Kyle Cleveland, my colleague at Temple University Japan, recently published a report in the online Asia-Pacific Journal, “Mobilizing Nuclear Bias: The Fukushima Nuclear Crisis and the Politics of Uncertainty” that has drawn widespread media attention. Based on numerous interviews with government officials, military officers and nuclear energy experts, along with documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests to U.S. government agencies, Cleveland has pieced together a critical, but nuanced picture of a crisis that was closer to careening out of control than is generally acknowledged. There was a great deal of confusion in the early weeks of the crisis as different actors had different information and made varied assessments about what the information indicated.
Cleveland elucidates the yawning chasm between the minimizing and downplaying efforts of Tokyo Electric Power Co. and the U.S. government’s assessments of the nuclear crisis. Because the Japanese government was reliant on Tepco for information this also created a gulf of perceptions between the two governments.
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