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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Koide Hiroaki has dedicated his career to preventing a nuclear disaster in Japan. That disaster has now happened. As we learn in this wide-ranging and important interview, the accident often referred to as 3/11 was enormous and in many ways unprecedented. The full scope of the disaster is still unknown, but is clearly on the scale of Chernobyl, placing the amount of radioactive material released into the atmosphere possibly up to 1,000 times the Hiroshima bombing of 1945. Professor Koide's reporting in his many books, interviews, and radio programs is essential reading for anyone wishing to learn the nature and extent of the radiological event of March 2011 and beyond. But early in the interview we learn something else. For while in ways unprecedented, 3/11 is also a part of a historical series of nuclear exposures from the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, to the Castle-Bravo Lucky Dragon Incident of 1954, to Semipalatinsk, to Chernobyl, and to the next sure-to-happen event. In fact, while it is clear that the urgent social, political, and medical task right now is the acute contamination of land, air, sea, and bodies by the Fukushima dai-ichi meltdowns, as Prof. Koide says, as bad as Fukushima is, “a much greater event has already taken place.” His immediate reference is the enormous amount radioactive material released in the atmospheric testing from 1945 to 1980.
1 Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies (Princeton University Press, 1999); Paul Virilio, “The Primal Accident,” in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
2 The United States and the Soviet Union signed a test ban treaty for 1963, but France continued atmospheric testing until 1974 and China until 1980.
3 As the Chernobyl and Fukushima researcher Timothy Mousseau has shown, cancer is only one of the damaging health effects of ionizing radiation. His studies of birds and rodents have shown smaller brain sizes, male sterility, cataracts, and reduced life-spans. Personal communication, February 2016.
4 Mike Davis, Dead Cities: And Other Tales (New Press, The, 2003), 33, 40.
5 For the shared toxic legacy of both sides of the Cold War see in English Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2015). In Japanese see Suga Hidemi, Han genpatsu no shisoshi: reisen kara Fukushima e (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 2012).
6 Quoted in Robert Stolz, Bad Water: Nature, Pollution, and Politics in Japan, 1870-1950 (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society) (Duke University Press Books, 2014), 98.
7 Jason W. Moore, “Cheap Food and Bad Climate: From Surplus Value to Negative Value in the Capitalist World Ecology,” Critical Historical Studies Spring (2015), 18-19.
8 Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2011), 57.
9 The failed but instructive Pentagon program to attempt to craft a warning not to open Yucca Mountain that could be understood by any civilization some 10,000 years in the future-beyond the time span of existing human language-immediately runs into Lovecraftian notions of time and ancient angry gods buried in deep in the earth. See Peter van Wyck, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
10 The alien origin of the “black oil” of the X-Files speaks to this cosmic horror while also linking it to fossil fuel consumption. See for example Justin McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene” in Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, forthcoming).
11 Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Commentary October (1965).
12 Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Washington: Zero Books, 2011), chapter two.
13 Hirotaka Kasai: “Kasai: So…about the airborne radiation dosage and the soil contamination, there is a public entity that measures and publishes the airborne levels. But the soil contamination is not measured. I remember reading about Chernobyl that the soil contamination levels are the standard by which one gets the right to evacuation and refuge. But Japan only measures the air.” Unpublished interview with Koide Hiroaki, December 2014. See also, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Touching the Grass: Science, Uncertainty and Everyday Life from Chernobyl to Fukushima” in Science, Technology, & Society 19:3 (2014): 331-362.
14 Koide: “Take Germany for example. There both the government and industry decided to eliminate nuclear power. When it came to the question of what happens to all the people in that industry the answer led to entirely new jobs being born. In short, if the decision is made to eliminate nuclear power, and the entire society works towards that goal, then I think it can be done - even though people hooked on the drug will truly believe that they will die without it. So the job is to show them that is not the case, that we can build an alternative one piece at a time. Then again, that's really my responsibility isn't it?” (Laughs). Unpublished interview December 2014.
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