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."

Comments

Radio Bikini

[wwest4]

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.

Re:The flip side of the coin.

[sockonafish]

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?

Remember: Cancer is a genetic disease

[The Tyro]

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.

The great scientific irony..

[pdxdada]

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.

nuclear links, DU, human experimention...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:The flip side of the coin.

[Rei]

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.