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Atoms for Peace: Learning to Love the Bomb

To justify their use in an increasingly anxious Cold War world, nuclear weapons were rebranded as a force for good. In 1969, North Yorkshire was unknowingly under siege.

Due to be detonated in North York Moors National Park, roughly ten kilometres away, the bomb was expected to be larger than the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, resulting in a 25 kiloton explosion. Locals, for their inconvenience, were to be financially compensated, but this only accounted for the short-term disruptions – a minor earthquake and subsequent building damage – rather than the radiation, which would be difficult to clean from the natural gas let alone expunge from these communities. The irony is that these programmes generated their own toxicity and their legacy is still being felt today in the radioactive contamination of Carson National Forest in New Mexico, the pollution of the Caspian Sea and the degradation of Yakut-Sakha in Siberia.

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