Past nuclear weapon tests linked to 4 million premature deaths globally, report says

Nuclear weapons testing has affected every single human on the planet, causing at least 4 million premature deaths from cancer and other diseases over time, according to a new report delving into the deadly legacy.More than 2,400 nuclear devices were detonated in tests conducted worldwide between 1945 and 2017.Of the nine countries known to possess nuclear weapons - Russia, the United States, China, France, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea - only Pyongyang has conducted nuclear tests since the 1990s.But a new report from the Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) humanitarian organisation, provided exclusively to Agence France-Presse, details how the effects of past tests were still being felt worldwide.“They poisoned us,” Hinamoeura Cross, a 37-year-old Tahitian parliamentarian who was aged seven when France detonated its last nuclear explosion near her home in French Polynesia in 1996.Seventeen years later, she was diagnosed with leukaemia, in a family where her grandmother, mother and aunt already suffered from thyroid cancer.A US test of a nuclear artillery shell at the Nevada Test Site in 1953. File photo: National Nuclear Security Administration via Reuters