Nuclear Disasters

In 1950, when I was thirteen years old, I had a copy of John Hersey's The Wall. That is when I read the details about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, as a child. When I was married at 18, that book became the first in a long succession of books that eventually became our family library. I venerated the writer.

I think now, all those years later, that perhaps I did not fully understand everything that was described. Largely, I believe, because as a child I simply could not believe that such dreadful carnage of humankind's devising could occur in a civilized world.

In 1986 I lived in Tokyo, Japan. It was most certainly a civilized world. Replete with history, culture, heritage, and indescribable beauty. Living there, my literary reading expeditions took another turn as I read Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, Dream of the Red Chamber by Tsao Hsueh-Chin (Cao Xuegin), and finally, among other books that moved me greatly, John Hersey's Hiroshima.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was well known to me. The enormity of the human tragedy it represented was much written of, discussed and regretted. But reading the book while living in Japan was an unforgettable experience.

I used to walk often past the Japanese Defence Department, never once seeing anyone entering or leaving, in uniform. Later learning that Japanese shunned public displays of the military. That those belonging to the military wore civilian clothing in public, in transit to and from the building, only changing into uniform once safely inside.

The Japanese public seemed to much prefer it that way. Memories of the war, though long past, were not fondly recalled.

So it is more than a little ironic that this nation gave shelter to Jewish refugees. While they fled the long tentacles of fascism and while Nazi Germany was dedicated to their extermination, even as Japan was a member of the Axis war machine, it saved Jewish lives.

And it is additionally ironic that the sole country on Earth that suffered horribly through two atomic bomb attacks based its energy needs and its economic strength on nuclear energy production. Practicality trumping the anguish of profoundly dreadful experience.

Only to find that dependence, and the illusion that any potential danger from operating nuclear reactors could be controlled with diligence and scientific best-methods applied turned out to be illusory indeed.

Earthquake events are common in Japan, and one learns to live with them and more or less overlook them. That the quake that brought the destructive tsunami that destroyed the nuclear plants at Fukushima was a catastrophic one on a never-before-seen scale, was an event waiting to happen.

And Japan, one of the strongest economies in the world (that has been suffering from a series of economic downturns for decades) - a country the United States had first devastated with two nuclear attacks, then aided immeasurably to discover democracy and social equality along with financial security - finds itself now mired in misery.

Pledging now to mothball its many nuclear plants, and permanently shelve plans for new ones.
Its 30% reliance for its energy needs on nuclear, with plans to upgrade that to 50% reliance, a matter of past government policy.

No longer feasible in the face of a province whose geography has been irremediably contaminated with radiation. Its people made homeless, its industry and agriculture dreadfully impacted.

The unknowable ways of nature, physics, geography, geology and human fallibility can create situations so profoundly affecting as to be beyond belief.