The official website of the Contra Costa (CA) school district hosts, and apparently created as an official resource, this large site about the 1944 ammunition explosion at the Port Chicago Naval facility, near San Francisco.

This incident, which killed 377 people, is a major issue with black historians because 202 of the victims were black and because some of the survivors were subsequently court-martialed for mutiny after they refused to return to loading ammunition at the facility.

The site gives an inordinate amount of favorable attention to an absolutely ludicrous, idiotic, and defamatory conspiracy theory alleging that the Port Chicago explosion was in fact a nuclear explosion and that this was a deliberate act by the US government.

This starts on the intro page. Note that the graphic accompanying the link to the section entitled "explosion" is an image of a nuclear explosion. The first of only 3 links on this page is to an online conspiracy book entitled Last Wave at Port Chicago by one Peter Vogel, which contends that the explosion was caused by an early nuclear bomb, and strongly suggests that this was a deliberate test using black servicemen as guinea pigs.

(For the record, the Port Chicago explosion occurred a full year before the first nuclear test in New Mexico and the subsequent nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Port Chicago facility was less than 25 miles from the center of San Francisco and half that from Oakland with many small communities between. The explosion occurred at 10:30 PM, when there would have been many thousands of people out on the streets of these communities in those days before television. A nuclear explosion there, especially a 20 kiloton explosion as Vogel alleges, would have blinded thousands. A surface detonation would have been exceptionally "dirty" and the incidence of radiation sickness would have been very high and very obvious, much worse than that resulting from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki airbursts. It would certainly have killed most of the people in Port Chicago who escaped the blast. Residual radioactivity would be easily detectable and identifiable, though not dangerous, today. The site is only a few miles from some of the best equipped radiological monitoring laboraties in the world.)

This transparently misleading and biased presentation continues in the section entitled "nuclear accident?". On the right, there is a lengthy list of links to conspiracy sites making the nuclear explosion claim and only one now-dead link to a rather brief rebuttal from a newsgroup poster. Note also the exclamation point after the blurb for Vogel's book---"....after 20 years of research!".

The left sidebar is much, much worse. It lists a number of conspiracist contentions as though they were facts. The opposing (that is, sane) side is represented only by the brief and rather lame note at the bottom. Note how the suggestion for a debate is framed to include the nuclear explosion claim on both sides: "You decide. - -Was this a planned nuclear explosion? An accident?"

Remember, this incredible disgusting nonsense is specifically and openly targeted at elementary school-children and this is done with official sanction. It inclues a page on California content standards, apparently to assist teachers in justifying their use of this "resource."

The author of the page is one Doug Prouty, "Educational Technology Coordinator - Contra Costa County Office of Education."

I am absolutely enraged at this, a completely lunatic, demonizing and easily disproven conspiracy claim represented as a resource for young children.

If they weren't already, Prouty's sympathies are made obvious on the timeline accompanying the Port Chicago Today page, including a lengthy list of protest actions attributed simply to "the public", a description of the Sandinista dictatorship as the "Revolutionary Government of Nicaragua," a paen to moonbat martyr Brian Willson (who lost both legs trying to block a munitions train during a pro-Sandinista demo in 1987) and links to various leftist organizations.

Vogel's central lie is that enough fissionable material for a nuclear bomb existed at the time, mid-1944, and that this was somehow covered up in all accepted histories of the Manhattan Project. This contention, in turn, rests on a scientifically illiterate claim that the "Mark 2" bomb design did not need highly enriched uranium and could have worked with material that was enriched to the lower level available at the time.

He contradicts himself by claiming that this "Mk 2" was abandoned for inefficiency after the Port Chicago "test". At the risk of belaboring the obvious, the results of the test would seem to indicate otherwise. If such a bomb worked, why wasn't it put into production and used instead of waiting a year for much smaller amounts of HEU? He does not mention the exponentially greater effort required to produce highly enriched uranium as compared to low enriched uranium. 

Vogel accounts for the absence of fall-out with a classic strawman, demonstrating that this hypothetical LEU bomb would not have produced large amounts of plutonium residue and tacitly assuming that plutonium is the only hazardous component in nuclear explosion debris. This will work for his scientifically illiterate audience but not here. Any fission reaction will produce lightweight radioactive isotopes and these, not plutonium residue, are the primary hazards in fallout. How has this easily detectable debris eluded the notice of qualified physicists from nearby Cal-Berkeley for 60 years?

He also claims that the low humidity that night, recorded as 15%, would mitigate fallout. To begin with, 15% is nearly impossible on a coastline on a summer night. This sounds a lot more like a "no data" minimum entry from the Weather Service. Secondly, the mitigating effect of low humidity is relatively small, it would not eliminate fallout completely or even reduce it to a safe level. Thirdly, low humidity is not relevant to surface and especially to water bursts, simply because the enormous amount of water thrown up in the explosion would carry the debris regardless of the humidity.
Keep in mind that this kind of demonizing claim is a major factor in the background beliefs of terrorists, anti-war activists, and America-hating bigots.