After watching the movie “ Atomic Café “ I needed to put this story on my Blog I wrote it a long time ago and put it on another Blog from a friend but now I wanted to put it here to.
Please read it and then watch the FREE movie Atomic Café.
Then you will understand that in the early days and years of atomic adventure most of the authorities and public did not know what they were dealing with.
And even if the authorities knew, they did not care so much for the safety of their people.
But after seeing the destruction of 2 A - bombs on Japan you would think that “they” would be a bit more cautious.
| Written by Frank | ||||||
| Tuesday, 20 July 2010 03:50 All of us know about Uranium, Radium and radioactivity, but how and by whom were they – and their unique properties -- discovered? | ||||||
Naively, radioactivity became a fad in 1920s America. Radium was used in all sorts of products ranging from toothpaste, wrist watches and beauty products: women used to use them to remove warts and unwanted hair. Thousands of Americans drank or injected radioatvie solutions for its then thought cure-all effect. von Scholocky, an amateur artist, found some other strange but interesting uses for the stuff. He invented a radium painted crucifix that glowed in the dark. The girls who worked for him also painted their teeth with radium so they would glow in the dark, too. Although glow in the dark teeth may have been appealing in those days, an unfortunate side effect was that they contracted bone cancer, something that's sure to ruin any amateur artist''s day. Perhaps one of the more helpful uses of these strange substances was that Radium and Uranium were found to have a strange property: they both emitted mysterious X-rays – a technology used to this day which has helped millions around the world. People began to wonder if amateur artist's teeth and Mary Curie's cookbooks might not have some other useful applications – say, a weapon of fast and unimaginable power born from the primal energy of the Universe for instance? Only America, with the help of Britain, was willing to bet the rent and pay two billion dollars for a bunch of foreign types, recruited from war-torn Europe, to work in a secret laboratory in the New Mexican desert and sit around clapping erasers together until something blew up in their faces. This was the the birth of the first atomic bomb, otherwise known as the Manhattan Project. Name: Trinity Born: July 16, 1945 Birthplace: Jornado Del Muerto (translated, it means journey of death) New Mexico (suits well, right?) Explosive Capacity: 19 kilotons Hospital: Los Alamos New Mexico Nationality:, American Race: Plutonium Blood type: A Father: J. Robert Oppenheimer God Father: Albert Einstein Legal Guardian: Harry S Truman Siblings: Little boy (Hiroshima August 6, 1945) Fat man, (Nagasaki August 9, 1945) During the countdown for the first ever atomic explosion, Los Alamos radio stations broadcast a lullaby: Tchaikovsky’s 'Serenade for Strings'. How oblivious they were in those days, to play a beautiful piece of music as a prelude to such a devastating event. Trinity was born with a blast, seen for 250 miles and heard for 50 miles. It was so bright it could have been seen from another planet. Even a congenially blind girl named Georgia Green riding in a car 20 miles distant, saw a momentary fleeting light. There were many eyewitness accounts: “From the east came the first faint signs of dawn and just at that moment there arose as if from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world. The light of many suns in one. It was a sunrise such as the world has never seen. A great green super sun . It is possible that if the first man could have been present in the moment of creation when God said “ let there be light” he might have seen something like what we saw. “ (William Lawrence, the only news reporter allowed to witness Trinity) “Well, It was far more violent then I expected. There was this enormous fireball, by then already turning yellow and red moving up and soon the whole sky became filled with violet radiation. I was naturally complimented that my damn machine worked. To me it seemed like the last moments of the earth, that perhaps the last human beings then will see the same thing that we have seen. “ (George Kistiakowsky Los Alamos bomb scientist) Hiroshima, a city the size of Houston. US military orders had been given not to fire-bomb it, as had been done to many other Japanese cities; Truman wanted a few virgin targets on which to test the new bomb’s effectiveness. The generals called the bomb Little Boy. The pilots, who didn’t understand the bomb too well, called it the gimmick or the pumpkin. Scientists, who understood the bomb all too well, called it the Beast. When the bombs blinding purplish light exploded none, of the pilots noticed any sound. Oddly neither did most of Hiroshima’s residents. Co pilot Lewis screamed either: ”My God! What have we done. “ or “My God, Look at the son of a bitch go!” When asked later, he couldn’t remember which. The tail gunner gave an oddly culinary description of the holocaust: "Fires are springing up everywhere like flames shooting up out of an huge bed of coals……It’s like a mass of bubbling molasses". “The mushroom is spreading out” Lewis said “I looked out and saw a city boiling.” By some estimates 300,000 of the 344,000 inhabitants of the city were killed. (the Hiroshima city government conservatively estimates 200,000.) “I looked out of the window at the branch of a willow tree. Just at the moment I turned my eyes back into the old and dark classroom, there was a flash. It was indescribable. It was as if a monstrous piece of celluloid had flared up all at once. Even as my eyes were being pierced by the sharp vermilion flash, the second building was already crumbling.” (Kataoka Osamu, a schoolboy, caught in the Hiroshima bombing.) It was possible to tell where people near ground zero had been standing by the thin circles of white ash on the ground or the faintly greasy grey spots of the surfaces like tile and stone. The amount of matter converted into energy by little boy weighed about as much as a small coin. “No man, in our position and subject to our responsibilities, holding in his hands a weapon of such possibilities, could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.” (Henry Stimson, Truman’s secretary of war) Christian, Jewish, and Hindu civilizations have this (nuclear) capability. The Communist powers also posses it. Only the Islamic civilization is without it. But that position is could change… "We will eat grass or leaves, even go hungry but we will get one of our own.” ( Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, former Pakistani prime minister) During the Cold War, the U.S. started testing more and more. American citizens had to deal with all the tests, not knowing how dangerous, this all was it is astonishing to read about how the public kept dumb or have been told not to worry. Americans around the testing sites and far beyond would soon find out. A message from the Atomic Energy Commission, in 1957: "You people who live near the Nevada Test Site are in a very real sense active participants in the Nation’s atomic test program." After the United States had completed its third official atomic test (Nagasaki), It began testing in earnest. Some of the testing was done on South Pacific islands. A lot of it was done in Nevada and Utah, and once during operation Wigwam, an A bomb was blown up off the coast of San Diego. At its height 4 bombs a month were being set off. The AEC set up bleachers near the test ground so the site secretaries, carpenters and plumbers could watch the “pretty bangs “ When the Nevada test began, the scientist had to improvise radiation sampling devices out of Electrolux vacuum cleaners. Residents in the path of the fall out began to find their hair was… falling out. Leukemia and Cancer was rising dramatically. Once 4,000 sheep 50 miles away turned out dead, and once, 150 miles away, a herd of goats caught in a cloud of fallout turned blue. Once all the way in Rochester, New York, fallout fell on the Kodak Company plant and ruined a huge batch of film. Two Colorado Scientists noticed their state’s radioactivity levels were going up. The Governor said “ they had a screw loose “ and “should be arrested “ When dangerous levels of strontium 90 began turning up in milk and babies teeth, public pressure forced a moratorium and finally a ban on above ground testing. So, about 12 bombs a year were tested underground but at least 24 of them got away and released radioactivity, above ground of course. There was even an organization in Utah called Downwinders who would keep you posted by sending you a postcard with “site, date and explosive power." Dick Powell began filming The Conqueror, release date March 1956. Starring John Wayne, Susan Howard and Agnes Morehead, in the sand dunes of St. George, Utah, a year after the 1953 test shot “Dirty” Harry a 32 kiloton A-bomb had blanketed the entire area with fallout. Decades later the three actors and their director were dead of cancer, nearly have the 200 members of the film crew had also contracted the disease. When an official at the Defense Nuclear Agency got the news he murmured, “Please, God don’t let us have killed John Wayne.” PLEASE COPY AND PASTE THIS LINK TO WATCH ATOMIC CAFE http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi3624928281/ Trying to keep the public on ease and not to get worried, all kinds of efforts were taken to keep the danger and information about radiation at low key. We know better now, we hope. Thanks for reading, Frank |
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