Imagine surviving a nuclear bomb, witnessing the unspeakable hell of melted flesh dangling off people’s bodies like blackened seaweed, some victims with their eyeballs hanging out, and then discovering that you are persona non grata. You are a walking miracle and yet now you are about to be victim-blamed.
Those who lived to tell the tale of the abominable horrors unleashed by the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 found there was a stigma attached to being a hibakusha (survivor of the bomb). Atomic People (BBC2), an excellent documentary all the more powerful for its sober understatedness, spelt out, via the quiet but harrowing testimonies of hibakusha now in their nineties, not only what happens when a nuclear bomb falls (“The centre of