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.

Comments

Theres no conspiracy

[ball-lightning]

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.

Global military supremacy?

[Spyffe]

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!

Re:Global military supremacy?

[iocat]

Not quite. The fear of a German bomb was what got Einstein to write a very influential letter supporting the nuclear weapons program to FDR, and that was certainly a supporting reason, but we ultimately developed it for the same reasons the Germans wanted to -- to make a really big bomb.

As for dropping it on Japan, I suggest anyone interested in the subject at all check out a book called Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B Frank. He examines original source material and lets the reader decide whether or not it was good idea.

Some of the interesting things he reveals: the Japanese plan, to fight the US to a bloody standstill on the beaches and then sue for a negotiated peace, would certainly have been bloody. The Japanese were massing *all* their remaining forces exactly where the US was planning to strike.

Certainly there would have been tens if not hundreds of thousands of Allied and Japanese casualties. But, it wouldn't have mattered in the long run, because most of the Japanese population would have starved to death shortly after, anyway.

See, Since the cities were totally bombed out, General LeMay's next targets were the rail-heads. After two weeks of bombing them Japan would have been totally unable to ship food around the counry, resulting in mass starvation, regardless of their surrender. (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.)

Anyway, it's a pretty fascinating book...

It's really an open question as to what would have happened if we hadn't dropped the bomb -- people in the US were so sick of war Japan may have been able to get a negotiated peace (just before they all starved to death).

Where did this stupid article come from?

[Animats]

The Port Chicago disaster is well-known. Some people make a big deal out of it for racial reasons (most of the people killed were black). But a nuclear explosion? No way.

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.

Insulting

[tuxlove]

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".

Happened in the Gulf War

[The Tyro]

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.

Re:small correction: picric acid

[enkidu]

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).

I kinda doubt if it was nitrobenzol (german for nitrobenzene) rather than benzene. (mono) nitrobenzene is volatile and VERY poisonous and can kill by being absorbed through the skin. It's sometimes used as a component of some explosives, but usually as a raw material of the preparation of other organic compounds. There would be practically no point in shipping it across the ocean. It may have been trinitrobenzene (or TNB) but then it would have been called TNB. Anyway, 35 tons of TNB is peanuts compared to 2300 tons of picric acid. In one ship. [shudder] On fire. [cringe] If the captain had had any idea of the explosive force on that ship, he would have steered her out of port under full power and then abandoned ship. He probably just thought that the ship and ajacent ships would get blown up, not the whole f'ing city.

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