Ever since the first nuclear test in 1945, nuclear power it has been having both positive, and negative effects on the world. It started off as being used as a weapon of mass destruction, but was soon made into a clean energy source. But nuclear power’s deadly history has lead to a great fear around it. Plants can meltdown, the explosion automatically killing many people, and the radiation silently spreading to cause even more damage. In the past nuclear power plants have gone completely wrong, and this fear is still shaping today’s current events.

For a while, during the Cold War, mutually assured destruction kept countries from bombing each other because of the knowledge that their target could just as easily bomb them. This idea has managed to keep the peace for many years. Nuclear weapons “are a type of weapon that countries spend enormous sums of money to develop but don’t actually intend to use.” But if a country is to get nuclear weapons, who isn’t afraid of destruction, and feels the devestation they could cause is enough to justify a nuclear attack, the story may change.

An unopened ferris wheel near Chernobyl

The fear of radiation is widespread, after all, its invisible and odourless yet has the potential to cause mass destruction. On April 26 1986, the a disaster occurred at the Chernobyl Power Plant. Fires and steam explosions released 5% of the radioactive core into the atmosphere. Some newspapers reported 2000 deaths caused by this incident, one even reported 500 000 deaths cause by Chernobyl, but according to a documentary we watched in class, only 56 deaths can be directly attributed to radiation after the incident. The reports of high death tolls were due to radiophobia. In fact, the fear of radiation was probably a bigger issue than the radiation itself. People began taking any little symptom and assuming it was an issue due to radiation even if it was nothing. This backed up the health system which made it hard to treat the more dire issues. According to the video “The threat of human health posed by radiation has been overstated” and it takes a lot more radiation to cause serious damage than originally thought. Nuclear energy is associated with nuclear bombs which creates more fear than it may deserve. This video does a good job of making people question whether or not our fear of nuclear power is warranted, because the benifits may outweigh the risks.

But the fear of radiation is still warranted. In The China Syndrome a reporter visits a nuclear power plant and witnesses something in the reactor that worries her. What she doesn’t realize is that there is such a big issue with the plant that it could cause a meltdown that would make an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable. The radiation at Chernobyl may not have caused too many deaths, but it still made the area uninhabitable and the threat was for sure there.

Today’s nuclear weapons are much more powerful than the ones dropped on Japan at the end of WWII so it’s in everybody’s interest that the mutually assured destruction policy stays intact. Nuclear weapons can be used as threats along with bargaining tools, they are more like political weapons than physical ones. For example, in 2015 Iran agreed to pause its nuclear weapons program in exchange for relief. The countries with nuclear weapons can threaten those without a nuclear program with their weapons, but in reality, World War 3 is in nobody’s best interest, so as long as the world remembers that, doomsday shouldn’t become reality. I may be optimistic, but I like to believe that humans wouldn’t destroy our home planet in nuclear war.

In the TV show The 100 the end of the world made a reality, but even then, the show shows us that our humanity keeps us from destroying each other, and was caused by an Arificial Inteligence hacking nuclear launch codes. It was the program’s lack of humanity that caused the eventual end.

Bomb Launching Scene in The 100:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=59u429tXqek