Chet Raymo, “Nuclear Landscapes”

Anyway, as I dredged my memory for the child’s awareness of the birth of the Atomic Age, one black-and-white image stood out: the obliterated city of Hiroshima. I brought up a Google Earth image of the city today. You can see a snapshot below. To the left, Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park. Surrounding it, a modern, bustling city, essentially indistinguishable from any modern city anywhere. At the top center, across the street from the park, what appears to be a baseball stadium!

What about the country that initiated the Atomic Age? I used Google Earth to bring up an image of the Hanford Reservation in Washington state, where the plutonium was produced for the Trinity test in New Mexico and the Nagasaki bomb- and thousands of subsequent weapons. That’s the reservation to the left of the river in the image below, a wasteland. Granted, this part of the state, in the rain shadow of the Cascades, is naturally desert. The area to the right of the river is irrigated orchard and farmland. The Hanford Reservation is still too poisoned by radioactive waste to allow human habitation or cultivation.