Lead article
November 1999

Accidents, revolt arise from drive for global nuclear domination

by Franklin Dmitryev

The U.S. Senate's arrogant rejection last month of a limited nuclear weapons test ban sent a shock wave around the world. Coming on top of President Clinton's Republican-supported push to build a national missile defense system, the defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty sounded like the battle cry for an ominous new stage of nuclear buildup. Clinton has gone so far as to ask Russia to dump the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty limiting missile defense, thus dispelling any illusion that the dangers of nuclear war have disappeared with the end of the Cold War.

At the same time that the specter of a new generation of nuclear weaponry looms, the nuclear industry continues to exact death and debilitation in the here and now, as it did recently in Tokai, Japan. Played down at the time and virtually ignored by the establishment media ever since, Japan's Sept. 30 accident was one of the most serious nuclear accidents ever, comparable to those at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, in 1979 and Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986.

An eerie blue flash was the first sign that something had gone terribly wrong on the morning of Sept. 30. Before long, three workers at the JCO uranium processing plant in Tokai, Japan, were taken to a hospital-two in critical condition, having absorbed lethal doses of radiation. The solution they were pouring set off a nuclear chain reaction that would not be stopped until the next day.

Radiation bombarded the plant and everything around it while radioactive gas streamed out of the building, much of it falling with the rain on houses, soil and people. The deadly chain reaction manifested the true nature of capital's drive for ever-greater production and, at the same time, gave new impetus to its opposite, revolt, in the anti-nuclear movements around the world:

• On Oct. 4, 22 workers were exposed to radiation at a nuclear power plant in South Korea, sparking a street protest. Declaring "The accident in Japan is likely to happen here," the group Green Korea United demanded removal of all nuclear reactors from the country.
  
• On Oct. 7, Mohawks pledged to use "human resistance" to stop the shipment of plutonium from Russia through Native territory by Atomic Energy of Canada.
  
• On Oct. 11, South Africans protested the decision to build a nuclear power plant near Capetown.
  
• In Raynesway, Britain, workers blasted the veil of secrecy off their Rolls-Royce plant. Neighbors had never known it was processing uranium like the Tokai plant. Reporting that there were no off-site emergency plans and no radiation containment facility at the factory, the workers alerted the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

At first count, 14 Tokai workers were exposed to radiation. By Oct. 15 the count was raised to 69 after investigators finally bothered to check 20 workers' radiation-monitor badges. Many workers were exposed to radiation levels 50 to 100 times higher than the legal yearly limit. Firefighters, never warned of radioactivity, went in without protective gear. Even 14 workers who shut down the chain reaction were not wearing adequate protective clothing and received high levels of radiation. Furthermore, the JCO plant is adjacent to a residential area. Testing done by independent scientists suggests that several hundred people may have been exposed.

Along with the cascade of radiation came a cascade of official lies, secrecy and cover-ups. Residents point out that most people learned of the accident from news reports and were not told to evacuate or stay indoors until seven or more hours after the chain reaction began. And on Oct. 15, two weeks later, JCO admitted that radioactive iodine gas was still leaking.

On Oct. 18 the Japanese publication MAGPIE COUNTRY NUKES HEADLINER reported that the government knew in the early hours of Oct. 1 that it should expand the evacuation zone but did not for fear of causing panic-the same excuse for deceit used in every nuclear exposure, from open-air atomic bomb testing to the Chernobyl explosion.

PRODUCTION FOR PRODUCTION'S SAKE

The first news reports blamed the accident on "human failure" by careless workers who circumvented safety measures to save time by pouring the uranium solution by hand into a bucket. The truth later came out that the orders to cut corners came from the top. The bucket shortcut took only 30 minutes rather than the three hours required when chemicals were piped through vats as they were supposed to be.

What Marx termed the capitalist drive for production for production's sake has played a part in most major nuclear accidents, such as at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant where workers had been forced to work 40 straight 10-hour days right before that plant's partial meltdown in 1979.

The latest accident follows a series of alarming accidents in Tokai, including just in the last four years a molten metal leak, an explosion, and a radioactive waste leak that was found to have existed for 30 years.

None of that, however, stopped Japanese Prime Minister Obuchi from reaffirming his government's determination to build another 20 nuclear power reactors by 2010. However, the Japanese masses may yet have an impact as forceful as the mass revulsion that Three Mile Island sparked: Not only did that 1979 accident bring orders for new U.S. nuclear power plants to a screeching halt, but all those ordered since 1974 were eventually cancelled. Similarly, the 1986 Chernobyl explosion infuriated the many peoples of the state-capitalist Russian empire at their nuclear victimization and spurred the growth of the movements that would break apart the so-called Soviet Union.

Whitewashing and reviving the U.S. nuclear industry has been a political priority throughout the last 20 years-which is not unrelated to the Senate vote rejecting the nuclear test ban treaty, two weeks after the Tokai accident. What made it easier for the Senate to reject was that Clinton has been pushing the fantasy of a missile defense, known in Reagan's time as Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars." The supposedly successful test of an anti-missile defense may sow illusions among the militarists that a technological (read: "magic") umbrella will soon protect them from the results of a new arms buildup.

It is precisely such a growing accumulation of deadly nuclear bombs that our militarists thirst for. They are determined to let nothing-neither the test ban treaty's safeguards against proliferation, nor the improbability of ever achieving a working missile defense-stand in their way. In contrast to their dangerous obsession, just at this moment so conservative a figure as Reagan's own arms control specialist, Paul Nitze, is arguing that there is no reason "why we should not unilaterally get rid of our nuclear weapons" whose very presence "threatens our existence."

NUCLEAR DEATH VS. LIVING LABOR

In truth, nothing is really "accidental" in terms of what happened in Japan, or any other nuclear accident, for that matter. Accidents flow from a specific drive for and concentration of dead labor over living labor, as exemplified in the nuclear arms and energy industry.

The nuclear industry has been discredited not only by spectacular accidents but by its normal practices in which the lives and health of working people are sacrificed to the drive for production through routine exposures to radiation and toxic chemicals.

Amid this growing toll of disease and death, a man nearly 20 years dead took center stage in August. Years before, Joe Harding's exhumed bones had proved that radiation doses at the federal uranium enrichment plant at Paducah, Ky. were far higher than claimed.

For nine years before his death the Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors denied Harding's reports of radiation exposure. A DOE study in 1981 attributed Harding's death to eating country ham and smoking. Other workers have come forward to support his reports of a dense fog of uranium dust and smoke that would cling to workers' skin and coat their throats and teeth. By 1999 the activity of Joe Harding and other workers and residents around Paducah led to two lawsuits and a Congressional investigation where workers told of conditions such as clouds of smoke from spontaneously ignited uranium fires.

Ronald Fowler, a health physicist at Paducah, testified that management had told workers for decades "that production takes precedence over health." He found documents "showing radiation tens to thousands of times higher than the prescribed action levels for the plant, in areas like the cafeteria, the kitchen, locker rooms, storage rooms, and parking lots." (See stories on community responses to nuclear poisoning, below and page 10.)

This tale of official lies, sacrifice of the innocents on the altar of production, and opposition from below characterizes the entire nuclear weapons complex-from Hanford, Wash., the explosion waiting to happen, whose plutonium leak draws closer to the Columbia River every day; to Oak Ridge, Tenn., created by the Army in 1943 as the secret home of the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

Nor has the end of the Cold War-with or without the test ban treaty-put an end to the drive for production of the most destructive weapons known. It has, however, meant greater awareness of the military's 1,752 toxic chemical dumps and of over 45,000 potentially radioactively contaminated sites in the U.S.

The proximity of many of these sites to communities of Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos and poor whites-as well as the many attempts to dump radioactive waste on Native American land-has also spread awareness of environmental racism.

But the big bucks raked in by private companies involved in the "cleanup" of these sites give little solace to the people who are still suffering and dying from the contamination's effects. DOE officials still repeat the same old lie that the Oak Ridge reservation is safe, even though doctors hired by the federal government concluded in 1997 that something there is making workers sick.

Today, when there is no Cold War enemy justifying the nuclear juggernaut, the all-out war against American workers yesterday, today, and tomorrow has appeared from behind its veil as the casualties among the workers continue to mount.

The demand for justice against the nuclear complex's inhumanity is widespread-from the organizing around all the weapons production sites, to this year's Mothers Day rally of 700 people at the Nevada Test Site demanding an end to the radioactive poisoning of Mother Earth; from the Shoshone and Arapaho protest against a proposed nuclear waste incinerator in Idaho that would release poisons onto the Wind River Indian Reservation, to the 5,000 signatures gathered in three days in Chelyabinsk, Russia, opposing plans to import nuclear waste from abroad.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson's apology to Joe Harding's family reflects the rulers' fear of that movement from below, and their scramble to deflect it from probing too deeply into the capitalist roots of this system that stockpiles the most destructive force created and uses it against human beings, and in the process of its production sends millions to an early grave.

Neither apologetic officials nor the end of the Cold War should be allowed to conceal the fact that nuclear bombs are only the starkest expression of a social system where the human being serves the process of production, rather than the reverse. The deathly nature of capitalist science will not go away without uprooting of capitalism itself.

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