Dreadful but Intensifying Competition in South Asia

From the speculation on the internal nuclear exposure in the previous two blogs, which is torturing the mind of tens of thousands of people here in Japan, many of them young mothers, we will broaden our view and look at what is happening in the international real politics.
Decades ago Mahatma Gandhi and his entourage was touring the coastal area of India's eastern Orissa, known for its scenic beauty and a number of huge Hindu temples.  He was terribly upset when the news was brought to him that his wife, with some other women, visited one of those temples without his knowledge which were not open to the 'untouchables'.
Not far from the place the independent India built a testing ground for missiles.  She launched Agni V, her first ICBM, from there on 19 April 2012.  It is said to be capable of delivering a nuclear warhead(s) to far-ranging targets.  The Prime Minister of India openly praised the achievement.  Thus India became the 4th country to possess ICBM after the US, Russia, and China.
So far the testfiring by India has gone uncensured, and it is likely to be so.  The nuclear weapons have come to stay in India, at least in the eyes of the government and its advisers.  But if a country, India or otherwise, is allowed a free-hand in nuclear development, what would be the basis for the international community for denouncing the testfiring by the DPRK, which, by the way, had failed on 13 April.  To be sure there is the Security Council Resolution 1874 prohibiting the DPRK such an action.  But it does not give a free-hand to other countries.
Another thing is the nuclear competition between India on one hand and China and Pakistan on the other, which India's testfiring is sure to intensify.  Already China exhibited her East Wind 31 ICBM at the National Foundation Day, 1 October 1999.  Its improved version, East Wind 31A, was shown ten years later amid great applause.  As for Pakistan, she testfired her Shaheen 1A IRBM on 25 April, 6 days after the Indian ICBM.
Thus the competition will continue endlessly.  This is the essence of the deterrence theory.  It is such a hollow, meaningless idea, nothing to enhance the great names of peoples.  Moreover, the vast resources could have been fruitfully used to help the uncared, unloved, and unwanted, of which there are tens of millions.
    

Dr.Hida Stressing Internal Nuclear Exposure

Contrary to the views expressed at the discussion mentioned in my previous blog, Dr.Hida Shuntaro, a physicist now 95, has been stressing the significance of understanding the internal exposure.  I have recently seen a 53-minute documentary on him, entitled Atomic Wounds, made by a French director Mac Petitjean in 2006.  Most of the following are from the scenes of the film.  The rest is from a 20-minute film which edited his lectures after the 11 March nuclear accident.
When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Hida, 28, was in the military barracks there as a physician.  He immediately took his cycle to head for the city, and saw hundreds of people walking for help with their skin coming off from the bodies.    Some days later his father came looking for him but could not find him as he was busily engaged in rescue work.  His family decided that he had been lost, and had a funeral for him!
Hida is still critical of the US for dropping the bomb, as, in his view, they did so to threaten the Soviets, and they fixed the time at 8:15 in the morning, as they had found by their reconnaissance flight that it was the time when maximum number of people were out on the street.
The US, moreover, set up a research institute known as ABCC.  It examined 120,000 people.  It, however, tried to cure no one, which was not their interest.  All the data were sent to the US.  The bodies of the dead there were minutely anatomized and sent also.  The photos of the destruction taken by the Japanese were confiscated.  The publication of research on the victims was prohibited after 1951(Japan was under occupation till April 1952).
According to Hida, the patients who were hospitalized began to suffer from high fever, to show purple spots, and to vomit blood after several weeks, although they were not burnt at all.  This was due to the low-level radioactivity, but it was made clear only in the 70s.  It can be explained only on the basis of the intake into the body by food, drink, and breathing of very tiny radioactive particles.
Hida says that the experiences from Hiroshima and Nagasaki are all that there is to analyze these phenomena.  He himself began to suffer a sudden attack of pain at his waist which disabled him from walking.  This was shortly before he became 40.  He seems to be walking all right now.
Thousands of people have developed some cancerous symptoms after 50-60 years of the bombs. It is not possible to prove that it is due to the radioactivity.  But the number itself is the proof.
We should not have nuclear plants, let alone bombs.  Why no plants?  It is because Japan has not much land-space.  It has been reported in the US that the breast cancer has increased in 1,300 counties out of the total of 3,000.  The only factor common to these 1,300 is that they are within 100 miles of nuclear reactors.  If the same standard is to be applied here, all the land will be easily within the radius.
The only way to fight the radioactivity, Hida emphasizes, is to rise early, retire early, to exercise, to have sunbeams, in a nutshell to go back to more natural life-style, and by so doing to acquire general immunity.
        

What is 'Dangerous Contamination'?

Since the terrible accident at the Fukushima nuclear plant one year ago, people here are very sensitive as to their food and drink in case they might contain radioactive element beyond a certain level, and for a good reason.  Some journalists, scientists, and even medical doctors have made them all the more anxious by stating that we should aim at taking zero-radioactive food, without telling them if it is possible at all, or, if the amount of intake could be looked at in a wider perspective.
Therefore, the publication in a book form, in March 2012, of the record of a three-and-a-half hour discussion by several professionals on this subject, or more precisely, on the 'truth about the internal nuclear exposure', to use the sub-title of the book, in easy Japanese, is a matter of congratulations.  It was published by Nagasaki University which has done a lot of research work on the radioactive fallout both in Japan and at Chernobyl.
Unlike the case of Chernobyl, where most of the exposure came from the internal sources, i.e., from the food-intake over the long years since the explosion(25 years on 26 April 2011), in the case of Fukushima the danger comes mainly from the external, i.e.,from the fallout carried by the wind.  Then how is it that the people are afraid of their food and drink?
Broadly the reasons are two.  One is that some intellectuals who are supposed to be specialists in the fields have loudly talked about the danger of locally-produced food.  Moreover, by so doing, they tend to give the impression that they really know.  The media would go to them, rather than to the scholars of more balanced view.  Interestingly, those scientists with such an extreme view are mostly physicists(presumably because they believe in the continuous existence of the matter).  We are also led to wonder why the physicists and others have not talked to each other.
Another reason is concerned with what I have called the more balanced view.  The participants in the discussion seem to be of the opinion that the Japanese are not good at taking such a view.  They tend to think in terms of either right or wrong.  The participants of course agree that the less the intake of radioactivity-affected food or drink the better.  But it is not possible to reduce it to zero.  There is some radioactivity inside our bodies and in the atmosphere around us to begin with.  Therefore it should be put not in the zero or plus formula but in the cost-benefit or risk-benefit way.  Some food items may be contaminated to a certain extent.  Should we refuse to take them then?  If so what would be the alternative sources of food, and is the alternative available all the time?            
A similar inexperience in risk management was seen at the earliest stage of the accident when there was a considerable delay in opening the vent of the reactors.  If the vent had been opened at the earliest opportunity, the hydrogen explosion would have been averted, and the fallout would have been much less.  The delay should be explained in terms of the stereotyped notion that it should not be opened as it would result in the fallout.  However, the risk of the fallout from opening the vent and the risk accompanying the explosion should have been put in perspective, in trade-off relations.  The fact is they were not.
Incidentally it was pointed out that the Fukushima reactors belonged to the BWR/Mark 1 type designed by the GE.  Later on the GE noticed that this type had a defect in that it would be in danger of explosion when all the sources of electricity were cut off-exactly what happened this time.  It was probably then that they fixed a vent.
They also reported this before the Congressional hearing, and informed the users as well.  Have the Japanese users taken note of the seriousness of the matter?  And where has the know-how been stocked till now?  Neither the government or the company has spoken a word on it.
                 

Manzhouguo's Army, Its Short History

The history of Japan's step-by-step invasion of China in modern period, starting decisively in 1931, and ultimately leading to the all-out war in the whole Asia-Pacific and Japan's defeat, is fairly well known by now, owing to the research work by the historians from many countries. But, until I saw a documentary film by Japan's NHK(Nihon Hoso Kyokai, Japan Broadcasting Corporation) the other day, I was unaware of the history of the puppet army Japan tried to build within Manzhouguo as a supporting force to Japan's own powerful army stationed there.
The film was entitled "The Manzhouguo Army--Under the Banner of the Cooperation of Five National Groups". Japan, in occupying the Chinese Northeast, also known as the Three Eastern Provinces, in 1931, and turning it into the territory of an outwardly independent state, Manzhouguo, the next year, made the Cooperation of the Five National Groups the official ideology. They refer to the Japanese, the Chinese who constitute the most of the residents, Manchurians, the descendants of the former dynastic rulers, Koreans who migrated there fleeing from the Japanese rule over the Korean Peninsula, and the Mongolians. They were supposed to be equal.
But the leadership officially resided in the hands of the Japanese. Manzhouguo was a monarchy. Japan smuggled out the deposed Chinese Emperor from Beijing and made him the Emperor there, "the last Emperor". The Ministers were all Chinese/Manchurians, but the real power resided with the Vice-Ministers, No.2 posts, who were all Japanese. Numerous land issues between the local Chinese peasants and Japanese/Korean immigrants were solved in favour of the latter, with Koreans legally treated as the Japanese.
The puppet state was in existence for 13 and a half years, and then collapsed with Japan's defeat. Would it be impertinent to ask if it would have continued longer if it had been given a constitution guaranteeing to the non-Japanese elite groups posts in the upper bureaucracy, and seats in the legislature, and the common people had been assured some of the fundamental rights, all irrespective of what groups they came from?
It is of course an entirely hypothetical, and purely academic, question. None of them, starting from the constitution, were in place when Japan collapsed. But when the Japanese who were ruling there, and specially the SMRC(South Manchurian Railway Company, the mighty economic machine in control of the railways and coal there) studied the history of the British rule over India, did they not learn those lessons?
And, while studying the British rule, did they not study the Indian Army, a unique creation of the Raj, which developed from an auxiliary force to the British Army into a full-fledged one. The British, to a large extent, transferred power in 1947 not to the Indians in general but to the highly trained parliamentarians, higher civil bureaucrats and the higher military officers they had brought up during the preceding three to four decades.
What about the Manzhouguo Army? The above film says that a Military Academy was established in 1939, and the students included all of the above groups. There were 250 Chinese in one year alone. But many of them ultimately joined the Eighth-Route(Chinese Communist) Army in the end. A Korean survivor was saying that the war was after all Japan's war, not Korea's. Some Mongolians revolted, like Aung San's army in Burma, against Japan. The documentary says that the Mongolians especially worked hard to study the technologies from Japan in agriculture and other fields.
The Mongolians were mobilized in the war against the Soviet and the outer-Mongolian forces in 1939, and was beaten. Some was saying in the film that it was wrong to use them in the trench warfare. They are not fit for it. They are fit for the cavalry war. So another hypothetical and purely academic question would be, what would have been the consequences for the Mongolians, who were highly independent-minded, if the Soviets and the Outer-Mongolians had been repulsed at the border?

Japanese PM Nowhere To Be Seen

The Second Nuclear Security Summit was over at Seoul, South Korea, under the growing shadow of the North Korean threat to launch what it calls a satellite. But my attention was drawn to the behaviour, or the non-behaviour, of Japan's Prime Minister, Mr.Noda Yoshihiko.
He left Tokyo's Haneda Airport at 7.19 pm on 26th for Seoul's Kimpo Airport. By the time he checked in the Lotte Hotel it must have been around 10 pm, too late for whatever may have been going on as a part of the Summit. It was in the morning, the next day 27th, that he met the host of the Summit, the South Korean President.
Did the other heads of the states/governments behave in a similar way? Far from it. In the afternoon of 26th, for example, Chairman Hu and President Obama had a 90-minute conference. There was also a meeting between the Russian and South Korean Presidents, and so on. Mr.Obama had a conference with the South Korean host even on the previous day, 25th.
The 27th was the main day. But it seems Mr.Noda had invited, or had been invited by, any one for a person-to-person talk. It is true he had a talk with as many as a dozen heads of the states/governments. But they were all between the sessions, in the corridors(of power?), and for only several minutes, both sides standing, hardly worth to be called a meeting. Mr.Noda's view became known only by a formal speech he read out at the main conference.
He arrived back at Haneda at 5.04 pm on that same day. In order to do so he must have left the hotel at 2.30 latest(there is no time difference). Taking into account the group photograph, the working lunch, and the press conference at the hotel, all in the published diary, it is difficult to imagine that he could have any meaningful talk with any one present at the Summit.
Thus ended Mr.Noda's two-day visit to Korea. True, on both days he had a busy schedule at home. But that is a different matter. There were as many as 53 heads of states/governments at the Summit. If Mr.Noda did not find it necessary to talk to them, even at the cost of part of his political programme at home, it is, to say the least, surprising.