Quote:
Originally Posted by Kobi
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Sometimes, I see stuff in the news that makes me realize how old habits and beliefs still linger in the minds of us imperfect mortals. So, I thought it might be interesting to start a thread for those comments hitting the news that make us go "huh?" or "did they really say that?" kind of stuff.
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Personally I don’t think there should be a statute of limitations on "did they really say that" and in this case did they really do that?
Happy Savages
Castle Bravo was a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb blast, the largest U.S. test ever, detonated over Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954.
Rongelap was heavily contaminated by the Castle Bravo blast. The official explanation is that the wind suddenly shifted. Many of the islanders believe that the wind direction was known and the blast occurred anyway. The U.S. Navy waited several days before evacuating the island.
In 1957, the Rongelapese were told their island was safe again — a blatant untruth — and were transported back to their ancestral home, where they proceeded to die of cancer and give birth to large numbers of stillborn, deformed children. The bodies of many of the islanders were removed by U.S. personnel and examined.
A year before they were moved back to Rongelap, Merril Eisenbud, the first health and safety chief of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, had said, according to the transcript of a 1956 meeting:
“That island is by far the most contaminated place on earth and it would be very interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment. . . . While it is true that these people do not live the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is also true that these people are more like us than the mice.”