DiaNuke.org

From the Editor’s Desk |A number of occasions coalesced together this month to inspire discussion around Amitav Ghosh’s scintillating career as a leading literary figure from South Asia. It is also 20 years since he published ‘Countdown’ in 1999 – a petite, but deeply insightful book, written soon after India’s nuclear tests. Yet the book finds infrequent mention in the several praises that have been penned in honour of Ghosh, following the award.

In the 1950s, areas known as Emu Fields and Maralinga were used to test nine full-scale atomic bombs and for 600 other nuclear tests, leaving the land highly radioactive. We weren’t on ground zero, but the dust didn’t stay in one place. The winds brought the poison to us and many others.

On 30 October 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the Tsar Bomba nuclear bomb over the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in northern Russia. To this day, this is the largest nuclear weapon detonated. The 27-tonne Soviet Tsar Bomba (king of bombs) was the most powerful weapon ever constructed.

Less than 60 years ago, Britain was exploding nuclear bombs in the middle of Australia. In the mid-1950s, seven bombs were tested at Maralinga in the south-west Australian outback.