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Global Focus on Hiroshima on
the 40th Anniversary of the Bombing
The world's leading news providers
gathered together in Hiroshima in August, 1985, the 40th anniversary
of the bombing of Hiroshima. ABC of the United States sent a star
anchorperson, Peter Jennings, to Japan for daily live coverage
of how Hiroshima was now. The Peace Memorial Ceremony was relayed
live on a nationwide network in the United States for the first
time.
The reports gave full recognition to the
devastation wrought by the bombing even while maintaining the
view that the bombing had been necessary to end the war. Parallel
views informed the framework of the Nuclear Non-proliferation
Treaty that basically accepted a monopoly of nuclear weapons by
the existing nuclear powers, centered on the United States and
Soviet Union. There was no suggestion that nuclear weapons were
so inhumane that they could never be used. The reports did not
call for nuclear disarmament and an end to the global threat.
Knowing What the War Was Like
- A Message for Children
In the autumn of 1985, the 40th anniversary
of the A-bombing, Hiroshima City and NHK-Hiroshima launched a
joint project to make a video series of A-bombing witnesses. The
20-minute testimonies have been a major tool for passing on the
memories of the bombing for future generations.
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NHK TV started a new series in 1984 called,
Knowing What the War Was Like - A Message
for Children, for airing in a special Good
Morning Journal series. This series continued until 1989.
* Knowing
What the War Was Like - A Message for Children (1985) Memories
of Hiroshima Under the Scorching Sun (1985) Watch
What I Have to Tell You: A Deaf Person Relates Her Experiences
of Nagasaki (1988)
Reactor Meltdown at Chernobyl
in the USSR
On April 26, 1986, a reactor core melted
down at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in the Soviet Republic
of the Ukraine. The explosion of the nuclear fuel spread lethal
radioactive fallout across Europe and around the world. The Ukraine
government announced in 2004 that 3.2 million people had been
affected by the radiation from that accident. The Russian Minister
of Public Health and Social Development gave a figure of 1.45
million for Russia alone.
The pattern of exposure after Chernobyl
differed in various ways from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
but Russian physicians visited the Radiation Effects Research
Foundation's Hiroshima Laboratory to learn about the effects experienced
there from Hiroshima physicians who had treated many A-bomb victims.
*NHK Special:
Reviving A-Bombing Data: Hiroshima and Chernobyl
(1986)
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