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Call for 2011 World Conference against A&H Bombs

This year's World Conference against A&H Bombs will gather in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the wake of the devastating nuclear disaster which is still unfolding at Fukushima. Understandably, this is one of the main themes running through this year's Conference. Tony Simpson addresses some of the questions raised by Fukushima in the paper he will present to the Conference.

To mark the 66th anniversary of the nuclear bombardment of these two Japanese cities, on 6 August, the Russell Foundation is publishing a new edition of THE LEGACY OF CHERNOBYL by Zhores Medvedev. In his preface to the new edition, Dr Medvedev descibes how, in 1987, he met with members of the Japan Atomic Industrial Forum. At that time, he had already started to study the available information about what had happened at Chernobyl the previous year, as he was not satisfied with the Soviet report to the International Atomic Energy Agency. His Japanese hosts were not interested in too many details. "We do not find Chernobyl relevant to Japan," one of them told him. "Such accidents can never happen here."

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