Hanford Nuclear Bombing Case Study

As World War II was coming to an end during 1945, the creation of one of the most destructive weapons known to humanity occurred within the United States. This weapon, known as “the atomic bomb,” was used on the two Japanese cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in a death toll unprecedented by any military weapon used before and an immediate, unconditional surrender. Some historians believe President Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb in order to intimidate the Soviet Union whereas others believe it was a strictly military measure designed to force Japan’s unconditional surrender. In the Report of a Scientific Panel of nuclear physicists, some scientific colleagues believed the atomic bomb was a “purely technical

The Hanford nuclear site in Benton, Washington was established in 1943 to produce the raw

Although drinking water is not yet known to have been affected, the groundwater was contaminated with volatile organic compounds and heavy metals (5). Both of these types of contaminants have been linked with one or several of the following: cancer, liver, kidney, and nervous system problems (4). In July 1979, the State Court required that all material be removed from the site by July 1980 (5). The state has spent over $300,000 cleaning this site (5). According to EPA standards, this site is in the "construction completed" stage of clean up. This does not mean, however that actual cleanup is complete because groundwater may need to be treated more than 30 years before contaminants are at accepted levels (5).

Dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified under the information they had at the time. When criticizing the actions of the Truman administration one needs to consider the effect of knowledge in hindsight. Truman was working under the knowledge that dropping the nuclear bombs would bring a short and fast victory to the Pacific front of the Second World War. As the war had already ended in Europe by this time, leaders were looking to end the campaign in the Pacific as quickly as possible. From a cost benefit perspective dropping the bombs on Japan meant that very few American lives were lost, and the cost of building the bombs compared to the cost of a minimum six month continuation of fighting.Additionally, there was no testing

Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombs tragically slaughtered 140,000 people. The miniscule town boasts one of the highest per capita incomes in the United States, and is almost 80 percent white. The Manhattan Project decades hence burgeoned into Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) a massive facility, easily 27,000 acres embedded in a New Mexico mountain plateau. When population estimations include farmers, farming communities, and Native Americans, some 38,000 Americans lived within a closer radius than Amarillo, Texas. Work at nuclear facilities was egregiously health hazardous throughout the 1950s and 1960s, leading Congress to pair the Radiation Compensation Exposure Act (1990) with an Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act in 2000.

However, this seemly simple situations gets extraordinarily complicated when every dimension is explored. The area was designated as a site for plutonium production in World War II by the United States Department of Energy, the same group that is in charge of the cleanup of the area. While they were widely successful at the nuclear power production, they have not been nearly as successful at cleaning up this area. In fact, they continue to stall today, and it was recently announced that the Tri-party agreement had been revised, and they had further delayed the deadline to begin cleaning up until 2019. Heart of America Northwest, is a citizen group that is attempting to put pressure on the anyone who has influence over this cleanup progress, by informing the citizens of the dangers of this lack of progress. This terribly complex issue could easily be related to many aspects of the course including pollution, environmental law, environmental ethics, and even waste. However, the work that I was involved with, informing people about the issues involved with Hanford, made the history of the environmental movement and the energy section resonate with me the

Yet another type of bomb was dropped by the B-52s, this one containing a large amount of the defoliating gas, Agent Orange. Hundreds of millions of acres of jungle were destroyed and even more fields and rice paddies were poisoned because of Agent Orange. South Vietnamese farmers complained about the detrimental effect Agent Orange had on their rice paddies, and its use flooded camps and cities with refugees from outlying areas where entire crops were destroyed. Agent Orange was supposed to eliminate the VC's advantageous hiding places, but it only turned the people we were fighting for against us even more. Even more so, Agent Orange cause countless birth defects and deadly illnesses in returning vets. Thousands of soldiers came back with reoccurring sicknesses, and even cancer. 6 The use of Agent Orange was perhaps one of the largest mistakes made in Vietnam.

Sweeney and Bock switched airplanes, with Sweeney flying Bockscar and Bock flying The Great Artiste

Assignment 1 – The Atrocities of Zyklon B Since the Holocaust, nearly 70 years ago, the world has watched as similar catastrophes have occurred in various continents across the globe. Few, however, have been as far-reaching in their affliction, targeted in their hate or as determined in the systematic approach to crimes against humanity. The gays, roma, mentally handicapped and physically disabled were all victims of the Nazi regime, and the way in which those deemed ‘inferior’ were exterminated took an (if possible) increasingly sadistic turn with the emergence of a dangerous new chemical weapon in 1941. The new asphyxiating agent, Zyklon B, was used wholly for pest control up until this point; after which it became a tool of mass annihilation

While doing research for an essay on Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Southern Washington I read that the Department of Energy wants to ship 3 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The shortest route from Hanford to Carlsbad cuts through Eastern Oregon. This worries me.

I read an article titled “The power of the H-bomb” about a year or two ago, and it is something I often find myself bringing up in conversations with my friends. The article, written for the Harvard Crimson in 2002, discusses Harvard students’ experiences with meeting new people and having them discover that they are/were students at Harvard. The first student to recount his experiences, Olugbenga T. Okusanya ’05, recalled multiple instances in which he was conversing with a girl/group of girls and noticed a drastic increase in their perception of him upon learning that he was a student at Harvard, ultimately leading to an increased interest in romantic pursuits of Okusanya. However, Okusanya was not the only student who reported this: countless

The Trinity Project was a project conducted to test the effects of a nuclear weapon. The Trinity nuclear device was detonated on a 100-foot tower on the Alamogordo Bombing Range in south-central New Mexico at 0530 hours on 16 July 1945. (Rohrer, 1995-2003). This project was organized by the Manhattan Engineer District (MED). This organization worked diligently planning and coordinating all of the logistics for the groundbreaking event. From 1945-1946 over 1000 personnel either worked or visited the test site. The United States was trying to gain nuclear proliferation throughout the world so this project was necessary for our enemies to see the devastation of a nuclear blast.

The first World war chemical weapons were used then outlawed for combat. “Unlike when the U.S. was the only nuclear power and first used the technology against Japan without fear of reciprocation” ( The Ch.1 The Dangers). As a country we didn’t know the effects of a bomb on a living city, but now we know the consequences. Now what

By bombing Japan, many civilians were killed as a result of the U.S. 's desire to use a new weapon. Laurence describes the bomb as, "a thing of beauty to behold" and "Never before had so much brain power been focused on a single problem" (11). This demonstrated how the U.S. saw Japan as a problem that needed to be dealt with quickly and that the new and supposedly destructive weapon was the best choice. While the targets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were both production areas ,they were inhabited by a number of civilians. By choosing to drop the bomb, thousands were annihilated and any survivors began to suffer from radiation sickness shortly after. Because of its destruction, the U.S. believed the atomic bomb was a quick solution to the war.

There have been lots of nuclear accident around the world. One of the accident that had a major impact on the world was the Chernobyl disaster. The disaster took place on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. The disaster was caused by a reaction explosion induced by design faults and staff application errors. The accident took place in the course of scheduled tests to check the power supply mode in the event of external sources loss. Even after 10 days, explosions and ejections of radioactive substances continued. The release of radiation and radioactive substance polluted the places within 30 km of Chernobyl, and those areas have been closed for a long period of