Joshua Baker
LightNews LightNews
banner
joshuabaker.phd
Joshua Baker
@joshuabaker.phd
48 followers 110 following 59 posts
Investigative researcher w/PhD in political science, & advanced degrees in history & IR. Focus on pressure networks and perception manipulation, specifically re: nuclear weapons & climate. Push back against those who get rich by making the world worse.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Joshua Baker
atomicanalyst.bsky.social
As a reminder, here's what happened after we exploded 100 nuclear devices in the atmosphere at the Nevada Test Site from 1951-62:
A black and white map prepared by Richard Miller showing (in dark black streaks) areas across the continental United States where two or more radioactive fallout clouds passed over between 1951 and 1962. Every state was affected, with eastern Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, and others being especially hard hit.
January 22, 2025 at 9:21 PM
joshuabaker.phd
p.48-49 - emphasized text: "Thousands of people had nobody to help them. Miss Sasaki was one of them. Abandoned and helpless, under the crude lean-to in the courtyard of the tin factory, beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man whose burned face was scarcely a face any more, she suffered awfully that night from the pain in her broken leg. She did not sleep at all; neither did she converse with her sleepless companions. ... Mr. Tanimoto, after his long run and his many hours of rescue work, dozed uneasily. When he awoke, in the first light of dawn he looked across the river and saw that he had not carried the festered, limp bodies high enough on the sandpit the night before. The ride had risen above where he had put them; they had not had the strength to move; they must have drowned. He saw a number of bodies floating in the river."
August 6, 2025 at 11:35 PM
joshuabaker.phd
This is a graphic and heartbreaking section. There is no justification for ever using these weapons again. A lot of people get paid a lot of money to tell you it's actually complicated and that there are scenarios where we could and should use them - but I promise, it's not complicated.
p. 45 - highlighted text - Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandpit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly. With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, "These are human beings." It took him three trips to get them all across the river.
August 6, 2025 at 10:34 PM
joshuabaker.phd
p.24-25: The lot of Drs. Fujii, Kanda, and Machii right after the explosion - and, as these three were typical, that of the majority of the physicians and surgeons of Hiroshima - with their offices and hospitals destroyed, their equipment scattered, their own bodies incapacitated in varying degrees, explained why so many citizens who were hurt went untended and why so many might have lived died. Of 150 in the city, 65 were already dead and most of the rest were wounded. Of 1780 nurses, 1654 were dead or too badly hurt to work. in the biggest hospital, that of the Red Cross, only 6 doctors out of 30 were able to function, and only 10 nurses out of more than 200. The sole uninjured doctor on the Red Cross Hospital staff was Dr. Sasaki." "Dr. Sasaki worked without method, taking those who were nearest him first, and he noticed soon that the corridor seemed to be getting more and more crowded. Mixed in with the abrasions and lacerations which most people in the hospital had suffered, he began to find dreadful burns. He realized then that casualties were pouring in from outdoors. There were so many that he began to pass up the lightly wounded; he decided that all he could hope to do was stop people from bleeding to death. Before long, patients lay and crouched on the floors of the wards and in the laboratories and all the other rooms, and in the corridors, and on the stairs, and in the front hall, and under the porte-cochere, and on the stone front steps, and in the driveway and courtyard, and for blocks each way in the streets outside. Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together. Many people were vomiting. A tremendous number of schoolgirls ... crept into the hospital. In a city of 245,000, nearly 100,000 people had been killed or doomed at one blow; a 100,000 more were hurt. At least 10,000 of the wounded made their way to the best hospital in town, which was altogether unequal to such a trampling, since it had 600 beds
August 6, 2025 at 10:24 PM
joshuabaker.phd
Page 16 of Hiroshima - highlighted text - "Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.
August 6, 2025 at 10:08 PM
joshuabaker.phd
I'm going to thread a few passages that jumped out at me (warning: some are heartbreakingly sad, some are grizzly and very graphic) but truly I encourage anyone who is seeing this to just read the book, as the impact of all of it at once is infuriating and oppressive in a terribly radicalizing way.
August 6, 2025 at 10:08 PM