Most people around the world learned about power of the atom from newspapers on August 7, 1945 after the U.S. military dropped a nuclear bomb that destroyed the city of Hiroshima in Japan and killed or injured 140,000 people. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second bomb on the city of Nagasaki.
After the war, governments realized that nuclear energy to generate electricity would be unacceptable to the population unless people could be convinced that it was completely separate from nuclear weapons. The U.S. began an “atoms for peace” propaganda campaign to convince Americans to accept nuclear energy despite their knowledge of its terrible destructive power. The campaign to deny the link between the two continues today in every country that has nuclear energy, including Canada.
CRED-NB was co-host of a lecture by University of British Columbia professor M.V. Ramana on Oct. 12 at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. The link between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons “is a truth that has been systematically masked” says Ramana. See the video HERE.