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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.
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...?
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
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?
The public fears the word "nuclear" as a little child fears the word "boogie man." How a microwave was ever sold is beyond me...
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
Frankly, 50 years is good enough. We have a whole gen that has no idea what nukes are other than what is shown in the latest PS2 game.
You would be doing a service to your countymen.
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
uh.... hello? fusion is still a nuclear reaction last I checked.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
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.
then those Al Qaeda members will yell to you "It's Necessary Evil to whack your arrogant ass in 9/11"...
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.
They were doing no such thing. The russians had declared war on Japan and Truman wanted to demonstrate the size of the United State's penis to prevent Russia from getting too cocky.
Additionally, one could argue that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also a scientific experiment, as well as a political statement to the Russians.
Regardless, 300,000 people bit the dust in the attrocity that occurred at Hiroshima. Half of those people were children.
It's always been argued that we dropped the bomb to end the war, but the war was already over. Japan had been castrasted already; it's fleets blown to nothing, it's army pathetic, and it's people yelling for the war to end.
Watch the Fog of War if you want more insight on the decision making process behind nuking Japan.
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
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.
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the war was already over
the fight isn't over until they stop, you know, fighting. Our goal wasn't to "prove" ourselves better then the Japanese. we had been doing that since 1942. our goal was to get them to STOP shooting at us.
consider the facts presented in the Fog of War. American bombers killed 100,000 people in a single night of fire bombing. We destroyed, what, 95% of Tokyo? in a single night.
we "only" killed about 80,000 in a night in Hiroshima (many of the secondary deaths took a lot longer).
The A-Bombs killed only a fraction of the people killed thru conventional bombings and warfare. Add up just the numbers that are shown in Fog of War.
but, after allll that, the Japanese were STILL FIGHTING. They had no navy to speak of, and they had no manufacturing capabilities to make a new one. After the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea, there was no way they could have produced enough Aircraft Carriers to rival us. We had more at that point, and we could build them faster. They also didn't haevteh means (nor apparently the will) to develop new weapons. (They ahd the same model planes at the beginning and end of the war, while the Allies developed better equipment in general). They barely had two cities left standing on their island. They didn't have much of ANY military or industry left.
buuut, they kept fighting. even "castrated". what we needed was something to make them GIVE UP. maybe another year of conventional war would have made them give up. But the A-bomb DID make them give up.
so no, the war was NOT over. Not until the opponent stops fighting.
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
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
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?
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www.fairtax.org
It's no wonder, considering that soldiers in WWII and Korea got cigarettes as part of their daily ration.
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