#nuclear testing

[hussyknee]

(alt included in all images)

Another thread by Senator Ben Ray Luján here.

A book on the subject (haven't read it myself):

One of the sources in another one of Alisa's furiously impassioned twitter threads have been debunked, so I didn't include that. But she claims that her own family was caught in the fallout zone when her mother was a baby, which eventually led to her and large numbers of her community developing cancer. It's human for that kind of grief to be caught up in inaccuracies. People are already being ghastly and racist to Hispanos and Indigenous people criticizing the hype for the movie. They're not attacking Oppenheimer for being Jewish, they're criticising the erasure of the human cost of these bombs and the continued valorisation of the U.S military's actions in World War II as some kind of moral saviourism.

While Oppenheimer himself believed that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally justified (they had planned to drop them on Germany except they surrendered before they could), he also felt had blood on his hands and regretted his role as the "Father of the Atomic Bomb". He spent the rest of his career vehemently opposing further development of thermonuclear weapons and the hydrogen bomb accurately predicting the concept of mutually assured destruction. This eventually made him a victim of Senator McCarthy's Red Scare and his clearance was revoked. I haven't seen the movie (Christopher Nolan is the kind of casual white racist I avoid on principle) but people who have seen it say that it doesn't glorify nuclear weapons and depicts the man himself with the complex moral nuance that seems to be accurately reflective of his real life.

The backlash to Indigenous and Hispanos people's criticisms and to people pointing out that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocides is also frustrating because...both world wars were a clash of genocidal empires. The reason they were world wars is because the countries colonized by Japan, China, the European powers and the US were all dragged into it, whether they wanted to or not. Jews were one of the many colonized peoples that suffered in that time, who were left to die by everyone until they could be used to frame the Allied powers as moral saviours, establishing a revisionist nostalgia for heroism that powers the US military industrial complex to this day.

As early as May 1942, and again in June, the BBC reported the mass murder of Polish Jews by the Nazis. Although both US President, Franklin Roosevelt, and British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, warned the Germans that they would be held to account after the war, privately they agreed to prioritise and to turn their attention and efforts to winning the war. Therefore, all pleas to the Allies to destroy the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ignored. The Allies argued that not only would such an operation shift the focus away from winning the war, but it could provoke even worse treatment of the Jews. In June 1944 the Americans had aerial photographs of the Auschwitz complex. The Allies bombed a nearby factory in August, but the gas chambers, crematoria and train tracks used to transport Jewish civilians to their deaths were not targeted.

(Source)

Uncritical consumption of World War II media is the reinforcement of imperialist propaganda, more so when one group of colonized people is used to silence other colonized peoples. Pitting white Jewry against BIPOC is to do the work of white supremacy for imperialist colonizers, and victimizes Jews of colour twice over.

Edit: friends, there's been some doubt cast on the veracity of Alisa's claims. The human cost to the Hispanos population caught downwind of the nuclear tests is very real, as was land seizure without adequate compensation. However, there's no record I can yet find about Los Alamos killing livestock and Hispanos being forced to work for Los Alamos without PPE. There is a separate issue about human testing in the development of said PPE that's not covered here. I'm turning off reblogs until I can find out more. Meanwhile, here's another more legitimate article you can boost instead:

[sweetmeatdale]

Aliens upon learning that we were not actually in a nuclear war: Ok? I guess testing a weapon makes sense. But why did you need to test the same weapon 2058 times?

Human: 2056

Alien: *visible fear as the realization kicks in and they question which ones weren’t tests

[eowyntheavenger]

By Emily Strasser | August 9, 2023

At the theater where I saw Oppenheimer on opening night, there was a handmade photo booth featuring a pink backdrop, “Barbenheimer” in black letters, and a “bomb” made of an exercise ball wrapped in hoses. I want to tell you that I flinched, but I laughed and snapped a photo. It took a beat before I became horrified—by myself and the prop. Today is the 78th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, which killed up to 70,000 people and came only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima that killed as many as 140,000 people. Yet still we make jokes of these weapons of genocide.

Oppenheimer does not make a joke of nuclear weapons, but by erasing the specific victims of the bombings, it repeats a sanitized treatment of the bomb that enables a lighthearted attitude and limits the power of the film’s message. I know this sanitized version intimately, because my grandfather spent his career building nuclear weapons in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the site of uranium enrichment for the Hiroshima bomb. My grandfather died before I was born, and though there were photographs of mushroom clouds from nuclear tests hanging on my grandmother’s walls, we never discussed Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or the fact that Oak Ridge, still an active nuclear weapons production site, is also a 35,000-acre Superfund site. At the Catholic church in town, a pious Mary stands atop an orb bearing the overlapping ovals symbolizing the atom, and until it closed a few years ago, a local restaurant displayed a sign with a mushroom cloud bursting out of a mug of beer.

Oppenheimer does not show a single image of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Instead, it recreates the horror through Oppenheimer’s imagination, when, during a congratulatory speech to the scientists of Los Alamos after the bombing of Hiroshima, the sound of the hysterically cheering crowd goes silent, the room flashes bright, and tatters of skin peel from the face of a white woman in the audience. The scene is powerful and unsettling, and, arguably, avoids sensationalizing the atrocity by not depicting the victims outright. But it also plays into a problematic pattern of whitewashing both the history and threat of nuclear war by appropriating the trauma of the Japanese victims to incite fear about possible future violence upon white bodies. An example of this pattern is a 1948 cover of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which featured a white couple fleeing a city beneath a glowing orange sky, even though the book itself brought the visceral human suffering to American readers through the eyes of six actual survivors of the bombing.

The Oppenheimer film also neglects the impacts of fallout from nuclear testing, including from the Trinity test depicted in the film; the harm to the health of blue-collar production workers exposed to toxic and radiological materials; and the contamination of Oak Ridge and other production sites. Instead, the impressive pyrotechnics of the Trinity test, images of missile trails descending through clouds toward a doomed planet, and Earth-consuming fireballs interspersed with digital renderings of a quantum universe of swirling stars and atoms, elevate the bomb to the realm of the sublime—terrible, yes, but also awesome.

A compartmentalized project. The origins of this treatment can be traced to the Manhattan Project, when scientists called the bomb by the euphemistic code word “gadget” and the security policy known as compartmentalization limited workers’ knowledge of the project to the minimum necessary to complete their tasks. This policy helped to dilute responsibility and quash moral debates and dissent. Throughout the film, we see Oppenheimer move from resisting compartmentalization to accepting it. When asked by another scientist about his stance on a petition against dropping the bomb on Japan, he responds that the builders of the bomb do not have “any more right or responsibility” than anyone else to determine how it will be used, despite the fact that the scientists were among the few who even knew of its existence.

Due to compartmentalization, the vast majority of the approximately half-million Manhattan Project workers, like my grandfather, could not have signed the petition because they did not know what they were building until Truman announced the bombing of Hiroshima. Afterward, press restrictions limited coverage of the humanitarian impacts, giving the false impression that the bombings had targeted major military and industrial sites—and eliding the vast civilian toll and the novel horrors of radiation. Photographs and films of the aftermath, shot by Japanese journalists and American military, were classified and suppressed in the United States and occupied Japan.

The limit of theory. Not only is it dishonest and harmful to erase the suffering of the real victims of the bomb, but doing so moves the bomb into the realm of the theoretical and abstract. One recurring theme of the film is the limit of theory. Oppenheimer was a brilliant theorist but a haphazard experimentalist. A close friend and fellow scientist questions whether he’ll be able to pull off this massive, high-stakes project of applied theory. Just before the detonation of the Trinity test bomb, General Leslie Groves, the military head of the project, asks Oppenheimer about a joking bet overheard among the scientists regarding the possibility that the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. Oppenheimer assures Groves that they have done the math and the possibility is “near zero.” “Near zero?” Groves asks, alarmed. “What do you want from theory alone?” responds Oppenheimer.

Can the theoretical motivate humanity to action?

One telling scene shows Oppenheimer at a lecture on the impacts of the bomb. We hear the speaker describe how dark stripes on victims’ clothing were burned onto their skin, but the camera remains on Oppenheimer’s face. He looks at the screen, gaunt and glassy-eyed, for a few moments, before turning away. Americans are still looking away. As a country, we’ve succumbed to “psychic numbing,” as Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell call it in their book Hiroshima in America, which leads to general apathy about nuclear weapons—and pink mushroom clouds and bomb props for selfies.

On this anniversary of Nagasaki, the world stands on a precipice, closer than ever to nuclear midnight. The nine nuclear-armed states collectively possess more than 12,500 warheads; the more than 9,500 nuclear weapons available for use in military stockpiles have the combined power of more than 135,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

If Oppenheimer motivates conversation, activism, and policy shifts in support of nuclear abolition, that’s a good thing. But by relegating the bomb to abstracted images removed from actual humanitarian consequences, the film leaves the weapon in the realm of the theoretical. And as Oppenheimer says in the film, “theory will only take you so far.” Today, it’s vital that we understand the devastating impacts that nuclear weapons have had and continue to have on real victims of their production, testing, and wartime use. Our survival may depend on it.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Several First Nations and environment advocates are criticizing a decision by Canada’s nuclear regulator to greenlight a proposed nuclear waste site near the Ottawa River. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has, following an environmental assessment, authorized construction of a waste facility on the site of the Crown-owned Chalk River Laboratories, which tests nuclear technology in Deep River, Ont., about 180 kilometres northwest of Ottawa. The site sits within a kilometre of the Ottawa River, on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg peoples.

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

[putting-ragatha-in-places]

put her in the bikini atoll nuclear testing site

ragatha in bikini atoll nuclear testing site

[colonellickburger]

Eddo Hartmann. The Sacrifice Zone. The Polygon, Kazakhstan, which was once home to the Soviet Union’s nuclear testing facilities.

[lutnistas]

post-soviet town Kurchatov ( Kazakhstan ) - the former operations center for the adjoining Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site

[contremineur]

The spray dome from the Hardtack Umbrella underwater nuclear test on the Enewetak lagoon, June 9th 1958

The detonation occurred at 11:15 AM (local time) with clear skies and a 15 to 17-knot wind from the east-northeast. Within one-tenth of a second, the spray dome had broken through the surface. The overall shape of the spray dome resembled a vertical column with the plumes helping create the shape. Within 20 seconds of detonation, the maximum height of the column reached 5,000 feet. The base surge reached a distance around 10,000 feet downwind, reaching out approximately 6,000 feet in all directions. This base surge could be seen from the air for about 25 minutes and the foam patch over the blast location lasting even longer. The blast yield of the nuclear device was measured to be eight kilotons. The Umbrella blast created a crater 3,000 feet (914 m) in diameter and 20 feet (6 m) in depth in the lagoon. […] After all scientific data had been gathered from the target ships, they were restored to be seaworthy and towed back to Pearl Harbour. The Moran was concluded to be unseaworthy due to the blast and was sunk by naval gunfire near Ikuren Island.

text abridged from here

[nickysfacts]

How Vegas learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb!

🎰☢️🎰

[hussyknee]

tbh: you should just take all of that first thread out of the oppenheimer post. it's a little bit of truth (a couple dozen families of hispanic homesteaders had their land seized via imminent domain and were unjustly compensated) coupled with a *lot* of b.s. or exaggeration (their livestock were SHOT, they were FORCED to work in berylium mines, white workers got protective gear but hispanic ones didn't, loyda martinez sued because of the beryliosis, etc. etc.)

Thank you for telling me. I only did a general check on whether the issue was real instead of whether each claim was true. My bad. I was only able to do a cursory Google search on those claims, which didn't turn up anything, but Google is also pretty unreliable now. I'm beginning to doubt whether Alisa is a good faith actor though, which is a shame because it sabotages the surfacing of the violence done to New Mexico's Hispanos. I disabled reblogs on the post until I could look into it in-depth.

In the meantime, here's a source for the population impact and infant mortality of people caught downwind of the Trinity test:

Here's one about an NYC vigil held for the New Mexico people affected by The Manhattan Project's nuclear tests.

“They’ll never reflect on the fact that New Mexicans gave their lives. They did the dirtiest of jobs. They invaded our lives and our lands and then they left,” Tina Cordova, a cancer survivor and founder of a group of New Mexico downwinders, said of the scientists and military officials who established a secret city in Los Alamos during the 1940s and tested their work at the Trinity Site some 200 miles (322 kilometers) away.

And by far the most blood-curdling thing I found:

Jesus Christ. There's a book called The Plutonium Files written about the experiments conducted for The Manhattan Project. From the Wikipedia article:

What. The fuck. I'd never be lax about unverified claims, but you can see why shooting livestock and the forced labour of native landholders doesn't stretch believability to a lot of people.

Here's a very detailed but easy to read pdf about the experiments and who spearheaded them. I'm ADHDing my way through it, but it does include Oppenheimer's own proximity to the trials.

[sweetmeatdale]

Y’all ever just think about how Oppenheimer used to just fuck off into the desert for weeks on end with basically no food and now Vegas is huge and is draining the Colorado river dry?

[eowyntheavenger]

By Susan Montoya Bryan

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. —  The movie about a man who changed the course of the world’s history by shepherding the development of the first atomic bomb is expected to be a blockbuster, dramatic and full of suspense.

On the sidelines will be a community downwind from the testing site in the southern New Mexico desert, the impacts of which the U.S. government never has fully acknowledged. The movie on the life of scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the top-secret work of the Manhattan Project sheds no light on those residents’ pain.

“They’ll never reflect on the fact that New Mexicans gave their lives. They did the dirtiest of jobs. They invaded our lives and our lands and then they left,” Tina Cordova, a cancer survivor and founder of a group of New Mexico downwinders, said of the scientists and military officials who established a secret city in Los Alamos during the 1940s and tested their work at the Trinity Site some 200 miles away.

Cordova’s group, the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, has been working with the Union of Concerned Scientists and others for years to bring attention to what the Manhattan Project did to people in New Mexico.

While film critics celebrate “Oppenheimer” and officials in Los Alamos prepare for the spotlight to be on their town, downwinders remain frustrated with the U.S. government — and now movie producers — for not recognizing their plight.

Advocates held vigils Saturday on the 78th anniversary of the Trinity Test in New Mexico and in New York City, where director Christopher Nolan and others participated in a panel discussion following a special screening of the film.

Nolan has called the Trinity Test an extraordinary moment in human history.

“I wanted to take the audience into that room and be there for when that button is pushed and really fully bring the audience to this moment in time,” he said in a clip being used by Universal Studios to promote the film.

The movie is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Nolan has said Oppenheimer’s story is both a dream and a nightmare.

Lilly Adams, a senior outreach coordinator with the Union of Concerned Scientists, participated in the New York vigil and said it was meant to show support for New Mexicans who have been affected.

“The human cost of Oppenheimer’s Trinity Test, and all nuclear weapons activities, is a crucial part of the conversation around U.S. nuclear legacy,” she said in an email. “We have to reckon with this human cost to fully understand Oppenheimer’s legacy and the harm caused by nuclear weapons.”

In developing and testing nuclear weapons, Adams said the U.S. government effectively “poisoned its own people, many of whom are still waiting for recognition and justice.”

Adams and others have said they hope that those involved in making “Oppenheimer” help raise awareness about the downwinders, who have not been added to the list of those covered by the federal government’s compensation program for people exposed to radiation.

Government officials chose the Trinity Test Site because it was remote and flat, with predictable winds. Due to the secret nature of the project, residents in surrounding areas were not warned.

The Tularosa Basin was home to a rural population that lived off the land by raising livestock and tending to gardens and farms. They drew water from cisterns and holding ponds. They had no idea that the fine ash that settled on everything in the days following the explosion was from the world’s first atomic blast.

The government initially tried to hide it, saying that an explosion at a munitions dump caused the rumble and bright light, which could be seen more than 160 miles away.

It wasn’t until the U.S. dropped bombs on Japan weeks later that New Mexico residents realized what they had witnessed.

According to the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, large amounts of radiation shot up into the atmosphere and fallout descended over an area about 250 miles long and 200 miles (322 kilometers) wide. Scientists tracked part of the fallout pattern as far as the Atlantic Ocean, but the greatest concentration settled about 30 miles from the test site.

For Cordova and younger generations who are dealing with cancer, the lack of acknowledgment by the government and those involved with the film is inexcusable.

“We were left here to live with the consequences,” Cordova said. “And they’ll over-glorify the science and the scientists and make no mention of us. And you know what? Shame on them.”

[literacywasamistake]

“Then, after all of that, the people of the Marshall Islands underwent what Genz has described as one of the most violent histories of the twentieth century.

The Pacific War brought air raids and hunger, and when the war was over the American military began twelve years of nuclear weapons testing on the atolls of Bikini and Enewetak at the northern end of the island chain.

During those years, sixty-seven atomic and thermonuclear bombs were detonated; one of them, called “Castle Bravo,” created a blast a thousand times the magnitude of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. When Castle Bravo exploded on March 1, 1954, it completely obliterated three nearby islands, and the atoll of Rongelap some hundred miles away, which had not been evacuated, was hit with the radiation fallout. For a day and a night its islanders were blanketed in snowlike ash and began experiencing radiation sickness, including severe burns. After a few days, they were finally evacuated, then returned in 1957 despite the continued risks. Some three hundred people, many who had lived through the blast and were suffering from thyroid cancer, self-evacuated from Rongelap in 1985, permanently leaving their home behind.

Before the nightmare of nuclear testing, Rongelap had been the site of the Marshall Islands’ only navigation school.”

Excerpt From

Wayfinding

M. R. O'Connor

[head-post]

Putin signed the cancellation of nuclear test treaty ratification

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law Thursday, cancelling Russia’s ratification of a key nuclear treaty and allowing new atomic weapons tests.

Putin stated that cancelling Russia’s ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CNTBT) merely “mirrors” the position of the United States, which signed but never ratified the treaty.

Both houses of the Russian parliament approved the cancellation of ratification unanimously, and then Putin signed the final approval, according to Russian media.

Russian officials explained that withdrawing from the treaty does not mean resuming nuclear testing. Moscow will only conduct tests if the United States decides to do the same, however, the Kremlin’s decision has raised concerns among analysts.

Russia ratified the treaty in 2000, and the US is one of several countries that had never ratified the ban, including other nuclear powers such as China, India and Pakistan.

Read more HERE

[longlistshort]

Above is Cara Despain's installation for the 2023 Florida Prize in Contemporary art at the Orlando Museum of Art. Her work feels especially timely with the recent release of Oppenheimer, a film about the scientist who led the effort to create the first atomic bomb. Her installation for this show is captivating- eerie glowing green glassware  surrounds the entrance to a mesmerizing video installation, Test of Faith, where atomic explosions fill three walls as a Mormon hymn plays.

The museum's information on the artist and her work-

Miami-based artist Cara Despain was born and raised in Salt Lake City, and the experience of growing up in the West informs much of her work. Through video, sculpture, photography, and installation she critiques a range of issues pertinent to the region that are also internationally relevant. These issues stem in part from the nineteenth-century concept of Manifest Destiny, the belief that Providence intended for American civilization to extend across the continent and benefit from all its yet untapped resources. That philosophy gave rise to such virtues associated with the character of the American West as optimism, independence, and self-reliance. It also engendered an unchecked hubris which has sometimes had tragic consequences. Among these unintended consequences are the human and environmental costs of atmospheric nuclear weapons testing from 1945-1962 which polluted vast areas of the West and inflicted disease and death on many of the region's residents. Being from this region and having family that lived there during those tests, Despain has long had a deep concern about lingering effects of this exposure for the people downwind.

Despain's two-part installation begins with six cabinets of glowing green glassware. This inexpensive Depression-era glass was popular for its vibrant green color. As a bonus, the glass is fluorescent and glows hauntingly in the dark under ultraviolet light. This seductive coloration is ominous, though, being produced by adding small amounts of uranium oxide to the glass mixture. While now we would not consider using radioactive dinnerware, Despain is demonstrating our once innocent relationship with this toxic element that made the atomic age possible.

The domestic, fragile uranium glass flanks the entrance to Test of Faith, an immersive video installation that is menacing and enthralling. The room is filled with a series of atomic explosions edited from vintage nuclear test footage from the Nevada Test Site, which was less than 150 miles from where her family in southern Utah originates. Projected simultaneously on three walls, billowing clouds in swirling tones of blue, green, and yellow build to a crescendo then fade before the next explosion. To heighten the darkly supernatural sensation, Despain shows each mushroom cloud divided in mirror form like Rorschach inkblots and we are left to see within these abstract patterns our own fears and trepidations. Accompanying this vision of cosmic destruction is the sound of the Mormon hymn "Love One Another" rising and falling in step with each detonation. The digitally altered synthetic timbre of the song completes the experience of facing the apocalypse and is reference to the insidious appeal to the assumed patriotism and obedient nature of the largely Mormon and ranching populations in the fallout region to support the testing.

Today, nuclear weapons testing may seem like a remote episode in American history associated with the Cold War and the once alarming spread of global Communism. Despain's work is intended to remind us that the nuclear threat is still present, with more nations than ever expanding their arsenals or developing and testing new weapons.