You know that global priorities have been hopelessly perverted when responsible, stable democratic countries give up safe nuclear energy due to public pressure while fanatical despots leap toward nuclear-weapons capabilities without a hitch.
A remarkable bit of news out of Germany:
The German government agreed on Monday to phase out all nuclear power by 2022, a sharp reversal by Chancellor Angela Merkel aimed at appeasing the country’s intensified antinuclear movement. . . . Mrs. Merkel has been grappling with the sudden deepening of German distrust of nuclear power since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan set off the world’s worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.
And an unremarkable bit of news out of Iran:
Iran has conducted work on technology to place nuclear material on a missile and detonate it, the International Atomic Energy Agency wrote in a nine-page report published May 24. Documented evidence suggests that Iran has done “studies involving the removal of the conventional high-explosive payload from the warhead of the Shahab-3 missile and replace it with a spherical nuclear payload,” the report states.
A single accident—a freakishly large geologic event combined with a uniquely situated island nuclear plant—sends policy and technology marching swiftly in reverse. But three decades of doomsday genocide threats, global terrorist facilitation, illicit nuclear programs, and violations of international law can’t bring the oh-so-concerned “antinuclear movement” to block production of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
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