Essays on Nuclear Age

The Earth exploded into the nuclear age on 16 July 1945. On that day, the US tested a completely new type of weapon in the New Mexico desert. Crafted from a tennis-ball-sized plutonium sphere, the Trinity bomb produced an explosion equivalent to 20,000 tonnes of TNT.

16 July 1956 – First atomic bomb is tested in Los Alamos; 6 August 1945 – US drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan; 9 August 1945 – US drops atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan; 1949 – Soviet Union (USSR) tests its first atomic bomb; 1954 – US launches first nuclear-powered submarine; 1956 – The first nuclear reactor to provide electricity to a national grid opens in Calder Hall, England; 1968 – Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is signed.

Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, etc.

Nuclear technology has also been used for peaceful means. The first nuclear reactor to provide electricity to a national grid opened in England in 1956. Now, 442 reactors in 32 nations generate 16% of the world’s electricity.

While atomic power was promoted for a time as the epitome of progress and modernity, entering into the nuclear power era also entailed frightful implications of nuclear warfare, the Cold War, mutual assured destruction, nuclear proliferation, the risk of nuclear disaster (potentially as extreme as anthropogenic global nuclear winter), as well as beneficial civilian applications in nuclear medicine.