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Re-examining the Port Chicago Disaster
GoneGaryT writes "Say chaps, this might be old hat, but there's a fab site for conspiracy theory aficionados at portchicago.org ; it's a pdf book expounding the theory of Peter Vogel's that the Port Chicago magazine explosion (1944) was a nuclear weapons test. It's actually pretty thorough, like 20 years of research thorough. Would the US really blow up their own people for the sake of global military supremacy? Naaaah..." Chapter 9 of the book has a factual account of the disaster (which I'd never heard of before); if you're not interested in the rest of the theory, at least reading the historical account is informative and will give you an appreciation of the explosive power of several million pounds of military ordnance.
Good question. There isn't any. Case closed.
The main supporting inference requires considerable suspension of disbelief, and is presented as nothing more than conjecture. From Chapter 10, page 19:
The author thinks the thing was loaded concealed and armed with a 4 atm pressure depth charge fuse? Please.
Whether or not there was a nuclear explosion, I don't think so. However, that area has always played a very important part of the military in the Bay Area.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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I skimmed some of the PDFs.
b .h tml
d e. html
h tm . ht m
What I didn't see were comparisons to larger known conventional maritime explosions like in Texas or Halifax.
Just because it was a big blast doesn't mean it was a nuke. As for Teller, it was obvious from the interviews in the Atomic Bomb Movie that Teller is off his rocker.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/maritime-2
"British Ministry of War Transport steamship (7,142 tons) loaded with 1,400 tons of munitions and a cargo of 9,000 cotton bales, was berthed in Bombay docks when a fire broke out with such ferocity that it soon reached the ammunition stored in the forward section of the ship. The resulting explosion was almost as great as the blowing up of the ammunition ship Mount Blanc in Halifax Harbour during the First World War. Fires on shore blazed for two days and nights as the flaming bales of cotton were hurled into the air only to drop onto the wooden shacks and shanties of Bombay's slums. In the harbour itself, eighteen merchant ships were either sunk or severely damaged. A total of 336 people died and over 1,000 injured."
"A gigantic explosion occurred at the West Lock Munitions Facility, Pearl Harbor, the cause of which has never been explained. The ammo-loaded ships were spaced in line apart from each other when the first explosion occurred at the dock setting off a series of explosions on the other ships. Some vessels managed to take evasive action thus terminating the domino like chain of explosions. Destroyed were the Landing Ship (Tank) LST-43, LST...69, LST-179, LST-353 and LST-480. Also destroyed were the Landing Craft (Tank) LCT(6)-961, LCT(6)-963 and LCT(6)-983. Bodies were being dragged from the water days after the event. Casualties were said to be over 1,000 killed or wounded."
So the Navy Pier accident isn't unique in violent destructive power.
There are two other explosions I've read about with similarities to the one that is pdf'ed to hell and back.
http://www.region.halifax.ns.ca/community/explo
Stored in the holds, or simply stacked on deck,of the Mont Blanc were 35 tons of benzol, 300 rounds of ammunition, 10 tons of gun cotton, 2,300 tons of picric acid (used in explosives), and 400,000 pounds of TNT.
"The Mont Blanc drifted by a Halifax pier, brushing it and setting it ablaze. Members of the Halifax Fire Department responded quickly, and were positioning their engine up to the nearest hydrant when the Mont Blanc disintegrated in a blinding white flash, creating the biggest man-made explosion before the nuclear age. It was 9:05am.
Over 1,900 people were killed immediately; within a year the figure had climbed well over 2,000. Around 9,000 more were injured, many permanently; 325 acres, almost all of north-end Halifax, were destroyed.
Much of what was not immediately levelled burned to the ground, aided by winter stockpiles of coal in cellars. As for the Mont Blanc, all 3,000 tons of her were shattered into little pieces that were blasted far and wide. The barrel of one of her cannons landed three and a half miles away; part of her anchor shank, weighing over half a ton, flew two miles in the opposite direction. Windows shattered 50 miles away, and the shock wave was even felt in Sydney, Cape Breton, 270 miles to the north-east."
http://sdsd.essortment.com/texascityexplo_rkvi.
http://www.texasoutside.com/galveston/texascity
I'm going to respond to the article logically, resisting the impulse to immediately smack the conspiracy theorists upside the head.
Being European, I was not familiar with the incident. Running a very quick search shows that there was an accident at a port (Port Chicago), when it was used for loading and transporting ammunition during WW2.
Sources say that there was an explosion of approximately 5 thousand tons of conventional explosives, started accidentally. Undoubtedly it was a massive chain reaction and there had apparently been some (certainly understandable) concern over the safety of the facility.
The article source claims it was a nuclear weapon.
The documentary "Trinity and Beyond - The Atomic Bomb Movie" (good footage, narrated by William Shatner) contains recently de-classified footage. It shows the US military staging a conventional explosion of the order of a kiloton, designed to help figure out what to expect from a real nuclear explosion. And guess what... it behaved very much like you would expect a nuclear explosion.
The facts are as follows:
(1) There was a big explosion.
(2) A 5-kiloton conventional explosion could at first glance be mistaken for a nuclear explosion. Big explosions look similar, it doesn't matter how they're triggered.
The critical problem with their argument is as follows: The test site of the very first atomic weapon, Trinity, is still noticably radioactive today, possibly dangerous. Indeed, the fallout effects are still noticable from other sites exposed to nuclear weapons - in the environmental and survivor's radiation poisoning.
To those who assert that the Port Chicago explosion was the result of a nuclear explosion - how do you explain a nuclear weapon with no fallout and radioactivity? I vouch that you are trying to manipulate the facts to justify a theory - rather than basing your opinions from facts.
You would have thought that during a "20 year investigation" they would have gone out there with a geiger counter and check out the background radiation. Which would have discounted nuclear weapons very quickly.
I was sure the incident sounded familiar, but not for the reason stated.
Port Chicago is known as a tragedy and milestone in race relations in the U.S. military, which was segregated throughout WWII. Here is the Navy account, not bad in its honesty.
"The explosion at Port Chicago accounted for fifteen percent of all African-American casualties of World War II." Some 320 people were killed instantly, nearly all of them black. The ordnance loaders were a black unit. Hundreds of the survivors refused to return to work after the accident without safety changes. A couple hundred were summarily court-martialed, and 50 more were tried for mutiny with a possible death sentence.
The incident drew a great deal of attention, again not for allegedly being nuclear, and mau have factored into President Truman's historic integration of the military.
This may not be a technological angle, but it does emphasize that poor safety practice with conventional explosives caused the disaster, as I suggested in an earlier post.
My former boss worked for a decade at a New Mexico university (not sure which one) doing highspeed photography work. He had compiled a tape of much of the non-classified footage he had accumulated over the years. He lent it to me and I found it some very cool footage. It contained several conventional weapons detonations including one 20,000 ton TNT blast. It created a mushroom cloud exactly like what I have seen off nuclear weapon blasts. Mushroom cloud != Conspiracy Residual radition = Conspiracy (for me) But I've seen no evidence for any. Case closed.
Not to nitpick but Port Chicago is near San Francisco, its not anywhere near the city of Chicago.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
- Just before
10:20 p.m. on July 17th, 1944, the worst home front disaster of WWII, occurred at a Naval pier in the San Francisco Bay Area.
That same site also lists several nuclear-conspiracy pages about Port Chicago, and almost all of them are more succinct than the one listed in the story.Five thousand tons of ammunition in ships being loaded by black sailors exploded, sending a blast more than 12,000 feet into the sky.
The explosion destroyed the pier, a train, and both ships, instantly killing everyone aboard (some 320 men).
This page in particular is short, and has a quick list of bullet points that try to show that Port Chicago was nuclear. They may all be obviously BS (to someone more versed in its history...?), but they're not simply "the explosion was so big, it HAD to be nuclear!" as others has suggested.
And lastly, when visiting this Amazon.com page for a Port Chicago book, am I the only one who sees "Customers who wear clothes also shop for: Clean Underwear"?? Maybe I'm delerious from being up in the middle of the night.
The language used in the memo seems to me more equivocal then Galbraith's statments in the interview with Terkel.
Consider: and
and The memo does conclude that surrender was inevitable even without an invasion, and without the use of the atomic bomb. However, it does seem to assume the continued conventional bombing of the Japanese mainland, something Galbraith fails to mention in his comments to Terkel. "Bomber" Harris in the UK and LeMay in the US had long been making optimistic claims about the power of conventional bombing to end the war. Could this memo be part of the the same school?
1. If this really was the case then it is in the lake.
2. From a NUKE you do not get a lot of residual radiation. The neutrons are under 14KEv so they cause minimal side reactions. So you get radiation from the blast and some from the fallout. But not a lot. An H bomb is an entirely different matter. It will generate a considerable quantity of radioactive isotopes in aything that happens to be close to the epicenter.
3. So 50 years later it will take you using some very serious gear to actually find if a small nuke was blown up.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
By 1944, all labs in the world together had produced less than one percent of enriched fissile material needed to build one single bomb. For this reason alone there can not have been a nuclear exposion before, say, may '45
Some serious gear, like, say, an el-cheapo geiger detector? Go to the Trinity test site during the brief period of time its open to the public every year. The ground is still radioactive. You *do* get residual radiation, from a fission bomb, and it lasts and lasts. No Energizer bunny needed.
The Democratic Party: We've been pussies since 1968!
Only one gram of matter was converted to energy when the Hiroshima A-bomb exploded. Its charge was was about the critical mass of uranium (about 50-odd kilograms)
That's not to say the A-bomb had a yeild of only 0.002% of its mass, though.
I'm no expert on atomic physics, but I'd say the mass lost is somewhat like teensy bit of mass lost when two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom combine to form a H2O molecule plus some extra heat energy, except that for a fission reaction, some thingymajig is happening with nuclear particles rather than with 'bond energy'.
Blancmange
iocat said:
>(It's unclear if LeMay knew this would be the
>result, but since he spent the months before
>fire-bombing civilian areas, it seems likely
>that he probably didn't care that much.)
That's a bit disingenuous.
Japanese cities of the time were not nicely, neatly divided into industrial / residential areas, and a lot of Japanese war production was at the cottage level, making that kind of differentiation in targeting well-nigh impossible. Granted, Life magazine said of the Tokyo fire-bombing, ``We have now proven that a Japanese city when properly kindled will burn like autumn leaves.'', but given the behaviour of Japan during World War II such sentiment can be understood in context.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
What lake are you talking about? Port Chicago is not on a lake (nor anywhere near a lake). You are confusing Port Chicago with the city of Chicago. Not the same place nor no where near each other.
Port Chicago is located North of San Francisco on Suisun Bay, an outlet of the Sacramento River. It's not in the middle of nowhere, it is located about 2 miles from Martinez, California, Concord, California, and a number of other towns / cities. ANY sort of atomic detonation would have been extremely obvious to any of the universities / labs in the area (Berkeley for example is only 19 miles away). As for "getting near the site" you can walk right up to the outer fence or sail up near the docks (not too close mind you) more than close enough for a geiger counter to check background radiation (especially since most of the buildings have been there since the port was built)
In the book referenced above, Franks makes an excellent point, which was that the American people were so sick, by 1944, of the inhumanity of war, that they were willing to tolerate and support any inhumanity, no matter how big, to get it over with faster. Given that, and given the enormous number of US casualties we would have taken to invade Japan, I find it pretty hard to argue with *any* of the US strategy in pressing the war against Japan.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
mmmm - I was living in DC around '95 when the 50th anniversary of hiroshima was being greeted by an exhibit at the national air a space museum. The original exhibit was critical of the decision to drop the bomb and exposed some lies (like we didn't know about what the radiation would do the the population) and, as I recall, the director of the museum was fired and the script re-written befor the exhibit opened. Here's a little bit of that story, complete with quote:
"One major problem was the consequences of not using the atomic bombs. The earlier scripts implied Japan would have surrendered without an invasion. Dr. Tom Crouch, one of the exhibit's curators explained the evidence for that conclusion:
'(take) The Strategic Bombing Survey team for example. Paul Nitze and John Kenneth Galbraith and the economists who were in Japan in the months immediately after the war to assess the impact of the strategic bombing campaign. They looked at everything I mean at economics, at morale, at what happened to fire departments and particular industries, particular towns. With regard to Japan. Their final comment on the (Atomic) bomb was that their studies indicated had there been no bomb, had there been no invasion, Japan would of surrendered in September-October. Something of that sort. Other Post-War studies said the same thing. I don't think we quote any of the others. Marine Corps and Army immediate Post-War gaming situations in 1946-1947, when they were playing with the political elements suggested essentially the same thing. The collapse was closer than the Japanese themselves realized and would of come at that point. If you see that in the script you're only going to see that as a quote from somebody else. There will be quotes to the contrary.' "
closed minded is as closed minded does