A lump of raw ore on a shelf in your home office? Sure.
Uranium ore in ton quantities, underground in a poorly ventilated mine? That’s a big health risk, due to radon, other daughter products, and the inherent heavy metal hazards of uranium.
>Uranium mining has widespread effects, contaminating the environment with radioactive dust, radon gas, water-borne toxins, and increased levels of background radiation...Uranium is an α-particle emitter, as are many of its radioactive decay products, including radon. α-Particles are bulky (2 protons and 2 neutrons) and cannot penetrate human skin. However, when particulate matter containing α-emitters is inhaled or ingested, it results in internal exposure to radiation. The carcinogenicity of inhaled α-emitters is not in dispute. Radon gas is responsible for up to 20% of cases of lung cancer in Canada.
I believe a parallel debate among historians is whether mass Japanese civilian suicides near battle zones were under Japanese military orders or were merely voluntary. You can be sure the Allied invasion of the home islands would have been desirable for such coerced self killing -- which the Allies tried to prevent -- if it had been the mission to kill as many Japanese people as possible.
What is AFAIK not debated is that Japanese who did surrender, instead of heading for the suicide cliffs in places like Okinawa (I don't know about Saipan), were often murdered from a distance by the Japanese soldiers who wanted everyone to head for the suicide cliffs. It possibly deterred other Japanese who were thinking of surrender. Unfortunately I think that your justified indignation actually overestimates human righteousness and justification, both theirs and ours and our own future descendants'. I think justification is needed and justice/hope is too but it won't come from the likes of us.
I have no defence for the Canadian government's treatment of Indigenous people - either in this case or in a thousand others - but describing the Manhattan Project as "an American mission to kill as many people as they could in Japan" is really, really facile.
For most of the war, the primary concern of the Manhattan Project was to counter Nazi Germany's attempt to build something similar, which had started beforehand. I don't know whether the US handled the bomb responsibly, but I know that the Nazis definitely wouldn't have. Given that history, as a Jew I find it almost offensive to deny the virtue of a mission to keep Hitler from having nuclear weapons unchecked.
Even once Germany surrendered, the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did. There were various ways the US probably could have caused fewer civilian casualties; but they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day.
> the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did
While this was the rationale that was published after the war by the US government, current historical scholarship indicates that it was a lot more complicated than that. To give just a few key points:
Actual casualty estimates made by the US military in the spring and summer of 1945 for a land invasion of Japan were much smaller than figures quoted (without any specific sourcing given) in rationales published after the war. The latter figures were in the range of a half million to a million casualties, but the former figures were more like tens of thousands.
While it was certainly a goal of the Truman Administration to end the war quickly, if at all possible before the Soviet Union attacked Japan, dropping the atomic bombs was far from the only feasible option for doing that. In particular, there were plenty of indications (including intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, since the US had broken the Japanese diplomatic code years before and was routinely reading all such traffic) that clarifying exactly what "unconditional surrender" meant, and in particular what the status of the Japanese Emperor would be, would have given the peace party within the Japanese government enough leverage to force a surrender sooner.
There is also plenty of evidence that at the very least Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, wanted to drop the atomic bombs in order to make the Soviet Union more tractable diplomatically and to reverse the much more conciliatory policy towards them that FDR had taken.
And finally, the internal deliberations of the Japanese government (which were not available to historians until some decades after the war) show that the impact of the Soviet Union invading Manchuria was much greater than the impact of the atomic bombs in pushing the issue for surrender. The Japanese weren't even sure at first what the atomic bombs were, and in any case the US had been firebombing Japanese cities for months so additional bombing was not a huge shock. The Soviets, however, had been stringing Japan along for more than a year at that point, holding out some hope that Japan might be able to get a negotiated peace brokered through the Soviet Union. In fact Stalin never had any such intention; he just wanted to make sure the Japanese didn't surrender until he had a chance to enter the war against them. But Japanese leaders didn't understand that until they were forced to realize it by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (the same morning that the Nagasaki bomb was dropped).
Two good detailed references are The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz and Racing the Enemy by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa.
> they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day
The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.
Thanks for the pointers...I'm not interested in defending American Jingoism by any means, and am very interested in learning more about the decision to drop the bomb.
That said, I do want to dispute this:
> The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.
It's an exaggeration to say that they were "destroyed". Yes, ~100,000 died in the firebombings of Tokyo...but even by the end of the war the population was still well over 3 million, 10x the size of Hiroshima. Whatever the "true" motivation, the selection of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was entirely coherent with the claimed strategy that was focused on destroying the Japanese capability to make war, rather than to commit indiscriminate genocide as claimed.
> It's an exaggeration to say that they were "destroyed".
You could say the same about Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you want to be sufficiently particular. But if you look at pictures of Tokyo, for example, after the firebombing raids, and pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs were dropped, they look pretty similar.
> even by the end of the war the population was still well over 3 million, 10x the size of Hiroshima
And before the war Tokyo's population was about 7 million, perhaps 20x the size of Hiroshima.
> the selection of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was entirely coherent with the claimed strategy that was focused on destroying the Japanese capability to make war, rather than to commit indiscriminate genocide as claimed
I agree that "indiscriminate genocide" was not a motivation (and no serious historian that I'm aware of claims that it was).
However, "destroying the Japanese capability to make war" is also something of a misstatement regarding the selection of atomic bomb targets. That is another aspect of the rationale given by the US government after the war that has been called into question by more recent historical scholarship. There were high officials in the Truman administration that advocated for using the bombs first on a purely military installation, like a naval base, or for a demonstration on some uninhabited island first (with Japanese observers invited). However, those officials had no real voice in the actual target selection. The main factors in the target selection were that it be a city with some military capability (and none of the cities chosen as potential targets had very much--because, as I have said, by that point in the war there wasn't much warmaking capability anywhere in Japan), such as a factory, but with significant civilian population surrounding it (such as factory workers' homes), and that the targeting point be chosen to maximize the effects of the bomb in order to make them clear to the Japanese.
Another factor that needs to be considered when talking about removing Japan's warmaking capability is that, by the end of 1944, the US Navy had Japan completely blockaded; no ships could get in or out. The Japanese Navy was destroyed and Japan had no prospect of getting any additional resources from anywhere (and Japan itself has very few natural resources at all--that's why the Japanese were so insistent upon expanding their control of Asia prior to WW II). That fact alone meant that erosion of the Japanese warmaking capability was only a matter of time. Factories are pointless without raw materials, and guns and tanks and planes are pointless without fuel and ammunition. Indeed, at least one internal US military study found that the blockade all by itself might have caused the Japanese to surrender eventually, without either any atomic bombs or any invasion.
Based on my notes from reading The New World: Volume 1, 1939-1946 by Hewlett and Anderson, approximately 1/6th of the Uranium used for the Manhattan Project came from Canada, 1/7th from the US, and the rest came from the Belgian Congo (most of that was actually shipped across the Atlantic before the US entered the war- it was stored on Staten Island for safekeeping before US entry and the creation of the Manhattan Project). I don't know much about the US uranium, but I do know that the Belgian Congo uranium mining was also done under a racist colonial system that exploited the locals and gave them inadequate protection or understanding of the risks they were taking. Postwar US Uranium mines in Arizona and Utah also used Dine (Navajo) and other native peoples with similar levels of racism, exploitation, leaving thousands of people sick etc.
There are surprisingly strong parallels to the current 'Race for Lithium' and 'Race for Rare Earths'- hard-rock mining is a terrible business all the way around.
Can you show me where in the comment some one called someone else racist?
Otherwise, it seems like you are projecting yourself onto the Belgium Congo being identified as racist, which is just like a "Well yeah duh" level of racism. It seems like you are angry that the Belgium Congo was identified as a racist enterprise, which even by their own accounts is objectively true. So do you self identify with the Belgium Congo?
I mean, I will go on record and say that Leopold II was a racist based on what he did in Congo. I'm comfortable doing that. And while we're at it, Roosevelt was racist for putting all Japanese-Americans into camps. Btw, did you know that Belgium and the US fought Hitler and Tojo, who were also racist? I know all very controversial stuff. Man, I'm enjoying calling people out for racism on the internet and I feel so good about myself right now.
I guess I meant it to whomever that smurph was. In your original comment, I didn't see you calling out any individual either in the comments, or in history as being racists. It might not be clear because I believe the admins have deleted the post of the sockpuppets/ smurphs.
The subtitle of the article is "A mine in the Northwest Territories provided much of the uranium used during the Manhattan Project—unbeknownst to the indigenous people who worked there." So broader commentary on uranium mining in other places using indigenous peoples is relevant and using history to compare to modern day is relevant.
Mining isn't racist necessarily, but it is definitely done by exploiting people, and in ways that line up with the power structure at that place and time.
My wife did her (pharmacy) residency at a hospital in West Virginia, which is both incredibly poor, exploited heavily for coal mining (until the recent fracking boom surge in natural gas killed it), and very white. She definitely spent a lot of her time treating black lung and other mining diseases that didn't involve mining for uranium.
Mining exploits the land, it exploits the people who do it, and our civilization is built on it and absolutely requires enormous quantities of it. I don't have a larger point, just that I try to live with it.
So does a community that allows a mining operation to "exploit" it have any say in the matter? Is it possible that the operating brings new jobs to the community that wouldn't have existed otherwise?
Complex question, one of personal morality and judgement, the sort of thing that everyone has to answer for themselves.
For myself, the concerns I have are about consent: how well are the risks explained to and understood by all parties involved, and what happens if one of the parties says no (especially the less powerful group). It should in theory be possible to mostly resolve those issues with consent, though in practice, even among adults it seems we have trouble with it, as the original article makes clear.
There are some philosophers who point out that a lot of the suffering from these sorts of trade-offs are actually felt by people who aren't even born yet- those who grow up amid the dust and debris, those exposed in utero, etc. which raises all sorts of even more difficult questions about consent.
Again, I have no answer for this, but I think it is good practice for humans to at least regularly think about these sorts of moral trade-offs being made by our civilization, because we each have our own point where we have to be the one who walks away from Omelas.
> Postwar US Uranium mines in Arizona and Utah also used Dine (Navajo) and other native peoples with similar levels of racism, exploitation, leaving thousands of people sick etc.
Not exactly just exploiting minorities. My grandpa died because he mined Uranium post-war, but he was white and afaik so was everyone he worked with.
They didn't say "just" or "only" minorities. However, most of the mines were located on or near, Navajo land and over 4 million tons of ore came for that land. The workers were disproportionately Navajo and the land is now poisoned with radioactive waste from the mining, with cancer rates doubling from the 1970s to the 1990s. Land the Navajo were forced onto. Recognizing the damage this has done to an already persecuted minority population does not negate damage done to individuals of other races or ethnicities.
The risk was very much known, as all male miners died at about 45. It was called the miners disease.
Eg the nazis promised the Jachimov miners to close it, so they won their support. When the Russians kept it going and expanded it, the risk was still known, and simple measures could have saved thousands of lives, but they didn't care.
> This secrecy was maintained long after the end of the war. “Efforts were made to give the message that the uranium came from Canada, as a way of deflecting attention away from the Congo..."
> Under Belgian rule, Congolese workers toiled day and night in the open pit, sending hundreds of tonnes of uranium ore to the US every month.
Lived in the nwt for many years as a kid. Highlights? A lot:
- good schools. I miss Ms. Carter
- travel extensively through Yukon
- great shape: shoveled a lot of snow and frozen Canadian ice cream. Lots of cross country skiing
- maple walnut icecream is awesome. Hard to find in the usa
- had a decent fossil collection for a while
- got into a lot of trouble (having fun). Still know k-6 principal name (Ms. Wind and her paddle. She might remember me too).
- awesome/epic snowball fights. I should have pitched for the Yankees
- appreciation for beauty of land nature
- caught my first fish in the keele River. Smoked it
- cold nights makes well read kids
- a piece of sputnik fell to earth not too far from us
- as ref almost all Canadians live very close to us border. The nwt capital (yellowknife) is on great slave lake about 40 degree north. You live there because you are a native, geologist, government worker. Named after local tribe
- great bear lake is one lake up from great slave
- Unofficial national dessert? Strawberry short cake or rhubarb pie.
> - maple walnut icecream is awesome. Hard to find in the usa
It's fairly findable in the Northeast (as is maple walnut fudge). The best maple walnut ice cream I've ever had was at a place called Brickley's[1] in Rhode Island.
You're right. If you are in Maine or north of Boston you can probably get it ie NE corner of US. I'm NYC area ... and it's persona non grata. Thanks for the link
I'd put the "must be north of" city at Hartford for the ice cream, but you're right about the NYC area. I've seen maple-walnut fudge as far south as Pennsylvania though.
Is maple walnut ice cream not a thing across the US? I grew up in New England not far from the Canadian border, now live in upstate NY and have easy access to maple walnut ice cream. Never realized how lucky I was.
As a Canadian, this is how I feel whenever folks are talking about US states other than like, Texas or New York.
It's interesting being in Europe or somewhere and having a bunch of travelers introduce themselves, I've always noticed that most people will say what country their from, Italy, France, Canada etc, but Americans always just use their state.
People go with big cities usually.
Some people like Nevada but most will still say Vegas. People say they are from Philadelphia rather than the state. Chicago is used more often. Buffalo over New York. New Jersey, Rhode Island seem to be used more than a city. Boston over the state but in Cambridge they use the city and state. Texas is more common than Austin unless you are in the states. Florida could go both ways and be more regional South Beach, Miami, Ft Lauderdale vs from Florida.
Interesting topic. In Europe it seems by country. From France vs from Paris
In Europe the answer depends on who you're talking with.
For example if you're in a German train and ask someone where they're from, they might say they are from Swabia (a linguistic region similar but not identical to the state of Baden-Württemberg). If you had asked them in a Swabian accent, they would have instead answered with the specific city, e.g. Limburg. If you ask the same person in English while he's on vacation in Paris, he'll say he's from Germany.
What people actually identify with most strongly depends heavily on the region; in large cities it's often the city or metropolitan area, but elsewhere it's not uncommon to associate with linguistic regions, kingdoms that stopped existing centuries ago, or your state or administrative district (particularly when it coincides with one of the previous points).
States are more autonomous than provinces (although closer) or regions in many european countries. My in-laws live in France but we'd rarely talk about the Departement they live in, it's the city that's mentioned.
Saying your state is imo closer to saying your European country instead of saying Europe.
Additionally, culture and education being what they are, most adults in western countries have heard of all the states, moreso than some of their principal cities, so it's not that odd to mention it.
Perhaps a dumb question but why isn't mining highly robotized? As a layperson, it seems like it would lend itself well to remotely controlled heavy machinery.
I don't have an answer for mining specifically, but having worked in robotics in the past, I'd probably guess it's just fundamentally cheaper to pay very poor people to do it vs developing and maintaining new technologies. Unfortunately, because I could see the benefit to robotic mining technologies, heck maybe if we ever figure out how to feasibly mine asteroids or something they will get some funding.
Other types of mines are less robotized, since they only have to worry about inhalation hazards, and not radioactivity. However, in most other types of mines, machines still do most of the drilling, lifting, detonation of explosives, and so on.
The biggest hazard in a modern mine is probably the accumulation of dust in enclosed spaces. I'd guess injuries during machine maintenance and repair come second, and cave-ins are a distant third. (I'm speculating though; I don't have data to back that up.)
The heavy machinery work until it does not. Someone needs to come down there and unjam it, replace the broken parts, so the maintainance and so on. It’s highly mechanized, but there are people who still need to keep it going.
Being from the US, I've noticed several times where a Canadian has popped up and said something similar to a boast that Canadians helped with something that is primarily an American thing. It always ways feels like the little brother chiming in "but I helped too!" I find it very endearing. Kind of a Wally and Beaver moment.
> helped with something that is primarily an American thing
To be clear though, a huge amount of the key players were foreign scientists or foreign educated, such as Oppenheimer himself. We need to keep this in mind because although the U.S. helped pull all this together, we couldn't have done it without the foreign help we received. This is important in today's climate that gets more and more nationalistic by the day. Germany effectively gave the allies the win because they pushed out good people. The U.S. must keep this in mind.
Only minor parts from this Eldorado mine in Canada (907 tons, 0.03% graded) and Colorado could be used, the largest percentage came from the superior Belgish Kongo Shinkolobwe mine, 65% graded.
65 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadAlso what, Ehtséo Ayah didn't see a great mushroom in the distance? That's pretty disappointing
According to this article, it was mostly First Nation workers in the ore mines. https://ejatlas.org/conflict/mining-and-transportation-of-ur...
Here's another article about the workers in the ore mines. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/natives-worked-unprotected-in...
Uranium ore in ton quantities, underground in a poorly ventilated mine? That’s a big health risk, due to radon, other daughter products, and the inherent heavy metal hazards of uranium.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653646/
I believe a parallel debate among historians is whether mass Japanese civilian suicides near battle zones were under Japanese military orders or were merely voluntary. You can be sure the Allied invasion of the home islands would have been desirable for such coerced self killing -- which the Allies tried to prevent -- if it had been the mission to kill as many Japanese people as possible.
What is AFAIK not debated is that Japanese who did surrender, instead of heading for the suicide cliffs in places like Okinawa (I don't know about Saipan), were often murdered from a distance by the Japanese soldiers who wanted everyone to head for the suicide cliffs. It possibly deterred other Japanese who were thinking of surrender. Unfortunately I think that your justified indignation actually overestimates human righteousness and justification, both theirs and ours and our own future descendants'. I think justification is needed and justice/hope is too but it won't come from the likes of us.
For most of the war, the primary concern of the Manhattan Project was to counter Nazi Germany's attempt to build something similar, which had started beforehand. I don't know whether the US handled the bomb responsibly, but I know that the Nazis definitely wouldn't have. Given that history, as a Jew I find it almost offensive to deny the virtue of a mission to keep Hitler from having nuclear weapons unchecked.
Even once Germany surrendered, the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did. There were various ways the US probably could have caused fewer civilian casualties; but they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day.
While this was the rationale that was published after the war by the US government, current historical scholarship indicates that it was a lot more complicated than that. To give just a few key points:
Actual casualty estimates made by the US military in the spring and summer of 1945 for a land invasion of Japan were much smaller than figures quoted (without any specific sourcing given) in rationales published after the war. The latter figures were in the range of a half million to a million casualties, but the former figures were more like tens of thousands.
While it was certainly a goal of the Truman Administration to end the war quickly, if at all possible before the Soviet Union attacked Japan, dropping the atomic bombs was far from the only feasible option for doing that. In particular, there were plenty of indications (including intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, since the US had broken the Japanese diplomatic code years before and was routinely reading all such traffic) that clarifying exactly what "unconditional surrender" meant, and in particular what the status of the Japanese Emperor would be, would have given the peace party within the Japanese government enough leverage to force a surrender sooner.
There is also plenty of evidence that at the very least Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, wanted to drop the atomic bombs in order to make the Soviet Union more tractable diplomatically and to reverse the much more conciliatory policy towards them that FDR had taken.
And finally, the internal deliberations of the Japanese government (which were not available to historians until some decades after the war) show that the impact of the Soviet Union invading Manchuria was much greater than the impact of the atomic bombs in pushing the issue for surrender. The Japanese weren't even sure at first what the atomic bombs were, and in any case the US had been firebombing Japanese cities for months so additional bombing was not a huge shock. The Soviets, however, had been stringing Japan along for more than a year at that point, holding out some hope that Japan might be able to get a negotiated peace brokered through the Soviet Union. In fact Stalin never had any such intention; he just wanted to make sure the Japanese didn't surrender until he had a chance to enter the war against them. But Japanese leaders didn't understand that until they were forced to realize it by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (the same morning that the Nagasaki bomb was dropped).
Two good detailed references are The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz and Racing the Enemy by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa.
> they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day
The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.
That said, I do want to dispute this:
> The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.
It's an exaggeration to say that they were "destroyed". Yes, ~100,000 died in the firebombings of Tokyo...but even by the end of the war the population was still well over 3 million, 10x the size of Hiroshima. Whatever the "true" motivation, the selection of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was entirely coherent with the claimed strategy that was focused on destroying the Japanese capability to make war, rather than to commit indiscriminate genocide as claimed.
You could say the same about Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you want to be sufficiently particular. But if you look at pictures of Tokyo, for example, after the firebombing raids, and pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombs were dropped, they look pretty similar.
> even by the end of the war the population was still well over 3 million, 10x the size of Hiroshima
And before the war Tokyo's population was about 7 million, perhaps 20x the size of Hiroshima.
> the selection of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was entirely coherent with the claimed strategy that was focused on destroying the Japanese capability to make war, rather than to commit indiscriminate genocide as claimed
I agree that "indiscriminate genocide" was not a motivation (and no serious historian that I'm aware of claims that it was).
However, "destroying the Japanese capability to make war" is also something of a misstatement regarding the selection of atomic bomb targets. That is another aspect of the rationale given by the US government after the war that has been called into question by more recent historical scholarship. There were high officials in the Truman administration that advocated for using the bombs first on a purely military installation, like a naval base, or for a demonstration on some uninhabited island first (with Japanese observers invited). However, those officials had no real voice in the actual target selection. The main factors in the target selection were that it be a city with some military capability (and none of the cities chosen as potential targets had very much--because, as I have said, by that point in the war there wasn't much warmaking capability anywhere in Japan), such as a factory, but with significant civilian population surrounding it (such as factory workers' homes), and that the targeting point be chosen to maximize the effects of the bomb in order to make them clear to the Japanese.
Another factor that needs to be considered when talking about removing Japan's warmaking capability is that, by the end of 1944, the US Navy had Japan completely blockaded; no ships could get in or out. The Japanese Navy was destroyed and Japan had no prospect of getting any additional resources from anywhere (and Japan itself has very few natural resources at all--that's why the Japanese were so insistent upon expanding their control of Asia prior to WW II). That fact alone meant that erosion of the Japanese warmaking capability was only a matter of time. Factories are pointless without raw materials, and guns and tanks and planes are pointless without fuel and ammunition. Indeed, at least one internal US military study found that the blockade all by itself might have caused the Japanese to surrender eventually, without either any atomic bombs or any invasion.
There are surprisingly strong parallels to the current 'Race for Lithium' and 'Race for Rare Earths'- hard-rock mining is a terrible business all the way around.
Its a sort of religion, and there's the fanatics who accuse others of heresy.
I'd feel the same disgust for ISIS activists
Otherwise, it seems like you are projecting yourself onto the Belgium Congo being identified as racist, which is just like a "Well yeah duh" level of racism. It seems like you are angry that the Belgium Congo was identified as a racist enterprise, which even by their own accounts is objectively true. So do you self identify with the Belgium Congo?
My wife did her (pharmacy) residency at a hospital in West Virginia, which is both incredibly poor, exploited heavily for coal mining (until the recent fracking boom surge in natural gas killed it), and very white. She definitely spent a lot of her time treating black lung and other mining diseases that didn't involve mining for uranium.
Mining exploits the land, it exploits the people who do it, and our civilization is built on it and absolutely requires enormous quantities of it. I don't have a larger point, just that I try to live with it.
For myself, the concerns I have are about consent: how well are the risks explained to and understood by all parties involved, and what happens if one of the parties says no (especially the less powerful group). It should in theory be possible to mostly resolve those issues with consent, though in practice, even among adults it seems we have trouble with it, as the original article makes clear.
There are some philosophers who point out that a lot of the suffering from these sorts of trade-offs are actually felt by people who aren't even born yet- those who grow up amid the dust and debris, those exposed in utero, etc. which raises all sorts of even more difficult questions about consent.
Again, I have no answer for this, but I think it is good practice for humans to at least regularly think about these sorts of moral trade-offs being made by our civilization, because we each have our own point where we have to be the one who walks away from Omelas.
Not exactly just exploiting minorities. My grandpa died because he mined Uranium post-war, but he was white and afaik so was everyone he worked with.
They didn't say "just" or "only" minorities. However, most of the mines were located on or near, Navajo land and over 4 million tons of ore came for that land. The workers were disproportionately Navajo and the land is now poisoned with radioactive waste from the mining, with cancer rates doubling from the 1970s to the 1990s. Land the Navajo were forced onto. Recognizing the damage this has done to an already persecuted minority population does not negate damage done to individuals of other races or ethnicities.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/10/4735472...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222290/
The Manhattan Project was done to end a war killing tens of thousands of people a day, which I think can defend some grim tradeoffs.
I won't claim all workers were well treated, but many scientists were also killed and injured in this learning process.
> This secrecy was maintained long after the end of the war. “Efforts were made to give the message that the uranium came from Canada, as a way of deflecting attention away from the Congo..."
> Under Belgian rule, Congolese workers toiled day and night in the open pit, sending hundreds of tonnes of uranium ore to the US every month.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-forgotten-mi...
- good schools. I miss Ms. Carter
- travel extensively through Yukon
- great shape: shoveled a lot of snow and frozen Canadian ice cream. Lots of cross country skiing
- maple walnut icecream is awesome. Hard to find in the usa
- had a decent fossil collection for a while
- got into a lot of trouble (having fun). Still know k-6 principal name (Ms. Wind and her paddle. She might remember me too).
- awesome/epic snowball fights. I should have pitched for the Yankees
- appreciation for beauty of land nature
- caught my first fish in the keele River. Smoked it
- cold nights makes well read kids
- a piece of sputnik fell to earth not too far from us
- as ref almost all Canadians live very close to us border. The nwt capital (yellowknife) is on great slave lake about 40 degree north. You live there because you are a native, geologist, government worker. Named after local tribe
- great bear lake is one lake up from great slave
- Unofficial national dessert? Strawberry short cake or rhubarb pie.
I think you mean about 62 degrees north latitude?
It's fairly findable in the Northeast (as is maple walnut fudge). The best maple walnut ice cream I've ever had was at a place called Brickley's[1] in Rhode Island.
1: https://www.brickleys.com/
First I've heard of it being hard to find. It's everywhere in New England.
It's interesting being in Europe or somewhere and having a bunch of travelers introduce themselves, I've always noticed that most people will say what country their from, Italy, France, Canada etc, but Americans always just use their state.
Interesting topic. In Europe it seems by country. From France vs from Paris
For example if you're in a German train and ask someone where they're from, they might say they are from Swabia (a linguistic region similar but not identical to the state of Baden-Württemberg). If you had asked them in a Swabian accent, they would have instead answered with the specific city, e.g. Limburg. If you ask the same person in English while he's on vacation in Paris, he'll say he's from Germany.
What people actually identify with most strongly depends heavily on the region; in large cities it's often the city or metropolitan area, but elsewhere it's not uncommon to associate with linguistic regions, kingdoms that stopped existing centuries ago, or your state or administrative district (particularly when it coincides with one of the previous points).
Saying your state is imo closer to saying your European country instead of saying Europe.
Additionally, culture and education being what they are, most adults in western countries have heard of all the states, moreso than some of their principal cities, so it's not that odd to mention it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x7DozCqLxU
Other types of mines are less robotized, since they only have to worry about inhalation hazards, and not radioactivity. However, in most other types of mines, machines still do most of the drilling, lifting, detonation of explosives, and so on.
The biggest hazard in a modern mine is probably the accumulation of dust in enclosed spaces. I'd guess injuries during machine maintenance and repair come second, and cave-ins are a distant third. (I'm speculating though; I don't have data to back that up.)
To be clear though, a huge amount of the key players were foreign scientists or foreign educated, such as Oppenheimer himself. We need to keep this in mind because although the U.S. helped pull all this together, we couldn't have done it without the foreign help we received. This is important in today's climate that gets more and more nationalistic by the day. Germany effectively gave the allies the win because they pushed out good people. The U.S. must keep this in mind.
anyhow, at one point a Canadian threatens the American that he's going to "go all War of 1812 on your ass."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-forgotten-mi...