The Neo-Cons, Not Carter, Killed Nuclear Energy

The conventional wisdom in the nuclear community and in general is that President Jimmy Carter drove the nail in the civilian nuclear coffin when he stopped the reprocessing of nuclear fuel in 1976. But this is wrong. The dishonor does not belong to Carter. The policy that ended nuclear reprocessing was first promoted under the Ford Presidency, in a 1975 policy paper written under Ford’s chief of staff Dick Cheney. And long before the Ford Administration, the idea that civilian nuclear power was bad, and that reprocessing should be stopped, was extensively argued by Albert Wohlstetter, one of the most ghoulish, secretive, and influential of U.S. nuclear strategists, from the late 1950s to his death in 1997.

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