Pandora's Nuclear Box

Abstract

The most dramatic aspect of the nuclear age has been the strategic arms race that it has inspired. For nearly a decade following Hiroshima, questions of the development and control of nuclear arms dominated discussion and debate in the high political councils of the world's major powers, and the race for leadership in military nuclear capability was the only aspect of the nuclear phenomenon that captured public attention and scholarly analysis. While the nuclear arms debate continues unabated, as evidenced by the recently concluded Non-Proliferation Treaty (npt) and the current strategic arms limitation talks (salt) between Washington and Moscow, broader nuclear vistas have opened up. President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace proposal of 1953, followed by the 1955 Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, and the creation in 1957 of the International Atomic Energy Agency (iaba) accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world impressed on the public consciousness an awareness that the atom had a benign and constructive dimension as well as destructive capabilities. In 1970 this awareness is much more manifest, and a significantly larger portion of time and energy devoted to nuclear questions is being invested in the peaceful nuclear domain. The prevailing, though not unchallenged attitude among Elites and publics in advanced and developing nations is one of anticipation of the potential benefits to be derived from the harnessing of the peaceful atom. But this quasieuphoric view, as the books by Novick* and by Curtis and Hogan2 reveal, is built on a combination of grossly inadequate public information and knowledge regarding the risks inherent in the industrialization of atomic power, and high-level, high-powered salesmanship by spokesmen of government and private industry. The message of these two studies on the peaceful atom is that apprehensiveness rather than anticipation would be a more appropriate mood; that nuclear power development is being exploited at a pace that outdistances our command of the technology; and that the longterm consequences of the continued commercialization of the atom at the present rate and under existing conditions are at best risky and at worst potentially disastrous. The development of the power reactor programme in the United States dates from the mid-1950s, when the Atomic Energy Commission, supported by industries which had heavily invested in military nuclear technology and by proponents of the private ownership of utilities, ended the government monopoly in the nuclear