60 years on, is the world any safer?

摘要

"I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." These words from the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita, flashed through physicist Robert Oppenheimer's mind as he watched the first atomic bomb test in a desert in New Mexico on 16 July 1945. Code-named Trinity, the bomb that he developed changed the world forever. Six decades later, we are struggling to come to terms with Oppenheimer's legacy. Thousands of tonnes of plutonium and highly enriched uranium have been produced by both civilian and military nuclear programmes of many countries. The world's nuclear arsenal stands at 27,000 bombs, most of them far more powerful than those the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki within a month of the Trinity test. As many as nine countries may possess nuclear weapons today, and dozens more have access to nuclear materials and the technology to turn them into bombs. "Sixty years after the dawn of the atomic age, the nuclear chickens are coming home to roost," says Nigel Chamberlain of the British American Security Information Council, a think tank based in London and Washington DC.