Klima | Krisen | Utopien Vortrag „80 Jahre Atomzeitalter – und wie weiter?“

Lecture by Stefan Lau (DFG-VK Karlsruhe), followed by 7.30 pm "Black Rain" Japanese feature film 1989 by Shôhei Imamura.

On July 16, 1945, the atomic age on our planet began with the first nuclear explosion, the so-called Trinity test, in the US state of New Mexico. On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 a.m. local time, the crew of the US bomber Enola Gay detonated the uranium bomb "Little Boy" over Hiroshima. This was followed by the dropping of the plutonium bomb "Fat Man" on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed around 100,000 people immediately. Over 130,000 more people died by the end of 1945, tens of thousands more died from consequential damage in the years that followed and the survivors, the Hibakusha, are still suffering from the devastating consequences of the terrible US atomic bombs to this day.

Although only Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only wars in which atomic bombs were used against people 80 years ago, people are still dying every day from the consequences of both the military and civilian use of nuclear energy: in uranium mining, from the long-term effects of the worldwide atomic bomb tests, the nuclear reactor disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima and, at the latest since Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, drone attacks on nuclear facilities are threatening new dimensions of nuclear catastrophes.

The questions and demands arising from 80 years of the nuclear age will be explored in a lecture and discussion.