Nuclear Proliferation and Democratic Deficit

This is the draft of an article published in Planet S Magazine: March 29 – April 11, 2007 Volume 5: Issue 16

Sometime after the mushroom clouds settled in Japan at the close of the Second World War, a move was made against the spread and use of nuclear weapons. For one, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was established, setting its sights on preventing another Hiroshima or Nagasaki. In 1968 the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was established, and signed by numerous states, as an agreement to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons. And yet, despite the existence of the agency and the treaty, both very popular, at least in word, we are facing a nuclear weapons crisis.

The world remains inundated with these bombs and, only worse, more are being developed. The reason this is such a bad situation is that most people, especially in Western countries, are opposed to the nuclear weapons industry. Nevertheless, their opposition usually falls on deaf ears. While the United States accuses Iran of having a secret nuclear weapons program, and condemns North Korea for having the bomb, it continues to fund the design and production of nuclear weapons.

So the time is ripe for a documentary film about the nuclear weapons industry. And this is just what Danny Bradbury, a journalist and filmmaker, has done with Epicentre, a film whose grand topic arose from something much smaller.

“It started off being a film primarily about the downwinders: a group of people in the U.S. who were dusted by radioactive fallout from the atmospheric tests in the 50s and 60s. I arranged to go and interview some of these people and as I went down there and talked to them I realized that actually the bomb had a much bigger effect in many different ways in terms of the effect on the land and the environment from the testing and the nuclear reactors it used to produce the weapons, the fuel for the weapons, and on the people that lived on that land and what had happened to them. So, essentially, it turned into a much bigger story. The film sort of developed organically as I went along and it went from being one movie to being three or four different movies that I resolved to try and squeeze down into one broad look on the issue.”

“And actually one of the things I found out was that the U.S. nuclear weapons complex is revitalizing, they’re re-developing the complex in a sort of multi-decade plan. And they’ve made decisions to re-design essentially the entire nuclear arsenal – begin making new nuclear weapons. Not only has the issue not gone away since the Cold War but actually we are in a crucial period and it’s coming to the foreground again in terms of foreign policy and world politics.”

Bradbury suggests that the West is not living up to its image as a moral authority. Considering the evidence, he’s definitely on the right lines.

“We really should be leading the way in terms of trying to lead the world to a non-nuclear stage – to the point where we are able to get rid of all nuclear weapons. But in fact the U.S. is moving in the opposite direction. They’re essentially giving a message to the world that ‘not only are we keeping our bombs,’ which we actually did commit to trying to get rid of under the non-proliferation treaty, ‘but also we’re developing new ones.’”

And to make matters worse, the effect of the nuclear weapons industry is not confined to the relations between states. It has had a corroding effect on our internal political system, and our most beloved of institutions: democracy.

“Everyone talks about the effect of nuclear weapons on the world in terms of national boundaries. They think about it in terms of nations. To me, it seems much more productive to think about this in terms of a division between a government and its people. So when you look at the effect of the bomb, and when you look at the stake holds that’s involved in producing a bomb, and who controls it, it very much divides the people from the government. So the government says ‘we need to pile all this tax-money into developing nuclear weapons.’ And the people, generally I think, don’t appreciate the idea of being incinerated within half an hour’s notice.”

Nevertheless, we should not see ourselves as just passive, resigned to merely wishing the nuclear weapons industry away. We, specifically the people of Saskatchewan, are partly responsible for the spread of nuclear weapons. And so we have a role, if we wish to take it, in ending nuclear proliferation.

“The nuclear energy industry arose because the nuclear weapons industry existed. And there’s always been an extremely strong tie between the two. Some of the uranium that was used in the original Japanese bombs came from Saskatchewan. We’ll always have to live with that fact. We have a responsibility for what happened. Of course we are all responsible in some way or another. If you support, in any way, what happens within the nuclear weapons complex then ultimately you’ve helped to make the world a worse place.”