The Castle Bravo Disaster - A "Second Hiroshima"
On March 1st, 1954, the United States detonated the country’s first thermonuclear or fusion bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, a small coral reef and 23 islands almost equidistant from Australia, Japan, and Hawaii. In the days and weeks following the blast, the United States would pay out millions of dollars in settlements, thousands of islanders would be evacuated and re-evacuated, and the Japanese public would deem the test “a second Hiroshima,” a comparison no citizen would dare make lightly.
Joseph Rotblat -
Sir Joseph Rotblat KCMG CBE FRS (4 November 1908 – 31 August 2005) was a Polish and British physicist. During World War II he worked on Tube Alloys and the Manhattan Project, but left the Los Alamos Laboratory on grounds of conscience after it became clear to him in 1944 that Germany had ceased development of an atomic bomb.
His work on nuclear fallout was a major contribution toward the ratification of the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. A signatory of the 1955 Russell–Einstein Manifesto, he was secretary-general of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from their founding until 1973 and shared, with the Pugwash Conferences, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize "for efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international affairs and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms."
Rotblat felt betrayed by the use of atomic weapons against Japan, and gave a series of public lectures in which he called for a three-year moratorium on all atomic research. Rotblat was determined that his research should have only peaceful ends, and so became interested in the medical and biological uses of radiation. In 1949, he became Professor of Physics at St Bartholomew's Hospital ("Barts"), London, a teaching hospital associated with the University of London. He remained there for the rest of his career, becoming a professor emeritus in 1976.
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