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The New York Times obituary of Theodore Van Kirk, navigator and last surviving crew member of the B-29 “Enola Gay” when it dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima that killed at least 140,000 people, is a reflection of the historical myths and rationalizations that have served to justify the mission since 1945. That they do […] The death of Fred Ordway recalls the sins of post-WWII decades when Americans turned a blind eye to Nazi atrocities as long as German scientists and engineers brought to this country dedicated themselves to the Stars and Stripes. As “rocket scientist” Wernher von Braun’s chief popular apologist, Ordway helped to cosmeticize von Braun’s complicity in […] Someday, far in the future, scholars will look back in awe at the national larceny that is American strategic weapons procurement. The latest episode in a noir drama that stretches back to the years after World War I, when the services were learning how to milk Congress with defense appropriations as job acts, is the […] A YouTube video of Fukushima residents dancing to Pharrell Williams’s hit song has joined the worldwide phenomenon. “Even after the nuclear accident, many people are still leading ‘happy’ everyday lives. We wanted to show to the world the cheerful atmosphere in which we live,” said Hitomi Kumasaka, the 53-year-old producer of the video, who runs […] Los Angeles has been ground zero for the military-industrial complex ever since Glenn Martin wowed carnival crowds at the Pomona Speedway in 1914 by dropping bombs from biplanes. So maybe folks out there know a good raree-show when they see one. The Los Angeles Times published this week a cogent survey by Pulitzer-winning reporter David […] One of the first conundrums that medical students face is that technology has pushed doctors and patients into realms of experience where they are morally and ethically unprepared. These often occur at the extreme boundaries of life and death, where American medicine, at least, is increasingly focused. This is an old dialectic, of course: what […] The paradigm shift of nuclear power safety in Europe–away from the old American price-conscious doctrine that ignored low-chance risks, toward an approach that adopts preventive measures based on worst-case scenarios–is happening because of post-Fukushima recognition of the magnitude of consequences for populations and territories when reactors fail catastrophically. (In the words of the chairman of […] Energy Solutions, an American company led by an investment manager and an accountant, appears to have sold Tokyo Electric Power Company a lemon for the crucial task of decontaminating hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive water that have accumulated at Fukushima Daichi. The ALPS multi-nuclide removal system there has been completely shut down after […] Okuma and Futaba, the two towns that host Tokyo Electric Power Company’s ruined Fukushima reactors, have already given their all for nuclear power. They are highly radioactive and their former residents will probably never live there again. So it is understandable that these citizens might balk at allowing radioactive waste from the disaster to be […] It’s reasonable to assume that many Americans could identify Colonel Paul Tibbets (1915-2007) as the pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It’s equally reasonable to gauge that virtually no one has ever heard of Colonel Victor Delnore (1914-1998), commander of the U.S. Occupational Forces in Nagasaki from […] |