A NEW Manhattan project to solve our human-caused environmental crisis ? Oh God !

If the gameplan of the Manhattan atomic Project is followed once again, foreigners will do most of the heavy lifting while America will gets most of the credit, the profits and the protection.

Why did 1954's "Castle Bravo" fallout cloud , rather than 1918's Spanish Flu or 1883's Krakatoa, finally convince humans of our interconnected biosphere?

Perhaps natural things don't really matter to us hubris-driven humans.

Because even huge natural catastrophes like Spanish Flu (and earlier global pandemics) and the volcano Krakatoa's volcanic winter didn't seem to count as much in the human mind as did a relatively small disaster that humans themselves were causing.

The unexpectedly large yield from the American thermonuclear test Castle Bravo in 1954 led to a strong plume of radioactive dust to fall on a Japanese fishing boat thousands of miles away, quickly killing one crewman.

It also added a relatively small amount of a much longer term radiation killer, strontium 90, to go high up into the atmosphere and then slowly fall all over the world, onto grass and then into cow's milk and eventually into the growing bones of babies.

The three verities of Modernity : the separate simple solidities of the Man's Will, Nature and the Atom

The pre WWI Freud put paid to the first verity pretty quickly - suggesting that inside an individual's solid and stable 'will' was actually a seething sea of competing components - not all 'visible' to that individual's ken.

The 1920s-1930s fundamental physicists did the same for the verity of the solid and stable atom, with sub atomic science quickly being revealed as only slightly less complicated that the science of the human mind.

But I think it took the physicists' mutating subatomic particles from all those fallout clouds drifting around the world from mid 1950s nuclear testing , falling to the earth and into the Freudian minds of boomer teenagers in the form of the science fiction cum horror movies that really destroyed the third verity.

Man's split mind had in turn split the atom and the fallout drifting down worldwide indiscriminately over plant, animal and human alike had finally re-united humanity and all other lifeforms on an increasingly fragile seeming planet ...

Four years difference really matter : when you're four and eight

On August 15th 1945, the two children (ages four and eight) of a young American serviceman in the Pacific preparing to invade Japan probably responded quite differently from the united way their two grandmothers (aged 59 and 63) reacted to the news that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had caused the Japanese to sue for peace.

The two grandmothers were both united in giving comparatively little thought to all the grandmothers and grandchildren killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki , so glad were they that their son/son-in-law wasn't going to be killed during the Allied invasion effort.

The eight year old child agreed - very glad that Daddy wasn't going to die overseas and would be coming home soon unharmed.

But the four year old child probably hadn't even been told that Daddy was facing imminent death overseas or that two bombs that killed thousands of children would now bring Daddy home safe.

This child's reaction was no reaction.

Because when you are very young, even only being four years apart in age makes a huge difference - though four years difference means nothing when you are two grandparents nearing retirement.

Flash forward to the Spring of 1956 and the news that deadly nuclear fallout from an American Bravo Castle Test of an hydrogen bomb had gone around the world in the atmosphere strong enough to kill a Japanese fisherman thousands of miles from the test site.

The grandmothers are now in their seventies and the eight year old is now 19 and drafted into the Army.

Their fear over American nuclear fallout worries and their regret for the loss of a human life is undoubtedly tempered by the thought that the American A-Bombs had saved thousands of American lives and that the wartime Japanese had been particularly cruel to other ethnicities on many well documented occasions.

By contrast, the four year old is now 15 and this child is distinctly uncomfortable with possible death or genetic damage from fallout radiation - possibly because of her viewing of many youth-oriented movies on the subject.

The child knows - from schoolbooks - that the A-Bombs killed hundreds of thousands but also shortened the war , saving the lives of starving millions in Japan and in her overseas occupied territories, as well as tens of thousands of American servicemen.

But that child doesn't feel it - in her bones - as her older brother does.

She, being four, wasn't literally there, at the time on the dropping of the Bomb.

In body yes - but not in heart, mind and soul.

Four years difference among the young  really matter --- this is the starting thesis of this blog.

My postwar transitional generation, by definition a little too young to remember WWII first hand, only learned of WWII (and how supposedly Big Science won the war) second hand,  learned it in the mind but not experienced it in the heart.

During its key plastic formative years, my generation held both this second hand kernel of support for prewar modernity's Big Science and first hand support for the beginnings of post-modern/postwar human rights protests of the Sixties.

The key characteristic of this transitional generation was not Sixties street conflict but internal mental conflict - knowing both modernity and postmodernity but not being totally in either camp, unlike their parents or children...

Since Manhattan Project caused first global environmental crisis, it can hardly solve the new one ...

If your baby isn't dying from an overdose of Strontium 90 from mother's breast milk , it isn't for want of trying on the part of the permanently teenage males who brought us the first Manhattan Project.

They would have polished and re-polished the turd that is atomic bombs , with their deadly atmospheric tests, until all of us were full of atomic fallout radiation - including themselves.
That's the thing about dumb fucks - they can't stop harming even themselves .

Thankfully some of them became enlightened before they died (and a wrathful God forcefully did it for them).

But what then is the excuse of the permanently twenty something male (once again !) down the street who emerges from his make believe world of super hero comic books just long enough to earnestly inform us that "... another Manhattan Project , maybe in geo-engineering , will quickly solve any climate problem - if that problem actually exists...".

Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as 20/20 non-hindsight ....

Noir films reveal the disconnect between Breen Office moral uplift and the darker reality of America

Contrary to general opinion, Noir films do not just show the grimmer parts of American life.

Their particular effectiveness is to give you both the official version and then show you the unofficial reality.

It was a bit like public school and high school in my day : we got plenty of sunny uplift from our unaltered textbooks, '40s and '50s NFB films and present day CBC radio school broadcasts.

But just outside the classroom, TV's noir and sci fi horror movies , combined with tv newscasts, told us all was not really that rosy in the human animal kingdom.

Of course, learning in school and on television about good old Uncle Joe Stalin's Katyn Forest mass graves, Auschwitz, DDT, Thalidomide and Nuclear Fallout had already prepared us to trust film noir far more than any government official ....

FALLOUT means all Life dies at a COmmon table

Michael Marshall

"The fallout from the volcano Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 led to "The Year without Summer" across the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, in which hundreds of thousands died on the diseases of hunger."

"The fallout from the last Soviet H-Bomb test series led to increases in cancers all around the world."

"The fallout from the brutalities of the Germans upon ' just a bunch of Polacks' (culminating in the horrors of AUSCHWITZ), ultimately led to the deaths of the sons of many of those same  Isolationist parents, years later and half a non-isolated world away....

Few of us are likely to misunderstand these three sentences, even though the word fallout was first used, in its modern sense, only in 1949.

We now accept that a volcano or pandemic half a world away can reach out and bite us anywhere in the world - even in the heart of Isolationism - the American Heartland of the Mid-West.

We learned this first in 1945 at HIROSHIMA, when it became clear that either a rocket or a large bomber could travel half way around the world and drop a city leveling bomb on us.

We learned it even better by 1954, than none of us could live 'safe' in the countryside --- death would just come to us a little later - from radioactive dust drifting down from the sky from bombs a continent away.

And over and over, if a war happens in a part of the world judged vital by some superpower or other, we know sooner or later our kids will be called upon to get in there and die.

We now accept what Modernist Man did not -- that the world is just one big 'common table' and that we can dine together around it --- or all die together around it.

So people - which side are you on ?

Still believing in MOdernity, that Man is far above nature and we can do nothing to it - or it to us - that a little High Tech Science can't solve ?

Or do you now accept that we live , fully embedded ,inside Nature and Nature's limits, that we now live in "The Age of Commensality" ?

This is this century's global ideological divide ......