Half life (1/9)

PROGETTO 4.1 - STUDIARE GLI EFFETTI A LUNGA E BREVE DURATA DELL'ATOMICA SU
ORGANISMI UMANI
1 Marzo 1954 - Subito dopo la prima bomba H russa, gli Stati Uniti sperimentano gli effetti della radiottività della prima bomba H statunitense (test "Bravo") sugli abitanti - volontariamente non evacuati, i documenti e alcune
testimonianze recentemente scoperti lo provano - delle isole Marshall.
I discendenti degli antichi navigatori del pacifico furono sacrificati in
nome della scienza, della follia umana, del razzismo ideologico.
Il famoso regista di documentari, Dennis O'Rourke, in questo suo splendido e crudo documentario, "Half Life" (1985) racconta con l'ausilio di testimonianze dell'epoca e filmati eccezionali questa terribile storia, una storia quasi sconosciuta alla coscienza dei più ma indelebile sulla pelle e nelle malattie delle vecchie come delle nuove generazioni degli atolli vicino a Bikini.

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The Americans exploded the H-bomb, code-named Bravo, on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 2,000 kilome­
ters northeast of Australia, on 1 March 1954. It was the height
of the Cold War and this, the first deliverable hydrogen or
super-bomb detonated by the U.S., heralded the opening of a
terrifying new chapter of the arms race.

Hundreds of people living on the tiny nearby islands of
Rongelap, Rongerik, and Utirik in the Marshalls were exposed
to massive radioactive fallout from Bravo, as tons of pul­
verized coral and debris from Bikini were sucked up into a
fireball 35 kilometers high and dumped on the islands down­
wind. Children played in the deadly white fallout dust thinking
it was snow.

Six years earlier, the Americans had tested two atomic
weapons at Bikini. They were modest by today's standards —
at 20 kilotons each about as powerful as the bombs which
devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Before these blasts the
islanders within a 500 kilometer radius of Bikini were evacu­
ated as a precaution.

Bravo was a different story. At 15 megatons, it was 1,000
times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. It was also
the biggest hydrogen bomb ever tested by the U.S. And, we
now know, it was the "dirtiest" in terms of fallout: this was
the bomb that really alerted the world to the dangers of radio­
activity. Yet none of the islanders were warned or evacuated
before Bravo.

The Americans have always argued that the fallout expo­
sure was an accident. According to the official version put
forward at the time by Lewis Strauss, then head of the U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission, the upper level winds shifted
suddenly after the blast and failed to follow their predicted
pattern which would have taken the fallout away from Ronge­
lap, Rongerik, and Utirik.

But according to facts which emerge from Half Life, this
story was a smokescreen. The film accuses the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission, in charge of the Bravo test, of knowing
the islanders would be directly in the fallout's path and of
doing nothing to move them. These assertions, culled from
recently declassified documents, are backed up by interviews
with two American weathermen and a radio operator who were
stationed downwind from Bravo, and who insist that the fall­
out disaster could have been avoided. One of the weathermen,
Gene Curbow, is suffering from leukemia and is suing the
U.S. government. He attributes his cancer, like that suffered
by many Marshallese since Bravo, directly to radiation expo­
sure. The people from Rongelap, the atoll closest to ground
zero for Bravo, received the most lethal fallout dose. In the
four years after Bravo, women on Rongelap had a miscarriage
and stillbirth rate more than twice that of unexposed women.
More than 60 percent of those on Rongelap who were aged
under ten when Bravo happened have undergone surgery for
removal of thyroid tumors. In 1972 a teenager from Rongelap,
Lekoj Anjain, who was a year old when contaminated in 1954,
died of myelogenous leukemia. His was the first death of a
Marshallese which the American authorities admitted was due
to fallout. The boy's parents have since received $50,000
compensation.

Medical teams from the Atomic Energy Commission
(now the Department of Energy) began examining the is­
landers immediately after the Bravo blast and have returned to
do follow-up tests at least once a year since then, as part of an
official study of the exposed people.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• human
• Guinea
• Pig
• atomic
• experiment
• radiations
• marshall
• bikini
• documentary
• bomb
• bravo
• test
• cavie
• documentario
• atomica

[markossize]

bombe H da 20 milioni di tonnellate d TNT,le dovete ai vostri figli????....generali pazzi scatenati...

[marcotogniphoto]

Dennis O Rourke è un grandissimo,

tutti i suoi documentari sono opere d'arte. grazie per aver messo questo su youtube.

[ignotae]

che tristezza... follia umana allo stato puro. Cercherò di vederlo tutto