[rerevisionist]

'Mooninquirer' pointed out-

http://www.fluoridation.com/atomicbomb.htm

is a 1997 article attributed to Joel Griffiths, 'a medical writer' and Chris Bryson, with 'a Masters degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism'. Quite a few sources are cited, but in the tradition of naff journalism they aren't collected together and summarised; nor are the sources which are missing, or removed.

The basic point is that uranium isotopes were (are?) separated by making a compound of uranium that was a gas, then separating the slightly different densities of gas made by the two isotopes. Presumably this was actually done, and wasn't a myth. Unfortunately fluorine is highly reactive - it's a sort of super-chlorine. [Note added May 2014: fluorine is the element, a yellowish dangerous gas; fluorides are compounded of this with (usually) a metal]. Hydrofluoric acid is like a hyped-up form of hydrochloric acid, and is notorious for being one of the few substances that attack glass. It is, or was, used to etch glass. I would guess most of the physicists of the Manhattan Project would certainly have known this, including people like Teller; so this adds to the charge sheet against them.

Anyway, from a small short list, uranium hexafluoride was selected despite the obvious risks. Griffiths and Bryson say that 'millions of tons' of fluorine were needed, which sounds like an exaggeration. However there was a leak or leaks, and New Jersey farms bore the fallout. So did the workers with fluorine - for example, they ended with no teeth. Du Pont was the company involved.

Fluorine (like aluminium and many other elements) has no biological uses in nature (yet discovered), though its compounds have sometimes been discovered to have effects as drugs and poisons.

One of the theses of this forum is that nuclear explosions were found not to work - as in fact is to be expected. The question as to the motives for hiding this is a main issue.

Groves gets mentioned in Griffiths and Bryson, though I couldn't find Oppenheimer or any other scientists. There was a post-war cover-up. Of course also the aluminium industry got involved - the standard aluminium ore is bauxite, sodium aluminium fluoride, which produces fluorides as by-products. I'd guess, without this extra unfortunate fact, the fluoride issue would have been settled fairly soon after the war ended in 1945. The University of Rochester according to Griffiths and Bryson played a major part in concealment and lies. They also say Dr Harold Slavkin is Director of the National Institute for Dental Research.

It's important that anti-fluoridation people be aware of such simple facts.

Worth noticing there are other analogies with other chemicals. For example, one type of organophosphate insecticide was used in Britain against warble fly (their larvae burrow under cattle's skin, and make holes in the hide). The stuff was poured on the backs of the cows. This must have been the cause of BSE - there was a close geographical relationship. There were various investigations, some under Krebs, and the whole issue was evaded. It's tempting to think that it must have been money that was the issue - lawsuits etc - but in view of the way governments throw money away I think probably it was to protect careers and reputations.

Incidentally the proposal for underground thorium reactors in China may be a disguised way to dump toxic waste.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

When the US Bureau of land reclamation build dams in the western USA, they ended up with lots of electricity that no one really needed. So they made aluminum, which no one really needed either. So they made bombers and fighter planes out of the aluminum and went to war to blow them up.

Just my theory.

http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-A ... 0140178244

[rerevisionist]

Interesting idea, but it may be wrong - aluminium is quite a lot less dense than steel, approaching one third of the weight per given volume. BUT it may not be as strong, of course. A bit of online poking around suggests aluminium is a third the 'strength' of steel (depends on how it's measured). Stainless steel has been around since at least WW1 and on the face of it must have been a good bet. Beryllium is even lighter and I've heard it was used in German tanks. (I heard that the British would not use beryllium because the Germans held the patents...) I'm not even sure how important lightness was for airplanes - the Hurricane fighter had a high proportion of fabric covering! Interesting design decisions and no doubt assorted vested interests lobbied hard...

[FirstClassSkeptic]

In many cases, the planes' components were hardly worth salvaging. But their aluminum ran to the hundreds of millions of pounds, and could be melted down into ingots and reused.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/xplanes/boneyard.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXoB3lQcZk8

The Columbia River has a key role in the history of aluminum production in America, as the industry was the first major industrial customer of Columbia River hydropower. Over time, the industry grew to employ around 11,000 people in the Northwest and consume 3,150 megawatts of electricity, enough to light three cities the size of present-day Seattle for a year. But rising costs of electricity and labor, and intense competition in the world aluminum market made it increasingly difficult for the 10 Northwest smelters to compete, and by the end of the 20th century most of the region’s smelters were closed and/or facing an uncertain future.

The electrolysis technique of producing aluminum from bauxite requires large amounts of electricity delivered steadily. With Bonneville Dam coming online in 1938 and the region hungry for economic expansion, the aluminum industry seemed promising for the Pacific Northwest. That year J.D. Ross, first administrator of the Bonneville Power Project (it was renamed the Bonneville Power Administration in 1940), commented in the Project’s first annual report that industrial development and national defense would be important uses of electricity from the dam. But he did not mention aluminum. Ross didn’t favor aluminum because smelters used large amounts of power but did not employ large numbers of people. He thought the aluminum industry should stay out of the Northwest in favor of other, more labor-intensive industries until the completion of Grand Coulee Dam in 1941.

However, the Bonneville Project faced tough questioning in Congress in 1938 and early 1939 about its low revenues. The Project needed to boost its sales to satisfy Congress, and aluminum was the answer. Ross died in March 1939, and in May President Roosevelt appointed Frank Banks of the Bureau of Reclamation as a temporary replacement. A conservative Republican, his ties to private business made him unpopular with public power advocates and New Deal Democrats. Banks would go on to be key figure in the construction of Grand Coulee Dam, but his tenure as Bonneville administrator ended in September when Roosevelt appointed Paul Raver as permanent administrator. Raver signed a contract with ALCOA in December to supply electricity — initially 32.5 megawatts — for a smelter at Vancouver. The first transmission line from the dam was completed to Vancouver at about the same time. With that smelter the Northwest aluminum industry was born.

Boeing, which was building warplanes in Seattle, was a primary customer for aluminum from Northwest smelters. It has been estimated that electricity from Grand Coulee Dam alone provided the power to make the aluminum in about one-third of the planes built during World War II.

http://www.nwcouncil.org/history/aluminum.asp

World War II greatly stimulated the production of aluminum. For example, in 1939, total world production is, without regard to the Soviet Union, was 620 thousand tons, but by 1943 had grown to 1.9 million tons

http://tintis.info/production.html

[rerevisionist]

There seem to be several questions--
[1] Was Al in fact superior to Fe or other metals (irrespective of price?) in strength/weight/corrosion properties for war?
[2] Was Al better in peacetime also? - So far as I know, reinforced concrete always had steel beams.
[3] Was Al favoured purely because it used a lot of electricity - rather like a dumpload - and so went in parallel with dam construction?
[4] What about the fluoride? - I'd guess the business types had little idea about the chemistry, and I suspect the physics and chemistry types would not be fluent enough to outline any problems in a convincing way. Judging by your quotations, the subject wasn't even mentioned.

The Wikipedia article Water fluoridation in the United States is more-or-less pro fluoridation but does give some information in chronological sequence. It certainly looks like a case of poor quality science with (deliberately?) badly designed experiments and data analysis. It seems to ignore diet changes (i.e. lots more sugar and junk food). And the poor quality 'research' seems to have hinged on the idea of 'fewer cavities', something difficult to measure ... and note that workers in WW2 with hydrofluoric acid to make uranum hexafluoride lost all their teeth - but these were counted as having 'fewer cavities'!! This seems to be typical of fluorosis - spots develop which enlarge until the tooth blackens and disappears. Incidentally the cost of equipment to fluoridate looks like another scam. Why not bubble fluorine direct into water? - Well, it's lethal stuff. So they use a compound - sodium fluoride. What happens if it doesn't dissolve evenly? - it's poisonous - so special equipment is used to mix in it....

Part of the case against the CDC.

I was interested to see this pair of Wiki maps
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... -2006.jpeg

Note the way Washington state (top left, where the Grand Coulee dam is, near Vancouver) is more fluoridated than its neighbours!

[FirstClassSkeptic]

I did hear once a few years ago that advanced Soviet jet fighters use steel instead of aluminum.

After the war, titanium became all the rage in the USA.

[FirstClassSkeptic]

I never thought of it from the point of view that they wanted to replace steel with aluminum. I just thought of it as they wanted to waste everything. Even the Steinway piano company was called upon to dig into their stock of Norway spruce, used to make sound boards, and use it to make glider parts. I suppose that if they had discovered an immense supply of Norway spruce, that they would have made B-29 bombers out of that, instead of aluminum.