[ RadSafe ] RE: Misleader of the Year 2004 - anti-nuclear & other comments

[Jaro]

Bjorn,

How about the web site, "The Port Chicago Disaster" as the "misleader of the
year" ?

Its at http://intergate.cccoe.k12.ca.us/pc/nuclear.htm and its maintained by
the Contra Costa County Office of Education
Pleasant Hill, California (United States).

Here is a critique of it, from another web site :



Outrage: Public school pushes conspira-lie

The official website of the Contra Costa (CA) school district hosts, and
apparently created as an official resource, this large site about the 1944
ammunition explosion at the Port Chicago Naval facility, near San Francisco.

This incident, which killed 377 people, is a major issue with black
historians because 202 of the victims were black and because some of the
survivors were subsequently court-martialed for mutiny after they refused to
return to loading ammunition at the facility.

The site gives an inordinate amount of favorable attention to an absolutely
ludicrous, idiotic, and defamatory conspiracy theory alleging that the Port
Chicago explosion was in fact a nuclear explosion and that this was a
deliberate act by the US government.

This starts on the intro page. Note that the graphic accompanying the link
to the section entitled "explosion" is an image of a nuclear explosion. The
first of only 3 links on this page is to an online conspiracy book entitled
Last Wave at Port Chicago by one Peter Vogel, which contends that the
explosion was caused by an early nuclear bomb, and strongly suggests that
this was a deliberate test using black servicemen as guinea pigs.

(For the record, the Port Chicago explosion occurred a full year before the
first nuclear test in New Mexico and the subsequent nuclear attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Port Chicago facility was less than 25 miles
from the center of San Francisco and half that from Oakland with many small
communities between. The explosion occurred at 10:30 PM, when there would
have been many thousands of people out on the streets of these communities
in those days before television. A nuclear explosion there, especially a 20
kiloton explosion as Vogel alleges, would have blinded thousands. A surface
detonation would have been exceptionally "dirty" and the incidence of
radiation sickness would have been very high and very obvious, much worse
than that resulting from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki airbursts. It would
certainly have killed most of the people in Port Chicago who escaped the
blast. Residual radioactivity would be easily detectable and identifiable,
though not dangerous, today. The site is only a few miles from some of the
best equipped radiological monitoring laboraties in the world.)

This transparently misleading and biased presentation continues in the
section entitled "nuclear accident?". On the right, there is a lengthy list
of links to conspiracy sites making the nuclear explosion claim and only one
now-dead link to a rather brief rebuttal from a newsgroup poster. Note also
the exclamation point after the blurb for Vogel's book---"....after 20 years
of research!".

The left sidebar is much, much worse. It lists a number of conspiracist
contentions as though they were facts. The opposing (that is, sane) side is
represented only by the brief and rather lame note at the bottom. Note how
the suggestion for a debate is framed to include the nuclear explosion claim
on both sides: "You decide. - -Was this a planned nuclear explosion? An
accident?"

Remember, this incredible disgusting nonsense is specifically and openly
targeted at elementary school-children and this is done with official
sanction. It inclues a page on California content standards, apparently to
assist teachers in justifying their use of this "resource."

The author of the page is one Doug Prouty, "Educational Technology
Coordinator - Contra Costa County Office of Education."

I am absolutely enraged at this, a completely lunatic, demonizing and easily
disproven conspiracy claim represented as a resource for young children.

If they weren't already, Prouty's sympathies are made obvious on the
timeline accompanying the Port Chicago Today page, including a lengthy list
of protest actions attributed simply to "the public", a description of the
Sandinista dictatorship as the "Revolutionary Government of Nicaragua," a
paen to moonbat martyr Brian Willson (who lost both legs trying to block a
munitions train during a pro-Sandinista demo in 1987) and links to various
leftist organizations.

Vogel's central lie is that enough fissionable material for a nuclear bomb
existed at the time, mid-1944, and that this was somehow covered up in all
accepted histories of the Manhattan Project. This contention, in turn, rests
on a scientifically illiterate claim that the "Mark 2" bomb design did not
need highly enriched uranium and could have worked with material that was
enriched to the lower level available at the time.

He contradicts himself by claiming that this "Mk 2" was abandoned for
inefficiency after the Port Chicago "test". At the risk of belaboring the
obvious, the results of the test would seem to indicate otherwise. If such a
bomb worked, why wasn't it put into production and used instead of waiting a
year for much smaller amounts of HEU? He does not mention the exponentially
greater effort required to produce highly enriched uranium as compared to
low enriched uranium.

Vogel accounts for the absence of fall-out with a classic strawman,
demonstrating that this hypothetical LEU bomb would not have produced large
amounts of plutonium residue and tacitly assuming that plutonium is the only
hazardous component in nuclear explosion debris. This will work for his
scientifically illiterate audience but not here. Any fission reaction will
produce lightweight radioactive isotopes and these, not plutonium residue,
are the primary hazards in fallout. How has this easily detectable debris
eluded the notice of qualified physicists from nearby Cal-Berkeley for 60
years?

He also claims that the low humidity that night, recorded as 15%, would
mitigate fallout. To begin with, 15% is nearly impossible on a coastline on
a summer night. This sounds a lot more like a "no data" minimum entry from
the Weather Service. Secondly, the mitigating effect of low humidity is
relatively small, it would not eliminate fallout completely or even reduce
it to a safe level. Thirdly, low humidity is not relevant to surface and
especially to water bursts, simply because the enormous amount of water
thrown up in the explosion would carry the debris regardless of the
humidity.
Keep in mind that this kind of demonizing claim is a major factor in the
background beliefs of terrorists, anti-war activists, and America-hating
bigots.

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