Why nuclear power must go.

AuthorWilliams, Chris
PositionReprint

From the very beginning, unlocking the power of the atom for "peaceful" energy production was about waging war to its logical endpoint: the power to destroy life on a planetary scale.

People around the world were aghast at the apocalyptic destruction wreaked on Japan during a few hellish minutes when the United States dropped the nuclear bombs codenamed Little Boy and Fat Man on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The immediate loss of life, in the tens of thousands, coupled with the invisible and long-term effects of radiation sickness and cancers, brought the world up against the sharp razor edge of the nuclear age.

Subsequently, during the Cold War, NATO's nuclear war policy was officially named MAD--for Mutually Assured Destruction--a point parodied in the outstanding black comedy Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

If nuclear weapons were to have a future, perfecting them as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction needed a justification other than annihilating humans. Moreover, the plutonium typically used in fusion-based hydrogen bombs--hundreds and even thousands of times more destructive than an atom bomb--is not an element that occurs naturally on earth. It is a byproduct of fission, splitting uranium atoms to unleash and harness energy, which takes place inside nuclear reactors.

Hence, without a nuclear power program, presented as the peaceful generation of unlimited, cheap and safe energy, it's not possible to realistically produce the required amount of plutonium for nuclear weapons.

The first nuclear plants in the United Kingdom, commissioned in the 1950s at Calder Hall and Chapelcross, were explicitly for the production of plutonium for Britain's nascent nuclear weapons program; generating electricity was a secondary consideration.

In 1954, Lewis Strauss, chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission, imagined a nuclear-powered paradise:

Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to Meter ... It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. But the interconnection between nuclear power and nuclear weapons is inescapable. Because nuclear weapons are designed to be the "Hammer of God," the ultimate arbiter of power, any country that is under external threat will logically seek to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent, which was their stated benefit and contribution to "world peace."

North Korea, following George Bush's post-September 11 declaration that it was a member of the "axis of evil," concluded it needed to speed up development and testing of a nuclear weapon, which it realized with an underground nuclear detonation in October 2006. Iran, the second member of the reputed Axis (Saddam Hussein's Iraq...

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