An energy shock stemming from an Iran war scenario is driving increased interest in nuclear power development across hard-hit regions of Asia and Africa.

There is a gate across this road. The modern man says, “I see no reason for it; let us remove it.” The wiser man says, “If you see no reason for it, I will not let you remove it. Go away and and think. When you can tell me why it is here, I may let you destroy it.”

The gate in our present matter is the old, comfortable, and perhaps somewhat unimaginative reliance on the established flows of global energy. For decades, the world has operated on a certain kind of geopolitical plumbing, a system of pipes and currents that moved oil and gas from one corner of the earth to another with a predictable, if uninspired, regularity. This system was not merely a matter of economics; it was a fence. It was a fence that provided a certain kind of stability, a way of ensuring that the lights stayed on in the great cities of Asia and Africa without requiring every nation to become a master of the most terrifyingly complex sciences known to man. It was a fence that allowed a nation to focus on its own culture, its own commerce, and its own domestic peace, by outsourcing the heavy, dangerous, and volatile business of energy production to a global market.

But now, a great wind is blowing from the Middle East, a wind of conflict and uncertainty that threatens to blow this gate right off its hinges. The modern energy planners, looking at the smoke rising from the horizon, have decided that the fence is no longer sufficient. They have looked at the old reliance on imported energy and concluded that it is a weakness, a vulnerability, a mere lack of foresight. And so, they propose a most radical demolition. They propose to tear down the old, simple reliance on the market and replace it with the monumental, the massive, and the intensely complicated: the nuclear reactor.

The reformers argue that because the old way is now dangerous, the new way must be better. They see the energy shock not as a reason to repair the gate, but as a mandate to pave over the entire landscape with concrete and uranium. They believe that by building these great, glowing monuments to self-sufficiency, they are achieving a higher form of security. They are attempting to replace a system of external dependence with a system of internal complexity.

There is a profound paradox here. The reformer seeks to achieve security by embracing a much greater degree of danger. To escape the volatility of a distant war, they are moving toward the volatility of the atom. They are trading the risk of a sudden shortage for the risk of a permanent, catastrophic presence. They are attempting to solve the problem of instability by introducing a new, much more profound kind of instability - the kind that does not merely turn off the lights, but fundamentally alters the very ground upon which we stand.

The cleverness of the energy policymaker is such that he can look at a crisis of supply and see only an opportunity for a revolution in technology. He does not see that the “instability” he seeks to escape was actually a form of manageable chaos, a system that, while prone to price shocks, did not require the management of radioactive isotopes. He is like a man who, finding his house drafty, decides to replace all the windows with heavy iron plates. He has certainly stopped the draft, but he has also made it impossible to see the sun, and he has made the house much harder to escape should a fire break out.

We must ask if these nations, in their rush to build these new fences of steel and uranium, have understood what the old fence was doing. The old reliance on imported energy was a fence that kept the burden of high-stakes technological mastery away from the daily lives of the ordinary citizen. It allowed for a certain simplicity of existence. The new way - the nuclear way - demands a level of technical, political, and environmental vigilance that is almost unimaginable. It requires a permanent, high-level state of readiness and a level of expertise that can turn a single mistake into a tragedy of generations.

The tragedy of the modern reformer is that he often mistakes the removal of a difficulty for the arrival of a solution. He believes that by making the energy supply more difficult to interrupt, he is making the nation more secure. But true security is not found in the complexity of the machine, but in the resilience of the people and the stability of the foundations. To move from the uncertainty of the market to the terrifying certainty of the reactor is not a move toward progress; it is a move toward a much more expensive and much more dangerous form of permanence. One does not solve a storm by building a fortress of glass; one simply ensures that when the storm arrives, the wreckage is much more spectacular.