National Security News Service

The United States deliberately allowed Japan access to the United States’ most secret nuclear weapons facilities while it transferred tens of billions of dollars worth of American tax paid research that has allowed Japan to amass 70 tons of weapons grade plutonium since the 1980s, a National Security News Service investigation reveals. These activities repeatedly violated U.S. laws regarding controls of sensitive nuclear materials that could be diverted to weapons programs in Japan. The NSNS investigation found that the United States has known about a secret nuclear weapons program in Japan since the 1960s, according to CIA reports.

The diversion of U.S. classified technology began during the Reagan administration after it allowed a $10 billion reactor sale to China. Japan protested that sensitive technology was being sold to a potential nuclear adversary. The Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations permitted sensitive technology and nuclear materials to be transferred to Japan despite laws and treaties preventing such transfers. Highly sensitive technology on plutonium separation from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site and Hanford nuclear weapons complex, as well as tens of billions of dollars worth of breeder reactor research was turned over to Japan with almost no safeguards against proliferation. Japanese scientist and technicians were given access to both Hanford and Savannah River as part of the transfer process.
While Japan has refrained from deploying nuclear weapons and remains under an umbrella of U.S. nuclear protection, NSNS has learned that the country has used its electrical utility companies as a cover to allow the country to amass enough nuclear weapons materials to build a nuclear arsenal larger than China, India and Pakistan combined.

This deliberate proliferation by the United States fuels arguments by countries like Iran that the original nuclear powers engage in proliferation despite treaty and internal legal obligations. Russia, France, Great Britain as well as the United States created civilian nuclear power industries around the world from their weapons complexes that amount to government-owned or subsidized industries. Israel, like Japan, has been a major beneficiary and, like Japan, has had nuclear weapons capabilities since the 1960s.
A year ago a natural disaster combined with a man-made tragedy decimated Northern Japan and came close to making Tokyo, a city of 30 million people, uninhabitable. Nuclear tragedies plague Japan’s modern history. It is the only nation in the world attacked with nuclear weapons. In March 2011, after a tsunami swept on shore, hydrogen explosions and the subsequent meltdowns of three reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant spewed radiation across the region. Like the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan will face the aftermath for generations. A twelve-mile area around the site is considered uninhabitable. It is a national sacrifice zone.

How Japan ended up in this nuclear nightmare is a subject the National Security News Service has been investigating since 1991. We learned that Japan had a dual use nuclear program. The public program was to develop and provide unlimited energy for the country. But there was also a secret component, an undeclared nuclear weapons program that would allow Japan to amass enough nuclear material and technology to become a major nuclear power on short notice.

That secret effort was hidden in a nuclear power program that by March 11, 2011– the day the earthquake and tsunami overwhelmed the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant – had amassed 70 metric tons of plutonium. Like its use of civilian nuclear power to hide a secret bomb program, Japan used peaceful space exploration as a cover for developing sophisticated nuclear weapons delivery systems.
Political leaders in Japan understood that the only way the Japanese people could be convinced to allow nuclear power into their lives was if a long line of governments and industry hid any military application. For that reason, a succession of Japanese governments colluded on a bomb program disguised as innocent energy and civil space programs. The irony, of course, is that Japan had gone to war in 1941 to secure its energy future only to become the sole nation attacked with nuclear weapons.

Energy has always been Japan’s Achilles’ heel. Her need for oil in the face of an American embargo triggered Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and the continued shortage was a recurring theme in her defeat in that war. Only one act could take more credit for Japan’s humiliation – the splitting of the atom that gave birth to the nuclear bomb. Now Japan would turn that same atom to its own purposes — to ensure a stable source of energy well into the next century and, equally important, to ensure that the homeland never again suffered the indignity of defeat.
Japan approached the nuclear problem the same way it tackled the electronics and automobile industries. A core group of companies were each given key tasks with long-term profit potential. Then the government nurtured these companies with whatever financial, technological and regulatory support needed to assure their success. The strategy worked brilliantly to bring Japan from post-war oblivion to economic dominance in a single generation.

The five companies designated for the development of nuclear technologies had to make major strides beyond the conventional light water reactors that had become fixtures in Japan under U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program in the 1950s. Japan would have to do what the Americans and Europeans had failed to do – make an experimental breeder program a commercial success. Their hubris convinced them that they could. The Japanese, after all, were the masters of the industrial process. They had turned out automobiles, televisions and microchips superior to the Americans, with better quality and at less cost. Nuclear accidents are almost always the result of human error: sloppy operators without the proper education or training or who did not install enough redundancies. Such things happen to Americans and Russians, but not to Japanese.

As China, North Korea, India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapon systems, Japan and her Western allies strengthened their alliances to counter the burgeoning threat. From a secret meeting between U.S. President Lyndon Johnson and Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in the 1960s and the participation of several subsequent American and Japanese leaders, the secret transfer of nuclear technology was part of an international strategy to fortify Japan against an ever-escalating East Asian arms race. This policy culminated during the Reagan administration in legislation that dramatically changed U.S. policy. The United States ceded virtually all control of U.S.-origin nuclear materials shipped to Japan.
To the detriment of the world and her people, the Japanese government exploited the Japanese public’s well-known abhorrence of nuclear weapons to discourage the media and historians from delving into its nuclear weapons activities. Consequently, until the March 2011 tragedy, the Japanese nuclear industry had largely remained hidden from critical eyes. The less than thorough International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s proliferation safeguard agency, also turned a blind eye.

In a rare glimpse of a Japanese industry that has remained top secret for so many decades, our investigation raises serious concerns about Japanese and Western nuclear policies and the officials who shaped those policies during and after the Cold War. International corporations and officials sacrificed the safety and security of the public to carry out the deception. Under the guise of a peaceful nuclear power program, they made huge profits.

F-Go: The First Japanese Nuclear Weapons Program
In the early 1940s, with the world locked in the bloodiest conflict in human history, scientists in Germany, Great Britain, the United States and Japan struggled to unlock from the atom a weapon of almost inconceivable power. This race to turn theory into devastating reality formed a secret subtext to the war that destroyed millions of lives using industrial warfare. In the area of theoretical physics, Japan was as advanced as her European and American rivals. She lacked only the raw materials and the sheer industrial excess to turn those materials into an atomic bomb. But Japan’s war machine was nothing if not resourceful.

Since 1940, the Japanese had been aggressively researching the science of the nuclear chain reaction. Dr. Yoshio Nishina had been nominated for the Nobel Prize for his pre-war work in nuclear physics. Now he and a team of young scientists worked tirelessly at the Riken, the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research, to beat the Americans to the bomb. After two years of preliminary research, the atom bomb program called F-Go began in Kyoto in 1942. By 1943, Japan’s Manhattan Project had not only produced a cyclotron that could separate bomb-grade uranium, but also had developed a team of nuclear scientists with the knowledge to unleash the atom’s unknown power. As America built a uranium enrichment plant in the Washington desert so enormous it drew every watt of electricity from the Grand Coulee Dam, the Japanese scoured their empire for enough raw uranium to make their own bomb, with only limited success.

Japan looked to Nazi Germany for help. The Nazis, too, had been pursuing the nuclear bomb. But, by early 1945, the Allies were on the Rhine and the Russians had taken Prussia. In a last-ditch effort, Hitler dispatched a U-boat to Japan loaded with 1,200 pounds of uranium. The submarine never arrived. American warships captured it in May 1945. Two Japanese officers on board the submarine committed suicide and the shipment of uranium was diverted to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for use in the American Manhattan Project. Without the uranium, Japan could not produce more than one or two small atomic bombs.

As the bomb programs in both countries neared completion in 1944, General Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign drew closer to Japan’s home islands. Fleets of B-29 bombers rained fire on Tokyo and other major cities. Nishina had to move his effort to the tiny hamlet of Hungman in what is now North Korea. The move cost the Japanese program three months.

On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped a single atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The blast killed more than 70,000 people outright, and in the days and weeks to come thousands more succumbed. When word of the blast reached Nishina, he knew immediately that the Americans had beaten him to the prize. But he also had implicit confirmation that his own atomic bomb could work. Nishina and his team worked tirelessly to ready their own test. Historians such as Robert Wilcox and Atlanta Journal Constitution writer David Snell believe that they succeeded. Wilcox writes that on August 12, 1945 – three days after the Nagasaki bombing and three days before Japan signed the articles of surrender – Japan tested a partially successful bomb in Hungnam. By then the effort was merely symbolic. Japan lacked the means to produce more weapons or to deliver them accurately to the United States.

As Japan rebuilt after the war, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came to represent the folly of Japan’s imperial aspirations as well as American inhumanity toward the Japanese. The Japanese people held nuclear weapons in abhorrence. Japan’s leaders shared that view, but, having been on the receiving end of nuclear warfare, also developed a special appreciation for the bomb’s strategic value.
As the war ended, thousands of American troops occupied Japan. After the nuclear attacks on Japan, the United States feared that the desire and ability to create this power would spread throughout the world. Washington learned that Japan had been much closer to its own nuclear bomb than previously thought. Destroying Japan’s nuclear-weapons capability became a high priority. In addition to negotiating international non-proliferation agreements, U.S. occupation troops destroyed several cyclotrons and other vestiges of Japan’s atomic bomb project to prevent Japan from resuming its nuclear program. Though the troops could demolish the physical remnants of the F-Go project, they could not destroy the enormous body of knowledge Nishina and his team had accumulated during the war.

The Beginning the Japan’s Nuclear Program
In the years to come the men behind F-Go would become the leaders of Japan’s nuclear power program. Their first priority was to stockpile enough uranium to ensure that nuclear research could continue in Japan. The war and the atomic blasts that ended it left a strong and enduring impression on the Japanese people. They abhorred the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the Japanese leadership recognized that in nuclear power there was an alternative to foreign energy dependence, a dependence that had hindered Japan since her entry into the industrial era.
With the surrender of Japan, the United States became the preeminent power in the Pacific. But that position was challenged in 1949 with the communist victory in China and successful nuclear tests by the Soviet Union. The communists were challenging America in the Pacific, and Japan suddenly shifted from vanquished adversary to valuable ally.

The United States was completely unprepared when North Korean troops swarmed south in 1952. Soon poorly armed, under-trained American Marines were surrounded in Pusan with their backs to the sea. For the first of many times during the Korean War, the American military commander, Gen. Douglass MacArthur, lobbied President Truman to use nuclear weapons.

Those weapons were stored on the Japanese island of Okinawa. While American troops faced annihilation in Pusan, American B-29s waited with engines running to bomb targets in China and Korea. Later in the war, when Chinese troops entered Korea, nuclear-laden bombers flying from Japan would actually penetrate Chinese and North Korean airspace. One jet fighter bomber was shot down.
The Korean War is an important milestone for Japan. Only seven years after the most humiliating defeat in its three-thousand-year history, Japan served as the staging ground for the same military that had defeated her. Japan’s own military at the time was practically nonexistent. As humiliating as the American servicemen who frequented Tokyo’s nickel brothels was the realization that Japan’s defense was wholly in American hands. As Truman played the game of nuclear brinkmanship with the Chinese, it became apparent that Japan’s defense now relied on the same nuclear bombs that had sealed her World War II defeat.

In the early 1950s, the United States aggressively urged Tokyo to get involved in the nuclear power business. Having witnessed the destructive power of nuclear energy, President Eisenhower was determined to keep it under strict control. He also realized that the world would never accept a complete U.S. monopoly on atom-splitting technology, so he developed an alternative — Atoms for Peace. Eisenhower gave resource-starved countries like Japan and India nuclear power reactors as a form of technical, economic and moral support. Lacking the indigenous resources to rebuild its economy and infrastructure, Japan quickly turned to nuclear power as the answer for its chronically energy-starved economy.
With the help of the American Atoms for Peace program, Japan began to develop a full-scale nuclear power industry. The Japanese sent scores of scientists to America for training in nuclear energy development. Desperate to regain a foothold in the international arena and reclaim its sovereignty and power after the war, the Japanese government willingly spent scarce funding on research labs and nuclear reactors.
Japan’s wartime experience had prepared her to build a nuclear industry from scratch, but with Atoms for Peace, it was cheaper to import complete reactors from the West.

Atoms for Peace supported British and Canadian nuclear exports as well as American. Britain went first, selling its Magnox plant to Japan. General Electric and Westinghouse rapidly secured the rest of the industry, selling reactor designs and components to Japan at exorbitant prices. The Japanese industry quickly became a model for other Atoms for Peace countries. A generation of brilliant young Japanese scientists came of age during this period, all committed to the full exploitation of nuclear energy.

Once the industry was vitalized, Japan resumed its own nuclear research independent from the United States. Encouraged by the Americans, in 1956 Japan’s bureaucrats mapped out a plan to exploit the entire nuclear fuel cycle. At that time the concept was only theoretical, no more a reality than the atomic bomb was when Einstein penned his infamous letter to Roosevelt in 1939. According to the theory, plutonium could be separated from the spent fuel burned in conventional reactors and used to fuel new “breeder reactors.” No one had yet been able to make it work, but this was the dawn of the age of technology. Scientists in Japan, America and Europe were intoxicated with the possibilities of scientific advancements. Japan’s central planners and bureaucrats were equally enthusiastic. The breeder reactor plan would make the most efficient use of the raw uranium Japan imported from the United States. It would wean Japan from her dependence on American energy and also create an enormous stockpile of plutonium – the most powerful and difficult to obtain bomb material.

In October 1964, communist China stunned the world by detonating its first nuclear bomb. The world was caught by surprise, but nowhere were emotions as strong as in Japan. Three months later Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato went to Washington for secret talks with President Lyndon Johnson. Sato gave LBJ an extraordinary ultimatum: if the United States did not guarantee Japan’s security against nuclear attack, Japan would develop a nuclear arsenal. The ultimatum forced LBJ to extend the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” over Japan. Ironically, this guarantee later enabled Sato to establish Japan’s Three Non-Nuclear Principles: to never own or produce nuclear weapons or allow them on Japanese territory. The policy won Sato the Nobel Prize for Peace. The Japanese public and the rest of the world never knew that these three principles were never fully enforced, and Sato allowed the secret nuclear weapons program to go on.

In the years to come, thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons would pass through Japanese ports and American bases in Japan. Even before Sato’s historic meeting with LBJ, Japan had quietly agreed to officially ignore U.S. nuclear weapons stored in Japan. Japanese officials were shrewd enough to put nothing down on paper, but U.S. Ambassador to Tokyo Edwin O. Reischauer disclosed the pact in a 1981 newspaper interview. In 1960, the Japanese government had verbally agreed to allow nuclear-armed American warships access to Japanese ports and territorial waters. Several current and former U.S. and Japanese officials confirm Ambassador Reischauer’s interpretation, including the former Japanese Ambassador in Washington, Takezo Shimoda.

When asked about these issues in the 1980s, the Japanese government flatly denied there was any such understanding and said it was “inconceivable” that it had a different interpretation of the treaty conditions than the United States. Nonetheless, after Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki ordered his Foreign Ministry to investigate the facts, the best it could do was to say it could find no written records of the pact.
Declassified U.S. government documents make a mockery of the Three Non-Nuclear Principles. The papers reveal that Japanese government officials ignored evidence that the United States was routinely bringing nuclear weapons into Japanese ports. American military planners took Japan’s silence as tacit permission to carry nuclear weapons into Japanese harbors. The American aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, home ported for decades in Yokohama, routinely carried a small arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Japan even participated in joint military exercises in which U.S. forces simulated the use of nuclear weapons. These revelations underline the dichotomy between the Japanese government’s public policies and its actions regarding nuclear weapons. One of the pivotal debates in Japan during the early 1970s was whether to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The treaty basically froze the nuclear status quo. The five nuclear powers retained their arsenals while the rest of the world pledged to abstain from nuclear weapons. More than a hundred countries signed the treaty. The only notable exceptions were the few states that held open the nuclear option: India, Pakistan, Israel and Japan. The debate, like most decisions on these issues in Japan, was not carried out in a public forum. But the Americans were listening, and what they heard put Japan’s nuclear ambitions in a completely new light.

Yasuhiro Nakasone was Director of the Japanese Defense Agency and one of a new generation of pro-nuclear politicians. Though he was not in favor of immediate nuclear armament, he opposed any action that would limit Japan’s right to develop nuclear weapons in the future. Nakasone was one of the principal authors of a 1969 policy paper that said in a chapter on national security: “For the time-being Japan’s policy will be not to possess nuclear weapons. But it will always maintain the economic and technical potential to manufacture nuclear weapons and will see to it that Japan won’t accept outside interference on this matter.”

Six years later Nakasone was again embroiled in the nuclear debate. At stake was Japan’s ability to go nuclear and the biggest prize in Japanese politics – the prime minister’s gavel. Nakasone assured his rise to prime minister by outwardly supporting the NPT. The price for Japan’s cooperation was President Gerald Ford’s pledge not to interfere with Japan’s nuclear programs, even when they included material and technology ideally suited to nuclear weapons use. With Ford’s guarantee, Japan finally ratified the NPT in 1976. Japan’s nuclear commerce continued unabated. The United States continued to supply enriched uranium to Japanese reactors and allowed the spent fuel to be reprocessed in Europe and the plutonium shipped back to Japan, where it was stockpiled for future use in breeder reactors.
Stopping the Spread of Fissile Material

After Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, he instituted an aggressive policy to control the spread of fissile materials. As a former nuclear reactor engineer on a Navy submarine, Carter knew better than any other world leader the immense power locked up in plutonium and highly enriched uranium. He was determined to keep it out of the hands of even our closest non-nuclear allies – including Japan.

Carter had good reason for this policy. Despite Japan’s ratification of the NPT in 1976, a study conducted for the CIA the following year named Japan as one of the three countries most able to go nuclear before 1980. Only the Japanese people’s historic opposition to nuclear weapons argued against Japanese deployment. Every other factor argued for a Japanese nuclear capability. By now the CIA – and its more secretive sister agency, the NSA — had learned the position of Japan’s inner circle.

Carter knew the incredibly volatile effect plutonium would have on world stability. Plutonium is the single most difficult to obtain ingredient of nuclear bombs. Even relatively backward countries – and some terrorist groups – now possess the technology to turn plutonium or highly enriched uranium into a nuclear weapon. But refining plutonium or enriching uranium is an extremely difficult, costly task. Carter knew that by limiting the spread of plutonium and uranium, he could control the spread of nuclear weapons. He made preventing the spread of plutonium the cornerstone of his nuclear non-proliferation policy.

The Japanese were shocked when Carter entered office and promptly pushed through Congress the 1978 Non-Proliferation Act, which subjected every uranium and plutonium shipment to congressional approval and blocked a host of sensitive nuclear technologies from Japan. Carter was determined not to transfer nuclear technology or materials that Japan could use to make nuclear weapons. The decision was hugely unpopular in America’s nuclear establishment as well. America’s nuclear scientists had expected much from Carter since he was one of them: someone who knew and understood nuclear energy.

Carter’s efforts ended America’s plans to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. Carter stopped reprocessing because he feared the consequences of Korean or Taiwan stockpiling plutonium. He believed it would lead to an Asian arms race involving Japan and China as well as Korea or Taiwan. Carter’s U.S. nuclear doctrine was enormously unpopular among America’s nuclear science elite, who viewed a plutonium-based fuel cycle as the future of nuclear energy. They saw the atom as the solution to the problems that had stalled America’s great economic boom – acid rain from coal, shortages and embargos of oil. With an almost inexhaustible supply of cheap, clean nuclear energy, America would reclaim its position as the world’s unquestioned economic leader. But for many it went beyond even that. If America could complete the fuel-cycle – complete the nuclear circle, all of humanity could be lifted up by the nuclear bootstrap. At research centers around the country and in the Department of Energy’s Forrestal Building on Washington’s Independence Avenue, enthusiasm for the breeder program reached almost a religious crescendo.

If the breeder reactor was going to revolutionize the world’s nuclear economy, went the thinking in America’s nuclear establishment, the United States would have to share it with her allies in Europe and Japan. The very cornerstone of science is the free exchange of information, and the American scientists shared openly with their European and Japanese colleagues. The cooperation ran both ways. The breeder reactor was proving to be a monumental technical challenge, and DOE was eager to learn from the mistakes of Germany, Britain and France, all of which had been working on the problem nearly as long as the United States. Carter’s policies hindered America’s efforts to develop and share a plutonium-based nuclear energy cycle.

To the chagrin of the powerful nuclear weapons and nuclear power lobbies, Carter abandoned the idea of a new nuclear renaissance. Carter’s administration ushered in an era of reduced nuclear trade and an interruption to the free flow of ideas among scientists. For men like Richard T. Kennedy and Ben Rusche at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Harry Bengelsdorf at the U.S. Department of Energy, the restraints were completely unacceptable. Jimmy Carter’s re-election defeat brought the nuclear establishment another opportunity.

One of the most passionate nuclear believers was a career bureaucrat named Richard Kennedy. A former Army officer, he labored in obscurity at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, his career held hostage by his vehement opposition to President Carter’s nuclear policies. All of that changed after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. One of Reagan’s first acts as president was to effectively reverse Carter’s nuclear doctrine, which had barred the United States from using plutonium in civilian power projects with America’s friends or adversaries.

Reagan made Kennedy his right-hand man for nuclear affairs. From his new post as Ambassador at Large for Nuclear Energy, Kennedy oversaw the dismantling of the Carter policies he despised. The new administration rejuvenated American and international reliance on plutonium.
But one legacy of the Carter years hobbled America’s headlong leap into international nuclear commerce. Carter had pushed through Congress in 1978 the Atomic Energy Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that strictly limited how foreign countries could import and use nuclear materials originating in the United States. Under the Act, Congress had to approve every single shipment of reactor fuel that crossed an international border. The law was an insufferable impediment to Kennedy’s vision of unfettered nuclear commerce. So he set out to circumvent it.
In the early days of the Reagan buildup, as the massive injection of cash into America’s conventional and nuclear war-making industries dramatically increased, the administration force-fed money to the nuclear scientists designing new warheads and attempting to solve the nuclear breeder reactor conundrum.

At the center of this plan was an experimental facility at the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee’s scenic Clinch River valley. Here in the Appalachian foothills, America’s most brilliant scientists were assembling a breeder reactor. The technology held incredible promise. As it generated power, it transformed previously spent nuclear fuel into pure plutonium. The breeder became the Holy Grail of nuclear science, a closed fuel cycle that would open up an almost limitless supply of energy. The Clinch River breeder project was on the cutting edge of technology, and, under Reagan, the Department of Energy flooded the project with money. The project cost $16 billion dollars between 1980 and 1987. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, Congress stopped the program cold.

Despite the efforts of the country’s best minds and nearly limitless budgets, the breeder program did not work. And it was not only the Clinch River team who failed. Breeder programs in Germany, France and the United Kingdom also could not make the leap from lab experiment to commercially viable practice. Reagan’s commitment to new nuclear weapons never flagged, but as the mid-eighties recession dragged on, he could not protect every facet of the military industrial complex from congressional cost-cutting. In 1987, Congress pulled the funding on Clinch River. To the cadre of scientists and Energy Department bureaucrats who had made the breeder reactor their life’s work, it was a disaster. Yet despite their failure and the nation’s lack of support, they remained faithful to the idea of the nuclear fuel cycle.

In the meantime, one country was still doggedly pursuing the breeder technology: Japan. In 1987, the resources of Japan’s runaway economy seemed limitless. If any nation could make the breeder economically viable, it was Japan. But if Japanese scientists were to succeed, they would need to start where the Americans had left off.

To understand what happened next requires an understanding of how American government really works. While administrations change every four or eight years and Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, regularly cycles its membership, the bureaucracy rolls on with almost monolithic continuity. In the bureaucracy, careerists can entrench behind their coveted projects to wait out administrations. Before Congress terminated the breeder program, Reagan left its future in the hands Richard T. Kennedy.

Kennedy looked like a Hollywood casting director’s version of the Washington insider, says long-time adversary Damon Moglen. “He had the nasty, florid appearance of a man who spent a lifetime in smoky back rooms, and his demeanor reeked of influence peddling. You could have seen him coming out of Tammany Hall.” Kennedy’s friends were kinder. Ben Rusche, a colleague at the NRC, praised Kennedy’s political instincts. “He was very attuned, perhaps to a degree greater than many that were in the business, to political realities both internally and externally.” Friend and foe alike agree that Kennedy trampled over lesser bureaucrats who stood in his way. He was the perfect man to orchestrate the salvation of the American breeder program by transferring it part and parcel to Japan.

The plan would require a masterful manipulation of Washington’s byzantine bureaucratic process. A technology transfer of this magnitude requires the approval of hundreds of officials at dozens of agencies. But precisely because it is so large and complicated, a canny insider can shepherd it through channels with the aid of a small cadre of true believers. Eight years of joint breeder development with Japan had created a crop of young scientists and bureaucrats passionately devoted to the cause. And Kennedy was still flush with an improbable victory—forcing Congress to allow the sale of nuclear reactors to Communist China in 1985.

In 1984 the Westinghouse Corporation had struck a deal to supply nuclear reactors to China worth as much as $10 billion. The deal was an incredible windfall for the American nuclear industry and would be a cornerstone in Kennedy’s efforts to make the United States dominate in the world’s nuclear commerce. The only problem was China’s abysmal record of sharing nuclear secrets with all bidders.

In a bitter session on the Senate floor, then Democratic Assistant Majority Leader Alan Cranston charged that the Reagan administration on Kennedy’s watch had “systematically withheld, suppressed and covered up information – known virtually throughout the executive branch – which Congress might find worrisome.” China was already known to have sold nuclear technology to five international nuclear outlaws: Pakistan, Iran, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina. By 1984, Cranston and most of the American government knew that China had given sophisticated nuclear weapons designs to Pakistan. Beijing had also sold the enriched uranium that would find its way into South Africa’s nuclear bombs. China sold heavy water for use in Argentina’s bomb program, while also selling nuclear materials to arch rival Brazil and negotiating nuclear agreements with Iran. China’s nuclear proliferation track record could hardly have been worse, but instead of negotiating ironclad safeguards, Kennedy returned from Beijing with an agreement so ambiguous that both sides could interpret it however they liked. China had refused to sign a non-proliferation pledge or agree to give the United States the right to prevent China from reprocessing fuel burned in the reactors into plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.

Kennedy returned to Beijing in June 1985 to lead the American side of the nonproliferation negotiations. He brought back a new agreement that was almost identical to the first. But $10 billion projects die hard in Washington, and a threat to cancel Chinese Premier Deng Xiaoping’s upcoming visit to Washington provided Kennedy the opening he needed. As the administration promoted its argument that the best way to contain the Chinese nuclear threat was to become its primary supplier, Westinghouse passed out subcontracts that made the deal popular among politicians.

The China agreement had forged Kennedy’s inner circle into an administrative juggernaut, and despite the potential rewards awaiting key players in lobbying firms and Japanese-funded think tanks, the nucleus of Kennedy’s circle remained in the government. Now with the Japanese breeder program on the line, Kennedy’s right-hand man at the U.S. State Department, Fred McGoldrick, and DOE contractor Harold Bengelsdorf, would rally breeder disciples throughout the government. Their goal was to transfer the American taxpayer funded technology of the $16 billion Clinch River project to Japan’s largest utility company for less than one-thousandth the American investment. The plan had already been approved, largely by Japanese and American consultants working for the Big Five Japanese corporations.

Two major obstacles stood in their way. U.S. and international law strictly limited the technology developed in the Clinch River program, particularly reprocessing technology used to separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. And the plan would require hundreds of international shipments of weapons-grade plutonium and high level nuclear waste on ships.

In the early days of 1986, Kennedy met almost daily with Lewis Dunn, a midlevel functionary in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. ACDA had the contract to write the proliferation threat assessment that would determine in large part whether the deal with Japan would survive.
Dunn had committed his career to opposing the spread of nuclear weapons. But like Kennedy, he believed that the best way to manage nuclear technology was to become the world’s leading nuclear supplier. In his quiet, determined way, Dunn was as powerful an advocate of the Japan agreement as Kennedy. Records of Dunn’s frequent meetings with Kennedy remain classified, but Kennedy’s calendars reveal an extraordinarily close collaboration between the two men.

Dunn worked for ACDA, a semi-autonomous agency housed in the State Department’s office building at Foggy Bottom. At least three times a week for nearly a year, Dunn made the long walk from ACDA’s offices on the third floor to Kennedy’s corner office. They talked for hours about the threat assessment that Congress would use to decide whether or not to allow the transfer to Japan.

The report Dunn penned made the agency rounds in the middle of 1986 and met with immediate skepticism from the Pentagon, the CIA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Central Intelligence Agency had been warning for years that Japan had the technology, and perhaps the will, to go nuclear. Contrary to the popular view inside the U.S. government, Japan had never given up the legal right to go nuclear. In fact, in a series of policy papers and internal debates going back to the early 1950s, Japanese policymakers had explicitly reserved the nuclear option. Most tellingly, an internal planning document that circulated at the highest level of Japanese government in 1969 stated that Japan would maintain —and, if necessary, develop – the technical and financial means to develop nuclear weapons. In an ominous aside, the paper vowed to do so “no matter what foreign pressures were applied.”

The CIA knew of the 1969 planning paper and reams of other evidence that suggested Japan had the will and the means to go nuclear if it felt threatened. Reports the CIA sent to U.S. presidents on the issue beginning in the 1960s shored up the nuclear umbrella commitment Lyndon Johnson had made to Prime Minister Eisaku Sato in 1965. The agency made sure that every president since LBJ knew Japan’s nuclear potential. Yet the warnings rarely trickled down to the working levels of the bureaucracy, where nuts and bolts decisions such as the transfer of the Clinch River hardware and research results were hammered out with Japan.

The CIA had been skeptical of Japan’s nuclear program for decades. The CIA and NSA eavesdropped routinely on America’s allies as well as her adversaries. Over the years, the CIA had consistently reported that Japan had both the potential and – under the right circumstances – the will to go nuclear. But in 1987, when Kennedy was pushing hard to accelerate the trade in nuclear secrets and materials with Japan, the CIA was out of the loop. Ironically, the agency that knew the most about Japan’s nuclear potential knew the least about the internal deliberations in the United States about transferring nuclear technology to Japan. The CIA is charged with monitoring foreign governments. While it has never completely restrained itself from spying on rival agencies, in this case the agency knew almost nothing about Kennedy’s internal effort to move the Clinch River project to Japan. Ultimately, the CIA was cut out of the decision. The role of chief opponent belonged to the Pentagon.

State, DOE and ACDA favored wholesale collaboration with Japan, while the Pentagon feared terrorists could hijack sea shipments of bomb-grade plutonium carried between Europe and Japan. Leading the Pentagon’s camp was Fred Ikle, Reagan’s Undersecretary of Defense for Nuclear Programs. Ikle’s concern about terrorist attacks was genuine, but a far greater concern lurked beneath the surface of open debate, a subject so politically unpopular that it was barely raised outside the Pentagon. For years intelligence analysts at DOD and the CIA had believed that Japan was capable of developing a formidable nuclear arsenal. Though few in the administration doubted Japan’s technical abilities, Ikle and a few others were alone in their belief that Japan had the political potential to go nuclear.

Kennedy had one ally in the Pentagon. Captain James Auer was the Japan officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He was the Pentagon’s first authority on all things Japanese. Auer had spent nearly half his 20-year naval career in Japan, first as commanding officer of a guided missile frigate home-ported in Yokohama, and later as a student at the Japanese equivalent of the U.S. Naval Academy. Like many Westerners who come into close contact with Japanese culture, Auer was a convert. He spoke the language, read the literature and became a connoisseur of the Japanese classic dance form, Kabuki.

That talent would serve him well in the Pentagon in 1986, as the American military bureaucracy squared off against the State and Energy departments over Japan. While the civilian bureaucrats viewed Japan as a vibrant and able partner in world affairs, and particularly in the field of nuclear energy, the warriors in the Pentagon held a far darker view. Since the time of the Korean War, the American military had regarded Japan largely as a freeloader that had built its monstrously successful economy on the backs of American servicemen who held the Soviets, Chinese and North Koreans at bay. Before any evidence had been examined, the Defense Department was far less likely to be sympathetic to Japan’s case than were the other major agencies in Washington.

The chief exception to this rule was Auer, who as a committed Japanophile was also in exactly the right place to help push the U.S.-Japan Agreement through the Pentagon. Early in 1986, Auer’s name begins to appear in Kennedy’s official calendar. As the Japan Desk officer at Defense, Auer was privy to almost all of the paperwork and high-level meetings regarding the proposed plutonium deal. He also was in weekly contact with his many friends and colleagues in the Japanese Embassy and at the Big Five corporate offices that served as a shadow foreign service for Japan. It is not clear whether Auer leaked the Pentagon’s deliberations or strategy to Kennedy or the Japanese. The Pentagon’s chief concern with the U.S.-Japan Agreement was the transport of enormous quantities of weapons-grade plutonium and nuclear waste along sea-lanes that could not be adequately defended.

The Pentagon confronted Kennedy on the security issue. In report after report, the Defense Department concluded that nothing less than a destroyer escort could adequately protect the plutonium shipments. Men like Richard Spear, with twenty years command experience in the Navy, found their warnings overruled by Kennedy and his colleagues on the strength of Lewis Dunn’s ACDA analysis. In the only plutonium shipment through the Panama Canal before the U.S.-Japan Agreement entered force, the Navy deployed a small armada to ensure its safe passage. The operation was coordinated by Lt. Col. Oliver North, of Iran-Contra fame. Now, on the force of an analysis conducted almost entirely within Foggy Bottom by Kennedy and Dunn, the United States was preparing to allow hundreds of tons of plutonium and other fissile materials to transit the high seas protected only by a few policemen on a cargo ship.

Frank Gaffney, then a deputy assistant secretary for defense, recalls the Pentagon’s reaction to the transport plan as one of almost total resistance. “There was just no way we were going to protect those shipments. It would be too much of a drain on our readiness. And the Japanese were neither willing nor able to stop a determined attack halfway around the world.”

The scenario Ikle and Gaffney foresaw was a slow and poorly armed nuclear transport vessel incapable of fighting off even a lone gunboat. A plutonium laden ship would be at the mercy of any nation or terrorist organization that could get its hands on a World War Il-vintage destroyer or even an armed speed-boat.

The Pentagon had favored air transport of the plutonium, but that option had been stymied when supposedly crash-proof casks smashed open in tests. Greenpeace got the tests results and took them straight to the media. That ended the Pentagon’s favored option of transporting plutonium and high-level nuclear waste by air. The Defense Department also had concerns that the Japanese would use the plutonium in their own weapons program. Except for the CIA, no branch of the U.S. government believed more firmly that Japan could one day go nuclear. But a nuclear Japan was not a deal-breaker for Defense as much as it would be for other agencies. In the ongoing industrial, economic and ideological campaign against communism, Japan was perhaps America’s strongest Cold War ally. Although her military was purely defensive, and she did not have the will in 1986 to use it, the long memories at Defense recalled a Japan that had been an extremely formidable military force. Many of the top-ranking officers came from old-line military families and had fathers and uncles who had fought against the Japanese in World War II. If the State Department regarded Japan as an enormous pacifist economic engine, and Energy regarded her as a surrogate womb for its cherished breeder reactor, Defense still saw Japan as a sleeping giant. But this time the giant was on America’s side.

A nuclear-armed Japan would relieve much of the drain on American military resources. The need to keep two divisions on the ground in Korea, as well as nuclear armed ships and aircraft in the Pacific as a hedge against China and the missile bases in the Soviet Far East detracted from the Pentagon’s chief mission – preparing for all-out war on the plains of Central Europe. The Reagan administration’s strategy was to push the Soviet war machine until it broke, taking the Soviet Union and its satellite regimes with it. A more aggressive, nuclear-armed Japan would be a tremendous asset in this effort. So while Defense fought against the sea-shipment of plutonium on tactical grounds, its opposition to plutonium and technology transfer to Japan was only pro forma.

Auer was able to capitalize on this sentiment behind the scenes. Late in 1986, the Pentagon grudgingly signed off on Dunn’s report stating that sea transport of plutonium did not constitute a major proliferation risk. The Pentagon was not the lead agency, Gaffney explains, so even had it fought tooth and nail, State and Energy would probably have been able to muster the support to defeat the opposition, and possibly the career ambitions of its major figures.

The Pentagon knew that the Clinch River technology was ideally suited for use in nuclear weapons. Most of the project’s theoretical research had been carried out at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But the hardware development and much of the hands-on research took place at the plutonium separation canyons at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina, and at Hanford, Washington, two of the country’s other major nuclear weapons laboratories.

The facilities in Washington State were built to separate plutonium for the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s and had been vastly expanded in a new Savannah River facility in the 1950s and 60s. By the time the Clinch River program was in full swing, the plants that first gave birth to the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki and now were building hydrogen bomb warheads, were accepting dozens of Japanese visiting scientists each year. When the program’s demise became inevitable, the Japanese came in even greater numbers.

The breeder reactor runs on plutonium, a substance that is otherwise useful only in nuclear weapons. Any technology that yielded plutonium was by definition a nuclear weapons project. In the United States, such projects are limited to a handful of nuclear weapons facilities owned exclusively by the government. President Harry Truman, recognizing the inherent risk of privatizing nuclear weapons capability, established the American bomb program independent of private industry and the military.

The most sensitive technologies in the Clinch River project were housed on these remote nuclear reservations. And from the very outset, Japanese industry officials wanted onto the American bases to see what they were getting. The U.S.-Japan Agreement called for a five-year period of cooperation in which Japanese and American scientists would work together on breeder projects, funded largely by the Japanese utilities. The idea, as DOE project director William Burch put it, is to “stay in the ball game.” To stay in the game, the United States would have to play by Japan’s rules. And the specific items Japan wanted came straight from the nuclear weapons program.

On top of the list was sophisticated plutonium separation hardware housed at the Savannah River Site, which had churned out weapons plutonium for a generation. Savannah River built and tested centrifuges, which after further testing at the Argonne National Laboratory, were shipped to Japan for use in the Recycle Energy Test Facility (RETF), a deceptively named plant for separating weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel. RETF was central to the Japanese breeder reactor plan. The Japanese needed the high-capacity plant to manufacture their own high-grade plutonium. While the plant was under construction, Japan contracted the refining job to France and Great Britain.

America’s experience producing military plutonium at Savannah River was ideally suited for use in the Japanese program. Other U.S. weapons labs have also contributed to the Japanese program. Hanford and the Argonne-West laboratory in Idaho conducted thousands of hours of tests on plutonium fuel assemblies for the Joyo breeder reactor. Japanese scientists were integrally involved in these tests and had virtual free-run of the U.S. nuclear weapons establishment. If Japan does someday deploy nuclear weapons, it will have been made possible by the wholesale transfer of weapons-usable technology through the U.S.-Japan Agreement.

The Agreement between the Energy Department and Japan’s monolithic nuclear energy utility, the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), violated a laundry-list of anti-nuclear prohibitions. It provided no Japanese guarantee that nuclear material would not be transferred to other countries without American consent, nor any assurance that Japan would not reprocess American reactor fuel into plutonium without prior U.S. approval. In short, the United States abdicated all control of U.S.- origin nuclear material in Japan for the next 30 years.
The deal also violated Carter’s Atomic Energy Act, a U.S. law which mandates that the reprocessing or retransfer of American nuclear material must not increase the risk of proliferation. In particular, the agreement did not ensure timely warning to the United States of any diversion for weapons purposes. In fact, Japan has lost track of more than 70 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium at its accident plagued Tokai reprocessing plant – enough to make more than 20 nuclear weapons. In a single agreement, the United States ceded control of nuclear material and gave up whatever safety margin it had to prevent a rapid nuclear deployment. At the time of the transfer, officials in both Washington and Tokyo knew that the only thing the breeder program would produce reliably was plutonium and that it would churn it out in enormous quantities, and in a form twice as pure as the plutonium used in American nuclear weapons.

To the American bureaucrats and scientists who engineered the transfer, it was a coup for science and international cooperation. As always, the concept of a nuclear armed Japan was difficult to believe in light of the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In addition to the wholesale transfer of U.S. fast-breeder and reprocessing technology to Japan, the U.S-Japan Agreement gave Japan the right to import unlimited amounts of nuclear materials from the United States, reprocess it into plutonium without restriction, and retransfer it to other countries.

Senator John Glenn, who as a former astronaut knew enough science to grasp the implications of the agreement, fought vehemently against it. But Kennedy’s people had sent it to Capitol Hill unannounced, only hours before the holiday recess. Most of Glenn’s supporters had already left, and he could only stand back and watch as the agreement passed. The Comptroller General of the United States immediately declared the agreement illegal. President George H.W. Bush signed it anyway. Before signing the U.S.-Japan Agreement, the United States had considered requests to separate plutonium from U.S.-origin fuel on a request-by-request basis. This agreement, instead, gave Japan blanket authority to reprocess and store U.S.-origin nuclear material within Japan, as well as the authority to transfer spent fuel to designated facilities in Europe for plutonium separation.
Soon after the legislation was signed into law, Kennedy and his team were duly rewarded. For James Auer, the Navy captain who had helped Kennedy get the agreement past the Pentagon, it was a great career boost. Auer, soon after passage, traded in his Navy Blue for the tweed jacket of a tenured professor at Vanderbilt University in a new position at a think tank fully funded by Japanese industry.

McGoldrick and Bengelsdorf retired from government service several years later and established a business of their own making hundreds of thousands of dollars as private consultants for the Japanese nuclear industry. By 1988, when the Senate ratified Kennedy’s U.S.-Japan Nuclear Agreement, Japan was one of only a few countries in the world that regarded plutonium as an asset, not a liability. The Soviets and Americans were trying to devise ways to store and secure vast quantities of this long-lived, radioactive element. In places like Germany and Italy, strong public protests compelled governments to store plutonium outside their own national borders.

By the 1970s, Japan began to aggressively pursue a space program. Japan had risen from her World War II defeat to establish herself as a premier manufacturing and technological power. The Jet Age had given way to the Space Age, and a world power like Japan had to have its own space program. The decision, as is almost always the case in Japan, was pragmatic rather than emotional. Communications in the future would depend on satellites, and warfare would be conducted with long-range missiles. By 1969, Japan had already decided to maintain the ability to go nuclear on short notice. From the start, long-range ballistic missiles and satellite targeting abilities were part of that defense architecture.
In 1969 Japan delved aggressively into space, opening the National Aerospace Development Agency (NASDA) and funded it lavishly. The agency’s goal was to promote the useful role of space. Japan was not interested in a headlong race to the moon; it wanted satellites for communication and surveillance. And it knew how to get them.

Just as America transferred nuclear technology to Japan under Atoms for Peace, America opened its space secrets to Japan as well. NASDA developed the N-I liquid-fuel launch vehicle with American assistance and used it to loft the Kiku 2 communications satellite in 1977. The feat made Japan the third nation, after the United States and the Soviet Union, to place an artificial satellite in geostationary orbit.

After the successful launch of Kiku 2, NASDA developed the N-II and H-II rockets, to launch various utility satellites for telecommunications, broadcasting, weather monitoring and other Earth observation functions. The H-II — a large-scale and highly efficient international class launcher — has been flying since 1994. The H-II’s lift capability corresponded to the ability to launch nuclear payloads to transcontinental ranges. Despite the initial success of Kiku II, Japan’s consistent stumbling block was accuracy. Unlike the Americans, and even the Russians, Japanese rocket scientists lacked the ability to consistently place satellites in precise orbits.

Successors to the Kiku II had a history of imprecise, wobbly orbits. Kiku III, designed for a decade of service, exhausted its fuel trying to hold its orbit and fell from the sky after only two and a half years. Kiku IV lasted less than two years. As scientists everywhere do when faced with a hard problem, the Japanese looked for a shortcut. It came with the decline of Soviet communism.

In 1991, the seemingly airtight security of the Soviet space and missile programs was thrown wide open as scientists fled to the West. Japan’s secret service capitalized on the chaos and procured the design and some hardware of an SS-20 missile bus, the critical third stage of the Soviets’ then most advanced medium-range ballistic missile. With its three warheads, the SS-20 bus was an engineering treasure, from which Japan learned a great deal about missile guidance. They learned from the Russian missile how to place several warheads on one rocket. The technology, called MIRVing, is key to all modern ballistic missile forces. When one missile disgorges several warheads to an individual target, it is virtually impossible to defend against it.

Japan also developed the Lunar-A moon probe, a space exploration vehicle that in many ways resembles an intercontinental ballistic missile system. The Lunar-A system was designed to place three probes at exactly determined targets on the moon. The technology is directly transferable to a ballistic missile application. In addition to testing multiple reentry vehicle technology and targeting, the probe could test Japan’s ability to produce hardened electronics. The instruments aboard the probe would have to withstand the tremendous pressure of striking the moon’s surface and burrowing into the rock. This is precisely the same technology the United States has perfected for its bunker-busting small nuclear weapons, such as the B-61-11 developed for the B-2 bomber. The technology perfected in the Lunar-A mission gave Japan the option to develop nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles as sophisticated as any in the world.

The mood toward nuclear weapons was changing in Japan. Perhaps the most telling statement was uttered by cabinet minister Hatsumo Hada to then U.S. Ambassador Walter Mondale at an embassy dinner party. Hada, who later became ambassador to China, told Mondale that Japan would have to go nuclear if North Korea obtained the bomb or the regional security situation worsened. The Japanese public would have to be educated, Hada said, but that would not present a problem. The fragility of the stability of the area over the years has only increased as China and North Korea’s tested nuclear weapons. Japan feels it must be ready to quickly respond in the region. In the early 1980s, when her bubble economy burst, Japan cut back on spending in many areas. But it never abandoned its commitment to nuclear energy. In that area, it was still a world leader.

In the 1990s, the governor of Tokyo prefecture –essentially Tokyo’s mayor and one of Japan’s most powerful politicians, Shintaro Ishihara, first openly advocated the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal. Surprisingly, there was little public outcry, and the governor was re-elected by a wide margin.
From the very start, the Japanese breeder program was predicated on the belief that Japanese industry could do what the Americans and Europeans had failed to do – run the extremely complicated breeder cycle safely and profitably. That belief was rooted in Japan’s national self-confidence, nurtured by two generations of success in manufacturing. Japan’s dedicated and educated workforce and its special brand of quality management made it the world leader in a host of industries. Nuclear power generation would, it was believed, merely be one more success, made possible by Japan’s superior workers and management.

Thirty years ago even Japan’s harshest critics might have agreed that perhaps it could succeed where Western efforts had failed. But that optimism soon faded as a string of nuclear catastrophes demonstrated that nuclear industries are far different than any other. Both the Monju fast-breeder reactor in 1995 and the Tokai reprocessing plant in April 1997 suffered serious, accidental radiation leaks; both accidents were the subjects of attempted cover-ups. Most egregious was the fire and leak of radioactive sodium at the Monju FBR. Japan’s Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Development Corporation (PNC), the government corporation that operated Monju, lied repeatedly to the public about the accident. PNC attempted to suppress video footage that showed the cause of the accident: a ruptured pipe in a secondary cooling system that had spilled an estimated two to three tons of radioactive sodium – the largest such leak in the history of fast-breeder technology. One of the reasons PNC gave for releasing the misinformation was that Monju was too important to Japan’s energy program to jeopardize the reactor’s operation. In other words, the public’s safety was secondary to the breeder program.

Had it not been for a courageous act by a group of Fukui prefecture officials in the early morning of December 11, PNC’s attempted cover-up probably would have succeeded. Suspecting a cover-up, the officials entered the plant and secured the videotape. The action came as a direct result of a previous accident at Fukui’s Tsuruga Unit I reactor in the early 1980s. Fukui prefecture officials were not permitted to investigate that mishap. When the Monju accident took place, the officials were determined not to be turned away a second time. Following revelations that the agency itself had been involved in trying to withhold the video, a PNC executive committed suicide.

In the midst of the major problems at Japan’s nuclear facilities, a military response not seen since World War II came back into the Japanese psyche. In the spring of 1999, Japanese warships fired on North Korean trawlers that had strayed into Japanese waters. This action was the first time Japanese guns had fired in anger since the end of the war. In pure military terms, the engagement was insignificant, but the North Pacific region took notice because it symbolized the reawakening of the Japanese warrior ethic.

Besides Japan, only France, Russia and Great Britain still regard plutonium as an asset. These countries have invested tens of billions of dollars in their commercial reprocessing industry. The United States abandoned its only reprocessing facility in Barnwell, S.C., just outside the gates of the Savannah River Site without ever operating the facility. Only huge government-owned plants in La Hague, France, and Sellafield, England, separate tons of plutonium from spent nuclear fuel for foreign customers. The biggest of these customers is Japan, which, despite its confidence in its ability to build a breeder reactor, had turned to purchasing plutonium from the British and French.

The plutonium that the French and British reprocessors return to Japan is pure enough to use in nuclear weapons, and some of it comes from uranium mined in the United States. Thanks to the U.S.-Japan Agreement pushed through by the Reagan administration’s Richard Kennedy, the United States no longer has any influence over the transport and use of this material. So even after Japan’s disastrous nuclear accidents, and despite efforts to limit nuclear weapons and prevent terrorist groups from obtaining nuclear material, U.S.-origin nuclear material is still being shipped to Japan by the ton. Every shipload contains enough plutonium for hundreds of bombs.

Though the Japanese people are among the world’s most ardent nuclear weapons opponents, Japan’s security is inextricably tied to nuclear weapons. The American nuclear umbrella is currently Japan’s last line of defense against nuclear armed neighbors like China and North Korea. And the Japanese leadership’s rationale has been that there is no real certainty that the Americans will step into a nuclear fray to protect Japan. With the possibility of bombs from China or North Korea exploding over its territory, many Japanese leaders have come to consider the nuclear option not merely desirable, but indispensable.

Richard Kennedy died in 1998 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. As the years passed his disciples lived lives of comfort. But as these men enjoyed the fruits of their labor for Ambassador Kennedy, the reality of the policies they had created were playing out in a most dramatic fashion.

The Sellafield nuclear reprocessing facility is the British government-owned version of the Savannah River Site. Once dedicated to the production of the world’s most deadly substance, plutonium, the key ingredient of nuclear bombs, Sellafield was up until a few years ago the nearby town’s lifeblood. Sixty-five hundred people work at Sellafield separating the coveted plutonium from nuclear reactor fuel irradiated in power plants around the world. It is dangerous work. A microscopic particle of plutonium is enough to cause deadly lung or blood cancers. Sellafield produced plutonium by the ton, as well as even greater quantities of other radioactive wastes. Like Savannah River, the British plant spread radiation into the surrounding environment. Since 1952, fish, shellfish, and sea plants in the Irish Sea, and even the local pigeons, have been heavily contaminated with radioactive waste from Sellafield. The plutonium plant released into the sea 30 billion liters of radioactive waste in a single decade.

The most dangerous result of Sellafield’s reprocessing industry is the arms race it may cause on the other side of the world. That is because British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL), the government-owned corporation that runs Sellafield, churns out plutonium for the highest bidder. Dr. Frank Barnaby, a retired British nuclear weapons designer, says that the plutonium fuel produced at Sellafield that was repeatedly shipped to Japan was sufficiently pure to be used in nuclear weapons. He explains that both the United States and Great Britain have both built and tested nuclear weapons made with the so-called reactor grade plutonium.

The late Paul Leavanthal, a non-proliferation expert, said the people of Seascale, the town nearest Sellafield, unwittingly supplied plutonium that could have ended up in nuclear bombs, and charged that “the Thatcher British government did it in the name of British jobs.” Ambassador Kennedy’s agreement required the ships transporting the materials to be escorted by government ships dedicated to protecting the plutonium from possible terrorist attack. The intent of this language was to require warships to escort the shipments, but, in response to domestic Japanese pressure, the shipping company persuaded the American, British and Japanese governments to allow two transport ships to escort each other. The transport ships are owned by Pacific Nuclear Transport Limited, a subsidiary of BNFL that is partially owned by a consortium of Japanese utility companies that wanted to save money.

The ongoing nuclear commerce between Japan and France and Britain soon became routine. The shipments of thousands of tons of U.S.-origin reactor waste for Japan each year were largely uneventful until the spring of 1995. Beyond profit, there is another reason France and Britain continue to ship plutonium to Japan. If they do not, Russia will. In economic terms, the balance of supply and demand favors Japan, the world’s only serious plutonium buyer. Faced with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Japan – and given the bloody history between these nations – Japan’s Asian neighbors began buying from Areva, the French government owned reprocessor. These shipments have not been uneventful.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster was not Japan’s first close call with nuclear weapons grade plutonium. Japan came very close to contaminating the Chilean coast on March 20, 1995, when the Pacific Pintail, laden with enough waste plutonium to build hundreds of nuclear bombs, tried to head into the protection of Chilean waters during a storm.

On March 20, 1995, Captain Blaine Axton had never seen worse weather in his forty years at sea. His lightly armed trawler, the Pacific Pintail, labored in the heavy seas, the 40-foot waves crashing over her bow, the spray flying away horizontally in the storm. He was in the midst of an Antarctic gale off Cape Horn at the tip of South America – the deadliest ocean in the world – but the weather was only one of Axton’s problems.
The Pintail was locked in a tense standoff with a Chilean Navy gunboat over the contents of the Pintail‘s hold: twenty-eight canisters of high-level plutonium-laden radioactive waste, en route from France to Japan. If the Pintail were to founder, her toxic cargo could poison the entire west coast of South America. Both Axton and his Chilean counterpart were acutely aware of the potential for disaster.

Through the spray and driving rain, Axton could make out a gunboat flying the Chilean flag. The Chilean captain had already warned Axton that he was authorized to use any means necessary to prevent the Pintail from entering Chile’s 200-mile exclusion zone. The language was clear to Axton; it was the most polite way of saying “turn around, or we’ll sink you or board you.”

The Chilean government was determined that if the Pintail were to go down, it should be as far away as possible from the South Sea fisheries that are a mainstay of the Chilean economy. The Chilean gunboat captain continued to shout warnings over the Guard Channel. As she battled her way through the sea to take up a firing position against the Pintail, her captain was on the radio to Santiago, begging for permission to open fire. It did not come. As Axton gambled, the Chileans were not about to put a cargo of nuclear waste at the bottom of their sea. The sea was so rough that both ships were struggling just to stay afloat. A boarding party was out of the question. The Chilean gunboat had no choice but to let her continue into Chilean waters, where the Pintail survived the storm in the lee of the Patagonian coast. Tellingly, when the storm-battered Pintail arrived in Japanese waters two weeks later, with a typhoon building in the east, her Japanese owners ordered the Pintail to wait out the storm 300 miles from Japanese shores.

In September 2010, France’s Areva loaded the first plutonium-based mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel into Reactor Number 3 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. As the years passed more and more Japanese leaders have become bolder in their pro-military and pro-nuclear pronouncements. In the weeks leading up to the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster, the issue of a nuclear-armed Japan became very public after a Chinese captain was arrested after he rammed Japanese coast guard vessels with his ship. In an interview with the British newspaper, The Independent, Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara asserted that Japan could develop nuclear weapons within a year and send a strong message to the world. “All our enemies: China, North Korea and Russia – all close neighbors – have nuclear weapons. Is there another country in the world in a similar situation? People talk about the cost and other things but the fact is that diplomatic bargaining power means nuclear weapons. All the [permanent] members of the [United Nations] Security Council have them.” Ishihara told The Independent the clash, which ended when police released the captain of the Chinese ship accused of ramming the Japanese coast guard vessel, had exposed his country’s weakness in Asia. “China wouldn’t have dared lay a hand on the Senkakus [if Japan had nuclear weapons].”

The week before the governor made his comments, Beijing announced that its 2011 defense budget would be increased by 13 percent. Further adding to the tension with Japan is that China officially surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy in January 2011. The governor said that a nuclear-armed Japan would also win more respect from Russia, which seized four Japanese-owned islands during the Second World War. And he advised his nation to rid itself of all restrictions in its constitution on the manufacture and sale of weapons. “We should develop sophisticated weapons and sell them abroad. Japan made the best fighters in the world before America crushed the industry. We could get that back.” Japanese nationalists have urged Japan’s postwar constitution, written by the United States during the American occupation, be abandoned. It makes Japan initiating war illegal.

A month after the governor made these comments, three reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant melted down including Reactor Number 3 with the plutonium-based MOX fuel. For the first time the larger Japanese public began to ask serious questions about the relationship between their government and the powerful Japanese utility companies and their plutonium stockpile.
A year later, more questions than answers remain.
________________________________________
Editor’s Note: Beginning in 1991 reporters for the National Security News Service undertook an investigation into a covert Japanese nuclear weapons program. Our work has continued over the years. It gave NSNS unique insights into the reasons for the misstatements and secrecy that surround the ongoing tragedy at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This story represents the work of a team of current and former reporters, fellows and interns for NSNS.

Joseph Trento has spent more than 35 years as an investigative journalist, working with both print and broadcast outlets and writing extensively. Before joining the National Security News Service in 1991, Trento worked for CNN’s Special Assignment Unit, the Wilmington News Journal, and prominent journalist Jack Anderson. Trento has received six Pulitzer nominations and is the author of five books, including Prelude to Terror, The Secret History of the CIA, Widows, and Prescription for Disaster. Joe currently serves as the editor of DCBureau.org.

http://www.dcbureau.org/201204097128/national-security-news-service/united-states-circumvented-laws-to-help-japan-accumulate-tons-of-plutonium.html

by: Jack Rasmus, Truthout | News Analysis

(Photo: Justen Eason / Flickr [3])

The Occupy Wall Street movement has raised the slogan of “We are the 99 percent” and coined the catchphrase that articulates the standoff they’ve begun: “99 percent vs. the 1 percent.” So far, the idea of taxing the rich has only been stated in general terms.

In order for it to have impact, it must be further clarified, or else it will be misinterpreted by politicians pushing ideas which they will falsely claim would tax the rich – such as Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s phony 9-9-9 plan, or even Obama’s “millionaires’ tax.”

Here are 13 true, progressive tax-the-rich proposals:

1. Require Professional Investors to Bring Their Offshore Trillions Back to US Banks 

About $4 trillion today is held in offshore tax havens by US investors, individuals and institutions in island nations such as Cayman Islands, Vanuatu, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Cyprus and others, and in more traditional havens such as Switzerland and Lichtenstein. The IRS has identified 27 of these, which it calls “special jurisdictions.”

If just $2 trillion of that $4 trillion being held offshore was required to be redeposited in US banks, those investors would have to pay the 35 percent, top-bracket personal income tax on that money the first year. This new requirement would raise about $700 billion.

Future earnings on the remainder would also be taxed in the second to fifth years, yielding another $200 billion a year. Anyone refusing to repatriate funds could receive a 10 percent penalty after 90 days, followed by additional similar penalties. Countries that refused to cooperate should have their US-based assets frozen and taxed until they comply.

2. Require US-Based Multinationals to Repatriate Funds Hoarded in Offshore Subsidiaries

Multinational corporations today are hoarding between $1 and $1.4 trillion in their offshore subsidiaries, thereby refusing to pay the required 35 percent corporate tax rate. If they were required to repatriate just the lower amount, $1 trillion, it would raise $350 billion in the first year and another $140 billion a year in each of the next four years. A 50 percent tariff could be imposed on re-imported products produced offshore by any company refusing to repatriate these funds.

3. Incentivize Domestic Investment and Job Creation for Corporations Sitting on Trillions in Cash 

Large US corporations today are hoarding between $2 and $2.5 trillion in cash and refusing to invest it in the United States, instead preparing to buy back stock, increase dividends or acquire other companies. US companies refusing to create jobs by domestically investing, within six months, at least one third of their current $2 trillion cash hoard would be taxed at a 15 percent surtax rate for the remaining six months of the first fiscal year. This measure would raise another $300 billion in tax revenue for the first year. The tax would repeat for those not investing their cash hoard in the subsequent second year at the same rate.

4. Implement a Financial Transactions Tax on Stocks, Bonds and Derivatives

At least $150 to $200 billion a year would be raised by implementing a financial transactions tax as follows:

• $1.00 per every common stock trade for stock value traded $10,000 or less.
• Add $100.00 for stock trades valued $10,000 to $100,000.
• One percent tax on all trades worth more than $100,000.
• One dollar for every $1,000 value for all forms of corporate bond sales, both investment and junk-grade bonds.
• A similar charge for commercial paper transactions.
• $1 per $100 notional value for all interest rate, currency and other derivatives trades, levied on each of the counterparties.
• 1 percent tax of notional value for all credit default swaps derivatives trades.

5. Raise Capital Gains, Dividends Tax and Restore Estate Tax to 1980 Levels

This proposal raises taxes on capital gains and dividends from the current 15 percent to the 35 percent rate that is currently levied on all top-bracket personal incomes. It would also tax carrying interest at the same rate, and require all hedge fund managers to pay 35 percent, instead of their current 15 percent. Estate tax rates and thresholds would be restored to 1980 levels. These measures raise at least $125 billion in the first year, as well as an additional $125 billion per year for the next four years.

6. End the Bush-Era Tax Cuts 

The Bush tax cuts passed between 2001 and 2004 cost approximately $2.9 trillion over the last decade. Extending the Bush tax cuts for another decade will cost another $2.2 to $2.7 trillion. These extensions in 2010-2011 alone cost the US budget about $270 billion a year. Immediately suspending the Bush tax cuts for 2012, the second year, will save $270 billion.

7. Restore Top Personal and Corporate Tax Rates to 1980 Levels

Proposal 5 addresses only capital gains, dividends and estate tax rates within the broader personal income tax. Proposal 6 addresses revenue savings for only one more year, 2012. Proposal 6 includes revenue potentially raised from raising the top marginal income tax rate or the top marginal corporate income tax rate back to 1980 levels of 50 percent. It does not include numerous tax credits, exemptions, subsidies and other tax loopholes for the wealthy and corporations.

Restoring the top marginal rates for the personal income tax in general and the corporate income tax to the 50 percent level in 1980, as well as raising capital gains and dividends to the 50 percent level would raise more than $100 billion more in tax revenue per year.

8. Stabilize State Revenues With a Business-to-Business 2 Percent Value-Added Tax (VAT

Consumers and households pay a significant sales tax to provide state government revenues. Businesses buying from other businesses should also pay an appropriate “business to business” sales tax on intermediate goods they buy from each other, just as households pay on final goods sales. The initial tax should be levied at half the consumer sales tax rate in the first year. After that, it should be scaled to an equal rate over a five-year period.

This business sales tax, a “value-added tax” only on intermediate goods sales, would in most cases fully stabilize state revenues.

9. De-Incentivize States’ “Race to the Bottom” With a Relocation Tax

This tax would prevent states from competing with each other in a “race to the bottom” to lure companies from each other, which has been increasingly undermining state revenues for more than a decade.  It would be a federal level tax designed to offset any tax advantage to a company from moving from its current state to another state.

Should the company relocate nonetheless, the revenue from the tax is earmarked for spending on job creation and job retraining for workers negatively affected by the relocation.

10: Increase the Social Security Payroll Tax on Wages and Salaries (Earned Incomes)

Currently, less than 85 percent of all wage earners pay up to the current top annual limit of $106,800. This imbalance occurred because wage income at the top wage levels above $106,800 has risen faster than the Social Security base increase.

This proposal would raise the limit to $250,000 a year and indexes future limits to inflation to recover the remaining 15 percent of earned incomes (wages) not paying the Social Security tax above $106,800.

This approach is sometimes called “scrap the cap.” However, the full proposal here – “pay the same” – also calls for requiring an equivalent 6.7 percent tax on all capital incomes (dividends, interest, capital gains, rents) up to the $250,000.

“Pay the same” would not only stabilize current Social Security payments for the rest of the century, but would also create enough revenue to raise Social Security benefit payments by at least 20 percent above current levels.

11. Transform Social Security Into a True Social Insurance Tax

A 6.7 percent tax levied on all incomes (capital gains, dividends, interest, business rents, etcetera) up to $250,000 annually, and also indexed for inflation, would create an even larger Social Security surplus. It is called a “pay the same”: payroll equivalent tax.

This plan would transform Social Security from a “payroll tax” to a true social insurance tax. The tax revenue raised would amount to additional hundreds of billions of dollars a year and stabilize the Social Security trust funds for the rest of the 21st century while simultaneously providing a 20 percent raise in monthly Social Security benefit payments for the 48 million current and future retirees.

12.  Increase Medicare’s 1.45 Percent Payroll Tax by 0.25 Percent

An initial 0.25 percent increase in the payroll tax – that’s a combined 0.5 percent for employee and employer – for the next ten years provides all necessary funding to stabilize the Medicare system for ten years. Starting the 11th year, 2022, another 0.25 percent each tax increase is necessary. Thereafter, the 77 million baby boomers begin to decline as a cost factor and the costs of Medicare level off and then decline. So, a total tax increase of 0.5 percent over 20 years for both worker and employer totally covers the Medicare cost shortfalls. Those who consider this mere 1.7 percent tax for the next ten years unacceptable should consider that the typical employer-insured health care plan costs the equivalent of 30-35 percent of a worker’s take-home pay today.

13. Tax the “Big-Four Parasite Industries”: Banks, Oil, Health Insurance and Big Pharma

There are four industries that are sucking the economic lifeblood from the US economy at the expense of not only their workers (the bottom 80 percent households), but also of millions of smaller businesses. These industries “suck” superprofits out of the economy, away from wages and other businesses income. They are the most powerful in terms of both economic and political influence. They are the banks, the oil companies, the health insurance companies and the big pharmaceutical companies.

The excess prices they charge have been rising at double digits now for decades, allowing the big four parasites to reap superprofits at the expense of everyone else. An excess-profits tax equivalent to a minimum 10 percent of the gross profits or net income of the companies in these industries should be levied on the biggest companies in these industries. Those excess profits should be returned to consumers and small businesses as offsets for health care costs, gas and electric utility costs, and mortgage interest in the form of credits on annual federal tax returns.

The preceding proposals to “Tax the Rich” are excerpted from the recent pamphlet by Jack Rasmus, “An Alternative Program for Economic Recovery,” recently produced for various Teamsters unions in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. The longer pamphlet also includes proposals to restructure the banking and retirement systems in the United States, create 17 million jobs, save 11 million homeowners, and stabilize state and local government finances. For more information about the pamphlet, contact the author [4]. The pamphlet may also be ordered online [5].

Another super-slick global financial analysis firm has just tallied how much net worth is sloshing around in the pockets of the world’s most spectacularly wealthy. So when will the time finally come to stop the counting and start the taxing? In today’s astoundingly unequal global economy, banks can go either of two routes or both to bag ever bigger returns. They can squeeze the 99 percent with nuisance fees and penalties. Or they can cater to the richest of the rich.But both routes have bumps. The 99 percent can squeeze back, as they did earlier this month when Americans by the tens of thousands shut down their Bank of America accounts to protest the bank’s $5 debit card greed grab.

And the richest of the rich? To cater to these fortunates, you have to first find them. That can be difficult. Fortunately, financial industry consulting firms have stepped up to help. These firms have started publishing annual global wealth surveys that pinpoint where banks and luxury retailers and anyone else who wants in on top 1 percent action can find œhigh and œultra high net-worth individuals. Last week, a new global firm the Singapore-based Wealth-X entered the global wealth survey fray, joining a crowded field that already includes Capgemini and Merrill Lynch, the Boston Consulting Group, Credit Suisse, and Deloitte LLP.Each of these firms has tried to carve out a unique market niche. The Wealth-X specialty?

The world of the ultra rich, those individuals who can claim at least $30 million in net worth. And the researchers at Wealth-X haven’t just counted these ultras in their first annual global wealth census. They’ve tiered them.For the entire world and major nations Wealth-X teases out subsets of the super rich, from the $30-to-$50 million set to the $1 billion and up. For the first time, thanks to Wealth-X, we can compare the barely ultra with the comfortably ultra and those super ultras who can make the comfortables seem pinched. Our report maps exactly where the biggest money is located, Wealth-X CEO Mykolas Rambus boasted at a Geneva news conference last week, œand just how much there is.The Wealth-X research answers œhow many as well. The firm counts 185,795 individuals worldwide with at least $30 million net worth.

These ultra high net-worth individuals UHNWs hold $25 trillion in combined wealth.The global economy may be tottering, the new Wealth-X World Ultra Wealth Report 2011 goes on to inform us, but the lifestyle habits of UHNW individuals have not been severely impacted. Simply put, the Wealth-X analyst team gushes, the world’s wealthy elite are in a class of their own.

In that class, Americans pack a bunch of the rows. Of the near 186,000 global ultra rich, 57,860  or 30 percent carry U.S. passports. These American ultras hold a combined net worth of $7.6 trillion, an average of $131.4 million each.That average masks a huge concentration of wealth at America’s summit. The 455 deep-pocketed Americans worth at least $1 billion hold half a trillion more in wealth than the 29,415 Americans in the Wealth-X $30-to-$50 million tier. These numbers need a bit more context to have any real meaning, and we can take a stab at providing that context by glancing over at the œsuper committee deficit-reductions deliberations now underway in Washington, D.C.

The 12 lawmakers on this congressional super committee six Republicans and six Democrats are trying to trim $1.2 trillion off federal red ink over the next ten years. On their chopping block: Medicare, Social Security, and assorted other programs essential to the well-being of America’s 99 percent. The super committee reporting-out deadline comes next week. No one knows how much budget-cutting pain the panel will be recommending. But panel members could actually avoid all that pain and raise over $1 trillion in new money for investing in America simply by subjecting all U.S. individual net worth over $30 million to a modest wealth tax.

Our U.S. ultra wealthy, Wealth-X calculates, together hold almost $5.9 trillion over this $30 million threshold. An annual 5 percent wealth tax on this overage would raise over $293 billion a year, or $2.9 trillion over the next decade more than double the $1.2 trillion the super committee is so desperately looking to find. The most amazing part of this? America’s ultra rich could easily pay this 5 percent annual wealth tax for the next ten years and remain as rich as ever.

That’s because wealth begets wealth. All those trillions of dollars America’s ultras are currently holding don’t sit under some mattress. The ultra wealthy have those trillions invested in assets that generate short- and long-term returns. If America’s ultras averaged returns on those investments not that far above 5 percent over the next ten years, they could pay the wealth tax and still end the decade with higher personal net worths than when the decade began.

Back in the 1990s, a public-spirited financial industry superstar multimillionaire San Francisco money manager Claude Rosenberg spent a sizeable chunk of his personal fortune campaigning to get a similar message across about the enormous wealth of the wealthy. Rosenberg’s particular point: America’s fabulously rich could hike their annual contributions to charity by tenfold and still end up with higher personal fortunes. Rosenberg started a research group dedicated to sharing this message and the analysis behind it. He wrote a book and peppered the periodicals that rich people read with op-eds that detailed his group’s number crunching.In the year 2000, Rosenberg’s researchers would document, households with $1 million or more in income could have given $128 billion more to charity than they actually did in fact give, without losing any net worth over the course of the year.

Claude Rosenberg died three years ago at age 80, his message to the super rich essentially totally ignored. The vast increase in charitable giving by the rich he had hoped to inspire never materialized.The message to the rest of us from Rosenberg’s noble effort?The excess wealth our ultra wealthy hold, if put to the public good, could change the trajectory of America’s future. The ultra wealthy don’t seem to be willing to do that putting on their own.With a few tweaks of our tax code, we could do that putting for them.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/global-super-rich-stash-now-25-trillion-1321201867. All rights are reserved.

Any epoch of capitalism allegedly premised on competition is visible only from the rearview mirror. It is a leftist truism that in the process of competition, capitalism destroys competition. Competition, therefore, is transformed into its opposite: monopoly. Capitalism no longer survives by enlarging competition, but rather through its reduction. The supreme outcome of the contemporary globalization of monopoly capital has been an amplification of world exploitation, poverty rates, wealth disparities, and food insecurities. Since the mid-1970s the rate of world growth has stalled by nearly 70%

And one consequence of decelerating rates of growth has been a turn to financialization since about 1980 by giant firms unable to find sufficient high return investment outlets in production. Large corporations gradually began to rely on speculative investments made possible by highly leveraged assets and as a result have fomented financial crises of unfathomable proportions at a time when state systems everywhere are increasingly subject to the vagaries of the market and are forced to subsidize the failures of corporate capitalism through taxpayer sponsored bailouts.

Leaders at national, regional, and municipal levels have begun to ameliorate the resulting fiscal crises by disinvesting in social services and creating more regressive tax systems, thereby intensifying the effective level of exploitation. Hence, the internationalization of monopoly capital, rather than contributing to the stabilization of global systems, is aggrandizing crises in both the scarcely indistinct private and public sectors.

 Inequality, in all its repugnance, has become deeper and more entrenched. Today the richest 2% of adult individuals own more than half of global wealth, with the richest 1% accounting for 40% of total global assets. Although the gap in per capita income between the richest and poorest regions of the world fell from 15:1 to 13:1during the golden age of Keynesianism, it increased by 19:1 by 2002. And from 1970 to 2009 the per capita GDP of developing countries (excluding China) averaged a mere 6.3% of the per capita GDP of the G8 countries (the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, and Russia).

The opening decade of the twenty-first century has seen surges of food crises, with hundreds of millions of people chronically food-deprived, in an era of rising food prices and widespread speculation. In a report released last week by The World Hunger Organization 17.2 million U.S. households were food insecure in 2010, the highest level on record, as the Great Recession continues to wreak havoc on families across the country. On a global scale, the World Bank reports that over half the global population lives on less than $2.50 per day and over 800 million people go hungry daily. And according to UNICEF nearly 8 million human beings died in 2010 because they were simply too poor to stay alive. Meanwhile, the U.N. reported in 2005 that the richest 500 people in the world earned more than the poorest 416 million.

According to the same report the richest 350 people in the world own assets commensurable to more than 50% of the world’s population. And finally, according to a 1998 UN Development Report the wealthiest 15 people on the planet have assets that exceed the total annual income equal to the poorest 98% of those living on the African continent. The transcendent irony of the internationalization of monopoly capital is that this entire thrust toward monopolistic multinational-corporate development has been justified at every turn by a neoliberal ideology rooted in the vaulted rhetoric of “free market” competition.

Claims like these are specious to the point of logical cruelty.  For example, if Wal-Mart were a country according to a June, 2011 Report issued by Business Insider, its revenues would exceed the GDP Norway, the 25th largest economy in the world. In less than three minutes Business Insider debunks the mythology of free-market ideologues: Yahoo is bigger than Mongolia, Visa is bigger than Zimbabwe, Nike is bigger than Paraguay, McDonalds is bigger than Latvia, Amazon.com is bigger than Kenya, Apple is bigger than Ecuador, Ford is bigger than Morocco, Bank of America is bigger than Vietnam, General Electric is bigger than New Zealand, Chevron is bigger than the Czech Republic, and Exxon- Mobil is bigger than Thailand.  The monopolization of big business is endemic to capitalism. And the monopolization of capitalism produces corporatism. And corporatism bastardizes any prospect of establishing accessible and accountable democratic institutions and practices.

Take, for instance, the unrivaled monopolization of the U.S. financial sector. In 1990, the ten largest domestic financial institutions held only 10% of total financial assets. Today they own 70%. (Former U.S. Secretary of Labor asks “how else could we explain their apparent coordination on charging debit card fees?”) The largest five U.S. banks now hold $11 trillion in assets. Big banks ought to be partitioned (or destroyed). Perhaps we could learn from the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, a piece of legislation designed not only to encourage economic efficiency by reducing the market power of economic giants like railroads companies but also to thwart companies from becoming so large that their political power would undermine the democratic process.

The capitalist aspiration is ultimately one of irreducible self-annihilation. Corporate capitalists consecrate and condemn competition in the same breath and in so doing mistake mirrors for windows, growth for progress, and competition for contradiction.

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/wal-mart-larger-norway-exposing-myth-capital-competition-1322835390. All rights are reserved.

Unidentified woman: In Caracas, at the foot of Mt. Avila, the big mountain, inhabitants of the Barrio Simon Rodriguez, Las Barracas del Manicomio, founded by Maura, Marina Catalina, Luis, Jose, Socorro, Salumino, Victor, Pedro, Rosa and many others, today we say that we are visible, that we have a voice as legitimate citizens of this nation and inheritors of this earth. Those of us who live here announce the refounding of our barrio as a space of dignity, hope, peace, and future [for our children]. We who are today asserting our rights, we tell our history. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): The Casa de Cullura Simon Rodriguez in the barrio Simon Rodriguez, Lass Barracas del Manicomio, I think it was an experience similar to that of many other barrios. Over the years, the people of many communities in Venezuela were trying to break the circle around the popular neighborhoods the stigma that had been created by the media which meant that if you were living in a barrio you were associated with violence and delinquency instead of being associated with the work and the struggles that are the daily life of the barrio. The Casa de Cultura Simon Rodriquez had as one of its activities the Cineclub Manicomio. The cineclub came from years of experience. In the 1970s, the Venezuelan Federation of Centers of Cinematographic Culture emerged mostly as a political initiative and also as a social work initiative. It was an initiative of the community itself. The cineclub involved the projection of films on any wall, on any corner of the barrio. This created a space for people to come together in large numbers and from there people would organize the next assembly, the next mobilization, while discussing and socializing. Then there was a “jump”, and here I’m giving a very brief historical account, a moment in which there is a technological advance and also a change in the situation of the country. In the 1990s, during the city council of Aristobolo as mayor, there were some grants given to the barrios and thus a video camera came to Manicomio. From there, the fact that the projected image was no longer merely of some film that brings the community together but instead now we were the protagonists, we make visible each house, each inhabitant of the barrio, all the different social actors in the community [was a major change]. To see oneself as the protagonist of the images was an enormous advance for community organizing. And from there emerged the possibility of experiences not limited by the cineclub, the exchange of a film tape with another barrio and the ensuing conversation and discussion, of sharing experiences, but the chance to substitute images of ourselves on the TV monitor for the image of those who are denigrating us. 

Ricardo Marquez (Presidente de Catia TVe) : In the year 1989, we took a space in the Barrio Simon Rodriquez del Manicomio. There we founded the Casa de Cultura Simon Rodriquez, but all the time were getting threats that we were going to get kicked out by the police and the authorities. So a companero said that we should start a cineclub because if we lost the space we could still carry out our work in the streets. That is how the Cineclub Manicomio was born. The FEVEC lends a 16mm projector, and though an agreement with the CONAC, we were able to buy a Hi-8 camera, one of the first that came out, a VHS, a microphone, and audiophone. From there we took off, documenting the activities in the barrio.

Wilfredo Vasquez: We are here [filming] in the Casa de la Cultura Simon Rodriquez to enjoy the baseball game of Caracas vs. Magallanes. Here in the stands, you have been invited. [Vasquez interviewing a young boy on the street]: We are here with Dilinyer who watches these games every day. Which team are you rooting for? 

Dilinyer: Magallanes.

Vasquez: And why are you rooting for Magallanes? 

Dilinyer: Because Caracas has sunk too low.

Vasquez: Listen to that! And you think Magallanes will win tonight?

Dilinyer: Yes.

Vasquez: What is the message you would like to say to all the Magallaneros?

Dilinyer: That they should win a lot [of games] and that we will beat Caracas [for the championship].

Vasquez: Well, this is the message from one of the kids of the Magallanes barrio.

Wilfredo Vasquez: This is the site for Casa de la Cultura Simon Rodriquez del Manicomio and la Pastora which the municipal government headed by mayor Antonio Ledesma has refused to finish. Even though a budget of 25 million was approved, he is attempting to take the money away from the project because sadly in this country culture and education do not represent votes for them. That’s why we make the call to you not to get manipulated by the big money guys who will come to the barrio in this election year to manipulate you. Vote, but vote conscientiously! 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): I think the year 1998 was fundamental for the meeting that happened with the companeros from TVC Rubio to share the experiences of 23 de enero, Manicomio, Barquisimeto, everywhere, and to learn that it’s possible to build a transmitter with that technology like the comrades of TVC Rubio did so the images that are produced in the barrio and cineclub can be transmitted through a radio-electrical signal. 

Unidentified interviewer: Do you think it’s advantageous that Manicomio is situated in high ground in the west of Caracas?

Unidentified studio technician: Of course. Remember that in the signal transmission part, the part I work in, the higher you can put the antenna and the higher your position, to see the coverage you are going to have and see it with your own eyes, you are guaranteed that the signal will reach there. It doesn’t matter if you are working with low power because that has to do with transmission power, the antenna will compensate so it can reach the interested parties. As you know, the VHF, the channels for 2 to 13 on TV, are already occupied by the national coverage associations, the major broadcast networks. The only small opportunity possible [for local broadcasts] is the channels of UHF, but remember that there are people already there in the area of Caracas. So the stations that want to start setting up must do it now, because you guys will be the pioneers here in Caracas. The situation with Conatel has been, let’s say, difficult. The only thing we have accomplished is getting the first permit for the FM station of Michelana which is in position number 1. We have estimated that we are in position number 3 and 4. We haven’t won the war but have won a battle. Well, here is the TV transmitter, a simple power unit, the amplification unit, the controls, the inputs, and the power supply. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): In the year 1999, the doors open, there are extraordinary changes because the constitutive assembly also allows, not only that the encounter among diverse community initiatives is possible and the political environment permits discussion, but also it establishes and legalizes community media as a right and that the state must not only permit but stimulate the creation of these spaces of communication for the people. 

Ricardo Marquez (Presidente de Catia TVe): The Catia TVe project has been born from a lot of effort and has taken its strength from the power of the people and the process [of gaining power]. And there is an event in particular which I would like to bring up, and this is the first meeting we had with President Chavez. This happened in July of 2000. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): We were in the midst of a crowd of journalists and there is an interview in which we request a greeting to Catia. The President, with his characteristic wisdom, with his immediate identification with the people and their endeavors was moved by the idea of the community station. He declared this immediately and he made a connection. I think this is fundamental because it shows that the fight is listened to and accompanied by its leader. 

Ricardo Marquez (Presidente de Catia TVe): And in that meeting attended by Monica Gil, Leafar Guevara, Wilfredo Vasquez, Blanca Eekhout, we made a makeshift microphone in the middle of the night with tape and cardboard with a sign reading “Community Television of the West”. We met with President Chavez and he became enthusiastic about the idea. He said he wanted to give us support. At that moment, a military official showed up, an undersecretary of state who received orders [from President Chavez] to provide us with full support. This in the end did not really materialize, which was very hard. I kept going to Conatel to try and get our permits, but I would not be heard at that time and I was not taken seriously. 

Wilfredo Vasquez [being interviewed]: I think that the time has come for this type of [community] media. It is the moment for a media to not censor. It is time to tell this country the truth. This project, Linterna Majica, an alternative media project that intends to broadcast to [the communities of] La Pastora, to parts of Junquito, to parroquia Sucre, and 23 de Enero, it is important not only to develop this project but to help it spread to many parts of the country in order to transmit information that is truthful and accurate.

 President Hugo Chavez [being interviewed]: I bring a very Bolivarian greeting to all the people of Catia. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): Mr. President, what do you think about community broadcast stations, which is what we are developing, about the social appropriation of the means of communication?

 President Hugo Chavez: Well, this is marvelous and you deserve to be congratulated because you have leapt forward in the struggle, the vanguard of the struggle that will now happen with much greater force because as you know, tomorrow I will sign into effect the new legislation on telecommunications. This law establishes, through a very precise articulation, that communities have the right to create and manage communal media. Keep going, forge ahead, and congratulations! Now, when do you broadcast and from where? 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): We will begin TV broadcasts a month from today, but for now we are producing radio and coordinating with communities.

President Hugo Chavez: And where do you have your station?

 Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): We are presently in the Lidice Hospital. We are with Linterna Majica.

President Hugo Chavez: The idea is that Bolivarian schools with function this way too. We’re moving slowly in the direction – to enable the children themselves to make programs, to record the contents, do the interviews, and otherwise participate. That is wonderful. That is the democracy we want – the democracy of the people. Thank you [for your efforts]. So, where is Rangle Gomez, did he not come? Andrade, you are Vice Minister. This is Vice Minister Andrade, he was a captain [in the military], a Revolutionary Lieutenant, but he is now Vice Minister. I want to help them [talking to Vice Minister Andrade] because I can imagine how many difficulties they have gone through. They are with a community television station and I want you to go see them and find out in what manner we can help them. I also see this as a model that we can show to the people all over the country, in Guasdualito, San Fernando, Della Amacuro, so that people can begin to learn how beautiful it is to participate. Don’t you think so? You can be a national promoter [of community media]. I leave you in this young man’s hands [Vice Minister Andrade]; he is extraordinary. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): Your thoughts on the social appropriation of the communications media? 

Unidentified person being interviewed: I think it is very appropriate. It is not healthy that public communications remain trapped by only one social interest. It is absolutely indispensable that social participation should be expressed through independent media as well, that it be expressed in its social intention, in its social function. For this reason, if there is something that will make this law endure, it will be precisely these reasons. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): Your opinion on this law that provides for communities to have access to the means of communication?

Unidentified person being interviewed: I think an important element of this law is that it does not only look at the economics of the question. With this law, we will intensify the plans for citizen participation. Community radio and TV stations have lower wattage because they are intended to serve the local communities, which will help to increase the plural participation of organized communities in the generation of information. I think this is a great step forward for civil society. This organic [communications] law is being established as a medium for organized society to express its interests.

 Ricardo Marquez (Presidente de Catia TVe): When our companera Blanca Eekhout attended the Culture Prize events at Miraflores [the President’s Official Residence], she was finally able to talk to the president and to hand him a letter inviting him to the station’s inauguration. President Chavez told Blanca that he had wanted to talk to us, and she replied that we were also eager to talk to him but had been unable to. That very day, the president told us that he wanted to participate in the inauguration, but not on the date that we had planned because that day was the anniversary of the Vargas tragedy, with many activities already organized for that day, but that if it could be done on the 20th of December he could come. So we organized the whole activity for the 20th of December 2000. But the event was suspended because the vice minister of communications and the president of Conatel said that Catia TVe didn’t have a permit, and that a TV station without a permit could not be inaugurated.

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): I think the president has such a gift for listening, and Catia provided a practical example of this. Catia opened the door for discussing new legal rulings for broadcasting and became the first community station legalized this way. Up to that point, all through the Fourth Republic, these community stations were considered illegal and pirate, and could be persecuted and legally sanctioned. So because of this encounter [directly with the president], the door was opened because to go from the letter of the law to its reality there is an important leap, and this was facilitated by the president because on the day of the inauguration we still did not have the permit to function as a community TV station. We did not have it because there were no regulations that would allow it, even though the law was there, it was a dead letter. So the president promised to accompany us for the opening of our station. We had come up against an administrative snag because there had been no ruling made to allow for opening our channel. But the president activated the state structures so that they asserted what was in the Constitution. This encounter triggered the whole discussion about the need to have a new set of rules for community media, and as a consequence Catia TVe came into existence.

Crowd chanting at the inauguration of Catia TVe with the president on March 30, 2001: Our TV station is here! Our TV station is here!

Unidentified person shouting to the president: Hugo, here you will hear about the good things that are happening in our country!

President Hugo Chavez: Very good, but the bad as well. Both the good and the bad. Rather, let’s move away from these categories. We must hear the people’s opinions in their own words. And the alternative communities, and learn about the alternatives, yes, and the projects of the people. And also to wage war against lies.

President Hugo Chavez Frias (speaking at the inauguration of Catia TVe): So it will not be only Chavez on the TV networks anymore. No. Now we also have TeleCatia, in the hands of the people because it is the people who must enter into the battle. A TV station that is not manipulated by powerful economic interests – that is a marvelous thing. That is true liberty. Catia TVe is now officially inaugurated! 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): You can’t talk about organization in recent years without also talking about April 11th [the day that President Chavez was ousted in a coup de etat]. April 11th impacted the political, social, and emotional lives of our people. The 11th, and the 13th of April, were an extraordinary moment for the history of Venezuela and popular struggles around the world. On April 11th, we can see images from the alternative and community media, we can see images of the other voices and perspectives that neither the public nor private media showed. It’s the view of people in the streets, in the city. One can reconstruct what happened from the images from the companeros of COTRAIN, PANAFILMS, Catia TVe, from many people with a camera in their hands who had never been involved in an experience of communication other than their [personal] exercise. It was the [attempt at a] collective participation to document and gather those perspectives. And while all this is important, I think the most important thing is the [telling of] the truth. There were huge numbers of people who were there until the end, who were defending with their open hearts and without arms. Their only weapon was determination and love – they were there believing and defending the nation, the president, defending life. And that was made visible through community media despite its being absolutely ignored by the large media powers. We were in a difficult situation because we were in enemy territory. We were in the Lidice Hospital, which was under the control of the mayor Alfredo Pena. There were companeros recording, there were companeros taking material to move it elsewhere. 

Ricardo Marquez (Presidente de Catia TVe): On that day, the 11th of April, we dismantled the TV transmitter in the very early morning with the help of the hospital guards. The next day, we were concerned, thinking about what we could do. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): The recording studios had been dismantled and we were trying to set up in various spaces.

Ricardo Marquez (Presidente de Catia TVe): Companero Wilfredo took a vehicle to Miraflores and recorded what was happening there, where people were beginning to congregate. There were soldiers on top of Miraflores. One of the military folks started to make signs, asking the people to come. And Wilfredo took his camera to Catia and showed it around: “Look, the soldiers are with us! Let’s bring Chavez back!” From there began an expansive wave message transmission by means of cell phones, from house phones, by motorcyclists, taxi drivers, truck drivers, everyone began to mobilize with the aim of recovering the democracy.

 Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): On the 12th, there was an important level of mobilization through the internet, by means of intermediaries, calling for a cacerolazo for the night, searching [for an appropriate response to this emergency]. There, the work of Catia TVe and other community media was important. I think that what is important is the exercise of communication that the people made. Not be means of some pre-established formula, but through the direct exercise of the right to communicate.

Iris Castillo (Director of Catia TVe): On April 12th, several companeros from the channel went to the streets in the evening with a camera and arrived at Miraflores [the Presidential Palace] where they recorded the people assembled there, refusing [to recognize] the coup de etat.

 Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): When we speak about the 11th, we say that there were three important moments. First was the “big farce”, the show woven by the large media channels, who actually were the architects of the coup in which the political, religious, and military people were merely actors taking part – a mere piece inside a montage – to justify to the world the terrible action that was being carried out against the Venezuelan people. On the 11th of April, the first important act of communication was to tell people not to believe the lies. Through those at the bridge defending the dignity of the people and through those who were watching television who said this is not true – they did not believe. But in addition to that terrible action, there is a crucial moment when, on the 12th, the media repression emerges. Repressive occupations were accompanied by cameras. The telecasting advices the search of the Bolivarians, where it is said that Aristoulo was dead. Facing this repression that had as a goal to keep people from going out [and mobilizing], the people carried a different reading – it actually became an encouragement to go out to the streets. First, they [the people] did not believe the lie. Then they acted differently from what the media campaign was prescribing and went to the streets. Then, facing the silence in which just cartoons were being on the major media stations on April 13th while an amazing popular insurrection to recover the nation, this media silence was not accepted by the people, who forged their own communication channels. They went to the streets, to the assemblies, from mouth to mouth, by flyers, the internet, cell phones, motorcycles going from one place to another, community media gathering images, and later the recovery of the sate broadcasting station. In other words, there were thousands of actions everywhere, by everybody, not only because of our right to democracy but also our right to speak for ourselves and to change our reality.

Crowd chanting in front of Presidential Palace: Chavez hold on – the people are rising up! We want Chavez! We want Chavez! 

Leaders of the Mass Mobilization addressing the crowd in front of Presidential Palace (April 13, 2002): To the Venezuelan people, and to anyone else interested – I, Hugo Chavez Frias, Venezuelan, President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela declare that I have not renounced the legitimate power. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): That a television station as small as Catia, which in our first phase we had a transmitter of barely 30 watts and with a small radius of transmission, that this television station was able to act as a hindrance to those who took up the role of the vanguard of the opposition [to the democratically-elected government of Hugo Chavaz] and who claimed the role of the promoters of freedom of expression, with the mayor, who was [formerly] a journalist. They adopted the role of communication leaders, [defending] the discourse of liberty and freedom of speech – those gentlemen, in addition to threatening and boycotting us, one day decided to shut down Catia TVe.

Blanca Edkhout (July 10, 2003): We don’t have access to this area [our station], but our lawyers are here.

 Unidentified man: Today, we are taking the equipment and taking back the space that they [Catia TVe] were occupying. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): Locks were placed; the equipment was taken, thus expropriating the right of the people of the Catia community on top of closing a space that was actually quite small.

  Alfredo Pera (mayor of Caracas): I don’t know if you remember that a year ago, the Vatican, the government of the Pope, received a demand from the government of Rome, because there was a Vatican Radio antenna near a school and it had been proven that the radiation from the antenna was causing health problems in the kids, in some cases cancer, the Vatican had to remove these transmitters, and the Pope never complained that his rights to freedom of speech had been taken away. Our hospitals act with autonomy, I don’t know if you know that. What I know about the events is that the medical community of the Lidice Hospital, all the community, including the workers, were opposed to this so called station.

 Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): That was terrible, but it also generated a level of identification of the people with Catia TVe. Not only in Venezuela but from around the world we received support from organizations, and a lot of media everywhere that identified with our struggle. All this made visible the true colors of the oligarchy, of the Venezuelan opposition. They are fascists that are radically opposed to letting the people, the communities, have their own voices. They utilize “freedom of speech” to construct a lie, a constant farce, as they have never allowed the people to express themselves. This mayor, who was for a long time the star journalist of a television channel and wrote in one of the main newspapers, the first thing he does is to close a small attempt by the people to communicate to the people from the community of the Barrio Simon Rodriquez, Manicomio.

 Unidentified newscaster: The journalist for El Obsevador, Noe Pernia, made a statement in regard to the incident with a supposed community journalist in the context of a protest by university students last Tuesday.

 Ricardo Marquez (Presidente de Catia TVe): I think that those journalists attack community media journalists first because they are scared Because all professions want to hold on to their small kingdoms – the engineer is the only one “qualified” to build houses – but in this country, people have built more than two and a half million houses in 40 years without engineers or architects, perhaps poorly made but the people themselves have done it, something that the state had never done. The lawyers are those who supposedly have discernment, truth, because they have the Roman code of law on their side. So certified journalists are in a difficult situation because they want to be the only ones with the right to tell us what is happening. 

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): I think that community media are a central experience, but they must be only a school, spaces for gathering, so that the people can develop the audio-visual discourse – build, take power, as we have. The Mission Robinson has been an extraordinary example, the right that everyone has to read and write. We also have the right to write our own history and reconstruct the image that we have of ourselves and project it to the world. 

Gabriel Gil (Director of Catia TVe): Catia TVe is proposed as an instrument for the organization of the communities and the people along the path to socialism. The idea is that communication will be useful for organization and formation [of a people’s democracy]. Communication, organization, and formation will be useful in the taking of power by the communities, for the direct exercise of democracy. In socialism, the direct exercise of democracy is key, and communication cannot be excluded from that.

Blanca Edkhout (Fundadora de Catia TVe): What is most important to keep from this experience is first that rights cannot be delegated, and the right to communication is a fundamental one that shapes us as human beings. For this reason the exercise of speaking for oneself must be permanent. The effort for the establishment of Catia TVe is one of many years, of many people, and it’s the search of a people to engage in social transformation. Sometimes, we think that things are there because they were given to us, that they dropped from the heavens. It’s not so, it’s a constant and never ending effort, it’s believing in dreams no matter what. 

Ricardo Marquez (Presidente de Catia TVe): The simple fact of having gone through Catia TVe, and of having held a camera, a microphone, made a video, even if it’s only done once, we have reached our goal, we demystify the medium, which is crucial. Television loses its alienating power that it has over individuals because then people know how it’s done. That’s why we say don’t just watch television, make it!

 The Population Myth

People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor

 By George Monbiot. October 03, 2009,  The Guardian — 29th September 2009 —

It’s no coincidence that most of those who are obsessed with population growth are post-reproductive wealthy white men: it’s about the only environmental issue for which they can’t be blamed. The brilliant earth systems scientist James Lovelock, for example, claimed last month that “those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.”(1)

 But it’s Lovelock who is being ignorant and irrational. A paper published yesterday in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, Sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5% of the world’s population growth and just 2.4% of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4% of the extra people, but 14% of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world’s population growth happened in places with very low emissions(2).

 Even this does not capture it. The paper points out that around one sixth of the world’s population is so poor that it produces no significant emissions at all. This is also the group whose growth rate is likely to be highest. Households in India earning less than 3,000 rupees a month use a fifth of the electricity per head and one seventh of the transport fuel of households earning Rs30,000 or more. Street sleepers use almost nothing. Those who live by processing waste (a large part of the urban underclass) often save more greenhouse gases than they produce.

Many of the emissions for which poorer countries are blamed should in fairness belong to us. Gas flaring by companies exporting oil from Nigeria, for example, has produced more greenhouse gases than all other sources in sub-Saharan Africa put together(3). Even deforestation in poor countries is driven mostly by commercial operations delivering timber, meat and animal feed to rich consumers. The rural poor do far less harm(4). The paper’s author, David Satterthwaite of the International Institute for Environment and Development, points out that the old formula taught to all students of development – that total impact equals population times affluence times technology (I=PAT) – is wrong. Total impact should be measured as I=CAT: consumers times affluence times technology.

Many of the world’s people use so little that they wouldn’t figure in this equation. They are the ones who have most children. While there’s a weak correlation between global warming and population growth, there’s a strong correlation between global warming and wealth. I’ve been taking a look at a few superyachts, as I’ll need somewhere to entertain Labour ministers in the style to which they’re accustomed. First I went through the plans for Royal Falcon Fleet’s RFF135, but when I discovered that it burns only 750 litres of fuel per hour(5) I realised that it wasn’t going to impress Lord Mandelson. I might raise half an eyebrow in Brighton with the Overmarine Mangusta 105, which sucks up 850 l/hr(6). But the raft that’s really caught my eye is made by Wally Yachts in Monaco. The WallyPower 118 (which gives total wallies a sensation of power) consumes 3400 l/hr when travelling at 60 knots(7).

That’s nearly one litre per second. Another way of putting it is 31 litres per kilometre(8). Of course to make a real splash I’ll have to shell out on teak and mahogany fittings, carry a few jet skis and a mini-submarine, ferry my guests to the marina by private plane and helicopter, offer them bluefin tuna sushi and beluga caviar and drive the beast so fast that I mash up half the marine life of the Mediterranean. As the owner of one of these yachts I’ll do more damage to the biosphere in ten minutes than most Africans inflict in a lifetime. Now we’re burning, baby.

Someone I know who hangs out with the very rich tells me that in the banker belt of the lower Thames valley there are people who heat their outdoor swimming pools to bath temperature, all round the year. They like to lie in the pool on winter nights, looking up at the stars. The fuel costs them £3000 a month. One hundred thousand people living like these bankers would knacker our life support systems faster than 10 billion people living like the African peasantry. But at least the super wealthy have the good manners not to breed very much, so the rich old men who bang on about human reproduction leave them alone.

In May the Sunday Times carried an article headlined “Billionaire club in bid to curb overpopulation”. It revealed that “some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly” to decide which good cause they should support. “A consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.”(9) The ultra-rich, in other words, have decided that it’s the very poor who are trashing the planet. You grope for a metaphor, but it’s impossible to satirise.

James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven’t been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich. The obsessives could argue that the people breeding rapidly today might one day become richer. But as the super wealthy grab an ever greater share and resources begin to run dry, this, for most of the very poor, is a diminishing prospect. There are strong social reasons for helping people to manage their reproduction, but weak environmental reasons, except among wealthier populations.

The Optimum Population Trust glosses over the fact that the world is going through demographic transition: population growth rates are slowing down almost everywhere and the number of people is likely, according to a paper in Nature, to peak this century(10), probably at around 10 billion(11). Most of the growth will take place among those who consume almost nothing. But no one anticipates a consumption transition. People breed less as they become richer, but they don’t consume less; they consume more. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers.

Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock’s words, “hiding from the truth”. It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich. So where are the movements protesting about the stinking rich destroying our living systems? Where is the direct action against superyachts and private jets? Where’s Class War when you need it? It’s time we had the guts to name the problem. It’s not sex; it’s money. It’s not the poor; it’s the rich. www.monbiot.com