Taking the ‘bloom off the nuclear rose’

corporation in gross revenues. Her sisters, including Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and Gulf, were not far behind.

The bulk of the OPEC dollar revenues, Kissinger’s ‘recycled petrodollars,’ was deposited with the leading banks of London and New York, the banks which dealt in dollars as well as international oil trade. Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank—all enjoyed the windfall profi ts of the oil crisis. We shall later see how they recycled their petrodollars during the 1970s, and how this set the stage for the great debt crisis of the 1980s.8

TAKING THE ‘BLOOM OFF THE NUCLEAR ROSE’

One principal concern of the authors of the 400 per cent oil price increase was how to ensure that their drastic action would not drive the world to accelerate an already strong trend towards the construction of a far more effi cient and ultimately less expensive alternative energy source—nuclear electricity generation.

Kissinger’s former dean at Harvard, and his boss when Kissinger briefl y served as a consultant to John Kennedy’s National Security Council, was McGeorge Bundy. Bundy left the White House in 1966 in order to play a critical role in shaping the domestic policy of the United States as president of the largest private foundation, the Ford Foundation. By December 1971, Bundy had established a major new project for the foundation, the Energy Policy Project, under the direction of S. David Freeman, and with an impressive $4 million checkbook and a three-year time limit. Bundy’s Ford study, titled ‘A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future,’ was released in the midst of the debate during the 1974 oil crisis. It was to shape the public debate in the critical time of the oil crisis.

For the fi rst time in American establishment circles, the fraudulent thesis was proclaimed that ‘Energy growth and economic growth can be uncoupled; they are not Siamese twins.’ Freeman’s study advocated bizarre and demonstrably ineffi cient ‘alternative’ energy sources such as wind power, solar refl ectors and burning recycled waste. The Ford report made a strong attack on nuclear energy, arguing that the technologies involved could theoretically be used to make nuclear bombs. ‘The fuel itself or one of the byproducts, plutonium, can be used directly or processed into the material for nuclear bombs or explosive devices,’ the report asserted.

The Ford study correctly noted that the principal competitor to the hegemony of petroleum in the future was nuclear energy, warning against the ‘very rapidity with which nuclear power is spreading in all parts of the world and by development of new nuclear technologies, most notably the fast breeder reactors and the centrifuge method of enriching uranium.’ The framework of the U.S. fi nancial establishment’s antinuclear ‘green’ assault had been defi ned by Bundy’s project.9

By the early 1970s, nuclear technology had clearly established itself as the preferred future choice for effi cient electricity generation, vastly more effi cient (and environmentally friendly) than either oil or coal. At the time of the oil shock, the European Community was already well into a major nuclear development program. As of 1975, the plans of member governments called for the completion of between 160 and 200 new nuclear plants across Continental Europe by 1985.

In 1975, the Schmidt government in Germany, reacting rationally to the implications of the 1974 oil shock, passed a program which called for an added 42 gigawatts of German nuclear plant capacity, to produce a total of approximately 45 per cent of German total electricity demand by 1985, a program exceeded in the EC only by France’s, which projected 45 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity by 1985. In the fall of 1975, Italy’s industry minister, Carlo Donat Cattin, instructed Italy’s nuclear companies, ENEL and CNEN, to draw up plans for the construction of some 20 nuclear plants for completion by the early 1980s. Even Spain, just then emerging from four decades of Franco’s rule, had a program calling for the construction of 20 nuclear plants by 1983. A typical 1 gigawatt nuclear facility is generally suffi cient to supply all the electricity requirements for a modern industrial city of 1 million people.

The rapidly growing nuclear industries of Europe, especially France and Germany, were beginning for the fi rst time to emerge as competent rivals to American domination of the nuclear export market by the time of the 1974 oil crisis. France had secured a Letter of Intent from the Shah of Iran, as had Germany’s KWU, to build a total of four nuclear reactors in Iran, while France had signed with Pakistan’s Bhutto government to create a modern nuclear infrastructure in that country. Negotiations between the German government and Brazil also reached a successful conclusion in February 1976, for cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. This included German construction of eight nuclear reactors as well as facilities for reprocessing and enriching uranium reactor fuel. German and French