The Military Potential of Civilian Nuclear Energy 1 MOVING TOWARDS LIFE IN A NUCLEAR ARMED CROWD ? ALBERT WOHLSTETTER, THOMAS A. BROWN, GREGORY JONES, DAVID McGARVEY, HENRY ROWEN, VINCENT TAYLOR AND ROBERTA WOHLSTETTER INTRODUCTORY NOTE WHEN the patriotic euphoria which followed the explosion of the nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki subsided, scientists of the Manhattan Project began a public agitation unique in the history of the scientific com- munity in any country in its intensity and its persistence. In their two great campaigns, they agitated for the esta,blishmertt of a system for the international control of atomic energy to prevent the production of nuclear weapons, and for the legal provision of "civilian control" within the United States. In their melodramatic propaganda, these scientists, who had begun as the Federation of Atomic Scientists and had changed their name to the Federation of American Scientists in order to give an impression and to gain a greater breadth of support, presented two starkly divergent alternatives. These were the production of fissile substances for military and hence destructive purposes, and production for civilian and hence beneficent purposes. It was of course known that the two alternatives travelled part of their respective ways on a common path and the major proposal for a scheme of international control, the Acheson-Lilienthal report, was well aware of this. So was the proposal made to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission by Bernard Baruch on behalf of the United States. Once the Soviet Union refused to have any part of the proposal which offered a chance of effectiveness, the movement for international control faded for a decade. Attention was turned to the develop- ment of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. President Eisenhower's pro- gramme of "atoms for peace" spoke for this peaceful intention. Meanwhile the design and construction or importation of plants for the production of electrical power through the use of nuclear energy went on. It was done with a good conscience. Even though the original optimism regarding the trans- figuration of society through nuclear energy evaporated, the time was foreseen when it would become effectively competitive with the production of electrical power from fossil substances. Furthermore, the exhaustion of supplies of these fossil substances was also foreseen and it seemed therefore prudent and necessary to proceed. So it went until well into the 1960s. Then came the wave of discontent in the advanced industrial societies. One of the chief objects of this dis- content was the spoliation of the natural environment by industrial plants. 1 An abridged and revised version of a moiaograph prepared by Pan Heuristics, Los Angeles, California, December 1975.388 Reports and Documents In the United States, vigorous civic groups concerned with the environment have demanded restrictive legislation and have been successful in litigation in the courts. In Switzerland, the site of a projected nuclear power plant in Kaiserslautern was " occupied" by "environmentalists ". In Sweden, opposition to the construction of new nuclear power plants was one of the issues in the recent election; the espousal of such construction is said to have been one of the grounds for the defeat o.f the Social Democratic Party. In Great Britain, the suspension of plans for the construction of new plants for the production of nuclear power has been recommended by a recent report. None of this criticism of the production of such plants has regarded the fact, once perceived but since neglected, thrtt the path to the use of nuclear energy for civilian purposes and the path to the use of nuclear energy for military purposes are identical for much of the way. What was perceived early in the discussion o,f the problems of international control regarding the opportunity to shift--rel~fively easily and in a short time--from the civilian to the military development of nuclear energy, has been forgotten or denied. The report to the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Moving Towards Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd?, by Professor Albert Wohlstetter of the University of Chicago and his colleagues in Pan Heuristics, brought this possibility to prominence by a detailed and rigorous analysis. The basic problem analysed in the ,report, which is reproduced in much revised form in the Reports and Documents section of this issue of Minerva, is that in the next 10 years many countries, including several which have agreed to abstain from making bombs, can come within hours of the production of a bomb without plainly violating their agreements; they can do so without " diverting" special nuclear material, and without being restrained by "safe- guards" which have been designed to verify whether or not material has been diverted. This development would lower the political and economic price of nuclear weapons and at the same time would increase the incentives to acquire them. Moving Towards Life in a Nuclear Armed Crowd? suggests the need, not for stopping all production of nuclear power, but for a fundamental change in the rules of its development and export. Existing rules permit the spread of nuclear weapons which they are supposed to inhibit. The report returns with strong evidence to the basic issues raised in the first years of the nuclear age: the close connection between the military and civilian uses of nuclear energy; the dividing line between "safe" and "dan- gerous " nuclear activities; and the necessity for an early warning of a crossing of that line. It deals with the technically defective idea for the "denaturing" of plutonium, which raised hopes three decades ago and still persists to this day in the belief--accepted by high officials in private industry, by governments