Tag: Janette D. Sherman M.D.

Seventy years! As I was sorting through papers, correspondence, news clippings and records, I realized that nuclear bomb and nuclear power development occurred within my lifetime. It was July 1945 when Trinity, the first atomic bomb, was detonated at the nuclear site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, followed the next month with a uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and a hydrogen bomb on Nagasaki. At least 129,000 men, women and children were immediately killed.

On Oct. 3, U.S. forces shot up the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, run by Doctors Without Borders, killing 12 staff and seven patients. This news upset me greatly. U.S. military personnel can remotely direct drones to kill whatever target they want to hit thousands of miles away. Americans have developed an amazing killing ability. This last week, 26-year-old Chris Harper-Mercer killed nine people and wounded nine at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.

Just 70 years ago, on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Alamogordo Nuclear Site in New Mexico. Trinity was the name chosen by J. Robert Oppenheimer, who later recalled that the explosion had reminded him of a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The terrifying destructive power of atomic weapons was to haunt many of the Manhattan Project scientists for the remainder of their lives.

While sorting through papers, correspondence, news clippings, records etc., I realized that nuclear bomb and nuclear power development has occurred within my lifetime. It was July 16, 1945, when Trinity, the first atomic bomb, was detonated at Alamogordo nuclear site in New Mexico, followed by the uranium bomb dropped on Hiroshima and the hydrogen bomb on Nagasaki in August.

March 11 will make the second anniversary of the triple catastrophes that occurred in Japan: the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima. Over the last two years people are asking whether the Fukushima nuclear disaster is worse than what occurred in 1986 in Chernobyl.

The good news is that 11 months after the Fukushima meltdown, thousands of Japanese marched in the streets to protest the continuing operation of nuclear power plants in their country, and urged a shift to renewable energy. Meanwhile in the U.S. the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved the building of two new nuclear power plants in Georgia.

Earthquake evacuees living in temporary housing and shelters in the hard-hit city of Ishinomaki have developed deep thrombophlebitis, the swelling of a vein caused by a blood clot. Diseases of the blood and circulatory and lymphatic systems are among the most widespread consequences of the Chernobyl contamination, especially among evacuees.