The Religion of Progress

...where rain can be impounded in ordinary reservoir systems...

...One project already planned is an enormous half-billion dollar dual-purpose atomic powered combine to be constructed near Los Angeles...

...These centers would produce both electric power and sufficient fresh water, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and weed killers to support agriculture in areas where literally nothing grew before...

...This is a fact of physics, of the laws of the ultimate constitution of matter, not a malign technology that perhaps, on some lucky tomorrow, a beneficent technician will correct...

...To them the older technology of steel and steam was and continues to be inapplicable, while the nuclear age holds out great promise...

...Atomic Energy Commission last June...

...The establishment of nuclear energy centers, in fact, is being studied by a group of scientists appointed by the U.S...

...A few years ago the practical use of nuclear fuels for water desalination and the generation of electricity was a pipe dream...

...It is just possible because the the economic development of the newer, smaller and weaker nations depends on the wider use of nuclear energy...

...it is all the religion we have...

...it is one step away from a holocaust...

...For good or ill we are chained to our faith in scientific progress...

...For the Communists (Russian or Chinese) who preside over "dictatorships dedicated to an idea," as Hudson firmly phrases it, the worship of Progress, including nuclear progress, is their Rock of Ages...

...It will produce electric power and desalted water in huge quantities: 150 million gallons a day at one-fifth the cost for purifying salt water in the largest conventional desalination installations now in existence...

...If a general war can be averted," he says on his last page, "mankind can look forward to an age of economic progress in which standards of living could everywhere be raised...

...Such uses of nuclear energy are the basis of man's hope for changing the weather and other seasonal, even regional, factors so that the entire earth will be gradually made over into an environment suitable for living...

...The central problem of our time," Hudson says, "is to get rid of this terrible store of destructive power, for if it is not eliminated in time, it will almost certainly sooner or later be used...

...Speaking at the International Conference on Water for Peace in Washington last spring, U.S...

...It is just possible to hope, though with no great confidence . . . that capitalist and Communist [countries] may find a peaceful outlet for their energies in a cooperative economist reconstruction of the world...

...Satan's is the other face of God, as the cabalists used to say...

...The flaw in this vision of more room for crowding humanity is that the use of nuclear fuels in power reactors leads to the production, as a by-product, of plutonium?which, after concentration in chemical separation plants of a simpler and cheaper type, can be used in hydrogen bombs...

...He is speaking of the world's present stockpile of nuclear weapons, with its rated explosive potential of more than 50 billion tons of tnt...

...It is the creed of the developed nations, who dream of a world remade to suit themselves...

...Hudson titles the summary chapter in this level-headed and at the same time nuclear bomb-haunted review of world politics since the last war...

...Reviewed by asher brynes Author, "We Give to Conquer" The peace we have now is preferable only to the nuclear war we can make at this moment...

...Here is a book so clear-headed it is as painful as life itself—until the author boggles at the threshold of atomic destruction...

...Unless nuclear armaments are abolished, Hudson insists, the odds are against the prevention of nuclear war in the coming period of human history...

...They would constitute integrated enterprises which would offer developing countries a means to break the vicious circle of high-cost energy resulting from low levels of energy utilization...

...Today the idea of small-scale atomic versions of the Tennessee Valley Authority is entirely feasible —even in the deserts of the Sahara, or the Unknown Quarter of Arabia, or in central Australia, where there is nothing but wind, sand and sunlight...

...But if the peaceful uses of atomic energy in the future yield still more by-products that can be converted into still more nuclear bombs, there is surely no getting rid of the danger once and for all...

...Further improvements in technology are expected to make seawater practically as cheap as piped rainwater...

...But the developing countries—so many of which are without adequate supplies of fresh water, hydroelectric sites, or fossil fuels like petroleum and coal—pressed for such uses of atomic energy...

...What can we do to climb down from "The Crater's Edge," as G.F...

...Atomic Emergency Commissioner James T. Ramey emphasized this bright side of the nuclear nightmare: "With the availability of very low cost nuclear energy, the centers (or combines) would supply not only water but power, chemicals, fertilizers and energy for industrial support systems to make the surrounding land productive...

...The same defect inheres in any large-scale "peaceful" application of nuclear energy—for example, the projected blasting of another canal through the isthmus of Panama or Nicaragua...

...And it is becoming the romance of the developing peoples, who, having little to lose, swallow the same dreams without considering the drawbacks...

...Yet this idea of nuclear disarmament in a world where breeder reactors are proliferating all over the place, is as impossible as the similar idea of destroying all conventional weaponry—which Hudson calls "disarmament a la Russe...