Posted on 10/29/2005 8:13:55 PM PDT by ncountylee
TOKYO (AP) - Victims of the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan joined a sit-in rally in Hiroshima on Saturday to protest plans to base a nuclear-powered American warship in the country, an activist said.
The protest came as talks got underway between top Japanese and American security officials on how to realign the U.S. military presence in Japan.
About 80 people - many of them victims of the 1945 U.S. atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - rallied against plans announced Friday by the U.S. Navy to deploy a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in Japan, said Kazutoshi Kajikawa, who heads the Hiroshima Peace Movement Center.
"It makes me angry that America can even consider basing a nuclear carrier in Japan, the only country in the world to have suffered a nuclear attack," Kajikawa said.
Basing the ship in Japan will also put the Japanese public at risk of being exposed to a radiation leak, he said.
The U.S. has said the carrier can be operated safely in Japanese waters. American Ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer told reporters Friday that nuclear ships had made 1,200 visits to Japan in the past 40 years without harming the environment.
The U.S. Navy said it decided to replace the conventional aircraft carrier now based in Yokosuka, just outside Tokyo, with the nuclear-powered ship because it has greater capabilities.
If you are trying to imply that the carrier will be carrying nuclear weapons, you are wrong. US aircraft carriers are sort of a joke if a nuclear conflict ever arises. They would have no use since the three tier nuclear standoff approach does not need them at all. Our three tiers are submarine launched ballistic missiles (the primary weapon to keep foes in the area around Japan pacified), B-2 bombers (the sneak attack nuclear weapon--it fairly useless for a retaliatory nuclear attack), and intercontinental ballistic missiles (the weapons to end all wars--these are the ones that can carry 10 MT weapons).
Aircraft carriers have no use here. While you certainly could put nuclear weapons on an aircraft carrier ready to be dropped by an aircraft, it would add nothing to the already formidable nuclear deterrent that is already built up (consider any conflict that we wouldn't use SLBMs (15 min) first followed by ICBMs (30 min)). Almost any attack by aircraft would be slower than SLBMs and ICBMs by hours! And the type of nuclear weapons would be very small (you can't launch very heavy aircraft from an aircraft carrier).
It would, on the other hand, be a considerable risk for the US to have nukes there. We are not going to station nuclear weapons on a ship that goes to third-world port calls. The security risk is too great. There is a reason that our SSBNs (nuclear powered submarines that carry nuclear weapons) do not make port calls in third world countries (they rarely make any port calls--and they are always, if I remember correctly, in the US). There is also a reason why B-2s are stationed in the US (and not forward deployed, unlike almost every other type of aircraft). You do not put nuclear weapons in a place where a clever opponent can snatch them.
I thank all those who participated in the bombs. From designing, engineering, manufacturing and dropping. It ensured that I, my brother and sister would be born and know a wonderful father.
"The A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably saved my father's life, as well aws the lives of over a million American infantrymen,..."
I'm with ya on that.
Had TWO uncles on either side of the family tree headed to the Pacific Hell Fight.
A lot of my cousins wouldn't have been born if they didn't drop the Bombs.
Good analysis.
Oh I know! My Hubby served on the USS Grant, a Nuclear powered Sub. (SSBN 631) Those things are safer than any Nuke Power plant built on land. Why they don't adapt THAT design for Electricity devlopment is beyond me. Oh yea, Liberal Enviro-weenies. Sorry, I forgot. Silly me!
"Why is it that Nagasaki and Hiroshima were able to be re-inhabited after having an atomic weapon dropped on them?"
Because it was dropped on the orders of a kinder, more gentle Democratic Adminstration?
(sarcasm intented)
I don't see how the propulsion system, which is a controlled nuclear fission which heats water to produce steam, has anything to do with an uncontrolled nuclear fission in a nuclear bomb. It makes as much sense as not allowing steamboats into Chicago.
Ya know..........those are really darn good questions!
Those things are safer than any Nuke Power plant built on land.
Had a friend who worked on both military and civilian reactors as a welder. He said the military would X-ray the welds from many different angles looking for any flaws and if found on it had to be done over again. Civilian reactors, he said, were far more lenient.
My father was part of an airborne combat team on the USS James Jackson -- going through the Panama Canal on August 8th -- when he heard about Hiroshima.
He said everybody on the ship was convinced they had just avoided certain death -- that had they made it to either Guam or the Phillipines staging areas for Operation Majestic -- they would have never seen home again.
But I still wonder about a world where -- had Hitler been a little more patient with his military plans and more trusting of his scientists -- atomic warfare would have become oh too imaginable.
I still feel sympathy and horror thinking about the children killed in the two atomic blasts. Man as a species came very very close to practical extinction. The British, Japanese and Soviets were much closer to building gun-type U-235 bombs then was realized since most of our efforts were to get implosion plutonium bombs workable before the Nazis.
The mind truly boggles had Operation Barberrosa been delayed and the Nazis been able to develop and marry atomic weapons and superior rocket-based delivery systems before or contemporaneously with our efforts.
I'm not sure I'd allow stemboats into Chicago. That city has a tendency to erupt into flames.
boat
Do you say "boat" in front of him? These Navy chaps get irritated if it's not called a ship.
Somehow there's alot of "God" in the timing and turning of events. It's the ONLY explanation I can come up with.
I guess they also protested against their father's and grandfather's unprovoked non-nuclear attacks against innocent Americans that left 3000 dead and innocent Chinese that killed more than 10,000,000. Course the biased media must have covered that up.
As an ex Navy nuke, I can tell you why. Navy nuclear power plants are much more expensive for MW than a civilian nuclear plant. There is a good reason. Navy nuclear plants have to operate like racecars (up power, down power), and at the same time be strong enough that if your ship is attacked, they have a reasonable chance to continue operating safely (propulsion equals life in the Navy). Civilian plants only have to operate at peak power (for the most part). They also don't have to be small enough to fit inside a ship, and resistant to damage that might occur in a war. If you lose power on a nucleared power ship in a tactical situation, you could very well end up dead (think submarines). If you lose power on a civilian plant, you can just fire up some peaking plants to take up the load on the grid.
An enemy of my enemy is my ??? ... Japan today is about to re-arm .. their is presently a bill before their legislature to amend their consitution to allow substantial build-up of a "Self-Defense" force... I don't think a combat veteran of the Pacific theater, after some thought, if given the choice, would think it a bad bargain to have the Japanese fighting for instead of against us.
We are going to need these good people in the future...the demostrators we are discussing are a minority in today's Japan.
Hitler never really cared for his atomic program, but that is not what crippled it. The scientists who were working on it used data from an old test (if I recall correctly, it was for the macroscopic cross section of absorption of uranium), that led them to believe that a nuclear weapon would have to be much larger that what is true, and that the only way to construct a nuclear reactor that used natural uranium (to make plutonium) was by using deuterium as a moderator. The plutonium solution was the only realistic solution because there was no doubt that allied bombers would have annihilated any massive plant to enrich uranium. This made the German atomic program dependent on the acquisition of large quantities of deuterium in order to make nuclear reactors to create plutonium. If they would have acquired the deuterium and started testing reactors, they probably would have found the error and started using other designs for their plutonium production reactors. But it would have been far too late. I can see no way that their delayed nuclear program could have produced enough bomb-making plutonium before the end of the war (especially with allied bombers annihilating every industrial facility). A good discussion on this is in the book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (he got the Pulitzer Prize for this definitive history of the US atomic bomb program).
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