The Port Chicago Disaster
November 25, 2002 7:58 AM   Subscribe

Now that dubbya has decided to make nukes a first strike option.... heres a little known tale out if WW2. Dock workers(largely african american...naw no racism there) loading explosives are instantly atomized leaving a huge crater in the river bed. The navy's spin... simultaneous explosion of conventional high-explosives! What does this have to do with our "new" war?? dubbya has put his ok on developing miniature nukes(1kt and below for "bunker busting") could this happen again? And Why wasn't this in my history books??
posted by hoopyfrood (11 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason:



 
You want every little naval accident to be in your history books? How big is your backpack?
posted by tiamat at 8:04 AM on November 25, 2002


Featured previously here for our enjoyment on MeFi, which featured this link from the History Channel and this one from nexusmagazine.
posted by plemeljr at 8:05 AM on November 25, 2002


Um, why not just test for radioactive fallout.
posted by four panels at 8:07 AM on November 25, 2002


Gee, plemeljr, and here I was fanning through my 'little' blue book of The Comments of Chairman Dan and you had the appropriate link right there. ;)
posted by y2karl at 8:13 AM on November 25, 2002


Why is it that people have to sneak in a racism spin just because it might fit?

2 ships were totally destroyed, one of them new. The accident caused millions of (1940s) dollars in damages. Does anyone really think this was an acceptable outcome to the military because it mostly killed black people? As if the navy relaxed its safety precautions for handling explosives because blacks were working the docks.
posted by adzuki at 8:23 AM on November 25, 2002


Not racism so much as protection of morale, I think. The 1943 Baker's Creek troop transport crash was also hushed up. The facts on this one are only now coming to light through the efforts of a survivor's son.
posted by SealWyf at 8:32 AM on November 25, 2002


Amazingly, before the 1948 desegregation of the military, the military was, in fact ... segregated. I suppose one could reach back into history and make a big deal out of the fact that before it got better, it was worse, but I'm not certain what the point is.

Also, high explosives, it turns out, are ... highly explosive. It's happened other places before, when nuclear science didn't hardly exist. Don't get it into your head that just because nuclear devices are more efficient at vaporizing things, that conventional explosives are incapable of vaporizing things. If anything, nuclear explosives are that much safer to handle. They're not going to become unstable sitting in a warehouse, subject to temperature and humidity fluctuations, and they're not going to explode when you accidentally clank them. (No, I wouldn't, just for kicks. But you see my point.) Indeed, in half a century of nuclear weaponry, now expanded to include 8 or more countries, there has not been one single accidental detonation of a nuclear weapon, even given the frightening lists of accidents we know about.

And the United States has never relinquished first-strike nuclear attack as an option. Doing so would not have allowed the US to reserve its nuclear forces as a retaliation for a wholly conventional Soviet invasion of Europe.
posted by dhartung at 8:40 AM on November 25, 2002


What's with the Bush references? One thing has nothing to do with the other -- it's just yet another thinly-veiled attempt to rehash the same tired arguments about the administration ("dubbya" -- I laughed the first time Molly Ivins used that name. Back in the 1990s). I didn't vote for him, and I'm not a Republican, but I don't understand making tortured connections just to bash Bush (again). And the connection between Bush and an explosion on a dock in 1944 (two years before he was born) is about as tenuous as it gets.
posted by pardonyou? at 8:46 AM on November 25, 2002


This is absurd. Assuming that we had a nuke to test, why wouldn't we test it in the middle of a desert far away instead of destroying materiel and killing enlisted men during a desperate war? There is no plausible motive for the conspiracy alleged.
posted by norm at 8:51 AM on November 25, 2002


hoopyfrood, I sentence you to 50 lashings with a wet noodle for contributing to the World Punctuation Shortage. In order to preserve our precious natural punctuation resources, please limit yourself to one terminal question mark per sentence.

Thank you.
posted by jammer at 8:51 AM on November 25, 2002


"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." -- N. Bonaparte
posted by Cerebus at 9:15 AM on November 25, 2002


« Older Disgust is universal it seems   |   fancyteeth flash animation Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments