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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?
Given the callousness of letting people die in St. George Utah from fallout-related illnesses, I have no doubt they would have during the cold war. That being said, if it had been a test, I would think there would have been major epidemialogical effects (like Leukemia). So if it was a test, it was a miserable failure ;-)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
You'd think some of that twenty years of research would be dedicated to getting the name right.
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.
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.
Wow, that was the most interesting 354-page article I've ever seen posted here. I think it said something about some stuff blowing up, but I'm not really sure. I'm going to go to sleep now.
Now THERE's a government conspiracy! Making ships/people disappear AND travel through time!
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.
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
I have some black helicopters and a bridge in Brooklyn for sale, if you want them.
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.
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!
--
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
Was it a nuke test? Naaah. ...But it might have been aliens.
....First it was the RFID chips in my tires monitoring my position in front of Taco-Bell for the government and now it Nuclear blasts in a densely packed city!......
Does Oliver Stone know about this?.....
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.
... 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)
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
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.
From chapter 9:
-
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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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.
Well, I must say that I've never heard of this at all. You learn something new every day.
it doesn't sound like a nuclear device to me. But aren't there bombs that cause damage, but don't leave radioactivity? Neutron bombs? or something?
Forgive me if I'm wrong - the body clock hasn't got used to waking up early after the Xmas holidays/parties/late nights.
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. . . if the U.S. sucessfully tested a U-235 bomb in 1944, why did it test another U-235 bomb at White Sands in 1945? The U.S. could have had three bombs read for use in 1945 then, or at the very least, the U.S. could have tested the plutonium bomb at White Sands and had two bombs of known-good design to drop on Japan.
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.
If I criticize this post, and then someone criticizes me, then can I recriticize them?
What if I criticize myself pre-emptively by saying "recriticize" isn't a word?
Then am I not myself?
For all the soviet russia posts, I sure don't hear the "what a country!" punchline...
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Well, if the US wanted to take out Chicago (and the REST of Illinois) all they would have to do us blow up Fermilab. It would take out a sizeable chunk of the state. Good thing I live no more than 25 miles from it! :)
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
The prose in this book would bore even the most strung-up of conspiracy theorists. I quit reading after a page and a half, because I thought I was proofreading my nephew's term paper.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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".
..., and we knew that their scientists were well on the way there.
Actually, they weren't. There was research, of course, but they never came very far on the long, complicated way of building a working bomb. First the Nazis were convinced to win the war easily by conventional means (in 1939 and 40 it looked pretty good for them). In 1942, there was a request by the military on a nuclear bomb. The scientists agreed that it could be done, but would need several more years. See this page on the Uran-Projekt if you can understand German. When the German scientists, already interned after Germany's defeat in May '45, learned about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they refused to believe it.
er... I didn't RTFA either... but it just makes me wonder. Why suppose that it was a nuke - We have no shortage of desert, with nobody around, right? So why would we detonate a nuke in a populated area? A secret test, after all. Much more interesting to me is the theory that the chicago fire (and a disastrous fire hundreds of miles away that happened simultaneously) are the result of a glancing comet impact. THATs interesting.
This space available.
"Ah, but are they anti-matter?"
Before or after the blast?
When a disaster like this happens, I hope I'm able to say "What the hell was that?!"
While reading in the slashdot postings below about Raelean leader Rael, I hit a link to www.skepdic.com on rael, when i cycled through and found this page charles tart. It describes an anecdote by an apparently famous crackpot about a psycic experience about an explosion a woman had the night before Port Chicago blew up.
I had never heard of Port Chicago before, and here I find it connected like Kevin Bacon to Slashdot.
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.
You idiot, everyone knows who the bitch in that relationship is. The man is forced to wear Bright Red and Green underwear all the time!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
- 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.
Picric acid is a yellow crystalline, high explosive bursting charge. It is initiated by lead azide or mercury fulminate. Picric acid has the same effectiveness as TNT. ... Picric acid in contact with lead produces lead picrate, a sensitive and violent explosive.
The idea of 2300 tons of this stuff on any one ship give me the willies. If it all went up at once, which by the descriptions it did, it would be the equivalent of a modern day medium sized tactical nuke.
Good examples BTW. Looks like just another crackpot theory filtering through the memepool. Nothing to see here folks, move along.
EnkiduEOT
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I guess... to put it into one "word"....
STFU.
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/
You are correct: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are no longer noticeably radioactive. The fact that the lifetime and power of a radioisotope are inversely proportional is probably a factor here as well as those cited.
OTOH, it seems unlikely that those around at the time could fail to tell an air-burst explosion from an underground one, so simple Geiger Counter testing of ground samples should quickly settle the Port Chicago issue: some fission products are extremely long-lived, yet powerful enough to be easy to spot.
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
Would the US really blow up their own people for the sake of global military supremacy? Naaaah...
I hate to contaminate your anti-Americanism with some reality, Michael, but in 1944 the people who were desiring global military supremacy were German and Japanese.
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
Consider the four major disasters:
- SS Fort Stikine, the ship that blew up in Bombay, was Canadian built.
- USS Maine - Maine borders Canada. Was it a message to the US from our northern "friends?"
- Port Chicago - easy access by Canadian saboteurs with limpets, also sends that same "message"
- Halifax - need I say more?
Those dastardly canadians like to blow up ships. Please stay tuned for my 352 page pdf.5-kiloton or smaller bombs are a lot harder to build. In fact, they are talking about it now, because a bunch of rather moronic US politicians want to use nukes as regular battlefield weapons. They are referred to as mini-nukes.
If this explosion was about 2-5 kilotons, I find it hard to believe it was a nuke. That's simply too small.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Just wait until Hollywood get their hands on this. You should know better, Slashdot!!
Can't wait to see the monacled German doctor who secretly heads-up the nuclear program.
"I vudent vurry about ze people in Chicago...de test is all dat matterz!"
(yes, that isn't how Germans pronounce English, however Hollywood has convinced itself that Germans do pronounce English exactly like the Dutch)
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
Nope, we're still orders of magnitude off, even for the piddling little Hiroshima bomb. 15,000 lbs is just 7.5 tons, almost 3 orders of magnitude off of the 10 kiloton estimate in the parent post. Even if blasting slurry is more powerful than TNT, I suspect we're still 2 or more orders of magnitude between a Daisy Cutter and a nuke.
IMHO the Nuke is kind of like Space... It's BIG, so BIG that the ordinary human mind just doesn't take it in. Unfortunately the world seems to be losing its fear of nuclear weapons - I guess the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are fading. I suspect someone is going to have to lose another city to re-vaccinate the human race with proper fear of nuclear weapons.
Also IMHO, as bad as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in the larger view of history, it may be a good thing that nuclear weapons were used in war when only one side had them, and there was no chance of an escalation. No head of state could have left such a potent weapon unused for so long had it not be demonstrated to be that terrible.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I am sure that the infamous Port Chicago blast was not caused by a nuclear explosion.
I mean, when investigators looked at the blast, there were NO signs of a nuclear explosion at ground level: a circular yawning crater, people blinded by the initial nuclear fireball, and definitely NO strong background radiation at the center of the explosion. A ground-level nuclear explosion of even a low-yield device would throw up a lot of highly-radioactive fallout particles, but there wasn't any downwind from Port Chicago, so....
This conspiracy crowd definitely needs to be passed tinfoil hats, that's to be sure.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
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.
Do you have reliable resources to back up that?
You know, I've tried the local library and have found very few books on the subject and most of them full of speculation.
Had such effects been observed, you know some nut would have had to have tried to reproduced it in his basement and had people witness his house vanishing or something. I mean, if people will build breeder reactors in their backyard and fusion reactors in their basement, then surely someone somewhere has tried to reproduce the Philadelphia experiment as its portrayed in movies and popular legend.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Good thing you put that disclaimer in there.
Port Chicago was a 5 KILOton explosion. Hiroshima was about a 12 kiloton explosion. Neither were anywhere near a megaton, and Hiroshima _was_ bigger than Port Chicago.
Which isn't to say that the conspiracy has even a slight bit of validity.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
The guy who wrote this is now officially nominated to join the Order of the Tinfoil Hat.
-30-
Surely the survivors of the blast should have a cancer rate much higher than the normal population!
Where are those statistics???
Thanks, Michael. That'll certainly pump up the ad impressions today. Maybe a link to a flat earth site can be next?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
There was no "Ordinance" involved. The two ships (there were two explosions) were carrying Ammonium Nitrate fertilizer.
Although it is true that Ammonium Nitrate + Fuel Oil was used for the Oaklahoma City bombing, Ammonium Nitrate is not military ordinance.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Ammonium Nitrate was Texas City, not port Chicago.
Test your net with Netalyzr
While I think you are right -- there would've been radiation in this case, there are a lot of references that do everything but directly state (from the individuals involved, directly -- people like Ted Taylor) that the US developed the ability back in the mid 60's to build low and medium yield nuclear fission devices that produced virtually no radiation and no fallout (using materials around the core to absorb the emitted neutrons, and using a very small amount of fissionable material, so the fuel is fully spent, and none is blown out by the shockwave).
Now, it seems unlikely that that would happen in this case, but if they were (from things I've inferred) to have stored large amounts of coal or something around too large of an amount of processed uranium, and it *accidently* went supercritical and produced a low yield explosion, you could potentially get very little emitted radiaion.
Don't forget, early on in the development of nuclear capabilities, the stuff that had been learned in New Mexico wasn't properly communicated to facilities in other places. Its been well documented that communication problems between those who were researching the physics involved and those building the hardware for processing it (ie, at Oak Ridge) almost led to very bad design decisions that could've resulted in accidental "events".
I find it highly unlikely anyone at this stage in development would advocate blowing anything up so near a major, and very important city.
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How else can you explain the fact that Strom Thurmond is not dead? Its the symbiotic alien organism keeping him alive.
From the look of him, they need to run him through the sarcophagus again. The damn host is falling apart!
C4 is about 1.4 times more powerful than TNT, but more importantly its got substantially more intial "kick" than TNT... and its that kick that causes the damage in explosive ordinance.
My point is that you don't even need 1000 B29's since weapons have been using much more advanced chemical explosives since well before WWII. Google couldn't find any good references for differences in power between a particular class of conventional explosive and the more commonly used "kilo/mega"ton ratings used in nuclear devices... although I'm sure a little more looking would've turned something up.
"Please show some evidence"
Here! Can you see it? Well, that's because it's invisible.
Anybody remember the explosion that happened in Las Vegas in 1988? It was a couple megaton blast produced by conventional explosives...well solid rocket fuel anyway. It is recorded as one of the largest explosions of all time.
As for his reply:
If, guy, you were so familiar with modern grammar usage, why did you comment? You were the one who started the "pedantry" thread; you can't just stand back and act the victim now. Some guy made a spelling error, you discredited him because of that (i.e. you didn't "read for content rather than details and distractions"). Obviously it was an important enough detail to you that you felt the need to point it out. You, as well, made an error in your writing, and you fell back on some lame excuse for why it's ok for you to do it, but not him.I quite got the meaning of your (initial) post. The spelling error (made by the author of the Webpage) was only one small point of the whole post; there were others. What got me going was the fact that you couldn't accept your mistake, but rather you fell back on lame excuses (as i said above). I rarely point out spelling/grammar mistakes in posts, but when doing so is an integral part, for any reason, i make damned sure that i didn't misspell anything in my post. If i want to sound condescending, i should do a good job of it.
Anyway, the point is that you do, indeed, fall into the jurisdiction of the "people in glass houses..." thing. Next time you attempt to discredit/ridicule/condescend upon a person, please make sure that either a.) you don't do something along the same lines as your "target", and/or b.) you admit your mistake, if you do make one. Otherwise, expect a thread of flames like this and the above posts.
Offering a difference of opinion isnt moronic. Trying to counter a difference of opinion is. You are hereby labeled a moron for trying so desperately to read that you have been labeled one. (Aren't I nice?)
/IS/ one of the stupidest things a human is capable of doing!" and then put it into something better.
As for it being a book, I'm sorry but I was under the impression that digital information coming through my computer screen was not the same as it being printed.
'cause it's NOT.
All that labor going towards formatting something for media it isnt going to be displayed on is worthless, okay? It's nice and all that he spent so long trying to make it workable as a book, but then he decided to distribute it in Non-book form. "Oh no! If I convert these newspaper quotes to plain text for viewing on a scrolling sign, all the collums will be lost!"
So your point about him having spent so long laying out their media in a certain format, and then being too idiotic or lazy or whateverthefuck to just give the fuck up and realize that people reading this online arent going to see this as being a book, well, you get the drift?
And it's not a troll post, it's just blatantly off-topic while giving an honest opinion not to offend people but to cause those who are thinking of using PDF on the web to go "Oh, gee, that
I probably had more.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Yes - the footage i saw of the shockwave travelling through the ground looked unnervingly similar to an underground nuclear test.
However, my main source for this is Copenhagen, an excellent play by Michael Frayn. I get the impression his research was thorough and honest, so I believe that Germany or its allies didn't have a suitable device to test at Port Chicago. YMMV, natch.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Well, thanks for taking the time to explain yourself at length, and sign your name to it.
Yes, I made a mistake, I thought I conceded that. Too subtle. Yes, the Manhatten Project guy made a mistake, which I commented on in a throwaway joking line in a comment that went on to talk about the stuff I really thought interesting. Someone else mentioned the spelling error several posts earlier. As you perceive, I really wanted to talk about explosive yield, but it took several posts before interesting comments on that emerged; so I wish I'd left the first line out.
Reread my note. Of course I was saying typos in a post aren't very important. They're not, and I wasn't commenting on a post in the first place, but someone's splash page for a serious, official website.
This discussion really got going because I played along with the critics, and they didn't get it, even when I stuck in one of those smileys. I don't feel like a victim, I feel bad for getting a bunch of people stirred up over something I don't even care about. I can also be as stubborn as anyone.
While some of them admittedly do contain good content, many of them appear to contain showy philosophy, pedantry, or accounts of his many, many, many, many fields of expertise.
FWIW, I don't make stuff up, and do have an unusual resume -- only three manys, though. Thanks for the partial compliment, and I'll try not to be showy or pedantic -- or chatty. Peace?
This is not a troll. The validity of these statements, however, is in question, but would not surprise me if true. History, like all reality, is always interpreted. At least this is one more major conspiracy theory.
The attack upon Pearl Harbor, which triggered the United States to enter World War II, was quite possibly provocated by the United States. The Unites States knew that an attacking force was headed towards Pearl Harbor and let them attack. It is likely that this was done in order to enrage American citizens and encourage American Involvement in World War II.
The United States government at the time allowed many military and non military citizens to be killed, willingly.
In 1940, Arthur McCollum of the Office of Naval Intelligence submitted a memo to Navy Captains Walter Anderson and Dudley Knox which detailed an 8 step plan to provoke Japan into attacking the United States.
President Roosevelt, over the course of 1941, implemented all 8 of the recommendations contained in the McCollum memo.
Following the eighth provocation, Japan attacked. The public was told that it was a complete surprise, an "intelligence failure", and America entered World War II.
The McCollum Memo, authored 1940, was not publicly released until 1994, 54 years later.
Washington D.C. intelligence apparently knew of the impending attack long before, but did not inform Hawaii local intelligence. They even moved most valuable military assets away from Pearl Harbor before the attack and left old ships there to take the damage.
References;
The McCollum Memo: The Smoking Gun of Pearl Harbor
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/McCollu
Pearl Harbor, Internment, and Hiroshima: Historical Lessons
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Civil_
Documentary, Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor The Government Knew!
http://www.indybay.org/news/2002/09/144578
The McCollum Memo
http://salc.wsu.edu/fair_s02/fs7/(pearl%20h
Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/deta
Pass me the teriyaki sauce. Crow just isn't tasty without that teriyaki sauce, mmm-mmm! :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The lightest portable identified in the Brookings survey and your link was the "Davy Crockett" (51 lbs.). It does seem they had a nuke for every occasion. Perhaps there is an undisclosed weapon even more portable.
I wanted to say that the idea of nuclear interceptors for ABM was long dead, but it's not at all true. In April 2002 the WP published this op-ed re the Pentagon's Defense Science Board studying the option. Congress overrode the Pentagon in October and forbade research into the topic. I read somewhere that the Board intends to complete its study nonetheless.
EMP and danger to U.S. satellites are mentioned as hazards, aside from political fallout. So I guess despite misgivings the nuclear interceptor concept is still live, at least in the minds of some planners.
Dane County Airport (MSN) still has the concrete shelters that once housed pairs of F-106's -- they were supposed to greet Russian bombers over Canada with a nuclear-tipped Genie rocket. Northbrook, Illinois was home to the nuclear-armed Nike Hercules. When the National Guard toted nukes -- oooh, that was a scary thought. I don't think those nukes were that small either -- I believe they were in the 10 kiloton range.
Very well, suh, peace it is. Sorry for the cheap shot. :p
They're devestating weapons, to be sure, but they do not vaporize whole cities in a single blow.
Yep, although with MIRV's and ICBM's they do have pushbutton convenience and 30-minute delivery with no risk to anyone on the delivery end. At our peak in the 60's the U.S. owned 30,000+ warheads -- and never used even one after the first two. No one did. That's the really remarkable statistic to me. On the other hand, how much tonnage of boring bombs did the U.S. drop on Vietnam and surroundings? Several times all of WWII?
The Russians did test a 50-megaton device nicknamed "Tsar Bomba" that was prototyped to yield as much as 100+ megatons. That thing could be characterized as a city-killer. It looks like around 1960 both superpowers began to retire the big H-bombs in favor of smaller, lighter, more precise weapon in the 50-100 kiloton range. The Tsar Bomba weighed about 30 tons.
Re Japan, according to some reports what really demoralized the leaders was that the bomb would make unnecessary an Allied invasion of the island, which was hoped to produce a confrontation bloody enough to spur a negotiated peace with Japan retaining some of its conquests. The Allies did assume an invasion was necessary with conventional bombing, and apparantly were assumed it might be necessary even with nuclear bombing. Debate about all this will continue for years, but has recently become more interesting with the declassification of U.S. WWII intelligence documents, esp. decrypted MAGIC/ULTRA Japanese communications. Fascinating stuff.
I don't buy Vogel's theory that such a thing could have been intentional. But it's hard to ignore the optical scans of reports of nuclear tests referring to them as a "mushroom to 18,000 feet in typical Port Chicago fashion". Or the fact that the same guy (USN Capt William Parsons) who wrote the initial report on the effects of Port Chicago's blast was a year later aboard the Enola Gay as the Manhattan Project scientist on the crew that attacked Hiroshima. The Napa Sentinel found that the ship's destination was Tinian, which was where the atomic attacks did actually originate a year later. And the atomic bombs were shipped through the rebuilt Port Chicago.
So what about the radiation? Well, it immediately struck me in the talk with my friend that we in the Bay Area "always thought the massively high cancer rates in Contra Costa County were due to the oil refineries." Since they have that problem there, once again I see logic pointing at checking it further, not dismissing it.
There seems to be disagreement over the presence of radiation at the scene of the explosion, since no one knew to watch for it. And the site remains under military control today. But this whole thing can be tested one way or the other by checking for elevated background radiation levels in the uninhabited areas of the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta to the northeast of the Concord Naval Weapons Center (formerly known as Port Chicago) which would have been downwind of the explosion in 1944 and where the fallout would have settled.
(In that part of California in July, overnight winds are always inland from San Francisco Bay into the Central Valley. And online info indicates that night in 1944 winds were out of the WSW as would be expected.)