Flowers Of Destruction

: THE RESTLESS EARTH :

WHEN THE atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, it devastated the plant life of the area. Over a radius of 8 km (5 miles) from the centre of the explosion, trees were broken or burned and all other vegetation disappeared. The first reports on the damage predicted that nothing would grow there for 70 years.

As it turns out, within a few weeks of the blast the ruins of the city were covered by a carpet of greenery and wild flowers. The heat of the explosions had actually caused seeds buried under ground to germinate.

Even stranger was the fact that plants that had grow in Hiroshima, such as tomatoes, flourished as never before. Wheat and soyabean harvest were also unexpectedly plentiful. The reason was that the fungal blights and insects pests that had hindered their growth had been killed off by the flames and the nuclear radiation.

Other effects of the radiation were far more sinister. Strange mutations begun to-

Scorched earth : The nuclear explosion at Hiroshima devastated life above ground.

appear in local plants: deformed flowers, whitened leaves and retarded growth were all reported. Thankfully, this mutant strains died out within three or four years, although the long- term genetic effects of the radiation are largely unknown.

Since the explosion of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in April 1986, Soviet scientists have studied the effects on the plant life in the area. Many of the abnormal growths appear to be temporary phenomena, but the persistance of radioactive particles in the soil will contaminate subsequent generations of plants and the animals and the people that eat them. For example, local people are forbidden to gather and eat mushrooms. Forty years earlier, no one knew to give a similar warning to the hungry survivors of Hiroshima.

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