Nuclear power

The other Monday morning, I was standing under a tree out at the end of Long Island waiting for the bus to take me, as it does, on my weekly ordeal to Babylon.

Maybe I should explain that this is the first stage of the Long Island railroad's effort to get you to get me from the end of the island into Manhattan. The Long Island railroad is an institution which would provide music hall comedians with at least three or four sallies a night, if there were any more music halls. 

For years and years it has been in the red. For years and years, therefore, it has followed the rule of all public institutions that threaten to go bankrupt. It boasts of its efficiency and it promises more and better services. Towards the end of Nelson Rockefeller's term as governor of New York, he promised such drastic and pleasing reforms in the rickety railroad that it would soon be known, he said, as the best commuter railroad in the United States. 

Well, the Long Island railroad is still the best railroad on Long Island. It's the only one. One of its reforms was to increase the number of trips available from the end of the island – we're just a hundred miles out from the city – but it would reduce the number of trains. Now how do you do that? Well, the timetable offers two trains a day and about six what are called 'road and rail' trips. In other words, about half the inbound trip is by bus to a junction where you pick up the train into New York. 

My bus leaves our village of Cutchogue at 11.30 in the morning and arrives at Babylon just before one o'clock. You then catch the 1.05 from Babylon to New York. That's what the timetable says. So far this summer we've not made it. Last Monday, for instance, the bus – which starts eight miles away and makes one stop before me – was 35 minutes late. That's quite a feat for a drive of eight miles. What it meant was that we missed not only the 1.05 train from Babylon, but the 1.32 and we therefore hung around in the boiling heat for an hour and caught the 2.32 which, I must say, was air-conditioned to the temperature of an icicle. 

We arrived in New York just before four o'clock and I was home on the half-hour, a hundred miles in five spanking hours from door to door! I hasten to say, by the way, that the Long Island would be no better if it were nationalised which in a way it is because, like our main eastern seaboard railroad lines, it's in a hopeless financial position and is subsidised by the government and the money for the subsidy and the improved services comes from guess who? The tax payer. 

Well, some of you may still be confused about Babylon. It is 40 miles out from Manhattan and how did it get its peculiar name? Well, it was named by a sea captain, one Jacob Conklin who was shanghaied by the pirate Captain Kidd and, being seized, he bided his time, dived, or dove, aboard, overboard, and came up on a neck of land which he promptly called Babylon. That’s all I can find in the history books. I hope it explains the name. 

Captain Kidd, by the way, was finally caught by the authorities on Long Island and was extradited to England for trial. He was said to have buried his treasure in Peconic Bay which we overlook from our house and I can only say that I've been fishing these waters for 40 years and I believe the story is nonsense, unless what he buried there were schools of weakfish, porgies, kingfish, bluefish and blowfish. 

Well, if you make me go on this way, I shall never get to my story which goes back to my standing under a tree by our local petrol station waiting for the bus and talking to Joe. Joe is a large, jokey man with dark hair, a permanent grin and an Edwardian bay window which he's always threatening to do something about. He prides himself on his youthful looks and it was more or less of a jest of mine that I said to him, 'Joe, what were you doing 61 years ago today?' 

There'd been a piece in the paper, as there always is on 4 August, about the anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. I assumed that Joe would haul off in a mock aggressive way and protest that he had not seen the light of day until 1920 at the earliest. To my astonishment, he turned out to be my age and he said simply, 'I was a toddler.' 

He maintained, as American toddlers of that generation still do, that the war didn't start till 1917, just as the toddlers of another American generation date the start of the Second World War from 7 December 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Well, it was too hot to go into all of that but it reminded me that Americans have a passion for anniversaries and this weekend they had a slew of them. I suppose all nations have their own taste in anniversaries but the tastes do vary. 

In England my feeling is always that the anniversaries the papers really like to wallow in such things as the landing of William the Conqueror or the 300th anniversary of the birth or death of John Milton. I remember the quiet pride with which my old editor, Alfred Wadsworth of the Guardian, called me once across the Atlantic – and he was not a man to call anybody long-distance if he could send a postcard – to say that he thought we had scooped the whole London press on, that is, the 500th anniversary of the birth of Alfred the Great. 

Americans, on the other hand, while they reverently observe the birthday of George Washington and are going into fits of nostalgia and firecrackers over the coming bicentennial of the republic, seem to keep tabs rather on recent anniversaries, whether grim or glorious. The 8 August is a date that Americans will remember for many years to come as the date on which Richard Nixon, one year ago, became the first American president to resign. This also means, of course, that Gerald Ford has come to the end of his first year as President Ford and there have been wads of columns summing up his achievements and failures. 

August 6, however, is a date which the whole world had better keep in mind. It was the date on which the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and there's always, by way of atonement, I suppose, a severely respectful despatch from that rebuilt city, reporting on the observances in the place it happened. This year, the 30th anniversary, we are told there were public prayers and the symbolic release of a flight of peace birds. 

It was arranged some time ago that the Prime Minister of Japan should be in Washington on the 30th anniversary and on Wednesday he sat down in the White House with President Ford. They did not bring up Hiroshima but ironically Mr Miki explained to the president the hard time he's having getting the Japanese parliament to ratify the treaty that promises to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. That's the treaty concluded between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1968, since when 94 countries have ratified it. There are 15 other countries that have signed it but failed to have it ratified by this governments and Japan is one. 

The prime minister's difficulties are easy to state and, I should guess, appalling to overcome. Japan is about to start exporting nuclear technology for atomic power plants and the promise is always that these power plants will not be capable of making weapons. But the process of converting nuclear power into nuclear weapons is not difficult and Mr Ford asked Mr Miki to join other nuclear exporting nations to set up safeguards and precautions that will stop the spread of weapons and the ability to make weapons. 

While begging Japan not to be caught up in the atomic arms race, President Ford gave the prime minister the assurance that the security of Japan is a vital American interest and that the American nuclear deterrent is there to prove it. Now it's always said by politicians who serve on atomic energy committees that atomic power plants are one thing and atomic weapons quite something else and that nobody should be alarmed at hearing that small or unstable government is purchasing reactors. 

However, that is not the view of the scientists and the most significant act done here by way of recalling Hiroshima was a petition sent last Thursday to the White House and the Congress by 2,300 scientists. It said that the dangers to all of us of nuclear power – and they meant precisely power, in any form – are so serious that there must be what they called 'a drastic reduction' in the building of new reactors. 

The problems of safety seem to set in at three stages. First, the reactors themselves should be safely built. Then there should be absolute safeguards for protecting the plutonium and a safe system of disposing of nuclear wastes. The scientists, and they were led by three men who were involved in the work that developed the first nuclear bomb, disagree most strongly with the politicians on the question of how easy it is, or isn't, to steal or divert the plutonium that's produced by commercial reactors into the making of nuclear explosives or – a horror that hasn't been much publicised – radiological terror weapons. The scientists say that in the present system of manufacturing plutonium, there are many weaknesses, mainly in the safeguards against theft and diversion of this lethal element. 

Second only to this warning was another on the dangers of nuclear waste. They say that no technically or economically feasible methods have yet been proven for the ultimate disposal of radioactive wastes. Now why should anyone run even the faintest risk of allowing some madcap dictator or terror group to acquire the means of making nuclear weapons which, by the way, can now be made the size of a portable radio set. 

Well, unfortunately, the question has not been put to the public in that form. Last spring, an electrical engineering concern – it makes nuclear technology – took a poll. It asked people if they favoured the building of more nuclear power plants to produce electricity. Sixty-three per cent said 'yes', 19 per cent 'no', 18 per cent of the usual 'don't knows'. Who would be against the making of electricity from some other source than coal, if you don't mention the collateral dangers, especially since the United States government is anxious to increase the electricity generated by nuclear reactors from the present seven per cent to 50 per cent by the end of the century? 

Well, put that way, it all sounds not merely guileless but progressive and sensible. And yet, on the anniversary of Hiroshima, over 2,000 distinguished scientists are warning us that by our present procedures, the 55 American reactors of today could grow in 25 years to 830 reactors, producing half the nation's electricity maybe, but able, also, to produce, by accident or stealth, enough weapons to obliterate all present treaties and agreements and finish us off.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.