What if USA’s nuclear bombs dropped in North Carolina HAD detonated?
The Potential Nuclear Fallout in North Carolina, Mapped Atlantic Wire CONNOR SIMPSON 21 Sept 13 You’ve probably heard by now that the U.S. military nearly committed the biggest “oopsie daisy!” in history when they accidentally dropped two nuclear bombs near Goldsboro, North Carolina. But what if they did? Thankfully they didn’t detonate, but let’s imagine, just for a split second, that they did. This isn’t you typical Saturday morning exercise. There’s a certain macabre aspect to it investigation that can be hard to get over. Thousands of people would be dead, but it’s hard not to be at least a little curious to know how much of the U.S. would have been affected had the bombs gone off………
it would have been bad.
How bad, you ask? Well, by using the handy NukeMap3D created by Alex Wellerstein, we can determine how much destruction would have followed at least one atomic bomb dropping in North Carolina. The blast could have reached, with the wind blowing in the right direction, as far up the coast as New York City. Philadelphia and Washington would likely have been affected. This map is calculated with a 15 mile an hour wind and 100 percent fission:
That’s a lot of the east coast. The fallout would likely not fall in such a straight line. And depending on the weather, could bend in many directions and possibly stretch even further. This is all speculative, of course. Most importantly, thankfully, the bombs never detonated in real life.
We know about this ultimate close call thanks to investigate journalist Eric Schlosser. He unearthed this declassified document that details the incident in question through a Freedom of Information Act request while researching his new book, Command and Control, about the nuclear arms race. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/09/potential-nuclear-fallout-north-carolina-mapped/69701/
South Carolina was very nearly nuclear bombed by US military
The Time the U.S. Military Came This Close To Dropping a Nuclear Bomb on North Carolina Slate, By Will Oremus, Sept. 20, 2013 Remember fallout shelters? Air raid drills? Duck and cover?
At the height of the Cold War, Americans lived in perpetual fear of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. But perhaps we were afraid of the wrong side.
A declassified document obtained by author Eric Schlosser sheds new light on the 1961 Goldsboro accident, in which a U.S. Air Force B-52 broke apart in midair over 
North Carolina, dropping a pair of Mark 39 nuclear bombs on the countryside below. The accident is not news, but just how close the military came to wiping out a swath of the Eastern Seaboard has long been debated. For years the military insisted that the hydrogen bombs were never in danger of detonating.
The secret document, written by a nuclear weapons safety supervisor in 1969 and first published by The Guardian today, makes it clearer than ever that was not the case. In fact, three of the four safety mechanisms on one of the bombs were unlocked in the course of the fall. By the time the bomb reached the ground, the only thing preventing it from detonating was a single, simple, low-voltage switch. A short-circuit of that switch as a result of the mid-air breakup—“a postulate that seems credible,” the supervisor writes—could have resulted in mass destruction.
The Mark 39 bombs, Schlosser notes in his new book Command and Control, were some 250 times as powerful as the device that the United States dropped on Hiroshima……..http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/20/goldsboro_nuclear_accident_declassified_document_u_s_nearly_nuked_north.html
Cuba’s abandoned unfinished nuclear power plant
Concrete Crypt for Communist Dreams: Cuba’s Unfinished Nuclear Power Plant http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/09/11/the_unfinished_cuban_nuclear_power_plant_abandoned_when_the_ussr_collapsed.html By Atlas Obscura, Sept. 11, 2013 In 1976, Communist companions Cuba and the Soviet Union signed a deal to build a nuclear power plant in Juraqua. Construction on the first of two nuclear reactors began in 1983 with a target operational date of 1993. But a few years before the reactor’s scheduled completion, the USSR collapsed. The flow of crucial Soviet funds ceased, 300 Russian technicians went home, and Cuba was forced to suspend construction on its badly needed power plant.
Lacking nuclear fuel and without the primary components installed, the plant sat in limbo until December 2000, when Russian President Vladimir Putin paid a visit to Cuba. Putin offered Fidel Castro a belated $800 million to finish the first reactor. Despite Cuba’s reliance on imported oil for power, Castro declined. Project status: officially abandoned.
The unfinished plant, a huge, domed concrete structure, sits on the Caribbean coast, across the bay from the city of Cienfuegos.
Russia’s secret maze of underground radioactive trash tunnels
A Secret Race for Abandoned Nuclear Material http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/world/asia/a-secret-race-for-abandoned-nuclear-material.html?_r=0 By ELLEN BARRY August 17, 2013 Working in top secret over a period of 17 years, Russian and American scientists collaborated to remove hundreds of pounds of plutonium and highly 
enriched uranium — enough to construct at least a dozen nuclear weapons — from a remote Soviet-era nuclear test site in Kazakhstan that had been overrun by impoverished metal scavengers, according to a report released last week by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard.
The report sheds light on a mysterious $150 million cleanup operation paid for in large part by the United States, whose nuclear scientists feared that terrorists would discover the fissile material and use it to build a dirty bomb.
Over the years, hints emerged that something extraordinarily dangerous had been left behind in a warren of underground tunnels — like the American aerial drones that circled over the site, looking for intruders, or the steel-reinforced concrete that was poured into tunnels and over stretches of earth.
Among the report’s new revelations is that the Soviet testers left behind components, including high-purity plutonium, that could have been used to build not just a dirty bomb but a “relatively sophisticated nuclear device,” an American official told the report’s authors. Continue reading
Britain’s pro nuclear spin in the 1980s – denigrating opponents
Labour and Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND ) were tarred as Communist sympathisers or stooges. Greenham women were projected as naïve (coupled in some narratives with the condescending qualification “well-meaning mothers and grandmothers”, and in others with “squalid” and “dangerous feminists”). The Conservative line was “If you knew what we know, you wouldn’t question the need for Trident and Cruise”. History has confirmed that the peace movement understood much more than we were given credit for. Perhaps that is why Thatcher’s government refused to engage in an intelligent debate over nuclear policy, finding it easier to belittle their opposition while asserting their status quo decisions and preferences as if they were factual, evidence-based necessities.
Pro-nuclear propaganda in 1983: lessons for 2013 50/50 Inclusive Democracy REBECCA JOHNSON 9 August 2013 Read the first.] Cabinet papers and secret government letters from 1983 that have been made public under the 30 year rule show that Margaret Thatcher’s government was more seriously worried about the electoral impact of nuclear weapons deployments than had previously been revealed.
Their concerns included the popular opposition to Trident replacement and to the US siting of cruise missiles at Greenham Common.
Though Labour was tearing itself apart over the break-away faction that formed a new Social Democratic Party (SDP), some 700,000 more people voted for the disarmament-oriented Labour Party of 1983 than in the 1979 election when the Party was led by Prime Minister James Callaghan, who took the first steps towards Trident replacement and the deployment of cruise missiles in 1979. Callaghan lost that election, and Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Labour’s defeat in 1983 had far more to do with the SDP factor in a two-party system, economic reconstruction, and innovative use of media and advertising techniques by the Tories……… Continue reading
A political advantage: the reason why USA bombed Japanese cities
.it wasn’t necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war but our possession and demonstration of the bomb would make the Russians more manageable in Europe.
The real purpose in incinerating two high-density civilian population centers, says Stimson, was “to persuade Russia to play ball.”
that’s the very definition of terrorism: using violence or the threat of violence as the means to achieve political ends. It’s terrorism with a vengeance. Americans just don’t do that kind of thing. Americans would never behave in such a horribly depraved and cruel manner. But, in fact, we did. And, as Part II of this article will make devastatingly clear, we still do. And it won’t stop until America awakens to the truth about itself, and, openly acknowledging that truth with a show of genuine heartfelt remorse, proceeds to make amends where amends are due.
America’s Nuclear Madness: Terrorism With A Vengeance (Part I) By Robert Quinn” OpEdNews 8/11/2013 “………The inhumanity of it all couldn’t be more telling. The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki was especially brutal and cruel. Knowing of the horrendous horrors that had already been unleashed in Hiroshima, three days later the U.S. did the same thing to the civilian population of Nagasaki. Why? Japan’s surrender was already assured without the bombs. Surely surrender would soon be following on the heels of Hiroshima’s decimation. So, again, why the second bomb?
The answer is as simple as it is grotesque. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki because Japan’s surrender was never the issue. Getting Japan to surrender was the pretext. The bombs were dropped to make a point. There were political reasons for nuking those two high-density civilian populations, and the United States was not going to let Japan interfere with its political agenda by way of an untimely surrender. The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki was part of a political maneuver that had already been decided upon — a one-two punch stratagem designed to strike fear into post-war Russia (our ally in the war against Germany) and convince them to accept their subordinate position on the postwar world stage.
Atomic Bombs Were Dropped On High-Density Civilian Populations In Japan To Make A Political Statement Continue reading
America’s official lies about the reasons for atomic bombing of Japanese cities
Regardless of the number of American lives Truman claims to have saved, the vast majority of Americans accept the official story as gospel. The indoctrinating media and sixty-eight years of propagandistic history texts from grammar school through high school did its job well. But, except for the fact of the bombs having been dropped, the official story is a lie. Not merely mistaken, but a lie.
In terms of moral justification, the official story no doubt provides a great deal of comfort to a great many Americans. Unfortunately, all indications are that this moral centerpiece of the official story just isn’t true. The truth, as it turns out, is so barbaric that it’s almost inconceivable..
America’s Nuclear Madness: Terrorism With A Vengeance (Part I) By Robert Quinn“ OpEdNews 8/11/2013 “………..The Official Story
Sixty-eight years ago, August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the first atomic bomb to ever be used in warfare on the civilian population of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later a second atomic bomb was dropped on the civilian population of Nagasaki, Japan. All toll, nearly a quarter of a million civilian men, woman, children, and babies lost their lives in those blasts. Of those who survived the blasts, many were maimed for life and many more would later die slow, painful deaths due to radiation poisoning and various forms of cancer.
In Hiroshima, a city with a population of 290,000, the initial death count by the end of August 1945 was estimated at 100,000. By the end of 1950 the estimated death toll had risen, according to some estimates, to 200,000. In Nagasaki, a city with a population of 240,000, including 400 prisoners of war, it’s estimated that some 70,000 were killed by the initial blast, with 140,000 dead within the next five years.
The official story at the time was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets whose destruction was necessary to bring the war to an end. This was a lie. The American public was also told that leaflets were dropped warning the inhabitants of these cities of the impending destruction and that they should leave. This, too, was a lie. The official story tells of President Truman’s decision to go nuclear on Japan as a necessary last resort designed to hasten a Japanese surrender, thereby saving American soldiers the horrors of a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland. As we will see, this, too, was a lie.
The official story claims that dropping the bombs saved the lives of many thousands of American soldiers which otherwise most certainly would have been lost. In October 1945, two months after the bombs were dropped, Truman wrote in his diary: Continue reading
No military need for atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
America’s Nuclear Madness: Terrorism With A Vengeance (Part I) By Robert Quinn” OpEdNews 8/11/2013 “………….Japan Had Already Been Defeated Prior To Dropping the Bombs After the war had ended, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (a board consisting of more than 1,000 individuals, both military and civilian), was tasked by U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson with the examination and analysis of U.S. involvement in WW II. The Survey concluded in 1946 that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
But it was not only with the advantage of hindsight that this conclusion was reached. General Eisenhower (Supreme Commander of allied forces in Europe) and General MacArthur (Supreme Commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific) came to the same conclusion before the bombs were ever dropped. I don’t think there’s any question that both General Eisenhower and General MacArthur would have done whatever was necessary to spare their troops the horrors of a ground invasion. But the fact is that neither of them believed that a ground invasion of mainland Japan was necessary. Continue reading
Yoshito Matsushige, photographer of iconic Hiroshima bombing pictures
the American military confiscated all of the post-bomb prints, just as they seized the Japanese newsreel footage,
Journalist Took Five Historic Pictures—That Must Never Be Repeated The Nation, Greg Mitchell on August 8, 2013 Yoshito Matsushige, a photographer for the Chugoku Shimbun, took the only pictures in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, that have surfaced since. It was these five photos Life magazine published on September 29, 1952, hailing them as the “First Pictures—Atom Blasts Through Eyes of Victims,” breaking the long media blackout on graphic images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On August 6, 1945, Matsushige wandered around Hiroshima for ten hours, carrying one of the few cameras that survived the atomic bombing and two rolls of film with twenty-four possible exposures. This was no ordinary photo opportunity. He lined up one gripping shot after another, but he could only push the shutter seven times. Continue reading
Japanese man advocates for Korean hibakusha
Japanese man stands up for Korean A-bomb victims jdp. AUGUST 8, 2013 by FAITH AQUINO Second-generation A-bomb victim Nobuto Hirano has been helping Korean atomic bomb survivors for almost three decades now. Although the Little Boy and the Fat Man were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, there were also thousands of Korean victims of the atomic explosions. Despite criticism from fellow Japanese, Hirano has continued to carry out his advocacy for the hibakusha who also deserve compensation but were neglected….http://japandailypress.com/japanese-man-stands-up-for-korean-a-bomb-victims-0833537/
How they began: the lies about Hiroshima atomic bombing
from its very first words, the official narrative was built on a lie, or at best a half-truth. Hiroshima did contain an important military base, used as a staging area for Southeast Asia, where perhaps 25,000 troops might be quartered. But the bomb had been aimed not at the “Army base” but at the very center of a city of 350,000, with the vast majority women and children and elderly males.
In fact, the two most important reasons Hiroshima had been chosen as our #1 target were: It had been relatively untouched by conventional bombs, meaning its large population was still in place and the bomb’s effects could be fully judged
residential areas bore the brunt of the bomb, with less than 10 percent of the city’s manufacturing, transportation, and storage facilities damaged.
There was something else missing in the Truman announcement: Because the president in his statement failed to mention radiation effects,
68 Years Ago: Truman Opened the Nuclear Era — With a Lie About Hiroshima Greg Mitchell, HUFFINGTON POST, : 08/06/2013 When the shocking news emerged that morning, exactly 68 years ago, it took the form of a routine press release, a little more than one thousand words long……The atmosphere was so casual, many reporters had difficulty grasping the announcement. ….
Those who helped prepare the presidential statement — principally Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson — sensed that the stakes were high, for this marked the unveiling of both the atomic bomb and the official narrative of Hiroshima, which largely persists to this day. It was vital that this event be viewed as consistent with American decency and concern for human life. Continue reading
Discovery of medical records of world’s first nuclear bomb radiation victim
“The records are invaluable as those reporting in detail on changes in her health condition after she was exposed to a fatal level of radiation.”
Medical records of world’s first radiation victim from A-bomb recovered Asahi Shimbun, By YURI OIWA/ Staff Writer, 4 August 13,
Long-lost medical records detailing the sharply deteriorating health of the world’s first recognized radiation sickness patient have been
recovered 68 years after the victim died within weeks of being exposed to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.
The patient, Midori Naka, a stage actress, died 18 days after she was injured in the nuclear blast on Aug. 6, 1945. She was staying in Hiroshima as part of a traveling theater troupe. After returning to Tokyo a few days later, Naka died while undergoing treatment, which included blood transfusions, at the University of Tokyo Hospital. She was 36.
The discovery came after decades of efforts by researchers to locate her missing records.The hospital kept updates of her condition leading up to her death and the results of her autopsy. But other vital records have been missing until their recent recovery.
Kazuhiko Maekawa, professor emeritus with the University of Tokyo who is expert in treating patients suffering from radiation exposure, hailed the discovery of Naka’s medical records. Continue reading
Nuclear war came so close in 1983
It is frighteningly revealing that, as in the previous Whitehall scenario conducted two years earlier, the war game predicts that NATO would use nuclear weapons first
the Queen never got to make that awe-inspiring and terrible address to her people. Instead, it disappeared into the files, to become a chilling curiosity of our recent history – and also a constant reminder of what could happen.
BigRead: what if nuclear war had happened in Europe in 1983 by: Dominic Sandbrook, Daily Mail August 02, 2013 AS the sun rises over London, it reveals a city scarred and bloodied beyond recognition. It is March 1983, and for days Soviet bombs have rained down on Britain’s capital.
Thousands of houses lie shattered and abandoned. Broken bodies litter the streets. The air hangs heavy with dread.
Downing Street has been obliterated and Buckingham Palace stands smouldering. The Queen, who broadcast so movingly to the nation a few days ago, has not been seen for days.
Despite calls for her to be evacuated to Balmoral, she refused to leave the capital, insisting that like her father George VI during World War II, she would stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the people of London.
QUEEN’S SPEECH: The speech she never had to deliver
But even as Britain burns, a much bigger horror is unfolding far away to the east.
Above the cities of the Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellites, nuclear mushroom clouds are rising. Faced with defeat on the battlefield, the West has fallen back on its last hope: a nuclear attack on the Communist Empire itself.
It sounds like something from a science fiction film. But this terrifying scenario comes from newly-declassified government documents, released earlier this week by the UK’s National Archives agency under the country’s Thirty Year Rule. Continue reading
Atomic bombing of Japanese cities was wrong and unnecessary
In a Newsweek interview, Ike would add: “…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
Countdown to Hiroshima, for July 31, 1945: Top Truman Aide Opposes Use of Bomb Greg Mitchell, HUFFINGTON POST, : 07/31/2013 For the past several days here, and for more to come, I am counting down the days to the atomic bombing of Japan (August 6 and August 9, 1945), marking events from the same day in 1945. I’ve written hundreds of article and three books on the subject: Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton), Atomic Cover-Up (on the decades-long suppression of shocking film shot in the atomic cities by the U.S. military) and Hollywood Bomb (the wild story of how an MGM 1947 drama was censored by the military and Truman himself).
Here are previous daily pieces this month in this unique series.
July 31, 1945: The assembly of Little Boy is completed. It is ready for use the next day. But a typhoon approaching Japan will likely prevent launching an attack. Several days might be required for weather to clear.
- In Germany, Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to Truman–and the highest-ranking U.S. military officer during the war–continues to privately express doubts about the bomb, that it may not work and is not needed, in any case. He would later write in his memoirs:
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”…………… Continue reading
False arguments on the “necessity” for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Will Media Raise Key Questions About Hiroshima, and Nuclear Legacy, This Year? THE NATION,Greg Mitchell on July 24, 2013 Sixty-eight years ago last week the Nuclear Age began with the first successful test of an atomic weapon at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert. The test and what surrounded it set the standard for much of what followed in the decades to come: radiation dangers, official secrecy and cover-ups, a nearly endless nuclear arms race, and the triumph of the national security state……
Every summer for the past thirty years I’ve written numerous articles about this and related subjects—because the US media, with the exception of the fiftieth anniversary in 1995, fail to raise new, or even longstanding, questions. I’ve written three books on the subject: Hiroshima in America (with Robert Jay Lifton), Atomic Cover-Up (on the decades-long suppression of shocking film shot in the atomic cities by the US military) and Hollywood Bomb (the wild story of how an MGM 1947 drama was censored by the military and Truman himself).
For now, here’s a kind of summary of the debate of the use of the bomb in August 1945. Continue reading
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