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.'"

Comments

Re:This sounds dumb...but

[chrysrobyn]

Besides, this is not just a bomb that killed thousands of people. It's a bomb that saved hundreds of thousands of lives. By forcing the Japanese into surrender, a months-long, duke-it-out, land invasion of Japan became unneccessary.

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.

Early Soviet nuclear work at Mayak

[Anonymous Coward]

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a great view of early Soviet nuclear work at Mayak starting in the late 1940's
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=so9 9larin

"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=so9 9larin