Anti-nuclear Movement Research Articles

Antinuclear Radicals: Scientific Experts and Antinuclear Activism in Japan

This article examines the role of scientific experts in the post-war Japanese antinuclear power movement. It argues that experts and their movements have influenced the development of nuclear power in Japan, albeit in an indirect, constrained and sporadic way. Experts like the nuclear chemist Takagi Jinzaburō stimulated an upsurge of antinuclear protest and public opinion, especially after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, which made power plant siting more difficult, contributed to longer construction lead times, and forced state and nuclear industry officials to devote considerable resources to atomic energy public relations (PR) campaigns and compensation for nuclearised communities. The antinuclear advocacy and activism of scientific experts arguably helped to slow down nuclear power development, resulting in a less nuclearised Japan than imagined by its advocates. Antinuclear experts and their movements, however, never became players in mainstream nuclear policymaking and had to be content with pressure tactics from the political peripheries. After the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster of March 2011 some observers pointed to this lack of direct political influence as evidence of the failure of the antinuclear movement. Rather than outright failure, however, this article presents a more ambivalent history marked by both achievements and shortcomings.

Digital Transcendentalism in David Mitchell’s <em>Cloud Atlas</em>

life of man is a self evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Circles (1841)1All the great books in the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images of the soul.-Herman Melville, Pierre (1852)2Near the end of The First Luisa Rey one of six largely separate stories that make up David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, an antinuclear activist named Margo Roker awakens from a coma at the precise moment when Bill Smoke, the hired thug who beat her into that coma months before, is shot and killed in another part of the city. Punctuating the expected, and gratifying, poetic justice of the hit man Bill Smoke's death and the revival of his innocent victim is, less expectedly, a recitation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1857 poem Brahma. time of these narrated events is marked twice in concurrent sections so readers understand that the figurative rebirth of Margo Roker and the death of Bill Smoke occur simultaneously during the reading of Brahma. As Margo lays in her hospital bed comatose, Hester Van Zandt, another antinuclear activist, reads the poem aloud to her. Hester is interrupted when Margo regains consciousness; nonetheless, the first three stanzas are completed at the bedside of the victim:If the red slayer think he slays,Or if the slain think he is slainThey know not well the subtle waysI keep, and pass, and turn again.Far or forgot to me is near;Shadow and sunlight are the same;The vanish'd gods to me appear;And one to me are shame or fame.They reckon ill who leave me out;When me they fly, lam the wings;I am the doubter and the doubt,And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.1Emerson's poem functions at this point in Cloud Atlas as an emblem of poetic justice, each stanza enlarging comprehension and perspective, moving beyond human figures (slayer and slain) and categories of perception (distance, shadow, and vision) to surpass even fundamental conceptual categories themselves. As will become clear in the argument to follow, dramatizes particularly well the novel's own ambition for innovative brands of narrative comprehensiveness. Of course, we might be tempted to circumscribe the kind of gimmicky, mystical, causality that has slayer and slain linked instantaneously in a kind of cosmic entanglement to the demands of Mitchell's imitated genre, the thriller a la Dan Brown or Tom Clancy.4 quick terse prose of the Mystery, written in a style suggesting such popular fiction, prioritizes kinetic movement and plot coincidence over deep characterization and formal experimentation. This might lead one to argue that Emerson's transcendent, comprehensive figure of Brahma merely lends high literary gloss to the vulgar poetic justice via surprising coincidence that is virtually de rigueur for this type of genre fiction (and indeed proves central to solving the Luisa Rey mystery). But the karmic entanglement and cosmic comprehension that Brahma names extend beyond the Luisa Rey chapters and can be seen to undergird the entire structure of Mitchell's novel, and this despite the fact that the other five stories are written in different settings and styles that do not, with respect to genre, necessitate such narrative shape or resolution.I will argue in what follows that David Mitchell's novels, particularly Cloud Atlas, express a notable brand of contemporary transcendentalism linked to new media forms that I will call digital transcendentalism. Mitchell's formally ambitious and innovative novels, this is to say, possess features relevant to accounts of recent shifts in contemporary literary production-for instance, as a means of understanding the place of the novel in the age of ubiquitous new media and of literature's role in the persistence of religion (both weak and fundamentalist) in the contemporary period, giving rise to descriptions of the present as a postsecular age. …

3월 11일 이후의 일본과 세계를 어떻게 상상할 것인가 = How to Imagine Japan and the World after 3/11

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear accident(3/11), there have been many discourses which compared Japan after 3/11 to postwar Japan. This is not only because the ruins after the disaster remind people of the postwar catastrophe, but because it is recognized as an opportunity to change current Japanese society. However, after the anti-nuclear movement cooled down and people began to talk about a way out of the Fukushima accident, Japan now seems to be on its way to restoration. Based on above consideration, this article analyzes some fictions that imagine the future after 3/11, for fiction or literature is a sort of practice which changes “the real” by presenting a possibility to imagine a different world. Reading Fukuichi Kanko Project as a work of literary imagination, we come to understand that the future Japan or Fukushima it suggests is an extension of postwar Japan. Not only that, the project starts from supposing a collectivity of the Japanese nation as its basic intention shows. By contrast, some literature after 3/11 visualizes gaps and splits in seemingly unchanged reality. God Bless You 2011 reveals differences between before and after “that thing” by juxtaposing these two, and The Island of Eternal Life and Kentousi go one step further to describe Japan as a “closed” nation following an imaginary earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident after 3/11. In particular, Kentousi questions if one imagines Japan and the Japanese language as completely closed boundaries. If it is possible to talk about “post 3/11 literature,” it would be a practice that can alienate so-called reality from itself and reveal differences in seemingly homogeneous collectivity.

Between Grassroots Protest and Green Politics: The Democratic Potential of the 1970s Antinuclear Activisim

This article narrates the development of the antinuclear movement from the bottom up, showing how local protests initiated changes in Germans' ideas about democracy and public participation, precipitating the Green Party's emergence. The narrative begins with the pre-history of the 1975 occupation of the Wyhl reactor site in Southern Baden. It shows that vintners' concerns about the future of their livelihoods underpinned protests at Wyhl, but argues that the anti-reactor coalition grew in breadth after government officials' perceived misconduct caused local people to connect their agricultural concerns with democracy matters. It then explains how local protests like the Wyhl occupation influenced the formation of the German Green Party in the late 1970s, showing how the sorts of convergences that occurred amidst “single issue” protests like the anti-Wyhl struggle enabled a wide variety of activists to come together in the new party. Thus, the article argues that particular, local concerns initiated a rethinking of participation in electoral politics. Far from fracturing society, these local concerns promoted diverse new coalitions and shaped an inclusive approach to electoral politics.

Structure Without Hierarchy

Structure Without Hierarchy

Activists in Politics: The Influence of Embedded Activists on the Success of Social Movements

Social movements strive for policy changes that will realize their conception of the “perfect world.” To achieve their aims as rapidly as possible, movements attempt to identify the most effective ways of influencing decision makers. In parliamentary democracies, the central decision makers are political parties. Much of the existing literature emphasizes the use of public pressure and lobbying. To complement this literature, I argue that the intersection between political parties and social movements is also a strong and stable means for activists to influence policy. Using novel microdata on the German antinuclear movement, and particularly its success in influencing the shutdown of nuclear power plants, I demonstrate that movements realize their goals significantly more rapidly when their intersection with political parties increases. My results also suggest that there is a tipping point beyond which the effect of this intersection declines.

Making an Opportunity

The debate over “political opportunity structure” has been a central issue in the contemporary social movement study. This article seeks to move beyond the structure/agency dispute by looking at how social movements make an opportunity by transforming an initially unfavorable political structure. I analyze Taiwan’s environmentalism, particularly the anti-Kuokuang Petrochemical Park movement (2005–2011) and the post-Fukushima antinuclear movement (2011–2014), to understand the process in which hostile or indifferent political elites were converted into a pro-environmental stand. I use the term strategic bipartisanship to identify the effort to build the nexus to mainstream parties while maintaining the façade of neutrality, which was made possible because of the dissolution of the previously tight movement-party nexus that allowed activists to leverage party competition to their own advantage.

The impact of war on mental health: lest we forget

The often-unconscious and enduring impact of war is one of the driving forces of history. Yet these terrible costs and the lessons learned by psychiatry tend to be forgotten (1). At a time when many nations are remembering the legacy of World War I, the greatest military conflagration in history, it is timely to reflect on what has been learnt about the impacts of war on mental health. Ironically, it is only since the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the DSM-III in 1980 (2) that the field of traumatic stress has blossomed and been subsequently underpinned by a major body of neuroscience and clinical research. Despite the slow development of interest into the long-term consequences of the traumatic stress of war, many of the developments in mental health care in the 20th century emerged from the innovations demanded by the need to deal more effectively with the flood of mental casualties amongst the combatants of World Wars I and II. The model of community psychiatry was adapted from the model of forward psychiatry developed by the military to deal with acute combat stress reactions; this model was underpinned by the principles of the provision of early treatment close to the battle front with the expectancy of recovery and return to service (1). Crisis intervention, group therapy and therapeutic communities were innovations that evolved out of the military medical corps (1). However, psychiatrists who served in the military were often conflicted by powerful and potentially competing value systems concerning whether their primary responsibility was to the soldier or to the war effort (3). The prevailing attitudes would tend to indicate that individuals’ interests often lost out – the veteran who broke down in battle was generally stigmatized. The diagnoses promulgated by the profession, such as compensation neurosis, lack of moral fibre and inadequate personality reflected how the problem was seen to be caused by moral weakness and vulnerability (4). In this characterization, the causal role of the horrors of combat were minimized by psychiatry, in contrast to compensation seeking and vulnerability.

Civil defence in the city: federal policy meets local resistance in Baltimore, 1957–1964

ABSTRACT:Between 1950 and 1964, as a result of slight federal policy shifts, Cold War civil defence went from a pro-urban policy dedicated to the preservation of communities to an anti-urban policy focused on social control in the wake of an attack. Civil defence volunteers in Baltimore along with some of the city's civil defence paid staff, who had bought the federal message that they could protect themselves and their communities for nuclear war, allied with anti-nuclear activists against an increasingly militarized programme – one that by 1961 prioritized post-attack policing and de-emphasized the imperative to preserve urban neighbourhoods.

American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990: The Challenge of Peace. By Kyle Harvey

<i>American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990: The Challenge of Peace</i>. By Kyle Harvey

Handbook for Survival—Saving Lives During Radiation Release and Other Disasters

This short book (145 pages) is the culmination of Dr. Brodsky’s 65 year career devoted to good science in radiation safety and really caring for the welfare of workers and the public. The book is a condensed version of his 2011 book Actions for Survival –Saving Lives in the Immediate Hours After Release of Radioactive or Other Toxic Agents, MJR Publications, Baltimore, MD 373 pages. In these books Dr. Brodsky has taken on the daunting task of presenting defensible science for safety in words that are understandable to persons without scientific training. During his career he constantly challenged those who abused science for their own agenda. He describes how he has confronted antinuclear activists, other scientists, and the heads of government agencies in a lifelong endeavor to correct bad science and the results of misunderstandings about radiation.

How Udo Wanted to Save the World in ‘Erich's Lamp Shop’: Lindenberg's Concert in Honecker's East Berlin, the NATO Double-Track Decision and Communist Economic Woes

AbstractThe concert given by the West German rock star Udo Lindenberg in East Berlin on 25 October 1983 links cultural, political, diplomatic and economic history. The East German regime had banned performances by the anti-nuclear peace activist and musician since the 1970s, but eventually allowed a concert, hoping to prevent the deployment of American nuclear missiles in West Germany. In allowing this event, however, East Germany neither prevented the implementation of the NATO double-track decision of 1979 nor succeeded in controlling the political messages of the impertinent musician. Desperate for economic aid from the West, East Germany decided to cancel a promised Lindenberg tour in 1984, causing widespread disillusionment among his fans in the country.

Osaka Inside Out [podcast]. [2013]. Recorded and mixed by David Novak with the guidance of Fujiwara Hide, Higashiseto Satoru, David Hopkins, Nakagawa Kôhei, Nakajima Akifumi. Annotated by David Novak. Webpage with notes in English, http://www.sensorystudies.org/sound-gallery/osaka-inside-out-recording-the-keynote-sounds-of-the-city/. Bibliography. Link to streaming 128K MP3 and downloadable WAY file (20:52) hosted by SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/sensorystudies/osaka-soundscape-2-mix. - Podcast: The Sounds of Japan's Antinuclear Movement. 2013.

Osaka Inside Out [podcast]. [2013]. Recorded and mixed by David Novak with the guidance of Fujiwara Hide, Higashiseto Satoru, David Hopkins, Nakagawa Kôhei, Nakajima Akifumi. Annotated by David Novak. Webpage with notes in English, http://www.sensorystudies.org/sound-gallery/osaka-inside-out-recording-the-keynote-sounds-of-the-city/. Bibliography. Link to streaming 128K MP3 and downloadable WAY file (20:52) hosted by SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/sensorystudies/osaka-soundscape-2-mix. - Podcast: The Sounds of Japan's Antinuclear Movement. 2013. [Recorded and annotated by David Novak]. Webpage with notes in English, http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/251-the-performance-of-protest-the-sounds-of-japan-s-antinuclear-movement-in-fukushima-tokyo-and-osaka. Related videos, links. Link to streaming electronic file (15:19). - Volume 47

The Life-Time of Tomorrow Party of Japan and Its Negative Impacts on the Anti-Nuclear Movements in Japan’s Politics

The nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi in Japan on 11th March 2011 was unimaginably scary for the Japanese people and it was easily expected that Japan was going to abandon nuclear power with anti-nuclear political parties. Contrarily, Japan decided to maintain nuclear power with pro-nuclear political parties. This decision of Japan was influenced by the negative impacts brought by the Tomorrow Party of Japan (TPJ), the largest political party in the history of Japan which was established primarily to abandon nuclear power. The purpose of this paper is to look at the life-time of TPJ from 28th November to 27th December in 2012 and examine the negative impacts by TPJ on the anti-nuclear movements in Japan’s politics. The paper then discovers that the Japanese people came to lose trust in anti-nuclear political parties because they recognized, due to TPJ, that ‘anti-nuclear’ can be abused by politicians for elections, the characteristics of the ‘anti-nuclear’ village are not so different from those of the nuclear power village and the anti-nuclear party is an amateur without leaders. The paper finally concludes that it will take much time and efforts to regain a lost trust in anti-nuclear political parties.

Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century

T he years during and after World War II saw a remarkable evolution in anarchist views on violence. While earlier generations of anarchists had assumed that violence would, in one way or another, factor into the revolutionary struggle, those who identified as anarchists in the first two decades after the war in Britain and the United States were far more likely to adopt nonviolence as an almost default position. Anarchists were among those who pioneered the use of nonviolent resistance in the British and American contexts, and anarchist ideas exerted a strong influence within the postwar anti-nuclear movement, which in its most radical manifestations situated its opposition to nuclear weapons within a broader opposition to war, militarism, and violence of all kinds. Although few postwar anarchists BENJAMIN J. PAULI

Why are there no big nuke protests?

The antinuclear movement has fluctuated between gigantic (in the 1980s) and almost nonexistent (the 1970s, now). What accounts for these remarkable variations? Is it possible to identify the factors that touched off the remarkable surges in participation in the 1960s and 1980s? If it were possible, could such factors be put into play today?

Nuclear Energy in the Public Sphere: Anti-Nuclear Movements vs. Industrial Lobbies in Spain (1962–1979)

This article examines the role of the Spanish Atomic Forum as the representative of the nuclear sector in the public arena during the golden years of the nuclear power industry from the 1960s to 1970s. It focuses on the public image concerns of the Spanish nuclear lobby and the subsequent information campaigns launched during the late 1970s to counteract demonstrations by the growing and heterogeneous anti-nuclear movement. The role of advocacy of nuclear energy by the Atomic Forum was similar to that in other countries, but the situation in Spain had some distinguishing features. Anti-nuclear protest in Spain peaked in 1978 paralleling the debates of a new National Energy Plan in Congress, whose first draft had envisaged a massive nuclearization of the country. We show how the approval of the Plan in July 1979, with a significant reduction in the nuclear energy component, was influenced by the anti-nuclear protest movements in Spain. Despite the efforts of the Spanish Atomic Forum to counter its message, the anti-nuclear movement was strengthened by reactions to the Three Mile Island accident in March 1979.

Frances Crowe, 95-year-old antinuclear activist

In this interview, legendary activist Frances Crowe looks back on 70 years of protesting against the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. She describes the impact that the news of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima had on the American public in 1945—and how she and her husband, a radiologist and physician who had educated her on the effects of radiation poisoning, then decided to take a stand against its use. Among other acts of civil disobedience, she went on to spend a month in federal prison after spray-painting “Thou Shalt Not Kill” on the casings of missile tubes at a nuclear submarine base in Rhode Island. This grandmother of five has been arrested nine times for trespassing at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station and was arrested again on January 14, two months shy of her 95th birthday. On the eve of the publication of her book, Finding My Radical Soul, Crowe tells about growing up in the Midwest during an era of Progressive politics, her evolution as a protestor, the limits of civil disobedience, what drove her and her husband—and what continues to drive her today.

The Creation of Radicalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism in Nova Scotia, c. 1972–1979

Abstract: An attempt to build the world's largest nuclear power plant on a tiny island off the south shore of Nova Scotia in the early 1970s sparked an anti-nuclear movement that was able, by the end of the decade, to force the provincial government to abandon plans for a united regional electric utility. The provincial movement shared in the creation of national, continental, and even global campaigns against nuclear technology but was fractious within itself. Bringing together peace activists, feminists, counterculture back-to-the-landers, along with classic conservationists, engineers, and fishers' advocates, the anti-nuclear coalition faced inevitable internal disagreement. By the late 1970s, different approaches to government and industry – as partners or as adversaries – had produced a nascent environmental mainstream, and by extension a radical fringe, from activist groups and networks that had achieved success by working together in prior years. The anti-nuclear controversy of the 1970s was key to the shape of the environmental movement in decades to follow.

Getting to the Heart of Science: Rosalie Bertell’s Eco-Feminist Approach to Science and Anti-Nuclear Activism

This article focuses on Rosalie Bertell’s activist work with Indigenous communities in the Marshall Islands, Canada, and the United States. It examines how Bertell’s religious identity and her involvement in the eco-feminist, social justice, and anti-nuclear movements influenced her to develop a distinct approach to epidemiology. Bertell drew upon eco-feminist philosophy to challenge predominant ideas about scientific objectivity and detachment as they developed in modern epidemiology. She adopted a situated approach to epidemiology by relying on her expertise in biostatistics and incorporating a multi-disciplinary set of tools for perceiving radiation damage in the body to do small-scale community health studies. Bertell’s study model was shaped by the specific environmental health concerns of communities, designed to encourage community involvement, and intended for use as a political tool. Most significantly, with it she challenged the notion that scientists could achieve scientific objectivity only through detachment from the subjects of one’s analysis.