Politicians ignored Oppenheimer’s advice, but can still heed his grandson’s

livemint.com:

“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds," said Dr J Robert Oppenheimer, quoting (or misquoting, according to some) the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the mushroom cloud that marked the success of the Manhattan Project in building the world’s first nuclear bomb. Twenty days later, an American bomber dropped ‘Little Boy’, as the first bomb was named, on Hiroshima. Three days later, ‘Fat Man’ burnt Nagasaki to a cinder.

The combined death toll was estimated to be 200,000. But destruction was not the only possible use for the power of the atom. Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of the father of the atomic bomb, said in an interview with Time that if politicians had decided not to engage in an arms race and build ever-larger nuclear arsenals, the public would have accepted nuclear energy more readily than they have, sparing the world of human-induced climate change.

The distaste for nuclear energy stems from fears of the atom bomb. But the fact is that nuclear power started being generated in the US in 1952 before spreading to other parts of the world until the late 1970s. In 1979, almost 20% of power generated in the US was derived from nuclear reactors.

Then, there was a partial meltdown at one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, capital of Pennsylvania. This set off a series of vigorous anti-nuclear protests in the US, with celebrities such as Jane Fonda taking the lead. President Jimmy Carter, who had dealt with nuclear power during his stint in the navy, described the accident as minor in private but refused to say that in public and instituted a lengthy review of nuclear safety.