A-Bomb Survivors Join Nuclear Power Opposition
International Herald Tribune Saturday 6th August, 2011
NAGASAKI, Japan - In 1945, Masahito Hirose saw the white mushroom cloud rise from the atomic bomb that incinerated this city and that left his aunt to die a slow, painful death, bleeding from her nose and gums. Still, he and other survivors of the attacks here and in Hiroshima quietly accepted Japan's postwar embrace of nuclear power, believing government assurances that it was both safe and necessary for the nation's economic rise.
That was before this year's accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan confronted them once again with their old nightmare of thousands of civilians exposed to radiation. Aghast at the catastrophic failure of nuclear technology, the dwindling numbers of A-bomb survivors, most now in their late 70s or older, have stepped forward for the first time to oppose nuclear power.
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