Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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