Nuclear weapons

On August 6 1945, U.S. Army Air Forces detonated a uranium gun type fission bomb nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. 3 days later, on August 9, detonated a plutonium implosion type fission bomb nicknamed ‘Fat Man’ over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The first nuclear weapons were detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both the Little Boy and the Fat Man were nuclear weapons, which are weapons that use energy from fission and fusion to create a huge explosion. The two bombings killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people.

Radiation

Nuclear weapons emit large amounts of thermal radiation as visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light. Radiation can also have effects that happen on longer scale, such as cancer, by causing mutations in the DNA of living cells. Among the long-term effects suffered by atomic bomb survivors, the most deadly was leukemia.

Sadako Sasaki and Peace Park

Sadako Sasaki was a Japanese girl who was 2 years old when an American atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima .She was 2 kilometers away from where the bomb exploded. Most of Sadako’s neighbors died, but she wasn’t injured at all, at least not in any way people could see. When she was 12, in 1955, her illness became worse and she was diagnosed with leukemia. She wanted to go back to school, but she had to stay in the hospital where she cried. She is known for folding over 1,000 paper cranes in response to a Japanese legend.( An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by the gods) After hearing the legend, Sadako decided to fold 1,000 cranes in the hope that she would get well again. Sadako kept folding cranes even though she was in great pain. One day Sadako went to sleep, never to wake up again. She had folded a total of 644 paper cranes. Thirty-nine of Sadako’s classmates decided to try to raise money for a special memorial for Sadako and other children who had died because of the atomic bomb. They sent letters to schools all over Japan. Students from 3,100 schools and from 9 foreign countries gave money. On May 5, 1958, almost 3 years after Sadako had died, enough money was collected to build a monument in her honor.

Fission and fusion

Fission and fusion are two physical processes that produce massive amounts of energy from atoms. Nuclear fission and fusion involve the disintegration and combination of the elemental nucleus. Fission is the splitting of a large atom into two or more smaller ones. Fusion is the fusing of two or more lighter atoms into a larger one. The energy released by fission is a million times greater than that released in chemical reactions, the energy released by fusion is three to four times greater than the energy released by fission.

The Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project produced two different types of atomic bombs, code-named Fat Man and Little Boy. ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. This bomb was developed by Lieutenant Commander Francis Birch’s group .Little Boy was a terribly unsafe weapon design. It was a uranium bomb, and used a gun-like mechanism to shoot one sub-critical mass of U-235 into another, creating the critical mass that exploded. Once the gun was loaded with the cordite propellant anything that ignited it would cause a full yield explosion of the bomb. ‘Fat Man’ was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki by the United States on 9 August 1945. ‘Fat Man’ was a plutonium bomb, used a sphere of plutonium that was then compressed by ordinary explosives to create the necessary critical density.

Ionizing radiation and Non-ionizing radiation

Ionizing radiation is a type of energy released by atoms that travels in the form of electromagnetic waves such as gamma or X-rays or particles such as neutrons, beta or alpha. Ionizing radiation has sufficient energy to affect the atoms in living cells and thereby damage their genetic material (DNA) or the cell mutates incorrectly and can become cancerous. Ionizing radiation is only harmful to an organism as a whole when its amount gets too high .Non-ionizing radiation is made up of weaker electromagnetic waves that are not powerful enough to disassemble an atom. But this type of radiation may still cause cell damage in high doses.
ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons)

ICAN was launched in 2007.It is a coalition of non-governmental organizations in one hundred countries promoting adherence to and implementation of the United Nations nuclear weapon ban treaty. ICAN began in Australia and was formally launched in Austria in April 2007. The campaign received the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons.

Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons ( NPT) is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. Four UN member states have never signed the treaty: India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan.

Bamboo

Bamboo is actually considered a grass, and is the fastest growing plant on earth. After the blast of 1945 in Hiroshima, bamboo was the first plant to re-sprout. The incinerating heat destroyed all trees and other plant life, except for one bamboo grove.