By now, I'm sure most people have seen the picture on the left. It's an x-ray of one of the unexploded bombs in London. If a bomb in a public place wasn't enough, these criminals use nails and sometimes even rat poison so the blood doesn't clot properly after the nails impale.

An interesting post about the after-effects of such bombs in Tel Aviv is here.

Here we are today, on the 60th anniversary of the day 'Little Boy' blew over Hiroshima. 140,000 people were obliterated. Many more have lived a very different life because of the after affects of that day.

I urge everyone to take a few minutes and visit this virtual museum. It's a collection of stories, photographs and other memorabilia from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (If you hit the Japanese version, just look for the button that says - see English site and follow the links).

It got me thinking today. Growing up in the 80s, we were constantly reminded of the chance of nuclear war was at every corner. Maybe it was just my liberal teachers, or the movies like The Day After but as an impressionable young girl I was often drawn to the thoughts that the whole world was about to be obliterated. When I was 15, I wrote a creative writing story that won awards called 'The End', which detailed the possibility that war had been declared and that missiles were on their way. It went into getting the family all together in a makeshift shelter, and everyone talking in the last few moments of their life. While I was very chuffed to win the award, and even have my story published in the local paper, it has always been something that made me sad that my psyche was in such a space growing up that my biggest worry that we were all just about ready to die.

Fast forward 20 years (How did THAT happen?), and my nieces and nephews don't have that same perception. The Doomsday Clock means nothing to them. I marvel at how times have changed in a lot of ways, and yet at the same time, the events of the last few years remind me often of that mid-80s fear that pervaded the time.

Just taking a quick look, the Doomsday Clock was between 3 to 4 minutes to midnight when I was writing those stories in school. After that, it moved back to the current position of 7 minutes before midnight. But it hasn't been updated since 2002...and it looks like it's due for it's latest adjustment anytime now. Something tells me it certainly won't be moving backward.