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NUCLEAR PEACE AS A COVER STORY
“I thought that people would not like the prospect of
being fried with their families and their neighbors and
every living person that they had heard of. I thought
it would only be necessary to make the danger known and
that, when this had been done, men of all parties would
unite to restore previous safety. I found that this was
a mistake. There is a motive which is stronger than
self-preservation: it is the desire to get the better
of the other fellow.”
— Bertrand Russell’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY
(3 Volumes, 1967, 1968, 1969)
WALDEN: As with our colleges, as with a hundred “modern PEOPLE OF
improvements”; there is an illusion about them; there is not
WALDEN
always a positive advance. The devil goes on exacting compound
interest to the last for his early share and numerous succeeding
investments in them. Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,
which distract our attention from serious things. They are but
improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already
but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New
York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from
Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing
important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the
man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf
woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet
was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object
were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel
under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to
the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into
the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess
Adelaide has the whooping cough.
ADELAIDE
HARRIET MARTINEAU
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“I’d rather use the nuclear bomb.... The nuclear bomb.
Does that bother you? I just want you to think big,
Henry, for Christ’s sake.... You’re so goddamned
concerned about the civilians, and I don’t give a damn.”
— President Richard Milhous Nixon, on tape, 1972
VIETNAM
ATOM BOMB
“Fiddle-dee-dee, war, war, war,
I get so bored I could scream!”
—Scarlet O’Hara
Nuclear peace is a cover story, sponsored by a people who are
covering up after perpetrated two nuclear atrocities.
There exists in our psychology a perpetual war between reality
and self-delusion. What is real is simple and obvious but often
needs to be ignored. Every battle in this psychological war is
won by our self-delusion, but needs for self-delusion are ever-
changing. One century’s need for self-delusion expresses itself
in one peculiar manner, and then after a century or so there is
a ground-shift in our psychology and the self-delusions we come
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to require are similar but different. When our need for self-
delusion shifts in this manner, the simple and obvious reality
that had previously been hotly denied and attacked comes to be
simple and obvious to all. Reality wins as soon as no-one any
longer needs to reject and repudiate it.
Thus it is in our saga of atomic power. We claimed that we had
won WWII by dropping a couple of advanced A-bombs on Japan.
Actually the weapons we employed on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki
amounted to low-tech dirty bombs, not much resembling the
nuclear detonations we had been scheming. These devices did not
so much as leave craters. The damage we photographed was mostly
due to structure fires they occasioned on the ground. They
amounted to the type of device that unskilled terrorists might
nowadays fashion in some cavern in the mountains of the Hindu
Kush — but then our propaganda machine took over, and we
convinced everyone that these crude radiological devices dropped
after Japan had already been seeking to surrender
unconditionally had been what had won the war. Truth was
inverted in the usual manner: we had to destroy cities of women
and children and old people in order to save lives, etc. “Atoms
for Peace” became our rallying cry as we infinitely stockpiled
new generations of improved A-bombs and then H-bombs. We weren’t
the perpetrators of atrocity because we were the very opposite
of that, a peace-loving people willing to do whatever to create
a future world of plentiful power. Nuclear peace, electricity
too cheap to meter, became our self-righteous apology for our
regime of terrorizing the entire planet. To obtain the
cooperation of the utility corporations we legislated a secret
tax subsidy — that they be released from almost all of the
liability for any serious nuclear accidents.
When the ground shifts and we are no longer important and we no
longer have any need to lie to ourselves in this particular
manner, reality will emerge from its cocoon of lies and will be
seen as simple and obvious. Our history books will record this
period in which we are now living as the period in which “Atoms
for Peace” had for a time been the necessary cover story for the
only nation ever to have bombed entire civilian cities into
oblivion. It had made us seem virtuous rather than wicked during
the period in which anyone cared whether we were seen as good
or evil.
The story told by the nuclear interveners is that they have not
won yet because they have not yet come up with a persuasive
argument against nuclear power, an argument persuasive enough
to make citizens understand. The story is that as soon as they
come up with this persuasive argument and convince advocates of
nuclear power that this has all been one big mistake, all the
nuclear power plants will have to shut down and we’ll be oh so
safe. I don’t credit that story because there already exists
such a totally persuasive argument, and it’s a simple one. What
it is, is, it’s an explanation of the danger and expense that
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would carry the day for any reasonable person. The fact of the
matter is, however, that the nuclear protesters are prevented
from deploying such a totally persuasive and simple argument!
They are prevented because of what they are — they’re
protesters. Perpetuation of our dangerous situation is not only
the legitimation of the intervener, it is his and her bliss.
Such protest is for them a way of life, a manner of being.
Without being feckless opponents of nuclear power, they’d be
nothing — if they won hands down there’d be nothing left to
enable them to present themselves as the righteous and knowing
ones!
What is this totally persuasive and simple argument that is
being ignored because it would shut down all the nuclear power
plants, that I referred to in the above paragraph? I’m going to
tell you right now. I’m going to give it to you straight and
simple. “Atoms for Peace” is an American national project that
originated after the “Little Boy” U235 gun-mechanism bomb we had
constructed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee was dropped onto the
undamaged city of Hiroshima at approximately 8:15AM (Japan
Standard Time) on August 6, 1945 and 3 days later at 11:02AM the
“Fat Man” Pu239 implosion-mechanism bomb that we had constructed
in Hanford, Washington, intended for the undamaged city of
Kokura, Japan, was dropped instead onto the undamaged city of
Nagasaki. Comparing the blast results of these 2 distinct
devices, produced by our 2 distinct weapons programs, was what
was going to enable us to decide which of our 2 production
facilities to close at the end of the war as our spending began
to wind down. Unfortunately, due to defects in the firing
mechanisms, neither bomb went off like an atomic bomb — going
off instead like the kind of “prompt criticality” that can
easily occur as a nuclear power plant melts down. However, when
President Eisenhower needed a cover story in order to generate
public support for taxation to keep our atomics agenda alive,
he was able to initiate his “Project Plowshare” to (among other
things) detonate a string of atomic devices deep underground,
blasting a channel across Nicaragua connecting the Gulf of
Mexico with the Pacific — something nicknamed our “Pan-Atomic
Canal.” When it became clear that such earthmoving projects were
far too radioactive ever to be realizable, we fell back on our
cover story “electrical energy too cheap to meter.” –For what
better excuse for the guilt of our continuation of atoms for war
could there be (I ask you) than pride that what we were going
to use them for was peace? The problem with this was
radioactivity — our electric utilities were far too conscious
of the enormous liability they were going to incur in the
inevitable eventual major accident at a privately owned fission
nuclear power plant, and they were wisely unanimously refusing
to fund such a dream. That little fiscal kerfuffle was solved
very readily by legislative enactment of a “cap” on the total
amount of liability each holder of a nuclear power plant license
faced in the event of any such accident (the term “subsidy” is
never deployed in describing this cap on liability, because to
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deploy such a term would be to give away the whole welfare-for-
the-wealthy confidence game). The utility corporation would be
liable only for the first $375,000,000 of the damages (seems
like a lot, huh?). Industry insurance would cover the next
$11,600,000,000 (seems like a lot, huh?). New taxes would be
enacted to cover damages above $11,975,000,000. Now, let’s see
some comparison figures — since Chernobyl cost about
$15,000,000,000 immediately plus perhaps $564,310,000,000 in
the following decades, if such an excursion were to occur at a
fission power plant owned by a public utility in the United
States of America (such as Brown’s Ferry or Three Mile Island),
we would need to authorize an increase in our federal tax burden
of some $567,000,000,000. It follows that nuclear electricity
can be shown to be more affordable than that generated by fossil
fuel only in disregard of all such eventualities (likewise it
can be shown to be “greener” only in such a fraudulent manner).
Our nuclear protesters cannot afford to point out that our
utility companies don’t think nuclear electricity is a wise
investment, because then they’d win — and since there’d be
nothing left for them to protest they’d need to get a life.
Therefore what we hear them produce amount to “loyal opposition”
arguments in favor of this or that doable marginal improvement
in plant safety standards.
There aren’t very many citizens who are in favor of atoms for
war. This whole thing is based, therefore, upon the conceit that
it is possible for a citizen to be “against atoms for war” but
“for atoms for peace.” However, the atoms-for-peace thing
demonstrably began as a cover story for the funding of continued
development of atomic weapons, and in my own work experience in
the nuclear economy during the decade of the 1970s, I saw again
and again how this cover story was continuing ad infinitum.
Atoms for peace was atoms for war. I would be interfacing with
a nuclear engineer one day, at General Electric’s Nuclear Energy
Division in San Jose — and the next day he’d be absent from his
work station. When, weeks or months later, he would re-emerge,
he’d offer no explanation for his absence — presumably he had
been at his other duty assignment, a secret one at a bomb trigger
plant in Texas. I would interview for a job at the Clinch River
fast-sodium-loop breeder reactor, and would learn that the
reason why this device was referred to as a “breeder” was that
in addition to generating a minuscule amount of civilian
electric power as a mere cover story, the device also had a
primary purpose of enriching nuclear materials for use in the
cores of new atomic weapons. I would read about the prospect of
fusion energy generated by dropping little hollow glass pellets
of deuterium gas into an explosion chamber and detonating them
one by one by means of a ring of powerful lasers, and would
recognize that these pellets were cheaply available because the
container surrounding an H-bomb is packed full of these pellets
— and they need to be regularly swapped out due to the fact that
the halflife of deuterium is short.
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Our “peace” is all about war, it is our cover story for war.
It is the smiley-face chalked onto the tip of a nuclear missile.
Nuclear peace is nuclear war. Those who are against atoms for
war but for atoms for peace assure us that they will never sell
their souls to Satan but in fact –although they are blissfully
unaware of this– they have already sold their souls to Satan.
(At this point I have encountered an objection from a reader.
“Your argument is an over-generalization. You can’t possibly
know how everyone thinks, so I object to your pejorative claims
about how the people who are against atoms for war but for atoms
for peace think. There are citizens who are perfectly well aware
of what has happened historically, but they condition their
support for the nuclear economy on a verifiably peaceful
program.” Here is what I responded to that objecting reader:
“You are supposing incorrectly that it matters what these people
who are in favor of the nuclear economy although opposed to atoms
for war presume they are doing. Actually it doesn’t matter in
the slightest what they presume they are doing. It is not what
people presume they are doing that matters, but what they are
doing! What these advocates of the nuclear economy (for peaceful
generation of clean civilian electrical energy) are actually
doing is supporting the nuclear economy that supports nuclear
war. For instance, in a stage hypnotism exhibition it is almost
impossible to get an hypnotized person on the stage to do
anything wicked while they are hypnotized, if you allow the
hypnotized person to be aware that this thing is wicked. If you
say “This is your wife and here is a hatchet. Kill your wife!”
the hypnotized husband will of course refuse. You have to hand
the hypnotized husband a pillow and say “This is a hatchet and
your wife is a chicken. Prepare supper for your family.” Then
he will run around on the stage chopping at his wife with the
pillow, and it will be so hilarious you’ll be rolling in the
aisle. You see, it doesn’t matter what the hubby supposes he is
doing while he is hypnotized, it doesn’t matter at all that he
supposes that he is killing a chicken to prepare dinner for his
family. What matters is what he is actually doing on the stage,
which is chopping at his wife, who is a chicken, but with a
pillow (in this stage hypnotism act, of course, for obvious
reasons you can never ever actually hand a hypnotized subject a
real hatchet).
No, we don’t get a free pass for supposing we are right and
righteous. Things don’t work that way. It is our responsibility
not to allow ourselves to be duped. If some spokesperson waves
his hands at us and goes ‘In this fist I am holding atoms for
war, but in the other fist I am holding atoms for peace, and
lucky you, you can choose the reason for which you are in support
of the nuclear economy,’ it is our responsibility to figure out
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that this is a false dichotomy and that both his fists are
offering, actually, atoms for war. Nobody gets to be a fault-
free dupe. In this real world the only way to be as innocent as
a dove is to be as cunning as a serpent.”)
I have been very much derailed by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
disaster. Plant #2 on this electric-power site happens to be a
General Electric Mark I design on which I had worked. Once upon
a time, many long years ago, I was not a retired geezer — I was
a workahubby in his late 30s with four small mouths to stuff
full of food. This was in San Jose, California in the 1970s.
I was a systems analyst for the General Electric Nuclear Power
Division. Part of my work was night work, radiation cleanup at
the General Electric Test Reactor (GETR) in Pleasanton,
California, and in doing that work I sustained exposures
approximately 5 times higher than the maximum radiation that is
now being received by Japanese nuclear workers as they attempt
to bring what is left of these reactors to cold shutdown. I also
from time to time served Generous Erectric as an “internal
auditor,” which is to say, at my boss’s request I sniffed around
to try to find things that were going sour, and make confidential
reports to management about such issues. (The purpose of such
internal auditing is for management to learn about potential
problems before these show up unexpectedly and embarrassingly
on an external, which is to say, a for real, audit.)
The thing about fabricating a nuclear reactor pressure vessel
bigger than a house with steel walls a couple of inches thick,
is that it is not possible to fabricate anything so huge without
there being multiple defects — imperfections such as “cold
shuts” and “apparent cracks and voids.” Therefore a necessary
part of the construction of these safety vessels is to detect
the inevitable detectable defects, and then (1) to hog out all
suspect areas with a welding torch and refill them very
carefully with uniform molten material that is at least as
strong as the surrounding two inches of steel wall. Therefore
(2) a necessary part of the process must be X-ray verification
of these weld corrections. Did the welding remove the entire
imperfection, or was it perhaps merely a surface job, a mere
cosmetic “fix”? Therefore (3) a necessary part of the process
is documentation of the satisfactory nature of these X-ray
verifications of these weld corrections. What I discovered in
an internal audit in 1976 was merely that some of this vendor
quality documentation was missing from the purchasing record.
Did the welds actually get performed, at that vendor
manufacturing facility? Had such repairs been performed
correctly at the vendor plant? In the absence of such
documentation, who is to know for sure that quality has been
preserved? This becomes exceedingly dangerous and potentially
exceedingly expensive if the reactor pressure vessel in question
is already in use, because by then it has become intensely
radioactive and cannot even be approached let alone X-rayed. Did
I mention that these nuclear reactor pressure vessels cost
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multiple millions of dollars, each, and millions more to move
to the power site?
Well, I filed my internal report, with my boss and with my boss’s
boss, and then began to notice strange activities. Conference
rooms full of buyers and buyers’ assistants, sitting around
scribbling on pieces of paper. Pieces of paper that look very
much like the missing weld verification documents. This looked
very much like the after-the-fact forging and robosigning of
missing quality documentation. Did I know that for sure? –No,
it was mere suspicion. So I asked my boss what was going down
and his answer was “It’s none of your business. You’ve made
enough trouble already. Now you stay out of this.”
I waited roughly ten days, while I talked about my suspicions
with various low-level GE managers, and then one morning I
walked to a nearby pay phone at a gas station and placed a
telephone call to Washington DC, to the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission. I couldn’t get through to anyone so I left my name
and home phone number and said some words about having
discovered some stuff that needed to be looked into.
The next morning I was back at my desk and Security paid me a
visit. I was raised up and duck-walked to Personnel, and then I
remember about an hour with the suits, with unpleasant things
being said. On the basis of the fact that it had been something
like ten days between the point at which my internal audit had
uncovered these irregularities, and the morning I attempted to
place that pay phone call to the NRC, I was warned that I might
well be charged with a crime of ten days worth of guilty
knowledge and collusion — and not only fined but imprisoned for
years.
However, if I would say nothing, in its kindness to me as a
career employee GE would not ask that I be prosecuted. I would
be instantly terminated “for lack of work” and would receive one
week’s termination pay for each of the dozen years I had been a
Generous Erectric employee. I would be eligible for Unemployment
Compensation. Then there was a door, and I was standing in the
parking lot with a check in my hand. I remember turning around
and seeing that there wasn’t a doorknob on the outside of the
door. I hadn’t even managed to retrieve the pictures of my four
little ones off the top of my desk (a friend inside later brought
this out to me) — let alone any of my audit documentation in a
file in my desk drawer.
I immediately went to a lawyer I knew in downtown San Jose.
However, she said she would need to decline to take my case
because of “conflict of interest.” Since a large part of her
income came from doing bits and pieces of work for the local
General Electric Nuclear Power Division, she explained, it would
be against her best interests to represent me, because then she
like me would be put on the industry’s blacklist.
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Over the decades since then I have kept my part of the bargain,
have remained silent (on account of that threat, but also,
I confess, due to the sad reality that nobody has ever displayed
the slightest interest). However, when recently I learned that
Reactor Pressure Vessel #2 at Fukushima Daiichi was leaking
nuclear fuel out its bottom, learned that this plant had gone
into “China Syndrome,” I said to myself “Maybe I know why this
is happening. Are the core materials leaking out through the
cracks and crevices for which I was fired back in 1976?” (Do I
know that for sure? No, I’m merely suspicious.)
So I have been spending some time constructing an account of
atomic war and atomic peace and the intimate linkages between
these two thingies. Here it is.
Also, recently, at the urging of a Quaker friend who had made
some contacts for me, I attempted a phone call to the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission in Washington DC to inform them that I had
information about quality defects in one of the Fukushima
reactors that had gone “China-syndrome.” The lady on the other
end of the line went “Well, I guess the statute of limitations
has expired on that one,” and I was going to inquire “Hey, what
statute of limitations?” — but I was granted no opportunity to
react in such a manner, she having already hung up.
I have recently been making the acquaintance of Professor
Emeritus Anne Firor Scott of Duke University, and familiarizing
myself with her historical writings. I note one of the remarks
made by Professor Scott in a recent addendum to her classic 1970
monograph THE SOUTHERN LADY: FROM PEDESTAL TO POLITICS, 1830-1930:
We sometimes say, only half in jest, that historians
write their autobiographies into scholarship;
this book might give some credence to that notion.
(Professor Scott, who is now in her 90th decade, had grown up
surrounded by southern “ladies,” hence her research.)
Well, as a point in comparison, you will easily detect in the
chronology of “Our Friend The Atom” that follows, that my own
historical scholarship has been produced under a similar sort
of rubric. I am writing in general about nuclear power in war
and peace –about our national trajectory in this regard– while
in fact my own personal trajectory through life has been largely
shaped by our national relationship with the atom: this was
initially because of memories of what my mother said to me while
I was a tender child and our atomic bombs were descending onto
Japanese cities and WWII was abruptly coming to a completion,
and then subsequently due to Marine training for “ABC” warfare,
and because of my friendship after exiting the Marines with a
mulatto Proctor and Gamble employee in Evendale, Ohio who was
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being systematically murdered as part of a federal government
plutonium experiment run under the authority of the hospital of
the University of Cincinnati, and because of my subsequent
education and training and systems-analyst and auditing duties
at the General Electric Nuclear Power Division in San Jose,
California, and at the end because of my abortive attempt to
become a “nuclear whistleblower” to the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, followed immediately by my being fired by the
General Electric Corporation, and because of the quarter-century
of duress that followed that firing (possibly, although I cannot
know for sure) in consequence of that attempt to blow the whistle
on quality problems, problems having to do with the apparent
falsification of vendor X-ray verification documents for welds
on the surface of immense multi-million-dollar Mark I nuclear
reactor pressure containment vessels (such as the vessel used
in Plant #2 at Fukushima Daiichi).
Recently I have been perusing a long series of news articles in
the New York Times, that have been pretending to be factual
reporting but have tendentiously been characterizing what has
happened at Fukushima Daiichi after the earthquake and tsunami
as having been a situation set up by a uniquely Japanese false
consciousness, that has led uniquely the Japanese to forever be
lying to themselves and to each other about the safety of what
they have been doing with atomics. This series of articles has
literally amazed me! –because of the manner in which these
descriptions of this supposedly unique Japanese false
consciousness are identical with what I personally have
experienced at GE with the all-American nuclear false
consciousness. The cover-up continues! There is now an overt
newspaper campaign to contain the disaster as a Japan-only
disaster, pretending that the lessons we might learn cannot
apply to America (apparently because we Americans aren’t at all
like those collective-consciousness Japs who only think the way
1
a colony of ants thinks — apparently we Westerners know how to
think creatively and individually and rationally and could never
be guilty of a Japanese nuclear false-consciousness certitude
of collective safety — and therefore our nuke industry at home
is safe even though theirs has now been demonstrated not to have
been safe).
1. It amazes me, how for instance a newspaper article by a Japanese reporter, Norimitsu Onishi’s “‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe
for Nuclear Crisis” (June 24, 2011), can be employed to pander to a racist/culturalist fantasy about differences in mental capacity
between Americans and Japanese — yet the manner in which this series of articles has left entirely open and available this racist/
culturalist fantasy seems to me to be inexplicable except as such an exercise in disingenuity.
JAPS THINK LIKE ANTS
