High-Energy Dispute

Regarding “Fear of Fusion,� I haven’t heard such astounding drivel since the Carter Administration.

The quote attributed to Paul Ehrlich: “. . . like giving a machine gun to an idiot child,� actually came from one of his articles, “An Ecologist’s Perspective on Nuclear Power,� published in Public Issue Report from the Federation of American Scientists, May/June 1975. Ehrlich’s specialty is not energy, but population control, which, he has stated, should be accomplished through coercive means if necessary.

Barry Commoner, a one-time presidential candidate, is a self-avowed Marxist. I quote from his article on the energy crisis (“A Reporter at Large; Energy III,� the New Yorker, February 16, 1976): “Economists and other students of capitalism will recognize that the basic ideas I have discussed are among those first put forward by Karl Marx.�

What these two, and others that you didn’t include, have in common is not that they are ecologists; they are not. Neither are they particularly concerned about mankind’s survival as a whole. They are anti-energy activists dedicated to the development of the industrialized free world so as to achieve their bucolic vision of Utopia.

If this seems extreme, imagine Commoner explaining to a throng of famine-stricken citizens of any Third World nation you choose that they will continue to die by the thousands while a bunch of elitist limousine liberals withholds the solution to their problems. Tell them, Mr. Commoner, that they must die so that we can pursue your Weltanschauung. Mr. Ehrlich, tell the young mother with the infant struggling against acute malnutrition that her child and millions like him must die because you don’t trust any government with a cheap, abundant source of energy.

JAMES R. ADAMS

Sierra Madre