Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Ed for ever
Britain’s role in atomic warfare
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ued from a er was out of at, he saw the to where our flattened. My went to look ld. We spent days with them until they died. The soldiers came, dug a hole, threw the bodies in, poured gasoline in and threw in a match. There was no human dignity. I watched without any feeling. I was stunned.
“I couldn’t even cry. That troubled me for years until I started studying psychology and understood it was a defence mechanism called psychic numbing. I talked to a lot of survivors and many shared the experience.
“Eventually we went to my uncle’s house outside the city. Those with no family had to stay and started dying of radiation sickness. Pregnant women gave birth to babies with deformities.
“Hiroshima had 360,000 people at that time. By the end of 1945, 140,000 perished. Today, because the radiation continued to affect people years later, the total number is around 300,000.”
ON FEELING NUMB
BRITISH physicists played a vital role in helping the US develop the world’s first weapon of mass destruction.
Winston Churchill created the Directorate of Tube Alloys – the code name for the British atomic project.
The United States was also conducting research. In 1943, Churchill and President Roosevelt agreed to collaborate and 19 British scientists joined the US Manhattan Project.
Roosevelt’s death in 1945 marked the end of the partnership.
In 1947, the UK restarted its atomic bomb programme and tested its first atomic bomb in 1952. America tested a powerful thermonuclear weapon, or H Bomb, the same year. The Soviet Union followed suit in 1954. The arms race was well under way.