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Rejection of US Hiroshima Myths Long Overdue

By John LaForge, published by PeaceVoice

Hiroshima was “a military base.” The US atomic bombings “ended the war,” and they “prevented an invasion and saved lives.” Our government’s tests of atomic weapons on people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 76 years ago were rationalized using these myths which transformed indiscriminate destruction into a “good thing.” This mythology stands as a roadblock to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The “good bomb” story is still believed by many in the United States because of decades of deliberate myth-making started by President Truman. He announced after Hiroshima, “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” Some 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima, another 70,000 in Nagasaki. Almost all were civilians. The bombs were dropped miles from the nearest military base in both cases.

The incurious can be excused for accepting this cover-story — even though it was publicly rejected at the time by great thinkers and writers including Albert Camus and Dorothy Day — because documents that prove the president and his administration lied were kept secret for decades.

One is the April 1946 US Strategic Bombing Survey, led by Dr. Paul Nitze who would later become Navy Secretary and later still a presidential advisor to Ronald Reagan. Nitze’s extensive official government study demolished Truman’s whitewash, concluding, “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated,” according to The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth by historian Gar Alperovitz.

Likewise, the 1946 report of the Intelligence Group of the War Department’s (now Pentagon’s) Military Intelligence Division — only discovered in 1989 — concluded that atomic bombings had not been needed to end the war. The Intelligence Group “judged that it was ‘almost a certainty that the Japanese would have capitulated upon the entry of Russia into the war,’” according to The Decision.

The judgment of Major General Curtis LeMay made six weeks after Nagasaki was more emphatic. Gen. LeMay headed the 21st Bomber Command and directed the firebombing of Osaka, Tokyo and 58 other Japanese cities. LeMay said Sept. 20, 1945, at a New York press conference reported in The New York Herald Tribune, “The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.” A surprised reporter asked, “Had they not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?” and LeMay answered, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

So for 76 years debate has raged about whether the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was ethical. Truman’s shrewd deception that mass destruction “saved lives” has long obscured the (previously classified) historical record, as well as the voices of high-level critics who rejected the big lie.

In 1945, Brig. General Bonnie Feller wrote, “Neither the atomic bombing nor the entry of the Soviet Union into the war forced Japan’s unconditional surrender.”

President Eisenhower said, “First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s Chief of Staff, said later in life, “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”

Returning to Paul Nitze, after 43 years in government spent promoting nuclear weapons, he went from the Strategic Bombing Survey’s crushing of Truman’s Hiroshima myth in 1946, to obliterating all the remaining excuses for nuclear weapons in 1999. He wrote in The New York Times:

I see no compelling reason why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons. To maintain them … adds nothing to our security. … I can think of no circumstances                           under which it would be wise for the US to use nuclear weapons, even in retaliation for their prior use against us.

Today, the global clamor for abolition is invigorated by the entry-into-force of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. With it, we have a new opportunity to renounce fairytales about the atrocities of August 6 and 9, to eliminate the needless costs of perpetual nuclear threats (“deterrence”), to cease our radioactive terrorism, and to finally scrap our nuclear arsenal. ###

Also published at:

* http://www.peacevoice.info/2021/08/04/rejection-of-us-hiroshima-myths-long-overdue/ * https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/06/rejection-of-us-hiroshima-myths-long-overdue/ * https://sierracountyprospect.org/2021/08/04/myths-rejected-8-4-21/ · https://www.laprogressive.com/the-atomic-bomb/ (LA Progressive 8/9/21) * StarDemocrat (Easton MD)-www.stardem.com/opinion/columns/rejection-of-u-s-hiroshima-myths-long-overdue/article_bfa3be15-48d7-586d-8550-516ab86ebd0b.html *https://www.newagebd.net/article/145997/rejection-of-us-hiroshima-myths-long-overdue * https://www.fergusfallsjournal.com/opinion/rejection-of-myths-long-overdue/article_16c92098-f9df-11eb-8f0d-cf4d80bec32b.html * https://www.radiofree.org/2021/08/06/rejection-of-us-hiroshima-myths-long-overdue/* https://spotonflorida.com/southeast-florida/3003632/rejection-of-us-hiroshima-myths-long.html * https://www.newsbreak.com/news/2337046296313/rejection-of-myths-long-overdue * https://twitter.com/Antiwarcom/status/1423835843542716424 *https://spotonmaryland.com/eastern-shore/577998/rejection-of-us-hiroshima-myths-long.html -and-*www.reddit.com/r/GoldandBlack/comments/p1csht/rejection_of_us_hiroshima_myths_long_overdue/

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UK Navy’s Public Brawl over Responsibility for Nuclear Mass Destruction

By John LaForge

In a rare, public dispute between British Naval officers over legal responsibility for attacks using nuclear weapons, two retired British submarine commanders have openly attacked each other’s views in writing. The online confrontation opens a window to the tortured thinking inside the perpetual, high-level, planning and preparation for such attacks among nuclear armed states.

The very public brawl — between Rear Admiral John Gower, a former submarine commander and retired leading ministry official, and the retired submarine Commander Robert Forsyth — appeared on the website of The Nautilus Institute, a British military think tank, in an exchange of six lengthy letters last year. And the open quarrel spotlighted the global debate over the legal status of nuclear weapons threats, politely known as “deterrence,” especially since the entry into force of the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

What caused the online uproar was Adm. Gower’s claim that British ballistic missile submarine captains do not have any right to even question, much less refuse an order to launch their nuclear weapons. The headline in a report on the clash in The Ferret of Scotland was, “Trident commanders ‘not legally responsible’ for nuclear attack.”

Adm. Gower initially wrote an article about UK nuclear weapons command, control, and communications, and claimed, “The military has no formal role in the advice or decision upon whether to launch” nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, which are all on its Trident submarines. “There was then, and there is now, no latitude for a [commanding officer or executive officer] to delay or refuse a launch order on any basis,” he wrote.

Gower’s position creates — in the phrase coined by Professor Robert J. Lifton — an “atrocity producing situation” by institutionalizing blind obedience, and the world well knows what it led to in Hitler’s fascist regime. The claim that submarine commanders have no choice but to obey when ordered to attack with nuclear weapons is a clear violation of the Nuremberg Charter, Principles and Judgment. It was Gower’s shocking assertion that such orders cannot be disobeyed that forced Cdr. Forsyth to publicly lambast his comrade in arms.

“We knew our missiles were targeted to take out Moscow — the so called ‘Moscow Criterion’ — and that this would cause appallingly disproportionate and indiscriminate deaths to millions of the civilian population by blast and fire immediately and, for decades to come, through radiation,” Cdr. Forsyth wrote. “We knew that such a strike would be well outside any accepted international humanitarian law.”

“This is factually wrong,” Adm. Gowers replied, although he admitted that authoritative warnings about unlawful indiscriminate destruction have existed for decades, acknowledging, “Although the [International Committee of the Red Cross] made statements in 1945 and 1950 on the consequences of atomic weapons use, these were not legal judgments.”

Cdr. Forsyth then pointed explicitly to the laws imposed by the Allies on the defeated Nazis: “Nuremberg Principle IV states, ‘The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.’ Unquestioning obedience to a superior’s order is not enough. The UK Joint Service Manual of the Law of Armed Conflict itself states that military commanders ‘… have a responsibility to cancel or suspend the attack if it turns out that the object to be attacked is going to be such that the proportionality rule would be breached.’ So it is the CO himself who must make a considered and informed decision as to whether he should obey the order.”

To this Adm. Gower rejoined: “Successive Attorneys General … have maintained confidence in their judgment that in the extreme circumstances where the employment of the nuclear weapons might be justified, they can be so employed in ways consistent with IHL” [International Humanitarian Law].

Cdr. Forsyth rejected this claim writing, “Rear Admiral Gower states that he is prepared to put his faith in the Attorney General’s infallibility, and that a Trident CO can similarly assume that any order to fire will be fully compliant with International Humanitarian Law. He suggests that as a ‘lay’ person I should not question the Government’s legally obtained position. To which I say, ‘What about Iraq 2003 and the Chilcot Inquiry?’” The reference is to the July 2016 House of Commons report that castigated and condemned the UK’s role in the US-led military bombardment and occupation of Iraq.

Forsyth continued: “Rear Admiral Gower suggests that the COs of [nuclear-armed subs] are absolved of any responsibility because they do not have knowledge of the targets or other specifics of the attack nor have any discretion in carrying out the order. However, there is no reference to such words in the Nuremberg Principles.” Cdr. Forsyth reminded Gower of military personnel’s responsibility under international law to disobey unlawful orders “provided a moral choice was in fact possible.” He wrote, “The CO needs to know the facts to make a moral choice; moreover, he has discretion by virtue of his Captain’s Key which must be turned to give his permission to fire. … The CO could well be placed in involuntary legal jeopardy if he obeys without question not knowing the facts.”

Adm. Gower then resorted to name calling, having lost the argument on the legal basis. Gower wrote, “Those who seek unilateral disarmament of the UK have begun to use this personal threat against the [commanding officer] as a means of undermining the moral component of the deterrent.” (See my comments at CounterPunch Dec. 7, 2017, What Kind of Nuclear Attack Would be Legal? and Apr. 20, 2015, Arresting the Wrong Suspects.

But Cdr. Forsyth wasn’t distracted. “The crucial question,” he concluded, “is whether Adm. Gower’s statement that a military commander with the responsibility and discretion to withhold fire is, as he asserts, uniquely exempt from the provisions of the Nuremberg Principles and Article 33 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”

In an email to me, international law Professor Francis Boyle at the University of Illinois Law School, and author of The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence (Clarity 2002), answered Forsyth with authoritatively: “The Nuremberg Charter and Judgment were unanimously approved by a UN General Assembly Resolution making them customary international law.”

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Biden’s MacArthur Moment

by John LaForge, Nukewatch

Joe Biden has his own Douglas MacArthur moment, and should replace the head of US Strategic Command, Adm. Charles A. Richard, just as Harry Truman fired the insubordinate commander of the US war in Korea.

Truman biographer David McCullough reports that in November 1950, Gen. “MacArthur called on the administration to recognize the ‘state of war’ imposed by the Chinese, then to drop 30 to 50 atomic bombs on Manchuria and the mainland cities of China.” MacArthur then urged that the US “‘sever’ Korea from Manchuria by laying down a field of radioactive wastes, ‘the by-products of atomic manufacture,’ all along the Yalu River.” In April 1951, President Truman fired MacArthur, replacing him with Gen. Matt Ridgeway.

Adm. Richard wrote in the US Naval Institute journal Proceedings that the US must, “consider the possibility of great power competition, crisis, or direct armed conflict with a nuclear-capable peer.” The language is more nuanced than MacArthur’s, but just as genocidal. “We’ve assumed strategic deterrence will hold in the future, but as the threat environment changes, this may not be the case,” he said in an interview, as if discussing the strength of a dike and not the death of millions. This terror-mongering must not be allowed to grow deeper roots at StratCom.

The Omaha, Nebraska-based organization is nominally in control of all US nuclear weapons systems. StratCom says its “responsibilities include” overall US nuclear weapons “operations”, “global strike”, and “targeting”. Its day-to-day business is nuclear attack planning, and Adm. Richard is familiar with the preparations as he previously was commander of Submarine Forces, commander of Submarine Force Atlantic, and commander of Allied Submarine Command.

Adm. Richard claims China intends be a “strategic peer” of the US, and that China is “aggressively challenging international norms and global peace using instruments of power and threats of force…,” according to Bill Gertz, in the Washington Times. Yet China’s “near peer” nuclear arsenal totals 350 warheads, while the Pentagon’s stock of 3,800 warheads is 10 times its size. The recent report by Simone Chun points out the Elephant in the Room here, counting 290 US military bases surrounding China in the Asia-Pacific region alone, and the Pentagon’s request for an astounding $27 billion budget increase in its military buildup there.

The admiral’s psychological projection regarding “instruments of power and threats of force” shows an willful (or imbalanced) blindness to the millions that are being or have been devastated, displaced, maimed, dismembered, or killed by US warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and Syria. China hasn’t crossed another state’s border since its 1951 crushing, 300-mile push-back against MacArthur’s forces in North Korea.

“While [China] has maintained a ‘no first-use’ policy since the 1960s — contending it will never use a nuclear weapon first … This policy could change in the blink of an eye,” Adm. Richard says. But why would it? China’s no first-use policy absolutely reduces tensions of all kinds. This is a goal that Mr. Biden the Strategic Command, and NATO could pursue, and an accomplishment they could share with China by making the same pledge — now a bill in Congress.

Like with Gen. MacArthur before him, there is a madness in Adm. Richard’s speech. There is no reason whatsoever for China to reverse its no first-use pledge, except in the minds of the irrationally paranoid. US Strategic Command used to be run by Gen. George L. Butler who since retiring speaks more sanely about the Bomb. In Sept. 1999 Gen. Butler said, “Nuclear weapons are not weapons at all. They are insanely destructive agents of physical and genetic terror” that are “morally indefensible.” This is a description that now applies to Adm. Richard himself, whom the president should relieve of duty.

— A version of this comment ran April 26 at CounterPunch.org.

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Accidental Apocalypse and Nuclear War on Drugs

Image by Christopher Farrugia.

By John LaForge, Nukewatch

With existential national security threats from floods, droughts, wildfires, water pollution, sea-level rise, and peak oil,[1] the US Air Force, the Air National Guard and nuclear weapons manufacturers could do crucial defense work in the US heartland by building, installing, managing and expanding renewable (wind and solar) electric power systems — instead of polishing their 400 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, and preparing to welcome an astronomically expensive replacement missile dubbed Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. Call such a switch a “Climate Defense Initiative” since it would constitute deterrence against actual threats.

But no. Congress’s “ICBM Coalition,” missile contractors Lockheed Martin, GE, Northrup-Grumman, Boeing, and United Technologies, hundreds of subcontractors, their lobbyists, and public relations departments have conjured implausible but scary sounding reasons for paying an estimated $264 billion for yet another new rocket system. Since 1955, the nuclear-armed rocket gravy train has invented reasons for Atlas missiles, Titan missiles, Minuteman I, II and III missiles, and even a few dozen Peacekeepers.

The proposal to replace today’s 400 land-based ICBMs is so unsound and unpopular that even centrist organizations and individuals have condemned it (most for the wrong reasons), among them the editorial board of Bloomberg News, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Arms Control Association, Defense News, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and a handful of retired military commanders.

Six years ago, the Bulletin referred to “the significant number of ‘expert’ studies that have appeared over the past five years suggesting that the ICBM leg of the nuclear triad should be deactivated”.[2] Gen. James Cartwright, a former Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chaired a 2012 study group whose final report — co-signed by then Senator and later Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel — said in part: “No sensible argument has been put forward for using nuclear weapons to solve any of the major 21st century problems we face …. In fact, nuclear weapons have on balance arguably become more a part of the problem than any solution.” Secretary Perry warns at his website, in speeches and in his memoir that ICBMs, “are simply too easy to launch on bad information and would be the most likely source of an accidental nuclear war,” and he says the ICBM system is “‘destabilizing’ in that it invites an attack from another power.”

All these critics point to these same fundamental failures and risks of ICBMs: they are redundant; they turn their sitting duck locations in five states into national sacrifice zones; and they robotize military commanders by pushing them to launch “on warning” without knowing whether the warning signals are misreads, mistakes or miscalculations.

Don’t mention the drug busts

Still, the mainstream critiques of the new missile program have ignored the scandals that have rocked the Air Force over the last 15 years[3] resulting in hundreds of demotions, firings, courts martial and forced retirements. Officers among the 9,600 people in the Minuteman III missile system have been punished for sexual assaults, spousal abuse, distributing illegal drugs, violating safety and security rules, failing and/or cheating on exams, sleeping at the controls, and even illegally flying nuclear-armed Cruise missiles cross country. In 2014, the AP referred to, “a flagging sense of purpose”, “stunning breakdowns in discipline, training, morale, security, leadership”, and “a decrepit Minuteman III missile force that few airmen want to join and even fewer view as a career-enhancing mission.”[4]

Missile field duty is understood by those assigned to it as a career cul-de-sac, plagued by years of isolation and boredom in rural outbacks, and haunted by high-level discussions of eliminating the missiles. Lacking a mission beyond sitting in place at attention or rehearsing doomsday drills, and overshadowed for promotion and commendations by warzone colleagues in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, missile crews can feel left behind. The variety and depth of staff scandals in the missile fields appears to demonstrate a broad-based disillusionment.

In 2007, three full Colonels, a Lt. Colonel and dozens of low-level personnel at Minot AFB in North Dakota were demoted or sacked after they allowed the fantastically dangerous loading and cross-country air transport of six nuclear-armed Cruise missiles.[5] The nuclear weapons, each holding up to ten times the force of the Hiroshima bomb[6] were flown 1,542 miles from Minot to Barksdale AFB in Louisiana the US staging area for its Middle East wars and an operational bomber base with 44 B-52s.

In 2008, three of the four on-duty Air Force missileers in a Minot missile launch center fell asleep at the con­trols of a com­po­nent that holds launch codes. Rules require at least two crewmembers to stay awake while on alert. They were im­me­di­ate­ly barred from missile duty and were later dis­charged from the ser­vice.[7]

In October 2010, a computer glitch knocked fifty Minuteman missiles offline at F.E. Warren AFB in Wyoming “for longer than an hour.” Five launch control centers lost all contact with the fifty far-off Minuteman III missiles they normally control. Most unintentionally, the Air Force’s response to the temporary disarmament demonstrated the missile system’s obsolete and useless status. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Dirk Jameson told press that the electronic shutdown had “no real bearing on the capabilities of our nuclear forces.”

In 2013, Air Force missileers, two at Minot and two at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, were reprimanded for leaving blast doors open at missile launch control centers in violation of strict protocols. The lapses were described by former missileer Bruce Blair as having enabled potential saboteurs to access super-secret missile launch codes. Understandably, the blunders were attributed to a lackadaisical mindset among the missileers.

In 2014, two missile launch crew administrators at Malmstrom were accused of operating an illegal narcotics distribution system across six Air Force bases, allegedly sending messages to eleven others, three of whom were members of launch control crews. According to Lt. Gen. James Holmes’ 268-page report on the scandal, the messages mentioned “specific, illegal drug use … [including] synthetic drugs, ecstasy and amphetamines.”[8]

Separately, Gen. Holmes’ investigation uncovered widespread cheating by missileers on launch procedure exams. Consequently, a total of 92 missileers at Malmstrom’s 341st Missile Wing were suspended, decertified, and barred from launch control duty. A total of nine missile field Colonels and Lt. Colonels at Malmstrom, nearly the entire chain of command, was removed from duty for failing to detect the mass cheating.

Damn the torpedo makers

How do the ICBMS survive the corruption, accidents, “stunning breakdowns,” and high-level condemnation? One answer is in a February 9 report by William Hartung of the Center for International Policy, titled “Inside the ICBM Lobby: Special Interests or the National Interest?” Hartung details the huge sums lavished by weapons contractors on lobbying and campaign contributions in order to buy votes from lawmakers in states that host the missiles, air bases, or the contractors themselves (Montana, North Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming), even though, as the report notes, there is “no militarily sound reason to build a new ICBM.” The report says that Northrop Grumman and its major subcontractors have given $1.2 million to the current members of the Senate missile coalition since 2012 and over $15 million more to members of key Congressional committees that help determine how much is to be spent. In addition, the top eleven contractors working on the new missile spent over $119 million on lobbying in 2019 and 2020, and employed 410 lobbyists.

How can the weapons industry seem to smash or buy off everything standing in its way, whether it’s reason, precaution, or spending limits? Part of the answer is in Mussolini’s definition of fascism as the merger of state and corporate power, and in Eisenhower’s farewell warning against the same.

— This piece was originally at Counterpunch.org, March 28, 2021

Notes

  1. See Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, South End Press, 2002; Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, One World Press, 2008; Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, New Society Publishers, 2005.
  2. Adam Lowther, “A Year Later: Responding to Problems in the ICBM Force,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 2015, http://thebulletin.org/year-later-responding-problems-icbm-force7984.
  3. AP, “California: Navy Commander Admits Taking Bribes,” New York Times, Jan. 7, 2015; David Sanger & William Broad, “Pentagon Studies Reveal Major Nuclear Problems,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 2014; “Another Charge in Navy Bribe Case,” New York Times, April 18, 2014; Helene Cooper, “Navy Opens Inquiry into Cheating in Reactor Training,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2014; “Fraud in Army Recruiting Bonus Program May Cost Nearly $100 million,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2014.
  4. Robert Burns, AP, “Study Finds Troubles Run Deep In Nuclear Missile Force,” Nov. 20, 2013; AP, “Air Force Is Working To Mend Missile Corps,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, June 11, 2014.
  5. Sarah Baxter, “US Hits Panic Button as Air Force ‘Loses’ nuclear missiles,” London Times, Oct. 21, 2007.
  6. “W80-1 Warhead Selected for New Nuclear Cruise Missile,” Federation of American Scientists, Oct. 10, 2014, https://fas.org/blogs/security/2014/10/w80-1_lrso/.
  7. Barbara Starr & Larry Shaughnessy, CNN, “Air Force says officers fell asleep with nuke code,” July 24, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/24/missile.error/index.html.
  8. Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “ND Missile Launch Officers in Drug Scandal,” Jan. 16, 2014; R. Jeffrey Smith, “Aiming High,” Slate, April 14, 2014; and Josh Harkinson, “Death Wears Bunny Slippers,” Mother Jones, Nov./Dec. 2014; “Security troops on U.S. nuclear missile base took LSD, records show”, Associated Press, NBC News, May 24, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/security-troops-u-s-nuclear-missile-base-took-lsd-records-n877056

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Fukushima at Ten: Aftershocks, Lies, and Failed Decontamination

Image at “Mechanics of a Nuclear Meltdown Explained”, by Jenny Marder, PBS News Hour, March 15, 2011: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/mechanics-of-a-meltdown-explainedP8

 

By John LaForge

It’s now 10 years since the catastrophic triple meltdowns of reactors at Fukushima in Japan. As Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health project put it three years ago, “Enormous amounts of radioactive chemicals, including cesium, strontium, plutonium, and iodine were emitted into the air, and releases of the same toxins into the Pacific have never stopped, as workers struggle to contain over 100 cancer-causing chemicals.”

Nukewatch and hundreds of other groups and scientific journals have issued dozens of reports about the disaster. A score of books have been published on the subject, and major media have at least done annual reviews of the official evacuations, cleanups and decontamination efforts. With so much information available, it is not possible to do more than present another update on recent news and analysis.

There is news of the shortage of Fukushima health studies; big earthquakes (aftershocks) rattling reactors and waste tanks; corporate and government dishonesty about decontamination; novel radioactive particles dispersed; and renewed fish contamination.

Very few health studies

“So far only one single disease entity has been systematically examined in humans in Fukushima: thyroid cancer,” says Dr. Alex Rosen, the German chair of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Other diseases, such as leukemia or malformations, which are associated with increased radiation exposure, have not been investigated, Rosen told the German medical journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt March 2.

(Fie studies have focused on birth abnormalities in the areas most affected: three on infant mortality rates, one on underweight newborns, and one on declining birth rates 9 months after March 2011.*)

The one disease study of the population was a screening for thyroid cancer in 380,000 local children under the age 18. In January 2018, the journal Thyroid reported 187 cases after five years. Reviewing the study, Mangano write in the Washington Spectator that, “A typical population of 380,000 children would produce 12 cases in five years.” The increase among children is “exactly what would be expected if Fukushima were a factor, as radiation is most damaging to the fetus, infant and child,” Mangano said.

New Earthquakes Rattle Wreckage and Nerves

Another large earthquake, magnitude 7.3, struck Feb. 13, again off the coast of the Fukushima reactor complex, and the reported 30 seconds of terror was followed by14 aftershocks up to magnitude 5.

The quake was severe enough that Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) and federal regulators suspect it caused additional damage to reactors 1 and 3 where cooling water levels fell sharply, the Associated Press reported. The Feb. 13 quake was felt in Tokyo 150 miles away. Japan’s meteorological agency said it was believed to be an aftershock of the record 2011 quake.

At a Feb. 15 meeting, government regulators said the quake had probably worsened existing earthquake damage in reactors 1 and 3 or broken open new cracks causing the cooling water level drop, the AP said.

“Because (the 2011 quake) was an enormous one with a magnitude of 9.0, it’s not surprising to have an aftershock of this scale 10 years later,” said Kenji Satake, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Earthquake Research Institute.

There have been six major aftershocks in the Fukushima area since March 2011: April 7, 2011 (magnitude 7.1); April 11, 2011 (6.6); July 10, 2011 (7.0); Oct. 26, 2013 (7.1); Nov. 26, 2016 (6.9); and Feb. 13, 2021 (7.3).

Earthquake shocks are not the only recurring nightmare to haunt the survivors of the record quake that killed 19, 630. Typhoon Hagibis slammed into Tamura City in October 2019, and swept away an unknown number of bags of radioactive debris that had been stacked near a river.

Since March 2011, over 22 million cubic meters of contaminated soil, brush and other matter from areas hard hit by fallout have been collected in large black plastic bags and piled in temporary storage mounds in thousands of places. (“Fukushima residents fight state plan to build roads with radiation-tainted soil,” Japan Times, Apr. 29, 2018) Yet the volume is the tip of the iceberg: According to R. Ramachandran, in The Hindu, January 31, 2020, no decontamination activities are planned for the majority of forested areas which cover about 75 per cent of the main contaminated area of 9,000 square km.”

Cover-ups and disinformation

Reporting Feb. 14 about the latest quake, the AP noted that Tepco “has repeatedly been criticized for cover-ups and delayed disclosures of problems.” On June 22, 2016, Tepco’s President Naomi Hirose publicly admitted that the company’s lengthy refusal to speak of the “meltdowns” it knew of at its three reactors was tantamount to a cover-up and apologized for it.

The Washington Post reported March 6, 2021 that, “For years, Tepco claimed that the treated water stored at the plant contained only tritium, but data deep on its website showed that the treatment process had failed.” The tanks now hold almost 1.25 million tons of highly contaminated waste water. “In 2018, [Tepco] was forced to acknowledge that 70 percent of the water is still contaminated with dangerous radioactive elements — including strontium-90, a bone-seeking radionuclide that can cause cancer — and will have to be treated again before release,” the Post reported.

Harvey Wasserman reported for Columbus Institute for Contemporary Journalism’s The Free Press on a July 2007 earthquake that shook Japan and forced dangerous emergency shutdowns at four reactors at Kashiwazaki. “For three consecutive days [Tepco] was forced to issue public apologies for erroneous statements about the severity of the damage done to the reactors, the size and lethality of radioactive spills into the air and water, the on-going danger to the public, and much more. Once again, the only thing reactor owners can be trusted to do is to lie.”

Radioactive Particles Newly identified

Work just published in the journal Science of the Total Environment documents new, highly radioactive particles that were released from the destroyed Fukushima reactors. The study was led by Dr. Satoshi Utsunomiya and Kazuya Morooka of Kyushu University. “Two of these particles have the highest cesium radioactivity ever measured for particles from Fukushima,” the research found. The study analyzed particles that were taken from surface soils collected 3.9 kilometers from the reactor site.

Speaking with Science Daily Feb. 17, Dr. Utsunomiya said, “Owing to their large size, the health effects of the new particles are likely limited to external radiation hazards during static contact with skin.” The particles were reportedly spewed by the hydrogen explosions that rocked the reactor buildings and fell within a narrow zone that stretches ~8 kilometers north-northwest of meltdowns.

But Dr. Utsunomiya also said the long-lived radioactivity of cesium in “the newly found highly radioactive particles has not yet decayed significantly. As such, they will remain in the environment for many decades to come, and this type of particle could occasionally still be found in radiation hot spots.”

Smaller radioactive particles of uranium, thorium, radium, cesium, strontium, polonium, tellurium and americium were found afloat throughout Northern Japan, according to a report by Arnie Gundersen and Marco Kaltofen published July 27, 2017 in Science of the Total Environment. The radioactively hot particles were found in dusts and soils. About 180 particulate matter samples were taken from automobile or home air filters, outdoor surface dust, and vacuum cleaner bags. Some142 of the samples (about 80 percent) contained cesium-134 and cesium-137 which emit intense beta radiation and is very dangerous if ingested or inhaled. “A majority of these samples were collected from locations in decontaminated zones cleared for habitation by the National Government of Japan,” the authors revealed.

Greenpeace Reports Cleanup Failures and Deception

Greenpeace Japan released two major reports March 4 that also contradict the country’s positive decontamination and human rights claims after 2011.

“Successive governments during the last 10 years … have attempted to perpetrate a myth about the nuclear disaster. They have sought to deceive the Japanese people by misrepresenting the effectiveness of the decontamination program and ignoring radiological risks,” said Shaun Burnie, Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia and co-author of the first report.

Key findings of the radiation report Fukushima 2011-2020 are:

  • Most of the 840 square kilometer Special Decontamination Area (SDA), where the government is responsible for decontamination, remains contaminated with radioactive cesium. … an overall average of only 15% has been decontaminated. • No long-term decontamination target level will be achieved in many areas. Citizens will be subjected for decades to radiation exposures in excess of the … recommended maximum. • In the areas where evacuation orders were lifted in 2017, specifically Namie and Iitate, radiation levels remain above safe limits, potentially exposing the population to increased cancer risk.

Key findings of The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station decommissioning report are:

  • The current decommissioning plan in the timeframe of 30-40 years is impossible to achieve and is illusory. • Radioactive waste created at the site should not be moved. Fukushima Daiichi is already and should remain a nuclear waste storage site for the long term.

— This is a report is the Spring 2021 Nukewatch Quarterly soon in your mailbox. A version of the article was published at CounterPunch, March 12-14, 2021 

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