Prologue: A Millennial drive round the roundabout
You’re driving down the road and come to a roundabout and realize you’re going the wrong way, so you circle the roundabout till you’re facing the way you came. That’s a 180. Then you realize no, you were going the right way from the start, so you circle again till you’re going in the original direction. That’s a 360. Then you realize the original direction was wrong after all, and you circle yet again—that’s now a 540.
By this time, you’re probably wondering who’s giving the directions. They don’t seem very consistent or confident. Besides, all this accelerating, slowing down, circling again and again wastes time and fuel, puts unnecessary wear and tear on the vehicle, and is frustrating for the passengers never mind other drivers.
But behind all of the bickering, there is in fact consistency. It’s just consistency in the repetition of misinformation and disinformation, half-truths and untruths. It’s relentless consistency that has prevailed for more than 80 years.
The above is a parable. It describes Germany’s tortured relationship with nuclear power for the entirety of the 21st Century so far. Like many countries including Canada, West Germany in the 1960s realized that atomic fission is an extremely effective and efficient way to make electric power. Accordingly, the country embarked on a nuclear build program that eventually resulted in a 19-strong nuclear fleet. At its height, that fleet produced 25 percent of the country’s electric power, from nearly 23,000 MW of capacity. You could say that fleet was a major part of the backbone of West Germany’s powerhouse economy, an economy whose productive dynamism was admired and envied around the world.
Like Canada, West Germany had an anti-nuclear movement, and like the Canadian the German nuclear power sector was effectively slowed down but not broken by anti-nuclear activism, especially following the Chernobyl accident. But unlike Canada, West Germany incorporated a major “new” country, via reunification with East Germany in 1991, which had followed the collapse of communism.
Within seven years of reunification, the anti-nuclear movement in Germany, represented in electoral politics by the Green Party, achieved its Holy Grail: a prominent position in a ruling federal coalition despite getting only 6.7 percent of the vote. The Greens’ price for participating in the so-called “Red-Green” coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) was phasing out nuclear power in Germany. That was formally codified in 2000 with a 32 year cap on average plant life. This was Germany’s first full circle of the roundabout on nuclear.
Since 2000, the phaseout was reversed (in 2010; that was the second full circle, or 180—we’re now at 360 degrees), then in 2011 that reversal was itself rescinded and the phaseout timeline greatly accelerated (after Fukushima; 540 degrees). And, in light of the shock in Germany from Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, there is now strong discussion of yet another round of the roundabout, this time back in favour of nuclear in case you lost track. This would, if it happens, bring Germany’s multi-decade nuclear spin-out to 720 degrees.
But the phaseout has remained the main pillar of German national policy ever since it was first begun in 2000. This is an unequivocal success for the Greens, who, to repeat, made the phase out part of the price of their participation in the “Red-Green” coalition of 1998.
From the above, it is clear that something happened in reunified Germany between 1991 and 1998 that made it possible for a fringe party of pacifist environmentalists to acquire enough political power to change the energy landscape of a major world economy. What was that something that happened?
That something relates to the consistency mentioned above, the consistency in repeating half-truths and untruths—misinformation and disinformation. Some of them predate WWII. Mostly they relate to nuclear, only not nuclear power. They relate to The Atomic Bomb, and the circumstances that created it in the crowded and dark years from 1939 to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Lies, myths, and the origin of Public Relations
The German nuclear phase out seems today to have been almost a logical and natural outcome of the prevailing delusions and self-serving myths that comprised Germany’s postwar political/geopolitical weltanshauung. These related to Germany’s relationship with Russia and the Soviet Union going back to the two World Wars. They are the following:
1. Russia the victim, and real victor, of WWII
The Soviet/Russian myth about WWII was twofold: first, that it started in 1941; and second, that the USSR was the main victim of Hitler, and his sole vanquisher. This myth completely sidestepped Soviet complicity not just in starting the war but in re-arming Germany since 1919. The USSR’s September 1939 invasion of Poland was planned and coordinated with Germany’s invasion of Poland two weeks prior. With these inconvenient facts unmentioned and out of the way, the Soviets after the war were able to claim that they, specifically the Russians, were Hitler’s sole victims and sole victors. This was an essential feature of the bipolar postwar relationship between Germany and Russia.
Bipolarity ignored everyone else in what became the Iron Curtain countries as well as Belarus and especially Ukraine, whose inhabitants in reality were the main victims of Nazi and Soviet atrocities. It also hugely downplayed America’s role in defeating Hitler. In the postwar Soviet-German pas de deux, Americans were in Germany not because they were the senior partner in the alliance that crushed Hitler and now provided the security underpinning of Western Europe’s prosperity, but because they were aggressive militarists and bullies.
2. Germany the errant
Whitewashing the Soviet role in starting WWII also whitewashed Germany’s reason for starting the war in 1939 and then turning on their Soviet ally in 1941: capturing and forcibly colonizing all the territory from East Prussia to eastern Ukraine—the future Iron Curtain countries. This allowed the postwar Federal Republic to claim that WWII was all about the Holocaust and Hitler’s anti-Semitism.
In fact, the Holocaust, as horrific as it was, was a subset of Germany’s extermination program, the near-entire focus of which was to colonize eastern Europe after having starved its civilian inhabitants, Jews and Slavs, to death.
3. America the bad
Emphasizing that America had invented nuclear weapons, and was the only country to have used them, made it easy to paint the Japan bombings as the worst event of the war, proving America was an aggressive imperialist.
This distracted from the Soviet and German complicity in starting the war, as well as from the mass executions and other atrocities that characterized and defined it. In a stunning Orwellian propaganda coup, the successors of the wartime collaborators after the war collaborated in telling a false story about their wartime collaboration.
In postwar Soviet and East German “peace” propaganda, which focused totally on opposing American but not Soviet nuclear weapons, the capitalist U.S. embodied militarism and expansionism. With reunification in 1991, the Federal Republic of Germany acquired roughly 16 million new citizens who had been propagandized for decades to believe this. Anti-capitalism dovetailed perfectly with the new and fast-growing issue of climate change. Thus, “America the villain” was a foil to reinforce both the Soviet/Russian and German war myths, and the misplaced Green concern over climate.
4. America the nuclear bad
Conflating America with the dangers and evils of nuclear weapons enabled the moralistic stigmatization of nuclear technology—right down to specific fission product isotopes—thereby ensuring that that stigmatization applied equally to civilian nuclear power. Nuclear weapons, on German soil expressly to threaten Russia the poor victim and noble smiter of Hitler, create cesium-137; so do power reactors. How can the latter, which like bombs were invented by America, be anything but evil and dangerous.
5. Germany and Russia: two friends, working it out
Germany’s policy of Ostpolitik—its unabashed friendliness toward Soviet Russia—expressed the belief that lucrative trade would soothe Russia’s perennially wounded national pride and convince her that Germany had learned from its errant turn to Hitler that war is bad and trade is good and that Germany, unlike America, only wanted Russia to get rich and be safe.
In the post-reunification German mindset, ridding Germany of nuclear power was possible only if dependence on Russian gas was increased. This natural gas bridge, first diplomatic then physical in the form of pipelines, from Russia to Germany furthered the aims of Ostpolitik, in a positive feedback loop.
When Climate Change became a major public issue, concurrent with the increased strength of the Greens following reunification, the claim that renewable energy would replace nuclear and coal, which it cannot, further reinforced and cemented the bridge. This strengthened Germany’s relationship with Russia, regardless of the open criminality of the Russian regime, to the point that preserving that relationship has superseded domestic energy and climate change policy.
PR: tell your story or let it be told
Each of the above 5 myths and delusions is, on its own, preposterous and easily discredited. But repeated relentlessly, as often as possible, over years and decades, they led to the situation we have today. Germany today still clings to Ostpolitik fantasies, even as Putin bombs Ukrainian civilians and continues his brutal imperialist aggression and thumbs his nose at Olaf Scholz’s earnest and pathetic attempts to talk him down.
Germany relies nearly exclusively on natural gas to heat its homes, and hopes one day to fix its relationship with Russia so it can rebuild the bridge of gas dependence—it worked so well the last time. Germany clings to the nuclear phase out and repeats the silly fairy tales about renewable energy, even as it continues to lecture about climate change.
This hallucinatory nonsense, still held today at the highest levels of the German elites, is what happens when easily debunked but mutually reinforcing myths and delusions, like those listed above, are repeated relentlessly over decades and go uncontested, or weakly contested, in public discussions.
Yes, this is a problem of Public Relations. And what is Public Relations other than an organized, coordinated, systematic, deliberate effort to tell a story about someone or something.
Whether that story is truthful or not depends on the aim of the storyteller. The man generally considered the Father of Public Relations, Ivy Lee, during the Interwar period told gauzy stories about Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy, whitewashing these terrible regimes for American publics. While Lee’s efforts ultimately failed and he was discredited, his Soviet clients (or at least his prospective clients; it’s unclear whether Lee’s gushing apologias of the USSR were for pay or on spec) applied his methods and techniques in the decades following WWII.
The civilian nuclear industry in Germany was utterly unprepared to deal with the ferocity of anti-nuclear opinion especially following reunification. Lee’s Soviet (later Russian) protegés had been relentless in the decades after WWII. By the time Willy Brandt instituted Ostpolitik, Soviet propaganda had convinced enough Germans that the USSR’s violent overthrow of Czechoslovakia in 1948 (and again in 1968) and Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Wall, placing nuclear missiles in Cuba, and near–nuclear war with China in 1969 were understandable outcomes of Soviet “concern for security”—directly reflecting myth #1, above. Accordingly, the first natural gas deals were agreed, the countless Soviet aggressions in the Iron Curtain countries were downplayed or ignored, and the Federal Republic and USSR signed an agreement to renounce the use of force (!—Molotov–Ribbentrop, anyone?). The Americans of course had agreed to no such thing, which underlined their warmongering in some German minds.
So after reunification, with Green strength bolstered by new anti-American compatriots from East Germany, the constant stigmatization of nuclear ensured anti-nukery supplanted environmentalism as the party’s organizing principle.
In retrospect it shouldn’t be surprising that the nuclear industry in Germany was steamrolled. The German “nuclear industry,” like in all countries with civilian nuclear power, is dominated by electric utilities that produce bulk power for the electrical grid. Utilities make electricity, and their lobbying focuses on that. Their lobbyists and PR people couldn’t wade into every one of Germany’s historical neuroses as they put their case for the location of this plant or that—German anti-nukery is a conglomeration of antipathies stemming from Germany’s past and its relationship with its past. The postwar myths that helped German politicians get through their days—i.e., that helped a crushed and prostate recent imperial power re-channel its aggression inwards, within the confines and on the frontier of of a global superpower rivalry in which it was now just a pawn—pushed Germans to taking a position on energy that didn’t just play well within those myths but that reinforced them.
So, when the nuclear phase out was cemented, it was the Greens’ price for having been browbeaten into supporting NATO’s air strikes on Serbia in the Kosovo war in 1999. Having abandoned pacifism, the Greens doubled down on anti-nukery, which served their “Red” partners’ Ostpolitik: Russian gas would, post-phaseout, supply the kilowatt-hours the nuclear plants once did.
At this point the physical also began reinforcing the mythical. German homes are mostly heated with gas, and the nuclear phase out ensured that would continue. But the phase out also required something other than nuclear fission to make electricity. Because of climate change, that something couldn’t be coal, so again Russian gas to the rescue to kill two birds with one stone. The constant circling of the roundabout—first a 180, then a 360, then 540—was successive German chancellors grappling with the impossibility of renewable energy, the claimed stand-in for nuclear, actually standing in for it.
It was only Putin’s full scale invasion of Ukraine that forced German Ostpolitikers to dismantle the Russian gas bridge. SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz promised this outrage would prompt a zeitenwende in German foreign policy, but has struggled ever since to appreciate the implications of abandoning a 50-year policy and admitting it was a mistake; the policy was justified using 80 years of mythology based on misinformation and disinformation.
Today, the nuclear phase out, the keystone of Ostpolitik, suddenly has no justification. Its supporters no longer have a friendly home.
Friedrich Merz, fiction fighter: the original direction was the right one
Scholz’s struggles to define a post-Ostpolitik German direction have been unsuccessful. His coalition has collapsed. Thre will be elections in 2025 which if held today would result in a pro-nuclear chancellor, Friedrich Merz of the CDU.
Scholz’s predecessor Angela Merkel, of the CDU, Merz’s party, was once pro-nuclear. She buckled under Green hysteria during the Fukushima meltdowns, took the car back into the roundabout, and accelerated the phase out. She then buckled under the realization that without nuclear Germany needed gas, and could either import cheap Russian gas or go bankrupt importing LNG. She took the easy way out, and doubled down on Ostpolitik. Merz appears unlikely to support either the phase out or a pro-Russia policy.
Is that because he can read the public like everybody else and knows his three predecessors Gerhard Schroder, Merkel, and Scholz are now so completely discredited that a proper zeitenwende would raise little opposition?
Or because he can do math and knows there’s no hope renewable energy can meet German energy demand and is willing to tell his citizens the country should have gone straight through the roundabout from the start?
Or both?
A Chancellor Merz who thinks the phase out was a mistake does not equate to one who will build new nuclear plants, as a late November Spiegel article points out. But Merz has said he would give German Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine, without restriction on their use against Russia.
Zeitenwende must happen before a proper energiewende can take place. Merz has his problems with wind power, too.
We’ll see.