Currently, nine countries around the world have announced that they are in possession of nuclear weapons. Collectively, these nine countries have roughly 15,000 nukes. According the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons, “A single nuclear warhead, is detonated on a large city, could kill millions of people, with the effects persisting for decades” The victims who die from the initial blast are not the only suffers. Many survivors later suffer cancers from the radiation given off by the bomb. One nuclear bomb would forever alter one’s life in an instant. On a clear day in August of 1945, roughly 130,000 people died istantaneously. Mikiso Iwasa was one of the rare survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. Mikiso Iwasaki's’ entire family died on August 6, 1945, except for her mother, who died 4 days later in her Mikasa's arms. Mikiso emerged unscathed from the initial bombing, but he later suffered from radiation poisoning. "After that month, I started showing symptoms of illness – red spots appeared on my body, my throat hurt, I couldn't eat, I had a temperature, my gums bled, and my hair fell out. For 20 days I remained in bed, on the verge of death," (Iwasa, Tienabeso, Alvear and Utada). Mikiso Iwasaki was not the only survivor of Hiroshima to remember the horror. Kawamoto, a 13-year-old middle school student, located at school only about a …show more content…
During WW2, the US annually mined over 17,000 tons of uranium oxide in the Rocky and Sierra Nevada mountains. Before 1959, no laws dictated where to properly dump chemical waste. Ergo this waste would routinely be released into waterways. By 1980, there were about 35 large scale mills throughout the US producing uranium oxide. The environmental impact and worker health hazards of the uranium mining industry have been the subject of several lawsuits. Most notable was a spill of radioactive material was from a dam near Church Rock, New Mexico in 1979, and a suit launched on behalf of Navajo Uranium miners in 1983. Destruction of resources is one of the many detrimental impacts that come with the cost of nuclear warfare. According to a study done by AJ Software on atomicarchive.com, “the nitric oxide produced by the weapons could reduce the ozone levels in the northern hemisphere by as much as 30 to 70 percent”. A 2014 report published in the journal Earth's Future found that “even a regional war of 100 nuclear detonations would produce 5 teragrams of black soot that would rise up to Earth's stratosphere and block sunlight. This would produce a sudden drop in global temperatures that could last longer than 25 years and temporarily destroy much of the Earth's protective ozone layer. This could also cause as much as an 80% increase in UV radiation on Earth's surface and destroy both