(from "Kujira to Inbou" (Whales and Plots), by Yoshito Umezaki, 1986)

Note:
1. The words of conversations or statements which were made in English are not the exact wording as the original, because they were translated from Japanese texts in the book.

2. Remarks starting with an "*" are mine.

"It was to avoid the topic of the problem of the disposal of nuclear waste that the US government tried to direct the world's attention to the whaling issue at the Stockholm conference. The USA has been disposing of nuclear waste in the sea, but pollution due to damage of the containers was becoming a difficult problem. Because of the whaling issue, they could avoid the nuclear disposal problem being discussed at the conference, but George Kennan - a US delegate - later stated the following about the political intention before the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate: "It was because the military did not want the discussion on the problem of nuclear waste".

This is an extract from an article, "Light and Shadow of the Anti-Whaling Movement^(*1)", which Davidson wrote in the June, 1975, issue of a PR magazine, My Family, of Ajinomoto Co Ltd. As a nuclear superpower, the USA started the disposal of nuclear waste in the sea soon after the end of WWII in 1945. Nuclear waste from nuclear weapon factories and nuclear power plants is concreted and packed in oil drums and sent to the bottom of the sea. There are 50 disposal sites in east and west offshore areas of the USA. The number of oil drums dumped by 1970 was up to 47,000. However, it turned out that the drums had been damaged by water pressure and artificial radioactive elements such as Cobalt-60 and Cesium-137 had leaked and contaminated submarines and fish.

In 1961 the US Nuclear Commission tested the disposal of oil drums and found that 36% of the drums were damaged at 180 meters depth. But this fact had been made a strict secret until it was revealed in August 1980 by Jackson Davis - professor of Ecology at Santa Cruz School of University of California. Why it was made a strict secret? A comment by a concurrent US Nuclear Commission's member is presented in the New York Times dated August 20th, 1980: "The development cost of containers which can bear high pressure is very high and economically impossible." Davis also revealed that the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) had confirmed the leak of nuclear waste from oil drums by photographs, and radioactive substance was found in black cod which was harvested in 1976.

George F. Kennan, who is cited in Davidson's article in My Family, is one of the top experts on Soviet affairs in the USA, and his paper in the July, 1947, issue of Foreign Affairs became a big topic. The paper, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct", which he wrote under a pseudonym, "X", analyzed the background and direction of military and foreign policy activities of the Soviet Union smartly and thoroughly, and reasoned the necessity of careful long-term strategy for containment of the USSR.

The basics of concurrent policy toward the USSR by President Harry Truman and Secretary of State John Dulles was countermeasure by power. In such a situation, the outstandingness of Kennan's paper drew great attention. Serving as director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff and US ambassador to the USSR, Kennan - over eighty years old - is still in good health, and the Kennan Institute is the highest authority on Russian studies. Because of such a background, I completely trust his statement to the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate: "It was because the military did not want discussion on the problem of nuclear waste that the US tried to direct attention to the whaling issue".

"Leaders of the anti-whaling movement in the US do not know whales well. Some people know whales better but they consider using whales for political purposes. It means they are trying to use it effectively to attack Japan on the trade or fishery problems. The Stockholm conference was the first stage. They added the whaling issue to the agenda item to avoid discussion about the nuclear waste disposal. The core of the power which mobilized environmental protection organizations to Stockholm and worked for lobbying was the Pentagon. I guarantee this information since I got it from a journalist who reports the White House related matters."
- Martin Davidson

Davidson told me the above at the Foreign Press Club in Yuuraku-chou, Tokyo, in July 1975. He also pointed out as follows: "Since McArthur - supreme commander of GHQ (General Headquarters) - approved in 1946 the resumption of Japanese whaling after WWII to secure food, the US government could not ask Japan directly for the whaling moratorium. In the future, probably they will not either." His remark has been correct. The US government has never talked about the whaling moratorium through diplomatic channels. It seems they were anxious about damage to US-Japan relations.

At that time, there was a league of Dietmen for the research on marine development in the Liberal Democratic Party. It was chaired by Takeo Ohkubo, who changed from the first Director General of the Maritime Safety Agency to the Dietman, elected in Kumamoto Prefecture. Since the league studied marine development and the marine defense problem mainly from the military viewpoint, it often had contact with the Pentagon. When member Dietmen visited Washington D.C. after the Stockholm conference, top people of the Pentagon repeatedly asked them to appreciate the US position on the whaling policy. There was no explanation why the US government adopted the whale protection policy. Probably the Pentagon was anxious about the effect of the US policy of a whaling ban on its military friend, Japan.

Kazuo Tanikawa, who was a member of the league and became the Director General of Defense Agency later, was talked to by Pentagon people about whales every time he visited USA. Since he could not understand the background, he called Kunio Yonezawa of the Fisheries Agency and asked for an explanation. After Yonezawa explained, "The Pentagon has no interest in whale resource protection but uses whales to direct world attention away from the Vietnam War.^(*2)", Tanikawa was convinced of it: "Well, it's likely". But there is no trace that the league did anything for the whaling moratorium, in response to the wishes of the Pentagon.

After all, the problem of nuclear waste disposal was not put on the agenda at Stockholm. The US strategy to use whales to dodge the Vietnam War problem and the nuclear waste disposal problem worked very well.

1 This title is literal translation from the book. I'm not sure whether the PR magazine My Family was in English or not.

2 The ten-year whaling moratorium was suddenly added in December 1971 to the agenda item of the Stockholm conference by a strong request from the US government, although the provisional agenda had already been completed in June 1971. Also, the Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme had announced beforehand that he would accuse at the conference the environmental destruction by the defoliation tactics in the Vietnam War. That's being the reason, some people in Japan believe this story. Of course, Russell Train denied it and stated that the motivation was pure concern about the protection of whales. However, the official document about the proposal of the ten-year moratorium is still confidential for national secrecy reasons at the National Archives.

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