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U.S. Offers Glimpse at Manhattan Project Facility
jonerik writes "According to this article from the Associated Press, the US government is this week permitting the public a rare glimpse of its high-security Y-12 nuclear weapons plant as part of Oak Ridge, Tennessee's annual Secret City Festival, which is being held this coming weekend. Although the plant is still associated with ongoing nuclear weapons work, members of the public will be permitted to see parts of the facility associated with its work on the Manhattan Project's 'Little Boy' bomb, which was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. The facility produced the uranium-235 which was used in the device using 1,152 massive calutrons across nine separate buildings in 1944 and 1945. 'Don't you know the people in Knoxville wondered what in the world was going on out here,' Department of Energy guide Ray Smith said on Monday. 'All this material was coming in, truckload after truckload, and nothing ever left.'"
Man, I have quite a few paid leave days to spend and this would have been a great geek opportunity to spend part of them...being a science/history geek, this would have been a nice thing to visit.
It's not like we find any reason to visit Tennessee these days...
We need -1, Funny.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Ah, it's because of messages like yours that I have "insightful" set to score "-2."
You do know that the "unconditional" surrender that Roosevelt accepted (keeping the emperor on the throne) was essentially the same as the rejected offer the Japanese had previously made, right?
There are two very good museums in Japan you'd learn a lot at. One is in Hiroshima, and has many, many historical U.S. documents that show very clearly why the bombs were dropped. (Here's a hint: It's not the reason you think it is.) The other is at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which gives a pretty good insight into the history of WW2 that most Americans (evidently including you) don't know.
Even accepting your argument as true, there's a rather disturbing calculus of the value of human life (foreign civilian v. domestic military) you're employing. We're seeing it in the popular American perception of Iraq, where Americans basically don't give a damn about how many Iraqi civilians are killed. I can at least understand that. The whole reason a war with Iraq was politically possible in the first place without any kind of provocation is that Americans basically don't like "those kinds of people" very much.
But given that WW2 happened 60 years ago, America was equally at war with Germany and Japan. amd Japan is one of America's closest economic and strategic allies today, the fact that you would still consider killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to be negligible compared to "saving" hundreds of thousands of American military suggests you have deep prejudicial issues. I'm not going to call you racist, but it sure seems that you are.
With great power comes great fan noise.
You do know that there was no previous offer of surrender, right?
You do know that the actual surrender was, in fact, unconditional, right? We allowed the Emperor to stick around as a figurehead; it wasn't required.
And as far as the calculus: on one side, we have the people killed by the bomb directly. Many of them were "civilians", as much as that existed in wartime Japan.
On the other side, we have the entirety of the US armed forces, PLUS the population (civilian and otherwise) of Japan. The dictum was total war, by any means necessary, complete devotion to the Emperor until everybody on one side or the other was dead.
The correct choice was to end the war ASAP.
The fact that, as you say, "Japan is one of America's closest economic and strategic allies today," shows that we did everything right. What if, after the war, the island had been a wasteland, with 75% of the population dead?
The fact that you can't see that ending the war was a Good Thing shows you have deep anti-American issues. I'm not going to call you an idiot, but it sure seems that you are.
I live in Nagasaki (temporarily) as an American ex-pat (ex like external, not ex-wife). I sat through all the same lessons you did in school. I know the Western perspective.
They say the victor of war gets to define "history". Well, current "history", whoever the victor, isn't looking too keen on the American atomic bombing. There are several stories that the Japanese Emperor looked for a way to conditionally surrender, but the American president found that unacceptable -- the Emperor must give up his throne and tell his people he was not a god. (For this culture, that was not negotiable.) Additionally, the Japanese appeared to be postponing invasion long enough to surrender to the Soviets, who were making steady progress accross China at this time, and were supposedly 2 weeks away. The Soviets, as the theory goes, would accept a war-ending surrender that left the Japanese Emperor his throne and some dignity left. There was no realistic way the Japanese could surrender to the Americans if they believed any of them would still be alive to meet the Soviets -- the Americans knew this and were desperate to save the Japanese from the Communists.
I've been to the Nagasaki Peace Park and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. My grandfather was a US Navy fighter pilot in World War II. Every fiber of my being wants the Americans to have been justified in wiping out 150,000 civilians in two blinks of an eye, and perhaps tenfold (or more) than that in the decades to follow.
I'm not a historian, but I've read some history books (and watched The History Channel do its story on the end of WW2 in the Pacific). I don't claim to know what's right, but I want to offer these other perspectives for you to consider before making your bold claim that killing that many people was an effort to "save lives". Please take a look at both sides on Wikipedia (although it's clear you're pretty up on the proponents' side, the opposition is quite interesting to consider). We can't know for sure what happened 60 years ago. Maybe, even if the atomic bombs ended up costing more lives and Japan fell to the Russians, the world political landscape would have been different, causing World War 3 or the something like the Cuban Missile Crisis to play out differently so the long term cost in life would have been much higher. Maybe not.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a great view of early Soviet nuclear work at Mayak starting in the late 1940's9 9larin
9 9larin
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=so
"expensive apparatuses were more valuable than the people who operated them"
"it was common to clean up spills of radioactive solutions by hand. It seems strange now, but the possibility of spills was not anticipated, and there was no way to collect spilled solution safely. We had only wash cloths, buckets, and sometimes, rubber gloves. We collected the spilled solution and poured it into big glass bottles--it was a very expensive compound and we were expected to recover every drop."
"leaks happened there they sometimes lost as much as three tons of highly radioactive product. To collect those spills with wash cloths was impossible."
"several hundred kilograms of freshly irradiated nuclear fuel got stuck--men from everywhere in the plant were called out, and one after another they used long steel rods to push the elements into the apparatus. The only protection they had was cotton overalls and gloves"
Enjoy
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=so
I live about half a mile from the Y-12 facility. Some guys from work and I got together to tour their place a few weeks ago to view their network infrastructure. They've got a HUGE room full of Crays. It was pretty loud in there, as to be expected. One of the less polite of the guys I was with had the nerve to ask one of their network admins what he made.. 37 grand and no benefits, because very few of them actually work for Y-12. That was a surprise. From what I saw, most everything there is AMD and Nvidia. Their preferred Linux is SuSE for some reason.. to each their own I suppose. For anyone who may want to make the trip, drop me a line and I'll let you know of some other interesting things to do around here. For anyone bringing their family, there's a park (Commerce Park, I think it's called) right next to Y-12 with a nice little picnic/fishing area. I'm rambling.
Er, hello... the "total war" crap was put around by the members of the US government that were hot to test their new weapon. Many other people in the government kept trying to point out that their own intelligence was telling them that the Japanese government was willing to surrender under certain terms, but these guys had no intention of letting that interfere with the chance to use things that go boom.
I don't know why Americans are always bitching about the French surrendering, I mean towards the start of German occupation thousands upon thousands of frenchmen were dying each day on the front lines. There is a big difference between getting your arse handed to you and then giving up and surrendering for no good reason. Really the French and Japan had exactly the same reasons for surrendering an agressor, had killed hundreds of thousands of their army. So they surrendered and the killing stopped.
If you are Japanese, surely you know the firebombing of other cities in Japan killed more people than either nuclear bombing. You do know that, right?
The reason they shocked is they were an atrocity. Eating a thousand Japanese babies would have had the same impact.
I am trolling
This is the coolest place to go visit - would have been a seat of government for the uk during a nuclear war scenario. Lots of cool stuff to see.
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Hack Green
Home page
Not quite on the scale of this one but I thought someone here might find this of use.
Nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Some of the people on here are so liberal that they're offended by the realities of everyday life. There's nothing wrong with having pride in your country and admiring its war machines.
I'm surprised that these people aren't ashamed of being human or living in the country they do, because after all, humans fought their way to the top of the food chain and their ancestors surely took the country they live in by force from someone else. Fighting, natural selection- it's all part of nature. No matter how evolved people think they are, they still cannot break free of the most simple rules of mother nature.
One of the things I've always thought the Americans got right, and could be justifiably proud of, was how they rebuilt both Germany and Japan after WW2.
While not _completely_ innocent of a Machiavelllian scheming (what is, in politics?) the effort to NOT seek revenge by punishing the enemy, and instead to do everything possible to rebuild their economies and get them back on their own, *independant* feet, I think was one of the wisest political decisions made in human history. The contribution to the stability and well-being of the world since is incaluable.
The sad thing is that it appears that the lesson learned there has been forgotten. Can you imagine what the world would be like today, if the US had, instead of invading Iraq, chosen to bring the Marshall Plan to Afganistan?
Not only would the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of people been improved (an absolute good in of itself) an America that chose to treat Afganistan benevolently, that rebuilt industry and infrastructure and got the country cleaned up and back on its feet, would have torn the heart out of the support base for the people who attacked the US in the first place. It's hard to get people to hate the guy whose making your life better....
Ah well.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
By bombing Japan, the US avoided having to clean up hundreds (if not thousands) of islands and hundreds of cities, over an immense area.
That all sounds wonderfully simple -- until you remember that before the bombing, the Japanese were working through multiple other countries to surrender.
As for the Japanese armies in China and on mainland Asia, they were already defeated by both the Chinese communists and by Russia's Red Army.
Remember, before we nuked Japan, the US could park battleships only a couple of miles off the Japanese coast and shell at will without resistance. Japan was militarily defeated.
Japan could have put up some resistance in case of a US invasion of their home islands, but the much quoted "million American casualties" is an out and out lie. The US military calculated estimated casualties from an invasion as around 200,000. Horrendous, yes, but your comment seems to imply that the Japanese still had a viable and functioning military -- they didn't.
The real reason for the nuking of Japan?
As WWII journalist and author Studs Terkel put it, "Why did we drop [the atomic bombs]? So little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we've got the cards. That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we've got something and they'd better behave themselves in Europe. That's why it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and they'll spit in your eye."
I do remember in the early 1960's that the Atomic Engergy Museum in Oak Ridge had a Californium 252 http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele098.html / source in a tank of water, with a chute that would direct a quarter to the source, hold it for a few seconds, then let it roll on out. Cf252 is a stong neutron source, which activated the silver to a very short-lived isotope. We had fun running quarters through as fast as posible to see how hot we could get them. But, they had to shut it down in 1964, because the copper isotopes (US Treasury changed the quarter to a silver sandwich of copper) lasted much, much longer.
cabg x3 is a life changing event...
Oh yes, because once one side has committed an atrocity they're no longer human, and anything is justified. That's the kind of logic that keeps bitter ethnic conflicts going for 30 years, children living their whole lives knowing nothing but getting them because of what they did to us, and then they'll get us because of what we just did to them. An atrocity is an atrocity is an atrocity, no matter what the other side did.
I am trolling
During WWII, my grandfather was teaching physics to Navy cadets at Murray State College in western Kentucky, as part of the War Department's "90-Day Wonder" program. They'd take cadets out of basic training who'd had some college experience, and give them technical training before putting them in charge of engineering battallions, or other technical posts.
Grandfather (a civilian) actually wanted to enlist in the regular military, but was always told by the temporary military commander of this civilian school, "Uncle Sam needs you right here, teaching these cadets." Finally he gave up, decided they were right, and resigned himself to what he was best at, being a small-town physics teacher.
Immediately he starts getting draft notices in the mail. In frustration he showed the notices to the commander, who telephoned his own superiors and according to my grandfather, "Just started cussing." After five minutes, he hangs up.
The next thing my grandfather knows, he receives another notice, no return address, telling him to take a train from Murray to a town he'd never heard of near Knoxville, and not to tell anybody where he was going.
Grandfather arrived at Oak Ridge, which in his telling was hardly a town, with knee-deep mud in the streets. He asked where the town hall was (this is where he was supposed to meet his contact) but no one would say a word to him. Finally he joined in a boy's game of marbles, and found out from the children where the place was.
From the town hall, he was whisked into the nascent Oak Ridge plant, and interviewed for some hours about his background, and his knowledge of physics (which I remember was heavy on practical knowledge, but medium on sophisticated theory.)
After the meeting was over, they wouldn't let him leave the plant for several more hours, as his paperwork had gone missing during the interview.
Grandfather decided that Oak Ridge was no place to raise my three year-old father, took the train back to Murray, and went straight back to teaching those Navy cadets (and then the GI Bill veterans, after the war, and then their children.)
He died in 1996, without ever knowing the job description for which he'd been so meticulously interviewed.
Now the story about the class of graduating cadets "replacing" his entire set of "civilian" demonstration apparatus by standing at attention and presenting him with a chalkboard eraser tied to a piece of string will have to wait for another Offtopic post....
RIP, Granddaddy.
Actually, that alone is a pretty good reason.
I can't tell you how sick and disgusting I think it is to "justify" the incineration of thousands and thousands of civilians in order to make moves on a global chessboard of what you think some other country might do.
Russia rarely expanded after the Second World War.
Especially compared to the US!
Who's the real empire here? How many times did the USSR invade the US? None. But the US and other western countries occupied parts of the USSR for years (from WWI into the 1920s) trying to overthrow the young Bolshevik gov't.
Who knows what the USSR might have evolved into without that aggression against it. But that is just conjecture.
We do know that the US encircled the USSR with bases, illegally flew spy planes over its territory, rigged industrial accidents, and used every dirty trick in the book in a war of aggression known as the "Cold War."
No matter how you figure it -- numbers of interventions, number of outright invasions, numbers of gov'ts overthrown and replaced by puppet regimes -- it is clear who the world's aggressor nation is. It is the US. The aggression of the US around the world in the past century dwarfs anything the USSR dreamed of, or anything achieved by the British, or other, empires.
That might not be pleasant for us to acknowledge, but facts are facts.
This is the classic false dichotomy that everyone pulls out to support the bombing: It was either invade and take the entire island by force, or use the A-bomb. With that pair of choices, it seems pretty foolish to even question the use of the bomb.
Now, it turns out that there were actually more than just two options, and these were options seriously considered by Truman.
The first option was conditional surrender. The Japanese actually requested conditional surrender, with the main concession they wanted being an at least ceremonial role for their Emperor*. Now, we really wanted unconditional surrender (they -had- started the devastating Pacific War after all), and obviously we were nervous about any conditions that left Japan able to start another war. Whatever specific demands they might have had, though, we don't know for sure because we never asked for clarification.
The second alternative was to wait for the Russians to declare war. The administration was quite sure that Japan would surrender once Russia entered the war. Now, we definitely didn't want the Japanese surrendering to the Russians. Cold War logic was in effect before WWII was over. The bombs were meant to scare not just Japan but Russia as well.
There was a third option, the off-shore demonstration of the A-bombs incredible power, but I consider this the weakest. We only had two bombs, so if the demonstration didn't convince them we'd have to pray the one we had left worked and did the job.
Anyway, the point of this is not to say that the bomb was the wrong decision. The point is that the situation was not as simple as 200,000 people dead in two blasts or millions dead in an invasion. That's just a false dichotomy that makes what is really a horrendous decision to have to make look simple so we can sleep at night.
From Truman's point of view in 1945 it may have been the right choice; now that we know more about the bomb's effects it's less clear. But it was never clear to begin with.
* A concession that, despite the unconditional surrender, McArthur granted them anyway. Ironic, and also a pretty awesome diplomatic move on McArthur's part.
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