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Oldest Weapons-grade Plutonium Found In Dump
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Jan 21, 2009 07:31 PM
from the radioactive-home-coming dept.
from the radioactive-home-coming dept.
Urchin writes "Researchers have just identified the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made. The batch was produced as part of the Manhattan Project, but predates Trinity — the first nuclear weapon test — by seven months. It was unearthed in a waste pit at Hanford, Washington, inside a beaten up old safe."
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Submission: Oldest weapons-grade plutonium found in dump by Anonymous Coward
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File 13 (Score:5, Interesting)
No political statement intended, but it would be surprising if one day the government contractors doing cleanup also found a more/less completed Nuclear weapon warhead buried in a trash pit too.
Makes one wonder what Russia still has buried in their "nuclear trash pits"?
I am sure Mike Rowe will Not be going to film that Dirty Job... (But I would certainly watch it if he ever did... as I imagine seeing Barsky fall in a pit of Nuclear Waste as Mike kiddingly mocks him...
Re:File 13 (Score:5, Interesting)
Makes one wonder what Russia still has buried in their "nuclear trash pits"?
Stuff you would not believe, ranging from nuclear-powered generators (for remote installations) that were abandoned all over the ex-Soviet Union on its collapse, to six nuclear submarines and ten reactor cores that were just dumped into the Artic...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kara_Sea [wikipedia.org]
This not counting the nukes they lost at sea, or are still rusting away awaiting decomm.
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Researchers (Score:5, Funny)
Worth a read - interesting article (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparantly the stuff was actually discovered in 2004, but it's taken them this long to do the scientific detective work to figure out where this particular sample came from.
Scary picture of the rusty unearthed safe & dirty glass bottle full of 99.96% pure plutomium here:
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn16447-hanford-site/ [newscientist.com]
Re:Worth a read - interesting article (Score:4, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239 [wikipedia.org] shows that Plutonium-239 is really hard to make and come by... anything more pure than 94% is considered weapons grade and anything more pure than 97% is considered "super grade."
What's more is that after doing some calculations, it looks like you only need about 510cc of the stuff to reach critical mass and there's 400cc here. Could this have been dangerous in the wrong hands?
The article is full of its own questions. There's still a mystery as to how the safe was contaminated and why this sample wasn't used in a bomb sooner. The article treats these questions like ancient history, but aren't there people alive and around who can answer them? Weren't there records kept?
Further investigation is warranted.
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Re:Worth a read - interesting article (Score:5, Funny)
The real shame is that Doc Brown never had to get involved with terrorists after all.
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Re:Worth a read - interesting article (Score:4, Informative)
Now, P-239 decays into U-235, and it -is- easy to chemically separate them.
All of this I learned in the last 10 minutes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium-239
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Nuclear Dump (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nuclear Dump (Score:5, Informative)
Tell it to the downwinders [downwinders.com]. In 1945 alone Hanford released over 500,000 curies of radioactive iodine into the air. Three Mile Island, by comparison, released about 20 curies by accident and everyone freaked out.
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A little insight.. (Score:5, Informative)
I have personally visited the fields where they doing all this. The term "waste pit" is misleading. A lot of stuff was stuffed in 55gal drums and buried in rows underground just because they didnt know what to do with it. It was always intended to go back and clean them up, but due to delays they have been there longer than expected. It wasnt just thrown out in a big pile.
There is a huge tent on rollers (about football field size) that has a crane mechanism hanging from the ceiling. The barrels (and some boxes) are mostly rusted really bad so digging is done very slowly to avoid busting any. Those that are judged to be too weak are packed into a larger barrel that fits over the old one. There is also a ventilation trailer that has automated drills to pierce drums that are under pressure slowly to release gases so they dont explode. Its really pretty cool how they have it set up.
They just didnt know any better back then, and there was no way for them to have guessed what would happen with all that stuff. Unfortunately work on the vitrification plant is constantly delayed due to red-tape, but when it gets up and running then that will be a major break through.
Note: Most of the stuff in these barrels is solid. The liquid stuff are held in huge (over a million gallon) tanks. Those are also being replaced.
I guess that (Score:5, Funny)
Richard Feynman mustn't have had access to this particular safe.
More to be found (Score:5, Interesting)
Much more. Take a drive out there sometime. Mile after mile of desert. There is construction rubble, old reactors, contaminated pipes and equipment mixed with construction rubble. Even the stuff they know is there is bad. Tanks full of screaming hot radioactive waste that burp flammable gas. Can't stabilize it, can't remove it, and definitely no smoking near it. The cesium pool...no life guard on duty. N Springs, the canyon facilities. And that's just what we know about. There are certainly more finds like this one buried out there. More plutonium, uranium, americium, cesium, thorium, take your pickium there's a container of it buried out there, probably mixed with something toxic, mutagenic, or carcinogenic that's equally scary when it's not radioactive. They were in a hurry, didn't understand the risks, record keeping was...occasional...and what scientists did was not understood by the majority of people working out there and frequently not well regulated.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, it is what it is out there. Just don't be surprised what turns up in a backhoe bucket out at Hanford.
Re:More to be found (Score:5, Interesting)
but its hardly the fallout 3 scenario you imply.
Nah, I was there. There's a ton of crap out there. A lot of it we know about, a lot we still don't. A bunch has been cleaned up but it's a huge expanse of land that's been in use over 60 years. I personally found stuff buried in cabinets in labs that have been in use for decades that scared me. The researchers using that lab at the time had no idea it was there. People come and go out there all the time. Stuff gets left behind, the next person to use that space doesn't have a clue what went on there before and doesn't want to deal with the paperwork to get rid of it. Now apply that to hundreds of square miles of desert dedicated to producing weapons of mass destruction in a hurry. I'll take bizarre radioisotopes for 600, Alex. And the answer was always the daily double. Some of those projects were military, either secret or undocumented or both. And they tended to bury their mistakes.
It's beautiful country, no doubt. And cancer rate in the area population, adjusted for age, is actually lower than the general population. Ambient radiation...depends where you're standing and when you were there. The iodine releases...those were bad but a long time ago. The old A & B reactors might be a museum now, but I don't think you'll ever get the grand tour of the canyon facilities in the 200 Area. There are a lot of doors in those you wouldn't want to open. The K Basins, the rod pools...I wonder if those cases have corroded all the way through yet? I'd be surprised if they got those cleaned up, it was hard to even handle them. There were rooms full of rotting rods.
The real problem with the cleanup is a lack of will to get it done, not necessarily the contractors. I was on a site one day...15 contractors standing around, half of them half-way into protective equipment. I asked why everyone was standing around and they said they had to wait for a mandatory safety lecture but the person giving it was late. 45 minutes later some dude shows up and gives them a five minute pep talk on slip, trip and fall hazards. Cornered him on his way off site and asked if he knew how much money went down the drain because he couldn't get there on time. He was furious. I got a call a couple days later...I won't tell you who from...but they were concerned about hearing that I wasn't a team player. Still not, but that's not here or there. Contractors are what they are and everyone has a lawyer, but the real problem is good old fashioned mismanagement.
In short, you don't know shit. If you live in the Tri-Cities you only know what the PR people tell you. If you're DoE management, you definitely don't have a clue. If you work out there somewhere, you know your little space and that's it. If you're EPA or Ecology you know your projects but not the whole picture. If you do anything classified you don't talk to anyone else and no one knows what you really do. Everything is so compartmentalized, a lot of historical knowledge is long gone, and the Bush administration has been running things out there the last decade. The same people who brought us Katrina and Iraq supervising a hazmat cleanup. ROFL!
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A native's perspective. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, it's only a matter of time before a crew of teenage crime-fighters mutates into existence. Hanford will then be the safest place in the world!
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Interesting)
Hanford isn't that bad of a problem---yet. The important thing to note is that Hanford is proximate to the Columbia River, a major watershed for the Pacific Northwest. Currently the stored (highly radioactive) waste is leaking into the groundwater, but has not yet reached the river. Once that happens, well, things won't be very pretty downriver. Portland is known for being a fairly "green" city, and that trend can be expected to continue. Possibly it'll be a glowing, radioactive green city...
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
You said "Currently the stored (highly radioactive) waste is leaking into the groundwater, but has not yet reached the river."
But I showed you that it has already. Operational or not - and you didn't mention that at all in your post; it's still there, and given that the site hasn't been cleaned up, it is still a problem, neh? Did it just stop leaking? Leakage is still occurring and will likely get worse as the containers buried there, and the liquid waste facilities, continue to deteriorate.
It's also highly likely that there's a lot of that waste, even from the time period you refer to, sequestered in sediments and other places along the river.
I guess I'm wondering what point you're trying to make in your reply. "That's not the waste I was talking about" sounds like "that's not the droids you are looking for."
Not yet? Are you implying that Hanford isn't a major problem, "yet"? It's been a superfund site since the late 80s, and is not-so-debatedly our worse radioactive dump site. Why it hasn't been seriously dealt with, considering it's location and the cities downstream, and the sheer amount of waste stored there, escapes me.
I'm not being pedantic. Hanford is a horrible problem and we should have put major funding into cleaning it up back in the 80s, when the problem was recognized. I'm old enough to remember the news and science journal reports back when it started becoming a concern - decades late wrt to our knowledge about the dangers, as far as I'm concerned.
That's what got my ire up about this story - finding an old Manhattan Proj era safe with near-critical mass material in it just "buried" at the site - likely lost thru oversight and secrecy, and we're apparently just getting that deep into digging this stuff up? Obviously our cleanup/superfund programs are underfunded or not being done competently. (Not news, but still aggravating)
So make yourself clear, if you can.
Yeah, I'm angry. Not at you, specifically, but at the ignoramuses who have and continue to bury problems like this because it's "not their problem" - or, "it's not a /(our) problem...yet" or "we don't want to pay money to fix it, let our kids do it." Bullshit. Metric tons of bullshit. ... superfund sites seem to exist at the whim of the current administration. Which is a travesty. We as a country need to own up to our past problems, and just fix them. Which will be costly, but not as costly as ceasing to exist as as a nation, culture, or society, or even a responsible political entity. If there is such a thing.
Not sorry if I seem to be ranting. Someone has to say it. I just wish I knew how to say it more clearly.
SB
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
Under intense time pressure to work with previously theoretical isotopes that just might save tens of thousands of American lives?
At the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian Japanese lives.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:4, Funny)
At the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian Japanese lives.
That's what happens when your Emperor and your military piss off America.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:4, Insightful)
That is such a bizarre statement that I'm just going to stare at you in shock.
*stares*
You do know that working Plutonium implosion devices are super-hard to create, right? Unless you have everything precisely calibrated, the bomb will merely fizzle rather than fission. So even with a safe full of Plutonium, it will be a long time until someone sets us up the bomb. (Say, about 92 years? :-P)
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Informative)
Relatively speaking, building a space shuttle is easy once you have enough fuel. Relatively speaking.
Sorry, but no. The implosion part of the weapon is incredibly difficult. Far more difficult than your average terrorist organization could pull off. One of the reasons why the US restricts supercomputers and monitors for large detonations is that development tends to require both a computer simulation (to get the design right) and experimentation to ensure the quality of construction. If you have enough materials, you can forgo the former part and just experiment.
Perhaps you're thinking of gun-type weapons? Those are stupidly simple to build in comparison to an implosion device. However, they are made from Uranium rather than Plutonium.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Informative)
For your sake, I hope this is a joke. The tolerances of implosion nuclear weapons are incredibly tight. The type of plans necessary to create a functioning implosion device are state-held secrets and have only been seen by a select few with Top Secret clearance. Anything you can get out of a textbook or off the internet is simply not detailed enough to produce a functional weapon.
Think of it this way. You need to pack C4 in a casing such that:
1. The force of the C4 is completely contained.
2. The force is evenly applied to the plutonium sphere such that it won't shift or move about during detonation.
3. The force is projected as close to spherically as possible.
Those are tall orders for any engineer! As I said, the tolerances are so tight that the most likely outcome of any detonation is a fizzle. Only with very sophisticated R&D can any superpower even hope to create an implosion device.
Gun type on the other hand, are easy. Just slam two hemispheres of Uranium together hard enough and BOOM. With that kind of ease of use, why would any non-superpower bother with implosion devices? (For the record, gun-types were retired by the military due to safety concerns. If anything accidentally sets off the explosive trigger... BOOM! Whereas implosion devices can be designed to fizzle if accidentally detonated before arming.)
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet the first time a team of engineers tried to build one, it worked. They didn't even have a supercomputer to do simulations on.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:4, Insightful)
They're also highly ineffective. Very little fallout can be spread through conventional means. And of the fallout that does spread, you'll kill very few people. The explosion intended to disperse the materials is guaranteed to kill more people than the radioactive fallout.
Rule of thumb: If the fallout is hot enough to kill a large number of people, it's hot enough to completely degrade within hours to months. The only place you're going to find those sorts of materials is inside a live reactor. For obvious reasons, it's not really feasible to get a hold of such materials.
Worst case scenario, you give a half-dozen people lung cancer. Not exactly an effective weapon.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Funny)
Worst case scenario, you give a half-dozen people lung cancer. Not exactly an effective weapon.
Just make sure you don't detonate it in the smoking area, or you'll never even know if it was effective....
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
As a terror weapon, it works. The people who do not understand the difference vastly outnumber the ones who do.
BOMB? Radiation!?! SERIOUS PANIC
Will it actually rack up a large body count? No. But the resulting panic (OMG terrorist Radiation!!) would be far, far worse than anything we've yet seen.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you notice that was the last time that Japan attacked anyone? Peace is the result of completely removing your enemy's capacity or desire to wage war. Sad, but true.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
peace for the enemy maybe, How long has US spent in the time since then NOT at war?
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
>peace for the enemy maybe, How long has US spent in the time since then NOT at war?
With all due respect, there has been nothing to compare with WWII. All states of War are not equal.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:4, Insightful)
Tell that to the guys in the cemetary, their widows, their children.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
All states of War are not equal.
Tell that to the guys in the cemetary, their widows, their children.
Believe me, all states of war are equal when you're on the wrong end of an enemy weapon.
Well, any state of war is bad (I think that's your point), but I offer you 416,000 [wikipedia.org] examples of why "all states of war are equal" is a mistake to think. Compare that to the current war's 5,000ish [wikipedia.org] figure and you can better visualize the point of the GGP.. BTW, figures are fatal U.S. military casualties only
Fishbowl's opinion remains true in my eyes - WWII does not compare to anything since and there is indeed a 'spectrum' in regard to the 'state of war'. War is war, but it is not the same every time -- Some wars are more heinous than others.
Here's a quick synopsis of casualties in major U.S wars [infoplease.com].
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, figures are fatal U.S. military casualties only
I think that's exactly the problem with this line of discussion.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
Our standing army and research and procurement programs during times of absolute peace are around 3% of GDP so it's been nothing in the grand scheme of things.
... military expenditures are a bit like unemployment figures. How high they are depends on how you do the math. It seems the actual US military/defence budget is just over 4% of GDP. For the year 2009 the figure is (According to wikipedia) $515.4 Billion which is some 5.7% of GDP. If you also count miscellaneous other military spending it gets closer to 8-9%. This only covers the US armed forces. The Iraq war comes on top of this figure since Iraq and Afghanistan aren't included in the defence budget they are funded through supplementary spending bills. If you take other military expenditures like: black projects, veterans expenditures, subsidising of military equipment to other countries including the massive aid to Israel (only a portion of this aid ever gets paid back even if it is theoretically handed out in the form of loans) and count them as military spending the total US military expenditures for the last few years will easily top 10% of GDP. Keep in mind that black projects include some very expensive gadgetry and Israel isn't exactly a cheap proposition either. To keep the peace in that region the USA has to subsidise the military acquisitions of several surrounding arab countries to ensure a reasonable degree of military parity. Plus every time the the Israelis decide to exercise their right to defend them selves with totally disproportionate bombing campaigns in Lebanon and the occupied territories it triggers another wave of bribery to keep their Arab neighbours nice and docile and that usually takes the form of new and better weapons.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Informative)
The numbers don't add up - IIRC, the pessimistic (Lancet) figures are about 600,000 dead from violence, many more if you compare the pre-Gulf War I death rates with today - lots of deaths from bad water, especially among young children. The UN estimates over 500,000 Iraqi children under 5 died under sanctions beyond the pre-war mortality rates. AFAIK child mortality has not fallen much since, certainly not to pre-Gulf War I levels.
The US annual auto crash fatalities used to be around 40,000-50,000 last time I looked, so that's at most 300,000 since the start of Gulf War II.
Of course the US has a much larger population than Iraq, so even if the numbers of deaths were equal, -and they aren't even close- the death rates would be proportionally much higher in Iraq.
Neither the proportion of US GDP spent on war nor the number of US auto fatalities are a good measure of the harm to the people of Iraq.
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Japan wanted to surrender and USA didn't accept? (Score:5, Informative)
The atomic bomb did not remove Japan's desire to wage war, three offers of surrender previous to the bomb would indicate that their desire was basically gone already.
[Citation needed]
Or, less tersely, your assertion flies in the face of everything I have read about World War II.
Hmm, let's consult Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan [wikipedia.org]
So, I guess there was sort of an offer to surrender, but President Roosevelt was not willing to accept the conditions, and it's not clear that the Japanese government as a whole would have gone along with it even had it been accepted.
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Re:Japan wanted to surrender and USA didn't accept (Score:5, Insightful)
Wikipedia can say whatever it wants. The truth is this:
We gave them an ultimatum saying were would bomb the shit out of them unless they agreed to us. They said no.
We bombed hiroshima.
Then, we airdropped leaflets and told them that we would do it again unless they surrendered. They said no.
We bombed nagasaki.
Even _then_ the majority of the military elite wanted to keep fighting. It wasn't until 5 days later that the emporer decide to capitulate.
Fuck this shit about 'oh, the poor poor japanese' The alternative was for us to invade japan with troops (estimates at the time said it would take 1,000,000 troops to take it). Yeah, it sucks that we bombed them, yeah, it was terrible for the people that had to experience it, but we were in a war where the loser was going to be vanquished. If I were the president at the time and I had a choice between bombing some cities and conceivable losing a significant percentage of 1,000,000 of my own citizens, I would make the same choice.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Informative)
Furthermore, after having been burned to a crisp, they still wouldn't grant an unconditional surrender. The only thing left was a bloody ground assault
Your history is a bit
The long-range bomber allowed direct attacks upon factories, transportation hubs, storage facilities and other paraphenalia of a modern industrial economy. This had the effect of involving the civilian population, who had previously remained distant from actual warfare (until a nation's defenses were overrun and an occupation began.) Germany and Japan both built their military machines using civilian workers and production facilities, who became legitimate targets once the ability to hit them was available.
You know what? We deduce the existence of peace because there are intervals between wars. Peace is an ideal, and like most ideals it is rarely, if ever, fully realized. Not for long, anyway. You're also wrong about why we never had future attacks from Japan. They'd have done it if they could
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the whining about my statement has been for a citation. I find this rather hilarious, as the first person who responded to my post gave a citation that supported my point: that there had been earlier offers of peace from japan that were rejected by Roosevelt. Either way, the source I take my information from was the largely undisputed article printed shortly after Japan's surrender, authored by Walter Trohan [pqarchiver.com]. For those who do not have access to Proquest, The Journal of Historical Review [ihr.org] gives a pretty good analysis of the article and also reprints the text at the bottom of the page.
From the Journal Article:
Trohan's article revealed that two days prior to Rooseveltâ(TM)s departure for Yalta, the president received a crucial, forty page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from highly placed Jap officials offering surrender terms which were virtually identical to the ones eventually dictated by the Allies to the Japanese in August.
Yes, there were 5 offers of peace relayed to the allies long before the atom bombs were dropped. The three I refer to in my original post were the three that had been relayed directly to US forces, the other two were relayed via the British.
Why is it that everyone focuses on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, completely ignoring the months of fire raids that preceeded
I do not discount the magnitude of these bombings, but a quick search of Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] does reveal that these missions began after the three offers of peace I am discussing. The terms which the allied forces made Japan agree to in the end (which only asked to keep their monarch in place) were identical to the ones given before these bombings. This means that the bombings were entirely unnecessary.
Furthermore, after having been burned to a crisp, they still wouldn't grant an unconditional surrender.
True, they did not agree to an unconditional surrender, but since Roosevelt dismissed the offer out of hand, it is also true that there was no effort truly made to find out if they would accept unconditional surrender. However, since the eventual surrender still allowed Japan the one condition they asked for, I find your point is rather moot.
Though, the bombings did have one effect. They made Japan desperate enough to make similar offers to Russia.
From the end of the Trohan article:
Just before the Japanese surrender the Russian foreign commissar disclosed that the Japs had made peace overtures through Moscow asking that the Soviets mediate the war. These overtures were made in the middle of June through the Russian foreign office and also through a personal letter from Hirohito to Stalin Both overtures were reported to the United States and Britain.
The analysis about bombers and civilian war is mostly correct. Additionally, I never really disagreed that eliminating the enemy's ability to wage war was effective, I only note that the extent to which it was taken in the Pacific Theater was completely unnecessary.
You're also wrong about why we never had future attacks from Japan. They'd have done it if they could ... we just w
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Informative)
Boy, well that sure worked well with Germany post WWI.
One of the more uninformed remarks. Look, after World War I the Allies essentially bankrupted Germany with war reparations. That left Germans prime targets for the first demagogue to come along. After the Second World War, we did exactly the opposite ... rather than destroying what remained of their economy we rebuilt it. The two situations are simply not comparable.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Informative)
Actually that number is a very very low estimate.
Did you know that the US military is still using the stockpile of purple hearts that was made for the invasion of Japan.
The military estimates for the losses are in the hundreds of thousands for US and over a million for Japan.
Japan had also already crossed the NBC line before the US dropped the bombs. They had used chemical and biological weapons in China.
Yes it was a terrible waste of life. If the government of Japan had just cared enough about their own citizens lives it never would have happened.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Informative)
That is a myth. Japan never offered to surrender. They offered to negotiate an end to the war but they would have kept Korea and most of what the had left in China..
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There was a whole study (Score:5, Insightful)
done on this, I think back in the 60's. They concluded that the actual likely casualties were much lower on both sides. Most of Japan's Army was in China or isolated in various places. The Allies had TOTAL air and sea superiority, so they could outflank any defense along the coast and prevent any movement or concentration of enemy forces, or even resupply. At that point there was basically no oil anywhere in Japan.
This may not have been as apparent to the Allies in 1945 however. We can endlessly argue one way or the other about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The truth is they attacked us and showed no mercy and we fought back against them with everything we had. If you have a guy on the ropes and he isn't quite down yet you step up and hit him again, as hard as you can.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B. Frank is a far better book and better researched.
The book you mention is interesting, but the author in that book appears to have an agenda that the use of the atomic bomb was unnecessary; I would submit that the Americans insisting on unconditional surrender is the key factor in both Germany and Japan's peaceful re-emergence as a major economic power rather than a military power.
Mostly I reject the thesis that the use of an atomic bomb in WW2 was ex facie immoral. Remember, this was the war that produced genocide against Jews, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Chinese and other peoples on the basis of ethnicity. The firebombing of Tokyo produced more causalities than the atomic bomb, so I think the historical context supports the idea that the Americans did not break any legal or moral taboos of the time (such as the ban on chemical warfare).
Remember, the atomic bomb was developed for use against the Nazi's; they had the good (or bad depending on your viewpoint) luck of surrendering to the Allies first, rendering the use of the A-bomb unnecessary.
I think the discussion at this point is just that. No one really understands why the war ended how or when it did; in my opinion, the use of these weapons was warranted and in retrospect left Japan infinitely better off 20 years after the war was over.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Informative)
We killed just as many Japanese civilians in one bombing run with incendiary bombs as with one atomic bomb.
Everything I've observed and studied about the war points to the loss of Japanese lives would have been far higher if we invaded. If you question this, look at casualty numbers for German civilians. Plus we (racially) hated the Japanese far more than the Germans. And the Germans weren't culturally opposed surrender.
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Re:Mystery Pits (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have any idea of the kind of balls it took to be a part of this team? Under intense time pressure to work with previously theoretical isotopes that just might save tens of thousands of American lives?
And you judge them? You, with the heat on, comfortable, probably overly fed.
What. A. Putz. You. Are.
Nuclear isotopes were treated with quite a degree of reckleness for a good many years. Also I don't think they were any more heroic then anyone else who assisted with the war effort, although unlike many they were establishing for themselves quite a lucrative career. The men working in coal mines to supply energy to head up the war effort we far more heroic then a bunch of scientists getting paid handsome salarys to do what they like to do anyways, ground breaking science.
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Amen to that (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear isotopes were treated with quite a degree of reckleness for a good many years.
It's amazing how they treated plutonium like a bag of groceries back then. Best example of that is the Demon Core. [wikipedia.org] A sphere of plutonium that killed two scientists, Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. In two different critical exposures.
Both times were simply the experimenter being clumsy. Dropping a brick or bumping a screwdriver. The core would go near-critical and make a flash of radiation. Louis Slotin lasted 9 days, and Harry Daghlian made it 21.
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Re:when will it (Score:4, Insightful)
When someone sees an image of the Virgin Mary burned into their face from the radiation.
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