8 h. ago What it's really like to survive a nuclear blast – 'the end of the world'

What happens when a nuclear bomb gets dropped on a major city? It’s knowledge the survivors of the 1945 blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to carry for the rest of their lives

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7 d. ago I changed my mind on banning the bomb, but the threat of nuclear war is growing – and so is complacency | Polly Toynbee

Though the weapons I campaigned against remain terrifying, I doubt we can disarm unilaterally. That should be the stuff of vital debate: right now, it isn’t This week marks 80 years since the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the few remaining witnesses tell of incinerated, melted and obliterated families. Soon there will be none left to remember. Survivors’ graphic accounts of “the noiseless flash” were captured by John Hersey in his book Hiroshima, read by my generation with shock and fear. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach taught us every gut-wrenching detail of the radiation sickness I fully expected to die of. Civil defence leaflets told families how to hide under the stairs with a radio and torch.I grew up expecting early death by nuclear war. My father was a 1957 founder of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament who didn’t expect us to survive inevitable nuclear holocaust. He carried a large bottle of suicide pills, enough to kill us all when the bomb fell, to save us from slowly ...

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7 d. ago Hiroshima nuclear bomb survivors mark 80 years in 'last' milestone for many

The average age of survivors is now 86 and some fear their stories will die with them, while warnings have been issued about the growing support for nuclear weapons

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8 d. ago Atomic bombing survivor issues stark warning over current threat on Hiroshima anniversary

An atomic bombing survivor has issued a stark warning over the use of nuclear weapons on the 80th anniversary of the attack on Hiroshima.

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8 d. ago Survivor of the Hiroshima bomb says Trump is ‘a huge mess’ as he gives stark warning to the world

‘Why do these animals called humans like war so much?’ asked Nobel Peace Prize winner and Hiroshima survivor Toshiyuki Mimaki, as he discussed the ongoing threat of nuclear weapons

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9 d. ago Hiroshima’s fading legacy: the race to secure survivor’s memories amid a new era of nuclear brinkmanship

Eighty years on from the destruction of the city, registered survivors of the blast - known as hibakusha – have fallen below 100,000The fires were still burning, and the dead lay where they had fallen, when a 10-year-old Yoshiko Niiyama entered Hiroshima, two days after it was destroyed by an American atomic bomb.“I remember that the air was filled with smoke and there were bodies everywhere and it was so hot,” Niiyama says in an interview at her home in the Hiroshima suburbs. “The faces of the survivors were so badly disfigured that I didn’t want to look at them. But I had to.” Continue reading...

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