Nuclear reactors were invented to kill people. Within a year of the first full-scale reactor coming online at #Hanford in 1944, they were the key to killing almost 100,000 people in #Nagasaki.
American military leaders were aware of the dangers of radioactive particles long before #Hiroshima or #Trinity.
On #DDay there was a special unit under Operation Peppermint, that came ashore in Normandy with Geiger Counters in anticipation that the Nazis might "pepper" the beaches with uranium particles to sicken and slow the invasion.
Yes, and this book was read by Leo Szilard, who was the physicist in the 1930s who in 1935 envisioned the mechanism that would actualize such a weapon, just years before fission was observed in a lab in Germany in 1938.
Human "bio-robots" had to make homemade lead lined suits to then spend 40 seconds to 2 minutes on the roof of reactor #3 shoveling bits of the reactor core into the hole where reactor #4 used to be. 3,500 people did this task.
Today (March 1) is the 70th anniversary of the #Bravo Test, the largest nuclear weapon test ever conducted by the US, on #Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. It was a radiological disaster that resulted in the irradiation and forced displacement of whole communities.
Here is an article I wrote 7 years ago about how Bravo put the word #fallout into our lexicon.
"The Bravo Test and the Death and Life of the Global Ecosystem in the Early Anthropocene"
Tomorrow afternoon Sydney time, join my hybrid lecture, either at #UNSW, or register on Zoom at the link below.
It will be a book talk about my book, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (Yale 2022). The subtitles is: How millions harmed by #nuclear weapons & power have been made invisible during the Cold War & after