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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.)