Page 4-Thursday, March 20, 1980-The Michigan Daily NineY Yers o f' EdiforiaI Freedomi World nuke problems extend past corporate profit greed '1 Vol. XC; No. 133 News Phone: 764-0552 Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan Iran' iflation, frustration T SEEMS we have reached the point at which nothing more can be said about the hostage situation in Iran. With the recent failure of the United Nations Commission, the U.S. has explored every viable solution to the problem. It looks hopeless. About the only observations that do occur to us-and they are admittedly only idle observations, for we have no answers-involve some comparisons between' the Iranian parliamentary elections and the American presidntial campaign. Not only are we the hostages of hostile student radicals in our own em- bassy in Iran, we are the hostages of raging inflation here at home. Each situation has been called a "crisis," yet each has been dragging on so long that that word, with its connotations of urgency and immediacy, now seems terribly inadequate. " We are now electing a president, and the Iranians are now electing a parliament. The Parliament will almost certainly be subject to the whims of Ayatollah Khomeini. Many Americans maintain the president is subject to thewhims of Congress. " We must wait for a new president to solve the inflation problem, because our current leader has seemed in- capable of doing so. We must also wait for the Iranian Parliament to convene to solve the hostage problem. In both cases, our waiting could be in vain. Americans today have more reason to be frustrated about inflation and the Iranian situation than ever before. And there appears to be no way to vent that frustration. Perhaps we are heading for a release of both kinds of tension that will change the face of the nation and the world. Contradictions about Agent Orange spur controversy If all goes according to plan, the first Soviet nuclear power plant in the western hemisphere will begin operation in Cien- fuegos, Cuba, in 1984. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this "socialist" nuclear plant in America's backyard will be that it underscores a disturbing contradiction in the anti-corporate ideology of a growing segment of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement. That ideology, reflecting the political direc- tions of some anti-nuclear leaders, blames big business and the corporate-dominated gover- nment for the development of nuclear power and all its attendant safety hazards. WHILE CRITICISMS of the corporate nature of nuclear power in America may be well-grounded. the heavy emphasis on the profit motive by many activists obscures more important forces driving the worldwide spread of nuclear power. Activists like Jane Fonda typify this em- phasis: "If we continue to place our health and safety in the hands of utility executives whose main goal in life is to maximize profits," she has declared, "we will see more Harrisburgs, we will see more leaks and we will see an increase in the cancer epidemic that is already running rampant in this coun- try." Likewise, a publication of the anti-nuclear Abalone Alliance in California declared recently that "Our country's energy choices are perverted in a basic and growing way by the dominance of military and corporate priorities in the Department of Energy." HOLLYWOOD, TOO, has grafted the anti- corporate argument to the anti-nuclear debate. Movies such as "The China Syn- drome" and the recent TV drama "The Plutonium Incident" unfailingly present the safety hazards of nuclear power as a direct consequence of the "profit motive" that drives corporate executives to cut corners and take dangerous risks. In the morality play of our time, nuclear developers and utilities such as Babcock and Wilcox, Kerr-McGee, and Pacific Gas and Electric have taken over the devil's role from such Vietnam War-era spectres as Dow Chemical and Lockheed. However, if profit-hungry executives are the principle nemeses behind nuclear power, how should we view the proposed Soviet plant in Cuba? Or for that matter, how should we view the 21 nuclear reactors now operating in the Soviet Union, and the giant Leningrad nuclear plant which will soon become the world's largest? - IF CAPITALISM and the profit motive are what make nuclear power dangerous, are we to accept that nuclear power in socialisthan- ds is safe? Perhaps that is not the conclusion that Jane Fonda and other anti-nuclear ac- tivists would have us reach, but it certainly tends to sound like it. Ironically, it is exactly the conclusion of the nuclear enthusiasts in the socialist world. Within days after the near disaster at Three Mile Island, Pravda assured Soviet readers that nuclear power itself was safe and it denounced the power monopolies at Harrisburg for not taking the required safety measures. As one Soviet writer put it, the lesson of Three Mile Island is that safety is in- seperable from socialist control of nuclear power. A Cuban writer in the magazine Prisma blasted the American press for focusing, on problems of plant design and asserted that the utilities, "guided by the first law of the capitalist system of obtaining the greatest profit, had no scruples preventing By Alan Ramo the placing of plastic or cheap steel in place of the intended copper conduit which was dic- tated by the designs and security norms." Those cheap pipes, he claimed, eventually led to the radiation leak and near meltdown. Such a scenario may be worthy of Hollywood script writers, but it does not square with the findings of the Kemeny Commission, which blamed the accident on human design errors-the kinds of errors which are inevitable in any kind of society. APART FROM the errors of fact, the trouble with this analysis, as it concerns the anti-nuclear movement, is that it suggests (wittingly or not) that the problem of nuclear I purchased its reactor from Canada instead of from the Soviet Union. ANOTHER DRIVING force behind the spread of nuclear power, which is obscured by the anti-corporate argument, is the'- legitimate aspirations of Third World nations to develop energy alternatives to'petroleum.M The American conservation approach may be appropriate for the United States, which puts:- more energy into air-conditioning than China . puts into its entire industrial production, but-- it fails to speak to the desperate needs for in- creased energy production in most of the Third, World. Again, talk of alternatives, such as biomass conversion and solar power, is fine in, the United States, which through conser- vation can "buy" the time to develop them, but nations like the Philippines and Cuba need " FEW sun-bleached stumps are the only hint of what only a decade ago was a thick forest of trees reaching over 70 feet into the air." That is how Bill Kurtis, a Chicago television journalist, describes a part of the Vietnamese countryside he visited recently. The destruction was not caused by National Liberation Front guerrillas thrashing out Thieu's troops. Nor was it caused by the flame- throwers American foot soldiers carried into battle. The widespread defoliation of for- merly fertile Vietnamese land was, achieved by the use of a merciless agent of destruction-Agent Orange-developed by armed services scientists as America's contribution to the criminal legacy of chemical war- fare., Agent Orange was used by the government for ten years ending in 1972. But the problems it engendered may be just beginning. Some of the herbicides contained in the chemical, it seems, have serious and abiding effects both on the health of people exposed to the substance and on the health of those people's children.u The carcinogenic and gene-altering properties of Agent Orange have been exposed in a memorandum that seems to have originated in the Veterans Ad- mnistration (VA). The memorandum's citation of the negative effects of the chemical contradict VA and Depar- tment of Defense testimony that no negative effects have been proven. Some Americans expressed hope with the passing of the Nixon Ad- ministration that the government would drop the veil; that the secrecy and defensiveness about executive- level operations would be replaced by openness to the public, except in special cases that genuinely called for security. But in the Agent Orange case, the government has looked very much like that of the dark Nixon years. The VA and Defense Department statements up to now that there is no evidence to back up the claims against the defoliant are not surprising. Those agencies have not been looking very hard for evidence; if they should turn up scientific findings in support of the claims, they will be liable for millions of dollars of disability benefits. So the federal government marches on in its time-honored patterns of belligerence and, perhaps, deceit. A Captain Alvin Young of the Air Force, an expert in plant herbicides, recently testified before Congress that there was no evidence that Agent Orange caused significant health problems to humans. It was that same Captain Young whose name appears At the top of the controversial VA memorandum. The hopes for openness and honesty in government were just pipe dreams, it seems. The days of darkness and contradiction are still upon us. s~ Daily Photo'= MANY ANTI-NUCLEAR activists have tended to blame greed and corporate motives for safety. hazards of nuclear power. However, some believe such an analysis obscures much" larger dynamics underlying the worldwide spread of nuclear power. power is limited to a few greedy corporations and individuals. In doing so, it obscures the much larger dynamics behind the worldwide spread of nuclear power-dynamics which account for the fact that both socialist and capitalist nations are exporting nuclear power to the Third World, and that a recent conference of 66 non-communist nations whole-heartedly supported the rapid development of fast-breeder reactors around the world. Behind this global adoption of nuclear power are some key forces that are far more complex than corporate profit motiveq. First, modern, industrial, highly-centralized nations tend to develop those technologies which ft it into the fabric of centralized con- trol. Because of the cost and technological sophistication of this control, it requires cen- tral planning and a technological elite. It strengthens the power of central government. Furthermore, the highly technical nature of nuclear power also encourages an increased dependence of the Third World on the developed nations which can supply the technical training, fuel processing, and con- struction of plants. This gain contributes to the power of the central elite, a fact which may explain why Rumania, a Soviet bloc country with an independent foreign policy, more energy right now. They view nuclear power as. a viable solution, whether, Americans do or not. This presents a further irony-andt problem-for the anti-nuclear movement. For as the rest of the world-and particularly the communist world-rushed headlong toward nuclear development, the pro-nuclear forces will inevitably rally Americans behind a fear of "falling behind," especially behind the Soviets. The anti-corporate nuclear movement may well find that its most serious obstacle to a nuclear-free America is the con- tinued development of non-corporate nuclear plants in Russia' What this suggests to many anti-nuclear ac- tivists is that the ideology behind the movement must be international, and neither capitalist, Marxist, nor Christian Democratic., As Todd Gitlin, -a Berkeley, California activist, told an anti-nuclear con- ference in Oakland in January: "The world is a limited arena. We can no longer ignore the international implications of the anti-nuclear power issue." Alan Ramo is an Oakland, California at-I torney and anti-nuclear activist. He wrote this article for the Pacific News Service. ...................................... ....:.:.:.;.:.:..........'.-.'....'...., Editorial policies Cartoons frequently appear on both the left and right sides LETTERS TO THE DAILY: Campus not even a nice place to visit I i -' ... of the page; 'necessarily re opinions. they do not present Daily To the Editor: The woman sitting next to me was staring. No, make that GLARING. Apparently, I was not squeezing into'my half of the bus seat tight enough. Apparently, she figured I should be able to un- screw my knees and carry them ....... .................r....,.._, ................,. , ............................. .................................. . with me anytime I'm riding the bus from North Campus to Cen- tral Campus. So I scru-u-u-u-u-u-u-nched up. Real tight. Ugh. And for the rest of the ten-minute ride. . . no, make that ORDEAL. . . the female student remained quiet and expressionless. Like everyone else on the crowded bus. Even though it happened on the first day of my visit here, I knew I was in trouble again. For this boy from Southern Illinois, it was to be the start of another week at the place some folks call the home of the Maize and Blue. But not me. As far as I'm concerned, and judging strictly from my monthly visits since September, the University of Michigan is strictly the. home of the unfriendly, faceless zombie. Somewhere in the admissions catalogue, I'm sure it reads Taxes are To the Daily: In his article entitled "Local Farms Gone by 2012?" (Daily, March 14), Mr. Fieber mentioned several reasons why farmland is taken out of production. Another ~recn i C that farmers are ino l "Bring us your frowners, bring us your people who are afraid to be nice . .:" Something like the Statue of Liberty. Except that it appears that there is no such thing as liberty at this school. Everyone seems trapped in their own little worlds, with little room for anyone else who, heaven forbid, might try and be their friends. Yes, Michigan students, you know who you are. You are the lady who works as a cashier in the basement of the Michigan League, the one who frowns at all students and all of the lunch food that they are pur- chasing. I ate down there once this week, but you and your terrifying frowns made me lose any semblance of an appetite. You are the woman I passed in the street last night, the one I walked by when there was no one around. "Howareya doin?" I tried to say cheerfully. You looked up at me, but said nothing. Not even a smile. From now on Miss, don't even look up. And finally, you are every student who walks across the Diag during mid-afternoon. I was full of smiles, and I was trying my darndest to treat you all like people. But during my ex- periment on Monday and Tuesday, not one of you even returned my grins. NOT ONE. sure, I don't know you. And sure, I'll never see you again. B what the hell is wrong with a little friendliness? How hard is it to just smile and say "Hello" right back?Who knows? You may like it But until then, you are a school of zombies. Apparently, while you are getting an education here, you certainly aren't learning anything. -Bill Plaschke, student, Southern Illinois University March 19 a farming problem, too some of their land because of the high taxes. This is especially true with older farmers whose income is limited. With land prices, in- terest rates, and farm equipment prices so high, young farmers ty is being taken out of production at an alarming rate. Grocery stores do not buy produce from local farmers as they did years ago, but if truckers are forced to curtail some of their shipments beaue f the energy situation, 1 ( \\ t Rm fr WOMMi MMMM