Malu 'Aina
Help Uncover the Truth!
The resolution below has been sent to State Senators Gil Kahele 586-6760, Josh Green, and State Rep. Faye Hanohano 586-6530 with a request that it be introduced in both the State Senate and State House this legislative session.
Please call these and other State legislative offices and urge support.
Call toll free 974-4000 to get any legislator or government office.
Add Your Voice in Solidarity!
Resolution calling for comprehensive independent testing and monitoring to determine the extent of radiation contamination at the Pohakuloa Training Area (PTA).
1. WHERES, the Army repeatedly denied the use of depleted uranium (DU) in Hawaii, and it now has been confirmed that the Army used DU at PTA, Schofield Barracks, and possibly other sites in Hawaii; and
2. the documented use of Davy Crockett DU spotting rounds, and the possible use of other DU spotting rounds or weapon systems, have created the presence of radiation contamination at PTA; and
3. the U.S. Army’s license to possess DU in Hawaii expired in 1964, thereby making the Army’s possession of DU in the form of on site contamination for nearly half a century illegal possession without a license; and
4. the full extent of radiation contamination at PTA is unknown since less than 1% of the 133,000-acre base has been tested, and only a few fragments of an estimated 2000 Davy Crockett DU spotting rounds have been found; and
5. DU is a chemically toxic and radioactive heavy metal with a half-life of 4.5 billion years; and
6. DU emits radioactive alpha particles that can cause cancer, cell mutations, birth defects, and other possible health problems; and
7. on July 2, 2008, the Hawaii County Council (HCC) passed Resolution No. 639-08 by a vote of 8-1 urging the military to order a complete halt to bombing, all live firing, and dust creating activities until there is a clean up of the depleted uranium; and
8. live-fire continues at PTA and the DU has not been cleaned up, thereby risking the spread of radioactive contamination on and off base; and;
9. HCC Resolution 639-08 also called on the military to establish a citizen monitoring system to work closely with the military to assure transparency and community confidence; and
10. HCC Resolution 701-08 passed unanimously on Aug. 13, 2008 named Dr. Lorrin Pang, MD, MPH to be the official council representative and community liaison with the military to assure transparency and community confidence; and
11. the military has failed to establish a citizen monitoring system to work closely with the military to assure transparency and community confidence; and
12. independent action is needed to address the potential hazards to troops, citizens and visitors of radiation contamination at Pohakuloa Training Area, therefore
BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HAWAII STATE SENATE AND HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, that comprehensive, independent testing and monitoring be done with citizen oversight led by Dr. Lorrin Pang, MD. to determine the extent of radiation contamination at the Pohakuloa Training Area (PTA) and that federal funds be sought to pay for this effort through Hawaii’s Congressional delegation.
BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that copies of this resolution to be sent to the PTA Commander, Hawaii Army Garrison Commander, Commander -in-Chief Pacific (CINCPAC), Hawaii’s Governor, members of Hawaii’s Congressional delegation, members of the United States Senate and House Subcommittees on Defense Appropriations, and the President of the United States of America.
Military Clean Up NOT Build Up!
1. Mourn all victims of violence. 2. Reject war as a solution. 3. Defend civil liberties. 4. Oppose all discrimination, anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic, etc.
5. Seek peace through justice in Hawai`i and around the world.
Contact: Malu `Aina Center for Non-violent Education & Action P.O. Box AB Kurtistown, Hawai`i 96760.
Phone (808) 966-7622. Email ja@interpac.net http://www.malu-aina.org
Hilo Peace Vigil leaflet (Feb. 11, 2011 – 491st week) – Friday 3:30-5PM downtown Post Office
Replies
Mahalo Kaohi for this contribution so others may comprehend what this is all about. I urge people to taken this issue up with the legislature. If they are dumping these toxins in Waianae to clean up Schofield of it, which they shouldn't, then people should be outraged at this criminal practice. Clean up means exactly thqt and not relocating the tosins to another place on the island especially where civilians are living. They have to dump the toxins (DU) outside of Hawaii's territory. Eventually, it will enter our aquifers and with the 4.5 billion half-life, the islands will be unfit for human life. Where will the islanders be relocated to, if they are still alive? The U.S.A. has always considered the Hawaiian Islands expendable; and that's an ugly fact. You will be wrenched from your Mother-Land like those that lived on Bikini Island,become a stateless person to live in a foreign country against your will if the State of Hawaii doesn't act on this NOW! It's everyone's duty to let the legislature know this because our lives depends on it.
Be a Valentine for Peace!
Published by jalbertini on February 12th, 2011 in Hawaii Independence, Military, Public Events, Social Justice, Take Action!.
Peace Organizing meeting
Malu Aina will have a peace organizing meeting on Monday, Feb. 14th from 7-9PM at the Keaau Community Center.
1. Please come to lend a Valentine Day hand for peace. We are planning a solidarity day of Peace Action against the wars for April 9th in Hilo in conjunction with actions around the U.S. There is lots to be done to mobilize.
2. We also need help to get the DU monitoring resolutions passed in the Hawaii State legislature.
3. We need deas for resisting major military expansion at Pohakuloa, including helicopter flights up Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. One idea for discussion is a possible annual Ho’olaule’a at Mauna Kea Park near the PTA main gate. A celebration of resistance with food, music, speakers, info tables, etc. A day of fun but also protest.
Other ideas are welcome too.
Mahalo.
–
Jim Albertini
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We must find our inner voice to understand and drawing meaning from deep within our minds to prevent our Na Kanaka humanity to disappear just because of 'disbelief' of what man can do just to gain power from a competitive need to gain senseless power over another group of people.
It is important to note that we man, women, and children all have a voice and can choose to say it in writing.
Join the voices of Malu 'Aina.
Please Kokua,
This is an important action to take on behalf of all people in Hawaii, especially Waianae residence. From 2009 to 2010 we became Schofields dump site for their firing range toxic contamination of DU and other poisonous chemicals. Our today children and elderly were Square Pants Sponge Bobs for the Army in Hawaii. We the westside of Oahu received their pilau depleted uranium and are not very sick with people dying.
The Army Risk Health Assessments are saying that we contacted DU through our eating habits of fish or anything from near off shores. That survey was conducted at a recent Nanakuli meeting by a Pentagon Hired team of foreigner data collectors. Ones that could barely speak English--unbiased of local populace, and manipulative to favor the fault the weight of the problem onto the subsistence native population and its business communities that markets fish to the public. It's called free enterprise or 'consumerism' as cause of sicknesses.
The Army needed to get rid of their left over excess of Uranium that they got from the Germans to create both bombs Fat Man and Little Boy so they dumped it off Maili Beach in Waianae.
Mockup of the original weapon
"Fat Man" is the codename for the atomic bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, by the United States on August 9, 1945, at 11:02 PM (JSP). It was the second of the only two nuclear weapons to be used in warfare to date, and its detonation caused the third man-made nuclear explosion. The name also refers more generically to the early nuclear weapon designs of U.S. weapons based on the "Fat Man" model. It was an implosion-type weapon with a plutonium core, similar to the Trinity device tested only a month earlier in New Mexico.[1]
"Fat Man" was possibly named after Winston Churchill,[2] though Robert Serber said in his memoirs that as the "Fat Man" bomb was round and fat, he named it after Sydney Greenstreet's character of "Kasper Gutman" in The Maltese Falcon. The design of "Fat Man" nuclear assembly was substantially the same as "the gadget" detonated at the Trinity test in July 1945.
"Fat Man" was detonated at an altitude of about 1,800 feet (550 m) over the Japanese city of Nagasaki and was dropped from a B-29 bomber Bockscar, piloted by Major Charles Sweeney of the 393d Bombardment Squadron, Heavy. The bomb had a yield of about 21 kilotons of TNT or 88 TJ.[3] Because of Nagasaki's hilly terrain, the bomb missed its intended detonation point, and damage was somewhat less extensive than that in relatively flat Hiroshima. An estimated 39,000 people were killed outright by the bombing at Nagasaki, and a further 25,000 were injured.[4] Thousands more died later from related blast and burn injuries, and hundreds more from radiation illnesses from exposure to the bomb's initial radiation. The aerial bombing raid on Nagasaki had the third highest fatality rate in World War II[5] after the nuclear strike on Hiroshima[6][7][8][9] and the March 9/10 1945 fire bombing raid on Tokyo.[10]
TechnologyThe device was 128 inches (3,300 mm) long, 5 feet (1.5 m) in diameter, and weighed 10,200 pounds (4,600 kg). In accordance with the name, it was more than twice as wide as Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier; however, the mass was only 15% more than that of Little Boy.
"Fat Man" was an implosion-type device using plutonium-239. A subcritical sphere of plutonium was placed in the center of a hollow sphere of high explosive. Thirty-two pairs of detonators located on the surface of the high explosive were fired simultaneously to produce a powerful inward pressure on the core, squeezing it and increasing its density, resulting in a supercritical condition and a nuclear initiation.
At first it was thought that two pieces of subcritical plutonium (Pu-239) could simply be shot into one another to create a nuclear explosion, and a plutonium gun-type design of this sort (known as the "Thin Man" bomb) was worked on for some time during the Manhattan Project. In April 1944, Emilio Segrè discovered that plutonium created for the bomb in the nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington—even though it was supergrade plutonium containing only about 0.9% Pu-240—was not as pure as the initial samples of plutonium developed at the cyclotrons at Ernest O. Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Because of the presence of the Pu-240 isotope, reactor-bred plutonium had a much higher rate of spontaneous neutron emission than was previously thought, and if a gun-type device was used it would most likely pre-initiate and result in a messy and costly "fizzle". The spontaneous fission rate of Pu-240 is 40,000 times greater than that of Pu-239, so that in a gun-type plutonium device of the sort planned during the Manhattan Project, the last few centimeters would have to be traveled in less than 40 microseconds. After this problem was realized, the entire Los Alamos laboratory re-organized around the problem of the implosion bomb, the "Fat Man" starting in June 1944.
The difficulty in the design of an implosion device lay primarily in properly compressing the plutonium core into a near-perfect sphere; if the compression was not symmetrical it would cause the plutonium to be ejected from the weapon, making it an inefficient "dirty bomb". In order to accomplish the compression, the high explosive system had to be carefully designed as a series of explosive lenses which used alternating fast- and slow-burning explosives to shape the explosive shock wave into the desired spherical shape. An early idea of this sort had been raised by physicist Richard Tolman during early discussions of possible bomb designs, specifically in having many pieces of fissile material attached to explosives that would then assemble them in a spherical fashion. This idea was further developed by Seth Neddermeyer, who attempted to find a way to collapse a hollow sphere of plutonium onto a solid sphere of it inside itself. Neither of these ideas relied on compression of the plutonium, and neither would assemble the device fast enough to avoid preinitiation (see discussion below).[11]
The idea of using shaped charges came from James L. Tuck[12] and was developed by mathematician John von Neumann,[13] and the idea that under such pressures the plutonium metal itself would be compressed may have come about from conversations with Edward Teller, whose knowledge of how dense metals behaved under heavy pressure was influenced by his theoretical studies of the Earth's core with George Gamow.[11] Von Neumann and George Kistiakowsky eventually became the principal architects behind the lens system. Robert Christy is credited with doing the final calculations that showed that a solid subcritical sphere of plutonium could be compressed to a critical state greatly simplifying the task since earlier efforts had attempted the more difficult compression of 3D shapes like spherical shells. After Christy's report, the solid-plutonium core weapon was referred to as the "Christy Gadget".
Because of its complicated firing mechanism, and the need for previously untested synchronization of explosives and precision design, it was felt that a full test of the concept was needed before the scientists and military representatives could be confident it would perform correctly under combat conditions. On July 16, 1945, a device using a similar mechanism (called the "gadget" for security reasons) detonated in a test explosion at a remote site in New Mexico, known as the "Trinity" test. It gave about 20 kt (80 TJ), 2 to 4 times the expected yield.
The gun-type method, though inadequate for plutonium, could still be used for highly enriched uranium, and was employed in the "Little Boy" device, used against Hiroshima. The implosion method is more efficient than the gun-type method, and also far safer, as a perfect synchronization of the explosion lenses is required for the core to properly detonate, greatly reducing the chances of an accidental nuclear initiation. After the success of the first implosion "gadget", almost all subsequent American fission designs utilized implosion, with a rare few that used the gun-type design out of special design requirements (like extreme narrowness of weapon, such as nuclear artillery).
The Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon detonated at Operation First Lightning (known as "Joe 1" in the West) was closely based on the "Fat Man" device, on which they had obtained detailed information from the spies Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and David Greenglass.
The names for all three projects ("Fat Man", "Thin Man", and "Little Boy") were allegedly created by Robert Serber, a former student of Los Alamos director Robert Oppenheimer who worked on the project, according to Serber. According to his later memoirs, he chose them based on their design shapes; the "Thin Man" would be a very long device, and the name came from the Dashiell Hammett detective novel and series of movies by the same name; the "Fat Man" bomb would be round and fat and was named after Sidney Greenstreet's "Kasper Gutman" character in The Maltese Falcon. "Little Boy" would come last and be named only to contrast to the "Thin Man" bomb.[14]
Other sources say the names originated with the Army Air Forces. According to this version, the B-29 bombers would need certain modifications to enable them to carry the weapons. A cover story was created that the modifications were to fit out two B-29s as transportation aircraft for President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The "Fat Man" was supposedly Churchill, the "Thin Man", Roosevelt.[15] When it was discovered that the gun-bomb could be shorter than first thought, "Thin Man" was renamed "Little Boy."
After the war, the Fat Man (technically the model 1561 Fat Man) was modified--improved detonators, a more reliable firing system, and other minor changes. It thus emerged as the Mark III (or Mark 3) atomic bomb. Approximately 100 units were added to the arsenal before retirement by 1950.
[edit] Interior of bomb
The original blueprints of the interior of both Fat Man and Little Boy have recently been unclassified. Also, much information about the main parts is available in the unclassified public literature. Of particular interest is a description of Fat Man sent to Moscow by Soviet spies at Los Alamos in 1945. It was released by the Russian government in 1992.[16]
Below is a diagram of the main parts of the "Fat Man" device itself, followed by a more detailed look at the different materials used in the physics package of the device (the part responsible for the nuclear initiation).
[edit] Physics package
[edit] Assembly
To allow insertion of the plutonium pit as late as possible in the device's assembly, the spherical U-238 tamper had a 4 inches (100 mm) diameter cylindrical hole running through it, like the hole in a cored apple. The missing cylinder, containing the plutonium pit, could be slipped in through a hole in the surrounding aluminium pusher.
In August 1945, it was assembled on Tinian Island. When the physics package was fully assembled and wired, it was placed inside its ellipsoidal aerodynamic bombshell and wheeled to the bomb bay of the B-29 Superfortress named "Bockscar", after its normally assigned command pilot, Fred Bock (who flew a different plane on the Nagasaki mission).[17]
In 2003, these concentric spheres and cylinder were recreated as the centerpiece of an art installation called Critical Assembly by sculptor Jim Sanborn. Using non-nuclear materials, he replicated the internal components of the "Trinity" device, which had the same design as Fat Man. Critical Assembly was first displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC.[18]
[edit] Initiation sequence
The plutonium must be compressed to twice its normal density before free neutrons are added to start the fission chain reaction:
The result is that about two and a half of the thirteen pounds of plutonium in the pit, (about 20% of the 6.2 kilograms (14 lb) ) fissioned, and converted probably less than 1 gram (0.035 oz) of mass into energy, releasing the energy equivalent of 21 kilotons of TNT or 88 TJ.