CORRUPT?

"The same self-interest prevails today with regard to health hazards of anything related to an industry. The cigarette companies, despite large accumulations of data that cigarette smoking is one of the worst health hazards faced be Americans today, continued for years to deny that any hazard existed... The federal government and the nuclear industry are much larger forces with much at stake... There are very powerful forces that hope that there are minimal health hazards to the use of nuclear energy."

The implication made here is that the scientists and engineers in the nuclear industry are sufficiently corrupt to misinterpret data on health hazards in order to hold on to career, wealth, power, glory, or whatever it is that will make men sell their integrity. The same insinuation is frequently made, with greater clarity and shamelessness, by Najarian's mentor Nader.

What Najarian says about the cigarette industry is, of course, in itself quite true; so let us push him into his own trap: How many doctors could the cigarette industry get to deny the correlation between cigarette smoking and lung cancer? How many doctors could it get to "demonstrate" that this correlation was meaningless?

Only one that we know of; perhaps nine or ten others who were corrupt, incompetent or both. The medical profession as a whole, the A.M.A., even the doctors who preferred to go on smoking, could not be bought; they recognized the danger and warned the public of it. Why then should nuclear engineers and scientists be less ethical? Like doctors who need not seek a career in the tobacco industry, nuclear engineers and physicists have plenty

of opportunities to work in a dozen fields other than nuclear power or weapons radiological therapy, or tracer biology, to name but two.

Why is it that except for a handful of dubious cases no doctor would back up the cigarette industry on the safety of smoking? And why is it that except for a handful of dubious cases every one of thousands of nuclear engineers will back up the industry on the safety of nuclear power?

True, there is no shortage of scientists warning against nuclear power among entomologists and Nobel Prize winning experts on the fine structure of the retina; but what of the many thousands of nuclear scientists and engineers?

There were three members of a bizarre cult who chose the limelight of anti-nuclear publicity. There were a few lightweight technocrats who found a shortcut to glory when they wasted away anonymously under mountains of barren paper. And there is Prof. Kendall who freely mixes discredited fantasies on nuclear power with political demands for unilateral disarmament.

•Who else? Who else is there but a handtul who have found an easy way to publicity, political power, and the adulation by pampered brats who proudly wallow in ignorance?

Compare them to the many thousands of honest engineers who work in the knowledge that nuclear power saves lives when it replaces other sources of electricity; who get no glory, no TV interviews, no selt-righteous rewards playing sanctimonious redeemers; but whose children are harassed by their schoolmates, egged on by an ignorant and vicious press and by the superstition mongers with academic degrees.

Is it the thousands in the scientific and professional societies that have endorsed nuclear power as the safest form of power generation that are corrupt? Is it the Health Physics Society or the American Medical Association who have not the least vested interest in nuclear power, yet have taken the same stand?

Or is it Mrs. Caldicott with her superstitious humbug (" Imagine our descendants waking up in the morning with radioactive vats leaking all over the country, the food contaminated, their kids already being born deformed, and dying of leukemia and cancer...") who by helping to scuttle a safer energy source is morally trampling on her Oath ot Hippocrates?