But there have been suspicions it was being used as a cover to develop nuclear weapons, which prompted the UN Security Council, US and EU to impose crippling sanctions from This led to an agreement in between Iran and other big powers, in which Iran signed a deal to scale back its nuclear energy programme in exchange for trade, but President Donald Trump pulled out of the deal in May And now European countries have challenged Iran for not following the terms of the deal. And after the escalating tensions between Iran and the US this year, President Trump has pledged that as long as he is president, Iran will not be allowed to have nuclear weapons.
After increased tensions over the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani by the US in Baghdad, Iran has said it's not going to follow the restrictions imposed by the deal anymore.
The number of nuclear weapons in the world is actually down from 70, in to around 14, today. In July , it looked as though the world was a step closer to becoming nuclear weapon free when more than countries endorsed a UN treaty to ban them altogether.
The UK and France have said the agreement didn't take into account the realities of international security - and nuclear deterrence has been important to keeping peace for more than 70 years. While countries like the UK and US are reducing their nuclear stockpile, experts say they are still modernising and upgrading their existing armoury.
And North Korea continues to test and develop its nuclear programme with missile tests as recent as October. So while the world may have fewer nukes today than it did 30 years ago, it doesn't look like you'll be seeing a complete end any time soon. Listen to Newsbeat live at and weekdays - or listen back here. Clearance efforts after World War Two were extensive, but some unexploded devices were "either deemed not to present a risk… or too inaccessible for practical removal", said the guide.
Bomb disposal experts say they had no choice but to detonate the bomb because the fuse was so corroded they could not tell what type it was, or if it had been booby trapped. A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said explosive ordnance teams from the Royal Navy and Army worked with local authorities to safely dispose of the bomb.
Military teams worked for 24 hours to build protective structures and trenches to minimise the impacts of the blast and used more than " tonnes of sand" to mitigate the explosion. Send your story ideas to spotlight bbc. Students evacuated over bomb to return in days. Home Office 'responsible' for bomb damage. WW2 bomb blast: Doors and windows 'blown through'. Exeter WW2 bomb: Residents not able to go home.
Exeter WW2 bomb detonated after homes evacuated. Twelve student halls evacuated over WW2 bomb. Ministry of Defence. Image source, Devon and Cornwall Police. A bomb was detonated in a controlled explosion in Exeter. How did the bomb get there? In the months following V-E Day that May, a woman who had been bombed out of her home there found her way, with her young son, out to Oranienburg, where she had a boyfriend.
The town was a constellation of yawning craters and gutted factories, but beside Lehnitzstrasse and not far from the canal, she found a small wooden barracks empty and intact. She moved in with her boyfriend and her son. Abandoned ammunition and unexploded bombs claimed their first postwar victims almost as soon as the last guns fell silent.
In June , a cache of German anti-tank weapons exploded in Bremen, killing 35 and injuring 50; three months later in Hamburg, a buried American pound bomb with a time-delay fuse took the lives of the four technicians working to disarm it. It was dangerous work done at close quarters, removing fuses with wrenches and hammers.
He said he never felt fear during the defusing process. In the same way that a baker bakes bread, we defuse bombs.
In the decades after the war, bombs, mines, grenades and artillery shells killed dozens of KMBD technicians and hundreds of civilians. Thousands of unexploded Allied bombs were excavated and defused.
But many had been buried in rubble or simply entombed in concrete during wartime remediation and forgotten. In the postwar rush for reconstruction, nobody kept consistent information about where unexploded bombs had been made safe and removed. A systematic approach to finding them was officially regarded as impossible. When Reinhardt started work with the East German KMBD in , both he and his counterparts in the West usually found bombs the same way: one at a time, often during construction work.
But the government of Hamburg had recently brokered an agreement to allow the states of West Germany access to the 5. Between and , ACIU pilots flew thousands of reconnaissance missions before and after every raid by Allied bombers, taking millions of stereoscopic photographs that revealed both where the attacks could be directed and then how successful they had proved.
Those images held clues to where bombs had landed but never detonated—a small, circular hole, for example, in an otherwise consistent line of ragged craters. Defense Intelligence Agency by an enterprising American intelligence officer based in Germany, who had hoped to sell them privately to the German government for his own profit. When he failed, he sold 60, of them to the teacher for a few pfennigs each. Carls, sensing a business opportunity, snapped them up for a deutsche mark apiece.
Convinced there must be more, held somewhere in the United States, Carls established a company, Luftbilddatenbank. With the help of archivists in Britain and the States, he brought to light hundreds of cans of aerial reconnaissance film that had gone unexamined for decades.
Supplementing the photographs and the sortie plots with local histories and police records, contemporary eyewitness testimony and the detailed records of bombing missions held at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, Carls was able to build a chronology of everything that had happened to a given patch of land between and Examining the photographs using a stereoscope, which makes the images appear in 3-D, Carls could see where bombs had fallen, where they had exploded and where they may not have.
He closed in on an L-shaped cul-de-sac in Oranienburg, in the area between Lehnitzstrasse and the canal. On the other monitor, he used the geolocation data of the address to summon a list of more than aerial photographs of the area shot by Allied reconnaissance pilots and scrolled through them until he found the ones he needed. A week after the March 15 raid, photographs and were taken from 27, feet over Oranienburg, a fraction of a second apart.
They showed the scene near the canal in sharp monochromatic detail, the curve of the Lehnitzstrasse bridge and the bare branches of the trees on Baumschulenweg tracing fine shadows on the water and the pale ground beyond. Then Kroeckel used Photoshop to tint one picture in cyan and the other in magenta, and combined them into a single image.
I put on a pair of cardboard 3-D glasses, and the landscape rose toward me: upended matchbox shapes of roofless houses; a chunk of earth bitten out of the Lehnitzstrasse embankment; a giant, perfectly circular crater in the middle of Baumschulenweg. Yet we could see no sign of a dormant 1,bomb concealed in the ruins of the neighborhood, where, soon after the photograph was taken, a woman would find a home for herself and her family.
Kroeckel explained that even an image as stark as this one could not reveal everything about the landscape below. Paule Dietrich bought the house on the cul-de-sac in Oranienburg in He and the German Democratic Republic had been born on the same day, October 7, , and for a while the coincidence seemed auspicious. At 20, he and the others were guests at the opening of the Berlin TV tower, the tallest building in all of Germany.
Over the next 20 years, the Republic was good to Dietrich. He drove buses and subway trains for the Berlin transit authority. That it would do so was the calculated gamble and hope of Mr.
Stimson, General Marshall, and their associates. The facts are these. On July 26, , the Potsdam Ultimatum called on Japan to surrender unconditionally. On July 29 Premier Suzuki issued a statement, purportedly at a cabinet press conference, scorning as unworthy of official notice the surrender ultimatum, and emphasizing the increasing rate of Japanese aircraft production. Eight days later, on August 6, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; the second was dropped on August 9 on Nagasaki; on the following day, August 10, Japan declared its intention to surrender, and on August 14 accepted the Potsdam terms.
On the basis of these facts, I cannot believe that, without the atomic bomb, the surrender would have come without a great deal more of costly struggle and bloodshed. Exactly what role the atomic bomb played will always allow some scope for conjecture.
A survey has shown that it did not have much immediate effect on the common people far from the two bombed cities; they knew little or nothing of it. The even more disastrous conventional bombing of Tokyo and other cities had not brought the people into the mood to surrender.
The evidence points to a combination of factors. These elements, however, were not powerful enough to sway the situation against the dominating Army organization, backed by the profiteering industrialists, the peasants, and the ignorant masses.
With dread prospect of a deluge of these terrible bombs and no possibility of preventing them, the argument for surrender was made convincing. This I believe to be the true picture of the effect of the atomic bomb in bringing the war to a sudden end, with Japan's unconditional surrender. If the atomic bomb had not been used , evidence like that I have cited points to the practical certainty that there would have been many more months of death and destruction on an enormous scale.
Also the early timing of its use was fortunate for a reason which could not have been anticipated. If the invasion plans had proceeded as scheduled, October, , would have seen Okinawa covered with airplanes and its harbors crowded with landing craft poised for the attack. The typhoon which struck Okinawa in that month would have wrecked the invasion plans with a military disaster comparable to Pearl Harbor.
These are some of the facts which lead those who know them, and especially those who had to base decisions on them, to feel that there is much delusion and wishful thinking among those after-the-event strategists who now deplore the use of the atomic bomb on the ground that its use was inhuman or that it was unnecessary because Japan was already beaten.
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