Electing peace

The media have been painting Carter as inept, but preferable to Reagan the warmonger. Yet it is Carter whose policies have brought the country ever closer to war: and not only by appeasement, irresolution and unilateral disarmament, but also by stifling energy production.

The strength of a nation does more than win wars: It prevents them. But strength does not just mean superior weaponry (although even this advantage has now been squandered away); ultimately it means the strength of a country's industrial base and the strength of its population's will to survive. Britain in 1940 demonstrated what these two pillars mean even when appeasing weaklings (and a wishfully thinking population) have left a country disarmed and defenseless.

Carter's energy record is dismal. He has stifled oil production by a demagogic excise ("windfall") tax; he has stifled coal production and coal use by prohibitive regulation and by backroom deals in his administration. Every form of energy has been saddled with a 23,000 employee, $12 billion/year DoE bureaucracy.

But the most effective obstructions have been those blocking nuclear power, often with international implications. His moratorium on fuel processing and his so-called safeguards policy have significantly damaged US prestige and credibility in the world. Not only has the US become a country that has abandoned its technological lead, but also one that has willfully abrogated its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The recent decision to export fuel to India, a bomb producer and non-signatory, has only completed the picture of unreliability and inconsistency.

Nobody, least of all the Soviets, believe Carter's assurances that the US is strong enough to enforce the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf by military might. What they and everybody else would find credible and impressive is energy production replacing the need for Arab oil; and that, indeed, is the surest road to peace.

Increased production of all forms of energy, in one way or another, can help toward that goal. But the one that is immediately available is removal of the artificial roadblocks obstructing nuclear power.

How will that provide oil and gasoline for transportation? By freeing oil that is now being burned for electricity, a surprisingly large fraction of energy imports. In 1979, US utilities burned more than 523 million barrels of oil to generate electricity; and that works out to almost 27% of crude imports, and no less than 47% of petroleum imports from the Arab OPEC countries. [Source: Monthly Energy Reports, Energy Information Admin.]

Yet Carter has not even done as much as lift the wasteful and unsafe ban on reprocessing, not even after receiving the report by the International Fuel Cycle Evaluation, which he had sponsored in 1977.

That report by 21 countries was ready in February of this year:

Reprocessing is essential; safeguards are a political, not a technical problem.

In reply, Carter yawned.

It is not, then, Reagan who is the warmonger. Neither, for that matter, is Carter a man who would lead this country into war.

He would just drift and blunder into it.