A lot of nuclear tests were done when I was a little girl and there was all sorts of talk about the threat of nuclear war. We participated in air raid drills at school and I can still remember the sound of air raid sirens. I had nightmares about nuclear annihilation for years.
I boycotted French wine in the 1990s when they were still carrying out nuclear testing. I'm definitely a no-nukes girl.
The Atlantic has published 36 photos of nuclear bomb tests and I was surprised to learn that over 2000 of these tests have been performed. They instill awe and fear in me.
 |
| U.S. military observers watch the explosion during Operation Crossroads Baker, a nuclear test conducted on Bikini Atoll on July 25, 1946. This was the fifth nuclear explosion ever, after two other tests and the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.(U.S. Department of Defense) |
 |
| A massive column of water rises from the sea as the U.S. detonate an atom bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device, July 25, 1946. (AP Photo) |
 |
| Mannequins representing a typical American family gathered in a living room are pictured on March 15, 1953 in House No. 2, awaiting an atomic test explosion on Nevada proving grounds. (AP Photo) |
 |
| After the blast, a damaged living room, members of the mannequin family tossed about or missing after an atomic blast on March 17th, 1953. (U.S. Department of Defense) |
 |
| This "Survival Town" house, photographed recently, was built some 7,500 feet from a 29-kiloton nuclear detonation -- it remained essentially intact. Survival Town consisted of houses, office buildings, fallout shelters, power systems, communications equipment, radio broadcasting station, and trailer homes. The test, called Apple II, was fired on May 5, 1955. (U.S. Department of Defense) |
Since the time of Trinity -- the first nuclear explosion in 1945 -- nearly 2,000 nuclear tests have been performed, with the majority taking place during the 1960s and 1970s. When the technology was new, tests were frequent and often spectacular, and led to the development of newer, more deadly weapons. But starting in the 1990s, there have been efforts to limit the future testing of nuclear weapons, including a U.S. moratorium and a U.N. comprehensive test ban treaty. As a result, testing has slowed -- though not halted -- and there are questions about the future.
Unbelievable!
ReplyDeleteI remember the drills and crawling under our school desks, and I remember thinking what good would my desk do.
Some of those observers seem to be awfully close to the blasts. I wonder how many of them developed cancer.
ReplyDeleteOne of my father's friends survived the Nagasaki bomb.
ReplyDeleteHe was in a deep cellar, two storeys below ground, a prisoner-of-war, a slave worker for the Imperial Japanese Army. They'd been told that they would all be executed, when they were no longer needed. Of his party of over six hundred who were shipped to japan, torpedoed, left on a burning ship, picked up four days later by a japanese warship, then shipwrecked again, in shark-filled waters, Ted was one of 43 survivors.
When the bomb fell, their cellar bloomed, for a moment, bright as daylight. When they went up, most of the city was gone, swept flat, fires burning everywhere, people staggering, blind, their skin sloughing off naked bodies in sheets.
They were his enemies, they'd whipped him, beaten him, broken his bones, pissed in his food, spat in his face, and Ted, sixty years on, cried as he talked of stacking bodies, carrying dying children, he said he had no fear of hell any more.
Nothing the devil could do would be worse than where he'd already been.
But, he always said, those two bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saved millions of lives. Because they stopped the war. Because the Japanese were ordered by their god/emperor to die rather than be conquered, and mass suicides were expected.
Right or wrong, who knows? In the early eighties, I visited Leningrad. Soviet Russia, and discovered that ordinary russians were afraid of our bombs, why, they asked, did the west have so many missiles aimed at them, why did we want to annihilate them, turn their country into a smouldering wasteland.
Yes, just like us, they'd been told of the aggressor beyond the horizon, they'd drilled in the futile way we did, what to do if the warning came.
And they were as bewildered as we were, by the distant hatred that aimed its kilotons of warheads at their children.
No, I'm not saying Soviet Russia was a benign neighbour, but that its citizens heard just the same arguments and justifications as we did for the arms race. We had silos aimed at them because they had silos aimed at us. We built bigger missiles so they built bigger missiles.
And we're still doing it.
Somewhere, out there, under the ocean, there are nuclear subs. Armed and targeted. And proud to be so.
Well put Soubriquet.
ReplyDelete