Nuclear Power and Human Nature

From Omni Magazine, October 1978;

If the world is to step back from the nuclear brink, the United States, which led the way there, must lead the way back; its President must reassert leadership.

The radioactive particle is too dangerous and implacable for fallible humans to fool with.

"Despite the best efforts and intentions of the people of the United Nations," said Jacques-Yves Cousteau, addressing the U.N. in 1976, "human society is too diverse, national passion too strong, human aggressiveness too deep-seated for the peaceful and the warlike atom to stay divorced for long. We cannot embrace one while abhorring the other; we must learn, if we want to live at all, to live without both."

The strange thing is, we all know that and we always have. From time out of mind, our mythology has prepared us. The tales of Prometheus and Pandora, and of Faust, and the notion of hubris in Greek tragedy, are as apt now as when invented. More apt. How, in the Ages of Bronze or Iron, could those lessons have been so perfecty applicable, and so desperately important? It is almost as if the old storytellers had blinked, millenia in advance, at the white thermonuclear flash, and had begun preparing their admonitions.

Pandora opened her box, of course, and Prometheus stole the fire, Perhaps these things are inevitable, given the nature of man and matter.