Dear MEL Topic Readers,
US nuclear weapons testing can forever scar a nation. Just ask the
Marshall Islands
Humans learned to produce, deliver, and detonate nuclear weapons, but keep
ignoring the long-term consequences and effects of them. It takes over 24,000
years, longer than civilized human history, for half of the atoms in
radioactive plutonium-239, the primary fissile isotope used for nuclear
weapons, to decay into a different element. Yet, the US exploded 67 nuclear bombs
in the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific Ocean between 1946 and 1958,
which caused immediate health issues like skin burns, hair loss, nausea, and also
led to a range of long-term effects, including increased rates of cancer, miscarriages,
and birth defects, including severely deformed babies who were scarcely
recognized as human beings. It made the beautiful tropical islands
uninhabitable. In addition, nuclear fallout from those explosions was scattered
by winds and was detected as far as Sri Lanka and Mexico. The US also conducted
100 atmospheric tests between 1951 and 1962, and hundreds of underground tests
until 1992. In the same year when France and China conducted their last nuclear
tests, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) was created in 1996 and
signed by major nuclear powers like the US, Russia, and China, but has not been
ratified by the respective states yet. In the meantime, countries that didn’t
sign the treaty, India, Pakistan, and North Korea, conducted two nuclear tests
respectively.
Eight decades ago, over 200,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki by US atomic bombs. The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon
Hidankyo, a Japanese grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Recently, US President Trump, who is openly eager to be awarded
the prize, talked about the possibility of nuclear weapons testing, and
Japanese PM Takaichi said she will nominate Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. What
do people of the Marshall Islands and Japan think?
Read the article and learn what the immediate and lasting effects of nuclear
bombs from the Marshall Islands are.
No comments:
Post a Comment