Let us pause

“The horrible and heartbreaking events in Japan present a strange concatenation of disasters”, writes Jonathan Schell in his article From Hiroshima to Fukushima. “First, the planet unleashed one of its primordial shocks, an earthquake, of a magnitude greater than any previously recorded in Japan. The earthquake, in turn, created the colossal tsunami, which, when it struck the country’s northeastern shores, pulverized everything in its path, forming a filthy wave made of mud, cars, buildings, houses, airplanes and other debris. In part because the earthquake had just lowered the level of the land by two feet, the wave rolled as far as six miles inland, killing thousands of people.

In a stupefying demonstration of its power, as the New York Times has reported, the earthquake moved parts of Japan thirteen feet eastward, slightly shifted the earth’s axis and actually shortened each day that passes on earth, if only infinitesimally (by 1.8 milliseconds).”

Yet, as Schell observes, “this was not all. Another shock soon followed.” Schell then draws our attention to the “chain of events at the [Fukushima] reactors now running out of control” – events that provide “a case history of the underlying mismatch between human nature and the force we imagine we can control.” Read more at TheNation.com

Jonathan Schell is the Doris M. Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale University. He is the author of The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People, an analysis of people power, and The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.

Thomas Bundschuh