To Jerusalem and Back

...But the sightseeing and storytelling are really only small diversions...

...Coal ash contains traces of poisonous heavy metals and carcinogenic hydrocarbons, but tens of millions of tons of coal ash are dumped in landfills every year in this country which are easily leached by rainwater...

...The shine of power is about him...

...To Jerusalem andBaek is BeUow's diary of the trip...

...Not surprisingly, a meltdown has never occurred...

...But they did not solve it...

...All this is true...

...There are many possible solutions, it now appears, and Beckmann's favorite seems to be sealing the wastes into a certain newly-developed type of fireproof, waterproof, and earthquake-proof glass and dropping the glass cubes into deep geological salt formations...

...they worry about making a living...

...24 The Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977...

...From the beginning he has made his sentences carry the rhythm, the lilt, of Irish-American speech...

...He captures the odd contrasts of the walled old city, its ancient and beautiful structures surrounded by modern bustle and filth...

...Dismissing her niece's husband, Jenny says he's not worth the powder to blow him to hell...

...Like Bellow's friend John Auerbach--a survivor of the Holocaust who found refuge in Israel, only to lose a son to the Yon Kippur War--they while away pleasant afternoons with friends...

...Shimon Peres, Minister of Defense, "carries an aura...

...An Armenian Archbishop, who himself prepares the food for a dinner at his luxurious Jerusalem apartment, is offended when one of his guests smokes between courses: "This is Naomi Decter recently spent four years in Israel, studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem...

...Studs Lonigan wanted to be "strong and tough and the real stuff...

...Most analyses of nuclear-power risks, however, fail to examine the dangers of"not going nuclear...

...With respect to waste disposal, the contrast with fossil fuels is again instructive...

...Among the (probably small) population of persuadable skeptics, I doubt that more than a small proportion have the required tolerance...

...While a new technology might have its problems, these must be evaluated in the light of the problems associated with the old technology for which the new might substitute...

...Can the Israelis trust Kissinger...

...Beckmann, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado, is perhaps most informative on the subject of nuclear waste disposal...

...We should prefer technological solution's, provided they are available and not prohibitively expensive...

...For To Jerusalem andBaek is the journal of a man who is concerned ultimately with weightier matters, in a country where no political fact or event is ever taken lightly...

...Yet certain critics--William Troy was one, Clifton Fadiman was another--saw considerably more than Dreiserian boldness in Farrell's works...

...Of course, the chances that the gases would escape from the 31/2-foot steel-and-concrete containment dome that encases any reactor are close to zero...

...Vandals, terrorists, and assorted mischiefmakers would find hundreds of more available and useful objects with which to occupy themselves...

...he has come there to hear what they have to say...

...The old lady Grace Hogan Dunne, who came over from the old sod during the Civil War, is not long for this world...

...One must also be able to overcome aversion to his political crankiness...

...This followed by only three years a major oil storage tank fire in Bayonne, New Jersey, started by the collision of two nearby ships...

...Still, we should be reluctant to put too much faith in psychology and politics...

...The former are one in 20,000 per reactor year...

...This element of atmospheric chance is particularly instructive--since it affects the potential consequences of a reactor meltdown too...

...These questions constitute the daily catechism of the Israeli--only this catechism comes without answers...

...Mayor Teddy Kollek, respected by all factions in Jerusalem, and "Israel's most valuable political asset," "virtuously" has only a salad for lunch, then polishes off an entire dish of sweets for dessert...

...Although safety standards have occasionally been faulted for being too low, and the enforcing agency (the Atomic Energy Commission and later the NRC) often faulted for tolerating non-compliance, the fact remains that no one working in this country's civilian nuclear power industry has ever died (or fallen ill) due to radiation poisoning...

...He is worried about Israel, where "there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you cannot take your right to live for granted...

...Larry Dunne, who dies of paresis and tuberculosis, was always going to get a job, but you can lead a horse to water and still fail to make him drink...

...But, put together as Farrell puts them, they come off the tongue as neatly as cummings' "watersmooth silver stallion...

...contrast, a 90,000-barrel oil storage complex in South Brooklyn caught fire and exploded in.January 1976...

...It is truly a pity that Beckmann should have cut himself off from that larger readership to which he would be entitled by virtue of his interesting substantive arguments...

...He declares himself willing to believe, with the psalmist, that that light may be "the outer garment of God...

...If Israelis cannot take their right to live for granted, they live very much as if they could...

...The members of the Dunne family--the two brothers who failed at different times in "the shoe game," the mother who boasted in her wheelchair that she was still a "hard woman," the self-pitying and occasionally drunken daughter Jenny and her pious sister Nora--think and talk in the cliches of their South Chicago milieu...

...Nevertheless, despite its apparently desperate situation, Israel is not a desperate country...

...Fashions come and go...

...Taken singly, the words--strong, tough, the real stuff--are commonplace...

...Should they accept the creation of yet another hostile state in their already dangerously unfriendly neighborhood...

...So, one need not rely on the whims of Zephyr and Aeolus to protect human populations...

...Are they, do they have an obligation to be, a just society in a universe of injustice...

...And from the moment he arrives, he finds himself caught up in the "gale of conversation-exposition, argument, harangue, analysis, theory, expostulation, threat and prophecy" that is standard Israeli fare...

...The granite in Manhattan's Grand Central Station, for instance, emits more radiation than an NRC-licensed reactor facility...

...True to type, it is cranky, paranoiac, and abusive...

...The end is a picture of the times--the thirties, when a job on WPA was equivalent to hope of heaven--that is absolutely grueling and most depressingly real...

...7 0QD0Q6Qii60O0DOQQ6Q00ggOg00ODIoQ000QQgQU0Q00Q0QDQOQ0Q0QO060QQmIOQ0gO0I0000QIIoI~QQQIOIOI00D~0QoIQ~OI00I00D0ODI00B0UQO~D00gQQQIQ0OoQwQ~0QDgO0Qi00QQ~ BOOK REVIEW To Jerusalem and Back Saul BeUow / Viking / 17.95 Naomi Decter A year ago, Saul Bellow spent several months at the Jerusalem artists' colony Mishkenot haSha'ananim...

...At dinner with the Armenian Archbishop, at lunch with Teddy Kollek, in meetings with other Israeli statesmen and thinkers, as well as with friends, the talk centers on the urgent political problems of Israel and of the world...

...Although Beckmann's arguments are generally rather compelling, he does not do as good a job as he could with respect to the possible hazards of nuclear theft and blackmail...

...Bellow clearly has his share in those small pleasures, and To Jerusalem and Back fully reflects his enjoyment...

...The only adverse effect of a meltdown is the release of radioactive gases which would ordinarily dissipate harmlessly into the atmosphere unless a temperature inversion were combined with a slight wind...

...In addition, Bellow reads and quotes from the writings of others equally concerned, among them Walter Laqueur, Elie Kedourie, Herman Kahn, and Lev Navrozov...

...Is the United States capable of dealing with that threat...

...You and I have been using these threadbare expressions all our lives, but we could not make them come out with a lilt the way Farrell does...

...Bellow scrutinizes the people he meets and recreates them, as perhaps only a novelist can, in a series of small, sharply-drawn portraits...

...They even know how to have a good time...

...On the contrary --and perhaps despite himself, for he is far from sanguine about Israel's prospects-Bellow's portrait of Israeli life, its ordinary routine against a background of impassioned argument and continuous danger, is reassuring...

...In Israel Bellow is surrounded by people who share his worry...

...This solution is technically feasible and seems to me to present no difficult political or social problems...

...inculte...

...In Eugene Bardach teaches in the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley...

...One of the fu'st lessons we teach our students at the Graduate School of Public Policy is that decision-makers must always consider the option of "permitting present trends to continue without interference...

...but Bellow is inevitably drawn back into contemplation of the most pressing issues...

...Can they hope to survive at all...

...He says theft is very difficult, that there are easier ways to apply blackmail, and that a "no-nonsense" deterrence policy will discourage would-be saboteurs and hijackers...

...For the occupation with affairs of daily life in a hostile universe is unquestionably a,jewish habit...

...It is also intelligent, informative, readable, and persuasive--persuasive to me at least...

...Farrell, like Conrad, makes you see...

...As a visiting luminary, he met with prominent Israelis...

...When Nora's children shuffle off delinquent spouses, it's good riddance to bad rubbish...

...Coal mining, for example, in the late 1960s led to 246 fatal accidents per year...

...Superstitious, the Dunnes are always knocking on wood...

...Before reading Beckmann I had been somewhat skeptical of nuclear power, but, it seemed to me, open-minded...

...Unfortunately, it will take more than mere openmindedness to permit Beckmann's useful analysis to take hold in a larger public...

...Bellow is amused, touched and irritated, especially since the Hasid's importunings are not without effect: "I turn to the twice disagreeable chicken and eat guiltily, my appetite spoiled...

...But the best of each succeeding fashion works its way into the schools...

...And the Israel of To Jerusalem and Back is in this sense undeniably a,jewish state--no small asset, given the Jews' record of survival...

...The trip proved rich in material for Bellow the storytellerl On his flight to Israel he meets a young Hasidic Jew, and Bellow's description of the inevitable confrontation over an unkosher chicken dinner perfectly evokes all the emotions roused in the lapsed-of-faith by the pious...

...They build ugly buildings...

...It's threadbare language in flavorsome voice...

...The Irish, like other ethnics who had not had time to amass property, had to live through the period...

...as an intellectual in a foreign country, he read up on the area, and pondered what he read, what he saw, and what he heard...

...In addition, the wind would have to blow the gases towards population centers if humans were to be affected directly...

...Beckmann argues that the problems of nuclear power are minor in comparison with the problems of sticking with the familiar technologies based on fossil fuels...

...Consider, for example, the probabilities of a reactor meltdown in conjunction with the probabilities of explosion of an oil storage complex...

...as a Jew in the Holy Land, he saw friends and relatives, and wandered around Jerusalem...

...they complain about taxes...

...He notes the ugliness of post-British architecture in the new city...

...In both cases, the explosions created deadly billows of oily black smoke that would have caused many thousands of deaths had the wind and temperature conditions been slightly different...

...BOOK REVIEW The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear PetrBeckmann / The GolemPress / $10.95 Eugene Bardach Petr Beckmann's short book The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear is squarely in the genre of the political tract...

...they gossip about corruption in high places...

...The routine, day-to-day, health and safety risks of nuclear power generation are essentially zero, according to Beckmann...

...That is, there will be no need to have what Barry Commoner calls a "nuclear priesthood" watching over the wastes for thousands of years...

...Wastes in such a form are as invulnerable to natural hazards as one could possibly wish, and it is impossible to imagine why any human being should wish to tamper with them...

...This is due mainly to the stringency of the standards enforced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC...

...Is Russia really a threat to peace in the Middle East and in the world...

...People and scenery provide but brief respite...

...Bellow is worried about the world, where "the eagerness to kill for political ends--or to justify killing by such ends--is as keen now as it ever was...

...Indeed, the radium and thorium isotopes in coal ash emit radioactivity many times in exces's of what NRC standards would allow if the NRC were responsible for regulating this waste...

...The book is not, as such a book might easily be, unhappy or discouraging...

...Peres comes to lunch not to discuss politics, but eager to talk with a fellow writer...

...Hemingway and Fitzgerald may have displaced Dreiser and Farrell for a while, but all four are now together in the pantheon of twentieth-century classics...

...But above all he makes you hear...

...For years the AEC pooh-poohed the problem, and nuclear advocates assured us it was trivial and easily solved...

...And looking out over the hills of Judaea, he feels that "the light of Jerusalem has purifying powers and filters the blood and the thoughts...

...Bellow's descriptions of Jerusalem are no less evocative...

...Nor--as Beckmann convincingly demonstrates-has a meltdown even come close, even in the well-publicized cases of the Browns Ferry, Alabama, fire of March 1975 and the emergency shutdown of the Fermi I reactor near Detroit in October 1966...

...Beckmann goes to great lengths to develop the contrastingly poor health and safety record for fossil fuels...

...Nonfatal injuries and the high incidence of pneumoconiosis ("black lung" disease) make the contrast even more striking...

...their grief becomes an addiThe Alternative: An American Spectator February 1977 23 tional criterion in the daily measurement of life's small pleasures...