Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : learning from a man-made disaster / Scott D. Sagan -- Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster : an overview / Kenji E. Kushida -- The accident that could never happen : deluded by a design basis / Gregory D. Wyss -- Security implications of the Fukushima accident / Kaoru Naito -- Political leadership in nuclear emergency : institutional and structural constraints / Nobumasa Akiyama -- Radiation protection by numbers : another "man-made disaster" / Toshihiro Higuchi -- Encouraging transnational organizational learning / Kazuto Suzuki -- Were Japan's nuclear plants uniquely vulnerable? / Phillip Lipscy, Kenji E. Kushida, and Trevor Incerti -- Beyond Fukushima : enhancing nuclear safety and security in the 21st century / Edward D. Blandford and Michael M. May.

This book the culmination of a truly collaborative international and highly interdisciplinary effort brings together Japanese and American political scientists, nuclear engineers, historians, and physicists to examine the Fukushima accident from a new and broad perspective. It explains the complex interactions between nuclear safety risks (the causes and consequences of accidents) and nuclear security risks (the causes and consequences of sabotage or terrorist attacks), exposing the possible vulnerabilities all countries may have if they fail to learn from this accident. The book further analyzes the lessons of Fukushima in comparative perspective, focusing on the politics of safety and emergency preparedness. It first compares the different policies and procedures adopted by various nuclear facilities in Japan and then discusses the lessons learned and not learned after major nuclear accidents and incidents in other countries in the past. The book's editors conclude that learning lessons across nations has proven to be very difficult, and they propose new policies to improve global learning after nuclear accidents or attacks. -- Provided by publisher.

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