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While there's good reason to believe some countries intend to harness nuclear power toward green ends, there's also good reason to believe that other nations will use warming as a pretext for less virtuous purposes--namely, to acquire technology that would allow them to build nuclear weapons. And, even as nuclear power spreads to developing countries without such nefarious motives, the increased production of uranium and plutonium will provide new opportunities for would-be terrorists (or profiteers selling to terrorists). Nuclear power may be a necessary, if not sufficient, weapon against planetary apocalypse; but, in hyping its ameliorative properties, we could well open ourselves to a different sort of catastrophe.
In the American psyche, "nuclear" has long been synonymous with "doom." As Lawrence Wittner writes in The Struggle Against the Bomb, that conviction has applied not only to weapons, but to anything atomic. In fact, the grassroots arms control movement was kick-started in the 1950s less by the horror of duck-and-cover drills or the growth of the Soviet nuclear arsenal than by tests of our own H-bombs, which spewed radiation into the atmosphere. Ultimately, the first U.S.-Soviet arms control treaty, signed by President Kennedy in 1963, limited not nuclear bombs or missiles, but nuclear tests.
