Well-attended public lecture with Emeritus Professor Charles Perrow

A great amount of people had chosen to join when Yale Emeritus Professor Charles Perrow yesterday the 17th of September gave a presentation on; ”Nuclear Deniers: Guilty Knowledge of Radiation from Hiroshima to Fukushima”.

Perrow emphasized how there in powerful states across borders in countries as United States, Germany, France, Soviet, United Kingdom and Japan in a historical perspective as well as today has been a denial of the damaged coursed and the damages that might be caused regarding nuclear and atomic bombs. It’s his conviction that there exists a political intention to ignore the possibility of damage and hereby a social construction of risk rises. A more specific explanation of the presentation theme is;

“Nuclear denials parallel other denials such as climate change and the link between smoking and cancer, aligning state and corporate interests. The US and the Soviet Union utilized denial and secrecy with respect to radiation damages from atomic bombs, bomb factories, and nuclear power plants in order to legitimate the bomb and its bad seed, nuclear power plants. When obvious damages unmasked denial and secrecy, risk analysis was employed. Probability Risk Analysis ignored possibilities, and favored probabilities, which were always found to be low.  Since they were not zero, the risk analysis trope blamed the victims for their lifestyles or unreasonable fears, with terms such as “radiophobia” accounting for morbidity and mortality.  These dynamics are emerging in Fukushima where the radiation effects are said to be trivial but the psychological effects potentially deadly. Powerful state and corporate interests are involved in this social construction of risk”.

Get his presentation here: charles_perrow_public_lecture_cbs.pptx