Port Chicago Disaster - Nuclear Bomb Theory

Nuclear Bomb Theory

The Port Chicago explosion was studied by the Los Alamos National Laboratory team working on the Manhattan project. The resulting damage was seen as being similar to the effects of a relatively small nuclear explosion with destructive power equivalent to 2,000 tons of TNT. Paul Masters—a photo technician at Los Alamos—made copies of some of the study documents and stored them at his home. In 1980, Peter Vogel discovered one of Masters' documents in a rummage sale and noticed that one section of text read "Ball of fire mushroom out at 18,000 ft in typical Port Chicago fashion". Vogel—a New Mexican information officer-turned-journalist—began to research the possibility that the Port Chicago explosion was caused by a nuclear bomb. Beginning in 1982, Vogel publicly voiced his theory, raising a storm of controversy in the Bay Area press.

Vogel continued to hunt for clues for the next 20 years, eventually writing a book and, in 2002, establishing a website delineating various circumstantial reasons why the Port Chicago explosion could have been nuclear. After failing to find hard evidence to support his theory, Vogel abandoned it in 2005. Vogel's website was remounted in 2009 under a different URL.

Vogel's theory has not had any traction amongst mainstream historians. Nuclear historians Lawrence Badash and Richard G. Hewlett, in an article from 1993, took issue both with Vogel's alleged evidence of weapons effects residues as well as Vogel's proposed timetable for the production of the bomb itself. "It is impossible that there would have been no noticeable effects that later would have been identifiable as nuclear," they wrote, "Yet rescue and investigating personnel combed the area immediately after the blast, and the ammunition depot, which was quickly rebuilt, is in use today. These activities, without any reported injuries resulting from residual radioactivity, clearly indicate that only conventional explosives were detonated." They criticized Vogel for being "silent" about all of the evidence against his theory, and found the persistence in the propagation of the Vogel theory in the media "even in the face of evidence to the contrary" as exemplifying "the process by which conspiracy theories and other astounding knowledge claims gain popular attention."