Plutonium - Tumblr Posts
Sean bienvenidos, japonistasarqueologicos a una nueva entrega de historia nipona en la que os pongo imágenes de los epicentros tras los bombardeos del 6 y 9 de agosto, una vez dicho esto pónganse cómodos que empezamos. - Antes que nada me gustaría poner un poco de contexto histórico para poder entender la situación, Japón estaba perdiendo la guerra y estaban buscando formas desesperadas para frenar el avance norteamericano que se cernía sobre el país del sol naciente. Recurrirán a los kamikazes vía aérea y terrestre de hecho se estaba preparando en Japón unas fuerzas de defensa con mujeres, tras la batalla de Okinawa en los 82 días de combate murieron cerca de 100.000 soldados japoneses, más de 12.000 estadounidenses y al menos 100.000 civiles locales, incluidos cientos que fueron obligados a matarse a sí mismo, también se perdería el Yamato en el último kamikaze. - Ciudad de Hiroshima:6 de agosto 1945, Little Boy fue arrojado desde el Enola Gay, matando a más de 70.000 personas al instante y muchas más morirían consecuencia de la radiación. Ciudad de Nagasaki: 9 de agosto 1945, Fat Man, fue la otra bomba atómica lanzada por el mismo avión, causando la muerte de 49.000 personas el día de la explosión. - Conclusión: Los costos fueron terribles, ya que las propias consecuencias lo fueron aún más, espero que no se tengan más bombas atómicas, ni de cualquier otro tipo, el ser humano debería aprender de los errores de la historia para que se acabaran las guerras. Publicación en memoria de todos los que murieron por las bombas atómicas. - Esperó que os haya gustado y nos vemos en próximas publicaciones que pasen una buena semana. - 日本の考古学者の皆さん、ようこそ日本史の新連載へ。8月6日と9日の原爆投下後の爆心地の画像をお届けします。 - まず最初に、この状況を理解するために歴史的背景を説明したいと思う。日本は戦争に負け、日出ずる国に迫りつつあったアメリカの進撃を食い止めるための絶望的な方法を模索していた。沖縄戦の後、82日間の戦闘で10万人近くの日本兵が死に、1万2000人以上のアメリカ兵と、自殺を余儀なくされた数百人を含む少なくとも10万人の民間人が亡くなった。 - 広島市：1945年8月6日、エノラ・ゲイからリトルボーイが投下され、7万人以上が即死。長崎市：1945年8月9日、ファットマンが同じ飛行機から投下され、爆発当日に49,000人が死亡した。 - 結論：原爆投下は、その結果そのものもさることながら、その代償もまた恐ろしいものであった。 私は、原爆や他のいかなる種類の爆弾もこれ以上投下されないことを願うとともに、人類が歴史の過ちから学び、戦争がなくなることを願っている。原爆で亡くなられたすべての方々を悼んで。 - お気に召していただけたなら幸いである。 良い一週間を. - Welcome, Japanese archaeologists, to a new instalment of Japanese history in which I bring you images of the epicentres after the bombings of 6 and 9 August, so make yourselves comfortable and let's get started. - First of all I would like to give some historical context to understand the situation, Japan was losing the war and they were looking for desperate ways to stop the American advance that was looming over the land of the rising sun. They resorted to kamikazes by air and land in fact they were preparing in Japan a defence force with women, after the battle of Okinawa in the 82 days of combat nearly 100,000 Japanese soldiers died, more than 12,000 Americans and at least 100,000 local civilians, including hundreds who were forced to kill themselves, they would also lose the Yamato in the last kamikaze. - Hiroshima City: 6 August 1945, Little Boy was dropped from the Enola Gay, killing over 70,000 people instantly and many more would die from radiation. Nagasaki City: 9 August 1945, Fat Man, was the other atomic bomb dropped from the same plane, killing 49,000 people on the day of the explosion. - Conclusion: The costs were terrible, as the consequences themselves were even more so. I hope that there will be no more atomic bombs, or any other type of bomb, and that mankind should learn from the mistakes of history so that wars will end. Publication in memory of all those who were killed by atomic bombs. - I hope you liked it and see you in future publications. Have a good week.
Why are they mining so much right now?
Cobalt has become the center of a major upsurge in mining in Congo, and the rapid acceleration of cobalt extraction in the region since 2013 has brought hundreds of thousands of people into intimate contact with a powerful melange of toxic metals. The frantic pace of cobalt extraction in Katanga bears close resemblance to another period of rapid exploitation of Congolese mineral resources: During the last few years of World War II, the U.S. government sourced the majority of the uranium necessary to develop the first atomic weapons from a single Congolese mine, named Shinkolobwe. The largely forgotten story of those miners, and the devastating health and ecological impacts uranium production had on Congo, looms over the country now as cobalt mining accelerates to feed the renewable energy boom—with little to no protections for workers involved in the trade.
The city of Kolwezi, which is 300 km (186 miles) northwest of Lubumbashi and 180 km from the now-abandoned Shinkolobwe mine, sits on top of nearly half of the available cobalt in the world. The scope of the contemporary scramble for that metal in Katanga has totally transformed the region. Enormous open-pit mines worked by tens of thousands of miners form vast craters in the landscape and are slowly erasing the city itself.
[...]Much of the cobalt in Congo is mined by hand: Workers scour the surface level seams with picks, shovels, and lengths of rebar, sometimes tunneling by hand 60 feet or more into the earth in pursuit of a vein of ore. This is referred to as artisanal mining, as opposed to the industrial mining carried out by large firms. The thousands of artisanal miners who work at the edges of the formal mines run by big industrial concerns make up 90 percent of the nation’s mining workforce and produce 30 percent of its metals. Artisanal mining is not as efficient as larger-scale industrial mining, but since the miners produce good-quality ore with zero investment in tools, infrastructure, or safety, the ore they sell to buyers is as cheap as it gets. Forced and child labor in the supply chain is not uncommon here, thanks in part to a significant lack of controls and regulations on artisanal mining from the government.
[...]When later atomic research found that uranium’s unstable nucleus could be used to make a powerful bomb, the U.S. Army’s Manhattan Project began searching for a reliable source of uranium. They found it through Union Minière, which sold the United States the first 1,000 tons it needed to get the bomb effort off the ground.
The Manhattan Project sent agents of the OSS, precursor to the CIA, to Congo from 1943 to 1945 to supervise the reopening of the mine and the extraction of Shinkolobwe’s ore—and to make sure none of it fell into the hands of the Axis powers. Every piece of rock that emerged from the mine for almost two decades was purchased by the Manhattan Project and its successors in the Atomic Energy Commission, until the mine was closed by the Belgian authorities on the eve of Congolese independence in 1960. After that, the colonial mining enterprise Union Minière became the national minerals conglomerate Gécamines, which retained much of the original structure and staff.
[...]Dr. Lubaba showed me the small battery-operated Geiger counters that he uses in the field to measure radioactivity. He had begun the process of trying to find and interview the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners, but he explained that tracing the health consequences of working in that specific mine would be difficult: Many long-established villages in the area have been demolished and cast apart as cobalt extraction has torn through the landscape. His initial inquiries suggested that at least some of the descendants of the Shinkolobwe miners had been drawn into the maelstrom of digging in the region around Kolwezi.
In her book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, historian Gabrielle Hecht recounts the U.S. Public Health Service’s efforts to investigate the effects of uranium exposure on people who worked closely with the metal and the ore that bore it. In 1956, a team of medical researchers from the PHS paid a visit to Shinkolobwe while the mine was still producing more than half of the uranium used in America’s Cold War missile programs. Most of their questions went unanswered, however, as Shinkolobwe’s operators had few official records to share and stopped responding to communications as soon as the researchers left.
[...]“Don’t ever use that word in anybody’s presence. Not ever!” Williams quotes OSS agent Wilbur Hogue snapping at a subordinate who had said the mine’s name in a café in Congo’s capital. “There’s something in that mine that both the United States and Germany want more than anything else in the world. I don’t know what it’s for. We’re not supposed to know.”
I'm now ninety percent certain that if Laughing Jack does actually poison people (can't actually remember if he does in the story) like the fandom says that this is what he uses.
New candy unlocked