Abstract
Nuclear governmentality is offered as a conceptual contribution to research on energy politics, security studies, and nuclearity. Nuclear governmentality is conceived as a logic of government in the Foucauldian sense, that describes contiguities in conduct and symbolic representations found across disparate dispositifs, especially (albeit not exclusively) those strategically aimed at eliciting and exploiting atomic forces in medicine, industry, and war. This project demonstrates the logic and technologies of power specific to nuclear governmentality in post-Fukushima Daiichi energy commitments, evacuation policies, risk assessments, and health surveillance programs. Nuclear governmentality is at once modern in its adaptation of regimes of risk management and anachronistic in its prioritization of sovereign decisionality in their developments and deployments, especially evident in the legal principle of the minimum standard and the instrument of the permissible dose.
Introduction
On 11 March 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis briefly ruptured the narrative of human control over the atom established in the post-World War II (WWII) period, leading Japan’s National Diet Independent Investigation Commission (2012) to describe the disaster as human-engineered. Blame was largely apportioned to Tokyo Electric Power Organization (TEPCO), the regional utility company that owned the Daiichi site, for failing to prevent flooding of critical infrastructure. The resulting decline in market confidence echoed globally, evidenced in the falling market valuation of uranium and nuclear disinvestment efforts in countries such as Germany. Yet, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), under the leadership of Shinzō Abe since 2012, promises to preserve Japan’s nuclear apparatus by re-starting reactors and by continuing breeder-reactor and plutonium-based fuel re-processing/enrichment programs, having linked these programs directly to national security.
Despite strong anti-nuclear sentiments in Japan, Abe’s post-Fukushima policy aimed forcefully at re-establishing faith in atomic governance and de-stigmatizing irradiated people and places, as illustrated by the elimination of almost all exclusion zones and evacuation subsidies, a policy enabled by increasing the national allowable exposure level from one to 20 millisieverts a year. Radiation refugees are encouraged to return with reassurances that exposure levels are negligible and are being tracked by authorities. The World Health Organization (WHO) has delimited the ‘collective absorbed dose’ from the disaster, and that dose’s potential for excess cancer risks is authoritatively monitored by the Fukushima Health Management Survey (FHMS), promising early detection and mitigation. However, rising thyroid cancer incidents among children, identified by its thyroid-screening protocol, have produced controversy about causation, with some researchers and activists pointing to the special hazards of nuclear fallout for children. Others have denied any correlation, calling for an end to enhanced medical surveillance because of reputational damage. The debate about Fukushima’s biological effects is polarized, but ultimately marginalized in policy-making as nuclear capability is cast as integral to national security and sovereignty. Rising tensions with North Korea helped re-legitimize the LDP’s stance toward nuclear security in Japan, facilitating controversial constitutional interpretations and revisions that increase Japan’s ‘defense’ capabilities and internal policing of dissent through new legislation around state secrets and conspiracy.
Nuclear capability remains central to the LDP’s framing of national security in myriad ways. This article offers a Foucauldian approach to nuclear governmentality to explain the interpretation and deployments of nuclear security and radiation risk in the wake of the meltdowns at Daiichi. Nuclear governmentality is a logic of government that inflects the organization of social conduct across dispositifs that exhort and exploit atomic energies and radiation more generally. Nuclear governmentality is conceptualized as a calculus for representing and administering atomic energy’s impacts on national sovereignty, economic security, and the vitality of populations. It encodes liberalism’s pastoral logic, as described by Michel Foucault (1979), and its sovereign decisionality, as theorized by Giorgio Agamben (2005), in highly contested representations of security and empowerment. In so doing, nuclear governmentality captures the undecidability of the relationship between a pastoral biopolitics of the population and brute nuclear sovereignty arising with the development and deployment of atomic weapons technologies. Critics since J. Robert Oppenheimer have pointed out that although organizing national security, atomic operations unleash death and fortify the sovereign state’s capacity to let die (as with nuclear sacrifices). Nuclear sacrifices are juridically encoded in constitutional limits on human rights, in allowable exposure levels that accept excess mortality, and in juridical exceptions to legal protections enacted in radiation emergencies. The eruption of sovereign decisionality occurs not only in judgments about acceptable risks under emergency conditions, but also in the routine development and institutionalization of foundational assumptions about radiation exposure effects for individuals and populations across social contexts. In this project, sovereign decisionality is specifically illustrated in the biopolitics, or politics of life, inherent in nuclear governmentality’s radiation protection security protocols, particularly with respect to the conceptualization and administration of the permissible dose and minimal standard of protection both prior to and after the Fukushima 11 March disaster in Japan.
Michel Foucault argued that the modern period was characterized by a retreat of brute sovereignty, as biopolitical technologies of government that elicit and channel population biovitalities supplement and replace older, repressive systems of centralized power. Foucault struggled to locate the atomic bomb within this new milieu, concluding ultimately in Society Must Be Defended that its sovereign power capacity to annihilate life presents a paradox that must ultimately be managed governmentally (2003: 253). Accordingly, the governmental response aimed at domesticating atomic dangerousness was dispersed and multifaceted, involving international agreements regarding arms control and the circulation of radioisotopes; national laws and regulatory apparatuses; exposure protocols for individuals and entire populations; and radiation research across dispositifs. As defined by Foucault, a dispositif is a ‘system of relations’ established between and across heterogeneous elements, including particular discourses, institutions, technologies, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, and so on (1980: 194).
Drawing upon Bruno Latour’s extension of the Foucauldian dispositif, Gabrielle Hecht (2012: 10) mapped the contours of ‘nuclearity’, described as ordering the enriched-uranium supply chain at the heart of the nuclear energy and weapons apparatus, across Africa and Europe. Nuclearity represents a technopolitical phenomenon ordering people and things across dispositifs, the interpretations and operations of which are localized but, simultaneously, are connected by unifying themes, such as symbolic exceptionality, and by a material apparatus composed of mines, refining and enrichment facilities, distribution networks, and ultimate end-use destinations – all of which pose acknowledged risks for excess mortality governed through the determination and administration of the permissible dose. Yet, as with all biopolitical formulations of life, the permissible dose introduces a critical break in the continuum between what must live and what must die (Foucault, 2003: 254–255).
The approach to nuclear governmentality developed here extends Hecht’s analysis by interrogating sovereign and biopolitical operations pertaining more generally to the elicitation, understanding, and exploitation of atomic/nuclear energies and radiation protection, using Fukushima Daiichi as the case example. The biopolitics of radiation effects have been inextricably shaped by the entanglement of sovereign power with nuclearity since WWII, as documented historically by Lenoir and Hays (2000) in ‘the Manhattan Project for Biomedicine’ and in Creager’s (2013) Life Atomic, which describe the contours of an international dispositif inextricably linking military and medical isotopes and objectives. The weaponization of atomic energies shaped expert discourse concerning radiation protection but this was a highly contested research arena, as documented by Hamblin’s (2008) Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, which chronicles contestations over life and death agendas within the US nuclear weapons dispositif as authorities divided in their opinions about human vulnerability to atomic testing and fallout. These historians demonstrate that expert knowledge concerning atomic energy and radiation’s biological effects were shaped in complex ways by the nuclear-security state, a militarized logic of statehood, the power of which to destroy life is rationalized in the west by appeals to democracy. Accordingly, Masco (2015) describes nuclear sovereignty as ordering security relations among nations in the Cold War period and legitimizing knowing sacrifices of domestic and foreign populations, narrowly and technically coded in the form of excess cancer mortalities.
The undecidable effects of atomic power have long been recognized, since the atomic bomb was acknowledged as both delivering and testing democracy (see Loud, 1948). Accordingly, this article examines nuclear governmentality in pre- and post-Fukushima Japan as control over atomic fission and its alchemic elements – especially plutonium – are officially reinforced as foundational to state security, its sine qua non, despite democratic support for nuclear decommissioning and pacifism rooted in national experiences of nuclear sacrifice, most recently invigorated by the Fukushima disaster. Whereas Mutimer (2011) articulates how arms control operates as a governmentality rationality that both elicits and controls nuclear weapons, this project addresses how the forces of atomic destruction elicited by the sovereign arm of nuclear governmentality are checked and domesticated by the biopolitical arm, obscuring a fundamental decisionality integral to atomic enterprises specifically, and to posited relationships between radiation and biological life more generally. That decisionality is disclosed in the contested model of life undergirding the regime of radiation protection, the ‘letting die’ incorporated in protective standards, the marginalization and/or censorship of dissident knowledge, and in the suspension of ordinary guarantees of protection in conditions of emergency. These strategic incorporations of sovereign decisionality work to support a nuclearized conception of statehood predicated on knowing sacrifices, exemplifying the undecidability of the relationship between biopolitics and sovereignty. Yet, the entangled relationships across state sovereignty, nuclear security, and radiation protection in the wake of Fukushima are fundamentally contested through disparate tactics of resistance by anti-nuclear activists/journalists/artists, concerned medical and/or government authorities, and everyday people whose lives have been disrupted by the undecidability of radiation effects.
Nuclear governmentality in Japan: Origins and operations
Nuclear governmentality began in the early 20th century with the discovery of radiant energies, the elicitations and circulations of which both promoted and degraded life. In medicine, radiant energies were deployed therapeutically to destroy dangerous tissues while factory workers exposed to radium were dreadfully poisoned through bioaccumulation. Governments across the world raced to unlock atomic energies for energy and weapons. Japan was among those nations that turned to the atom to compensate for limited access to energy resources during a globalizing regime of international mercantile capitalism (Bartholomew, 1989). In addition to disclosing the vital energies of atoms during the 1930s (Yukawa, 1935), Japan’s physicists studied radiation’s biological risks, as illustrated in a 1938 letter by physicist Yoshino Nishina to Niels Bohr describing the biological effects of neutrons. As in the West, wartime research in the 1930s and 1940s weaponized atomic energies, bombarding fissile uranium-235 atoms with neutrons in a newly discovered mechanism for eliciting energy explosively, while also interrogating unleashed forces’ potential as biological weapons (Kim, 2007: 142). Despite achieving atomic sophistication, Japan lost the race for the bomb, becoming instead its test-ground.
Post-war fission research was banned by the USA, which imposed a regime of peace encoded in a prototype for Japan’s pacifist constitution that was adapted with national independence in 1952. The US nuclear umbrella promised Japan security through deterrence, while Japan’s domestic forces policed the population. However, as observed in 1955 by Kisaburo Yokota, professor of international law at Tokyo University, the question of how Japan would remain ‘secure’ despite its disarmament troubled the nation (Yokota, 1954/1955: 33–34). Public support for neutrality and pacifism prevailed in the immediate wake of WWII, with Japan envisioned as a ‘Switzerland of the Pacific’. However, support for a militarized expression of sovereign power reassembled with the outbreak of the Korean War as the government pursued ‘disguised and gradual rearmament’ with the National Policy Reserve, today’s Self Defense Forces. The stature of Japan’s self-defense has been a contested problem of government since, particularly with respect to atomic matters, given the strong anti-nuclear and pacifist domestic attitudes whose vitalities are periodically infused by nuclear accidents ranging from the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon 5) incident of 1954, the Jōyō fast-breeder uranium-reprocessing reactor accident in Tokai-mura in 1999, and the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
Japan’s post-WWII nuclear governmentality was polyvalent, simultaneously promoting epidemiological research on atomic bomb effects, radiation medicine, civilian atomic energy production, and the processing and stockpiling of fissile materials for atomic weapons, with the latter endeavors institutionalized in ‘reprocessing’ and breeder reactor programs. Each of these disparate and interconnected agendas sought to understand and exploit atomic energies through distinct research programs, institutes, and national/international collaborations. Each was governed by distinct professional expertise, regulatory regimes, and juridical laws and rules. Each was constituted in its particularity, but also shared the globalizing impulse toward atomic exploitation and control as means of securing national stature and vitality. Yet, each dispositif also encountered heterogeneous forms of resistance, including resistance from atomic authorities. Nuclear governmentality’s sovereign politics are disclosed in these conflicts, particularly with regard to the decisionality invoked to resolve divergent understandings of atomic energies’ impacts on national security, the economy, and population vitalities.
Atomic security: Energy and defense
Drawing on Foucault, Sven Opitz (2010: 98) observes while ‘population forms the government’s sphere of intervention’ under liberalism, ‘economy provides the rationalization for the exercise of power’. This insight that liberal economy legitimizes sovereignty is demonstrated in Japan’s post-WWII atomic undertakings, which aimed to deliver multi-layered security, legitimized by economic benefits and social welfare. Post-WWII funding for atomic research was allocated in 1953 and a legal infrastructure was established for atomic energy produced by Japan’s regional utilities in 1955 with the Atomic Energy Basic Act (No. 186), whose purpose states: The purpose of this Act is to secure energy resources in the future, achieve scientific and technological progress, and promote industry by encouraging the research, development and utilization of nuclear energy, thereby contributing to the improvement of the welfare of human society and of the national living standard.
The atomic promise of a bountiful economy, with attendant improvements for human welfare, was challenged by experts, such as Yukawa Hideki who cautioned against excessive optimism and warned against importing unproven technology (Bartholomew, 1989: 279), and Nishiwaki Yasushi (1957) who warned of the dangers radioactivity posed by detailing hazards for individuals and populations.
At issue, was the capacity of human control over atomic energies that could deliver death, as well as promote life. Nuclear governmentality, as the logic of government organizing the elicitation and administration of atomic energies, promised to domesticate dangerousness across multiple dispositifs, illustrating how potential catastrophe is ‘rendered actionable’ through rationalities of government and forms of knowledge (see Aradau and Van Munster, 2011). For example, in Japan multiple laws were instituted to govern radiation safety, with each addressing a distinct social terrain, including medical care, pharmaceuticals and devices, industrial safety, and prevention of radioisotope hazards, with oversight organized across four ministries. Disparate operations across terrains were united by a single supplier (the Japan Radioisotope Association) and by a Radiation Council tasked with standardizing radiation-protection regulations (Yamaguchi, 2017). However, although the uncertainty of radiation risk has been rendered actionable through technocratic controls and precise calculations of dose-effects, hazards ultimately escaped symbolic containment as citizens and scientists challenged safety protocols and dose-effect models, illustrated by Sato’s (2014) call to re-examine the ‘connection between the scientific power that decides the limit of dose of radiation and the power of security governing the population following a calculation of the social-economic cost’. Horizons of counter-intelligibility contradict the fundamental atomic promises of security, economy, and population.
Government control over research funding and social engineering was deployed to contain atomic resistance, the latter tactic illustrated in the Shinto purification rite performed at the launch of the peaceful atom in 1956 (Trumbull, 1955). Matsutaro Shoriki, a founder of Japan’s LDP in 1955, collaborated with the CIA to publicize atomic power using his position as head of The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper (Warnock, 2012). Atom Boy sought to rehabilitate the atom in popular culture. Networks of influence supported by the regional utilities cultivated local officials and journalists, but repressed anxieties about radiation returned in cultural icons, such as Godzilla. Fears about radiation hazards were tempered, but not extinguished, when Japan began building commercial reactors based on imported designs in the early 1960s, coinciding with a period of rapid economic growth and Cold War tensions (Bartholomew, 1989). In 1967, the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission’s (JAEC) first ‘Long Term Plan’ promoted fast-breeder reactors as the mainstream because they promised to close the nuclear fuel cycle, freeing Japan from resource dependency and signaling the capacity to produce weapons (Suzuki, 2010). In 1975, the government made nuclear fusion research a national top research priority (CIA Directorate of Intelligence, 1985: 8).
The demonstrable proliferation and safety risks associated with these programs led to international scrutiny and enhanced administrative controls. Within Japan, the Nuclear Industrial Safety Agency was established in 2001 to help combat anti-nuclear resistance fueled by the 1999 nuclear accident at Jōyō, as described by Cavasin (2008). Despite opposition, Japan’s government steadfastly pursued nuclear programs, citing their promise in affording multilayered forms of security. Japan’s multifaceted embrace of nuclear energy – particularly in the arenas of recycling, plutonium-stockpiling, and fusion research – was widely noted as in potential conflict with the country’s ‘pacifist’ constitution, especially Article 9 under Chapter II ‘Renunciation of War’, because these programs signal just-in-time weapons capacities. Although unaltered as of 2019, successive administrations have reinterpreted the language of Article 9 to expand national ‘defense’ capabilities. As shall be demonstrated, Japan’s reigning conceptualization of national security drives costly and risky nuclear programs, subjugating the (imagined) guiding-hand of energy markets to the imperatives of state sovereignty. Moreover, the imperative of nuclear security shapes administration of the population through the transnational biopolitics of radiation protection, whose formalized, but contested, protocols for measuring exposure and predicting effects were derived in significant part from the real-world laboratory of post-WWII Japan.
Atomic epidemiology and the biopolitics of radiation protection
The social problem of representing and governing radiation risk pre-dates WWII, as early 20th-century optimism regarding therapeutic applications subsided amidst growing evidence of dangerousness. Horrific occupational exposures and demonstrations of hereditary effects in exposed laboratory animals in the 1920–1930s drove public demands for regulation, with the International Committee for Radiological Protection (ICRP) being formed in 1928 with the charge of representing safe exposure levels. Their standardized dose-effects model was a prototype that provided a strategic calculus for administering exposure, with predicted effects delimited within a field of mathematical probabilities of excess mortalities, primarily from cancer and leukemia. The model was used to administer exposure judiciously in the workplace and in medicine. Yet, the knowledge incorporated into this model was contested and politicized, with researchers disagreeing on fundamental issues informing conceptualization of dose and response, and disputes prevailing over methodologies for representing and measuring radiation exposure and the extent and scale of impacts across time (for example see Nurnberger, 1937).
Although occupational hygiene and atomic medicine were concerned with relatively short-term somatic effects upon individuals, laboratory research on biological effects in the 1920s and 1930s sought to identify hereditary effects in radiation-exposed populations, extending eugenic frames from the 1920s by adopting ‘natality and mortality’ as ‘two primary elements’ seen as fundamental to the discussion of population growth and decline (Pearl, 1927: 532). Investigations into radiation’s effects on heredity and reproductive fitness were modeled in the laboratory silkworm experiments of Toyama Kametarō in Japan, whose cultivation of genetic thought between 1894 and 1918 (Onaga, 2015) was extended in 1925 by K. Katsuki’s research on the effects of X-rays upon silkworm population vitality (Murakami and Miki, 1972). Japanese research on population-level effects in silkworms was complemented by research in the USA on fruit flies by HJ Muller (1927). No one knew whether the demonstrated population-level genetic effects on these species applied to human populations.
WWII shaped research and regulatory agendas around military objectives, including understanding how to exploit radiation as a biological weapon that could elicit both individual and population level effects (Creager, 2013: 26). Radioisotopes produced in cyclotrons and experimental nuclear reactors were interrogated for their capacities to destroy life at macro and micro levels, with ethical quandaries about applications simplified in decisions about who must live and who must die. Yet, even as radiation was weaponized in research and experimental devices, workers’ exposure was regulated and monitored as the fields of radiation protection and health physics were institutionalized with government war spending. The capacities for radiation to destroy life were thereby mapped and subjected to administrative command and control.
The real-world laboratories produced by the atomic bombs detonated over Japan and the 219 atmospheric test detonations in the USA (Arms Control Association, 2019), fueled efforts to understand the atom’s destructive capacities on physical infrastructures and population vitalities, especially on excess mortality and reduced natality. No study was more ambitious than the project launched in 1946 by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), the largest (public) study of radiation’s effects on human mortality and natality across time, funded in Japan largely by the US military. Although this research was weaponized in strategic intent, its effects operated to domesticate radiation risk, transforming unknown hazards into predictable mortality effects from specifically designated diseases (such as cancer), with no sustained impacts posited for overall population vitality. The importance afforded to natality is illustrated by Appendix 6 of the ABCC’s 1947 General Report, ‘The question of the genetic effects of the atomic bomb’, which delineates efforts to ‘determine the results of all conceptions in the Hiroshima area’ in order to better understand hereditary effects (Neel, 1947: 56). The appendix, written by James V. Neel, an American geneticist, described unprecedented surveillance of women’s reproduction, collectivized in the construct of F1, the first-generation children of survivors. Efforts to expand epidemiological research in 1950 began with a questionnaire in the national census addressing citizens’ recollections of locations and symptoms after the explosions. This questionnaire helped articulate a broader field of visibility of the irradiated population, defined as approximately 284,000 A-bomb survivors present within the city limits of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the bombings. Out of this the Life Span Study (LSS) Cohort was generated, aimed at mathematically representing the ‘excess risks’ for mortality from specific diseases, particularly leukemia and cancer, and adverse reproductive effects within an initial sub-group of 120,000 individuals. The resulting research helped refine posited relationships between radiation dose and population effects in the ICRP and WHO dosimetry.
As chronicled by Lindee (1994) in Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima, the ABCC’s social surveillance was deployed at a troublingly obtrusive scale, particularly by the genetic study aimed at representing radiation risk across generations. Yet, although the overall program was undoubtedly ambitious, it suffered serious limitations first documented by Neel in his report. These included the inadequate choice of Kure, approximately 23 kilometers from Hiroshima, as a control population for comparing increased incidents of disease, reproductive, and genetic problems; inadequate census and medical record-keeping; and widespread practices of infanticide of congenitally malformed infants. Concerned that Kure may have been contaminated by fallout, Neel sought out another control population that could serve as the comparative norm for establishing the rate of radiation-induced mutations in the ABCC study’s population. Neel decided upon the South American Yanomami and launched a major research endeavor funded by the ABCC that was subsequently criticized as bio-colonialism (see Tierney, 2000: 42–48). Sovereignty and biopolitics were conjoined in this effort to understand the effects of radiation on the heritable genetic vitality of exposed populations.
ABCC protocols and research findings were institutionalized as setting the standards for investigating the biological effects of radiation and were incorporated into ICRP and national dose-effects models (Shigematsu, 1998: 5425). This research is organized by the competing imperatives to understand radiation’s killing potential and to shepherd the biovitalities of populations, particularly where natality is concerned. The tension is resolved in research findings delineating radiation’s somatic impacts on individual mortality (primarily through cancer and leukemia), with few-to-no projected population-level effects. Accordingly, in a retrospective study of reproductive effects, Neel and Schull (1991) acknowledged some direct somatic (teratogenic) effects of radiation occurring in utero for the most exposed, but denied maternal genetic damage impacting subsequent pregnancies and national vitalities. The question of human susceptibility to transgenerational genomic effects has been hotly contested since the 1930s.
Although representations and governance of radiation risk have been contested across dispositifs, they are perhaps most fraught in radiation epidemiology. For example, Petryna (2002) and Kuchinskaya (2013) independently demonstrate the politicization of radiation risk in the wake of the 1986 Chernobyl accident as the Soviet administration adjusted the biological threshold dose from 0.01–1 rem before the accident, to as high as 250 rems after the accident. By re-articulating the body as largely immune from chronic exposure to low-dose radiation, the higher threshold transformed Chernobyl’s effects upon populations into psychological symptoms of trauma. To this day, considerable scientific controversy exists over radiation’s effects upon individuals, entire populations, and the existential viability of the species being. Critics’ concerns regarding radiation effects over natality and genomic integrity rupture the suture between nuclear sovereignty and the biopolitics of radiation protection by re-introducing the specter of radiation-induced human mortality, though at the level of the population.
The biopolitics of radiation protection have always been shaped by the imperatives of economy and national security. Although risk and protection are administered in distinct ways across dispositifs, the concept of ‘dose’ is commonly deployed, as nuclear governmentality imposes a totalizing regime of calculation on exposures whose vital formulations are indelibly shaped by decisionality regarding the forms of radiation measured (for example, gamma versus alpha), the types and duration of measurement (for example, badges, Geiger counters, or whole-body scans), and the identification and interrogation of individual and/or population-level effects. Symbolic representations and administration of ‘dose’, generalized as a measurement of exposure to known hazards, are not politically innocent. Schwartz et al. (2011) articulate five critical assumptions underlying the dose-assessment paradigm: (1) risk independence, assuming exposures and health impacts are targeted and independent, not synergistic; (2) risk averaging, which reduces the multidimensional aspects of risk to a single or small set of estimates for the entire population; (3) risk non-transferability, presuming risks are non-transferable across people; (4) risk synchrony, arising from single, snapshot-like representations of risk; and (5) risk accumulation, thought of in terms of incremental and summative doses. Dose has historically been governed in terms of thresholds, with effects posited as increasing in a linear relationship to dose. As illustrated in post-Fukushima Japan, dose is essential to nuclear governmentality’s regime of radiation protection circulating across dispositifs: no effects, beyond acute radiation syndrome, can be assessed in its absence. Moreover, no diseases can be linked to dose beyond those formally acknowledged in existing radiation protection protocols. So, for example, highly elevated levels of diabetes in Fukushima prefecture after the accident have been attributed to lifestyle changes, rather than radiation exposure.
Nuclear governmentality in post-Fukushima Japan
Nuclear governmentality is modern, in the liberal sense, in that it systematizes control over atomic energy and governs through risk, delineating benefits and assigning probabilities to liabilities, including those deriving from catastrophic accidents. Liabilities are formulated and governed by laws and regulatory agencies whose missions include the vitalities of individuals and populations. The legal principle of the minimum standard and the instrument of the permissible dose are foundational to the adjudication of nuclear governmentality’s risk decision making when human populations are involved. Despite the guise of pastoral ‘biopolitics’, which promise to elicit and securitize life, nuclear governmentality entails decisionality in articulating the characteristics, measurement, and extrapolated effects of the permissible dose. With the permissible dose, the state decides upon the acceptable level of risk and this decision-making authority is both acknowledged and rationalized in appeals to national economy and security. State decisionality is supported by a complex array of dispositifs whose biopolitical knowledge and governance of radiation safety are fundamentally politicized. Politicization surfaces in the wake of radiological emergencies when the assumptions and effects of radiation measurements, models, and permissible doses are challenged.
Japan’s post-3/11 nuclear sovereignty
Although the Fukushima disaster encouraged anti-nuclear sentiment, renewing latent cultural concerns regarding radiation health effects, it also reinforced the relationships across nuclear reactors and nuclear defense, drawing attention to the polyvalent and ambivalent coding of Japan’s nuclear security. In a series of secret meetings held after the Daiichi accident, the JAEC, nuclear industry officials, and scientists decided to resume fuel-reprocessing and enrichment despite dangerous leaks in these operations at Tokai village caused by the earthquake (The Mainichi, 2012a). Discovery of an active 100-kilometer fault at the Rokkasho reprocessing and enrichment facility (under construction since 1993) also failed to erode support for Japan’s plutonium-thermal (pluthermal) program, which aims to re-deploy at least 16 boiling water reactors to burn mixed-oxide (uranium and plutonium) MOX fuel (The Asahi Shimbun, 2013).
In 2011, LDP member and former Minister of Defense (2007–2008) Sigeru Ishibu laid out the explicit rationale linking nuclear energy policy to national security through Japan’s (just-in-time) nuclear weapons capacity: If we had to start from basic research, it would take five to 10 years to create nuclear weapons, but since we have nuclear power technology, it would be possible to create nuclear weapons in the relatively short time of several months to a year. . . . And our country has globally leading-edge rocket technology, so if we put these two together, we can achieve effective nuclear weapons in a relatively short time. (NTI, 2012)
Japan’s nuclear deterrent power is articulated as deriving from its just-in-time nuclear weapons’ capacities, re-inscribing a nuclear-statist view of sovereign power. Japan could produce approximately 6,000 nuclear bombs with its stockpile of more than 47 metric tonnes of separated plutonium.
The sovereign aspect of nuclear governmentality shaped decision-making regarding energy policy in 2012, as Japan’s Basic Atomic Energy Law was modified through the addition of an appendix that specified nuclear energy policy must foster national security (The Mainichi, 2012b). The Asahi Shimbun’s editorial response to the legal modification noted that ‘In both Japanese and English, the term ‘national security’ also means ‘national defense’ (The Asahi Shimbun, 2012). The symbolic contiguities across nuclear energy, national security, and nuclear defensive capabilities have been reinforced by officials from Japan’s Ministry of Defense and the nuclear utilities. In 2012, then-Minister of Defense, Satoshi Morimoto, stated boldly that ‘nuclear plants’ afford ‘deterrent force’ (Newstrack India, 2012). In 2016, Defense Minister, Tomomi Inada, declared that ‘Under the Constitution, there are no restrictions on the types of weapons that Japan can possess as the minimum necessary’, with the ‘minimum necessary’ for defensive purposes (The Mainichi, 2016). In 2017, TEPCO’s new chairman, Takashi Kawamura, asserted: ‘nuclear power includes a wide range of technologies that Japan should not abandon, for national security reasons’ (Associated Press, 2017). In 2018, the US and Japan renewed their 30-year Nuclear Cooperation Agreement despite widespread media criticism that Japan alone pursues pluthermal energy among signatories to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Pluthermal energy is a foundational mythos key to nuclear governmentality’s multi-layered promise of security. Pluthermal energy promises to deliver both economy and state sovereignty in a world ordered by nuclear states and powerful corporations, the stability of which is represented as always being under threat, especially in response to energy constraints. Accordingly, political theorist Shani (2013: 5) contends that Japan’s LDP party remains committed to a realist view of national security that conflates ‘state’ and ‘nation’, while prioritizing the state’s role in protecting the population from external threats within a Hobbesian framework. As noted by Shani, a Hobbesian view of sovereignty dominates Japan’s logic of national security, subordinating ‘human security’ to a militaristic national security doctrine, developed here as rooted in nuclear governmentality. The logic and deployment of sovereign decisionality can be demonstrated in the biopolitics of Fukushima radiation protection.
The biopolitics of the Fukushima radiation risk
The sovereignty of the Hobbesian world of state against state described by Shani is today tempered by biopolitical expectations concerning the state’s domestic responsibilities to promote ‘improvement of the welfare of human society and of the national standard of living’, as encoded in Japan’s Atomic Energy Act. However, the pastoral operations of the state in cultivating vital energies for markets and populations are ultimately subordinated in a decision calculus that legitimizes economic and health sacrifices made domestically to protect national sovereignty internationally. Deployments of this decision calculus in the development and implementation of radiation protection, particularly through the administration of the ‘minimum standard’ and ‘permissible dose’, illustrate how sovereignty ultimately conditions decisions about life.
Japan’s constitution, approved in 1946, guarantees only a minimum standard of wholesome and cultured living standards, as encoded in Article 25, which affirms, but simultaneously tempers, the right to life through the incorporation of ‘minimum standards’: ‘All people shall have the right to maintain the minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living. In all spheres of life, the State shall use its endeavors for the promotion and extension of social welfare and security, and of public health.’ The concept of minimum standards is an instrument of sovereign decisionality: minimum standards ultimately re-introduce sovereign decisionality in representing and establishing risk to wholesome and cultured living. It is deployed operationally in the formulation of the ‘permissible dose’, a construct whose origins and authorities lie within the sovereign arm of nuclear governmentality, as illustrated with the ABCC. Prior to Fukushima, the permissible dose in Japan was one millisievert a year; after the disaster, the dose was raised to 20 millisieverts for civilians. Debate exists over the scope and scale of increased risks from the new permissible dose and uncertainty exists over the particularities of individual and population exposures during and after the disaster. As observed by Tosa (2015), uncertainty facilitates politicization.
Expert efforts to capture the scale of the disaster, the particularities of irradiation of people and places, and the attendant health risks for populations ultimately deployed problem-solution frames and research protocols from the ABCC, causing Susan Lindee (2016: 185) to observe that the Fukushima disaster has been designated the ‘third atomic bombing of Japan’. Contiguities drawn across disasters can be found in expert comparisons, as illustrated by remarks made by Kodama Tatsuhiko (2011), head of the Radioisotope Center at the University of Tokyo, who told a diet committee that Fukushima produced the heat equivalent of 29.6 Hiroshima a-bombs, although he acknowledged that direct comparisons of fallout across atomic catastrophes falter on uncertainties pertaining to the volume, characteristics, and dispersion of radionuclides. This uncertainty is erased symbolically by the energy equivalences established between disasters, with the imposition of predictability and hint at risk mitigation afforded by established radiation protocols and dose-effect models. Collectivized representations of exposure for high-risk areas, formalized in the idea of the ‘collective dose’, direct surveillance for specific disease outbreaks predicted by dose-effect models, the assumptions and probabilities of which are largely derived from research by the ABCC and its successor organization.
Having officially narrated collective exposure doses from the 2011 nuclear disaster in its 2012 report, the WHO tackled the problem of predicting effects with its 2013 ‘Health risk assessment from the nuclear accident after the 2011 great East Japan earthquake and tsunami based on a preliminary dose estimation’. This report relied on a reduced estimation of effective doses ranging from
Nuclear governmentality imposed a temporal and calculable order through these dose reconstructions, allowing nuclear sacrifices to be represented as excess risks for high-impact populations, the value of which can be represented, quantified, and compared with nuclear security benefits. Yet, sovereign decisionality infuses expert representations of exposure and risk. For example, following ABCC protocols, radiation exposure was measured narrowly in relation to external exposure to gamma radiation during the emergency phase, with the primary concern about effects represented in relation to increased risks for particular cancers across the lifespan. Nuclear governmentality acknowledges (adult) sacrifices and demands risks be mapped and ‘excess mortality’ calculated using expert protocols that dictate how hazards and effects are both represented and governed. But collectivized, averaged representations of excess cancer risks across the lifespan are contingent and politicized representations that can deflect focus from natal effects. Yet, concerns about natality, thought of in terms of the vulnerabilities of youth and transgenerational genetic damage, have fueled resistance to the dominant paradigm of radiation protection since the 1950s and today shape controversy surrounding Fukushima radiation measurement and health monitoring programs.
Published reports demonstrate the high mutability of dose assessment across expert reports produced by the FHMS and WHO and the homogenization of individual exposures in constructs of collective population doses. These moves generated dissent, with critics questioning the integrity of official undertakings (Yagasaki, 2016) and local communities responding by launching independent studies of children’s internal exposure. The appointment of Dr Shunichi Yamashita as vice president of FMU and director of the Radiation Medical Science Center there represented a flashpoint in the controversy over radiation exposure and its effects. Yamashita is a recognized expert, but his post-disaster reassurances that ‘smiling’ deflects radiation damage generated international controversy, which was amplified by media disclosure of his role in secret meetings allegedly aimed at stage-managing public hearings of the FHMS’s Oversight Committee Meeting (Williamson, 2014). Yamashita’s reputation was also tarnished by the admission that he had advised against dispensing potassium iodide tablets (which blocks thyroid absorption of radioiodine) to children in the early days of the disaster. After stepping down from his post in 2013, Yamashita maintained that excess risks for cancer are low for exposure levels under 100 millisieverts (Der Spiegel, 2011). This claim that radiation under 100 millisieverts produces few effects for populations homogenizes types of radiation, forms of exposure (internal versus external), and affected populations, obscuring development vulnerabilities.
In April 2011, Japan’s government increased the safe exposure level from one millisievert a year to 20 millisieverts a year, which is the level recommended by the ICRP for nuclear plant workers (McCurry, 2011). The decision to extend this permissible dose to children led Professor Toshiso Kosako, who was temporarily appointed to the government’s nuclear advisory committee, to resign in protest over the ‘intolerable’ dose (McCurry, 2011). In 2015, Japan again raised the permissible dose for local government and workers ‘ahead of restart of nuclear reactors’ (The Mainichi, 2015). The state effectively monopolized judgment on the acceptable level of risk, as illustrated by a ruling made by Tomoichiro Nishikawa of the Fukuoka High Court, who ruled against anti-nuclear Kyushu residents, declaring in his decision: ‘A judgment has to be made based on the standard of what level of danger a society would be willing to live with’ (The Asahi Shimbun, 2016).
The homogenized and extrapolated concept of a collective dose, and its statistical relation to somatic effects across a hypothesized lifespan, is foundational to the biopolitics of nuclear governmentality. Collective dose governs the uncertainties of radiation hazard with established excess risks for specific diseases that, when coupled with surveillance medicine, facilitate early detection and mitigation in targeted populations. Dose is also a tool that can be used to class as ‘noise’, and thereby exclude, unexpectedly high incidents in the frequency of disease. Radiation authorities in Japan, such as those involved in the FHMS, argued that the capacity to reconstruct dose empirically for individual bodies is critical for linking radiation exposure to a particular individual’s disease, even when the disease at issue is known to be caused by radiation exposure, as illustrated in debates about rising incidents of childhood thyroid cancer in Japan. Thyroid cancer is a particularly sensitive issue because of potential impacts on population natality, as the young are especially susceptible and damage to the thyroid can adversely impact fertility.
The first round of thyroid tests conducted by the FHMS for approximately 80,000 Fukushima children found ‘no direct [exposure] effects’, although one case of thyroid cancer was detected, described by Shinichi Suzuki of FMU as unrelated to the disaster (Nose and Oiwa, 2012). Subsequent surveys found additional cases of thyroid cancer, and parents alleged that negative results for suspicious thyroid nodules from FMU screenings were contradicted by positive findings in private clinics (Ash, 2013). In 2014, FMU’s screening committee rejected nuclear fallout as responsible for the 75 confirmed or suspected thyroid cancer cases detected among 270,000 Fukushima Prefecture children that year (The Japan Times, 2014). This was despite a study published in 2015 concluding that the increased rate of incidents of thyroid cancers was unlikely to have resulted from a ‘screening surge’, given that the incident rate was found to be 20 to 50 times the national average at the close of 2014 (Tsuda et al., 2015). Shoichiro Tsugane of Japan’s National Cancer Center explained why a connection could not be established: ‘Unless radiation exposure data are checked, any specific relationship between a cancer incidence and radiation cannot be identified’ (The Japan Times, 2015).
Tsugane’s insistence on empirical evidence of individual bodily exposure illustrates a double-move fraught with tension at the heart of nuclear governmentality. On the one hand, nuclear governmentality operates through a homogenized population dose (or doses) and then extrapolates to individual doses based on the particularities of population characteristics and lifestyles. The homogenized, collectivized population dose is stretched across time, allowing for statistical projections of selected diseases across the lifespan, which are managed through surveillance medicine, although historically individuals have been responsibilized with subsequent self-care. However, on the other hand, nuclear governmentality simultaneously holds that individual incidents of disease, even when occurring in excess of predicted effects in the workplace, clinic, or nuclear-disaster zone, cannot be attributed directly to radiation exposure in the absence of empirical monitoring of individual exposure. The linkages across radiation exposure source, radiation dose, and radiation-induced disease must be empirically established at the level of the individual case in order for a particular claim to be made regarding radiation effects, yet the formalized collective dose can be deployed to deny that an individual’s cancer was caused by a particular exposure.
Although couched in scientific expertise and certainty, Lindee (2016: 187–188) points out that ‘dosimetry calculation is a fundamentally humanistic exercise critical to all risk assessment’ because it depends on reconstructing bodily exposures in ‘excruciating detail’. Dosimetry is socially constructed through choices about how, what, and when to sample and through assumptions about effects derived from the ABCC and encoded into the ICRP, including the exclusive focus on cancer and leukemia. In Japan, the contingency of government dosimetry was demonstrated by citizens who deployed Geiger counters to provide alternative mappings of ‘hot-spots’ of concentrated radionuclides, levels of which contradicted government readings, particularly near schools (The Japan Times, 2012). Social media platforms enabled widespread sharing of these alternative representations of radiation risk (Plantin, 2015). Dosimetric mapping of bodies – particularly children’s bodies – produced the most resistance as critics decried the six-month delay in disseminating radiation badges to exposed communities. Experts such as Hokkaido Cancer Center Director Nishio Masamichi also pointed out that radiation badges are inadequate for monitoring exposure to internalized radionuclides (Penney, 2011).
Post-Fukushima dosimetry and projected effects were politicized as assumptions, and methodologies and governmental deployments were criticized in the national media, calling into question the decisionality encoded in the radiation protection paradigm. Conflict over the biopolitics of radiation health effects prompted a November 2012 visit by Anand Grover, UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. His report voiced concerns regarding new elevated radiation exposure laws and inadequate oversight of health issues, with special concern expressed over the decision to allow habitation in areas with up to 19 millisieverts a year of external exposure (Grover, 2012). Yet, LDP policy has emphasized re-starting reactors and re-settling evacuees using dose-projections that represent few excess risks, beyond psychological distress, from chronic exposure to fallout. In April 2017, the LDP cut housing subsidies for ‘voluntary evacuees’, with Masahiro Imamura, who heads recovery for the Tohoku region, stating that radiation refugees should assume ‘self-responsibility for their own decisions’ (O’Connor, 2017). Nuclear governmentality promises to arm individuals with the knowledge they need to navigate an increasingly contaminated environment (Ribault, 2013), as encoded in the purpose of the FHMS; as stated in a 2016 report: ‘The purpose of the survey is to enable the residents to understand their individual radiation dose as basic data, and to help manage their long-term health’ (Fukushima Medical University, 2016). Contemporary nuclear governmentality empowers individuals to know and manage their risks using models of exposure that are deeply political because of contested assumptions and deployments.
Conclusion
Nuclear governmentality is a logic of government that demands the elicitation of atomic energies known to be hazardous for biological life, but promises to domesticate dangerousness with utopian applications (Peoples, 2016) and command and control protocols. Nuclear governmentality promises multi-layered state security while acknowledging the potential for catastrophic risks, which are rendered actionable through bureaucratic administration, emergency planning, and radiation protection. The legal principle of the minimum standard and the instrument of the permissible dose are foundational to representing and governing radiation risks. The permissible dose allows radiation exposure to be represented and administered, for entire populations and for discrete individuals. However, choices about protocols for measuring radiation exposure and assumptions about effects built into dose-effect models are fundamentally political. Uncertainties and controversies over measurement and effects – especially with respect to chronic, low-level exposure in real world conditions – are essential to nuclear governmentality’s operations because they justify surveillance and administration of contaminated regions, centralizing authority over the identification and determination of radiation exposure and risk. Decision makers can then compare probabilistic models of excess risks for entire exposed populations or narrowly defined sub-groups with the presumed, multifold state/energy security benefits of nuclear governmentality. Population-level impacts on future natality are denied in this calculus of individual mortalities weighed against national security. Ultimately, decisions concerning the permissible dose are sovereign decisions encoded into conceptual formations, measurement protocols, and extrapolated effects, with biopolitical implications regarding the expendability of the vital forces of the most exposed and vulnerable populations.
Nuclear governmentality is inscribed by, and reproduces, paradox as its operations aimed at promoting democracy and securing the population simultaneously threaten these valued outcomes. Sovereign decisionality stands at the center of this paradox and is inscribed in the biopolitics of post-Fukushima radiation protection and in the prioritization of pluthermal power, despite potentially catastrophic risks. De Larringa and Doucet (2008) argue that security discourses can, and increasingly do, operate in conjunction with the global exercise of sovereign power. The post-Fukushima security discourse of radiation protection especially demonstrates the prioritization of nuclear sovereignty in representations of children’s risk and the attendant discounting of their future bio-vitalities, well as the future vitalities of populations being urged to return to the former exclusion zones. The undecidability of the relationship between sovereignty and radiation biopolitics illustrated in the Fukushima case demonstrates how the function of death is inscribed politically in security apparatuses that claim to optimize life.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, editor, and editorial staff for their very insightful and constructive feedback.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
