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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.
Since there were places that the US could (and did) test nuclear bombs, there is no reason for them to test it there. In addition, there was no radiation, and the survivors showed no signs of radiation poisoning. It was just a normal explosion, albeit a very big one.
Actually, what was going on in 1944 and prompted the US nuclear program's development was not the US trying to gain global military supremacy.
Instead, we were trying to develop a weapon which would obviate the need to land troops in Japan, which would have led to one of the bloodiest invasions ever. (Read about the Japanese preparations for the invasion - the villagers with pikes training to "stave" off armed infantry.)
Even given hindsight, nuclear weapons didn't give us global supremacy. If anything, they allowed third world countries (China, the Soviets, Pakistan) to play hardball politics with the "big boy" Western powers.
Second, as to your (sarcastic) reference to the US killing our own citizens to test a nuke: If we were to do that, we'd pick an uninhabited place, surely! Somewhere we could hush it up better than, say, a couple miles from San Francisco!
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
It is very American to stand up and say that you're patriotic especially after September 11th, and then go on and on about how "they" the government are trying to control you "the sheep", or how "they" want to go to war.
Here's a little lesson in how things work for Americans, because obviously some of you just don't get it. American Government is ran by AMERICANS. "they" are "us" and no different except the titles beside their names.
So would "they" set off a nuke on "their" own people?
HELL NO
This was an accident that was covered up because the Armed forces (that ensure our freedom and lifestyles as Americans) made a mistake and like ANY human they didn't want to fess up to it. It's a whole lot easier to pretend something didn't happen or "bend the truth" then to come right out with it. That's the one thing that just doesn't register with me, since when is "the government" some new breed of people in America?
Sometimes it sickens me to see people so proud to be Americans to just turn around and bitch about what they take for granted.
In Soviet Russia, you wouldn't see a book like this.
"I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to my death for your right to say it" - Voltaire
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Yea, he's full of shit.
There wasn't enough weapon-grade Uranium in the United States in 1944 to make a weapon of this class. What did exist was being used to determine the physical properties of the material for weaponization.
The amount of weapon-grade Uranium from Oak Ridge and Hanford is well documented in histories of the "gadget". And besides, an American test would have taken place not in Chicago but out in the boondocks.
"Uranium resources were very rare so the bomb would have to be simple and guaranteed to work. The luxury of a test model would not be available."
It's repeated over and over by everyone involved and in each and every history of the American and Soviet programs at the beginings.
The San Francisco area has a number of nuclear embarassments. There are leaky barrels of radioactive material off the Farralones, and ground contamination at Hunter's Point. Ships used near nuclear tests were decontaminated or scrapped there. Mare Island used to be a nuclear weapons storage area. But the SF area's anti-nuclear activists have never brought up Port Chicago, and if there was any evidence of contamination, it would have been noticed by now.
The author's online chapter sections don't even seem to have much relevance to his conspiracy theory.
I think this article is insulting to those who were there. They complained about the unsafe conditions, and were severely reprimanded when they walked off the job. Those that did walk off the job lived. Those that didn't stand up to the man died. And a lot died. To claim that the accident was a planned test is an absurdity of the highest order. To say it was not an accident is tantamount to saying that the survivors were liars, and that their (admittedly incompetent) supervisors were suicidal/homicidal.
Also, the belief that the US had the fissionable material to waste in an uncontrolled (and murderous) test is even more absurd. Especially so close to a highly populated area such as San Francisco. Port Chicago is VERY close to SF, especially in terms of a nuclear explosion. It's only something like 30 miles as the crow flies.
This is one of the stupidest and most insulting conspiracy theories I've ever come across. It insults not only the survivors, but our intelligence as well. Right up there with the moonshot conspiracy "theory".
To kibitz that comment, no you didn't. You did so instead to commit a war crime (attacking a civilian populace). And to those who say "Oh but they had no idea it would be so bad!", that argument falls flat when they did it again to Nagasaki a few days later. You know, after they had all the recon photos in from the first blast...
I watched a documentary on the two bombs a while back, and one of the military guys they interviewed made a very interesting comment, which was along the lines that as soon as the joint chiefs saw the recon photos for the Hiroshima blast one of them said "My God. We can't let the public see these photos. They'd never forgive us.". Sounds to me like they knew exactly how reprehensible that kind of blast was to civilians. And yet they did it again. No wonder the US doesn't want to sign any treaties on international war crime courts...
A fair number more were killed in the massive Tokyo firebombing. I'm pretty sure they were abandoned in their cells to die. Many POW's were killed in the American attacks on Japanese shipping, presumably with American awareness of at least the risk.
There was also a proven concern that the Japanese would execute their POW's upon an American invasion. Extracting the Allies in Hiroshima would have been tricky one way or the other.
Tragic though that anyone died there. War against civilians is a paticularly filthy business.
There have, to be picky, been instances of the U.S. targeting its own people. Kent State comes to mind, not a whole lot less. It's tough to figure out what to call the Civil War.
When the USAF was dropping Daisy Cutters during the Gulf war, a group of Brits thought the conflict had gone nuclear... easy mistake to make if you're close enough. The size of the explosion is pretty much unmatched among conventional ordinance.
15000 lbs of blasting slurry in a big metal barrel... I can see where that might mimic a small nuclear explosion quite nicely.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
That is not what should give you willies about this incident.
What should give you willies is that someone's miltary (british to be exact) has had no doubts about bring a ship with this cargo manifest into the middle of a city instead of unloading it offshore.
And methinks that there is a mistake in the reference. It was not benzol. It was nitrobenzol if I recall correctly. Which is also an explosive. All 35 tons of it. In barrels on the deck. They are actually what caught fire after the other ship (forgot the name) collided with the MonBlan. In other words there was not a single item of cargo on the manifest that was not explosive.
And the most interesting of it all. The cretinous idiot in the military who OKed the manifest for loading as well as the cretinous idiot who OKed bringing the ship into harbour were not ever considered at fault. The criminal procedings concentrated on the captain of the ship (who survived the incident by running like hell the moment it went on fire).
Back on the topic. It is possible that it was not a nuke in Chicago. Actually most likely that it was not. But knowing the military it might as well have been. They would have liked it to be. Good test. And good riddance to some pesky loading workers and privates ya know...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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Your points regarding the criminal incompetence of the persons in charge of shipping are spot on. They should have been taken out, had 2 pounds each of picric acid wrapped around various points of their bodies and had them detonated at suitably random amounts of time.
EnkiduEOT
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
It may not be especially relevant to Slashdot's ostensible mission,
Sure it does. Slashdot can't resist a conspiracy theory. If you've never been around a conspiracy nerd, it's quite a sight. They make us computer / scifi / anime / trek nerds look like a bunch of social gadflys. These guys are just sad. Whether it be Kennedy or the moon landing, they can't possibly believe that any event could go by without a Vast Conspiracy behind it and they're quite glad to bend your ear. For hours. Repeatedly.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it." Col. Jeff Cooper
I'm obviously unfamiliar with tactical nukes, and had no idea that there was stuff with yields that low.
The existence of such low-yield nukes makes the whole issue even more frightening. As long as the yields were up in the kiloton-and-higher range, nukes were a boolean issue. You nuke or you don't nuke, and there's no in-between.
Low-yield tactical nukes and well as high-yield conventional weapons blur the line. Once you cross that line, and now it may be hard to know exactly when that happened, then it may be "easier" to simply escalate the yield than it would have been to begin with a old-fashioned tens-of-kilotons nuclear device.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Surely the survivors of the blast should have a cancer rate much higher than the normal population!
Where are those statistics???