Jimmy Carter saved Canadian nuclear reactor after meltdown

https://www.military.com/history/how-jimmy-carter-saved-canadian-nuclear-reactor-after-meltdown.html

by georgecmu • 4 years ago

137 112 4 years ago

military.com

incomingpain3• 4 years ago

Jimmy Carter is an interesting US president that I like and yet don't understand.

After just 1 term he remarkably lost to Reagan. I just never quite understood why he lost so badly.

ChuckNorris89• 4 years ago

Because in politics winning or losing elections has nothing to do with competence but with popularity and how good you are at moving the blame off yourself to your competitors.

willnonya2• 4 years ago

So, you're saying it has nothing to do with competence but everything to do with, competence?

Just because the things that makes politicians successful don't make for particularly good people doesn't negate Carter's lack of proficiency in the field.

OneLeggedCat• 4 years ago

Anyone would have lost to Reagan. He was extremely charismatic.

mytailorisrich3• 4 years ago

Bad economy, high inflation, energy crisis, and pretty bad international context (Iran, Afghanistan).

smt88• 4 years ago

This is the correct answer. Carter would have lost to a significantly worse candidate than Reagan if they hadn't had Reagan.

Studies don't show that Americans vote much based on foreign policy, but they certainly crush the current president and Congress when the economy is bad and inflation is high. It doesn't matter whether he did anything to cause it or not.

recuter5• 4 years ago

“I can’t believe Reagan won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”

Yes, I know the quote is paraphrased and was originally about Nixon. I just find this befuddlement why Jimmy Carter lost amusing.

Man got very badly played:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter%27s_engagement_wi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_oil_crisis

He was also attacked by a bunny:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident

wallfacer1206• 4 years ago

How is the 79 oil crisis an example of Carter getting "played" exactly?

incomingpain3• 4 years ago

Thanks for the response. It's interesting, my focus was always the 1973 oil crisis; which is repeating in history again right now. I mostly dismissed 1979 as just a post-crisis fluctuation. #nixonsfault for price fixing. You're not allowed to price fix. You know what they're doing with insulin right now?

In Canada we get taught more about the 1979 canadian embassy helped save the US diplomats.

It's interesting I found this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Iranian_Revolution_conspi...

If political wiki is calling it a conspiracy theory... it's probably true.

That's a great bunny story. Goes to show a political bias in the media even back then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_UFO_incident

Check out this. He publicly admitted to seeing a UFO. You might think he was a crackpot or something but suddenly the navy started revealing UFO videos.

https://www.space.com/ufos-videos-declassified-navy-release....

There's some high ranking elected us politicians who upon this coming out they said there's so much more still classified. Yet nobody is talking about this.

CalChris2• 4 years ago

Reagan was an entertainer for people who wanted entertainment. Carter was a decent man replaced by a vain man.

drewcoo3• 4 years ago

They were both neoliberals who pushed deregulation. And both were union-busters. Carter was the beginning of that trend, in fact, putting an end to FDR's legacy. Reagan just did it more palatably, with a smile and a joke.

wallfacer1206• 4 years ago

Because voters reason like language models, not like symbolic ais.

UncleOxidant4• 4 years ago

It was mostly due to the Iranian hostage crisis. Every night on TV there was a count "Day 123: America held hostage!" - this was when the ABC news show Nightline with Ted Koppel got it's start. Also, the economy wasn't great. We had inflation - though to be fair that started during the Nixon/Ford admins and was largely due to 1) Vietnam war spending and 2) the Arab oil embargo. Unemployment was also fairly high (around this time the term 'stagflation' was coined.) Carter appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chairman in '79 with the full knowledge that Volcker planned to significantly raise interest rates in order to curb inflation - in fact, Volcker did not expect to be chosen as Fed chairman because he made it clear to Carter in his interview that he would significantly raise rates. By the time of the election the Fed rate was around 13% which began to slow the economy significantly. Add to this that Carter was very honest with the American people that they needed to consume less and develop alternative forms of energy to become less dependent on authoritarian regimes.

Well, it was all too much for most of the electorate. Carter did the hard things that needed to be done. Volcker raising interest rates was absolutely the right thing to do and it did quell inflation a few years down the road, but Carter bore the brunt of the immediate political fallout.

Carter was thinking further ahead than probably any president in my lifetime (from JFK through Biden). He was the first president to take climate change seriously. If we would've listened to him I think we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're in now. But American politics is a short-term game... and it's even moreso now than it was then.

pstuart• 4 years ago

And when discussing that hostage crisis we would be remiss if we did not include the October Surprise that ensured said crisis would hurt Carter: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/ronald-reagan-october-surpris...

spaetzleesser2• 4 years ago

"I just never quite understood why he lost so badly."

The hostage crisis probably broke him (the rescue attempt was a total disaster. Not his fault but it looked terrible) plus the inflation fighting Volker did. Reagan was also an excellent communicator. Hard to campaign against a guy like him.

indymike• 4 years ago

After just 1 term he remarkably lost to Reagan.

American voters are very unforgiving to bad economies and bad foreign policy outcomes. Carter was the victim of both, and Reagan was a formidable candidate.

DSingularity• 4 years ago

Jimmy Carter. A great president treated like an outcast. If you fight for things like fair elections or against things like apartheid you will be demoted despite your credentials.

hsnewman• 4 years ago

Only by people who don't want fair elections and apartheid. He was a good president.

recuter5• 4 years ago

Only, huh? You know it is quite tiresome this attitude of "if you don't vote like me you're literally pro terrible thing". It is just as annoying as people who would accuse Carter voters of being limp wristed champagne communists.

A lot of the people who voted for him the first time around did not vote for him the second time around for a variety of reasons. Primarily his perceived job performance.

mytailorisrich3• 4 years ago

"It's the economy, stupid"

If people are unemployed and/or face high inflation and energy costs they won't vote for you whatever your stance on apartheid...

blululu2• 4 years ago

Republicans like Eisenhower, Nixon and Bush all got re-elected after first terms of job losses. (Reagan is the only Republican post WWII to post first term job gains). If the economy were the end all be all, then there would be no need to have a disrespectful slogan to score ideological points.

drewcoo3• 4 years ago

He was an outcast in his own party. [1] With not just the Republicans but also the Democrats against him, he wasn't terribly effective. What he did post-Presidency is no way to measure his tenure in office.

[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/21/camelots-...

quanto• 4 years ago

Disheartening is to hear that people view Carter as a nice guy but incompetent. "Nice guys finish last." Perhaps it is ingrained in our Western culture that we expect leaders to be aggressive and aggrandizing.

Carter is the only modern president to have a successful second career after presidency -- through the Carter Center. He has detractors as all politicians do, but to call him incompetent belies his long and varied career, including the one in this article.

willnonya2• 4 years ago

It's a fallacy to believe that intelligence or competency in one field translates to competency in all fields.

An admittedly intelligent and nice guy he wasn't a particularly competent president. Looking at his term through the lense of sympathy rather than history gives a distorted picture.

DantesKite• 4 years ago

Herber Hoover is a brilliant example of this. Great engineer. Terrible president.

darksaints• 4 years ago

Carter successfully deregulated the railroad industry, the trucking industry, the airline industry, and the craft brewing industry. A huge amount of the economic growth often attributed to his successors is actually due to his success in identifying sources of stagflation and systematically eliminating them. Carter was better than a good president, he was just a victim of shitty politics.

kzrdude4• 4 years ago

The stories people tell of politicians are not exactly always fact-based. Well-known people, especially those who don't speak for themselves (in social media) they get a reputation that sticks.

coolso• 4 years ago

Looking at his term through the lense of sympathy rather than history gives a distorted picture.

In light of comparisons of the current President to him, the current meme seems to be to consider Carter “an actually very good, misunderstood President” in the hopes of neutering the insult.

robonerd7• 4 years ago

During Carter's presidency, you had the Iranian hostage crisis, the '79 energy crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent end of Détente.

I think Carter has relatively little blame for these things, but nevertheless, it's easy for me to see why people think Carter was a nice guy but too weak.

aaronbrethorst• 4 years ago

Carter ended the Iranian hostage crisis. https://www.vox.com/2016/1/25/10826056/reagan-iran-hostage-n...

UncleOxidant4• 4 years ago

the '79 energy crisis

Which was a continuation of the energy crisis (and rise in oil prices) that began with the '73 Arab oil embargo.

flavius296632• 4 years ago

When you have gas queues, high inflation and a weakening international stand...you will blame at least some of it on the president.

UncleOxidant4• 4 years ago

The gas queues started well before Carter. They started in '73. And Carter was calling for the US to move to alternative energy sources that would make us less vulnerable to undemocratic states - this was well before any other prominent pols were calling for this. Had we listened to him we wouldn't be in a lot of the messes we're currently in.

tasty_freeze4• 4 years ago

The inflation rate might have peaked under Carter (13%), but not by a lot. The annual inflation rate was 11% in 1974.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/infl...

It blows my mind to think that Nixon, in an effort to combat inflation, unilaterally decreed that there would be price and wage freezes across the board. There was certainly dissent and discussion about it, but nobody stormed the capital, nobody called for blood. Imagine what would happen today if Biden tried the same edict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock

spaetzleesser2• 4 years ago

Being viewed as a good president is often luck. Carter had very bad timing. Iranian hostages, inflation and other issues. Reagan on the other hand had lucky timing with the economy going up and Gorbachev coming in which sealed the end of the Soviet Union. Clinton was lucky riding the .COM bubble and which then blew up on Bush. Bush also had bad luck with 9/11 and the real estate bubble blowing up during his presidency and not two years later under Obama. Trump was lucky that the upturn from 2008 on kept going during his 4 years. Seems Biden has bad luck that the bubble created by easy money seems to finally cause negative consequences.

kzrdude4• 4 years ago

Reagan is viewed as good while the Iran Contra affair was entirely illegal and immoral. There certainly is no fairness in these common reputations.

tasty_freeze4• 4 years ago

Bush also had bad luck with 9/11

Certainly 9/11 was a national tragedy, but Bush's ratings skyrocketed after 9/11, so I would disagree that it was bad luck for Bush.

kmlx2• 4 years ago

"Nice guys finish last." Perhaps it is ingrained in our Western culture that we expect leaders to be aggressive and aggrandizing.

one could argue that it’s mostly a feature of the US.

reaperducer• 4 years ago

one could argue that it’s mostly a feature of the US.

Only if one was unfamiliar with pretty much every British prime minister, and almost every king or emperor on the planet in the last 3,000 years.

Tao331• 4 years ago

If you believe Hunter S Thompson (I realize that's a big "if") he was one of the most calculating and mean people he'd ever met.

kzrdude4• 4 years ago

This here seems to be the context of what you said, even if Thompson is not offering much of an argument in his elaboration. https://www.openculture.com/2012/07/hunter_s_thompson_rememb...

chrisdhoover• 4 years ago

Carter is a deeply moral man who successfully fought off a killer rabbit. While his presidency was unsuccessful, he is my favorite president in my lifetime. Didn’t Willie Nelson smoke dope at the white house during the Carter admin?

pragmatic• 4 years ago

With Carter’s son on the roof OSS something like that.

blantonl• 4 years ago

I would imagine that in military and defense circles, there are hundreds of highly classified nuclear incidents that we'll never, ever know about in our lifetimes.

The work and materials that these folks worked with in the 50's and 60's were probably so outrageously dangerous that it would bend the mind to think what they were capable of accidentally doing and how much destruction and mayhem that was/could have been caused due to a mistake.

robonerd7• 4 years ago

Close calls can certainly be hidden, but serious nuclear accidents that result in appreciable release of radioactive materials are another story. Those are very hard to hide for long (there have certainly been attempts though.) I think by now we know about about most of the accidents.

For instance, the British government initially tried to cover up the Windscale fire, but they couldn't hide the release of Polonium.

mixmastamyk2• 4 years ago

See the Santa Susana field lab and other coverups. Dark of the Valley is a recent doc on the situation.

In short, they built a reactor in the hills in a simple building without containment. Worked fine until it exploded.

DonHopkins14• 4 years ago

Jimmy Carter will always be my favorite Amazing Colossal President, as Rodney Dangerfield described in the SNL "The Pepsi Syndrome" sketch:

https://m.facebook.com/tapewrecks/videos/the-pepsi-syndrome/...

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78ppepsi.phtml

Dr. Casey: “It means, Mrs. Carter, your husband, President Carter, has become [camera zooms in on Dr. Casey] the amazing colossal president.”

Mrs. Carter: “Well, how big is he?”

Dr. Casey: “Well, Mrs. Carter, it’s difficult to comprehend just how big he is but to give you some idea, we’ve asked comedian Rodney Dangerfield to come along today to help explain it to you. Rodney?”

[Rodney Dangerfield enters]

Rodney: “How do you do, how are you?”

Denton: “Rodney, can you please tell us, how big is the president?”

Rodney: “Oh, he’s a big guy, I’ll tell you that, he’s a big guy. I tell you, he’s so big, I saw him sitting in the George Washington Bridge dangling his feet in the water! He’s a big guy!”

Mrs. Carter: “Oh my God! Jimmy! Oh God!”

Rodney: “Oh, he’s big, I’ll tell you that, boy. He’s so big that when two girls make love to him at the same time, they never meet each other! He’s a big guy, I’ll tell you!”

Mrs. Carter: “Oh no! Oh Jimmy! My Jimmy!”

Rodney: “I don’t want to upset you, lady, he’s big, you know what I mean? Why, he could have an affair with the Lincoln Tunnel! I mean, he’s really high! He’s big, I’ll tell you! He’s a big guy!”

Mrs. Carter: “No! No! No!”

Denton: “Rodney, thank you very much. You can go.”

Rodney: “It’s my pleasure. He’s way up there, lady! You know what I mean?”

—Saturday Night Live, Season 4: Episode 16, “The Pepsi Syndrome” skit, Apr. 7, 1979

mixmastamyk2• 4 years ago

This was a great skit, just recently was introduced to it on this very site. May have seen it as a child, it certainly reminds me of that time.

DonHopkins14• 4 years ago

Bill Murray + Richard Benjamin + Tom Davis + Al Franken + Dan Aykroyd + Laraine Newman + Garret Morris + Jane Curtin + Rodney Dangerfield + Gilda Radner

What could POSSIBLY go wrong??? ;)

wallfacer1206• 4 years ago

Jimmy Carter rocked -- the image of him as weak or mealy-mouthed is the complete opposite of correct. Read about how he dealt with the Iranian hostage crisis, he had iron principles and nerves of steel. Reagan, on the other hand, got utterly played by the Iranians.

The fact that Carter was a genius is pretty cool too.

drewcoo3• 4 years ago

I don't think the October surprise was "getting played by the Iranians." Nor was Iran-Contra. Reagan was connected, with a VP ex-CIA chief, no less.

Carter is known for his "crisis of confidence" speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58

antattack• 4 years ago

Carter's administration supplied US arms to Indonesia fighting East Timor:

"I saw intelligence that came from hard, firm sources in East Timor. There were people being herded into school buildings and set on fire. There were people herded into fields and machine-gunned. ... We knew the place was a free-fire zone and that Suharto was given the green light by the United States to do what he did. We sent the Indonesian generals everything that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn't have any guns. We sent them rifles, ammunition, mortars, grenades, food, helicopters. You name it; they got it. ... None of that got out in the media. No one gave a damn. It is something that I will be forever ashamed of. The only justification I ever heard for what we were doing was the concern that East Timor was on the verge of being accepted as a new member of the United Nations and there was a chance that the country was going to be either leftist or neutralist and not likely to vote [with the United States] at the UN."[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_invasion_of_East_Ti...

wallfacer1206• 4 years ago

What is it that you think this proves?

Maursault• 4 years ago

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, and I think by now he is a national treasure, but it isn't enough. I think President Carter should be beatified and canonized a saint, and that this be done while he's still alive. I also think we should clone him for all kinds of reasons.

Jimmy Carter saved Canadian nuclear reactor after meltdown

Related Stories