Christopher Scanlon; 6/8/08
In the early 1980s, with the nuclear arms race in full swing and the Doomsday Clock rushing ever closer to midnight, a story began to circulate around my home town of Hobart that the safest place in the world in the event of a nuclear winter was Tasmania. To be precise, the town of Margate, just south of Hobart, was deemed to be the best place to be if ever the Cold War should turn hot. Margate’s plentiful supply of clean water, abundant forests and rich soils, combined with the microclimate and air currents afforded by the surrounding mountains, would, according to the story, afford the ideal place to sit out nuclear Armageddon… While it may no longer capture the popular imagination, we are living in a fool’s paradise if we think we’re out of the nuclear shadow. The fact is that The Bomb is still very much with us.
See: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/hiroshima-reminds-us-of-existing-danger-20080805-3qgv.html
