Originally published at New America Media.

by Yoichi Shimatsu

A year on, the Fukushima nuclear disaster has reached far beyond Japan
as an encroaching threat to human health everywhere and to the very
existence of life on Earth. As the fallout goes global, there’s nowhere
to run or hide since even tiny dosages in rainwater and the food chain
have a cumulative effect.

In high-tech societies under constant
exposure to radiation from medical scanners, security systems, telecom
devices and consumer electronics, nearly everyone is teetering at the
brink of the cancer abyss. The slightest exposure to dust from Fukushima
is a ticket to an early exit.

Despite new admissions of a
cover-up from high officials and an independent investigation in Japan,
governments and the nuclear establishment continue to deny or downplay
the immense dangers posed by atmospheric fallout and sea dumping from
the Fukushima meltdowns. An accurate reckoning of the danger to public
health worldwide is not being discussed because governments are
powerless against the nuclear monstrosity they created.

Decades
of assurances about nuclear safety have been blown away by the
unexpected global effects of the March meltdowns. The past year’s crisis
yanked open a Pandora’s Box of bizarre science that staggers the
imagination of corporate scientists and bureaucrat engineers, from whom
there comes only dumfounded silence.

These include:

• Previously unknown types of explosive nuclear reactions occurring midair
  or underground, which have been misrepresented as “hydrogen blasts”

• Expansion of a vast ozone hole over the Arctic Circle, now equal in
  area to the damaged upper atmosphere over the Antarctic, caused by
  radioactive iodine and xenon gas caught in the jet stream, leaving the
  Earth’s air supply unprotected and heightening the threat of skin
  carcinoma

• High-energy interactions of xenon gas (which decays
  into cesium) with incoming solar flares and artificial electromagnetic
  belts created by US, NATO and Russian missile-defense shields (this
  synergy is visible in the northern lights that emit a deep green color
  due to the excitation of xenon, and it is no coincidence that three
  American nuclear power plants were incapacitated during the recent solar
  flare)

• The growing possibility of mass extinction of marine
  life in the Pacific Ocean due to the nuclear contamination of major
  spawning waters for plankton and fish, the bottom of the food chain for
  higher life-forms, including whales and humans

• A rising threat
  to human reproductive health from ingestion of radioactive isotopes
  through food, drinking water and respiration, resulting in mass
  abortions and population decline for Japan, a trend that will extend
  worldwide

• Mutations of contagious pathogens, such as bird flu,
  due to genetic disorders in both microorganism and host species,
  including domesticated animals and wildlife.

Public at Risk From Official Silence

At
the molecular level inside a biological cell, gamma-ray bombardment
rewrites the genetic code contained in the chromosomes, scrambling the
elegant poetry of life into gibberish. Since leukemia, cancers and birth
defects can be falsely attributed to other disorders, the governments
of North America, Europe and Asia along with international agencies can
be counted on to remain silent or mount campaigns of misdiagnosis to
protect their nuclear power and weapons programs, along with their food
and travel industries. Bureaucrats, at heart and out of self-interest,
are cowards.

While the World Health Organization imposed a strict
travel ban on Hong Kong during the much less risky SARS outbreak of
1992, the WHO and governments accept those devious ads from the Japanese
travel bureau luring tourists with the false claim that the country and
its food are safe. With rising numbers of naive tourists returning with
serious health problems, residents and travel agents in Singapore and
Hong Kong have finally become wary of sending anyone to Japan. Business
as usual is death abnormal.

Warhead Recycling Worsened the Crisis

Whatever
his timid admissions about the official cover-up so far, former Prime
Minister Naoto Kan has yet to disclose the truth behind his more
disturbing decisions: first, the absence of stenographers and voice
recordings at his emergency Cabinet meetings; and why the government had
to order the Tokyo Electric Power Company not to abandon Fukushima No.1
plant after the March 15 mini-nuclear explosions.

The
high-level cover-up and lab analysis of cesium-isotope ratios indicate
the Japanese nuclear establishment was illegally involved in the
reprocessing of weapons-grade uranium at Fukushima No. 1 and probably
two other civilian nuclear plants in northern Japan. The US Department
of Energy dares not address Tokyo’s violation of the Non-Proliferation
Treaty because much of the enriched nuclear material at Fukushima was
covertly supplied from the American military arsenal under a suspected
2006 secret accord between the Bush and Abe administrations.

According
to whistleblowers in the US non-proliferation agency, highly reactive
uranium from dismantled US warheads stored in the Fukushima
spent-fuel pools readily ignited after the quake knocked out the water
pumps. A transport casket of elongated shape resembling a missile was
sky-hooked out of a pool by helicopter soon after the tsunami, but the
remainder of the weapons-grade stock was too heavy to remove. The series
of detonations prevented repair crews from accessing controls of the
reactor cores, which eventually melted through the containment chambers
and into the subsurface soil.

When the quake and tsunami hit on
March 11, only three reactors out of a total six at Fukushima were
scheduled to produce electricity yet in actuality five were operational.
Since then plant workers disclosed that the supposedly empty Reactor 4
had been refitted with a new steel shroud in secret by GE and that it
was fully loaded with new fuel rods. The two extra reactors were running
clandestine operations, the likeliest purpose being the enrichment of
uranium prior to extraction. By no coincidence, Hitachi Electric and
Honeywell are partners in developing a laser-plasma system to extract
highly pure plutonium and uranium

The collaboration between
Washington and Tokyo in a covert nuclear-weapons program was a violation
of international law that in its hypocrisy and duplicity towers above
Iran’s suspected program or North Korea’s puny attempts at bomb-making.
Weapons production at Fukushima also violates the foundations of the
US-Japan Security treaty, which stipulates that Japan provide military
bases in exchange for protection under the American nuclear umbrella.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s selective enforcement of the
counter-proliferation treaty only spurs smaller nations to invest in
nuclear deterrence against the real possibility of a covert build-up by
Japan, Israel, India and other US allies.

Now, to make an
optimistic prediction: Considering the 33-year half-life of cesium, far
more people worldwide can be expected to die horribly due to the fallout
of Fukushima rather than in any nuclear war with Iran or North Korea.
Proliferation begins at home; not only inside faulty nuclear plants but
whenever we switch on a television set or open the refrigerator door.
Our consumerist demand for convenience leads to docile acceptance of
mass suicide. Laziness -- both physical and mental -- is thus the greatest
of the seven deadly sins of this nuclear era.

Earthquakes and
volcano eruptions are becoming more frequent in Japan as well as the
entire Ring of Fire. Nearly every nuclear plant in the Pacific region
has reached the limit of its spent fuel rod capacity, meaning these time
bombs are fully loaded and ready to blow. Even when the cesium and
strontium threats diminish, the possibility of mass extinction will
remain for as long as humankind can muddle along. The chunks of uranium
blasted into seawater around Fukushima have a half-life of 700,000
years. Many more quakes, tsunamis and lava eruptions are coming --
Fukushima was only the first such crisis and it’s still not over.

Yoichi
Shimatsu, former associate editor with Pacific News Service and general
editor at the Japan Times Weekly, has reported from Fukushima and
served as an environmental consultant on countering radiation effects.