Arjun Makhijani is an extraordinary and rare mix of nuclear scientist, historian and socially engaged philosopher. I'm presenting him every two years because his analysis is embedded in rarely scrutinized facts and remains shockingly timely:
Disarmament is more urgently needed now that nuclear weapons have spread far beyond the original weapons states and there are even voices in Japan today that call for nuclear weapons. And Makhijani shows that we can only find the path back from the abyss if we are clear and honest about how nuclear weapons were invented and first used. And there is much information in this talk that has been shunned or kept secret.
Questions raised in this part are: Why was the US fleet moved from San Diego to Pearl Harbor? Does the Japanese attack have anything to do with the US oil embargo? What were the original goals of the Manhattan Project and why and when were they changed? And who was in charge of this secret program when even the US Vice President or the generals responsible for WWII did not know.
Thanks to KEXP, Seattle, program host Mike McCormick for giving me the audio for this program.Â
Makhijani, originally from Mumbai, India, holds a Ph.D. in engineering with focus on nuclear fusion from the University of California, Berkeley. He has written books and articles on the nuclear fuel cycle, weapons production, testing, workers' exposure to radiation and nuclear waste. He also wrote the ground breaking book: Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy, the first analysis of a transition to a U.S. economy based completely on renewable energy. Makhijani is President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, the website is IEER.org and has over three decades of activism for disarmament.
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