Pearls and Irritations

Nuclear power provides the nuclear explosives and a cloak for hiding the development of nuclear weapons.

Last week we remembered the nuclear bombing of Japan by the United States in August 1945. On 6 August 1945, a US B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Highly enriched uranium was the explosive. Three days later, another B-29 bombed Nagasaki, which had negligible military facilities, with an atomic bomb containing plutonium as the explosive.

It has been difficult to estimate the total number of deaths, both prompt deaths from the blast and firestorm, and long-term deaths from radiation-induced cancers. Total estimates are in the range 150,000 to 246,000, the vast majority of whom were civilians.

The US government has attempted to justify the bombings by claiming that it would have had to invade Japan, that this would have been resisted fiercely, and that the US death toll would have been several hundreds of thousands. The second and third claims are doubtless true, but the first has been vigorously debated by historians, political scientists and members of the public.

By the beginning of August 1945, the US air force had almost total command of the skies over Japan and was destroying Japan’s domestic industries and decimating the civilian population. The US navy had command of the seas around Japan. No food, fuel, medical supplies or weapons could be imported. Eventually, Japan would have had to surrender or starve. The US did not have to invade.

But the US wanted a prompt surrender. It saw time as the essence because, on 8 August 1945, the USSR declared war on Japan and simultaneously invaded Japanese-controlled Manchuria on the east Asian mainland. The US wanted complete control of Japan after its surrender. So the second nuclear bombing could been seen as a message to the USSR, “keep out!”.

Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945. Historical evidence, discussed in Paul Ham’s book ‘Hiroshima Nagasaki’, suggest that the principal motivation for Japan’s rapid surrender was not the nuclear bombings but the Soviet Union’s invasion. Prior to the nuclear bombings, the US air force had devastated over 60 Japanese cities with both conventional bombs and firebombs. The latter caused enormous destruction because many buildings were constructed of timber. In this context, the nuclear bombings did not immediately register with the Japanese military as a game changer.

The Japanese government wanted a guarantee that, after it surrendered, it could keep its emperor as symbolic ruler. But the US government demanded unconditional surrender. Ironically, after Japan surrendered, the US allowed the emperor to remain after all.

After the war, so-called ‘peaceful’ nuclear power was developed, possibly as a salve for the consciences of the scientists, politicians and military who had driven the development of nuclear bombs.

But ‘peaceful’ nuclear power involves both uranium enrichment and the production of plutonium in the spent fuel. Most nuclear power reactors require enrichment of the fissile isotope, uranium-235, to a concentration of 4–5%. (The rest is uranium-238 which is not fissile.) Further enrichment makes the uranium suitable for nuclear weapons: the greater the enrichment, the smaller the weapon.

Plutonium-239, the other principal nuclear weapons explosive, is produced in nuclear reactors. It can be extracted from the spent fuel by chemical reprocessing. The claim by some nuclear power proponents, that reactor-grade plutonium (i.e. plutonium from the spent fuel of nuclear power reactors as opposed to military reactors) is unsuitable for nuclear weapons, is a lie that has been refuted by members of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission and nuclear weapons designers.

In several countries, ‘peaceful’ nuclear power was used to produce the explosives for nuclear weapons, either by uranium enrichment or reprocessing of spent fuel. The United Kingdom supplemented its stocks of plutonium-239 from military reactors with plutonium from its first generation of civil (nuclear power) reactors. In France, the military and civil components of the nuclear industry are indistinguishable. India developed its nuclear bomb by using civil nuclear reactors supplied by Canada.

A Pakistani nuclear physicist and engineer, Dr A.Q. Khan, developed his country’s nuclear bomb based on his experience in uranium enrichment obtained at the URENCO research and development plant in Europe. He was an entrepreneur, assisting North Korea to develop its nuclear weapons via uranium enrichment and also establishing black market businesses in components of this technology.

South Africa’s nuclear weapons program was based on both military and civil nuclear programs. It is the only nuclear weapons country to have terminated its program and dismantled its weapons and facilities.

Several other countries attempted to use nuclear power to cloak their development nuclear weapons but did not complete their programs: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Libya, South Korea and Taiwan (twice).

For more information about the attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, by countries to develop nuclear weapons under the cloak of ‘peaceful’ nuclear power, see the Nuclear Weapons Archive, the Institute for Science and International Security, the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, and research articles by Dr David Albright.

In 1970, under Liberal Party Prime Minister John Gorton pushed by nuclear knights, Sir Philip Baxter and Professor Sir Ernest Titterton, Australia commenced the construction of a nuclear power station at Jervis Bay in NSW. The intention was to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons as well as electricity. This was terminated at an early stage by a change of Prime Minister to William McMahon in an internal coup in the Liberal Party. (See Richard Broinowski’s book, ‘Fact or Fission’.) In December 1972, under Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, Australia ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Although Labor has committed to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, it has so far failed to do so, possibly because this could invalidate the Force Posture Agreement that permits the visits of US nuclear powered submarines and B-52s that could be carrying nuclear weapons.

Nuclear power proponents have attempted to justify their technology – which is dangerous, expensive, inflexible in operation, and slow to build – on the back of the AUKUS agreement. It must be resisted strongly.

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