GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX ATOMIC PEACE ATOMIC WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE “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 HDT WHAT? INDEX ATOMIC PEACE ATOMIC WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX ATOMIC PEACE ATOMIC WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX ATOMIC PEACE ATOMIC WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX ATOMIC PEACE ATOMIC WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX ATOMIC PEACE ATOMIC WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX ATOMIC PEACE ATOMIC WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 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. HDT WHAT? INDEX ATOMIC PEACE ATOMIC WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 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 HDT WHAT? INDEX ATOMIC PEACE ATOMIC WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 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