The anti-nuclear movement spawned today’s radical environmentalism. Using the ‘front group’ tactic beloved of communist agitators, it fed lies to sympathetic reporters and whipped reasonable concerns into hair-trigger sensitivities. Its progeny is your last and ever more outrageous electricity bill.
An essential aspect of the vigilance that sustains liberty is the capacity to learn the lessons of history. What follows describes how radical activists captured the environmental movement as a part of the march through the institutions of Western society. The worldwide campaign against nuclear power became the foundation and testbed for the strategy and tactics of using environmentalism to de-industrialise and demoralise the West. The most recent manifestation of the movement is the climate scare and the push for expensive and unreliable renewable energy.
In 1980, the late John Grover thoroughly documented the anti-nuclear campaign in The Struggle for Power: What We Haven’t Been Told and Why! This account is drawn from his research. Grover was a mining engineer with an eye for the tactics of the Fabians and their more radical fellow travellers. He named some of the people and the main groups involved in the anti-uranium mining and anti-nuclear power movement, both internationally and locally.
The anti-nuclear movement started in the 1950s while American and Russian bomb tests were dispersing plutonium into the atmosphere. This aroused reasonable objections and also a very different kind of resistance to the Western nuclear deterrent and nuclear power in general. The 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty answered the reasonable concerns and was not a problem for the nuclear power industry, but in the 1970s the US created 20,000 government employees dedicated to improving the environment. Nuclear power stations soon became a target due to “thermal pollution” from their cooling systems, this tack being backed up by fear campaigns about the dangers of radiation.
Two sensationalized books appeared in 1969/70, The Careless Atom by Sheldon Novick and Perils of the Peaceful Atom by Richard Curtis, the former garnering generally favourable and accepting reviews that would set the standard for all the media sympathy to come. The books’ appearance also marked the start of the all-out campaign against nuclear energy.
In 1971 Ralph Nader, bankrolled by the Rockefeller Foundation network, began to work with lawyer Anthony Roisman and the Union of Concerned Scientists to combine the efforts of environmental groups and public interest lawyers against atomic power. According to Grover, by 1977 environmental interests funded as many as 600 environmental lawyers in the US with a budget in the order of $45 million, much of it devoted to energy-stopping. They worked on a wide front, using legal action to delay projects, lobbying Congress and government agencies, recruiting churches and distributing publicity material to the general public. They fuelled exaggerated perceptions of the dangers of radiation and the purported incompetence of the industry. A long-established environmental group, the Sierra Club in California, became more extreme during the 1970s and turned against nuclear power. It was highly influential due to its well-connected membership and a budget of three millioncareless atom dollars, a very hefty sum in 1977.
