Beyond Nuclear International
Asterix and nuclear power
How bootlegged versions of the legendary comic books conscripted the little Gaul into the anti-nuclear movement
By Linda Pentz Gunter
It was an audacious piece of bootlegging that began in Austria and then spread like wildfire across Europe. Someone in the Austrian anti-nuclear movement decided to recreate the much beloved Asterix character in an anti-nuclear tale. Through cut-and-paste, an all new Asterix book was born — Asterix und das Atomkraftwerk (Asterix and nuclear power). It was created to coincide with the ultimately successful campaign against the proposed Zwentendorf nuclear power plant in Austria.
For those of us who grew up in Europe, the Asterix books — about the little ancient Gaul and his stone-hauling sidekick, Obelix — were a childhood fixture. Full of whimsy and humor, they were written in French by Rene Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo. The plots largely centered around Asterix and his fellow villagers defending themselves against the Romans. But they also ventured forth, including to ancient Britain, where Asterix mocks the national obsession with drinking tea by calling it “eau chaude”.
By 1978, when the first bootlegged anti-nuclear Asterix book appeared, Goscinny had died, but Uderzo filed numerous lawsuits and was eventually able to block distribution. Before then, however, the cut-and-paste idea had taken off, and numerous books had appeared, with at least 20 versions in German as well as in French, Dutch and in several Spanish dialects including Basque.
Asterix and Nuclear Power replicated the anti-Roman theme, this time with Julius Caesar planning to build a nuclear power plant in the village of Gauls inhabited by Asterix and his friends.
Fukushima evacuees forced back into unacceptably high radiation zones
One man is advocating for their protection
By Linda Pentz Gunter
A UN Special Rapporteur who last August joined two colleagues in sounding an urgent alarm about the plight of Fukushima workers, has now roundly criticized the Japanese government for returning citizens to the Fukushima region under exposure levels 20 times higher than considered “acceptable” under international standards.
He urged the Japanese government to “halt the ongoing relocation of evacuees who are children and women of reproductive age to areas of Fukushima where radiation levels remain higher than what was considered safe or healthy before the nuclear disaster seven years ago.”
Baskut Tuncak, (pictured at top) UN Special Rapporteur on hazardous substances and wastes, noted during a October 25, 2018 presentation at the UN in New York, as well at a press conference, that the Japan Government was compelling Fukushima evacuees to return to areas where “the level of acceptable exposure to radiation was raised from 1 to 20 mSv/yr, with potentially grave impacts on the rights of young children returning to or born in contaminated areas.”
Typical housing for evacuees. 20 m2 prefab cabins, evacuation site, Miharu, Fukushima, 46 km north west of Fukushima-Daichi Nuclear Power Plant. (Photo: Lis Fields.)
He described exposure to toxic substances in general as “a particularly vicious form of exploitation.”
Why the UK Labour Party — and everyone — should reject nuclear power
Don’t Nuke the Climate is at the COP talks in Poland. Back in the UK, the Labour Party needs to listen
By Linda Walker
How many times have you heard people say ‘I would much rather not have nuclear power but we need it to combat climate change’?
This claim has been made so many times by the nuclear industry and its supporters that many people now just accept it as the lesser of two evils.
But the development of new nuclear power plants is actually no part of the solution to tackling climate change, and is in fact a big part of the problem.
Nuclear power is not carbon-free; is prohibitively expensive; all projects overrun wildly on both time and budget; is a source of harmful waste which no one yet knows what to do with; provides a terrorist target; produces routine emissions which are harmful to health; power plants are vulnerable to the flooding which will come as sea levels rise, and have to close down in times of drought; Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown the widespread and long-term health and environmental impact of accidents; and even nuclear advocates have recently admitted the close links to nuclear weapons.
Atomic Dust
US atomic bomb and missile tests crowded them onto Ebeye. Now their former Marshall Islands paradise is “the Slum of the Pacific.”
Words and photos by Vlad Sokhin
Children lying on mattresses placed on the floor of a room in an overcrowded house. Often several families live in one home.
The tiny island of Ebeye in Kwajalein Atoll, Marshall Islands, has a total area of 0.36 square kilometres and is home to over 15,000 people, most of whom were moved there from nearby islands because of a US Army missile range-testing program that was launched in the late 1940s. Overcrowding, poverty, outbreaks of infectious diseases and a high level of unemployment has led some to refer to Ebeye as the ‘ghetto of the Pacific’. Until the 1940s, the island’s population was negligible. During the Second World War, Japan occupied the Marshall Islands and moved some 1,000 settlers there and when the US captured the islands in 1944, a new naval base and the movement of people from other parts of the Atoll rapidly augmented Ebeye’s population.
A boys stands on a rock in a rubbish dump and watches his friends play in the water. Although Ebeye’s residents make a lot of efforts to keep their island clean, due to the lack of regular collections, waste builds up at various dumps across the island.
In preparation for ‘Operation Crossroads’, an extensive missile testing programme that would eventually comprise 67 blasts, the US military decided to move all non-US personnel from around the Kwajalein Atoll onto Ebeye, which lies around five kilometres north of Kwajalein Island, the largest in the Atoll. On 1 March 1954, under the code name of ‘Castle Bravo’, the US military detonated a dry fuel hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll, in the north of the island chain, which was to be the most powerful nuclear device ever exploded by the United States. Though the Bikini Islanders had been persuaded to relocate to a neighbouring island in 1946, where they had suffered shortages and malnutrition, members of other nearby communities on Rongelap island were not evacuated until 3 days after the blast, causing many to suffer the effects of radiation sickness and birth defects.
Keen to return to their ancestral lands, Bikini islanders were tentatively allowed to come back to their homes three years after ‘Castle Bravo’ but had to be moved again after many developed leukaemia and thyroid tumours.
‘We were used as guinea pigs – every one of us’
No commendations or medals for America’s atomic vets
By Jennifer LaFleur, Reveal. (Originally published May 27, 2016.)
The USS De Haven sailed from Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor on May 5, 1958, carrying 240 men deep into the Pacific on a secret mission.
Gunner’s mate Wayne Brooks had only a vague idea of their destination. But within a few days, he would experience an explosion so immense and bright that he could see his own bones. He and his crewmates had been assigned to witness Operation Hardtack I, a series of nuclear tests in the Pacific.
The De Haven, a destroyer, was one of dozens of ships assigned to the operation at Enewetak Atoll, Bikini Atoll and Johnston Island. It would be their crews’ initiation into the ranks of hundreds of thousands of service members now known as “atomic veterans.”
Wayne Brooks was a gunner’s mate aboard the USS De Haven when it sailed deep into the Pacific for Operation Hardtack I, a series of nuclear tests in 1958. Over three months, he witnessed 27 of them. (Photo: Courtesy of Wayne Brooks).
What seems like a story long tucked away in history books remains a very real struggle for those veterans still alive, the radiation cleanup crews who followed and their families – many of them sick and lacking not just the federal compensation, but also the recognition they believe they deserve.
There is no commendation or medal for being an atomic vet.
Holding onto optimism in the pursuit of peace
“When we squabble over trivialities, we are nothing more than useful idiots to the power elites.”
By Peter Weish
This is Peter Weish’s acceptance speech on receiving the 2018 Nuclear-Free Future Award in the category of Lifetime Achievement, on October 24 in Salzburg, Austria.
As we all know, it all began with the bomb. After the two atomic weapons of mass destruction were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dictum shifted in the mid-1950s to “Atoms for Peace,” sparking a euphoric faith in the power of the atom. Every self-respecting country set up its own nuclear research centers and embarked on atomic energy projects.
The Austrian Atomic Energy Research Organization was founded in 1956, and in 1960 the first research reactor was built, in Seibersdorf. From 1966 to 1970, I worked at the reactor facility, in the Institute for Radiation Safety, where I noticed, with growing concern, how others were handling radioactive substances incompetently and irresponsibly yet seeking at the same time to promote these substances’ large- scale use. When the reactor’s technical director stated one day in a radio interview, “We hear constant claims that radiation causes cancer. The opposite is true – radiation cures cancer,” I had had enough.
Peter Welsh, second from left, joined fellow 2018 Nuclear-Free Future Award winners, left to right: Linda Walker, Weish, Karipbek Kuyukov, Didier and Paulette Anger. Photo: © Orla Connolly.
Together with my friend Eduard Gruber, a radio chemist, I began developing scientific arguments to counter the pro-nuclear narrative and raise public awareness. It was only much later that I chanced upon a quotation from Jean Jacques Rousseau that neatly summed up my motivation: “I would never presume to educate people if others did not seek to mislead them!” And so it was that in 1969 I published my first critical essay on nuclear energy.
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