![]() ![]() After reading, have the students listen to Gill Scott Heron’s song below. This can be organized as a group read-aloud or students may read quietly on their own. The lyrics of Gill Scott Heron’s We Almost Lost Detroit (see below) Once released, radioactive elements remain in the environment for millennia upon millennia, putting future generations at risk of developing cancer and genetic mutations.Īfter the Opinion Continuum ask students to read the following text in class: And that is only the first tier of mass destruction.Īll this and apart from the extreme fires and meta-hurricane force winds the least understood effect of nuclear weaponry comes into play, virtually forever - that is, long-lived ionizing radiation. How could emergency services respond to a city on fire? If a 750 kiloton ICBM was targeted over Lower Manhattan, 87 – 143 square miles of New Jersey, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens would be engulfed in a super inferno. Unparalleled human suffering and the state’s inability to respond to their citizens’ needs would be the inevitable outcome of one nuclear weapon being used in an urban environment. Climate effects of nuclear war and implications for global food production. One billion people could starve as a result. Firestorms out of urban areas would send massive amounts of particulate debris into the troposphere, causing global cooling that would adversely effect climate and food production. ![]() New research suggests that even a limited nuclear exchange could have world-wide ramifications. A sun brought down to earth that can initiate firestorms, which deplete oxygen from the environment and create hurricane-force winds that attract debris and feed the storm itself, causing super-infernos that no living being can survive. The destructive force of nuclear weapons, such as the immense light and thermal heat of a nuclear explosion, is comparable to the interior of the sun. Students do not often understand that the primary effects of a nuclear explosion include blast, heat, fire and radiation, producing destruction on an unimaginable scale. Many are unaware that nuclear weapons are unique and are not at all like conventional bombs - that these ‘weapons’ cause destruction through the splitting of the atom, which creates tremendous power, called nuclear fission. They are often surprised to learn that today approximately 15,000 nuclear weapons are owned by nine nations and remain a threat to all life on earth. Even still, apart from current news items, few students understand the basic facts. These and other bent spears or broken arrows happen with too great a regularity. ![]() Had the device detonated, lethal fallout could have been deposited over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York City – putting millions of lives at risk. Each bomb carried a payload of 4 megatons – the equivalent of 4 million tons of TNT explosive. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage. The US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. One of the most chilling examples was in 1961 when two hydrogen bombs dropped over North Carolina after the plane carrying them malfunctioned in flight. There have been many such events that have not only been kept secret, but fundamentally call into question nuclear defense as a practice and philosophy. According to an article by Schlosser in The Guardian, “A 1970 study by one of America’s nuclear weapon laboratories, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, stated that at least 1,200 weapons were involved in accidents between 19.” US Military parlance for nuclear related accidents or near-accidents is ‘broken arrows’ or ‘bent spears’. Investigative journalist Eric Schlosser published Command and Control, a book about near nuclear misses over the last seven decades of the Atomic Age. A Multi-Media Lesson Plan on Nuclear Near Missesīy Kathleen Sullivan, PhD, Hibakusha Stories Program Director Rationale ![]()
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