5 ms·

Cool. Also what, Ehtséo Ayah didn't see a great mushroom in the distance? That's pretty disappointing

by lincon127 3y ago

kotaKat 3y ago
[flagged]
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  Not only was the mine primarily staffed by "whites", uranium ore has negligible health risks.
  - etc-hosts 3y ago
    I read through the linked article. I didn't find anything specific about the ratio of First Nation to white workers in the mines. According to this article, it was mostly First Nation workers in the ore mines. https://ejatlas.org/conflict/mining-and-transportation-of-uranium-ore-at-port-radium-northwestern-territories-and-its-impacts-on-the-local-deline-first-nation-community-who-worked-there https://ejatlas.org/conflict/mining-and-transportation-of-ur... Here's another article about the workers in the ore mines. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/natives-worked-unprotected-in-uranium-mine-1.159274 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/natives-worked-unprotected-in...
  - fsh 3y ago
    Breathing in dust from uranium ore, or its decay product Radon is very much a health risk: https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining-and-milling https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining...
  - nukeman 3y ago
    A lump of raw ore on a shelf in your home office? Sure. Uranium ore in ton quantities, underground in a poorly ventilated mine? That’s a big health risk, due to radon, other daughter products, and the inherent heavy metal hazards of uranium.
  - 542354234235 3y ago
    >Uranium mining has widespread effects, contaminating the environment with radioactive dust, radon gas, water-borne toxins, and increased levels of background radiation...Uranium is an α-particle emitter, as are many of its radioactive decay products, including radon. α-Particles are bulky (2 protons and 2 neutrons) and cannot penetrate human skin. However, when particulate matter containing α-emitters is inhaled or ingested, it results in internal exposure to radiation. The carcinogenicity of inhaled α-emitters is not in dispute. Radon gas is responsible for up to 20% of cases of lung cancer in Canada. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653646/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653646/
- version_five 3y ago
  This is inaccurate, revisionist and offensive to most Canadians, and has no place in this kind of forum.
- glompers 3y ago
  https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-history-okinawa-idUST29175620070406 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-history-okinawa-idU... I believe a parallel debate among historians is whether mass Japanese civilian suicides near battle zones were under Japanese military orders or were merely voluntary. You can be sure the Allied invasion of the home islands would have been desirable for such coerced self killing -- which the Allies tried to prevent -- if it had been the mission to kill as many Japanese people as possible. What is AFAIK not debated is that Japanese who did surrender, instead of heading for the suicide cliffs in places like Okinawa (I don't know about Saipan), were often murdered from a distance by the Japanese soldiers who wanted everyone to head for the suicide cliffs. It possibly deterred other Japanese who were thinking of surrender. Unfortunately I think that your justified indignation actually overestimates human righteousness and justification, both theirs and ours and our own future descendants'. I think justification is needed and justice/hope is too but it won't come from the likes of us.
- wk_end 3y ago
  I have no defence for the Canadian government's treatment of Indigenous people - either in this case or in a thousand others - but describing the Manhattan Project as "an American mission to kill as many people as they could in Japan" is really, really facile. For most of the war, the primary concern of the Manhattan Project was to counter Nazi Germany's attempt to build something similar, which had started beforehand. I don't know whether the US handled the bomb responsibly, but I know that the Nazis definitely wouldn't have. Given that history, as a Jew I find it almost offensive to deny the virtue of a mission to keep Hitler from having nuclear weapons unchecked. Even once Germany surrendered, the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did. There were various ways the US probably could have caused fewer civilian casualties; but they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did While this was the rationale that was published after the war by the US government, current historical scholarship indicates that it was a lot more complicated than that. To give just a few key points: Actual casualty estimates made by the US military in the spring and summer of 1945 for a land invasion of Japan were much smaller than figures quoted (without any specific sourcing given) in rationales published after the war. The latter figures were in the range of a half million to a million casualties, but the former figures were more like tens of thousands. While it was certainly a goal of the Truman Administration to end the war quickly, if at all possible before the Soviet Union attacked Japan, dropping the atomic bombs was far from the only feasible option for doing that. In particular, there were plenty of indications (including intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, since the US had broken the Japanese diplomatic code years before and was routinely reading all such traffic) that clarifying exactly what "unconditional surrender" meant, and in particular what the status of the Japanese Emperor would be, would have given the peace party within the Japanese government enough leverage to force a surrender sooner. There is also plenty of evidence that at the very least Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, wanted to drop the atomic bombs in order to make the Soviet Union more tractable diplomatically and to reverse the much more conciliatory policy towards them that FDR had taken. And finally, the internal deliberations of the Japanese government (which were not available to historians until some decades after the war) show that the impact of the Soviet Union invading Manchuria was much greater than the impact of the atomic bombs in pushing the issue for surrender. The Japanese weren't even sure at first what the atomic bombs were, and in any case the US had been firebombing Japanese cities for months so additional bombing was not a huge shock. The Soviets, however, had been stringing Japan along for more than a year at that point, holding out some hope that Japan might be able to get a negotiated peace brokered through the Soviet Union. In fact Stalin never had any such intention; he just wanted to make sure the Japanese didn't surrender until he had a chance to enter the war against them. But Japanese leaders didn't understand that until they were forced to realize it by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (the same morning that the Nagasaki bomb was dropped). Two good detailed references are The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz and Racing the Enemy by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. > they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.

Cool. Also what, Ehtséo Ayah didn't see a great mushroom in the distance? That's pretty disappointing

kotaKat 3y ago

[flagged]

llm_nerd 3y ago
Not only was the mine primarily staffed by "whites", uranium ore has negligible health risks.
- etc-hosts 3y ago
  I read through the linked article. I didn't find anything specific about the ratio of First Nation to white workers in the mines. According to this article, it was mostly First Nation workers in the ore mines. https://ejatlas.org/conflict/mining-and-transportation-of-uranium-ore-at-port-radium-northwestern-territories-and-its-impacts-on-the-local-deline-first-nation-community-who-worked-there https://ejatlas.org/conflict/mining-and-transportation-of-ur... Here's another article about the workers in the ore mines. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/natives-worked-unprotected-in-uranium-mine-1.159274 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/natives-worked-unprotected-in...
- fsh 3y ago
  Breathing in dust from uranium ore, or its decay product Radon is very much a health risk: https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining-and-milling https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactive-waste-uranium-mining...
- nukeman 3y ago
  A lump of raw ore on a shelf in your home office? Sure. Uranium ore in ton quantities, underground in a poorly ventilated mine? That’s a big health risk, due to radon, other daughter products, and the inherent heavy metal hazards of uranium.
- 542354234235 3y ago
  >Uranium mining has widespread effects, contaminating the environment with radioactive dust, radon gas, water-borne toxins, and increased levels of background radiation...Uranium is an α-particle emitter, as are many of its radioactive decay products, including radon. α-Particles are bulky (2 protons and 2 neutrons) and cannot penetrate human skin. However, when particulate matter containing α-emitters is inhaled or ingested, it results in internal exposure to radiation. The carcinogenicity of inhaled α-emitters is not in dispute. Radon gas is responsible for up to 20% of cases of lung cancer in Canada. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653646/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653646/
version_five 3y ago
This is inaccurate, revisionist and offensive to most Canadians, and has no place in this kind of forum.
glompers 3y ago
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-history-okinawa-idUST29175620070406 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-history-okinawa-idU... I believe a parallel debate among historians is whether mass Japanese civilian suicides near battle zones were under Japanese military orders or were merely voluntary. You can be sure the Allied invasion of the home islands would have been desirable for such coerced self killing -- which the Allies tried to prevent -- if it had been the mission to kill as many Japanese people as possible. What is AFAIK not debated is that Japanese who did surrender, instead of heading for the suicide cliffs in places like Okinawa (I don't know about Saipan), were often murdered from a distance by the Japanese soldiers who wanted everyone to head for the suicide cliffs. It possibly deterred other Japanese who were thinking of surrender. Unfortunately I think that your justified indignation actually overestimates human righteousness and justification, both theirs and ours and our own future descendants'. I think justification is needed and justice/hope is too but it won't come from the likes of us.
wk_end 3y ago
I have no defence for the Canadian government's treatment of Indigenous people - either in this case or in a thousand others - but describing the Manhattan Project as "an American mission to kill as many people as they could in Japan" is really, really facile. For most of the war, the primary concern of the Manhattan Project was to counter Nazi Germany's attempt to build something similar, which had started beforehand. I don't know whether the US handled the bomb responsibly, but I know that the Nazis definitely wouldn't have. Given that history, as a Jew I find it almost offensive to deny the virtue of a mission to keep Hitler from having nuclear weapons unchecked. Even once Germany surrendered, the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did. There were various ways the US probably could have caused fewer civilian casualties; but they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did While this was the rationale that was published after the war by the US government, current historical scholarship indicates that it was a lot more complicated than that. To give just a few key points: Actual casualty estimates made by the US military in the spring and summer of 1945 for a land invasion of Japan were much smaller than figures quoted (without any specific sourcing given) in rationales published after the war. The latter figures were in the range of a half million to a million casualties, but the former figures were more like tens of thousands. While it was certainly a goal of the Truman Administration to end the war quickly, if at all possible before the Soviet Union attacked Japan, dropping the atomic bombs was far from the only feasible option for doing that. In particular, there were plenty of indications (including intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, since the US had broken the Japanese diplomatic code years before and was routinely reading all such traffic) that clarifying exactly what "unconditional surrender" meant, and in particular what the status of the Japanese Emperor would be, would have given the peace party within the Japanese government enough leverage to force a surrender sooner. There is also plenty of evidence that at the very least Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, wanted to drop the atomic bombs in order to make the Soviet Union more tractable diplomatically and to reverse the much more conciliatory policy towards them that FDR had taken. And finally, the internal deliberations of the Japanese government (which were not available to historians until some decades after the war) show that the impact of the Soviet Union invading Manchuria was much greater than the impact of the atomic bombs in pushing the issue for surrender. The Japanese weren't even sure at first what the atomic bombs were, and in any case the US had been firebombing Japanese cities for months so additional bombing was not a huge shock. The Soviets, however, had been stringing Japan along for more than a year at that point, holding out some hope that Japan might be able to get a negotiated peace brokered through the Soviet Union. In fact Stalin never had any such intention; he just wanted to make sure the Japanese didn't surrender until he had a chance to enter the war against them. But Japanese leaders didn't understand that until they were forced to realize it by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (the same morning that the Nagasaki bomb was dropped). Two good detailed references are The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz and Racing the Enemy by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. > they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.