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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.
where is the residual radiation?
I always like to read about incidents I've never heard of. This is one of them.
It may not be especially relevant to Slashdot's ostensible mission, but it does make for an interesting read.
I know it's consider incorrect around here to comment on spelling, but the author begins to lose credibility when he misspells "Manhattan Project" on his front page.
One observation is that many people are slow to draw the connection between nuclear and ordinary explosives because today's nuclear yields are so high. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki each had raw explosive power of around 10 kilotons each (the Nagasaki plutonium bomb was a good deal more powerful than the U-235 Hiroshima bomb, but because of inaccurate placement inflicted about half the damage). Nuclear explosions are worse for human life by heat and gamma radiation, but otherwise this tonnage could realistically be delivered by aircraft by conventional explosives or, in equivalent destructive terms, by firebomb bombardment such as had leveled most of Tokyo and Dresden.
So there was some resistance at the time to focusing on the nuclear program when waves of 1,000 B-29's delivering 10 tons each could do the same task with proven technology. In another parallel, some estimates are that the "$3 Billion Dollar Gamble" B-29 may have cost more to develop and build than the bomb!
Also, all large explosions assume the familiar mushroom cloud appearance.
I don't address at all the propriety of dropping "the bomb," just the reasons a conventional explosion might be mistaken for one.
IIRC, the bombs were 'shipped' in part assembled form. There is no way they could be detonated early until they were on the delivery plane.
Funny, isn't it, that the U.S. blowing up "its own people" is considered orders of magnitude worse than it blowing up other people? We do the latter from time to time, sometimes with regret.
We do apply a similar rule to other leaders; it is also thought reprehensible that Saddam Hussein used poison gas on "his own people," although I seriously doubt he consider the Kurds his people, or vice versa.
I don't think the U.S. would kill its own people deliberately, as least not often and outside of certain wars, but have noted a willingness to allow some to die by neglect. There's another odd distinction.
It's kind of like the moral repugnancy of someone killing their own family, though many of us are aware family might be the most tempting to kill. Not our families, mind you -- other people killing their own families.
... is what anyone should take this theory with.
I will openly admit that I did not RTFA, simply because the FA is too F long. I did go to the site and tried to skim the salient points, and I read the historical account (of an event I had never heard of, and I tend to consider myself something of a WW II history buff).
At first glance, this is shaping up to be a case of someone starting from a false premise and building an argument to support it. Several times people have attempted the old "wow this was way too powerful to have been a conventional explosion it must be nuclear" gambit.
I can easily cite an example of another historical event that resulted in a very large conventional explosion that mimicked atomic bomb effects. On December 6, 1917, a French cargo ship carrying a large amount of picric acid, TNT, benzole, and guncotton caught fire and exploded in Halifax harbor. The force of the explosion is estimated to have been in the neighborhood of 3 kilotons. It had all the effects of a atomic blast: fireball, mushroom cloud, shock wave, even a small tidal wave since the explosion was over water, and so on, all but the radiation. However, no one by any conceivable stretch of the imagination can claim that this was an atomic explosion.
In addition, it is my understanding that it took a great deal of time and expense to build first the test device that was exploded in the desert and then the two that were dropped over Japan. That represented the sum total of America's nuclear arsenal at the time. A great deal of care was taken with these devices. It seems very odd to me that there would be some sort of "accident" with a heretofore unknown weapon that America possessed at the time. Atomic weapons just do not simply "go off" unless the bomb were specifically armed, and there would be no reason to keep an armed atomic weapon in the hold of a ship.
As for purposely detonating a device to test its effects on a populated area? Please. I can only stretch my incredulity so far. Yes, the US government has done some terrible things in the past, but it would take a great deal of very compelling evidence to make me believe they would do something that blatant.
Anyone who has read the entire book from beginning to end, feel free to poke holes in my argument. My research into this theory was hampered by the fact that the site did not contain a concise summary of the theory itself. For someone with the time, perhaps this would be a good candidate for applying the Carl Sagan Baloney Detection Kit.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
There was only one reason for our development of the atomic bomb during WWII.
We needed to do so before the Germans did first, and we knew that their scientists were well on the way there. We knew they had stopped Uranium-bearing ore exports in 1939.
We had to get to it first. Using it in Japan was an afterthought, which was in itself based on the casualty estimates for a full scale island hopping land invasion of Japan. We may not have been able to do it--the Japanese were more than willing to be suicidal rather than surrender.
From chapter 9:
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The buildings of the Naval Magazine were damaged extensively; sporadic damage to structural members of buildings was proven up to 13 miles - Suval [railroad] Station, California; plate glass was broken up to 35.5 miles - Petaluma, California; and a legitimate claim for plaster damage was reported at 48 miles - Calistoga, California.
Death count: 320 dead, 81 bodies recovered, of which 30 were positively identified.A pilot flying at 9000 feet saw pieces of white-hot metal rise above his altitude.
I'm impressed...
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Waaiit... You're not an American are you? Because if you were, you'd know that Americans come in all varieties: those who think that "one world government" is generally a good thing and those who think it is the most horrible thing you could think of, those who think the government should get involved in the lives of its citizens for any number of reasons, and those who feel that the government should have a very hands off approach, and those who have no clue what the government should be doing. (and all those can be further subdivided, and there are sure to be plenty of other sub-divisions both having to do with government and without.) However it seems to me that the people running the government are pretty much a self-selecting bunch, narrowing down the people they deem worthy to join their ranks to one or two per position before the general populace has a chance to have a say in things.
According to John Kenneth Galbraith, who worked on an independent civilian commission appointed by President Roosevelt to study what really happened in the aftermath of WWII, Japan was ready to surrender before the A-Bomb was dropped.:
Taken from "The Good War," by Studs TerkelI think the "we had to drop the A-bomb becauase the invasion would have been worse" story is a remarkably well done piece of propaganda which has endured to the point of becoming accepted fact. As Mr. Galbraith points out, the US did not know that Japan was ready to surrender at the time. However, it is wrong to keep using that story now, given that it is probably false. I would rather the US say, OK, we didn't know that Japan was going to surrender, but we wished we did because we wish we didn't drop the bomb on them.
As far as villagers training with pikes, that's probably on the same level as the bomb drills in US schools where everyone hid under their desk -- something to give ordinary citizens some feeling of security, nothing more.
- Most of the comprehensive data and analyses of those data that are
available in Government Port Chicago explosion records are
extraneous to the purpose of this book and will not be considered.
Sections of available Port Chicago explosion records, for example, that
precisely detail and mathematically dissect the "Percentage of plaster
damage to total houses damaged" and the "Frequency distribution of
number of structural members broken by buildings, area" would be
neither instructive nor interesting to a general readership.
Maybe he should have had such a clue for the rest of the book.Wasn't in Port Chicago at all. Large explosions are quite common during war time, but don't get publicity at the time for obvious reasons. I'd never heard of the Port Chicago one before this post but it seems nothing unusual.
d crater.htm) and here (http://www.healeyhero.fsnet.co.uk/rescue/blew_up1 .htm). I remember seeing the crater being used as a motor cycling scrambling route in the late 1970's. The size was impressive to say the least.
m akhist/makhist6_prog8b.shtml
In fact the biggest single conventional explosion of the second world war happened less than 10 miles from where I grew up in Burton-on-Trent, England. Only the Hirmoshima, Nagasaki and New Mexico tests were larger. It was 'common knowlege' at the time locally, and cracks in ceilings were regularly pointed out to me as a kid as having been caused by 'the dump blowing up', but few people outside the area have ever heard of it.
The Fauld dump exploded in November 1944 taking 4,000 tons of bombs with it. There's good pages here (http://www.carolyn.topmum.net/tutbury/fauld/faul
Theres's also a couple of earlier large naval explosion that may be of interest as similar forgotten tragedies. Bothe happened in Sheerness harbour in WWI - the HMS Bulwark and later the Princess Irene. The BBC did an program on these recently - http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/beyond/factsheets/
Tactical nukes indeed do get down to about that size. Some of them are "dial-a-yield."
:-)
Tactical nukes were intended for all sorts of uses. For example, the anti-aircraft batteries around the US during the early cold war had nuclear warheads in the missiles. The Navy had nuclear warheads in the anti-aircraft missiles on almost all of their combat ships. I was an aircrewman in a P-3 Orion (submarine hunter) and we carried nuclear depth charges. Submarines carried nuclear torpedos.
I believe the only reason that tactical nukes are not used in the NMD anti-missile systems is political. Although there is one other possibility (exo-atmospheric burst caused EMP), the advantages of nuclear warheads for anti-ballistic missile defense seem immense - the problems of hitting the target go away - you just need to get close. (I would love to hear from anyone who *knows* why these difficult "hit-to-kill" vehicles are being used instead of nukes, if it is not political).
As far as conventional explosives go... I once watched a demonstration (and test) at Sandia Labs (Albuquerque, NM - where they did most nuclear weapons design). They set off around 1 kiloton equivalent of high explosive a few miles from where we were watching at an Armed Forces Day demonstration. It certainly produced a very nice mushroom cloud and a heck of a bang!
As a kid, I set off a small explosive in the back yard (my parents were not amused). It was about an ounce of Sodium Chlorate mixed with Sugar and a little Sulfur, with an electrical detonator (single strand of wire shorting an extension cord). I also made a very small, but distinct, mushroom cloud
For more info on nukes, see This Site.
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