Atoms for Peace: Learning to Love the Bomb
To justify their use in an increasingly anxious Cold War world, nuclear weapons were rebranded as a force for good.
In 1969, North Yorkshire was unknowingly under siege. The market towns of Pickering and Whitby faced a looming existential threat: a nuclear bomb. Due to be detonated in North York Moors National Park, roughly ten kilometres away, the bomb was expected to be larger than the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, resulting in a 25 kiloton explosion. Couched within this perilous scheme, however, were two further twists: firstly, that it had been initiated by the British government and secondly, that it was supposedly well intentioned. It was a bomb for ‘peaceful purposes’.
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