Nuclear vs climate change: the clash of the alarmists
...Historic experience tells us that the success or otherwise of competitive scaremongering has little to with the actual intensity of the alleged threat. Rather its success usually depends on the ability of the scaremonger to resonate with contemporary cultural values. So a couple of weeks ago, when the American evangelist preacher Harold Camping predicted the imminent arrival of Judgment Day, not many people took him seriously. In previous times, however, millennial apprehensions about End Times could unleash major panics. When religious fanatics prophesied that the world would come to an end, followed by the Last Judgment, it really had a major impact on everyday life. The flames of terror impacted on the imagination of hundreds of thousands of people who waited for the coming Apocalypse (1).

This time around, many people joked about Camping’s ‘Rapture’ and carried on with life as normal. Yet some of the same people who made fun of the Rapture had been caught up, only a few months earlier, in a wave of panic-buying of stocks of potassium iodine, which is used to protect the body from the effects of nuclear fallout. In the US, stocks completely sold out following the crippling of the Fukushima nuclear reactor in Japan. Many Americans believed that radioactive particles from Japan posed a threat to their health. Yet on balance, the threat to Americans from the fallout in Japan was about as significant as Camping’s fantasy Rapture. As the German government has subsequently discovered, scaremongering about radiation is likely to frighten people far more than old-fashioned warnings about Judgment Day....