President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program was tragically misleading: fissionable atoms don't know the different between war and peace. The infrastructure and the academic training necessary to run nuclear power reactors translates all too easily into building nuclear weapons.

The key ingredient is fissionable U-238 or plutonium. Only nation states have been able to assemble the capital to build the production facilities required to produce these materials. Once you can produce enriched uranium, and have trained nuclear technologists, the path from nuclear power to nuclear weapons is fairly short, as we have now seen several times in world history.

In a sane world, humanity would be doing everything possible to shut down the entire nuclear industry, from the mines on up, and to vastly reduce the number of existing nuclear weapons.

To call for an energy policy requring a vast expansion in nuclear infrastructure is the height of irresponsibiliity in the world we live in today. Nothing could endanger the future of our species more than accelerating the production of fissionable materials and the further diffusion of nuclear technologies. We already see how powerful appeals to protect our country from "nuclear terrorism" can be. After 9/11, we can either have a little sense of the ferocious repression that governments would be willing to deploy if a non-state nuclear weapon were ever detonated anywhere in the world.

I am optimtic enough to believe that human beings are capable of recognizing this danger of nuclear proliferation, and that we can find other ways to meet our energy needs that do not involve putting us on such a certain path to the disaster of losing cities to nuclear terrorism.