Regarding "the blurring of nuclear power and nuclear weapons", I believe that Petra Kelly and the founders of the Green Party in Germany in the 1970s saw nuclear power rightfully or wrongly as part of the military-industrial complex and opposed it on that basis. The bizarre thing about the current moment is that the modern German Greens have thrown the baby out and kept the bathwater. They remain adamantly opposed to nuclear power, but have gone all-in on military support for Ukraine; essentially serving adjuncts for NATO militarism.
For me the German Greens symbolize the decadence of the contemporary "Left", which by abandoning their roots in working class movements driven by class analysis and historical materialism, have become seemingly untethered from the real world, pursing Utopian fantasies like Zero Emissions (in our lifetimes!?) with no real understanding the material conditions which underpin German prosperity (affordable energy supplies). Collapsing Germany's industrial economy is "painful but necessary". Creative destruction, bring it on! No worries! In his search to find replacements for Russian gas, Robert Habeck returned from Qatar empty-handed; we later learned that Qataris wanted thirty-year contracts; he rejected that, because natgas is for him just a transitional thing. The German citizenry needs to vote the Greens out of power as soon as possible before they utterly destroy that country. Maybe then Germany can once again embrace nuclear power.
Regarding "the blurring of nuclear power and nuclear weapons", I believe that Petra Kelly and the founders of the Green Party in Germany in the 1970s saw nuclear power rightfully or wrongly as part of the military-industrial complex and opposed it on that basis. The bizarre thing about the current moment is that the modern German Greens have thrown the baby out and kept the bathwater. They remain adamantly opposed to nuclear power, but have gone all-in on military support for Ukraine; essentially serving adjuncts for NATO militarism.
For me the German Greens symbolize the decadence of the contemporary "Left", which by abandoning their roots in working class movements driven by class analysis and historical materialism, have become seemingly untethered from the real world, pursing Utopian fantasies like Zero Emissions (in our lifetimes!?) with no real understanding the material conditions which underpin German prosperity (affordable energy supplies). Collapsing Germany's industrial economy is "painful but necessary". Creative destruction, bring it on! No worries! In his search to find replacements for Russian gas, Robert Habeck returned from Qatar empty-handed; we later learned that Qataris wanted thirty-year contracts; he rejected that, because natgas is for him just a transitional thing. The German citizenry needs to vote the Greens out of power as soon as possible before they utterly destroy that country. Maybe then Germany can once again embrace nuclear power.
Good article! But I think the link in this post is for a different unherd article?