Beyond Nuclear International

Recovery of the state or recovery of the people?

By Mia Winther-Tamaki

The Japanese people and landscapes still feel the unending impacts of a nuclear catastrophe that occurred a dozen years ago. Thousands of black bags litter the Fukushima exclusion zone enclosing radioactive earth and rubbish with nowhere to go. Japan has begun releasing millions of tons of radioactive wastewater into the sea. The death and destruction of the earthquake and tsunami — a tragedy in itself — was compounded by nuclear calamity.

 On March 11, 2011, a powerful undersea earthquake unleashed the deluge that flooded the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), causing the release of deadly nuclear radiation. Invisible and moving uncontrollably, radiation continues to contaminate soil, air, water and lives it has touched. The Japanese government was responsible for not only creating the circumstance of neglect that caused the nuclear meltdown, but also for exacerbating the impacts of nuclear fallout through a delayed and opaque response that downplayed the severity of the catastrophe.

Though the crisis was triggered by natural disasters, the nuclear catastrophe that followed was profoundly man-made. The late geographer Neil Smith describes the “unnaturalness” of disasters like Fukushima’s: “The contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.”

Following the nuclear disaster, Japan shifted to a necessary post-disaster survival and recovery strategy that can be characterized by the term “resilience,” defined by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction as the ability to “resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through…preservation and restoration…” However, resilience was invoked and experienced in two distinct forms in the aftermath of Fukushima: recovery of the state and recovery of the people. 

Resilience, a term originating from ecology to describe species returning to “equilibrium” after an environmental shock, has become a frequently used buzzword across many disciplines. Urban geographer Tom Slater discusses the way resilience discourse is neatly folded into neoliberal nostrums by evoking the evolutionary “naturalness” of biological processes, framing market-driven agendas as inevitably interlinked with ongoing cycles of adaptive growth. 

Not-so-happy Clams open to new anti-nuclear challenge

By Arnie Alpert

When a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania went from a technological miracle to a pile of radioactive rubble in a matter of moments in 1979, the Portsmouth, New Hampshire office of the Clamshell Alliance became a hive of activity. I was working there at the time, fielding calls from activists and journalists from around the world. Everyone wanted our opinion since — over the previous few years — our nonviolent demonstrations to prevent the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant put us at the forefront of a growing social movement.

From the arrests of 18 New Hampshire residents in our first act of civil disobedience in 1976 to more than 1,400 arrests the following spring to a permitted rally that drew some 18,000 protesters in 1978, the Clamshell Alliance touched off a grassroots anti-nuclear rebellion that brought the “No Nukes” message to communities across the country and into the popular culture.

With that groundwork in place, Three Mile Island took our message to the next level. The idea that “nuclear power is a bad way to generate electricity” soon became accepted knowledge across the United States. Everyone from Wall Street tycoons to congressional staffers to ordinary voters now understood that the nuclear industry’s promise of safe, clean and affordable power was a fraud.

Unfortunately, in recent years this understanding has slowly eroded, as the industry has worked to tout its product as the answer to climate catastrophe. With the Biden administration now sinking billions into nuclear energy — and Congress on the verge of passing legislation to ease regulatory precautions on new reactors — the nuclear fraudsters are aiming for a comeback.

What can we learn from Philip Berrigan’s quest for peace?

By Brad Wolf

It is April 15 and we can reflect on the life and work of Philip Berrigan and undertake our own ministry of risk for peace—to ease the suffering, to restore human dignity, and to challenge our doomed policy of warmaking.

Each year Americans forfeit a sizable slice of their income to the United States Treasury to fund the government. Tax Day is dreaded. No one likes surrendering their hard-earned cash. But rather than a resigned shrug, Americans should look closely at what they are getting for their money when it comes to government services and policy.

In fiscal year 2023, the Pentagon received $858 billion for the preparation of war. This doesn’t include hidden costs for intelligence services, veterans’ benefits, Homeland Security, or the Department of Energy, which oversees the nation’s nuclear arsenal. All totaled, over $1 trillion a year is allotted for warmaking. By comparison, the 2023 budget for the U.S. Department of State, this nation’s department tasked with making peace across the globe, was a relatively miniscule $63 billion.

One way to register resistance to this profligate spending on warmaking is that of renowned peace activist and then Catholic priest Philip Berrigan. During the Vietnam War, Phil initiated the destruction of U.S. military draft files in Baltimore and Catonsville, Maryland, to save the lives of both Vietnamese and Americans, actions for which he received lengthy prison sentences.

These draft file actions by Phil initiated a new form of resistance to the Vietnam War, since no copies were kept of the draft files. Hundreds of similar actions followed at draft board offices across the country with hundreds of thousands of draft files destroyed, all stopping young men from being conscripted to kill or be killed.