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Elon Musk has been accused of underplaying America’s atomic bombing of Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World Struggle II throughout his interview of Donald Trump.
Mr Musk was speaking about nuclear energy with the previous president when he stated folks have an unfounded concern of nuclear electrical energy technology. It’s the “most secure type of electrical energy technology”, he argued.
“Individuals had been asking me in California, are you nervous a few nuclear cloud coming from Japan? I’m like no, that is loopy. It’s really, it’s not even harmful in Fukushima. I flew there and ate domestically grown greens on TV to show it,” he stated in the course of the interview on his social media platform X on Monday.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed however now they’re full cities once more,” the multibillionaire proprietor of Tesla, SpaceX and X stated.
“That is nice, that is nice,” Mr Trump responded.
“It’s not as scary as folks suppose, mainly,” Mr Musk added.
They joked about nuclear energy going through a “branding drawback”.
“We must rebrand it,” the previous president informed Mr Musk. “We’ll identify it after you or one thing.”
America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, destroying the town and killing 140,000 folks. Three days later, it nuked Nagasaki and killed 70,000 extra folks.
Japan surrendered on 15 August, ending World Struggle II.
Mr Musk’s remarks understating the gravity of the atomic bombing of Japan and the Fukushima meltdown triggered an uproar on social media.
“Musk is minimising what occurred in Fukushima. I’m as huge a fan of nuclear energy as there may be however it is a utterly dumba** factor to say,” educational and creator Tom Nichols stated on X.
A towering tsunami slammed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear energy plant in 2011, destroying its energy provide and cooling techniques and sparking meltdowns in three of its six reactors. The tsunami and the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that triggered it killed about 20,000 folks and the meltdown left giant components of Fukushima prefecture uninhabitable.
“However he topped it by noting that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are high quality now,” Mr Nichols stated, referring to Mr Musk.
“Nice job boys, simply misplaced one in all our most vital allies in Asia,” stated author Kevin Xu.
At a ceremony marking the anniversary of the atomic bombing final week, Nagasaki mayor Shiro Suzuki known as on international locations with nuclear weapons and people underneath their nuclear umbrellas, together with Japan, to abolish them.
“You have to resist the truth that the very existence of nuclear weapons poses an rising menace to humankind,” Mr Suzuki stated, “and you need to make a courageous shift towards the abolition of nuclear weapons.”
The ceremony was boycotted by ambassadors of the US, UK and a number of other European international locations in protest towards Israel not being invited.
Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida reiterated his pledge to pursue a nuclear weapons-free world. However his critics, lots of them survivors of the atomic bombings, criticised it as a hole pledge as Japan depends on the American nuclear umbrella whereas build up its personal navy.
