ABSTRACT
Reformers in Congress and within the administration used proposals for nonproliferation legislation to wage a war on plutonium proliferation and to attempt a fundamental alteration of accepted truths about the inevitability of the plutonium economy. The war that the reformers were waging against the nuclear managers involved specific arguments about technical truths, legal rights, constitutional questions, and political power. Reformers had a different sense of timing and priorities. To the reformers in Congress, however, there was nothing inevitable about the breeder, reprocessing, or commercial production and use of plutonium. The hearings demonstrated that to the reformers, new legislation would be "nothing more than a commonsense codification of existing policy regarding nuclear exports to nonweapon states." Motivations for nuclear arms could be moderated not only by offers of military security, but by a series of bilateral and multilateral incentives aimed at energy and even military security.
