There is now a relatively long introduction at the top of this blog, due to the present nuclear threat caused by disarmament and arms control propaganda, and the dire need to get the facts out past pro-Russian media influencers or loony mass media which has never cared about nuclear and radiation effects facts, so please scroll down to see blog posts. The text below in blue is hyperlinked (direct to reference source materials, rather than numbered and linked to reference at the end of the page) so you can right-click on it and open in a new tab to see the source. This page is not about opinions, it provides censored out facts that debunk propaganda, but for those who require background "authority" nonsense on censored physics facts, see stuff here or here. Regarding calling war-mongering, world war causing, terrorism-regime-supporting UK disarmers of the 20th century "thugs" instead of "kind language": I was put through the Christianity grinder as a kid so will quote Jesus (whom I'm instructed to follow), Matthew 23:33: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell?" The fake "pacifist" thugs will respond with some kindly suggestion that this is "paranoid" and that "Jesus was rightfully no-platformed for his inappropriate language"! Yeah, you guys would say that, wouldn't ya. Genuine pacifism requires credible deterrence! Decent people seem to be very confused about the facts of this. Jesus did not say "disarm to invite your annihilation by terrorists". You can't "forgive and forget" when the enemy is still on the warpath. They have to be stopped, either by deterrence, force, defense, or a combination of all these.
https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth/ (Peter Vanderwicken in the Harvard Business Review Magazine, May-June 1995): "The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works ... The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity. What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. ... The architect of the transformation was not a political leader or a constitutional convention but Joseph Pulitzer, who in 1883 bought the sleepy New York World and in 20 years made it the country’s largest newspaper. Pulitzer accomplished that by bringing drama to news—by turning news articles into stories ... His journalism took events out of their dry, institutional contexts and made them emotional rather than rational, immediate rather than considered, and sensational rather than informative. The press became a stage on which the actions of government were a series of dramas. ... The press swarmed on the story, which had all the necessary dramatic elements: a foot-dragging bureaucracy, a study finding that the country’s favorite fruit was poisoning its children, and movie stars opposing the pesticide. Sales of apples collapsed. Within months, Alar’s manufacturer withdrew it from the market, although both the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration stated that they believed Alar levels on apples were safe. The outcry simply overwhelmed scientific evidence. That happens all too often, Cynthia Crossen argues in her book Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America. ... Crossen writes, “more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause.” “Most members of the media are ill-equipped to judge a technical study,” Crossen correctly points out. “Even if the science hasn’t been explained or published in a U.S. journal, the media may jump on a study if it promises entertainment for readers or viewers. And if the media jump, that is good enough for many Americans.” ... A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Such an “emergency government can’t govern,” Weaver concludes. “Not only does public support for emergency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, but officials acting in the emergency mode can’t make meaningful public policies. According to the classic textbook definition, government is the authoritative allocation of values, and emergency government doesn’t authoritatively allocate values.” (Note that Richard Rhodes' Pulitzer prize winning books such as The making of the atomic bomb which uncritically quote Hiroshima firestorm lies and survivors nonsense about people running around without feet, play to this kind of emotional fantasy mythology of nuclear deterrence obfuscation so loved by Uncle Sam's folk.)
This means that they can invade territory with relative impunity, since the West won't deter such provocations by flexible response - the aim of Russia is to push the West into a policy of massive retaliation of direct attacks only, and then use smaller provocations instead - and Russia can then use its tactical nuclear weapons to "defend" its newly invaded territories by declaring them to now be part of Mother Russia and under Moscow's nuclear umbrella. Russia has repeatedly made it clear - for decades - that it expects a direct war with NATO to rapidly escalate into nuclear WWIII and it has prepared civil defense shelters and evacuation tactics to enable it. Herman Kahn's public warnings of this date back to his testimony to the June 1959 Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, but for decades were deliberately misrepresented by most media outlets. President Kennedy's book "Why England Slept" makes it crystal clear how exactly the same "pacifist" propaganda tactics in the 1930s (that time it was the "gas bomb knockout blow has no defense so disarm, disarm, disarm" lie) caused war, by using fear to slow credible rearmament in the face of state terrorism. By the time democracies finally decided to issue an ultimatum, Hitler had been converted - by pacifist appeasement - from a cautious tester of Western indecision, into an overconfident aggressor who simply ignored last-minute ultimatums.
Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons (US Government) is written in a highly ambiguous fashion (negating nearly every definite statement with a deliberately obfuscating contrary statement to leave a smokescreen legacy of needless confusion, obscurity and obfuscation), omits nearly all key nuclear test data and provides instead misleading generalizations of data from generally unspecified weapon designs tested over 60 years ago which apply to freefield measurements on unobstructed radial lines in deserts and oceans. It makes ZERO analysis of the overall shielding of radiation and blast by their energy attenuation in modern steel and concrete cities, and even falsely denies such factors in its discussion of blast in cities and in its naive chart for predicting the percentage of burns types as a function of freefield outdoor thermal radiation, totally ignoring skyline shielding geometry (similar effects apply to freefield nuclear radiation exposure, despite vague attempts to dismiss this by non-quantitative talk about some scattered radiation arriving from all angles). It omits the huge variations in effects due to weapon design e.g. cleaner warhead designs and the tactical neutron bomb. It omits quantitative data on EMP as a function of burst yield, height and weapon design.
It omits most of the detailed data collected from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the casualty rates as a function of type of building or shelter and blast pressure. It fails to analyse overall standardized casualty rates for different kinds of burst (e.g. shallow underground earth penetrators convert radiation and blast energy into ground shock and cratering against hard targets like silos or enemy bunkers). It omits a detailed analysis of blast precursor effects. It omits a detailed analysis of fallout beta and gamma spectra, fractionation, specific activity (determining the visibility of the fallout as a function of radiation hazard, and the mass of material to be removed for effective decontamination), and data which does exist on the effect of crater soil size distribution upon the fused fallout particle size distribution (e.g. tests like Small Boy in 1962 on the very fine particles at Frenchman Flats gave mean fallout particle sizes far bigger than the pre-shot soil, proving that - as for Trinitite - melted small soil particles fuse together in the fireball to produce larger fallout particles, so the pre-shot soil size distribution is irrelevant for fallout analysis).
By generally (with few exceptions) lumping "effects" of all types of bursts together into chapters dedicated to specific effects, it falsely gives the impression that all types of nuclear explosions produce similar effects with merely "quantitative differences". This is untrue because air bursts eliminate fallout casualties entirely, while slight burial (e.g. earth penetrating warheads) eliminates thermal (including fires and dust "climatic nuclear winter" BS), the initial radiation and severe blast effects, while massively increasing ground shock, and the same applies to shallow underwater bursts. So a more objective treatment to credibly deter all aggression MUST emphasise the totally different collateral damage effects, by dedicating chapters to different kinds of burst (high altitude/space bursts, free air bursts, surface bursts, underground bursts, underwater bursts), and would include bomb design implications on these effects in detail. A great deal of previously secret and limited distributed nuclear effects data has been declassified since 1977, and new research has been done. Our objectives in this review are: (a) to ensure that an objective independent analysis of the relevant nuclear weapons effects facts is placed on the record in case the currently, increasingly vicious Cold War 2.0 escalates into some kind of limited "nuclear demonstration" by aggressors to try to end a conventional war by using coercive threats, (b) to ensure the lessons of tactical nuclear weapon design for deterring large scale provocations (like the invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939 which triggered world wars) are re-learned in contrast to Dulles "massive retaliation" (incredible deterrent) nonsense, and finally (c) to provide some push to Western governments to "get real" with our civil defense, to try to make credible our ageing "strategic nuclear deterrent". We have also provided a detailed analysis of recently declassified Russian nuclear warhead design data, shelter data, effects data, tactical nuclear weapons employment manuals, and some suggestions for improving Western thermonuclear warheads to improve deterrence.
‘The evidence from Hiroshima indicates that blast survivors, both injured and uninjured, in buildings later consumed by fire [caused by the blast overturning charcoal braziers used for breakfast in inflammable wooden houses filled with easily ignitable bamboo furnishings and paper screens] were generally able to move to safe areas following the explosion. Of 130 major buildings studied by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey ... 107 were ultimately burned out ... Of those suffering fire, about 20 percent were burning after the first half hour. The remainder were consumed by fire spread, some as late as 15 hours after the blast. This situation is not unlike the one our computer-based fire spread model described for Detroit.’
- Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 3: What the Planner Needs to Know About Fire Ignition and Spread, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, Panel 27.
The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, US Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Theatre, report 92, volume 2 (May 1947, secret):
Volume one, page 14:
“... the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only:
“... capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).”
Volume two examines the firestorm and the ignition of clothing by the thermal radiation flash in Hiroshima:
Page 24:
“Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.” [Contrast this to the obfuscation and vagueness in Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons!]
Page 88:
“Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 unclassified USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims]
“... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.”
ABOVE: "missile gap" propaganda debunked by secret 1970s data; Kennedy relied on US nuclear superiority. Using a flawed analysis of nuclear weapons effects on Hiroshima - based on lying unclassified propaganda reports and ignorant dismissals of civil defense shelters in Russia (again based on Hiroshima propaganda by groves in 1945) - America allowed Russian nuclear superiority in the 1970s. Increasingly, the nuclear deterrent was used by Russia to stop the West from "interfering" with its aggressive invasions and wars, precisely Hitler's 1930s strategy with gas bombing knockout-blow threats used to engineer appeasement. BELOW: H-bomb effects and design secrecy led to tragic mass media delusions, such as the 18 February 1950 Picture Post claim that the H-bomb can devastate Australia (inspiring the Shute novel and movie "On the Beach" and also other radiation scams like "Dr Strangelove" to be used by Russia to stir up anti Western disarmament movement to help Russia win WWIII). Dad was a Civil Defense Corps Instructor in the UK when this was done (the civil defense effectiveness and weapon effects facts on shelters at UK and USA nuclear tests were kept secret and not used to debunk lying political appeasement propaganda tricks in the mass media by sensationalist "journalists" and Russian "sputniks"):
Message to mass-media journalists: please don't indulge in lying "no defence" propaganda as was done by most of the media in previous pre-war crises!
The basic fact is that nuclear weapons can deter/stop invasions unlike the conventional weapons that cause mass destruction, and nuclear collateral damage is eliminated easily for nuclear weapons by using them on military targets, since for high yields at collateral damage distances all the effects are sufficiently delayed in arrival to allow duck and cover to avoid radiation and blast wind/flying debris injuries (unlike the case for the smaller areas affected by smaller yield conventional weapons, where there is little time on seeing the flash to duck and cover to avoid injury), and as the original 1951 SECRET American Government "Handbook on Capabilities of Atomic Weapons" (limited report AD511880L, forerunner to today's still secret EM-1) stated in Section 10.32:
"PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT ITEM TO BE REMEMBERED WHEN ESTIMATING EFFECTS ON PERSONNEL IS THE AMOUNT OF COVER ACTUALLY INVOLVED. ... IT IS OBVIOUS THAT ONLY A FEW SECONDS WARNING IS NECESSARY UNDER MOST CONDITIONS TO TAKE FAIRLY EFFECTIVE COVER. THE LARGE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES IN JAPAN RESULTED FOR THE MOST PART FROM THE LACK OF WARNING."
As for Hitler's stockpile of 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas, whose strategic and also tactical use was deterred by proper defences (gas masks for all civilians and soldiers, as well as UK stockpiles of fully trial-tested deliverable biological agent anthrax and mustard gas retaliation capacity), it is possible to deter strategic nuclear escalation to city bombing, even within a world war with a crazy terrorist, if all the people are protected by both defence and deterrence.
J. R. Oppenheimer (opposing Teller), February 1951: "It is clear that they can be used only as adjuncts in a military campaign which has some other components, and whose purpose is a military victory. They are not primarily weapons of totality or terror, but weapons used to give combat forces help they would otherwise lack. They are an integral part of military operations. Only when the atomic bomb is recognized as useful insofar as it is an integral part of military operations, will it really be of much help in the fighting of a war, rather than in warning all mankind to avert it." (Quotation: Samuel Cohen, Shame, 2nd ed., 2005, page 99.)
‘The Hungarian revolution of October and November 1956 demonstrated the difficulty faced even by a vastly superior army in attempting to dominate hostile territory. The [Soviet Union] Red Army finally had to concentrate twenty-two divisions in order to crush a practically unarmed population. ... With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears when we think of [World War II nuclear city bombing like Hiroshima]. The high casualty estimates for nuclear war are based on the assumption that the most suitable targets are those of conventional warfare: cities to interdict communications ... With cities no longer serving as key elements in the communications system of the military forces, the risks of initiating city bombing may outweigh the gains which can be achieved. ...
‘The elimination of area targets will place an upper limit on the size of weapons it will be profitable to use. Since fall-out becomes a serious problem [i.e. fallout contaminated areas which are so large that thousands of people would need to evacuate or shelter indoors for up to two weeks] only in the range of explosive power of 500 kilotons and above, it could be proposed that no weapon larger than 500 kilotons will be employed unless the enemy uses it first. Concurrently, the United States could take advantage of a new development which significantly reduces fall-out by eliminating the last stage of the fission-fusion-fission process.’
- Dr Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, 1957, pp. 180-3, 228-9. (Note that sometimes the "nuclear taboo" issue is raised against this analysis by Kissenger: if anti-nuclear lying propaganda on weapons effects makes it apparently taboo in the Western pro-Russian disarmament lobbies to escalate from conventional to tactical nuclear weapons to end war as on 6 and 9 August 1945, then this "nuclear taboo" can be relied upon to guarantee peace for our time. However, this was not only disproved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by the Russian tactical nuclear weapons reliance today, the Russian civil defense shelter system detailed on this blog which showed they believed a nuclear war survivable based on the results of their own nuclear tests, and the use of Russian nuclear weapons years after Kissinger's analysis was published and criticised, for example their 50 megaton test in 1961 and their supply of IRBM's capable of reaching East Coast mainland USA targets to the fanatical Cuban dictatorship in 1962. So much for the "nuclear taboo" as being any more reliable than Chamberlain's "peace for our time" document, co-signed by Hitler on 30 September 1938! We furthermore saw how Russia respected President Obama's "red line" for the "chemical weapons taboo": Russia didn't give a toss about Western disarmament thugs prattle about what they think is a "taboo", Russia used chlorine and sarin in Syria to keep Assad the dictator and they used Novichok to attack and kill in the UK in 2018, with only diplomatic expulsions in response. "Taboos" are no more valid to restrain madmen than peace treaties, disarmament agreements, Western CND books attacking civil defense or claiming that nuclear war is the new 1930s gas war bogyman, or "secret" stamps on scientific facts. In a word, they're crazy superstitions.)
All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of DELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace":
"Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.
ABOVE: Example of a possible Russian 1985 1st Cold War SLBM first strike plan. The initial use of Russian SLBM launched nuclear missiles from off-coast against command and control centres (i.e. nuclear explosions to destroy warning satellite communications centres by radiation on satellites as well as EMP against ground targets, rather than missiles launched from Russia against cities, as assumed by 100% of the Cold War left-wing propaganda) is allegedly a Russian "fog of war" strategy. Such a "demonstration strike" is aimed essentially at causing confusion about what is going on, who is responsible - it is not quick or easy to finger-print high altitude bursts fired by SLBM's from submerged submarines to a particular country because you don't get fallout samples to identify isotopic plutonium composition. Russia could immediately deny the attack (implying, probably to the applause of the left-wingers that this was some kind of American training exercise or computer based nuclear weapons "accident", similar to those depicted in numerous anti-nuclear Cold War propaganda films). Thinly-veiled ultimatums and blackmail follow. America would not lose its population or even key cities in such a first strike (contrary to left-wing propaganda fiction), as with Pearl Harbor in 1941; it would lose its complacency and its sense of security through isolationism, and would either be forced into a humiliating defeat or a major war.
Before 1941, many warned of the risks but were dismissed on the basis that Japan was a smaller country with a smaller economy than the USA and war was therefore absurd (similar to the way Churchill's warnings about European dictators were dismissed by "arms-race opposing pacifists" not only in the 1930s, but even before WWI; for example Professor Cyril Joad documents in the 1939 book "Why War?" his first hand witnessing of Winston Churchill's pre-WWI warning and call for an arms-race to deter that war, as dismissed by the sneering Norman Angell who claimed an arms race would cause a war rather than avert one by bankrupting the terrorist state). It is vital to note that there is an immense pressure against warnings of Russian nuclear superiority even today, most of it contradictory. E.g. the left wing and Russian-biased "experts" whose voices are the only ones reported in the Western media (traditionally led by "Scientific American" and "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"), simultaneously claim Russia imposes such a terrible SLBM and ICBM nuclear threat that we must desperately disarm now, while also claiming that Russian tactical nuclear weapons probably won't work so aren't a threat that needs to be credibly deterred! This only makes sense as Russian siding propaganda. In similar vein, Teller-critic Hans Bethe also used to falsely "dismiss" Russian nuclear superiority by claiming (with quotes from Brezhnev about the peaceful intentions of Russia) that Russian delivery systems are "less accurate" than Western missiles (as if accuracy has anything to do with high altitude EMP strikes, where the effects cover huge areas, or large city targets. Such claims would then by repeatedly endlessly in the Western media by Russian biased "journalists" or agents of influence, and any attempt to point out the propaganda (i.e. he real world asymmetry: Russia uses cheap countervalue targetting on folk that don't have civil defense, whereas we need costly, accurate counterforce targetting because Russia has civil defense shelters that we don't have) became a "Reds under beds" argument, implying that the truth is dangerous to "peaceful coexistence"!
“Free peoples ... will make war only when driven to it by tyrants. ... there have been no wars between well-established democracies. ... the probability ... that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident [is] less than one chance in a thousand. ... there have been more than enough to provide robust statistics ... When toleration of dissent has persisted for three years, but not until then, we can call a new republic ‘well established.’ ... Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders ... using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation ... Republican behaviour ... in quite a few cases ... created an ‘appeasement trap.’ The republic tried to accommodate a tyrant as if he were a fellow republican; the tyrant concluded that he could safely make an aggressive response; eventually the republic replied furiously with war. The frequency of such errors on both sides is evidence that negotiating styles are not based strictly on sound reasoning.” - Spencer Weart, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (Yale University Press)
The Top Secret American intelligency report NIE 11-3/8-74 "Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict" warned on page 6: "the USSR has largely eliminated previous US quantitative advantages in strategic offensive forces." page 9 of the report estimated that the Russian's ICBM and SLBM launchers exceed the USAs 1,700 during 1970, while Russia's on-line missile throw weight had exceeded the USA's one thousand tons back in 1967! Because the USA had more long-range bombers which can carry high-yield bombs than Russia (bombers are more vulnerable to air defences so were not Russia's priority), it took a little longer for Russia to exceed the USA in equivalent megatons, but the 1976 Top Secret American report NIE 11-3/8-76 at page 17 shows that in 1974 Russia exceeded the 4,000 equivalent-megatons payload of USA missiles and aircraft (with less vulnerability for Russia, since most of Russia's nuclear weapons were on missiles not in SAM-vulnerable aircraft), amd by 1976 Russia could deliver 7,000 tons of payload by missiles compared to just 4,000 tons on the USA side. These reports were kept secret for decades to protect the intelligence sources, but they were based on hard evidence. For example, in August 1974 the Hughes Aircraft Company used a specially designed ship (Glomar Explorer, 618 feet long, developed under a secret CIA contract) to recover nuclear weapons and their secret manuals from a Russian submarine which sank in 16,000 feet of water, while in 1976 America was able to take apart the electronics systems in a state-of-the-art Russian MIG-25 fighter which was flown to Japan by defector Viktor Belenko, discovering that it used exclusively EMP-hard miniature vacuum tubes with no EMP-vulnerable solid state components.
There are four ways of dealing with aggressors: conquest (fight them), intimidation (deter them), fortification (shelter against their attacks; historically used as castles, walled cities and even walled countries in the case of China's 1,100 mile long Great Wall and Hadrian's Wall, while the USA has used the Pacific and Atlantic as successful moats against invasion, at least since Britain invaded Washington D.C. back in 1812), and friendship (which if you are too weak to fight, means appeasing them, as Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler for worthless peace promises). These are not mutually exclusive: you can use combinations. If you are very strong in offensive capability and also have walls to protect you while your back is turned, you can - as Teddy Roosevelt put it (quoting a West African proverb): "Speak softly and carry a big stick." But if you are weak, speaking softly makes you a target, vulnerable to coercion. This is why we don't send troops directly to Ukraine. When elected in 1960, Kennedy introduced "flexible response" to replace Dulles' "massive retaliation", by addressing the need to deter large provocations without being forced to decide between the unwelcome options of "surrender or all-out nuclear war" (Herman Kahn called this flexible response "Type 2 Deterrence"). This was eroded by both Russian civil defense and their emerging superiority in the 1970s: a real missiles and bombers gap emerged in 1972 when the USSR reached and then exceeded the 2,200 of the USA, while in 1974 the USSR achieve parity at 3,500 equivalent megatons (then exceeded the USA), and finally today Russia has over 2,000 dedicated clean enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons and we have none (except low-neutron output B61 multipurpose bombs). (Robert Jastrow's 1985 book How to make nuclear Weapons obsolete was the first to have graphs showing the downward trend in nuclear weapon yields created by the development of miniaturized MIRV warheads for missiles and tactical weapons: he shows that the average size of US warheads fell from 3 megatons in 1960 to 200 kilotons in 1980, and from a total of 12,000 megatons in 1960 to 3,000 megatons in 1980.)
The term "equivalent megatons" roughly takes account of the fact that the areas of cratering, blast and radiation damage scale not linearly with energy but as something like the 2/3 power of energy release; but note that close-in cratering scales as a significantly smaller power of energy than 2/3, while blast wind drag displacement of jeeps in open desert scales as a larger power of energy than 2/3. Comparisons of equivalent megatonnage shows, for example, that WWII's 2 megatons of TNT in the form of about 20,000,000 separate conventional 100 kg (0.1 ton) explosives is equivalent to 20,000,000 x (10-7)2/3 = 431 separate 1 megaton explosions! The point is, nuclear weapons are not of a different order of magnitude to conventional warfare, because: (1) devastated areas don't scale in proportion to energy release, (2) the number of nuclear weapons is very much smaller than the number of conventional bombs dropped in conventional war, (3) because of radiation effects like neutrons and intense EMP, it is possible to eliminate physical destruction by nuclear weapons by a combination of weapon design (e.g. very clean bombs like 99.9% fusion Dominic-Housatonic, or 95% fusion Redwing-Navajo) and burst altitude or depth for hard targets, and create a weapon that deters invasions credibly (without lying local fallout radiation hazards), something none of the biased "pacifist disarmament" lobbies (which attract Russian support) tell you, and (4) people at collateral damage distances have time to take cover from radiation and flying glass, blast winds, etc from nuclear explosions (which they don't in Ukraine and Gaza where similar blast pressures arrive more rapidly from smaller conventional explosions). There's a big problem with propaganda here.
(These calculations, showing that even if strategic bombing had worked in WWII - and the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded it failed, thus the early Cold War effort to develop and test tactical nuclear weapons and train for tactical nuclear war in Nevada field exercises - you need over 400 megaton weapons to give the equivalent of WWII city destruction in Europe and Japan, are often inverted by anti-nuclear bigots to try to obfuscate the truth. What we're driving at is that nuclear weapons give you the ability to DETER the invasions that set off such wars, regardless of whether they escalate from poison gas - as feared in the 20s and 30s thus appeasement and WWII - or nuclear. Escalation was debunked in WWII where the only use of poison gases were in "peaceful" gas chambers, not dropped on cities. Rather than justifying appeasement, the "peaceful" massacre of millions in gas chambers justified war. But evil could and should have been deterred. The "anti-war" propagandarists like Lord Noel-Baker and pals who guaranteed immediate gas knockout blows in the 30s if we didn't appease evil dictators were never held to account and properly debunked by historians after the war, so they converted from gas liars to nuclear liars in the Cold War and went on winning "peace" prices for their lies, which multiplied up over the years, to keep getting news media headlines and Nobel Peace Prizes for starting and sustaining unnecessary wars and massacres by dictators. There's also a military side to this, with Field Marshall's Lord Mountbatten, lord Carver and lord Zuckerman in the 70s arguing for UK nuclear disarmament and a re-introduction of conscription instead. These guys were not pacifist CND thugs who wanted Moscow to rule the world, but they were quoted by them attacking the deterrent but not of course calling for conscription instead. The abolishment of UK conscription for national service in 1960 was due to the H-bomb, and was a political money-saving plot by Macmillan. If we disarmed our nuclear deterrent and spend the money on conscription plus underground shelters, we might well be able to resist Russia as Ukraine does, until we run out of ammunition etc. However, the cheapest and most credible deterrent is tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the concentration of aggressive force by terrorist states..)
Duncan Campbell's War Plan UK relies on the contradiction of claiming that the deliberately exaggerated UK Government worst-case civil defense "exercises" for training purposes are "realistic scenarios" (e.g. 1975 Inside Right, 1978 Scrum Half, 1980 Square Leg, 1982 Hard Rock planning), while simultaneously claiming the very opposite about reliable UK Government nuclear effects and sheltering effectiveness data, and hoping nobody would spot his contradictory tactics. He quotes extensively from these lurid worst-case scenario UK civil defense exercises ,as if they are factually defensible rather than imaginary fiction to put planners under the maximum possible stress (standard UK military policy of “Train hard to fight easy”), while ignoring the far more likely limited nuclear uses scenario of Sir John Hackett's Third World War. His real worry is the 1977 UK Government Training Manual for Scientific Advisers which War Plan UK quotes on p14: "a potential threat to the security of the United Kingdom arising from acts of sabotage by enemy agents, possibly assisted by dissident groups. ... Their aim would be to weaken the national will and ability to fight. ... Their significance should not be underestimated." On the next page, War Plan UK quotes J. B. S. Haldane's 1938 book Air Raid Precautions (ARP) on the terrible destruction Haldane witnessed on unprotected people in the Spanish civil war, without even mentioning that Haldane's point is pro-civil defense, pro-shelters, and anti-appeasement of dictatorship, the exact opposite of War Plan UK which wants Russia to run the world. On page 124 War Plan UK the false assertion is made that USA nuclear casualty data is "widely accepted" and true (declassified Hiroshima casaulty data for people in modern concrete buildings proves it to be lies) while the correct UK nuclear casualty data is "inaccurate", and on page 126, Duncan Campbell simply lies that the UK Government's Domestic Nuclear Shelters- Technical Guidance"ended up offering the public a selection of shelters half of which were invented in the Blitz ... None of the designs was ever tested." In fact, Frank Pavry (who studied similar shelters surviving near ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 with the British Mission to Japan_ and George R. Stanbury tested 15 Anderson shelters at the first UK nuclear explosion, Operation Hurricane in 1952, together with concrete structures, and many other improvised trench and earth-covered shelters were nuclear tested by USA and UK at trials in 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1958, and later at simulated nuclear explosions by Cresson Kearny of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA, having also earlier been exposed to early Russian nuclear tests (scroll down to see the evidence of this). Improved versions of war tested and nuclear weapons tested shelters! So war Plan UK makes no effort whatsoever to dig up the facts, and instead falsely claims the exact opposite of the plain unvarnished truth! War Plan UK shows its hypocrisy on page 383 in enthusiastically praising Russian civil defense:
"Training in elementary civil defence is given to everyone, at school, in industry or collective farms. A basic handbook of precautionary measures, Everybody must know this!, is the Russian Protect and Survive. The national civil defence corps is extensive, and is organized along military lines. Over 200,000 civil defence troops would be mobilized for rescue work in war. There are said to be extensive, dispersed and 'untouchable' food stockpiles; industrial workers are issued with kits of personal protection apparatus, said to include nerve gas counteragents such as atropine. Fallout and blast shelters are provided in the cities and in industrial complexes, and new buildings have been required to have shelters since the 1950s. ... They suggest that less than 10% - even as little as 5% - of the Soviet population would die in a major attack. [Less than Russia's loss of 12% of its population in WWII.]"
'LLNL achieved fusion ignition for the first time on Dec. 5, 2022. The second time came on July 30, 2023, when in a controlled fusion experiment, the NIF laser delivered 2.05 MJ of energy to the target, resulting in 3.88 MJ of fusion energy output, the highest yield achieved to date. On Oct. 8, 2023, the NIF laser achieved fusion ignition for the third time with 1.9 MJ of laser energy resulting in 2.4 MJ of fusion energy yield. “We’re on a steep performance curve,” said Jean-Michel Di Nicola, co-program director for the NIF and Photon Science’s Laser Science and Systems Engineering organization. “Increasing laser energy can give us more margin against issues like imperfections in the fuel capsule or asymmetry in the fuel hot spot. Higher laser energy can help achieve a more stable implosion, resulting in higher yields.” ... “The laser itself is capable of higher energy without fundamental changes to the laser,” said NIF operations manager Bruno Van Wonterghem. “It’s all about the control of the damage. Too much energy without proper protection, and your optics blow to pieces.” ' - https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/llnls-nif-delivers-record-laser-energy
NOTE: the "problem" very large lasers "required" to deliver ~2MJ (roughly 0.5 kg of TNT energy) to cause larger fusion explosions of 2mm diameter capsules of frozen D+T inside a 1 cm diameter energy reflecting hohlraum, and the "problem" of damage to the equipment caused by the explosions, is immaterial to clean nuclear deterrent development based on this technology, because in a clean nuclear weapon, whatever laser or other power ignition system is used only has to be fired once, so it needs to be less robust than the NIF lasers which are used repeatedly. Similarly, damage done to the system by the explosion is also immaterial for a clean nuclear weapon, in which the weapon is detonated once only! This is exactly the same point which finally occurred during a critical review of the first gun-type assembly nuclear weapon, in which the fact it would only ever be fired once (unlike a field artillery gun) enabled huge reductions in the size of the device, into a practical weapon, as described by General Leslie M. Groves on p163 of his 1962 book Now it can be told: the story of the Manhattan Project:
"Out of the Review Committee's work came one important technical contribution when Rose pointed out ... that the durability of the gun was quite immaterial to success, since it would be destroyed in the explosion anyway. Self-evident as this seemed once it was mentioned, it had not previously occurred to us. Now we could make drastic reductions in ... weight and size."
This principle also applies to weaponizing NIF clean fusion explosion technology. General Groves' book was reprinted in 1982 with a useful Introduction by Edward Teller on the nature of nuclear weapons history: "History in some ways resembles the relativity principle in science. What is observed depends on the observer. Only when the perspective of the observer is known, can proper corrections be made. ... The general ... very often managed to ignore complexity and arrive at a result which, if not ideal, at least worked. ... For Groves, the Manhattan project seemed a minor assignment, less significant than the construction of the Pentagon. He was deeply disappointed at being given the job of supervising the development of an atomic weapon, since it deprived him of combat duty. ... We must find ways to encourage mutual understanding and significant collaboration between those who defend their nation with their lives and those who can contribute the ideas to make that defense successful. Only by such cooperation can we hope that freedom will survive, that peace will be preserved."
General Groves similarly comments in Chapter 31, "A Final Word" of Now it can be told:
"No man can say what would have been the result if we had not taken the steps ... Yet, one thing seems certain - atomic energy would have been developed somewhere in the world ... I do not believe the United States ever would have undertaken it in time of peace. Most probably, the first developer would have been a power-hungry nation, which would then have dominated the world completely ... it is fortunate indeed for humanity that the initiative in this field was gained and kept by the United States. That we were successful was due entirely to the hard work and dedication of the more than 600,000 Americans who comprised and directly supported the Manhattan Project. ... we had the full backing of our government, combined with the nearly infinite potential of American science, engineering and industry, and an almost unlimited supply of people endowed with ingenuity and determination."
Additionally, the test was made in a hurry before an atmospheric teat ban treaty, and this rushed use of a standard air drop steel casing made the tested weapon much heavier than a properly weaponized Ripple II. The key point is that a 10 kt fission device set off a ~10 Mt fusion explosion, a very clean deterrent. Applying this Ripple II 1,000-factor multiplicative staging figure directly to this technology for clean nuclear warheads, a 0.5 kg TNT D+T fusion capsule would set off a 0.5 ton TNT 2nd stage of LiD, which would then set off a 0.5 kt 3rd stage "neutron bomb", which could then be used to set off a 500 kt 4th stage or "strategic nuclear weapon". In practice, this multiplication factor of 1,000 given by Ripple II in 1962 from 10 kt to 10 Mt may not be immediately achievable to get from ~1 kg TNT yield to 1 ton TNT, so a few more tiny stages may be needed for the lower yield. But there is every reason to forecast that with enough research, improvements will be possible and the device will become a reality. It is therefore now possible not just in "theory" or in principle, but with evidence obtained from practical experimentation, using suitable already-proved technical staging systems used in 1960s nuclear weapon tests successfully, to design 100% clean fusion nuclear warheads! Yes, the details have been worked out, yes the technology has been tested in piecemeal fashion. All that is now needed is a new, but quicker and cheaper, Star Wars program or Manhattan Project style effort to pull the components together. This will constitute a major leap forward in the credibility of the deterrence of aggressors.
ABOVE: as predicted, the higher the input laser pulse for the D+T initiator of a clean multiplicatively-staged nuclear deterrent, the lower the effect of plasma instabilities and asymmetries and the greater the fusion burn. To get ignition (where the x-ray energy injected into the fusion hohlraum by the laser is less than the energy released in the D+T fusion burn) they have had to use about 2 MJ delivered in 10 ns or so, equivalent to 0.5 kg of TNT equivalent. But for deterrent use, why use such expensive, delicate lasers? Why not just use one-shot miniaturised x-ray tubes with megavolt electron acceleration, powered a suitably ramped pulse from a chemical explosion for magnetic flux compression current generation? At 10% efficiency, you need 0.5 x 10 = 5 kg of TNT! Even at 1% efficiency, 50 kg of TNT will do. Once the D+T gas capsule's hohlraum is well over 1 cm in size, to minimise the risk of imperfections that cause asymmetries, you don't any longer need focussed laser beams to enter tiny apertures. You might even be able to integrate many miniature flash x-ray tubes (each designed to burn out when firing one pulse of a MJ or so) into a special hohlraum. Humanity urgently needs a technological arms race akin to Reagan's Star Wars project, to deter the dictators from invasions and WWIII. In the conference video above, a question was asked about the real efficiency of the enormous repeat-pulse capable laser system's efficiency (not required for a nuclear weapon whose components only require the capability to be used once, unlike lab equipment): the answer is that 300 MJ was required by the lab lasers to fire a 2 MJ pulse into the D+T capsule's x-ray hohlraum, i.e. their lasers are only 0.7% efficient! So why bother? We know - from the practical use of incoherent fission primary stage x-rays to compress and ignite fusion capsules in nuclear weapons - that you simply don't need coherent photons from a laser for this purpose. The sole reason they are approaching the problem with lasers is that they began their lab experiments decades ago with microscopic sized fusion capsules and for those you need a tightly focussed beam to insert energy through a tiny hohlraum aperture. But now they are finally achieving success with much larger fusion capsules (to minimise instabilities that caused the early failures), it may be time to change direction. A whole array of false "no-go theorems" can and will be raised by ignorant charlatan "authorities" against any innovation; this is the nature of the political world. There is some interesting discussion of why clean bombs aren't in existence today, basically the idealized theory (which works fine for big H-bombs but ignores small-scale asymmetry problems which are important only at low ignition energy) understimated the input energy required for fusion ignition by a factor of 2000:
In the final diagram above, we illustrate an example of what could very well occur in the near future, just to really poke a stick into the wheels of "orthodoxy" in nuclear weapons design: is it possible to just use a lot of (perhaps hardened for higher currents, perhaps no) pulsed current driven microwave tubes from kitchen microwave ovens, channelling their energy using waveguides (simply metal tubes, i.e. electrical Faraday cages, which reflect and thus contain microwaves) into the hohlraum, and make the pusher of dipole molecules (like common salt, NaCl) which is a good absorber of microwaves (as everybody knows from cooking in microwave ovens)? It would be extremely dangerous, not to mention embarrassing, if this worked, but nobody had done any detailed research into the possibility due to groupthink orthodoxy and conventional boxed in thinking! Remember, the D+T capsule just needs extreme compression and this can be done by any means that works. Microwave technology is now very well-established. It's no good trying to keep anything of this sort "secret" (either officially or unofficially) since as history shows, dictatorships are the places where "crackpot"-sounding ideas (such as douple-primary Project "49" Russian thermonuclear weapon designs, Russian Sputnik satellites, Russian Novichok nerve agent, Nazi V1 cruise missiles, Nazi V2 IRBM's, etc.) can be given priority by loony dictators. We have to avoid, as Edward Teller put it (in his secret commentary debunking Bethe's false history of the H-bomb, written AFTER the Teller-Ulam breakthrough), "too-narrow" thinking (which Teller said was still in force on H-bomb design even then). Fashionable hardened orthodoxy is the soft underbelly of "democracy" (a dictatorship by the majority, which is always too focussed on fashionable ideas and dismissive of alternative approaches in science and technology). Dictatorships (minorities against majorities) have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of concern for the fake "no-go theorems" used by Western anti-nuclear "authorities" to ban anything but fashionable groupthink science.
ABOVE: 1944-dated film of the Head of the British Mission to Los Alamos, neutron discoverer James Chadwick, explaining in detail to American how hard it was for him to discover the neutron, taking 10 years on a shoe-string budget, mostly due to having insufficiently strong sources of alpha particles to bombard nuclei in a cloud chamber! The idea of the neutron came from his colleague Rutherford. Chadwick reads his explanation while rapidly rotating a pencil in his right hand, perhaps indicating the stress he was under in 1944. In 1946, when British participation at Los Alamos ended, Chadwick wrote the first detailed secret British report on the design of a three-stage hydrogen bomb, another project that took over a decade. In the diagram below, it appears that the American Mk17 only had a single secondary stage like the similar yield 1952 Mike design. The point here is that popular misunderstanding of the simple mechanism of x-ray energy transfer for higher yield weapons may be creating a dogmatic attitude even in secret nuclear weaponeer design labs, where orthodoxy is followed too rigorously. The Russians (see quotes on the latest blog post here) state they used two entire two-stage thermonuclear weapons with a combined yield of 1 megaton to set off their 50 megaton test in 1961. If true, you can indeed use two-stage hydrogen bombs as an "effective primary" to set off another secondary stage, of much higher yield. Can this be reversed in the sense of scaling it down so you have several bombs-within-bombs, all triggered by a really tiny first stage? In other words, can it be applied to neutron bomb design?
The 1946 Report of the British Mission to Japan, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compiled by a team of 16 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during November 1945, which included 10 UK Home Office civil defence experts (W. N. Thomas, J. Bronowski, D. C. Burn, J. B. Hawker, H. Elder, P. A. Badland, R. W. Bevan, F. H. Pavry, F. Walley, O. C. Young, S. Parthasarathy, A. D. Evans, O. M. Solandt, A. E. Dark, R. G. Whitehead and F. G. S. Mitchell) found: "Para. 26. Reinforced concrete buildings of very heavy construction in Hiroshima, even when within 200 yards of the centre of damage, remained structurally undamaged. ... Para 28. These observations make it plain that reinforced concrete framed buildings can resist a bomb of the same power detonated at these heights, without employing fantastic thicknesses of concrete. ... Para 40. The provision of air raid shelters throughout Japan was much below European standards. ... in Hiroshima ... they were semi-sunk, about 20 feet long, had wooden frames, and 1.5-2 feet of earth cover. ... Exploding so high above them, the bomb damaged none of these shelters. ... Para 42. These observations show that the standard British shelters would have performed well against a bomb of the same power exploded at such a height. Anderson shelters, properly erected and covered, would have given protection. Brick or concrete surfac shelters with adequate reinforcement would have remained safe from collapse. The Morrison shelter is designed only to protect its occupants from the refuge load of a house, and this it would have done. Deep shelters such as the refuge provided by the London Underground would have given complete protection. ... Para 60. Buildings and walls gave complete protection from flashburn."
Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons in Table 12.21 on p547 flunks making this point by giving data without citing its source to make it credible to readers: it correlated 14% mortality (106 killed out of 775 people in Hiroshima's Telegraph Office) to "moderate damage" at 500m in Hiroshima (the uncited "secret" source was NP-3041, Table 12, applying to unwarned people inside modern concrete buildings).
"A weapon whose basic design would seem to provide the essence of what Western morality has long sought for waging classical battlefield warfare - to keep the war to a struggle between the warriors and exclude the non-combatants and their physical assets - has been violently denounced, precisely because it achieves this objective." - Samuel T. Cohen (quoted in Chapman Pincher, The secret offensive, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1985, Chapter 15: The Neutron Bomb Offensive, p210).
The reality is, dedicated enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons were used to credibly deter the concentrations of force required for triggering of WWIII during the 1st Cold War, and the thugs who support Russian propaganda for Western disarmament got rid of them on our side, but not on the Russian side. Air burst neutron bombs or even as subsurface earth penetrators of relatively low fission yield (where the soil converts energy that would otherwise escape as blast and radiation into ground shock for destroying buried tunnels - new research on cratering shows that a 20 kt subsurface burst creates similar effects on buried hard targets as a 1 Mt surface burst), they cause none of the vast collateral damage to civilians that we see now in Ukraine and Gaza, or that we saw in WWII and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. This is 100% contrary to CND propaganda which is a mixture of lying on nuclear explosion collateral damage, escalation/knockout blow propaganda (of the type used to start WWII by appeasers) and lying on the designs of nuclear weapons in order to ensure the Western side (but not the thugs) gets only incredible "strategic deterrence" that can't deter the invasions that start world wars (e.g. Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939.) "Our country entered into an agreement in Budapest, Hungary when the Soviet Union was breaking up that we would guarantee the independence of Ukraine." - Tom Ramos. There really is phoney nuclear groupthink left agenda politics at work here: credible relatively clean tactical nuclear weapons are banned in the West but stocked by Russia, which has civil defense shelters to make its threats far more credible than ours! We need low-collateral damage enhanced-neutron and earth-penetrator options for the new Western W93 warhead, or we remain vulnerable to aggressive coercion by thugs, and invite invasions. Ambiguity, the current policy ("justifying" secrecy on just what we would do in any scenario) actually encourages experimental provocations by enemies to test what we are prepared to do (if anything), just as it did in 1914 and the 1930s.
ABOVE: 0.2 kt (tactical yield range) Ruth nuclear test debris, with lower 200 feet of the 300 ft steel tower surviving in Nevada, 1953. Note that the yield of the tactical invasion-deterrent Mk54 Davy Crockett was only 0.02 kt, 10 times less than than 0.2 kt Ruth.
It should be noted that cheap and naive "alternatives" to credible deterrence of war were tried in the 1930s and during the Cold War and afterwards, with disastrous consequences. Heavy "peaceful" oil sanctions and other embargoes against Japan for its invasion of China between 1931-7 resulted in the plan for the Pearl Harbor surprise attack of 7 December 1941, with subsequent escalation to incendiary city bombing followed nuclear warfare against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Attlee's pressure on Truman to guarantee no use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean War (leaked straight to Stalin by the Cambridge Spy Ring), led to an escalation of that war causing the total devastation of the cities of that country by conventional bombing (a sight witnessed by Sam Cohen, that motivated his neutron bomb deterrent of invasions), until Eisenhower was elected and reversed Truman's decision, leading not to the "escalatory Armageddon" assertions of Attlee, but to instead to a peaceful armistice! Similarly, as Tom Ramos argues in From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Kennedy's advisers who convinced him to go ahead with the moonlit 17 April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba without any USAF air support, which led to precisely what they claimed they would avoid: an escalation of aggression from Russia in Berlin, with the Berlin Wall going up on 17 August 1961 because any showing weakness to an enemy, as in the bungled invasion of Cuba, is always a green light to dictators to go ahead with revolutions, invasions and provocations everywhere else. Rather than the widely hyped autistic claims from disarmers and appeasers about "weakness bringing peace by demonstrating to the enemy that they have nothing to fear from you", the opposite result always occurs. The paranoid dictator seizes the opportunity to strike first. Similarly, withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021 was a clear green light to Russia to go ahead with a full scale invasion of Ukraine, reigniting the Cold War. von Neumann and Morgenstein's Minimax theorem for winning games - minimise the maximum possible loss - fails with offensive action in war because it sends a signal of weakness to the enemy, which does not treat war as a game with rules to be obeyed. Minimax is only valid for defense, such as civil defense shelters used by Russia to make their threats more credible than ours. The sad truth is that cheap fixes don't work, no matter how much propaganda is behind them. You either need to militarily defeat the enemy or at least economically defeat them using proven Cold War arms race techniques (not merely ineffective sanctions, which they can bypass by making alliances with Iran, North Korea, and China). Otherwise, you are negotiating peace from a position of weakness, which is called appeasement, or collaboration with terrorism.
"Following the war, the Navy Department was intent to see the effects of an atomic blast on naval warships ... the press was invited to witness this one [Crossroads-Able, 23.5 kt at 520 feet altitude, 1 July 1946, Bikini Atoll]. ... The buildup had been too extravagant. Goats that had been tethered on warship decks were still munching their feed, and the atoll's palm trees remained standing, unscathed. The Bikini test changed public attitudes. Before July 1, the world stood in awe of a weapon that had devastated two cities and forced the Japanese Empire to surrender. After that date, the bomb was still a terrible weapon, but a limited one." - Tom Ramos (LLNL nuclear weaponeer and nuclear pumped X-ray laser developer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Prevent Nuclear War, Naval Institute Press, 2022, pp43-4.
ILLUSTRATION: the threat of WWII and the need to deter it was massively derided by popular pacifism which tended to make "jokes" of the Nazi threat until too late (example of 1938 UK fiction on this above; Charlie Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator" is another example), so three years after the Nuremberg Laws and five years after illegal rearmament was begun by the Nazis, in the UK crowds of "pacifists" in Downing Street, London, support friendship with the top racist, dictatorial Nazis in the name of "world peace". The Prime Minister used underhand techniques to try to undermine appeasement critics like Churchill and also later to get W. E. Johns fired from both editorships of Flying (weekly) and Popular Flying (monthly) to make it appear everybody "in the know" agreed with his actions, hence the contrived "popular support" for collaborating with terrorists depicted in these photos. The same thing persists today; the 1920s and 1930s "pacifist" was also driven by "escalation" and "annihilation" claims explosions, fire and WMD poison gas will kill everybody in a "knockout blow", immediately any war breaks out.
"Fuchs reasoned that [the very low energy, 1-10 kev, approximately 10-100 lower energy than medical] x-rays from the [physically separated] uranium explosion would reach the tamper of beryllium oxide, heat it, ionize the constituents and cause them to implode - the 'ionization implosion' concept of von Neumann but now applied to deuterium and tritium contained within beryllium oxide. To keep the radiation inside the tamper, Fuchs proposed to enclose the device inside a casing impervious to radiation. The implosion induced by the radiation would amplify the compression ... and increase the chance of the fusion bomb igniting. The key here is 'separation of the atomic charge and thermonuclear fuel, and compression of the latter by radiation travelling from the former', which constitutes 'radiation implosion'." (This distinction between von Neumann's "ionization implosion" INSIDE the tamper, of denser tamper expanding and thus compressing lower density fusion fuel inside, and Fuchs' OUTSIDE capsule "radiation implosion", is key even today for isentropic H-bomb design; it seems Teller's key breakthroughs were not separate stages or implosion but rather radiation mirrors and ablative recoil shock compression, where radiation is used to ablate a dense pusher of Sausage designs like Mike in 1952 etc., a distinction not to be confused for the 1944 von Neumann and 1946 Fuchs implosion mechanisms!
It appears Russian H-bombs used von Neumann's "ionization implosion" and Fuchs's "radiation implosion" for RDS-37 on 22 November 1955 and also in their double-primary 23 February 1958 test and subsequently, where their fusion capsules reportedly contained a BeO or other low-density outer coating, which would lead to quasi-isentropic compression, more effective for low density secondary stages than purely ablative recoil shock compression. This accounts for the continuing classification of the April 1946 Superbomb Conference (the extract of 32 pages linked here is so severely redacted that it is less helpful than the brief but very lucid summary of its technical content, in the declassified FBI compilation of reports concerning data Klaus Fuchs sent to Stalin, linked here!). Teller had all the knowledge he needed in 1946, but didn't go ahead because he made the stupid error of killing progress off by his own "no-go theorem" against compression of fusion fuel. Teller did a "theoretical" calculation in which he claimed that compression has no effect on the amount of fusion burn because the compressed system is simply scaled down in size so that the same efficiency of fusion burn occurs, albeit faster, and then stops as the fuel thermally expands. This was wrong. Teller discusses the reason for his great error in technical detail during his tape-recorded interview by Chuck Hansen at Los Alamos on 7 June 1993 (C. Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, 2nd ed., pp. II-176-7):
"Now every one of these [fusion] processes varied with the square of density. If you compress the thing, then in one unit's volume, each of the 3 important processes increased by the same factor ... Therefore, compression (seemed to be) useless. Now when ... it seemed clear that we were in trouble, then I wanted very badly to find a way out. And it occurred to be than an unprecedentedly strong compression will just not allow much energy to go into radiation. Therefore, something had to be wrong with my argument and then, you know, within minutes, I knew what must be wrong ... [energy] emission occurs when an electron and a nucleus collide. Absorption does not occur when a light quantum and a nucleus ... or ... electron collide; it occurs when a light quantum finds an electron and a nucleus together ... it does not go with the square of the density, it goes with the cube of the density." (This very costly theoretical error, wasting five years 1946-51, could have been resolved by experimental nuclear testing. There is always a risk of this in theoretical physics, which is why experiments are done to check calculations before prizes are handed out. The ban on nuclear testing is a luddite opposition to technological progress in improving deterrence.)
(This 1946-51 theoretical "no-go theorem" anti-compression error of Teller's, which was contrary to the suggestion of compression at the April 1946 superbomb conference as Teller himself refers to on 14 August 1952, and which was corrected only by comparison of the facts about compression validity in pure fission cores in Feb '51 after Ulam's argument that month for fission core compression by lens focussed primary stage shock waves, did not merely lead to Teller's dismissal of vital compression ideas. It also led to his false equations - exaggerating the cooling effect of radiation emission - causing underestimates of fusion efficiency in all theoretical calculations done of fusion until 1951! For this reason, Teller later repudiated the calculations that allegedly showed his Superbomb would fizzle; he argued that if it had been tested in 1946, the detailed data obtained - regardless of whatever happened - would have at least tested the theory which would have led to rapid progress, because the theory was wrong. The entire basis of the cooling of fusion fuel by radiation leaking out was massively exaggerated until Lawrence Livermore weaponeer John Nuckolls showed that there is a very simple solution: use baffle re-radiated, softened x-rays for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel, e.g. very cold 0.3 kev x-rays rather than the usual 1-10 kev cold-warm x-rays emitted directly from the fission primary. Since the radiation losses are proportional to the fourth-power of the x-ray energy or temperature, losses are virtually eliminated, allowing very efficient staging as for Nuckolls' 99.9% 10 Mt clean Ripple II, detonated on 30 October 1962 at Christmas Island. Teller's classical Superbomb was actually analyzed by John C. Solem in a 15 December 1978 report, A modern analysis of Classical Super, LA-07615, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by mainstream historian Alex Wellerstein, FOIA 17-00131-H, 12 June 2017; according to a list of FOIA requests at https://www.governmentattic.org/46docs/NNSAfoiaLogs_2016-2020.pdf. However, a google search for the documents Dr Wellerstein requested shows only a few at the US Gov DOE Opennet OSTI database or otherwise online yet e.g. LA-643 by Teller, On the development of Thermonuclear Bombs dated 16 Feb. 1950. The page linked here stating that report was "never classified" is mistaken! One oddity about Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" is that the even if fusion rates were independent of density, you would still want compression of fissile material in a secondary stage such as a radiation imploded Alarm Clock, because the whole basis of implosion fission bombs is the benefit of compression; another issue is that even if fusion rates are unaffected by density, inward compression would still help to delay the expansion of the fusion system which leads to cooling and quenching of the fusion burn.)
In fact (see Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear warhead designer Nuckolls' explanation in report UCRL-74345): "The rates of burn, energy deposition by charged reaction products, and electron-ion heating are proportional to the density, and the inertial confinement time is proportional to the radius. ... The burn efficiency is proportional to the product of the burn rate and the inertial confinement time ...", i.e. the fusion burn rate is directly proportional to the fuel density, which in turn is of course inversely proportional to the cube of its radius. But the inertial confinement time for fusion to occur is proportional to the radius, so the fusion stage efficiency in a nuclear weapon is the product of the burn rate (i.e., 1/radius^3) and time (i.e., radius), so efficiency ~ radius/(radius^3) ~ 1/radius^2. Therefore, for a given fuel temperature, the total fusion burn, or the efficiency of the fusion stage, is inversely proportional to the square of the compressed radius of the fuel! (Those condemning Teller's theoretical errors or "arrogance" should be aware that he pushed hard all the time for experimental nuclear tests of his ideas, to check if they were correct, exactly the right thing to do scientifically and others who read his papers had the opportunity to point out any theoretical errors, but was rebuffed by those in power, who used a series of contrived arguments to deny progress, based upon what Harry would call "subconscious bias", if not arrogant, damning, overt bigotry against the kind of credible, overwhelming deterrence which had proved lacking a decade earlier, leading to WWII. This callousness towards human suffering in war and under dictatorship existed in some UK physicists too: Joseph Rotblat's hatred of anything to deter Russia be it civil defense or tactical neutron bombs of the West - he had no problem smiling and patting Russia's neutron bomb when visiting their labs during cosy groupthink deluded Pugwash campaigns for Russian-style "peaceful collaboration" - came from deep family communist convictions, since his brother was serving in the Red Army in 1944 when he alleged he heard General Groves declare that the bomb must deter Russia! Rotblat stated he left Los Alamos as a result. The actions of these groups are analogous to the "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" in the 1930s. After Truman ordered a H-bomb, Bradbury at Los Alamos had to start a "Family Committee" because Teller had a whole "family" of H-bomb designs, ranging from the biggest, "Daddy", through various "Alarm Clocks", all the way down to small internally-boosted fission tactical weapons. From Teller's perspective, he wasn't putting all eggs in one basket.)
There is more to Fuchs' influence on the UK H-bomb than I go into that paper; Chapman Pincher alleged that Fuchs was treated with special leniency at his trial and later he was given early release in 1959 because of his contributions and help with the UK H-bomb as author of the key Fuchs-von Neumann x-ray compression mechanism patent. For example, Penney visited Fuchs in June 1952 in Stafford Prison; see pp309-310 of Frank Close's 2019 book "Trinity". Close argues that Fuchs gave Penney a vital tutorial on the H-bomb mechanism during that prison visit. That wasn't the last help, either, since the UK Controller for Atomic Energy Sir Freddie Morgan wrote Penney on 9 February 1953 that Fuchs was continuing to help. Another gem: Close gives, on p396, the story of how the FBI became suspicious of Edward Teller, after finding a man of his name teaching at the NY Communist Workers School in 1941 - the wrong Edward Teller, of course - yet Teller's wife was indeed a member of the Communist-front "League of women shoppers" in Washington, DC.
Chapman Pincher, who attended the Fuchs trial, writes about Fuchs hydrogen bomb lectures to prisoners in chapter 19 of his 2014 autobiography, Dangerous to know (Biteback, London, pp217-8): "... Donald Hume ... in prison had become a close friend of Fuchs ... Hume had repaid Fuchs' friendship by organising the smuggling in of new scientific books ... Hume had a mass of notes ... I secured Fuchs's copious notes for a course of 17 lectures ... including how the H-bomb works, which he had given to his fellow prisoners ... My editor agreed to buy Hume's story so long as we could keep the papers as proof of its authenticity ... Fuchs was soon due for release ..."
Chapman Pincher wrote about this as the front page exclusive of the 11 June 1952 Daily Express, "Fuchs: New Sensation", the very month Penney visited Fuchs in prison to receive his H-bomb tutorial! UK media insisted this was evidence that UK security still wasn't really serious about deterring further nuclear spies, and the revelations finally culminated in the allegations that the MI5 chief 1956-65 Roger Hollis was a Russian fellow-traveller (Hollis was descended from Peter the Great, according to his elder brother Chris Hollis' 1958 book Along the Road to Frome) and GRU agent of influence, codenamed "Elli". Pincher's 2014 book, written aged 100, explains that former MI5 agent Peter Wright suspected Hollis was Elli after evidence collected by MI6 agent Stephen de Mowbray was reported to the Cabinet Secretary. Hollis is alleged to have deliberately fiddled his report of interviewing GRU defector Igor Gouzenko on 21 November 1945 in Canada. Gouzenko had exposed the spy and Groucho Marx lookalike Dr Alan Nunn May (photo below), and also a GRU spy in MI5 codenamed Elli, who used only duboks (dead letter boxes), but Gouzenko told Pincher that when Hollis interviewed him in 1945 he wrote up a lengthy false report claiming to discredit many statements by Gouzenko: "I could not understand how Hollis had written so much when he had asked me so little. The report was full of nonsense and lies. As [MI5 agent Patrick] Stewart read the report to me [during the 1972 investigation of Hollis], it became clear that it had been faked to destroy my credibility so that my information about the spy in MI5 called Elli could be ignored. I suspect that Hollis was Elli." (Source: Pincher, 2014, p320.) Christopher Andrew claimed Hollis couldn't have been GRU spy Elli because KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky suggested it was the KGB spy Leo Long (sub-agent of KGB spy Anthony Blunt). However, Gouzenko was GRU, not KGB like Long and Gordievsky! Gordievsky's claim that "Elli" was on the cover of Long's KGB file was debunked by KGB officer Oleg Tsarev, who found that Long's codename was actually Ralph! Another declassified Russian document, from General V. Merkulov to Stalin dated 24 Nov 1945, confirmed Elli was a GRU agent inside british intelligence, whose existence was betrayed by Gouzenko. In Chapter 30 of Dangerous to Know, Pincher related how he was given a Russian suitcase sized microfilm enlarger by 1959 Hollis spying eyewitness Michael J. Butt, doorman for secret communist meetings in London. According to Butt, Hollis delivered documents to Brigitte Kuczynski, younger sister of Klaus Fuchs' original handler, the notorious Sonia aka Ursula. Hollis allegedly provided Minox films to Brigitte discretely when walking through Hyde Park at 8pm after work. Brigitte gave her Russian made Minox film enlarger to Butt to dispose of, but he kept it in his loft as evidence. (Pincher later donated it to King's College.) Other more circumstantial evidence is that Hollis recruited the spy Philby, Hollis secured spy Blunt immunity from prosecution, Hollis cleared Fuchs in 1943, and MI5 allegedly destroyed Hollis' 1945 interrogation report on Gouzenko, to prevent the airing of the scandal that it was fake after checking it with Gouzenko in 1972.
It should be noted that the very small number of Russian GRU illegal agents in the UK and the very small communist party membership had a relatively large influence on nuclear policy via infiltration of unions which had block votes in the Labour Party, as well the indirect CND and "peace movement" lobbies saturating the popular press with anti-civil defence propaganda to make the nuclear deterrent totally incredible for any provocation short of a direct all-out countervalue attack. Under such pressure, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government abolished the UK Civil Defence Corps, making the UK nuclear deterrent totally incredible against major provocations, in March 1968. While there was some opposition to Wilson, it was focussed on his profligate nationalisation policies which were undermining the economy and thus destabilizing military expenditure for national security. Peter Wright’s 1987 book Spycatcher and various other sources, including Daily Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp's book Walking on Water, documented that on 8 May 1968, the Bank of England's director Cecil King, who was also Chairman of Daily Mirror newspapers, Mirror editor Cudlipp and the UK Ministry of Defence's anti-nuclear Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, met at Lord Mountbatten's house in Kinnerton Street, London, to discuss a coup e'tat to overthrow Wilson and make Mountbatten the UK President, a new position. King's position, according to Cudlipp - quite correctly as revealed by the UK economic crises of the 1970s when the UK was effectively bankrupt - was that Wilson was setting the UK on the road to financial ruin and thus military decay. Zuckerman and Mountbatten refused to take part in a revolution, however Wilson's government was attacked by the Daily Mirror in a front page editorial by Cecil King two days later, on 10 May 1968, headlined "Enough is enough ... Mr Wilson and his Government have lost all credibility, all authority." According to Wilson's secretary Lady Falkender, Wilson was only told of the coup discussions in March 1976.
CND and the UK communist party alternatively tried to claim, in a contradictory way, that they were (a) too small in numbers to have any influence on politics, and (b) they were leading the country towards utopia via unilateral nuclear disarmament saturation propaganda about nuclear weapons annihilation (totally ignoring essential data on different nuclear weapon designs, yields, heights of burst, the "use" of a weapon as a deterrent to PREVENT an invasion of concentrated force, etc.) via the infiltrated BBC and most other media. Critics pointed out that Nazi Party membership in Germany was only 5% when Hitler became dictator in 1933, while in Russia there were only 200,000 Bolsheviks in September 1917, out of 125 million, i.e. 0.16%. Therefore, the whole threat of such dictatorships is a minority seizing power beyond it justifiable numbers, and controlling a majority which has different views. Traditional democracy itself is a dictatorship of the majority (via the ballot box, a popularity contest); minority-dictatorship by contrast is a dictatorship by the fanatically motivated minority by force and fear (coercion) to control the majority. The coercion tactics used by foreign dictators to control the press in free countries are well documented, but never publicised widely. Hitler put pressure on Nazi-critics in the UK "free press" via UK Government appeasers Halifax, Chamberlain and particularly the loathsome UK ambassador to Nazi Germany, Sir Neville Henderson, for example trying to censor or ridicule appeasement critics David Low, to fire Captain W. E. Johns (editor of both Flying and Popular Flying, which had huge circulations and attacked appeasement as a threat to national security in order to reduce rearmament expenditure), and to try to get Winston Churchill deselected. These were all sneaky "back door" pressure-on-publishers tactics, dressed up as efforts to "ease international tensions"! The same occurred during the Cold War, with personal attacks in Scientific American and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and by fellow travellers on Herman Kahn, Eugene Wigner, and others who warned we need civil defence to make a deterrent of large provocations credible in the eyes of an aggressor.
Chapman Pincher summarises the vast hypocritical Russian expenditure on anti-Western propaganda against the neutron bomb in Chapter 15, "The Neutron Bomb Offensive" of his 1985 book The Secret Offensive: "Such a device ... carries three major advantages over Hiroshima-type weapons, particularly for civilians caught up in a battle ... against the massed tanks which the Soviet Union would undoubtedly use ... by exploding these warheads some 100 feet or so above the massed tanks, the blast and fire ... would be greatly reduced ... the neutron weapon produces little radioactive fall-out so the long-term danger to civilians would be very much lower ... the weapon was of no value for attacking cities and the avoidance of damage to property can hardly be rated as of interest only to 'capitalists' ... As so often happens, the constant repetition of the lie had its effects on the gullible ... In August 1977, the [Russian] World Peace Council ... declared an international 'Week of action' against the neutron bomb. ... Under this propaganda Carter delayed his decision, in September ... a Sunday service being attended by Carter and his family on 16 October 1977 was disrupted by American demonstrators shouting slogans against the neutron bomb [see the 17 October 1977 Washington Post] ... Lawrence Eagleburger, when US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, remarked, 'We consider it probably that the Soviet campaign against the 'neutron bomb cost some $100 million'. ... Even the Politburo must have been surprised at the size of what it could regard as a Fifth Column in almost every country." [Unfortunately, Pincher himself had contributed to the anti-nuclear nonsense in his 1965 novel "Not with a bang" in which small amounts of radioactivity from nuclear fallout combine with medicine to exterminate humanity! The allure of anti-nuclear propaganda extends to all who which to sell "doomsday fiction", not just Russian dictators but mainstream media story tellers in the West. By contrast, Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons doesn't even mention the neutron bomb, so there was no scientific and technical effort whatsoever by the West to make it a credible deterrent even in the minds of the public it had to protect from WWIII!]
So why on earth doesn't the West take the cheap efficient option of cutting expensive oralloy and maximising cheap natural (mostly lithium-7) LiD in the secondary? Even Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons on p17 (para 1.55) states that "Weight for weight ... fusion of deuterium nuclei would produce nearly 3 times as much energy as the fission of uranium or plutonium"! The sad answer is "density"! Natural LiD (containing 7.42% Li6 abundance) is a low density white/grey crystalline solid like salt that actually floats on water (lithium deuteroxide would be formed on exposure to water), since its density is just 820 kg/m^3. Since the ratio of mass of Li6D to Li7D is 8/9, it would be expected that the density of highly enriched 95% Li6D is 739 kg/m^3, while for 36% enriched Li6D it is 793 kg/m^3. Uranium metal has a density of 19,000 kg/m^3, i.e. 25.7 times greater than 95% enriched li6D or 24 times greater than 36% enriched Li6D. Compactness, i.e. volume is more important in a Western MIRV warhead than mass/weight! In the West, it's best to have a tiny-volume, very heavy, very expensive warhead. In Russia, cheapness outweights volume considerations. The Russians in some cases simply allowed their more bulky warheads to protrude from the missile bus (see photo below), or compensated for lower yields at the same volume using clean LiD by using the savings in costs to build more warheads. (The West doubles the fission yield/mass ratio of some warheads by using U235/oralloy pushers in place of U238, which suffers from the problem that about half the neutrons it interacts with result in non-fission capture, as explained below. Note that the 720 kiloton UK nuclear test Orange Herald device contained a hollow shell of 117 kg of U235 surrounded by a what Lorna Arnold's book quotes John Corner referring to a "very thin" layer of high explosive, and was compact, unboosted - the boosted failed to work - and gave 6.2 kt/kg of U235, whereas the first version of the 2-stage W47 Polaris warhead contained 60 kg of U235 which produced most of the secondary stage yield of about 400 kt, i.e. 6.7 kt/kg of U235. Little difference - but because perhaps 50% of the total yield of the W47 was fusion, its efficiency of use of U235 must have actually been less than the Orange Herald device, around 3 kt/kg of U235 which indicates design efficiency limits to "hydrogen bombs"! Yet anti-nuclear charlatans claimed that the Orange Herald bomb was a con!)
ABOVE: USA nuclear weapons data declassified by UK Government in 2010 (the information was originally acquired due to the 1958 UK-USA Act for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes, in exchange for UK nuclear weapons data) as published at http://nuclear-weapons.info/images/tna-ab16-4675p63.jpg. This single table summarizes all key tactical and strategic nuclear weapons secret results from 1950s testing! (In order to analyze the warhead pusher thicknesses and very basic schematics from this table it is necessary to supplement it with the 1950s warhead design data declassified in other documents, particularly some of the data from Tom Ramos and Chuck Hansen, as quoted in some detail below.) The data on the mass of special nuclear materials in each of the different weapons argues strongly that the entire load of Pu239 and U235 in the 1.1 megaton B28 was in the primary stage, so that weapon could not have had a fissile spark plug in the centre let alone a fissile ablator (unlike Teller's Sausage design of 1951), and so the B28 it appears had no need whatsoever of a beryllium neutron radiation shield to prevent pre-initiation of the secondary stage prior to its compression (on the contrary, such neutron exposure of the lithium deuteride in the secondary stage would be VITAL to produce some tritium in it prior to compression, to spark fusion when it was compressed). Arnold's book indeed explains that UK AWE physicists found the B28 to be an excellent, highly optimised, cheap design, unlike the later W47 which was extremely costly. The masses of U235 and Li6 in the W47 shows the difficulties of trying to maintain efficiency while scaling down the mass of a two-stage warhead for SLBM delivery: much larger quantities of Li6 and U235 must be used to achieve a LOWER yield! To achieve thermonuclear warheads of low mass at sub-megaton yields, both the outer bomb casing and the pusher around the the fusion fuel must be reduced:
"York ... studied the Los Alamos tests in Castle and noted most of the weight in thermonuclear devices was in their massive cases. Get rid of the case .... On June 12, 1953, York had presented a novel concept ... It radically altered the way radiative transport was used to ignite a secondary - and his concept did not require a weighty case ... they had taken the Teller-Ulam concept and turned it on its head ... the collapse time for the new device - that is, the amount of time it took for an atomic blast to compress the secondary - was favorable compared to older ones tested in Castle. Brown ... gave a female name to the new device, calling it the Linda." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp137-8. (So if you reduce the outer casing thickness to reduce warhead weight, you must complete the pusher ablation/compression faster, before the thinner outer casing is blown off, and stops reflecting/channelling x-rays on the secondary stage. Making the radiation channel smaller and ablative pusher thinner helps to speed up the process. Because the ablative pusher is thinner, there is relatively less blown-off debris to block the narrower radiation channel before the burn ends.)
"Brown's third warhead, the Flute, brought the Linda concept down to a smaller size. The Linda had done away with a lot of material in a standard thermonuclear warhead. Now the Flute tested how well designers could take the Linda's conceptual design to substantially reduce not only the weight but also the size of a thermonuclear warhead. ... The Flute's small size - it was the smallest thermonuclear device yet tested - became an incentive to improve codes. Characteristics marginally important in a larger device were now crucially important. For instance, the reduced size of the Flute's radiation channel could cause it to close early [with ablation blow-off debris], which would prematurely shut off the radiation flow. The code had to accurately predict if such a disaster would occur before the device was even tested ... the calculations showed changes had to be made from the Linda's design for the Flute to perform correctly." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp153-4. Note that the piccolo (the W47 secondary) is a half-sized flute, so it appears that the W47's secondary stage design miniaturization history was: Linda -> Flute -> Piccolo:
"A Division's third challenge was a small thermonuclear warhead for Polaris [the nuclear SLBM submarine that preceeded today's Trident system]. The starting point was the Flute, that revolutionary secondary that had performed so well the previous year. Its successor was called the Piccolo. For Plumbbob [Nevada, 1957], the design team tested three variations of the Piccolo as a parameter test. One of the variants outperformed the others ... which set the stage for the Hardtack [Nevada and Pacific, 1958] tests. Three additional variations for the Piccolo ... were tested then, and again an optimum candidate was selected. ... Human intuition as well as computer calculations played crucial roles ... Finally, a revolutionary device was completed and tested ... the Navy now had a viable warhead for its Polaris missile. From the time Brown gave Haussmann the assignment to develop this secondary until the time they tested the device in the Pacific, only 90 days had passed. As a parallel to the Robin atomic device, this secondary for Polaris laid the foundation for modern thermonuclear weapons in the United States." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp177-8. (Ramos is very useful in explaining that many of the 1950s weapons with complex non-spherical, non-cylindrical shaped primaries and secondaries were simply far too complex to fully simulate on the really pathetic computers they had - Livermore got a 4,000 vacuum tubes-based IBM 701 with 2 kB memory in 1956, AWRE Aldermaston in the Uk had to wait another year for theirs - so they instead did huge numbers of experimental explosive tests. For instance, on p173, Ramos discloses that the Swan primary which developed into the 155mm tactical shell, "went through over 100 hydrotests", non-nuclear tests in which fissile material is replaced with U238 or other substitutes, and the implosion is filmed with flash x-ray camera systems.)
"An integral feature of the W47, from the very start of the program, was the use of an enriched uranium-235 pusher around the cylindrical secondary." - Chuck Hansen, Swords 2.0, p. VI-375 (Hansen's source is his own notes taken during a 19-21 February 1992 nuclear weapons history conference he attended; if you remember the context, "Nuclear Glasnost" became fashionable after the Cold War ended, enabling Hansen to acquire almost unredacted historical materials for a few years until nuclear proliferation became a concern in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea). The key test of the original (Robin primary and Piccolo secondary) Livermore W47 was 412 kt Hardtack-Redwood on 28 June 1958. Since Li6D utilized at 100% efficiency would yield 66 kt/kg, the W47 fusion efficiency was only about 6%; since 100% fission of u235 yields 17 kt/kg, the W47's Piccolo fission (the u235 pusher) efficiency was about 20%; the comparable figures for secondary stage fission and fusion fuel burn efficiencies in the heavy B28 are about 7% and 15%, respectively:
ABOVE: the heavy B28 gave a very "big bang for the buck": it was cheap in terms of expensive Pu, U235 and Li6, and this was the sort of deterrent which was wanted by General LeMay for the USAF, which wanted as many weapons as possible, within the context of Eisenhower's budgetary concerns. But its weight (not its physical size) made it unsuitable for SLBM Polaris warheads. The first SLBM warhead, the W47, was almost the same size as the B28 weapon package, but much lighter due to having a much thinner "pusher" on the secondary, and casing. But this came at a large financial cost in terms of the quantities of special nuclear materials required to get such a lightweight design to work, and also a large loss of total yield. The fusion fuel burn efficiency ranges from 6% for the 400 kt W47 to 15% for the 1.1 megaton B28 (note that for very heavy cased 11-15 megaton yield tests at Castle, up to 40% fusion fuel burn efficiency was achieved), whereas the secondary stage ablative pusher fission efficiency ranged from 7% for a 1.1 inch thick natural uranium (99.3% U238) ablator to 20% for a 0.15 inch thick highly enriched oralloy (U235) ablator. From the brief description of the design evolution given by Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), it appears that when the x-ray channelling outer case thickness of the weapon is reduced to save weight, the duration of the x-ray coupling is reduced, so the dense metal pusher thickness must be reduced if the same compression factor (approximately 20) for the secondary stage is to be accomplished (lithium deuteride, being of low density, is far more compressable by a given pressure, than dense metal). In both examples, the secondary stage is physically a boosted fission stage. (If you are wondering why the hell the designers don't simply use a hollow core U235 bomb like Orange Herald instead of bothering with such inefficient x-ray coupled two-stage designs as these, the answer is straightforward: the risk of large fissile core meltdown by neutrons Moscow ABM defensive nuclear warheads, neutron bombs.)
The overall weight of the W47 was minimized by replacing the usual thick layer of U238 pusher with a very thin layer of fissile U235 (supposedly Teller's suggestion), which is more efficient for fission, but is limited by critical mass issues. The W47 used a 95% enriched Li6D cylinder with a 3.8mm thick U235 pusher; the B28 secondary was 36% enriched Li6D, with a very heavy 3cm thick U238 pusher. As shown below, it appears the B28 was related to the Los Alamos clean design of the TX21C tested as 95% clean 4.5 megatons Redwing-Navajo in 1956 and did not have a central fissile spark plug. From the declassified fallout composition, it is known the Los Alamos designers replaced the outer U238 pusher of Castle secondaries with lead in Navajo. Livermore did the same for their 85% clean 3.53 megatons Redwing-Zuni test, but Livermore left the central fission spark plug, which contributed 10% of its 15% fission yield, instead of removing the neutron shield, using foam channel filler for slowing down the x-ray compression, and thereby using primary stage neutrons to split lithium-6 giving tritium prior to compression. Our point is that Los Alamos got it wrong in sticking too conservatively to ideology: for clean weapons they should have got rid of the dense lead pusher and gone for John H. Nuckolls idea (also used by Fuchs in 1946 and the Russians in 1955 and 1958) of a low-density pusher for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel. This error is the reason why those early cleaner weapons were extremely heavy due to unnecessary 2" thick lead or tungsten pushers around the fusion fuel, which massively reduced their yield-to-weight ratios, so that LeMay rejected them!
This is justified by the data given for a total U238 capture-to-fission ratio of 1 in the 11 megaton Romeo test and also the cross-sections for U235 capture and fission on the AWE graph for relevant neutron energy range of about 1-14 Mev. If half the neutrons are captured in U238 without fission, then the maximum fission yield you can possibly get from "x" kg of U238 pusher is HALF the energy obtained from 100% fission of "x" kg of U238. Since with U238 only about half the atoms can undergo fission by thermonuclear neutrons (because the other half undergo non-fission capture), the energy density (i.e., the Joules/kg produced by the fission explosion of the pusher) reached by an exploding U238 pusher is only half that reached by U235 (in which there is less non-fission capture of neutrons, which doubles the pusher mass without doubling the fission energy release). So a U235 pusher will reach twice the temperature of a U238 pusher, doubling its material heating of fusion fuel within, prolonging the fusion burn and thus increasing fusion burn efficiency. 10 MeV neutron energy is important since it allows for likely average scattering of 14.1 MeV D+T fusion neutrons and it is also the energy at which the most important capture reaction, the (n,2n) cross-section peaks for both U235 (peak of 0.88 barn at 10 Mev) and U238 (peak of 1.4 barns at 10 Mev). For 10 Mev neutrons, U235 and U238 have fission cross-sections of 1.8 and 1 barn, respectively. For 14 Mev neutrons, U238 has a (n,2n) cross section of 0.97 barn for U237 production. So ignoring non-fission captures, you need 1.8/1 = 1.8 times greater thickness of pusher for U238 than for U235, to achieve the same amount of fission. But this simple consideration ignores the x-ray ablation requirement of the explosing pusher, so there are several factors requiring detailed computer calculations, and/or nuclear testing.
Note: there is an extensive collection of declassified documents released after Chuck Hansen's final edition, Swords 2.0, which are now available at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/*, being an internet-archive back-up of a now-removed US Government Freedom of Information Act Reading Room. Unfortunately they were only identified by number sequence, not by report title or content, in that reeding room, and so failed to achieve wide attention when originally released! (This includes extensive "Family Committee" H-bomb documentation and many long-delayed FOIA requests submitted originally by Hansen, but not released in time for inclusion in Swords 2.0.) As the extract below - from declassified document RR00132 - shows, some declassified documents contained very detailed information or typewriter spaces that could only be filled by a single specific secret word (in this example, details of the W48 linear implosion tactical nuclear warhead, including the fact that it used PBX9404 plastic bonded explosive glued to the brittle beryllium neutron reflector around the plutonium core using Adiprene L100 adhesive!).
ABOVE: Declassified data on the radiation flow analysis for the 10 megaton Mike sausage: http://nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/RR00198.pdf
Note that the simplistic "no-go theorem" given in this extract, against any effect from varying the temperature to help the radiation channelling, was later proved false by John H. Nuckolls (like Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" was later proved false), since lowered temperature delivers energy where it is needed while massively reducing radiation losses (which go as the fourth power of temperature/x-ray energy in kev).
Russian propagandists are discussing the best way to scare the West - testing a nuclear Tsar Bomb or checking bomb shelters.
pic.twitter.com/qWCaxjvfM8
ABOVE secret reports on Australian-British nuclear test operations at Maralinga in 1956 and 1957, Buffalo and Antler, proved that even at 10 psi peak overpressure for the 15 kt Buffalo-1 shot, the dummy lying prone facing the blast was hardly moved due to the low cross-sectional area exposed to the blast winds, relative to standing dummies which were severely displaced and damaged. The value of trenches in protecting personnel against blast winds and radiation was also proved in tests (gamma radiation shielding of trenches had been proved at an earlier nuclear test in Australia, Operation Hurricane in 1952). (Antler report linked here; Buffalo report linked here.) This debunks the US Department of Defense models claiming that people will automatically be blown out of the upper floors of modern city buildings at very low pressures, and killed by the gravitational impact with the pavement below! In reality, tall buildings mutually shield one another from the blast winds, not to mention the radiation (proven in the latest post on this blog), and on seeing the flash most people will have time to lie down on typical surfaces like carpet which give a frictional resistance to displacement, ignored in fiddled models which assume surfaces have less friction than a skating rink; all of this was omitted from the American 1977 Glasstone and Dolan book "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons". As Tuck's paper below on the gamma radiation dose rate measurements on ships at Operation Crossroads, July 1946 nuclear tests proved, contrary to Glasstone and Dolan, scattered radiation contributions are small, so buildings or ships gun turrets provided excellent radiation "shadows" to protect personnel. This effect was then calculated by UK civil defence weapons effects expert Edward Leader-Williams in his paper presented at the UK's secret London Royal Society Symposium on the Physical Effects of Atomic Weapons, but the nuclear test data as always was excluded from the American Glasstone book published the next year, The Effects of Atomic Weapons in deference to lies about the effects in Hiroshima, including an "average" casualty curve which deliberately obfuscated huge differences in survival rates in different types of buildings and shelters, or simply in shadows!
Note: the DELFIC, SIMFIC and other computer predicted fallout area comparisons for the 110 kt Bikini Atoll Castle-Koon land surface burst nuclear test are false since the distance scale of Bikini Atoll is massively exaggerated on many maps, e.g. in the Secret January 1955 AFSWP "Fall-out Symposium", the Castle fallout report WT-915, and the fallout patterns compendium DASA-1251! The Western side of the Bikini Atoll reef is at 165.2 degrees East, while the most eastern island in the Bikini Atoll, Enyu, is at 165.567 degrees East: since there are 60 nautical miles per degree by definition, the width of Bikini Atoll is therefore (165.567-165.2)(60) = 22 nautical miles, approximately half the distance shown in the Castle-Koon fallout patterns. Since area is proportional to the square of the distance scale, this constitutes a serious exaggeration in fallout casualty calculations, before you get into the issue of the low energy (0.1-0.2 MeV) gamma rays from neutron induced Np239 and U237 in the fallout enhancing the protection factor of shelters (usually calculated assuming hard 1.17 and 1.33 MeV gamma rads from Co60), during the sheltering period of approximately 1-14 days after detonation.
"Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr Dulles calls 'brinkmanship'. This is a policy adopted from a sport ... called 'Chicken!' ... If one side is unwilling to risk global war, while the other side is willing to risk it, the side which is willing to run the risk will be victorious in all negotiations and will ultimately reduce the other side to complete impotence. 'Perhaps' - so the practical politician will argue - 'it might be ideally wise for the sane party to yield to the insane party in view of the dreadful nature of the alternative, but, whether wise or not, no proud nation will long acquiesce in such an ignominious role. We are, therefore, faced, quite inevitably, with the choice between brinkmanship and surrender." - Bertrand Russell, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1959, pp30-31.
Emphasis added. Note that Russell accepts lying about nuclear weapons just as gas weapons had been lied about in the 1920s-30s by "arms controllers" to start WWII, then he simply falls into the 1930s Cambridge Scientists Antiwar Group delusional propaganda fraud of assuming that any attempt to credibly deter fascism is immoral because it will automatically result in escalatory retaliation with Herman Goering's Luftwaffe drenching London with "overkill" by poison gas WMDs etc. In particular, he forgets that general disarmament pursued in the West until 1935 - when Baldwin suddenly announced that the Nazis had secretly produced a massive, unstoppable warmachine in two years - encouraged aggressors to first secretly rearm, then coerce and invade their neighbours while signing peace promises purely to buy more time for rearmament, until a world war resulted. Not exactly a great result for disarmament propaganda. So after obliterating what Reagan used to call (to the horror of commie "historians") the "true facts of history" from his mind, he advocates some compromise with the aggressors of the 30 September 1938 Munich Agreement peace-in-our-time sort, the historically proved sure fire way to really escalate a crisis into a major war by showing the green lamp to a loon to popular media acclaim and applause for a fairy tale utopian fantasy; just as the "principled" weak, rushed, imbecile withdrawl from Afghanistan in 2021 encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022, and also the green lamp for Hamas to invade Israel in 2023.
"... deterrence ... consists of threatening the enemy with thermonuclear retaliation should he act provocatively. ... If war is 'impossible', how can one threaten a possible aggressor with war? ... The danger, evoked by numerous critics, that such research will result in a sort of resigned expectation of the holocaust, seems a weak argument ... The classic theory of Clausewitz defines absolute victory in terms of disarmament of the enemy ... Today ... it will suffice to take away his means of retaliation to hold him at your mercy." - Raymond Aron, Introduction to Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 9-12. (This is the commie support for arms control and disarmament has achieved, precisely the weakening of the West to take away credible deterrence.)
"75 years ago, white slavery was rampant in England. ... it could not be talked about openly in Victorian England, moral standards as to the subjects of discussion made it difficult to arouse the community to necessary action. ... Victorian standards, besides perpetuating the white slave trade, intensified the damage ... Social inhibitions which reinforce natural tendencies to avoid thinking about unpleasant subjects are hardly uncommon. ... But when our reluctance to consider danger brings danger nearer, repression has gone too far. In 1960, I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war ... people are willing to argue that it is immoral to think and even more immoral to write in detail about having to fight ... like those ancient kings who punished messengers who brought them bad news. That did not change the news; it simply slowed up its delivery. On occasion it meant that the kings were ill informed and, lacking truth, made serious errors in judgement and strategy. ... We cannot wish them away. Nor should we overestimate and assume the worst is inevitable. This leads only to defeatism, inadequate preparations (because they seem useless), and pressures toward either preventative war or undue accommodation." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 17-19. (In the footnote on page 35, Kahn notes that original nuclear bullshitter, the 1950 creator of fake cobalt-60 doomsday bomb propaganda, Leo Szilard, was in the usual physics groupthink nutters club: "Szilard is probably being too respectful of his scientific colleagues who also seem to indulge in ad hominem arguments - especially when they are out of their technical specialty.")
"Ever since the catastropic and disillusioning experience of 1914-18, war has been unthinkable to most people in the West ... In December 1938, only 3 months after Munich, Lloyd's of London gave odds of 32 to 1 that there would be no war in 1939. On August 7, 1939, the London Daily Express reported the result of a poll of its European reporters. 10 out of 12 said, 'No war this year'. Hitler invaded Poland 3 weeks later." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 39. (But as the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 proved, even the label "war" is now "controversial": the aggressor now simply declares they are on a special operation of unifying people under one flag to ensure peace! So the reason why there is war in Ukraine is that Ukraine is resisting. If it waved a white flag, as the entire arms control and disarmament lobby insists is the only sane response to a nuclear-armed aggressor, there would be "peace," albeit on Russia's terms: that's why they disarmed Ukraine in 1994. "Peace propaganda" of "disarmers"! Free decent people prefer to fight tyranny. But as Kahn states on pp. 7-9:
"Some, most notably [CND's pseudo-historian of arms race lying] A. J. P. Taylor, have even said that Hitler was not like Hitler, that further appeasement [not an all-out arms race as was needed but repeatedly rejected by Baldwin and Chamberlain until far too late; see discussion of this fact which is still deliberately ignored or onfuscated by "historians" of the A. J. P. Taylor biased anti-deterrence left wing type, in Slessor's The Central Blue, quoted on this blog] would have prevented World War II ... If someone says to you, 'One of us has to be reasonable and it is not going to be me, so it has to be you', he has a very effective bargaining advantage, particularly if he is armed with thermonuclear bombs [and you have damn all civil defense, ABM, or credible tactical deterrent]. If he can convince you he is stark, staring mad and if he has enough destructive power ... deterrence alone will not work. You must then give in or accept the possibility of being annihilated ... in the first instance if we fight and lose; in the second if we capitulate without fighting. ... We could still resist by other means ranging from passive resistance of the Gandhi type to the use of underground fighting and sabotage. All of these alternatives might be of doubtful effectiveness against [the Gulag system, KGB/FSB torture camps or Siberian salt mines of] a ruthless dictatorship."
Sometimes people complain that Hitler and the most destructive and costly war and only nuclear war of history, WWII, is given undue attention. But WWII is a good analogy to the danger precisely because of the lying WMD gas war propaganda-based disarmament of the West which allowed the war, because of the attacks by Hitler's fans on civil defense in the West to make even the token rearmament after 1935 ineffective as a credible deterrent, and because Hitler has mirrors in Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon and Stalin. Kahn explains on p. 173: "Because history has a way of being more imaginative and complex than even the most imaginative and intelligent analysts, historical examples often provide better scenarios than artificial ones, even though they may be no more directly applicable to current equipment, postures, and political situations than the fictional plot of the scenario. Recent history can be especially useful.")
"One type of war resulting at least partly from deliberate calculation could occur in the process of escalation. For example, suppose the Soviets attacked Europe, relying upon our fear of their reprisal to deter a strategic attack by us; we might be deterred enough to pause, but we might evacuate our cities during this pause in the hope we could thereby convince the Soviets we meant business. If the Soviets did not back down, but continued their attack upon Europe, we might decide that we would be less badly off if we proceeded ... The damage we would receive in return would then be considerably reduced, compared with what we would have suffered had we not evacuated. We might well decide at such a time that we would be better off to attack the Soviets and accept a retalitory blow at our dispersed population, rather than let Europe be occupied, and so be forced to accept the penalty of living in the hostile and dangerous world that would follow." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 51-2.
"We must recognise that the stability we want in a system is more than just stability against accidental war or even against an attack by the enemy. We also want stability against extreme provocation [e.g. invasion of allies, which then escalates as per invasion of Belgium 1914, or Poland 1939]." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 53(footnote).
Note: this 1962 book should not be confused with Kahn's 1984 "updated" Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, which omits the best material in the 1962 edition (in the same way that the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons omits the entire civil defense chapter which was the one decent thing in the 1957 and 1962/4 editions!) and thus shows a reversion to the less readable and less helpful style of his 1960 On Thermonuclear War, which severely fragmented and jumbled up all the key arguments making it easy for critics to misquote or quote out of context. For example, Kahn's 1984 "updated" book starts on the first page of the first chapter with the correct assertion that Johnathan Schell's Fate of the Earth is nonsense, but doesn't say why it's nonsense, and you have to read through to the final chapter - pages 207-8 of chapter 10 - to find Kahn writing in the most vague way possible, without a single specific example, that Schell is wrong because of "substantive inadequacies and inaccuracies", without listing a single example such as Schell's lying that the 1954 Bravo nuclear test blinded everyone well beyond the range of Rongelap, and that it was impossible to easily shield the radiation from the fallout or evacuate the area until it decays, which Schell falsely attributed to Glasstone and Dolan's nonsense in the 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons! Kahn eventually in the footnote on page 208 refers readers to an out-of-print article for facts: "These criticisms are elaborated in my review of The Fate of the Earth, see 'Refusing to Think About the Unthinkable', Fortune, June 28, 1982, pp. 113-6. Kahn does the same for civil defense in the 1984 book, referring in such general, imprecise and vague terms to Russian civil defence, with no specific data, that it is a waste of time, apart possibly one half-baked sentence on page 177: "Variations in the total megatonnage, somewhat surprisingly, do not seem to affect the toll nearly as much as variations in the targetting or the type of weapon bursts." Kahn on page 71 quotes an exchange between himself and Senator Proxmire during the US Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production, Civil preparedness and limited nuclear war where on page 55 of the hearings, Senator Proxmire alleges America would escalate a limited conflict to an all-out war because: "The strategic value and military value of destroying cities in the Soviet Union would be very great." Kahn responded: "No American President is likely to do that, no matter what the provocation." Nuclear war will be limited, according to Herman Kahn's analysis, despite the bullshit fron nutters to the contrary.
Kahn on page 101 of Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s correctly and accurately condemns President Carter's 1979 State of the Union Address, which claimed falsely that just a single American nuclear submarine is required by America and has an "overwhelming" deterrent against "every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union". Carter ignored Russian retaliation on cities if you bomb theirs: America has avoided the intense Russian protection efforts that make the Russian nuclear threat credible, namely civil defense shelters and evacuation plans, and also the realpolitik of deterrence of world wars, which so far have only been triggered due to invasions of third parties (Belgium '14, Poland '39). Did America strategically nuke every city in Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022? No, debunking Proxmire and the entire Western pro-Russian "automatic escalation" propaganda lobby, and it didn't even have tactical neutron bombs to help deter the Russians like Reagan in the 1980s, because in the 1990s America had ignored Kahn's argument, and went in for MINIMAL deterrence of the least credible sort (abolishing the invasion-deterring dedicated neutron tactical nuclear stockpile entirely; the following quotation is from p101 of Kahn's Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s):
"Minimum deterrence, or any predicated on an escessive emphasis on the inevitably of mutual homocide, is both misleading and dangerous. ... MAD principles can promote provocation - e.g. Munich-type blackmail on an ally. Hitler, for example, did not threaten to attack France or England - only Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It was the French and the British who finally had to threaten all-out war [they could only do this after rearmament and building shelters and gas masks to reduce the risk of reprisals in city bombing, which gave more time for Germany to prepare since it was rearming faster than France and Britain which still desperately counted on appeasement and peace treaties and feared provoking a war by an arms-race due to endless lying propaganda from Lord Grey that his failure to deter war in 1914 had been due to an arms-race rather than the incompetence of the procrastination of his anti-war Liberal Party colleagues in the Cabinet] - a move they would not and could not have made if the notion of a balance of terror between themselves and Germany had been completely accepted. As it was, the British and French were most reluctant to go to war; from 1933 to 1939 Hitler exploited that reluctance. Both nations [France and Britain] were terrified by the so-called 'knockout blow', a German maneuver that would blanket their capitals with poison gas ... The paralyzing effect of this fear prevented them from going to war ... and gave the Germans the freedom to march into the Ruhr, to form the Anschluss with Austria, to force the humiliating Munich appeasement (with the justification of 'peace in our time'), and to take other aggressive actions [e.g. against the Jews in the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, etc.] ... If the USSR were sufficiently prepared in the event a war did occur, only the capitalists would be destroyed. The Soviets would survive ... that would more than justify whatever sacrifice and destruction had taken place.
"This view seems to prevail in the Soviet military and the Politburo even to the present day. It is almost certain, despite several public denials, that Soviet military preparations are based on war-fighting, rather than on deterrence-only concepts and doctrines..." - Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, 1984, pages 101-102.
Kahn adds, in his footnote on p111, that "Richard Betts has documented numerous historical cases in which attackers weakened their opponents defenses through the employment of unanticipated tactics. These include: rapid changes in tactics per se, false alarms and fluctuating preparations for war ... doctrinal innovations to gain surprise. ... This is exactly the kind of thing which is likely to surprise those who subscribe to MAD theories. Those who see a need for war-fighting capabilities expect the other side to try to be creative and use tactical innovations such as coercion and blackmail, technological surprises, or clever tactics on 'leverage' targets, such as command and control installations. If he is to adhere to a total reliance on MAD, the MADvocate has to ignore these possibilities." See Richard Betts, "Surprise Despite Warning: Why Sudden Attacks Succeed", Political Science Quarterly, Winter 1980-81, pp. 551-572.)
Compare two situations: (1) Putin explodes a 50 megaton nuclear "test" of the warhead for his new nuclear reactor powered torpedo, Poseidon, a revamped 1961 Tsar Bomba, or detonates a high-altitude nuclear EMP "test" over neutral waters but within the thousands of miles range of USA or UK territory; (2) Putin invades Poland using purely conventional weapons. Our point here is that both nuclear AND conventional weapons trigger nuclear threats and the risk of nuclear escalation, as indeed they have done (for Putin's nuclear threats scroll down to videos with translations below). So the fashionable CND style concept that only nuclear weapons can trigger nuclear escalation is bullshit, and is designed to help Russia start and win WWIII to produce a world government, by getting us to undertake further unilateral (not multilateral) disarmament, just as evolved in the 1930s, setting the scene for WWII. Japan for example did not have nuclear weapons in August 1945, yet triggered not just tactical nuclear war (both cities had some military bases and munitions factories, as well as enormous numbers of civilians), and the decision to attack cities rather than just "test" weapons obove Tokyo bay as Teller demanded but Oppenheimer rejected (for maximum impact with a very small supply of nuclear weapons) showed some strategic nuclear war thinking. Truman was escalating to try to shock Japan into rapid surrender emotionally (many cities in Japan had already been burned out in conventional incendiary air raids, and the two nuclear attacks while horrible for civilians in those cities contributed only a fraction of the millions killed in WWII, despite anti-nuclear propaganda lies to the contrary). Truman's approach escalating to win is the opposite of the "Minimax game theory" (von Neumann's maths and Thomas Schelling's propaganda) gradual escalation approach that's currently the basis of nuclear deterrence planning despite its failure wherever it has been tried (Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc). Gradual escalation is supposed to minimise the maximum possible risk (hence "minimax" name), but it guarantees failure in the real world (unlike rule abided games) by maximising the build up of resentment. E.g. Schelling/Minimax say that if you gradually napalm civilians day after day (because they are the unprotected human shields used by terrorists/insurgents; the Vietcong are hiding in underground tunnels, exactly like Hamas today, and the Putin regime's metro 2 shelter tunnels under Russia) you somehow "punish the enemy" (although they don't give a toss about the lives of kids which is why you're fighting them!) and force them to negotiate for peace in good faith, then you can pose for photos with them sharing a glass of champagne and there is "world peace". That's a popular fairy tale, like Marxist mythology.
Once you grasp this fact, that nuclear weapons have been and will again be "used" explosively without automatic escalation, for example provocative testing as per the 1961 Russian 50 megaton bomb test, or the 1962 high altitude EMP bursts, you should be able to grasp the fact that the "escalation" deception used to dismiss civil defense and tactical nuclear deterrence against limited nuclear war, is fake news from Russian fellow-travellers like Corbyn. Once you assign a non-unity probability to "escalation", you're into conventional war territory: if you fight a conventional war, it can "escalate" to nuclear war as on 6 August 1945. Japan did not avoid nuclear attack by not having nuclear weapons on 6 August 1945. If it had nuclear weapons ready to be delivered, a very persuasive argument could be made that unless Truman wanted to invite retaliation, World War II would have remained strategically non-nuclear: no net strategic advantage would have been achieved by nuclear city bombing so only war-ending tactical nuclear threats could have prevailed in practice. But try explaining this to the groupthink pseudosocialist bigoted mass murderers who permeate fake physics with crap; it's no easier to explain to them the origins of particle masses or even dark energy/gravitation; in both cases groupthink lying hogwash persists because statements of proved facts are hated and rejected if them debunk religious style fairy tales the mass media loves. There were plenty of people warning that mass media gas war fear mongering was disguised Nazi supporting propaganda in the 1930s, but the public listened to that crap then just as it accepted the "eugenics" (anti-diversity evolution crap of Sir Galton, cousin of Darwin) basis for Hitler's Mein Kampf without question, just as they accepted the lying propaganda from the UK "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" which like CND and all other arms control and disarmament lobbies supporting terrorist states today, did more than even Hitler to deliberately lay the foundations for the Holocaust and World War II, while never being criticised in the UK media! Thus, it's surely time for people to oppose evil lying on civil defence to save lives in all disasters from storms to conventional war, to collateral damage risks in nuclear terrorism by mad enemies. At some point, the majority has to decide to either defend itself honestly and decently against barbarism, or be consumed by it as a price for believing bullshit. It's time for decent people to oppose lying evil regarding the necessity to have credible tactical (not incredible strategic) nuclear weapons, as Oppenheimer called for in his 1951 speech, to deter invasions.
Democracy can't function when secrecy is used to deliberately cover-up vital data from viewing by Joe Public. Secrecy doesn't protect you from enemies who independently develop weapons in secret, or who spy from inside your laboratories:
"The United States and Great Britain resumed testing in 1962, and we spared no effort trying to find out what they were up to. I attended several meetings on that subject. An episode related to those meetings comes to mind ... Once we were shown photographs of some documents ... the photographer had been rushed. Mixed in with the photocopies was a single, terribly crumpled original. I innocently asked why, and was told that it had been concealed in panties. Another time ... questions were asked along the following lines: What data about American weapons would be most useful for your work and for planning military technology in general?"
- Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, Hutchinson, London, 1990, pp225-6.
Nuclear saber-rattling from Russian propagandists. They think tactical nuclear weapons aren't enough, and strategic ones should be used.
Review of Peter Kuran's excellent "Neutron Bomb Movie".
Below is a brief clip for review purposes from a longer newsreel of President Eisenhower, enthusiastically promoting the 96% clean fusion Poplar nuclear test (detonated 12 July 1958). On 30 October 1962, Kennedy tested… pic.twitter.com/y4QpR5eCum
More news of Russian TV population preparation for nuclear escalations, which the Western media and politicians continue to ignore as propaganda, just as Novichok and the Ukraine invasion prep was ignored as propaganda bluff, until it took us by "surprise". We need to prepare now https://t.co/tiFmJw0Htq
ABOVE: The British government has now declassified detailed summary reports giving secret original nuclear test data on the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) damage due to numerous nuclear weapons, data which is still being kept under wraps in America since it hasn't been superseded because Western atmospheric nuclear tests were stopped late in 1962 and never resumed - even though the Russians have even more extensive data - completely debunking Glasstone and Dolan's disarmament propaganda nonsense in the 1962, 1964 and 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons which ignores EMP piped far away from low altitude nuclear tests by power and communications cables and falsely claims instead that such detonations don't produce EMP damage outside the 2psi blast radius! For a discussion of the new data and also a link to the full 200+ pages version (in addition to useful data, inevitably like all official reports it also contains a lot of "fluff" padding), please see the other (physics) site: https://nige.wordpress.com/2023/09/12/secret-emp-effects-of-american-nuclear-tests-finally-declassified-by-the-uk-and-at-uk-national-archives/ (by contrast, this "blogspot" uses old non-smartphone proof coding, no longer properly indexed any long longer by "google's smartphone bot"). As long ago as 1984, Herman Kahn argued on page 112 of his book Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s: "The effects of an EMP attack are simply not well understood [in the West, where long powerlines were never exposed on high altitude nuclear tests, unlike the Russian's 1962 Operation K, so MHD-EMP or E3 damage wasn't even mentioned in the 1977 Glasstone and Dolan Effects of Nuclear Weapons], but the Soviets seem to know - or think they know - more than we do."
ABOVE: Moscow Metro and Metro-2 (secret nuclear subway) horizonially swinging blast doors take only 70 seconds to shut, whereas their vertically rising blast doors take 160 seconds to shut; both times are however far shorter than the arrival time of Western ICBMs or even SLBMs which take 15-30 minutes by which time the Russian shelters are sealed from blast and radiation! In times of nuclear crisis, Russia planned to evacuate from cities those who could not be sheltered, and for the remainder to be based in shelters (similarly to the WWII British situation, when people slept in shelters of one kind or another when there was a large risk of being bombed without notice, particularly in supersonic V2 missile attacks where little warning time was available).
NUKEGATE - Western tactical neutron bombs were disarmed after Russian propaganda lie. Russia now has over 2000... "Disarmament and arms control" charlatans, quacks, cranks, liars, mass murdering Russian affiliates, and evil genocidal Marxist media exposed for what it is, what it was in the 1930s when it enabled Hitler to murder tens of millions in war. Glasstone's and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons deceptions totally disproved. Professor Brian Martin, TRUTH TACTICS, 2021 (pp45-50): "In trying to learn from scientific publications, trust remains crucial. The role of trust is epitomised by Glasstone’s book The Effects of Atomic Weapons. Glasstone was not the author; he was the editor. The book is a compilation of information based on the work of numerous contributors. For me, the question was, should I trust this information? Was there some reason why the editors or authors would present fraudulent information, be subject to conflicts of interest or otherwise be biased? ... if anything, the authors would presumably want to overestimate rather than underestimate the dangers ... Of special interest would be anyone who disagreed with the data, calculations or findings in Glasstone. But I couldn’t find any criticisms. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was treated as the definitive source, and other treatments were compatible with it. ... One potent influence is called confirmation bias, which is the tendency to look for information that supports current beliefs and dismiss or counter contrary information. The implication is that changing one’s views can be difficult due to mental commitments. To this can be added various forms of bias, interpersonal influences such as wanting to maintain relationships, overconfidence in one’s knowledge, desires to appear smart, not wanting to admit being mistaken, and career impacts of having particular beliefs. It is difficult to assess the role of these influences on yourself. "
New photos of non-collapsed Nevada houses after 5 psi peak overpressure in the 29 kt Teapot Apple-2 test, Nevada, 5 May 1955; plus an analysis of why the freedom of the press means freedom for dictatorial censors of the facts (the press)
Above: the effects of blast duration for severe damage (50% risk of collapse) on diffraction sensitive targets are highly limited. A peak overpressure of 5 psi (note that 1 psi = 6.9 kPa in modern units) causes severe damage to brick houses for all yields above about 20 kt. This means that the cube-root scaling law determines damage effects and casualty radii. The casualty data in the table on the right is correlated to the risk of building collapse, rather than peak overpressure. In reality, the blast duration effects are eliminated at high yields because it is not the impulse but the maximum (peak) pressure which determines whether walls crack, and if the pressure is too low to crack a wall, then regardless how long that low pressure lasts (i.e. regardless how high the impulse loading is), it survives. Put another way, chairs don't collapse after sitting them for a given period of time if the force on them per unit area (pressure) is below the failure limit: thus the impulse, pressure integrated over time, is simply not relevant. Glasstone and Dolan obfuscate this to the point of deception. Sources: here and here. The reality is that blast duration effects are grossly exaggerated for propaganda purposes. In the 1957 edition of Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the nonographs for damage correctly reverted - using a curved scaling line - from 0.4 power of yield to 1/3 power of yield for high yields, but this was eliminated in the misleadingly simplistic graphs in 1962/4 and 1977 editions.
Above: Operation Teapot (civil defense Operation Cue), shot Apple-2, 29 kt yield on 500 foot tower, fireball at Yucca Flat in Nevada on 5 May 1955.
5 May 1955 Apple 2 nuclear test of 29kt giving 5psi peak overpressure to a brick house, which does not collapse completely, and the risk of people being hit by anything other than flying glass (behind windows on the side facing the fireball) is trivial, because the walls are blown outwards, not inwards.
5 May 1955 Apple 2 nuclear test of 29kt giving 5psi peak overpressure to a wood frame American house on Yucca Flat, Nevada test site. Again, the cine films prove that the house failed in the negative phase, exploding outwards, not inwards. Anyone under a British Blitz "Morrison shelter" type table away from windows facing the fireball could have survived. The house didn't burn.
Shelter at Home: June 1941 (U.K. Ministry of Home Security)
U.K. National Archives document HO228/1, "Notes on the occupancy of shelters during attack by V1 weapons on London, 1944" (which we put on Internet Archive years ago) found that in a sample of 1,471 people within 170 feet of V1 explosions (approximately 1 ton of TNT) from 18 June to 28 August 1944, 853 took shelter in Andersons (outdoor earth-covered corrugated steel arches) or Morrisons (indoor steel table shelters, with 3 mm thick steel table top, roughly equivalent to a typical inch thick wooden table), and 618 did not. This was for a situation where the air raid warning sirens were basically useless in giving a credible warning.
Many V1s were fired everyday and passed over large areas before the crashing and exploding, so you had the "crying wolf" syndrome if the air raid warnings were given too often, and many people became inured to the warnings and didn't take cover. The time available to duck and cover for 1 psi blast overpressure on seeing the flash of the explosion (1 ton of TNT) was just 0.4 second, whereas you have 4 seconds for the same window-busting pressure in a 1 kiloton explosion and 40 seconds in a 1 megaton explosion. The point is, you get better civil defence possibilities in properly informed populations for nuclear attack, than for conventional explosives, especially if the civilian casualty risk is due to long range collateral damage to a city from a distant nuclear explosion on a military target. (That credible nuclear war situation maximises the time available to duck and cover, and then to take shelter or evacuate from any surface burst downwind area fallout risk.)
Next, consider shelter occupation during the 13 June 1917 air raid on London by twin-engined Gotha bombers during WWI, when 41 of the 59 people killed were exposed outdoors in the open (usually watching the aircraft bombing them!): see U.K. National Archives report 225/12, "A Comparison between the number of people killed per tonne of bombs during World War I and World War II" (which we put on Internet Archive years ago). The same report does an analysis which compared this 13 June 1917 air raid, where 69.5% of people were totally unprotected, standing outdoors while being bombed, with the World War II Blitz where only 5% of people were in the open, 60% were indoors and not in shelter (but usually in rooms with cross-taped windows or papered window glass to reduce the risk of cuts from glass fragments), and 35% were in shelters (Andersons, Morrisons, tube station tunnels, Dover caves, etc.). Even poor shelter in houses is immensely safer than exposure outdoors.
As Terrence H. O'Brien explains in the official U.K. government history book, Civil Defence, H.M. Stationery Office, 1955, at pages 9-13, the 13 June 1916 air raid on London by 14 Gotha bombers was the worst of the war, killing 162 and injuring 426 (because there was no duck and cover advice initially, and people moved outdoors to watch bombs falling on them, or stood behind glass windows to watch bombs fall before them and blast glass into their faces). The British government did nothing until a repeated air raid on 7 July 1916 killed another 54 and injured 190. This forced the government to make the police display "Take Cover" notices to encourage people to get indoors, and to blow whistles or even explode "maroon" sound bombs to indicate the danger for the deaf. But still nothing was done about sensible "duck and cover" indoors to reduce dangers from collapsing houses until further air raids killed school children, and forced a further improvement in civil defence advice.
Now let's consider casualty rates. The Secret 5 May 1941 British Cabinet report by Home Secretary Herbert Morrison, "Air Raids on London, September-November 1940" (U.K. National Archives document CAB 67-9) found that 1 ton of bombs totally destroyed homes for 35 people (10 houses) but killed only 6, in other words, 6/35 or 17% of those whose homes were wrecked were killed. The majority survived, even in protracted bombing air raids where few people bothered to take shelter! The report further noted: "most valuable information has been obtained on the effects of bombs in framed buildings. Such buildings are practically immune to anything but a direct hit."
Ministry of Home Security reports S118 and RC450 show the casualty rates in totally demolished buildings (grade A damage, extending to 70 feet from ground zero in V1 and V2 surface bursts). Report S118 shows that for the brief period of "duck and cover" possible in subsonic V1 cruise missile attacks on Britain in 1944, 23.5% were killed within 70 feet from ground zero (grade A damage to houses, total collapse), while RC450 shows that for the same zone in supersonic V2 missile attacks (no time for duck and cover, due to sound arriving with the shock wave), 61.9 of a sample of 155 people were killed in houses. The RC450 data for V1 missiles on brick houses, giving a very brief duck and cover time, were used in Table 6.1 of the American Capabilities of Atomic Weapons (TM 23-200, November 1957, Confidential) and in Table 10-1 of Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons (DNA-EM-1, 1972).
Even more spectacular, within 70 feet radius, over half (51.2%) were totally unhurt in completely collapsed brick houses with the brief duck and cover time for V1 attacks (source: report RC450), compared to just 16.1% unhurt for the supersonic V2 attacks which gave no time for duck and cover (source: report S118).
Report S118 is based on a detailed analysis of 12 explosions of V2 missiles without any warning in built-up areas, where 155 people were in unprotected parts of brick houses within 70 feet of ground zero (grade A damage, collapse from over 30 psi peak overpressure), and 146 were in unprotected parts of brick houses within 70-100 feet of ground zero (grade B damage, partial collapse from 15-30 psi peak overpressure). Grade C damage (cracked walls, houses standing but beyond economic repair) extended from 100-300 feet radius (2.5 to 15 psi peak overpressure) in these 1 ton TNT explosions where 90% were unhurt in brick houses, while grade D damage (glass and tiles damage) extended from 300-600 feet radius (1-2.5 psi peak overpressure) where 99.5 were hurt indoors.
Notice that these peak overpressures for 1 ton of TNT actually observed in WWII are:
70 feet radius: range of collapse or grade A damage = 30 psi peak overpressure
100 feet radius: range of partial collapse or grade B damage = 15 psi peak overpressure
300 feet radius: range of cracking to walls or grade C damage = 2.5 psi peak overpressure
600 feet radius: range of serious damage to glass and tiles or grade D damage = 1 psi peak overpressure
The same A, B, C and D damage overpressure zones defined by the U.K. government in Nuclear Weapons 1959 (which gives ranges corresponding to the overpressures listed below), and the pressures were reduced to take account of the longer blast duration from nuclear weapons:
grade A = 11 psi
grade B = 6 psi
grade C = 1.5 psi
grade D = 0.75 psi
Therefore, the 1950s U.K. Civil Defence Corps was not ignoring blast duration effects in its casualty estimates, because it correlated the world war II damage (not the overpressures from 1 ton TNT bombs!) with casualty rates and then compared actual damage from Nevada tests and Japan in August 1945 with the effects of similar house damage on people in Britain in WWII. (CND type propaganda during the 1980s from Phil Bolsover, the BBC and Duncan Campbell falsely claimed that the UK data was based on blast pressures from conventional bombs. But, as we have shown, the Home Office took account of this, showing that grade A damage brick house was caused by 30 psi peak overpressure in 1 ton of TNT V1 and V2 bombs, but required only 11 psi for nuclear weapons with a long blast duration, and so on.)
If we move to the data in each report (S118 and RC450) for the grade B damage (partial collapse) at 70-100 feet radius from 1 ton of TNT, we find that only 2.7% are killed for V1 attacks (slight duck and cover, report source RC450) compared to 7.5% killed for V2 attacks (no duck and cover).
The reports also give data for injuries (light injuries which require only plasters for glass cuts, and serious injuries which require hospital attention for broken bones, etc.). But when you look into the details in the original reports you actually find that far from minimising casualty data, the U.K. reports maximise and tend to exaggerate casualties, because the few casualties that did occur in shelters tended to result from people ignoring the instructions and putting table shelters into rooms with unprotected glass windows or on insecure floors, or not properly bolting the shelters together. Very few casualties if any tended to occur where the local street air raid wardens had inspected the shelters and ensured they were properly located and constructed!
Dr David Baker's September 2017 Haynes Nuclear Weapons Manual now has a preview on amazon, two months before publication. I remember being told by a physics professor that only criticisms from the famous are taken objectively, so maybe since I'm not famous, I'd better avoid making any criticisms. From the selection of extracts available, it's a coffee table version of existing, widely known information, rather than setting out a more revolutionary approach that kills off propaganda.
David Baker's nice schematic of elementary physics digs a little deeper than the superficial drivel of most "introductions".
Page 58 states: "ERW warheads were originally selected for the Lance missile ... but the public outcry was so great that they were never deployed." But he doesn't seem to go into the facts about this, and sort the wheat grain from the chaff.
Dr Baker does do a very good job at covering the development of nuclear weapons by different countries, such as this example of British nuclear weapons including the configurations of the weapon casings and photos of arming keys.
Baker also describes warhead delivery systems such as Trident.
Review of Henry Wickham Steed (former Times newspaper editor), The Press, Penguin books, 14 October 1938 The Pope may launch his Interdict, The Union its decree, But the bubble is blown and the bubble is pricked By us and such as we. Remember the battle and stand aside, While thrones and powers confess That King over all the children of pride Is the press, the press, the press. - Kipling, The Press
Above: first edition of The Press by Henry Wickham Steed, Penguin Special S20, 250 pages (update on pages 249-250 is dated 14 October 1938)
Steed's The Press is vitally important for understanding the current taboo on the publication and broadcast of the nuclear weapons capabilities facts by the mainstream media, because there was a similar taboo on a similar subject (arms and deterrence) for a similar reason ("political correctness") when he wrote it, in 1938, during the disarmament of the west relative to the fascist Nazi regime. (Both were then arming, but the Nazis were doing it much faster than Britain, so the arms gap was widening and the prospects for winning a war were diminishing every day.)
The basic cause of the lack of free speech and publication then was exactly the same as it is today: foreign fascists, and other dictatorial regimes who hate free liberty, cloaked themselves in false liberal colours and claimed to be "offended" by free speech which denounced their aggressive threats.
As we previously pointed out in detail, contrary to popular historical drivel, the fact is that Winston Churchill was busy writing his histories of the Duke of Marlborough during the period, and his only contributions made the problems worse. As appeaser Professor Cyril Joad pointed out in his Why War?, Churchill had prior to the first world war debated pacifist drivel monger and liar Sir Norman Angell on the arms race, losing the argument. Angell simply sneered that if both sides try to deter the other, they will cause fail. He didn't explain how. The audience were taken by Angell's lies, not Churchill's blathering. It's the old Machiavellian story of factual evidence losing the battle in the media because its proponents are pompous fools and can't make the evidence convincing:
"But to come to those who, by their own ability and not through fortune, have risen to be princes, I say that Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and such like are the most excellent examples. ... It was necessary, therefore, to Moses that he should find the people of Israel in Egypt enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians, in order that they should be disposed to follow him so as to be delivered out of bondage. It was necessary that Romulus should not remain in Alba, and that he should be abandoned at his birth, in order that he should become King of Rome and founder of the fatherland. It was necessary that Cyrus should find the Persians discontented with the government of the Medes, and the Medes soft and effeminate through their long peace. Theseus could not have shown his ability had he not found the Athenians dispersed. These opportunities, therefore, made those men fortunate, and their high ability enabled them to recognize the opportunity whereby their country was ennobled and made famous. "Those who by valorous ways become princes, like these men, acquire a principality with difficulty, but they keep it with ease. The difficulties they have in acquiring it arise in part from the new rules and methods which they are forced to introduce to establish their government and its security. And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them. "It is necessary, therefore, if we desire to discuss this matter thoroughly, to inquire whether these innovators can rely on themselves or have to depend on others: that is to say, whether, to consummate their enterprise, have they to use prayers or can they use force? In the first instance they always succeed badly, and never compass anything; but when they can rely on themselves and use force, then they are rarely endangered. Hence it is that all armed prophets have conquered, and the unarmed ones have been destroyed. Besides the reasons mentioned, the nature of the people is variable, and whilst it is easy to persuade them, it is difficult to fix them in that persuasion. And thus it is necessary to take such measures that, when they believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by force.
"If Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus had been unarmed they could not have enforced their constitutions for long - as happened in our time to Fra Girolamo Savonarola, who was ruined with his new order of things immediately the multitude believed in him no longer, and he had no means of keeping steadfast those who believed or of making the unbelievers to believe. Therefore such as these have great difficulties in consummating their enterprise, for all their dangers are in the ascent, yet with ability they will overcome them; but when these are overcome, and those who envied them their success are exterminated, they will begin to be respected, and they will continue afterwards powerful, secure, honoured, and happy.
"To these great examples I wish to add a lesser one; still it bears some resemblance to them, and I wish it to suffice me for all of a like kind: it is Hiero the Syracusan. This man rose from a private station to be Prince of Syracuse, nor did he, either, owe anything to fortune but opportunity; for the Syracusans, being oppressed, chose him for their captain, afterwards he was rewarded by being made their prince. He was of so great ability, even as a private citizen, that one who writes of him says he wanted nothing but a kingdom to be a king. This man abolished the old soldiery, organized the new, gave up old alliances, made new ones; and as he had his own soldiers and allies, on such foundations he was able to build any edifice: thus, whilst he had endured much trouble in acquiring, he had but little in keeping."
- Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter VI, "Concerning New Principalities which are acquired by one's own arms and ability".
Steed in The Press puts himself in the position of Machiavelli by telling the reader truths they don't want to hear about the "news". On page 248 Steed writes:
"My paper would be national, not nationalist. It would be liberal, not Liberal. It would strive for Peace, without pacifism. ... Never would it fall into the grievous error of thinking the avoidance of conflict the same thing as peace. ... men will never be weaned from war, with its spirit of life-risking adventure, unless peace enlist the spirit of self-devotion and self-sacrifice in ways worthier than those of war. My newspaper would seek to link the nations not only against war but in defence of individual freedom and of human right ... it would work to harness all classes of citizens to the task of constructive improvement in the edifice of society."
On pages 249-250, Steed's 14 October 1938 update to the book damns the British media's appeasing cover-up of Nazi genocide in the Munich Agreement signed by Chamberlain days earlier, allowing the invasion of the Sudetenland without a bullet being fired, in the name of "peace", while Hitler monitored the British press and coerced Neville Henderson and Chamberlain into putting "old boy" pressure the publishers to fire appeasement critics like Captain W. E. Johns, editor of both Flying and Popular Flying, and to get Hitler critic cartoonist David Low to tone down his attacks (such critics were attacked falsely as racists who irrationally hate war mongering Aryans, etc):
"Since these lines were written in mid-September the British press has - with one or two notable exceptions - made further progress on the road that leads to totalitarian servitude. Though we are not yet in a state of war ... the great majority of our newspapers toned down the news and withheld frank comment upon it.
"This they did partly in response to suggestions of "confidentially" made by some clandestine organisation that represents, or pretends to represent, the [anti-Jew, pro-fascist] views of official quarters. No newspaper, as far as I am aware, has denounced in public this impertinent meddling with the freedom of responsible journalism.
"On the early afternoon of Sunday, October 9, the German Dictator, Herr Hitler, fortified by the Munich Agreement and by a scrap of paper which he and the British Prime Minister had signed - publicly told Great Britain to mind her own business and not to meddle with Germany's business; and, on pain of German displeasure, he placed his veto upon the return to office of three prominent British public men.
"When this news was broadcast on the evening of Sunday, October 9, the whole nation was moved to wrath. Of the depth of its wrath hardly a hint was given next morning in the leading British newspapers ... large advertising agents had warned journals for which they provide much revenue that advertisements would be withheld from them should they 'play up' the international crisis and cause an alarm which was 'bad for trade'. [Emphasis added.]
"None of the newspapers thus warned dared to publish the names of these advertisement agents or to hold them up to public contempt [it's unlikely that this would have worked if they had the mindset of former Labour Party MP fascist Sir Oswald Moseley, who openly wanted fascism in Britain, ran a "Blackshirt" newspaper in Britain, and had some powerful supporters camouflaged as "anti-war" pacifists on his side]. And this at a moment when it is of the utmost national importance to unite the country in defence of its freedom and, maybe, of its independent existence!
"Never since the distant days of Ethelred the Unready [a Chamberlain-like weak King who was never ready for the invading Danes and tried to buy them off, which just encouraged more and more blackmail] and the later days of Charles II, have more humiliating pages of British history been written than those which bear the record of the past few weeks.
"Of Ethelred the Unready and the period of Danegeld the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle said: 'All these calamities fell upon us because of evil counsel, because tribute was not offered to them [the Danes] at the right time nor yet were they resisted; but when they had done the most evil, then was peace made with them'."
"Of evil counsel there has been no lack during recent years. 'Leading' organs of the British Press have offered it in plenty [in 1935 Labour Party leader pacifist George Lansbury resigned at the thought of having to deter Nazi fascists from over-running the planet, and replaced by the disarmer Clement Attlee who we have quoted at length in previous posts, dismissing deterrence; thus Chamberlain had no real opponents and could rearm Britain slower than Hitler to avoid credibly deterring him]. 'Leading' organs of the British Press have offered it in plenty.
"It would remain only for them to accept with dutiful submissiveness the claim which Herr Hitler has already put forward, and may soon renew, that unless the British Government wishes to incur German hostility it must so control British newspapers as to prevent them from taking exception to anything Herr Hitler may say or do.
"Fortunately, there are signs [too late to deter Hitler] that a spirit of revolt against this foreign dictation is stirring ... May this spirit spread ... until it finds courage to serve neither the timidity nor the dictatorial itch of Governments but the public to whom alone it owes allegiance."
This is a pretty damning critique of the British Press in 1938 by a former Times newspaper editor. He was damned as a racist by the Nazis for writing that book, and Chamberlain's fascist mindset continued, getting Captain W. E. Johns fired for his Flying and Popular Flying magazine criticisms early in 1939. It was only after the civil defence was really going, with Anderson shelter development in February 1939, that the mood changed and the press realised that its appeasement of Hitler's peace propaganda lies was wallpapering over the news of a real threat that needed to be stopped, and that war would not annihilate everyone in a few seconds if there was evacuation and shelter in place to reduce the dangers. Conclusion: the "free" press is a laggard and historically stopped dissemination of facts in an unequivocal manner, until too late to credibly deter aggression.
Why the freedom of the press means freedom for dictatorial liars and thugs It is fashionable for self-proclaimed "liberals" who hate freedom to prattle on about the existence of "freedom of the press", as if that freedom to elitist, rich thugs is any better than, say "freedom of dictators", "freedom of elitists", "freedom of bigots", or indeed "freedom of liars". Steed quotes Socrates: "The sun might as easily be spared from the universe as free speech from the liberal institutions of society." But Steed recognised that bigoted dictators like Hitler are easily "offended" by the "rudeness" of any critics (if the critic is so polite that the criticism is impotent, it's not a severe criticism, is it?) and states the key question on page 7 of The Press: "Dictatorial systems which muzzle or control the Press and do away with freedom of speech and of public and private criticism, are claiming for themselves a degree of political and social efficiency superior to that of democracies. How far is this claim warranted? ... One thing they cannot tolerate is is the freedom of public knowledge that goes to the forming of sound judgement." On page 8, Steed argues that the Aryan Nazi fascist racism is as bad as his own families Jewish-Marxist hate of liberty, in suppressing objective, rational criticisms and smearing critics with abuse: "Unless there is freedom to know, to agree or to disagree, there cannot be enlightened support of the men charged with the conduct of public affairs. In other words, there cannot exist the instructed public opinion which is the mainstay of democratic governments." For that defence of freedom of speech and critical debate, despite having a Jewish family, Steed was called a racist by the Jewish Marxists who prefer a Nazi-type Stalinist dictatorship to honest debate, because of their fanatical, paranoid hatred of "capitalism". Steed explains on pages 8-9 the problem: "... absence of informed criticism or agreement, and the restriction of public knowledge, tend to breed the corruption and other forms of inefficiency to which dictatorial systems are particularly liable. The same lack of public control allows abuses to grow until they reach a point at which a community is compelled to conspire or to rebel against its rulers, seeing that no other means of redress can be found. Thus, the end of dictatorship man be chaos and social disorder." Another prescient remark is made by Steed on page 28 of The Press, on the subject of the future of television (which was still in its infancy in 1938): "... television should enable people to see what is actually taking place and to be spectators of real events. Thus, it may exercise their powers of direct observation and strengthen, rather than weaken, their perceptive and reasoning faculties. If so, it will be a gain, both to the public and to the press." Steed on page 41 of The Press also offers sage editorial advice to journalists and authors on the eternal problem of being fashionable enough to be of interest to potential readers: "If the Press would lead, it must first follow. In any case, it must march so nearly abreast of its readers as to seem to be keeping pace with them. To run too far ahead is to lose touch. ... The crowd likes to feel that those whom it follows know where to go, and how to get there. Above all, the crowd likes its leaders to be proved right by events. It does not easily forgive those who mislead or who fail to guide it at difficult turnings." Steed adds on page 42: "Mr Bernard Shaw has written some shrewd truths upon journalism. 'What people cannot endure,' he declares, 'is the pompous oracle with nothing to say ... They prefer snippets because the snippets are usually much better. But let anyone come along who can supply the real thing, and the public cannot have enough of it. ... offices are prisons in which the cleverest editor will soon lose touch with the world, being cut off as he is from political meetings, scientific lectures, concerts and even dinners by the hours during which he has to work'."
He adds on page 57 a summary of the bugbears for different regimes that use "fashion" censorship: "Communist Russia cannot tolerate free discussion upon matters like the ownership of property. Nazi Germany cannot allow the dogmas of blood and race to be called in question. Fascist Italy cannot brook free enquiry into the nature or functions of the state, or into the position of individuals in regard to the state." On the next page, Steed quotes John Stuart Mill's On Liberty: "A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions, but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury." The point here is that censorship prevents the correction of error, as Steed explains on page 58: "This sound doctrine applies with especial force to the freedom of the press. In free countries, the press fails in its proper task if it glosses over or shirks from exposing abuses or practices harmful to the general welfare." On pages 63-64, Steed explains that Hitler's error was in assuming that the diversity of thought between Aryan and Jewish cultures in Germany in WWI led to defeat, whereas supposed unity or herd like co-operation in Britain led to its victory in that war: "Human progress, as I understand it, has not been bought about by 'mass thought' or 'likemindedness' [Although this was important in American and British factories for the efficient manufacture of munitions in WWI, and is also used in large lecture theatres for mass-education and for scientific journals to indoctrinate people in fashionable dogmas regardless of the benefits of less fashionable alternatives which, with funding, are eventually shown to model the data more consistently. Since 1972 this has been named "groupthink" by Dr Irving Janis.] ... The worth of freedom is that it gives a chance to individual minds to wrestle with error and ignorance, so seek what is true and to proclaim it, and, no matter at what risk, to bear witness to the truth they have found. It is an opportunity for personal enterprise and endeavour; and, politically and socially, an opening for public service. It is the antithesis of dictatorial constraint." Steed explains on page 68 of The Press that in Nazi Germany, Herr Wilhelm Waldkirch's book, Die Zeitungspolitische Aufgabe, or The Political Task of the Press, instructs newspapers to communicate Hitler's messages to the people, and as Hitler himself said (a quote the communists believe, too): "A newspaper is the means of popular self-education [if it is censored by bigoted dogmatists]." Now contrast this crap of Adolf Hitler to the London 7 February 1852 The Times newspaper editorial: "The duty of the journalist is the same as that of the historian - to seek out the truth, above all things, and to present it to his readers, not such things as statecraft would wish them to know, but the truth as near as he can attain it." Steed argues that wars and revolutions are the lifeblood of the news on page 110 of The Press: "... in August 1642, three months after Charles I had raised his standard against Parliament at Nottingham, the first true newspaper came into being. Regular English journalism began with the Civil War and the political strife that led up to it. From the outset it was vivacious and, on the whole, truthful." He explains on page 112: "It was not by accident that the first English newspapers took shape between 1640 and 1688, that is to say, during the troubled period covered by the reign of Charles I, the Commonwealth, and the reigns of Charles II and James II, for at no time in English history had so many conflicting political ideas and passions filled the public mind, or had the essentials of political freedom been so fiercely debated. With the Revolution of 1688, the expulsion of James II and the accession of William and Mary, English political ideas began profoundly to influence the Continent of Europe. The movement of thought represented by Locke's essays on Toleration and Concerning the Human Understanding led, directly and indirectly, to the "Encyclopaedism" [the political satires of Voltaire, et al.] which was to culminate in the French Revolution of 1789, after having been responsible, in part, for the terms of the American Declaration of Independence, on July 4, 1776." Steed argues on page 113: "This movement of thought might not have spread and flourished without the constant discussion of fundamental principles in English newspapers ..." He explains that King Charles II had tried to prevent this freedom of the press by his 1680 proclamation For Restraining the Printing of News, Books and Pamphlets of News without Leave. In other words, Charles II was well aware that the free press was being used to incite and spread dissent and revolutionary conspiracies that (in the words of Charles II's Chief Justice Scroggs in 1680) "showed a manifest intent to breach the peace", and tried to stamp it out by using censorship (like the Vatican's Index of heretical books). But in 1695, Parliament liberated the press from the shackles of Charles II's law. During the period 1680-1695, England had to rely on personal letters and word of mouth for uncensored news, as in Nazi Germany and the USSR. Steed writes on page 114 of The Press that the liberation of the press from censorship in 1695 led to an explosion in popular publications: "Within a few weeks of the freeing of the Press from censorship, a number of newspapers of a fresher type came into existence ... On May 17, 1695, appeared the Flying Post, published thrice weekly. It was followed quickly by The English Courant, the Post Boy and the Weekly Messenger, all of which were morning papers. ... On Wednesday March 11, 1702, however, the Daily Courant was published. It was the first English daily paper." What is most interesting on pages 166-167 of Steed's The Press is his discussion of how Hitler controlled the censorship of criticism of Nazi propaganda in Britain's "free press" in Britain: "Totalitarian Governments often profess to desire peace and friendship ... So foreign criticism and and the publication [in free countries] of unpleasant facts are deplored as tending to 'impede friendship and to endanger peace'. Moreover, when independent and well-informed writers in free countries comment truthfully upon the doings of totalitarian Governments, the ambassadors or other emissaries of those Governments [whose job it is explain foreign newspaper headlines and leading articles with the dictator] lose no time in suggesting to newspaper proprietors or editors [or in the case of David Low's cartoons or the Flying and Popular Flying magazines editor Captain WE Johns, cabinet ministers, who can coerce and pull strings with otherwise independent-minded publishers] that the publication of contributions from such writers 'irritate' the dictators and are therefore dangerous. ... to restrain foreign criticism without causing public resentment. "Herr Hitler has, it is true, publicly demanded that British newspapers be brought under Government control, at least to the extent of suppressing criticism of himself or of Nazi Germany. And he threatened Great Britain with a 'National Socialist answer' if this were not done. ... They forgot that in dealing with bullies, meekness is a vice." Hitler's answer to charges that he was bully was simply to assert that his critics were bullies. The word doesn't convey any meaning without the context being taken into account: who is telling the lies, and who is exposing the relevant facts against the censorship of liars? That tells you who the bully is. While you might claim that everybody has the right to censoring others, the problem is that this gives a free hand to lying fairy-tale "story tellers" who publish partial facts and refuse to engage in debate with real opponents, publishing only praising comments, which make them appear right. That was the subtle tactic used by Hitler: there was no censorship of people writing to praise him! President Ronald Reagan put this beautifully as a joke, along the following lines: American says to a Russian comrade: "I'm liberal, as I'm free to criticise the American government."
Russian replies: "I'm also liberal, as I'm also free to criticise the American government!"
(The point being made is that, even in the worst dictatorships, there is plenty of so-called "freedom" if you just love dictatorships and praise the dictator, or you criticise or attack the dictator's enemies!)
The attempts of Hitler to use influence over the Daily Mail and other British newspapers for fascist revolution in London were in 1936 analysed in detail by Nazi researcher Dr Max Gruenbeck in his two-volume treatise on the British press for fascists, Die Presse Grossbritanniens, a work approved officially by Hitler's expert on foreign media, Dr Ernst Hanfstaengel (Chief of the Nazi Party Foreign Press Department), and that book is quoted by Steed on pages 174-175 of The Press, as follows:
"Especially in recent years, British newspaper men and politicians insist that Great Britain and the United States of America are countries where the Press is absolutely free. ... When Lord Rothermere's papers [e.g. London Daily Mail] gave vigorous support for a time to the Fascist movement [of former Labour Party MP, Sir Oswald Mosley] in England their initiative was throttled in a few weeks by their advertisement department ... The State has various possibilities of influencing newspapers; and, particularly at critical moments, old and half-forgotten laws like the Official Secrets Act can be brought forward to throw serious shadows upon the halo of British newspaper freedom."
Ummm. Nazis appealing to the British Official Secrets Act to defend fascism? That was of course exactly what happened in 1935 when British government fascist-supporting appeasers used the trick of keeping secret estimates on the size of the illegal German Air Force, while making public statements denying any air threat, but then suddenly reversed direction when Hitler announced an air force and announced that the German Air Force was not only real but too big to fight, so that due to the Official Secrets Act, at no time was there an admitted "emerging threat" which could be stopped!
Steed explains on page 194 how secrecy laws in France were abused by a spy who had infiltrated the French military, Colonel Henry, who gave French military secrets to Germany and covered up the disclosures by fabricating a trumped up charge against an innocent scapegoat, Captain Dreyfus, who was wrongly convicted or treason on the basis of faked evidence by the spy, and was sentenced to penal servitude on the worst French prison, in Devil's Isle. This led to Emile Zola's article J'accuse, and Colonel Henry's eventual arrest and suicide in 1898. Steed had met Bernard Lazare, the French Jew who exposed the facts that led to Zola's article, while he was working on a history of liberal thought in Europe, in Paris University, as he explains on page 194 of The press:
"This 'Dreyfus Affair' contained in germ the anti-Jewish feeling that has since been exploited by Hitler in Germany. The French anti-Semites made capital out of it. They claimed that the honour of the French Army was offended by suggestions that a French court martial had condemned an innocent man ... So fierce did controversy become that the stability of the French Republic was believed to be threatened. ... And, since Germany and Italy were alleged to have benefited by Captain Dreyfus's 'treason', the crisis took on a dangerous international character."
THE CORRUPT PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS
Science has always been corrupted by malicious hate attacks on new technology, such as nuclear weapons deterrent, an exploitation for quackery, which is defined as a "professional" (money-making) activity, akin to peddling snakeoil for profit. Throughout the 20th century, nuclear weapons effects were abuse by communist fronts like CND and Greenpeace, just as today they prevent any just, constructive, and evidence based criticisms of CO2 climate theory from being published (but do allow lies to be published), using paranoid and pseudo-scientific "elitist" dictatorship rather than reason. This is called hubris, it is the corruption of power by a lying cartel of funding grant milkers.
To give some examples, in the 1930s the irrational hater of cheap Anderson type air raid shelters who delayed civil defence possibly for years (which were needed for credible deterrence of the Nazi bombing threat, the main obstacle in stopping genocide in Europe), the famous chemistry professor J. B. S. Haldane was able to put out a series of books linking science to his pet politics, Marxism. In 1938 he published The Marxist Philosophy and the Sciences, as well as Heredity and Politics, while fellow Marxist and best-selling popular mathematics author (who had the long-winded best sellers Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen) Lancelot Hogben, edited the book Political Arithmetic. These were abuses of science for supporting dictatorship propaganda about "equality".
Anyone who argued was censored out, and these people were only willing to enter debates with biased empires who would silence just opponents to make it appear they were wrong, without being given any fair chance to oppose the liars. A major reason why so many East Enders bombed in the Blitz did not use their Anderson shelters in the London Blitz and other air raids was not the cold and damp (duck boards had been invented in WWI trenches to deal with the problems), but the J. B. S. Haldane's continuing lying Marxist crusade to exaggerate high explosive effects and to call for deep shelters by claiming that simple, affordable earth covered shelters gave no protection (totally untrue):
Like the repeated lying articles on a "missile gap" which the lying Washington Post newspaper published by Democrat writer Alsop and which Kennedy naively believed, the lying Daily Worker newspaper in Britain hated civil defence and ensured that as few people as possible used safe air raid shelters, using cartoon propaganda that effectively supported the Nazis, something understandable when you remember the Nazi-Soviet Pact made in August 1939 for Germany and Russia to jointly invade Poland in September 1939 (a pact that continued right through the Blitz of 1940 and only ended with Hitler's invasion of Russia in June 1941, to the complete surprise of Stalin, who had been shooting the messengers who truthfully told him what his beloved fellow dictator and comrade Hitler was planning). The communists wanted Britain to give a free hand to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and civil defence shelters stood in the way of the Daily Worker's agenda.
Update (22 July 2017): This Glasstone blog
Above: from May 2010 to 22 July 2017 there have been 1,491,479 views of this blog, mainly on the default page https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/ rather than any archived post (the most popular archived individual post has received 60,301 bits, which is only 4% of the total number of views). The blogger Glasstone blog was set up in March 2006, but blogger statistics are only displayed on this page from May 2010, probably due to blogger dumping the earlier statistics a few years ago (the statistics recorded from 2006 to 2010 are available in screen prints on earlier posts in that period, and bring the total to something over 2 million hits). Fascism is a fashion conscious, populist, groupthink movement of hypocrisy, so they are always keen to claim that they have to pay no attention to something nobody reads, no matter how much factual evidence is available which debunks the fashionable lies of the populist media on nuclear weapons effects for deterring conventional wars. Therefore, it is advisable to record statistics which prove that there is some interest in the facts, debunking fascist anti-civil defence, anti-life, anti-freedom and anti-liberty hubris in the mainstream pseudo-liberal media.
Update (23 July 2017) on the rising threats of fascism in Britain from the hard pseudo-liberal left
16 July 2017 page 8 SUNDAY EXPRESS: Corbyn's racist and fascist Labour Party anti-Jew hate incitement tragedy facts. Jews are being attacked by ignorant Left wing communists and Marxists on the false Nazi claim that they are evil capitalists.
Frederick Forsyth has written on page 13 of the 21 July 2017 Daily Express about the rising tide of evil fascist racial hatred in Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, reminding the world of historical facts:
"Moderate Labour MPs have been threatened with death ... This happened in the 1930s in Italy. The extreme Left demagogue then was called Mussolini. Lest you be confused, both the Italian Fascist Party and the German NSDAP started out as extreme Left. [And Britain's Union of Fascists leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, was a former Labour Party MP. The Labour Party leader George Lansbury in 1935 resigned because he couldn't face an arms race to deter Nazis from killing Jews. In August 1939 the USSR and Nazis signed a pact to invade Poland from East and West in September 1939 and before the Nazis started the Holocaust in Poland, the USSR had already murdered in cold blood 22,000 Polish Jews in the Katryn Forest Massacre of March 1940. USSR-Nazi collaboration continued after the USSR invasion of Poland in 1939 and continued throughout the Blitz of London, ending only in June 1941. Stick that fact in your pipe and smoke it, communist thugs.] They were later dubbed Right because each was a vicious rival of the communist parties for the working class vote. ... But the new ultra-Left adores Jeremy Corbyn, a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist-Leninist and demagogue.
"Mr Corbyn has publicly supported the provisional IRA which murdered 18 paratroopers at Warrenpoint ... He has lauded Hamas and Hezbollah ... He proudly subscribes to the economic theories of Marxist-Leninism which, everywhere they have been tried, have led to ruin. ... its gulags set up more concentration camps than the Nazis. ... Behind him stands Momentum and inside it the hard squad for whom intimidation is no stranger. Already within Labour anti-Semitism, always a storm-cone of coming nastiness, is virtually institutionalised. But the truly weird thing is this. According to the polls, more than half the voters of Britain would elect him tomorrow - the new duce of hard-Left fascism - to be our prime minister."
The reason for this result is precisely the same TV and general media bias that has been allowed to occur on nuclear weapons, which filters out all the hard facts, leaving only lying crap to mislead!
Beryl Peach exposes cowardly rioting thugs tactics in supporting Jeremy Corbyn Labour party fanaticism: DAILY EXPRESS 2017.
Frederick Forsyth DAILY EXPRESS 21 July 2017 page 33 exposing fascism of left wing fanatic Jeremy Corbyn.
Frederick Forsyth DAILY EXPRESS 21 July 2017 page 33 exposing fascism of left wing fanatic Jeremy Corbyn.
Very true. It's hard to get real "free press", or to be sure you really have it, when both the government and foreign powers are covertly bribing and blackmailing newspapers etc into presenting the news they want distributed. Your blog seems to provide another source of information to add to the (sometimes false) data from more "official" sources. This post dispels the idea that 5 psi causes widespread mortality, even in normal houses. Just as importantly, if not more so, it compares the peak side-on overpressures for damage by 20 kt and .002 kt bursts. Thus, a rough yet credible comparison can be made between normal air raids and nuclear attack. As I have said before, a 1 mt airburst at 7600 ft could cause "grade A" damage out to maybe 9000 ft. V-2 only did this to 70 ft. Hence, the 1.3 mt of conventional air raids on Germany were equivalent to roughly 1300000/(70/9000)^2=79 individual 1 mt hits. Due to nuclear weapons and other considerations such as current political alliances, I fit into JD Culshaw's second group. I think that if there were another world war in the near future, it would be like ww2 but very much worse. I would guess anywhere from 100 million to a billion deaths, and not all from nukes. Starvation, disease, genocide, and conventional and guerilla warfare would all likely be important. I'm not trying to fear monger. A war such as this can be deterred by both ofensive and defensive methods, as well as peaceful cooperation, when appropriate. You might also be interested in William H Hessler's collier article "The A-Bomb Won't Do What You Think!" Hessler recognizes that the huge number of injuries and deaths in Japan were due to the lack of warning. Being that the article was written in the late 1940's, he doesn't understand land surface burst fallout. Hessler describes that 10 devices, each with a tenth the power used at nagasaki, would be more militarily effective than the single Fat Man weapon was. I might add that this does have to do with the scientifically calculated destructive power of these weapons. If dropped "in a random pattern" on "a considerable area of general strategic importance", the barrage of smaller devices would be 2.15 times as effective. For destroying a small target area, a single small device would be better than a single big one, because, as describedin your previous blog post, it would not cause as much collateral damage. Hessler comes to the same conclusion you have: while nuclear weapons are certainly powerful, and in some cases quite effective, they cannot always be counted on to produce complete devastation in every military situation. As I have said before, this also means that they cannot be relied on, by themselves, to deter all enemies.
I'm not happy including claims that you make such as: "As I have said before, a 1 mt airburst at 7600 ft could cause "grade A" damage out to maybe 9000 ft. V-2 only did this to 70 ft. Hence, the 1.3 mt of conventional air raids on Germany were equivalent to roughly 1300000/(70/9000)^2=79 individual 1 mt hits."
You shouldn't make claims like that without stating what types of building you refer to (modern city steel frame, reinforced concrete, or brick) and what their density is per unit area for calculations of blast attenuation (energy loss and upward diffraction of energy) due to scattering of blast energy upwards into the free air, and also damage done as the blast encounters successive buildings in travelling outwards along any particular radial line from ground zero. Please take more care, in any future comments, to spell out what assumptions you make in back-of-the-envelope calculations. Thank you!
Thankyou for not censoring my comment. When I said "damage out to maybe 9000 ft ", I was talking about damage to brick buildings, in the region of regular reflection. At that range, the angle of incidence of the blast relative to the ground is about 40 degrees, and the distance the blast must travel through any given kind of building before hitting the ground is (height of building)/sin40°, regardless of the scale of the damage (so long as the buildings are much shorter than the burst altitude). According to Philip J. Dolan's 1972 em-1, the blast from a 760 ft scaled height burst does not form a mach stem "traveling outwards along any particular radial line from ground zero" until it reaches a scaled ground range of 900 ft. After that, the amount of attenuation will increase as an exponential function of the TRUE distance (not scaled distance) from the start of the mach stem at 900 W^1/3 ft from ground zero. Thus, in the Mach stem, larger yields are more attenuated. I don't know exactly how to calculate such attenuation, but I know that for ~60m tall brick buildings and 40° incidence, the path through the buildings is only maybe 100 m. Of course, such a high airburst will have almost no effect on concrete buildings. This is why the lethal range within such buildings at Hiroshima was only .12 miles. At nagasaki, there was at least moderate stuctural damage and occasional mortality out to .3 miles, according to Dikewood's AD653922 Analysis Of Japanese Nuclear Casualty Data and ADA219691 Japanese Nuclear Casualty Data Combined Injury And Mortality Analysis. For a 580 ft scaled HOB, the mach stem reaches out to perhaps 580ft with almost 30psi. I'm not sure about the degree of attenuation in a surface burst, although I attempted to estimate this in a previous comment with many inaccurate assumptions and a large, confusing table. I only used the airburst with brick buildings to give a rough comparison between normal air raids and nuclear attack. Positive phase duration appears to make a real difference I also found it interesting that "Grade B" damage (6-15 psi for brick buildings and long blast durations) only causes 7.5% mortality (maybe even less if the walls blow outward) and that simple duck and cover reduced this to only 2.7%. Of course, for a low airburst or ground burst near a city, attenuation might make this actual area much smaller indeed, so that even this countermeasure would be largely unnecessary. That would be very good. Better, of course, would be if the facts were disseminated and prevented a nuclear war to begin with:-) When I told my estimates for a ww3,my point was that it would be bad, and not soley due to nuclear conflict, but society would still be able to recover. Great post!
The 1957 edition of Glasstone's "Effects of nuclear weapons" is the only one to give an honest analytical blast effects description, including a formula for maximum displacement of a building wall by a blast wave. In addition, the nomographs for blast damage in the 1957 edition allow correctly for the effects of blast duration becoming insignificant in the high (megaton yield) range, so that at very high yield the correct criterion for damage is the peak overpressure (or peak dynamic pressure), regardless of the duration. Only at low yields does blast duration have an effect.
This is best seen in chapter 11 (Damage to Structures) of the 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, EM-1, which unfortunately is not available in PDF format although the British Library Document Supply has it on microfiche in an obscure nuclear reports collection (not listed in their online computer catalogue, so you have to email them). However, the key data from Chapter 11 is available in PDF form in Appendix C, Tables C-2 through C-5, which gives the destruction peak overpressures for all the structures, as a function of bomb yield. (I've put all the Appendices to DNA-EM-1 1972 edition on the internet, e.g. internet archive and also linked from the DNA-EM-1 summary/background info on this blog.)
For example, a brick house (structure 11-4 in Table C-2 on page C-10 of DNA-EM-1, 1972) suffers "severe damage (50% collapse risk)" at a constant 5.0 psi peak overpressure for yields from 30 kilotons through 30 megatons. But at lower yields than 30 kt, Dolan shows that the peak overpressure rises to 5.5 psi peak overpressure at 1 kt, 6.5 psi at 0.1 kt, and 7.5 psi at 0.01 kt (or 10 tons of nuclear yield, equivalent for 50% blast to a WWII bomb of 5 tons of TNT conventional explosion).
This proves that for such brick houses, there is actually very little effects from the increasing blast duration (impulse) at higher yields: it reduces the peak overpressure to a a certain value, which then remains constant regardless of further increases in yield. A good way to understand this is to consider the time factor of pressing against a wall, or sitting on a chair: clearly a wall doesn't get pushed over, and a chair doesn't collapse, if the force applied is below the threshold needed to crack it, regardless of the duration of the small force. If it takes 5 psi to knock a wall over, then you can apply 4 psi for as long as you want and it will remain standing! Hence the data in this blog post, and previous posts, really is accurate in extrapolating from WWII damage to nuclear weapons.
Other examples:
DNA-EM-1 data for w3-8 storey reinforced concrete city buildings (type 11-3 in Table C-2) shows 50% collapse (severe damage) at 10 psi peak overpressure for 30 megatons, 11 psi for 1 megaton, 17 psi for 1 kt, and 28 psi peak overpressure for 0.01 kiloton.
DNA-EM-1 data for "moderate damage" (defined as 50% risk of damage beyond economic repair) in Table C-4 is generally two-thirds the peak overpressure needed for severe damage.
Table C-3 with data on peak dynamic (not over) pressures needed for 50% risk of severe damage to more drag-sensitive targets shows that steel frame office buildings with glass walls (structure 11-11) have greatest sensitivity to weapon yield, ranging from 60.0 psi dynamic pressure at 1 kiloton down to just 2.4 psi dynamic pressure at 30 megatons.
The 1957 edition of Glasstone's "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" indicates in Figure 6.41b (when combined with figure 3.94a in the same book) that severe damage (type A damage) to multistory reinforced concrete builds with light walls requires 50 psi peak overpressure for 1 kt yield and 15 psi for 1 megaton, while for multistory steel frame city skyscrapers with glass walls the peak overpressures are 30 psi for 1 kt and 10 psi for 1 megaton.
Yes. Exactly my point! Peak overpressure alone is the criteria above a certain yield. This precise yield depends on the target in question. Blast waves with very high peak overpressures decay from their peak more rapidly than lower overpressure ones, more massive or less rigid buildings respond to loads more slowly, and diffracion loads often last less time than the positive phase itself. In any case, the yield above which overpressure is the only criteria is typically very large. For a house it might be 500 tons of tnt, or a 1 kt nuclear weapon. Above this yield, it will take 6psi to cause partial collapse and 11psi to cause complete collapse regardless of whether the yield is 1kt, 20kt, 1000kt, or 10,000kt. At lower yields, more typical of normal HE,higher pressures are needed. At 1t, it might take 15psi to induce partial collapse and all of 30psi to cause complete collapse. For a charge of 100 kg (.00022kt), the pressures will be even more. For a grenade or small mortar shell of 3.7kg (.0000074kt) to blow a hole in a structure (a task more difficult than collapsing the whole thing at the load bearing joints) probably requires hundreds or thousands of psi. Of course, by that point, metal fragments and direct fireball contact are likely of more importance. In general cube root scaling is good for comparing various kiloton and megaton nuclear yields, but not so good for comparing different subkiloton conventional yields. I also find it interesting that Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons gives 60 psi dynamic pressure as causing severe damage to steel buildings at 1 kt, but Effects of Nuclear Weapons gives 30 psi overpressure (17psi dynamic pressure?) as the same criterion! Correction: cube root scaling still predicts overpressure, dynamic pressure, duration, time of arrival, etc just fine at subkiloton yields and even ton and pound yields. What I meant is that the overpressure for a given kind of damage increases as the yield decreases in this range of yields. Thus the cube root scaling law alone will not give an accurate answer when comparing 100 kg and 3.7 kg yields with megaton yields.
Thanks. "For a grenade or small mortar shell of 3.7kg (.0000074kt) to blow a hole in a structure (a task more difficult than collapsing the whole thing at the load bearing joints) probably requires hundreds or thousands of psi. Of course, by that point, metal fragments and direct fireball contact are likely of more importance."
At very low yields, peak overpressure (and peak dynamic pressure) simply fails to last long enough to cause enough deflection to damage the object. That's the only reason that you have to take time (thus impulse) into account there. As I've said before, longer blast duration is actually a benefit for survival in houses because the weight of the room doesn't fall on occupants in a shelter - it gets blown downrange into the yard. So the weight falling on a table shelter roof is reduced in high yield nuclear weapons.
For TNT bombs, as you imply, the metal case - depending on its thickness - picks up energy that would otherwise go into air blast. So metal debris or shrapnel ends up doing most of the damage (cratering and injury to personnel), if the case is properly designed, in a conventional explosion. The air blast energy is reduced due to the kinetic energy gained by the metal debris from the casing surrounding the explosive. The metal jacket in a "pineapple" design hand grenade is given a chunky design - like a chocolate bar - to enable bits to break off predictably with certain size and momentum, so that the effects are reliable.
After college, I was given an unclassified tour of computer simulation software by a UK military research agency in Surrey. They were predicting the radius of injuries for such weapons using very crude mathematical models that ignored air drag on on the shrapnel, and simply took account of gravity. The context was a pretty impressive but partial computer map of Iraq, based on satellite data and ground surveys by personnel to determine how passable the terrain was to tanks, wheeled vehicles, etc. So they had this computer war game simulator, something along the lines of Grand Auto Theft, in which the military could rehearse. The data collection by military personnel was excellent, but the weapons effects predictions looked over simplistic, ignoring air drag on shrapnel.
You see exactly the same crap in Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" where they deleted the final chapter on principles of protection (which was in all earlier editions, 1950, 57, 62 and 64), they deleted the data on how simple whitewash saved the clean Encore nuclear test house from burning in 1953 (while the unpainted and thrash surrounded houses burned at 12 cal/cm sq), and they included a "thermal burns distribution" predictor graph that lacked any discussion of how to include city skyline shielding effects on thermal burns.
Note also that scattered thermal radiation does not offset direct attenuation (contrary to Glasstone 1957-77). Like air scatter from the sun (the blue sky), wide angle distribution of scattered thermal may mathematically be impressive for an imaginary plane in free air, but a solid object gets a surface exposure of only half the scattered radiation on each side! A window gets even less, since the solid angle is only a small portion. Then you have got the problem that scattered thermal doesn't concentrate like direct radiation as a "pane shaped area" in the room like direct sunshine, but is diffuse and spread over large wall areas like light on a cloudy day, diluting the exposure to objects in a room by a large factor (equal to the window area divided by the effective area of exposed surfaces in the room, roughly half the area of the floor, ceiling, and four walls, allowing for the cosine of the angles for the spreading of the calories per unit area)! No mention of any of this by Glasstone, and no use of it in any of the biased folk who exaggerate thermal effects!
How to achieve peace through tested, proved and practical declassified countermeasures against the effects of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and conventional weapons. Credible deterrence through simple, effective protection against invasions and collateral damage. Discussions of the facts as opposed to inaccurate, misleading lies of the "disarm or be annihilated" political dogma variety. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda debunked by the hard facts. Walls not wars. Walls bring people together by stopping attacks by "divide and rule" style divisive terrorists, contrary to simplistic Vatican propaganda.
Historically, it has been proved that having weapons is not enough to guarantee a reasonable measure of safety from terrorism and rogue states; countermeasures are also needed, both to make any deterrent credible and to negate or at least mitigate the effects of a terrorist attack. Some people who wear seatbelts die in car crashes; some people who are taken to hospital in ambulances, even in peace-time, die. Sometimes, lifebelts and lifeboats cannot save lives at sea. This lack of a 100% success rate in saving lives doesn't disprove the value of everyday precautions or of hospitals and medicine. Hospitals don't lull motorists into a false sense of security, causing them to drive faster and cause more accidents. Like-minded ‘arguments’ against ABM and civil defense are similarly vacuous.
‘As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile-defense construction in Europe will be removed.’
‘The [ABM] treaty was in 1972 ... The theory ... supporting the ABM treaty [which prohibits ABM, thus making nations vulnerable to terrorism] ... that it will prevent an arms race ... is perfect nonsense because we have had an arms race all the time we have had the ABM treaty, and we have seen the greatest increase in proliferation of nuclear weapons that we have ever had. ... So the ABM treaty preventing an arms race is total nonsense. ...
‘The Patriot was not a failure in the Gulf War - the Patriot was one of the things which defeated the Scud and in effect helped us win the Gulf War. One or two of the shots went astray but that is true of every weapon system that has ever been invented. ...
‘President Bush said that we were going ahead with the defensive system but we would make sure that nobody felt we had offensive intentions because we would accompany it by a unilateral reduction of our nuclear arsenal. It seems to me to be a rather clear statement that proceeding with the missile defence system would mean fewer arms of this kind.
‘You have had your arms race all the time that the ABM treaty was in effect and now you have an enormous accumulation and increase of nuclear weapons and that was your arms race promoted by the ABM treaty. Now if you abolish the ABM treaty you are not going to get another arms race - you have got the arms already there - and if you accompany the missile defence construction with the unilateral reduction of our own nuclear arsenal then it seems to me you are finally getting some kind of inducement to reduce these weapons.’
Before the ABM system is in place, and afterwards if ABM fails to be 100% effective in an attack, or is bypassed by terrorists using a bomb in a suitcase or in a ship, civil defense is required and can be effective at saving lives:
‘Paradoxically, the more damaging the effect, that is the farther out its lethality stretches, the more can be done about it, because in the last fall of its power it covers vast areas, where small mitigations will save very large numbers of people.’
‘The purpose of a book is to save people [the] time and effort of digging things out for themselves. ... we have tried to leave the reader with something tangible – what a certain number of calories, roentgens, etc., means in terms of an effect on the human being. ... we must think of the people we are writing for.’
“FY 1997 Plans: ... Provide text to update Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... Update the unclassified textbook entitled, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. ... Continue revision of Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... FY1999 Plans ... Disseminate updated The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.”
‘During World War II many large cities in England, Germany, and Japan were subjected to terrific attacks by high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Yet, when proper steps had been taken for the protection of the civilian population and for the restoration of services after the bombing, there was little, if any, evidence of panic. It is the purpose of this book to state the facts concerning the atomic bomb, and to make an objective, scientific analysis of these facts. It is hoped that as a result, although it may not be feasible completely to allay fear, it will at least be possible to avoid panic.’
‘The consequences of a multiweapon nuclear attack would certainly be grave ... Nevertheless, recovery should be possible if plans exist and are carried out to restore social order and to mitigate the economic disruption.’
‘Suppose the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had been 1,000 times as powerful ... It could not have killed 1,000 times as many people, but at most the entire population of Hiroshima ... [regarding the hype about various nuclear "overkill" exaggerations] there is enough water in the oceans to drown everyone ten times.’
In 1996, half a century after the nuclear detonations, data on cancers from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was published by D. A. Pierce et al. of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF (Radiation Research vol. 146 pp. 1-27; Science vol. 272, pp. 632-3) for 86,572 survivors, of whom 60% had received bomb doses of over 5 mSv (or 500 millirem in old units) suffering 4,741 cancers of which only 420 were due to radiation, consisting of 85 leukemias and 335 solid cancers.
‘Today we have a population of 2,383 [radium dial painter] cases for whom we have reliable body content measurements. . . . All 64 bone sarcoma [cancer] cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy [1,000 rads], while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy.’
‘... it is important to note that, given the effects of a few seconds of irradiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a threshold near 200 mSv may be expected for leukemia and some solid tumors. [Sources: UNSCEAR, Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation, New York, 1994; W. F. Heidenreich, et al., Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1999), p. 205; and B. L. Cohen, Radiat. Res., vol. 149 (1998), p. 525.] For a protracted lifetime natural exposure, a threshold may be set at a level of several thousand millisieverts for malignancies, of 10 grays for radium-226 in bones, and probably about 1.5-2.0 Gy for lung cancer after x-ray and gamma irradiation. [Sources: G. Jaikrishan, et al., Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. S149 (for natural exposure); R. D. Evans, Health Physics, vol. 27 (1974), p. 497 (for radium-226); H. H. Rossi and M. Zaider, Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1997), p. 85 (for radiogenic lung cancer).] The hormetic effects, such as a decreased cancer incidence at low doses and increased longevity, may be used as a guide for estimating practical thresholds and for setting standards. ...
‘Though about a hundred of the million daily spontaneous DNA damages per cell remain unrepaired or misrepaired, apoptosis, differentiation, necrosis, cell cycle regulation, intercellular interactions, and the immune system remove about 99% of the altered cells. [Source: R. D. Stewart, Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. 101.] ...
‘[Due to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986] as of 1998 (according to UNSCEAR), a total of 1,791 thyroid cancers in children had been registered. About 93% of the youngsters have a prospect of full recovery. [Source: C. R. Moir and R. L. Telander, Seminars in Pediatric Surgery, vol. 3 (1994), p. 182.] ... The highest average thyroid doses in children (177 mGy) were accumulated in the Gomel region of Belarus. The highest incidence of thyroid cancer (17.9 cases per 100,000 children) occurred there in 1995, which means that the rate had increased by a factor of about 25 since 1987.
‘This rate increase was probably a result of improved screening [not radiation!]. Even then, the incidence rate for occult thyroid cancers was still a thousand times lower than it was for occult thyroid cancers in nonexposed populations (in the US, for example, the rate is 13,000 per 100,000 persons, and in Finland it is 35,600 per 100,000 persons). Thus, given the prospect of improved diagnostics, there is an enormous potential for detecting yet more [fictitious] "excess" thyroid cancers. In a study in the US that was performed during the period of active screening in 1974-79, it was determined that the incidence rate of malignant and other thyroid nodules was greater by 21-fold than it had been in the pre-1974 period. [Source: Z. Jaworowski, 21st Century Science and Technology, vol. 11 (1998), issue 1, p. 14.]’
‘Professor Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to the accumulated dose of radiation. ... Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957 Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress.’ – Abstract of thesis by Jennifer Caron, Edward Lewis and Radioactive Fallout: the Impact of Caltech Biologists Over Nuclear Weapons Testing in the 1950s and 60s, Caltech, January 2003.
Dr John F. Loutit of the Medical Research Council, Harwell, England, in 1962 wrote a book called Irradiation of Mice and Men (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London), discrediting the pseudo-science from geneticist Edward Lewis on pages 61, and 78-79:
‘... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls. …
‘What Lewis did, and which I have not copied, was to include in his table another group - spontaneous incidence of leukemia (Brooklyn, N.Y.) - who are taken to have received only natural background radiation throughout life at the very low dose-rate of 0.1-0.2 rad per year: the best estimate is listed as 2 x 10-6 like the others in the table. But the value of 2 x 10-6 was not calculated from the data as for the other groups; it was merely adopted. By its adoption and multiplication with the average age in years of Brooklyners - 33.7 years and radiation dose per year of 0.1-0.2 rad - a mortality rate of 7 to 13 cases per million per year due to background radiation was deduced, or some 10-20 per cent of the observed rate of 65 cases per million per year. ...
‘All these points are very much against the basic hypothesis of Lewis of a linear relation of dose to leukemic effect irrespective of time. Unhappily it is not possible to claim for Lewis’s work as others have done, “It is now possible to calculate - within narrow limits - how many deaths from leukemia will result in any population from an increase in fall-out or other source of radiation” [Leading article in Science, vol. 125, p. 963, 1957]. This is just wishful journalese.
‘The burning questions to me are not what are the numbers of leukemia to be expected from atom bombs or radiotherapy, but what is to be expected from natural background .... Furthermore, to obtain estimates of these, I believe it is wrong to go to [1950s inaccurate, dose rate effect ignoring, data from] atom bombs, where the radiations are qualitatively different [i.e., including effects from neutrons] and, more important, the dose-rate outstandingly different.’
‘From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies [by Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller and other geneticists who worked on plants, who falsely hyped their insect and plant data as valid for mammals like humans during the June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on fallout effects], it appeared that the number (or frequency) of mutations in a given population ... is proportional to the total dose ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions need to be revised, at least for mammals. [Mammals are biologically closer to humans, in respect to DNA repair mechanisms, than short-lived insects whose life cycles are too small to have forced the evolutionary development of advanced DNA repair mechanisms, unlike mammals that need to survive for decades before reproducing.] When exposed to X-rays or gamma rays, the mutation frequency in these animals has been found to be dependent on the exposure (or dose) rate ...
‘At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 R/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. [Emphasis added.] There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent ... with adult female mice ... a delay of at least seven weeks between exposure to a substantial dose of radiation, either neutrons or gamma rays, and conception causes the mutation frequency in the offspring to drop almost to zero. ... recovery in the female members of the population would bring about a substantial reduction in the 'load' of mutations in subsequent generations.’
George Bernard Shaw cynically explains groupthink brainwashing bias:
‘We cannot help it because we are so constituted that we always believe finally what we wish to believe. The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed, we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against, but that this evidence was staring us in the face all the time.’
From the essay titled ‘What is Science?’ by Professor Richard P. Feynman, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and published in The Physics Teacher, vol. 7, issue 6, 1968, pp. 313-20:
‘... great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
‘We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields - radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners' airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. ... you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’
Richard P. Feynman, ‘This Unscientific Age’, in The Meaning of It All, Penguin Books, London, 1998, pages 106-9:
‘Now, I say if a man is absolutely honest and wants to protect the populace from the effects of radioactivity, which is what our scientific friends often say they are trying to do, then he should work on the biggest number, not on the smallest number, and he should try to point out that the [natural cosmic] radioactivity which is absorbed by living in the city of Denver is so much more serious [than the smaller doses from nuclear explosions] ... that all the people of Denver ought to move to lower altitudes.'
Feynman is not making a point about low level radiation effects, but about the politics of ignoring the massive natural background radiation dose, while provoking hysteria over much smaller measured fallout pollution radiation doses. Why is the anti-nuclear lobby so concerned about banning nuclear energy - which is not possible even in principle since most of our nuclear radiation is from the sun and from supernova debris contaminating the Earth from the explosion that created the solar system circa 4,540 million years ago - when they could cause much bigger radiation dose reductions to the population by concentrating on the bigger radiation source, natural background radiation. It is possible to shield natural background radiation by the air, e.g. by moving the population of high altitude cities to lower altitudes where there is more air between the people and outer space, or banning the use of high-altitude jet aircraft. The anti-nuclear lobby, as Feynman stated back in the 1960s, didn't crusade to reduce the bigger dose from background radiation. Instead they chose to argue against the much smaller doses from fallout pollution. Feynman's argument is still today falsely interpreted as a political statement, when it is actually exposing pseudo-science and countering political propaganda. It is still ignored by the media. It has been pointed out by Senator Hickenlooper on page 1060 of the May-June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man:
‘I presume all of us would earnestly hope that we never had to test atomic weapons ... but by the same token I presume that we want to save thousands of lives in this country every year and we could just abolish the manufacture of [road accident causing] automobiles ...’
Dihydrogen monoxide is a potentially very dangerous chemical containing hydrogen and oxygen which has caused numerous severe burns by scalding and deaths by drowning, contributes to the greenhouse effect, accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals, and contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape: 'Dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.'
Protein P53, discovered only in 1979, is encoded by gene TP53, which occurs on human chromosome 17. P53 also occurs in other mammals including mice, rats and dogs. P53 is one of the proteins which continually repairs breaks in DNA, which easily breaks at body temperature: the DNA in each cell of the human body suffers at least two single strand breaks every second, and one double strand (i.e. complete double helix) DNA break occurs at least once every 2 hours (5% of radiation-induced DNA breaks are double strand breaks, while 0.007% of spontaneous DNA breaks at body temperature are double strand breaks)! Cancer occurs when several breaks in DNA happen to occur by chance at nearly the same time, giving several loose strand ends at once, which repair proteins like P53 then repair incorrectly, causing a mutation which can be proliferated somatically. This cannot occur when only one break occurs, because only two loose ends are produced, and P53 will reattach them correctly. But if low-LET ionising radiation levels are increased to a certain extent, causing more single strand breaks, P53 works faster and is able deal with faster breaks as they occur, so that multiple broken strand ends do not arise. This prevents DNA strands being repaired incorrectly, and prevents cancer - a result of mutation caused by faults in DNA - from arising. Too much radiation of course overloads the P53 repair mechanism, and then it cannot repair breaks as they occur, so multiple breaks begin to appear and loose ends of DNA are wrongly connected by P53, causing an increased cancer risk.
1. DNA-damaging free radicals are equivalent to a source of sparks which is always present naturally.
2. Cancer is equivalent the fire you get if the sparks are allowed to ignite the gasoline, i.e. if the free radicals are allowed to damage DNA without the damage being repaired.
3. Protein P53 is equivalent to a fire suppression system which is constantly damping out the sparks, or repairing the damaged DNA so that cancer doesn’t occur.
In this way of thinking, the ‘cause’ of cancer will be down to a failure of a DNA repairing enzyme like protein P53 to repair the damage.
'For the mindset that engendered and enables this situation, which jeopardizes the existence of the United States as a nation as well as the lives of millions of its citizens, some American physicians and certain prestigious medical organizations bear a heavy responsibility.
Charles J. Hitch and Roland B. McKean of the RAND Corporation in their 1960 book The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, pp. 310-57:
‘With each side possessing only a small striking force, a small amount of cheating would give one side dominance over the other, and the incentive to cheat and prepare a preventative attack would be strong ... With each side possessing, say, several thousand missiles, a vast amount of cheating would be necessary to give one side the ability to wipe out the other’s striking capability. ... the more extensive a disarmament agreement is, the smaller the force that a violator would have to hide in order to achieve complete domination. Most obviously, “the abolition of the weapons necessary in a general or ‘unlimited’ war” would offer the most insuperable obstacles to an inspection plan, since the violator could gain an overwhelming advantage from the concealment of even a few weapons.’
Disarmament after World War I caused the following problem which led to World War II (reported by Winston S. Churchill in the London Daily Express newspaper of November 1, 1934):
‘Germany is arming secretly, illegally and rapidly. A reign of terror exists in Germany to keep secret the feverish and terrible preparations they are making.’
British Prime Minister Thatcher's address to the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament on 23 June 1982, where she pointed out that in the years since the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 million people had been killed by 140 non-nuclear conflicts:
‘The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. It is the disposition on the part of some states to impose change on others by resorting to force against other nations ... Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace.’
J. D. Culshaw, the then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his article in the Scientific Advisory Branch journal Fission Fragments, September 1972 (issue No. 19), classified 'Restricted':
'Apart from those who don't want to know or can't be bothered, there seem to be three major schools of thought about the nature of a possible Third World War ...
* 'The first group think of something like World War II but a little worse ...
* '... the second of World War II but very much worse ...
* 'and the third group think in terms of a catastrophe ...
'When the Armageddon concept is in favour, the suggestion that such problems exist leads to "way out" research on these phenomena, and it is sufficient to mention a new catastrophic threat [e.g., 10 years later this was done by Sagan with "nuclear winter" hype, which turned out to be fake because modern concrete cities can't produce firestorms like 1940s wooden-built areas of Hamburg, Dresden and Hiroshima] to stimulate research into the possibilities of it arising. The underlying appeal of this concept is that if one could show that the execution of all out nuclear, biological or chemical warfare would precipitate the end of the world, no one but a mad man would be prepared to initiate such a war. [However, as history proves, plenty of mad men end up gaining power and leading countries into wars.]'
J. K. S. Clayton, then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his introduction, entitled The Challenge - Why Home Defence?, to the 1977 Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch Training Manual for Scientific Advisers:
'Since 1945 we have had nine wars - in Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam, between China and India, China and Russia, India and Pakistan and between the Arabs and Israelis on three occasions. We have had confrontations between East and West over Berlin, Formosa and Cuba. There have been civil wars or rebellions in no less than eleven countries and invasions or threatened invasions of another five. Whilst it is not suggested that all these incidents could have resulted in major wars, they do indicate the aptitude of mankind to resort to a forceful solution of its problems, sometimes with success. ...'
It is estimated that Mongol invaders exterminated 35 million Chinese between 1311-40, without modern weapons. Communist Chinese killed 26.3 million dissenters between 1949 and May 1965, according to detailed data compiled by the Russians on 7 April 1969. The Soviet communist dictatorship killed 40 million dissenters, mainly owners of small farms, between 1917-59. Conventional (non-nuclear) air raids on Japan killed 600,000 during World War II. The single incendiary air raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 killed 140,000 people (more than the total for nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined) at much less than the $2 billion expense of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs! Non-nuclear air raids on Germany during World War II killed 593,000 civilians. The argument that the enemy will continue stocking megaton fallout weapons if we go to cleaner weapons is irrelevant for deterrence, since we're not planning to start war, just to credibly deter invasions. You should not try to lower your standards of warfare to those of your enemy to appease groupthink taboos, or you will end up like Britain's leaders in the 1930s, trying to collaborate with fascists for popular applause.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: ‘My Lords, if we are going into the question of lethality of weapons and seek thereby to isolate the nuclear as distinct from the so-called conventional range, is there not a danger that the public may think that Vimy, Passchendaele and Dresden were all right—sort of tea parties—and that nuclear war is something which in itself is unacceptable?’
Lord Trefgarne: ‘My Lords, the policy of making Europe, or the rest of the world, safe for conventional war is not one that I support.’
Mr. Bill Walker (Tayside, North): ‘I remind the House that more people died at Stalingrad than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Yet people talk about fighting a conventional war in Europe as if it were acceptable. One rarely sees demonstrations by the so-called peace movement against a conventional war in Europe, but it could be nothing but ghastly and horrendous. The casualties would certainly exceed those at Stalingrad, and that cannot be acceptable to anyone who wants peace’
On 29 October 1982, Thatcher stated of the Berlin Wall: ‘In every decade since the war the Soviet leaders have been reminded that their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles ... one day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.’
On 22 November 1990, she said: ‘Today, we have a Europe ... where the threat to our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact has been removed; where the Berlin Wall has been torn down and the Cold War is at an end. These immense changes did not come about by chance. They have been achieved by strength and resolution in defence, and by a refusal ever to be intimidated.’
‘... peace cannot be guaranteed absolutely. Nobody can be certain, no matter what policies this or any other Government were to adopt, that the United Kingdom would never again be attacked. Also we cannot tell what form such an attack might take. Current strategic thinking suggests that if war were to break out it would start with a period of conventional hostilities of uncertain duration which might or might not escalate to nuclear conflict. ... while nuclear weapons exist there must always be a chance, however small, that they will be used against us [like gas bombs in World War II]. ... as a consequence of war between other nations in which we were not involved fall out from nuclear explosions could fall on a neutral Britain. ... conventional war is not the soft option that is sometimes suggested. It is also too easily forgotten that in World War II some 50 million people died and that conventional weapons have gone on killing people ever since 1945 without respite.’ - - The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Lord Gray of Contin), House of Lords debate on Civil Defence (General Local Authority Functions) Regulations, Hansard, vol. 444, cc. 523-49, 1 November 1983.
‘All of us are living in the light and warmth of a huge hydrogen bomb, 860,000 miles across and 93 million miles away, which is in a state of continuous explosion.’ - Dr Isaac Asimov.
‘Dr Edward Teller remarked recently that the origin of the earth was somewhat like the explosion of the atomic bomb...’ – Dr Harold C. Urey, The Planets: Their Origin and Development, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p. ix.
‘But compared with a supernova a hydrogen bomb is the merest trifle. For a supernova is equal in violence to about a million million million million hydrogen bombs all going off at the same time.’ – Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), The Nature of the Universe, Pelican Books, London, 1963, p. 75.
‘In fact, physicists find plenty of interesting and novel physics in the environment of a nuclear explosion. Some of the physical phenomena are valuable objects of research, and promise to provide further understanding of nature.’ – Dr Harold L. Brode, The RAND Corporation, ‘Review of Nuclear Weapons Effects,’ Annual Review of Nuclear Science, Volume 18, 1968, pp. 153-202.
‘It seems that similarities do exist between the processes of formation of single particles from nuclear explosions and formation of the solar system from the debris of a [4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, type Ia] supernova explosion. We may be able to learn much more about the origin of the earth, by further investigating the process of radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons tests.’ – Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001), University of Arkansas, ‘Radioactive Fallout in Astronomical Settings: Plutonium-244 in the Early Environment of the Solar System,’ pages 83-96 of Radionuclides in the Environment: A Symposium Sponsored By the Division of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology At the 155th Meeting of the American Chemical Society, San Francisco, California, April 1-3, 1968, edited by Symposium Chairman Dr Edward C. Freiling (1922-2000) of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Advances in Chemistry Series No. 93, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.
Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001) in 1956 correctly predicted the existence of water-moderated natural nuclear reactors in flooded uranium ore seams, which were discovered in 1972 by French physicist Francis Perrin in three ore deposits at Oklo in Gabon, where sixteen sites operated as natural nuclear reactors with self-sustaining nuclear fission 2,000 million years ago, each lasting several hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW. The radioactive waste they generated remained in situ for a period of 2,000,000,000 years without escaping. They were discovered during investigations into why the U-235 content of the uranium in the ore was only 0.7171% instead of the normal 0.7202%. Some of the ore, in the middle of the natural reactors, had a U-235 isotopic abundance of just 0.440%. Kuroda's brilliant paper is entitled, 'On the Nuclear Physical Stability of the Uranium Minerals', published in the Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 25 (1956), pp. 781–782 and 1295–1296.
A type Ia supernova explosion, always yielding 4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, results from the critical mass effect of the collapse of a white dwarf as soon as its mass exceeds 1.4 solar masses due to matter falling in from a companion star. The degenerate electron gas in the white dwarf is then no longer able to support the pressure from the weight of gas, which collapses, thereby releasing enough gravitational potential energy as heat and pressure to cause the fusion of carbon and oxygen into heavy elements, creating massive amounts of radioactive nuclides, particularly intensely radioactive nickel-56, but half of all other nuclides (including uranium and heavier) are also produced by the 'R' (rapid) process of successive neutron captures by fusion products in supernovae explosions. Type Ia supernovae occur typically every 400 years in the Milky Way galaxy. On 4 July 1054, Chinese astronomers observed in the sky (without optical instruments) the bright supernova in the constellation Taurus which today is still visible as the Crab Nebula through telescopes. The Crab Nebula debris has a diameter now of 7 light years and is still expanding at 800 miles/second. The supernova debris shock wave triggers star formation when it encounters hydrogen gas in space by compressing it and seeding it with debris; bright stars are observed in the Orion Halo, the 300 light year diameter remains of a supernova. It is estimated that when the solar system was forming 4,540 million years ago, a supernova occurred around 100 light years away, and the heavy radioactive debris shock wave expanded at 1,000 miles/second. Most of the heavy elements including iron, silicon and calcium in the Earth and people are the stable end products of originally radioactive decay chains from the space burst fallout of a 7 x 1026 megatons thermonuclear explosion, created by fusion and successive neutron captures after the implosion of a white dwarf; a supernova explosion.
How would a 1055 megaton hydrogen bomb explosion differ from the big bang? Ignorant answers biased in favour of curved spacetime (ignoring quantum gravity!) abound, such as claims that explosions can’t take place in ‘outer space’ (disagreeing with the facts from nuclear space bursts by Russia and America in 1962, not to mention natural supernova explosions in space!) and that explosions produce sound waves in air by definition! There are indeed major differences in the nuclear reactions between the big bang and a nuclear bomb. But it is helpful to notice the solid physical fact that implosion systems suggest the mechanism of gravitation: in implosion, TNT is well-known to produce an inward force on a bomb core, but Newton's 3rd law says there is an equal and opposite reaction force outward. In fact, you can’t have a radially outward force without an inward reaction force! It’s the rocket principle. The rocket accelerates (with force F = ma) forward by virtue of the recoil from accelerating the exhaust gas (with force F = -ma) in the opposite direction! Nothing massive accelerates without an equal and opposite reaction force. Applying this fact to the measured 6 x 10-10 ms-2 ~ Hc cosmological acceleration of matter radially outward from observers in the universe which was predicted accurately in 1996 and later observationally discovered in 1999 (by Perlmutter, et al.), we find an outward force F = ma and inward reaction force by the 3rd law. The inward force allows quantitative predictions, and is mediated by gravitons, predicting gravitation in a checkable way (unlike string theory, which is just a landscape of 10500 different perturbative theories and so can’t make any falsifiable predictions about gravity). So it seems as if nuclear explosions do indeed provide helpful analogies to natural features of the world, and the mainstream lambda-CDM model of cosmology - with its force-fitted unobserved ad hoc speculative ‘dark energy’ - ignores and sweeps under the rug major quantum gravity effects which increase the physical understanding of particle physics, particularly force unification and the relation of gravitation to the existing electroweak SU(2) x U(1) section of the Standard Model of fundamental forces.
Even Einstein grasped the possibility that general relativity's lambda-CDM model is at best just a classical approximation to quantum field theory, at the end of his life when he wrote to Besso in 1954:
‘I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the [classical differential equation] field principle, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, [non-quantum] gravitation theory included ...’
‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Professor Richard P. Feynman (quoted by Professor Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, New York, 2006, p. 307).
‘The expression of dissenting views may not seem like much of a threat to a powerful organization, yet sometimes it triggers an amazingly hostile response. The reason is that a single dissenter can puncture an illusion of unanimity. ... Among those suppressed have been the engineers who tried to point out problems with the Challenger space shuttle that caused it to blow up. More fundamentally, suppression is a denial of the open dialogue and debate that are the foundation of a free society. Even worse than the silencing of dissidents is the chilling effect such practices have on others. For every individual who speaks out, numerous others decide to play it safe and keep quiet. More serious than external censorship is the problem of self-censorship.’
— Professor Brian Martin, University of Wollongong, 'Stamping Out Dissent', Newsweek, 26 April 1993, pp. 49-50
In 1896, Sir James Mackenzie-Davidson asked Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895: ‘What did you think?’ Röntgen replied: ‘I did not think, I investigated.’ The reason? Cathode ray expert J. J. Thomson in 1894 saw glass fluorescence far from a tube, but due to prejudice (expert opinion) he avoided investigating that X-ray evidence! ‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Richard Feynman, in Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006, p. 307.
Mathematical symbols in this blog: your computer’s browser needs access to standard character symbol sets to display Greek symbols for mathematical physics. If you don’t have the symbol character sets installed, the density symbol 'r' (Rho) will appear as 'r' and the 'p' (Pi) symbol will as 'p', causing confusion with the use of 'r' for radius and 'p' for momentum in formulae. This problem exists with Mozilla Firefox 3, but not with Microsoft Explorer which displays Greek symbols.
Mean yield of the 5,192 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed Russian nuclear stockpile as of January 2009: 0.317 Mt. Total yield: 1,646 Mt.
Mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile as of January 2007: 0.257 Mt. Total yield: 1,172 Mt.
For diffraction damage where damage areas scale as the two-thirds power of explosive yield, this stockpile's area damage potential can be compared to the 20,000,000 conventional bombs of 100 kg size (2 megatons of TNT equivalent total energy) dropped on Germany during World War II: (Total nuclear bomb blast diffraction damaged ground area)/(Total conventional blast diffraction damaged ground area to Germany during World War II) = [4,552*(0.257 Mt)2/3]/[20,000,000*(0.0000001 Mt)2/3] = 1,840/431 = 4.3. Thus, although the entire U.S. stockpile has a TNT energy equivalent to 586 times that of the 2 megatons of conventional bombs dropped on Germany in World War II, it is only capable of causing 4.3 times as much diffraction type damage area, because any given amount of explosive energy is far more efficient when distributed over many small explosions than in a single large explosion! Large explosions are inefficient because they cause unintended collateral damage, wasting energy off the target area and injuring or damaging unintended targets!
In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. (Data: Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pages 1-27.) Over 40 years, in 36,500 survivors monitored, there were 176 leukemia deaths which is 89 more than the control (unexposed) group got naturally. There were 4,687 other cancer deaths, but that was merely 339 above the number in the control (unexposed) group, so this is statistically a much smaller rise than the leukemia result. Natural leukemia rates, which are very low in any case, were increased by 51% in the irradiated survivors, but other cancers were merely increased by just 7%. Adding all the cancers together, the total was 4,863 cancers (virtually all natural cancer, nothing whatsoever to do with radiation), which is just 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, the total increase over the natural cancer rate due to bomb exposure was only 9%, spread over a period of 40 years. There was no increase whatsoever in genetic malformations.
‘If defense is neglected these weapons of attack become effective. They become available and desirable in the eyes of an imperialist dictator, even if his means are limited. Weapons of mass destruction could become equalizers between nations big and small, highly developed and primitive, if defense is neglected. If defense is developed and if it is made available for general prevention of war, weapons of aggression will become less desirable. Thus defense makes war itself less probable. ... One psychological defense mechanism against danger is to forget about it. This attitude is as common as it is disastrous. It may turn a limited danger into a fatal difficulty.’
Advice of Robert Watson-Watt (Chief Scientist on the World War II British Radar Project, defending Britain against enemy attacks): ‘Give them the third best to go on with, the second best comes too late, the best never comes.’
All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of dDELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace": "Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.
Update (19 January 2024): Jane Corbin of BBC TV is continuing to publish ill-informed nuclear weapons capabilities nonsense debunked here since 2006 (a summary of some key evidence is linked here), e.g. her 9pm 18 Jan 2024 CND biased propaganda showpiece Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vgq5/nuclear-armageddon-how-close-are-we which claims - from the standpoint of 1980s Greenham Common anti-American CND propaganda - that the world would be safer without nuclear weapons, despite the 1914-18 and 1939-45 trifles that she doesn't even bother to mention, which were only ended with nuclear deterrence. Moreover, she doesn't mention the BBC's Feb 1927 WMD exaggerating broadcast by Noel-Baker which used the false claim that there is no defence against mass destruction by gas bombs to argue for UK disarmament, something that later won him a Nobel Peace Prize and helped ensure the UK had no deterrent against the Nazis until too late to set off WWII (Nobel peace prizes were also awarded to others for lying, too, for instance Norman Angell whose pre-WWI book The Great Illusion helped ensure Britain's 1914 Liberal party Cabinet procrastinated on deciding what to do if Belgium was invaded, and thus failed deter the Kaiser from triggering the First World War!). The whole basis of her show was to edit out any realism whatsoever regarding the topic which is the title of her programme! No surprise there, then. Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia are currently designing the W93 nuclear warhead for SLBM's to replace the older W76 and W88, and what she should do next time is to address the key issue of what that design should be to deter dictators without risking escalation via collateral damage: "To enhance the flexibility and responsiveness of our nuclear forces as directed in the 2018 NPR, we will pursue two supplemental capabilities to existing U.S. nuclear forces: a low-yield SLBM warhead (W76-2) capability and a modern nuclear sea launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) to address regional deterrence challenges that have resulted from increasing Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities. These supplemental capabilities are necessary to correct any misperception an adversary can escalate their way to victory, and ensure our ability to provide a strategic deterrent. Russia’s increased reliance on non-treaty accountable strategic and theater nuclear weapons and evolving doctrine of limited first-use in a regional conflict, give evidence of the increased possibility of Russia’s employment of nuclear weapons. ... The NNSA took efforts in 2019 to address a gap identified in the 2018 NPR by converting a small number of W76-1s into the W76-2 low-yield variant. ... In 2019, our weapon modernization programs saw a setback when reliability issues emerged with commercial off-the-shelf non-nuclear components intended for the W88 Alteration 370 program and the B61-12 LEP. ... Finally, another just-in-time program is the W80-4 LEP, which remains in synchronized development with the LRSO delivery system. ... The Nuclear Weapons Council has established a requirement for the W93 ... If deterrence fails, our combat-ready force is prepared now to deliver a decisive response anywhere on the globe ..." - Testimony of Commander Charles Richard, US Strategic Command, to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 13 Feb 2020. This issue of how to use nuclear weapons safely to deter major provocations that escalate to horrific wars is surely is the key issue humanity should be concerned with, not the CND time-machine of returning to a non-nuclear 1914 or 1939! Corbin doesn't address it; she uses debunked old propaganda tactics to avoid the real issues and the key facts.
For example, Corbin quotes only half a sentence by Kennedy in his TV speech of 22 October 1962: "it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States", and omits the second half of the sentence, which concludes: "requiring a full retalitory response upon the Soviet Union." Kennedy was clearly using US nuclear superiority in 1962 to deter Khrushchev from allowing the Castro regime to start any nuclear war with America! By chopping up Kennedy's sentence, Corbin juggles the true facts of history to meet the CND agenda of "disarm or be annihilated." Another trick is her decision to uncritically interview CND biased anti-civil defense fanatics like the man (Professor Freedman) who got Bill Massey of the Sunday Express to water down my article debunking pro-war CND type "anti-nuclear" propaganda lies on civil defense in 1995! Massey reported to me that Freedman claimed civil defense is no use against a H-bomb, which he claims is cheaper than dirt cheap shelters, exactly what Freedman wrote in his deceptive letter published in the 26 March 1980 Times newspaper: "for far less expenditure the enemy could make a mockery of all this by increasing the number of attacking weapons", which completely ignores the Russian dual-use concept of simply adding blast doors to metro tubes and underground car parks, etc. In any case, civil defense makes deterrence credible as even the most hard left wingers like Duncan Campbell acknowledged on page 5 of War Plan UK (Paladin Books, London, 1983): "Civil defence ... is a means, if need be, of putting that deterrence policy, for those who believe in it, into practical effect."
6 Comments:
Very true. It's hard to get real "free press", or to be sure you really have it, when both the government and foreign powers are covertly bribing and blackmailing newspapers etc into presenting the news they want distributed. Your blog seems to provide another source of information to add to the (sometimes false) data from more "official" sources. This post dispels the idea that 5 psi causes widespread mortality, even in normal houses. Just as importantly, if not more so, it compares the peak side-on overpressures for damage by 20 kt and .002 kt bursts. Thus, a rough yet credible comparison can be made between normal air raids and nuclear attack. As I have said before, a 1 mt airburst at 7600 ft could cause "grade A" damage out to maybe 9000 ft. V-2 only did this to 70 ft. Hence, the 1.3 mt of conventional air raids on Germany were equivalent to roughly 1300000/(70/9000)^2=79 individual 1 mt hits. Due to nuclear weapons and other considerations such as current political alliances, I fit into JD Culshaw's second group. I think that if there were another world war in the near future, it would be like ww2 but very much worse. I would guess anywhere from 100 million to a billion deaths, and not all from nukes. Starvation, disease, genocide, and conventional and guerilla warfare would all likely be important. I'm not trying to fear monger. A war such as this can be deterred by both ofensive and defensive methods, as well as peaceful cooperation, when appropriate. You might also be interested in William H Hessler's collier article "The A-Bomb Won't Do What You Think!" Hessler recognizes that the huge number of injuries and deaths in Japan were due to the lack of warning. Being that the article was written in the late 1940's, he doesn't understand land surface burst fallout. Hessler describes that 10 devices, each with a tenth the power used at nagasaki, would be more militarily effective than the single Fat Man weapon was. I might add that this does have to do with the scientifically calculated destructive power of these weapons. If dropped "in a random pattern" on "a considerable area of general strategic importance", the barrage of smaller devices would be 2.15 times as effective. For destroying a small target area, a single small device would be better than a single big one, because, as describedin your previous blog post, it would not cause as much collateral damage. Hessler comes to the same conclusion you have: while nuclear weapons are certainly powerful, and in some cases quite effective, they cannot always be counted on to produce complete devastation in every military situation. As I have said before, this also means that they cannot be relied on, by themselves, to deter all enemies.
Anonymous:
I'm not happy including claims that you make such as: "As I have said before, a 1 mt airburst at 7600 ft could cause "grade A" damage out to maybe 9000 ft. V-2 only did this to 70 ft. Hence, the 1.3 mt of conventional air raids on Germany were equivalent to roughly 1300000/(70/9000)^2=79 individual 1 mt hits."
You shouldn't make claims like that without stating what types of building you refer to (modern city steel frame, reinforced concrete, or brick) and what their density is per unit area for calculations of blast attenuation (energy loss and upward diffraction of energy) due to scattering of blast energy upwards into the free air, and also damage done as the blast encounters successive buildings in travelling outwards along any particular radial line from ground zero. Please take more care, in any future comments, to spell out what assumptions you make in back-of-the-envelope calculations. Thank you!
Thankyou for not censoring my comment. When I said "damage out to maybe 9000 ft ", I was talking about damage to brick buildings, in the region of regular reflection. At that range, the angle of incidence of the blast relative to the ground is about 40 degrees, and the distance the blast must travel through any given kind of building before hitting the ground is (height of building)/sin40°, regardless of the scale of the damage (so long as the buildings are much shorter than the burst altitude). According to Philip J. Dolan's 1972 em-1, the blast from a 760 ft scaled height burst does not form a mach stem "traveling outwards along any particular radial line from ground zero" until it reaches a scaled ground range of 900 ft. After that, the amount of attenuation will increase as an exponential function of the TRUE distance (not scaled distance) from the start of the mach stem at 900 W^1/3 ft from ground zero. Thus, in the Mach stem, larger yields are more attenuated. I don't know exactly how to calculate such attenuation, but I know that for ~60m tall brick buildings and 40° incidence, the path through the buildings is only maybe 100 m. Of course, such a high airburst will have almost no effect on concrete buildings. This is why the lethal range within such buildings at Hiroshima was only .12 miles. At nagasaki, there was at least moderate stuctural damage and occasional mortality out to .3 miles, according to Dikewood's AD653922 Analysis Of Japanese Nuclear Casualty Data and ADA219691 Japanese Nuclear Casualty Data Combined Injury And Mortality Analysis. For a 580 ft scaled HOB, the mach stem reaches out to perhaps 580ft with almost 30psi. I'm not sure about the degree of attenuation in a surface burst, although I attempted to estimate this in a previous comment with many inaccurate assumptions and a large, confusing table. I only used the airburst with brick buildings to give a rough comparison between normal air raids and nuclear attack. Positive phase duration appears to make a real difference I also found it interesting that "Grade B" damage (6-15 psi for brick buildings and long blast durations) only causes 7.5% mortality (maybe even less if the walls blow outward) and that simple duck and cover reduced this to only 2.7%. Of course, for a low airburst or ground burst near a city, attenuation might make this actual area much smaller indeed, so that even this countermeasure would be largely unnecessary. That would be very good. Better, of course, would be if the facts were disseminated and prevented a nuclear war to begin with:-) When I told my estimates for a ww3,my point was that it would be bad, and not soley due to nuclear conflict, but society would still be able to recover. Great post!
The 1957 edition of Glasstone's "Effects of nuclear weapons" is the only one to give an honest analytical blast effects description, including a formula for maximum displacement of a building wall by a blast wave. In addition, the nomographs for blast damage in the 1957 edition allow correctly for the effects of blast duration becoming insignificant in the high (megaton yield) range, so that at very high yield the correct criterion for damage is the peak overpressure (or peak dynamic pressure), regardless of the duration. Only at low yields does blast duration have an effect.
This is best seen in chapter 11 (Damage to Structures) of the 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, EM-1, which unfortunately is not available in PDF format although the British Library Document Supply has it on microfiche in an obscure nuclear reports collection (not listed in their online computer catalogue, so you have to email them). However, the key data from Chapter 11 is available in PDF form in Appendix C, Tables C-2 through C-5, which gives the destruction peak overpressures for all the structures, as a function of bomb yield. (I've put all the Appendices to DNA-EM-1 1972 edition on the internet, e.g. internet archive and also linked from the DNA-EM-1 summary/background info on this blog.)
For example, a brick house (structure 11-4 in Table C-2 on page C-10 of DNA-EM-1, 1972) suffers "severe damage (50% collapse risk)" at a constant 5.0 psi peak overpressure for yields from 30 kilotons through 30 megatons. But at lower yields than 30 kt, Dolan shows that the peak overpressure rises to 5.5 psi peak overpressure at 1 kt, 6.5 psi at 0.1 kt, and 7.5 psi at 0.01 kt (or 10 tons of nuclear yield, equivalent for 50% blast to a WWII bomb of 5 tons of TNT conventional explosion).
This proves that for such brick houses, there is actually very little effects from the increasing blast duration (impulse) at higher yields: it reduces the peak overpressure to a a certain value, which then remains constant regardless of further increases in yield. A good way to understand this is to consider the time factor of pressing against a wall, or sitting on a chair: clearly a wall doesn't get pushed over, and a chair doesn't collapse, if the force applied is below the threshold needed to crack it, regardless of the duration of the small force. If it takes 5 psi to knock a wall over, then you can apply 4 psi for as long as you want and it will remain standing! Hence the data in this blog post, and previous posts, really is accurate in extrapolating from WWII damage to nuclear weapons.
Other examples:
DNA-EM-1 data for w3-8 storey reinforced concrete city buildings (type 11-3 in Table C-2) shows 50% collapse (severe damage) at 10 psi peak overpressure for 30 megatons, 11 psi for 1 megaton, 17 psi for 1 kt, and 28 psi peak overpressure for 0.01 kiloton.
DNA-EM-1 data for "moderate damage" (defined as 50% risk of damage beyond economic repair) in Table C-4 is generally two-thirds the peak overpressure needed for severe damage.
Table C-3 with data on peak dynamic (not over) pressures needed for 50% risk of severe damage to more drag-sensitive targets shows that steel frame office buildings with glass walls (structure 11-11) have greatest sensitivity to weapon yield, ranging from 60.0 psi dynamic pressure at 1 kiloton down to just 2.4 psi dynamic pressure at 30 megatons.
The 1957 edition of Glasstone's "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" indicates in Figure 6.41b (when combined with figure 3.94a in the same book) that severe damage (type A damage) to multistory reinforced concrete builds with light walls requires 50 psi peak overpressure for 1 kt yield and 15 psi for 1 megaton, while for multistory steel frame city skyscrapers with glass walls the peak overpressures are 30 psi for 1 kt and 10 psi for 1 megaton.
Yes. Exactly my point! Peak overpressure alone is the criteria above a certain yield. This precise yield depends on the target in question. Blast waves with very high peak overpressures decay from their peak more rapidly than lower overpressure ones, more massive or less rigid buildings respond to loads more slowly, and diffracion loads often last less time than the positive phase itself. In any case, the yield above which overpressure is the only criteria is typically very large. For a house it might be 500 tons of tnt, or a 1 kt nuclear weapon. Above this yield, it will take 6psi to cause partial collapse and 11psi to cause complete collapse regardless of whether the yield is 1kt, 20kt, 1000kt, or 10,000kt. At lower yields, more typical of normal HE,higher pressures are needed. At 1t, it might take 15psi to induce partial collapse and all of 30psi to cause complete collapse. For a charge of 100 kg (.00022kt), the pressures will be even more. For a grenade or small mortar shell of 3.7kg (.0000074kt) to blow a hole in a structure (a task more difficult than collapsing the whole thing at the load bearing joints) probably requires hundreds or thousands of psi. Of course, by that point, metal fragments and direct fireball contact are likely of more importance. In general cube root scaling is good for comparing various kiloton and megaton nuclear yields, but not so good for comparing different subkiloton conventional yields.
I also find it interesting that Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons gives 60 psi dynamic pressure as causing severe damage to steel buildings at 1 kt, but Effects of Nuclear Weapons gives 30 psi overpressure (17psi dynamic pressure?) as the same criterion!
Correction: cube root scaling still predicts overpressure, dynamic pressure, duration, time of arrival, etc just fine at subkiloton yields and even ton and pound yields. What I meant is that the overpressure for a given kind of damage increases as the yield decreases in this range of yields. Thus the cube root scaling law alone will not give an accurate answer when comparing 100 kg and 3.7 kg yields with megaton yields.
Thanks. "For a grenade or small mortar shell of 3.7kg (.0000074kt) to blow a hole in a structure (a task more difficult than collapsing the whole thing at the load bearing joints) probably requires hundreds or thousands of psi. Of course, by that point, metal fragments and direct fireball contact are likely of more importance."
At very low yields, peak overpressure (and peak dynamic pressure) simply fails to last long enough to cause enough deflection to damage the object. That's the only reason that you have to take time (thus impulse) into account there. As I've said before, longer blast duration is actually a benefit for survival in houses because the weight of the room doesn't fall on occupants in a shelter - it gets blown downrange into the yard. So the weight falling on a table shelter roof is reduced in high yield nuclear weapons.
For TNT bombs, as you imply, the metal case - depending on its thickness - picks up energy that would otherwise go into air blast. So metal debris or shrapnel ends up doing most of the damage (cratering and injury to personnel), if the case is properly designed, in a conventional explosion. The air blast energy is reduced due to the kinetic energy gained by the metal debris from the casing surrounding the explosive. The metal jacket in a "pineapple" design hand grenade is given a chunky design - like a chocolate bar - to enable bits to break off predictably with certain size and momentum, so that the effects are reliable.
After college, I was given an unclassified tour of computer simulation software by a UK military research agency in Surrey. They were predicting the radius of injuries for such weapons using very crude mathematical models that ignored air drag on on the shrapnel, and simply took account of gravity. The context was a pretty impressive but partial computer map of Iraq, based on satellite data and ground surveys by personnel to determine how passable the terrain was to tanks, wheeled vehicles, etc. So they had this computer war game simulator, something along the lines of Grand Auto Theft, in which the military could rehearse. The data collection by military personnel was excellent, but the weapons effects predictions looked over simplistic, ignoring air drag on shrapnel.
You see exactly the same crap in Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" where they deleted the final chapter on principles of protection (which was in all earlier editions, 1950, 57, 62 and 64), they deleted the data on how simple whitewash saved the clean Encore nuclear test house from burning in 1953 (while the unpainted and thrash surrounded houses burned at 12 cal/cm sq), and they included a "thermal burns distribution" predictor graph that lacked any discussion of how to include city skyline shielding effects on thermal burns.
Note also that scattered thermal radiation does not offset direct attenuation (contrary to Glasstone 1957-77). Like air scatter from the sun (the blue sky), wide angle distribution of scattered thermal may mathematically be impressive for an imaginary plane in free air, but a solid object gets a surface exposure of only half the scattered radiation on each side! A window gets even less, since the solid angle is only a small portion. Then you have got the problem that scattered thermal doesn't concentrate like direct radiation as a "pane shaped area" in the room like direct sunshine, but is diffuse and spread over large wall areas like light on a cloudy day, diluting the exposure to objects in a room by a large factor (equal to the window area divided by the effective area of exposed surfaces in the room, roughly half the area of the floor, ceiling, and four walls, allowing for the cosine of the angles for the spreading of the calories per unit area)! No mention of any of this by Glasstone, and no use of it in any of the biased folk who exaggerate thermal effects!
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