Nuclear bomb: effects and ethics
The nuclear bomb is the most deadliest weapon on the planet, and with it’s usage comes great moral and ethical obligation. The effects of the nuclear warfare, fallout or testing are ruinous and destructive, the result of nuclear warfare is not only mass human destruction and obliteration of property but extensive damage to the environment in the blast radius, contaminating the land, water and air with radioactive ash commonly known as nuclear fallout.
The effects of nuclear fallout drew international attention in 1954 when the radioactive fallout from the bomb ‘Castle Bravo’ contaminated a Japanese fishermen’s boat in the Pacific ocean causing one of the several fishermen to die several months later, this led to the fear of consuming contaminated Tuna which resulted in the temporary boycotting of the Japanese staple. This act drew the world’s spotlight on the effects of nuclear fallout and atmospheric testing.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study claimed that there would have been an extra eleven thousand deaths in the United States from 1951 until present day due to terminal illnesses caused by nuclear fallout from atmospheric testing.
The ones present during the Hiroshima explosion were subjected to a variety of medical illnesses such as thermal injuries and extreme radiation exposure, these two reasons caused a great number of deaths through the first and the ninth weeks after the explosion. The radiation caused several complications for the people, who suffered from conditions ranging from infertility to blood disorders to cancer.
The ethical and moral duties that come with this deadly bane with the power to endanger the existence of mankind are far too prodigious. Even the scientists that were the part of the ‘Manhattan project’ were worried with the use of the nuclear bomb.
Since the discovery of ionizing radiation, scientists had long strived to understand the effects of ionizing radiation and so on January 15, 1995, U.S. Department of Energy released previously classified 1.6 million documents on how the U.S. government experimented on humans (civilians and soldiers) without their consent by exposing them to radioactive material.
This experiment involved a lot of inhumane episodes like feeding radioactive material to mentally-unstable children, enlisting doctors to administer radioactive iron to impoverished pregnant women, exposing U.S. soldiers and prisoners to high levels of radiation, irradiating the testicles of prisoners, which caused severe birth defects, exhuming bodies from graveyards to test them for radiation (without the consent of the families of the deceased).
The most powerful nuclear bomb ever created is the “Tsar Bomba” by the Soviet Union, the blast yield of this bomb is fifty megatons of TNT, this bomb has only been tested once but partially shattered windows nine hundred kilometers away.