Paper Cranes (Part One)
A massive explosion detonated in Beirut on August 6th, 2020. The ‘net swarmed with cell phone video of the blast, which looked inordinately atomic in nature, yet supposedly was the result of an accidental fire detonating a stored supply of 2800 tons of ammonium nitrate, the same stuff they use for both fertilizer and bombs. The initial towering plumes of smoke from the fire were menacing enough, but the ensuing detonation looked positively nuclear, complete with ground zero zone destruction and an ominously orange mushroom cloud. 140 people dead, over 5,000 injured, and because of the ensuing carnage, better than 300,000 people became homeless.
Lebanon was already suffering from an increased caseload of Covid-19 and a shortage of medical resources and food supplies. Then its global port city was more or less destroyed by that blast. The Lebanese were irked, rightfully so, and demanded answers as to why that much hazardous material was sitting in a downtown warehouse for six years.
That blast reminded me, while penning the apocalyptic natures of 2020, it’d be negligent not to include some thoughts on nukes and nuclear power.
That week marked the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings. To date, the United States remains the only world power which has actively used nuclear weapons on existing cities. On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM, the U.S. B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy,” a four ton uranium bomb on the city center of Hiroshima. Seconds after detonation, the estimated temperature was 5,400-7,200 degrees Fahrenheit at ground zero. Almost everything within one mile was completely destroyed by the blast and ensuing firestorm. A black rain of highly radioactive particles fell on the city, causing additional radiation exposure.
An estimated 140,000 people, including those with radiation-related injuries and illnesses, died through Dec. 31, 1945, which was about 40 percent of Hiroshima’s population of 350,000 before the attack. Everyone within a radius of 1,600 feet from ground zero died that day. The total death toll, including those Hiroshima survivors who eventually died from radiation-related cancers, was about 300,000. Most of the people exposed to Little Boy’s radiation developed symptoms such as vomiting and hair loss, and died within three to six weeks.
Three days later, on August 9, 1945, a second bomb named “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki. 35,000 people immediately perished, estimated casualties panned out to be somewhere between 80,000 to 100,000 people. Fat Man was a bigger bomb than Little Boy, but less people died at Nagasaki because the bomb was dropped outside the city’s center and the terrain wasn’t as flat as Hiroshima. Nevertheless, 70% of the city’s industrial zone was destroyed. Similar long term radiation effects resulted for Nagasaki’s population.
Over a half million Japanese survivors of the bombs are now certified as hibakusha, stigmatized throughout Japan in the same manner as India’s untouchables, mostly due to public ignorance about radiation sickness. To be recognized as hibakusha, wherein one may receive allowance stipends and free medical treatment from the Japanese government, those citizens had to be within two kilometers of the blast, or exposed to those areas within two weeks of the blasts, or exposed to fallout from the bombs, or they were unborn as of yet but carried by pregnant women who’d been exposed to any of those former conditions. Hibakusha and their children are derided throughout Japanese culture, often refused employment or services, suffering daily discrimination. Long term sociological effects of the only use of nuclear weapons on civilian populations linger in Pan-Asian sociology.
We Americans are responsible for that.
I’ve read too many nationalist historian takes on how President Truman’s decision to use the bombs saved American lives and averted a costly invasion of Japan. Poppycock, to use one of my mother’s aphorisms. It’s usually pro-nationalist American archivists who pose that justification. More measured analysts note Winston Churchill and other non-American leaders of state knew that Russian entry into the war had already convinced Japan to consider surrender, as they weren’t doing so well because of Allied blockades and continuous bombings resulting in millions of Japanese becoming homeless. American nationalism was jacked up like never before after Pearl Harbor, and Truman and his advisors wanted to play in the sandbox with their new toys to intimidate Russia (Truman and Stalin had been sparring for some time during his presidency) and remind them not to push the West during negotiations of post-war European politicking, as well as ceding any claims to the spoils of war in the Pacific theater. We wanted to show the Reds that fucking with us was a recipe for disaster.
Nearly half a million Japanese people died because one whiteboy wanted to have a dick measuring contest.
In present day Hiroshima, multi-colored origami paper cranes decorate most avenues and byways of the city. They’re symbols of peace, perpetuated by Sadako Sasaki, a 12 year old bomb survivor who developed leukemia after her exposure to Hiroshima radiation at the age of 2. With little embitterment, she began folding paper cranes using medicine wrappers after hearing an old Japanese story that those who fold a thousand cranes are granted one wish. She passed away three months after she started the effort. Former U.S. President Barack Obama brought four paper cranes that he folded himself when he visited in May of 2016, becoming the first serving American leader to visit Hiroshima.
I’ve never been to Japan, but the arrays of paper cranes look lovely in photos, and seem to mete out a kind of symmetry, a message of hope of sorts, an ethereal balancing of a horrific injustice. I have a folded paper crane myself. I picked it up at a Phish show at a non-profit booth supporting anti-nuke movements and measures. Ugh, I know, how utterly white of me. I’m not a big fan of jam bands, and while I appreciate the musical prowess of the heir apparent to Jerry and the Dead, they’re not really my bag. I’ve developed a middling superstition about the crane. I’ve perched it in some dangling branches of an ivy plant I’ve been nursing for the last four or five years, and there’s some ridiculous part of me that whispers in my ear, as long as that little black paper crane rests there safely, without harm or unrest, as long as I look out for it, the world won’t have to suffer another nuclear incident anytime soon.
It’s a stupid conceit. But you never know. Little energies can combine to create bigger ones. Same with good intentions. Those little superstitions can sometimes deliver good karma. Power of mind thing. Self fulfilling prophecies. Thought dictates reality, sure as the sun rises. If enough of us believe in a thing, that thing is probably, eventually, going to happen, for better or for worse.
The Bay of Pigs and Kennedy. Chernobyl. Three Mile Island. It’s all perfect horseshit, through and through. I’m as anti-nuke as can be. I have to be. To be a true human being, you can’t support the existence of nuclear weapons. To do so means accepting a level of culpable deniability. Nukes are dead ends. Nuclear power isn’t sustainable. We can’t safely store the waste – the Yucca Mountain and Hanford depositories, as well as the other 19 nuclear waste dumps across the nation, will be toxic and near impossible to clean up for the next ten thousand years. It’s an inherently unsafe industrial undertaking.
Meltdowns have been narrowly averted hundreds of times across the 57 operating nuclear power plants in the United States. California had two nuclear plants until recently; the San Onofre plant in San Diego was shuttered a few years back, the Diablo Canyon plant is still running, right in the picturesque vicinity of southern Big Sur, only 70 miles away from the San Andreas earthquake fault slated to give way any old day now, geologically speaking. If Diablo melts down, Californians can kiss their way of life good bye. It’ll affect the entire region, from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It’ll render the entire central coast a wasteland.
If that happens during a major earthquake, California will essentially become the apocalypse’s home turf, just as it’s often portrayed in movies and film and even my own serialized storytelling. In reality, there won’t be an epically majestic struggle for survival between survivors and mutants battling among dystopian ruins. Nope. Everyone will be dead and they’ll have perished in agonizing ways. Those few fortunate enough to survive a nuclear plant meltdown and a Richter scale 9.0 trembler would become refugees in Arizona, Oregon, or Nevada.
Diablo Canyon was supposedly reinforced to withstand at least a 6.8 earthquake, and its dome bolstered to repel a terrorist airliner crash after 9-11. What happens if an 8.0 quake or greater comes along? Nobody knows. Nothing good, that’s certain. I render a fantasy version of this potentially horrific calamity in the serialized fiction of The Worldshift Chronicles.
In 2011, the Fukushima nuclear incident in Japan was a prime example of how earthquakes and nuclear power plants are a Grade A shit storm mix. Millions of gallons of radioactive waters poured into the Pacific Ocean after an earthquake driven, fourteen-meter-high tsunami hit the plant and resulted in three reactor meltdowns, hydrogen explosions, and widespread radioactive contamination, prompting Japanese officials to issue evacuations of everyone within a twenty-kilometer range of the plant.
It’s not hard to err on the side of caution with nuclear plants located anywhere on the increasingly volatile Pacific Rim. Get rid of the fucking things once and for all. Nuclear power isn’t a viable energy source. It’s a profit-based infrastructure created without regard for all, servicing the rich, endangering the many. It’s going to take many years to advance our technologies enough where we might figure out how to safely decontaminate our vast stockpiles of nuclear waste, rather than letting it sit hot and toxic underneath our sovereign soil.
And not so sovereign soil, as a matter of record. The Marshall Islands still host a massive concrete dome the locals there call ‘The Tomb,’ full of irradiated soil and debris from American nuclear testing, mostly over and on the Marshallese islands of Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll. They remain the sole foreign governance apart from Japan that’s had to directly deal with American nuclear legacies, having spent the better part of the years between 1948 and 1956 enduring the detonations of over sixty nuclear bombs.
According to a Los Angeles Times investigation conducted a few years back, the U.S. also shipped 130 tons of radioactive soil from our own country’s testing sites to store in the dome at the Marshal Islands. Marshallese leaders fired up a massive lawsuit back in 1988 against the U.S., asking for 2.3 billion dollars in reparations; a compact titled The Nuclear Claim Tribunal was established, but U.S. courts have been uncooperative, issuing only 4 million dollars in claims. Adding insult to injury is the reality the Marshall Islands are rapidly undergoing changes to their ways of life because of climate change spurred on by industrialized countries. Rising sea levels threaten to submerge many atolls which host Marshallese citizens. And so here again, we have third world nations paying the costs of first world nation hubris.
Even now, some fifty odd years later, many parts of the Marshall Islands are as radioactive as Chernobyl and Fukushima. Though Marshallese islanders were evacuated to nearby islands while the U.S. conducted years of testing, they eventually returned and many ended up suffering and dying from radiation poisoning years after testing had ceased. The Marshall Islands are the ‘unknown’ second nation that suffered from United States deployment of nuclear weapons.
A limited nuclear exchange between any two nations will result in the radical alteration of global weather patterns, the poisoning of the planet’s air stream with radioactive isotopes, food chain viability, and the abject interruption of international commerce. A full exchange would culminate in the near eradication of our entire species and very likely an outright extinction. Aside from the millions who’d die in the initial strikes of civilian cities, the ensuing nuclear winter would kill most if not all of the remaining survivors and would alter the compositions of our ozone layer as dense ash and blasted particulates blotted out the skies, bringing on a global famine with the destruction of the food chain as crops the world over failed from lack of sunlight and drops in temperature.
The complete lack of insight in creating, maintaining, and improving an arsenal of mass destruction weapons that upon their use, would result in irradiated land masses rendered uninhabitable for millennia, is totally mindless. We live on a planet that’s 75% covered in water, and we’re going to permanently muck up a significant portion of that remaining habitable land space? We’re already doing a bang-up job of polluting that measly 25% land mass. If nukes don’t end us, irreversible climate change will.
Mutual assured destruction is not a sustainable deterrence. At some point, someone short on possessing empathy of what it would mean to kill millions is going to say fuck it and hit the red button out of sheer impulse. That’s just how some humans roll. It’s nothing short of a miracle That Guy didn’t use any nukes during his tenure, that same guy who asked his advisors if a nuke detonation might deter advancing hurricanes. You can bet he desperately wanted to, probably against Iran more than anyone or anything else.
Not only have our technological advances outrun our intellectual ones, the focus of those advances tends to lean toward militaristic or industrial applications designed for defense or profit, rather than infrastructure improvements or health care, or sociological considerations like hunger, poverty, and mental illness.
Continued….
*Compiled from August 6, 2020