Re: Is the theory of an atomic blast at Port Chicago plausible?

OC, 

Sorry to take so long to answer your question, but I had a lot of reading
to do for this.  I've done considerable thinking on this and the conclusion
that I come to is that it almost certainly wasn't a nuke.  I'll cover a few
of the issues brought up in the references you supplied and explain myself
as best I can.  

The number one reason I think it wasn't a nuke is the two survivors
mentioned in one of the web sites.  There were two guys in a machine shop
only a few yards away from the end of the dock.  I would expect them to
show significant radiation related injuries from the prompt gammas from the
fireball of a nuclear explosion.  There was no mention of them being
injured that way in any material I found. 

There were a few things that made me laugh in the descriptions, the
distance that the deck plates flew and the crater under the ship were the
best.  One of the authors seemed surprised that stuff could land upwards of
3 miles away.  I've seen the aftermath of an accidental munitions bunker
detonation at a military facility.  Three miles is nothing and most of the
explosives models that are available  to the public don't take into account
the effect of tamping.  Trying to work backward to a theoretical "yield"
from debris blown out of a ship with a design like the Liberty is
remarkably hard with huge error bars.  Saying that the explosion was "too
big for the 1.6kt of explosives aboard" rings of bad math and a lack of
knowledge of the astonishing things explosives do.  The dent in the area
under the ship was formed by a shock wave, nothing so grandiose as a nuke
is needed to dent the sea floor.  Way back in college I saw a few of Dr.
Harold Edgerton's films (the inventor of high-speed stroboscopic filming)
showing shock waves in various media done for the military.  The crater
formation is fascinating and quite large if conditions are right, such as a
relatively dense medium (water) transmitting the shock.  

Next up is the issue of fallout.  The location is California, the
theoretical device in the ship was the "Mark II".  I looked over the design
info that I could find for this "gadget" and it is ugly.  From what I
remember of weapons design, this would rank as one of the messiest types of
devices you could devise.  There would be considerable uranium left behind
as well as the expected exotic (some are long-lived) fission products.  I
seriously doubt that the humidity was 15% that night on the water in
California, that sounds like a typical "no data" reading from the weather
service.  That and it is too perfect an excuse for "atmospheric conditions
limiting the production of fallout".  A few soil samples from the area as
well as up wind should put this to rest.  California is so environmentally
conscious, that it strains credulity to believe that something like this
would be left uninvestigated there.  

I could go on for many pages, but that is enough for now.  If you get the
chance to snag a few soil samples and throw them in a HPGe detector and
compare them to USGS records for the area, let me know.   Fun question, I
learned quite a bit and had fun researching the answer.  

Scott Kniffin
Principal Engineer
NASA GSFC