Deep in the heart of Texas, a small arrogant clique of ailing cold-war gladiators is busy fighting the last energy war, working to a master plan drawn up decades ago by America's military industrial complex. Their intention is to secure for America the world's dwindling oil supplies by ringing the last remaining oil fields with American military bases. As the only fields that really matter are in the Middle East, the USA is aided and abetted by Israel and its Jewish diaspora...or at least the Zionist wing of it. This is a marriage of convenience that will last just as long as it is politically correct for the American Mid-West to believe that good old farm boys from Kansas will be happy defending Jewish settlements in Palestine. Europhiles suffer from similar illusions in believing that the Galway militia will roll out of the pubs and volunteer as cannon fodder when Karelian tanks roll into Estonia.

Meanwhile at the rotten heart of Europe there are still bureaucrats so bedazzled by the lure of a centralised energy supply system for Fortress Europe that they continue to push a fifty year old technology already decades past its promised sell-by dates. No sane person believes that space heating at a hundred degrees can be sensibly supplied by boiling a super-charged kettle to the sort of temperatures best left ninety three million miles away at the centre of the sun. Indeed as early as 1923 John Burden Sanderson Haldane remarked that '...on thermodynamical grounds, which I can hardly summarize shortly, I do not much believe in the commercial possibility of induced radio-activity.

But that is only half of it. Fritz Schumacher was never one to mince words when it came to nuclear power. In his 1967 Des Voeux Memorial Lecture...see Small is Beautiful, Chapter 9 for the full text...he had this to say: 'No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make 'safe' and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilisation could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all.'