Nuclear nightmare.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Column

My old friend Harvey Wasserman has been protesting against nuclear power for more than thirty-five years now.

He was at the Clamshell Alliance events in New England in the late 1970s.

He interviewed some of the victims at Three Mile Island.

He went to Chernobyl ten years after that catastrophe, and he cites a study putting the death toll there at a staggering 985,000 people.

He's written book after book, article after article, about the enormous hazards of nuclear energy, but the industry ignored him, and the U.S. government ignored him, and the Japanese government ignored him.

They also ignored The Progressive, if I may say so without sounding too smug. Since Hiroshima, The Progressive never bought into "the peaceful atom." And from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, you could barely open an issue of The Progressive without reading about the dangers of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy.

One of The Progressive's most reprinted stories came out in February 1976. It was called "The Doomsday Strategy," and it was written by Sidney Lens. Nuclear energy, he wrote, "poses certain dangers to life and health qualitatively different from any humankind has ever known before." Understanding that nuclear power was part and parcel of the effort to prepare for nuclear war, Lens added: "The same considerations that prompt the government to deceive Americans about the possible number of deaths in nuclear war cause it to lie about the dangers posed by peaceful energy reactors."

In November 1976, Wasserman himself wrote a prescient story for The Progressive on the subject. It was eerily entitled "Japan's Nuclear Crisis." He warned of the dangers that earthquakes posed to that country's nuclear plants. And he even cited mishaps at the Fukushima complex.

So when the earthquake and tsunami did hit Fukushima, and the nightmare became a reality, we naturally contacted Wasserman for...