วันพุธที่ 30 กรกฎาคม พ.ศ. 2557

By KATE BRUMBACK

ATLANTA (AP) — The last surviving member of the crew that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima once said he thought the bombing was necessary because it shortened the war and eliminated the need for an Allied land invasion that could have cost more lives on both sides.

But Theodore "Dutch" VanKirk also said it made him wary of war - and that he would like to see all of the world's atomic bombs abolished.

VanKirk died Monday at the retirement home where he lived in Stone Mountain, Georgia, his son Tom VanKirk said. He was 93.

Theodore VanKirk flew as navigator on the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb deployed in wartime over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

The bombing hastened the end of World War II. The blast and its aftereffects killed 140,000 in Hiroshima. Three days after Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. That blast and its aftermath claimed 80,000 lives. Six days after the Nagasaki bombing, Japan surrendered.

Whether the United States should have used the atomic bomb has been debated endlessly.

"I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run," VanKirk told The Associated Press in a 2005 interview. "There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese."
But VanKirk said the experience of World War II also showed him "that wars don't settle anything."
"And atomic weapons don't settle anything," he said. "I personally think there shouldn't be any atomic bombs in the world — I'd like to see them all abolished.
"But if anyone has one," he added, "I want to have one more than my enemy."
VanKirk was teamed with pilot Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebee in Tibbets' fledgling 509th Composite Bomb Group for Special Mission No. 13.
The mission went perfectly, VanKirk told the AP. He guided the bomber through the night sky, just 15 seconds behind schedule, he said. As the 9,000-pound bomb nicknamed "Little Boy" fell toward the sleeping city, he and his crewmates hoped to escape with their lives.
They didn't know whether the bomb would actually work and, if it did, whether its shockwaves would rip their plane to shreds. They counted — one thousand one, one thousand two — reaching the 43 seconds they'd been told it would take for detonation, and heard nothing.
"I think everybody in the plane concluded it was a dud. It seemed a lot longer than 43 seconds," VanKirk recalled.
Then came a bright flash. Then a shockwave. Then another shockwave.

VanKirk stayed on with the military for a year after the war ended. Then he went to school, earned degrees in chemical engineering and signed on with DuPont, where he stayed until he retired in 1985. He later moved from California to the Atlanta area to be near his daughter.

Like many World War II veterans, VanKirk didn't talk much about his service until much later in his life when he spoke to school groups, his son said.

"I didn't even find out that he was on that mission until I was 10 years old and read some old news clippings in my grandmother's attic," Tom VanKirk told the AP in a phone interview Tuesday.

Instead, he and his three siblings treasured a wonderful father, who was a great mentor and remained active and "sharp as a tack" until the end of his life.

"I know he was recognized as a war hero, but we just knew him as a great father," Tom VanKirk said.

VanKirk's military career was chronicled in a 2012 book, "My True Course," by Suzanne Dietz. VanKirk was energetic, very bright and had a terrific sense of humor, Dietz recalled Tuesday.

Interviewing VanKirk for the book, she said, "was like sitting with your father at the kitchen table listening to him tell stories."

A funeral service was scheduled for VanKirk on Aug. 5 in his hometown of Northumberland, Pennsylvania. He will be buried in Northumberland next to his wife, who died in 1975. The burial will be private.

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Can embattled gray whale make it home?

Young, undernourished mammal was discovered entangled off Southern California, but has been freed and is inching slowly toward Arctic home waters

July 29, 2014 by Pete Thomas

Gray whale dragging kelp and perhaps a rope off Mission Beach; photo via Facebook

For those who like to root for the underdog, a young gray whale off California is struggling mightily, yet against strong odds, to reach its Arctic home waters.
Last Thursday the 25-foot juvenile whale was spotted off Mission Beach and La Jolla in San Diego County. It was entangled with rope—possibly a commercial fishing line—and kelp, and was clearly encumbered (see top image).
Most gray whales have already reached their Arctic feeding grounds, after spending the winter and part of spring in Baja California nursing and mating grounds. This straggler was swimming at about the same pace a person walks.

Gray whale, no longer entangled, is spotted Saturday off Huntington Beach; photo courtesy of John Minar

A disentanglement team did not reach the whale before nightfall Thursday, but a group of surfers experienced a close and unforgettable encounter with what was most likely the same whale, just before dusk.
Alex Rennie posted this recollection on Facebook: “Kid you not—today I got a foot massage … from a WHALE!! I surfed with Rick and Victor at Tourmaline’s today … and I noticed there was a whale circling around me. Its back was barnacled, so I first thought it was a rock until it started moving and breached—exhaling. I yelled to the guys and Victor paddled over. The whale proceeded to bump Victor from under his board lifting him about a foot upward.

Gray whale investigates Cabrillo Marina; last three photos are courtesy of ©Diane Alps/Cabrillo Marine Aquarium

“After it put him down it circled under me and rubbed it’s body underneath my feet as I sat on my board, (sort of cat-like) lifting me upward too. (So I kinda surfed the whale).
“He was about 20+ feet long—where the barnacles ended—his skin was smooth and dark grey (and felt nice on my feet!) I thought I saw seaweed or something dangling off his tail—so the only downer to it is that he may have been seeking our help.”
Was the whale seeking help? Only the whale knows.
But this whale looked thin and undernourished, and was covered with an inordinate amount of lice (whale lice is normal, but too much whale lice is a sign of poor health).
GraywhaleDianaAlps

But the whale pushed on, and received significant help from somebody, or some group, on the weekend.
A whale of similar size and with similar markings—almost undoubtedly the same whale—was spotted Saturday off Orange County. And it was no longer entangled.
David Anderson of Capt. Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Safari posted on Facebook that he had located the whale, ready to help disentangle the mammal, but that job had already been accomplished by “a lifeguard.”
NOAA, which is supposed to be notified before any disentanglement effort is made, has not said who or what group freed the whale, or whether this was even the same whale. But unofficially, it’s the same whale.
GraywhaleAlps

On Saturday, the cetacean made an appearance near the lineup at the U.S. Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach. On Sunday it was seen inside Cabrillo Marina, within vast Los Angeles Harbor, swimming in and out of boat slips.
Diane Alps, programs coordinator at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, captured the last three images accompanying this story. On Monday she posted this update on Facebook:
“Yesterday we got a visit from a juvenile gray whale, approx 25ft long, in the Cabrillo Marina—not just in the LA Harbor, but way up in the Marina! Worried that it might have been the entangled whale that was reported off of La Jolla, I called John Calambokidis, (a trained and authorized disentangler) who was nearby, readying to depart for a research project.
“Once we found the whale, we were able to confirm that it was not entangled (yea!) There is still great concern though, as this whale is slow moving, and WAY behind its feeding schedule.”
There are about 22,000 Pacific gray whales, which spend the summer gorging on small crustaceans, such as amphipods, that are concentrated in Arctic waters.
The juvenile whale off Southern California is probably hungry, but there’s hope along those lines. Gray whales are highly opportunistic and feed on more items than any other species of whale, including krill, which is presently blooming off Southern and Central California.
Wrote Alisa Schulman-Janiger on Facebook: “Note the heavy infestation of orange whale lice and the large post-cranial dip (depression behind the blowholes), indicating that this whale is underweight and not in good health. It was moving up the coast at a very slow rate of just over about one mile an hour; gray whales typically swim at three to five miles per hour.
“Please watch for this ailing whale as it passes through the South Bay and up the coastline!”
So the watch continues, and the best news is that the whale is no longer encumbered, so maybe that will provide this underdog with the boost it needs to prevail.

วันจันทร์ที่ 7 กรกฎาคม พ.ศ. 2557

Cursed Warship Revealed With Treasure Onboard

Researchers and divers have started studying the secrets the Mars, the pride of Sweden's 16th-century navy, has held for 450 years.

Mars was the largest ship in the world in its day. It exploded and sank during a battle in 1564.

The Mars lies at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, where it sank during a naval battle in 1564. A diver at upper right provides scale.

COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPH BY TOMASZ STACHURA, OCEAN DISCOVERY

Now, a few years after the ship's discovery, researchers have concluded that the one-of-a-kind ship is also the best preserved ship of its kind, representing the first generation of Europe's big, three-masted warships.

Naval historians know a lot about 17th-century ships, Jane J. Lee

National Geographic

PUBLISHED JULY 7, 2014

It was the largest and fiercest warship in the world, named the Mars for the Roman god of war, but it went up in a ball of flames in a brutal naval battle in 1564, consigning 800 to 900 Swedish and German sailors and a fortune in gold and silver coins to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

but very little about warships from the 16th century, said Johan Rönnby, a professor of maritime archaeology at Södertörn University in Sweden, who is studying the 197-foot-long (60 meter) wreck.

"It's a missing link," said Rönnby, whose work is funded in part by a grant from the National Geographic Society's Global Exploration Fund. The 1500s is an important period, he said, because it's when big three-masted warships started being built.

Researchers have found cargo from early warships called galleons—slightly later iterations of the type of vessel the Mars exemplifies. And they've recovered pieces of actual ships, including the English flagshipMary Rose, which sank during a battle in 1545. But never have they found something as well preserved as the Mars.

Rönnby and his team want to leave the Mars on the seafloor and instead use three-dimensional scans and photographs to share the wreck with the world.

Rönnby, with help from Richard Lundgren—part owner of Ocean Discovery, a company of professional divers that assists in maritime archaeology work—and others, has been piecing together photomosaics and scanning the wreck to produce 3-D reconstructions. With funding from the National Geographic Society/Waitt Grants Program, they are working this summer to complete their scans of the entire ship.

Bringing a ship out of the ocean is expensive, and it can cause significant harm to artifacts. The laser scans Lundgren and colleagues have taken are accurate to within 0.08 inches (2 millimeters)—more than enough to satisfy most researchers.

Using some relatively new tools and methods, archeologists now have a chance to reconstruct the last minutes of the ship and the souls onboard, Lundgren said, and gain some insight into how people behaved on a battlefield.

Finding the Mars

Treasure hunters, archaeologists, and history aficionados have sought the Mars over the years. But they were unsuccessful until the late spring of 2011, when a group of divers located one of maritime archaeology's greatest finds in 246 feet (75 meters) of water. (See "5 Shipwrecks Lost to Time That Archaeologists Would Love to Get Their Hands On.")

Legend has it that a specter rose from the inferno to guard the Mars, the pride of the Swedish navy, against ever being discovered.

The discovery was the culmination of a 20-year search by Lundgren, along with his brother Ingemar and their colleague Fredrik Skogh. The men had dreamed of finding the mighty Mars since making a childhood visit to a Stockholm museum housing another iconic Swedish warship, named the Vasa. Richard and Ingemar Lundgren became professional divers in part because of that dream.

NG STAFF, JAMIE HAWK. SOURCE: RICHARD LUNDGREN, OCEAN DISCOVERY

War Machine

The Mars sank on May 31, 1564, off the coast of a Swedish island called Öland. She came to rest on the seafloor tilted to her starboard, or right, side. Low levels of sediment, slow currents, brackish water, and the absence of a mollusk called a shipworm—responsible for breaking down wooden wrecks in other oceans in as little as five years—combined to keep the warship in remarkable condition.

What makes this find even more exciting, said Lundgren, is that the Marsdidn't sink because of a design flaw or poor seamanship.

"Mars was a functioning war machine that performed extremely well in battle," he explained. She sank loaded to the gills with cannons—even her crow's nests had guns—sailors, and all the accoutrements needed to run a ship built for war (including eight different kinds of beer).

This warship had "totally unheard of firepower" for her time, said Lundgren. And it's those cannons that played a role in her demise.

A Fiery End

The Mars went down while engaged with a Danish force allied with soldiers from a German city called Lübeck. The Swedes routed the Danes on the first day of battle, said Rönnby. So on the second day, the Germans decided to press their luck.

German forces began lobbing fireballs at the Mars and eventually succeeded in pulling alongside the burning ship so soldiers could board her. As gunpowder on the warship fueled the inferno, the heat became so intense that cannons began to explode, said Rönnby.

Those explosions eventually sank the warship. Legend, however, tells a slightly different story.

The Swedish kings at the time were busy trying to consolidate their position, Rönnby explained. "[But] the Catholic Church was a problem for the new kings because it was so powerful," he said. So in trying to diminish the church's power, monarchs like Erik XIV—who commissioned the Mars—would confiscate church bells, melt them down, and use the metal to make cannons for their new warships.

Legend has it that carrying those repurposed church bells doomed theMars to a watery grave. The warship carried either 107 or 173 cannons of many different sizes.

A Time Machine

"It's not just a ship, it's a battlefield," said Rönnby. Diving on the wreck, "you're very close to this dramatic fire on board, people killing each other, everything was burning and exploding," he said.

In fact, when Lundgren and colleagues brought a piece of the ship's hull to the surface, they noticed a charred scent wafting from the burnt wood.

"In the end, I think, that's the aim of archaeology—to discuss ourselves and the human aspects of a site," Rönnby said.

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วันพุธที่ 2 กรกฎาคม พ.ศ. 2557

China Seeks Great Power Status After Sea Retreat

By David Tweed Jul 3, 2014

Admiral Zheng He is everywhere in China these days, even though he died almost 600 years ago. The government is promoting him to remind its people -- and Asia -- that China’s destiny is to be a great naval power.

Almost a century before Christopher Columbus discovered America,Zheng in 1405 embarked on a series of voyages with ships of unrivaled size and technical prowess, reaching as far as India and Africa.

The expeditions are in the spotlight in official comments and state media as China lays claim to about 90 percent of the South China Sea and President Xi Jinping seeks to revive China’s maritime pride. In doing so he risks setting up confrontations with Southeast Asian neighbors and the U.S., whose navy has patrolled the region since World War II. Geopolitical dominance of the South China Sea would give China control of one of the world’s most economically and politically strategic areas.

“The Chinese believe they have the right to be a great power,” said Richard Bitzinger, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “What we are seeing is a hardening of China’s stance about its place in the world.”

Stretching from Taiwan toward Singapore, about half of the world’s merchant tonnage flows through the region, carrying about $5.3 trillion of goods each year, from iron ore and oil to computers and children’s toys. Some 13 million barrels of oil a day transited the Straits of Malacca in 2011, about one third of global oil shipments. The sea lanes currently lack a dominant overseer, with the U.S., China and neighboring nations all having a presence.

China’s claim is based on a 1947 map, with a more recent version following a line of nine dashes shaped like a cow’s tongue, looping down to a point about 1,800 kilometers (1,119 miles) south from the coast of Hainan island. The area overlaps claims from Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei and Taiwan. In the adjacent East China Sea, China contests islands administered by Japan.Overlapping Claims

The ambitions of China’s leaders don’t stop at the nine-dash line.

“China’s ultimate long-term goal is to obtain parity with U.S. naval capacity in the Pacific,” said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, adjunct professor at the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “This is a long-term proposition. At this stage the Chinese understand they don’t have the capacity to take on the U.S. head-on.”

‘Chinese DNA’

Sensing the U.S. is distracted by foreign policy challenges in the Middle East and Ukraine, China has been ratcheting up pressure on its neighbors, Lam said. It seized control of the Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines in 2012 as Chinese ships “shooed away” their rivals.

China in early May towed a $1 billion oil exploration rig into contested waters near the Paracel Islands off Vietnam, sparking skirmishes between coast guard vessels, the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat and anti-Chinese demonstrations. In an attempt to soothe tensions, Premier Li Keqiang said June 18 that “expansion is not in the Chinese DNA” and that talks can ensure stability in the region.

“The charm rhetoric is still there but the actions speak louder than words and unfortunately the actions are scaring the hell out of Southeast Asia,” said Ernest Bower, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It looks to Southeast Asia like China has taken off the gloves,” he said via a podcast on June 11 as CSIS released its report “Decoding China’s Emerging ‘Great Power’ Strategy in Asia.”

‘Great Rejuvenation’

China is backing its assertiveness with a campaign of historical justification based on Zheng’s voyages.

The admiral’s first fleet numbered more than 255 vessels and carried 27,000 crew, mostly soldiers. Flanked by his flotilla, Zheng proclaimed China’s glory and affirmed “China’s dominant geopolitical standing in the China Seas and Indian Ocean,” according to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum.

The project ended in 1433, after Zheng died and a new emperor bristled at the cost of the expeditions amid threats to China’s northern land frontier. The move suspended China’s state-backed long-rangenaval aspirations for 500 years.

Liu Cigui, the head of China’s coast guard, invoked Zheng in a June 8 article arguing that rebuilding maritime power is an essential part of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Xi incorporated that phrase in his “Chinese Dream” speech in March last year when he set 2049, the 100th anniversary of Communist rule, as a target for China to restore itself to economic, political and cultural primacy in Asia.

Opium Wars

He has since then emphasized the damage inflicted on China by foreign powers like the U.K. which annexed territory in the century that followed the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century.

“We should never forget this humiliating history,” Xi said on June 27. “We should remember our mission, and improve our land and maritime frontier work in a steady way.” Xi spoke at the fifth National Land and Maritime Frontier Working Conference.

“National prestige matters particularly to the Chinese because they have been a great imperial power,” said Robert D. Kaplan, the chief geopolitical analyst for Austin, Texas-based Stratfor Global Intelligence and author of ‘‘Asia’s Cauldron,’’ which examines the risks to regional stability of China’s rise. China is “promoting the historical memory” of Zheng’s voyages to justify its claims, he said.

Oil and Gas

The South China Sea is rich in resources, with the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimating it contains 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in proved and probable reserves. That would be enough to replace China’s crude-oil imports for five years and gas imports for the next century, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Reserves in disputed areas have yet to be tapped in scale.

With an area of at least 3.5 million square kilometers, the seas contain several hundred small islands, rocks and reefs, most located in the Paracel and Spratly Island chains. Many are submerged at full tide and are little more than shipping hazards.

In and around these rocks, shoals and islands lives another valuable resource: enough fish to comprise about 10 percent of the globe’s total catch, according to the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center.

Even with large swathes of the sea in dispute, other countries manage to cooperate. Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore work together to maintain the security of the Malacca Strait. In May, the Philippines and Indonesia resolved a disagreement over sea boundaries.

Security Shield

The sea plays a strategic role for China: it’s a natural security shield for its densely populated southern regions and ports.

To pursue its claims, China has stepped up coordination among its agencies. The restructured State Oceanic Administration was established in July 2013, bringing maritime law enforcement bodies together into a centralized coast guard.

China’s navy is modernizing and is expanding a base at Yalong Bay at the southern tip of Hainan Island, off China’s southern coast. The facility has two piers, each a kilometer (0.6 mile) long, to service surface ships. Four 230-meter piers accommodate submarines, along with an underwater tunnel, according to Felix Chang, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

‘Undermining Alliances’

While the base is close enough to the Paracel Islands to support large-scale naval and air activities, the Spratlys in the south of the South China Sea are too far away for China to control, according to Ian Storey, senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

The distance may explain why China is building artificial islands in the Spratlys area, by reclaiming land around the Johnson South Reef, according to Philippine fishermen and officials in the area. Such islands could help anchor China’s claims and be developed into bases from which it would be able to mount a continuous presence, challenging the Philippines, a U.S. treaty ally.

“China is testing the limits of America’s alliance relationships in Asia,” said Storey. “By pushing and probing and essentially showing that the U.S. isn’t willing to respond to these provocations, it is undermining those alliances and hence ultimately U.S. credibility and U.S. power over the long term.”

There are two schools of thought on the eventual outcome of China’s ascendancy, according to Rory Medcalf, director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney.

One argues that dominance of the South China Sea is an inevitable outcome of China’s economic and military expansion. The other says that China will have to curb its ambitions or risk provoking a conflict, even war, which could draw in the U.S.

It’s not possible to judge which scenario ends up proving right, said Medcalf. “The story is only beginning.”

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