Alexandra’s Reviews > The Road from Los Alamos > Status Update

"Since preliminary fusion-power engineering is already under way, however, it is a reasonable hope that a prototype of a commercial fusion reactor could operate in about the year 2000, and that fusion might contribute a few percent of the country's power supply by the year 2020" (191).

"When our secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger, was asked whether it really would be possible to control forces and make calculated decisions amid the destruction and confusion of nuclear battle, he replied, 'I just don't have any idea. I don't know that anybody has any idea.' Surely it is reckless to stake a nation's survival on detailed plans for something about which no one has any idea" (140).