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Historians Propose National Park To Preserve Manhattan Project Sites
Hugh Pickens writes writes "William J. Broad writes that a plan now before Congress would create a national park to protect the aging remnants of the atomic bomb project from World War II, including hundreds of buildings and artifacts scattered across New Mexico, Washington and Tennessee — among them the rustic Los Alamos home of Dr. Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, and a large Quonset hut, also in New Mexico, where scientists assembled components for the plutonium bomb dropped on Japan. 'It's a way to help educate the next generation,' says Cynthia C. Kelly, president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, a private group in Washington that helped develop the preservation plan. 'This is a major chapter of American and world history. We should preserve what's left.' Critics have faulted the plan as celebrating a weapon of mass destruction, and have argued that the government should avoid that kind of advocacy. 'At a time when we should be organizing the world toward abolishing nuclear weapons before they abolish us, we are instead indulging in admiration at our cleverness as a species,' says Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich. Historians and federal agencies reply that preservation does not imply moral endorsement, and that the remains of so monumental a project should be saved as a way to encourage comprehension and public discussion. A park would be a commemoration, not a celebration, says Heather McClenahan, director of the Los Alamos Historical Society pointing out there are national parks commemorating slavery, Civil War battles and American Indian massacres. 'It's a chance to say, "Why did we do this? What were the good things that happened? What were the bad? How do we learn lessons from the past? How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?" '"
It's Christmas at ground zero
There's music in the air
The sleigh bells are ringing and the carolers are singing
While the air raid sirens blare
It's Christmas at ground zero
The button has been pressed
The radio just let us know
That this is not a test
Everywhere the atom bombs are dropping
It's the end of all humanity
No more time for last-minute shopping
It's time to face your final destiny
It's Christmas at ground zero
There's panic in the crowd
We can dodge debris while we trim the tree
Underneath the mushroom cloud
Ronald Reagan:
Well, the big day is only a few hours away now.
I'm sure you're all looking forward to it
as much as we are.
You might hear some reindeer on your rooftop
Or Jack Frost on your windowsill
But if someone's climbing down your chimney
You better load your gun and shoot to kill
It's Christmas at ground zero
And if the radiation level's okay
I'll go out with you and see all the new
Mutations on New Year's Day
It's Christmas at ground zero
Just seconds left to go
I'll duck and cover with my Yuletide lover
Underneath the mistletoe
It's Christmas at ground zero
Now the missiles are on their way
What a crazy fluke, we're gonna get nuked
On this jolly holiday
What a crazy fluke, we're gonna get nuked
On this jolly holiday!
--Wierd Al Yankovic
Christmas At Ground Zero
They are desperately trying to [b]get rid[/b] of about a trillion tons of nuclear waste from historic bomb making before it leaks into the Columbia RIver.
And they'll do it too. Just as soon as they figure out how, and if we pay Bechtel enough billions. Though sometimes it's about the journey and not the destination.
Take the tour, see the sights.
...Would honor something like this.
are condemned to repeat it. This is one piece of history that no one wishes to see repeated.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
But it all depends on the execution. As with any museum/park/etc. how you structure it sets the tone.
Great example would be German museums dealing with the events surrounding their involvement in the World Wars and the Holocaust. You go into any of those, and while they talk a lot about the Nazi Party, National Socialism, Hitler and the rest, you would be hard pressed to say that anyone would think any of it is an endorsement. Everything I saw really had a tone of: "My God, we screwed the pooch BIGTIME. Let's put this all out here, so maybe people won't let it happen again"
Granted, the atomic bomb isn't quite as clear of a moral area, since while it did kill many, many people, it also ended the war much earlier than was likely without it, and therefore all the casualties that would have entailed didn't occur. Instead of glorifying a WMD, it can help foster discussion about them, and past them.
"How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?"
Assad, Hamas and Iran know...Sarin is the neutron bomb of the 21st century. It destroys civilians without destroying the infrastructure so the attacker can just move in and get rid of the bodies and it has a ready made infrastructure in place to use to continue their conquest.
I may sound "off topic" or "trolling" but Syria's activities today show the reality.
the Dennis Kucinich who just lectured the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on how autism is caused by mercury in vaccines, right?
HEY THIS GUY SOUNDS LIKE AN EXPERT IN EVERYTHING LET'S LISTEN TO HIM
Why don't we just bulldoze concentration camps too? You know, just so we don't appear to be supporting the Holocaust.
then build it in hiroshima stupid people
been done
But there are no shortage of morbidly old professors who think they were. You don't get to make nukes and deserve to be remebered at the same time.
For those who've never visited, a tour of the museums at Los Alamos (the town) is incredibly humbling and thought-provoking. Except perhaps for psychopaths, there is nothing celebratory about it. On the contrary, the atmosphere is deeply troubling and anxiety producing. However, I for one would appreciate the opportunity to visit the lab grounds as a national park, to better understand how the Manhattan Project transpired. I believe this is important for humankind to grasp the darker sides of its nature.
Critics have faulted the plan as celebrating a weapon of mass destruction, and have argued that the government should avoid that kind of advocacy.
I've been to plenty of Holocaust museums and memorials and I don't recall any of them focusing on a celebration but rather the educational aspect.
Dumb!
They were cheep, quickly built bland buildings. Nothing exciting at all to really see.
Put a historical marker at the place and be done with it. There are enough good movies about it, and old film footage for anyone interested to look at.
There is a difference between a National Park and a National Historic Park. The proposed "National Park" is a National Historic Park, about 3 notches below a National Park in terms of visitors, staff, and funding.
"How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?"
*Have*? You *had* to use it? Sometimes there's nothing you can say but WTF.
This is very true. When I was in Germany I went to the dachau camp. It was a very somber experience. There was plenty explaining exactly what happened on the grounds. It was preserved and rebuilt in some ways, but it was never "endorsed"
I felt some pride at the gate looking at the plaques commemorating the U.S. 20th Armored Division and U.S. 42nd Infantry Division, they liberated the camp. A member of my family was in the U.S. 101st Airborne Division and they liberated of one of the sub-camps nearby. I was proud of the guys who shut down these camps and destroyed the government that created them.
But, yeah, once my eyes moved from the plaques to the original motto on the gate things became quite somber.
Sorry, no. Just make sure it's not contaminated. If it is, clean it up. If it isn't, let the current owners enjoy it. Historic preservation and environmentalism have to have limits. If they don't, everything will eventually become historic, and nothing will be farmed or lived on.
Let me be the first to propose the monument be a re-creation of the half-mile surrounding ground zero at Hiroshima. Highlighting the twisted and melted steel girders of the destroyed buildings, the piles of fused glass-like bricks and featuring the charred human remains.
> arc de triomphe, Trafalgar square, brandenburg gate
They were monuments to their country's victories; built also as rememberences to those who gave their lives for their country.
Not monuments to the group of men who created the machines of death and destruction.
Given the, um, totally excellent, standards for handling of radioactive goodies that were adhered to by unpracticed people rushing like crazy and shielded by secrecy, declaring the whole thing a "national park" and forgetting about it is probably cheaper than rehabilitating the place....
I agree completely. I work on a large government installation. Any building over 50 years old is considered potentially "historic" and must be studied prior to making changes or demolition. Old crappy buildings from the mid 50's of no particular interest. This isn't the Parthenon and there are already plenty of museums at places like Los Alamos and Alamogordo.
If we're going to just memorialize everything and turn everything into a historical building/place/whatever, why not just lock down the whole country and never allow us to do anything new ever again?
How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?
Well, one obvious solution is to kill everyone with some other superweapon so nobody is around to use atomic bombs in warfare. Otherwise, I think sooner or later atomic bombs will be used again. There are huge disincentives to using them, but there's no reason to expect those disincentives to always be good enough.
Consider for example, Syria's situation in the Middle East. The current government is facing its doom by a massive rebellion. But it might be able to hold on by using sarin nerve gas on the rebels. According to the media, various US military sources are claiming that Syria has mixed precursor chemicals for sarin and loaded it into warheads on aerial bombs.
Now it depends on whether a dying regime thinks it'll get better return from using sarin than not. A lot will depend on what sort of threat the rest of the world can and does choose to make with respect to these terrible weapons and whether Assad will be bold or desperate enough to call their bluff.
This is likely to be an occasional occurrence for dictatorships down the road as well. And some of those will be nuclear armed.
I for one am very glad of the lesson taught to the world by the detonation of two bombs during wartime Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I live in Australia, and we were next on the invasion list. I regret the loss of civilian life that the Japanese people suffered as a consequence of war and I am glad that Japan is now one of our greatest friends and highly respected.
I think it was inevitable that we would discover some method for extremely large scale destruction and I'm glad that humanity has so far not used the technology since WWII for anything more serious than sabre rattling- and that's bad enough. We need to understand how to deal with this kind of power because as much as we may not like it, it exists and it has existed all along. There are worse things than nuclear weapons too, so the learning experience is useful in other areas.
I personally support the idea of a monument to those men who were part of the Manhattan Project and think its pretty shallow for people to call them murderers etc. Firstly: fuck you- you weren't there (and neither was I). WWII was a response, NOT an invasion.
I agree with jtownatpunk.net 's comments. Take advantage of the learning experience while there are still people alive who can look you in the eye and tell you what it was really like back then. Sadly for the Manhattan Project the time for that is likely past.
Where is Major Kong!
The war was basically over. The main part of the Japanese Army was on the Chinese mainland.
The forces in Japan were more than sufficient to inflict massive casualties on the US. Look at what they managed at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the previous two battles on Japanese soil. Plus they were training their civilians to resist and fight. Plus we now know they were planning on using chemical weapons on the invasion beaches when the US landed. Plus they had been holding back kamikaze aircraft and suicide boats, again look at Okinawa. Plus they had also perfected the aerial dropping of bubonic plague infected fleas, they even tested it on Chinese villages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731. Marry this with their new submarines that could launch 2 or 3 aircraft, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400_class_submarine, and they would have the capability to target San Francisco not just invasion beaches. We have no idea what would have happened if the war went on until Spring 1946, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_japan.
The Russians were already invading in the north.
Wrong, Russia did not invade Japan until after the atomic bomb was dropped, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan.
Even if Russia would have attacked with the atomic bombing they would be quite busy on the mainland for many more months. Plus the Russians did not have an amphibious capability, they could not invade the Japanese home islands in force even if they wanted to.
Again, the vast majority of the Japanese army was on the Japanese mainland.
The millions of Japanese casualties that the previous poster referred to would have been predominately civilian. Some fighting, some caught in the middle, some suiciding ... again see Okinawa.
Rome (or rather Athens) wasn't built in a day ;)
Sorry, no. Just make sure it's not contaminated. If it is, clean it up. If it isn't, let the current owners enjoy it. Historic preservation and environmentalism have to have limits. If they don't, everything will eventually become historic, and nothing will be farmed or lived on.
How about the current owners pay for the cleanup themselves instead of having the taxpayers subsidize their enjoyment?
Point taken about everything becoming historic though.
Why are these weapons so different, in that "we must never use them again"? No one ever says that about, say, TNT, or even bullets.
Somehow it is accepted in war that we can shoot, blow up, stab, bludgeon, or strangle the enemy, but using an A-bomb is immoral.
Maybe what we should be concerned about is war itself.
I can't confirm it, but I think it was Sir Arthur Harris who said something like "Tell me one thing that is moral in war. Is sticking a bayonet in a man's belly moral?"
'It's a chance to say, "Why did we do this? What were the good things that happened? What were the bad? How do we learn lessons from the past? How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?"
I have a couple of problems with this quote. First of all, stylistically, it resembles the sort of thing that a rather vacuous high school student might write. It also contains an egregious example of a planted assumption: "How do we not ever have to use an atomic bomb in warfare again?" Planted assumption=We HAD to use them in Japan. The truth of this proposition may be a matter for debate-- however, it is incredibly offensive to me that this lady (who considers herself a historian or at least a student of history) believes that it is self-evident.
From what I understand, recent scholarship tends to support the opposite view, based in large part on War Department studies which came out in 1945 and have only recently been declassified.
How is this different than if Russia set up a set of historical preservation sites of the nuclear facilities leading to its first nuclear bomb? Or China?
You may not have approved, but it IS history.
Else, you might as well be saying to demolish anything that reminds you of something negative.
Perhaps you'd like to see the Peenemunde Historical Technical Museum in Germany razed and forgotten?
How is your position any different than others who have tried to erase "inconvenient" histories?
Do you even think about what you're saying before you say it? Ever been to Hanford or driven across it on hwy 240? In this particular case, the land is already "grabbed". In fact, about half of it has been set up as wildlife refuges already. "We" (e.g., the government) are still the current owners of much of the Manhattan Project lands.
As far as historical preservation at Hanford goes, the B reactor building is being left up, but all the other reactors are cocooned, and there won't be too much left of any of the buildings, laboratories, etc. at all in a couple of years. Most of it has already been removed.
'At a time when we should be organizing the world toward abolishing nuclear weapons before they abolish us, we are instead indulging in admiration at our cleverness as a species,' says Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich.
That's the sort of thing that you people elect to represent you. Wow.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
The buildings celebrate glorious military victories in accordance with the inherited rules of warface. Or liberation from foreign despotism. Pro gloria et patria. A building is like a victory march, and the arc is a reference to the old Roman Titus Arc. Nuclear mass murder of civilians and "victory" by murder blackmail of the non-combattant population are not glorious.