London. -- This week a British ship left a French dock, monitored from the sky by American satellites on its way to Japan.
Before it left, the port of Cherbourg was sealed off in a military-style police action, with French commandos held in reserve.
A Princeton University physicist, Edwin Lyman, has warned that if accidentally this ship caught fire on the high seas but reasonably near land, it could contaminate millions of people.
Billions of dollars are at stake. National egos are at risk. A nuclear-arms race between China and Japan may develop.
Japan? The most pacifist of the major industrialized nations? It does not make sense to accuse it of malevolent nuclear-arms ambition. But then Tokyo's explanation of this ship doesn't make sense either.
The ship holds about 1.7 tons of highly radioactive bomb-grade plutonium waste -- waste so deadly that a person standing within three feet of a glass block of it would receive a fatal dose of radiation in less than a minute.
This is the second plutonium ship to circle half the globe. The first, two years ago, caused such a row that the Japanese government announced a rethink of the role of plutonium in its energy program. This second ship is the result of the rethink.
The Japanese say the plutonium -- recycled waste from its conventional reactors sent to French and British reprocessing plants -- is meant to fuel a breeder reactor one day. That day is at least 40 years hence. Most countries, including the United States, have formally abandoned the goal of building breeder reactors -- power plants that, once operational, generate their own fuel from nuclear fission and therefore never require outside refueling.
Why are the Japanese, militant protagonists of nuclear disarmament, pursuing a plutonium economy? Not only are the scientific hurdles to building commercially viable breeder reactors mind-boggling, there is no economic need in a world with too much plutonium from dismantled nuclear warheads and an abundance of low-priced uranium sufficient for all the world's projected demand for conventional reactors.
Japan, if it so chose, could secure its energy needs for 60 years by buying up uranium with the money it is now spending on the plutonium enterprise.
If one arm of the Japanese establishment is anti-nuclear, however, another clearly believes Japan must maintain the option to offset Chinese and North Korean nuclear weapons if the Asian geopolitical balance tilts against it.
Thus in November Japan introduced a resolution in a U.N. committee urging the nuclear states "to further pursue progressive and balanced reductions of nuclear weapons in the light of Article 6 of the [nuclear] nonproliferation treaty" -- a move considered so outrageous by the Clinton administration that it lobbied Japan to dilute it.
Meanwhile, Japan is stealthily putting itself in position to join the nuclear-weapon states.
Perhaps one cannot blame Japan. American reaction to the Japanese nuclear-reduction proposal showed that, notwithstanding the disarmament pleas of Gen. Colin Powell and other military officers, the United States has no intention of significantly cutting its nuclear arsenal.
Therefore, neither will Russia, China, Britain or France. If the nuclear-haves cannot deny themselves, why should the Third World -- or Japan -- hold back? The professed American desire to win an "indefinite and unconditional" extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty at its April review conference looks doomed.
Despite the end of the Cold War, we are going to see a more nuclear world over the next decade. The plutonium ship, as it moves through the world's major oceans with its poisonous cargo, is the most dramatic and visible sign of the sailing away of all our hopes for a more peaceful and less dangerous world.
Jonathan Power writes a column on the Third World.