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

[Dukelow, James S Jr]

I have sent the following message to Dr. Joseph Ovick, Superintendent of the Costra Costa County School District:

Dear Dr. Ovick:

I was led to the treatment of the Port Chicago disaster and subsequent mutiny and court martial on your school district's website by an outraged contributor to RADSAFE, an Internet mailing list for radiation safety professionals.  I was not as outraged, perhaps because I fundamentally agree with Doug Prouty's opinion/bias on the issue of the mutiny and court martial.  I did find his focus on Peter Vogel's rather speculative conspiracy theory that the explosion was an early, and subsequently supressed, nuclear weapons experiment--in effect using the sailors, mostly black, loading the munitions ship and the townspeople of Port Chicago as guinea pigs--to be completely unbalanced.  The only link that looked like it might offer some contrary opinion was broken, leading to nothing relevant to the issue.

There is, in fact, quite a bit of contrary opinion and historical fact available, rather easily found by doing a Yahoo search on the words "Port Chicago disaster".  For instance, the online, open source encyclopedia Wikipedia has a nice article at <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Chicago_disaster> and there are a variety of other naval and military history sites with relevant information.

Your website and, indeed, your school district should be in the business of education, not propaganda and indoctrination.

Best regards.

Jim Dukelow
36905 E. Rodeo PR NE
Benton City, WA 99320

==================

That said, I have a couple of items of dispute with the unnamed "another web site" author of the complaints about the Contra Costa County S.D. propaganda.  I have interpolated my comments in the original text.

-----Original Message-----
From: radsafe-bounces at radlab.nl on behalf of Jaro
Sent: Sun 2/6/2005 7:18 PM
To: RADSAFE
Subject: [ RadSafe ] RE: Misleader of the Year 2004 - anti-nuclear & othercomments
 
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.

JSD Comment:  The unnamed author makes the same mistake that Peter Vogel apparently did, thinking that a mushroom cloud is somehow unique to a nuclear explosion.  I saw the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980.  In 1984, my wife and I were coming over the mountains south of Mexico City, going to the airport, on the morning of the explosion and fire at an LPG storage and distribution depot on the north end of the city, some 20-30 miles away.  Both explosions produced a rising fireball that looked for all the world like the typical mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion.

   <snip>

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.

JSD comment:  Well, we all know that properly configured assemblies of natural uranium (0.7% U-235) and low-enriched uranium (3-4% U-235) will go critical.  When the U.S. government decided a few years ago that having medium enriched uranium fuel in research reactors around the world was a proliferation concern, it drew the line between concern and not-concern at 20% enriched.  The answer to the question of why 20% or 30% enrichment was not used in the Hiroshima bomb a year early may simply be that the amount of uranium required for an explosion-producing super-criticality might have made the weapon to heavy for delivery by a B-29.

   <snip>

====================

Best regards.

Jim Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow at pnl.gov

These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.