Quote:"When I get my shelter finished, I'm going to mount a machine gun at the hatch to keep the neighbors out if the bomb falls. I'm deadly serious about this. If the stupid American public will not do what they have to to save themselves, I'm not going to run the risk of not being able to use the shelter I've taken the trouble to provide to save my own family."

This kind of tough talk from a Chicago suburbanite last week had echoes all over the U.S., as the headlines spread uneasiness and the shelter business boomed. In Austin, Texas, Hardware Dealer Charles Davis stashed four rifles and a .357 Magnum pistol in his shelter and pointed out its four-inch-thick wooden door: "This isn't to keep radiation out, it's to keep people out." Davis is also prepared in the event that some of his shelterless neighbors get into his shelter before he does. "I've got a .38 tear-gas gun, and if I fire six or seven tear-gas bullets into the shelter, they'll either come out or the gas will get them."

Swarm of Locusts. "This seems to be something that looms very large in a lot of people's minds," says Vice President Roger Culler of International Shelter Corp. Many shelter owners, for example, go to great lengths to keep their shelters secret—even to the extent of passing off shelter construction workers as furnace repairmen.

Relations between Los Angeles and Las Vegas are still recovering from a flap over a speech by Las Vegas Civil Defense Leader J. Carlton Adair, who proposed a 5,000-man militia against the possibility of wartime refugees from California pouring into Nevada "like a swarm of locusts." And Civil Defense Coordinator Keith Dwyer of California's Riverside County (pop. 306,191) last week told a group of officials and reserve policemen in the town of Beaumont that as many as 150,000 refugees from Los Angeles might stream into Beaumont if there were an enemy attack, and that all survival kits should include a pistol. "There's nothing in the Christian ethic," said Dwyer, "which denies one's right to protect oneself and one's family."

Quote:“Plutonium material mixed with the flaming fuel drained into trench cables and was carried away in the smoke from several fires. This resulted in a deposition of alpha contamination on the launch pad complex that represented a major contamination problem. Contaminated debris was scattered throughout the wire-enclosed pad area and neighbouring areas. Metal revetment buildings were highly contaminated with alpha activity. Burning fuel flowing through cable trenches caused contamination on the interior of the revetments and all equipment contained therein. Fuel, which spilled and flowed over the compacted coral surrounding the launch mount and revetments resulted in highly contaminated areas. Prevailing winds at the time of the destruction caused general contamination of all areas downwind of the launch mount.”

Cleaning up Johnston Atoll

Quote:‘Atomic Bill’ and the Birth of the Bomb

How a star reporter became a cheerleader for the Manhattan Project, and what that says about journalistic ethics today.

5:51 a.m. on Monday, May 21, 1956, the famed New York Times science correspondent William Leonard “Atomic Bill” Laurence watched a new universe burst into existence.

As with most profound revelations, this one took a few minutes to sink in, even as Laurence watched it unfold about 40 miles away through a set of heavy goggles. Reliable eye protection was necessary when watching the birth of a new universe, as Laurence well knew, having already done so several times in his long career. No one else among the 14 other reporters who stood around him on that 1956 morning, clustered on the flag bridge of the Amphibious Force Command Ship U.S.S. Mount McKinley (AGC-7), could boast of such exclusives.

But even Laurence had never seen anything like what he was now contemplating. Called Cherokee, it was a hydrogen bomb that moments before had been dropped about four miles off target from a B-52 bomber flying 10 miles over the northern Pacific, near the island of Namu in the Bikini Atoll. Cherokee detonated at an altitude of about 5,000 feet with an explosive force of 3.8 megatons, hundreds of times as powerful as the Trinity test that had once so awed him.

William Laurence is the great neglected celebrity of the Manhattan Project. Mentioned in nearly every account of the atomic bomb saga, from Lansing Lamont’s 1965 “Day of Trinity” to Richard Rhodes’s seminal Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” he’s the enigmatic reporter standing on the sidelines scribbling notes while Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, and the other Los Alamos geniuses stand in the cold New Mexico desert one July morning to watch the birth of their creation.

Yet none of these books, the films and TV movies such as “Fat Man and Little Boy” and “Day One,” or any of the other sundry retellings of the Manhattan Project story gives Laurence more than a passing reference. After encountering this mysterious figure so many times in so many different venues, I began to wonder: Who the hell was this guy, and how did he ever get to be the only reporter allowed to cover one of the biggest stories of the 20th century?

To the nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, Laurence was “part huckster, part journalist, all wild card … he’s improbable in every way, a real-life character with more strangeness than would seem tolerable in pure fiction.” He has also become something of a moral bête noire for some who have questioned his motivations, ethics, and Manhattan Project reporting, seeing him either as an opportunist who parlayed a lucky break into a historical exclusive or a nefarious propagandist for the military establishment.

....

We will probably never know the true extent to which William Laurence was co-opted, compromised, or corrupted by his military and governmental connections and involvements. It appears that in many ways, he was never really certain himself, and allowed himself to fall into a rabbit hole of murky motivations, ethical conflicts, and questionable alliances for the sake of what he viewed as his journalistic duty and dedication to the truth. What is clear, however, is that he allowed his awe, his sense of wonder, to overwhelm his consciousness, numbing his original visceral dread of atomic weapons and his detailed knowledge of their power. After struggling for decades with the insoluble conflict between the atom’s potential for both unparalleled good and unspeakable evil, he resolved the struggle in his own soul by surrendering to a comforting anodyne, a conviction that nuclear weapons were ultimately a “world-covering, protective umbrella” to shield humanity until the dawn of a golden era of peace.

Blinded by the fireball light of Cherokee that shone so brilliantly and then faded, Laurence anesthetized the dread he had felt and warned of long before any of his colleagues by simply fooling himself. Those of us who are his inheritors must guard against falling into the same trap.

‘Atomic Bill’ and the Birth of the Bomb

Quote:The crash occurred at Lakenheath Royal Air Force Station. 20 miles northeast of Cambridge, England. The plane was part of the 307th Bombardment Wing and had recently come from Lincoln Air Force Base, Nebraska. As part of what was called "Operation Reflex," B-47 bombers were regularly rotated, usually on a 90-day basis, to bases in the United Kingdom and North Africa. In the storage igloo were three Mark 6 nuclear bombs, each 12 feet long and 6 feet in diameter. Each bomb had about 8,000 lbs. of TNT as part of its trigger mechanism. The blazing jet fuel did not ignite the TNT and was extinguished by the base fire fighters. The four crewmen [of the aircraft] were killed. "It is possible that a part of Eastern England would have become a desert" had the TNT exploded and showered radioactive materials over a wide area, said a now retired Air Force general who was in the U.K. at the time. "It was a combination of tremendous heroism, good fortune and the will of God," said a former Air Force officer who was on the scene.

It is not clear when American nuclear weapons were first deployed to Europe.

The Broken Arrow Project

Quote:In less than three years, NASA could be testing a nuclear rocket in space.
The space agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced on Wednesday that Lockheed Martin had been selected to design, build and test a propulsion system that could one day speed astronauts on a trip to Mars.

BWX Technologies, based in Lynchburg, Va., will build the nuclear fission reactor at the heart of the engine.

The $499 million program is named DRACO, short for the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations.

The DRACO engine would consist of a nuclear reactor that would heat hydrogen from a chilly minus 420 degrees Fahrenheit to a toasty 4,400 degrees, with the hot gas shooting from a nozzle to generate thrust. Greater fuel efficiency could speed up journeys to Mars, reducing the amount of time astronauts spend exposed to the treacherous environment of deep space.

NY Times (archived)

Quote:"Seeing the DRACO images of Didymos for the first time, we can iron out the best settings for DRACO and fine-tune the software," said Julie Bellerose, the DART navigation lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "In September, we'll refine where DART is aiming by getting a more precise determination of Didymos' location."

NASA spacecraft set to intentionally crash into an asteroid to help save Earth

Quote:i. after years of canibus telling me to watch this & thinking SPACEys name was k-pax, run, die hard, run-style, i finally did and, shit-- this is a contactee movie! like george adamski or king, van tassel & his integratron voices of enoch, orthon & ashtar, rael & unarius-ruth-uriel, even ti & do peep all descended from swedenborgian angels, theosophy's ascended masters, post-astral mormons & comte de saint germain of mt shasta's prickly "I AM" movement, 7 heavenly trumpets blaring thru cracks in the walls of our prison like john's in revelation--blinded spacey's fruit-addict extraterrestial "prot" (NOT "k-pax") even rocks stunna shades like king's 1959 interplanetary parliament video:

--and, so; 

ii. since xmas ive gone thru weeks, now months of total paranoia, dissociative insomnia, synchronicity obsession, deja vu/mind-panic, hypochondria & unreal body/unraveling of self etc & this movie is one of the only things to break through all that (--if u post corny Glad your feelin better PD! shit i will block) to reveal actual, nourishing truth coming unto me as an open & honest guide or seer even tho i adolescently rebuked it as "patch adams shit" & sat idly as it was crowned tacky & sentimental by guys who i know cried after a breakup to cannibal ox's "the f-word." its dumb, so dumb to think of kpax (i mean, "prot") as a corny forrest gump box of chocolates guy instead of a weird fuck-up whose cliched pearls of alien wisdom represent understandable human (?) responses to real suffering.

iii. ufo ideation is mental illness, or vice versa: like the kid in jose chung's from outer space who'd rather be abducted than get a job in his shitty small town (rerun in my own shitty small town as a ufosick kid bored & weird & not yet old enough to get a job) ive seen extraterrestrial compulsion as a mechanism for dealing with true alienation & hopelessness, "the agony & humilation of being human" to quote chung again: why this quasi-religious impulse to trip into space-madness & disordered eccentricity? 

Quote:DOD: Two weapons were jettisoned from a C-124 aircraft on July 28 off the east coast of the United States. There were three weapons and one nuclear capsule aboard the aircraft at the time. Nuclear components were not installed in the weapons. The C-124 aircraft was enroute from Dover Air Force Base, Delaware when a loss of power from number one and two engines was experienced. Maximum power was applied to remaining engines; however, level flight could not be maintained. At this point, the decision was made to jettison cargo in the interest of safety of the aircraft and crew. The first weapon was jettisoned at 4,500 feet altitude. The second weapon was jettisoned at approximately 2,500 feet altitude. No detonation occurred from either weapon. Both weapons are presumed to have been damaged from impact with the ocean surface. Both weapons are presumed to have submerged almost instantly. The ocean varies in depth in the area of jettisonings. The C-124 landed at an airfield in the vicinity of Atlantic City, New Jersey, with the remaining weapon and the nuclear capsule aboard. A search for the weapons or debris had negative results.

CDI: Three of the 32 accidents occurred while transporting nuclear weapons from one place to another, using the C-124 "Globemaster" transport. In this instance weapons and a nuclear capsule were being taken to Europe. The weapons were jettisoned within an area 100 miles southeast of the Naval Air Station, Pomona, N.J. where the aircraft landed. The two weapons are still presumably in the area, somewhere east of Rehobeth Beach, Delaware, Cape May and Wildwood, N.J.
The Broken Arrow Project

• 2nd Battalion, 504th Airborne Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, North Carolina
  
• Company B, 167th Infantry Regiment, 31st Infantry Division, Camp Atterbury, Indiana
  
• Company C, 135th Infantry Regiment, 47th Infantry Division, Fort Rucker, Alabama
  
• Tank Platoon, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Camp Carson, Colorado
  
• Engineer Platoon, 369th Engineer Amphibious Support Regiment, Fort Worden, Washington
  
• Medical Detachment (augmented), Sixth Army, numerous Sixth Army posts.
  

• Observation of the shot
  

• Psychological testing
  
• Movement to objective
  
• Inspection of an equipment display
  
• Airborne exercise
  

Quote:Of the 44 States included in Annex 2 required for entry into force of the CTBT, all have signed with the exceptions of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), India, and Pakistan. Five of the 44 Annex 2 States have signed but not ratified the CTBT; they are China, Egypt, Iran, Israel, and the United States. The United States and China are the only remaining NPT Nuclear Weapon States that have not ratified the CTBT.
CTBT

Quote:While New York City was, he stated, a particularly tempting target for “whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning,” city dwellers everywhere now had to grapple with the “stubborn fact of annihilation.” He was less than thrilled that, after World War II—“the worst blood bath in history”—the world’s leadership had apparently learned nothing, and still seemed hell-bent on total self-destruction.

“I hold one share in the corporate earth,” he wrote as the Cold War picked up steam, “and am uneasy about the management.” “God’s stuff” was clearly unsafe in human hands.
...

“A nation wearing atomic armor is like a knight whose armor has grown so heavy he is immobilized,” White retorted. “He can hardly walk, hardly sit his horse, hardly think, hardly breathe.” The H-bomb, he wrote, had “little virtue as a weapon of war, because it would leave the world uninhabitable.”
- EB White, nuclear watchdog
Stealing God’s Stuff

Quote:Making 'The Blue Flash': How I reconstructed a fatal atomic accident

In 1946, a dangerous radioactive apparatus in the Manhattan Project killed a scientist when his screwdriver slipped. To tell his story, Ben Platts-Mills pieced together what happened inside the room.

Less than a year after the Trinity atomic bomb test, a careless slip with a screwdriver cost Louis Slotin his life.

In 1946, Slotin, a nuclear physicist, was poised to leave his job at Los Alamos National Laboratories (formerly the Manhattan Project). When his successor came to visit his lab, he decided to demonstrate a potentially dangerous apparatus, called the "critical assembly". During the demo, he used his screwdriver to support a beryllium hemisphere over a plutonium core. It slipped, and the hemisphere dropped over the core, triggering a burst of radiation. He died nine days later.

Last week, BBC Future explored the consequences of this fatal accident in a specially illustrated story created by the artist and writer Ben Platts-Mills:

he Blue Flash: How a careless slip led to a fatal accident in the Manhattan Project

In this gallery, Platts-Mills explains how he composed the illustrations, based on reconstructions created shortly after the accident, archive photographs, and his own mock-up of the apparatus built from household materials.

Quote:Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories are the design and engineering labs for the W88 Alt 370, while multiple nuclear security enterprise facilities are responsible for other aspects of the W88 Alt 370:

• Sandia National Laboratories produces the neutron generators.
  
• Los Alamos National Laboratory produces detonator assemblies.
  
• Kansas City National Security Campus produces the gas transfer system and the arming, fuzing, and firing subsystem.
  
• Savannah River Site is responsible for testing, evaluating, and replenishing the gas transfer system.
  
• The Pantex Plant is responsible for producing the conventional high explosives and final assembly of the complete W88 Alt 370 for delivery to the U.S. Navy.
  

W88 Alteration 370

Quote:A "pit" is the fissile core of a nuclear warhead. In modern warheads, it creates a nuclear explosion that triggers a substantially larger thermonuclear explosion. All pits currently in the U.S. nuclear stockpile were made at the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, CO, which opened in 1952. The Department of Energy (DOE) halted pit manufacturing operations there in 1989; the United States has been unable to make stockpile-quality pits -- and therefore complete nuclear warheads since then. Inability to make pits may have adverse consequences. For example: (1) The United States cannot replace pits for the W88 warhead (for the Trident II missile) that are destroyed during evaluation; currently, only one W88 evaluation pit remains, so use of more W88 pits would reduce deployable warheads. (2) Pits deteriorate over time, though the rate at which that happens is under study. If pits of a given type deteriorate so much as to be no longer reliable, or if an unanticipated defect arises, then hundreds to thousands of deployed warheads might have to be withdrawn.

Nuclear Warhead "Pit" Production: Background and Issues for Congress (2004)

Quote:This photo from 1979 shows a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory employee opening the world's heaviest hinged door, which was eight feet thick, nearly twelve feet wide, and weighed 97,000 pounds. A special bearing in the hinge allowed a single person to open or close the concrete-filled door, which was used to shield the Rotating Target Neutron Source-II (RTNS-II) -- the world’s most intense source of continuous fusion neutrons. Scientists from around the world used it to study the properties of metals and other materials that could be used deep inside fusion power plants envisioned for the next century.
DOE photo of the week for Aug 24, 2012 | Photo at Flickr

Quote:'X' sign atop Twitter HQ in SF taken down after city, resident complaints

SAN FRANCISCO -- The large and bright 'X' logo that sat on top of the San Francisco headquarters of the company formerly known as Twitter has now been taken down.

And now, the company will be fined for installing the logo on the roof without a permit.

According to the Department of Building Inspection in San Francisco, fees will be for removal of the structure, building permits and to cover the costs of DBI and planning department's investigation.

Patrick Hannan, communications director with the DBI, said a building permit is required to remove the structure but, due to safety concerns, the permit can be secured after the structure is taken down.

Hannan said they received 24 complaints about the 'X' logo structure over the weekend including concerns about its safety and illumination.

ABC7 went to the building Monday morning and the sign is no longer up. Crews were also working on the vertical sign along the side of the building.

The sign was installed Friday, and lasted three days. The city of San Francisco said that they were opening an investigation and complaint into permit requirements for the sign.

Residents in the area were also not pleased, as the sign pulsated light, illuminating the surrounding buildings.

Quote:On the other hand, this kind of science-fiction counterfactual can have its usefulness as a thought experiment. It isn’t history, but it can be used to illustrate some important aspects about the early history of the atomic bomb that a lot of people don’t know, and to undo a little bit of the “great man” obsession with bomb history. Albert Einstein has been associated with the bomb both through his famous mass-energy equivalence calculation (E=mc²) and because of the famous Einstein-Szilard letter to Roosevelt in 1939. On the face of it, this gives him quite a primary role, and indeed, he usually shows up pretty quickly at the beginning of most histories of the Manhattan Project. But neither E=mc² nor the Einstein-Szilard letter were as central to the Manhattan Project’s success as people realize — either scientifically or historically.

Quote:In the philosophy of thermal and statistical physics, Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment created by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell in which he suggested how the Second Law of Thermodynamics might hypothetically be violated. In the thought experiment, a demon controls a small door between two chambers of gas. As individual gas molecules approach the door, the demon quickly opens and shuts the door so that fast molecules pass into the other chamber, while slow molecules remain in the first chamber. Because faster molecules are hotter, the demon's behavior causes one chamber to warm up as the other cools, thus decreasing entropy and violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

(08-04-2023, 07:03 AM)BIAD Wrote: ...And don't forget 'Two Tribes' with a fine example of the media presenting the fear-driven rhetoric!

Quote:We Go on Record: the CW Response to Hiroshima By Dorothy Day September 1, 1945

Mr. Truman was jubilant. President Truman. True man; what a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news; “jubilant” the newspapers said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.

That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, on page one, column one of the Herald Tribune, says. The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers – scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.

Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have created destruction. We have created a new element, called Pluto. Nature had nothing to do with it.
Created to Destroy

“A cavern below Columbia was the bomb’s cradle,” born not that men might live, but that men might be killed. Brought into being in a cavern, and then tried in a desert place, in the midst of tempest and lightning, tried out, and then again on the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ, on a far off island in the eastern hemisphere, tried out again, this “new weapon which conceivably might wipe out mankind, and perhaps the planet itself.”

“Dropped on a town, one bomb would be equivalent to a severe earthquake and would utterly destroy the place. A scientific brain trust has solved the problem of how to confine and release almost unlimited energy. It is impossible yet to measure its effects.”

“We have spent two billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history and won,” said President Truman jubilantly.

The papers list the scientists (the murderers) who are credited with perfecting this new weapon. One outstanding authority “who earlier had developed a powerful electrical bombardment machine called the cyclotron, was Professor O. E. Lawrence, a Nobel prize winner of the University of California. In the heat of the race to unlock the atom, he built the world’s most powerful atom smashing gun, a machine whose electrical projectiles carried charges equivalent to 25,000,000 volts. But such machines were found in the end to be unnecessary. The atom of Uranium-235 was smashed with surprising ease. Science discovered that not sledgehammer blows, but subtle taps from slow traveling neutrons managed more on a tuning technique were all that were needed to disintegrate the Uranium-235 atom.”

(08-07-2023, 03:43 AM)EndtheMadnessNow Wrote: ...Makes ya wonder what pyramids or cloaked deathstar they have up in Space, where we can't see.?...