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John Ritch came to the WNA in January 2001 after seven years as U.S. ambassador to UN organizations in Vienna, among them the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization. In Vienna, he was active in promoting the IAEA's global strengthened-safeguards system and new conventions on nuclear safety. He participated in the U.S.-North Korea nuclear negotiations and the UN Conferences reviewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995 and 2000.
Previously Amb. Ritch was a staff adviser to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 22 years, specializing in East-West relations and nuclear arms control. During that period, he was also an entrepreneur, heading a real estate development company and co-founding a multinational enterprise marketing fitness-related products throughout Europe. He is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and holds a Master's Degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
Read statements made by John Ritch.
Nuclear Energy and Sustainable Development: Join Us in the Worldwide Debate
John B RitchDirector GeneralWorld Nuclear Association
When future historians assess the nuclear age as it has unfolded thus far, they will surely see a saga that displays, in full measure, man's twin capacities for rationalism and perversity.
From the beginning, the two impulses competed vigorously. If the discovery of fission was a scientific marvel, the achievement was soon rendered far less glorious by the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the steady and grotesque proliferation of thousands of atomic warheads capable of blackening the sky and all civilization.
Today, as the world emerges from a half century of Cold War, we have come full circle. If once we feared nuclear Armageddon, the looming question now is whether humankind can summon the wisdom to employ atomic power as an instrument of salvation - as we struggle to avert a menacing change in the entire biosphere. The constant in this equation is the ongoing contest to determine if sanity is to prevail over folly and self-destruction.
Fortunately, those who would champion nuclear technology stand on ever-stronger foundations - built by scientists and diplomats laboring for decades to convert the ideal of 'atoms for peace' to practical reality.
On the scientific front, nuclear technology has matured into a unique tool of sustainable global development. As our world grapples with the challenge of a burgeoning population pressing against the limits of a fragile biosphere, nuclear power stands unparalleled in its capacity to generate electricity safely, cleanly and on a virtually unlimited scale. Today nuclear power production draws on some 14,000 reactor-years of practical experience.
In the pursuit of sustainable development, nuclear technology also offers a dazzling and ever widening array of tools strengthening worldwide efforts to promote agricultural productivity, eradicate virulent pests, protect livestock health, preserve food, develop water resources, enhance human nutrition, improve medical diagnosis and treatment, and advance environmental science.
To support this progress, international diplomacy - public and private - has made historic strides in building a framework of rules and obligations for atomic commerce. Today the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is supported by strong and nearly universal safeguards, while a fabric of binding Conventions helps to ensure safe nuclear procedures worldwide. Two great institutions - the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Association of Nuclear Operators - stand as twin pillars of 'atoms for peace'.
Sadly, the achievements of nuclear science and diplomacy have not been paralleled by a comparable expansion of public appreciation. Myths abound concerning nuclear power and radioactive waste, distorting public debate at the very moment when nuclear technology seems indispensable if we are to meet the environmental challenge. The obvious irony is that anti-nuclear mythology is most avidly propagated by persons describing themselves as 'green'.
The World Nuclear Association is determined to promote, as a matter of ethical principle and urgent public need, an ongoing debate over energy resources that focuses citizens and governments alike on the real choices facing humanity and on the severe dangers - for the prospects of global development and for the biosphere - if decision-making on this fundamental policy is shaped by ideology and illusion rather than by science and facts.
The WNA website (www.world-nuclear.org) aims to provide a wealth of relevant information for citizens, journalists and policymakers. We believe that the facts speak for themselves, but we intend to be tireless in disseminating the facts as widely as possible.
On the policy front, we viewed the arrival of the Obama Administration with a mixture of hope and apprehension. Experience has shown that parties of the left are inclined to accept the dangers of catastrophic climate change but slow to accept and act on the reality that nuclear power must play a central role in any rational strategy to meet this challenge. Broadly, this mirrors an opposite tendency among parties of the right, which generally exhibit excessive skepticism about environmental science but acceptance of nuclear power as a desirable source of clean energy.
The Bush Administration was a classic example of the latter tendency. A crucial question surrounding the Obama Administration is whether it can bridge this left-right gap by joining its environmental concerns to hard-nosed reality about the immense value of nuclear power.
The early signs are mixed . The patently political decision to cancel Yucca Mountain was not an encouraging start, and we have reason to wonder about the virtual absence from the President's environmental pronouncements of any mention of nuclear power. Even as President Obama's energy secretary speaks soundly about the necessary role of nuclear energy, we see little else in the administration's rhetoric or policies that expresses the urgency of accelerating the nuclear renaissance. The Department of Energy may understand nuclear power, but does the White House?
Meanwhile, WNA efforts remain focused on emphasizing - to policymakers and the public - the reality and severity of the climate change problem; the value of nuclear power as a safe, large-scale source of climate friendly energy; and the urgent need for UN climate negotiations to produce an agreed program of international action that is realistic as to its targets, technologies and mechanisms. In that arena, we shall continue to oppose the perverse efforts of 'environmentalists' seeking to stigmatise and explicitly exclude from the emissions-reduction mechanisms a technology - nuclear power - that belongs at the center of any rational global response to the greenhouse challenge.
The WNA aim, in sum, is to promote international action on sustainable development and a central role for nuclear power. To citizens everywhere concerned to promote real solutions to a global crisis without precedent, we offer a hand of partnership and an invitation to join us in this effort.