ABSTRACT
The challenge issued by Jimmy Carter on the proliferation issue, together with the congressional battles over nonproliferation, enrichment, privatization, reprocessing, nuclear export licensing, and safeguards pushed the Ford administration toward an election eve position on an official US nuclear export policy. The manager/reformist fight was waged continually and subverted the Carter policy even before it was sent forward to Congress. At work in the nuclear fuel cycle reassessment was a new cognizance of the links between domestic and international policy. On October 28, 1976, while on a campaign swing through Ohio, Ford formally announced a new US nuclear policy that challenged several of the major premises of nearly three decades of US energy policy. By 1977, in that fateful first year of the Carter administration, each faction warned of dire consequences awaiting continued lack of US leadership in coming to grips with plutonium in particular and nuclear energy in general.
