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Atomic Veterans Speak Out
GoneGaryT writes "Last night I stumbled across the site for Atomic Veterans, the guys in the forces who were present at the Pacific atmospheric nuclear tests and those who 'cleaned-up' Eniwetok 20 years later. There are scores of testimonies, many from men who have a range of cancers or who have since died from them. The absolute and callous disregard for their health and safety at the time is shocking; I suppose the same kind of thing happened to British, French, Russian and Chinese troops in similar circumstances. The Chernobyl pages discussed here a few months ago were eerie; this site is simply heartbreaking. On the one hand, I hate the idea of this site being Slashdotted, on the other hand, people, you've just got to read some of these testimonies. What happened back then is no joke and I'm not sure if we have half the fallout story even now. For the continental US, see this compilation."
I hate to put information about a topic so serious into the half-credible bin, but what sense are we supposed to make out of black and white map that doesn't have any sort of key? I can't tell if the white or the black is what indicates an area was affected... I think it's the white but I'm just guessing.
Communication helps sometimes.
the usa atomic program back then saved the world millions of lives.
and prevented millions more from living in dictatorial tyranny.
the bomb ended ww2 and was a great blessing.
Yes, and the other real shame is the obsession that certain groups have with the effects of radiation. One of the main reasons why the USA has not progressed to using nuclear for bulk power is the overzealous regulations by the government, passed by under-educated representatives who's ears are turned by hyper-sensitive environmentalists.
Let's just give the people behind atomic bombs a little bit of credit for what they've done for world history...
The use of the weapon was the knockout blow that ended the first World War. There's know way of telling how many lives were saved as a result of the war ending then compared to going on for however longer it would have went without it.
The fact that both the US and the USSR had nuclear weapons during the cold war scared both sides into being unable to use them. Mutually Assured Destruction was a valid theory because USSR fell not by military attack but simple political failure.
In fact, the biggest threat the USA faces today is not from any organized state but from stateless terrorists who would love to get ahold of nuclear weapons, but don't have a government worth of resources to develop what history has proven is quite a hard thing to come accross and control.
having a site devoted to mirroring sites featured by slashdot would be a great idea (at least, if you linked to them instead of to the original site).
Why isn't this done? Copyright concerns? Disorganisation? Procrastination? Or...?
One of the creepiest sections is where chinese troops put gas masks on their horses and charge the mushroom cloud with AK47s blazing. Freaky. It laos has people in lawn chairs watching explosions, and people in trenchs watching explosions, and explosions sinking an entire abandoned Navy and all kinds of crap.
The other cool thing about the movie is this: it's narrated by Captain Kirk himself.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
You Can't Hug Your Children With Nuclear Arms! No, but seriously, those guys got hosed :(
...has a couple of photos of the first British H-bomb test on Christmas Island in his album. He was in one of the observation planes which recorded the test. Luckily, it appears that he was sufficiently far enough away not to be affected by radiation or fallout -- he is 86, and still going strong.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Just like the Germans that bombed Pearl Harbor.
For those who are interested in what the natives went through as well as the navy guys, check out Radio Bikini. There's some good clips of the blasts, too.
ground zero
man, on the map showing the range of the nuclear testing aftermath, southern nevada and utah were almost totally covered. i wonder if those clouds could have carried over any kind of effects to this day...
but remember that oppenheimer, feynman, fermi, slotin, serber, a few dozen others and both pilots of the enola gay died of cancer. Some decades after, some days.
You mean, like, he came back in time and jumped from the fictional star trek universe into our universe and is now trying to build a career in hollywood?
My grandfather's ship was nuked. Yup. What happened was they were going to test out the weapon, so they gave the crew a brand new ship, and their old ship, along with others, were docked in a bay and nuked. Then the crew, including my grandfather, swept the radioactive dust off the deck and went back to work. He was fine, but there was a very high cancer rate amoung veterans. He never got cancer in all his life. Also, regarding the spread of radioactive dust in the US, because of this, most people do have harmless accumulations of radioactive isotopes in there bodies.
My Grandpa saw some test bombings. He was a really cool guy and I wish I got to know him better. He died of cancer when I was really little. I remember my father telling me what was happening and me not completely understanding whats going on. I never got to really know him and the rest of my grandparents I have left aren't worth knowing. :(
You'd think that would discourage the use of depleted uranium in modern warfare.
But you'd be wrong.
America fights dirty.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
See today's BBC article Still no fix on nuclear waste.
That's just Britain. It's a lot more alarming in many other places in Europe and Asia.
This site has a relatively limited number of stories, and the people who posted them are a self-selected group. People who got cancer are more likely to post.
Of course, any group of people of a size as large as the group who could be considered an "atomic veterans", and of the same sort of age demographic, would have a reasonable number of people who had cancer.
What would be interesting is a study where individuals were selected randomly from all "atomic veterans", and then a statistical analysis of these, compared to a general group from the population with the same age demographics.
There is a biological expectation that being an "atomic veteran" would increase your risk of cancer, but looking at this site does not provide much evidence for that point due to the lack of statistical validity.
X-Has-Sig: yes
Troy, NY has recieved a lot of radioactive fallout.
3 /c lassnotes/classnotes2.html
A quick googling returned this site:
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/NewsComm/Magazine/fall0
I know there are others to back this story, but if you take a map and look at how far away Troy, NY is from Las Vegas, NV, it might frighten you a little.
As a resident of beautiful scenic Troy, NY, I can proudly say that this fallout has never had an effect on my life, I really like those extra fingers....
in the South Pacific during the nuclear tests. I have no proof it was related, but I do know he had cancer that basically basically crippled him, and one leg was amputated first below the knee, then at the knee, then at the hip. He was confined to a wheelchair for the last decade of his life before it eventually killed him.
If we expect soldiers to risk their lives in service to this country, they have every right to expect their lives won't be thrown away for nothing. It shows a lack of respect to endanger them, then ignore them when they need our help.
From a reminiscence on the linked site: We were required to lie face down, with an arm over our eyes untill [sic] ten seconds after the blast. I recall being able to see through my arm, like looking at an x-ray!
The guy talks about the amazing fauna he saw while scuba diving between atomic tests, and the requisite topless natives, and concludes that he wouldn't have missed for anything!
I suspect others may not share that opinion, of course, and I doubt I would.
Good find, GoneGaryT, and good work approving it, Michael.
Slashdot is improved by articles like this.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Until recently we have not had a thourough understanding of the effects of radiation on the human body and other organisms. To this day there are very few effective treatments for radiation exposure. Most people still aren't aware that the most destructive carcinogen, (the object that causes the most cancers in the USA) is our good old friend the sun. During the tests of the atomic weapons the effects, and the amount of radiation released was unknown. So despite the terrible effects of these weapons had, not only on the people we used them on, but on the people we tested them around, it was not intentional that our soldiers were exposed. *Interesting side note: During WW I women were hired to paint the controlls on the inside of fighter planes. The paint was composed of radium, so that pilots could see the controlls in the dark. The women would like their brushes between painting jobs to keep the tip fine enough for the small writing. When the women died, they had to be buried in lead lined coffins. *
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
The public fears the word "nuclear" as a little child fears the word "boogie man." How a microwave was ever sold is beyond me...
I can recall cases that involved British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers. Last year, there was a documentary about the nuclear test happened in Australia. While Australia herself is nuclear weapon free, it was being used as a testing ground for the British test program... Some veterans were exposed to high radiation doses because of wind shift, miscalculated yield and reasons like that. In theory, the commanders could just place the film badges and dosimeters. But, the military planner at that time really wanted to stretch that a bit further. From memory, PLA did the same thing after the first Chinese atomic test in 1964. Some troops were ordered to drive/ march across the ground zero after some precalculated "safety hours"....
The Cold War was a crazy time in human history Well, we might be committing something equally ridiculous right now without realising that... I am quite sure the situation is the same in France and USSR. Any example?
remember that oppenheimer, feynman, fermi, slotin, serber, a few dozen others and both pilots of the enola gay died of cancer or radioation poisoning. Some decades after, some days.
Yeah, war's a bitch. And everyone is a hypocrite. You just happen to be on the side that happened to win. You can be damn sure that if the allies had lost, there'd be plenty of American (and allied) war criminals to prosecute. How is nuking a civilian city not a war crime? It's not if you win the war, that's how. My point is, every human being to ever walk this earth is a hypocrite.
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In some pictures, near the actual explosion, there are rows of criss-crossing smoke trails. What causes that?
P.S. This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.
Now I have -more- reason to leave... *shudder*
--RIAmAses! Let my MP3ople go!
Ok, but is there really a point to this story? I mean really. It's pretty common knowledge that corners were cut to get nuclear programs fielded in time and it's pretty well known that those involved didn't always come out unscathed. This isn't exactly news here. It hasn't been for a long time. Is there really anything beyond the "Ode to the victims of nuclear power" moral lesson I should be getting here, cuz I just ain't feeling it. If this stuff were still happening today I may give an extra shit or two, but the days of ignorance and nessecity are far, far behind us when it comes to the blind employment of nuclear testing and such.
Now why do I doubt that you'll never see a story posted here taking the opposite position-- The benefits of nuclear power and how it was instrumental in stopping Stalin, a real, hardcore mass murderer in check.
Corners were cut. People died due to ignorance. It's sad, but it's not news. In fact, it's been covered and documented in every possible way. But hey, what's a little more rehash between friends, right?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The DOE has some great photos of the various test shots available, at very low cost.
--jc
And I thought I have a nice green glow after surviving chernobyl....
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
I would be much more concerned over advanced bio weapons instead of nukes. Bio weapons are a lot easier to use, just bring an infected person into a large city and you can kill a lot more than a nuke.
Most of the problems happened because experts were generally naive about radiation back then. They even once used X-rays to treat acne. It worked for a while, but the patients kept getting cancer years down the road.
:-)
I wonder if newer technologies such as quantum computing don't have similar issues. Suppose quantum computing messes up the "probability matrix" of the universe somehow. Maybe the side effects happen in ways we are not used to looking for. Not likely, but nobody knows for 100% sure since we still do not understand the quantum world fully, just like we didn't understand the downsides of radiation back then. Maybe quantum computers running on earth kill millions of cats on the planet Shroedina
Table-ized A.I.
I've heard Japan was going to surrender before we dropped the bomb, but we didn't know due to a translation error. They responded to us "We don't have a decision yet" in regards to the end of the war. Our interpreters translated it to, "We decide no."
There's an old phrase for this kind of thing: Pioneers get the arrows. It's the cost of being a pioneer.
Today, we are playing with technology that we have no experience in. For instance, nanotubes. What are the long-term effects of nanotube exposure? No one can possibly know for sure.
I had an opportunity to ask one of the grad students at the University of Washington Physics Department about nanotubes. See, he was working with nanotubes. He told me that nanotubes are probably damaging, but the body probably has defenses against it just like it has defenses against very small pieces of dust. He said that it was a privilege to be able to work on such technology, and even if it meant losing ten or twenty years of his life, it would be worth it still.
I am sure that the early pioneers in teh nuclear and radioactive substance fields felt the same way. Marie Curie would probably do it all over again even if she knew the consequences. I think these people would probably do the same.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
If I recall correctly, the Russians would march troops right over the blast area to see what kinds of effects the radiation would have on men. I don't know if they were Russian troops or prisoners, but either way.
Of course, it could have been the Chinese, or maybe just my rightist history teacher's bias against the Communists.
Help a college student
In ANY OTHER industrialized western democracy, EVERY citizen of that country has his/her medical needs taken care of for either a FRACTION of what we charge here, or for free. THat is because their healthcare systems are funded by taxes, and mainly by income taxes on wealthy investors, upper income earners (doctors, etc), and corporations.
If any of these vets were to live in Canada legally, all they have to do is walk into any hospital, and they would be taken care of.
But the USA has a healthcare system rigged to hold the American citizen hostage to investor interests. It is rigged to make the average American citizen hostage to employment. It is rigged to increase desperation in the workers. It is rigged to increase dependence of the employee to the employer. It is rigged to make people afraid to lose their job, and therefore more malleable and more productive. It is rigged to make Americans scramble and hustle so they and their kids will not die due to lack of healthcare.
Our healthcare system is a CRIME and our top politicians, past and present, should be indicted, tried, convicted, and severely punished by rule of law for their criminal malfeasance in this travesty that is American healthcare.
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
The theory goes something like this:
Cancer occurs as a consequence of genetic damage that hits certain critical genes within in a cell, usually those that control cell growth/death. Many genes control cell growth... if one of these genes gets overexpressed, or a suppressor gene or modulator region for one of the aforementioned genes gets damaged or otherwise turned off, you can get cancer... but not always.
If your own body's immune system recognizes the cancer cell as abnormal and kills it, you dodge the bullet. There's absolutely no way to quantify how often it happens, but it's probably more often than we know.
Ionizing radiation affects DNA by damaging it. However, your body can often use the matching DNA strand from the other side of the double-helix to repair the damaged region... you have enzymes in your cell nuclei that are specifically for this. You should thank your lucky stars for those enzymes too... there are a few syndromes where those enzymes are deficient or dysfunctional: those poor patients grow cancers like it's their job.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
unfortunately we (I mean the government) treat these men and women like real versions of Grandpa Simpson... It truely is sad...
flinging poop since 1969
A "dirty bomb" just isn't that effective. It will render some area more or less unusable for a long period of time (ie, nobody will want to live or work in that region even when the radiative material has been removed). But atomic weapons have spewed huge amounts of radiation into the upper atmosphere. I just can't see a dirty bomb dispersing radiation so effectively. In my humble opinion, a dirty bomb would be less effective than a large mass of plastic explosive and easier to trace.
It is actually one of the political hot buttons in the state of Utah. There is a whole group of people who complain about all kinds of problems due to the affects of the Nevada test site. One of the Utah Senators (don't remember which one) campaigned a little on the fact that he had relatives affected.
Basically he was told to point the camera at the test site and close his eyes for the flash.
What was done at these testings we now know to be attrocious. Planes were flying through nuclear clouds and after landing were scrubbed clean by soldiers wearing shorts and boots only. (The test were performed in desert like areas.) Hundreds of officers were ordered to stand there and watch the nuclear blasts. Nuclear clouds floated over and settled on the nearby major city (Adelaide pop of 800,000 or so at the time.).
Civilians were held on an oval 40 kilometers from the test site.
"When they went off there would be this almighty flash which could blind you and it was like a hot towel was being put on the back of your neck.
"After that we were actually told it was all right to turn around to look at them. The last one was hotter than the other two, that's how close we were."
Soon after the explosions, the Maralinga Village was hit by strong wind gusts which coated buildings and equipment with contaminated radioactive dust.
Soldiers toured the local test sites within hours of testing.
Unfortunately at the time very little was known about the dangers. Hence why they were testing. even after almost 50 years the sites have been through a complete cleanup (in the last 10 years) but are still radioactive.
Residents would picnic and visit the areas to watch the nuclear testing.
My friend's grandfather died of cancer. So did many who were at the testing with him. They were exposed to nuclear blasts with out any protections. The worst part is that both the British and Austrlian Governments refuse to have any inquiries into what our Nuclear Veterans suffered, nor will they offer any compensation those those or their families who suffered directly from Nuclear Testing.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
The server doesn't seem to be having problems, so it'll probably be okay. But I've mirrored the content anyways: http://stuff.gotroot.ca/mirrors/www.aracnet.com/%2 57Epdxavets/
I seem to recall reading that one of the reasons used for acquiring the F-111 was to have something to drop nukes on Indonesia and other neighbouring countries in the event of Communism spreading into our immediate region.
I was born in Las Vegas as a result of the 1950's atomic tests. My father was stationed there as a GI in the 50's and moved back as a civilian in 1962.
/. story. One of them even died days after reuniting with some of his long-lost buddies.
My father participated in about 40 above-ground nuclear test while he was in the Army from 1956-58. Initially trained as a smoke generator - "I tipped up a 55-gallon drum of diesel fuel whenever they called for smoke" he was later trained as a radiological monitor with the 1st Radiological Safety Support Unit - they liked to joke that RSSU was "USSR" spelled backwards. Some of the guys in his unit are quoted on the site mentioned in the
I take great pride in helping my father to arrange a Vegas reunion of the 1st RSSU a few years ago. They weren't your average GI's - most had degrees when they entered the service. To hear them tell stories about getting blown backwards by an H-bomb in the Pacific ("They told us that it'd be bigger than usual") is breathtaking. These guys saw some amazing shit. My father tells about flying with an ignorant chopper pilot who flew them into the edge of the drifting mushroom cloud as they measured radiation levels!
I should write a book about this stuff. Actually, I should get my father to commit his memories to tape/film. He's living back in Vegas and I wish the gov't regulations didn't forbid me to tape his stories while taking the monthly free tour of the Nevada Test Site. He has a fantastic collection of photos, slides and anecdotes that should be preserved.
My father holds no grudge against the government as far as the testing goes. As he says, everyone was learning as they went along. "I'm just glad that I was one of the guys lucky enough to have a lead-lined set of fatigues," he says.
Lets nuke Iraq. That will show them we're serious and also put their car-bombs to shame.
Turn the desert to GLASS I say!!
well... that sounds a little unlikely that they were that exposed to radiation from radium that they were buried in lead containment.
why take an interesting story and lie to make it more exciting?
anyway... for a long time, you could buy alarm clocks with radium dials for your nightstand. They were painted by cheap labor in countries where they just don't enforce safety laws.
I call BS.
I saw the bill my insurance company paid for my hospital stay $37,000 + for 5 days. That didn't include the surgery or doctors. You will die of the cancer I had sucessfully removed before you get your operation if the government is involved.
I have friends in Canada. They tell me 18 months is the wait for a common hip replacement. In the US if you are on Medicare you'll get it the same day you broke your hip.
I have a friend in the UK who has been waiting 3 years for an operation as her health continues to fail. She will die because of government health care.
Goverment rationing of health care sucks. The last thing we need is some government accountant deciding if we are going to live or die based on some table and formula. By the way all these Vets are entitled to free government health care through the VA. Guess what they aint getting it like they were promised. Governmet mandated health care provided by the government will never work in the US because the government will screw us just like they are screwing these Vets.
The movie is worth watching. See John Wayne try to play the part of a Mongol Chieftain. Listen to some of the worst dialogue ever to grace the screen.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Who has won the most wars to preserve the American way of life? Who singlehandedly won the West? Who, above all others represents the American ideals that we hold dearest to our hearts?
Ronald Reagan? Close. No, it was that unassuming gentleman of cinema called John Wayne. He was the quintessential American hero.
How ironic is it that our government killed him with nuculer (if that's what our elected officials call it, then it must be right) fallout? In fact most everyone who worked on those movie sets in our revered West died unusual deaths related to the atomic testing grounds nearby.
Whether or not you actually worshipped the man, you might have some sympathy for those who, in the persuit of a decent livelihood, succumbed to the treachery of our scientists and politicians who let them make movies in those dangerous areas.
A moment of silence please.
...omphaloskepsis often...
not much else to say.
The absolute and callous disregard for their health and safety at the time is shocking Yes, how shocking. Especially seeing as how no one knew the full extent of the damaging effects caused by the radiation that was being emitted. It's so easy to criticize in hindsight.
is that the creation of the first fision bomb was probably the greatest scientific achievment in human history. The neutron was only discovered in 1930, fission in 1939. From there the first reactor only went on line in December 1942 and the first fission bomb, Trinity was tested less than three years later. In the interviening time some very smart men had to discover isotope separation (extreemly hard as Uranium 235 and 238 are chemically identical), and figure out how to make large remote controlled factories to produce a new element, Plutonium which durring the designing only existed in microgram quantities. Also let's not forget the problems of explosive lenses, and just dealing with a newly discovered mettle which burns violently in air.
Also for all you out there willing to blame the atomic bombing of Japan on America's megalomania don't forget that this was a joint venture between England, Canada and America. The fact that the bombs were made here was only by virtue of the fact that we were the only country with the economy to do it. Also the whole thing was only possible thanks to some very smart Europeans, notably two Hungarians (Leó Szilárd and John von Neumann) a Dane (Neils Bohr) and an Italian (Enrico Fermi).
It really is a very sad irony that the most explosive growth in the theory and aplication of physics should happen for the aim of killing large numbers of people. However before anyone starts damning anyone though, remember what they were trying to do: stop the most destructive war in human history.
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org
if your web server is reduced to nothing but molten slag? ;-)
Thats what freaks me out the most. War is war and there will always be men and women who will put the good of their country and kin above their own lives. I would probably die for mine (assuming they equipped the Canadian military with something more deadly than plastic forks
Are the lives of your soldiers and the costs of equipping them so valuable that you would rather wipe a city (or two) of civilians off the planet, than expend your military resources?
The scary thing is that so many people will answer yes.
"I am become death, shatterer of worlds."
-R. J. Oppenheimer.
Aren't we all.
What a sad way to justify the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
I fail to understand why people keep going on and on about whether the atomic bomb should or shouldn't have been dropped on Japan 59 years ago. It was dropped; that's a historical fact (except possibly in the realm of fiction), and arguing whether it should or shouldn't have been done or trying to assign blame won't change that fact. The argument that should be taking place is whether and under what circumstances we should use the atomic bomb again in the future, with the actual use in WWII as a historical adjunct, nothing more.
I haven't read the links yet, but I just have to point out that the U.S. government has a long history, particularly in the mid 20th century, of using humans as guinea pigs. In particular, see the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, which took place between 1932 and 1972, and which basically allowed about 40 black men to die of syphilis so that doctors could study the effects of the disease, even after effective cures for it were known.
The US government was looking for Mengele until at least his death in 1979, but continued the aforementioned experiment on a group that it considered racially inferior until 1972. Amazing.
* mild mannered physics grad student by day *
* daring code hacker by night *
http://www.silent-tristero.com
...to ascribe ailments that are routinely associated with aging to nuclear tests from AT LEAST 47 years ago with personnel who must be AT LEAST 64 (a 17 year old who caught the end of the Castle tests), is a little bit "I hate the government."
While I have no doubt that these men/women/animals suffered some unexpected exposure damage surely sufficient enough to cause terminal problems, it doesn't seem so heartbreaking when the letters are a few years old and sound like regular older persons' problems.
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As noted by others, there are other exposures that have done equal or more damage. My dad died from asbestos exposure during WWII ( mesothelioma cancer). He was a MMM3rd and worked in the engine room. A lotta guys worked around asbestos and have since died. In a way, similar story to radiation exposure. No one knew the risks. So, people worked and played around this stuff for years. I grew up in Los ALamos, NM and remember playing in a few creek beds that had wierd smells and dark, greyish slim on the rocks. Life is nothing but dealing with and accepting a certain level of risk. This story is just another sad tale of life on this planet.
It is ok to flog this horse one more time. I have been reading about it for 30 years.
But there have been new atomic veterans and civilians for the last twenty years due to the usage of military stream (contaminanted with Americium, Technicium, Neptunium and various isotopes of Plutonium) depleted Uranium (238) anti-tank ordinance. Tonnes and tonnes onto western states. Vieques Island and parts of Okinawa severely contaminated with Ur238 that has a half life of 4 plus billion years.
Yes, veterans, like the 15 homeless Korean war vets I lived with for 3 1/2 years and the two to five mentally ill Vietnam war vets I also lived with during that time.
The chemists always chuckled at the physcicists at Los Alamos whenever they stuck a metal shovel into uranium. An intense fire starts. When depleted Uranium ordinance strikes metal, it ignites so hot that 90+% can oxidize to one micron particles. These exhibit brownian motion - they do a devils dance in the atmosphere for years, decades in arid environments, and can return as aerosol with a whisper of the wind.
One micron particles of DU 238 ingested give off alpha. That size is almost tailor made for efficacy. This resulted in a spike of specific leukemias and kidney cancers in Basra (Southern Iraq) from 1996 on. I have 6 (5 us and one Mennonite Canadian) friends who saw that cancer ward from 1996 to 2002, and two in June 2003. All came back changed from viewing that pediatric oncology ward.
Of course, contrary to Pentagon statements in the early 1990's, military instead of commercial Ur238 was used. Plutonium and Neptunium are almost as toxic as botulism toxin. The tie ins between the chemical toxicities and the radioactive mutagenic activity probably has some very strong synergistic effects. Unknown however, it hasn't been studied much.
It hasn't been studied much in veterans is the case again. There were some mass spec studies done in Canada and Italy on the first Gulf war veterans. That is how the military waste stream was identified, they were not only pissing DU, but also transuranics two years after leaving the theatre.
For Vietnam war vets - Agent orange and all dibenzofuranes and their ilk have an affinity for DNA (especially after hitting the cytochrome P-450 enzyme chain - arene oxides) and are transmitted via sperm into the next generation. If these new vets are pissing DU it is also going into their sperm.
No, DU is not the entire answer to Gulf War syndrome. Adrenaline and stress, the touch of nerve gases that went up from bombed chemical arsenals, the anthrax vaccine, some of the insects that bit soldiers and the parasite they vector, etc., etc., all played a factor in Gulf War Syndrome. But DU explains many many symptoms that in retrospect were not exhibited by say, non atomic WWII vets.
Birth defects and still borns are way way up in all people exposed to DU, including males vets.
Just as Agent Orange was dismissed for years, and not studied in the US (and the de facto isolation of the nmost promising studies by the isolation of Vietnam) until the later 1990's - depleted Uranium is not being studied seriously here.
No one else is using DU yet, just the US and UK (and Israel), and now it is probably being added to the new bunker buster bombs (five letters from the Senate Finance chair to me state that the Pentagon hasn't gotten back to him yet whether DU is in the bunker buster bombs). Russia is all set to start bringing on line DU antitank ordinance for sale to any and all however, not quite yet - give them six months to start competing with Alliant Technology.
No, we have a new generation of atomic vets starting up. How many more?
You google it, Nukewatch is a good place to start.
Shalom,
Mark
My grandfather always proudly spoke of watching the nuclear tests. He got colon cancer, and died a couple years ago.
How can such a inaccurate piece of tripe be so overrated?
It's a troll not insightful.
I don't bloody mod things I know nothing about.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Clearly the servicemen got the short end of the stick. Not nearly so bad as the civilians downwind of Hanford and Oakridge. Green Run was a deliberate release of extremely large amounts of radioactive materal, mostly iodine-131 to study how well the plume could be tracked
In a three-year period covered by the report, the Hanford iodine-131 emissions totaled 450,000 curies of which 340,000 were released in 1945. The panel had not yet examined releases after 1947 n including the December 1949 "Green Run", a deliberate experiment which released thousands of curies of radioactive iodine and other fission products.
340,000 curies. Let's put that in perspective. How much radioiodine was released during the Three Mile Island incident? I'll tell you. 15 curies. The Green Run story is ready for prime time
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Its supposed to be "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" but I was too lazy to write it out (that and I can never rember how to spell "Oppenheimer") so I copied and pasted from the first google quote I got. Then I hit submit and went "Oh shit, thats not right."
Damn you internet! Damn you for feeding me lies! *Shakes fist angrilly*
You... stupid thing. Useless tool. You... dumb...
I mean...
Aw crap, I never could stay mad at the net for long. Its so cute and innocent!
*Surfs away to Wikipedia*
Thanks, Doc.
Does W personally give you a BJ every morning to come out and say that for him? Precise? ha. right. They've accidentally hit so many civilians and non-military buildings it's not even funny.
for list of all nuclear explosions in history 1945-1998:
/
....
http://www.okgeosurvey1.gov/level2/nuk e.cat.index. html
put THAT in your database and smoke it
for photography of effects on children and newborns in Iraq from
depleted uranium from first Gulf War and updates:
http://www.savewarchildren.org/
http:// www.savewarchildren.org/exhibitPictures.htm l
Japanese photograher Takashi Morizumi::1
http://www.chimerafilms.co.uk/childre n6.html
"American troops guarding the Ministry of Oil
Received:16:23JST, 21/06/03
"Looters ransacked most of the government buildings after the war, but
this building was always under the U.S. protection. I burst out laughing
when I saw the American soldiers on guard here. Isn't it a little
too obious? This scene sympolises one of the objectives of the war."
"Gulf War Syndrome"-- often claimed to be from DU, then
usually denied by the US. Will there more US veteran
cases from the lastest? Still a mystery...
RADIATION EXPOSURE COMPENSATION Program
http://www.angelfire.com/tx/atomicveteran
Atomic Veterans Radiation News
http://www.tpromo.com/usvi/atomic/
http://www.vethealth.cio.med.va.gov/atomicvets.h tm "Approximately
195,000 U. S. service members have been identified as participants in the
post-World War II occupation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan following
the atomic bombing of Japan. In addition, approximately 210,000 mostly
military members are confirmed as participants in U.S. atmospheric
nuclear weapons tests between 1945 and 1962 in the United States and the
Pacific and Atlantic oceans prior to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.
Largely as a result of epidemiological studies of Japanese atomi..."
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/
Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with
Atomic Radiation. 1982 Wasserman and Soloman
http://archives.cjr.org/year/94/2/radiation.asp
Columbia Journalism Review
March/April 1994 THE RADIATION STORY NO ONE WOULD TOUCH
by Geoffrey Sea
" In California, Dorothy Legarreta, who had worked on the Manhattan
Project as a laboratory technician, organizes the National Association
of Radiation Survivors (NARS) and starts to write a book about human
experimentation. In 1982, while examining the papers of Joseph Hamilton
-- the scientist in charge of radiation experiments at the University of
California -- at the library of the University of California at Berkeley,
she comes across a 1950 memo written to Shields Warren, then director
of the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of biology and medicine. The
memo advised that large primates -- chimpanzees, for example -- be
substituted for humans in the planned studies on radiation's cognitive
effects (the very same program of experimentation that Dr. Saenger was
to execute). The use of humans, Hamilton wrote, might leave the AEC
open "to considerable criticism," since the experiments as proposed had
"a little of the Buchenwald touch."
"After Legarreta finds the so-called Buchenwald memo, Hamilton's
papers are removed from public access by University of California
administrators. Soon after this, Legarreta files a Freedom of Information
Act request with the Department of Energy, asking for all documents
concerning experiments in which humans were intentionally exposed to
radioactive materials through injection or ingestion. Later that year,
NARS receives a two-foot-high carton of documents in response -- documents
that, for the first time, expose the widespread human experimentation
program of the U.S. government.
"1988: Dorothy Legarreta is killed in a mysterious car crash,
reminiscent of the death of Karen Silkwood. Legarreta's briefcase --
listed on the accident report as being found -- is missing. The tow-truc
You confuse scientific achivement and governmental decision. Why were the atomic bombs dropped onto Japan, not on Germany? You know the answer - curiosity of arrogant scientists and racism against the Japanese.
I'm still amazed that they designed and built these weapons with little more than slide rules and primitive computers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I hereby award you the Golden Slash and Dot for being the first reader to not only fail to read the article, but failing to read the post you are responding to!! Three cheers for our hero, scout of deeper depths of silliness than we have ever delved before!
And your grammar is atrocious. "A totally ignorant and bastardized of the use"?
What if we stop the hand-wringing. What if we stop the crying. What if we take a moment to consider that people have been killed and maimed throughout history while engineering the worlds most grand inventions. How many lives were forever lost on the Hoover dam? The great wall of China? These people deserve our admiration for their sacrifice.
However, the purpose behind this article seems to distort this and bring us into an emotional state of irrationality. AKA propaganda. Do they mention the countless lives saved by the deterrent factor of that arsenal which was developed? Nothing at all other than America is somehow responsible for these men suffering.
I'm not a fucking troll!! The men involved said it themselves! Take note of the last paragraph!!!
When asked about his role in the Tokyo firebombing, he remarked: "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side.
I believe all you've done is prove that you are a hypocrite. Sorry I had to bash America. Obviously you're not open to an intellectual debate.
They should get a mention, especially as three-quarters of them were civilians.
"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction." - Harry Truman, August 9, 1945 (three days after Hiroshima, just after Nagasaki)
Interesting that the Pres would lie like that, eh?
then those Al Qaeda members will yell to you "It's Necessary Evil to whack your arrogant ass in 9/11"...
My Grandfather was in the Tuskeegy (spelling?) experiements when he was in the navy. They had them all on boats in a circle and had no idea what they were there for. The government set off an atomic bomb under the water. He said it was like nothen he ever seen before. He lived to be 65 and the only kind of cancer he ever got was skin cancer. I guess he just got lucky. The people that had to be or went on deck died almost instantaniously. No mutations in the family yet BTW :P
I haven't yet read the article (I will in a day or so, when things reach some level of normalcy there, and I stand a better chance of seeing it), but I have a comment for the poster.
When atomic testing was being done, the people involved really had no idea what they were getting into. They didn't really know that the fallout would have the effect it did, for as long as it did. It was mostly guesswork, since nobody had split the atom before all this, and they were (mostly) trying to figure out the limits. Sure, they knew what they WANTED to see, but there were still reservations as to the extent that things would happen.
I'm not going to get into an argument on who knew what and when; I think that history has already played that deck of cards.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
I remember sitting on deck with my head in my arms at blast time. I was able to see the bones in my arms.
Holy shit. I says it all.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In my humble opinion, a dirty bomb would be less effective than a large mass of plastic explosive and easier to trace.
In a MILITARY campaign that would be entirely true, but if you're a terrorist, who has no illusions about being able to acutally kill all his adversaries, a "dirty bomb" would be much more effective.
The goal is to create terror, afterall, and nothing creates terror within my parent's generation like the word "nuclear". (I consider this to be the reason we have so few nuclear power plants despite the actual facts involved showing how much "safer" they are compared to a typical coal power plant.)
It's all about fear.
Life is too short to proofread.
The Japs wanted to surrender, but they wanted to keep their Emperor. They would have allowed US troops to occupy their islands, and would have paid reparations, and would have been in no position to continue the war, but that wasn't enough for the US.
Truman dropped the bomb on a civilian target which had been intentionally left alone during conventional bombing (so refugees from other cities were living there), so that the Japanese spirit would be entirely shattered.
It wasn't about saving millions of lives, it was about total victory in the public eye. It was about propaganda.
DOE radiation experiments on unsuspecting civilians
Three things about this:
1. If the Clinton administration hadn't opened these records, people would brand anyone who claimed that this stuff actually happened as tinfoil hat wearing paranoids.
2. If the tip of this iceberg was spotted during this administration,all evidence of it would have been "accidentally" destroyed like all records of the Bush family's skeletons - from the grandfathers registered foreign agent status for the German banker, the fact that the Bush brothers were all close with Hinckley when they lived in Lobbock. Why did the Hinckley family offer up their blacksheep for the Bushes to be able to take early control of the White House (which Bush, Sr. had wanted since he had Kennedy killed for fucking him on the Bay of Pigs)? Because the DOE was going to fine the Hinckley's oil company for illegal profit taking during 1973-1981, and for fear of the ensuing cans of worms that would be exposed as those dominos fell. I wonder if they ever were fined? - I would assume yes since Hinckley failed to do the job. All the way up to the idiot son's national Guard service record details, so that they could not be used against him in the election.
3. John Titor was correct, he said the civil war would start on "a day everyone would remember", my guess is that now that the Bush/Cheney regime realize that they are going to lose, they will say that there is going to be an attack on election day and delay the election, that will become (in hindsight) the day that catalyzed the civil war.
Col. (now Brig. Gen, retd.) Paul Tibbets is still alive. He's doing fine; he was flying until at least 1998. He has a web site., from which you can order a detailed model of the Hiroshima bomb personally signed by Gen Tibbets.
At the begining when the French did the atomic test into the atmosphere, they were doing it in the desert in Algeria (then a colonie).
s /d ecember/27/newsid_2985000/2985200.stm
Officials were safely protected in bunker many mile away from the impact of hte bomb and they sent troop to do militar manoeuvre even at ground zero.
Almost nobody talks about it. It's tabou.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/storie
I could not find online testimonies, they are probably almost all dead by now.
A page that shows how many nuclear tests where undertaken by many nations:
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/487/4839.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Maralinga Experiments
Bizarrely or thankfully, Australia has no nukes (officially) but the Pommies do. I guess that's offsite storage at its best.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
And don't forget that the potential health hazards were unknown.
In fact, it's through the atmospheric tests and the effects those had on people and animals (plus plants) in the area that the effects first became recognised.
When that happened people were no longer let into the area without heavy protective equipment and until the dust had settled (literally).
It also led to the treaty banning atmospheric testing.
The people on the site quoted are for the most part proud of their part in history, they understand that the effects of radiation were not (well) understood at the time.
The only case of a country deliberately exposing large numbers of people to harsh radiation was the cleanup of the Chernobyl accident (which was itself caused by blatant disregard for safety procedures when reactor crew shut down the safety mechanisms to see what would happen if the reactor overheated, they found out...) when thousands of military personel were dispatched to the area to help fight the fires without any protective clothing or equipment at all.
The people sending them knew they'd get lethal exposure in minutes and told them to stay inside the direct area over the reactor for no more than 5 minutes but didn't tell them why.
Most died in under a week, many within a day. They were mostly burried in the direct area, their remains too heavily irradiated to allow them to be brought home to their families who were told some made up story of what happened to their loved ones.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If a nuke the size of the world war II atomics(weighing 10,000 lbs) existed in World war I, you could have delivered it via Zeppelin. Of course the Zeppelin probably would not have survived the blast unless the zeppelin crew could get their craft to at least 3 or 4 miles up(not impossible but very difficult).
In fact in late 1917, a zeppelin crew had escaped fighters by doing their entire mission above 20,000 feet.
Wether the dropping of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hirsohima was right is open to discussion. What I found wrong is the total lack of care for the people involved in the testing. Also quite disturbing: I heard that in a museum (was it Los Alamos?) you could buy silver jewelry in the shape of the first and second atomic bomb. Now that is tasteless, I guess the next phase is Zyklon B jewelry.
My father and all his brothers except for the youngest joined the service at about the same time in the early 50's. They all developed various illness (in my father's case, heart problems and lupus) but the youngest brother never had any major problems and their parents lived until their 90's (my dad died in his 50's) To this day I wonder if they were exposed to something that caused their problems.
Aren't we looking at the sacrifices of an entire nation, especially those closest to the radioactivity? Not to mention the Pacific Islanders, the Japanese, then the Russians, probably the Chinese, Pakistanis and Indians, inevitably the Iranians and eveyone else racing into the Club. Those farthest from the danger continued to make the decisions, kept the Cold War arms race rolling. Fault the Russians for going for it, the Americans for milking it, but let's admit that the people are cannon fodder on a global scale. And nothing has changed.
--
make install -not war
This is very interesting
plutonium and neptunium are _not_ chemically toxic in any way. in biological systems they are chemically inert as no cells are capable of processing it, and it cannot substitute for any element used in biological systems (unlike radium, which can substitute for calcium).
they are however _radiologically_ toxic.
as for the "toxic as botulism toxin", i call bullshit again. eat 1 mg of plutonium and 1 mg of botulism toxin and see who dies first.
but don't just take my word for it. try here.
Well, twenty years later, he developed a type of cancer that 90% of the time occurs in people over the age of 70. The doctor tried to tell us it was because of his diet and the fact that he used to smoke. Seems to make sense... except he was in his mid forties. There have been maybe a dozen people his age in the US who have developed the cancer.
We contacted the Veterans Administration and they found in his medical records, a series of dosages of radiation throughout his military career. They said his death was service related and they would pay us money as long as we didn't sue them. My mom took their offer.
I don't recall anything in history about von Neumann having anything to do with the A-bomb. I'm pretty sure he designed computers and was not Hungarian (von Neumann sounds German).
Edward Teller, OTOH, is Hungarian, and convinced Einstein (with Szilard) to sign the letter to FDR saying that it was imperative to develop the bomb. Likewise, it was his testimony to Congress that got them to go ahead with the H-bomb project.
aQazaQa
While I don't agree with you, I will defend you as not being a troll.
I lived in Japan for many years, speak the language well, and a couple of my best friends are Japanese. I've taken beautiful photos of the A-Bomb Dome in rare snowfall at dusk. In grade school, I had a close friend whose mother was a little girl in Hiroshima on the day the bomb was dropped (forunately, she was not near the hypocenter, and is still alive and healthy today). I agree with you that tactics such as the firebombing of all the major Japanese cities other than Kyoto (which was spared all bombing, by order), and the use of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would certainly have been prosecuted as ar crimes if Japan had won the war.
In a slight aside, no one (not even in Japan) seems to talk so much about the firebombing campaign as they do about Hiroshima and Nagasaki,even though the firebombing killed more people and destroyed more cities than the A-bombs did. Substantial parts of Tokyo didn't look all that different from Hiroshima, in 1945.
John Dower has an excellent book, "War without Mercy." I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the topic of the great cruelty with which both Japan and the United States prosecuted the war.
A few years before reading it, I visited Hiroshima for the first time, and while going through the A-Bomb Museum at the peace park, it struck me that the only reason this museum wasn't in Honolulu or San Francisco or San Diego was that we developed the bomb first. Only there would have been no museum. If Japan had won and annexed Hawaii and/or the US west coast as the terms of peace, no museum would have ever been permitted.
There is no doubt that they would have done it to us, and they did have a nuclear program for that very purpose, although it wasn't far enough along to give any hope.
Is that a good reason? Not terribly so. In August of 1945, Japan had no significant air power remaining, and nearly every ship in the Japanese navy was either sunk or out of commission. Any ship that left its port would never return. Any ship that stayed there would likely be sunk anyway. The army was still forceful and would have resisted for quite a while before surrendering, if we had invaded the main islands, but would have been defeated.
Would the general civilian populace really have fought with bamboo spears and such? I doubt it. A few maybe, but not most. Even if they had, that wasn't much of a threat. Spears don't do very well against a rifle company with M-1s and BARs, and in that war, people with spears would most certainly have been shot by people with rifles.
So, while the facts are that the bombings did end the war sooner and did save American lives, I'm not persuaded by the numbers commonly cited, and those who say it prevented the invasion of Kyushu were nuts if they were even thinking of it.
Kyushu is very mountainous, and fighting across it would have been tough going. In contrast, the land north of Tokyo is a flat plain. If I were commanding an invasion, I would have put Marine and Army divisions ashore on the excellent beaches north of the Boso Peninsula of Chiba prefecture, and swept inland through what is now Narita airport and down into Tokyo. There are a few rivers to cross in between, but with the air support that would have been available and with PT boats operating in the rivers (they are wide and deep; a destroyer escort might even be able to navigate them) that wouldn't have been hard. That area is paddy land, so an invasion would have been best done in the late fall or winter of 1945 - 1946, when the paddies are empty and dry. Tanks and trucks could move across them with ease, and a massive invasion force would have been in Tokyo in a few weeks.
I'm not persuaded that the bombings were justified, but I am fairly persuaded that they were unavoidable given the brutality and merciless character of the Pacific War, and the political realities Truman would have faced if he hadn't authorized them. Of the two
One thing is sure with nuclear weapons : Like with guns, they have killed more innocent and civil human lifes in manipulations and negligenges than against foreign enemies ...
Source :
http://www.campusprogram.com/reference/en/wikipedi a/l/li/list_of_nuclear_accidents.html
We've to tell our governments to ban nuclear power plants and weapons and to restrict the number of guns to civilians.
------ Mathieu Demers Technicien en informatique http://www.mathieudemers.com/ http://demers.mine.nu/
What I find appalling is the lack of information on what happened to people who live/lived in areas of the Pacific where nuclear testing was conducted.
m l
The biggest problems have been from Bikini Atoll, but there's also been a lot of cancer, birth defects etc round Mururoa Atoll (French testing) - which also gets next to no publicity.
Actually, I should start with what I know, for people who have no idea what I'm talking about -
when the bombs were dropped on Bikini Atoll, no one evacuated a nearby atoll despite knowing the windpatterns would drop fallout (there was alot of ignorance about the effects though) nuclear 'snow' or fallout covered the island, in fact, locals, not knowing what it was, went out to 'play' in it. Not to mention, the original inhabitants of Bikini Atoll were relocated *back* to the atoll, where they remained for several years - unknown to them, part of a study on the effects of radiation.
Other than really high rates of cancer etc (among the whole region - 'strange' & deformed fish are found very far from the testing sites after tests), one of the most well known effects has been the so called "Jellyfish babies".
I'm sure you can guess by the name that the effects are quite horrific.
It basically covers a range of deformities, but generally refers to the birth of well, I hesitate to use the word 'children' - with missing limbs and/or heads, often with weird skin colourings (I mean discolourations, but apparently they can be surreally vivid).
Often they're born dead, sometimes they'll survive for a few minutes or hours. Midwives know not to let the mother see them.
As far as I know, there very little official records being kept, and very little investigation.
Oh, great - and now I find a link!
This echo's a lot of what I've heard, with some more detail:
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/374-5/3678.ht
---- I've fallen, and I can't get up.
name one government that is not corrupt so we can move there?
Can't comment on that, but you're the nimrod who picked your username.
That said, you are an embarrassment to your country. I'm going to take that google.ca link to mean that you are Canadian). I seriously doubt that you are sorry you had to bash America. Your tone is aggressive and confrontational, and yet you have the gall to claim that your opponent is the one who isn't open to intellectual debate. Hint: the f-word rarely adds to your intellectual credibility. It's also interesting the note that your "evidence" of the man incriminating himself is from Dissident Voice, a highly biased source to say the least which does not footnote the quote from the gentleman in question. There's plenty of quality evidence to support the assertion that allied actions in Japan were immoral, but you certainly aren't adding to the quality of the discussion. I don't know if you're a troll, but I'm pretty sure you are a fool.
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
Substances don't have to be "processed biologically" or "substitute for any element" in order to be toxic or dangerous. Even something like microscopic gold particles or noble gasses can be toxic.
but don't just take my word for it. try here.
Yes, and that web site states "Extremely small particles of plutonium on the order of micrograms can cause lung cancer if inhaled into the lungs." Whether that makes Plutonium more toxic than botulism toxin or not is a matter of semantics. I suspect a microgram of botulism toxin won't kill you no matter how you are exposed to it.
And the same web site states: "The chemical and radiological toxicity of plutonium should be distinguished from the danger of plutonium." So, contrary to your ramblings, the very web site you point to attributes both chemical and radioactive toxicity to Plutonium.
I don't know the actual danger from ingesting, inhaling, or otherwise coming in contact with Plutonium. But neither do you, nor anybody else. What I do know is that ignorant fools like you are responsible for exposing people to risks that people never agreed to being exposed to willingly. You seem think that just because you are unimaginative and stupid enough to figure out how something could be dangerous, it's OK to dump the stuff on the world. That kind of hubris is why so many people distrust science and scientists so much.
The conservative and prudent thing to do is that, when we have a choice, and we do when it comes to weapons, energy, and products, we don't risk exposing people to substances unless those substances have been proven safe beyond a reasonable doubt.
actually, if you eat them both, you'll probably die, but there won't be any way to tell which one killed you....
...in the scheme of things, not much different than the Tuskegee Experiment, and lots of other reported and unreported human studies.
The next shoe to drop will be a website devoted to people who lived in the Tri-Cities, WA in the 50's, where the AEC (now DOE) purposely released radioactive iodine into the atmosphere from Hanford, to see how it spread in the civilian population, half-lifes, and probably low-key short-term epidemiology studies w/o telling anyone what had happened.
Again, this stuff is kind of old news.
While physically damaging, find a Bataan Death March survivor and see if he'll talk about it. Or, heck, any combat survivor, for that matter.
Everyone knows that a truly "intellectual" debate will never take place here on slashdot. My usage of the F-word was necessary because I'm frustrated with the bias attitude on slashdot. The mods' stiffling of my very valid argument is extremely frustrating. And as for my nick... well, lets just say I like to take the controversial side (especially against the /. consensus).
I appologize for the non-credible source I quoted. I didn't have time to do my proper "research". I'll be sure to properly footnote my slashdot comments in the future.
Secret tests conducted there in violation of environmental laws continue to be sequestered by Presidential order.
** That said, you are an embarrassment to your country. I'm going to take that google.ca link to mean that you are Canadian). I seriously doubt that you are sorry you had to bash America. **
On a different note, enlisted Canadian servicemen were horrifically mistreated by the Japanese while being held as prisoners of war. They were slowly being starved to death and overworked, and were due to be executed if it looked possible that their allies might liberate them. This order was overturned as a direct result of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Americans, and it was the Americans who initially looked after these mistreated men when the Japanese surrendered.
I recommend Thief Of Time by Terry Pratchett if you want to see an example how fiddling with the smallest units of the universe can mess up ;-)
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
But how does this bash microsloth or worship apple?
Sincerely,
Confused slashbot.
No way! To the contrary!
I have talked to Josef Rotblat (who was among the advocates to get the Manhattan Project started), and he said that the reason why he thought it would be critical to start was that he realized how easy it was going to be. Surely, he said, anybody could do it, and seeing what Hitler had been capable of doing, it was critical that he didn't get it first. Later, he said, he understood how wrong he had been: You can't deter a madman (the argument is of course much longer and deeper than that, but that's the one-liner).
Also, in late 1941, (Bohr came on board much later IIRC), the other scientist you mention felt they had most of the stuff ready. They were allready certain how the bomb was going to be built. The rest was mere engineering to them. Sustained and controlled fission was a much more interesting problem, which they pretty much devoted all their attention to at that point, the question is if they really needed to do that to build a bomb....? Fermi was bored out of his mind by simply working on the bomb... I believe the reason why the got sustained fission is not because it was necessary for building the bomb, but because it was a much more interesting problem.
The bomb was no scientific achievement, it was a simple application of some trivial theory from contemporary science.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
that radiation causes cancer... but then we turn around and use radiation to cure it. hmmmm....
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
I wonder if they have any superpowers?
It's probably one of the least known of the existing nuclear arsenal, but it's also the cleanest, most efficient and deadliest. It destroys human flesh with neutron and gamma radiation while leaving cities and their power grids fully intact. And its radiation can penetrate armored structures and go deep into the ground. As far as I know, it's never been used or tested (on anyone). But unlike it's nuclear siblings, it's radiation decays quickly and doesn't cause a nuclear winter.
We destroyed 2 cities with nukes. We destroyed 4 cities by firebombing; in total about equalling the number of casualties.
Even if we had not used nukes, there's no reason to suspect we couldn't have accomplished the same task with further firebombing.
paintball
Was that we needed to use atomic weapons at all.
Although it would take more flights, we could have killed just as many civilians by continuing our campaign of firebombing.
paintball
Just got a bit struck by this quote, "Chernobyl pages discussed here a few months ago were eerie; this site is simply heartbreaking".
Even though the page's story wasn't true about someone actually motorbiking in the area it is not less heartbreaking in any way.
"The use of the weapon was the knockout blow that ended the first World War."
First, and most obvious, the atomic bomb was developed between 1941 and 1945, which most people regard as being the second world war, not the first, which was 1914-18. Second, Germany had already surrendered to conventional forces and Japan's forces were largely defeated by the time the bomb was deployed, so the atomic bomb was really the icing, not the cake.
"There's know way of telling how many lives were saved as a result of the war ending then compared to going on for however longer it would have went without it."
The US was already bombing Tokyo and other major cities with conventional weapons (which is why Okinawa was strategically important; it provided a base of operations for long range bombers). In all probability (and according to the estimates of military planners), the war would have lasted perhaps another year at most, and cost around 150,000 lives. Just google for "japan invasion casualty estimate" for more info.
"The fact that both the US and the USSR had nuclear weapons during the cold war scared both sides into being unable to use them."
I have to point out that the main reason the USSR aquired nuclear weapons was because they were afraid of the US using them (this was rightly pointed out by Enrico Fermi, one of the people who pushed for the development of the hydrogen bomb). You also forget the number of times that US presidents had to be convinced by aides NOT to use them (Vietnam springs to mind, and Ronald Regan's famous on-air gaffe), not to mention the occasions where false alarms brought the world within minutes of obliteration (like the discovery of "moon-bounce" of RADAR signals). Frankly, that is the kind of "security" I could do without.
"Mutually Assured Destruction was a valid theory because USSR fell not by military attack but simple political failure."
No, the Soviet Union collapse was more because of economic failings, not political (and if you think the situation was that simple, then you fail to understand it), and would probably still exist if it had been managed better; "all care, no responsibility" is not a viable method of governance (Americans, take note of your own government's behaviour). Besides, those of us who were actually alive during the cold war will remember that MAD existed to maintain a stalemate and prevent one side finding a strategic advantage, not to see who would go broke first (this is part of the Regan myth, that he somehow "forced" the USSR to go bankrupt. This simply isn't true: the USSR had been an economic corpse for some time. Regan just happened to be in office when the USSR finally admitted it's dire straits, a move taking a lot of courage on Gorbachev's part since it involved destroying his own power base).
"In fact, the biggest threat the USA faces today is...[snip]...from stateless terrorists who would love to get ahold of nuclear weapons, but don't have a government worth of resources to develop what history has proven is quite a hard thing to come accross and control."
While historically there has been tight security around nuclear weapons, the same cannot be said today. Considering that large parts of the former Eastern Bloc are still struggling economically, with governments subject to large scale corruption and infiltration by organized crime, it is entirely possible that terrorist groups could aquire nuclear weapons (in small quantities, admittedly, but any nuclear wapon sold has a use-by date. Think about that: you don't spend millions of dollars on a weapon that will eventually become useless, unless you intend to use it while you can). That being said, nuclear wapons are notoriously hard to transport through regular shipping channels, so it is highly unlikely any terrorist organization will use any kind of nuclear device (clean or dirty) on US soil unless it can obtain the materials in the US. Of course, the anthrax in letters sent after 9/11 was a strain traced to US wapons labs, so I wouldn't be too complacent about weapons security anywhere in the world, if I were you.
I always remember a talk I heard at a ham radio club. The speaker was talking about his experience with the British tests on Christmas Island.
I don't recall exactly what his job was but for one test he was one of the closest people to the blast. He was with a team of people in the back of a truck with lots of electronic equipment. The truck was sealed up so as to be as light tight as possible. Despite the brilliant sun outside, to the people's eyes, it was absolutely black inside.
When the bomb went off, the inside of the truck lit up as brightly as the sun outside.
...our DNA is equipped with raid-1 capabilities ?
Maybe it requires some added Reed-Solomon codes, everyone knows raid-1 doesn't protect against data-corruption...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I know many people think that most Native Americans were murdered (many were) but it's worth pointing out that disease was the biggest killer of the indigenous population.
My father was in the Navy in the 1950s, and experienced a nuclear test. Livestock were placed on landing craft relatively near the explosion site, and his boat was one at the periphery. According to his account, the blast caused a wave that nearly capsized the destroyer he was on, and the landing craft and livestock were never found.
I've asked him about follow-ups. He has been to the VA hospital for checkups SPECIFICALLY because of these tests, and no ill effects were found. The important detail for me, though, was that the Veteran's Administration was looking into the cases, and looking for medical problems related to the tests. At 70 years old, my father is one of the healthiest people I know, and can bench-press almost twice what I can (though I'm getting stronger).
Visit Lockjaw's Lair. He won't bite.
here (left-bottom).
Sure, smoking is much more dangerous than a 15 megaton nuke...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
The question to me on this issue seems not to be whether fewer deaths would have resulted from an invasion of Japan than the use of the atomic bomb, but rather whether or not an invasion of Japan, without the bomb, would have been necessary to end the war.
Even if we disregard the possibility that Japan was already ready to surrender, I still find it difficult to justify an invasion of mainland Japan. By this time, Japanese power was effectively crushed, and without access to the material resources it had obtained in its conquests, Japan could not have posed a serious further threat to the region if proper measures were taken to secure from Japan the means to pose further threat, for example by the creation of military bases in the region, strengthening other states in the region, etc. Ultimately it should not matter if a nation formally surrenders or not. Japan had already lost the war.
Logic, macros, and more
Am I the only one who's going to call bullshit on this little bit of hilarity?
Even for those ignorant enough to fall for "U238 dangerous radioactivity" hoax (and it is a hoax), what half-functioning brain could actually think that a toxin could be "transmitted via sperm into the next generation"!? Have fun explaining the mechanism for that one. I dare you to try. Do it in the name of pseudoscience! And remember, the burden of proof is on the person making extraordinary claims, not the one debunking them.
(Really -- tell your tall tales to your little sister, not to me.)
As for the rest about DU -- I will personally volunteer to have a 1kg block of DU placed underneath my bed for the next ten years, as long as it is wrapped in aluminum foil. (The latter just because I'm paranoid; what else is aluminum foil used for? ;-) And, oh yeah, as long as I won't be inhaling or ingesting any particles of uranium or its oxides -- not because of radioactivity, but because it is a heavy metal with chemical effects similar to (and not substantively worse than) lead poisoning. (I'm not afraid of lead, either; I just don't want to eat it.)
Yeah. Like Saddam's regime would never have grouped together childhood cancer cases and attributed them to U.S. munitions for the propaganda effect. No, that could never happen.
Really, your post gave me my laugh of the day. Pure anti-nuclear FUD, though very Politically Correct. Only on /. could it have been modded up to +4, "Informative".
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
were all people that didn't know what was coming.
Invading soldiers at least know what they're dealing with, one would hope.
They started the war...
They visited atrocieisa on Nanking (which they still deny)...
I feel if it saved 1 american life, the bombing was justified. Sorry, I just do. If Japan didn't want to be destroyed utterly, they should not have attacked us.
Its all well and good to be peaceful after you've had the crap kicked out of you, but maybe they should have reflected better on December 6th. By the 7th, it was too late to talk of peace until we had destroyed them utterly.
It had to be that way. Even the Japanese agree.
With my reading threshhold, I didn't see the anonymous coward you were replying to, but I thought I'd comment.
I really don't understand the "we went to war for oil" charge. It doesn't make economic sense. First of all, the war and subsequent reconstruction cost much more than all the oil Iraq will generate for many years. Second, it would have been much easier for the evil Republicans/neo-cons/(oil companies) to just make oil money from the already corrupt Oil for Food program run by the UN.
A google news search for "oil food corruption UN" will let you choose the sources you find most credible, but I'm pretty sure they all say roughly the same things.
That said, though I supported and still support the war, I know there is plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree about whether the US should have invaded Iraq. Much of the original intelligence leading to war was flawed; we expected to find stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and we haven't so far. This is disturbing both in the magnitude of our intelligence failures and the possibility that parts of these stockpiles were transferred to Syria or Iran. However, the information Saddam had regarding how to make WMDs was nearly as dangerous as the WMDs themselves, and Putin claims to have given Bush intelligence prior to the war that Saddam intended to commit terrorist attacks against the US. Of course, when "intelligence" is really just rumors it is easy for this sort of conversation to devolve into cherry-picking of sympathetic news reports, so I'll give my reasons for supporting the war.
1) The best prewar intelligence we had indicated that Iraq was a threat. Also, Saddam never cooperated with the inspections that were the condition for the cessation of hostilities in the Gulf War.
2) Saddam's regime was bad enough that whatever we leave in its place has a very good chance of at least being better.
3) The sanctions weren't sustainable because of the harm done to the Iraqi people, but sanctions couldn't be lifted until inspections were allowed.
4) By the time we knew for certain Saddam was again a threat, it would be too late to avoid major consequences.
There are some good arguments the other way, too:
1) Containment/sanctions were working. As far as WMD production goes, it looks like that's right.
2) The suffering of the Iraqi people under Saddam is not the US's problem. We aren't invading Zimbabwe to oust Mugabe, why Iraq?
3) The confidence level of the prewar intelligence was overstated, and Congress and the people of the US should have been given a clearer picture of how certain we were about needing to go to war. Again, the intelligence failures are very disturbing. I think the intelligence was oversold, but it was genuinely believed credible by the Bush administration.
There are plenty of good arguments against the war. Unless you have evidence to the contraty, the "Bush invaded Iraq for oil" is just character assassination.
Also, they don't tell you about all the false alerts. The only reason we're still here is because the system requires human intervention and we have alert alert level system, as in "That can't be a real war message. We're not on war alert. Call HQ to confirm." That has happened more than once. Wait until we get automated.
Then there's tactical nuclear warefare where you realize what they aren't telling you is that if you do what they tell you to do in case of a tactical nuclear strick, you won't actually survive. But you will live (painfully) for about a week. Since your side needs about a week to get replacement troops in, surviving for that long will make the enemy fail in their objective of neutralizing your forces with a nuclear weapon. So do your part, troop, and try to not spit up too much blood and die too quickly.
And, finally nuclar waste, from these atomics programs, is a way of saying hello to your great**6 grandchildren (if there are any).
Plutonium is a heavy metal and - even ignoring the radiological effects - settles into the body the same way lead and other heavy metals do.
That's what makes it so lethal as a radiological substance. It gets accumulated by the body where it can cause on-going damage instead just passing through.
Clear, Dark Skies
I have great sympathy for any cancer patient. However, they are not magically experts on what caused their cancer, as much as they strive to understand, and perhaps blame somebody
What would be useful is statistically significant comparisons to similar populations.
Even then, the episodes are so few that there could be clustering issues. Picture an auditorium full of people who each flip one coin. Write the result on a seating chart. Armed with the data, you can come up with lots of interesting, but ultimately meaningless things ("sitting within 20 ft of a support pillar makes you four times as likely to flip heads!").
You'll be surprised to learn that the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki *was* the prototype. IIRC, the entire US aresenal of nuclear weapons was 2 uranium and 1 plutonium. 1 uranium bomb was dropped at Trinity, New Mexico, in the view of the scientists who had created it. (much to their surprise - many felt that they had foolishy dabbled in power that should only have been unleashed by the Almighty - but I digress). Not having any way to test the plutonium bomb, and needing (as you stated) a way to show that the US could keep it coming, and being quite sure that the plutonium bomb would work, they dropped the actual prototype on Nagasaki.
(I might have the two cities reversed - but you get the idea)
...British, French, Russian and Chinese...
But then again it isn't nearly as fun to criticize them.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
There are many veterans from the same era who never went to the gulf who are suffering from GWS like symptoms, but are not considered (by the VA) to have GWS. GWS has been shown to be trasmissable by sexual contact and through extended non-sexual contact, which indicates that it is not likely to be due to a chemical contaminant, but is more likeyly to be a pathogen.
Read up on the pathogen Mycoplasma Fermentans (Incognitus strain) and the associated patent for genetically modifiying that pathogen that was filed by the Army.
It is not the contamination from weapons used, it was in the vaccines given to people who were scheduled to go over seas at that time. Among those personel who's orders were changed to non-gulf service have a very high incedence of GWS syptoms, as do their families and loved ones.
I'm not certain if Saddam had biological weapons, but I ame absolutely sure that Uncle Sam did, and he was testing them on our own servicemen.
(Posting Anonymously in order to avoid further dificulties...)
I deeply respect your compassion and desire for peace.
Unfortunately, human history doesn't make that a likely prospect. WW2 was an 8 year display of barbarity on a massive scale.
Nothing about people has changed in the decades following the Second World War. Only the overwhelming force and omnipresence of the superpowers (just the US today) makes that sort of war impossible.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
There were two plutonium implosion devices and one enriched uranium gun-type device. The Trinity device was a plutonium implosion bomb. Hiroshima was the gun-type Little Boy, Nagasaki was the second plutonium implosion device, called Fat Man. The implosion device was a much more complicated and efficient weapon, but the U.S. had to be sure it would work, hence the test at Trinity.
It's strange that some areas of the map vary in shade precisely across state lines. For instance, look at the Florida panhandle. Could it be that some states have different measurement methods?
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
Hormesis is the name of the effect where, at low enough doses, something will have a beneficial effect.
There are quite a few references on the web, with this one being a decent overview. It also goes into possible mechanisms of action. Another site that discusses "safe doses" of cancer-causing agents has a nice graph on the page that helps explain the concept.
I first learned about it back when I was taking "Radioactive Chemistry." We had to use a literal 10-ft. pole to move the one cobalt-60 source. We bought our uranium from the art department. It turns out that the one black pigment had an incredibly high concentration of depleted uranium that was easy to purify.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
I don't think your optimisim regarding an American invasion of the home islands is justifed. The Americans had just finished with Okinawa, where the cost of capturing that small island was 70,000+ American casulaties (12,000 killed) along with over 100,000 Japaense military dealths and over 100,000 Japanese civilian deaths. Almost the entire Japanese military garrison was killed rather than surrender.
In my opinion (which is shared with the majority of military historians) an American invasion of the home islands and a Russian invasion of Manchuria would have cost far far more casulaties than the nuclear bombings did, not to mention more property destruction. While we will never know for sure, none of the evidence we have supports any kind of quick march on Tokyo that you envision.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
It wasn't "accidental" at all. In fact, it was a calculated effort to test the affects of nuclear weapons on fully equipped soldiers.
Link Here
Australia and Britain intentionally tested nuclear weapons on their own soldiers.
+ nick
To discuss how some vets got the short end of the stick some 50 years ago without a mention of more recent ones is rather bizarre.
Soldiers are still using DU-coated ammunition. We can't think of the past as some unfortunate occurence created by a few corrupt or ignorant individuals- recent history shows that there is a larger problem. This is not just a tragedy: it is an ongoing crime.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Sorta. He had the chance to serve and passed it up.
Sorry for the "revisionist history" lesson, it had to be said.
(If you don't believe in the propaganda Hollywood churns out today, why should you believe anything from its past?)
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
It's amazing how the long post above could get a +5 with only asinine by spewing empty accusations. This is why we have museums and history books, and why you need to use the brain while digesting them.
Take the Pacific war progress, the japanese resistance, the total war theory and a newly discovered weapon with consequences unknown... there's nothing more out of line with the rest of WWII. 'nuff said
"So unmerciful is life, that everything afterwards is too late."
There's a beautiful book out called "100 Suns" (Michael Light) which consists of photographs of various nuclear bomb tests. Some of the photographs are just spectacular, some are mostly weird (a couple of the pictures are taken with a very fast camera very quickly after the detonation). Beautifully printed which gives the photos immediacy and power.
You might be interested to know that one of the late-war invasion plans for Japan involved a landing along the northern coast of Ibaraki and a southern sweep down into Tokyo.
I believe it was proposed as a last resort in the event that the USSR managed to land troops on Honshu, in order to prevent them taking TOkyo themselves.
The scientists involved in development and testing of nuclear weapons in the 1940 - 1958 time period did not know about the long range effects of different types of radiation, they learned as they went. It really was an entirely new field.
One result of the Nevada tests that gets little publicity: A lot of westerns were filmed in that area in the 50's and 90% of the actors have had or died of, various cancers. I can only name one for sure but he's the biggest of them all: John Wayne.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I'd be interested to find out the number cancer cases that were reported in the US prior to nuclear testing (the 5 years before). And compare them to the number reported after testing (the 5 years after). I think the results would be astounding.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
You'll be hearing similar stories in twenty years about veterans exposed to depleted uranium. I suppose it's easier to look back and be shocked by the ignorance of others than to see our own mistakes as we make them.
so the sites don't get /.ed
Duh, really on the cusp of IT intelligence here...
It's kind of weird seeing this article on /. considering that I just watched "The fog of war" on the weekend. I highly reccommend everyone watch it.
Anyway, the movie is 11 lessons from Robert S. McNamara. He was the secretary of defence for Kennedy, and was there for the cuban missle crisis. He also participated in fire bombing japan during WWII. It's interesting wisdom right from the horse's mouth.
One of the interesting lessons he has is that "There must be proportionality to war". In one night they had killed 100,000 people by firebombing bombing Tokyo. He addmitted that if the U.S. had lost WWII, he would have been charged and convicted of war crimes. Well, they then went on to firbomb 66 other japanese cities. In the end of it, they had killed more japanese civilians then the atomic bombs.
So after watching the movie. I was trying to figure out more depth to this lesson. As you point out they could have saved lives by killing hundreds (millions?) of thousands of people. It could easily be millions, remember 1 attack on Tokyo killed 100,000 people. With 66 more attacks, they could have reached the million people mark. I think his point is that if you're willing to drop a massive bomb and kill a shit load of people, you better be ready to have it done to you. It's the basis of Mutually Assured Destruction. If you kill a shit load of people you actually raise the bar of acceptable behavior in war.
So if it was acceptable to drop the bomb and firebomb japan. Would it have been acceptable to that being done to the U.S.?
-asoap
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
You keep using that word. I don't think you know what it means.
mettle
n : the courage to carry on; "he kept fighting on pure spunk";
"you haven't got the heart for baseball" [syn: heart, nerve,
spunk]
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
The Radiation Reassessed page, a NSF sponsored project, discusses the cancer statistics for Hiroshima survivors. Here's the relevant quote: However, it's worth noting that among about 52,000 survivors who received at least .005 sieverts (0.5 rem) of radiation, 420 excess cancer deaths have been blamed on radiation, while about 7,600 other cancer deaths were due to other causes. That's hardly the kind of cancer epidemic that many people associate with the word "radiation."
Less than 1% died of radiation included cancers. A much larger fraction must be assumed to have suffered from non-fatal cancers or other ill effects. Still, the radiation exposure was far from the dominant health effect in the lives of those people.
The point is that the perception most or all radiation victims suffered health effects is wrong. The primary effects of the atomic bomb were immediate, not lingering.
If suffering among the GI victims is as widespread as stories make it sound, then at least some of it must be attributed to the nocebo effect. [Nocebo is the opposite of placebo effect. If someone tells you that you ought to feel bad, you do feel bad.]
Any invasion of Honshu would have had to pass by Kyushu, subjecting their flanks to attack (by suicide aircraft and boats). There were more than 2000 aircraft held in reserve in Honshu and about 1 million troops as well. As absurd as an invasion of Kyushu might seem to you, it was necessary to prevent more casualties. Hiroshima was the military command center controlling the defence of Kyushu and Shikoku.
Nagasaki perished because Kokura was overcast (Kokura was the primary target, Nagasaki was the secondary). Why Nagasaki? 2 very important reasons: it was a large port that would have been needed for the conventional invasion of Kyushu and it was the place that the special torpedos used in Pearl Harbor were made. Normal torpedos dropped by aircraft plunge to about 20-30 meters after splashing into the water (and would slammed into the bottom of Pearl Harbor if they had been dropped there), the ones made by Mitsubishi in Nagasaki were made to plunge to only 10 meters before leveling off. Never underestimate the power of revenge.
Scientists from Tokyo were in Hiroshima within 12 hours of the bomb dropping, and they knew what sort of weapon it was immediately. Why? They were working on their own. Japan was within 1 year of making their own atomic bombs when the war ended. The facilities used to make the components for theirs were located in Northen Korea.
If you think that the arguments in favor of the use of nuclear weapons were unjustified, you don't understand them, the cultures involved, nor the people involved. I recommend you read the following 2 books by Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and Dark Sun.
It's no wonder, considering that soldiers in WWII and Korea got cigarettes as part of their daily ration.
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
I can't believe all you tin-hats out there still believe that a "nuclear weapon" exists. If humanity ever did detonate a "nuclear weapon" we'd all be dead now. We're not dead, so there aren't any nuclear weapons. You idiots probably believe people have walked on the moon, too. Morons.
http://xkcd.com/386/
There are two points of view regarding the horrific events which occurred (and still may be occurring) during the course of nuclear power development and testing.
The first is; we should have known better, treated people better, realized sooner what the risks and dangers are, and acted quicker to stop the process of poison and contamination to our world and its people.
The second is; we did what we had to do. The birth of nuclear power was during a wartime period, where our enemies literally had plans to subdue the US mainland militarily - if not to completely command and conquer. Later, the Cold War did more to demonstrate the terror present in nuclear weapons than any peace protest. Mutually Assured Destruction is the most terrible consequence the world ever faced - keeping in mind that it takes two to tango. Had the US ceased or limited its nuclear production capability in the 50s and 60s, it is possible (even likely) that one of our Soviet counterparts might have tried to captitilize on the imbalance of power between the two superpower nations.
Regardless of your view on this matter, one does have to admit that EVERYTHING we know about the effects of radiation on human tissue has come from the unfortunate exposure of willing and unwilling participants in nuclear tests (and weapons deployment). Moreover, we know more than the general population realizes about harmful / leathal dose levels, long-term risk factors, and exposure consequences. It comes down to politics, mostly. If you think nuclear energy is bad, then it is bad. If you think it is good, then you appeal to a minority of mostly scientific types. If you vote your conscience, then what the majority thinks will be the accepted norm. That is why there hasn't been a new nuclear power plant commissioned in the US in almost 20 years - and the licensure process begins almost 15 years before that.
Yes, Chernobyl was the proverbial "nail in the coffin" for the US nuclear power industry. But don't rush to take an unbalanced view of history. Nuclear energy is with us forever. We can learn from our mistakes and experiences to make the future better than the past, or we can continue to live in fear and discord - not even trusting our neighbors and friends who might have jobs related to the nuclear industry. Either way, the future is ours to claim.
For those who sacrificed their lives for our current state of knowledge about nuclear power, I say, "rest peacefully, dear friends. Your sacrifice was not in vain." For those who are currently suffering as a result of a nuclear test, accident, or other type of inadvertant or intentional exposure, I say, "your pain matters, and the world should care about your condition and do everything possible to aid you and prevent the same kinds of things from happening to others." But, for those who would desire to capitilize on the real hurts and invent problems and issues that aren't truly real, I say, "may you realize the pain you are continuing to cause, and see that you really aren't helping anything. Selfishness at the expense of others is always wrong."
This sig is a test. If this had been an actual sig, you would be reading something quite a bit wittier than this now.
You have missed the strongest argument against the war
The Security Council of the United Nations has voted against that war!
It seemed clear to the majority of the members of that council, that there are neither WMD nor that there is any connection to Al Quaida.
What an irony, that a nation
Ulysses $ Grant Led the Redmondees to significant victory against Robert E Leenux and his rebel open source confederacy. Despite the loss of several cannon through crashes on the way to the battlefield the redmondees where not at a disadvantage as the rebels had trouble installing there cannonballs into the canons. The day was finally won by some fool accidentally leaving open the rebel Armys root the redmonees where able to press this advantage despite some of the suffering a virus that was going thought the army. Despite this setback Robert E Leenux has vowed to continue the fight and it is surely far from over.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
This is not the type of article I've come to expect from /.! If we continue to fear monger about the horrors of nuclear anything we'll still be using fossil fuels to power everything 100 years from now. Sure people were going to get hurt and will continue to get hurt by radiation as we continue to study and use nuclear energy. If you play with fire you will get burned. Just as there were accidents when people had fires in the their homes for heat and now I have a nice, safe little flame, right in the heart of my furnace in the basement of my home 24 hours a day 365 days a year. The technology has been refined and it's save and extremely useful. The US Navy has been using nuclear power for 50 years with a virtually perfect record of safety. The reactors are so safe and reliable they're sealed and only serviceable in dry dock. Yet they can provide 20 years worth of clean, safe, utterly reliable power to our war ships.
I'm sorry for the men that have paid for our early research with their lives and their health. We owe them our gratitude and respect. Strict rules for safety are certainly needed. I just can't believe the way the American people have allowed the ignorant media and simple fear to cause them to shun a source of energy with such incredible potential. Get over your fear and let the rest of us get on with advancing technology. If you want safety, don't kid yourself. It's an illusion anyway. When we let the idea that "somebody might get hurt" prevent us from exploring and seeking new technologies we're all doomed.
Yes they were, but unfortuantly they were fake;
Smoke rockets were launched just before detonation of the test device. When scientists later watched films of the detonation, they could see how the shock wave propegated through the air by watching the smoke trails.
Don't you ever read other comments from people before you reply? Guess not. This guy mixes rational, reasonable posts to get karma with hilarious trolls like the one you replied to.
The discussion of the use of atomic weapons in Japan can not really ignore the issue of the USSR, its potential entry into the war, and the possibility of part of Japan ending up as a communist dictatorship.
7/17/45 Diary Entry:
"He'll [Stalin and Russia] be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about."
7/18/45 Letter to Bess Truman:
"...I've gotten what I came for - Stalin goes to war [against Japan] August 15 with no strings on it. He wanted a Chinese settlement [in return for entering the Pacific war, China would give Russia some land and other concessions] - and it is practically made - in a better form than I expected. [Chinese Foreign Minister] Soong did better than I asked him. I'll say that we'll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won't be killed! That is the important thing."
7/18/45 Diary Entry:
"P.M. [Prime Minister Winston Churchill] & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan [atomic bomb] (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time."
7/25/45 Diary Entry:
"The weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new [Kyoto or Tokyo]."
7/25/45 Diary Entry:
"He [Stimson] and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement [known as the Potsdam Proclamation] asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful."
7/31/45 Letter to Bess Truman:
"He [Stalin] doesn't know it but I have an ace in the hole and another one showing - so unless he has threes or two pair (and I know he has not) we are sitting all right." [A possible reference to the atomic bomb, possessed at the time by the U.S. but not by Russia.]
Yes open air testing was bad. Its ancient history. Learn the lesson you can never trust government or military and move on. They serve an important purpose but they have a lot of power and they will abuse it unless the people they are supposed to be working for stop them.
If you want to be concerned about something happening today and something you can do something about be very concerned the Bush administration is developing new tactical nukes for use on deep bunkers and caves. If deployed these will drop the bar for use of nuclear weapons. There is great potential the military will use them in future conflicts like Afghanistan and Iraq. Once they start using them , they might start like using then and there is great danger they will continue using them and use them in more and more situations.
If nothing else write your senators and reps and tell them why authorizing these weapons is bad.
@de_machina
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
I've read some of these John Titor messages and the thing that stands out the most that makes me not believe a word of it is that it's the Farmers Vs. The cities, and the war was finally won when the cities were nuked...
The issue here is that cities don't make enough food to last through a 8 year war. It just wouldn't happen. Starvation would kill *everyone* in the city before 8 years.
There was an outstanding Canadian show on the subject - if I could only remember the name.
S ee the 3rd paragraph from the bottom
i ct _war/canada_veterans/clip5#
http://www.valourandhorror.com/HK/HKsyn_2.htm
http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-71-1039-5836/confl
No mention of the execution order, but there is a clip on the page that is interesting.
If I remember right, Valour and the Horror might have been the name of the documentary. I think you'll find the documentary as riveting as I did if you can track it down.
http://www.valourandhorror.com/DB/LINKS/home.htm
has video ordering links.
http://www.galafilm.com/galafilm/e/tv/doc/valour.h tml
is another site
painted radium on the dials of clocks. She's still around but her fingers are badly gnarled with terrible rheumatoid arthritis. We somehow wonder if the radium didn't have something to do with it. We actually have a clock around here somewhere that she painted the hands on. I remember seeing it as a kid in my parent's garage at night.
I was wondering, it seems people who die from radiation do so because their body rejects itself since it's been popped full of tiny holes. Would it be possible to save more people with radiation exposure by pumping them full of anti-rejection drugs or shutting down their immune system somehow?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Is it just me, or is there always a lot of 'well, they did the best thing they could at that time and they've learned their lesson', every single time one of the atrocious war crimes committed by the USA is brought up?
go to the DOE page click on "Search Hrex", get
This site is no longer available due to lack of funding.
PBS did a documantary a couple of years ago called "Race for the Superbomb". It has some neat maps which discuss radiation if someone detonates a bomb near you.
why am I always taken so seriously :)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Although little was known about Unit 731 at the time, (even their human trials unit was the size of Auschwitz-Birkenau) - it was known that Japanese society was heavily militarised and the losses durring any invasion would have been terrible on both sides.
Nukes are bad, but so are CBWs. Experimenting on live subjects the way that was done is unforgiveable. However the US covered the whole thing in return for the 'medical research'.
See my journal, I write things there
there is nothing a nuclear bomb can do, that enough conventional bombs can't do as well. With little fallout.
Joe Sixpacks, defender of the common man.
So what do you propose as an alternative? Blockade? Great, millions starving is SO much better than some cities being bombed.
Diplomatic pressure to surrender? This one is the hardest to really dismiss, as *everybody* wishes it had been possible. But for evidence against it, look what was happening. As of August, the cabinet had still not been able to even articulate their terms, or determine even approximately what to have their few, inept peace feelers communicate. Then, even AFTER the first bomb, the cabinet is still split over surrender. After the SECOND bomb, the cabinet still dithers, is convinced only by the personal intervention of the emperor, and a part of the military then even starts a coup to try to overturn the emperor for THAT!
The Russians invade? Augh, I don't know who would consider this to be a benefit - look at the results in the parts of Manchuria that the Soviets captured in 1945. Something like 20% of the civilian population went "missing". Realistically, would they treat the Japanese any better? Plus now Japan is another Korea, divided and ready for Cold War incidents?
Invasion by US/allies? Oh sure, 100,000 allied casualties on top of hundreds of thousands of Japanese. Again, millions of Japanese starve, since transportation system is wrecked.
So yeah, it was an awful thing, but it seems to have been the least awful of the realistic alternatives.
You?
I.e., you are what you eat (and drink, and breathe,
modulo how you stir it up (or don't) with habits of
activity or inactivity, etc.).
Did they ask you if you are a habitual pesticide
or herbicide squirter in your garden vs pulling
weeds and mashing bugs?
Did they ask you whether you live in the downwind
plume of e.g. defective dry cleaning equipment, or
whether you work with solvents etc?
Did they ask you about your diet and exercise
in any kind of detail? Whether you do a lot of
corn syryp and aspartame? Perfer real steamed
veggies with a little real butter vs
growth-enhanced chicken parts in partially
hydrogenated glop?
Not too likely, right? Unless you have a doctor
who is privately interested in that sort of thing.
Why isn't there a standard questionnaire that
is mandated for anyone who falls seriously ill,
so a solid statistical database can be built?
Is there no money in having toxic insults to
our lives identified and eliminated?
Is there no money in having a healthy populace?
Maybe it will take an offshoot of moveon to do
what needs doing independently and in spite of
of or dear leaders, who represent what?
This is a textbook example of Pre-Emptive Strike.
You say there was no plan for the US to attack Japan. True. But if you look at the situation in 1941, you will see that the diplomatic relations were already tense. Japan was attacking China with incredible brutality. Outraged by the Japanese actions, many government, including the US, placed an embargo on strategic materials to Japan.
Those resources, the most important one being OIL, were in short supply in Japan and were critical to their military and civilian operations. At this point, the japanese government and military decided to seize the south-east asian resources. They knew that the US would not sit still while japanese forces began marching on every island there, so they considered a pre-emtive strike.
It turned out to be one heck of a bad move, but it was a pre-emptive strike.
Also, as for the comparison to Bush, don't throw it away so fast. Granted, the US government is not the 1941 japanese government. Still, some interesting parrallels can be found:
1-Both launched a pre-emptive strike against a country that had no intentions of war (The lack of WMD is further proof of that... Iraq was a bankrupt 3rd world country, not a menacing state. Yes, countries that help terrorists might be a threat but Iraq was the wrong place to look for that)
2-In both cases, oil was a major issue. (I for one think it was the primary motivation for the US invasion but I have no proof so I will not argue further on that. Still, even if it didn't cause the war, oil was a major resource, for the Americans and Iraqies alike. It represents billions of dollars that will now likely go to Americans and coalition companies)
3-The strikes seem to backfire. More US soldiers have died since Saddam has fallen than during the war. The cost of all this is huge, the American economy is in the red. Relations with a lot of USA's allies are at their lowest point since the last century. International organisations are begining to fall apart.
So, Bush is not Hitler. But he certainly is not Gandhi either. The war has been done, so now it's too late to back out. If a stable democracy can emerge out of it, good. The idea now is to restore Iraq, restore diplomatic relations and make sure that every american citizen ask himself/herself: Do we really want to give that man another 4 years ?
>I'm not a fucking troll!!
Perhaps you forgot you were logged in, "ubertroll".
He is a little cagey about the exact nature of the war, he says that the cities choose security over freedom and the rural areas don't. He implies it happens over a long time.
I certainly suspect he isn't who he claimed to be, but there are things that seem obvious now and things that were definitely not that obvious back then - one interesting thing that no one seemed to pick up on was, he ask if people know who own most of the solar panel production capacity and IP. It is of course, the oil companies.
Two things: the psychological impact of a nuclear bomb is much greater and the short term risk to the attacker is less (only one plane risked to take out a city).
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
probably contributed significantly to the restraint exercised by the USA and the USSR, two countries that could have killed many tens of millions ouright in a nuclear war and many more later through its aftermath.
Soviet tactical plans for major cities were to use thermonuclear devices, then, a few days later, an arial spray of anthrax on any survivors. With the radiation exposure, a weakened immune system, and limited access to antibiotics, survial within 50 miles of the epicenter was estimated to be less then 1/10 of 1 percent. Tens of millions dead? Gross understatement. Who knows what the Americans had cooking.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
http://www.armytimes.com/story.php?f=1-292925-2810 214.php
....
April 09, 2004
Sick Guard members blame depleted uranium
By Jane McHugh Times staff writer
Headaches and joint aches, ever-present nausea, overpowering fatigue and pain when swallowing.
Those are among the symptoms reported by a group of military police officers who were evacuated out of Iraq for other injuries, mostly orthopedic.
Must be radiation poisoning, the sick soldiers from the New York National Guard's 442nd MP Company think.
The Army says that tests so far don't support that
well, if you have transuranics in your urine, you have transuranics in your sperm. Radiation around gametes is a cause of mutation. Go google Dr. Helen Caldicott. She did a fund raiser for a Senator I helped elect in 1984. Google Rosalie Bertell. She wrote the book on low level doses.
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"I will personally volunteer to have a 1kg block of DU placed underneath my bed for the next ten years, as long as it is wrapped in aluminum foil."
I presume you say that because it's true that the alpha emissions from U will not penetrate the foil, but please form an airtight seal, because it will evolve Radon gas, which of course is also radioactive.
Good call. i even remember that episode. not sure how I eneded up with only one though ^_^
You need a FREE iPod Nano
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No, the Security Council of the United Nations failed to decide what to do when their resolutions regarding Iraq were violated. That is very different than voting against the war.
There was never a vote on it because Russia and France expressed their intent to veto any resolution authorizing force against Iraq. Here is a nice summary of the order of the UN delibarations before the US invasion.
Note the proposed resolution points out that UN resolution 687 ended the Gulf War with a cease-fire contingent on Iraq's acceptance and compliance with the provisions of that resolution. Iraq was found in material breach of its obligations in resolution 1441. Thus, the cease-fire is voided by Iraq's noncompliance and Iraq put us back at war. It would have been nice to have the Security Council express its support for its own resolutions, but it was not necessary even to be technically legal under international law.
However, I really don't understand from where the myth has arisen that the UN has some sort moral credibility. Libya is the chairman of the UN Human Rights Committee, and Russia was a permanent member of the Security Council while Stalin killed millions. The United Nations can be useful as a forum for discussing grievances, but it's organization and composition prevent it from being trustworthy as a guide to action.
The US is in compliance with the democratic decisions of the Security Council (Given the makeup of the Security Council is determined by historical accident for the permanent members and election to non-concurrent terms from within the general assembly and that the permanent members each have a veto calling it democratic is a bit of a stretch. Pseudo-republicish maybe?) It simply did not agree that the threat of veto prevents it from acting.
Reasonable people may disagree about whether the invasion is technically a violation of international law (I've of course argued above it isn't), but the ultimate arbiter of whether it was illegal is what, the UN Security Council? This points out a fundamental weakness in the organization of the UN: any permanent member of the Security Council could do whatever they wanted, and no response would be "legitimate" without UN Security Council approval which would just be vetoed.
You stated, "[i]t seemed clear to the majority of the members of that council, that there are neither WMD nor that there is any connection to Al Quaida."
That's false on both counts. Every serious intelligence service believed that Saddam still had WMDs. Also, there were Iraqi connections to al Qaeda. The preliminary report from the 9/11 commission that caused headlines said that there was no evidence that Saddam supported al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. Look up the text of the relevant section of the report yourself.
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I worked many moons ago in a lab that measured uranium loads in miners. The detectors were very sensitive - I was told by an older technician that they could even see the spikes in the background radiation after the Chinese atmospheric A-bomb tests in the 60's. However, the amount of radiation in the miners lungs was so small that readings were taken in a lead lined 8 inch steel chamber to screen out environmental radiation. We also had to account for the of the normal background radiation given off by humans, so we calibrated to unexposed subjects of about the same weight and build (lots of K40 in muscles). It still took us about an hour to get a decent signal.
However, if I remember correctly, the reason we were doing this was to ensure that the uranium burdens didn't get too high as there was a correlation between high burdens and lung cancer. Probably not due to the radiation - it seems unlikely with that low an amount but possibly through chemical or physical toxicity (like with asbestos...). Just saying that there *might* be some basis for some of the DU complaints...
What I find most amusing about the data is that those who work heavily with plutonium have on average, longer lifespans than those who don't.
Of course the correlations between longer lifespan and employment in nuclear fields likely lie elsewhere rather than the plutonium itself, but there is significant statistical data which shows plutonium exposure _isnt_ "scary lethal nuclear bogeyman" as the anti-nuke tinfoil hat zealots make it out to be.
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when the bomb was actually dropped?
where can I find this diary and personal presidential letter collection? online?
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for someone who has lived in japan he has quickly forgotten how determined, boneheaded or just plain old fanatics or however you want to put it, can a normal japanese be about simple common things. how criteria seems to stop working stoped behind a big wall or "ruru-desu" and it's WAY toned down now after decades of american influence, now put yourself back in wartime imperial japan where the emperor was commanding an army that had not lost a battle in 2000 years? imagine america getting invaded by any army. would you not go to arms to defend it?
Correct.
U238 decays very slowly; I've lived in basement rooms that probably had higher ambient radon levels than a 1kg block of U238 could cause or sustain. It'd probably be better to leave it open and just make sure the room is well-ventilated, which always is a good idea for living quarters anyway.
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
Original poster said, "Agent orange and all dibenzofuranes and their ilk have an affinity for DNA... and are transmitted via sperm into the next generation.", then implied that DU could pull the same trick. That doesn't say anything about mutation or the (presumably deleterious) effects of DU: It's a claim that somehow agent orange, DU, et al. can be physically passed as poisons (!?) "into the next generation". I don't see how the original poster could have meant anything else.
On top of this, direct comparison of agent orange and DU in this way is fallacious. Even assuming that DU has all the negative effects ascribed to it (which it does not), I don't think that anybody claims that it is a chemical mutagen or is in any way similar to agent orange. It's a poisonous heavy metal like lead, it emits very small amounts of radiation, and it very slowly decays, evolving relatively tiny amounts of potentially harmful substances such as radon; but I don't see any mechanism for it to have "affinity for DNA".
All in all, that was the funniest line from a very unscientific post.
Off to Google...
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
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"I really don't understand the "we went to war for oil" charge. It doesn't make economic sense. First of all, the war and subsequent reconstruction cost much more than all the oil Iraq will generate for many years." Ask who is footing the bill, then ask who is profiting most. Then ask yourself if you really believe we have selfless politicians who only look out for our good. I've already answered these questions for myself. Yes, this is cynical, and I believe I have good reason for being cynical. "Second, it would have been much easier for the evil Republicans/neo-cons/(oil companies) to just make oil money from the already corrupt Oil for Food program run by the UN." Oh, hold on a sec... I don't blame the evil Republicans/neo-cons solely. The democrats are in on this, they only pretend not to be for political reasons. I remember the aggression on Yugoslavia... Wasn't for oil, it was for all those mass killings that were occuring, and then later no evidence was found to support the 100,000 number we were told. And a few years later, a pipeline was built through Kosovo... But you are right about one thing though, there is a deeper motive than oil behind all this. It is about control. There is alot more on the line in Iraq than oil, and it has nothing to do with terrorists. "A google news search for "oil food corruption UN" will let you choose the sources you find most credible, but I'm pretty sure they all say roughly the same things." Yeah, I know all about that. We shouldn't even be in the UN as it is now, IMO. "The best prewar intelligence we had indicated that Iraq was a threat. Also, Saddam never cooperated with the inspections that were the condition for the cessation of hostilities in the Gulf War." In the end he did cooperate with inspectors. Yes, he played games, didn't for a while, etc... But our government doesn't exist to police the world. We should learn what happened to the Brits back in the day when they took that burden upon themselves. "2) Saddam's regime was bad enough that whatever we leave in its place has a very good chance of at least being better." You know, I keep hearing this, but I've seen no evidence that it was so bad. He treated the Kurds about on par with how we treated Indian uprisings. Yeah, people are tortured and in our prisons, people are routinely raped. Yeah, he used gas, the same type of gas we sold to him. And we used gas in Waco on the branch davidians. Our allies in Saudi Arabia cut peoples hands off. I haven't seen evidence to support this villanization, so I choose not to believe it until I see it. Remember, before Yugoslavia we were told 100,000 people were killed. No evidence to support that after the fact. "3) The sanctions weren't sustainable because of the harm done to the Iraqi people, but sanctions couldn't be lifted until inspections were allowed." You're forgetting, before the war he agreed. In fact, there were many years that he did let the inspectors in, and the sanctions weren't lifted. Then there were times he didn't. It was an on again off again game. Sanctions weren't going to be lifted any time soon whether he cooperated or not, and I think he knew that. "4) By the time we knew for certain Saddam was again a threat, it would be too late to avoid major consequences." We should have thought of that before we decided to do business with the guy way back in the day. How'd you like law enforcement to hear through the grapevine that you're going to commit some crime and have them break into your house and arrest you before you do it? Same principle. Dangerous principle. Unamerican. As for that bit about me character assinating Bush, I'd take it a step further, I don't believe Bush, or 99 percent of any of our politicians have any character that can be assinated. This goes for the democrats and republicans equally. I think their records speak for themselves. Follow the money. But kudos to you for presenting your views in a very civilized and rational manner. I have different views than you, but I welcome hearing yours any day. That anon guy I responded to could learn a lesson from you.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
Thanks for the interesting reply, but break it up into paragraphs next time. Reading it was hard on the eyes. :)
:)
We seem to differ most on level of cynicysm and whether to intervene internationally or let other people deal with their own problems.
Cynicysm-wise, I assume that at least half of politicians mainly mean well, but are enamoured enough of power to make somewhat slimy compromises (i.e. stupid McCain-Feingold 1st amendment-violating bill, etc.). I suspect that about a quarter of politicians of any party are either borderline sociopaths that only care about themselves and harming their opponents, but I think they can generally be kept in check by the demands of the voting public and other politicians who either have better motivations or conflicting bad motivations.
I would love for America to take a break and be isolationist for awhile except for trade, but I think the harm to the world of such a policy would be too great. I personally think we should intervene strongly, militarily if necessary, in both Zimbabwe and Sudan. The situations in both countries are so awful that I think it is immoral to stand idly by when we have the power to help; I don't want the US to be the world's policeman, but in the case of mass murder I think we should intervene when we are able. When the world said "Never again" after WWII did we just mean "never again" if accompanied with violations of another countries territory? Reasonable people certainly disagree with me on this point (I think my position is an extremely small minority.), but I'd like anyone reading to decide how bad a situation in another country would have to be until it would be a moral necessity to intervene if we were able. Think about it and then read about what is happening in Sudan regarding ethnic cleansing and slavery or what Mugabe has done to his opponents in Zimbabwe.
I tried to google for Kosovo ethnic cleansing postwar statistics, but I couldn't find any major site that I trust with good statistics. The media drive me nuts when they have tons of build-up reporting before anything is known and then little to no analysis after the fact. Can you point me to a reliable site giving stats on how many were were killed in Bosnia before the war? My results were clogged with geocities and other free hosting sites for which the credibility was hard to judge.
I've actually never before heard the argument that the war was about oil referring to both Democratic and Republican support. I've always heard it as an anti-Bush rallying cry. However, I think you misunderstood my point about the Oil-for-Food program; the US and US oil companies are now going to pay market price for any Iraqi oil, whereas they could have gotten steep discounts via the Oil For Food program. Or are you saying availability of oil is by far more important than price to the politicians in charge?
I would have no major problem with us leaving the UN, but I wonder whether sticking around and using our veto on just about everything wouldn't be better. If we leave, then the UN might become a de facto alliance of anti-US countries. While even an alliance of all our potential opponents is not a major security threat right now, wouldn't it be easier to pay our UN dues and then veto things we don't like. We don't have to actually pay any attention to the UN at all; just sit an intern in our UN seat with instructions to say "Nay" to all votes.
"I've seen no evidence it was so bad. He treated the Kurds about on par with how we treated Indian uprisings." First of all, previous bad acts on the part of the United States should not prevent the United States from preventing bad acts now. Had there been a country powerful enough and concerned enough in the 1800s to prevent US oppression of Native Americans, I think their intervention would have been a good thing. But you can't unring a bell; that happened long ago and I think trying to fix it now would very likely make more problems than it solve
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A lot of the posts here assume that the facts were known at the time of the action. while in hindsite the actions may have been harsh in may cases what was known at the time lead to the actions and were resonable by any standard of the time. makes for a fun argument but is a bunch of meaningless static in the larger analysis.