Update, Tuesday 19 November 2024:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4v0rey0jzo: "Vladimir Putin has approved changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, setting out new conditions under which the country would consider using its arsenal. The doctrine now says an attack from a non-nuclear state, if backed by a nuclear power, will be treated as a joint assault on Russia. The update was proposed in September and rubber stamped on Tuesday [19 November 2024], the 1,000th day of the war with Ukraine. It also follows Washington’s decision on Monday to allow Ukraine to fire long-range US missiles into Russia. Under the changes, a large attack on Russia with conventional missiles, drones or aircraft could meet the criteria for a nuclear response, as could an attack on Belarus or any critical threat to Russia's sovereignty. Any aggression against Russia by a state which is a member of a coalition would be seen by Moscow as aggression from the whole group. The updates expand the number of countries and coalitions, and the kinds of military threats, subject to a possible nuclear response, according to state-run news agency Tass."
Max Seddon and Chris Cook, "Leaked Russian military files reveal criteria for nuclear strike", Financial Times newspaper (UK), 28 Feb 2024: "The exercises offer a rare insight into how Russia views its nuclear arsenal as a cornerstone of its defence policy — and how it trains forces to be able to carry out a nuclear first strike in some battlefield conditions. ... The slides summarise the threshold as a combination of factors where losses suffered by Russian forces “would irrevocably lead to their failure to stop major enemy aggression”, a “critical situation for the state security of Russia”. ... Russia’s military is also expected to be able to use tactical nuclear weapons for a broad array of goals, including “containing states from using aggression ... or escalating military conflicts”, “stopping aggression”, preventing Russian forces from losing battles or territory, and making Russia’s navy “more effective”. Putin said last June that he felt “negatively” about using tactical nuclear strikes, but then boasted that Russia had a larger non-strategic arsenal than NATO countries. “Screw them, you know, as people say,” Putin said. ... The documents reflect patterns seen in exercises the Russian military held regularly before and since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. ... While Russia’s president has the sole authority to launch a first nuclear strike, the low threshold for tactical nuclear use set out in the documents conforms with a doctrine some western observers refer to as “escalating to de-escalate”. Under this strategy a tactical weapon could be used to try to prevent Russia from becoming embroiled in a sprawling war, particularly one in which the US might intervene. Using what it calls “fear inducement”, Moscow would seek to end the conflict on its own terms by shocking the country’s adversary with the early use of a small nuclear weapon — or securing a settlement through the threat to do so."
BELOW: Secret "For Official Use" and individually numbered Russian nuclear defense manual (169 pages long, T. F. Myasnikova, technical editor) entitled "КРАТКИЙ СПРАВОЧНИК ПО БОЕВЫМ СВОЙСТВАН ЯДЕРНОГО ОРУЖИЯ" [= "A Brief Guide to the Combat Properties of Nuclear Weapons"] states: "Ядерное оружие обладает значительно большей разрушительной силой по сравнению с обычными видами оружия, но существуют простые и надежные методы защиты от него." [= Nuclear weapons have significantly greater destructive power than conventional weapons, but there are simple and reliable methods of protecting against them."] It adds: "В этом руководстве представлен краткий обзор ядерного оружия, средств и методов защиты от ядерной угрозы, а также инструкции о том, как действовать в случае применения ядерного оружия." [= "This guide provides a brief overview of nuclear weapons, the means and methods of defending against a nuclear threat, and instructions on what to do in the event of a nuclear weapon being used."] The manual contains data tables on damage to Russian military equipment based on Russian nuclear weapons tests, as shown above (this manual is the 2nd edition, dated 1969, but since Russian atmospheric nuclear tests ended in 1962, the data is still valid today). The Russian peak overpressure unit is the kg/cm^2 which equal to 1 atmosphere or 14.7 psi in classic American units or 101 kPa in Western SI units (1 kg/cm^2 = 10 tons/m^2 = 1 atmosphere = 14.7 psi = 101 kPa). Page 104 states that for 1 kiloton-1 megaton yields, Russian "Basement shelters for the population (type III shelters)" require 2-4 kg/cm^2 or 30-60 psi for destruction (making them harder than the concrete buildings surviving near ground zero in Hiroshima), while hydroelectric dams and underground utility pipes for water, sewage and gas supply require 10-15 kg/cm^2 or 150-225 psi for destruction. The hardest targets listed (on page 100) are the concrete runways at airports, which require in excess of 20 kg/cm^2 or 300 psi for destruction by cracking and spalling (ground shock effects). Note particularly Table 41 at pages 92-93, where severe damage (destruction) radii are given for Russian tactical nuclear missiles, cruise missiles, jet fighters, jet bombers, nuclear artillery guns, anti-aircraft guns, mortars, light and heavy machine guns, light and heavy grenade launchers, for air and surface bursts and for 13 yield classes from 1 kiloton to 1 megaton (including the calculated damage pressures in kg/cm^2, separately shown for surface and air bursts). Also, note that it compiles Russian data on measured EMP from nuclear tests in Tables 23 and 24 on page 71, showing the induced voltages as a function of weapon yield, type of conductor (aerial or underground buried power cable), and distance from ground zero. This proves Russian capabilities to use EMP effects from nuclear weapons. For example, Table 23 shows that 10 kV was induced in a 10m aerial at 3.3 km from a 1 megaton low altitude detonation. Note also that Russia found (Table 38) that forest area fires (not isolated fires) cannot occur after surface bursts in coniferous forests even at megaton yields, because of the low angle of elevation of the fireball and because the blast wave following the heat flash blows out most fires, although fire areas can occur at certain distances from ground zero in deciduous and mixed forests for higher-yield surface bursts. This detailed analysis proves Russian preparation for tactical nuclear war is true.
KEY FAILURES OF TODAY'S "MINIMAL DETERRENCE" (KAHN'S "TYPE 1 DETERRENT" AKA THE DREADNOUGHTS THAT FAILED TO DETER THE INVASION OF BELGIUM IN 1914 THAT TRIGGERED WWI):
1. It doesn't deter world war situations, which both occurred because of invasions of 3rd parties (invasion of Belgium 1914, Poland 1939), akin to the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine by Russia. In other words, you need credible deterrence of major provocations.
2. It doesn't even deter a direct attack by fanatical opponents, such as the October 2023 Hamas surprise attack on Israel or the December 1941 Pearl Harbor surprise attack or the 9/11 attack by war-crazy thugs.
3. It assumes sanity on the enemy side, while mental pressures are brought to bear on the sanity of the opponent in response to major provocations, e.g. "sanctions" against the enemy hardens their resolve (aided by internal state propaganda of the enemy, blaming hardships on you), just as "pressure" such as napalming Vietnam failed to deter the Tet Offensive. If you ban your use of overwhelming force to credibly stop or deter an opponent, you don't end in a fairy tale land of mutual love and understanding, but with a battle-hardened opponent, with the fighting mentality of a wounded animal. In other words, you get the opposite result.
4. The only people who can be safely and credibly deterred with "minimal deterrence" are not terrorist states, but generally established democracies, who you don't have fights with anyway (see Dr Weart's "Never at War: Why Democracies will not Fight One Another"), so you've reduced deterrence down to a level where it's only credible in situations where NOT needed! Duh! Try explaining this with any hardened fanatical "pacifist" and you soon see they're fanatical ranting lunatics obsessed with moronic "taboos" or war-making eugenics pseudoscience genocide schemes, and not the least interested in what they claimed they're concerned with, PEACE!
ABOVE: weak blast waves oscillate buildings within the "elastic" deformation range, absorbing up ~1% of the intercepted blast wave energy, whereas blast waves strong enough to oscillate the building well into the "plastic" deformation range can demolish modern steel and concrete city buildings (which mostly remained standing after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki air bursts) can absorb typically 10 times more energy or ~10% of the intercepted blast wave energy. Successive interactions in a large city causes a vast amount of shielding, as compared to tests conducted over flat desert or ocean. Although blast waves last longer at higher yields, their cube-root scaled-up blast effects radii contain more buildings along any radial line than for the smaller distances of destruction at lower yields, thus offsetting the extra energy at any given scaled "free field" peak overpressure. This was demonstrated by a study comparing blast effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where most of the buildings were wooden to "free field" nuclear tests by Penney, but it was suppressed by Bethe and Glasstone in the American "Bible" Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, which uses energy conservation violating "free field" blast and radiation data from tests over ideal unobstructed terrain. We exposed this delusion in 1990 in Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, which was then censored by CND liar-duped publishers. Professor Bridgman's Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects can be used to demonstrate the exaggerations in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons when Glasstone's free-field (unobstructed terrain) nuclear effects predictions from desert and ocean nuclear tests are improperly applied to concrete cities. Bridgman, for instance, considers a building with an exposed area of 163 square metres, a mass of 455 tons and natural frequency of 5 oscillations per second, and finds that a peak overpressure of 10 psi (69 kPa) and peak dynamic pressure of 2.2 psi (15 kPa) at 4.36 km ground range from a 1 Mt air burst detonated at 2.29 km altitude, with overpressure and dynamic pressure positive durations of 2.6 and 3.6 seconds, respectively, produces a peak deflection of 19 cm in the building about 0.6 second after shock arrival. The peak deflection is computed from Bridgman's formula on p. 304. This 19 cm computed maximum deflection allows us to estimate how much energy is permanently and irreversibly absorbed from the blast wave by a building (if damaged, additional energy is absorbed and is transformed into slow-moving - relative to the shock front velocity - debris which falls to the ground and is quickly stopped after the blast has passed it) by: E = Fx, where F is force (i.e., product of total pressure and area) and x is distance moved in direction of force due to the applied force from the blast wave.
If the average pressure for the first 0.5 second is equal to 12 psi (83 kPa) then the average force on the building during this time is 13 million Newtons, and the energy absorbed is: E = Fx = 13,000,000*0.19 = 2.6 MJ, which is removed from the blast wave in the form of oscillations of the building. Successive absorption by building after building rapidly absorbs blast energy in this way.
Although you could say the blast wave from a 50% blast nuclear megaton warhead contains 2.1 x 10^15 Joules, the blast wave energy rapidly decreases as it dumps hot air behind it to form the fireball (Glasstone omits the fireball energy partition after blast breakaway, but the DELFIC mushroom cloud module shows that, to fit observed cloud parameters theoretically, fully 45% of the yield is hot air dumped behind the blast that powers the mushroom cloud rise and expansion, so 50-45 = 5% of total yield (or 1/10 of original blast yield) remains in the blast wave after the negative phase fully develops). In addition, the blast forms a 3-d hemisphere so that the percentage of the total blast energy in the Mach front intercepting buildings near the surface is small and gets smaller as the blast propagates! It is only that part which causes damage that gets attenuated; furthermore the yield scaling issue increases the building shielding effect for larger yields, because the radial distance being considered is increased. For example, in the example above, 10 psi peak overpressure (69 kPa in SI units) occurs at 4.36 km from a 1 megaton strategic bomb, but the 163 square metres of the building is only a small fraction, f, of the blast hemisphere at that range, namely f = 163/(2*Pi*4360^2) = 163/120,000,000 = 1.37*10^{-6}. So if the blast still contained 5% of the total weapon yield at this stage (1/10 of the original blast yield), the total blast energy striking the building's surface area would be just (2.1 x 10^14 )* 1.37*10^{-6} = 2.9*10^8 Joules, proving that the oscillations of the building removed 2.6MJ of 290MJ blast energy intercepted, nearly 1%, which is a similar fraction to Penney's finding in Hiroshima (below).
You get additional, greater, energy loss due to damage done to buildings close to the fireball. For n such buildings in a radial line, the cumulative removal of blast energy fraction is: exp(-2.6n/290), which is greater for the larger blast damage distances in built up areas predicted for effects of higher yields! So increasing the yield increases the shielding for any given free-field pressure (the distance of which scales up with yield)!
ABOVE:error by DTRA regarding energy absorption by buildings. U.S. Government's DTRA DISPATCH magazine article "Building Effects on Airblast from Nuclear Detonations in Urban Terrain" falsely conflates the abrupt shock front with the length of the entire blast wave, claiming that since buildings are 2000 denser than blast waves: "the air will move 2000 times father than the structure in the same time interval. Thus while the building is moving 1cm. the shock has moved more than 20m, and the energy is a small fraction of 1% the blast energy." The key error here is the statement that "the shock has moved 20 m". They meant the shock front, which isn't the same thing as the entire blast wave, the thickness of which is dependent on bomb yield, and is what moves drag-sensitive buildings with large window openings where the overpressure quickly equalises. So they are totally wrong. They are absurdly arguing that only 1/2000 of the dynamic pressure (kinetic energy per unit volume of air) of air presents a force upon buildings, or presumably upon ships sails (which are denser than air), or eardrums (again which are denser than air). The shoddy, imprecise form of their statement makes it hard to understand precisely what they are saying, but it seems to be that they are assuming falsely that the blast wave consists only of a shock front, which will move 20 m past the building (without moving it significantly) before the building has moved 1 cm, but the density of the building and the location of the shock front relative to the building is IRRELEVANT while the mass of air BEHIND the shock front is delivering energy to the building, as proved by the absence from the relevant equations of both building density and shock front location after it has passed, but winds are still blowing. It's not the shock front that causes the building to oscillate, but the wind pressure behind the shock front. The building density, and the distance the shock FRONT moves beyond the building, have no relevance to thickness the layer of air BEHIND the shock front, which is what is pushing the building, and this thickness increases with bomb yield! (However, most of the push to the building occurs due to the highest dynamic pressure, i.e. the air just behind the discontinuity or "shock front".) As a result, the actual energy absorption by a building is more than 100 times greater than DTRA's ratio of densities claims. Small-scale models of buildings, whether absolutely rigid or made from glass mirrors don't in any way, shape or form model the energy captured in oscillations by thousands of tons of reinforced concrete of real buildings.
The wind (dynamic) pressure induced motion effects which have nothing to do with the relative density of the shock front compared to the building. The amount of energy picked up from either the wind pressure of normal breezes or the blast wave of a nuclear explosion, by a building in oscillatory energy is the time-integrated form of Newtonian equation E = F.x, where force F = P.A, where P is dynamic pressure and A is area, and x is the amount of displacement induced. There's no density of the building in these equations, and no dependence on the shock front, but rather the integrated dynamic pressure over the entire duration of the blast at the location of interest (if the building delays the passage of the shock front instead of letting it pass freely through windows etc, then there's an additional term for the time-integrated overpressure contribution). As dynamic pressure is removed by the building - not by the shock front but by the air behind it, lasting seconds in higher yield detonations - the overpressure also falls as the blast restores itself to the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions (overpressure energy is transformed into dynamic pressure energy, thus weakening overpressure as well as dynamic pressure). If DTRA were correct that only the front part (shock front) of a blast wave is relevant to delivery of energy and delivers only 1/2000 of the energy of the blast, then by analogy our eardrums and ship sails would be similarly so inefficient at picking up energy from the dynamic pressure of sound and the wind, respectively, that they couldn't work! Notice that their computer codes in 2013 falsely EXCLUDED any absorption of energy by the blast in oscillating thousands of tons of reinforced concrete, causing damage (much larger, huge amounts of energy are required to actually destroy reinforced concrete by permanent deformation; the springy oscillations of a building in a gale or blast wave take up far less energy than actual destruction requires), contrary to what John von Neumann pointed out (that buildings are NOT rigid but absorb energy from the blast, decreasing the blast parameters like pressures and impulses as the blast propagates through a city, unlike desert or ocean in unobstructed terrain nuclar tests!) in the 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons (removed by Glasstone from future editions, just as he removed the civil defence chapter from the 1977 edition!).
ABOVE: Appendix A of Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons gives a specific calculated example that allows the absorption of blast energy by oscillating modern concrete buildings to be calculated: a reinforced concrete building of 952 metric tons, 75x75ft, 38 ft high (thus horizontal area of 265 square metres), resisting force 4 psi, is subjected to a peak overpressure and dynamic pressure loading of 32 psi (242,000 Pascals) decaying to zero in 0.32 second. Calculated peak deflection of middle of the building was 0.88 foot or 0.27 m (the top would be deflected twice this amount). Reinforced concrete is relatively ductile, but any cracking absorbs even more energy than the simple calculation of the kinetic energy of blast-induced oscillation. So the blast wave energy absorbed from the simple physics law E = Fx = PAx where P is pressure loading, A is exposed area of building being loaded, and x is the displacement(or more precisely from the integral form of this, where energy absorbed is force integrated over displacement, as shown above) is about E = Fx = (242,000)(265)(0.27) = 17,000,000 Joules. This energy is removed from the blast wave by being transferred from the blast into the kinetic energy of oscillating the building! Hard fact!
The Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, on page 57 has a section written by John von Neumann and Fredrick Reines of Los Alamos (it is attributed to them in a footnote) stating clearly: "the structures ... have the additional complicating property of not being rigid. This means that they do not merely deflect the shock wave, but they also absorb energy from it at each reflection. The removal of energy from the blast in this manner decreases the shock pressure at any given distance from the point of detonation to a value somewhat below that which it would have been in the absence of dissipative objects, such as buildings." Glasstone removed this from future (1957-77) editions, not because it is wrong (it isn't), but apparently because it debunks official nuclear lies used for strategic deterrence in the same way that gas and incendiary bombing effects was exaggerated in the 1930s to try to deter war!
Now consider the energy absorption in the plastic region for reinforced concrete. The calculations of energy absorption in oscillating a building are for the small "elastic response" region of the pressure-displacement curve. But vast amounts of energy are absorbed beyond that elastic limit, and yet at pressures lower than required to make a reinforced concrete building collapse (always ignored by ignorant shelter critics, as Lord Baker explained, for shelter design in his 1978 book which we reviewed in detail a few posts back). There is a summary of the key building parameters America uses in calculating the effects of nuclear blast on buildings of various kinds in Table 15.6 on page 525 of Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects, Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1: building 15.2.2 (3-8 story reinforced concrete, small window area) has a severe damage ductility ratio of 7.5, i.e. it fails and collapses (severe damage) when the displacement is 7.5 times the maximum elastic response. Put another way, the plastic limit for reinforced concrete is 7.5 times the elastic displacement limit. Northrop's figure 15.7 shows the extension versus applied pressure load. The energy absorbed in the elastic limit is a triangle terminating at a displacement of 1 ductility unit (units are extension/elastic limit extension), so it has an area of 0.5 units (energy absorption for oscillating the building, see diagram below). But the plastic response is not a triangle but a unit high rectangle which starts at one unit and extends to 7.5 units (severe damage/collapse), its area is thus 7.5 - 1 = 6.5 units, so it absorbs 6.5/0.5 = 13 times as much energy as that used to oscillate the building elastically! So reinforced concrete buildings can absorb 13 times more energy in being damaged, than they can absorb in oscillating elastically. The ratio of total energy absorbed to flatten the buildings, to the maximum energy that can be absorbed elastic oscillate it, is (6.5 + 0.5)/0.5 = 14. Thus, the total energy absorption by a building can be 14 times that involved in merely oscillating it!
ABOVE: model of a building having a blast, the simple engineering graph from EM-1 showing the ratio of energy needed to total a building to that which merely oscillates it. The axes depict loading force and displacement, respectively, so the areas under the curve beautifully correspond to energy absorbed, allowing us to calculate the total energy needed to flatten a city very easily (from a simple, standard physics formula, energy E = Fx), in terms of multiples of the energy needed to just oscillate the buildings elastically. Northrop's data for other types of buildings are as follows: type 15.2.5 wood frame house has the same 7.5 ductility ratio for collapse, so it can absorb in plastic deformation 13 times the elastic oscillatory energy; type 15.2.3 brick house has a ductility ratio of 4 for severe damage, and a type 15.2.10 3-10 story steel-frame office building has a ductility ratio of 10 for severe damage. This is precisely Lord Baker's principle of the Morrison table shelter (for details, please see Lord Baker's 1978 book about the problems with explaining this to the bureaucratic nutters who don't understand the physics behind engineering, the brilliantly titled Enterprise versus Bureaucracy) where the plastic deformation of steel is used to absorb many times more energy than it can absorb elastically. In other words, it's the damage done (plastic deformation of reinforced concrete) that really absorbs vast amounts of blast energy, not the smaller energy absorption from elastic oscillations of a building! Northrop's table 15.6 shows that the reinforced concrete building, type 15.2.2, has a natural period of oscillation of about 0.3 second, and a static yield resistance of about 3 psi. Northrop's Figure 15.10 shows it has 50% probability of severe damage at 2.85 km from a 1 megaton surface burst on an ideal, unobstructed desert surface with no blast energy absorption by buildings intervening between that target and ground zero! For comparison, a similar 1 megaton surface burst in unobstructed desert is shown in Northrop's Figure 15.11 to have 50% probability of destroying a typical British brick house at 4.42 km ground range (50% severe damage probability), whereas Figure 15.18 gives a range of only 2.74 km for collapse of 3-10 story steel-frame buildings from a 1 megaton surface burst on unobstructed, open terrain.
We have already given in many posts extensive evidence proving that concrete buildings in Hiroshima and modern cities absorb thermal, nuclear and blast effects in a way totally ignored by Glasstone's unobstructed desert analysis. Strategic nuclear deterrence is thus bunk, if based on nuclear test effects data from unobstructed desert or open ocean. We need tactical nuclear deterrence to stop invasions and the use of force, not an incredible threat of bombs on cities, which is analogous to the gas and incendiary bombing exaggerations of the 1920s and 1930s which failed to deter WWII. The exaggerations were made by both lying disarmers (to scare people into disarmament) and by lying proponents of aerial bombing in war (to scare enemies into surrender). The resulting pseudo "consensus of expert opinion" from both groups had tragic consequences. Strategic bombing, megatons of ~100 kg high explosive on Germany, equivalent to a large nuclear attack however you scale the megatonnage (by the 2/3 power of blast yield for peak overpressure over unobstructed terrain, or by an even weaker function of yield for initial nuclear radiation), also failed to produce military results when civilians were bombed. The two low yield nuclear weapons dropped over mostly wooden houses in Japan did not produce the results publically claimed (for propaganda) for modern concrete cities. We've been blogging this for years, ignored by the loons who prefer anti-nuclear lies about strategic nuclear deterrence!
The effect of scattered thermal radiation diffusing into shadows was insignificant at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where burns from thermal radiation were only received in an unobstructed radial line from the fireball, so that any shielding provided virtually complete protection from thermal flash. The 110 Castle-3 shot at Bikini Atoll in 1954 was fired during a moderate rainstorm to obtain data on the reduction of blast and thermal effects by rainfall. There are no films that show the fireball because the water content of the air absorbed the thermal and visible transmission. Heavy rain or fog absorbs the thermal radiation locally around the fireball, rather than creating a large amount of dangerously wide-angle scattered radiation at great distances. Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, gives data for Pacific test conditions in Figure 6.39 on page 248, on the effect of scattered thermal radiation from a burst at 1 km altitude, at various distances and for different fields of view:
At 10 km ground range, 43% of the thermal radiation in unobstructed terrain is direct (from the fireball), and 57% is scattered, but the angular distribution of scattering is not extreme (most of the scattering comes from air relatively near the fireball): the total (direct plus scattered) is 80% for a 30 degrees field of view (only 20% of the thermal radiation comes from angles exceeding 30 degrees from the radial line to the burst). Only 4% of the total thermal radiation at 10 km comes from angles beyond 90 degrees (i.e. 96% comes from the hemisphere around a target facing the burst).
At 30 km ground range, 16% of the thermal radiation in unobstructed terrain is direct (from the fireball), and 84% is scattered, but the angular distribution of scattering is not extreme (most of the scattering comes from air relatively near the fireball): the total (direct plus scattered) is 70% for a 40 degrees field of view (only 30% of the thermal radiation comes from angles exceeding 40 degrees from the radial line to the burst). Only 6% of the total thermal radiation at 10 km comes from angles beyond 90 degrees (i.e. 94% comes from the hemisphere around a target facing the burst).
Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, also gives graphs of the thermal radiation spectrum, showing differences with burst altitude and yield. Figure 6.19 shows that a 1 kt surface burst gives a thermal spectrum which peaks at 1.1 micron (Planck radiating temperature = 2000 K), compared to 0.4 micron (Planck radiating temperature = 5000 K) for 1 kt air bursts at 1-30 km altitude. Figure 6.21 shows there is much less difference between the spectra for surface and air bursts for 1 megaton yield: 0.70 micron peak in the thermal spectrum (Planck radiating temperature = 3800 K) for a megaton surface burst, compared with 0.52 microns (Planck radiating temperature = 4500 K) for a 30 km altitude megaton burst.
Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, in Figure 16.10 uses hydrodynamic calculations to prove that the maximum fire wind velocity in a firestorm is only a weak function of the fire intensity, for example a fire with a radius of 10 km will create a maximum fire wind velocity of 17 m/s for a fire intensity of 25 kW/m2, but this only increases to 36 m/s if the fire intensity is increased to 240 kW/m2.
Remember also that nuclear test evidence shows that the risk of clothing or other items burning is less for real levels of office humidity than for target materials left to dry out in the Nevada at the lower humidity of Nevada nuclear tests like Encore; clothing shields thermal radiation and increases burns energy requirements contrary to Glasstone.
Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, Table 14.5 on page 501 also points out that while people standing nude 2 metres behind glass windows watching the nuclear blast approach them will receive a 50% median dose of 3 glass fragment abdominal wall penetrations at a peak overpressure of 7 psi, it takes 15 psi if they are wearing clothing! If they duck and cover, they will can avoid the directional flying glass (and the thermal burns) completely. What Northrop doesn't tell you is that in a built up city, the dynamic pressure needed to energise those glass fragments to lethal velocities don't exist 2 metres behind glass windows in general; only behind those windows facing the fireball with an unobstructed view. Other windows on all all sides of the building will certainly break if the overpressure is high enough, but the blast wind (dynamic pressure) is directional and so the windows will not be blasted inwards with the same speed (at lower pressures they can even fail in the negative phase and be sucked outwards, with no hazard whatsoever to occupants!). Northop (1996) in chapter 14 on personnel casualties gives very high mortality rates based on unprotected head impacts, particularly for standing personnel, e.g. 5 psi for 50% mortality for people standing in buildings swept through by blast winds. Again, this assumes the blast winds are not obstructed and attenuated by the other surrounding buildings in a city, but it also suggests a simple civil defense precaution to accompany duck and cover in a crisis situation: bicycle helmets can be kept under emergency table "shelters" and can be put on quickly before the blast arrives, after a nuclear explosion, to minimise head trauma from flying debris or bodily translation and impact for high dynamic pressures and long blast durations. With duck and cover, you can avoid wind drag or injury from flying debris and you can keep away from a blast reflecting surface, then Northop shows in Figures 14.2 and 14.3 that you have 50% chance of surviving 37 psi peak overpressure from 1 megaton if you are lying down perpendicular to the direction of approach of the blast wave, or 62 psi if your are lying parallel to the direction of the blast (i.e., lying down facing away from the flash). In other words, blast is then very survivable!
(3). Simply allow nuclear radiation doses in modern cities to be attenuated severely by a factor of about 100 (from the 2011 Los Alamos report unobstructed desert "free field" initial nuclear radiation dose data study for the shadowing by intervening the buildings of in New York City) - before you include the actual shielding by a building people are in, which is much better for INR than Glasstone claims, because essentially ALL of the urban area outdoor 100-fold reduced radiation dose is SCATTERED, not direct, so it is energy-degraded and not the highest-energy direct gamma and neutrons (which are attenuated severely on the transit through all the buildings in the radial line from the bomb)! Putting in "/100" to the computer formulae is not rocket-science! Simple. Nothing in the universe is perfect, but this correction is easy, and gives a minimal baseline for realism for the urban effects of nuclear weapons, lacking in all anti-nuclear diatribes. For higher yield weapons, the increased ranges for given radiation doses will lead to increased attenuation, since at increased ranges there will be more concrete buildings intervening in the the radial line from fireball to target, and although scattered radiation builds up at greater distances, it has lower energy than unscattered radiation and therefore is less penetrating (easier to shield). The most penetrating and wide-angle scattered nuclear radiation dose is from neutrons, but for the full range of 13 different nuclear weapon designs in the 1984 EM-1, the effective mean free-path for the surface burst neutron dose over the distance 1-2 km only ranges from 189 to 221 metres (the latter being weapon type 13, the neutron bomb). (The neutron dose will essentially completely arrived - except for a small portion due to delayed neutrons from fission products like bromine-90 - before blast damage occurs to those buildings lcated near the crater.) Glasstone is widely ignored when pointing out in one table in the last chapter - contrary to many free-field charts and graphs - that 50% survival in modern concrete buildings in Hiroshima occurred at 0.12 mile for the 16 kt air burst at 600 m; this scales up by the cube-root scaling law to predict 50% survival at 1.2 miles from a 16 megaton air burst at 6 km altitude; initial radiation dose distances scale as a weaker function of yield than blast.
ACDA disarmament bigots simply lied in the traditional "H. G. Wells" 1930s-sci-fi-style of disarmament fantasy, in testimony to congress, about the motivation and the detailed work of those people who disproved them, they ignored the classified data on blast and fallout shielding in their "effects" models, or their calculations assumed that people failed to use fallout shelters in order to deceptively "reduce" fallout protection factors by a factor of 7, by simply assuming people would go outside to be exposed to unshielded fallout (like most people, they also massively exaggerated the mean gamma ray energy of fallout during the sheltering period, as we have previously exposed, which is debunked by the measurements after the Redwing Zuni and Tewa tests) - they also lied that Jones didn't include fallout casualties when in fact he did include fallout correctly, finding that you don't get fallout casualties with the high degree of radiation shielding in shelters, an exact analogy to the situation where the 100,000 protection factor of activated charcoal gas mask filters gave no gas casualties in 1938 research, and disarmament bigots tried to claim that was some kind of ignorant dismissal of the horrors of true gas war so they would "arbitrarily" assume that only say 50% of people put on gas masks in order to then falsely claim that gas masks were somehow "calculated" to only work for 50% of people - i.e. only those assumed to be actually wearing them! - a travesty and abuse of scientific modelling (like lying that you have done detailed calculations proving that car seat belts make no difference in accidents, when in fact you have merely assumed that nobody wears the seat belts!), when in fact the true excellence of gas mask protection was proved to successfully deter Hitler from using gas on civilians with gas masks, saving millions contrary to the hate attacks on civil defence by disarmament propaganda deceivers (who recognised that civil defence made deterrence credible, and so was a threat to their bigoted plans for peace at any price):
ABOVE: extracts from the famous 1979 T. K. Jones Boeing Corporation letter, page 2, debunking "arms control" nuclear weapons effects liars in detail. This really exasperated my dad, John B. Cook, who was a Civil Defence Corps instructor in the 1950s, but was old enough to live through the 1930s appeasement era when Philip Noel-Baker repeated lied on the effects of gas bombs, claiming gas masks will never work, because babies and the elderly won't put them on properly, blah, blah, so we must ban evil civil defence and instead guarantee peace by appeasing the Nazis because of we don't, they will DEFINITELY gas us all with a massive gas bomb raid on day 1 of war. In fact, Philip Noel-Baker did this first in a BBC radio speech in 1927, 6 years before Hitler was elected. Family members who knew the truth from gas attacks in WWII - largely negated by simple gas masks and going into shelters for droplets of persistent liquids like mustard agent - had to put up with this lying BBC and other media propaganda for disarmament throughout the 1930s, to the joy of the Nazis who were secretly rearming and preparing for invasions (not necessarily war, since Hitler would have been quite happy to "peacefully" invade the world and then use efficient gas chambers to dispose of those whose race or views he found to be "offensive", like modern snowflakes today). What really irritated dad, however, was that Philip Noel-Baker, having lied about gas effects in his February 1927 BBC radio broadcast and throughout the 1930s to great applause from pacifists who effectively did Hitler's bidding, was made a Lord and a Nobel Peace prize winner for appeasement propaganda lies that led to world war, and then did the same thing all over again during the cold war, issuing nuclear weapons lies. In a 1980 House of Lords debate on Civil Defence, he lied that the air burst in Hiroshima produced lethal fallout: "It covers everything in Hiroshima not already rendered lethal, and so those who have escaped the flash, the blast, the fire, will die within a short time. The first atomic bomb weighed two kilograms. It was little larger than a cricket ball. ... In 1978, more than 2,000 died in Hiroshima from its long-term effects."
Every word here is totally untrue, and easily disproved, but nobody in the House of Lords explained the facts to him, so this he quotes on page 5 of his 1980 Ecology Party book "How to Survive the Nuclear Age", and on page 6 he adds an attack on civil defence: "I feel the same outrage in 1980 when the Home Office [UK Government civil defence] propose to circulate a a copy of a pamphlet entitled Protect and Survive to every citizen. ... To strengthen the walls and ceilings as the pamphlet suggests, he needed a garden, a spade, sandbags, and the strength to dig and transport a ton of earth." However, the infirm or elderly don't need to hire an army of helpers to make a fallout shelter, because - contrary to Philip Noel-Baker - you can simply use water from a hose to fill up water filled bags inside boxes which do the shielding, as explained in the Home Office scientific advisory branch Fission Fragments magazine article (reprinted in the Royal Observer Corps Journal, vol. 27, issue 2, February 1985, page 26, below). In any case, in actual implementation, you would have some organization for civil defence in time of crisis, with people in nighbourhoods helping one another (lending hose pipes, helping to assemble emergency shelters around tables in homes, etc). Noel-Baker ends his case by absurdly calling for disarmament as a "sure way to avoid the war", by again ignoring the lessons of his own 1930s disarmament war effects propaganda which led to appeasement and thus the encouragement of enemy aggression, triggering the Second World War: "This is not a utopian dream. It is the system by which David Lloyd George disarmed Germany in 1919..." This claim typifies Noel-Baker's absurd, self-contradictory nonsense, since DLG's 1919 "system" led to another, far worse, world war, not to peace.
In that 1980 Ecology Party book "How to Survive the nuclear age", there is after the deceptions from Labour Party Lord Noel-Baker, a summary of civil defence shelter advice, but then the book ends with the transcript of the final big speech from Lord Mountbatten to the arms control anti-nuclear propaganda institute SIPRI at Strasbourg on 11 May 1979 (the IRA tragically ended his appeasement campaign with a bomb on his boat off the coast of Sligo, Ireland, on 27 August 1979): "A military confrontation between the nuclear powers could entail the horrifying risk of nuclear warfare [hardly likely if we have overwhelming superiority for credible deterrence, as we should have had - but did not have - in the 1930s to deter Hitler]. ... A new world war can hardly fail to involve the all-out use of nuclear weapons [this is debunked by former NATO General Sir John Hackett's book "The Third World War" which shows how escalation risks will be controlled even in the event of a Russian first-strike on Britain, provided that we are prepared for nuclear war - this book will be discussed in detail later in this blog post, below]. ... Let us all resolve to take all possible practical steps to ensure that we do not, through our own folly, go over the edge."
ABOVE: the most advanced and latest American "counterforce" nuclear weapons, the oralloy (Oak Ridge Alloy, aka U235 loaded secondary stage) W88 nuclear warheads were designed to knock out the huge well shock-insulated Russian SS-18 missile silos when they had a physical vulnerability number of 52L7, corresponding to a peak overpressure of 7000 psi, which is well within the crater radius. This is highly relevant today, since ehe SS-18 (in Russian nomenclature: R-36M2) is still in service (like the American W88), and the Russians have 46 of them, each with 10 warheads of 800 kilotons each, i.e. a total of 10x46 = 460 nuclear warheads and 3680 megatons. These 211 ton SS-18s are due to be replaced with the latest 208 ton Sarmat (RS-28) missiles (which made its first test flight on 20 April 2022, during the Ukraine war), extending the range from 11,000 km for the SS-18 to 18,000 km for the Sarmat. Unfortunately, as this declassified report shows, as with the Russian civil defense shelters, the silo hardness was underrated and the physical vulnerability is not 52L7 as originally supposed. The SS-18 silos could take much higher peak overpressures than 7000 psi and related ground shock, cratering throwout, etc. (The current "best guess" - and this is not proof tested due to the ban on atmospheric nuclear testing - is that it takes a peak overpressure of 10,000 psi to blow the silo door off the SS-18 silo and wreck the missile, which occurs at a distance from the warhead similar to its inertial gyroscopic CEP targetting error if the accurate GPS satellite navigation system is taken out by high altitude bursts, so to get a high kill probability you need to target many warheads per silo, a hugely inefficient strategy when all the enemy has to do is launch the SS-18 out of the silo before your warheads arrive!) In addition to this underestimate of the hardness of vital military "counterforce" targets in Russia, the Americans also massively over-estimated the cratering and ground shock effects for high yields in ordinary soils (not easily broken coral reefs!). (For references, please see the earlier blog posts about cratering exaggerations linked here and here.) The points we want people to take away, or at least openly investigate and question are:
(1) countervalue (anti-city) effects of nuclear weapons are bunk because, aside from the mistakes and deliberate omissions Glasstone and Dolan made for propaganda purposes in their 1977 edition, if the chips really do go down, you or your opponent can simply evacuate cities - most of which self-evacuate at 5pm every weekday, anyhow - evacuation is not a miracle, despite what Scientific American or Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says - before issuing an ultimatum, just as the UK did with evacuating kids from London in Operation Pied Piper on 1 September 1939 before issuing an ultimatum and then declaring war 48 hours later,
(2) you or your opponent can not only safeguard the civilians in cities by evacuating them (or putting the people into shelters/basements etc if you have them, as the Russians do, and as thankfully the Ukrainians do which is a key reason they have been able to fight the Russian invasion, as a result of having previously been part of the civil defense obsessed USSR), but 100% of missiles in silos can also be safeguarded from destruction by simply firing them out of their silos, if seriously threatened by a counterforce (anti-silo) enemy attack. In other words, if you decide to credibly target enemy nuclear weapons (a very costly strategy in terms of the number of W88 warheads per silo for any significant chance of damaging a >7000psi peak overpressure-requiring SS-18 missile silo, which are about as well protected as the concrete and steel around most nuclear power reactor cores), your targetting policy will encourage the enemy to launch first, to save their missiles from being taken out! So using nuclear weapons to target other nuclear weapons in hardened silos (or hidden in the sea in submarines!), apart from being extremely inefficient and costly in terms of your stockpile, is also a policy that provokes the risk of enemy "launch on warning" crisis instability because you are, if "successful", removing the enemy's protected second strike retaliation capability, and once the second strike option is gone, they are pushed back into the old first-strike aka launch-on-warning policy, which is extremely dangerous if their radar operators mistake some third party's missile testing for a launch against them, etc., etc. So the obsessive "disarmament fantasy" of only using nuclear weapons to try to deter other nuclear weapons in silos by targeting them, is a dangerous illusion that provokes crisis instability and risks an accidental nuclear war, in addition to being an exceptionally ineffective deterrent! All you do with that delusion is to deter the enemy from a second-strike policy, and force the enemy into a dangerous first-strike/launch on warning policy! If you can knock out the enemy warheads in their silos, the enemy will simply ensure that there is a very high probability that their missiles have been launched out of their silos before your warheads arrive, so you will be uselessly destroying EMPTY missiles silos! (your warheads take 25 minutes to arrive for an ICBM between continents, and 10 minutes for a back door attack of an SLBM launched from a submarine; less time is required for a Russian sub to hit NY or LA because they are beside oceans, unlike Moscow and most Russian targets that are well inland!).
(3) In any case, how do you target enemy SLBMs in submarines hidden at sea? Similarly, the most numerous Russian ICBM in their stockpile is the mobile SS-27 Mod 2/RS-24, of which they have 135 missiles on 16-wheeled mobile launch vehicles which can move around, with 4 separate MIRV nuclear megaton warheads per missile and a range of 11,000 km. How do you target them as they move around during a crisis situation? They can easily move position enough to survive an nuclear warhead in the US stockpile during the 25 minutes while your missiles are on the way to hit them in a crisis situation, so you are literally trying to hit a moving target - do you really believe America will be able to reprogram the target locations for ICBM warheads in flight as they are moving? The whole idea would be amusing if it wasn't so tragic (there was an effort to create a warhead which could track its moving target and adjust its trajectory accordingly, the MARV - Maneuverable Reentry Vehicle - the only known Western MARV was the Pershing II warhead, which disarmed as part of the INF treaty to appease Russia/pro-disarmament politicians in the West). So the whole idea of using nuclear weapons to hit enemy nuclear weapons before they are launched is crazy and dangerous. It's no joke that all the disarmament propaganda claims falsely that nuclear weapons have only the purpose of targetting other nuclear weapons in silos. That policy is dangerous, because it just encourages the enemy to get the weapons out of their silos before your weapons can arrive, so you are not deterring the enemy to launch their weapons, but forcing them to launch on warning, a lunatic policy! Nuclear weapons are only effective in a counterforce operation against armies on the move, either as a deterrent or to physically stop invasions without collateral damage by air burst enhanced neutron weapons. The only real use of nuclear weapons should be, as Oppenheimer said, as a tactical threat to stop the military invasions and attacks that triggered two world wars.
Nuclear weapons are exceptionally good at deterring (or stopping) armies on the move! Not so if they are dispersed in defensive positions like hasty earth covered emergency civil defense shelters that resist 40 psi peak overpressure and give a protection factor of 200 or more against radiation; but the point is that they deter enemy military offensives and once the enemy has crossed your border you are within your rights to stop them; the credible threat will prevent invasions this way, ending world war. (Nuclear weapons are also effective at destroying enemy nuclear weapons in flight, e.g. the 2 kt W66 neutron warhead in the American Sprint ABM missile could melt down the fissile material in Russian nuclear warheads in flight in the atmosphere, and the 5 Mt W71 x-ray warhead of the Spartan ABM missile would ablate, deflect and destroy Russian warheads in space; they also knock down trees to create demilitarised zones in jungle warfare which enable easy identification of insurgents entering those zones for attacks.)
"Indeed an easy calculation shows that, if the USSR carries out its city evacuation plans, the total number of casualties that all the nuclear weapons in our missiles could cause would be a good deal less than 50% the losses they suffered in World War II. A reasonable estimate, based on the Oak Ridge [National Laboratory] test of a blast resistant 'expedient shelter', described in the USSR civil defense handbooks, gives for the loss which our missile carried nuclear weapons could cause, about 3% of the USSR population. What about our own situation? ... An evacuation plan [costs] $1.2 billion .... a blast resistant shelter system similar to that of China ... would cost around $35 billion."
In 1979, in a joint article with hydrogen bomb advocate Dr Edward Teller in the U.S. Senate Congressional Record (2 August 1979, page S-11490), Wigner points out that Kahn's Type I deterrence is inadequate to prevent war (Type I is also called "mutual assured destruction", if both sides have parity via "arms control" delusions): "... I believe that the so called Mutual Assured Destruction is nonsense, because suppose even if the attacked nation could retaliate, if the other nation pretends that it does not believe it and makes a demand, is there any point in resisting? What good does it do if it can destroy hundreds of thousands of the aggressors' lives ..."
In his 26 May 1964 address to Mercer County NJ Civil Defense organization (reprinted in his Collected Works, part B, Vol. 8, p35 et seq.), Wigner explains that "people who are against Civil Defense often have some element of frustration ... and they find more easily time for, and outlet in, their opposition," as explained by Robert Waelder's article Protest and Revolution Against Western Societies, in M.A. Kaplan (ed), The Revolution in World Politics (New York, 1962, p 18), i.e. it is the same as the mechanism for Marxist agitators, some of which are openly Marxist and others pretend to be libertarian while remaining faithful to the bigoted dictators. Wigner's address continues: "Much more literature - I think 80% - is against than for Civil Defense and much of it is completely irresponsible. A few weeks ago I read an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which the author said that a complete fallout [cheaper than blast] shelter program would cost $50 billion. Now $50 billion is more than would be spent on the complete blast [and fallout] shelter program which I mentioned [$35 billion]. But ... who will contradict it?"
The only reply Wigner received was a nonsense filled 11-page article attacking all these lessons from Russian Civil Defense, headed "Limited Nuclear War" by Sidney D. Drell and Frank von Hippel, and published in the November 1976 issue of Scientific American, the editor of which, Dennis Flanagan, refused to publish Wigner's rebuttal, entitled "We heartily disagree", just as Kahn's rebuttal to the nonsense review of his book on Civil Defense in 1961 had been refused by Scientific American, leading Kahn to expand it into his 1962 book "Thinking about the unthinkable". Wigner's and A. A. Broyles rebuttal to Scientific American was finally published instead as "We heartily disagree" in the Journal of Civil Defense, v10, pp. 4-8, July-August 1977 issue, pointing out that the Russian casualties with civil defense would be 4% on Wigner's unclassified estimate or 2% using T. K. Jones's classified data estimate (utilizing secret data on the survival of foxholes in nuclear tests, in the 1972 DNA-EM-1 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons), and that the Russian improvised lined, covered trench shelters survive a peak overpressure of 40 psi as well as heat flash and fallout radiation, and adds that contrary to the nonsense in Scientific American, the Russians did test their plans by evacuating the city of Sevastopol in a drill which led to improvements in their plans.
H-bomb proponent Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and A. A. Broyles in May 1973 had jointly authored the American Security Council report, "Without civil defense we are in a glass house", which basically argues that you can't have a deterrent for world war if you are not prepared to use that deterrent when your bluff is called. If you are in Chamberlain's position in 1938 or Baldwin's in 1935, you are scared of using the deterrent because it is like "throwing stones in glass houses", because - if you can't shelter people because you refuse to have shelters and you also won't have a plan to evacuate kids from London (Operation Pied Piper, 1939) before you declare war - then you can easily be scared and coerced by Hitler or other dictators, who can see clearly that your "deterrent" is a complete bluff and totally, pathetically useless, because a weapon you can't use is not a credible deterrent. Naturally, as we keep repeating on this blog, this is what the defeatists who love Putin and other dictators want since surrender has two vital steps: (1) get rid of the shield (civil defense) since that makes the sword credible as an alternative to disarmament, and (2) point out that a sword without a shield is an incredible deterrent that is useless, so we had better disarm (and surrender)! Arms control delusions like supposed "parity" (a balance of weapons on both sides, as if democracies need detering like dictatorships), when one side has credible civil defense and the other doesn't, is like a duel between two people, similarly armed, but with one wearing body armour and the other totally unprotected! Not on that, but the dictator is the one wearing the body armour!
If proof of this is needed, Robert Scheer, a fellow in arms control at Stanford University and the author of With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, became "Truthdig" editor-in-chief, a propagandarist who claims that ending WWII with nuclear weapons made Truman guilty of "the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history", so he needs to check his facts on the numbers gassed in the Holocaust, or starved in Ukraine by Stalin, unless he denies those deliberate acts of terrorism like the other left wing Holocaust deniers who confuse racism and anti-racism, terrorism and anti-terrorism. When you actually check the facts: (1) Secretary Stimson (U.S. Secretary of War) knew he has a secret nuclear weapons program of investment of billions of dollars to justify to Congress after WWII ended and didn't want to hold back using the bomb for that reason, so he promoted Hiroshima as being a military target (it did have military bases, particularly at Hiroshima Castle just north of ground Zero, but it was also a highly populated civilian city), (2) Hiroshima's air raid shelters were unoccupied because Japanese Army officers were having breakfast when B29s were detected far away, says Yoshie Oka, the operator of the Hiroshima air raid sirens on 6 August 1945, (3) Colonel Tibbets, former bomber of Germany before becoming the Hiroshima pilot as commander of the 509th Composite Group, explains how his pilots and crew were ridiculed heavily for lack of accomplishments, while preparing for weeks on Tinian Island. According to Tibbet's own book The Tibbets Story a poem was published before Hiroshima called "Nobody knows" lampooning the 509th's results: "Nobody knows. Into the air the secret rose; Where they're going, nobody knows; Tomorrow they'll return again; But we'll never know where they've been. Don't ask us about results or such; Unless you want to get in Dutch. But take it from one who is sure of the score, the 509th is winning the war. When the other Groups are ready to go; We have a program of the whole damned show; And when Halsey's 5th shells Nippon's shore; Why, shucks, we hear about it the day before. And MacArthur and Doolittle give out in advance; But with this new bunch we haven't a chance; We should have been home a month or more; For the 509th is winning the war." Tibbets was therefore determined create maximum effects after his group had been ridiculed at Tinian Island for not attacking Japan during weeks of preparations on the island, rehearsing the secret nuclear attacks while other B29s were taking took flak trying to bomb Japan into surrender with conventional bombs. He writes in The Tibbets Story that regular morning flights of small groups of weather and phototographic survey planes that did not make significant attacks over possible nuclear target cities, helped to reduce civil defense readiness in the cities, as well as reducing the air defense risks, since Japan was rationing its use of its limited remaining air defense in 1945.
The November 1976 Scientific American anti-civil defense article claimed that civil defense was discredited since: "In the 1960s the US adopted a strategic policy giving top priority to the prevention of nuclear war through deterrence ...", to which Wigner and Broyles responded to this claim in "We heartily disagree" in the July-August 1977 Journal of Civil Defense: "How do you deter an attack unless you convince an enemy that you will fight the war that he is starting?"
Dictators often start wars which their people don't need: the Persian war against the Greeks, Hannibal's war against Rome, the Tartar's invasions of Europe, the Turks' invasion of Hungary, the invasions of Napoleon. You have to accept that aggression is not necessarily a completely rational activity! All that counts for deterrence is that it is credible. If you don't prepare to fight with strategic nuclear weapons, then they are just a pointless bluff, a paper tiger as the Chinese put it, not a credible deterrent. Which is precisely what the disarmers want, of course, since nuclear parity, with the shift away from credible nuclear deterrence to incredible foolery, is only one step away from admitting the uselessness of the strategic nuclear stockpile, disarming and surrendering!
ABOVE: the 11 October 1952 cover of Picture Post showed clearly the "separation of effects" in an air burst (31 kiloton air burst at 3,440 ft, the Charlie shot of 22 April 1952, Nevada test site), where the fireball cools and forms into toroidal shape (with the radioactivity in the ring) before the "stem" of popcorned dust from the desert is sucked through the middle, before cascading harmlessly around the periphery without mixing with the fission products in the toroidal ring. Despite the visual proof that intense radioactive fallout can be avoided by air bursts, anti-nuclear propaganda helped by Russian fronts continued to raise fallout fears to promote Western arms control and disarmament, leaving the field clear for undeterred Russian conventional invasions and wars.
"The conventional wisdom about Ukraine's nuclear weapons is wrong. In fact, as soon as it declared independence, Ukraine should have been quietly encouraged to fashion its own nuclear deterrent. Even now, pressing Ukraine to become a nonnuclear state is a mistake. A nuclear Ukraine makes sense for two reasons. First, it is imperative to maintain peace between Russia and Ukraine. That means ensuring that the Russians, who have a history of bad relations with Ukraine, do not move to reconquer it. ... Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression. ... A conventional war between Russia and Ukraine would entail vast military casualties and the possible murder of many thousands of civilians. Russians and Ukrainians have a history of mutual enmity; this hostility, combined with the intermixing of their populations, raises the possibility that war between them could entail Bosnian style ethnic cleansing and mass murder. This war could produce millions of refugees clamoring at the borders of Western Europe. ... There is also the threat of escalation beyond the borders of Russia and Ukraine. For example, the Russians might decide to reconquer other parts of the former Soviet Union in the midst of a war, or might try to take back some of Eastern Europe. Poland and Belarus might join forces with Russia against Ukraine or gang up with Ukraine to prevent a Russian resurgence. The Germans, Americans or Chinese could get pulled in by their fear of a Russian victory. (Doubters should remember that the United States had no intention of fighting in Europe when war broke out in 1914 and again in 1939.) ...
"Russia has dominated an unwilling and angry Ukraine for more than two centuries, and has attempted to crush Ukraine's sense of self-identity. Recent history witnessed the greatest horrors in this relationship: Stalins government murdered an astounding 12 million Ukrainians during the 1930s. ... A Ukrainian conventional deterrent is not a viable option because Ukraine cannot build an army powerful enough to stop a Russian attack. Ukraine's army might put up dogged resistance, but it would eventually be defeated. Russia is simply too powerful. ... Conventional military power is significantly more expensive than nuclear military power and requires a larger military; hence it requires far more popular mobilization. ... A security guarantee from the West is theoretically possible but not a practical strategy for maintaining Ukrainian sovereignty. Extending deterrence to Germany during the Cold War was a demanding and expensive job; extending deterrence further east to Ukraine would be even more difficult. ... Vilifying nuclear weapons is a fashionable sport in the West. ... This view of nuclear weapons is simplistic and flies in the face of the inherent logic of nuclear deterrence, as well as the history of the Cold War. In fact, nuclear weapons often diminish international violence, and Ukrainian nuclear weapons would be an effective deterrent against a Russian conventional attack or nuclear blackmail. In the pre-nuclear world of industrialized great powers, there were two world wars between 1900 and 1945 in which some 50 million Europeans died. In the nuclear age, the story is very different. Only some 15,000 Europeans were killed in minor wars between 1945 and 1990, and there was a stable peace between the superpowers that became increasingly robust over time. ... Moreover, there is always the possibility that nuclear weapons might be used inadvertently or accidentally in the course of a conventional war, which provides further incentives for caution."
Notice the point that Angell fails to explain why mutual deterrence won't keep the peace! If any mass-media "nuclear overkill" lies were true and we only needed 0.02 kiloton W54 sized nuclear warheads, we'd have 0.02 kiloton nuclear weapons. The reason why we have higher yields is lying isn't a credible deterrent when the chips go down, and what we have is a bare minimum to carry out a minimal deterrent function. It's easy to reduce nuclear weapon yields by removing boost gas, secondary stages, etc. The actual problem is the exact opposite of what 100% of quack mass media liars rant: if actually we want to reduce the risk of war including escalation to nuclear war, we need a credible deterrent which we don't have (see facts below). As regards huge stockpiles, this bankrupts the dictatorship as seen in the 1980s. It's a small price to pay, compared to the cost of a world war. Angell simply sneers at mutual deterrence, without (1) saying what's wrong with it, (2) investigating how to make it stable, (3) explaining why there's something wrong with "Si vis Pacem, para Bellum". Herman Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War discovered these pseudo-pacifists were key to starting WWII by duping the public with the illusion of security through disarmament (using itallics to emphasise this point!). What's actually needed, Kahn showed is credible deterrence including civil defence in order to reduce collateral damage such as radiation exposure to civilians (this is discussed in detail below, with quotations from Kahn's various books). This quotation of Angell versus Churchill in a 1913 deterrence debate is important because Churchill's pre-WWI naval Dreadnought deterrence ("We need eight, and we won't wait!") proved an incredible deterrent against the invasion of Belgium in 1914 which triggered WWI! So deterrence must be credible against the spectrum of provocations that result in wars, not just against a subset of the spectrum of possible provocations!
But Churchill's so-called "brilliant oratory" during the 1930s again failed to sway public opinion early enough to credible deter the Nazis from invading Poland in 1939 and triggering WWII. He failed to defeat the anti-deterrence movement led by Norman Angell and Philip Noel-Baker. So there are important lessons to learn here. In the end, the "anti-war movement" - which had become by 1939 a Nazi Fifth Column in the UK - had to be forceably shut down (with oppressive press censorship) once war broke out, as enemy collaboration or defeatism. However, they re-started again in 1945 when wartime censorship was lifted, and were never debunked by scientists, historians or journalists who could see the dangers from attacking them, i.e. the fascist mentality of such self-righteous lying quacks and charlatans, which were identical to the pseudo-scientist mindsets of Nazi eugenics pseudoscience and Marxism pseudoscience. The anti-nuclear quacks immediately focussed on nuclear weapons radiation, just as they had focussed on gas fear-mongering in the 1920s and 1930s! The journalists, historians and scientists who should have called out the liars instead backed anti-nuclear liars, instead of repudiating them and using nuclear weapons to deter war! Historians like AJP Taylor were accused by Herman Kahn of fiddling their analysis of Hitler and war origins, simply in order to "justify" a delusional anti-nuclear agenda (e.g., AJP Taylor was a founder of unilateral nuclear disarmament organisation "CND"!). There is still a taboo on mentioning the fact that Glasstone's and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons states in Table 5.160 that a large cheap WWII Anderson shelter (light 10-gage corrugated steel hemispherical arch with 20-25 ft span and 5 ft earth cover at the crown) requires 45-60 psi peak overpressure for collapse, while an 8" thick reinforced hemispherical buried concrete arch with 16 ft span and 4 ft earth cover at the crown requires 220-280 psi peak overpressure for collapse, i.e. survival within half-a-mile from a one megaton surface burst, proving relatively cheap, credible, effective civil defence (Glasstone's book, however, generally is misleading "free field" effects data from nuclear tests in deserts, omitting the blast and radiation shielding caused by energy absorption by concrete building skylines in cities; the only parts of Glasstone quoted by the CND people are the falsehoods; the media let them get away with it!).
- Professor Philip Noel-Baker, "Foreign Affairs and How They Affect Us", BBC Radio, February 1927 (false claim, repudiated in secret discussions by UK Government Chemical Warfare Research Department, but not in public, thus enabling this form of "pacifist" lying to be used by Nazis to engineer appeasement leading to World War II; see also p31 of T. H. O'Brien's appalling UK official WWII history "Civil Defence" which dumbly mentions this episode without following up the implications for fascist appeasement!).
"Any use of nuclear weapons will escalate into a general war. There is no defence against such weapons ... nuclear warfare will destroy civilsation, and perhaps exterminate mankind. To hope for salvation from Civil Defence is a dangerous self-deluding pipe dream."
(Thus, the same anti-civil defence "pacifists" who laid the seeds for WWII in 1927 were at it in 1980, simply changing "gas" to "nuclear"! The thug was allowed to go on a Nobel Peace Prize winning anti-civil defence lying crusade because the "journalists", "historians", and "scientists" didn't want to upset the apple cart by telling the public the truth in time to credibly deter another war, exactly what also happened with lying war-mongering appeaser and BBC Brains Trust radio "expert" Professor Cyril Joad who recommended a peace deal with the Nazis in his August 1939 book "Why War?" which on p71 quoted Normal Angell before WWI allegedly "debunking" Winston Churchill as a war-monger responsible for WWI via the old pre-WWI naval arms race, viz "We want eight [Dreadnoughts] and we won't wait!" Joad was eventually kicked out of the BBC for being convicted of dodging his rail fare, not kicked out for helping Hitler's fascist "peace" propaganda - something that has also proved true for many other "untouchable stars" like Sir Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, et al. Journalism, the legal profession, scientific principles, etc., having first made heroes of liars who "filter out the unpleasant facts the public don't want to be concerned with", then always get to cover-up ahem "set aside" 100% of "issues" in their support of big pseudo-pacifist "star" liars, until the problem is so out of control they finally have to publish it, when they "switch over" and start saying the exact opposite about the "star", usually when the star is dead and it's too late, making believe that they did their best to oppose the liars, when in fact the evidence proves the exact opposite: they make as much money out of the star as they can, appeasing the thug in the process. The problem is that quacks and charlatans have always filled the BBC and other mass media outlets and pumped out endless lying about weapons effects, without any competent opposition whatsoever. You have to appreciate that this is simply because "war news" sells better on TV, than "deterrence evidence"! So today you have endless TV "history" shows about Hitler starting WWII, but none about the cause in the gas knockout blow esaggerations and gas mask lying or Anderson shelter lying by pseudo-pacifists, or even the lying origins of Hitler's eugenics in British pseudo-scientists like Darwin's cousin, eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, or his fan club - including the French Nobel Medical Laureate Dr Alexis Carrell who proposed to Hitler the use of gas chambers for "peaceful" mass murder of "state enemies" in his eugenics pseudoscience Nazi bestseller, "Man the Unknown". It's nearly all pathetic propaganda to enforce the false AJP Taylor style orthodoxy that there are no lessons about civil defence and pseudoscience lying from "expert conssensus" to be learned to ensure peace!)
Below: 13 July 2024 Russian State TV Channel 1 (Putin's Kremlin controlled Russian language propaganda channel for the Russian people): "Any confrontation with the NATO bloc is possible only with the use of nuclear weapons. There is simply no other option. If NATO's military organization surpasses us, it is absolutely futile for us to enter into such an armed confrontation with conventional means of destruction only."
NO: this is not "just a bluff". Putin has over 2000 tactical neutron bombs; we have damn all now. OK? We DID have dedicated tactical nuclear weapons until 1992, and they deterred Russian invasions, but since then we have cut back our deterrence to a bare minimum which excludes the deterrence of conventional wars which risk escalating (like the invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939) into a World War, despite Herman Kahn's warnings of the dangers from minimum deterrence in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War.
Russian propagandists:
"Any confrontation with the NATO bloc is possible only with the use of nuclear weapons. There is simply no other option. If NATO's military organization surpasses us, it is absolutely futile for us to enter into such an armed confrontation with… pic.twitter.com/LYIRrj17Ig
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) July 13, 2024
"If we are able to use these weapons, and the enemy does not have them, their military effect can only be matched by his use of larger-yield dirty weapons - with the political and propaganda penalties their use implies. Of course the converse will also be true." - Samuel T. Cohen, Low-yield fusion weapons for limited wars, RAND report R-347, 1 June 1959, Secret - Restricted Data classified, p.2 (note this report is based on Livermore laboratory's very clean low yield Dove and Starling devices, developed after the successful testing of 95% clean 4.5 megaton Navajo and 85% clean 3.53 megaton Zuni at Bikini Atoll in 1956 which had lead pushers; Cohen's declassified paper is now in Eisenhower's Presidential Library with annotation on the front cover proving President Eisenhower was briefed on it in 1959!).
"There is another way in which we can have too narrow a focus. We can refuse to entertain or consider seriously ideas which seem to be 'crackpot' or unrealistic, but which are really just unfamiliar. In more casual days one could dismiss a bizarre-sounding notion with a snort or comment about it being impractical or implausible. Things moved slowly, and no real harm was done if a new idea took several years to prove itself. Indeed, allowing a notion to stay around for several years before giving it serious intellectual attention meant that most of the 'half-baked' ones got scuttled and never had to be considered seriously at all." - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p125.
"At times, the costs and risks of trying to shift the balance of power are too great, forcing great powers to wait for more favorable circumstances. But the desire for more power does not go away, unless a state achieves the ultimate of hegemony. Since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, however, the world is condemned to perpetual great-power competition. ... They will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability. Simply put, great powers are primed for offense. ... a great power will defend the balance of power when looming change favors another state ... states recognise that the more powerful they are relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival. Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon ... Great powers ... have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system. This dilemma is captured in brutally frank comments that Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that Poland, which was not an independent state at the time, might regain its sovereignty. 'Restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us,' he believed, and therefore he advocated that Prussia [today, North East Germany] should 'smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out'." - Professor John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001, chapter 1.
According to the 1984 Guinness Book of Records (published for sale at Christmas 1983), page 219: "Mass killings ....The greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign nation against the government of another is that of 26,300,000 Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse-tung between 1959 and May 1965. This accusation was made by an agency of the USSR Government in a radio broadcast on 7 Apr 1969. ... The Walker Report published by the US Senage Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death roll within China since 1949 between 32.25 and 61.7 million. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Jean-Pierre Dujardin in Figaro magazine of 19-25 Nov 1949. USSR The total death roll in the Great Purge or Yezhovshchina, in the USSR, in 1936-8 ... was administered by the Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del (NKVD), or People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Soviet security service ... S. V. Utechin, an expert on Soviet affairs, regarded estimates of 8,000,000 or 10,000 victims as 'probably now exaggerations'. On 17 Aug 1942, Stalin indicated to Churchill in Moscow that 10 million kulaks had been liquidated for resisting the collectivization of their farms. ... Genocide ... It has been estimated that 35,000,000 Chinese were wiped out in the Mongolian invasion of 1210-19." This information about Chinese and Russian socialism mass killing of resistance in the 20th century is also given on pages 193-4 the 1975 Guinness Book of Records, 22nd edition issued in October 1975, which also points out on pages 187-8 that over a million were killed during the 1st Battle of the Somme in 1916 France, 1.3-1.5 million were killed during the 880 days siege of Leningrad in WWII. (These horrific war casualties are dwarfed by the natural disasters table on page 212, giving 75 million dead of plague in 1347-51, 21.64 million dead of flu pandemic in 1918, 9.5 million dead from famine in China in 1877-8, 3.7 million dead in a flood in China in 1931, and 1.5 million dead from famine and typhus in Ireland in 1846-51.) So much for propaganda that nuclear deterrence "risks" are particularly horrific statistics in history! Tens of millions were killed by socialist dictators in modern times, without nuclear bombs. Similarly huge numbers were killed by natural disease pandemics and extreme weather. The key difference is that we can now deter invasions.
"Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of utterly destroying the other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. ... Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. ... But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this. ...
"Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. ... A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints. ... When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists’ civil rights. ... If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb. Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory.
"How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, and are then left hanging? The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. ... In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives? ... A Fashion in Thinking. Without any [objective] censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development. In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons—maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. ...
"The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. ... [George] Kennan’s advice to his own country—to begin unilateral disarmament—belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the officials in Moscow’s Old Square roar with laughter at your political wizards! ... But in fact, members of the US antiwar movement became accomplices in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there. Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? ... To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, in this case, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal. ... Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism. The Communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes."
- Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University, A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978.
ABOVE: as Herman Kahn predicted in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War, the paranoid anti-arms race groupthink mob insanity of "disarmament and arms control" public coercion after the first World War was not a fluke, but instead was a standard human reaction to the end of a war. It sowed the seeds of another war! Similarly, after Cold War 1.0 ended in 1991, opposition to disarmament and arms control virtually disappeared, so enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons (which deterred the kind of invasions and conventional warfare that led to both World Wars, including nuclear weapons use twice in the second one), were removed unilaterally by the West, allowing Russian aggression to trigger Cold War 2.0. This is basically a repetition of the way fake "pacifist" disarmament propaganda lying by Lord Noel-Baker (who in a BBC radio broadcast in February 1927 first claimed that there was no defense against gas WMD except disarmament) and Sir Norman Angell (who had been at it since 1908 with his "Great Illusion" anti-deterrence book, see his pre-WWI argument with Churchill reported by Professor Cyril Joad in the latter's 1939 book "Why War?"), engineered disaster via populist weapons effects lying, "knockout blow" deceptions, and lying denials of civil defense effectiveness to negate threats (all the lessons of these lies have NOT been learned, and people like Lord Noel-Baker, who lied about gas knockout blows on BBC radio in February 1927, were still doing exactly the same thing with nuclear weapons fallout lies in 1980 in response to "Protect and Survive"!).
You won't find any objective analysis of this in any "history book", all of which follow left wing Marxism propaganda or the anti-nuclear biased CND bigot AJP Taylor, in denying the facts using a data-dump of horseshit propaganda to bury the truth. In reality, as the cartoon published in the 17 May 1919 Daily Herald by Will Dyson shows, people did predict another war by 1940 as a result of the 1919 "peace deal" by Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Baron Sonnino. But most people prefer to believe lies, a fact shown clearly by an unbiased view of history, or even by an unbiased view of "superstring theory" in physics. But don't dare to stand up for truth, because you'll be subject to lying ad hominem attacks and denied a right to reply and debunk the liars. Power corrupts absolutely because the cowardly crowd backs "fashion", not fact.
This was explained back in 1532 by Machiavelli in The Prince: “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.”
It was also later explained by John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859: “A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind ...”
And don't forget Professor F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1960, p. 379: “The very magnitude of the power over men’s minds that a highly centralised and government-dominated system of education places in the hands of the authorities ought to make one hesitant before accepting it too readily.”
This attitude encourages the mainstream media or "liberals" to censor anything that debunks their agenda. To recap, anti-deterrence propaganda from bigoted liars is the orthodoxy, and infects nuclear weapons discussions, deterrence discussions, and the entire "arms control and disarmament" movement with crap. Mainstream media would shut down the internet to "protect" people from potential "error". It's all Stalinist censorship, made plain by Orwell's book 1984, but ignored as "taboo" by thug censors masquerading as "liberals".
Kahn made the following point about disarmament and arms control: reducing nuclear stockpiles and unilaterally eliminating Type II Deterrence (i.e. deterrence of the provocations that cause war, e.g., disarming in 1992 the West's W79 neutron bombs to deter the invasions that set off both World Wars) doesn't make you safer, because it increases the risk of war as proved by history. Reducing the risk of an "accidental" nuclear war is best done using ABM, civil defense, plus safeguards inside nuclear weapons, than by disarmanent which increases the risk of war by reducing credible deterrence of war. The idea that unilateral disarmament protects you is like saying that nuclear-unarmed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were safe from nuclear attack in August 1945 because they were so-called "Nuclear Free Zones"! Similarly, the fact the world was non-nuclear in 1939 didn't stop nuclear weapons being manufactured and used to end that war! All of the CND arguments are fake news, just as all the arguments by Angell in 1908 against deterrence were fake news. Fakes news sells - as proved by the sale of fairy tales and "fiction". Even if you don't like particular uses or yields of nuclear weapons, there is a choice of tailored nuclear warhead yields and designs, and types of employment to produce different effects, with widely variable cleanliness, neutron output, EMP output, and the separation of heat, blast and fallout effects in air and subsurface bursts, to deter invasions without the collateral damage that accompanies conventional warfare.
"It is entirely plausible that the Nobel Peace Prize [albeit on a more rational and honest planet] should have been awarded to the designers of the first SLBM (submarine launched ballistic missile) systems, for in being so well hidden under the seas, this kind of weapon has made war much less likely during these years and, further, let each side relax somewhat more in the knowledge that such war was unlikely." - George H. Quester, "Maritime Issues In Avoiding Nuclear War", Armed Forces and Society, v13, issue 2, Winter 1987, p. 199.
ABOVE: the Russians have recently released a PDF of their detailed technical nuclear effects analysis of the survival of their cheap civil defense dual-use style (basement car park etc in peacetime) nuclear war shelters: "Civil defense shelters. Designs and calculations" by VA Kotlyarevsky, VI Ganushkin, AA Kostin, et al.; edited by VA Kotlyarevsky. - M.: Stroyizdat, 1989 (607 pages long, 144 references, full of equations and graphs). (Russian: "Убежища гражданской обороны. Проекты и расчеты" / В.А. Котляревский, В.И. Ганушкин, А.А. Костин и др.; под редакцией В. А. Котляревского. - М.: Стройиздат, 1989. https://tehne.com/library/ubezhishcha-grazhdanskoy-oborony-konstrukcii-i-raschet-moskva-1989 ) This tells you that these are not "just for show", but are blast and radiation hardened double-blast door, very high overpressure surviving, very intense fallout surviving protection that fundamentally alters the strategic balance and undermines our nuclear deterrent. This should nukegate the "Scientific American" and other pro-Russian, Western deterrent undermining thugs.
ABOVE: Kahn pointed out in On Thermonuclear War 1960 that the way to prevent invasions and wars in the Middle East is nuclear proliferation of CREDIBLE deterrents (not just nuclear weapons, but also ABM and civil defense shelters to mitigate the civilian collateral damage) that really DETER/HALT INVASIONS (the key is to focus on the 1914 invasion of Belgium by mobilization and concentrated force, triggering WWI and the same for Poland in 1939, triggering WWII): if both sides have a credible, stable nuclear deterrent against INVASIONS (i.e., stable = safe from destruction in an enemy 1st strike, so that nuclear retaliation is guaranteed), you get mutual deterrence and thus peace, not war. And even if one side DOES try an attack, a neutron bomb air burst can discriminately halt the aggression, without any collateral damage (of the sort caused by conventional warfare such as the invasions by the Russians in Ukraine and by Hamas in Israel). Conventional weapons are not a substitute because their mobilization along frontiers causes "crisis instability" as occurred in 1914, leading to war. This is why compact, long-range nuclear weapons to prevent this kind of 1914 mobilization "crisis instability" trigger problem, are required. Nuclear escalation can be deterred, just as gas war escalation was deterred against terrorist states successfully in WWII, by a combination of credible civil defense plus retaliation threats capability. The "all out" use of nuclear weapons is simply a form of nuclear disarmament, that leaves the aggressor open to retaliation by the other side's protected 2nd strike (retaliation) force. We have to get this message out past the fake news and "taboo" superstitions of anti-deterrent warmongering paranoid disarmament quacks and charlatans masquerading as "peace advocates". If you want a "two-state solution" and one of those two states is intent on the racist extermination of the other, it shouldn't require Einstein to declare that pressurised "peace talks" are going to be "double-talk"; the slavery issue of 1861 in America wasn't resolved by a "two-state solution" with the southern Confederacy one state and the northern Union the other, nor was the protestant-catholic conflict in Northern Ireland resolved by a "two-state solution", but by a single-state solution with power sharing. You don't resolve a conflict by pressurised "peace talks" or "declarations" between leading opponents in bad faith, but only by genuine accommodation of differences at grass roots or street level. This is why conflicts and wars come before peace settlements. If you really want a "two-state solution" between bitter rivals, you need a credible deterrent to keep the peace. Machiavelli or Marx? Truth or lying? That's the choice.
Glasstone and Dolan stated in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), Table 12.17 on page 546, that the median distance in Hiroshima for survival after 20 days was 0.12 miles for people in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for people standing outdoors. Therefore the median distances for survival in modern city buildings and in the open differed by a factor of 11 for Hiroshima; the difference in areas was thus a factor of 112 or about 120. Hence, taking cover in modern city buildings reduces the casualty rates and the risks of being killed by a factor of 120 for Hiroshima conditions, contrary to popular media presented political propaganda that civil defence is hopeless. This would reduce 500,000 casualties for people unprotected in the open (assumed generally throughout Glasstone's book and about 100% of anti-nuclear propaganda) to 4,000 casualties, if people are on the lower floors of concrete buildings.
(NOTE: back in 1990, I completed the unpublished book Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, debunking Glasstone's "free fields" blast and radiation calculations for modern cities. Basically, the oscillation of, and at higher pressures the plastic zone damage of, modern reinforced concrete city buildings by blast waves is easy to calculate, and irreversibly absorbs free-field blast energy, quickly lowering the overpressure and dynamic pressure to values way lower than measured over unobstructed desert and ocean at nuclear weapons tests and reported by Glasstone. Penney measured this blast energy absorption effect at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the majority of buildings were single storey wood-frame, not concrete. Dr John von Neuman predicted this blast energy attenuation by causing destruction in Los Alamos blast wave secret reports LA-1020/LA-1021, from which it entered Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons, but Dr Bethe deleted this information from the unclassified summary version, LA-2000, and it was deleted from the later Glasstone Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, and replaced with a denial of this fact, despite the fact it is a consequence from the principle of conservation of energy, and the exclusion of the effect makes the blast treatment wrong. Similarly, throughout the 1950s the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch calculated thermal effects allowing for skyline shadowing, disproving firestorms and related nuclear winter using this mechanism, but secrecy was used to prevent the information getting wide coverage. Glasstone also mis-calculates all other nuclear effects, for example fallout and cratering are both based on debunked simplifications, exaggerating the effects by large factors. Glasstone entirely ignores all political and military effects of nuclear weapons, as well as the influence of clean secondary stages on the effects of nuclear weapons, e.g. the separation of effects for the air burst neutron bomb. Glasstone's book is really: "The fake effects of nuclear weapons on civilian targets, ignoring the blast and radiation skyline shielding"! Some declassified exaggerations in nuclear threats from Russian tactical nuclear weapons, debunking populist CND/Nukemap nuclear weapons effects propaganda, are presented in NUCLEAR WEAPONS COLLATERAL DAMAGE EXAGGERATIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR CIVIL DEFENSE. This is treated as "heresy" by the deluded quacks and charlatans of war-making "disarmament" taboos.).
"The critical point is whether the Soviets and the Europeans believe that we can keep our casualties to a level we would find acceptable ... In such an eventuality, the Soviets would be deterred from such provocative acts as a ground attack on Europe ... But if they do not believe that we can keep casualties to a level we would find acceptable, the Soviets may feel safe in undertakng these extremely provocative adventures ... this in itself creates an extremely dangerous negotiating situation - one in which the possibility of extreme pressure and blackmail will always be in the background, if not the foreground. ... 'Will the survivors envy the dead?' Unless the President believes that the postwar world will be worth living in, he will in all likelihood be deterred from living up to our alliance obligations." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton Uni. Press, 1960, page 35. This is Kahn's key argument, explaining the Ukraine war today; a fact always ignored by 100% of "nuclear critics". On page 34, Kahn gives a "notorious" table relating casualties to calculated recovery times for GDP; the GDP recovers in one year if 1% are killed, 100 years if 90% are killed. This difference is similar to the observed 120-fold difference in risk of being killed in Hiroshima if people are outdoors and totally unshielded, to the risk when shielded by the lower floors of modern city concrete buildings. So efficient civil defense warnings make nuclear deterrence over 100 times more credible, reducing casualties and the time taken for economic recovery from 100 years to under 1 year!
Kahn on page 48 of On Thermonuclear War easily debunks J. B. S. Haldane's genetic defects naive propaganda lie for nuclear war, because spreading out damage in time allows survival, whereas having all the damage kill 100% immediately doesn't permit survival. Kahn considers two nuclear attacks (Table 8): an initial 1,500 megatons on 150 targets, and a later wargasm of 20,000 megatons on 400 targets. He then goes into radiation effects lying propaganda by left-wing anti-nuclear disarmament fanatics, before giving the fallout gamma radiation effects much later on, in Tables 23 and 24. For the 1,500 megaton attack, only 1% of the area of the USA gets 6000-10,000R in the first 48 hours outdoors, requiring shelter protection factors of 40-65; for the 20,000 megaton attack, 50% of the area gets this radiation so you need 50 times more good shelter. As a result of these calculations, Kahn argues on p111: "we recommend that about $150 million be spent on identifying, counting, labelling and improving the best radiation protection in every neighbourhood so that people will know where to go...", adding that radiation meters are needed to enable people to go outdoors after 48 hours briefly to decontaminate or evacuate heavy fallout areas before getting a lethal radiation dose in structures offering poor protection. All this was, Kahn points out, published in a 1958 RAND Corp report ignored by President Eisenhower to save a few bucks (it was mostly implemented by Kennedy in 1961). In Tables 12, 13 and 14 Kahn shows how to deal with strontium-90 fallout contaminated food: on page 65 he points out that the linear no-threshold radiation effects theory is fake news for civil defense since the radium dial painters required 20,000 - 30,000 strontium units equivalent to get bone cancer, whereas the official safety limit is just 67 units! So simply by kicking out bad "science" (political "theory" standards) and keeping to actual radiation effects data, you resolve a problem by feeding food with over 25,000 strontium units to animals, and reserving less contaminated food for human consumption. Commenting generally on this kind of fashionable nuclear exaggeration mentality, Kahn explains on p160:
"... we are likely to suffer from the same movement towards 'responsible' budgets, pacifism, and unilateral and universal disarmament that swept through England in the 1920s and 1930s. The effect then was that England prematurely disarmed herself to such an extent that she first lost her voice in world affairs, and later her independence in a war that was caused as much by English weakness as by anything else."
Kahn adds to this on page 568:
"It is difficult and even impossible for most Americans to believe that they have an enemy. This is particularly true of intellectuals and 'men of good will'. ... that all sane men are reasonable and it ought to be easy to clear up misunderstandings by a few meetings and agreements (that is, they believe in what the psychiatrist calls a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' in the sense that 'good will generates good will' ..." Kahn testified to congress that Newman hadn't read his book!
Russian propagandists threaten with tactical nuclear strikes on Ukraine. They think that after that, Europe will immediately stop "demonizing and isolating Russia" and will immediately "line up at our door to say hello." pic.twitter.com/6kgmkMc5p3
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 4, 2024
Senator John F. Kennedy forecast in a speech to the Senate on 14 August 1958: "... the deterrent ratio might well shift to the Soviets so heavily, during the years of the gap, as to open to them a shortcut to world domination ... Their missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly, but surely, advance - through Sputnik diplomacy, limited 'brush fire' wars, indirect non-overt aggression, intimidation and subversion, increased prestige or influence, and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the free world will shift against us." (If the Russians have 2,000 to 10,000 tactical neutron bombs and we have none, our "strategic balance" of ICBMs etc will be incredible retaliation, so our tactical deterrent "gap" in defenses puts us into the situation that Kennedy forecast.)
Kennedy's 1961 decision to back Kahn's crash civil defense program was apparently due to his attending the June 1959 nuclear war hearings (at which Herman Kahn first found fame); yet even earlier Kennedy had observed first-hand the appeasement of the Nazis while working for his father, the US Ambassador, for 6 months in 1939, writing his 150-pages thesis on "Appeasement at Munich: The inevitable result of the slowness of the British democracy to change from a disarmament policy"! This thesis was edited into the 1940 UK bestselling book "Why England Slept" by the New York Times journalist Arthur Krock (with a foreword by Henry Luce), in which Kennedy pointed out that the refusal of pro-disarmament northern left-wing councils to instigate civil defence (then called air raid precautions) supported fascist appeasement! However, Kennedy's interest in arms race, disarmament, and war issues goes back even further, to the year 1932, when he was 15 and in hospital, according to the author Kay Halle: "Joseph Kennedy Sr asked me if I would stop with him while we were in the hospital to see his young son who was in there quite ill. ... We went into his bedroom, his room at the hospital, and you could hardly see him, he was so buried in the bed under masses of books. ... I was awfully interested because the book he was reading was World Crisis by Winston Churchill [the book recommended as the best study of war and deterrence and its failure, by Herman Kahn in On Thermonuclear War]."
(Kay Halle quote source: Robin Cross, "JFK: A Hidden Life", Bloomsbury, London, 1992. Robin Cross's JFK book also points out that Kennedy "had always been a supporter of a vigorous defense policy. In 1948-9 he had attacked the Truman administration over the economies it had made in the defense establishment, advocating an air force of 70 groups, rather than the 55 groups proposed ... in the 1950s, he had urged the re-arming of Europe, if necessary with US help ... In the Senate in the summer of 1954 he had opposed the Eisenhower administration's reduction in the size of the army ... In May 1955 ... he claimed that the administration had 'guessed short' on the military strength of the Soviet Union ... It was by this consistent route that in 1958 Jack Kennedy arrived at the momentous discovery of the 'missile gap', which was to provide one of the principal themes of his 1960 presidential campaign." Kennedy was on the same page as Kahn. In 1957, America had no proof-tested ICBM, just the 3,000 mile range Jupiter IRBM, while the Russians had successfully tested ICBMs the rockets of which successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik, on 4 October 1957. Although by putting Jupiter IRBMs into Turkey America could cancel out the small ICBM "missile gap", there was concern that just a few Russian ICBM nuclear blasts over American cities could wipe out Western Cold War resolve, as had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When elected, Kennedy reversed Eisenhower's civil defense policy, as well as increasing the Minuteman ICBM order by 75%, the Western Europe tactical nuclear weapon stockpile by 60%, and the total number of American nuclear weapons by 100%, in an early effort at bankrupting the Russians with an arms race; a policy abandoned for a time after the Vietnam disaster, but re-instigated in the 1980s by Reagan with the desired effects.)
Nicola Smith and Susie Coen in the Telegraph, 21 August 2024: "US prepares for threat of joint Chinese, Russian and North Korean nuclear strike. Joe Biden secretly approved change to America’s nuclear defence plan in March... The United States is making plans to counter the… pic.twitter.com/jXWnTBijZC
"People May Not Care Simply Because They Do Not care. ... The following (paraphrased) quotations are typical of the bureaucrat or decision maker who simply cannot imagine that his safe, snug world can really be dangerous. (The quotations are not exclusive. The determined do-nothing advocate will go through each in turn.)
1. The problem is hypothetical. You cannot prove that it exists. There is no need to get hysterical.
2. The problem is there, but there are many other problems. In your parochialism [limited views] and naivety, you have gotten hysterical. We have known about this problem for some time and we are not excited. Why are you?
3. The problem is there. It is insoluble. (Or, it is too late to do anything.) For God's sake don't rock the (political or public relations) boat. [This is based on Kahn's dealings with people like his boss at RAND Corporation, just prior to his leaving to found the Hudson Institute.]
The key words in the above are hypothetical, parochial, naive, and hysterical. That is, any specialist who raises a problem in his specialty is accused of being hypothetical and parochial, of not taking a practical over-all view. ... I can remember an occasion when I was discussing with one of these critics what seemed to me like a problem approaching potentially crisis proportions. He insisted that I was comparing hypothetical Soviet programs with hard American programs. I pointed out with some asperity that the Soviets up to that time had refused to allow our staff access to their records; naturally we would have some trouble proving that these programs existed and would actually meet the hypothetical dates. On the other hand, our staff did have access to U.S. data, so it was easy to show that our counter programs were not as firm as advertised. ... A typical hypothetical possibility is illustrated by the ominous possibilities for Hitler-type blackmail tactics created by the waning of our Type II and Type III Deterrence capability" - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, pp347-8.
"There is a great deal of worry today that the Russians may make impressive gains utilizing only 'ambiguous challenges', without presenting us with any direct challenges. ... Their success to date in using 'ambiguous challenges' should be nothing to what they could do if they could afford and desired to be unambiguous. ... I think we can expect much firmer, confident and imaginative behavor, if not audacious and reckless conduct, from Khrushchev and his successors that we had from Stalin [a prediction that was confirmed by the 1961 Berlin Wall, 50 megaton test and the 1962 Cuban missiles crisis, etc.]" - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, p348
"As the picture of horror of a modern thermonuclear war grows, we tend to ... we emphasise the impact of our capabilities on the enemy's mind rather than on his body [italic emphasis is Kahn's own]. ... Type I Deterrence is the deterrence of a direct attack [Dulles' massive retaliation]. ... Type II Deterrence is defined as using strategic threats to deter an enemy from engaging in very provocative acts [e.g. invasion of Poland 1939, invasion of Belgium 1914, invasion of Ukraine 2022] ... Type III Deterrence might be called 'tit-for-tat' [e.g. Kennedy's decision to resume USA nuclear tests in 1962 in response to Russia's 50 megaton test in late 1961, etc.]." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, p126. Regarding "knockout blow" propaganda scams in the media/politics, Kahn on p350 argues that the same delusional lie occurred before each major war, including WWI and WWII, both to sell the war to the public and to justify not planning for a long-duration war of attrition which seemed "defeatist". For example, mass media "pacifist" morons believed and hyped that, prior to WWI: "interdependence of nations was so great that the sheer interruption of normal commerce would cause a collapse after a few weeks or months in much the same way that people argue today that if the A country (big cities) is destroyed, the B country (small cities, rural areas) must also necessarily collapse [after a countervalue nuclear strike on cities]. Therefore, almost everybody expected the war of 1914 to be short ... the famous Schlieffen Plan ... called for them to destroy the French in about 6 weeks, then move their army to the Russian front and destroy the Russians in the next few weeks... [Hitler in 1939 simply aimed to repeat this, dismissing Schlieffen Plan's failure in WWI as sabotage from internal enemies of the state]." (Quote from Kahn, OTW, p350.)
"To understand this attitude ... in 1961 Herman Kahn’s 1960 radically innovative book on the nuclear deterrence of war in general (not merely “massive retaliation” to deter all-out “doomsday” attacks, as was the previous policy by Dulles) was “reviewed” by controversial lawyer James Roy Newman in Scientific American. Newman, a complete bastard to Britain - he drafted the notorious and paranoid McMahon 1946 US Atomic Energy Act, which illegally and unilaterally ended Britain’s wartime agreement to continue postwar collaboration on nuclear energy - hadn’t read Kahn’s book (any more than he had read the vital Churchill-Roosevelt Hyde Park agreement for post-war continuation of nuclear collaboration of September 19, 1944 or consulted the UK government on the topic, when drafting the quack Atomic Energy Act passed by Congress in 1946!), and just scanned the first part of Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War briefly and taken some quotes and tables out of context to criticise (despite the title, its purpose is the credible deterrence of major provocations, not just the fighting of WWIII if deterrence fails). Moreover, he denied the existence of the author, because the publisher hadn’t provided much biography! We don’t need that kind of abuse from such bigots, do we?" - https://nigecook.substack.com/p/coming-soon
Anti-civil defense fanatic Lawrence Freedman (the guy who got the Sunday Express by drop my feature on the exaggerated collateral damage from nuclear weapons in 1995) has a new article in the New York Times (3 October 2024): "Putin Keeps Threatening to Use Nuclear Weapons. Would…
The explanation of the neutron bomb's invasion deterrent history in the 1958 low yield relatively clean "peaceful" Livermore nuclear explosives Dove and Starling is given by Samuel Cohen in his 6 December 1984 interview, conducted by Robert Del Tredici in Beverley Hills, California (published on pages 157-9 of his 1987 book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb,):
"I was in the Efficiency Group at Los Alamos. Our job was to figure out the yield of the bomb that was burst over Nagasaki. ... On the evening of Hiroshima, when Oppenheimer was describing in very crude terms the catastrophe that had taken place over that city, the scientists who were listening to him were a bunch of howling savages, embullient beyond imagination, as pleased as punch ... Oppenheimer is rightfully called the father of the atomic bomb, but equally rightfully he could be called the father of the tactical nuclear weapon because he did the first conceptual spadework for using nuclear weapons strictly in a battlefield way instead of just decimating cities in a holocaust [thus led to his legendary dispute with Teller who just wanted massive retaliation H-bombs as a deterrent and bargaining chip for peace with Russia] ... He professed to be sufficiently guilt-ridden and aghast and appalled over the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that he never wanted that to happen again. So he recommended we design lower-yield weapons that wouldn't wipe out cities ... The basic concept is to be able to have a battlefield nuclear weapon that won't have all these nasty side effects ... If it's going to be used to get what we call the 'separation of effects', in other words, to get rid of the blast and heat [collateral damage to civilians], it not only has to be air burst, but it has to be burst high ... between 2,000 and 3,000 feet. ... it's a kind of micro-mini hydrogen bomb. ...
"I'd had the idea for the neutron bomb about 8 years before I figured out how to put it together. I put together the actual concept in the summer of 1958. It came about purely by accident when I visited the Livermore Laboratory in the spring of 1958. I asked if anyone had any new ideas going around, and they said they really didn't, though they had begun work on some peaceful nuclear explosives. And the head of the division said, 'Before you go home, you ought to take a look at these', and he showed me designs for some of the peaceful devices. And there they were: the neutron bomb characteristics. One of those designs was called Dove. Dove, by the way, for 'Dove of Peace'. ... Well, there were two, Dove and Starling; both derived the major share of their energy from fusing deuterium and tritium. ... The question I asked was, 'How many neutrons come out of this thing?' They made a few back-of-the-envelope calculations and the answer was: a hell of a lot. Then I took these calculations home and made my own calculations about the military effects of such a weapon, and, voila, the neutron bomb! Then I put together the military concept of how to use this bomb and went off on a big sales campaign. ...
"Ever since Day 1 we've patterned our nuclear war-fighting strategies after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ... So what we're basically proposing here [using conventional Teller or Dulles "massive retaliation" MAD mutual-assured-destruction H bombs-on-cities crap] to deter war is the threat of our own suicide. ... it's all based on the premise that if we cross that nuclear threshold one more time, we'll bring on the beginning of the end. So you get people like Jonathan Schell [author of "Fate of the Earth" which lies that the 15 megaton Bravo test blinded everyone at Rongelap and that radiation can't be stopped easily by simple earth covered shelters proved at nuclear tests] and Carl Sagan with the idea of nuclear winter and everything else. It's Armageddon. I don't find their ideas credible, and I'll tell you why: because in order to get these results from using nuclear weapons against cities, you have to have nations willing to use them that way. ... You know what the United States has to do if it wants to survive? It has to accept the fact that there will probably be a nuclear war, and it has to prepare to fight it and win it. ... It's been U.S. national policy for more than a quarter of a century that nuclear weapons are actually unusable weapons. That's horseshit, and you can quote me on that. ... Let the allies develop their own neutron bomb. As a matter of fact, let's sell it to them! They should have discriminate weapons for their own self-defense. The United States doesn't need to take on the burden of defending all the rest of the world. That [the UK policy of 1914 regarding Belgium's invasion and 1939 regarding Poland's invasion, not to mention 2022 regarding Ukraine's invasion] is in fact the best way of getting into a nuclear war ..."
The technical history of Livermore's development of enhanced-neutron tactical nuclear weapons goes back to a study of lightweight, thin H-bomb casings by Dr Herbert York, discussed in detail below with regard to recently declassified data on the designs of two American H-bombs of roughly similar physical size but different mass, composition and yield: the W47 and the B28. York showed that the pressure and duration of the x-ray energy coupling causing the fusion stage's compression force are both functions of the case thickness. So if you reduce the outer casing thickness to make the bomb lighter, you have less compression force and it lasts a shorter period of time. To ensure a successful fusion burn in this situation, you have to reduce the amount of dense material like uranium in the fusion stage and replace it with easier to compress fusion fuel. This occurred in progressive Livermore designs with smaller sizes and lighter casings during the 1950s, starting with a device called Linda, then Flute, then Piccolo. These had thin oralloy (highly enriched U235) pushers (3.8mm thick for Piccolo), but clean versions with lead pushers in place of U235 were designed, and the combination of the high percentage of fusion yield with the thin pusher and outer casing gave the enhanced neutron Dove design.
(The paragraph above about the link between speed of fusion burn and tamper thickness in low yield neutron bomb design is not speculative, and is confirmed not just by the recent book by Tom Ramos, but earlier by nuclear weapons effects expert Charles S. Grace of the Royal Military College of Science in his 1994 Nuclear Weapons Principles, Effects and Survivability on 23: "It is possible to produce comparatively low-yield weapons with only a small fission trigger to initiate a fusion stage. If it is designed so that the nuclear reactions proceed as fast as possible, the tamper need not be very thick, and a large proportion of the energetic fusion neutrons will escape." Grace around that time very kindly responded to a letter from me and provided photos of British military equipment exposed at the UK nuclear tests for my book, Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, as well as telephoning me, which was helpful. He was a very powerful advocate of the neutron bomb to deter invasions, writing a letter to the New Scientist to debunk anti-nuclear bomb propaganda. He did a lot of research using Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston facilities on simple protection against nuclear attack, and his book also points out that Glasstone and Dolan are completely misleading regarding thermal effects, stating on page 41: "Adequate protection for the skin greatly reduces the risk of thermal casualties. ... wearing a well-designed NBC suit over combat clothing, and a respirator and gloves ... the thermal energy from [1 kiloton yield] tactical weapons needed to cause extensive second-degree burns is about 1.3 MJ/m^2 [i.e., 31 cal/cm^2 since 4.186 J = 1 Calorie, and 1 m^2 = 10^4 cm^2; for bare skin only 160 kJ/m^2 or 3.8 cal/cm^2 is needed; thus there is a huge difference between Glasstone and Dolan and the actual risk, and Grace points out that if clothing ignites, people can simply roll out the flames on the ground, without getting burned!]." Grace's book also gives the military effects of nuclear weapons - ignored entirely by Glasstone and Dolan - including photos of vehicles exposed at 370 m range to 10 kiloton Totem-1 nuclear test on a 100 ft high tower in Australia in 1953. A side-on tank was not overturned by 230 kPa peak overpressure, but was displaced 2.5 m with a peak acceleration of 30g. The mudguards and trailer were damaged, but: "After the burst the tank was able to be driven off, and its gun was fired after sand and debris had been removed from the barrel. The lighter scout car was beyond repair. Had crews been in the vehicles they would have received a radiation dose of around 100,000 cGy [R] ... they would have been incapacitated virtually instantaneously.")
BBC won't report Reuters any more than USA news will, sad yet what happens in corrupt despotic regimes claiming that lying is "free speech on nuclear weapons": Russian nuclear test chief says Moscow is ready to resume testing 'at any moment' https://t.co/SYlfwJXHan
This Russian State TV Channel 1 broadcast on a proposed nuclear test on a fake "plywood" based city to make the fake plywood burn for YouTube viewers, is a load of complete CND anti-nuclear propaganda crap. George R Stanbury of UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch civil… https://t.co/ustSLjl1SN
"Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is deficient. ... a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy [spying problem plus whole notion of democracy requiring voters to be informed] or await their consequences with patience. These are qualities which more especially belong to an individual or an aristocracy; and they are precisely the qualities by which a nation, like an individual, attains a dominant position. ... The mass of the people may be led astray by ignorance or passion ..." - Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America 1835 (Vintage NT 1954 ed, v1, pp243-5, as quoted by H. Kahn, OTW, p579; note that Kahn's full quotation backs the notion of elitism aristocracy as the solution, aka the clan dynasties in USA politics such as the Kennedy and Bush political families. On page 407 of OTW, Kahn also appears to back elitism in discussing how von Mannstein was able to bypass jobsworths in the General Staff and get a direct meeting with Hitler to modify the Schlieffen Plan's to outflank the new French Magoniot Line defenses by invading through the Ardennes Forest with the latest Panzer tanks; Hitler had many defects but at least he was prepared to listen seriously to "crackpot" sounding ideas from the lower ranks and implement them, unlike so many openly fascist "top dogs" today).
"There seems to be little point in discussing the view that finds a solution in a totally disarmed world. ... The violator would then have an incredible advantage if the agreement ever broke down ..." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton Uni. Press, 1960, page 5. Kahn adds added that the world of 1914 and 1939 was non-nuclear, there was an international ban on chemical weapons (the Hague Convention of 1899) prior to WWI in which chemical weapons were used without restraint, and that there was agreement amongst experts that WWII would start with a gas knockout blow against cities, when in fact no gas was ever dropped on cities during WWII (pesticide Zyklon B, crystals which emits non-persistent hydrogen cyanide gas on exposure to the air, was used in gas chambers but the Nazis never dropped any of their 12,000 tons of tabun nerve agent on cities thanks to retaliation risks and the universal issue of gas masks). So disarmament propaganda was just that, lying blathering by politicians to earn "peace prizes".
"It would be disastrous to have a conspicious gap in the spectrum of deterrents and capabilities [strategic and tactical to cover all kinds of dangerous provocations]. For example, when President Eisenhower remarked at a press conference that it was unthinkable that he would call out federal troops to enforce federal law ... some Southerners immediately did something to make it thinkable [Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to Little Rock's Central High School to reinforce Arkansas' National Guard in allowing 9 black students to enroll at the school in 1957]." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p286. The point is, saying something is "unthinkable so we don't need to prepare for it" is not cost-effective when it encourages and invites the enemy to invade and provoke you. Lying blathering peacenik enemy collaboration always backfires by inviting aggression. (Even Trump had this problem, when some of his supporters misinterpreted his peaceful speech - questioning why the postal ballots showed higher support for Biden than the polling station in-person votes - and invaded the Capitol on 6 January 2021.) If you want to deter evil, you have to avoid ambiguity and to be open and also clear that nothing is "unthinkable" and state in advance precisely what you will do in any eventuality, so as to make deterrence unequivocally effective. You want the enemy to be clear what they will have coming to them if they provoke you: "with the record of the 1930s plainly before us, we should all be able to realise that it is possible for all these kinds of deterrence to be strained." - Kahn, OTW, p286.
No wonder the Leninist lawyer James Roy Newman of the "elitist communist" Scientific American hated Kahn in his "review"! I first read Kahn's On Thermonuclear War in 1990, and have just finished re-reading it in September 2024 due to the Ukraine war. My view of the book is now very different to the notes I made in 1990 when reading Kahn during the writing of my own unpublished August 1990 dated manuscript Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory. The basic problem is that Kahn has two theses in one volume. The first 310 pages of On Thermonuclear War debunks populist nuclear weapons and war myths, such as fallout gamma rays and strontium-90 in food killing everyone; the second part, pages 311-651 is an analysis of the history of war and extrapolations of that history to various kinds of deterrence and nuclear war. As his preface says (page x): "This book is dedicated to the goal of anticipating, avoiding, and alleviating crises." (Italic emphasis is Kahn's own.) The problem with Kahn's On Thermonuclear War is precisely the same as that with Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons: jumbled up presentation (if you are discussing one type of nuclear explosion, you need to discuss the effects that type produces, not separate effects into different chapters, so readers are misled and think heavy fallout occurs from air bursts, etc.,) and you need to show how deterrence of certain kinds of nuclear attack even within a nuclear war is necessary to retain "bargaining chips", "cities as hostages", etc. Otherwise 100% of readers do what journalists do with "Nukemap" and simply assume the entire enemy stickpile is used in a single knockout blow on cities, in which 100% of people unprotected, by even "duck and cover"! This increased casualties by a factor of 120 in Hiroshima, and is where you get the 120 fold exaggerations of nuclear war casualty predictions from. By the omission of key (secret classified) data on neutron bombs to deter invasions in the first place, or survival of people and vehicles in simple, cheap trench shelters at nuclear tests, for example, you depart 180 degrees from reality.
"But how many murders are they [lying journalists, politicians, fellow-travelling Western nuke designers who won't disclose the truth to the media] responsible for? Basically, nuclear deterrence using tactical nuclear weapons to deter the invasions that set off both World Wars, i.e. the invasion of Belgium in 1914 by concentrated force and of Poland in 1939 by concentrated force (from the East by Russia and from the West by Germany), could have prevented many millions of deaths since 1945, but evil folk prevented this, wanting war to continue. ... Hiroshima was entirely vaporized by a nuclear explosion on 6 August 1945, says CND. In that case, this US Air Force film of the slight scorching on otherwise undamaged materials, proving the effectiveness of “duck and cover” for shielding, is fake news. But it’s not. What’s fake news is everything every published on nuclear weapons effects by Bulletin of Atomic scientists, Scientific American, all newspapers, and all TV shows on the subject ... In fact, Hiroshima casualty data published [in the massively-effects-exaggerating] Glasstone book “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” (1962-77 editions) proves that being indoors in the lower floors of a concrete building reduces the LD50 radius from 1.3 miles in the open to 0.12 miles for lower floors of concrete buildings. Since area is proportional to radius squared, this means a protection factor of 120 for Hiroshima burst conditions (16 kt, 600m altitude). This shielding factor would for a densely populated modern city reduce 500,000 (half a million) killed for people outdoors totally unshielded to “just” 4,000 killed indoors on the lower floors of modern city concrete buildings! Er, this result of 4,000 killed just happens to be precisely the number mentioned by the Independent newspaper article (quote above!) of pensioners murdered by cold and starvation due to financial destitution due to Sir Keir Starmer’s “tough decision” to end winter fuel allowances, in order to pay massive salary rises to public sector employees." - https://nigecook.substack.com/p/another-assassination-attempt-on
Kahn makes a further essential point about "secrecy" (there ain't any secrecy when the other side has spies like Fuchs) covering up alleged gross delusional failings in Western nuclear weapons design, effects and capabilities on page 384 of On Thermonuclear War, where he quotes extensively from chapter 6 "Torpedoes" of Rowland and Boyd's US Navy Bureau of Ordnance in World War II (published by the US Navy), proving how the secrecy of US torpedo design, development, testing and stockpiling led to tragic groupthink delusions of supremacy and of having the best torpedoes in the world, that were only debunked in actual combat during the 1941-3 period of WWII: "As each defect was exposed, the morale of the submariners who risked their lives to take the war to the enemy suffered, the enemy was given further respite ... the problem was compounded by the Bureau's reluctance to accept the fleet evaluation of its weapon. This reluctance was born ... from misplaced confidence in its own past work. ... Security, a necessary concern of the armed forces, became such a fetish that measures designed to protect a device from enemy eyes actually hid its defects from those who made the regulations. Ironically, some of those defects were already known to the foreign powers who later became our allies or enemies. ... even when the torpedo exploded properly, it lacked the punch submariners desired. ... each defect concealed another ... The Bureau was reluctant to believe that the secret weapon long regarded as one of our greatest assets should turn out to be a liability." (Kahn gives many other similar examples of bureaucratic secretive nonsense backfiring even in WWI, in Chapter 8 of OTW. American Colonel Billy Mitchell of the American Air Force was the first to suggest paratroopers to get over enemy lines, and predicted a Japanese attack on Pearl harbor (he was demoted and then court martialled on the direct orders of President Calvin Coolidge). Tanks and gas are both treated in detail by Kahn: both were kept so secret that the military didn't have a clue about them when first used on the battlefield so their initial "factor of surprise" was lost and the enemy was given the chance to negate them after bungled first-use:
"The first use of tanks in September 1916 completely ignored the tactical and strategic ideas of the innovators and was carried out as a sort of field trial. ... The German poison gas story has some interesting analogies with the British tank story. This too had an uphill fight with the authorities. Again, even after the weapon had been developed the command did not wish to take the risk of using the untried weapon on a large scale, though the inventors urged it, until the military had developed some experience on the capabilities and limitations of gas warfare. It was first tried on April 22, 1915 and proved a tremendous tactical success. In fact, a five-mile gap was opened in the Allied lines, but the Germans were not prepared to exploit the opportinity. They were not really making an attack, they were just trying an experiment. The British reaction ... was very fast. ... Sir William Ramsay had guessed from the description of the battle reports that chlorine had been used and came to the War Office with a protective measure, some sample mouth-pads made of flannel or wool soaked in hyposulphite of soda. British women were asked to furnish 1,000,000 at once. Thanks to their help and Red Cross efforts, the necessary quantity came in several days. Within a fortnight, every man in the British army at the front was supplied with a rudimentary respirator. ... History is full of examples of impractical notions, or, equally important, notions that proved to be just fine but which were tested prematurely. ... The most spectacular military event of World War I, the development of two parallel lines of trenches ... while predicted by Bloch, came as a complete surprise. ... given the examples of such warfare in the American Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War - it is hard to see how military experts could have overlooked the possibility that the widespread availability of machine guns and barbed wire might result in static trench warfare, but the military planners on both sides completely overlooked the possibility [as they did for submarines blocking logistics supplies, depth charges, and particularly SAS type infiltration tactics to overcome trench warfare: French Captain Laffargue wrote a proposal for this which the Allies laughed at, but when a copy of the proposal fell into German hands, Ludendorff at once (quote from Captain G. C. Wynne on p357 of Kahn's OTW): "translated into German and issued as an official German training manual, eventually becoming the basis of General Ludendorff's textbook ... [leading to German implementation of the enemy's plan so] the Germans so effectively broke through the British position in March 1918, and the Chemin des Dames position in May ...". SO, UNLESS WE ARE TO REPEAT SUCH MISTAKES, WE MUST NOT ALLOW PETTY HUBRIS OF "JOBSWORTH BUREAUCRATS" TO BLOCK INNOVATIONS NEEDED TO WIN WARS!
ABOVE: Kahn was treated with the "shoot the messenger" reaction against Machiavelli, merely for speaking truth to power in 1960: "If the above deterrents are to work reliably, there must always be in the background the knowledge that if they did not, other kinds of deterrents or corrections would come in. It could be disastrous to have a conspicuous gap in the spectrum of deterrents and capabilities. For example, when President Eisenhower remarked at a press conference that it was unthinkable that he would call out federal troops to enforce federal law in the Southern states, some Southerners immediately did something to make it thinkable. Something similar may happen if he convinces the Soviets that he means what he says when he says that "war is preposterous." I suspect that many in the West are guilty of the worst kind of wishful thinking when, in discussing deterrence, they identify the unpleasant with the impossible. It is particularly hard to understand why this is so when almost all who write on this subject were adults during the later part of the Hitler era and presumably were educated in some of the ways in which all these types of deterrence can be strained." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, page 286. Will the left ever learn facts from history?
ABOVE: Nazi supporting "peace" propaganda flooded the UK and USA in the 1930s, as it still does. Comintern's legacy is a repetition of the 1920s and 1930s anti-deterrent mindset, falsely portrayed by Russian "Fifth Column" propaganda fronts as "pacifism" or "peace" arguments. When communists were rejected as unpopular at the election polls, they adopted subversive methods, trying to undermine war readiness (deterrence) to help Russia get in a position to start WWIII, just as they had helped the Nazis in the 1930s do exactly the same thing (while being awarded "Nobel Peace Prizes" for their propaganda; look at the history of 1920s and 1930s gas war anninilation "Nobel peace Prize" liars Lord Noel-Baker, Sir Norman Angell et al.). The result wasn't an end to the arms race or militarism, but an escalation on the enemy side, and an erosion of technical competence and military preparedness on the side of the democracies. Banning the TV transmission of classic "Tom and Jerry" cartoons for "portraying violence as normal to kids" and banning "Action Man" style toy guns for "encouraging deterrence of dictators to kids" in the West, didn't stop Russia's Hitler Youth movement from preparing for war. All this just helped the enemy prepare for WWIII. The paranoid conspiracies aren't the supposed "war mongers" on the side of the democracies, but by the real war mongers on the side of the dictatorships and their fellow travelling "Sputniks", in infiltrating the Western political systems, mass media, and educational establishments with delusional fanatical anti-Western-nuclear bias. Numerous articles sent to "New Scientist" in the 1990s proving the errors in popular propaganda it published by anti-nuclear fanatics like "Rob Edwards" (co-author of the 1982 book "Fuelling the nuclear arms race: the links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons") were simply rejected because they contradicted populist lies "New Scientist" published weekly from such people! This made it appear that there was no opposition to such Russian Fifth Column propaganda lies! Result: no civil defence option and no tactical nuclear deterrent option against "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction" in 2002, and instead WAR. Which is precisely what these lying thugs want. Once the press, the teachers, and the corrupt pseudo-liberal MPs or Lords use enforced "speech filtering" to completely corrupt free debate (it's not that much different to a dictatorship, except that "no platforming censorship" is used in the West, while bullets and poison is used in the dictatorships), you have crackpots and quacks in charge of "democracy", which is a travesty of the term!
If you ban civil defense and nuclear deterrence of dictatorships, then you are left only with the option of WAR against every invasion or WMD threat which your delusional censorship encourages and promotes!
That's not pacifism. On the contrary, it's needless fascist based genocidal war that could be stopped!
As regards "child soldiers": we're constantly reminded of the plight of kids in wars, so why should they be denied the right to defend democracy in countries with ageing populations, when a failure of deterrence and dictatorial occupation will ruin the lives of kids?
All these fanatically anti-civil defense, anti-deterrent so-called "pacifists" - when pressed for their solution to terrorism - claim we can use "non-violent opposition" to enemy attacks; but we saw what happens to kids in this situation in the Holocaust and wars! If we're not going to have a nuclear deterrent, and we're not going to allow kids to learn how to protect themselves, the results are evil and immoral. These facts are conveniently declared to be "taboo"!
"... in letters to me dated April 10, 1979, and June 18, 1979, representatives of the DOE stated that my open research, and a national contest that I conducted, would lead to the generation and transmission of classified data - this in spite of the fact that all of the information that I was seeking would come from unclassified published sources. It has also become obvious that at least one of the three concepts discussed in the disputed Morland article is currently unclassified in the Soviet Union, and that when it was discussed openly here in 1976 by a Soviet scientist, the U.S. government, acting through the Energy Research and Development Agency, classified his speeches (Morland might have stood a better chance of publishing his article in the USSR).
"The concepts discussed in the Morland article deal with basic applied physics, and they are certainly no longer 'secret' - if they were, four other nations would not now have operating thermonuclear weapons. Even though the DOE now admits that this type of information is in the public domain, it is still trying to suppress the circulation of this data, in order to maintain a false illusion of secrecy, and to maintain a real monopoly over the dissemination of weapons-related information, and over the public discussion of American nuclear policies, policies which affect nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons. ... What happened next will be discussed in the description of the accompanying diagram, when the concept of isentropic compression is explained. ... As can be seen from the enclosed diagram, the basic bomb consists of two boosted fission triggers at opposite ends of a mass of lithium-6 deuteride fusion fuel, all contained in an outer casing of uranium-238. ... This arrangement requires that the outer weapon casing play an essential role (as medium to absorb x-rays and re-emit them into the fuel mass) ... there are two triggers in the bomb. The purpose of this is to allow a symmetrical compression of the fusion fuel between them, as well as allowing an x-ray source at each end of the bomb. These two fission triggers must fire simultaneously, or no fusion will occur. ... This sudden elevation in temperature of the fusion fuel, following the isentropic compression, begins the larger main fusion reaction in the weapon. ... " [Emphasis added.]
It must be emphasised (see the latest blog post here for the physical and mathematical details) that adiabatic "non-shock isentropic compression" of low density fusion fuel was first suggested during the April 1946 Los Alamos Super Conference, but was ignored by Teller and the American mainstream until investigated and tested by Nuckolls during totally clean secondary tests (including a 99.9% clean Ripple II 10 megaton test on 30 October 1962). Isentropic compression is compression without heat transfer between the fusion fuel and its surroundings, involving a gradually increasing compression - more like the pressure variations in a sound wave than the pressure discontinuity at a shock front. Shock waves involve "isothermal compression" at the shock front, which radiates wasted energy as heat in all directions, reducing the kinetic energy used to compress the fusion fuel. The key thing to focus on is the fact that you want to compress fusion fuel to cause fusion, and the fusion then releases heat which opposes compression, dispersing the remaining fusion fuel, and ending fusion. What you are trying to do is to compress fusion fuel so it releases nuclear energy (including heat) as a result of nuclear fusion, not waste energy radiating heat into the surroundings before you compress the fuel (such heat waste opposes compression of the fusion fuel). To the extent that you heat the fuel and cause it to radiate energy during compression, you defeat your purpose and get an inefficient compression (akin to pre-initiation in primary stage fission weapons if they are pre-heated by neutron induced fissions).
Teller ignored all this, and indeed until March 1951 he claimed to have a "no go theorem" against compression, and then he used ablative recoil exploding pushers to give relatively ineffective shock compression of fusion stages in his "Sausage" design, the standard 1950s thermonuclear system. Nuckolls and the Russians, however, used gentler isentropic compression (by using a low-density pusher like beryllium on a clean LiD fusion fuel capsule; with any dense U238 placed in the outer casing of the bomb, rather than used as the pusher in contact with the fusion fuel), which enabled more of the primary stage x-ray energy to be used to compress the fusion stage to high density, with less energy being wasted on heat transfer during compression. If you do any sort of work, e.g. hammering nails into wood, charging a battery, or running an engine, some energy will be used in achieving the objective, and some will be wasted as heat. If you want maximum work efficiency, you need to minimise waste heat (i.e. you want to reduce the rise in entropy S, so that the change in entropy dS ~ 0, which is the definition of the ideal of "isentropic compression"), which means losing the shock wave-producing dense ablative shell on the fusion fuel in the "Sausage" designs tested in the 1950s by the USA, which resists isentropic compression. With a dense pusher, you get shock compression which radiates heat before the shock even reaches the core and compresses it, so you only get core compression factor of 20-30, whereas if you use a low-density ablator like beryllium, aluminium or plastic on the fusion fuel, you can achieve nearly isentropic compression factors of 1,000 or more! I.e.. the core density is increased by a factor of 1,000, so that the fusion rate is much faster and more efficient (more fusion is accomplished before the bomb blows itself apart). The latter compression is even sufficient to ignite deuterium fusion, according to Russian claims about their 1960s-1970s cleaner isentropic bomb tests for "peaceful uses" (and tactical nuclear weapons), giving a far cheaper and longer-life warhead than the deuterium-tritium fuel used in the low yield American "Dove" and "Starling" designs of neutron bombs! ("Isotropic compression" just means equal from all directions, and has nothing to do with "isentropic compression".) Similarly, the first implosion bombs used dense U238 neutron reflectors around the core, requiring inefficient shock compression, whereas lower density beryllium reflectors allowed greater efficiency quasi-isentropic compression in fission designs.
A great deal of the popular media's confusion over thermonuclear weapons designs is down to misunderstanding the nature of the x-ray pulse from the fission primary stage. Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons usefully explains that most (over 80%) of the energy can be released x-rays generated by inelastic fission fragment collisions, on a time scale of the order 1 shake or 10 nanoseconds. However, that is only true for a bare fissile metal core, so in reality the considerable mass of chemical implosion debris (mainly carbon, oxygen and hydrogen ions) around that core diffuses the x-rays with a random-walk that slows the x-ray emission into typicaly a 100-times longer pulse than 10 nanoseconds, i.e. around 1 microsecond. It is for this reason that early thermonuclear weapons had heavy outer cases, to contain the diffusive x-ray emission pulse from the fission primary stage's ionized low-Z element fireball, enabling more of that energy to be coupled into fusion stage before the outer casing is destroyed and the coupling ends. Because of this, the fusion stage is not abruptly compressed over a 10 nanosecond time period as implied by Glasstone's unclassified statement that most of the fission energy is emitted in the last shake, but more gradually over a time of up to 1 microsecond. The design of the fission primary stage therefore determines the nature of the x-ray pulse waveform. This problem has been known since the beginning, which is why a gun-type fission weapon was selected in 1946 for the fusion "Super" primary stage, because it would eliminate the implosion debris fireball x-ray diffusion problem, and also why Gamow designed a cylindrical implosion "Greenhouse-George" primary, to enable x-rays from a bare side of a fissile core to initiate fusion without the complexity of x-ray shielding and transport through low-Z barriers, as occurs with spherical implosion primary stages.
Ironically, Chuck Hansen, the author of US Nuclear Weapons, re-invented the Russian "Project 49" double-primary H-bomb independently in a 27 August 1979 letter to Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, only to have this double-primary design dismissed as "wrong" by American nuclear weaponeers, some of whom didn't even know that: (a) Teller and Ulam had stated that one or more primary stages could be used to ignite a H-bomb in their 1951 breakthrought paper, and (b) you can get both primary stages to detonate simultaneously by simply wiring up the electronic neutron guns for each primary into a parallel circuit, and doing the same for their electrical detonators and x-unit capacitors and krytron switches. Hardened groupthink dogma orthodoxy is is hard to debunk! (The Russian double primary idea was even earlier suggested by journalist John McPhee to nuclear weaponeer Dr Ted Taylor with this dismissive result, as reported in McPhee's 1974 book, The Curve of Binding Energy. Note that Howard Morland's design relied on Edward Teller's single-primary H-bomb illustration in his article "Hydrogen Bomb", in the Encyclopedia Americana, v14.)
GEORGE GAMOW'S ASYMMETRIC-IMPLOSION FISSION BOMB DESIGN FOR USE AS AN EFFICIENT DIRECTED X-RAY SOURCE FOR RUSSIAN PROJECT 49 DOUBLE PRIMARY NEUTRON BOMBS
(a) the fissile mass is off-centre, so x-rays escape in a preferential direction with little shielding by chemical explosive debris, thus maximising the exposure of a fusion fuel capsule to x-rays from an implosion fission primary, and
(b) the fact
only one detonation point is required
(which can be shielded by a steel cover to protect that point from accidental impact etc), minimises the size of the x-unit capacitor, battery, etc, as compared to spherical implosions where a lot of points need simultaneous ignition for successful implosion (see French nuclear test flash x-ray photos below!). The West uses a "no-go theorem" to rule out this design called "one-point safety", whereby the implosion system must be safe from effective compression of the fissile core occurring from a detonation at any single point on the outside. However, for such very low yield (sub kiloton) fission weapons, safety concerns can be relaxed in a world war situation where mass production of nuclear shells is required, and the neutron gun must be fired at the optimum compression time to achieve a significant nuclear yield. The single point of detonation can be protected both (a) mechanically by a steel impact cap over it (so if dropped, any impact detonation will occur at the wrong point, and (b) electrically by a fuse in series with the detonator which will blow at a current rating below that required to fire the detonator. When the weapon's detonation is actually required, the fuse can be mechanically changed for a high-current conductor just before detonation.
A feature of this Gamow design is that although the off-centre fissile core is simultaneously compressed in time, the force is anisotropic (being naturally greater on the side with the most explosives), so the hollows in the fissile cores need to be displaced similarly to compensate (so that side of the fissile core with weaker implosion pressure is thinner). Although you would expect the ansiotropy of implosion to physically shift the core towards the fusion capsule and thus block the x-ray channel, this doesn't happen in reality because the time scale of the macroscopic acceleration of the core (taking many microseconds) is massive, compared to the relatively trivial timescale of the very fast nuclear reactions such as fission and x-ray ablation phenomena! It appears from Russian information that they use this kind of fission primary to massively reduce the mass and firing circuit complexity of their double-primary ignited neutron bombs. Dr Gamow illustrated technical reports himself, as he did for his wonderful kid's physics books on a big bang, etc.
ABOVE: note that a single Gamow asymmetric implosion fission stage can also be used to enhance the neutrons and prompt gamma rays in a preferential direction, for use in either ABM defensive neutron warheads (to take out incoming MIRV warheads), or to create a directed prompt gamma ray and prompt Compton current, for a non-lethal localized and directed EMP collateral-damage-averting nuclear weapon (as described using old tech, 3 decades ago in the November 1994 issue of Electronics World, by yours truly), and this Gamow off-centre implosion is depicted in an August 6, 2015-uploaded animated video and labelled "Swan" by Russian Wikipedia user "Guga50", which is currently displayed on the Russian Wikipedia article "Nuclear Weapons" (this Russian "Nuclear Weapons" Wikipedia article is not just a translation of the Western Wikipedia "Nuclear Weapons" article, which shows an entirely different "Swan"-labelled design; a symmetric prolate spheroid with 2-point detonation, not an asymmetric 1-point detonation implosive; my point here is just to point out a discrepancy rather than to say "one is right and one is wrong", since both types are certainly possible from the pure scientific standpoint and it is likely the American "Swan" design is the two-point implosion system, but the Russian Wikipedia design is backed by the design Western nuclear weaponeer Gamow explains in detail in his originally top secret 1946 report and the general Russian custom to take short cuts for cheapness that are "ruled out" by Western bureaucrats with bigger weapons budgets to blow at the taxpayers expense), which states: "... the 1st fission stage cannot provide a sufficient amount of X-ray radiation energy, which is necessary to ensure the explosion of "large" thermonuclear stages. In three-stage devices, the 1st fission stage (with an explosion power of up to tens of kilotons) is used for the radiation implosion of the 2nd ("small") thermonuclear stage (with an explosion power of several hundred kilotons), and the radiation of this 2nd thermonuclear stage (together with the radiation of the 1st stage) is used for the radiation implosion of the 3rd ("large") thermonuclear stage ... In "Tsar Bomba" (AN-602), the first two and the second two stages were placed symmetrically on 2 sides of the third ("large") thermonuclear stage, according to the so-called "bifilar" scheme." (Note: the Russian Wikipedia page on the neutron bomb points out that the casing is composed of "transparent" elements, i.e. those with small cross sections for 14.1 Mev neutron reactions, such as nickel, chromium and tungsten.)
Russian language Wikipedia https://ru.wikipedia.org "Nuclear Weapons" page, section on "Swan" (translated from Russian into English; 14 October 2024): "The described scheme of spherical implosion is archaic and has hardly been used since the mid-1950s. The principle of operation of the “Swan” type design (English: swan) is based on the use of a fissile assembly of a special shape, which, in the process of implosion initiated at one point by one fuse, is compressed in the longitudinal direction and turns into a supercritical sphere. The shell itself consists of several layers of explosive with different detonation rates, which is made on the basis of an alloy of octogen and plastic in the required proportion and filler - polystyrene foam, so that between it and the nuclear assembly located inside there remains a space filled with polystyrene foam. This space introduces the necessary delay due to the fact that the speed of detonation of the explosive exceeds the speed of the shock wave in the polystyrene foam. The shape of the charge strongly depends on the detonation speed of the shell layers and the speed of propagation of the shock wave in polystyrene, which is hypersonic under these conditions. The shock wave from the outer layer of explosive reaches the inner spherical layer simultaneously over the entire surface. A significantly lighter tamper is made not from 238U, but from beryllium, which reflects neutrons well. It can be assumed that the unusual name of this design - "Swan" (first tested by Inca in 1956) was suggested by the shape of the swan's neck. Thus, it was possible to abandon the spherical implosion and, thereby, solve the extremely difficult problem of sub-microsecond synchronization of fuses on a spherical assembly and thus simplify and reduce the diameter of the implosion nuclear weapon from 2 m in the “Fat Man” to 30 cm or less in modern nuclear weapons."
[Original Russian: "Описанная схема сферической имплозии архаична и с середины 1950-х годов почти не применяется. Принцип действия конструкции типа «Swan» ( англ. swan — лебедь), основан на использовании делящейся сборки особой формы, которая в процессе инициированной в одной точке одним взрывателем имплозии, сжимается в продольном направлении и превращается в надкритическую сферу. Сама оболочка состоит из нескольких слоёв взрывчатого вещества с разной скоростью детонации, которую изготавливают на основе сплава октогена и пластика в нужной пропорции и наполнителя — пенополистирола, так что между ним и находящейся внутри ядерной сборкой остаётся заполненное пенополистиролом пространство. Это пространство вносит нужную задержку за счёт того, что скорость детонации взрывчатки превышает скорость движения ударной волны в пенополистироле. Форма заряда сильно зависит от скоростей детонации слоёв оболочки и скоростью распространения ударной волны в полистироле, которая в данных условиях гиперзвуковая. Ударная волна от внешнего слоя взрывчатки достигает внутреннего сферического слоя одновременно по всей поверхности. Существенно более лёгкий тампер выполняется не из 238U, а из хорошо отражающего нейтроны бериллия. Можно предположить, что необычное название данной конструкции — «Лебедь» (первое испытание — Inca в 1956 г.) было подсказано формой шеи лебедя. Таким образом оказалось возможным отказаться от сферической имплозии и, тем самым, решить крайне сложную проблему субмикросекундной синхронизации взрывателей на сферической сборке и таким образом упростить и уменьшить диаметр имплозивного ядерного боеприпаса с 2 м у «Толстяка» до 30 см и менее в современных ядерных боеприпасах."]
Nuclear war threat discussion efforts in the Presidential Election Debate on TV in September 2024, Trump v. Harris, note only Trump was concerned with nuclear war (Harris was in the Democratic party, whose president on 6 and 9 August 1945 used two nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state, which explains this clearly):
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on Putin nuclear threat being ignored by left wingers: pic.twitter.com/p13yNTRz9C
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on need for America to get tough not appease dictatorial terrorists like Harris did which started and sustained the Vietnam style massacres of Ukraine and Gaza wars instead of DETERRING WAR USING… pic.twitter.com/av9rfK2CPK
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on how Biden Admin destroyed American military credibility, thus WWIII risks now in Ukraine war plus Gaza war: pic.twitter.com/zUM62ADTdB
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump debate biased by moderators trying to shut off Trump responses to liar: pic.twitter.com/JwKkFPub9h
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on Biden Admin deliberately left-wing pandering appeasement show-off crass method pulling out from Afghanistan and its effects on Putin: pic.twitter.com/cGpTU82bxn
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on how Democrats engineered the riots in Washington DC then tried to blame Trump: pic.twitter.com/g75NdMturH
Key part of US presidential debate ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump 10 September 2024 presidential election debate on HYPOCRISY OF LAW use by pseudo "Democrats": pic.twitter.com/QaCNxD5CW9
Herman Kahn is clear, in On Thermonuclear War, about the mobilization problem for bulky conventional weapons (unlike compact nukes out of sight in subs, ICBMs or airfield igloos) triggering off wars such as WWI, quoting on page 359 the assistant chief of the French General Staff, General Boisdeffre's explanation to Russian Tsar Nicholas: "The mobilization is the declaration of war. To mobilize is to oblige one's neighbor to do the same. ... Otherwise, to leave a million men on one's frontier, without doing the same simultaneously, is to deprive oneself of all possibility of moving later; it is placing oneself in a situation of an individual who, with a pistol in his pocket, should should let his neighbor put a weapon to his forehead without drawing his own." Kahn also emphasises the ironic pacifism of the Liberal Party Cabinet of the UK Government which set off WWI by declaring war on Germany (which had not declared war on Britain and did not want war with Britain):
"The [August 1914 WWI-declaring British Liberal Party government] Cabinet was overwhelmingly pacific. At least three-quarters of its members were determined not to be drawn into a European quarrel, unless Great Britain were herself attacked, which was not likely. ... They did not believe that if Germany attacked France, she would attack her through Belgium [triggering WWI via the 1839 Treaty of London, an analogy to our guarantee to defend Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum]..." - Churchill, The World Crisis, v1, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923, p211 (quoted by Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p387). Winston Churchill, himself a Liberal government minister when war was declared in 1914 (he had to rejoin the Conservatives after the Liberal Party was run-over by its role in declaring WWI) was anti-militarism expenditure in general, like his father Lord Randolph Churchill (who in 1886 resigned as Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, in an effort to reduce arms expenditure). On 13 May 1901, Winston Churchill, Boer War hero and newly elected Conservative MP, took up his late father's anti-militarism position in his speech to the House of Commons: "I regard it as a grave mistake in Imperial policy to spend thirty millions a year on the Army. I hold that the continued increase in Army expenditure cannot be viewed by supporters of the Government without the greatest alarm and apprehension, and by Members who represent working class constituencies without extreme dislike. I desire to urge considerations of economy on His Majesty’s Government, and as a practical step that the number of soldiers which they propose to keep ready for expeditionary purposes should be substantially reduced. ... Once you are so unfortunate as to be drawn into a war, no price is too great to pay for an early and victorious peace. All economy of soldiers or supplies is the worst extravagance in war. I am concerned only with the Estimates for the ordinary service of the year, which are increasing at such a rate that it is impossible to view them without alarm. Does the House realise what British expenditure on armaments amounts to? See how our Army Estimates have grown - seventeen millions in 1894, eighteen in 1897, nineteen in 1899, twenty-four in 1900, and finally in the present year no less than twenty-nine millions eight hundred thousand." However, by 1908 Churchillhad reversed this, in the light of Germany militarism, which required British expenditure on an arms race to maintain credible deterrence. Churchill was a realistic, deterrence-supporting pacifist, not a warmonger. Conventional weapons only failed as a credible deterrent in 1914 because of the instability caused by the need to mobilize them along frontiers, something not needed with long-range nuclear weapons now!
Herman Kahn on p371 states of Churchill's The World Crisis, volume 1: "I know of no better textbook on the subject of war, prewar preparations, and peacetime risks. ... Let me now quote Churchill on the possibility of a surprise attack. He is discussing the tension during the 1911 Agadir crisis. Lloyd George had just made a speech with the idea of forcing the German government to back down. The Germans did not like it ... 'It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of ... No one would do such things. Civilisation has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong.' (W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis, v1, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1923, p45)." Kahn then explains the analogy of 1930s fears of gas annihilation to thermonuclear ignorance and propaganda:
"War, unrestricted war, seemed like an unbelievable nightmare and therefore somehow unreal. The very terror of war [annihilation by exaggerated gas or incendiary or high explosive bombing on cities] powerfully reinforced all those who wished to reject military solutions or palliatives in favor of much more attractive schemes for world government or universal disarmament or some major step in that direction.[Italics are Herman Kahn's own.] ... In fact it was not until April 1939, after the second invasion of Czechoslovakia, that the British went all out ... It was by that time far too late." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p377. When Kahn was writing, the USA had massive nuclear superiority in both tactical and strategic weapons. Today, however, the situation is reversed and Kahn's warning is pertinent again: Russia and its allies China, North Korea and Iran have superiority. (We also need to remember the 1939-40 phoney war; it was Churchill not Hitler who initiated city bombing in 1940, deliberately in order to divert enemy bombing from RAF airfields that were needed to retain air superiority and prevent an invasion succeeding. Churchill was only able to do this because Britain had civil defense to mitigate the effects of the retaliation when the RAF were unable to entirely stop enemy attacks. Without civil defense, either Churchill wouldn't have been able to do this, so the airfields might have been put out and an invasion done, or else casualty rates 60 times higher could have resulted in the Blitz (the ratio of WWI bombing casualties per ton of bombs on unprotected civilians, to WWII, when people had shelters).
On page 378 of On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn emphasises (italics are Kahn's own): "The whole history of the 1933-1939 period is a clear example of the failure of Type II [deterrence of major provocations like invasion of an ally] and Type III Deterrence [deterrence of minor provocations like rearmament, militarization, etc.]. These failures occurred because neither the British nor the French [don't forget the USA which passed its Neutrality Act in 1935!] had the resolve to use their superior military power or their superior resources to check German aggression until it was too late. ... The longer they put off using their superior power the less credible it became that it would ever be used. Finally their power itself became inferior so that even when its use was seriously threatened, the German government was no longer impressed." Kahn quotes Churchill: "We had been reduced in those five years [of anti-war disarmament and then anti-war appeasement propaganda about gas knockout blow escalations wiping out humanity, 1933-1938, cumulating in the worthless piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler on 30 September 1938 promising peace for our time] from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengable that we never cared to think about it. We have been reduced from a position where the very word 'war' was considered one which would be used only by persons qualifying for a lunatic asylum." - Winston Churchill, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, G. P. Putnam's Sons, NY, 1941, p60 (quoted by Herman Kahn on page 379 of On Thermonuclear War, where Kahn comments: "Hitler and some of his staff were victims of overconfidence. By the time the war started, they felt that they had more than enough of a lead to win. ... the war would doubtless be short [precisely the delusion of Russia when invading Ukraine, in 2022] ..."
Herman Kahn on page 378 of On Thermonuclear War quotes Air Marshall Sir John Slessor's Central Blue Praeger, NY, 1957, which states the reality on page 161: by 1938 Britain was spending £300 million a year on arms, contrasted to well over £1000 million a year then being spent on arms by the Nazis. Thus, the Nazis were far outrunning Britain so that every day of peace that "Chamberlain bought with his peace agreements" actually gave the Nazis a bigger lead; Britain was not "buying time for rearmament to fight" contrary to financially illiterate historians, journalists and other Chamberlain "pacifism" fans to this day, rather, Chamberlain was helping the Nazis prepare better than the UK by delaying war! If the enemy is getting way bigger than you by the day, you don't do yourself any favours by delaying the fight. The fact that this is still "disputed" by left wing historians to back disarmament in the face of Russia today just demonstrates how Comintern's legacy of infiltration of the Western universities and mass media continues to this day.
One final thought from Kahn's On Thermonuclear War is his Figure 8 on page 469, showing the relationship between missile accuracy, warhead yield, and the 50% probable target peak overpressure at the intended ground zero (the intended ground zero never debunked with 100% probability in reality, due to inaccuracies in the missile guidance system, never mind the risk of warhead malfunction/ABM interception): in 1960 American 10 megaton warheads were placed on missiles with good accuracy gyroscopes, CEP = 1 mile, which gave 50% probability of delivering 100 psi peak overpressure to the intended ground zero, destroying typical 1960 era primitive (not shock protected) missile silos. So the USA could take out hard Russian ICBMs at that time. But the corresponding 10 megaton Russian warheads were (supposedly) on less accurate missiles, CEP = 5 miles, which would only deliver about average 4 psi peak overpressure at the intended "ground zero" (because they would on average miss targets by miles), so Russia couldn't in 1960 usefully target American ICBM's in their silos! If they did so, they would fail with high probability, because the hard targets would on average receive only 4 psi, not the 100 psi needed to wreck them. Thus, Russia had to target wood-frame American houses with ICBM's in 1960, the only yank assets that could be wrecked by 4 psi, not missile silos. In effect, missile accuracy forced America and Russia to have different nuclear war strategies: America could use "counterforce" targetting on hard Russian silos, but the less accurate Russian missiles of the same yield class would have to be targetted on "soft countervalue" targets, like residential areas. This asymmetry in USA and Russian targetting was often promoted by "arms control and disarmament" promoters like Hans Bethe as preventing a direct comparison; Bethe wrote articles in journals denying Russian superiority in megatonnage because they had less accurate missiles. But this is fake news, because Russia's a dictatorship, America isn't. Which is more dangerous, Russia wiping out American civilians or America wiping out Russian ICBMs? Duh. One strategy is evil, the other is just war.
Kahn also went into the problem with populist notions of "knockout blow" 1st strikes, versus 2nd strikes in nuclear war. In summary, Russia now has superiority in tactical neutron weapons, protected deep shelters and the secret Metro 2 underground railway to evacuate the dictators from the Kremlin to safe rural bunkers in the event of a nuclear strike on Moscow (as well as many dual-purpose cheap but hard underground car parks/shelters and tube stations/shelters and basement cafes/shelters, with double blast doors fitted for civilians), and it has placed a large number of ICBMs on mobile launchers which can move around (out of the 4 psi damage zone) while USA ICBMs are inflight. So, since America doesn't have such civil defense or mobile ICBM launchers or neutron bombs, it doesn't really have a credible deterrent against Russia, but Russia has a credible deterrent against American nuclear leverage. This was claimed to reduce nclear war risks by demonstrating to Russia that it has nothing to fear from America unless Russia launches a first strike on America, when what survived of American military assets (e.g. some Trident SLBMs) could disarm themselves by setting off a firework display over the Kremlin (while the Russians survive in hard double-blast doored shelters). This limited American "second strike capability" was supposed to be "safe deterrence". However, as we have seen, it hasn't stopped Russia invading Ukraine, using Novichok and Polonium-210 in the UK, etc. In other words, it's "minimal deterrence" that leaves open the key risk Kahn warned about, a repetition of the 1930s fiasco that was designed to minimise the risk of "accidental war" by peace treaties with dictators (who interpreted them as signs of virtual signalling weakness to be laughed at and ignored), but did the opposite, causing WWII. Mathematically, the error is that the Iwo Jima proved Lanchester Equations of war are being disregarded in preference to Morgenstern and von Neumann's "Minimax theorem" of game theory. The Lanchester Equations prove that the probability of victory in war (i.e. the rate of disarmament of the weaker side) is proportional to the square of the ratio of forces (surviving a 1st strike) and you need thus to risk using as much force as you can; the Minimax theorem by contrast says that to win a rule-abided game you should take minimal risks and not "escalate to win". The Minimax theorem is disproved by the US Strategic Bomb Survey WWII pre-nuclear attacks data, as well as the results in Vietnam and other wars of "gradual punishment" to try to coerce the enemy into defeat. The Lanchester equations model the history of victorious combats. All current Western nuclear policy is based on Minimax (the McNamara legacy), not Lanchester!
To recap for clarity in the reader's mind: Kahn's 1960 On Thermonuclear War was written while Eisenhower/Dulles "Massive retaliation" (aka "MAD" = Musual Assured Destruction, aka "Type 1 Deterrence") was in play, although General Maxwell D. Taylor (later Kennedy's limited nuclear war adviser), Henry Kissinger (in his 1957 "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy"), and people like Kahn's childhood friend and RAND Corporation colleague, physicist Samuel Cohen, were already advocating cleaner enhanced neutron weapons to credibly deter the invasions that triggered terrible conventional wars like WWI, WWII, the 1950-53 Korean War, etc. (note that contrary to "arms control and disarmament" liars, the "neutron bomb" is not limited to low kiloton yields, but can be used as a 10 megaton Ripple II 99.9% clean device for the case of wide area fronts of tanks crossing borders, provided a precursor burst of similar yield is detonated 5-25 seconds in advance, in order to reduce air density in the target area behind the shock front of the first burst, and so provide hydrodynamic enhancement of neutrons from the second explosion). Kahn considered a wide range of deterrent postures and kinds of wars in his book, and countermeasures in excruciating detail and cold-bloodedness, which put off many idealists from even bothering to read it carefully, let alone implement all of its recommendations! The key problem Kahn found for today's "minimal deterrence policy" was that arms control plus Russian tactical nuclear weapons and shelters superiority, kills off any hope deterring the kinds of "Type II deterrence" needed to prevent enemies from invading 3rd parties, i.e. the invasion of Ukraine 2022 couldn't be credibly deterred by saying "if you do that, Putin, I'll kill myself by disarming my country by firing all my weapons at you for an imaginary knockout blow" (most of which will be negated by Russian ABM, or negated by Russian shelters, or negated by Russian mobile ICBM's simply starting their engines and driving outside the 4psi blast overturning radius while the pre-programmed ICBM's are in flight from USA to their previous locations in Russia identified on satellite photos prior to pressing the button)!" This simply isn't a credible deterrent to kind of situations which have initiated 100% of the world wars in history! WTF has gone wrong with these people? Comintern propaganda has infected top dogs for decades with "Jaw, jaw, not war, war" appeasement crap (Winston Churchill was the only person in human history in the Cabinet of the country triggering BOTH World Wars, tried to deter BOTH, and FAILED both times, but is somehow remembered in propaganda history as a "great orator" despite failing to sway public opinion pre-WWI and pre-WWII to deter the wars; he may have been the most sensible person on both occasions but the result was still a World War each time!). Maybe it's partly down to luddite opposition to progress (the sin of nuclear technology stagnation caused by decades of bans of tests for improved, more credible nuclear deterrent warhead options), and partly down to nostalgic "last war" style military inertia, of the kind that sent Polish horse mounted (cavalry) divisions into battle with Panzer tanks in 1939. The key problem is that the current "protected second strike capability" ("we will never strike first!") is that the enemy leadership may develop the mentality of Hamas in October 2023. If so, that very limited "minimum deterrence" will fail, and there will be a nuclear war. Also, Russia has threatened to nuke non-nuclear Sweden and non-nuclear Ukraine, just as America nuked non-nuclear Japan in 1945 twice, so the CND fantasy of securing a "nuclear free zone" by unilateral disarmament is just a pipe dream. If we continue as we have done until now, Russia and other enemy states will become an ever more war-minded alliance intent on our nuclear annihilation.
"Russia has launched several air attacks on Ukraine this week, costing Moscow a reported £1.1bn. Last night, Kyiv came under drone attack for the third night in four days, with debris injuring people and damaging buildings." - https://t.co/oNs8lwTTmZ And when the Roubles run out,…
"The threat of Russian escalation is almost absent in the conversation. It is as if the limit of their conventional powers has been exposed by the humiliation of Kursk, along with the emptiness of their nuclear rhetoric. The latter cannot be entirely ignored, if the Kremlin feels…
Democrats in 2021 accelerated the pull out from Afghanistan to the extent that people flooded runways and later fell off undercarriages of the escaping aircraft (worse than the organized rooftop queue for the last Helicopters leaving Saigon, in 1975!), to pacify disarmers, peace protestors, liberals etc., like Putin and Hamas, then Putin and Hamas realise they can invade Ukraine (2022) and Israel (2023) with impunity. INNOCENT PEOPLE ARE KILLED WHEN YOU GIVE A GREEN LIGHT TO DICTATORS. We need credible deterrence. Like, NOW, to stop these invasions. Duh. The entire problem is down to the lying left wing Lenin lawyer "virtual signalling" political tactic lampooned years ago by Bob Monkhouse's advice to succeed by "faking sincerity" ("Nukemap" lying crap is an excellent example of how the old 1930s "guaranteed gas knockout blow annihilation within hours of war being declared" propaganda horsecrap is resurrected for mainstream media lying fake "pacicism" today). That deliberate abusive lying propaganda by the herd mentality "autistic groupthink" thugs of left wing bigots backfires, just as with right wing thugs, and costs lives.
The UK and France are eager to allow Ukraine to strike military targets deep within Russian territory, while the US and Germany are opposed - Financial Times
The reason for Germany and the US reluctance is that the Biden administration and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are…
It's impossible to tell precisely why this 1930s "gas war will escalate within hours and wipe out everybody" pro-Nazi appeasement escalation-doomsday lying and Vietnam era "don't escalate to win" anti-military lunacy is still prevailing in America and Germany, but nuclear heebie jeebies based on fake "Nukemap" style crap is certainly a big factor, plus the fact that both countries lost major wars with costly financial and psychosis implications (Germany lost WWI and WWII; America lost Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). Someday victory may become fashionable again, probably only after "virtue signalling faked pacifist sincerity" is debunked by Putin.
Looks like the commie Russian siding thug Joseph Rotblat, a Nobel Peace Laureate for giving the green card to Putin like fellow "pacifists" did to the Kaiser to begin WWI and to Hitler, starting WWII. But from his "diplomacy" he wants WWIII by provoking war, not Western… https://t.co/jfs2CEe2KV
The Russian multistaged 1000 megaton (1 Gt) bomb design goes back to Leo Szilard's anti-H bomb "doomsday machine" propaganda news conference of 1950. As Herman Kahn argued, it's not a credible deterrent, is hard to deliver (it would be the size of a large submarine), and the… https://t.co/zgErh5mnVN
Russian state TV channel 1 admits invasion causin pain, but then adds that Russia is a nuclear state. Get prepared for possible Putin resumption of nuclear weapons coercion, or other nuclear saber rattling such as an EMP test as occurred on 22 October 1962, during Cuban crisis! https://t.co/I0gtQpb8OI
"For Russia, the strategic defeat means the end of its statehood and thousand-year history. Then the question arises - why should we be afraid? Isn't it better to go to the end?" - Putin
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 20, 2024
Are you a retired NATO F-16 pilot? Then you are needed to help defend liberty against the Ruskies. Ukraine doesn't have enough F-16 pilots available. https://t.co/Mdto9HhPMc
I arrived in Moscow for the BBC in 2000 on the day Russia admitted to the Kursk submarine disaster. Now, in Kursk, Putin’s struggling with new disaster - as his war vs Ukraine rebounds
I’ve witnessed Russia’s long slide to this point, close-up. It’s all in my book - out today 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/VREwcF6R4m
"The incursion into Kursk region by the AFU is in favor of Russia," Russians are told by their TV channels, because an attack on Russian territory closes the possibility of negotiations with Ukraine.
Answer: in case Putin at some point hits the vodka, sees red at the invasion of Russia, and presses a button. Hitler had 12,000 tons of tabun by 1945 - equivalent to Russia's nuclear stockpile in terms of killing potential - but never used a drop of it. But the RISK was… https://t.co/eHzQLYxY8x
Ukrainian President Zelenskyy on Putin's (aka Russian State TV Channel 1's) recent nuclear war threats: Zelenskyy thinks that Putin loves life too much to start a nuclear war. True, up to a point, but: (1) Putin could escalate nuclear threats without much risk of being wiped out… pic.twitter.com/9wTNFVKUaT
The basic fact is that nuclear weapons can deter/stop invasions unlike the conventional weapons that cause mass destruction, and nuclear collateral damage is eliminated easily for nuclear weapons by using them on military targets, since for high yields at collateral damage distances all the effects are sufficiently delayed in arrival to allow duck and cover to avoid radiation and blast wind/flying debris injuries (unlike the case for the smaller areas affected by smaller yield conventional weapons, where there is little time on seeing the flash to duck and cover to avoid injury), and as the original 1951 SECRET American Government "Handbook on Capabilities of Atomic Weapons" (limited report AD511880L, forerunner to today's still secret EM-1) stated in Section 10.32:
"PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT ITEM TO BE REMEMBERED WHEN ESTIMATING EFFECTS ON PERSONNEL IS THE AMOUNT OF COVER ACTUALLY INVOLVED. ... IT IS OBVIOUS THAT ONLY A FEW SECONDS WARNING IS NECESSARY UNDER MOST CONDITIONS TO TAKE FAIRLY EFFECTIVE COVER. THE LARGE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES IN JAPAN RESULTED FOR THE MOST PART FROM THE LACK OF WARNING."
As for Hitler's stockpile of 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas, whose strategic and also tactical use was deterred by proper defences (gas masks for all civilians and soldiers, as well as UK stockpiles of fully trial-tested deliverable biological agent anthrax and mustard gas retaliation capacity), it is possible to deter strategic nuclear escalation to city bombing, even within a world war with a crazy terrorist, if all the people are protected by both defence and deterrence.
This means that they can invade territory with relative impunity, since the West won't deter such provocations by flexible response - the aim of Russia is to push the West into a policy of massive retaliation of direct attacks only, and then use smaller provocations instead - and Russia can then use its tactical nuclear weapons to "defend" its newly invaded territories by declaring them to now be part of Mother Russia and under Moscow's nuclear umbrella. Russia has repeatedly made it clear - for decades - that it expects a direct war with NATO to rapidly escalate into nuclear WWIII and it has prepared civil defense shelters and evacuation tactics to enable it. Herman Kahn's public warnings of this date back to his testimony to the June 1959 Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, but for decades were deliberately misrepresented by most media outlets. President Kennedy's book "Why England Slept" makes it crystal clear how exactly the same "pacifist" propaganda tactics in the 1930s (that time it was the "gas bomb knockout blow has no defense so disarm, disarm, disarm" lie) caused war, by using fear to slow credible rearmament in the face of state terrorism. By the time democracies finally decided to issue an ultimatum, Hitler had been converted - by pacifist appeasement - from a cautious tester of Western indecision, into an overconfident aggressor who simply ignored last-minute ultimatums.
Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons (US Government) is written in a highly ambiguous fashion (negating nearly every definite statement with a deliberately obfuscating contrary statement to leave a smokescreen legacy of needless confusion, obscurity and obfuscation), omits nearly all key nuclear test data and provides instead misleading generalizations of data from generally unspecified weapon designs tested over 60 years ago which apply to freefield measurements on unobstructed radial lines in deserts and oceans. It makes ZERO analysis of the overall shielding of radiation and blast by their energy attenuation in modern steel and concrete cities, and even falsely denies such factors in its discussion of blast in cities and in its naive chart for predicting the percentage of burns types as a function of freefield outdoor thermal radiation, totally ignoring skyline shielding geometry (similar effects apply to freefield nuclear radiation exposure, despite vague attempts to dismiss this by non-quantitative talk about some scattered radiation arriving from all angles). It omits the huge variations in effects due to weapon design e.g. cleaner warhead designs and the tactical neutron bomb. It omits quantitative data on EMP as a function of burst yield, height and weapon design.
It omits most of the detailed data collected from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the casualty rates as a function of type of building or shelter and blast pressure. It fails to analyse overall standardized casualty rates for different kinds of burst (e.g. shallow underground earth penetrators convert radiation and blast energy into ground shock and cratering against hard targets like silos or enemy bunkers). It omits a detailed analysis of blast precursor effects. It omits a detailed analysis of fallout beta and gamma spectra, fractionation, specific activity (determining the visibility of the fallout as a function of radiation hazard, and the mass of material to be removed for effective decontamination), and data which does exist on the effect of crater soil size distribution upon the fused fallout particle size distribution (e.g. tests like Small Boy in 1962 on the very fine particles at Frenchman Flats gave mean fallout particle sizes far bigger than the pre-shot soil, proving that - as for Trinitite - melted small soil particles fuse together in the fireball to produce larger fallout particles, so the pre-shot soil size distribution is irrelevant for fallout analysis).
By generally (with few exceptions) lumping "effects" of all types of bursts together into chapters dedicated to specific effects, it falsely gives the impression that all types of nuclear explosions produce similar effects with merely "quantitative differences". This is untrue because air bursts eliminate fallout casualties entirely, while slight burial (e.g. earth penetrating warheads) eliminates thermal (including fires and dust "climatic nuclear winter" BS), the initial radiation and severe blast effects, while massively increasing ground shock, and the same applies to shallow underwater bursts. So a more objective treatment to credibly deter all aggression MUST emphasise the totally different collateral damage effects, by dedicating chapters to different kinds of burst (high altitude/space bursts, free air bursts, surface bursts, underground bursts, underwater bursts), and would include bomb design implications on these effects in detail. A great deal of previously secret and limited distributed nuclear effects data has been declassified since 1977, and new research has been done. Our objectives in this review are: (a) to ensure that an objective independent analysis of the relevant nuclear weapons effects facts is placed on the record in case the currently, increasingly vicious Cold War 2.0 escalates into some kind of limited "nuclear demonstration" by aggressors to try to end a conventional war by using coercive threats, (b) to ensure the lessons of tactical nuclear weapon design for deterring large scale provocations (like the invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939 which triggered world wars) are re-learned in contrast to Dulles "massive retaliation" (incredible deterrent) nonsense, and finally (c) to provide some push to Western governments to "get real" with our civil defense, to try to make credible our ageing "strategic nuclear deterrent". We have also provided a detailed analysis of recently declassified Russian nuclear warhead design data, shelter data, effects data, tactical nuclear weapons employment manuals, and some suggestions for improving Western thermonuclear warheads to improve deterrence.
‘The evidence from Hiroshima indicates that blast survivors, both injured and uninjured, in buildings later consumed by fire [caused by the blast overturning charcoal braziers used for breakfast in inflammable wooden houses filled with easily ignitable bamboo furnishings and paper screens] were generally able to move to safe areas following the explosion. Of 130 major buildings studied by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey ... 107 were ultimately burned out ... Of those suffering fire, about 20 percent were burning after the first half hour. The remainder were consumed by fire spread, some as late as 15 hours after the blast. This situation is not unlike the one our computer-based fire spread model described for Detroit.’
- Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 3: What the Planner Needs to Know About Fire Ignition and Spread, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, Panel 27.
The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, US Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Theatre, report 92, volume 2 (May 1947, secret):
Volume one, page 14:
“... the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only:
“... capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).”
Volume two examines the firestorm and the ignition of clothing by the thermal radiation flash in Hiroshima:
Page 24:
“Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.” [Contrast this to the obfuscation and vagueness in Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons!]
Page 88:
“Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 unclassified USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims]
“... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.”
There is now a relatively long introduction at the top of this blog, due to the present nuclear threat caused by disarmament and arms control propaganda, and the dire need to get the facts out past pro-Russian media influencers or loony mass media which has never cared about nuclear and radiation effects facts, so please scroll down to see blog posts. The text below in blue is hyperlinked (direct to reference source materials, rather than numbered and linked to reference at the end of the page) so you can right-click on it and open in a new tab to see the source. This page is not about opinions, it provides censored out facts that debunk propaganda, but for those who require background "authority" nonsense on censored physics facts, see stuff here or here. Regarding calling war-mongering, world war causing, terrorism-regime-supporting UK disarmers of the 20th century "thugs" instead of "kind language": I was put through the Christianity grinder as a kid so will quote Jesus (whom I'm instructed to follow), Matthew 23:33: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell?" The fake "pacifist" thugs will respond with some kindly suggestion that this is "paranoid" and that "Jesus was rightfully no-platformed for his inappropriate language"! Yeah, you guys would say that, wouldn't ya. Genuine pacifism requires credible deterrence! Decent people seem to be very confused about the facts of this. Jesus did not say "disarm to invite your annihilation by terrorists". You can't "forgive and forget" when the enemy is still on the warpath. They have to be stopped, either by deterrence, force, defense, or a combination of all these.
ABOVE: The June 1957 edition of Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons was the first to include the effects of blast duration (which increases with the cube-root of weapon yield) on blast damage from nuclear weapons. This is very important for wind drag loading to drag-sensitive targets, but has less effect for diffraction-sensitive targets which respond to peak pressures, especially where the blast pressure rapidly equalizes around the structure (e.g. utility poles or buildings with large expanses of glass which shatters, allowing rapid pressure equalization). For example, Glasstone 1957, Fig. 6.41b (p253, using Fig. 3.94a on p109 to convert scaled distances to overpressures from a surface burst on open deserted terrain) shows that for yields of 1 kt, 20 kt (approximately the 16 kt Hiroshima and 21 kt Nagasaki yields), and 1 megaton, peak overpressures of 55, 23 and 15 psi, respectively, are required for collapse (severe damage) to modern multistory reinforced concrete buildings with light walls (Fig. 6.41a shows that about 5 psi will demolish a wood frame house - no longer in modern city centres - regardless of yield). Notice that this means that modern cities are extremely resistant to blast from ~1 kt neutron bombs, requiring more than twice the peak overpressure for collapse than was needed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also notice that very large amounts of energy are absorbed from the blast in causing severe damage to modern reinforced concrete city buildings, causing rapid attenuation of free-field pressure so that ocean and desert test validated cube-root damage scaling laws break down for high yield bursts in modern cities (see latest blog post here for examples of calculations of this energy absorption in both oscillating a building in the elastic deflection engineering graph zone, and the much larger energy absorption in causing plastic zone distortion to reinforced concrete - basically the former typically absorbs about 1% of blast energy, whereas the latter takes up something like 10 times more energy, or 10%, a factor entirely dismissed by Glasstone and Dolan but analyzed by Penney). Above a megaton or so, the increasing blast duration has less and less effect on the peak overpressure required for severe damage, because for destruction a threshold blast loading exists, regardless of the blast duration. (A 1 mile/hour wind will not blow a wall down, regardless of how long it lasts. In other words, large impulses cease to be damage criteria if the blast pressure drops below a threshold needed for damage.) Glasstone 1957 Fig 6.41c on p255 shows that automobiles suffer severe damage 36 psi peak overpressure for 1 kt, 18 psi for 20 kt, and 12 psi for 1 megaton. These pressures for destruction of automobiles are similar to the severe damage data given for multistorey steel frame office buildings with light walls. The key point here is that low-yield (around 1 kt) tactical nuclear weapons produce far less collateral damage to civilian infrastructure than high yield bursts, and even the effects of the latter are exaggerated severely for modern cities when using wooden house data in unobstructed terrain at ocean or desert terrain nuclear tests. Collateral damage is eliminated by exploiting the fact that higher pressures are needed for air blast damage at lower yields, and using earth penetrator warheads or air bursts to constrain air blast pressures to civilian infrastructure, ensuring that they are not collapsed (causing casualties in modern steel or concrete buildings).
Note that the later (1962/4 and 1977) editions of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons replace the correct (curved line conversion) blast duration nomographs in the 1957 edition with simplistic Wn yield scaling (where n = 0.4 for drag sensitive targets), which is a simplification which fails to correctly model the fact that blast duration effects on overpressures are eliminated at very high yields because a minimum threshold blast pressure is needed to cause damage.
J. R. Oppenheimer (opposing Teller), February 1951: "It is clear that they can be used only as adjuncts in a military campaign which has some other components, and whose purpose is a military victory. They are not primarily weapons of totality or terror, but weapons used to give combat forces help they would otherwise lack. They are an integral part of military operations. Only when the atomic bomb is recognized as useful insofar as it is an integral part of military operations, will it really be of much help in the fighting of a war, rather than in warning all mankind to avert it." (Quotation: Samuel Cohen, Shame, 2nd ed., 2005, page 99.)
‘The Hungarian revolution of October and November 1956 demonstrated the difficulty faced even by a vastly superior army in attempting to dominate hostile territory. The [Soviet Union] Red Army finally had to concentrate twenty-two divisions in order to crush a practically unarmed population. ... With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears when we think of [World War II nuclear city bombing like Hiroshima]. The high casualty estimates for nuclear war are based on the assumption that the most suitable targets are those of conventional warfare: cities to interdict communications ... With cities no longer serving as key elements in the communications system of the military forces, the risks of initiating city bombing may outweigh the gains which can be achieved. ...
‘The elimination of area targets will place an upper limit on the size of weapons it will be profitable to use. Since fall-out becomes a serious problem [i.e. fallout contaminated areas which are so large that thousands of people would need to evacuate or shelter indoors for up to two weeks] only in the range of explosive power of 500 kilotons and above, it could be proposed that no weapon larger than 500 kilotons will be employed unless the enemy uses it first. Concurrently, the United States could take advantage of a new development which significantly reduces fall-out by eliminating the last stage of the fission-fusion-fission process.’
- Dr Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, 1957, pp. 180-3, 228-9.
Note that sometimes the "nuclear taboo" issue is raised against this analysis by Kissenger: if anti-nuclear lying propaganda on weapons effects makes it apparently taboo in the Western pro-Russian disarmament lobbies to escalate from conventional to tactical nuclear weapons to end war as on 6 and 9 August 1945, then this "nuclear taboo" can be relied upon to guarantee peace for our time. However, this was not only disproved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by the Russian tactical nuclear weapons reliance today, the Russian civil defense shelter system detailed on this blog which showed they believed a nuclear war survivable based on the results of their own nuclear tests, and the use of Russian nuclear weapons years after Kissinger's analysis was published and criticised, for example their 50 megaton test in 1961 and their supply of IRBM's capable of reaching East Coast mainland USA targets to the fanatical Cuban dictatorship in 1962. So much for the "nuclear taboo" as being any more reliable than Chamberlain's "peace for our time" document, co-signed by Hitler on 30 September 1938! We furthermore saw how Russia respected President Obama's "red line" for the "chemical weapons taboo": Russia didn't give a toss about Western disarmament thugs prattle about what they think is a "taboo", Russia used chlorine and sarin in Syria to keep Assad the dictator and they used Novichok to attack and kill in the UK in 2018, with only diplomatic expulsions in response. "Taboos" are no more valid to restrain madmen than peace treaties, disarmament agreements, Western CND books attacking civil defense or claiming that nuclear war is the new 1930s gas war bogyman, or "secret" stamps on scientific facts. In a word, they're crazy superstitions.)
All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of DELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace":
"Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.
ABOVE: Why didn't Britain declare war on Russia when it jointly invaded Poland with the Nazis, or even later when Russia invaded Finland single-handed? Answer: Comintern had stuffed the British mass media, British universities, and even the Labour Party with Russian stooges! Barrister Denis Pritt, Labour MP, simply blamed the British government for not cosying up to Communist dictatorial Russia (in the same way Chamberlain had cosied up to Adolf Hitler's Nazis)! Pritt in 1936 went to watch the "Trial of the Sixteen" in Moscow, a show trial purge of Stalin's criticis that made a mockery of the law, but be defended Stalinism in his tract, "The Zinoviev Trial". He was only finally kicked out of the Labour Party after he defended Russia's invasion of Finland in popular Penguin Book Specials. But he wasn't alone. The communists of the British media used the same tactics as the Nazis to undermine or destroy critics, so they managed to churn out one-sided propaganda nearly as bad as the media saturation with anti-nuclear, anti-CO2 crap today.
Russian project 49 dual-primary thermonuclear weaponeer Dr Yuri Trutnev has an officially "proatom.ru"-published technical history of the design of the Russian nuclear weapons (which differ from UK-USA designs fundamentally) here (extracted from Russian "Atomic Strategy" No. 18, August 2005): "the problem of ensuring spherically symmetric compression of the secondary module was radically solved, since the time of “symmetrization” of the energy around the secondary module was much less than the time of compression of this module. ... The first two-stage thermonuclear charge, designated RDS-37, was developed in 1955 and successfully tested on November 22, 1955. The energy release of the charge in the experiment was 1.6 Mt, and since for safety reasons at the Semipalatinsk test site the charge was tested at partial power, the predicted full-scale energy release of the charge was ~ 3 Mt. The energy release amplification factor in RDS-37 was about two orders of magnitude, the charge did not use tritium, the thermonuclear fuel was lithium deuteride, and the main fissile material was U-238. ... Particular attention should be paid to the works of 1958. This year, a new type of thermonuclear charge, “product 49,” was tested [the double-primary H-bomb], which was the next step in the formation of a standard for thermonuclear charges (its development was completed in 1957, but testing on the SIP did not take place). The ideologists of this project and the developers of the physical charge circuit were Yu. N. Babaev and I. The peculiarity of the new charge was that, using the basic principles of the RDS-37, it was possible to: • significantly reduce overall parameters due to a new bold solution to the problem of transfer of X-ray radiation, which determines implosion; • simplify the layered structure of the secondary module, which turned out to be an extremely important practical decision. According to the conditions of adaptation to specific carriers, “product 49” was developed in a smaller overall weight category compared to the RDS-37 charge, but its specific volumetric energy release turned out to be 2.4 times greater.
"The physical design of the charge turned out to be extremely successful; the charge was transferred to service and subsequently underwent modernization associated with the replacement of primary energy sources. In 1958, together with Yu. N. Babaev, we managed to develop 4 thermonuclear charges, which were tested on the field in 7 full-scale tests, and all of them were successful. This work was practically implemented within 8 months of 1958. All of these charges used a new circuit, first introduced in Product 49. Their energy release ranged from 0.3 to 2.8 Mt. In addition, in 1958, under my leadership M. V. Fedulov also developed the lightest thermonuclear charge at that time according to the “product 49” design, which was also successfully tested. Work on the miniaturization of thermonuclear weapons was new at that time, and it was met with a certain misunderstanding and resistance. ... One of the well-known pages in the history of work on thermonuclear weapons of the USSR is the creation of a superbomb - the most powerful thermonuclear charge. I will dwell on some points of this development. ... Among the features of this charge, it should be noted that the large volume of the charge (due to its high energy release) required significant amounts of X-ray energy to carry out implosion. The developed nuclear charges did not satisfy this condition, and therefore, a previously developed two-stage thermonuclear charge with a relatively low energy release was used as the primary source of the “super-powerful charge”. This charge was developed by me and Yu. N. Babaev. ... In the next project (a return to the untested 1958 system) that I supervised, every effort was made to ensure near-perfect implosion symmetry. This brilliant work led to success, and in 1962, the problem of implementing thermonuclear ignition was solved in a special device. In other full-scale tests that followed, this success was consolidated, and as a result, thermonuclear ignition provided the calculated combustion of the secondary module with an energy release of 1 Mt. My co-authors in this development were V.B. Adamsky, Yu.N. Babaev, V.G. Zagrafov and V.N. Mokhov. ... This principle has found a variety of applications in the creation of fundamentally new types of thermonuclear charges, from special devices for the use of nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes to significant military applications." (Note there is a 2017 filmed interview of Trutnev - in Russian - linked here.)
"... it is an important defect of 'arms control' agreements that the punishment or correction of even outright violation is not done automatically ... [in 1934 Ramsay] MacDonald and his supporters urged one of the least aggressive nations in Europe to disarm itself to a level equal with their potential attackers ... Probably as much as any other single group I think that these men of good will can be charged with causing World War II. [Italics are Kahn's own.] ... In March 1934, Stanley Baldwin, in answer to a statement by Winston Churchill to the effect that Germany was rearming and growing stronger than Great Britain, made his famous statement: 'If all our efforts at agreement fail [why 'all' and how do you define 'failure' until after the enemy secretly breaks the agreement and enemy starts a war, when it is too late?] ... in air strength and air power this country shall no longer be inferior to any country within striking distance of its shores'. In spite of this pledge, by 1935 the Germans had achieved parity or even air superiority and their rate of expansion was much larger than that of the British; thus the disparity grew with the years. ... On March 16, 1935, Hitler decreed conscription ... In April, the League [of Nations, the old version of the UN] ... unanimously voted that treaties should not be broken by unilateral action. ... At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to 'retaliate' if they attacked him. ... The technique he used is such an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs that it is of extreme value to all who are concerned with the problem of maintaining a peaceful and secure world to go over the story in some detail." - Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, pp. 390-392, 403. (Kahn then gives a long discussion of the "you have the choice"-way Hitler blackmailed President Hacha into signing over his country to the Nazis in March 1939, despite the worthless Munich agreement of 1938, using first-hand testimony from Hitler's translator at the 14 March 1939 Hitler-Hacha meeting, Paul Schmidt: "There were, said Hitler, 'two possibilities. The first was that the invasion of the German troops might develop into a battle. The resistance would then be broken down by force of arms with all available means. The other was that the entry of the German troops should take place in a peaceable manner ...'." Now the issue is this: Hitler used "peace" as an option to get what he wanted without violence. But populist propaganda claims Hitler was "violent". Nope: Hitler preferred to "peacefully" invade, "peacefully" gas opponents in gas chambers with musicians playing classical music at the deportation camp railway stations to prevent violence starting, etc. Reagan made the point in his March 1983 "evil empire" speech that the most evil thugs of all that instigate genocide hide behind the cloak of spurious pacifism!)
https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth/ (Peter Vanderwicken in the Harvard Business Review Magazine, May-June 1995): "The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works ... The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity. What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. ... The architect of the transformation was not a political leader or a constitutional convention but Joseph Pulitzer, who in 1883 bought the sleepy New York World and in 20 years made it the country’s largest newspaper. Pulitzer accomplished that by bringing drama to news—by turning news articles into stories ... His journalism took events out of their dry, institutional contexts and made them emotional rather than rational, immediate rather than considered, and sensational rather than informative. The press became a stage on which the actions of government were a series of dramas. ... The press swarmed on the story, which had all the necessary dramatic elements: a foot-dragging bureaucracy, a study finding that the country’s favorite fruit was poisoning its children, and movie stars opposing the pesticide. Sales of apples collapsed. Within months, Alar’s manufacturer withdrew it from the market, although both the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration stated that they believed Alar levels on apples were safe. The outcry simply overwhelmed scientific evidence. That happens all too often, Cynthia Crossen argues in her book Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America. ... Crossen writes, “more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause.” “Most members of the media are ill-equipped to judge a technical study,” Crossen correctly points out. “Even if the science hasn’t been explained or published in a U.S. journal, the media may jump on a study if it promises entertainment for readers or viewers. And if the media jump, that is good enough for many Americans.” ... A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Such an “emergency government can’t govern,” Weaver concludes. “Not only does public support for emergency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, but officials acting in the emergency mode can’t make meaningful public policies. According to the classic textbook definition, government is the authoritative allocation of values, and emergency government doesn’t authoritatively allocate values.” (Note that Richard Rhodes' Pulitzer prize winning books such as The making of the atomic bomb which uncritically quote Hiroshima firestorm lies and survivors nonsense about people running around without feet, play to this kind of emotional fantasy mythology of nuclear deterrence obfuscation so loved by the mass media.)
“... Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution ... It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea ....” – Ronald Reagan, Moscow State University, May 31, 1988 (quoted at our physics site, www.quantumfieldtheory.org). Text in blue on this blog is hyperlinked directly to reference material (so can be opened in another tab by right-clicking on it):
ABOVE: "missile gap" propaganda debunked by secret 1970s data; Kennedy relied on US nuclear superiority. Using a flawed analysis of nuclear weapons effects on Hiroshima - based on lying unclassified propaganda reports and ignorant dismissals of civil defense shelters in Russia (again based on Hiroshima propaganda by groves in 1945) - America allowed Russian nuclear superiority in the 1970s. Increasingly, the nuclear deterrent was used by Russia to stop the West from "interfering" with its aggressive invasions and wars, precisely Hitler's 1930s strategy with gas bombing knockout-blow threats used to engineer appeasement. BELOW: H-bomb effects and design secrecy led to tragic mass media delusions, such as the 18 February 1950 Picture Post claim that the H-bomb can devastate Australia (inspiring the Shute novel and movie "On the Beach" and also other radiation scams like "Dr Strangelove" to be used by Russia to stir up anti Western disarmament movement to help Russia win WWIII). Dad was a Civil Defense Corps Instructor in the UK when this was done (the civil defense effectiveness and weapon effects facts on shelters at UK and USA nuclear tests were kept secret and not used to debunk lying political appeasement propaganda tricks in the mass media by sensationalist "journalists" and Russian "sputniks"):
Message to mass-media journalists: please don't indulge in lying "no defence" propaganda as was done by most of the media in previous pre-war crises!
Again, to recap: the biggest threat is nuclear coercion as occurred when Russia broke a ceasefire and resumed nuclear testing in 1961, and built the Berlin Wall, then in 1962 put nuclear weapons into Cuba's fanatical dictatorship. This is not the mainstream media portrayal of the "nuclear threat" (immediate knockout blow, total disarmament in a few seconds by exploding everything in the stockpile, which is loved by TV, newspapers, magazines, and films and which - like the gas bomb knockout blow hype of the 1930s - makes war appear "unthinkable" to support appeasement, disarmament and arms control delusions which are bits of paper that simply can't stop the real threats from dictatorships). At some point there may be a serious deliberate escalation to end the war, and we need to be prepared and ready to step up deterrence against this, or to respond rationally in some other way. The supply of F16s by NATO members to Ukraine to bomb targets in Russia will allow Putin the excuse he feels he needs to escalate nuclear threats further, so we must prepare. This is not "defeatism", but preparing for freedom to prevail, to win the war, to deter escalation, and to survive.
ABOVE: Example of a possible Russian 1985 1st Cold War SLBM first strike plan. The initial use of Russian SLBM launched nuclear missiles from off-coast against command and control centres (i.e. nuclear explosions to destroy warning satellite communications centres by radiation on satellites as well as EMP against ground targets, rather than missiles launched from Russia against cities, as assumed by 100% of the Cold War left-wing propaganda) is allegedly a Russian "fog of war" strategy. Such a "demonstration strike" is aimed essentially at causing confusion about what is going on, who is responsible - it is not quick or easy to finger-print high altitude bursts fired by SLBM's from submerged submarines to a particular country because you don't get fallout samples to identify isotopic plutonium composition. Russia could immediately deny the attack (implying, probably to the applause of the left-wingers that this was some kind of American training exercise or computer based nuclear weapons "accident", similar to those depicted in numerous anti-nuclear Cold War propaganda films). Thinly-veiled ultimatums and blackmail follow. America would not lose its population or even key cities in such a first strike (contrary to left-wing propaganda fiction), as with Pearl Harbor in 1941; it would lose its complacency and its sense of security through isolationism, and would either be forced into a humiliating defeat or a major war.
Before 1941, many warned of the risks but were dismissed on the basis that Japan was a smaller country with a smaller economy than the USA and war was therefore absurd (similar to the way Churchill's warnings about European dictators were dismissed by "arms-race opposing pacifists" not only in the 1930s, but even before WWI; for example Professor Cyril Joad documents in the 1939 book "Why War?" his first hand witnessing of Winston Churchill's pre-WWI warning and call for an arms-race to deter that war, as dismissed by the sneering Norman Angell who claimed an arms race would cause a war rather than avert one by bankrupting the terrorist state). It is vital to note that there is an immense pressure against warnings of Russian nuclear superiority even today, most of it contradictory. E.g. the left wing and Russian-biased "experts" whose voices are the only ones reported in the Western media (traditionally led by "Scientific American" and "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"), simultaneously claim Russia imposes such a terrible SLBM and ICBM nuclear threat that we must desperately disarm now, while also claiming that Russian tactical nuclear weapons probably won't work so aren't a threat that needs to be credibly deterred! This only makes sense as Russian siding propaganda. In similar vein, Teller-critic Hans Bethe also used to falsely "dismiss" Russian nuclear superiority by claiming (with quotes from Brezhnev about the peaceful intentions of Russia) that Russian delivery systems are "less accurate" than Western missiles (as if accuracy has anything to do with high altitude EMP strikes, where the effects cover huge areas, or large city targets. Such claims would then by repeatedly endlessly in the Western media by Russian biased "journalists" or agents of influence, and any attempt to point out the propaganda (i.e. he real world asymmetry: Russia uses cheap countervalue targetting on folk that don't have civil defense, whereas we need costly, accurate counterforce targetting because Russia has civil defense shelters that we don't have) became a "Reds under beds" argument, implying that the truth is dangerous to "peaceful coexistence"!
“Free peoples ... will make war only when driven to it by tyrants. ... there have been no wars between well-established democracies. ... the probability ... that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident [is] less than one chance in a thousand. ... there have been more than enough to provide robust statistics ... When toleration of dissent has persisted for three years, but not until then, we can call a new republic ‘well established.’ ... Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders ... using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation ... Republican behaviour ... in quite a few cases ... created an ‘appeasement trap.’ The republic tried to accommodate a tyrant as if he were a fellow republican; the tyrant concluded that he could safely make an aggressive response; eventually the republic replied furiously with war. The frequency of such errors on both sides is evidence that negotiating styles are not based strictly on sound reasoning.” - Spencer Weart, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (Yale University Press)
The Top Secret American intelligency report NIE 11-3/8-74 "Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict" warned on page 6: "the USSR has largely eliminated previous US quantitative advantages in strategic offensive forces." page 9 of the report estimated that the Russian's ICBM and SLBM launchers exceed the USAs 1,700 during 1970, while Russia's on-line missile throw weight had exceeded the USA's one thousand tons back in 1967! Because the USA had more long-range bombers which can carry high-yield bombs than Russia (bombers are more vulnerable to air defences so were not Russia's priority), it took a little longer for Russia to exceed the USA in equivalent megatons, but the 1976 Top Secret American report NIE 11-3/8-76 at page 17 shows that in 1974 Russia exceeded the 4,000 equivalent-megatons payload of USA missiles and aircraft (with less vulnerability for Russia, since most of Russia's nuclear weapons were on missiles not in SAM-vulnerable aircraft), amd by 1976 Russia could deliver 7,000 tons of payload by missiles compared to just 4,000 tons on the USA side. These reports were kept secret for decades to protect the intelligence sources, but they were based on hard evidence. For example, in August 1974 the Hughes Aircraft Company used a specially designed ship (Glomar Explorer, 618 feet long, developed under a secret CIA contract) to recover nuclear weapons and their secret manuals from a Russian submarine which sank in 16,000 feet of water, while in 1976 America was able to take apart the electronics systems in a state-of-the-art Russian MIG-25 fighter which was flown to Japan by defector Viktor Belenko, discovering that it used exclusively EMP-hard miniature vacuum tubes with no EMP-vulnerable solid state components.
There are four ways of dealing with aggressors: conquest (fight them), intimidation (deter them), fortification (shelter against their attacks; historically used as castles, walled cities and even walled countries in the case of China's 1,100 mile long Great Wall and Hadrian's Wall, while the USA has used the Pacific and Atlantic as successful moats against invasion, at least since Britain invaded Washington D.C. back in 1812), and friendship (which if you are too weak to fight, means appeasing them, as Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler for worthless peace promises). These are not mutually exclusive: you can use combinations. If you are very strong in offensive capability and also have walls to protect you while your back is turned, you can - as Teddy Roosevelt put it (quoting a West African proverb): "Speak softly and carry a big stick." But if you are weak, speaking softly makes you a target, vulnerable to coercion. This is why we don't send troops directly to Ukraine. When elected in 1960, Kennedy introduced "flexible response" to replace Dulles' "massive retaliation", by addressing the need to deter large provocations without being forced to decide between the unwelcome options of "surrender or all-out nuclear war" (Herman Kahn called this flexible response "Type 2 Deterrence"). This was eroded by both Russian civil defense and their emerging superiority in the 1970s: a real missiles and bombers gap emerged in 1972 when the USSR reached and then exceeded the 2,200 of the USA, while in 1974 the USSR achieve parity at 3,500 equivalent megatons (then exceeded the USA), and finally today Russia has over 2,000 dedicated clean enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons and we have none (except low-neutron output B61 multipurpose bombs). (Robert Jastrow's 1985 book How to make nuclear Weapons obsolete was the first to have graphs showing the downward trend in nuclear weapon yields created by the development of miniaturized MIRV warheads for missiles and tactical weapons: he shows that the average size of US warheads fell from 3 megatons in 1960 to 200 kilotons in 1980, and from a total of 12,000 megatons in 1960 to 3,000 megatons in 1980.)
The term "equivalent megatons" roughly takes account of the fact that the areas of cratering, blast and radiation damage scale not linearly with energy but as something like the 2/3 power of energy release; but note that close-in cratering scales as a significantly smaller power of energy than 2/3, while blast wind drag displacement of jeeps in open desert scales as a larger power of energy than 2/3. Comparisons of equivalent megatonnage shows, for example, that WWII's 2 megatons of TNT in the form of about 20,000,000 separate conventional 100 kg (0.1 ton) explosives is equivalent to 20,000,000 x (10-7)2/3 = 431 separate 1 megaton explosions! The point is, nuclear weapons are not of a different order of magnitude to conventional warfare, because: (1) devastated areas don't scale in proportion to energy release, (2) the number of nuclear weapons is very much smaller than the number of conventional bombs dropped in conventional war, (3) because of radiation effects like neutrons and intense EMP, it is possible to eliminate physical destruction by nuclear weapons by a combination of weapon design (e.g. very clean bombs like 99.9% fusion Dominic-Housatonic, or 95% fusion Redwing-Navajo) and burst altitude or depth for hard targets, and create a weapon that deters invasions credibly (without lying local fallout radiation hazards), something none of the biased "pacifist disarmament" lobbies (which attract Russian support) tell you, and (4) people at collateral damage distances have time to take cover from radiation and flying glass, blast winds, etc from nuclear explosions (which they don't in Ukraine and Gaza where similar blast pressures arrive more rapidly from smaller conventional explosions). There's a big problem with propaganda here.
(These calculations, showing that even if strategic bombing had worked in WWII - and the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded it failed, thus the early Cold War effort to develop and test tactical nuclear weapons and train for tactical nuclear war in Nevada field exercises - you need over 400 megaton weapons to give the equivalent of WWII city destruction in Europe and Japan, are often inverted by anti-nuclear bigots to try to obfuscate the truth. What we're driving at is that nuclear weapons give you the ability to DETER the invasions that set off such wars, regardless of whether they escalate from poison gas - as feared in the 20s and 30s thus appeasement and WWII - or nuclear. Escalation was debunked in WWII where the only use of poison gases were in "peaceful" gas chambers, not dropped on cities. Rather than justifying appeasement, the "peaceful" massacre of millions in gas chambers justified war. But evil could and should have been deterred. The "anti-war" propagandarists like Lord Noel-Baker and pals who guaranteed immediate gas knockout blows in the 30s if we didn't appease evil dictators were never held to account and properly debunked by historians after the war, so they converted from gas liars to nuclear liars in the Cold War and went on winning "peace" prices for their lies, which multiplied up over the years, to keep getting news media headlines and Nobel Peace Prizes for starting and sustaining unnecessary wars and massacres by dictators. There's also a military side to this, with Field Marshall's Lord Mountbatten, Lord Carver and War Office scientific adviser Lord Zuckerman in the Cold War arguing for UK nuclear disarmament and a re-introduction of conscription instead. These guys were not pacifist CND thugs who wanted Moscow to rule the world, but they were quoted by them attacking the deterrent, but not of course quoting them calling for conscription instead. The abolishment of UK conscription for national service announced in 1960 was due to the H-bomb, and was a political money-saving plot by Macmillan. If we disarmed our nuclear deterrent and spend the money on conscription plus underground shelters, we might well be able to resist Russia as Ukraine does, until we run out of ammunition etc. However, the cheapest and most credible deterrent is tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the concentration of aggressive force by terrorist states..)
Duncan Campbell's War Plan UK relies on the contradiction of claiming that the deliberately exaggerated UK Government worst-case civil defense "exercises" for training purposes are "realistic scenarios" (e.g. 1975 Inside Right, 1978 Scrum Half, 1980 Square Leg, 1982 Hard Rock planning), while simultaneously claiming the very opposite about reliable UK Government nuclear effects and sheltering effectiveness data, and hoping nobody would spot his contradictory tactics. He quotes extensively from these lurid worst-case scenario UK civil defense exercises ,as if they are factually defensible rather than imaginary fiction to put planners under the maximum possible stress (standard UK military policy of “Train hard to fight easy”), while ignoring the far more likely limited nuclear uses scenario of Sir John Hackett's Third World War. His real worry is the 1977 UK Government Training Manual for Scientific Advisers which War Plan UK quotes on p14: "a potential threat to the security of the United Kingdom arising from acts of sabotage by enemy agents, possibly assisted by dissident groups. ... Their aim would be to weaken the national will and ability to fight. ... Their significance should not be underestimated." On the next page, War Plan UK quotes J. B. S. Haldane's 1938 book Air Raid Precautions (ARP) on the terrible destruction Haldane witnessed on unprotected people in the Spanish civil war, without even mentioning that Haldane's point is pro-civil defense, pro-shelters, and anti-appeasement of dictatorship, the exact opposite of War Plan UK which wants Russia to run the world. On page 124 War Plan UK the false assertion is made that USA nuclear casualty data is "widely accepted" and true (declassified Hiroshima casaulty data for people in modern concrete buildings proves it to be lies) while the correct UK nuclear casualty data is "inaccurate", and on page 126, Duncan Campbell simply lies that the UK Government's Domestic Nuclear Shelters- Technical Guidance"ended up offering the public a selection of shelters half of which were invented in the Blitz ... None of the designs was ever tested." In fact, Frank Pavry (who studied similar shelters surviving near ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 with the British Mission to Japan_ and George R. Stanbury tested 15 Anderson shelters at the first UK nuclear explosion, Operation Hurricane in 1952, together with concrete structures, and many other improvised trench and earth-covered shelters were nuclear tested by USA and UK at trials in 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1958, and later at simulated nuclear explosions by Cresson Kearny of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA, having also earlier been exposed to early Russian nuclear tests (scroll down to see the evidence of this). Improved versions of war tested and nuclear weapons tested shelters! So war Plan UK makes no effort whatsoever to dig up the facts, and instead falsely claims the exact opposite of the plain unvarnished truth! War Plan UK shows its hypocrisy on page 383 in enthusiastically praising Russian civil defense:
"Training in elementary civil defence is given to everyone, at school, in industry or collective farms. A basic handbook of precautionary measures, Everybody must know this!, is the Russian Protect and Survive. The national civil defence corps is extensive, and is organized along military lines. Over 200,000 civil defence troops would be mobilized for rescue work in war. There are said to be extensive, dispersed and 'untouchable' food stockpiles; industrial workers are issued with kits of personal protection apparatus, said to include nerve gas counteragents such as atropine. Fallout and blast shelters are provided in the cities and in industrial complexes, and new buildings have been required to have shelters since the 1950s. ... They suggest that less than 10% - even as little as 5% - of the Soviet population would die in a major attack. [Less than Russia's loss of 12% of its population in WWII.]"
'LLNL achieved fusion ignition for the first time on Dec. 5, 2022. The second time came on July 30, 2023, when in a controlled fusion experiment, the NIF laser delivered 2.05 MJ of energy to the target, resulting in 3.88 MJ of fusion energy output, the highest yield achieved to date. On Oct. 8, 2023, the NIF laser achieved fusion ignition for the third time with 1.9 MJ of laser energy resulting in 2.4 MJ of fusion energy yield. “We’re on a steep performance curve,” said Jean-Michel Di Nicola, co-program director for the NIF and Photon Science’s Laser Science and Systems Engineering organization. “Increasing laser energy can give us more margin against issues like imperfections in the fuel capsule or asymmetry in the fuel hot spot. Higher laser energy can help achieve a more stable implosion, resulting in higher yields.” ... “The laser itself is capable of higher energy without fundamental changes to the laser,” said NIF operations manager Bruno Van Wonterghem. “It’s all about the control of the damage. Too much energy without proper protection, and your optics blow to pieces.” ' - https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/llnls-nif-delivers-record-laser-energy
NOTE: the "problem" very large lasers "required" to deliver ~2MJ (roughly 0.5 kg of TNT energy) to cause larger fusion explosions of 2mm diameter capsules of frozen D+T inside a 1 cm diameter energy reflecting hohlraum, and the "problem" of damage to the equipment caused by the explosions, is immaterial to clean nuclear deterrent development based on this technology, because in a clean nuclear weapon, whatever laser or other power ignition system is used only has to be fired once, so it needs to be less robust than the NIF lasers which are used repeatedly. Similarly, damage done to the system by the explosion is also immaterial for a clean nuclear weapon, in which the weapon is detonated once only! This is exactly the same point which finally occurred during a critical review of the first gun-type assembly nuclear weapon, in which the fact it would only ever be fired once (unlike a field artillery gun) enabled huge reductions in the size of the device, into a practical weapon, as described by General Leslie M. Groves on p163 of his 1962 book Now it can be told: the story of the Manhattan Project:
"Out of the Review Committee's work came one important technical contribution when Rose pointed out ... that the durability of the gun was quite immaterial to success, since it would be destroyed in the explosion anyway. Self-evident as this seemed once it was mentioned, it had not previously occurred to us. Now we could make drastic reductions in ... weight and size."
This principle also applies to weaponizing NIF clean fusion explosion technology. General Groves' book was reprinted in 1982 with a useful Introduction by Edward Teller on the nature of nuclear weapons history: "History in some ways resembles the relativity principle in science. What is observed depends on the observer. Only when the perspective of the observer is known, can proper corrections be made. ... The general ... very often managed to ignore complexity and arrive at a result which, if not ideal, at least worked. ... For Groves, the Manhattan project seemed a minor assignment, less significant than the construction of the Pentagon. He was deeply disappointed at being given the job of supervising the development of an atomic weapon, since it deprived him of combat duty. ... We must find ways to encourage mutual understanding and significant collaboration between those who defend their nation with their lives and those who can contribute the ideas to make that defense successful. Only by such cooperation can we hope that freedom will survive, that peace will be preserved."
General Groves similarly comments in Chapter 31, "A Final Word" of Now it can be told:
"No man can say what would have been the result if we had not taken the steps ... Yet, one thing seems certain - atomic energy would have been developed somewhere in the world ... I do not believe the United States ever would have undertaken it in time of peace. Most probably, the first developer would have been a power-hungry nation, which would then have dominated the world completely ... it is fortunate indeed for humanity that the initiative in this field was gained and kept by the United States. That we were successful was due entirely to the hard work and dedication of the more than 600,000 Americans who comprised and directly supported the Manhattan Project. ... we had the full backing of our government, combined with the nearly infinite potential of American science, engineering and industry, and an almost unlimited supply of people endowed with ingenuity and determination."
Additionally, the test was made in a hurry before an atmospheric teat ban treaty, and this rushed use of a standard air drop steel casing made the tested weapon much heavier than a properly weaponized Ripple II. The key point is that a 10 kt fission device set off a ~10 Mt fusion explosion, a very clean deterrent. Applying this Ripple II 1,000-factor multiplicative staging figure directly to this technology for clean nuclear warheads, a 0.5 kg TNT D+T fusion capsule would set off a 0.5 ton TNT 2nd stage of LiD, which would then set off a 0.5 kt 3rd stage "neutron bomb", which could then be used to set off a 500 kt 4th stage or "strategic nuclear weapon". In practice, this multiplication factor of 1,000 given by Ripple II in 1962 from 10 kt to 10 Mt may not be immediately achievable to get from ~1 kg TNT yield to 1 ton TNT, so a few more tiny stages may be needed for the lower yield. But there is every reason to forecast that with enough research, improvements will be possible and the device will become a reality. It is therefore now possible not just in "theory" or in principle, but with evidence obtained from practical experimentation, using suitable already-proved technical staging systems used in 1960s nuclear weapon tests successfully, to design 100% clean fusion nuclear warheads! Yes, the details have been worked out, yes the technology has been tested in piecemeal fashion. All that is now needed is a new, but quicker and cheaper, Star Wars program or Manhattan Project style effort to pull the components together. This will constitute a major leap forward in the credibility of the deterrence of aggressors.
ABOVE: as predicted, the higher the input laser pulse for the D+T initiator of a clean multiplicatively-staged nuclear deterrent, the lower the effect of plasma instabilities and asymmetries and the greater the fusion burn. To get ignition (where the x-ray energy injected into the fusion hohlraum by the laser is less than the energy released in the D+T fusion burn) they have had to use about 2 MJ delivered in 10 ns or so, equivalent to 0.5 kg of TNT equivalent. But for deterrent use, why use such expensive, delicate lasers? Why not just use one-shot miniaturised x-ray tubes with megavolt electron acceleration, powered a suitably ramped pulse from a chemical explosion for magnetic flux compression current generation? At 10% efficiency, you need 0.5 x 10 = 5 kg of TNT! Even at 1% efficiency, 50 kg of TNT will do. Once the D+T gas capsule's hohlraum is well over 1 cm in size, to minimise the risk of imperfections that cause asymmetries, you don't any longer need focussed laser beams to enter tiny apertures. You might even be able to integrate many miniature flash x-ray tubes (each designed to burn out when firing one pulse of a MJ or so) into a special hohlraum. Humanity urgently needs a technological arms race akin to Reagan's Star Wars project, to deter the dictators from invasions and WWIII. In the conference video above, a question was asked about the real efficiency of the enormous repeat-pulse capable laser system's efficiency (not required for a nuclear weapon whose components only require the capability to be used once, unlike lab equipment): the answer is that 300 MJ was required by the lab lasers to fire a 2 MJ pulse into the D+T capsule's x-ray hohlraum, i.e. their lasers are only 0.7% efficient! So why bother? We know - from the practical use of incoherent fission primary stage x-rays to compress and ignite fusion capsules in nuclear weapons - that you simply don't need coherent photons from a laser for this purpose. The sole reason they are approaching the problem with lasers is that they began their lab experiments decades ago with microscopic sized fusion capsules and for those you need a tightly focussed beam to insert energy through a tiny hohlraum aperture. But now they are finally achieving success with much larger fusion capsules (to minimise instabilities that caused the early failures), it may be time to change direction. A whole array of false "no-go theorems" can and will be raised by ignorant charlatan "authorities" against any innovation; this is the nature of the political world. There is some interesting discussion of why clean bombs aren't in existence today, basically the idealized theory (which works fine for big H-bombs but ignores small-scale asymmetry problems which are important only at low ignition energy) understimated the input energy required for fusion ignition by a factor of 2000:
In the final diagram above, we illustrate an example of what could very well occur in the near future, just to really poke a stick into the wheels of "orthodoxy" in nuclear weapons design: is it possible to just use a lot of (perhaps hardened for higher currents, perhaps no) pulsed current driven microwave tubes from kitchen microwave ovens, channelling their energy using waveguides (simply metal tubes, i.e. electrical Faraday cages, which reflect and thus contain microwaves) into the hohlraum, and make the pusher of dipole molecules (like common salt, NaCl) which is a good absorber of microwaves (as everybody knows from cooking in microwave ovens)? It would be extremely dangerous, not to mention embarrassing, if this worked, but nobody had done any detailed research into the possibility due to groupthink orthodoxy and conventional boxed in thinking! Remember, the D+T capsule just needs extreme compression and this can be done by any means that works. Microwave technology is now very well-established. It's no good trying to keep anything of this sort "secret" (either officially or unofficially) since as history shows, dictatorships are the places where "crackpot"-sounding ideas (such as douple-primary Project "49" Russian thermonuclear weapon designs, Russian Sputnik satellites, Russian Novichok nerve agent, Nazi V1 cruise missiles, Nazi V2 IRBM's, etc.) can be given priority by loony dictators. We have to avoid, as Edward Teller put it (in his secret commentary debunking Bethe's false history of the H-bomb, written AFTER the Teller-Ulam breakthrough), "too-narrow" thinking (which Teller said was still in force on H-bomb design even then). Fashionable hardened orthodoxy is the soft underbelly of "democracy" (a dictatorship by the majority, which is always too focussed on fashionable ideas and dismissive of alternative approaches in science and technology). Dictatorships (minorities against majorities) have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of concern for the fake "no-go theorems" used by Western anti-nuclear "authorities" to ban anything but fashionable groupthink science.
ABOVE: 1944-dated film of the Head of the British Mission to Los Alamos, neutron discoverer James Chadwick, explaining in detail to American how hard it was for him to discover the neutron, taking 10 years on a shoe-string budget, mostly due to having insufficiently strong sources of alpha particles to bombard nuclei in a cloud chamber! The idea of the neutron came from his colleague Rutherford. Chadwick reads his explanation while rapidly rotating a pencil in his right hand, perhaps indicating the stress he was under in 1944. In 1946, when British participation at Los Alamos ended, Chadwick wrote the first detailed secret British report on the design of a three-stage hydrogen bomb, another project that took over a decade. In the diagram below, it appears that the American Mk17 only had a single secondary stage like the similar yield 1952 Mike design. The point here is that popular misunderstanding of the simple mechanism of x-ray energy transfer for higher yield weapons may be creating a dogmatic attitude even in secret nuclear weaponeer design labs, where orthodoxy is followed too rigorously. The Russians (see quotes on the latest blog post here) state they used two entire two-stage thermonuclear weapons with a combined yield of 1 megaton to set off their 50 megaton test in 1961. If true, you can indeed use two-stage hydrogen bombs as an "effective primary" to set off another secondary stage, of much higher yield. Can this be reversed in the sense of scaling it down so you have several bombs-within-bombs, all triggered by a really tiny first stage? In other words, can it be applied to neutron bomb design?
The 1946 Report of the British Mission to Japan, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compiled by a team of 16 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during November 1945, which included 10 UK Home Office civil defence experts (W. N. Thomas, J. Bronowski, D. C. Burn, J. B. Hawker, H. Elder, P. A. Badland, R. W. Bevan, F. H. Pavry, F. Walley, O. C. Young, S. Parthasarathy, A. D. Evans, O. M. Solandt, A. E. Dark, R. G. Whitehead and F. G. S. Mitchell) found: "Para. 26. Reinforced concrete buildings of very heavy construction in Hiroshima, even when within 200 yards of the centre of damage, remained structurally undamaged. ... Para 28. These observations make it plain that reinforced concrete framed buildings can resist a bomb of the same power detonated at these heights, without employing fantastic thicknesses of concrete. ... Para 40. The provision of air raid shelters throughout Japan was much below European standards. ... in Hiroshima ... they were semi-sunk, about 20 feet long, had wooden frames, and 1.5-2 feet of earth cover. ... Exploding so high above them, the bomb damaged none of these shelters. ... Para 42. These observations show that the standard British shelters would have performed well against a bomb of the same power exploded at such a height. Anderson shelters, properly erected and covered, would have given protection. Brick or concrete surfac shelters with adequate reinforcement would have remained safe from collapse. The Morrison shelter is designed only to protect its occupants from the refuge load of a house, and this it would have done. Deep shelters such as the refuge provided by the London Underground would have given complete protection. ... Para 60. Buildings and walls gave complete protection from flashburn."
Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons in Table 12.21 on p547 flunks making this point by giving data without citing its source to make it credible to readers: it correlated 14% mortality (106 killed out of 775 people in Hiroshima's Telegraph Office) to "moderate damage" at 500m in Hiroshima (the uncited "secret" source was NP-3041, Table 12, applying to unwarned people inside modern concrete buildings).
"A weapon whose basic design would seem to provide the essence of what Western morality has long sought for waging classical battlefield warfare - to keep the war to a struggle between the warriors and exclude the non-combatants and their physical assets - has been violently denounced, precisely because it achieves this objective." - Samuel T. Cohen (quoted in Chapman Pincher, The secret offensive, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1985, Chapter 15: The Neutron Bomb Offensive, p210).
The reality is, dedicated enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons were used to credibly deter the concentrations of force required for triggering of WWIII during the 1st Cold War, and the thugs who support Russian propaganda for Western disarmament got rid of them on our side, but not on the Russian side. Air burst neutron bombs or even as subsurface earth penetrators of relatively low fission yield (where the soil converts energy that would otherwise escape as blast and radiation into ground shock for destroying buried tunnels - new research on cratering shows that a 20 kt subsurface burst creates similar effects on buried hard targets as a 1 Mt surface burst), they cause none of the vast collateral damage to civilians that we see now in Ukraine and Gaza, or that we saw in WWII and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. This is 100% contrary to CND propaganda which is a mixture of lying on nuclear explosion collateral damage, escalation/knockout blow propaganda (of the type used to start WWII by appeasers) and lying on the designs of nuclear weapons in order to ensure the Western side (but not the thugs) gets only incredible "strategic deterrence" that can't deter the invasions that start world wars (e.g. Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939.) "Our country entered into an agreement in Budapest, Hungary when the Soviet Union was breaking up that we would guarantee the independence of Ukraine." - Tom Ramos. There really is phoney nuclear groupthink left agenda politics at work here: credible relatively clean tactical nuclear weapons are banned in the West but stocked by Russia, which has civil defense shelters to make its threats far more credible than ours! We need low-collateral damage enhanced-neutron and earth-penetrator options for the new Western W93 warhead, or we remain vulnerable to aggressive coercion by thugs, and invite invasions. Ambiguity, the current policy ("justifying" secrecy on just what we would do in any scenario) actually encourages experimental provocations by enemies to test what we are prepared to do (if anything), just as it did in 1914 and the 1930s.
ABOVE: 0.2 kt (tactical yield range) Ruth nuclear test debris, with lower 200 feet of the 300 ft steel tower surviving in Nevada, 1953. Note that the yield of the tactical invasion-deterrent Mk54 Davy Crockett was only 0.02 kt, 10 times less than than 0.2 kt Ruth.
It should be noted that cheap and naive "alternatives" to credible deterrence of war were tried in the 1930s and during the Cold War and afterwards, with disastrous consequences. Heavy "peaceful" oil sanctions and other embargoes against Japan for its invasion of China between 1931-7 resulted in the plan for the Pearl Harbor surprise attack of 7 December 1941, with subsequent escalation to incendiary city bombing followed nuclear warfare against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Attlee's pressure on Truman to guarantee no use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean War (leaked straight to Stalin by the Cambridge Spy Ring), led to an escalation of that war causing the total devastation of the cities of that country by conventional bombing (a sight witnessed by Sam Cohen, that motivated his neutron bomb deterrent of invasions), until Eisenhower was elected and reversed Truman's decision, leading not to the "escalatory Armageddon" assertions of Attlee, but to instead to a peaceful armistice! Similarly, as Tom Ramos argues in From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Kennedy's advisers who convinced him to go ahead with the moonlit 17 April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba without any USAF air support, which led to precisely what they claimed they would avoid: an escalation of aggression from Russia in Berlin, with the Berlin Wall going up on 17 August 1961 because any showing weakness to an enemy, as in the bungled invasion of Cuba, is always a green light to dictators to go ahead with revolutions, invasions and provocations everywhere else. Rather than the widely hyped autistic claims from disarmers and appeasers about "weakness bringing peace by demonstrating to the enemy that they have nothing to fear from you", the opposite result always occurs. The paranoid dictator seizes the opportunity to strike first. Similarly, withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021 was a clear green light to Russia to go ahead with a full scale invasion of Ukraine, reigniting the Cold War. von Neumann and Morgenstein's Minimax theorem for winning games - minimise the maximum possible loss - fails with offensive action in war because it sends a signal of weakness to the enemy, which does not treat war as a game with rules to be obeyed. Minimax is only valid for defense, such as civil defense shelters used by Russia to make their threats more credible than ours. The sad truth is that cheap fixes don't work, no matter how much propaganda is behind them. You either need to militarily defeat the enemy or at least economically defeat them using proven Cold War arms race techniques (not merely ineffective sanctions, which they can bypass by making alliances with Iran, North Korea, and China). Otherwise, you are negotiating peace from a position of weakness, which is called appeasement, or collaboration with terrorism.
"Following the war, the Navy Department was intent to see the effects of an atomic blast on naval warships ... the press was invited to witness this one [Crossroads-Able, 23.5 kt at 520 feet altitude, 1 July 1946, Bikini Atoll]. ... The buildup had been too extravagant. Goats that had been tethered on warship decks were still munching their feed, and the atoll's palm trees remained standing, unscathed. The Bikini test changed public attitudes. Before July 1, the world stood in awe of a weapon that had devastated two cities and forced the Japanese Empire to surrender. After that date, the bomb was still a terrible weapon, but a limited one." - Tom Ramos (LLNL nuclear weaponeer and nuclear pumped X-ray laser developer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Prevent Nuclear War, Naval Institute Press, 2022, pp43-4.
ILLUSTRATION: the threat of WWII and the need to deter it was massively derided by popular pacifism which tended to make "jokes" of the Nazi threat until too late (example of 1938 UK fiction on this above; Charlie Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator" is another example), so three years after the Nuremberg Laws and five years after illegal rearmament was begun by the Nazis, in the UK crowds of "pacifists" in Downing Street, London, support friendship with the top racist, dictatorial Nazis in the name of "world peace". The Prime Minister used underhand techniques to try to undermine appeasement critics like Churchill and also later to get W. E. Johns fired from both editorships of Flying (weekly) and Popular Flying (monthly) to make it appear everybody "in the know" agreed with his actions, hence the contrived "popular support" for collaborating with terrorists depicted in these photos. The same thing persists today; the 1920s and 1930s "pacifist" was also driven by "escalation" and "annihilation" claims explosions, fire and WMD poison gas will kill everybody in a "knockout blow", immediately any war breaks out.
"Fuchs reasoned that [the very low energy, 1-10 kev, approximately 10-100 lower energy than medical] x-rays from the [physically separated] uranium explosion would reach the tamper of beryllium oxide, heat it, ionize the constituents and cause them to implode - the 'ionization implosion' concept of von Neumann but now applied to deuterium and tritium contained within beryllium oxide. To keep the radiation inside the tamper, Fuchs proposed to enclose the device inside a casing impervious to radiation. The implosion induced by the radiation would amplify the compression ... and increase the chance of the fusion bomb igniting. The key here is 'separation of the atomic charge and thermonuclear fuel, and compression of the latter by radiation travelling from the former', which constitutes 'radiation implosion'." (This distinction between von Neumann's "ionization implosion" INSIDE the tamper, of denser tamper expanding and thus compressing lower density fusion fuel inside, and Fuchs' OUTSIDE capsule "radiation implosion", is key even today for isentropic H-bomb design; it seems Teller's key breakthroughs were not separate stages or implosion but rather radiation mirrors and ablative recoil shock compression, where radiation is used to ablate a dense pusher of Sausage designs like Mike in 1952 etc., a distinction not to be confused for the 1944 von Neumann and 1946 Fuchs implosion mechanisms!
It appears Russian H-bombs used von Neumann's "ionization implosion" and Fuchs's "radiation implosion" for RDS-37 on 22 November 1955 and also in their double-primary 23 February 1958 test and subsequently, where their fusion capsules reportedly contained a BeO or other low-density outer coating, which would lead to quasi-isentropic compression, more effective for low density secondary stages than purely ablative recoil shock compression. This accounts for the continuing classification of the April 1946 Superbomb Conference (the extract of 32 pages linked here is so severely redacted that it is less helpful than the brief but very lucid summary of its technical content, in the declassified FBI compilation of reports concerning data Klaus Fuchs sent to Stalin, linked here!). Teller had all the knowledge he needed in 1946, but didn't go ahead because he made the stupid error of killing progress off by his own "no-go theorem" against compression of fusion fuel. Teller did a "theoretical" calculation in which he claimed that compression has no effect on the amount of fusion burn because the compressed system is simply scaled down in size so that the same efficiency of fusion burn occurs, albeit faster, and then stops as the fuel thermally expands. This was wrong. Teller discusses the reason for his great error in technical detail during his tape-recorded interview by Chuck Hansen at Los Alamos on 7 June 1993 (C. Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, 2nd ed., pp. II-176-7):
"Now every one of these [fusion] processes varied with the square of density. If you compress the thing, then in one unit's volume, each of the 3 important processes increased by the same factor ... Therefore, compression (seemed to be) useless. Now when ... it seemed clear that we were in trouble, then I wanted very badly to find a way out. And it occurred to be than an unprecedentedly strong compression will just not allow much energy to go into radiation. Therefore, something had to be wrong with my argument and then, you know, within minutes, I knew what must be wrong ... [energy] emission occurs when an electron and a nucleus collide. Absorption does not occur when a light quantum and a nucleus ... or ... electron collide; it occurs when a light quantum finds an electron and a nucleus together ... it does not go with the square of the density, it goes with the cube of the density." (This very costly theoretical error, wasting five years 1946-51, could have been resolved by experimental nuclear testing. There is always a risk of this in theoretical physics, which is why experiments are done to check calculations before prizes are handed out. The ban on nuclear testing is a luddite opposition to technological progress in improving deterrence.)
(This 1946-51 theoretical "no-go theorem" anti-compression error of Teller's, which was contrary to the suggestion of compression at the April 1946 superbomb conference as Teller himself refers to on 14 August 1952, and which was corrected only by comparison of the facts about compression validity in pure fission cores in Feb '51 after Ulam's argument that month for fission core compression by lens focussed primary stage shock waves, did not merely lead to Teller's dismissal of vital compression ideas. It also led to his false equations - exaggerating the cooling effect of radiation emission - causing underestimates of fusion efficiency in all theoretical calculations done of fusion until 1951! For this reason, Teller later repudiated the calculations that allegedly showed his Superbomb would fizzle; he argued that if it had been tested in 1946, the detailed data obtained - regardless of whatever happened - would have at least tested the theory which would have led to rapid progress, because the theory was wrong. The entire basis of the cooling of fusion fuel by radiation leaking out was massively exaggerated until Lawrence Livermore weaponeer John Nuckolls showed that there is a very simple solution: use baffle re-radiated, softened x-rays for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel, e.g. very cold 0.3 kev x-rays rather than the usual 1-10 kev cold-warm x-rays emitted directly from the fission primary. Since the radiation losses are proportional to the fourth-power of the x-ray energy or temperature, losses are virtually eliminated, allowing very efficient staging as for Nuckolls' 99.9% 10 Mt clean Ripple II, detonated on 30 October 1962 at Christmas Island. Teller's classical Superbomb was actually analyzed by John C. Solem in a 15 December 1978 report, A modern analysis of Classical Super, LA-07615, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by mainstream historian Alex Wellerstein, FOIA 17-00131-H, 12 June 2017; according to a list of FOIA requests at https://www.governmentattic.org/46docs/NNSAfoiaLogs_2016-2020.pdf. However, a google search for the documents Dr Wellerstein requested shows only a few at the US Gov DOE Opennet OSTI database or otherwise online yet e.g. LA-643 by Teller, On the development of Thermonuclear Bombs dated 16 Feb. 1950. The page linked here stating that report was "never classified" is mistaken! One oddity about Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" is that the even if fusion rates were independent of density, you would still want compression of fissile material in a secondary stage such as a radiation imploded Alarm Clock, because the whole basis of implosion fission bombs is the benefit of compression; another issue is that even if fusion rates are unaffected by density, inward compression would still help to delay the expansion of the fusion system which leads to cooling and quenching of the fusion burn.)
In fact (see Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear warhead designer Nuckolls' explanation in report UCRL-74345): "The rates of burn, energy deposition by charged reaction products, and electron-ion heating are proportional to the density, and the inertial confinement time is proportional to the radius. ... The burn efficiency is proportional to the product of the burn rate and the inertial confinement time ...", i.e. the fusion burn rate is directly proportional to the fuel density, which in turn is of course inversely proportional to the cube of its radius. But the inertial confinement time for fusion to occur is proportional to the radius, so the fusion stage efficiency in a nuclear weapon is the product of the burn rate (i.e., 1/radius^3) and time (i.e., radius), so efficiency ~ radius/(radius^3) ~ 1/radius^2. Therefore, for a given fuel temperature, the total fusion burn, or the efficiency of the fusion stage, is inversely proportional to the square of the compressed radius of the fuel! (Those condemning Teller's theoretical errors or "arrogance" should be aware that he pushed hard all the time for experimental nuclear tests of his ideas, to check if they were correct, exactly the right thing to do scientifically and others who read his papers had the opportunity to point out any theoretical errors, but was rebuffed by those in power, who used a series of contrived arguments to deny progress, based upon what Harry would call "subconscious bias", if not arrogant, damning, overt bigotry against the kind of credible, overwhelming deterrence which had proved lacking a decade earlier, leading to WWII. This callousness towards human suffering in war and under dictatorship existed in some UK physicists too: Joseph Rotblat's hatred of anything to deter Russia be it civil defense or tactical neutron bombs of the West - he had no problem smiling and patting Russia's neutron bomb when visiting their labs during cosy groupthink deluded Pugwash campaigns for Russian-style "peaceful collaboration" - came from deep family communist convictions, since his brother was serving in the Red Army in 1944 when he alleged he heard General Groves declare that the bomb must deter Russia! Rotblat stated he left Los Alamos as a result. The actions of these groups are analogous to the "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" in the 1930s. After Truman ordered a H-bomb, Bradbury at Los Alamos had to start a "Family Committee" because Teller had a whole "family" of H-bomb designs, ranging from the biggest, "Daddy", through various "Alarm Clocks", all the way down to small internally-boosted fission tactical weapons. From Teller's perspective, he wasn't putting all eggs in one basket.)
There is more to Fuchs' influence on the UK H-bomb than I go into that paper; Chapman Pincher alleged that Fuchs was treated with special leniency at his trial and later he was given early release in 1959 because of his contributions and help with the UK H-bomb as author of the key Fuchs-von Neumann x-ray compression mechanism patent. For example, Penney visited Fuchs in June 1952 in Stafford Prison; see pp309-310 of Frank Close's 2019 book "Trinity". Close argues that Fuchs gave Penney a vital tutorial on the H-bomb mechanism during that prison visit. That wasn't the last help, either, since the UK Controller for Atomic Energy Sir Freddie Morgan wrote Penney on 9 February 1953 that Fuchs was continuing to help. Another gem: Close gives, on p396, the story of how the FBI became suspicious of Edward Teller, after finding a man of his name teaching at the NY Communist Workers School in 1941 - the wrong Edward Teller, of course - yet Teller's wife was indeed a member of the Communist-front "League of women shoppers" in Washington, DC.
Chapman Pincher, who attended the Fuchs trial, writes about Fuchs hydrogen bomb lectures to prisoners in chapter 19 of his 2014 autobiography, Dangerous to know (Biteback, London, pp217-8): "... Donald Hume ... in prison had become a close friend of Fuchs ... Hume had repaid Fuchs' friendship by organising the smuggling in of new scientific books ... Hume had a mass of notes ... I secured Fuchs's copious notes for a course of 17 lectures ... including how the H-bomb works, which he had given to his fellow prisoners ... My editor agreed to buy Hume's story so long as we could keep the papers as proof of its authenticity ... Fuchs was soon due for release ..."
Chapman Pincher wrote about this as the front page exclusive of the 11 June 1952 Daily Express, "Fuchs: New Sensation", the very month Penney visited Fuchs in prison to receive his H-bomb tutorial! UK media insisted this was evidence that UK security still wasn't really serious about deterring further nuclear spies, and the revelations finally culminated in the allegations that the MI5 chief 1956-65 Roger Hollis was a Russian fellow-traveller (Hollis was descended from Peter the Great, according to his elder brother Chris Hollis' 1958 book Along the Road to Frome) and GRU agent of influence, codenamed "Elli". Pincher's 2014 book, written aged 100, explains that former MI5 agent Peter Wright suspected Hollis was Elli after evidence collected by MI6 agent Stephen de Mowbray was reported to the Cabinet Secretary. Hollis is alleged to have deliberately fiddled his report of interviewing GRU defector Igor Gouzenko on 21 November 1945 in Canada. Gouzenko had exposed the spy and Groucho Marx lookalike Dr Alan Nunn May (photo below), and also a GRU spy in MI5 codenamed Elli, who used only duboks (dead letter boxes), but Gouzenko told Pincher that when Hollis interviewed him in 1945 he wrote up a lengthy false report claiming to discredit many statements by Gouzenko: "I could not understand how Hollis had written so much when he had asked me so little. The report was full of nonsense and lies. As [MI5 agent Patrick] Stewart read the report to me [during the 1972 investigation of Hollis], it became clear that it had been faked to destroy my credibility so that my information about the spy in MI5 called Elli could be ignored. I suspect that Hollis was Elli." (Source: Pincher, 2014, p320.) Christopher Andrew claimed Hollis couldn't have been GRU spy Elli because KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky suggested it was the KGB spy Leo Long (sub-agent of KGB spy Anthony Blunt). However, Gouzenko was GRU, not KGB like Long and Gordievsky! Gordievsky's claim that "Elli" was on the cover of Long's KGB file was debunked by KGB officer Oleg Tsarev, who found that Long's codename was actually Ralph! Another declassified Russian document, from General V. Merkulov to Stalin dated 24 Nov 1945, confirmed Elli was a GRU agent inside british intelligence, whose existence was betrayed by Gouzenko. In Chapter 30 of Dangerous to Know, Pincher related how he was given a Russian suitcase sized microfilm enlarger by 1959 Hollis spying eyewitness Michael J. Butt, doorman for secret communist meetings in London. According to Butt, Hollis delivered documents to Brigitte Kuczynski, younger sister of Klaus Fuchs' original handler, the notorious Sonia aka Ursula. Hollis allegedly provided Minox films to Brigitte discretely when walking through Hyde Park at 8pm after work. Brigitte gave her Russian made Minox film enlarger to Butt to dispose of, but he kept it in his loft as evidence. (Pincher later donated it to King's College.) Other more circumstantial evidence is that Hollis recruited the spy Philby, Hollis secured spy Blunt immunity from prosecution, Hollis cleared Fuchs in 1943, and MI5 allegedly destroyed Hollis' 1945 interrogation report on Gouzenko, to prevent the airing of the scandal that it was fake after checking it with Gouzenko in 1972.
It should be noted that the very small number of Russian GRU illegal agents in the UK and the very small communist party membership had a relatively large influence on nuclear policy via infiltration of unions which had block votes in the Labour Party, as well the indirect CND and "peace movement" lobbies saturating the popular press with anti-civil defence propaganda to make the nuclear deterrent totally incredible for any provocation short of a direct all-out countervalue attack. Under such pressure, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government abolished the UK Civil Defence Corps, making the UK nuclear deterrent totally incredible against major provocations, in March 1968. While there was some opposition to Wilson, it was focussed on his profligate nationalisation policies which were undermining the economy and thus destabilizing military expenditure for national security. Peter Wright’s 1987 book Spycatcher and various other sources, including Daily Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp's book Walking on Water, documented that on 8 May 1968, the Bank of England's director Cecil King, who was also Chairman of Daily Mirror newspapers, Mirror editor Cudlipp and the UK Ministry of Defence's anti-nuclear Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, met at Lord Mountbatten's house in Kinnerton Street, London, to discuss a coup e'tat to overthrow Wilson and make Mountbatten the UK President, a new position. King's position, according to Cudlipp - quite correctly as revealed by the UK economic crises of the 1970s when the UK was effectively bankrupt - was that Wilson was setting the UK on the road to financial ruin and thus military decay. Zuckerman and Mountbatten refused to take part in a revolution, however Wilson's government was attacked by the Daily Mirror in a front page editorial by Cecil King two days later, on 10 May 1968, headlined "Enough is enough ... Mr Wilson and his Government have lost all credibility, all authority." According to Wilson's secretary Lady Falkender, Wilson was only told of the coup discussions in March 1976.
CND and the UK communist party alternatively tried to claim, in a contradictory way, that they were (a) too small in numbers to have any influence on politics, and (b) they were leading the country towards utopia via unilateral nuclear disarmament saturation propaganda about nuclear weapons annihilation (totally ignoring essential data on different nuclear weapon designs, yields, heights of burst, the "use" of a weapon as a deterrent to PREVENT an invasion of concentrated force, etc.) via the infiltrated BBC and most other media. Critics pointed out that Nazi Party membership in Germany was only 5% when Hitler became dictator in 1933, while in Russia there were only 200,000 Bolsheviks in September 1917, out of 125 million, i.e. 0.16%. Therefore, the whole threat of such dictatorships is a minority seizing power beyond it justifiable numbers, and controlling a majority which has different views. Traditional democracy itself is a dictatorship of the majority (via the ballot box, a popularity contest); minority-dictatorship by contrast is a dictatorship by the fanatically motivated minority by force and fear (coercion) to control the majority. The coercion tactics used by foreign dictators to control the press in free countries are well documented, but never publicised widely. Hitler put pressure on Nazi-critics in the UK "free press" via UK Government appeasers Halifax, Chamberlain and particularly the loathsome UK ambassador to Nazi Germany, Sir Neville Henderson, for example trying to censor or ridicule appeasement critics David Low, to fire Captain W. E. Johns (editor of both Flying and Popular Flying, which had huge circulations and attacked appeasement as a threat to national security in order to reduce rearmament expenditure), and to try to get Winston Churchill deselected. These were all sneaky "back door" pressure-on-publishers tactics, dressed up as efforts to "ease international tensions"! The same occurred during the Cold War, with personal attacks in Scientific American and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and by fellow travellers on Herman Kahn, Eugene Wigner, and others who warned we need civil defence to make a deterrent of large provocations credible in the eyes of an aggressor.
Chapman Pincher summarises the vast hypocritical Russian expenditure on anti-Western propaganda against the neutron bomb in Chapter 15, "The Neutron Bomb Offensive" of his 1985 book The Secret Offensive: "Such a device ... carries three major advantages over Hiroshima-type weapons, particularly for civilians caught up in a battle ... against the massed tanks which the Soviet Union would undoubtedly use ... by exploding these warheads some 100 feet or so above the massed tanks, the blast and fire ... would be greatly reduced ... the neutron weapon produces little radioactive fall-out so the long-term danger to civilians would be very much lower ... the weapon was of no value for attacking cities and the avoidance of damage to property can hardly be rated as of interest only to 'capitalists' ... As so often happens, the constant repetition of the lie had its effects on the gullible ... In August 1977, the [Russian] World Peace Council ... declared an international 'Week of action' against the neutron bomb. ... Under this propaganda Carter delayed his decision, in September ... a Sunday service being attended by Carter and his family on 16 October 1977 was disrupted by American demonstrators shouting slogans against the neutron bomb [see the 17 October 1977 Washington Post] ... Lawrence Eagleburger, when US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, remarked, 'We consider it probably that the Soviet campaign against the 'neutron bomb cost some $100 million'. ... Even the Politburo must have been surprised at the size of what it could regard as a Fifth Column in almost every country." [Unfortunately, Pincher himself had contributed to the anti-nuclear nonsense in his 1965 novel "Not with a bang" in which small amounts of radioactivity from nuclear fallout combine with medicine to exterminate humanity! The allure of anti-nuclear propaganda extends to all who which to sell "doomsday fiction", not just Russian dictators but mainstream media story tellers in the West. By contrast, Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons doesn't even mention the neutron bomb, so there was no scientific and technical effort whatsoever by the West to make it a credible deterrent even in the minds of the public it had to protect from WWIII!]
So why on earth doesn't the West take the cheap efficient option of cutting expensive oralloy and maximising cheap natural (mostly lithium-7) LiD in the secondary? Even Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons on p17 (para 1.55) states that "Weight for weight ... fusion of deuterium nuclei would produce nearly 3 times as much energy as the fission of uranium or plutonium"! The sad answer is "density"! Natural LiD (containing 7.42% Li6 abundance) is a low density white/grey crystalline solid like salt that actually floats on water (lithium deuteroxide would be formed on exposure to water), since its density is just 820 kg/m^3. Since the ratio of mass of Li6D to Li7D is 8/9, it would be expected that the density of highly enriched 95% Li6D is 739 kg/m^3, while for 36% enriched Li6D it is 793 kg/m^3. Uranium metal has a density of 19,000 kg/m^3, i.e. 25.7 times greater than 95% enriched li6D or 24 times greater than 36% enriched Li6D. Compactness, i.e. volume is more important in a Western MIRV warhead than mass/weight! In the West, it's best to have a tiny-volume, very heavy, very expensive warhead. In Russia, cheapness outweights volume considerations. The Russians in some cases simply allowed their more bulky warheads to protrude from the missile bus (see photo below), or compensated for lower yields at the same volume using clean LiD by using the savings in costs to build more warheads. (The West doubles the fission yield/mass ratio of some warheads by using U235/oralloy pushers in place of U238, which suffers from the problem that about half the neutrons it interacts with result in non-fission capture, as explained below. Note that the 720 kiloton UK nuclear test Orange Herald device contained a hollow shell of 117 kg of U235 surrounded by a what Lorna Arnold's book quotes John Corner referring to a "very thin" layer of high explosive, and was compact, unboosted - the boosted failed to work - and gave 6.2 kt/kg of U235, whereas the first version of the 2-stage W47 Polaris warhead contained 60 kg of U235 which produced most of the secondary stage yield of about 400 kt, i.e. 6.7 kt/kg of U235. Little difference - but because perhaps 50% of the total yield of the W47 was fusion, its efficiency of use of U235 must have actually been less than the Orange Herald device, around 3 kt/kg of U235 which indicates design efficiency limits to "hydrogen bombs"! Yet anti-nuclear charlatans claimed that the Orange Herald bomb was a con!)
ABOVE: USA nuclear weapons data declassified by UK Government in 2010 (the information was originally acquired due to the 1958 UK-USA Act for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes, in exchange for UK nuclear weapons data) as published at http://nuclear-weapons.info/images/tna-ab16-4675p63.jpg. This single table summarizes all key tactical and strategic nuclear weapons secret results from 1950s testing! (In order to analyze the warhead pusher thicknesses and very basic schematics from this table it is necessary to supplement it with the 1950s warhead design data declassified in other documents, particularly some of the data from Tom Ramos and Chuck Hansen, as quoted in some detail below.) The data on the mass of special nuclear materials in each of the different weapons argues strongly that the entire load of Pu239 and U235 in the 1.1 megaton B28 was in the primary stage, so that weapon could not have had a fissile spark plug in the centre let alone a fissile ablator (unlike Teller's Sausage design of 1951), and so the B28 it appears had no need whatsoever of a beryllium neutron radiation shield to prevent pre-initiation of the secondary stage prior to its compression (on the contrary, such neutron exposure of the lithium deuteride in the secondary stage would be VITAL to produce some tritium in it prior to compression, to spark fusion when it was compressed). Arnold's book indeed explains that UK AWE physicists found the B28 to be an excellent, highly optimised, cheap design, unlike the later W47 which was extremely costly. The masses of U235 and Li6 in the W47 shows the difficulties of trying to maintain efficiency while scaling down the mass of a two-stage warhead for SLBM delivery: much larger quantities of Li6 and U235 must be used to achieve a LOWER yield! To achieve thermonuclear warheads of low mass at sub-megaton yields, both the outer bomb casing and the pusher around the the fusion fuel must be reduced:
"York ... studied the Los Alamos tests in Castle and noted most of the weight in thermonuclear devices was in their massive cases. Get rid of the case .... On June 12, 1953, York had presented a novel concept ... It radically altered the way radiative transport was used to ignite a secondary - and his concept did not require a weighty case ... they had taken the Teller-Ulam concept and turned it on its head ... the collapse time for the new device - that is, the amount of time it took for an atomic blast to compress the secondary - was favorable compared to older ones tested in Castle. Brown ... gave a female name to the new device, calling it the Linda." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp137-8. (So if you reduce the outer casing thickness to reduce warhead weight, you must complete the pusher ablation/compression faster, before the thinner outer casing is blown off, and stops reflecting/channelling x-rays on the secondary stage. Making the radiation channel smaller and ablative pusher thinner helps to speed up the process. Because the ablative pusher is thinner, there is relatively less blown-off debris to block the narrower radiation channel before the burn ends.)
"Brown's third warhead, the Flute, brought the Linda concept down to a smaller size. The Linda had done away with a lot of material in a standard thermonuclear warhead. Now the Flute tested how well designers could take the Linda's conceptual design to substantially reduce not only the weight but also the size of a thermonuclear warhead. ... The Flute's small size - it was the smallest thermonuclear device yet tested - became an incentive to improve codes. Characteristics marginally important in a larger device were now crucially important. For instance, the reduced size of the Flute's radiation channel could cause it to close early [with ablation blow-off debris], which would prematurely shut off the radiation flow. The code had to accurately predict if such a disaster would occur before the device was even tested ... the calculations showed changes had to be made from the Linda's design for the Flute to perform correctly." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp153-4. Note that the piccolo (the W47 secondary) is a half-sized flute, so it appears that the W47's secondary stage design miniaturization history was: Linda -> Flute -> Piccolo:
"A Division's third challenge was a small thermonuclear warhead for Polaris [the nuclear SLBM submarine that preceeded today's Trident system]. The starting point was the Flute, that revolutionary secondary that had performed so well the previous year. Its successor was called the Piccolo. For Plumbbob [Nevada, 1957], the design team tested three variations of the Piccolo as a parameter test. One of the variants outperformed the others ... which set the stage for the Hardtack [Nevada and Pacific, 1958] tests. Three additional variations for the Piccolo ... were tested then, and again an optimum candidate was selected. ... Human intuition as well as computer calculations played crucial roles ... Finally, a revolutionary device was completed and tested ... the Navy now had a viable warhead for its Polaris missile. From the time Brown gave Haussmann the assignment to develop this secondary until the time they tested the device in the Pacific, only 90 days had passed. As a parallel to the Robin atomic device, this secondary for Polaris laid the foundation for modern thermonuclear weapons in the United States." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp177-8. (Ramos is very useful in explaining that many of the 1950s weapons with complex non-spherical, non-cylindrical shaped primaries and secondaries were simply far too complex to fully simulate on the really pathetic computers they had - Livermore got a 4,000 vacuum tubes-based IBM 701 with 2 kB memory in 1956, AWRE Aldermaston in the Uk had to wait another year for theirs - so they instead did huge numbers of experimental explosive tests. For instance, on p173, Ramos discloses that the Swan primary which developed into the 155mm tactical shell, "went through over 100 hydrotests", non-nuclear tests in which fissile material is replaced with U238 or other substitutes, and the implosion is filmed with flash x-ray camera systems.)
"An integral feature of the W47, from the very start of the program, was the use of an enriched uranium-235 pusher around the cylindrical secondary." - Chuck Hansen, Swords 2.0, p. VI-375 (Hansen's source is his own notes taken during a 19-21 February 1992 nuclear weapons history conference he attended; if you remember the context, "Nuclear Glasnost" became fashionable after the Cold War ended, enabling Hansen to acquire almost unredacted historical materials for a few years until nuclear proliferation became a concern in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea). The key test of the original (Robin primary and Piccolo secondary) Livermore W47 was 412 kt Hardtack-Redwood on 28 June 1958. Since Li6D utilized at 100% efficiency would yield 66 kt/kg, the W47 fusion efficiency was only about 6%; since 100% fission of u235 yields 17 kt/kg, the W47's Piccolo fission (the u235 pusher) efficiency was about 20%; the comparable figures for secondary stage fission and fusion fuel burn efficiencies in the heavy B28 are about 7% and 15%, respectively:
ABOVE: the heavy B28 gave a very "big bang for the buck": it was cheap in terms of expensive Pu, U235 and Li6, and this was the sort of deterrent which was wanted by General LeMay for the USAF, which wanted as many weapons as possible, within the context of Eisenhower's budgetary concerns. But its weight (not its physical size) made it unsuitable for SLBM Polaris warheads. The first SLBM warhead, the W47, was almost the same size as the B28 weapon package, but much lighter due to having a much thinner "pusher" on the secondary, and casing. But this came at a large financial cost in terms of the quantities of special nuclear materials required to get such a lightweight design to work, and also a large loss of total yield. The fusion fuel burn efficiency ranges from 6% for the 400 kt W47 to 15% for the 1.1 megaton B28 (note that for very heavy cased 11-15 megaton yield tests at Castle, up to 40% fusion fuel burn efficiency was achieved), whereas the secondary stage ablative pusher fission efficiency ranged from 7% for a 1.1 inch thick natural uranium (99.3% U238) ablator to 20% for a 0.15 inch thick highly enriched oralloy (U235) ablator. From the brief description of the design evolution given by Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), it appears that when the x-ray channelling outer case thickness of the weapon is reduced to save weight, the duration of the x-ray coupling is reduced, so the dense metal pusher thickness must be reduced if the same compression factor (approximately 20) for the secondary stage is to be accomplished (lithium deuteride, being of low density, is far more compressable by a given pressure, than dense metal). In both examples, the secondary stage is physically a boosted fission stage. (If you are wondering why the hell the designers don't simply use a hollow core U235 bomb like Orange Herald instead of bothering with such inefficient x-ray coupled two-stage designs as these, the answer is straightforward: the risk of large fissile core meltdown by neutrons Moscow ABM defensive nuclear warheads, neutron bombs.)
The overall weight of the W47 was minimized by replacing the usual thick layer of U238 pusher with a very thin layer of fissile U235 (supposedly Teller's suggestion), which is more efficient for fission, but is limited by critical mass issues. The W47 used a 95% enriched Li6D cylinder with a 3.8mm thick U235 pusher; the B28 secondary was 36% enriched Li6D, with a very heavy 3cm thick U238 pusher. As shown below, it appears the B28 was related to the Los Alamos clean design of the TX21C tested as 95% clean 4.5 megatons Redwing-Navajo in 1956 and did not have a central fissile spark plug. From the declassified fallout composition, it is known the Los Alamos designers replaced the outer U238 pusher of Castle secondaries with lead in Navajo. Livermore did the same for their 85% clean 3.53 megatons Redwing-Zuni test, but Livermore left the central fission spark plug, which contributed 10% of its 15% fission yield, instead of removing the neutron shield, using foam channel filler for slowing down the x-ray compression, and thereby using primary stage neutrons to split lithium-6 giving tritium prior to compression. Our point is that Los Alamos got it wrong in sticking too conservatively to ideology: for clean weapons they should have got rid of the dense lead pusher and gone for John H. Nuckolls idea (also used by Fuchs in 1946 and the Russians in 1955 and 1958) of a low-density pusher for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel. This error is the reason why those early cleaner weapons were extremely heavy due to unnecessary 2" thick lead or tungsten pushers around the fusion fuel, which massively reduced their yield-to-weight ratios, so that LeMay rejected them!
This is justified by the data given for a total U238 capture-to-fission ratio of 1 in the 11 megaton Romeo test and also the cross-sections for U235 capture and fission on the AWE graph for relevant neutron energy range of about 1-14 Mev. If half the neutrons are captured in U238 without fission, then the maximum fission yield you can possibly get from "x" kg of U238 pusher is HALF the energy obtained from 100% fission of "x" kg of U238. Since with U238 only about half the atoms can undergo fission by thermonuclear neutrons (because the other half undergo non-fission capture), the energy density (i.e., the Joules/kg produced by the fission explosion of the pusher) reached by an exploding U238 pusher is only half that reached by U235 (in which there is less non-fission capture of neutrons, which doubles the pusher mass without doubling the fission energy release). So a U235 pusher will reach twice the temperature of a U238 pusher, doubling its material heating of fusion fuel within, prolonging the fusion burn and thus increasing fusion burn efficiency. 10 MeV neutron energy is important since it allows for likely average scattering of 14.1 MeV D+T fusion neutrons and it is also the energy at which the most important capture reaction, the (n,2n) cross-section peaks for both U235 (peak of 0.88 barn at 10 Mev) and U238 (peak of 1.4 barns at 10 Mev). For 10 Mev neutrons, U235 and U238 have fission cross-sections of 1.8 and 1 barn, respectively. For 14 Mev neutrons, U238 has a (n,2n) cross section of 0.97 barn for U237 production. So ignoring non-fission captures, you need 1.8/1 = 1.8 times greater thickness of pusher for U238 than for U235, to achieve the same amount of fission. But this simple consideration ignores the x-ray ablation requirement of the explosing pusher, so there are several factors requiring detailed computer calculations, and/or nuclear testing.
Note: there is an extensive collection of declassified documents released after Chuck Hansen's final edition, Swords 2.0, which are now available at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/*, being an internet-archive back-up of a now-removed US Government Freedom of Information Act Reading Room. Unfortunately they were only identified by number sequence, not by report title or content, in that reeding room, and so failed to achieve wide attention when originally released! (This includes extensive "Family Committee" H-bomb documentation and many long-delayed FOIA requests submitted originally by Hansen, but not released in time for inclusion in Swords 2.0.) As the extract below - from declassified document RR00132 - shows, some declassified documents contained very detailed information or typewriter spaces that could only be filled by a single specific secret word (in this example, details of the W48 linear implosion tactical nuclear warhead, including the fact that it used PBX9404 plastic bonded explosive glued to the brittle beryllium neutron reflector around the plutonium core using Adiprene L100 adhesive!).
ABOVE: Declassified data on the radiation flow analysis for the 10 megaton Mike sausage: http://nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/RR00198.pdf
Note that the simplistic "no-go theorem" given in this extract, against any effect from varying the temperature to help the radiation channelling, was later proved false by John H. Nuckolls (like Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" was later proved false), since lowered temperature delivers energy where it is needed while massively reducing radiation losses (which go as the fourth power of temperature/x-ray energy in kev).
Russian propagandists are discussing the best way to scare the West - testing a nuclear Tsar Bomb or checking bomb shelters.
pic.twitter.com/qWCaxjvfM8
ABOVE secret reports on Australian-British nuclear test operations at Maralinga in 1956 and 1957, Buffalo and Antler, proved that even at 10 psi peak overpressure for the 15 kt Buffalo-1 shot, the dummy lying prone facing the blast was hardly moved due to the low cross-sectional area exposed to the blast winds, relative to standing dummies which were severely displaced and damaged. The value of trenches in protecting personnel against blast winds and radiation was also proved in tests (gamma radiation shielding of trenches had been proved at an earlier nuclear test in Australia, Operation Hurricane in 1952). (Antler report linked here; Buffalo report linked here.) This debunks the US Department of Defense models claiming that people will automatically be blown out of the upper floors of modern city buildings at very low pressures, and killed by the gravitational impact with the pavement below! In reality, tall buildings mutually shield one another from the blast winds, not to mention the radiation (proven in the latest post on this blog), and on seeing the flash most people will have time to lie down on typical surfaces like carpet which give a frictional resistance to displacement, ignored in fiddled models which assume surfaces have less friction than a skating rink; all of this was omitted from the American 1977 Glasstone and Dolan book "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons". As Tuck's paper below on the gamma radiation dose rate measurements on ships at Operation Crossroads, July 1946 nuclear tests proved, contrary to Glasstone and Dolan, scattered radiation contributions are small, so buildings or ships gun turrets provided excellent radiation "shadows" to protect personnel. This effect was then calculated by UK civil defence weapons effects expert Edward Leader-Williams in his paper presented at the UK's secret London Royal Society Symposium on the Physical Effects of Atomic Weapons, but the nuclear test data as always was excluded from the American Glasstone book published the next year, The Effects of Atomic Weapons in deference to lies about the effects in Hiroshima, including an "average" casualty curve which deliberately obfuscated huge differences in survival rates in different types of buildings and shelters, or simply in shadows!
Note: the DELFIC, SIMFIC and other computer predicted fallout area comparisons for the 110 kt Bikini Atoll Castle-Koon land surface burst nuclear test are false since the distance scale of Bikini Atoll is massively exaggerated on many maps, e.g. in the Secret January 1955 AFSWP "Fall-out Symposium", the Castle fallout report WT-915, and the fallout patterns compendium DASA-1251! The Western side of the Bikini Atoll reef is at 165.2 degrees East, while the most eastern island in the Bikini Atoll, Enyu, is at 165.567 degrees East: since there are 60 nautical miles per degree by definition, the width of Bikini Atoll is therefore (165.567-165.2)(60) = 22 nautical miles, approximately half the distance shown in the Castle-Koon fallout patterns. Since area is proportional to the square of the distance scale, this constitutes a serious exaggeration in fallout casualty calculations, before you get into the issue of the low energy (0.1-0.2 MeV) gamma rays from neutron induced Np239 and U237 in the fallout enhancing the protection factor of shelters (usually calculated assuming hard 1.17 and 1.33 MeV gamma rads from Co60), during the sheltering period of approximately 1-14 days after detonation.
"Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr Dulles calls 'brinkmanship'. This is a policy adopted from a sport ... called 'Chicken!' ... If one side is unwilling to risk global war, while the other side is willing to risk it, the side which is willing to run the risk will be victorious in all negotiations and will ultimately reduce the other side to complete impotence. 'Perhaps' - so the practical politician will argue - 'it might be ideally wise for the sane party to yield to the insane party in view of the dreadful nature of the alternative, but, whether wise or not, no proud nation will long acquiesce in such an ignominious role. We are, therefore, faced, quite inevitably, with the choice between brinkmanship and surrender." - Bertrand Russell, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1959, pp30-31.
Emphasis added. Note that Russell accepts lying about nuclear weapons just as gas weapons had been lied about in the 1920s-30s by "arms controllers" to start WWII, then he simply falls into the 1930s Cambridge Scientists Antiwar Group delusional propaganda fraud of assuming that any attempt to credibly deter fascism is immoral because it will automatically result in escalatory retaliation with Herman Goering's Luftwaffe drenching London with "overkill" by poison gas WMDs etc. In particular, he forgets that general disarmament pursued in the West until 1935 - when Baldwin suddenly announced that the Nazis had secretly produced a massive, unstoppable warmachine in two years - encouraged aggressors to first secretly rearm, then coerce and invade their neighbours while signing peace promises purely to buy more time for rearmament, until a world war resulted. Not exactly a great result for disarmament propaganda. So after obliterating what Reagan used to call (to the horror of commie "historians") the "true facts of history" from his mind, he advocates some compromise with the aggressors of the 30 September 1938 Munich Agreement peace-in-our-time sort, the historically proved sure fire way to really escalate a crisis into a major war by showing the green lamp to a loon to popular media acclaim and applause for a fairy tale utopian fantasy; just as the "principled" weak, rushed, imbecile withdrawl from Afghanistan in 2021 encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022, and also the green lamp for Hamas to invade Israel in 2023.
"... deterrence ... consists of threatening the enemy with thermonuclear retaliation should he act provocatively. ... If war is 'impossible', how can one threaten a possible aggressor with war? ... The danger, evoked by numerous critics, that such research will result in a sort of resigned expectation of the holocaust, seems a weak argument ... The classic theory of Clausewitz defines absolute victory in terms of disarmament of the enemy ... Today ... it will suffice to take away his means of retaliation to hold him at your mercy." - Raymond Aron, Introduction to Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 9-12. (This is the commie support for arms control and disarmament has achieved, precisely the weakening of the West to take away credible deterrence.)
"75 years ago, white slavery was rampant in England. ... it could not be talked about openly in Victorian England, moral standards as to the subjects of discussion made it difficult to arouse the community to necessary action. ... Victorian standards, besides perpetuating the white slave trade, intensified the damage ... Social inhibitions which reinforce natural tendencies to avoid thinking about unpleasant subjects are hardly uncommon. ... But when our reluctance to consider danger brings danger nearer, repression has gone too far. In 1960, I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war ... people are willing to argue that it is immoral to think and even more immoral to write in detail about having to fight ... like those ancient kings who punished messengers who brought them bad news. That did not change the news; it simply slowed up its delivery. On occasion it meant that the kings were ill informed and, lacking truth, made serious errors in judgement and strategy. ... We cannot wish them away. Nor should we overestimate and assume the worst is inevitable. This leads only to defeatism, inadequate preparations (because they seem useless), and pressures toward either preventative war or undue accommodation." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 17-19. (In the footnote on page 35, Kahn notes that original nuclear bullshitter, the 1950 creator of fake cobalt-60 doomsday bomb propaganda, Leo Szilard, was in the usual physics groupthink nutters club: "Szilard is probably being too respectful of his scientific colleagues who also seem to indulge in ad hominem arguments - especially when they are out of their technical specialty.")
"Ever since the catastropic and disillusioning experience of 1914-18, war has been unthinkable to most people in the West ... In December 1938, only 3 months after Munich, Lloyd's of London gave odds of 32 to 1 that there would be no war in 1939. On August 7, 1939, the London Daily Express reported the result of a poll of its European reporters. 10 out of 12 said, 'No war this year'. Hitler invaded Poland 3 weeks later." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 39. (But as the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 proved, even the label "war" is now "controversial": the aggressor now simply declares they are on a special operation of unifying people under one flag to ensure peace! So the reason why there is war in Ukraine is that Ukraine is resisting. If it waved a white flag, as the entire arms control and disarmament lobby insists is the only sane response to a nuclear-armed aggressor, there would be "peace," albeit on Russia's terms: that's why they disarmed Ukraine in 1994. "Peace propaganda" of "disarmers"! Free decent people prefer to fight tyranny. But as Kahn states on pp. 7-9:
"Some, most notably [CND's pseudo-historian of arms race lying] A. J. P. Taylor, have even said that Hitler was not like Hitler, that further appeasement [not an all-out arms race as was needed but repeatedly rejected by Baldwin and Chamberlain until far too late; see discussion of this fact which is still deliberately ignored or onfuscated by "historians" of the A. J. P. Taylor biased anti-deterrence left wing type, in Slessor's The Central Blue, quoted on this blog] would have prevented World War II ... If someone says to you, 'One of us has to be reasonable and it is not going to be me, so it has to be you', he has a very effective bargaining advantage, particularly if he is armed with thermonuclear bombs [and you have damn all civil defense, ABM, or credible tactical deterrent]. If he can convince you he is stark, staring mad and if he has enough destructive power ... deterrence alone will not work. You must then give in or accept the possibility of being annihilated ... in the first instance if we fight and lose; in the second if we capitulate without fighting. ... We could still resist by other means ranging from passive resistance of the Gandhi type to the use of underground fighting and sabotage. All of these alternatives might be of doubtful effectiveness against [the Gulag system, KGB/FSB torture camps or Siberian salt mines of] a ruthless dictatorship."
Sometimes people complain that Hitler and the most destructive and costly war and only nuclear war of history, WWII, is given undue attention. But WWII is a good analogy to the danger precisely because of the lying WMD gas war propaganda-based disarmament of the West which allowed the war, because of the attacks by Hitler's fans on civil defense in the West to make even the token rearmament after 1935 ineffective as a credible deterrent, and because Hitler has mirrors in Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon and Stalin. Kahn explains on p. 173: "Because history has a way of being more imaginative and complex than even the most imaginative and intelligent analysts, historical examples often provide better scenarios than artificial ones, even though they may be no more directly applicable to current equipment, postures, and political situations than the fictional plot of the scenario. Recent history can be especially useful.")
"One type of war resulting at least partly from deliberate calculation could occur in the process of escalation. For example, suppose the Soviets attacked Europe, relying upon our fear of their reprisal to deter a strategic attack by us; we might be deterred enough to pause, but we might evacuate our cities during this pause in the hope we could thereby convince the Soviets we meant business. If the Soviets did not back down, but continued their attack upon Europe, we might decide that we would be less badly off if we proceeded ... The damage we would receive in return would then be considerably reduced, compared with what we would have suffered had we not evacuated. We might well decide at such a time that we would be better off to attack the Soviets and accept a retalitory blow at our dispersed population, rather than let Europe be occupied, and so be forced to accept the penalty of living in the hostile and dangerous world that would follow." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 51-2.
"We must recognise that the stability we want in a system is more than just stability against accidental war or even against an attack by the enemy. We also want stability against extreme provocation [e.g. invasion of allies, which then escalates as per invasion of Belgium 1914, or Poland 1939]." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 53(footnote).
Note: this 1962 book should not be confused with Kahn's 1984 "updated" Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, which omits the best material in the 1962 edition (in the same way that the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons omits the entire civil defense chapter which was the one decent thing in the 1957 and 1962/4 editions!) and thus shows a reversion to the less readable and less helpful style of his 1960 On Thermonuclear War, which severely fragmented and jumbled up all the key arguments making it easy for critics to misquote or quote out of context. For example, Kahn's 1984 "updated" book starts on the first page of the first chapter with the correct assertion that Johnathan Schell's Fate of the Earth is nonsense, but doesn't say why it's nonsense, and you have to read through to the final chapter - pages 207-8 of chapter 10 - to find Kahn writing in the most vague way possible, without a single specific example, that Schell is wrong because of "substantive inadequacies and inaccuracies", without listing a single example such as Schell's lying that the 1954 Bravo nuclear test blinded everyone well beyond the range of Rongelap, and that it was impossible to easily shield the radiation from the fallout or evacuate the area until it decays, which Schell falsely attributed to Glasstone and Dolan's nonsense in the 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons! Kahn eventually in the footnote on page 208 refers readers to an out-of-print article for facts: "These criticisms are elaborated in my review of The Fate of the Earth, see 'Refusing to Think About the Unthinkable', Fortune, June 28, 1982, pp. 113-6. Kahn does the same for civil defense in the 1984 book, referring in such general, imprecise and vague terms to Russian civil defence, with no specific data, that it is a waste of time, apart possibly one half-baked sentence on page 177: "Variations in the total megatonnage, somewhat surprisingly, do not seem to affect the toll nearly as much as variations in the targetting or the type of weapon bursts." Kahn on page 71 quotes an exchange between himself and Senator Proxmire during the US Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production, Civil preparedness and limited nuclear war where on page 55 of the hearings, Senator Proxmire alleges America would escalate a limited conflict to an all-out war because: "The strategic value and military value of destroying cities in the Soviet Union would be very great." Kahn responded: "No American President is likely to do that, no matter what the provocation." Nuclear war will be limited, according to Herman Kahn's analysis, despite the bullshit fron nutters to the contrary.
Kahn on page 101 of Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s correctly and accurately condemns President Carter's 1979 State of the Union Address, which claimed falsely that just a single American nuclear submarine is required by America and has an "overwhelming" deterrent against "every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union". Carter ignored Russian retaliation on cities if you bomb theirs: America has avoided the intense Russian protection efforts that make the Russian nuclear threat credible, namely civil defense shelters and evacuation plans, and also the realpolitik of deterrence of world wars, which so far have only been triggered due to invasions of third parties (Belgium '14, Poland '39). Did America strategically nuke every city in Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022? No, debunking Proxmire and the entire Western pro-Russian "automatic escalation" propaganda lobby, and it didn't even have tactical neutron bombs to help deter the Russians like Reagan in the 1980s, because in the 1990s America had ignored Kahn's argument, and went in for MINIMAL deterrence of the least credible sort (abolishing the invasion-deterring dedicated neutron tactical nuclear stockpile entirely; the following quotation is from p101 of Kahn's Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s):
"Minimum deterrence, or any predicated on an escessive emphasis on the inevitably of mutual homocide, is both misleading and dangerous. ... MAD principles can promote provocation - e.g. Munich-type blackmail on an ally. Hitler, for example, did not threaten to attack France or England - only Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It was the French and the British who finally had to threaten all-out war [they could only do this after rearmament and building shelters and gas masks to reduce the risk of reprisals in city bombing, which gave more time for Germany to prepare since it was rearming faster than France and Britain which still desperately counted on appeasement and peace treaties and feared provoking a war by an arms-race due to endless lying propaganda from Lord Grey that his failure to deter war in 1914 had been due to an arms-race rather than the incompetence of the procrastination of his anti-war Liberal Party colleagues in the Cabinet] - a move they would not and could not have made if the notion of a balance of terror between themselves and Germany had been completely accepted. As it was, the British and French were most reluctant to go to war; from 1933 to 1939 Hitler exploited that reluctance. Both nations [France and Britain] were terrified by the so-called 'knockout blow', a German maneuver that would blanket their capitals with poison gas ... The paralyzing effect of this fear prevented them from going to war ... and gave the Germans the freedom to march into the Ruhr, to form the Anschluss with Austria, to force the humiliating Munich appeasement (with the justification of 'peace in our time'), and to take other aggressive actions [e.g. against the Jews in the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, etc.] ... If the USSR were sufficiently prepared in the event a war did occur, only the capitalists would be destroyed. The Soviets would survive ... that would more than justify whatever sacrifice and destruction had taken place.
"This view seems to prevail in the Soviet military and the Politburo even to the present day. It is almost certain, despite several public denials, that Soviet military preparations are based on war-fighting, rather than on deterrence-only concepts and doctrines..." - Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, 1984, pages 101-102.
Kahn adds, in his footnote on p111, that "Richard Betts has documented numerous historical cases in which attackers weakened their opponents defenses through the employment of unanticipated tactics. These include: rapid changes in tactics per se, false alarms and fluctuating preparations for war ... doctrinal innovations to gain surprise. ... This is exactly the kind of thing which is likely to surprise those who subscribe to MAD theories. Those who see a need for war-fighting capabilities expect the other side to try to be creative and use tactical innovations such as coercion and blackmail, technological surprises, or clever tactics on 'leverage' targets, such as command and control installations. If he is to adhere to a total reliance on MAD, the MADvocate has to ignore these possibilities." See Richard Betts, "Surprise Despite Warning: Why Sudden Attacks Succeed", Political Science Quarterly, Winter 1980-81, pp. 551-572.)
Compare two situations: (1) Putin explodes a 50 megaton nuclear "test" of the warhead for his new nuclear reactor powered torpedo, Poseidon, a revamped 1961 Tsar Bomba, or detonates a high-altitude nuclear EMP "test" over neutral waters but within the thousands of miles range of USA or UK territory; (2) Putin invades Poland using purely conventional weapons. Our point here is that both nuclear AND conventional weapons trigger nuclear threats and the risk of nuclear escalation, as indeed they have done (for Putin's nuclear threats scroll down to videos with translations below). So the fashionable CND style concept that only nuclear weapons can trigger nuclear escalation is bullshit, and is designed to help Russia start and win WWIII to produce a world government, by getting us to undertake further unilateral (not multilateral) disarmament, just as evolved in the 1930s, setting the scene for WWII. Japan for example did not have nuclear weapons in August 1945, yet triggered not just tactical nuclear war (both cities had some military bases and munitions factories, as well as enormous numbers of civilians), and the decision to attack cities rather than just "test" weapons obove Tokyo bay as Teller demanded but Oppenheimer rejected (for maximum impact with a very small supply of nuclear weapons) showed some strategic nuclear war thinking. Truman was escalating to try to shock Japan into rapid surrender emotionally (many cities in Japan had already been burned out in conventional incendiary air raids, and the two nuclear attacks while horrible for civilians in those cities contributed only a fraction of the millions killed in WWII, despite anti-nuclear propaganda lies to the contrary). Truman's approach escalating to win is the opposite of the "Minimax game theory" (von Neumann's maths and Thomas Schelling's propaganda) gradual escalation approach that's currently the basis of nuclear deterrence planning despite its failure wherever it has been tried (Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc). Gradual escalation is supposed to minimise the maximum possible risk (hence "minimax" name), but it guarantees failure in the real world (unlike rule abided games) by maximising the build up of resentment. E.g. Schelling/Minimax say that if you gradually napalm civilians day after day (because they are the unprotected human shields used by terrorists/insurgents; the Vietcong are hiding in underground tunnels, exactly like Hamas today, and the Putin regime's metro 2 shelter tunnels under Russia) you somehow "punish the enemy" (although they don't give a toss about the lives of kids which is why you're fighting them!) and force them to negotiate for peace in good faith, then you can pose for photos with them sharing a glass of champagne and there is "world peace". That's a popular fairy tale, like Marxist mythology.
Once you grasp this fact, that nuclear weapons have been and will again be "used" explosively without automatic escalation, for example provocative testing as per the 1961 Russian 50 megaton bomb test, or the 1962 high altitude EMP bursts, you should be able to grasp the fact that the "escalation" deception used to dismiss civil defense and tactical nuclear deterrence against limited nuclear war, is fake news from Russian fellow-travellers like Corbyn. Once you assign a non-unity probability to "escalation", you're into conventional war territory: if you fight a conventional war, it can "escalate" to nuclear war as on 6 August 1945. Japan did not avoid nuclear attack by not having nuclear weapons on 6 August 1945. If it had nuclear weapons ready to be delivered, a very persuasive argument could be made that unless Truman wanted to invite retaliation, World War II would have remained strategically non-nuclear: no net strategic advantage would have been achieved by nuclear city bombing so only war-ending tactical nuclear threats could have prevailed in practice. But try explaining this to the groupthink pseudosocialist bigoted mass murderers who permeate fake physics with crap; it's no easier to explain to them the origins of particle masses or even dark energy/gravitation; in both cases groupthink lying hogwash persists because statements of proved facts are hated and rejected if them debunk religious style fairy tales the mass media loves. There were plenty of people warning that mass media gas war fear mongering was disguised Nazi supporting propaganda in the 1930s, but the public listened to that crap then just as it accepted the "eugenics" (anti-diversity evolution crap of Sir Galton, cousin of Darwin) basis for Hitler's Mein Kampf without question, just as they accepted the lying propaganda from the UK "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" which like CND and all other arms control and disarmament lobbies supporting terrorist states today, did more than even Hitler to deliberately lay the foundations for the Holocaust and World War II, while never being criticised in the UK media! Thus, it's surely time for people to oppose evil lying on civil defence to save lives in all disasters from storms to conventional war, to collateral damage risks in nuclear terrorism by mad enemies. At some point, the majority has to decide to either defend itself honestly and decently against barbarism, or be consumed by it as a price for believing bullshit. It's time for decent people to oppose lying evil regarding the necessity to have credible tactical (not incredible strategic) nuclear weapons, as Oppenheimer called for in his 1951 speech, to deter invasions.
Democracy can't function when secrecy is used to deliberately cover-up vital data from viewing by Joe Public. Secrecy doesn't protect you from enemies who independently develop weapons in secret, or who spy from inside your laboratories:
"The United States and Great Britain resumed testing in 1962, and we spared no effort trying to find out what they were up to. I attended several meetings on that subject. An episode related to those meetings comes to mind ... Once we were shown photographs of some documents ... the photographer had been rushed. Mixed in with the photocopies was a single, terribly crumpled original. I innocently asked why, and was told that it had been concealed in panties. Another time ... questions were asked along the following lines: What data about American weapons would be most useful for your work and for planning military technology in general?"
- Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, Hutchinson, London, 1990, pp225-6.
Nuclear saber-rattling from Russian propagandists. They think tactical nuclear weapons aren't enough, and strategic ones should be used.
Review of Peter Kuran's excellent "Neutron Bomb Movie".
Below is a brief clip for review purposes from a longer newsreel of President Eisenhower, enthusiastically promoting the 96% clean fusion Poplar nuclear test (detonated 12 July 1958). On 30 October 1962, Kennedy tested… pic.twitter.com/y4QpR5eCum
More news of Russian TV population preparation for nuclear escalations, which the Western media and politicians continue to ignore as propaganda, just as Novichok and the Ukraine invasion prep was ignored as propaganda bluff, until it took us by "surprise". We need to prepare now https://t.co/tiFmJw0Htq
ABOVE: The British government has now declassified detailed summary reports giving secret original nuclear test data on the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) damage due to numerous nuclear weapons, data which is still being kept under wraps in America since it hasn't been superseded because Western atmospheric nuclear tests were stopped late in 1962 and never resumed - even though the Russians have even more extensive data - completely debunking Glasstone and Dolan's disarmament propaganda nonsense in the 1962, 1964 and 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons which ignores EMP piped far away from low altitude nuclear tests by power and communications cables and falsely claims instead that such detonations don't produce EMP damage outside the 2psi blast radius! For a discussion of the new data and also a link to the full 200+ pages version (in addition to useful data, inevitably like all official reports it also contains a lot of "fluff" padding), please see the other (physics) site: https://nige.wordpress.com/2023/09/12/secret-emp-effects-of-american-nuclear-tests-finally-declassified-by-the-uk-and-at-uk-national-archives/ (by contrast, this "blogspot" uses old non-smartphone proof coding, no longer properly indexed any long longer by "google's smartphone bot"). As long ago as 1984, Herman Kahn argued on page 112 of his book Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s: "The effects of an EMP attack are simply not well understood [in the West, where long powerlines were never exposed on high altitude nuclear tests, unlike the Russian's 1962 Operation K, so MHD-EMP or E3 damage wasn't even mentioned in the 1977 Glasstone and Dolan Effects of Nuclear Weapons], but the Soviets seem to know - or think they know - more than we do."
ABOVE: Moscow Metro and Metro-2 (secret nuclear subway) horizonially swinging blast doors take only 70 seconds to shut, whereas their vertically rising blast doors take 160 seconds to shut; both times are however far shorter than the arrival time of Western ICBMs or even SLBMs which take 15-30 minutes by which time the Russian shelters are sealed from blast and radiation! In times of nuclear crisis, Russia planned to evacuate from cities those who could not be sheltered, and for the remainder to be based in shelters (similarly to the WWII British situation, when people slept in shelters of one kind or another when there was a large risk of being bombed without notice, particularly in supersonic V2 missile attacks where little warning time was available).
NUKEGATE - Western tactical neutron bombs were disarmed after Russian propaganda lie. Russia now has over 2000... "Disarmament and arms control" charlatans, quacks, cranks, liars, mass murdering Russian affiliates, and evil genocidal Marxist media exposed for what it is, what it was in the 1930s when it enabled Hitler to murder tens of millions in war. Glasstone's and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons deceptions totally disproved. Professor Brian Martin, TRUTH TACTICS, 2021 (pp45-50): "In trying to learn from scientific publications, trust remains crucial. The role of trust is epitomised by Glasstone’s book The Effects of Atomic Weapons. Glasstone was not the author; he was the editor. The book is a compilation of information based on the work of numerous contributors. For me, the question was, should I trust this information? Was there some reason why the editors or authors would present fraudulent information, be subject to conflicts of interest or otherwise be biased? ... if anything, the authors would presumably want to overestimate rather than underestimate the dangers ... Of special interest would be anyone who disagreed with the data, calculations or findings in Glasstone. But I couldn’t find any criticisms. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was treated as the definitive source, and other treatments were compatible with it. ... One potent influence is called confirmation bias, which is the tendency to look for information that supports current beliefs and dismiss or counter contrary information. The implication is that changing one’s views can be difficult due to mental commitments. To this can be added various forms of bias, interpersonal influences such as wanting to maintain relationships, overconfidence in one’s knowledge, desires to appear smart, not wanting to admit being mistaken, and career impacts of having particular beliefs. It is difficult to assess the role of these influences on yourself. "
Radiation Effects Research Foundation covers up the very low cancer rates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear survivors using cynical obfuscation tactic
In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. (Data: Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pages 1-27.) Over 40 years, in 36,500 survivors monitored, there were 176 leukemia deaths which is 89 more than the control (unexposed) group got naturally. There were 4,687 other cancer deaths, but that was merely 339 above the number in the control (unexposed) group, so this is statistically a much smaller rise than the leukemia result. Natural leukemia rates, which are very low in any case, were increased by 51% in the irradiated survivors, but other cancers were merely increased by just 7%. Adding all the cancers together, the total was 4,863 cancers (virtually all natural cancer, nothing whatsoever to do with radiation), which is just 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, the total increase over the natural cancer rate due to bomb exposure was only 9%, spread over a period of 40 years. There was no increase whatsoever in genetic malformations.
'This continues the series of general reports on mortality in the cohort of atomic bomb survivors followed up by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. This cohort includes 86,572 people with individual dose estimates ... There have been 9,335 deaths from solid cancer and 31,881 deaths from noncancer diseases during the 47-year follow-up. ... We estimate that about 440 (5%) of the solid cancer deaths and 250 (0.8%) of the noncancer deaths were associated with the radiation exposure [emphasis added]. ... a new finding is that relative risks decline with increasing attained age, as well as being highest for those exposed as children as noted previously. A useful representative value is that for those exposed at age 30 the solid cancer risk is elevated by 47% per sievert at age 70. ... There is no direct evidence of radiation effects for doses less than about 0.5 Sv [emphasis added; notice that this report considers 86,572 people with individual dose estimates, and 40% have doses below 5 mSv or 0.005 Sv, so the politically expedient so-called 'lack of evidence' is actually a fact backed up by one hell of a lot of evidence that there are no radiation effects at low doses, a fact the biased scare-story-selling media and corrupt politically-expedient politicians will never report!].' - D. L. Preston, Y. Shimizu, D. A. Pierce, A. Suyama, and K. Mabuchi, 'Studies of mortality of atomic bomb survivors. Report 13: Solid cancer and noncancer disease mortality: 1950-1997', Radiation Research, volume 160, issue 2, pp. 381-407 (2003). Above: what is being politically covered up in the latest reports by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. D. A. Pierce and D. L. Preston (Radiation Effects Research Foundation, Hijiyama Park, Hiroshima) wrote in 'Radiation-related cancer risks at low doses among atomic bomb survivors', Radiation Research, volume 154, issue 2. pp. 178-86 (August 2000): 'To clarify the information in the Radiation Effects Research Foundation data regarding cancer risks of low radiation doses, we focus on survivors with doses less than 0.5 Sv. ... Analysis is of solid cancer incidence from 1958-1994, involving 7,000 cancer cases among 50,000 survivors in that dose and distance range. The results provide useful risk estimates for doses as low as 0.05-0.1 Sv, which are not overestimated by linear risk estimates computed from the wider dose ranges 0-2 Sv or 0-4 Sv. There is ... an upper confidence limit on any possible threshold is computed as 0.06 Sv [emphasis added]. It is indicated that modification of the neutron dose estimates currently under consideration would not markedly change the conclusions.' In the illustration above, at 3.4 rads (gamma dose equivalent) reduced the natural leukemia rate by 30% in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data available in 1982. There seems to be a "threshold" of 8 rads before there is any increase in risk. (H. Kato and W. J. Schull, 'Studies of the mortality of A-bomb survivors. 7. Mortality, 1950-1978: Part I. Cancer mortality', Radiation Research, May 1982, v90, Issue 2, pp. 395-432.) The accuracy in dosimetry (substantiated by measurements of neutron induced activity and gamma ray thermoluminescence in the two cities) at that time meant that the doses were generally believed accurate to about +/- 50% (the accuracy of later estimates has increased). These data are based on a radiation quality factor of about 20 for neutrons, to reconcile data from the two cities (the Hiroshima gun-type bomb bomb leaked the most neutrons, which were mainly absorbed in the high explosive in the Nagasaki device which worked by spherically symmetrical implosion), i.e., 1 rad from neutrons was considered to be equivalent to 20 rads of gamma rays. The reason for the reduction in natural leukemia rate by 3.4 rads may be either the stimulation of the protein P53 repair mechanism which repairs DNA strands broken by radiation, and/or a long-term boosting to the immune system caused somehow by surviving the nuclear explosions with low doses. It is unlikely to be a completely statistical random error, because the sample size of people exposed to low doses of radiation is very large - 23,073 people exposed to an average of 3.4 rads, with an unexposed control group size of 31,581. However, the exact doses received were still fairly uncertain in 1982, and the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still dying:
This means that the early data from the 1950s upon which all the health physics philosophy (linear dose-effects relation with no threshold dose before effects start to appear, and no effect of dose rate - see previous post) is useless not only because of the dosimetry but because it was premature to judge long terms effects by that early data. For example, the major source of 1950s data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is summarised in a table on page 966 of the 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Join Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man. This table was headed "Incidence of leukemia among the combined exposed populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by distance from the hypocenter (January 1948-September 1955)", and it is divided into distances of 0-1 km (0.96% of survivors had leukemia), 1-1.5 km (0.30% of survivors had leukemia), 1.5-2 km (0.043% of survivors had leukemia) and beyond 2 km (0.017% had leukemia). This early data was simply not detailed enough, and not collected over a long enough period of time to assess the effects of radiation properly, and there was no proper dosimetry to determine the doses people received, their shielding by houses (and the mutual shielding of clusters of houses), etc. The valuable data has taken decades to get.
The joint Japanese-American (Department of Energy)-funded Radiation Effects Research Foundation aren't putting the sort of detailed dose-effects data we need on the internet due to political bias in favour of fashionable prejudice in Japan, despite such bias being cynically anti-scientific, ignorance-promoting, politically expedient dogmatism: its online 16 pages booklet called 'Basic Guide to Radiation and Health Sciences' gives no quantitative results on radiation effects whatsoever, while it falsely promotes lies about radioactive rainout on page 5:
Above: by the time that the mass fires developed in the wooden homes of Hiroshima (breakfast time) and Nagasaki (lunch time) from blast wind-overturned cooking braziers, paper screens, and bamboo furnishings, the mushroom cloud has been blown away by the wind. The moisture and soot from the firestorm in Hiroshima which condensed to a 'black rain' when it had risen and cooled above the city, fell on the city an hour or two after the explosion and did not intersect the radioactive mushroom cloud, which had attained much higher altitude than the firestorm soot and moisture in any case.The neutron induced activity doses from the ground were trivial compared to the outdoor initial nuclear radiation doses, as illustrated in a previous post using the latest DS02 dosimetry. The RERF propaganda seeks to discredit civil defence by false propaganda, a continuation of the fellow travelled Cold War Soviet communist propaganda against Western defenses.
‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’
- R. P. Feynman (quoted by Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, 2006, p. 307).
‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of [the speculative consensus of] experts.’
- R. P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1999, p187.
You can see that small doses up to 5 rads have no effect either way on the leukemia risk, while 6-9 rads in this data seems to cause a reduction in normal leukemia risk from 0.17% to 0.12%. Doses which exceed this are harmful, possibly because the P53 repair mechanism was saturated and could not repair radiation induced damage to DNA due to the rate it occurred at higher doses. A dose of 20-40 rads more than doubles the natural leukemia risk. Hence anyone getting leukemia after a larger dose is more than 50% likely to have got the cancer as a result of the radiation exposure than naturally. (You cannot say this about other forms of cancer because 23% of Americans die from some form of cancer now anyway, so even the sort of risks at massive radiation doses can't compete with the natural risk of cancer for most types of cancer.) Notice that the DS02 dosimetry dose effects estimates are within 10% of the earlier DS86 estimates. DS02 (Dosimetry System 2002) was adopted in 2003 and gives a radiation dose at 1 m above he ground in open terrain at 1 km from ground zero of 4.5 and 8.7 Gy in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, with 0.08 and 0.14 Gy at 2 km, respectively. According to the recent Life Span Study report for the period of 1950-2000, among 86,611 survivors for whom individual doses were estimated, there were 47,685 deaths (55% of total number of survivors alive in 1950), including 10,127 from solid cancer and 296 from leukemia. Out of the 10,127 solid cancer deaths, only 5% were due to radiation, as shown by comparison to a non-exposed (but otherwise matched) control group.
In 1969, Professor Ernest Sternglass, a physicist, correlated a dramatic increase in infant mortality during the 1950s to the increasing fallout radiation from nuclear testing. His papers and books on low-level radiation effects were unscientific in the sense that they illustrate how not to do science. He had no control group, unlike the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data. So he had no idea what was causing the childhood mortality rise. It could have been diet, proximity to smoking adults at home, effects of natal X-rays (see previous post), childhood X-ray checks or screening for TB, etc.
Above: Professor Sternglass' analysis, which wasn't even based upon a real increase childhood mortality, which was falling before, during and after the nuclear tests. Sternglass instead claimed that in the absence of nuclear testing, childhood mortality should (in his opinion), have somehow continued to decrease according to the average fall rate of 1935-50 (when better medical care was reducing childhood mortality). Then he claimed that the flattening of the curve which occurred instead was evidence for a relative increase in childhood mortality due to radiation from fallout caused by nuclear testing.
He was therefore first assuming that fallout from bomb testing was responsible, and then - without stating this assumption - he was using this assumption to claim that the data of the correlation between infant mortality and fallout rate was evidence that fallout was causing the increase! His first presentation was at the 9th Annual Hanford Biological Symposium, May 1969. On 24 July 1969, Dr Alice Stewart wrote an article for the New Scientist, "The pitfalls of Extrapolation" which found another contradiction in Professor Sternglass' theory:
"Sternglass has postulated a fetal mortality trend which would eventually produce rates well below the level which - according to his own theory - would result from background radiation."
The danger here is that bad science, lacking mechanism, can be asserted and become credible in the public despite being completely false, just because a scientist misuses authority to gain attention. In this case, when Sternglass' paper was rejected from a scientific journal, he had it published in the September 1969 issue of Esquire magazine, titled ‘The death of all children’. That magazine advertised the story as a selling point, and sent out copies of the magazine to prominent people in politics. If he had scientific evidence that was being covered up, that would have been reason to do that, assuming that the media would be interested in making a political storm out of the facts (which strongly support a result which is the opposite of that which Sternglass makes). So you end up with the idea that these false claims about low level radiation stem from politics: if the public wants to fear low level, low dose rate radiation, someone will fiddle the statistics accordingly. Anyone giving the facts is conveniently ignored or ridiculed as being ‘out of touch’ or part of a conspiracy and cover-up.
(I don't find that too scientific either because it just ignores the pair-production mechanism for the creation of fundamental particles in strong fields, it is essentially ad hoc theorizing which doesn't explain or predict the key issues in the cosmological application of general relativity - such as the epicycles like dark matter and dark energy - it doesn't explain the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and as a result, perhaps, it has not gained so much attention as his claims on low-level radiation. However, Sternglass is right in some details, such as the cause of the double slit experiment interference with single photons being the size of the photon compared to the slit spacing, about Bohr's mainstream Copenhagen Interpretation orthodoxy being not even wrong unpredictive belief, and about Dirac's sea in quantum field theory being censored today as a physical mechanism because of heresies over aether, which he discussed with Einstein and others like Feynman, who advised him to check and prove his ideas more carefully.)
Update: the report by Donald A. Pierce and Dale L. Preston of RERF, 'Radiation-Related Cancer Risks at Low Doses among Atomic Bomb Survivors' in Radiation Research v. 154 (2000), pp. 178–186 states: 'Analysis is of solid cancer [not leukemia] incidence from 1958–1994, involving 7,000 cancer cases among 50,000 survivors in that dose and distance range. ... There is a statistically significant risk in the range 0–0.1 Sv, and an upper confidence limit on any possible threshold is computed as 0.06 Sv. It is indicated that modification of the neutron dose estimates currently under consideration would not markedly change the conclusions.'
D. L. Preston et al.,'Effect of Recent Atomic Bomb Survivor Dosimetry Changes on Cancer Mortality Risk Estimates,' Radiation Research, v162 (2004), pp. 377-389 state: 'The Radiation Effects Research Foundation has recently implemented a new dosimetry system, DS02, to replace the previous system, DS86. This paper assesses the effect of the change on risk estimates for radiation-related solid cancer and leukemia mortality. The changes in dose estimates were smaller than many had anticipated, with the primary systematic change being an increase of about 10% in γ-ray estimates for both cities. In particular, an anticipated large increase of the neutron component in Hiroshima for low-dose survivors did not materialize. However, DS02 improves on DS86 in many details, including the specifics of the radiation released by the bombs and the effects of shielding by structures and terrain. ... For both solid cancer and leukemia, estimated age–time patterns and sex difference are virtually unchanged by the dosimetry revision. The estimates of solid-cancer radiation risk per sievert and the curvilinear dose response for leukemia are both decreased by about 8% by the dosimetry revision, due to the increase in the γ-ray dose estimates...' However, the difficulty of finding any recent reported summary of the key data on the internet suggests that maybe they are not publishing the detailed data on dose versus effects, but just some average based on force-fitting the high-dose effects data to the linear, no-threshold model. Otherwise it would just be embarrassing to the orthodoxy, and draw the ignorant scorn of the anti-nuclear lobby? Of course the public at large only wants to hear lies about radiation because they've been brainwashed by propaganda based on prejudices, not science, and the media provide what readers want to hear, political arguments.
The information from the current online version of http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/faqs/faqse.htm#faq2, quoting data for 1950-90 from Radiation Research (146:1-27, 1996), without any doses to correspond to the effects despite the massive 2002 dosimetry project, clearly seems to prove that the Radiation Effects Research Foundation is covering up the dose-effects data by only making available on the internet data stripped of the dosimetry, so that it doesn't upset the 1950s linear, no-threshold religious style orthodoxy or rather, dogma. Of course, if they didn't cover-up, the implications would be uproar. So the one really valuable source of information is censored.
There is no other really reliable data because of the lack of good control groups (with similar exposures to other risks, similar lifestyles, etc.) and statistically significant population sizes exposed. For example, the 64 Marshallese on Rongelap after the Bravo test who were exposed to about 175 rads of gamma radiation from fallout over 44 hours in 1954 are too small a sample to get accurate long-term data from. In 1972, one person died from leukemia due to gamma radiation in the group of 64, and several thyroid nodules (most thyroid effects of radiation are not lethal) also occurred as a result of beta radiation to the thyroid gland from drinking water collected by an open cistern which became contaminated by the fallout containing iodine-131. Although this gives a leukemia risk of 1/64 after 175 rads received over 44 hours, this figure is statistically very weak because of the small sample size.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki data are being deliberately abused for propaganda purposes by ignoring the low dose data, and falsely taking high dose data and using that as if effects are directly proportional to dose with no threshold and no dose rate effect. Sometimes in the past claims have been made that the cancer rates were worse than previously thought. In 1957, Japanese type isolated wooden houses were exposed to nuclear tests in Nevada during Operation Plumbbob to determine how much radiation shielding they provided. It's obvious that a cluster of houses will provided more shielding than an isolated house in a desert, because the slant direct and scattered radiation will get additional shielding by the surrounding buildings they have to penetrate. It turned out that the wooden houses gave a typical protection factor of about 2-3 against the initial neutrons and gamma rays. The shielding by adjacent buildings was ignored. Later it was shown that the shielding by surrounding houses in a city doubles the overall protection factor for wooden houses, from 2-3 to 4-6. As a result, the estimated doses were halved. This meant that the same number of cancers was caused by only half as much radiation, so the number of cancers per unit of radiation was doubled.
So these revisions were caused by dosimetry, not new effects showing up! The dosimetry is very accurate now. The effects of radiation are "well known" in the scientific sense, although they're not "well known" in the political sense.
'For the past several years, the LNT (linear no-threshold) theory has come under attack within the scientific community. Analysis of a number of epidemiological studies of the Japanese survivors of the atomic bombings and workers exposed to low level radiation suggest that the LNT philosophy is overly conservative, and low-level radiation may be less dangerous than commonly believed. Proponents of current standards argue that risk conservatism is justified because low level risks remain uncertain and it is prudent public health policy; LNT opponents maintain that regulatory compliance costs are excessive, and there is now substantial scientific information arguing against the LNT model. Regulators use the LNT theory in the standards setting process to predict numbers of cancers due to exposure to low level radiation because direct observations of radiation-induced cancers in populations exposed to low level radiation are difficult. The LNT model is simplistic and provides a conservative estimate of risk. Abandoning the LNT philosophy and relaxing regulations would have enormous economic implications. However, alternative models to predict risk at low dose are as difficult to justify as the LNT model. Perhaps exposure limits should be based on model-independent approaches. There is no requirement that exposure limits be based on any predictive model. It is prudent to base exposure limits on what is known directly about health effects of radiation exposure of human populations.'
'Low doses in the mGy range [1 mGy = 0.1 rad, since 1 Gray = 1 Joule/kg = 100 rads] cause a dual effect on cellular DNA. One is a relatively low probability of DNA damage per energy deposition event and increases in proportion to the dose. At background exposures this damage to DNA is orders of magnitude lower than that from endogenous sources, such as reactive oxygen species. The other effect at comparable doses is adaptive protection against DNA damage from many, mainly endogenous, sources, depending on cell type, species and metabolism. Adaptive protection causes DNA damage prevention and repair and immune stimulation. It develops with a delay of hours, may last for days to months, decreases steadily at doses above about 100 mGy to 200 mGy and is not observed any more after acute exposures of more than about 500 mGy. Radiation-induced apoptosis and terminal cell differentiation also occur at higher doses and add to protection by reducing genomic instability and the number of mutated cells in tissues. At low doses reduction of damage from endogenous sources by adaptive protection maybe equal to or outweigh radiogenic damage induction. Thus, the linear-no-threshold (LNT) hypothesis for cancer risk is scientifically unfounded and appears to be invalid in favour of a threshold or hormesis. This is consistent with data both from animal studies and human epidemiological observations on low-dose induced cancer. The LNT hypothesis should be abandoned and be replaced by a hypothesis that is scientifically justified and causes less unreasonable fear and unnecessary expenditure.'
Online there is a 1982 book by Harvey Wasserman, Norman Solomon, Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Walters called 'Killing our Own: Chronicling the Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation, 1945-1982'. It contains a summary of all the radiation horror stories (some like Sternglass, et al., are pseudoscience, and some are valid). It doesn't contain any of the basic data with large control groups that shows how many excess cancers actually occur as a function of dose for particular dose rates. It relies instead on the opinions of committees and scientific authorities, repeating Sternglass' claims in chapter 11 and complaining that 'The industry as a whole has devoted thousands of dollars to undercutting his reputation.' That's the problem: you can't deal with errors by making ad hominem attacks on the reputations of the people making the errors, but by clearly emphasising where the errors are. Better still, publish the facts briefly, clearly, honestly, and fairly as simple graphs in the first place, and then the public will know what they are and will be able to make informed judgements.
In May 1985, a U.S. National Research Council report on mortality in nuclear weapons test participants raised several questions. Some 5,113 nuclear test participants had died between 1952-81, when 6,125 deaths would be expected for a similar sized group of non-exposed Americans. The number of leukemia deaths was 56, identical to that in a similar sized non-exposed group. However, as the graph at the top of this post shows, the risk depends on the dose, so the few people with the highest doses would have far greater risks. In 1983, a C.D.C. report on the effects of fallout from the Plumbbob-Smoky test in 1957 showed that 8 participants in that test has died from leukemia up to 1979, compared to only 3 expected from a similar sized sample of non-exposed Americans. However, even for the Plumbbob-Smoky test, the overall death rate from all causes in the exposed test participants (320 deaths from 1957-79) was less than that in a matched sample of non-exposed Americans (365 deaths). The average dose to American nuclear test participants was only about 0.5 rad, although far higher doses were received by those working with fallout soon after nuclear tests. Altogether, out of 205,000 U.S. Department of Defense participants in nuclear tests, 34,000 were expected to die from naturally occurring cancer, and 11 from cancer due to radiation exposure. (According to the March 1990 U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency study guide DNA1.941108.010, report HRE-856, Medical Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
Update (13 August 2007):
There is an essay by Dr Donald W. Miller, Afraid of Radiation? Low Doses are Good for You, available in PDF format here. Two problems with that title are:
(1) as pointed out in previous posts, only long-ranged, low-LET radiation like gamma rays and x-rays (which are electrically neutral, and thus only weakly ionizing) exhibit a threshold in all reliable data. Alpha and beta radiations are short-ranged, high-LET radiation, so where they can gain entry to the body (by being inhaled or ingested in soluble form, for example, which is not too easy for insoluble radioactivity trapped in fallout particles composed of fused glass spheres from melted sand grains), they can irradiate a few nearby cells very intensely because of their short range. With alpha and beta radiation, there is no threshold dose and all exposure is potentially harmful; the effects do obey a linear dose-response relationship at low doses of alpha and beta exposure. Only for gamma and x-rays at low dose rates are there thresholds and benefits possible from boosting the immune system and DNA repair mechanisms like P53.
(2) the dose rate seriously affects the rate of cancer induction, which is an effect currently ignored completely by Health Physicists. This is because all laws and personal 'dosimeter' radiation monitoring systems for radiation safety record merely the integrated total doses, without regard to the dose rate at which the dose was received. (Some effects prediction schemes do make arbitrary 'factor of two' corrections, doubling the danger expected from doses received above some threshold for high dose rates, but these corrections grossly neglect the observed facts; see previous post for details of how this was discovered in animal experiments, and why it is still censored out!).
Summary: gamma or x-ray radiation received at a low dose rate in small total doses can reduce the normal cancer rate. If this small total dose radiation is received at a high dose rate, however, protein P53 may not be fast enough able to repair the damage successfully during the exposure, and if there are multiple breaks in DNA strands produced in a short period of time, the broken bits will risk being 'repaired' incorrectly (the wrong way around or whatever), initiating cancer at some time in the future when that DNA is unzipped and thus copied in order to create new cells.
This isn't rocket science. As an analogy, solar radiation from the sun contains ultraviolet radiation, which will make a geiger counter (provided it has been provided with a transparent glass window, not a shield to keep ultraviolet light out!) click rapidly, since it borders the soft x-ray spectrum and is weakly ionizing. If you receive ultraviolet radiation at a low dose rate in small total doses, the positive effects may outweigh the risks: vitamin D produced which is helpful rather than dangerous. If, however, you are exposed to very intense ultraviolet, the DNA in your skin gets broken up at a rate faster than protein P53 can stick the pieces together again, so some bits are put back together in the wrong order and skin cancer may eventually result when those cells try to divide to form new skin cells. The visible 'burning' of skin by ultraviolet is also due to dose rate effects causing cellular death and serious cellular disruption. It doesn't matter so much what the total dose is. What matters even more than the dose, for long term effects, is the dose rate (speed) at which the radiation dose is received.
The key facts about radiation seem to be: it's all harmful at sufficiently high dose rates and at high doses. Gamma and x-rays are 'safe' (i.e., have advantages which outweigh risks) at low dose rates (obviously dose rates were high at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where 95% of the doses were received from initial radiation lasting 10 seconds) and at low total doses. On the other hand, there is always a risk from cellular exposure to alpha and beta radiation because they are short-ranged so their energy is all absorbed in just a small number cells. Because they are quickly stopped by solid matter, they deposit all their energy in sensitive areas of bone tissue if you inhale or ingest sources of alpha and beta radiation that can be doposited in bones (a very small fraction of ingested soluble radium, strontium, uranium, and plutonium can end up in the bones). Gamma rays and x-rays are not dangerous at low dose rates and small total doses because they are not stopped so easily by matter as alpha and beta particles because they carry no electrical charge. This means that gamma and x-rays deposit their energy over a larger volume of tissue so that at low dose rates DNA repair mechanisms can repair damage as soon as it occurs.
Anyway, to get back to the paper by Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD, he does usefully explain an evolved conspiracy to confuse the facts:
'A process known as radiation hormesis mediates its beneficial effect on health. Investigators have found that small doses of radiation have a stimulating and protective effect on cellular function. It stimulates immune system defenses, prevents oxidative DNA damage, and suppresses cancer.'
He cites the monumental report on effects of low dose rate, low-LET gamma radiation on 10,000 people in Taiwan by W.L. Chen,Y.C. Luan, M.C. Shieh, S.T. Chen, H.T. , Kung, K.L. Soong, Y.C.Yeh, T.S. Chou, S.H. Mong, J.T.Wu, C.P. Sun,W.P. Deng, M.F.Wu, and M.L. Shen, Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, page 6, available in PDF format here:
'An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan. Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 ([low dose rate, low-LET gamma radiation emitter] half-life: 5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv, a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv. Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per 100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per 1,000 children under age 19.
'The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per 100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and income distributions of these persons are the same as for the general population, it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure. ...
'The data on reduced cancer mortality and congenital malformations are compatible with the phenomenon of radiation hormesis, an adaptive response of biological organisms to low levels of radiation stress or damage; a modest overcompensation to a disruption, resulting in improved fitness. Recent assessments of more than a century of data have led to the formulation of a well founded scientific model of this phenomenon.
'The experience of these 10,000 persons suggests that long term exposure to [gamma]radiation, at a dose rate of the order of 50 mSv (5 rem) per year, greatly reduces cancer mortality, which is a major cause of death in North America.'
The statistics in the paper by Chen and others has been alleged to apply to a younger age group than the general population, affecting the significance of the data, although in other ways the data are more valid than Hiroshima and Nagasaki data extrapolations to low doses. For instance, the radiation cancer scare mongering of survivors of high doses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been prejudiced in the sense of preventing a blind to avoid “anti-placebo” effect, e.g. increased fear, psychological stress and worry about the long term effects of radiation, and associated behaviour. The 1958 book about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, “Formula for Death”, makes the point that highly irradiated survivors often smoked more, in the belief that they were doomed to die from radiation induced cancer anyway. Therefore, the fear culture of the irradiated survivors would statistically be expected to result in a deviancy from normal behaviour, in some cases increasing the cancer risks above those due purely to radiation exposure.
For up-to-date data and literature discussions on the effects of DNA repair enzymes on preventing cancers from low-dose rate radiation, please see
If we lived in a rational society, the facts above would be reported in the media, and would be the focus for discussion about radiation hazards. Instead, the media and their worshippers (the politicians) as well as their funders (the general public who fund the media by paying for it), choose to ignore or ridicule the facts because the facts are 'unfashionable' and lying bullshit (see Sterngrass graph above) is 'fashionable' and some sort of consensus of mainstream narcissistic elitists with a political mandate to kill people by lying about the effects of low-level radiation and refusing to discuss the facts. There is no uncertainty about these facts, as radiation effects have been better checked and more extensively studied than any other alleged hazard to life!
Below a little summary of politically-inexpedient facts from a book edited by Nobel Laureate Professor Eugene P. Wigner, Survival and the Bomb: Methods of Civil Defense, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, London, 1969.
The dust jacket blurb states: 'The purpose of civil defence, Mr. Wigner believes, is the same as that of the anti-ballistic missile: to provide not a retaliation to an attack, but a defense against it; for no peace is possible as long as defense consists solely in the threat of revenge and as long as an aggressor - the one who strikes first - has a considerable advantage. Civil and anti-ballistic missile defense not only provide some protection against an attack, they render it less likely by decreasing the advantage gained by striking first.'
The chapter on 'Psychological Problems of A-Bomb Defense' is by Professor of psychology, Irving L. Janis, who states on p. 61:
'It has been suggested that the device of using increasing doses of graphic sound films (preferably in technicolor) showing actual disasters should be investigated as a possible way of hardening people and preventing demoralization.'
He adds on pp. 62-3:
'For the large number of patients who will be worried about epilation, ugly scar tissue, and other disfigurements, a special series of pamphlets and posters might be prepared in advance, containing reassuring information about treatment and the chances of recovery.'
On pp. 64-5 he deals with the 'General Effects on Morale of A-Bomb Attack':
'In general, a single atomic bomb disaster is not likely to produce any different kind of effects on morale than those produced by other types of heavy air attacks. This is the conclusion reached by USSBS [U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1945] investigators in Japan. Only about one-fourth of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki asserted that they had felt that victory was impossible because of the atomic bombing. The amount of defeatism was not greater than that in other Japanese cities. In fact, when the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were compared with those in all other cities in Japan, the morale of the former was found to resemble that of people in the lightly bombed and unbombed cities rather than in the heavily bombed cities. This has been explained as being due to the fact that morale was initially higher than average in the two cities because, prior to the A-Bomb disasters, the populace had not been exposed to a series of heavy air attacks. Apparently a single A-Bomb attack produced no greater drop in morale among the Japanese civilians than would be expected from a single saturation raid of incendiaries or of high explosive bombs.'
On p. 68, Professor Janis addresses the question 'Will There Be Widespread Panic?':
'Prior to World War II, government circles in Britain believed that if their cities were subjected to heavy air raids, a high percentage of the bombed civilian population would break down mentally and become chronically neurotic. This belief, based on predictions made by various specialists, proved to be a myth.'
The chapter on 'Decontamination' is by Dr Frederick P. Cowan (then the Head of the Health Physics Division, Brookhaven National Laboratory) and Charles B. Meinhold, who summarise data from a vital selection of decontamination research reports. The first report summarised (on page 227) is J. C. Maloney, et al., Cold Weather Decontamination Study, McCoy, I, II, and IV, U.S. Army Chemical Corps., Nuclear Defense Laboratory, Edgewood Arsenal, reports NDL-TR-24, -32, and -58 (1962, 1962 and 1964), which demonstrated that:
1. 'In most cases, the time during which access to important facilities must be denied can be reduced by a factor of 10 (e.g., from two months to less than a week) using practical methods of decontamination.'
2. 'Radiation levels inside selected structures can be reduced by a factor of 5.'
3. 'Radiation levels outdoors in selected areas can be reduced by a factor of 20.'
4. 'These results can be achieved without excessive exposure to individuals carrying out the decontamination.'
On page 228, Cowan and Meinhold point out:
'Although long sheltering periods may in some cases be reduced by the effect of rainfall or by transfer of people to less-contaminated areas, it is clear that decontamination is a very important technique for hastening the process of recovery.
'Although the gamma radiation from fallout is the major concern, the effects of beta radiation should not be overlooked. Fallout material left on the skin for an extended period of time [this critical time is just a few minutes for fallout contamination an hour after the explosion, but much longer periods of exposure are required for burns if the fallout is more than an hour old, and after 3 days the specific activity of fallout from a land surface burst is simply too low to cause beta burns] can cause serious burns, and if inhaled or ingested in sufficient quantities, it can result in internal damage. Grossly contaminated clothing may contribute to such skin exposures or indirectly to the ingestion of radioactive material. Thus it may be necessary to resort to decontamination of body surfaces, clothing, food and water.'
1. 'The mass of the radioactive material itself is a tiny fraction of the mass of the inert fallout material with which it is associated. This, in discussing the mechanics of removal, fallout may be considered as a type of dirt.'
2. 'In general, the amount of radioactive material removed is proportional to the total amount of fallout material removed.'
4. 'Under most circumstances one is dealing with small particle sizes.
'The methods applicable to radiological decontamination are those available to dirt removal in general. Some common examples are sweeping, brushing, vacuuming, flushing with water, scrubbing, surface removal, and filtration. In addition, the radioactive material can be shielded by plowing, spading, covering with clean dirt or by construction of protective dikes. Such methods may utilize power equipment or depend upon manual labor. Their effectiveness will vary widely, depending upon the method of application, the type of surface, the conditions of deposition, etc. ...
'Flushing with water can be very effective, particularly if the water is under pressure, the surface is smooth and proper drainage [to deep drains, where the radiation is shielded by intervening soil] is available. Under certain conditions, the use of water flushing during the deposition period can be of great value. The water will tend to fill the surface irregularities and prevent entrapment of particles. Soluble materials will be kept in solution, thereby reducing the chance of surface adsorption.'
On p. 232, a useful summary table of decontamination is given:
There is other extensive data on fallout decontamination in many previous posts on this blog, e.g., as the posts here, here and here (this last link includes a slightly different table of decontamination efficiencies, which is interesting to compare to the table of data above), as well as several other earlier ones. In summing up the situation for urban area decontamination, Cowan and Meinhold state on p. 232:
'A number of factors make large-scale decontamination useful in urban areas. Much of the area between buildings is paved and, thus, readily cleaned using motorized flushers and sweepers, which are usually available. If, in addition, the roofs are decontaminated by high-pressure hosing, it may be possible to make entire buildings habitable fairly soon, even if the fallout has been very heavy.'
On page 237 they summarise the evidence concerning methods for the 'Decontamination of People, Clothing, Food, Water and Equipment':
'Since fallout is basically dirt contaminated with radioactive substances, it can be largely removed from the skin by washing with soap and water. ... Not all the radioactivity will be removed by washing, but that remaining will not be large enough to be harmful. ... To be a problem in relation to food, fallout must get into the food actually eaten by people. ... Vegetables exposed to fallout in the garden will be grossly contaminated but may still be usable after washing if protected by an outer skin or husk or if penetration of fallout into the edible portions is not excessive. ... Reservoirs will receive fallout, but much of it will settle to the bottom, be diluted by the huge volume of water, or be removed by the filtering and purifying systems. Cistern water may be very contaminated if contaminated rainwater or water from contaminated roofs has been collected. Milk from cattle who have fed on contaminated vegetation may contain large quantities of radioactive iodine for a period of a month or more ... but milk can be used for durable products such as powdered milk or cheese, since the radioactive iodine decays with a half-life of eight days. Thus, after a month only 7 percent of the initial [Iodine-131] remains.'
There is then a chapter on 'Economic Recovery' by Professor of Economics, Jack Hirshleifer, who points out on page 244:
'Economic recovery from localized bombing attacks in general has been quite remarkable. In Hiroshima, for example, power was generally restored to surviving areas on the day after the attack, and through railroad service recommenced on the following day. [Ref.: U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Washington, D.C., 1946, p. 8.]
'By mid-1949, population was back to the preattack level, and 70 percent of the destroyed buildings had been reconstructed. [Ref.: Research Department, Hiroshima Municipal Office, as cited in Hiroshima, Hiroshima Publishing, 1949.]
'In general, populations of damaged areas have been highly motivated to stay on, even in the presence of severe deprivation; once having fled, they have been anxious to return. The thesis has even been put forward that a community hit by disaster rebounds so as to attain higher levels of achievement than would otherwise have been possible. [Ref.: this refers to the study after the 1917 Halifax explosion, made by Samuel H. Prince, Catastrophe and Social Change, Columbia University-Longmans, Green, New York, 1920.] ...
'In the midnineteenth century John Stuart Mill commented on:
... what has so often excited wonder, the great rapidity with which countries recover from a state of devastation; the disappearance, in a short time, of all traces of the mischiefs caused by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and the ravages of war. An enemy lays waste a country by fire and sword, and destroys or carries away nearly all the moveable wealth existing in it: all the inhabitants are ruined, and yet in a few years after, everything is much as it was before. - J.S. Mill, 'Principles of Political Economy', Ashley's New Edition, Longmans, Green, London, 1929, Book I, pp. 74-75.
"From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies [by Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller and other geneticists who worked on plants, who falsely hyped their insect and plant data as valid for mammals like humans during the June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on fallout effects], it appeared that the number (or frequency) of mutations in a given population ... is proportional to the total dose ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions need to be revised, at least for mammals. [Mammals are biologically closer to humans, in respect to DNA repair mechanisms, than short-lived insects whose life cycles are too small to have forced the evolutionary development of advanced DNA repair mechanisms, unlike mammals that need to survive for decades before reproducing.] When exposed to X-rays or gamma rays, the mutation frequency in these animals has been found to be dependent on the exposure (or dose) rate ...
"At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 R/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. [Emphasis added.] There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent ... with adult female mice ... a delay of at least seven weeks between exposure to a substantial dose of radiation, either neutrons or gamma rays, and conception causes the mutation frequency in the offspring to drop almost to zero. ... recovery in the female members of the population would bring about a substantial reduction in the 'load' of mutations in subsequent generations."
Above: the theory of the experimentally observed threshold doses for the radium dial painters and for the Hiroshima survivors.
... Low-level radiation is another example of a science being controlled by politics.
By the time the protein P53 repair mechanism for DNA breaks was discovered and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki effects of radiation were accurately known, the nuclear and health physics industries had been hyping inaccurate radiation effects models which ignored non-linear effects (like saturation of the normal P53 repair mechanism of DNA) and the effects of dose rate for twenty years.
The entire industry had become indoctrinated in the philosophy of 1957, and there was no going back. Most of health physicists are employed by the nuclear or radiation industry at reactors or in medicine/research, so all these people have a vested interest in not rocking their own boat. The only outsiders around seem to politically motivated in one direction only (anti-nuclear), so there’s a standoff. Virtually everyone who enters the subject of health physics gets caught in the same trap, and so there is no mechanism in place to allow for any shift of consensus....
On Wednesday morning, it's been 20 years since the Chernobyl disaster... The communist regimes could not pretend that nothing had happened (although in the era before Gorbachev, they could have tried to do so) but they had attempted to downplay the impact of the meltdown. At least this is what we used to say for twenty years. You may want to look how BBC news about the Chernobyl tragedy looked like 20 years ago.
Ukraine remembered the event (see the pictures) and Yushchenko wants to attract tourists to Chernobyl. You may see a photo gallery here. Despite the legacy, Ukraine has plans to expand nuclear energy.
Today I think that the communist authorities did more or less exactly what they should have done - for example try to avoid irrational panic. It seems that only 56 people were killed directly and 4,000 people indirectly. See here. On the other hand, about 300,000 people were evacuated which was a reasonable decision, too. And animals are perhaps the best witnesses for my statements: the exclusion zone - now an official national park - has become a haven for wildlife - as National Geographic also explains:
Reappeared: Lynx, eagle owl, great white egret, nesting swans, and possibly a bear Introduced: European bison, Przewalski's horse Booming mammals: Badger, beaver, boar, deer, elk, fox, hare, otter, raccoon dog, wolf Booming birds: Aquatic warbler, azure tit, black grouse, black stork, crane, white-tailed eagle (the birds especially like the interior of the sarcophagus)
... Greenpeace in particular are very wrong whenever they say that the impact of technology on wildlife must always have a negative sign. ...
In other words, the impact of that event has been exaggerated for many years. Moreover, it is much less likely that a similar tragedy would occur today. Nuclear power has so many advantages that I would argue that even if the probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster in the next 20 years were around 10%, it would still be worth to use nuclear energy.
Some children were born with some defects - but even such defects don't imply the end of everything. On the contrary. A girl from the Chernobyl area, born around 1989, was abandoned by her Soviet parents, was adopted by Americans, and she became the world champion in swimming. Her name? Hint: the Soviet president was Gorbachev and this story has something to do with the atomic nucleus. Yes, her name is Mikhaila Rutherford. ;-)
Exactly 21 years ago, the Ukrainian power plant exploded. ...
A new study has found that the long-term health impact of the Chernobyl disaster was negligible. All kinds of mortality rates were at most 1% higher than normally.
Yushchenko calls for a revival of the zone. His proposals include a nature preserve - which is more or less a fact now - as well as production of bio-fuels and a science center. The Korean boss of the U.N. calls for aid to the region.
copy of a fast comment there:
Environmental thinking is in perfect harmony with media hype.
Chernobyl wasn't the first case. Hiroshima was. A Manhatten District PhD physicist (Dr Jacobson, from memory?), who didn't actually work at Los Alamos and because of the compartmentalization of secrets didn't know anything about nuclear weapons effects, issued a press release about fallout the day after Hiroshima was on the front pages.
He wrote that the radioactivity would turn Hiroshima into a radioactive waste land for 75 years. Not 70 or 80 years, but 75 years, which is a bit weird bearing in mind the fact that radioactivity decays exponentially.
Actually there was no significant fallout or neutron induced activity beyond a few hours at Hiroshima due to the burst altitude. Even in a surface burst, the radioactivity drops to within the natural background at ground zero after a few years, and there are people living at Bikini Atoll today, where a 15 megatons surface burst was tested in 1954.
The effects of radiation are serious at high doses, but there is plenty of evidence that they are exaggerated for low doses of gamma and neutron radiation...
copy of another fast comment there:
The full report http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/49/ states: "The ICRP risk estimate assumes a dose and dose-rate effectiveness factor (DDREF) of 2.0 (reducing predicted risk by a factor of 2.0) for extrapolation of the data from the bomb survivors (who were exposed at extremely high dose rate) to lower dose and/or dose-rate exposures."
This is a vital issue, because cancer occurs when when the damage to DNA occurs so quickly that protein P53 can't repair it as single strand breaks. As soon as you get double breaks of DNA, there is the risk of the resulting bits of loose DNA being "repaired" the wrong way around in the strand by protein P53, and this can cause radiation induced cancer.
So at low dose rates to weakly ionizing (low linear energy transfer, or low LET) radiation like gamma rays, radiation causes single breaks in DNA and protein P53 has time to repair them before further breaks occur.
At high dose rates, the breaks occur so quickly that the P53 repair mechanism is overloaded with work, and repairs go wrong because DNA gets fairly fragmented (not just two loose ends to be reattached, but many bits) and P53 then accidentally puts some of the ends "back" in the wrong places, causing the risk of cancer.
"... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls."
So, for a fixed dose of 1,000 R spread over a month (which is far less lethal in short term effects than a that dose spread over a few seconds, as occurs with initial radiation in a nuclear explosion, or over a few days when most of the fallout dose is delivered), the leukemia rate can vary from 5-40% as the dose rate varies from 1.3-81 r/hour.
The cancer rate doesn't just double at high dose rates. It increases by a factor of 8 (i.e., 5% to 40%) as the dose rate rises from 1.3 to 81 r/hour.
In fact, for comparing cancer risks at low level (near background) and Hiroshima, the dose rates cover a wider range that this experiment, so the correction factor for the effect of dose rate on risk will be bigger than 8.
Background radiation studies are based on average exposure rates of just 0.02 mr/hour, i.e., 0.00002 r/hour, while at Hiroshima and similar instrumented nuclear tests, the initial nuclear radiation lasted a total of 20 seconds until it was terminated by bouyant cloud rise effect.
Hence for a dose of 1 r spread over 20 seconds at Hiroshima, the dose rate it was received at was 180 r/hour. (Although according to Glasstone and Dolan'snuclear test data, half of the initial radiation dose would generally be received in about half a second, so the effective dose rate would be even higher than 180 r/hour.)
Hence, the range of dose rates from bachground to Hiroshima is 0.00002 r/hour to 180 r/hour or more, a factor of 9,000,000 difference or more.
Since in the animal experiments the leukemia rate increased by a factor of 8 due to a 62 fold increase in dose rate (i.e., as the dose rate increased from 1.3 to 81 r/hour), cancer risk is approximately proportional to the square root of the dose rate, so a 9,000,000 fold increase in dose rate should increase the cancer risk by 3,000 times.
Hence, the cancer risks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by this model exaggerate low level radiation effects by over 3,000 times, not merely by a factor of 2.
Update 28 April 2007: the last comment above contains an error and the exaggeration of radiation effects at low dose rates is even greater as a result.
The calculation should have have subtracted the 2% leukemia incidence in the non-irradiated control group from both the 40% and 5% figures. Hence, the radiation induced leukemia for 1000 R received at rates of 1.3 to 81 r/hour ranged from 3% to 38%, not 5% to 40%. This means that a 62.3 fold increase in dose rate increased the leukemia rate due to the radiation by a factor of 38/3 = 12.7. Hence, the radiation-induced (not the total) leukemia incidence is proportional to (dose rate)^{0.615}, instead of (dose rate)^{1/2}.
Using this corrected result for a 9 million fold difference between the dose rates of background (low dose rate) and Hiroshima (high dose rate) radiation, the radiation induced leukemia incidence for a similar total radiation dose will increase by a factor of 18,900, not 3,000.
Hence, radiation-induced leukemia rates currently being extrapolated from Hiroshima and Nagasaki data down to low dose rate radiation will exaggerate by a factor of 18,900 or so, rather than the factor of 2 currently assumed by orthodoxy.
15 May 2007 update: the Radiation Effects Research Foundation has deleted the pages linked to in this post, including http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/faqs/faqse.htm and http://www.rerf.jp/top/qae.htm
http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa2.html contains an interesting table which shows the probability that cancer is caused by radiation instead of natural causes (non-exposed control group data) at various distances from ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For the most highly irradiated 810 survivors within 1 km of ground zero, 22 died from leukemia between 1950-90, of which 100% are attributable to radiation exposure. In the same group of 810 persons, 128 died from other forms of cancer, but only 42% of these 128 deaths were attributable to radiation.
Hence, even the most highly irradiated survivors who did die from cancer (apart from leukemia) were more likely (58% chance) to have died from naturally contracted cancer than from radiation induced cancer (42% risk).
Only for leukemia was there more than 100% chance that a cancer death was due to radiation and not due to natural cancer risks. As explained in previous posts, this is due to the fact that leukemia is both rare and is strongly correlated to radiation exposure than other cancers.
It is a pity that the Radiation Effects Research Foundation still has not added the mean shielded biologically equivalent doses (in centi-sieverts, which are identical to the old unit the rem) for each group of survivors listed using the DS02 dosimetry system.
"Question 7: What health effects have been seen among the children born to atomic-bomb survivors?
"Answer 7: This was one of the earliest concerns in the aftermath of the bombings. Efforts to detect genetic effects were begun in the late 1940s and continue to this day. Thus far, no evidence of genetic effects has been found. ..."
Comment about Pugwash and the anti-nuclear hysteria propaganda
I recently came across a free PDF book on the internet, authored by John Avery of the Danish Pugwash Group and Danish Peace Academy, called Space-Age Science and Stone-Age Politics.
It is a similar kind of book to that which was published widely in the 1980s, full of pseudophysics like claims that nuclear weapons can somehow destroy life on earth, when a 200 teratons (equal to 200*10^12 tons, i.e., 200 million-million tons or 200 million megatons) explosion from the KT event 65 million years ago failed to kill off all life on earth!
(This figure comes from David W. Hughes, "The approximate ratios between the diameters of terrestrial impact craters and the causative incident asteroids", Monthly Notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 338, Issue 4, pp. 999-1003, February 2003. The KT boundary impact energy was 200,000,000 megatons of TNT equivalent for the 200 km diameter of the Chicxulub crater at Yucatan which marks the KT impact site. Hughes shows that the impact energy (in ergs) is: E= (9.1*10^24)*(D^2.59), where D is impact crater's diameter in km. To convert from ergs to teratons of TNT equivalent, divide the result by the conversion factor of 4.2*10^28 ergs/teraton.)
Compare the power of all the world's nuclear weapons to that comet, and you see it's a complete fantasy. A megaton low altitude burst nuclear weapon will cause rapidly decreasing casualty rates in houses and rapidly decreasing destruction as the distance increases from 2 to 3 miles. In brich houses, the mortality risk from all blast effects (deaths are mainly due to debris impacts and related collapse of the house) for people lying down on the floor in U.K. type brick houses (with standard 9 inch thick brick walls) falls from about 50% at 2 miles to only about 5% at 3 miles from a 1 Mt surface burst. (Depending on the weapon design and the shielding geometry of the house and neighbouring homes, particularly the locations of windows, initial radiation and or thermal radiation may also cause some injury in some circumstances at these distances. If the location is downwind of the explosion, some quickly decaying fallout hazard may also exist in the event of true surface bursts on land (but not air bursts), depending on the windshear, fission yield fraction of the weapon, and whether the person stays indoors in a central area for the first few days or not.)
In addition, a 1 Mt low altitude bomb explosion would break virtually 100% of windows for a 10 mile radius (with a lower incidence of breakage extending much further, and isolated breaks occurring due to atmospheric "focussing" of the shock wave periodically in focus-point zones hundreds of miles downwind), and cause immense panic and massive numbers of casualties for any people outdoors, particularly any who have a clear line-of-sight to the fireball in the few seconds before the heat flash stops (the blast wave generally takes longer to arrive than the heat flash lasts, so even if a shield is destroyed by the blast, it protects against the heat flash; the shadow cast by a single leaf is enough to prevent serious thermal burns over the shadow area, as proved by photographs taken by the U.S. Army at Hiroshima and Nagasaki: see previous posts on this blog, for example). Skin burns from thermal flash and from beta rays due to fallout contamination are two of the biggest immediate concerns.
However, many nuclear weapons have yields lower than 1 Mt. Current (January 2007) mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile: 0.257 Mt. Total yield: 1,172 Mt.
This is completely trivial compared to the 200,000,000 Mt KT-impact explosion 65 million years ago which did not kill off life on Earth.
Let's now get back to John Avery's Space-Age Science and Stone-Age Politics, the Preface of which claims inaccurately:
"... science has given humans the power to obliterate their civilization with nuclear weapons..."
Avery gives no evidence for this claim, it's a typical example of groupthing propaganda.
The idea is as follows:
(1) claim that your pet hate, such as nuclear weapons or global warming or aliens, is a real threat to civilization,
(2) ignore all evidence to the contrary, and blame politicians for stone age ideas which are causing or risking a disaster.
In the 1930s, those who said Hitler was a threat and should be deterred by air power were dismissed by idealists and Nazi fellow-travellers as "war-mongers".
They either didn't understand, or pretended that they didn't understand, that they were the war-mongers.
If you want peace under freedom, human nature being as it is, you need to be strong enough enough to protect yourself.
Weaken yourself by disarmament and you make yourself attractive to thugs by standing out as a good potential mugging victim.
Somehow all those pacifists escaped the real world of childhood, where you find out that defenselessness makes you victim to all passing thugs who want someone to pick on, mug, rob, and fight.
If you carry a big stick, you live a happier life if you want peace and freedom, than you live if you don't carry a big stick.
Stone age politics is sensible, because the problems of life remain the same now as then: politics is not leading human nature into war. Human nature leads politicians into war.
Contrary to Avery's mindset, you can't change the world by imposing a new political idealism on man.
That's called dictatorship, and all versions so far have been evil failures: fascist Nazism as well well as Communist dictatorship.
It makes a powerful elite few into dictators who become corrupt, people have to be coerced or bribed into maintaining the status quo under the dictatorship, the whole thing is unstable and based on hatreds and violence and terror.
The error is trying to impose a political "solution" on human nature. Human nature is determined by genes, not by ideals written in books by philosophers.
We see this in the fact that even when each individual in identical twins is brought up under different conditions in different places, they remain extremely similar in their interests and outlooks and intelligence. Genetics, sadly perhaps, does exert a massive influence on life.
The idea that problems like war - which are caused by deep-rooted instincts, hatreds, feelings of injustice, tribal rivalries, and prejudices - can be wiped out by philosophical belief systems like pacifist ideology, is utopian, not realistic.
Avery does reflect some of these issues on page 8 of his Preface, where he quotes Arthur Koestler's remark:
"We can control the movements of a space-craft orbiting about a distant planet, but we cannot control the situation in Northern Ireland."
This is very deep. The pacifists keep kidding themselves that if only they could explain to terrorists or dictators how wrong they are, the world would be put right. Wrong. The terrorists and dictators are paranoid, deluded bigots who simply don't want to hear the facts. The only thing they will listen to or respect is force, not talk. However, sometimes - as in the case in Northern Ireland - after several generations a compromise and settlement can be reached to halt the ongoing violence, at least for a while. Unless the core problems are resolved, however, violence might flare up again when tensions and pressures are increased at some time in the future.
Don't rely on politicians and talk. Those who cherish peace agreements should remember that unless there is really genuine goodwill behind each signatory, the agreement isn't worth the paper it is written on. It's actually negative equity, if it brings one side a false sense of security, as was the case with Neville Chamberlain when he got Adolf Hitler's autograph on a peace pact at Munich in September 1938.
In other words, making peace with a homocidal maniac and then waving the peace agreement around and saying "Peace in our time", is very dangerous. If Chamberlain had responded better (more aggressively) to Hitler, millions of lives might had been saved. Unfortunately he and his predecessors had a fixation with an inaccurate analysis of the interpretation of World War I. They thought that "peace at any cost" was worth while. They were wrong in forgetting the advice of the Roman, Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, writing in his book Epitoma rei militaris (c. 390 AD): "Si vis pacem, para bellum." (If you wish for peace, prepare for war.)
Moving on to Chapter 1 of Avery's book, The world as it is, and the world as it could be, things get more interesting. The chapter begins with a list of interesting facts. Some are a bit out of date. As of 1997, the annual U.S. military budget is not nearly a thousand billion, but merely $439 billion (only $23 billion is spent on nuclear warheads).
Avery claims in his list on page 12 that:
"In the world as it is, the nuclear weapons now stockpiled are sufficient to kill everyone on earth several times over."
This is total nonsense as already explained and shown by bthe previous posts on this blog: nuclear weapons are not that powerful, in part because the blast and other effects distances don't scale up in proportion to the amount of energy. Hence, increase the energy release by a million times, and the blast pressure damage distances are increased by only the cube-root of a million, i.e., just 100 times.
Nuclear weapons actually "work" more by knocking over charcoal cooking braziers at breakfast time (as in the case of the firestorm at Hiroshima) and by the combination of nuclear radiation with thermal flash burns (the nuclear radiation lowers the white blood cell count for a few months after exposure, preventing infections of the burned skin from being healed naturally, so the person dies). Nuclear weapons are very dangerous and powerful, but they are certainly not the superbombs painted by media hysteria and political propaganda in the Cold War. That propaganda went unchallenged by most scientists largely because it helped stabilize the situation and deter war.
However, it is now dangerous to over-hype the effects of nuclear weapons in this manner, because it detracts from the effectiveness of simple civil defence "duck and cover" and evacuation countermeasures. If you do get a terrorist nuclear attack, the casualty toll is basically dependent on whether people watch the flash and fireball through windows (getting burned by thermal radiation in the process, and then get killed or seriously injured when the blast wave arrives some seconds later, fragmenting the windows), or whether they "duck and cover".
Avery then goes on to Africa and its problems: the need for safe and adequate drinking water supplies and medical help.
Avery suggests funding these justifiable schemes by taxing international currency transactions. Sounds good if it works, i.e., if it doesn't put international trade out of business. If you tax too much, this will happen, because imports and exports will become even more highly taxed than they are now.
Page 16 contains the stupid claim:
"In the world as it could be, a universal convention against terrorism and hijacking would give terrorists no place to hide."
So a piece of paper will prevent terrorists hiding in mountains, in vast sparsely populated areas? This is an example of dangerous nonsense. It's dangerous because it creates a false sense of security, resting on a piece of paper.
In the real world, there are lots of bits of paper in each country with laws written on them. That doesn't abolish crime. Reason? The laws are just scribbles on pieces of paper. Human nature is such that criminals don't pay attention to laws, and even with the deterrents of fines and prison sentences, nobody has ever invented a way to make all people conform to the law. When you apply this fact to terrorists, the problem is immense because the punishments available cannot be scaled up in proportion to the potential crimes and acts of terrorism. The relative risks for terrorists don't increase in proportion to the threat that the terrorists present to civilization.
Avery also goes on to claim (on page 17) that war could be abolished just as slavery was abolished.
There are various deep-rooted problems with this claim: the American Civil War was essentially a war against slavery.
War and slavery have very little to do with one another. Often, people go to war to preserve your independence, i.e., to fight for freedom, or fight against the prospect of becoming a slave in some political ideology (fascism, communism, etc.).
It follows that if you want to ensure continued freedom from slavery, you need the ability to fight against those who would make a slave of you. Therefore, you need to be able to go to war to prevent slavery.
If you abolish the possibility of fighting against thugs, you will risk becoming a slave. So Avery's idea that the abolition of slavery in the American Civil War and other fights should now be followed by an abolition of the possibility of war, i.e., fighting against the prospect of being enslaved by thugs, is a contradiction. It is manifestly gullible and dangerous.
Moving on to Chapter 2 of Avery's book, Tribalism, which contains a discussion of how bees returning to their hives can communicate to other bees some information about how far away, and in what direction, any good pollen sources can be found. This was discovered in 1945 by Karl von Frisch. The returning bee flies around in a kind of circle with occasional short cuts across the diameter of the circle. The direction of the short cut across the diameter of the circle marks the direction to the pollen source, and the number of wiggles the Bee's abdomen makes as it crosses the diameter of the circle indicate the distance to the pollen source:
"Studies of the accuracy with which her hive-mates follow these instructions show that the waggle dance is able to convey approximately 7 bits of information - 3 bits concerning distance and 4 bits concerning direction."
Interesting trivia.
Moving on to Avery's Chapter 3, Nationalism, a false religion, things get back on topic again. Avery argues that the nation state is a kind of tribe, and wars between nation states are basically tribal wars: "... a totally sovereign nation-state has become a dangerous anachronism."
Unless you precisely define a "totally sovereign nation-state", this is illucid. Most nation-states have some interdependence on others, such as being part of a union (e.g., the European Union or the United States of America) or federation (e.g., the Russian Federation).
This doesn't prevent them being involved in wars, or starting wars to protect themselves if their vital interests are threatened.
There is actually a danger in federation and union which I must explain:
A few hundred years ago, there was an era called the "Age of Discovery" in which large unions, nations and empires, sent out armies to seize the assets of small, happy, free and independent tribes. This theft was "justified" by denying the victims any right of free expression, and indeed herding them up and selling them as slaves.
The Spanish actually destroyed an ancient South American civilization in this way, while other Europeans colonised massive areas of Africa and Asia, forcing the people into slavery or brainwashing them with various religions.
Therefore, even successful unions, federations and other groups may pose a threat to civilizations that differ from themselves. There is an enormous amount of sheer arrogance in the replies people give to this. They claim that errors that occurred before cannot happen again because people learn from their mistakes. Wrong. Errors that have occurred in the past actually keep on occurring:
Even within any union or federation, you will find groups of people being exploited by the union or federation as a whole. They will be forced to pay taxes for services they do not use, and so on. They do not have any say because they are a minority and the particular form of so-called "democracy" (which is a sheer travesty of the term "democracy" as used in Ancient Greece, where every citizen had a daily vote on the day's policies) in use is basically a dictatorship with a choice between two rich old men, once every five years.
If we go back in time a bit to the age before really effective military forces existed in England, you come to a time when England was free to all who came with enough swords. This is precisely the reason why first the Romans and later the Normans invaded England successfully.
If we give up our armaments, we will be in a similar position to that we were in when we were conquered by the Romans and the Normans.
Alliances are fickle. In World War I, from 1914-8 the allies consisting of Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Serbia, and Belgium fought against the enemies consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. In 1915 Japan joined the allies and Bulgaria joined the enemy. In 1916 and 1917, Romania and America, respectively, joined the allies.
In World War II, 1939-45, Italy and Japan, which had both been allies in World War I, became enemies, switching sides. Allegiances can shift, treaties can be broken. In World War II, America was surprised by the sneaky Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while Russia was surprised by Hitler's treachery. Russia had a pact with Hitler which guaranteed peace. It wasn't worth a cent.
Avery correctly pins a share of the blame for World War II on the French, on page 62:
"In 1921, the Reparations Commission fixed the amount that Germany would have to pay [mainly to France, in compensation for the costs of World War II] at 135,000,000,000 gold marks. Various western economists realized that this amount was far more than Germany would be able to pay; and in fact, French efforts to collect it proved futile. Therefore France sent army units to occupy industrial areas of the Ruhr in order to extract payment in kind. The German workers responded by sitting down at their jobs. Their salaries were paid by the Weimar government, which printed more and more paper money. The printing presses ran day and night, flooding Germany with worthless currency. By 1923, inflation had reached such ruinous proportions that baskets full of money were required to buy a loaf of bread. At one point, four trillion paper marks were equal to one dollar. This catastropic inflation reduced the German middle class to poverty and destroyed its faith in the orderly working of society.
"The Nazi Party had only seven members when Adolf Hitler joined it in 1919. By 1923, because of the desperation caused by economic chaos, it had grown to 70,000 members."
Avery's Chapter 4 is called Religion: Part of the problem? - or the answer?. This is particularly interesting (page 67):
"Early religions tended to be centred on particular tribes, and the ethics associated with them were usually tribal in nature. ... In the 6th century B.C., Prince Gautama Buddha founded a new religion in India, with a universal (non-tribal) code of ethics. Among the sayings of the Buddha are the following: Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love. Let a man overcome anger by love; let him overcome evil by good. All [weak] men tremble at punishment. All [over-indulged] men love life. Remember that you are like them, and do not cause slaughter.
"One of the early converts to Buddhism was the emperor Ashoka Maurya, who reigned in India between 273 B.C. and 232 B.C. After his conversion, he resolved never again to use war as an instrument of policy. He became one of the most humane rulers in history, and he also did much to promote the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia.
"In Christianity, which is built on the foundations of Judaism, the concept of universal human brotherhood replaces narrow loyalty to the tribe. [This simplification of Avery's won't go down well with followers of Judaism, and ignores the crimes, from the Inquisition to Nazi Christianity, done in the name of Christianity over the centuries.] The universality of Christian ethical principles, which we see especially in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, make them especially relevant to our own times. Today, in a world of thermonuclear weapons, the continued existence of civilization depends on whether or not we are able to look on all of humanity as a single family."
This again is wrong: thermonuclear weapons don't threaten our existence. They are there because people threaten our freedom.
If they do get used in war again, that would be terrible, but how terrible it is depends on what people can do to protect themselves. It's a quantitative thing, not a qualitative thing.
All disasters are terrible. They are more terrible if you give up in advance and don't have any civil defence advice in place with the evidence to support - to the general public hearing the advice - the fact that "duck and cover" and decontamination and other countermeasures do actually work and are feasible and have been well tested against a range of different types of nuclear explosion in carefully instrumented, scientific trials.
On page 68, Avery states:
"In the Christian Gospel According to Matthew, the following passage occurs: You have heard it said: Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy. But I say unto you: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that spitefully use you and persecute you. ...
"The seemingly impractical advice given to us by both Jesus and Buddha - that we should love our emenies and return good for evil - is in fact of the greatest practicality, since acts of unilateral kindness and generosity can stop escalatory cycles of revenge and counter-revenge such as those which characterize the present conflict in the Middle East and the recent troubles in Northern Ireland. Amazingly, Christian nations, while claiming to adhere to the ethic of love and forgiveness, have adopted a policy of 'massive retaliation', involving systems of thermonuclear missiles whose purpose is to destroy as much as possible of the country at which retaliation is aimed. It is planned that entire populations shall be killed in a 'massive retaliation', innocent children along with guilty politicians."
Avery here neglects a very important question:
"Would you love Adolf Hitler as your neighbour and forgive him while he is in the middle of exterminating millions in gas chambers, and allow him to continue?"
Jesus's to love thy neighbour doesn't or shouldn't apply to Mr Hitler. So we immediately find a massive hole in Christian ethics and philosophy. Avery merely ignores the existence of this hole, which in the real world (if he were a politician) would mean he would be liable to fall straight down the hole, dragging all those who followed him down there too.
No. You shouldn't love thy neighbour if that neighbour is potentially a mass murderer who will use your good will to help accomplish evil goals. That's a massive problem that totally destroys the whole thesis of Avery.
Avery goes on, still on page 68:
"The startling contradiction between what Christian nations profess and what they do was obvious even before the advent of nuclear weapons..."
Hold hard. Nuclear weapons ended World War II, because they forced Russia to declare war on Japan in order to get some of the advantages of being a victor. This made Japan's leaders realise it has lost the war. The numbers of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were trivial compared to the numbers killed by regular incendiary air raids on Japan, which included the firestorm on Tokyo in March 1945 that was far more destructive than a nuclear bomb.
The purpose of our having nuclear weapons is to deter war and prevent a war. 'Massive retaliation' is an old and largely outdated deterrent concept, and there are more modern strategies such as counterforce (hitting military targets with weapons of yields and burst types such as to minimise any possible collateral damage to civilian homes).
However, the point is that World Wars are less likely when the potential losses to all parties are massive. This is the main reason why nuclear weapons have prevented regional Cold War conflicts from escalating to all-out World War.
On page 160, Avery produces a graph (Figure 8.1) which shows the increase in infant deaths due to the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990, under U.N. Security Council Resolution 678 which authorized the use of 'all necessary means' to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. The mortality rate of children under five years of age in Iraq doubled within a year.
This highlights the perils of economic sanctions: they don't hurt the dictators, they kill innocent kids. They may sound "peaceful" but they still kill. In the same way, according to some muddled pacifist sentiments, only war using particular kinds of "violent weapons" is a bad thing. According to that bad philosophy, the use of gas chambers to massacre people is "peaceful" because there are no "horrible bombs or bullets" involved. Actually, it is just as bad to kill people regardless of the method used. Cold-blooded slaughter with gas, refusal to allow medical treatment, or starvation is - if anything - even more sinister than the use of violence in anger.
Avery's Chapter 10 is World government. The flaw with this idea is simple to see: laws get broken. The idea that a world government based on laws will be a success is refuted amply by a look at what happens in any country when laws are made: criminals break them regardless of law enforcers. At present, the stability of the world is ensured by military deterrence. Remove that mechanism, and you are playing with fire. Every time people have tried to impose a philosophical solution like Marxism or Fascism, it has failed. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The idea of a world government is that of absolute power, and absolute corruption.
The Roman Empire was the world government of its time. It was maintained by ruthless suppression of dissent, and it was continually at war, often civil war.
A world government would not abolish war, it would relabel all future wars as "civil wars". Merely adding the word "civil" to war is the kind of worse-than-useless political solution to a problem you can expect from moronic zombies.
On page 214, Avery quotes a 1954 suggestion by Edith Wynner for world government (which sounds as if it is a line borrowed from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still):
"A policeman seeing a fight between two men, does not attempt to determine which of them is in the right and then help him beat up the one he considers wrong. His function is to restrain violence by both, to bring them before a judge who has authority to determine the rights of the dispute, and to see that the court's decision is carried out."
This is all false. First, the person who is being wrongfully attacked first wants the attack to stop, not to beat up the other person.
The suggestion in the quotation that people always want revenge is prejudiced and wrong.
Second, the policeman does have a duty to collect relevant evidence and to do that efficiently he or she needs to take statements from any witnesses, and ascertain that any evidence (weapons with fingerprints, etc.) will be available for use in a prosecution. The policeman decides on the basis of this preliminary investigation who he or she should arrest.
If the policeman arrests an innocent person to bring them before a judge, that is wrongful arrest. Arrests must be based on evidence or at least strong suspicion with some reasoning behind it.
The whole idea that in any war both sides are equally at fault is nonsense: and an insult to those murdered by Hitler's thugs.
In particular, the idea of an international police force to catch and punish criminals fighting terrorist wars is just nonsense because it can't deal with suicide bombers. You can jump up and down on the grave of the suicide bomber, but that will not deter other suicide bombers.
The pacifist case for world government is just shallow and insulting. It is likely to cause more violent wars (which will be called, ironically, "civil wars") than before, simply because vast numbers of people will probably resent the system. It will permit corruption and "might is right" majority rule and barbarity on a scale not seen since the Roman Empire. It will not be capable of stopping 9/11 type suicide bombers.
World government would reduce individualism by removing part of each person's sense of personal identity to a group, and will thereby increase the risk of subversive warfare and insurrection against the massive nanny-state quango of dictatorial majority-controlled officialdom that constitutes the travesty of democracy masquerading as a "world government".
"... the fact is that, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, humans have not killed other humans as a matter of course for the greatest part of Homo Sapiens’ time on earth. The beginnings of our species are figured to be about 195,000 years ago, the date of the earliest anatomically modern skeletons, but there is no indication of anything like murder until about 20,000 years ago. Doesn’t seem to be in our blood, but in our circumstances. ...
"But it is important to see that this kind of interpersonal violence and murder comes rather late in Sapiens development. In fact, for 90 per cent of our time on earth there is nothing to indicate that humans ever reached the extreme state of knocking each other off. It was a reaction to an extreme crisis, it got to be a familiar response to the increased tensions in a time of scarcity and competition, and once established it seems to have continued on.
"But not because it was in our human nature. Rather it was in the conditions of our life. And therefore the obvious lesson is that we can’t just shrug and say some people are just “born killers,” or “it’s in the blood.” It’s not, and was not for 175,000 years." - Kirkpatrick Sale
The killing started with people hunting animals for food. People were primarily tribal hunters for the 175,000 years before they became farmers around the time of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago. Hunting is a violent activity, so when hunting ended, those people used to regular bouts of violence would be more likely to fight among themselves instead. You see this in primitive tribes even today: they have two important activities, both full of ceremony and skill: hunting and warfare. The hunting provides food. The warfare maintains order between rival tribes, driving away the hunting competition and the danger of invasion of their villages and theft of their wives by other tribes.
According to Wikipedia: "Neanderthals became extinct in Europe approximately 24,000 years ago". Maybe they were driven away or killed off in warfare? Even if this was the case, it's not automatically the survivors who are to blame.
The pacifist approach begins with the false assumption that fighting and violence are totally immoral and inexcusable under all circumstances. Yet the cold blooded massacres of history (which pacifists don't seem to worry about) like concentration camps where malnutrition and disease, slavery and neglect, or cold-blooded gassing, are the really big problems. Anne Frank died from typhus, and millions died from murder or deliberate neglect in axis civilian concentration camps.
Saddam used nerve gas to murder thousands of Kurds in 1988, and he ordered the torture and murder of thousands of others. It doesn't make that much difference whether he used a bullet to "violently" murder someone, or simply let them die from thirst more "peacefully" in a cell. It's still murder.
I think that this problem is deliberately being neglected by pacifism, and it's the fatal flaw in pacifism. There was an infamous Oxford Union debate around 1933 on whether to "Fight for King and Country". A pacifist philosopher, the immoral Professor C.E.M. Joad (later imprisoned for travelling without a valid railway ticket), was asked what he would do "if his wife was being raped by enemy soldiers". He dismissed the question with a comic reply that he would simply join in and have an orgy, which made most people there laugh, and he won the vote.
The public viewed the plight of people in concentration camps as a joke at that time, circa 1933, in comparison to the violent horrors of having a major war.
But the correct question to pin on the pacifist is what you do if the enemy is torturing people held without charge in concentration camps, as Hitler and Saddam did. Economic sanctions is worse than useless: the death rate of children under 5 years of age doubled within a year due to the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990, under U.N. Security Council Resolution 678 which authorized the use of 'all necessary means' to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. You can't hurt the dictator by applying economic sanctions: innocent people suffer. The only real option is to go to war against them. It's simply not a case that "two wrongs don't make a right". You have to try to estimate how many more people you can save by going to war than will be killed if you don't have the war. Whether it is right or not depends on whether there is a profit to be had, i.e. if the number of lives saved exceeds the number killed in the conflict.
You can only call a war illegitimate or "murder" if amount of anticipated suffering as a result of the conflict exceeds the amount of suffering which is likely if the war doesn't occur.
There is not much to say about the incident, really, which was hardly Chernobyl.
It's interesting however that Japan has managed to embrace nuclear reactor technology despite the anti-nuclear sentiment in the aftermath of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the 1954 contamination of 23 Japanese fishermen on the "Lucky Dragon".
What is interesting about the media is not the science (the newspaper editor doesn't know the difference between a pBq and a GBq, it's all the same), but the politics.
Here in the UK, there is no antinuclear concern about the risks of having 0.99 microcurie or 9.9 kBq of Am-241 (very similar to plutonium for health reasons) in smoke detectors in every house to save lives in fires.
Antinuclear people don't put on a massive front-page propaganda attack saying that 9.9 kBq of Am-241 emits 9900 alpha particles per second, and since a single alpha particle can in principle set off a lung cancer, it follows that over a two week period a smoke detector emits enough alpha particles to totally wipe out humanity, at least in principle.
It's fairly obvious that this scare-mongering won't get into the newspapers, although on a scientific footing it is similar quantitatively to much of the anti-nuclear protestors propaganda.
Nobody will listen to propaganda unless it reinforces their prejudices.
If you point out that a single smoke detector, if incinerated in a fire, could - according to the exceptionally fiddled antinuclear lobby calculations - exterminate humanity, nobody listens.
If the media publish the same fiddled calculation about a leak of radioactivity from a nuclear reactor, it gets a very different treatment from those reading it, starting off a panic wave.
If you take a rock, in principle (according to misleading calculations) that could be used by a terrorist to kill everyone, simply by hitting people over the head. In practice, of course that is not going to happen. Similarly, the Am-241 contaminated smoke from a single burned smoke detector isn't going to end up in people's lungs, with one alpha particle setting off a cancer in each person in the world.
If you want to play the numbers game, you can point out that Am-241 has a half-life of 432 years, so it's effective life is statistically 432/(ln 2) = 623 years. (Am-241 will emit the same number of alpha particles until it has completely decayed as would be emitted if the emission rate at the present time, now, were sustained for the statistically effective lifespan of 623 years.)
So 0.99 microcurie/9.9 kBq of Am-241 in a smoke detector emits a total of 2x10^14 alpha particles in its lifespan.
Since the world's population is 6,700,000,000 = 6.7x10^9, it is clear that if only 1 in 30,000 of the alpha particles emitted by a single smoke detector starts a lung cancer, the number of people killed will be equal to the number of people on the planet!
So it's very easy to come up with scare-mongering statements about radiation, simply because the numbers are so big.
The "problem" for scare mongerers is that the actual risks are diluted by immense factors. Not only will it be extremely unlikely that smoke containing alpha emitters will get into many people's lungs, but even when it gets there, it is usually removed quickly like ordinary dust, and in any case the probability of a single alpha particle causing a lung cancer is extremely low.
So because the quantitative errors involve in naive scare-mongering antinuclear propaganda are so extreme, the qualitative nature of the risk changes totally:
it's a trivial risk compared to the hazards of inhaling natural radioactive radon gas that comes from the soil and seeps into houses.
Traditionally, the pro-nuclear lobby has made an awful mess and have never properly made people aware clearly of the nature and intensity of natural background radiation from space and present in soil, water, food, and the air.
If they did calculate and measure background radiation exposures carefully, they could express radiation levels in terms of the natural average sea level exposure, so people would be aware of radiation in a more useful, more quantitative sort of way.
However, they don't do this. Edward Teller made a complete mess of it in the 1950s by having to compare radiation from the nuclear industry to cigarette smoking, instead of comparing it to natural background radiation in a quantitative way.
In addition, it is vital to present the facts of how background radiation levels vary in different locations.
The best thing the nuclear industry could do is to publish a global map (like a layered Google map) on the internet with reliable data on radiation levels around the world, showing how cosmic radiation varies as a function of terrain altitude and proximity to the poles (where the earth's magnetic field lines are nearly vertical and so can't shield charged cosmic rays), as well as the effects of different types of soils which contain different amounts of radioactive minerals.
They should also indicate the natural alpha, beta and gamma radiation in food, water, air and soil in different places.
It would be useful knowledge that anyone could grasp if colour coding was used.
SM has kindly emailed me the following extract about firestorm exaggerations by Dr W. E. Strope who worked at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at nuclear tests from Crossroads (1946) at Bikini Atoll, onward.
AIR DEFENSE BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE CIVIL DEFENSE
Whole World on Fire—And All Wet
Walmer (Jerry) Strope
I have just finished reading a strange book, Whole World on Fire, by Lynn Eden, published by Cornell University Press a month ago. Ms. Eden is an historian at Stanford University. Her thesis is that Air Force targeteers perversely continued to use blast damage as the basis for targeting even though fire damage "would extend two to five times farther than blast damage" because of institutional biases stemming from the emphasis on precision bombing in World War II. That is, "organizations draw on past practices and ideas even as they innovate to solve new problems."
To Ms. Eden, the question of prioritizing nuclear weapon effects is just a convenient example of this institutional characteristic. She does not purport herself to be an expert on the physics of mass fires. This helps explain part of the strangeness I find in the book; namely, Why now? After all, the Cold War is over and targeteers are not fine-tuning the SIOP. It seems she has spent 15 years reviewing the literature on nuclear fires, interviewing the knowledgeable people and writing the book. It just happened to come out now.
In Chapter 1, Ms. Eden introduces her readers to the problem by postulating the detonation of a 300-kt bomb 1,500 feet above the Pentagon. It is here that I encounter more of the strangeness. It seems that Ms. Eden is under some pressure to convince her readers that the Air Force had plainly ignored the obvious. Therefore, she tends to present the most extreme positions on mass fire issues, as well as some of the "tricks of the trade." One trick: close in, we are told "the fireball would melt asphalt in the streets." But when the description gets to the Capitol building some three miles away, there is no comparable sentence. The previous image is permitted to carry over.
Next, we are told, "Even though the Capitol is well constructed to resist fire, and stands in an open space at a distance from other buildings, light from the fireball shining through the building’s windows would ignite papers, curtains, light fabrics, and some furniture coverings. Large sections of the building would probably suffer heavy fire damage. The House and Senate office buildings would suffer even greater damage. The interiors of these buildings would probably burn."
Hold on! Wait a minute! The Capitol building is completely protected by sprinklers. So are the House and Senate office buildings, the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court building, and the massive buildings lining the Mall and in the Federal Triangle. These buildings may become sopping wet but they probably will not burn. The monuments also will not burn.
Why don’t mass fire calculators take sprinkler systems, venetian and vertical blinds, and other fire protection measures into account? Is the situation in the Nation’s Capital unusual? Not anymore. For decades, the lowly fire protection engineer and his employer, the fire insurance industry, have been gnawing away at the fire problem. According to the National Fire Protection Association, between 1977 and 2002 the annual number of building fires in the United States declined by 50%, from 3.2 million a year to 1.6 million a year. Fires in hotels and motels, which killed over 100 people a year as recently as the late 1960s, have become so rare that the U.S. Fire Administration no longer keeps statistics on them. If it were not for a sizable increase in wildfire damage—resulting from timber management practices—the statistics would look even better.
Ultimately, Ms. Eden concludes, "Within tens of minutes, the entire area, approximately 40 to 65 square miles—everything within 3.5 or 4.6 miles of the Pentagon—would be engulfed in a mass fire. The fire would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else." To reach this horrific prediction, Ms. Eden has to ignore more than the prevalence of sprinkler systems. Among these other issues are the hole in the doughnut problem and the survivability problem.
I was introduced to the hole in the doughnut issue in 1963 when I first visited UK civil defense in the Home Office, Horseferry House, London. I discovered that the people I was talking to had planned the incendiary attacks during World War II. Their effectiveness depended on how many explosive bombs they included in an attack. If they included too many, the buildings were knocked down and didn’t burn well. In fact, the target just smoldered. If they included too few, the incendiaries often just burned out on undamaged roofs. Finally, in the Hamburg attack, they got it right, just opening up the buildings so they burned rapidly. The Hamburg mass fire was called a "fire storm." These people were adamantly unanimous that a nuclear weapon could never cause a firestorm. The severe-damage region around the explosion would just smolder, producing a "ring fire," called a doughnut by our fire research people. That’s apparently what happened at Hiroshima.
Mass fire models that ignore such views produce fierce fires that would seem to destroy everything. But lots of people survived in the fire areas at Hamburg and Hiroshima. The late Dr. Carl F. Miller (after whom the California chapter of ASDA is named) did the definitive analysis of the records of the Hamburg Fire Department. About 20 percent of the people in the fire area were in underground bunkers. Eighty percent were in shelters in building basements. Survival in bunkers was 100%; in basements, it was 80%.
Despite her exaggeration of mass fire effects, I don’t think Ms. Eden’s book would convince the joint strategic targeteers to change their ways. I have concluded that the blast footprint and the fire footprint will be roughly congruent. Thus, I refer to them simply as the "direct effects area" (See my Nuclear Emergency Operations 101.)
Lynn Eden’s book is a strange book—and a little bit dumb (her term.) I wouldn’t recommend you buy it. But if you are part of the old civil defense research group, you should find the pages on that work interesting. If you just want to learn something about mass fires, try to find a copy of FEMA H-21 of August 1990, the Nuclear Attack Environment Handbook. It won’t lead you astray.
I exchanged emails on the subject of blast wave energy attenuation in causing damage, a couple of years ago, with Dr Harold Brode, the RAND Corporation expert on the effects of nuclear weapons. I had read Dr William Penney's evidence published in 1970 about the blast in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which he had personally surveyed as soon as the war ended in 1945. The blast, Penney's studies showed, rapidly lost energy (and pressure) due to the work done in causing damage. According to the laws of physics, once damage is done like this, energy is irreversibly lost. The American book by Glasstone ignores this effect entirely, although it does cite Penney's paper.
Harold Brode suggested that when the blast knocks down a house, the energy used to do that is not entirely lost because you get accelerated fragments of brick, glass and wood moving outward in the radial direction. However, these move far more slowly than the shock front and soon lag behind the shock, fall to the ground and decelerate by tumbling. The distances debris moved when houses were knocked down in nuclear tests in 1953 and 1955 were carefully measured and filmed; it is not that far, and most of the debris remains close (within a matter of metres) to the house. So there is a problem here. For relatively small weapons, the blast pressure drops so rapidly with distance in the range of serious damage, that the energy loss effect is not too severe (although it was apparent in Penney's measurements of the deflection of steel bars and the crushing of petrol cans at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). But for big weapons, it interferes seriously with the blast scaling laws and the result is that blast damage distances increase far more slowly than the official predictions, especially at low pressures.
This is relevant to massive controversies over thermal radiation effects like skin burns and fires. The majority of fires in Japanese residential areas were caused by the blast wave via overturning cooking braziers in homes full of inflammable paper screens, bamboo furniture, etc., the charcoal braziers being in use at the times of each nuclear attack (breakfast time for Hiroshima, lunch time for Nagasaki). Colonel Tibbets, in charge of the 509th which dropped the bombs (he was the pilot on the Hiroshima raid) writes in his 1978 autobiography about how expert he was on firestorms. He had served in Europe on successful incendiary missions before going to Japan, where he advised General LeMay on how to successfully create firestorms with a mix of incendiaries plus EXPLOSIVES, which create blast damage and enable fires to start in the debris of wooden buildings. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki landed at local times of 8.15 am, when people were either on their way to work or school, or having breakfast (using charcoal cooking braziers in wood frame houses containing inflammable bamboo and paper screen furnishings), and at 12 pm, when many people were preparing lunch and others were out of doors.
The skin burns risk depends mainly on the time of day, since the percentage of people who would be in an unobstructed line-of-sight of a fireball in a modern city ranges from 1% in the early hours of the morning to an average of 25% during the daytime. Hence, the flash burns casualty rate can easily vary by a factor of 25, just as a function of the time of day that an explosion occurs. Obviously, the density of combustible materials on the ground determines the risk of a firestorm, but this is trivial for most modern buildings in cities made largely from steel and concrete, which simply don't burn. Dr Brode did several studies of firestorm physics during the 1980s, which I feel are irrelevant because the fact is that firestorms were well investigated in World War II when incendiary attacks were made on many cities in an effort to start them. The areas which burned well and led to firestorms has a massive abundance of combustible materials per square foot, and these were mainly the wooden medieval parts of old cities like Hamburg, and wooden construction areas of Japanese cities. Once burned, there were rebuilt with less inflammable materials, so these firestorms cannot be repeated in the future. (Similarly, wooden London was burned down in 1666, and was rebuilt in a more fire-resistant manner.)
There are some interesting reports by Carl Miller on firestorms in Germany, written in the 1960s. Somehow, the RAND Corporation did not get hold of this information, or else it simply jumped on the "Nuclear Winter" funding band waggon in 1983, and ignored the facts about firestorms derived from WWII obtained from personal experience by people like George R. Stanbury of the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch.
Dr Strope wrote a 1963 NRDL unclassified report on the base surge radiation effects of the 1946 Baker underwater test, which took a lot of finding. Fortunately the British library at one time was donated a lot of original NRDL reports (in printed form, not the usual poor-quality microfilm) and hold them at Boston Spa. I've compiled and assessed a great deal of information on radiation from underwater tests, but blogger and wordpress blog sites are not suited to publishing tables of information.
The British information which Dr Strope refers to in 1963 is that of Home Office scientist George R. Stanbury, who did the civil defence studies at the first British nuclear test in Monte Bello, 1952. Stanbury writes in the originally 'Restricted' (since declassified) U.K. Home Office Scientific Adviser's Branch journal Fission Fragments, Issue Number 3, August 1962, pages 22-26:
'The fire hazard from nuclear weapons
'by G. R. Stanbury, BSc, ARCS, F.Inst.P.
'We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation from nuclear attack. We hope to show that there is good scientific justification for the assessments we have made, and we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ...
'Firstly ... the collapse of buildings would snuff out any incipient fires. Air cannot get into a pile of rubble, 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This is not just guess work; it is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb [V1 cruise missile] incidents in London supported by a wealth of experience gained generally in the last war.
'Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general.
'Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited, it by no means follows that a continuing and destructive fire will develop.
'The effect of shielding in a built-up area was strikingly demonstrated by the firemen of Birmingham about 10 years ago with a 144:1 scale model of a sector of their city which they built themselves; when they put a powerful lamp in the appropriate position for an air burst they found that over 50% of the buildings were completely shielded. More recently a similar study was made in Liverpool over a much larger area, not with a model, but using the very detailed information provided by fire insurance maps. The result was similar.
'It is not so easy to assess the chance of a continuing fire. A window of two square metres would let in about 10^5 calories at the 5 cal/(cm)^2 range. The heat liberated by one magnesium incendiary bomb is 30 times this and even with the incendiary bomb the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5; in a large room it is very much less.
'Thus even if thermal radiation does fall on easily inflammable material which ignites, the chance of a continuing fire developing is still quite small. In the Birmingham and Liverpool studies, where the most generous values of fire-starting chances were used, the fraction of buildings set on fire was rarely higher than 1 in 20.
'And this is the basis of the assertion [in Nuclear Weapons] that we do not think that fire storms are likely to be started in British cities by nuclear explosions, because in each of the five raids in which fire storms occurred (four on Germany - Hamburg, Darmstadt, Kassel, Wuppertal and a "possible" in Dresden, plus Hiroshima in Japan - it may be significant that all these towns had a period of hot dry weather before the raid) the initial fire density was much nearer 1 in 2. Take Hamburg for example:
'On the night of 27/28th July 1943, by some extraordinary chance, 190 tons of bombs were dropped into one square mile of Hamburg. This square mile contained 6,000 buildings, many of which were [multistorey wooden] medieval.
'A density of greater than 70 tons/sq. mile had not been achieved before even in some of the major fire raids, and was only exceeded on a few occasions subsequently. The effect of these bombs is best shown in the following diagram, each step of which is based on sound trials and operational experience of the weapons concerned.
'102 tons of high explosive bombs dropped -> 100 fires
'88 tons of incendiary bombs dropped, of which:
'48 tons of 4 pound magnesium bombs = 27,000 bombs -> 8,000 hit buildings -> 1,600 fires
'40 tons of 30 pound gel bombs = 3,000 bombs -> 900 hit buildings -> 800 fires
'Total = 2,500 fires
'Thus almost every other building [1 in 2 buildings] was set on fire during the raid itself, and when this happens it seems that nothing can prevent the fires from joining together, engulfing the whole area and producing a fire storm (over Hamburg the column of smoke, observed from aircraft, was 1.5 miles in diameter at its base and 13,000 feet high; eyewitnesses on the ground reported that trees were uprooted by the inrushing air).
'When the density was 70 tons/square mile or less the proportion of buildings fired during the raid was about 1 in 8 or less and under these circumstances, although extensive areas were burned out, the situation was controlled, escape routes were kept open and there was no fire storm.'
Regarding Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo and other incendiary attacks on Japan, there is an excellent table of comparison of all the data on page 336 of the 1950 "Effects of Atomic Weapons" (deleted from later editions), based on the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report of 1946 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Hiroshima bomb destroyed 4.7 square miles, Nagasaki 1.8 square miles, and the 1,667 tons of incendiary and TNT dropped on Tokyo in one conventional raid destroyed 15.8 square miles, killing many more people than the atomic bombs.
The nuclear winter cold war propaganda dependent as it was on firestorm nonsense, is a complete lie scientifically of course, but it was a major politician and media "spin event":
"This study, which is based entirely on open Soviet sources, examines and analyzes Soviet views on and uses made by Soviet scientists of the so-called ''Nuclear Winter'' hypothesis. In particular, the study seeks to ascertain whether Soviet scientists have in fact independently confirmed the TTAPS prediction of a ''Nuclear Winter'' phenomenon or have contributed independent data or scenarios to it. The findings of the study are that the Soviets view the ''Nuclear Winter'' hypothesis as a political and propaganda opportunity to influence Western scientific and public opinion and to restrain U.S. defense programs. Analysis of Soviet publications shows that, in fact, Soviet scientists have made no independent or new contributions to the study of the ''Nuclear Winter'' phenomenon, but have uncritically made use of the worst-case scenarios, parameters, and values published in the Crutzen-Birks (Ambio 1982) and the TTAPS (Science, December 1983) studies, as well as models of atmospheric circulation borrowed from Western sources. Furthermore, current Soviet directives to scientists call for work on the further strengthening of the Soviet Union's military might, while it is also explained that the dire predictions of the possible consequences of a nuclear war in no way diminish the utility of the Soviet civil defense program and the need for its further improvement."
- Dr Leon Goure, USSR foreign policy expert, Soviet Exploitation of the 'Nuclear Winter' Hypothesis, SCIENCE APPLICATIONS INTERNATIONAL CORP., MCLEAN, VA, report SAIC-84/1310, DNA-TR-84-373, SBITR-84-373, ADA165794, June 1985.
A great deal of the problem is that following fashion and consensus is the easiest thing to do. Usually the mainstream viewpoint is the best there is, so people have a lot of faith in it, on the principle that "so many people can't all be wrong".
Nuclear winter has quite an interesting history which I've followed from the beginning. It started off with the comet impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. The comet forms a fireball when it collides with the atmosphere, and the thermal radiation is supposed to ignite enough tropical vegetation to produce a thick smoke cloud, freezing the ground and killing off many species.
The best soot to absorb solar radiation is that from burning oil, and Saddam tested this by igniting all of Kuwait's oil wells after the first Gulf War. Massive clouds of soot were produced, but the temperature drop was far less than "nuclear winter" calculations predicted occurred in the affected areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in_the_first_Gulf_War
The idea that a dark smoke layer will stop heat energy reaching the ground is naive because by conservation of energy, the dark smoke must heat up when it absorbs sunlight, and since it is dark in colour it is as good at radiating heat as absorbing it. So it passes the heat energy downwards as the whole cloud heats up, and when the bottom of the cloud has reached a temperature equilibrium with the top, it radiates heat down to the ground, preventing the dramatic sustained cooling.
Although there is a small drop in temperature at first, as when clouds obscure the sun, all the soot cloud will do in the long run is to reduce the daily temperature variation of the air from day to night, so that the temperature all day and all night will be fairly steady and close to the average of the normal daytime and nighttime temperatures.
The dinosaur extinction evidence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_Crater, might be better explained by the direct effects of the comet impact: the air blast wave and thermal radiation effects on dinosaurs, and the kilometers-high tsunami. At the time the comet struck Chicxulub in Mexico with 100 TT (100,000,000 megatons or 100 million million tons) energy 65 million years ago, the continents were all located in the same area, see the map at http://www.dinotreker.com/cretaceousearth.html and would all have suffered severe damage from the size of the explosion. Most dinosaur fossils found are relatively close to the impact site on the world map 65 million years ago.
Another issue is that some proportion of the rock in the crater was calcium carbonate, which releases CO2 when heated in a fireball. If there was enough of it, the climatic effects would have been due to excessive heating, not cooling.
The "nuclear winter" idea relies on soot, not dust such as fallout (which is only about 1% of the crater mass, the remainder being fallback of rock and crater ejecta which lands within a few minutes). So it is basically an extension of the massive firestorms theory, which has many issues because modern cities don't contain enough flammable material per square kilometre to start a firestorm even when using thousands of incendiaries. In cases such as Hiroshima, the heavy fuel loading of the target area created a smoke cloud which carried up a lot of moisture that condensed in the cool air at high altitudes, bringing the soot back promptly to earth as a black rain.
Because this kind of thing is completely ignored by "nuclear winter" calculations, the whole "nuclear winter" physics looks artificial to me. In 1990, after several studies showed that TTAPS (Sagan et al.) had exaggerated the problem massively by their assumptions of a 1-dimensional model and so on, TTAPS wrote another paper in Science, where they sneakily modified the baseline nuclear targetting assumptions so that virtually all the targets were oil refineries. This enabled them to claim that a moderate cooling was still credible. However, the Kuwait burning oil wells experience a few years later did nothing to substantiate their ideas. Sagan did eventually concede there were faulty assumptions in the "nuclear winter" model, although some of his collaborators continue to write about it.
Just to comment on this. I read Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War" (first published 1960) as a teenager and then requested his other books via the local library.
Kahn's book "The Next 200 Years" is if I recall, a small slim paperback and I don't think there was much data in it to make his case.
The key book for environmentalism is Herman Kahn and Julian Simon, "The Resourceful Earth - A Response to Global 2000" published in 1984 (Kahn died in 1983 while it was still in the press).
That volume is massive and contains hundreds of graphs and tables of data which really make a convincing case that environmentalism exaggerated the facts.
I read that perhaps twenty years ago and don't have a copy handy. But I think it dealt with everything.
Even things like species extinction are being grossly exaggerated - species are always becoming extinct as the fossil record shows. It's nothing new. As new species come along, old ones die off. It that wasn't the case, there would still be dinosaurs around, and the world would be a lot less healthy for humans. The whole reason why saber toothed tigers and other wild beasts were hunted to extinction was to make life bearable, not out of ignorance or selfishness!
Most of this environmentalism is a replacement for religion. The rate of rise of sea levels, etc., is slow enough that low lying areas can build up defenses in the meanwhile - far more cheaply than cutting CO2 emissions.
Better still, switch to nuclear power. The effects of low doses of external gamma radiation, especially if delivered at low dose rates, are actually beneficial to human beings as they stimulate DNA repair mechanisms like P53 and cut the cancer risk (it's only internal high-LET radiation like alpha and beta particles from ingested Sr-90 or Pu-239, or extremely large doses/dose rates from gamma rays, that cause a net health risk):
See the monumental report on effects of low dose rate, low-LET gamma radiation on 10,000 people in Taiwan by W.L. Chen,Y.C. Luan, M.C. Shieh, S.T. Chen, H.T. , Kung, K.L. Soong, Y.C.Yeh, T.S. Chou, S.H. Mong, J.T.Wu, C.P. Sun,W.P. Deng, M.F.Wu, and M.L. Shen, Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, page 6, available in PDF format at
http://www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf
'An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan. Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 ([low dose rate, low-LET gamma radiation emitter] half-life: 5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv, a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv. Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per 100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per 1,000 children under age 19.
'The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per 100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and income distributions of these persons are the same as for the general population, it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure. ...
'The data on reduced cancer mortality and congenital malformations are compatible with the phenomenon of radiation hormesis, an adaptive response of biological organisms to low levels of radiation stress or damage; a modest overcompensation to a disruption, resulting in improved fitness. Recent assessments of more than a century of data have led to the formulation of a well founded scientific model of this phenomenon.
'The experience of these 10,000 persons suggests that long term exposure to [gamma]radiation, at a dose rate of the order of 50 mSv (5 rem) per year, greatly reduces cancer mortality, which is a major cause of death in North America.'
For Hiroshima-Nagasaki data supporting the fact that low level gamma radiation cuts down cancer risks, see the most recent two posts at http://glasstone.blogspot.com/
Growing populations and economic activity really need to be used to sort out the problems in an unbiased way. Unfortunately, the mainstream approaches start with a prejudice dating back to 1957 when the facts were not known (P53 was only discovered twenty years later). The culture clash between fashionable politics and scientific facts always result in fashionable politics winning, and people needlessly dying and suffering as a consequence.
"History shows that much can change, expectedly or unexpectedly, over short periods, and it is unlikely that most trends would continue unabated for decades without changing course."
I hope you are right. Unfortunately, they will probably make changes for the worst. Like spending enough to bankrupt the world by building giant CO2 extractors which will be completed just about the time the oil, gas and coal runs out, and so will never be used. That's the story of how politics always works when it uses "common sense" to tackle complex problems: it is not merely "too little too late", but "completely crazy".
Fastfission, please don't make ''ad hominem'' personal insults about Sternglass being "semi-crackpot". If you want to see my alternative POV on Sternglass, see my top blog post at [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/]], which analyses errors in Sternglass' work. Notice that this (Wikipedia) article on Sternglass contains a lot of bias. First, it claims in passing that Herman Kahn minimises the effects of radiation, when in fact radiation is the topic Kahn dwells on, e.g., Kahn stated in his 1960 book ''On Thermonuclear War,'' Princeton University Press, p 24:
‘... those waging a modern war are going to be as much concerned with bone cancer, leukemia, and genetic malformations as they are with the range of a B-52 or the accuracy of an Atlas missile.’
Secondly, this Wiki article claims that Linus Pauling was warning that there is no safe threshold back in the 1960s. Scientifically, what matters is what evidence there is either for or against a threshold. Certainly there is no threshold for high-LET radiation like alpha and beta particles in tissue, because they are stopped within a small distance and the ionization density is large enough to overcome human DNA repair mechanisms like protein P53 (which was only discovered in the late 1970s). However, low-LET radiation like gamma rays, when received at either high or low dose rates, do show a threshold [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/]]; this data is from Japanese nuclear weapon attacks (where the dose rates were high, due to initial nuclear radiation) and from low-level radiation during an accident where Cobalt-60 got into steel used to make buildings lived in for 20 years by 10,000 people in Taiwan (see W.L. Chen, Y.C. Luan, M.C. Shieh, S.T. Chen, H.T. , Kung, K.L. Soong, Y.C.Yeh, T.S. Chou, S.H. Mong, J.T.Wu, C.P. Sun,W.P. Deng, M.F.Wu, and M.L. Shen, ''Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?,'' published in the ''Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons,'' Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, page 6, available in PDF format here: [[http://www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf]]).
Thirdly, as explained in my blog [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/]], Alice Stewart actually debunked Sternglass' model, instead of confirming it as this Wikipedia nonsense claims:
Sternglass first publicised his "theory" at 9th Annual Hanford Biological Symposium, May 1969. On 24 July 1969, Dr Alice Stewart wrote an article for the ''New Scientist'', "The pitfalls of Extrapolation" which found a big problem:
"Sternglass has postulated a fetal mortality trend which would eventually produce rates well below the level which - according to his own theory - would result from background radiation." [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/]]
Fourthly, his book ''Before the Big Bang'' contains various errors and doesn't address or replace the standard model of particle physics. It's not a case that Sternglass belongs to a group of "crackpots", it's just a case that his work on these subjects is severely defective and wanting. If he did a lot more work on it and resolved the problems, then that would be fine. What causes difficulties is the dictatorial difficulty when people try to impose things which contain errors, without first correcting the errors, on the world. Labelling all people with alternative ideas "crackpots" by default isn't helpful, especially when you do it from anonymously under the name "Fastfission".
Sternglass may have a problem with nuclear power, but in that case he has the problem that the sun is nuclear and that background low-level radiation exists everywhere. Does he advise us to minimise it by living at the bottom of mineshafts in locations where there is little thorium-232, potassium-40, uranium-238 (and uranium decay daughters, like radon-222), etc? What about carbon-14 naturally in food? People like Sternglass have helped prejudice the public against the facts. I've traced the history of radiation hysteria here: [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2007/03/control-of-exposure-of-public-to.html]], [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2007/03/effect-of-dose-rate-not-merely-dose-on.html]] in particular, and [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2007/03/above-3.html]]. The basic conclusion is that the "no threshold" dictum was popularised on the basis of flawed paper by Professor E. B. Lewis, author of Leukemia and Ionizing Radiation, ''Science'', 17 May 1957, v125, No. 3255, pp. 965-72. Lewis used very preliminary Japanese and other data which wasn't detailed enough to show that a threshold existed. He was arguing from ignorance, not from evidence! Yet his argument, which ignored dose rate effects and the quality factor of the radiation, i.e., high or low linear energy transfer (LET). - Nigel Cook 172.207.139.192 (talk) 22:04, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
continuation of last sentence in previous comment:
Yet his argument, which ignored dose rate effects and the quality factor of the radiation, i.e., high or low linear energy transfer (LET), was widely accepted at the time due to political prejudice about the Cold War, and has not been corrected as the facts have emerged since.
I've also got a lot of other evidence that backs up the Japanese and Taiwan data: there were studies for example of cancer rates in different cities with different levels of natural background radiation yet closely matched population groups (with matched age groups, same diets, same habits regards smoking and drinking, etc.).
The fact that this isn't being done by professional health physicists is a sad reflection on the state of society with its severe radiation dogmas and orthodoxies, and character assassination of anyone who prefers FACTS to FASHIONS.
‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - R. P. Feynman (quoted by Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, 2006, p. 307).
‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of [the speculative consensus of] experts.’ - R. P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1999, p187.
Cities at greater elevations above sea level have higher background radiation due to cosmic radiation (at sea level, the atmosphere is equivalent to a radiation shield of 10 metres of water, but as you move to higher altitudes, there is a fall in this amount of shielding between you and the nuclear furnaces called stars in the vacuum of outer space, so the cosmic background radiation exposure you get increases substantially).
The studies date from the 1970s-1990s, and show that if anything there is a fall in the cancer rate as you go to cities at higher altitude and more background radiation.
However, critics may claim that it is due to cleaner air, less smog, lower oxygen pressure and a healthier lifestyle.
Other studies of this sort have therefore compared cities at similar altitude with matched populations, where differences in background radiation arise from the bedrock. A city built on granite will generally have a higher background radiation level than one built on clay or limestone, so it is possible to measure the different considerably background radiation levels in different cities, and this can be correlated to cancer rates.
Obviously here things are complicated because you get radon-222 gas inside buildings built on granite that contains traces of uranium ore. This radon-222 emits alpha particles that are high-LET radiation and certainly they don't conform to a threshold-effects relationship (there is no threshold for high-LET radiation like alpha particles inside the body, only for gamma rays at relatively low doses). So this would complicate the results of the survey, and this is the case.
I will dig out all the graphs and other evidence and publish them on this blog in the future.
Louise, thank you for a very interesting post on a fascinating subject! Cosmic rays are amazing. Apparently 90% that hit the Earth's atmosphere are protons from the sun, 9% are alpha particles (helium nuclei) and 1% are electrons.
Of course the protons don't make it through the Earth's atmosphere (equivalent to a radiation shield of 10 metres of water, which is quite adequate to shield the core of a critical water-moderated nuclear reactor!!).
When the high-energy protons hit air nuclei, you get some secondary radiation being created like pions which decay into muons and then electrons.
A lot of the electrons get trapped into spiralling around the Earth's magnetic field lines at high altitudes, in space, forming the Van Allen radiation belts.
Where the magnetic field lines dip at the poles, they all come together, and so the electron density increases at the poles. At some point this negative electric charge density is sufficiently large to "reflect" most incoming electrons back, and that spot is called the "mirror point".
Hence the captured electrons are trapped into spiralling around magnetic field lines, to-and-fro between mirror points in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
There are also of course occasional irregular gamma ray flashes from gamma ray bursters, heavy particles, etc.
It's not clear what the actual radiation levels involved are: obviously the radiation level from cosmic radiation on Earth's surface is known. It's highest at the poles where incoming radiation runs down parallel to magnetic field lines (without being captured), hence the "aurora" around the polar regions where cosmic rays leak into the atmosphere in large concentrations.
It's also high in the Van Allen belts of trapped electrons.
It's not quite as bad in space well away from the Earth. Apparently, the cosmic radiation level on the Moon's surface is approximately 1 milliRoentgens/hour (10 micro Sieverts/hour), about 100 times the level on the Earth's surface. If that's true, then presumably the Earth's atmosphere (and the Earth's magnetic field) is shielding 99% of the cosmic radiation exposure rate.
All satellites have to have radiation-hardened solar cells and electronics, in order to survive the enhanced cosmic radiation exposure rate in space.
In the original version of Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" he has a graph showing the gamma ray energy spectrum of cosmic radiation in outer space, with another curve showing the gamma ray output from black holes via Hawking radiation. Unfortunately, the gamma background radiation intensity at all frequencies in the spectrum is way higher than the predicted gamma ray output from massive black holes (which is tiny), so there is too much "noise" to identify this Hawking radiation.
This list is mainly books I've actually read, whereas [for] the last one you did (a year or more ago), I hadn't hea[r]d most of the titles. So I can make a comment or two.
I have ... disagreements with some claims in these books. ...
* I disagree with Weinberg's hype (The First 3 Minutes) in applying general relativity to cosmology, because I think in a quantum gravity theory the exchanged gravitons will be received in a redshifted state for gravitational interactions between relativistically receding masses.
* I disagree with Richard Rhodes several major errors (The Making of the Atomic/Hydrogen Bomb). (1) Presenting the Copenhagen Interpretation of Bohr as if it is Gospel truth, and ignoring Feynman's path integrals interpretation which replaces the Copenhagen Interpretation with chaotic effects due to path interference in small distance scales, e.g., interference to electron orbits by pair production of virtual particles which cause Brownian-motion type chaos in the atom. (2) Not pointing out clearly that the role of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to encourage Russia to declare war on Japan (to be on the list of victors, and hence to end Japan's hopes that Russia might negotiate a settlement with America, which was why Japan was holding out), which ended Japan's hopes that Russia would negotiate with America to end the war without loss of face. (Although because America on 9 August had exaggerated its hand with atomic warfare, and the President had promised an endless rain of ruin when in fact a third atomic bomb wouldn't be ready until September, America had to accept a conditional surrender from Japan, rather than unconditional surrender: it couldn't afford to have its bluff called when it would be unable to deliver another atomic bomb for many weeks.) According to page 336 of the U.S. Government book "Effects of Atomic Weapons" (1950), the incendiary raid on Tokyo killed more than the number killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. According to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation internet site (they do the surveys of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors), even in the survivors within 1 km of the hypocentre, less than half the leukemia cases were due to radiation (the majority were natural). Leukemia is the most enhanced cancer after radiation exposure. Altogether, from 1950-90, only 428 people died of cancer of all sorts due to radiation (9% of all the cancer deaths, i.e., 91% of cancer deaths were not connected to radiation, as proved by the control group survey) in a group of 36,500 survivors. Hence, the average risk of death from cancer due to radiation to a survivor for a period of 40 years after exposure was only 1.2%, compared to a natural (non-radiation) cancer death risk of 13%. No wonder that 50% of the survivors were still alive in 1995, fifty years after the bombings. Ref.: Radiation Research (146:1-27, 1996).
Richard Rhodes - like Steven Weinberg - [is] not writing pure science, but spin that the public want to read because they are prejudiced by propaganda from political institutions with axes to grind. What really made me angry in Rhodes' books are his pseudoscientific treatment of fallout particles. He claims that coral is reduced to calcium metal in one place, and in another he claims the first H-bomb test in 1952 produced 80 million tons of mud. It turned out that the fallout had been carefully collected and analysed in weapon test reports WT-615, WT-915 and WT-1317, which show that the fallout from coral (CaCO3, calcium carbonate) is CaO (lime), with an outer layer of Ca(OH)2 (slaked lime, calcium hydroxide). The 80 million tons he quotes is the crater volume which is mostly just ejected as rocks around the crater. The fallout mass taken up into the fireball is only 1% of the cratered material. Even if the fireball was hot enough to reduce 80 million tons of coral to calcium metal (it isn't), that calcium would oxidise in the atmosphere while falling out. Rhodes' science is a lot of hogwash!
Thanks, Louise. This is extremely interesting and very informative! It's interesting that the dense meteorites, especially those composed of iron and nickel, tend to survive the ablation during their fall through the atmosphere, and hit the ground. Less dense stony objects of similar mass tend to heat up and then explode like an air burst nuclear bomb while still high in the atmosphere, as was the case of the Tunguska explosion of June 30, 1908 (an explosion equivalent to several megatons of TNT, see C. Chyba, P. Thomas, and K. Zahnle, "The 1908 Tunguska Explosion: Atmospheric Disruption of a Stony Asteroid", Nature, v361, 1993, p. 40-44).
"Since the Hall of Meteorites contains similiar samples, are any of them about to melt? If they contained even a tiny amount of radioactive isotopes, it would not be safe to go near this room. If they contained any isotopes, those would have decaued to nothing long ago. Today these rocks are cold as the New York Winter, yet Earth's core continues to produce heat."
If a small rock was hot enough to measure the heat, the radiation would be lethal. A radiation dose of 10 Sieverts, which is equal to 10 Joules/kg for a quality factor of 1 (low LET radiations), is lethal within a few days. Since an average person is 70 kg, that means that 700 Joules of radiation is lethal. To make a rock hot and remain hot for long periods by the degradation of radioactive energy into heat, a larger amounts of radioactive energy are required, so the radiation from such a rock would be lethal.
The thing about the earth is that you have a lot of radioactivity distributed within it, and very little leakage of that energy. A few feet of earth or rock can keep the embers of a fire hot for a long time. If you take account of the thickness of the earth's crust, it traps heat very efficiently, so that a moderate amount of radioactivity keeps the core hot. (However, I'm skeptical about the details as I've not seen any convincing calculations from geologists so far.)
If you try testing those meteorites for radioactivity content, you will find there will be some content in them (probably little, but still a trace)! The earth does contain a lot of uranium: http://www.uic.com.au/nip78.htm:
"The convection in the core may be driven by the heat released during progressive solidification of the core (latent heat of crystallisation) and leads to the self-sustaining terrestrial dynamo which is the source of the Earth's magnetic field. Heat transfer from the core at the core/mantle boundary is also believed to trigger upwellings of relatively hot, and hence low density, plumes of material. These plumes then ascend, essentially without gaining or losing heat, and undergo decompression melting close to the Earth's surface at 'hot spots' like Hawaii, Reunion and Samoa.
"However, the primary source of energy driving the convection in the mantle is the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium. In the present Earth, most of the energy generated is from the decay of U-238 (c 10-4 watt/kg). At the time of the Earth's formation, however, decay of both U-235 and K-40 would have been subequal in importance and both would have exceeded the heat production of U-238. ...
"Measurements of heat have led to estimates that the Earth is generating between 30 and 44 terawatts of heat, much of it from radioactive decay. Measurements of antineutrinos have provisionally suggested that about 24 TW arises from radioactive decay. Professor Bob White provides the more recent figure of 17 TW from radioactive decay in the mantle. This compares with 42-44 TW heat loss at the Earth's surface from the deep Earth."
There's nothing in the universe that isn't radioactive. (Even clouds of hydrogen gas contain traces of tritium.)
Table 1 in that above-linked article shows that meteorites are 0.008 parts per billion uranium, the earth's mantle is 0.021 parts per billion uranium, and the continental crust is 1.4 parts per billion uranium. The concentration of uranium in the earth's core is not very well known (antineutrino measurements are available), but since uranium is relatively dense (denser than lead), there may be a considerable concentration of uranium in the earth's core, at least similar to that in the crust. Also thorium-232, etc.
... The earth's core is hot not because the radioactivity is capable of keeping isolated rocks hot, but because the rate of loss of heat is minimised due to the poor thermal conductivity of the outer layers, particularly the crust. This keeps most of the heat trapped.
The calculation to check the theory should be simple. Take the total radioactivity in the earth (in Becquerels, decays/second), multiply it by the average energy of the radiation emitted (0.3 MeV or so for a beta particle, 4 MeV or so for an alpha particle) and that gives you the total MeV/second, then convert that power ... into Joules/second (watts). Then estimate the diffusion rate of the heat out of the earth.
[BTW, I've noticed some typographical errors and errors of grammar in the last update added to the body of this post, e.g., the update section. I'm not going to try to update it, for the following reasons. There is a flaw in the old blogger template software used on this blog, and every time any changes are made, extra line spacings between paragraphs are automatically inserted when the changes are saved. There is also a flaw that if the template is changed, comments are lost and not transferred over.]
... The evidence in favour of a supernova explosion shortly before the Earth formed 4,540 million years ago is compelling from the natural radioactivity distribution in the Earth. Earth is basically a giant fallout particle, as people like Edward Teller first pointed out over fifty years ago:
‘Dr Edward Teller remarked recently that the origin of the earth was somewhat like the explosion of the atomic bomb...’
– Dr Harold C. Urey, The Planets: Their Origin and Development, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p. ix.
‘It seems that similarities do exist between the processes of formation of single particles from nuclear explosions and formation of the solar system from the debris of a supernova explosion. We may be able to learn much more about the origin of the earth, by further investigating the process of radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons tests.’
– Dr P.K. Kuroda, ‘Radioactive Fallout in Astronomical Settings: Plutonium-244 in the Early Environment of the Solar System,’ Radionuclides in the Environment (Dr Edward C. Freiling, Symposium Chairman), Advances in Chemistry Series No. 93, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1970. ...
A rare, non-detailed background survey of the social reasons for nuclear weapons effects data censorship is the paper:
Professor Brian Martin (then a PhD physicist at the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Australian National University, Canberra, but now he is Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong), "Critique of Nuclear Extinction", published in Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300 (1982):
"The idea that global nuclear war could kill most or all of the world's population is critically examined and found to have little or no scientific basis. A number of possible reasons for beliefs about nuclear extinction are presented, including exaggeration to justify inaction, fear of death, exaggeration to stimulate action, the idea that planning is defeatist, exaggeration to justify concern, white western orientation, the pattern of day-to-day life, and reformist political analysis. Some of the ways in which these factors inhibit a full political analysis and practice by the peace movement are indicated. Prevalent ideas about the irrationality and short duration of nuclear war and of the unlikelihood of limited nuclear war are also briefly examined."
For his article debunking the "nuclear winter" hoax of Sagan et al., see Brian Martin's article, "Nuclear winter: science and politics", Science and Public Policy, Vol. 15, No. 5, October 1988, pp. 321-334, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/88spp.html.
"ALTHOUGH AMOUNTS OF NITROGEN OXIDES EQUIVALENT TO THE OUTPUT FROM MANY CONCORDES WERE RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE WHEN NUCLEAR TESTING WAS AT ITS PEAK, THE AMOUNT OF OZONE IN THE ATMOSPHERE WAS NOT AFFECTED."
What happens when nitrogen oxides are released in a nuclear explosion is partly that they combine with moisture in the mushroom cloud to form very dilute nitric acid which eventually (after being blown around the world in small particles) gets precipitated.
More important, although the shock wave of a nuclear explosion creates nitrogen oxides, especially nitrogen dioxide, THE PROMPT X-RAYS AND GAMMA RADIATION CREATE OZONE!
It's the ozone around the early fireball that shields most of the the early-time thermal radiation, which is mainly in the ultraviolet.
Hence, nuclear explosions in the atmosphere don't just release oxone-destroying nitrogen oxides, THEY ALSO RELEASE OZONE! Depending on the yield and the altitude of the detonation, in some cases the Earth's ozone layer can actually be INCREASED not reduced.
A high altitude nuclear explosion does NOT produce a strong blast wave, and all nitrogen oxides production requires a high overpressure shock wave! Hence, in a high altitude nuclear explosion, the production of ozone from gamma radiation EXCEEDS the production of nitrogen oxides by many times. It is quite conceivable that suitable high altitude nuclear explosions over the South Pole would have the effect of repairing the hole in the ozone layer there. Of course, it won't happen, because as Feynman said when discussing nuclear testing hysteria in the 1960s, we really still live in a pseudo-scientific age.
"Large segments of Western populations hold sciences in low esteem. This trend became particularly pervasive in the field of radiation sciences in recent decades. The resulting lack of knowledge, easily filled with fear that feeds on itself, makes people susceptible to prevailing dogmas. Decades-long moratorium on nuclear power in the US, resentment of "anything nuclear", and delay/refusal to obtain medical radiation procedures are some of the societal consequences. The problem has been exacerbated by promulgation of the linear-no-threshold (LNT) dose response model by advisory bodies such as the ICRP, NCRP and others. This model assumes no safe level of radiation and implies that response is the same per unit dose regardless of the total dose. The most recent (June 2005) report from the National Research Council, BEIR VII (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) continues this approach and quantifies potential cancer risks at low doses by linear extrapolation of risk values obtained from epidemiological observations of populations exposed to high doses, 0.2 Sv to 3 Sv. It minimizes the significance of a lack of evidence for adverse effects in populations exposed to low doses, and discounts documented beneficial effects of low dose exposures on the human immune system. The LNT doctrine is in direct conflict with current findings of radiobiology and important features of modern radiation oncology. Fortunately, these aspects are addressed in-depth in another major report—issued jointly in March 2005 by two French Academies, of Sciences and of Medicine. The latter report is much less publicized, and thus it is a responsibility of radiation professionals, physicists, nuclear engineers, and physicians to become familiar with its content and relevant studies, and to widely disseminate this information. To counteract biased media, we need to be creative in developing means of sharing good news about radiation with co-workers, patients, and the general public."
Here's a quotation from Feynman (not his specific objection to low-level radiation hysteria which he rejected elsewhere by saying that if Pauling et al were so worried about such levels of radiation, they'd campaign first and foremost to make everyone evacuate cities at high altitudes where cosmic radiation is highest, they'd ban air travel, they'd evacuate cities built on bedrock like granite that contains substantial quantities of naturally radioactive uranium-238, etc., and THEN move on to the far smaller dangers of fallout from weapons tests which only increased lifetime background radiation dosage by typically a mere 1%, see Feynman's book called "The Meaning of It All"):
"... great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
"We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders' airfields--radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners' airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. ... you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
"When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask, "How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?"
"It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.
"In a field which is so complicated ... that true science is not yet able to get anywhere, we have to rely on a kind of old-fashioned wisdom, a kind of definite straightforwardness. I am trying to inspire the teacher at the bottom to have some hope and some self-confidence in common sense and natural intelligence. The experts who are leading you may be wrong.
"I have probably ruined the system, and the students that are coming into Caltech no longer will be any good. I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television--words, books, and so on--are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.
"Finally, with regard to this time-binding, a man cannot live beyond the grave. Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the race--now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable--does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.
"It is necessary to teach both to accept and to reject the past with a kind of balance that takes considerable skill. Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation."
’Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During Groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance.’
- Wikipedia.
‘[Groupthink is a] mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.’
- Professor Irving Janis.
The wikipedia article on groupthink gives two examples which have been investigated in some detail: the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (1986) which Feynman and a military guy investigated, and Bay of Pigs invasion (1959-1962).
Challenger exploded on launch in 1986 because it was launched in freezing weather, when the cold had caused the rubber O-rings (sealing the sections of reusable booster rocket) to cease being rubbery and to leak fuel outwide the rocket, which ran down the outside and ignited in the rocket flames at the bottom. The leaking O-rings were soon burned, failing entirely, and causing the boosters to ignite along the seals and blow up.
In the days and hours before the disaster occurred, technicians repeatedly pointed out to their bosses that this risk was going to put lives on the line. The way out was to wait until the environment temperature was above the point where rubber ceases to function as a sealant. But the delay in firing the shuttle was deemed to be too costly and unnecessary. The risks, although known, were dismissed by the senior "experts" in charge of the operation who heard about them. There was also the problem that the major source of data on the problem was the contractor which was selling the booster's to NASA, which didn't want to lose its contract by causing unnecessary problems and worries. So everyone agreed to cross their fingers, hope for the best, and launch the shuttle when they knew the temperature was so low that the rubber sealants would malfunction and possibly leak causing disaster.
An account of the investigation was written by Feynman, included as an appendix to Feynman's book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Feynman the main physicist on the commission inquiry into the disaster. However, Feynman couldn't find the exact cause directly himself because - despite going to all the contractors - nobody there told him the facts. The people concerned who knew were scared to lose their jobs or to be somehow "disloyal" to their employers by speaking out.
What happened instead was that Feynman was told the facts by another expert, the rocket engineer General Donald J. Kutyna, who was investigating the disaster on the same committee. Kutyna was the man who had headed the inquiry into the explosion of a liquid-fuelled Titan missile in its silo in 1980 (a technician had in that case caused the diaster by accidentally dropping a wrench socket down the silo, where it hit the fuel tank and caused a leak which led to a chemical explosion which blew the 9-megaton warhead off the missile without detonating the 1-point safe nuclear core, of course). Because of his experience of investigating a liquid fuelled rocket explosion, Kutyna was able to work out why Challenger blew up and told Feynman the facts to ensure that the NASA cover-up would be exposed, and criticisms levelled at those who made the decision to launch in low temperature weather, when they should have delayed launch to reduce risks, saving lives.
The Bay of Pigs disaster occurred when President Kennedy in 1961 authorised the invasion of Cuba by a group of Cuban exiles. They met fierce opposition and called for air support. Kennedy didn't want to provide air support using the U.S. military, for fear that the U.S. involvement would become known. In the end, he lost both the invasion and also the anonymity of the U.S., because when Castro captured the Cuban exiles they had U.S. equipment and admitted having been trained by the U.S. The cause of the failure was the groupthink of Kennedy's advisors, who feared speaking out of turn when the final planning for the operation was being approved.
Another example of groupthink by a committee of leading experts, which is the design of the Hiroshima bomb, which used 64.1 kg of highly enriched uranium and only managed to fission 1% of that, about 12 kt or so. The Nagasaki bomb contained only 6.19 kg of plutonium, but had an efficiency of over 20% fission. In 1952, an implosion bomb along the lines of the Nagasaki bomb (but with a hollow core) using the same quantity of uranium as the Hiroshima bomb, yielded 500 kt, i.e. 50% fission efficiency.
Why was the Hiroshima bomb relatively so inefficient? In the book The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee, Dr Theodore Taylor criticised the Hiroshima bomb design as a stupid design which was the result of groupthink-type incompetence due to a committee team.
The Hiroshima bomb was like a gun and fired a solid cylinder of highly enriched U-235 into a hollow cylinder. There were quite a few issues with this. If fission reaction was started by a stray neutron before the projectile U-235 was fully home in the hollow U-235 sleeve, the result would be relatively inefficient because the geometry would allow most of the neutrons to escape instead of producing further fissions. Since the duration of any fission reaction was trivial in comparison to the time taken for the projective to move a few centimetres, there would be no further assembly once the reaction began.
These details are disclosed in an article called The Physics of the Bomb published in No. 2 of the Penguin series 'Science News;, 1947, written by Los Alamos weapons designer Professor Philip Morrison. Morrison expanded on several details of the 1945 Smyth report (Atomic Energy for Military Purposes) in his article, for example the statistical risks of pre-detonation (inefficiency) due to the neutron background in a gun-type weapon assembly, the fact that neutrons reflected by a tamper take so long to go out of the core, get reflected and return to the core, that in that interval the chain reaction has grown exponentially and the returning neutrons are trivial. Morrison made it clear that the role of a neutron reflector is restricted largely to keeping the critical mass minimal at the moment the reaction starts and thus starting the reaction efficiently (with as much supercriticality as possible for a given mass of fissile material, since supercriticality depends on the ratio of the actual mass present to the critical mass at the moment the reaction begins), instead of preventing neutron escape once the reaction is growing at an exponential rate. He also made it clear that the fission chain reaction is ended in all cases prematurely to some degree (hence without 100% fission efficiency) due to thermal expansion of the bomb core, which soon makes it subcritical, quenching the reaction. he made it clear that the key to high efficiency is achieving the maximum possible degree of supercriticality at the start of the reaction, i.e. having a configuration which has as many critical masses present as possible. This can be achieved by reducing the effective value of the critical mass while keeping the actual mass of fissile material constant; this is the route taken when a bomb core is compressed, and in high yield, high-efficiency fission weapons it is is achieved using a hollow fissile core surrounded by a layer of chemical explosive which is detonated at many points simultaneously. Such points were not always intuitively obvious during WWII, and the nearest the Manhattan had to a computer was a non-electronic (mechanical, driven by electric motors but involving no information in the form of electrical signals) punched-card sorting system. Initially it was used for months by the person in charge of it to play about, producing logarithmic tables, until Oppenheimer fired that person and put Feynman in charge of making efficiency calculations for atomic bomb cores. In 1953, Morrison had to testify before the U.S. Congressional hearings on "Subversive Influence in the Educational Process" by the Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, 83nd congress. Morrison admitted being a communist party member at college. In earlier hearings before the same committee, Morrison was accused of hyping the effects of nuclear weapons in Japan for political purposes. See http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/morrison.html
Philip Morrison, a Cornell Professor of Physics, expresses doubts about atomic warfare and then faces a Congressional anticommunist investigating committee, 1952 a brief excerpt from: SUBVERSIVE INFLUENCE IN THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS (Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, 82nd congress, 2nd session, Sept. 8, 9, 10, 23, 24, 25, and Oct. 13, 1952 (US Govt Printing Office, 1952)
----------------------------------- Mr. Morris. Did you contribute an article to the Scientific Amercan? Dr. Morrison. I have had it published. I don't know if you call that contributing or not.
Mr. Morris. Did you write a review of a book by an Englishman named P.M.S. Blackett, entitled "Fear, War, and the Bomb?"
Dr. Morrison. I reviewed P.M.S. Blackett's book for the Herald Tribune and for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Mr. Morris. And you praised that book?
Dr. Morrison. I said that book had many excellent things in it. I also criticized an amendment. I wrote an honest review of the book.
Mr. Morris. Mr. Chairman, may that review of Dr. Morrison of P.M.S. Blackett's book entitled "Fear, War, and the Bomb" be put into the record?
The Chairman. It may be made part of the record.
(The material referred to follows:)
"BLACKETT'S ANALYSIS OF THE ISSUES" by Philip Morrison [Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, February 1949]
It is 3 years since the writing of the first extensive political work of the atomic scientists: One World or None. Now the same publishers put out the American edition of a book by another scientist, the distinguished. well-informed, and earnest P.M.S. Blackett of Great Britain. As a contributor to the first book, I feel no proprietary pangs in urging all those who bought or borrowed it--and there were many--to get hold of the Blackett book.
It is written at a sadder time, and perhaps a wiser one. It is written by a man whose experience is both that of a physicist and that of a military man, and who is no American, but an Englishman, willing to take a somewhat more critical position on the issues of the day than almost any American scientist has publicly done. It is a book which does Professor Blackett credit for its thoughtfulness and scope, even though as he himself points out it is by no means "the whole truth." Read it if you wish to have an opinion on the issues of atomic energy.
My piece in One World or None was the description of the effect of a single atomic bomb on New York City. It is a frightening article, as I have many times tested by direct observation. Yet it is a major thesis of the Blackett book--and I believe a correct thesis--that even a thousand bombs will not of themselves decide the issue of a major war. We said there is no defense, and we meant it. It is still true. But we spoke in a different language from the language of Blackett. We did not speak in terms of strategy, in terms of overall economies, in terms of production and territorial conquest. We spoke of the impact of the bomb on the homes and the hopes of men and women.
I wrote of the lingering death of the radiation casualties, of the horrible flash burns, of the human wretchedness and misery that every atomic bomb will leave near its ground zero. Against this misery there is indeed no real defense. Neither our oceans nor our radar nor our fighters can keep us intact through another major war. But--and I quote Blackett (p. 159): "The very effective campaign, largely initiated by the atomic scientists themselves, to make the world aware of the terrible dangers of atomic bombs, played an important part in bringing pressure to bear on the American Government to propose measures to control atomic weapons and to take them out of the hands of the military."
----------------------------------- The hearing transcript provides this note on Morrison: "Professor Morrison is a nuclear physicist who took part in the design and fabrication of the bomb at Los AIamos Laboratory. He is now a member of the Physics Department at Cornell University."
Much of the effort made by people to publish nuclear weapon design secrets seems to be motivated by anti-deterrence sentiments.
Information on details of nuclear weapon design is not needed to justify civil defence/defense efforts.
Some historically scientific material of great relevance to this post is to be found in the book by physicists Dr. Edward Teller and Dr. Albert L. Latter, Our Nuclear Future ... Facts, Dangers and Opportunities, Criterion Books, New York, 1958:
A very prescient passage from page 119:
"It is possible that radiation of less than a certain intensity does not cause bone cancer or leukemia at all. In the past small doses of radiation have often been regarded as beneficial. This is not supported by any scientific evidence [as of 1958]. Today many well-informed people believe [without any evidence, i.e. on the basis of pure ignorance] that radiation is harmful even in the smallest amounts. This statement has been repeated [by mainstream "professional" cranks, who haven't grasped the subtle difference between fact-based science and authority-based religion/belief, and that no amount of "professional" dogma can overrule the need for fact based evidence in science, unlike subjective fields like politics/education/religion, where the student must give answers in exams which confirm to groupthink ideology, not to the facts if the facts are different to the mainstream consensus behind the examinations board; students who pass such exams by giving the "right" answers to subjective controversies are often instilled with a confusion between what is fact and what is speculative dogma, and as a result they defend crackpot mainstream beliefs as if those beliefs were science, not lies: the only way they have to defend such lies is by personal abuse of those who factual evidence and by lying, since they have no factual evidence, no scientific basis for arguing their case, just vacuous assertions based on ignorance and a refusal to read the facts and act upon them] in an authoritive manner. Actually there can be little doubt that radiation hurts the individual cell. But a living being is a most complex thing. Damage to a small fraction of the cells might be beneficial to the whole organism. Some experiments on mice seem to show that exposure to a little radiation increases the life expectancy of the animals. Scientific truth is firm - when it is complete. The evidence of what a little radiation will do in a complex animal like a human being is in an early and uncertain state."
On pages 121-122, the book points out that Denver in the United States is at an altitude of 5000 feet above sea level, and so receives 43% more hazardous cosmic radiation (because there is less air shield between it and outer space) than you get at sea level.
The bone cancer and leukemia rates in Denver, where the 5000 feet altitude caused a 43% increase in cosmic radiation, were significantly lower than those in the sea level cities of San Francisco and New Orleans in 1947 (before any nuclear test fallout arrived).
For example, there were 10.3 leukemia cases diagnosed per 100,000 of population in San Francisco in 1947, and only 6.4 in Denver.
On page 122, Drs. Teller and latter analyse the results as follows:
"One possible explanation for the lower incidence of bone cancer and leukemia in Denver is that disruptive processes like radiation are not necessarily harmful in small enough doses. Cell deterioration and regrowth go on all the time in living creatures. A slight acceleration of these processes could conceivably be beneficial to the organism."
Actually, the mechanism is more subtle: protein P53, discovered only in 1979, is encoded by gene TP53 which occurs on human chromosome 17. P53 also occurs in other mammals including mice, rats and dogs. P53 continually repairs breaks in DNA which easily breaks at body temperature due to free radicals produced naturally in various ways and also as a result of ionisation of caused by radiation hitting water and other molecules in the body. Cancer occurs when several breaks in DNA happen to occur by chance at nearly the same time, giving several loose ends which P53 repairs incorrectly, causing a mutation. This cannot occur when only one break occurs, because only two loose ends are produced, and P53 will reattach them correctly. If low-LET ionising radiation levels are increased to a certain extent, causing more single strand breaks, P53 works faster and is able deal with faster breaks as they occur, so that multiple broken strand ends do not arise. This prevents DNA strands being repaired incorrectly, and prevents cancer - a result of mutation caused by faults in DNA - from arising. Too much radiation of course overloads the P53 repair mechanism, and then it cannot repair breaks as they occur, so multiple breaks begin to appear and loose ends of DNA are wrongly connected by P53, causing an increased cancer risk. Obviously there is a statistical risk. Quite a lot of wrongly reassembled broken DNA needs to occur until the result causes cancer. Many wrongly assembled DNA strands simply result in cell death when it tries to divide, instead of allowing endless divisions into defective cells, i.e. cancer cells. Besides P53, there are other proteins involved in DNA repair after damage. Over 50% of all cancers, however, result from mutated forms of P53 which are unable to repair damaged DNA.
So it is clear that most cancers occur as a result of a rapid double break to the TP 53 gene on human chromosome 17. The cell then divides normally, but the resulting cell produces its P53 from a mutated TP 53 gene and thus produces a flawed P53 protein, which is unable to properly repair further damage in the DNA of the cell. As a result, these cells are subjected to cumulative damage and mutations from free radicals, and are relatively likely to become cancer cells. The stimulation of P53 with low-LET (weakly ionising) radiation can boost it's efficiency, preventing multiple strand breaks from having time to occur because breaks get repaired faster before a backlog can accumulate. This is a homeostasis effect: an increase in the rate of low-LET radiation weak ionisation naturally causes the body to slightly over-respond by increasing in a non-linear response the rate of P53 repairs (similarly, the body over-responds for a long time after an infection by boosting the white cell count to levels higher than those which existed before the infection). This disproportionately or over-compensation boosts the body's ability to cope with other causes of DNA damage, such as natural causes, so the net effect is a reduction in natural cancer rates that far outweighs the trivial radiation damage at low dose rates. Hence, the overall cancer risk at low-LET low dose rate radiation is less than it would be in the absence of the radiation.
Teller and Latter then point out that if there is an effect of the enhanced cosmic radiation in Denver on the leukemia and bone cancer rate as compared to lower altitude cities, "the effect is too small to be noticed compared to other effects."
In other words, this factual data as of 1947 set a limit on how bad the radiation-induced leukemia rate could be: if it existed at all, it was dwarfed by "noise" in the data. Whenever some signal gets drowned by "noise" in data, then the real scientist starts to investigate the "noise" which is more important than the trivial signal. (This was directly how the big bang was confirmed, when the microwave background noise in the sky was investigated in the mid-1960s and found to be severely red-shifted fireball radiation from the big bang.)
On page 124, it is pointed out that mortality statistics - which don't show a decrease in cancer risks from living in places of high cosmic radiation exposure like Denver - and which therefore don't show any negative risks from low level radiation, do show correlations between other things. For example, being 10% overweight reduces life expectancy by 1.5 years, while smoking one pack of cigarettes a day reduces life expectancy by 9 years (equivalent to an average of 15 minutes reduction in life per cigarette smoked).
These are things which are real, statistically significant risks. Low-LET radiation at low dose rates isn't that kind of problem (to say the very least of it).
EDWARD LEWIS AND RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT THE IMPACT OF CALTECH BIOLOGISTS ON THE DEBATE OVER NUCLEAR WEAPONS TESTING IN THE 1950s AND 60s Thesis by Jennifer Caron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science Science, Ethics, and Society Option CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY Pasadena, California 2003 (Presented January 8, 2003)
"ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Professor Ed Lewis, I am deeply grateful to you for sharing your story and spending hours talking to me. ...
"ABSTRACT The work of Caltech biologists, particularly, Edward Lewis, on leukemia and ionizing radiation transformed the public debate over nuclear weapons testing. The United States began testing hydrogen bombs in 1952, sending radioactive fallout around the globe. Earlier more localized fallout was generated starting in 1945 from tests of atomic weapons at Nevada test sites. The Atomic Energy Commission claimed the tests would not harm human health. Geneticists knew from animal and plant experiments that radiation can cause both illness and gene mutations. They spoke out to warn the policymakers and the public. Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to the accumulated dose of radiation. He argued that this implied that leukemia resulted from a somatic gene mutation. Since there was no evidence for the existence of a threshold for the induction of gene mutations down to doses as low as 25 r, there was unlikely to be a threshold for the induction of leukemia. This was the first serious challenge to the concept that there would be a threshold for the induction of cancer by ionizing radiation. Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957 Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress." (Emphasis added to key points.)
Page 13:
"The most controversial aspect of his analysis was the linear dose-response curve. This relationship made sense to geneticists who had found a linear relationship between radiation and mutations in Drosophila down to 25 rad (Stern and Spencer). Additionally, it fit with the hypothesis of Muller that cancer could result from somatic mutations. This was not the accepted idea in other scientific and medical communities. Rather, as the official voice, the AEC medical doctors and scientists promoted the assumption that there would be a threshold below which radiation would do no harm, just as there is frequently such a threshold in chemical toxicology because the body can process small quantities of toxins like alcohol. The AEC vocally assumed and defended the threshold hypothesis; furthermore, they seem to have assumed that the amount of radiation received by Americans from fallout would be less than the threshold. Lewis found no evidence for such a threshold, and the AEC scientists were unable to offer any."
(Emphasis added to Lewis's ignorant failure to discover the facts about low level radiation, and its pseudoscientific abuse or misinterpretation as being a fact rather than an expression of science-abusing ignorance and scientific failure. If a scientist fails to find evidence which in fact does exist, that is hardly an accomplishment to be hyped or applauded. Lewis failed to find the evidence of a threshold because the dosimetry available from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was then too crude and inaccurate to produce accurate, detailed results. If Lewis had made efforts to obtain the facts instead of pretending that ignorant error was fact and going on a crusade to promote such ignorant error in journals like Science and in testimony to U.S. Congressional Hearings, then he would have been doing science not pseudoscience.)
To make the mechanism easily understood, one simple analogy to the roles of protein P53, cancer and radiation is a gasoline dump:
1. DNA-damaging free radicals are equivalent to a source of sparks which is always present naturally, and are caused by many interactions including those of ionizing radiation produced by many other causes in the body.
2. Cancer is equivalent the fire you get if the sparks are allowed to ignite the gasoline, i.e. if the free radicals are allowed to damage DNA without the damage being repaired.
3. Protein P53 is equivalent to a fire suppression system which is constantly damping out the sparks, or repairing the damaged DNA so that cancer doesn't occur.
In this way of thinking, the "cause" of cancer will be down to a failure of the P53 to repair the damage.
Naturally, the majority of cancers involve cells containing mutated P53: to get cancer naturally you usually need to have a mutation in a cell's P53 protein, which stops P53 from repairing DNA.
In other words, cancer appears when the cancer suppressor is damaged.
In nuclear radiation induced cancer, the mechanism is just slightly different: radiation induced cancer occurs where the radiation level is so great that it overwhelms the ability of P53 to repair the damage to the DNA.
However, there is another effect. As the radiation level increases, the rate of P53 repairs increases slightly faster than the DNA damage rate. This is because the body naturally detects radiation damage as an increase in free radicals (chemical-type poisoning) and over-compensates for this increase by dramatically increasing the P53 activity in repairing damaged DNA (cf. the old adage "a little of what does you harm, makes you stronger").
Only when the radiation level is higher than the maximum rate that P53 can repair broken DNA, does the cancer rate start to rise. Up to that level, the increasing P53 activity over-compensates for the radiation damage by repairing DNA much more quickly than normal, in a attempt to return the body to homeostasis.
As an analogy, think about flu: once you get infected the body's immune system must over-compensate, not just "tread water" in just keeping the infection level from rising.
It's inadequate for the immune system to respond to rampant infection by merely increasing the attacks on bacteria (which surge through tissues damaged by the flu virus, and cause the worst symptoms) at the same rate that the bacteria is growing.
If the rate of response of the immune system was the same as that of the cause of the problem, then the immune system would merely be containing the infection and preventing it from getting worse.
That's not good enough.
Instead, the immune system needs to increase the rate of attack on bacteria to a higher value than the rate which the bacteria is multiplying at, in order to not merely prevent the infection from getting worse, but to actually cause the bacterial to get killed off at a rate which is bigger than the rate at which the bacteria are multiplying. Only in this case can the population of bacteria decrease, instead of remaining constant, as would be the case if the immune system response was matched to the infection level.
Similarly, in a war, if you only respond with exactly the same amount of force as your enemy, you will be able to prevent the enemy winning, but you won't be able to end the war! The battle will go on without end. The only way to win is for one side to use more force than the other. If both sides always remain equal in strength, then the war will last forever.
Protein P53 inside individual cell nuclei, by analogy to the role of T-cells and the white blood cells of the immune system, must over-compensate for increasing problems in order to return the body to normal.
It is no good if P53's response is identical to the rate of production of DNA damage. P53 must over-compensate to any increased damage, so that the overall amount of excess DNA damage, once it is detected, begins to decrease with time instead of merely remaining constant.
Homeostasis is used in many organs and systems. In order for normal conditions to be maintained, as soon as any problem is experienced, the body must over-compensate to push conditions back towards the original conditions, not merely keep problems from getting worse.
It's not good enough to merely negate additional damage. The body has to over-compensate in order to not just prevent the problem getting worse, but to restore health. And that is precisely what happens if the injury is not overwhelmingly severe.
Once a fire starts, you don't want to simply respond by preventing it from getting bigger. You want, instead, to make the fire smaller. If the rate of growth of the fire is dF/dt, you don't want your fire-fighting response to equal dF/dt, or you will simply be preventing the fire from getting bigger. What you want is to respond at a rate which exceeds the rate of increase of the fire, so that the size of the fire falls with time instead of remaining constant.
Similarly, with radiation or any other problem, the body's response at low levels is to over-compensate. This over-compensation will actually reduce the natural cancer rate at low radiation levels.
At very high radiation levels, this effect is disappears and the net response is negative, because damage occurs at such a high rate that the P53 repair mechanism is overloaded and is increasingly unable to repair the damage.
Another analogy to P53 is the brakes of a vehicle. Cancer in this analogy is like a automobile crash. If the brakes are defective, that can cause a crash. The ability of a vehicle driver to avoid a crash depends to a considerable extent upon having good brakes. The ability of the brakes to prevent a crash may be impaired by various factors, such as excessive speed or oil on the road. If the brakes are merely capable of preventing the speed from increasing, they are not good enough. Brakes must be able to do more than cancel out acceleration and keep the velocity constant. Brakes must be able to bring about a deceleration, to slow a vehicle.
It's pretty obvious that protein P53 is able to bring about a net reduction in the natural cancer rate when exposed to low-LET ionizing radiation at a "low" dose rates (but still many times the natural background dose rate).
Once the excessive number of free radicals from radiation are detected as a chemical poisoning internally, P53 repair processes are greatly enhanced to over-compensate for the damage rate, in order to reduce the total amount of damage (rather than merely keeping it in check, or constant). By analogy, in any infection problem, homeostasis mechanisms act to restore the equilibrium not by keeping the damage level constant, but increasing the repair rate so that it exceeds the rate of damage. Only in this way can the total amount of damage be reduced.
If you actually read Kahn's most important work, On Thermonuclear War, the key arguments against wishful thinking are based on facts, not "opinions".
Fact: arms control was tried throughout the 1930s to enable the world to "live in peace" with the Nazis.
Fact: the Nazis simply agreed to everything then broke their word, broke the written agreements they gave to Prime Minister Chamberlain at Munich, etc.
Fact: arms control does not protect you from other countries with secret rearmament programs.
Fact: Hitler's Germany were able to almost instantly convert peacetime factories to munitions factories, by simply preparing the plans and blueprints. No practical arms-inspection policy can get around that.
Fact: even if arms control and pacifism prevented World War II, which it failed to do of course, but even if it did "succeed", millions would still have died in concentration camps and "peaceful invasions" could not have been prevented.
Fact: if you want to prevent evil, you need leverage, not worthless paper agreements. The only leverage the Stalins and Hitlers understand is bombs. Everything else is propaganda and lies as far as they are concerned. Dictators aren't interested in being seen as respectable nice guys who stick on contracts.
As Herman Kahn wrote, Khruschev's proposal for arms control - whereby no inspections of Russian disarmament were allowed and anyone cheating would be (in Kruuschev's words) expected to "cover themselves in shame" was a hoax. The Soviets never covered themselves in shame. They broke the testing cessation in 1961 and detonated a 50 megaton bomb. They were proud, not covered in shame.
Unless you can find some wood-frame cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki to detonate the bombs over, the effects are not as impressive as the hype claims. Even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death rates for people with any kind of screening from the thermal flash (whose severe effects was stopped by just a single leaf, a thin white shirt, or a sheet of paper) cut casualty rates massively. Duck-and-cover does work. Nuclear radiation produced high mortality only when combined with thermal burns: this is the "syngerism" effect because the mechanism for death is that radiation reduces the white blood cell count at just the time when skin burn blisters burst and become infected. If you avoid thermal burns, the LD50 for nuclear radiation is about three times higher. That's why ducking and covering is so vital. It also reduces the amount of debris that can hit you in the face (like flying glass). Most of the people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked at the fireball, often through glass windows, as the blast wave was silently approaching. Films of nuclear explosions which superimpose the sound of blast on to the fireball with no delay time, mislead viewers about the time-sequence of the effects of nuclear weapons. Similarly, you get some time after a nuclear explosion to evacuate or prepare an improvised shelter, before the fallout even starts to arrive. Philip LaRiviere in the 1950s measured nuclear test data showing the different arrival times and maximum fallout dose rate times after a range of Nevada and Pacific nuclear tests in nuclear test report USNRDL-TR-137 ("The Relationship of Time of Peak Activity from Fallout to Time of Arrival", U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, 28 February 1957). On average, even once fallout begins to arrive, it settles diffusively and takes a long time to react peak activity. The time of peak radiation level is about the same time as the time taken for the fallout to begin to arrive in the first place. So as with the delayed double heat flash pulse and the delayed arrival of the blast, you have enough time to protect yourself or evacuate from a potential downwind fallout area. If fallout begins to arrive, you can see it. It's clearly visible wherever the dose rate is life-threatening.
The point is, nuclear weapons are not automatically going to produce a lot of civilian casualties if there is a reasonable civil defense education in the reliable (nuclear test based) facts.
If you are going to deter dictators from walking all over you like Hitler and Stalin, then you need to be tough. Toughness is the only thing that deters the sort of trash who don't care about human values at all.
The TAPPS (Toon et al.) studies have been wrong from day 1. In 1983 they used flawed assumptions for everything, from the absorption coefficient for sunlight by soot, to ignoring scavenging and atmospheric turbulence, etc. They also exaggerated the burnability of the fuel loading.
When a building collapses, most of the combustible material is buried under tons of debris and dust and can't burn. You don't get firestorms anymore like you did in wood-frame buildings such as those in the old, medieval part of Hamburg or Dresden, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In addition, they ignored the fact that for surface bursts (unlike the air bursts over japan) the EMP deposition region will overlap the ground surface and couple thousands of amps in microsecond surges into all the electrical conductors, which would branch out throughout the city before the crater had even formed, and would blow all the fuses/circuit breakers and cut off the electricity supply to buildings, reducing the fire risk.
For a surface burst, the fireball evevation angle is such that most buildings will be "shadowed" by other buildings, preventing ignition.
In their 1989 paper, the TAPPS team failed to retract their earlier errors and apologise for hyping poorly researched trash, and instead changed the targetting assumptions to oil refineries, in an attempt to maintain some climatic effects. It was still wrong! The smoke from mass oil refinery fires doesn't hang around freezing the ground for months. It gets blown around and dispersed by atmospheric winds, turbulence, and it gets washed out by rainfall.
Another popular myth is that the entire crater volume gets converted into dust which enters the stratosphere. Actually, 99% of the apparent crater volume is due to compression of the ground and material dumped around the crater to form the crater "lip" and the ejecta zone surrounding the lip. Only 1% of the cratered mass ends up in the atmosphere, and that forms the fallout, 70% of which is deposited within 24 hours.
On the topic of ozone depletion, please notice that the prompt gamma rays from a nuclear explosion ionize the air, creating ozone. This effect seriously modifies the early-time history of the thermal pulse output, and has been intensively studied in nuclear tests (although early studies were classified).
Hence, the production of ozone-destroying nitrogen oxides in the air shock wave at high overpressures must be balanced against the production of ozone by gamma rays.
For increasing burst altitude, the amount of ozone produced by a nuclear explosion becomes greater than the nitrogen oxide ozone depletion effect, because at high altitudes the air shock wave does not reach sufficient overpressure to produce nitrogen oxides (the equilibrium concentration of nitrogen oxides is a strong function of the pressure).
Hence, high altitude bursts - which have been threatened on the West by Russian leaders due to EMP effects - will actually increase the amount of ozone in the stratosphere!
In addition, the net ozone depletion by a low altitude burst is a lot less than 1970s and 1980s predictions (ignoring the production of ozone in nuclear explosions) suggested. Much of the nitrogen oxides combine with water vapour in the fireball and you end up with nitric acid, eventually gets washed out of the atmosphere by rain and doesn't affect ozone. See:
"Nitrogen oxides, nuclear weapon testing, Concorde and stratospheric ozone" P. Goldsmith, A. F. Tuck, J. S. Foot, E. L. Simmons & R. L. Newson, published in Nature, v. 244, issue 5418, pp. 545-551, 31 August 1973:
"ALTHOUGH AMOUNTS OF NITROGEN OXIDES EQUIVALENT TO THE OUTPUT FROM MANY CONCORDES WERE RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE WHEN NUCLEAR TESTING WAS AT ITS PEAK, THE AMOUNT OF OZONE IN THE ATMOSPHERE WAS NOT AFFECTED."
Below is an extract from a British Civil Defence magazine article written by George R. Stanbury, head of civil defence research on the British "Operation Hurricane" nuclear bomb test at Monte Bello, and before that an expert on the incendiary bombing of Britain in World War II.
'We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation from nuclear attack. We hope to show that there is good scientific justification for the assessments we have made, and we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ...
'Firstly ... the collapse of buildings would snuff out any incipient fires. Air cannot get into a pile of rubble, 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This is not just guess work; it is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb [V1 cruise missile] incidents in London supported by a wealth of experience gained generally in the last war.
'Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general.
'Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited, it by no means follows that a continuing and destructive fire will develop.
'The effect of shielding in a built-up area was strikingly demonstrated by the firemen of Birmingham about 10 years ago with a 144:1 scale model of a sector of their city which they built themselves; when they put a powerful lamp in the appropriate position for an air burst they found that over 50% of the buildings were completely shielded. More recently a similar study was made in Liverpool over a much larger area, not with a model, but using the very detailed information provided by fire insurance maps. The result was similar.
'It is not so easy to assess the chance of a continuing fire. A window of two square metres would let in about 10^5 calories at the 5 cal/(cm)^2 range. The heat liberated by one magnesium incendiary bomb is 30 times this and even with the incendiary bomb the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5; in a large room it is very much less.
'Thus even if thermal radiation does fall on easily inflammable material which ignites, the chance of a continuing fire developing is still quite small. In the Birmingham and Liverpool studies, where the most generous values of fire-starting chances were used, the fraction of buildings set on fire was rarely higher than 1 in 20.
'And this is the basis of the assertion [in Nuclear Weapons] that we do not think that fire storms are likely to be started in British cities by nuclear explosions, because in each of the five raids in which fire storms occurred (four on Germany - Hamburg, Darmstadt, Kassel, Wuppertal and a "possible" in Dresden, plus Hiroshima in Japan - it may be significant that all these towns had a period of hot dry weather before the raid) the initial fire density was much nearer 1 in 2. Take Hamburg for example:
'On the night of 27/28th July 1943, by some extraordinary chance, 190 tons of bombs were dropped into one square mile of Hamburg. This square mile contained 6,000 buildings, many of which were [multistorey wooden] medieval.
'A density of greater than 70 tons/sq. mile had not been achieved before even in some of the major fire raids, and was only exceeded on a few occasions subsequently. The effect of these bombs is best shown in the following diagram, each step of which is based on sound trials and operational experience of the weapons concerned.
'102 tons of high explosive bombs dropped -> 100 fires
'88 tons of incendiary bombs dropped, of which:
'48 tons of 4 pound magnesium bombs = 27,000 bombs -> 8,000 hit buildings -> 1,600 fires
'40 tons of 30 pound gel bombs = 3,000 bombs -> 900 hit buildings -> 800 fires
'Total = 2,500 fires
'Thus almost every other building [1 in 2 buildings] was set on fire during the raid itself, and when this happens it seems that nothing can prevent the fires from joining together, engulfing the whole area and producing a fire storm (over Hamburg the column of smoke, observed from aircraft, was 1.5 miles in diameter at its base and 13,000 feet high; eyewitnesses on the ground reported that trees were uprooted by the inrushing air).
'When the density was 70 tons/square mile or less the proportion of buildings fired during the raid was about 1 in 8 or less and under these circumstances, although extensive areas were burned out, the situation was controlled, escape routes were kept open and there was no fire storm.'
My comment about the fact that high altitude nuclear explosions produce an excess of ozone (by gamma ray emission) without producing nitrogen oxides that destroy ozone (nitrogen oxide formation requires a very compressed shock wave, which can't occur in low density air at high altitude), needs the following reference:
"The Tokomak is a donut-shaped magnetic bottle for containing hot plasma. Controlled fusion has long held the promise of limitless energy, but requires temperatures and pressures similiar to the Sun's interior. Despite decades of work, controlled fusion remains as it was in 1964, just around the corner."
Controlled nuclear fusion by magnetic confinement of hot plasma is a joke. Strong magnetic fields are never perfectly uniform and the pressure of plasma needed to cause deuterium and tritium nuclei to fuse is immense! So you always get instabilities develop.
The situation is similar to trying to use a low-density fluid to compress a higher-density fluid, in other words you get a form of Taylor instability develop.
The magnetic field causes the plasma to not be uniformly compressed, but to break up into jets where the magnetic field is slightly weaker. Because you can't make the magnetic field perfectly uniform, this is inevitable.
It's like squeezing an orange with your hands. You don't end up with a uniformly compressed orange. You end up with juice squirting into somebody's eye.
The radioactive waste from a controlled nuclear fusion reactor, if if could be made to work efficiently, would in practical terms be even worse than that from nuclear fission!
At least the 300 fission products decay, as a mixture, faster than the inverse of time. The fission product dose rate falls as about t^{-1.2} where t is time after fission. In any case, fission products have been proved to be safely confined with only a few feet migration over a time span of 1.7 billion years, as a result of the intense natural nuclear reactors in concentrated uranium ore seams at Oklo, in Gabon:
"Once the natural reactors burned themselves out, the highly radioactive waste they generated was held in place deep under Oklo by the granite, sandstone, and clays surrounding the reactors’ areas. Plutonium has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago."
But for fusion, you get the accumulation of relatively long lived iron-59, iron-55, cobalt-60, nickel-63, and many other nuclides which are caused by the capture in reactor materials of high energy neutrons from the fusion process. E.g., the fusion of tritium and deuterium releases 17.6 MeV, of which 14.1 MeV is carried by the neutron. This massive neutron energy is to be compared to the thermalized neutrons of 0.025 eV energy! As a result, whereas in fission you can reprocess the fuel rods to extract the radioactive waste without the whole reactor becoming dangerously radioactive, in fusion the whole reactor becomes almost uniformly contaminated by neutron capture in the structural elements! There is nothing you can do about this.
Controlled nuclear fusion has a lot in common with string theory in terms of over-hype, and failure. The most sensible way to use safe nuclear fusion energy is to further develop solar power and other ways to extract the energy of fusion being carried out in the sun's core.
"Nuclear's OK, but cars can't run on nuclear, so how can that really be a solution?" - Andrew
Nuclear power doesn't burn fossil fuels, which leaves more of those fuels for powering the internal combustion engine rather than generating electricity.
Cars can eventually (when fossil fuel costs make the price of gasoline too much for most people to afford) be fitted with electric motors run on electricity using efficient, low-weight rechargable lithium-ion batteries, and these can be recharged from mains supplied by nuclear reactors.
Obviously, electric trains can run on nuclear generated electricity without any interim battery storage.
The thing about nuclear power is that it is excessively expensive due to excessive safety precautions, and it is also a victim of lying propaganda from the environmental lobby which doesn't understand nuclear power in the proper context of natural radiation background levels and natural radon gas hazards, or even the naturally proved storage of intense radioactive waste for billions of years!
Fission products have been proved to be safely confined with only a few feet migration over a time span of 1.7 billion years, as a result of the intense natural nuclear reactors in concentrated uranium ore seams at Oklo, in Gabon:
"Once the natural reactors burned themselves out, the highly radioactive waste they generated was held in place deep under Oklo by the granite, sandstone, and clays surrounding the reactors’ areas. Plutonium has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago."
Data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is strongest (most evidence) for low doses, where it shows a suppression and a threshold for such low-LET (linear energy transfer) radiation like gamma rays. See my post here for a discussion of the extensive evidence.
High-LET radiation like alpha particles deposits a lot of energy per unit length of path of the radiation through tissue, and this can overcome the natural protein P53 repair mechanism which sticks broken DNA fragments back together. In fact, the main cancer risk occurs in multiple DNA strand breaks, where bits of DNA end up being stuck back together in the wrong sequence, either killing the cell when it later tries to divide, or more seriously causing cancer when the cell divides in a damaged form which is out of control and causes a tumour.
But such high-LET radiation like alpha particles are only a hazard internally, such as when radioactive material is inhaled or ingested. The alpha particle emitter plutonium in a nuclear reactor is inside sealed aluminium fuel pellets and at no time is such waste a serious inhalation or ingestion hazard.
W.L. Chen,Y.C. Luan, M.C. Shieh, S.T. Chen, H.T. , Kung, K.L. Soong, Y.C.Yeh, T.S. Chou, S.H. Mong, J.T.Wu, C.P. Sun,W.P. Deng, M.F.Wu, and M.L. Shen, Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, page 6, available in PDF format here:
'An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan. Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 ([low dose rate, low-LET gamma radiation emitter] half-life: 5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv, a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv. Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per 100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per 1,000 children under age 19.
'The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per 100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and income distributions of these persons are the same as for the general population, it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure. ...
'The data on reduced cancer mortality and congenital malformations are compatible with the phenomenon of radiation hormesis, an adaptive response of biological organisms to low levels of radiation stress or damage; a modest overcompensation to a disruption, resulting in improved fitness. Recent assessments of more than a century of data have led to the formulation of a well founded scientific model of this phenomenon.
'The experience of these 10,000 persons suggests that long term exposure to [gamma]radiation, at a dose rate of the order of 50 mSv (5 rem) per year, greatly reduces cancer mortality, which is a major cause of death in North America.'
The fact that leukemia risk is sensitive function of dose rate and not just dose means that most of the radiation monitors for workers in the nuclear industry (which merely record total dose, i.e. integrated dose rate, and don't show the mean rate at which the dose was received at) is almost useless for assessing risks.
"... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls."
All of this evidence is ignored or censored out of mainstream discussions by bigoted politicians, journalists, editors and environmental quangos. So "Health Physics" (which radiation safety is currently known as) isn't really healthy physics anymore, it's instead becoming more of a pseudoscientific exercise in political expediency and ignoring evidence.
Fusion power doesn't look very realistic or safe either, because of the high energy neutrons given off in tritium-deuterium fusion which will turn the structural materials of the entire fusion reactor radioactive quite quickly, since they have a much greater range than the moderated (thermalized) neutrons in a nuclear fission reactor. So neutron-induced activity is a problem with fusion reactors. You have also to compress plasma to enormous pressures to achieve fusion using electrically controlled magnetic fields, which in a commercial fusion reactor producing gigawatts of power, would not exactly have the "fail-safe" safety features of a fission reactor. Any slight upset to the carefully aligned and balanced magnetic fields which are compressing the fusion plasma would potentially turn the fusion reactor into the scene of a H-bomb exposion, complete with radioactive fallout from the neutron-induced activity in the structural materials. This aspect of fusion power isn't hyped very much in the popular media, either. Could it be that the people working on such areas simply don't want their funding to dry up?
"That’s where nuclear fusion comes in. Like the sun, it fuses light atoms (hydrogen isotopes, generally) into heavier ones (helium, generally). Radioactivity is produced, but in vastly smaller and easier-to-handle amounts than in nuclear fission plants. But to get fusion to work, the power plant has to produce conditions of extreme heat and adequate pressure to get the hydrogen to fuse in the first place. On one hand this is a perfect safety feature. If a breakdown ever occurred, damage to the reactor instantly destroys the conditions necessary for continued nuclear reactions. And since only a very small amount of fuel is reacting in a given time, a problem instantly and automatically prevents the reactor from causing melting down. It’s a physical impossibility."
You have a bit of disinformation here for some reason. If you know the physics you choose to write about, you are aware that the easiest fusion process to achieve is tritium+deuterium -> helium + neutron + 17.6 MeV.
Since 80% of the mass is helium and only 20% is the neutron, 80% of the energy, i.e. 14.1 MeV of that is carried by the neutron, so in each fusion event of 17.6 MeV, you get 14.1 MeV of neutron energy which can potentially induce radioactivity into the reactor containment vessel or building.
In fission, an average of about 200 MeV of energy is released in each fission event of which only about 30 MeV is residual radioactivity from fission products.
So in fission, about 15% of the energy is released as radioactivity, while in fusion of tritium and deuterium it can be anything up to 80%.
Neutron induced activity is a less severe problem in fission reactors than in experimental fusion reactors, because the neutrons are thermalized to low energy (about 0.025 eV ) and don't irradiate the entire reactor structure, whereas the 14.1 MeV fusion neutrons are highly penetrating and do go everywhere, turning structural steel radioactive, etc. This is not 'easily handled'.
'On one hand this is a perfect safety feature. If a breakdown ever occurred, damage to the reactor instantly destroys the conditions necessary for continued nuclear reactions. And since only a very small amount of fuel is reacting in a given time, a problem instantly and automatically prevents the reactor from causing melting down. It’s a physical impossibility.'
To make a nuclear fusion reactor work at an energy density that gives the gigawatts of power required for economic or meaningful commercial use, you need a massive amount of fuel with an immense pressure, exerted on the plasma by strong magnetic fields which can squeeze the conductive (ionized) plasma.
If anything goes wrong, you get an explosion. Trying to compress a plasma with magnetic fields is like trying to squeeze and compress an orange with your fingers anyway, which is one reason why fusion has always been a crackpot activity (all hype, no commercially viable success).
It is the nuclear fission reactor which is inherently stable, because it has built-in 'fail safe' design. The control rods fall back in and make it sub-critical if power fails. By contrast, if power fails to the electromagnets containing plasma as a thousand atmospheres or more in a fusion reactor, you get a nuclear explosion as a matter of course.
The more you go into the details, the more stupid nuclear fusion becomes. If you want to use the most easy to achieve fusion reaction, you need to use tritium as well as deuterium, and tritium is exceedingly expensive (it's produced by bombarding lithium with neutrons in a fission reactor).
If you just want to use just deuterium, the amount of pressure and temperature you need to make the reaction exothermal is far higher, because the reaction has a higher threshold for ignition, like a high activation energy in a chemical reaction.
The 'ITER' reactor page http://www.iter.org/a/index_faq.htm states:
'The DT fusion reaction creates helium, which is inert and harmless, and neutrons, which can make surrounding materials radioactive for varying amounts of time.'
This seems to indicate that they are planning to demonstate the concept using DT fusion, using tritium presumably made at great expense in fission reactors. (Which would be extremely expensive, but cheap compared to the cost of trying to extract the tiny amount of natural tritium in seawater.)
The whole fusion spin industry is a complete fraud and pseudoscience. If you want to promote safe nuclear fusion energy, make do with sunlight and its derivatives.
Chernobyl didn't blow up because it was an old design. It blew up because the Soviet RBMK reactor was a stupid design with a massive positive reactivity when the control rods are withdrawn, and the engineers in charge in April 1986 were cowboys, carrying out an unauthorized experiment (to see if the reactor could power its own energency water cooling pumps in the event of losing external electric power), which was obviously dangerous. They switched off the water cooling system, they switched off all the automatic safety systems (which can't be switched off in Western reactor designs when the reactor is in use), then they withdrew most of the control rods. The reactor design was stupid because the control rods were driven by only slow electric motors which couldn't quickly insert them in an emergency. It would take 18 seconds in the RBMK reactor to fully insert the control rods (in Western reactors it takes only 2-3 seconds), and the reactor exploded 40 seconds after the experiment began due to stupidity.
Also, nuclear fission waste is easy to handle and has been proved safe for 1.7 billion years, which is longer than any other kind of industrial waste has been verified to be safe for!
Fission products have been proved to be safely confined with only a few feet migration over a time span of 1.7 billion years, as a result of the intense natural nuclear reactors in concentrated uranium ore seams at Oklo, in Gabon:
"Once the natural reactors burned themselves out, the highly radioactive waste they generated was held in place deep under Oklo by the granite, sandstone, and clays surrounding the reactors’ areas. Plutonium has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago."
I took a look at your blog and and its link to http://wtcdemolition.blogspot.com/ which claims that the World Trade Center twin towers collapse in 2001 was due to an explosion instead of planes crashing in and melting the steel frame with burning aviation fuel, which then allowed the floors to collapse under gravity (piling up into an accumulating downward-travelling mass as they fell, the snowplow effect, which soon makes negligible the resistance of each extra floor the immense mass hits; so there is relatively little deviation from free fall - it soon becomes like dropping a brick on a pile of leaves).
The alleged evidence for it being due to an explosion which is given is not explosion evidence: dust, "extreme high heat in the ground zero rubble (widely-reported/well-substantiated)" etc are normal results of a heavy mass of building falling a great height and hitting the ground. The kinetic energy is
E = (1/2)mv^2
and for gravitational near-free fall velocity v is related to gravitational acceleration g and vertical fall distance s by
v^2 = 2gs
Hence
E = (1/2)mv^2 = (1/2)m(2gs) = mgs.
Each WTC tower had a structural mass of 169,000,000 kg (mainly structural steel and concrete), and was 417 m high (to the top of room, not the spire/antenna). Hence the mean fall distance was 209 m.
This gives an energy release of
E = mgs = 169,000,000*9.81*209
= 3.46*10^11 Joules
Now remember that 1 kt of TNT is equivalent to 4.184*10^12 J.
Hence, each of the twin towers released the equivalent of 0.083 kt of TNT just due to the gravitational collapse, neglecting the energy of the aircraft impacts and the aviation fuel.
This 0.083 kt is in the yield range of the smallest American nuclear bomb, the 23 kg Davy Crockett. So it just equivalent to a very small nuclear explosion.
So all the alleged "evidence" that the tower collapses had some characteristics similar to a small nuclear explosion are missing the point that the energy release when 169,000 metric tons thuds after a fall of hundreds of metres is substantial! Of course it has some characteristics of a big explosion, and you do generally get electromagnetic pulses released by conventional explosions or collisions (the heat causes ionization of material, which if the electrons are detached in an asymmetric way creates the radiation of a radio-frequency pulse).
The easy discriminator between a nuclear explosion and a conventional explosion or collapse is obviously the easily traced radioactive fission product signature. Anyone with a portable detector have been able to detect if there had been a nuclear explosion involved.
The simplest theory which fits the facts for the World Trade Centre twin towers collapse is the most obvious one, that the conspiracy was a terrorist group which flew aircraft into the twin towers. That was enough to cause the destruction observed. You don't need to add more explosives, the weight of the building in combination to the damage and fires due to the aviation fuel heating and weakening the steel frame and thereby allowing the floors to fall was enough to cause all the effects.
If you want to attack conspiracies, please attack the many real conspiracies instead of imaginary ones, e.g. discredit mainstream string theory for claiming to be a theory of quantum gravity when it predicts nothing, or discredit the conspiracy to misinform people on the effects of nuclear weapons tests and radiation effects as a function of dose rate!
The problem is, as I'm sure you are aware, the factual conspiracies just don't have any interest to many people, who prefer more imaginary speculative stuff, instead of sticking to solid evidence.
How to achieve peace through tested, proved and practical declassified countermeasures against the effects of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and conventional weapons. Credible deterrence through simple, effective protection against invasions and collateral damage. Discussions of the facts as opposed to inaccurate, misleading lies of the "disarm or be annihilated" political dogma variety. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda debunked by the hard facts. Walls not wars. Walls bring people together by stopping attacks by "divide and rule" style divisive terrorists, contrary to simplistic Vatican propaganda.
Historically, it has been proved that having weapons is not enough to guarantee a reasonable measure of safety from terrorism and rogue states; countermeasures are also needed, both to make any deterrent credible and to negate or at least mitigate the effects of a terrorist attack. Some people who wear seatbelts die in car crashes; some people who are taken to hospital in ambulances, even in peace-time, die. Sometimes, lifebelts and lifeboats cannot save lives at sea. This lack of a 100% success rate in saving lives doesn't disprove the value of everyday precautions or of hospitals and medicine. Hospitals don't lull motorists into a false sense of security, causing them to drive faster and cause more accidents. Like-minded ‘arguments’ against ABM and civil defense are similarly vacuous.
‘As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile-defense construction in Europe will be removed.’
‘The [ABM] treaty was in 1972 ... The theory ... supporting the ABM treaty [which prohibits ABM, thus making nations vulnerable to terrorism] ... that it will prevent an arms race ... is perfect nonsense because we have had an arms race all the time we have had the ABM treaty, and we have seen the greatest increase in proliferation of nuclear weapons that we have ever had. ... So the ABM treaty preventing an arms race is total nonsense. ...
‘The Patriot was not a failure in the Gulf War - the Patriot was one of the things which defeated the Scud and in effect helped us win the Gulf War. One or two of the shots went astray but that is true of every weapon system that has ever been invented. ...
‘President Bush said that we were going ahead with the defensive system but we would make sure that nobody felt we had offensive intentions because we would accompany it by a unilateral reduction of our nuclear arsenal. It seems to me to be a rather clear statement that proceeding with the missile defence system would mean fewer arms of this kind.
‘You have had your arms race all the time that the ABM treaty was in effect and now you have an enormous accumulation and increase of nuclear weapons and that was your arms race promoted by the ABM treaty. Now if you abolish the ABM treaty you are not going to get another arms race - you have got the arms already there - and if you accompany the missile defence construction with the unilateral reduction of our own nuclear arsenal then it seems to me you are finally getting some kind of inducement to reduce these weapons.’
Before the ABM system is in place, and afterwards if ABM fails to be 100% effective in an attack, or is bypassed by terrorists using a bomb in a suitcase or in a ship, civil defense is required and can be effective at saving lives:
‘Paradoxically, the more damaging the effect, that is the farther out its lethality stretches, the more can be done about it, because in the last fall of its power it covers vast areas, where small mitigations will save very large numbers of people.’
‘The purpose of a book is to save people [the] time and effort of digging things out for themselves. ... we have tried to leave the reader with something tangible – what a certain number of calories, roentgens, etc., means in terms of an effect on the human being. ... we must think of the people we are writing for.’
“FY 1997 Plans: ... Provide text to update Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... Update the unclassified textbook entitled, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. ... Continue revision of Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... FY1999 Plans ... Disseminate updated The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.”
‘During World War II many large cities in England, Germany, and Japan were subjected to terrific attacks by high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Yet, when proper steps had been taken for the protection of the civilian population and for the restoration of services after the bombing, there was little, if any, evidence of panic. It is the purpose of this book to state the facts concerning the atomic bomb, and to make an objective, scientific analysis of these facts. It is hoped that as a result, although it may not be feasible completely to allay fear, it will at least be possible to avoid panic.’
‘The consequences of a multiweapon nuclear attack would certainly be grave ... Nevertheless, recovery should be possible if plans exist and are carried out to restore social order and to mitigate the economic disruption.’
‘Suppose the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had been 1,000 times as powerful ... It could not have killed 1,000 times as many people, but at most the entire population of Hiroshima ... [regarding the hype about various nuclear "overkill" exaggerations] there is enough water in the oceans to drown everyone ten times.’
In 1996, half a century after the nuclear detonations, data on cancers from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was published by D. A. Pierce et al. of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF (Radiation Research vol. 146 pp. 1-27; Science vol. 272, pp. 632-3) for 86,572 survivors, of whom 60% had received bomb doses of over 5 mSv (or 500 millirem in old units) suffering 4,741 cancers of which only 420 were due to radiation, consisting of 85 leukemias and 335 solid cancers.
‘Today we have a population of 2,383 [radium dial painter] cases for whom we have reliable body content measurements. . . . All 64 bone sarcoma [cancer] cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy [1,000 rads], while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy.’
‘... it is important to note that, given the effects of a few seconds of irradiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a threshold near 200 mSv may be expected for leukemia and some solid tumors. [Sources: UNSCEAR, Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation, New York, 1994; W. F. Heidenreich, et al., Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1999), p. 205; and B. L. Cohen, Radiat. Res., vol. 149 (1998), p. 525.] For a protracted lifetime natural exposure, a threshold may be set at a level of several thousand millisieverts for malignancies, of 10 grays for radium-226 in bones, and probably about 1.5-2.0 Gy for lung cancer after x-ray and gamma irradiation. [Sources: G. Jaikrishan, et al., Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. S149 (for natural exposure); R. D. Evans, Health Physics, vol. 27 (1974), p. 497 (for radium-226); H. H. Rossi and M. Zaider, Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1997), p. 85 (for radiogenic lung cancer).] The hormetic effects, such as a decreased cancer incidence at low doses and increased longevity, may be used as a guide for estimating practical thresholds and for setting standards. ...
‘Though about a hundred of the million daily spontaneous DNA damages per cell remain unrepaired or misrepaired, apoptosis, differentiation, necrosis, cell cycle regulation, intercellular interactions, and the immune system remove about 99% of the altered cells. [Source: R. D. Stewart, Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. 101.] ...
‘[Due to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986] as of 1998 (according to UNSCEAR), a total of 1,791 thyroid cancers in children had been registered. About 93% of the youngsters have a prospect of full recovery. [Source: C. R. Moir and R. L. Telander, Seminars in Pediatric Surgery, vol. 3 (1994), p. 182.] ... The highest average thyroid doses in children (177 mGy) were accumulated in the Gomel region of Belarus. The highest incidence of thyroid cancer (17.9 cases per 100,000 children) occurred there in 1995, which means that the rate had increased by a factor of about 25 since 1987.
‘This rate increase was probably a result of improved screening [not radiation!]. Even then, the incidence rate for occult thyroid cancers was still a thousand times lower than it was for occult thyroid cancers in nonexposed populations (in the US, for example, the rate is 13,000 per 100,000 persons, and in Finland it is 35,600 per 100,000 persons). Thus, given the prospect of improved diagnostics, there is an enormous potential for detecting yet more [fictitious] "excess" thyroid cancers. In a study in the US that was performed during the period of active screening in 1974-79, it was determined that the incidence rate of malignant and other thyroid nodules was greater by 21-fold than it had been in the pre-1974 period. [Source: Z. Jaworowski, 21st Century Science and Technology, vol. 11 (1998), issue 1, p. 14.]’
‘Professor Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to the accumulated dose of radiation. ... Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957 Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress.’ – Abstract of thesis by Jennifer Caron, Edward Lewis and Radioactive Fallout: the Impact of Caltech Biologists Over Nuclear Weapons Testing in the 1950s and 60s, Caltech, January 2003.
Dr John F. Loutit of the Medical Research Council, Harwell, England, in 1962 wrote a book called Irradiation of Mice and Men (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London), discrediting the pseudo-science from geneticist Edward Lewis on pages 61, and 78-79:
‘... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls. …
‘What Lewis did, and which I have not copied, was to include in his table another group - spontaneous incidence of leukemia (Brooklyn, N.Y.) - who are taken to have received only natural background radiation throughout life at the very low dose-rate of 0.1-0.2 rad per year: the best estimate is listed as 2 x 10-6 like the others in the table. But the value of 2 x 10-6 was not calculated from the data as for the other groups; it was merely adopted. By its adoption and multiplication with the average age in years of Brooklyners - 33.7 years and radiation dose per year of 0.1-0.2 rad - a mortality rate of 7 to 13 cases per million per year due to background radiation was deduced, or some 10-20 per cent of the observed rate of 65 cases per million per year. ...
‘All these points are very much against the basic hypothesis of Lewis of a linear relation of dose to leukemic effect irrespective of time. Unhappily it is not possible to claim for Lewis’s work as others have done, “It is now possible to calculate - within narrow limits - how many deaths from leukemia will result in any population from an increase in fall-out or other source of radiation” [Leading article in Science, vol. 125, p. 963, 1957]. This is just wishful journalese.
‘The burning questions to me are not what are the numbers of leukemia to be expected from atom bombs or radiotherapy, but what is to be expected from natural background .... Furthermore, to obtain estimates of these, I believe it is wrong to go to [1950s inaccurate, dose rate effect ignoring, data from] atom bombs, where the radiations are qualitatively different [i.e., including effects from neutrons] and, more important, the dose-rate outstandingly different.’
‘From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies [by Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller and other geneticists who worked on plants, who falsely hyped their insect and plant data as valid for mammals like humans during the June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on fallout effects], it appeared that the number (or frequency) of mutations in a given population ... is proportional to the total dose ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions need to be revised, at least for mammals. [Mammals are biologically closer to humans, in respect to DNA repair mechanisms, than short-lived insects whose life cycles are too small to have forced the evolutionary development of advanced DNA repair mechanisms, unlike mammals that need to survive for decades before reproducing.] When exposed to X-rays or gamma rays, the mutation frequency in these animals has been found to be dependent on the exposure (or dose) rate ...
‘At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 R/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. [Emphasis added.] There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent ... with adult female mice ... a delay of at least seven weeks between exposure to a substantial dose of radiation, either neutrons or gamma rays, and conception causes the mutation frequency in the offspring to drop almost to zero. ... recovery in the female members of the population would bring about a substantial reduction in the 'load' of mutations in subsequent generations.’
George Bernard Shaw cynically explains groupthink brainwashing bias:
‘We cannot help it because we are so constituted that we always believe finally what we wish to believe. The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed, we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against, but that this evidence was staring us in the face all the time.’
From the essay titled ‘What is Science?’ by Professor Richard P. Feynman, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and published in The Physics Teacher, vol. 7, issue 6, 1968, pp. 313-20:
‘... great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
‘We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields - radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners' airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. ... you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’
Richard P. Feynman, ‘This Unscientific Age’, in The Meaning of It All, Penguin Books, London, 1998, pages 106-9:
‘Now, I say if a man is absolutely honest and wants to protect the populace from the effects of radioactivity, which is what our scientific friends often say they are trying to do, then he should work on the biggest number, not on the smallest number, and he should try to point out that the [natural cosmic] radioactivity which is absorbed by living in the city of Denver is so much more serious [than the smaller doses from nuclear explosions] ... that all the people of Denver ought to move to lower altitudes.'
Feynman is not making a point about low level radiation effects, but about the politics of ignoring the massive natural background radiation dose, while provoking hysteria over much smaller measured fallout pollution radiation doses. Why is the anti-nuclear lobby so concerned about banning nuclear energy - which is not possible even in principle since most of our nuclear radiation is from the sun and from supernova debris contaminating the Earth from the explosion that created the solar system circa 4,540 million years ago - when they could cause much bigger radiation dose reductions to the population by concentrating on the bigger radiation source, natural background radiation. It is possible to shield natural background radiation by the air, e.g. by moving the population of high altitude cities to lower altitudes where there is more air between the people and outer space, or banning the use of high-altitude jet aircraft. The anti-nuclear lobby, as Feynman stated back in the 1960s, didn't crusade to reduce the bigger dose from background radiation. Instead they chose to argue against the much smaller doses from fallout pollution. Feynman's argument is still today falsely interpreted as a political statement, when it is actually exposing pseudo-science and countering political propaganda. It is still ignored by the media. It has been pointed out by Senator Hickenlooper on page 1060 of the May-June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man:
‘I presume all of us would earnestly hope that we never had to test atomic weapons ... but by the same token I presume that we want to save thousands of lives in this country every year and we could just abolish the manufacture of [road accident causing] automobiles ...’
Dihydrogen monoxide is a potentially very dangerous chemical containing hydrogen and oxygen which has caused numerous severe burns by scalding and deaths by drowning, contributes to the greenhouse effect, accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals, and contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape: 'Dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.'
Protein P53, discovered only in 1979, is encoded by gene TP53, which occurs on human chromosome 17. P53 also occurs in other mammals including mice, rats and dogs. P53 is one of the proteins which continually repairs breaks in DNA, which easily breaks at body temperature: the DNA in each cell of the human body suffers at least two single strand breaks every second, and one double strand (i.e. complete double helix) DNA break occurs at least once every 2 hours (5% of radiation-induced DNA breaks are double strand breaks, while 0.007% of spontaneous DNA breaks at body temperature are double strand breaks)! Cancer occurs when several breaks in DNA happen to occur by chance at nearly the same time, giving several loose strand ends at once, which repair proteins like P53 then repair incorrectly, causing a mutation which can be proliferated somatically. This cannot occur when only one break occurs, because only two loose ends are produced, and P53 will reattach them correctly. But if low-LET ionising radiation levels are increased to a certain extent, causing more single strand breaks, P53 works faster and is able deal with faster breaks as they occur, so that multiple broken strand ends do not arise. This prevents DNA strands being repaired incorrectly, and prevents cancer - a result of mutation caused by faults in DNA - from arising. Too much radiation of course overloads the P53 repair mechanism, and then it cannot repair breaks as they occur, so multiple breaks begin to appear and loose ends of DNA are wrongly connected by P53, causing an increased cancer risk.
1. DNA-damaging free radicals are equivalent to a source of sparks which is always present naturally.
2. Cancer is equivalent the fire you get if the sparks are allowed to ignite the gasoline, i.e. if the free radicals are allowed to damage DNA without the damage being repaired.
3. Protein P53 is equivalent to a fire suppression system which is constantly damping out the sparks, or repairing the damaged DNA so that cancer doesn’t occur.
In this way of thinking, the ‘cause’ of cancer will be down to a failure of a DNA repairing enzyme like protein P53 to repair the damage.
'For the mindset that engendered and enables this situation, which jeopardizes the existence of the United States as a nation as well as the lives of millions of its citizens, some American physicians and certain prestigious medical organizations bear a heavy responsibility.
Charles J. Hitch and Roland B. McKean of the RAND Corporation in their 1960 book The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, pp. 310-57:
‘With each side possessing only a small striking force, a small amount of cheating would give one side dominance over the other, and the incentive to cheat and prepare a preventative attack would be strong ... With each side possessing, say, several thousand missiles, a vast amount of cheating would be necessary to give one side the ability to wipe out the other’s striking capability. ... the more extensive a disarmament agreement is, the smaller the force that a violator would have to hide in order to achieve complete domination. Most obviously, “the abolition of the weapons necessary in a general or ‘unlimited’ war” would offer the most insuperable obstacles to an inspection plan, since the violator could gain an overwhelming advantage from the concealment of even a few weapons.’
Disarmament after World War I caused the following problem which led to World War II (reported by Winston S. Churchill in the London Daily Express newspaper of November 1, 1934):
‘Germany is arming secretly, illegally and rapidly. A reign of terror exists in Germany to keep secret the feverish and terrible preparations they are making.’
British Prime Minister Thatcher's address to the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament on 23 June 1982, where she pointed out that in the years since the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 million people had been killed by 140 non-nuclear conflicts:
‘The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. It is the disposition on the part of some states to impose change on others by resorting to force against other nations ... Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace.’
J. D. Culshaw, the then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his article in the Scientific Advisory Branch journal Fission Fragments, September 1972 (issue No. 19), classified 'Restricted':
'Apart from those who don't want to know or can't be bothered, there seem to be three major schools of thought about the nature of a possible Third World War ...
* 'The first group think of something like World War II but a little worse ...
* '... the second of World War II but very much worse ...
* 'and the third group think in terms of a catastrophe ...
'When the Armageddon concept is in favour, the suggestion that such problems exist leads to "way out" research on these phenomena, and it is sufficient to mention a new catastrophic threat [e.g., 10 years later this was done by Sagan with "nuclear winter" hype, which turned out to be fake because modern concrete cities can't produce firestorms like 1940s wooden-built areas of Hamburg, Dresden and Hiroshima] to stimulate research into the possibilities of it arising. The underlying appeal of this concept is that if one could show that the execution of all out nuclear, biological or chemical warfare would precipitate the end of the world, no one but a mad man would be prepared to initiate such a war. [However, as history proves, plenty of mad men end up gaining power and leading countries into wars.]'
J. K. S. Clayton, then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his introduction, entitled The Challenge - Why Home Defence?, to the 1977 Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch Training Manual for Scientific Advisers:
'Since 1945 we have had nine wars - in Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam, between China and India, China and Russia, India and Pakistan and between the Arabs and Israelis on three occasions. We have had confrontations between East and West over Berlin, Formosa and Cuba. There have been civil wars or rebellions in no less than eleven countries and invasions or threatened invasions of another five. Whilst it is not suggested that all these incidents could have resulted in major wars, they do indicate the aptitude of mankind to resort to a forceful solution of its problems, sometimes with success. ...'
It is estimated that Mongol invaders exterminated 35 million Chinese between 1311-40, without modern weapons. Communist Chinese killed 26.3 million dissenters between 1949 and May 1965, according to detailed data compiled by the Russians on 7 April 1969. The Soviet communist dictatorship killed 40 million dissenters, mainly owners of small farms, between 1917-59. Conventional (non-nuclear) air raids on Japan killed 600,000 during World War II. The single incendiary air raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 killed 140,000 people (more than the total for nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined) at much less than the $2 billion expense of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs! Non-nuclear air raids on Germany during World War II killed 593,000 civilians. The argument that the enemy will continue stocking megaton fallout weapons if we go to cleaner weapons is irrelevant for deterrence, since we're not planning to start war, just to credibly deter invasions. You should not try to lower your standards of warfare to those of your enemy to appease groupthink taboos, or you will end up like Britain's leaders in the 1930s, trying to collaborate with fascists for popular applause.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: ‘My Lords, if we are going into the question of lethality of weapons and seek thereby to isolate the nuclear as distinct from the so-called conventional range, is there not a danger that the public may think that Vimy, Passchendaele and Dresden were all right—sort of tea parties—and that nuclear war is something which in itself is unacceptable?’
Lord Trefgarne: ‘My Lords, the policy of making Europe, or the rest of the world, safe for conventional war is not one that I support.’
Mr. Bill Walker (Tayside, North): ‘I remind the House that more people died at Stalingrad than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Yet people talk about fighting a conventional war in Europe as if it were acceptable. One rarely sees demonstrations by the so-called peace movement against a conventional war in Europe, but it could be nothing but ghastly and horrendous. The casualties would certainly exceed those at Stalingrad, and that cannot be acceptable to anyone who wants peace’
On 29 October 1982, Thatcher stated of the Berlin Wall: ‘In every decade since the war the Soviet leaders have been reminded that their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles ... one day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.’
On 22 November 1990, she said: ‘Today, we have a Europe ... where the threat to our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact has been removed; where the Berlin Wall has been torn down and the Cold War is at an end. These immense changes did not come about by chance. They have been achieved by strength and resolution in defence, and by a refusal ever to be intimidated.’
‘... peace cannot be guaranteed absolutely. Nobody can be certain, no matter what policies this or any other Government were to adopt, that the United Kingdom would never again be attacked. Also we cannot tell what form such an attack might take. Current strategic thinking suggests that if war were to break out it would start with a period of conventional hostilities of uncertain duration which might or might not escalate to nuclear conflict. ... while nuclear weapons exist there must always be a chance, however small, that they will be used against us [like gas bombs in World War II]. ... as a consequence of war between other nations in which we were not involved fall out from nuclear explosions could fall on a neutral Britain. ... conventional war is not the soft option that is sometimes suggested. It is also too easily forgotten that in World War II some 50 million people died and that conventional weapons have gone on killing people ever since 1945 without respite.’ - - The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Lord Gray of Contin), House of Lords debate on Civil Defence (General Local Authority Functions) Regulations, Hansard, vol. 444, cc. 523-49, 1 November 1983.
‘All of us are living in the light and warmth of a huge hydrogen bomb, 860,000 miles across and 93 million miles away, which is in a state of continuous explosion.’ - Dr Isaac Asimov.
‘Dr Edward Teller remarked recently that the origin of the earth was somewhat like the explosion of the atomic bomb...’ – Dr Harold C. Urey, The Planets: Their Origin and Development, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p. ix.
‘But compared with a supernova a hydrogen bomb is the merest trifle. For a supernova is equal in violence to about a million million million million hydrogen bombs all going off at the same time.’ – Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), The Nature of the Universe, Pelican Books, London, 1963, p. 75.
‘In fact, physicists find plenty of interesting and novel physics in the environment of a nuclear explosion. Some of the physical phenomena are valuable objects of research, and promise to provide further understanding of nature.’ – Dr Harold L. Brode, The RAND Corporation, ‘Review of Nuclear Weapons Effects,’ Annual Review of Nuclear Science, Volume 18, 1968, pp. 153-202.
‘It seems that similarities do exist between the processes of formation of single particles from nuclear explosions and formation of the solar system from the debris of a [4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, type Ia] supernova explosion. We may be able to learn much more about the origin of the earth, by further investigating the process of radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons tests.’ – Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001), University of Arkansas, ‘Radioactive Fallout in Astronomical Settings: Plutonium-244 in the Early Environment of the Solar System,’ pages 83-96 of Radionuclides in the Environment: A Symposium Sponsored By the Division of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology At the 155th Meeting of the American Chemical Society, San Francisco, California, April 1-3, 1968, edited by Symposium Chairman Dr Edward C. Freiling (1922-2000) of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Advances in Chemistry Series No. 93, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.
Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001) in 1956 correctly predicted the existence of water-moderated natural nuclear reactors in flooded uranium ore seams, which were discovered in 1972 by French physicist Francis Perrin in three ore deposits at Oklo in Gabon, where sixteen sites operated as natural nuclear reactors with self-sustaining nuclear fission 2,000 million years ago, each lasting several hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW. The radioactive waste they generated remained in situ for a period of 2,000,000,000 years without escaping. They were discovered during investigations into why the U-235 content of the uranium in the ore was only 0.7171% instead of the normal 0.7202%. Some of the ore, in the middle of the natural reactors, had a U-235 isotopic abundance of just 0.440%. Kuroda's brilliant paper is entitled, 'On the Nuclear Physical Stability of the Uranium Minerals', published in the Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 25 (1956), pp. 781–782 and 1295–1296.
A type Ia supernova explosion, always yielding 4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, results from the critical mass effect of the collapse of a white dwarf as soon as its mass exceeds 1.4 solar masses due to matter falling in from a companion star. The degenerate electron gas in the white dwarf is then no longer able to support the pressure from the weight of gas, which collapses, thereby releasing enough gravitational potential energy as heat and pressure to cause the fusion of carbon and oxygen into heavy elements, creating massive amounts of radioactive nuclides, particularly intensely radioactive nickel-56, but half of all other nuclides (including uranium and heavier) are also produced by the 'R' (rapid) process of successive neutron captures by fusion products in supernovae explosions. Type Ia supernovae occur typically every 400 years in the Milky Way galaxy. On 4 July 1054, Chinese astronomers observed in the sky (without optical instruments) the bright supernova in the constellation Taurus which today is still visible as the Crab Nebula through telescopes. The Crab Nebula debris has a diameter now of 7 light years and is still expanding at 800 miles/second. The supernova debris shock wave triggers star formation when it encounters hydrogen gas in space by compressing it and seeding it with debris; bright stars are observed in the Orion Halo, the 300 light year diameter remains of a supernova. It is estimated that when the solar system was forming 4,540 million years ago, a supernova occurred around 100 light years away, and the heavy radioactive debris shock wave expanded at 1,000 miles/second. Most of the heavy elements including iron, silicon and calcium in the Earth and people are the stable end products of originally radioactive decay chains from the space burst fallout of a 7 x 1026 megatons thermonuclear explosion, created by fusion and successive neutron captures after the implosion of a white dwarf; a supernova explosion.
How would a 1055 megaton hydrogen bomb explosion differ from the big bang? Ignorant answers biased in favour of curved spacetime (ignoring quantum gravity!) abound, such as claims that explosions can’t take place in ‘outer space’ (disagreeing with the facts from nuclear space bursts by Russia and America in 1962, not to mention natural supernova explosions in space!) and that explosions produce sound waves in air by definition! There are indeed major differences in the nuclear reactions between the big bang and a nuclear bomb. But it is helpful to notice the solid physical fact that implosion systems suggest the mechanism of gravitation: in implosion, TNT is well-known to produce an inward force on a bomb core, but Newton's 3rd law says there is an equal and opposite reaction force outward. In fact, you can’t have a radially outward force without an inward reaction force! It’s the rocket principle. The rocket accelerates (with force F = ma) forward by virtue of the recoil from accelerating the exhaust gas (with force F = -ma) in the opposite direction! Nothing massive accelerates without an equal and opposite reaction force. Applying this fact to the measured 6 x 10-10 ms-2 ~ Hc cosmological acceleration of matter radially outward from observers in the universe which was predicted accurately in 1996 and later observationally discovered in 1999 (by Perlmutter, et al.), we find an outward force F = ma and inward reaction force by the 3rd law. The inward force allows quantitative predictions, and is mediated by gravitons, predicting gravitation in a checkable way (unlike string theory, which is just a landscape of 10500 different perturbative theories and so can’t make any falsifiable predictions about gravity). So it seems as if nuclear explosions do indeed provide helpful analogies to natural features of the world, and the mainstream lambda-CDM model of cosmology - with its force-fitted unobserved ad hoc speculative ‘dark energy’ - ignores and sweeps under the rug major quantum gravity effects which increase the physical understanding of particle physics, particularly force unification and the relation of gravitation to the existing electroweak SU(2) x U(1) section of the Standard Model of fundamental forces.
Even Einstein grasped the possibility that general relativity's lambda-CDM model is at best just a classical approximation to quantum field theory, at the end of his life when he wrote to Besso in 1954:
‘I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the [classical differential equation] field principle, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, [non-quantum] gravitation theory included ...’
‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Professor Richard P. Feynman (quoted by Professor Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, New York, 2006, p. 307).
‘The expression of dissenting views may not seem like much of a threat to a powerful organization, yet sometimes it triggers an amazingly hostile response. The reason is that a single dissenter can puncture an illusion of unanimity. ... Among those suppressed have been the engineers who tried to point out problems with the Challenger space shuttle that caused it to blow up. More fundamentally, suppression is a denial of the open dialogue and debate that are the foundation of a free society. Even worse than the silencing of dissidents is the chilling effect such practices have on others. For every individual who speaks out, numerous others decide to play it safe and keep quiet. More serious than external censorship is the problem of self-censorship.’
— Professor Brian Martin, University of Wollongong, 'Stamping Out Dissent', Newsweek, 26 April 1993, pp. 49-50
In 1896, Sir James Mackenzie-Davidson asked Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895: ‘What did you think?’ Röntgen replied: ‘I did not think, I investigated.’ The reason? Cathode ray expert J. J. Thomson in 1894 saw glass fluorescence far from a tube, but due to prejudice (expert opinion) he avoided investigating that X-ray evidence! ‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Richard Feynman, in Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006, p. 307.
Mathematical symbols in this blog: your computer’s browser needs access to standard character symbol sets to display Greek symbols for mathematical physics. If you don’t have the symbol character sets installed, the density symbol 'r' (Rho) will appear as 'r' and the 'p' (Pi) symbol will as 'p', causing confusion with the use of 'r' for radius and 'p' for momentum in formulae. This problem exists with Mozilla Firefox 3, but not with Microsoft Explorer which displays Greek symbols.
Mean yield of the 5,192 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed Russian nuclear stockpile as of January 2009: 0.317 Mt. Total yield: 1,646 Mt.
Mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile as of January 2007: 0.257 Mt. Total yield: 1,172 Mt.
For diffraction damage where damage areas scale as the two-thirds power of explosive yield, this stockpile's area damage potential can be compared to the 20,000,000 conventional bombs of 100 kg size (2 megatons of TNT equivalent total energy) dropped on Germany during World War II: (Total nuclear bomb blast diffraction damaged ground area)/(Total conventional blast diffraction damaged ground area to Germany during World War II) = [4,552*(0.257 Mt)2/3]/[20,000,000*(0.0000001 Mt)2/3] = 1,840/431 = 4.3. Thus, although the entire U.S. stockpile has a TNT energy equivalent to 586 times that of the 2 megatons of conventional bombs dropped on Germany in World War II, it is only capable of causing 4.3 times as much diffraction type damage area, because any given amount of explosive energy is far more efficient when distributed over many small explosions than in a single large explosion! Large explosions are inefficient because they cause unintended collateral damage, wasting energy off the target area and injuring or damaging unintended targets!
In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. (Data: Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pages 1-27.) Over 40 years, in 36,500 survivors monitored, there were 176 leukemia deaths which is 89 more than the control (unexposed) group got naturally. There were 4,687 other cancer deaths, but that was merely 339 above the number in the control (unexposed) group, so this is statistically a much smaller rise than the leukemia result. Natural leukemia rates, which are very low in any case, were increased by 51% in the irradiated survivors, but other cancers were merely increased by just 7%. Adding all the cancers together, the total was 4,863 cancers (virtually all natural cancer, nothing whatsoever to do with radiation), which is just 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, the total increase over the natural cancer rate due to bomb exposure was only 9%, spread over a period of 40 years. There was no increase whatsoever in genetic malformations.
‘If defense is neglected these weapons of attack become effective. They become available and desirable in the eyes of an imperialist dictator, even if his means are limited. Weapons of mass destruction could become equalizers between nations big and small, highly developed and primitive, if defense is neglected. If defense is developed and if it is made available for general prevention of war, weapons of aggression will become less desirable. Thus defense makes war itself less probable. ... One psychological defense mechanism against danger is to forget about it. This attitude is as common as it is disastrous. It may turn a limited danger into a fatal difficulty.’
Advice of Robert Watson-Watt (Chief Scientist on the World War II British Radar Project, defending Britain against enemy attacks): ‘Give them the third best to go on with, the second best comes too late, the best never comes.’
All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of dDELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace": "Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.
Update (19 January 2024): Jane Corbin of BBC TV is continuing to publish ill-informed nuclear weapons capabilities nonsense debunked here since 2006 (a summary of some key evidence is linked here), e.g. her 9pm 18 Jan 2024 CND biased propaganda showpiece Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vgq5/nuclear-armageddon-how-close-are-we which claims - from the standpoint of 1980s Greenham Common anti-American CND propaganda - that the world would be safer without nuclear weapons, despite the 1914-18 and 1939-45 trifles that she doesn't even bother to mention, which were only ended with nuclear deterrence. Moreover, she doesn't mention the BBC's Feb 1927 WMD exaggerating broadcast by Noel-Baker which used the false claim that there is no defence against mass destruction by gas bombs to argue for UK disarmament, something that later won him a Nobel Peace Prize and helped ensure the UK had no deterrent against the Nazis until too late to set off WWII (Nobel peace prizes were also awarded to others for lying, too, for instance Norman Angell whose pre-WWI book The Great Illusion helped ensure Britain's 1914 Liberal party Cabinet procrastinated on deciding what to do if Belgium was invaded, and thus failed deter the Kaiser from triggering the First World War!). The whole basis of her show was to edit out any realism whatsoever regarding the topic which is the title of her programme! No surprise there, then. Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia are currently designing the W93 nuclear warhead for SLBM's to replace the older W76 and W88, and what she should do next time is to address the key issue of what that design should be to deter dictators without risking escalation via collateral damage: "To enhance the flexibility and responsiveness of our nuclear forces as directed in the 2018 NPR, we will pursue two supplemental capabilities to existing U.S. nuclear forces: a low-yield SLBM warhead (W76-2) capability and a modern nuclear sea launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) to address regional deterrence challenges that have resulted from increasing Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities. These supplemental capabilities are necessary to correct any misperception an adversary can escalate their way to victory, and ensure our ability to provide a strategic deterrent. Russia’s increased reliance on non-treaty accountable strategic and theater nuclear weapons and evolving doctrine of limited first-use in a regional conflict, give evidence of the increased possibility of Russia’s employment of nuclear weapons. ... The NNSA took efforts in 2019 to address a gap identified in the 2018 NPR by converting a small number of W76-1s into the W76-2 low-yield variant. ... In 2019, our weapon modernization programs saw a setback when reliability issues emerged with commercial off-the-shelf non-nuclear components intended for the W88 Alteration 370 program and the B61-12 LEP. ... Finally, another just-in-time program is the W80-4 LEP, which remains in synchronized development with the LRSO delivery system. ... The Nuclear Weapons Council has established a requirement for the W93 ... If deterrence fails, our combat-ready force is prepared now to deliver a decisive response anywhere on the globe ..." - Testimony of Commander Charles Richard, US Strategic Command, to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 13 Feb 2020. This issue of how to use nuclear weapons safely to deter major provocations that escalate to horrific wars is surely is the key issue humanity should be concerned with, not the CND time-machine of returning to a non-nuclear 1914 or 1939! Corbin doesn't address it; she uses debunked old propaganda tactics to avoid the real issues and the key facts.
For example, Corbin quotes only half a sentence by Kennedy in his TV speech of 22 October 1962: "it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States", and omits the second half of the sentence, which concludes: "requiring a full retalitory response upon the Soviet Union." Kennedy was clearly using US nuclear superiority in 1962 to deter Khrushchev from allowing the Castro regime to start any nuclear war with America! By chopping up Kennedy's sentence, Corbin juggles the true facts of history to meet the CND agenda of "disarm or be annihilated." Another trick is her decision to uncritically interview CND biased anti-civil defense fanatics like the man (Professor Freedman) who got Bill Massey of the Sunday Express to water down my article debunking pro-war CND type "anti-nuclear" propaganda lies on civil defense in 1995! Massey reported to me that Freedman claimed civil defense is no use against a H-bomb, which he claims is cheaper than dirt cheap shelters, exactly what Freedman wrote in his deceptive letter published in the 26 March 1980 Times newspaper: "for far less expenditure the enemy could make a mockery of all this by increasing the number of attacking weapons", which completely ignores the Russian dual-use concept of simply adding blast doors to metro tubes and underground car parks, etc. In any case, civil defense makes deterrence credible as even the most hard left wingers like Duncan Campbell acknowledged on page 5 of War Plan UK (Paladin Books, London, 1983): "Civil defence ... is a means, if need be, of putting that deterrence policy, for those who believe in it, into practical effect."
Above: what is being politically covered up in the latest reports by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. D. A. Pierce and D. L. Preston (Radiation Effects Research Foundation, Hijiyama Park, Hiroshima) wrote in 'Radiation-related cancer risks at low doses among atomic bomb survivors', Radiation Research, volume 154, issue 2. pp. 178-86 (August 2000): 'To clarify the information in the Radiation Effects Research Foundation data regarding cancer risks of low radiation doses, we focus on survivors with doses less than 0.5 Sv. ... Analysis is of solid cancer incidence from 1958-1994, involving 7,000 cancer cases among 50,000 survivors in that dose and distance range. The results provide useful risk estimates for doses as low as 0.05-0.1 Sv, which are not overestimated by linear risk estimates computed from the wider dose ranges 0-2 Sv or 0-4 Sv. There is ... an upper confidence limit on any possible threshold is computed as 0.06 Sv [emphasis added]. It is indicated that modification of the neutron dose estimates currently under consideration would not markedly change the conclusions.' In the illustration above, at 3.4 rads (gamma dose equivalent) reduced the natural leukemia rate by 30% in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data available in 1982. There seems to be a "threshold" of 8 rads before there is any increase in risk. (H. Kato and W. J. Schull, 'Studies of the mortality of A-bomb survivors. 7. Mortality, 1950-1978: Part I. Cancer mortality', Radiation Research, May 1982, v90, Issue 2, pp. 395-432.) The accuracy in dosimetry (substantiated by measurements of neutron induced activity and gamma ray thermoluminescence in the two cities) at that time meant that the doses were generally believed accurate to about +/- 50% (the accuracy of later estimates has increased). These data are based on a radiation quality factor of about 20 for neutrons, to reconcile data from the two cities (the Hiroshima gun-type bomb bomb leaked the most neutrons, which were mainly absorbed in the high explosive in the Nagasaki device which worked by spherically symmetrical implosion), i.e., 1 rad from neutrons was considered to be equivalent to 20 rads of gamma rays. The reason for the reduction in natural leukemia rate by 3.4 rads may be either the stimulation of the protein P53 repair mechanism which repairs DNA strands broken by radiation, and/or a long-term boosting to the immune system caused somehow by surviving the nuclear explosions with low doses. It is unlikely to be a completely statistical random error, because the sample size of people exposed to low doses of radiation is very large - 23,073 people exposed to an average of 3.4 rads, with an unexposed control group size of 31,581. However, the exact doses received were still fairly uncertain in 1982, and the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still dying:
Above: what is being politically covered up in the latest reports by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. D. A. Pierce and D. L. Preston (Radiation Effects Research Foundation, Hijiyama Park, Hiroshima) wrote in 'Radiation-related cancer risks at low doses among atomic bomb survivors', Radiation Research, volume 154, issue 2. pp. 178-86 (August 2000): 'To clarify the information in the Radiation Effects Research Foundation data regarding cancer risks of low radiation doses, we focus on survivors with doses less than 0.5 Sv. ... Analysis is of solid cancer incidence from 1958-1994, involving 7,000 cancer cases among 50,000 survivors in that dose and distance range. The results provide useful risk estimates for doses as low as 0.05-0.1 Sv, which are not overestimated by linear risk estimates computed from the wider dose ranges 0-2 Sv or 0-4 Sv. There is ... an upper confidence limit on any possible threshold is computed as 0.06 Sv [emphasis added]. It is indicated that modification of the neutron dose estimates currently under consideration would not markedly change the conclusions.' In the illustration above, at 3.4 rads (gamma dose equivalent) reduced the natural leukemia rate by 30% in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data available in 1982. There seems to be a "threshold" of 8 rads before there is any increase in risk. (H. Kato and W. J. Schull, 'Studies of the mortality of A-bomb survivors. 7. Mortality, 1950-1978: Part I. Cancer mortality', Radiation Research, May 1982, v90, Issue 2, pp. 395-432.) The accuracy in dosimetry (substantiated by measurements of neutron induced activity and gamma ray thermoluminescence in the two cities) at that time meant that the doses were generally believed accurate to about +/- 50% (the accuracy of later estimates has increased). These data are based on a radiation quality factor of about 20 for neutrons, to reconcile data from the two cities (the Hiroshima gun-type bomb bomb leaked the most neutrons, which were mainly absorbed in the high explosive in the Nagasaki device which worked by spherically symmetrical implosion), i.e., 1 rad from neutrons was considered to be equivalent to 20 rads of gamma rays. The reason for the reduction in natural leukemia rate by 3.4 rads may be either the stimulation of the protein P53 repair mechanism which repairs DNA strands broken by radiation, and/or a long-term boosting to the immune system caused somehow by surviving the nuclear explosions with low doses. It is unlikely to be a completely statistical random error, because the sample size of people exposed to low doses of radiation is very large - 23,073 people exposed to an average of 3.4 rads, with an unexposed control group size of 31,581. However, the exact doses received were still fairly uncertain in 1982, and the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still dying:
31 Comments:
http://nige.wordpress.com/2007/04/05/are-there-hidden-costs-of-bad-science-in-string-theory/
... Low-level radiation is another example of a science being controlled by politics.
By the time the protein P53 repair mechanism for DNA breaks was discovered and the Hiroshima-Nagasaki effects of radiation were accurately known, the nuclear and health physics industries had been hyping inaccurate radiation effects models which ignored non-linear effects (like saturation of the normal P53 repair mechanism of DNA) and the effects of dose rate for twenty years.
The entire industry had become indoctrinated in the philosophy of 1957, and there was no going back. Most of health physicists are employed by the nuclear or radiation industry at reactors or in medicine/research, so all these people have a vested interest in not rocking their own boat. The only outsiders around seem to politically motivated in one direction only (anti-nuclear), so there’s a standoff. Virtually everyone who enters the subject of health physics gets caught in the same trap, and so there is no mechanism in place to allow for any shift of consensus....
http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/04/twenty-years-after-chernobyl.html
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Twenty years after Chernobyl
On Wednesday morning, it's been 20 years since the Chernobyl disaster... The communist regimes could not pretend that nothing had happened (although in the era before Gorbachev, they could have tried to do so) but they had attempted to downplay the impact of the meltdown. At least this is what we used to say for twenty years. You may want to look how BBC news about the Chernobyl tragedy looked like 20 years ago.
Ukraine remembered the event (see the pictures) and Yushchenko wants to attract tourists to Chernobyl. You may see a photo gallery here. Despite the legacy, Ukraine has plans to expand nuclear energy.
Today I think that the communist authorities did more or less exactly what they should have done - for example try to avoid irrational panic. It seems that only 56 people were killed directly and 4,000 people indirectly. See here. On the other hand, about 300,000 people were evacuated which was a reasonable decision, too. And animals are perhaps the best witnesses for my statements: the exclusion zone - now an official national park - has become a haven for wildlife - as National Geographic also explains:
Reappeared: Lynx, eagle owl, great white egret, nesting swans, and possibly a bear
Introduced: European bison, Przewalski's horse
Booming mammals: Badger, beaver, boar, deer, elk, fox, hare, otter, raccoon dog, wolf
Booming birds: Aquatic warbler, azure tit, black grouse, black stork, crane, white-tailed eagle (the birds especially like the interior of the sarcophagus)
... Greenpeace in particular are very wrong whenever they say that the impact of technology on wildlife must always have a negative sign. ...
In other words, the impact of that event has been exaggerated for many years. Moreover, it is much less likely that a similar tragedy would occur today. Nuclear power has so many advantages that I would argue that even if the probability of a Chernobyl-like disaster in the next 20 years were around 10%, it would still be worth to use nuclear energy.
Some children were born with some defects - but even such defects don't imply the end of everything. On the contrary. A girl from the Chernobyl area, born around 1989, was abandoned by her Soviet parents, was adopted by Americans, and she became the world champion in swimming. Her name? Hint: the Soviet president was Gorbachev and this story has something to do with the atomic nucleus. Yes, her name is Mikhaila Rutherford. ;-)
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/04/chernobyl-21-years-later.html
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Chernobyl: 21 years later
Exactly 21 years ago, the Ukrainian power plant exploded. ...
A new study has found that the long-term health impact of the Chernobyl disaster was negligible. All kinds of mortality rates were at most 1% higher than normally.
ScienceDaily, full study.
Everyday life is riskier.
Yushchenko calls for a revival of the zone. His proposals include a nature preserve - which is more or less a fact now - as well as production of bio-fuels and a science center. The Korean boss of the U.N. calls for aid to the region.
copy of a fast comment there:
Environmental thinking is in perfect harmony with media hype.
Chernobyl wasn't the first case. Hiroshima was. A Manhatten District PhD physicist (Dr Jacobson, from memory?), who didn't actually work at Los Alamos and because of the compartmentalization of secrets didn't know anything about nuclear weapons effects, issued a press release about fallout the day after Hiroshima was on the front pages.
He wrote that the radioactivity would turn Hiroshima into a radioactive waste land for 75 years. Not 70 or 80 years, but 75 years, which is a bit weird bearing in mind the fact that radioactivity decays exponentially.
Actually there was no significant fallout or neutron induced activity beyond a few hours at Hiroshima due to the burst altitude. Even in a surface burst, the radioactivity drops to within the natural background at ground zero after a few years, and there are people living at Bikini Atoll today, where a 15 megatons surface burst was tested in 1954.
The effects of radiation are serious at high doses, but there is plenty of evidence that they are exaggerated for low doses of gamma and neutron radiation...
copy of another fast comment there:
The full report http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/7/49/ states: "The ICRP risk estimate assumes a dose and dose-rate effectiveness factor (DDREF) of 2.0 (reducing predicted risk by a factor of 2.0) for extrapolation of the data from the bomb survivors (who were exposed at extremely high dose rate) to lower dose and/or dose-rate exposures."
This is a vital issue, because cancer occurs when when the damage to DNA occurs so quickly that protein P53 can't repair it as single strand breaks. As soon as you get double breaks of DNA, there is the risk of the resulting bits of loose DNA being "repaired" the wrong way around in the strand by protein P53, and this can cause radiation induced cancer.
So at low dose rates to weakly ionizing (low linear energy transfer, or low LET) radiation like gamma rays, radiation causes single breaks in DNA and protein P53 has time to repair them before further breaks occur.
At high dose rates, the breaks occur so quickly that the P53 repair mechanism is overloaded with work, and repairs go wrong because DNA gets fairly fragmented (not just two loose ends to be reattached, but many bits) and P53 then accidentally puts some of the ends "back" in the wrong places, causing the risk of cancer.
The factor of 2 risk increase for high dose rates as opposed to low dose rates is nonsense; it's a far bigger factor, as Dr Loutit explained in his ignored book "Irradiation of Mice and Men" in 1962. On page 61 he states:
"... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls."
So, for a fixed dose of 1,000 R spread over a month (which is far less lethal in short term effects than a that dose spread over a few seconds, as occurs with initial radiation in a nuclear explosion, or over a few days when most of the fallout dose is delivered), the leukemia rate can vary from 5-40% as the dose rate varies from 1.3-81 r/hour.
The cancer rate doesn't just double at high dose rates. It increases by a factor of 8 (i.e., 5% to 40%) as the dose rate rises from 1.3 to 81 r/hour.
In fact, for comparing cancer risks at low level (near background) and Hiroshima, the dose rates cover a wider range that this experiment, so the correction factor for the effect of dose rate on risk will be bigger than 8.
Background radiation studies are based on average exposure rates of just 0.02 mr/hour, i.e., 0.00002 r/hour, while at Hiroshima and similar instrumented nuclear tests, the initial nuclear radiation lasted a total of 20 seconds until it was terminated by bouyant cloud rise effect.
Hence for a dose of 1 r spread over 20 seconds at Hiroshima, the dose rate it was received at was 180 r/hour. (Although according to Glasstone and Dolan'snuclear test data, half of the initial radiation dose would generally be received in about half a second, so the effective dose rate would be even higher than 180 r/hour.)
Hence, the range of dose rates from bachground to Hiroshima is 0.00002 r/hour to 180 r/hour or more, a factor of 9,000,000 difference or more.
Since in the animal experiments the leukemia rate increased by a factor of 8 due to a 62 fold increase in dose rate (i.e., as the dose rate increased from 1.3 to 81 r/hour), cancer risk is approximately proportional to the square root of the dose rate, so a 9,000,000 fold increase in dose rate should increase the cancer risk by 3,000 times.
Hence, the cancer risks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by this model exaggerate low level radiation effects by over 3,000 times, not merely by a factor of 2.
Update 28 April 2007: the last comment above contains an error and the exaggeration of radiation effects at low dose rates is even greater as a result.
The calculation should have have subtracted the 2% leukemia incidence in the non-irradiated control group from both the 40% and 5% figures. Hence, the radiation induced leukemia for 1000 R received at rates of 1.3 to 81 r/hour ranged from 3% to 38%, not 5% to 40%. This means that a 62.3 fold increase in dose rate increased the leukemia rate due to the radiation by a factor of 38/3 = 12.7. Hence, the radiation-induced (not the total) leukemia incidence is proportional to (dose rate)^{0.615}, instead of (dose rate)^{1/2}.
Using this corrected result for a 9 million fold difference between the dose rates of background (low dose rate) and Hiroshima (high dose rate) radiation, the radiation induced leukemia incidence for a similar total radiation dose will increase by a factor of 18,900, not 3,000.
Hence, radiation-induced leukemia rates currently being extrapolated from Hiroshima and Nagasaki data down to low dose rate radiation will exaggerate by a factor of 18,900 or so, rather than the factor of 2 currently assumed by orthodoxy.
15 May 2007 update: the Radiation Effects Research Foundation has deleted the pages linked to in this post, including http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/faqs/faqse.htm and http://www.rerf.jp/top/qae.htm
The new locations are http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa2.html and http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa7.html
http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa2.html contains an interesting table which shows the probability that cancer is caused by radiation instead of natural causes (non-exposed control group data) at various distances from ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For the most highly irradiated 810 survivors within 1 km of ground zero, 22 died from leukemia between 1950-90, of which 100% are attributable to radiation exposure. In the same group of 810 persons, 128 died from other forms of cancer, but only 42% of these 128 deaths were attributable to radiation.
Hence, even the most highly irradiated survivors who did die from cancer (apart from leukemia) were more likely (58% chance) to have died from naturally contracted cancer than from radiation induced cancer (42% risk).
Only for leukemia was there more than 100% chance that a cancer death was due to radiation and not due to natural cancer risks. As explained in previous posts, this is due to the fact that leukemia is both rare and is strongly correlated to radiation exposure than other cancers.
It is a pity that the Radiation Effects Research Foundation still has not added the mean shielded biologically equivalent doses (in centi-sieverts, which are identical to the old unit the rem) for each group of survivors listed using the DS02 dosimetry system.
http://www.rerf.or.jp/general/qa_e/qa7.html states:
"Question 7: What health effects have been seen among the children born to atomic-bomb survivors?
"Answer 7: This was one of the earliest concerns in the aftermath of the bombings. Efforts to detect genetic effects were begun in the late 1940s and continue to this day. Thus far, no evidence of genetic effects has been found. ..."
Comment about Pugwash and the anti-nuclear hysteria propaganda
I recently came across a free PDF book on the internet, authored by John Avery of the Danish Pugwash Group and Danish Peace Academy, called Space-Age Science and Stone-Age Politics.
It is a similar kind of book to that which was published widely in the 1980s, full of pseudophysics like claims that nuclear weapons can somehow destroy life on earth, when a 200 teratons (equal to 200*10^12 tons, i.e., 200 million-million tons or 200 million megatons) explosion from the KT event 65 million years ago failed to kill off all life on earth!
(This figure comes from David W. Hughes, "The approximate ratios between the diameters of terrestrial impact craters and the causative incident asteroids", Monthly Notice of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 338, Issue 4, pp. 999-1003, February 2003. The KT boundary impact energy was 200,000,000 megatons of TNT equivalent for the 200 km diameter of the Chicxulub crater at Yucatan which marks the KT impact site. Hughes shows that the impact energy (in ergs) is: E= (9.1*10^24)*(D^2.59), where D is impact crater's diameter in km. To convert from ergs to teratons of TNT equivalent, divide the result by the conversion factor of 4.2*10^28 ergs/teraton.)
Compare the power of all the world's nuclear weapons to that comet, and you see it's a complete fantasy. A megaton low altitude burst nuclear weapon will cause rapidly decreasing casualty rates in houses and rapidly decreasing destruction as the distance increases from 2 to 3 miles. In brich houses, the mortality risk from all blast effects (deaths are mainly due to debris impacts and related collapse of the house) for people lying down on the floor in U.K. type brick houses (with standard 9 inch thick brick walls) falls from about 50% at 2 miles to only about 5% at 3 miles from a 1 Mt surface burst. (Depending on the weapon design and the shielding geometry of the house and neighbouring homes, particularly the locations of windows, initial radiation and or thermal radiation may also cause some injury in some circumstances at these distances. If the location is downwind of the explosion, some quickly decaying fallout hazard may also exist in the event of true surface bursts on land (but not air bursts), depending on the windshear, fission yield fraction of the weapon, and whether the person stays indoors in a central area for the first few days or not.)
In addition, a 1 Mt low altitude bomb explosion would break virtually 100% of windows for a 10 mile radius (with a lower incidence of breakage extending much further, and isolated breaks occurring due to atmospheric "focussing" of the shock wave periodically in focus-point zones hundreds of miles downwind), and cause immense panic and massive numbers of casualties for any people outdoors, particularly any who have a clear line-of-sight to the fireball in the few seconds before the heat flash stops (the blast wave generally takes longer to arrive than the heat flash lasts, so even if a shield is destroyed by the blast, it protects against the heat flash; the shadow cast by a single leaf is enough to prevent serious thermal burns over the shadow area, as proved by photographs taken by the U.S. Army at Hiroshima and Nagasaki: see previous posts on this blog, for example). Skin burns from thermal flash and from beta rays due to fallout contamination are two of the biggest immediate concerns.
However, many nuclear weapons have yields lower than 1 Mt. Current (January 2007) mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile: 0.257 Mt. Total yield: 1,172 Mt.
This is completely trivial compared to the 200,000,000 Mt KT-impact explosion 65 million years ago which did not kill off life on Earth.
Let's now get back to John Avery's Space-Age Science and Stone-Age Politics, the Preface of which claims inaccurately:
"... science has given humans the power to obliterate their civilization with nuclear weapons..."
Avery gives no evidence for this claim, it's a typical example of groupthing propaganda.
The idea is as follows:
(1) claim that your pet hate, such as nuclear weapons or global warming or aliens, is a real threat to civilization,
(2) ignore all evidence to the contrary, and blame politicians for stone age ideas which are causing or risking a disaster.
In the 1930s, those who said Hitler was a threat and should be deterred by air power were dismissed by idealists and Nazi fellow-travellers as "war-mongers".
They either didn't understand, or pretended that they didn't understand, that they were the war-mongers.
If you want peace under freedom, human nature being as it is, you need to be strong enough enough to protect yourself.
Weaken yourself by disarmament and you make yourself attractive to thugs by standing out as a good potential mugging victim.
Somehow all those pacifists escaped the real world of childhood, where you find out that defenselessness makes you victim to all passing thugs who want someone to pick on, mug, rob, and fight.
If you carry a big stick, you live a happier life if you want peace and freedom, than you live if you don't carry a big stick.
Stone age politics is sensible, because the problems of life remain the same now as then: politics is not leading human nature into war. Human nature leads politicians into war.
Contrary to Avery's mindset, you can't change the world by imposing a new political idealism on man.
That's called dictatorship, and all versions so far have been evil failures: fascist Nazism as well well as Communist dictatorship.
It makes a powerful elite few into dictators who become corrupt, people have to be coerced or bribed into maintaining the status quo under the dictatorship, the whole thing is unstable and based on hatreds and violence and terror.
The error is trying to impose a political "solution" on human nature. Human nature is determined by genes, not by ideals written in books by philosophers.
We see this in the fact that even when each individual in identical twins is brought up under different conditions in different places, they remain extremely similar in their interests and outlooks and intelligence. Genetics, sadly perhaps, does exert a massive influence on life.
The idea that problems like war - which are caused by deep-rooted instincts, hatreds, feelings of injustice, tribal rivalries, and prejudices - can be wiped out by philosophical belief systems like pacifist ideology, is utopian, not realistic.
Avery does reflect some of these issues on page 8 of his Preface, where he quotes Arthur Koestler's remark:
"We can control the movements of a space-craft orbiting about a distant planet, but we cannot control the situation in Northern Ireland."
This is very deep. The pacifists keep kidding themselves that if only they could explain to terrorists or dictators how wrong they are, the world would be put right. Wrong. The terrorists and dictators are paranoid, deluded bigots who simply don't want to hear the facts. The only thing they will listen to or respect is force, not talk. However, sometimes - as in the case in Northern Ireland - after several generations a compromise and settlement can be reached to halt the ongoing violence, at least for a while. Unless the core problems are resolved, however, violence might flare up again when tensions and pressures are increased at some time in the future.
Don't rely on politicians and talk. Those who cherish peace agreements should remember that unless there is really genuine goodwill behind each signatory, the agreement isn't worth the paper it is written on. It's actually negative equity, if it brings one side a false sense of security, as was the case with Neville Chamberlain when he got Adolf Hitler's autograph on a peace pact at Munich in September 1938.
In other words, making peace with a homocidal maniac and then waving the peace agreement around and saying "Peace in our time", is very dangerous. If Chamberlain had responded better (more aggressively) to Hitler, millions of lives might had been saved. Unfortunately he and his predecessors had a fixation with an inaccurate analysis of the interpretation of World War I. They thought that "peace at any cost" was worth while. They were wrong in forgetting the advice of the Roman, Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, writing in his book Epitoma rei militaris (c. 390 AD): "Si vis pacem, para bellum." (If you wish for peace, prepare for war.)
Moving on to Chapter 1 of Avery's book, The world as it is, and the world as it could be, things get more interesting. The chapter begins with a list of interesting facts. Some are a bit out of date. As of 1997, the annual U.S. military budget is not nearly a thousand billion, but merely $439 billion (only $23 billion is spent on nuclear warheads).
Avery claims in his list on page 12 that:
"In the world as it is, the nuclear weapons now stockpiled are sufficient to kill everyone on earth several times over."
This is total nonsense as already explained and shown by bthe previous posts on this blog: nuclear weapons are not that powerful, in part because the blast and other effects distances don't scale up in proportion to the amount of energy. Hence, increase the energy release by a million times, and the blast pressure damage distances are increased by only the cube-root of a million, i.e., just 100 times.
Nuclear weapons actually "work" more by knocking over charcoal cooking braziers at breakfast time (as in the case of the firestorm at Hiroshima) and by the combination of nuclear radiation with thermal flash burns (the nuclear radiation lowers the white blood cell count for a few months after exposure, preventing infections of the burned skin from being healed naturally, so the person dies). Nuclear weapons are very dangerous and powerful, but they are certainly not the superbombs painted by media hysteria and political propaganda in the Cold War. That propaganda went unchallenged by most scientists largely because it helped stabilize the situation and deter war.
However, it is now dangerous to over-hype the effects of nuclear weapons in this manner, because it detracts from the effectiveness of simple civil defence "duck and cover" and evacuation countermeasures. If you do get a terrorist nuclear attack, the casualty toll is basically dependent on whether people watch the flash and fireball through windows (getting burned by thermal radiation in the process, and then get killed or seriously injured when the blast wave arrives some seconds later, fragmenting the windows), or whether they "duck and cover".
Avery then goes on to Africa and its problems: the need for safe and adequate drinking water supplies and medical help.
Avery suggests funding these justifiable schemes by taxing international currency transactions. Sounds good if it works, i.e., if it doesn't put international trade out of business. If you tax too much, this will happen, because imports and exports will become even more highly taxed than they are now.
Page 16 contains the stupid claim:
"In the world as it could be, a universal convention against terrorism and hijacking would give terrorists no place to hide."
So a piece of paper will prevent terrorists hiding in mountains, in vast sparsely populated areas? This is an example of dangerous nonsense. It's dangerous because it creates a false sense of security, resting on a piece of paper.
In the real world, there are lots of bits of paper in each country with laws written on them. That doesn't abolish crime. Reason? The laws are just scribbles on pieces of paper. Human nature is such that criminals don't pay attention to laws, and even with the deterrents of fines and prison sentences, nobody has ever invented a way to make all people conform to the law. When you apply this fact to terrorists, the problem is immense because the punishments available cannot be scaled up in proportion to the potential crimes and acts of terrorism. The relative risks for terrorists don't increase in proportion to the threat that the terrorists present to civilization.
Avery also goes on to claim (on page 17) that war could be abolished just as slavery was abolished.
There are various deep-rooted problems with this claim: the American Civil War was essentially a war against slavery.
War and slavery have very little to do with one another. Often, people go to war to preserve your independence, i.e., to fight for freedom, or fight against the prospect of becoming a slave in some political ideology (fascism, communism, etc.).
It follows that if you want to ensure continued freedom from slavery, you need the ability to fight against those who would make a slave of you. Therefore, you need to be able to go to war to prevent slavery.
If you abolish the possibility of fighting against thugs, you will risk becoming a slave. So Avery's idea that the abolition of slavery in the American Civil War and other fights should now be followed by an abolition of the possibility of war, i.e., fighting against the prospect of being enslaved by thugs, is a contradiction. It is manifestly gullible and dangerous.
Moving on to Chapter 2 of Avery's book, Tribalism, which contains a discussion of how bees returning to their hives can communicate to other bees some information about how far away, and in what direction, any good pollen sources can be found. This was discovered in 1945 by Karl von Frisch. The returning bee flies around in a kind of circle with occasional short cuts across the diameter of the circle. The direction of the short cut across the diameter of the circle marks the direction to the pollen source, and the number of wiggles the Bee's abdomen makes as it crosses the diameter of the circle indicate the distance to the pollen source:
"Studies of the accuracy with which her hive-mates follow these instructions show that the waggle dance is able to convey approximately 7 bits of information - 3 bits concerning distance and 4 bits concerning direction."
Interesting trivia.
Moving on to Avery's Chapter 3, Nationalism, a false religion, things get back on topic again. Avery argues that the nation state is a kind of tribe, and wars between nation states are basically tribal wars: "... a totally sovereign nation-state has become a dangerous anachronism."
Unless you precisely define a "totally sovereign nation-state", this is illucid. Most nation-states have some interdependence on others, such as being part of a union (e.g., the European Union or the United States of America) or federation (e.g., the Russian Federation).
This doesn't prevent them being involved in wars, or starting wars to protect themselves if their vital interests are threatened.
There is actually a danger in federation and union which I must explain:
A few hundred years ago, there was an era called the "Age of Discovery" in which large unions, nations and empires, sent out armies to seize the assets of small, happy, free and independent tribes. This theft was "justified" by denying the victims any right of free expression, and indeed herding them up and selling them as slaves.
The Spanish actually destroyed an ancient South American civilization in this way, while other Europeans colonised massive areas of Africa and Asia, forcing the people into slavery or brainwashing them with various religions.
Therefore, even successful unions, federations and other groups may pose a threat to civilizations that differ from themselves. There is an enormous amount of sheer arrogance in the replies people give to this. They claim that errors that occurred before cannot happen again because people learn from their mistakes. Wrong. Errors that have occurred in the past actually keep on occurring:
Even within any union or federation, you will find groups of people being exploited by the union or federation as a whole. They will be forced to pay taxes for services they do not use, and so on. They do not have any say because they are a minority and the particular form of so-called "democracy" (which is a sheer travesty of the term "democracy" as used in Ancient Greece, where every citizen had a daily vote on the day's policies) in use is basically a dictatorship with a choice between two rich old men, once every five years.
If we go back in time a bit to the age before really effective military forces existed in England, you come to a time when England was free to all who came with enough swords. This is precisely the reason why first the Romans and later the Normans invaded England successfully.
If we give up our armaments, we will be in a similar position to that we were in when we were conquered by the Romans and the Normans.
Alliances are fickle. In World War I, from 1914-8 the allies consisting of Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Serbia, and Belgium fought against the enemies consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. In 1915 Japan joined the allies and Bulgaria joined the enemy. In 1916 and 1917, Romania and America, respectively, joined the allies.
In World War II, 1939-45, Italy and Japan, which had both been allies in World War I, became enemies, switching sides. Allegiances can shift, treaties can be broken. In World War II, America was surprised by the sneaky Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while Russia was surprised by Hitler's treachery. Russia had a pact with Hitler which guaranteed peace. It wasn't worth a cent.
Avery correctly pins a share of the blame for World War II on the French, on page 62:
"In 1921, the Reparations Commission fixed the amount that Germany would have to pay [mainly to France, in compensation for the costs of World War II] at 135,000,000,000 gold marks. Various western economists realized that this amount was far more than Germany would be able to pay; and in fact, French efforts to collect it proved futile. Therefore France sent army units to occupy industrial areas of the Ruhr in order to extract payment in kind. The German workers responded by sitting down at their jobs. Their salaries were paid by the Weimar government, which printed more and more paper money. The printing presses ran day and night, flooding Germany with worthless currency. By 1923, inflation had reached such ruinous proportions that baskets full of money were required to buy a loaf of bread. At one point, four trillion paper marks were equal to one dollar. This catastropic inflation reduced the German middle class to poverty and destroyed its faith in the orderly working of society.
"The Nazi Party had only seven members when Adolf Hitler joined it in 1919. By 1923, because of the desperation caused by economic chaos, it had grown to 70,000 members."
Avery's Chapter 4 is called Religion: Part of the problem? - or the answer?. This is particularly interesting (page 67):
"Early religions tended to be centred on particular tribes, and the ethics associated with them were usually tribal in nature. ... In the 6th century B.C., Prince Gautama Buddha founded a new religion in India, with a universal (non-tribal) code of ethics. Among the sayings of the Buddha are the following: Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love. Let a man overcome anger by love; let him overcome evil by good. All [weak] men tremble at punishment. All [over-indulged] men love life. Remember that you are like them, and do not cause slaughter.
"One of the early converts to Buddhism was the emperor Ashoka Maurya, who reigned in India between 273 B.C. and 232 B.C. After his conversion, he resolved never again to use war as an instrument of policy. He became one of the most humane rulers in history, and he also did much to promote the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia.
"In Christianity, which is built on the foundations of Judaism, the concept of universal human brotherhood replaces narrow loyalty to the tribe. [This simplification of Avery's won't go down well with followers of Judaism, and ignores the crimes, from the Inquisition to Nazi Christianity, done in the name of Christianity over the centuries.] The universality of Christian ethical principles, which we see especially in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, make them especially relevant to our own times. Today, in a world of thermonuclear weapons, the continued existence of civilization depends on whether or not we are able to look on all of humanity as a single family."
This again is wrong: thermonuclear weapons don't threaten our existence. They are there because people threaten our freedom.
If they do get used in war again, that would be terrible, but how terrible it is depends on what people can do to protect themselves. It's a quantitative thing, not a qualitative thing.
All disasters are terrible. They are more terrible if you give up in advance and don't have any civil defence advice in place with the evidence to support - to the general public hearing the advice - the fact that "duck and cover" and decontamination and other countermeasures do actually work and are feasible and have been well tested against a range of different types of nuclear explosion in carefully instrumented, scientific trials.
On page 68, Avery states:
"In the Christian Gospel According to Matthew, the following passage occurs: You have heard it said: Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy. But I say unto you: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that spitefully use you and persecute you. ...
"The seemingly impractical advice given to us by both Jesus and Buddha - that we should love our emenies and return good for evil - is in fact of the greatest practicality, since acts of unilateral kindness and generosity can stop escalatory cycles of revenge and counter-revenge such as those which characterize the present conflict in the Middle East and the recent troubles in Northern Ireland. Amazingly, Christian nations, while claiming to adhere to the ethic of love and forgiveness, have adopted a policy of 'massive retaliation', involving systems of thermonuclear missiles whose purpose is to destroy as much as possible of the country at which retaliation is aimed. It is planned that entire populations shall be killed in a 'massive retaliation', innocent children along with guilty politicians."
Avery here neglects a very important question:
"Would you love Adolf Hitler as your neighbour and forgive him while he is in the middle of exterminating millions in gas chambers, and allow him to continue?"
Jesus's to love thy neighbour doesn't or shouldn't apply to Mr Hitler. So we immediately find a massive hole in Christian ethics and philosophy. Avery merely ignores the existence of this hole, which in the real world (if he were a politician) would mean he would be liable to fall straight down the hole, dragging all those who followed him down there too.
No. You shouldn't love thy neighbour if that neighbour is potentially a mass murderer who will use your good will to help accomplish evil goals. That's a massive problem that totally destroys the whole thesis of Avery.
Avery goes on, still on page 68:
"The startling contradiction between what Christian nations profess and what they do was obvious even before the advent of nuclear weapons..."
Hold hard. Nuclear weapons ended World War II, because they forced Russia to declare war on Japan in order to get some of the advantages of being a victor. This made Japan's leaders realise it has lost the war. The numbers of people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were trivial compared to the numbers killed by regular incendiary air raids on Japan, which included the firestorm on Tokyo in March 1945 that was far more destructive than a nuclear bomb.
The purpose of our having nuclear weapons is to deter war and prevent a war. 'Massive retaliation' is an old and largely outdated deterrent concept, and there are more modern strategies such as counterforce (hitting military targets with weapons of yields and burst types such as to minimise any possible collateral damage to civilian homes).
However, the point is that World Wars are less likely when the potential losses to all parties are massive. This is the main reason why nuclear weapons have prevented regional Cold War conflicts from escalating to all-out World War.
On page 160, Avery produces a graph (Figure 8.1) which shows the increase in infant deaths due to the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990, under U.N. Security Council Resolution 678 which authorized the use of 'all necessary means' to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. The mortality rate of children under five years of age in Iraq doubled within a year.
This highlights the perils of economic sanctions: they don't hurt the dictators, they kill innocent kids. They may sound "peaceful" but they still kill. In the same way, according to some muddled pacifist sentiments, only war using particular kinds of "violent weapons" is a bad thing. According to that bad philosophy, the use of gas chambers to massacre people is "peaceful" because there are no "horrible bombs or bullets" involved. Actually, it is just as bad to kill people regardless of the method used. Cold-blooded slaughter with gas, refusal to allow medical treatment, or starvation is - if anything - even more sinister than the use of violence in anger.
Avery's Chapter 10 is World government. The flaw with this idea is simple to see: laws get broken. The idea that a world government based on laws will be a success is refuted amply by a look at what happens in any country when laws are made: criminals break them regardless of law enforcers. At present, the stability of the world is ensured by military deterrence. Remove that mechanism, and you are playing with fire. Every time people have tried to impose a philosophical solution like Marxism or Fascism, it has failed. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The idea of a world government is that of absolute power, and absolute corruption.
The Roman Empire was the world government of its time. It was maintained by ruthless suppression of dissent, and it was continually at war, often civil war.
A world government would not abolish war, it would relabel all future wars as "civil wars". Merely adding the word "civil" to war is the kind of worse-than-useless political solution to a problem you can expect from moronic zombies.
On page 214, Avery quotes a 1954 suggestion by Edith Wynner for world government (which sounds as if it is a line borrowed from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still):
"A policeman seeing a fight between two men, does not attempt to determine which of them is in the right and then help him beat up the one he considers wrong. His function is to restrain violence by both, to bring them before a judge who has authority to determine the rights of the dispute, and to see that the court's decision is carried out."
This is all false. First, the person who is being wrongfully attacked first wants the attack to stop, not to beat up the other person.
The suggestion in the quotation that people always want revenge is prejudiced and wrong.
Second, the policeman does have a duty to collect relevant evidence and to do that efficiently he or she needs to take statements from any witnesses, and ascertain that any evidence (weapons with fingerprints, etc.) will be available for use in a prosecution. The policeman decides on the basis of this preliminary investigation who he or she should arrest.
If the policeman arrests an innocent person to bring them before a judge, that is wrongful arrest. Arrests must be based on evidence or at least strong suspicion with some reasoning behind it.
The whole idea that in any war both sides are equally at fault is nonsense: and an insult to those murdered by Hitler's thugs.
In particular, the idea of an international police force to catch and punish criminals fighting terrorist wars is just nonsense because it can't deal with suicide bombers. You can jump up and down on the grave of the suicide bomber, but that will not deter other suicide bombers.
The pacifist case for world government is just shallow and insulting. It is likely to cause more violent wars (which will be called, ironically, "civil wars") than before, simply because vast numbers of people will probably resent the system. It will permit corruption and "might is right" majority rule and barbarity on a scale not seen since the Roman Empire. It will not be capable of stopping 9/11 type suicide bombers.
World government would reduce individualism by removing part of each person's sense of personal identity to a group, and will thereby increase the risk of subversive warfare and insurrection against the massive nanny-state quango of dictatorial majority-controlled officialdom that constitutes the travesty of democracy masquerading as a "world government".
copy of a comment made on John Horgan's blog:
http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/csw/?p=50
"... the fact is that, as near as we can tell from the fossil record, humans have not killed other humans as a matter of course for the greatest part of Homo Sapiens’ time on earth. The beginnings of our species are figured to be about 195,000 years ago, the date of the earliest anatomically modern skeletons, but there is no indication of anything like murder until about 20,000 years ago. Doesn’t seem to be in our blood, but in our circumstances. ...
"But it is important to see that this kind of interpersonal violence and murder comes rather late in Sapiens development. In fact, for 90 per cent of our time on earth there is nothing to indicate that humans ever reached the extreme state of knocking each other off. It was a reaction to an extreme crisis, it got to be a familiar response to the increased tensions in a time of scarcity and competition, and once established it seems to have continued on.
"But not because it was in our human nature. Rather it was in the conditions of our life. And therefore the obvious lesson is that we can’t just shrug and say some people are just “born killers,” or “it’s in the blood.” It’s not, and was not for 175,000 years." - Kirkpatrick Sale
The killing started with people hunting animals for food. People were primarily tribal hunters for the 175,000 years before they became farmers around the time of the last ice age, around 20,000 years ago. Hunting is a violent activity, so when hunting ended, those people used to regular bouts of violence would be more likely to fight among themselves instead. You see this in primitive tribes even today: they have two important activities, both full of ceremony and skill: hunting and warfare. The hunting provides food. The warfare maintains order between rival tribes, driving away the hunting competition and the danger of invasion of their villages and theft of their wives by other tribes.
According to Wikipedia: "Neanderthals became extinct in Europe approximately 24,000 years ago". Maybe they were driven away or killed off in warfare? Even if this was the case, it's not automatically the survivors who are to blame.
The pacifist approach begins with the false assumption that fighting and violence are totally immoral and inexcusable under all circumstances. Yet the cold blooded massacres of history (which pacifists don't seem to worry about) like concentration camps where malnutrition and disease, slavery and neglect, or cold-blooded gassing, are the really big problems. Anne Frank died from typhus, and millions died from murder or deliberate neglect in axis civilian concentration camps.
Saddam used nerve gas to murder thousands of Kurds in 1988, and he ordered the torture and murder of thousands of others. It doesn't make that much difference whether he used a bullet to "violently" murder someone, or simply let them die from thirst more "peacefully" in a cell. It's still murder.
I think that this problem is deliberately being neglected by pacifism, and it's the fatal flaw in pacifism. There was an infamous Oxford Union debate around 1933 on whether to "Fight for King and Country". A pacifist philosopher, the immoral Professor C.E.M. Joad (later imprisoned for travelling without a valid railway ticket), was asked what he would do "if his wife was being raped by enemy soldiers". He dismissed the question with a comic reply that he would simply join in and have an orgy, which made most people there laugh, and he won the vote.
The public viewed the plight of people in concentration camps as a joke at that time, circa 1933, in comparison to the violent horrors of having a major war.
But the correct question to pin on the pacifist is what you do if the enemy is torturing people held without charge in concentration camps, as Hitler and Saddam did. Economic sanctions is worse than useless: the death rate of children under 5 years of age doubled within a year due to the sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990, under U.N. Security Council Resolution 678 which authorized the use of 'all necessary means' to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. You can't hurt the dictator by applying economic sanctions: innocent people suffer. The only real option is to go to war against them. It's simply not a case that "two wrongs don't make a right". You have to try to estimate how many more people you can save by going to war than will be killed if you don't have the war. Whether it is right or not depends on whether there is a profit to be had, i.e. if the number of lives saved exceeds the number killed in the conflict.
You can only call a war illegitimate or "murder" if amount of anticipated suffering as a result of the conflict exceeds the amount of suffering which is likely if the war doesn't occur.
Hi Nige
Do you have any comments about the Japanese earthquake and the nuclear reactor yet?
SM
Hi Susan,
There is not much to say about the incident, really, which was hardly Chernobyl.
It's interesting however that Japan has managed to embrace nuclear reactor technology despite the anti-nuclear sentiment in the aftermath of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the 1954 contamination of 23 Japanese fishermen on the "Lucky Dragon".
What is interesting about the media is not the science (the newspaper editor doesn't know the difference between a pBq and a GBq, it's all the same), but the politics.
Here in the UK, there is no antinuclear concern about the risks of having 0.99 microcurie or 9.9 kBq of Am-241 (very similar to plutonium for health reasons) in smoke detectors in every house to save lives in fires.
Antinuclear people don't put on a massive front-page propaganda attack saying that 9.9 kBq of Am-241 emits 9900 alpha particles per second, and since a single alpha particle can in principle set off a lung cancer, it follows that over a two week period a smoke detector emits enough alpha particles to totally wipe out humanity, at least in principle.
It's fairly obvious that this scare-mongering won't get into the newspapers, although on a scientific footing it is similar quantitatively to much of the anti-nuclear protestors propaganda.
Nobody will listen to propaganda unless it reinforces their prejudices.
If you point out that a single smoke detector, if incinerated in a fire, could - according to the exceptionally fiddled antinuclear lobby calculations - exterminate humanity, nobody listens.
If the media publish the same fiddled calculation about a leak of radioactivity from a nuclear reactor, it gets a very different treatment from those reading it, starting off a panic wave.
If you take a rock, in principle (according to misleading calculations) that could be used by a terrorist to kill everyone, simply by hitting people over the head. In practice, of course that is not going to happen. Similarly, the Am-241 contaminated smoke from a single burned smoke detector isn't going to end up in people's lungs, with one alpha particle setting off a cancer in each person in the world.
If you want to play the numbers game, you can point out that Am-241 has a half-life of 432 years, so it's effective life is statistically 432/(ln 2) = 623 years. (Am-241 will emit the same number of alpha particles until it has completely decayed as would be emitted if the emission rate at the present time, now, were sustained for the statistically effective lifespan of 623 years.)
So 0.99 microcurie/9.9 kBq of Am-241 in a smoke detector emits a total of 2x10^14 alpha particles in its lifespan.
Since the world's population is 6,700,000,000 = 6.7x10^9, it is clear that if only 1 in 30,000 of the alpha particles emitted by a single smoke detector starts a lung cancer, the number of people killed will be equal to the number of people on the planet!
So it's very easy to come up with scare-mongering statements about radiation, simply because the numbers are so big.
The "problem" for scare mongerers is that the actual risks are diluted by immense factors. Not only will it be extremely unlikely that smoke containing alpha emitters will get into many people's lungs, but even when it gets there, it is usually removed quickly like ordinary dust, and in any case the probability of a single alpha particle causing a lung cancer is extremely low.
So because the quantitative errors involve in naive scare-mongering antinuclear propaganda are so extreme, the qualitative nature of the risk changes totally:
it's a trivial risk compared to the hazards of inhaling natural radioactive radon gas that comes from the soil and seeps into houses.
Traditionally, the pro-nuclear lobby has made an awful mess and have never properly made people aware clearly of the nature and intensity of natural background radiation from space and present in soil, water, food, and the air.
If they did calculate and measure background radiation exposures carefully, they could express radiation levels in terms of the natural average sea level exposure, so people would be aware of radiation in a more useful, more quantitative sort of way.
However, they don't do this. Edward Teller made a complete mess of it in the 1950s by having to compare radiation from the nuclear industry to cigarette smoking, instead of comparing it to natural background radiation in a quantitative way.
In addition, it is vital to present the facts of how background radiation levels vary in different locations.
The best thing the nuclear industry could do is to publish a global map (like a layered Google map) on the internet with reliable data on radiation levels around the world, showing how cosmic radiation varies as a function of terrain altitude and proximity to the poles (where the earth's magnetic field lines are nearly vertical and so can't shield charged cosmic rays), as well as the effects of different types of soils which contain different amounts of radioactive minerals.
They should also indicate the natural alpha, beta and gamma radiation in food, water, air and soil in different places.
It would be useful knowledge that anyone could grasp if colour coding was used.
SM has kindly emailed me the following extract about firestorm exaggerations by Dr W. E. Strope who worked at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at nuclear tests from Crossroads (1946) at Bikini Atoll, onward.
Link: http://www.strategicdefense.org/Commentary/Worldonfire.htm
AIR DEFENSE BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE CIVIL DEFENSE
Whole World on Fire—And All Wet
Walmer (Jerry) Strope
I have just finished reading a strange book, Whole World on Fire, by Lynn Eden, published by Cornell University Press a month ago. Ms. Eden is an historian at Stanford University. Her thesis is that Air Force targeteers perversely continued to use blast damage as the basis for targeting even though fire damage "would extend two to five times farther than blast damage" because of institutional biases stemming from the emphasis on precision bombing in World War II. That is, "organizations draw on past practices and ideas even as they innovate to solve new problems."
To Ms. Eden, the question of prioritizing nuclear weapon effects is just a convenient example of this institutional characteristic. She does not purport herself to be an expert on the physics of mass fires. This helps explain part of the strangeness I find in the book; namely, Why now? After all, the Cold War is over and targeteers are not fine-tuning the SIOP. It seems she has spent 15 years reviewing the literature on nuclear fires, interviewing the knowledgeable people and writing the book. It just happened to come out now.
In Chapter 1, Ms. Eden introduces her readers to the problem by postulating the detonation of a 300-kt bomb 1,500 feet above the Pentagon. It is here that I encounter more of the strangeness. It seems that Ms. Eden is under some pressure to convince her readers that the Air Force had plainly ignored the obvious. Therefore, she tends to present the most extreme positions on mass fire issues, as well as some of the "tricks of the trade." One trick: close in, we are told "the fireball would melt asphalt in the streets." But when the description gets to the Capitol building some three miles away, there is no comparable sentence. The previous image is permitted to carry over.
Next, we are told, "Even though the Capitol is well constructed to resist fire, and stands in an open space at a distance from other buildings, light from the fireball shining through the building’s windows would ignite papers, curtains, light fabrics, and some furniture coverings. Large sections of the building would probably suffer heavy fire damage. The House and Senate office buildings would suffer even greater damage. The interiors of these buildings would probably burn."
Hold on! Wait a minute! The Capitol building is completely protected by sprinklers. So are the House and Senate office buildings, the Library of Congress, the Supreme Court building, and the massive buildings lining the Mall and in the Federal Triangle. These buildings may become sopping wet but they probably will not burn. The monuments also will not burn.
Why don’t mass fire calculators take sprinkler systems, venetian and vertical blinds, and other fire protection measures into account? Is the situation in the Nation’s Capital unusual? Not anymore. For decades, the lowly fire protection engineer and his employer, the fire insurance industry, have been gnawing away at the fire problem. According to the National Fire Protection Association, between 1977 and 2002 the annual number of building fires in the United States declined by 50%, from 3.2 million a year to 1.6 million a year. Fires in hotels and motels, which killed over 100 people a year as recently as the late 1960s, have become so rare that the U.S. Fire Administration no longer keeps statistics on them. If it were not for a sizable increase in wildfire damage—resulting from timber management practices—the statistics would look even better.
Ultimately, Ms. Eden concludes, "Within tens of minutes, the entire area, approximately 40 to 65 square miles—everything within 3.5 or 4.6 miles of the Pentagon—would be engulfed in a mass fire. The fire would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else." To reach this horrific prediction, Ms. Eden has to ignore more than the prevalence of sprinkler systems. Among these other issues are the hole in the doughnut problem and the survivability problem.
I was introduced to the hole in the doughnut issue in 1963 when I first visited UK civil defense in the Home Office, Horseferry House, London. I discovered that the people I was talking to had planned the incendiary attacks during World War II. Their effectiveness depended on how many explosive bombs they included in an attack. If they included too many, the buildings were knocked down and didn’t burn well. In fact, the target just smoldered. If they included too few, the incendiaries often just burned out on undamaged roofs. Finally, in the Hamburg attack, they got it right, just opening up the buildings so they burned rapidly. The Hamburg mass fire was called a "fire storm." These people were adamantly unanimous that a nuclear weapon could never cause a firestorm. The severe-damage region around the explosion would just smolder, producing a "ring fire," called a doughnut by our fire research people. That’s apparently what happened at Hiroshima.
Mass fire models that ignore such views produce fierce fires that would seem to destroy everything. But lots of people survived in the fire areas at Hamburg and Hiroshima. The late Dr. Carl F. Miller (after whom the California chapter of ASDA is named) did the definitive analysis of the records of the Hamburg Fire Department. About 20 percent of the people in the fire area were in underground bunkers. Eighty percent were in shelters in building basements. Survival in bunkers was 100%; in basements, it was 80%.
Despite her exaggeration of mass fire effects, I don’t think Ms. Eden’s book would convince the joint strategic targeteers to change their ways. I have concluded that the blast footprint and the fire footprint will be roughly congruent. Thus, I refer to them simply as the "direct effects area" (See my Nuclear Emergency Operations 101.)
Lynn Eden’s book is a strange book—and a little bit dumb (her term.) I wouldn’t recommend you buy it. But if you are part of the old civil defense research group, you should find the pages on that work interesting. If you just want to learn something about mass fires, try to find a copy of FEMA H-21 of August 1990, the Nuclear Attack Environment Handbook. It won’t lead you astray.
I exchanged emails on the subject of blast wave energy attenuation in causing damage, a couple of years ago, with Dr Harold Brode, the RAND Corporation expert on the effects of nuclear weapons. I had read Dr William Penney's evidence published in 1970 about the blast in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which he had personally surveyed as soon as the war ended in 1945. The blast, Penney's studies showed, rapidly lost energy (and pressure) due to the work done in causing damage. According to the laws of physics, once damage is done like this, energy is irreversibly lost. The American book by Glasstone ignores this effect entirely, although it does cite Penney's paper.
Harold Brode suggested that when the blast knocks down a house, the energy used to do that is not entirely lost because you get accelerated fragments of brick, glass and wood moving outward in the radial direction. However, these move far more slowly than the shock front and soon lag behind the shock, fall to the ground and decelerate by tumbling. The distances debris moved when houses were knocked down in nuclear tests in 1953 and 1955 were carefully measured and filmed; it is not that far, and most of the debris remains close (within a matter of metres) to the house. So there is a problem here. For relatively small weapons, the blast pressure drops so rapidly with distance in the range of serious damage, that the energy loss effect is not too severe (although it was apparent in Penney's measurements of the deflection of steel bars and the crushing of petrol cans at Hiroshima and Nagasaki). But for big weapons, it interferes seriously with the blast scaling laws and the result is that blast damage distances increase far more slowly than the official predictions, especially at low pressures.
This is relevant to massive controversies over thermal radiation effects like skin burns and fires. The majority of fires in Japanese residential areas were caused by the blast wave via overturning cooking braziers in homes full of inflammable paper screens, bamboo furniture, etc., the charcoal braziers being in use at the times of each nuclear attack (breakfast time for Hiroshima, lunch time for Nagasaki). Colonel Tibbets, in charge of the 509th which dropped the bombs (he was the pilot on the Hiroshima raid) writes in his 1978 autobiography about how expert he was on firestorms. He had served in Europe on successful incendiary missions before going to Japan, where he advised General LeMay on how to successfully create firestorms with a mix of incendiaries plus EXPLOSIVES, which create blast damage and enable fires to start in the debris of wooden buildings. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki landed at local times of 8.15 am, when people were either on their way to work or school, or having breakfast (using charcoal cooking braziers in wood frame houses containing inflammable bamboo and paper screen furnishings), and at 12 pm, when many people were preparing lunch and others were out of doors.
The skin burns risk depends mainly on the time of day, since the percentage of people who would be in an unobstructed line-of-sight of a fireball in a modern city ranges from 1% in the early hours of the morning to an average of 25% during the daytime. Hence, the flash burns casualty rate can easily vary by a factor of 25, just as a function of the time of day that an explosion occurs. Obviously, the density of combustible materials on the ground determines the risk of a firestorm, but this is trivial for most modern buildings in cities made largely from steel and concrete, which simply don't burn. Dr Brode did several studies of firestorm physics during the 1980s, which I feel are irrelevant because the fact is that firestorms were well investigated in World War II when incendiary attacks were made on many cities in an effort to start them. The areas which burned well and led to firestorms has a massive abundance of combustible materials per square foot, and these were mainly the wooden medieval parts of old cities like Hamburg, and wooden construction areas of Japanese cities. Once burned, there were rebuilt with less inflammable materials, so these firestorms cannot be repeated in the future. (Similarly, wooden London was burned down in 1666, and was rebuilt in a more fire-resistant manner.)
There are some interesting reports by Carl Miller on firestorms in Germany, written in the 1960s. Somehow, the RAND Corporation did not get hold of this information, or else it simply jumped on the "Nuclear Winter" funding band waggon in 1983, and ignored the facts about firestorms derived from WWII obtained from personal experience by people like George R. Stanbury of the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch.
Dr Strope wrote a 1963 NRDL unclassified report on the base surge radiation effects of the 1946 Baker underwater test, which took a lot of finding. Fortunately the British library at one time was donated a lot of original NRDL reports (in printed form, not the usual poor-quality microfilm) and hold them at Boston Spa. I've compiled and assessed a great deal of information on radiation from underwater tests, but blogger and wordpress blog sites are not suited to publishing tables of information.
The British information which Dr Strope refers to in 1963 is that of Home Office scientist George R. Stanbury, who did the civil defence studies at the first British nuclear test in Monte Bello, 1952. Stanbury writes in the originally 'Restricted' (since declassified) U.K. Home Office Scientific Adviser's Branch journal Fission Fragments, Issue Number 3, August 1962, pages 22-26:
'The fire hazard from nuclear weapons
'by G. R. Stanbury, BSc, ARCS, F.Inst.P.
'We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation from nuclear attack. We hope to show that there is good scientific justification for the assessments we have made, and we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ...
'Firstly ... the collapse of buildings would snuff out any incipient fires. Air cannot get into a pile of rubble, 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This is not just guess work; it is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb [V1 cruise missile] incidents in London supported by a wealth of experience gained generally in the last war.
'Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general.
'Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited, it by no means follows that a continuing and destructive fire will develop.
'The effect of shielding in a built-up area was strikingly demonstrated by the firemen of Birmingham about 10 years ago with a 144:1 scale model of a sector of their city which they built themselves; when they put a powerful lamp in the appropriate position for an air burst they found that over 50% of the buildings were completely shielded. More recently a similar study was made in Liverpool over a much larger area, not with a model, but using the very detailed information provided by fire insurance maps. The result was similar.
'It is not so easy to assess the chance of a continuing fire. A window of two square metres would let in about 10^5 calories at the 5 cal/(cm)^2 range. The heat liberated by one magnesium incendiary bomb is 30 times this and even with the incendiary bomb the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5; in a large room it is very much less.
'Thus even if thermal radiation does fall on easily inflammable material which ignites, the chance of a continuing fire developing is still quite small. In the Birmingham and Liverpool studies, where the most generous values of fire-starting chances were used, the fraction of buildings set on fire was rarely higher than 1 in 20.
'And this is the basis of the assertion [in Nuclear Weapons] that we do not think that fire storms are likely to be started in British cities by nuclear explosions, because in each of the five raids in which fire storms occurred (four on Germany - Hamburg, Darmstadt, Kassel, Wuppertal and a "possible" in Dresden, plus Hiroshima in Japan - it may be significant that all these towns had a period of hot dry weather before the raid) the initial fire density was much nearer 1 in 2. Take Hamburg for example:
'On the night of 27/28th July 1943, by some extraordinary chance, 190 tons of bombs were dropped into one square mile of Hamburg. This square mile contained 6,000 buildings, many of which were [multistorey wooden] medieval.
'A density of greater than 70 tons/sq. mile had not been achieved before even in some of the major fire raids, and was only exceeded on a few occasions subsequently. The effect of these bombs is best shown in the following diagram, each step of which is based on sound trials and operational experience of the weapons concerned.
'102 tons of high explosive bombs dropped -> 100 fires
'88 tons of incendiary bombs dropped, of which:
'48 tons of 4 pound magnesium bombs = 27,000 bombs -> 8,000 hit buildings -> 1,600 fires
'40 tons of 30 pound gel bombs = 3,000 bombs -> 900 hit buildings -> 800 fires
'Total = 2,500 fires
'Thus almost every other building [1 in 2 buildings] was set on fire during the raid itself, and when this happens it seems that nothing can prevent the fires from joining together, engulfing the whole area and producing a fire storm (over Hamburg the column of smoke, observed from aircraft, was 1.5 miles in diameter at its base and 13,000 feet high; eyewitnesses on the ground reported that trees were uprooted by the inrushing air).
'When the density was 70 tons/square mile or less the proportion of buildings fired during the raid was about 1 in 8 or less and under these circumstances, although extensive areas were burned out, the situation was controlled, escape routes were kept open and there was no fire storm.'
Regarding Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo and other incendiary attacks on Japan, there is an excellent table of comparison of all the data on page 336 of the 1950 "Effects of Atomic Weapons" (deleted from later editions), based on the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report of 1946 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Hiroshima bomb destroyed 4.7 square miles, Nagasaki 1.8 square miles, and the 1,667 tons of incendiary and TNT dropped on Tokyo in one conventional raid destroyed 15.8 square miles, killing many more people than the atomic bombs.
The nuclear winter cold war propaganda dependent as it was on firestorm nonsense, is a complete lie scientifically of course, but it was a major politician and media "spin event":
"This study, which is based entirely on open Soviet sources, examines and analyzes Soviet views on and uses made by Soviet scientists of the so-called ''Nuclear Winter'' hypothesis. In particular, the study seeks to ascertain whether Soviet scientists have in fact independently confirmed the TTAPS prediction of a ''Nuclear Winter'' phenomenon or have contributed independent data or scenarios to it. The findings of the study are that the Soviets view the ''Nuclear Winter'' hypothesis as a political and propaganda opportunity to influence Western scientific and public opinion and to restrain U.S. defense programs. Analysis of Soviet publications shows that, in fact, Soviet scientists have made no independent or new contributions to the study of the ''Nuclear Winter'' phenomenon, but have uncritically made use of the worst-case scenarios, parameters, and values published in the Crutzen-Birks (Ambio 1982) and the TTAPS (Science, December 1983) studies, as well as models of atmospheric circulation borrowed from Western sources. Furthermore, current Soviet directives to scientists call for work on the further strengthening of the Soviet Union's military might, while it is also explained that the dire predictions of the possible consequences of a nuclear war in no way diminish the utility of the Soviet civil defense program and the need for its further improvement."
- Dr Leon Goure, USSR foreign policy expert, Soviet Exploitation of the 'Nuclear Winter' Hypothesis, SCIENCE APPLICATIONS INTERNATIONAL CORP., MCLEAN, VA, report SAIC-84/1310, DNA-TR-84-373, SBITR-84-373, ADA165794, June 1985.
A great deal of the problem is that following fashion and consensus is the easiest thing to do. Usually the mainstream viewpoint is the best there is, so people have a lot of faith in it, on the principle that "so many people can't all be wrong".
Nuclear winter has quite an interesting history which I've followed from the beginning. It started off with the comet impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. The comet forms a fireball when it collides with the atmosphere, and the thermal radiation is supposed to ignite enough tropical vegetation to produce a thick smoke cloud, freezing the ground and killing off many species.
The best soot to absorb solar radiation is that from burning oil, and Saddam tested this by igniting all of Kuwait's oil wells after the first Gulf War. Massive clouds of soot were produced, but the temperature drop was far less than "nuclear winter" calculations predicted occurred in the affected areas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in_the_first_Gulf_War
The idea that a dark smoke layer will stop heat energy reaching the ground is naive because by conservation of energy, the dark smoke must heat up when it absorbs sunlight, and since it is dark in colour it is as good at radiating heat as absorbing it. So it passes the heat energy downwards as the whole cloud heats up, and when the bottom of the cloud has reached a temperature equilibrium with the top, it radiates heat down to the ground, preventing the dramatic sustained cooling.
Although there is a small drop in temperature at first, as when clouds obscure the sun, all the soot cloud will do in the long run is to reduce the daily temperature variation of the air from day to night, so that the temperature all day and all night will be fairly steady and close to the average of the normal daytime and nighttime temperatures.
The dinosaur extinction evidence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_Crater, might be better explained by the direct effects of the comet impact: the air blast wave and thermal radiation effects on dinosaurs, and the kilometers-high tsunami. At the time the comet struck Chicxulub in Mexico with 100 TT (100,000,000 megatons or 100 million million tons) energy 65 million years ago, the continents were all located in the same area, see the map at http://www.dinotreker.com/cretaceousearth.html and would all have suffered severe damage from the size of the explosion. Most dinosaur fossils found are relatively close to the impact site on the world map 65 million years ago.
Another issue is that some proportion of the rock in the crater was calcium carbonate, which releases CO2 when heated in a fireball. If there was enough of it, the climatic effects would have been due to excessive heating, not cooling.
The "nuclear winter" idea relies on soot, not dust such as fallout (which is only about 1% of the crater mass, the remainder being fallback of rock and crater ejecta which lands within a few minutes). So it is basically an extension of the massive firestorms theory, which has many issues because modern cities don't contain enough flammable material per square kilometre to start a firestorm even when using thousands of incendiaries. In cases such as Hiroshima, the heavy fuel loading of the target area created a smoke cloud which carried up a lot of moisture that condensed in the cool air at high altitudes, bringing the soot back promptly to earth as a black rain.
Because this kind of thing is completely ignored by "nuclear winter" calculations, the whole "nuclear winter" physics looks artificial to me. In 1990, after several studies showed that TTAPS (Sagan et al.) had exaggerated the problem massively by their assumptions of a 1-dimensional model and so on, TTAPS wrote another paper in Science, where they sneakily modified the baseline nuclear targetting assumptions so that virtually all the targets were oil refineries. This enabled them to claim that a moderate cooling was still credible. However, the Kuwait burning oil wells experience a few years later did nothing to substantiate their ideas. Sagan did eventually concede there were faulty assumptions in the "nuclear winter" model, although some of his collaborators continue to write about it.
copy of a comment:
http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/10/where-to-now.html
Just to comment on this. I read Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War" (first published 1960) as a teenager and then requested his other books via the local library.
Kahn's book "The Next 200 Years" is if I recall, a small slim paperback and I don't think there was much data in it to make his case.
The key book for environmentalism is Herman Kahn and Julian Simon, "The Resourceful Earth - A Response to Global 2000" published in 1984 (Kahn died in 1983 while it was still in the press).
That volume is massive and contains hundreds of graphs and tables of data which really make a convincing case that environmentalism exaggerated the facts.
I read that perhaps twenty years ago and don't have a copy handy. But I think it dealt with everything.
Even things like species extinction are being grossly exaggerated - species are always becoming extinct as the fossil record shows. It's nothing new. As new species come along, old ones die off. It that wasn't the case, there would still be dinosaurs around, and the world would be a lot less healthy for humans. The whole reason why saber toothed tigers and other wild beasts were hunted to extinction was to make life bearable, not out of ignorance or selfishness!
Most of this environmentalism is a replacement for religion. The rate of rise of sea levels, etc., is slow enough that low lying areas can build up defenses in the meanwhile - far more cheaply than cutting CO2 emissions.
Better still, switch to nuclear power. The effects of low doses of external gamma radiation, especially if delivered at low dose rates, are actually beneficial to human beings as they stimulate DNA repair mechanisms like P53 and cut the cancer risk (it's only internal high-LET radiation like alpha and beta particles from ingested Sr-90 or Pu-239, or extremely large doses/dose rates from gamma rays, that cause a net health risk):
See the monumental report on effects of low dose rate, low-LET gamma radiation on 10,000 people in Taiwan by W.L. Chen,Y.C. Luan, M.C. Shieh, S.T. Chen, H.T. , Kung, K.L. Soong, Y.C.Yeh, T.S. Chou, S.H. Mong, J.T.Wu, C.P. Sun,W.P. Deng, M.F.Wu, and M.L. Shen, Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, page 6, available in PDF format at
http://www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf
'An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan. Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 ([low dose rate, low-LET gamma radiation emitter] half-life: 5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv, a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv. Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per 100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per 1,000 children under age 19.
'The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per 100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and income distributions of these persons are the same as for the general population, it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure. ...
'The data on reduced cancer mortality and congenital malformations are compatible with the phenomenon of radiation hormesis, an adaptive response of biological organisms to low levels of radiation stress or damage; a modest overcompensation to a disruption, resulting in improved fitness. Recent assessments of more than a century of data have led to the formulation of a well founded scientific model of this phenomenon.
'The experience of these 10,000 persons suggests that long term exposure to [gamma]radiation, at a dose rate of the order of 50 mSv (5 rem) per year, greatly reduces cancer mortality, which is a major cause of death in North America.'
For Hiroshima-Nagasaki data supporting the fact that low level gamma radiation cuts down cancer risks, see the most recent two posts at http://glasstone.blogspot.com/
Growing populations and economic activity really need to be used to sort out the problems in an unbiased way. Unfortunately, the mainstream approaches start with a prejudice dating back to 1957 when the facts were not known (P53 was only discovered twenty years later). The culture clash between fashionable politics and scientific facts always result in fashionable politics winning, and people needlessly dying and suffering as a consequence.
"History shows that much can change, expectedly or unexpectedly, over short periods, and it is unlikely that most trends would continue unabated for decades without changing course."
I hope you are right. Unfortunately, they will probably make changes for the worst. Like spending enough to bankrupt the world by building giant CO2 extractors which will be completed just about the time the oil, gas and coal runs out, and so will never be used. That's the story of how politics always works when it uses "common sense" to tackle complex problems: it is not merely "too little too late", but "completely crazy".
copy of a comment to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ernest_J._Sternglass#POV_issues
Fastfission, please don't make ''ad hominem'' personal insults about Sternglass being "semi-crackpot". If you want to see my alternative POV on Sternglass, see my top blog post at [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/]], which analyses errors in Sternglass' work. Notice that this (Wikipedia) article on Sternglass contains a lot of bias. First, it claims in passing that Herman Kahn minimises the effects of radiation, when in fact radiation is the topic Kahn dwells on, e.g., Kahn stated in his 1960 book ''On Thermonuclear War,'' Princeton University Press, p 24:
‘... those waging a modern war are going to be as much concerned with bone cancer, leukemia, and genetic malformations as they are with the range of a B-52 or the accuracy of an Atlas missile.’
Secondly, this Wiki article claims that Linus Pauling was warning that there is no safe threshold back in the 1960s. Scientifically, what matters is what evidence there is either for or against a threshold. Certainly there is no threshold for high-LET radiation like alpha and beta particles in tissue, because they are stopped within a small distance and the ionization density is large enough to overcome human DNA repair mechanisms like protein P53 (which was only discovered in the late 1970s). However, low-LET radiation like gamma rays, when received at either high or low dose rates, do show a threshold [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/]]; this data is from Japanese nuclear weapon attacks (where the dose rates were high, due to initial nuclear radiation) and from low-level radiation during an accident where Cobalt-60 got into steel used to make buildings lived in for 20 years by 10,000 people in Taiwan (see W.L. Chen, Y.C. Luan, M.C. Shieh, S.T. Chen, H.T. , Kung, K.L. Soong, Y.C.Yeh, T.S. Chou, S.H. Mong, J.T.Wu, C.P. Sun,W.P. Deng, M.F.Wu, and M.L. Shen, ''Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?,'' published in the ''Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons,'' Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, page 6, available in PDF format here: [[http://www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf]]).
Thirdly, as explained in my blog [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/]], Alice Stewart actually debunked Sternglass' model, instead of confirming it as this Wikipedia nonsense claims:
Sternglass first publicised his "theory" at 9th Annual Hanford Biological Symposium, May 1969. On 24 July 1969, Dr Alice Stewart wrote an article for the ''New Scientist'', "The pitfalls of Extrapolation" which found a big problem:
"Sternglass has postulated a fetal mortality trend which would eventually produce rates well below the level which - according to his own theory - would result from background radiation." [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/]]
Fourthly, his book ''Before the Big Bang'' contains various errors and doesn't address or replace the standard model of particle physics. It's not a case that Sternglass belongs to a group of "crackpots", it's just a case that his work on these subjects is severely defective and wanting. If he did a lot more work on it and resolved the problems, then that would be fine. What causes difficulties is the dictatorial difficulty when people try to impose things which contain errors, without first correcting the errors, on the world. Labelling all people with alternative ideas "crackpots" by default isn't helpful, especially when you do it from anonymously under the name "Fastfission".
Sternglass may have a problem with nuclear power, but in that case he has the problem that the sun is nuclear and that background low-level radiation exists everywhere. Does he advise us to minimise it by living at the bottom of mineshafts in locations where there is little thorium-232, potassium-40, uranium-238 (and uranium decay daughters, like radon-222), etc? What about carbon-14 naturally in food? People like Sternglass have helped prejudice the public against the facts. I've traced the history of radiation hysteria here: [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2007/03/control-of-exposure-of-public-to.html]], [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2007/03/effect-of-dose-rate-not-merely-dose-on.html]] in particular, and [[http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2007/03/above-3.html]]. The basic conclusion is that the "no threshold" dictum was popularised on the basis of flawed paper by Professor E. B. Lewis, author of Leukemia and Ionizing Radiation, ''Science'', 17 May 1957, v125, No. 3255, pp. 965-72. Lewis used very preliminary Japanese and other data which wasn't detailed enough to show that a threshold existed. He was arguing from ignorance, not from evidence! Yet his argument, which ignored dose rate effects and the quality factor of the radiation, i.e., high or low linear energy transfer (LET). - Nigel Cook 172.207.139.192 (talk) 22:04, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
continuation of last sentence in previous comment:
Yet his argument, which ignored dose rate effects and the quality factor of the radiation, i.e., high or low linear energy transfer (LET), was widely accepted at the time due to political prejudice about the Cold War, and has not been corrected as the facts have emerged since.
I've also got a lot of other evidence that backs up the Japanese and Taiwan data: there were studies for example of cancer rates in different cities with different levels of natural background radiation yet closely matched population groups (with matched age groups, same diets, same habits regards smoking and drinking, etc.).
The fact that this isn't being done by professional health physicists is a sad reflection on the state of society with its severe radiation dogmas and orthodoxies, and character assassination of anyone who prefers FACTS to FASHIONS.
‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - R. P. Feynman (quoted by Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, 2006, p. 307).
‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of [the speculative consensus of] experts.’ - R. P. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, 1999, p187.
Cities at greater elevations above sea level have higher background radiation due to cosmic radiation (at sea level, the atmosphere is equivalent to a radiation shield of 10 metres of water, but as you move to higher altitudes, there is a fall in this amount of shielding between you and the nuclear furnaces called stars in the vacuum of outer space, so the cosmic background radiation exposure you get increases substantially).
The studies date from the 1970s-1990s, and show that if anything there is a fall in the cancer rate as you go to cities at higher altitude and more background radiation.
However, critics may claim that it is due to cleaner air, less smog, lower oxygen pressure and a healthier lifestyle.
Other studies of this sort have therefore compared cities at similar altitude with matched populations, where differences in background radiation arise from the bedrock. A city built on granite will generally have a higher background radiation level than one built on clay or limestone, so it is possible to measure the different considerably background radiation levels in different cities, and this can be correlated to cancer rates.
Obviously here things are complicated because you get radon-222 gas inside buildings built on granite that contains traces of uranium ore. This radon-222 emits alpha particles that are high-LET radiation and certainly they don't conform to a threshold-effects relationship (there is no threshold for high-LET radiation like alpha particles inside the body, only for gamma rays at relatively low doses). So this would complicate the results of the survey, and this is the case.
I will dig out all the graphs and other evidence and publish them on this blog in the future.
copy of a comment:
http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/
Louise, thank you for a very interesting post on a fascinating subject! Cosmic rays are amazing. Apparently 90% that hit the Earth's atmosphere are protons from the sun, 9% are alpha particles (helium nuclei) and 1% are electrons.
Of course the protons don't make it through the Earth's atmosphere (equivalent to a radiation shield of 10 metres of water, which is quite adequate to shield the core of a critical water-moderated nuclear reactor!!).
When the high-energy protons hit air nuclei, you get some secondary radiation being created like pions which decay into muons and then electrons.
A lot of the electrons get trapped into spiralling around the Earth's magnetic field lines at high altitudes, in space, forming the Van Allen radiation belts.
Where the magnetic field lines dip at the poles, they all come together, and so the electron density increases at the poles. At some point this negative electric charge density is sufficiently large to "reflect" most incoming electrons back, and that spot is called the "mirror point".
Hence the captured electrons are trapped into spiralling around magnetic field lines, to-and-fro between mirror points in the Northern and Southern hemispheres.
There are also of course occasional irregular gamma ray flashes from gamma ray bursters, heavy particles, etc.
It's not clear what the actual radiation levels involved are: obviously the radiation level from cosmic radiation on Earth's surface is known. It's highest at the poles where incoming radiation runs down parallel to magnetic field lines (without being captured), hence the "aurora" around the polar regions where cosmic rays leak into the atmosphere in large concentrations.
It's also high in the Van Allen belts of trapped electrons.
It's not quite as bad in space well away from the Earth. Apparently, the cosmic radiation level on the Moon's surface is approximately 1 milliRoentgens/hour (10 micro Sieverts/hour), about 100 times the level on the Earth's surface. If that's true, then presumably the Earth's atmosphere (and the Earth's magnetic field) is shielding 99% of the cosmic radiation exposure rate.
All satellites have to have radiation-hardened solar cells and electronics, in order to survive the enhanced cosmic radiation exposure rate in space.
In the original version of Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" he has a graph showing the gamma ray energy spectrum of cosmic radiation in outer space, with another curve showing the gamma ray output from black holes via Hawking radiation. Unfortunately, the gamma background radiation intensity at all frequencies in the spectrum is way higher than the predicted gamma ray output from massive black holes (which is tiny), so there is too much "noise" to identify this Hawking radiation.
copy of a comment:
http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/csw/?p=85#comment-13372
This list is mainly books I've actually read, whereas [for] the last one you did (a year or more ago), I hadn't hea[r]d most of the titles. So I can make a comment or two.
I have ... disagreements with some claims in these books. ...
* I disagree with Weinberg's hype (The First 3 Minutes) in applying general relativity to cosmology, because I think in a quantum gravity theory the exchanged gravitons will be received in a redshifted state for gravitational interactions between relativistically receding masses.
* I disagree with Richard Rhodes several major errors (The Making of the Atomic/Hydrogen Bomb). (1) Presenting the Copenhagen Interpretation of Bohr as if it is Gospel truth, and ignoring Feynman's path integrals interpretation which replaces the Copenhagen Interpretation with chaotic effects due to path interference in small distance scales, e.g., interference to electron orbits by pair production of virtual particles which cause Brownian-motion type chaos in the atom. (2) Not pointing out clearly that the role of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to encourage Russia to declare war on Japan (to be on the list of victors, and hence to end Japan's hopes that Russia might negotiate a settlement with America, which was why Japan was holding out), which ended Japan's hopes that Russia would negotiate with America to end the war without loss of face. (Although because America on 9 August had exaggerated its hand with atomic warfare, and the President had promised an endless rain of ruin when in fact a third atomic bomb wouldn't be ready until September, America had to accept a conditional surrender from Japan, rather than unconditional surrender: it couldn't afford to have its bluff called when it would be unable to deliver another atomic bomb for many weeks.) According to page 336 of the U.S. Government book "Effects of Atomic Weapons" (1950), the incendiary raid on Tokyo killed more than the number killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. According to the Radiation Effects Research Foundation internet site (they do the surveys of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors), even in the survivors within 1 km of the hypocentre, less than half the leukemia cases were due to radiation (the majority were natural). Leukemia is the most enhanced cancer after radiation exposure. Altogether, from 1950-90, only 428 people died of cancer of all sorts due to radiation (9% of all the cancer deaths, i.e., 91% of cancer deaths were not connected to radiation, as proved by the control group survey) in a group of 36,500 survivors. Hence, the average risk of death from cancer due to radiation to a survivor for a period of 40 years after exposure was only 1.2%, compared to a natural (non-radiation) cancer death risk of 13%. No wonder that 50% of the survivors were still alive in 1995, fifty years after the bombings. Ref.: Radiation Research (146:1-27, 1996).
Richard Rhodes - like Steven Weinberg - [is] not writing pure science, but spin that the public want to read because they are prejudiced by propaganda from political institutions with axes to grind. What really made me angry in Rhodes' books are his pseudoscientific treatment of fallout particles. He claims that coral is reduced to calcium metal in one place, and in another he claims the first H-bomb test in 1952 produced 80 million tons of mud. It turned out that the fallout had been carefully collected and analysed in weapon test reports WT-615, WT-915 and WT-1317, which show that the fallout from coral (CaCO3, calcium carbonate) is CaO (lime), with an outer layer of Ca(OH)2 (slaked lime, calcium hydroxide). The 80 million tons he quotes is the crater volume which is mostly just ejected as rocks around the crater. The fallout mass taken up into the fireball is only 1% of the cratered material. Even if the fireball was hot enough to reduce 80 million tons of coral to calcium metal (it isn't), that calcium would oxidise in the atmosphere while falling out. Rhodes' science is a lot of hogwash!
copy of a comment:
http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2007/12/night-at-museum-pt-2.html
Thanks, Louise. This is extremely interesting and very informative! It's interesting that the dense meteorites, especially those composed of iron and nickel, tend to survive the ablation during their fall through the atmosphere, and hit the ground. Less dense stony objects of similar mass tend to heat up and then explode like an air burst nuclear bomb while still high in the atmosphere, as was the case of the Tunguska explosion of June 30, 1908 (an explosion equivalent to several megatons of TNT, see C. Chyba, P. Thomas, and K. Zahnle, "The 1908 Tunguska Explosion: Atmospheric Disruption of a Stony Asteroid", Nature, v361, 1993, p. 40-44).
"Since the Hall of Meteorites contains similiar samples, are any of them about to melt? If they contained even a tiny amount of radioactive isotopes, it would not be safe to go near this room. If they contained any isotopes, those would have decaued to nothing long ago. Today these rocks are cold as the New York Winter, yet Earth's core continues to produce heat."
If a small rock was hot enough to measure the heat, the radiation would be lethal. A radiation dose of 10 Sieverts, which is equal to 10 Joules/kg for a quality factor of 1 (low LET radiations), is lethal within a few days. Since an average person is 70 kg, that means that 700 Joules of radiation is lethal. To make a rock hot and remain hot for long periods by the degradation of radioactive energy into heat, a larger amounts of radioactive energy are required, so the radiation from such a rock would be lethal.
The thing about the earth is that you have a lot of radioactivity distributed within it, and very little leakage of that energy. A few feet of earth or rock can keep the embers of a fire hot for a long time. If you take account of the thickness of the earth's crust, it traps heat very efficiently, so that a moderate amount of radioactivity keeps the core hot. (However, I'm skeptical about the details as I've not seen any convincing calculations from geologists so far.)
If you try testing those meteorites for radioactivity content, you will find there will be some content in them (probably little, but still a trace)! The earth does contain a lot of uranium: http://www.uic.com.au/nip78.htm:
"The convection in the core may be driven by the heat released during progressive solidification of the core (latent heat of crystallisation) and leads to the self-sustaining terrestrial dynamo which is the source of the Earth's magnetic field. Heat transfer from the core at the core/mantle boundary is also believed to trigger upwellings of relatively hot, and hence low density, plumes of material. These plumes then ascend, essentially without gaining or losing heat, and undergo decompression melting close to the Earth's surface at 'hot spots' like Hawaii, Reunion and Samoa.
"However, the primary source of energy driving the convection in the mantle is the radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and potassium. In the present Earth, most of the energy generated is from the decay of U-238 (c 10-4 watt/kg). At the time of the Earth's formation, however, decay of both U-235 and K-40 would have been subequal in importance and both would have exceeded the heat production of U-238. ...
"Measurements of heat have led to estimates that the Earth is generating between 30 and 44 terawatts of heat, much of it from radioactive decay. Measurements of antineutrinos have provisionally suggested that about 24 TW arises from radioactive decay. Professor Bob White provides the more recent figure of 17 TW from radioactive decay in the mantle. This compares with 42-44 TW heat loss at the Earth's surface from the deep Earth."
There's nothing in the universe that isn't radioactive. (Even clouds of hydrogen gas contain traces of tritium.)
Table 1 in that above-linked article shows that meteorites are 0.008 parts per billion uranium, the earth's mantle is 0.021 parts per billion uranium, and the continental crust is 1.4 parts per billion uranium. The concentration of uranium in the earth's core is not very well known (antineutrino measurements are available), but since uranium is relatively dense (denser than lead), there may be a considerable concentration of uranium in the earth's core, at least similar to that in the crust. Also thorium-232, etc.
... The earth's core is hot not because the radioactivity is capable of keeping isolated rocks hot, but because the rate of loss of heat is minimised due to the poor thermal conductivity of the outer layers, particularly the crust. This keeps most of the heat trapped.
The calculation to check the theory should be simple. Take the total radioactivity in the earth (in Becquerels, decays/second), multiply it by the average energy of the radiation emitted (0.3 MeV or so for a beta particle, 4 MeV or so for an alpha particle) and that gives you the total MeV/second, then convert that power ... into Joules/second (watts). Then estimate the diffusion rate of the heat out of the earth.
[BTW, I've noticed some typographical errors and errors of grammar in the last update added to the body of this post, e.g., the update section. I'm not going to try to update it, for the following reasons. There is a flaw in the old blogger template software used on this blog, and every time any changes are made, extra line spacings between paragraphs are automatically inserted when the changes are saved. There is also a flaw that if the template is changed, comments are lost and not transferred over.]
Extract of relevant material from a comment to:
http://kea-monad.blogspot.com/2007/11/panthalassa.html
...
The evidence in favour of a supernova explosion shortly before the Earth formed 4,540 million years ago is compelling from the natural radioactivity distribution in the Earth. Earth is basically a giant fallout particle, as people like Edward Teller first pointed out over fifty years ago:
‘Dr Edward Teller remarked recently that the origin of the earth was somewhat like the explosion of the atomic bomb...’
– Dr Harold C. Urey, The Planets: Their Origin and Development, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p. ix.
‘It seems that similarities do exist between the processes of formation of single particles from nuclear explosions and formation of the solar system from the debris of a supernova explosion. We may be able to learn much more about the origin of the earth, by further investigating the process of radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons tests.’
– Dr P.K. Kuroda, ‘Radioactive Fallout in Astronomical Settings: Plutonium-244 in the Early Environment of the Solar System,’ Radionuclides in the Environment (Dr Edward C. Freiling, Symposium Chairman), Advances in Chemistry Series No. 93, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.
...
A rare, non-detailed background survey of the social reasons for nuclear weapons effects data censorship is the paper:
Professor Brian Martin (then a PhD physicist at the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Australian National University, Canberra, but now he is Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong), "Critique of Nuclear Extinction", published in Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300 (1982):
"The idea that global nuclear war could kill most or all of the world's population is critically examined and found to have little or no scientific basis. A number of possible reasons for beliefs about nuclear extinction are presented, including exaggeration to justify inaction, fear of death, exaggeration to stimulate action, the idea that planning is defeatist, exaggeration to justify concern, white western orientation, the pattern of day-to-day life, and reformist political analysis. Some of the ways in which these factors inhibit a full political analysis and practice by the peace movement are indicated. Prevalent ideas about the irrationality and short duration of nuclear war and of the unlikelihood of limited nuclear war are also briefly examined."
For his article debunking the "nuclear winter" hoax of Sagan et al., see Brian Martin's article, "Nuclear winter: science and politics", Science and Public Policy, Vol. 15, No. 5, October 1988, pp. 321-334, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/88spp.html.
Notice that Brian Martin is an immensely important figure in censorship studies: http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/controversy.html#nuclearwar.
Of particular interest on the Brian Martin site are the following pages:
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/intro/
and
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/controversy.html
Also see the informative article on line in PDF:
"Nitrogen oxides, nuclear weapon testing, Concorde and stratospheric ozone" P. Goldsmith, A. F. Tuck, J. S. Foot, E. L. Simmons & R. L. Newson, published in Nature, v. 244, issue 5418, pp. 545-551, 31 August 1973:
"ALTHOUGH AMOUNTS OF NITROGEN OXIDES EQUIVALENT TO THE OUTPUT FROM MANY CONCORDES WERE RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE WHEN NUCLEAR TESTING WAS AT ITS PEAK, THE AMOUNT OF OZONE IN THE ATMOSPHERE WAS NOT AFFECTED."
What happens when nitrogen oxides are released in a nuclear explosion is partly that they combine with moisture in the mushroom cloud to form very dilute nitric acid which eventually (after being blown around the world in small particles) gets precipitated.
More important, although the shock wave of a nuclear explosion creates nitrogen oxides, especially nitrogen dioxide, THE PROMPT X-RAYS AND GAMMA RADIATION CREATE OZONE!
It's the ozone around the early fireball that shields most of the the early-time thermal radiation, which is mainly in the ultraviolet.
Hence, nuclear explosions in the atmosphere don't just release oxone-destroying nitrogen oxides, THEY ALSO RELEASE OZONE! Depending on the yield and the altitude of the detonation, in some cases the Earth's ozone layer can actually be INCREASED not reduced.
A high altitude nuclear explosion does NOT produce a strong blast wave, and all nitrogen oxides production requires a high overpressure shock wave! Hence, in a high altitude nuclear explosion, the production of ozone from gamma radiation EXCEEDS the production of nitrogen oxides by many times. It is quite conceivable that suitable high altitude nuclear explosions over the South Pole would have the effect of repairing the hole in the ozone layer there. Of course, it won't happen, because as Feynman said when discussing nuclear testing hysteria in the 1960s, we really still live in a pseudo-scientific age.
See also:
J. Strzelczyk, W. Potter, & Z. Zdrojewicz, "Rad-By-Rad (Bit-By-Bit): Triumph of Evidence Over Activities Fostering Fear of Radiogenic Cancers at Low Doses", Dose Response, v. 5 (2007), issue 4, pp. 275-283:
"Large segments of Western populations hold sciences in low esteem. This trend became particularly pervasive in the field of radiation sciences in recent decades. The resulting lack of knowledge, easily filled with fear that feeds on itself, makes people susceptible to prevailing dogmas. Decades-long moratorium on nuclear power in the US, resentment of "anything nuclear", and delay/refusal to obtain medical radiation procedures are some of the societal consequences. The problem has been exacerbated by promulgation of the linear-no-threshold (LNT) dose response model by advisory bodies such as the ICRP, NCRP and others. This model assumes no safe level of radiation and implies that response is the same per unit dose regardless of the total dose. The most recent (June 2005) report from the National Research Council, BEIR VII (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) continues this approach and quantifies potential cancer risks at low doses by linear extrapolation of risk values obtained from epidemiological observations of populations exposed to high doses, 0.2 Sv to 3 Sv. It minimizes the significance of a lack of evidence for adverse effects in populations exposed to low doses, and discounts documented beneficial effects of low dose exposures on the human immune system. The LNT doctrine is in direct conflict with current findings of radiobiology and important features of modern radiation oncology. Fortunately, these aspects are addressed in-depth in another major report—issued jointly in March 2005 by two French Academies, of Sciences and of Medicine. The latter report is much less publicized, and thus it is a responsibility of radiation professionals, physicists, nuclear engineers, and physicians to become familiar with its content and relevant studies, and to widely disseminate this information. To counteract biased media, we need to be creative in developing means of sharing good news about radiation with co-workers, patients, and the general public."
Here's a quotation from Feynman (not his specific objection to low-level radiation hysteria which he rejected elsewhere by saying that if Pauling et al were so worried about such levels of radiation, they'd campaign first and foremost to make everyone evacuate cities at high altitudes where cosmic radiation is highest, they'd ban air travel, they'd evacuate cities built on bedrock like granite that contains substantial quantities of naturally radioactive uranium-238, etc., and THEN move on to the far smaller dangers of fallout from weapons tests which only increased lifetime background radiation dosage by typically a mere 1%, see Feynman's book called "The Meaning of It All"):
"What is Science?" by R.P. Feynman, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and reprinted from The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1968, pp. 313-320:
"... great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
"We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders' airfields--radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners' airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. ... you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
"When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask, "How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?"
"It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.
"In a field which is so complicated ... that true science is not yet able to get anywhere, we have to rely on a kind of old-fashioned wisdom, a kind of definite straightforwardness. I am trying to inspire the teacher at the bottom to have some hope and some self-confidence in common sense and natural intelligence. The experts who are leading you may be wrong.
"I have probably ruined the system, and the students that are coming into Caltech no longer will be any good. I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television--words, books, and so on--are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.
"Finally, with regard to this time-binding, a man cannot live beyond the grave. Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the race--now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable--does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.
"It is necessary to teach both to accept and to reject the past with a kind of balance that takes considerable skill. Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation."
On the subject of consensus-led "groupthink", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink:
’Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. During Groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance.’
- Wikipedia.
‘[Groupthink is a] mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.’
- Professor Irving Janis.
The wikipedia article on groupthink gives two examples which have been investigated in some detail: the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (1986) which Feynman and a military guy investigated, and Bay of Pigs invasion (1959-1962).
Challenger exploded on launch in 1986 because it was launched in freezing weather, when the cold had caused the rubber O-rings (sealing the sections of reusable booster rocket) to cease being rubbery and to leak fuel outwide the rocket, which ran down the outside and ignited in the rocket flames at the bottom. The leaking O-rings were soon burned, failing entirely, and causing the boosters to ignite along the seals and blow up.
In the days and hours before the disaster occurred, technicians repeatedly pointed out to their bosses that this risk was going to put lives on the line. The way out was to wait until the environment temperature was above the point where rubber ceases to function as a sealant. But the delay in firing the shuttle was deemed to be too costly and unnecessary. The risks, although known, were dismissed by the senior "experts" in charge of the operation who heard about them. There was also the problem that the major source of data on the problem was the contractor which was selling the booster's to NASA, which didn't want to lose its contract by causing unnecessary problems and worries. So everyone agreed to cross their fingers, hope for the best, and launch the shuttle when they knew the temperature was so low that the rubber sealants would malfunction and possibly leak causing disaster.
An account of the investigation was written by Feynman, included as an appendix to Feynman's book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, Feynman the main physicist on the commission inquiry into the disaster. However, Feynman couldn't find the exact cause directly himself because - despite going to all the contractors - nobody there told him the facts. The people concerned who knew were scared to lose their jobs or to be somehow "disloyal" to their employers by speaking out.
What happened instead was that Feynman was told the facts by another expert, the rocket engineer General Donald J. Kutyna, who was investigating the disaster on the same committee. Kutyna was the man who had headed the inquiry into the explosion of a liquid-fuelled Titan missile in its silo in 1980 (a technician had in that case caused the diaster by accidentally dropping a wrench socket down the silo, where it hit the fuel tank and caused a leak which led to a chemical explosion which blew the 9-megaton warhead off the missile without detonating the 1-point safe nuclear core, of course). Because of his experience of investigating a liquid fuelled rocket explosion, Kutyna was able to work out why Challenger blew up and told Feynman the facts to ensure that the NASA cover-up would be exposed, and criticisms levelled at those who made the decision to launch in low temperature weather, when they should have delayed launch to reduce risks, saving lives.
The Bay of Pigs disaster occurred when President Kennedy in 1961 authorised the invasion of Cuba by a group of Cuban exiles. They met fierce opposition and called for air support. Kennedy didn't want to provide air support using the U.S. military, for fear that the U.S. involvement would become known. In the end, he lost both the invasion and also the anonymity of the U.S., because when Castro captured the Cuban exiles they had U.S. equipment and admitted having been trained by the U.S. The cause of the failure was the groupthink of Kennedy's advisors, who feared speaking out of turn when the final planning for the operation was being approved.
Another example of groupthink by a committee of leading experts, which is the design of the Hiroshima bomb, which used 64.1 kg of highly enriched uranium and only managed to fission 1% of that, about 12 kt or so. The Nagasaki bomb contained only 6.19 kg of plutonium, but had an efficiency of over 20% fission. In 1952, an implosion bomb along the lines of the Nagasaki bomb (but with a hollow core) using the same quantity of uranium as the Hiroshima bomb, yielded 500 kt, i.e. 50% fission efficiency.
Why was the Hiroshima bomb relatively so inefficient? In the book The Curve of Binding Energy by John McPhee, Dr Theodore Taylor criticised the Hiroshima bomb design as a stupid design which was the result of groupthink-type incompetence due to a committee team.
The Hiroshima bomb was like a gun and fired a solid cylinder of highly enriched U-235 into a hollow cylinder. There were quite a few issues with this. If fission reaction was started by a stray neutron before the projectile U-235 was fully home in the hollow U-235 sleeve, the result would be relatively inefficient because the geometry would allow most of the neutrons to escape instead of producing further fissions. Since the duration of any fission reaction was trivial in comparison to the time taken for the projective to move a few centimetres, there would be no further assembly once the reaction began.
These details are disclosed in an article called The Physics of the Bomb published in No. 2 of the Penguin series 'Science News;, 1947, written by Los Alamos weapons designer Professor Philip Morrison. Morrison expanded on several details of the 1945 Smyth report (Atomic Energy for Military Purposes) in his article, for example the statistical risks of pre-detonation (inefficiency) due to the neutron background in a gun-type weapon assembly, the fact that neutrons reflected by a tamper take so long to go out of the core, get reflected and return to the core, that in that interval the chain reaction has grown exponentially and the returning neutrons are trivial. Morrison made it clear that the role of a neutron reflector is restricted largely to keeping the critical mass minimal at the moment the reaction starts and thus starting the reaction efficiently (with as much supercriticality as possible for a given mass of fissile material, since supercriticality depends on the ratio of the actual mass present to the critical mass at the moment the reaction begins), instead of preventing neutron escape once the reaction is growing at an exponential rate. He also made it clear that the fission chain reaction is ended in all cases prematurely to some degree (hence without 100% fission efficiency) due to thermal expansion of the bomb core, which soon makes it subcritical, quenching the reaction. he made it clear that the key to high efficiency is achieving the maximum possible degree of supercriticality at the start of the reaction, i.e. having a configuration which has as many critical masses present as possible. This can be achieved by reducing the effective value of the critical mass while keeping the actual mass of fissile material constant; this is the route taken when a bomb core is compressed, and in high yield, high-efficiency fission weapons it is is achieved using a hollow fissile core surrounded by a layer of chemical explosive which is detonated at many points simultaneously. Such points were not always intuitively obvious during WWII, and the nearest the Manhattan had to a computer was a non-electronic (mechanical, driven by electric motors but involving no information in the form of electrical signals) punched-card sorting system. Initially it was used for months by the person in charge of it to play about, producing logarithmic tables, until Oppenheimer fired that person and put Feynman in charge of making efficiency calculations for atomic bomb cores. In 1953, Morrison had to testify before the U.S. Congressional hearings on "Subversive Influence in the Educational Process" by the Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, 83nd congress. Morrison admitted being a communist party member at college. In earlier hearings before the same committee, Morrison was accused of hyping the effects of nuclear weapons in Japan for political purposes. See http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/morrison.html
Philip Morrison, a Cornell Professor of Physics, expresses doubts about atomic warfare and then faces a Congressional anticommunist investigating committee, 1952
a brief excerpt from: SUBVERSIVE INFLUENCE IN THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS (Hearings before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, 82nd congress, 2nd session, Sept. 8, 9, 10, 23, 24, 25, and Oct. 13, 1952 (US Govt Printing Office, 1952)
-----------------------------------
Mr. Morris. Did you contribute an article to the Scientific Amercan?
Dr. Morrison. I have had it published. I don't know if you call that contributing or not.
Mr. Morris. Did you write a review of a book by an Englishman named P.M.S. Blackett, entitled "Fear, War, and the Bomb?"
Dr. Morrison. I reviewed P.M.S. Blackett's book for the Herald Tribune and for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Mr. Morris. And you praised that book?
Dr. Morrison. I said that book had many excellent things in it. I also criticized an amendment. I wrote an honest review of the book.
Mr. Morris. Mr. Chairman, may that review of Dr. Morrison of P.M.S. Blackett's book entitled "Fear, War, and the Bomb" be put into the record?
The Chairman. It may be made part of the record.
(The material referred to follows:)
"BLACKETT'S ANALYSIS OF THE ISSUES"
by Philip Morrison
[Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, February 1949]
It is 3 years since the writing of the first extensive political work of the atomic scientists: One World or None. Now the same publishers put out the American edition of a book by another scientist, the distinguished. well-informed, and earnest P.M.S. Blackett of Great Britain. As a contributor to the first book, I feel no proprietary pangs in urging all those who bought or borrowed it--and there were many--to get hold of the Blackett book.
It is written at a sadder time, and perhaps a wiser one. It is written by a man whose experience is both that of a physicist and that of a military man, and who is no American, but an Englishman, willing to take a somewhat more critical position on the issues of the day than almost any American scientist has publicly done. It is a book which does Professor Blackett credit for its thoughtfulness and scope, even though as he himself points out it is by no means "the whole truth." Read it if you wish to have an opinion on the issues of atomic energy.
My piece in One World or None was the description of the effect of a single atomic bomb on New York City. It is a frightening article, as I have many times tested by direct observation. Yet it is a major thesis of the Blackett book--and I believe a correct thesis--that even a thousand bombs will not of themselves decide the issue of a major war. We said there is no defense, and we meant it. It is still true. But we spoke in a different language from the language of Blackett. We did not speak in terms of strategy, in terms of overall economies, in terms of production and territorial conquest. We spoke of the impact of the bomb on the homes and the hopes of men and women.
I wrote of the lingering death of the radiation casualties, of the horrible flash burns, of the human wretchedness and misery that every atomic bomb will leave near its ground zero. Against this misery there is indeed no real defense. Neither our oceans nor our radar nor our fighters can keep us intact through another major war. But--and I quote Blackett (p. 159): "The very effective campaign, largely initiated by the atomic scientists themselves, to make the world aware of the terrible dangers of atomic bombs, played an important part in bringing pressure to bear on the American Government to propose measures to control atomic weapons and to take them out of the hands of the military."
-----------------------------------
The hearing transcript provides this note on Morrison:
"Professor Morrison is a nuclear physicist who took part in the design and fabrication of the bomb at Los AIamos Laboratory. He is now a member of the Physics Department at Cornell University."
Much of the effort made by people to publish nuclear weapon design secrets seems to be motivated by anti-deterrence sentiments.
Information on details of nuclear weapon design is not needed to justify civil defence/defense efforts.
Some historically scientific material of great relevance to this post is to be found in the book by physicists Dr. Edward Teller and Dr. Albert L. Latter, Our Nuclear Future ... Facts, Dangers and Opportunities, Criterion Books, New York, 1958:
A very prescient passage from page 119:
"It is possible that radiation of less than a certain intensity does not cause bone cancer or leukemia at all. In the past small doses of radiation have often been regarded as beneficial. This is not supported by any scientific evidence [as of 1958]. Today many well-informed people believe [without any evidence, i.e. on the basis of pure ignorance] that radiation is harmful even in the smallest amounts. This statement has been repeated [by mainstream "professional" cranks, who haven't grasped the subtle difference between fact-based science and authority-based religion/belief, and that no amount of "professional" dogma can overrule the need for fact based evidence in science, unlike subjective fields like politics/education/religion, where the student must give answers in exams which confirm to groupthink ideology, not to the facts if the facts are different to the mainstream consensus behind the examinations board; students who pass such exams by giving the "right" answers to subjective controversies are often instilled with a confusion between what is fact and what is speculative dogma, and as a result they defend crackpot mainstream beliefs as if those beliefs were science, not lies: the only way they have to defend such lies is by personal abuse of those who factual evidence and by lying, since they have no factual evidence, no scientific basis for arguing their case, just vacuous assertions based on ignorance and a refusal to read the facts and act upon them] in an authoritive manner. Actually there can be little doubt that radiation hurts the individual cell. But a living being is a most complex thing. Damage to a small fraction of the cells might be beneficial to the whole organism. Some experiments on mice seem to show that exposure to a little radiation increases the life expectancy of the animals. Scientific truth is firm - when it is complete. The evidence of what a little radiation will do in a complex animal like a human being is in an early and uncertain state."
On pages 121-122, the book points out that Denver in the United States is at an altitude of 5000 feet above sea level, and so receives 43% more hazardous cosmic radiation (because there is less air shield between it and outer space) than you get at sea level.
The bone cancer and leukemia rates in Denver, where the 5000 feet altitude caused a 43% increase in cosmic radiation, were significantly lower than those in the sea level cities of San Francisco and New Orleans in 1947 (before any nuclear test fallout arrived).
For example, there were 10.3 leukemia cases diagnosed per 100,000 of population in San Francisco in 1947, and only 6.4 in Denver.
On page 122, Drs. Teller and latter analyse the results as follows:
"One possible explanation for the lower incidence of bone cancer and leukemia in Denver is that disruptive processes like radiation are not necessarily harmful in small enough doses. Cell deterioration and regrowth go on all the time in living creatures. A slight acceleration of these processes could conceivably be beneficial to the organism."
Actually, the mechanism is more subtle: protein P53, discovered only in 1979, is encoded by gene TP53 which occurs on human chromosome 17. P53 also occurs in other mammals including mice, rats and dogs. P53 continually repairs breaks in DNA which easily breaks at body temperature due to free radicals produced naturally in various ways and also as a result of ionisation of caused by radiation hitting water and other molecules in the body. Cancer occurs when several breaks in DNA happen to occur by chance at nearly the same time, giving several loose ends which P53 repairs incorrectly, causing a mutation. This cannot occur when only one break occurs, because only two loose ends are produced, and P53 will reattach them correctly. If low-LET ionising radiation levels are increased to a certain extent, causing more single strand breaks, P53 works faster and is able deal with faster breaks as they occur, so that multiple broken strand ends do not arise. This prevents DNA strands being repaired incorrectly, and prevents cancer - a result of mutation caused by faults in DNA - from arising. Too much radiation of course overloads the P53 repair mechanism, and then it cannot repair breaks as they occur, so multiple breaks begin to appear and loose ends of DNA are wrongly connected by P53, causing an increased cancer risk. Obviously there is a statistical risk. Quite a lot of wrongly reassembled broken DNA needs to occur until the result causes cancer. Many wrongly assembled DNA strands simply result in cell death when it tries to divide, instead of allowing endless divisions into defective cells, i.e. cancer cells. Besides P53, there are other proteins involved in DNA repair after damage. Over 50% of all cancers, however, result from mutated forms of P53 which are unable to repair damaged DNA.
So it is clear that most cancers occur as a result of a rapid double break to the TP 53 gene on human chromosome 17. The cell then divides normally, but the resulting cell produces its P53 from a mutated TP 53 gene and thus produces a flawed P53 protein, which is unable to properly repair further damage in the DNA of the cell. As a result, these cells are subjected to cumulative damage and mutations from free radicals, and are relatively likely to become cancer cells. The stimulation of P53 with low-LET (weakly ionising) radiation can boost it's efficiency, preventing multiple strand breaks from having time to occur because breaks get repaired faster before a backlog can accumulate. This is a homeostasis effect: an increase in the rate of low-LET radiation weak ionisation naturally causes the body to slightly over-respond by increasing in a non-linear response the rate of P53 repairs (similarly, the body over-responds for a long time after an infection by boosting the white cell count to levels higher than those which existed before the infection). This disproportionately or over-compensation boosts the body's ability to cope with other causes of DNA damage, such as natural causes, so the net effect is a reduction in natural cancer rates that far outweighs the trivial radiation damage at low dose rates. Hence, the overall cancer risk at low-LET low dose rate radiation is less than it would be in the absence of the radiation.
Teller and Latter then point out that if there is an effect of the enhanced cosmic radiation in Denver on the leukemia and bone cancer rate as compared to lower altitude cities, "the effect is too small to be noticed compared to other effects."
In other words, this factual data as of 1947 set a limit on how bad the radiation-induced leukemia rate could be: if it existed at all, it was dwarfed by "noise" in the data. Whenever some signal gets drowned by "noise" in data, then the real scientist starts to investigate the "noise" which is more important than the trivial signal. (This was directly how the big bang was confirmed, when the microwave background noise in the sky was investigated in the mid-1960s and found to be severely red-shifted fireball radiation from the big bang.)
On page 124, it is pointed out that mortality statistics - which don't show a decrease in cancer risks from living in places of high cosmic radiation exposure like Denver - and which therefore don't show any negative risks from low level radiation, do show correlations between other things. For example, being 10% overweight reduces life expectancy by 1.5 years, while smoking one pack of cigarettes a day reduces life expectancy by 9 years (equivalent to an average of 15 minutes reduction in life per cigarette smoked).
These are things which are real, statistically significant risks. Low-LET radiation at low dose rates isn't that kind of problem (to say the very least of it).
For more about Lewis's non-threshold propaganda campaign "and the debate about nuclear weapons testing", see:
>http://etd.caltech.edu/etd/available/etd-03292004-111416/unrestricted/LewisandFallout.pdf
EDWARD LEWIS AND RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT
THE IMPACT OF CALTECH BIOLOGISTS ON THE DEBATE
OVER NUCLEAR WEAPONS TESTING IN THE 1950s AND 60s
Thesis by
Jennifer Caron
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
degree of
Bachelor of Science
Science, Ethics, and Society Option
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Pasadena, California
2003
(Presented January 8, 2003)
"ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Professor Ed Lewis, I am deeply grateful to you for sharing your story and spending
hours talking to me. ...
"ABSTRACT
The work of Caltech biologists, particularly, Edward Lewis, on leukemia and ionizing radiation transformed the public debate over nuclear weapons testing. The United States began testing hydrogen bombs in 1952, sending radioactive fallout around the globe. Earlier more localized fallout was generated starting in 1945 from tests of atomic weapons at Nevada test sites. The Atomic Energy Commission claimed the tests would not harm human health. Geneticists knew from animal and plant experiments that radiation can cause both illness and gene mutations. They spoke out to warn the policymakers and the public. Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations
exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to
the accumulated dose of radiation. He argued that this implied that leukemia resulted from a somatic gene mutation. Since there was no evidence for the existence of a
threshold for the induction of gene mutations down to doses as low as 25 r, there was unlikely to be a threshold for the induction of leukemia. This was the first serious challenge to the concept that there would be a threshold for the induction of cancer by
ionizing radiation. Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk
estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the
number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957
Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress." (Emphasis added to key points.)
Page 13:
"The most controversial aspect of his analysis was the linear dose-response curve. This relationship made sense to geneticists who had found a linear relationship between
radiation and mutations in Drosophila down to 25 rad (Stern and Spencer). Additionally, it fit with the hypothesis of Muller that cancer could result from somatic mutations. This was not the accepted idea in other scientific and medical communities. Rather, as the official voice, the AEC medical doctors and scientists promoted the assumption that there
would be a threshold below which radiation would do no harm, just as there is frequently such a threshold in chemical toxicology because the body can process small quantities of toxins like alcohol. The AEC vocally assumed and defended the threshold hypothesis;
furthermore, they seem to have assumed that the amount of radiation received by Americans from fallout would be less than the threshold. Lewis found no evidence for such a threshold, and the AEC scientists were unable to offer any."
(Emphasis added to Lewis's ignorant failure to discover the facts about low level radiation, and its pseudoscientific abuse or misinterpretation as being a fact rather than an expression of science-abusing ignorance and scientific failure. If a scientist fails to find evidence which in fact does exist, that is hardly an accomplishment to be hyped or applauded. Lewis failed to find the evidence of a threshold because the dosimetry available from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was then too crude and inaccurate to produce accurate, detailed results. If Lewis had made efforts to obtain the facts instead of pretending that ignorant error was fact and going on a crusade to promote such ignorant error in journals like Science and in testimony to U.S. Congressional Hearings, then he would have been doing science not pseudoscience.)
To make the mechanism easily understood, one simple analogy to the roles of protein P53, cancer and radiation is a gasoline dump:
1. DNA-damaging free radicals are equivalent to a source of sparks which is always present naturally, and are caused by many interactions including those of ionizing radiation produced by many other causes in the body.
2. Cancer is equivalent the fire you get if the sparks are allowed to ignite the gasoline, i.e. if the free radicals are allowed to damage DNA without the damage being repaired.
3. Protein P53 is equivalent to a fire suppression system which is constantly damping out the sparks, or repairing the damaged DNA so that cancer doesn't occur.
In this way of thinking, the "cause" of cancer will be down to a failure of the P53 to repair the damage.
Naturally, the majority of cancers involve cells containing mutated P53: to get cancer naturally you usually need to have a mutation in a cell's P53 protein, which stops P53 from repairing DNA.
In other words, cancer appears when the cancer suppressor is damaged.
In nuclear radiation induced cancer, the mechanism is just slightly different: radiation induced cancer occurs where the radiation level is so great that it overwhelms the ability of P53 to repair the damage to the DNA.
However, there is another effect. As the radiation level increases, the rate of P53 repairs increases slightly faster than the DNA damage rate. This is because the body naturally detects radiation damage as an increase in free radicals (chemical-type poisoning) and over-compensates for this increase by dramatically increasing the P53 activity in repairing damaged DNA (cf. the old adage "a little of what does you harm, makes you stronger").
Only when the radiation level is higher than the maximum rate that P53 can repair broken DNA, does the cancer rate start to rise. Up to that level, the increasing P53 activity over-compensates for the radiation damage by repairing DNA much more quickly than normal, in a attempt to return the body to homeostasis.
As an analogy, think about flu: once you get infected the body's immune system must over-compensate, not just "tread water" in just keeping the infection level from rising.
It's inadequate for the immune system to respond to rampant infection by merely increasing the attacks on bacteria (which surge through tissues damaged by the flu virus, and cause the worst symptoms) at the same rate that the bacteria is growing.
If the rate of response of the immune system was the same as that of the cause of the problem, then the immune system would merely be containing the infection and preventing it from getting worse.
That's not good enough.
Instead, the immune system needs to increase the rate of attack on bacteria to a higher value than the rate which the bacteria is multiplying at, in order to not merely prevent the infection from getting worse, but to actually cause the bacterial to get killed off at a rate which is bigger than the rate at which the bacteria are multiplying. Only in this case can the population of bacteria decrease, instead of remaining constant, as would be the case if the immune system response was matched to the infection level.
Similarly, in a war, if you only respond with exactly the same amount of force as your enemy, you will be able to prevent the enemy winning, but you won't be able to end the war! The battle will go on without end. The only way to win is for one side to use more force than the other. If both sides always remain equal in strength, then the war will last forever.
Protein P53 inside individual cell nuclei, by analogy to the role of T-cells and the white blood cells of the immune system, must over-compensate for increasing problems in order to return the body to normal.
It is no good if P53's response is identical to the rate of production of DNA damage. P53 must over-compensate to any increased damage, so that the overall amount of excess DNA damage, once it is detected, begins to decrease with time instead of merely remaining constant.
Homeostasis is used in many organs and systems. In order for normal conditions to be maintained, as soon as any problem is experienced, the body must over-compensate to push conditions back towards the original conditions, not merely keep problems from getting worse.
It's not good enough to merely negate additional damage. The body has to over-compensate in order to not just prevent the problem getting worse, but to restore health. And that is precisely what happens if the injury is not overwhelmingly severe.
Once a fire starts, you don't want to simply respond by preventing it from getting bigger. You want, instead, to make the fire smaller. If the rate of growth of the fire is dF/dt, you don't want your fire-fighting response to equal dF/dt, or you will simply be preventing the fire from getting bigger. What you want is to respond at a rate which exceeds the rate of increase of the fire, so that the size of the fire falls with time instead of remaining constant.
Similarly, with radiation or any other problem, the body's response at low levels is to over-compensate. This over-compensation will actually reduce the natural cancer rate at low radiation levels.
At very high radiation levels, this effect is disappears and the net response is negative, because damage occurs at such a high rate that the P53 repair mechanism is overloaded and is increasingly unable to repair the damage.
Another analogy to P53 is the brakes of a vehicle. Cancer in this analogy is like a automobile crash. If the brakes are defective, that can cause a crash. The ability of a vehicle driver to avoid a crash depends to a considerable extent upon having good brakes. The ability of the brakes to prevent a crash may be impaired by various factors, such as excessive speed or oil on the road. If the brakes are merely capable of preventing the speed from increasing, they are not good enough. Brakes must be able to do more than cancel out acceleration and keep the velocity constant. Brakes must be able to bring about a deceleration, to slow a vehicle.
It's pretty obvious that protein P53 is able to bring about a net reduction in the natural cancer rate when exposed to low-LET ionizing radiation at a "low" dose rates (but still many times the natural background dose rate).
Once the excessive number of free radicals from radiation are detected as a chemical poisoning internally, P53 repair processes are greatly enhanced to over-compensate for the damage rate, in order to reduce the total amount of damage (rather than merely keeping it in check, or constant). By analogy, in any infection problem, homeostasis mechanisms act to restore the equilibrium not by keeping the damage level constant, but increasing the repair rate so that it exceeds the rate of damage. Only in this way can the total amount of damage be reduced.
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dv8 2xl:
If you actually read Kahn's most important work, On Thermonuclear War, the key arguments against wishful thinking are based on facts, not "opinions".
Fact: arms control was tried throughout the 1930s to enable the world to "live in peace" with the Nazis.
Fact: the Nazis simply agreed to everything then broke their word, broke the written agreements they gave to Prime Minister Chamberlain at Munich, etc.
Fact: arms control does not protect you from other countries with secret rearmament programs.
Fact: Hitler's Germany were able to almost instantly convert peacetime factories to munitions factories, by simply preparing the plans and blueprints. No practical arms-inspection policy can get around that.
Fact: even if arms control and pacifism prevented World War II, which it failed to do of course, but even if it did "succeed", millions would still have died in concentration camps and "peaceful invasions" could not have been prevented.
Fact: if you want to prevent evil, you need leverage, not worthless paper agreements. The only leverage the Stalins and Hitlers understand is bombs. Everything else is propaganda and lies as far as they are concerned. Dictators aren't interested in being seen as respectable nice guys who stick on contracts.
As Herman Kahn wrote, Khruschev's proposal for arms control - whereby no inspections of Russian disarmament were allowed and anyone cheating would be (in Kruuschev's words) expected to "cover themselves in shame" was a hoax. The Soviets never covered themselves in shame. They broke the testing cessation in 1961 and detonated a 50 megaton bomb. They were proud, not covered in shame.
Fact: the only way to encourage peace and freedom is to carry a big stick and be seen to be ready to actually USE the big stick. Having civil defence, even just improvised plans like the Kearny car-over-trench shelter than anyone can fix up in the time between a bomb going off and the fallout arriving and building up to a hazardous level downwind - is crucial. Three feet of dirt and you're safe. If you look at the fallout patterns actually measured after nuclear tests with the average yield of stockpiled bombs today, the danger is way exaggerated. Also, the fallout in hazardous areas is clearly visible. Walk crosswind, and you can get out of the danger area before you get a dangerous dose. All nuclear effects are grossly exaggerated. It's pretty easy to grasp this when you understand the physics, instead of believing uneducated hype and spin.
Unless you can find some wood-frame cities like Hiroshima and Nagasaki to detonate the bombs over, the effects are not as impressive as the hype claims. Even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death rates for people with any kind of screening from the thermal flash (whose severe effects was stopped by just a single leaf, a thin white shirt, or a sheet of paper) cut casualty rates massively. Duck-and-cover does work. Nuclear radiation produced high mortality only when combined with thermal burns: this is the "syngerism" effect because the mechanism for death is that radiation reduces the white blood cell count at just the time when skin burn blisters burst and become infected. If you avoid thermal burns, the LD50 for nuclear radiation is about three times higher. That's why ducking and covering is so vital. It also reduces the amount of debris that can hit you in the face (like flying glass). Most of the people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked at the fireball, often through glass windows, as the blast wave was silently approaching. Films of nuclear explosions which superimpose the sound of blast on to the fireball with no delay time, mislead viewers about the time-sequence of the effects of nuclear weapons. Similarly, you get some time after a nuclear explosion to evacuate or prepare an improvised shelter, before the fallout even starts to arrive. Philip LaRiviere in the 1950s measured nuclear test data showing the different arrival times and maximum fallout dose rate times after a range of Nevada and Pacific nuclear tests in nuclear test report USNRDL-TR-137 ("The Relationship of Time of Peak Activity from Fallout to Time of Arrival", U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, 28 February 1957). On average, even once fallout begins to arrive, it settles diffusively and takes a long time to react peak activity. The time of peak radiation level is about the same time as the time taken for the fallout to begin to arrive in the first place. So as with the delayed double heat flash pulse and the delayed arrival of the blast, you have enough time to protect yourself or evacuate from a potential downwind fallout area. If fallout begins to arrive, you can see it. It's clearly visible wherever the dose rate is life-threatening.
The point is, nuclear weapons are not automatically going to produce a lot of civilian casualties if there is a reasonable civil defense education in the reliable (nuclear test based) facts.
If you are going to deter dictators from walking all over you like Hitler and Stalin, then you need to be tough. Toughness is the only thing that deters the sort of trash who don't care about human values at all.
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The TAPPS (Toon et al.) studies have been wrong from day 1. In 1983 they used flawed assumptions for everything, from the absorption coefficient for sunlight by soot, to ignoring scavenging and atmospheric turbulence, etc. They also exaggerated the burnability of the fuel loading.
When a building collapses, most of the combustible material is buried under tons of debris and dust and can't burn. You don't get firestorms anymore like you did in wood-frame buildings such as those in the old, medieval part of Hamburg or Dresden, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In addition, they ignored the fact that for surface bursts (unlike the air bursts over japan) the EMP deposition region will overlap the ground surface and couple thousands of amps in microsecond surges into all the electrical conductors, which would branch out throughout the city before the crater had even formed, and would blow all the fuses/circuit breakers and cut off the electricity supply to buildings, reducing the fire risk.
For a surface burst, the fireball evevation angle is such that most buildings will be "shadowed" by other buildings, preventing ignition.
In their 1989 paper, the TAPPS team failed to retract their earlier errors and apologise for hyping poorly researched trash, and instead changed the targetting assumptions to oil refineries, in an attempt to maintain some climatic effects. It was still wrong! The smoke from mass oil refinery fires doesn't hang around freezing the ground for months. It gets blown around and dispersed by atmospheric winds, turbulence, and it gets washed out by rainfall.
Another popular myth is that the entire crater volume gets converted into dust which enters the stratosphere. Actually, 99% of the apparent crater volume is due to compression of the ground and material dumped around the crater to form the crater "lip" and the ejecta zone surrounding the lip. Only 1% of the cratered mass ends up in the atmosphere, and that forms the fallout, 70% of which is deposited within 24 hours.
On the topic of ozone depletion, please notice that the prompt gamma rays from a nuclear explosion ionize the air, creating ozone. This effect seriously modifies the early-time history of the thermal pulse output, and has been intensively studied in nuclear tests (although early studies were classified).
Hence, the production of ozone-destroying nitrogen oxides in the air shock wave at high overpressures must be balanced against the production of ozone by gamma rays.
For increasing burst altitude, the amount of ozone produced by a nuclear explosion becomes greater than the nitrogen oxide ozone depletion effect, because at high altitudes the air shock wave does not reach sufficient overpressure to produce nitrogen oxides (the equilibrium concentration of nitrogen oxides is a strong function of the pressure).
Hence, high altitude bursts - which have been threatened on the West by Russian leaders due to EMP effects - will actually increase the amount of ozone in the stratosphere!
In addition, the net ozone depletion by a low altitude burst is a lot less than 1970s and 1980s predictions (ignoring the production of ozone in nuclear explosions) suggested. Much of the nitrogen oxides combine with water vapour in the fireball and you end up with nitric acid, eventually gets washed out of the atmosphere by rain and doesn't affect ozone. See:
"Nitrogen oxides, nuclear weapon testing, Concorde and stratospheric ozone" P. Goldsmith, A. F. Tuck, J. S. Foot, E. L. Simmons & R. L. Newson, published in Nature, v. 244, issue 5418, pp. 545-551, 31 August 1973:
"ALTHOUGH AMOUNTS OF NITROGEN OXIDES EQUIVALENT TO THE OUTPUT FROM MANY CONCORDES WERE RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE WHEN NUCLEAR TESTING WAS AT ITS PEAK, THE AMOUNT OF OZONE IN THE ATMOSPHERE WAS NOT AFFECTED."
Below is an extract from a British Civil Defence magazine article written by George R. Stanbury, head of civil defence research on the British "Operation Hurricane" nuclear bomb test at Monte Bello, and before that an expert on the incendiary bombing of Britain in World War II.
'Restricted' classified U.K. Home Office Scientific Adviser's Branch journal Fission Fragments, W. F. Greenhalgh, Editor, London, Issue Number 3, August 1962, pages 22-26:
'The fire hazard from nuclear weapons
'by G. R. Stanbury, BSc, ARCS, F.Inst.P.
'We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation from nuclear attack. We hope to show that there is good scientific justification for the assessments we have made, and we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ...
'Firstly ... the collapse of buildings would snuff out any incipient fires. Air cannot get into a pile of rubble, 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This is not just guess work; it is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb [V1 cruise missile] incidents in London supported by a wealth of experience gained generally in the last war.
'Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general.
'Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited, it by no means follows that a continuing and destructive fire will develop.
'The effect of shielding in a built-up area was strikingly demonstrated by the firemen of Birmingham about 10 years ago with a 144:1 scale model of a sector of their city which they built themselves; when they put a powerful lamp in the appropriate position for an air burst they found that over 50% of the buildings were completely shielded. More recently a similar study was made in Liverpool over a much larger area, not with a model, but using the very detailed information provided by fire insurance maps. The result was similar.
'It is not so easy to assess the chance of a continuing fire. A window of two square metres would let in about 10^5 calories at the 5 cal/(cm)^2 range. The heat liberated by one magnesium incendiary bomb is 30 times this and even with the incendiary bomb the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5; in a large room it is very much less.
'Thus even if thermal radiation does fall on easily inflammable material which ignites, the chance of a continuing fire developing is still quite small. In the Birmingham and Liverpool studies, where the most generous values of fire-starting chances were used, the fraction of buildings set on fire was rarely higher than 1 in 20.
'And this is the basis of the assertion [in Nuclear Weapons] that we do not think that fire storms are likely to be started in British cities by nuclear explosions, because in each of the five raids in which fire storms occurred (four on Germany - Hamburg, Darmstadt, Kassel, Wuppertal and a "possible" in Dresden, plus Hiroshima in Japan - it may be significant that all these towns had a period of hot dry weather before the raid) the initial fire density was much nearer 1 in 2. Take Hamburg for example:
'On the night of 27/28th July 1943, by some extraordinary chance, 190 tons of bombs were dropped into one square mile of Hamburg. This square mile contained 6,000 buildings, many of which were [multistorey wooden] medieval.
'A density of greater than 70 tons/sq. mile had not been achieved before even in some of the major fire raids, and was only exceeded on a few occasions subsequently. The effect of these bombs is best shown in the following diagram, each step of which is based on sound trials and operational experience of the weapons concerned.
'102 tons of high explosive bombs dropped -> 100 fires
'88 tons of incendiary bombs dropped, of which:
'48 tons of 4 pound magnesium bombs = 27,000 bombs -> 8,000 hit buildings -> 1,600 fires
'40 tons of 30 pound gel bombs = 3,000 bombs -> 900 hit buildings -> 800 fires
'Total = 2,500 fires
'Thus almost every other building [1 in 2 buildings] was set on fire during the raid itself, and when this happens it seems that nothing can prevent the fires from joining together, engulfing the whole area and producing a fire storm (over Hamburg the column of smoke, observed from aircraft, was 1.5 miles in diameter at its base and 13,000 feet high; eyewitnesses on the ground reported that trees were uprooted by the inrushing air).
'When the density was 70 tons/square mile or less the proportion of buildings fired during the raid was about 1 in 8 or less and under these circumstances, although extensive areas were burned out, the situation was controlled, escape routes were kept open and there was no fire storm.'
Copy of a comment to:
http://sovietologist.blogspot.com/2008/04/new-toon-et-al-study-on-regional.html
My comment about the fact that high altitude nuclear explosions produce an excess of ozone (by gamma ray emission) without producing nitrogen oxides that destroy ozone (nitrogen oxide formation requires a very compressed shock wave, which can't occur in low density air at high altitude), needs the following reference:
U.S. Congress Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, 2004. These EMP hearings discuss the politics, such as an outrageous threat allegedly made by the Soviet Ambassador to the U.S., Vladimir Lukin, who said to the Americans in Vienna in May 1999: 'we have the ultimate ability to bring you down [by EMP from high altitude nuclear detonations]'.
copy of a comment to
http://riofriospacetime.blogspot.com/2008/05/science-of-iron-man.html
"The Tokomak is a donut-shaped magnetic bottle for containing hot plasma. Controlled fusion has long held the promise of limitless energy, but requires temperatures and pressures similiar to the Sun's interior. Despite decades of work, controlled fusion remains as it was in 1964, just around the corner."
Controlled nuclear fusion by magnetic confinement of hot plasma is a joke. Strong magnetic fields are never perfectly uniform and the pressure of plasma needed to cause deuterium and tritium nuclei to fuse is immense! So you always get instabilities develop.
The situation is similar to trying to use a low-density fluid to compress a higher-density fluid, in other words you get a form of Taylor instability develop.
The magnetic field causes the plasma to not be uniformly compressed, but to break up into jets where the magnetic field is slightly weaker. Because you can't make the magnetic field perfectly uniform, this is inevitable.
It's like squeezing an orange with your hands. You don't end up with a uniformly compressed orange. You end up with juice squirting into somebody's eye.
The radioactive waste from a controlled nuclear fusion reactor, if if could be made to work efficiently, would in practical terms be even worse than that from nuclear fission!
At least the 300 fission products decay, as a mixture, faster than the inverse of time. The fission product dose rate falls as about t^{-1.2} where t is time after fission. In any case, fission products have been proved to be safely confined with only a few feet migration over a time span of 1.7 billion years, as a result of the intense natural nuclear reactors in concentrated uranium ore seams at Oklo, in Gabon:
"Once the natural reactors burned themselves out, the highly radioactive waste they generated was held in place deep under Oklo by the granite, sandstone, and clays surrounding the reactors’ areas. Plutonium has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago."
- http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml
But for fusion, you get the accumulation of relatively long lived iron-59, iron-55, cobalt-60, nickel-63, and many other nuclides which are caused by the capture in reactor materials of high energy neutrons from the fusion process. E.g., the fusion of tritium and deuterium releases 17.6 MeV, of which 14.1 MeV is carried by the neutron. This massive neutron energy is to be compared to the thermalized neutrons of 0.025 eV energy! As a result, whereas in fission you can reprocess the fuel rods to extract the radioactive waste without the whole reactor becoming dangerously radioactive, in fusion the whole reactor becomes almost uniformly contaminated by neutron capture in the structural elements! There is nothing you can do about this.
Controlled nuclear fusion has a lot in common with string theory in terms of over-hype, and failure. The most sensible way to use safe nuclear fusion energy is to further develop solar power and other ways to extract the energy of fusion being carried out in the sun's core.
copy of a comment to
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2008/05/nuclear-power-return-of.html
"Nuclear's OK, but cars can't run on nuclear, so how can that really be a solution?" - Andrew
Nuclear power doesn't burn fossil fuels, which leaves more of those fuels for powering the internal combustion engine rather than generating electricity.
Cars can eventually (when fossil fuel costs make the price of gasoline too much for most people to afford) be fitted with electric motors run on electricity using efficient, low-weight rechargable lithium-ion batteries, and these can be recharged from mains supplied by nuclear reactors.
Obviously, electric trains can run on nuclear generated electricity without any interim battery storage.
The thing about nuclear power is that it is excessively expensive due to excessive safety precautions, and it is also a victim of lying propaganda from the environmental lobby which doesn't understand nuclear power in the proper context of natural radiation background levels and natural radon gas hazards, or even the naturally proved storage of intense radioactive waste for billions of years!
Fission products have been proved to be safely confined with only a few feet migration over a time span of 1.7 billion years, as a result of the intense natural nuclear reactors in concentrated uranium ore seams at Oklo, in Gabon:
"Once the natural reactors burned themselves out, the highly radioactive waste they generated was held in place deep under Oklo by the granite, sandstone, and clays surrounding the reactors’ areas. Plutonium has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago."
- http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml
Data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is strongest (most evidence) for low doses, where it shows a suppression and a threshold for such low-LET (linear energy transfer) radiation like gamma rays. See my post here for a discussion of the extensive evidence.
High-LET radiation like alpha particles deposits a lot of energy per unit length of path of the radiation through tissue, and this can overcome the natural protein P53 repair mechanism which sticks broken DNA fragments back together. In fact, the main cancer risk occurs in multiple DNA strand breaks, where bits of DNA end up being stuck back together in the wrong sequence, either killing the cell when it later tries to divide, or more seriously causing cancer when the cell divides in a damaged form which is out of control and causes a tumour.
But such high-LET radiation like alpha particles are only a hazard internally, such as when radioactive material is inhaled or ingested. The alpha particle emitter plutonium in a nuclear reactor is inside sealed aluminium fuel pellets and at no time is such waste a serious inhalation or ingestion hazard.
Gamma radiation, from evidence at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Taiwan incident where 180 buildings lived in by 10,000 people for 20 years were constructed of steel which accidentally included intensely radioactive cobalt-60 from discarded radiotherapy sources, is low-LET radiation which does exhibit a threshold before any excess cancer risk (predominantly leukemia) shows up. There is evidence that the exact threshold dose effect for low-LET radiations such as gamma radiation depends on the dose rate at which the radiation is received, and not merely on the total dose. If the dose rate is producing DNA damage at a rate which is lower than the maximum rate at which P53 can repair DNA strand breaks, no excess cancer (above the natural cancer rate) occurs. The cancer risk depends on the proportion of the radiation dose which is above this threshold, and is proportional to that dose received at a rate exceeding the repairable DNA damage rate.
W.L. Chen,Y.C. Luan, M.C. Shieh, S.T. Chen, H.T. , Kung, K.L. Soong, Y.C.Yeh, T.S. Chou, S.H. Mong, J.T.Wu, C.P. Sun,W.P. Deng, M.F.Wu, and M.L. Shen, Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, page 6, available in PDF format here:
'An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan. Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 ([low dose rate, low-LET gamma radiation emitter] half-life: 5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv, a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv. Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per 100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per 1,000 children under age 19.
'The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per 100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and income distributions of these persons are the same as for the general population, it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure. ...
'The data on reduced cancer mortality and congenital malformations are compatible with the phenomenon of radiation hormesis, an adaptive response of biological organisms to low levels of radiation stress or damage; a modest overcompensation to a disruption, resulting in improved fitness. Recent assessments of more than a century of data have led to the formulation of a well founded scientific model of this phenomenon.
'The experience of these 10,000 persons suggests that long term exposure to [gamma]radiation, at a dose rate of the order of 50 mSv (5 rem) per year, greatly reduces cancer mortality, which is a major cause of death in North America.'
The fact that leukemia risk is sensitive function of dose rate and not just dose means that most of the radiation monitors for workers in the nuclear industry (which merely record total dose, i.e. integrated dose rate, and don't show the mean rate at which the dose was received at) is almost useless for assessing risks.
This has been known and published widely since 1962:
"... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls."
All of this evidence is ignored or censored out of mainstream discussions by bigoted politicians, journalists, editors and environmental quangos. So "Health Physics" (which radiation safety is currently known as) isn't really healthy physics anymore, it's instead becoming more of a pseudoscientific exercise in political expediency and ignoring evidence.
Fusion power doesn't look very realistic or safe either, because of the high energy neutrons given off in tritium-deuterium fusion which will turn the structural materials of the entire fusion reactor radioactive quite quickly, since they have a much greater range than the moderated (thermalized) neutrons in a nuclear fission reactor. So neutron-induced activity is a problem with fusion reactors. You have also to compress plasma to enormous pressures to achieve fusion using electrically controlled magnetic fields, which in a commercial fusion reactor producing gigawatts of power, would not exactly have the "fail-safe" safety features of a fission reactor. Any slight upset to the carefully aligned and balanced magnetic fields which are compressing the fusion plasma would potentially turn the fusion reactor into the scene of a H-bomb exposion, complete with radioactive fallout from the neutron-induced activity in the structural materials. This aspect of fusion power isn't hyped very much in the popular media, either. Could it be that the people working on such areas simply don't want their funding to dry up?
copy of a comment submitted to moderation queue at the blog:
http://www.builtonfacts.com/2008/05/15/nuclear-fusion-power/#comment-16
"That’s where nuclear fusion comes in. Like the sun, it fuses light atoms (hydrogen isotopes, generally) into heavier ones (helium, generally). Radioactivity is produced, but in vastly smaller and easier-to-handle amounts than in nuclear fission plants. But to get fusion to work, the power plant has to produce conditions of extreme heat and adequate pressure to get the hydrogen to fuse in the first place. On one hand this is a perfect safety feature. If a breakdown ever occurred, damage to the reactor instantly destroys the conditions necessary for continued nuclear reactions. And since only a very small amount of fuel is reacting in a given time, a problem instantly and automatically prevents the reactor from causing melting down. It’s a physical impossibility."
You have a bit of disinformation here for some reason. If you know the physics you choose to write about, you are aware that the easiest fusion process to achieve is tritium+deuterium -> helium + neutron + 17.6 MeV.
Since 80% of the mass is helium and only 20% is the neutron, 80% of the energy, i.e. 14.1 MeV of that is carried by the neutron, so in each fusion event of 17.6 MeV, you get 14.1 MeV of neutron energy which can potentially induce radioactivity into the reactor containment vessel or building.
In fission, an average of about 200 MeV of energy is released in each fission event of which only about 30 MeV is residual radioactivity from fission products.
So in fission, about 15% of the energy is released as radioactivity, while in fusion of tritium and deuterium it can be anything up to 80%.
Neutron induced activity is a less severe problem in fission reactors than in experimental fusion reactors, because the neutrons are thermalized to low energy (about 0.025 eV ) and don't irradiate the entire reactor structure, whereas the 14.1 MeV fusion neutrons are highly penetrating and do go everywhere, turning structural steel radioactive, etc. This is not 'easily handled'.
'On one hand this is a perfect safety feature. If a breakdown ever occurred, damage to the reactor instantly destroys the conditions necessary for continued nuclear reactions. And since only a very small amount of fuel is reacting in a given time, a problem instantly and automatically prevents the reactor from causing melting down. It’s a physical impossibility.'
To make a nuclear fusion reactor work at an energy density that gives the gigawatts of power required for economic or meaningful commercial use, you need a massive amount of fuel with an immense pressure, exerted on the plasma by strong magnetic fields which can squeeze the conductive (ionized) plasma.
If anything goes wrong, you get an explosion. Trying to compress a plasma with magnetic fields is like trying to squeeze and compress an orange with your fingers anyway, which is one reason why fusion has always been a crackpot activity (all hype, no commercially viable success).
It is the nuclear fission reactor which is inherently stable, because it has built-in 'fail safe' design. The control rods fall back in and make it sub-critical if power fails. By contrast, if power fails to the electromagnets containing plasma as a thousand atmospheres or more in a fusion reactor, you get a nuclear explosion as a matter of course.
The more you go into the details, the more stupid nuclear fusion becomes. If you want to use the most easy to achieve fusion reaction, you need to use tritium as well as deuterium, and tritium is exceedingly expensive (it's produced by bombarding lithium with neutrons in a fission reactor).
If you just want to use just deuterium, the amount of pressure and temperature you need to make the reaction exothermal is far higher, because the reaction has a higher threshold for ignition, like a high activation energy in a chemical reaction.
The 'ITER' reactor page http://www.iter.org/a/index_faq.htm states:
'The DT fusion reaction creates helium, which is inert and harmless, and neutrons, which can make surrounding materials radioactive for varying amounts of time.'
This seems to indicate that they are planning to demonstate the concept using DT fusion, using tritium presumably made at great expense in fission reactors. (Which would be extremely expensive, but cheap compared to the cost of trying to extract the tiny amount of natural tritium in seawater.)
The whole fusion spin industry is a complete fraud and pseudoscience. If you want to promote safe nuclear fusion energy, make do with sunlight and its derivatives.
Chernobyl didn't blow up because it was an old design. It blew up because the Soviet RBMK reactor was a stupid design with a massive positive reactivity when the control rods are withdrawn, and the engineers in charge in April 1986 were cowboys, carrying out an unauthorized experiment (to see if the reactor could power its own energency water cooling pumps in the event of losing external electric power), which was obviously dangerous. They switched off the water cooling system, they switched off all the automatic safety systems (which can't be switched off in Western reactor designs when the reactor is in use), then they withdrew most of the control rods. The reactor design was stupid because the control rods were driven by only slow electric motors which couldn't quickly insert them in an emergency. It would take 18 seconds in the RBMK reactor to fully insert the control rods (in Western reactors it takes only 2-3 seconds), and the reactor exploded 40 seconds after the experiment began due to stupidity.
Also, nuclear fission waste is easy to handle and has been proved safe for 1.7 billion years, which is longer than any other kind of industrial waste has been verified to be safe for!
Fission products have been proved to be safely confined with only a few feet migration over a time span of 1.7 billion years, as a result of the intense natural nuclear reactors in concentrated uranium ore seams at Oklo, in Gabon:
"Once the natural reactors burned themselves out, the highly radioactive waste they generated was held in place deep under Oklo by the granite, sandstone, and clays surrounding the reactors’ areas. Plutonium has moved less than 10 feet from where it was formed almost two billion years ago."
- http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/factsheets/doeymp0010.shtml
google: we got nuked on 9/11
Hi David Howard,
I took a look at your blog and and its link to http://wtcdemolition.blogspot.com/ which claims that the World Trade Center twin towers collapse in 2001 was due to an explosion instead of planes crashing in and melting the steel frame with burning aviation fuel, which then allowed the floors to collapse under gravity (piling up into an accumulating downward-travelling mass as they fell, the snowplow effect, which soon makes negligible the resistance of each extra floor the immense mass hits; so there is relatively little deviation from free fall - it soon becomes like dropping a brick on a pile of leaves).
The alleged evidence for it being due to an explosion which is given is not explosion evidence: dust, "extreme high heat in the ground zero rubble (widely-reported/well-substantiated)" etc are normal results of a heavy mass of building falling a great height and hitting the ground. The kinetic energy is
E = (1/2)mv^2
and for gravitational near-free fall velocity v is related to gravitational acceleration g and vertical fall distance s by
v^2 = 2gs
Hence
E = (1/2)mv^2 = (1/2)m(2gs) = mgs.
Each WTC tower had a structural mass of 169,000,000 kg (mainly structural steel and concrete), and was 417 m high (to the top of room, not the spire/antenna). Hence the mean fall distance was 209 m.
This gives an energy release of
E = mgs = 169,000,000*9.81*209
= 3.46*10^11 Joules
Now remember that 1 kt of TNT is equivalent to 4.184*10^12 J.
Hence, each of the twin towers released the equivalent of 0.083 kt of TNT just due to the gravitational collapse, neglecting the energy of the aircraft impacts and the aviation fuel.
This 0.083 kt is in the yield range of the smallest American nuclear bomb, the 23 kg Davy Crockett. So it just equivalent to a very small nuclear explosion.
So all the alleged "evidence" that the tower collapses had some characteristics similar to a small nuclear explosion are missing the point that the energy release when 169,000 metric tons thuds after a fall of hundreds of metres is substantial! Of course it has some characteristics of a big explosion, and you do generally get electromagnetic pulses released by conventional explosions or collisions (the heat causes ionization of material, which if the electrons are detached in an asymmetric way creates the radiation of a radio-frequency pulse).
The easy discriminator between a nuclear explosion and a conventional explosion or collapse is obviously the easily traced radioactive fission product signature. Anyone with a portable detector have been able to detect if there had been a nuclear explosion involved.
The simplest theory which fits the facts for the World Trade Centre twin towers collapse is the most obvious one, that the conspiracy was a terrorist group which flew aircraft into the twin towers. That was enough to cause the destruction observed. You don't need to add more explosives, the weight of the building in combination to the damage and fires due to the aviation fuel heating and weakening the steel frame and thereby allowing the floors to fall was enough to cause all the effects.
If you want to attack conspiracies, please attack the many real conspiracies instead of imaginary ones, e.g. discredit mainstream string theory for claiming to be a theory of quantum gravity when it predicts nothing, or discredit the conspiracy to misinform people on the effects of nuclear weapons tests and radiation effects as a function of dose rate!
The problem is, as I'm sure you are aware, the factual conspiracies just don't have any interest to many people, who prefer more imaginary speculative stuff, instead of sticking to solid evidence.
However, thanks for your comment!
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