Japan has been there before. And that's what makes the growing
radiation threat from the Fukushima Daiichi plant as mysterious
as it is disturbing: Why did a country that suffered the utter
horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki so willingly give itself over
to nuclear power? Japan's 55 reactors produce nearly 30 per cent
of the country's electricity, and the long-term strategy before
the Fukushima disaster was to push that figure to 50 per cent by
2030. Almost alone among its political allies, whose ambitions
were reined in by the catastrophes at Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl, the land that experienced the atomic bomb has chosen
to expand its network of nuclear plants, many of them knowingly
built in seismic zones. Whatever the future now holds for
Japan's shattered nuclear dreams, how could it so easily have
overlooked its past? The answer begins with the country's
astonishing postwar recovery and its success in undoing the
devastation of which Hiroshima remains the most potent symbol.
The turning point was the