The effects of nuclear weapons: debunking lying exaggerations that encourage proliferation

‘... We learned about an enemy who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal. ... We learned that the institutions charged with protecting ... did not adjust their policies, plans and practices to deter or defeat it.’ - Thomas H. Kean (Chair) and Lee H. Hamilton (Vice Chair), Preface to The 9/11 Commission Report, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

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 ‘King and Country’ Debate, 1933: Student Politics, Pacifism and the Dictators



"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.



Architects of Armageddon: the Home Office Scientific Advisers' Branch and civil defence in Britain, 1945–68



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].

posted by nige @ 4:15 PM 0 comments

Friday, October 23, 2009

Factual evidence versus the consensus of ignorant opinion and propaganda during the 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on the Effects of Nuclear Fallout

"From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies [by Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller and other geneticists who worked on plants, who falsely hyped their insect and plant data as valid for mammals like humans during the June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on fallout effects], it appeared that the number (or frequency) of mutations in a given population ... is proportional to the total dose ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions need to be revised, at least for mammals. [Mammals are biologically closer to humans, in respect to DNA repair mechanisms, than short-lived insects whose life cycles are too small to have forced the evolutionary development of advanced DNA repair mechanisms, unlike mammals that need to survive for decades before reproducing.] When exposed to X-rays or gamma rays, the mutation frequency in these animals has been found to be dependent on the exposure (or dose) rate ... At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 R/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent ... with adult female mice ... a delay of at least seven weeks between exposure to a substantial dose of radiation, either neutrons or gamma rays, and conception causes the mutation frequency in the offspring to drop almost to zero. ... recovery in the female members of the population would bring about a substantial reduction in the 'load' of mutations in subsequent generations."

- Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd ed., 1977, pp. 611-3.

"... we know through [inappropriate fruitfly and maize] experiments in genetics that the frequency of these [DNA] breaks, like the frequency of the mutations of the genes, is linearly proportional to the dose of radiation used, no matter how small ... It is true that at high dose rates of radiation you sometimes have two chromosomal [DNA] breaks near together and then you can get entanglement [i.e. repair incorrectly done to the broken ends of DNA strands where two breaks occur nearby] which would not happen if you have low dose rates. At low dose rates you therefore expect [if you are ignoring DNA repair mechanisms like the enzyme protein P53, only discovered in the late 1970s] the effect to be proportional but at the high dose rates to go up even more steeply. ... there was a less than linear apparent effect at very high doses, owing, as we judged, to the fact that the cells that had been worse hit were killed off more so that we lost the cases. But I do not see any way of getting a fundamentally nonlinear effect, especially at low doses. If the process takes place in any way like what we think it does, that is. [It doesn't, since in 1957 Muller and the other geneticists were ignorant of the DNA repair mechanisms discovered in the late 1970s!]"

- Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller's deceptive testimony to the Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Congress of the Unites States, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, June 1957, vol. 2, pages 1054 and 1138.



Above: numbers have become more accurate over the past half century, but the data on massive threshold radiation doses required for chronic exposure (low dose rates for 20 years exposure, as opposed to acute exposure over a few seconds for Hiroshima initial radiation which is more likely to saturate DNA strand breakage repair mechanisms like enzyme P53) to produce bone cancers in radium dial painters, was submitted to Congressional hearings on fallout in 1957 (which we discussed in connection with fallout research on the earlier post linked here) in a paper called Potential Hazards of World-Wide Sr-90 Fallout from Weapons Tests by Drs. Wright H. Langham and Ernest C. Anderson of Los Alamos. The solid data for the radium dial painter threshold evidence was simply ignored by Professor Edward Lewis, who instead fabricated false "evidence" for a linear, non-threshold theory from nuclear explosions in Japan, by means of ignoring statistics from Japan which did not fit his theory.

The U.S. National Bureau of Standards reported in 1941 that seven people with 0.02-0.5 micrograms of radium in their bodies for periods of 7-25 years had no effects, while bone cancer and death had resulted from 1.2 micrograms of radium: this finding historically resulted in the conservative setting of a maximum permissible safe concentration of 0.1 micrograms for radium in the body (which means that a greater quantity can be ingested, because most ingested radium is rapidly eliminated from the body and does not enter the bones: even for injected radium, the mean amounts remaining in the bodies of 19 patients after 6 months, 12 months and 20 years were just 4.7%, 2.2% and 0.8% respectively as reported on page 1162 of the 1957 fallout hearings). (A curie or 3.7×1010 Bq or decays per second, is equivalent to about 1 gram of radium.)

By the time of the June 1957 Congressional hearings on fallout effects, the group of internally contaminated radium workers and patients whose dosimetry had been established by careful whole body radiation measurements and excretion measurements, had grown to 78 people with an average exposure period of 25 years, of whom 15 developed malignant tumors; all of the tumors occurred in those people with the highest contamination, 0.5-10 micrograms of radium in their bodies. However, as pages 1155-6 of the testimony points out, the patient with 0.5 micrograms of radium apparently also had thorium contamination which increased the total dose received. Pages 1147-72 of the 1957 fallout hearings consists of detailed testimony of the research on this group up to that time. The radium dial painters licked their brushes to get a fine point to apply the luminous radium/zinc sulphide paint to the numerals and hands of watches; the patients were given radium contaminated water to drink as a health remedy. After presenting these data, Dr William B. Looney (b. 1922) testified (page 1157 of the hearings):

"I am saying that the minimal carcinogenic dose that we have reported for tumors to be produced in man is in the order of 2,000 rads. ... Ten microcuries of strontium deposited in the skeleton for 70 years would give an estimated dose of about 2,000 rads. This is the minimum radiation dose recorded which has produced a bone tumor in man. This should give some idea of the magnitude of strontium levels which may produce a bone tumor in man. You will notice that 6,000 rads is the estimated amount of radiation known to produce most tumors. The amount of strontium 90 which would deliver 6,000 rads to the skeleton over a life span of 70 years would be in the order of 30 microcuries. ... The patient with the smallest total body radium known to induce tumor formation ... died from a bone tumor in 1952 ... the patient would have received a total accumulated dose of about 1,800 rads during the 25-year period."

Since 1957, the group of radium contaminated workers and patients for which there is accurate dosimetry by measurements has increased from 78 to 2,383, and of these 2,383 cases: "All 64 bone sarcoma [cancer] cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy [1,000 rads], while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy." [Dr Robert Rowland, Director of the Center for Human Radiobiology, "Bone Sarcoma in Humans Induced by Radium: A Threshold Response?", Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting, European Society for Radiation Biology, Radioprotection colloquies, Vol. 32CI (1997), pp. 331-8.]

On May 27, 28, 29 and June 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7, 1957, the Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Congress of the United States, Eighty-Fifth Congress, First Session on The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, were held openly under the Chairmanship of Representative Chet Holifield of California, with media attendance. The published hearings are 2,216 pages in length, printed in three separate volumes (part 1 is pages 1-1,008, part 2 contains pages 1,009-2,065, and part 3 contains pages 2,067-2,216). During the debates between experts in these hearings, the "threshold dose" concept for long term effects was falsely killed off, in favour of Edward Lewis's linear non-threshold dose-effects "law" using non-scientific arguments and fears.



Above: this is the graph Professor Edward Lewis used on page 956 of the 1957 fallout hearings to attack the threshold dose evidence: for this purpose it relies on one allegedly solid data point for leukemia induction below 200 rem (numbers below data points are the excess numbers of leukemias over the natural number expected). This smallest dose data point is from the data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki available in 1957: there were 10 cases of leukemia out of 23,000 survivors at 1.5-2 km from ground zero in both cities, and from the unexposed control group only 4 would have been expected to have leukemia. Hence, the average radiation dose to those 23,000 survivors - assumed to be 25 rem using the very crude and inaccurate dosimetry which was available in 1957 - gave an excess cancer rate of 10 - 4 = 6 cases per 23,000 survivors. This is statistically insignificant, as testified by Dr Shields Warren on page 980. Moreover, Lewis ignored data from nuclear bomb survivors who received low doses and had a reduced leukemia risk as a consequence: page 1887 gives a table of leukemia results from Hiroshima available in 1957 which shows that there were 8 leukemia cases in the control group of 50,500 people beyond 2.5 km from ground zero (i.e. a rate of 0.016%), and only 2 cases in the 17,200 survivors who received low doses of radiation at 2-2.5 km (i.e. a rate of 0.012%). Hence, that table (from a U.S. National Academy of Sciences report, Pathologic Effects of Atomic Radiation, submitted as testimony) showed even in 1957 that low doses of radiation appeared to have a beneficial effect in reducing the natural cancer incidence below the rate in the control group. Lewis simply ignored this data which did not fit into his dogmatic linear non-threshold theory. Later data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki has far better, accurate and verified (against nuclear test data from the Pacific and Nevada) dosimetry as well as leukemia and solid cancer (tumor) data spanning over six decades: it confirms that threshold and beneficial effects exist but is suppressed and censored by the Japanese-American funded Radiation Effects Research Foundation to keep Lewis's false linear non-threshold dogma alive for political expediency.

‘Professor Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to the accumulated dose of radiation. ... Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957 Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine [E. B. Lewis, 'Leukemia and Ionizing Radiation', Science, v. 125, pp. 965-972, 17 May 1957]. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress.’ – Abstract of thesis by Jennifer Caron, Edward Lewis and Radioactive Fallout: the Impact of Caltech Biologists Over Nuclear Weapons Testing in the 1950s and 60s, Caltech, January 2003.

Lewis's pseudo-scientific linear non-threshold deception in testimony to Congress led to Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling using the data to estimate that strontium-90 in nuclear weapons testing would cause 1,000 leukemia deaths for each fission megaton of air bursts, by giving a very tiny increase in background radiation to the bones of billions of people around the world. However, radium is deposited in the bone and by analogy to strontium-90 the data for 2,383 radium dial painters who ingested radium licking their brushes to a fine point shows that bone cancer induction requires a threshold of 1,000 rads, and there was no excess of leukemias. Nobody has ever received 1,000 rads from strontium-90 ingestion from a nuclear bomb (not even the Rongelapese who drank contaminated rainwater for two days 115 miles downwind from the 15 megaton BRAVO test in 1954). Both leukemia and thyroid cancer have traditionally had diagnosis problems. The rates reported in different communities, or the same communities at different times in history, vary widely due to the rate of diagnosis rather than the true incidence. For example, before the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the reported thyroid tumor rates in the Gomel region of Belarus (mean thyroid dose to kids = 17.7 rads) were under 1 case per 100,000; in the US it was 13,000 (13% of the population) and in Finland 35,600 (35.6%). The Gomel region started to diagnose thyroid problems properly only after Chernobyl and reported a peak of 17.9 cases per 100,000 children (0.0179%) in 1995. This statistic can be used both for and against radiation:

(1) The 1995 peak of 0.0179% of Gomel people with occult thyroid cancers after 17.7 rads to the thyroid from Chernobyl's iodine-131 shows a 25-fold increase over the incidence in 1987. Hence, radiation is terrible, and the iodine-131 from Nevada testing probably caused many cancers!

(2) The 1995 peak of 0.0179% of Gomel people with occult thyroid cancers after 17.7 rads to the thyroid from Chernobyl's iodine-131 shows a 726-fold reduction from the normal rate in the U.S. and a 2,000-fold reduction from the normal rate in Finland. Hence, radiation is great, and the iodine-131 from Nevada testing probably saved many people getting cancer!

This conflict of interpretation is typical of the quackery of "ecological" studies of cancer rates due to radiation: having a proper control group is essential to getting meaningful information because it's the only way to determine statistical significance and to calibrate diagnosis rates properly. Improved diagnosis led to a rise in the reported crude mortality rate for leukemia in the U.S. from 42 per million per year in 1940 to 68 in 1954. Unless you know the diagnosis efficiency, reported cancer rates are useless. A lot of the data that Lewis used is this kind of statistical noise, lacking proper control groups to determine if errors exist.

Dr Gordon M. Dunning, chief Health Physicist for at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for fallout safety during nuclear weapons tests, wrote in the June 1964 edition of Health Aspects of Nuclear Weapons Testing, page 13:

"In describing the therapeutic use of iodine 131 in the treatment of hyperthyroidism, the [U.S. National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, Pathological Effects of Thyroid Irradiation, A Report of a Panel of Experts from the Committees on Biological Effects of Radiation, July 1962; revised version date December 1966 is AD0651181, which notes that for a given dose the thyroid damage due to X-rays is more severe than that due to iodine-131 because the X-rays are received at a higher dose rate in a matter of seconds, while the dose from iodine-131 is received at a lower rate, spread over several weeks] report stated: '... There is no evidence at hand, except for one doubtful case in a child, that any of the treatments for hyperthyroidism has produced a thyroid cancer, although doses have ranged from a few thousand rad (roentgens) upward ...'."

After that was published, there was an argument between Dr Dunning and an anti-nuclear information group, published in the September 1964 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, pages 29-30. Dunning, who had been in charge of public safety and iodine-131 monitoring during the 1950s, pointed out that a medical study that found that "one in 286 children exposed to 100 rads of throid radiation may develop thyroid cancer" and a 1961 Federal Radiation Council report that 150 rads "significantly increasd cancer rates" applied to therapeutic X-ray irradiation delivered at very high dose rates (X-rays over a period of seconds, unlike iodine-131 doses delivered spread over a period of weeks) which (quoting from U.S. National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, Pathological Effects of Thyroid Irradiation, A Report of a Panel of Experts from the Committees on Biological Effects of Radiation, July 1962) "appear to be 5 to 15 times as effective as iodine 131 ... There is no evidence at hand, except for one doubtful case in a child, that any of the treatments for hyperthyroidism has produced a thyroid cancer, although doses have ranged from a few thousand rad upward. ..."

Dr Dunning added in his letter to the September 1964 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, pages 29 that (because iodine-131 is of course highly volatile and doesn't condense quickly on fast-falling large fallout particles, so it is fractionated i.e. severely depleted from local fallout near the test site, but enriched in the distant fallout far downwind): "... the highest annual levels of iodine-131 in milk ever reported by the U.S. Public Health Service Milk Monitoring Network were at Palmer, Alaska (October 1961 through September 1962) ... The iodine-131 fallout in Alaska was largely the result of the USSR tests i.e., not local fallout. Incidentally, the Russian tests also were the principal source of the cesium 137 fallout in Alaska ..."

The thyroid damage to the people of Rongelap 115 miles downwind of the 14.8 megatons CASTLE-BRAVO nuclear test in March 1954 was due to their consumption of water from a fallout contaminated open cistern which collected rainwater (and fallout). They took no precautions and as a result received massive doses (from not just iodine-131 but also the other shorter lived iodine nuclides) according to the dosimetry based on iodine-131 excretion in the report by Dr Edward T. Lessard, et al., Thyroid Absorbed Dose for People at Rongelap, Utirik, and Sifo on March 1, 1954, BNL-5188. The people on Rongelap received mean thyroid doses from ingested water of 2,100 rads, those at Sifo received 670 rads, and those at Utirik received 280 rads. Therefore, the fact that some of the people did get thyroid nodules from their massive thyroid doses was to be expected, and does not prove the existence of a risk below the observed thresholds for the relevant dose rates.

(We discussed the civil defense countermeasures against iodine-131 and the other short half-life iodine nuclides in fallout in detail in the earlier post linked here. The main hazard is to young children with small thyroid glands that concentrate iodine (a small thyroid gland size implies a large dose, because the radiation "dose" is defined as the energy deposited per unit mass of tissue, i.e. 1 centigray = 0.01 J/kg) who drink much fresh milk from cattle grazing on fallout contaminated pasture. Iodine is volatile so it fractionates strongly in fallout, with little of it condensing on to large fallout particles which descend quickly near the detonation, and most of it condensing slowly on small particles which remain at high altitudes for long periods, where most of the activity safely decays before deposition. The small fraction of volatile iodine nuclides which manage to descend to the ground before decaying into safe non-radioactive products are chemically attached to particles and are purely an ingestion hazard due to drinking milk from cattle ingesting fallout or drinking water from shallow open cisterns which do not dilute the activity much. Human experiments at the July 1962 104 kt Nevada nuclear test SEDAN showed that the integrated inhalation dose from iodine-131 to a person standing outside in the fallout area without protection was trivial compared to the gamma dose received. Hence the pathway for significant iodine doses is ingestion of contaminated milk and water, not inhalation. In the Nevada SEDAN test, a man who was exposed in the open to the base surge without any protection received a thyroid gland dose due only slightly higher than his external gamma exposure. Three air samplers determined that no more than 10% of the iodine in the Sedan fallout was present as a vapour during the cloud passage; i.e., 90% or more of the iodine was fixed in the silicate Sedan fallout and was unable to evaporate from the fallout particles to give a soluble vapour. For the very different, humid conditions of the Marshall islands, this conclusion was also confirmed by data (BNL-5188) on the iodine contamination of drinking water consumed by the Rongelap islanders and their measured iodine excretion of iodine; ingestion of iodine was the exposure route, not inhalation. The peak iodine-131 contamination of milk occurs 2-3 days after fallout deposition due to the conbination of the 8-days physical half-life and the metabolism of cattle. Ingestion of iodine can be prevented by many methods: avoiding consumption of fallout contaminated milk and water for a month after the detonation; passing water and milk through any simple ion-exchange absorber to decontaminate them before drinking; drinking contaminated milk/water and simply taking potassium iodate tablets daily to saturate the thyroid with non-radioactive iodine and thus block iodine uptake for the first month; using dried milk or UHT treated milk in place of fresh milk for a month; drinking water from deep water sources where the iodine contaminated has been diluted substantially; keeping dairy cattle under cover and on uncontaminated winter fodder for a month after detonation; using contaminated milk to make long-life products like milk powder, UHT milk, cheese, etc., which can be consumed later after the 8-day half life iodine contamination has safely decayed. See also the discussion of general fallout predictions and countermeasures on the earlier posts here and here.)

Dr John F. Loutit of the Medical Research Council, Harwell, England, in 1962 wrote a book called Irradiation of Mice and Men (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London), discrediting the pseudo-science from geneticist Edward Lewis on pages 61, and 78-79:

‘... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls. ...

‘What Lewis did, and which I have not copied, was to include in his table another group - spontaneous incidence of leukemia (Brooklyn, N.Y.) - who are taken to have received only natural background radiation throughout life at the very low dose-rate of 0.1-0.2 rad per year: the best estimate is listed as 2 x 10-6 like the others in the table. But the value of 2 x 10-6 was not calculated from the data as for the other groups; it was merely adopted. By its adoption and multiplication with the average age in years of Brooklyners - 33.7 years and radiation dose per year of 0.1-0.2 rad - a mortality rate of 7 to 13 cases per million per year due to background radiation was deduced, or some 10-20 per cent of the observed rate of 65 cases per million per year. ...

‘All these points are very much against the basic hypothesis of Lewis of a linear relation of dose to leukemic effect irrespective of time. Unhappily it is not possible to claim for Lewis’s work as others have done, “It is now possible to calculate - within narrow limits - how many deaths from leukemia will result in any population from an increase in fall-out or other source of radiation” [Leading article in Science, vol. 125, p. 963, 1957]. This is just wishful journalese.

‘The burning questions to me are not what are the numbers of leukemia to be expected from atom bombs or radiotherapy, but what is to be expected from natural background .... Furthermore, to obtain estimates of these, I believe it is wrong to go to [1950s inaccurate, dose rate effect ignoring, data from] atom bombs, where the radiations are qualitatively different [i.e., including effects from neutrons] and, more important, the dose-rate outstandingly different.’

This is supported by the following statements in the British Medical Research Council report of June 1956, The Hazards to Man of Nuclear and Allied Radiations, which is reprinted in the 1957 congressional hearings, pp. 1539-1614:

"[Page 1548] Repair processes. [Paragraph 27] ... Repair processes within the individual cell are little understood and still largely a matter of speculation [in 1956], but they must play an important part after low doses. ...

"[Page 1612] [Paragraph 303] A study of the pitchblende miners of Schneeberg and Joachimsthal suggests strongly that inhalation of the radioactive gas radon may lead to cancer of the lung. The latent period has been put at 17 years and the dosage to the lungs over that period at about 1000 r and in some parts of the lung much higher."

"[Page 1613] [Paragraph 309] Delayed effects of radiation on the skin extend from a temporary loss of hair after local dosages of 300-400 r to severe and permanent damage after a local exposure to single doses of 1500 r or more, or to repeated doses totalling 4000 r or more in a number of weeks. It is in the skin damaged by these higher doses of radiation that tumours, when they occur, are most likely to develop."

Professor Edward Lewis's 1957 congressional fallout testimony on page 956 contradicts his testimony on page 959. He starts on page 956 stating that leukemia data is "rather good":

"... the reason that I am stressing leukemia today is that we have rather good data and rather good evidence on leukemia as compared to data on other effects on man from ionizing radiation ..."

Then on page 959 he admits that the leukemia data is not good at low doses:

"In the low-dose region here, there is a dashed line, and there are only six individuals on which to say anything. The point here, however, is that in the absence of any other information it seems to me - this is my personal opinion - that the only prudent course is to assume that a straight-line relationship holds here as well as elsewhere in the higher dose region.

"It may be that there is a threshold - that is, a dose below which leukemia will not develop. However, we can say safely, I think, that if there is a threshold dose it must be below 100 r. The reason for saying that is that in the region below 100 r, you would not expect to have gotten the 6 cases of leukemia as a result of chance more than 1 in 50 times."

Lewis simply ignores the effect of dose rate on cancer induction! The whole reason why the radium dial painters had a massive threshold of 1,000 rads for cancer, as opposed to a cancer threshold on the order of 5 rads at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is the dose rate. The radium dial painters received massive doses of radiation at low dose rates over a period of decades so that DNA repair mechanisms could repair many of the DNA breaks and reduce the cancer risk, while the doses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were spread over just a matter of seconds at a very high dose rate, which was more liable to overload the DNA repair mechanism by causing breaks faster than they could be repaired, so that loose ends of DNA are "rejoined" to the wrong segment ends (this is unlikely at low dose rates because there is plenty of time for repair after each break before the next break occurs).

What happened in thise 1957 hearings was that geneticists like Lewis and also Nobel laureate Hermann Muller dogmatically believed from their fruit fly genetic data (totally inappropriate to humans) that radiation effects were a linear, non-threshold response to dose. Fruit flies and even mice are inappropriate because they are all short-lived and have evolved without the highly efficient DNA repair enzyme mechanisms used by long-lived human beings. (DNA is naturally being damaged all the time. This is a benefit to relatively short-lived bacteria, flies and mice because it allows them to evolve faster to changing environmental conditions, but it is a danger to humans because without efficient DNA repair, everyone would get cancer and die before the reproductive age of 20-40. Therefore, humans and other long-lived animals have evolved complex DNA repair systems which are effective at preventing both natural and radiation induced cancer up to a certain threshold dose rate; the data prove that only severe exposure overloads the DNA repair mechanisms and can cause cancer.)

Against these dogmatic crusading geneticists, the radiation cancer researchers testified cautiously in favour of a threshold dose for cancer induction using observational data. E.g., on pages 1147-1194 it is testified that there is a threshold dose of thousands of rads to the bones from radium required before any radium dial painter (who regularly licked the brush to get a fine point while working) received bone cancer many years later. On page 1558 it is shown that lung cancers to uranium mine workers who inhaled radon gas required lung doses of about 1,000-10,000 rads over a mean latent period of 17 years, while on page 1887 the data from Hiroshima showed that the small radiation doses at 2-2.5 km from the bombs caused a reduction in the leukemia incidence (0.012%) to slightly below the natural incidence (0.016%) that occurred in the control group beyond 2.5 km, although the numbers of cases were so few at that time that this particular evidence was not statistically significant (unlike the data available today, and indeed since about 1979). There was also weaker evidence from Dr Willard F. Libby on page 1517 that the leukemia incidence in the high-altitude city of Denver which is exposed to nearly double the cosmic radiation of San Francisco has only 62% of that in San Francisco (which is at sea level). On page 980, testimony is given that the background radiation dose over 30 years at sea level is 3.1 rads, but it is 5.5 rads in Denver due to the altitude and thus the increased cosmic radiation.

This kind of evidence for low level radiation benefits is "ecological" because it's not a properly controlled study: you have to apply hundreds of slightly uncertain correction factors to allow for the differences between the population of Denver to that of San Francisco - differences in smoking, drinking, age, diet, exercise and so on - so that the uncertainties in the hundreds of correction factors accumulate to generally make the overall result statistically insignificant. (The underlying reason why threshold evidence is ignored is simply that the critics of the linear non-threshold theory so far tend to promote very weak or quack evidence such as ecological studies which are just as much junk science as Ernest Sternglass's crackpottery, where he claims that the decrease in infant mortality due to medical improvements was somehow a natural exponential law which should have continued forever, and that the fact that it levelled off is thus to be considered proof of harm due to radiation from nuclear testing! Until all such propaganda and quackery, both pro- and anti-radiation, is removed from the scene, the facts will remain submerged by endless, unfruitful controversy.)

The case for a threshold was testified by the President for the American Association for Cancer Research, Dr Jacob Furth (who in 1928 was the first to discover that radiation can induce cancer in mice), and the United States representative to the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, pioneering radiation pathologist Dr Shields Warren (1898-1980) of the New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston. Dr Furth's statement on pages 978-9 gives the threshold dose-effects response the following scientific support:

"The complex mammalian host is capable of compensating for subtle damage. It has been shown that partial body irradiation is not conducive to leukemia development; the unexposed parts powerfully protect the exposed part. Thus, if direct hits cause mutation, humoral substances either counteract or reverse their actions. ... The early radiologists who got such cancers had severe radiation burns with chronic ulcers in which the tumors arose. ... It deserves emphasis that cancer did not arise on the hands of tens of thousands of people receiving huge quantities in small doses [allowing recovery between exposures] over long periods [an analogy here is ultraviolet radiation ionization to the skin from natural sun bathing; if you spread out your exposure and get a little each day, there is evidence that the risk of skin cancer is lower than if you get the same dose all in one brief exposure to a similar spectrum of radiation but received at an extremely high intensity on a sun bed which burns your skin badly, or while outdoors for many hours without any protection]. ... The very idea that leukemia and cancers result from a direct hit mutation was never solidly proven ... Newer evidence unquestionably indicates that some indirect factor [discovered decades later to be human DNA repair enzymes like protein P53, which are stimulated to can repair radiation induced DNA breaks in humans at low doses but of course become overloaded if the dose rate is too high and causes DNA strands to break repeatedly before they can be repaired correctly] plays a determining role in the development of leukemias or tumors."

Dr Shields Warren added on page 980: "I would like to point out that the results at the lower end of the scale that has been used by Dr Lewis [to try to defend the linear non-threshold theory] are not considered as actually statistically significant."

He added on page 981: "With acute or chronic radiation there is what is called a threshold effect in body cells. In other words, because many cells can continue to function even though irradiated and many cells in the body can be repaired even though damaged, we find that at low levels of radiation there is no observable effect."

More crucially, Dr Warren invoked the radium dial painters threshold dose data for the strontium-90 fallout leukemia propaganda on page 987:

"It is striking that in those persons who have had radium deposited in their bones there has been no evidence of leukemia, even though [after receiving massive doses of several thousands of rads] they have developed bone sarcoma [tumours]."

On page 1006, Dr Warren testified:

"I have favored the concept of a threshold for most carcinogenic agents for a number of reasons. First, that in our experiments with carcinogenic hydrocarbons, which are known to be derived from such substances as coal tar, we find that a threshold exists for them. We find that, with many of the medicines that are commonly used for one or another effect on cells, there is a threshold effect to those medicines. ... I like to think of this reparative force, these agents and others which Dr Furth mentioned, as being things which counteract the effect of very low level radiation."

Dr H. L. Friedell, Director of the Atomic Energy Medical Research Project in the School of Medicine at Western Reserve University, testified on page 1001, showing how statistical correlations of death rates in radiologists to the unexposed population can give totally false results unless there is an effort to understand the mechanism for radiation damage in detail:

"I think it is important to show that the activity of radiology itself does not attract into it people who are likely to have a higher death rate, especially at the higher ages, because very early in radiology an individual who had one sort of illness or another was often given the advice to enter radiology, because it appeared to be a sedentary occupation. ... It is difficult trying to make this decision from the statistics alone.

"An example of how this might occur is something that was presented by George Bernard Shaw ... Statistics were presented to him to show that as immunization increased, various communicable diseases decreased in England. He hired somebody to count up the telegraph poles erected in various years ... and it turned out that telegraph poles were being increased in number. He said, 'Therefore, this is clear evidence that the way to eliminate communicable diseases is to build a lot more telegraph poles'.

"All I would like to say here is that the important point is that if you really want to understand it, you have to look at the mechanism of the occurrence. I think this is where the emphasis should lie."

Dr Austin M. Brues, MD (born 1906, Director of the Biological and Medical Research Division of Argonne National Laboratory) added the following comments on page 1001 in support of the threshold:

"If you have two experiments with the same kind of mice treated in the same way, you will expect the second one to come out the same way the first one did. You take a prediction of that sort as simply representing honesty on the part of the investigator. That is why the experiment was repeated in which the irradiated mice lived a little longer because it was difficult to believe, and needed to be confirmed. I think perhaps a lot of our experiments that come out the 'right' way should be repeated too." [Emphasis added.]

On page 1007, Dr Ernest Pollard of Yale University's biophysics department agreed with Dr Friedell's remarks on the need to substantiate mere statistical studies with investigations on the biological mechanism for the radiation damage repair at low doses, but argued that in the meantime, to be "conservative", the linear non-threshold theory should be "assumed":

"... the conservative thing to do in obtaining that knowledge is to assume linearity and therefore no threshold."

The problem here is that once you dogmatically "assume" something in science, you can't later shift it when scientific data arises that challenges the dogma, because it becomes an ingrained foundation of the textbooks, the teaching courses, the "beliefs" of students studying radiology and health physics, researchers, and so on. E.g., dogmatically assuming that the earth is the centre of the universe seemed sensible at one time based on the available evidence, but it was later used to fend off evidence that the earth rotates daily and actually orbits the sun annually. The reason why the new evidence was censored was because the old dogmatic assumption had become an ingrained foundation of science. It is hard to shift foundations because foundations are assumed to be solid building blocks so that mainstream widely-believed theories are built upon them (e.g., Ptolemy's epicycle method of predicting planetary positions in the earth-centred universe model), and facts are endlessly arranged around them. Once a student had invested years learning Ptolemy's epicycle prediction method based on the foundation of the sun orbiting the earth, the student developed loyality to that model and an irrational belief in the foundations to that model, as well as a subject loyality. Criticism of dogmatic foundations was falsely dismissed by educated epicycle students as being "ignorant" or "anti-science".

On page 1143, Dr James F. Crow, professor of genetics and zoology at Wisconsin University, testified:

"I believe most geneticists are convinced that at least some of the somatic [cell division such as related to cancer; not inherited genetic] effects of radiation are of a linear non-threshold sort. I don't think anybody would be so dogmatic as to state that all such effects are or even what the fraction is."

Geneticist and Nobel laureate Dr Muller then stated on page 1143:

"My opinion is ... that the most important effects ... are in all probability linear without a threshold."

On page 1144, Senator Anderson commented favourably on the groupthink advocacy of the linear, non-threshold theory by all the geneticists who had testified:

"I am just wondering if geneticists had a union, guild or gang, or something that teaches you to hang together? This is ... certainly the most agreed group I have seen. I commend you of the fact that you have been able to hang together as long as you have through a rather long day."

Dr Crow then stated in response on page 1144 that their scientific dogma is firm, but not their quantitative facts that supposedly confirm the dogma:

"I think the conclusion that any effect of radiation is harmful is about as firm a scientific conclusion ever is. Of course, the quantitative figures are much less firm."

In other words, Dr Crow was advocating a religious type belief system, a pseudo-scientific dogma justified by majority opinion and the mere consensus of geneticists about cancer induction by radiation. As Feynman repeatedly spelled out, this dogmatic consensus of ignorant opinion is the opposite of science:

‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Richard Feynman in Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006, p. 307.

Dr Friedell testified on pages 902-3:

"In effect, what I am saying is large doses produce tumors and leukemia, and by 'large doses', I am talking about thousands of roentgens, many hundreds of roentgens. If you set yourself up with a model in which you show that these doses will produce tumors and leukemia, and then extrapolate down to low levels ... how good are these extrapolations - is this conjecture? Is this soundly conceived?

"I wish I could offer an authoritative statement right now to end all of this discussion, but unfortunately I cannot. However, I would like to say this: That I am concerned about the fact that there are no [statistically significant, June 1957] data at the very low levels. It is just nonexistent. Much below a hundred roentgens, or 25 roentgens in the case of mutations, we have no data. ... One of the reasons we are using large doses [in animal experiments] is that you have to have some kind of statistical security in looking at the information. To discover an effect which would occur once in 10,000 times, you would require an inordinate number of biological specimens ... for this reason we do not have really secure data."

On pages 904-6, Dr Friedell argued that cells must have some kind of DNA repair mechanism simply because most of the DNA damage due to radiation does not cause cancer; there is an immense amount of natural non-cancer causing cellular ionization caused by natural background radiation, which is so much more intense than global nuclear testing fallout from the hundreds megatons of thermonuclear tests during the 1950s:

"If you are interested in numbers, each one of us are receiving or having about 3,000 to 5,000 ionizing events per cubic centimeter per second ... We are living in a sea of radiation ... This, of course, is concerned with the whole concept of whether the effects will be occurring at low levels in the same rate that they are occurring at high levels, and whether there is such a thing as a threshold. In other words, is there some level below which nothing will happen?

"Again, this is very difficult to establish. The evidence, as I see it, is inconclusive in this direction, and if I had to choose, if I had to make a decision now, if I were compelled to make a decision, I would hesitate to accept this [Edward Lewis] concept that a threshold does not exist. ...

"I would say, from the point of view of production of tumors, and leukemias, I would hesitate to accept the concept that a threshold does not exist. From a point of view of genetics ... I would like to point out the data on mutations and genetic effects do not exist below 25 roentgens. ...

"I think probably the most important thing is to look at the basic aspects of what occurs in biological systems, so that we can understand the mechanism, so that we can see whether once we understand this mechanism it fits in with the data which we already have. And here I feel is where the greatest possibility for really learning something about it exists. I would like to see this emphasized over and above the efforts to perhaps use 10 million mice [whose DNA repair mechanisms differ significantly to humans, due to their short lifespan and hence lack of the evolutionary human need to survive to a reproductive age of decades without cancer] at very low levels. I would think that basic studies of biochemical [DNA repair] effects, the possible way in which these things occur, would contribute more than doing such statistical studies [on mice]. ... I do not feel we have yet really looked at this in an unbiased and nonemotional manner."

Dr Friedell's written testimony on pages 908-10 states:

"At the lower dose levels there is rapid recovery. At the higher dose levels recovery is markedly impaired ... Protraction and fractionation of the radiation delivered markedly reduces the total somatic biological effect. ... Generally, radiation delivered over a long period of time gives some of the tissues an opportunity to recover (a process which is poorly understood) and, therefore, increases survival. ... With respect to the genetic effects, which have been extensively studied by biologists, there are sufficient uncertainties even in these data that it is not possible to accept them as entirely unassailable. These include the fact that data at low levels do not exist, that data are confined at present to Drosophila [fruit flies] and a few small mammals such as mice, that the mutation rate due to ultraviolet radiation appears to be nonlinear, and there is reason to believe that some of the energy transfer with ionizing radiation is in part of the same character as that with ultraviolet radiation."

Against this was extensive political-type, non-scientific testimony from Dr Ralph E. Lapp (1917-2004), who had written a series of articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about civil defense against fallout after the 1954 BRAVO test fallout, and in 1957 he had been to Japan to interview the fallout contaminated crew of the Lucky Dragon for a book he was researching. (We have discussed the Lucky Dragon incident and the communist propaganda concerning the death of one of the crew due to an unnecessary and infected blood transfusion on the earlier blog post linked here.) In fact, Lapp cut short his trip to Japan to testify at the Congressional Hearings on fallout.



We have discussed Lapp's influence on radiation hysteria briefly in a previous post. In 2002, he wrote a damning letter published in the Washington Post (Thursday, November 21, 2002; Page A40), in which he complained about too much fear of radiation:

'Radiation Risk Realities. The Nov. 11 front-page story on "dirty bomb" risks, "Hunting a Deadly Soviet Legacy," needed to put the threat in perspective. The release of radioactive cesium into the atmosphere from the Chernobyl plant in 1986 was 1,000 times as great as the release in the "dirty bomb" scenario. In assessing radiation risk, it is essential to understand the basic facts about data accumulated during half a century of medical studies. Among a half-million Hiroshima survivors, for example, fewer than 1 percent of the observed cancer deaths were the result of the A-bomb radiation. How many Americans know that?'

But in his 1957 testimony to Congress, which spans pages 1241-84 of the published Hearings, he doom-mongered to the extent of trying to turn the Hearings into a witch hunt naming as "reckless" the honest Atomic Energy Commission health physicists Drs Merril Eisenbud (the author of Environmental Radioactivity and An Environmental Odyssey), Willard Libby (who won the Nobel Prize for discovering how to use naturally radioactive carbon-14 to date things) and Richard Doan, who had all stated the fact in public that the radiation dose from low-dose rate strontium-90 test fallout was tens of thousands to millions of times lower than the threshold minimum dose observed for cancer induction in the radium dial painters. On page 1279, Lapp quoted all their statements which he falsely deemed "reckless":

Reckless or nonsubstantiated statements do a disservice to the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] and to the Nation.

Example: Dr Eisenbud is quoted in an article titled "Man Who Measures A-Fallout Belittles Danger" (Sunday News, New York, March 20, 1955) as follows: "The total fallout to date from all tests would have to be multiplied by a million to produce visible, deleterious effects except in areas close to the explosion, itself."

Example: Dr Libby in a speech dated June 3, 1955, stated: "However, as far as immediate or somatic damage to the health is concerned, the fallout dosage rate as of January 1 of this year in the United States could be increased 15,000 times without hazard."

Example: Dr Richard Dean while in Tokyo on May 13, 1957 stated that the bomb tests would not have "the slightest possible effect" on humans.

I do not label Dr Libby's statement as reckless but interpose it to illustrate the spectrum of opinion being given to the public.


In fact, Dr Eisenbud's statement that a million times more fallout would be required to exceed the observed threshold dose for cancer was merely summarizing calculations in Appendix E to Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons (which found that 400,000,000 bomb tests of nominal 20 kt yield i.e. 8,000,000 megatons would be required to cause a threshold hazard from plutonium-239 ingestion and 755,000 nominal bomb tests i.e. 15,100 megatons would be required to create a minimal external radiation hazard) and the fallout hazard situation had actually improved since 1950 with regard to the discovery that strontium is discriminated against by plants and animals, reducing human uptake substantially (for the situation before this strontium discrimination by the food chain was known, see Worldwide Effects of Atomic Weapons: Project Sunshine, RAND Corp. report R-251-AEC, August 6, 1953). Dr Lapp was well aware of this, but chose to gain publicity by joining the alarmist low-level radiation scare-mongering bandwaggon. Then in his 2002 letter to the Washington Post complains about lying radiation hysteria! It was too late to change prejudices he helped sow back in 1957.

Dr Lapp also wrote an article attacking relatively clean nuclear weapons, 'The "Humanitarian" H-Bomb', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1956, V. XII, No. 7, pp. 261-264. There, his main complaint is that lithium deuteride costs more than depleted uranium, although he at least explains fission product fractionation in fallout very clearly. As we explained in the previous post, the clean thermonuclear weapon became a stockpiled reality in the form of the neutron bomb, which averts fallout due to low fission yield and a burst altitude to avoid dirt being sucked into the fireball. This eliminates collateral fallout damage, while retaining a credible, fearful deterrence.

"It is not contended that there is no risk however minute. But all life, and every minute of our day and night, is measured in terms of risk - 40,000 highway deaths each year in this country, accidents in the home, etc. We make our choice: How much risk are we willing to take as payment for our pleasures (swimming at the seashore, for example), our comfort or our material progress? Here our choice seems much clearer. Are we willing to take this very small and rigidly controlled risk, or would we prefer to run the risk of annihilation which might result if we surrendered the weapons which are so essential to our freedom and our actual survival."

- Dr Willard F. Libby, page 1519 of the 1957 congressional hearings on fallout.

Testimony and opinion came from 50 expert scientific witnesses who personally conducted fallout research at Nevada and Pacific nuclear weapons tests, including the Scientific Director of nuclear testing Dr Alvin C. Graves (1912-1966), the Technical Director of the U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project Dr Frank H. Shelton, as well as university academic scientists studying genetic risks of radiation and cancer risks, including Nobel Laureates Hermann J. Muller, Willard F. Libby and Edward B. Lewis. The Foreword (by Carl T. Durham, Chair of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, and Chet Holifield, Chair of the Special Subcommittee on Radiation) to volume one of the printed hearings acknowledges "the excellent support we received from the staff and from the committee's consultant, Dr Paul Tompkins [born 1914, PhD received in biochemistry, California, 1941; Manhattan Project from 1943-9, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory from 1949], technical director of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at the University of California, whose advice was most helpful in connection with technical questions which arose during the course of the hearings."




We've previously given some extracts from these 1957 fallout hearings on blog posts here and here. One of the reasons for my earlier interest is that Tompkins submitted for the record a number of U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory reports on fallout prediction and decontamination by Schuert, Triffet, Carl F. Miller, and others, which have never been published elsewhere:






Above: notice that Schuert's fallout predictions for 1956 Bikini Atoll Operation Redwing tests Tewa (5.01 Mt total yield, 87% fission), Zuni (3.53 Mt total yield, 15% fission), Flathead (365 kt total yield, 73% fission) and Navajo (4.5 Mt total yield, 5% fission) published on pages 304-307 have the map scales all reduced by a factor of 2, halving the apparent linear dimensions and thus reducing the apparent fallout areas by a factor of 4, compared to the accurate fallout patterns distance scales in the declassified 1961 Redwing fallout compendium report WT-1317 pages 140-143.

As explained on this blog before, the official compendium of all American nuclear test fallout patterns, DASA-1251, first declassified partially in 1979, is very seriously in error due to such errors in the scales of fallout patterns, which is particularly severe for the 110 kt Castle-Koon surface burst, but also for many important megaton yield range nuclear test fallout patterns. The reason for the persistence of such careless errors propagating for decades through the fallout prediction literature and confusing the efforts to model and predict fallout, has been partly the general secrecy of fallout from the very beginning, and partly a lack of effort to widely publish the declassified facts in a high-quality format which is clearly printed (most declassified reports are copies of copies with bits blanked out and cut out, which are in turn copies of originals, and the print quality is very poor and a strain to read, let alone examine closely for errors).

Edward A. Schuert's A Fallout Forecasting Technique with Results Obtained at the Eniwetok Proving Ground, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory Technical Report USNRDL-TR-139, May 1957 is now only publically available in a practically useless, very poor quality (presumably a scan of a copy of a copy of a microfiche film) PDF file here. So we've created a very high quality (22.7 MB) PDF version with clear diagrams of the essential nuclear test fallout predictions, using the version of Schuert's fallout prediction report USNRDL-TR-139 published in the 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings (omitting all obsolete diagrams on cloud heights, etc., and keeping to information which remains useful today, so that the file size does not require an excessive download time). Schuert's simple, quick fallout area and "hotline" prediction technique is vital for simple emergency fallout predictions and was used by the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch for civil defense fallout manuals during the Cold War (predicted dose rates were added to the forecast "hotline" by simply using computer calculated graphs of dose rate versus downwind distance for various wind speeds and weapon yields, published in chapter 5 of Philip J. Dolan's Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, DNA-EM-1).

Dr Alvin C. Graves (4 November 1909-1966), Scientific Director of Operations Ivy and Castle

The most dramatic testimony in the 1957 hearings came on pages 53-104 from Dr Alvin C. Graves of Los Alamos. Graves is featured talking extensively about nuclear weapons with actor Reed Hadley in the 1952 film of the first ten megaton hydrogen bomb test, Operation IVY, shot MIKE. On May 21, 1946, Graves was irradiated with 360 rem (although he was told his dose was just 200 rem to prevent undue worry, and he still believed that at the 1957 hearings!) when his friend, Dr Louis Slotin, was demonstrating to him a criticality experiment with a 6.2 kg plutonium nuclear bomb core, in which he placed the bottom half of the core in a beryllium tamper and kept the upper half just slightly separated by a screwdriver blade to avoid criticality. The following photograph shows the situation just before the screwdriver slipped and the assembly went critical, releasing a burst of radiation and heating up until thermal expansion quenched the reaction and reverted the assembly to a sub-critical condition:



Slotin, being closest received a 2100 rem average trunk lethal dose in the accident (which was a near repetition of the August 21, 1945 criticality accident involving a plutonium core in a tungsten carbide reflector which killed Harry K. Daghlian 28 days after a dose of 510 rem), with much larger localized exposures to his hands, which swelled up since they had been in contact with the assembly soon after fission (Slotin had a much higher local dose to his hands than any tank crew under a properly air burst neutron bomb explosion could possibly get, contrary to hysterical radiation effects propaganda which Samuel Cohen discredited in his book The Truth About the Neutron Bomb). Slotin died 9 days later. Graves was the next closest and received 360 rem, but was told he had 200 rem to avoid stress while recovering from radiation sickness. Graves describes the experience in detail on pages 103-4 of the 1957 hearings:

Representative Van Zandt: "Mr. Chairman, may I ask this question. Doctor, how many roentgens did your body absorb in the Los Alamos accident?"

Dr Graves: "I had about 200 [it was actually 360]."

Representative Cole: "From outward appearances you look rather healthy."

Dr Graves: "Thank you."

Representative Cole: "At this time some several years later."

Dr Graves: "That was in 1946, so it has been 11 years. But this really is not important. You may have one person take 200 roentgens as I did and be perfectly happy for 10 years. But does it give me a greater probability of having cancer or does it give me a greater probability of this, that or the other, we just do not know. The danger is not that this will happen to you. The danger is that it is more likely to happen to you. Maybe the more likely is not very much more likely, but it is still more likely. [Graves died from a heart condition in 1966, 20 years after his exposure.]"

Representative Van Zandt: "Doctor, how did this dose of radiation affect you?"

Dr Graves: "I was nauseated for the first day. I was in the hospital for 2 weeks. I never did feel very sick but I was quite - I did not have very much ambition, I was tired, I got tired climbing steps and so on, and this lasted for perhaps 6 months. At the end of 6 months I was back to work, and I can't tell any difference now."

Representative Van Zandt: "Did it affect your hair in any way?"

Dr Graves: "I lost the hair on one side of my head. I did not have to shave for a while, which was a byproduct that was useful."

Representative Van Zandt: "How about your eye?"

Dr Graves: "I have a radiation cataract in one eye. The other eye is perfectly all right."

Representative Holifield: "What was the white corpuscle count at the end of 6 months?"

Dr Graves: "At the end of 6 months it was back to normal. You can't tell anything. You can examine me with a microscope or anything else, and you can't tell any difference now. At the time my white blood cell count dropped from about 8,000 or 9,000, which was normal, down to around 2,000. Again I don't have these numbers in front of me, so I don't remember exactly. But at the end of perhaps a week or 10 days the count began to increase again, and got back to normal. As a matter of fact, it got above normal. By 6 months it was back to normal, and stayed there ever since."

Representative Holifield: "Dr Graves, I think I express the feelings of every member of this committee that have known about this for so many years, that we are glad you are in as good health as you are today, and we want to again express our thanks to you for the tremendous contribution you have made to the security of our Nation."

Representative Cole: "Mr Chairman, I just want to concur in what you have said with respect to the attitude of the committee toward Dr Graves' work. But since we have engaged in some rather personal questions of him with respect to consequences of his exposure, I would like to inquire if since that occurred you have increased your family in any way, and if so, whether the progeny is apparently normal and healthy. Mr Chairman, I do not ask it facetiously. Here is a man who has been exposed to a degree of radiation probably greater than any person that we know. He has told us the consequences to him of his own body. Since radiation exposure has been said to involve a question of sterility and so forth, unless he would rather not answer, i would like to give him the opportunity of indicating."

Dr Graves: "I had one daughter before the accident. I have had a daughter and son since the accident. The daughter and son as far as can be told are perfectly normal kids. We love them very much."

Representative Van Zandt: "From a heredity standpoint, do they show any extraordinary amount of energy as a result of your brush with atomic energy?"

Dr Graves: "Speaking as a parent they are very intelligent children."

As time permits, this blog post will be extended to examine in detail the testimony in the 1957 fallout hearings, showing how different scientists presented evidence for and against the "threshold" and "non-threshold" dose-effects response to radiation for cancer induction and genetic effects, and also examining other aspects of the hearings. (A paper on decontaminating water from the hearings is linked here.) One important point is that pages 321-3 state that a detailed paper on the nature of fallout was submitted by Charles E. Adams of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, but was not printed. As a result, there is no discussion in the hearings of the visible nature of fallout as a contaminant itself, and the testimony is limited to just the way that fallout is deposited and the radiation it emits. (If photos of fallout particles and trays showing the visible fallout associated with various dose rates and doses had been published in 1957, a lot of the hysteria about "invisible fallout dangers" and confusion about the distinction between actual fallout particles and particles of nuclear radiation could have avoided.)

posted by nige @ 12:10 PM 0 comments

Friday, September 11, 2009

Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense, Effects Manual EM-1


Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons_Part I -


Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons_Part II -



Above: Sam T. Cohen invented the neutron bomb in 1958 by scaling down to very low yield the design of the REDWING-NAVAJO 5% fission, 95% fusion 'clean' nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in 1956. Cohen personally recruited his school friend, the famous strategist Herman Kahn, to the RAND Corporation. They realized in the 1950s that appearing reasonable or 'sane' will encourage fanatical terrorists. To deal with gun-carrying thugs, the police must descend to their level and likewise carry guns; they will be at a fatal disadvantage otherwise. 'Sanely' ignoring or steering clear of insane thugs will only encourage them; this is the 'sane' policy which pacifist nations tried with Hitler throughout the 30s. But if you want peace in an insane world, you may counter-intuitively need to build up 'insane' stockpiles of armaments or 'insanely' go out looking for trouble with power crazed dictators. Only by behaving in a threateningly violent way towards them can you ever hope to intimidate them into understanding that they must stop what they are doing and focus on improvement. Allowing Hitler the freedom to terrorise and massacre Jewish children and invalids seemed 'sane' to the 'honorable pacifist' 30s politician, but in retrospect we can see it would have been far safer for all concerned and far more humanitarian if the civilized world had gone a little more insane with him as soon as his inhuman activities began in 1933 or so, and displayed some anger and threatened credibly some violence in order to stop such abuses instead of appeasing and encouraging inhumane dictatorships.

On 29 September 1982, Elliott Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in the U.S. Government, gave the following brilliant address to the Chicago World Affairs Council:

'It was primarily two things that saved us from the danger of nuclear war which we faced in the 1950s. The first was the development in the mid-1950s of an intellectual understanding of deterrence: that what deters nuclear war is not simply more weapons but a protected strategic force that can strike back even if it is attacked first. Such a force removes the temptation to strike first. It is vital to realize that the development of the theory of deterrence was the most important act of arms control in the postwar era; more important than any negotiation or treaty we have engaged in. The second thing that kept nuclear annihilation at a distance was the development of new weapons that were shaped by this theory of deterrence. ... The missile silo ... able to last out a first strike and retaliate; The ballistic missile submarine, which was more invulnerable because it was hidden in the depths of the sea; and the spy satellite, which for the first time gave an accurate accounting of the other side's strategic forces, thus reducing uncertainty and nervousness. Arms control agreements like SALT 1 (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, number 1) would not have been possible without this weapon, because they would have been wholly impossible to verify.

'These facts constitute a genuine paradox: that the moral result of avoiding nuclear war was achieved through certain weapons. I believe we must face this paradox squarely ... We face an appalling danger in nuclear war and have limited resources to cope with it. Since the 1950s, one of the resources that has been most useful is the redesign of weapons so that they will contribute to a true deterrent.'


Herman Kahn's 1959 testimony to the 22-26 June 1959 U.S. Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War:

Page 833:

'Let me start by making some remarks about quantitative computations. The most important reason for being quantitative is because one may, in fact, be able to calculate what is happening. Many of the witnesses have emphasized the uncertainities of thermonuclear war but ... Napoleon ... would have been impressed with the relevance of quantitative calculations; impressed with the accuracy with which people predict what a nuclear war is like. ... This is of some real interest; before World War II, for example, many of the staffs engaged in estimating the effects of bombing over-estimated the effects of bombing by large amounts. This was one of the main reasons that at the Munich Conference and earlier occasions the British and the French chose appeasement to standing firm or fighting. Incidentally, these staff calculations were more lurid than the worst imaginations of fiction. [Air bombing was predicted to destroy whole cities in firestorms in a single air raid, with clouds of poison gas killing everyone for hundreds of miles downwind, like fallout exaggerations from megaton surface bursts which assume that people are constantly outdoors on a smooth infinite unobstructed plane, etc.]'


Page 904:

'I would like to emphasise: Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. If they had not been able to declare war in either of those 2 years, they would have had to let the Germans do whatever they wanted to do. ... I have a book ... which I recommend to those who want to exaggerate the impact of thermonuclear war. It is called Munich: Prologue to Tragedy, by Wheeler Bennett [this book is similar in many respects to President John F. Kennedy's own excellent book written from first hand experience in London when World War II broke out, on the perils of appeasement due to exaggeration of the effects of war, Why England Slept; remember that Hitler was widely praised by pacifists globally after he announced with a lot of hype but of course no sincerity, his grand '25-Year-Peace-Plan' on March 7, 1936]. Among other things Wheeler Bennett discusses why Chamberlain and Daladier folded. When they returned from Munich [where they enjoyed lovely tea and cakes while making useless pacifist treaties on bits of paper not worth a cent with the evil Adolf Hitler in 1938, being far too fearful of Hitler's ever increasing military power and its exaggerated explosive and poison gas effects to challenge him over his evil treatment of Jews even at that time] they were cheered by their people in Paris and London, because war had been averted. Over that weekend some people began to understand that war had been averted by a sellout of the worst sort. And on Monday some few were prepared to criticize. But ... The people who critized Chamberlain and Daladier, with a couple of exceptions, did not criticize them for not going to war; they said, "Hitler was bluffing, and you should have stood your ground".

'As far as we can tell, Hitler was not bluffing. The men who were in the room with him could see he was not bluffing. It was easy for the people back home to say he was bluffing, but not for the men who had the decision to make. The German people did not want war. The German Army did not want war. ... But Hitler seems to have been willing to have a war if he couldn't have his way.'


Pages 909-15:

'Our study distinguishes three types of deterrence in examining the implications for nonmilitary defense:

'Type I - Deterrence of a direct attack on the United States. ... It is not that the Soviets could reliably expect to be untouched, but that a situation might arise in which the Soviets might feel that going to war was the least risky of the available alternatives. ...

'Type II - Deterrence of extremely provocative behavior. The Soviets ... ask themselves if they can force the United States to accept peacefully the consequences of some extremely provocative action (say a large-scale attack on Europe or a Munich-type crisis). ... If the Soviets were not deterred then the United States might actually carry out an evacuation to try to persuade them to desist. If the evacuation did not persuade the Soviets to desist, then in the last resort the United States might decide that it was less risky to go to war than to acquiesce. ...

'Type III - Deterrence of moderately provocative actions. [Berlin Wall of 1961, Cuban missiles crisis of 1962, the Soviet backed war against South Vietnam, etc.] In this case it would be wishful thinking to expect deterrence to work most of the time. However, Soviet calculations which contemplate provoking the United States might be influenced by the existence of a U.S. plan for a crash nonmilitary defense program. ... Experience has shown that attempts to conduct large and overcoordinated programs tend to create inflexibility and to stifle new, unproven ideas or independent approaches.'


In the 22-26 June 1959 U.S. Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental effects of Nuclear War following Kahn was the Nobel Laureate Willard F. Libby who stated on pages 924-5:

'We are led, when we review the history of man, ancient and modern, to the conclusion that it is wise to take out some insurance for our protection in the event that something goes wrong and peaceful international relations come to an end. The nature of the effects of modern nuclear weapons and the ranges over which these effects can produce casualties may provoke the question: "Is there really anything we can do?" My answer to this question is, "Yes." ...

'The committee will recall that we have announced that the fallout from the [15 megatons Castle-Bravo surface burst of] March 1, 1954, detonation at Bikini Atoll would have created radiation casualties in an area estimated at 7,000 square miles if no protective measures were taken. Casualties, seriously injured and dead from the initial effects of this bomb would have occurred in an area of perhaps 250 to 300 square miles [for people standing up, fully exposed to the effects of flying glass and thermal radiation from a 15 megatons bomb which is now long since obsolete and replaced by bombs with typically 100 times smaller yield, 150 kt]. There is a great difference between the two areas and I should like to focus on the need for protection and the capability for protecting the people in the 6,700 square miles or more beyond the range of initial blast, thermal and nuclear radiation. We can save them easily. We can lose them easily. ...

'The first action for anyone who does not already possess the knowledge is to learn what these weapons effects are. No one can be expected to act properly or at all for that matter on any problem unless he understands what makes it. It is necessary for people to learn about fallout, about nuclear radiation, about the effects of nuclear radiation on people, animals, plants, food, water: the things that are immutably linked to life.'


Dr Paul Tompkins of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory stated on pages 953-4 of the Hearings:

'I had the experience of being on the Manhattan Division [developing the first nuclear weapons] in 1943. I am very familiar with the psychology of revulsion against the effect these weapons can produce. ... the results are catastropic enough in their own right. They need no imaginary amplification. The facts themselves are bad enough. However, it is crucially important to look those facts squarely in the face if one is going to face the necessity for survival if against your will or despite anything you can do about it, it is imposed on you. As far as I am concerned, if the chips ever go down and avoiding a conflict is not possible in the scheme of human events of the future, I for one do not propose to see this Nation come out the loser. ...

'The world of the future is going to be dangerous. The human capacity to inflict such damage will inevitably be there. The threat of the employment of that damage is something with which we will have to live unless something very drastic changes in our international relations. ... I personally never expect to see consequences of the type displayed on these maps. ...

'As far as I am personally concerned, by looking at the problems, understanding what they are composed of, and by necessity being an incurable optimist, I never expect to see a war of this kind happen. It is possible that more limited engagements of a more sharply defined type will be fought under the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads some time in the future. If so, let us be prepared for that. So, that at least, is my personal view as to the role that the nonmilitary defense should play, and it will never be perfect.'


Chairman Holifield then concluded the 1959 Hearings on pages 954-5 with the following words:

'These long technical testimonies were necessary in order that the basic record might be presented in as fair a way as we know how. In conclusion I want to say the challenge of the nuclear age is enormous and inescapable.

'The facts of nuclear war and the effects of nuclear war once established will not fade away because they are unpleasant. If we are prudent we will not ignore them.

'They will not disappear. Each of us must accept personal responsibilities because the nuclear war is a personal threat to our survival.

'The problem is too large to leave solely in the hands of the diplomats and the generals.'


I've blogged before about Samuel Glasstone, Philip J. Dolan, their book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1977, and the neutron bomb which they avoid mentioning in that book but discuss elsewhere, such as in Dolan's classified manual Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons DNA-EM-1 and Glasstone's Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia article on Nuclear Weapons. The neutron bomb is the number 1 reason why a new edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons is needed, or at least open publication of Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons DNA-EM-1. The purpose of nuclear weapons in the world since 1945 has been to end world wars. They succeeded in ending WWII and preventing WWIII. But does it make sense to abolish them now that WWIII is no longer such a threat due to the collapse of communism? Certainly, thousands of high-yield strategic weapons may now be considered a "threat" of World War, rather than a vital deterrent to such a war. But some nuclear weapons are still needed to deter a smaller nuclear threat from proliferation, terrorist states, and so on:



So it stands to reason that the nuclear deterrent needs to be redirected towards the current smaller scale nuclear threat, now that the Cold War has been fading into history for twenty years and strategic stockpiles are diminishing. As General Charles de Gaulle famously observed, "generals are always fighting the last war". Things need to be updated. The neutron bomb is perfect: it is only effective for low kiloton yields, so it preserves and indeed enhances the credible deterrent aspect of nuclear weapons, while averting all risks of collateral damage (there is no blast, thermal or local fallout threat due to the low 1-2 kilotons yield of which 80% of the 17.6 MeV deuterium-tritium fusion energy comes out as 14.1 MeV neutrons - which, unlike 0.025 eV reactor moderated neutrons, can't be stopped by thin plastic, cadmium foil, etc. contrary to pseudoscientific propaganda - and the 500 metres burst altitude).

'The neutron bomb, so-called because of the deliberate effort to maximize the effectiveness of the neutrons, would necessarily be limited to rather small yields - yields at which the neutron absorption in air does not reduce the doses to a point at which blast and thermal effects are dominant. The use of small yields against large-area targets again runs into the delivery problems faced by chemical agents and explosives, and larger yields in fewer packages pose a less stringent problem for delivery systems in most applications. In the unlikely event that an enemy desired to minimize blast and thermal damage and to create little fallout but still kill the populace, it would be necessary to use large numbers of carefully placed neutron-producing weapons burst high enough to avoid blast damage on the ground [500 metres altitude for a neutron bomb of 1 kt total yield], but low enough to get the neutrons down. In this case, however, adequate radiation shielding for the people would leave the city unscathed and demonstrate the attack to be futile.'

- Dr Harold L. Brode, RAND Corporation, Blast and Other Threats, pp. 5-6 in Proceedings of the Symposium on Protective Structures for Civilian Populations, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, Symposium held at Washington, D.C., April 19-23, 1965.


Samuel Cohen, as discussed in earlier posts here and here, argues that his neutron bomb is safer than the high-yield relatively indiscriminate (i.e. collateral damage causing) strategic nuclear weapons now stockpiled. See this linked post for a detailed review of the history of the weapon and the hysterically lying propaganda it generated. Cohen invented the neutron bomb in 1958 at the RAND Corporation: it was a miniaturized successor to the 95% "clean" nuclear test Navajo of Operation Redwing in 1956. He summarizes the history of the neutron bomb in his online lecture (presented in front of an audience which included Edward Teller), Nuclear terrorism: a credible threat?

During research for an Electronics World article on EMP published in November 1994, at the suggestion of the Atomic Weapons Establishment Library, I obtained Dolan's declassified 1,651 pages long Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons. This information is vital for discrediting and debunking the media hype and ignorance of the wide variety of nuclear weapons effects resulting from different kinds of detonation depending on height and depth of burst in conjunction with weapon design factors such as casing and fission yield, many combinations of which produce no nuclear radiation injuries, thermal burns or blast effects. The information published in the widely cited unclassified 1977 Glasstone and Dolan book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, is described in a footnote on page 1 of EM-1 as merely a "qualitative" introductory supplement to the secret manual EM-1.

I've blogged (in the 2006 Glasstone and Dolan post) about all of the history and technical details of the various updates to this manual to the present time. It started out in July 1951 as Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, TM 23-200, edited by Dr Gerald W. Johnson (Chief of the Analysis Branch, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project), and was a secret quantitative supplement to the more qualitative 1950 unclassified Effects of Atomic Weapons. Some 1,079 copies of each edition were published, and it was regularly updated with page changes as new information from testing became available. For example, the November 1957 edition includes an analysis of the effect of the blast wave "precursor" caused by desert sand popcorning into hot dust due to the thermal radiation flash on sandy soil, and also a brief mention of EMP effects on electronic equipment. Neither of these topics were even mentioned in the unclassified Effects of Nuclear Weapons until April 1962. In November 1964, the secret manual was revised and retitled Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, and the Scientific Advisory Group on Effects (SAGE) was formed to edit revisions to the manual.



Above: SAGE Panel in August, 1966.

Dolan's 2-part secret revision was published in 1972 with 17 chapters which fitted into two loose-leaf binders, and a 22 chapter secret update under the editorship of Brode was published in 1991 (consisting of 22 separate volumes). In 1993, this final unwieldy revision was summarised as a set of the basic equations for predicting effects and issued in September 1996 as the 736 pages long Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from DSWA's Effects Manual One (EM-1) edited by John A. Northrop, and published by the Defense Special Weapons Agency.



Above: John Northrop's 736 pages long Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from DSWA's Effects Manual One (EM-1) in September 1996 briefly summarized the formulas from the multi-thousand pages long 22-volume Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, DNA-EM-1, while in July 2001 the 535 pages long first edition of Charles Bridgman's Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects summarized the physics behind the formulae in Northrop's book.



Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, DNA-EM-1
Philip J. Dolan (Editor), Stanford Research Institute
July 1, 1972
Change 1: July 1, 1978
Change 2: August 1, 1981
DEFENSE NUCLEAR AGENCY, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Declassified on 13 February 1989.

Part 1. Phenomenology.
PDF download of Part 1, preliminary pages and contents pages, Change 2, August 1981 (45 pages, 1.6 MB) These pages are also available here.

Chapter 1. Introduction. 30 pages.
Chapter 2. Blast and Shock Phenomena. 306 pages. Blast wave section is here and ground shock/cratering/water bursts/underwater bursts section is here.
Chapter 3. Thermal Radiation Phenomena. 114 pages.
Chapter 4. X-Ray Radiation Phenomena. 30 pages.
Chapter 5. Nuclear Radiation Phenomena. 151 pages.
Chapter 6. Transient-Radiation Effects on Electronics (TREE) Phenomena. 16 pages.
Chapter 7. Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Phenomena. 40 Pages.
Chapter 8. Phenomena Affecting Electromagnetic Propagation. 94 pages.

Part 2. Damage Criteria.
PDF download of Part 2, preliminary pages and contents pages, Change 2, August 1981 (50 pages, 1.7 MB)

Chapter 9. Introduction to Damage Criteria. 187 Pages.
Chapter 10. Personnel Casualties. 38 Pages.
Chapter 11. Damage to Structures. 50 Pages.
Chapter 12. Mechanical Damage Distances for Surface Ships and Submarines Subjected to Nuclear Explosions. 147 Pages.
Chapter 13. Damage to Aircraft. 81 Pages.
Chapter 14. Damage to Military Field Equipment. 46 Pages.
Chapter 15. Damage to Forest Stands. 64 Pages.
Chapter 16. Damage to Missiles. 121 Pages.
Chapter 17. Radio Frequency Signal Degradation Relevant to Communications and Radar Systems. 32 pages.
Appendices A-F. 112 pages.




Dolan's Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense manual EM-1 (1651 pages in two parts, 'Phenomenology' and 'Damage Criteria'; both originally loose-leaf binders to allow page updates) is the massive and complete 'Secret-Restricted Data' classified nuclear weapons effects compendium source used to write the relatively brief and less detailed unclassified book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. The problem with the latter is that it omits vital nuclear effects data for civil defence, which we will review below. Now Dolan's massive secret compilation of nuclear test facts and computer simulation results is going online as PDF files. One example of something blanked-out in DNA-EM-1 is the graph showing predicted EMP electric field strengths at the earth's surface from high altitude nuclear detonations of various yields and altitudes, but that graph occurs in another declassified document as explained in a post on high altitude EMP effects, http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/emp-radiation-from-nuclear-space.html. There is also a supplement showing effects of nuclear weapons in arctic conditions, linked here. Some additional declassified details from DNA-EM-1 can be found on pages 164 and 168 of the 1998 Sandia National Laboratory Survey of Weapons Development and Technology, report WR-708. E.g., severe tank damage occurs at a peak overpressure of 49 psi, immediate radiation casualties at 8,000 rads, and the x-ray and nuclear radiation effects from an exoatmospheric burst in the vacuum of space (above about 100 km) can be represented by:

X-ray exposure (cal/cm2) = 5.97*106Wkt/Rm2 (this corresponds to 75% of the explosion energy in x-rays),

Peak gamma dose rate (rads/sec) = 5.37*1015Wkt/Rm2, and

Neutron fluence (neutrons/cm2) = 2.29*1018Wkt/Rm2.



Above: as a multimedia supplement to the Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, this excellent originally secret U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency film, High-Altitude Nuclear Weapons Effects: Part One, Phenomenology (20 minutes) discusses in detail, using nuclear test film clips, the effects of 1962 high altitude nuclear tests BLUEGILL, KINGFISH, and STARFISH. It is mainly concerned with fireball expansion, rise, striation along the Earth's natural magnetic field lines, and air ionization effects on radio and radar communications, but it also includes a section at the end explaining the high altitude EMP damage mechanism.

BLUEGILL (410 kt, 48 km detonation altitude, 26 October 1962) fireball was still fully ionized at a temperature of about 10,000 K and 'several kilometres in diameter' when the shock wave departed from the fireball at 0.1 second. The fireball expanded to 10 km in diameter at 5 seconds, at which time it was buoyantly rising at 300 m/sec. It was filmed from below and within a minute transforms while rising into a torus or doughnut shape. It attained a diameter of 40 km at 1 minute, and stabilised at an altitude of 100 km a few minutes later.

KINGFISH (410 kt, 95 km detonation altitude, 1 November 1962) initially had a fireball size is 10 times bigger than BLUEGILL, because of the lower air density at the higher detonation altitude. The KINGFISH fireball rises ballistically (not buoyantly) at 1,500 m/sec (which is 5 times faster than the buoyant rise speed of the lower altitude detonation BLUEGILL). The fireball diameter longways is 300 km at 1 minute, and it is elongated along the natural geomagnetic field lines while expanding. It reaches a maximum altitude of 1,000 km in 7.5 minutes before falling back to 150-200 km (it falls back along the magnetic field lines, not a simple vertical fall). The settled debris has a diameter of 300 km and a thickness of 30 km, emitting beta and gamma radiation which ionize the air in the D-layer, forming a ‘beta patch’. Photographs of beta radiation aurora from the fireball are included in the film: beta particles spiral along the Earth's magnetic field lines and shuttle along the field lines from pole to pole. The film above has a speeded-up film showing the development of the magnetically striated fireball from the KINGFISH fireball.

STARFISH (1.4 Mt, 400 km detonation altitude, 9 July 1962) according to the Nuclear Effects Group at the Atomic Weapons Establishment, Aldermaston, for detonations above 200 km altitude, the “expanding debris compresses the geomagnetic field lines because the expansion velocity is greater than the Alfven speed at these altitudes. The debris energy is transferred to air ions in the resulting region of tightly compressed magnetic field lines. Subsequently the ions, charge-exchanged neutrals, beta-particles, etc., escape up and down the field lines. Those particles directed downwards are deposited in patches at altitudes depending on their mean free paths. These particles move along the magnetic field lines, and so the patches are not found directly above ground zero. Uncharged radiation (gamma-rays, neutrons and X-rays) is deposited in layers which are centered directly under the detonation point. The STARFISH event (1.4 megatons at 400 km) was in this altitude regime. Detonations at thousands of kilometres altitude are contained purely magnetically. Expansion is at less than the local Alfven speed, and so energy is radiated as hydromagnetic waves. Patch depositions are again aligned with the field lines.”

When STARFISH was detonated: “The large amount of energy released at such a high altitude by the detonation caused widespread auroras throughout the Pacific area, lasting in some cases as long as 15 minutes; these were observed on both sides of the equator. In Honolulu an overcast, nighttime sky was turned into day for 6 minutes (New York Times, 10 July 1962). Observers on Kwajalein 1,400 nautical miles (about 2,600 km) west reported a spectacular display lasting at least 7 minutes. At Johnston Island all major visible phenomena had disappeared by 7 minutes except for a faint red glow. The earth's magnetic field [measured at Johnston] also was observed to respond to the burst. ... On 13 July, 4 days after the shot, the U.K. satellite, Ariel, was unable to generate sufficient electricity to function properly. From then until early September things among the satellite designers and sponsors were ‘along the lines of the old Saturday matinee one-reeler’ as the solar panels on several other satellites began to lose their ability to generate power (reference: The Artificial Radiation Belt, Defense Atomic Support Agency, 4 October 1962, report DASA-1327, page 2). The STARFISH detonation had generated large quantities of electrons that were trapped in the earth's magnetic field; the trapped electrons were damaging the solar cells that generated the power in the panels.” (Defense Nuclear Agency report DNA-6040F, AD-A136820, pp. 229-30.)



Above: as a multimedia supplement to the Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, this excellent originally secret U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency film, High-Altitude Nuclear Weapons Effects: Part Two, Systems Interference (16 minutes), discusses the interference to radio and radar signals by high altitude nuclear detonations.

TM 23-200, Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, was a single volume consisting of 441 pages in 12 sections divided into 2 parts (it has only about a quarter as many pages as Dolan’s 1651 pages long 2-volume 1972 revision DNA-EM-1):

Contents of Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Washington, D.C., technical manual TM 23-200, November 1957, Confidential (declassified in 1997)

Preliminary pages (22 pages consisting of title pages, distribution list, contents pages, page locator for physical phenomena figures and tables, and foreword)

Part 1: Physical Phenomena

Section 1: Introduction (13 pages)
Section 2: Blast and Shock Phenomena (95 pages)
Section 3: Thermal Radiation Phenomena (19 pages)
Section 4: Nuclear Radiation Phenomena (87 pages)

Part 2: Damage Criteria

Section 5: Introduction (21 pages)
Section 6: Personnel Casualties (20 pages)
Section 7: Damage to Structures (54 pages)
Section 8: Damage to Naval Equipment (15 pages)
Section 9: Damage to Aircraft (11 pages)
Section 10: Damage to Military Field Equipment (23 pages)
Section 11: Forest Stands (15 pages)
Section 12: Miscellaneous Radiation Damage Criteria (10 pages)

Appendix 1: Supplementary Blast Data (32 pages)
Appendix 2: Useful Relationships (10 pages)
Appendix 3: Glossary (7 pages)
Appendix 4: Bibliography (9 pages)

Page 4 of this bibliography cites the report: J. F. Canu and P. J. Dolan, Prediction of Neutron-Induced Activity in Soils, AFSWP-518, June 1957, Secret – Restricted Data.




It has a Foreword on page xxii by Edward N. Parker (Rear Admiral, USN), Chief, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, stating:

'The purpose of this manual is to provide the military Services with a compendium of the phenomena manifested by the detonation of nuclear weapons and the effects thereof in terms of damage to targets of military interest.

'This edition of Capabilities of Atomic Weapons represents the continuing effort by the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project to make available the progressively improved data resulting from field testing, scaled tests, laboratory and theoretical analyses.


'... Every effort has been made to include the best available data which will assist the using Services in meeting their particular operational requirements. As additional or better data becomes available it will be incorporated herein.'

Concerning the early history of EMP as a damaging effect of nuclear weapons, a very brief and but pertinent discussion of EMP effects from low altitude and surface bursts occurs in the November 1957 edition of the Confidential (classified) U.S. Department of Defense, Armed Forces Special Weapons Project manual TM 23-200, Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, section 12, Miscellaneous Radiation Damage Criteria, page 12-2, paragraph 12.2c:

'Electromagnetic Radiation. A large electrical signal is produced by a nuclear weapon detonation. The signal consists of a rather sharp transient signal with a strong frequency component in the neighborhood of 15 kilocycles. Field strengths greater than 1 volt per metre have been detected from megaton yield weapons at a distance of about 2,000 miles. Electronic equipment which responds to rapid, short duration transients can be expected to be actuated by pickup of this electrical noise.'

'In November 1964, DASA (Defence Atomic Support Agency) consolidated nuclear effects knowledge in the classified publication, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons. A revised edition was published in 1968. These publications preceded the two-volume Effects Manual-1 (EM-1), first published in 1972. ... Integrating Knowledge: In 1972, DNA published a two-volume nuclear weapons effects manual called Effects Manual-1 (EM-1). Two years later, DNA issued a NATO-releasable [less classified] version of EM-1. These volumes provided critical planning information for unified and specified CINCs, civilian civil defense activities, and NATO officials.'


- pages 16 and 19 of the colourful booklet, Defense Soecial Weapons Agency, 50th Anniversary 1947-1997. For a 466 page review published by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in 2002, see AD-A412977 (35.3 Mb).

All civil defence planning is either directly or indirectly (via Glasstone and Dolan Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1977) based on Dolan's Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons. The latest official American civil defence manual, for example, cites directly the secret 1988 revision of 'DNA EM-1 (Effects Manual 1), Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, Chapter 10, July 1, 1972'; 'NATIONAL PLANNING SCENARIOS: Created for Use in National, Federal, State, and Local Homeland Security Preparedness Activities, Version 21.2 DRAFT, February 2006'.

There is a definite need to debunk general Planet of the Apes style nuclear effects exaggeration hype by politicans which simultaneously:

(1) encourages misguided nuclear proliferation (rogue states, dictators and terrorists think that simply having a nuclear threat will get them anything they want by intimidation, due to the exaggeration in the popular media) and

(2) discourages simple civil defense countermeasures from being taken seriously. If you're in the crater region, you don't need civil defense, but as we've seen, even the crater sizes have been grossly exaggerated in the public domain. The "overkill" areas are trivial compared to the areas over which even the simplest informed civil defense countermeasures like duck and cover and getting out of the immediate downwind area (or under cover there) before the wind blows fallout there, is effective at saving lives.



Why exaggerating the effects of aerial bombardment caused World War II

The tragedy of the exaggeration of the offensive capabilities of aerial attack was plain to see during the 1930s. Public opinion was on British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's side (appeasing Hitler) because the effects of war had been exaggerated in 1938 by the British War Office: aerial bombing was (inaccurately) predicted to cause 121 casualties/ton, and the German air force was expected (for no reason other than doom mongering, it seems) to deliver its maximum capacity of 600 tons of chemical incendiary, gas and explosive bombs daily on Britain, killing 2.2 million people per month.

Chamberlain and the British public were scared by these false "predictions" which were based on the WWI unopposed attacks in daylight and had no relevance for inaccurate nighttime bombing when enemy bombers were subject to AA and fighter defenses.

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!

If Chamberlain and - more important - the general public had known the true civilian threat in 1938 from aerial attack instead of the hysterical exaggerations officially promoted, then Hitler might have been stopped or effectively deterred earlier on, with less cost in human lives. Delaying the war gave Germany years to prepare for war, which made the war worse than it would otherwise have been.

As an example, what could happen when Iran gets the U-235, and maybe gets some lithium and heavy water to make lithium deuteride to get a H-bomb (it's now known than lithium-6 deuteride isn't necessary; the 11-Mt Castle-Romeo nuclear test used only natural lithium and was a great success)? It may be just like Munich and Iran will be appeased through fear of a nuclear war, due to lying exaggerations hyped in the media just like the prediction of 2.2 million casualties per month from Nazi air raids.

Update: the nuclear weapons proliferation exaggerated threat is already causing Britain to appease Iran and take no notice of violation of human rights, according to Martin Fletcher's front page story in The Times newspaper, 24 September 2009.

Britain is appeasing Iran, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi says
by Martin Fletcher
The Times online, September 24, 2009

The only Iranian to win the Nobel Peace Prize accused Britain of ignoring the regime’s savage suppression of opposition in order to safeguard talks on its nuclear programme.

Shirin Ebadi, the human rights lawyer, said that her worst fears were confirmed when she saw the British Ambassador at President Ahmadinejad’s inauguration.

“That’s when I felt that human rights were being neglected,” she told The Times. “I’m very sorry to say the West cares more about its own security than human rights. I think they’re wrong . . . Undemocratic countries are more dangerous than a nuclear bomb. It’s undemocratic countries that jeopardise international peace.”

Dr Ebadi said that sanctions should have been imposed on the Iranian regime over the alleged theft of the election and the subsequence killing, beating and imprisoning of opponents. She has called for the downgrading of Western embassies, the withdrawal of ambassadors and the freezing of the assets of Iran’s leaders.
...

Dr Ebadi plans to go home in two months, daring the regime to arrest the first Muslim woman to win a Nobel prize. In 2000 she spent three weeks in solitary confinement after lodging a complaint against Tehran’s police chief for a lethal attack on pro-democracy students.

If not imprisoned, she will fight to secure justice for the families of those killed in the crackdown — a trail that could lead all the way to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. She has been approached by the mother of Neda Soltan, the student whose death made her an icon of the opposition.

Dr Ebadi said that she was enraged by the crimes that the regime had perpetrated in the name of Islam, but that ordinary Iranians were united as never before, with women at the fore, and that they would not forgive or forget the regime’s crimes. “The opposition has gained unstoppable momentum,” she said. “The people have reached a point of no return. I am sure they will be victorious, but when? The fall of the Berlin Wall was totally predictable but no one could say when.”

Before 9/11, Weinberger was quizzed by skeptical critics on BBC News Talking Point on Friday, 4 May, 2001, Caspar Weinberger quizzed on new US Star Wars ABM plans:


‘It is like saying we don't like chemical warfare - we don't like gas attacks - so we are going to give up and promise not to have any defences ever against them and that of course would mean then we are perfectly safe. ...


‘The ... idea that you are somehow endangering people by having a defence strikes me almost as absurd as saying you endanger people by having a gas mask in a gas attack. ...


‘Now if you tell an aggressive nation that [chemical or nuclear weapons are] the one system of weapons that is never going to be defended against - what are they going to do? They are going to make every effort to get that kind of system of weapons. That is what is happening ...’



Update: Google have now digitized in quality freely downloadable PDF format (and also in much poorer quality online-viewer format) a 377 pages long unclassified 1965 U.S. National Academy of Sciences nuclear weapons effects compendium, Proceedings of the symposium on protective structures for civilian populations. (This begins with Dr Brode's review of nuclear weapon effects.) Other relevant Google free downloads in PDF format can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and the 15 September 1961 issue of Life magazine with President Kennedy's famous letter on civil defense against fallout can be found here.




Above: Life magazine (Kennedy's civil defense issue) makes it clear that in the absence of an all-out nuclear war, survival means having not just the ability to hit back, but also having civil defence so that the other side is unable to cause excessive intimidation with their nuclear stockpile; any cold war has a winner and a loser. As detailed in the Glasstone and Dolan post earlier, the refusal to be intimidated held back the Soviet Union long enough for it to collapse.

Marshall of the Soviet Union Vasiliy D. Sokolovsk, Military Strategy (Ministry of Defense of the USSR, 1969): ‘A war will end lawfully [i.e. in accordance with the presumed ‘laws’ of Marxism-Leninism for the evolution of society] with the victory of the progressive Communist social and economic system over the reactionary capitalist system, which is historically destined to go under.’

Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, 1979 (the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan): ‘The Soviet Union has superiority over the United States. Henceforth it will be the United States who will be threatened. It had better get used to it.’

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, 23 June 1983: ‘There are two Soviet Unions. The people - millions of them - dream of an end to wars, to armaments. The government, to the contrary, does not contemplate that idea even for a minute. It does, of course, want the WEST to disarm. But not one item of Soviet military equipment will ever be given up. ... It is normal to be afraid of nuclear weapons. I would condemn no one for that. But the generation now coming out of Western schools is unable to distinguish good from evil. Even those words are unacceptable. This results in impaired thinking ability. Isaac Newton, for example, would never have been taken in by communism! These young people will soon look back on photographs of their own demonstrations and cry. But it will be too late. I say to them: You are protesting nuclear arms. But are you prepared to try to defend your homeland with NON-nuclear arms? No: These young people are unprepared for ANY kind of struggle.’

Tens of millions died in World War II because of the 1930s efforts to negotiate with totalitarians through a false fear of war due to the quantitative exaggeration of the effects of aerial attack, and a widespread belief that peace could be guaranteed by exaggerating the effects of war into a dogmatic religion of pseudo-science, which would brainwash humanity into avoiding war. This lying only encouraged the proliferation of weapons to the despotic dictatorships which wanted to have the threat of such weapons in order to achieve political intimidation, ‘peaceful invasions’ and genocide without opposition. See, for example, the article:

‘INTERNATIONAL PHYSICIANS FOR THE PREVENTION OF NUCLEAR WAR: MESSIAHS OF THE NUCLEAR AGE?’, The Lancet (British medical journal), 18 November 1988, pp.1185-6, by Jane M. Orient, MD.

Leaders of the Nobel Peace Prize winning group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) claim that their struggle against the nuclear threat may be ‘one of the significant contributions of our profession to the survival of humankind’ (Lown, B., ‘Looking back, seeing ahead’, Lancet, 1988; ii: 203-4). Citing their ‘unique knowledge and expertise’ as qualifications for working for the abolition of nuclear weapons, IPPNW urges physicians to educate the public about nuclear war and to offer sound prescriptions for nuclear war prevention (Lown, B., ‘Looking back, seeing ahead’, Lancet, 1988; ii: 203-4).

In science, good intentions and noble sentiments do not exempt one's work from critical scrutiny. Because the advocacy of IPPNW is cloaked in scientific authority, it should be (but rarely is) subjected to the usual rigors of scientific criticism.

IPPNW has indeed played a major role in educating the public about nuclear war, and consequently in gaining widespread acceptance of fallacious beliefs, some of which are repeated in the Lancet (Lown, B., ‘Looking back, seeing ahead’, Lancet, 1988; ii: 203-4). For example, Lown speaks of nuclear winter as a “discovery” rather than as a hypothesis. IPPNW has pointedly ignored the criticism (Penner, J. E., ‘Uncertainties in the smoke source term for “nuclear winter” studies’, Nature, 1986; 324: 222-226; Seitz, R., ‘Siberian fire as “nuclear winter” guide’, Nature, 1986; 323: 116-117; Seitz, R., ‘In from the cold: “nuclear winter” melts down’, National Interest, 1986; 2(1): 3-17; Chester, C. V., et al., ‘A preliminary review of the TTAPS nuclear winter scenario’, Oak Ridge, TN: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 1984, report ORNL/TM-9223) of the original nuclear winter report, as well as the later, more sophisticated studies that have debunked the doomsday scenario ...

In referring to the Chernobyl disaster, Lown (Lown, B., ‘Looking back, seeing ahead’, Lancet, 1988; ii: 203-4) states that the odds of a meltdown were estimated to be 1 in 10,000 years, according to Soviet Life. (A mere meltdown would have been a trivial event in comparison with the graphite-fueled fire that actually occurred.) Yet American engineers recognized the danger of reactors with a positive void coefficient (like the Chernobyl reactor) as early as 1950 (Teller, E., ‘Better a shield than a sword: perspectives on defense and technology’, New York: Free Press, 1987). Why did the Soviets choose an unsafe design for a reactor built quite recently? One possible explanation is that such reactors can be refueled while in operation, permitting the production of weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct (Cohen, B. L., ‘The nuclear reactor accident at Chernobyl, USSR’, Am. J. Phys, 1987; 55: 1076-1083).

The assertion that civil defense might ‘foster illusions but would not mitigate any of the dreadful consequences’ (Lown, B., ‘Looking back, seeing ahead’, Lancet, 1988; ii: 203-4) is in conflict with the data. ... citing the experience of the Hamburg firestorm of 1943 as ‘proof’ of the futility of shelters (Ervin F. R., et al., ‘Human and ecologic effects in Massachusetts of an assumed thermonuclear attack on the United States’, New England Journal of Medicine, 1962; 266: 1127-1137; Leaf A., ‘New perspectives on the medical consequences of nuclear war’, New England Journal of Medicine, 1986; 315: 905-912; Geiger, H. J., ‘Illusion of survival’, in: Adams, A. and Cullen, S., eds., ‘The final epidemic: physicians and scientists on nuclear war’, Chicago: Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, 1981: 173-181; Leaning, J., ‘Star Wars revives civil defense’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1987; vol 43(4): 42-46), even though 85% of the population in the firestorm area survived, including most persons who were in minimally adequate bomb shelters (U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, No. 154: Public Air Raid Shelters in Germany; Earp, Kathleen A., ‘Deaths from Fire in Large Scale Air Attack – with Special Reference to the Hamburg Fire Storm’, Whitehall, U. K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, Report CD/SA 28, April 1953, discussed in summary here and in detail here, but ignored by Brode).

... history is apparently not among the areas of expertise claimed by IPPNW. 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?


"Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by making decisions as a group.[1] During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group." - Wikipedia.

Ultimately the nuclear weapons civil defence policy is driven by prejudice, not by scientific facts. Making the facts widely available in a clear format of relevance to the nuclear threats actually existing today (as opposed to the effects of a hypothetical all out nuclear war between communism and capitalism three or four decades ago, before arms reductions began) would help.

Upate: there is an article by Zbigniew Jaworowski of Poland's Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, "Radiation Hormesis - A Remedy for Fear" in BELLE Newsletter, pp. 14-20, Vol. 15, No. 2, May 2009. The long-term effects of radiation were reviewed in detail on the earlier post, linked here. (For a video introduction to this topic, see the presentation by Dr Gary Sanquist, Low-Level Radiation: Is It Good for You?)

See also: Bernard L. Cohen, Ph.D., "The Linear No-Threshold Theory of Radiation Carcinogenesis Should Be Rejected", published in Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Volume 13, Number 3, Fall 2008, pp. 70-76, linked here. There is an audio file of a talk by him linked here. One issue I have with his papers is that he doesn't lucidly go into the scientific details of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki threshold dose cover up by the RERF and the radium dial painters threshold dose cover-up.



Update on 19 October 2009: PhD research student Melissa Smith of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, has just had published a vital new scholarly paper on the role of the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch nuclear test research programme in shaping the 'Protect and Survive' advice (one fragment of which was actually published as a paper in the little read 1965 U.S. National Academy of Sciences civil defense compendium, Proceedings of the symposium on protective structures for civilian populations, giving experimental data on the 1.25 MeV mean gamma Co-60 radiation protection factors for emergency 'core shelters' inside typical British homes):

Melissa Smith, 'Architects of Armageddon: the Home Office Scientific Advisers' Branch and civil defence in Britain, 1945–68', British Journal for the History of Science (published by Cambridge University Press), 8 October 2009.

Abstract:

'In 1948, in response to the perceived threat of atomic war, the British government embarked on a new civil defence programme. By the mid-1950s, secret government reports were already warning that this programme would be completely inadequate to deal with a nuclear attack. The government responded to these warnings by cutting civil defence spending, while issuing apparently absurd pamphlets advising the public on how they could protect themselves from nuclear attack. Historians have thus far sought to explain this response with reference to high-level decisions taken by policymakers, and have tended to dismiss civil defence advice as mere propaganda. This paper challenges this interpretation by considering the little-known role of the Home Office Scientific Advisers' Branch, a group of experts whose scientific and technical knowledge informed both civil defence policy and advice to the public. It explores both their advisory and research work, demonstrating their role in shaping civil defence policy and showing that detailed research programmes lay behind the much-mocked government civil defence pamphlets of the 1950s and 1960s.'

This paper is an expanded version of the essay awarded the Singer Prize of the British Society for the History of Science for 2008:

Ms Melissa Smith wins 2008 Singer Prize

The BSHS Singer Prize judging panel has selected the essay entitled "Architects of Armageddon: Scientific advisers and civil defence in Britain, 1945-68" by Ms Melissa Smith (CHSTM, University of Manchester), as the winner of the 2008 Singer Prize. The judges were impressed by the flair and ambition of the essay, by its critical engagement with the existing literature on post-war British science and government, and by its extensive use of primary archival sources. They found the essay original, well written, engaging and informative.


We have also blogged about this research. As previously explained, the government should have published nuclear weapons effects research based on nuclear test data in order to substantiate the scientific basis for civil defense. Hiding the factual scientific evidence for public civil defense advice behind a solid wall of secrecy is a guaranteed way to allow the advice to be falsely ridiculed and ignored by ignorant 'scientists' with a political agenda, thereby maximising the scale of tragedy in the event that civil defense is needed in a disaster. Allowing the popular media to wrongly discredit civil defence also increases the risk of war by encouraging dictators and terrorists to spend money trying to get hold of weapons of mass destruction in the belief that there is no effective defense against such weapons. It's vital to publish the facts!

Reduction of countermeasure and civil defense chapter contents of the Effects of Nuclear Weapons in successive editions

The key pages from the U.S. Government's 456 pages long September 1950 edition of The Effects of Atomic Weapons are linked here (82.7 MB PDF file download). Notice that it contains extensive data on the underwater BAKER test base surge and also rainout radiation patterns not to mention detailed predictions of shore innundations by the water waves created, pertinent to the effects of radiation and water waves from a terrorist shallow underwater nuclear detonation below the waterline inside a ship in a harbor or off the coast of city, which is excluded from all further editions, and it also contains two chapters dealing with civil defense countermeasures: Chapter X, Decontamination, and Chapter XII, Protection of Personnel. The next edition was the June 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons, key pages of which are linked here (90.8 MB download), which only contains one civil defense chapter: Chapter XII, Protective Measures (although it also contains good civil defense countermeasures in some other chapters, for example pages 318-322 which describe the 1953 Nevada nuclear tests on ignition and the conclusions for civil defense). The problem with reducing the association of nuclear weapon test effects data and civil defense countermeasures is that the latter will not be taken seriously by the public (in fact they will be ridiculed by the media and ignored by the public) without proper justification, i.e., proof that nuclear weapons tests have been done to validate the civil defense countermeasures.

posted by nige @ 6:18 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities, by Edward Teller and Albert L. Latter




Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities, by Edward Teller and Albert L. Latter (Criterion Books, New York, 1958), page 139:

"It is generally believed that the First World War was caused by an arms race. For some strange reason most people forget that the Second World War was brought about by a situation which could be called a race in disarmament. The peace-loving and powerful nations divested themselves of their military power. When the Nazi regime in Germany adopted a program of rapid preparation for war, the rest of the world was caught unawares. At first they did not want to accept the fact of this menace. When the danger was unmistakable, it was too late to avert a most cruel war, and almost too late to stop Hitler short of world conquest."


Above: 9.3 megatons Hardtack-Poplar fireball in 1958. This photo has only been recently released with the name of the test. Maybe the proximity of the fighter (which survived) creates the wrong (not so doomsday-like) impression?



Above: a different regime of nuclear effects phenomena. Colour photos now available of the Teak fireball and surrounding red shock wave air glow. The bomb was 3.8 Mt (50% fission yield fraction) detonated at 77 km altitude nearly over Johnston Island, and was photographed in 1958 from a mountain top on Maui, 794 nautical miles away. As we mentioned in a previous post, Teller and Latter related the case of the Plumbbob-John air burst of 18 July 1957, where five men stood at ground zero (directly below the rocket carried bomb burst) without injury (although they were not looking directly at the fireball at zero time, or they would have received retinal burns). Teak was a similar case: proving that nuclear weapons can be used (for instance as high altitude bursts to destroy incoming missiles) without hazards, if they are designed to minimize prompt gamma ray output and thus EMP radiation (this can be done by the use of clean nuclear weapons with suitable tamper materials that will minimize the high-energy secondary gamma ray yield when hit by neutrons).

Teller and Latter explain that radiological warfare is a benefit compared to the carnage of using conventional weapons

"The lifetime of the radioactive material may be long enough to give an opportunity to the people to escape from the contaminated area [longer half lives mean that the chance of a radioactive atom decaying in any given second is lower, so the specific activity is lower; e.g. if you have N radioactive atoms with a half life of T time units, then the decay rate is simply (lne2)*N/T ~ 0.693N/T atoms decaying per unit time, thus the longer the half-life T the lower the radioactivity level that a given number of radioactive atoms produces, where 1/(lne2) ~ 1.44 which is the factor by which you must multiply the half-life to get the statistical mean life, defined as the time to zero activity if the initial straight-line asymptotic gradient of the decay curve, i.e. exp(-AT) ~ 1 - AT, were followed instead of the exponential curve which of course is itself just a mathematical idealization because it can never reach zero, despite the quantum reality check that in the real world some day the final radioactive atom will decay, and zero activity will be attained after a finite time]. At the same time, one may precipitate almost all the activity near the explosion [using shallow underground detonations produced by earth penetrator warheads, like Redwing-Seminole 13.7 kt shot surface burst inside a water tank at Eniwetok Atoll in 1956 to simulate shallow burial] so that distant localities would not be seriously affected. It is conceivable, therefore, that radiological warfare could be used in a humane manner. By exploding a weapon of this kind near an island one might be able to force evacuation without loss of life. No instrument, not even a weapon, is evil in itself. Everything depends on the way in which it is used."

- Edward Teller and Albert L. Latter, Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities (Criterion Books, New York, 1958), p. 136.



Above: Redwing-Seminole 13.7 kt shot inside a water tank at Eniwetok Atoll in 1956 to simulate shallow burial. The Wilson cloud shields much of the thermal radiation, while the enhanced cratering action deposits almost all of the radioactivity in the local fallout, seen here as the throwout from the crater. Teller and Latter explain how this kind of radiological warfare could make enemy forces evacuate an island like Iwo Jima (where the island had to be shelled with conventional weapons and flame-throwers, resulting in the death of 21,703 of the 22,786 Japanese soldiers, and the death of 6,825 allied soldiers) before receiving a lethal radiation dose, without any of the immoral carnage of shelling or other gross effects from conventional weapons. Another moral use of nuclear weapons that circumvents the carnage of conventional warfare is air bursts at altitudes just over the maximum fireball radius, to clear the conventional weapons defending coastal areas and beaches prior to an invasion such as the D-day landings: neutron-induced activity covers only a small area and the dose rates are relatively low once the aluminium-28 has decayed with a half-life of only 2.3 minutes.

Sr-90 exaggerations

Teller and Latter also explain how the threat from strontium-90 is grossly exaggerated. Sr-90 is more important than the equally long-lived Cs-137 because Cs-137 like potassium resides in tissues whose cells are regularly renewed and thus is rapidly eliminated from the body, whereas a small fraction of Sr-90 ends up in the bones for life, creating a larger dose. (The I-131 problem and its countermeasures was discussed in detail earlier in the blog post linked here.) Once the fallout comes down, there is a brief spell of danger while the fallout particles are physically present on the leaves and stems of crops, but this can be washed off and wind and rain soon wash the fallout particles into the soil where root uptake is important for the soluble component of the fallout activity. In coral soil or limestone based soil there is an abundance of calcium (coral is calcium carbonate) so chemically similar strontium gets crowded out and diluted.

In most American soils, however, there is less calcium, so with an average natural strontium to calcium mass abundance of 1:100, there is only about 27 kg of soluble natural strontium per acre. Adult humans have a natural strontium to calcium mass ratio of just 1:1,400 and contain only 0.7 gram of natural strontium. Hence, strontium uptake via the food chain from soil to human beings is discriminated against (relative to calcium) by the factor 14. These figures allow the dilution of strontium-90 to be calculated. Each step of the food chain discriminates against strontium relative to calcium (see also pages 1521-9 of the U.S. Congressional Hearings The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, May-June 1957, which states on page 1529: "100 metres [depth] of sea water has 370 grams of dissolved calcium per square foot compared to the average of 20 grams per square foot for the top 2.5 inches of soil which absorbs and holds the fallout radiostrontium"):

(1) Soil: 1 g of Sr for every 100 g of Ca (protection factor = 1)

(2) Plants: 1 g of Sr for every 140 g of Ca (protection factor = 140/100 = 1.4)

(3) Milk: 1 g of Sr for every 980 g of Ca (protection factor = 980/100 = 9.8 for root uptake of soluble Sr in soil by grass, or 980/140 = 7 for Sr ingestion by cattle from fresh fallout particles still adhering directly to the grass)

(4) Human: 1 g of Sr for every 1,400 g of Ca (protection factor of 1400/100 = 14 for fallout in the soil, or 1400/140 = 10 for fallout on plants which are ingested by cattle)

J. L. Kulp's report "Sr-90 in Man" published in Science, 8 February 1957, vol. 125, p. 219, showed that in 1955 the average diet for the human population of the United States contained 7 micro-microcuries of Sr-90 per gram of calcium. It also reported an average worldwide total body burden of 0.12 micro-microcuries per gram of skeletal calcium, and a concentration in young children 3-4 times higher (due to growing bones and thus greater calcium intake from drinking milk).



In 1996, half a century after the nuclear detonations, data on cancers from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was published by D. A. Pierce et al. of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF (Radiation Research vol. 146 pp. 1-27; Science vol. 272, pp. 632-3) for 86,572 survivors, of whom 60% had received bomb doses of over 5 mSv (or 500 millirem in old units) suffering 4,741 cancers of which only 420 were due to radiation, consisting of 85 leukemias and 335 solid cancers.


‘Today we have a population of 2,383 [radium dial painter] cases for whom we have reliable body content measurements. . . . All 64 bone sarcoma [cancer] cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy [1,000 rads], while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy.’


- Dr Robert Rowland, Director of the Center for Human Radiobiology, Bone Sarcoma in Humans Induced by Radium: A Threshold Response?, Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting, European Society for Radiation Biology, Radioprotection colloquies, Vol. 32CI (1997), pp. 331-8.


Zbigniew Jaworowski, 'Radiation Risk and Ethics: Health Hazards, Prevention Costs, and Radiophobia', Physics Today, April 2000, pp. 89-90:


‘... it is important to note that, given the effects of a few seconds of irradiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a threshold near 200 mSv may be expected for leukemia and some solid tumors. [Sources: UNSCEAR, Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation, New York, 1994; W. F. Heidenreich, et al., Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1999), p. 205; and B. L. Cohen, Radiat. Res., vol. 149 (1998), p. 525.] For a protracted lifetime natural exposure, a threshold may be set at a level of several thousand millisieverts for malignancies, of 10 grays for radium-226 in bones, and probably about 1.5-2.0 Gy for lung cancer after x-ray and gamma irradiation. [Sources: G. Jaikrishan, et al., Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. S149 (for natural exposure); R. D. Evans, Health Physics, vol. 27 (1974), p. 497 (for radium-226); H. H. Rossi and M. Zaider, Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1997), p. 85 (for radiogenic lung cancer).] The hormetic effects, such as a decreased cancer incidence at low doses and increased longevity, may be used as a guide for estimating practical thresholds and for setting standards. ...


‘Though about a hundred of the million daily spontaneous DNA damages per cell remain unrepaired or misrepaired, apoptosis, differentiation, necrosis, cell cycle regulation, intercellular interactions, and the immune system remove about 99% of the altered cells. [Source: R. D. Stewart, Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. 101.] ...


‘[Due to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986] as of 1998 (according to UNSCEAR), a total of 1,791 thyroid cancers in children had been registered. About 93% of the youngsters have a prospect of full recovery. [Source: C. R. Moir and R. L. Telander, Seminars in Pediatric Surgery, vol. 3 (1994), p. 182.] ... The highest average thyroid doses in children (177 mGy) were accumulated in the Gomel region of Belarus. The highest incidence of thyroid cancer (17.9 cases per 100,000 children) occurred there in 1995, which means that the rate had increased by a factor of about 25 since 1987.


‘This rate increase was probably a result of improved screening [not radiation!]. Even then, the incidence rate for occult thyroid cancers was still a thousand times lower than it was for occult thyroid cancers in nonexposed populations (in the US, for example, the rate is 13,000 per 100,000 persons, and in Finland it is 35,600 per 100,000 persons). Thus, given the prospect of improved diagnostics, there is an enormous potential for detecting yet more [fictitious] "excess" thyroid cancers. In a study in the US that was performed during the period of active screening in 1974-79, it was determined that the incidence rate of malignant and other thyroid nodules was greater by 21-fold than it had been in the pre-1974 period. [Source: Z. Jaworowski, 21st Century Science and Technology, vol. 11 (1998), issue 1, p. 14.]’


W. L. Chen, Y. C. Luan, M. C. Shieh, S. T. Chen, H. T. Kung, K. L. Soong, Y. C. Yeh, T. S. Chou, S. H. Mong, J. T. Wu, C. P. Sun, W. P. Deng, M. F. Wu, and M. L. Shen, ‘Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?’, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, page 6, available in PDF format here:


‘An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan. Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 ([low dose rate, gamma radiation emitter] half-life: 5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv, a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv. Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per 100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per 1,000 children under age 19.


‘The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per 100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and income distributions of these persons are the same as for the general population, it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure. ...’


‘Professor Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to the accumulated dose of radiation. ... Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957 Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress.’ – Abstract of thesis by Jennifer Caron, Edward Lewis and Radioactive Fallout: the Impact of Caltech Biologists Over Nuclear Weapons Testing in the 1950s and 60s, Caltech, January 2003.


Dr John F. Loutit of the Medical Research Council, Harwell, England, in 1962 wrote a book called Irradiation of Mice and Men (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London), discrediting the pseudo-science from geneticist Edward Lewis on pages 61, and 78-79:


‘... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls. …


‘What Lewis did, and which I have not copied, was to include in his table another group - spontaneous incidence of leukemia (Brooklyn, N.Y.) - who are taken to have received only natural background radiation throughout life at the very low dose-rate of 0.1-0.2 rad per year: the best estimate is listed as 2 x 10-6 like the others in the table. But the value of 2 x 10-6 was not calculated from the data as for the other groups; it was merely adopted. By its adoption and multiplication with the average age in years of Brooklyners - 33.7 years and radiation dose per year of 0.1-0.2 rad - a mortality rate of 7 to 13 cases per million per year due to background radiation was deduced, or some 10-20 per cent of the observed rate of 65 cases per million per year. ...


‘All these points are very much against the basic hypothesis of Lewis of a linear relation of dose to leukemic effect irrespective of time. Unhappily it is not possible to claim for Lewis’s work as others have done, “It is now possible to calculate - within narrow limits - how many deaths from leukemia will result in any population from an increase in fall-out or other source of radiation” [Leading article in Science, vol. 125, p. 963, 1957]. This is just wishful journalese.


‘The burning questions to me are not what are the numbers of leukemia to be expected from atom bombs or radiotherapy, but what is to be expected from natural background .... Furthermore, to obtain estimates of these, I believe it is wrong to go to [1950s inaccurate, dose rate effect ignoring, data from] atom bombs, where the radiations are qualitatively different [i.e., including effects from neutrons] and, more important, the dose-rate outstandingly different.’




Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities, by Edward Teller and Albert L. Latter (Criterion Books, New York, 1958):

Page 167:

'If we continue to consume [fossil] fuel at an increasing rate, however, it appears probable that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will become high enough to raise the average temperature of the earth by a few degrees. If this were to happen, the ice caps would melt and the general level of the oceans would rise. Coastal cities like New York and Seattle might be innundated. Thus the industrial revolution using ordinary chemical fuel could be forced to end ... However, it might still be possible to use nuclear fuel.'

Page 147:

'All the energy in that Nevada explosion was not quite sufficient to evaporate the water droplets in a cloud one mile broad, one mile wide, and one mile deep. This is not a very big rain cloud. ... Nuclear explosions are violent enough. But compared to the forces of nature - compared even with the daily release of energy from not particularly stormy weather - all our bombs are puny.'


Above: Dr Zaius in Planet of the Apes simultaneously held religious and scientific positions, leading him to suppress scientific findings which contradicted the religious dogma. You know, like my suppression by Britain's Open University physics department chairman, Professor Russell Stannard, author of books like Science and the Renewal of Belief:

"offering fresh insight into original sin, the trials experienced by Galileo, the problem of pain, the possibility of miracles, the evidence for the resurrection, the credibility of incarnation, and the power of steadfast prayer. By introducing simple analogies, Stannard clears up misunderstandings that have muddied the connections between science and religion, and suggests contributions that the pursuit of physical science can make to theology",


arguing that science should be alloyed with dogma again as a "unification" of physics and religion, as it was in the time of Galileo. Actually, this makes some sense when you recognise that Stannard takes "physics" to include the religious belief in uncheckable pseudoscience: a landscape of 10500 different universes to account for the vast number of possible particle physics theories which can be generated by the 100 or more moduli for the shape of the unobservably small compactification of 6-dimensions assumed to exist in the speculative Calabi-Yau manifold of string theory, as well as other rubbish like Aspect's alleged "experimental evidence" on entanglement via correlation of particle spins:

"In some key Bell experiments, including two of the well-known ones by Alain Aspect, 1981-2, it is only after the subtraction of ‘accidentals’ from the coincidence counts that we get violations of Bell tests. The data adjustment, producing increases of up to 60% in the test statistics, has never been adequately justified. Few published experiments give sufficient information for the reader to make a fair assessment." - http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9903/9903066v2.pdf

"The quantum collapse [in the mainstream interpretation of quantum mechanics, where a wavefunction collapse occurs whenever a measurement of a particle is made] occurs when we model the wave moving according to Schroedinger (time-dependent) and then, suddenly at the time of interaction we require it to be in an eigenstate and hence to also be a solution of Schroedinger (time-independent). The collapse of the wave function is due to a discontinuity in the equations used to model the physics, it is not inherent in the physics." - Thomas Love, California State University.

As a physics student with a mechanism for gravity that predicted correctly the cosmological acceleration two years ahead of its discovery, Russell didn't even personally reply but just passed my paper to Dr Bob Lambourne who in 1996 wrote to me that my prediction for quantum gravity and cosmological acceleration was not important because it is not within the metaphysical, non-falsifiable domain of Professor Edward Witten's stringy speculations on 11-dimensional 'M-theory'. In 1986, Professor Russell was awarded the Templeton Project Trust Award for ‘significant contributions to the field of spiritual values; in particular for contributions to greater understanding of science and religion’. So who says the Planet of the Apes story is completely fictional, aside from a little hairiness?


Above: Nova (Linda Harrison) portrayed in 3978 AD, in the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes. A nuclear war destroys 'civilization' leaving beautiful dumb girls like Nova. However, the film is politically correct and adds mutant aggressive apes to earth's survivors to make sure that the nuclear war 'survivors will envy the dead' (as Nikita Khrushchev claimed, quoted in Pravda, 20 July 1963), just as politically correct dogma requires.


Above: another view; maybe the alleged evidence for health benefits like enhanced lifespan and lower cancer rates from low level residual radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki contribute to her very healthy appearance?



‘Planet of the Apes’ started out as a Pierre Boulle novel in which a couple discover a bottle containing the story of how humans become dictatorial, slovenly and lazy by using apes as slaves to do their work, until there is a rebellion and an ape revolution reverses the situation. Humans are too cowardly to fight back and submit to the chains of oppression. Apes become the masters of human slaves. The twist at the end of the novel occurs when Boulle reveals that the story in a bottle has not been found by humans but rather by a couple of apes (who have read it with astonishment and dismiss the story just as a silly hoax).



The film, however, is another story and is based on a film script by ‘Twilight Zone’ master Rod Serling and Michael Wilson, and in some ways is a reversal of the underlying politics of Boulle's book (producer Arthur P. Jacobs contacted Pierre Boulle and asked him to take a look at the script; Boulle responded on April 29, 1965 that "he truly did not like the Statue of Liberty ending, feeling that it cheapened the story as a whole, and served as the 'temptation from the Devil'...") Instead of the disaster coming through the pacifist humans refusing to fight against oppression, it instead occurs (in the film) as a result of humans fighting one another with nuclear weapons and destroying the cities of human civilization, giving the apes in jungles the opportunity to take over the planet. However, some parts of Pierre Boulle's original plot are resurrected in the sequels to the 1968 film, where the mechanism by which the apes take over the planet is the use of ape slaves who rebel.



The first film, in the script by Rod Serling, starts with three astronauts taking an 18-month (ship time) journey supposed to cover a distance of 320 light years in 2,000 earth years, at a velocity of 320/2000 = 0.16c. At 16% of light velocity, ship time travels at just [1 – 0.162]1/2 = 0.987 of the rate of earth time, so the ship time passing would be 1974 years, not the 18 months that is claimed in the film. Deep sleep cubicles in the ship are used to keep the astronauts alive with the use of minimal resources during the journey. Serling changed the twist that Boulle used by having the ship hit an asteroid half way into the trip, cracking the plastic cubicle of the female astronaut and causing her to prematurely age and die in her sleep. This causes the computer to automatically abort the mission and turn the ship back towards the earth, which in the screenplay by Serling is discovered when the computer tapes are read later (this episode was omitted from the film). The ship, returning to a grossly altered earth with no surviving runways, crash lands in a lake.



The astronauts discover that on this planet the apes rule dumb, ignorant humans. In the final scene, the twist revealing that the planet is actually the earth (which should have been pretty obvious from the similar gravity, atmosphere, sun, moon, star positions in the sky, and so forth) is done by showing the Statue of Liberty half buried by beach sand. A nuclear war has apparently occurred during the 2,000 years that elapsed. The second film in the series, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, furthers this theme by having the surviving astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston, appropriately nicknamed ‘Charlie Hero’ off-set by the Chimpanzee actor Roddy McDowell) and beautiful savage girl Nova discover an underground colony of surviving radiation-mutated humans worshipping a cobalt-cased ‘alpha-omega doomsday bomb’. Sublime political message: ‘the survivors in a nuclear war will have to live for thousands of years underground and will be mutants that envy the dead.’ Not exactly the truth about the harmlessness of slowly-decaying (i.e. low dose rate) cobalt fallout (which can simply be swept up and buried long before anyone gets a dangerous dose) compared to the survivable but more dangerous fast-decaying (i.e. high dose rate) fission products:

'Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around...Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it.'

- Thomas K. Jones, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, Research and Engineering, LA Times 16 January 1982.









The apes follow them underground and, after his girlfriend Nova is killed in the fighting, the bitter, love-cheated Charlie Hero decides to destroy the planet in anger, finally succeeding by falling on to the doomsday button which ends the story, just as in Pierre Boulle’s previous film Bridge on the River Kwai the crazy hero falls on the detonator switch when shot, blowing up the bridge. Fortunately the alpha-omega bomb - presumably because it's capable of destroying the whole planet - is the one bomb made which doen’t have a permissive action link and require authority codes and dual key activation to arm, with the key holes too far apart for one person to simultaneously turn both together. After all, you don't want to make such a dangerous bomb very hard to accidentally set off, do you, at least not if you're using it as the ending to a fine film?



This fictional tale, in lieu of the full facts on nuclear weapons effects, helped to cement the myth in popular culture that nuclear weapons are a danger to human civilization, rather than deterring world war.

Fraction of activity in local fallout

One of the interesting things about this 1958 book by Teller and Latter is that it gives details of how the atmospheric Nevada testing tried to minimise local fallout. E.g., on page 98, they claim that if the test is on a 'tower so tall that the fireball cannot touch the surface ... the amount of close-in fallout is reduced from eighty per cent to approximately five per cent.'

However, this figure is misleading! The actual percentage of the gamma activity in local fallout from 30 Nevada tower bursts at heights exceeding 100Wkt1/3 feet (it did not decrease at heights above that, due to the contribution to local fallout from the condensed iron oxides produced by the fireball enveloping the tower material) was 20% of that of a surface burst, not 5%.

This 20% figure comes from Jack C. Greene, et al., Response to DCPA Questions on Fallout, Prepared by the Subcommittee on Fallout, Advisory Committee on Civil Defense of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, U.S. Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, DCPA Research Report No. 20, November 1973. This report was written by a committee composed of top experts on fallout such as Dr Carl F. Miller who had collected the fallout at Castle and Plumbbob and developed the fallout model used by DCPA, and Dr R. Robert Rapp of RAND Corporation who had analyzed the effect of the toroidal distribution of activity in the mushroom clouds of Bravo and Zuni upon the fallout pattern.

The proportion of activity in local fallout depends on which nuclides you are considering, so it is a different number for gamma and beta activity and for different times after burst. If you quote the percentage of unfractionated activities (like Zr-95) in local fallout, that is much larger than the percentage of the fractionated I-131, Cs-137, Sr-89 and Sr-90 in local fallout. Most of the fractionated nuclide decay chains have somewhat different volatilities, so they fractionate to different degrees. Therefore, there is no natural way to define what is meant by the fraction of activity that comes down in local fallout. One artificial way to define it is to consider the local fallout fraction as the gamma exposure rate normalized to 1 hour after burst an integrated over the area of the local fallout pattern. This includes fractionation to the extent that it reduces the average gamma exposure rate at the reference time of one hour after burst.

On page 3 they note that the radiation level at a fixed time after burst from a unit mass of fallout per unit area increases as the particle size decreases, e.g. the radiation level for a given deposition density at a fixed time after burst actually increases as you move further downwind from ground zero:

‘This observation is consistent with the consensus that radiochemical fractionation causes this ration to decrease with increasing particle size.’

In other words, the value of the ratio (R/hr at 1 hour)/(fission kiloton/square mile) is smaller for highly fractionated close-in fallout (which is depleted in volatile fission products) than it is for the unfractionated and enriched fallout deposited at great distances:

‘This problem has been customarily circumvented by using what amounts to an average of this ratio over the region of “local” fallout, where “local” was defined at the convenience of the author.’

They denote the average “local” fallout (R/hr at 1 hour)/(fission kiloton/square mile) ratio as K1, while the unfractionated fission product value is K0, so K1/K0 = fraction of activity in local fallout.

K1 is reduced by 25% due to instrument response to multidirectional gamma rays from fallout when calibrated using point sources. The batteries in the instrument partly shield the detector from gamma rays coming from certain directions, and the partial shielding of the instrument by the body of the person holding the instrument is also important for fallout measurements. It is also reduced by about 25% due to terrain shielding of direct gamma rays from fallout that collects in small hollows (microrelief) on the ground. Hence, the actual measured ratio, K2 = 0.77x0.75K1 = 0.56K1.

‘Local fallout’ has been defined in three different ways by different people, causing confusion over how to average K1. One way is to define local fallout according as fallout larger than a particular fallout grain size, another way is to define it as radiation levels greater than a particular dose rate at a given time after detonation, and a third way is to define it as the fallout deposited within a certain period of time, such as 24 hours after detonation.

Page 4 states that the best surface burst data is for 0.5 kt Johnie Boy (1170), 1.5 kt Buffalo-2 (980), 3.53 Mt Zuni (1150), 5.01 Mt Tewa (920), and 1.2 kt Sugar (1215), giving a mean of 1090 for K2 and 1930 for K1.

P. 8 states that the average K2 for 30 Nevada steel tower tests with tower heights (scaled by cube-root of yield to 1 kt) of 100 ft or more (due to the steel of the tower the fallout did not diminish below this value) is 220 (R/hr at 1 hour)/(fission kiloton/square mile), while for 40 air bursts at similar scaled altitudes, the mean is K2 = 25 (R/hr at 1 hour)/(fission kiloton/square mile).

Hence, high tower shots produce 100*220/1090 = 20% of the local fallout gamma dose rates of surface bursts, while free air bursts at heights above the fireball radius produced only 100*25/1090 = 2.3% of the fallout of surface bursts.

The Trinity result of K2 = 690 for 37Wkt1/3 feet steel tower burst is 100*690/1090 = 63% of the fallout of a surface burst and is equivalent to a 1 Mt detonation on a 30 storey steel framed building.



On p. 13, after investigating the local fallout fractions from Pacific surface bursts on coral islands, reefs and on the ocean water surface, they concluded that the type of surface did not have a substantial effect on the measured amount of local fallout produced by nuclear surface bursts.

On p. 17, after observing that iodine in fallout is highly fractionated since volatile and condenses late in the fireball history on to the surfaces of the remaining small particles (i.e., it is depleted from the local close-in fallout), they explain that the Japanese fishermen exposed to Bravo fallout on 1 March 1954 just north of Rongelap Atoll were found to have 7 times as much external gamma radiation exposure as thyroid iodine exposure.

In the July 1962 104 kt Sedan test in Nevada, a man who was exposed in the open to the base surge without any protection received a thyroid gland dose due only slightly higher than his external gamma exposure. Three air samplers determined that no more than 10% of the iodine in the Sedan fallout was present as a vapour during the cloud passage; i.e., 90% or more of the iodine was fixed in the silicate Sedan fallout and was unable to evaporate from the fallout particles to give a soluble vapour.

P. 19: ‘There is evidence that much if not all heavy fallout observed during atmospheric nuclear tests was visible as individual particles falling and striking objects, or as deposits ... the forehead will feel like sandpaper to the touch of the hand. The gritty sensation will also be felt on the hands and on bared arms. ... Probably you do not have a radiation-measuring instrument (if you do you can work outside until the instrument reads 0.5 R/hr), but heavy fallout can still be detected by one of these several clues: Seeing fallout particles, fine, soil-coloured, some fused, bouncing upon or hitting a solid object, particularly visible on shining surfaces such as the hood or top of a car or truck. ... Feeling particles striking the nose or forehead ... In the rain, after turning on the windshield wiper of your car, seeing fallout particles in raindrops slide downward on the glass and pile up at the edge of the wiper stroke, like dust or snow.’

P. 20: ‘Typical specific activities of fallout particles are 5 x 1014 fissions/gram of fallout; thus for each R/hr at 1 hour exposure rate produced, 5 milligrams of particles would be deposited per sq ft of area.’ For a minimal sickness gamma dose of 150 R over a week outdoor, 50 R/hr at 1 hour would be needed, requiring 0.25 gram per square foot of fallout to be deposited at 1 hour, which is readily visible on surfaces.

P. 27: Dr Timothy Fohl and A. D. Ealay of Mt. Auburn Research Associates (MARA) used a buoyant vortex fireball in their 1972 report Vortex Ring Model of Single and Multiple Cloud Rise, DNA-2945F, to model to simulate the effect of two simultaneous 13.5 Mt nuclear surface bursts. If they are detonated within 5 fireball diameters of each other, they merge while rising into a single cloud which reaches only 66% of the altitude reached by an individual detonation.

Going back to the Teller and Latter book, their figure of 5% for high tower shots roughly applies to the fractionated I-131, Cs-137, Sr-90 and Sr-89 in local fallout, rather than to the mixture of unfractionated and fractionated activities which give rise to the total gamma radiation field from local fallout. On page 99 they state:

'In the case ... where the fireball almost touches the ground, the close-in fallout is also only about five percent [actually, as we saw above, for 40 free air bursts where the fireball did not touch the ground, it was only 2.3% of the fallout gamma activity of surface bursts]. This is a somewhat surprising fact since in this case photographs show large quantities of surface material being sucked up into the cloud, just as they are in a true surface explosion.

'This material certainly consists of large, heavy dirt particles which subsequently fall out of the cloud. Yet most of them somehow fail to come in contact with the radioactive fission products.

'This peculiar phenomenon can be understood by looking at the details of how the fireball rises. At first the central part of the fireball is much hotter than the outer part and thus it rises more rapidly. As it rises, however, it cools and falls back around the outer part, creating in this way a doughnut-shaped structure. The whole process is analogous to the formation of an ordinary smoke ring.

'In most of the photographs one sees, the doughnut is obscured by the cloud of water that forms, but sometimes when the weather is particularly dry, it becomes perfectly visible. During the rather orderly circulation of air through the hole, the bomb debris and the dirt that has been sucked up remain separated.'


Above: toroidal circulation in the 1953 Climax test: dust passes up through the middle of the toroid without mixing with the ring shaped fireball, then it cools as it hits cold air at the top, causing it to cascade back around the outside of the fireball. Result: harmless, non-radioactive fallout of dust which has never come into contact with the radioactive toroidal shaped fireball (a ring doughnut shape with a hollow in the middle.



Above: toroidal fireball in the 1953 Grable nuclear air burst.




Above: photos taken at 17, 27 and about 50 seconds after the French nuclear test Licorne (a 914 kt balloon suspended shot, at 500 m altitude on 3 July 1970). The fireball thermal radiation is initially shielded by the expanding Wilson condensation cloud, which forms in humid atmosphere the low pressure, cooling air in the negative pressure blast phase (some distance behind behind the ever expanding compressed shock front). Edward Teller and Albert Latter clearly describe the scientific phenomena of the white 'skirt' surrounding the mushroom stem for bursts in humid air, on page 84 of their 1958 book Our Nuclear Future:

'It is actually a cloud: a collection of droplets of water too small to turn into rain but big enough to reflect the white light of the sun. ... The white skirts (which are not always present) do not consist of any material that is falling out of the cloud. On the contrary, a moist layer of air is sucked up into the cloud from the side and the droplets which form in this layer give rise to a cloud-sheet with the appearance of a skirt.'


Above: the lethal global fallout fallacy started with the 1949 book by David Bradley, No Place to Hide, which grossly exaggerated the Crossroads-BAKER fallout.

The effects of small doses of plutonium were falsely claimed to be harmful using metaphysical linear extrapolation from high dose radium effects, in lieu of actual data for low doses. When eventually in the 1970s and 1980s the detailed dosimetry for thousands of early radium dial painters was done (by exhuming the corpses and actually measuring the radium in the bones), in was discovered that alpha radiation effects internally were a threshold effect requiring a minimum of 1,000 rads or 10 Gy, so the linear dose-effects theory was bunk:

‘Today we have a population of 2,383 [radium dial painter] cases for whom we have reliable body content measurements. . . . All 64 bone sarcoma [cancer] cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy [1,000 rads], while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy.’

- Dr Robert Rowland, Director of the Center for Human Radiobiology, Bone Sarcoma in Humans Induced by Radium: A Threshold Response?, Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting, European Society for Radiation Biology, Radioprotection colloquies, Vol. 32CI (1997), pp. 331-8.


DCPA Attack Environment Manual -

posted by nige @ 5:17 PM 0 comments

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Blast Wave


Above: Figure 2-23 on p. 2-59 of Dolan's Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, DNA-EM-1, 1972, showing the rapid decay of the peak overpressure with increasing distance from a 1 kt nuclear surface burst:

R (feet) - P (psi)

25 - 300,000
40 - 60,000
70 - 10,000
150 - 1,000
400 - 70
1,000 - 10
20,000 - 0.1

The curve, based on Brode's theoretical calculations with programs that include both hydrodynamic motion and radiation flow, can be represented by the simple equation:

P (psi) = (1.7 x 1010 /R3.4) + (7.0 x 106 /R2) + (1,700 /R),

where R is distance in feet. The R3.4 fall in pressure at the smallest distances differs from the simple theoretical R3 prediction for the fall in overpressure due to dispersal of energy over the increasing mass of engulfed ambient air (this mass is proportional to R3) because the shock front is losing energy by radiating thermal radiation at the highest overpressures, which causes an additional fall in peak overpressure with distance. Scaling to other explosion yields is done by multiplying the distances by the cube-root of the total kiloton yield.

Dolan gives also a free air burst curve in Figure 2-2 on p. 2-7, which can be obtained by scaling the surface burst peak overpressure curve to a yield of about 0.565 kt, implying that surface bursts have an effective yield (due to reflection of blast wave energy into a hemispherical region) of 1.77 times the free air burst yield. Hence, the distance for any given pressure in a surface burst extends about 1.771/3 = 1.21 times as far as in a free air burst in sea level air. For a perfectly rigid surface, an effective yield increase factor of 2 would be expected since the same amount of blast energy for any radius would be concentrated in a hemisphere with only half the volume of the sphere for that distance. A reflection factor of 1.77 therefore implies that only 100(1 - 1.77/2) = 11.5% of the blast energy in a surface burst is permanently absorbed by the ground in the cratering, ground shock, and soil heating (fallout formation) processes. If the initial blast energy is 50% of the total yield in a free air burst, then in a surface burst it will be reduced to 44%. A discussion of blast theory and some test data is given in an earlier post linked here.

PRECURSOR EFFECTS

The history of the precursor is discussed in earlier blog post about Glasstone and Dolan. The billowing of thermally-raised smoke and dust in the blast wave of the TRINITY test (100 feet over dark desert soil) in 1945 should have been the suggested a modification of the blast by dust loading of the air in that region, but the first film of the precursor shock wave was obtained on the DOG shot of TUMBLER-SNAPPER in the Nevada in 1952. Dark coloured (brown) desert sand, consisting of crystals of silica, was exploded or 'popcorned' into hot dust by thermal radiation exposures of 11-19 cal/cm2 for yields of 35 kt to 1.4 Mt; a similar effect on lighter coloured (grey-white) coral sand required 15-27 cal/cm2. This formed a cloud of hot dust-laden air several metres high over the ground, which caused the blast wave to speed up and change in characteristics. The density of the dust added to the air increased the blast wind or dynamic pressure (which is directly proportional to the density), while the added momentum increased the duration of the blast winds, greatly increasing damage to structures and vehicles by the 'sandstorm effect' of the air-blasted dust cloud. The peak overpressure is somewhat reduced by the upward refraction of energy due to the temperature-height profile in the precursor region.

In 1953, the precursor effect was demonstrated by a comparison of damage from the ENCORE and GRABLE shots. The second test was at lower altitude so the thermal radiation was able to popcorn the desert effectively, creating far greater dynamic pressure effects than ENCORE at the same overpressures for drag effects on jeeps, trucks, and other dynamic-pressure sensitive targets. At subsequent tests in Nevada, selected areas around ground zero were flooded to form shallow lakes, while other areas were coated with asphalt, concrete, grass and other surfaces to investigate precursor development as a function of the reflective and physical nature of the surface. Precursors were noted at higher overpressures over coral sand, including surface bursts of over 30 kt yield (so that the fireball at thermal maximum is high enough to irradiate the ground with sufficient thermal energy to cause popcorning). Dolan's Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, DNA-EM-1, 1972, p. 2-81, states that dust blast precursors will occur over dark city asphalt for burst altitudes below 800W1/3 feet, for W kilotons total yield, and for bursts over dark desert sand precursors will occur for burst altitudes below 650W1/3 feet. These formulae are valid for yields of 1-50 kt where observations are available (for other yields consideration must be given as to whether there is sufficient thermal exposure in the time before blast arrival for a dust layer to be produced).



Above: some typical qualitative precursor blast waveforms for overpressure and dynamic pressure, taken from Dolan's DNA-EM-1, 1972, which on pages 2-81 to 2-89 includes a detailed predictive system to indicate the shape of the precursor waveforms as a function of yield, height of burst and distance from ground zero. This was later developed into a quantitative precursor waveform prediction system in the late 1990s. At very high overpressures, the blast arrival is so soon after that detonation that very little of the thermal radiation has been emitted by the fireball, so there has been little development of a precursor in the available time. Therefore, the precursor develops gradually as the shock travels outward into areas which have been irradiated for longer times after burst, where enough thermal radiation has been emitted to cause a hot dust layer ahead of the shock wave. At long distances, the blast wave runs out of the dust layer because it encounters a region where the thermal radiation exposure has simply not been strong enough to 'popcorn' the sand or to 'smoke' the asphalt or grass. When this happens, the precursor encounters cooler air which makes it slow down, allowing the main blast wave (still travelling through air warmed by the precursor) to catch up and merge with the precursor, forming an ideal shaped blast wave once again.

posted by nige @ 10:08 AM 0 comments