Lenore Marshall, “The Nuclear Sword of Damocles,” 1971.

In the title of this article, poet and peace activist Lenore Marshall—one of the founders of SANE in 1957—calls nuclear energy a “Sword of Damocles,” referring to an ancient Greek story with the moral that fortune and power also bring danger and responsibility. How can we understand Marshall’s article as a shift from concerns about nuclear war to concerns about the environmental impact of nuclear waste?