On March 28th 1979 a series of human and mechanical errors at the 3-Mile Island plant exposed the core. It reacted with steam and produced hydrogen which exploded. None of the emergency teams could understand what was going on inside the reactor. ibid.
The systems and numbers approach dominated the Pentagon. McNamara’s whizz-kids were convinced that the battle against the Viet-Cong could be managed in a rational, scientific way. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box II: To the Brink of Eternity, BBC 1992
They were years of great hope. Stalin had just died. Khrushchev had come to power. We believed atomic power would lead to a better life for everyone. Professor Yuri I Koryakin, USSR Institute of Power Research
The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. Omar Bradley, American general
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. Omar Bradley
It is essential that no country gain ascendancy over the United States in the development, manufacture and tactical use of Atomic weapons. Admiral William H P Blandy
The first atomic bomb was assembled at Los Alamos, a secret laboratory in New Mexico. The Atomic Bomb Story: Trinity & Beyond, 1995
The blast instantly raised temperatures to ten million degrees, releasing a force of a million pounds of pressure, vaporising the tower and all desert life within half a mile. ibid.
The Little Boy bomb was detonated over Hiroshima at an altitude of 1,800 feet to achieve maximum blast effect. ibid.
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections. Niels Bohr
March: On 11th March at 2.46 p.m. earthquake warnings flashed across Japan ... Tsunami: travelling at over five hundred miles an hour the wave takes just minutes to reach the coast of Japan ... Nuclear radiation ... Four of the reactors were destroyed through overheating. The Year the Earth Went Wild, Channel 4 2011
Today the nuclear bomb is like a Sword of Damocles hanging over us. James Burke, Connections: Death In The Morning s1e2, BBC 1978
This is the nightmare of the second half of the twentieth century: suitcase with an atomic bomb inside it. Once you steal the nuclear material any physics graduate can do the rest. James Burke, Connections s1e3: Distant Voices, BBC 1978
The nightmare is what the result will be. ibid.
This is the result: ex-experimental fusion reactor. If we can get fusion to work you could power Los Angeles for a month on a bucket of seawater which contains the kind of atoms you need for the fusion process. James Burke, Connections s3e10: In Touch
And that’s the catch – you’ve got to make the plasma hotter than anything that ever existed on the planet. The problem with that is it’ll vaporise everything in sight. Except there’s one thing that won’t vaporise everything – a magnetic field to hold the plasma in. ibid.
The floor of the planet begins to tremble. The 1,200-ton cover of the reactor suddenly blasts into the air. An ultra-powerful stream of radioactive vapour releases uranium and graphite. The Battle of Chernobyl, 2006
For the next seven months 5,500 people will wage hand to hand combat with an invisible enemy. ibid.
43,000 people are evacuated tearfully but peacefully. Buses carry Europe’s first atomic refugees. They have been exposed to doses of radiation that could alter the composition of the blood and engender fatal cancers. ibid.
The initial symptoms of radiation sickness: vomiting, nausea and diarrhoea are followed by a latency period. It’s only later that much more serious symptoms appear, such as deterioration of bone marrow and horrible burns that eat flesh down to the bone. ibid.
The roof of the plant is covered with highly contaminated pieces of graphite. These pieces of graphite enveloped uranium rods. They have blown from the reactor during the explosion. One single piece gives off enough radiation to kill a man in less than one hour. They just have to be got rid of before construction continues. ibid.
Russian soldiers nicknamed bio-robots for the occasion. His battalion of young reservists is preparing to go up on to the roof of the reactor for the first time. They’re between twenty and thirty years old ... No human being has ever worked in zones as radioactive as this. ibid.
As a reward each soldier receives a liquidator certificate from the army. And a hundred rouble bonus. The equivalent today of about $100. They risked their lives. But they’ve only reduced the radiation level on the roof by 35%. ibid.
Today 8,000,000 people live in contaminated areas of the Ukraine, Russia and especially Belarus. ibid.
Meanwhile, beneath the ageing reactor of sarcophagus #4 a poison remains deadly. ibid.
66,824. April 26th 1986 ... The Chernobyl power station has four separate nuclear reactors on site. Days that Shook the World s1e9: First Nuclear Reaction/Chernobyl, BBC 2003
The roof blows off reactor number four. Five seconds later the core erupts and scatters fifty tons of nuclear fuel, graphite and debris up to three kilometres away. ibid.
It’ll burn for another nine days. ibid.
Chernobyl is the world’s worst nuclear disaster. ibid.
A version of the Inquisition is about to lay hands on a nuclear weapon. Under the stultified rule of religion, the great and inventive and sophisticated civilization of Persia has been steadily losing its pulse. Its writers and artists and intellectuals are mainly in exile or stifled by censorship; its women are chattel and sexual prey; its young people are mostly half-educated and without employment. After a quarter century of theocracy, Iran still exports the very things it exported when the theocrats took over – pistachio nuts and rugs. Modernity and technology have passed it by, save for the only achievement of nuclearization. Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great p280
There are two senses in which we are in confrontation over Iran ... illegally trying to acquire and to conceal its acquirement of thermonuclear weapons ... public opinion especially amongst the young is anti-theocratic. Christopher Hitchens, reddit online interview
In 1957 Henry Kissinger published a book called Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy in which he argued for a bomb shelter in every house, and a doctrine of limited nuclear war. The Trials of Henry Kissinger, 2002
You want a regime like that to have nuclear weapons? You’re welcome. Christopher Hitchens
When the day comes that Tehran can announce its nuclear capability, every shred of international law will have been discarded. The mullahs have publicly sworn – to the United Nations and the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency – that they are not cheating. As they unmask their batteries, they will be jeering at the very idea of an ‘international community’. How strange it is that those who usually fetishize the United Nations and its inspectors do not feel this shame more keenly. Christopher Hitchens