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Atomic Veterans Speak Out
Posted by
michael
on Sun Jul 11, 2004 10:09 PM
from the lead-lined-jockstrap dept.
from the lead-lined-jockstrap dept.
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."
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A map without a key... (Score:5, Insightful)
Communication helps sometimes.
Re:A map without a key... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually you could put a lot of informatio into the picture.
1. It was compiled by a civilian because; the DOE/DOD probably didn't care about the topic of continental radiation.
2. If that's correct and credible data on fallout, it might suggest that they _did_ monitor the fallout. Maybe they didn't belive that the fallout were dangerous at that time, maybe they thought that building nukes to fight the commies were more important or maybe someone earned way to much money on money on it.
3. The data was probably classified until late eighties - 1991. So someone decided that some peolpe could die because testing the nukes where more important.
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Re:A map without a key... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:A map without a key... (Score:5, Funny)
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Trinity: The Atomic Bomb Movie (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Trinity: The Atomic Bomb Movie (Score:5, Informative)
Right, that's an amazing sequence, especially when you realize the horse mask is anything but airtight - as if it would really make that much of a difference.
Read the history of this shot:CASTLE-BRAVO [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
Apparently the bomb designers miscalculated something. The yield was supposed to be about 5 megatons. Turned out to be closer to 15. (Miscalculated!) The fallout irradiated other islanders and a fishing boat that were supposed to be safe. I'd say this event qualifies as one of the biggest engineering f-ups in history.
Here's an interesting animation [cancer.gov] about fallout from the Nevada tests. Guess it's for people who don't like to read. [slashdot.org]
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Castle Bravo (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still amazed that they designed and built these weapons with little more than slide rules and primitive computers.
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Re:Trinity: The Atomic Bomb Movie (Score:5, Funny)
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My GrandFather... (Score:5, Interesting)
...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.
Re:My GrandFather... (Score:5, Interesting)
He was at Bikini helped setup and "clean-up" afterwards. No cancers or other tell-tales.
He does joke why his kids are taller then them though... he 6'2" and kids 6'2" to 6'10". For us it was all the manure between our toes while cleaning the barn.
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Radio Bikini (Score:5, Informative)
Actually i got a true story about this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Actually i got a true story about this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I am currently in remission after having Acute Myeloblastic Leukaemia for the past couple of months. It's interesting how some people who have been exposed to radiation and all sorts of nasties which could potentially develop into cancer, never get it. Whilst others who have been through nothing of the sort get cancer, like myself.
I live a normal life, the doctors don't know why I got Leukaemia and don't know why lots of other people who come for treatment at the same hospital gets Leukaemia or any other cancer for that matter. There are a lot of people I stayed with who were elderly men and had been exposed to nuclear radiation or war situations where the risk of cells mutating into cancer is higher than the rest of the population.
Sadly, cancer continues to take a hold on the lives of many people and although a cure is bound to occur sometime in the future, our grandfathers and ancestors who put their lives on the line to save their nations or whatever don't get to see that cure.
I'm in remission but that doesn't mean I'm cured. The absolute and callous disregard for their health and safety at the time _is_ definitely shocking and when I see that somebody like me who hasn't done anything as brave and courageous as our forefathers, it kinda makes me feel guilty that I am getting better but they had no chance.
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Numerical Data? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Numerical Data? (Score:5, Interesting)
The kind of doses they're talking about are actually too small to make this work. For instance, this [aracnet.com] guy says "...4 years ago, our Health Physics people told me that I had the highest recorded occupational dose of anyone in Canada," which turns out to be 150 mrem. Well, 150 mrem is on the same order of magnitude as natural background for one year. (It depends on things like whether you live in Denver, and whether you have radon in your basement.) The added cancer risk is simply infinitesimal, and this was apparently an unusually high dose.
People just don't seem to want to admit that radiation exposure is a risk, and that the risk is small and quantifiable. Check out this [wikipedia.org] wikipedia article to learn about the units involved. Most cancer is caused by something other than radiation, and nearly all radiation exposure is natural exposure anyway, at the epidemiologial level.
I'd be more concerned about the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings...or veterans working in shipyards who got exposed to asbestos... or some of the ones who got a case of acute lead poisoning via a bullet.
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Re:Numerical Data? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of the 220 people who worked on location, 91 contracted cancer by the early 1980s and 46 died of it -- including Wayne, co-stars Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead, and director Dick Powell. Statistically, only 30 people out of a group that size should have gotten cancer in their lifetimes.
Source: Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope [straightdope.com].
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Re:Numerical Data? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, and of course none of those people were heavy smokers. No, not a one of them (that's sarcasm by the way). Dick Powell used to advertise cigarettes, Wayne was a five pack a day smoker and even Agnes Moorehead (now this would be the name of a porno star, interesting how times change, isn't it?) was known to light up now and then. Of course killing yourself with a pack-a-day habit isn't as interesting as a conspiracy theory.
The residents of southwestern Utah are predominantly Mormon and therefore predominantly non-smokers. They also experienced (and continue to experience) cancer rates that are more than triple the norm, and the pattern of increased cancer risk closely correlates to the distance from the blast sites and related common weather patterns. Mormons elsewhere generally experience lower than normal cancer rates.
Also, no "conspiracy theory" is required here: The US government did not truly understand the risks, and neither did the people living downwind. The government was well aware of the short-term dangers of radiation sickness, but didn't really know that lower exposure levels could cause increased cancer risk decades later.
My father used to go out and watch the blasts for fun, and I'm sure I would have done the same; they were pretty impressive even from two hundred miles away. My dad, by the way, has not had any form of cancer and is still quite healthy. His younger brother had leukemia but beat it with a year of intensive chemotherapy.
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Pioneers get the arrows (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Remember: Cancer is a genetic disease (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Great article! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Remember... (Score:5, Interesting)
Same in UK and China. Any Franch/ USSR example? (Score:4, Informative)
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 [aic.gov.au]. 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?
Re:Same in UK and China. Any Franch/ USSR example? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [news.com.au] were ordered to stand there and watch the nuclear blasts. Nuclear clouds floated over and settled on [news.com.au] the nearby major city (Adelaide pop of 800,000 or so at the time.).
Civilians [news.com.au] 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 [news.com.au] 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.
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DOE test shot pictures available (Score:5, Informative)
The DOE [doe.gov] has some great photos of the various test shots available, at very low cost.
--jc
My father is/was an atomic vet (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The great scientific irony.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The great scientific irony.. (Score:5, Insightful)
the fight isn't over until they stop, you know, fighting. Our goal wasn't to "prove" ourselves better then the Japanese. we had been doing that since 1942. our goal was to get them to STOP shooting at us.
consider the facts presented in the Fog of War. American bombers killed 100,000 people in a single night of fire bombing. We destroyed, what, 95% of Tokyo? in a single night.
we "only" killed about 80,000 in a night in Hiroshima (many of the secondary deaths took a lot longer).
The A-Bombs killed only a fraction of the people killed thru conventional bombings and warfare. Add up just the numbers that are shown in Fog of War.
but, after allll that, the Japanese were STILL FIGHTING. They had no navy to speak of, and they had no manufacturing capabilities to make a new one. After the battles of Midway and the Coral Sea, there was no way they could have produced enough Aircraft Carriers to rival us. We had more at that point, and we could build them faster. They also didn't haevteh means (nor apparently the will) to develop new weapons. (They ahd the same model planes at the beginning and end of the war, while the Allies developed better equipment in general). They barely had two cities left standing on their island. They didn't have much of ANY military or industry left.
buuut, they kept fighting. even "castrated". what we needed was something to make them GIVE UP. maybe another year of conventional war would have made them give up. But the A-bomb DID make them give up.
so no, the war was NOT over. Not until the opponent stops fighting.
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Green Run (Score:5, Interesting)
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
nuclear links, DU, human experimention... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Those who forget history are doomed... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Those who forget history are doomed... (Score:5, Funny)
Just what we need on Slashdot... a Civil War troll...
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Re:The flip side of the coin. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:The flip side of the coin. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The flip side of the coin. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:The flip side of the coin. (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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.
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Re:The flip side of the coin. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:The flip side of the coin. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Perhaps this is true...perhaps it's not (Score:5, Interesting)
First, with so much misinformation floating around about Japan's eagerness to surrender, it's pathetic that a comment like this is modded as "Funny". Pathetic.
First, here's a link to a transcript of the Potsdam Declaration, issued by the Allies on July 26, 1945, calling for Japan's immediate surrender: Potsdam Declaration [ndl.go.jp].
What was Japan's response? The next day, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo advised that "it would [be] extremely impolitic for Japan to reject the Potsdam Declaration", and secured agreement to not publicly dismiss the document. The next day, however, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki did publicly reject the declaration, stating "The government does not regard [the Potsdam Declaration] as a thing of any value; the government will just ignore [mokusatsu] it. We will press forward resolutely to carry the war to a successful conclusion."
Quotes appear in Richard Frank's "Downfall". Frank goes on to comment, "Literally, mokusatsu meant 'kill with silence,' but idiomatically it housed an array of meanings: 'take no notice of it', 'treat with silent contempt', or 'ignore.'"
It doesn't mean "We don't have a decision yet."
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Re:thx for their efforts and sacrifices (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:thx for their efforts and sacrifices (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:thx for their efforts and sacrifices (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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then will you please (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:You just happen to be on the side that won (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:Troll!?!?! I'm not a fucking troll !! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Parent
Regrettably, they earned it. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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not that effective (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Miss the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:not that effective (Score:5, Insightful)
This is somewhat true. But it's not a trick that's going to work twice. Once people see how unimpressive the first dirty bomb is, they won't be that scared by later ones. Car bombs on the other hand routinely deliver results. You will be able to consistently generate fear with one of these.
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Re:new atomic veterans du238 (Score:5, Interesting)
Some general information. Naturally-occurring uranium is composed of three different isotopes. It's 99.2745% U-238,
To use uranium in the production of nuclear power, it must be enriched. The result of the enrichment process is uranium with a U-235 percentage of from 3-5%, if you're talking about a civilian power plant, or upwards of 90%, if you're talking about a naval reactor.
What's left over from this process is the depleted uranium. It's called that because it's been depleted of the U-235. In other words, it's actually less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium, one of the most abundant elements on the planet.
So how radioactive is it? Not very. The measure of radioactivity is the Curie. 1 Ci is equal to 3.7*10^10 radioactive decays per second. In SI units, we use the Becquerel, and 1 Bq is equal to 1 radioactive decay per second, or 1 Bq = 2.703*10^-11 Ci.
Now, plain, natural uranium has an activity level of 25 Bq/kilogram. Consider for a second how amazingly low that is: in one kilogram of natural uranium, there are only 25 radioactive decays each second. That's about 4 moles of uranium, by the way, so that's roughly 2.4*10^24 atoms.
By comparison, the C-14 isotope of carbon is present to such a degree in organic matter that a random block of the stuff has an activity level of 6 pCi/g. Potassium-40 is also present in organic matter, to the tune of 11 pCi/g. Hell, take a 70 kilogram adult, and total up the naturally occurring radioisotopes in his body (the uranium, the thorium, the K-40, the radium, the C-14, the tritium, the polonium), and you'll see that a human being has an activity level of over 19,000 Bq, or 278 Bq/kg.
Human beings are over 11 times as radioactive as natural uranium, and even more radioactive than U-238.
So stop hysteria-mongering.
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chemically toxic? bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
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 [nationmaster.com].
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