Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #129 Interview with Peter Vogel

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Much has been writ­ten and said about the devel­op­ment of nuclear weapons. Per­haps the most intrigu­ing chap­ter in the devel­op­ment of the bomb was revealed by researcher Peter Vogel, who devel­oped com­pelling infor­ma­tion that the 1944 explo­sion of an ammu­ni­tion ship was, in fact, the explo­sion and prob­a­ble delib­er­ate test of an ear­ly atom­ic weapon. When the E.A. Bryan explod­ed in Suisun Bay (in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area), the phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics of the explo­sion were typ­i­cal of an atom­ic blast, not a con­ven­tion­al one. In this broad­cast, Vogel high­lights these char­ac­ter­is­tics includ­ing: a bril­liant white flash (not the yel­low or orange flash that would be char­ac­ter­is­tic of TNT or tor­pex); an appar­ent Wil­son con­den­sa­tion cloud (char­ac­ter­is­tic of nuclear explo­sions over water) and blast dam­age much greater than would have been pro­duced by a con­ven­tion­al explo­sion. In addi­tion, Peter presents com­pelling his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion indi­cat­ing that the Port Chica­go explo­sion was the test of an ear­ly and rel­a­tive­ly crude atom­ic weapon called the Mark II. Cit­ing cor­re­spon­dence about the Mark II between many of the prin­ci­pal par­tic­i­pants in the Man­hat­tan Project, Peter ana­lyzes the role of the Mark II in the devel­op­ment of the A‑bomb and delin­eates numer­ous indi­ca­tions of a cov­er-up of Port Chica­go. Among the sig­nif­i­cant indi­ca­tions of a cov­er-up are: the re-clas­si­fi­ca­tion of the mil­i­tary’s Port Chica­go report as “Top Secret” imme­di­ate­ly after the pub­li­ca­tion of Peter’s research in 1982 (almost forty years after the explo­sion); obfus­ca­tion of the amount of fis­sion­able ura­ni­um avail­able for the Port Chica­go test; destruc­tion of records of two rail cars loaded at Los Alam­os Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry and unloaded at Port Chica­go; mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion of an appar­ent film of the Port Chica­go explo­sion as hav­ing been made in Hol­ly­wood; extreme agi­ta­tion on the part of Edward Teller (“Father of the H‑bomb”) upon being ques­tioned about Port Chica­go and the dis­ap­pear­ance of records of the inci­dence of can­cer in the area around the blast for sev­er­al key years after the explo­sion. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the Los Alam­os Lab­o­ra­to­ry was very inter­est­ed in the Port Chica­go blast. The report for the lab was writ­ten by Cap­tain William Par­sons, who lat­er served as the bomb­ing offi­cer on the Eno­la Gay ( the plane that dropped the first A‑bomb on Hiroshi­ma) and who also super­vised the “Oper­a­tion Cross­roads” nuclear tests at the Biki­ni Atoll. The black sailors who worked at Port Chica­go mutinied after the blast. That mutiny was a sig­nif­i­cant event in recent African-Amer­i­can his­to­ry. (Record­ed in Jan­u­ary of 1999.)

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