The Sun
BIRTH defects and cancers blight the tortured people who have the misfortune of living in the world’s most radioactive places.
More than seven decades on from the first atomic bomb tests, the fallout continues to wreak havoc with these communities.
To this day, many people even remain exiled from their homes at the hands of the irreversible, catastrophic impacts the testing continues to have.
As well as devastating environmental and economical consequences, some communities are still battling the health and social costs of trials.
And one professor has forecast the tests will ultimately claim the lives of more than two million worldwide from cancer and other chronic diseases.
Dr Tilman Ruff, Associate Professor at the Nossal Institute for Global Health, University of Melbourne, says the devastating impacts of tests will continue to plague the planet for thousands of years.
He told The Sun Online: “Of the more than 2,000 atmospheric nuclear test explosions undertaken, 543 were exploded in the atmosphere, with radioactive fallout equivalent to tens of thousands of Hiroshima size bombs dispersed to every corner of the planet.
“France, the UK and US conducted 175 of these above-ground explosions in the Pacific region.
“The terrible consequences will persist over many millennia.
“Over 2.5million people will die of cancer worldwide because of these tests, and a similar number will die of other chronic diseases and developmental disorders.”
The year 1946 marked the start of a 12 year period in which the US detonated 67 nuke explosions in Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Carried out in the early days of the Cold War, the tests included the 1954 Castle Bravo bomb which remains the most powerful thermonuclear weapon America has ever detonated.
The civilisation-wrecking 15-megatonne nuke, which exploded near Bikini, was 1,100 times bigger than the atomic bomb used to massacre thousands in Hiroshima in 1945.
Bravo – nearly three times its predicted power – exposed thousands in neighbouring islands to the radioactive fallout – despite the 167 residents in Bikini Atoll being evacuated before the first test in 1946.
Fallout from the unprecedented explosion – including radioactive particles – spread around the world.
US government scientists declared Bikini safe for resettlement in the early 1970s, but by 1978 residents were removed when it became clear that they were ingesting dangerously high levels of radiation from the contaminated fish, plants and water.
The governments hell-bent on developing the worst weapons of mass destruction were willing to put their own military and civilian citizens in harm’s way
Dr Tilman Ruff
The small community has never been able to return to their home, and a 2012 United Nations report found that the Bikini remains uninhabitable to humans because of “near-irreversible environmental contamination”.
The fish cannot be eaten, the plants cannot be farmed because of the contaminated soil and consuming water would be dangerous.
Dr Ruff, who is also the co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, said people’s livelihoods were given little thought when tests were deployed.
“The bulk of long-term radiation exposure from this fallout comes from carbon-14, with a half-life of 5730 years,” he added.
“Add to this worry and fear, displacement, discrimination, loss of homelands, culture, livelihoods and communities across generations for those directly put in harm’s way.
“The governments hell-bent on developing the worst weapons of mass destruction were willing to put their own military and civilian citizens in harm’s way.
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