Chapter 20

Japan, ‘death ashes’ and a memorable sea disposal action

In the summer of 1982, in order to consolidate international opposition to the spent nuclear fuel cargoes, I accepted an invitation to a lecture tour in Japan, from where we imported spent fuel for reprocessing at Sellafield, dubbed Britain’s Nuclear Laundry. Peter Taylor of the Political Ecology Research Group and Chantal Girres of the Comite Contre Pollution a la Hague (CCPAH) accompanied me to Japan, a place I had longed to see for a variety of reasons. Manami Susuki, a tireless anti-nuclear activist who had arranged the tour, together with her two helpers, Watanabe-san and Kumura-san, met us at Tokyo airport. Ironically enough when we arrived a pitched battle was in progress between the protesters against the airport expansion and the authorities which made me feel quite at home. The tour we were about to embark on had been arranged with military precision. As we finished one presentation we were whisked off by train or van to the next destination, wheeled in to a packed press conference or lecture hall where we did our stuff only to be whisked out again after questions, on to our next destination. In three weeks, I made 27 presentations.

We saw little of the Japanese people or the countryside. A professional interpreter accompanied us. She was fluent in French, German, Japanese and English. The tour was as exhausting as it was successful. Peter Taylor dropped out after two weeks. He simply could not go on. Watanabe-san, Kumura-san, Chantal and I, together with the tireless Manami, completed the tour which took us to Hiroshima, Nagasaki and every other port and town which had any connection with the nuclear industry in any of its guises. We were followed everywhere by the security agencies. We addressed strikers at the giant Mitsubishi plant which built the pressure vessels for nuclear reactors and which had, against the instructions of the management, decided to recommence the practice of commemorating the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb. We stayed with novice monks in monasteries and with university lecturers in tiny flats in Tokyo. On our final day, we were asked to take part in a Japanese-style demonstration against a nuclear facility.

At the beginning of the march, we were invited to choose a red or yellow headband. Choosing red, we were told, would require us to be at the tail of the march where the trouble would be deliberately provoked while a camera crew would film the police’s inevitably heavy-handed reaction for later use as propaganda. The yellow headbands were for the wimps who wanted to steer clear of trouble and who would form the head of the march. I chose yellow. Chantal, to my chagrin, chose red. As we set off, the march was strictly marshalled by brutish-looking riot police in full battle dress. They wielded truncheons on open display and on their hands they wore plastic covers which projected a viciously sharp plastic edge when a fist was formed. We were allowed to march four abreast and not allowed to sway or in any other way touch the line of riot police marching parallel to us. From the outset, the march was intimidated by the right wing nationalists who were, incredibly, allowed to drive armoured cars up and down our ranks shouting abuse at us without so much as a hair being turned by the riot police. At one point they drove at the march in an attempt to scatter it, the more to provoke the wrath of our riot-gear clad minders.

As we approached the nuclear plant, the ‘snake marching’ began. This involved the red head-bands beginning to deliberately provoke the riot police by linking arms and swaying from side to side as they walked, banging into the line of police who would then retaliate. Before long, the entire aft end of the march was engaged in a pitched battle with the police, all captured on film by the activists. It was quite an extraordinary spectacle which resulted in bloodied protesters being bundled into police vans.

Our last presentation was as guests at the Hiroshima Day commemorative service. Prior to the event we were introduced to members of the hibukushas – a generation of ‘second class citizens’ who had either themselves been contaminated by radioactive fall-out from the bomb or who were the progeny of such ‘tainted’ people. These individuals were sometimes denied jobs, found it difficult to marry and enjoy the trappings of the modern age and had been condemned to a life of hardship and hand-outs thanks to the bomb and its legacy.

We visited the hospitals in which these radiation victims languished and we were taken to the domed ruins of the building, left as it stood after the bomb as a memorial to that awful event, directly above which the bomb exploded. And we were invited to the river upon which people annually sailed their tiny paper boats bearing candles, in an emotional ceremony, as they communicated with the spirits of the dead. At the service itself, held at a few minutes after 8 am on the 8th August, the precise time the bomb was dropped, we held a two minute silence for the dead. It was a hugely moving experience and one which will stay with me for the rest of my life. I was here at the very scene where the most appalling act of mass destruction of a civilian population took place and from which the world has since divided into its belligerent, nuclear-armed super-states.

I left Japan the following morning. As I stood on Tokyo station waiting for the train to the airport, Watanabe-san, who had been my constant companion for three weeks, moved away from me a few feet while appearing to rehearse something. Finally he turned to me with tears in his eyes. He had spoken not one word of English to me previously, but he looked me in the eye and in faltering English which he had clearly learned from our interpreter, said, ‘Peter-san. You live a long way away and I will miss you velly much. Thank you for coming to our countly and for fighting nuclear industlee. I solly we send death ashes to your countly. Please lite to me. Goodbye.’ He gave me the biggest hug I’ve ever had and, tears streaming down his face, he turned and was gone.

While in Japan, Hans Guyt had taken over the radioactive waste dumping campaign. He phoned me just before I left Japan to tell me that the direct action campaign against the British dump in the Atlantic had gone extremely well. The activists had occupied the tipping platforms of the Gem and had managed to prevent any dumping for three days. Now the combined Dutch, Swiss and Belgian operation was to begin and I would be back from Japan in time to participate in the action which would involve both the Sirius, the newly acquired pilot vessel purchased amid some controversy by the Dutch office, and the Cedarlea. The two Belgian vessels, the Rheinbourg and the Scheldebourg, would be carrying a record tonnage of waste for disposal. There was no way I wanted to miss this showdown.

The Sirius was built for shallow water work and in open sea was slow and would roll on wet grass, as they say. As a consequence, she left earlier than the Cedarlea which first went to Belgium to generate media coverage for the campaign. Being a relatively fast and seaworthy vessel, the Cedarlea was to wait off the Channel Lighthouse Vessel in an attempt to pick up the two ships leaving Belgium and shadow them down to the dumping ground. The Belgian ships would have to pass within a few miles of us as they came down the English Channel.

I had the pleasure of working with Ken Ballard, technically a first mate, but promoted to skipper for this campaign. We waited for 48 hours at the Channel Light but failed to spot the ships. I suggested to Ken that we may have missed them during the night and that we should head off for the dumping ground, to which he replied, ‘Ok. Let’s have dinner first and then we’ll move.’

As we emerged on the bridge after dinner, Ken was looking intently through the binoculars at two ships about a mile away. He telegraphed ‘full ahead’ and we took off in pursuit of what he felt sure were the two dump vessels. Within an hour, we had caught them and confirmed Ken’s suspicions. Overnight, the weather worsened considerably to a force eight and we came upon the Sirius, labouring in the heavy seas. Due to the conditions, the Cedarlea was forced to reduce revs slightly but the dump ships ploughed on at full speed, hoping to out-run us, lying deep in the water with waves crashing over the bows – a spectacular sight. The poor Sirius was reduced to almost heaving to and the Cedarlea ploughed on past her, bucking and slewing around in the great waves which battered the ship. We arrived at the dump site 36 hours later, and although the dump ships had managed to steal a lead on the Cedarlea, we still had them on radar and could direct the Sirius to them with ease. Hans set about going through the diplomatic niceties which always preceded direct actions, asking the skippers and crews to please desist from polluting international waters, to which the reply was a euphemistic ‘Bollocks!’ Battle commenced.

These ships didn’t use tipping platforms. Instead, the barrels were lifted from the holds by grabs: two, three or even four at a time, and yanked over the side of the ship in one movement at the end of which the release mechanisms would be triggered and the barrels would crash into the sea in a totally uncontrolled manner. The crews from the Sirius’s inflatable dinghies were buzzing around the Rheinbourg while our contribution from the Cedarlea was to dedicate our one and only inflatable to the Scheldebourg. Within an hour, the Scheldebourg had wisely parted company from its sister ship, forcing us to break off our action. Our primary task was to support the Sirius and its crews in the action and to act as a filming platform; we would therefore have to leave the Scheldebourg to dump its cargo in peace, a hundred miles away. As the action intensified, the barrels were getting closer and closer to the inflatables as the crews judged the fall more and more precisely. This had little impact on the dumping crews who simply continued to tip the barrels over the side like shelling so many peas.

This mayhem continued for two days until I became very concerned about the way Hans was pushing his crews to risk themselves more and more. I decided a parley was in order and I clambered into an inflatable to be transferred to the Sirius. The swell was enormous as we powered across the 300 yards of open water between the two ships, blocking out any sight of the Sirius as we plummeted into a trough between the waves. My driver, a Dutchman called Willem, decided to ‘wave hop’ by opening the throttle and bouncing from one wave crest to the next; the entire experience of crossing a relatively small area of ocean from one ship to the other was most a uncomfortable and dangerous experience. I sullenly climbed on board the Sirius. As soon as I had both feet on the deck, the ship’s motion was all too apparent. I threw up and felt so sick for the duration of my time on the Sirius that I did little more than to tell Hans that I felt we had pushed this campaign as far as we could. He disagreed. Hans continued to deploy his crews until the inevitable happened. One of the inflatables was badly hit by a falling barrel, causing concussion for the driver, Dutchman Gys Thieme. The tactic of using inflatables was called off. Harold Zindler, the burly German ‘action specialist’ on board the Sirius made a rope ladder which was used to board the Rheinbourg during one of the infrequent smokoes the crew enjoyed and occupy the cranes used to discharge the barrels.

After two days, the protesters in the cranes were finally dislodged and incarcerated, under arrest, in the chain locker and held on board the ship, courtesy of the Belgian authorities. When they arrived back in Belgium five days later, Harold and his team were heroes. Only when the courts threatened to fine Greenpeace £20,000 for every day of further disruption did Hans agree to call it off. It was a cracking action which, in hindsight, probably broke the resolve of the dumping nations and led, almost directly, to the eventual ban a year later.

But now it was time to celebrate. The two ships, Cedarlea and Sirius, hove to that evening and a humdinger of a party was held on both ships throughout the night. Unknown to me at the time, the party led to one of our German crew falling desperately and improbably in love with a female on the Sirius, a situation of unrequited love which was to hit us straight in the face on the way home. One Greenpeace ship was to go to Spain to capitalise on the huge public support for Greenpeace there, given that it was a Spanish fishing area into which the waste was being dumped without any notice being given. The other ship was to go to Ireland, the country which suffered from the nuclear waste activities of the UK, and a country vital to the anti-nuclear campaign. The Cedarlea drew the short straw and went off to Ireland, the Sirius to Vigo in Spain where a football match was delayed to give the population a chance to meet the heroic Greenpeace: 10,000 people lined the quayside.

We went off to Cork where two people awaited our arrival and they were the guys waiting to take our lines. The trip back to Cork, however, was not without its drama. Our lovelorn friend tried to commit suicide, an act which required immediate notification to the authorities and we were plunged into a legal situation which we could have well done without.

The Cedarlea stayed in Cork for three days during which we did our best to ginger up support for the campaign before I flew home and the ship made her way back to London, in a voyage which has gone down in the annals of Greenpeace folklore. Ken Ballard was skipper and lived at that time in Falmouth. He jumped ship there and handed over the captaincy to first mate John Sprange. En route, the Cedarlea almost collided with a cross channel ferry and fouled fishing nets as it cut a swathe of mayhem along the south coast. More importantly, however, Ken’s premature departure from the ship was seen as an act of negligence by the marine division hierarchy and was to have serious repercussions years later.

For me, the battle against the nuclear juggernaut continued unabated. I went to Cherbourg where I worked with our French colleagues to make a further attempt at stopping the arrival of a consignment of spent nuclear fuel. I was ashore, working out of a supporter’s flat, monitoring the radio signals of the Sirius as she made her way into port, against the order of the harbour master. I could hear some muffled activity in the background and then my eyes popped wide open when I heard skipper Willem Beekman come on the radio screaming, ‘Mayday! Mayday! This is the Greenpeace ship, Sirius, in Cherbourg harbour. We are under attack! Mayday!’

I thought Willem had finally flipped and as we rushed down to the docks I wondered what on earth we would find. A line of riot police stood on the quayside, no more than ten yards from the Sirius. They were literally using the ship as target practice for stun grenades and smoke canisters. The ship was wreathed in smoke and flames licked up from the bridge superstructure. I couldn’t believe it. The French were bombing one of our ships, something they were to do again, with devastating consequences, in New Zealand in 1985.

A month later, we prepared round five against spent nuclear fuel ships arriving in Cherbourg. The Sirius was due to collect me from Fecamp on France’s east coast where I had been attending a series of meetings with other activists. Tony Marriner met me in the hotel in Fecamp and brought news that the Sirius would be in port at around midnight. As we sat in the bar of the hotel, I noticed someone watching us quite closely, but thought little of it at the time. Tony and I were joined by a television crew and we moved into the restaurant to eat. My interested party moved with us. After dinner, I decided to walk to the phone booth up the road to make sure that the harbour authorities had been informed of the Sirius’ arrival. Tony came with me. I had had one beer and one glass of wine. As we stood squashed in the phone box to avoid the lashing wind and rain, two police cars drew up outside the box and I was dragged into a car, accused of being drunk and whisked off to the gendarmerie.

A stern-faced officer began interrogating me. He effectively accused me of illegal entry into France since I had been ‘deported’ when I was last in Cherbourg. I told him that was nonsense and that he knew it. He said I would have to take a breathalyser test which was of course positive, although I was never shown the result. I laughed at the comedy of it all. I was thrown in a cell for the night and charged with being drunk.

In the morning, the French Greenpeace office had organised a massive press presence which was designed to embarrass the authorities but which backfired badly. The press headlines the next day were ‘Greenpeace director arrested for drunkenness’ and no matter how much I protested my innocence, I was considered guilty by the press. It was a much more newsworthy story than ‘Greenpeace waits for nuclear shipment’. McTaggart, apparently believing the reports, based on his knowledge of me, went totally ape.