Past nuclear weapon tests linked to 4 million premature deaths globally, report says
Norwegian People’s Aid details a deadly legacy of tests since 1945 that continue to sicken and claim lives
Nuclear weapons testing has affected every single human on the planet, causing at least 4 million premature deaths from cancer and other diseases over time, according to a new report delving into the deadly legacy.
More than 2,400 nuclear devices were detonated in tests conducted worldwide between 1945 and 2017.
Of the nine countries known to possess nuclear weapons - Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea - only Pyongyang has conducted nuclear tests since the 1990s.
But a new report from the Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) humanitarian organisation, provided exclusively to Agence France-Presse, details how the effects of past tests were still being felt worldwide.
“They poisoned us,” Hinamoeura Cross, a 37-year-old Tahitian parliamentarian who was aged seven when France detonated its last nuclear explosion near her home in French Polynesia in 1996.
Seventeen years later, she was diagnosed with leukaemia, in a family where her grandmother, mother and aunt already suffered from thyroid cancer.
