Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

maisonneuve.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#51

Post by wongarsu »

ipaddr wrote: post #41
palijer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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).

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#52

Post by also23throwaway »

opticfluorine wrote: post #49
scrubs wrote: post #29

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 h…

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.

Don’t live in the northeast, and this is the first time I’m hearing about the existence of maple walnut ice cream.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#53

Post by failuser »

AYBABTME wrote: post #32

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.

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.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#54

Post by pdonis »

wk_end wrote: post #42
pdonis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 atomi…

> 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.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#55

Post by version_five »

palijer wrote: post #33
cgeier wrote: post #30

I had to look this up: the Northwest Territories are a part of Canada. It's only mentioned about half way through the article.

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.

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.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#56

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

juujian wrote: post #44
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Con…

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 go…

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.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#57

Post by ghc »

scrubs wrote: post #29

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 h…

> maple walnut icecream is awesome. Hard to find in the usa

First I've heard of it being hard to find. It's everywhere in New England.

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#59

Post by rurban »

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.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-the-forgotten-mi...

Re: Mine in the Northwest Territories provided uranium to Manhattan Project (2011)

#60

Post by rurban »

BurningFrog wrote: post #24
mandevil wrote: post #4

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 Pr…

The risks around radioactive materials were very poorly understood at the time, and were largely learned by lethal trial and error. 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.

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.
Post reply on HN