Reflections
Day, Samuel H. Jr.
REFLECTIONS Samuel H. Day Jr. Faustian Bargain As one who knows little about nuclear engineering but worries about what nuclear engineering can do to us, I owe a great deal to an organization...
...At the beginning of the 1970s, the ambitious plans of America's nuclear energy establishment, calling for a thousand nuclear power reactors by the end of the century, went virtually unchallenged in the scientific and technical community...
...Although many nonscientists worried about such things as the adverse effects of radiation and waste heat from nuclear power plants, they lacked authoritative scientific and technical evidence to support their misgivings...
...I opened the envelope, hoping to find the Pentagon's "defense" dogma challenged in the same hard-hitting style the UCS had once applied to the claims of the nuclear power barons...
...These reflections are prompted by the recent arrival of an envelope bearing the familiar blue-and-white letterhead of the Union of Concerned Scientists, with a message stamped in red—Important: contains survey on defense policy...
...This was more than just an everyday plea against nuclear doomsday...
...I could choose less than 2 per cent, 2 to 4 per cent, or more than 4 per cent...
...All who are engaged in the continuing struggle for safe and sane energy policy alternatives look back on the UCS's early contribution as a creative and dynamic one...
...say look back because the Union of Concerned Scientists—now a large national organization—seems to have shifted its principal concern to another area...
...An accompanying letter from Howard C. Ris Jr., director of the UCS's nuclear arms program, spelled out the kind of "modest improvements in conventional defenses" the UCS has in mind: "new systems for moving forces to the battlefield, prepo-sitioning supplies, better anti-tank defenses, and use of inexpensive precision-guided defense missiles...
...held back out of fear, or indifference, or conflict of interest...
...It also assumes minimum disruption of the political and institutional forces that have brought us to our present plight...
...It was also a pitch for military bases and staging areas in such hot spots as the Persian Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and the Horn of Africa, and a plug for more napalm, more nerve gas, more cluster bombs...
...If I were a Pentagon strategist looking for relief from the mounting public concern over nuclear war, I would welcome any deal that left unchallenged the "national security" goals which the nuclear arsenal was built to serve...
...As threats go, nuclear war easily dwarfs the most catastrophic of nuclear power accidents...
...In their book, Advice and Dissent, about scientists who serve as whistle-blowers, Joel Primack and Frank von Hippel give rightful credit to two early UCS leaders— physicist Henry Kendall and economist Daniel Ford—as "pioneers in public interest science...
...Development of more powerful conventional weapons...
...In those days, the UCS was one of many professional organizations around the country that were adding their voices to the rising chorus of protest against the Vietnam war...
...But it also seems to be carving out for itself a special role as broker between the peace movement and the Pentagon...
...A peacetime draft...
...By refusing to accept such cosmetic solutions in the early 1970s, the Union of Concerned Scientists won the grudging respect of its antagonists in industry and government...
...In exchange for nuclear overkill, it offers more modest kill mechanisms...
...The UCS volunteers performed outstanding scientific and technical investigative work, and they took the results to the public...
...for neutron bombs, cluster bombs...
...Accompanying the questionnaire was a Union of Concerned Scientists "national security policy" statement linking nuclear "arms control" with a buildup in conventional weapons: "The United States should announce its intention to adopt a policy of No First Use of Nuclear Weapons elsewhere in the world...
...But now, a reluctance to risk losing that respectability may be why this distinguished public interest group has become the promoter of a different kind of quick fix...
...The movement to avert the horror of a nuclear war needs all the help it can get...
...In the process, they also demonstrated the propensity of the nuclear energy bureaucracy in government and industry to cover up those dangers...
...In turn, the Union of Concerned Scientists inspired many others—in and out of science—to challenge the ascendancy of nuclear power...
...The Union of Concerned Scientists filled that void...
...Better training of our troops...
...The reasons are not hard to understand...
...The other part of the question asked what was the largest budget increase I would support in order to pay for the UCS's proposed buildup in conventional military forces...
...In doing so, they broke ranks with other scientists and scientific groups who Samuel H. Day Jr., a contributing editor of The Progressive and former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, wrote "Hans Bethe's Silent Whistle" in the February issue...
...Nonetheless, something is amiss: The UCS's contribution to the public's understanding of the threat of nuclear war bears little resemblance—in substance, style, or spirit—to the way it once helped us appreciate the danger of nuclear power...
...Replacement of aging equipment...
...for the outmoded and now too dangerous nuclear shield, a worldwide military presence more like the ones that earlier empires used to impose their will...
...As in Europe, such a policy will be contingent on the development of adequate conventional strength...
...First in nuclear reactor safety, and then in such related problem areas as nuclear waste disposal, it produced and analyzed the technical information we needed for making independent judgments...
...It's as though the nuclear reactor safety problem that the Union of Concerned Scientists addressed a little more than a decade ago could have been resolved with the replacement of a few pipes and valves...
...Besides, the two threats are not unrelated, as the UCS was among the first to point out...
...Faustian Bargain As one who knows little about nuclear engineering but worries about what nuclear engineering can do to us, I owe a great deal to an organization called the Union of Concerned Scientists...
...To be sure, the Union of Concerned Scientists also calls for a freeze to be followed by a cutback in nuclear weapons production, a pledge against first use of nuclear weapons, and an end to the testing of nuclear warheads and delivery systems...
...But, frankly, I'd never have expected that kind of a deal to be proposed by the Union of Concerned Scientists...
...The Union of Concerned seems to be carving out a special role as broker between the peace movement and the Pentagon The assumption that rapid deployment forces and precision-guided munitions are a solution to the nuclear threat rests on the faith that nothing much needs fixing except the kind of military power America projects around the world...
...A few years later it came into its own when it ventured alone into the quagmire of nuclear power...
...Like many others, the UCS has joined the peace movement...
...For me and many other nonscientists, the UCS helped demystify nuclear power...
...Sure enough, there were some critical comments on nuclear weapons policies, but what caught my eye was a statement in the UCS's "defense policy" questionnaire: "It may be necessary to improve the capacity of NATO conventional forces in order to provide an adequate deterrent to the Warsaw Pact...
...This was the prelude to a two-part, multiple choice question which began, "Which of the following areas of improvement would you support if and only if determined to be necessary to build a 'firebreak' against the use of nuclear weapons...
...The Union came into existence in 1969 as a loosely knit group of academics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University who were concerned about the effect of American science and technology on the people of Vietnam...
...Its pamphlets and press releases nowadays talk not about nuclear power but about nuclear weapons...
...For cruise missiles and Pershings, a buildup of the air, ground, and naval forces already massed in and around Europe...
...Universal service with military and other forms...
...Drawn into the issue by a local nuclear power plant licensing case in Boston, volunteers for the UCS uncovered and documented a fearful new dimension of the nuclear threat: the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to catastrophic accidents...
Vol. 47 • March 1983 • No. 3
