Explore "Day of the Moron" by H. Beam Piper on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It's natural to trust the unproven word of the fellow who's "on my side" -- but the emotional moron is on no one's side, not even his own. Once, such an emotional moron could, at worst, hurt a few. But with the mighty, leashed forces Man employs now.
There were still, in 1968, a few people who were afraid of the nuclear power plant. Oldsters, in whom the term "atomic energy" produced semantic reactions associated with Hiroshima. Those who saw, in the towering steam-column above it, a tempting target for enemy -- which still meant Soviet -- bombers and guided missiles. Some of the Central Intelligence and F. B. I. people, who realized how futile even the most elaborate security measures were against a resourceful and suicidally determined saboteur. And a minority of engineers and nuclear physicists who remained unpersuaded that accidental blowups at nuclear-reaction plants were impossible.