Has the world forgotten the catastrophic danger if a plutonium-powered space rocket crashed to Earth

Beyond Nuclear 31st March 2018, President Trump has announced that he wants the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to “lead an innovative space exploration program to send American astronauts back to the moon, and eventually
Mars.” But the risks such ventures would entail have scarcely been touched upon.

For those of us who watched Ron Howard’s nail-biter of a
motion picture, Apollo 13, and for others who remember the real-life drama
as it unfolded in April 1970, collective breaths were held that the
three-man crew would return safely to Earth. They did.

What hardly anyone remembers now — and certainly few knew at the time — was that the
greater catastrophe averted was not just the potential loss of three lives,
tragic though that would have been. There was a lethal cargo on board that,
if the craft had crashed or broken up, might have cost the lives of
thousands and affected generations to come. It is a piece of history so
rarely told that NASA has continued to take the same risk over and over
again, as well as before Apollo 13. And that risk is to send rockets into
space carrying the deadliest substance ever created by humans: plutonium.
https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2018/03/31/the-real-houston-problem/

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How the viewing public was ‘protected’ from seeing what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing did to people

Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the cutting room floor https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/hiroshima-and-nagasaki-on-the-cutting-room-floor/ By Thomas Gaulkin, August 5, 2019 Seventy-four years after nuclear weapons were first and last used in war, it can be challenging to conceive of the devastation they cause. But even in the immediate months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, news accounts offered a view of ingenuity and destruction that often elided the human cost.

The newsreels below [on original] were mainly screened to audiences in 1946 and 1947 and detail the destructive force of the explosions almost entirely through excited accounts of the structural damage to the cities. There’s occasional mention of the lost city populations and the scientific knowledge to be gained from studying their casualties, but hardly any description of what people actually suffered, let alone personal accounts. It’s instructive to look at and listen to these reports today, and contemplate what is missing.

The 12-minute reel below was produced by the US War Department in 1946. “Tale of Two Cities” makes selective use of film that was confiscated from a Japanese filmmaker, Akira Iwasaki—though you wouldn’t know that from the narration, which boasts that “army cameramen have found and filmed pictorial evidence that tells in twisted steel and stone the effect of death-dealing atomic power.” (Some twenty years later, historian Eric Barnouw obtained more of Iwasaki’s footage and produced a remarkably different narrative that documented the horrible physical impact of the attacks on Hiroshima’s citizens.)

Contrasted with the triumphant tone of the news/propaganda made for 1940s audiences, silence changes everything. Made public only decades later, the two films below —one beginning with footage of wounded victims, the other, a full-color glimpse of survivors picking up the pieces of the ruined city—report what those above do not, without a single word.

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