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The Nuclear Freeze Movement

 

Its deadly force wiped out forty five thousand citizens on the first day and an additional nineteen thousand during the subsequent four months. "A bright light filled the plane," wrote Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. "We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud.boiling up, mushrooming." For a moment, no one spoke. Then everyone was talking. "Look at that! Look at that! Look at that!" exclaimed the co-pilot, Robert Lewis, pounding on Tibbets's shoulder. Lewis said he could taste atomic fission; it tasted like lead. Then he turned away to write in his journal. "My God," he asked himself, "what have we done?" (Special Report, "Hiroshima: August 6, 1945"). United States then solidified their point by dropping a plutonium nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, effectively ending World War II. Dropped on August 9, 1945, just three days after "Little Boy", "Fat Man" had eliminated twenty two thousand people and another seventeen thousand within the next four months.
             The nuclear weapons of World War II had a three-phase process to their destructive raid. The primary step included intense gamma rays that emit from the blast itself. These rays instantly vaporize all of the people in the radius of "Ground Zero", or the immediate area where the bomb hits. Light from this explosion is so bright that it immediately and permanently blinds every living thing in a ten-mile vicinity of the blast whether or not their eyes are open or shut. The secondary phase is a pressure wave that follows over the next few seconds. This immense pressure causes bleeding from every orifice of the body. Then momentary winds follow which reach up to the hundreds of miles an hour and seventy miles an hour as far as six miles away. The following radiation results in vomiting, skin rashes, and intense unquenchable thirst. Hair begins to fall out in clumps and skin begins to peel away as it decays away before one's eyes.


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