MAGAZINE REVIEWS

Loose nukes

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Nov 21, 1998) -- -- We don't hear much these days about the dangers of nuclear power, but in fact the proliferation of nuclear technology and its subsequent ordinariness might be one of the greatest hidden dangers of our time.

Harper's Magazine

In the November issue of Harper's Magazine, author Ken Silverstein recounts the strange tale of the Boy Scout who tried to build a nuclear breeder reactor in his mother's potting shed and nearly succeeded.

David Hahn was a seemingly normal, well-adjusted teen-ager in the squeaky-clean town of Golf Manor, Michigan, when moon-suited agents from the Environmental Protective Agency swarmed around the back-yard shed where Hahn housed his own little Manhattan Project.

As it turned out, since he was 10, Hahn was obsessed by chemistry, and while he was a poor student, he was a real whiz in his home lab, where he manufactured his own fireworks and moonshine whiskey. Eventually, with the help of some gullible officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who provided him with essential information about radioactive isotopes, including commercial sources for some of the radioactive material he'd need for his reactor, Hahn's lab was leaking radioactivity throughout his neighborhood.

Silverstein doesn't think that Hahn had any evil intentions -- in fact, his main motivation was to earn merit-badge credit towards Eagle Scout status (there is a merit-badge for atomic energy, although harnessing it is not a requirement). In the end, Hahn made Eagle Scout. He is now a crew member of the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise aircraft carrier.

Mother Jones

Ken Silverstein has been busy on the trail of nuclear dangers. In addition to the above piece, he wrote "Security Meltdown" in the Nov./Dec. issue of Mother Jones, in which he asks, "Who is watching the people who are watching our nukes?"

As the question implies, the answer is, no one, really. While the armed forces have a Personnel Reliability Program (PRP) intended to assure that only "competent, stable, and dependable individuals" have access to nuclear weapons, Silverstein quotes one PRP expert as saying the program is so terribly flawed that "thousands of unstable people have been certified for PRP-approved posts."

Silverstein's article details some of the most egregious PRP failures. Among those who were PRP-certified were several murderers and suicides as well as many hardcore drug users. Silverstein seems to feel that a simple tightening of PRP standards and practices, as well as more aggressive postapproval monitoring procedures, would go a long way toward reducing the likelihood of some crazy person getting ahold of a nuclear weapon and firing it.

The New Yorker

An unusually in-depth profile of Vice-President and president-to-be Al Gore in the Oct. 26/Nov. 2 issue of the New Yorker reveals him to be a deep thinker of an almost religious bent. Indeed, as Louis Menand writes in the cleverly-titled "After Elvis," Gore is a divinity-school dropout who liberally quotes Reinhold Neibuhr, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl in conversation. He is also a political theorist who believes that the Constitution is a kind of programming code that maximizes the efficiency of representative democracy, and a "holist" who seeks to restore the split between mind and body brought about by Cartesian logic.

Presumably, when Gore is president, we can look forward to weekly sermons from the Oval Office.

On the occasion of the theatrical re-release of "The Wizard of Oz," author John Lahr contributes a memoir of his father, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, to the Nov. 16 issue of The New Yorker. "If Dad had a tail, he would have twisted it just as the Lion did," writes Lahr. Indeed, what Lahr reveals is that the role of the Cowardly Lion was the epitome of typecasting for Bert Lahr, who was in real life a difficult, neurotic, depressive personality who lacked the courage to deal with the basic emotional needs of his family.

George

In "Hatching a Harlequin" in the December issue of George, author Katie Roiphe gives an old-fashioned, close reading of the Starr report. Far from an objective rendering of the evidence the independent counsel amassed against President Clinton, Roiphe shows how the report's narrative is a carefully manipulated retelling of events that curiously emphasize Monica Lewinsky's emotional state during her so-called affair with the president.

The report adheres so closely to Lewinsky's point of view, writes Roiphe, "that it begins to look as if the president is on trial for not caring enough about the young woman." Roiphe shows how what the report leaves out is equally significant. While the report makes it seem like the affair was the be-all and end-all of both Clinton and Lewinsky's lives, in fact Starr omitted all mention of Lewinsky's non-presidential sexual, I mean, social life.

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Nov. 21, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]