"Three of the nation's leading atomic scientists were ushered into the White House one morning last week by Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lewis Strauss for a 45-minute conference with the President. The scientists: Edward Teller, credited with the theoretical discovery that led to a successful H-bomb, Ernest O. Lawrence, Nobel Prizewinning director of the University of California's radiation laboratory at Livermore, Calif., and Mark M. Mills, physicist and head of the lab's theoretical division. They brought a report of grave but potentially hopeful meaning. In the lab at Livermore, they told the President, scientists have found how to make H-bombs that will be 96% freer from radioactive fallout than the first models."
Above: neutron induced activities in atoms per fission depend upon bomb construction, particularly fission yield fraction ("cleanliness"). This table of data is based on the same source as Harold A. Knapp's 1960 table of accumulated doses from neutron induced activities in fallout (shown below), and is taken from the 1965 U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report USNRDL-TR-1009 by Drs. Glenn R. Crocker and T. Turner. (This report is available as a 10 MB PDF download here. For Crocker's report on the fission product decay chains, see this link.)
Above: neutron induced activity gamma doses are smaller than fission product gamma doses, so "clean" nuclear weapons - despite releasing neutrons and creating some neutron induced activity - do eliminate much of the fallout problem.
Above: fallout from 95% 'clean' bomb test Navajo, Bikini Atoll, 1956 (WT-1317 ). Surface burst in the lagoon on a barge, the yield was 4.5 Mt, and it was only 5% fission. Each square in this and the next map has side of 20 minutes of latitude/longitude (= 20 nautical miles or 37 km). The radiation levels are relatively low, 20 times smaller than a fission weapon of similar yield.
Above is the best fallout pattern (from U.S. weapon test report WT-1317 by Drs. Terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere) from the Zuni shot of 3.53 megatons, 15% fission at Bikini Atoll in 1956. It combines all available data, unlike the data in report DASA-1251, which gives unjoined data for the lagoon and the ocean. The ocean data was obtained in three ways, since fallout sinks in water. First, ships lowered probes into the water and measured the rate the fallout sank with time. Second, ships took samples of water from various depths for analysis. Third, the low level of radiation over the ocean was measured by both ships and aircraft, correcting for altitude and shielding of the geiger counter.
This particular test is unusual, as it was a surface burst on land (coral island), and was extensively studied; they even fired rockets through the different parts of the cloud at 7 and 15 minutes after burst, containing miniature radiation meters and radio transmitters, to map out the radioactivity distribution (it worked, showing toroidal distribution!). Ships were located in the fallout area at various locations to determine the fallout arrival time, build up rate (which was slow, due to the huge mushroom cloud which took time to pass overhead and diffused lengthways), decay rate after fallout arrival, mass of fallout and visibility of fallout deposit, and the chemical abundances of the various nuclides in fallout at different locations. Near the burst, large fallout particles arrive which fallout of the fireball before gaseous nuclides in decay chains have decayed into solids and condensed, so the biggest fallout particles, near ground zero, have relatively little I-131, Cs-137, and Sr-90. Gaseous precursors like xenon and krypton prevent Cs and Sr decay chains from condensing early, while iodine is volatile itself. Smaller fallout particles, while posing an overall smaller radiation hazard, have relatively more of these internal hazards (I-131 concentrates in the thyroid gland if ingested, say by drinking milk, while Cs-137 goes into muscle and Sr-90 goes into bone, assuming it is in a soluble form, which is of course not the case if the ground burst is on silicate-based soil, because the radioactivity is then trapped inside glass spheroids).
Here is a report of Dr. Hans A. Bethe, working group chairman, originally 'Top Secret - Restricted Data', to the President's Science Advisory Committee, dated 28 March 1958, defending 'clean nuclear weapons tests', courtesy of Uncle Sam:
Pages 8-9 defend clean nuclear weapons! As stated, Zuni was only 15% fission, so it was 85% clean. The dose rates given on these fallout patterns are extrapolated back to 1 hour, before the fallout had completely arrived anywhere, so are far higher than ever occurred anywhere! The true dose rates are lower due to decay during wind-carried transit. The dose rates also refer to the equivalent levels on land, which are about 535 times higher than over ocean at 2 days after burst, because the fallout landing on the ocean sinks steadily, and the water shields most of the radiation. The average decay rate of the fallout was t^-1.2 for all weapons tests. It is amazing how much secrecy there was during the cold war over thecivil defence data in WT-1317. The point is, fallout is not as bad as some people think, just like blast and cratering.
Co-60 bomb research
Wikipedia insert: Extensive residual radioactivity experiments and civil defence fallout studies were made during these tests. The Antler-1 test contained normal cobalt-59 which upon neutron capture was transmuted into radioactive cobalt-60 [1]. This provided a way to measure the neutron flux inside the weapon, although it was also of interest from the point of view of radiological warfare.
The then Science Editor of the New York Times, William L. Laurence, wrote in his 1959 book Men and Atoms (Simon & Schuster, New York, p. 195):
‘Because the cobalt bomb could be exploded from an unmanned barge in the middle of the ocean it could be made of any weight desired ... Professor Szilard has estimated that 400 one-ton deuterium-cobalt bombs would release enough radioactivity to extinguish all life on earth.’
The total amount of gamma ray energy emitted from cobalt-60 is only 2.82 MeV and this meagre energy release is spread over a statistical mean time of 1.44 times the 5.3 years half life of cobalt-60. (The number 1.44 is given approximately by 1 over the natural logarithm, i.e., the log to the base e, of 2, since this is the conversion factor between half-life and mean life time for radioactivity.) For comparison, every neutron used to fission an atom of U235, Pu239, or U238 releases 200 MeV of energy, including 30 MeV of residual radioactivity.
Hence, fission is by far the most efficient way to create radioactive contamination. The dose rate from Co-60 in the Antler-1 fallout was insignificant until most of the fission products had decayed, and only a few large pellets of Co-60 were found afterwards. The overall contribution of Co-60 to the fallout radiation was trivial compared to fission products and shorter-lived neutron induced activities in the bomb materials.
A study was done into the penetration of the fallout gamma radiation from the Antler tests by British Home Office and Atomic Weapons Research Establishment scientists A. M. Western and H. H. Collin in Maralinga. The results in their AWRE paper Operation Antler: the attenuation of residual radiation by structures, were published in Fission Fragments No. 10, June 1967, and showed the the long-term integrated fallout gamma radiation doses were reduced by a factor of 5 for a mass shielding of 312.4 kg per square metre, which is equivalent to a thickness of 15 cm of earth. A mass shielding of 781.1 kg per square metre stopped 96.6 % of the gamma rays, and this is equivalent to a protection factor of more than 29 by a shield of 38 cm of earth. America also performed studies which showed how fallout problems can be avoided.
(These data are computed from a full table which includes some nuclides not listed in WT-1317. I'll give that complete listing later. At present data tables do not seem to format properly on this blog site.)
But even for a very 'clean' bomb like Navajo, fission products dominate the fallout radiation dose. The sodium isotope Na-24 (15 hours half life) is generally considered the most important environmental form of neutron induced activity, and the abundance of Na-24 was only 0.0314 atom/fission in Navajo, 0.0109 atom/fission in Zuni, and 0.00284 atom/fission in Tewa. (These tests all involved large quantities of sea water being irradiated, Navajo and Tewa were water surface bursts and Zuni was on a small island surrounded by ocean.)
Far more important were U/Np-239, -240 and U-237 (which is created by a reaction whereby one neutron capture in U-238 results in two neutrons being emitted). The capture atoms/fission for Navajo, Zuni and Tewa were respectively 0.04, 0.31 and 0.36 for U/Np-239, 0.09, 0.005, and 0.09 for U/Np-240, and 0.09, 0.20 and 0.20 for U-237. (See also USNRDL-466.) These can emit as much radiation as fission products at the intensely critical early times of 20 hours to 2 weeks after detonation. They emit very low energy gamma rays, so the average energy of fallout gamma rays for a bomb containing a lot of U238 is low during the sheltering period, 0.2-0.6 MeV, and this allows efficient shielding to be done far more easily than implied by most civil defence calculations (which are based on gamma radiation from fission products with mean gamma energy of 0.7-1 MeV).
This was first pointed out based on British nuclear test fallout data (for Operation Totem and other tests) by George R. Stanbury in a Restricted U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch report in 1959, The contribution of U239 and Np239 to the radiation from fallout (although this paper originally contained a few calculation errors, the point that the average fallout gamma ray energy is lower than for fission products stands). You get much better shielding in a building that American calculations show, due to their incorrect use of 0.7-1 MeV mean gamma ray energy. The mean gamma ray energy at 8 days after Castle tests was only 0.34 MeV (WT-934 page 56, and WT-915 page 145; see also WT-917 pages 114-116, and also see of course WT-1317).
When tritium fuses with deuterium to produce helium-4 plus a neutron, the neutron’s mass is 20% of the total product mass, so the complete fusion of a 1 kg mixture of deuterium and tritium yields 0.2 kg of free neutrons, which – if all could be captured by cobalt-59 – would create 12 kg of Co-60. This was Professor Szilard’s basis for a ‘doomsday’ device.
However, Dr Gordon M. Dunning (b. 1910) of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, who was responsible for radiological safety during 1950s American tests, published calculations for such ‘cobalt-60 bombs’ (Health Physics, Vol. 4, 1960, p. 52). These show that a 100 megaton bomb with a thick cobalt-59 case, burst at a latitude of 45 degrees North, would produce an average Co-60 infinite-time gamma radiation exposure outdoors of 17 Roentgens in the band between 30 and 60 degrees North, around the earth. This ignores weathering of fallout, and assumes a uniform deposition.
The maximum rate at which this exposure would be received (outdoors), is 0.00025 Roentgens per hour, only 12 times greater than background radiation. Choosing a longer half-life reduces the intensity by increasing the time lapse between each particle emission; so the longer the half-life, the lower the intensity. If it is decaying rapidly, you can shelter while it decays. If the half-life is long, you can decontaminate the area before receiving a significant dose. No problem!
Creating Co-60 inside a weapon uses up precious neutrons, without releasing any prompt energy to help the nuclear fusion process, unlike U-238 fission, which releases both prompt energy and neutrons. Every neutron captured by Co-59 to produce radioactive Co-60 will lead to the release of only 2.82 MeV of radiation energy (one beta decay and two gamma rays). However, every neutron induced fission of uranium-238 releases about 200 MeV of energy, including more residual radiation energy than that released from Co-60. Therefore, fission gives a greater hazard than that from Co-6o and other neutron capture activities.
All of the escaping neutrons in an underwater or underground burst are captured in the water or soil, but only about 50% are captured by the water or soil in a surface burst. The amounts of neutron induced activity from the environment generally have a small effect, the highest activity being due to Na-24. In bombs containing U-238, the major neutron capture nuclides are Np-239 and U-237, which give off low energy gamma rays for the first few days and weeks. Shielding this radiation is easy.
The use of tungsten (W) carbide ‘pushers’ for clean nuclear weapons led to the discovery of W-185 (74 days half-life) in fallout from the 330 kt Yellowwood water surface burst at Eniwetok, 26 May 1958. It emits very low energy (0.055 MeV) gamma rays. Yellowwood produced 0.32 atoms of W-185 per fission, based on the ratio of W-185 to Zr-95 (assuming 0.048 atoms of Zr-95 per fission) in the crater sludge at 10 days after burst. (Frank G. Lowman, et al., U.S. Atomic Energy Commission report UWFL-57, 1959, p. 21.) W-185 was discovered on plankton and plant leaves, but was not taken up by the sea or land food chains. In fallout from the 104 kt, 30% fission Sedan shot at Nevada on 6 July 1962, W-187 (24 hours half-life) gave 55% of the gamma dose rate at 24 hours after burst, compared with 2% from Na-24 due to neutron capture in soil.
The ocean food-chain concentrates the neutron-capture nuclides iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn) to the extent that Fe-55 and Zn-65 constituted the only significant radioactivity dangers in clams, fish and birds which ate the fish after nuclear tests at Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls, during the 1950s. However, these nuclides are not concentrated in land vegetation, where the fission products cesium (which is similar to potassium) and strontium (which is similar to calcium) are of major importance. This is caused by the difference between the chemical composition of sea water and land. (Where necessary chemical elements are abundant, uptake of the chemically similar radioactive nuclide is greatly reduced by dilution.)
Fish caught at Eniwetok Atoll, a month after the 1.69 Mt Nectar shot in 1954, had undetectably low levels of fission products, but high levels of Fe-55 (95% of activity), Zn-65 (3.1%), and cobalt isotopes. In terns (sea birds) at Bikini Atoll, Zn-65 contributed almost all of the radioactivity after both the 1954 and 1956 tests. Fe-55 gave off 73.5% of the radioactivity of a clam kidney collected in 1956 at Eniwetok, 74 days after the 1.85 Mt Apache shot; cobalt-57, -58, and –60 contributed 9.6, 9.2, and 1.8%, while all of the fission products only contributed 3.5%.
Fish collected at Bikini Atoll two months after the 1956 Redwing series which included Zuni,Navajo and Tewa, had undetectably low levels of fission products, but Zn-65 contributed 35-58% of the activity, Fe-55 contributed 15-56%, and cobalt gave the remainder. (Frank G. Lowman, et al., U.S. Atomic Energy Commission report UWFL-51, 1957.)
In 1958, W.J. Heiman of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory released data on the sodium-24 activity induced in sea water after an underwater nuclear explosion in which 50 % of the gamma radiation at 4 days after burst is due to Np-239. He found that Na-24 contributed a maximum of 7.11 % of the gamma radiation, at about 24 hours after burst (Journal of Colloid Science, Vol. 13, 1958, pp. 329-36).
Hence even in a water burst, Np-239 radiation is far more important than Na-24.
Perhaps the most important modification in the April 1962 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was the disclosure that the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons contains substantial amounts of radioactive nuclides from neutron capture in U-238. This had been pointed out by scientist George Stanbury (who worked with data from nuclear tests, and had attended British nuclear tests to study the effects) of the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch in report A12/SA/RM 75, The Contribution of U239 and Np239 to the Radiation from Fallout, November 1959, Confidential (declassified only in June 1988). Both Mr Stanbury and The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1962 found 40% of the gamma radiation dose rate from fallout is the typical peak contribution due to Neptunium-239 and other capture nuclides (e.g., U-237, which is formed by an important reaction whereby 1 neutron capture in U-238 is followed by 2 neutrons being released), which all emit very low energy gamma radiation, and are important between a few hours and a few weeks after burst, i.e., in the critical period for fallout sheltering.
Because of the low energy of the gamma rays from such neutron-capture elements, which are present in large quantities in both Trinity-type fission bombs (with U-238 tampers) and thermonuclear bombs like Mike and Bravo, the fallout is much easier to protect against than pure fission products (average gamma energy 0.7 MeV). However, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, while admitting that up to 40% of the gamma radiation is from such nuclides, did not point out the effect on the gamma energy and radiation shielding issue, unlike Stanbury’s Confidential civil defence report. This discovery greatly stimulated the “Protect and Survive” civil defence advice given out in Britain for many years, although it was kept secret because the exact abundances of these bomb nuclides in fallout were dependent on the precise bomb designs, which were Top Secret for decades.
NEUTRON CAPTURE-INDUCED NUCLIDES IN FALLOUT
Scroll down for the table. There is an error with this blog system changing html tables by prefixing them with large unwanted empty spaces. I'll fix this issue when I have time.
Nuclides formed by neutron capture in the thermonuclear bomb, 189 metric tons steel barge (NAVAJO AND TEWA TESTS), and the surrounding sea water
Measured Bikini Atoll test data for thermonuclear weapon designs of various fission yields, and two types of fusion charge ‘pusher’*
Nuclide
Half-life
Exposure rate at 1 hour after detonation, (R/hr)/(kt/mi2) per capture atom/fission. 3 ft height, ideal theory, Triffet 61.
Redwing-Navajo
4.50 Mt, 5% fission
Lead (Pb) pusher
Bomb mass = 6.80 metric tons
Redwing-Zuni
3.53 Mt, 15% fission
Lead (Pb) pusher
Bomb mass = 5.51 metric tons
Redwing-Tewa
5.01 Mt, 87% fission
Uranium-238 pusher
Bomb mass = 7.14 metric tons
Abundance of neutron induced nuclides in total fallout, atoms per fission:
Na-24
15.0 hours
1284.7
0.0314
0.0109
0.00284
Cr-51
27.7 days
0.280
0.0120
0.00173
0.000297
Mn-54
312 days
0.614
0.10
0.011
0.00053
Mn-56
2.58 hours
2668
0.094
0.010
0.00053
Fe-55
2.73 years
0.00416
14.9
6.05
0.573
Fe-59
44.5 days
6.19
0.0033
0.00041
0.000167
Co-57
271 days
0.113
0.00224
0.0031
0.000182
Co-58
70.9 days
3.11
0.00193
0.0036
0.000289
Co-60
5.27 years
0.299
0.0087
0.00264
0.00081
Cu-64
12.7 hours
89.5
0.0278
0.0090
0.00228
Zn-65
244 days
0.531
0.00435
0.00720
0.0000489
Sb-122**
2.71 days
38.4
0
0.219
0
Sb-124**
60.2 days
6.92
0
0.073
0
Ta-180
8.15 hours
35.9
0.038
0.0411
0.01
Ta-182
115 days
2.67
0.038
0.0194
0.01
Pb-203
2.17 days
26.0
0.0993
0.050
0.0000178
U-237
6.75 days
6.50
0.09
0.20
0.20
U-239
23.5 minutes
173
0.04
U-239 ® Np ® Pu
0.31
U-239 ® Np ® Pu
0.36
U-239 ® Np ® Pu
Np-239
2.35 days
14.9***
U-240
14.1 hours
0 (no gamma rays)
0.09
U-240 ® Np ® Pu
0.005
U-240 ® Np ® Pu
0.09
U-240 ® Np ® Pu
Np-240
7.22 minutes
150
Total amount of neutron induced activity (capture atoms per fission):
* Compiled from the data in: Dr Terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere, Operation Redwing, Project 2.63, Characterization of Fallout, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, 1961, originally Secret – Restricted Data (now unclassified), weapon test report WT-1317, Table B.22 and Dr Carl F. Miller, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report USNRDL-466, 1961, Table 11 on page 41, originally Secret – Restricted Data (now unclassified). The ‘pusher’ absorbs initial x-ray energy and implodes, compressing the fusion charge. Data for Fe-55 is based on the ratios of Fe-55 to Fe-59 reported by Frank G. Lowman, et al., U.S. Atomic Energy Commission report UWFL-51 (1957), and H.G. Hicks, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report UCRL-53505 (1984), assuming that the neutron capture ratios in iron were similar for shots Apache and Tewa. Data for Zn-65 is based on the ratios of Zn-65 to Mn-54 reported by F.D. Jennings, Operation Redwing, Project 2.62a, Fallout Studies by Oceanographic Methods, report WT-1316, Secret – Restricted Data, 1961, pages 115 and 120.
** The Zuni device contained antimony (Sb), which boils at 1750 C and was fractionated in the fallout. This is the only fractionated neutron capture nuclide. The data shown are for unfractionated cloud samples: for the close-in fallout at Bikini Lagoon the abundances for Sb-122 and Sb-124 are 8.7 times smaller.
***Note that this is not the maximum exposure rate from Np-239 (at 1 hour after detonation it is still increasing because it is the decay product of U-239).
How clean nuclear weapons led Dr Samuel T. Choen to invent the neutron bomb circa 1958:
Samuel Cohen From Wikipedia
Samuel T. Cohen is a physicist who is known for inventing the W70 warhead, the "enhanced neutron weapon" or neutron bomb, the blueprints of which were allegedly stolen by the Chinese [1]. He got his physics PhD from UCLA. In 1944 he worked on the Manhattan project with calculating how neutrons behaved in Fat Man. At RAND Corporation in 1950, his calculations of the intensity of radiation from fallout were included as a special appendix in Samuel Glasstone's book The Effects of Atomic Weapons. In the Vietnam War, Cohen argued that using small neutron bombs would end the war quickly and save many American lives, but politicians were not amenable to his ideas. He was a member of the Los Alamos Tactical Nuclear Weapons Panel in the early 1970s. President Carter delayed the neutron bomb in 1978 [2], but during Reagan's presidency, Cohen claims to have convinced Reagan to make 700 neutron bombs, 350 shells to go into the 8 inch (200-millimetre) howitzer and 350 W70 warheads for the Lance missile [3]. Cohen's backing of investigations into these controversial ideas won him some media attention after many years of being ignored [4]. In 1992 he was featured on the award-winning BBC TV series Pandora's Box episode, To the Brink of Eternity, discussing his battles with officialdom and colleagues at the RAND Corporation.
'Clean' nuclear tests and Cohen's revolutionary invention In 1956, President Eisenhower announced the testing of a 95% 'clean' (2-stage) fusion weapon, later identified to have been the 11 July Navajo test at Bikini Atoll during Operation Redwing. This weapon had a 4.5 megatons yield. Previous 'dirty' weapons had fission proportions of 50-77%, due to the use of uranium-238 as a 'pusher' around the lithium deuteride (secondary) stage. (The fusion neutrons have energies of up to 14.1 MeV, well exceeding the 1.1 MeV 'fission threshold' for U-238.) The 1956 'clean' tests used a lead pusher, while in 1958 a tungsten carbide pusher was employed. Hans A. Bethe supported clean nuclear weapons in 1958 as Chairman of a Presidential science advisory group on nuclear testing [5]:
"... certain hard targets require ground bursts, such as airfield runways if it is desired to make a crater, railroad yards if severe destruction of tracks is to be accomplished... The use of clean weapons in strategic situations may be indicated in order to protect the local population." (Dr Hans Bethe, 27 March 1958 Top Secret - Restricted Data Report to the NSC Ad Hoc Working Group on the Technical Feasibility of a Cessation of Nuclear Testing (Bethe was the Working Group Chairman, page 9).
In consequence of Bethe's recommendations, on 12 July 1958, the Hardtack-Poplar shot on a barge in the lagoon yielded 9.3 megatons, of which only 4.8% was fission. It was 95.2% clean. It was the clean Mk-41C warhead.
Cohen in 1958 investigated a low-yield 'clean' nuclear weapon and discovered that the 'clean' bomb case thickness scales as the cube-root of yield. So a larger percentage of neutrons escapes from a small detonation, due to the thinner case required to reflect back X-rays during the secondard stage (fusion) ignition. For example, a 1-kiloton bomb would need to have a case only 1/10th the thickness of that for 1-megaton [6].
This means that although most of the neutrons are absorbed by the outer casing in a 1-megaton bomb, in a 1-kiloton bomb they would mostly escape. A neutron bomb is only feasible if the yield is sufficiently high that efficient fusion stage ignition is possible, and if the yield is low enough that the case thickness will not absorb too many neutrons. This means that neutron bombs have a yield range of 1-10 kilotons, with fission proportion varying from 50% at 1-kiloton to 25% at 10-kilotons (all of which comes from the primary stage). The neutron output per kiloton is then approximately 10-15 times greater than for a pure fission implosion weapon or a standard (high yield) strategic warhead like a W87 or W88 [7].
Official U.S. Department of Defense manual on the neutron bomb Cohen's neutron bomb is not mentioned in the unclassified manual by Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, but is included as an 'enhanced neutron weapon' in chapter 5 of the declassified (formerly secret) manual edited by Philip J. Dolan, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense, effects manual DNA-EM-1, updated 1981 (U.S. Freedom of Information Act).
Provided that the weapon was not used in a thunderstorm, no fallout effects would occur from the use of a neutron bomb according to that manual, as the combination of 500 m burst altitude and low yield prevents fallout in addition to significant thermal and blast effects. The reduction in damage outside the target area is a major advantage of such a weapon to deter massed tank invasions. An aggressor would thus be forced to disperse tanks, which would make them easier to destroy by simple hand-held anti-tank missile launchers.
Cohen stated that he "worked in France on low-yield, highly discriminate tactical nuclear weapons in 1979-1980".
"In 1979, Pope John Paul II conferred on one of the authors (Sam Cohen) a peace medal for his invention, the neutron bomb. This was a small nuclear weapon designed to do its work, killing enemy military forces, without destroying a country’s infrastructure." (Cohen, March 11, 2003)
The Pope, John Paul II, was from Poland and knew that Warsaw Pact forces had a massive tank superiority (though NATO maintained a technical superiority) in Europe and that a deterrent which was designed to minimise civilian casualties was a step away from indiscriminate warfare. Though the neutron bomb's killing by radiation is no different than chemical warfare.
The speed of modern warfare meant that the civilian population would be unlikely to withdraw from combat zones and would suffer a large number of deaths from even low yield nuclear weapons. The very deployment of the neutron bomb threatened an escalation to full scale nuclear retaliation, thus canceling out the supposed benefit of the neutron bomb. Advances in precision anti-tank weapons ultimately made the neutron bomb redundant.
In 1981, the Christian Science Monitor reported that there "are 19,500 tanks in the Soviet-controlled forces of the Warsaw Pact aimed at Western Europe. Of these, 12,500 are Soviet tanks in Soviet units. NATO has 7,000 tanks on its side facing the 19,500." (Joseph C. Harsch, "Neutron Bomb: Why It Worries The Russians," Christian Science Monitor, August 14, 1981, p. 1.) [8]
[edit] References Hans A. Bethe, Working Group Chairman, originally Top Secret - Restricted Data Report of the the President's Science Advisory Committee, 28 March 1958, defending on pages 8-9 'clean nuclear weapons tests', online Terry Triffet and Philip LaRiviere, Characterization of Fallout, Operation Redwing fallout studies, directly comparing contamination from two 'dirty' tests (Tewa and Flathead) to two 'clean' tests (Navajo and Zuni), online Charles Platt, "Profits of Fear", August 16, 2005 online; Sam Cohen and Joseph D. Douglass, Jr, "The Nuclear Threat That Doesn't Exist – or Does It?", March 11, 2003, online; Red mercury, fusion-only neutron bombs, Russia, Iraq, etc ---- "North Korea's Nuclear Initiative", April 28 2004 online ---- "Development of New Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons", March 9, 2003, online ---- "The Rogue Nuclear Threat", April 26, 2002, online Joe Douglass, The Conflict Over Tactical Nuclear Weapons Policy in Europe (1968) William R. Van Cleave, S. T. Cohen, Nuclear Weapons, Policies, and the Test Ban Issue, 1987, ISBN 0275923126 Samuel T. Cohen, We Can Prevent World War III, 1985, 2001, ISBN 0915463105 ---- The Truth About the Neutron Bomb: The Inventor of the Bomb Speaks Out, William Morrow & Co., 1983, ISBN 0688016464 ---- Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2000), ISBN 0738822302, memoir Review of Shame published on Amazon: [9]
The only paper by Hugh Everett I've ever read, back at the British Library in 1994, was "The Distribution and Effects of Fallout in Large Nuclear Weapon Campaigns", Operations Research, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1959, pp. 226-248, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-364X(195903%2F04)7%3A2%3C226%3ATDAEOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H It was complete trash even in 1959, I'm afraid to say.
He used the RAND Corporation fallout model for a start, which is based on nuclear tests at Bikini and Eniwetok where a large amount of sea water was incorporated into the fireball (the fireball in megaton surface burst events was always far large in diameter than the tiny test island or the barge in the lagoon). This led to a second hotspot on average 50-75 miles downwind (there was also one around ground zero) which the RAND model reproduced, but which was due to the salt water precipitating as salt crystals from the mushroom cloud. As the hydroscopic crystals fell through warm humid air layers, they gained weight from absorbing moisture, and became salt slurry particles which finally landed about 2-3 hours downwind in an irregular shaped hotspot. For a couple of examples of such fallout patterns at Bikini Atoll, see my post:
For another example, see http://www.answers.com/topic/bravo-rand-corp-jpg
So I think Hugh Everett's fallout statistics are based on an implicit assumption that in a nuclear war the targets will be fought over pacific atolls in warm, humid locations.
His paper doesn't discuss any of this essential background, and is typical of the b******* calculations that abound on nuclear weapons effects.
The key declassified report by Dr Carl F. Miller is USNRDL-466, which since this post was written (which links to a copy of that report on a U.S. government run server), has been removed from the U.S. government document collection or the link has become corrupted. Hence the link in this post to USNRDL-466 does not work any longer.
An alternative server also hosts that crucial report by Dr Miller here:
Table 11 (on page 41 of the original document) contains all of the originally Secret - Restricted Data on neutron induced activities U-239/Np-239, U-237, and Np-240 in the fallout from 13 different key Jangle, Castle, Redwing and Plumbbob fallout producing tests.
Notice that i(1) on the top line of the table data is the reference 1 hour dose rate assuming 1 atom/fission, so that allows you to work out the atoms/fission ratios from the 1 hour dose rates given in that table.
E.g., the Sugar and Uncle shots of Jangle in 1951 both produced 1-hour reference dose rates of 0.106 units due to U-239, which itself would produce 0.1799 units if there was 1 atom/fission of U-239 produced.
Hence, Sugar and Uncle both produced 0.106/0.1799 = 0.59 atoms/fission of U-239 and Np-239 (ignore the data given in the table for Np-239 because that is for the actual Np-239 atoms per fission created by 1 hour, not the total Np-239; since Np-239 is created from the decay of U-239, the total amount of Mp-239 produced is identical to the amount of U-239 produced, but because U-239 has a half life of 23.5 minutes, only 83% of the Np-239 has actually been formed within 1 hour of detonation).
As the table shows, only thermonuclear weapons produce significant quantities of U-237.
It is also worthy of note that the fission bomb tests Diablo and Shasta of Plumbbob in 1957 both produced only 0.10 atom/fission of U-239/Np-239, which is only about one-sixth of the production in the 1951 Sugar and Uncle tests.
The reason is that the 1951 tests Sugar and Uncle were old-fashioned implosion bombs with thick U-238 neutron "reflectors" that (instead of simply reflecting neutrons back) captured a large proportion of neutrons emitted from the core, whereas the 1957 tests Diablo and Shasta did not employ U-238 as a thick neutron reflector. The smaller amounts of U-238 contained in Diablo and Shasta was present in the highly-enriched uranium that was used in the composite uranium-plutonium cores that were in use at that time.
Notice also that Castle-Bravo produced 0.56 atoms/fission of U-239/Np-239, 0.10 atoms/fission of U-237, and 0.14 atoms/fission of Np-240, according to Dr Miller's secret data.
Japanese investigators tried to measure the capture/fission ratios from the Castle-Bravo fallout that landed on the "Lucky Dragon No. 5" which was 100 miles downwind of the detonation (it was just north-west of Rongelap when fallout arrived).
To avoid secrecy, Dr Miller quoted the (unclassified) Japanese findings in his unclassified 1963 "Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures" SRI report and also in his 1964 SRI report "Biological and Radiological Effects of Fallout from Nuclear Explosions": the data from the Japanese physicists suggest a figure of 0.30 atoms/fission for U-239/Np-239 and 0.15 atoms/fission for U-237.
These figures are wrong: the first is too low and the second is too high. You can't chemically separate small quantities of these nuclides because they are quite similar chemically, so you can't distinguish the beta particles, only the gamma ray energies using a crystal and scintillation counter. The problem of accurate determination comes down to the quality of the equipment and the quality of the samples of the fallout. The fallout that had been subjected to spray and wind on the decks of the "Lucky Dragon No. 5" for two weeks on the voyage back to Japan was not idea, and nor was the calibration of the instruments which the Japanese physicists used.
The American data is far more reliable. In addition, the Japanese physicists did not know about fission product fractionation (see table 8 on page 35 of the declassified report by Dr Miller for fully corrected detailed fractionation data downwind from the Redwing 1956 tests), which reduced the accuracy of their determination of capture atoms/fission. This is because, in order to determine the number of say U-239 atoms/fission, you need to determine not only the number of U-239 atoms in your sample, but also the number of fissions. If you try to determine the number of fissions by measuring the number of Sr-90 atoms present and using the production ratio of Sr-90 on standard "M" shaped fission fragment abundance graphs, you will underestimate the number of fissions, because Sr-90 is depleted from local fallout due to the fireball temperature. The correct way to work out the amount of fission in a sample is to determine the number of atoms of something that is not fractionated, such as Nb-95 (the Americans originally in the 1950s used Mo-99 as the reference nuclide, switching to Nb-95 in the 1960s because it is more abundant in fallout, and is thus easier to measure with greater accuracy).
One other measurement of interest for the 1956 Redwing series is in the report by M. Morgenthau, H.E. Shaw, L.M. Hardin, R.C. Tomkins, and P.W. Krey, Preliminary Report, Operation Redwing, Project 2.65, Land Fallout Studies, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Sandia Base, Albuquerque, ITR-1319, January 1957: the Redwing-Lacrosse 40 kt test produced 0.2 atom/fission of Np-239.
In his 1959 report The Decontamination of Surfaces Contaminated with Fallout from Nuclear Detonations at Sea, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense laboratory, report USNRDL-TR-329, Dr Miller makes it clear that although Np-239 and U-237 can contrubute 50% of the gamma dose rate some days after a thermonuclear explosion, neutron induced activity from Na-24 in sea water is trivial by comparison.
Dr terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere support this with detailed tables of neutron induced activity from a variety of different thermonuclear weapons (clean and dirty fission yields) tested during Operation Redwing in 1956, in their report Characterization of Fallout, weapon test report WT-1317 (1961):
Table 11 (on page 41 of the Dr Miller's report USNRDL-466) allows the following product atom/fission ratios to be deduced:
J-Sugar: 0.59 atom/fission of U239
J-Uncle: 0.59 atom/fission of U239
C-Bravo: 0.56 atom/fission of U239, 0.10 atom/fission of U237, 0.14 atom/fission of U240
C-Romeo: 0.66 atom/fission of U239, 0.10 atom/fission of U237, 0.23 atom/fission of U240
C-Koon: 0.72 atom/fission of U239, 0.10 atom/fission of U237
C-Union: 0.44 atom/fission of U239, 0.20 atom/fission of U237, 0.07 atom/fission of U240
R-Zuni: 0.31 atom/fission of U239, 0.20 atom/fission of U237, 0.005 atom/fission of U240
R-Tewa: 0.36 atom/fission of U239, 0.20 atom/fission of U237, 0.09 atom/fission of U240
P-Diablo: 0.10 atom/fission of U239
P-Shasta: 0.10 atom/fission of U239
P-Coulomb C: 0.03 atom/fission of U239
The reason why Castle shot Union produced twice the ratio of U-237 atoms per fission that Bravo produced was that Union used a thermonuclear fuel consisting of lithium deuteride enriched to 95% lithium-6 and only 5% lithium-7, whereas Bravo used unenriched lithium deuteride, which contains only 7.42% lithium-6 and 92.58% lithium-7. Since lithium-6 is more readily fissioned by neutrons to produce tritium than lithium-7 is, the enriched lithium-6 in the Union bomb resulted in a higher ratio of tritium fusion reactions to deuterium fusion reactions than Bravo did. (Bravo did involve some tritium fusion, but the relative abundance of tritium in the Bravo bomb was somewhat lower than that in the Union bomb.) Consequently, Union produced more high-energy tritium fusion neutrons than Bravo did. Because U237 is only created in large quantities by high-energy neutrons, it is a sensitive indicator of the relative amount of energy derived from tritium fusion in a thermonuclear weapon. Deuterium fusion produces neutrons with lower energy than those produced in tritium fusion reactions. Therefore, the higher the amount ratio of tritium to deuterium produced in the bomb, the higher the production of U237.
Two deuterium atoms can fuse into helium-3, releasing a 2.4 MeV neutron. When tritium and deuterium fuse into helium-4, however, a 14.1 MeV neutron is emitted. (By conservation of momentum, the neutron takes most of the energy in fusion reactions. D + D -> He-3 + n results in the release of 3.2 MeV of energy, of which 75% is the kinetic energy of the neutron. T + D -> He-4 + n results in the release of 17.6 MeV of energy, of which 80% is the kinetic energy of the neutron.)
Quite a lot of other piecemeal data for other Redwing tests has also been declassified and released in other formerly secret reports.
WT-1317 page 65, table 3.14 states that Redwing-Flathead had a Np-239 product/fission ratio of 0.41 atom/fission.
As already stated in the previous comment, ITR-1319, implies that the Redwing-Lacrosse test produced 0.2 atom/fission of Np-239.
WT-1315 page 29, table 4.1 gives the relative activities from fission products and U239 at two times after burst for Redwing tests Cherokee, Zuni and Navajo. Because we already know that the absolute value of the ratio for Zuni is 0.31 atom/fission of U239 (from Dr Miller's report USNRDL-466, page 41, table 11), we can use WT-1315 page 29 table 4.1 to obtain the Np239 product/fission ratios from Cherokee and Navajo. As a result, we find that Cherokee produced 0.36 atoms/fission of Np239, while Navajo produced about 0.085 atom/fission of Np239.
(The Np-239 production shown for Navajo in the table of the main body of this blog post is incorrect.)
Regarding the clean neutron bomb controversy, the 1988 book by the late Chuck Hansen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons (Orion Books), gives some relevant information on pages 175-201:
"W-79 [this is the nuclear warhead of a rocket-propelled 8-inch diameter, 43-inch long, 215 pounds mass, artillery shell; this artillery shell includes a rocket motor to double the usual 8-inch shell's range to 18 miles, and has a target sensor and programmable height of burst as well as Category D PAL built into it to prevent unauthorised use]
"... Development engineering of the W-79 started at Livermore in January 1975. By 1976, the Army was developing a warhead for an eight-inch atomic artillery shell that would be the first U.S. weapon specially designed to reduce collateral damage from blast and radioactivity.
[Because 80% of the energy in tritium-deuterium fusion is released as 14.1 MeV (highly penetrating) neutrons, the blast and thermal output of the bomb is reduced and will be negligible for a 1kt neutron bomb burst at say 500 metres over the target, where only neutron radiation will be a hazard.]
"In January 1977, President Gerald Ford approved a Stockpile Memorandum that featured the W-79 as an 'enhanced radiation' weapon (the so-called 'neutron bomb which is really not much more than a boosted fission device). Production engineering began in March; this phase was suspended (for political reasons) at the end of September and not resumed until the beginning of November 1978.
[Actually, as Cohen has pointed out, the mechanism of the neutron bomb is that a standard Teller-Ulam design when reduced to very low yields automatically has a high neutron output. The case thickness, needed to reflect X-rays from the fission primary to the physically separate fusion charge within the weapon, is proportional to the cube-root of the total required yield of the weapon. So the case thickness required for a Teller-Ulam device of 1 kt is only 10% of that required for a total yield of 1 Mt. It is this massive, order-of-magnitude reduction of case thickness for a low-yield Teller-Ulam bomb, which makes the neutron bomb effect occur: the thin casing of a 1 kt Teller-Ulam allows over 90% of the neutrons to escape without being scattered and degraded to low energy, whereas the thick casing needed for a 1 Mt Teller-Ulam bomb results in something like 90% of the neutrons being captured or scattered and degraded to low energy.]
"The first production unit appeared in July 1981. Quantity production started in September and continued until August 1986 after 550 (including 325 'enhanced radiation' and 225 standard) W-79s were produced."
Hansen goes on to state that the W-79-1 model of the W-79 was the neutron bomb, which had a selectable yield of up to 2 kt: "the W-79-1 has three yields between a few hundred tons up to about two kilotons. Fission-fusion percentages range from 50:50 at the lower yield up to 25:75 at the higher yield."
The W-79-1 warhead is extremely small and the primary employs cylindrical implosion of Pu-239, instead of spherical implosion. I.e., the primary contains a core cylinder of Pu-239 which is surrounded by a beryllium neutron reflector and then a cylindrical shell of chemical high explosive.
This use of cylindrical implosion (not spherical implosion) for igniting fusion reactions was an old principle which was first tested in the Greenhouse-George nuclear test of 9 May 1951.
The reason of using a cylindrical primary is that the two ends of the fissioning plutonium rod in the centre are exposed and by placing a fusion charge nearby the exposed end, it is far easier to ignite fusion than in the case of a spherical implosion bomb where chemical high explosive has to first absorb then reradiate X-rays (which is a less efficient process because some energy is absorbed and used to create a shock wave instead of being passed on as X-rays, and the geometry - i.e. the bigger distance between the fusion charge and the fissioning material in the primary reduces the flux of radiation that hits the fusion charge).
Chuck Hansen's description claims that the fusion charge is a removable 'tritium reservoir' that is placed into a hollow area within the plutonium clinder of the fission primary, as in a boosted weapon. Actually, this is incorrect. In a cylindrical implosion weapon, unlike a spherical implosion weapon, fusion materials can be placed near the fissile material on the end of the plutonium cylinder, without taking up room within the cylinder itself: X-rays emitted by the end of the fissioning plutonium cylinder can then be used as in the Teller-Ulam configuration to do the necessary compression of the physically separated fusion fuel, which is a more efficient situation than 'boosting'.
Cylindrical implosion of the primary is required in a 2 kt neutron bomb artillery shell in order (1) to make the bomb fit into an artillery shell, and (2) to make the Teller-Ulam fusion system work efficiently at such low yields by eliminating the usual high explosive layer that is between the fissioning primary and the fusion charge if spherical implosion is used.
It is correct, however, that for efficient operation a very low yield neutron bomb of only 1 kt can utilise a fusion charge including a capsule of tritium gas (instead of just solid lithium-6 deuteride as is used in large thermonuclear weapons). This is not "boosting" as Chuck Hansen claimed, because the tritium is physically separated from the fission primary. The neutron bomb employs the Teller-Ulam concept. (It is not simply a boosted weapon, or the neutrons would be unable to escape easily.)
The W-66 warhead is another American neutron bomb, but the W-66 was for the "Sprint" ABM missile warhead: the neutrons would destroy incoming enemy ICBM warheads within the atmosphere (hence the need for low yield and no collateral damage, and the choice of using clean neutron bombs was ideal).
Theoretical research for the W-66 began with Samuel Cohen's work on the neutron bomb in 1958, but production engineering for the W-66 neutron bomb for the Sprint ABM warhead only began in January 1972, and the first W-66 warheads were manufactured in June 1974. By March 1975, 70 W-66 warheads had been produced.
The W-70 Mod 3 is another example of a neutron bomb. It was the warhead for the U.S. Army "Lance" missile.
Production engineering on the W-70 began in December 1970 and manufacture began in June 1973. By July 1977, 900 W-70s had been produced; these were ordinary thermonuclear warheads with selectable yields of up to 100 kt.
The development of the W-70 Mod 3, the neutron bomb version, began in April 1976 but was suspended by President Carter at the end of September 1977 for political reasons. Production engineering was resumed on 1 November 1978 and manufacture began in May 1981. From August 1981 to February 1983, 380 neutron bomb W-70 Mod 3 were built:
"Yield of the W-70 Mod 3 is selectable as one of two values: one slightly less than a kiloton and the other slightly in excess of a kiloton. Both yields are about 60% fusion and 40% fission." (Page 201 of Chuck Hansen's U.S. Nuclear Weapons, orion Books, 1988.)
The W-70 neutron bomb warhead is 465 pounds in mass, 97 inches long and 22 inches in diameter.
Also relevant (discusses natural nuclear "pollution" hysteria such as censorship from the popular media of all reports on the safe and complete containment of nuclear waste from the 15 Oklo nuclear reactors in the massive uranium ore seams of Gabon, Africa within sedimentary rock for the past 1,700 million years):
Dr Terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere, Operation Redwing, Project 2.63, Characterization of Fallout, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, 1961, Secret – Restricted Data, weapon test report WT-1317, page 120:
"The induced products contributed 63 percent of the total dose rate in the Bikini Lagoon area 110 hours after Shot Zuni; and 65 percent of the dose rate from Shot Navajo products at an age of 301 days was due to induced products, mainly Mn-54 and Ta-182."
There is a page about Professor Triffet (who taught engineering at the University of Arizona after producing the 1961 weapon test report WT-1317, and died in 2003 from cancer at age 80), here.
Some information on the measured capture atoms/fissions ratios for cobalt isotopes in the clean (5% fission) 4.5 Mt Rewing-Navajo nuclear test have been published in the report:
P. O. Strom, J. L. Mackin, D. MacDonald, and P.E. Zigman, "LONG-LIVED COBALT ISOTOPES OBSERVED IN FALLOUT FROM THE NAVAJO DETONATION OF OPERATION REDWING", U.S. Naval Radiological Defense laboratory, technical report USNRDL-TR-215, 26 March 1958, originally classified Secret - Restricted Data.
With regard to the comment immediately above, it is interesting to note that the authors also wrote an unclassified report on the topic, published in the journal "Science" in 1958 (albeit without the specific nuclear test data references of the classified version of the report):
Peter O. Strom, James L. Mackin, Douglas MacDonald, and Paul E. Zigman, et al., "Long-lived cobalt isotopes observed in fallout", Science, vol. 128, August 22, issue number 3321, 1958, pp. 417-9.
This report notes that Co-60 is the most important gamma emitter in Redwing test fallout for the period of from 1-10 years after nuclear detonation. It also notes that the Co-60 originated from neutron capture in impurities in the weapon (i.e., the steel casing of the bomb and the steel barge that supported the bomb), because the amount of cobalt in the sea water around the detonation was far to small to account for the observed neutron-induced Co-60 activity.
Note that prior to the publication of Strom's report by Science in 1958, Science had earlier published a report by Shipman and others about the discovery of neutron-induced manganese-54 in fallout:
William H. Shipman, Philip Simone, and Herbert V. Weiss, "Detection of manganese-54 in radioactive fallout", Science, vol. 126, November 8, 1957, issue number 3280, pp. 971-2.
In addition, Drs. Ralph F. Palumbo and Frank G. Lowman reported on iron-55 (Fe-55) in fallout at Kabelle Island in Rongelap Atoll, in their report "The Occurrence of Antimony 125, Europium 155, Iron 55, and Other Radionuclides in Rongelap Atoll Soil", report UWFL-56, April 1958.
The neutron-induced iron-55, manganese-54 and cobalt-60 from neutron capture in the steel casing and delivery system around the bomb are major contributors - particularly at times around a year after detonation - to the fallout gamma dose rate in fractionated local fallout (depleted of Cs-137 due to its gaseous precursor in the hot fireball which prevents much of it condensing on the fast-falling large fallout particles which leave the fireball before it has cooled and condensed).
Accession Number : AD0410522 Title : FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL COUNTERMEASURES, VOLUME 1 Corporate Author : STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA Personal Author(s) : Miller, Carl F. Handle / proxy Url : http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD410522 Report Date : JAN 1963 Pagination or Media Count : 402
Abstract : The major purpose of this report is to outline and discuss these physical processes and the important parameters on which they depend. The data, data analyses, data correlation schemes, and discussions presented here are organized to emphasize size basic principles so that an appropriate methodology can be applied in evaluating the radiological consequences of nuclear war. An explosion of any kind, detonated near the surface of the earth, causes material to be thrown up or drawn into a chimney of hot rising gases and raised aloft. In a nuclear explosion, two important processes occur: (1) radioactive elements, which are produced and vaporized in the process, condense into or on this material; and (2) a large amount of non-radioactive material, rises thousands of feet into the air before the small particles begin to fall back. This permits the winds to scatter them over large areas of the earth's surface. Thus, when the particles reach the surface of the earth they are far from their place of origin and contain, within or on their surface, radioactive elements. Whether they are solid particles produced from soil minerals, or liquid (salt- containing) particles produced from sea water, they are called fallout. The composition of fallout can be described in terms of two or three components. One is the inactive carrier; this consists of the environmental material at the location of the detonation and is the major component in a near-surface detonation. The second component includes all the radioactive elements in the fallout.
I've just found more information on neutron capture to fission ratios for U-237, Np-239 etc.
At the U.K. National Archives, category DEFE16, there is are reports containing declassified data for the Np-239 production by 1957 U.K. tests ANTLER (3 shots at Maralinga), all very low atoms/fission due to the absence of a thick U-238 tamper (presumably those shots used beryllium neutron reflectors instead of U-238). There was some variation in the exact figures due to the different bomb designs: ANTLER used U-235, Pu-235 and composite core. The U-235 core bomb was only of course enriched to say 93.5% U-235 so it contained 6.5% U-238 or so, which produced more U-237 and U/Np-239 than the pure plutonium core device. The design of each ANTLER device bomb core is unclassified and was published in 1987 in the book by official Atomic Weapons Establishment historial Laura Arnold, in her book "A Very Special Relationship", H.M. Stationery Office.
There is also data in a report on U-237 by Hanna of AWRE in the DEFE16 files at the U.K. National Archives for the two 1953 U.K. TOTEM tests at Emu Field, Australia, giving the U-237 production, which was low because they were pure fission shots. I don't have my notes handy but from memory I think the U-237 production was only 1/3,000 atom per fission. The higher production in thermonuclear weapons occurs due to the higher neutron energy you get from fusion neutrons (up to and including 14.7 MeV), which well exceeds the neutron threshold energy needed for the reaction:
U-238 + neutron -> U-237 + 2 neutrons.
Another source of data on U/Np-239 production in U.K. nuclear test fallout in atoms/fission is available in the U.K. National Archines in George R. Stanbury's Home Office civil defence report:
British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch in report A12/SA/RM 75, The Contribution of U239 and Np239 to the Radiation from Fallout, November 1959, Confidential (declassified only in June 1988).This gives a collection of early U.K. test data. One error that I noticed in Stanbury's calculations is that he wrongly predicts the U-239 contribution at early times. Stanbury correctly uses the exponential decay law for a single nuclide in combination with the [time]^{-1.2} decay law of fallout composed of 200 nuclides, to deduce that a neutron induced activity contributes a maximum % to the fallout decay rate at a time equal to 1.2/(ln 2) = 1.2/0.693 = 1.73 times its half life. E.g., for U-239 with 23.5 minutes half life, it contributes a maximum % to fallout at 23.5*1.73 = 40 minutes after burst, and for Np-239 with 56 hours half life, the maximum % contribution to the fallout occurs at 4 days after burst. But Stanbury gets the formula wrong for the U-239 contribution, calculating 8% peak contribution at 40 minutes, which I found to be in error, although it is not an important error (Stanbury gets the correct figure of 40% peak contribution by Np-239 to the gamma radiation of fallout at 4 days after burst, however).
The new data I've just found is in the excellent and vital report on fallout effects from U.K. tests in Australia on the public health (which is worth study for the other information it contains on fallout in addition, and will be used to update blog posts here):
http://www.arpansa.gov.au/pubs/technicalreports/tr105.pdf"The production ratios in atoms per fission, suggested by Crocker and Turner (1965) for neutron-induced radionuclides in fallout, reflect a different generation of nuclear weapons from at least some of those included among the twelve tested by Britain in Australia some ten years earlier. For example, for low yield explosions, Crocker and Turner give neptunium [Np]-239 and uranium [U]-237 as the dominant induced radionuclides, with typical production ratios
" - neptunium-239: 0.018 atoms per fission, from neutron capture in uranium-238
" - uranium-237: 0.026 atoms per fission, from (n, 2n) on uranium-238.
"Whereas measurements on airborne debris from HURRICANE (Gale 1954b), TOTEM (T1 and T2: Gale 1954a) and BUFFALO (KITE: Marston 1957) give values of neptunium-239 atoms per fission two orders of magnitude higher [this is due to the historical weapon design change, from using U-238 tampers around the bomb core in early tests, to using beryllium neutron reflectors in place of U-238 tampers in later designs]. A more detailed comparison is made in Table 2.1.
"Table 2.1
"NEPTUNIUM-239 IN FALLOUT
"ORIGIN ATOMS PER FISSION
"Crocker and Turner (1965) 0.018
"HURRICANE 0.6+/-0.1
"TOTEM-1 1.8 +/-0.2
"TOTEM-2 2.5 +/-0.3"
REFERENCES:
Glenn R. Crocker and T. Turner, Calculated activities, exposure rates, and gamma spectra for unfractionated fission products, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, report USNRDL-TR-1009 (1965).
Gale 1954a: H. J. Gale, Operation TOTEM. Radioactive sampling and analysis report. Atomic Weapons Research Establishment report T6/54, 1954.
Gale 1954b: H. J. Gale, Operation HURRICANE Group Reports (part 51). Measurements of the radioactivity of an airborne sample of the cloud collected at Broome, Western Australia. Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, report T89/54, 1954.
Marston 1957: H. R. Marston, The accumulation of radioactive iodine in the thyroids of grazing animals subsequent to atomic weapons tests. Unpublished manuscript, July 1957.
"There is also data in a report on U-237 by Hanna of AWRE in the DEFE16 files at the U.K. National Archives for the two 1953 U.K. TOTEM tests at Emu Field, Australia, giving the U-237 production, which was low because they were pure fission shots. I don't have my notes handy but from memory I think the U-237 production was only 1/3,000 atom per fission."
U-237 results from neutron capture in U-238 followed by double neutron emission, the n,2n reaction first discovered by Professor Kenjiro Kimura, who used this reaction to discover Uranium-237, and later found this isotope in the CASTLE-BRAVO fallout that landed on the Japanese fishing boat 'Lucky Dragon' on 1 March 1954.
Kenshi Hirata, 26, accountant at Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company, Hiroshima (Trumbull pp. 25, 61, and 119): “‘through an open window what looked like a golden lightning flash ... had blown up out of the earth. The weird light was everywhere. I immediately thought of an air-raid, and hurled myself prostrate in the passage.’ Hirata’s quick action probably saved him serious injury, if not his life. ... Because it was the middle of summer, which is exceptionally hot in southern Japan, most of the people of Hiroshima were very thinly clad that morning, so they had less than ordinary protection against burns, Hirata observed. ... [Back in Nagasaki] ‘I shouted to my aged father ... ‘Lie face downward!’ In the immediate moment I was expecting that terrific explosion blast and roar.’ ... Kenshi and his father were unharmed. ‘But in two or three minutes ... I saw people running out of their houses, holding their hands over injuries on their heads, faces, and bodies. Most of these were wounds caused by flying pieces of glass.”
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 29, Mitsubishi ship designer who died in 2010, aged 93 (Trumbull pp. 28 and 109): “‘Suddenly there was a flash like the lighting of a huge magnesium flare,’ Yamaguchi recalls. The young ship designer was so well drilled in air-raid precaution techniques that he reacted automatically. He flung his hands to his head, covering his eyes with his fingers and stopping his ears with his two thumbs. Simultaneously he dropped to the ground, face down. ... ‘As I prostrated myself, there came a terrific explosion’ ... [The left side of his face and arm facing the fireball were burned, and he returned to Nagasaki, experiencing the second nuclear explosion on the sixth-floor of the headquarters office of Mitsubishi.] Spelling out the danger of flying glass, he urged them to keep windows open during an air-raid alert, and at the instant of the flash to seize at once upon any shelter available ... the second A-bomb confirmed young Yamaguchi’s words, exploding in a huge ball of fire about a mile away. Yamaguchi’s lecture ... was not lost upon his colleagues. With the young designer’s words still fresh in their minds, they leaped for the cover of desks and tables. ‘As a result,’ said Yamaguchi, ‘my section staff suffered the least in that building. In other sections there was a heavy toll of serious injuries from flying glass’.”
Shigeyoshi Morimoto, 46, maker of kites for air defense of Japanese ships, used his Hiroshima experience to take cover in Nagasaki after seeing the flash, before the windows were blasted in. Tsuitaro Doi, 47, was on his Hiroshima hotel bed, a thin floor mattress called a “futon” when he saw the explosion flash (Trumbull pages 42 and 106-7): “I quickly rolled over and covered my head with the futon ... The floor of the room and my futon were covered with tiny bits of shattered glass. I noticed that I had a slight cut on one arm, and another on the leg, where I wasn’t covered. ... [He returned home to Nagasaki] “Doi was telling his wife in detail about the bomb. ‘If you ever see that flash,’ he said, ‘immediately prostrate yourself on the floor, or the ground if you are outside. ...’ As he was saying these words, the windows lighted as if giant searchlights had been turned directly into the house. ... Mrs Doi startled, jumped to her feet impulsively and turned to run out of the house. Doi grabbed her and pulled her and the baby down as the blast wave shattered all the glass in the little cottage and ripped off the wood and paper sliding doors. As the flimsy house steadied Doi opened his eyes, and saw that the interior of the room was a wreck. But neither he nor his wife nor the baby was hurt.”
Shinji Kinoshita, 50, was hit by falling roof slabs in a Hiroshima warehouse but returned home to Nagasaki and was just outside the door of his family home when the bomb fell (Trumbull p105): “he was momentarily blinded by a flash that seemed to cover the sky. Like the other survivors of the Hiroshima attack, Kinoshita realized at once what the strange, blinding light meant, and reacted without a second’s hesitation. He threw himself face first on the ground, at the same time shouting into the house, ‘Cover yourself with futons!’”
Masao Komatsu, 40, was hit by falling beam in a Hiroshima warehouse and was on board a train in Nagasaki when the bomb fell (Trumbull, p101): “the interior of the coach was bathed in a stark, white light. Komatsu immediately dived for the floor. ‘Get down!’ he screamed at the other passengers. Some recovered sufficiently from the daze of the blinding light to react promptly to his warning. Seconds later came the deafening crack of the blast, and a shock wave that splintered all the windows on both sides of the train. The passengers who had not dived under the seats were slashed mercilessly from waist to head by glass flying at bullet speed.”
Takejiro Nishioka, 55, publisher of Nagasaki’s leading newspaper in 1945 who became Governor of the Nagasaki Prefecture in 1957. In Hiroshima on business on 6 August 1945, he survived the first nuclear explosion and noted the delay of the blast wave after the visible flash. When he returned to Nagasaki he was not allowed to publish the facts, and only survived by diving into an air raid shelter when he saw the flash after a single B-29 appeared over the city. He explained (Trumbull, p92):
“I had observed in Hiroshima that when the flash came, there would be a few seconds before it was followed by the blast wave ... I have often bitterly regretted the law that gagged me as a newspaperman, and forced me to confine my communications to the governor’s ear alone.”
Japan only permitted civil defense advice against nuclear attack to be published after the second nuclear attack on Nagasaki, which was too late. Even at ground zero, the blast wave was delayed after the first flash because of the height of burst, so quick reactions could limit exposure to flying glass. Proof of the efficiency of duck and cover advice against the blast wind and flying debris was given by Nagasaki’s police chief Mizuguchi, who had been told Nishioka’s advice by the Nagasaki governor and had passed it to his first-grade middle school student son, who was with three friends in Daikoku-Machi street, Nagasaki, when the flash occurred (Trumbull pp. 114-5):
“The police chief’s son remembered his father’s warning at once. Hauling his friend with him by the hand, he dashed for a shelter on the pavement ... The two boys in the shelter were saved; the other two, who stayed on the street, seemed to vanish ... Mizuguchi’s wife, at the same moment, happened to be standing just outside their house, under the eves, with a baby in her arms. The instant she saw the flash, she recalled her husband’s words of the night before and rushed back into the house. She opened a closet and, with the baby still in her arms, crowded inside and pulled shut the sliding door. ... The room, and the area outside the house, was covered with innumerable sharp, pointed slivers of shattered glass. Clearly, she had escaped serious injury by shutting herself in the closet. ...
“Nishioka was bitterly upbraided by Hiromasa Nakamura, chief of the foreign affairs sections of the Nagasaki Prefectural Office, for not briefing other government officials on the happenings at Hiroshima and the efficacy of bomb shelters. ... ‘I could only tell him that I was indeed anxious to tell everyone in Nagasaki what I had learned, but that if I had done so, I would have been liable for violation of the law against spreading ‘wild rumors’, and could have been arrested and convicted.”
Weapons effects exaggerations against civil defense are escalated by successive journalists and editors, who increase circulation against ever increasing noise levels from rival journals by publishing lying scare mongering which is “justified” by the allegedly moralistic pseudo-ethical assumption that “the ends justify the means”. Environmentalists who worship subjective, fashionable groupthink like a religion scream and conflate natural cancers with the effects of radiation. Like a Gordian Knot, any attempt to pull apart this scam “orthodoxy” just hardens the dogma, because its proponents do not believe in it on the basis of hard objective science, but just as an emotional, ethical, moralistic piece of patronising high-horse politics. As Glasstone pointed out in the 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons, it is like the gas effects fear-mongering exaggerations propaganda before WWII (which claimed that gas would destroy civilization and lied that there was no defense).
The 1935 effectively pro-Nazi “pacifist” conspiracy between Labour and Conservatives to pander to popular British pro-disarmament pacifist media sentiments
“There is no security in armaments and we shall be no party to piling them up.”
– Labour Party Leader of the Opposition Clement Attlee, 1935 (two years after Hitler took power and began rearming Germany; quotation from Gilbert and Gott, The Appeasers, 1967). Troubled by the failure of unilateral disarmament to save millions of lives in WWII, Attlee 12 years later as Prime Minister ordered the stockpiling of the first British nuclear weapons to deter WWIII from starting.
“Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm ... I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.”
– Conservative Prime Minister Stanley “the bomber will always get through” Baldwin, who won the 1935 general election with a large majority by lying to get votes for popular pacifism, denying Winston Churchill’s unpopular “warmongering” claims that Hitler was rearming Germany and must be deterred effectively (speech in House of Commons, 12 November 1936). (Some pro-Baldwin historians – not Winston Churchill – claim Baldwin was referring to an earlier non-existing election than 1935, but this makes no difference to the lying.)
An early example of “ends justify the means” exaggeration of weapons effects is Will Irwin’s 1921 book, The Next War, exaggerating gas war into the end of civilization to “justify” 1920s disarmament. This was followed by a chorus of others, before appeasers like Chamberlain stepped in to “guarantee peace in our time” by shaking Hitler’s hand (while Britain only rearmed at a fraction of the rate of Germany, so as “not to risk another war”). Instead, this increased the danger of war:
“These weapons often appear mysterious and sinister to the general public. I think that much of the responsibility for this feeling falls on our government which, by placing great restriction on the public discussion of these weapons by military officers, has fostered this miasma of ignorance. ... the government perpetuates the mysteriousness of these weapons by its restrictions. Until I retired as Commanding General, U.S. Army Chemical Corps Research and Development Command, I was under such restrictions. ... An uninformed public will not support urgently needed research and development on these weapons, nor will it be prepared psychologically for their use against us. ... Only knowledge of these weapons will make them less terrifying.
“In 1959, after hearings on research in CBR (Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Warfare), the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives stated that. ‘There is an urgent need for greater public understanding of the dangers and uses of CBR if proper support is to be given to our defenses and countermeasures’. ... The attitude of our government not only prevents the public from learning of these weapons: it is also greatly responsible for the failure of our military personnel to learn about them. ... The military, in our country, are not a caste apart, but simply an extension of the civilian populace.”
- Brigadier General J.H. Rothschild, Tomorrow’s Weapons, McGraw-Hill, N.Y., 1964, pp. xi-xiii.
Rothschild explains on page 1 that his June 1959 Harper’s Magazine article arguing for greater defense against chemical and biological weapons was opposed by letters of protest “against war itself”. He then explains on page 2 that chemical and biological weapons are not uniquely invisible. Bullets are also invisible while flying through the air. On page 3 he adds that in WWI only 2% of gassed American Expeditionary Force casualties died, compared to 25.8% of non-gas casualties, adding: “Exposed to one of the nerve gases, available since World War II, the casualty will either die or recover completely. Though a person under the effects of the nerve gases looks as though he is suffering greatly, men who have been accidentally exposed to them, and have recovered, say that they do not remember suffering at all. This is at great variance with the experience of casualties resulting from bullets, shell fragments, flame throwers, and land mines.”
Matthew Meselson, reviewing Rothschild’s book using sophistry on page 35 of the October 1964 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, fell into a false argument, claiming that the use of chemical weapons in WWII would have caused them to be used in the Korean War with “additional casualties.” In fact, the use of chemical weapons in WWI did not cause them to be used in WWII, and the use of nuclear weapons in WWII did not cause them to be used during the Cold War. Furthermore, because America kept to “conventional” weapons during the Korean War, it had to drop 635,000 tons of explosives and napalm bombs on Korea, more than in the entire Pacific theatre during WWII, ruining Korea’s cities, with immense casualties and suffering. Escalating to demoralise the enemy, as in August 1945, may stop wars and so stop further physical use of the feared weapon.
Biologist J. B. S. Haldane summarised the psychology of denial and duplicity in claiming gas warfare “unthinkable” in his 1925 book Callinicus: “First are a number of out-and-out Pacifists, who object to all war, and apparently hope to make it more difficult ... With them are associated a group of sentimentalists who appear to me definitely to be the Scribes and Pharisees of our age. ... They salve their consciences for such behaviour by attacking, in the name of their God or their ideals, every novelty ... In particular they are distinguished by a ferocious opposition to, and contempt for, any attempt at the solution of human problems by honest and simple intellectual effort.”
Attacks on civil defense are akin to attacking home fire insurance, hospitals, ambulances, seatbelts, lifeboats, and other damage reducing precautions on the false allegation that they deflect attention from utopian accident prevention, or that they are “inefficient” and “the survivors would envy the dead”. The “false sense of security” and “recklessness” historically is shown to occur not with civil defense, but with a lack of civil defense, leading to either appeasement or a maximum amount of damage, escalating the problems.
Above: the overcrowding of wood-frame buildings in 1945 Hiroshima was such that 42 percent of the ground areas in the main firestorm areas was covered with wooden buildings containing charcoal braziers, paper screens, and bamboo furnishings. This compared to 45 percent ground coverage by buildings in the central wooden medieval part of Hamburg which suffered a firestorm in July 1943. (Source: secret USSBS report The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, May 1947, volume 2. This originally secret volume is not the misleading 1946 pamphlet, which omits all vital data.) U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, never-published full May 1947 report 92 on Hiroshima, volume 2, typeset edition pages 126-8 (quoted on pages 176 and 98 of Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945):
“Structural damage by blast to multistory, steel- and reinforced concrete-frame structures did not extend beyond 2,000 feet from GZ. The buildings within this radius sustained an average of 12 percent structural damage. The average for all the buildings of this type in Hiroshima was 8 percent.”
These are modern city buildings. The burned out areas in old photos are congested (a roof to ground area averaging 42% in firestorm areas) wood frame houses. On page 98, Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 quotes the secret 1947 USSBS Hiroshima report, vol 1, pp 13-14 (typeset edition):
“... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits.”
The electric power was rapidly cut off by the overload, so sustained heat came from charcoal fires in Hiroshima's houses (due to breakfast, i.e. 8:15 local time).
Above: overcrowded wood frame housing containing charcoal braziers on the edge of the damaged area in Hiroshima (U.S. National Archives photo). How many cities in the world which contain this type of overcrowded wooden housing with charcoal braziers are targets for nuclear terrorism today? Note also that formerly secret measurements of the specific activity of fallout show that only about 1% of the crater volume becomes lofted fallout dust, most of which falls back rapidly: nuclear tests in the 1950s thus confirmed that there is no significant nuclear winter (cooling) from the cratered dust lofted as fallout. This claim relies on the carbon soot from large-scale firestorms (not just fires) which are supposed to inject a stable, non-humid, layer of hydroscopic carbon soot to altitudes where it can be warmed and achieve stable stable buoyancy, blocking out sunlight from lower altitudes. This contravenes the facts concerning the black rain in Hiroshima, which rapidly precipitated the soot. Robock's poorly researched but politically correct (peer-reviewer passed) Climactic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts (Atmos. Chem. Phys., v7, pp. 2003–2012, 2007) maintains the nuclear disaster delusion by ignoring all factual data on firestorm dust from Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Before quoting the firestorm details from the secret Hiroshima report, it is worth pointing out that all nuclear weapons stockpiled today are much smaller yield MIRV (multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles) than the heavy fallout weapons tested in the 1950s. Most are relatively little more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons. Professor Freeman Dyson debunked the popular myths in his 1985 book Weapons and Hope (Harper and Row, New York, pp. 33-41):
“In 1957 ... Nevil Shute Norway published On the Beach, a description of mankind wiped out by radiological warfare [he had also previously published guesswork speculations about war in Britain in his April 1939 novel, What Happened to the Corbetts, which incorrectly speculated that bombing would cause a lack of clean water and cause that diseases like cholera to spread]. Norway's poignant translation of apocalyptic disaster into the everyday voices of real people caught the imagination of the world. His book became an international best-seller and was made into a successful film. The book and the film created an enduring myth, a myth which entered consciously or subconsciously into all subsequent thinking about nuclear war. ... Almost all the details are wrong: radioactive cobalt would not substantially increase the lethality of large hydrogen bombs; fallout would not descend uniformly over large areas but would fall sporadically in space and time; people could protect themselves from the radioactivity ...
“The first generation of hydrogen bombs which were tested in 1952 and 1954 had yields running from ten to fifteen megatons. They were, from a modern point of view, absurdly and inconveniently large. ... By the time I paid my first visit to Los Alamos, in the summer of 1956, hydrogen bombs of the twenty-megaton class were already considered technologically obsolete; all the experts I spoke to were working on smaller bombs with lower yields. ... The race toward smaller bombs has been driven by ... the cruise missile and the MIRV (Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicle). ... As soon as cruise missiles and MIRVs are available, high-yield weapons rapidly become obsolete. ... The central paradox of the arms race is the discrepancy between public perception and reality. The public perceives the arms race as giving birth to an endless stream of weapons of ever-increasing destructiveness and ever-increasing danger. ... In the 1950s there was indeed a race to produce weapons of mass destruction ... Since then the arms race has been running strongly in other directions, away from weapons of mass destruction toward weapons of high precision. ... One consequence of the computer revolutions has been the replacement of big hydrogen bombs by the MIRV and the cruise missile.”
The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, secret, unpublished three-volume May 1947 report
The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, USSBS report 92, volume 2 (typeset May 1947 edition, secret)
Volume one, page 14: “the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only “capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).” Page 85 of volume one explains why so many people were outdoors in Hiroshima at 8:15 on 6 August 1945:
“Conditions on Morning of Attack. The morning of 6 August 1945 was clear with a small amount of clouds at high altitude. Wind was from the south with a velocity of about 4.5 miles per hour. Visibility was 10 to 15 miles. An air-raid ‘alert’ was sounded throughout Hiroshima Prefecture at 0709 hours [the weather survey B-29 aircraft flying one hour ahead of the nuclear bomber]. ‘All-clear’ was sounded at 0731 hours. The following circumstances account in part for the high number of casualties resulting from the atomic bomb:
(1) Only a few persons remained in the air-raid shelters after the ‘all-clear’ sounded.
(2) No ‘alert’ was sounded to announce the approach of the planes involved in the atomic-bomb attack.
(3) The explosion occurred during the morning rush hours when people had just arrived at work or were hurrying to their places of business. This concentrated the population in the center of the city ...”
Volume two examines the ignition of clothing by the thermal radiation flash in Hiroshima:
Page 24: “Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.”
Page 28: “Wood poles as far as 10,000 feet in a southerly direction from AZ [air zero] and 13,000 feet in a northerly direction were flash-burned but the burns, generally not much more than a discoloration of the wood, were in all cases only on the side of the pole facing AZ. ... it is logical to conclude that wood (ignition temperature approximately 450 F) was not raised to its ignition temperature, except possibly in its most easily ignitable condition, such as dry-rotted. Surface spalling or roughening of granite by heat was observed near GZ and as far as 2,400 feet from AZ. This condition was only noticeable where the granite was directly exposed to rays from the bomb (surfaces facing AZ but shielded from it were not spalled) indicating that extremely high temperatures lasted only a fraction of a second. Asphalt road surfaces and asphalt-painted surfaces also were flash-burned, distinct shadows of objects being cast upon them, which again indicated that the radiated heat from the bomb created a temperature which was high but of short duration. ... Blisters as much as one-sixteenth inch high were raised on exposed tile at GZ (2,000 feet from AZ), decreasing in size as the distance from AZ increased until they were barely visible at 4,400 feet from AZ (4,000 feet from GZ).”
Page 34: “The fire wind seems to have reached its maximum velocity about 2 to 3 hours after the bomb explosion, following which it began to diminish in intensity. ... the heavier rain began about 3,500 feet west of GZ and extended westward about 5,000 feet. Light rain was reported to have fallen near the center of the city. ... Rain fell almost exclusively in the northwest area of the city ... accounted for by the light natural wind from the southeast which blew particles of hot carbon northwestward to a cooler area where moisture condensed about them and fell as rain.”
Page 44: “A special effort was made to determine the probable cause of initial ignition in buildings in which there was fire and the reason for non-ignition in buildings in which there was no fire. By observation and by interrogation of persons who were in or near the buildings when the bomb detonated it was established that the probable causes of initial ignition in 40 of the 58 fire-resistive [not wood frame] buildings in which there was fire were as follows: 8 by heat radiation from the bomb (primary fire); 3 by blast disturbance of telephone or chemical laboratory equipment (secondary fire); and 29 by fire spread from exposing buildings.”
Page 45: “Direct Ignition by the Atomic Bomb. ...
“(1) Each of the eight fire-resistive buildings in which primary fire was reported had unprotected windows facing AZ. Black cotton black-out curtains or light-weight paper, or both, were reported to have ignited initially in most of these buildings. All buildings in Hiroshima whose windows were not equipped with steel-roller shutters, which were considered light-proof, were required to have black-out curtains. Among the eight buildings which had primary fires, the farthest from AZ was Building 64 [Hiroshima Communications Hospital] at 5,300 feet [from AZ, or 4,900 feet from GZ].
“(2) A doctor who was in the first story of Building 64, a hospital 5,300 feet from AZ, stated that he discovered fire in the second story 10 minutes after the detonation, but was unable to identify the source. ... Cotton black-out curtains were drawn across the second-story windows only. ... Contents in the second story were totally damaged by fire, but in the first story only a few pieces of wooden furniture near the windows in the south wall facing AZ were scorched ...”
Page 70: “Direct Ignition by the Atomic Bomb. None of the 8 non-combustible buildings which had [contents] fire in them was reported to have had its contents ignited by radiated heat from the bomb. All except 3 (Buildings 46, 78, and 81) of the 12 non-combustible buildings had at least some unprotected wall openings facing AZ at the time of detonation of the bomb. The contents of these 3 buildings were shielded from direct radiated heat from the bomb by a blank wall, closed fire shutters, or another building. ...
Pages 74-75: “Combustible Construction. a. General. ... combustible buildings were load-bearing, brick-wall structures with wooden floors or roof, or both; steel-frame structures with wooden purlins and studs ... It was established that the probable cause of initial ignition in 23 of the 41 buildings which had fire was as follows: 3 by secondary fire (electrical equipment, stoves and industrial furnaces), and 20 by fire spread from exposing buildings. ... No eyewitness testimony was obtained to the effect that any one of the 41 fire-damaged combustible buildings was ignited directly by flash heat from the bomb.
“b. Direct Ignition by the Atomic Bomb. Although none of the 41 fire-damaged combustible buildings was reported to have been ignited by radiated heat from the bomb, it is considered probable that the contents of a few of the buildings which had unshielded wall openings facing AZ and which were within 4,000 feet of AZ were ignited in this manner. Since wooden poles and other exposed wood, even near GZ, were only flash burned by the bomb, it seems unlikely that exposed wood outside or inside buildings was ignited directly. ...
“c. Ignition by Secondary Fire. It was established that the initial ignition in three combustible buildings (3 [Hiroshima Electric Company’s Yagurashita Substation 900 feet from GZ], 37 [Takano Bath House 4,200 feet from GZ], and 72 [Toyo Light Alloy Company 6,200 feet from GZ]) was probably by secondary fire. These comprise 13 percent of the cases in which the probable cause was determined in this class of building. Building 3, an electric substation, was ignited by short circuits in electric generating and transforming equipment after the blast had collapsed the combustible roof. ... Building 37, a public bath house, was ignited by a hot stove after the blast had collapsed the combustible roof so that it fell on the stove. The combustible debris and contents were completely consumed. Building 72, an aluminum foundry, was ignited by a hot stove ...”
Page 88: “Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims] ... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.”
Page 110: “The most common failure of wood-frame buildings was buckling of the relatively slender columns ... This resulted usually either from a mass displacement of the building away from the blast, or from panel walls being blown in and carrying the columns along.”
Pages 126-8: “Structural damage by blast to multistory, steel- and reinforced concrete-frame structures did not extend beyond 2,000 feet from GZ. The buildings within this radius sustained an average of 12 percent structural damage. The average for all the buildings of this type in Hiroshima was 8 percent.”
Page 96 gives the mean destructive distance for multistory steel and reinforced concrete frame (both earthquake and non-earthquake resistant) buildings at 700 feet, compared to 9,200 feet for Japanese (wood-pole constructed) wooden houses. The damaged areas are proportional to the square of the radius, so although the Japanese wooden houses were only destroyed out to a radius about 13 times greater than modern city buildings, they were destroyed over an that was 173 times greater. Thus, for a similar bomb yield and altitude, the number of damaged buildings in a modern city would be 173 times less than in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
“The atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima, although it was an extremely powerful blast weapon, caused relatively little structural damage to the 81 important bridges. Scattered throughout the entire city, the bridges, 260 to 15,600 feet from ground zero (GZ), connected islands to islands and islands to the mainland, forming an adequate and efficient bridge system. ... impressive evidence of the ability of the bridges to resist the forces of the Hiroshima atomic bomb (air-burst at 2,000 feet0 was found in the facts that (1) 10 of 19 timber bridges studied were undamaged, (2) 10 of 15 concrete bridges had no damage, and (3) 14 of 23 steel bridges were undamaged.”
This is illustrated by the survival of the nuclear target point, the distinctive T-shaped Aioi bridge at the intersection of the Ota and Motoyasu Rivers (located 1,000 feet from ground zero due to the Hiroshima bombing error). Volume three at page 40 explains: “This bridge of plate-girder design received physical damage of a spectacular and interesting nature but it continued to carry unrestricted highway, pedestrian, and street railway traffic. The longitudinal steel girders suffered no great structural damage although a slight lateral deformation indicated that they had been highly stressed.” Bridge 20 over the Motoyasu River at 2,900 feet from ground zero retained clear “shadows” of non-scorched asphalt cast by the hand railings, one of the pieces of evidence which allowed geometric determination of the burst location and altitude.
EMP effects in Hiroshima may have been masked by blast and fire damage, as indicated in volume three, pages 191-6: “Of the 7 substations of the Chugoku Electric Co., the Sendamachi substation and steam-electric plant at 7,700 feet from GZ were heavily damaged by fires which spread to the area. The Otemachi substation, 2,400 feet from GZ, was heavily damaged by blast and fires started by the short-circuited equipment. The Dambara, Misasa, and Eba substations were only slightly damaged at distances from GZ of 5,500 feet and beyond. ... Analysis of the Damage. The Hiroshima substation, 15,000 feet from GZ, was undamaged by blast as a direct effect, but the tremendous overload created by the short-circuited damaged electrical equipment in the city of Hiroshima tripped the circuit breakers in the substation and immediately interrupted all electrical services in the Hiroshima area.”
Above: the reason why there is statistically reliable data on high doses of radiation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is simply the fact that many people - far from being instantly vaporized along with all buildings near ground zero - survived all of the nuclear explosion effects within the Hiroshima firestorm in the Bank of Japan and Geibi Bank Company, and extinguished fires 2-3 hours after the nuclear explosion when firebrands (burning cinders) were blown through broken windows from the wooden areas firestorm surrounding these modern concrete city buildings. The photos above are from the U.S. Department of Defense DCPA Attack Environment Manual 1973, chapters 3 and 8, which documents the successful firefighting in modern buildings within the Hiroshima firestorm. The diagram on the right shows substantial radiation protection factors in modern city buildings from fallout radiation. Amateur fire-fighting in the Hiroshima nuclear attack is more applicable to modern cities today which contain fire-sprinkler systems in vulnerable buildings and fewer wooden houses:
Above: buildings protect against thermal burns and fire ignition by the simple shadowing effect. The badly injured people in Hiroshima in many documented survivor accounts of serious burn and flying glass injuries had moved into a position (behind windows or outdoors) with a direct radial line to the fireball, to watch the B-29 bomb carrying aircraft.
Above: conventional warfare dropped 240 kilotons of bombs on Germany in the month of March 1945 alone, equivalent to 15 times the 16 kt Hiroshima nuclear bomb, i.e., one Hiroshima every 2 days during March 1945.
Note that in both WWI and WWII the vast majority of the weapons and explosives used were manufactured during the war itself, so prior disarmamant would not have assured that no weapons were used. One assumption in most disarmament propaganda is that a war is an instant all-out blitz; this assumption was made prior to WWI and was proved false, and again before WWII and was proved false again. The whole of the second-strike capability of hardened silos and hidden submarines designed by RAND Corporation strategists in the late 1950s was specifically aimed at removing any temptation for such a short knock-out war. This second-strike system remains and takes away any rational incentive to launch a surprise all-out attack. This is why, as President Obama stated, the major risk from nuclear weapons is a limited nuclear attack due to terrorism and rogue states. A nuclear attack will have a similar effect to large WWII air raids, but the effects will be easier to mitigate than V2 warheads, if people are informed about the reality of nuclear weapons effects phenomenology, and duck before the blast wave arrives, stamp out fires, and take cover from fallout. EMP will often rapidly disconnect the electrical fire risk by activating circuit breakers in substations, as at the Nevada test site after EMP pick up in long cables which carried thousands of amps from close-in locations out to the control point 30 miles away (not only to the 2 psi overpressure range gives in Glasstone and Dolan, which confuses the range to which cables pick up EMP with the range to which currents can be carried by cables). This is made clear in B. J. Stralser's secret 30 April 1961 E.G. and G. report Electromagnetic effects from nuclear tests.
What went wrong with civil defense during the Cold War era was the move towards hubris, arrogance, patronising, dependence upon authority, and increasing secrecy over the basis of the evidence for widely mocked and attacked civil defense countermeasures against nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Instead of focussing on making the lessons of Hiroshima clear for all to understand, these lessons went unpublished or were actually classified secret. The failure of the government to effectively and scientifically answer and demolish false propaganda attacks in the media against civil defense undermines national security when the chips are down:
“The only way to win a war is to escalate it one way or another above what the enemy can endure. If we feel that we cannot win without unacceptable risk we have no business fighting in the first place.
“There are just two checks on escalation. One is the waning of motivation for fighting the war in the first place. A long grinding war of attrition on the ground might achieve this ... The second check on escalation is to so overwhelm your enemy with such heavy and rapid destruction that he loses all hope of winning. Then surrender is an attractive choice when compared to inevitable defeat or certain death. This, of course, is the way we brought Japan to terms in 1945. It was unnecessary to invade with infantry and fight a ground war. We seem to have forgotten this fact. Even though Japan had four million troops under arms with two million guarding her shores, not a shot was fired. We invaded with fourteen hundred military administrators, by air. Not a life was lost in this invasion.
“The Japanese had been highly motivated to wage war against us. Kamikaze tactics and no-surrender policies were typical. Yet a realization that Japan simply could not win and the certainty that continued resistance meant mounting devastation caused her to toss in the sponge. ... In the final analysis, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved and dozens of cities spared ... In Korea ... there were three and a half million military casualties on both sides during three years of drawn-out war. Over a million civilians were killed ...”
- General Curtis E. LeMay, America is in Danger, pages 307-9.
In a surprise attack, conventional weapons give practically no time for defensive countermeasures, unlike the bright flash prior to the blast arrival over most of the damaged area in a nuclear explosion, which acts as a warning. With nuclear weapons, there is an automatic warning prior blast and fallout arrival over the wide areas of destruction, which gives time for most people to take effective countermeasures and was used by people who experienced the Hiroshima nuclear explosion before travelling to Nagasaki and surviving the second nuclear explosion. As explained by Professor Joseph O. Hirschfelder, “The Effects of Atomic Weapons”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August-September 1950, vol. VI, no. 8-9, pp. 236-40 and 285-6 (quotation from page 238):
Noel-Baker, athlete and Quaker disarmer typical of the ideologues exaggerating weapons effects and denying facts about the efficiency of civil defence countermeasures today, later won a Nobel Peace prize and become a Lord, but his fear-mongering and scare-mongering lies about civil defence actually helped to enable Hitler to murder millions by cultivating appeasement. I have yet to find any historian who addresses the ideology whereby lies about civil defence for utopian dreams of disarmament are compared to Adolf Hitler's or Joseph Stalin's ideological lies of eugenics or Marxism; all are ideologies where "the ends justify the means" and since the ends are not achieveable in the real world, all of these ideologies which rely on lying fear-mongering about the alleged evils of weapons, minority races, or genuine democracy. He failed to achieve peace and his lying ideology against civil defense actually made the war risks and the war dangers of the world worse, by removing support for Churchill and allowing public empathy to side with Hitler, even to the point of the British football team being forced to give the Nazi salute at a game in Germany. Support for appeasement was due in large part to the anti-civil defense groupthink polemics which played up WWI effects, but Noel-Baker did not do this by accident or genuine error, because he was still continuing the same inaccurate anti-civil defense polemics in 1980 to deny any possibility of civil defense being of value under any circumstances, again by examining only the worst and least probable possibility, despite this being proved in WWII to be a contrived, unbalanced piece of sophistry. This is like denying the value of hospitals, seat-belts or life-boats by the trick of only considering worst-case eventualities where they are of minimal utility. House of Lords Home and Civil Defence Debate on 5 March 1980 (Hansard, vol 406 cc260-386):
But this is another falsehood of the same type as his 1927 BBC broadcast on gas: as WWII indicated (where gas was not used against Britain or Germany), by reducing the scale of the disaster if a terrorist or accidental nuclear explosion should occur, civil defense could help avoid escalation to a massive war by minimizing the effects even within war itself, stabilizing the political situation.
“In May 1929, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom sponsored a conference in Frankfurt on ‘modern methods of warfare and the protection of civil populations’. ... While the overall objective of the proceedings was to enhance pleas for disarmament, individual participants did so by calling attention to the stakes of future wars ... conference speakers emphasized that ‘the worst of the past gives little idea of what would be the horrible reality of a future war,’ one where ‘the civil population ... will be massacred by gas bombs from thousands of aeroplanes ...’”
– Professor Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp149-50 (citing Getrud Woker, “The Effects of Chemical Warfare,” in Les methodes modernes de guerre et la protection des populations civiles / Chemical Warfare: An Abridged Report of Papers Read at an International Conference at Frankfurt, London, 1930, p45).
“Most of the books and pamphlets on the subject seem to me to be of the nature of propaganda ... a great many opponents of the Government state that such things as gas-masks and gas-proof rooms are completely useless, that London could be wiped out in a single air raid ... a frightful responsibility rests on those who expose British children to such a death in order to score a point ... In 1915 ... I was at that time a captain in a British infantry battalion and was brought out of the trenches to St. Omer, where I assisted my father in the design of some of the first gas masks. ... one would be safe in a phosgene concentration of one part per thousand, of which a single breath would probably kill an unprotected man. Hence in practice such a mask is a very nearly complete protection. ... These gases can penetrate into houses, but very slowly. So even in a badly-constructed house one is enormously safer than in the open air. ... even if a new gas is produced, it is very unlikely that it will get through our respirators. ... Now all the poisonous gases and vapours used in war are heavier than air, so it is thought that they would inevitably flood cellars ... But within a short time it would be mixed with many times its volume of air. Now air containing one part in 10,000 of phosgene is extremely poisonous. But its density exceeds that of air by only one part in 4,000.”
- Professor J. B. S. Haldane, A.R.P., 1938.
“Ever since the Armistice, three classes of writers have been deluding the long-suffering British public with lurid descriptions of their approaching extermination in the next war ... pure sensationalists, ultra-pacifists, and military experts. ... they do want to get their manuscript accepted for the feature page of the Daily Drivel or the Weekly Wail. In order to do that, they must pile on the horrors thick ... The amount of damage done by such alarmists cannot be calculated, but is undoubtedly very great. ... It is significant that they concentrate almost unanimously on poison gas, and that the dangers of high explosive and incendiary bombs are seldom stressed. The reason, of course, is obvious – poison gas has a much greater news value. It is still a new and mysterious form of warfare, it is something which people do not understand, and what they do not understand they can readily be made to fear. ... Millions of people, perhaps, have been impressed by the authority and reputation of Mr H. G. Wells into believing that this picture represents the plain truth.”
- Professor James Kendall (a 1917 Chemical Warfare Liaison Officer), Breathe Freely! The Truth About Poison Gas, G. Bell & Sons, London, 1938, pp. 11-13.
“... 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 ... one of the most important aspects of the interwar period [was] the enormous and almost uncontrollable impulse toward disarmament ... 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 Kahn.]. ... At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to ‘retaliate’ if they attacked him. ... an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs ”
- H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, pp. 390-1 and 403.
Future President John F. Kennedy's college thesis, Why England Slept, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1962 (first published 1940), pages 7, 169, 170 and 179:
Page 7: “What had England been doing while Hitler was building up this tremendous German Army?... To say that all the blame must rest on the shoulders of Neville Chamberlain or of Stanley Baldwin is to overlook the obvious. As the leaders, they are, of course, gravely and seriously responsible. But, given the conditions of democratic government, a free press, public elections, and a cabinet responsible to Parliament and thus to the people, given rule by the majority, it is unreasonable to blame the entire situation on one man or group.”
Page 169: “... I believe, as I have stated frequently, that leaders are responsible for their failures only in the governing sector and cannot be held responsible for the failure of a nation as a whole ... I believe it is one of democracy’s failings that it seeks to make scapegoats for its own weaknesses.”
Page 170: “Herbert Morrison, the able British Labour Leader ... was being criticised in 1939 for co-operating with the Government ... ‘At the beginning I got plenty of abuse from the irresponsibles because I said that Labour administrators must play their full part in A.R.P. [Air Raid Precautions, i.e. civil defense], which was denounced as a fraud and a plot... to create war psychology. For Labour local authorities to co-operate with state departments in this task was treachery ... no A.R.P. could possibly be effective’.”
Page 179: “... the dictator is able to know exactly how much the democracy is bluffing, because of the free Press, radio, and so forth, and so can plan his moves accordingly.”
Kennedy stuck to his guns with civil defense. After the first Russian nuclear weapon test, he wrote a public letter to President Truman warning of the risk of an "atomic Pearl Harbor", published in the New York Times of 10 October 1949. Kennedy also attended the 22-26 June 1959 nuclear war congressional hearings which featured Herman Kahn on civil defense, and Kennedy used the supposed missile gap as the basis for his Presidential election campaign (which in the even only appeared in about 1975 when the USSR achieved parity and went on bankrupting itself by churning out more missiles). Kennedy set up the public fallout shelter allocation in 1961. All of this goes back to his time in the American Embassy in 1939 and the research he did into the connection between British civil defense apathy in the 1930s and appeasement (even encouragement) of fear exploiting Nazi thugs. He could see that aggressors are all alike: they are all self-deluded, they all have an ideology, and they all use fear-mongering lies.
Professor Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge University Press, 2012) finds that (p176): “a variety of voices reflected on the enormous destructive potential of air power in interwar Britain, and many determined to prevent the imagined horrors of the next war from coming true. Several important constituent bodies of the nation – including key segments of women, trades unionists, and members of the state itself – worked fervently for disarmament and to challenge efforts to accept aerial and perhaps even chemical attacks as somehow inevitable in a future war.”
Pro-disarmament propaganda which was based entirely on exaggeration of weapons and war effects (ignoring the real dangers of ideologies like racist eugenics and ethnic cleansing) and denials of civil defense efficiency went largely unopposed until 1938, partly due to official secrecy to keep both the enemy and the public ignorant (while they were being sold exaggerations by the media). To be heard, disarmament activists had the temerity to falsely dismiss all countermeasures, to exaggerate the scale of potential attacks, and to ignore the fact that countermeasures were a tried and tested solution (unlike disarmament without civil defense, i.e. complete vulnerability). Public apathy allowed doom exaggerations to be mainly supported or allowed to circulate without correction. How many newspapers, popular historians, or TV stations stand up and publish the facts on nuclear weapons and Hiroshima today? None. Civil defense has never had any backing and has always been violently opposed by ideologies which prefer war. When Noel-Baker claimed to have an "authority" which proved a consensus of gas war experts who knew gas had no countermeasure, he was simply lying to the nation. In any case, his claim that science is determined by a religious type consensus, was again lying to the nation, because science is distinguished from political agreements by its factual evidence rather than its fashionable popularity and the number of votes its adverts gain. Never mind how "unpopular" or "unfashionable" it is for a gas mask or duck and cover evasive action to protect the public, it is fact:
Some myths debunked: 1. nobody was "vaporized": people are 70% water which has far too high a specific heat capacity and latent heat of vaporization even at ground zero, 2. fallout and neutron induced activity were insignificant compared to the initial nuclear radiation doses, because of the height of burst, 3. the long term effects of radiation were trivial compared to the natural cancer rate in an unexposed control group, and genetic effects were insignificant, 4. conventional weapons killed more people and resulted in more deaths and suffering because conventional wars lasted for years: the "blunt knife" is more dangerous overall, because it is likely to slip and cause injuries, because you need to use more force on a blunt knife to achieve any given result, 5. shallow underground bursts avert collateral damage around bunkers, while retaining credible deterrence. Downwind fallout can be washed or brushed off, and nuclear radiation is attenuated by buildings, 6. nuclear weapons with individually larger areas of effects are actually easier to protect against than an immense number of conventional weapons, because the blast wave is delayed for a longer period of time after the bright visible flash over most of the damaged area: fashionable lying "films" falsely superimpose the sound on the flash to "discredit" civil defense, one of the most sinister deceptions. The same applies to fallout: the further an effect has to travel, the longer it takes to arrive, so there is time to evacuate or to take cover in a safe building. Conventional weapons failed to deter two world wars, which explains why Cold War nuclear weapons were relied upon for deterrence. Anti-civil defense propaganda for nuclear disarmament politics is reducing not only deterrence but public safeguards against nuclear terrorism. Nuclear disarmament will put the clock back to the pre-nuclear era of conventional world wars. Nuclear safeguards and inspections will simply drive proliferation further underground, or risk war in themselves (just as 1930s efforts to oppose proliferation risked starting a war).
Modern buildings in modern cities do not suffer firestorms.
“The only way to win a war is to escalate it one way or another above what the enemy can endure. If we feel that we cannot win without unacceptable risk we have no business fighting in the first place.
“There are just two checks on escalation. One is the waning of motivation for fighting the war in the first place. A long grinding war of attrition on the ground might achieve this … The second check on escalation is to so overwhelm your enemy with such heavy and rapid destruction that he loses all hope of winning. Then surrender is an attractive choice when compared to inevitable defeat or certain death. This, of course, is the way we brought Japan to terms in 1945. It was unnecessary to invade with infantry and fight a ground war. We seem to have forgotten this fact. Even though Japan had four million troops under arms with two million guarding her shores, not a shot was fired. We invaded with fourteen hundred military administrators, by air. Not a life was lost in this invasion.
“The Japanese had been highly motivated to wage war against us. Kamikaze tactics and no-surrender policies were typical. Yet a realization that Japan simply could not win and the certainty that continued resistance meant mounting devastation caused her to toss in the sponge. … In the final analysis, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved and dozens of cities spared … In Korea … there were three and a half million military casualties on both sides during three years of drawn-out war. Over a million civilians were killed ...”
- General Curtis E. LeMay, America is in Danger, pages 307-9.
General Curtis Emerson LeMay (1906-90) developed and led the B-17 and B-24 incendiary bombing missions first in Europe and then B-29 missions in the Pacific during World War II, including control of incendiary raids and the two nuclear attacks. In the Cold War he headed the Berlin airlift of 1948, was the founder of SAC (the Strategic Air Command), and from 1961-5 was Chief of Staff of the USAF, retiring after arguments with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara over the Vietnam War. LeMay advised declaring war on North Vietnam (which McNamara refused to do) and the escalatory winning tactics that had proved successful against Japan without requiring a ground invasion of Japan in 1945. McNamara instead initially used the failing flexible response efforts to try to encourage negotiation with the least possible force, and later a gradual rather than overwhelming vertical escalation which simply resulted in media criticism for the killing of civilians with no positive result. While LeMay requested the bombing of North Vietnam harbors, but McNamara preferred to leave them untouched and bomb insurgent camps and supply routes within Vietnam, claiming that LeMay’s scheme would kill Soviet Union advisers in supply ships in the harbors of North Vietnam, escalating the war horizontally, destabilizing Europe.
General Curtis E. LeMay’s 5 June 1968 book America is in Danger (Funk and Wagnalls, New York) is still valid today, and it predicted on page 307 that America was going to lose in Vietnam, if McNamara’s graduated response war policy continued. The book jacket clearly summarizes LeMay’s case: “America is in danger. … We find ourselves in a purely defensive role, unable to make our will felt even in a conflict with a backward jungle country. … Our strategic nuclear superiority has given us much diplomatic strength in the past. Do we still have that strength? … I think not. That is why America is in grave danger. … Assessing the strategic situation, General LeMay argues that our former policy of overwhelming nuclear superiority proved itself during the crises in Berlin, Taiwan, and Cuba, and produced twenty years of relative peace. Yet the current Administration has opted for a new and untested posture that permits, even encourages parity with Russia.”
On pages viii-ix LeMay explains that the worst wars are caused by dogmatic censorship in democracy:
“The equivocal manner in which we are waging the war in Southeast Asia [Vietnam] is a direct result of the bankrupt nature of a deterrent policy. … ‘defense intellectuals’ go unchallenged simply because the experienced professional active duty officers are officially prohibited from entering into public debate. … In 1916 while war in Europe was raging, President Woodrow Wilson banished from Washington a few officers at the Army War College who had the temerity to plan for war. … I. S. Block, ‘proved’ statistically in a popular book The Future of War, and in numerous speeches, that war was an economic impossibility [Norman Angell’s Great Illusion in 1908 deluded Britain into viewing war as economically absurd, but was still awarded a Knighthood and a Nobel Peace Prize after WWI, since facts are always distorted to fit in to a hardened ideology]. His disciples (among whom was David Starr Jordan) were still plugging this doctrine in America in the face of the Battles of the Marne and the Somme.
“Just a few months before Sarajevo in 1914, David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford University and a renowned naturalist, said, ‘It is apparently not possible for another real war among the nations of Europe to take place.’ … Before World War II the military profession was again pre-empted by the ‘defense intellectuals.’ … The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 had outlawed law in principle. The Washington Disarmament conferences of the 1930s, if not arriving at a treaty had at least condemned ‘offensive’ weapons. … There was no one who could tell America that wars cannot be won with defensive weapons. … In the Army Air Corps we developed the B-17 Flying Fortress almost clandestinely. … Thirteen were ordered in 1937 and with them we worked out the tactics and strategies which carried the war to Germany and Japan …”
On pages xiii-xiv, LeMay points out that in any war, be it Japan or Vietnam, there is no certain quantitative prediction possible of the effect of weapons on the will of the enemy to resist or surrender, and this factor must be either omitted or faked in all computer “predictions”:
“We computerized every activity susceptible to machine analysis long before most businesses or other government agencies … What we did not do was to force non-quantifiable data into a quantified mold in order to feed it to the machines. … when defense intellectuals attempt, in deadpan seriousness, to quantify the effect that x number of casualties will have on the government or the will to resist, they are entering the Land of Oz. Some countries have succumbed, as France did in 1940, with minor casualties. Carthage and Paraguay (in 1870) show that other countries never give up, no matter what the casualties. … Such unknowns in the strategic equation are anathema to the quantifier.”
LeMay elaborates this on page 77:
“An enraged country may go to war against impossible odds, with no logical change of victory. This is another example of weakness in the concept of deterrence – the possibility of the illogical reaction. Thus did Paraguay fight against an overwhelming alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1864. So did little Serbia stand up to the great Austria-Hungarian Empire in 1914. And thus did England and France declare war on Germany in 1939 … Almost any country can be pushed too far, as was Hungary in 1956. It then feels compelled to fight regardless of the consequences. Patrick Henry’s remark ‘give me liberty or give me death’ is not an isolated human decision.”
LeMay’s points out that Defense Secretary McNamara’s failure in the Vietnam War was due to the abuse of science, in fiddling computer model assumptions about the political response to the enemy to military coercion. LeMay on page 89 shows that this failure of analysis in Vietnam also applies to general nuclear war deterrence planning, e.g. McNamara’s 1967 Posture Statement: “To deter deliberate nuclear attack upon the United States … ability to inflict an unacceptable degree of damage …” Here the word “unacceptable” is a subjective function of the emotional state of mind of the enemy.
Anti-nuclear war propaganda like Kubrick’s pseudoscience film Dr Strangelove is attributed by LeMay on pages 8-12 to ideologues (the pseudo-pacifists, the pseudo-moralistic crusaders, and the well-meaning media whose lying “anti-war” propaganda lay behind previous wars):
“This large peace-time military establishment has allowed many scaremongers to capitalize on the traditional anti-military American attitudes and thus sell books and movies. … It is like yelling fire in a crowded theatre. Some … is encouraged by our enemies to weaken faith in our military leadership and thus to undermine our resolve or capability for self-defense. Some of it, of course, is a perfectly legitimate concern over how a large, perpetual military establishment will change our system of values, society, and government. … One must keep in mind the communist technique of ‘boring from within.’ … History illustrates that the first act of a dictator is to distort and suppress the news. Free speech and press permit the truth to be aired and opposing opinions to be expressed. … The world is moving too fast today, particularly in technology, for us to be tied to a monolithic organization which stifles all thought outside its own party line of hackneyed solutions. … One of the greatest dangers in a military estimate of any situation is to believe, through party-line strategic concepts, that you know what the enemy will or will not do. We knew that Japan would not attack Pearl Harbor, our best-defended outpost. … We knew that the Soviet Union would not put nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles in Cuba. … We must – but do not – have a defense organization which permits controversy, which permits the ‘unthinkable’ condition to be debated freely, which permits the screwball idea to come forth, and which tolerates the maverick officer. The Andrew Jacksons, the Zachary Taylors, the Ulysses S. Grants, the George Deweys, the Alfred Thayer Mahans, the Billy Mitchells, are not nurtured in orthodoxy. They are not products of a party line.”
In a chapter on the “Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” LeMay explains on page 204 that although “Every large war, of course, is sparked by some relatively minor event, as the murder at Saravejo in 1914 or the Nazi march into Poland in 1939”, ignition sparks are not the fuel. The straw that breaks the camel’s back is not the sole or even the major problem:
“The small countries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Poland most certainly cannot be accused of ‘catalytic’ behavior during these tense times. Should Poland have succumbed for the sake of world peace? The small country argument is sometimes related to the ‘statistical’ theory. As more countries get the bomb, goes the reasoning, something is likely to happen that will cause a bomb to go off. … This fear should be laid to rest. The number of nuclear bombs and warheads have already proliferated to the thousands and the first accidental nuclear explosion has yet to occur. … For example, on December 8, 1964, a B-58 Hustler bomber with a ‘nuclear device’ in its bomb bay caught fire at Bunker Hill Air Force Base, Indiana … no radioactive contamination occurred. Of the four bombs dropped from a B-52 off Palomares, Spain, as a result of a refueling collision in 1966 … there was some relatively harmless contamination caused by two which broke up. A nuclear bomb is a highly complicated device and many sequential steps must be taken to light it off. … At worse, the chemical high explosive components of a bomb might detonate from fire and scatter some nuclear material which could cause a small area to become mildly and harmlessly radioactive, as in Spain. Nothing of this sort is liable to lead to a nuclear war.”
On pages 242-260, in his chapter on “Counterinsurgency and the War in Vietnam”, LeMay points out:
“It is a war waged simultaneously on many fronts and in many forms. It is a cold war and a hot war, and economic war and a political war, a propaganda war and an ideological war. It is waged by the communists according to their own timetable and on battlefields of their choosing. … By 1965 we were bombing North Vietnam and landing combat troops to engage with the Viet Cong. Yet the South Vietnamese army was shot with desertions and down to one-third strength. Equipment worth millions of dollars from the United States was finding its way into Viet Cong hands. … It is a war of flexible response not designed to win but rather to punish, and to punish only enough to bring the Hanoi government to the conference table. … It is a war where our powerful Navy allows foreign ships to supply the enemy with war materials. … It is a war where we allow the one principal harbor – the harbor through which the large majority of enemy supplies must flow – to remain undamaged. … This is the war of flexible response and graduated deterrence applied for the first time. This is the war concocted by the arms controllers of the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations to prevent, they believed, the feared nuclear holocaust. The consequences of such a cruel non-war will be heartache, frustration, and death, rather than a reasonable political settlement. We must change our strategy. …
“The long, drawn-out conflict has created dissension, disillusion, and dispute in America. It has seemed to foster a greater sense of determination and purpose in North Vietnam. … Oriental stoicism and patience make North Vietnam willing to extend the struggle from generation to generation, or so they say, to have a ‘protracted war’. … we are fighting with the commodity most precious to us … the lives of men. And what is our objective? To negotiate. … Our continued pleas for peace and talks can only leave an impression of irresolution, which encourages North Vietnamese resistance. … we dribbled in reinforcements, taking one half-measure after another in the ‘graduated’ manner of flexible response, pursuing a peculiar strategy which said, in effect, ‘Fight the enemy on his own terms.’ … we must fight the war from our position of strength, not theirs. We must fight it at the lowest cost to ourselves and at the greatest cost to the enemy. … Probably the weirdest aspect of this Alice-in-Wonderland war is that we have dropped more explosive on Vietnam than we did on Germany in World War II. … It is not air power that is wanting. It is the wrong employment of air power. … The sanctuary we have granted to the port of Haiphong is one of the strangest anomalies in the history of warfare. During the past two years 827 ships have brought munitions and supplies to North Vietnam. Of these ships, 267 were Russian, 258 were Red Chinese, 94 were from Eastern European countries, and 210 were ships of our alleged allies and foreign air recipients. … There are so many ways we could close that port! We could blockade it. We could bomb it to rubble. We could mine it. We could sink a ship in the entrance channel.”
The American gradual response doctrine in Vietnam backfired and built up resistance and hardness in North Vietnam. When finally the bombing intensity was increased, the people were by then well accustomed to bombing and inured to bombing. Vietnam is the textbook example of what happens when you try to fight a politically correct war: not only do you lose militarily, but you also cause more destruction and suffering in the process of losing and then suffer more savage propaganda from the “peace” movement for having done so. In his chapter on “Limited War”, LeMay explains how Einstein’s equation can be used to intimidate an enemy thus actually preventing the usual massacre:
“Modern delivery systems make it possible to achieve great accuracy in placing weapons on target, and technology has made it possible to tailor the size of the nuclear yield to fit the situation [dial a yield]. The basic target system for nuclear weapons, as in all conflict, is the enemy’s military capability … The introduction of appropriate-sized nuclear weapons should insure an early termination of hostilities, reduce casualties among American and friendly forces, and limit, not expand, the amount of economic disruption and destruction … As to the question of escalation to general nuclear war, it would seem that this is a matter which should concern the Communists more than it does the United States … With United States superiority, the crossing of any threshold of escalation presents an outcome progressively worse for the Communists. Lacking a capability to fight and win a full-fledged war with the United States, they are obliged, in their own interests, to keep any war at a low level of intensity. …
“The idea of controlled escalation is not valid when we are confronted by an irrational enemy. A country bent on suicide cannot be stopped short of that. …
“1. Success in limited war is contingent upon maintaining a superior general war capability.
“2. Escalation must be feared most by the power with the weaker general war capability. …
“Unless we start to win the wars we get into, we may find ourselves overextended around the world on several frontiers, fighting equivocal wars. To maintain such vast military forces America would become an armed camp with all our sons being drafted for these endless foreign wars. God forbid! The 1984 of George Orwell would be here. America could then offer little more to its citizens than communism does to its comrades.”
In a chapter on “Military Superiority” at pages 273-309, LeMay explains that fashionable arms control and weapons parity is a dangerous policy because it encourages aggression and coercion by the enemy:
“The desire to reduce the huge expenditure for armed forces and armaments is universal. Measures to reduce the risk of war or its destructive nature are crucial matters to all. … Why have physical scientists taken up arms control with such consummate zeal? Some scientists have suggested that there is a guilt complex at work. The physical scientists unleashed the horrible genie of nuclear energy and now they feel morally responsible for putting the genie back into the bottle. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [which responded with a damning review of LeMay’s book, written by Dr Ralph Lapp, ignoring the military lessons about war and quibbled about the yields of some Russian missiles] has beat this drum for almost two decades. Activists … set out to change the national ethos by making nuclear war so horrible to contemplate that national defense with nuclear weapons would be considered immoral and unthinkable. … This anti-nuclear movement is a highly charged, emotional ‘cause’ which has attracted many other groups. The peace organizations have joined with vim. Yet so have many able and well-intentioned politicians, diplomats, and businessmen. … These are all people with a crusading zeal to do away with nuclear weapons and save the world from nuclear war. … They conceive of nuclear weapons to be the greatest evil in the world, and this thought seems to becloud all judgement, knowledge, and sometimes even loyalties. …
“The accidental war concept was popularly launched by the novel Red Alert [by Peter George in 1958, which was made into Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb using cobalt bomb propaganda against LeMay, Kahn and Teller], a horror story describing a war started by a crazed SAC commander. … Soon after the story was published in 1958, it was ordered that tactical pilots would be medically examined for possible mental abnormalities. The connection seems obvious. Fail-Safe by Burdick and Wheeler was a later thriller of similar plot. This impossible yarn related how a condenser blew in communications equipment, causing a bomber force to fly past its fail-safe point and attack Moscow. Such a ridiculously inaccurate story, deliberately twisting the whole concept of fail-safe which simply meant that if any part of the system failed the system was safe, was passed off by the authors as an authentic possibility, even a probability. Said the authors, ‘it represents a competent estimate of the technical and scientific factors involved in the ‘fail-safe’ system. …
“War is never ‘cost-effective’ in terms of dollars and blood. People are killed. To them the war is total. You cannot tell bereaved wives, children, and parents that today’s war in Vietnam, for example, is a counter-insurgency exercise into which the United States is putting only a limited effort. Death is final, and drafted boys should not be asked to make this ultimate sacrifice unless the Government is behind them 100 percent. If we pull our punches how can we explain it to their loved ones? … Our losses so far in Vietnam exceed those of the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined. Are we paying this price simply to help a friendly country stop outside aggression, or are we actually fighting expanding communism? … we should never engage in a small war unless we are prepared to fight and win a large war. This is fundamental. … The only way to win a war is to escalate it one way or another above what the enemy can endure. If we feel that we cannot win without unacceptable risk we have no business fighting in the first place.
“There are just two checks on escalation. One is the waning of motivation for fighting the war in the first place. A long grinding war of attrition on the ground might achieve this … The second check on escalation is to so overwhelm your enemy with such heavy and rapid destruction that he loses all hope of winning. Then surrender is an attractive choice when compared to inevitable defeat or certain death. This, of course, is the way we brought Japan to terms in 1945. It was unnecessary to invade with infantry and fight a ground war. We seem to have forgotten this fact. Even though Japan had four million troops under arms with two million guarding her shores, not a shot was fired. We invaded with fourteen hundred military administrators, by air. Not a life was lost in this invasion.
“The Japanese had been highly motivated to wage war against us. Kamikaze tactics and no-surrender policies were typical. Yet a realization that Japan simply could not win and the certainty that continued resistance meant mounting devastation caused her to toss in the sponge. … In the final analysis, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved and dozens of cities spared … In Korea … there were three and a half million military casualties on both sides during three years of drawn-out war. Over a million civilians were killed ...”
On pages 104-5, LeMay recommends ABM, pointing out that enemy nuclear missile warheads are vulnerable to initial nuclear radiation and X-ray ablation extending over immense distances in the vacuum of space by a defensive nuclear explosion, so they are shot down without having to “hit a bullet with a bullet”. On page 106, LeMay points out that on 10 November 1966 Defense Secretary McNamara publicly admitted that Russia was employing these ABM systems around Moscow and Leningrad. The three 300 kt Russian Operation K nuclear tests at altitudes of 290, 150 and 59 km on 22 and 28 October and 1 November 1962, respectively, were ABM system proof tests. Unlike American high altitude nuclear tests (where EMP damage on Hawaii was discovered purely by accident), Russia specifically instrumented burned power transmission lines and telephone lines for EMP damage research before setting off these nuclear tests. Russian unveiled its Griffon ABM in 1963 and “The Galosh ABM was displayed in a Moscow parade in November, 1964.”
Despite this proof-tested Russian ABM accomplishment which would have shot down rogue nuclear missiles falling on Moscow, America never protected its cities by ABM systems. Civil defense is also derided in democracies by utopian ideologies who are rewarded Nobel Peace Prizes for censoring out the facts.
“Appeasement seldom works in the long term ... appeasement will not prevent every possible attack.”
Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1972
Janis, civil defense research psychologist and author of Psychological Stress (Wiley, N.Y., 1958), Stress and Frustration (Harcourt Brace, N.Y., 1971), and Air War and Emotional Stress (RAND Corporation/McGraw-Hill, N.Y., 1951), begins Victims of Groupthink with a study of classic errors by “groupthink” advisers to four American presidents (page iv):
“Franklin D. Roosevelt (failure to be prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor), Harry S. Truman (the invasion of North Korea), John F. Kennedy (the Bay of Pigs invasion), and Lyndon B. Johnson (escalation of the Vietnam War) ... in each instance, the members of the policy-making group made incredibly gross miscalculations about both the practical and moral consequences of their decisions.”
Joseph de Rivera's The Psychological Dimension of Foreign Policy showed how a critic of Korean War tactics was excluded from the advisory group, to maintain a complete consensus for President Truman. Schlesinger's A Thousand Days shows how President Kennedy was misled by a group of advisers on the decision to land 1,400 Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs to try to overthrow Castro's 200,000 troops, a 1:143 ratio. Janis writes in Victims of Groupthink:
“I use the term “groupthink” ... when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”(p. 9)
“... the group's discussions are limited ... without a survey of the full range of alternatives.”(p. 10)
“The objective assessment of relevant information and the rethinking necessary for developing more differentiated concepts can emerge only out of the crucible of heated debate [to overcome inert prejudice/status quo], which is anathema to the members of a concurrence-seeking group.”(p.61)
“One rationalization, accepted by the Navy right up to December 7 [1941], was that the Japanese would never dare attempt a full-scale assault against Hawaii because they would realize that it would precipitate an all-out war, which the United States would surely win. It was utterly inconceivable ... But ... the United States had imposed a strangling blockade ... Japan was getting ready to take some drastic military counteraction to nullify the blockade.”(p.87)
“... in 1914 the French military high command ignored repeated warnings that Germany had adopted the Schlieffen Plan, which called for a rapid assault through Belgium ... their illusions were shattered when the Germans broke through France's weakly fortified Belgian frontier in the first few weeks of the war and approached the gates of Paris. ... the origins of World War II ... Neville Chamberlain's ... inner circle of close associates ... urged him to give in to Hitler's demands ... in exchange for nothing more than promises that he would make no further demands.”(pp.185-6)
“Eight main symptoms run through the case studies of historic fiascoes ... an illusion of invulnerability ... collective efforts to ... discount warnings ... an unquestioned belief in the group's inherent morality ... stereotyped views of enemy leaders ... dissent is contrary to what is expected of all loyal members ... self-censorship of ... doubts and counterarguments ... a shared illusion of unanimity ... (partly resulting from self-censorship of deviations, augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent)... the emergence of ... members who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”(pp.197-8)
“... other members are not exposed to information that might challenge their self-confidence.”(p.206)
Survival at high overpressures from nuclear bombs in Japan, by easy shielding of outdoor radiations
Source: L. Wayne Davis, “Prediction of Urban Casualties and the Medical Load from a High-Yield Nuclear Burst” (based on over 35,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki case histories), Dirkwood Corporation paper DC-P-1060. By contrast, the widely circulated 1979 U. S. Office of Technology Assessment report, “The Effects of Nuclear War”, assumes that just 5-6 psi produces 50% mortality (the computer model this estimate is from ignores floor resistance, like an ice-skating rink in multistory buildings, thus assuming that the blast blows people out of high-rise buildings to be killed by gravity in the fall to the ground), compared to over 15 psi for people indoors at Nagasaki (people indoors were largely protected from blast-duration dependent wind drag effects, and longer duration blast reduces the vertically falling debris load on survivors by blowing debris horizontally, often reducing rather than increasing the overall hazard). Table 5 in the 1979 report “arbitrarily” assumes that 6.7 cal/sq. cm is lethal to people outdoors, whereas the Dirkwood report shows that 16 cal/sq. cm was lethal to 50% of personnel exposed outdoors in thin summer clothing in Hiroshima, and larger amounts are required for higher weapon yields. Clothing and shadows from buildings, trees, fences, and vehicles offered substantial protection. The U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports on Hiroshima and Nagasaki document how people were able to roll and beat out ignited dark colored clothing at very high thermal exposures, usually without sustaining serious burns. Once people are protected against the radiation, flying debris and wind drag by taking cover, Glasstone and Dolan’s 1977 “Effects of Nuclear Weapons” shows in Table 12.38 that an effective peak overpressure of 62 psi is required for 50% lethality from blast effects. Their Table 12.43 shows that the average mass of flying glass fragments decreases with increasing overpressure, from 1.45 grams at 1.9 psi to 0.13 grams at 5.0 psi, making protection against high velocity flying glass splinters and other debris possible. M. K. Drake, et al., “Collateral Damage”, Science Applications, Inc., Defense Nuclear Agency report DNA 4734Z, ADA071371, 1978, page 5-86: “For personnel inside structures, the probability of being hit by glass fragments decreases rapidly as a person moves laterally from behind a window. At 25 degrees from the edge of a window pane, the density of glass fragments is approximately one-tenth the density of fragments measured directly behind the window. ... This was extremely evident in injuries of British civilians during World War II. As the people learned to quit looking out of their windows during bomb raids, the number of glass casualties decreased dramatically.” (Like lightning before thunder, the painfully bright first flash of a nuclear explosion arrives ahead of the slower blast wave, proving a useful warning to duck and cover over large areas of destruction. Fallout consists of small particles which take time to arrive, allowing evacuation or improvised radiation shielding. Fallout predictions only failed during early 1950s tests due to inadequate knowledge of the fallout mechanism and inadequate weather predictions. Modern city buildings with modern fire-resistant furnishings are even less prone to ignition than black air-raid blackout curtains in wartime Hiroshima, which generally failed to start sustained fires. The Hiroshima firestorm was caused by thousands of overturned charcoal stoves in paper screen filled congested wooden housing areas, so overcrowded they were a peacetime fire risk, according to the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey report. With no firestorms, there can be no nuclear winter. In Hiroshima, where there was a firestorm, sunshine was blocked out for 25 minutes as proved by the Hiroshima meteorological sunshine recorder data.)
Above: fallout from 95% 'clean' bomb test Navajo, Bikini Atoll, 1956 (WT-1317 ). Surface burst in the lagoon on a barge, the yield was 4.5 Mt, and it was only 5% fission. Each square in this and the next map has side of 20 minutes of latitude/longitude (= 20 nautical miles or 37 km). The radiation levels are relatively low, 20 times smaller than a fission weapon of similar yield.
Above is the best fallout pattern (from U.S. weapon test report WT-1317 by Drs. Terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere) from the Zuni shot of 3.53 megatons, 15% fission at Bikini Atoll in 1956. It combines all available data, unlike the data in report DASA-1251, which gives unjoined data for the lagoon and the ocean. The ocean data was obtained in three ways, since fallout sinks in water. First, ships lowered probes into the water and measured the rate the fallout sank with time. Second, ships took samples of water from various depths for analysis. Third, the low level of radiation over the ocean was measured by both ships and aircraft, correcting for altitude and shielding of the geiger counter.
14 comments:
How clean nuclear weapons led Dr Samuel T. Choen to invent the neutron bomb circa 1958:
Samuel Cohen
From Wikipedia
Samuel T. Cohen is a physicist who is known for inventing the W70 warhead, the "enhanced neutron weapon" or neutron bomb, the blueprints of which were allegedly stolen by the Chinese [1]. He got his physics PhD from UCLA. In 1944 he worked on the Manhattan project with calculating how neutrons behaved in Fat Man. At RAND Corporation in 1950, his calculations of the intensity of radiation from fallout were included as a special appendix in Samuel Glasstone's book The Effects of Atomic Weapons. In the Vietnam War, Cohen argued that using small neutron bombs would end the war quickly and save many American lives, but politicians were not amenable to his ideas. He was a member of the Los Alamos Tactical Nuclear Weapons Panel in the early 1970s. President Carter delayed the neutron bomb in 1978 [2], but during Reagan's presidency, Cohen claims to have convinced Reagan to make 700 neutron bombs, 350 shells to go into the 8 inch (200-millimetre) howitzer and 350 W70 warheads for the Lance missile [3]. Cohen's backing of investigations into these controversial ideas won him some media attention after many years of being ignored [4]. In 1992 he was featured on the award-winning BBC TV series Pandora's Box episode, To the Brink of Eternity, discussing his battles with officialdom and colleagues at the RAND Corporation.
'Clean' nuclear tests and Cohen's revolutionary invention
In 1956, President Eisenhower announced the testing of a 95% 'clean' (2-stage) fusion weapon, later identified to have been the 11 July Navajo test at Bikini Atoll during Operation Redwing. This weapon had a 4.5 megatons yield. Previous 'dirty' weapons had fission proportions of 50-77%, due to the use of uranium-238 as a 'pusher' around the lithium deuteride (secondary) stage. (The fusion neutrons have energies of up to 14.1 MeV, well exceeding the 1.1 MeV 'fission threshold' for U-238.) The 1956 'clean' tests used a lead pusher, while in 1958 a tungsten carbide pusher was employed. Hans A. Bethe supported clean nuclear weapons in 1958 as Chairman of a Presidential science advisory group on nuclear testing [5]:
"... certain hard targets require ground bursts, such as airfield runways if it is desired to make a crater, railroad yards if severe destruction of tracks is to be accomplished... The use of clean weapons in strategic situations may be indicated in order to protect the local population." (Dr Hans Bethe, 27 March 1958 Top Secret - Restricted Data Report to the NSC Ad Hoc Working Group on the Technical Feasibility of a Cessation of Nuclear Testing (Bethe was the Working Group Chairman, page 9).
In consequence of Bethe's recommendations, on 12 July 1958, the Hardtack-Poplar shot on a barge in the lagoon yielded 9.3 megatons, of which only 4.8% was fission. It was 95.2% clean. It was the clean Mk-41C warhead.
Cohen in 1958 investigated a low-yield 'clean' nuclear weapon and discovered that the 'clean' bomb case thickness scales as the cube-root of yield. So a larger percentage of neutrons escapes from a small detonation, due to the thinner case required to reflect back X-rays during the secondard stage (fusion) ignition. For example, a 1-kiloton bomb would need to have a case only 1/10th the thickness of that for 1-megaton [6].
This means that although most of the neutrons are absorbed by the outer casing in a 1-megaton bomb, in a 1-kiloton bomb they would mostly escape. A neutron bomb is only feasible if the yield is sufficiently high that efficient fusion stage ignition is possible, and if the yield is low enough that the case thickness will not absorb too many neutrons. This means that neutron bombs have a yield range of 1-10 kilotons, with fission proportion varying from 50% at 1-kiloton to 25% at 10-kilotons (all of which comes from the primary stage). The neutron output per kiloton is then approximately 10-15 times greater than for a pure fission implosion weapon or a standard (high yield) strategic warhead like a W87 or W88 [7].
Official U.S. Department of Defense manual on the neutron bomb
Cohen's neutron bomb is not mentioned in the unclassified manual by Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, but is included as an 'enhanced neutron weapon' in chapter 5 of the declassified (formerly secret) manual edited by Philip J. Dolan, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense, effects manual DNA-EM-1, updated 1981 (U.S. Freedom of Information Act).
Provided that the weapon was not used in a thunderstorm, no fallout effects would occur from the use of a neutron bomb according to that manual, as the combination of 500 m burst altitude and low yield prevents fallout in addition to significant thermal and blast effects. The reduction in damage outside the target area is a major advantage of such a weapon to deter massed tank invasions. An aggressor would thus be forced to disperse tanks, which would make them easier to destroy by simple hand-held anti-tank missile launchers.
Cohen stated that he "worked in France on low-yield, highly discriminate tactical nuclear weapons in 1979-1980".
"In 1979, Pope John Paul II conferred on one of the authors (Sam Cohen) a peace medal for his invention, the neutron bomb. This was a small nuclear weapon designed to do its work, killing enemy military forces, without destroying a country’s infrastructure." (Cohen, March 11, 2003)
The Pope, John Paul II, was from Poland and knew that Warsaw Pact forces had a massive tank superiority (though NATO maintained a technical superiority) in Europe and that a deterrent which was designed to minimise civilian casualties was a step away from indiscriminate warfare. Though the neutron bomb's killing by radiation is no different than chemical warfare.
The speed of modern warfare meant that the civilian population would be unlikely to withdraw from combat zones and would suffer a large number of deaths from even low yield nuclear weapons. The very deployment of the neutron bomb threatened an escalation to full scale nuclear retaliation, thus canceling out the supposed benefit of the neutron bomb. Advances in precision anti-tank weapons ultimately made the neutron bomb redundant.
In 1981, the Christian Science Monitor reported that there "are 19,500 tanks in the Soviet-controlled forces of the Warsaw Pact aimed at Western Europe. Of these, 12,500 are Soviet tanks in Soviet units. NATO has 7,000 tanks on its side facing the 19,500." (Joseph C. Harsch, "Neutron Bomb: Why It Worries The Russians," Christian Science Monitor, August 14, 1981, p. 1.) [8]
[edit]
References
Hans A. Bethe, Working Group Chairman, originally Top Secret - Restricted Data Report of the the President's Science Advisory Committee, 28 March 1958, defending on pages 8-9 'clean nuclear weapons tests', online
Terry Triffet and Philip LaRiviere, Characterization of Fallout, Operation Redwing fallout studies, directly comparing contamination from two 'dirty' tests (Tewa and Flathead) to two 'clean' tests (Navajo and Zuni), online
Charles Platt, "Profits of Fear", August 16, 2005 online;
Sam Cohen and Joseph D. Douglass, Jr, "The Nuclear Threat That Doesn't Exist – or Does It?", March 11, 2003, online; Red mercury, fusion-only neutron bombs, Russia, Iraq, etc
---- "North Korea's Nuclear Initiative", April 28 2004 online
---- "Development of New Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons", March 9, 2003, online
---- "The Rogue Nuclear Threat", April 26, 2002, online
Joe Douglass, The Conflict Over Tactical Nuclear Weapons Policy in Europe (1968)
William R. Van Cleave, S. T. Cohen, Nuclear Weapons, Policies, and the Test Ban Issue, 1987, ISBN 0275923126
Samuel T. Cohen, We Can Prevent World War III, 1985, 2001, ISBN 0915463105
---- The Truth About the Neutron Bomb: The Inventor of the Bomb Speaks Out, William Morrow & Co., 1983, ISBN 0688016464
---- Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb (2000), ISBN 0738822302, memoir
Review of Shame published on Amazon: [9]
copy of a comment:
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/lumidek/2255564331801041534/?a=49676#932025
The only paper by Hugh Everett I've ever read, back at the British Library in 1994, was "The Distribution and Effects of Fallout in Large Nuclear Weapon Campaigns",
Operations Research, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1959, pp. 226-248, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0030-364X(195903%2F04)7%3A2%3C226%3ATDAEOF%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H It was complete trash even in 1959, I'm afraid to say.
He used the RAND Corporation fallout model for a start, which is based on nuclear tests at Bikini and Eniwetok where a large amount of sea water was incorporated into the fireball (the fireball in megaton surface burst events was always far large in diameter than the tiny test island or the barge in the lagoon). This led to a second hotspot on average 50-75 miles downwind (there was also one around ground zero) which the RAND model reproduced, but which was due to the salt water precipitating as salt crystals from the mushroom cloud. As the hydroscopic crystals fell through warm humid air layers, they gained weight from absorbing moisture, and became salt slurry particles which finally landed about 2-3 hours downwind in an irregular shaped hotspot. For a couple of examples of such fallout patterns at Bikini Atoll, see my post:
http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/clean-nuclear-weapon-tests-navajo-and.html
For another example, see http://www.answers.com/topic/bravo-rand-corp-jpg
So I think Hugh Everett's fallout statistics are based on an implicit assumption that in a nuclear war the targets will be fought over pacific atolls in warm, humid locations.
His paper doesn't discuss any of this essential background, and is typical of the b******* calculations that abound on nuclear weapons effects.
The key declassified report by Dr Carl F. Miller is USNRDL-466, which since this post was written (which links to a copy of that report on a U.S. government run server), has been removed from the U.S. government document collection or the link has become corrupted. Hence the link in this post to USNRDL-466 does not work any longer.
An alternative server also hosts that crucial report by Dr Miller here:
http://survival-training.info/Library/Nuclear/Nuclear%20-%20Decontamination%20of%20Fallout%20-%20Part%20II%20-%20Composition%20of%20Contaminants%20-%20C.%20Miller.pdf
Table 11 (on page 41 of the original document) contains all of the originally Secret - Restricted Data on neutron induced activities U-239/Np-239, U-237, and Np-240 in the fallout from 13 different key Jangle, Castle, Redwing and Plumbbob fallout producing tests.
Notice that i(1) on the top line of the table data is the reference 1 hour dose rate assuming 1 atom/fission, so that allows you to work out the atoms/fission ratios from the 1 hour dose rates given in that table.
E.g., the Sugar and Uncle shots of Jangle in 1951 both produced 1-hour reference dose rates of 0.106 units due to U-239, which itself would produce 0.1799 units if there was 1 atom/fission of U-239 produced.
Hence, Sugar and Uncle both produced 0.106/0.1799 = 0.59 atoms/fission of U-239 and Np-239 (ignore the data given in the table for Np-239 because that is for the actual Np-239 atoms per fission created by 1 hour, not the total Np-239; since Np-239 is created from the decay of U-239, the total amount of Mp-239 produced is identical to the amount of U-239 produced, but because U-239 has a half life of 23.5 minutes, only 83% of the Np-239 has actually been formed within 1 hour of detonation).
As the table shows, only thermonuclear weapons produce significant quantities of U-237.
It is also worthy of note that the fission bomb tests Diablo and Shasta of Plumbbob in 1957 both produced only 0.10 atom/fission of U-239/Np-239, which is only about one-sixth of the production in the 1951 Sugar and Uncle tests.
The reason is that the 1951 tests Sugar and Uncle were old-fashioned implosion bombs with thick U-238 neutron "reflectors" that (instead of simply reflecting neutrons back) captured a large proportion of neutrons emitted from the core, whereas the 1957 tests Diablo and Shasta did not employ U-238 as a thick neutron reflector. The smaller amounts of U-238 contained in Diablo and Shasta was present in the highly-enriched uranium that was used in the composite uranium-plutonium cores that were in use at that time.
Notice also that Castle-Bravo produced 0.56 atoms/fission of U-239/Np-239, 0.10 atoms/fission of U-237, and 0.14 atoms/fission of Np-240, according to Dr Miller's secret data.
Japanese investigators tried to measure the capture/fission ratios from the Castle-Bravo fallout that landed on the "Lucky Dragon No. 5" which was 100 miles downwind of the detonation (it was just north-west of Rongelap when fallout arrived).
To avoid secrecy, Dr Miller quoted the (unclassified) Japanese findings in his unclassified 1963 "Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures" SRI report and also in his 1964 SRI report "Biological and Radiological Effects of Fallout from Nuclear Explosions": the data from the Japanese physicists suggest a figure of 0.30 atoms/fission for U-239/Np-239 and 0.15 atoms/fission for U-237.
These figures are wrong: the first is too low and the second is too high. You can't chemically separate small quantities of these nuclides because they are quite similar chemically, so you can't distinguish the beta particles, only the gamma ray energies using a crystal and scintillation counter. The problem of accurate determination comes down to the quality of the equipment and the quality of the samples of the fallout. The fallout that had been subjected to spray and wind on the decks of the "Lucky Dragon No. 5" for two weeks on the voyage back to Japan was not idea, and nor was the calibration of the instruments which the Japanese physicists used.
The American data is far more reliable. In addition, the Japanese physicists did not know about fission product fractionation (see table 8 on page 35 of the declassified report by Dr Miller for fully corrected detailed fractionation data downwind from the Redwing 1956 tests), which reduced the accuracy of their determination of capture atoms/fission. This is because, in order to determine the number of say U-239 atoms/fission, you need to determine not only the number of U-239 atoms in your sample, but also the number of fissions. If you try to determine the number of fissions by measuring the number of Sr-90 atoms present and using the production ratio of Sr-90 on standard "M" shaped fission fragment abundance graphs, you will underestimate the number of fissions, because Sr-90 is depleted from local fallout due to the fireball temperature. The correct way to work out the amount of fission in a sample is to determine the number of atoms of something that is not fractionated, such as Nb-95 (the Americans originally in the 1950s used Mo-99 as the reference nuclide, switching to Nb-95 in the 1960s because it is more abundant in fallout, and is thus easier to measure with greater accuracy).
One other measurement of interest for the 1956 Redwing series is in the report by M. Morgenthau, H.E. Shaw, L.M. Hardin, R.C. Tomkins, and P.W. Krey, Preliminary Report, Operation Redwing, Project 2.65, Land Fallout Studies, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Sandia Base, Albuquerque, ITR-1319, January 1957: the Redwing-Lacrosse 40 kt test produced 0.2 atom/fission of Np-239.
In his 1959 report The Decontamination of Surfaces Contaminated with Fallout from Nuclear Detonations at Sea, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense laboratory, report USNRDL-TR-329, Dr Miller makes it clear that although Np-239 and U-237 can contrubute 50% of the gamma dose rate some days after a thermonuclear explosion, neutron induced activity from Na-24 in sea water is trivial by comparison.
Dr terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere support this with detailed tables of neutron induced activity from a variety of different thermonuclear weapons (clean and dirty fission yields) tested during Operation Redwing in 1956, in their report Characterization of Fallout, weapon test report WT-1317 (1961):
http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/clean-nuclear-weapon-tests-navajo-and.html
Table 11 (on page 41 of the Dr Miller's report USNRDL-466) allows the following product atom/fission ratios to be deduced:
J-Sugar: 0.59 atom/fission of U239
J-Uncle: 0.59 atom/fission of U239
C-Bravo: 0.56 atom/fission of U239, 0.10 atom/fission of U237, 0.14 atom/fission of U240
C-Romeo: 0.66 atom/fission of U239, 0.10 atom/fission of U237, 0.23 atom/fission of U240
C-Koon: 0.72 atom/fission of U239, 0.10 atom/fission of U237
C-Union: 0.44 atom/fission of U239, 0.20 atom/fission of U237, 0.07 atom/fission of U240
R-Zuni: 0.31 atom/fission of U239, 0.20 atom/fission of U237, 0.005 atom/fission of U240
R-Tewa: 0.36 atom/fission of U239, 0.20 atom/fission of U237, 0.09 atom/fission of U240
P-Diablo: 0.10 atom/fission of U239
P-Shasta: 0.10 atom/fission of U239
P-Coulomb C: 0.03 atom/fission of U239
The reason why Castle shot Union produced twice the ratio of U-237 atoms per fission that Bravo produced was that Union used a thermonuclear fuel consisting of lithium deuteride enriched to 95% lithium-6 and only 5% lithium-7, whereas Bravo used unenriched lithium deuteride, which contains only 7.42% lithium-6 and 92.58% lithium-7. Since lithium-6 is more readily fissioned by neutrons to produce tritium than lithium-7 is, the enriched lithium-6 in the Union bomb resulted in a higher ratio of tritium fusion reactions to deuterium fusion reactions than Bravo did. (Bravo did involve some tritium fusion, but the relative abundance of tritium in the Bravo bomb was somewhat lower than that in the Union bomb.) Consequently, Union produced more high-energy tritium fusion neutrons than Bravo did. Because U237 is only created in large quantities by high-energy neutrons, it is a sensitive indicator of the relative amount of energy derived from tritium fusion in a thermonuclear weapon. Deuterium fusion produces neutrons with lower energy than those produced in tritium fusion reactions. Therefore, the higher the amount ratio of tritium to deuterium produced in the bomb, the higher the production of U237.
Two deuterium atoms can fuse into helium-3, releasing a 2.4 MeV neutron. When tritium and deuterium fuse into helium-4, however, a 14.1 MeV neutron is emitted. (By conservation of momentum, the neutron takes most of the energy in fusion reactions. D + D -> He-3 + n results in the release of 3.2 MeV of energy, of which 75% is the kinetic energy of the neutron. T + D -> He-4 + n results in the release of 17.6 MeV of energy, of which 80% is the kinetic energy of the neutron.)
Quite a lot of other piecemeal data for other Redwing tests has also been declassified and released in other formerly secret reports.
WT-1317 page 65, table 3.14 states that Redwing-Flathead had a Np-239 product/fission ratio of 0.41 atom/fission.
As already stated in the previous comment, ITR-1319, implies that the Redwing-Lacrosse test produced 0.2 atom/fission of Np-239.
WT-1315 page 29, table 4.1 gives the relative activities from fission products and U239 at two times after burst for Redwing tests Cherokee, Zuni and Navajo. Because we already know that the absolute value of the ratio for Zuni is 0.31 atom/fission of U239 (from Dr Miller's report USNRDL-466, page 41, table 11), we can use WT-1315 page 29 table 4.1 to obtain the Np239 product/fission ratios from Cherokee and Navajo. As a result, we find that Cherokee produced 0.36 atoms/fission of Np239, while Navajo produced about 0.085 atom/fission of Np239.
(The Np-239 production shown for Navajo in the table of the main body of this blog post is incorrect.)
Regarding the clean neutron bomb controversy, the 1988 book by the late Chuck Hansen, U.S. Nuclear Weapons (Orion Books), gives some relevant information on pages 175-201:
"W-79 [this is the nuclear warhead of a rocket-propelled 8-inch diameter, 43-inch long, 215 pounds mass, artillery shell; this artillery shell includes a rocket motor to double the usual 8-inch shell's range to 18 miles, and has a target sensor and programmable height of burst as well as Category D PAL built into it to prevent unauthorised use]
"... Development engineering of the W-79 started at Livermore in January 1975. By 1976, the Army was developing a warhead for an eight-inch atomic artillery shell that would be the first U.S. weapon specially designed to reduce collateral damage from blast and radioactivity.
[Because 80% of the energy in tritium-deuterium fusion is released as 14.1 MeV (highly penetrating) neutrons, the blast and thermal output of the bomb is reduced and will be negligible for a 1kt neutron bomb burst at say 500 metres over the target, where only neutron radiation will be a hazard.]
"In January 1977, President Gerald Ford approved a Stockpile Memorandum that featured the W-79 as an 'enhanced radiation' weapon (the so-called 'neutron bomb which is really not much more than a boosted fission device). Production engineering began in March; this phase was suspended (for political reasons) at the end of September and not resumed until the beginning of November 1978.
[Actually, as Cohen has pointed out, the mechanism of the neutron bomb is that a standard Teller-Ulam design when reduced to very low yields automatically has a high neutron output. The case thickness, needed to reflect X-rays from the fission primary to the physically separate fusion charge within the weapon, is proportional to the cube-root of the total required yield of the weapon. So the case thickness required for a Teller-Ulam device of 1 kt is only 10% of that required for a total yield of 1 Mt. It is this massive, order-of-magnitude reduction of case thickness for a low-yield Teller-Ulam bomb, which makes the neutron bomb effect occur: the thin casing of a 1 kt Teller-Ulam allows over 90% of the neutrons to escape without being scattered and degraded to low energy, whereas the thick casing needed for a 1 Mt Teller-Ulam bomb results in something like 90% of the neutrons being captured or scattered and degraded to low energy.]
"The first production unit appeared in July 1981. Quantity production started in September and continued until August 1986 after 550 (including 325 'enhanced radiation' and 225 standard) W-79s were produced."
Hansen goes on to state that the W-79-1 model of the W-79 was the neutron bomb, which had a selectable yield of up to 2 kt: "the W-79-1 has three yields between a few hundred tons up to about two kilotons. Fission-fusion percentages range from 50:50 at the lower yield up to 25:75 at the higher yield."
The W-79-1 warhead is extremely small and the primary employs cylindrical implosion of Pu-239, instead of spherical implosion. I.e., the primary contains a core cylinder of Pu-239 which is surrounded by a beryllium neutron reflector and then a cylindrical shell of chemical high explosive.
This use of cylindrical implosion (not spherical implosion) for igniting fusion reactions was an old principle which was first tested in the Greenhouse-George nuclear test of 9 May 1951.
The reason of using a cylindrical primary is that the two ends of the fissioning plutonium rod in the centre are exposed and by placing a fusion charge nearby the exposed end, it is far easier to ignite fusion than in the case of a spherical implosion bomb where chemical high explosive has to first absorb then reradiate X-rays (which is a less efficient process because some energy is absorbed and used to create a shock wave instead of being passed on as X-rays, and the geometry - i.e. the bigger distance between the fusion charge and the fissioning material in the primary reduces the flux of radiation that hits the fusion charge).
Chuck Hansen's description claims that the fusion charge is a removable 'tritium reservoir' that is placed into a hollow area within the plutonium clinder of the fission primary, as in a boosted weapon. Actually, this is incorrect. In a cylindrical implosion weapon, unlike a spherical implosion weapon, fusion materials can be placed near the fissile material on the end of the plutonium cylinder, without taking up room within the cylinder itself: X-rays emitted by the end of the fissioning plutonium cylinder can then be used as in the Teller-Ulam configuration to do the necessary compression of the physically separated fusion fuel, which is a more efficient situation than 'boosting'.
Cylindrical implosion of the primary is required in a 2 kt neutron bomb artillery shell in order (1) to make the bomb fit into an artillery shell, and (2) to make the Teller-Ulam fusion system work efficiently at such low yields by eliminating the usual high explosive layer that is between the fissioning primary and the fusion charge if spherical implosion is used.
It is correct, however, that for efficient operation a very low yield neutron bomb of only 1 kt can utilise a fusion charge including a capsule of tritium gas (instead of just solid lithium-6 deuteride as is used in large thermonuclear weapons). This is not "boosting" as Chuck Hansen claimed, because the tritium is physically separated from the fission primary. The neutron bomb employs the Teller-Ulam concept. (It is not simply a boosted weapon, or the neutrons would be unable to escape easily.)
The W-66 warhead is another American neutron bomb, but the W-66 was for the "Sprint" ABM missile warhead: the neutrons would destroy incoming enemy ICBM warheads within the atmosphere (hence the need for low yield and no collateral damage, and the choice of using clean neutron bombs was ideal).
Theoretical research for the W-66 began with Samuel Cohen's work on the neutron bomb in 1958, but production engineering for the W-66 neutron bomb for the Sprint ABM warhead only began in January 1972, and the first W-66 warheads were manufactured in June 1974. By March 1975, 70 W-66 warheads had been produced.
The W-70 Mod 3 is another example of a neutron bomb. It was the warhead for the U.S. Army "Lance" missile.
Production engineering on the W-70 began in December 1970 and manufacture began in June 1973. By July 1977, 900 W-70s had been produced; these were ordinary thermonuclear warheads with selectable yields of up to 100 kt.
The development of the W-70 Mod 3, the neutron bomb version, began in April 1976 but was suspended by President Carter at the end of September 1977 for political reasons. Production engineering was resumed on 1 November 1978 and manufacture began in May 1981. From August 1981 to February 1983, 380 neutron bomb W-70 Mod 3 were built:
"Yield of the W-70 Mod 3 is selectable as one of two values: one slightly less than a kiloton and the other slightly in excess of a kiloton. Both yields are about 60% fusion and 40% fission." (Page 201 of Chuck Hansen's U.S. Nuclear Weapons, orion Books, 1988.)
The W-70 neutron bomb warhead is 465 pounds in mass, 97 inches long and 22 inches in diameter.
The link in a comment above to a post about Samuel Cohen's neutron bomb is defective.
The correct links are:
http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/05/revised-edition-of-sam-cohens-shame-is.html
http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/06/third-edition-of-sam-cohens-book.html
Also relevant (discusses natural nuclear "pollution" hysteria such as censorship from the popular media of all reports on the safe and complete containment of nuclear waste from the 15 Oklo nuclear reactors in the massive uranium ore seams of Gabon, Africa within sedimentary rock for the past 1,700 million years):
http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/05/radioactivity-lingering-in-hiroshima.html
Dr Terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere, Operation Redwing, Project 2.63, Characterization of Fallout, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, 1961, Secret – Restricted Data, weapon test report WT-1317, page 120:
"The induced products contributed 63 percent of the total dose rate in the Bikini Lagoon area 110 hours after Shot Zuni; and 65 percent of the dose rate from Shot Navajo products at an age of 301 days was due to induced products, mainly Mn-54 and Ta-182."
There is a page about Professor Triffet (who taught engineering at the University of Arizona after producing the 1961 weapon test report WT-1317, and died in 2003 from cancer at age 80), here.
Some information on the measured capture atoms/fissions ratios for cobalt isotopes in the clean (5% fission) 4.5 Mt Rewing-Navajo nuclear test have been published in the report:
P. O. Strom, J. L. Mackin, D. MacDonald, and P.E. Zigman, "LONG-LIVED COBALT ISOTOPES OBSERVED IN FALLOUT FROM THE NAVAJO DETONATION OF OPERATION REDWING", U.S. Naval Radiological Defense laboratory, technical report USNRDL-TR-215, 26 March 1958, originally classified Secret - Restricted Data.
Table 3 on page 7 states:
0.0088 Co-60 atoms/fission
0.0014 Co-57 atoms/fission
0.00074 Co-58 atoms/fission
With regard to the comment immediately above, it is interesting to note that the authors also wrote an unclassified report on the topic, published in the journal "Science" in 1958 (albeit without the specific nuclear test data references of the classified version of the report):
Peter O. Strom, James L. Mackin, Douglas MacDonald, and Paul E. Zigman, et al., "Long-lived cobalt isotopes observed in fallout", Science, vol. 128, August 22, issue number 3321, 1958, pp. 417-9.
This report notes that Co-60 is the most important gamma emitter in Redwing test fallout for the period of from 1-10 years after nuclear detonation. It also notes that the Co-60 originated from neutron capture in impurities in the weapon (i.e., the steel casing of the bomb and the steel barge that supported the bomb), because the amount of cobalt in the sea water around the detonation was far to small to account for the observed neutron-induced Co-60 activity.
Note that prior to the publication of Strom's report by Science in 1958, Science had earlier published a report by Shipman and others about the discovery of neutron-induced manganese-54 in fallout:
William H. Shipman, Philip Simone, and Herbert V. Weiss, "Detection of manganese-54 in radioactive fallout", Science, vol. 126, November 8, 1957, issue number 3280, pp. 971-2.
In addition, Drs. Ralph F. Palumbo and Frank G. Lowman reported on iron-55 (Fe-55) in fallout at Kabelle Island in Rongelap Atoll, in their report "The Occurrence of Antimony 125, Europium 155, Iron 55, and Other Radionuclides in Rongelap Atoll Soil", report UWFL-56, April 1958.
The neutron-induced iron-55, manganese-54 and cobalt-60 from neutron capture in the steel casing and delivery system around the bomb are major contributors - particularly at times around a year after detonation - to the fallout gamma dose rate in fractionated local fallout (depleted of Cs-137 due to its gaseous precursor in the hot fireball which prevents much of it condensing on the fast-falling large fallout particles which leave the fireball before it has cooled and condensed).
Some vital reports by Dr. Carl F. Miller:
Accession Number : AD0476572
Title : BIOLOGICAL AND RADIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF FALLOUT FROM NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS. CHAPTER 1: THE NATURE OF FALLOUT. CHAPTER 2: FORMATION OF FALLOUT PARTICLES
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD476572&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
Corporate Author : STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA
Personal Author(s) : Miller, Carl F.
Handle / proxy Url : http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD476572
Report Date : MAR 1964
Pagination or Media Count : 89
Abstract : Contents: The Nature of Fallout; Local Fallout; World-Wide Fallout; Potential Hazards from Fallout; Radioactive Decay; The Standard Intensity and Contour Properties. Formation of Fallout Particles; General Description of Fallout Formation Processes; The Structure and Composition of Individual Fallout Particles; Solubility Properties of Fallout; Radioactive Elements in Fallout; The Condensation Process.
also:
FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL COUNTERMEASURES, VOLUME 1
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD410522&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
The major purpose of this report is to outline and discuss these physical processes and the important parameters on which they depend.
Accession Number : AD0410522
Title : FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL COUNTERMEASURES, VOLUME 1
Corporate Author : STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA
Personal Author(s) : Miller, Carl F.
Handle / proxy Url : http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD410522
Report Date : JAN 1963
Pagination or Media Count : 402
Abstract : The major purpose of this report is to outline and discuss these physical processes and the important parameters on which they depend. The data, data analyses, data correlation schemes, and discussions presented here are organized to emphasize size basic principles so that an appropriate methodology can be applied in evaluating the radiological consequences of nuclear war. An explosion of any kind, detonated near the surface of the earth, causes material to be thrown up or drawn into a chimney of hot rising gases and raised aloft. In a nuclear explosion, two important processes occur: (1) radioactive elements, which are produced and vaporized in the process, condense into or on this material; and (2) a large amount of non-radioactive material, rises thousands of feet into the air before the small particles begin to fall back. This permits the winds to scatter them over large areas of the earth's surface. Thus, when the particles reach the surface of the earth they are far from their place of origin and contain, within or on their surface, radioactive elements. Whether they are solid particles produced from soil minerals, or liquid (salt- containing) particles produced from sea water, they are called fallout. The composition of fallout can be described in terms of two or three components. One is the inactive carrier; this consists of the environmental material at the location of the detonation and is the major component in a near-surface detonation. The second component includes all the radioactive elements in the fallout.
and:
Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures. Volume 2
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD410521&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
Title : Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures. Volume 2. Corporate Author : STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA. Personal Author(s) : Miller, Carl F.
Accession Number : AD0410521
Title : Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures. Volume 2
Corporate Author : STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA
Personal Author(s) : Miller, Carl F.
Handle / proxy Url : http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD410521
Report Date : JAN 1963
Pagination or Media Count : 290
Descriptors : *RADIOACTIVE CONTAMINATION, *FALLOUT, CLEANING, SEA WATER
Subject Categories : RADIO COUNTERMEASURES
RADIOACTIVITY, RADIOACTIVE WASTES & FISSION PROD
I've just found more information on neutron capture to fission ratios for U-237, Np-239 etc.
At the U.K. National Archives, category DEFE16, there is are reports containing declassified data for the Np-239 production by 1957 U.K. tests ANTLER (3 shots at Maralinga), all very low atoms/fission due to the absence of a thick U-238 tamper (presumably those shots used beryllium neutron reflectors instead of U-238). There was some variation in the exact figures due to the different bomb designs: ANTLER used U-235, Pu-235 and composite core. The U-235 core bomb was only of course enriched to say 93.5% U-235 so it contained 6.5% U-238 or so, which produced more U-237 and U/Np-239 than the pure plutonium core device. The design of each ANTLER device bomb core is unclassified and was published in 1987 in the book by official Atomic Weapons Establishment historial Laura Arnold, in her book "A Very Special Relationship", H.M. Stationery Office.
There is also data in a report on U-237 by Hanna of AWRE in the DEFE16 files at the U.K. National Archives for the two 1953 U.K. TOTEM tests at Emu Field, Australia, giving the U-237 production, which was low because they were pure fission shots. I don't have my notes handy but from memory I think the U-237 production was only 1/3,000 atom per fission. The higher production in thermonuclear weapons occurs due to the higher neutron energy you get from fusion neutrons (up to and including 14.7 MeV), which well exceeds the neutron threshold energy needed for the reaction:
U-238 + neutron -> U-237 + 2 neutrons.
Another source of data on U/Np-239 production in U.K. nuclear test fallout in atoms/fission is available in the U.K. National Archines in George R. Stanbury's Home Office civil defence report:
HO 226/75
British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch in report A12/SA/RM 75, The Contribution of U239 and Np239 to the Radiation from Fallout, November 1959, Confidential (declassified only in June 1988).This gives a collection of early U.K. test data. One error that I noticed in Stanbury's calculations is that he wrongly predicts the U-239 contribution at early times. Stanbury correctly uses the exponential decay law for a single nuclide in combination with the [time]^{-1.2} decay law of fallout composed of 200 nuclides, to deduce that a neutron induced activity contributes a maximum % to the fallout decay rate at a time equal to 1.2/(ln 2) = 1.2/0.693 = 1.73 times its half life. E.g., for U-239 with 23.5 minutes half life, it contributes a maximum % to fallout at 23.5*1.73 = 40 minutes after burst, and for Np-239 with 56 hours half life, the maximum % contribution to the fallout occurs at 4 days after burst. But Stanbury gets the formula wrong for the U-239 contribution, calculating 8% peak contribution at 40 minutes, which I found to be in error, although it is not an important error (Stanbury gets the correct figure of 40% peak contribution by Np-239 to the gamma radiation of fallout at 4 days after burst, however).
The new data I've just found is in the excellent and vital report on fallout effects from U.K. tests in Australia on the public health (which is worth study for the other information it contains on fallout in addition, and will be used to update blog posts here):
Keith N. Wise and John R. Moroney, Public Health Impact of Fallout from British Nuclear Weapons Tests in Australia, 1952-1957, Australian Radiation Laboratory, report ARL/TR105, ISSN 0157-1400, May 1992, pages 6-7:
http://www.arpansa.gov.au/pubs/technicalreports/tr105.pdf"The production ratios in atoms per fission, suggested by Crocker and Turner (1965) for neutron-induced radionuclides in fallout, reflect a different generation of nuclear weapons from at least some of those included among the twelve tested by Britain in Australia some ten years earlier. For example, for low yield explosions, Crocker and Turner give neptunium [Np]-239 and uranium [U]-237 as the dominant induced radionuclides, with typical production ratios
" - neptunium-239: 0.018 atoms per fission, from neutron capture in uranium-238
" - uranium-237: 0.026 atoms per fission, from (n, 2n) on uranium-238.
"Whereas measurements on airborne debris from HURRICANE (Gale 1954b), TOTEM (T1 and T2: Gale 1954a) and BUFFALO (KITE: Marston 1957) give values of neptunium-239 atoms per fission two orders of magnitude higher [this is due to the historical weapon design change, from using U-238 tampers around the bomb core in early tests, to using beryllium neutron reflectors in place of U-238 tampers in later designs]. A more detailed comparison is made in Table 2.1.
"Table 2.1
"NEPTUNIUM-239 IN FALLOUT
"ORIGIN ATOMS PER FISSION
"Crocker and Turner (1965) 0.018
"HURRICANE 0.6+/-0.1
"TOTEM-1 1.8 +/-0.2
"TOTEM-2 2.5 +/-0.3"
REFERENCES:
Glenn R. Crocker and T. Turner, Calculated activities, exposure rates, and gamma spectra for unfractionated fission products, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, report USNRDL-TR-1009 (1965).
Gale 1954a: H. J. Gale, Operation TOTEM. Radioactive sampling and analysis report. Atomic Weapons Research Establishment report T6/54, 1954.
Gale 1954b: H. J. Gale, Operation HURRICANE Group Reports (part 51). Measurements of the radioactivity of an airborne sample of the cloud collected at Broome, Western Australia. Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, report T89/54, 1954.
Marston 1957: H. R. Marston, The accumulation of radioactive iodine in the thyroids of grazing animals subsequent to atomic weapons tests. Unpublished manuscript, July 1957.
"There is also data in a report on U-237 by Hanna of AWRE in the DEFE16 files at the U.K. National Archives for the two 1953 U.K. TOTEM tests at Emu Field, Australia, giving the U-237 production, which was low because they were pure fission shots. I don't have my notes handy but from memory I think the U-237 production was only 1/3,000 atom per fission."
REFERENCE:
U.K. National Archives: DEFE 16/411
Determination of U237 production in Operation Totem
by F. C. Hanna
1954
Report No N/M 68
U-237 results from neutron capture in U-238 followed by double neutron emission, the n,2n reaction first discovered by Professor Kenjiro Kimura, who used this reaction to discover Uranium-237, and later found this isotope in the CASTLE-BRAVO fallout that landed on the Japanese fishing boat 'Lucky Dragon' on 1 March 1954.
Clean strategic weapons were already stockpiled.That was MK-36C(6 MT,96%fusion).Full-yield version of MK36 had a yieid 19 mt ,10mt-was false.
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