The scribblers

What all that has to do with energy is that the scribblers who conned the American people in world affairs are still conning them in the field of energy.

The people who told you that a Communist takeover in Southeast Asia would not lead to a bloodbath are now telling you that nuclear power is unsafe and unnecessary. The commentators who laughed at the domino theory are now scaring you with radioactivity. The newscasters who called for the Shah to be ousted are now telling you the American industrial giant can run on solar energy alone. The politicians who told you the Cubans were a stabilizing influence in Africa are now telling you that scientists had claimed nothing could ever go wrong in a nuclear plant. The Knights of the Double Standard who preach damnation of Chile and friendship with the USSR in the interests of human rights are now calling for the conversion of nuclear plants to coal-fired ones in the interests of safety.

But while the Tom-Wicker type of hack may have lost much credibility, it is sometimes thought that the staff writers of scientific journals can be trusted.

They cannot. What can be trusted (within normal bounds of scientific controversy) are the scientific papers that form the bulk of journals such as Science; but the weekly commentaries preceding them are written by scribblers who are, for the most part, worthy colleagues of Jack Anderson. In fact, Robert Gillette slanted his pieces in Science before he slanted them in the Los Angeles Times, P. M. Boffey slanted them there before he slanted them in the New York Times, and the present set of slanters presumably slant in hopes of making it to the citadels of national brainwashing, too.

Thus, we find Eliot Marshall gleefully writing in Science about Dixy Lee Ray closing a low-level waste dump in Washington State; he considers this ironic for an outspoken supporter of nuclear power and suggests she did it because next year is an election year. He does not know that only a minor part of low-level wastes comes from nuclear power plants, and that it is hospitals whose need for these dumps is critical. It is inconceivable to him that Gov. Ray could have closed the site for honest reasons, for honesty is not a concept many members of his profession are familiar with.

Yet this is only an unimportant, run-of-the-mill example that is repeated a hundred times every month. The current special issue of IEEE Spectrum on the TMI Grand Disaster does not once compare the risks of various power sources, and the final article is by the editor who but 5 years ago wrote an editorial revealing his mistaken belief that nuclear plants could explode. The first issue of Science 80, along with responsible articles, brings the fashionable what-if fantasies of what radio waves could do to you (could, might, and never been disproved are the key words of these trashy meditations). And so endlessly on.

Few of these "science" scribblers are probably vicious; they are mainly incompetent and eager to be fashionable. But they do a lot of damage because they are quite wrongly credited with the same trustworthiness as the scientists who write for their journals.

In reality, they have the same relation to science as the charwomen in the Louvre have to art.