TWO QUOTES

Ralph Rohweder, Director of Science Information Service, Mt. Vernon, Va., to Ms. B. Weeks, "Book World" editor of the Washington Post, which brought long and glowing reviews of three antinuclear books on its front page.

"The main obstacle to human progress is not in the realms of economics or politics. It is in psychology... The programmed mind can become so rigid that not even real-world experience will affect patterns of perception. For instance, the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis caused millions of people to believe that men had one less rib than women while the facts were at their finger tips.

"Almost as irrational... is the phobia associated with the word nuclear in our time. For many people that word blocks thought processes and the ability to absorb information.

"Insane reactions to a word like nuclear occur because extreme fear has unhinged the mind. This is the psychological basis for brainwashing...

"Enclosed is a little booklet, Doctors Against Health, which will, in about 30 minutes, let you understand the fraud you have helped to promote.

Steve Baer, solar engineer and entrepreneur (Zomeworks Crp., Albuquerque, N.M.), in SOLAR ENGINEERING, Jan. 1982:

"A subsidized industry has been taught that the way to make money is through lobbyists, not by developing better products. Subsidies, and the threat of losing them, make the solar lobbies swell and solar research shrivel... Designs of solar heaters that are actually cost-effective are a dangerous threat to a subsidized industry ... The money is directed toward those who can demonstrate that they must be helped, ie. that they are incompetent. Proving incompetence has become a specialty. Large companies have become especially good at it, not only in the solar field, but also in synfuels and atomic businesses... Tax credits for solar energy, although they are not in the interests of solar energy, create a noisy group of happy recipients who claim that, by receiving money they never earned, they are solving a serious global problem... Taxing fossil fuels would, in fact, do what the solar lobbies claim they want, but it would not create a happy group who knew they were getting something for nothing...

"The bogus solution of passing out tax credits has come to pass because there are people who are ignorant enough and noisy enough to confidently pretend that they can manage our lives for us through government intervention better than we can through the market place."