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PORT CHICAGO 1/2
Know the fact behind the Covert Up... |
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Briefing: While the media is screaming that there are dangerous "anti-government" thoughts loose among the citizens of this country, the confidence of the people is being shaken daily by more and more revelations of those in power treating the American people as if they were so many guinea pigs. We have heard of GIs given LSD without their knowledge which resulted in the death of a man when he jumped out a window. We have heard about whole towns being subjected to radioactive fallout to see what would happen, and all the while government spokesmen cooed about how safe it was. The August 18-20 issue of USA Today reports that a search has turned up 16,000 persons who were unknowing subjects of government radioactivity experiments. And this number is said to represent "only a fraction" of Cold War radiation tests. So now with commemorative programs all over the media for the nuking of Japan to end WWII, we have one group saying it was necessary and right [it was] and another group saying it was a racist act [it was]. Hey, if the government of the United States would commit the racist act of putting AMERICANS of Japanese heritage into concentration camps, and even have it upheld by the Supreme court (Korematsu v. U.S.,1944) one can easily imagine why they were apparently willing to do more to homeland "Japs" than to our European enemies. Therefore, the PRO editors are going to join in all this celebration of the first use of a nuclear "device" to kill human beings with an article of our own...but we won't be talking about Japan! It was August 6, 1945 when a blinding flash cut across the sky of Hiroshima causing the eventual death of some 80,000 men, women and children. But a year earlier in July, 1944 a huge explosion had occurred at the naval ammunition facility at Port Chicago, California. All contemporary accounts described the disaster as due to conventional explosives but an odd quirk of fate worthy of a Perry Mason show or a mystery novel started author Peter Vogel probing in other directions. The results of that quest which we will summarize here was published in the Spring 1982 issue of The Black Scholar in an article called The Last Wave From Port Chicago by Peter Vogel. In the spring of 1980 the author found a document at the bottom of a box of photographic equipment and supplies from a church rummage sale. That document was entitled the "History of the 10,000 ton gadget" and had come from Los Alamos laboratories in Autumn of 1944. Many people might have never paid any attention to this paper which was a previously top secret technical description of the timing of the various events taking place within a nuclear explosion after detonation. The "history" proceeds through a number of steps indicating, for example, the detonation wave reaching the tamper in .067 milliseconds (step 2), The tamper being fully compressed at .127 ms (step 3), ball of fire fully expanded at approximately 160 ms (step 8). But the Rosetta stone here was step 11. It stated: "Ball of fire mushroom (sic) out at 18,000 ft in typical Port Chicago fashion." This line set off alarm bells. The author learned that the Port Chicago explosion was indeed characterized by a brilliant white flash and that a ball of fire mushroomed out to at least 10,000 feet before it was obscured by nightfall. So now the author had a few questions come to mind that needed some answers: > "Did the U.S. in fact have the capability to build a nuclear fission weapon as early as July 1944? Was there sufficient U-235 available? > Had the bomb been specified by that time? That is, were the technical details of it's design drawn up in final form by that time? > Was there any evidence that the Port Chicago explosion was nuclear in origin? All of these questions were later answered in the affirmative by the authors research. All bomb buffs know that there were two different types of nuclear devices used on Japan. The one used on Hiroshima was called "the gun" by it's builders and later came to be known as "little boy". It was a simple unrifled 5" naval gun barrel with a charge that drove one subcritical mass of U-235 into another subcritical mass of U-235 at the other end of the barrel. The two masses when forced together made a mass large enough for the nuclear explosion to occur. The other type was a plutonium bomb in which a spherical shell of plutonium was compressed into a critical mass by precisely timed shaped charges placed over it's surface. It was called "fat man" because of it's rounded shape. You can also see that it is a very high-tech device compared to "the gun". There is clear evidence that this second type of bomb could not have been detonated at Port Chicago. So now a few questions of "accepted history" begin to arise. The government insists that the Hiroshima bomb (the gun) had never been tested prior to it's use on Japan. The "trinity" test of the plutonium device is widely touted as the "first" atomic explosion the world had ever seen. But scientifically this makes no sense. After the first demonstration of a sustained chain reaction, it was not even known if a nuclear explosion would indeed occur And if so, what might be the result of such a blast (some feared the atmosphere of the earth itself might be set on fire dooming the planet). The logical sequence for bomb testing would be to first test the ultra-simple device first. There were in fact few other options since the explosive lenses for the plutonium bomb were not reliable and tested until the spring of 1945. On the other hand, records show that at the end of 1943 there was enough bomb grade U-235 to make one or two over-designed gun bombs or several minimum critical mass devices. And the plot thickens. Vogel writes, "Shortly after the disaster at Port Chicago, the Los Alamos Laboratories were radically re-organized in structure, organization and effort, effective August 1, 1944. This re-organization had, as it's most substantial effect the curtailment of all Laboratories' work on the uranium-235 gun assembly weapon which was to be detonated over Hiroshima." Could it be that suddenly all program managers grew extremely confident for some reason that the gun device would work as planned? Note also that in 1944 the only method of delivering the bomb was by boat. Albert Einstein had written President Roosevelt in 1939 saying, "A single bomb of this type, [ed. atomic] carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air." The gun bomb weighed 9,000 pounds. Interestingly enough, the ship that exploded at Port Chicago, the E.A. Bryan, had just been ordered to the Alameda ship yards to have its 5-ton (10,000 pound maximum load) booms and gear replaced with 10-ton booms and gear in the No. 1 and No. 5 holds. The crater in the river bottom showed the blast originated in No. 1 hold. The boxcar records that would show what was in that hold are missing. At 21 hours 18 minutes 50.94 seconds a blinding white flash lit up the Port Chicago sky. Vogel writes, " The pilot of an Army Air Corps C-49 aircraft flying line-of-sight towards Port Chicago at a distance of four to five miles described the explosion as 'a terrific white flash". Explosions produced by conventional explosives do not produce a white flash. Some have argued that the white flash came from magnesium-loaded weapons but inventory records show no such weapons either loaded on the Bryan or on the pier. But there was more evidence of a nuclear explosion than just the white flash. At the court of inquiry the C-49 pilot described what he saw: "Well there seemed to be a white flash and this flash had with it a large smoke ring that spread out in all directions around Port Chicago. I would estimate it, from the air to be at least three miles wide. This smoke ring proceeded then to go up and in the center of that was a terrific flash which mounted up as high as I was, 9,000 and above me." It turns out that in the Bikini tests of July 1st and July 25, 1946 where two atomic bombs were detonated in the lagoon at Bikini island just above the water surface a phenomena was observed that was not seen at the Japanese detonations: The Wilson Condensation Cloud. It is not "smoke" but rather water vapor. In the Bikini tests the Wilson cloud was 2 miles in diameter and "The ring rests on the water and encloses the rapidly expanding fireball. A few instants later the fireball 'whooshed' up through the center of the Wilson cloud at Bikini to a height of about 9000 feet." This is virtually the same as the pilot's description of the "smoke" ring observed at Port Chicago. The seismic record also shows not a series of conventional explosions (as might be the case if ammo went off) but rather a single explosion of 3.4 on the Richter Scale. This record clearly shows that the front end characteristics of the blast do not match those of a slow burning conventional explosion, despite attempts to portray it as such. It also happens that there was actually motion picture footage taken of the blast by a navy plane flying over Port Chicago. Now the Navy claims the film is a Hollywood recreation, but did not make the claim until people began investigating the possibility of a nuclear blast at Port Chicago. Indeed, the fact that a motion picture camera was rolling and pointed in the right direction at the time of the blast points to the possibility that the explosion was not only nuclear but also not accidental. The film, which the navy claims is fake shows a textbook nuclear detonation. The blast itself was phenomenal. While the total amount of TNT aboard the Bryan and the pier was no more than 1,780 tons, which likely burned in large portion, the crater under the ship was 66 feet deep by 300 feet wide and 700 feet long. This is greater than the calculations for a 5 kiloton nuclear bomb. The whole ship disappeared and no large piece of it was ever found. A 12 ton locomotive on the pier also "vanished" along with 320 men (mostly black) working on the ship and dock. Damage from the explosion at Port Chicago tends to match the same destruction at similar distances from ground zero in Hiroshima. Generally speaking, evidence is there that Port Chicago was hit with a nuclear device of more than 5 kilotons... or a "10,000 ton gadget"! Thus, there appears to be exceptionally strong evidence that Port Chicago was destroyed by a nuclear bomb. It is author Vogel's contention that the device was detonated on purpose rather than by accident. From what we know about government thinking then and now there is a certain credibility to the claim. It was war time and the winner was far from settled. The allies had this secret weapon project that could turn the tide in Europe and Japan if successful, but there were many unknowns. Would it work? If you put it in a ship and drove into a harbor, say even, best case, one containing an ammo dump, how much damage would you get? How would men respond to such a massive blast? Would they rally and fight or just give up and run? How could you get the maximum information out of a test when you had so little bomb material to spare? You certainly couldn't test it on an enemy city. What if it failed and the enemy got the mechanism (and the enriched uranium-235). Furthermore, it would blow the cover on the whole project. No. The only test that would make sense would require a sacrifice. Millions of people were dying in the war anyway and if the sacrifice of a port facility at which virtually everyone except a few officers were black, could save America, then the price was probably deemed worth it. (Especially given the racist attitude prevalent in government and the military at the time) So the ship with the first atomic bomb was in the harbor and the plane with the camera running was flying overhead and perhaps the timer was ticking away. Afterward, the effects were duly noted. The black GI's did rally to help their buddies in spite of the huge blast until much later when strange sickness began to appear in those helping with rescue and a "mutiny" took place among workers. And with that successful "first" test of a nuclear weapon, research turned to the development of the plutonium type bomb, which in all the history books (he who controls the present controls the past) was latter to be called the "first" atomic explosion. Whether the explosion at Port Chicago was an accident or purposely done, it is very hard for those of us in this generation to judge the desperate struggle of those dark days of war. We now know that Hitler lost, but it was far from certain then. Indeed, the final outcome to that great conflict only became certain once it was clear that the atomic idea would work. And if the Port Chicago explosion was atomic, the postwar greatness of this country can in many ways be traced to the GIs at Port Chicago whose sacrifice showed that all was not lost and that Nazis would never be celebrating victory in New York City. No matter how it happened, lets never forget those black men who experienced the greatest home-front disaster of the war. And we also should never forget the kind of government that views it's own citizen's not as it's master, but rather as so many expendable laboratory animals to be used as government sees fit. That's the way PRO thinks the anniversary of the atomic bombs should be remembered. Likings
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