Ending Nuclear Tests, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons – By Ray Acheson (Counterpunch) / Aug 30, 2023
In 1945, the United States (US) government built and detonated the first nuclear weapon in the deserts of New Mexico. The fallout from that test spread to 46 US states, Canada, and Mexico. Three weeks later, the US government dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of people and devastating both cities, and leaving a radioactive legacy for generations. Since then, more than 2000 nuclear “tests” have been conducted worldwide by nine nuclear-armed states, causing widespread cancers and other health tragedies, environmental contamination, and displacement.
The date for the International Day against Nuclear Tests was chosen to commemorate the closure of the Soviet Union’s Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan on 29 August 1991, where more than 450 tests were conducted. But the sites of nuclear weapon detonations are not the only sites of harm created by nuclear testing. All activities associated with nuclear weapons cause grave harm to people, animals, land, and water—from the mining of uranium to the processing of the fuel and building of the bomb, from the detonation of the weapon to the storage of radioactive waste. All these activities must end.
Nuclear violence
The word “test” does not sufficiently reflect the horror unleashed by the detonation of an atomic bomb.
Nuclear weapon “tests” are not hypothetical training exercises—they are very real explosions that release radioactive debris globally, scarring landscapes and poisoning plants, animals, oceans, rivers, and human beings.
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