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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."
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.
just a little fyi, we used the nuke in the Second world war... using it in the first would be highly improbable, as we didn't even have planes that could deploy it at the time.
ok.. so heads you lose tails I win. right?
Japan didn't surrender after the first bomb, thus a second was justified. Their effectiveness had already been shown in the Southwestern US, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not tests. How many times does it have to be said that a prolonged war with Japan would have cost more lives than ending the war with nukes?
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?
The DOE has some great photos of the various test shots available, at very low cost.
--jc
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.
Rape of Nanking is a forgotten Holocaust. The Japanese Government is reluctant to give a formal apology to the Rape of Nanking or the invasion to China herself. South Korean government received their long overdue apology just before the 2002 World Cup Soccer, co-organised by Japan/ Korea.
Some historians claimed that the lost of China to communism (and many other related problems) was the direct consequence of the Japanese Invasion. A whole generation of more educated/modernised officiers with the Chiang Kai-shek government got slaughtered between 7/7/1937 (the attack of Peking) to 13/12/137 (the fall of Nanking). The level of corruption in China got rampant after WW2 and thus triggered the shift towards communism....
The Japanese Emperor and the wartime cabinet should feel lucky as the atomic bomb was not directed towards them. At the end of the day, many Hiroshima and Nagasaki civilians are innocents.
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
Huh. last I heard, the cigarette was far more lethal a cause of cancer than the Sun.
*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. *
This last part sounds like an urban myth. The radium painters indeed suffered (and the worst cases experienced extremely high rates of bone cancer (20 cases of bone cancer out of the 44 worst exposure cases). This doesn't describe the full story. There apparently were other nasty illnesses they could fall prey to. But they were ingesting paints with high concentrations of radium. Someone handling the unshielded coffin of such a victim wouldn't receive significant dosage (IMHO of course), and I don't see any other obvious benefit to a lead-lined coffin. After all, six feet or so of earth is a very effective shield.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that several of these poor women were buried in lead-lined coffins (perhaps out of ignorance or for propaganda purposes), but you don't need to bury them that way.
Right, that's an amazing sequence, especially when you realize the horse mask is anything but airtight - as if it would really make that much of a difference.
Read the history of this shot:CASTLE-BRAVO
Apparently the bomb designers miscalculated something. The yield was supposed to be about 5 megatons. Turned out to be closer to 15. (Miscalculated!) The fallout irradiated other islanders and a fishing boat that were supposed to be safe. I'd say this event qualifies as one of the biggest engineering f-ups in history.
Here's an interesting animation about fallout from the Nevada tests. Guess it's for people who don't like to read.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
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
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
I would just like to point out that, up until as late as the late 50's, it was believed that radiation was actually good for you.
There's a lot of evidence that low dosages of radiation are good for you. Google "hormesis" or check out this article.
There's also a psychological issue about radiation or toxic exposure. To make up some numbers, let's say 10,000 soldiers get exposed during a nuclear bomb test in the '50s. Let's say that based on normal demographic statistics, 1,000 of them would have gotten cancer 50 years later. However, the radiation exposure increases the number of cancers by 50%, so 1,500 get cancer. In other words, only 1/3 of the men who got cancer did so because of the exposure, but I guarantee you that nearly all of the 1,500 would be sure that their cancer must have been caused by the bomb test.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
V-E day was May 8, 1945; the successful test of atomic bomb was July 6, 1945. Unfortunately the time machine project hasn't been completed so we could drop the atomic bomb on Germany first.
If you look at the destruction of the firebombings of Dresden and Hamburg, you would know the goverment wouldn't have had a problem dropping the atomic bomb there.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Putting aside the "which war?" error, the main point is wrong, too. The US conducted the Strategic Bombing Survey after the war to determine the effects of conventional and atomic bombings. Before the end of the war, many of the top military brass, such as Undersecretary of the Navy, Bard, had been lobbying Truman not to use the bomb or to use it only as a test to demonstrate that we had it, because they were convinced that the Japanese were about to surrender. The Strategic Bombing Survey confirmed that the Japanese were, in fact, ready to surrender, and indicated that the Japanese had already been ready to offer a non-unconditional surrender, and would likely have offered an unconditional surrender within months. They did a person-by-person breakdown of the views in the Japanese government, their actions, and all sorts of other stuff to come to this conclusion; it was a pretty in-depth report. The only reason it took them more than the (sarcasm)huge benevolent three day waiting period(/sarcasm) that we gave them before dropping the second bomb was due to all of the confusion in the Japanese government.
The more you learn about what we did, the more annoyed you get with it. The target planning memos show a clear preference for killing *more* civilians, actually ruling out a number of militarly more useful targets with less civilian casualties. It's also likely that even Truman himself was lied to. In Truman's diaries, he writes how he never could support the targetting of Japanese women and children - how he didn't want America to resort to the sort of lows that the Japanese had, and how he was only interested in targetting the military. After the war, he gave an infamous speech in which he told the nation we had just dropped the first atomic bomb on "... Hiroshima - a military base".
I could go on in a lot more detail... but you get the picture. There's a lot of myths about Japan near the end of WWII, and one of the most profound is that the government was all looking to fight to the death.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
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.
Operation Magic, in which we had cracked their communication encryption, we learned that the Japanese wanted to surrender but were worried about the fate of their emperor.
Admiral William Leahy along with the rest of the Joint Chiefs all felt that the Japanese were defeated militarily. An effective sea blockade was in place as well as the success of conventional bombing and the seizure of Okinawa.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Five Star Admiral Chester Nimitz all agreed that Japan was defeated militarily. Former Ambassador to Japan for 10 years Joseph Grew who understood the Japanese mentality at the time felt the Japanese would surrender unconditionally if allowed to keep their emperor.
When presented to Truman he thought it a "sound idea" and ran it by the Joint Chiefs who also approved the proposal. However at the Potsdam conference that followed the stipulation to allow the emperor to retain power was omitted.
Truman wanted to drop the bomb in order to make the Russians more manageable as they had violated the Yalta agreement and felt they couldn't be trusted, not allowing democratic elections to take place in the countries they had liberated in Eastern Europe.
Even Winston Churchill was quoted as saying:
"The historic fact remains and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue."
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.
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.