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In the name of science Lyndon LaRouche and The New American Fascism
by Dennis King, Doubleday, New York, pp 415, $19.95

MANY scientists encount ered a curious phenomenon in American airports
during the late 1970s and early 1980s: neatly dressed young people peddling
a magazine called Fusion. Their promotion of nuclear power, fusion, and
beam weapons was accompanied by strident denunciation of environmentalists,
Jane Fonda and sundry others. Their signs bore provocative slogans like
‘Nuke the Whales’ and ‘More Nukes, Less Kooks.’ It was tempting to wonder
what ‘kooks’ they were talking about.

Fusion was published by the Fusion Energy Foundation, one of many organisations
created by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr, an American extremist who began on the
left, but veered sharply to the right during the 1970s. The magazine was
a strange mixture; attacks on the organisation’s opponents and allegations
of bizarre conspiracies accompan ied articles extolling fusion and directed-energy
weapons. It portrayed British Intelligence as an arm of a sinister conspiracy
supposedly dating back at least to Aristotle, who purportedly tried to subvert
Plato’s reign of reason. One editorial warned against ‘journals that promote
a vicious Malthusian-Aristotelian line on science, ranging from Science,
Natural History, and The Smithsonian to the hard-core British New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ,
Nature, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs’.

Even years before publication of Spycatcher, I knew that anyone who
thought British Intelligence ruled the world was rather remote from reality.
However, I had been made sensitive to the ‘LaRouchies.’

Many others were not. Some conservatives and advocates of nuclear power
were appalled by LaRouche’s politics, but others welcomed allies of any
sort. The Fusion Energy Foundation hopped on the beam-weapons bandwagon
before Ronald Reagan, and claimed ‘credit’ for Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ programme.
That claim is dubious, but LaRouche’s followers did have a surprisingly
strong influence on the Reagan Administration – especially on politically
naive advocates of Star Wars, who felt isolated from a sceptical scientific
community.

Some conservatives and technology advocates who steered clear of LaRouche
were attacked for their efforts. Retired general Daniel Graham – whose High
Frontier proposal helped to lay the foundation for the Strategic Defense
Initiative – was accused of promoting ‘KGB cult penetration into the US
military’. LaRouche called the conservative Heritage Foundation, a ‘think-tank’
based in Washington which financially supported Graham, ‘an extremely dangerous
agent of a foreign government’.

King details allegations of the financial manipulations that led to
LaRouche’s conviction for fraud last year, as well as other unsavoury activities.
Obsessed by LaRouche’s antisemitism, King draws parallels with the rise
of Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, I don’t think King pays enough attention
to LaRouche’s involvement with science and the Reagan Administration, which
might have made a book itself.