Comment

...Heaven forbid...

...The report is obviously not the last word on the subject, but as the product of ten years of work it is impressive...

...More than $7.5 billion had been invested in the three projects...

...indeed, exactlv what thev did in 1980...

...Four more years of Reagan can have catastrophic consequences: a further chill in relations between the nuclear superpowers...

...Democratic pollster Pat Caddell has pointed out...

...As in the case of heptachlor, the Government knew about EDB's carcinogenic effects a decade ago...

...The manufacturers of EDB, like.all entrepreneurs, should be required to demonstrate the safety of a new product...

...after all, a compendium of the most flagrant hypocrisies and contradictions...

...Washington's Yellow Science When in doubt, classify it, The Reagan Administration has abided by that maxim throughout its tenure, most recently while trying to demonstrate "an expanding pattern of Soviet violations or possible violations of arms control agreements," which "raise doubts about the reliability of the U.S.S.R...

...The Price of Power The nuclear power industry received some powerful jolts in recent weeks, and their combined impact is likely to have a decisive effect on the future of atomic energy...

...Chemical and Engineering News pointed out that the Army has failed to detect any toxins in the fifty samples from Southeast Asia it has studied...

...If some companies go belly up, so be it...

...they are politics pure and simple...

...Their primary concern is to ensure the health of agribusiness interests...

...Still unanswered, too, is the question of why the Soviets would use a toxin that, in military terms, is relatively ineffective...

...The failure to remove EDB-tainted food from store shelves could result in hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths by the middle of the next century...

...The shocks came in a wave: The Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company decided to turn its Zimmer nuclear power plant, already 97 per cent complete, into a coal burning unit (see Page 15...

...Moreover, bankruptcy could open the door to municipal ownership of electrical power, providing an opportunity to foster alternative forms of energy while ridding ourselves of the nuclear nightmare once and for all...

...When the nation was let in on that little secret not too long ago, one person was surprised and perhaps even a bit embarrassed: John Block, the Secretary of Agriculture...

...In the words of The Wall Street Journal, "State regulators must decide whether to bail the companies out by slugging consumers with big rate increases or to refuse bailouts and perhaps push some companies into bankruptcy proceedings...

...And why not...

...High on the list of charges was the old claim that the Soviet Union and its allies have used toxins and chemical weapons-called yellow rain—in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia...

...There was the Ronald Reagan of the Oval Office, progenitor of the largest Federal deficit in American history...

...The specter of yellow rain-raised through the use of yellow science-greases the skids in Congress for more military allocations and newer chemical weapons...

...The Fat's in the Fire One of the ways President Reagan stands tall in the saddle is by avoiding foods high in saturated fat...

...But when all the rhetoric is stripped away, it seems that Kissinger and his fellow commissioners are not primarily concerned about any real threat to U.S...

...There never should have been a crisis...

...Why our crisis...

...Indeed, the Reagan Administration's charges bear no resemblance to science...

...The Winter of Deceit Despite Seymour Hersh's finest efforts, Henry Kissinger just won't go away...

...The high-risk nuclear companies are no longer suitable" for the traditional buyer of utility stocks...

...Why, in the seven years since the EPA announced it was considering a ban on the substance, has the pesticide been poured on food eaten by millions...

...Just a Trace of Poison When it comes to the environment, the Federal bureaucracy is "governing by crisis," one critic recently lamented—first heptachlor, then temik, and now ethylene dibromide (EDB...

...There was the saber-rattling President, ardent supporter of mind-boggling military spending—the Government's "prime responsibility...

...To date, the Government's physical evidence of chemical warfare in Afghanistan consists of one gas mask, apparently purchased in Kabul, that had trichothe-cene toxins on its surface...

...In view of the critical nature of this issue, it would not be unreasonable to expect that the United States has an irrefutably strong case to support its charges, and, especially, that the supporting science is sound," Editor Michael Heylin wrote in his introduction to a twenty-seven-page special report...

...There is no dearth of issues to be debated in a national political campaign...

...The four dozen plants still under construction or on hold face cost overruns of200 to 1,000 per cent above original estimates, according to industry analyst Charles Komanoff, who predicts that eighteen or nineteen more reactors will bite the dust...

...There was the Great Conservative who regards Federal programs to feed the hungry and heal the sick as unwarranted intrusions into privacy and assaults on freedom...

...A later sage observed, though, that if you fool them once, it's good for four years...

...Army's chemical weapons program, told Chemical and Engineering News...

...what Washington calls yellow rain, they suggest, is really bee feces...

...And here was the visionary statesman solemnly intoning that "the future is best decided by ballots, not bullets...

...Now that EDB has generated so much attention, the Government may respond to public pressure, issue standards of exposure, and possibly even ban the pesticide from future use...

...Rumor has it that he's likely to be back as Secretary of State in the next Republican Administration...

...Not surprisingly, the utilities are also looking to consumers and taxpayers for immediate relief...

...The damned thing is ridiculous," Saul Hormats, former director of the U.S...

...Science is held in "low regard" at the State Department, concluded Chemical and Engineering News...

...It was a job well done—by the organizers of the boycott and by all consumers who respected it...

...At first, the State Department claimed the pollen was a clever dispersal mechanism for poisons...

...Now all the meticulous research, the piles of press releases, the hours of meetings, the lobbying have paid off...

...The Energy Department found last year that utilities had saddled consumers with 30 per cent of the cost of cancelled reactors, foisted 40 per cent off on the taxpayers (in the form of taxes the companies didn't pay), and left utility stockholders to bear the remainder...

...All along, the food industry has fought the Government's half-hearted attempts to regulate EDB—and fought them so successfully that Federal officials continue to scoff at the suggestion that EDB poses a serious health hazard...

...Said the report, reverberating in Kissinger's ponderous monotone, "The Soviet-Cuban thrust to make Central America part of the geo-strategic challenge is what has turned the struggle in Central America into a security and political problem for the United States and for the hemisphere...

...Scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency have, in fact, called EDB the most powerful carcinogen ever tested by the agency...

...More to the point, perhaps, would be to cite ten years of regulatory sabotage by industry and our public servants...

...Though Reagan's tenure has been, in our judgment, an unmitigated disaster for the great majority of Americans and a grave menace to the peoples of the world, the President has every reason to feel smug and even cocky...

...In one sense, these developments represent only additional crises for an industry that has already weathered many storms...

...Our very masculinity is on the line, Kissinger warned in a passage eerily reminiscent of his Vietnam apologies: "Beyond the issue of U.S...

...Presumably, the prospect of a re-election campaign has imposed certain restraints on Reagan, preventing him from exercising his most atavistic impulses...

...It's all there in the report, though these stunning phrases didn't make it into most of the newspaper or broadcast coverage...

...His standing in the public opinion polls is relatively high...

...If Reagan stays on his diet, he may live long enough to see a government that is responsive to the public interest...

...The speech was...

...What makes all this frustrating depressing and terribly dangerous is not the President's skill at using glib banalities to mesmerize a substantia] segment of the electorate, but the dismal absence of any effective response...

...Indiana Public Service, which once assumed that annual electricity demand would grow by 8 or 9 per cent, today puts the figure at 3 per cent...

...Regulation was strengthened, and the amount needed to build and operate reactors increased as a result...

...But independent scientists have since found that the pollen came from plants native to the region...

...air or ground troops is not ruled out...

...The Washington Post found that the Agriculture Department did take action: It organized a "strategy session" for citrus growers, grain dealers, and chemical company executives to plan ways of keeping EDB on the market...

...would be read as a sign of U.S...

...Virtually every paragraph was punctuated, for example, with his favorite scareword, "crisis"—as in, "the crisis will not wait...

...the Commonwealth Edison Company was denied a license to operate its finished Byron Nuclear Power Station near Rockford, Illinois, and the Public Service Company of Indiana scrapped plans for its half-built Marble Hill reactor...

...the Long Island Shoreham plant, whose owner has been borrowing to pay dividends, and the reactor in Midland, Michigan, which is costing billions more than was predicted...

...Antinuclear activists, a handful of conscientious Government employees, and the 1979 Three Mile Island accident heightened the public's awareness of the social costs of atomic energy, such as cancer...

...Two weeks before the Administration issued its digest of alleged perfidy, the yellow rain indictment was quashed in the pages of the prestigious Chemical and Engineering News...

...Instead, the Democrats' answer has been a mumble of timid quibbles...

...And here was the peace-minded candidate earnestly asking the people of the Soviet Union whether it wouldn't be better to do away with nuclear weapons altogether There was the "commando-in-chief...

...The commission did recommend "significantly increased levels of military aid as quickly as possible" and the removal of legal prohibitions against training and aiding police organizations—which, Kissinger said with Orwellian doublespeak, "has the paradoxical effect, in certain cases, of inhibiting our efforts to improve human rights performance...

...No utility has ever attempted to convert a nuclear reactor into a coal-fired generator...

...The United States "has no physical evidence that tri-chothecenes have been used in a weapons system...

...security but about America's image...

...Block, it turns out, shelved an Agriculture Department pamphlet that recommended reducing cholesterol intake...

...Each event marked a watershed for the industry...

...And here was the Ronald Reagan of the re-election campaign, calling for adoption of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget...

...In many companies, it represents one to two times the equity capital," one financial adviser recently noted...

...And none of the approximately 100 nuclear power projects shelved by utilities in the past decade has cost as much as Marble Hill...

...The President is no repository of political lore, but somebody has probably let him in on the old adage that you can't beat somebody with nobody, and he knows it's true...

...It may come as news to industry, but there is no constitutional right to pollute the environment and jeopardize human life—even in pursuit of a fast buck...

...A few pundits, more bold than perspicacious, had predicted that Reagan would bow into graceful retirement at the end of one term—and a rumor to that efTect even swept Wall Street just a few days before the President made his announcement— but there was little doubt all along that his decision would be to go for four more years...

...Here Kissinger gave free rein to his paranoia about "hostile outside forces," "aggressive outside power," and "aggressive external forces...

...Anyone who has a stomach for propaganda and an ear for manipulative language will relish the Kissinger report...

...Instead of holding these two Ronnies up to the scorn and ndicule they so richly deserve, instead of asking the real Reagan to stand up and identify- himself, the Democrats seem to be trying to prove they can be both of them, only cheaper or faster or better or with more finesse...

...This time his portfolio was Central America, and the Presidential commission he led produced a classic document of Kissingerian deceit...

...No upper limit can be placed on this "necessary assistance," and the use of U.S...

...He said he was determined to complete what he began three years ago...

...Never before had the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, citing inadequate quality control, unconditionally withheld an operating license...

...When mixed with impure water, infant formula can bring on disease, malnutrition, and death...

...In response to this corporation-made plague, the Infant Formula Action Coalition (INFACT) based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, began seven years ago to organize a national boycott of Nestle...

...According to UNICEF, a million babies die every year in the Third World because of improperly used infant formula, yet Nestle and other manufacturers have been relentlessly pushing the product...

...Agriculture officials say they are no longer in the business of giving nutritional advice—and they are right...

...Commonwealth Edison originally predicted that Chicago's demand would grow by 7 per cent a year, but it now projects a 2 per cent increase—and the Illinois Governor's Office of Consumer Services says that estimate is too high...

...Such projects are pushing their financial backers to the brink of ruin...

...But in addition to such actions, a recall of contaminated products seems to be in order...

...In mid-January, at the request of Congress, the White House churned out fifty pages of such accusations—all secret, of course...

...Eight million copies of the brochure had been distributed under previous Administrations...

...Clouding the U.S...

...Unfortunately, we haven't heard the last of Henry Kissinger...

...The triumph of hostile forces...

...Or maybe even for eight...

...There are many other holes in the Government's argument...

...Can another Nobel Peace Prize be far behind...

...The Wall Street Journal pointed out that "Federal officials aren't inclined to take sweeping regulatory action," largely because of concern over "enormous expense and headaches for the industry...

...The New York Times blamed the crisis on "ten years of Government foot-dragging...

...impotence...

...accusations further is the presence of large amounts of bee pollen in the yellow rain samples...

...EDB, in use since the 1940s, quickly produces tumors in laboratory animals, and a lifetime of exposure to food containing the chemical would cause cancer in three out of every 1,000 people, the EPA estimates...

...Officials noted that the Soviet Union, unlike the nations of Southeast Asia, maintains a commercial pollen industry...

...If there were such a thing as a real opposition, it would have been able to seize on the State of the Union Message as a perfect campaign tract against the incumbent Administration...

...Unless a powerful political movement can block such bailouts, state officials are likely to heed the industry's yelps, as they have in the past...

...the crisis is nonpartisan...

...Heptachlor and temik have disappeared from the headlines (though not from the ecosystem), and the last of these pesticides has moved to center stage...

...he said in the State of the Union Message...

...Whatever course of action is finally adopted, a larger and more fundamental issue will linger like a pesticide residue...

...as a negotiating partner...

...as one broadcaster said in a revealing slip of the tongue—the invader of Grenada, sponsor of insurrection against Nicaragua, supplier of arms around the world...

...it should not be left to the Government to prove it is dangerous...

...Among the likely candidates for cancellation are the two projects mothballed last summer by the Washington Public Power Supply System...

...the crisis in Central America makes a particularly urgent claim on the United States...

...But the setbacks suffered by electric company executives also usher in a profoundly new era for nuclear power...

...stepped-up U.S...

...Nestle agreed in January to make significant reforms in the way it markets infant formula and to issue warning on its package labels and in its promotional literature...

...bankruptcy—an unprecedented phenomenon in the electricity business—is a growing possibility...

...But Kissinger's main rhetorical device was repetition, which he employed ad nauseam to underscore his interventionist philosophy...

...The answers include mismanagement, high interest rates, greed, myopia, the vise of stagflation, and the vagaries of oil prices...

...the promise of the atom has turned into a nightmare for many utilities...

...When the state of Florida decided last December to recall all products containing trace amounts of EDB, Washington was barely ruffled...

...Potential investors are turning a cold shoulder to concerns that have heavy nuclear commitments...

...After re-election, no holds will be barred Reagan will go for broke, and broke is what we'll be...

...Reagan is shaping up as the big debate, and in that contest Reagan is a sure winner Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said that you can't fool all the people all the time...

...If the choice is between a genuine and an ersatz conservative, the genuine always wins...

...Once voters ascertain that they are going to be stuck with one kind of Reagan or another, they'll opt for the real thing That is...

...By placing the burden of proof on government rather than on industry, the nation's regulatory apparatus protects business to the detriment of protecting people...

...It could have been challenged as an obvious hoax—the work of an impostor, a second Ronald Reagan clearly at odds with the first...

...Recognizing that the American people may not thrill at the notion of helping notoriously brutal regimes do their dirty work, Kissinger reached deep into his bag of tricks and came up with a gimmick that even surpassed his own customary resourcefulness...

...military intervention around the world: new and more severe hardships for the elderly, the poor, the disadvantaged: an intensified offensive against the organized working , class and...

...A report from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institutes acknowledged a clear connection between fat intake and cholesterol levels on the one hand, and heart disease on the other...

...The severity of the crisis facing the nuclear industry has prompted frenzied calls for regulatory "streamlining," designed to short-circuit safety review, cut construction delays, and lower costs...

...Sweet Taste of Success Though your teeth will be the .worse for it, your conscience will now be clean if you indulge in Nestle chocolate...

...But this is not the case...

...There he was again in January, dominating the news with his old syllogisms and sophistries, whispering Cold War fantasies into the ears of yet another President...

...And here was the Great Meddler who proposes to have Washington compel prayer, outlaw abortion, and determine what should and should not be taught in the schools...

...It is the reliability of the United States that stands under indictment...

...In providing military assistance, the United States will follow a "humane anti-guerrilla strategy," alternately referred to as "enlightened counterinsurgency effort...

...Americans should not sit still and allow themselves to be forced to pick up the tab for the industry's blunders...

...Initial claims that the toxins do not occur naturally in Southeast Asia blew up in the Government's face, since fungi capable of producing them in food grains have been known to exist in Asia since at least 1939...

...The boycott of Nestle products has ended, at least temporarily, because consumer activists have triumphed over the world's largest manufacturer of infant formula...

...We, too, were surprised recently, when one Government agency did place a premium on the health of Americans...

...Skyrocketing construction costs have long plagued the atomic utilities, and not a single reactor order has been placed since 1978...

...Why, then, has the chemical been used to treat soil and to fumigate fruits, vegetables, and grains in the past ten years...

...Bankruptcy trustees, appointed by a court, would probably be more accountable than corporate executives...

...But who will do the debating'* Reagan vs...

...To defend its manhood, the United States must "provide all necessary assistance to defeat totalitarian guerrillas," the report instructed...

...Companies should b» held to the rules of capitalism they so enthusiastically tout—those who stand to profit, the stockholders, should also bear the risks...

...From Southeast Asia, the Government has produced five "positive" environmental samples, none of which has been confirmed by independent analysis, and all of which were tested in a single laboratory...

...security interests in the Central American-Caribbean region, our credibility is widely engaged...

...Who knows, another "peace with honor" may be on the horizon...

...Not one piece of military hardware—not a shell, grenade, rocket, canister, or weapon fragment—has tested positive for toxins...

...His drab Democratic opposition is in disarray, unsure from day to day whether to oppose or espouse Reagan's politics...

...the Seabrook plants in New Hampshire, where company officials needed a week to sell bonds that typically would have been snapped up in hours...

...When all the factors are tallied up, however, regulation has contributed most significantly to the price of nuclear power, and we should all be thankful that it has...

...The biological samples are questionable, and the chemical warfare charges by Hmong refugees don't check out...

...for that matter, against the middle class, too: new Government assaults on First Amendment rights and other civil liberties...

...It's a self-defeating strategy...

...To make matters worse for the industry, it has substantially overestimated the demand for electricity...

...Alas, the hope was dashed only four days later, when the President announced he would run for re-election...

...Lies, distortions, twisted logic, and gross hyperbole all found their rightful place in the effort to identify the revolutions in the region as "a serious threat to the United States...

...Central America's crisis is our crisis...

...How did the utilities get into such a bind...