USS G Washington to be deployed in Japan


Officials from the Japanese government and Yokosuka city, near Tokyo, will visit Bremerton, Washington in the United States and view a drill at the US naval base that simulates a nuclear accident. It is part of preparations for the deployment of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington to Yokosuka naval base next year.

Wikipedia has a lot of history and trivia about Yokosuka, the largest naval base in Japan, here.

Also on Sunday, 15,000 Japanese people ormed a human chain around the US Kadena Air Base in central Okinawa to protest the military presence there. The demonstration is one of the events planned ahead of Tuesday's 35th anniversary of Okinawa Prefecture's reversion from US rule to Japan.

Okinawa hosts some 75 percent of the US bases stationed in Japan in terms of space.

On Sunday afternoon, 15,000 people, including members of labor unions and citizens' groups, surrounded the largest US air base in the Far East with a 17-kilometer human chain.

Sources: NHK World (Sunday)

Kadena Official Site is the US offical site, while Wikipedia has more details and history here.

Heiwa Forum has news and updates here (in Japanese)

Comments, anyone?

Comments

Pandabonium said…
While a "major" nuclear accident may be unlikely, what I worry about is "minor" leaking and of nuclear and chemical pollution that might well go unreported, yet cause long term harm to large numbers of people. Ships of this size are environmentally dirty to begin with, and with a nuclear reactor far worse.

Haunani Kay Trask, Director of the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i, wrote in 1993: "Recently in Hawai'i we've learned that in the 1960s and 1970s U.S. nuclear submarines dumped radioactive water in Honolulu Harbor and Pearl Harbor. There was no accountability for that at all. We found it out because of a lawsuit filed by the Quakers, the American Friends Service Committee. We also know that there are tremendous numbers of warheads stored on the island of Oahu. We don't know where they are stored, but we know that they are there. They are also transshipped across our island chain and there isn't any notification of when that happens. But we do know that it occurs." - 1993

There's the problem. We'll never be advised of what is really happening until decades later, if at all.
10:50 am, May 15, 2007
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