It’s all the fault of the physicists..

About 50 years ago, when I was a fresh graduate student, I wrote to the eminent nuclear physicist Amasa S. Bishop , who worked in fusion research, for advice on embarking on a career in nuclear fusion. He told me not to bother “The solution is not for your lifetime”.

Maybe he was right. When he died in 1997, fusion research was in progress, but still as far as ever from accomplishing the holy grail of getting more energy out of controlled fusion than one put in. In the year of his death, the Joint European Torus (JET) produced 16MW output equivalent to 65% of input power for half a second. Recent reports about the ITER
Reactor[1] are more hopeful. It now appears that a working reactor may be on line in 2018.

What has this got to do with the “Jewish Question”?

The reason why I posed my question as a starry-eyed student to Bishop so many years ago was that we had just witnessed the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1956. And even then it was clear to me that if the world had the limitless clean energy promised by fusion power, the trump card for Arab blackmail of the West – oil – would disappear, leaving room for an equitable solution to what subsequently proved to be an ongoing crisis.

To be fair to the physicists, just like space exploration, this is an engineering problem. The physics of fusion is well-established, just as the maths for space travel was solved by Isaac Newton over 300 years ago. So had the United States been as far-sighted as I all these years ago, and put as much effort into the fusion problem as they subsequently did into Space Research, they would have avoided all the problems of the Middle East which have caused so much bloodshed and trauma, not least to the Americans.

__________________________________________

[1] ITER was an acronym of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, but political correctness concerning the negative connotations of the word "thermonuclear" led officials to change the official provenance of the name, attributing it instead to the Latin word for "the way".