INSECTS AND NUCLEAR WAR

This technique was used in Mexico to control the medfly, made famous by California governor Jerry Brown, whose "environmen-tal" demagoguery used to be reported in these pages in 1979-81-- and who remembers the twerp now? Dr Bertram Wolfe did, in an outstanding article "Medfly Revives a Tale of Techno-Paranoia," (LA Times, 9/10/87) recalling how Jerry scaremongered about the dangers of Malathion (pesticide spray) and how TV programs and press articles inundated California with rubbish about big agribusiness endangering lives for profits. Only when other states threatened to ban California produce, and the DoA threatened to quarantine it, did Jerry suddenly reverse himself, saving most of the California fruit crop by aerial spraying in the nick of time. But peo-ple have almost totally forgotten how they were used and fooled.

Another good article in this category is "A Memoir of Nuclear Winter" by T. Rothman in the Nov. 87 Analog Science Fiction/ Science Fact.

Rothman soberly assesses the history of the purely technical points of "Nuclear Winter" (in whose birth he participated) down to the Summer 1986 Foreign Affairs article, in which Thompson and Schneider, two of the original Nuclear Winter authors, write about a cooling over land of about 10 degrees F for a matter of days to weeks, and state "on scientific Founds the global apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be relegated to a vanishingly low level of probability."

He does not mention how the whole affair was managed as a publicity stunt, with the Kendall Foundation hiring a PR agency for $200,000 to plug Sagan and Ehrlich, nor how Science published their papers on the spot without proper review and waved its usual originality requirements [AtE Jun 84]; even so, he arrives at the conclusion "Nuclear war is horrible enough not to require distor-tion." With this every sane person will agree, though another point seems more important: do we just want to horrify people with descriptions of nuclear war (correct ones, of course), or do we want to prevent it? And do we prevent it by treaties with crooks, or by a space shield and a population willing and able to survive and win?

Where are they now, the warriors of the Medfly, Nuclear Winter, biodegradability and a thousand other hoaxes?

Scaring the wits out of people with hoaxes about food irradia-tion, the profits in cancer and the disintegration of the ozone layer, and preaching appeasement of the Soviets. How many times can the American public be fooled by the same people via the same media, then forget and be fooled by the same people via the same media again?

I have not yet stopped counting.

[More: Current IAEA Bulletin (Intl. Atomic En. Agcy., Vienna), vol. 29, no.2 1987. Contains 3 articles on isotope applications, one on insect control.]