POWER May 2012 - 94

NUCLEAR POWER
Too Dumb to Meter: Follies,
Fiascoes, Dead Ends, and Duds on
the U.S. Road to Atomic Energy
The commercial development of nuclear power began immediately after the
Second World War ended and the Manhattan Project secrets were released
to the public. As the headline-also the title of a new book-implies, the
development path was not always straight or even clearly marked. In this
POWER exclusive, the first chapter of Too Dumb to Meter begins a serial
presentation of the book.
By Kennedy Maize
O
n September 16, 1954, a dapper and
double-breasted U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission Chairman, Lewis
Strauss, stepped to the microphone at the
Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City. He
was addressing a dinner meeting of the National
Association of Science Writers. An
ebullient Strauss bragged,
Transmutation of the elements-unlimited
power, ability to investigate the working of
living cells by tracer atoms, the secret of
photosynthesis about to be uncovered-
these and a host of other results all in fifteen
short years. It is not too much to expect
that our children will enjoy in their homes
electrical energy too cheap to meter-will
know of great periodic regional famines in
the world only as matters of history-will
travel effortlessly over the seas and under
them and through the air with a minimum
of danger and at great speeds-and will
experience a lifespan far longer than ours,
as disease yields and man comes to understand
what causes him to age. This is the
forecast for an age of peace.
It didn't quite work out that way. Much of
the story of the atom focuses on the well-known
course of development of newer, bigger, stronger
bombs, and of the birthing problems and
maturation of civilian nuclear power plants.
Whereas most histories of technology
catalog success, this book details failure: explosive,
expensive, repeated failure. This is
a less well-known story, but often more interesting
and more amusing. It also serves as
a cautionary account of the perils of government
hubris, public hysteria, and centralized
planning gone wild: misguided policy, misunderstood
history, misapplied engineering,
and mistaken economics.
94
This book brings to light some of the
things that went wrong-often terribly
wrong-from conception through failed implementation.
It is a tale of the stubborn and
mistaken belief in the ability of big science,
big engineering, and big government money
to solve any technical problem.
This story begins not with the well-known
history of the Manhattan Project and its intrepid
bomb builders, but with what came
next-immediately after August 1945.
Chapter 1. The Madness of Nukes
Most Americans reacted joyously to the initial
news of the atomic bombs falling on Japan
in the summer of 1945, as the vast destruction
spread by the atom spelled the end of the
Empire of the Rising Sun. Whatever these
mysterious bombs were, they did the job-
and most were glad. Sen. Brien McMahon, a
young Connecticut Democrat who would seal
his brief place in history by becoming a chief
architect of the postwar Atomic Energy Commission,
was fond of saying that the bombing
of Hiroshima was the greatest event in world
history since the birth of Jesus Christ.
Yet, there was also a twinge of guilt in the
public sentiment after the first atom bombs fell,
particularly as the scope of the devastation in
the two Japanese cities became known. Writer
John Hersey captured the ambiguity beautifully
in an article titled " Hiroshima, " published
in the New Yorker in August 1946, a year after
the U.S. bomb destroyed that metropolis.
Hersey's 36,000-word article, which occupied
the entire edition of the magazine and
was immediately published as a book, personalized
the effects of the atomic bomb in
spare, calm language that made the horror of
nuclear war accessible to any reader. It had
a profound impact on the way many people
viewed atomic energy for decades to come.
www.powermag.com
Hersey-who had won a Pulitzer Prize for
fiction the year before with A Bell for Adano,
a tale of the U.S. military occupation of a
town in Italy-described six survivors of the
nuclear inferno in Japan and how it changed
their lives. When the article appeared, the
magazine's editors began the edition with
this introduction:
TO OUR READERS The New Yorker this
week devotes its entire editorial space to an
article on the almost complete obliteration
of a city by one atomic bomb, and what
happened to the people of that city. It does
so in the conviction that few of us have yet
comprehended the all but incredible destructive
power of this weapon, and that everyone
might well take time to consider the terrible
implications of its use. -The Editors.
" Hiroshima " was a publishing sensation. The
magazine quickly sold out on newsstands (at fifteen
cents an issue), and copies were soon being
scalped to collectors for ten dollars and more.
Reprint requests poured in to the New Yorker,
and Knopf produced a book that hit the stores in
October. The Book of the Month Club distributed
copies to its members for free. It became
one of the most influential books of the last half
of the twentieth century.
Soon after, many Americans began to
wonder incredulously at those two terrible
pieces of blast and fire that fell out of the sky.
Just what were they? Clearly, a new force
had been unleashed, one that even most welleducated
Americans didn't understand and
couldn't quite comprehend.
Time magazine, in its July 1, 1946, cover
story on Albert Einstein and the bomb (the third
time Einstein had appeared on the magazine's
cover), captured that feeling of combined awe
and befuddlement, writing in its signature style:
POWER | May 2012
http://www.powermag.com
POWER May 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER May 2012
