TWO ATTITUDES

"The natural energy of the Universe, the power that lights the stars in the sky, is nuclear . . . Why then are so many of us prepared to march against its use to provide us with electricity? . . . Fear of cancer, that great standby of all en-vironmentalist demagogues [disregards the damage to the living cell equivalent to the effects of radiation by small inef-ficiencies in the normal process of oxidative metabolism] . . . So far as our cells are concerned, damage by radiation and by breathing oxygen are almost indistinguishable . . . [but] breath-ing is fifty times more dangerous than the sum total of all radiation we normally receive from all sources."

Nuclear issues, London

"If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS. It has the potential to end industrialism, which is the main force behind the environmental crisis."

[Celebrated as heroic by B. McKibben, another of Schell's and Brodeur's colleagues from the New Yorker, in the latest book to make the rounds among the Penthouse Proletariat.]