Groupthink and proliferation: how exaggerating weapons effects encourages proliferation by making such weapons appeal to terrorists and dictators
Summary of this blog post
Lying about the capabilities of aerial bombardment in order to "defend" the false dogma of Lord Grey in 1914, encouraged Hitler to announce his air force in 1935 to intimidate all those who wanted peace. Lying about the effects of aerial bombardment has the effect of encouraging nuclear proliferation since 1945, not reducing it, and such lying simultaneously attacks (in the media-distorted perception) the capabilities of civil defense countermeasures, which proved completely effective where they were (rarely) taken in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as we will demonstrate below to start off with (in an earlier post we analyzed the rapid recovery of both of those cities, despite the fact that 93 other Japanese cities had been firebombed by conventional incendiaries to the same extent in fire-destroyed wood frame housing area as Nagasaki). If the media can be forced to stop lying about nuclear radiation and nuclear weapons effects, and to stop lying that nothing can be done using civil defense, that will do a damn sight more to make the world a safer place than repeating the popular lie of Lord Grey, and that diplomacy will prevent proliferation threats to human life. "Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" policies were extensively applies to the Nazi regime but just encouraged it. "Speak softly but carry a big stick" also encouraged the German invasion of Belgium that caused Britain to declare war on Germany in 1914 (Lord Grey spoke quietly as we shall see; he failed to make it clear in time to Germany that war would result from that action). It also caused, as we shall see, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, where Japan was losing an arms race and felt under pressure to attack sooner rather than later. Weapons do not cause or deter war or terrorism by themselves. There needs to be a credible deterrent, that includes civil defense.
Introduction
Above: the British Mission to Japan in 1945 evaluated the nuclear explosion damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, producing a report called The Effects of the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (linked here, 42.5 MB pdf file). The purpose of the British Mission was for ten British Home Office bomb damage scientists to directly compare the British bomb damage assessment criteria from German air raids upon British cities with conventional bombs to the effects of nuclear weapons. Page 6 states:
"Photographs in this report and elsewhere show great areas of destruction in which, rising here and there like islands, there remain reinforced concrete buildings showing few signs of external damage. There were in fact many reinforced concrete buildings in Hiroshima and a number in Nagasaki. ... 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."
On page 8, the report finds that Japanese wood-frame houses collapsed out to a ground range of 2.0 km in Hiroshima and 2.4 km in Nagasaki, while typical brick type British type only collapsed out to an average distance of 910 metres (at 1.6 km they were standing but irrepairably cracked, at 2.4 km they needed repair before habitation and there was minor damage from 3.2-4.0 km). Page 9 states:
"The provision of air raid shelters throughout Japan was much below European standards. Those along the verges of the wider streets in Hiroshima were comparatively well constructed: they were semi-sunk, about 20 ft. long, had wooden frames, and 1 ft. 6 ins. to 2 ft. of earth cover. One is shown in photograph 17. Exploding so high above them, the bomb damaged none of these shelters.
"In Nagasaki there were no communal shelters except small caves dug in the hillsides. Here most householders had made their own backyard shelters, usually slit trenches or bolt holes covered with a foot or so of earth carried on rough poles and bamboos. These crude shelters, one of which is shown in photograph 18, nevertheless had considerable mass and flexibility, qualities which are valuable in giving protection from blast [better protection is provided by "earth arching", where a weak arched structural support is used during construction to hold up a mound of packed earth, but the earth acts to deflects the load around the weak support when hit by a blast wave]. Most of these shelters had their roofs forced in immediately below the explosion; but the proportion so damaged had fallen to 50 per cent. at 300 yards from the centre of damage, and to zero at about 1/2 mile.
"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 [1.5 million of which were assembled in Britain by September 1939, each sleeping 6 people], properly erected and covered, would have given protection. Brick or concrete surface shelters with adequate reinforcement would have remained safe from collapse. The [indoor] Morrison shelter is [a steel table type shelter] designed only to protect its occupants from the debris load of a [collapsing] house, and this it would have done. Deep shelters such as the refuge provided by the London Underground would have given complete protection."
Page 11: "There were cases where a clump of grass or the leaf of a tree had cast a sharp shadow on otherwise scorched wood. Therefore the most intense flash from the ball of fire had ended in a time less than that required to shrivel vegetation. On the other hand, since direct injuries to the eye-ball were not common, the heat radiation may be presumed to have required a perceptible time to build up to its maximum intensity, during which some people had closed their eyes."
Above: U.S. Army photo showing how a mere leaf of Fatsia japonica attenuated the heat flash enough to prevent scorching to the bitumen on an electric pole near the Meiji Bridge, 1.3 km range, Hiroshima. It didn't even vaporize the leaf before the pulse ended, let alone did it ignite the wooden pole (most photos claiming to show thermal flash radiation effects in Hiroshima and Nagasaki show effects from the fires set off by the blast wave overturning cooking stoves, which developed 30 minutes to 2 hours later).
Page 12: "In general, even thin clothing protected from flashburn. There were a few exceptions, when the skin was burnt through uncharred fabric where the latter was stretched tightly, say over the point of the shoulder. On other occasions, equally rare, clothing caught fire without burning the skin [the flames were easy to put out when the thermal pulse subsided]." Above: photos of a Hiroshima woman (left) with flash burns where the dark pattern lines printed on tight-fitting clothing conducted heat to the skin, and a Nagasaki man (right) with the shadow of his vest burned on his skin; from Figure 1.3 in the January 16, 2009 manual, Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation, developed by the U.S. Homeland Security Council Interagency Policy Coordination Subcommittee for Preparedness & Response to Radiological and Nuclear Threats.
Page 14: "The Japanese had provided fuel for the fires [in buildings] by introducing a mass of wooden detail [also paper screens and bamboo furnishings] into otherwise fireproof buildings. Photograph 20 shows the interior of one of the reinforced concrete buildings of the hospital in Nagasaki, 1/2 mile from the centre of damage. Having resisted the blast, these buildings and their services were denied to the city at a critical time because they were filled with such material as that shown in the photograph: a false lath and plaster ceiling hung on heavy timbers, a wooden floor raised on wooden beams, and plaster walls on battens and laths.
"As a result, about half the occupants were killed or were trapped and died in the fires which broke out nearly everywhere among this material It is a very plain lesson that a fireproof building should not be converted into a major fire risk and a trap for its tenants by ill-chosen fittings."
In order to estimate the casualty rate curve, the British Mission to Japan on page 18 uses detailed survival records from a group of 15,000 Hiroshima school children working throughout the city on the construction of fire breaks and other tasks when the bomb fell in the early morning. Scaling the data to the London population density of 45 people per acre, they calculated on page 19 that 65,000 people would be killed in a British city without evasive action, or 50,000 allowing for the fact that some people would be indoors inside brick rather than wooden buildings. Assuming 15 houses per acre of ground, they then calculated that 30,000 houses would be beyond repair after an Hiroshima type attack on a British city, with another 35,000 needing extensive repair. The British Home Office bombing effects scientists who had seen the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki stated on page 13 of the Home Office Civil Defence Manual of Basic Training, Vol. 2 Pamphlet No. 6, Atomic Warfare (H. M. Stationery Office, 1950):
"If the people in our cities were caught, as were the Japanese, without [credible] warning, before any evacuation had taken place, and with no suitable shelters, the casualties caused by a [Hiroshima or Nagasaki type] high air burst would be formidable [thermal effects would be reduced severely in a surface or low air burst by shadowing due to structures blocking the line-of-sight to the fireball before the blast wave arrival time, and by loss of energy due to crater throwout, etc.]. The British Mission to Japan estimated that under these circumstances as many as 50,000 people might lose their lives in a typical British city with a population density of 45 persons to the acre. Much can be done, however, to mitigate the effects of the bomb and to save life, and it is certain that with adequate advance preparations, including the provision of suitable [WWII type] shelters and with good Civil Defence services, the lives lost could be reduced to a fraction of the number estimated by the British Mission."
That statement had been personally approved in June 1950 by no less than the then British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who contributed a page-long personally signed Foreword to that "Atomic Warfare" pamphlet, explaining concisely that Civil Defence was needed to combat the proliferation of nuclear weapons (click on images for larger view):
1. Hiroshima and Nagasaki effects in wood-frame cities don't apply to modern concrete and steel cities, except for deliberate exaggerations to encourage proliferation and reduce civil defense readiness against terrorist: the most widespread lethal effects are easily mitigated in modern cities
Above: at Hiroshima any opaque object like a hat prevented burns, so if personnel had ducked and covered when they saw the bomb fall, they would have avoided the thermal burns and flying glass injuries which caused the lethal synergism of combined infected wounds and radiation-depressed white blood cell counts, where the radiation exposure would not have caused a lethal effect if unaccompanied by burns and other trauma (see the diagram below). Experiments on glass window breakage similarly show that even just by ducking 10, 20 and 24 degrees angle below the horizontal from behind from a glass window, reduces the number of skin-penetrating, blast-wind accelerated, high velocity glass fragments to a unit area of skin to about 40 %, 15 % and only 10 %, respectively, of the values horizontally behind the window (ref.: page 21 of Dr E. Royce Fletcher's report Glass Fragment Hazard from Windows Broken by Airblast, ADA105824, DNA 5593T, 1980; clothing also provides a measure of protection). This demonstrates that even feeble "duck and cover" reduces not just the thermal flash exposure from nuclear weapons, but also the blast fragment laceration hazard.
Above: Dr Shields Warren (whose factual testimony on radiation hazards to the U.S. Congress in 1957 we discussed in the previous post) and Dr Ashley Webster Oughterson compiled detailed data on the survival of groups of people at various distances in Hiroshima according to the degree of protection they had in their book Medical effects of the atomic bomb in Japan, by the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw Hill, New York, 1956).
The high casualty rates from thermal radiation in Japan are not generally applicable to other situations. The U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment study The Effects of Nuclear War in 1979 pointed out that on a cold winter night typically only 1 % of the population would be exposed to thermal radiation, compared to typically 25 % for the summer and daytime. In addition, the weather (atmospheric visibility) affects thermal transmission from bomb to target, just as the wind direction affects fallout delivery to a target in a surface burst. Nobody therefore can assert that a nuclear weapon explosion will automatically produce the effects exhibited on Hiroshima. Even if the atmospheric conditions were similar, other factors would be different and the results would not be the same.
For example, Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), in Table 12.17 on page 546, stated that the distance from ground zero in Hiroshima for 50 % survival after 20 days was 0.12 miles for people in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for people standing outdoors. Therefore the difference in distances between the range for 50% survival in modern city buildings and that for people flash burned, irradiated and blasted while standing in the open, was a factor of 11 for Hiroshima, so the difference in areas is a factor of 112 ~ 120. Hence, taking cover in modern city buildings would reduce the risk of being killed by a factor of 120 for Hiroshima conditions, contrary to popular media presented political propaganda that civil defence is hopeless.
Above: Here again are some extracts from the civil defence chapter XII, "Principles of Protection: Basis for Protective Action", in the 1962/64 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons:
'In Japan, where little evasive action was taken [due to ignorance of nuclear weapons effects and countermeasures in August 1945], the survival probability depended upon whether the individual was outdoors or inside a building and, in the latter case, upon the type of structure [easily inflammable bamboo and paper screen filled wood frame houses with easily-overturned charcoal cooking braziers existed throughout Hiroshima at the breakfast time attack and in the Nagasaki lunch time attack; such wood frame structures are no longer found in any modern city centres where they have long been replaced with non-flammable brick, steel and concrete]. At distances between 0.3 and 0.4 mile from ground zero in Hiroshima the average survival rate, for at least 20 days after the nuclear explosion, was less than 20 percent. Yet in two reinforced concrete office buildings, at these distances, almost 90 percent of the nearly 800 occupants survived more than 20 days, although some died later of radiation injury.
'Furthermore, of approximately 3,000 school students who were in the open and unshielded within a mile of ground zero at Hiroshima, about 90 percent were dead or missing after the explosion. But of nearly 5,000 students in the same zone who were shielded in one way or another, only 26 percent were fatalities. These facts bring out clearly the greatly improved chances of survival from a nuclear explosion that could result from the adoption of suitable warning and protective measures. [Table 11.17 on page 553 states that 50% survival after 20 days in Hiroshima occurred at 0.12 mile from ground zero for personnel in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for personnel outdoors; an 11-fold difference in distances and a 120-fold difference in areas, casualty rates and the probability of becoming a casualty. Total casualties after 20 days show an even greater difference because the low LD50 for radiation caused by the burns-irradiation synergism was absent in buildings which prevented line-of-sight flash burns; the firestorm developed in wooden houses after charcoal braziers were overturned and took hours to spread to the contents of brick, masonry, concrete and steel-frame buildings, so survivors had time to escape the firestorm] ... survival in Hiroshima was possible in buildings at such distances that the overpressure in the open was 15 to 20 pounds per square inch. ... it is evident ... that the area over which protection could be effective in saving lives is roughly eight to ten times as great as that in which the chances of survival are small.'
Page 645 (1962/4 edition):
'The major part of the thermal radiation travels in straight lines, so any opaque object interposed between the fireball and the exposed skin will give some protection. This is true even if the object is subsequently destroyed by the blast, since the main thermal radiation pulse is over before the arrival of the blast wave.
'At the first indication of a nuclear explosion, by a sudden increase in the general illumination, a person inside a building should immediately fall prone, and, if possible, crawl behind or beneath a table or desk or to a planned vantage point. Even if this action is not taken soon enough to reduce the thermal radiation exposure greatly, it will minimise the displacement effect of the blast wave and provide a partial shield against splintered glass and other flying debris.
'An individual caught in the open should fall prone to the ground in the same way, while making an effort to shade exposed parts of the body. Getting behind a tree, building, fence, ditch, bank, or any structure which prevents a direct line of sight between the person and the fireball, if possible, will give a major degree of protection. If no substantial object is at hand, the clothed parts of the body should be used to shield parts which are exposed. There will still be some hazard from scattered thermal radiation, especially from high-yield weapons at long ranges, but the decrease in the direct radiation will be substantial.'
A person on the ground whose clothes ignite (which is only a risk under extremely high thermal exposure to dark coloured clothing) can immediately extinguish the clothes by simply rolling over to starve the flames of oxygen. Page 653 (1962/4 edition):
'Some, although perhaps not all, of the fallout in the Marshall Islands, after the test explosion of March 1, 1954, could be seen as a white powder or dust. This was due, partly at least, to the light color of the calcium oxide or carbonate of which the particles were mainly composed. It is probable that whenever there is sufficient fallout to constitute a hazard, the dust will be visible.'
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Elton) stated in the House of Lords debate on Civil Defence (General Local Authority Functions) Regulations, Hansard, vol. 444, cc. 523-49, 1 November 1983:
"Even if our entire nation were to disarm itself completely and stand aghast but with folded arms as motionless spectators of a European war, not all the huffing and puffing, even of the CND, will change the direction of the wind and not even one stray missile has to land on our soil for a large part of the debris of a continental nuclear war to be dumped by an unfavourable wind across the whole breadth of this country. ... Buildings can provide a shield against radiation, if properly used. They can even provide some protection against both flash and blast ...
"Those who claim that civil defence is a confidence trick—and I return very briefly indeed to the burden of my original theme—and that nothing worthwhile can be done to protect our people in time of war are themselves in a false position. ... As to the interlinking of the defence against an attack and provision to attack in kind, I think all of your Lordships in the House at the moment are old enough to recall our experience with gas in the last world war. There was gas in Germany, there was gas here. We had gas masks as part of our civil defence and gas was never used. I hope that I refer to a fruitful paradigm."
"The Germans did not use gas during the 1939-1945 war [except for hydrogen cyanide gas, used for example in the gas chambers from 1941 at Auschwitz concentration camp, which was stored in solid form called ‘Zyklon-B’ using a reaction with oxalic acid discovered by German chemist Dr Brune Tesch], but on its conclusion it was found that they held large stocks of both new and old war gases and some of these were ready for use in bombs and shells. [German chemist Dr Gerhard Schrader on December 23, 1936 discovered the first nerve gas, tabun, and the Nazis manufactured 12,000 tons of it between April 1942 and May 1945, but did not use it for fear of mustard gas reprisals, since Germany had a rubber shortage and hence not enough gas masks. Dr Gerhard Schrader and three others also discovered sarin nerve gas in Nazi Germany in 1938. Soman nerve gas was discovered in 1944 in Germany by a Nobel Laureate, vitamin expert Dr Richard Kuhn.]
"... it is fair to assume that the knowledge that the population of this country all possessed efficient respirators [by September 1939, no less than 38 million gas masks had been issued to civilians] and were trained in their use, together with the possibility of retaliation, was an important deterrent. [Note that standard British World War II gas masks with activated charcoal absorbers give protection against all nerve gases; the airborne LDt50 (concentration-time product) dose of tabun needed to kill by unprotected skin absorption is 3,700 times higher than that for inhalation, and 3,100 times higher for sarin. Therefore, wearing a gas mask without protective clothing will give a protection factor of several thousand, vastly increasing the amount of nerve gas needed to kill people even under suitable weather conditions.]"
- U.K. Home Office, Civil Defence Manual of Basic Training, Vol. 2, Pamphlet No. 1, Basic Chemical Warfare, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1949, p. 3.
Just as lying "anti-war" propaganda attacked civil defence against nuclear warfare during the Cold War, the "Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group" in 1937 published a book trying to ridicule as worthless civil defence in Britain, The Protection of the Public from Aerial Attack. Their main criticisms were directed at gas defences, where they exaggerated the risks because they were completely ignorant of the real dangers. For example, they tried to discredit gas-proofed rooms by showing that an immense concentration of gas outside could gradually diffuse into the room over a 3-hour period. Problem is, the gas gets blown away within 10 minutes, and the gas proof room was mainly designed to avoid skin absorption which requires much higher concentrations than those for inhalation; gas masks were to be issued for the inhalation threat. (Obviously in an imaginary war atmosphere of 100% pure nerve gas, there is no oxygen and a gas mask would be no use; you would suffocate. This kind of "overkill" delusion is often promoted by ignorant "anti-war" scientists who are really trying to encourage vulnerability, panic and surrender to terrorist threats and intimidation of all types.)
Above: the data proving the life-saving effectiveness of even poor, improvised protection such as "duck and cover" countermeasures against blast and blast wind carried flying debris during World War II bombing air raid attacks on U.K. cities; from page 12 of the U.K. Home Office, Civil Defence Manual of Basic Training, Vol. 2, Pamphlet No. 5, Basic Methods of Protection Against High Explosive Missiles, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1949. Pages 12-18 explain:
"It cannot be too strongly emphasised that it is most important, from the point of view of reducing casualties as a whole, for everyone in an area under attack to make use of any shelter that is available. Recent research has shown that there would be less fatal casualties if everyone were in relatively poor shelter than if half the population were in shelter twice as good and the other half remained in the open. ... Protection against blast and splinters from a 500 lb. medium cased bomb exploding 50 ft. away will be afforded by the following materials of the thickness indicated:-
Lateral protection
(i) Mild steel plate - 1.5 inches
(ii) Reinforced concrete - 12 inches
(iii) Brickwork or masonry - 13.5 inches
(iv) Unreinforced concrete - 15 inches
(v) Ballast or broken stone - 24 inches
(vi) Earth or sand - 30 inches
(vii) Solidly stacked timber - 36 inches
Overhead protection
(i) Mild steel plate - 5/16 inches
(ii) Reinforced concrete - 6 inches
(iii) Efficient brick arching - 9 inches
(iv) Earth, sand or ballast - 18 inches
(v) The inside of an existing substantial building having a roof and not less than two storey floors overhead, provided that the floor above the protected space is supported to enable it to resist the debris load. ... Shelters providing protection against medium case type bombs also provide a measure of protection against the atomic bomb."
In the above quotation from the 1949 British civil defence manual, the lateral protection thicknesses are identical to those specified by the Revised Code (Section 13 of the U.K. Civil Defence Act, 1939) for the Guidance of Occupiers and Owners of Factory Premises, Factories, Mines and Commercial Buildings, and Other Persons Concerned in the Civil Defence (Approval and Revision of Code) Order, 1939, No. 920, 14 August 1939 (issued by the Lord Privy Seal, John Anderson), although two of the overhead thicknesses quoted above are considerably larger than those specified in 1939 (1/4 inch of mild steel plate and 4 inches of reinforced concrete specified in 1939 for overhead protection were both increased as a result of wartime experience, but the other standards were intact).
Notice that these air-raid protection guidelines are not designed for complete protection against a direct hit. They are merely designed to ensure survival 50 feet or 15 metres from a typical medium-cased, 500 pound or 227 kg chemical high explosive bomb such as TNT. Such a bomb typically is equivalent to 175 kg of TNT. If we use the cube-root scaling law from 0.175 ton to the blast yield fraction for the Hiroshima bomb (roughly 7 kilotons of blast yield), the destruction radius increases by a factor of 40,0001/3 = 34, so the British World War II shelter standard would provide protection at a distance of 34*15 = 510 metres or zero ground range distance (510 metres is on the order of the burst altitude).
Hence, nobody would have been killed by blast effects in Hiroshima on this basis. This whole treatment has been oversimplified above (not considering nuclear radiation shielding, for instance, which would generally require more shielding near the detonation point), just to get across the basic message that standard British civil defence - although not designed to take the blast from even a conventional 500 pound bomb nearer than 50 feet away - would still have provided adequate blast protection in Hiroshima. Sounds paradoxical, doesn't it? But we will see below how well typical World War II "Anderson" shelters survived the British nuclear weapons test at Monte Bello in 1952, and why the results were secret.
2. The use of diplomacy to delude yourself that making yourself vulnerable makes you safer
On June 14, 1946, Bernard Baruch's plan for nuclear weapons disarmament and international control of nuclear technology had been presented to the United Nations. Learning from the failure of arms control on worthless, signed pieces of paper and endless hot air "talks" with Hitler's Nazi Germany in the 1930s, it proposed proper inspections of all facilities (not just the declared nuclear installations), and proposed that the U.N. Charter's veto clause should not apply to sanctions for stipulated violations. Stalin's Soviet Union was developing nuclear weapons secretly at that time, so it objected and on June 19, 1946 put forward propaganda counter-proposals which were totally useless for preventing proliferation and designed to put democracies at a disadvantage to dictatorships by:
(1) providing no safeguards against evasion, and
(2) demanding total nuclear disarmament by America before an international control plan was negotiated.
The Soviet counter-proposals to the Baruch plan were therefore rejected on the basis of the Nazi lesson. Britain had declared war on Germany when it invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Soviet Union then invaded eastern Poland on September 17, violating the 1932 Soviet–Polish Non-Aggression Pact, in accordance with a secret protocol contained in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939:
'In addition to stipulations of non-aggression, the treaty included a secret protocol dividing Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence, anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. Thereafter, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded their respective sides of Poland, dividing the country between them. Part of eastern Finland was annexed by the Soviet Union after an attempted invasion. This was followed by Soviet annexations of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and eastern and northern Romania.' - Wikipedia.
The Soviet Union remained a Nazi ally and collaborator, actually joining in the Nazi genocide by murdering many thousands of Polish people for political reasons in the Katryn Forest Massacre:
'... Soviet NKVD officers also conducted lengthy interrogations of 300,000 Polish POWs in camps[136][137][137][138][139] that were, in effect, a selection process to determine who would be killed.[3] On March 5, 1940, in what would later be known as the Katyn massacre,[3][140][141] orders were signed to execute 25,700 Polish POWs, labeled "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries", kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus.[142]' - Wikipedia.
This union of evil continued until 22 June 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, which turned Stalin into a temporary ally of convenience until the war ended. This was vital to the defeat of the Nazis, since its fierce battles on the Eastern Front against Russia sapped Nazi resources and morale far more effectively than aerial bombardment of cities. However, it meant that after the end of World War II, Russia set up sock-puppet governments in Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Albania. On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill's gave a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, stating:
'From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an "iron curtain" has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.'
On September 29, 1950, President Truman announced detection of the first Soviet nuclear test, and on January 31, 1950, he ordered that America was to proceed with hydrogen bomb development to remain ahead of Stalin. It is of interest to consider the historical lesson of what happens when disarmament is attempted in the face of a dictatorship to try to avert weapons proliferation and an arms race by setting a "good example to follow" and proclaiming pacifist sentiments while lying that a nuclear detonation could not be protected against and that if we all brainwash ourselves that civil defense is a confidence trick and therefore encourage and then surrender to terrorist demands, we will be guaranteed safe from war and oppression.
3. The historical fact nobody wants to learn lessons from: making yourself weak, and making peaceful agreements with evil terrorists, is a cranky, "snake oil" anti-war measure; if you are genuinely anti-war, you need to be able to mitigate it sufficiently so that you can deter evil by the threat of war
Above: David Low's illustration for the London Evening Standard newspaper of July 8, 1936, showing Hitler free to walk over the 'spineless leaders of democracy' (the steps of Hitler are labelled 'Rearmament', 'Rhineland fortified', 'Dantzig' ... 'Boss of the Universe').
Exaggeration of the effects of aerial bombing led to secret weapons proliferation by Germany, which was "banned" (on useless paper agreements) from rearmament after World War I. When Goering's air force was announced in 1935, it made the threat of war against Hitler incredible and unconvincing, so politicians had to follow the popular pacifist sentiments of the media, instead of stopping Hitler while there was still time (despite their massive arms reductions, Britain and France still had the edge on Germany until January 1938, according to RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn's evaluation in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War). This is highly relevant to President Obama's argument for nuclear disarmament, which will take away the nuclear deterrence that has prevented a Third World War since 1945. If we disarm, we need civil defense and ABM (anti-ballistic missile) systems (whose reliability and scope is never 100 % perfect), against the threat from secret and not-so-secret nuclear proliferation.
Otherwise, by telling the media, the terrorists and the rogue states that the (popularly exaggerated) effects of nuclear war are so terrible that we have disarmed and have no effective defenses against nuclear attack, we will encourage even more nuclear proliferation threats than those which have already occurred.
The wholesale exaggeration of nuclear weapons threats which has attacked and "ridiculed" (in the eyes of the media and public) civil defense efforts, has made nuclear weapons attractive to rogue states and terrorists.
If you make dictators and terrorists believe that nuclear weapons are the one kind of threat that there is no protection against, instead of reducing nuclear proliferation, you encourage proliferation (threats) while simultaneously undermining the credibility of civil defense countermeasures.
The idea that exaggerating the effects of war will prevent war and encourage disarmament is still rife today despite having been categorically discredited by its encouragement of proliferation and its encouragement of aggressive terrorism in the 1930s. This is the whole reason why Glasstone and Dolan's The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was first published openly in 1950, although the latest revision is now being withheld from widespread open publication.
‘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.’
– Dr George Gamow (the big bang cosmologist), Dr Samuel Glasstone, DSc (Executive Editor of the book), and Professor Joseph O. Hirschfelder, The Effects of Atomic Weapons, Chapter 1, p. 1, Paragraph 1.3, U.S. Department of Defense, September 1950.
In 1950, the Top Secret British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch report SA/16 (HO225/16 in the UK National Archives), The number of atomic bombs equivalent to the last war air attacks on Great Britain and Germany, concluded:
‘The wide publicity given to the appalling destruction caused by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has possibly tended to give an exaggerated impression of their effectiveness. Perhaps the best way to counteract this impression, and to help to get the atomic bomb to scale, is to consider the numbers of atomic bombs that would have to be dropped on this country and on Germany to have caused the same total amount of damage as was actually caused by attacks with high explosive and incendiary bombs.
‘During the last war a total of 1,300,000 tons [i.e. 1.3 MEGATONS of bombs] were dropped on Germany by the Strategic Air Forces [of Britain and America]. If there were no increase in aiming accuracy, then to achieve the same amount of material damage (to houses, industrial and transportational targets, etc.) would have required the use of over 300 atomic bombs together with some 500,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs for targets too small to warrant the use of an atomic bomb... the total of 300,000 civilian air raid deaths in Germany could have been caused by about 80 atomic bombs delivered with the accuracy of last war area attacks, or by about 20 atomic bombs accurately placed at the centres of large German cities...’
This report, SA/16, was kept "Top Secret" for 8 years, and then "Restricted" for another 22 years. It was never published, and civil defence was gradually undermined by the exaggeration of nuclear weapons effects by political groups such as CND, the full facts remaining secret.
Before Mr Pseudoscience of CND makes the claim that the Home Office miss-divided 1.3 megatons of bombs into 20 kilotons, adding that "everyone can see that 1.3 Mt is just 65 times 20 kt", it should be pointed out, as explained in the comments at http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/samuel-glasstone-and-philip-j-dolan.html and http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2007/03/above-3.html, that blast damage radii for overpressure diffraction damage scale at most as the cube-root of yield (or more slowly than the cube-root if allowance for blast attenuation by the work energy used in destroying houses while the blast knocks down successive houses in a radial line from ground zero is included in the calculations). Areas of damage scale as the square of the ground range, or the two-thirds of yield at most.
Hence, the 1.3 megatons of small bombs dropped as mentioned in this blog post is not anywhere remotely equivalent to a single 1.3 megaton nuclear bomb. It turns out that 1.3 megatons as a single explosive is only the equivalent of 4.64 kilotons of 100 kg bombs, because efficiency is greater for smaller bombs.
(This is the reason that America stopped designing very high yield thermonuclear weapons after the 1954 nuclear tests of Operation Castle, and the mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed 1.172 Gt or 1,172 Mt U.S. nuclear stockpile is only 0.257 Mt or 257 kt. 257 kt is just 12 times the yield of the Nagasaki bomb, so by the cube-root scaling law the blast destruction radii for the mean yield of 257 kt is just 2.27 times the blast destruction radii in Nagasaki. Because there are no flimsy wood-frame inflammable cities in the West, the actual effects of typical stockpiled nuclear weapons today would be less severe than they were in Nagasaki.)
Because the average bomb size of conventional (chemical) high explosive bombs was under 100 kg in WWII, they were far more efficient than a megaton nuclear bomb: relative area damaged = number of bombs * {bomb yield}2/3
Hence to get the same area damaged by 100 kg TNT bombs as by a 1 Mt nuclear bomb, you would need only 1/(10-7)2/3 = 46,400 conventional 100 kg bombs, a total of just 46400*0.0001 = 4.64 kilotons of bombs doing the same area destruction as a single 1 megaton bomb. To emphasise this non-linear addition law:
1 megaton of TNT as a single explosion = 4.64 kt of 100 kg bombs in an air raid
The relative efficiency of the single 1 Mt nuclear bomb in this example is only 0.464% compared to conventional small TNT explosive bombs.
Hence, heavy conventional high explosive bombing raids with hundreds of aircraft in WWII produced the same destruction as a relatively large thermonuclear weapon. The fact that easily mitigated effects (such as delayed fallout and thermal radiation which is easily avoided by ducking and covering skin) were absent in the high explosive attacks, where the energy wasn't wasted but mainly went into blast wave damage, made conventional warfare far more dangerous.
Above: All that happened to the Anderson shelters 400 yards from the 25 kt Hurricane nuclear test on 3 October 1952 was that a few sand bags were blown off by the arrival of the blast wave, but by that time the initial nuclear radiation and thermal radiation pulses were already over, so the sandbags had shielded the radiation. Frank H. Pavry, who as part of the British Mission to Japan had observed the surviving air raid shelters near ground zero in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, organized the construction of 15 Anderson shelters. In World War II, two types of shelters were issued by the U.K. government to householders: the 'Morrison' (a steel table designed to resist the debris load from the collapse of a house, which was introduced in March 1941 and named after the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison), and the 'Anderson' which was an outdoor shelter supplied to 2,100,000 householders (a 14-gauge corrugated steel arch shelter, 2 m long, 1.4 m wide and 1.8 m high, designed to accommodate 6 people and to be sunk to 1.2 metre depth and covered by at least 40 cm of earth; it was invented in 1938 and named after Sir John Anderson, who was in charge of U.K. Air Raid Precautions/Civil Defence).
Frank H. Pavry's report, Operation HURRICANE: Anderson Shelters, Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, AWRE-T17/54, was originally classified 'Secret - Atomic'. The 15 Anderson shelters had survived very well. Nearest to the bomb ship, they survived a peak overpressure of 55 psi or 380 kPa without internal damage: sand bags on the outside were hurled off when the blast wave arrived, but by that time they had done their job of shielding the initial neutron and gamma radiation. (They could have been replaced before fallout arrived.) At a peak overpressure of 12 psi or 83 kPa, even the sandbags on the outside remained intact. (Pavry had used sand bags instead of the recommended packed earth as a convenience.)
This rightly gave conviction to the British Home Office civil defence effects team. The bomb ship HMS Plym, can be seen moored in 40 feet of water 400 yards off Trimouille Island, Monte Bello group. The public information film on Operation Hurricane states: 'At Montebello the advance party is already at work: 200 Royal Engineers had arrived in April to find an empty wilderness of salt, bush and spinifex ... Within the danger zone they erected the familiar [World War II British civilian] Anderson shelters, well-protected by sandbags ... These tests would influence the pattern of civil defence against some future atomic attack. ... On shore, they find many of the Anderson shelters have survived the ordeal remarkably well – better than some of the concrete-block houses.' (The full report on the Anderson shelters exposed at Operation Hurricane is 'Operation Hurricane: Anderson Shelters', Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston, report AWRE-T17/54, 1954, UK National Archives reference ES 5/19 and also duplicated at DEFE 16/933. See also 'Penetration of the gamma flash into Anderson shelters and concrete cubicles', AWRE-T20/54, 1954, UK National Archives ref ES 5/22 duplicated at DEFE 16/935.)
4. How peace-making encourages war: proof that if you are genuinely anti-war, you make yourself strong enough to credibly deter war and provocative evils like genocide
The Historical Journal, Volume 22, Issue 02, June 1979 pp 397-422
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=3925428
"On 9 February 1933 the Oxford Union debated and carried by 275 votes to 153 the motion ‘That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. After a few days this became a major news story, first in Britain then also in the world press: the British embassies in Madrid and Santiago cabled the Foreign Office in alarm at the appearance of the story in the Spanish and Chilean press. The motion was taken up also by student debating societies all over Britain and overseas: in the United States, for example, any pledge to take no part in war came to be known as the ‘Oxford pledge’ or the ‘Oxford oath’. Since the debate, which took place ten days after Hitler had become chancellor of Germany, appeared to contrast British liberal, pacifist effeteness with fascist martial virility it was seized on in Germany and Italy. The Liberal M.P. Robert Bernays told the house of commons how he had been asked about the debate later in 1933 by a prominent Nazi youth leader: ‘There was an ugly gleam in his eye when he said: “The fact is that you English are soft.”’ And on 7 July 1934 Alfred Zimmern, professor of international relations at Oxford, wrote from Geneva to the former Union president responsible for the debate: ‘I hope you do penance every night and every morning for that ill-starred Resolution. It is still going on sowing dragons’ teeth. If the Germans have to be knocked out a second time it will be partly your fault.’"
- Martin Ceadel, "The ‘King and Country’ Debate, 1933: Student Politics, Pacifism and the Dictators", The Historical Journal vol. 22 (1979), pp. 397-422.
Careless journalist Vernon Bartlett in 1933 wrote Nazi Germany Explained, a book published by Victor Gollancz, based in part on the author's 40 minute interview of Adolf Hitler. Bartless wrote enthusiastic nonsense that was widely believed to be true, for example claiming that Hitler's eyes were "so large and so brown one might grow lyrical about them if one was a woman." (In fact, as Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott explained in their 1967 book The Appeasers, Hitler actually had blue - not brown - eyes!) Bartlett argued that Nazism should be tolerated because "a form of government which suits us, and which we have been able to adapt through centuries, may not suit other people."
Winston S. Churchill was the first to reveal, in the London Daily Express newspaper of November 1, 1934, that:
"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."
Above: America made the nuclear bomb in secret, hiding the £2 billion cost from Congress and pretending the facilities were being used for other purposes! So did Britain, hiding the £100 million cost until it was ready to test its first nuclear bomb. Thus, even democracies made their first nuclear bombs in a clandestine fashion, and it is far easier for dictatorships and terrorists to keep their work secret.
Churchill was deemed a war-monger for calling for action against Hitler before the Nazi power became so strong that a World War would be needed. The exaggeration of weapons effects in aerial bombardment had been so great that any course of action involving any risk of war was rejected by most of the media, the public, and thye politicians in favour of diplomacy by talks and agreements, which gave the Nazis time to make ever more preparations for war as Herman Kahn shows in detail:
"... in spite of the tremendous scale of the violations it still took the Germans five years, from January 1933 when Hitler came in to around January 1938, before they had an army capable of standing up against the French and the British. At any time during that five-year period if the British and the French had had the will, they probably could have stopped the German rearmament program. This ... makes me feel that the treaty provisions were as successful as one had a right to expect [i.e., World War II was not caused by a failure to sign enough bits of paper, 'peace treaties', but was caused by a failure to physically force thugs to obey them while there was still time to avert a major war]. ... it is an important defect of 'arms control' agreements that the punishment or correction of even outright violation is not done automatically ... but takes an act of will by policy level people in the nonviolating governments ... [As a result of the devastation caused by World War I] one of the most important aspects of the interwar period [was] the enormous and almost uncontrollable impulse toward disarmament ... there developed an enormous impulse to remove this disease or at least its manifestations. As late as 1934, after Hitler had been in power for almost a year and a half, [British Prime Minister] Ramsey McDonald still continued to urge the French that they should disarm themselves by reducing their army by 50 per cent, and their air force by 75 per cent.
"In effect, MacDonald and his supporters urged one of the least aggressive nations in Europe to disarm itself to a level equal with their potential attackers, the Germans. ... Probably as much as any other single group I think that these men of good will can be charged with causing World War II. [Emphasis by Herman Kahn, unless otherwise indicated.] ... It is ... one thing to fear and detest an evil [i.e., war] and quite a different thing to ignore all of the realistic aspects of the problem [the need to actually prevent war not by utopian, worthless treaties with thugs, but instead by means of exerting force against thugs to curtail their power before their capability becomes too great to safely oppose]. ... Hitler came into power in January 1933 and almost immediately Germany began to rearm [German peacetime engineering industries were already suitably tooled up to "secretly" make armaments, and had the weapons blueprints ready; see for example Lorimer's 1939 Penguin book, What Hitler Wants] ... but it was not until October 14, 1933 [that] Germany withdrew from a disarmament conference and the League of Nations ... Hitler's advisors seem to have been greatly worried that this action might trigger off a violent counteraction - for example, a French occupation of the Ruhr. But the British and the French contented themselves with denouncing the action."
- Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press, 1960, pp. 390-1. (A limited preview version of this book online here.)
The mechanism for the most deadly war in human history, World War II, is ascribed above by strategist Herman Kahn to the popular unilateral disarmament movement. The idea was that making yourself defenseless against thugs would prevent any possibility of war. In order to justify disarmament, the effects of aerial bombardment were grossly exaggerated.
The Italian General Guilio Douhet set the scene for the exaggerations in his 1921 book The Command of the Air. Douhet claimed that defence against aerial bombardment was practically impossible owing to the difficulty in detecting, locating and intercepting enemy bombers before they reached their objective. From this assumption, he argued that there is no way to protect civilian populations so any air raid would force the attacked country to surrender. This led him to propose that immense resources should be allocated to bomber air forces which should be used against the enemy's capital and other key cities. The popular concern generated led to the worthless Hague Air Warfare Rules of 1923, Article 22 of which stated:
"Aerial bombardment for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, of destroying or damaging private property not of military character, or of injuring noncombatants is prohibited." (Likewise, the League of Nations Assembly on September 10, 1938 adopted the worthless resolution that: "The intentional bombing of civilian populations is illegal". Declaring bombing illegal on pieces of paper has no significance in total war.)
British General J. F. C. Fuller, famous for his early support (against groupthink prejudice within an army that still thought in terms of cavalry and was generally hostile towards or at least suspicious of technology) of armoured tanks to penetrate through fortified enemy lines, tactics which ironically were bungled by the British Army in World War I (which only tried them in a half-hearted manner, squandering the factor of surprise) and were only first fully and efficiently implemented as part of the Nazi Blitzkrieg, wrote in his 1923 book The Reformation of War:
"I believe that in future warfare great cities, such as London, will be attacked from the air - and that a fleet of 500 airplanes, each carrying 500 ten-pound bombs of, let us suppose mustard gas [a skin blistering agent in the chart of war gases; more lethal alternatives such as phosgene and even just plain old chlorine were also tried and tested in World War I], might cause 200,000 minor casualties and throw the whole city into panic within half an hour of their arrival. Picture, if you can, what the result will be: London for several days will be one vast raiding bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium. ... Then will the enemy dictate his terms, which will be grasped at like straw by a drowning man. Thus may a war be won in forty-eight hours and the losses of the winning side may be actually nil! ... the belligerent possessing an overwhelming striking force need not necessarily resort to wholesale slaughter and destruction in order to gain his end. He might bring sufficient pessure to bear upon the enemy people by employing a non-lethal gas. Or he might combine non-lethal gas attacks with incendiary bombs, thus starting widespread conflagrations, which, while increasing the moral effects of his blow, would also cause immense material destruction."
Brigadier-General P. R. C. Groves, Director of Flying Operations at the British Air Ministry, in 1934 wrote in his book Behind the Smoke Screen:
"In Europe, warfare - hitherto primarily an affair of fronts - will be henceforth primarily an affair of areas. In this 'War of Areas' the aim of each belligerent will be to bring such pressure to bear upon the enemy people as to force them to oblige their government to sue for peace. The method of applying this pressure will be by aerial bombardment of national nerve centers, chief among which are the great cities. Existing air fleets are capable of inflicting destruction on a cyclonic scale, and they are constantly growing. It seems highly probable, therefore, in a future conflict, if any great disparity should exist between the strengths in the air of the belligerants, that the stronger will quickly overwhelm the opponent, possibly even before the latter could bring its naval and military forces to bear."
Just as the exaggeration of the effects of nuclear weapons and the alleged impossibility of civil defense against them during and after World War II led Stalin to order the testing of a Soviet nuclear bomb some 60 years ago, the exaggeration of the effects of aerial bombardment for disarmament propaganda in the 1930s had the same effect on Hitler.
As a result, on March 9, 1935, Germany announced officially the constitution of its new air force headed by Herman Goering, a famous German fighter plane ace of World War I who shot down 22 aircraft. The exaggeration in the popular media since the 1920s of the effects of aerial bombardment (from misrepresentative 1917 World War I precision bombing data) led to hysteria at any thought of another war, thereby increasing the appeasement of Hitler by Britain and France. On March 16, 1935, Hitler decreed conscription in Germany. The Council of the League of Nations responded in April not by requiring action against Hitler, but by the very opposite: all member states voted unanimously against unilateral action by any member state. Hence, as a group they could not agree to stop Hitler, but they could agree to stop any member state acting by themselves against Hitler. Under no circumstances could Hitler be stopped, for fear that Goering would respond by wiping out the planet with his air force.
"Following the line of argument of the disarmament theorists, we might as well disband the police force in the hope of ending crime."
- Captain W. E. Johns, Editorial, Popular Flying, May 1936.
"... history is apparently not among the areas of expertise claimed by IPPNW [international physicians for the prevention of nuclear war]. Its spokesmen have yet to comment on the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 (for which Kellogg and Briand received the Nobel Peace Prize), the Oxford Peace Resolution of 1934, the Munich Agreement of 1938, or the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, and on the effectiveness of these measures in preventing World War II. ...
"Sir Norman Angell (also a Nobel Peace Prize winner), in his 1910 best-seller entitled The Great Illusion, showed that war had become so terrible and expensive as to be unthinkable. The concept of ‘destruction before detonation’ was not discovered by Victor Sidel (Sidel, V. W., ‘Destruction before detonation: the impact of the arms race on health and health care’, Lancet 1985; ii: 1287-1289), but was previously enunciated by Neville Chamberlain, who warned his Cabinet about the heavy bills for armaments: ‘even the present Programmes were placing a heavy strain upon our resources’ (Minutes of the British Cabinet meeting, February 3, 1937: quoted in Fuchser, L. W., Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement: a Study in the Politics of History, Norton, New York, 1982). ...
"Psychic numbing, denial, and ‘missile envy’ (Caldicott, H., Missile envy: the arms race and nuclear war, New York: William Morrow, 1984) are some of the diagnoses applied by IPPNW members to those who differ with them. However, for the threats facing the world, IPPNW does not entertain a differential diagnosis, nor admit the slightest doubt about the efficacy of their prescription, if only the world will follow it. So certain are they of their ability to save us from war that these physicians seem willing to bet the lives of millions who might be saved by defensive measures if a nuclear attack is ever launched.
"Is this an omnipotence fantasy?"
- Jane M. Orient, MD, ‘INTERNATIONAL PHYSICIANS FOR THE PREVENTION OF NUCLEAR WAR: MESSIAHS OF THE NUCLEAR AGE?’, The Lancet (British medical journal), 18 November 1988, pp.1185-6. (See also link here.)
Herman Kahn argues, in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, that there was a financial motivation involved (hot air and paper both being cheap), and a cynical disregard for human decency by politicians who gained votes by making ever more "peace treaties" with thugs, which on even superficial inspection were obviously bogus as well as completely worthless:
"In May of 1935 the British, anxious to allay their anxieties cheaply [emphasis by Kahn], signed a naval agreement with the Germans, an act which probably ranks as the height of idiocy. ... the Germans agreed in this treaty that they would not use submarines in warfare against merchant shipping. This was an obviously worthless promise, since they had no other worthwhile purpose for their submarines."
Of course, human politics and disarmament intelligence has progressed a great deal since 1935. For example, we now have the revolutionary concept that instead of just signing treaties with thugs to "ensure peace", we back up those treaties by sanctions against violation. If only sanctions had been tried against Hitler, the modern disarmament fanatic claims, he would have been able to quietly gas the Jews and allow Anne Frank and others to die in "peaceful" concentration camps, without a World War. Actually, sanctions were tried against the fascists in the 1930s: they proved just as useless in the 1930s as they were against Saddam's Iraqi regime (where they just caused suffering to innocent people, not to the leadership). Kahn explains in On Thermonuclear War that sanctions failed because, if they were implemented strongly then they would have been effectively a declaration of war (which everyone feared and wanted to avoid), so they were applied in a deliberately stupid (ineffective) way to avoid any risk of provoking a war:
"In October 1935 Mussolini launched his invasion of Abyssinia. This was the most dramatic challenge yet to the authority of the League of Nations. In commenting on the attitude of the British government, Churchill states, 'The Prime Minister had declared that sanctions meant war; secondly, he resolved that there be no war; and thirdly, he decided upon sanctions. It was evidently impossible to reconcile these three conditions.'24 The sanctions were applied, but in an innocuous fashion that irritated but did not handicap Mussolini, but only discredited the idea of using sanctions in the future."
Quite often, World War I is alleged to have been the result of a war escalating from one bullet shot during an arms race between European powers, not as the result of political stupidity and agreements on pieces of paper like World War II. Actually, World War I was not started by either weapons or the arms race in Europe, but by politicians and treaties. In the First Balkan War of 1912-3, the Ottoman Empire was driven out of the Balkans by Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece. Serbia then fought the other Balkan states, doubling its territory in the Second Balkan War. The Serbians (whose ally was Russia) then threatened Bosnia (whose ally was Austria). In response to the Serbian-Russian threat to Bosnia, the Austrians decided to help defend Bosnia by holding military manoeuvres there. The Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was inspecting those troops in Sarajevo, Bosnia when a Serbian (Gavrilo Princip) assassinated him and his wife on June 28, 1914. So it was a dispute between Bosnia and Serbia, but the heir to the Austrian throne was assassinated.
In response, on July 23, Austria sent an unacceptable ultimatum to Serbia and then broke off diplomatic relations with it on July 25. In order to protect its ally Serbia from Austria, Russia mobilized some of its soldiers the next day, and on July 31 both Russia and Austria had fully mobilized. Germany sided with Austria against the Russian mobilization. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, which was the first declaration of war. In December 1912 the Chiefs of Staff of the German Kaiser had argued that Germany needed a war with Russia before Russia had completed its military modernisation programme, which would have made it an unacceptable threat. So Germany had, since 1912, been looking for an excuse to declare war on Russia, not because it was in an arms race with Russia, but because it preferred the idea of having a war with Russia to having an arms race to maintain the peace. This is similar to the aggressive role of Germany in World War II, and also to the role of Japan in attacking Pearl Harbor in 1941 to start a war with America before further expansion of the American Navy. The reason for the surprise attack was a simple calculation by the Imperial Japanese navy, which predicted that at the end of 1941 Japan would have 70 percent of the warship strength of America, but this strength: 'would fall to 65 percent in 1942, to 50 percent in 1943, and to a disastrous 30 percent in 1944.' (Source: H. P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance, Annapolis, 1982, p. 62.)
On August 3, 1914, after Belgium refused passage to the German army (which wanted to outflank its old enemy, France), France declared war on Germany to protect Belgium. When Germany invaded Belgium on August 4, Britain was forced to declare war on Germany under the terms of a protection treaty made between Britain and Belgium in 1839. So it wasn't an arms race that cause World War I, it was a domino effect of old political treaties and mutual defence agreements between countries on pieces of paper, which were supposed to preserve the peace but instead caused the countries to be sucked into war. The stupid political agreements to deter war simply failed and trapped other countries into declaring war; it was not the failure of deterrence in an arms race (contrary to modern propaganda). As a future U.S. President wrote (when he was working in the American Embassy in London in the late 1930s and witnessed the manipulation of World War I propaganda for disarmament), the causes of war go deeper than armaments:
“The [excuse] statement of Lord Grey, British Foreign Minister [responsible for getting Britain into World War I], made in 1914, that, ‘The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable,’ had a tremendous effect on post-war British opinion. Armaments were looked upon as something horrible, as being the cause of war, not a means of defense. ... but England’s failure to rearm has not prevented her from becoming engaged in a war; in fact, it may cost her one. The causes of war go deeper than armaments.”
- John F. Kennedy (1917-63), While England Slept, Wilfred Funk, Inc., New York, 1940, reprinted by Greenwood, 1981, pp. 6-7.
This is a very important point. In his personal political history of World War I, War Memoirs (1933), David Lloyd George does not mince words in his blame of Grey (1862-1933) for the political incompetence which caused World War I. Grey's famous claim that Kennedy quotes, "The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable," was just an excuse for his own blunders. The fact is that Grey's political incompetence as British Foreign Minister helped cause World War I and his excuse (blaming weapons instead of his own incompetence) sowed the lie that led to World War II. Wikipedia explains:
"In 1914, Grey played a key role in the July Crisis leading to the outbreak of World War I. His attempts to mediate the dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia by a "Stop in Belgrade" came to nothing, owing to the tepid German response. He also failed to clearly communicate to Germany that a breach of the treaty not merely to respect but to protect the neutrality of Belgium — of which both Britain and Germany were signatories — would cause Britain to declare war against Germany. When he finally did make such communication German forces were already massed at the Belgian border and Helmuth von Moltke convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II it was too late to change the plan of attack. Thus when Germany declared war on France (3 August) and broke the treaty by invading Belgium (4 August), the British Cabinet voted almost unanimously to declare war on August 4, 1914."
Above: colour film of former World War I British Prime Minister David Lloyd George cavorting with Adolf Hitler in 1936, and seeing Hitler's autobahn (the world's first motorways). Lloyd George (who was a cabinet minister in 1914 when World War I started and Prime Minister later in the war), condemned British Foreign Minister Lord Grey in his 1933 War Memoirs for causing World War I by fumbling incompetence in 1914. In August 1936, Lloyd George tried to be less incompetent at averting war himself when he met Hitler at Berchtesgaden and tried to resolve the political differences between Britain and the Nazis diplomatically. As he did with everybody else who met him, Hitler completely and utterly brainwashed Lloyd George with lies, irrelevant (but impressive) Nazi achievements in civil engineering and overcoming poverty, and sheer personality (Hitler greeted Lloyd George with enthusiastic flattery: "Here is the man who won the war!").
Lloyd George wrote in the November 17, 1936 issue of the London Daily Express newspaper that Hitler "is a born leader of men. A magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose, a resolute will and a dauntless heart. He is not merely in name but in fact the national Leader. He has made them safe against potential enemies by whom they were surrounded. He is also securing them against that constant dread of starvation, which is one of the poignant memories of the last years of the War and the first years of the Peace. Over 700,000 died of sheer hunger in those dark years. You can still see the effect in the physique of those who were born into that bleak world. The fact that Hitler has rescued his country from the fear of a repetition of that period of despair, penury and humiliation has given him unchallenged authority in modern Germany. As to his popularity, especially among the youth of Germany, there can be no manner of doubt. The old trust him; the young idolise him. It is not the admiration accorded to a popular Leader. It is the worship of a national hero who has saved his country from utter despondency and degradation. It is true that public criticism of the Government is forbidden in every form. That does not mean that criticism is absent. I have heard the speeches of prominent Nazi orators freely condemned. But not a word of criticism or of disapproval have I heard of Hitler. He is as immune from criticism as a king in a monarchical country. He is something more. He is the George Washington of Germany - the man who won for his country independence from all her oppressors. To those who have not actually seen and sensed the way Hitler reigns over the heart and mind of Germany this description may appear extravagant. All the same, it is the bare truth. ... What Hitler said at Nuremberg is true. The Germans will resist to the death every invader at their own country, but they have no longer the desire themselves to invade any other land."
Lloyd George of course had his first-hand impression of the Nazis revised. In 1938 he wrote another book, The Truth About Peace Treaties in which he blamed the Nazi aggression upon the French for effectively trying to starve the defeated Germans by the draconian terms of the Versailles Treaty (which Lloyd George himself helped to formulate) of June 29, 1918 which ended World War I six months later. The point here is that diplomacy and paper agreements were not a failure for want of trying; there were endless efforts to talk to Hitler and to get "peace treaties" signed by people. Trying to stop genocide by getting people to talk and agree to peace is like trying to stop crime by the same tactics: it misses the whole point. If you want to stop crime, you are just flattering yourself if you think you can get somewhere by talking to criminals or getting them to sign treaties (flattery is of course something politicians are very susceptible to).
Key earlier blog posts on this subject are linked here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Laws and agreements to prevent crime all suffer from the fundamental problem that criminals ignore them, or if pushed by fear of the consequences of violating the laws, then pretend to abide them, while breaking them secretly, so that even in principle crime can't be stopped or prevented by an "innocent until proved guilty" system of law. In the real world, no system of arms control and no disarmament agreements work perfectly, because terrorists seek to overcome them. This goes too for dictatorships, as shown by the examples of Hitler, the organization behind 9/11, the secret acquisition of nuclear weapons by South Africa in the 1980s, etc. Historically, groupthink on peaceful agreements, disarmament pacts, and laws has led to complacency and allowed problems to escalate ever further, as demonstrated by the Munich Pact in 1938 and the events which led up to it from 1933 (by 1938 it was too late to avoid a serious war, and Britain was unprepared at that time anyway, so appeasement by then was possibly the best of all options, buying time for British rearmament and civil defence activities like gas masks to successfully deter a gas attack; Hitler should have been stopped much earlier than Munich, say in 1933-4, which would have averted a major war as Herman Kahn argued in On Thermonuclear War).
"I asked Hitler about one in the morning while we were waiting for the draftsmen whether he would care to see me for another talk ... I had a very friendly and pleasant talk, on Spain (where he too said he had never had any territorial ambitions), economic relations with S. E. Europe, and disarmament. I did not mention colonies, nor did he. At the end I pulled out the declaration which I had prepared beforehand and asked if he would sign it. As the interpreter translated the words into German Hitler said Yes I will certainly sign it. When shall we do it? I said 'now', and we went at once to the writing table and put our signatures to the two copies which I had brought with me."
- British Prime Minister Chamberlain, letter to his sister Hilda, on 2 October 1938.
"This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine [waves the piece of paper to the crowd - receiving loud cheers]. Some of you, perhaps, have already heard what it contains ... My good friends, for the second time in our history a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time."
- Neville Chamberlain on arriving at Heston Aerodrome, announcing the Munich deal with Hitler, conceding the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany.

Above: David Low's cartoon of Munich, published on 30 September 1938. It shows (from left) Hitler, appeaser British Prime Minister Chamberlain, appeaser French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin standing in the doorway, captioned: "What, no chair for me?"

Above: David Low's earlier illustration for the London Evening Standard newspaper of July 8, 1936, showing Hitler free to walk over the 'spineless leaders of democracy' (the steps of Hitler are labelled 'Rearmament', 'Rhineland fortified', 'Dantzig' ... 'Boss of the Universe'). The pathetic truth is that David Low was pretty much alone in attacking Hitler with cartoons, and the Nazis actually persuaded the British government to put pressure on Low's newspaper editors to make him tone down his cartoon attacks on the Nazis, for fear of upsetting Hitler (what a complete travesty of the supposed "democratic freedom of the press" in Britain!):
In 1936 during the Berlin Olympic Games Low received his first request to tone down his depiction of Hitler in the interests of "good relations between all countries".
In 1937 the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax visited Germany and met with the Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who told him that Hitler was very sensitive to criticism in the British press, and he singled out Low for attention.
Lord Halifax contacted the manager of the Evening Standard to see if Low could be toned down. He said:
"You cannot imagine the frenzy that these cartoons cause. As soon as a copy of the Evening Standard arrives, it is pounced on for Low's cartoon, and if it is of Hitler, as it generally is, telephones buzz, tempers rise, fevers mount, and the whole governmental system of Germany is in uproar. It has hardly subsided before the next one arrives. We in England can't understand the violence of the reaction."
His attempt to influence newspaper management was unsuccessful, so the Foreign Secretary then decided to speak with Low directly. At their meeting, this is how David Low described Lord Halifax's explanation.
"Once a week Hitler had my cartoons brought out and laid on his desk in front of him, and he finished always with an explosion. That he was extremely sore; his vanity was badly touched... So the Foreign Secretary asked me to modify my criticism, as I say, in order that a better chance could be had for making friendly relations... The Foreign Secretary explained to me that I was a factor that was going against peace.' 'Do I understand you to say that you would find it easier to promote peace if my cartoons did not irritate the Nazi leaders personally?' 'Yes,' he replied. '...I said, "Well, I'm sorry." Of course he was the Foreign Secretary what else could I say? So I said, "Very well, I don't want to be responsible for a world war. But, I said "It's my duty as a journalist to report matters faithfully and in my own medium I have to speak the truth. And I think this man is awful. But I'll slow down a bit." So I did."
Meanwhile Hitler within a month invaded Austria. Low felt vindicated and went back to his old ways. Low said:
"...I was good for about three weeks. Then Hitler bounced in and invaded Austria, showing that he had given our Foreign Secretary a run-around, had taken him for a ride. I considered that let me out, so I resumed criticism."
It was no surprise when after the war it was revealed that Low was high on the Nazi's death list.
It wasn't only Hitler complaining about Low. In 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain singled out Low while appealing to newspapers to temper their critical commentary of Germany. Chamberlain said:
"Such criticism might do a great deal to embitter relations when we on our side are trying to improve them. German Nazis have been particularly annoyed by criticisms in the British press, and especially by cartoons. The bitter cartoons of Low of the Evening Standard have been a frequent source of complaint."
- http://hmmh.blogspot.com/2006/02/cartoonist-fought-hitler.html
Winston Churchill, who had been warning of the need to halt the "secret" Nazi armament programme since Hitler came to power, was similarly opposed as a "war-monger" by pacifist politicians in Parliament, backed by most of the mainstream media:
"The new appeasement was a mood of fear, Hobbesian in its insistence upon swallowing the bad in order to preserve some remnant of the good, pessimistic in its belief that Nazism was there to stay and, however horrible it might be, should be accepted as a way of life with which Britain ought to deal."
- Sir Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement, 1968.
Above: C. E. M. Joad's pacifist plea Why War? published by Penguin Books in August 1939, just days before Britain declared war on Germany: 'My case is that war is not something that is inevitable, but is the result of certain man-made circumstances; that man can abolish them, as he abolished the circumstances in which plague flourished.' Joad had long championed the pacifist case in Britain, presenting it in the infamous Oxford Union Society debate, on 9 February 1933 (ten days after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany) of the proposition: “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” Joad's eloquence led the motion to be passed by a vote of 275 to 153. The Oxford Union would not fight. Joad's argument simply omitted altogether the whole problem that if you don't fight a tyrant, the tyrant is free to massacre in cold blood, to starve ethnic minorities, and all the other horrors of life under an evil regime. When someone stood up in the famous debate and tried to get him to see reason by asking if he would fight an enemy soldier who was raping his sister, Joad - who reportedly had little respect for women - replied flippantly as Ceadel reports:
"When asked what he would do if he saw a German raping his sister, he replied in his famous falsetto voice: 'I should try and come between them'."
- Martin Ceadel, "The ‘King and Country’ Debate, 1933: Student Politics, Pacifism and the Dictators", The Historical Journal vol. 22 (1979), pp. 397-422.
This is a very important point, because it underlines the problem that once the effects of weapons of war have been exaggerated sufficiently to make war seem worse than any imaginable oppression, the pacifist case is invincible and has historically ridden roughshod over all conceivable objections by techniques such as sycophantic joking, or angry shouting and attempted "ridicule". As discussed in detail in an earlier post, World War II was caused by the promotion of gross, wanton exaggerations of a few unopposed 1917 World War I aerial bombing effects (analogous in many ways to surprise attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where people just stood there in surprise and so were burned or hit by glass): in a nutshell, this exaggeration led to appeasement which permitted Hitler to do whatever he wanted until 1939. Beginning in the 1920s, a succession of military writers and pacifists had competed with each other (in the popular media of books, broadcasts, novels and articles), to exaggerate the effects of aerial bombing, high explosives, incendiaries, and poison gas, until a picture was developed and presented which was virtually identical to "end of the world" modern descriptions of nuclear warfare. Modern cities would allegedly be wiped out by high explosive blast, incendiary-caused firestorms and life would be snuffed out without fail by the lingering poison gas clouds, according to this propaganda effort which set out variously to scare-monger, to sell books and other media, to support armament to deter war, or to support disarmament in the mistaken belief that being unarmed and unprotected will somehow prevent thugs from attacking you, and that protection efforts are hopeless anyway.
Britain began evacuating its cities of 1,500,000 children and the vulnerable on 1 September 1939 and declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, the day Winston Churchill explained to the House of Commons precisely why the war was necessary, plus exactly what the war was aiming to achieve through violence:
"This is not a question of fighting for Danzig or fighting for Poland. We are fighting to save the whole world from the pestilence of Nazi tyranny and in defence of all that is most sacred to man. This is no war for domination or imperial aggrandisement or material gain; no war to shut any country out of its sunlight and means of progress. It is a war, viewed in its inherent quality, to establish on impregnable rocks, the rights of the individual, and it is a war to establish and revive the stature of man."
Three types of exaggeration of the aerial threat
There are three aspects to the exaggeration of any kind of aerial threat. First, the size of the attack, i.e. the number of each type of weapon and how they will actually be used in a war (if an enemy wants to use thermal radiation or fallout radiation against civilians, he would need to organize the attack when the weather conditions were correct, e.g. not in low-visibility or when the winds were blowing in the wrong direction). In theory, if you are a pacifist or other civil defense objector and you simply postulate a big enough attack, then you don't need to worry so much about the direction of the wind or any details of calculating the effects: you "overkill" by postulating an incompehensible weight of attack. This is what the propagandarists have to do at the very start of their attack on humanitarian countermeasures, to have any chance of trying to make civil defence seem "absurd". Second, there are the detailed effects exaggerations (which we have covered in the many posts on this blog), and thirdly there is the exaggeration of the inefficiency of civil defense against those effects. Thus, there are three separate kinds of argument which can be combined against civil defense in any situation. This blog is concerned primarily with the second and third kinds of exaggeration: the exaggeration of nuclear effects and the exaggeration of the inefficiency of civil defense countermeasures. The issue of what weight of attack is most likely is primarily a matter for military strategy, tactics, and political decisions, rather than science. However, as shown in a previous post, there are a wide variety of ways in which weapons can be used, and if we have a protected second-strike capability, an enemy will have nothing to gain and plenty to lose by launching everything they have in one go. Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling, and Albert Wohlstetter of the RAND Corporation showed how a protected second-strike capability reduces the risk of nuclear "escalation" in any conflict.
This means that escalation of a conflict to an all-out nuclear war, the staple of 1960s nuclear fiction from Dr Strangelove to Planet of the Apes, in fact has been deterred effectively by the triad of second-strike capable submarines, hardened missile silos and supersonic jet bombers that was developed in the 1960s. Escalation in conflict simply removes bargaining chips if the other side has a protected nuclear force with a second-strike capability. Hence, the instability of potential tit-for-tat nuclear escalation was removed by the hardened, second-strike capable nuclear force. The threat since that time has been primarily from smaller nuclear crises, such as limited war, accidents, and terrorist nuclear threats. Herman Kahn has also listed ways in which nuclear weapons might be "tested" in order to intimidate an opponent while controlling the effects. E.g., sufficiently high altitude bursts for electromagnetic impacts would cause an immense amount of electronic damage to the civilian power infrastructure and to orbiting satellites used for many vital purposes, without causing the blast, thermal and fallout consequences of a near surface burst, while an underwater burst (simply a bomb set off below the waterline inside a ship like Britain's first nuclear test HURRICANE, detonated off the coast of a city) could produce terrific base surge irradiation hazards and contamination of the city, without causing other significant blast or thermal effects damage.
‘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.
"... even a cursory examination of the situation should reveal that strategic bombing of cities may, and very likely would be, as obsolete in the next war as trench warfare [or gas] was in the last. ... In the last war strategic bombing was resorted to in order to deprive the army at the front of weapons and supplies [from munitions industry located in cities]. Obviously, if you had a super-weapon that could wipe out an entire army in the field or on the march at one blow, there would be no further need of depriving an army that was no longer in being. ...
"... our giving up the right to use the H-bomb as a tactical weapon against [Soviet] armies would leave her free to march into the countries of western Europe. It would then be too late to stop her, for we could not drop the H-bomb on the cities of western Europe. The only time to stop Russia's armies is before they cross into the territory of our allies, during the crucial period when they are mobilized in large numbers and on the march.
"The American people, and the other free peoples of the world, could not agree to such a scheme to disarm them in advance and thus give the masters of the Kremlin a free hand. To do so would not prevent war, it would encourage it. Instead of being preventable, it would become inevitable. We wouldn't even save our cities from the fate of strategic bombing with A- and H-bombs, since the Kremlin has never kept its promises when they did not suit its purposes. ...
"These are the brutal facts that would confront us were we to renounce the right to use A- and H-bombs as tactical weapons against armies in the field [lacking the concrete buildings of modern cities for protection]. As long as we retain that right, the chances are good that we could prevent global war, for no nation would be likely to risk such a war in the face of the possibility that the main bulk of its armies might be wiped out at the outset. ...
"... Our justification for building the hydrogen bomb is thus not merely to prevent its use, but to prevent World War III, and to win it if it comes. We are not building it to bring Russia to its knees. We are building it to bring her to her senses."
- William L. Laurence, The Hell Bomb, Hollis and Carter, London, 1951, pp. 72-87.
Herman Kahn, in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, additionally explains the failure of early RAND Corporation systems analysis efforts to study just the "most probable" possibility. In a nutshell: if the "most probable" war scenario is 99.999% probable, then the "most probable" outcome will also have a high overall probability of being the outcome to actually occur so it can be focussed on, but if there are 100 different nearly equally probable outcomes, ranging from say 0.9-1.1% probability, then it is no good merely focussing on the "most probable" outcome because doing that will almost certainly mislead you: it is only 1.1% likely to actually occur, and 98.9% likely to not occur. So, if many similarly probable scenarios exist, you cannot afford to concentrate merely on one very slightly more likely scenario, but instead you must adopt a broad-spectrum policy of use against the wide range of threats against you.
These facts are all extremely inconvenient to those who just want to exaggerate nuclear weapons effects en masse in order to make civil defense seem absurd, so many don't bother, and pretend that escalation is not deterred by the protected second-strike capability. Therefore, they exaggerate the bombardment threat, by claiming that any nuclear detonation will automatically escalate the conflict into an all-out war where the scale of the conflict will be such as to increase the inefficiency of civil defense by overwhelming it, cratering every square inch of the country. Others take the Hiroshima and Nagasaki incendiary effects on predominantly wood-frame cities, scale them up to higher yields, and apply them to modern cities, neglecting differences such as the construction materials, the lack of open charcoal cooking braziers and paper/bamboo screens and easily inflammable furnishings like World War II dark coloured "black-out" air raid curtains in modern buildings. Then they add in fallout, as if a surface burst can produce the thermal effects of an air burst, which it can't (because of the use of energy for cratering and the shadowing effect of buildings on the line-of-sight thermal transmission from the low fireball before the blast wave can arrive). They ridicule the ease of shielding the radiation from fallout, even though wherever the bomb contains any kind of U-238 tamper or reflector, much of the intense radiation for the few days following the detonation is very easily-shielded low energy gamma radiation from U-240, Np-239, and U-237 caused by neutron capture in the U-238 (for a surface burst on ground containing a lot of sodium, you can get high energy, hard-to-shield, Na-24 activity as well, but that is dependent on the type of soil). Naturally, they ignore the dangerous and vital research which people like Dr Carl F. Miller and colleagues of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory did at the 1946-62 atomspheric nuclear tests on improvised fallout protection, evacuation and decontamination techniques.
Exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons makes you more vulnerable by getting rid of the simple, effective countermeasures: it encourages panic and helplessness in any attack, thereby maximising the numbers of people hurt by flash burns, flying glass and radiation, and maximising the scale of a tragedy.

Above: as this illustration shows, you can't even expect secrecy to work efficiently against nuclear proliferation in a democracy. If you think that secrecy will prevent nuclear proliferation, you need to look at the history of proliferation, beginning with Stalin's bomb test of 1949 when the facts were still officially highly classified. The New York Times science journalist William L. Laurence, eye-witness of the first nuclear tests (1945-6)and the bombing of Nagasaki, in his 1951 book on the physics and uses of the hydrogen bomb, The Hell Bomb (Hollis and Carter, London), identified fusion "boosting" and "spark plug" principles. He explains that liquid deuterium undergoes self-sustaining fusion (i.e., "ignition", as contrasted to a a non-sustaining fusion reaction where the energy losses due to radiation cool the fuel and prevent further fusion before the deuterium has all been fused into helium) at 50,000,000 C but only if it is maintained at that temperature for a period of 200 microseconds, which is 200 times longer than the 1 microsecond duration of such an immense temperature in a fission bomb. This is the basic problem that Teller and Ulam faced in using a fission bomb to ignite deuterium in the hydrogen bomb in 1951, and Laurence explains that three simple scientific facts overcome the problem:
(1) The "ignition" time for self-sustaining fusion decreases as the temperature is increased. For liquid deuterium the ignition time is 200 microseconds for 50 million C, 30 microseconds for 100 million C, and 4.8 microseconds for 200 million C.
(2) The speed of the fusion reaction is proportional to the square of the density of the deuterium fuel (suggesting that compressing the fusion fuel to 14 times its normal density will speed up the reaction by the needed factor of 200 at 50 million C).
(3) Using a mixture of deuterium and tritium (produced by neutron capture in lithium, so that lithium deuteride in the form of a white solid can used in place of liquid deuterium) speeds up the fusion reaction: deuterium-tritium fusion requires 20 times less "ignition" time than pure deuterium for similar fuel density and a temperature 50,000,000 C.
On page 46, Laurence argues from these facts that the temperature of a fission bomb needs to receive a deuterium-tritium "boost" to higher temperatures prior to the ignition of the main charge of deuterium or deuterium-tritium:
"It can thus be deduced that the only feasible H-bomb is one in which a relatively small amount of a deuterium-tritium mixture will serve as additional superkindling, to boost the kindling supplied by the improved model A-bomb, for lighting a fire with a vast quantity of deuterium. ...
"A deuterium bomb with a D-T booster would become a certainty if the temperature of the A-bomb trigger could be raised to 150 million or, better still, 200 million degrees. At the former temperature the D-T superkindling ignites in 0.38 microseconds; at the higher temperature the ignition time goes down to as low as 0.28 microseconds."
On page 53, Laurence mentioned "liquid deuterium and its tritium spark plug". Again, the concept of the "spark plug" to ignite a deuterium charge was used in the early thermonuclear weapons. He also pointed out on page 50 that lithium-6 (which is 7.42 % of natural lithium, and produces tritium upon neutron capture) does not need to be separated from natural lithium: "there is no need to separate it from its heavier twin [lithium-7], since the latter has no affinity for neutrons and nearly all of them are gobbled up by the lighter element." This only applies to the moderated, low energy "slow" neutrons in a reactor. For higher neutron energy (i.e. unmoderated fission neutrons), lithium-7 absorbs the high energy neutron then releases tritium, helium and another neutron, so lithium-7 produces even more tritium.
The New Yorker on December 15, 2008, published an article by David Samuels called Atomic John: A truck driver uncovers secrets about the first nuclear bombs. A truck driver went to several American and British museums which been given early nuclear weapons (with the fissile material and high explosives removed to make them safe), and by simply probing inside them with a miniature video camera and by taking measurements when the curator was not looking, he was able to draw up the blue prints, published on Wikipedia (here and here). This shows the way that secrets can leak out, even if nobody with security clearance to nuclear weapon blueprints actually leaks them.
Melissa Smith's article in the British Journal for the History of Science on the scientific research behind the British civil defence corps until it was disbanded in 1968
This detailed, 32 pages-long article has not been printed on paper (presumably it will be in the first issue of the journal printed in 2010) yet, but it is already available online as a PDF file so it will be reviewed in detail below.
Ms Smith is a PhD student at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine of the University of Manchester, researching the Home Office's Scientific Advisory Branch contributions to British civil defence police up to 1968. She won a prize for an earlier version of the article, and there is a mention at the earlier blog posts here and here, because the Scientific Advisory Branch research has been so widely ignored by historians, either out of ignorance or prejudice.
Civil defence in Britain started out to reduce the effects of conventional bombing in World War II, and succeeded in reducing casualty rates to way below those observed from 1917 air raids during World War I: in World War II a total of 71.27 kilotons (in average units of 175 kg of explosive, according to the British Home Office) of bombs, V1 cruise missiles and V2 supersonic ballistic missiles hit Britain, killing 60,595 and injuring 86,182, a casualty rate of 2 casualties/ton, 60 times fewer than the prediction based on World War I data! (Primary sources for these data are the official home front H.M. Stationery Office histories of World War II published in the 1950s, particularly Terence H. O'Brien's excellent 729 pages long Civil defence - History of the Second World War Series, H.M. Stationery Office, 1955, which together with other related sources, was on the bookshelves of the U.K. National Archives enquiry room at Kew when I was doing research there in the 1990s, and made interesting reading while awaiting requested civil defence reports. Some key data from O'Brien and other sources are compiled in Peter Laurie's book on civil defence, Beneath the City Streets. Harford M. Hyde and G. R. Falkiner Nuttall state in their 1938 book Air Defence and the Civil Population, The Cresset Press, London, pp. 44-5, that in the 1914-8 war there were 103 German air raids by 643 aircraft on England, dropping altogether 8,776 bombs with a total mass of 270 tons, killing 1,414 and injuring 3,416.)
Because simple civil defence countermeasures proved so successful against World War II conventional bombing, the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch exposed simple Anderson shelters (a corrugated steel arch supposed to be covered with a few feet of packed earth, but covered with sandbags for convenience in the first british nuclear test) to the first British nuclear test on October 3, 1952, and found they survived 12 psi peak overpressure with the sandbags intact but just had the sandbags blown off by the blast at 55 psi peak overpressure. By the time the blast arrived, much of the the thermal and initial nuclear radiation pulses were over, so the shelters provided good all-round protection (sandbags could have been replaced, or earth could have been shovelled on the shelter, before a hazardous fallout radiation dose was accumulated).
British civil defence had been restarted against the Soviet Union's nuclear threat as a result of the U.K. Joint Intelligence Committee's Top Secret report, ‘Russian interests, intentions and capabilities’, JIC (48) 9 (0), 23 July 1948, L/WS/1/1173 (U.K. National Archives document CAB 158/3, reproduced in Richard J. Aldrich, ed., Espionage, Security, and Intelligence in Britain, 1945-1970, Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 1998, pp. 76–77). This report gave a better prediction of Russian nuclear capabilities than the American CIA (for an analysis of the reasons for the CIA failure, see Donald P. Steury, How the CIA Missed Stalin's Bomb: Dissecting Soviet Analysis, 1946-50, CIA). The 23 July 1948 report, written at the height of the Berlin airlift (when the Russians shut off access to the Western part of Berlin to try to starve the population there), stated that the Soviet Union was producing every month 500 tanks, 300 fighter aircraft and 150 bombers, and that the Soviets would "produce their first atomic bomb by January 1951", obtaining 6-22 bombs by January 1953 and producing further bombs "at the rate of 2 to 4 per year". This report caused NATO to be set up in addition to British civil defence, although it had underestimated the threat: the first Russian nuclear test occurred on August 29, 1949.
After fallout from that first Russian test had been detected, civil defence was restarted in many countries. The 36 pages long "Restricted" classified Home Office Civil Defence Corps., Training Memorandum No. 3, Revised Edition, 1953: Civil Defence in Other Countries (H.M. Stationery Office, 1953) states that America had over 3,000,000 F.C.D.A. civil defence volunteers by May 31, 1952; Sweden had 900,000 enrolled civil defence personnel by January 1953; Canada had 52,000 in April 1952; Norway had 47,400 on July 1, 1952 (all of whom had completed basic training), and Denmark had 9,000 in July 1952 (in Denmark all private structures built after 1950 had to include shelters and all persons between 16-65 years of age were subject to conscription in civil defence).
I was disappointed in reading the article to find that Ms Smith does not cover any details whatsoever of the nuclear weapons tests research into protection against blast, thermal radiation and fallout, and while she mentions Home Office scientists visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Frank Pavry and George Stanbury attending the first British test, she omits to give the details and results of the civil defence research at even the first British nuclear weapon test, Operation HURRICANE in 1952, which was specifically designed (an underwater burst in a ship) to simulate a terrorist attack and to provide a maximum amount of civil defence information to check and extend the results in Glasstone's 1950 compilation The Effects of Atomic Weapons. She incorrectly states that the HURRICANE research was mainly concerned with blast, when in fact extensive fallout measurements were made for civil defence purposes. The whole point of exploding HURRICANE inside a ship was to gain civil defence information, contrary to her claim:
"However, civil defence always remained a low priority relative to the primary aim of weapons development."
This claim contradicts the stated civil defence objectives of the HURRICANE nuclear test director, Dr (later Lord) William G. Penney. See, for example, the interview of Penney published in journalist Bertin's 1955 book Atom Harvest, where Penney describes his work on modelling the base surge in an underwater explosion. Penney's early research on this fallout radiation problem is published in the 96-pages long, Los Alamos handbook compiled by a group headed by the brilliant neutron bomb inventor, Samuel T. Cohen, Cross-roads handbook of explosion phenomena, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory report LA-550, April 9, 1946 (6.1 MB PDF download link here; notice that Cohen adds an amendment to correct radiation calculation errors in Penney's paper!).
The purpose of that handbook was to predict the radioactive fallout contamination and other effects from the forthcoming CROSSROADS-BAKER nuclear weapon test, a 23.5 kt device to be detonated 90 feet below the surface of water 180 feet deep in Bikini Lagoon on July 25, 1946. Penney failed to predict the radiation hazards adequately, and was stunned to watch the radioactive base surge spreading out from the base of the collapsing water column while attending the test as a blast effects scientist. In his later BBC broadcast, Penney vividly described the BAKER base surge as: ‘a thin pancake mixture spreading as it is poured into a frying pan.’ Later, Penney and his colleague Hicks simulated the base surge in the laboratory by releasing columns of dyed water into water of slightly different density (produced by varying the salinity of the water), and presented a 24-pages long paper called "The Base Surge: the Mechanism of Fall-Out" at the secret 1948 Symposium on the Physical Effects of Atomic Weapons, Paper No. 14, declassified by the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment in 1955.
This paper demonstrates vital British civil defence research on fallout in 1948 influencing the nature of the test of Britain's first nuclear weapon, an objective decided upon in August 1950 (over two years before the test), according to page 68 of Richard Moore's book The Royal Navy and nuclear weapons. Ms Smith seems to think that the first Home Office information on fallout came from the 1950 American manual The Effects of Atomic Weapons, when in fact the Home Office received the vitally important 1948 AWRE Symposium on the Physical Effects of Atomic Weapons, as proved, for instance, by the discussion in the 1949 Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch paper HO 225/14, The advantage of lying prone in reducing the dose of gamma rays from an airburst atomic bomb.
Above: the residual contamination from the 1946 Bikini Atoll 23.5 kt BAKER nuclear test at 27 m depth in 55 m deep lagoon water, as published on page 285 of the 1950 edition of Glasstone's U.S. Department of Defense book The Effects of Atomic Weapons. To Penney detonated the first British nuclear bomb, 25 kt HURRICANE, at 2.7 m depth underwater in a 1,370-ton river class frigate anchored in 12 m of water 350 m off Trimouille Island, Monte Bello. The shallow HURRICANE explosion sucked up far more seabed mud than BAKER did, thus creating far more severe close-in fallout, and leaving a saucer-shaped crater on the seabed 6 m deep and 300 m across.
Unfortunately, the HURRICANE test fallout information was so important (as a bargaining chip for trading with America in exchange for megaton surface burst fallout data) that it was classified "Top Secret". Stanbury therefore in 1953 and 1954 had to write up a special more obscure "Restricted" version of the HURRICANE fallout results for civil defence use, HO 225/42, giving the fallout pattern from the HURRICANE test as idealized ellipses of similar area and length to the measured "fan shaped" pattern, without revealing the source of the new data, although still showing the vastly higher one-hour dose rates on adjacent land than those Glasstone (1950) gave for the 1946 BAKER underwater test. The difference was due to the considerably shallower depth of water in the HURRICANE test, which caused more mud to be taken up in the mushroom cloud, increasing the close-in fallout. In another report, HO 225/51, they applied the idealized elliptical version of the HURRICANE nuclear test fallout pattern to the situation of two bombs detonated off the port of Liverpool.
Ms Smith also omits to mention the Fission Fragments journal publication in the late 1960s of a draft Atomic Weapons Research Establishment report on the shielding of fallout gamma radiation at the British Operation ANTLER nuclear tests for civil defence in 1957 (also available as National Archives report HO 227/114 Extracts from a draft report entitled Operation Antler, the Attenuation of Residual Radiation by Structures). She makes no mention of the fact that the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch was given the classified November 1957 manual, the Capabilities of Atomic Weapons (only declassified in 1997) which was extensively checked and used by Stanbury in Home Office Advisory Branch reports on fallout and thermal radiation transmission. (For thermal effects assessing the classified American manual see National Archives documents HO 227/23, HO 227/90, HO 225/109, HO 225/112; for fallout assessments of the classified American manual see for example HO 225/101 Downwind fallout area from groundburst megaton explosions 1960.)
Instead of showing examples of Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch nuclear weapons testing research, Ms Smith tends to play down the rigorous basis for civil defence by using the example of "Protect and Survive" shelter design tests with radioactive sources in England, which have already been published in an American report. She falls into the popular prejudice (discredited by Professor Freeman Dyson in his 1984 book Weapons and hope, where he explains that when as a nuclear weapons design consultant he visited Los Alamos and LANL in 1958, all of the nuclear weapons being designed were of far lower yield than the old 10-15 megaton range weapons tested in 1952-4):
"In November 1952, however, the United States tested the world’s first hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb.32 This new type of weapon was not only hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bomb, but also generated far greater quantities of radioactive dust – fallout – which was produced when an H-bomb was detonated at ground level, and which could spread radiation hundreds of miles from the site of the explosion."
Multimegaton weapons were largely abandoned in the late 1950s (with the exception of fifty stockpiled 9 megaton warheads used for the massive, liquid-fueled Titan II missile, which was retained specifically in the stockpile in order to threaten to shake up the shelter system under the Kremlin in the event of a war, before the lower-yield earth penetrator was developed), because firstly they are extremely ineffective weight-for-weight compared to using a larger number of lower yield weapons, and secondly, their immense weight of many tons requires massive delivery systems. Because the area of destruction is less than proportional to the yield, bigger weapons are less effective than the same energy delivered by a larger number of smaller yield weapons. This is precisely why nobody stockpiles 50 megaton bombs for deterrence, although such yields were successfully tested for political purposes.
Above: the 1950 edition of Glasstone's U.S. Department of Defense book The Effects of Atomic Weapons predicted effects from fission air bursts of up to 200 kilotons (the highest yield predicted for the 1951 GREENHOUSE test series at Eniwetok), which includes the yield ranges of many nuclear weapons still stockpiled today. This graph from page 374 of that book shows that damage distances only vary slowly for large variations in explosive energy.
When you look at the average warhead yields stockpiled since about 1960, and take account of the fact that damage radii typically scale as the cube-root of yield, the thermonuclear weapons are typically about one order of magnitude larger in yield than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, so that the damage radii are increased by a factor of typically 101/3 ~ 2. Thus, analyses of the effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not obsolete; the testing of an undeliverable (82 ton mass) 10 megaton yield bomb at Eniwetok in 1952 did not change the real civil defence situation at any time because such massive bombs and their delivery systems were never deployed in significant numbers!
In any case, there were wide variations in nuclear strategy during the period that her article covers, which altered the way in which nuclear weapons would be used in war. In the 1950s, tactical nuclear warfare was rehearsed in Nevada nuclear weapons tests: nuclear weapons would be used as low air bursts dropped over enemy beach defenses prior to invasions of D-Day kind, preventing slaughter. On page 171 of On Thermonuclear War (1960), Herman Kahn argues: "... in World War I and World War II ... civilian morale played a essential role in furnishing men and materials to the fighting fronts. This is no longer true, and therefore civilians and their property are no longer military targets. The idea of bonus nonmilitary damage is now not only immoral, it is senseless." This was put made into national policy by U.S. Defense Secretary McNamara in his famous "no cities" Ann Arbor, Michigan speech of June 1962:
"The U.S. has come to the conclusion that, to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general nuclear war ... should be the destruction of the enemy's military forces, not of his civilian population."
As Clausewitz stated, the objective of a war is the resolution of a disagreement by the hot-blooded extension of politics, not an attempt to slaughter civilians (which is the major threat from the cold-blooded "peaceful" use of gas chambers and starvation in concentration camps). "Total war" by the indiscriminate bombing cities has hardened civilian resolve and defeated its military purpose: two megatons of conventional explosives and incendiaries dropped on Germany did not alone end World War II. However, Ms Smith's article is just a general overview of a large body of research so these issues should not obscure the fact that her article is far closer to the facts than the unbalanced, ignorant attacks of previous historians who based all of their conclusions about civil defence effectiveness on the books and thoughts of scientifically ignorant politicians, ignoring the actual research done by the Home Office Scientific Advisory branch altogether. Ms Smith concludes:
"... The implicit assumption by historians that scientific advisers were providing mere technical background to civil defence decisions has led to their important role in civil defence policy being ignored. Yet while ministers and top officials were arguing about the future of civil defence, the scientific advisers were helping define the terms on which nuclear war and civil defence would be understood. Far from being merely a group of boffins, there to be tapped by policymakers for technical data as required, the advisers played an active role in deciding how civil defence would be framed and how its problems would be solved. Policymakers and politicians took the final decisions about civil defence policy, but fundamental decisions taken by the Home Office scientists helped determine their range of options.
"Understanding these interactions is crucial in shedding light on the diverse ways in which science has been, and still is, used as a tool to shape policy."
The exact mechanism by which the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II

Above: munitions were being manufactured in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as in all Japanese cities. Before Hiroshima, no fewer than 93 Japanese cities had all been burned down (with the same average area destroyed as that due to the nuclear explosion in Nagasaki) using conventional incendiary air raids at a mere fraction of the cost in money, resources, and human work that the nuclear bombs required. This photo appropriately shows the remains of the torpedo plant at Nagasaki after the nuclear blast. Japan began the war against America at Pearl Harbor by dropping a revolutionary secret new weapon: specially designed torpedoes which could operate in harbor water normally too shallow for torpedoes; America likewise ended the war by dropping a secret new kind of bomb.
On October 1, 2009, Professor Freeman Dyson in a lecture at Tufts University "argued that it was not the August 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that convinced the Japanese to surrender at the end of World War II."
The exact mechanism is:
(1) News of Hiroshima convinced Joseph Stalin that the war against Japan was nearly over, so to be included on the list of victors in that war Stalin declared war against Japan on 8 August 1945 (two days after Hiroshima). (President Truman had already indicated to him that America was preparing to use nuclear weapons, and spies at Los Alamos had already given Stalin the key nuclear weapons secrets.)
(2) Japan's leaders had been holding out against nightly air raids and city firestorming by incendiaries, in the hope that Stalin would help negotiate an armistice or conditional surrender.
(3) Once Stalin had declared war on Japan on 8 August and had firmly backed that up by invading Japanese-held Manchuria on 9 August, and America had dropped a second nuclear weapon (Nagasaki) on Japan also on 9 August, Japanese hopes for Soviet diplomatic assistance evaporated.
The successful attacks of the Soviet Union in Manchuria, in the week after it declared war on Japan, defeated Japanese resolve and led to the Japanese surrender on 15 August, as Tsuyoshi Hasegawa demonstrates in his 2006 book, Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. But this Soviet invasion of Manchuria was not independent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Stalin waited until Hiroshima before he declared war on Japan and launched his invasion of Manchuria.
So nuclear weapons acted in two separate ways on Japan: (1) they added to the damage already being done nightly in thousand-bomber air raids on the cities of Japan, and (2) they pushed Stalin into hastily declaring war on Japan and starting to fight the Japanese before Japan could surrender to America. David Holloway's 1996 book, Stalin and the Bomb, documents Stalin's entirely delusional and paranoid dictatorial thought. Stalin viewed any offer of friendship and disarmament from "capitalists" as either suspicuous (trickery by capitalists?) or else as a sign of the inherent and exploitable weakness of democracy (the gullible stupidity of the capitalist politicians). His decisions were based entirely upon getting the biggest gains for the Soviet Union as he could, and he did not want friendship or collaboration with "capitalists" unless there was a material Soviet gain to be expected from it. He was not the kindly "Uncle Joe" character portrayed by World War II propaganda, and had no qualms about violating the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact. Wikipedia states:
"On August 6 and 9, the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. Also on August 9, the Soviet Union launched a surprise invasion of the Japanese colony in Manchuria (Manchukuo), in violation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact. These twin shocks caused Emperor Hirohito to intervene and order the Big Six to accept the terms the Allies had set down for ending the war in the Potsdam Declaration. After several more days of behind-the-scenes negotiations and a failed coup d'état, Hirohito gave a recorded radio address to the nation on August 15. In the radio address, called the Gyokuon-hōsō (Jewel Voice Broadcast), he read the Imperial Rescript on surrender, announcing to the Japanese populace the surrender of Japan."
There has been a great deal of propaganda over the facts due to the controversy over the role of nuclear weapons. Clearly America could have won the war without using nuclear weapons, but Stalin would have continued to hold out for as long as possible before getting involved so in that case the war would have been extended, and conventional air raids plus a ground invasion of Japan could have caused a predicted million casualties. (Cynical historians at the BBC hyped propaganda that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were simply demonstrations of American power to the Soviet Union, beginning the Cold War. The BBC's Laurence Rees, who was behind it, also wrote a 1992 book to his BBC TV series on propaganda, We Have Ways of Making You Think, where he writes: "Goebbels was undeniably a nasty piece of work, but he was a genius in his chosen field and one should be prepared to learn from nasty people as well as nice ones." In 2008, having failed to sway opinion in 1995 to the view that Hiroshima was designed to be a demonstration to Stalin, Rees wrote another BBC book, World War Two: Behind Closed Doors – Stalin, the Nazis and the West, which stated: "The reason the bomb was dropped was – as common sense suggested all along – primarily because the Americans wanted to end the war as quickly as possible and, crucially, prevent the need to invade the Japanese home islands.") See also Norris McWhirter's article, "The BBC's Hiroshima Disgrace", in the October 1995 issued of Freedom Today, analyzing the 1989 and 1995 BBC TV propaganda.
The person behind the way nuclear weapons were used against both Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan was in fact Colonel Paul Tibbets, head of the 509th, who piloted the Enola Gay in the Hiroshima attack. His autobiography, The Tibbets Story, published in 1978, is factual and frank on the way the bombs were used: they were used to maximise casualties in order to try to shock the Japanese into conceding defeat before they ran out of nuclear weapons. The problem for America was that it was producing plutonium too slowly to produce more than two bombs for delivery in August. Colonel Tibbets explains simply:
"The use of a second bomb the same week was calculated to indicate that we had an endless supply of this superweapon ... Actually, a third atomic bomb would not be ready until September, but we were confident two would be enough."
In other words, it was a confidence trick. America could not have caused as much destruction in Japan with nuclear weapons as it had already caused with conventional chemical explosives and incendiary attacks, because it didn't have enough nuclear weapons. According to page 336 of Glasstone's Effects of Atomic Weapons (1950), the March 9, 1945 air raid dropping 1,667 tons of TNT and incendiary bombs on Tokyo caused more casualties than Hiroshima or Nagasaki and destroyed 15.8 square miles, compared to just 4.7 at Hiroshima and 1.8 at Nagasaki, while the average for 93 air raids on other Japanese cities gave a mean of 1.8 square miles destroyed per raid of 1,129 tons of TNT and incendiaries. In other words, the same area destruction as 93 Nagasaki nuclear attacks had already been done in Japan by non-nuclear bombing air raids! That's how much more destructive "conventional" warfare was compared to nuclear weapons. The same occurred in Europe, where for example on February 13, 1945, 800 RAF Lancasters dropped 3 kt of TNT and incendiary bombs on Dresden, destroying 15 square miles and killing a similar number of people as were killed in Hiroshima.
The only reason why the casualty rates at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not lower was the element of surprise deliberately exploited by Tibbets, who records in his autobiography how he sent small groups of weather observation aircraft over the cities at the same time each day for weeks before dropping the bombs in part to make the population complacent (ignoring the air raid siren warnings), and also to reduce the concern of the AA (anti-aircraft) guns of the cities: hence, as widely documented by survivors accounts, most people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not take cover, but stood and watched the lone B-29 drop its bomb, often from behind glass windows, because they were unaware of the hazard of a nuclear weapon. If they had known, and had ducked and covered when they saw the bomb fall, they would have avoided the thermal burns and flying glass injuries which caused the lethal synergism of combined infected wounds and radiation-depressed white blood cell counts, where the radiation exposure would not have caused a lethal effect if unaccompanied by burns and other trauma:
Above: Dr Shields Warren (whose factual testimony on radiation hazards to the U.S. Congress in 1957 we discussed in the previous post) and Dr Ashley Webster Oughterson compiled detailed data on the survival of groups of people at various distances in Hiroshima according to the degree of protection they had in their book Medical effects of the atomic bomb in Japan, by the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw Hill, New York, 1956).
The high casualty rates from thermal radiation in Japan are not generally applicable to other situations. The U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment study The Effects of Nuclear War in 1979 pointed out that on a cold winter night typically only 1 % of the population would be exposed to thermal radiation, compared to typically 25 % for the summer and daytime. In addition, the weather (atmospheric visibility) affects thermal transmission from bomb to target, just as the wind direction affects fallout delivery to a target in a surface burst. Nobody therefore can assert that a nuclear weapon explosion will automatically produce the effects exhibited on Hiroshima. Even if the atmospheric conditions were similar, other factors would be different and the results would not be the same. For example, Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), in Table 12.17 on page 546, stated that the distance from ground zero in Hiroshima for 50 % survival after 20 days was 0.12 miles for people in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for people standing outdoors. Therefore the difference in distances between the range for 50% survival in modern city buildings and that for people flash burned, irradiated and blasted while standing in the open, was a factor of 11 for Hiroshima, so the difference in areas is a factor of 112 ~ 120. Hence, taking cover in modern city buildings would reduce the risk of being killed by a factor of 120 for Hiroshima conditions, contrary to popular media presented political propaganda that civil defence is hopeless.
Notice that Japanese and the media presentations in general of the effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have generally whitewashed over the difference in survival rates due to "duck and cover" in their data, and prefer to instead present the data politically to butress the falsehood that survival was impossible, claiming falsely that this is proved by printing photos of burned corpses and such like, while ignoring the 93 Nagasaki sized conflagrations produced by non-nuclear incendiary bombing before Hiroshima. Like C. E. M. Joad's propaganda which helped Hitler in 1933-9, they lie to support political initiatives which claim to cause disarmament and peace by snubbing civil defence, but which in fact simply encourage proliferation of weapons to terrorists and dictatorships which ignore treaties and revel in creating the one system of weapons which democracies falsely hype - using lies from Hiroshima - as being impossible to defend against. They don't care about scientific facts which people need to know to reduce risks which history has shown can never be averted simply by signing contracts with dictatorships and terrorists; they just care just about promoting their lying propaganda because it is currently deemed "politically correct" by scientifically ignorant, prejudiced politicians.
Relevant analogy to gas attack risk in World War II
"The use of gas is indeed a two-edged sword which may cut equally well both ways, and the certainty of reprisal on its own citizens will undoubtedly restrain any belligerent state from embarking upon unlimited gas warfare from the air, unless it is in desperate circumstances and is willing to gamble all on one gigantic blow, in the hope of crushing its adversary before he can retaliate.
"Although the use of gas against the civil population, at least in the early stages of a war, may be considered as unlikely, nevertheless, there is always the ever-present danger that it may be used at any time and may come as a complete surprise. For this reason, the only safe course that any government worthy of the name can adopt is to see that all possible steps are taken in time of peace to prepare for such an eventuality and that its civil population will be adequately protected against such attacks. It is in recognition of this danger that each country in Europe has provided gas masks and shelters for its entire urban population and has set up a most elaborate system of Passive Defense in its great cities."
- Lieutenant Colonel Augustin M. Prentiss, General Staff Corps., United States Army, Civil Air Defense: A Treatise on the Protection of the Civil Population against Air Attack, McGraw-Hill, London, 1941, p. 65.
Extract from an earlier post on thermal ignition by radiant exposure:

Above: people escaping the firestorm in the bamboo furnishings and paper screen filled wooden houses at Hiroshima, where thermal ignition was due to black coloured air-raid "blackout" curtains (which ignite easily, unlike light colours), and the overturning of thousands of household charcoal cooking braziers used during the breakfast-time attack in Hiroshima (the Nagasaki attack occurred when lunch was being prepared). The firestorm did not develop instantly, and lying propaganda is debunked by the facts:
‘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 originally ‘secret’ May 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Nagasaki states (vol. 1, p. 10):
‘... the raid alarm was not given ... until 7 minutes after the atomic bomb had exploded ... less than 400 persons were in the tunnel shelters which had capacities totalling approximately 70,000.’
This situation, of most people watching lone B-29 bombers, led to the severe burns by radiation and flying debris injuries in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The originally ‘secret’ May 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima, pp. 4-6:
‘Six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet [975 m] of air zero stated that black cotton black-out curtains were ignited by flash heat... A large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was, however, in agreement that a great majority of the original fires were started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires... There had been practically no rain in the city for about 3 weeks. The velocity of the wind ... was not more than 5 miles [8 km] per hour....
‘The fire wind, which blew always toward the burning area, reached a maximum velocity of 30 to 40 miles [48-64 km] per hour 2 to 3 hours after the explosion ... Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion... almost no effort was made to fight this conflagration within the outer perimeter which finally encompassed 4.4 square miles [11 square km]. Most of the fire had burned itself out or had been extinguished on the fringe by early evening ... There were no automatic sprinkler systems in building...’
The vital six secret volumes of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey consist of three volumes on Hiroshima dated May 1947 and three on Nagasaki dated June 1947. (These are completely separate from the brief unclassified summary on the effects published by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1946.) These secret volumes were finally declassified in 1972 and may be inspected at the British National Archives, as documents AIR 48/160, AIR 48/161, AIR 48/162, AIR 48/163, AIR 48/164, and AIR 48/165.
Dr Ashley Oughterson and Dr Shields Warren noted a fire risk in Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956, p. 17):
‘Conditions in Hiroshima were ideal for a conflagration. Thousands of wooden dwellings and shops were crowded together along narrow streets and were filled with combustible material.’
Above: seasoned ponderosa pine and douglas fir wood was just surface-charred to less than 1 mm depth (regardless of intensity), and not ignited, by a 30 kiloton TEAPOT Nevada test in 1955. The depth of charring shown in the curves are experimentally accurate to within +/- 10 % and apply to normal incidence (face-on exposure). (If the wood is exposed at angle A to the direction of the fireball, the radiant exposure needed for the same depth of charring is increased by the factor 1/cosine A.) Source: Kyle P. Laughlin, Thermal Ignition and Response of Materials, Report to the Test Director, Operation TEAPOT, Nevada Test Site, February-May 1955, Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, weapon test report WT-1198, December 1957 (declassified in July 1960), AD0611227. Laughlin exposed many inflammable materials to 30 kt Nevada nuclear weapons tests at Operation TEAPOT in 1955, discovering that thermal ignition to cause fires required thin kindling fuels (particularly newspaper litter, straw or sawdust), while thick inflammable materials such as plywood just undergo thermal ablation, i.e. the emission of smoke due to the vaporization of a fraction of a millimetre of the surface layer (e.g., the outer paint layer). The smoke produced in this way by the first part of the thermal radiation then shields and protects the underlying wood from reaching ignition temperature! Laughlin concludes his report as follows:
"Timber impregnated with flammable preservative oils, when painted with a white-pigmented fire-retarded coating composition [i.e. simply white-wash] whose chemical and physical characteristics fulfil requirements as specified by the Engineering Division of the Association of American Railroads, should be capable of resisting the thermal effects of atomic devices if the structure survives physically the effects of the blast wave. [For higher yield devices, even more thermal radiation exposure is required for the same effect, because the longer duration of the thermal pulse for bigger weapons produces a smaller temperature rise in any given material.]"
This had been known since the very first nuclear test, TRINITY (July, 16 1945):
‘The measured total radiation at [9.1-km] from the centre was 0.29 calories/cm2 ... Examination of the specimen exposed at [975 m] shows ... the charred layer does not appear to be thicker than 1/10 millimetre.... scorching of the fir lumber used to support signal wires extended out to about [1.9 km] ... the risk of fire due to the radiation ... is likely to be much less than the risk of fire from causes existing in the buildings at the time of explosion.’ – W. G. Marley and F. Reines, July 16th Nuclear Explosion [TRINITY, 1945]: Incendiary Effects of Radiation, Los Alamos report LA-364, October 1945, originally Secret, pp. 5-6.
“... the flow of heat [even within the fireball] into a massive object, such as a shot tower, shield, or coral rock, will be comparatively slow [in comparison to the brief duration of high fireball temperatures] even with a high temperature gradient. Consequently, the interior portions of large structures in the neighborhood [of the fireball] may not receive enough heat to evaporate ...”
- S. L. Whitcher, et al., Operation HARDTACK, Project 2.8, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense laboratory, weapon test report WT-1625 (1961), p. 12.
“The fact that only a thin layer of sand was actually either vaporized or melted, even though in contact with the fireball ... indicates that the thermal effects penetrate only superficially into solid material during the short duration of the very high temperatures. By computing the energy required to heat, decarbonate, and melt 264 tons of coral sand and to heat, melt and vaporize 165 tons of iron ... 8.5 % of the available radiant energy [i.e., 3% of the 15.2 kt yield of the 61-m high tower REDWING-INCA test, because the radiant energy was 35% of the total energy of the explosion] was utilised for heating the tower and soil material.”
- Charles E. Adams and J. D. O’Connor, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, report USNRDL-TR-208, 1957, p. 13.
ABOVE: U.S. Army photo showing how a mere leaf of Fatsia japonica attenuated the heat flash enough to prevent scorching to the bitumen on an electric pole near the Meiji Bridge, 1.3 km range, Hiroshima. It didn't even vaporize the leaf before the pulse ended, let alone did it somehow ignite the wooden pole (most photos claiming to show thermal flash radiation effects in Hiroshima and Nagasaki purely show effects from the fires set off by the blast wave overturning cooking stoves, which developed 30 minutes to 2 hours later).'Even blades of grass cast permanent shadows on otherwise badly scorched wood. The [Hiroshima nuclear bomb heat] flash lasted less time than it took the grass to shrivel.' - Chapman Pincher, Into the Atomic Age, Hutchinson and Co., London, 1950, p. 50.
ABOVE: the heat flash radiation which causes the scorching is so unscattered or unidirectional that any shading from the fireball source stops it even if you are exposed to the scattered radiation from the rest of the sky: shadows still present in October 1945 in the bitumen road surface of Yorozuyo Bridge, 805 m SSW of ground zero, Hiroshima, pointed where the bomb detonated (U.S. Army photo).“The foliage making up the crowns [upper branches and leaves] of the trees, while it has a high probability of being exposed to the full free-field radiation environment from air bursts... may, however, materially reduce the exposure of the forest floor by generating quantities of smoke and steam, as well as by direct shading.” - Philip J. Dolan, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency, 1978 revision, Secret – Restricted Data, Chapter 15, "Damage to Forest Stands", paragraph 15-9.
"Green leaves and needles on tree crowns smoke and char but do not ordinarily sustain ignition. This smoke production materially reduces the radiant exposure of the ground surface." - Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense, TM 23-200, Confidential, 1960, page 11-2.
“Fuels seldom burn vigorously, regardless of the wind conditions, when fuel moisture content exceeds about 16 percent. This corresponds to an equilibrium moisture content for a condition of 80 percent relative humidity. Rainfall of only a fraction of an inch will render most fuels temporarily nonflammable and may extinguish fires in thin fuels... Surface fuels in the interior of timber stands are exposed to reduced wind velocities; generally, these fuels retain their moisture as a result of shielding from the wind and shading from sunlight by the canopy.” - Philip J. Dolan, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency, 1978 revision, Secret – Restricted Data, Chapter 15, "Damage to Forest Stands", page 15-60. (This material can also be found in the U.S. Department of Defense's Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, TM-23-200, Confidential, 1960, p. 11-3.)
Above: Figure 6.24a of the 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons showing effect of a nuclear explosion giving a peak overpressure of 3.8 psi to a natural Pisonia dominated forest stand (similar to American beech forests) with a mean tree height of 50 feet and a mean diameter at the stem base of 2 feet (note that the test report WT-921 states that at 8,800 feet where the peak overpressure was 4.2 psi some 58% of trees were snapped so the figure of 90% given by Glasstone 1957 is not justified; about 50% of the trees were broken by 3.8 psi not 90%); this photo is identified as Bikini Atoll's Eniirikku (codenamed Uncle by America) Island, at a position just 9,300 feet from the 110 kt CASTLE-KOON nuclear surface burst test of 1954 in Figure 3.8 on page 38 of the originally Secret - Restricted Data report on forest stands exposed at Operation Castle, WT-921. Notice that the forest was not ignited; it did not burn contrary to anti-civil defense lies which are popularized by propaganda ... [for remainder, click here].













