FROM HIROSHIMA TO FUKUSHIMA!

It is tragic that Japan should suffer the brunt of nuclear catastrophe twice in a span of sixty years: once when its military misadventure ended up in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a second time when its nuclear misadventure ended up in Fukushima. While the first catastrophe ended the Second World War, will the second catastrophe mark the beginning of the end of the Nuclear Age?

The people will never vote for a nuclear party, be it in Japan or Germany, America or China, India or Pakistan! This belated awareness turned German Chancellor Angela Merkel the nuclear hawk to a nuclear dove. Her somersault setting a 2022-deadline for the nuclear exit policy has confounded her critics and robbed her political opponents, the Social Democrats, of their political plank. While her detractors call it rank opportunism, her supporters call it robust pragmatism – the same pragmatism which Vladimir Lenin displayed providing a minor role for private sector in the erstwhile Soviet Union in the 19202s or which Deng Xiaoping displayed in allowing market socialism to function in China in the 1980s. Needless to say a series of poll debacles for Christian Democrats and a massive demonstration against her nuclear policy forced her to read the writing on the wall.

Since Hiroshima, not a decade passes without a nuclear disaster. The year 1957 saw two mishaps, leading to radiation, one in the Soviet Union (Mayak) and the second in the UK (Cumbria); and in 1961, a minor explosion while the US Army was conducting experiments. And in 1979 came America’s worst disaster causing radioactive emission in Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island; and the nightmare of all was Chernobyl in 1986 when one of the reactors exploded, the fire burning for nine days emitting radiation a hundred times more than that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then started the rethinking on nuclear energy, not just by the Soviet Union but by the entire sane world!

(Copyright: Sunny Thomas @2011)