The liner notes explain the impetus for this comp: in the early 80’s fear of nuclear power was at an all-time high with the Three Mile Island meltdown (1979) still fresh in people’s minds. My family lived about 25 miles from a nuclear power plant that was (still is) on the shore of Lake Michigan and I remember my parents fretting big time about our safety in the early 80’s.

“Nuclear Power: No single civil industry threatens our lives, and the lives of future generations, with such brutal finality as Nuclear Power.
It will have a deep and damaging effect on all of us. An enourmous, appalling expensive risk. Despite the soothing words of the nuclear industry, accidents will happen.
Everyday, the radioactive rubbish dump of lethal nuclear waste grows bigger – in spite of the fact that no one yet knows how to dispose of it with safety and certainty.
It is a deadly inheritance to leave our children and their children. Of course, everyone needs energy – now, and in the future. But heat from atom spliting will fail to provide the kind of secure source of energy and we all need because it is complex, over-centralised, and unreliable, and also creates the materials for any country to assemble an atomic bomb.
Meanwhile, it is diverting vast sums of money and scientific resources away from the only true long-term solutions to our energy needs; an energy conservation programme, coupled with the harnessing of the only abundant source of energy the world will always have – the sun.
Will it dawn on us?”
-Roger Deakin, Friends of the Earth.

The post “Life in the European Theater” appeared first on Vinyl From The Vault.