The silver lining to the fog of war is that hostile acts of destruction enable the military to order new weapons systems. The self-inflicted sabotage of the battleship Maine rallied the American public to build new steamships to capture Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spanish control. The sinking of the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor sparked the biggest naval expansion in world history. Human lives are merely a part of the price. As put by the Beat poet Allen Ginzberg: War is good for business. Invest your son.



Today, the greatest threat confronting the U.S. Navy does not come from Russia, China or even the outlands of North Korea, but arose from the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns in spring 2011. Six years of continuous radioactive releases into the atmosphere and the Pacific Ocean have seriously contaminated dozens of American naval vessels and their personnel, at least 16 warships and 70,000 servicemen by the Navys own count. Based on closer examination of naval records of voyages, the total number is at least double that rather low official estimate.



The Pentagon is now facing a hard choice: to scrap its radioactive fleet and dump the mess at Hanford nuclear site and inside veterans hospitals, or arrange a naval war to sink the lethal vessels and their human cargo in foreign waters.



Considering the rising cost of health care and burden of student loans, American taxpayers are in no mood to finance the scrapping of supercarriers and missile destroyers or paying to build replacement vessels. The only way to rally the public to trade in their paltry savings accounts for armaments procurement is the outbreak of war with a supremely evil enemy.



With Syria now relegated to a minor-league battlefield for jihadists, and the Mediterranean shore with its luxury hotels on Israeli beaches being unsuitable for naval warfare, the Pentagon has found a distant villain in North Koreas leader Kim Jong-un, who talks tough and fires short-range rockets in the general direction of the USA. Therefore, its one-reactor nuclear program is being promoted as the casus belli for a coming war. Never mind that the North Koreans are merely trying to build a minimal deterrence capability against the vastly bigger nuclear programs of Japan and South Korea, which go secretly approved by Washington DC. The logic goes: If only Tokyo had dropped its nuclear load on Pyongyang instead of dumping it into the Pacific, none of this would be happening.



Ducks in a Shooting Gallery



Three USN supercarrier strike groups are now heading for the Sea of Japan, a narrow (1,000 kilometers at the widest point) enclosed body of water. There in its calm dark waters, a dozen big ships along with some 130 naval jets and dozens of helicopters will be parked like ducks in a row inside a shooting gallery.



If the North Koreans hesitate to open fire, for obvious reasons of national survival and common sense, there is a back-up team of shooters, namely the Maritime Self-Defense Force of Japan. A volley of Mitsubishi anti-ship missiles should do the job of sinking the U.S. Seventh Fleet and drowning the American sailors. The news media will assign the blame on Pyongyang for the dastardly deed. The Second Korean War will ensue, leaving millions dead from explosions and smoke, and in the chaos and fright nobody will notice the treacherous charade that sparked the brutal massacres of friends and foes alike.



Donald Trump has promised a huge increase in defense spending for new equipment so the Navy will not be rendered toothless. Half of its carriers and destroyers are now dangerously radioactive but, if current policy holds, these damaged goods will soon be sold off as scrap metal to South Korean and Taiwanese shipyards, eliminating any residual evidence of high treason. Shinzo Abe and Trump will emerge as victors over totalitarianism, much like Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta. Since the media applause will be thunderous, drowning out any and all critics, I am compelled to quietly write this near-term history in advance.



Paying back the US by killing Americans



The Japanese government is eager to oblige in the elimination of the seaborne evidence, since it was its reactors at Fukushima that hold liability for irradiating dozens of American warships and their crews. Tokyo has been obligated to the American side to sink the USS Ronald Reagan ever since the Japanese authorities failed to issue a warning about the weapons-grade plutonium released during the Reactor 3 meltdown in mid-March 2011. The unrepentant revanchist Abe, in any case, will relish the coming spectacle with a hearty banzai to avenge the Imperial fleets lost at the Battle of Midway and in the Coral Sea.



The Shock of Fukushima



The retreat of the USS Reagan from the coast of Sendai was a memorable event worthy of a disaster movie, as helicopters delivering aid to the tsunami survivors raced back to the carrier after weapons-grade plutonium in the air set off their isotope-detecting geiger counters. At the time, the U.S. commanders were not clued into the fact that the mixed-oxide fuel at Fukushima was involved in plutonium production for secret underground warhead facilities in nearby Hirono and Haramachi. Their understandable assumption was that a foreign power had exploded a hydrogen bomb over Fukushima, and so the good ship Reagan made a U-turn and fled to the open sea, but sadly too late since its air vents were by then heavily irradiated.



Unbeknownst to captain and crew was that the carriers desalination system was filling up with radioactive seawater flushed out of the Fukushima No.1 plants cooling system. Every cup of coffee, shower and any food boiled in water was lethal for crew members. A consequent flurry of odd cancers, miscarriages and defects in newborns motivated many of the crew members to file a lawsuit against the U.S. Navy for failing to alert them to the radioactivity threat and not decontaminating the ship. Instead of admitting the mistakes, the Pentagon has stonewalled the victims.



After its return to San Diego, the USS Reagan was towed to the Bremerton Naval Shipyard in Puget Sound where all its innards, from venting and pipes to electronics and computers, were stripped out, piled aboard a train and dumped at the Hanford Nuclear Site. The hulk was then towed back to San Diego where it idled until its internal systems were patched together into a semblance of battle-readiness. Built a a cost of $6 billion, the USS Reagan is overdue for scuttling, and unfortunately the crew with it.



Clueless Admirals



The carrier USS George Washington, which retreated before reaching Fukushima for the Operation Tomodachi (Friend) relief effort, was pulled out of its home port of Yokosuka and is now sitting in a Virginia dockyard, supposedly for nuclear fuel replacement.



The clueless admirals, left out of the loop by the Department of Energy (DOE) about the continuing threat gushing from Fukushima, unwisely allowed the supercarrier USS Nimitz to patrol off the China coast and then sail home along the North Pacific Current, the conveyor belt for radioactive releases from Fukushima to the American coastline. It, too, ended up at Bremerton shipyard for a year, and has since been parked in Everett, Washington State, under showers of radioactive rainfall.



Meanwhile, the carrier Carl Vinson was in the Arabian Sea where the body double of Osama Bin Laden was laid on its flattop deck and unceremoniously tossed overboard in a supposed Islamic burial. Under Muslim custom, believers bodies are laid in proper graves in expectation of the Second Coming. Presumably Osama, version 2, knows how to snorkel and swim on the Day of Reckoning. Then, the Navy made the fatal decision to the send the Vinson to the Philippines, just in time to be hit by high-level nuclear waste aboard barges sunk by the Japanese in to the Philippine Trench.



An Easter Blasphemy



At the time of writing, Easter Sunday 2017, the three aircraft carriers are plying their ways from Australia, San Diego and Hawaii toward Davy Jones Locker. The American sailors will soon reenact the destruction of the Russian Tsars Baltic Fleet at the entrance of the Japan Sea in the Battle of Tsushima. My grandfather in his youth celebrated that stunning victory, so why am I already mourning the coming slaughter at sea when the sailors, pilots and Marines are already doomed by radioactive exposure? I suppose it is more heroic to die from friendly fire than to waste away inside a veterans hospital. And better for the bottom line and big investors, just ask the shrewd Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin of Goldman Sachs.



In eulogy before the shooting in the back begins, let us sing the U.S. Navy song:



Stand Navy out to sea, fight our battle cry!

We'll never change our course so vicious foes steer shy-y-y-y!

Roll out the TNT, anchors aweigh!

Sail on to victory, and sink their bones to Davy Jones, hooray!



Anchors Aweigh, my boys, Anchors Aweigh!

Farewell,to Foreign Shores we sail at break of day-ay-ay-ay;

Through our last night ashore, drink to the foam,

Until we meet once more.



Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor with The Japan Times group, is a science journalist based in Hong Kong.