When oil-based economies start running out of crude, they face a terrible predicament. Seventy years ago, the Emperor of Japan sent his naval fleet into the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina, looking for oil and rubber. The United States, perturbed by this pillaging, stopped U.S. oil exports to Japan in July of 1941. With his back against the wall, the Emperor ordered an air strike on Pearl Harbor in December. When Japan lost that particular resource war, a/k/a World War II, it was stripped of its military, which, at the time, meant it was stripped of its capacity to become a modern, developed nation. But the horrible weapon that brought Japan to its knees also held the potential for Japan to rise from the radioactive ashes. Without a military, Japan could still save face. Nuclear energy saved Japan from a state of permanent disadvantage.
Nuclear power fueled Japan’s economy, turning it into the first Asian tiger, threatening China and leaving the other Asian economies in the dust. Freed of the costs of maintaining a military, banned from pillaging distant oil reserves, Japan took the strange and strangely familiar nuclear option and ran with it. Within a few decades, Japanese manufacturers were making the products that oil-based, militarized countries wanted to buy. Having lost the war for oil, Japan was winning the war for consumers, a victory fueled by nuclear energy.
Were it not for the recent earthquake and tsunami, one could argue that Japan’s pacifist and nuclear economic development was less violent than that of oil-based economies. For the past sixty years, Japan dropped no bombs near oil fields nor delivered weapons to brutal dictators. Japan, to its credit, developed a robust economy all on its own. But just because Japan stopped harming people in the pursuit of oil, doesn’t mean they didn’t know the risks of going nuclear.
In Japan, the generation that survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Hibakusha, describe for school children and visiting tourists how their lives were transformed in the aftermath of the bombings. Decade after decade, these survivors keep the atrocity of atomic weaponry alive in the nation’s and world’s imagination. The world the Hibakusha describe is unendurable and yet somehow they endured.
But while the Hibakusha’s stories may have constrained admirals from dropping atomic weapons on civilian targets, those stories of unimaginable horror did not constrain Japanese political leaders from building nuclear reactors. Many Hibakusha, I gather, will not speak against the nuclear industry in Japan. Not even now. They don’t want to connect the dots. That would be too political, too controversial. It’s one thing to remind the world of the suffering caused by atomic explosions and another thing entirely to challenge national economic policy. To suffer at the hands of one’s enemies is noble. To suffer through one’s own actions is not only tragic, but deeply embarrassing. And yet, there’s nothing like recognizing how we hurt ourselves to provoke a change in behavior.
For the most part, then, modern economic development has followed two courses, each with its own form of violence. For countries that rely heavily on oil, the violence takes the form of colonial aggression and strategic armed conflict. For countries that rely heavily on nuclear power, the violence takes the form of unintended, self-inflicted annihilation. Each of these forms of energy is deadly, and we kid ourselves if we think otherwise.
From an educational point of view, however, nuclear power is a better teacher. Nuclear-based economies put local people at risk, who suffer and then are ashamed at what they have done to themselves. The nuclear economy, as we are seeing in Japan, cannot export its violent side. The cries of its victims are too close to be ignored; the products too contaminated to be enjoyed. Japan is forced to see the violence embedded in its economy.
By contrast, the oil-based economies of North America and Europe have created a more fractured feedback system. While the victims of brutal dictators condemn the U.S. and Europe for supporting those brutal regimes, they don’t always recognize the problem with oil production itself. Several time zones away, the recipients of foreign oil can easily distract themselves from those distant cries with consumer goods.
Of course, another way to think about this problem is that the entire world is harming itself through industrialized economic development, regardless of which energy it chooses. By using coal or natural gas or oil or nuclear power, we are harming some ones and some places, either intentionally now or unintentionally later. Violence is part of the energy equation.
All over the world, the violent contradiction of energy is coming to the surface. In North Africa, it looks like moral indignation against corrupt dictators. In Japan, it looks like the terrible shame of leaders who cannot provide for tsunami victims because a nuclear power plant is taking up all of their time. Perhaps the next phase of economic development will take these tragic lessons to heart. Let’s hope that the next phase of modernization finds health and wellness to be a more precious commodity than television, uncontaminated food to be more valuable than computers. Perhaps as we see how easily the precious things of this world are destroyed by human invention we’ll be a bit more cautious about what we invent. Perhaps if we see the violence of energy production, we’ll be less comfortable in using it.
Meg Mott teaches political theory at Marlboro College. Comments welcome at: www.megmottshottopics.com.
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