User talk:Bpgreen

Give me advice. I'm a new user and ought to be writing term papers instead of doing this.

Radiation experiments, etc.

I've marked a few of your additions in regards to the human radiation experiments as being POV problems, and I thought I would let you know why specifically. The sources you have cited on these, esp. The Plutonium Files, are journalistic and sensationalistic, and in my mind do some error to the history of these things. Personally I think our articles on these subjects should be more balanced — certainly not letting anyone off the hook for recklnessness and error, but taking care to show as many sides of this as should be shown. Personally, I think the most reliable source in relation to the nuclear testing is Barton C. Hacker, Elements of controversy: the Atomic Energy Commission and radiation safety in nuclear weapons testing, 1947-1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Hacker is a professional historian and his work is adequately referenced and shows both a deep concern for truth as well as the victims of fallout. I'll try to incorporate his view, attributed of course, into the articles in order to balance them out a bit. I thought I would let you know this. I'm of course not trying to whitewash anything — I do believe that the U.S. government made some amazingly poor decisions in these regards — but I want the story to rest on the more factual accounts rather than the more journalistic ones. --Fastfission 17:40, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. When using original documents we have to make sure we don't violate WP:NOR, but I think linking to them is always acceptable in highlighting the work of others. I just wanted to make it clear to you that I'm not an apologist for the U.S. government in any respects, much less with these issues, though I do distrust some of the more sensational claims made by some of the literature in relation to test effects claims which came out in the early 1980s through late 1990s. This is less out of any belief that the government didn't do very unpleasant things, and more from a belief that the government is more often bungling than genuinely conspiratorial. ;-) --Fastfission 23:01, 10 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]