Talk:John C. Taschner

message: As noted, the stub as it had been edited is in the public domain. James S. 19:24, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyright 

message: I have asked for a content review version of this page, as necessary for the requested RFC.  James S. 17:29, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Deleted versions have been restored to the page history.  Rossami (talk) 00:28, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thank you.  Regarding your prod comment, he is still alive and was at the HPS Baltimore-Washington chapter meeting last month, although he just moved from Sparks, Nevada to Albuquerque, New Mexico. James S. 02:34, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  (Temporary?) undeletion requested 

message: I'm putting this here because recently became unavailable but is still in Google's cache.  It has his age (69 in 1999 is about 77 now)
:Web posted Saturday, September 25, 1999 -- http://www.amarillo.com/stories/092599/new_meet.shtml
;Nuclear weapons pioneers meet up at museum
:ALBUQUERQUE (AP) - John Taschner has spent more than 40 years around nuclear weapons - first as a young Air Force officer at the Nevada Test site during an early detonation, then later as part of a team that once helped clean up after a plane crash scattered plutonium across a Greenland glacier.
:The stories he's so familiar with are coming to life at the National Atomic Museum, where yellowing typewritten pages and grainy photos take viewers back to the early days of nuclear secrets.
:Until the end of the Cold War a decade ago, the U.S. government kept much of the information about the nation's nuclear history secret.
:Since then, the Nuclear Weapons Historic Film Project has obtained deteriorating films and has restored the images. Much of the information has been declassified and some went on display at the museum here as part of its Nuclear Pioneers Days 1999.
:"It's good to see these images saved so the kids can see what it was like for us working on these projects," said David Foster, a retired nuclear weapons safety engineer.
:About a dozen of the people who designed, tested and built the nation's nuclear arsenal were acknowledged during the event this week for their unsung efforts.
:Taschner, 69, who now works at Los Alamos National Laboratory and is still a member of the federal government's elite Accident Response Group, was among the nuclear veterans gathered at the museum. The response group, called ARG, scheduled a rare public demonstration of the techniques used to respond to nuclear weapons accidents.
:ARG members are on call every day of the year to respond to accidents, known in nuclear weapons circles as "broken arrows."
:They go through regular exercises, even though the government says there hasn't been a broken arrow since 1980.
:New Mexico is home to a large number of ARG members, and it's also the only place where two broken arrows have occurred: in 1950 and 1957.
:A B-29 taking off from Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque in 1950 crashed into the Manzano Mountains, killing its crew of 13 and destroying the nuclear weapon on board. Seven years later, a B-36 crew accidentally dropped a hydrogen bomb just south of the Albuquerque airport. The non-nuclear explosives detonated, but there was no radioactive contamination.
:Fragments from the 1957 accident were put on public display at the museum for the first time this week.
:Bill Crimson, 69, spent 34 years working in the U.S. nuclear program, including nuclear weapons accident recovery. He believes declassification is good as long as everything sensitive remains out of the public's eye.
:Crimson also believes accidents in which no one was injured or endangered should not be made public because disclosing the circumstances also discloses information that could be useful to countries trying to develop nuclear weapons.
:But, he said, "Any situation that leaves a question mark in the public's mind, it's best to take it from black to white, make it public." 
More at http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/News/092399.html James S. 23:54, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Amarillo Globe News article 

message: Gordon Riel has agreed to help me find the documentation of Taschner's Navy award, and, classification status permitting, the report(s) upon which the award was based. When those are available, I intend to ask for an RFC between the versions with and without mention of the award, but I ask patience in the mean time; please do not nominate for deletion until after the planned RFC. (Please note that I am not the one who requested the RFC in the first place.) James S. 02:39, 7 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  RFC status 

message: I have asked to include the facts about Taschner's Navy award for using tungsten in the Phalanx CIWS. James S. 06:41, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request for inclusion