Question

why did every one live under the threat of annihitation by nuclear weapons after the world war​

Answer 1

Answer:

Fear of total human annihilation is a tough feeling to live with every day. For children growing up in the Cold War, mutually assured nuclear destruction literally haunted their dreams. Many of them wrote letters to the president, begging Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and their successors not to push the button. Others just prayed the bomb would kill them instantly, preferring swift death to years of sickness and grief.

At the turn of the 20th century, people loved radiation. They were using radium to paint watch faces, and injected it in toothpaste for a mesmerizing glow. The technology was seen as a harbinger of a bright American future, a sustainable source of energy, and a miraculous ingredient for scientific and medical breakthroughs.

Then the United States bombed Japan. On August 6, 1945, the world watched 80,000 people perish in Hiroshima, followed by another 70,000 victims three days later in Nagasaki. Bodies within the immediate blast zone disintegrated into black dust. The bomb’s thermonuclear wave peeled back human flesh and toppled buildings; the flash alone caused severe burns. A deadly firestorm erupted. Those just outside the immediate blast were hit with such extreme radiation that their vital functions failed within days.

“The fear of irrational death…has burst out of the subconscious and into the conscious, filling the mind with primordial apprehensions,” wrote Norman Cousins in a Saturday Review editorial, days later. The Western world’s hopeful fascination with nuclear power perished.

That didn’t stop the government from building a hydrogen bomb 450 times more powerful than the one dropped on Nagasaki. The weapon’s first thermonuclear test was completed in 1952.

When the Department of Defense wasn’t urging citizens to build fallout shelters, it was sharing instructional films featuring friendly animals. The official 1951 Duck and Cover film, featuring Bert the Turtle, was intended to teach schoolchildren how to protect themselves from a nuclear blast.