There was "no nuclear material (in the warehouse) and no potential of pollution," Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi told state television. Iran's nuclear body said an accident had taken place at a warehouse in a nuclear complex without causing casualties or radioactive pollution.
Yes, US and Russian arsenals have declined substantially since the height of the Cold War, from about 63,476 warheads in 1986, per the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, to 12,170 this year, according to the Federation of American Scientists – enough to destroy the world many times over.Ī handout picture provided by Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation (aeoinews) shows a warehouse after it was damaged at the Natanz facility, one of Iran's main uranium enrichment plants, south of the capital Tehran on July 2, 2020. Facing mass protests in the 1980s and after an earlier hardline stance against a nuclear freeze, President Ronald Reagan sought the “total abolition” of nuclear weapons “from the face of the earth.” Then, in 2009, President Barack Obama came into office seeking “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”ĭespite such statements and repeated efforts at the highest levels of government to ban The Bomb, it is still alive and well. A decade later, in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed an international treaty committing the US to nuclear disarmament that is still in force today. There aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets,” said President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957.
But once he saw the catastrophic consequences – two cities in ruins, with an ultimate death toll that reached an estimated 200,000 (according to the Department of Energy’s history of the Manhattan Project) – Truman determined to never use The Bomb again and sought to “eliminate atomic weapons as instruments of war,” (While he later refused to rule out using The Bomb during the Korean War, he ultimately did not take that step).įuture American presidents from both parties largely agreed with Truman on this point. Perry Harry Truman could not have fully understood the power of the atomic bomb when – at his direction – the United States dropped two on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago.
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