697: StoogeLand

NDAA and Overturning of Smith-Mundt Act

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (NDAA) allows for materials produced by the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to be released within U.S. borders and strikes down a long-time ban on the dissemination of such material in the country.[14][15][16]

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Sun, 21 Sep 2014 15:00

Propaganda in the United States is propaganda spread by government and media entities within the United States. Propaganda is information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to influence opinions. Propaganda is not only in advertising; it is also in radio, newspaper, posters, books, and anything else that might be sent out to the widespread public.

Domestic[edit]World War I[edit]The first large-scale use of propaganda by the U.S. government came during World War I. The government enlisted the help of citizens and children to help promote war bonds and stamps to help stimulate the economy. To keep the prices of war supplies down, the U.S. government produced posters that encouraged people to reduce waste and grow their own vegetables in "victory gardens." The public skepticism that was generated by the heavy-handed tactics of the Committee on Public Information would lead the postwar government to officially abandon the use of propaganda.[1]

World War II[edit]During World War II the U.S. officially had no propaganda, but the Roosevelt government used means to circumvent this official line. One such propaganda tool was the publicly owned but government funded Writers' War Board (WWB). The activities of the WWB were so extensive that it has been called the "greatest propaganda machine in history".[1]Why We Fight is a famous series of US government propaganda films made to justify US involvement in World War II.

In 1944 (lasting until 1948) prominent US policy makers launched a domestic propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the U.S. public to agree to a harsh peace for the German people, for example by removing the common view of the German people and the Nazi party as separate entities.[2] The core in this campaign was the Writers' War Board which was closely associated with the Roosevelt administration.[2]

Another means was the United States Office of War Information that Roosevelt established in June 1942, whose mandate was to promote understanding of the war policies under the director Elmer Davies. It dealt with posters, press, movies, exhibitions, and produced often slanted material conforming to US wartime purposes. Other large and influential non-governmental organizations during the war and immediate post war period were the Society for the Prevention of World War III and the Council on Books in Wartime.

Cold War[edit]During the Cold War, the U.S. government produced vast amounts of propaganda against communism and the Soviet bloc. Much of this propaganda was directed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover, who himself wrote the anti-communist tract Masters of Deceit. The FBI's COINTELPRO arm solicited journalists to produce fake news items discrediting communists and affiliated groups, such as H. Bruce Franklin and the Venceremos Organization.

War on Drugs[edit]The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, originally established by the National Narcotics Leadership Act of 1988,[3][4] but now conducted by the Office of National Drug Control Policy under the Drug-Free Media Campaign Act of 1998,[5] is a domestic propaganda campaign designed to "influence the attitudes of the public and the news media with respect to drug abuse" and for "reducing and preventing drug abuse among young people in the United States".[6][7] The Media Campaign cooperates with the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and other government and non-government organizations.[8]

Iraq War[edit]In early 2002, the U.S. Department of Defense launched an information operation, colloquially referred to as the Pentagon military analyst program.[9] The goal of the operation is "to spread the administrations's talking points on Iraq by briefing ... retired commanders for network and cable television appearances," where they have been presented as independent analysts.[10] On 22 May 2008, after this program was revealed in the New York Times, the House passed an amendment that would make permanent a domestic propaganda ban that until now has been enacted annually in the military authorization bill.[11]

The Shared values initiative was a public relations campaign that was intended to sell a "new" America to Muslims around the world by showing that American Muslims were living happily and freely, without persecution, in post-9/11 America.[12] Funded by the United States Department of State, the campaign created a public relations front group known as Council of American Muslims for Understanding (CAMU). The campaign was divided in phases; the first of which consisted of five mini-documentaries for television, radio, and print with shared values messages for key Muslim countries.[13]

NDAA and Overturning of Smith-Mundt Act[edit]The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (NDAA) allows for materials produced by the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to be released within U.S. borders and strikes down a long-time ban on the dissemination of such material in the country.[14][15][16]

Ad Council[edit]The Ad Council, an American non-profit organization that distributes public service announcements on behalf of various private and federal government agency sponsors, has been labeled as "little more than a domestic propaganda arm of the federal government" given the Ad Council's historically close collaboration with the President of the United States and the federal government.[17]

International[edit]Through several international broadcasting operations, the US disseminates American cultural information, official positions on international affairs, and daily summaries of international news. These operations fall under the International Broadcasting Bureau, the successor of the United States Information Agency, established in 1953. IBB's operations include Voice of America, Radio Liberty, Alhurra and other programs. They broadcast mainly to countries where the United States finds that information about international events is limited, either due to poor infrastructure or government censorship. The Smith-Mundt Act prohibits the Voice of America from disseminating information to US citizens that was produced specifically for a foreign audience.

During the Cold War the US ran covert propaganda campaigns in countries that appeared likely to become Soviet satellites, such as Italy, Afghanistan, and Chile.

Recently The Pentagon announced the creation of a new unit aimed at spreading propaganda about supposedly "inaccurate" stories being spread about the Iraq War. These "inaccuracies" have been blamed on the enemy trying to decrease support for the war. Donald Rumsfeld has been quoted as saying these stories are something that keeps him up at night.[18]

Psychological operations[edit]The US military defines psychological operations, or PSYOP, as:

planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.[19]

The Smith-Mundt Act, adopted in 1948, explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at the US public.[20][21][22] Nevertheless, the current easy access to news and information from around the globe, makes it difficult to guarantee PSYOP programs do not reach the US public. Or, in the words of Army Col. James A. Treadwell, who commanded the U.S. military psyops unit in Iraq in 2003, in the Washington Post:

There's always going to be a certain amount of bleed-over with the global information environment.[23]

Agence France Presse reported on U.S. propaganda campaigns that:

The Pentagon acknowledged in a newly declassified document that the US public is increasingly exposed to propaganda disseminated overseas in psychological operations.[24]

Former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the document referred to, which is titled "Information Operations Roadmap." [22][24] The document acknowledges the Smith-Mundt Act, but fails to offer any way of limiting the effect PSYOP programs have on domestic audiences.[20][21][25]

Several incidents in 2003 were documented by Sam Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel, which he saw as information-warfare campaigns that were intended for "foreign populations and the American public." Truth from These Podia,[26] as the treatise was called, reported that the way the Iraq war was fought resembled a political campaign, stressing the message instead of the truth.[22]

See also[edit]References[edit]^ abThomas Howell, The Writers' War Board: U.S. Domestic Propaganda in World War II, Historian, Volume 59 Issue 4, Pages 795 - 813^ abSteven Casey, (2005), The Campaign to sell a harsh peace for Germany to the American public, 1944 - 1948, [online]. London: LSE Research Online. [Available online at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000736] Originally published in History, 90 (297). pp. 62-92 (2005) Blackwell Publishing^National Narcotics Leadership Act of 1988 of the Anti''Drug Abuse Act of 1988, Pub.L. 100''697, 102 Stat. 4181, enacted November 18, 1988^Gamboa, Anthony H. (January 4, 2005), B-303495, Office of National Drug Control Policy '-- Video News Release, Government Accountability Office, footnote 6, page 3 ^Drug-Free Media Campaign Act of 1998 (Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999), Pub.L. 105''277, 112 Stat. 268, enacted October 21, 1998^Gamboa, Anthony H. (January 4, 2005), B-303495, Office of National Drug Control Policy '-- Video News Release, Government Accountability Office, pp. 9''10 ^Drug-Free Media Campaign Act of 1998 of the Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act, 1999, Pub.L. 105''277, 112 Stat. 268, enacted October 21, 1998^Office of National Drug Control Policy Reauthorization Act of 2006, Pub.L. 109''469, 120 Stat. 3501, enacted December 29, 2006, codified at 21 U.S.C. § 1708^Barstow, David (2008-04-20). "Message Machine: Behind Analysts, the Pentagon's Hidden Hand". New York Times. ^Sessions, David (2008-04-20). "Onward T.V. Soldiers: The New York Times exposes a multi-armed Pentagon message machine". Slate. ^Barstow, David (2008-05-24). "2 Inquiries Set on Pentagon Publicity Effort". New York Times. ^Rampton, Sheldon (October 17, 2007). "Shared Values Revisited". Center for Media and Democracy. ^"U.S. Reaches Out to Muslim World with Shared Values Initiative". America.gov. January 16, 2003.

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Wed, 18 Feb 2015 20:17

Feb. 18, 2015, 10:19 AM3,304In addition to murdering innocent civilians and producing appalling propaganda videos, the jihadist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL) has reportedly developed some creative and effective recruiting techniques.

Last year, for example, the group successfully persuaded three Colorado schoolgirls they contacted on the Internet to steal passports and money from their parents and fly to Turkey to join up.

This morning, CNN shared some insight on some of ISIS' unconventional recruiting tools:

Julia La Roche for Business Insider

Now people in the West can finally understand what they're up against!

Nothing identifies it as Lybia, could be malibu

All prisoners kneel at the same time, none pushed down

Orange suits are new-creses. put on OVER existing clothing. Why?

Knives in left hand!

Nice jib shots

Colourized sea at end

Quilliam was established in 2007 by Ed Husain, Maajid Nawaz and Rashad Zaman Ali, three former members of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Ed Husain (Co-Director and Co-Founder) left Quilliam in 2011 to join the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ed Husain:

- Senior Fellow Middle Eastern Studies CFR

- Senior Advisor Tony Blair Faith Foundation

- Author of the book "The Islamist"

- Former Employers: HSBC Private Bank and the British Council

- In 2014 he was appointed to the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 05:13

Quilliam (Foundation)Founded2008FounderEd Husain, Maajid Nawaz, Rashad Zaman AliLocationKey people

Ed Husain, Maajid Nawaz, Rashad Zaman AliEmployees

13SloganChallenging Extremism, Promoting Pluralism, Inspiring ChangeWebsitequilliamfoundation.orgQuilliam is a London-based think tank that focuses on "counter-extremism", specifically Islamism, which it argues is the cause of Muslim terrorism. Founded as The Quilliam Foundation, it lobbies government and public institutions for more nuanced policies regarding Islam and the need for greater democracy in the Muslim world. According to its founder Maajid Nawaz, "We wish to raise awareness around Islamism";[1] also "I want to demonstrate how the Islamist ideology is incompatible with Islam. Secondly...develop a Western Islam that is at home in Britain and in Europe... reverse radicalisation by taking on their arguments and countering them."[2]

The organisation opposes any Islamist ideology, and champions freedom of expression. The critique of Islamist ideology by its founders Maajid Nawaz, Rashad Zaman Ali, and Ed Husain is based, in part, on their personal experiences.[3]

The organisation, named after William Quilliam,[4] a 19th-century British convert to Islam who founded England's first mosque, was originally called the Quilliam Foundation, but later rebranded as simply Quilliam.[5]

Terminology[edit]Quilliam defines Islamism in the following terms:

It is the belief that Islam is a political ideology, as well as a faith. It is a modernist claim that political sovereignty belongs to God, that the Shari'ah should be used as state law, that Muslims form a political rather than a religious bloc around the world and that it is a religious duty for all Muslims to create a political entity that is governed as such. Islamism is a spectrum, with Islamists disagreeing over how they should bring their 'Islamic' state into existence.Some Islamists seek to engage with existing political systems, others reject the existing systems as illegitimate but do so non-violently, and others seek to create an 'Islamic state' through violence. Most Islamists are socially modern but others advocate a more retrograde lifestyle. Islamists often have contempt for Muslim scholars and sages and their traditional institutions; as well as a disdain for non-Islamist Muslims and the West.[6]

Quilliam argues that Islam is just a religion, not a political religion nor an ideology [7] and that ''Islam is not Islamism.''[8]

Quilliam argues that ''[Islamists] are extreme because of their rigidity in understanding politics''.[9]

Founders[edit]Founders and directors[edit]Quilliam was established in 2007 by Ed Husain, Maajid Nawaz and Rashad Zaman Ali, three former members of the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Ed Husain (Co-Director and Co-Founder; left in 2011 to join the Council on Foreign Relations in New York[10])

Objectives and Impact[edit]A policy proposal published for the British government and journalists at the time of Quilliam's launch suggested establishing rehabilitation centres in which extremists could be deradicalised. These centres would expose extremists and terrorists who wish to leave their organisations to the work of scholars whose work has been recognized as sound and legitimate.

More recent information about Quilliam's goals, available on its website, states:

Challenging extremism is the duty of all responsible members of society. Not least because cultural insularity and extremism are products of the failures of wider society to foster a shared sense of belonging and to advance liberal democratic values. With Islamist extremism in particular, we believe a more self-critical approach must be adopted by Muslims. Westophobic ideological influences and social insularity needs to be challenged within Muslim communities by Muslims themselves whilst simultaneously, an active drive towards creating an inclusive civic identity must be pursued by all members of society.

Quilliam seeks to challenge what we think, and the way we think. It aims to generate creative, informed and inclusive discussions to counter the ideological underpinnings of terrorism, whilst simultaneously providing evidence-based recommendations to governments for related policy measures.[11]

To date the organization's goals have been mainly communicated through publishing reports, involvement in the media through taking part in interviews and discussions across Europe and the Middle East and through its 'Outreach and Training' unit which delivers a 'radicalisation awareness programme', a training course intended to develop students' understanding of:

* The difference between Islam as a faith and Islamism as a radicalizing political ideology which justifies violence* The different pathways into radicalization* A detailed explanation of the process of radicalization - the key causes of it and how it manifests itself* A thorough understanding of Islamist paradigms and extremists' propaganda* An exposition of the political narrative and manipulation of grievances which are exploited and used to groom vulnerable individuals* The cultivation of a climate which provides support for political violence* Explanation of the contextual nature of Islamist political ideas '' as a modern and totalitarian manipulation of traditional religious ideas

* A comprehensive ideological and theological refutation of Islamist thought providing a counter-narrative '' for those who need to engage directlyCondemnation of 2008 Gaza War[edit]On 30 December, just days after the outbreak of the Gaza War, Ed Husain condemned the "ruthless air strikes and economic blockade" of Gaza city by Israel.[12][13] He predicted that the result would be "rightful support for the beleaguered Palestinian peoples '' and a boost to the popularity of Hamas by default".[12]

Challenging Dutch politician Geert Wilders[edit]In February and October 2009, Quilliam publicly confronted the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, arguing that "Geert Wilders is undoubtedly an ill-informed, hate-driven bigot with many unpleasant views but he is not directly inciting violence. ... We therefore challenge Geert Wilders to an open debate in which we will argue that Islam is compatible with secular democracy and that, contrary to what he apparently believes, Muslims are not a threat to Europe and its values." [14][15]

Hijab and burqa[edit]Quilliam support the right of women to wear the hijab and the right of women to take it off. In a commentary in The Sun, Maajid Nawaz stated: "If Muslims object to the French ban on the hijab, we must also object to the 'Islamist' plan to impose the hijab and ban women uncovering their hair." [16] Quilliam has also defended the right of women to wear the full face veil, in the form of the niqab or burqa.[17]

Leaked report on the UK government's 'Prevent' strategy[edit]On 14 June 2010 a strategic briefing paper and covering letter signed by Maajid Nawaz and Ed Hussain was sent to Charles Farr, director of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT). The briefing paper was intended to be a confidential review of the UK government's post 7/7 anti-terrorism 'Prevent' strategy, and was "particularly critical of the view that government partnerships with non-violent yet otherwise extreme Islamists were the best way to fend off Jihadism".[18] Although sent "by hard copy alone" with no electronic version,[18] both letter and briefing paper were leaked by being scanned and published on the internet,[19] provoking protests from various groups which had been identified in the Quilliam briefing as sympathetic or supportive of Islamist extremism.[20]

According to the briefing document, "The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics.''[20][21]

Quilliam's report claimed that a unit within Scotland Yard called the Muslim Contact Unit,[20] and a separate independent group called the Muslim Safety Forum,[20] intended to improve the relationship between the police and the Muslim community, were respectively "Islamist-dominated"[22] and "associated with Jamaat e-Islami".[23] Other organisations listed by the Quilliam report included the Muslim Council of Britain,[20] and its rival Muslim Association of Britain,[21] both said to be "associated with the Muslim brotherhood".[24] Also said to have Islamist sympathies or to be associated with Islamist groups were the Islamic Human Rights Commission,[20][21] the Federation of Student Islamic Societies,[21] the Cordoba Foundation,[21] and the Islam Channel.[20]

The report said of these organisations: "These are a selection of the various groups and institutions active in the UK which are broadly sympathetic to Islamism. Whilst only a small proportion will agree with al-Qaida's tactics, many will agree with their overall goal of creating a single 'Islamic state' which would bring together all Muslims around the world under a single government and then impose on them a single interpretation of sharia as state law."[20][21]

Politicians described as "Islamist backed" included Salma Yaqoob, then leader of the Respect Party, and (then) former Respect MP George Galloway.[21]

Inayat Bunglawala, chairman of Muslims4Uk and a former spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, and Fatima Khan, vice-chair of the Muslim Safety Forum, both described Quilliam's list as "McCarthyite".[20][21] Bunglawala added: "In effect, Quilliam '' a body funded very generously by the government through Prevent '' are attempting to set themselves up as arbiters of who is and is not an acceptable Muslim."[21]

A Home Office spokesman told the press that the report had not been solicited but added: "We believe the Prevent programme isn't working as effectively as it could and want a strategy that is effective and properly focused '' that is why we are reviewing it."[20][21]

Maajid Nawaz told the Daily Telegraph: ''Quilliam has a track record of distinguishing between legal tolerance and civil tolerance '' we oppose banning non-violent extremists...yet we see no reason why tax payers should subsidise them. It is in this context that we wish to raise awareness around Islamism.'' [21]

David Cameron's Munich speech, February 2011[edit]Maajid Nawaz describes in his book Radical a meeting he had with the British prime minister, David Cameron, when he was called in to advise Cameron on a speech "distinguishing Islam from Islamism and extremism".[25] According to Nawaz, he presented Cameron with a "comparison between extremism and racism. I had argued that the two should be analogous in terms of public response. Why should extremist views, which went against basic liberties, be any more acceptable than racist or homophobic ones? I told Cameron that he shouldn't be afraid to criticise Muslims who were putting forward extremist views in the name of faith. There was a difference between holding these views and religious piety.''[26]

In February 2011, David Cameron accordingly made a speech in Munich in which he criticised ''state multiculturalism", saying: "Frankly, we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and much more active, muscular liberalism," said Cameron. "Let's properly judge these [Muslim] organisations: Do they believe in universal human rights - including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law? Do they believe in democracy and the right of people to elect their own government? Do they encourage integration or separatism?"[27]

In a debate with Nawaz, Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman described the speech to be "as inflammatory as it was superficial", since Cameron proceeded to "blame the rise of Islamist-inspired violence in the UK on 'segregated communities', 'the doctrine of state multiculturalism' and 'the passive tolerance of recent years'." Hasan concluded that "the most egregious aspect of the Prime Minister's now-notorious address was his enthusiastic endorsement of the so-called 'conveyor belt' theory of radicalisation, which states that young Muslims start off alienated and angry, slowly become more religious and politicised, and then almost automatically turn to violence and terror."

Nawaz conceded that "raising multiculturalism in the speech was an unnecessary distraction". However, he considered it a positive step that Cameron highlighted the problem of "non-violent extremism", which "may not pose a physical threat but that doesn't mean it is not a challenge requiring a robust policy response. Casual racism in society poses no direct physical threat, but we can all recognise that where it spreads unchecked, without a civic challenge, it is an unhealthy phenomenon. Islamism '' which can advocate anti-democratic views, divisive sectarianism and ideas that discriminate on grounds of gender and sexuality '' is analogous in this respect to racism. This does not mean we ban such ideas, but it does mean that, as with racism, we require a popular civil society approach in challenging them." Nawaz agreed that "there is no conclusive evidence that extremism is a 'conveyor belt' to terrorism, just as there is inconclusive evidence to the contrary." He added: "To become a jihadist terrorist, one first becomes an Islamist, though not all Islamists will go on to violence. Joining militant racist groups like Combat 18 seems unlikely if one is not first exposed to a level of racist rhetoric." He concluded that the conveyor belt theory "is a red herring. Whether or not there is a 'conveyor belt', we must surely agree that the spread of extremism in societies is unhealthy for integration in its own right."[28]

Resignation of English Defence League leadership[edit]On 8 October 2013 it was announced that the co-founders of the anti-Islamist English Defence League, Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, had had meetings with Quilliam and were now to leave the EDL. Robinson said that street protests were ''no longer effective'' and ''acknowledged the dangers of far-right extremism'', though he has stated his intention to continue to combat radical Islamism by forming a new party. Both Robinson and Carroll have been taking lessons in Islam from Quilliam member Usama Hasan, and intend to train in lobbying institutions.[29]

Quilliam had previously persuaded another member of the EDL, Nick Jode, to leave the movement: Jode had been persuaded by the writings and on-line videos of Maajid Nawaz speaking on behalf of Quilliam, being particularly impressed by Nawaz's debate with Anjem Choudary of the Islamist group Islam4UK.[13]

Criticism[edit]The foundation takes its name from Abdullah Quilliam, a 19th-century British convert to Islam who founded a mosque in Liverpool. Quilliam was an opponent of the British Empire and a supporter of the caliphate. He also argued that Muslims should not fight Muslims on behalf of European powers, citing specifically Britain's enlistment of Muslim soldiers against the resistance in Sudan.[30] In all these respects his activities, according to Yahya Birt, correspond to those that the individuals running the Quilliam Foundation today hold up as evidence of extremism.[31]

Critics have included Azzam Tamimi, Inayat Bunglawala, Ziauddin Sardar '• who formerly criticised Quilliam but has since sided with Maajid Nawaz during a debate with Tariq Ramadan broadcast on Press TV '• and Seumas Milne of The Guardian.[32]

Soon after the launch of Quilliam, Seumas Milne argued that "all three [of Quilliam's founders] are straight out of the cold war defectors' mould [...] trading heavily on their former associations and travelling rapidly in a conservative direction".[32] Quilliam's co-founder Maajid Nawaz, in turn, has described Milne as an "Orientalist" who has accepted that Islamism represents "the majority Muslim voice" together with "a form of reverse-racism [in which] liberal values were expected of the civilized white person, but the brown Muslim could not be held to those same standards, and should be judged by his or her own 'authentic' culture."[33]

In an open letter published in The Guardian on 26 April 2008, Anas al-Tikriti, Yvonne Ridley, Ihtisham Hibatullah, Ismail Patel and Roshan Salih wrote:

We believe this is just another establishment-backed attempt to divert attention from the main cause of radicalisation and extremism in Britain: the UK's disastrous foreign policy in the Muslim world, including its occupation of Muslim lands and its support for pro-western Muslim dictators. The foundation has no proven grassroots support within the Muslim community, although it does seem to have the ear of the powers that be, probably because it is telling them what they want to hear.

It is quite possible to be a politically engaged Muslim without wanting to fly planes into tall buildings. Yet the (Quilliam) foundation equates all forms of political Islam with extremism and terrorism. But those misguided few who are willing to cross the line into terrorism are not driven by disfranchisement or Sayyid Qutb's writings; they do it because they are furious about western foreign policy....[34]

Maajid Nawaz has since answered the charge that Quilliam ignores the impact of the UK's foreign policy:

I have attempted to strike a balance between the two extremes of the neoconservative right, which tends to blame Islam itself for an increase in Islamist-led violence, and the regressive left, which tends to blame only foreign or domestic western government policy. The fact is that human beings are complicated animals. Unlike water, we don't all boil at 100° Celsius. No catch-all cause of extremism can be identified. It is best to approach this subject with some general principles in mind that inevitably contribute to the phenomenon '' grievances, identity crises, charismatic recruiters and ideological narratives.[28]

When Quilliam's Ed Husain was alleged to have recommended spying on Islamists unsuspected of any crimes, Jonathan Githens-Mazer and Robert Lambert wrote:

Charles Moore and Dean Godson of Policy Exchange, have explained that this is a re-make of a 1980s Thatcherite counter-subversion strategy in which Husain is cast in the role of Frank Chapple the "moderate" trade union leader who was, they suggest, used to discredit and undermine the "extremist" miner's trade union leader Arthur Scargill. Husain, they argue, can help defeat Altikriti, Bungalwala and their colleagues in the same way.[35][36]Quilliam responded with a press release,[37] which stated:

Quilliam does not support indiscriminate 'mass spying' on British Muslims nor a 'police state'. Ordinary Muslims are our first line of defence against Islamist terrorism and our allies against extremists. We condemn any efforts to conduct mass spying operations on innocent Muslims through the Government's Prevent programme.[38]Funding[edit]In January 2009, The Times published an article claiming that Quilliam had received almost £1 million from the government. The article also said that some "members of the Government and the Opposition" had questioned the wisdom of "relying too heavily on a relatively unknown organisation ... to counter extremism."[39] Quilliam openly acknowledges the funding that it receives from the public sector, and has made its financial records publicly available.[40][41]

Since 2011 Quilliam has not received government ('public') funding.[42] In the BBC programme HARDtalk Nawaz explained: "the reason it was cut was because we disagreed at the time with the direction the government was headed. Now that the strategy has changed, and the policy of government has changed, what we haven't done is revitalize those funding relationships; but rather now we're 100% privately funded, which I'm happy with because of course it allows me to do the work without having to face the questions about which government is funding you and whether we're pursuing a government line or not."[43]

With the sudden cut in 2011, Quilliam operated at a loss that year; but after cutting half of its staff (including Ed Husain, who left when he secured a job with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York[10]) and cutting back on its expenses, the Guardian reported, "it was just about able to make it into the red again in the following year".[44]

According to its political liaison officer, Jonathan Russell, the removal of public funding has been to Quilliam's advantage as "it can remain ideas-focused, non-partisan and continue its own pursuits. Quilliam's ideas, projects and output are all made possible by the support of private donations from Muslim and non-Muslim individuals and foundations based in the United Kingdom and all around the world."[42]

See also[edit]References[edit]^Gardham, Duncan (2010-08-05). "Mainstream Islamic organisations 'share al-Qaeda ideology'". The Daily Telegraph (London). ^"How I'll fight against Islamic extremism". Echo News. Retrieved 2010-08-05. ^Nawaz, Maajid. Radical. W.H. Allen, London: 2012^Nawaz (2012): p. 327^"Quilliam". Quilliam. ^"Frequently Asked Questions '' What is Islamism?". Quilliam. Retrieved 24 October 2013. ^Husain states, ''Islamists are at odds with Islam as a faith. Islam is a faith not an ideology''How I'll fight against Islamic extremism^"Ed Husain: You Ask The Questions". London: Independent. 2008-04-14. ^"Pulling together to defeat terror" p. 3". Quilliam. Retrieved 24 October 2013. ^ abNawaz (2012): pp. 352-3^"About Us". Quilliam. Retrieved 24 October 2013. ^ abEd Hussain (30 December 2008). "Britain has a duty to Arabs". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 November 2013. ^ abKatie Engelhart (October 2013). "Revealing Quilliam, the Muslim Destroyers of the English Far-Right". Vice. Retrieved 3 November 2013. ^"Press Release: Quilliam Foundation challenges Geert Wilders to a debate on Islam". Quilliam. 11 February 2009. Retrieved 24 October 2013. ^"Quilliam challenges Dutch MP to public debate". Quilliam. 14 October 2009. Retrieved 24 October 2013. ^"Brit Muslims have a duty to fight extremism". The Sun. ^"Ban the burkha here in britain". Daily Express. ^ abNawaz (2012): p. 348^Quilliam: Preventing Terrorism: where next for Britain?^ abcdefghij"List sent to terror chief aligns peaceful Muslim groups with terrorist ideology". The Guardian. 4 August 2010. Retrieved 2 November 2013. ^ abcdefghijk"Mainstream Islamic organisations 'share al-Qaeda ideology'". The Daily Telegraph. 5 August 2010. Retrieved 2 November 2013. ^Quilliam "Preventing Terrorism: where next for Britain?": p. 4^Quilliam "Preventing Terrorism: where next for Britain?": p. 60^Quilliam "Preventing Terrorism: where next for Britain?": p. 59^Nawaz (2012): p. 349^Nawaz (2012): p. 351^"State multiculturalism has failed, says David Cameron". BBC News. 5 February 2011. Retrieved 5 February 2011. ^ ab"Age of extremes: Mehdi Hasan and Maajid Nawaz debate". London: New Statesman. 4 July 2012. Retrieved 24 October 2013. ^Milmo, Cahal (8 October 2013). "EDL leader Tommy Robinson turns his back on his own party over 'dangers of far-right extremism'". The Independent (London). Retrieved 8 October 2013. ^John Wolffe (1997). Religion in Victorian Britain: Culture and Empire. St. Martin's Press. p. 341. ISBN 978-0719051845. ^''Abdullah Quilliam: Britain's First Islamist?'', YahyaBirt.com, 25 January 2008^ abMilne, Seumas (2008-04-21). "All mod cons". London: Guardian. ^Nawaz (2012): pp. 328 & 341^"What turns some Islamists to terror". London: Guardian. 26 April 2008. Retrieved 24 October 2013. ^Jonathan Githens-Mazer and Robert Lambert Quilliam on Prevent: the wrong diagnosis, The Guardian, 19 October 2009^http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Quilliam_Foundation^"Allegations of Government spying on UK Muslims '' a statement from Quilliam directors". Quilliam. 20 October 2009. Retrieved 24 October 2013. ^"We do not support 'mass spying'". Manchester: Manchester Evening News. 16 April 2010. Retrieved 24 October 2013. ^Kerbaj, Richard (2009-01-20). "Government gives £1m to anti-extremist think-tank Quilliam Foundation". London: Times. ^"Frequently Asked Questions - Who Provides Funding?". Quilliam. ^Companies House, www.companieshouse.gov.uk, Quillam financial records for 2012, accessed 1 January 2013^ abRussell, Jonathan (29 October 2013). "Perspectives: The Quilliam Foundation - fighting extremism". BBC Religion & Ethics. Retrieved 3 November 2013. ^BBC Hard Talk, 14 August 2012: video from 21:14.^Ben, Quinn (12 October 2013). "Tommy Robinson link with Quilliam Foundation raises questions". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 November 2013. SourcesExternal links[edit]

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Archived Version

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 07:27

The Obama administration is preparing to equip the so-called ''moderate'' Syrian rebels with the ability to order U.S. air strikes despite the group's admitted allegiance to the Islamic State.Members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) will be provided with radios to call in strikes from American B-1B bombers as well as pickup trucks with mounted machine guns as the president puts the final touches on plans to train as many as 3,000 rebels in Jordan and Turkey by the end of 2015.

''Negotiations have been concluded and an agreement text will be signed with the US regarding the training of the Free Syrian Army in the coming period,'' said Turkish Foreign Ministry Spokesman Tanju Bilgic.

The planes will reportedly use similar munitions to those seen in Afghanistan, targeting anything from small vehicles to tanks with 500 and 2,000-pound guided bombs.

Aside from the Toyota Hi-Lux trucks, multiple groups of rebels will also be given mortars and possibly antitank weapons as well.

A senior military official speaking with the Wall Street Journal stated that the decision would likely emulate recent bombing campaigns against the Islamic State in Iraq.

''The way we envision it, it would be very similar to Kobani,'' the source said.

Ludicrously refuting previous statements by claiming not to be at war with the Syrian government, U.S. officials alleged that air strikes would likely not be ordered against the Syrian army.

Despite the Obama administration's claims, countless intelligence and military officials have stated that the ''moderate'' rebels are essentially non-existent, with well over 90 percent being with terrorist groups or aligned in ideology.

Just last September, a commander with the FSA admitted to fighting alongside several terrorist organizations in the region including the Islamic State.

''We are collaborating with the Islamic State and the Nusra Front by attacking the Syrian Army's gatherings in'... Qalamoun,'' Bassel Idriss, commander of an FSA-run rebel brigade, said. ''Let's face it: The Nusra Front is the biggest power present right now in Qalamoun and we as FSA would collaborate on any mission they launch as long as it coincides with our values.''

Jamal Maarouf, the leader of the Syrian Revolutionary Front (SRF), also told reporters last April that his fighters regularly worked with Al Qaeda and Al-Nusra as well.

During the same time period it was reported that ''several factions within the FSA, including Ahl Al Athar, Ibin al-Qa'im,'' decided to hand their weapons over to the Islamic State before pledging their allegiance to the group.

An Islamic State fighter speaking with Al-Jazeera in 2013 revealed that the FSA regularly sold its weapons to them shortly after they would receive shipments from the U.S.

''We are buying weapons from the FSA,'' Abu Atheer said. ''We bought 200 anti-aircraft missiles and Koncourse anti tank weapons. We have good relations with our brothers in the FSA.''

Obama's rebels and the Islamic State even went as far as to sign a non-aggression pact with one another in order to rally against the Assad government in late 2014.

In fact, with thousands of rebels openly defecting and joining ranks with the Islamic State, President Obama was forced to brazenly repeal sections of U.S. law that banned the arming of known terrorist groups in order to keep weapons flowing.

Obama's actions spurred a major backlash within the military at the end of 2013, resulting in numerous U.S. troops taking to social media to post photos of themselves holding up signs stating that they would not fight on the same side as terrorists in Syria.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz presciently warned in 2013 that President Obama was quickly turning the United States into Al Qaeda's air force as the situation in Syria continued to intensify.

''We should be focused on defending the United States of America,'' Cruz said. ''That's why young men and women sign up to join the military, not to, as you know, serve as Al Qaeda's air force.''

Watch: Obama is Arming ISIS to Fight ISISFacebook @ https://www.facebook.com/mt.examinerFollow Mikael Thalen @ https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen

Sources:

The Telegraph '' Moderate Syrian rebels 'to be given power to call in US airstrikes'Wall Street Journal '' U.S. to Give Some Syrian Rebels Ability to Call AirstrikesInfowars '' Obama admits ISIS Strategy about Deposing AssadInfowars '' Syrian Rebel Commander '' Yes, we're still Collaborating with ISISThe Independent '' 'I am not fighting against al-Qa'ida'... it's not our problem,' says West's last hope in SyriaBreitbart '' US Backed 'Moderate' Free Syrian Army Factions Join ISIS Terror GroupAl Jazeera '' Meeting al-Qaeda in SyriaIJ Review '' The 'Moderate' Syrian Rebels Obama Wants to Arm to Fight ISIS Signs Non-Aggression Pact with ISISInfowars '' 3,000 ''Moderate Rebels'' Defect to ISIS '' US Preparing 5,000 moreWashington Examiner '' UPDATED: Obama Waives Ban on Arming Terrorists to Allow Aid to Syrian OppositionInfowars '' Military Revolt Against Obama's Attack on SyriaPolitico '' Ted Cruz: U.S. not 'Al Qaeda's Air Force'

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Archived Version

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 07:13

47 photos

A woman looks at her destroyed home after returning to the village of Al-Mansuriya, Iraq, on Saturday, February 14.

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A Kurdish marksman looks over a destroyed area of Kobani, Syria, on Friday, January 30, after the city had been liberated from the ISIS militant group. Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, had been under assault by ISIS since mid-September.

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Smoke billows in Kirkuk, Iraq, as Kurdish Peshmerga fighters take position against ISIS militants on January 30. The aim of ISIS is to create an Islamic state across Sunni areas of Iraq and in Syria.

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Kurdish people celebrate in Suruc, Turkey, near the Turkish-Syrian border, after ISIS militants were expelled from Kobani on Tuesday, January 27.

47 photos

Collapsed buildings are seen in Kobani on January 27 after Kurdish forces took control of the town from ISIS.

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Junko Ishido, mother of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, reacts during a news conference in Tokyo on Friday, January 23. ISIS would later kill Goto and another Japanese hostage, Haruna Yukawa.

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ISIS militants are seen through a rifle's scope during clashes with Peshmerga fighters in Mosul, Iraq, on Wednesday, January 21.

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An elderly Yazidi man arrives in Kirkuk after being released by ISIS on Saturday, January 17. The militant group released about 200 Yazidis who were held captive for five months in Iraq. Almost all of the freed prisoners were in poor health and bore signs of abuse and neglect, Kurdish officials said.

47 photos

Smoke billows behind an ISIS sign during an Iraqi military operation to regain control of the town of Sadiyah, about 95 kilometers (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on Tuesday, November 25.

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Fighters from the Free Syrian Army and the Kurdish People's Protection Units join forces to fight ISIS in Kobani on Wednesday, November 19.

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A picture taken from Turkey shows smoke rising after ISIS militants fired mortar shells toward an area controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters near Kobani on Monday, November 3.

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Iraqi special forces search a house in Jurf al-Sakhar, Iraq, on Thursday, October 30, after retaking the area from ISIS.

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ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on Thursday, October 23. The United States and several Arab nations have been bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the militant group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.

47 photos

Kurdish fighters walk to positions as they combat ISIS forces in Kobani on Sunday, October 19.

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A U.S. Air Force plane flies above Kobani on Saturday, October 18.

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Heavy smoke rises in Kobani following an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on October 18.

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Cundi Minaz, a female Kurdish fighter, is buried in a cemetery in the southeastern Turkish town of Suruc on Tuesday, October 14. Minaz was reportedly killed during clashes with ISIS militants in nearby Kobani.

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Turkish police officers secure a basketball stadium in Suruc on October 14. Some Syrian Kurds were held there after crossing from Syria into Turkey. Tens of thousands of people fled Kobani to escape ISIS.

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Kiymet Ergun, a Syrian Kurd, celebrates in Mursitpinar, Turkey, after an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Kobani on Monday, October 13.

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Alleged ISIS militants stand next to an ISIS flag atop a hill in Kobani on Monday, October 6.

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In this photo released by the U.S. Air Force on Saturday, October 4, a U.S. Navy jet is refueled in Iraqi airspace after conducting an airstrike against ISIS militants.

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A Kurdish Peshmerga soldier who was wounded in a battle with ISIS is wheeled to the Zakho Emergency Hospital in Duhuk, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 30.

47 photos

Syrian Kurds wait near a border crossing in Suruc as they wait to return to their homes in Kobani on Sunday, September 28.

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Tomahawk missiles, intended for ISIS targets in Syria, fly above the Persian Gulf after being fired by the USS Philippine Sea in this image released by the U.S. Navy on Tuesday, September 23.

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Syrian Kurds fleeing ISIS militants wait behind a fence in Suruc on Sunday, September 21.

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A elderly man is carried after crossing the Syria-Turkey border near Suruc on Saturday, September 20.

47 photos

A Kurdish Peshmerga fighter launches mortar shells toward ISIS militants in Zumar, Iraq, on Monday, September 15.

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Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS militant positions from their position on the top of Mount Zardak, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday, September 9.

47 photos

Iraqi volunteer fighters celebrate breaking the Amerli siege on Monday, September 1. ISIS militants had surrounded Amerli, 70 miles north of Baquba, Iraq, since mid-June.

47 photos

Kurdish Peshmerga forces stand guard at their position in the Omar Khaled village west of Mosul on Sunday, August 24.

47 photos

Kurdish Peshmergas fight to regain control of the town of Celavle, in Iraq's Diyala province, on August 24.

47 photos

Displaced Iraqis receive clothes from a charity at a refugee camp near Feeshkhabour, Iraq, on Tuesday, August 19.

47 photos

Peshmerga fighters inspect the remains of a car that reportedly belonged to ISIS militants and was targeted by a U.S. airstrike in the village of Baqufa, north of Mosul, on August 18.

47 photos

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire at ISIS in Khazair, Iraq, on Thursday, August 14.

47 photos

Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and some other Yazidi people are flown to safety Monday, August 11, after a dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar. A CNN crew was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. But only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

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Thousands of Yazidis are escorted to safety by Kurdish Peshmerga forces and a People's Protection Unit in Mosul on Saturday, August 9.

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Thousands of Yazidi and Christian people flee Mosul on Wednesday, August 6, after the latest wave of ISIS advances.

47 photos

A Baiji oil refinery burns after an alleged ISIS attack in northern Selahaddin, Iraq, on Thursday, July 31.

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A Syrian rebel fighter lies on a stretcher at a makeshift hospital in Douma, Syria, on Wednesday, July 9. He was reportedly injured while fighting ISIS militants.

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Peshmerga fighters clean their weapons at a base in Tuz Khormato on June 25.

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New army recruits gather in Najaf, Iraq, on Wednesday, June 18, following a call for Iraqis to take up arms against Islamic militant fighters.

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Kurdish Peshmerga forces, along with Iraqi special forces, deploy their troops and armored vehicles outside of Kirkuk, Iraq, on June 12.

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Children stand next to a burnt vehicle during clashes between Iraqi security forces and ISIS militants in Mosul on Tuesday, June 10.

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Civilians from Mosul escape to a refugee camp near Irbil, Iraq, on June 10.

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Archived Version

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 13:49

It is unclear where this is, or if this is actually something they intend to do. 'Dimashki' has been suspended in other Twitter iterations for ISIS related tweets in the past.

From Twitter:

'--Courtesy of Weasel Zippers

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 03:13

WASHINGTON'--The U.S. has decided to provide pickup trucks equipped with machine guns and radios for calling in U.S. airstrikes to some moderate Syrian rebels, defense officials said. But the scope of any bombing hasn't been worked out'--a reflection of the complexities of the battlefield in Syria.

Military officials point to U.S. airstrikes, called in by Kurdish fighters, that helped drive Islamic State fighters from the city of Kobani...

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Archived Version

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 17:54

By LORI HINNANTPublished: TodayPARIS (AP) - Despite desecrated Jewish graves in France and a deadly attack at a synagogue in Copenhagen, European leaders on Monday rejected calls from the Israeli prime minister for a mass immigration of the continent's Jews, urging unity instead.

Hundreds of Jewish tombstones were found vandalized in eastern France on Sunday, hours after a Danish Jew guarding a synagogue in Copenhagen was shot to death. Frenchmen have been accused of three deadly attacks on Jewish sites since 2012: one at a school in the southern city of Toulouse, another at a museum in Brussels and finally one at a kosher market last month. Twelve people died in total.

"We know there are doubts, questions across the community," French President Francois Hollande said Monday. "I will not just let what was said in Israel pass, leading people to believe that Jews no longer have a place in Europe and in France in particular."

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls also said Monday that the government would defend French Jews against what he described as "Islamo-fascism."

"A Jew who leaves France is a piece of France that is gone," Valls told RTL radio.

Investigators were questioning five minors, 15 to 17 years old, in connection with the vandalized cemetery in the small town of Sarre-Union, the prosecutor of the eastern Bas-Rhin region told a news conference. One of the five had turned himself in.

All were from the region as were their families, and none had a criminal record of any kind, said Philippe Vannier. The youth can be held for up to 48 hours if required, before they have to be charged or let go.

Of the 400 tombs in the Sarre-Union cemetery, 250 had been vandalized, the prosecutor said.

In 2014, more than 7,000 French Jews in a community estimated at around 500,000 left for Israel, more than double the number for 2013.

And the Israeli Cabinet on Sunday approved a $46 million plan to encourage still more Jewish immigration from France, Belgium and Ukraine.

The exodus from France accelerated after the March 2012 attacks by Mohammed Merah, who stormed a Jewish school in Toulouse, killing three children and a rabbi.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that at a time of rising anti-Semitism in Europe, Israel is the only place where Jews can truly feel safe.

"This wave of attacks is expected to continue," Netanyahu told his Cabinet. "Jews deserve security in every country, but we say to our Jewish brothers and sisters, Israel is your home."

Netanyahu's comments triggered an angry response from Copenhagen's chief rabbi, Jair Melchior, who said he was "disappointed" by them.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday that her government will do everything possible to ensure Jewish sites are secure.

"We are glad and thankful that there is Jewish life in Germany again," Merkel said in Berlin. "And we would like to continue living well together with the Jews who are in Germany today."

___

Associated Press writers Jan Olsen in Copenhagen, Geir Moulson in Berlin, Josef Federman in Jerusalem and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed.

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 03:17

FacebookCraig Hicks, the man who murdered three Muslims in North Carolina this week, had a Facebook page. One of the groups he liked on it is the Southern Poverty Law Center.

An AlterNetarticle about Hicks'--reprinted today in both Raw Story and Salon'--includes several long quotes from Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Guess what subject never comes up?

No, I don't think the SPLC deserves any blame for the crime. That would be ridiculous. But the SPLC itself has a long history of throwing around blame in precisely that ridiculous way, so it would have been nice to hear how Potok reacts when an event like this lands in his own backyard. Double standards deserve to be challenged, right?

By the way: While the AlterNet piece doesn't mention Hicks' apparent fondness for the SPLC, it does mention the fact that his Facebook likes lean liberal. But it dismisses this as unimportant, telling us the significant thing is that Hicks "appears to fit the psychological profile of violent extremists'--regardless of their ideological stripes."

So it isn't ideology that's important but personality type? Apparently not: Having set ideology aside, the story smuggles it back in a little later:

Most [lone-wolf terrorists] were not young like the Boston Marathon bombers, but "were clustered most heavily between 30 and 49 years of age, although a surprising number were older than that," [an SPLC report] said. "This suggests that perpetrators spend many years on the radical right, absorbing extremist ideology, before finally acting out violently."

That summation strongly resembles Craig Stephen Hicks.

I can think of one way it doesn't.

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Archived Version

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 14:32

Journalist Kenji Goto's efforts to aid people living in conflict zones may have gone widely unnoticed if his kidnapping and beheading by the Islamic State militant group had not caused outrage worldwide last month.

But in the wake of his tragic death, an exhibition in Tokyo has included a piece of artwork created jointly by Goto and graphic artist Nakaba Kozu in 2010, which highlights their efforts to show the plight of those living amid war, especially children.

''Broken boy,'' a collage depicting the face of a boy killed in Liberia's civil war, is on display at the ongoing ''Flowers of Lives'' exhibition at Gallery Hibiya in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward until Wednesday.

The exhibition, which is organized by a Tokyo-based nongovernmental organization called the Japan-Iraq Medical Network (JIM-NET), features dozens of drawings and photographs, many of which are the work of children from Middle Eastern countries.

Maki Sato, secretary-general of the group, regretted that Goto himself could not attend the exhibition. Goto hosted an art exhibition in collaboration with Kozu five years ago.

''When I went to see Goto's work in 2010, I thought how similar our efforts were,'' Sato said. ''A few years ago we planned to organize such events together.''

Goto's piece is displayed above pencil drawing by Rana, a 12-year-old Iraqi girl who died of leukemia. The sketch is a self-portrait in which she is walking hand in hand with a Japanese friend.

In 2003, when Sato met Rana for the first time, he promised to bring her colored pencils so she could complete her drawing during his next visit. But she died later that year before she got the chance, Sato said.

''I've always wondered what colors Rana would have used,'' he said.

Goto's piece depicting the Liberian boy is displayed in a frame filled with colored pencils, a reference to Sato's exchange with Rana.

''I also remember our conversation and what Goto aimed to convey at that time,'' he said, which was to communicate the plight of children living in war zones.

That was what prompted Sato to contact the artist with whom Goto collaborated in 2010, leading to the artwork's inclusion in the current exhibition.

''He was not the only one providing support for people'' in war zones, Sato said.

''But without a place to present the efforts of people like Goto, their voices would remain unnoticed and unheard. I want people to see it and contemplate'' how they can help those in need, he said.

''It's not only about Goto or our organization's efforts. It's a symbol of what we all should be engaged in.''

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Archived Version

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 14:28

USA/Justice

At a White House summit this week, officials from the US and abroad will study ways to counter violent extremism of the kind that happened in recent days in the United States and Europe. 'Lone wolf' attackers are a special concern.

By Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer / February 15, 2015

The White House this week hosts a summit on countering violent extremism, coincidentally just days after murderous attacks with multiple victims in the United States and Europe.

The meeting, featuring speakers and participants from the US and abroad, has been in the works for months, part of a program the Obama administration began in 2011. But it comes just as a new report warns of a rise in violence by ''lone wolves'' or ''leaderless resistance'' groups composed of no more than two people.

Although the White House program has a broad mandate, recent events at first glance are connected to Islam: The shooting deaths last week of three young Muslims in Chapel Hill, N.C., by a suspect who may have been motivated by religious hatred as well as other issues, and the shooting attacks on a free speech event and a synagogue in Copenhagen, Denmark, over the weekend, believed to have been inspired by Islamic radicalism. Two people were killed and five police officers wounded in those attacks.

Under the Obama administration's program, Boston, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis-St. Paul have taken the lead ''in building pilot frameworks integrating a range of social service providers, including education administrators, mental health professionals, and religious leaders, with law enforcement agencies to address violent extremism as part of the broader mandate of community safety and crime prevention,'' the White House said in its statement last month announcing the summit.

Overcoming distrust has been a challenge for federal officials. Some critics say the apprehension of young men '' such as Christopher Lee Cornell, recently charged with plotting an attack on the US Capitol '' amounts to legally questionable entrapment.

The Los Angeles program has drawn criticism from civil rights groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Haroon Manjlai, a spokesman for the council's Los Angeles chapter, said the group is worried that the program will infringe on Muslims' freedom of speech and religion, and might hurt their public image.

The council's national office issued a statement ahead of the summit questioning the effectiveness of programs closely tied to a government that many Muslims don't trust. ''Credible community voices who are not viewed as 'being in the government's pocket' are necessary,'' it said.

The radicalization of Muslim youth has been a major concern in Minnesota, where more than 22 Somali men have gone to Somalia to fight for the radical group al-Shabab. Several others have gone or tried to go to Syria to fight for the Islamic State group.

Following the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington has taken what it calls ''a proactive approach to identifying and intervening individuals who may be susceptible to violent extremism.''

Authorities are still studying whether the killing of the three young Muslims in Chapel Hill, allegedly by Craig Hicks, was a hate crime.

On his Facebook page, he had written: ''I hate Islam just as much as christianity, but they have the right to worship in this country just as much as any others do.''

In Hicks' condo, police found four handguns, two shotguns and six rifles '' one a military-style AR-15 carbine '' and a large cache of ammunition. Although he apparently acted alone (possibly set off by a dispute with the victims over parking spaces), it's unclear whether he can be thought of as a violent extremist ''lone wolf'' in the usual sense '' even though the specifics of the attack bear that out.

In a report last week '' ''Age of the Wolf: A Study of the Rise of Lone Wolf and Leaderless Resistance Terrorism'' '' the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) examined more than 60 domestic terror incidents. Almost three-quarters of these were carried out or planned by a lone wolf, a single person acting without accomplices. Ninety percent of the incidents were the work of no more than two persons, according to the report.

The study, which included violence from both the radical right and homegrown jihadists from April 1, 2009 to Feb. 1, 2015, also found that a domestic terrorist attack or foiled attack occurred, on average, every 34 days.

''It's important to recognize the trend away from organized groups committing acts of domestic terror,'' said Mark Potok, SPLC senior fellow and editor of the report. ''As Timothy McVeigh demonstrated with the Oklahoma City bombing, lone wolves and small cells of domestic terrorists can create massive carnage.''

''The lone wolf's chief asset is that no one else knows of his violent plans, which makes them exceedingly difficult to disrupt,'' Mr. Potok said. ''It is imperative that authorities, including those gathering at the White House next week, take this threat seriously. Anything less would be an invitation to disaster.''

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Archived Version

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 14:37

Athens sources: Greeks plan to default inside Eurozone, Merkel seen as having ''fallen into bear trap''Whichever way you cut it, the only thing the Greek Government has done is to reveal an insoluble split at the heart of the European Union.

The view this afternoon among the Athens cognoscenti is that Syriza's long-foreseen game plan alternatives are playing out pretty much according to expectations: that is, the Franco-German divide on federal futures and fiscal discipline is there for all to see'....and becoming increasingly obvious.

The Slog first posted about this in November 2011, and predicted that, ultimately, it would lead to a fracture bad enough to destroy the EU. Earlier this week we saw Varoufakis ready to sign a French-inspired deal, and then the German Panzers rolling over it within hours. In the Parliament later, Tsipras did not seem surprised '' and indeed, joked about it.

It's time some of the commentators on this saga re-read the Lisbon Treaty. Under that agreement, there is no legal provision or framework in EU Treaties for a country to leave the euro; a decision to join the single currency was deliberately designed as an irreversible move.

Nor is there any possibility of Greece being ''forced'' to leave: whatever Germany, Draghi or Dieselboom threatens, the Greek antidote is simple: default within the eurozone.

That will implode markets around the world, encourage the likes of Italy, Portugal and Spain to do the same'...and vastly increase the cost of all sovereign borrowing.

The Greeks could go the way of the Brits '' and decide to leave the EU. But as article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty asserts, even that would require two years notice from the State to Brussels. And again, there is no way under that article that a jumper can be 'pushed'.

Berlin posturing and Frankfurt threats will not cut any ice with Athens. Indeed, in behaving in this Mobster way, all they're doing is shooting off their metatarsals.

Think about all this'....and then ignore the drivel you're being fed by West European media.

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 13:59

Thu Feb 19, 2015 8:35am ESTBy Renee Maltezou and Jan Strupczewski

ATHENS/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Greece formally requested a six-month extension to its euro zone loan agreement on Thursday, offering major concessions as it raced to avoid running out of cash within weeks, but immediately ran into strong objections from EU paymaster Germany.

Berlin's reaction was hostile, with the finance ministry describing the Greek proposal as "not a substantial solution" as it failed to fulfill conditions of an EU/IMF bailout program which leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had promised to ditch when he won an election last month.

With the program due to expire in little more than a week, Athens urgently needs to secure a financial lifeline to keep the country afloat beyond late March.

Euro zone finance ministers will meet on Friday afternoon in Brussels to consider the request, the chairman of their Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said in a tweet. That raised hopes of a deal to avert possible bankruptcy and a Greek exit from the 19-nation currency area.

But such hopes soon began to fade when the German Finance Ministry poured cold water on the Greek request made in a letter to Dijsselbloem for an extension to its "Master Financial Assistance Facility Agreement" with the euro zone.

Berlin has led skeptical euro zone governments in demanding that Greece keeps promises made by a previous conservative-led government to implement tough austerity policies and painful economic forms.

Finance Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger repeated German objections to Greek plans to seek a "bridge" deal covering funding while sidestepping austerity issues.

"The letter from Athens is not a proposal that leads to a substantial solution," Jaeger said in a statement. "In truth it goes in the direction of a bridge financing, without fulfilling the demands of the program."

The letter did not meet the criteria agreed by the Eurogroup of euro zone finance ministers on Monday, he added.

In Athens, a government official said Greece was proposing different terms from its current bailout obligations.

HUMANITARIAN CRISIS

Greece had committed to maintain fiscal balance during the interim period, take immediate reforms to fight tax evasion and corruption, and measures to deal with what Athens calls its "humanitarian crisis" and kick-start economic growth, he said.

In the document seen by Reuters, Greece pledged to meet its financial obligations to all creditors, recognize the existing EU/IMF program as the legally binding framework and refrain from unilateral action that would undermine the fiscal targets. [nL5N0VT2S7]

Crucially, it accepted that the extension would be monitored by the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, a climbdown by Tsipras who had vowed to end cooperation with "troika" inspectors accused of inflicting deep economic and social damage on Greece.

However, the document stopped short of accepting that Greece should achieve this year a surplus on the primary budget - which excludes repayments on Greece's huge debts - equal to three percent of the country's annual economic output, as promised under the bailout deal.

Tsipras wants to cut that to 1.5 percent to allow more state spending to ease the plight of the Greek people, while the document left the issue open by speaking of attaining "appropriate primary budget surpluses".

The six-month interim period would be used to negotiate a long-term deal for recovery and growth incorporating further debt relief measures promised by the Eurogroup in 2012.

If Berlin's reservations are shared among other euro zone governments, the letter's wording may fail in its intention: to allow Athens to avoid saying it is extending the current program that it opposes while creditors can avoid accepting a "loan agreement" without strings attached.

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis had expressed confidence on Wednesday. "The application will be written in such a way so that it will satisfy both the Greek side and the president of the Eurogroup," he said.

Crucial details remain to be clarified on the fiscal targets, labor market reforms, privatizations and other measures due to be implemented under the existing program.

Greek stocks initially rose on Thursday's developments, with the benchmark Athens stock index up 2 percent but slipped back after the German statement, being up just 0.6 percent on the day. Banks gained 9 percent but then shed half the gains.

POURING SCORN

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has poured scorn on suggestions that Athens could negotiate an extension of euro zone funding with no strings attached.

But on Wednesday he had indicated there may be some possibility of a compromise. "Our room for maneuver is limited," he said during a debate in Berlin, adding, "We must keep in mind that we have a huge responsibility to keep Europe stable."

Greece's finances are in peril. It is burning through its cash reserves and could run out of money by the end of March without fresh funds, a person familiar with the figures said.

Likewise its banks are dependent on the emergency funding controlled by the ECB in order to pay out depositors who have been withdrawing their cash. The ECB agreed on Wednesday to raise a cap on funding available under its Emergency Liquidity Assistance scheme to 68.3 billion euros (US$78 billion), a person familiar with the ECB talks said.

That was a rise of just 3.3 billion euros, less than Greece had requested. The modest increase raises the pressure for a compromise at the Eurogroup. One senior banker said it would be enough to keep Greek banks afloat only for another week if present outflow trends persist.

(Additional reporting by George Georgiopoulos and Lefteris Papadimas in Athens, Jan Strupczewski in Brussels, Madeline Chambers and Noah Barkin in Berlin,; Writing by David Stamp and Deepa Babington; Editing by Paul Taylor and Peter Millership)

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The European Central Bank has reportedly agreed to raise the emergency funding available to Greek banks to '‚¬68.3bn (£50.3bn).

The '‚¬3.3bn increase in the so-called Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) is critical for Greece's banks.

Depositors have been taking savings out of the country, depleting the banks' access to cash to lend.

However, the Greek central bank is said to have requested an additional '‚¬10bn of emergency funding.

The ECB had already raised the amount available to Greek banks by '‚¬5bn to about '‚¬65bn last week.

The deal will give Athens breathing space to negotiate a loan deal with its European creditors.

Greece is asking the eurozone for a six-month extension of its European loan, a Greek government official said on Wednesday. It would not be a renewal of the current bailout agreement, which includes strict austerity measures.

On Monday night, Greece rejected a plan to extend its '‚¬240bn (£178bn) bailout, describing it as "absurd".

Greece is likely to run out of money if a deal is not reached before the end of February.

"We should extend the credit programme by a few months to have enough stability so that we can negotiate a new agreement between Greece and Europe," Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis told Germany's ZDF.

Government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis confirmed that meant Mr Varoufakis would be asking for a six-month extension to Greece's current loan.

Mr Sakellaridis told Greece's Antenna TV: "Let's wait today for the request for an extension of the loan contract to be submitted by finance minister Varoufakis.

"All along deliberations are going on to find common ground, we want to believe that we are on a good path. We are coming to the table to find a solution."

'Yes or no'But he added the Greek government would not back down on issues that it considered non-negotiable.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble dismissed the Greek proposal, telling broadcaster ZDF on Tuesday evening: "It's not about extending a credit programme but about whether this bailout programme will be fulfilled, yes or no."

Mr Schaeuble added: "I don't have any new information, but there is no loan agreement, it's an assistance programme. And in this seemingly unimportant detail lies the key: Greece would like to receive credit, but not fulfil the conditions to allow Greece to recover economically."

In a surprise move, Greek MPs voted to elect pro-European conservative Prokopis Pavlopoulos as the country's new president on Wednesday.

The former minister and public law academic was put forward for the post in a bid to win much-needed cross-party support as Greece seeks to strike a deal with its international creditors.

Pavlopoulos was backed by the left-wing government as well as the main opposition party.

Conservative European Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos had been considered the front-runner for the largely ceremonial post.

An impasse over the selection of a new president triggered an early election last month that swept Syriza into government.

Friday deadlineThe Greek stock exchange rose 3% on Wednesday in morning trading in Athens as news of the loan extension application emerged, but later closed up just 1.1%.

The eurozone has given Greece until Friday to decide if it wants to continue with the current bailout deal.

Greece wants to replace the bailout with a new loan that it says would give it time to find a permanent solution to the debt crisis.

On Tuesday, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for a vote in the Greek parliament on whether to scrap the austerity programme on Friday, the same day as the eurozone deadline.

"We will not succumb to psychological blackmail," Mr Tsipras told parliament. "We are not in a hurry and we will not compromise."

US investment bank JP Morgan claimed over the weekend that '‚¬2bn worth of deposits was flowing out of Greek banks each week. It estimated that if that were to remain the case, they would run out of cash to use as collateral against new loans within 14 weeks.

JP Morgan's estimate is based on a calculation that a maximum of '‚¬108bn of deposits is left in Greek banks.

The most up-to-date figures from the Greek central bank show deposits dropped 2.4% month-on-month in December to '‚¬160.3bn from '‚¬164.3bn, marking the third consecutive monthly fall.

Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who is also chairing the Eurogroup meetings of eurozone finance ministers, warned on Monday night there were just days left for talks.

Mr Dijsselbloem said it was now "up to Greece" to decide if it wanted more funding or not.

Analysis: Theo Leggett, BBC business reporter:The apparent deadlock in Brussels is hardly surprising, because the two sides have very different goals.

The Greek government wants to scrap the current bailout deal, because of the very painful programme of spending cuts and other austerity measures that come with it. Instead, it wants a bridging loan to help it meet its short term needs, while a new deal is hammered out. Having been elected on an anti-austerity ticket, it can't afford to back down, or it will be accused of betraying Greek voters.

But other members of the eurozone, and Germany in particular, have a very different agenda. They want Greece to accept an extension to the current deal - with the rather uncertain promise of "flexibility" if it plays ball.

They don't want to show any signs of weakness, because of the signal that could send to anti-austerity movements in countries such as Spain, Portugal or Cyprus.

It would also be politically toxic in Germany, where many voters dislike the idea that they are paying for Greece's mistakes.

That doesn't mean a compromise is impossible. It simply means any deal would have to be presented as both an end to the current austerity programme and a continuation of it. A political fudge, in other words - and Brussels has plenty of experience in putting those together. So a short-term solution is possible, but far from certain.

Key dates for Greece - and the eurozone28 February - Current programme of loans ends

First quarter of 2015 - Greece's funding needs estimated at '‚¬4.3bn by end of March

19-20 March - EU leaders' summit

20 July - '‚¬3.5bn bonds held by the European Central Bank mature

20 August - '‚¬3.2bn bonds held by the European Central Bank mature

Greece has proposed a new bailout programme that involves a bridging loan to keep the country going for six months and help it repay '‚¬7bn (£5.2bn) of maturing bonds.

The second part of the plan would see the county's debt refinanced. Part of this might be through "GDP bonds" - bonds carrying an interest rate linked to economic growth.

Greece also wants to see a reduction in the primary surplus target - the surplus the government must generate (excluding interest payments on debt) - from 3% to 1.49% of GDP.

In Greece last week, two opinion polls indicated that 79% of Greeks supported the government's policies, and 74% believed its negotiating strategy would succeed.

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NOAA Global Analysis- Annual 1997The global average temperature of 62.45 degrees Fahrenheit for 1997 was the warmest year on record, surpassing the previous record set in 1995 by 0.15 degrees Fahrenheit

NOAA Global Analysis- Annual 2014The average temperature for the year [2014] was 0.69°C (1.24°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F) [ie 58.24F] , beating the previous record warmth of 2010 and 2005 by 0.04°C (0.07°F).

(H/T Ima Debatin')

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 03:47

The new findings push back scientists' understanding of when life on Earth was widespread. Photo: NASA

More than 3 billion years ago, Earth was a hostile, volatile place, its air oxygen-less and its climate unpredictable.

And yet, life thrived.

That's according to a study published in the journal Nature, which analysed 52 ancient rock samples and found that organisms capable of pulling nitrogen from the atmosphere and converting it into a usable form first appeared around 3.2 billion years ago '-- about a billion years earlier than previous estimates.

Though very early, very basic forms of life are thought to have existed even earlier than the 3.2 billion mark, the new findings push back scientists' understanding of when life was widespread.

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The secret ingredient is a type of nitrogen found in the ancient rock samples. Early life forms may have been able to live without oxygen '-- which didn't appear in Earth's atmosphere until what scientists call a "great oxygenation event" 2.3 billion years ago '-- but they required nitrogen to build genes and for other essential life processes. And unfortunately for the planet's ancient organisms, the kind of nitrogen in Earth's atmosphere exists in tightly bonded pairs that are useless when it comes to chemical reactions.

Non-biological processes, such as lightning discharge, may have converted bonded atmospheric nitrogen in small quantities, but not frequently enough to sustain large populations of living cells. For that, life on Earth needed to find a way to acquire its own nitrogen '-- an enzyme that could pull the compound from the atmosphere and convert it to its "fixed" or usable form.

Evidence of such an enzyme is what researchers found in their samples, which were sourced from some of Earth's oldest rock in South Africa and Australia and range from about 2.8 billion to 3.2 billion years old. The rocks contain a chemical signature of the nitrogen-fixing process, offering "hard evidence" that the conditions for life to flourish have existed 50 percent longer than scientists once believed, according to co-author Roger Buick.

"People always had the idea that the really ancient biosphere was just tenuously clinging on to this inhospitable planet, and it wasn't until the emergence of nitrogen fixation that suddenly the biosphere become large and robust and diverse," Buick, a professor at the University of Washington, said in a university press release. "Our work shows that there was no nitrogen crisis on the early Earth, and therefore it could have supported a fairly large and diverse biosphere."

Buick said these early organisms could have crawled out of the ocean and lived on land in a single layer of cells, coating the planet's rocks with a thin film of slime and quietly exhaling small amounts of oxygen. The presence of the chemical signature is indirect evidence of this hypothesis, but it's firm '-- the kind of chemical reaction preserved in the rocks can only happen in the presence of life.

Lead author Eva Stueken, also a University of Washington professor, said that the findings suggest it may be easier for complex biological processes to develop than originally thought.

"Imagining that this really complicated process is so old, and has operated in the same way for 3.2 billion years, I think is fascinating," she said. "It suggests that these really complicated enzymes apparently formed really early, so maybe it's not so difficult for these enzymes to evolve."

Washington Post

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 13:19

Chicago area residents traveling outside Thursday should watch out for frost bite as record low temperatures hit the area.

Just before 6:30 a.m. Thursday, O'Hare International Airport registered a temperature of minus 8 degrees, marking the coldest temperature on record for Feb. 19, according to the National Weather Service. Thursday's bone-chilling cold surpassed the previous record of 7 below recorded on Feb. 19 in 1936.

Powerful northwest winds of between 10 and 15 mph will make it feel like it's anywhere between minus 20 and minus 30 degrees outside, said National Weather Service meteorologist Amy Seeley. A wind chill advisory is in effect for the Chicagoland area until noon.

As of 6:30 a.m., the record-low temperatures were not causing some disruptions for morning commuters. Inbound and outbound trains on the Metra Electric District were temporarily stopped at 67th Street due to wire problems on the line. The problem was reported about 6:35 a.m., and Metra officials warned of "extensive delays," according to an alert. As of 7 a.m., trains were using only two tracks, and Trains 309 and 311, scheduled to arrive at 93rd Street at 8:12 a.m., were operating as a combination train due to the problem.

Metra also reported one train on the BNSF line, Train 1201, would terminate in Lisle instead of Naperville due to its "winter weather plan." Train 1205 would accommodate riders traveling to Naperville, according to a Metra service alert.

CTA trains and buses were reporting normal service early Thursday after switching problems caused brief delays for Green Line trains.

The bitter cold caused Chicago Public Schools to cancel classes Thursday, the fourth weather-related closing of the year so far. Several suburban districts also either canceled classes or announced a later starting time to avoid the brunt of the cold.

Officials warn that extended exposure to the extreme weather without proper clothing can increase the risk of hypothermia, and frost bite can occur in a matter of minutes on exposed skin outside.

Despite the extreme temperatures, the day is expected to be mostly sunny.

But Chicagoans shouldn't be fooled '' the sunshine is unlikely to help someone without a warm coat.

Copyright (C) 2015, Chicago Tribune

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Tim Radford & Oliver Tickell

17th February 2015

The mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era.

The Central Plains and Southwest region of the US face "unprecedented" droughts later this century, according to new research.

While Midwest states have experienced ever more flooding over the last 50 years, the regions already suffering from extremes of aridity are being warned to expect megadroughts worse than any conditions in the last 1,000 years.

Climate scientist Benjamin Cook, of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, and colleagues report in a new journal, Science Advances, that they looked at historical evidence, climate projections and ways of calculating soil moisture.

They found that the drought conditions of the future American west will be more severe than the hottest, most arid extended droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries - an unusually warm period climatologists call the Medieval Climatic Anomaly - which brought an end to the once-flourishing Ancient Pueblo culture of the American Southwest, forcing the people to migrate to other areas.

They report: "We have demonstrated that the mean state of drought in the late 21st century over the Central Plains and Southwest will likely exceed even the most severe megadrought periods of the Medieval era in both high and moderate future emissions scenarios, representing an unprecedented fundamental climate shift with respect to the last millennium.

"Notably, the drying in our assessment is robust across models and moisture balance metrics. Our analysis thus contrasts sharply with the recent emphasis on uncertainty about drought projections for these regions, including the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report."

A remarkably drier future far outside the contemporary experience

The growth rings of trees provided the evidence for reconstructions of what climatologists call the warm Medieval period, and the researchers matched the picture from the past with 17 different computer model predictions of the climate later in the 21st century.

The conclusions were ominous: nearly all the models predicted that the Plains and the Southwest would become drier than at any time in the last 1,000 years.

Even though winter rain and snowfall could increase in parts of California - currently in the grip of calamitous drought - in the decades to come, overall there will be lower cold season precipitation and, because of higher temperatures, ever more evaporation and ever more water demand for the surviving vegetation.

The authors conclude: "Ultimately, the consistency of our results suggests an exceptionally high risk of a multidecadal megadrought occurring over the Central Plains and Southwest regions during the late 21st century, a level of aridity exceeding even the persistent megadroughts that characterised the Medieval era.

"Our results point to a remarkably drier future that falls far outside the contemporary experience of natural and human systems in Western North America, conditions that may present a substantial challenge to adaptation.

"Human populations in this region, and their associated water resources demands, have been increasing rapidly in recent decades, and these trends are expected to continue for years to come.

"Future droughts will occur in a significantly warmer world with higher temperatures than recent historical events, conditions that are likely to be a major added stress on both natural ecosystems and agriculture."

Co-author Toby Ault, head of the Emergent Climate Risk Lab at Cornell University, warned of future megadroughts only last year. He says: "I was honestly surprised at just how dry the future is likely to be."

And to the north, more frequent severe floods

But to the north, in the American Midwest, conditions have begun to change in a different way. Iman Mallakour and Gabriele Villarini, of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iowa, collected evidence from 774 stream gauges in 14 states from 1962 to 2011.

The region was hit by economically-disastrous, billion-dollar floods in 1993, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2014. The researchers wanted to see whether flooding was really on the increase, or whether perception of greater flooding was what they called "an artefact of our relatively short collective memory."

They report in Nature Climate Change that a third of them had recorded a greater number of flood events, and only one in 10 recorded a decrease. The pattern of increase extended from North Dakota south to Iowa and Missouri, and east to Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

"While observational records from the central United States present limited evidence of significant changes in the magnitude of floodpeaks, strong evidence points to an increasing frequency of flooding", the paper explains. "These changes in flood hydrology result from changes in both seasonal rainfall and temperature across this region."

The result is a confirmation of the perceived increase, says Dr Villarini: "It's not that big floods are getting bigger, but that we have been experiencing a larger number of big floods."

The papers:

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

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World Press Photo of the Year 2014, First Prize Contemporary Issues. Photo by Mads Nissen, Denmark, Scanpix/Panos Pictures

A photograph that highlights the difficulties facing sexual minorities in Russia has won the World Press Photo contest's top prize. 'Jon and Alex', from a project called 'Homophobia in Russia', shows a 'intimate moment' between a gay couple from St. Petersburg and won Danish photographer Mads Nissen the Contemporary Issues category of the competition, as well as the first prize for a single image, netting him 11,500 Euro and Canon DSLR equipment.

The 2015 contest attracted entries from 5692 photographers representing 131 nationalities, and drew in a total of 97,912 pictures. Once again what constitutes an acceptable degree of digital manipulation has been questioned, with a spokesperson reportedly telling UK photo magazine Amateur Photographer that 22% of the short listed entries were rejected by the jury once original files were called in for checking. The World Press Photo foundation published Integrity of the Image (PDF), a paper dealing with the characteristics of image manipulation and the acceptable boundaries last year, which describes what it considers 'minor/normal/subtle/moderate' and which acknowledges that defining 'excessive' is open to interpretation.

For more information on the winners, the competition and to see a gallery of all the winning entries, visit the World Press Photo website. You can also hear the phone call in which Nissen was told he had won the overall prize.

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 03:25

A key element of the big data business is getting what much of computer technology secretly craves: Normality.

On Tuesday, several companies involved in analyzing digital information announced a common set of standards for Hadoop, perhaps the most widespread framework for technology analysis.

The companies, including General Electric, Hortonworks, IBM, Pivotal and Verizon, said they would develop their products and services on a common core of Hadoop's key components.

Common standards often follow early development of software and hardware. If more companies use the same stuff, it usually helps with things like learning and certification, application development, and new products.

''What we're seeing is the rise of algorithms in new customer engagement models,'' said Paul Maritz, the chief executive of Pivotal, a company that builds software for other companies and offers products for online software development.

[Video: IBM video on Hadoop software. Watch on YouTube.]

Hadoop is a method for distributing, managing and processing very large and often disparate amounts of data. It is open-source software, and comes out of research at Yahoo and Google, among other places.

Those two companies had businesses that involved collecting lots of behavioral online clicks, which made them among the first companies that had to handle big files of so-called unstructured data (as opposed to more conventional data, like payrolls). As more people, companies, and sensors move online, their unstructured data needs have become everyone's necessity, and Hadoop has flourished.

The technology has been somewhat difficult to use, however, and there are concerns that deepening uses of different kinds of Hadoop, even with slight variations, could slow down the market.

''This is consistent with moving the market along,'' said Herb Cunitz, the president of Hortonworks, a major provider of Hadoop technology. ''It's an initiative everyone is welcome to join.''

Standards have historically been a way for big technology companies to gain an edge over the competition by ensuring their knowledge is put to maximum use. Open source was considered a way around that, as well as the slowdowns caused by things like patent disputes.

Hadoop is getting to be big business. Hortonworks went public in December, and currently has a market capitalization just under $1 billion. Cloudera, the largest Hadoop vendor, took a huge funding round last March, including $740 million from Intel for an 18 percent stake.

Cloudera was notably absent from Tuesday's announcement, which took place at a Pivotal event in San Francisco. Down the road in San Jose, Cloudera was participating in its own big data event.

Pivotal, a company primarily spun out of assets of EMC and VMware in 2013, also announced that it has revenue of over $100 million in 2014. Over $40 million of that, Mr. Maritz said, came from subscription revenue from Pivotal's big data analysis product.

General Electric has invested in a data analysis platform called Predix. In December it announced a partnership project with Japan's SoftBank to sell the product in Japan. IBM has been selling Hadoop for several years, but has redoubled efforts as it styles itself as a cloud computing company.

Mr. Maritz said Cloudera was ''looking'' at the common standard. ''They have been invited,'' he said.

Mike Olson, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Cloudera, said his company thought the initiative was at minimum redundant. ''We believe the Apache Software Foundation is where the discussion should take place,'' he said, referring to the open-source group that supports Hadoop and many other open-source projects. ''The open-source world is a level playing field.''

Echo makes Siri look like the Newton. I believe it's because of their cloud capacity experience and technology

Echo speech recognition is refined and narrowed for each category that he can do something for therefore giving it the illusion of artificial intelligence

Interestingly I believe that the iOS speech recognition is far superior than that of Amazons echo.

Apple should acquire Amazon

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 08:15

The iPhone maker prefers buying smaller companies that fit easily into its existing businessYesterday, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) reported the biggest every quarterly profit in the corporate history. The iPhone maker generated $74.6 billion in sales and $18.02 billion in profits for the quarter ending December 2014. The record-breaking profits have given it more cash. Now Apple has enough cash to buy many of the world's largest corporations and rivals, and still have a few billion dollars to spare.

Apple can buy 483 of the S&P 500 companiesApple now has more cash than the market value of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) ($173 billion), International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) ($152 billion) and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) ($142 billion). As Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge points out, Apple's cash pile is greater than the market cap of all but 17 companies in the S&P 500 index. The valuations of Intel, AT&T, Visa Inc (NYSE:V), Walt The Walt Disney Company (NYSE:DIS), Comcast Corporation (NASDAQ:CMCSA) (NASDAQ:CMCSK), Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) are less than Apple's cash reserve.

If Tim Cook wanted to buy hot tech companies, he could acquire Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX), Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), Snapchat, Dropbox, and SpaceX and still have more than $20 billion left over. However, some of its biggest rivals are still out of reach. For instance, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) is currently valued at $346 billion, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is worth $352 billion, and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)'s market value stands at $212 billion. By Comparison, Apple itself is valued at $686 billion.

Apple may not pursue big-ticket acquisitionsBut Apple may not be interested in buying those companies. It spends money on smaller acquisitions. Apple's biggest ever acquisition was Beats, for which it paid $3 billion last year. Earlier this month, the iPhone maker purchased music analytics firm Semetric for an undisclosed sum. The Cupertino company buys smaller businesses that fit easily into its existing business.

A large chunk of Apple's cash is stashed outside the United States. The company exploits tax loopholes in countries like Ireland to keep its tax bills low without breaking a single tax law. Apple will be hit by a huge tax bill if it repatriates its cash. That's why the company prefers taking out debts to reward its shareholders, despite huge cash pile.

Apple shares skyrocketed 7.77% to $117.62 at 10:14 AM EST on Wednesday.

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Wed, 18 Feb 2015 23:51

War makes strange bedfellows.

Over the past decade, the Koch Brothers have become a major political force, funneling money from their family company into organizations that support conservative politicians and causes--including the denial of climate change.

So Charles and David Koch wouldn't seem like enthusiastic supporters of electric-car maker Tesla Motors.

Yet the Koch-funded group Americans for Prosperity is one of 10 signatories on a letter sent to U.S. governors and legislators urging them to support Tesla's direct-sales business model.

Tesla has fought auto-dealer associations in multiple states. They view the carmaker as a threat to the traditional franchised dealer model.

Yet that model doesn't work for Tesla, and enforcing it robs consumers of all possible choices, the letter (via Transport Evolved) says.

Sharing this sentiment with the Koch-funded group are the Sierra Club and Environmental America--groups from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Another signatory was the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, which nominated Arizona, Michigan, New Jersey, and Texas as finalists for the 2014 "Luddite Awards."

Getty Images / Bill PuglianoElon Musk

The Luddite Awards call out entities viewed as opposed to innovation--in this case four states with laws banning Tesla direct sales.

Support for both Tesla and increased competition in car sales brought all of these groups together.

"Some of us frequently find ourselves on different sides of public policy debates," the letter notes, but the groups involved are in agreement on this one issue.

The letter says current laws protecting franchised dealers were intended to prevent carmakers from squashing independent dealers with their own stores.

That doesn't apply to Tesla, which has sold cars directly to customers from the beginning.

Echoing past comments from Tesla officials, the letter said the carmaker needed to go the direct route because traditional franchised dealers have been "unwilling or unable to promote electric-vehicle sales with sufficient expertise or vigor."

However, the signatories note that their concerns are not limited to Tesla, saying existing laws negatively impact "any company seeking to distribute cars directly to customers."

Perhaps it's that emphasis on free-market competition that got a Koch-backed group to stand alongside the likes of the Sierra Club.

If so, it shows that Tesla's sales model could have a wider base of support than one might initially think.

This article originally appeared at Green Car Reports. Copyright 2015. Follow Green Car Reports on Twitter.

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 13:37

For $70 a month, you can enjoy AT&T Inc. 's ultrafast fiber-optic Internet access. For an additional $29 a month, you can avoid being tracked doing it.

AT&T T, -0.63% introduced its one gigabit-per-second service in Austin, Texas, in 2013, and rolled it out Tuesday in Kansas City, Mo. But the service comes with a hitch: The company tracks users as they surf the Web. Customers who want to keep their browsing habits to themselves have to pay a fee to opt out of monitoring.

Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford University computer scientist who focuses on online monitoring technology, said the user tracking by companies that provide both wireless and wired Internet access is worrisome. Such companies are in a position to perform relatively comprehensive tracking, and customers don't have any practical way to thwart it, he said.

Many Web companies let users opt out of sharing certain information at no charge, and Mr. Mayer questioned whether AT&T's privacy option is designed to discourage people from opting out of tracking. The monthly charge ''seems like a huge penalty intended to normalize the practice,'' he said.

An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.

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Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:57

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Brand new Y40 here, and the same crappy experience.

Just received my laptop, booted up, started browsing and this annoying Superfish VisualDiscovery bull**bleep** started popping up on me... **bleep**??!!

So Lenovo, a supposedly renowned hardware maker, is pushing crapware into its customers??

I'm stunned. Completely.

And please, don't give me that PUP ("Potentially Unwanted Program") nonsense. This is adware, plain and simple.

Also, yes; I could wipe the whole thing out and get a fresh OS install (which I'll probably end up doing anyway), but that would require me to obtain a new OS license (i.e.: pay for it, if I want Windows).

Yet... wait! I have already paid for a Windows license here!!! (because Lenovo forced me to, as they won't sell the machine OS-less). However, I only got a bloated, spammy version, which I cannot change, beacuse all is embedded into the recovery image...

I feelscammed.

[Moderator Edited per Forum Guidelines.]

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Tue, 17 Feb 2015 13:35

It's been known for a while that the NSA will intercept and bug equipment to spy on its soon-to-be owners, but the intellgency agency's techniques are apparently more clever than first thought. Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered apparently state-created spyware buried in the firmware of hard drives from big names like Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital. When present, the code lets snoops collect data and map networks that would otherwise be inaccessible -- all they need to retrieve info is for an unwitting user to insert infected storage (such as a CD or USB drive) into an internet-connected PC. The malware also isn't sitting in regular storage, so you can't easily get rid of it or even detect it.

Kaspersky isn't explicitly naming the culprits, but it also isn't shy about pointing a finger in the US government's direction. The company notes that the developers had access to unpatched exploits before they showed up in American cyberwarfare viruses like Stuxnet, and in some cases directly borrowed code modules. Also, most of the infections have occurred in countries that are frequently US spying targets, such as China, Iran, Pakistan and Russia. Reuters sources back this up with claims that the NSA has developed espionage techniques on this level.

The NSA isn't commenting on the findings. However, they don't bode well for the US' attempts to preserve the eroding trust of other countries. If the US can plant surveillance tools in hard disks, why would you buy a hard drive (or an entire computer) from an American source to safeguard your big secrets? You probably won't have to worry about these bugged drives at home, but they're likely to be major concerns abroad.

[Image credit: Getty Images]

Via:Reuters

Source:Kaspersky Lab

Tags:doublefantasy, equationdrug, equationgroup, equationlaser, fantasy, grayfish, harddrive, hdd, internet, kaspersky, kasperskylab, kasperskylabs, nsa, privacy, seagate, spying, storage, surveillance, toshiba, triplefantasy, westerndigital

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Archived Version

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 13:47

Aurich Lawson

CANCUN, Mexico '-- In 2009, one or more prestigious researchers received a CD by mail that contained pictures and other materials from a recent scientific conference they attended in Houston. The scientists didn't know it then, but the disc also delivered a malicious payload developed by a highly advanced hacking operation that had been active since at least 2001. The CD, it seems, was tampered with on its way through the mail.

It wasn't the first time the operators'--dubbed the "Equation Group" by researchers from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab'--had secretly intercepted a package in transit, booby-trapped its contents, and sent it to its intended destination. In 2002 or 2003, Equation Group members did something similar with an Oracle database installation CD in order to infect a different target with malware from the group's extensive library. (Kaspersky settled on the name Equation Group because of members' strong affinity for encryption algorithms, advanced obfuscation methods, and sophisticated techniques.)

Kaspersky researchers have documented 500 infections by Equation Group in at least 42 countries, with Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, Syria, and Mali topping the list. Because of a self-destruct mechanism built into the malware, the researchers suspect that this is just a tiny percentage of the total; the actual number of victims likely reaches into the tens of thousands.

A long list of almost superhuman technical feats illustrate Equation Group's extraordinary skill, painstaking work, and unlimited resources. They include:

The use of virtual file systems, a feature also found in the highly sophisticated Regin malware. Recently published documents provided by Ed Snowden indicate that the NSA used Regin to infect the partly state-owned Belgian firm Belgacom.The stashing of malicious files in multiple branches of an infected computer's registry. By encrypting all malicious files and storing them in multiple branches of a computer's Windows registry, the infection was impossible to detect using antivirus software.Redirects that sent iPhone users to unique exploit Web pages. In addition, infected machines reporting to Equation Group command servers identified themselves as Macs, an indication that the group successfully compromised both iOS and OS X devices.The use of more than 300 Internet domains and 100 servers to host a sprawling command and control infrastructure.USB stick-based reconnaissance malware to map air-gapped networks, which are so sensitive that they aren't connected to the Internet. Both Stuxnet and the related Flame malware platform also had the ability to bridge airgaps.An unusual if not truly novel way of bypassing code-signing restrictions in modern versions of Windows, which require that all third-party software interfacing with the operating system kernel be digitally signed by a recognized certificate authority. To circumvent this restriction, Equation Group malware exploited a known vulnerability in an already signed driver for CloneCD to achieve kernel-level code execution.Taken together, the accomplishments led Kaspersky researchers to conclude that Equation Group is probably the most sophisticated computer attack group in the world, with technical skill and resources that rival the groups that developed Stuxnet and the Flame espionage malware.

"It seems to me Equation Group are the ones with the coolest toys," Costin Raiu, director of Kaspersky Lab's global research and analysis team, told Ars. "Every now and then they share them with the Stuxnet group and the Flame group, but they are originally available only to the Equation Group people. Equation Group are definitely the masters, and they are giving the others, maybe, bread crumbs. From time to time they are giving them some goodies to integrate into Stuxnet and Flame."

Further ReadingIn an exhaustive report published Monday at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit here, researchers stopped short of saying Equation Group was the handiwork of the NSA'--but they provided detailed evidence that strongly implicates the US spy agency.

First is the group's known aptitude for conducting interdictions, such as installing covert implant firmware in a Cisco Systems router as it moved through the mail.

Second, a highly advanced keylogger in the Equation Group library refers to itself as "Grok" in its source code. The reference seems eerily similar to a line published last March in an Intercept article headlined "How the NSA Plans to Infect 'Millions' of Computers with Malware." The article, which was based on Snowden-leaked documents, discussed an NSA-developed keylogger called Grok.

Third, other Equation Group source code makes reference to "STRAITACID" and "STRAITSHOOTER." The code words bear a striking resemblance to "STRAITBIZARRE," one of the most advanced malware platforms used by the NSA's Tailored Access Operations unit. Besides sharing the unconventional spelling "strait," Snowden-leaked documents note that STRAITBIZARRE could be turned into a disposable "shooter." In addition, the codename FOXACID belonged to the same NSA malware framework as the Grok keylogger.

Apart from these shared code words, the Equation Group in 2008 used four zero-day vulnerabilities'--including two that were later incorporated into Stuxnet.

The similarities don't stop there. Equation Group malware dubbed GrayFish encrypted its payload with a 1,000-iteration hash of the target machine's unique NTFS object ID. The technique makes it impossible for researchers to access the final payload without possessing the raw disk image for each individual infected machine. The technique closely resembles one used to conceal a potentially potent warhead in Gauss, a piece of highly advanced malware that shared strong technical similarities with both Stuxnet and Flame. (Stuxnet, according to The New York Times, was a joint operation between the NSA and Israel, while Flame, according to The Washington Post, was devised by the NSA, the CIA, and the Israeli military.)Beyond the technical similarities to the Stuxnet and Flame developers, Equation Group boasted the type of extraordinary engineering skill people have come to expect from a spy organization sponsored by the world's wealthiest nation. One of the Equation Group's malware platforms, for instance, rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers'--a never-before-seen engineering marvel that worked on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate.

The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived military-grade disk wiping and reformatting, making sensitive data stolen from victims available even after reformatting the drive and reinstalling the operating system. The firmware also provided programming interfaces that other code in Equation Group's sprawling malware library could access. Once a hard drive was compromised, the infection was impossible to detect or remove.

Enlarge/ Forensics software displays some of the hard drives Equation Group was able to commandeer using malicious firmware.Kaspersky Lab

While it's simple for end users to re-flash their hard drives using executable files provided by manufacturers, it's just about impossible for an outsider to reverse engineer a hard drive, read the existing firmware, and create malicious versions.

"This is an incredibly complicated thing that was achieved by these guys, and they didn't do it for one kind of hard drive brand," Raiu said. "It's very dangerous and bad because once a hard drive gets infected with this malicious payload it's impossible for anyone, especially an antivirus [provider], to scan inside that hard drive firmware. It's simply not possible to do that."

Kaspersky Lab

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Archived Version

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 05:43

Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and NagasakiPart of the Pacific War, World War IIAtomic bomb mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (left) and Nagasaki (right)DateAugust 6 and 9, 1945LocationHiroshima and Nagasaki, JapanResultAllied victoryBelligerents United States United Kingdom JapanCommanders and leadersWilliam S. ParsonsPaul W. Tibbets, Jr.Shunroku HataUnits involvedManhattan District: 50 U.S., 2 British509th Composite Group: 1,770 U.S.Second General Army: Hiroshima: 40,000Nagasaki: 9,000Casualties and losses20 U.S., Dutch, British prisoners of war killed90,000''166,000 killed in Hiroshima39,000''80,000 killed in NagasakiTotal: 129,000''246,000+ killedIn August 1945, during the final stage of the Second World War, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in human history.

As the Second World War entered its sixth and final year, the Allies had begun to prepare for, what was anticipated to be, a very costly invasion of the Japanese mainland. This was preceded by an immensely destructive firebombing campaign that obliterated many Japanese cities. The war in Europe had concluded when Nazi Germany signed its instrument of surrender on May 8, 1945, but with the Japanese refusal to accept the Allies' demands for unconditional surrender, the Pacific War dragged on. Together with the United Kingdom and China, the United States calls for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945, was buttressed with the threat of "prompt and utter destruction".

By August 1945, the Allied Manhattan Project had successfully detonated an atomic device in the New Mexico desert and subsequently produced atomic weapons based on two alternate designs. The 509th Composite Group of the U.S. Army Air Forces was equipped with a SilverplateBoeing B-29 Superfortress that could deliver them from Tinian in the Mariana Islands. A uranium gun-type atomic bomb (Little Boy) was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by a plutonium implosion-type bomb (Fat Man) on the city of Nagasaki on August 9. Within the first two to four months of the bombings, the acute effects of the atomic bombings killed 90,000''166,000 people in Hiroshima and 39,000''80,000 in Nagasaki; roughly half of the deaths in each city occurred on the first day. During the following months, large numbers died from the effect of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians, although Hiroshima had a sizable military garrison.

On August 15, just days after the bombing of Nagasaki and the Soviet Union's declaration of war, Japan announced its surrender to the Allies. On September 2, it signed the instrument of surrender, effectively ending World War II. The bombings' role in Japan's surrender and their ethical justification are still debated.

BackgroundPacific WarMain article: Pacific WarIn 1945, the Pacific War between the Empire of Japan and the Allies entered its fourth year. The Japanese fought fiercely, ensuring that U.S. victory would come at an enormous cost. Of the 1.25 million battle casualties incurred by the United States in World War II, including both military personnelkilled in action and wounded in action, nearly one million occurred in the twelve-month period from June 1944 to June 1945. December 1944 saw American battle casualties hit an all-time monthly high of 88,000 as a result of the German Ardennes Offensive. In the Pacific the Allies returned to the Philippines,recaptured Burma, and invaded Borneo. Offensives were undertaken to reduce the Japanese forces remaining in Bougainville, New Guinea and the Philippines. In April 1945, American forces landed on Okinawa, where heavy fighting continued until June. Along the way, the ratio of Japanese to American casualties dropped from 5:1 in the Philippines to 2:1 on Okinawa.

As the Allied advance moved inexorably towards Japan, conditions became steadily worse for the Japanese people. Japan's merchant fleet declined from 5,250,000 gross tons in 1941 to 1,560,000 tons in March 1945, and 557,000 tons in August 1945. Lack of raw materials forced the Japanese war economy into a steep decline after the middle of 1944. The civilian economy, which had slowly deteriorated throughout the war, reached disastrous levels by the middle of 1945. The loss of shipping also affected the fishing fleet, and the 1945 catch was only 22% of that in 1941. The 1945 rice harvest was the worst since 1909, and hunger and malnutrition became widespread. U.S. industrial production was overwhelmingly superior to Japan's. By 1943, the U.S, produced almost 100,000 aircraft a year, compared to Japan's production of 70,000 for the entire war. By the summer of 1944, the U.S. had almost a hundred aircraft carriers in the Pacific, far more than Japan's twenty-five for the entire war. In February 1945, Prince Fumimaro Konoe advised the EmperorHirohito that defeat was inevitable, and urged him to abdicate.

Preparations to invade JapanEven before the surrender of Nazi Germany on May 8, 1945, plans were underway for the largest operation of the Pacific War, Operation Downfall, the invasion of Japan. The operation had two parts: Operations Olympic and Coronet. Set to begin in October 1945, Olympic involved a series of landings by the U.S. Sixth Army intended to capture the southern third of the southernmost main Japanese island, KyÅshÅ. Operation Olympic was to be followed in March 1946 by Operation Coronet, the capture of the Kantō Plain, near Tokyo on the main Japanese island of HonshÅ by the U.S. First, Eighth and Tenth Armies. The target date was chosen to allow for Olympic to complete its objectives, for troops to be redeployed from Europe, and the Japanese winter to pass.

Japan's geography made this invasion plan obvious to the Japanese; they were able to predict the Allied invasion plans accurately and thus adjust their defensive plan, Operation Ketsugō, accordingly. The Japanese planned an all-out defense of KyÅshÅ, with little left in reserve for any subsequent defense operations. Four veteran divisions were withdrawn from the Kwantung Army in Manchuria in March 1945 to strengthen the forces in Japan, and 45 new divisions were activated between February and May 1945. Most were immobile formations for coastal defense, but 16 were high quality mobile divisions. In all, there were 2.3 million Japanese Army troops prepared to defend the home islands, backed by a civilian militia of 28 million men and women. Casualty predictions varied widely, but were extremely high. The Vice Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy General Staff, Vice AdmiralTakijirō Ōnishi, predicted up to 20 million Japanese deaths.

A study from June 15, 1945, by the Joint War Plans Committee,[14] who provided planning information to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that Olympic would result in between 130,000 and 220,000 U.S. casualties of which U.S. dead would be the range from 25,000 to 46,000. Delivered on June 15, 1945, after insight gained from the Battle of Okinawa, the study noted Japan's inadequate defenses due to the very effective sea blockade and the American firebombing campaign. The Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General of the ArmyGeorge Marshall, and the Army Commander in Chief in the Pacific, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, signed documents agreeing with the Joint War Plans Committee estimate.

The Americans were alarmed by the Japanese buildup, which was accurately tracked through Ultra intelligence.Secretary of WarHenry L. Stimson was sufficiently concerned about high American estimates of probable casualties to commission his own study by Quincy Wright and William Shockley. Wright and Shockley spoke with Colonels James McCormack and Dean Rusk, and examined casualty forecasts by Michael E. DeBakey and Gilbert Beebe. Wright and Shockley estimated the invading Allies would suffer between 1.7 and 4 million casualties in such a scenario, of whom between 400,000 and 800,000 would be dead, while Japanese casualties would have been around 5 to 10 million.

Marshall began contemplating the use of a weapon which was "readily available and which assuredly can decrease the cost in American lives":poison gas. Quantities of phosgene, mustard gas, tear gas and cyanogen chloride were moved to Luzon from stockpiles in Australia and New Guinea in preparation for Operation Olympic, and MacArthur ensured that Chemical Warfare Service units were trained in their use. Consideration was also given to using biological weapons against Japan.

Air raids on JapanWhile the United States had developed plans for an air campaign against Japan prior to the Pacific War, the capture of Allied bases in the western Pacific in the first weeks of the conflict meant that this offensive did not begin until mid-1944 when the long-ranged Boeing B-29 Superfortress became ready for use in combat.Operation Matterhorn involved India-based B-29s staging through bases around Chengdu in China to make a series of raids on strategic targets in Japan. It had failed to achieve the strategic objectives that the planners had intended, largely because of logistical problems, the bomber's mechanical difficulties, the vulnerability of Chinese staging bases, and the extreme range required to reach key Japanese cities.

United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) Brigadier GeneralHaywood S. Hansell determined that Guam, Tinian, and Saipan in the Mariana Islands would better serve as B-29 bases, but they were in Japanese hands. Strategies were shifted to accommodate the air war, and the islands were captured between June and August 1944. Air bases were developed, and B-29 operations commenced from the Marianas in October 1944. These bases were easily resupplied by cargo ships. The XXI Bomber Command began missions against Japan on November 18, 1944.

The early attempts to bomb Japan from the Marianas proved just as ineffective as the China-based B-29s had been. Hansell continued the practice of conducting so-called high-altitude precision bombing, aimed at key industries and transportation networks, even after these tactics had not produced acceptable results. These efforts proved unsuccessful due to logistical difficulties with the remote location, technical problems with the new and advanced aircraft, unfavorable weather conditions, and enemy action.[31]

Hansell's successor, Major GeneralCurtis LeMay, assumed command in January 1945 and initially continued to use the same precision bombing tactics, with equally unsatisfactory results. The attacks initially targeted key industrial facilities but much of the Japanese manufacturing process was carried out in small workshops and private homes. Under pressure from USAAF headquarters in Washington, LeMay changed tactics and decided that low-level incendiary raids against Japanese cities were the only way to destroy their production capabilities, shifting from precision bombing to area bombardment with incendiaries.

Like most strategic bombing during World War II, the aim of the USAAF offensive against Japan was to destroy the enemy's war industries, kill or disable civilian employees of these industries, and undermine civilian morale. Civilians who took part in the war effort through such activities as building fortifications and manufacturing munitions and other war materials in factories and workshops were considered combatants in a legal sense and therefore liable to be attacked.

Over the next six months, the XXI Bomber Command under LeMay firebombed 67 Japanese cities. The firebombing of Tokyo, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, on March 9''10 killed an estimated 100,000 people and destroyed 16 square miles (41 km2) of the city and 267,000 buildings in a single night. It was the deadliest bombing raid of the war, at a cost of 20 B-29s shot down by flak and fighters. By May, 75% of bombs dropped were incendiaries designed to burn down Japan's "paper cities". By mid-June, Japan's six largest cities had been devastated. The end of the fighting on Okinawa that month provided airfields even closer to the Japanese mainland, allowing the bombing campaign to be further escalated. Aircraft flying from Allied aircraft carriers and the Ryukyu Islands also regularly struck targets in Japan during 1945 in preparation for Operation Downfall. Firebombing switched to smaller cities, with populations ranging from 60,000 to 350,000. According to Yuki Tanaka, the U.S. fire-bombed over a hundred Japanese towns and cities.[43] These raids were also very devastating.

The Japanese military was unable to stop the Allied attacks and the country's civil defense preparations proved inadequate. Japanese fighters and antiaircraft guns had difficulty engaging bombers flying at high altitude. From April 1945, the Japanese interceptors also had to face American fighter escorts based on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. That month, the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service and Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service stopped attempting to intercept the air raids in order to preserve fighter aircraft to counter the expected invasion. By mid-1945 the Japanese only occasionally scrambled aircraft to intercept individual B-29s conducting reconnaissance sorties over the country, in order to conserve supplies of fuel. By July 1945, the Japanese had stockpiled 1,156,000 US barrels (137,800,000 l; 36,400,000 US gal; 30,300,000 imp gal) of avgas for the invasion of Japan. While the Japanese military decided to resume attacks on Allied bombers from late June, by this time there were too few operational fighters available for this change of tactics to hinder the Allied air raids.

Atomic bomb developmentWorking in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada, with their respective projects Tube Alloys and Chalk River Laboratories,[51][52] the Manhattan Project, under the direction of Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, designed and built the first atomic bombs.

The uranium atom was first split by German physicists in 1938, making the development of an atomic bomb a theoretical possibility. Fearing that the German atomic bomb project would develop atomic weapons first, preliminary research in the U.S. began in late 1939. Progress was slow until the arrival of the British MAUD Committee report in late 1941 showed that only 5-10 kilograms, and not 500 tons, of pure uranium were needed. Arthur H. Compton set up the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, where, on December 2, 1942 the first sustained nuclear chain reaction was achieved. Groves appointed J. Robert Oppenheimer to orgainse and head the project's Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.

Two types of bombs were eventually devised. The Hiroshima bomb, known as a Little Boy, was a gun-type fission weapon that used uranium-235, a rare isotope of uranium extracted in giant factories at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The other was a more powerful and efficient but more complicated implosion-type nuclear weapon using plutonium-239, a synthetic element created in nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington. A test implosion weapon, the gadget, was detonated at Trinity Site, on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The Nagasaki bomb, a Fat Man, was a similar device.

There was a Japanese nuclear weapon program, but it lacked the human, mineral and financial resources of the Manhattan Project, and never made much progress towards developing an atomic bomb.

PreparationsOrganization and trainingThe 509th Composite Group was constituted on December 9, 1944, and activated on December 17, 1944, at Wendover Army Air Field, Utah, commanded by ColonelPaul Tibbets.[59] Tibbets was assigned to organize and command a combat group to develop the means of delivering an atomic weapon against targets in Germany and Japan. Because the flying squadrons of the group consisted of both bomber and transport aircraft, the group was designated as a "composite" rather than a "bombardment" unit.[60]

Working with the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, Tibbets selected Wendover for his training base over Great Bend, Kansas, and Mountain Home, Idaho, because of its remoteness. Each bombardier completed at least 50 practice drops of inert or conventional explosive pumpkin bombs and Tibbets declared his group combat-ready.[62]

The 509th Composite Group had an authorized strength of 225 officers and 1,542 enlisted men, almost all of whom eventually deployed to Tinian. In addition to its authorized strength, the 509th had attached to it on Tinian 51 civilian and military personnel from Project Alberta, known as the 1st Technical Detachment. The 509th Composite Group's 393d Bombardment Squadron was equipped with 15 Silverplate B-29s. These aircraft were specially adapted to carry nuclear weapons, and were equipped with fuel-injected engines, Curtiss Electric reversible-pitchpropellers, pneumatic actuators for rapid opening and closing of bomb bay doors and other improvements.

The ground support echelon of the 509th Composite Group moved by rail on April 26, 1945, to its port of embarkation at Seattle, Washington. On May 6 the support elements sailed on the SS Cape Victory for the Marianas, while group materiel was shipped on the SS Emile Berliner. The Cape Victory made brief port calls at Honolulu and Eniwetok but the passengers were not permitted to leave the dock area. An advance party of the air echelon, consisting of 29 officers and 61 enlisted men flew by C-54 to North Field on Tinian, between May 15 and 22.[66]

There were also two representatives from Washington, D.C., Brigadier GeneralThomas Farrell, the deputy commander of the Manhattan Project, and Rear AdmiralWilliam R. Purnell of the Military Policy Committee, who were on hand to decide higher policy matters on the spot. Along with Captain William S. Parsons, the commander of Project Alberta, they became known as the "Tinian Joint Chiefs".

Choice of targetsIn April 1945, Marshall asked Groves to nominate specific targets for bombing for final approval by himself and Stimson. Groves formed a Target Committee chaired by himself, that included Farrell, Major John A. Derry, Colonel William P. Fisher, Joyce C. Stearns and David M. Dennison from the USAAF; and scientists John von Neumann, Robert R. Wilson and William Penney from the Manhattan Project. The Target Committee met in Washington on April 27; at Los Alamos on May 10, where it was able to talk to the scientists and technicians there; and finally in Washington on May 28, where it was briefed by Tibbets and CommanderFrederick Ashworth from Project Alberta, and the Manhattan Project's scientific advisor, Richard C. Tolman.

The Target Committee nominated five targets: Kokura, the site of one of Japan's largest munitions plants; Hiroshima, an embarkation port and industrial center that was the site of a major military headquarters; Yokohama, an urban center for aircraft manufacture, machine tools, docks, electrical equipment and oil refineries; Niigata, a port with industrial facilities including steel and aluminum plants and an oil refinery; and Kyoto, a major industrial center. The target selection was subject to the following criteria:

The target was larger than 3 mi (4.8 km) in diameter and was an important target in a large urban area.The blast would create effective damage.The target was unlikely to be attacked by August 1945.[70]These cities were largely untouched during the nightly bombing raids and the Army Air Forces agreed to leave them off the target list so accurate assessment of the weapon could be made. Hiroshima was described as "an important army depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. It is a good radar target and it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage. Due to rivers it is not a good incendiary target."[70]

The Target Committee stated that "It was agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance. Two aspects of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released. Kyoto had the advantage of being an important center for military industry, as well an intellectual center and hence a population better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon. The Emperor's palace in Tokyo has a greater fame than any other target but is of least strategic value."[70]

Edwin O. Reischauer, a Japan expert for the U.S. Army Intelligence Service, was incorrectly said to have prevented the bombing of Kyoto.[70] In his autobiography, Reischauer specifically refuted this claim:

... the only person deserving credit for saving Kyoto from destruction is Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War at the time, who had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades earlier.

On May 30, Stimson asked Groves to remove Kyoto from the target list, but Groves pointed to its military and industrial significance. Stimson then approached PresidentHarry S. Truman about the matter. Truman agreed with Stimson, and Kyoto was temporarily removed from the target list. Groves attempted to restore Kyoto to the target list in July, but Stimson remained adamant. On July 25, Nagasaki was put on the target list in place of Kyoto. Orders for the attack were issued to General Carl Spaatz on July 25 under the signature of General Thomas T. Handy, the acting Chief of Staff, since Marshall was at the Potsdam Conference with Truman. That day, Truman noted in his diary that:

This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo]. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one.[77]

Proposed demonstrationIn early May 1945, the Interim Committee was created by Stimson at the urging of leaders of the Manhattan Project and with the approval of Truman to advise on matters pertaining to nuclear energy. During the meetings on May 31 and June 1, scientist Ernest Lawrence had suggested giving the Japanese a non-combat demonstration.Arthur Compton later recalled that:

It was evident that everyone would suspect trickery. If a bomb were exploded in Japan with previous notice, the Japanese air power was still adequate to give serious interference. An atomic bomb was an intricate device, still in the developmental stage. Its operation would be far from routine. If during the final adjustments of the bomb the Japanese defenders should attack, a faulty move might easily result in some kind of failure. Such an end to an advertised demonstration of power would be much worse than if the attempt had not been made. It was now evident that when the time came for the bombs to be used we should have only one of them available, followed afterwards by others at all-too-long intervals. We could not afford the chance that one of them might be a dud. If the test were made on some neutral territory, it was hard to believe that Japan's determined and fanatical military men would be impressed. If such an open test were made first and failed to bring surrender, the chance would be gone to give the shock of surprise that proved so effective. On the contrary, it would make the Japanese ready to interfere with an atomic attack if they could. Though the possibility of a demonstration that would not destroy human lives was attractive, no one could suggest a way in which it could be made so convincing that it would be likely to stop the war.

The possibility of a demonstration was raised again in the Franck Report issued by physicist James Franck on June 11 and the Scientific Advisory Panel rejected his report on June 16, saying that "we can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use." Franck then took the report to Washington, D.C., where the Interim Committee met on June 21 to re-examine its earlier conclusions; but it reaffirmed that there was no alternative to the use of the bomb on a military target.

Like Compton, many U.S. officials and scientists argued that a demonstration would sacrifice the shock value of the atomic attack, and the Japanese could deny the atomic bomb was lethal, making the mission less likely to produce surrender. Allied prisoners of war might be moved to the demonstration site and be killed by the bomb. They also worried that the bomb might be a dud since the Trinity test was of a stationary device, not an air-dropped bomb. In addition, only two bombs would be available at the start of August, although more were in production, and they cost billions of dollars, so using one for a demonstration would be expensive.[83]

LeafletsFor several months, the U.S. had dropped more than 63 million leaflets across Japan warning civilians of air raids. Many Japanese cities suffered terrible damage from aerial bombings, some were as much as 97% destroyed. LeMay thought that this would increase the psychological impact of bombing, and reduce the stigma of area bombing cities. Even with the warnings, Japanese opposition to the war remained ineffective. In general, the Japanese regarded the leaflet messages as truthful, but anyone who was caught in possession of one was arrested.[84] Leaflet texts were prepared by recent Japanese prisoners of war because they were thought to be the best choice "to appeal to their compatriots".

In preparation for dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, U.S. military leaders decided against a demonstration bomb, and against a special leaflet warning, in both cases because of the uncertainty of a successful detonation, and the wish to maximize psychological shock. No warning was given to Hiroshima that a new and much more destructive bomb was going to be dropped. Various sources give conflicting information about when the last leaflets were dropped on Hiroshima prior to the atomic bomb. Robert Jay Lifton writes that it was July 27, and Theodore H. McNelly that it was July 3. The USAAF history notes eleven cities were targeted with leaflets on July 27, but Hiroshima was not one of them, and there were no leaflet sorties on July 30. Leaflet sorties were undertaken on August 1 and 4. It is very likely that Hiroshima was leafleted in late July or early August, as survivor accounts talk about a delivery of leaflets a few days before the atomic bomb was dropped. One such leaflet lists twelve cities targeted for firebombing: Otaru, Akita, Hachinohe, Fukushima, Urawa, Takayama, Iwakuni, Tottori, Imabari, Yawata, Miyakonojo, and Saga. Hiroshima was not listed.[89]

Potsdam DeclarationTruman delayed the start of the summit by two weeks in the hope that the bomb could be tested before the start of negotiations with Stalin. The Trinity Test of July 16 exceeded expectations. On July 26, Allied leaders issued the Potsdam Declaration outlining terms of surrender for Japan. It was presented as an ultimatum and stated that without a surrender, the Allies would attack Japan, resulting in "the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland". The atomic bomb was not mentioned in the communiqu(C). On July 28, Japanese papers reported that the declaration had been rejected by the Japanese government. That afternoon, Prime MinisterSuzuki Kantarō declared at a press conference that the Potsdam Declaration was no more than a rehash (yakinaoshi) of the Cairo Declaration and that the government intended to ignore it (mokusatsu, "kill by silence").[93] The statement was taken by both Japanese and foreign papers as a clear rejection of the declaration. Emperor Hirohito, who was waiting for a Soviet reply to non-committal Japanese peace feelers, made no move to change the government position.

Under the 1943 Quebec Agreement with the United Kingdom, the United States had agreed that nuclear weapons would not be used against another country without mutual consent. In June 1945 the head of the British Joint Staff Mission, Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, agreed that the use of nuclear weapons against Japan would be officially recorded as a decision of the Combined Policy Committee. At Potsdam, Truman agreed to a request from Winston Churchill that Britain be represented when the atomic bomb was dropped. William Penney and Group CaptainLeonard Cheshire were sent to Tinian, but found that LeMay would not let them accompany the mission. All they could do was send a strongly worded signal back to Wilson.

BombsThe Little Boy bomb, except for the uranium payload, was ready at the beginning of May 1945. The uranium-235 projectile was completed on June 15, and the target on July 24. The target and bomb pre-assemblies (partly assembled bombs without the fissile components) left Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, California, on July 16 aboard the cruiserUSS Indianapolis, arriving July 26. The target inserts followed by air on July 30.

The first plutonium core, along with its polonium-berylliumurchin initiator, was transported in the custody of Project Alberta courier Raemer Schreiber in a magnesium field carrying case designed for the purpose by Philip Morrison. Magnesium was chosen because it does not act as a tamper. The core departed from Kirtland Army Air Field on a C-54 transport aircraft of the 509th Composite Group's 320th Troop Carrier Squadron on July 26, and arrived at North Field July 28. Three Fat Man high-explosive pre-assemblies, designated F31, F32, and F33, were picked up at Kirtland on July 28 by three B-29s, from the 393d Bombardment Squadron, plus one from the 216th Army Air Force Base Unit, and transported to North Field, arriving on August 2.

HiroshimaHiroshima during World War IIAt the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. A number of military units were located nearby, the most important of which was the headquarters of Field MarshalShunroku Hata's Second General Army, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan, and was located in Hiroshima Castle. Hata's command consisted of some 400,000 men, most of whom were on Kyushu where an Allied invasion was correctly anticipated. Also present in Hiroshima were the headquarters of the 59th Army, the 5th Division and the 224th Division, a recently formed mobile unit. The city was defended by five batteries of 7-and-8-centimeter (2.8 and 3.1 in) anti-aircraft guns of the 3rd Anti-Aircraft Division, including units from the 121st and 122nd Anti-Aircraft Regiments and the 22nd and 45th Separate Anti-Aircraft Battalions. In total, over 40,000 military personnel were stationed in the city.

Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military, but it also had large stockpiles of military supplies.[106] The city was a communications center, a key port for shipping and an assembly area for troops. It was also the second largest city in Japan after Kyoto that was still undamaged by air raids, due to the fact that it lacked the aircraft manufacturing industry that was the XXI Bomber Command's priority target. On July 3, the Joint Chiefs of Staff placed it off limits to bombers, along with Kokura, Niigata and Kyoto.

The center of the city contained several reinforced concrete buildings and lighter structures. Outside the center, the area was congested by a dense collection of small wooden workshops set among Japanese houses. A few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city. The houses were constructed of wood with tile roofs, and many of the industrial buildings were also built around wood frames. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage.

The population of Hiroshima had reached a peak of over 381,000 earlier in the war but prior to the atomic bombing, the population had steadily decreased because of a systematic evacuation ordered by the Japanese government. At the time of the attack, the population was approximately 340,000''350,000.[110] Residents wondered why Hiroshima had been spared destruction by firebombing. Some speculated that the city was to be saved for U.S. occupation headquarters, others thought perhaps their relatives in Hawaii and California had petitioned the U.S. government to avoid bombing Hiroshima. More realistic city officials had ordered buildings torn down to create long, straight firebreaks, beginning in 1944. Firebreaks continued to be expanded and extended up to the morning of August 6, 1945.

The bombingHiroshima was the primary target of the first nuclear bombing mission on August 6, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternative targets. The 393d Bombardment Squadron B-29 Enola Gay, piloted by Tibbets, took off from North Field, Tinian, about six hours' flight time from Japan. The Enola Gay (named after Tibbets' mother) was accompanied by two other B-29s. The Great Artiste, commanded by Major Charles Sweeney, carried instrumentation, and a then-nameless aircraft later called Necessary Evil, commanded by Captain George Marquardt, served as the photography aircraft.[115]

After leaving Tinian the aircraft made their way separately to Iwo Jima to rendezvous with Sweeney and Marquardt at 05:55 at 9,200 feet (2,800 m), and set course for Japan. The aircraft arrived over the target in clear visibility at 31,060 feet (9,470 m). Parsons, who was in command of the mission, armed the bomb during the flight to minimize the risks during takeoff. He had witnessed four B-29s crash and burn at takeoff, and feared that a nuclear explosion would occur if a B-29 crashed with an armed Little Boy on board. His assistant, Second LieutenantMorris R. Jeppson, removed the safety devices 30 minutes before reaching the target area.[120]

During the night of August 5''6, Japanese early warning radar detected the approach of numerous American aircraft headed for the southern part of Japan. Radar detected 65 bombers headed for Saga, 102 bound for Maebashi, 261 en route to Nishinomiya, 111 headed for Ube and 66 bound for Imabari. An alert was given and radio broadcasting stopped in many cities, among them Hiroshima. The all-clear was sounded in Hiroshima at 00:05. About an hour before the bombing, the air raid alert was sounded again, as Straight Flush flew over the city. It broadcast a short message which was picked up by Enola Gay. It read: "Cloud cover less than 3/10th at all altitudes. Advice: bomb primary." The all-clear was sounded over Hiroshima again at 07:09.

At 08:09 Tibbets started his bomb run and handed control over to his bombardier, Major Thomas Ferebee. The release at 08:15 (Hiroshima time) went as planned, and the Little Boy containing about 64 kg (141 lb) of uranium-235 took 44.4 seconds to fall from the aircraft flying at about 31,000 feet (9,400 m) to a detonation height of about 1,900 feet (580 m) above the city.[127]Enola Gay traveled 11.5 mi (18.5 km) before it felt the shock waves from the blast.[128]

Due to crosswind, the bomb missed the aiming point, the Aioi Bridge, by approximately 800 ft (240 m) and detonated directly over Shima Surgical Clinic at 34°23'²41'"N132°27'²17'"E>> / >>34.39468°N 132.45462°E>> / 34.39468; 132.45462. It created a blast equivalent to 16 kilotons of TNT (67 TJ), ± 2 kt. The weapon was considered very inefficient, with only 1.7% of its material fissioning.[130] The radius of total destruction was about 1 mile (1.6 km), with resulting fires across 4.4 square miles (11 km2).[131]

People on the ground reported seeing a pika or brilliant flash of light followed by a don, a loud booming sound. Some 70,000''80,000 people, of whom 20,000 were soldiers, or around 30% of the population of Hiroshima, were killed by the blast and resultant firestorm,[133][134] and another 70,000 injured.[135]

Events on the groundSome of the reinforced concrete buildings in Hiroshima had been very strongly constructed because of the earthquake danger in Japan, and their framework did not collapse even though they were fairly close to the blast center. Since the bomb detonated in the air, the blast was directed more downward than sideways, which was largely responsible for the survival of the Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall, now commonly known as the Genbaku (A-bomb) dome. This building was designed and built by the Czech architect Jan Letzel, and was only 150 m (490 ft) from ground zero. The ruin was named Hiroshima Peace Memorial and was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996 over the objections of the United States and China, which expressed reservations on the grounds that other Asian nations were the ones who suffered the greatest loss of life and property, and a focus on Japan lacked historical perspective.[136]

The Americans estimated that 4.7 square miles (12 km2) of the city were destroyed. Japanese officials determined that 69% of Hiroshima's buildings were destroyed and another 6''7% damaged.[137] The bombing started fires that spread rapidly through wood and paper homes. As in other Japanese cities, the firebreaks proved ineffective.

Hiroshima bombingStrike order for the Hiroshima bombing as posted on August 5, 1945

Injured civilian casualties

The dark portions of the garments this victim wore during the flash caused burns on the skin

Eizō Nomura was the closest known survivor, who was in the basement of a reinforced concrete building (it remained as the Rest House after the war) only 170 metres (560 ft) from ground zero (the hypocenter) at the time of the attack.[139][140] He lived into his 80s.[141][142] Akiko Takakura was among the closest survivors to the hypocenter of the blast. She had been in the solidly built Bank of Hiroshima only 300 meters (980 ft) from ground-zero at the time of the attack.[143]

Over 90% of the doctors and 93% of the nurses in Hiroshima were killed or injured'--most had been in the downtown area which received the greatest damage.[144] The hospitals were destroyed or heavily damaged. Only one doctor, Terufumi Sasaki, remained on duty at the Red Cross Hospital. Nonetheless, by early afternoon, the police and volunteers had established evacuation centres at hospitals, schools and tram stations, and a morgue was established in the Asano library.

Most elements of the Japanese Second General Army headquarters were at physical training on the grounds of Hiroshima Castle, barely 900 yards (820 m) from the hypocenter. The attack killed 3,243 troops on the parade ground. The communications room of Chugoku Military District Headquarters that was responsible for issuing and lifting air raid warnings was in a semi-basement in the castle. Yoshie Oka, a Hijiyama Girls High School student who had been mobilized to serve as a communications officer had just sent a message that the alarm had been issued for Hiroshima and Yamaguchi when the bomb exploded. She used a special phone to inform Fukuyama Headquarters that "Hiroshima has been attacked by a new type of bomb. The city is in a state of near-total destruction."[147]

Since Mayor Senkichi Awaya had been killed while eating breakfast with his son and granddaughter at the mayoral residence, Field Marshal Hata, who was only slightly wounded, took over the administration of the city, and coordinated relief efforts. Many of his staff had been killed or fatally wounded, including a Korean prince of the Joseon Dynasty, Yi Wu, who was serving as a lieutenant colonel in the Japanese Army.[149] Hata's senior surviving staff officer was the wounded Colonel Kumao Imoto, who acted as his chief of staff. Hiroshima Ujina Harbor was undamaged, and soldiers from there used suicide boats intended to repel the American invasion to collect the wounded, and take them down the rivers to the military hospital at Ujina. Trucks and trains brought in relief supplies and evacuated survivors from the city.

Twelve American airmen were imprisoned at the Chugoku Military Police Headquarters located about 1,300 feet (400 m) from the hypocenter of the blast.[151] Most died instantly, although two were reported to have been executed by their captors, and two prisoners badly injured by the bombing were left next to the Aioi Bridge by the Kempei Tai, where they were stoned to death.

Japanese realization of the bombingHiroshima before the bombing.

Hiroshima after the bombing.

The Tokyo control operator of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation noticed that the Hiroshima station had gone off the air. He tried to re-establish his program by using another telephone line, but it too had failed.[153] About 20 minutes later the Tokyo railroad telegraph center realized that the main line telegraph had stopped working just north of Hiroshima. From some small railway stops within 16 km (9.9 mi) of the city came unofficial and confused reports of a terrible explosion in Hiroshima. All these reports were transmitted to the headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff.[154]

Military bases repeatedly tried to call the Army Control Station in Hiroshima. The complete silence from that city puzzled the General Staff; they knew that no large enemy raid had occurred and that no sizable store of explosives was in Hiroshima at that time. A young officer was instructed to fly immediately to Hiroshima, to land, survey the damage, and return to Tokyo with reliable information for the staff. It was felt that nothing serious had taken place and that the explosion was just a rumor.[154]

The staff officer went to the airport and took off for the southwest. After flying for about three hours, while still nearly 160 km (99 mi) from Hiroshima, he and his pilot saw a great cloud of smoke from the bomb. In the bright afternoon, the remains of Hiroshima were burning. Their plane soon reached the city, around which they circled in disbelief. A great scar on the land still burning and covered by a heavy cloud of smoke was all that was left. They landed south of the city, and the staff officer, after reporting to Tokyo, began to organize relief measures.[154]

Events of August 7''9After the Hiroshima bombing, Truman issued a statement announcing the use of the new weapon. He stated, "We may be grateful to Providence" that the German atomic bomb project had failed, and that the United States and its allies had "spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history'--and won." Truman then warned Japan: "If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware."[157]

The Japanese government did not react. Emperor Hirohito, the government, and the war council considered four conditions for surrender: the preservation of the kokutai (Imperial institution and national polity), assumption by the Imperial Headquarters of responsibility for disarmament and demobilization, no occupation of the Japanese Home Islands, Korea, or Formosa, and delegation of the punishment of war criminals to the Japanese government.

The Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov informed Tokyo of the Soviet Union's unilateral abrogation of the Soviet''Japanese Neutrality Pact on August 5. At two minutes past midnight on August 9, Tokyo time, Soviet infantry, armor, and air forces had launched the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation. Four hours later, word reached Tokyo of the Soviet Union's official declaration of war. The senior leadership of the Japanese Army began preparations to impose martial law on the nation, with the support of Minister of War Korechika Anami, in order to stop anyone attempting to make peace.

On August 7, a day after Hiroshima was destroyed, Dr. Yoshio Nishina and other atomic physicists arrived at the city, and carefully examined the damage. They then went back to Tokyo and told the cabinet that Hiroshima was indeed destroyed by an atomic bomb. Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, estimated that no more than one or two additional bombs could be readied, so they decided to endure the remaining attacks, acknowledging "there would be more destruction but the war would go on." American Magic codebreakers intercepted the cabinet's messages.

Purnell, Parsons, Tibbets, Spaatz, and LeMay met on Guam that same day to discuss what should be done next. Since there was no indication of Japan surrendering, they decided to proceed with dropping another bomb. Parsons said that Project Alberta would have it ready by August 11, but Tibbets pointed to weather reports indicating poor flying conditions on that day due to a storm, and asked if the bomb could be readied by August 9. Parsons agreed to try to do so.

NagasakiI realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb ... It is an awful responsibility which has come to us ... We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.

Nagasaki during World War IIThe city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest seaports in southern Japan, and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The four largest companies in the city were Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed about 90% of the city's labor force, and accounted for 90% of the city's industry.[166] Although an important industrial city, Nagasaki had been spared from firebombing because its geography made it difficult to locate at night with AN/APQ-13 radar.

Unlike the other target cities, Nagasaki had not been placed off limits to bombers by the Joint Chiefs of Staff's July 3 directive, and was bombed on a small scale five times. During one of these raids on August 1, a number of conventional high-explosive bombs were dropped on the city. A few hit the shipyards and dock areas in the southwest portion of the city, and several hit the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works.[166] By early August, the city was defended by the IJA 134th Anti-Aircraft Regiment of the 4th Anti-Aircraft Division with four batteries of 7 cm (2.8 in) anti-aircraft guns and two searchlight batteries.

In contrast to Hiroshima, almost all of the buildings were of old-fashioned Japanese construction, consisting of wood or wood-frame buildings with wood walls (with or without plaster) and tile roofs. Many of the smaller industries and business establishments were also situated in buildings of wood or other materials not designed to withstand explosions. Nagasaki had been permitted to grow for many years without conforming to any definite city zoning plan; residences were erected adjacent to factory buildings and to each other almost as closely as possible throughout the entire industrial valley. On the day of the bombing, an estimated 263,000 people were in Nagasaki, including 240,000 Japanese residents, 10,000 Korean residents, 2,500 conscripted Korean workers, 9,000 Japanese soldiers, 600 conscripted Chinese workers, and 400 Allied prisoners of war in a camp to the north of Nagasaki.[168]

The bombingResponsibility for the timing of the second bombing was delegated to Tibbets. Scheduled for August 11 against Kokura, the raid was moved earlier by two days to avoid a five-day period of bad weather forecast to begin on August 10. Three bomb pre-assemblies had been transported to Tinian, labeled F-31, F-32, and F-33 on their exteriors. On August 8, a dress rehearsal was conducted off Tinian by Sweeney using Bockscar as the drop airplane. Assembly F-33 was expended testing the components and F-31 was designated for the August 9 mission.

Special Mission 16, Secondary target Nagasaki, August 9, 1945AircraftPilotCall SignMission roleEnola GayCaptain George W. MarquardtDimples 82Weather reconnaissance (Kokura)Laggin' DragonCaptain Charles F. McKnightDimples 95Weather reconnaissance (Nagasaki)BockscarMajor Charles W. SweeneyDimples 77Weapon DeliveryThe Great ArtisteCaptain Frederick C. BockDimples 89Blast measurement instrumentationBig StinkMajor James I. Hopkins, Jr.Dimples 90Strike observation and photographyFull HouseMajor Ralph R. TaylorDimples 83Strike spare'--did not complete missionAt 03:49 on the morning of August 9, 1945, Bockscar, flown by Sweeney's crew, carried Fat Man, with Kokura as the primary target and Nagasaki the secondary target. The mission plan for the second attack was nearly identical to that of the Hiroshima mission, with two B-29s flying an hour ahead as weather scouts and two additional B-29s in Sweeney's flight for instrumentation and photographic support of the mission. Sweeney took off with his weapon already armed but with the electrical safety plugs still engaged.[173]

During pre-flight inspection of Bockscar, the flight engineer notified Sweeney that an inoperative fuel transfer pump made it impossible to use 640 US gallons (2,400 l; 530 imp gal) of fuel carried in a reserve tank. This fuel would still have to be carried all the way to Japan and back, consuming still more fuel. Replacing the pump would take hours; moving the Fat Man to another aircraft might take just as long and was dangerous as well, as the bomb was live. Tibbets and Sweeney therefore elected to have Bockscar continue the mission.[175]

This time Penney and Cheshire were allowed to accompany the mission, flying as observers on the third plane, Big Stink, flown by the group's operations officer, Major James I. Hopkins, Jr. Observers aboard the weather planes reported both targets clear. When Sweeney's aircraft arrived at the assembly point for his flight off the coast of Japan, Big Stink failed to make the rendezvous.[173] According to Cheshire, Hopkins was at varying heights including 9,000 feet (2,700 m) higher than he should have been, and was not flying tight circles over Yakushima as previously agreed with Sweeney and Captain Frederick C. Bock, who was piloting the support B-29 The Great Artiste. Instead, Hopkins was flying 40-mile (64 km) dogleg patterns. Though ordered not to circle longer than fifteen minutes, Sweeney continued to wait for Big Stink, at the urging of Ashworth, the plane's weaponeer, who was in command of the mission.

After exceeding the original departure time limit by a half hour, Bockscar, accompanied by The Great Artiste, proceeded to Kokura, thirty minutes away. The delay at the rendezvous had resulted in clouds and drifting smoke from fires started by a major firebombing raid by 224 B-29s on nearby Yahata the previous day over Kokura. Additionally, the Yawata Steel Works intentionally burned coal tar, to produce black smoke.[178] The clouds and smoke resulted in 70% of the area over Kokura being covered, obscuring the aiming point. Three bomb runs were made over the next 50 minutes, burning fuel and exposing the aircraft repeatedly to the heavy defenses of Yawata, but the bombardier was unable to drop visually. By the time of the third bomb run, Japanese antiaircraft fire was getting close, and Second Lieutenant Jacob Beser, who was monitoring Japanese communications, reported activity on the Japanese fighter direction radio bands.

After three runs over the city, and with fuel running low because of the failed fuel pump, they headed for their secondary target, Nagasaki.[173] Fuel consumption calculations made en route indicated that Bockscar had insufficient fuel to reach Iwo Jima and would be forced to divert to Okinawa. After initially deciding that if Nagasaki were obscured on their arrival the crew would carry the bomb to Okinawa and dispose of it in the ocean if necessary, Ashworth ruled that a radar approach would be used if the target was obscured.[180]

At about 07:50 Japanese time, an air raid alert was sounded in Nagasaki, but the "all clear" signal was given at 08:30. When only two B-29 Superfortresses were sighted at 10:53, the Japanese apparently assumed that the planes were only on reconnaissance and no further alarm was given.

A few minutes later at 11:00, The Great Artiste dropped instruments attached to three parachutes. These instruments also contained an unsigned letter to Professor Ryokichi Sagane, a physicist at the University of Tokyo who studied with three of the scientists responsible for the atomic bomb at the University of California, Berkeley, urging him to tell the public about the danger involved with these weapons of mass destruction. The messages were found by military authorities but not turned over to Sagane until a month later. In 1949, one of the authors of the letter, Luis Alvarez, met with Sagane and signed the document.[183]

At 11:01, a last-minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed Bockscar's bombardier, Captain Kermit Beahan, to visually sight the target as ordered. The Fat Man weapon, containing a core of about 6.4 kg (14 lb) of plutonium, was dropped over the city's industrial valley at 32°46'²25'"N129°51'²48'"E>> / >>32.77372°N 129.86325°E>> / 32.77372; 129.86325. It exploded 47 seconds later at 1,650 ± 33 ft (503 ± 10 m), above a tennis court halfway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works) in the north. This was nearly 3 km (1.9 mi) northwest of the planned hypocenter; the blast was confined to the Urakami Valley and a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills. The resulting explosion had a blast yield equivalent to 21 ± 2 kt (87.9 ± 8.4 TJ). The explosion generated heat estimated at 3,900 °C (7,050 °F) and winds that were estimated at 1,005 km/h (624 mph).[186]

Big Stink spotted the explosion from a hundred miles away, and flew over to observe. Because of the delays in the mission and the inoperative fuel transfer pump, Bockscar did not have sufficient fuel to reach the emergency landing field at Iwo Jima, so Sweeney and Bock flew to Okinawa. Arriving there, Sweeney circled for 20 minutes trying to contact the control tower for landing clearance, finally concluding that his radio was faulty. Critically low on fuel, Bockscar barely made it to the runway on Okinawa's Yontan Airfield. With only enough fuel for one landing attempt, Sweeney and Albury brought Bockscar in at 150 miles per hour (240 km/h) instead of the normal 120 miles per hour (190 km/h), firing distress flares to alert the field of the uncleared landing. The number two engine died from fuel starvation as Bockscar began its final approach. Touching the runway hard, the heavy B-29 slewed left and towards a row of parked B-24 bombers before the pilots managed to regain control. The B-29's reversible propellers were insufficient to slow the aircraft adequately, and with both pilots standing on the brakes, Bockscar made a swerving 90-degree turn at the end of the runway to avoid running off the runway. A second engine died from fuel exhaustion by the time the plane came to a stop. The flight engineer later measured fuel in the tanks and concluded that less than five minutes total remained.

Following the mission, there was confusion over the identification of the plane. The first eyewitness account by war correspondent William L. Laurence of the New York Times, who accompanied the mission aboard the aircraft piloted by Bock, reported that Sweeney was leading the mission in The Great Artiste. He also noted its "Victor" number as 77, which was that of Bockscar, writing that several personnel commented that 77 was also the jersey number of the football player Red Grange.[189] Laurence had interviewed Sweeney and his crew, and was aware that they referred to their airplane as The Great Artiste. Except for Enola Gay, none of the 393d's B-29s had yet had names painted on the noses, a fact which Laurence himself noted in his account. Unaware of the switch in aircraft, Laurence assumed Victor 77 was The Great Artiste, which was in fact, Victor 89.

Events on the groundAlthough the bomb was more powerful than the one used on Hiroshima, the effect was confined by hillsides to the narrow Urakami Valley. Of 7,500 Japanese employees who worked inside the Mitsubishi Munitions plant, including mobilized students and regular workers, 6,200 were killed. Some 17,000''22,000 others who worked in other war plants and factories in the city died as well. Casualty estimates for immediate deaths vary widely, ranging from 22,000 to 75,000.[195][196][197] In the days and months following the explosion, more people died from bomb effects. Because of the presence of undocumented foreign workers, and a number of military personnel in transit, there are great discrepancies in the estimates of total deaths by the end of 1945; a range of 39,000 to 80,000 can be found in various studies.[110][197]

Unlike Hiroshima's military death toll, only 150 soldiers were killed instantly, including thirty-six from the IJA 134th AAA Regiment of the 4th AAA Division. At least eight known POWs died from the bombing and as many as 13 may have died, including a British citizen, Royal Air Force Corporal Ronald Shaw,[199] and seven Dutch POWs.[200] One American POW, Joe Kieyoomia, was in Nagasaki at the time of the bombing but survived, reportedly having been shielded from the effects of the bomb by the concrete walls of his cell.[201] There were 24 Australian POWs in Nagasaki, all of whom survived.[202]

The radius of total destruction was about 1 mi (1.6 km), followed by fires across the northern portion of the city to 2 mi (3.2 km) south of the bomb.[131][203] About 58% of the Mitsubishi Arms Plant was damaged, and about 78% of the Mitsubishi Steel Works. The Mitsubishi Electric Works only suffered 10% structural damage as it was on the border of the main destruction zone. The Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works, the factory that manufactured the type 91 torpedoes released in the attack on Pearl Harbor, was destroyed in the blast.[204]

Plans for more atomic attacks on JapanGroves expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use on August 19, with three more in September and a further three in October.[83] On August 10, he sent a memorandum to Marshall in which he wrote that "the next bomb ... should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather after 17 or 18 August." On the same day, Marshall endorsed the memo with the comment, "It is not to be released over Japan without express authority from the President."[83]

There was already discussion in the War Department about conserving the bombs then in production for Operation Downfall. "The problem now [August 13] is whether or not, assuming the Japanese do not capitulate, to continue dropping them every time one is made and shipped out there or whether to hold them ... and then pour them all on in a reasonably short time. Not all in one day, but over a short period. And that also takes into consideration the target that we are after. In other words, should we not concentrate on targets that will be of the greatest assistance to an invasion rather than industry, morale, psychology, and the like? Nearer the tactical use rather than other use."[83]

Two more Fat Man assemblies were readied. The third core was scheduled to leave Kirtland Field for Tinian on August 15, and Tibbets was ordered by LeMay to return to Utah to collect it.[206]Robert Bacher was packaging it for shipment in Los Alamos on August 14 when he received word from Groves that the shipment was suspended.[207]

Surrender of Japan and subsequent occupationUntil August 9, Japan's war council still insisted on its four conditions for surrender. On that day Hirohito ordered Kōichi Kido to "quickly control the situation ... because the Soviet Union has declared war against us." He then held an Imperial conference during which he authorized minister Shigenori Tōgō to notify the Allies that Japan would accept their terms on one condition, that the declaration "does not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a Sovereign ruler."

On August 12, the Emperor informed the imperial family of his decision to surrender. One of his uncles, Prince Asaka, then asked whether the war would be continued if the kokutai could not be preserved. Hirohito simply replied "Of course." As the Allied terms seemed to leave intact the principle of the preservation of the Throne, Hirohito recorded on August 14 his capitulation announcement which was broadcast to the Japanese nation the next day despite a short rebellion by militarists opposed to the surrender.

In his declaration, Hirohito referred to the atomic bombings:

Moreover, the enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

Such being the case, how are We to save the millions of Our subjects, or to atone Ourselves before the hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors? This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.[211]

In his "Rescript to the Soldiers and Sailors" delivered on August 17, he stressed the impact of the Soviet invasion and his decision to surrender, omitting any mention of the bombs.[212] Hirohito met with General MacArthur on September 27, saying to him that "[t]he peace party did not prevail until the bombing of Hiroshima created a situation which could be dramatized." Furthermore, the "Rescript to the Soldiers and Sailors" speech he told MacArthur about was just personal, not political, and never stated that the Soviet intervention in Manchuria was the main reason for surrender. In fact, a day after the bombing of Nagasaki and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, Hirohito ordered his advisers, primarily Chief Cabinet SecretaryHisatsune Sakomizu, Kawada Mizuho, and Masahiro Yasuoka, to write up a surrender speech. In Hirohito's speech, days before announcing it on radio on August 15, he gave three major reasons for surrender: Tokyo's defenses would not be complete before the American invasion of Japan, Ise Shrine would be lost to the Americans, and atomic weapons deployed by the Americans would lead to the death of the entire Japanese race. Despite the Soviet intervention, Hirohito did not mention the Soviets as the main factor for surrender.

Depiction, public response and censorshipLife among the rubble in Hiroshima in March and April 1946. Film footage taken by Lieutenant Daniel A. McGovern (director) and Harry Mimura (cameraman) for a United States Strategic Bombing Survey project.During the war "annihilationist and exterminationalist rhetoric" was tolerated at all levels of U.S. society; according to the British embassy in Washington the Americans regarded the Japanese as "a nameless mass of vermin". Caricatures depicting Japanese as less than human, e.g. monkeys, were common. A 1944 opinion poll that asked what should be done with Japan found that 13% of the U.S. public were in favor of "killing off" all Japanese men, women, and children.

After the Hiroshima bomb detonated successfully, Robert Oppenheimer addressed an assembly at Los Alamos "clasping his hands together like a prize-winning boxer". The Vatican was less enthusiastic; its newspaper L'Osservatore Romano expressed regret that the bomb's inventors did not destroy the weapon for the benefit of humanity.[218] Nonetheless, news of the atomic bombing was greeted enthusiastically in the U.S.; a poll in Fortune magazine in late 1945 showed a significant minority of Americans (22.7%) wishing that more atomic bombs could have been dropped on Japan. The initial positive response was supported by the imagery presented to the public (mainly the powerful images of the mushroom cloud) and the censorship of photographs that showed corpses and maimed survivors.

Wilfred Burchett was the first journalist to visit Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped, arriving alone by train from Tokyo on September 2, the day of the formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri. His Morse code dispatch was printed by the Daily Express newspaper in London on September 5, 1945, entitled "The Atomic Plague", the first public report to mention the effects of radiation and nuclear fallout. Burchett's reporting was unpopular with the U.S. military. The U.S. censors suppressed a supporting story submitted by George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, and accused Burchett of being under the sway of Japanese propaganda. Laurence dismissed the reports on radiation sickness as Japanese efforts to undermine American morale, ignoring his own account of Hiroshima's radiation sickness published one week earlier.[222]

The Hiroshima ruins in March and April 1946, by Daniel A. McGovern and Harry MimuraA member of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Lieutenant Daniel McGovern, used a film crew to document the results in early 1946.[223] The film crew's work resulted in a three-hour documentary entitled The Effects of the Atomic Bombs Against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The documentary included images from hospitals showing the human effects of the bomb; it showed burned out buildings and cars, and rows of skulls and bones on the ground. It was classified "secret" for the next 22 years. During this time in America, it was a common practice for editors to keep graphic images of death out of films, magazines, and newspapers. The total of 90,000 ft (27,000 m) of film shot by McGovern's cameramen had not been fully aired as of 2009. According to Greg Mitchell, with the 2004 documentary film Original Child Bomb, a small part of that footage managed to reach part of the American public "in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended".[223]

Motion picture company Nippon Eigasha started sending cameramen to Nagasaki and Hiroshima in September 1945. On October 24, 1945, a U.S. military policeman stopped a Nippon Eigasha cameraman from continuing to film in Nagasaki. All Nippon Eigasha's reels were then confiscated by the American authorities. These reels were in turn requested by the Japanese government, declassified, and saved from oblivion. Some black-and-white motion pictures were released and shown for the first time to Japanese and American audiences in the years from 1968 to 1970.[223] The public release of film footage of the city post attack, and some research about the human effects of the attack, was restricted during the occupation of Japan, and much of this information was censored until the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951, restoring control to the Japanese.

Only the most sensitive and detailed weapons effects information was censored during this period. There was no censorship of the factually written accounts. For example, the book Hiroshima written by Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey, which was originally published in article form in the popular magazine The New Yorker,[227] on August 31, 1946, is reported to have reached Tokyo in English by January 1947, and the translated version was released in Japan in 1949.[228][230] The book narrates the stories of the lives of six bomb survivors from immediately prior, to months after, the dropping of the Little Boy bomb.[227]

Post-attack casualtiesFilm footage taken in Hiroshima in March 1946 showing victims with severe burnsIn the spring of 1948, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) was established in accordance with a presidential directive from Truman to the National Academy of Sciences '' National Research Council to conduct investigations of the late effects of radiation among the survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[231] One of the early studies conducted by the ABCC was on the outcome of pregnancies occurring in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in a control city, Kure, located 18 mi (29 km) south of Hiroshima, in order to discern the conditions and outcomes related to radiation exposure.[232] Dr. James V. Neel led the study which found that the number of birth defects was not significantly higher among the children of survivors who were pregnant at the time of the bombings.[233] The National Academy of Sciences questioned Neel's procedure which did not filter the Kure population for possible radiation exposure. Among the observed birth defects there was a higher incidence of brain malformation in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, including microencephaly and anencephaly, about 2.75 times the rate seen in Kure.[236]

In 1985, Johns Hopkins University human geneticist James F. Crow examined Neel's research and confirmed that the number of birth defects was not significantly higher in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many members of the ABCC and its successor Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) were still looking for possible birth defects or other causes among the survivors decades later, but found no evidence that they were common among the survivors.[238][239] Despite the insignificance of birth defects found in Neel's study, historian Ronald E. Powaski wrote that Hiroshima experienced "an increase in stillbirths, birth defects, and infant mortality" following the atomic bomb. Neel also studied the longevity of the children who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reporting that between 90 and 95 percent were still living 50 years later.[238]

Around 1,900 cancer deaths can be attributed to the after-effects of the bombs. An epidemiology study by the RERF states that from 1950 to 2000, 46% of leukemia deaths and 11% of solid cancer deaths among the bomb survivors were due to radiation from the bombs, the statistical excess being estimated at 200 leukemia and 1,700 solid cancers.[241]

HibakushaPanoramic view of the monument marking the hypocenter, or ground zero, of the atomic bomb explosion over NagasakiThe survivors of the bombings are called hibakusha(èç†è…?), a Japanese word that literally translates to "explosion-affected people." As of March 31, 2014[update], 192,719 hibakusha were recognized by the Japanese government, most living in Japan.[242] The government of Japan recognizes about 1% of these as having illnesses caused by radiation.[243] The memorials in Hiroshima and Nagasaki contain lists of the names of the hibakusha who are known to have died since the bombings. Updated annually on the anniversaries of the bombings, as of August 2014[update] the memorials record the names of more than 450,000 hibakusha; 292,325 in Hiroshima[244] and 165,409 in Nagasaki.[245]

Hibakusha and their children were (and still are) victims of severe discrimination in Japan due to public ignorance about the consequences of radiation sickness, with much of the public believing it to be hereditary or even contagious.[246] This is despite the fact that no statistically demonstrable increase of birth defects or congenital malformations was found among the later conceived children born to survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[247] A study of the long-term psychological effects of the bombings on the survivors found that even 17''20 years after the bombings had occurred survivors showed a higher prevalence of anxiety and somatization symptoms.[248]

Double survivorsOn March 24, 2009, the Japanese government officially recognized Tsutomu Yamaguchi as a double hibakusha. He was confirmed to be 3 km (1.9 mi) from ground zero in Hiroshima on a business trip when Little Boy was detonated. He was seriously burnt on his left side and spent the night in Hiroshima. He arrived at his home city of Nagasaki on August 8, the day before Fat Man was dropped, and he was exposed to residual radiation while searching for his relatives. He was the first officially recognized survivor of both bombings.[249] He died on January 4, 2010, at the age of 93, after a battle with stomach cancer.[250] The 2006 documentary Twice Survived: The Doubly Atomic Bombed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki documented 165 nijÅ hibakusha (lit. double explosion-affected people), and was screened at the United Nations.[251]

Korean survivorsDuring the war, Japan brought as many as 670,000 Korean conscripts to Japan to work as forced labor. About 20,000 Koreans were killed in Hiroshima and another 2,000 died in Nagasaki. Perhaps one in seven of the Hiroshima victims were of Korean ancestry. For many years, Koreans had a difficult time fighting for recognition as atomic bomb victims and were denied health benefits. Most issues have been addressed in recent years through lawsuits.[253]

Debate over bombingsThe atomic bomb was more than a weapon of terrible destruction; it was a psychological weapon.

'-- Henry L. Stimson, 1947[254]The role of the bombings in Japan's surrender and the U.S.'s ethical justification for them has been the subject of scholarly and popular debate for decades. J. Samuel Walker wrote in an April 2005 overview of recent historiography on the issue, "the controversy over the use of the bomb seems certain to continue." He wrote that "The fundamental issue that has divided scholars over a period of nearly four decades is whether the use of the bomb was necessary to achieve victory in the war in the Pacific on terms satisfactory to the United States."

Supporters of the bombings generally assert that they caused the Japanese surrender, preventing casualties on both sides during Operation Downfall. One figure of speech, "One hundred million [subjects of the Japanese Empire] will die for the Emperor and Nation,"[256] served as a unifying slogan, although that phrase was intended as a figure of speech along the lines of the "ten thousand years" phrase. In Truman's 1955 Memoirs, "he states that the atomic bomb probably saved half a million U.S. lives'-- anticipated casualties in an Allied invasion of Japan planned for November. Stimson subsequently talked of saving one million U.S. casualties, and Churchill of saving one million American and half that number of British lives." Scholars have pointed out various alternatives that could have ended the war without an invasion, but these alternatives could have resulted in the deaths of many more Japanese. Supporters also point to an order given by the Japanese War Ministry on August 1, 1944, ordering the execution of Allied prisoners of war when the POW camp was in the combat zone.[260]

Those who oppose the bombings cite a number of reasons for their view, among them: a belief that atomic bombing is fundamentally immoral, that the bombings counted as war crimes, that they were militarily unnecessary, that they constituted state terrorism, and that they involved racism against and the dehumanization of the Japanese people. Another popular view among critics of the bombings, originating with Gar Alperovitz in 1965 and becoming the default position in Japanese school history textbooks, is the idea of atomic diplomacy: that the United States used nuclear weapons in order to intimidate the Soviet Union in the early stages of the Cold War.[262] The bombings were part of an already fierce conventional bombing campaign. This, together with the sea blockade and the collapse of Germany (with its implications regarding redeployment), could also have led to a Japanese surrender. At the time United States dropped its atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union launched a surprise attack with 1.6 million troops against the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. "The Soviet entry into the war", argued Japanese historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, "played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender because it dashed any hope that Japan could terminate the war through Moscow's mediation".[263]

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The Army Air Forces in World War II. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. OCLC 256469807. Retrieved March 2, 2014. Dietz, Suzanne Simon; Van Kirk, Theodore Jerome (2012). My true course: Dutch Van Kirk, Northumberland to Hiroshima. Lawrenceville, Georgia: Red Gremlin Press. ISBN 978-0-692-01676-3. OCLC 797975707. Drea, Edward J. (1992). MacArthur's ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War Against Japan, 1942''1945. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0-7006-0504-5. OCLC 23651196. Edwards, Jack; Walter, Jimmy (1991). Banzai you Bastards. London: Souvenir Press. ISBN 0-285-63027-X. OCLC 24908835. Edwards, Pail N. (1996). The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-55028-8. OCLC 807140394. Feraru, Arthur N. (May 17, 1950). "Public Opinion Polls on Japan". Far Eastern Survey (Institute of Pacific Relations) 19 (10): 101''103. doi:10.1525/as.1950.19.10.01p0599l. ISSN 0362-8949. JSTOR 3023943. Fi(C)v(C), Nicolas; Waley, Paul (2003). Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective: Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo. London: RoutledgeCurzon. ISBN 0-7007-1409-X. Frank, Richard B. (1999). Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-41424-X. Fujiwara, Akira (1991). Tettei kenshō Shōwa Tennō "dokuhakuroku". Tōkyō: Ōtsuki Shoten. ISBN 4-272-52022-9. Giangreco, D. M. (2009). Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan 1945''1947. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-59114-316-1. OCLC 643381863. Goldstein, Donald; Dillon, Katherine V; Wenger, J Michael (1995). Rain of Ruin: a Photographic History of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Washington, D.C.: Brassey's. ISBN 1-57488-033-0. OCLC 31969557. Gordin, Michael D. (2007). Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-12818-9. OCLC 70630623. Gowing, Margaret (1964). Britain and Atomic Energy, 1935''1945. London: Macmillan Publishing. OCLC 3195209. Groves, Leslie (1962). Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-306-70738-1. OCLC 537684. Gruhl, Werner (2007). Imperial Japan's World War II, 1931''1945. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. ISBN 978-0-7658-0352-8. OCLC 76871604. Grunden, Walter E. (1998). "Hungnam and the Japanese atomic bomb: Recent Historiography of a Postwar Myth". Intelligence and National Security13 (2): 32''60. doi:10.1080/02684529808432475. ISSN 0268-4527. Ham, Paul (2011). Hiroshima Nagasaki. Sydney: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-7322-8845-7. OCLC 746754306. Harvey, Robert (2007). American Shogun: General MacArthur, Emperor Hirohito and the Drama of Modern Japan. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press. ISBN 1-58567-891-0. OCLC 62134797. Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi (2006). Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01693-4. Hein, Laura; Selden, Mark, eds. (1997). Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age. New York: M.E. Sharpe. ISBN 978-1-56324-967-9. Hixson, Walter L. (2002). The American Experience in World War II: The Atomic Bomb in History and Memory. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-94035-1. OCLC 59464269. Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (1993). Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943''1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44132-3. OCLC 26764320. Hoyt, Edwin P. (2001). Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-8154-1118-9. OCLC 12722494. Hubbell, Harry; Cheka, Joseph; Jones, Throyce (1969). The Epicenters of the Atomic Bombs. Reevaluation of All Available Physical Data With Recommended Values. Hiroshima: Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. OCLC 404745043. Ishikawa, Eisei; Swain, David L. (1981). Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-02985-3. OCLC 715904227. Johnston, Barbara Rose (2008). The Consequential Damages of Nuclear War: The Rongelap Report. Walnutt Creek: Left Coast Press. ISBN 978-1-59874-346-3. Jones, Vincent (1985). Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History. OCLC 10913875. Jowett, Philip S.; Andrew, Stephen (2002). The Japanese Army 1931''45: 2 1942''45. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84176-354-5. OCLC 59395824. Kerr, E. Bartlett (1991). Flames Over Tokyo: the US Army Air Forces' Incendiary Campaign against Japan 1944''1945. New York: Donald I. Fine Inc. ISBN 1-55611-301-3. Kerr, George D.; Young, Robert W.; Cullings, Harry M.; Christy, Robert F. (2005). "Bomb Parameters". In Young, Robert W.; Kerr, George D. Reassessment of the Atomic Bomb Radiation Dosimetry for Hiroshima and Nagasaki '' Dosimetry System 2002. Hiroshima: The Radiation Effects Research Foundation. OCLC 271477587. Kido, Kōichi; Yoshitake, Oka (1966). æ'¨æ¶å¹¸ä¸æ—¥è¨ [Kido Kōichi Diary] (in Japanese). Tōkyō: Tōkyō Daigaku Shuppankai. ISBN 4-13-030012-1. Knebel, Fletcher; Bailey, Charles W. (1960). No High Ground. New York: Harper and Row. ISBN 0-313-24221-6. Krimsky, Sheldon; Shorett, Peter (2005). Rights and Liberties in the Biotech Age: Why We Need a Genetic Bill of Rights. Lantham: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-7425-4341-2. Lewis, Robert A.; Tolzer, Eliot (August 1957). "How We Dropped the A-Bomb". Popular Science: pp. 71''75, 209''210. ISSN 0161-7370. Lifton, Robert Jay (1991). Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-4344-X. OCLC 490493399. Long, Gavin (1963). The Final Campaigns (PDF). Australia in the War of 1939''1945. Series 1 '' Army. Volume 7. Canberra: Australian War Memorial. OCLC 1297619. Retrieved October 31, 2011. McCormack, Mary (2008). "Radiotherapy and Cancer". In Sean Kehoe, Eric Jauniaux, Pierre Martin-Hirsch, Philip Savage. Cancer and Reproductive Health. London: Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. ISBN 978-1-904752-61-5. McNelly, Theodore H. (2000). "The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb". In Jacob Neufeld. Pearl Harbor to V-J Day: World War II in the Pacific. New York: Diane Publishing Co. ISBN 1-4379-1286-9. Malik, John (September 1985). "The Yields of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Explosions". Los Alamos National Laboratory. Retrieved March 9, 2014. Miller, Richard Lee (1986). Under the Cloud: The Decades of Nuclear Testing. New York: Two-Sixty Press. ISBN 0-02-921620-6. Monk, Ray (2012). Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center. New York; Toronto: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-50407-2. Moore, Mike (July''August 1995). "Troublesome Imagery". Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science) 54 (4): 73''74. ISSN 0096-3402. Newman, Robert P. (1995). Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press. ISBN 0-87013-403-5. OCLC 32625518. Nichols, Kenneth D. (1987). The Road to Trinity. New York: William Morrow and Company. ISBN 0-688-06910-X. Powaski, Ronald E. (1987). March to Armageddon: The United States and the Nuclear Arms Race, 1939 to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-536454-5. Preston, Diana (2005). Before The Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima. New York: Walker & Co. ISBN 0-8027-1445-5. Reischauer, Edwin O. (1986). My Life Between Japan And America. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-039054-9. OCLC 13114344. Rotter, Andrew J. (2008). Hiroshima: The World's Bomb. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-280437-5. Russ, Harlow W. (1990). Project Alberta: The Preparation of Atomic Bombs For Use in World War II. Los Alamos, New Mexico: Exceptional Books. ISBN 978-0-944482-01-8. OCLC 24429257. Sandler, Stanley (2001). World War II in the Pacific: an Encyclopedia. New York: Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0-8153-1883-9. OCLC 44769066. Schaffer, Ronald (1985). Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-503629-8. OCLC 11785450. Selden, Kyoko Iriye; Selden, Mark (1990). The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe. ISBN 0-87332-773-X. OCLC 20057103. Sharp, Patrick B. "From Yellow Peril to Japanese Wasteland: John Hersey's 'Hiroshima'". Twentieth Century Literature46 (2000): 434''452. JSTOR 827841. Sherwin, Martin J. (2003). A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and its Legacies. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0-8047-3957-9. OCLC 52714712. Sklar, Morty, ed. (1984). Nuke-rebuke: Writers & Artists Against Nuclear Energy & Weapons. Iowa City, Iowa: The Spirit That Moves Us Press. ISBN 0-930370-16-3. OCLC 10072916. SlavinskiÄ­, Boris Nikolaevich (2004). The Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact: A Diplomatic History, 1941''1945. Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series. London; New York: RoutledgeCurzon. ISBN 978-0-415-32292-8. Sodei, Rinjiro (1998). Were We the Enemy? American Survivors of Hiroshima. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press. ISBN 0-8133-2960-4. Stohl, Michael (1979). The Politics of Terrorism. New York: M. Dekker. ISBN 978-0-8247-6764-8. OCLC 4495087. Sweeney, Charles; Antonucci, James A.; Antonucci, Marion K. (1997). War's End: An Eyewitness Account of America's Last Atomic Mission. New York: Quill Publishing. ISBN 0-380-78874-8. Thomas, Gordon; Morgan-Witts, Max (1977). Ruin from the Air. London: Hamilton. ISBN 0-241-89726-2. OCLC 252041787. Tibbets, Paul W. (1998). Return Of The Enola Gay. New Hope, Pennsylvania: Enola Gay Remembered. ISBN 0-9703666-0-4. OCLC 69423383. Wainstock, Dennis D. (1996). The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. ISBN 0-275-95475-7. OCLC 33243854. Walker, J. Samuel (January 1990). "The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update". Diplomatic History14 (1): 97''114. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1990.tb00078.x. ISSN 1467-7709. Walker, J. Samuel (April 2005). "Recent Literature on Truman's Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground". Diplomatic History29 (2): 311''334. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2005.00476.x. ISSN 1467-7709. Retrieved January 30, 2008. Werrell, Kenneth P. (1996). Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers over Japan during World War II. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-665-4. OCLC 32921746. White, Geoffrey. M. (July 1995). "Memory Wars: The Politics of Remembering the Asia-Pacific War". Asia-Pacific Issues (21). ISSN 1522-0966. Retrieved June 30, 2013. Williams, M. H. (1960). Chronology, 1941''1945. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army. OCLC 1358166. Zaloga, Steven J.; Noon, Steve (2010). Defense of Japan 1945. Fortress. Oxford: Osprey Publishing. ISBN 1-84603-687-9. OCLC 503042143. Further readingThere is an extensive body of literature concerning the bombings, the decision to use the bombs, and the surrender of Japan. The following sources provide a sampling of prominent works on this subject matter.

Allen, Thomas; Polmar, Norman (1995). Code-Name Downfall. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80406-9. The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1981). Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 0-465-02985-X. Gosling, Francis George (1994). The Manhattan Project : Making the Atomic Bomb. Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Energy, History Division. OCLC 637052193. Hogan, Michael J. (1996). Hiroshima in History and Memory. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-56206-6. Kanabun (2012). Kyoko; Tam, Young, eds. A story of a girl who survived an atomic bomb [原ç†ãé­ã£ãŸå°‘å¥"のè(C)±]. ASIN B00HJ6H2EK. Retrieved December 25, 2013. Krauss, Robert; Krauss, Amelia (2005). The 509th Remembered: A History of the 509th Composite Group as Told by the Veterans Themselves. Buchanan, Michigan: 509th Press. ISBN 0-923568-66-2. OCLC 59148135. Merton, Thomas (1962). Original Child Bomb: Points for Meditation to be Scratched on the Walls of a Cave. New York: New Directions. OCLC 4527778. Murakami, Chikayasu (2007). Hiroshima no shiroi sora (The White Sky in Hiroshima). Tokyo: Bungeisha. ISBN 4-286-03708-8. Ogura, Toyofumi (1948). Letters from the End of the World: A Firsthand Account of the Bombing of Hiroshima. Tokyo: Kodansha International. ISBN 4-7700-2776-1. Sekimori, Gaynor (1986). Hibakusha: Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tokyo: Kosei Publishing Company. ISBN 4-333-01204-X. Thomas, Gordon; Morgan-Witts, Max (1977). Enola Gay: The Bombing of Hiroshima. New York: Konecky & Konecky. ISBN 1-56852-597-4. Ward, Wilson (Spring 2007). "The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima". International Security31 (4): 162. doi:10.1162/isec.2007.31.4.162. ISSN 1531-4804. Warren, Stafford L. (1966). "Manhattan Project". In Ahnfeldt, Arnold Lorentz. Radiology in World War II. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army. OCLC 630225. External linksArchives"Documents on the Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb". Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. Retrieved January 3, 2012. "The Effects of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki". U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. 1946. Retrieved January 3, 2012. "President Truman Defends Use of Atomic Bomb, 1945:Original Letters". Shapell Manuscript Foundation. Retrieved February 8, 2014. "Scientific Data of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Disaster". Atomic Bomb Disease Institute, Nagasaki University. Retrieved January 3, 2012. "Correspondence Regarding Decision to Drop the Bomb". Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Retrieved January 3, 2012. "Tale of Two Cities: The Story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki". National Science Digital Library. Retrieved January 3, 2012. "The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki". Atomic Archive. 1946. Retrieved January 3, 2012. "The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II". National Security Archive. Retrieved January 3, 2012. "Nagasaki Archive". Google Earth mapping of Nagasaki bombing archives. Retrieved January 3, 2012. "Hiroshima Archive". Google Earth mapping of Hiroshima bombing archives. Retrieved January 3, 2012. "Annotated bibliography for atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki". Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues. Retrieved January 3, 2012. The short film Children of Hiroshima (Reel 1 of 2) (1952) is available for free download at the Internet ArchiveThe short film Children of Hiroshima (Reel 2 of 2) (1952) is available for free download at the Internet Archive"Photo gallery of aftermath pictures". Time-Life. Retrieved February 8, 2014. Video footage of the bombing of Nagasaki (silent) on YouTubeCommemorationMay 8, 1884 '' December 26, 1972

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The Manhattan Project was a research and development project that produced the first atomic bombs during World War II. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major GeneralLeslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that designed the actual bombs. The Army component of the project was designated the Manhattan District; "Manhattan" gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. Along the way, the project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys. The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (about $26 billion in 2015[1] dollars). Over 90% of the cost was for building factories and producing the fissile materials, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons. Research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

Two types of atomic bomb were developed during the war. A relatively simple gun-type fission weapon was made using uranium-235, an isotope that makes up only 0.7 percent of natural uranium. Since it is chemically identical to the most common isotope, uranium-238, and has almost the same mass, it proved difficult to separate. Three methods were employed for uranium enrichment: electromagnetic, gaseous and thermal. Most of this work was performed at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In parallel with the work on uranium was an effort to produce plutonium. Reactors were constructed at Oak Ridge and Hanford, Washington, in which uranium was irradiated and transmuted into plutonium. The plutonium was then chemically separated from the uranium. The gun-type design proved impractical to use with plutonium so a more complex implosion-type weapon was developed in a concerted design and construction effort at the project's principal research and design laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The project was also charged with gathering intelligence on the German nuclear energy project. Through Operation Alsos, Manhattan Project personnel served in Europe, sometimes behind enemy lines, where they gathered nuclear materials and documents, and rounded up German scientists. Despite the Manhattan Project's tight security, Soviet atomic spies still penetrated the program.

The first nuclear device ever detonated was an implosion-type bomb at the Trinity test, conducted at New Mexico's Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range on 16 July 1945. Little Boy, a gun-type weapon, and Fat Man, an implosion-type weapon, were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. In the immediate postwar years, the Manhattan Project conducted weapons testing at Bikini Atoll as part of Operation Crossroads, developed new weapons, promoted the development of the network of national laboratories, supported medical research into radiology and laid the foundations for the nuclear navy. It maintained control over American atomic weapons research and production until the formation of the United States Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.

OriginsIn August 1939, prominent physicists Le" Szilrd and Eugene Wigner drafted the Einstein''Szilrd letter, which warned of the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type". It urged the United States to take steps to acquire stockpiles of uranium ore and accelerate the research of Enrico Fermi and others into nuclear chain reactions. They had it signed by Albert Einstein and delivered to PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt called on Lyman Briggs of the National Bureau of Standards to head the Advisory Committee on Uranium to investigate the issues raised by the letter. Briggs held a meeting on 21 October 1939, which was attended by Szilrd, Wigner and Edward Teller. The committee reported back to Roosevelt in November that uranium "would provide a possible source of bombs with a destructiveness vastly greater than anything now known."[2]

Briggs proposed that the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) spend $167,000 on research into uranium, particularly the uranium-235 isotope, and the recently discovered plutonium.[3] On 28 June 1941, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8807, which created the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD),[4] with Vannevar Bush as its director. The office was empowered to engage in large engineering projects in addition to research.[3] The NDRC Committee on Uranium became the S-1 Uranium Committee of the OSRD; the word "uranium" was soon dropped for security reasons.[5]

In Britain, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls at the University of Birmingham had made a breakthrough investigating the critical mass of uranium-235 in June 1939.[6] Their calculations indicated that it was within an order of magnitude of 10 kilograms (22 lb), which was small enough to be carried by a bomber of the day.[7] Their March 1940 Frisch''Peierls memorandum initiated the British atomic bomb project and its Maud Committee,[8] which unanimously recommended pursuing the development of an atomic bomb.[7] One of its members, the Australian physicist Mark Oliphant, flew to the United States in late August 1941 and discovered that data provided by the Maud Committee had not reached key American physicists. Oliphant then set out to find out why the committee's findings were apparently being ignored. He met with the Uranium Committee, and visited Berkeley, California, where he spoke persuasively to Ernest O. Lawrence. Lawrence was sufficiently impressed to commence his own research into uranium. He in turn spoke to James B. Conant, Arthur Compton and George Pegram. Oliphant's mission was therefore a success; key American physicists were now aware of the potential power of an atomic bomb.[9][10]

At a meeting between President Roosevelt, Vannevar Bush, and Vice President Henry A. Wallace on 9 October 1941, the President approved the atomic program. To control it, he created a Top Policy Group consisting of himself'--although he never attended a meeting'--Wallace, Bush, Conant, Secretary of WarHenry L. Stimson, and the Chief of Staff of the Army, GeneralGeorge Marshall. Roosevelt chose the Army to run the project rather than the Navy, as the Army had the most experience with management of large-scale construction projects. He also agreed to coordinate the effort with that of the British, and on 11 October he sent a message to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, suggesting that they correspond on atomic matters.[11]

FeasibilityProposalsThe S-1 Committee held its first meeting on 18 December 1941 "pervaded by an atmosphere of enthusiasm and urgency"[12] in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent United States declaration of war upon Japan and then on Germany.[13] Work was proceeding on three different techniques for isotope separation to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. Lawrence and his team at the University of California, Berkeley, investigated electromagnetic separation, while Eger Murphree and Jesse Wakefield Beams's team looked into gaseous diffusion at Columbia University, and Philip Abelson directed research into thermal diffusion at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and later the Naval Research Laboratory.[14] Murphree was also the head of an unsuccessful separation project using gas centrifuges.[15]

Meanwhile, there were two lines of research into nuclear reactor technology, with Harold Urey continuing research into heavy water at Columbia, while Arthur Compton brought the scientists working under his supervision at Columbia University and Princeton University to the University of Chicago, where he organized the Metallurgical Laboratory in early 1942 to study plutonium and reactors using graphite as a neutron moderator.[16] Briggs, Compton, Lawrence, Murphree, and Urey met on 23 May 1942 to finalize the S-1 Committee recommendations, which called for all five technologies to be pursued. This was approved by Bush, Conant, and Brigadier GeneralWilhelm D. Styer, the chief of staff of Major GeneralBrehon B. Somervell's Services of Supply, who had been designated the Army's representative on nuclear matters.[14] Bush and Conant then took the recommendation to the Top Policy Group with a budget proposal for $54 million for construction by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, $31 million for research and development by OSRD and $5 million for contingencies in fiscal year 1943. The Top Policy Group in turn sent it to the President on 17 June 1942 and he approved it by writing "OK FDR" on the document.[14]

Bomb design conceptsCompton asked the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer of the University of California, Berkeley, to take over research into fast neutron calculations'--the key to calculations of critical mass and weapon detonation'--from Gregory Breit, who had quit on 18 May 1942 because of concerns over lax operational security.[17]John H. Manley, a physicist at the Metallurgical Laboratory, was assigned to assist Oppenheimer by contacting and coordinating experimental physics groups scattered across the country.[18] Oppenheimer and Robert Serber of the University of Illinois examined the problems of neutron diffusion'--how neutrons moved in a nuclear chain reaction'--and hydrodynamics'--how the explosion produced by a chain reaction might behave. To review this work and the general theory of fission reactions, Oppenheimer convened meetings at the University of Chicago in June and at the University of California, Berkeley, in July 1942 with theoretical physicists Hans Bethe, John Van Vleck, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, Robert Serber, Stan Frankel, and Eldred C. Nelson, the latter three former students of Oppenheimer, and experimental physicistsFelix Bloch, Emilio Segr¨, John Manley, and Edwin McMillan. They tentatively confirmed that a fission bomb was theoretically possible.[19]

There were still many unknown factors. The properties of pure uranium-235 were relatively unknown, as were those of plutonium, an element that had only been discovered in February 1941 by Glenn Seaborg and his team. The scientists at the Berkeley conference envisioned creating plutonium in nuclear reactors where uranium-238 atoms absorbed neutrons that had been emitted from fissioning uranium-235 atoms. At this point no reactor had been built, and only tiny quantities of plutonium were available from cyclotrons.[20] Even by December 1943, only two milligrams had been produced.[21] There were many ways of arranging the fissile material into a critical mass. The simplest was shooting a "cylindrical plug" into a sphere of "active material" with a "tamper"'--dense material that would focus neutrons inward and keep the reacting mass together to increase its efficiency.[22] They also explored designs involving spheroids, a primitive form of "implosion" suggested by Richard C. Tolman, and the possibility of autocatalytic methods, which would increase the efficiency of the bomb as it exploded.[23]

Considering the idea of the fission bomb theoretically settled'--at least until more experimental data was available'--the Berkeley conference then turned in a different direction. Edward Teller pushed for discussion of a more powerful bomb: the "super", now usually referred to as a "hydrogen bomb", which would use the explosive force of a detonating fission bomb to ignite a nuclear fusion reaction in deuterium and tritium.[24] Teller proposed scheme after scheme, but Bethe refused each one. The fusion idea was put aside to concentrate on producing fission bombs.[25] Teller also raised the speculative possibility that an atomic bomb might "ignite" the atmosphere because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei.[note 1] Bethe calculated that it could not happen,[27] and a report co-authored by Teller showed that "no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started."[28] In Serber's account, Oppenheimer mentioned it to Arthur Compton, who "didn't have enough sense to shut up about it. It somehow got into a document that went to Washington" and was "never laid to rest".[note 2]

OrganizationManhattan DistrictThe Chief of Engineers, Major General Eugene Reybold, selected ColonelJames C. Marshall to head the Army's part of the project in June 1942. Marshall created a liaison office in Washington, D.C., but established his temporary headquarters on the 18th floor of 270 Broadway in New York, where he could draw on administrative support from the Corps of Engineers' North Atlantic Division. It was close to the Manhattan office of Stone & Webster, the principal project contractor, and to Columbia University. He had permission to draw on his former command, the Syracuse District, for staff, and he started with Lieutenant ColonelKenneth Nichols, who became his deputy.[30][31]

Because most of his task involved construction, Marshall worked in cooperation with the head of the Corps of Engineers Construction Division, Major General Thomas M. Robbins, and his deputy, Colonel Leslie Groves. Reybold, Somervell and Styer decided to call the project "Development of Substitute Materials", but Groves felt that this would draw attention. Since engineer districts normally carried the name of the city where they were located, Marshall and Groves agreed to name the Army's component of the project the Manhattan District. This became official on 13 August, when Reybold issued the order creating the new district. Informally, it was known as the Manhattan Engineer District, or MED. Unlike other districts, it had no geographic boundaries, and Marshall had the authority of a division engineer. Development of Substitute Materials remained as the official codename of the project as a whole, but was supplanted over time by "Manhattan".[31]

Marshall later conceded that, "I had never heard of atomic fission but I did know that you could not build much of a plant, much less four of them for $90 million."[32] A single TNT plant that Nichols had recently built in Pennsylvania had cost $128 million.[33] Nor were they impressed with estimates to the nearest order of magnitude, which Groves compared with telling a caterer to prepare for between ten and a thousand guests.[34] A survey team from Stone & Webster had already scouted a site for the production plants. The War Production Board recommended sites around Knoxville, Tennessee, an isolated area where the Tennessee Valley Authority could supply ample electric power and the rivers could provide cooling water for the reactors. After examining several sites, the survey team selected one near Elza, Tennessee. Conant advised that it be acquired at once and Styer agreed but Marshall temporized, awaiting the results of Conant's reactor experiments before taking action.[35] Of the prospective processes, only Lawrence's electromagnetic separation appeared sufficiently advanced for construction to commence.[36]

Marshall and Nichols began assembling the resources they would need. The first step was to obtain a high priority rating for the project. The top ratings were AA-1 through AA-4 in descending order, although there was also a special AAA rating reserved for emergencies. Ratings AA-1 and AA-2 were for essential weapons and equipment, so Colonel Lucius D. Clay, the deputy chief of staff at Services and Supply for requirements and resources, felt that the highest rating he could assign was AA-3, although he was willing to provide a AAA rating on request for critical materials if the need arose.[37] Nichols and Marshall were disappointed; AA-3 was the same priority as Nichols' TNT plant in Pennsylvania.[38]

Military Policy CommitteeBush became dissatisfied with Colonel Marshall's failure to get the project moving forward expeditiously, specifically the failure to acquire the Tennessee site, the low priority allocated to the project by the Army and the location of his headquarters in New York City.[40] Bush felt that more aggressive leadership was required, and spoke to Harvey Bundy and Generals Marshall, Somervell, and Styer about his concerns. He wanted the project placed under a senior policy committee, with a prestigious officer, preferably Styer, as overall director.[38]

Somervell and Styer selected Groves for the post, informing him on 17 September of this decision, and that General Marshall ordered that he be promoted to brigadier general,[41] as it was felt that the title "general" would hold more sway with the academic scientists working on the Manhattan Project.[42] Groves' orders placed him directly under Somervell rather than Reybold, with Colonel Marshall now answerable to Groves.[43] Groves established his headquarters in Washington, D.C., on the fifth floor of the New War Department Building, where Colonel Marshall had his liaison office.[44] He assumed command of the Manhattan Project on 23 September. Later that day, he attended a meeting called by Stimson, which established a Military Policy Committee, responsible to the Top Policy Group, consisting of Bush (with Conant as an alternate), Styer and Rear AdmiralWilliam R. Purnell.[41] Tolman and Conant were later appointed as Groves' scientific advisers.[45]

On 19 September, Groves went to Donald Nelson, the chairman of the War Production Board, and asked for broad authority to issue a AAA rating whenever it was required. Nelson initially balked but quickly caved in when Groves threatened to go to the President.[46] Groves promised not to use the AAA rating unless it was necessary. It soon transpired that for the routine requirements of the project the AAA rating was too high but the AA-3 rating was too low. After a long campaign, Groves finally received AA-1 authority on 1 July 1944.[47]

One of Groves' early problems was to find a director for Project Y, the group that would design and build the bomb. The obvious choice was one of the three laboratory heads, Urey, Lawrence, or Compton, but they could not be spared. Compton recommended Oppenheimer, who was already intimately familiar with the bomb design concepts. However, Oppenheimer had little administrative experience, and, unlike Urey, Lawrence, and Compton, had not won a Nobel Prize, which many scientists felt that the head of such an important laboratory should have. There were also concerns about Oppenheimer's security status, as many of his associates were Communists, including his brother, Frank Oppenheimer; his wife, Kitty; and his girlfriend, Jean Tatlock. A long conversation on a train in October 1942 convinced Groves and Nichols that Oppenheimer thoroughly understood the issues involved in setting up a laboratory in a remote area and should be appointed as its director. Groves personally waived the security requirements and issued Oppenheimer a clearance on 20 July 1943.[48][49]

Collaboration with the United KingdomThe British and Americans exchanged nuclear information but did not initially combine their efforts. Britain rebuffed attempts by Bush and Conant in 1941 to strengthen cooperation with its own project, codenamed Tube Alloys,[50] because it was reluctant to share its technological lead and help the United States develop its own atomic bomb. An American scientist who brought a personal letter from Roosevelt to Churchill offering to pay for all research and development in an Anglo-American project was poorly treated, and Churchill did not reply to the letter. The United States as a result decided as early as April 1942 that its offer was rejected, and that it should proceed alone.[51] The United Kingdom did not have the manpower or resources of the United States and despite its early and promising start, Tube Alloys soon fell behind its American counterpart.[52] On 30 July 1942, Sir John Anderson, the minister responsible for Tube Alloys, advised Churchill that: "We must face the fact that ... [our] pioneering work ... is a dwindling asset and that, unless we capitalise it quickly, we shall be outstripped. We now have a real contribution to make to a 'merger.' Soon we shall have little or none."[53] That month Churchill and Roosevelt made an informal, unwritten agreement for atomic collaboration.[54]

The opportunity for an equal partnership no longer existed, however, as shown in August 1942 when the British unsuccessfully demanded substantial control over the project while paying none of the costs. By 1943 the roles of the two countries had reversed from late 1941;[51] in January Conant notified the British that they would no longer receive atomic information except in certain areas. While the British were shocked by the abrogation of the Churchill-Roosevelt agreement, head of the Canadian National Research Council C. J. Mackenzie was less surprised, writing "I can't help feeling that the United Kingdom group [over] emphasizes the importance of their contribution as compared with the Americans."[54] As Conant and Bush told the British, the order came "from the top". The British bargaining position had worsened; the American scientists had decided that the United States no longer needed outside help, and they and others on the bomb policy committee wanted to prevent Britain from being able to build a postwar atomic weapon. The committee supported, and Roosevelt agreed to, restricting the flow of information to what Britain could use during the war'--especially not bomb design'--even if doing so slowed down the American project. By early 1943 the British stopped sending research and scientists to America, and as a result the Americans stopped all information sharing. The British considered ending the supply of Canadian uranium and heavy water to force the Americans to again share, but Canada needed American supplies to produce them.[55] They investigated the possibility of an independent nuclear program, but determined that it could not be ready in time to affect the outcome of the war in Europe.[56]

By March 1943 Conant decided that British help would benefit some areas of the project. James Chadwick and one or two other British scientists were important enough that the bomb design team at Los Alamos needed them, despite the risk of revealing weapon design secrets.[57] In August 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt negotiated the Quebec Agreement, which resulted in a resumption of cooperation[58] between scientists working on the same problem. Britain, however, agreed to restrictions on data on the building of large-scale production plants necessary for the bomb.[59] The subsequent Hyde Park Agreement in September 1944 extended this cooperation to the postwar period.[60] The Quebec Agreement established the Combined Policy Committee to coordinate the efforts of the United States, United Kingdom and Canada. Stimson, Bush and Conant served as the American members of the Combined Policy Committee, Field Marshal Sir John Dill and Colonel J. J. Llewellin were the British members, and C. D. Howe was the Canadian member.[61] Llewellin returned to the United Kingdom at the end of 1943 and was replaced on the committee by Sir Ronald Ian Campbell, who in turn was replaced by the British Ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, in early 1945. Sir John Dill died in Washington, D.C., in November 1944 and was replaced both as Chief of the British Joint Staff Mission and as a member of the Combined Policy Committee by Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson.[62]

When cooperation resumed after the Quebec agreement, the Americans' progress and expenditures amazed the British. The United States had already spent more than $1 billion ($13,600,000,000 today[1]), while in 1943, the United Kingdom had spent about £0.5 million. Chadwick thus pressed for British involvement in the Manhattan Project to the fullest extent and abandon any hopes of a British project during the war.[56] With Churchill's backing, he attempted to ensure that every request from Groves for assistance was honored.[63] The British Mission that arrived in the United States in December 1943 included Niels Bohr, Otto Frisch, Klaus Fuchs, Rudolf Peierls, and Ernest Titterton.[64] More scientists arrived in early 1944. While those assigned to gaseous diffusion left by the fall of 1944, the 35 working with Lawrence at Berkeley were assigned to existing laboratory groups and stayed until the end of the war. The 19 sent to Los Alamos also joined existing groups, primarily related to implosion and bomb assembly, but not the plutonium-related ones.[56] Part of the Quebec Agreement specified that nuclear weapons would not be used against another country without mutual consent. In June 1945, Wilson agreed that the use of nuclear weapons against Japan would be recorded as a decision of the Combined Policy Committee.[65]

The Combined Policy Committee created the Combined Development Trust in June 1944, with Groves as its chairman, to procure uranium and thorium ores on international markets. The Belgian Congo and Canada held much of the world's uranium outside Eastern Europe, and the Belgian government in exile was in London. Britain agreed to give the United States most of the Belgian ore, as it could not use most of the supply without restricted American research.[66] In 1944, the Trust purchased 3,440,000 pounds (1,560,000 kg) of uranium oxide ore from companies operating mines in the Belgian Congo. In order to avoid briefing US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. on the project, a special account not subject to the usual auditing and controls was used to hold Trust monies. Between 1944 and the time he resigned from the Trust in 1947, Groves deposited a total of $37.5 million into the Trust's account.[67]

Groves appreciated the early British atomic research and the British scientists' contributions to the Manhattan Project, but stated that the United States would have succeeded without them. Whether or not he was correct, the British wartime participation was crucial to the success of the United Kingdom's independent nuclear weapons program after the war when the McMahon Act of 1946 temporarily ended American nuclear cooperation.[56]

Project sitesA selection of US and Canadian sites important to the Manhattan Project. Click on the location for more information.Oak RidgeThe day after he took over the project, Groves took a train to Tennessee with Colonel Marshall to inspect the proposed site there, and Groves was impressed.[69][70] On 29 September 1942, United States Under Secretary of WarRobert P. Patterson authorized the Corps of Engineers to acquire 56,000 acres (23,000 ha) of land by eminent domain at a cost of $3.5 million. An additional 3,000 acres (1,200 ha) was subsequently acquired. About 1,000 families were affected by the condemnation order, which came into effect on 7 October.[71] Protests, legal appeals, and a 1943 Congressional inquiry were to no avail.[72] By mid-November U.S. Marshals were tacking notices to vacate on farmhouse doors, and construction contractors were moving in.[73] Some families were given two weeks' notice to vacate farms that had been their homes for generations;[74] others had settled there after being evicted to make way for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1920s or the Norris Dam in the 1930s.[72] The ultimate cost of land acquisition in the area, which was not completed until March 1945, was only about $2.6 million, which worked out to around $47 an acre.[75] When presented with Public Proclamation Number Two, which declared Oak Ridge a total exclusion area that no one could enter without military permission, the Governor of Tennessee, Prentice Cooper, angrily tore it up.[76]

Initially known as the Kingston Demolition Range, the site was officially renamed the Clinton Engineer Works (CEW) in early 1943.[77] While Stone and Webster concentrated on the production facilities, the architectural and engineering firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed and built a residential community for 13,000. The community was located on the slopes of Black Oak Ridge, from which the new town of Oak Ridge got its name.[78] The Army presence at Oak Ridge increased in August 1943 when Nichols replaced Marshall as head of the Manhattan Engineer District. One of his first tasks was to move the district headquarters to Oak Ridge although the name of the district did not change.[79] In September 1943 the administration of community facilities was outsourced to Turner Construction Company through a subsidiary, the Roane-Anderson Company (for Roane and Anderson Counties, in which Oak Ridge was located).[80] Chemical engineers, including William J. Wilcox Jr. and Warren Fuchs, were part of "frantic efforts" to make 10% to 12% enriched uranium 235, known as the code name "tuballoy tetroxide", with tight security and fast approvals for supplies and materials.[81] The population of Oak Ridge soon expanded well beyond the initial plans, and peaked at 75,000 in May 1945, by which time 82,000 people were employed at the Clinton Engineer Works,[68] and 10,000 by Roane-Anderson.[80]

Los AlamosThe idea of locating Project Y at Oak Ridge was considered, but in the end it was decided that it should be in a remote location. On Oppenheimer's recommendation, the search for a suitable site was narrowed to the vicinity of Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Oppenheimer owned a ranch. In October 1942, Major John H. Dudley of the Manhattan Project was sent to survey the area, and he recommended a site near Jemez Springs, New Mexico.[82] On 16 November, Oppenheimer, Groves, Dudley and others toured the site. Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding the site would make his people feel claustrophobic, while the engineers were concerned with the possibility of flooding. The party then moved on to the vicinity of the Los Alamos Ranch School. Oppenheimer was impressed and expressed a strong preference for the site, citing its natural beauty and views of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which, it was hoped, would inspire those who would work on the project.[83][84] The engineers were concerned about the poor access road, and whether the water supply would be adequate, but otherwise felt that it was ideal.[85]

Patterson approved the acquisition of the site on 25 November 1942, authorizing $440,000 for the purchase of the site of 54,000 acres (22,000 ha), all but 8,900 acres (3,600 ha) of which were already owned by the Federal Government.[86]Secretary of AgricultureClaude R. Wickard granted use of some 45,100 acres (18,300 ha) of United States Forest Service land to the War Department "for so long as the military necessity continues".[87] The need for land for a new road, and later for a right of way for a 25-mile (40 km) power line, eventually brought wartime land purchases to 45,737 acres (18,509.1 ha), but only $414,971 was spent.[86] Construction was contracted to the M. M. Sundt Company of Tucson, Arizona, with Willard C. Kruger and Associates of Santa Fe, New Mexico, as architect and engineer. Work commenced in December 1942. Groves initially allocated $300,000 for construction, three times Oppenheimer's estimate, with a planned completion date of 15 March 1943. It soon became clear that the scope of Project Y was greater than expected, and by the time Sundt finished in 30 November 1943, over $7 million had been spent.[88]

Because it was secret, Los Alamos was referred to as "Site Y" or "the Hill".[89] Birth certificates of babies born in Los Alamos during the war listed their place of birth as PO Box 1663 in Santa Fe.[90] Initially Los Alamos was to have been a military laboratory with Oppenheimer and other researchers commissioned into the Army. Oppenheimer went so far as to order himself a lieutenant colonel's uniform, but two key physicists, Robert Bacher and Isidor Rabi, balked at the idea. Conant, Groves and Oppenheimer then devised a compromise whereby the laboratory was operated by the University of California under contract to the War Department.[91]

ArgonneAn Army-OSRD council on 25 June 1942 decided to build a pilot plant for plutonium production in Red Gate Woods southwest of Chicago. In July, Nichols arranged for a lease of 1,025 acres (415 ha) from the Cook County Forest Preserve District, and Captain James F. Grafton was appointed Chicago area engineer. It soon became apparent that the scale of operations was too great for the area, and it was decided to build the plant at Oak Ridge, and keep a research and testing facility in Chicago.[92][93]

Delays in establishing the plant in Red Gate Woods led Compton to authorize the Metallurgical Laboratory to construct the first nuclear reactor beneath the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. The reactor required an enormous amount of graphite blocks and uranium pellets. At the time, there was a limited source of pure uranium. Frank Spedding of Iowa State University were able to produce only two short tons of pure uranium. Additional three short tons of uranium metal was supplied by Westinghouse Lamp Plant which was produced in a rush with makeshift process. A large square balloon was constructed by Goodyear Tire to encase the reactor.[94][95] On 2 December 1942, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiated the first artificial[note 3] self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in an experimental reactor known as Chicago Pile-1.[97] The point at which a reaction becomes self-sustaining became known as "going critical". Compton reported the success to Conant in Washington, D.C., by a coded phone call, saying, "The Italian navigator [Fermi] has just landed in the new world."[98][note 4]

In January 1943, Grafton's successor, Major Arthur V. Peterson, ordered Chicago Pile-1 dismantled and reassembled at Red Gate Woods, as he regarded the operation of a reactor as too hazardous for a densely populated area.[99] After the war, the operations that remained at Red Gate moved to the new Argonne National Laboratory about 6 miles (9.7 km) away.[93]

HanfordBy December 1942 there were concerns that even Oak Ridge was too close to a major population center (Knoxville) in the unlikely event of a major nuclear accident. Groves recruited DuPont in November 1942 to be the prime contractor for the construction of the plutonium production complex. DuPont was offered a standard cost plus fixed fee contract, but the President of the company, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., wanted no profit of any kind, and asked for the proposed contract to be amended to explicitly exclude the company from acquiring any patent rights. This was accepted, but for legal reasons a nominal fee of one dollar was agreed upon. After the war, DuPont asked to be released from the contract early, and had to return 33 cents.[100]

DuPont recommended that the site be located far from the existing uranium production facility at Oak Ridge.[101] In December 1942, Groves dispatched Colonel Franklin Matthias and DuPont engineers to scout potential sites. Matthias reported that Hanford Site near Richland, Washington, was "ideal in virtually all respects". It was isolated and near the Columbia River, which could supply sufficient water to cool the reactors that would produce the plutonium. Groves visited the site in January and established the Hanford Engineer Works (HEW), codenamed "Site W".[102]

Under Secretary Patterson gave his approval on 9 February, allocating $5 million for the acquisition of 40,000 acres (16,000 ha) of land in the area. The federal government relocated some 1,500 residents of White Bluffs and Hanford, and nearby settlements, as well as the Wanapum and other tribes using the area. A dispute arose with farmers over compensation for crops, which had already been planted before the land was acquired. Where schedules allowed, the Army allowed the crops to be harvested, but this was not always possible.[102] The land acquisition process dragged on and was not completed before the end of the Manhattan Project in December 1946.[103]

The dispute did not delay work. Although progress on the reactor design at Metallurgical Laboratory and DuPont was not sufficiently advanced to accurately predict the scope of the project, a start was made in April 1943 on facilities for an estimated 25,000 workers, half of whom were expected to live on-site. By July 1944, some 1,200 buildings had been erected and nearly 51,000 people were living in the construction camp. As area engineer, Matthias exercised overall control of the site.[104] At its peak, the construction camp was the third most populous town in Washington state.[105] Hanford operated a fleet of over 900 buses, more than the city of Chicago.[106] Like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, Richland was a gated community with restricted access, but it looked more like a typical wartime American boomtown: the military profile was lower, and physical security elements like high fences, towers and guard dogs were less evident.[107]

Canadian sitesBritish ColumbiaCominco had produced electrolytic hydrogen at Trail, British Columbia, since 1930. Urey suggested in 1941 that it could produce heavy water. To the existing $10 million plant consisting of 3,215 cells consuming 75 MW of hydroelectric power, secondary electrolysis cells were added to increase the deuterium concentration in the water from 2.3% to 99.8%. For this process, Hugh Taylor of Princeton developed a platinum-on-carbon catalyst for the first three stages while Urey developed a nickel-chromia one for the fourth stage tower. The final cost was $2.8 million. The Canadian Government did not officially learn of the project until August 1942. Trail's heavy water production started in January 1944 and continued until 1956. Heavy water from Trail was used for Chicago Pile 3, the first reactor using heavy water and natural uranium, which went critical on 15 May 1944.[108]

OntarioThe Chalk River, Ontario, site was established to rehouse the Allied effort at the Montreal Laboratory away from an urban area. A new community was built at Deep River, Ontario, to provide residences and facilities for the team members. The site was chosen for its proximity to the industrial manufacturing area of Ontario and Quebec, and proximity to a rail head adjacent to a large military base, Camp Petawawa. Located on the Ottawa River, it had access to abundant water. The first director of the new laboratory was John Cockcroft, later replaced by Bennett Lewis. A pilot reactor known as ZEEP (zero-energy experimental pile) became the first Canadian reactor, and the first to be completed outside the United States, when it went critical in September 1945. A larger 10 MW NRX reactor, which was designed during the war, was completed and went critical in July 1947.[108]

Northwest TerritoriesThe Eldorado Mine at Port Radium was a source of uranium ore for the project.[109]

Heavy water sitesMain article: P-9 ProjectAlthough DuPont's preferred designs for the nuclear reactors were helium cooled and used graphite as a moderator, DuPont still expressed an interest in using heavy water as a backup, in case the graphite reactor design proved infeasible for some reason. For this purpose, it was estimated that 3 long tons (3.0 t) of heavy water would be required per month. The P-9 Project was the government's code name for the heavy water production program. As the plant at Trail, which was then under construction, could produce 0.5 long tons (0.51 t) per month, additional capacity was required. Groves therefore authorized DuPont to establish heavy water facilities at the Morgantown Ordnance Works, near Morgantown, West Virginia; at the Wabash River Ordnance Works, near Dana and Newport, Indiana; and at the Alabama Ordnance Works, near Childersburg and Sylacauga, Alabama. Although known as Ordnance Works and paid for under Ordnance Department contracts, they were built and operated by the Army Corps of Engineers. The American plants used a process different from Trail's; heavy water was extracted by distillation, taking advantage of the slightly higher boiling point of heavy water.[110][111]

UraniumOreThe key raw material for the project was uranium, which was used as fuel for the reactors, as feed that was transformed into plutonium, and, in its enriched form, in the atomic bomb itself. There were four known major deposits of uranium in 1940: in Colorado, in northern Canada, in Joachimstal in Czechoslovakia, and in the Belgian Congo.[112] All but Joachimstal were in allied hands. A November 1942 survey determined that sufficient quantities of uranium were available to satisfy the project's requirements.[113] Nichols arranged with the State Department for export controls to be placed on uranium oxide and negotiated for the purchase of 1,200 long tons (1,200 t) of uranium ore from the Belgian Congo that was being stored in a warehouse on Staten Island and the remaining stocks of mined ore stored in the Congo. He negotiated with Eldorado Gold Mines for the purchase of ore from its refinery in Port Hope, Ontario, and its shipment in 100-ton lots. The Canadian government subsequently bought up the company's stock until it acquired a controlling interest.[114]

While these purchases assured a sufficient supply to meet wartime needs, the American and British leaders concluded that it was in their countries' interest to gain control of as much of the world's uranium deposits as possible. The richest source of ore was the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo, but it was flooded and closed. Nichols unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate its reopening and the sale of the entire future output to the United States with Edgar Sengier, the director of the company that owned the mine, Union Mini¨re du Haut Katanga.[115] The matter was then taken up by the Combined Policy Committee. As 30 percent of Union Mini¨re's stock was controlled by British interests, the British took the lead in negotiations. Sir John Anderson and Ambassador John Winant hammered out a deal with Sengier and the Belgian government in May 1944 for the mine to be reopened and 1,720 long tons (1,750 t) of ore to be purchased at $1.45 a pound.[116] To avoid dependence on the British and Canadians for ore, Groves also arranged for the purchase of US Vanadium Corporation's stockpile in Uravan, Colorado. Uranium mining in Colorado yielded about 800 long tons (810 t) of ore.[117]

Mallinckrodt Incorporated in St. Louis, Missouri, took the raw ore and dissolved it in nitric acid to produce uranyl nitrate. Ether was then added in a liquid''liquid extraction process to separate the impurities from the uranyl nitrate. This was then heated to form uranium trioxide, which was reduced to highly pure uranium dioxide.[118] By July 1942, Mallinckrodt was producing a ton of highly pure oxide a day, but turning this into uranium metal initially proved more difficult for contractors Westinghouse and Metal Hydrides.[119] Production was too slow and quality was unacceptably low. A special branch of the Metallurgical Laboratory was established at Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa, under Frank Spedding to investigate alternatives, and its Ames process became available in 1943.[120]

Isotope separationNatural uranium consists of 99.3% uranium-238 and 0.7% uranium-235, but only the latter is fissile. The chemically identical uranium-235 has to be physically separated from the more plentiful isotope. Various methods were considered for uranium enrichment, most of which was carried out at Oak Ridge.[121]

The most obvious technology, the centrifuge, failed, but electromagnetic separation, gaseous diffusion, and thermal diffusion technologies were all successful and contributed to the project. In February 1943, Groves came up with the idea of using the output of some plants as the input for others.[122]

CentrifugesThe centrifuge process was regarded as the only promising separation method in April 1942.[123]Jesse Beams had developed such a process at the University of Virginia during the 1930s, but had encountered technical difficulties. The process required high rotational speeds, but at certain speeds harmonic vibrations developed that threatened to tear the machinery apart. It was therefore necessary to accelerate quickly through these speeds. In 1941 he began working with uranium hexafluoride, the only known gaseous compound of uranium, and was able to separate uranium-235. At Columbia, Urey had Cohen investigate the process, and he produced a body of mathematical theory making it possible to design a centrifugal separation unit, which Westinghouse undertook to construct.[124]

Scaling this up to a production plant presented a formidable technical challenge. Urey and Cohen estimated that producing a kilogram (2.2 lb) of uranium-235 per day would require up to 50,000 centrifuges with 1-meter (3 ft 3 in) rotors, or 10,000 centrifuges with 4-meter (13 ft) rotors, assuming that 4-meter rotors could be built. The prospect of keeping so many rotors operating continuously at high speed appeared daunting,[125] and when Beams ran his experimental apparatus, he obtained only 60% of the predicted yield, indicating that more centrifuges would be required. Beams, Urey and Cohen then began work on a series of improvements which promised to increase the efficiency of the process. However, frequent failures of motors, shafts and bearings at high speeds delayed work on the pilot plant.[126] In November 1942 the centrifuge process was abandoned by the Military Policy Committee following a recommendation by Conant, Nichols and August C. Klein of Stone & Webster.[127]

Electromagnetic separationElectromagnetic isotope separation was developed by Lawrence at the University of California Radiation Laboratory. This method employed devices known as calutrons, a hybrid of the standard laboratory mass spectrometer and cyclotron. The name was derived from the words "California", "university" and "cyclotron".[128] In the electromagnetic process, a magnetic field deflected charged particles according to mass.[129] The process was neither scientifically elegant nor industrially efficient.[130] Compared with a gaseous diffusion plant or a nuclear reactor, an electromagnetic separation plant would consume more scarce materials, require more manpower to operate, and cost more to build. Nonetheless, the process was approved because it was based on proven technology and therefore represented less risk. Moreover, it could be built in stages, and rapidly reach industrial capacity.[128]

Marshall and Nichols discovered that the electromagnetic isotope separation process would require 5,000 tons of copper, which was in desperately short supply. However, silver could be substituted, in an 11:10 ratio. On 3 August 1942, Nichols met with Under Secretary of the TreasuryDaniel W. Bell and asked for the transfer of 6,000 tons of silver bullion from the West Point Depository. "Young man," Bell told him, "you may think of silver in tons but the Treasury will always think of silver in troy ounces!"[131] Eventually, 14,700 tons were used.[132]

The 1,000-troy-ounce (31 kg) silver bars were cast into cylindrical billets and taken to Phelps Dodge in Bayway, New Jersey, where they were extruded into strips 0.625 inches (15.9 mm) thick, 3 inches (76 mm) wide and 40 feet (12 m) long. These were wound onto magnetic coils by Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After the war, all the machinery was dismantled and cleaned and the floorboards beneath the machinery were ripped up and burned to recover minute amounts of silver. In the end, only 1/3,600,000th was lost.[132][133] The last silver was returned in May 1970.[134]

Responsibility for the design and construction of the electromagnetic separation plant, which came to be called Y-12, was assigned to Stone & Webster by the S-1 Committee in June 1942. The design called for five first-stage processing units, known as Alpha racetracks, and two units for final processing, known as Beta racetracks. In September 1943 Groves authorized construction of four more racetracks, known as Alpha II. Construction began in February 1943.[135]

When the plant was started up for testing on schedule in October, the 14-ton vacuum tanks crept out of alignment because of the power of the magnets, and had to be fastened more securely. A more serious problem arose when the magnetic coils started shorting out. In December Groves ordered a magnet to be broken open, and handfuls of rust were found inside. Groves then ordered the racetracks to be torn down and the magnets sent back to the factory to be cleaned. A pickling plant was established on-site to clean the pipes and fittings.[130] The second Alpha I was not operational until the end of January 1944, the first Beta and first and third Alpha I's came online in March, and the fourth Alpha I was operational in April. The four Alpha II racetracks were completed between July and October 1944.[136]

Tennessee Eastman was hired to manage Y-12 on the usual cost plus fixed fee basis, with a fee of $22,500 per month plus $7,500 per racetrack for the first seven racetracks and $4,000 per additional racetrack.[138] The calutrons were initially operated by scientists from Berkeley to remove bugs and achieve a reasonable operating rate. They were then turned over to trained Tennessee Eastman operators who had only a high school education. Nichols compared unit production data, and pointed out to Lawrence that the young "hillbilly" girl operators were outperforming his PhDs. They agreed to a production race and Lawrence lost, a morale boost for the Tennessee Eastman workers and supervisors. The girls were "trained like soldiers not to reason why", while "the scientists could not refrain from time-consuming investigation of the cause of even minor fluctuations of the dials."[139]

Y-12 initially enriched the uranium-235 content to between 13% and 15%, and shipped the first few hundred grams of this to Los Alamos in March 1944. Only 1 part in 5,825 of the uranium feed emerged as final product. Much of the rest was splattered over equipment in the process. Strenuous recovery efforts helped raise production to 10% of the uranium-235 feed by January 1945. In February the Alpha racetracks began receiving slightly enriched (1.4%) feed from the new S-50 thermal diffusion plant. The next month it received enhanced (5%) feed from the K-25 gaseous diffusion plant. By April K-25 was producing uranium sufficiently enriched to feed directly into the Beta tracks.[140]

Gaseous diffusionThe most promising but also the most challenging method of isotope separation was gaseous diffusion. Graham's law states that the rate of effusion of a gas is inversely proportional to the square root of its molecular mass, so in a box containing a semi-permeable membrane and a mixture of two gases, the lighter molecules will pass out of the container more rapidly than the heavier molecules. The gas leaving the container is somewhat enriched in the lighter molecules, while the residual gas is somewhat depleted. The idea was that such boxes could be formed into a cascade of pumps and membranes, with each successive stage containing a slightly more enriched mixture. Research into the process was carried out at Columbia University by a group that included Harold Urey, Karl P. Cohen and John R. Dunning.[141]

In November 1942 the Military Policy Committee approved the construction of a 600-stage gaseous diffusion plant.[142] On 14 December, M. W. Kellogg accepted an offer to construct the plant, which was codenamed K-25. A cost plus fixed fee contract was negotiated, eventually totaling $2.5 million. A separate corporate entity called Kellex was created for the project, headed by Percival C. Keith, one of Kellogg's vice presidents.[143] The process faced formidable technical difficulties. The highly corrosive gas uranium hexafluoride would have to be used, as no substitute could be found, and the motors and pumps would have to be vacuum tight and enclosed in inert gas. The biggest problem was the design of the barrier, which would have to be strong, porous and resistant to corrosion by uranium hexafluoride. The best choice for this seemed to be nickel. Edward Adler and Edward Norris created a mesh barrier from electroplated nickel. A six-stage pilot plant was built at Columbia to test the process, but the Norris-Adler prototype proved to be too brittle. A rival barrier was developed from powdered nickel by Kellex, the Bell Telephone Laboratories and the Bakelite Corporation. In January 1944, Groves ordered the Kellex barrier into production.[144][145]

Kellex's design for K-25 called for a four-story 0.5-mile (0.80 km) long U-shaped structure containing 54 contiguous buildings. These were divided into nine sections. Within these were cells of six stages. The cells could be operated independently, or consecutively within a section. Similarly, the sections could be operated separately or as part of a single cascade. A survey party began construction by marking out the 500-acre (2.0 km2) site in May 1943. Work on the main building began in October 1943, and the six-stage pilot plant was ready for operation on 17 April 1944. In 1945 Groves canceled the upper stages of the plant, directing Kellex to instead design and build a 540-stage side feed unit, which became known as K-27. Kellex transferred the last unit to the operating contractor, Union Carbide and Carbon, on 11 September 1945. The total cost, including the K-27 plant completed after the war, came to $480 million.[146]

The production plant commenced operation in February 1945, and as cascade after cascade came online, the quality of the product increased. By April 1945, K-25 had attained a 1.1% enrichment and the output of the S-50 thermal diffusion plant began being used as feed. Some product produced the next month reached nearly 7% enrichment. In August, the last of the 2,892 stages commenced operation. K-25 and K-27 achieved their full potential in the early postwar period, when they eclipsed the other production plants and became the prototypes for a new generation of plants.[147]

Thermal diffusionThe thermal diffusion process was based on Sydney Chapman and David Enskog's theory, which explained that when a mixed gas passes through a temperature gradient, the heavier one tends to concentrate at the cold end and the lighter one at the warm end. Since hot gases tend to rise and cool ones tend to fall, this can be used as a means of isotope separation. This process was first demonstrated by H. Clusius and G. Dickel in Germany in 1938.[148] It was developed by US Navy scientists, but was not one of the enrichment technologies initially selected for use in the Manhattan Project. This was primarily due to doubts about its technical feasibility, but the inter-service rivalry between the Army and Navy also played a part.[149]

The Naval Research Laboratory continued the research under Philip Abelson's direction, but there was little contact with the Manhattan Project until April 1944, when Captain William S. Parsons, the naval officer who was in charge of ordnance development at Los Alamos, brought Oppenheimer news of encouraging progress in the Navy's experiments on thermal diffusion. Oppenheimer wrote to Groves suggesting that the output of a thermal diffusion plant could be fed into Y-12. Groves set up a committee consisting of Warren K. Lewis, Eger Murphree and Richard Tolman to investigate the idea, and they estimated that a thermal diffusion plant costing $3.5 million could enrich 50 kilograms (110 lb) of uranium per week to nearly 0.9% uranium-235. Groves approved its construction on 24 June 1944.[150]

Groves contracted with the H. K. Ferguson Company of Cleveland, Ohio, to build the thermal diffusion plant, which was designated S-50. Groves' advisers, Karl Cohen and W. I. Thompson from Standard Oil,[151] estimated that it would take six months to build. Groves gave Ferguson just four. Plans called for the installation of 2,142 48-foot-tall (15 m) diffusion columns arranged in 21 racks. Inside each column were three concentric tubes. Steam, obtained from the nearby K-25 powerhouse at a pressure of 100 pounds per square inch (690 kPa) and temperature of 545 °F (285 °C), flowed downward through the innermost 1.25-inch (32 mm) nickel pipe, while water at 155 °F (68 °C) flowed upward through the outermost iron pipe. Isotope separation occurred in the uranium hexafluoride gas between the nickel and copper pipes.[152]

Work commenced on 9 July 1944, and S-50 began partial operation in September. Ferguson operated the plant through a subsidiary known as Fercleve. The plant produced just 10.5 pounds (4.8 kg) of 0.852% uranium-235 in October. Leaks limited production and forced shutdowns over the next few months, but in June 1945 it produced 12,730 pounds (5,770 kg).[153] By March 1945, all 21 production racks were operating. Initially the output of S-50 was fed into Y-12, but starting in March 1945 all three enrichment processes were run in series. S-50 became the first stage, enriching from 0.71% to 0.89%. This material was fed into the gaseous diffusion process in the K-25 plant, which produced a product enriched to about 23%. This was, in turn, fed into Y-12,[154] which boosted it to about 89%, sufficient for nuclear weapons.[155]

Aggregate U-235 productionAbout 50 kilograms (110 lb) of uranium enriched to 89% uranium-235 was delivered to Los Alamos by July 1945.[155] The entire 50 kg, along with some 50%-enriched, averaging out to about 85% enriched, were used in Little Boy[155]

PlutoniumThe second line of development pursued by the Manhattan Project used the fissile element plutonium. Although small amounts of plutonium exist in nature, the best way to obtain large quantities of the element is in a nuclear reactor, in which natural uranium is bombarded by neutrons. The uranium-238 is transmuted into uranium-239, which rapidly decays, first into neptunium-239 and then into plutonium-239.[156] Only a small amount of the uranium-238 will be transformed, so the plutonium must be chemically separated from the remaining uranium, from any initial impurities, and from fission products.[156]

X-10 Graphite ReactorIn March 1943, DuPont began construction of a plutonium plant on a 112-acre (0.5 km2) site at Oak Ridge. Intended as a pilot plant for the larger production facilities at Hanford, it included the air-cooled X-10 Graphite Reactor, a chemical separation plant, and support facilities. Because of the subsequent decision to construct water-cooled reactors at Hanford, only the chemical separation plant operated as a true pilot.[157] The X-10 Graphite Reactor consisted of a huge block of graphite, 24 feet (7.3 m) long on each side, weighing around 1,500 long tons (1,500 t), surrounded by 7 feet (2.1 m) of high-density concrete as a radiation shield.[157]

The greatest difficulty was encountered with the uranium slugs produced by Mallinckrodt and Metal Hydrides. These somehow had to be coated in aluminum to avoid corrosion and the escape of fission products into the cooling system. The Grasselli Chemical Company attempted to develop a hot dipping process without success. Meanwhile Alcoa tried canning. A new process for flux-less welding was developed, and 97% of the cans passed a standard vacuum test, but high temperature tests indicated a failure rate of more than 50%. Nonetheless, production began in June 1943. The Metallurgical Laboratory eventually developed an improved welding technique with the help of General Electric, which was incorporated into the production process in October 1943.[158]

Watched by Fermi and Compton, the X-10 Graphite Reactor went critical on 4 November 1943 with about 30 long tons (30 t) of uranium. A week later the load was increased to 36 long tons (37 t), raising its power generation to 500 kW, and by the end of the month the first 500 milligrams (0.018 oz) of plutonium was created.[159] Modifications over time raised the power to 4,000 kW in July 1944. X-10 operated as a production plant until January 1945, when it was turned over to research activities.[160]

Hanford reactorsAlthough an air-cooled design was chosen for the reactor at Oak Ridge to facilitate rapid construction, it was recognized that this would be impractical for the much larger production reactors. Initial designs by the Metallurgical Laboratory and DuPont used helium for cooling, before they determined that a water-cooled reactor would be simpler, cheaper and quicker to build.[161] The design did not become available until 4 October 1943; in the meantime, Matthias concentrated on improving the Hanford site by erecting accommodations, improving the roads, building a railway switch line, and upgrading the electricity, water and telephone lines.[162]

As at Oak Ridge, the most difficulty was encountered while canning the uranium slugs, which commenced at Hanford in March 1944. They were pickled to remove dirt and impurities, dipped in molten bronze, tin, and aluminum-silicon alloy, canned using hydraulic presses, and then capped using arc welding under an argon atmosphere. Finally, they were subjected to a series of tests to detect holes or faulty welds. Disappointingly, most canned slugs initially failed the tests, resulting in an output of only a handful of canned slugs per day. But steady progress was made and by June 1944 production increased to the point where it appeared that enough canned slugs would be available to start Reactor B on schedule in August 1944.[163]

Work began on Reactor B, the first of six planned 250 MW reactors, on 10 October 1943.[164] The reactor complexes were given letter designations A through F, with B, D and F sites chosen to be developed first, as this maximised the distance between the reactors. They would be the only ones constructed during the Manhattan Project.[165] Some 390 long tons (400 t) of steel, 17,400 cubic yards (13,300 m3) of concrete, 50,000 concrete blocks and 71,000 concrete bricks were used to construct the 120-foot (37 m) high building.

Construction of the reactor itself commenced in February 1944.[166] Watched by Compton, Matthias, DuPont's Crawford Greenewalt, Leona Woods and Fermi, who inserted the first slug, the reactor was powered up beginning on 13 September 1944. Over the next few days, 838 tubes were loaded and the reactor went critical. Shortly after midnight on 27 September, the operators began to withdraw the control rods to initiate production. At first all appeared well but around 03:00 the power level started to drop and by 06:30 the reactor had shut down completely. The cooling water was investigated to see if there was a leak or contamination. The next day the reactor started up again, only to shut down once more.[167][168]

Fermi contacted Chien-Shiung Wu, who identified the cause of the problem as neutron poisoning from xenon-135, which has a half-life of 9.2 hours.[169] Fermi, Woods, Donald J. Hughes and John Archibald Wheeler then calculated the nuclear cross section of xenon-135, which turned out to be 30,000 times that of uranium.[170] Fortunately, DuPont engineer George Graves had deviated from the Metallurgical Laboratory's original design in which the reactor had 1,500 tubes arranged in a circle, and had added an additional 504 tubes to fill in the corners. The scientists had originally considered this overengineering a waste of time and money, but Fermi realized that by loading all 2,004 tubes, the reactor could reach the required power level and efficiently produce plutonium.[171] Reactor D was started on 17 December 1944 and Reactor F on 25 February 1945.[172]

Separation processMeanwhile, the chemists considered the problem of how plutonium could be separated from uranium when its chemical properties were not known. Working with the minute quantities of plutonium available at the Metallurgical Laboratory in 1942, a team under Charles M. Cooper developed a lanthanum fluoride process for separating uranium and plutonium, which was chosen for the pilot separation plant. A second separation process, the bismuth phosphate process, was subsequently developed by Seaborg and Stanly G. Thomson.[173] This process worked by toggling plutonium between its +4 and +6 oxidation states in solutions of bismuth phosphate. In the former state, the plutonium was precipitated; in the latter, it stayed in solution and the other products were precipitated.[174]

Greenewalt favored the bismuth phosphate process due to the corrosive nature of lanthanum fluoride, and it was selected for the Hanford separation plants.[175] Once X-10 began producing plutonium, the pilot separation plant was put to the test. The first batch was processed at 40% efficiency but over the next few months this was raised to 90%.[160]

At Hanford, top priority was initially given to the installations in the 300 area. This contained buildings for testing materials, preparing uranium, and assembling and calibrating instrumentation. One of the buildings housed the canning equipment for the uranium slugs, while another contained a small test reactor. Notwithstanding the high priority allocated to it, work on the 300 area fell behind schedule due to the unique and complex nature of the 300 area facilities, and wartime shortages of labor and materials.[176]

Early plans called for the construction of two separation plants in each of the areas known as 200-West and 200-East. This was subsequently reduced to two, the T and U plants, in 200-West and one, the B plant, at 200-East.[177] Each separation plant consisted of four buildings: a process cell building or "canyon" (known as 221), a concentration building (224), a purification building (231) and a magazine store (213). The canyons were each 800 feet (240 m) long and 65 feet (20 m) wide. Each consisted of forty 17.7-by-13-by-20-foot (5.4 by 4.0 by 6.1 m) cells.[178]

Work began on 221-T and 221-U in January 1944, with the former completed in September and the latter in December. The 221-B building followed in March 1945. Because of the high levels of radioactivity involved, all work in the separation plants had to be conducted by remote control using closed-circuit television, something unheard of in 1943. Maintenance was carried out with the aid of an overhead crane and specially designed tools. The 224 buildings were smaller because they had less material to process, and it was less radioactive. The 224-T and 224-U buildings were completed on 8 October 1944, and 224-B followed on 10 February 1945. The purification methods that were eventually used in 231-W were still unknown when construction commenced on 8 April 1944, but the plant was complete and the methods were selected by the end of the year.[179] On 5 February 1945, Matthias hand-delivered the first shipment of 80 grams (2.6 ozt) of 95%-pure plutonium nitrate to a Los Alamos courier in Los Angeles.[172]

Weapon designIn 1943, development efforts were directed to a gun-type fission weapon with plutonium called Thin Man. Initial research on the properties of plutonium was done using cyclotron-generated plutonium-239, which was extremely pure, but could only be created in very small amounts. Los Alamos received the first sample of plutonium from the Clinton X-10 reactor in April 1944 and within days Emilio Segr¨ discovered a problem: the reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of plutonium-240, resulting in up to five times the spontaneous fission rate of cyclotron plutonium.[180] Seaborg had correctly predicted in March 1943 that some of the plutonium-239 would absorb a neutron and become plutonium-240.[181]

This made reactor plutonium unsuitable for use in a gun-type weapon. The plutonium-240 would start the chain reaction too quickly, causing a predetonation that would release enough energy to disperse the critical mass with a minimal amount of plutonium reacted (a fizzle). A faster gun was suggested but found to be impractical. The possibility of separating the isotopes was considered and rejected, as plutonium-240 is even harder to separate from plutonium-239 than uranium-235 from uranium-238.[182]

Work on an alternative method of bomb design, known as implosion, had begun earlier at the instigation of the physicist Seth Neddermeyer. Implosion used explosives to crush a subcritical sphere of fissile material into a smaller and denser form. When the fissile atoms are packed closer together, the rate of neutron capture increases, and the mass becomes a critical mass. The metal needs to travel only a very short distance, so the critical mass is assembled in much less time than it would take with the gun method.[183] Neddermeyer's 1943 and early 1944 investigations into implosion showed promise, but also made it clear that the problem would be much more difficult from a theoretical and engineering perspective than the gun design.[184] In September 1943, John von Neumann, who had experience with shaped charges used in armor-piercing shells, argued that not only would implosion reduce the danger of predetonation and fizzle, but would make more efficient use of the fissionable material.[185] He proposed using a spherical configuration instead of the cylindrical one that Neddermeyer was working on.[186]

By July 1944, Oppenheimer had concluded plutonium could not be used in a gun design, and opted for implosion. The accelerated effort on an implosion design, codenamed Fat Man, began in August 1944 when Oppenheimer implemented a sweeping reorganization of the Los Alamos laboratory to focus on implosion.[187] Two new groups were created at Los Alamos to develop the implosion weapon, X (for explosives) Division headed by George Kistiakowsky and G (for gadget) Division under Robert Bacher.[188][189] The new design that von Neumann and T (for theoretical) Division, most notably Rudolf Peierls, had devised used explosive lenses to focus the explosion onto a spherical shape using a combination of both slow and fast high explosives.[190]

The design of lenses that detonated with the proper shape and velocity turned out to be slow, difficult and frustrating.[190] Various explosives were tested before settling on composition B as the fast explosive and baratol as the slow explosive.[191] The final design resembled a soccer ball, with 20 hexagonal and 12 pentagonal lenses, each weighing about 80 pounds (36 kg). Getting the detonation just right required fast, reliable and safe electrical detonators, of which there were two for each lens for reliability.[192] It was therefore decided to use exploding-bridgewire detonators, a new invention developed at Los Alamos by a group led by Luis Alvarez. A contract for their manufacture was given to Raytheon.[193]

To study the behavior of converging shock waves, Robert Serber devised the RaLa Experiment, which used the short-lived radioisotopelanthanum-140, a potent source of gamma radiation. The gamma ray source was placed in the center of a metal sphere surrounded by the explosive lenses, which in turn were inside in an ionization chamber. This allowed the taking of an X-ray movie of the implosion. The lenses were designed primarily using this series of tests.[194] In his history of the Los Alamos project, David Hawkins wrote: "RaLa became the most important single experiment affecting the final bomb design".[195]

Within the explosives was the 4.5-inch (110 mm) thick aluminum pusher, which provided a smooth transition from the relatively low density explosive to the next layer, the 3-inch (76 mm) thick tamper of natural uranium. Its main job was to hold the critical mass together as long as possible, but it would also reflect neutrons back into the core. Some part of it might fission as well. To prevent predetonation by an external neutron, the tamper was coated in a thin layer of boron.[192] A polonium-beryllium modulated neutron initiator, known as an "urchin" because its shape resembled a sea urchin,[196] was developed to start the chain reaction at precisely the right moment.[197] This work with the chemistry and metallurgy of radioactive polonium was directed by Charles Allen Thomas of the Monsanto Company and became known as the Dayton Project.[198] Testing required up to 500 curies per month of polonium, which Monsanto was able to deliver.[199] The whole assembly was encased in a duralumin bomb casing to protect it from bullets and flak.[192]

The ultimate task of the metallurgists was to determine how to cast plutonium into a sphere. The difficulties became apparent when attempts to measure the density of plutonium gave inconsistent results. At first contamination was believed to be the cause, but it was soon determined that there were multiple allotropes of plutonium.[200] The brittle α phase that exists at room temperature changes to the plastic β phase at higher temperatures. Attention then shifted to the even more malleable δ phase that normally exists in the 300 °C to 450 °C range. It was found that this was stable at room temperature when alloyed with aluminum, but aluminum emits neutrons when bombarded with alpha particles, which would exacerbate the pre-ignition problem. The metallurgists then hit upon a plutonium-gallium alloy, which stabilized the δ phase and could be hot pressed into the desired spherical shape. As plutonium was found to corrode readily, the sphere was coated with nickel.[201]

The work proved dangerous. By the end of the war, half the experienced chemists and metallurgists had to be removed from work with plutonium when unacceptably high levels of the element appeared in their urine.[202] A minor fire at Los Alamos in January 1945 led to a fear that a fire in the plutonium laboratory might contaminate the whole town, and Groves authorized the construction of a new facility for plutonium chemistry and metallurgy, which became known as the DP-site.[203] The hemispheres for the first plutonium pit (or core) were produced and delivered on 2 July 1945. Three more hemispheres followed on 23 July and were delivered three days later.[204]

TrinityBecause of the complexity of an implosion-style weapon, it was decided that, despite the waste of fissile material, an initial test would be required. Groves approved the test, subject to the active material being recovered. Consideration was therefore given to a controlled fizzle, but Oppenheimer opted instead for a full-scale nuclear test, codenamed "Trinity".[205]

In March 1944, planning for the test was assigned to Kenneth Bainbridge, a professor of physics at Harvard, working under Kistiakowsky. Bainbridge selected the bombing range near Alamogordo Army Airfield as the site for the test.[206] Bainbridge worked with Captain Samuel P. Davalos on the construction of the Trinity Base Camp and its facilities, which included barracks, warehouses, workshops, an explosive magazine and a commissary.[207]

Groves did not relish the prospect of explaining the loss of a billion dollars worth of plutonium to a Senate committee, so a cylindrical containment vessel codenamed "Jumbo" was constructed to recover the active material in the event of a failure. Measuring 25 feet (7.6 m) long and 12 feet (3.7 m) wide, it was fabricated at great expense from 214 long tons (217 t) of iron and steel by Babcock & Wilcox in Barberton, Ohio. Brought in a special railroad car to a siding in Pope, New Mexico, it was transported the last 25 miles (40 km) to the test site on a trailer pulled by two tractors.[208] By the time it arrived, however, confidence in the implosion method was high enough, and the availability of plutonium was sufficient, that Oppenheimer decided not to use it. Instead, it was placed atop a steel tower 800 yards (730 m) from the weapon as a rough measure of how powerful the explosion would be. In the end, Jumbo survived, although its tower did not, adding credence to the belief that Jumbo would have successfully contained a fizzled explosion.[209][210]

A pre-test explosion was conducted on 7 May 1945 to calibrate the instruments. A wooden test platform was erected 800 yards (730 m) from Ground Zero and piled with 100 long tons (100 t) of TNT spiked with nuclear fission products in the form of an irradiated uranium slug from Hanford, which was dissolved and poured into tubing inside the explosive. This explosion was observed by Oppenheimer and Groves's new deputy commander, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell. The pre-test produced data that proved vital for the Trinity test.[210][211]

For the actual test, the weapon, nicknamed "the gadget", was hoisted to the top of a 100-foot (30 m) steel tower, as detonation at that height would give a better indication of how the weapon would behave when dropped from a bomber. Detonation in the air maximized the energy applied directly to the target, and generated less nuclear fallout. The gadget was assembled under the supervision of Norris Bradbury at the nearby McDonald Ranch House on 13 July, and precariously winched up the tower the following day.[212] Observers included Bush, Chadwick, Conant, Farrell, Fermi, Groves, Lawrence, Oppenheimer and Tolman. At 05:30 on 16 July 1945 the gadget exploded with an energy equivalent of around 20 kilotons of TNT, leaving a crater of Trinitite (radioactive glass) in the desert 250 feet (76 m) wide. The shock wave was felt over 100 miles (160 km) away, and the mushroom cloud reached 7.5 miles (12.1 km) in height. It was heard as far away as El Paso, Texas, so Groves issued a cover story about an ammunition magazine explosion at Alamogordo Field.[213][214]

PersonnelIn June 1944, the Manhattan Project employed some 129,000 workers, of whom 84,500 were construction workers, 40,500 were plant operators and 1,800 were military personnel. As construction activity fell off, the workforce declined to 100,000 a year later, but the number of military personnel increased to 5,600. Procuring the required numbers of workers, especially highly skilled workers, in competition with other vital wartime programs proved very difficult.[215] In 1943, Groves obtained a special temporary priority for labor from the War Manpower Commission. In March 1944, both the War Production Board and the War Manpower Commission gave the project their highest priority.[216]

Tolman and Conant, in their role as the project's scientific advisers, drew up a list of candidate scientists and had them rated by scientists already working on the project. Groves then sent a personal letter to the head of their university or company asking for them to be released for essential war work.[217] At the University of Wisconsin''Madison, Stanislaw Ulam gave one of his students, Joan Hinton, an exam early, so she could leave to do war work. A few weeks later, Ulam received a letter from Hans Bethe, inviting him to join the project.[218] Conant personally persuaded the explosives expert George Kistiakowsky to join the project.[219]

One source of skilled personnel was the Army itself, particularly the Army Specialized Training Program. In 1943, the MED created the Special Engineer Detachment (SED), with an authorized strength of 675. Technicians and skilled workers drafted into the Army were assigned to the SED. Another source was the Women's Army Corps (WAC). Initially intended for clerical tasks handling classified material, the WACs were soon tapped for technical and scientific tasks as well.[220] On 1 February 1945, all military personnel assigned to the MED, including all SED detachments, were assigned to the 9812th Technical Service Unit, except at Los Alamos, where military personnel other than SED, including the WACs and Military Police, were assigned to the 4817th Service Command Unit.[221]

An Associate Professor of Radiology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, Stafford L. Warren, was commissioned as a colonel in the United States Army Medical Corps, and appointed as chief of the MED's Medical Section and Groves' medical advisor. Warren's initial task was to staff hospitals at Oak Ridge, Richland and Los Alamos.[222] The Medical Section was responsible for medical research, but also for the MED's health and safety programs. This presented an enormous challenge, because workers were handling a variety of toxic chemicals, using hazardous liquids and gases under high pressures, working with high voltages, and performing experiments involving explosives, not to mention the largely unknown dangers presented by radioactivity and handling fissile materials.[223] Yet in December 1945, the National Safety Council presented the Manhattan Project with the Award of Honor for Distinguished Service to Safety in recognition of its safety record. Between January 1943 and June 1945, there were 62 fatalities and 3,879 disabling injuries, which was about 62 percent below the rate of private industry.[224]

SecrecyA 1945 Life article estimated that before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings "[p]robably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved." The magazine wrote that the more than 100,000 others employed with the project "worked like moles in the dark". Warned that disclosing the project's secrets was punishable by 10 years in prison or a $10,000 ($131,000 today[1]) fine, they saw enormous quantities of raw materials enter factories with nothing coming out, and monitored "dials and switches while behind thick concrete walls mysterious reactions took place" without knowing the purpose of their jobs.[225][226][227][228][229]

Oak Ridge security personnel considered any private party with more than seven people as suspicious, and residents'--who believed that US government agents were secretly among them'--avoided repeatedly inviting the same guests. Although original residents of the area could be buried in existing cemeteries, every coffin was reportedly opened for inspection.[229] Everyone, including top military officials, and their automobiles were searched when entering and exiting project facilities. One Oak Ridge worker stated that "if you got inquisitive, you were called on the carpet within two hours by government secret agents. Usually those summoned to explain were then escorted bag and baggage to the gate and ordered to keep going." Nonetheless, despite being told that their work would help end the war and perhaps all future wars,[230] not seeing or understanding the results of their often tedious duties'--or even typical side effects of factory work such as smoke from smokestacks'--and the war in Europe ending without the use of their work, caused serious morale problems among workers and caused many rumors to spread. One manager stated after the war:[228]

Well it wasn't that the job was tough ... it was confusing. You see, no one knew what was being made in Oak Ridge, not even me, and a lot of the people thought they were wasting their time here. It was up to me to explain to the dissatisfied workers that they were doing a very important job. When they asked me what, I'd have to tell them it was a secret. But I almost went crazy myself trying to figure out what was going on.[228]

Another worker told of how, working in a laundry, she every day held "a special instrument" to uniforms and listened for "a clicking noise". She learned only after the war that she had been performing the important task of checking for radiation with a geiger counter. To improve morale among such workers Oak Ridge created an extensive system of intramural sports leagues, including 10 baseball teams, 81 softball teams, and 26 football teams.[228]

CensorshipVoluntary censorship of atomic information began before the Manhattan Project. After the start of the European war in 1939 American scientists began avoiding publishing military-related research, and in 1940 scientific journals began asking the National Academy of Sciences to clear articles. William L. Laurence of The New York Times, who wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post in September 1940 on atomic fission, later learned that government officials asked librarians nationwide in 1943 to withdraw the issue.[231] The Soviets noticed the silence, however. In April 1942 nuclear physicist Georgy Flyorov wrote to Josef Stalin on the absence of articles on nuclear fission in American journals; this resulted in the Soviet Union establishing its own atomic bomb project.[232]

The Manhattan Project operated under tight security lest its discovery induce Axis powers, especially Germany, to accelerate their own nuclear projects or undertake covert operations against the project.[233] The government's Office of Censorship, by contrast, relied on the press to comply with a voluntary code of conduct it published, and the project at first avoided notifying the office. By early 1943 newspapers began publishing reports of large construction in Tennessee and Washington based on public records, and the office began discussing with the project how to maintain secrecy. In June the Office of Censorship asked newspapers and broadcasters to avoid discussing "atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission, atomic splitting, or any of their equivalents. The use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials, heavy water, high voltage discharge equipment, cyclotrons." The office also asked to avoid discussion of "polonium, uranium, ytterbium, hafnium, protactinium, radium, rhenium, thorium, deuterium"; only uranium was sensitive, but was listed with other elements to hide its importance.[234][235]

Soviet spiesMain article: Atomic spiesThe prospect of sabotage was always present, and sometimes suspected when there were equipment failures. While there were some problems believed to be the result of careless or disgruntled employees, there were no confirmed instances of Axis-instigated sabotage.[236] However, on 10 March 1945, a Japanese fire balloon struck a power line, and the resulting power surge caused the three reactors at Hanford to be temporarily shut down.[237] With so many people involved, security was a difficult task. A special Counter Intelligence Corps detachment was formed to handle the project's security issues.[238] By 1943, it was clear that the Soviet Union was attempting to penetrate the project. Lieutenant Colonel Boris T. Pash, the head of the Counter Intelligence Branch of the Western Defense Command, investigated suspected Soviet espionage at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. Oppenheimer informed Pash that he had been approached by a fellow professor at Berkeley, Haakon Chevalier, about passing information to the Soviet Union.[239]

The most successful Soviet spy was Klaus Fuchs, a member of the British Mission who played an important part at Los Alamos.[240] The 1950 revelation of Fuchs' espionage activities damaged the United States' nuclear cooperation with Britain and Canada.[241] Subsequently, other instances of espionage were uncovered, leading to the arrest of Harry Gold, David Greenglass and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.[242] Other spies like George Koval and Theodore Hall remained unknown for decades.[243] The value of the espionage is difficult to quantify, as the principal constraint on the Soviet atomic bomb project was a shortage of uranium ore. The consensus is that espionage saved the Soviets one or two years of effort.[244]

Foreign intelligenceMain article: Alsos MissionIn addition to developing the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project was charged with gathering intelligence on the German nuclear energy project. It was believed that the Japanese nuclear weapons program was not far advanced because Japan had little access to uranium ore, but it was initially feared that Germany was very close to developing its own weapons. At the instigation of the Manhattan Project, a bombing and sabotage campaign was carried out against heavy water plants in German-occupied Norway.[245] A small mission was created, jointly staffed by the Office of Naval Intelligence, OSRD, the Manhattan Project, and Army Intelligence (G-2), to investigate enemy scientific developments. It was not restricted to those involving nuclear weapons.[246] The Chief of Army Intelligence, Major General George V. Strong, appointed Boris Pash to command the unit,[247] which was codenamed "Alsos", a Greek word meaning "grove".[248]

The Alsos Mission to Italy questioned staff of the physics laboratory at the University of Rome following the capture of the city in June 1944.[249] Meanwhile Pash formed a combined British and American Alsos mission in London under the command of Captain Horace K. Calvert to participate in Operation Overlord.[250] Groves considered the risk that the Germans might attempt to disrupt the Normandy landings with radioactive poisons was sufficient to warn General Dwight D. Eisenhower and send an officer to brief his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith.[251] Under the codename Operation Peppermint, special equipment was prepared and Chemical Warfare Service teams were trained in its use.[252]

Following in the wake of the advancing Allied armies, Pash and Calvert interviewed Fr(C)d(C)ric Joliot-Curie about the activities of German scientists. They spoke to officials at Union Mini¨re du Haut Katanga about uranium shipments to Germany. They tracked down 68 tons of ore in Belgium and 30 tons in France. The interrogation of German prisoners indicated that uranium and thorium were being processed in Oranienburg, 20 miles north of Berlin, so Groves arranged for it to be bombed on 15 March 1945.[253]

An Alsos team went to Stassfurt in the Soviet Occupation Zone and retrieved 11 tons of ore from WIFO.[254] In April 1945, Pash, in command of a composite force known as T-Force, conducted Operation Harborage, a sweep behind enemy lines of the cities of Hechingen, Bisingen and Haigerloch that were the heart of the German nuclear effort. T-Force captured the nuclear laboratories, documents, equipment and supplies, including heavy water and 1.5 tons of metallic uranium.[255][256]

Alsos teams rounded up German scientists including Kurt Diebner, Otto Hahn, Walther Gerlach, Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizs¤cker, who were taken to England where they were interned at Farm Hall, a bugged house in Godmanchester. After the bombs were detonated in Japan, the Germans were forced to confront the fact that the Allies had done what they could not.[257]

Bombing of Hiroshima and NagasakiPreparationsStarting in November 1943, the Army Air Forces Materiel Command at Wright Field, Ohio, began Silverplate, the codename modification of B-29s to carry the bombs. Test drops were carried out at Muroc Army Air Field, California, and the Naval Ordnance Test Station at Inyokern, California.[258] Groves met with the Chief of United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), General Henry H. Arnold, in March 1944 to discuss the delivery of the finished bombs to their targets.[259] The only Allied aircraft capable of carrying the 17-foot (5.2 m) long Thin Man or the 59-inch (150 cm) wide Fat Man was the British Avro Lancaster, but using a British aircraft would have caused difficulties with maintenance. Groves hoped that the American Boeing B-29 Superfortress could be modified to carry Thin Man by joining its two bomb bays together.[260] Arnold promised that no effort would be spared to modify B-29s to do the job, and designated Major General Oliver P. Echols as the USAAF liaison to the Manhattan Project. In turn, Echols named Colonel Roscoe C. Wilson as his alternate, and Wilson became Manhattan Project's main USAAF contact.[259] President Roosevelt instructed Groves that if the atomic bombs were ready before the war with Germany ended, he should be ready to drop them on Germany.[261]

The 509th Composite Group was activated on 17 December 1944 at Wendover Army Air Field, Utah, under the command of Colonel Paul W. Tibbets. This base, close to the border with Nevada, was codenamed "Kingman" or "W-47". Training was conducted at Wendover and at Batista Army Airfield, Cuba, where the 393d Bombardment Squadron practiced long-distance flights over water, and dropping dummy pumpkin bombs. A special unit known as Alberta was formed at Los Alamos under Captain William S. Parsons as part of the Manhattan Project to assist in preparing and delivering the bombs.[262] Commander Frederick L. Ashworth from Alberta met with Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz on Guam in February 1945 to inform him of the project. While he was there, Ashworth selected North Field on the Pacific Island Tinian as a base for the 509th Composite Group, and reserved space for the group and its buildings. The group deployed there in July 1945.[263] Farrell arrived at Tinian on 30 July as the Manhattan Project representative.[264]

Most of the components for Little Boy left San Francisco on the cruiser USS Indianapolis on 16 July and arrived on Tinian on 26 July. Four days later the ship was sunk by a Japanese submarine. The remaining components, which included six uranium-235 rings, were delivered by three C-54 Skymasters of the 509th Group's 320th Troop Carrier Squadron.[265] Two Fat Man assemblies travelled to Tinian in specially modified 509th Composite Group B-29s. The first plutonium core went in a special C-54.[266] A joint targeting committee of the Manhattan District and USAAF was established to determine which cities in Japan should be targets, and recommended Kokura, Hiroshima, Niigata and Kyoto. At this point, Secretary of WarHenry L. Stimson intervened, announcing that he would be making the targeting decision, and that he would not authorize the bombing of Kyoto on the grounds of its historical and religious significance. Groves therefore asked Arnold to remove Kyoto not just from the list of nuclear targets, but from targets for conventional bombing as well.[267] One of Kyoto's substitutes was Nagasaki.[268]

BombingsIn May 1945, the Interim Committee was created to advise on wartime and postwar use of nuclear energy. The committee was chaired by Stimson, with James F. Byrnes, a former US Senator soon to be Secretary of State, as President Harry S. Truman's personal representative; Ralph A. Bard, the Under Secretary of the Navy; William L. Clayton, the Assistant Secretary of State; Vannevar Bush; Karl T. Compton; James B. Conant; and George L. Harrison, an assistant to Stimson and president of New York Life Insurance Company. The Interim Committee in turn established a scientific panel consisting of Arthur Compton, Fermi, Lawrence and Oppenheimer to advise it on scientific issues. In its presentation to the Interim Committee, the scientific panel offered its opinion not just on the likely physical effects of an atomic bomb, but on its probable military and political impact.[269]

At the Potsdam Conference in Germany, Truman was informed that the Trinity test had been successful. He told Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, that the US had a new superweapon, without giving any details. This was the first official communication to the Soviet Union about the bomb, but Stalin already knew about it from spies.[270] With the authorization to use the bomb against Japan already given, no alternatives were considered after the Japanese rejection of the Potsdam Declaration.[271]

On 6 August 1945, the 393d Bombardment Squadron B-29 Enola Gay, piloted and commanded by Tibbets, lifted off with Parsons on board as weaponeer, and Little Boy in its bomb bay. Hiroshima, the headquarters of the 2nd General Army and Fifth Division and a port of embarkation, was the primary target of the mission, with Kokura and Nagasaki as alternatives. With Farrell's permission, Parsons completed the bomb assembly in the air to minimize the risks during takeoff.[272] The bomb detonated at an altitude of 1,750 feet (530 m) with a blast that was later estimated to be the equivalent of 13 kilotons of TNT.[273] An area of approximately 4.7 square miles (12 km2) was destroyed. Japanese officials determined that 69% of Hiroshima's buildings were destroyed and another 6''7% damaged. About 70,000 to 80,000 people, of whom 20,000 were Japanese soldiers, or some 30% of the population of Hiroshima, were killed immediately, and another 70,000 injured.[274][275]

On the morning of 9 August 1945, the B-29 Bockscar, piloted by the 393d Bombardment Squadron's commander, Major Charles W. Sweeney, lifted off with a Fat Man on board. This time, Ashworth served as weaponeer and Kokura was the primary target. Sweeney took off with the weapon already armed but with the electrical safety plugs still engaged. When they reached Kokura, they found cloud cover had obscured the city, prohibiting the visual attack required by orders. After three runs over the city, and with fuel running low, they headed for the secondary target, Nagasaki. Ashworth decided that a radar approach would be used if the target was obscured, but a last-minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed a visual approach as ordered. The Fat Man was dropped over the city's industrial valley midway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works in the south and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works in the north. The resulting explosion had a blast yield equivalent to 21 kilotons of TNT, roughly the same as the Trinity blast, but was confined to the Urakami Valley, and a major portion of the city was protected by the intervening hills, resulting in the destruction of about 44% of the city. The bombing also crippled the city's industrial production extensively and killed 23,200-28,200 Japanese industrial workers and 150 Japanese soldiers.[276] Overall, an estimated 35,000-40,000 people were killed and 60,000 injured.[277][278]

Groves expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use on 19 August, with three more in September and a further three in October.[279] Two more Fat Man assemblies were readied. The third core was scheduled to leave Kirtland Field for Tinian on 12 August.[278] Robert Bacher was packaging it at the Ice House at Los Alamos when he received word that the Japanese had initiated surrender negotiations.[280] Groves ordered the shipments suspended. On 11 August, he phoned Warren with orders to organize a survey team to report on the damage and radioactivity at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A party equipped with portable Geiger counters arrived in Hiroshima on 8 September headed by Farrell and Warren, with Japanese Rear Admiral Masao Tsuzuki, who acted as a translator. They remained in Hiroshima until 14 September and then surveyed Nagasaki from 19 September to 8 October.[281] This and other scientific missions to Japan would provide valuable scientific and historical data.[282]

The necessity of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became a subject of controversy among historians. Some questioned whether an "atomic diplomacy" would not have attained the same goals and disputed whether the bombings or the Soviet declaration of war on Japan was decisive.[283] The Franck Report was the most notable effort pushing for a demonstration but was turned down by the Interim Committee's scientific panel.[284] The Szilrd petition, drafted in July 1945 and signed by dozens of scientists working on the Manhattan Project, was a late attempt at warning President Harry S. Truman about his responsibility in using such weapons.[285][286]

After the warSeeing the work they had not understood produce the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs amazed the workers of the Manhattan Project as much as the rest of the world; newspapers in Oak Ridge announcing the Hiroshima bomb sold for $1 ($13 today[1]).[226][235] Although the bombs' existence was public secrecy continued, and many workers remained ignorant of their jobs; one stated in 1946, "I don't know what the hell I'm doing besides looking into a '--'--'-- and turning a '--'--'-- alongside a '--'--'--. I don't know anything about it, and there's nothing to say". Many residents continued to avoid discussion of "the stuff" in ordinary conversation despite it being the reason for their town's existence.[229]

In anticipation of the bombings, Groves had Henry DeWolf Smyth prepare a history for public consumption. Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, better known as the "Smyth Report", was released to the public on 12 August 1945.[287] Groves and Nichols presented Army''Navy "E" Awards to key contractors, whose involvement had hitherto been secret. Over 20 awards of the Presidential Medal for Merit were made to key contractors and scientists, including Bush and Oppenheimer. Military personnel received the Legion of Merit, including the commander of the Women's Army Corps detachment, Captain Arlene G. Scheidenhelm.[288]

At Hanford, plutonium production fell off as Reactors B, D and F wore out, "poisoned" by fission products and swelling of the graphite moderator known as the Wigner effect. The swelling damaged the charging tubes where the uranium was irradiated to produce plutonium, rendering them unusable. In order to maintain the supply of polonium for the urchin initiators, production was curtailed and the oldest unit, B pile, was closed down so at least one reactor would be available in the future. Research continued, with DuPont and the Metallurgical Laboratory developing a redox solvent extraction process as an alternative plutonium extraction technique to the bismuth phosphate process, which left unspent uranium in a state from which it could not easily be recovered.[289]

Bomb engineering was carried out by the Z Division, named for its director, Dr. Jerrold R. Zacharias from Los Alamos. Z Division was initially located at Wendover Field but moved to Oxnard Field, New Mexico, in September 1945 to be closer to Los Alamos. This marked the beginning of Sandia Base. Nearby Kirtland Field was used as a B-29 base for aircraft compatibility and drop tests.[290] By October, all the staff and facilities at Wendover had been transferred to Sandia.[291] As reservist officers were demobilized, they were replaced by about fifty hand-picked regular officers.[292]

Nichols recommended that S-50 and the Alpha tracks at Y-12 be closed down. This was done in September.[293] Although performing better than ever,[294] the Alpha tracks could not compete with K-25 and the new K-27, which had commenced operation in January 1946. In December, the Y-12 plant was closed, thereby cutting the Tennessee Eastman payroll from 8,600 to 1,500 and saving $2 million a month.[295]

Nowhere was demobilization more of a problem than at Los Alamos, where there was an exodus of talent. Much remained to be done. The bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were like laboratory pieces; work would be required to make them simpler, safer and more reliable. Implosion methods needed to be developed for uranium in place of the wasteful gun method, and composite uranium-plutonium cores were needed now that plutonium was in short supply because of the problems with the reactors. However, uncertainty about the future of the laboratory made it hard to induce people to stay. Oppenheimer returned to his job at the University of California and Groves appointed Norris Bradbury as an interim replacement. In fact, Bradbury would remain in the post for the next 25 years.[291] Groves attempted to combat the dissatisfaction caused by the lack of amenities with a construction program that included an improved water supply, three hundred houses, and recreation facilities.[289]

Two Fat Man''type detonations were conducted at Bikini Atoll in July 1946 as part of Operation Crossroads to investigate the effect of nuclear weapons on warships.[296] Able was detonated on 1 July 1946. The more spectacular Baker was detonated underwater on 25 July 1946.[297]

After the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a number of Manhattan Project physicists founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which began as an emergency action undertaken by scientists who saw urgent need for an immediate educational program about atomic weapons.[298] In the face of the destructiveness of the new weapons and in anticipation of the nuclear arms race several project members including Bohr, Bush and Conant expressed the view that it was necessary to reach agreement on international control of nuclear research and atomic weapons. The Baruch Plan, unveiled in a speech to the newly formed United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) in June 1946, proposed the establishment of an international atomic development authority, but was not adopted.[299]

Following a domestic debate over the permanent management of the nuclear program, the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was created by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 to take over the functions and assets of the Manhattan Project. It established civilian control over atomic development, and separated the development, production and control of atomic weapons from the military. Military aspects were taken over by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP).[300] Although the Manhattan Project ceased to exist on 31 December 1946, the Manhattan District would remain until it too was abolished on 15 August 1947.[301]

CostManhattan Project costs through 31 December 1945[302]SiteCost (1945 USD)Cost (2015 USD) % of totalOak Ridge$1.19 billion$15.6 billion700162900000000000062.9%Hanford$390 million$5.11 billion700120600000000000020.6%Special operating materials$103 million$1.35 billion70005500000000000005.5%Los Alamos$74.1 million$970 million70003900000000000003.9%Research and development$69.7 million$913 million70003700000000000003.7%Government overhead$37.3 million$488 million70002000000000000002.0%Heavy water plants$26.8 million$351 million70001400000000999991.4%Total$1.89 billion$24.8 billionThe project expenditure through 1 October 1945 was $1.845 billion, equivalent to less than nine days of wartime spending, and was $2.191 billion when the AEC assumed control on 1 January 1947. Total allocation was $2.4 billion. Over 90% of the cost was for building plants and producing the fissionable materials, and less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.[303][304]

A total of four weapons (the Trinity gadget, Little Boy, Fat Man, and an unused bomb) were produced by the end of 1945, making the average cost per bomb around $500 million in 1945 dollars. By comparison, the project's total cost by the end of 1945 was about 90% of the total spent on the production of US small arms (not including ammunition) and 34% of the total spent on US tanks during the same period.[302]

LegacyThe political and cultural impacts of the development of nuclear weapons were profound and far-reaching. William Laurence of the New York Times, the first to use the phrase "Atomic Age",[305] became the official correspondent for the Manhattan Project in spring 1945. In 1943 and 1944 he unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the Office of Censorship to permit writing about the explosive potential of uranium, and government officials felt that he had earned the right to report on the biggest secret of the war. Laurence witnessed both the Trinity test[306] and the bombing of Nagasaki and wrote the official press releases prepared for them. He went on to write a series of articles extolling the virtues of the new weapon. His reporting before and after the bombings helped to spur public awareness of the potential of nuclear technology and motivated its development in the United States and the Soviet Union.[307]

The wartime Manhattan Project left a legacy in the form of the network of national laboratories: the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and Ames Laboratory. Two more were established by Groves soon after the war, the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, New York, and the Sandia National Laboratories at Albuquerque, New Mexico. Groves allocated $72 million to them for research activities in fiscal year 1946''1947.[308] They would be in the vanguard of the kind of large-scale research that Alvin Weinberg, the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, would call Big Science.[309]

The Naval Research Laboratory had long been interested in the prospect of using nuclear power for warship propulsion, and sought to create its own nuclear project. In May 1946, Nimitz, now Chief of Naval Operations, decided that the Navy should instead work with the Manhattan Project. A group of naval officers were assigned to Oak Ridge, the most senior of whom was Captain Hyman G. Rickover, who became assistant director there. They immersed themselves in the study of nuclear energy, laying the foundations for a nuclear-powered navy.[310] A similar group of Air Force personnel arrived at Oak Ridge in September 1946 with the aim of developing nuclear aircraft.[311] Their Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft (NEPA) project ran into formidable technical difficulties, and was ultimately cancelled.[312]

The ability of the new reactors to create radioactive isotopes in previously unheard-of quantities sparked a revolution in nuclear medicine in the immediate postwar years. Starting in mid-1946, Oak Ridge began distributing radioisotopes to hospitals and universities. Most of the orders were for iodine-131 and phosphorus-32, which were used in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. In addition to medicine, isotopes were also used in biological, industrial and agricultural research.[313]

On handing over control to the Atomic Energy Commission, Groves bid farewell to the people who had worked on the Manhattan Project:

Five years ago, the idea of Atomic Power was only a dream. You have made that dream a reality. You have seized upon the most nebulous of ideas and translated them into actualities. You have built cities where none were known before. You have constructed industrial plants of a magnitude and to a precision heretofore deemed impossible. You built the weapon which ended the War and thereby saved countless American lives. With regard to peacetime applications, you have raised the curtain on vistas of a new world.[314]

NotesFootnotes

^The reaction Teller was most concerned with was: 147N + 147N '†' 2412Mg + 42He (alpha particle) + 17.7 MeV.[26]^In Bethe's account, the possibility of this ultimate catastrophe came up again in 1975 when it appeared in a magazine article by H.C. Dudley, who got the idea from a report by Pearl Buck of an interview she had with Arthur Compton in 1959. The worry was not entirely extinguished in some people's minds until the Trinity test.[29]^Natural self-sustaining nuclear reactions have occurred in the distant past.[96]^The allusion here is to the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus, who reached the Caribbean in 1492.Citations

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V-123.^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 301''307^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 148''154^Hawkins, Truslow & Smith 1961, p. 203.^Hansen 1995a, p. I-298.^Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 235.^Gilbert 1969, pp. 3''4.^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 308''310^Hewlett & Anderson 1962, pp. 244''245.^Baker, Hecker & Harbur 1983, pp. 144''145^Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 288^Hoddeson et al. 1993, p. 290^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 330''331^Jones 1985, p. 465.^Hewlett & Anderson 1962, pp. 318''319.^Jones 1985, pp. 478''481.^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 174''175^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 365''367^ abJones 1985, p. 512.^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 360''362^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 367''370^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 372''374^Jones 1985, pp. 514''517.^Jones 1985, p. 344.^Jones 1985, p. 353.^Jones 1985, pp. 349''350.^Ulam 1976, pp. 143''144.^Jones 1985, p. 350.^Jones 1985, p. 358.^Jones 1985, p. 361.^Nichols 1987, p. 123.^Jones 1985, p. 410.^Jones 1985, p. 430.^Wickware, Francis Sill (20 August 1945). "Manhattan Project: Its Scientists Have Harnessed Nature's Basic Force". Life. p. 91. Retrieved 25 November 2011. ^ ab"Mystery Town Cradled Bomb: 75,000 in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Worked Hard and Wondered Long about Their Secret Job". Life. 20 August 1945. p. 94. Retrieved 25 November 2011. ^"The Secret City / Calutron operators at their panels, in the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II.". The Atlantic. 25 June 2012. Retrieved 25 June 2012. ^ abcdWellerstein, Alex (16 April 2012). "Oak Ridge Confidential, or Baseball for Bombs". Restricted Data. Retrieved 7 April 2013. ^ abcWickware, Francis Sill (1946-09-09). "Oak Ridge". Life. p. 2. Retrieved 17 December 2014. ^Warren, Cecil (7 August 1945). "Atomic Bomb Secrecy Related By Ex-Worker". The Miami News. pp. 1''A. Retrieved 22 August 2013. ^Sweeney 2001, pp. 196''198.^Holloway 1994, pp. 76''79.^Jones 1985, pp. 253''255.^Sweeney 2001, pp. 198''200.^ ab"No News Leaked Out About Bomb". Lawrence Journal-World. Associated Press. 1945-08-08. p. 5. Retrieved April 15, 2012. ^Jones 1985, pp. 263''264.^Jones 1985, p. 267.^Jones 1985, pp. 258''260.^Jones 1985, pp. 261''265.^Groves 1962, pp. 142''145.^Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 312''314.^Hewlett & Duncan 1969, p. 472.^Broad, William J. (12 November 2007). "A Spy's Path: Iowa to A-Bomb to Kremlin Honor". The New York Times. pp. 1''2. Retrieved 2 July 2011. ^Holloway 1994, pp. 222''223.^Groves 1962, pp. 191''192.^Groves 1962, pp. 187''190.^Jones 1985, p. 281.^Groves 1962, p. 191.^Jones 1985, p. 282.^Groves 1962, pp. 194''196.^Groves 1962, pp. 200''206.^Jones 1985, pp. 283''285.^Jones 1985, pp. 286''288.^Groves 1962, p. 237.^Jones 1985, pp. 289''290.^Goudsmit 1947, pp. 174''176.^Groves 1962, pp. 333''340.^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 380''381^ abGroves 1962, pp. 253''255.^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 379''380^Groves 1962, p. 184.^Groves 1962, pp. 259''262.^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 386''388^Groves 1962, p. 311.^Campbell 2005, pp. 39''40.^Groves 1962, p. 341.^Groves 1962, pp. 268''276.^Groves 1962, p. 308.^Jones 1985, pp. 530''532.^Holloway 1994, pp. 116''117.^"Potsdam and the Final Decision to Use the Bomb". The Manhattan Project: An Interactive History. US Department of Energy, Office of History and Heritage Resources. Archived from the original on 22 November 2010. Retrieved 19 December 2010. ^Groves 1962, pp. 315''319.^Hoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 392''393^"U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey: The Effects of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki". Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. 19 June 1946. pp. 9, 36. Retrieved 15 March 2009. ^Alan Axelrod (May 6, 2008). The Real History of World War II: A New Look at the Past. Sterling. p. 350. ^Nuke-Rebuke: Writers & Artists Against Nuclear Energy & Weapons (The Contemporary anthology series). The Spirit That Moves Us Press. May 1, 1984. pp. 22''29. ^Groves 1962, pp. 343''346.^ abHoddeson et al. 1993, pp. 396''397^"The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, A Collection of Primary Sources". National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 162. George Washington University. 13 August 1945. ^Nichols 1987, pp. 215''216.^Ahnfeldt 1966, pp. 886''889.^Home & Low 1993, p. 537.^"The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, A Collection of Primary Sources". National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 162. George Washington University. 27 April 2007. ^Frisch 1970, pp. 107''115.^Hewlett & Anderson 1962, pp. 399''400.^July 1945&documentid=79&studycollectionid=abomb&pagenumber=1 "Petition to the President of the United States, 17 July 1945. Miscellaneous Historical Documents Collection". Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. Retrieved 20 October 2012. ^Groves 1962, pp. 348''362.^Nichols 1987, p. 226.^ abJones 1985, pp. 592''593.^Hansen 1995b, p. V-152.^ abHewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 625.^Nichols 1987, pp. 225''226.^Nichols 1987, pp. 216''217.^Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 624.^Hewlett & Anderson 1962, pp. 630, 646^Nichols 1987, p. 234.^Jones 1985, p. 594.^Grodzins & Rabinowitch 1963, p. vii.^Gosling 1994, pp. 55''57.^Groves 1962, pp. 394''398.^Jones 1985, p. 600.^ abHewlett & Anderson 1962, pp. 723''724.^Nichols 1987, pp. 34''35.^"Atomic Bomb Seen as Cheap at Price". Edmonton Journal. 7 August 1945. p. 1. Retrieved 1 January 2012. ^Laurence, William L. (26 September 1945). "Drama of the Atomic Bomb Found Climax in July 16 Test". The New York Times. Retrieved 1 October 2012. ^Sweeney 2001, pp. 204''205.^Holloway 1994, pp. 59''60.^Hewlett & Anderson 1962, pp. 633''637.^Weinberg 1961, p. 161.^Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 74''76.^Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 72''74.^Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 490''493, 514''515^Hewlett & Duncan 1969, pp. 252''253.^Hewlett & Anderson 1962, p. 655.ReferencesGeneral, administrative, and diplomatic historiesBernstein, Barton J. (June 1976). "The Uneasy Alliance: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Atomic Bomb, 1940''1945". The Western Political Quarterly (University of Utah) 29 (2): 202''230. doi:10.2307/448105. JSTOR 448105. Campbell, Richard H. (2005). The Silverplate Bombers: A History and Registry of the Enola Gay and Other B-29s Configured to Carry Atomic Bombs. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-2139-8. OCLC 58554961. Fine, Lenore; Remington, Jesse A. (1972). The Corps of Engineers: Construction in the United States. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History. OCLC 834187. Retrieved 25 August 2013. Frisch, David H. (June 1970). "Scientists and the Decision to Bomb Japan". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science) 26 (6): pp. 107''115. Gilbert, Keith V. (1969). History of the Dayton Project. Miamisburg, Ohio: Mound Laboratory, Atomic Energy Commission. OCLC 650540359. Retrieved 31 October 2014. Gosling, Francis George (1994). The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb. Washington, DC: United States Department of Energy, History Division. OCLC 637052193. Gowing, Margaret (1964). Britain and Atomic Energy, 1935''1945. London: Macmillan Publishing. OCLC 3195209. Grodzins, Morton; Rabinowitch, Eugene, eds. (1963). The Atomic Age: Scientists in National and World Affairs. New York: Basic Book Publishing. OCLC 15058256. Hewlett, Richard G.; Anderson, Oscar E. (1962). The New World, 1939''1946. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-520-07186-7. OCLC 637004643. Retrieved 26 March 2013. Hewlett, Richard G.; Duncan, Francis (1969). Atomic Shield, 1947''1952. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-520-07187-5. OCLC 3717478. Holloway, David (1994). Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939''1956. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-06056-4. OCLC 29911222. Howes, Ruth H.; Herzenberg, Caroline L. (1999). Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. ISBN 1-56639-719-7. OCLC 49569088. Hunner, Jon (2004). Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3891-6. OCLC 154690200. Johnson, Charles; Jackson, Charles (1981). City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942''1946. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 0-87049-303-5. OCLC 6331350. Jones, Vincent (1985). Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History. OCLC 10913875. Retrieved 25 August 2013. Rhodes, Richard (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-44133-7. OCLC 13793436. Stacey, C. P. (1970). Arms, Men and Government: The War Policies of Canada, 1939 '' 1945. The Queen's Printer by authority of the Minister of National Defence. Sweeney, Michael S. (2001). Secrets of Victory: The Office of Censorship and the American Press and Radio in World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2598-0. Villa, Brian L. (1981). "Chapter 11: Alliance Politics and Atomic Collaboration, 1941''1943". In Sidney, Aster. The Second World War as a National Experience: Canada. The Canadian Committee for the History of the Second World War, Department of National Defence. Retrieved 8 December 2014. Williams, Mary H. (1960). Chronology 1941''1945. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army. Technical historiesAhnfeldt, Arnold Lorentz, ed. (1966). Radiology in World War II. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Surgeon General, Department of the Army. OCLC 630225. Baker, Richard D.; Hecker, Siegfried S.; Harbur, Delbert R. (1983). Plutonium: A Wartime Nightmare but a Metallurgist's Dream. Los Alamos Science (Winter/Spring) (Los Alamos National Laboratory). pp. 142''151. Retrieved 22 November 2010. Hanford Cultural and Historic Resources Program, U.S. Department of Energy (2002). History of the Plutonium Production Facilities, 1943''1990. Richland, Washington: Hanford Site Historic District. OCLC 52282810. Hansen, Chuck (1995a). Volume I: The Development of US Nuclear Weapons. Swords of Armageddon: US Nuclear Weapons Development since 1945. Sunnyvale, California: Chukelea Publications. ISBN 978-0-9791915-1-0. OCLC 231585284. Hansen, Chuck (1995b). Volume V: US Nuclear Weapons Histories. Swords of Armageddon: US Nuclear Weapons Development since 1945. Sunnyvale, California: Chukelea Publications. ISBN 978-0-9791915-0-3. OCLC 231585284. Hawkins, David; Truslow, Edith C.; Smith, Ralph Carlisle (1961). Manhattan District history, Project Y, the Los Alamos story. Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers. ISBN 978-0-938228-08-0. Retrieved 20 February 2014. Originally published as Los Alamos Report LAMS-2532 Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (1993). Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943''1945. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44132-3. OCLC 26764320. Home, R. W.; Low, Morris F. (September 1993). "Postwar Scientic Intelligence Missions to Japan". Isis (University of Chicago Press on behalf of History of Science Society) 84 (3): pp. 527''537. doi:10.1086/356550. JSTOR 235645. Ruhoff, John; Fain, Pat (June 1962). The First Fifty Critical days. Mallinckrodt Uranium Division News. Vol. 7 (Nos 3 and 4) (St. Louis: Mallinckrodt Incorporated). Retrieved 30 October 2010. Serber, Robert; Rhodes, Richard (1992). The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07576-5. OCLC 23693470. (Available on Wikimedia Commons)Smyth, Henry DeWolf (1945). Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: the Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940''1945. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. OCLC 770285. Thayer, Harry (1996). Management of the Hanford Engineer Works In World War II: How the Corps, DuPont and the Metallurgical Laboratory Fast Tracked the Original Plutonium Works. New York: American Society of Civil Engineers Press. ISBN 0-7844-0160-8. OCLC 34323402. Waltham, Chris (20 June 2002). An Early History of Heavy Water. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of British Columbia. Retrieved 30 October 2010. Weinberg, Alvin M. (21 July 1961). "Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States". Science, New Series (American Association for the Advancement of Science) 134 (3473): pp. 161''164. Bibcode:1961Sci...134..161W. doi:10.1126/science.134.3473.161. JSTOR 1708292. Participant accountsExternal links

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 04:06

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 03:28

The Obama administration is amending its regulations for weapons sales to allow the export of armed military drones to friendly nations and allies.

The State Department said Tuesday the new policy would allow foreign governments that meet certain requirements '-- and pledge not to use the unmanned aircraft illegally '-- to buy the vehicles that have played a critical but controversial role in combating terrorism and are increasingly used for other purposes. Recipient countries would be required to sign end-use statements certifying that the drones would not be used for unlawful surveillance or force against domestic populations and would only be used in internationally sanctioned military operations, such as self-defense.

Each sale would be reviewed individually and the pledges would be monitored for compliance, the department said in a statement.

Previously, drone transfers had been governed by regulations that presumed that requests would be denied except in highly unusual circumstances. Certain armed drones '-- those with a range of 186 miles (300 kilometers) and able to carry a payload of 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) '-- will still be subject to those restrictions.

The administration said it was making the changes to ensure that military drones are used responsibly and legally. The new policy is also part of a broader U.S. strategy to cooperate with other nations to formulate global standards for the sale, transfer and use of unmanned aerial systems, it said.

The United States has used drone campaigns in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere to target terrorist leaders. The campaigns are run in parallel by the CIA and the Defense Department, and have been sources of controversy because of claims that innocent people have been killed along with targeted individuals.

Drones have become one of the most critical tools on the battlefield, providing troops with eyes in the sky and a weapons platform that can fly around the clock over hotspots and fire missiles without endangering a pilot.

Over the course of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, commanders' requests for drones skyrocketed and the Pentagon has struggled to keep up with the demand.

The U.S. also has shouldered the bulk of the burden in recent military operations such as Libya, Iraq and Syria, providing unmanned aircraft for surveillance and intelligence gathering as well as armed drones for airstrikes when needed. And Pentagon and Air Force officials have long observed that they have been pressed to get drones to all the missions and locations where they are needed.

Providing unmanned aircraft to allies will relieve some of that pressure. Officials did not identify any specific countries that could be in line for drone exports, but some potential nations would include Israel, Egypt and even some of the eastern European countries who have been concerned about the rise and threat of Russia.

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Tue, 17 Feb 2015 13:36

As the number of Ebola cases declines, pharma company Chimerix is unable to find sufficient patients for its trial in Liberia of the antiviral drug brincidofovir.

As the Ebola epidemic in West Africa appears to be slowing down, one result is that Durham, North Carolina-based Chimerix has found it difficult to fill a trial intended to test the antiviral drug brincidofovir at a clinic in Monrovia, Liberia.The current rate of Ebola is that there has been fewer than 100 new cases per week in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. Chimerix has treated fewer than 10 patients since the study began on January 2, 2015. Due to this low take up, the company says it is canceling the study.Chimerix President and CEO M. Michelle Berrey told The New York Times: ''Without having enough patients there to make any conclusions, it wasn't feasible for us to push forward.''Chimerix is not the only drug company struggling to enroll Ebola patients. Organizers of a Guinean trial to test Fujifilm's antiviral drug Avigan are looking to include additional clinics in order to find enough patients.Meanwhile, as research on the Ebola virus continues, researchers are seeking for more data. Emma Thomson of the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research told BBC News: ''A lot of Ebola sequencing has happened but the data hasn't always been uploaded. It's an international emergency so people need to get the data out there to allow it to be analyzed in different ways by different labs.''These thoughts were echoed by Paul Hunter, a professor of health protection at the University of East Anglia, in the same BBC feature. He said: ''It would be tragic if, during a crisis like this, data was not being adequately shared with the public health community. The rapid sharing of data could help enable more rapid control of the outbreak.''

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 07:26

WASHINGTON, D.C. '' Last week some 80,000 emails to and from former IRS executive Lois Lerner were recovered by the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) watchdog agency, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Both the former IRS Exempt Organizations Division Director Lois Lerner and current IRS Commissioner John Koskien have testified before Congress that these emails were ''permanently lost'' and they went to ''great lengths'' to recover them. The newfound emails that were previously said to be ''destroyed'' raise serious questions and concerns about the truthfulness of the IRS throughout the investigation. Below is Congressman Westmoreland's statement.

''It's time for the administration to come clean,'' stated Westmoreland. ''It is very obvious the IRS is attempting to cover something up. Their definition of 'great lengths' must be vastly different than mine, and fits in the pattern of the administration's constant inability to produce documents to Congress. The American people deserve to know the truth about this targeting scandal and I hope that these 80,000 emails will provide answers to two year old questions.

''Congress has a constitutional responsibility to provide oversight of the Executive Branch and to seek the truth on behalf of the American people. That is a responsibility I take very seriously. This administration has been ridden with scandals and cover ups, and my colleagues and I will continue to search for the truth to hold those involved responsible.''

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Wed, 18 Feb 2015 20:12

Five years ago I was invited to become the chief political commentator of the Telegraph. It was a job I was very proud to accept. The Telegraph has long been the most important conservative-leaning newspaper in Britain, admired as much for its integrity as for its superb news coverage. When I joined the Telegraph had just broken the MPs' expenses scandal, the most important political scoop of the 21st century.

I was very conscious that I was joining a formidable tradition of political commentary. I spent my summer holiday before taking up my duties as columnist reading the essays of the great Peter Utley, edited by Charles Moore and Simon Heffer, two other masters of the art.

No one has ever expressed quite as well as Utley the quiet decency and pragmatism of British conservatism. The Mail is raucous and populist, while the Times is proud to swing with the wind as the voice of the official class. The Telegraph stood in a different tradition. It is read by the nation as a whole, not just by the City and Westminster. It is confident of its own values. It has long been famous for the accuracy of its news reporting. I imagine its readers to be country solicitors, struggling small businessmen, harassed second secretaries in foreign embassies, schoolteachers, military folk, farmers'--decent people with a stake in the country.

My grandfather, Lt Col Tom Oborne DSO, had been a Telegraph reader. He was also a churchwarden and played a role in the Petersfield Conservative Association. He had a special rack on the breakfast table and would read the paper carefully over his bacon and eggs, devoting special attention to the leaders. I often thought about my grandfather when I wrote my Telegraph columns.

'You don't know what you are fucking talking about'Circulation was falling fast when I joined the paper in September 2010, and I suspect this panicked the owners. Waves of sackings started, and the management made it plain that it believed the future of the British press to be digital. Murdoch MacLennan, the chief executive, invited me to lunch at the Goring Hotel near Buckingham Palace, where Telegraph executives like to do their business. I urged him not to take the newspaper itself for granted, pointing out that it still had a very healthy circulation of more than half a million. I added that our readers were loyal, that the paper was still very profitable and that the owners had no right to destroy it.

The sackings continued. A little while later I met Mr MacLennan by chance in the queue of mourners outside Margaret Thatcher's funeral and once again urged him not to take Telegraph readers for granted. He replied: ''You don't know what you are fucking talking about.''

Events at the Telegraph became more and more dismaying. In January 2014 the editor, Tony Gallagher, was fired. He had been an excellent editor, well respected by staff. Mr Gallagher was replaced by an American called Jason Seiken, who took up a position called 'Head of Content.' In the 81 years between 1923 and 2004 the Telegraph had six editors, all of them towering figures: Arthur Watson, Colin Coote, Maurice Green, Bill Deedes, Max Hastings and Charles Moore. Since the Barclay Brothers purchased the paper 11 years ago there have been roughly six more, though it is hard to be certain since with the arrival of Mr Seiken the title of editor was abolished, then replaced by a Head of Content (Monday to Friday). There were three editors (or Heads of Content) in 2014 alone.

For the last 12 months matters have got much, much worse. The foreign desk'--magnificent under the leadership of David Munk and David Wastell'--has been decimated. As all reporters are aware, no newspaper can operate without skilled sub-editors. Half of these have been sacked, and the chief sub, Richard Oliver, has left.

Solecisms, unthinkable until very recently, are now commonplace. Recently readers were introduced to someone called the Duke of Wessex. Prince Edward is the Earl of Wessex. There was a front page story about deer-hunting. It was actually about deer-stalking, a completely different activity. Obviously the management don't care about nice distinctions like this. But the readers do, and the Telegraph took great care to get these things right until very recently.

The arrival of Mr Seiken coincided with the arrival of the click culture. Stories seemed no longer judged by their importance, accuracy or appeal to those who actually bought the paper. The more important measure appeared to be the number of online visits. On 22 September Telegraph online ran a story about a woman with three breasts. One despairing executive told me that it was known this was false even before the story was published. I have no doubt it was published in order to generate online traffic, at which it may have succeeded. I am not saying that online traffic is unimportant, but over the long term, however, such episodes inflict incalculable damage on the reputation of the paper.

Open for business?With the collapse in standards has come a most sinister development. It has long been axiomatic in quality British journalism that the advertising department and editorial should be kept rigorously apart. There is a great deal of evidence that, at the Telegraph, this distinction has collapsed.

Late last year I set to work on a story about the international banking giant HSBC. Well-known British Muslims had received letters out of the blue from HSBC informing them that their accounts had been closed. No reason was given, and it was made plain that there was no possibility of appeal. "It's like having your water cut off," one victim told me.

When I submitted it for publication on the Telegraph website, I was at first told there would be no problem. When it was not published I made enquiries. I was fobbed off with excuses, then told there was a legal problem. When I asked the legal department, the lawyers were unaware of any difficulty. When I pushed the point, an executive took me aside and said that "there is a bit of an issue" with HSBC. Eventually I gave up in despair and offered the article to openDemocracy. It can be read here.

I researched the newspaper's coverage of HSBC. I learnt that Harry Wilson, the admirable banking correspondent of the Telegraph, had published an online story about HSBC based on a report from a Hong Kong analyst who had claimed there was a 'black hole' in the HSBC accounts. This story was swiftly removed from the Telegraph website, even though there were no legal problems. When I asked HSBC whether the bank had complained about Wilson's article, or played any role in the decision to remove it, the bank declined to comment. Mr Wilson's contemporaneous tweets referring to the story can be found here. The story itself, however, is no longer available on the website, as anybody trying to follow through the link can discover. Mr Wilson rather bravely raised this issue publicly at the 'town hall meeting' when Jason Seiken introduced himself to staff. He has since left the paper.

Then, on 4 November 2014, a number of papers reported a blow to HSBC profits as the bank set aside more than £1 billion for customer compensation and an investigation into the rigging of currency markets. This story was the city splash in the Times, Guardian and Mail, making a page lead in the Independent. I inspected the Telegraph coverage. It generated five paragraphs in total on page 5 of the business section.

The reporting of HSBC is part of a wider problem. On 10 May last year the Telegraph ran a long feature on Cunard's Queen Mary II liner on the news review page. This episode looked to many like a plug for an advertiser on a page normally dedicated to serious news analysis. I again checked and certainly Telegraph competitors did not view Cunard's liner as a major news story. Cunard is an important Telegraph advertiser.

The paper's comment on last year's protests in Hong Kong was bizarre. One would have expected theTelegraph of all papers to have taken a keen interest and adopted a robust position. Yet (in sharp contrast to competitors like the Times)I could not find a single leader on the subject.

At the start of December the Financial Times, the Times and the Guardian all wrote powerful leaders on the refusal by the Chinese government to allow a committee of British MPs into Hong Kong. The Telegraph remained silent. I can think of few subjects which anger and concern Telegraph readers more.

On 15 September the Telegraph published a commentary by the Chinese ambassador, just before the lucrative China Watch supplement. The headline of the ambassador's article was beyond parody: 'Let's not allow Hong Kong to come between us'. On 17 September there was a four-page fashion pull-out in the middle of the news run, granted more coverage than the Scottish referendum. The Tesco false accounting story on 23 September was covered only in the business section. By contrast it was the splash, inside spread and leader in the Mail. Not that the Telegraph is short of Tesco coverage. Tesco pledging £10m to fight cancer, an inside peak at Tesco's £35m jet and 'Meet the cat that has lived in Tesco for 4 years' were all deemed newsworthy.

There are other very troubling cases, many of them set out in Private Eye, which has been a major source of information for Telegraph journalists wanting to understand what is happening on their paper. There was no avoiding the impression that something had gone awry with the Telegraph's news judgment. At this point I wrote a long letter to Murdoch MacLennan setting out all my concerns about the newspaper, and handing in my notice. I copied this letter to the Telegraph chairman, Aidan Barclay.

I received a cursory response from Mr Barclay. He wrote that he hoped I could resolve my differences with Murdoch MacLennan. I duly went to see the chief executive in mid-December. He was civil, served me tea and asked me to take off my jacket. He said that I was a valued writer, and said that he wanted me to stay.

I expressed all of my concerns about the direction of the paper. I told him that I was not leaving to join another paper. I was resigning as a matter of conscience. Mr MacLennan agreed that advertising was allowed to affect editorial, but was unapologetic, saying that ''it was not as bad as all that'' and adding that there was a long history of this sort of thing at the Telegraph.

I have since consulted Charles Moore, the last editor of the Telegraph before the Barclays bought the paper in 2004. Mr Moore confessed that the published accounts of Hollinger Inc, then the holding company for the Telegraph, did not receive the scrutiny they deserved. But no newspaper in history has ever given an unfavourable gloss on its owner's accounts. Beyond that, Mr Moore told me, there had been no advertising influence on the paper's news coverage.

After my meeting with Mr MacLennan I received a letter from the Telegraph saying that the paper had accepted my letter of resignation, but welcomed my offer to work out my six-month notice period. However in mid January I was asked to meet a Telegraph executive, this time over tea at the Goring Hotel. He told me that my weekly column would be discontinued and there had been a "parting of the ways".

He stressed, however, that the Telegraph would continue to honour my contract until it ran out in May. For my part I said that I would leave quietly. I had no desire to damage the newspaper. For all its problems it continues to employ a large number of very fine writers. They have mortgages and families. They are doing a fine job in very trying circumstances. I prepared myself mentally for the alluring prospect of several months paid gardening leave.

Story, what story?That was how matters stood when, on Monday of last week, BBC Panorama ran its story about HSBC and its Swiss banking arm, alleging a wide-scale tax evasion scheme, while the Guardian and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published their 'HSBC files'. All newspapers realised at once that this was a major event. The FT splashed on it for two days in a row, while the Times and the Mail gave it solid coverage spread over several pages.

You needed a microscope to find the Telegraph coverage: nothing on Monday, six slim paragraphs at the bottom left of page two on Tuesday, seven paragraphs deep in the business pages on Wednesday. The Telegraph's reporting only looked up when the story turned into claims that there might be questions about the tax affairs of people connected to the Labour party.

After a lot of agony I have come to the conclusion that I have a duty to make all this public. There are two powerful reasons. The first concerns the future of the Telegraph under the Barclay Brothers. It might sound a pompous thing to say, but I believe the newspaper is a significant part of Britain's civic architecture. It is the most important public voice of civilised, sceptical conservatism.

Telegraph readers are intelligent, sensible, well-informed people. They buy the newspaper because they feel that they can trust it. If advertising priorities are allowed to determine editorial judgments, how can readers continue to feel this trust? The Telegraph's recent coverage of HSBC amounts to a form of fraud on its readers. It has been placing what it perceives to be the interests of a major international bank above its duty to bring the news to Telegraph readers. There is only one word to describe this situation: terrible. Imagine if the BBC'--so often the object of Telegraph attack'--had conducted itself in this way. TheTelegraphwould have been contemptuous. It would have insisted that heads should roll, and rightly so.

This brings me to a second and even more important point that bears not just on the fate of one newspaper but on public life as a whole. A free press is essential to a healthy democracy. There is a purpose to journalism, and it is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big corporations and rich men. Newspapers have what amounts in the end to a constitutional duty to tell their readers the truth.

It is not only the Telegraph that is at fault here. The past few years have seen the rise of shadowy executives who determine what truths can and what truths can't be conveyed across the mainstream media. The criminality of News International newspapers during the phone hacking years was a particularly grotesque example of this wholly malign phenomenon. All the newspaper groups, bar the magnificent exception of the Guardian, maintained a culture of omerta around phone-hacking, even if (like the Telegraph) they had not themselves been involved. One of the consequences of this conspiracy of silence was the appointment of Andy Coulson, who has since been jailed and now faces further charges of perjury, as director of communications in 10 Downing Street.

Urgent questions to answerLast week I made another discovery. Three years ago the Telegraph investigations team'--the same lot who carried out the superb MPs' expenses investigation'--received a tip off about accounts held with HSBC in Jersey. Essentially this investigation was similar to the Panorama investigation into the Swiss banking arm of HSBC. After three months research theTelegraphresolved to publish. Six articles on this subject can now be found online, between 8 and 15 November 2012, although three are not available to view.

Thereafter no fresh reports appeared. Reporters were ordered to destroy all emails, reports and documents related to the HSBC investigation. I have now learnt, in a remarkable departure from normal practice, that at this stage lawyers for the Barclay brothers became closely involved. When I asked the Telegraph why the Barclay brothers were involved, it declined to comment.

This was the pivotal moment. From the start of 2013 onwards stories critical of HSBC were discouraged. HSBC suspended its advertising with the Telegraph. Its account, I have been told by an extremely well informed insider, was extremely valuable. HSBC, as one former Telegraph executive told me, is ''the advertiser you literally cannot afford to offend''. HSBC today refused to comment when I asked whether the bank's decision to stop advertising with the Telegraph was connected in any way with the paper's investigation into the Jersey accounts.

Winning back the HSBC advertising account became an urgent priority. It was eventually restored after approximately 12 months. Executives say that Murdoch MacLennan was determined not to allow any criticism of the international bank. ''He would express concern about headlines even on minor stories,'' says one former Telegraph journalist. ''Anything that mentioned money-laundering was just banned, even though the bank was on a final warning from the US authorities. This interference was happening on an industrial scale.

''An editorial operation that is clearly influenced by advertising is classic appeasement. Once a very powerful body know they can exert influence they know they can come back and threaten you. It totally changes the relationship you have with them. You know that even if you are robust you won't be supported and will be undermined.''

When I sent detailed questions to the Telegraph this afternoon about its connections with advertisers, the paper gave the following response. "Your questions are full of inaccuracies, and we do not therefore intend to respond to them. More generally, like any other business, we never comment on individual commercial relationships, but our policy is absolutely clear. We aim to provide all our commercial partners with a range of advertising solutions, but the distinction between advertising and our award-winning editorial operation has always been fundamental to our business. We utterly refute any allegation to the contrary."

The evidence suggests otherwise, and the consequences of theTelegraph'srecent soft coverage of HSBC may have been profound. Would Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs have been much more energetic in its own recent investigations into wide-scale tax avoidance, had the Telegraph continued to hold HSBC to account after its 2012 investigation? There are great issues here. They go to the heart of our democracy, and can no longer be ignored.

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Tue, 17 Feb 2015 15:08

A week after Reuters broke the news of talks between the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company (EGAS) and the American Noble Energy Company, which operates Israeli gas fields, the Ministry of Petroleum appears to publicly support a new policy that would allow the importation of Israeli gas.In 1979, Egypt became the first Arab country to sign a peace agreement with Israel. Despite full diplomatic relations, official niceties and, many years later, US-encouraged commercial and business agreements between the two former enemies, normalisation with Israel remained taboo and was rejected by the wider public.

So when former president Hosni Mubarak approved a 20-year agreement to export Egyptian gas to Israel in 2005 it caused a political uproar that continued until his ouster in February 2011.

Not only was Egypt pumping natural gas directly to Israel, it was doing so at below-market prices through East Mediterranean Gas (EMG), then co-owned by Mubarak 's friend Hussein Salem and former Israeli Mossad agent Yossi Maiman, who then sold the gas to Israel at higher rates, pocketing the difference.

In the aftermath of the uprising that toppled Mubarak in 2011, Egypt unilaterally terminated this agreement, citing failures by the Israeli side to meet payment deadlines in violation of the contract.

The decision was met with relief and a sense of revolutionary achievement, but things did not end there. When Mubarak was referred for trial in 2011, the gas deal was added to the corruption charges (a Cairo court dismissed the charges three months ago because the charges were too old to fall within its jurisdiction.)

More than four years later, Egyptian officials are negotiating a reversal of the gas deal through the very same pipeline that exported the gas to Israel, according to Reuters and official statements attributed to top-level officials in the ministry of petroleum.

The sub-headline of the pro-government Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper 's lead story on 3 February proclaimed: "Egypt to confront summer blackouts with Israeli gas. " On 7 February the same newspaper quoted a minister who refused to be named as saying that Egypt "doesn 't mind importing gas from Israel."

He added that the "sovereign authorities, " an euphemism for the military, intelligence and presidency, had followed the talks between EGAS and Noble Energy but had not yet given them the go-ahead for an agreement.

Officials in the Ministry of Petroleum and EGAS could not be reached for comment.

The cautiousness of the gradual and not yet final announcement of the news is an acknowledgment of the political sensitivities involved in this U-turn. The opacity and secrecy surrounding the talks provides scarce information, which critics say is reminiscent of deals under Mubarak.

"I hope we don 't repeat the mistakes of the past, " said Nasserist columnist Abdallah Al-Senawi, a supporter of president Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi.

"[Mubarak 's] relations and normalisation with Israel were never debated, no one was held accountable, and the truth was never fully disclosed to the public. Today we are reversing the equation and there are so many unanswered questions about the political and business aspects of importing Israeli gas. "

What prices are being discussed? Do they meet international standards? Are there alternatives to Israel? And what are the channels for serious debate in the absence of a parliament in Egypt were some of the questions Al-Senawi asked. The first parliament elected after Mubarak's ouster was dissolved in June 2012.

Egypt 's energy crisis began in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising with gas production companies reducing exploration and therefore production. Existing gas fields, which have an average lifespan of five to six years, are aging and aren 't being maintained. Between increasing demand and dwindling supply a gap has emerged.

Attempts to address this gap by supplying power stations with fossil fuel only partially solved the problem because a significant portion of these stations operate with gas.

Energy shortages then led the government to redirect all available gas to the domestic grid, stripping international gas companies BG and the Spanish-Italian Union Fenosa Gas (UFG), which own and operate the country 's two liquefaction plants jointly with EGAS, of their shares.

Lacking the necessary supplies to keep their business going, UFG 's liquefaction plant in the Delta governorate of Damietta fell idle in 2012. In 2013, UFG filed a complaint with the International Chamber of Commerce, accusing the Egyptian government of failing to commit to its agreement by failing to supply gas.

EMG, the company operating the Egypt-Israel gas pipeline, had already filed an arbitration case against Egypt demanding $8 billion in compensation for cancelling the supply of gas to Israel in 2011.

In 2013, serious debate in the gas business focused on Israel, by now a gas-producing country, as the answer to such problems. Perceived as being faster and easier to import natural gas from Israel, which also needs a market as large as Egypt 's, UFG signed a letter of intent (LOI) with the Israeli Tamar gas field to supply it with gas.

BG followed with a LOI with partners in the Israeli Leviathan gas field. However, for such letters to become fully-fledged agreements and come into effect they have to be approved by the Egyptian regulator.

Faced with significant fines in the two arbitration cases and the serious implications of the worsening energy crisis, Egypt responded by placing three conditions on the deals: resolving the arbitration cases against Egypt, clinching a value-added agreement with the government, and the approval of the "sovereign authorities."

The new development now is that Egyptian officials are talking to Noble Energy, a sign that long-term agreements with partners in the Israeli gas fields are close to realisation.

According to an informed source in one of the international gas production companies involved in the talks, the discussions are about importing seven billion cubic metres of natural gas daily to Egypt in a long-term agreement of 15 years.

If the parties agree to export the Israeli gas via the existing offshore pipeline it could start flowing into Egypt 's grid as early as this summer. But because Israel doesn 't have an immediate surplus to cover Egypt 's needs so soon, the quantities will be small.

"Israel won 't be able to supply Egypt with the required volumes before the end of 2016 or 2017, " said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the press.

The period between 2015 and 2017 "will be the darkest in Egypt, " the source added.

Noble Energy, the partner in Tamar and Leviathan, wants to construct two additional conduits under the sea and underground between Israel and Egypt to ensure a consistent and safe supply. The existing offshore pipeline that largely extends across North Sinai has been attacked multiple times by militants since 2011.

However, the idea of two additional pipelines was not conceived just to restore the level of gas production before the crisis emerged in Egypt. Because Israel 's gas surplus needs to be liquefied in order to be exported to Europe, it wants to do so via Egypt 's two liquefaction plants.

Egypt 's gas production companies typically produced 4.7 billion cubic metres daily while the country needs seven billion cubic metres. The difference was compensated by mazot (liquefied fuel.)

There is now no known government strategy to address the fearful blackouts of the approaching summer, which are expected to be worse than during the previous one. And it appears that for now the government is resorting to Arab nations for help in managing the year ahead.

In December, Algeria agreed to export six natural liquefied gas shipments of 850,000 cubic metres each to Egypt during 2015. The Ain Sokhna Port at the Suez Canal was identified as the most suited to receive these shipments, but the terminal isn't ready yet thus delaying their arrival.

However, suffering from an increase in domestic consumption, Algeria has reduced its gas exports since 2005 and isn 't viewed as a future gas provider to Egypt.

Egypt is engaged in talks with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to import petroleum products to cover the energy gap this year, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm,which did not cite figures.

This might delay an expected backlash resulting from signing a long-term agreement to import Israeli gas.

"Egypt 's opposition groups are overstretched with serious domestic issues and aren't paying attention to this development or don 't want to get into a confrontation with the authorities for now," said Wael Gamal, an economics columnist and researcher.

"So the timing is in the government's favour to go ahead with an agreement now if it wants."

But this will not prevent questions about the impact of the dependence on Israeli gas as a main source of energy on Egypt 's national security, Gamal added.

There are also questions that run deeper, to the psychological barrier many Egyptians still feel about Israel.

"How is one supposed to feel after drinking a cup of tea made on a stove operated by Israeli gas?" Samer Atallah, a professor of economics at the American University in Cairo, asked on Twitter.

*This story was first published in Ahram Weekly

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 03:14

A $395 million loan from China would help finance expansion of 107 kilometers of Route 32, the main highway from Costa Rica's capital to the Caribbean coast.

The administration of President Luis Guillermo Sol­s is moving to expedite approval of a Chinese loan to fund the expansion of Costa Rica's Route 32, the main highway connecting San Jos(C) and the Caribbean province of Lim"n.

Last Saturday, Presidency Minister Melvin Jim(C)nez announced the decision to table from the Legislative Assembly's agenda 16 bills currently ahead of the Chinese loan package to allow lawmakers to start discussing the measure.

On Monday morning, President Sol­s promised to include in the 2016 national budget approximately $20 million needed to pay for the expropriation of land and the relocation of public utilities along the route. Later that day, lawmakers passed all procedural motions regarding the bill, paving the way for its first round of voting.

Sol­s' announcement eliminated the main obstacle for lawmakers to approve a $395 million loan from China to expand the highway to four lanes along 107 kilometers. The figure represents 85 percent of the project's $465 million cost, with the Costa Rican government funding the remaining $70 million.

The deadline for approval of the loan in a second and final round of debate is Feb. 28, a date set by China to maintain the loan's current conditions, including a fixed interest rate of 6 percent for 20 years.

Public Works and Transport Minister Carlos Segnini on Monday said he is confident the loan can be approved before that deadline to avoid driving up the cost of the project.

Lawmakers who oppose the loan's approval have doubts about the conditions of the agreement. China has demanded the project be developed entirely by China Harbour Engeenering Company (CHEC) using only Chinese workers.

One of the loan's most vocal opponents is Citizen Action Party lawmaker Otton Sol­s, who said he opposes hiring CHEC, which he noted has drawn scrutiny on several occasions by the World Bank for breach of contracts.

''I would agree that China has the prerogative to choose the company that carries out the project if they were donating the funds. But what we are discussing here is a commercial loan, meaning Costa Rica should be the one selecting the company to develop the project,'' Sol­s said last week.

The expansion of Route 32 is key to the country's business sector as some 80 percent of Costa Rica's exports leave the country via Caribbean docks.

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 04:16

Sonia Van Meter is many things: a political consultant, a wife, a step-mother ... and a potential resident of Mars. Yes, you read that right.

Mars One, a privately funded organization based in the Netherlands, hopes to establish a permanent human colony on Mars within the next 10 years. And on Monday, the organization announced the 100 finalists for its first mission. Van Meter, an Austinite until just recently, is one of them.

"If we can look up from Earth and know that human beings are living on another planet, will we ever again be able to tell ourselves that there is anything we can't do?" Van Meter asks in her original audition tape for the Mars One mission.

If chosen, Van Meter will have to leave her director's position at Austin-based Stanford Caskey, her family and her home planet for good. The potential colony will be a permanent one, meaning the Mars One crew will not be returning to Earth.

There are still a few obstacles that Van Meter must face before she can call Mars her new home. Dubbed the "Mars 100," Van Meter and the rest of the finalists will take on a series of team-building tests and simulations, all of which will be the focus of a reality series.

In a moving column in Texas Monthly, Van Meter's husband Jason Stanford discusses the potential voyage, and the loss of his wife.

"I will mourn her a million times before she dies. I will not like any of this, but I love her, and this is a horizon worth crossing," Stanford writes. "Like those astronaut wives before me, I will man up."

Stanford points out that Van Meter's passion for the mission and the inspiration she draws from our planetary neighbor is what makes the difficulty worth it. "Space exploration inspires me, not just because of what we find out there, but what we discover about ourselves in the process," says Van Meter in her audition tape.

For Van Meter, the opportunity is all about the journey. "If we can look up from Earth and know that human beings are living on another planet, will we ever again be able to tell ourselves that there is anything we can't do?"

Uncertainties still face the Mars One mission. The foundation must raise enough money to fund the project, in addition to building a spaceship. Watch the trailer for the Mars One reality series below.

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 04:16

Mars One will be humankind's mission to Mars.

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon, the whole world was watching. In the next decade, about four billion people will have access to video images. Mars One expects that virtually every one of them will watch when the first humans land on Mars.

Mars One intends to gain funds to send humans and cargo to Mars by using a variety of ways. As Mars One is a private and not a governmental initiative, it gives anyone interested in the mission the possibility to cooperate in realising the mission. The targeted means of funding are as follows:

Exclusive partnershipsSponsorshipsSales of broadcasting rightsInvolvement with high net worth individualsRevenues from Intellectual PropertyCrowdfundingAs a comparison, the revenues from sponsorships and broadcasting rights for the Olympic games can be found in the table below. In this table you can see how much revenue is generated by the Olympics per four year period. Each four year period includes three weeks for the Summer Olympics, and three weeks for the Winter Olympics.

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 15:38

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 14:00

Greece will today ask the eurozone to extend what it is calling a 'loan agreement' and European officials are calling a 'bailout'.

Negotiations between the Greek government and the eurogroup have continued since Monday when Athens rejected the prospect of more bailout funds and the accompanying austerity measures.

Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis was optimistic a possible solution had been found:

''I think that if we continue in this fashion, tomorrow, at the euro working group there will be a good conclusion on a technical level '' an analysed text will have been agreed upon on and on Friday through teleconferencing, typically Greece's position will be approved.''

With the bailout due to expire at the end of this month eurozone finance ministers earlier this week had given Greece an ultimatum to accept conditional funding or suffer the consequences.

Knowing it is burning through its cash reserves, Athens has few options but is looking for a compromise with the eurozone which will be acceptable to Greek voters.

''Greece could run out of money''http://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2015/01/31/so-whose-problem-is-greek-debt-anyway/ by the end of March without fresh funds. One expert said Athens had enough to repay a 1.5 billion euro installment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) next month but would struggle to pay public sector salaries and pensions in April.

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 08:03

Story highlightsU.N. officials say no confirmation so far of claims by Iraq's U.N. ambassadorMohamed Alhakim: "This is clearly something bigger than we think"ISIS is considered the wealthiest terrorist group on recordBut Britain's ambassador to the U.N., Mark Lyall Grant, said the issue has not been officially discussed. Grant said there was no proof or evidence of the claim made by Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations.

The Iraqi ambassador, Mohamed Alhakim, on Tuesday urged the Security Council to investigate the deaths of 12 doctors in Mosul, Iraq. He said they were killed after refusing to remove organs from bodies.

"Some of the bodies we found are mutilated ... that means some parts are missing," he told reporters, adding that there were openings in the back of the bodies where the kidneys would be located.

"This is clearly something bigger than we think," Alhakim said.

The plunder of bodies for usable organs and tissues is widespread, according to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, director of Organs Watch, a University of California, Berkeley-based documentation and research project.

"Organ theft during wars, civil wars, dirty wars, wars involving undisciplined armies is not uncommon," Scheper-Hughes, chair of Berkeley's doctoral program in medical anthropology, said in an email.

The U.N.'s Iraqi mission on Wednesday said Alhakim was not granting interviews.

"At this point we're not in a position to corroborate what he says, but obviously any source of illegal financing of groups such as ISIS or other extremist groups is extremely worrisome," U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told CNN.

Nickolay Mladenov, the U.N. special envoy handling Iraq, said the organ theft claim would be investigated.

"We have seen these reports as well," he said. "However, I do not want to hasten to confirm anything before we study them in greater detail."

Mladenov said reports that the group "is using a human trafficking as part of its sources of income" have circulated for months.

"I cannot speak to the extent of that issue until we finalize our analysis of the problem but if one looks at the broader picture, it is very clear that the brutality and the tactics that (ISIS) is using expand by the day."

The U.S. State Department said it was aware of the "deeply disturbing comments" about the alleged organ trafficking but wasn't able to confirm them.

"We also have no reason to doubt them given other similar atrocities that have been documented and other heinous crimes for which ISIL has proudly taken credit," the State Department said, using another acronym for the militant group.

Alhakim said there is a market in Europe for the stolen organs. The terror group has taken over airports where the body parts could be flown out in deals arranged between middlemen and buyers, he said.

The mutilated bodies have been found in shallow graves over the last several weeks, he said.

Speaking to the Security Council at a regular meeting on Iraq on Tuesday, Alhakim cited what he said were crimes of genocide by ISIS -- "without even mentioning the traffic of human organs and the theft and trafficking of archaeological items and oil."

"These terrorist groups have desecrated all human values," he said. "They have committed the most heinous criminal terrorist acts against the Iraqi people -- whether Shia, Sunni, Christian, Turkmen."

Last month, Turkey's semiofficial Anadolu news agency and other outlets reported that ISIS had announced the opening of a medical school in its main stronghold in northern Syria.

"Dead bodies, once they are disarticulated, pulverized, processed, freeze-dried, etc., are so far removed from the 'human' person that they are simply commodities," Scheper-Hughes said. "The demand for fresh organs and tissues ... is insatiable."

Scheper-Hughes said fresh kidneys from "the brain dead or from those executed with the assistance of trained organ harvesters are the blood diamonds of illicit and criminal trafficking."

How ISIS is run

ISIS has been defined as the wealthiest terrorist group on record, using a combination of black-market oil sales, extortion and sophisticated social media to raise money to fund its expansion into Iraq and Syria, according to the U.S. Treasury.

The terrorist group pulls in about $1 million a day, according to the Treasury.

Extortion, such as demanding money from truck drivers and threatening to blow up businesses, is another revenue stream for the group, in addition to robbing banks and gold shops.

The income helps finance a growing stream of suicide attacks and assassinations, officials said. It also aids the recruitment of Sunni tribal fighters and finances spectacular prison raids that liberate hundreds of fighters, as well as attacks on police patrols.

ISIS controls vast areas of northern and western Iraq, as well as much of northeastern Syria -- and exercises draconian authority in areas as far apart as Anbar in western Iraq and Aleppo province in northern Syria. The group also continues to pick up endorsements and pledges of allegiance from other jihadist groups, most notably in Libya and Egypt.

Everything to know about the rise of ISIS

CNN's Richard Roth and Laura Koran contributed to this report.

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 07:08

By Philip Ewing

2/18/15 3:49 PM EST

Updated 2/18/15 11:00 PM EST

Rear Adm. John Kirby, who became a highly visible face for the Defense Department as it launched the war in Iraq and Syria, is stepping down to make room for a new civilian press secretary.

Kirby acknowledged his departure in a briefing for reporters on Wednesday, a day after Defense Secretary Ash Carter took an oath of office to become President Barack Obama's fourth Pentagon chief. Carter wants to ''revisit'' the role of press secretary, Kirby said, so he plans to name a civilian to take over for the two-star admiral who served as the Pentagon's first uniformed top spokesman.

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''One of the questions that I think he wants to rhetorically ask, or consider, is not just who the individual is, but what that individual represents, and whether it's appropriate or not to have a uniform up here,'' Kirby said. ''Those are fair questions for him to ask as he comes into the job.''

Kirby was asked whether he ever felt constrained because, as a uniformed service member, he's less free to criticize members of Congress or political leaders. No, he said. ''It hasn't been a big issue for me.''

Kirby's long service in the Pentagon, previously as the Navy's chief of public affairs and earlier as the top spokesman for then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, means he has long-standing relationships with many members of the Pentagon press corps. He's been a fixture on cable TV news networks. And reporters applauded on Wednesday after Associated Press correspondent Lolita Baldor and CNN reporter Barbara Starr hailed Kirby for his depth of knowledge about the military.

Kirby and Carter are not known to have clashed, but they apparently do not have a close relationship. New secretaries of defense typically name their own new top spokesmen when they arrive. For instance, Kirby's predecessor, George Little, accompanied Leon Panetta when he came to the Pentagon from the CIA.

Although Carter has not yet decided on a new press secretary, he's begun filling other key roles.

Air Force Undersecretary Eric Fanning is set to become his chief of staff, and Army Maj. Gen. Ron Lewis is expected to become his top military adviser.

Kirby's next moves are unclear. Two-star public affairs officers are rare, and as the first uniformed Pentagon press secretary, there's no precedent for him to follow.

He began his naval career as a surface warfare officer, but like many officers, reached a point at which he wanted to stay in the service but not go back to sea. So during a stint as an instructor at the Naval Academy, Kirby and a colleague took a marker and drew several slices of ''pie'' on a paper plate, then pinned on a wooden tongue depressor from the sick bay.

Kirby and his friend spun the dial, and he wound up with public affairs '-- although he did wind up going back to sea as the final shipboard spokesman for the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal.

''Once I got into the community, I made every effort to learn the craft and become proficient,'' Kirby told an interviewer last month. ''But becoming a PAO was the best decision I actually never made.''

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 06:36

Former President Bill Clinton apologized to Mexico during a speech there last week for a backfired U.S. war on drugs that has fueled spiraling violence.

''I wish you had no narco-trafficking, but it's not really your fault,'' Clinton told an audience of students and business leaders at the recent Laureate Summit on Youth and Productivity. ''Basically, we did too good of a job of taking the transportation out of the air and water, and so we ran it over land.

''I apologize for that,'' Clinton said.

Clinton was referring to U.S. drug enforcement policy that began under his predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who invested heavily in shutting down the Caribbean Sea as the favored trafficking route between the U.S. and South America and Central America. That effort pushed smuggling west, over land in Mexico.

Clinton made his own contribution. Opening Mexico's border with the U.S. encouraged land-based trafficking, and enforcement efforts that broke up Colombian cartels empowered Mexican drug gangs, who until then had largely been middlemen. With more power came more money. With more money came more violence.

Mexico, home to about a half-dozen extraordinarily powerful and violent cartels whose influence reaches well beyond narco-trafficking, has since the 1990s been a major focus of the U.S. war on drugs. Last month's discovery of 43 missing college students from rural Mexico, all found to have been killed and incinerated after being seized by state law enforcement, exposed a shocking level of Mexican government corruption.

The U.S. government spends roughly $40 billion to $50 billion each year fighting the war on drugs around the globe. The battle has taken a particularly devastating toll in Mexico. In recent years, at least 60,000 to 100,000 people are believed to have been murdered in Mexico, many in drug-related violence.

Despite -- or, more accurately, as a result of -- years of fighting against the narco-traffickers, 90 percent of the cocaine that arrives in the U.S. travels through Mexico and Central America, according to a recent State Department report. Cartels also continue to deliver a significant amount of heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine into the U.S.

"Of course, one wishes he and his counterparts would have done the right thing when they wielded the power to do so," Daniel Robelo, research director at the anti-drug war advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance, wrote in a blog post responding to Clinton's remarks. "But it's better to apologize than pretend he did nothing wrong at all. Yet we need much more than apologies -- especially from those who currently hold office, or who might in the near future."

While Clinton expanded the drug war during his presidency, it's not the first time he has criticized it since leaving office. In an interview for the 2011 documentary ''Breaking The Taboo,'' chronicling drug policies around the globe, Clinton flatly said the policy was a failure.

''Well obviously, if the expected results was that we would eliminate serious drug use in America and eliminate the narcotrafficking networks -- it hasn't worked,'' Clinton said.

During the first year of his administration, Clinton made free trade a top priority, pushing for the passage of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement. It wasn't an easy task. Having helped Democrats take the White House for the first time in 12 years, organized labor was in no mood to see manufacturing jobs shipped to Mexico. The debate was difficult enough without having to talk about the sprawling Mexican drug trade and its attendant corruption and the fact that the agreement would also end up benefiting the cartels.

And so he ordered his people not to talk about it.

''We were prohibited from discussing the effects of NAFTA as it related to narcotics trafficking, yes. For the godfathers of the drug trade in Colombia and Mexico, this was a deal made in narco heaven,'' Phil Jordan, who had been one of the DEA's leading authorities on Mexican drug organizations, told ABC News reporter Brian Ross four years after the deal had gone through.

The agreement squeaked through Congress in late 1993 and went into effect Jan. 1, 1994, the same day that the Zapatistas rose up in Southeast Mexico. With its passage, more than 2 million trucks began flowing northward across the border annually. Only a small fraction of them were inspected for cocaine, heroin, or meth.

The White House, in a 1999 report, estimated that commercial vehicles brought roughly 100 tons of cocaine into the country across the Mexican border in 1993. With NAFTA in effect, 1994 saw the biggest jump in commercial-vehicle smuggling on record -- a 25 percent increase. The number of meth-related emergency-room visits in the United States doubled between 1991 and 1994. In San Diego, America's meth capital, meth seizures climbed from 1,409 pounds in 1991 to 13,366 in 1994.

The opening of the border came at an opportune time for Mexican drug runners, who'd recently expanded their control of the cocaine trade and made major investments in large-scale meth production. Both were unintended consequences of U.S. policies in the '70s and '80s aimed at crushing meth and cocaine with a militarized, enforcement-heavy approach. The return of meth across the Mexican border was one more sign that the get-tough policies of the '80s had backfired.

Meth production had been driven underground and pushed into Mexico in the late '60s and '70s as a result of federal legislation. It fell into the waiting arms of a drug-smuggling establishment that itself had also been created by U.S. drug policy. The 1914 U.S. law that banned opium had created a situation in which the drug was illegal on one side of the border and legal on the other, where it had been grown since the 1800s. The Mexican government was in the midst of a revolution and unable to stop northward smuggling. Sociologist Lu­s Astorga, in his study "Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General Assessment," cites Los Angeles customs officials claiming that Baja California's then-governor, Esteban Cantº, a Mexican army colonel, was suspected of playing a major role in the drug trade by reselling product seized from other traffickers.

Mexican smugglers got another boost when the United States banned alcohol with the 18th Amendment. It took them decades, though, to get into the cocaine business. In the '70s, South American cocaine producers were running almost all of the cocaine imported into the United States through the Caribbean, into Miami, and then out to the rest of the nation. The feds brought the hammer down on the mound of coke that was Miami and the Caribbean smugglers in the '80s. While the government focused on the powder that then began to waft across the country, Mexican meth smugglers seized a perfect opportunity.

***

The opening salvo of the U.S. war on coke might well have been a 1981 Time magazine cover story on Miami's burgeoning drug trade, which put an intolerable situation before the eyes of the whole American public. The report, titled "Trouble in Paradise," led directly to federal intervention, with Vice President George H.W. Bush repeatedly traveling to Miami to oversee the response personally.

Unsettling and shifting a multibillion-dollar drug trade, however, is no simple affair. With tighter enforcement in Florida and the Caribbean, producers increasingly moved their product by tuna boat or airplane to Mexico or another nearby nation and then overland across the U.S. border. Mexico had the infrastructure ready: By the late '70s, it was the world's largest heroin exporter, with thousands of acres of poppy fields. The late '60s and '70s had also seen a dramatic increase in demand for Mexican marijuana; by the mid-'70s, it was among the world's foremost pot exporters.

The extensive South and Central American smuggling network was built while the United States' primary foreign-policy goals were to oppose communism and to support enemies of communism'--regardless of whether they were also drug traffickers. When relations with the Soviet Union began to thaw, in the mid-'80s, the United States was left with a superpower-sized military that had no obvious enemy. Drugs would have to do.

"Two words sum up my entire approach," President George H.W. Bush's drug czar, William Bennett, announced in 1989: "'consequences' and 'confrontation.'" He and Bush doubled annual drug-war spending to $12 billion and pressed fighter planes, submarines, and other military hardware into service for the cause. In 1989, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney secured $450 million to go after Caribbean smugglers; billions more were spent in the source countries of South America.

In the early '90s, a White House report notes, more than 250 tons of coke were smuggled into the United States through Florida in a year, while only about 100 tons flowed across the southwestern border. By the end of the decade, just under 200 tons each came across both boundaries. In subsequent years, the amount coming through the Caribbean steadily fell, and, by 2004, the Interagency Assessment of Cocaine Movement determined the route to account for less than 10 percent of all coke smuggling into the United States.

Spreading the market out didn't have a noticeable effect on supply north of the border. But it had an important impact south of it: It solidified the strength of Mexican drug-running organizations, which quickly realized that they could make a nice extra profit by packing another drug with their shipments of cocaine. U.S. restrictions on pharmaceutical companies, which had lowered domestic meth production, had also created a thriving Mexican meth industry. The Mexican cocaine cartels were flush with capital, having taken over major portions of the business from the Colombians'--thanks, in large measure, to successful U.S. efforts to decapitate Colombian drug organizations. These two circumstances led directly to the industrialization of the meth trade.

The Mexican traffickers renegotiated their deals with the Colombians, taking an ownership stake rather than a flat fee for transport, and then reinvested some of this capital in building meth factories. Their product was then shipped northward in unprecedented volumes.

The return of meth -- or, more precisely, the evolution of meth -- was a throw-your-hands-up moment for drug warriors. Federal surveys show a long and slow decline in the use of amphetamines in the United States from 1981 to the early '90s. But between 1994 and 1995, meth use jumped in the United States. Among 19- to 28-year-olds in the Michigan survey, annual use ticked up by a third. (It remained lower, however, than the American media would have you believe: Even after the jump in meth use, only 1.2 percent of the survey's total respondents admitted to using it.)

The shift of meth from localized production in California to big-time assembly lines in Mexico didn't go unnoticed by enforcement agents in the United States. But the eventual crackdown brought another unforeseen consequence: As California tightened its border in response to both drug smuggling and illegal immigration in the '90s, the drug runners gradually moved east. "The eastward expansion of the drug took a particular toll on central states such as Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska," notes the 2006 National Drug Threat Assessment. The Midwestern methedemic, as it came to be dubbed, was born.

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Portions of this article are excerpted from the book This Is Your Country On Drugs

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 06:30

[See NewsBusters for more.] Climate change enthusiast Bill Nye appeared on MSNBC, Monday, to lobby the network for more global warming cheerleading and the importance of linking all weather events to the phenomena. Talking to Joy Reid about the cold and snow hitting much of the country, he implored, "...Just say the word climate change. Just, like, 'It could be climate change. It's a possible connection to climate change. Is this evidence of climate change?'" Nye demanded, "Could you just toss that in now and then?" A compliant Reid agreed: "Absolutely. I would like to toss that in every single time." Nye then stated the obvious: "MSNBC is, in many ways, regarded as a progressive station." He spoke to the few conservatives watching MSNBC: "We need you."

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 05:21

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, in an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Wednesday, piggybacked on comments made by State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf on Monday, saying that "unless you change the conditions on the ground, you get to kill people forever."

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 04:59

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 03:43

David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist and longtime adviser to President Barack Obama, says he doesn't think Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) poses a credible threat to Hillary Clinton's likely presidential bid in 2016.

"I know Elizabeth Warren well, and my strong feeling is she's not going to run," Axelrod said in a Wednesday interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. "I think she's trying to influence the direction of the party, and you have more influence as a potential candidate than you do if you take yourself out. So she's allowing, she's sticking to this language of 'I'm not running for president,' and titillating people with it, because it gives her more leverage."

Axelrod continued, "I don't think she would beat her. I have high regard for Elizabeth. I don't think she would beat her. Look at the polling, Hugh. Hillary is probably as well-positioned within her own party as any open seat candidate has been in our lifetime."

Listen to the interview above.

Warren has repeatedly insisted she has no interest in running for president in 2016, but that hasn't stopped grassroots activists from trying to persuade the freshman senator to challenge presumed Democratic frontrunner Clinton. Earlier this week, the New York Working Families Party called on Warren to run, joining organizations like Ready for Warren who are pushing the senator to jump in.

Axelrod, who is promoting his new memoirBeliever: My Forty Years in Politics, has previously theorized that Warren is looking to exert "maximum leverage" on Clinton's 2016 platform.

"I think Elizabeth's very sincere about her concerns about what's happening in the American economy and Hillary hasn't said yet what exactly her program will be, what she's running on," Axelrod told MSNBC in December. "I think Elizabeth knows she's got maximum leverage by still being in the conversation."

In the Wednesday interview, Axelrod rejected Hewitt's assertion that Clinton's tenure at the State Department would hurt her chances.

"There are number of important advances that she had on her watch, which ended four years ago, that went to helping put together the international coalition in the midst of the financial crisis, putting together international coalitions around arms control, making sure that we had supply routes open so our troops could be resupplied in Afghanistan," Axelrod said. "This race is not going to be about that."

HuffPost Pollster's model, which tracks publicly available opinion polls, currently shows Clinton ahead of the rest of the potential Democratic field by nearly 50 points:

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 03:34

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Thu, 19 Feb 2015 03:24

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Wed, 18 Feb 2015 21:47

On Wednesday morning, CNN focused on the real targets of ISIS aggression: Western women.

In a very servicey segment, Carol Costello spelled out the ways that women in the West (you, your aunt, tiny baby Ariana Grande, dumb teens, sad moms, etc) are being targeted by ISIS, a group for murder enthusiasts that is using social media to manipulate women into thinking that life in ISIS would be pretty cool and fun. But don't fall for it, ladies: it's a trap.

Seems like if ISIS wanted to get me or any woman I know to join their dumb club, they'd have to make more changes than simply offering immature, uncoordinated cats and mass produced hazelnut spread. To evenbegin to considerjoining ISIS,I'd need, at the very least-

guaranteed hot running water (something that I don't currently have in my Brooklyn apartment because I've chosen to spend way to much money to live in a city of garbage.)a quiet, dark bedroom (again, something I don't have)lots of SPF (desert sun is bad for the freckled and melanoma-prone)flex timepaid maternity leavea uniondecent tomatoes, year roundthe men must shower at least once every other day. They look like they smell fucking rancid in their videos. Visible stink lines, practically. I'm not trying to get intimate with any of them, but it's truly distracting to work an environment of endless stench, and I can't do it.organized viewing parties for The Bachelor, with people who don't talk through the important parts but do talk through the inane parts.a Spotify Premium accountget rid of the whole "religion" thing. Muslim, Christian, Jewish, whatever '-- I just can't do any of that with a straight face at this point in my life.ease up on the murdering. Actually, don't do murdering at all. No murdering.don't do any maiming, either.change the name to something that isn't psychotic.stop declaring war on people. They don't like it. It is unchill.open up a New York office somewhere along the L, for ease of commute. I spent years trying to get here and hell if I'm going to move to the goddamn desert for even the fanciest of tent forts.adult cats, please. Kittens are cute, but they're fucking dicks.See? I was very close to joining. Thank goodness for CNN for setting me and the thousands currently trapped in American airports straight, and for bringing the focus back to how a movement that is actually impacting millions in the Middle East and North Africa might theoretically impact some lady currently in a suburban Cleveland Target checkout line.

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Wed, 18 Feb 2015 20:16

Russian protest group/band Pussy Riot have released their first English language song, a tribute to Staten Island choking victim Eric Garner. The single, "I Can't Breathe," includes legendary NYC art-rocker Richard Hell reading Garner's last words at the climax of the song, which is a slice of PJ Harvey-sounding electronic blues.

"This song is for Eric and for all those from Russia to America and around the globe who suffer from state terror'--killed, choked, perished because of war and state sponsored violence of all kinds'--for political prisoners and those on the streets fighting for change. We stand in solidarity," they wrote in a statement.

In the video (above), Pussy Riot's Masha and Nadya are buried alive in the Russian riot police uniforms worn during the violent attacks on protesters fighting for change in Russia. "Illegal violence in the name of the state kills not only its victims, but those who are chosen to carry out these actions,'' the group said of the video in a statement to BuzzFeed. "Policemen, soldiers, agents, they become hostages and are buried with those they kill, both figuratively and literally."

They also released a second video which is made up of footage from various Garner protests from the winter. Watch that one below.

The song, which was recorded in December in NY, also includes Nick Zimmer of Yeah Yeah Yeah's on guitar. Read the full lyrics below:

He's become his death The spark of the riots That's the way he's blessed To stay alive.

It never leads to an endIt's never getting quietIf it's unfair, my friend,Make up your mind

It's getting dark in New York cityIt's getting dark in New York cityIt's getting tight in New York cityI need to catch my breath

You know this world of hateYou know this stubborn lightThey're in the prayers you prayLate at night

We're only half way downWho dares to take a breath?Some fairness might be foundFrom ashes of his death.

[Eric Garner's last words, read by Richard Hell:]

Get away [garbled] for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I'm tired of it. It stops today. Why would you...? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn't do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because everytime you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me [garbled] Selling cigarettes. I'm minding my business, officer, I'm minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. please please, don't touch me. Do not touch me. [garbled] I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe.

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Tue, 17 Feb 2015 20:45

Published February 17, 2015What the West really needs to take on the Islamic State is ... a jobs program.

That's what a top State Department spokeswoman suggested when asked in a TV interview Monday night about what the U.S.-led coalition is doing to stop the slaughter of civilians by Islamic State militants across the region.

"We're killing a lot of them, and we're going to keep killing more of them. ... But we cannot win this war by killing them," department spokeswoman Marie Harf said on MSNBC's "Hardball." "We need ... to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs, whether --"

At that point, Harf was interrupted by host Chris Matthews, who pointed out, "There's always going to be poor people. There's always going to be poor Muslims."

Harf continued to argue that the U.S. should work with other countries to "help improve their governance" and "help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people."

She acknowledged there's "no easy solution" and said the U.S. would still take out ISIS leaders. But Harf said: "If we can help countries work at the root causes of this -- what makes these 17-year-old kids pick up an AK-47 instead of trying to start a business?"

Asked about Harf's remarks on Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Harf was only making the point that fighting ISIS entails more than just a military solution.

The comments come as the Obama administration takes heat from lawmakers for its approach to the Islamic State, whose self-proclaimed fighters in Libya recently executed 21 Coptic Christians from Egypt.

The White House on Tuesday kicked off a three-day summit on "countering violent extremism." It began with Vice President Biden moderating a discussion on countering extremism with representatives from cities.

This, though, follows a pattern of conferences and summits called by the administration to address urgent challenges. The administration is facing criticism for this approach -- and for describing the summit in general terms -- at a time when Islamic State militants are spreading, recruiting and executing prisoners from multiple countries in increasingly brutal ways.

"The White House had to seem like it was doing something," said Jonah Goldberg, a National Review editor and conservative columnist, while claiming the summit won't achieve much.

Senior administration officials, though, defended the conference, and their description of it, on a call with reporters.

Asked whether Islamic extremists are in fact the focus of the summit, one official said extremism has spanned "many decades" and taken on "many forms," but they recognize that those launching recent attacks "are calling themselves Muslims."

"You can call them what you want. We're calling them terrorists," the official said.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that as airstrikes continue in Iraq and Syria, the administration is boosting efforts to counter ISIS on social media. The plan centers around a small State Department agency that pushes against ISIS and other groups' online propaganda.

"We're getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content," Richard Stengel, under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, told the Times.

Officials reportedly plan to describe some of their social media strategy at the three-day counter-extremism summit.

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Tue, 17 Feb 2015 14:57

A German rapper who became a brutal poster boy for ISIS was married to a woman who was spying on him for the FBI, according to a new report.

The report claims that Denis Cuspert - who was also known as "Deso Dogg" and who now calls himself Abu Talha al-Amani - married a woman in Syria.

German and American intelligence sources confirmed that she transmitted critical information to the FBI, including details of top secret ISIS operations.

The unidentified woman left Syria when her handlers told her she was no longer safe. She is believed to now be in the U.S.

FoxNews.com previously reported that Cuspert, who was seen in an ISIS propaganda video in November hoisting the severed head of an "enemy of Islamic State," serves as a recruiter of German-speaking Islamists.

Numerous videos feature Cuspert encouraging Germans to embrace jihad in Syria and to "bring jihad to Germany."

German intelligence officials estimate that 500 German Muslims have traveled to Iraq and Syria, and roughly 150 radical Islamic fighters have returned to Germany.

Former German Rapper Is Now ISIS Poster Boy

'You're Not a Serious Leader': Judge Jeanine Slams Obama's ISIS Strategy

FoxNews.com reported:

Cuspert may have been ripe for the tried-and-true espionage technique. According to Bild, he was a womanizer in Germany, where he fathered three children with three women, including one who he dumped before embarking on his terrorist career. Cuspert arrived in Syria in 2013 from a so-called German jihadi colony in Egypt. It was not clear when he "married" the spy, but Bild reported that she informed her U.S. handler via secret methods on regular basis about Islamic State activities. It was unclear how she transmitted the information to her handler.

The timing of the ''honey trap'' revelations coincided with last week's designation by the U.S. of Cuspert as a ''global terrorist.''

"Denis Cuspert stands in the focus of security circles because of his essential role for Islamic State,'' a German law enforcement official told FoxNews.com. ''He is propagandist of IS."

The material gleaned by the spy served as the basis for the U.S. State Department's designation, according to Bild, which reported that Germany's top prosecutorial office benefited from the seduction mission. Germany's federal prosecutor has used the material to launch an investigation into Cuspert's Islamic State activities.

FBI officials did not return requests for comment.

Watch the clip from "Fox and Friends" above.

Herridge: WH Knew Location of ISIS Hostages, Delayed Rescue Attempt

Christian U.S. Veteran Fighting Alongside Kurds to Defeat ISIS

'I'm Not Going to Act Afraid': Military Wife Fights Back Against ISIS Hackers

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Mon, 16 Feb 2015 16:31

New York Times columnist David Carr, in his final public appearance, hosted a reunion of sorts with Snowden, protagonist of the film "Citizenfour," as well as director Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald.

From left: Poitras, Snowden and Greenwald. The three talked Thursday about the state of surveillance and about "Citizenfour," Poitras' Oscar-nominated film chronicling their storied secret discussions in a Hong Kong hideout.The New York Times

It was just like old times, sort of.

On Thursday, NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden got together again with journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras to talk surveillance, reliving in a sense their now historic secret meeting two summers ago in a Hong Kong hotel room.

That first time around, Snowden handed the two a huge cache of top secret National Security Agency documents and asked them to let the public know about the NSA's gigantic and constitutionally questionable appetite for people's data. The meeting set off a chain of events that led to, among other things, consternation in Silicon Valley about the privacy of customer data; international outrage over tapped phones; high-profile reassurances from the president about agency reform; the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize (shared by Greenwald, Poitras and others); and, more recently, a nomination for an Academy Award.

The last item was in part the reason for the reunion, where, this time around, Snowden couldn't be present in the flesh but instead beamed in on a live feed from Russia, where he's been holed up since the document handoff. Poitras famously filmed the initial encounter, with the UK's Guardian news site publishing a short video interview with Snowden when he revealed himself as the source of the leaks. In the film "Citizenfour" -- named for an alias used by Snowden -- Poitras taps previously unseen footage to chronicle the exchange and the surveillance-related circumstances surrounding it. Some have pegged the film as a shoo-in for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars on February 22.

In anticipation of that event, The New York Times' TimesTalks series played host to the three on Thursday, for a discussion of the film and the present state of "the surveillance state." (The roundtable marked, sadly, a final public appearance by moderator and Times media columnist David Carr, who died of a heart attack later in the evening.)

A 'rare record'One thing the discussion brought home is how remarkable the film is, simply from a historical standpoint. After all, regardless of how one views the leaking of government secrets, we don't have film of Deep Throat giving Woodward and Bernstein the scoop about Watergate; we don't have footage of Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers. But in "Citizenfour," we see Snowden in the act of handing over the classified material and explaining various aspects of it. The Hong Kong footage is a fascinating look, in more or less real time, of the events and people behind the countless brief news stories we might have read on the leak, the many sound bites we might have heard.

"I don't think there's any film like it," Snowden said. "It's very rare to get some kind of record like this."

One reason is perhaps obvious. In a remark that got a laugh from the crowd, Snowden said that when Poitras initially asked if she could film the goings-on, he said no "for a number of reasons, not the least of which is when you're involved in an action which is very likely to get you indicted, you typically don't have a camera rolling in the room." But, he said, Poitras was "good about not taking no as an answer."

And the filming, too, was partly strategic. Governments, Greenwald said, like to paint whistle-blowers as crazy, to "equate this level of dissent with the definition of mental instability so that you wanna kind of turn away from the revelations because the person revealing it is just so, kind of, icky." But with Snowden, he thought, that would be tough.

Snowden and Greenwald during their initial series of meetings in Hong Kong, in June 2013. Poitras is behind the camera.Laura Poitras/Radius-TWC

"When I first met Ed, that was the thing that convinced me that we really had an opportunity to do something that hadn't quite been done before," Greenwald said. "He's very humble and smart and articulate, and, you know, look at him: he just sort of looks like the grandkid of every Midwestern couple, you know? I knew that the government was going to have an extremely difficult time playing that game in this case."

Still, for all three, the main thing was getting the story out, not creating a cult of personality around Snowden. Moderator David Carr asked Snowden if Poitras respected that concern when making the film, and Snowden said she had.

"She focuses on the fact that there are many other players in the game," Snowden said, referring to privacy activists, previous whistle-blowers and others. "Ultimately, it's not a film about me; it's a film about us; it's about this moment; it's about this journey that we all went on: this experience of revelation -- and suspicion, in the beginning, but nobody could prove it, even though we suspected [such mass surveillance] was going on."

Intense debateSo, about a year and a half after their fateful meeting, are Snowden, Greenwald and Poitras satisfied with the events it triggered? Greenwald said he recalled Snowden worrying about "unraveling his life" only to find that no one cared about the revelations regarding the NSA. And then Greenwald spoke of something that's depicted in the film: Snowden watching the TV news as the shock wave triggered by the initial NSA stories spread.

"I remember the moment in Hong Kong when we did the first two or three stories and I was able to watch Ed watch the global news explode with these stories, and I felt so gratified," Greenwald said. "The intensity of the debate that has been triggered, not just in the United States but globally, has changed consciousness about so many things -- and that's beyond the concrete changes of companies being forced to encrypt and prove they're devoted to privacy so they don't lose a whole generation of users, or of individuals using encryption.

Poitras at an awards ceremony in Germany last year, with Snowden looking on via live video feed. "Citizenfour" has won awards for best nonfiction film from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle. Poitras also nabbed the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing - Documentaries.Adam Berry/Getty Images

"The debate that we were able to have that we couldn't have before -- not just about surveillance, but privacy in the digital age and the role of journalism and the dangers of government secrecy and the role that the United States plays in the world -- when you start changing consciousness like that, it may take a while for it to happen, but there's no question that the changes that are engendered will be fundamental."

Poitras agreed that eyes had been opened around the world, and she touched on another remarkable, and gripping, aspect of the film's Hong Kong footage: as you're watching it, you're very aware that the players involved have, in that moment, no idea how things are going to turn out.

"When we were sitting around talking about possible outcomes with lawyers," Poitras said to Carr, "sitting here with you was not one of them. And we really were thinking that there were some potentially really bad possible outcomes. And to have the international awareness -- we had no idea how large the story would be."

"I thought it was 95 percent certain that [Snowden] was gonna end up in American custody and be put in a cage for pretty much the rest of his life," Greenwald said, "and he thought that was a good possibility too...There were a few times when he came very close to that. And it was a little bit of luck but a lot of cunning as well that he was able to end up the way he ended up."

The latter part of the film gives a very brief glimpse of Snowden's current life in Russia. We see him reunited with the girlfriend whom, before spilling his secrets, he left in order to protect her from any incrimination. The two are shown in a scene of domestic peace, stirring a pot together as they prepare dinner.

"I think it's a critical part of the story," Greenwald said, "because it shows people you can stand up to the US government, you can take a courageous step that you believe in as an act of conscience and not be disappeared, not be put in a cage. You can find a way to then live a fulfilling life."

"I think that 'Citizenfour' has something hopeful in it," Poitras said. "It's hopeful for me because it's people basically being willing to be courageous and say something about what they see as wrong in the world."

Snowden said it was worth the sacrifices he's made. "I think everybody involved has paid some cost or another. I can't live with my family nowadays, I can't go back to my home. But it's incredibly satisfying to be a part of something larger than yourself, and there is a tremendous sense of peace in doing what you think is the right thing to do."

Here's the complete discussion:

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Tue, 17 Feb 2015 14:11

Actress Priyanga Burford stars as a Ukip candidate in the controversial drama. Credit: Channel 4Channel 4 drama Ukip: The First 100 Days has attracted nearly 1,000 complaints, with viewers suggesting the show was politically "bias".

Ofcom said it had received 731 complaints after the programme - which showed rioting on the streets in the wake of an unexpected Ukip victory in May's general election - was broadcast last night.

Ukip leader Nigel Farage strongly criticised the programme, describing it as a "biased, partisan depiction" of his party.

Channel 4 - who received around 250 complaints - defended the drama, insisting "a lot of research" went into it to ensure it complied with broadcasting rules.

Ukip leader Nigel Farage has strongly criticised the drama. Credit: PA WireAn Ofcom spokesperson told ITV News that it was assessing viewers' complaints that it was "bias" and presented an "unfair portrayal" of the party, before deciding whether to investigate.

The programme featured actress Priyanga Burford playing the part of the party's only Asian woman MP.

Her character's victory in Romford, Essex helps Nigel Farage achieve a landslide victory, putting him in Number 10.

But she is left torn when the ruling party decides to withdraw the UK from the EU, sparking riots between protesters for and against tough anti-immigration raids.

Farage predicted that the drama would "backfire" on Channel 4 in a post on Twitter last night.

Ukip MEP and parliamentary candidate Gerald Batten called on Ofcom to investigate whether the programme - which he described as a "piece of bile and vitriol" - had breached broadcasting regulations.

A Channel 4 spokesperson said: "This rise of Ukip's electoral support is one of the biggest political phenomena in recent years and this is reflected in The First 100 Days, which used policies and statements made by the party and its members to create a fictional future where the party is in power."

"The programme was produced in accordance with the Ofcom broadcast code and its obligations to be fair, accurate and duly impartial. The election period set out in the Ofcom broadcasting code has not started."

Last updated Tue 17 Feb 2015