Current events

You may have heard that China and Japan are quarreling over some islands that both claim as theirs, and that here in the US, some are talking about a possible war over the islands, which are thought to overlie extensive hydrocarbon deposits.

"Oh no!", I thought and emailed my friend K* in Japan to ask what’s up. She says that Japan is lots more worried about North Korea, which also claims the islands and which has been testing long-range missiles. North Korea tested its third nuclear weapon this year, and is a lot closer to Japan than China is.

In 1995, when I lived in Japan, North Korea was testing short range missiles and tensions were high – so high, in fact, that on January 17th, 1995, when the earthquake struck Kobe, my first thought, as my apartment rocked apart around me, was that we had been nuked, the quake was that cataclysmic.

Now, the US detonated 1,054 nuclear devices, from 1945 to 1992, in 5 states in the US (Nevada, New Mexico, Alaska, Colorado, and Mississippi), in the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and in near-outer space, polluting the entire world with plutonium, a man-made element which never existed on the planet before it was made by Americans in 1943 in large reactors made specifically for plutonium production. The nuclear weapons programs of the 5 acknowledged nuclear states (USA, Britain, France, China, and the USSR/Russia), the additional weapons states of India, Pakistan, and Israel, and the wanna-be’s like Libya, South Africa, North Korea, and Iran, have let the genie out of the bottle and it will never go back in and hide. Building nuclear weapons is less a research project these days and much more of an engineering challenge. The know-how is out there; it just takes money and a massive investment in production facilities for plutonium or uranium 235, converted or transmuted from uranium 238, which is not an uncommon element.

Hanford, Washington, where plutonium as produced in 7 nuclear reactors for WW2 and The Cold War, is known as the most polluted site in the US, but weapons production was spread out throughout the US, and that has caused wide-spread contamination across much of the US. The Soviet Union was much less cautious than the US, and has several sites which are uninhabitable for the next few thousand years (at least), Chernobyl being the best-known polluted site.

Extensive testing of nuclear devices by the USA and the USSR has polluted the planet with radioactive particles that will be active for tens and hundreds of thousands of years. Testing is necessary for weapons production; computers are not powerful enough to simulate the complexities of nuclear explosions.  The computer on my desk, which I am using now, is much more powerful than the ones used to develop early weapons; weapons development is in part responsible for all our computer’s evolution and power.

Weapons production has caused accidents and pollution, but non-aggressive nuclear use has also polluted the planet, most recently in the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011, where three reactors melted down and released toxic, long-lived nuclear compounds into the air and the sea. Three Mile Island in the US is the most well-know nuclear failure in the US, but less well known accidents have occurred here in many places, and Japanese reactors are not the first – or the last – to melt down and cause nuclear pollution and human harm..

(For decades, one of the first US melt-downs was in Southern California, near my childhood homes, in the secret facilities in the Simi Valley run by Rocketdyne and General Atomics, which was kept secret. Very few of the private companies that ran (and run) nuclear facilities in the US have been held accountable for mistakes made or pollution caused – in fact, production of all types of nuclear material has been extremely profitable for American companies, who continue to press for more atomic power use, as a solution to the use of dirty hydrocarbons like oil and coal and to counter the effects of Global Warming.)

North Korea has a long history of what seems to be national craziness, and the Japanese are a lot more worried about North Korea than they are about China. Japan is well within reach of North Korean missiles, and my assumption that we had been nuked in 1995 was not just paranoid, it was a realistic fear at that time.

I am and have long been glad that I was wrong then, and it’s news I never want to see or hear, but the genie is out of the bottle and can never be put back in.

 

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