(Two 30-minute segments)

Con­ducted in August of 1999, this broad­cast updates the inves­ti­ga­tion of the Port Chicago explo­sion. The bulk of the dis­cus­sion is very sim­i­lar to the top­i­cal con­tent of FTR-129. (Check the descrip­tion for that broad­cast for a detailed sum­mary of the pro­gram con­tent.) This broad­cast does con­tain sev­eral points of analy­sis not con­tained in FTR-129. In this pro­gram, Mr. Vogel high­lights the issue of resid­ual radi­a­tion at the Port Chicago site. (Port Chicago is now part of the Con­cord Naval Weapons sta­tion.) Crit­ics have main­tained that Port Chicago could not have been a nuclear explo­sion, because there would be detectable radi­a­tion at the explo­sion site. Peter points out that this is incor­rect. Within 10 years of a British test of a much larger weapon (also det­o­nated in a marine envi­ron­ment), the back­ground radi­a­tion lev­els had returned to nor­mal. The British test was of a 25 kilo­ton weapon and Port Chicago yielded the equiv­a­lent of 600 tons of TNT. Peter also dis­cusses eye­wit­ness tes­ti­mony of injuries to sailors who sur­vived the Port Chicago blast. Med­ical per­son­nel who sub­se­quently became acquainted with radi­a­tion burns voiced the opin­ion that the burns to Port Chicago sur­vivors were, in fact, radi­a­tion burns. In this pro­gram, Peter includes two new ele­ments in his research. Declas­si­fied doc­u­ments indi­cate that the prin­ci­pals involved with the devel­op­ment of the Mark II (an early atomic bomb) fore­cast that it would be avail­able by the fall of 1944. (Peter’s research indi­cates that the Port Chicago explo­sion, in July of ’44, was the test of the Mark II.) Recently, Peter filed a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act request for access to the seven lin­ear feet of doc­u­ments about the Port Chicago explo­sion at the Los Alamos National Lab­o­ra­tory. His request was denied and those doc­u­ments are now clas­si­fied. Bear in mind that these doc­u­ments sup­pos­edly per­tain to the explo­sion of a World War II ammu­ni­tion ship. Why have they now been denied to the pub­lic? (Please note that, due to an inter­rup­tion of the record­ing process due to tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties, Mr. Emory neglected to include dis­cus­sion of the Wil­son con­den­sa­tion cloud that was appar­ently present at Port Chicago. One of the evi­den­tiary points in Peter’s arti­cle, the pres­ence of the cloud is dis­cussed in FTR-129.) (See also FTR-129, as well as Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M-23.) (Recorded on 8/1/99.)

Note: There is some dis­tor­tion on this tape, though it is still easy to discern.