Gil Scott-Heron, Karen Silkwood, and the 1979 No Nukes Album: For those who came of age in the 1970s and 80s, political awakening to the dangers of nuclear power came as much via pop culture as it did from watching the nightly news. The 1979 triple album No Nukes: The MUSE Concerts for a Non-Nuclear Future, recorded over the course of five concerts in Madison Square Garden, and featuring a host of rock luminaries, made a durable mark on the movement. Reading an excerpt from her recent commentary in Counterpunch, Desiree Hellegers reflects on Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s song “We Almost Lost Detroit,” and its attention to both the 1966 partial meltdown at the Enrico Fermi plant outside Detroit, and the 1974 death of Karen Silkwood, a labor organizer and nuclear whistleblower, who was killed on her way to deliver documents about safety violations at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant in Oklahoma.
Image credit: "We Almost Lost Detroit" by swanksalot is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.