Nuclear Tsunami

The Japanese Government and America's Role in the Fukushima Disaster

By (author) Richard Krooth, Morris Edelson, Hiroshi Fukurai

Publication date:

10 February 2015

Length of book:

232 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739195697

This book begins with the analysis of America’s post-war intelligence operations, propaganda campaigns, and strategic psychological warfare in Japan. Banking on nuclear safety myths, Japan promoted an aggressive policy of locating and building nuclear power plants in depopulated areas suffering from a significant decline of local industries and economies. The Fukushima nuclear disaster substantiated that U.S. propaganda programs left a long lasting legacy in Japan and beyond and created the fertile ground for the future nuclear disaster. The book reveals Japan's tripartite organization of the dominating state, media-monopoly, and nuclear-plant oligarchy advancing nuclear proliferation. It details America’s unprecedented pro-nuclear propaganda campaigns; Japan’s secret ambitions to develop its own nuclear bombs; U.S. dumping of reprocessed plutonium on Japan; and the joint U.S.-Nippon propaganda campaigns for “safe” nuclear-power and the current “safe-nuclear particles” myths. The study shows how the bankruptcy of the central state has led to increased burdens on the population in post-nuclear tsunami era, and the ensuing dangerous ionization of the population now reaching into the future.

Table of Contents
Part I: Roots—U.S. Psychological Warfare Strategies & Propaganda Campaigns In Japan
Chapter 1: Most Nuclear-Feared Populations to the Atomic Enthusiast

Part II: Nuclear Fallout
Chapter 2: Trial by Sea, Trial by Fire
Chapter 3: Invisible Bullets
Chapter 4: Ignoring Risks to Species Life
Chapter 5: Mission Impossible: All About Nuclear Reactors
Chapter 6: Hubris and the Meta-World

Part III: In The Maelstrom
Chapter 7: Fail-Safe Fails Again
Chapter 8: Radiation Without End
Chapter 9: Nature as Nuclear Trash Bin
Chapter 10: Can Anyone Ever Pay?
Chapter 11: Returning—on Shaken Feet
Chapter 12: Popular Rights versus Corporate Power
Chapter 13: Who is in Charge Here?
Chapter 14: Making a Nation Safe for Profits
Chapter 15: Futures Unknown

Rather than a dispassionate public policy treatment of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the three authors of this book have written an impassioned denunciation of the decision makers responsible for the event. Understandable moral outrage drives a discussion that hits every major aspect of the tragedy, from the public relations campaign that convinced many Japanese to accept nuclear electric power production reactors less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the irresponsible nuclear reactor design and location decisions by Tokyo Electric Power Company, to involvement of organized crime syndicate labor subcontractors in the cleanup operations at the Fukushima site. Some of the most interesting material in the book describes the relationship between conservative media mogul and nuclear power enthusiast Matsutaro Shoriki and the CIA. The authors detail the cozy relationship between the nuclear industry and the government and the bumbling response of Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s cabinet. The government’s insistence on dealing with the disaster primarily as a public opinion problem rather than a public health problem, including official prevarication about the magnitude of the risks to health of radioactive contamination, comes in for scathing attack. Summing Up: Recommended. All readership levels.