Hanford Nuclear Bombing Case Study

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

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

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

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the Atomic Bomb “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. On August 9, 1945, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb “Fat Man” on Nagasaki. The first bomb was dropped to scare the Japanese into surrendering when it didn’t work the second bomb was dropped causing destruction and the surrender of Japan. In a time of need and anguish, Harry S Truman made the courageous decision to drop the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The big question is whether America was justified in dropping the bombs and it was because it would help stop the war, save American lives, and avenge those who were sadly murdered or hurt in the process.

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

The United States made the right decision to bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. President Truman, felt that is was evident that the other alternatives where the Allied forces thought of invading Japan could have led to a lot of casualties on their part (Roark 685). Another reason can be because it is the same Japan that agitated America to join the Second World War, which it had initially avoided, by bombing the Pearl Harbor (Riggs 3). Apparently, this grudge was carried forward.

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.

This was the time when the United States and the Japanese had an extreme rivalry between each other. After the Japanese attacked a US territory, killing 2,403 people, the US promptly declared war on Japan, entering themselves into a second world war after being significantly provoked. Germany and Italy declared war on the US after the US declared war on Japan. Later on, after defeating Germany, the USSR agreed to help the US defeat Japan ninety days after the Nazi surrender, so the US had a six month period before the USSR could come and help them defeat Japan. The US did not want to give up any territory to the USSR like they did with Europe, so the US had to attempt to end the war themselves prior to the ninety days. To end the war between the US and Japan prior to the agreed date by the USSR, J. Robert Oppenheimer invented something that would later murder 105,000 people and injure 94,000 more.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.