When the US Embassy, US Information Service (USIS), and CIA launched their vigorous campaign to promote nuclear energy in Japan, they turned to Matsutaro Shoriki, the father of Japanese baseball, who ran the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper and the Nippon Television Network. After two years’ imprisonment as a Class-A war criminal, Shoriki had been released without trial; his virulent anti-communism helped redeem him in American eyes (see Tetsuo Arima, “Shoriki’s Campaign to Promote Nuclear Power in Japan and CIA Psychological Warfare,” unpublished paper presented at Tokyo University of Economics, November 25, 2006). Shoriki’s newspaper agreed to co-sponsor the much-hyped US exhibit welcoming the atom back to Japan on November 1, 1955 with a Shinto purification ceremony in Tokyo. The US ambassador read a message from Eisenhower declaring the exhibit “a symbol of our countries’ mutual determination that the great power of the atom shall henceforward be dedicated to the arts of peace.”
Japan’s nuclear history in perspective: Eisenhower and atoms for war and peace
by Peter Kuznick
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/japans-nuclear-history-perspective-eisenhower-and-atoms-war-and-peace
After six weeks in Tokyo, the exhibit traveled to Hiroshima and six other cities. It highlighted the peaceful applications of nuclear energy for generating electricity, treating cancer, preserving food, controlling insects, and advancing scientific research. Military applications were scrupulously avoided. The nuclear future looked safe, abundant, exciting, and peaceful. The turnout exceeded expectations. In Kyoto, the USIS reported, 155,000 people braved snow and rain to attend.
The steady spate of films, lectures, and articles proved enormously successful.
Officials reported, “The change in opinion on atomic energy from 1954 to 1955 was spectacular … atom hysteria was almost eliminated and by the beginning of 1956, Japanese opinion was brought to popular acceptance of the peaceful uses of atomic energy”.
Such exultation proved premature. Antinuclear organizing by left-wing political parties and trade unions resonated with the public. An April 1956 USIS survey found that 60 percent of Japanese believed nuclear energy would prove “more of a curse than a boon to mankind” and only 25 percent thought the United States was “making sincere efforts” at nuclear disarmament. The Mainichi newspaper blasted the campaign: “First, baptism with radioactive rain, then a surge of shrewd commercialism in the guise of ‘atoms for peace’ from abroad.” The newspaper called on the Japanese people to “calmly scrutinize what is behind the atomic energy race now being staged by the ‘white hands’ in Japan.”
But intensified USIS activities over the coming years began to bear fruit. A classified report on the US propaganda campaign showed that in 1956, 70 percent of Japanese equated “atom” with “harmful,” but by 1958, the number had dropped to 30 percent. Wanting their country to be a modern scientific-industrial power and knowing Japan lacked energy resources, the public allowed itself to be convinced that nuclear power was safe and clean. It had forgotten the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 1954, the Japanese government began funding a nuclear research program. In December 1955, it passed the Atomic Energy Basic Law, establishing the Japan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC). Shoriki became minister of state for atomic energy and first chair of the JAEC. Japan purchased its first commercial reactor from Britain but quickly switched to US-designed light water reactors. By mid-1957, the government had contracted to buy 20 additional reactors.
In the United States, the AEC aggressively marketed nuclear power as a magic elixir that would power vehicles, feed the hungry, light the cities, heal the sick, and excavate the planet. Eisenhower unveiled plans for an atomic-powered merchant ship and an atomic airplane. In July 1955, the United States generated its first commercial nuclear power. In October 1956, Eisenhower informed the United Nations that the United States had agreements with 37 nations to build atomic reactors and was negotiating with 14 more.
By 1958, the United States was becoming almost giddy with the prospect of planetary excavation under the AEC’s Project Plowshare, which proposed to use peaceful nuclear blasts to build harbors, free inaccessible oil deposits, create huge underground reservoirs, and construct a bigger and better Panama Canal. Some wanted to alter weather patterns by exploding a 20-megaton bomb alongside the eye of a hurricane. One Weather Bureau scientist proposed a plan to accelerate melting of the polar icecaps by detonating 10-megaton bombs. Only Eisenhower’s reluctance to unilaterally break a Soviet-initiated nuclear test moratorium halted this sheer folly.
Still, Project Plowshare achieved its goals. Lewis Strauss, chairman of the AEC, admitted that Plowshare was intended to “highlight the peaceful applications of nuclear explosive devices and thereby create a climate of world opinion that is more favorable to weapons development and tests.”
Atoms for Peace masks nuclear weapons buildup.
Under the cover of the peaceful atom, Eisenhower pursued the most rapid and reckless nuclear escalation in history. The US arsenal went from a little more than 1,000 nuclear weapons when he took office to approximately 22,000 when he left. But even that figure is misleading. Procurements authorized by Eisenhower continued into the 1960s, making him responsible for the levels reached during the Kennedy administration — more than 30,000 nuclear weapons. In terms of pure megatonnage, the United States amassed the equivalent of 1,360,000 Hiroshima bombs in 1961.
Few know that Eisenhower had delegated to theater commanders and other specified commanders the authority to launch a nuclear attack if they believed it mandated by circumstances and were out of communication with the president or if the president had been incapacitated. With Eisenhower’s approval, some of these theater commanders had in turn delegated similar authority to lower commanders (I am grateful to Dan Ellsberg for this information). And given the fact that there were then no locks on nuclear weapons, many more people had the actual power, if not the authority, to launch a nuclear attack, including pilots, squadron leaders, base commanders, and carrier commanders.
In 1960, Eisenhower approved the first Single Integrated Operational Plan, which stipulated deploying US strategic nuclear forces in a simultaneous strike against the Sino-Soviet bloc within the first 24 hours of a war. The Joint Chiefs were subsequently asked to estimate the death toll from such an attack. The numbers were shocking: 325 million dead in the Soviet Union and China, another 100 million in Eastern Europe, 100 million from fallout in Western Europe, and up to another 100 million from fallout in countries bordering the Soviet Union — more than 600 million in total.
The price of denial.
While Americans were preparing for nuclear annihilation, the Japanese were living in their own form of denial. From its shaky beginnings in the 1950s, the Japanese nuclear power industry flourished in the 1960s and 1970s and continued to grow thereafter. Prior to the tsunami-precipitated Fukushima accident last month, Japan had 54 functioning nuclear power reactors that generated 30 percent of its electricity; some projected it would not be long before Japan reached 50 percent. But the terrible nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima has forced the Japanese to deal for a third time with the nightmarish side of the nuclear age and the fact that their nuclear program was born not only in the fantasy of clean, safe power, but also in the willful forgetting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal.
A reckoning with Japan’s nuclear legacy is now taking place. Hopefully, the Japanese will move forward from this tragedy to set a path toward both green energy and repudiation of deterrence under the US nuclear umbrella, much as they blazed a path with their Peace Constitution and antinuclearism following the horrors of World War II.