ABSTRACT
“Market democracy” is guiding energy policy in West Germany where only one nuclear reactor has been ordered since 1975. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the regulatory arm of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, had certified the reactor to be peaceful just months earlier. When the eight Israeli F-16s flashed out of the eastern sky that Sunday morning, June 7, 1981, and destroyed the Iraqi Osirak nuclear power plant near Baghdad, the entire house-of-cards scheme of international safeguards against proliferation of atomic weapons fell with the walls of the reactor. The Jimmy Carter administration took genuinely strong anti-proliferation measures: Carter suspended the American reprocessing program and forbade reprocessing of American fuel by foreign countries; he supported the passage of the US The present economic nightmare of nuclear power gives one chance to re-evaluate whether it is in the interest of national security to continue down the path of proliferation, or pull back.
