Despite my recent messages, I do not wish to give the impression I am pessimistic. I would not be working all these years promoting cold fusion if I thought there was little chance of success. However, you cannot win a political battle unless: you are prepared to win, and determined to win; you think carefully about strategy and tactics; and you move quickly to change your approach when circumstances change or a new opportunity arises.
Moving quickly means -- I do not think that cold fusion cells can be manufactured by people at home. I assume they will be high-tech devices. However if it turns out I'm wrong, I would be delighted and I would hope that people take advantage of that to launch a cottage industry cold fusion revolution. It might be similar to what is happening now with cheap replicator devices. In other words my strategy would be to depend upon midsize and large corporations to manufacture the devices because I assume for technical reasons that is the only practical way to do it, but I would love to be proved wrong. I made a list of reasons why I expect a long brutal political battle. If it turns out the opposition rolls over and placed dead, no one would be more delighted than me! I'm not hoping for a battle; I am preparing for one. There is a big difference. I listed some of the advantages the opposition is likely to have. Mainly money and political power. Here are some important advantages on our side. Some have now, and some we may soon have, which will grow grow stronger, while the opposition grows weaker. We have history on our side: Greed works in our favor too. Corporations, venture capitalists and many others will be determined to make money with cold fusion. They will defy large corporations. Microsoft clobbered IBM in the 1980s, even though it started off much smaller. Institutional inertia is on our side. IBM did not begin to respond to Microsoft and the personal computer revolution until it was almost too late and the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. As I said, a low profile works to our advantage. I do get sick of the low-profile approach, though. We are terribly weak now. When I talk to Mizuno or Prelas now, I am appalled at how easily their work was suppressed by a few nitwits. Stopping cold fusion in the 1990s was like taking candy from a baby. Robert Park makes a few phone calls and boom! -- six months of planning and funding requests go into the trashcan. A publisher abruptly cancels a book; a session at ACS is cancelled. This has happened over and over again, far more often than people realize. Both sides are trying to cover up the extent of it because the opponents don't want people to know how often they have interfered in academic freedom, and cold fusion researchers hope that Lucy will not snatch away the football next time. Researchers have been like mice fleeing from a wolf. Their only hope has been to hide. That is how things have been but it does not mean we will always be so weak. The funding at U. Missouri will not be cancelled, despite frantic efforts by opponents. We will have powerful allies too, especially the Pentagon. They do not want to see the Chinese army supplied with cold fusion powered equipment while we are stuck with fossil fuel. As I pointed out in my book, this would be similar to the Opium Wars or the battle between the ironclad Merrimack and U.S. Navy wooden ships. In these cases you had a 20-year gap in technology. This is something the Pentagon understands. If the Confederacy had been able to deploy a fleet of 50 ironclad ships more maneuverable than the Merrimack, they would have broken the Union blockade and won the Civil War. The cost would have been trivial compared to fighting the battle of Gettysburg and the siege of Richmond. Fortunately, the Confederacy was not capable of making such a fleet. They were not capable of making breech loaded repeating rifles, precision long-range artillery or Gatling guns. The Union did build fleets of ironclad steamships, and these other things, and much else. It was just beginning to deploy Gatling guns when the war ended. If the war had gone on another few months, Gatling guns firing 200 rounds a minute would have massacred soldiers the way they did in 1914. We may soon have powerful corporate allies as well. I expect that fossil fuel companies will deploy every political weapon they can muster to destroy cold fusion, but they may not realize cold fusion is real and they may not respond until it is too late. If money and power is already flowing into the research, and if large corporations such as General Electric are determined to apply cold fusion, Exxon Mobile will not be able to stop them. Grassroots support. I think this is the most critical thing of all. See the quote in the introduction to my book: "on public opinion, and on it alone, finally rests the issue." People have no idea how powerful the force of public opinion can be. As I've often said, when ordinary Americans realize that a family of four will save $8000 a year thanks to cold fusion, cold fusion will become unstoppable. Nothing that the coal industry or Exxon Mobil or anyone else can say what do will stop cold fusion, if only we can make the public fully aware of what cold fusion is capable of. People often thinks the US public is easily manipulated by money and the mass media. There is some truth to this, but the manipulators and the big money do not always win. Not every round. - Jed
