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Sabu Kohso is a political and social critic, translator, and a long-time activist in the global and anti-capitalist struggle. A native of Okayama, Japan, Kohso has lived in New York City since 1980. He has published several books on urban space and struggle in Japan, and has translated books by Kojin Karatani and David Graeber. His most recent book is Radiation and Revolution (Duke University Press, September 2020).  

In this essay for The Internationalist, Kohso highlights the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons and how the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine has reinstated the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. Kohso argues that while the nuclear threat has become increasingly normalized, leading to apathy and complacency, the pro-nuclear forces in Japan have been advocating for expanding the interpretation of Article 9.

The nuclear threat won’t go away. When we are about to forget it, the threat returns to a new stage in a new costume. We see it now with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the nuclear states reinstated the threat of the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. Even though it has been 77 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 11 years since Fukushima, the Janus heads of nuclear power (as weapon and energy) have resurfaced in the public discourse in Japan. Meanwhile, the Japanese government has decided to release nuclear wastewater from the crippled reactors of Fukushima Daiichi into the Pacific Ocean.

The detonator of nuclear calamities is constantly ticking like a time bomb, ready to go off at any instance of human mistake, mechanical breakdown, natural cataclysm, war, corporate greed, national NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard) and so forth. Meanwhile, radionuclides in various types are continuously released from accumulative and pervasive radioactive debris to our environment, slowly yet steadily making the earth an uninhabitable planet. But immersed as we are in tackling all other problems for survival, we are not thinking of the nuclear threat present in everyday life until it reappears to arrest our attention again. In each instance of recursions, it seems that the threat gets more actual, severe and fatal, but we are becoming increasingly accustomed to it rather than being shocked. 

In the wake of the ongoing war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a tacit threat by giving orders to increase the alert level of Russia’s nuclear forces. This exposed the limits of the West’s reliance on nuclear deterrence in the conventional sense. Deterrence refers to the idea that possessing nuclear weapons protects a nation from attack through the threat of overwhelming retaliation. This concept was functional for preventing war between the United States and the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. But during his invasion of Ukraine, Putin used nuclear deterrence not to protect Russia but to show his might and aggression. Consequently, Russia’s nuclear weapons dissuaded the West from intervening with conventional military forces to defend Ukraine. 

During the Ukraine invasion, the Russian Armed Forces attacked and occupied two nuclear power plants: the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station and the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The reckless and careless behaviours of the Russian troops vis-à-vis the nuclear facilities, which needed to be treated with extreme caution, were the most alarming. While the attack caused a fire in some parts of the facilities in Zaporizhzhia, in Chornobyl, the damage to the facilities and the pressure on staff members critically endangered the operation of the plant. It is said that in the latter instance, some Russian soldiers were exposed to radiation. Was this purely an accident or a twisted scheme? In any case, from these instances, it is hard for us not to read into the message being sent by the Russian state: that it is ready to deploy even a nuclear accident as its weapon. These desperate Russian measures — including the invasion of Ukraine itself — remind us of the suicidal decision of the Japanese empire to wage an all-front war against the Allied Forces during the 1930s–40s.  

Ukraine's ongoing conflict — especially the threat from the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons — provoked the debate on Japan’s nuclear armament. As stated in Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, Japan forbids itself from engaging in acts of war unless it is an act of self-defence. Regarding nuclear weapons, Japan holds the so-called ‘three non-nuclear principles’ (non-possession, non-production, and non-introduction) close — as a token of ‘no-more Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’ Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe initiated the debate to reconsider these principles; he was assassinated during a speech supporting his party's candidate.

The Japanese nationalists, whose leading figure was Abe, have long wanted to expand the interpretation of Article 9 and the US/Japan Security Treaty (especially ‘the Right to Collective Defense’) to make Japan ‘a normal nation-state’ with a regular army. One of their focuses has been to accept (or introduce) the US’s nuclear arms within the national territory. Their logic is that since Japan officially relies on the US’s nuclear arms for deterrence against the shared hypothetical enemies, Russia, China and North Korea, it has to accept the nuclear weapons of the US Forces stationed in Japan. Therefore, they have been discussing the option of making an official consensus on using the US’s nuclear weapons against the shared enemies if faced with hostility. 

The pro-nuclear forces in Japan consist of those powerful men who embody the will of the state by inheriting the imperial ambition with the slogan: ‘Rich Nation, Strong Troops.’ Powerful groups of men have sustained this statement throughout the phases of imperialism, its expansionism and even postwar consumerism. The same group played the leading role in introducing nuclear energy for civilian use in the 1960s, considering the transferability of nuclear energy and weapons and, thus, the possibility of developing their own nuclear weapons one day. In 2011, the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster broke out. Thereafter, in Japan, all nuclear plants were halted. But when the Abe Administration came into power for a second term at the end of 2012, it revived the pro-nuclear policy, seeking to restart Japan’s nuclear power plants one by one. 

Ironically, the only country that had experienced both nuclear attacks and a major nuclear accident sustained pro-nuclear policy, including the future option of nuclear armament. This is an absurd and shocking fact, but we in the world — including the people in Japan — have become increasingly familiarized with nuclear-related shocks. Numbed, the Japanese state is determined to allow the release of nuclear wastewater from the crippled reactors of Fukushima Daiichi into the Pacific Ocean. Quite naturally, concerns and opposition have been voiced internationally. A group of people in Japan have risen in protest, but the opposition has not gained influential momentum to challenge this fatal policy. This is one of the most explicit occasions where the pollutants — negative commons — produced within a national territory are imposed on the vast stretch of the Pacific Ocean, a common resource for everyone on this planet. Along with the war, this embodies one of the most epitomic contradictions confronted by the world today — the essential discrepancy between national interest and planetary well-being. 

The modus operandi of capitalist industries and states is to avoid taking responsibility for treating negative commons — either by detoxifying and recycling them or sealing them for seclusion — as much as possible and to impose the task on the countries and people in peripheries, either with force or compensation. The treatment of radioactive wastes is one of the riskiest, most difficult and most costly operations among the treatment of wastes. On top of that, nuclear wastes are unilaterally accumulating from the unstoppable production and consumption of energy and weaponry — this will continue as long as the capitalist-state mode of development leads the world. 

Today, the category of negative commons may have to be expanded from the wastes of consumed commodities to include the over-produced commodities, whose material existence — be it used or unused — induces uncontrollable psychological, social and environmental mutations as ‘hyperobject.’ And most commodities are being overproduced today. 

Among overproduced commodities, we are especially wary of weapons. Epitomized as it has been in the American gun culture, the overabundance of handguns and automatic rifles is turning those who culturally fetishize the triad of white supremacy, Christianity and guns into armed militias while accelerating domestic violence and mass shootings. In some cities, street protests cannot happen without the tension turning toward gunfights provoked by these white supremacist militias. In international politics, the over-production of nuclear weapons, ranging from Tsar Bomba to depleted uranium bullets, could allow the indefinite multiplication and variation of the forms of precursory nuclear war in our world, involving more and more complex participation of deterrence, always anticipating the coming of total nuclear war. 

In these multi-layered developments around nuclear power, can ‘anti-nuclear’ still be an effective slogan to oust nuclear power from our world? I cannot fully elucidate the problem of nuclear power vis-à-vis the world. But I would like to make a few remarks for closure. 

It is increasingly evident that it is impossible to oust nuclear power in and of itself without changing many other aspects of our world because nuclear power has been mutating it by being implicated. Thanks to its Janus-headedness, nuclear power guarantees the permanent link between capitalism and the state. There’s a reason the argument of choosing oil or nuclear is futile because owning more nuclear weapons guarantees the accessibility of more oil. 

The respected, yet somehow eclipsed, thinkers on nuclear power, such as Günther Anders, Robert Jungk and Midnight Notes Collective, pointed out from different registers that the problem of nuclear power is not limited to the sublimity of harms and destructive power of nuclear fission, but also the way the sublimity incapacitates our thinking, the way it controls the society, the way it binds the economy and the way it creates the conflictual relations among nation-states in the global order. Its haunting power is onto-metaphysical, socio-economic and techno-political at the same time. Therefore, ousting nuclear power would require a complex process that goes hand in hand with the revolutionary process of decomposing and recomposing the world of the capitalist nation-state. To say it in reverse, ousting nuclear power is a necessary part of changing the world and creating a different planetary experience.

The Internationalist Archive