SOME LESSONS FOR AMERICA

But no country is so good that the social engineers could not ruin it, and Australia is well ahead of the US on the road from free enterprise to big government and socialism, though still trailing Britain. The greatest opportunities can be botched when men look to Big Brother instead of relying on themselves.

More specifically, the uranium battle shows the absurdity of the anti-nuclear pretenses. Australia has no nuclear plants; she might as well stop digging iron ore to prevent automobile deaths and the proliferation of tanks.

Australia also illustrates the political aspect of the antinuclear campaign (what other aspect is there?). The country boasts no less than three Communist parties, all of them opposed to mining uranium in Australia (but not in the Communist countries); the Australian Conservation Foundation has, since the 1913 takeover, been manned by radical conservationists, including the former president of the Communist Party of Australia. Presumably the rank and file of the anti-uranium movement is not consciously Communist; yet if it were, it could do no better for Moscow than it is doing now. Which is a thought equally valid for the US.

The arguments against uranium mining are faithfully parroted from the US anti-nukes the absence of reactors makes no difference, for the idea is world-wide de-industrialization by any argument, however absurd. The lesson for America: If nuclear power were stopped, the antinukes would not go out of business; they are against all available energy, not just nuclear, and they will use any tactic in any mask to stop it.

In New Zealand, which has neither nuclear plants nor uranium deposits, the anti-nuclear protestors came out in force on the occasion of a visit by nuclear-powered vessels of the US Navy; in putting on this act designed to place them in a humanitarian light, they did not say whether they planned to defend their country without help of the US Navy, or indeed, whether they wanted to defend it at all.

The same kind of act is put on by US politicians in opposing the neutron bomb. The act is also put on in many other variations.Typically, Rep. T. Wirth (Colo.) played shocked and indignant on "finding out" that plutonium was being shipped from the Rocky Flats weapons plant near Denver to Los Alamos by air; prior to this "revelation" he had perhaps believed it was shipped to New Mexico on bicycles.