Pearce moves on to explore the closed cities of the Soviet Union, where plutonium was refined and nuclear bombs tested throughout the '50s and '60s, and where the full extent of environmental and human damage is only now coming to light. The United States Atomic Energy Commission accused them of being Red spies and ignored requests from the doctors desperately trying to treat them.
The fate of a group of Japanese fishermen, who suffered high radiation doses from the first hydrogen bomb test in Bikini atoll, was worse. Later, communities downwind of these tests suffered high cancer rates. Las Vegas, only seventy miles from the Nevada site of some hundred atmospheric tests, crowned four Miss Atomic Bombs in 1950s. We are, he finds, forever torn between technological hubris and all-too-human terror about what we have created.Īt first, Pearce reminds us, America loved the bomb. Fallout is an eye-opening odyssey through the first eight decades of this struggle and the radioactive landscapes it has left behind.
An investigation into our complicated 8-decade-long relationship with nuclear technology, from the bomb to nuclear accidents to nuclear waste.įrom Hiroshima to Chernobyl, Fukushima to the growing legacy of lethal radioactive waste, humanity's struggle to conquer atomic energy is rife with secrecy, deceit, human error, blatant disregard for life, short-sighted politics, and fear.
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