Thousands Visit Trinity Test Site For 70th Anniversary of First Atomic Blast 167
HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports that thousands of visitors converged Saturday on the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico where the first nuclear bomb was detonated nearly 70 years ago. Many posed for pictures near an obelisk marking the exact location where the bomb went off and were also able to see a steel shell that was created as a backup plan to keep plutonium from spreading during the explosion. "It brought a quick end to World War II, and it ushered in the atomic age," Erin Dorrance said. "So out here in the middle of nowhere New Mexico changed the world 70 years ago." Pete Rosada, a Marine Corps veteran, drove with another military veteran from San Diego to make the tour. Rosada said he previously visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese targets of atomic bombs during World War II after the test at the Trinity Site. "This completes the loop," said Rosado.
Tourists who joined a vehicle caravan out to the site at a school in Tularosa were greeted by demonstrators from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders who came to protest the 70th anniversary tour. The Downwinders is a grass-roots group that has set out to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb. Henry Herrera was 11 years old when he got up to help his father with the car on that fateful July morning in 1945 and says the dust from the blast scattered all over Tularosa, remembering how his mother had to wash clothes twice that day due to the fallout dusting the family's clothes line. "I stop to think I'm one lucky, fortunate guy because I'm here and so many are dead," says Herrera. "Gobs of people from around here died and nobody knew what they died of, they just went to bed and never woke up." Albuquerque resident Gene Glasgow, 69, visited the Trinity Site for the first time with relatives from Arizona. Born and raised in New Mexico, he said he'd grown curious through talking to people who witnessed the explosion, including one man who was laying trap line in the mountains at the time. "He thought the end of the world had come."
Tourists who joined a vehicle caravan out to the site at a school in Tularosa were greeted by demonstrators from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders who came to protest the 70th anniversary tour. The Downwinders is a grass-roots group that has set out to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb. Henry Herrera was 11 years old when he got up to help his father with the car on that fateful July morning in 1945 and says the dust from the blast scattered all over Tularosa, remembering how his mother had to wash clothes twice that day due to the fallout dusting the family's clothes line. "I stop to think I'm one lucky, fortunate guy because I'm here and so many are dead," says Herrera. "Gobs of people from around here died and nobody knew what they died of, they just went to bed and never woke up." Albuquerque resident Gene Glasgow, 69, visited the Trinity Site for the first time with relatives from Arizona. Born and raised in New Mexico, he said he'd grown curious through talking to people who witnessed the explosion, including one man who was laying trap line in the mountains at the time. "He thought the end of the world had come."
Atomic Blast (Score:1)
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"I'm so excited my lips and eyeballs are tingling like spiderman!" said one excited attendee.
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No nerd bucket list should be without the Nevada Test Site, which today is like a museum of the Cold War. It has control rooms with the largest CRT monitors ever made, whole test towns with houses, buildings, bridges, railroads and arrays of Fifties cars, all bent and blackened and melted by the earlist nuclear tests. You can see the ant-lion pits left by the era of underground testing. You can see the last blast hole drilled before the test ban treaty was signed, with the test array still dangling from the
Yeah, Heh Heh (Score:5, Funny)
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EPA... so overrated.
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Or they could just have detonated the bombs in uninhabited or sparely populated areas, such as one of the many islands off the Japanese coast, and then threatened to use them against the mainland. Or just waited a bit longer for the Japanese to give up because the people were literally starving and it was clear to many at the top of the government that the war was already lost.
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They dropped one on an actual city, and that wasn't a strong enough hint so they had to drop another one on another city.
This makes me suspect that if they'd put one across the bows the response would have been along the lines of "Ha! Missed, aah-sole!"
I'm not sure they had many spares, if they had any at all.
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If what others in this thread have said is accurate, it sounds like the government of Japan wanted to unconditionally surrender after the firebombing of Toyko, but that the military was against it and probably would not have gone along with it had the government tried. The atomic bombs and the significant destruction they created made it clear that more total destructio
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There was no uranium core left. It was used on Hiroshima.
AIUI, Japanese physicists knew what happened at Hiroshima. They also, correctly, figured that we couldn't make enough weapons-grade U-235 for a long time. What they didn't realize was that we had been working on plutonium bombs. They're a lot harder to get right (there was no test U-235 bomb explosion because people were confident it would work), but it's a lot easier to get Pu-239 than U-235. At the time of Japanese surrender, a plutonium bom
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it was clear to many at the top of the government that the war was already lost.
So clear that they had to be nuked twice before the penny dropped.
And even then, the equivelent of the cabinet was divided on the issue, and the military planned a coup so that they could continue to fight. There was a minor civil war while the generals refused to acknowledge the surrender, but it didn't amount to much.
Both the Japanese and Americans were operating under the assumption that Tokyo would be the next target in about 2 weeks, when the Emperor ordered the surrender, and the government followed, even if begrudgingly.
And don't forget Truman warned the Japanes
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It is thought that Truman's use of the bomb was decided by the massive losses on Okinawa, which totaled almost a quarter of a million on both sides.
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Russia's declaration of war was the other trigger for our use of the bomb.Imagine Russia swooping down into the less-defended half of the country and creating the dismal dump of "North Japan." Even after the collapse of Russian communism, it could have been a threat to peace unto this day.
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Got any evidence for that?
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They dropped one on an actual city, and that wasn't a strong enough hint so they had to drop another one on another city.
No, they dropped one and then didn't leave enough time for the Japanese to understand what had happened and make the political moves necessary to surrender, because they had two designs and wanted to test them both. They also wanted to compare the difference between detonating in the open and in a valley.
This makes me suspect that if they'd put one across the bows the response would have been along the lines of "Ha! Missed, aah-sole!"
Your suspicions are not really justification for and maiming hundreds of thousands of people. I thought the goal was to minimize casualties.
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They dropped one bomb, and the Japanese realized exactly what had happened very fast. There was no movement towards surrender.
The idea that they wanted to test both types is ludicrous, because they did a plutonium test at Trinity and a uranium one at Hiroshima. The idea that they wanted to test in the open and in a valley also fails, since Nagasaki was a secondary target that day, and the bomb was not dropped according to instructions.
As far as I can tell, the nukes did minimize casualties. Do you k
Re:Yeah, Heh Heh (Score:4, Interesting)
The first bomb was dropped to intimidate Japan into a surrender. It was working. The plan was already being drawn up, and this fact was not kept secret.
The second bomb was dropped to give the Soviets second thoughts about trying to invade eastern Europe, and it is this second bomb that many living Japanese consider excessive and unforgivable, not the first -- because they had to live with the consequences even though they weren't the real target.
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Unfortunately, the history lesson is wrong. After the first nuke, several Japanese high officials wanted to surrender, but they couldn't without unanimity on the Liaison Council, which included the ultra-hawkish Anami, the War Minister. It was not until the second nuke that Anami withdrew objections. Nobody really knew what he was going to do until late that evening, when he ordered the Army to acquiesce and committed seppuku.
I haven't seen any good evidence that dropping the Nagasaki bomb was done fo
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De-classified Estimates were 500K casualties for the initial lands with another 1 - 1.5 million for the entire campaign... on the U.S. side alone.. estimate were many time higher for civilians caught in the crossfire. As terrible as those bombs seems, They saved a great many lives on both sides.
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We probably would have just spent considerable resources carpetbombing and firing battleship guns at them, long before setting foot on any of the main Japanese islands.
Well, that or put a lot less aircraft and ships at risk by carpet-bombing Japan with atomic weapons. Mind you, we only had 3-4 total, and spent one on testing and two on targets... but the Tojo government didn't know that. All that hot air about how everyone would fight to the last man, woman, and child withered very quickly once the full horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came to light... and they realized that each happened from just one bomb, dropped by just one airplane. Morale pretty much evaporated at t
Re:Yeah, Heh Heh (Score:5, Interesting)
We probably would have just spent considerable resources carpetbombing and firing battleship guns at them, long before setting foot on any of the main Japanese islands.
Probably should review your history. The short story, the US dropped the bomb to win the peace, not the war...
By the time the US dropped the bombs, they had *already* spent considerably resources firebombing Tokyo [wikipedia.org] (including "Operation Meetinghouse" in March which was bigger than Dresden) to the point that most military commanders thought that there were no more high-value targets left in the city target (and other cities were then targeted). This was long before the nuclear bombs which were detonated in August...
I think many professional historians have become to realize that it was actually unnecessary to actually drop the bomb to conclude the war (it could have ended in a war of attrition as Japanese industrial war output had estimated to have dropped 90% from January to June of 1945), but the capitulation of the military was unlikely before the Russians would have become engaged in the Pacific War. The bomb was essentially dropped to hasten the end of the war to end the Pacific Theater War on the US terms (rather than risk a negotiated eastern block situation that occurred in Europe in the aftermath of the war).
Historical documents indicate that Prince Konoye was already favoring ending the war in February due the on-going strategic bombing campaigns which were devastating the country and the Emperor was favoring ending the war after the "Meetinghouse" firebombings in March, but the military rejected US requests for unconditional surrender until after the A-bombs were dropped in August. FWIW, Russia declared war on August 8th and invaded Manchuria on August 9th (3 months after the war in europe concluded as agreed to by Stalin in Yalta and coincidentally the same day the 2nd bomb was dropped).
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Mod parent informative.
From the linked Wikipedia article:
The Operation Meetinghouse air raid of 9–10 March 1945 was later estimated to be the single most destructive bombing raid in history.
Even more destructive than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.
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Yes. It's very easy, decades after the fact, to guess that perhaps the atomic bombings were unnecessary. What is clear is that given the choice between surrender and rapid annihilation, the Japanese chose surrender. The atomic bombings ended the war.
But the US nuked Japan twice. (Score:2)
Hiroshima might have been necessary as a show of US military might, but why launch take 2 on Nagasaki? Saying the atomic bombing-s (with an s) were necessary is a bit deceptive. These first generation nuclear weapons were really more weapons of fear than mass destruction. Nukes only earned their world-ending potential with the invention of ICBMs. Before that, it would have beeen a simple matter of launching fighter planes to shoot down the slow moving heavy bombers. Nagasaki was a totally unnecessary milita
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Nagasaki wasn't a strike against Japan, it was a strike by proxy against the Soviet Union.
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The Soviets had already built up enough forces in the far east to attack Japanese territory of Manchukuo, and they actually declared war on Japan and launched a major attack [wikipedia.org] just after the first atomic bomb dropped. There's little doubt that the military might of the Soviet Union, which was now a juggernaut of massive proportions, would have been able to overwhelm not only their mainland holdings, but eventually the home islands as well.
There was a real danger that Japan would have become a communist stron
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The Red Army was fighting on the continent of Asia in very useful strength. It didn't take them long at all to eliminate the Kwantung Army defending Manchuria. It was the largest land defeat the Japanese had during the war. The Soviets also overran a previously shared island (Sakhalin). The attempts at amphibious assaults in the Kuriles were much less successful, and the Soviet forces were in a bad situation before the Japanese were ordered to surrender to them.
One issue is that the Soviets had no qu
Fumimaro Konoe (Score:2)
Historical documents indicate that Prince Konoye was already favoring ending the war in February due the on-going strategic bombing campaigns which were devastating the country and the Emperor was favoring ending the war after the "Meetinghouse" firebombings in March, but the military rejected US requests for unconditional surrender until after the A-bombs were dropped in August.
Fumimaro Konoe [gettyimages.com] was a sheep among wolves, a diplomat who was effortlessly shoved aside whenever he presented the slightest obstacle to the warlords who controlled the Japanese army and navy.
Konoe resigned on 16 October 1941, one day after having recommended Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni to the Emperor as his successor. Two days later, Hirohito chose General Tojo as Prime Minister.
In February 1945, during the first private audience he had been allowed in three years he advised the Emperor to begin negotiations to end World War II. According to Grand Chamberlain Hisanori Fujita, Hirohito, still looking for a tennozan (a great victory), firmly rejected Konoe's recommendation.
Fumimaro Konoe [wikipedia.org]
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Prince Konoye was in favor of surrender early, but he didn't have the authority to do it. War Minister Anami was the biggest obstacle to surrender, and he went along (he never agreed) only after the second nuke.
There have been various estimates of how long Japan would have held out without the nukes (it's impossible to know which are accurate), and I think the shortest time I've seen was three months. With that delay, I'd estimate that the death toll among Chinese civilians due to delaying the end of t
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> Japan
I think you might want to look up 'literally'.
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I think you might want to look up 'literally'.
Or examine this helpful comic. [theoatmeal.com]
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They thought that the development of atomic weapons was inevitable (they knew that Germany and Japan were trying, but failing) and wanted the US to be the first to have them, rather than the first victim of them. They were also desperate to determine the effects on humans and cities so that they could plan a defence or at least understand what an atomic war would be like, hence the tests on the Japanese.
Re:Yeah, Heh Heh (Score:5, Funny)
For some insane reason, I've been binge reading books related to the Manhattan project. The takeaway is that much of the time they were flying blind or wearing blinders due to the extreme time pressure.
Sometimes they were plain reckless. The criticality experiments is a good case; adjusting the distance between two semi-critical cores with a screwdriver jammed in between. Great fun until the screwdriver slipped and the core went critical. Didn't go boom but killed a guy. For good measure they repeated the experiment and killed another guy.
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Not to mention the creepy way that Werner Heisenberg would intone "Let's cook!" as he gave the order to assemble each new bomb. Heisenberg's increasingly erratic behavior caused the OSS to ease him out of the project and erase any record that he had ever been involved in it. After the war, he retired to open the first carwash in Albuquerque.
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Yeah, everyone knows you use duct-tape for that instead of screwdrivers.
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You think wrong, buddy boy. The point was the whole E=mc^2 business that meant one single measly bomb gave off a really gigantic boom. The residual radiation was completely incidental, at least at the time.
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Uh, dude. This was, like, a war. Thousands of people were dying every day. So, no, they didn't worry that a few people might die as a result of developing a bomb that could end the war months earlier than it otherwise might have done, saving hundreds of thousands of lives as a result.
Downwinders' misguided protest (Score:2)
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They didn't use muskets. They used rifles.
FTFY (Score:2)
Many posed for x-ray pictures near an obelisk marking the exact location where the bomb went off
*alleged* fallout? (Score:2)
> An Army police vehicle led the caravan from Tularosa, passing the Tularosa Basin
> Downwinders protesting the alleged fallout from the atomic test.
What's 'alleged' about the fallout? Did I miss something?
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Trinity was a very small bomb comparatively to later tests, the alleged is that there is no proof of the claims of these people as it is highly unlikely to be true.
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Trinity was a 20kt bomb exactly like the one that obliterated Nagasaki. Hardly very small.
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It's small compared to other tests. It's only large compared to Hiroshima.
You'll note that Nagasaki and Hiroshima are still there. If we dropped, say, a 50 megaton bomb on them, they wouldn't be.
I'm not entirely sure that the amount of radioactive fallout is directly proportional to the size of the bomb, though.
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If we dropped, say, a 50 megaton bomb on them, they wouldn't be.
To be fair, both cities were flattened for a large distance around ground zero, and mostly rebuilt since. They were airbursts, so the fallout mostly blew away when it wasn't brought down by rain storms, but probably small enough that many people were killed by the immediate radiation; with a 50MT bomb, anyone close enough to be killed by that radiation would already have been vapourized.
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I was mostly talking about the fallout. You notice Pripyat hasn't been rebuilt.
Had the fallout been a lot worse, Nagasaki and Hiroshima would have been cordoned off.
I'm actually surprised they rebuilt, honestly. There are large parts of Okinawa where nothing gets built. I was under the understanding that it's a religious thing - they believe that the spirits of the dead from the battle there still occupy those sites, and building there would upset them. Okinawa tends to be cane fields, urban sprawl, and
Re:*alleged* fallout? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was mostly talking about the fallout. You notice Pripyat hasn't been rebuilt.
Bomb fallout decays rapidly because it's mostly short-lived isotopes from the explosion. Reactor fallout takes much longer, because it's mostly due to isotopes with much longer half-lives. On the plus side, because of that, the initial radiation level would typically be much lower.
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More to the point, airbursts don't create all that much fallout. What's left after the blast isn't enough to be really dangerous over a large area. A low or ground burst will create a lot more radioactive material.
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When you compare it to other tests, it is indeed quite small.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
There were some smaller, but many MUCH larger.
Context (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad things happen in war.
In a way, it's a good thing that people have luxury of forgetting that.
"He thought the end of the world had come." (Score:2)
In a way, he was right.
lots of history (Score:2)
However, I have been to The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History in Albuquerque(where bugs bunny always goes). It is a nice museum, apparently on a tight budget, with many interesting planes. They usually have a good traveling exhibit.
109 East Place is a good book on the secret site in Los Alamos. It was so secret that all communication and travel when through 109
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I wonder what the joke is regarding bugs bunny always taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque. Why not Tuscon or Flagstaff or Barstow. It it just because it's a funny word, like Timbuktu or Kalamazoo?
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Bugs Bunny always pronounced it "Albakoikey" in his faux-New Jersey accent. I don't think Tuscon or Flagstaff or Barstow has the same mispronunciation humor potential. And it's a funny word even when pronounced correctly, TBH.
Re: lots of history (Score:2)
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Admission was cheap, however they also forced you to buy a pass to visit their bullshit aliens exhibit which was extremely pricey for having no scientific or factual content whatsoever...
Demonstrators (Score:3)
Tourists who joined a vehicle caravan out to the site at a school in Tularosa were greeted by demonstrators from the Tularosa Basin Downwinders who came to protest the 70th anniversary tour. The Downwinders is a grass-roots group that has set out to bring public awareness about the negative impacts of the detonation of the bomb.
So what do these demonstraters hope to accomplish? Are they going to protest hard enough to prevent the test from happening in 1945?
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So what do these demonstraters hope to accomplish? Are they going to protest hard enough to prevent the test from happening in 1945?
No, they're going to protest so hard that North Korea's strange little evil laugh is even a bit stranger sounding when someone besides us tests another live nuke.
Full-time-activist-protester-types aren't known for their rational take on things. A sensible or useful take on the subject matter is never the point. It's all about being able to post protest scene selfies on FB.
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Just guessing here:
They want to remind the current politicians and the people that vote for them that nuclear testing isn't OK.
And probably that the US needs to take more concern about the environment, especially the military. Remember the story a few weeks back about how the background radiation in Denver is considerably higher than normal due to poor practices at an upwind nuclear weapon factory? That kind of crap is unacceptable.
(I'm not an anti-bomb guy or an anti-nuclear guy , but I do think the gove
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First off: spreading FUD? Watch that knee, it's jerking a bit there.
I can't find the story on slashdot (admittedly, I didn't try all too hard), but a quick google search found the name of the facility and the wikipedia article. It's the Rocky Flats Plant [wikipedia.org] about 15 miles from Denver. There are pretty little graphs showing where plutonium was found.
It's old news - I don't remember what the slashdot story was about off the top of my head.
My point is that this sort of thing isn't acceptable for commercial ent
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Typical of North Korea and USA regimes. (Score:1)
So typical, North Korea or USA oppressive regimes experiment on their own people.
Sorry I forgot.
Only in USA they blast their own people.
Only in USA state police is unloading ammunition at protesting workers.
Only in USA cops are in kindergartens.
Only in USA 99% of population is enslaved by oligarchs.
God have mercy.
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It brought a quick end to World War II... (Score:2)
Right.... Myth repeated many times becomes truth.
This myth is plainly obsolete and no longer withstands criticism now that WW2 facts are freely available.
If we were really that concern about saving human lives, we should have exploded Little boy and Fat Man in the same desert, in the presence of enemy nation's, Japanese, military representative and allowed them to film.
Hell in 1945, several month ago, Tokyo has been fire bombed and there were more victims in Tokyo (a total more 200,000 people - 90,000 dead
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In fact, nobody was tried for strategic bombing. The closest was the German guy who bombed Belgrade, which was an open city at the time and should have been spared all attack. Bombing civilians was not considered a war crime (and a careful study of Hague(IV) and Hague(IX) conventions will give you insight as to why).
Drama (Score:2)
Depending how dramatic the site is, the headline could read "Thousands Blown Away by Trinity Test Site For 70th Anniversary of First Atomic Blast."
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Funny how your corporate masters and the politicians they bought are trying to go back how people lived 300 years ago.
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cornering them in a blind alley
There was no blind alley, you're making that up.
And he wasn't "cornered," because he just kept walking towards his relative's house, while Zimmerman was headed the opposite way, back to his truck. So you're making that up, too.
Zimmerman was hunting
Yes, hunting groceries. At the grocery store, where he was headed.
he contradicted the 911 tapes multiple times
You mean, the sort of 911 tapes that NBC edited to change their entire context? Because that seems to be the sort of thing that has established your narrative, here.
And why did he get out of his car to look for a street sign on a different street to tell the 911 operator where to find him after he hung up and help was already on the way?
Because just like you, and me, and everyone els
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There was no blind alley, you're making that up.
The blind alley was the walkway between Twin Trees and Retreat View Circle.
It's a good thing he wasn't lost, then.
So you are saying Zimmerman was lying? He stated he got out of the car after his 911 call to walk down an alley to get to another street to read the street sign because he didn't know where the was.
I'm thinking you don't have any idea what Zimmerman said.
Cops much prefer to be told where to look for possible burglars via as much vague, imprecise blather as possible. They HATE it when you tell them things like which street you saw someone walking on, heading which direction, that sort of thing. Their jobs are much easier if you make it take as long as possible to figure out where someone is.
So they like it when you hang up on them because they tell you to stay in your car, because you really want to go hunt some Nigger? Because that's what Zimmerman did. They told h
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The blind alley was the walkway between Twin Trees and Retreat View Circle.
You're making it sound like an actual alley. You know, that you can get stuck in. We're talking about rows of buildings with gaps between them. Like the gap that Martin wandered off through. There was no "cornering," you're truly just fabricating that.
As for reading street signs: I know my way around all sorts of areas, including some spots I've driven and walked through for years. I'd never get "lost" in those areas, but if I wanted to be sure I was getting a street name right (for the police) on a cor
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Zimmerman never said that, and you know it.
So his racist rants caught on previous 911 calls didn't happen?
No, they said they didn't "need" him to follow Martin. Shortly afterwards (with Martin having continued to walk away, and gone from Zimmerman's view), Zimmerman was walking back to his truck.
Nope. He was in his car driving after him when told to not follow. He then got out and followed Martin. It was after he walked into the alley after Martin that the attack happened.
You are lecturing me on the events, and you don't seem to have even the basics right. Your account disagrees with Zimmerman. Why do you think Zimmerman is a liar?
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So his racist rants caught on previous 911 calls didn't happen?
Oh, I get it now. You're figuring that time travel is playing a role in the event. I didn't realize you were allowing for that possibility in your fictional narrative. While we're at it, I suppose you'd like to include his volunteer time with black kids, including those in his own extended family? And of course since you consider a term he used in the past to be a sign of his obvious criminality, you are of course applying that same standard to Martin, who used a racial slur moments before he attacked Zimm
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He indicated an intent to "teach a lesson"
I know you have a real allergy to putting anything at all in any kind of actual context, but he was talking about serial trespassers and burglars, especially in the context of his neighbors being repeatedly robbed. You keep tap-dancing around context, around the very reason that the neighborhood had and kept a watch in the first place. Regardless, the only person who brought up race was the police dispatcher who asked him to describe the possible trespasser, and prompted for race. Unless, of course, you're
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I know you have a real allergy to putting anything at all in any kind of actual context, but he was talking about serial trespassers and burglars,
He was talking about Black people because everyone knows they are the problem.
You keep tap-dancing around context,
No, I accept the context. You reject it. He was frustrated. He wanted someone to pay. Especially someone Black. That's the context you reject. When will you stop dancing around the context?
And he still didn't reach for his gun until he was on his back getting his head bashed into the sidewalk.
So? He wanted to make sure that the murder-one it was wouldn't stick. So he kept the gun hidden until he was hit by the prey he was stalking. Then he went for it.
Let me guess, you're also in the "hands up don't shoot" camp, in complete contradiction to what witnesses saw in that event, too.
No, I'm in the "why would a cop in fear for his life get out of his car an
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I'm sure the video showing a cop shooting a black guy in the back is all a fiction. He was actually charging the cop with a gun in his hand, but the video and witnesses were re-written in a horrible anti-white conspiracy.
Go on, spin that one. If there wasn't a camera, I bet the dead black guy would have ended up with his corpse in prison. The police report shows that the black guy was actively tasing the cop when he was shot, but the biased video shows him unarmed and r
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But the whole Trayvon Martin thing? Zimmerman didn't look for or cause the long series of neighborhood breakins that had him wondering who that unrecognized guy was out cutting through. He wasn't looking for the guy, he saw him while he was o
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He was stalking someone
Really? Going to the grocery store is "stalking someone?" Please explain. He had never seen him before. Didn't know he existed. Just noticed something out of the ordinary while driving out of the neighborhood. Do you deliberately avert your eyes from everything and everyone around you as you drive near your home so that you won't get confused and think you might be a stalker? You have a really strange concept of "stalking."
In fact, if you want to explore stalking, consider who approached who right befor
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Have you tried that against a bear in Alaska and seen what happens when you hunt that way?
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So being punched to the ground and attacked, then pulling a gun to defend your self and shooting then is hunting?
It is when you've expressed a desire to "take care of" (in the mob sense) something, then arm yourself, and track it, that's hunting, isn't it?
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if that was an attempt at a joke it failed. If It was serious, it was stupid
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He's talking about social conservatives, who want life to return to a non-existent "golden age" when men did what Jesus said if they didn't want to go to hell and women did what they were told if they didn't want to run into another door.
They tend to coincide with a lot of rich industrialists, who believe we should go back to a simpler time when they could shoot union leaders and not have to worry about silly things like safety or disability insurance, or paying actual money to the workers.
Personally, I'd s
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Well certainly as far as European infantry platoon leader Paul Fussel is concerned!
http://www.amazon.com/Thank-At... [amazon.com]
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I'd recommend Richard Frank's book "Downfall" to know who was willing to surrender, who wasn't, and what that meant. The Japanese government was willing to accept near-total surrender (the Japanese surrender was not unconditional) after the second city was nuked.
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Interesting. Mine was an Army MP - they formed a special MP company (all college grads) that was stationed in Albuquerque, NM. His company guarded all the atom bombs existing in the world at the time.