This month we devote all of this column to a brilliant book, Samuel McCracken's The War Against the Atom (Basic Books, New York, 1982; 206pp., hdbd., $18.50). "The overwhelming case for nuclear power
¾ and against the groups and individuals who continue to fight it" says the jacket, and nobody but Samuel McCracken (of Boston University, known to our readers from his articles in Commentary and other writings) could have made both of these cases as precisely, as devastatingly, as eloquently, and as readably. As with Edward Tellers books, we will not even try to condense a review into a few column inches; we will only strongly recommend it to readers, who will doubtlessly experience the usual difficulties in getting it at bookshops, airports, libraries and other places overflowing with antinuclear trash. They should ask why it is not available; perhaps there is some shame left in the country of John Peter Zenger.It is significant that the case for nuclear power has become a moral case of public health and suppressed truth, a case now pressed only by a few scientists and scholars, eagerly supported by masses of people who have no technical expertise, but who recognize the truth when it is trampled underfoot. Absent from that fight is the leadership of the nuclear industry: not its scientists and engineers, for whom these difficult times act as a sieve, retaining only the best and flushing away the lightweights, but the gutless presidents and vice-presidents who vaccilate between self-pity and self-congratulation, and who know nothing but how to crawl in the corridors of Washington.
And a personal note: It was McCracken's "The Population Controllers" (Commentary, May 1972) that finally convinced this writer that it was time to defend science from ex-scientists like Paul Ehrlich, and this newsletter was one of the results. It is deeply gratifying to know that, conversely, this newsletter brought a master like McCracken into the pronuclear camp.
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Vol. 10, No. 3
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 10, No. 3 Date: November 23, 2004 03:05 PM Title: OXFORD 1933
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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