Reactors for Red China

It is uncertain whether Reagan's July 27 agreement with Red China's President Li on the sale of nuclear reactors will be blocked by Congress (or by the courts, after the NRDC goes to court requiring an environmental impact statement, as it has done for other cases of nuclear export). But if it is blocked, as I believe it should be, it will be blocked for the wrong reasons.

As explained in the August issue, the idea of using a nuclear power reactor for the illicit manufacture of weapons materials is far fetched in any country, but in the case of admitted nuclear-weapons states, of which Red China is one, the idea is absurd.

The reason why Red China, the USSR, and their respective colonies should not be sold any reactors is the same as why they should not be sold any thumbtacks: it is irrational to make deals with totalitarian governments.

This has nothing to do, as some would have you believe, with handing out rewards and punishments. But when the totalitarians are forced to make their own thumbtacks and reactors, they have to divert capital, labor, materials and brainpower from their number one priority: their war machine to enslave others and their repressive machine to enslave their own. A thumbtack denied is a bullet delayed.

The particular case of aiding China is even more Chamberlainesque than the appeasement increasingly apparent in US foreign policy: to build up one crook against another will turn both of them against you, as Neville Chamberlain found out when the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed. If the US seeks allies against the Soviets, it need look no further than those who actively fight them within their colonies and protectorates in Asia, Africa, and Central America.

Red China is not a dictatorship like, say, Chile, which also (regrettably) represses all political dissent, but otherwise does not interfere in the private lives of its people, leaving them economic freedom, as well as the freedom to leave for a freer country. Red China is a totalitarian country that organizes the lives of its subjects for 24 hours a day, all with the purpose of enslaving them, their neighbors and, in their hopes, the rest of the world.

Compare this with the stomach-turning hypocrisy now displayed toward South Africa, which is not like Chile, either. Even now, under its state of emergency, it has more human rights and less racism than the rest of Africa put together. It is just as much part of the West as the US was when it, too, practiced racial repression, and when its black ghettos, too, erupted in fratricidal riots. Whatever South Africa's alleged failings, or to the contrary, its importance as a supplier of minerals to the US, one naked fact stands out: South Africa is blocking, and resolved to block, the determined thrust of history's most savage totalitarianism. The dupes of that totalitarianism are now screaming their heads off in congressional and campus performances for the doubly duped.

I hope South Africa, like Israel and Taiwan (the other two "leper states" being abandoned by the West) have learned the lesson of Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Zimbabwe in 1985: that to yield to the pressures and promises of a short-sighted and self-deceptive West is to go under.

That West is now offering reactors to Red China and reprisals to South Africa. The day when it realizes the folly of its selective and inverted morality will surely come; and I hope it will not come too late.