The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 7

The GAZETTE. Montreal. Jan 27. 1977 7 Fusion power vast energy pool believed untapped Dialogue: Israel, which began the October war with 1,700 tanks, now has 2,700 thanks to delivery of Egypt weak militarily more like this one from U.S. vague threats are her By R.

ZUBRIN In your editorial Jan. 7 entitled "A little conservation" you expressed the view that a positive policy objective for Canada and other advanced countries would be to "conserve energy" by reducing over-all energy consumption. This view, which has been promoted by the Club of Rome and other zero-growth spokesmen, is incompetent. Only a few years ago it would have generally been considered absolutely outrageous. Yet now we are being told, like the victims in some Orwellian' nightmare society: "Less is best." Cutting energy consumption means negative industrial growth, which means negative rates of capital formation.

Cutting energy consumption means lowering the general living standard. This in turn means destroying the level of cultural, educational and technological competence which allows the population of the industrialized sector to use advanced technology and which allows a significant number of individuals to make creative innovations, i.e. inventions and scientific discoveries, which allow society to progress. Cutting energy consumption means poverty, starvation and misery for millions. Canada and the U.S.

are not "the world's biggest energy wasters" but rather, along with the "energy wasting" industrial concentrations in Europe, the Soviet sector and Japan, represent the productive potential that is absolutely essential to the survival and progress of the Third World. Energy supplies are unlimited. Controlled thermonuclear fusion, the same huge source of energy as is released in uncontrolled form in a hydrogen bomb, soon can be feasible. Fusion uses deuterium "heavy water" as fuel, which one small plant in Nova Scotia is filtering out of the sk at a rate adequate to supply the entire energy needs of North America. There is enough deuterium in the sea to last mankind for millions of years at rates of energy consumption hundreds of times the present.

Recent Soviet breakthroughs in fusion research have made it clear that fusion reactors could be developed and be operating commercially by 1985. That is what we of the Fusion Energy Foundation propose. We have drawn up bills to be submitted to Parliament and the U.S. Congress for an international research and development program for controlled fusion. Simple-minded theory The bills call for spending $6 billion in the U.S.

and about $600 million in Canada on fusion research and on upgrading science programs in educational institutions, including the establishment of chairs of plasma physics (basic to fusion research) at as many universities as possible. The bills call for co-operation with the Soviets, Europeans and Japanese and advocate the expanded use of nuclear fusion plants (such as CANDU) during the interim period while fusions is developed. Controlled fusion is the concrete refutation of the alarm calls of the advocates of the "conserver society," but the incompetence of these people runs deeper. limit ners have to take these weapons into their calculations. The conclusion that emerges is this.

The Egyptian armed forces are in no fit state to attack Israel for at least several years, even if the terrain difficulties of the Sinai front are discounted. Syria, as always, is too weak to fight without Egypt, even if it were able to concentrate its forces three divisions of which are tied down in Lebanon i. And Israeli nuclear weapons have effectively deprived the Arab states since about 1970 of any option above that of a carefully limited attack It is quite understandable that the Arab states should mutter vague threats about a military alternative as a negotiating tactic, but the fact is that at the moment they do not have that alternative. To change the key variable, Egypt's military weakness, would take at least two to three years unless Soviet arms supplies were miraculously resumed. Some other factors discouraging an Arab military initiative, like the disengagement zones and Israel's nuclear weapons, have become semi-permanent features of the landscape.

Failure to achieve a Middle East peace settlement obviously does mean renewed war in the long run. Arab politics being what they are, a few well-placed bullets could transform Syria or Egypt into truly radical states overnight, even without the.incentive of a failure at Geneva. However, even the most enthusiastic Arab supporter of another round of fighting would find it hard to start an attack on Israel in this decade with any hope of success. By GWYNNE DYER LONDON Various Israeli sceptics continue to warn that behind the great Arab peace offensive lurk the preparations for another war. The Arab confrontation states make it quite clear, without saying it too loudly, that the alternative to significant progress towards a peace settlement this year is renewed war.

But could the Arabs attack Israel now with any prospect of even limited success? The announcement Jan. 12 of the Franco-Arab agreement to manufacture 200 Mirage combat aircraft in Egypt was the signal for a new wave of speculation about an Arabs arms buildup. Some Mirages, it was announced, would be delivered to Egypt by the end of the year. However it is very likely, in accordance with French practice, that the 22 figure includes 44 Mirages which Egypt ordered in January, 1975, and that it is that earlier order which will begin arriving later in 1977. As for the rest, it is anticipated that assembly of French combat aircraft in Egypt could start in about three years time and gradually develop towards a genuinely Egyptian-manufactured product by the time the last of the 200 were built in the mid-1980s.

This is scarcely a development that will affect the military balance this year or next. Egypt has been trying to diversify from its previous dependence on the Soviet Union for arms ever since 1973, but the Mirages that arrive next winter will be the very first major Western weapons it has received. Hardly any Soviet arms supplies have been sent to Egypt since the war only the com pletion of some pre-1973 orders and that oniy after much haggling. Egypt has never been able to replace its wartime losses of 1973. Moreover, because of the continuing Soviet embargo on spare parts for its Soviet-equipped armed forces, Cairo has been reduced to scrounging for them in other states that also operate Soviet-designed equipment.

At least 90 per cent of Egyptian weapons are more than five years old. and more than half are nearing the 10-year mark, corresponding to the massive Soviet re-equipment program after the 1967 war. A comparison of today's Egyptian armed forces with those at the beginning of October, 1973. shows the extent of the problem. Three and a half vears ago Egypt had 620 combat aircraft, most even then inferior in performance to Israel's counterparts.

Now it has 488, most simply the survivors of 1973. At the start of the October war it had approximately 2,000 tanks; it is now at least several hundred short of that figure. Syria has about 600 more tanks than it did in 1973, and 100 more combat aircraft, for totals of about 2,200 tanks and 440 planes. Jordan is marginally better off than it was, with one extra squadron of fighter bombers but the sum of these scarcely compares with the improvements of Israel's armed forces. In 1973 Israel had 480 combat aircraft; now it operates around 550 with 60 more older aircraft in reserve and an additional 60 new ones to be delivered in the next year or so.

It began the October war with 1,700 A column open to our readers who wish to comment on topics of interest. R. Zubrin, who holds degrees in math and physics from the University of Rochester, N.Y., is a full-time Montreal organizer for the Fusion Energy Foundation. The organization has members in Canada, the U.S. and Europe.

Fundamentally they are Malthusians, they hold that as population expands it simply accelerates the rate of resource depletion and therefore unless population growth is stopped society will collapse under the weight of excess consumption. This simple-minded theory falls apart immediately when it is noted that the question of what is and what is not a resource is determined solely by what technologies human beings put into practice. The larger the population, at a higher standard of living, the more in-venters and therefore the faster will be the rate of technological innovation that brings into existence new arrays of resources. This notion of the development of society is confirmed by the entire history of the human race, which shows that as per capita energy consumption increases, the world becomes capable of supporting an ever larger number of people. The human race is not a race of consumers, we are a race of creators, of producers and inventers.

We create our environment and resources. This understood, it becomes immediately apparent why every Malthusian prediction has fallen flat. For example Malthus' prediction of the impossibility of the world being capable of supporting more than 1.5 billion people. It is interesting to contemplate what might have been the result had the Club of Rome or the gentlemen of the "Gamma" think tank (conservor society advocates) been in position to determine policy for the human race during the Pleistocene epoch. They unquestionably would have observed that the expanding population of humans was depleting the herds of mastodons.

To stop this they would have legislated zero population growth at 125,000 people and outlawed any innovations in hunting technique, thus preventing the development among humans of enough collective leisure time to invent agriculture and keeping mankind in the Stone Age forever! And these incompetents presume to determine policy for mankind in the 20th century! This cannot be allowed. We must move forward. Fusion power is the way to the future. To increase public knowledge of the possibilities of fusion power and the necessity for its development, the Fusion Energy Foundation will be sponsoring a public conference on controlled fusion at the Universite du Montreal Feb. 19.

aP vyirepnoio determine the ancestry of Chip's dog." Jody said. "The president spent some time walking around the White House introducing himself to new staff members and harassing old ones," he said. Then Jody sighed and turned a page. "Other trivia he said, and there is where the White House press corps rebelled. After all, this is the kind of news that they have committed their lives to.

"Please do not characterize the news as trivia," one reporter told him. "Just give it." Jody looked hurt. "Well, it's just that I am embarrassed giving you this kind of stuff," he said. "And I thought that you were, too." Don't worry about a thing. Mr.

President. I think I'm gonna like that boy Chicago Sun-Times I. tanks. Thanks to captured Arab equipment and large American deliveries, it now has 2,700, with more on order. Israel also possesses almost 7,000 other vehicles, half again as many as all of its Arab neighbors combined.

In qualitative terms, the gap has opened markedly. Last month Israel took delivery of its first F-15 air superiority fighters, for which its Arab neighbors have no remotely comparable equipment, and it is already discussing a large order of F-16s as well. In guided weapons of all kinds, short-range missiles, and electronic warfare equipment it has established a wide lead over its opponents The creation of zones of disengagement on the Syrian and the Egyptian fronts presents a major obstacle to any repetition of the surprise Arab attack of 1973 Mutter vague threats Any Arab attack without surprise, in most observers' views, would be futile. The obstacle is particularly great in the Sinai peninsula, where the zone is wide and includes a low range of mountains running virtually its whole length, with American observers in the passes to warn of any suspicious military movements. Beyond all these calculations, there is the little mentioned but dominating fact of Israel's nuclear weapons or, to be charitable, its all-but-nuclear weapons, with perhaps a few bits left aside for final assembly so that the government can deny their existence without actually lying.

All Arab military plan counting on collective weariness with the whole subject of the constitution to persuade the premiers to agree on a minimum gesture which they could hold out to their electorate. Trudeau also might be able to hold out a little progress to his electorate at a time when he badly needs it. There is an irony in the recollection that it was almost exactly nine years ago, at a constitutional conference, that Trudeau leapt to national prominence. He was an unknown justice minister but his verbal battles with the then premier of Quebec, Daniel Johnson, probably contributed more than anything else to his securing the Liberal leadership a few months later. Nine years later, he is still scrambling for one small sign of agreement on the constitution.

Far from being a rising star, the latest Gallup poll shows that 57 per cent of the country disapproves of the way he is handling his job. Quebec, which started all the pressure to improve the constitution, now wants no part of the Canadian constitution. The separatist Parti Quebecois government wants right out of Canada altogether. With all that, the renewed attempts at constitutional reform seem to have all the relevance of knittmg knee socks for dodobirds. Gray covers Parliament for tke Ottawa Citizen.

Southam News Services Reply took three months Premiers' policy on constitution is 'serious PM writes Press secretary Jody Powell, centre, holds first session with reporters in White House Trivia irks Carter press aide They agreed they were all for patriation but only if the federal government would agree to an expansion of provincial powers over a variety of areas ranging from culture and communications to the Senate and the Supreme Court. That was further complicated when British Columbia and Alberta backed away from the terms of an amending formula on which everyone had supposedly agreed five years before. The provinces also tossed in a few curve balls on such things as immigration and resource taxation. Not surprisingly, it took Trudeau three months to get around to a formal reply and one more try at "a Draft Resolution Respecting the Constitution of Canada." The prime minister in his letter told the premiers they wanted too much or too little too much for a quickie patriation of the constitution and too little for a major constitutional revision. Patriation would be easy, but dabbling in the distribution cf federal-provincial powers would not.

"To do it partially, in the way your letter suggests, without a coherent total plan would in our view be a serious mistake." So the prime minister proposed a two-stage effort. First patriation and an amending formula, and then down to the more complicated and tender subject of who gets power to do what. At this stage, Trudeau clearly is By JOHN GRAY OTTAWA In what looks like a last desperate effort, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau has appealed to the provincial premiers to give the country a constitution which is at least Canadian, if not modern. The tone of Trudeau's appeal and the mood of senior federal officials suggests nobody is very optimistic about changing what the prime minister called "this remnant of our colonial condition of a century ago." Trudeau's preferred plan is for "pa-triation" of the British North America Act, which is effectively Canada's constitution but which is legally also a statute of the British Parliament. Along with provincial agreement on patriation of the constitution, Trudeau would like agreement on a formula whereby the constitution could be amended.

It all sounds simple enough for a young country which is rushing towards its 110th birthday. However, an agreement on an amending formula has eluded the best minds in the country for the past half century. Unless the premiers have changed their minds since autumn, it appears an agreement will prove elusive once more. The premiers' position was established at two meetings in August and September when they gathered behind closed doors, without Trudeau present to remind them how he would like the universe to unfold. "Here's the trivia for this morning." Powell said.

"The president slept late. He got up at 7 a.m. He couldn't find the news summary. In the future we will get him the news summary. "He ate breakfast at 8:30 a.m." Powell said.

"I forgot the name of the room. That sun porch. The family dining room. He had scrambled eggs, sweet rolls, bacon and sausages. No grits.

"He let me sit at the corner of the table and drink coffee while I took down what he had for breakfast. "We found out that the White House has no high chair for the president's grandson. Jason. We will get a high chair. We did get some kind of chair out of the Billiard Room "The president wTas accompanied later in the day by which is Chip Carter's dog.

It is a dog of undetermined ancestry." Someone asked what Billy Carter's dog was doing. "He was trying to By ROGER SIMON WASHINGTON Dear President Jimmy: I went to see your press secretary on his first day on the job. Jody Powell looked like he always did a WASP poster child. And when he walked into the White House press room for the first time he was just his old self. "Let's get going," Jody said.

"Then you can leave and I can leave and everybody will be happy." Up to that point, very few persons were happy. There were about 300 in the room to see Jody's first day and they were very crowded and stepping on each other';) feet. "I'm hoping that it will be so uncomfortable at these things that no one will come" Jody said. The press in its usual dignified, reserved manner Newsmen began mooing like cows Some began barking like dogs That's what we consider humor, Mr. President..