Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-the-hell-was-that?! dept.

When a flash of light beamed from the arid New Mexico desert early on July 16, 1945, residents of the historic Hispanic village of Tularosa felt windows shake and heard dishes fall. Some in the largely Catholic town fell to their knees and prayed.

The end of the world is here, they thought.

What villagers didn't know was that just before 5:30 a.m., scientists from the then-secret city of Los Alamos successfully exploded the first atomic bomb at the nearby Trinity Site. Left in its place was a crater that stretched a half-mile wide and several feet deep.

Thursday mark[ed] the 70th anniversary of the Trinity Test in southern New Mexico. It comes as Tularosa residents say they were permanently affected by the test and want acknowledgement and compensation from the U.S. government.

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders, said the aftermath caused rare forms of cancer for many of the 30,000 residents in the area surrounding Trinity. She said residents weren't told about the site's dangers and often picnicked there and took artifacts, including the radioactive green glass known as "trinitite."

Researchers from the National Cancer Institute are studying past and present cancer cases in New Mexico that might be related to the Trinity Test.

"It's a moral and ethical issue. It's about consent," said Cordova, a former Tularosa resident and cancer survivor. "We were never given the opportunity to do anything to protect ourselves, before or after."

Vera Burnett-Powell, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice's Radiation Exposure Compensation Act program, did not immediately return a phone message and email from The Associated Press.

Additional resources follow.

Isao Hashimoto created a video depicting the history of nuclear bomb tests entitled "1945-1998":

This piece of work is a bird's eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted.

The U.S. Department of Energy - Office of History and and Heritage Resources produced The Manhattan Project - an interactive history which provides an in-depth presentation of the entire Manhattan Project. It is categorized according to Events, People, Places, Processes, Science, and Resources.

There is an entire page dedicated to The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945.


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:45PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:45PM (#210860) Journal
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @11:12PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @11:12PM (#210895)

      I read that, and a few other articles there. They sure love the word "boffin", that's for sure.

    • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:48PM

      by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:48PM (#211053) Journal
      We also covered this story in our early days.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @08:52PM (#210863)

    Atomic Bomb Test Marks 70th Birthday Amid Renewed Interest

    How does a 70 year old atomic bomb test mark a birthday?
    Or was there a new atomic bomb test to mark the birthday?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @09:47PM (#210877)

      That would have been pretty cool to mark the 70th birthday, to detonate another above ground bomb.

      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 18 2015, @10:22PM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 18 2015, @10:22PM (#210885) Journal
        Teller, you were supposed to be dead.
        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:19AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:19AM (#210924)

      How does a 70 year old atomic bomb test mark a birthday?

      A big cake and tons of grandchildren around.

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @10:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 18 2015, @10:02PM (#210880)

    "Hello, I'm here from the government and fuck you."

  • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday July 19 2015, @06:14AM

    "Your link may be on-topic but it's awfully pink and salty."
    -- J. Random Kuron

    Someone else's copy of my Creative Commons work because I forgot to renew the domain and can't find my original markup.

    The original has some very frightening illustrations, when I can find my backup I will repost it somewhere within here [warplife.com].

    tl;dr: Saddam Hussein really was working on weapons of mass destruction. Arms control inspectors found lots of evidence of that after the first Persian Gulf War. Also Hitler was working on the bomb, had fifteen Norwegian commandoes not blown up the Norsk Hydro heavy water plant then sunk a fully-loaded passenger ferry there is some chance the NAZIs could have set up Moscow and London the bomb. This is portrayed in "The Heroes of Telemark" starring Kurt Russell.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @11:32AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @11:32AM (#211019)

      Interesting text but I wish to point out two small things.

      1) Our understanding of the Norsk Hydro heavy water changed in 2004 (basically it comes down to that the shipment was too small and too impure to be useful)

      2) Tritium in fusion weapons are a lot easier to get from Li-6 or Li-7 (this has been known since the 50s).

      Also might be worth pointing out that most countries with heavy water reactors havn't developed bombs (albeit sweden was pretty close) - graphite reactors are more commonly used for this (they are cheaper and faster to build)

      • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday July 19 2015, @12:55PM

        I'm not completely clear on how it works but heavy water reactors produce a lot more Plutonium than do light water reactors. Also if I understand correctly one does not need to use enriched Uranium to fuel them.

        The Trinity Test and Nagasaki used Plutonium implosion bombs; Hiroshima's was Uranium assembly.

        Tritium is also used to enable smaller implosion bombs. While strictly speaking it fuses it yields only a small amount of energy but lots of Neutrons. This is done for example with the W-30 warhead could be fitted on the Talos ship-to-air missile.

        Yes: nuclear antiaircraft missiles. My father was a Talos missile fire control officer during Vietnam but strangely never mentioned it; I found out from the White Sands Missile Range website.

        An Air Force fighter pilot who was scrambled during the Cuban Missile Crisis when a bear was mistaken for a saboteur called his air-to-air nuclear missile "The stupidest weapon ever invented".

        Doubtlessly the German bomb project knew how to make a Uranium bomb but did not have the means to refine it. During the war, the US Manhattan project borrowed ALL of the silver from the US Mint, drew it into magnet war then consumed ten percent of the entire nation's electrical supply. That's why Oak Ridge National Laboratory is in Tennessee, so they could use the hydroelectric power from the TVA.

        The Hanford reactor used to make Nagasaki's Plutonium by contrast was quite small.

        Actually Hitler faced a whole bunch of problems:

        It's easy to make a Uranium bomb but hard to refine the Uranium.

        It's easy to synthesize Plutonium but hard to design the bomb.

        That we were unsure that the Plutonium bomb would actually work is why we tested, as well as why Hiroshima got the Uranium bomb. One of the problems is that the nuclear cascade reaction is profoundly nonlinear. Until Los Alamos "tickled the tail of the dragon" by dropping a Pu hemisphere on a metal pole past another hemisphere, they didn't really know how big it should be.

        The Rosenberg treason conviction hinged on Klaus Fuch's crude pencil sketch of an explosive lens mold. The lens was crucial to the bomb's success but explosive lenses were well-known by industrial explosives engineers, it's just that the guy who was tasked with figuring out how to implode the pit didn't know about them until such an explosives engineer was asked to visit. Without a doubt the Germans knew all about explosive lenses.

        All of the Manhattan Project secrets other than the Pu initiator were declassified by some manner of insightful, patriotic public servant in 1965, I expect because the Soviets and PRC had the bomb. Now one may purchase The Los Alamos Primer for forty bucks from Amazon. I expect that was on Kim Jong Un's Amazon Wish List.

        --
        Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
        • (Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:56PM

          by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 19 2015, @01:56PM (#211059) Journal

          The majority of Talos missiles were conventionally armed [wikipedia.org] - the reason that your father never mentioned the nuclear option was, in addition to being highly classified during the time he was operating it, perhaps because it wasn't expected to be used in that role in Vietnam.

          • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 20 2015, @12:18AM

            Dad never mentioned it but there is a retired Talos missile fire control officer who was wriitten up in The Columbian here in Vancouver. He was given that assignment because he had a degree in IIRC health physics.

            I declined the NROTC scholarship because the officer who interviewed me suggested I would make a great submarine nuclear reactor operator. I expect I would have accepted had he recommended I serve aboard an aircraft carrier instead, at least I could swim through all the burning jet fuel.

            I have some reason to believe my father did signals intelligence. While I am sure he really did work with antiaircraft missiles there are some other aspects to his service that dont otherwise make sense.

            --
            Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:17PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @10:17PM (#211185)

          Heavy water (and graphite) reactors has the advantage of being able to use lower enrichment than light water - and therefore doesn't require (as much, there are heavy water designs that require enriched fuel) enrichment..

          However, it is possible to build breeders even with light water as a moderator.

          Might be of interest to know that the Hanford B reactor (the source for the plutonium in Fat Man) was graphite moderated.

          Just to quickly list the sources of the "first nuke" of different countries:
          USA - Little boy was U235, Fat Man was from a graphite moderated reactor (Hanford B)
          UK - mainly graphite (sellafield, magnox) with minor contributions from heavy water (canada)
          France - Graphite (Marcoule)
          Russia - Graphite
          North Korea - Graphite (Magnox)
          China - U235 (they didn't use plutonium until their 8th trst, they tested fusion bombs before that)
          India - Heavy water (CIRUS - canadian design but the geavy water from USA)
          Pakistan - Heavy water (indigenous design)

          (and near misses, never a [confirmed] hot test but have done cold tests (ie, without fissile core). Have aborted the programmes)
          South Africa - almost there with U235, had capabilities to produce enough plutonium with Heavy water
          Sweden - Never got enough plutonium (indigenous designs, heavy water)

          As seen, graphite is the most common route.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 19 2015, @09:41AM (#210998)

    "We have become Death, destroyer of Worlds."

    Khrishna, become Shiva, Dance, Baby, Dance. It's the 'Pokycalpse what split little Adam in twain, running round the circletron, in a Riddley Walker kinda way.

  • (Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Sunday July 19 2015, @04:18PM

    by Hawkwind (3531) on Sunday July 19 2015, @04:18PM (#211109)
    "Here's a plug for a novella I recently read called "The Dead Lake" (http://www.powells.com/biblio/66-9781908670144-0 [powells.com]). It's set in the rural country surrounding the Kazak nuclear tests and the fallout. Well written and moves quickly, a good page turner.