Obama Response to Japanese Nuclear Crisis Shows Need to Revive the Legacy of the Anti-nuclear Movement

Japan's desperate struggle to contain the nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors should bring the Obama's attempt to reintroduce nuclear power in the US to a grinding halt. Instead, the administration has responded with an anxious defense of nuclear power. Indeed, energy secretary Stephen Chu told Congress on the 15th that learning from the disaster in Japan would "strengthen America's nuclear industry." This ludicrous response and the mindset it reflects should push us to revive discussion of the US antinuclear movement from the 1970s, which posed radical alternatives to the energy policy offered by both major parties, and in doing so defeated the designs of the nuclear industry.

In the waning days of the American New Left, the antinuclear movement emerged to challenge an emergent and powerful industry, and eventually prevented hundreds of facilities from being built across the country. This broad-based struggle is important to consider now for a number of reasons. First, in an era when US politics were shifting rightward, this was a highly successful populist, grassroots, and militant response to powerful energy interests. It brought together workers, farmers, parents, students and others in both rural and urban settings to oppose the introduction of nuclear power. Second, the anti-nuke movement articulated anti-authoritarian organizing practices, relying on direct democratic decision-making and direct action. Third, the movement pushed beyond New Left thinking from the late 1960s and advanced important ideas about the role of hierarchy and domination in the contemporary era; the relationship of human society and the natural world; and the central role of capitalism in the destruction of the planet. The critique of patriarchy was a key note in the anti-nuke movement, and feminist analysis shaped the movement in fundamental ways. Organizations such as the Clamshell Alliance in New England and the Abalone Alliance in California pulled together the most libratory articulations of the counterculture with analytic acuity and political resolve.

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