ABSTRACT
Townsend Hoopes wrote in 1973 of an earlier era in U.S. foreign policy when a "legitimate concern for freedom and world order [went] to extremes that increasingly failed to meet the tests of interest or reason, proportion or morality." 1 Nearly two decades after that period, numerous events, domestic and international, focused attention on nuclear technology and the nuclear industry in a way that caused the U.S. Congress to reassess its efforts to constrain the supply of fissionable material, facilities, and technology. Those efforts, and nuclear export policy in general, were under fire for failing tests of interest, reason, and proportion. More important perhaps than the economic questions or the foreign policy implications, or the overarching power and prestige of the nuclear industry or nuclear supporters in Congress, were the shifting public images, and a consequent shift within the government and in the larger public, about safety and the nuclear future.
