Well, I’m sure you can rule out a nuclear disaster. There’d still be measurable radiation and fission products around. It would be impossible to keep that type of evidence under wraps.
Another argument against a nuclear accident is that the sailors hauling munitions had been complaining about bad conditions and improper handling for months before the accident. The workers knew there was a problem but “management” didn’t want to hear it.
The need to to ship munitions to the Pacific theatre to keep up with the war pushed down the senior officers’ appreciation for the problem–as did the fact that the complainers were nearly all black. They were dismissed as malingerers,
Lack of radiation would suggest to me that it was wasn’t, whatever theories somebody might have for mitigation of the radiation.
One thing which might be useful is to compare this incident to the Halifax explosion, which was during WWI, and definitely the result of a munitions ship full of conventional explosives (the Mont Blanc) going up.
The Halifax blast was of probably larger magnitude. A half ton chunk of the anchor from the ship landed 2 miles from the explosion. Windows were blown out 50 miles away, and shock waves reported 300 miles distant.
Note the description of the Halifax blast:
Several Halifax accounts refer to the ship going up in an extremely bright flash, so I tend to discount that bit of evidence from the accounts of Port Chicago being exclusive to atomic weapons. As well as other pieces of evidence that are simply features of large explosions than exclusively nuclear.
When ammunition ships blow, it’s a real problem. One of the problems is that at sea or in harbor, there is nothing to shield the blast, so its effects can be far-reaching, and far more widespread than an equivalent explosion on varied terrain. This could explain in part the disparity between the 1.4 kilotons of munitions the ship was carrying and the 2.23 estimate.
The Trinity explosion of fully one year after the date of the event you describe is the first acknowledged atomic blast. It was measured in kilotons, or thousands of tons of TNT, and scored what, eight or ten? I don’t think we had enough fissile material to make a bomb a year earlier, and even if we did, they don’t just detonate on their own. If an A-Bomb had detonated, it would have blown all of the munitions with it, and the explosion would have been half an order of magnitude larger. There is no question that the munitions were there.
Ammunition ships carry quite enough to match the described effects. Here are some (very carefully, Mr. Zotti) excerpted examples from this page and others as cited.*
“FORT STIKINE (April 14, 1944) British Ministry of War Transport steamship (7,142 tons) loaded with 1,400 tons of munitions and a cargo of cotton bales was berthed in Bombay docks when a fire broke out… The resulting explosion was almost as great as the blowing up of the ammunition ship Mount Blanc in Halifax Harbour during the First World War. Fires on shore blazed for two days and nights. In the harbour itself, eighteen merchant ships were either sunk or severely damaged. A total of 336 people died and over 1,000 injured.”
[It’s not good to compare apples to oranges, but that’s 1.4 kilotons of munitions going up there. --SK]
Mont Blanc (December 6, 1917) “Stored in the holds, or simply stacked on deck, were 35 tons of benzol, 300 rounds of ammunition, 10 tons of gun cotton, 2,300 tons of picric acid (used in explosives), and 400,000 pounds of TNT [0.2 KT TNT, plus a crapload of other dangerous stuff–SK]… Over 1,900 people were killed immediately; within a year the figure had climbed well over 2,000. Around 9,000 more were injured, many permanently; 325 acres, almost all of north-end Halifax, were destroyed.” --from http://www.region.halifax.ns.ca/community/explode.html
Note the date, almost twenty years before the atomic bomb was conceived, and almost thirty before it was built. Mushroom clouds are present at every explosion of this type; it is the nature of a big-ass explosion, not just that of an atomic bomb.
I should add that the harbor-destroying capabilities of a laden munitions ship go back to the earliest days of gunpowder. They have a nasty habit of blowing up. Captain Sir Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Patrick O’Brian’s inspiration for the character of Jack Aubrey, was forced by the Admiralty to keep his ideas on munition-shop “bombs” secret throughout the Nineteenth Century.
states that the Army/Navy Safety Board reported the yeild of the explosion as 2.13 kilotons. The ship held 1.5 kilotons of munitions. A bit of a discrepancy.
They also link members of the Manhattan Project to the scene, and describe why residual radiation may be low.
And the (in)famous Texas City disaster was caused by a ship half-full of fertilizer. (which ignited an oil storage facility of two, and a munitions ship…). Wiped out most of the city.
As a clarification, when I said “half an order of magnitude larger,” I meant larger than the described explosion. The munitions would have contributed only a percentage in an A-bomb blast.
And as far as the Manhattan people being very curious about that explosion, of course they were! This would have been a real-world example to study–before the tests were conducted. It would have supplied a wealth of information from damage projection to the building of structures for observation of the tests. I’m sure someone in New Mexico was on the first plane out to Port Chicago, not to cover things up, but to study.
The Manhattan peoples’ interest in the height of the fireball is interesting. That, I believe, is one way you ascertain the size of the explosion, something that would be valuable in a test. Since there was a known quantity of ammo about, it would have been keen data.
There are several eyewitness accounts of this event in Studs Terkel’s book “The Good War” (a collection of interviews with people who lived through WW II). I highly recommend this book! In fact, now I’ve reminded myself, I think I’ll re-read it again.
What really happened is that the Navy brass figured that since almost all of the personnel involved were black, that their safety didn’t matter enough to take adequate precautions against potential accidental explosions.
At least that is the common wisdom of the people who now live in the area. I used to live about a half-mile from the Port Chicago Highway…in West Pittsburg. (I guess someone just couldn’t think of any original city-names)
Shiva You should look deeper into that site from which you get your info. And also into the authors of the story/theory.
I thought at first that the Napa Sentinel might be a regular, mainstream newspaper. Turns out, it is/was a conspiracy oriented privately printed thingy. It also published stories on mind control and black helicopters.
If there were any credibility to the theory of a nuclear explosion, you can be a major news organization would have had it by now. Of course, they could be keeping it secret at the government’s request. :rolleyes:
I just remembered some more from the account of the Port Chicago explosion from The Good War. A contributing factor to the explosion was that the different load teams would compete to see who could load their ship fastest. People were taking shortcuts and handling the explosives roughly. This didn’t significantly increase the explosion hazard as long as they were loading the conventional explosives they’d been loading for much of the war.
However, a new explosive, Torpex, was being introduced, and it was not only more powerful than the old explosive, but it was more sensitive to physical shock (or perhaps electrostatic discharge). If there are any experts on demolition here at the SDMB, they could probably tell us how much more bang this stuff has and whether it requires more careful handling than whatever came before. I think it’s still the high explosive of choice in the military.
As to the discrepancy between the 2.13 kiloton yield reported and the 1.5 kilotons of munitions, that’s probably because of the way such things are measured. I’m guessing that the 1.5 kilotons of munitions means that there were 3 million pounds of various explosives present. When refering to the yield of explosives, however, you normalize to TNT, so a 2.13 kiloton explosion would be the explosion you’d get from 2,130 tons of TNT. It’s quite possible that the explosives carried abord the ship were higher yield than TNT.
I glanced through the article, and a lot of what they’re saying just doesn’t make any sense, particularly the part about the Mark II bomb. I did a search to try to find some independant verification of their claims about it, but I did not find any mention of it outside other Port of Chicago conspiracy pages.
They claim it used a moderator to allow the use of non-highly enriched fuel, which just does not seem like it would work. In fast fission, the mean neutron lifetime is somewhere on the order of 10[sup]-9[/sup] to 10[sup]-8[/sup] seconds, whereas the mean lifetime for thermalized neutrons in a typicla reactor is more like 10[sup]-5[/sup] to 10[sup]-4[/sup] seconds. AFAIK, the reaction in a typical bomb is over in less than 10[sup]-6[/sup] seconds, or somewhat less than 100 fast neutron lifetimes. That’s a discrepancy of a few orders of magnitude at least. I’m skeptical that clever engineering (esp. given the state of nuclear weapons technology in early 1944!) could overcome this problem.
They also use this as a basis for claiming that no plutonium would be produced, and their argument is totally ridiculous.
…is just simply wrong. [sup]238[/sup]U has its highest neutron capture cross section in the “resonance peaks” at intermediate neutron energies as they say (you can see a graph here–look at the blue line on the bottom graph). But having a moderator increases the probability that a neutron will be captured by [sup]238[/sup]U. If you have no moderator, then all the neutrons (statistically speaking) will be fast neutrons, and few of them will be captured. If you have a moderator, the neutrons don’t just immediately become thermalized–they actually spend quite a bit of time at the energies near those resonance peaks, and are thus much more likely to be captured. I work at a research reactor with fuel of roughly the same enrichment as this alleged bomb, and even though we only have half as much fuel and the energy output over the lifetime of our reactor is orders of magnitude less than the energy output of a small nuclear weapon, we have produced a macroscopic amount of Pu in our fuel. In short, the bomb they describe would have produced a significant amount of plutonium, and whoever wrote that article needs to go over their nuclear physics again.
The portions of the letter they quote which they claim describes the results of a secret test do not appear to describe any such thing. It looks to me like he’s probably talking about theoretical damage predictions.
They also completely sidestep the issue of detectable contamination. They say that it’s plausible that the people working there after the explosion wouldn’t have suffered radiation sickness, but that’s a different issue altogether (and I think they’re playing that one fast and loose also). If that bomb contained 5kg of Uranium as they claim, there should be plenty of fission products around today to detect even if it was incredibly inefficient. Not to mention that the bomb was inside a steel ship–neutron activation of all that steel should leave plenty of evidence, but it’s not there…
My father once mentioned that car-sized chunks of concrete fell in Galveston, eight to ten miles away, after the 1947 explosion (alternately, this link mentions pedestrians being knocked down ten miles away.) In any case, eyewitness accounts in Shiva’s first link compare with those from these two separate ammonium nitrate explosions (2300 tons, then 1,000 tons, I couldn’t find any mention of a munitions ship.)
Concerning fertilizer carrying vessels as opposed to munitions ships - remember that the Oklahoma City bombing was a fertilizer / diesel fuel bomb. Half a ton, if I recall. Ammonium nitrate goes off with a hell of a bang, and you can essentially regard a cargo of the right type of fertilizer in the same general category as a cargo of munitions.
