ATOMIC ERA: FROM BOMB... TO BUST

Fallout Fred Pearce Portobello €15.75 ★★★★★

There was a time when the word ‘nuclear’ was a cause for excitement, not alarm. Rather than suggesting more worrying news from North Korea or Sellafield, it used to conjure a sense of possibility and of a brighter, advanced future.

In Fallout, environmental journalist Fred Pearce traces the narrative of the atomic age, from its scientific origins in the Thirties, via the proliferation of weapons during the Cold War, to the divisive, secretive global situation today.

He starts in Hiroshima, where, in 1945, a US atom bomb destroyed the centre of the city and killed about 140,000 people. He finds a ‘disturbingly brutal directness’ about the way Japan commemorates the tragedy, with parents showing their children graphic photographs. Here, where they have experienced the worst, such weapons are only a source of horror, with none of the glamour or machismo they are associated with elsewhere.

Pearce lays bare the contradictions of our attitudes to nuclear technology. In the Fifties, barely a decade after the bombs fell in Japan, the idea of them was so sexy that Las Vegas held a ‘Miss Atomic Bomb’ pageant in which the winner posed in a mushroom-cloud-shaped costume and hotels charged premium rates for a view of a nearby testing site.

Now, Pearce argues, the nuclear age is over. Yet its consequences remain with us, from the ‘brooding nuclear nightmare’ of the toxic waste stored at Sellafield to the increased suicide rate after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Shifting geopolitics has slowed down disarmament, the bombs could still go off. It’s time we realised that fear is part of the fallout.