March 13, 1995 The Nation. 347 threat of authoritarian rule is spreading, it is worth summing up the broader issues of that debate.

Those advocating a vote for Dini argued that you cant stick to ideological niceties when democracy is in danger. There is, they insisted, a difference between a conservative and an au- thoritarian right. A Dini interregnum would not only gain time. It may pass laws, notably dealing with the control of tele- vision, that would prevent Berlusconis return. Behind the ar- gument that democracy was in danger lay the memory of Ger- many in the 193Os, when the left bickered while the Nazis rose to power. To dismiss this line it is not enough to point out that history does not repeat, that the streets of Italian cities today are not filled with squads of jackbooted thugs. One must also realize that nowadays Big Brother may advance surreptitious- ly, hidden at first behind TV screens.

The snag, answered the other side, is that we have not been asked to back a government that is merely introducing demo- cratic reforms but one that will carry out a policy of austerity with a clear class bias. To endorse such an unpopular program is to pave the way for the triumph of Fini and Berlusconi. This indictment raises larger issues. While Western Europe was being restructured in the past two decades, the left simply re- treated, giving up position after position and principle after principle. The ideological void thus created, combined with growing discontent, provided a climate conducive to the rise of the far right. The problem is not striking temporary deals that, after all, can be explained to ones supporters. The prob- lem for the left is to show that it has political and economic solutions to a deepening social crisis.

The rule ofhot money. Throughout Western Europe there is a strong feeling that employers and their servants in gov- ernment are preparing to launch a major offensive against the welfare state and other postwar gains of working people. The alleged reason 1s to solve the persistent problem of mass un- employment. Europe, it is argued, must rush to deregulate, followlng the example of the United States, where there are fewer Jobless.

Paradoxically, it is in Germany, where the election is over, that the crucial question of unemployment and the idea of a drastic cut in workmg hours as a means for reducing it were revived this past January. Dieter Schulte, president of the Fed- eration of German Unions, hinted that if a four-day work- week would really save Jobs, then his organization might consider working on Saturdays and even break their rule that reduction in working time should not be coupled with a drop in income. This proposed extension of last years Volks- wagen experiment on a national scale has been greeted favor- ably by employers and less so by many unions, notably the engineers of IG Metall, who know from experience that the promise of more jobs seldom stands the test of technologlcal change.

Why cant profits rather than wages be lowered to absorb the costs of shorter working hours? The answer you get is the same as when you make other suggestions to soften the im- pact of unemployment, such as the mass creation of socially useful jobs In health, education, care of old people or pres- ervation of the environment. To do so-the argument runs-

would be unprofitable. Creating such jobs would mean rais- ing taxes, and this cant be done because of foreign competi- tion; and if you lower profit margins capital will simply fly away. Having created a world kingdom dominated by finan- cial capital, our rulers and their servants preach that every- thing must be submitted to the tyranny of hot money-funds that can be transferred rapidly from one financial center to another to take advantage of differences in short-term inter- est rates. Now almost all money is potentially hot money. In this new setting, labor unions and left-wing parties can no longer be satisfied with domestic solutions; they must carry the struggle beyond their borders and make the entire Euro- pean Union their battlefield.

All over Europe there are tremors announcing a social up- heaval and, probably, the formation of entirely new political parties and other structures. I have limited myself to Western Europe, which can be treated as an entity, though it clearly does not act as one. From Bosnia to Chechnya, Western Eu- rope sees signs of its impotence, while Algerian explosions re- mind it of impending troubles from the South. It is in this transformed, deregulated context that the left must invent new forms of organization of labor and of democratic manage- ment of the economy. It must also project them beyond the frontiers of the nation-state. In order simply to survive, and not to surrender, the left must thus both think internationally and prepare for new offensives. This imperative, on reflection, 1s valid on both sides of the ocean. 0

pm ON SHAKY GROUND Will Japans Nuke Plants Be Next? AILEEN MIOKO SMITH AND C. DOUGLAS LUMMIS

L Tokyo

egend has it that there 1s a giant catfish buried deep in the sand beneath the Japanese islands who occa- sionally shifts and changes position. When that hap- pens the earth shakes and splits, rocks roll down

from the mountaintops and the fragile constructions of human beings collapse. People used to say that the ever- present danger of earthquakes here contributed to the Japa- nese sense of the ephemerality of all things.

Who would have thought they would build forty-eight nu- clear power plants on the back of the catfish?

Naturally, people worry about this. In the Visitors Center at the Mihama Nuclear Power Complex, there is an earth- quake safety demonstratlon display. Viewers stand in front

Aileen Moko Srnlth IS dwector of the Plutonium Acfron Network-Kyoto. C. Douglas Lummls, who teaches ut l h d a College In Tokyo, IS a co-president of Paclfic-Asia Resource Center (PARC). For more information contact Smith at Surte 103,22-75 Tanaka Sekrden-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606, Japan. FAX 81 75 702 1952.

348 The Nation. March 13, 1995 of a mock reactor and a narrators voice asks, And what if there is an earthquake? There is a moment of stillness. Then the safety control rods drop neatly down into the re- actor fuel, and the voiceover says, See, the reactor can be safely stopped.

As it happens, running directly beneath this Visitors Cen- ter is an earthquake fault.

Far from believing in the ephemerality of their construc- tions, power company scientists and engineers in Japan seem to believe that science and technology, properly employed, can

i overcome unpredictability and eliminate the danger of ac- cident from the world. This is a superstition common to SCI- entists everywhere. Without it, no one in his right mind would build a nuclear plant.

When the nuclear plant at Chernobyl blew up, Japans nu- clear engineers went on TV to assure the public that i t cant happen here: The Chernobyl plant was badly built; Japanese plants are of a different type-and have superior safety fea- tures. There will not be an accident.

And when the killer earthquake hit San Francisco in 1989, and ferro-concrete buildings, elevated highways and a piece of the Bay Bridge came down, engineers here went on TV and said much the same thing. The buildings and highways that collapsed were not built to be earthquake-proof, they ex- plained. In Japan, where earthquakes are well understood, all large constructtons are built to withstand any earthquake that might predictably occur.

In the great Kobe earthquake of January 17, 1995, every kind of construction went down. Concrete buildings disinte- grated, steel buildings looked like squashed tin cans, the sub- way became a mine disaster and 550 yards of the Hanshin Superhighway toppled over to one side, Its massive posts re- duced to gravel.

Now the experts are back on TV again, explaining. The con- struction was earthquake-proof, they say, meaning it was built to withstand any earthquake that mightpmdlctably have come to Kobe. But killer earthquakes dont come to Kobe. This earthquake was beyond prediction. It was bigger than any- one thought possible, and also different. It occurred on a number of different faults, some of which had not even been known to exist. It jiggled in an unusual way, producing strange effects, such as the collapse of only one of the middle floors of high-rise buildings.

It was a tremendous accident of nature. Accidents can happen.

The city of Kobe lies next to the southwest corner of what is called the Kink1 Triangle, an area where an extraordinarily large number of earthquake faults form a roughly triangular shape. The southeast corner of the triangle is under Ise Bay, and the tip is under Tsuruga Peninsula. Tsuruga is at the east- ern edge of Japans notorious Genpatsu Ginza-eighty-eight miles of coastline dotted with fifteen nuclear power plants. The peninsula itself is the site of the prototype fast breeder reactor Monju, three pressurized water reactors, two boiling water reactors plus a unique Japanese reactor called Fugen, which, like Monju, uses plutonium (the earths most toxic sub- stance) as fuel. Any one of the commercial reactors on the Genpatsu Ginza contains, at the time of refueling, 1,OOO times the radiation generated by the Hiroshima bomb. Monju, on the other hand, contains 1.4 tons of plutonium.

If an unpredictable Kobe-scale earthquake hit Tsuruga, Koreans would wonder at the green sun rising to their east at the wrong time.

Could such an accident happen? There is an earthquake fault that runs a third of a mile east

of the Mihama Complex (the one under the Visitors Center), passing about a half-miIe west of Monju. Government officials insist that this fault is inactive. Other experts point out that inactive simply means that there has been no earthquake there for a long time. It is utterly unscientific to say that this guarantees that there will be no earthquake on that fault in the future. As mentioned above, the Kobe earthquake occurred partly on faults that the experts didnt even know were there.

In any case, the earthquake-proof power plants were built on the basis of calculations that excluded the possibillty of an earthquake on this fault. Other faults also run in the area. Calculations that include the possibility of an earth- quake on a combination of these faults indicate an earthquake with twenty times the force of the maximum predicted by the government experts.

What would happen then? One official complained, Thats like asking what would happen if the world blew up!

There is a strong, but by no means strong enough, anti- nuclear-power movement in Japan. On the whole it has been weakened by excessive trust in scientists and government offi- cials: They must know what they are doing is the usual re- frain. The Kobe catastrophe has made it clear that they do not. There is no question that nuclear power generation is absurd on these shifting islands and will be abolished someday. The only question is whether that day will come in time. 0

I