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On this day in history–1970

December 18, 2019 By Bob Kinsey

1970 – ‘Baneberry’ detonated in a vertical shaft 912 feet (277m) beneath Yucca Flat area U8 at 1530 GMT with a yield of 10 kilotons from the LLNL weapons development device during Operation Emery, causing a 5.2 magnitude ground shock, creating a 492 foot (150m) diameter subsidence crater and venting 6.7 million curies of gross fission products that spread out beyond NTS. 666th U.S. test. Coordinates: 37.17309, -116.09973.
Side Note: — Three minutes after Zero Time, raw radioactive effluents and dust began forcibly venting from a fissure that had opened near surface ground zero and from the shaft itself because of failed stemming. The venting continued for 24 hours creating the worst radiological release since atmospheric testing was halted. Eighty-six NTS workers received higher levels of radiation than allowed. Two security guards who were ordered into the area developed leukemia and died within four years. The release of 80,000 curies of I-131 was by far the worst accidental release at NTS and was detected in milk samples elsewhere in Nevada. For anyone interested in numerology, please note this was the 666th U.S. test.

Filed Under: Perspective, Uncategorized

About Bob Kinsey

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Disarmament Quotes

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlisterKings Bay Protestor 2019

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford"The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

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