without regard to the risks they are creating for the very future of life on Earth."
Dr. Chris Busby of the Health and Life Sciences faculty at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland and author of Wings of Death, Nuclear Pollution and Human Health, says: "What we are seeing with nuclear scientists is a desperate need to control their environment and their lives and the forces that may affect their lives by creating a virtual universe which they can deal with by mathematics and by drawing straight lines on paper." It's the "cult of the nuclearists," says Busby. And this construct of the nuclear scientists seeking to "control nature with mathematical equations that make them feel safe" sets up a "collision with reality"--and a "way we are going to destroy ourselves." The belief in nuclear power is "far beyond anything scientific or rational," says Busby, who has a Ph.D. in chemical physics.
Joseph Mangano, executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, says the "religious passion for nuclear technology" started with the "guilt" of those in the Manhattan Project. "Those in the "nuclear priesthood' knew that these horrible bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives and they wanted to make up for that"They developed atomic energy for warfare and then thought it had other uses--and they would do anything to make that work." But the civilian nuclear technology they devised was also deadly, and this realization was too "devastating to be accepted" by the "nuclear originators" or those who followed who "spend their days with their buddies, their colleagues, all thinking the same way."
Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, in his 1955 book The Open Mind, wrote: "T he physicists felt a peculiarly intimate responsibility for suggesting, for supporting, and in the end, in large measure, for achieving the realization of atomic weapons".In some sort of crude sense"the physicists have known sin."
Whether out of indoctrination, misguided belief, an obsession to "control nature," the lure of the cult, closeness to power, job security, or their seeking to perpetuate a vested interest, the "nuclearists" have a religious allegiance to their technology. On a moral level, they have indeed sinned--and continue to do so. On a political level, they have corrupted and distorted energy policy in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. On an economic level, they are wasting a gargantuan portion of our tax dollars.
Choices of energy technology should be based on the technology being safe, clean, economic and in harmony with life. Instead, we are up against nuclear scientists and engineers pushing their deadly technology in the manner of religious zealots.
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