“The Eagle Has Landed”

On this date thirty-eight years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon, leaving Michael Collins orbiting
above. Armstrong announced the landing, saying “The Eagle has landed.” We all stayed glued to the TV set to watch the historic event, absorbing everything we could till the astronauts were back in the lunar module for the night.

A day or so later, my grandfather was remarking on what was so striking to him in watching the landing. He mentioned that as a young man he had spent the afternoon in a park in St. Louis, Missouri, watching as a pilot worked very hard to get a Wright flyer off the ground. By the time of the moon landing, he and my grandmother had taken a round-the-world vacation by commercial airliner. My grandfather never ceased to be amazed at the progress made by humanity in just his one single lifetime.

Trinity

The following story is from 1945, and is true:

Marty had been excited when she boarded the bus that would take her from Jacksonville, Illinois, to Tucson, Arizona. The war in Europe was over, which meant Bud would be returning home. Marty didn't know just when Bud would get home. But she wanted to get back to Tucson, eager to be home again and eager to lay the groundwork so she and Bud could get married as soon as possible after he returned.

Now it was late at night (actually, early in the morning) as the bus rolled across New Mexico. Everyone else was asleep — only Marty and the bus driver were awake, and they were in the middle of a long discussion. Suddenly, the sky lit up with a brilliant light that seemed brighter than mid-day. Everything in sight stood out, but it wasn't obvious where the light was coming from.

The discussion stopped. When it started again, the topic for all the rest of the trip to Tucson was “What was that????” Marty and the bus driver were unable to find any reasonable explanation.

Marty figured it out three weeks later when the newspaper headlines told of the use of a new type of weapon — an atomic bomb — over Hiroshima, Japan. The news stories said there had been a test in the New Mexico desert. A check of the calendar showed that what she and the bus driver had seen that night was the flash from the Trinity Test.

Meanwhile, Bud was still stuck in Europe wondering, along with many others, why they weren’t being sent home and released now that the war was over. He may not have known the Army was working on the logistics of shipping them all from the European to the Pacific Theater. Bud returned home five months later, and my parents were married on Christmas Eve, December 24^th, 1945.

The atomic test 15 seconds after detonation July 16, 1945 The Trinity test was the first ever test of a nuclear device

Sixty years later, in July of 2005, my wife and I joined in the event at the National Atomic Museum commemorating the Trinity Test and the beginning of the Atomic Age. It started the night before. We ate dinner with an older couple; she lived through the bombing in Germany as a young girl, and he had seen the Trinity flash on his way to go fishing outside Roswell. There were 1940’s cars in the parking lot, and wartime fashions were shown. The meat of the evening was a panel discussion (more a series of presentations) by two historians and two men who had been part of the Manhattan Engineering District — the Army’s part of the atomic bomb development program more broadly known as the Manhattan Project.

The next morning, on the sixtieth anniversary of the test, we were on one of the event’s three buses. The White Sands Missile Range had the site open for the anniversary. (Normally, it’s only open to the public on two Saturdays a year — one in October and one in April.) We were at Stallion Gate when it opened, and drove in to the McDonald Ranch house where the plutonium pit was assembled. We then spent some time at Ground Zero, before having green chile cheeseburgers at the Owl Cafe in San Antonio (where Manhattan Project people often ate on their way back and forth between the site and Los Alamos) before returning to Albuquerque.

One of the benefits of going as part of the group from the National Atomic Museum was that we weren’t just on our own looking around. Panel members from the night before spoke at the locations, giving us more of a picture of the conditions of sixty years ago. We also heard at least parts of interviews by various press organizations.

At the ranch house, an historian from the museum gave a picture of the camp that existed nearby at that time. He noted that the well and windmill could produce only about a gallon per hour of not very good water — which was why water for the several hundred people at the camp was trucked in. The one luxury was the stock tank, which was used as a swimming pool. Herb Lehr, who in 1945 was a sergeant in the Special Engineering Detachment, recounted bringing the plutonium pit (then the world’s supply of plutonium) down from Los Alamos, and told something of the checkout and assembly process. He noted that the markings on the door (clean your feet, don’t track in dust, etc.) were not authentic because they were done in chalk in 1945, while the ones you see now are painted on. At the request of some of the press representatives, he reenacted for the photographers how he took the assembled pit from the ranch house to the car (a 1942 Plymouth obtained new in 1945) to deliver it to the tower at Trinity Site Ground Zero.

Lehr also told of the hiccup in everyone's heartbeats as they attempted to load the pit into the rest of the device on the tower. Attempted — it didn’t fit, though the same pieces had fit at Los Alamos. The team lead said to just stop and they left it where it was, in contact with the outer uranium sphere, while they thought it through. A few minutes later, it slid in a fraction of an inch, and they realized they had a thermal problem. The plutonium core and the part of the unit near it were hot to the touch; the sphere had overnight cold. As the core heated the section of the sphere near it, its thermal expansion allowed the unit to slide in. Over a half hour or so the unit was assembled.

The historian speaking at Ground Zero (Ferenc Szasz, author of The Day the Sun Rose Twice) focussed on the difficulties in actually performing the test. This included worrying whether the night’s thunderstorms would clear before morning, and needing the wind to come from the proper direction. General Groves directly threatened the meteorologist that night, but fortunately the weather worked out well. That still left the question of whether the device would work properly, and with what kind of explosive yield. Of course, it did work — as everyone who saw the flash can attest.

That made me think of the tale told me years ago by people who had been in the Manhattan Project. Enrico Fermi was among those outside the blockhouse when the Trinity Test took place. After the initial radiation flash, he stood up and started dropping small pieces of paper. When the shock from the detonation arrived, the piece of paper that was in mid-air was moved and fell away from the rest. Fermi measured how far it was moved by the shock and, in just a few minutes, computed an estimate of the test’s explosive yield that was almost as good as the value that came days later from analyses of the experiment’s instrumentation.

Back at Ground Zero, Szasz noted that the inner fence surrounds the area where the test’s fireball touched the ground, where the trinitite was created. (Trinitite is glass created from the sand there by the heat of the Trinity Test fireball, all of which was later buried.) He also said that area was used to determine the detonation altitude that should be used in the attacks on Japan, both to maximize blast and shock effects on the cities from the atomic explosions and to avoid having the detonation fireballs reach the surface. Keeping the fireballs from touching the ground was necessary to minimize nuclear fallout from the explosions so the cities (and the areas downwind) would not be overly dangerous (longer term) either to their surviving residents or to invading U.S. soldiers — and so they would be better able to recover when the war was over.

On the bus ride home, I thought about the wartime focus that allowed a new weapon — a new class of weapon — to be used in the war just three weeks after the Trinity test showed it would work. That’s a very different timeline from what we see today. But it did bring the war to an end.

The National Atomic Museum hosted another event, three weeks after this one, that had as its focus the use of these new weapons during the August missions of the Enola Gay and Bock's Car that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

More information on the Trinity test and site can be found at the following web locations (among others):

• The Atomic Tourist
  
• Trinity Site
  
• Trinity
  

UPDATE: Links added in penultimate paragraph, and for Szasz’ book, in August.

... What She Said

I have wanted to write a piece about the need to quit ignoring the barbarity of those who have declared themselves our enemies, and the need to recognize how very important it is that we not lose — or quit. Now somebody else has done it, and done it much better than I ever could.

The piece combines Michael Yon's on-scene observations with Kathryn Jean Lopez' analysis to make a necessary point with superb clarity. It is titled "Severed heads beat report cards to the truth".

Go read it. Now.

An Update from Iraq

There's a new dispatch from Michael Yon in and around Baqubah, Iraq. He provides new information on what the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers are dealing with there, and some perspective on the al Qaeda atrocity he reported previously (and I commented on here). There is information on a couple other topics as well.

Definitely worth reading. Recommended.

Opinions

Courtesy of Military Motivator. (Take a look at the kids' pictures on Michael Yon's site, too.)

Certified Pits

Did you know the U.S. hasn't been capable of making nuclear weapons since 1989?

Sub-Humans

Every time I think they can't possibly get more debased and perverted, they can't possibly sink to an even deeper level of barbarity, the sub-humans of al Qaeda prove me wrong.

The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11-years-old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.

It seems to me the families served in this way were those with whom al Qaeda had been making no progress. This sort of barbaric treatment is unlikely to convert parents to the barbarians' point of view.

There are those who have suggested this is some sort of urban legend. And that is possible. But these actions were clearly believed by the official who reported them, and who showed a firm grasp on what had really been going on in the Baqubah area in the rest of what he said. And I, for one, would not be ready to assert that those rape and kill women and children in front of their families, and who enjoy using power drills on people in al Qaeda torture houses, would shrink from this additional barbarity.

Happy Fourth!

Yes, we have our disagreements. Some are even important. But let's remember what binds us together. Two hundred thirty-one years ago, our Founding Fathers created our nation as one of the most audacious experiments in history. Since then, we have become the greatest nation on God's green earth — and that's something to celebrate!

Just a Normal Al Qaeda Day

Al Qaeda terrorists are trying to set up a shadow government in Iraq, complete with its own courts, torture houses, and prisons. They are trying to call themselves "The Islamic State of Iraq" but Michael Yon reports the new name is just "lipstick on a pig" there. One reason is the version of Sharia law implemented by the Al Qaeda Muftis (judges) which includes severing the two "smoking fingers" of those caught smoking, beatings for refusing to grow beards, and beatings for such "obscene sexual suggestiveness" as carrying tomatoes and cucumbers in the same bag.

Like most bullies, Al Qaeda terrorists make a great show of being fearsome warriors but, also like most bullies, they are cowards. Al Qaeda terrorists hide behind women and children, and attack Coalition soldiers from behind their human shields. Al Qaeda terrorists are caught trying to escape while dressed as women. Al Qaeda terrorists take over a village they think they can hide in and attack American and Iraqi soldiers from, murder every man & woman & child & animal in the village, and rig the houses with explosives when they cut & run — leaving it to the Iraqi army to provide the burial rites of the religion the terrorists pretend to follow. Al Qaeda terrorists cut off the heads of children.

All in a normal day's activities for the Al Qaeda wolves, the pretenders in Muslim sheep's clothing. And, of course, these activities are completely ignored by the New York Times.

Scooter Libby Commutation

President George Bush on Monday commuted the sentence imposed by a federal judge on I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, removing the imprisonment but leaving the conviction intact with its fine and probation. The Left's response has been to attack Bush for the commutation, claiming it's an interference in the judicial process — ignoring the fact that executive clemency has always been an integral part of the process. Meanwhile, the Right has been angry that Bush didn't pardon Libby outright.

One thing every commentator I have seen has missed, however, is this: If Bush had pardoned Libby, the appeals process would have been aborted. By commuting the sentence, but leaving the conviction intact, Bush has enabled the appeal to go forward. Clearly he expects the conviction to be overturned by the appellate courts — perhaps in part because of several of the judge's rulings, but mostly because of the actions of a rogue prosecutor who knew at the beginning of his investigation (1) who the leaker was (Richard Armitage) and (2) that (probably) no crime had been committed; he ignored the actual leaker — the supposed object of his investigation — but continued anyway until he could find somebody he could convict of something. That's a result that may, as Bush and his advisors seem to feel, merit keeping the appeal alive.

The 2007 Immigration Bill

I have thought, multiple times over a period of months, to write about the immigration issue and this year's immigration bill. But the problem with that, especially with any thought of writing about the immigration bill, is that it's not clear what's actually in the bill.

A lot of folks have had a lot to say about what's in the immigration bill currently being considered in the Senate. And a lot of what's being said conflicts — not just in interpretation or implications of provisions, but in the basic facts of what the bill provides. Time and again, one senator would make a claim and another would make an absolutely contradictory claim. One would say the bill would allow imprisoned felons to get Z visas and citizenship, for example, while another would say those individuals were absolutely precluded from Z visas and from any consideration for U.S. citizenship. Obviously, I thought, at least one of them was lying. But now I'm not so sure, as the bill has apparently been being extensively modified and rewritten, even today — even tonight. Under such conditions, no senator can know just what is (and isn't) in the bill this afternoon, or this evening, or what was in it this morning. The same is true of the bill's amendments. So the senators are making different assumptions, relying on what they've been told by people they trust. The senators may not be lying, but they may well have been lied to.

That being the case, I cannot either support or oppose this bill based on what's in it. But I have decided I must oppose it.

The reason I've come down on the side against this bill is procedural. This bill has been brought up, and is being pushed through the Senate, in a unique manner. It has not been handled like any normal bill. There have been no committee hearings, no committee debate, and no committee amendments. Normally, this substantial and comprehensive a bill would be considered by multiple subcommittees and committees; this bill has been considered by none. Normally, a bill comes to the Senate floor in relatively final form; this bill is barely through its first draft, and the few amendments being allowed haven't yet been completed — even though they are being voted on. Harry Reid, the majority leader, is making senators vote on amendments and a final bill they haven't (and could not have) seen or read. That violates every normal principle and procedure of "the world's greatest deliberative body." The key question is why, and I don't see any possible answer that's good for this country or its people.

Three Quotations

"Captain" Ed Morrissey comments on reactions to the study showing how lopsided newsrooms are in their viewpoints:

From campus speech codes to the BCRA [Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, a.k.a. McCain-Feingold] to forcing journalists into political darkness, it seems that America has fallen in love with top-down solutions to hide political differences. Wouldn't sunlight be easier, more effective, and far less costly?

And here's something from an editorial on the National Review Online on the Supreme Court's decision in the Wisconsin Right to Life case:

The Washington Post, a longtime cheerleader for campaign-finance regulation, conceded that the specific advertisements involved in the case were “anodyne” but argued that it was nonetheless better to ban them than to take the risk that sham issue ads would also run: “Yesterday’s ruling reopens a dangerous loophole.”

That dangerous loophole is otherwise known as the First Amendment. If that amendment means anything, it has to mean that government should err on the side of tolerating more speech rather than less. If the power of judicial review means anything, it has to mean that the federal judiciary will not enforce laws that violate that principle. If the pursuit of campaign-finance “reform” ineluctably leads its advocates to regard free speech as a loophole, maybe they should reconsider whether it is such a good idea.

On a little different subject, but still on the subject of Americans' rights, James Taranto of the Opinion Journal web site writes on “The Truth About Guantanamo” — as opposed to what the primary networks and newspapers have been telling us. He notes that the Associated Press (and others) want the terrorists held there to simply be released. But the courts have consistently ruled that Prisoners of War can be held for the duration of their conflicts, and that these prisoners don't qualify for the rights of POWs. He questions why the AP (and others) want to give terrorists and other unlawful enemy combatants more rights than legitimate soldiers. Taranto's conclusion:

By keeping terrorists out of America, Guantanamo protects Americans' physical safety. By keeping them out of our justice system, it also protects our freedom.

Islamist Depravity

The Taliban, upstanding leaders of the Religion of Peace^TM that they are, are using six year old children as human bombs in their quest to commit mass murder.

“They placed explosives on a six-year-old boy and told him to walk up to the Afghan police or army and push the button,” said Captain Michael Cormier, the company commander who intercepted the child, in a statement. “Fortunately, the boy did not understand and asked patrolling officers why he had this vest on.”

The British soldiers defused the vest. The child's name and present location have not been released.

What can one possibly say about this? I cannot even begin to comprehend this level of subhuman behavior. The best I can do is quote:

The depravity of Islamists has no bounds. Remember that.

I Didn't Know ...

I didn't know Muslims had ritual butt washings. But apparently they do. Note the captions on a couple of the pictures posted on Michelle Malkin's site:

Masked Muslim moral police force a man wearing clothes deemed un-Islamic to suck on a plastic container Iranians use to wash their bottoms.

The Iranian morality police arrest the infidel after forcing him to drink from the toilet watering cans hanging around his neck.

Note that the Iranian "police" are enforcing their "morality" on people who are not conceivably subject to Islamic law, much less their extremist interpretation.

Here's a simple, less egregious example:

Whipped for wearing a soccer shirt.

This picture, like the others posted by several "new media" folks, are official pictures formally released by FARS and ISNA, the Iranian "news" agencies. I also note that, in these and other pictures, the "police" are all masked — which says to me these people know what they are doing is very wrong and, at some level, they are ashamed of what they are doing. Just like criminals the world over. And yet, from the pictures, they seem proud to be abusing innocent people. So why are they hiding behind masks?

More on this at Gateway Pundit, Captains Quarters, and Ali Eteraz. Ali Eteraz says this is all part of the Iranian government's intimidation and misdirection efforts designed to keep Iranians from protesting the fact that Iran's economy has been so mismanaged, that it is in so deep a hole, that this oil-rich nation must ration gasoline to its population.

Views of Iran

Jay Nordlinger had a spectacular Impromptus column a week ago (June 13. In one piece of it, he related something he saw at the “Davos in the Desert” conference not long ago:

Well, at this conference, I witnessed a spectacular outburst from a Palestinian journalist, directed at an Iranian official. The Palestinian pointed out that Iran was acting as the enemy of the Arabs, sowing murder and chaos in Iraq, Lebanon, and the PA [the Palestinian Authority] — arming and training Iraqi militias, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

And what kind of murder and chaos is Iran sowing? And how effective is Iran being at their chosen method of warfare? Nordlinger quotes from an article by Victor Davis Hanson:

not only can “a suicide bomber with a $100 vest” destroy “$1 million worth of electrical infrastructure.” In a “gruesome equation,” he can “cast the American engineers into the role of the incompetent or sinister by their failure to repair and rebuild faster than an illiterate can destroy.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem we face in asymmetrical warfare — especially when major elements of our own population refuse to recognize we're in a war at all.

Nordlinger provides a fitting summation: “It is worth bearing in mind: Israel and the United States aren’t the only countries that fear and hate the Iranian regime. And those who fear and hate that regime the most, of course, are Iranian citizens themselves.”

Iran has declared war on us — the United States and the West. Can't we at least take them at their word on this?

Twenty Years Ago

It was twenty years ago this week — on June 12, 1987 — that Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall and issued his most famous challenge: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The Wall came down just two years later. Now only a small piece remains, which the German government is trying its best to preserve as a remembrance and a memorial.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. The State Department and the National Security Council both objected, saying it was both useless and needlessly provocative. Of course, they were wrong. Reagan knew it and kept the line in the speech, knowing it was the right thing to say. Eventually, we all knew it, too.

Red Light Cameras

Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez has been a big proponent of red light cameras. Mayor Marty said the automated system would enable the city's police officers to concentrate more on crime fighting rather than traffic control. He said having these dealt with administratively would avoid clogging the courts. And they wouldn't perturb the Motor Vehicle Division, either, since the city had no power to cause points to be assessed against drivers licenses. Mayor Marty said the hefty fines ($100, $250, and $500 as compared to a fine of about $20 for this offence on a real traffic ticket) would be a deterrent that would cause infractions to drop and accidents to fall. Mayor Marty said this measure was a safety issue.

Opponents objected to the level of the fines, to the lack of due process, to the city usurping state authority, and to the imposition of this new "cash cow" revenue source for the city. They were also concerned that the city would shorten the yellow lights, as had been done in other cities, to increase the city's cash take regardless of its effect on safety. There was also concern that the company that processes the tickets has a positive incentive to maximize the number of tickets to maximize it's take (and, coincidentally, that of the city as well). Mayor Marty, the city traffic engineer, and others assured everyone this was about safety rather than money, and the city certainly would not be so dishonest as to monkey with the yellow light timings.

Albuquerque radio station KKOB AM's afternoon host Jim Villanucci has now taken up the cause of the red light cameras. After hearing primarily from proponents for so long, how we're hearing some reality. Now we hear in instance after instance how administrative abuse has replaced judicial review, with city administrative officers berating truthful appellants as liars and routinely upholding erroneous citations. It has also developed that citations have been regularly issued and upheld against cars that did enter the intersection after the light turned red, but did so legitimately under the control of a right turn green arrow. The city absolutely denied this ever happened — right up until confronted with video proof on Albuquerque television station KOAT. And that's the good part of the news.

Now it develops that accidents are not down at the intersections with the red light cameras, as the city has been insisting. The actual statistics show that accidents are up at all or nearly all — at some, the accident rate has doubled since the red light cameras started working. And people are out timing the length of the yellow lights, finding that many have been reduced from 4 seconds to less than 3. On KKOB radio last week, the city engineer claimed these signals all had their yellow lights set for a 4 second timing, and challenged his interviewer (Jim Villanucci) to time them himself. Even during that interview, people were calling in reporting their measurement of yellow light times under 3 seconds. The next day Albuquerqueans observed city workers changing the yellow light times from under 3 seconds to the 4 seconds the city traffic engineer had falsely said they were set at — and they got pictures and video of the city workers making the changes.

In other words, it looks like everything the city and its mayor have said on this subject has been a bunch of lies.

This shouldn't be a surprise. A number of studies (some of these, for example) have shown red light cameras do not increase safety or reduce accidents. What does reduce accidents is increasing the length of the yellow light. Indeed, one study cited by Villanucci said increasing the length of the yellow light by 1.5 seconds (to 5.5 seconds) reduced red light violations and accidents by more than 90 percent.

But Albuquerque and Mayor Marty don't care about that. They're really just in the program for the revenue.

Paul McCartney

Bob Clark, the morning host on KKOB Radio in Albuquerque, has a young son. And that son came in all excited at something he'd just learned.

"Dad, did you know Paul McCartney was a musician before he married Heather Mills?"

"Yeah, he was in a band called Wings."

And I bet he had no idea why his father was laughing so hard!

Greenland

There's a reason the Vikings called it Greenland.

We've Got To Negotiate

We're constantly being told we're losing in Iraq, particularly by the primary newspapers and television networks. These same folks continue on to say "... and we've got to negotiate directly with Iran and Syria."

Funny how those same folks are the ones who decline to report stories about Iraqis turning on al Qaeda (under its many names and guises) and taking — asking — help from U.S. military forces there to help protect their people from the foreign mercenaries.

It also seems to me that the call for us to negotiate directly with Iran and Syria is a direct acknowledgment that those two countries are the current participants in Iraq (the ones providing arms and funds and direction, and most of the manpower) and the violence there is a proxy war rather than a civil war.

Now if they'd just be honest enough to admit it, ....