The clock that stopped: the victory of nuclear arms and defeat of nuclear power

‘I visited the black marble obelisk which marks the epicentre of the explosion, and I saw the plain domestic wall-clock retrieved intact from the rubble with its bent hands recording the precise time of day when the city was obliterated: 11.02 a.m.

I was glad to be alone, because I could not have spoken.’ Published here 20 years ago, that was my memory of Nagasaki, the target on 9 August 1945 of the second and last nuclear weapon ever deployed. The subsequent seven decades of non-use of nuclear arms — deterred by that most chilling of threats, ‘mutually assured destruction’ — is one of the miracles of modern history, given the unsafe hands in which much of the materiel was held. The sadness is that the opportunity for peaceful use of the same science to provide sustainable, abundant, non–carbon-based power has been gradually muddled away by underinvestment and political shilly-shallying.

In Japan, the entire nuclear industry has been shut down since 2011, when a tsunami led to meltdown at Fukushima, mass evacuation, and the discovery of serious safety faults even though no one died of radiation.