Ernest Graves
It is very much like what the British did about poison gas in World War I. The Germans
caught them flat-footed. The Germans had chlorine, and they really decimated the
British. And the British looked around. They had no gas masks, they had no chlorine,
they had nothing. And they said, "What can we do?"
They decided that the best thing they could do would be to start a propaganda
campaign that would discredit the Germans. And they were successful. It was a sort of
a pilot effort, and the result of this was that we came out of World War I with a violent
or extreme public antipathy to chemical warfare, which has remained.
And perhaps justified. I am really not passing on the merits of this. I am talking about
the dynamics of it. Exactly the same thing has happened with nuclear weapons.
Q:
Well, in the case of nuclear weapons do you think this turn of events is unfortunate?
A:
It is one of those things where who knows? I think it is very unfortunate as far as
nuclear power is concerned. My personal opinion is we have made a huge mistake, that
we have denied ourselves perhaps what would have been, if it had been done right, the
cheapest, cleanest, safest power we could have. We wouldn't have been killing
hundreds of coal miners every year. We wouldn't have been polluting the air and
causing God knows how many cases of cancer a year and so forth and so on. All the
adverse effects of fossil fuels on mankind.
Q:
Which we don't talk about very much.
A:
We don't talk about, but I am sure that if you did an objective analysis, you would find
that mankind has suffered and will suffer far more damage from the continued use of
fossil fuels than it ever would have if we had gone more extensively to nuclear power.
But it is true that the nuclear industry has not done a good job.
The government people running it, and the industry combined, did a very poor job of
regulating it and educating the public, and there was extraordinary mismanagement in
the building of these plants, exemplified by the failure out in the state of Washington.
The public power entity in Washington had a very large plan to build nuclear power
plants in that state. Basically what happened was that due to mismanagement they went
bankrupt. They didn't complete the plants in the time that they were supposed to and
there were huge cost overruns. The net effect of this was that they reached the point
where they had to make a decision and they decided to abandon the whole program. All
these state and municipal bonds went in default.
It is true that the environmental opposition to these plants--there was a link between
the environmental opposition and the opposition to nuclear weapons--this opposition
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