Atomic Secrets · the hidden history of nuclear weapons

It is the new front door to atomic-secrets.org14, the site Walter Wilkinson has run since 2024 on two stories the official histories tell differently.

• Port Chicago, 1944. An ammunition pier near San Francisco blew up and killed 320 men. The Navy called it an accident. Peter Vogel argued it was a test of an early atomic bomb.
• Fukushima, 2011. After the earthquake and tsunami, the science writer Yoichi Shimatsu reported that secret weapons laboratories in northern Japan were part of what was destroyed.

The old site stays online, unchanged, as an archive. This page is where to start.

On the night of July 17, 1944, two explosions destroyed the loading pier at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine on Suisun Bay, along with two ships and a train1. 320 men were killed and about 400 injured. Most of the dead were Black enlisted sailors, who did the loading under white officers.

When the survivors were ordered back to loading weeks later, 50 refused and were convicted of mutiny2. On the 80th anniversary, July 17, 2024, the Navy exonerated all 256 men court-martialed after the disaster, finding serious legal errors in their trials.

A Navy Court of Inquiry sat for 39 days. It listed possible causes, from rough handling to sabotage, but named none as proven3. The site is now a national memorial4.

That the Port Chicago explosion was a proof test of an early nuclear weapon, a year before the first acknowledged test at Trinity in July 1945. His summary identifies it as a low-efficiency implosion design, the “Mark II”.

His search began in the spring of 1980, with a Los Alamos document he says he bought at a church rummage sale, titled History of the 10,000 Ton Gadget. He published the idea in The Black Scholar in 1982, and posted a full book online in 20015.

This is a minority view. The Navy’s record and the standard histories treat the disaster as a conventional explosion of munitions. Column C sets out what Vogel offered as evidence, and where it is open to question.

Vogel’s own website went dark in 2018. His book survived only as chapter files deep in the Internet Archive5, where Walter Wilkinson found it in October 2024. He merged the chapters, added a table of contents and published it in 2025 as a Kindle book6. A revised 2026 edition is in preparation.

Vogel himself has not been heard from in public since April 2019.

Vogel said there was. In 1981, he reported, the base’s public affairs officer told him the Navy held a nitrate film of the blast, which would date it before about 1950. The Navy later called its film a Hollywood-style re-creation, made in the 1960s. No copy has been found.

Vogel described the film in a 1999 radio interview7. A 1980 KQED television documentary he says used parts of it is being retrieved from the University of Georgia’s Peabody archive.

Daisy B. Herndon, whose 2022 book American Nuclear Deception8 argues that the explosion must be investigated as a nuclear event. She is the only author who says she corresponded with Vogel. Her book adds material his does not, including the argument that President Roosevelt witnessed the explosion.

Yoichi Shimatsu, a Japanese-American science writer living in northern Japan in 2011, was, by his account, the first journalist to enter the exclusion zone around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi plant with a camera. In a 2018 video9 he visits nine places he says secretly housed underground weapons laboratories, some destroyed on March 11, 2011. He argues they, not only the reactors, explain the radiation released.

The archive keeps his articles from rense.com10 and pages on individual sites, such as Kido Dam, which he says produces no power.

These are his claims. The official investigations attribute the releases to meltdowns at three Fukushima Daiichi reactors after the earthquake and tsunami knocked out their cooling11. Japan did run a wartime atomic program12; there is no public record of postwar weapons laboratories.

Walter Wilkinson, a retired engineer in Worland, Wyoming, who edited and published the surviving edition of Vogel’s book and has spoken about Port Chicago four times on Jeff Rense’s radio program13.

Go to atomic-secrets.org14. Every page, picture, recording and download stays where it was, so links in the books and in old posts keep working. Only the discussion forum and the reader logins have gone.