Such questions are not entirely new. For instance, during the Cold War, some of the Pentagon's scenarios for nuclear war began with a crisis in the Persian Gulf-West Asia region that then spread to Europe. During World War II, much of the strategy revolved around control of oil resources, which were the lifeblood of the war machines of all sides. Indeed, the US-Japanese crisis that boiled over into the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor centered on the oil resources of Indonesia, then colonized by Holland.¹A part of the Allied strategy during World War II centered on preventing German access to the rich uranium resources of the Congo, then colonized by Belgium.²

The environmental connections have also been drawn in the past. Widespread burning of coal in urban areas have given rise to terrible episodes of air pollution, for example in London (and at the present time, cities in China). The devastating consequences of the spread of fission products like iodine-131 and cesium-137 from serious nuclear power plant accidents have been among the main concerns about nuclear energy. the mining of both coal and uranium have caused severe pollution in many areas of the world. Plutonium-239, which is created in large amounts in nuclear power plants, has been a principal source of concern regarding nuclear power not only because of its utility in making weapons, but due to its long half-life (24,000 years) and its high radiotoxicity.

These issues are now coming together at an unprecedented political, military, and environmental conjuncture. Here are some of its characteristics:

• The build-up of greenhouse gases (notably carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and halocarbons) has reached a point where it is likely that it is changing the global climate. Expanding the use of nuclear energy to avert catastrophic climate change is now supported not only by the nuclear industry but also by a large number of governments, among them some of the richest and most powerful.

• The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic crisis in the region has led to heightened fears that nuclear warheads or nuclear weapons-usable materials, of either military or commercial provenance, could wind up on the black market.

• The United States, Russia, and other nuclear states are proposing that surplus plutonium from military programs be used as a fuel in commercial reactors. Moreover, despite the poor economic, environmental, and non-proliferation characteristics of plutonium, powerful bureaucracies in several countries support continued operation of reprocessing plants (France, Britain, Russia, Japan, India). At the same time, there is renewed interest in separation of plutonium from commercial spent fuel among politically and economically powerful advocates in the United States.

• Since the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Persian Gulf region has been in an intense long-term military crisis that includes the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s, Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction, and the United Nations sanctions against Iraq.

• A significant portion of the world's natural gas resources, which could be used to alleviate the greenhouse gas crisis, lie in the Central Asian and Persian Gulf regions, and in land and offshore areas belonging to countries such as Azerbaijan, Kazakstan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Qatar. These same countries also have the world's largest oil reserves. Thus the security of natural gas transport, which could be vital to both energy supply and to reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, is added to the issue of oil supply security and the various other security crises in the area.

These issues are so intertwined that major decisions of powerful governments and corporations in any one area are likely to have long-lasting and profound effects on all of them. Our review of the global situation leads us to conclude that we cannot provide sound information and analysis on the security, health, and environmental consequences surrounding nuclear development unless we fully integrate consideration of broader energy issues into them.

IEER staff have significant experience on energy and climate change issues (including ozone layer protection), though this is less familiar to many than our nuclear-weapons-related work. Most of my work in the 1970s and a considerable amount of work in the 1980s and 1990s has been on these subjects. IEER has produced a number of reports on ozone layer protection, beginning with Saving Our Skins, a basic analysis on the chemistry of ozone depletion completed in 1987, to Mending the Ozone Hole, published in 1995 by MIT Press. In the coming year, IEER will integrate more of this work with the nuclear-weapons-related environmental and security issues that have been the main focus of Science for Democratic Action in the past.