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(as the American, British, and French did of the West). The Soviets also
kept the Red Army in place in a de facto military occupation of Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and other eastern countries, establishing Communist
governments by force and trickery. The Americans, British, and French
feared that the Soviets would invade with tanks across the plains of cen-
tral Germany, so they deployed troops on their side. In 1949 they joined
Italy, the Low Countries, and others to form the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), and in 1955 West Germany joined. The Americans
backed up their troops with atomic bombs, soon deploying the weapons
on German soil. The West German government accepted this reluctantly,
but many citizens objected. They did not want to become the target of a
nuclear holocaust that would fry the entire region, especially when the
Americans would have some safety on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,
at least before the Soviets developed intercontinental missiles.
Germans became alarmed about the dangers of nuclear fallout from
American atomic tests. They read news stories of how radioactive dust
from the 1953 bombs tested in Nevada fell in measurable quantities thou-
sands of miles away. Then the hydrogen bomb explosion at Bikini Atoll in
the Pacific accidentally contaminated the crew of a Japanese trawler. Soon
the Soviet Union, as well as the United States, had a stockpile of thousands
of weapons. A magazine article described how an all-out attack would kill
or maim 70 million people and contaminate hundreds of square miles for
a generation. Next, an American general announced his estimate that an
atomic war would kill several hundred million. The Germans knew they
were at Ground Zero.
In 1957 the German public discovered that its NATO allies, the United
States and Britain, were about to station tactical nuclear weapons on their
own soil, including some to be in the hands of the Germany Army. This
was literally too close to home for many. The protesters called them-
selves the Fight Against Atomic Death (Kampf dem Atomtod). The Social
Democrats declared their party was opposed, as did groups of scientists,
some labor unions, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Opinion polls
showed two-thirds of the public were opposed. Several big demonstrations
protested the atomic weapons. But the opposition disappeared within a
year or so.
A different danger came from civilian nuclear power plants to gener-
ate electricity. These plants would emit radioactivity and would be likely
targets in case of war. Because of the promise of cheap electricity, the city
of Karlsruhe was eager for a plant but decided to locate it away from town
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