The Atomic West

Radical Initiatives and Moderate Alternatives: California's 1976 Nuclear Safeguards Initiative

Radical Initiatives and Moderate Alternatives California's 1976 Nuclear Safeguards Initiative Thomas Wellock£dward Teller was furious. With trembling hands and flushed face, the father of the hydrogen bomb confronted two engineers outside a California hearing room. His voice rising, he finally screamed at them, "You are traitors.II For Sierra Club lobbyistJohn Zierold, who witnessed the exchange, it was unnerving to watch a man of Teller's stature come unhinged in public.l No one present needed to be told what the exchange was about. The two engineers had quit their nuclear engineering jobs with General Electric to join a campaign for a 1976 voter initiative to halt nuclear plant operation and construction. As threatening as it sounded, Teller's outburst seemed odd considering the initiative's slim chances ofsuccess, for the nuclear industry had already turned public opinion against it.2 After the 1973 oil embargo, the idea of voters shutting down nuclear plants was considered absurd. That the engineers' actions might bring down the industry petrified Teller. "Goddamn, I've got to defeat the nuclear initiative," the scientist confessed to a reporter.3 He was not alone in his fears. Adversaries spat on each other, debate flared into shouting matches, and each side routinely branded its opponents liars. Short tempers abounded in a campaign in which fundamental values were at stake. Teller, a Hungarian refugee from Nazi Germany, believed that technology in a democratic society could elevate civilization to higher levels of dignity and achievement. Nuclear power would create energy abundance , spread American democracy and Civilization, and end the "pollu_ tion of poverty." Whatever its flaws, scientists and engineers were best off seeking reform within the system and not through open dissent that could wreck enthusiasm for the "peaceful atom."'! 200 Radical Initiatives and Moderate Altematives The engineers had lost Teller's technological optimism. As children of the Cold War, they feared poverty less than a decline in the quality of their middle-class existence. Technology had not been the magic solution to their generation's concerns. Government and scientific control of nuclear power appeared to threaten democracy, the environment, and world peace. Unlike Teller, they saw their profession as part of the problem, and only open disagreement could solve it.s Coming from within the nuclear community, the engineers' revolt made it easy for a nuclear booster's fears to run wild. The contest had national and international implications for the atom's future. "Proposition IS" made nuclear power an issue in the 1976 presidential elections and inspired six similar ballot measures in other states and Switzerland. Proposition IS's success, industrialists feared, might create an antinuclear domino effect.6 They breathed easier when Californians rejected Proposition IS by a two-to-one margin in June. Antinuclear initiatives in the other states lost by similar margins five months later. The American people were not ready to turn their backs on the country 's most highly touted energy option. Antinuclear activist David Pesonen surmised, II All their lives, people are told to connect the good life with industrial technology. With progress. We threatened all that, we scared them, and they backed away."7 It was a dubious victory for the nuclear industry. More remarkable was the fact that the election had been held at all. A third of the voters wanted to shut down nuclear power, and many more citizens were uneasy about its use. Capitalizing on the public dread of nuclear hazards whipped up by the campaign, antinuclear politicians in the California legislature pushed through three bills expanding the state's power to restrict nuclear plant construction. This achievement, just days before the Proposition 15 vote, provided a modest alternative to the ill-fated initiative. The central drama of Proposition IS was the confrontation between the worldview of antinuclear activists and the growth..oriented priorities that had informed socioeconomic policy in the country throughout its history. The dramatic success of the alliance between the federal government and scientific expertise during World War II produced a consensus supporting federal control over a host of policy areas, particularly civilian nuclear power.s Nuclear boosters believed that the state needed to promote peaceful uses of atomic power through a policy both controlled 201 THOMAS WELLOCK by federal administrators, scientists, and sympathetic politicians and insulated from the average citizen. Such insulation was justified because nuclear power was essential for economic growth and sodal stabllity.9 To muster sufficient...