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Allied Troops Prepared for Radiological Warfare on D-Day

Long before the completion of a working nuclear weapon by the United States at the end of World War Two, the United States contemplated the use of radioactive materials in warfare.From my book Nuclear Bodies:In a meeting of the Subcommittee of the S-1 Executive Committee (formerly the Uranium Committee of the US government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development) in October 1943, several of the top scientists overseeing the Manhattan Project considered methods of weaponizing radioactive

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Nuclear Colonialism: Selecting the Irradiated, video of online lecture

On October 28, 2020, I presented an online lecture at Whitman College in their 2020 series on the academic theme of Race, Violence, and Health. The lecture was titled "Nuclear Colonialism: Selecting the Irradiated." In the talk I survey the selection of atmospheric nuclear test sites by the first five nuclear weapon states. These test sites were invariably located nearby to populations that lacked the political ability to stop the effort. Often these sites were in colonial or postcolonial

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Livestream: ZERO Project 2020 Digital Roundtable August 7 / 8

There will be an amazing online event on Friday evening August 7 (USA times) and Saturday morning August 8 (Japan time). The event is sponsored by the Zero Project and includes music by DJ Spooky and numerous speaker and breakout session digital events. I will take part in a digital roundtable in dialogue with DJ Spooky,  Ryo Oshiba (President of the Hiroshima Peace Institute), and artist Cannon Hersey. The digital roundtable will be in English with Japanese subtitles. DJ Spooky will also

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My interview for the Atomic Heritage Foundation

Cindy Kelly, the founder of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, visited to Hiroshima, Nagasaki and other cities in Japan earlier this year. I had the pleasure of meeting up with Cindy and having a long chat at Kissui, the kaiseki restaurant in the Sunroute Hotel in Hiroshima, overlooking the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park. Here is the interview:The interview is up on the AHF webpage and includes a transcript. You can find it here. Here I am with Cindy across from the Peace

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Slaughtering Children with Nuclear Weapons

During the two nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many thousands of children were killed. In Hiroshima, where I live, many schools have memorials to the students and teachers that were killed during the nuclear attacks. Some have preserved small sections of the school as they were on the day of the attack. Here are photos of two schools, one in Hiroshima and one in Nagasaki, taken by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey team in the autumn of

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Podcast interview about the book "Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Nuclear Humanities in the Post-Cold War"

Earlier this year I published a co-edited book with Nico Taylor on nuclear humanities in the post-Cold War world, with Routledge Press. The book argues that nuclear scholarship has shifted in the post-Cold War era and is, in many ways, freed from its earlier sense that it should somehow contribute to waking people up to the threat of nuclear war, and help save the world. A tall order for academics in any field. We argue that the end of the Cold War has liberated nuclear scholarship to re-assess

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Trisha Pritikin talks about growing up in the shadow (and plumes) of Hanford

Trisha Pritikin is a native of Richland, Washington, the bedroom community for the professional class employees of the Hanford plutonium production facility of the US government in Eastern Washington. Hanford is where the first nuclear power plants on Earth were built in the 1940s. These plants were built to manufacture plutonium for the Manhattan Project, and subsequently for the bulk of the US nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War. The production of plutonium, and specifically the

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Hi-Roshimon: What We See When We Look at Hiroshima

What we see when we look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki depends on who we are, and where we are gazing from.,Some people see a humane use of a weapon of mass destruction whose use "ended the war" and "saved lives." Some people see a place of sorrow and mourning. For those who live here, we see home, work, friends, we see the same normal place anyone sees when they go about their day.Recently I published a book chapter on this topic in the wonderful book The unfinished atomic bomb: Shadows and

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Relocating Hiroshima to America in 1948

A reprint edition of John Hersey's 1946 classis Hiroshima by Bantam Books had the following cover:This astonishing graphic was done by artist Geoffrey Biggs (1908-1971). The book included this statement about the cover:"When Geoffrey Biggs, a master of shadow and light technique in art, brought in his startling illustration for the cover of Hiroshima, everyone wated to know: 'Where'd you get those people...why those two?'Biggs said he thought back to that August morning in a certain big

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Ágota Duró on (belated) Medical Assistance for Korean Atomic Bomb Survivors by Japanese Doctors and Civil Society

A new research article has been published by Dr. Ágota Duró at the Asia-Pacific Journal (JapanFocus). Duró recently recieved her PhD from Hiroshima City University in Peace Studies, and (full disclosure) I was her doctoral supervisor. This article is drawn from her dissertation which focused on Japanese civil society support for the rights and welfare of Korean hibakusha. There were tens of thousands of Koreans who experienced the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasakai, and it is only in

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