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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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
The DOE has some great photos of the various test shots available, at very low cost.
--jc
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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...
for list of all nuclear explosions in history 1945-1998:
/
....
http://www.okgeosurvey1.gov/level2/nuk e.cat.index. html
put THAT in your database and smoke it
for photography of effects on children and newborns in Iraq from
depleted uranium from first Gulf War and updates:
http://www.savewarchildren.org/
http:// www.savewarchildren.org/exhibitPictures.htm l
Japanese photograher Takashi Morizumi::1
http://www.chimerafilms.co.uk/childre n6.html
"American troops guarding the Ministry of Oil
Received:16:23JST, 21/06/03
"Looters ransacked most of the government buildings after the war, but
this building was always under the U.S. protection. I burst out laughing
when I saw the American soldiers on guard here. Isn't it a little
too obious? This scene sympolises one of the objectives of the war."
"Gulf War Syndrome"-- often claimed to be from DU, then
usually denied by the US. Will there more US veteran
cases from the lastest? Still a mystery...
RADIATION EXPOSURE COMPENSATION Program
http://www.angelfire.com/tx/atomicveteran
Atomic Veterans Radiation News
http://www.tpromo.com/usvi/atomic/
http://www.vethealth.cio.med.va.gov/atomicvets.h tm "Approximately
195,000 U. S. service members have been identified as participants in the
post-World War II occupation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan following
the atomic bombing of Japan. In addition, approximately 210,000 mostly
military members are confirmed as participants in U.S. atmospheric
nuclear weapons tests between 1945 and 1962 in the United States and the
Pacific and Atlantic oceans prior to the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty.
Largely as a result of epidemiological studies of Japanese atomi..."
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/
Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with
Atomic Radiation. 1982 Wasserman and Soloman
http://archives.cjr.org/year/94/2/radiation.asp
Columbia Journalism Review
March/April 1994 THE RADIATION STORY NO ONE WOULD TOUCH
by Geoffrey Sea
" In California, Dorothy Legarreta, who had worked on the Manhattan
Project as a laboratory technician, organizes the National Association
of Radiation Survivors (NARS) and starts to write a book about human
experimentation. In 1982, while examining the papers of Joseph Hamilton
-- the scientist in charge of radiation experiments at the University of
California -- at the library of the University of California at Berkeley,
she comes across a 1950 memo written to Shields Warren, then director
of the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of biology and medicine. The
memo advised that large primates -- chimpanzees, for example -- be
substituted for humans in the planned studies on radiation's cognitive
effects (the very same program of experimentation that Dr. Saenger was
to execute). The use of humans, Hamilton wrote, might leave the AEC
open "to considerable criticism," since the experiments as proposed had
"a little of the Buchenwald touch."
"After Legarreta finds the so-called Buchenwald memo, Hamilton's
papers are removed from public access by University of California
administrators. Soon after this, Legarreta files a Freedom of Information
Act request with the Department of Energy, asking for all documents
concerning experiments in which humans were intentionally exposed to
radioactive materials through injection or ingestion. Later that year,
NARS receives a two-foot-high carton of documents in response -- documents
that, for the first time, expose the widespread human experimentation
program of the U.S. government.
"1988: Dorothy Legarreta is killed in a mysterious car crash,
reminiscent of the death of Karen Silkwood. Legarreta's briefcase --
listed on the accident report as being found -- is missing. The tow-truc
I'm still amazed that they designed and built these weapons with little more than slide rules and primitive computers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Remember, the Japanese attacked us. That made them the bad guys that time around. We did bad things too, but at least we weren't trying to rule the world.
Situational ethics. Fewer people died that way than if we'd used conventional weapons. It sucks, but it sucks the least of several possible options. That's how people make decisions during wars.
How then shall we compare and evaluate the behaviors of different countries during wartime? Being cynical just obscures the issue. Saying "everyone's a hypocrite" is like giving up.
-jim
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
Putting aside the "which war?" error, the main point is wrong, too. The US conducted the Strategic Bombing Survey after the war to determine the effects of conventional and atomic bombings. Before the end of the war, many of the top military brass, such as Undersecretary of the Navy, Bard, had been lobbying Truman not to use the bomb or to use it only as a test to demonstrate that we had it, because they were convinced that the Japanese were about to surrender. The Strategic Bombing Survey confirmed that the Japanese were, in fact, ready to surrender, and indicated that the Japanese had already been ready to offer a non-unconditional surrender, and would likely have offered an unconditional surrender within months. They did a person-by-person breakdown of the views in the Japanese government, their actions, and all sorts of other stuff to come to this conclusion; it was a pretty in-depth report. The only reason it took them more than the (sarcasm)huge benevolent three day waiting period(/sarcasm) that we gave them before dropping the second bomb was due to all of the confusion in the Japanese government.
The more you learn about what we did, the more annoyed you get with it. The target planning memos show a clear preference for killing *more* civilians, actually ruling out a number of militarly more useful targets with less civilian casualties. It's also likely that even Truman himself was lied to. In Truman's diaries, he writes how he never could support the targetting of Japanese women and children - how he didn't want America to resort to the sort of lows that the Japanese had, and how he was only interested in targetting the military. After the war, he gave an infamous speech in which he told the nation we had just dropped the first atomic bomb on "... Hiroshima - a military base".
I could go on in a lot more detail... but you get the picture. There's a lot of myths about Japan near the end of WWII, and one of the most profound is that the government was all looking to fight to the death.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."
plutonium and neptunium are _not_ chemically toxic in any way. in biological systems they are chemically inert as no cells are capable of processing it, and it cannot substitute for any element used in biological systems (unlike radium, which can substitute for calcium).
they are however _radiologically_ toxic.
as for the "toxic as botulism toxin", i call bullshit again. eat 1 mg of plutonium and 1 mg of botulism toxin and see who dies first.
but don't just take my word for it. try here.
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."
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.
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 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
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.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.