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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.
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.
...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.
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?
they can disagree all they like.
they murdered millions of chinese, korean, american, south pacific islanders, philipinos, etc. in their treacherous rampage across north east and south east.
worrying about what they think was the least of our worries.
The use of the weapon was the knockout blow that ended the first World War.
Which World War?!?!
Do you mean the second world war, or is the first world war not named as such outside of the US?
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.
Hey, could someone else please point out it was the second world war? We need to make sure this is pointed out. We really do. It's important. Someone might think it was the first World War when it was really the second. You know? That's important. We can't allow a mistake like this to be uncorrected. Anyone?
> 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.
If there's no way of knowing, then isn't it impossible to say exactly whether it was a good or bad decision?
> 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.
The hardest part, by far, is obtaining enough fissile material. Luckily for terrorists and not so lucky for there targets, the cold war left behing lots of fissile material, some of which has gone missing according to the news.
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
who, the civilians who were nuked did all that?
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?
One of the fun parts about Slashdot is when you make a factual error, there's no shortage of people to fix your mistake...
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?
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?
If we hadn't bombed Japan, we would have invaded, and they would have fought to every last man, woman, and child. More than 2 cities would have been destroyed, and the death toll would have been much heigher. Dropping the bomb was a favor for the Japanese as well as us, and I've heard this opinion it on various NPR talk shows as well.
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.
The Japanese may disagree with you on that one.
The Japanese love to cry about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but when the Rape of Nanking comes up, they adopt a "who us?" attitude. War is hell. Awful things happen to good people during times of war. Japan does not deserve an apology.
Had we not used those two nuclear weapons, Japanese resolve wouldn't have been broken for years and many more Japanese and Americans would have died as a result.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
They may well disagree, but the fact is the Japanese surrender saved untold millions of Japanese lives that would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese islands, most of whom would have been "civilian" ( as with our other wars in Asia we would have found that women and children were armed combatants quite willing to die to the last "man" to defend their homeland. Guam would have looked like a cakewalk in comparison).
Such an invasion would have also destroyed what is perhaps the most remarkably peaceful post war occupation in world history, American civilians almost universally reporting that they were able to wander freely and alone in perfect safety because the Japanese treated them like honored guests, despite the fact that American military personel were not nearly always so polite.
KFG
Now hold on let me get this straight. What the Japanese did in war was murder, but the dropping of 2 nuclear weapons on civilians was a blessing? Been into the nationalism punch have we?
Many historians also disagree with the assertation that it was required to end the war in the pacific, since the Japanese were already pressing for peace, the Americans were already looking to the next war and needed a way to intimidate the Soviet Union. Instead of linking to a site I'll just link to a Google search Was the Bomb necessary.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
The DOE has some great photos of the various test shots available, at very low cost.
--jc
Those were smoke rockets fired to provide a background to measure the progression of the shock wave, once it was past the initial fireball. During the first fractions of a second, the shock wave and the fireball had the same perimeter. After, the shock wave continued outward and was harder to track.
As the shock wave continued out, it would cause a density change in the air, leading to a distortion in the images of the smoke trails.
Those smoke trails were only present in test firings, not at Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
--RIAmAses! Let my MP3ople go!
Perhaps you have forgotten the massive buyout program where the CIA was given billions and billions of dollars to buy ever scrap of nuclear material the old Soviet Union left in the hands of those willing to sell it.
That's why to date terrorists haven't gotten a hold of any. They are competing against the worldest biggest economy to get a hold of this material.
Yes, some of the material is missing, but we have tools to find it.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
In Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" Zinn points to declassified information which reveals that the USA had cracked the Japanese communication cipher and were monitoring communications. These communications included quotes from the Emperor that it was becoming clear that 'unconditional surrender' was the only viable option. Zinn believes the bomb wasn't so much dropped to stop the war, which probably would have happened by January according to an internal war department study, but rather to set the stage for complete American dominance via overwhelming firepower. Believe what you want, but I don't think the high school history case (it saved the world from an invasion of Japan which have costed more lives) is representative of reality -- I think the truth is much more complicated. That being said, anyone who is outraged by the civilian deaths of the nuclear bombings may not realize that the firebombing of Japan took many more civilian lives.
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.
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.
God I live people who like to play time-machine generals because nothing is clearer than hindsight.
Hell, if you want to play that game lets really play. How about if Europe hadn't punished Germany with crushing reparations after WWI we could have prevented Hitler's rise and the slaughter of a few million Jews in death camps and the soldiers who had to die in the effort to stop him.
How about if the US hadn't had to use it's trade with Japan as a foil against the colonialization of China by the Europeans then perhaps Japan wouldn't have felt the need to put themselves on a steroid enhanced industrialization of their nation that ultimately led to their invasion of China.
Or how about you and all the other apologists accept the fact that war is ugly and no one is innocent, the bombs were dropped, Japan surrendered unconditionally and the US won only to be later invaded by Sony, Mitsubishi and Nintendo.
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.
"If there's no way of knowing, then isn't it impossible to say exactly whether it was a good or bad decision?"
.01ml/kg of body wieght, kills in minutes, is pretty much undetectable, and can be spread by a garden bug sprayer that is a scary thought.
You are taking a common saying that means "A whole lot" literally. In fact there are ways to estimate the number of casualties as we did many amphibious assaults. For instance this document from the cia discusses such a thing.
The invasion of Okinawa had, at a low count, 122,000 deaths (including Japanese and American). Japan's main island was much more hardened and expected to fight harder over.
From a small search (so it may be off, there were several numbers thrown around so I took the largest) there were estimated 210,000 deaths from the bombs over 5 years.
Well over a million were estimated for just the first few islands around mainland Japan.
There is also the argument that we could starve them from a blockade. Maybe - but it is questionable wich is worse, starving millions or nuking thousands.
There is the argument that Japan was going to surrender anyway. Maybe. Even after the bombs the Emporer had a tough time convincing many in the military to surrender. It would depend on which faction won.
If it was justified more depends on your political views. No, I don't mean conservative or liberal, I mean what you place value on and which way you feel things would go.
"The hardest part, by far, is obtaining enough fissile material. Luckily for terrorists and not so lucky for there targets, the cold war left behing lots of fissile material, some of which has gone missing according to the news."
Another hard part is sneaking it in. It's not something that you put in a 2 litre bottle and drive around with.
A more likely terrorist weapon (the most likely is still conventional stuff though) are some chemical weapons. When a chemical requires
One of the main problems with these is that they require a certain level of sophistication to transport and detonate - usually those people are the leaders and have no intention of putting themselfs in that much harms way. Chemical weapons are generally easier to deal with. Though if any ever gets used in a populated area the destruction would be VERY bad.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Where's my mod points when I need them?
Thanks to all of America's veterans. You did a dirty, necessary job, and you did it well.
There was no better solution available. Even if there were, these same people would have told you how you did it all wrong. Just wait until they have their lives challenged. Watch how they start looking up to your example!
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!
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!!
I'm confused...
You seem to complain about the Japanese not apologizing for Nanking, but then say they don't deserve an apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both were acts of war against civilians and pretty hard to defend moraly. I think the Japanese deserve an apology just as much as the Chinese do.
Apologies don't bring anybody back from the dead, but at least it brings home the point that the action was wrong. It is pretty sad that neither the US or Japan want to admit that they did something wrong a lifetime ago. Hell, they weren't even the only ones - lets not forget Dresden.
The Germans might have been evil incarnate in that war, but these days they at least tend to admit that they were wrong.
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
They didn't immediately and unconditionally surrender. They were trying to negotiate terms - in fact, they had started looking for a way to sue for peace before the Hiroshima bombing. But it's not like they were white people, after all - they were "savages", and we had to show the Soviets our new weapon anyway.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
Please, I wish moderators wouldn't mark Insightful non-sensical postings ...
The use of the weapon was the knockout blow the ended the first World War. There's know way of telling how many livers were saved as a result of the war ending then compared to going on for however longer it would have went without it.
First, the bomb provided the climax to the SECOND World War. The First World War (or Great War) was fought earlier in the century. There is some debate as to how much longer Japan would have held out. Germany and Italy had long since been defeated. Hirohito could see the war ending in Japan as American systematically defeated his forces island-by-island in the Pacific (at great cost, yes, but the resolve of the Allies was winning consistently). Certainly, the bombs hastened his decision, but he likely would've surrendered anyway simply to avoid the firebombing that destroyed the likes of Dresden. Some historians doubt the Nagasaki bomb was evennecessary, and both bombs were a show of power that ended up killing largely civilian populations, not causing military destruction.
Mutually Assured Destruction was a valid theory because USSR fell not by military attack but simple political failure.
Actually, the USSR fell to the economic failure of the Communist system. Reagan increased defense spending during the 1980s essentially starting an arms race the Soviets could not maintain. Trying to match the military buildup of the US bankrupted the USSR. The social revolution that followed was inevitable given the critical mass of the poor left in Russia.
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.
Arguable. It's doubtful that nuclear terrorists could detonate more than one or two bombs on American soil in the best (for them) of scenarios, no matter what the alarmists in the White House would have you believe. Such an attack wouldn't destroy the US, not like a devastating nuclear war as we might have had during the Cold War. Others think greater threats to America come from biological and chemical agents that can easily and rapidly be dispersed into weakly guarded public utility systems. Nuclear weapons (at least on the order a terrorist is likely to come into contact with) have a comparitively limited damage potential.
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
I think the cost / benefit analysis around the decision to use the Bomb was much more complicated than you present. There are indications that the Japanese would have surrender without a full scale invasion.
You should try reading some of the hindsight pieces on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Many of the people involved at the time are now not such great fans of MAD as you seem to be.
MAD served to proliferate nuclear weapons and puts us in the position you describe us in today, afraid that terrorists will get a nuclear weapon. Since India got the bomb, Pakistan got the bomb. Pakistan gave the bomb to North Korea. Israel has the bomb, so Iran wants the bomb. Russia and former Soviet republics can't keep track of their bombs.
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
actually, there is a good way of tellign if it was a good or bad decision.
the decision to use the atomic bomb came as the emporer enacted programs to arm the women and children of japan with swords, since there werent enough guns to go around, and he wanted everyone to be prepared to fight an invasion.
its also of note that by "children," it means 13 and under, since at 14 you were in the military... period. and, for the fact checkers, im not positive -- it may have been 12, so go easy if its one of the two.
the plan of the japanese military as allied forces neared japan was to fight until the very last man, and not surrender until no japanese able to so much as hold up a sword was left standing. in his twilight years, the emporer was very public about how much his decision haunted him and about the horror he felt his pride and the pride of his nation led the world into.
there is a way of knowing how many lives were saved. the populations of hiroshima and nagasaki, man woman and child, were in preparation to defend against an invading force. women and children against marines, while they would be able to inflict massive casualty, would have been slaughtered. while nobody has the right or deserves the responsibility of deciding who should live and die, it is almost certain that most everyone who died by the bomb would have died defending japan from invasion; as well as tens of thousands more being prepared to defend coastlines with inadequate weaponry.
the US tried many times to settle the war without invasion. all were rebuked.
please, do not take me for saying that dropping nuclear bombs was an aceptable or only decision; take me as saying that it was an illustration of the horror of all war as compared to the horror of the united states or nuclear scientists.
when a decision must be made to kill half a million people or risk killing a million, there is no good decision. the best decision is still awful, and this was the situation that faced the world.
again, for the fact checkers, i pulled these number out of thin air. however, it is pure fact that the number of people killed at hiroshima and nagaski were far fewer that the majority of japans population that was being prepared to fight a desperate and hopeless last battle. the same forces that stormed the beaches at normandy under hellish fire and artillery would likely have no problem battling onto beaches defended by sword.
it is pointless to debate the decision. there was no good answer. the fact that the use of nuclear weapons was resonable compared to the alternative serves to ilustrate the horror of the time more than the horror of the decision. it was a bad decision, plain and simple -- but, there was no good decision available.
One of the fun parts about Slashdot is when you make a factual error, there's no shortage of people to fix your mistake..
:)
No kidding. I could say that version 1.03.46-r3 of program X had a bug, and someone would chime in telling me I was an idiot and that it was actually 1.03.47-r3 that contained the bug. And that it wasn't really a bug, but a problem that only arose if users of the program were lazy. And that I must be a stupid, lazy retarded Windows user cause I didn't know that.
No seriously
An on-topic note: The people I really feel sorry for are the Russians who had to test nuclear weapons. From what I've heard, safety precautions were atrocious and the radiation was (and is) an extremely bad problem in some parts. Of course we've had similar problems, but I can't imagine they are on the scale of Soviet Russia.
Umm, In Soviet Russia, YOU kill radioactive poison's babies?
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*
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
The second bomb was needed to show the atomic bomb was a serious threat... Hiroshima showed we could do it, Nagasaki showed we could keep doing it until they gave up.
"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?"
Exactly... People who propose alternatives don't realize a simple fact, Japanese people do not think like we do. Their culture is vastly different even today, back then they were so far removed from Western ways of thinking that forcing a surrender any other way simply would not have happened.
To the overly PC crowd- I am not saying that the Japanese way of thinking is any better or worse than the Western way, simply that it is different. Go live there for 15 months like I did and you will see the truth of my statement. They are great people, but not Westerners by any means(except of course some of the immigrants to western nations are pretty solidly western in outlook).
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
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.
...besides, they often forget the conventional bombing of many other Hiroshima-like cities, where the degree of destruction was similar, only much more bombers and bombs than one were used.
Oppenheimer: throat cancer. (He smoked.)
Feynman: leukemia, maybe related to radiation exposure.
Fermi: stomach cancer. Unlikely to be connected with radiation exposure.
Slotin: died from radiation exposure. (Not cancer.)
Serber: managed to live to 86.
Pilot Paul Tibbets: still alive, as far as I can tell.
Copilot Robert Lewis: died aged 66.
Still, one or two out of seven ain't bad.
he likely would've surrendered anyway simply to avoid the firebombing that destroyed the likes of Dresden.
The repeated firebombings of many Japanese cities killed more in each strike than either atomic bomb did. If it didn't get them to surrender the first half dozen or so times, its time to think up a new strategy.
Some historians doubt the Nagasaki bomb was evennecessary,
Said historians are idiots. Sure, Hiroshima was a dramatic blow. But until Nagasaki, the Japanese didn't know if this was a full weapons program or a single bomb that we couldn't make in quantity.
The atomic bombs were needed for a simple reason. The Japanese simply do not think like Westerners. True, there were some rumblings prior to Hiroshima leaning towards surrender, but until the US wiped out two cities with single bombs, a force that the Japanese had absolutely zero hope to defend against, the hardcore never surrender crowd could not be overcome. Anything else, be it invasions or massive conventional bombing, would have required that the US virtually wipe out the entire Japanese military, as well as a huge chunk of the civilian population that would have taken up the fight after the army was gone.
Don't forget, on Iwo Jima, out of about 27,000 Japanese troops, around 20,000 fought to the death. The home islands would have been defended far more fiercely. The civilian death toll from invasion(which would eventually be needed to clean up after conventional bombs, even if we bombed the Army out of existence) would be catastrophic, and the military death toll on both sides would also be immense. Compared to the few hundered thousand killed by the bombs and the fallout from them, an invasion of Japan would have made the horrors of all prior wars, put together, look like a schoolyard fistfight.
The two atomic bombs, as terrible as they were, were without a doubt the most merciful way to end the war. The Japanese would not have surrendered if they saw any sliver of hope of survival. Even after Nagasaki, there was a military coup that was very nearly succesful the night prior to the broadcast of the surrender message. Had that coup succeeded, Japan would not have surrendered.
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
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
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.doug-long.com/guide1.htm
I always heard that Japan was considering surrender prior to the bombs. The only exception being that they keep their deified Emperor.
from site...
Intercepted cables showed Japan responding positively to a U.S. offer of a surrender based on the "Atlantic Charter" as put forward in an official July 21, 1945 American radio broadcast. The key clause of the Charter promised that every nation could choose its own form of government (which would have allowed Japan to keep its Emperor).
The broadcast was allowed to stand with Presidential sanction, but U.S. officials chose thereafter to ignore this indication of Japan's willingness to surrender.
and
Three days before Hiroshima was bombed President Truman and his top advisers agreed Japan was seeking peace, but the President feared Tokyo would negotiate a surrender through Russia:
The diary of Walter Brown--an assistant to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes-- records that aboard ship returning from Potsdam on August 3, 1945 the President, Byrnes and Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to the President, "agrred [sic] Japas [sic] looking for peace. (Leahy had another report from Pacific) President afraid they will sue for peace through Russia instead of some country like Sweden." (See p. 415, Chapter 33)
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'."
I would have to argue that as the point was "some people consider it...", calling bullshit on it is laughable.
I could say "some people consider the world to be flat", would you be right in calling bs on that too?
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.
I'm from Pittsburgh. Let me tell you, everyone in the area was prepared for the possibility of an Axis air raid because that is where a LOT of the wartime steel production took place.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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
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?
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."
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.
** 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.
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.
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
but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
He's had FOUR FUCKING YEARS to "think it through", the problem has only gotten worse. His reasons for not doing it are alll easily answered -- eg: cache the pages befoer the site goes up; send an email to the site telling them what you're doing; put the cache link separately. The cached page can retain the origianl banner links and referrers -- pretty easy to automate as banners have predictable sites and URLs (As evidenced by the banner blocking software).
But Taco et al can't be bothered to spellcheck their one-paragraph items, so don't hold your breath.
But these were all people that didn't know what was coming.
Name a single Japanese person over the age of two who, in 1945, did not know that their country was in a war, one which they declared and fired the first shot against people who didn't know what was coming, and under aerial bombardment.
How many of the Oregonians killed by a Japanese bomb knew what was coming?
Since they were still, in fact, shooting at us, name a viable alternative to shooting back that would have ended the war without their explicit surrender.
Did not the Germans surrender unconditionally, but did we not have to take Berlin before they did so? Did we not bomb the shit out of it daily before we took it? Did they not bomb us previous to that? Did they not continue shooting at us until the moment of their surrender?
Invading soldiers at least know what they're dealing with, one would hope.
You have left the invaded out of that equation.
It was a war of the 'good old fashioned' kind. They shoot at us. We shoot at them. It continues until one side says "enough already."
I don't happen to agree that that's a very good way to go about things. I'm a nonviolent pacifist and all that shit. But it's still a historical fact.
KFG
The more you learn about what we did, the more annoyed you get with it.
After 3 1/2 years of total war fighting a very determined enemy no one should be surprised it ended with standoff nuclear attacks. Consider Japanese resistance at Iwo Jima or Okinawa. There was no precedence for Japanese surrender at any time during the war. The 1,000,000 man U.S. invasion force was greatful events happened the way they did.
an ill wind that blows no good
Hide it in a barge full of coal. Coal is radioactive (slightly, but enough to hide a bomb, especially since the coal also shields the bomb's emissions).
The suitcase thing is exagerated, even a 44 gallon drum or 'fridge is a bit small. The material needed to create an uncontrolled nuclear reaction is fairly large, or if small, very detectable by several means. We have a nuke that we fire out of a 105mm howitzer. That's just over 4" in diameter, for those who don't do metric. The Poseidon missile carries 14 (or more) nuclear weapons was 54" in diameter, so guesstimate its warheads were no more than 15" in diameter (and made a much bigger kaboom than a 105 nuclear shell).
It doesn't take much to make a nuclear weapon. Though a crude nuke is quite large. Minimum size has been going down ever since we learned how to do it.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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
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.
Remember that this is the organisation that sold weapons to Iran at the time when their leader had declared a war against the USA. Do people really think that Bush has his hands on the wheel any more than Reagan did? (no I'm not speaking ill of the dead, I'm beating the bush).
Faith in some technological magic is not going to find a kilogram of enriched Uranium at a range of a kilometre or two even if it is out in the open and painted bright pink, so finding some buried in a lead box in a remote part of a desert is even less likely. We obey the inverse square law in this house.Yep. Sure did. Doesn't actually change much about how hard a fight it will be that the lads on the other side of the hill are conscripts. Or do you assume that European armies (which are essentially conscript armies) are inherently inferior to the US Army (which is a long-service professional army)?
I don't buy that myself. Conscription doesn't imply lack of patriotism/zeal/skill. It just implies an opinion of the government as to the best way to prepare for a future war.
So what is it you're saying these people don't have the right to fight for there country Only America has the right.
Of course they have the right to fight for their country. But their right to fight doesn't excuse them from being killed if they fight and lose. If Japan had actually fought as hard protecting the Home Islands as they did on Guam or Okinawa, the Americans might have lost a million men. Or not. But the Japanese would have lost pretty much their entire population.
You're country bombed two cities full of civilians!!!
Please learn to spell "your". Reading this was painful. Trivial grammatical quibbles aside, the USA bombed a great many more than two cities. As did the British, the Germans, and the Soviets. Well, the Soviets mostly used artillery rather than aerial bombs, but dead is dead.
I have always found it curious that people objected more to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (both of which had military bases and industries, just like the other cities bombed/shelled by either side) than to, say, Tokyo, or Berlin. Both of which were pounded repeatedly.
I also should add, for those who haven't read General Arnold's autobiography, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and four other cities) were deliberately removed from the list of cities to be bombed conventionally. This was to allow for a more accurate determination of the effects of the atomic bombs, if and when they were used. So the use of nuclear weapons against those two cities spared (as a minimum) four other cities from aerial attack, and delayed the aerial attacks on those two cities till the last days of the war. Unlike, say, Berlin, which was bombed regularly thoughout the war.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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
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.
> How does that compare to the multitudes of Native Americans we murdered to live on this very land?
"We" didn't kill anyone. The people who did that left from Europe, so it would be more accurate to say that some Europeans killed the NAs. America didn't exist then. My ancestors hadn't even arrived in the "New World" by the time the natives were pushed back past the Mississippi River, so "we" is horribly inaccurate. Also take into account that even if my ancestors had been here, I do not take responsibility for the actions of those who came before me.
Get YOUR myths straight, sure it was an awful thing. Lots of awful things happen during wars, but this was probably one of the least awful things that could have happened, unless you go into fantasy land (like dreaming that the Japanese cabinet could get its act together and actually surrender before the Japanese people virtually ceased to exist).
Here's another little tidbit all you "oh it was so awful" ignoramuses leave out - somewhere around 5000 *Chinese* were dying EVERY DAY. You know, those dudes the Japanese invaded and still occupied? How long do you want to let the Japanese dick around with their fantasy "surrender with terms"? "A couple of months" - congratulations genius, there go 300,000 more innocent Chinese, on top of however many millions of Japanese starve to death that summer...
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
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.
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...