There was something I was going to write... I thought about it yesterday and now I can't remember. Ah well.
My brother and I were wondering about nuclear fusion today (I'm not sure how we got on the subect) and so we googled it. We ended up looking at Hydrogen bombs.
So heres the thing: The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was about 20 kilotons (20,000 tons of TNT) and its mushroom cloud was about a mile and a half around. In comparison, the first Hydrogen bomb, tested in 1952, was 5 megatons and its mushroom cloud was one hundred miles around. It was so monstrously powerful that the measurement equipment they had was insufficient. That's why those Japanese fishermen (along with about 250 others) got burned, because it was so much bigger than expected. The atoll was completely vaporized and then rained back down to the earth as radioactive fall-out.
"Twenty-three nuclear tests were carried out at Bikini between 1946 and 1958.
The original natives were granted $325,000 in compensation and returned to Bikini in 1974. But they were evacuated four years later when new tests showed high levels of residual radioactivity in the region." (BBC "On This Day")
Am I the only one who finds this completely sick? These are scientists who have worked their whole lives with this sort of thing, they aren't stupid! They knew the islands weren't safe before they ever sent the natives back, they didn't need four bloody years to figure that out! They detonated 23 nukes there for heaven's sake!
Gawl, it just makes me sick to know there are people out there who conduct horrifying science experiments at the expense of human life!
And there you have it. I wish I could remember the other thing I was going to write.
Shoot.
Bang!
4 comments:
hope joo' had a good doughnut day!
Dang, I read your post too quickly and thought that you were talking about the allowance of the Japanese people to go back to Hiroshima around the fifties (which may not have happened, I just thought that's what it said).. and so I wrote a long response to that.. and now I don't want to delete it all so, if anyone cares:
Ok, I admit it.. I'm too lazy too look it up, but in Madame Curie's biography it talks about the fact that people would buy.. I'm thinking radium since that's Madame Curie's thing.. and then use it as a sort of tool to try to solve all of the illnesses they had. There was even a scientist who exposed his own arm to radium in order to test what would happen if he did so (weird, yes I know) and concluded that radium might be able to both cause and heal wounds.
Now.. I'm not quite sure of the radioactive substance of nuclear bombs.. Uranium 235? (which I think often times contains radium..) Nor am I sure if the "radiation is a good thing" attitude carried over to the times of Hiroshima.
If, then, the radiation was thought not to be the killer, but somehow the bomb itself (as, I assume, is the case with many other bombs) it does seem a bit reasonable to me that no one stopped people from living within Hiroshima for a number of years..
I'm not sure.
Also, science and scientists (despite what they might have you believe) are not perfect.
Maybe next time I'll not read in such a fashion that I later realize I've come up with my own theme for someone else's writing. Sorry, if anyone actually spent a lot of time reading that and really didn't care.
um..
I'm sorry, but large doses of radiation are pretty much indisputably bad for a person.
Also, obviously the explosion of the bomb is what caused the most violent and most immediate destruction. But much of the controversy in atomic weapons lies in the long-term effects of released radiation.
Those working on developing the bomb were aware of its effects long before it was ever detonated over Hiroshima. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only furthered their understanding of those effects.
After examining and treating illnesses in both of those cities(for 29 years), doctors and scientists were certainly not oblivious to the risk posed to the natives of Bikini.
There was much to be learned by returning them to the atoll...
But.. there was some misunderstanding about radiation when it was first discovered...
"For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel. . . featured with pride the therapeutic effects of it's 'radioactive mineral springs.' Radioactivity wasn't banned in consumer products until 1938." - Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
So, yes, I was years off. They did know about the effects before then..
And, yes, I am aware of the fact that they would've known by the 1970s. I was just disputing the wrong thing with the wrong facts. :)
Maybe next time I'll look up my facts before I start talking. Dang, I lose.
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