Running the World Economy in Reverse
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nuclear companies, with the full support of their governments, entered in this period into negotiations with select developing sector countries, fully in the spirit of Eisenhower’s 1953 Atoms for Peace declaration. Clearly, the Anglo-American energy grip, based on their tight control of the world’s major energy source, petroleum, was threatened if these quite feasible programs went ahead. In the postwar period, nuclear energy represented precisely the same technological improvement over oil which oil had represented over coal when Lord Fisher and Winston Churchill argued at the end of the nineteenth century that Britain’s navy should convert to oil from coal. The major difference in the 1970s was that Britain and her cousins in the United States were firmly in control of world oil supplies. World nuclear technology threatened to open unbounded energy possibilities, especially if plans for commercial nuclear fast breeder reactors were realized, as well as for thermonuclear fusion. In the immediate aftermath of the 1974 oil shock, two organizations were established within the nuclear industry, both, significantly enough, based in London. In early 1975, an informal semisecret group was established, the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, or ‘London Club,’ as it was known. The group included Britain, the United States and Canada, together with France, Germany, Japan and the USSR. This was an initial Anglo-American effort to secure self-restraint on nuclear export. This group was complemented in May 1975 by the formation of another secretive organization, the London ‘Uranium Institute,’ which brought together the world’s major suppliers of uranium. This was dominated by the traditional British territories, including Canada, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. These ‘inside’ organizations were necessary, but by no means sufficient, for the Anglo-American interests to contain the nuclear ‘threat’ of the early 1970s. As one prominent antinuclear American from the Aspen Institute put it, ‘We must take the bloom off the “nuclear rose.”’ And take it off they did. DEVELOPING THE ANGLO-AMERICAN GREEN AGENDA It was no accident that, following the oil shock recession of 1974– 75, a growing part of the population of western Europe, especially in Germany, began talking for the first time in the postwar period about ‘limits to growth,’ or threats to the environment, and began to question their faith in the principle of industrial growth and technological progress. Very few people realized the extent to which
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