Click here for the key declassified nuclear testing and capability documents compilation (EM-1 related USA research reports and various UK nuclear weapon test reports on blast and radiation), from nukegate.org

We also uploaded an online-viewable version of the full text of the 1982 edition of the UK Goverment's Domestic Nuclear Shelters - Technical Guidance, including secret UK and USA nuclear test report references and extracts proving protection against collateral damage, for credible deterrence (linked here).

ABOVE: 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 by the sneering Norman Angell). 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 (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 complex SLBM and ICBM threat that we must disarm now, while also claiming that their tactical nuclear weapons probably won't work so aren't a threat! In similar vein, Teller-critic Hans Bethe also used to falsely "dismiss" Russian nuclear superiority by claiming (with any more evidence than Brezhnev's word, it appeared) 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 thousands of miles radii). 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 would turn into a "Reds under beds" argument, designed to imply that the truth is dangerous to "peaceful coexistence"!

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, and (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! There's a big problem with propaganda here.

(These calculations, showing that even if strategic bombing had worked in WWII - and the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded it failed, thus the early Cold War effort to develop and test tactical nuclear weapons and train for tactical nuclear war in Nevada field exercises - you need over 400 megaton weapons to give the equivalent of WWII city destruction in Europe and Japan, are often inverted by anti-nuclear bigots to try to obfuscate the truth. What we're driving at is that nuclear weapons give you the ability to DETER the invasions that set off such wars, regardless of whether they escalate from poison gas - as feared in the 20s and 30s thus appeasement and WWII - or nuclear. Escalation was debunked in WWII where the only use of poison gases were in "peaceful" gas chambers, not dropped on cities. Rather than justifying appeasement, the "peaceful" massacre of millions in gas chambers justified war. But evil could and should have been deterred. The "anti-war" propagandarists like Lord Noel-Baker and pals who guaranteed immediate gas knockout blows in the 30s if we didn't appease evil dictators were never held to account and properly debunked by historians after the war, so they converted from gas liars to nuclear liars in the Cold War and went on winning "peace" prices for their lies, which multiplied up over the years, to keep getting news media headlines and Nobel Peace Prizes for starting and sustaining unnecessary wars and massacres by dictators. There's also a military side to this, with Field Marshall's Lord Mountbatten, lord Carver and lord Zuckerman in the 70s arguing for UK nuclear disarmament and a re-introduction of conscription instead. These guys were not pacifist CND thugs who wanted Moscow to rule the world, but they were quoted by them attacking the deterrent but not of course calling for conscription instead. The abolishment of UK conscription for national service in 1960 was due to the H-bomb, and was a political money-saving plot by Macmillan. If we disarmed our nuclear deterrent and spend the money on conscription plus underground shelters, we might well be able to resist Russia as Ukraine does, until we run out of ammunition etc. However, the cheapest and most credible deterrent is tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the concentration of aggressive force by terrorist states..)

Britain was initially in a better position with regards to civil defense than the USA, because in WWII Britain had built sufficient shelters (of various types, but all tested against blast intense enough to demolish brick houses, and later also tested them at various nuclear weapon trials in Monte Bello and Maralinga, Australia) and respirators for the entire civilian population. However, Britain also tried to keep the proof testing data secret from Russia (which tested their own shelters at their own nuclear tests anyway) and this meant it appeared that civil defense advice was unproved and would not work, an illusion exploited especially for communist propaganda in the UK via CND. To give just one example, CND and most of the UK media still rely on Duncan Campbell's pseudo-journalism book War Plan UK since it is based entirely on fake news about UK civil defense, nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, fallout, blast, etc. He takes for granted that - just because the UK Government kept the facts secret - the facts don't exist, and to him any use of nuclear weapons which spread any radioactivity whatsoever will make life totally impossible: "What matters 'freedom' or 'a way of life' in a radioactive wasteland?" (Quote from D. Campbell, War Plan UK, Paladin Books, May 1983, p387.) The problem here is the well known fallout decay rate; Trinity nuclear test ground zero was reported by Glasstone (Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950) to be at 8,000 R/hr at 1 hour after burst, yet just 57 days later, on September 11, 1945, General Groves, Robert Oppenheimer, and a large group of journalists safely visited it and took their time inspecting the surviving tower legs, when the gamma dose rate was down to little more than 1 R/hr! So fission products decay fast: 1,000 R/hr at 1 hour decays to 100 at 7 hours, 10 at 2 days, and just 1 at 2 weeks. So the "radioactive wasteland" is just as much a myth as any other nuclear "doomsday" fictional headline in the media. Nuclear weapons effects have always been fake news in the mainstream media: editors have always regarded facts as "boring copy". Higher yield tests showed that even the ground zero crater "hot spots" were generally lower, due to dispersal by the larger mushroom cloud. If you're far downwind, you can simply walk cross-wind, or prepare an improvised shelter while the dust is blowing. But point any such errors out to fanatical bigots and they will just keep making up more nonsense.

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."

Update: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility, NIF, using ultraviolet wavelength laser beam pulses of 2MJ on to a 2mm diameter spherical beryllium shell of frozen D+T inside a 1 cm-long hollow gold cylinder "hohlraum" (which is heated to a temperature where it then re-radiates energy at much higher frequency, x-rays, on to the surface of the beryllium ablator of the central fusion capsule, which ablates causing it to recoil inward (as for the 1962 Ripple II nuclear weapon's secondary stage, the capsule is compressed by a factor of 35, mimicking the isentropic compression mechanism of a miniature Ripple II clean nuclear weapon secondary stage), has now repeatedly achieved nuclear fusion explosions of over 3MJ, equivalent to nearly 1 kg of TNT explosive. According to a Time article (linked her) about fusion system designer Annie Kritcher, the recent breakthrough was in part due to using a ramping input energy waveform: "success that came thanks to tweaks including shifting more of the input energy to the later part of the laser shot", a feature that minimises the rise in entropy due to shock shock wave generation (which heats the capsule, causing it to expand and resist compression) and increases isentropic compression which was the principle used by LLNL's J. H. Nuckolls to achieve the 99.9% clean Ripple II 9.96 megaton nuclear test success in Dominic-Housatonic on 30 October 1962. Nuckolls in 1972 published the equation for the idealized input power waveform required for isentropic, optimized compression of fusion fuel (Nature, v239, p139): P ~ (1 - t)-1.875, where t is time in units of the transit time (the time taken for the shock to travel to the centre of the fusion capsule), and -1.875 a constant based on the specific heat of the ionized fuel (Nuckolls has provided the basic declassified principles, see extract linked here). To be clear, the energy reliably released by the 2mm diameter capsule of fusion fuel was roughly a 1 kg TNT explosion. 80% of this is in the form of 14.1 MeV neutrons (ideal for fissioning lithium-7 in LiD to yield more tritium), and 20% is the kinetic energy of fused nuclei (which is quickly converted into x-rays radiation energy by collisions). Nuckolls' 9.96 megaton Housatonic (10 kt Kinglet primary and 9.95 Mt Ripple II 100% clean isentropically compressed secondary) of 1962 proved that it is possible to use multiplicative staging whereby lower yield primary nuclear explosions trigger off a fusion stage 1,000 times more powerful than its initiator. Another key factor, as shown on our ggraph linked here, is that you can use cheap natural LiD as fuel once you have a successful D+T reaction, because naturally abundant, cheap Li-7 more readily fissions to yield tritium with the 14.1 MeV neutrons from D+T fusion, than expensively enriched Li-6, which is needed to make tritium in nuclear reactors where the fission neutron energy of around 1 MeV is too low to to fission Li-7. It should also be noted that despite an openly published paper about Nuckolls' Ripple II success being stymied in 2021 by Jon Grams, the subject is still being covered up/ignored by the anti-nuclear biased Western media! Grams article fails to contain the design details such as the isentropic power delivery curve etc from Nuckolls' declassified articles that we include in the latest blog post here. One problem regarding "data" causing continuing confusion about the Dominic-Housatonic 30 October 1962 Ripple II test at Christmas Island, is made clear in the DASA-1211 report's declassified summary of the sizes, weights and yields of those tests: Housatonic was Nuckolls' fourth and final isentropic test, with the nuclear system inserted into a heavy steel Mk36 drop case, making the overall size 57.2 inches in diameter, 147.9 long and 7,139.55 lb mass, i.e. 1.4 kt/lb or 3.0 kt/kg yield-to-mass ratio for 9.96 Mt yield, which is not impressive for that yield range until you consider (a) that it was 99.9% fusion and (b) the isentropic design required a heavy holhraum around the large Ripple II fusion secondary stage to confine x-rays for relatively long time during which a slowly rising pulse of x-rays were delivered from the primary to secondary via a very large areas of foam elsewhere in the weapon, to produce isentropic compression. 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". It is therefore now possible not just in principle but in practice, 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:

"The early calculations on ICF (inertial-confinement fusion) by John Nuckolls in 1972 had estimated that ICF might be achieved with a driver energy as low as 1 kJ. ... In order to provide reliable experimental data on the minimum energy required for ignition, a series of secret experiments—known as Halite at Livermore and Centurion at Los Alamos—was carried out at the nuclear weapons test site in Nevada between 1978 and 1988. The experiments used small underground nuclear explosions to provide X-rays of sufficiently high intensity to implode ICF capsules, simulating the manner in which they would be compressed in a hohlraum. ... the Halite/Centurion results predicted values for the required laser energy in the range 20 to 100MJ—higher than the predictions ..." - Garry McCracken and Peter Stott, Fusion, Elsevier, 2nd ed., p149.

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?

ABOVE: 16 kt at 600m altitude nuclear explosion on a city, Hiroshima ground zero (in foreground) showing modern concrete buildings surviving nearby (unlike the wooden ones that mostly burned at the peak of the firestorm 2-3 hours after survivors had evacuated), in which people were shielded from most of the radiation and blast winds, as they were in simple shelters.

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.

ABOVE: 16 February 1950 Daily Express editorial on H Bomb problem due to the fact that the UN is another virtue signalling but really war mongering League of Nations (which oversaw Nazi appeasement and the outbreak of WWII); however Fuchs had attended the April 1946 Super Conference during which the Russian version of the H-bomb involving isentropic radiation implosion of a separate low-density fusion stage (unlike Teller's later dense metal ablation rocket implosion secondary TX14 Alarm Clock and Sausage designs) were discussed and then given to Russia. The media was made aware only that Fuchs hade given the fission bomb to Russia. The FBI later visited Fuchs in British jail, showed him a film of Harry Gold (whom Fuchs identified as his contact while at Los Alamos) and also gave Fuchs a long list of secret reports to mark off individually so that they knew precisely what Stalin had been given. Truman didn't order H-bomb research and development because Fuchs gave Stalin the A-bomb, but because he gave them the H-bomb. The details of the Russian H-bomb are still being covered up by those who want a repetition of 1930s appeasement, or indeed the deliberate ambiguity of the UK Cabinet in 1914 which made it unclear what the UK would do if Germany invaded Belgium, allowing the enemy to exploit that ambiguity, starting a world war. The key fact usually covered up (Richard Rhodes, Chuck Hansen, and the whole American "expert nuclear arms community" all misleadingly claim that Teller's Sausage H-bomb design with a single primary and a dense ablator around a cylindrical secondary stage - uranium, lead or tungsten - is the "hydrogen bomb design") here is that two attendees of the April 1946 Super Conference, the report author Egon Bretscher and the radiation implosion discoverer Klaus Fuchs - were British, and both contributed key H-bomb design principles to the Russian and British weapons (discarded for years by America). Egon Bretscher for example wrote up the Super Conference report, during which attendees suggested various ways to try to achieve isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel (a concept discarded by Teller's 1951 Sausage design, but used by Russia and re-developed in America on Nuckolls 1962 Ripple tests), and after Teller left Los Alamos, Bretscher took over work on Teller's Alarm Clock layered fission-fusion spherical hybrid device before Bretscher himself left Los Alamos and became head of nuclear physics at Harwell, UK,, submitting UK report together with Fuchs (head of theoretical physics at Harwell) which led to Sir James Chadwick's UK paper on a three-stage thermonuclear Super bomb which formed the basis of Penney's work at the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. While Bretscher had worked on Teller's hybrid Alarm Clock (which originated two months after Fuchs left Los Alamos), Fuchs co-authored a hydrogen bomb patent with John von Neumann, in which radiation implosion and ionization implosion was used. Between them, Bretscher and Fuchs had all the key ingredients. Fuchs leaked them to Russia and the problem persists today in international relations.

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.

Update (4 January 2024): on the important world crisis, https://vixra.org/abs/2312.0155 gives a detailed review of "Britain and the H-bomb" (linked here), and why the "nuclear deterrence issue" isn't about "whether we should deter evil", but precisely what design of nuclear warhead we should have in order to do that cheaply, credibly, safely, and efficiently without guaranteeing either escalation or the failure of deterrence. When we disarmed our chemical and biological weapons, it was claimed that the West could easily deter those weapons using strategic nuclear weapons to bomb Moscow (which has shelters, unlike us). That failed when Putin used sarin and chlorine to prop up Assad in Syria, and Novichok in the UK to kill Dawn Sturgess in 2018. So it's just not a credible deterrent to say you will bomb Moscow if Putin invades Europe or uses his 2000 tactical nuclear weapons. An even more advanced deterrent, the 100% clean very low yield (or any yield) multiplicative staged design without any fissile material whatsoever, just around the corner. Clean secondary stages have been proof-tested successfully for example in the 100% clean Los Alamos Redwing Navajo secondary, and the 100% clean Ripple II secondary tested 30 October 1962, and the laser ignition of very tiny fusion capsules to yield more energy than supplied has been done on 5 December 2022 when a NIF test delivered 2.05 MJ (the energy of about 0.5 kg of TNT) to a fusion capsule which yielded 3.15 MJ, so all that is needed is to combine both ideas in a system whereby suitably sized second stages - ignited in the first place by a capacitative charged circuit sending a pulse of energy to a suitable laser system (the schematic shown is just a sketch of principle - more than one laser would possibly be required for reliability of fusion ignition) acting on tiny fusion capsule as shown - are encased to two-stage "effective primaries" which each become effective primaries of bigger systems, thus a geometric series of multiplicative staging until the desired yield is reached. Note that the actual tiny first T+D capsule can be compressed by one-shot lasers - compact lasers used way beyond their traditional upper power limit and burned out in a firing a single pulse - in the same way the gun assembly of the Hiroshima bomb was based on a one-shot gun. In other words, forget all about textbook gun design. The Hiroshima bomb gun assembly system only had to be fired once, unlike a field artillery piece which has to be ready to be fired many thousands of times (before metal fatigue/cracks set in). Thus, by analogy, the lasers - which can be powered by ramping current pulses from magnetic flux compressor systems - for use in a clean bomb will be much smaller and lighter than current lab gear which is designed to be used thousands of times in repeated experiments. The diagram below shows cylindrical Li6D stages throughout for a compact bomb shape, but spherical stages can be used, and once a few stages get fired, the flux of 14 MeV neutrons is sufficient to go to cheap natural LiD. To fit it into a MIRV warhead, the low density of LiD constrains such a clean warhead will have a low nuclear yield, which means a tactical neutron deterrent of the invasions that cause big wars; a conversion of incredible strategic deterrence into a more credible combined strategic-tactical deterrent of major provocations, not just direct attacks. It should also be noted that in 1944 von Neumann suggested that T + D inside the core of the fission weapon would be compressed by "ionization compression" during fission (where a higher density ionized plasma compresses a lower density ionized plasma, i.e. the D + T plasma), an idea that was - years later - named the Internal Booster principle by Teller; see Frank Close, "Trinity", Allen Lane, London, 2019, pp158-159 where Close argues that during the April 1946 Superbomb Conference, Fuchs extended von Neumann's 1944 internal fusion boosting idea to an external D + T filled BeO walled capsule:

"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.)

ABOVE: the FBI file on Klaus Fuchs contains a brief summary of the secret April 1946 Super Conference at Los Alamos which Fuchs attended, noting that compression of fusion fuel was discussed by Lansdorf during the morning session on 19 April, attended by Fuchs, and that: "Suggestions were made by various people in attendance as to the manner of minimizing the rise in entropy during compression." This fact is vitally interesting, since it proves that an effort was being made then to secure isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel in April 1946, sixteen years before John H. Nuckolls tested the isentropically compressed Ripple II device on 30 October 1962, giving a 99.9% clean 10 megaton real H-bomb! So the Russians were given a massive head start on this isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel for hydrogen bombs, used (according to Trutnev) in both the single primary tests like RDS-37 in November 1955 and also in the double-primary designs which were 2.5 times more efficient on a yield-to-mass basis, tested first on 23 February 1958! According to the FBI report, the key documents Fuchs gave to Russia were LA-551, Prima facie proof of the feasibility of the Super, 15 Apr 1946 and the LA-575 Report of conference on the Super, 12 June 1946. Fuchs also handed over to Russia his own secret Los Alamos reports, such as LA-325, Initiator Theory, III. Jet Formation by the Collision of Two Surfaces, 11 July 1945, Jet Formation in Cylindrical lmplosion with 16 Detonation Points, Secret, 6 February 1945, and Theory of Initiators II, Melon Seed, Secret, 6 January 1945. Note the reference to Bretscher attending the Super Conference with Fuchs; Teller in a classified 50th anniversary conference at Los Alamos on the H-bomb claimed that after he (Teller) left Los Alamos for Chicago Uni in 1946, Bretscher continued work on Teller's 31 August 1946 "Alarm Clock" nuclear weapon (precursor of the Mike sausage concept etc) at Los Alamos; it was this layered uranium and fusion fuel "Alarm Clock" concept which led to the departure of Russian H-bomb design from American H-bomb design, simply because Fuchs left Los Alamos in June 1946, well before Teller invented the Alarm Clock concept on 31 August 1946 (Teller remembered the date precisely simply because he invented the Alarm Clock on the day his daughter was born, 31 August 1946! Teller and Richtmyer also developed a variant called "Swiss Cheese", with small pockets or bubbles of expensive fusion fuels, dispersed throughout cheaper fuel, in order to kinder a more cost-effective thermonuclear reaction; this later inspired the fission and fusion boosted "spark plug" ideas in later Sausage designs; e.g. security cleared Los Alamos historian Anne Fitzpatrick stated during her 4 March 1997 interview with Robert Richtmyer, who co-invented the Alarm Clock with Teller, that the Alarm Clock evolved into the spherical secondary stage of the 6.9 megaton Castle-Union TX-14 nuclear weapon!).

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.)

Above: declassified illustration from a January 1949 secret report by the popular physics author and Los Alamos nuclear weapons design consultant George Gamow, showing his suggestion of using x-rays from both sides of a cylindrically imploded fission device to expose two fusion capsules to x-rays to test whether compression (fusion in BeO box on right side) helps, or is unnecessary (capsule on left side). Neutron counters detect 14.1 Mev T+D neutrons using time-of-flight method (higher energy neutrons traver faster than ~1 Mev fission stage neutrons, arriving at detectors first, allowing discrimination of the neutron energy spectrum by time of arrival). It took over two years to actually fire this 225 kt shot (8 May 1951)! No wonder Teller was outraged. A few interesting reports by Teller and also Oppenheimer's secret 1949 report opposing the H bomb project as it then stood on the grounds of low damage per dollar - precisely the exact opposite of the "interpretation" the media and gormless fools will assert until the cows come home - are linked here. The most interesting is Teller's 14 August 1952 Top Secret paper debunking Hans Bethe's propaganda, by explaining that contrary to Bethe's claims, Stalin's spy Klaus Fuch had the key "radiation implosion"- see second para on p2 - secret of the H-bomb because he attended the April 1946 Superbomb Conference which was not even attended by Bethe!  It was this very fact in April 1946, noted by two British attendees of the 1946 Superbomb Conference before collaboration was ended later in the year by the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, statement that led to Sir James Cladwick's secret use of "radiation implosion" for stages 2 and 3 of his triple staged H-bomb report the next month, "The Superbomb", a still secret document that inspired Penney's original Tom/Dick/Harry staged and radiation imploded H-bomb thinking, which is summarized by security cleared official historian Arnold's Britain and the H-Bomb.  Teller's 24 March 1951 letter to Los Alamos director Bradbury was written just 15 days after his historic Teller-Ulam 9 March 1951 report on radiation coupling and "radiation mirrors" (i.e. plastic casing lining to re-radiate soft x-rays on to the thermonuclear stage to ablate and thus compress it), and states: "Among the tests which seem to be of importance at the present time are those concerned with boosted weapons. Another is connected vith the possibility of a heterocatalytic explosion, that is, implosion of a bomb using the energy from another, auxiliary bomb. A third concerns itself with tests on mixing during atomic explosions, which question is of particular importance in connection with the Alarm Clock."

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!]

"The Lance warhead is the first in a new generation of tactical mini-nukes that have been sought by Army field leading advocates: the series of American generals who have commanded the North Atlantic Treaty organization theater. They have argued that the 7,000 unclear warheads now in Europe are old, have too large a nuclear yield and thus would not be used in a war. With lower yields and therefore less possible collateral damage to civilian populated areas, these commanders have argued, the new mini-nukes are more credible as deterrents because they just might be used on the battlefield without leading to automatic nuclear escalation. Under the nuclear warhead production system, a President must personally give the production order. President Ford, according to informed sources, signed the order for the enhanced-radiation Lance warhead. The Lance already has regular nuclear warheads and it deployed with NATO forces in Europe. In addition to the Lance warhead, other new production starts include: An 8-inch artillery-fired nuclear warhead to replace those now in Europe. This shell had been blocked for almost eight years by Sen. Stuart Symington (D-Mo.), who had argued that it was not needed. Symington retired last year. The Pentagon and ERDA say the new nuclear 8-inch warhead would be safer from stealing by terrorists. Starbird testified. It will be "a command disable system" to melt its inner workings if necessary. ... In longer-term research, the bill contains money to finance an enhanced-radiational bomb to the dropped from aircraft." - Washington post, 5 June 1977.

This debunks fake news that Teller's and Ulam's 9 March 1951 report LAMS-1225 itself gave Los Alamos the Mike H-bomb design, ready for testing! Teller was proposing a series of nuclear tests of the basic principles, not 10Mt Ivy-Mike which was based on a report the next month by Teller alone, LA-1230, "The Sausage: a New Thermonuclear System". When you figure that, what did Ulam actually contribute to the hydrogen bomb? Nothing about implosion, compression or separate stages - all already done by von Neumann and Fuchs five years earlier - and just a lot of drivel about trying to channel material shock waves from a primary to compress another fissile core, a real dead end. What Ulam did was to kick Teller out of his self-imposed mental objection to compression devices. Everything else was Teller's; the radiation mirrors, the Sausage with its outer ablation pusher and its inner spark plug. Note also that contrary to official historian Arnold's book (which claims due to a misleading statement by Dr Corner that all the original 1946 UK copies of Superbomb Conference documentation were destroyed after being sent from AWRE Aldermaston to London between 1955-63), all the documents did exist in the AWRE TPN (theoretical physics notes, 100% of which have been perserved) and are at the UK National Archives, e.g. AWRE-TPN 5/54 is listed in National Archives discovery catalogue ref ES 10/5: "Miscellaneous super bomb notes by Klaus Fuchs", see also the 1954 report AWRE-TPN 6/54, "Implosion super bomb: substitution of U235 for plutonium" ES 10/6, the 1954 report AWRE-TPN 39/54 is "Development of the American thermonuclear bomb: implosion super bomb" ES 10/39, see also ES 10/21 "Collected notes on Fermi's super bomb lectures", ES 10/51 "Revised reconstruction of the development of the American thermonuclear bombs", ES 1/548 and ES 1/461 "Superbomb Papers", etc. Many reports are secret and retained, despite containing "obsolete" designs (although UK report titles are generally unredacted, such as: "Storage of 6kg Delta (Phase) -Plutonium Red Beard (tactical bomb) cores in ships")! It should also be noted that the Livermore Laboatory's 1958 TUBA spherical secondary with an oralloy (enriched U235) outer pusher was just a reversion from Teller's 1951 core spark plug idea in the middle of the fusion fuel, back to the 1944 von Neumann scheme of having fission material surrounding the fusion fuel. In other words, the TUBA was just a radiation and ionization imploded, internally fusion-boosted, second fission stage which could have been accomplished a decade earlier if the will existed, when all of the relevant ideas were already known. The declassified UK spherical secondary-stage alternatives linked here (tested as Grapple X, Y and Z with varying yields but similar size, since all used the 5 ft diameter Blue Danube drop casing) clearly show that a far more efficient fusion burn occurs by minimising the mass of hard-to-compress U235 (oralloy) sparkplug/pusher, but maximising the amount of lithium-7, not lithium-6. Such a secondary with minimal fissionable material also automatically has minimal neutron ABM vulnerability (i.e., "Radiation Immunity", RI). This is the current cheap Russian neutron weapon design, but not the current Western design of warheads like the W78, W88 and bomb B61.

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!

Compare these data for the 20 inch diameter, 49 inch, 1600 lb, 1.1 megaton bomb B28 to the 18 inch diameter, 47 inch, 700 lb, 400 kt Mk47/W47 Polaris SLBM warhead (this is the correct yield for the first version of the W47 confirmed by UK data in Lorna Arnold Britain and the H-bomb 2001 and AB 16/3240; Wikipedia wrongly gives the 600 kt figure in Hansen, which was a speculation or a later upgrade). The key difference is that the W47 is much lighter, and thus suitable for the Polaris SLBM unlike the heavier, higher yield B28. Both B28 and W47 used cylindrical sausages, but they are very different in composition; the B28 used a huge mass of U238 in its ablative sausage outer shell or pusher, while the W47 used oralloy/U235 in the pusher. The table shows the total amounts of Pu, Oralloy (U235), Lithium-6 (excluding cheaper lithium-7, which is also present in varying amounts in different thermonuclear weapons), and tritium (which is used for boosting inside fissile material, essentially to reduce the amount of Pu and therefore the vulnerability of the weapon to Russian enhanced neutron ABM warhead meltdown). The B28 also has an external dense natural U (99.3% U238) "ablative pusher shell" whose mass is not listed in this table. The table shows that the 400 kt W47 Polaris SLBM warhead contains 60 kg of U235 (nearly as much as the 500 kt pure fission Mk18), which is in an ablative pusher shell around the lithium deuteride, so that the cylinder of neutron-absorbing lithium-6 deuteride within it keeps that mass of U235 subcritical, until compressed. So the 400 kt W47 contains far more Pu, U235, Li6 and T than the higher yield 1.1 megaton B28: this is the big $ price you pay for reducing the mass of the warhead; the total mass of the W47 is reduced to 44% of the mass of the B28, since the huge mass of cheap U238 pusher in the B28 is replaced by a smaller mass of U235, which is more efficient because (as Dr Carl F. Miller reveals in USNRDL-466, Table 6), about half of the neutrons hitting U238 don't cause fission but instead non-fission capture reactions which produce U239, plus the n,2n reaction that produces U237, emitting a lot of very low energy gamma rays in the fallout. For example, in the 1954 Romeo nuclear test (which, for simplicity, we quote since it used entirely natural LiD, with no expensive enrichment of the Li6 isotope whatsoever), the U238 jacket fission efficiency was reduced by capture as follows: 0.66 atom/fission of U239, 0.10 atom/fission of U237 and 0.23 atom/fission of U240 produced by fission, a total of 0.66 + 0.10 + 0.23 ~ 1 atom/fission, i.e. 50% fission in the U238 pusher, versus 50% non-fission neutron captures. So by using U235 in place of U238, you virtually eliminate the non-fission capture (see UK Atomic Weapons Establishment graph of fission and capture cross-sections for U235, shown below), which roughly halves the mass of the warhead, for a given fission yield. This same principle of using an outer U235/oralloy pusher instead of U238 to reduce mass - albeit with the secondary cylindrical "Sausage" shape now changed to a sphere - applies to today's miniaturised, high yield, low mass "MIRV" warheads. Just as the lower-yield W47 counter-intuitively used more expensive ingredients than the bulkier higher-yield B28, modern compact, high-yield oralloy-loaded warheads literally cost a bomb, just to keep the mass down! There is evidence Russia uses alternative ideas.

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).

ABOVE: Hans A. Bethe's disastrous back-of-the-envelope nonsense "non-go theorem" against lithium-7 fission into tritium by 14.1 Mev D+T neutrons in Bravo (which contained 40% lithium-6 and 60% lithium-7; unnecessarily enriched - at great expense and effort - from the natural 7.42% lithum-6 abundance). It was Bethe's nonsense "physics" speculation, unbacked by serious calculation, who caused Bravo to go off at 2.5 times the expected 6 megatons and therefore for the Japanese Lucky Dragon tuna trawler crew in the maximum fallout hotspot area 80 miles downwind to be contaminated by fallout, and also for Rongelap's people to be contaminated ("accidents" that inevitably kickstarted the originally limited early 1950s USSR funded Communist Party anti-nuclear deterrence movements in the West into mainstream media and thus politics). There was simply no solid basis for assuming that the highly penetrating 14.1 Mev neutrons would be significantly slowed by scattering in the fuel before hitting lithium-7 nuclei. Even teller's 1950 report LA-643 at page 17 estimated that in a fission-fusion Alarm Clock, the ratio of 14 Mev to 2.5 Mev neutrons was 0.7/0.2 = 3.5. Bethe's complacently bad guesswork-based physics also led to the EMP fiasco for high altitude bursts, after he failed to predict the geomagnetic field deflection of Compton electrons at high altitude in his secret report “Electromagnetic Signal Expected from High-Altitude Test”, Los Alamos report LA-2173, October 1957, Secret. He repeatedly caused nuclear weapons effects study disasters. For the true utility of lithium-7, which is actually BETTER than lithum-6 at tritium production when struck by 14.1 Mev D+T fusion neutrons, and its consequences for cheap isentropically compressed fusion capsules in Russian neutron bombs, please see my paper here which gives a graph of lithium isotopic cross section versus neutron energy, plus the results when Britain used cheap lithium-7 in Grapple Y to yield 3 megatons (having got lower yields with costly lithium-6 in previous tests!).

Update (15 Dec 2023): PDF uploaded of UK DAMAGE BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS (linked here on Internet Archive) - secret 1000 pages UK and USA nuclear weapon test effects analysis, and protective measures determined at those tests (not guesswork) relevant to escalation threats by Russia for EU invasion (linked here at wordpress) in response to Ukraine potentially joining the EU (this is now fully declassified without deletions, and in the UK National Archives at Kew):

Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorist liars debunked by secret American government evidence that simple shelters worked, REPORT LINKED HERE (this was restricted from public view and never published by the American government, and Glasstone's lying Effects of Nuclear Weapons book reversed its evidence for propaganda purposes, a fact still covered by all the lying cold war pseudo "historians" today), Operation Hurricane 1952 declassified nuclear weapon test data (here), declassified UK nuclear tested shelter research reports (here), declassified EMP nuclear test research data (here), declassified clandestine nuclear bombs in ships attack on Liverpool study (here), declassified fallout decontamination study for UK recovery from nuclear attack (here), declassified Operation Buffalo surface burst and near surface burst fallout patterns, water decontamination, initial radiation shielding at Antler nuclear tests, and resuspension of deposited fallout dust into the air (inhalation hazard) at different British nuclear tests, plus Operation Totem nuclear tests crater region radiation surveys (here), declassified Operation Antler nuclear blast precursor waveforms (here), declassified Operation Buffalo nuclear blast precursor waveforms (here), declassified UK Atomic Weapons Establishment nuclear weapons effects symposium (here), and declassified UK Atomic Weapons Establishment paper on the gamma radiation versus time at Crossroads tests Able and Baker (here, paper by inventor of lenses in implosion weapons, James L. Tuck of the British Mission to Los Alamos and Operation Crossroads, clearly showing how initial gamma shielding in an air burst can be achieved with a few seconds warning and giving the much greater escape times available for residual radiation dose accumulations in an underwater burst; key anti-nuclear hysteria data kept covered up by Glasstone and the USA book Effects of Nuclear Weapons), and Penney and Hicks paper on the base surge contamination mechanism (here), and Russian nuclear warhead design evidence covered-up by both America and the so-called arms control and disarmament "experts" who always lie and distort the facts to suit their own agenda to try to start a nuclear war (linked here). If they wanted "peace" they'd support the proved facts, available on this blog nukegate.org since 2006, and seek international agreement to replace the incredible, NON-war deterring strategic nuclear weapons with safe tactical neutron warheads which collateral damage averting and invasion-deterring (thus war deterring in all its forms, not only nuclear), plus civil defence against all forms of collateral damage from war, which reduces escalation risks during terrorist actions, as proved in wars which don't escalate because of effective civil defence and credible deterrence (see below). Instead, they support policies designed to maximise civilian casualties and to deliberately escalate war, to profit "politically" from the disasters caused which they blame falsely on nuclear weapons, as if deterrence causes war! (Another lie believed by mad/evil/gullible mainstream media/political loons in "authority".) A good summary of the fake news basis of "escalation" blather against credible tactical nuclear deterrence of the invasions that set off wars is inadvertently provided by Lord David Owen's 2009 "Nuclear Papers" (Liverpool Uni Press), compiling his declassified nuclear disarmament propaganda reports written while he was UK Foreign Secretary 1977-9. It's all Carter era appeasement nonsense. For example, on pp158-8 he reprints his Top Secret 19 Dec 1978 "Future of the British Deterrent" report to the Prime Minister which states that "I am not convinced by the contention ... that the ability to destroy at least 10 major cities, or inflict damage on 30 major targets ... is the minimum criterion for a British deterrent." (He actually thinks this is too strong a deterrent, despite the fact it is incredible for the realpolitik tactics of dictators who make indirect provocations like invading their neighbours!) The reality Owens ignores is that Russia had and still has civil defence shelters and evacuation plans, so threatening some damage in retaliation is not a credible deterrent against the invasions that set off both world wars. On page 196, he gives a Secret 18 April 1978 paper stating that NATO then had 1000 nuclear artillery pieces (8" and 155mm), 200 Lance and Honest John tactical nuclear missile systems, 135 Pershing; all now long ago disarmed and destroyed while Russian now has over 2000 dedicated tactical nuclear weapons of high neutron output (unlike EM1's data for the low yield option of the multipurpose NATO B61). Owen proudly self-congratulates on his Brezhnev supporting anti-neutron bomb ranting 1978 book, "Human Rights", pp. 136-7. If Owen really wants "Human Rights", he needs to back the neutron bomb now to deter the dictatorships which destroy human rights! His 2009 "Nuclear Papers" at p287 gives the usual completely distorted analysis of the Cuban missiles crisis, claiming that despite the overwhelming American tactical and strategic nuclear superiority for credible deterrence in 1962, the world came "close" to a nuclear war. It's closer now, mate, when thanks to your propaganda we no longer have a credible deterrent, civil defence, tactical neutron warheads. Pathetic.

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!

Above: Edward Leader-Williams on the basis for UK civil defence shelters in SECRET 1949 Royal Society's London Symposium on physical effects of atomic weapons, a study that was kept secret by the Attlee Government and subsequent UK governments, instead of being openly published to enhance public knowledge of civil defence effectiveness against nuclear attack. Leader-Williams also produced the vital civil defence report seven years later (published below for the first time on this blog), proving civil defence sheltering and city centre evacuation is effective against 20 megaton thermonuclear weapons. Also published in the same secret symposium, which was introduced by Penney, was Penney's own Hiroshima visit analysis of the percentage volume reduction in overpressure-crushed empty petrol cans, blueprint containers, etc., which gave a blast partition yield of 7 kilotons (or 15.6 kt total yield, if taking the nuclear blast as 45% of total yield, i.e. 7/0.45 = 15.6, as done in later AWRE nuclear weapons test blast data reports). Penney in a 1970 updated paper allowed for blast reduction due to the damage done in the city bursts.

ABOVE: The 1996 Northrop EM-1 (see extracts below showing protection by modern buildings and also simple shelters very close to nuclear tests; note that Northrop's entire set of damage ranges as a function of yield for underground shelters, tunnels, silos are based on two contained deep underground nuclear tests of different yield scaled to surface burst using the assumption of 5% yield ground coupling relative to the underground shots; this 5% equivalence figure appears to be an exaggeration for compact modern warheads, e.g. the paper “Comparison of Surface and Sub-Surface Nuclear Bursts,” from Steven Hatch, Sandia National Laboratories, to Jonathan Medalia, October 30, 2000, shows a 2% equivalence, e.g. Hatch shows that 1 megaton surface burst produces identical ranges to underground targets as a 20 kt burst at >20m depth of burst, whereas Northrop would require 50kt) has not been openly published, despite such protection being used in Russia! This proves heavy bias against credible tactical nuclear deterrence of the invasions that trigger major wars that could escalate into nuclear war (Russia has 2000+ dedicated neutron bombs; we don't!) and against simple nuclear proof tested civil defence which makes such deterrence credible and of course is also of validity against conventional wars, severe weather, peacetime disasters, etc.

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 at collateral damage distances all the effects are sufficiently delayed in arrival (unlike the case for the smaller areas affected by conventional weapons), and as the original 1951 SECRET American Government "Handbook on Capabilities of Atomic Weapons" (limited report AD511880L, forerunner to today's still secret EM-1) stated in Section 10.32:

"PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT ITEM TO BE REMEMBERED WHEN ESTIMATING EFFECTS ON PERSONNEL IS THE AMOUNT OF COVER ACTUALLY INVOLVED. ... IT IS OBVIOUS THAT ONLY A FEW SECONDS WARNING IS NECESSARY UNDER MOST CONDITIONS TO TAKE FAIRLY EFFECTIVE COVER. THE LARGE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES IN JAPAN RESULTED FOR THE MOST PART FROM THE LACK OF WARNING."

As for Hitler's stockpile of 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas, whose strategic and also tactical use was deterred by proper defences (gas masks for all civilians and soldiers, as well as UK stockpiles of fully trial-tested deliverable biological agent anthrax and mustard gas retaliation capacity), it is possible to deter strategic nuclear escalation to city bombing, even within a world war with a crazy terrorist, if all the people are protected by both defence and deterrence.

J. R. Oppenheimer (opposing Teller), February 1951: "It is clear that they can be used only as adjuncts in a military campaign which has some other components, and whose purpose is a military victory. They are not primarily weapons of totality or terror, but weapons used to give combat forces help they would otherwise lack. They are an integral part of military operations. Only when the atomic bomb is recognized as useful insofar as it is an integral part of military operations, will it really be of much help in the fighting of a war, rather than in warning all mankind to avert it." (Quotation: Samuel Cohen, Shame, 2nd ed., 2005, page 99.)

‘The Hungarian revolution of October and November 1956 demonstrated the difficulty faced even by a vastly superior army in attempting to dominate hostile territory. The [Soviet Union] Red Army finally had to concentrate twenty-two divisions in order to crush a practically unarmed population. ... With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears when we think of [World War II nuclear city bombing like Hiroshima]. The high casualty estimates for nuclear war are based on the assumption that the most suitable targets are those of conventional warfare: cities to interdict communications ... With cities no longer serving as key elements in the communications system of the military forces, the risks of initiating city bombing may outweigh the gains which can be achieved. ...

‘The elimination of area targets will place an upper limit on the size of weapons it will be profitable to use. Since fall-out becomes a serious problem [i.e. fallout contaminated areas which are so large that thousands of people would need to evacuate or shelter indoors for up to two weeks] only in the range of explosive power of 500 kilotons and above, it could be proposed that no weapon larger than 500 kilotons will be employed unless the enemy uses it first. Concurrently, the United States could take advantage of a new development which significantly reduces fall-out by eliminating the last stage of the fission-fusion-fission process.’

- Dr Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, 1957, pp. 180-3, 228-9. (Note that sometimes the "nuclear taboo" issue is raised against this analysis by Kissenger: if anti-nuclear lying propaganda on weapons effects makes it apparently taboo in the Western pro-Russian disarmament lobbies to escalate from conventional to tactical nuclear weapons to end war as on 6 and 9 August 1945, then this "nuclear taboo" can be relied upon to guarantee peace for our time. However, this was not only disproved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by the Russian tactical nuclear weapons reliance today, the Russian civil defense shelter system detailed on this blog which showed they believed a nuclear war survivable based on the results of their own nuclear tests, and the use of Russian nuclear weapons years after Kissinger's analysis was published and criticised, for example their 50 megaton test in 1961 and their supply of IRBM's capable of reaching East Coast mainland USA targets to the fanatical Cuban dictatorship in 1962. So much for the "nuclear taboo" as being any more reliable than Chamberlain's "peace for our time" document, co-signed by Hitler on 30 September 1938! We furthermore saw how Russia respected President Obama's "red line" for the "chemical weapons taboo": Russia didn't give a toss about Western disarmament thugs prattle about what they think is a "taboo", Russia used chlorine and sarin in Syria to keep Assad the dictator and they used Novichok to attack and kill in the UK in 2018, with only diplomatic expulsions in response. "Taboos" are no more valid to restrain madmen than peace treaties, disarmament agreements, Western CND books attacking civil defense or claiming that nuclear war is the new 1930s gas war bogyman, or "secret" stamps on scientific facts. In a word, they're bullshit superstitions.)

(Quoted in 2006 on this blog here.)

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.

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.

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."

BELOW: declassified British nuclear war planning blast survival data showing that even without special Morrison table shelters, the American assumption that nobody can survive in a demolished house is false, based on detailed WWII British data (the majority of people in houses flattened within 77 ft from V1 Nazi cruise missiles survived!), and secret American reports (contradicting their unclassified propaganda) proved that blast survival occurred at 16 psi overpressure in Hiroshima's houses, e.g. see limited distribution Dirkwood corp DC-P-1060 for Hiroshima, also the secret 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons DNA-EM-1 table 10-1, and WWII report RC-450 table 8.2, p145 (for determining survival of people sheltered in brick houses, the WWII A, B, C, and D damage versus casualty data from V1 blast was correlated to similar damage from nuclear blast as given Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons page 249, Fig. 6.41a, and page 109 Fig. 3.94a, which show that A, B, C, and D damage to brick houses from nuclear weapons occur at peak overpressures of 9, 6, 3 and 0.5 psi, respectively; the longer blast from higher yields blows the debris over a wider area, reducing the load per unit area falling on to people sheltered under tables etc), and the declassified UK government assessment of nuclear terrorist attack on a port or harbour, as well as the confidential classified UK Government analysis of the economic and social effects from WWII bombing (e.g. the recovery times for areas as a function of percentage of houses destroyed):

Unofficial Russian video on the secret Russian nuclear shelters from Russian Urban Exploration, titled "Проникли на секретный Спецобъект Метро!" = "We infiltrated a secret special facility of the Metro!":

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).

fCo2fnIEVVDG-6K0Kwk9cik87id46Qw5l0qJSBtQ/s1600/Moscow%20bomb%20shelter6.png"/>

ABOVE: originally SECRET diagrams showing the immense casualty reductions for simple shelters and local (not long distance as in 1939) evacuation, from a UK Home Office Scientific Advisers’ Branch report CD/SA 72 (UK National Archives document reference HO 225/72), “Casualty estimates for ground burst 10 megaton bombs”, which exposed the truth behind UK Cold War civil defence (contrary to Russian propaganda against UK defence, which still falsely claims there was no scientific basis for anything, playing on the fact the data was classified SECRET). Evacuation plus shelter eliminates huge casualties for limited attacks; notice that for the 10 megaton bombs (more than 20 times the typical yield of today’s MIRV compact warheads!), you need 20 weapons, i.e. a total of 10 x 20 = 200 megatons, for 1 million killed, if civil defence is in place for 45% of people to evacuate a city and the rest to take shelter. Under civil defence, therefore, you get 1 million killed per 200 megatons. This proves that civil defence work to make deterrence more credible in Russian eyes. For a discussion of the anti-civil defence propaganda scam in the West led by Russian agents for Russian advantage in the new cold war, just read posts on this blog started in 2006 when Putin's influence became clear. You can read the full PDF by clicking the link here. Or see the files here.

ABOVE: the originally CONFIDENTIAL classified document chapters of Dr D.G. Christopherson’s “Structural Defence 1945, RC450”, giving low cost UK WWII shelter effectiveness data, which should also have been published to prove the validity of civil defence countermeasures in making deterrence of future war more credible by allowing survival of “demonstration” strikes and “nuclear accidents / limited wars” (it’s no use having weapons and no civil defence, so you can’t deter aggressors, the disaster of Munich appeasement giving Hitler a green light on 30 September 1938, when Anderson shelters were only issued the next year, 1939!). For the original WWII UK Government low cost sheltering instruction books issued to the public (for a small charge!) please click here (we have uploaded them to internet archive), and please click here for further evidence for the effectiveness of indoor shelters during WWII from Morrison shelter inventor Baker's analysis, please click here (he titled his book about WWII shelters "Enterprise versus Bureaucracy" which tells you all you need to know about the problems his successful innovations in shelter design experienced; his revolutionary concept was that the shelter should be damaged to protect the people inside because of the vast energy absorption soaked up in the plastic deformation of steel - something which naive fools can never appreciate - by analogy, if your car bumper is perfectly intact after impact you're unlikely to be because it has not absorbed the impact energy which has been passed on to you!). We have also placed useful declassified UK government nuclear war survival information on internet archive here and here. There is also a demonstration of how proof-tested WWII shelters were tested in 1950s nuclear weapon trials and adapted for use in Cold War nuclear civil defence, here, thus permanently debunking the somewhat pro-dictatorship/anti-deterrence Jeremy Corbyn/Matthew Grant/Duncan Campbell anti-civil defence propaganda rants which pretend to to based on reality, but obviously just ignore the hard, yet secret, nuclear testing facts upon which UK government civil defence was based as my father (a Civil Defence Corps instructor) explained here back in 2006. The reality is that the media follows herd fashion to sell paper/airtime; it doesn't lead it. This is why it backed Nazi appeasement (cheering Chamberlain's 1938 handshakes with Hitler for instance) and only switched tune when it was too late to deter Nazi aggression in 1939; it made the most money that way. We have to face the facts!

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. "

Honest Effects of Nuclear Weapons!

ABOVE (VIDEO CLIP): Russian State TV Channel 1 war inurer and enabler, NOT MERELY MAKING "INCREDIBLE BLUFF THREATS THAT WE MUST ALL LAUGH AT AND IGNORE LIKE DR GOEBBELS THREATS TO GAS JEWS AND START A WORLD WAR" AS ALMOST ALL THE BBC SCHOOL OF "JOURNALISM" (to which we don't exactly belong!) LIARS CLAIM, but instead preparing Russians mentally for nuclear war (they already have nuclear shelters and a new Putin-era tactical nuclear war civil defense manual from 2014, linked and discussed in blog posts on the archive above), arguing for use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine war in 2023: "We should not be afraid of what it is unnecessary to be afraid of. We need to win. That is all. We have to achieve this with the means we have, with the weapons we have. I would like to remind you that a nuclear weapon is not just a bomb; it is the heritage of the whole Russian people, suffered through the hardest times. It is our heritage. And we have the right to use it to defend our homeland [does he mean the liberated components of the USSR that gained freedom in 1992?]. Changing the [nuclear use] doctrine is just a piece of paper, but it is worth making a decision."

NOTE: THIS IS NOT ENGLISH LANGUAGE "PROPAGANDA" SOLELY ADDRESSED AS A "BLUFF" TO UK AND USA GOV BIGOTED CHARLATANS (those who have framed photos of hitler, stalin, chamberlain, baldwin, lloyd george, eisenhower, et al., on their office walls), BUT ADDRESSED AT MAKING RUSSIAN FOLK PARTY TO THE NEED FOR PUTIN TO START A THIRD WORLD WAR! Duh!!!!! SURE, PUTIN COULD PRESS THE BUTTON NOW, BUT THAT IS NOT THE RUSSIAN WAY, ANY MORE THAN HITLER SET OFF WWII BY DIRECTLY BOMBING LONDON! HE DIDN'T. THESE PEOPLE WANT TO CONTROL HISTORY, TO GO DOWN THE NEXT "PUTIN THE GREAT". THEY WANT TO GET THEIR PEOPLE, AND CHINA, NORTH KOREA, IRAN, ET Al. AS ALLIES, BY APPEARING TO BE DEFENDING RATIONALITY AND LIBERTY AGAINST WAR MONGERING WESTERN IMPERIALISM. For the KGB mindset here, please read Chapman Pincher's book "The Secret offensive" and Paul Mercer's "Peace of the Dead - The Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers". Please note that the link to the analysis of the secret USSBS report 92, The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (which google fails to appreciate is a report with the OPPOSITE conclusions to the lying unclassified reports and Glasstone's book on fire, is on internet archive in the PDF documents list at the page "The effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan" (the secret report 92 of the USSBS, not the lying unclassified version or the Glasstone book series). If you don't like the plain layout of this blog, you can change it into a "fashionable" one with smaller photos you can't read by adding ?m=1 to the end of the URL, e.g. https://glasstone.blogspot.com/2022/02/analogy-of-1938-munich-crisis-and.html?m=1

PLEASE BEAR WITH US - THIS SITE WAS DEVELOPED IN 2006 BEFORE GOOGLE SMARTPHONE BOT CACHING (GOOGLE BOTS CAN'T INDEX THIS FORMAT ANYMORE AS IT IS SIMPLY UNSUITABLE TO SMARTPHONES WHICH DIDN'T EXIST BACK IN 2006 - WILL MOVE TO A NEW DOMAIN SOON TO OVERCOME THIS. (HOPEFULLY THE TEXT WILL ALSO BE EDITED AND RE-WRITTEN TO TAKE OUT TYPING ERRORS AND DEAD LINKS DATING BACK TO 2006 WHEN THE BLOG BEGAN - A LOT HAS CHANGED SINCE THEN!)

Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons exaggerations completely undermine credible deterrence of war: Glasstone exaggerates urban "strategic" nuclear weapons effects by using effects data taken from unobstructed terrain (without the concrete jungle shielding of blast winds and radiation by cities!), and omits the most vital uses and most vital effects of nuclear weapons: to DETER world war credibly by negating the concentrations of force used to invade Belgium, 1914 (thus WWI) and Poland (WWII). The facts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the shielding of blast and radiation effects by modern concrete buildings in the credible nuclear deterrence of invasions (click here for data) which - unlike the countervalue drivel that failed to prevent WW2 costing millions of human lives - worked in the Cold War despite the Western media's obsession with treating as Gospel truth the lying anti-nuclear propaganda from Russia's World Peace Council and its allies (intended to make the West disarm to allow Russian invasions without opposition, as worked in Ukraine recently)! If we have credible W54's and W79's tactical nukes to deter invasions as used to Cold War, pro Russian World Peace Council inspired propaganda says: "if you use those, we'll bomb your cities", but they can bomb our cities with nuclear if we use conventional weapons, or even if we fart, if they want - we don't actually control what thugs in dictatorships - it is like saying Hitler had 12,000 tons of tabun nerve agent by 1945, so lying we had to surrender for fear of it. Actually, he had to blow his brains out because he had an incredible deterrent, as retaliation risk plus defence (masks) negated it!

Credible deterrence necessitates simple, effective protection against concentrated and dispersed invasions and bombing. The facts can debunk massively inaccurate, deliberately misleading CND "disarm or be annihilated" pro-dictatorship ("communism" scam) political anti-nuclear deterrence dogma. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda effects lies on blast and radiation for modern concrete cities is debunked by solid factual evidence kept from public sight for political reasons by the Marx-media which is not opposed by the remainder of the media, and the completely fake "nuclear effects data" sneaks into "established pseudo-wisdom" by the back-door. Another trick is hate attacks on anyone telling the truth: this is a repeat of lies from Nobel Peace Prize winner Angell and pals before WWI (when long-"outlawed" gas was used by all sides, contrary to claims that paper agreements had "banned" it somehow) and WWII (when gas bombing lies prior to the war by Angell, Noel-Baker, Joad and others were used as an excuse to "make peace deals" with the Nazis, again, not worth the paper they were printed on). Mathematically, the subset of all States which keep agreements (disarmament and arms control, for instance) is identical to the subset of all States which are stable Democracies (i.e., tolerating dissent for the past several years), but this subset is - as Dr Spencer Weart's statistical evidence of war proves in his book Never at War: Why Democracies Won't Fight One Another - not the bloody war problem! Because none of the disarmaments grasp set theory, or bother to read Dr Weart's book, they can never understand that disarmament of Democracies doesn't cause peace but causes millions of deaths.

PLEASE CLICK HERE for the truth from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the shielding of blast and radiation effects by modern concrete buildings in the credible nuclear deterrence of invasions which - unlike the countervalue drivel that failed to prevent WW2 costing millions of human lives - worked in the Cold War despite the Western media's obsession with treating as Gospel truth the lying anti-nuclear propaganda from Russia's World Peace Council and its allies (intended to make the West disarm to allow Russian invasions without opposition, as worked in Ukraine recently)! Realistic effects and credible nuclear weapon capabilities are needed for deterring or stopping aggressive invasions and attacks which could escalate into major conventional or nuclear wars. Credible deterrence is through simple, effective protection against concentrated and dispersed invasions and aerial attacks, debunking inaccurate, misleading CND "disarm or be annihilated" left political anti-nuclear deterrence dogma. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda effects lies on blast and radiation for modern concrete cities is debunked by solid factual evidence kept from public sight for political reasons by the Marx-media.

Glasstone's and Nukemap's fake Effects of Nuclear Weapons effects data for unobstructed deserts, rather than realistic blast and radiation shielding concrete jungles which mitigate countervalue damage as proved in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Penney and Stanbury, undermine credible world war deterrence just as Philip Noel-Baker's 1927 BBC radio propaganda on gas war knock-out blow lies were used by Nazi propaganda distributing "pacifist disarmers" to undermine deterrence of Hitler's war, murdering tens of millions deliberately through lies (e.g. effective gas masks don't exist) that were easy to disprove, but supported by the mainstream fascist leaning press in the UK. There is not just one country, Russia, which could trigger WW3, because we know from history that the world forms alliances once a major war breaks out, apart from a few traditional neutral countries like Ireland and Switzerland, so a major US-China war over Taiwan could draw in support from Russia and North Korea, just as the present Russian invasion and war against Ukraine has drawn in Iranian munitions support for Russia. So it is almost certain that a future East-vs-West world war will involve an alliance of Russia-China-North Korea-Iran fighting on multiple fronts, with nuclear weapons being used carefully for military purposes (not in the imaginary 1930s massive "knockout blow" gas/incendiary/high explosive raids against cities that was used by the UK media to scare the public into appeasing Hitler and thus enabling him to trigger world war; Chamberlain had read Mein Kampf and crazily approved Hitler's plans to exterminate Jews and invade Russia starting a major war, a fact censored out of biased propaganda hailing Chamberlain as a peacemaker).

Realistic effects and credible nuclear weapons capabilities are VITAL for deterring or stopping aggressive invasions and attacks which could escalate into major conventional or nuclear wars debunk Marx media propagandarists who obfuscate because they don't want you to know the truth, so activism is needed to get the message out against lying frauds and open fascists in the Russian supporting Marx mass media, which sadly includes government officialdom (still infiltrated by reds under beds, sorry to Joe MaCarthy haters, but admit it as a hard fact that nuclear bomb labs in the West openly support Russian fascist mass murders; I PRAY THIS WILL SOON CHANGE!).

ABOVE: Tom Ramos at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (quoted at length on the development details of compact MIRV nuclear warhead designs in the latest post on this blog) explains how the brilliant small size primary stage, the Robin, was developed and properly proof-tested in time to act as the primary stage for a compact thermonuclear warhead to deter Russia in the 1st Cold War, something now made impossible due to Russia's World Peace Council propaganda campaigns. (Note that Ramos has a new book published, called From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War which describes in detail in chapter 13, "First the Flute and Then the Robin", how caring, dedicated nuclear weapons physicists in the 1950s and 1960s actually remembered the lesson of disarmament disaster in the 1930s, and so WORKED HARD to develop the "Flute" secondary and the "Robin" primary to enable a compact, light thermonuclear warhead to help deter WWIII! What a difference to today, when all we hear from such "weaponeers" now is evil lying about nuclear weapons effects on cities and against Western civil defence and against credible deterrence on behalf of the enemy.)

ABOVE: Star Wars filmmaker Peter Kuran has at last released his lengthy (90 minutes) documentary on The neutron bomb. Unfortunately, it is not yet being widely screened in cinemas or on DVD Blu Ray disc, so you have to stream it (if you have fast broadband internet hooked up to a decent telly). At least Peter managed to interview Samuel Cohen, who developed the neutron bomb out of the cleaner Livermore devices Dove and Starling in 1958 (Ramos says Livermore's director, who invented a wetsuit, is now trying to say Cohen stole the neutron bomb idea from him! Not so, as RAND colleague and 1993 Effects Manual EM-1 editor Dr Harold L. Brode explains in his recent brilliant book on the history of nuclear weapons in the 1st Cold War (reviewed in a post on this blog in detail) that Cohen was after the neutron bomb for many years before Livermore was even built as a rival to Los Alamos. Cohen had been into neutrons when working in the Los Alamos Efficiency Group of the Manhattan project on the very first nuclear weapons, used with neutron effects on people by Truman, back in 1945 to end a bloody war while the Livermore director was in short pants.)

For the true effects in modern city concrete buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, disproving the popular lies for nudes in open deserts used as the basis for blast and radiation calculations by Glasstone and Nukemap, please click here The deceptive bigots protraying themselves as Federation of American Scientists genuine communist disarmers in the Marx media including TV scammers have been suppressing the truth to sell fake news since 1945 and in a repetition of the 1920s and 1930s gas war media lying for disarmament and horror news scams that caused disarmament and thus encouraged Hitler to initiate the invasions that set off WWII!

Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons exaggerations completely undermine credible deterrence of war: Glasstone exaggerates urban "strategic" nuclear weapons effects by using effects data taken from unobstructed terrain (without the concrete jungle shielding of blast winds and radiation by cities!), and omits the most vital uses and most vital effects of nuclear weapons: to DETER world war credibly by negating the concentrations of force used to invade Belgium, 1914 (thus WWI) and Poland (WWII). Disarmament and arms control funded propaganda lying says any deterrent which is not actually exploded in anger is a waste of money since it isn't being "used", a fraud apparently due to the title and content of Glasstone's book which omits the key use and effect of nuclear weapons, to prevent world wars: this is because Glasstone and Dolan don't even bother to mention the neutron bomb or 10-fold reduced fallout in the the Los Alamos 95% clean Redwing-Navajo test of 1956, despite the neutron bomb effects being analysed for its enhanced radiation and reduced thermal and blast yield in detail in the 1972 edition of Dolan's edited secret U.S. Department of Defense Effects Manual EM-1, "Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons", data now declassified yet still being covered-up by "arms control and disarmament" liars today to try to destroy credible deterrence of war in order to bolster their obviously pro-Russian political anti-peace agenda. "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 .

ABOVE: 11 May 2023 Russian state TV channel 1 loon openly threatens nuclear tests and bombing UK. Seeing how the Russian media is under control of Putin, this is like Dr Goebbels rantings, 80 years past. But this doesn't disprove the world war threat any more than it did with Dr Goebbels. These people, like the BBC here, don't just communicate "news" but attempt to do so selectively and with interpretations and opinions that set the stage for a pretty obviously hate based political agenda with their millions of viewers, a trick that worked in the 1st Cold War despite Orwell's attempts to lampoon it in books about big brother like "1984" and "Animal Farm". When in October 1962 the Russians put nuclear weapons into Cuba in secret without any open "threats", and with a MASSIVELY inferior overall nuclear stockpile to the USA (the USA had MORE nuclear weapons, more ICBMs, etc.), the media made a big fuss, even when Kennedy went on TV on 22 October and ensured no nuclear "accidents" in Cuba by telling Russia that any single accidentally launched missile from Cuba against any Western city would result in a FULL RETALITORY STRIKE ON RUSSIA. There was no risk of nuclear war then except by accident, and Kennedy had in his 25 May 1961 speech on "Urgent National Needs" a year and a half before instigated NUCLEAR SHELTERS in public basement buildings to help people in cities survive (modern concrete buildings survive near ground zero Hiroshima, as proved by declassified USSBS reports kept covered up by Uncle Sam). NOE THAT THERE IS A CREDIBLE THREAT OF NUCLEAR TESTS AND HIROSHIMA TYPE INTIMIDATION STRIKES, THE BBC FINALLY DECIDES TO SUPPRESS NUCLEAR NEWS SUPPOSEDLY TO HELP "ANTI-NUCLEAR" RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA TRYING TO PREVENT US FROM GETTING CREDIBLE DETERRENCE OF INVASIONS, AS WE HAD WITH THE W79 UNTIL DISARMERS REMOVED IT IN THE 90s! This stinks of prejudice, the usual sort of hypocrisy from the 1930s "disarmament heroes" who lied their way to Nobel peace prizes by starting a world war!

The facts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the shielding of blast and radiation effects by modern concrete buildings in the credible nuclear deterrence of invasions (click here for data) which - unlike the countervalue drivel that failed to prevent WW2 costing millions of human lives - worked in the Cold War despite the Western media's obsession with treating as Gospel truth the lying anti-nuclear propaganda from Russia's World Peace Council and its allies (intended to make the West disarm to allow Russian invasions without overwhelming, effective deterrence or opposition, as worked in Ukraine recently)!

Realistic effects and credible nuclear weapon capabilities are required now for deterring or stopping aggressive invasions and attacks which could escalate into major conventional or nuclear wars. Credible deterrence necessitates simple, effective protection against concentrated and dispersed invasions and bombing. The facts can debunk massively inaccurate, deliberately misleading CND "disarm or be annihilated" pro-dictatorship ("communism" scam) political anti-nuclear deterrence dogma. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda effects lies on blast and radiation for modern concrete cities is debunked by solid factual evidence kept from public sight for political reasons by the Marx-media, which is not opposed by the fashion-obsessed remainder of the media, and so myths sneak into "established pseudo-wisdom" by the back-door.

Saturday, March 03, 2007

Dr Carl F. Miller's reports on Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures

Dr Carl F. Miller, “A Theory of Decontamination of Fallout from Nuclear Detonations. Part II. Methods for Estimating the Composition of Contaminated Systems”, U. S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, report USNRDL-466, 29 September 1961.

Dr Terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere, “Operation Redwing. Project 2.63. Characterization of Fallout”, Nuclear Weapon test report WT-1317, 15 March 1961.

Above: visible appearance of a typical deposit of dangerous fallout; this is a secret photo from WT-1317 of a fallout tray automatically exposed for just 15 minutes at 1 hour after detonation of the 3.53 megaton, 15% fission surface burst Redwing-Zuni at Bikini in 1956. The fallout illustrated occurred on barge YFNB 13, located 20 km North-North-West of ground zero (downwind). The circular tray’s inner diameter is 8.1 cm. This 15 minute sample is only 22% of the total deposit of 21.9 g/m2 which occurred at that location. The barge’s radiation meter recorded a peak gamma intensity of 6 R/hr at 1.25 hours after the explosion.

Because fallout sinks in the ocean (which shields the fallout quite effectively, giving only a small dose rate) and the barge deck is much smaller than a land area, the barge radiation meters record only about 25% of those on land which are contaminated to the same extent. So on land the peak gamma ray intensity for this fallout would have been 4 x 6 = 24 R/hr at 1.25 hours. Correcting from 15% fission yield to 100% fission yield would increase this to 160 R/hr. The infinite time fallout dose is 5 times the peak intensity times the time of that intensity as measured from the time of explosion. Hence the infinite dose outdoors on land for pure fission would be 5 x 160 x 1.25 = 1000 R which is lethal. Any house would provide enough protection to save your life, however. (The dose law of 5 times intensity times arrival time is based on the t-1.2 decay law. Obviously it is well known that the fallout intensity drops below that law within 200 days, and a better law is 4 times intensity times arrival time. On the other hand, some radiation is received before the peak dose rate occurs, so it is sensible to use the factor of 5 multiplication as a rough approximation.)







Above: Dr Carl F. Miller's correlation of measurements of the decay rates of fallout from different tests during Operation Castle, 1954. (Dr Miller's own U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report on these decay rate correlations has never been declassified, and even in one of his major fallout reports which is now declassified, some of the statistics are blanked out because they are still secret. Part of the trouble is that the neutron capture to fission ratio in the uranium-238 component of a hydrogen bomb produces substantial quantities of nuclides like Np-239, U-237, etc., which affect the decay rate of the subsequent fallout. Therefore there is a link between the highly classified thermonuclear design physics and the radioactive hazards.)



Above: Cresson Kearny explains how to shield against fallout by making a 'core shelter' inside a building: put cardboard boxes on top of, and around, a strong table that you can shelter under: then put two large waterproof plastic waste bags inside one another in each box, and simply fill them up with water. This saves you messing around with dirt for shielding. Just 5 inches of water halves the intensity of 1 MeV gamma radiation penetrating it. Actually, dirty bombs with U-238 jackets produce a great deal of softer gamma rays from Np-239 (which has a half life of 56 hours and thus contributes a peak percentage to fallout radiation at a time of 1.73 X 56 = 4 days after burst) and U/Np-240, as well as U-237 which has a longer half life and contributes substantially during the two week sheltering period. So protection is even more efficient than Kearny quotes, due to the lower-energy of fallout from dirty hydrogen bombs with neutron capture in U-238. American experiments on fallout shielding by buildings used cobalt-60 gamma rays, which have a mean energy of 1.25 MeV (see page 120, 'Transmission Factors' in the PDF file of the U.S. Army Field Manual 3-3-1, Nuclear Contamination Avoidance, linked here) whereas dirty (high fission yield) thermonuclear weapons which contaminate large areas all expose U-238 to neutrons which always results in large amounts of non-fission neutron captures in U-238, creating large amounts of very low-energy gamma emitting Np-239, U-240, and U-237. The time that any neutron induced species contributes a peak percentage of the radiation from fallout is equal to 1.73 times its half-life (the 1.73 factor is simply the ratio 1.2/ln2, where 1.2 is the decay exponent of time for the overall mixture of nuclides in fallout, while ln2 is the factor which converts the average life of a particular nuclide into its half-life, which is always a factor 1.44 smaller than its average life). Thus, for Np-239 which has a half life of 56 hours, the peak percentage contribution it gives to fallout radiation occurs 4 days after detonation. U-237 has a half-life of 6.8 days, so contributes a peak percentage to fallout radiation 12 days after detonation.

Fractionation of fission products (the loss of slowly-condensing gaseous fission product decay chains from fast-falling large particles of fallout which exit the fireball before the slowly condensing nuclides have solidified, and are thus depleted in many fission product species) also affects the spectrum of gamma ray energy in a predictable way, softening the spectrum to lower mean energies in the close-in (depleted) fallout. Dr Terry Triffet first made this effect public in the 22-26 June 1959 U.S. Congressional Hearings on The Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, pages 61-111. Triffet in that testimony, with more details in in his declassified weapon test report WT-1317, 1961 (see also Dr Miller's 1961 report USNRDL-466 for REDWING fallout station distances from ground zero, nuclide measured fractionation ratios and neutron induced activity data), showed that at 1 week after burst, the mean gamma ray energy of fractionated fallout 8 statute miles downwind on Bikini Lagoon barge YFNB29 due to 5.01 Mt burst 87% fission REDWING-TEWA in 1956 was just 0.25 MeV (4.5 grams per square foot of fallout was deposited there, giving a peak dose rate on the barge of 40 R/hr at 2.7 hours after burst), while at 60 statute miles on ship LST611 downwind it was 0.35 MeV (due to less depletion of high energy fission products at greater distances, a fractionation effect) where only 0.06 gram/square foot of fallout was deposited giving a peak dose rate of 0.25 R/hr at 14 hours after burst. On page 205 of those June 1959 hearings, Triffet explained:

'I thought this might be an appropriate place to comment on the variation of the average energy. It is clear when you think of shielding, because the effectiveness of shielding depends directly on the average energy radiation from the deposited material. As I mentioned, Dr Cook at our [U.S. Naval Radiological Defense] laboratory has done quite a bit of work on this. ... if induced products are important in the bomb [dirty bombs with U-238 jackets], there are a lot of radiations emanating from these, but the energy is low so it operates to reduce the average energy in this period and shielding is immensely more effective.'



Above: Home-Made Self-Calibrating Kearny fallout meter (see Kearny's Oak Ridge National Laboratory book Nuclear War Survival Skills for instructions on building it, PDF version linked here; the self-calibrating radiation measurement accuracy data can be found in the original report ORNL-5040 linked here) being tested with a dental X-ray machine. The charged foil plates discharge and visibly fall together as soon as the X-ray machine is turned on. This is just a simple electroscope dosimeter, using the same principle as the pocket quartz fibre dosimeter, although it is in some respects better since you can clearly see the effects of radiation on discharging the plates.

You make it by taking two pieces of aluminium foil and folding them repeatedly until you have two 8-ply (8-layer) pieces of square shape and 2 inch long sides (this ensures the calibration). You hang each square in contact with the other by electrically non-conducting threads or thin non-conducting fishing line (any thin thread which has not been given anti-static treatment will do!) inside a can or jar. To get it to work you do need to have dry air inside the can (in high humidity air, you can't charge it since the water molecules almost immediately discharge the comb before it can even charge up the foil plates, so you need to put the whole thing inside a "dry bucket" with a transparent cover, adding some heated hydroscopic gypsum from plaster or re-heated silica gel to the bottom of the can, which comes in little paper packets in the packaging of all kinds of items these days, preventing moisture damage).

The top of the can is just covered by kitchen clear plastic wrap, with a little millimetre-calibrated scale on it to measure the distance between the aluminium plates when charged. A piece of wire like a straightened paperclip poked through the plastic wrap is used to charge the foil leaves; you simply bring a hair-charged plastic comb (or some other source of static electricity like a plastic ruler rubbed in a rolled up newspaper) to the charging wire, and the plates are charged. Because similar electric charges repel, the plates then move apart from one another! As air is ionized by radiation, charged air ions move between the plates, discharging them. The speed with which the plates are discharged therefore tells you the radiation level. Simple!

In reality, of course, hazardous fallout has always proved to be extremely visible, once the political pseudoscientific fallout quackery, hype and spin (claiming that natural cancer deaths are due to radiation exposure, and other lunacy) is rejected. A land surface burst (water surface bursts produce even more!) as proved by all the American tests ALWAYS creates roughly 200 tons of sand like fallout contaminant per kiloton of total yield, so if the 1-hour exposure rate conversion factor is taken to be typically 2000 (R/hr)/(kt/sq. mile) then the 2000 R/hr at 1 hour after bursts corresponds to 200 tons of fallout mass per square mile or 77 grams per square metre. Try sprinkling 77 grams of sand or flour per square metre. It's visible. Even when the particles themselves (like tiny flour grains) are too small to be seen, the bulk of material is visible. Similarly, atoms aren't visible to the eye, but if you have enough atoms, the bulk of material becomes visible! That's the whole reason why we can see matter in bulk, despite the individual fundamental particles of matter being individually too small to see! Rainout from air bursts is visible as rain, and runs down the drain or soaks deep into the ground (which attenuates the radiation) in the same way as rain. Ocean surface burst fallout arrives as tiny non-depositing wind-carried dry salt crystals if the humidity is very low, or as wet salt-slurry droplets in a high humidity atmosphere; the depositing droplets are visible. Anti-civil defense propaganda covers up the nuclear test data on fallout particle deposits and covers up the difference between radiation and fallout to make people confused about the danger and make it seem mysterious and fearful. Actually, you can wash fallout away, you can brush dry fallout away, it can be swept up and buried under the soil while it decays. There are numerous ways to successfully decontaminate and shield the danger. (On military ships, turning on the fire sprinklers on decks during fallout deposition was found to decontaminate the ships clean while fallout landed; it went straight down the drains, and the dose rate from surrounding contaminated water was 535 times lower than on land due to the mixing and sinking of fallout in the water, which shields most of the radiation! A favourite trick is to use large sheets of plastic to collect fallout. Once fallout has deposited, you roll them up and bury them, so that the fallout is shielded underground, meaning that you don't need to take shelter!

‘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.’ – Dr Frederick P. Cowan and Charles B. Meinhold, Decontamination, Chapter 10, pp. 225-40 in Dr Eugene P. Wigner (editor), Survival and the Bomb, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1969.

For road sweeper decontamination data see D. E. Clark, Jr., and W. C. Cobbin, Removal of Simulated Fallout from Pavements by Conventional Street Flushers, report USNRDL-TR-797, 1964.

Small areas of fallout contamination, such as indoor ingressed fallout contamination, are always in practice found to make totally and utterly negligible contributions to gamma ray doses by comparison to the gamma hazard from the wide areas of fallout outdoors, because most of the gamma dose rate comes from large distances horizontally across a vast uniformly contaminated plane, and that coming vertically upwards from the small amount of fallout under your feet or nearby is trivial by comparison, so the ingress of fallout into damaged buildings makes no significant difference to gamma doses!


Above: 'The three factors which count in gaining protection are the distance from the radioactive dust, the weight of material in between, and the time for which one remains protected while the radioactivity decays. A slit trench with overhead cover of two or three feet of earth would give very good protection against fall-out, as well as protection against blast, but the occupants would have to remain in the trench for forty-eight hours or more while the radioactivity surrounding them decayed. ... A prepared refuge room inside a house could be made to give good protection against fall-out (although not so good as a covered slit trench) and it would also be much less uncomfortable for a period of two days or more. A cellar or basement would be by far the best place for a refuge room; next best would be the room with the fewest outside walls and the smallest windows. The windows would need to be blocked with solid material, to the thickness of the surrounding walls at least. It would help if the walls themselves were thickened, not necessarily to their full height, with sandbags, boxes filled with earth, or heavy furniture. The occupants of the refuge roof would have to remain in it until told that it was safe to come out - perhaps for a period of days - and the room would have to be prepared and equipped accordingly.’ - British Home Office civil defence booklet, The Hydrogen Bomb (Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1957, 32 pages.)



Above: The car-over-trench expedient fallout shelter from G. A. Cristy and C. H. Kearny, Expedient Shelter Handbook, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, August 1974, report AD0787483, 318 pages. In place of a car, doors, felled logs, or planks of wood heaped with soil can be used instead, depending on the resources to hand. Kearny showed in a later Oak Ridge National Laboratory book, Nuclear War Survival Skills, 2nd ed., 1987, how to build improvised efficient, self-calibrating radiation dosimeter (a comb-charged jam-jar electroscope, calibrated accurately by the size of the aluminium foil leaves which carry the charge; the charges keeps the leaves separated against gravity until air is ionized by radiation, when the leaves lose charge and fall together, the amount of declease in separation distance in millimetres being accurately correlated with radiation dose as proved by laboratory tests!) that can be quickly made by anyone with kitchen odds and ends in an emergency, a hand-powered simple string-pulled hinged panel air cooling pump for such shelters in hot weather, and how to obtain food and water in a nuclear war.

The most important for emergency use (where rapid protection is desirable) are the 'car over trench shelter' (dig a trench the right size to drive your car over, putting the excavated earth to the sides for added shielding, then drive your car over it), "tilt up doors and earth" shelter (if your house is badly damaged, build a fallout shelter against any surviving wall of the house by putting doors against it and piling earth on top in accordance to the plans), and the "above ground door-covered shelter" (basically a trench with excavated earth piles at the sides, doors placed on top, then a layer of earth piled on top of the doors).








All these shelters can be constructed very quickly under emergency conditions (in a time of some hours, e.g., comparable to the time taken for fallout to arrive in the major danger area downwind from a large nuclear explosion). For the known energy of gamma rays from fallout including neutron induced activities with low energy gamma ray emission (Np-239, U-237, etc.), a thickness of 1 foot or 30 centimetres of packed earth (density 1.6 grams per cubic centimetre) shields 95% of fallout gamma radiation, giving an additional protective factor of about 20. A thickness of 2 feet or 60 centimetres of packed earth provides a protective factor of about 400. Caravans have a protective factor of 1.4-1.8, single storey modern bungalows have a protection factor of 5-6, while brick bungalows have a protective factor of 8-9. British brick multi-storey buildings have protection factors of 10-20, while British brick house basements have protective factors of 90-150. These figures can easily be increased by at least a factor of 2-3 by making a protected ‘inner core’ or ‘refuge’ within the building at a central point, giving additional shielding.

In 1964, Britain conducted experiments with Co-60 sources to validate the ‘core’ Protect and Survive shelter plan (above videos): A. D. Perryman, Experimental Determination of Protective Factors in a Semi-Detached House With or Without Core Shelters, U.K. Home Office report CD/SA117. Using Co-60, the dry fallout protective factor was 21 on the ground floor of a brick house, increasing to 39 in a core shelter, made using furniture piled near an inner wall. For real fallout with less than the 1.25 MeV mean gamma ray energy of Co-60, the protection would be far greater. See also the 75-pages long American report on these 'Protect and Survive' core shelter experiments in Britain by Joseph D. Velletri, Nancy-Ruth York and John F. Batter, Protection Factors of Emergency Shelters in a British Residence, Technical Operations Research, Burlington, Massachusetts, report AD439332, 1963.

John Newman examined effects of fallout blown into a buildings, due to blast-broken windows, in Health Physics, vol. 13 (1967), p. 991: ‘In a particular example of a seven-storey building, the internal contamination on each floor is estimated to be 2.5% of that on the roof. This contamination, if spread uniformly over the floor, reduces the protection factor on the fifth floor from 28 to 18 and in the unexposed, uncontaminated basement from 420 to 200.’

But measured volcanic ash ingress, measured as the ratio of mass per unit area indoors to that on the roof, was under 0.6% even with the windows open and an 11-22 km/hour wind speed (U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report USNRDL-TR-953, 1965). The main gamma hazard is from a very big surrounding area, not from trivial fallout nearby!

Dr Saad Z. Mikhail's paper, Beta-Radiation Doses from Fallout Particles Deposited on the Skin (Environmental Science Associates, Foster City, California, report AD0888503, 1971) quantified the beta contact hazard for fallout particles while they are descending in the open:

'A fission density of 1015 fissions per cubic centimeter of fallout material was assumed. Comparison of computed doses with the most recent experimental data relative to skin response to beta-energy deposition leads to the conclusion that even for fallout arrival times as early as 16.7 minutes post-detonation, no skin ulceration is expected from single particles 500 micron or less in diameter. Absorbed gamma doses calculated for one particle size (100 microns) show a beta-to-gamma ratio of about 15. Dose ratio for larger particle sizes will be smaller. Doses from arrays of fallout particles of different size distributions were computed, also, for several fallout mass deposition densities; time intervals required to accumulate doses sufficient to initiate skin lesions were calculated. These times depend strongly on the assumed fallout-particle-size distribution. Deposition densities in excess of 100 mg per square foot of the skin will cause beta burns if fallout arrival time is less than about three hours, unless the particles are relatively coarse (mean particle diameter more than 250 microns).'

Keeping the highly visible particles off the skin by wearing clothing, or removing them quickly by brushing or washing after contamination, eliminates the beta burn hazard, as demonstrated by the examples of Marshallese Islanders who washed after fallout contamination:

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, 27 May - 3 June 1957, pages 173-216 where Dr Gordon M. Dunning testified: ‘In the case of the Marshallese who were in the fallout from the detonation at the Pacific on March 1, 1954, most of the more heavily exposed showed some degree of skin damage, as well as about half of them showing some degree of epilation [hair loss] due to beta doses. However, none of these effects were present except in those areas where the radioactive material was in contact with the skin, i.e., the scalp, neck, bend of the elbow, between and topside of the toes. No skin damage was observed where there was a covering of even a single layer of cotton clothing. ... The Marshallese were semiclothed, had moist skin, and most of them were out-of-doors during the time of fallout. Some bathed during the two-day exposure period before evacuation, but others did not; therefore, they were optimal conditions for possible beta damage. The group suffering greatest exposure [Rongelap Islanders, 175 R gamma dose from 4 hours to 2 days after burst] showed 20 percent (13 individuals) with deep lesions; 70 percent (45 individuals) superficial lesions; and 10 percent (6 individuals) no lesions. Likewise, 55 percent (35 individuals) showed some degree of epilation followed by a regrowth of hair.' On pages 944-948, Dr Eugene P. Cronkite testified: 'The fallout material consisted predominantly of flakes of calcium oxide resulting from the incineration of the coral [reef near Namu Island at Bikini Atoll]. Upon the flakes of calcium oxide fission products were deposited. At Rongelap Atoll the material was visible and described as snowlike. ... To arrive at some physical estimate of the skin dose, an attempt must be made to add up the contributions of the penetrating gamma, the less penetrating gamma, the beta bath to which the individuals were exposed from the relatively uniform deposition of fission products in the environment, and the point contact source of fallout material deposited on the skin. By all means, the largest component of skin irradiation resulted from the spotty local deposits of fallout material on deposited surfaces of the body. To put it in reverse, the individuals who remained inside had no skin burn. It was only on those on whom the material was directly deposited on the skin that received burns. ... Itching and burning of the skin occurred in 28 percent of the people on Rongelap, 20 percent of the group on Ailinginae, and 5 percent of the Americans [weather station staff exposed to fallout on Rongerik Atoll]. There were no symptoms referable to the skin in the individuals on Utirik. In addition to the itching of the skin there was burning of the eyes and lacrimation in people on Rongelap and Ailinginae. It is probable that these initial skin symptoms were due to irradiation since all individuals who experienced the initial symptoms later developed unquestioned radiation-induced skin lesions that will be described later in detail. It is possible, however, that the intensely alkaline nature of the calcium oxide [produced when the coral i.e. calcium carbonate was heated in the fireball] when dissolved in perspiration might have contributed to the initial symptoms. ... Burns were caused by direct contact of the radioactive material with the skin. The perspiration as common in the tropics, the delay in decontamination and the difficulties in decontamination certainly favored the development of the skin burns. Those individuals who remained indoors or under trees during the fallout developed less severe skin burns. The children who went wading in the ocean developed fewer lesions of the feet and most of the Americans who were more aware of the dangers of the fallout, took shelter in aluminum buildings and bathed and changed clothes. Consequently they developed only very mild beta burns. Lastly, a single layer of cotton material offered almost complete protection, as was demonstrated by the fact that skin burns developed almost entirely on the exposed parts of the body.’

Dr Carl F. Miller's major fallout reports are now becoming available online thankfully: see the report linked here for Dr Miller's description of fallout and its chemical formation and fission product fractionation analysis, the report linked here for his fallout distribution analysis, the report here for Philip D. LaRiviere and Hong Lee's detailed and complete application of the Miller fallout model to civil defence problems, and finally here for the U.S. Department of Defense 1973 Attack Environment Manual for civil defense planners, which exclusively uses Dr Miller's nuclear test data-derived fallout model. Dr Miller was able to elaborate further on his work at the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in his speech accepting an award for decontamination research at the U.S. National Council on Radiological Protection (NCRP) symposium on 27-29 April 1981 in Virginia, published in The Control of Exposure of the Public to Ionising Radiation in the Event of Accident or Attack, pp. 99-100:

‘Someone talked a little about risks. ... In 1954 ... we were about 20 miles away when a 10-megaton shot was detonated ... The ship [YAG 39] sailed on a pathway that led to an area directly underneath the expanding cloud, so as to be exposed to a maximum amount of fallout ... Fallout arrived about 20 minutes after detonation, at which time I collected the first few drops of "hot" washdown water ... In 1957, at the Nevada Test Site, personnel from the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory and the Atomic Energy Commission sat in an underground shelter a mile away when shot Diablo was detonated. Some of us collected fallout particles ... after about a half-hour or so, one could hardly get a reading [from a single fallout particle] ... because of the rapid decay rate. ... With most of the local fallout that we're talking about, a lot of the larger particles are fused or melted to form little glassy marbles. The tower shots had iron in them so they were magnetic and we could separate hot fallout particles from tower shots with magnetism. The radioactive atoms that could be absorbed into, or by, body organs were the few that are plated out on the surface of the fallout particles during the later stages of condensation in the fireball. That's why the elements iodine, strontium, ruthenium and a few other isotopes of that nature have been found in organs of animals and humans.’

Dr Miller tragically died from leukemia in August 1981, four months after giving that speech, and leukemia is the form of cancer which correlates most strongly with external whole body gamma radiation exposure (thyroid tumours correlate to internal intake of radioactive iodine, which concentrates in the thyroid and irradiates it with beta particles). With most cancers, the risk of per individual without radiation is not much different from the slightly enhanced risk with significant radiation exposures, but since leukemia is both a rare cancer and so strongly dependent upon radiation dose, a person who does get leukemia after a significant dose may be more likely to have the leukemia as a result of the radiation, than for it to be coincidental. Dr Miller measured his own gamma dose to total 60 rads (cGy in tissue) received at relatively high dose rates soon after nuclear tests; this more than doubled the natural 0.5% risk of death from leukemia to over 1%. The fact that he contracted leukemia therefore implies that it was over 50% certain to be due to his gamma radiation exposure at the nuclear tests where he measured the gamma spectrum of fallout and analysed the physical nature of fallout and the decontamination effectiveness against fallout hazards. He took a calculated risk to get the vital Cold War fallout protection data, and he was unlucky. It is important not to minimise the immense human costs to such scientists and their families of acquiring the valuable direct scientific information on this important subject, which has direct relevance to the problem of weapons of mass destruction in today's world of increasing nuclear proliferation and radiological warfare threats.



Above: the need for people to understand observed facts about fallout and its decontamination in an accident or disaster. These photographs are of children accidentally exposed to fallout from the Bravo nuclear test in 1954, before the scientific aspects of fallout prediction and radiological safety had been investigated. The photographs on the left were taken about one month after exposure; those on the right show the recovery about six months later. The beta burns to neck and feet only began to appear on 14 March, two weeks after exposure (all of the beta burns and hair loss had appeared within four weeks of exposure). Because the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had ignorantly and prematurely announced on 11 March 1954 that the 236 contaminated Marshallese had no beta radiation burns, the word fallout gained a new political meaning as an unpleasant after effect subsequently.


Above: the table of fallout areas for measured dose rate contours in PLUMBBOB-SMOKY, 31 August 1957, Nevada, is taken from page 808 of the Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Congress of the United States, 86th Congress, The Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, June 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26, 1959, Part 1, U.S. Covernment Printing Office, Washington, 1959, 966 pages.






Dr Miller's work was cited in the final chapter in the 1962/4 editions of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, dealing with civil defence. The British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch in 1963 dedicated an entire scientific report (U.K. National Archives file HO 227/74) to reviewing Volume 1 of Dr Carl F. Miller's Stanford Research Institute (not SRI international) report Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures.

This is the first detailed model of the thermodynamics of fallout, which - as the previous post on this blog mentions - found that the fraction of the total fireball (thermal plus blast) energy which in a surface burst on Nevada sand is used to melt fallout varies from about 7.5% for a 1 kt total yield to 9.2% for 100 Mt. This agreed with an empirical observation of 3% at the Redwing-Inca 15 kt tower burst in 1956; such a tower burst would produce less than half the melted fallout that a surface burst produces (due to the decreased interaction of the fireball with the ground).

Chapter 1 of Dr Miller's Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures begins with the experimental data, showing photographs of the fallout from every type of nuclear explosion, and describing the physical, chemical and radiological processes. Since the appearance and physical, chemical and radiological nature of actual fallout is so confusing to many people - particularly in the media and politics (who naively confuse particles of radiation with particles of fallout, and end up with complete science fiction and nonsense, a problem extending even to author Richard Rhodes who in his historical book on the tests incorrectly asserted that fallout from hydrogen bombs is consists of metallic calcium), a revised adaptation of Dr Miller's approach will follow. This is mainly because of the declassification of other reports by Dr Miller and his colleagues ( U.S. Department of Defence reports USNRDL-374, -408, -440, -TR-208, and WT-1317), which show which nuclear tests each photograph arises from, and some additional data.



Above: yellow-brown fused-silicate sand from the Nevada Sugar ground burst, 1951

In this and each of the following photographs, the photograph on the left hand side is a picture of a 30 micron thick slice through the particle (produced by gluing the particle into plastic resin and then shaving off a thin slice). The image on the right hand side is an radioautograph, i.e., an x-ray like photo in which the source of the image is the action of beta particles from the fallout particle striking a light proofed packet of photographic film. The radioautograph shows, therefore, precisely where the fission products are distributed within each fallout particle.



Above: yellow/green silicate glass spheres from the Nevada Sugar ground burst, 1951.

Pure silicate (quartz) sand particles ejected from the crater remain liquid at temperatures below 2,950 °C, and re-solidify into insoluble glass spheres when the fireball temperature falls below 1,607 °C. Before this time, condensing fission products diffuse inside molten glass droplets, creating insoluble radioactive particles, but at later times fission products are deposited on the outside of solidified glass, giving soluble (biologically available) radioactivity. I-131 on the outer surfaces of fallout particles is in the soluble –1 oxidation state (U.S. test report WT-917). Water-soluble activity is located in an outer 0.35-micron deposit on the glass, while the soluble fraction for stomach acid (0.1 N HCl, pH4) is equivalent to a deposit 10 microns thick. The insoluble fraction of the volume equals the volume of the inner insoluble glass sphere divided into the effective total volume including the soluble outer deposit:

(4/3){Pi}*r3/[(4/3){Pi}(r + X)3] = (1 + X/r)-3,

where X is the thickness of the soluble deposit (0.35 and 10 microns respectively for water and acid) and r is the insoluble glass radius, measured in the same units. The soluble activity is:

100[1 - (1 + X/r)-3] %.

This is validated by fallout studies in 1956-7 at Australian-British nuclear tests over silicate soil. Antler gave 1.8% and 0.4% water solubility for particles of average radius 75 and 200 microns, respectively. At Mosiac, activity in particles of 1-mm radius was 0.1% water soluble, and at the Buffalo-1 tower burst, debris of 1-cm radius had 0.01% water solubility. Silicate sand (SiO2) has a density of 1.54 grams per cubic centimetre, and comprises 80% of soil above CaCO3 rock at the Australian-British Maralinga test site. Silicate minerals are the most common in the Earth’s crust, forming the most rock and sand. (These fallout solubility data on Australian-British nuclear tests Antler, Mosiac and Buffalo-1 come from Porton Technical Reports in the U.K. National Archives. The British chemical warfare laboratory at Porton Down conducted fallout decontamination and solubility research at Maralinga and Monte Bello under contract to the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch for civil defence, and the War Office for military research.)



Above: calcium oxide, -hydroxide, and -carbonate from Tewa coral reef burst, 1956. Coral sand (like chalk and limestone) is calcium carbonate, CaCO3, which dissociates into CO2 and CaO when heated to a temperature of 850 °C in the fireball. CaO melts at 2,570 °C, which must be reached for the core of the particle to be uniformly contaminated with fission products. The outside of the CaO core reacts with atmospheric moisture to form a calcium hydroxide layer during fallout: CaO + H2O -> Ca(OH)2.



Above: calcium oxide, -hydroxide, and -carbonate from the 10.4 megatons Mike coral island surface burst, 1952.

Reaction of the outer surface of this calcium hydroxide layer, Ca(OH)2 with atmospheric CO2 at temperatures below 30 °C creates an outer shell of CaCO3 + H2O. About 38.5% by mass of particles in the 1956 Zuni coral surface burst test had surface contamination only, but 98.7% of the radioactivity was contained in uniformly contaminated particles. The fallout density for coral bursts ranged from 2.36 grams per cubic centimetre for Bravo to 2.46 for Zuni. The solubility in water for Bravo and Zuni fallout was 20%. Nearly complete solubility occurred in weak acid. These fallout particles disintegrated rapidly upon contact with water and formed colloidal suspensions, almost entirely trapped above the ocean thermocline.


Above: dicalcium ferrite and calcium hydroxide; Inca steel tower shot over coral, 1956.



Above: black magnetic fallout particle (magnetite) from Inca steel tower burst, 1956. The Redwing-Inca test was a 15.2 kt-bomb was fired on top of a 61-m steel tower (containing 165 tons of iron) over coral sand at Eniwetok Atoll. Magnetite (Fe3O4) particles formed, and the mixed coral and steel formed marbles of contaminated black dicalcium ferrite (2CaO.Fe2O3) with veins of uncontaminated calcium hydroxide. By measuring the ratio of calcium to iron in the fallout, the mass of coral converted into fallout was found to be 264 tons. Only the top 2 mm of the sand around ground zero was thus swept up by the afterwinds:

‘The fact that only a thin layer of sand was actually either vaporized or melted, even though in contact with the fireball... indicates that the thermal effects penetrate only superficially into solid material during the short duration of the very high temperatures. By computing the energy required to heat, decarbonate, and melt 264 tons of coral sand and to heat, melt and vaporize 165 tons of iron ... 8.5% of the available radiant energy [i.e., 3% of bomb yield, because the radiant energy was 35% of the total energy of the explosion] was utilised for heating the tower and soil material.’ - Charles E. Adams and J.D. O’Connor, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, report USNRDL-TR-208, 1957, p. 13.



Above: typical glossy magnetic fallout particle, Upshot Knothole tower burst, 1953

The density of Upshot Knothole fallout from a detonation on a 91-m tall steel tower was 2.15 grams per cubic centimetre, a mixture of black magnetic iron oxide (magnetite, Fe3O4) from the steel tower and silicate glass from melted grains of Nevada sand. The particle core contains air bubbles and is a sand grain, melted into glass. The outer region contains the magnetite and the radioactive fission products. Studies at the 1957 tests Diablo and Shasta showed that steel tower shot fallout is 5% magnetite by mass and can be picked up with a magnet (U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report USNRDL-466, 1961).



Above: salt slurry droplet 0.2 mm diameter with 1 mm long paper soak-in, Redwing, 1956

The salt slurry droplet from a Redwing seawater surface burst (detonation on a steel barge in Bikini Lagoon) was deposited in 80% humidity air. Its density is 1.4 grams per cubic centimetre and it contains salt crystals precipitated in supersaturated salty water. Obviously, in drier air the particles are smaller and denser because the water content of the particles falls due to evaporation. In 80% humidity air an equilibrium water content occurs because the salty droplets are hydroscopic (they form surfaces for condensation of airborne moisture, which at some diameter offsets the evaporation effect). The radioactivity solubility is 35% as ions or cations (ions with positive charge in solution), while 65% of the activity is trapped insoluble in fused tiny particles of dicalcium ferrite created from the steel barge and the coral sand ballast in the barge.

Decontamination of fallout

If the fallout is in soluble form (as for a detonation involving proximity to sea water), then the problems are at their worse because many of the fission products are present in the ionic solution and become chemically bound to surfaces. If the detonation occurs over a typical land surface which is about 50% or more silicate (e.g., typical sand), then the decontamination is easier because most of the activity is insoluble (trapped in the solidified spheres of glass). Dry fallout can be decontaminated by a range of activities from flushing it down storm drains with water hosing, to using normal mechanical street sweepers. Inclined roofs do not retain large fallout particles efficiently, simplifying decontamination of buildings. The efficiency of decontamination depends strongly upon the total quantity of fallout taken up into the mushroom cloud and stem, which is typically about 1% of the mass of material ejected from the crater in a surface burst, typically 100-300 tons of fallout per kiloton of yield.



Above: Dr Carl F. Miller did vital 1950s fallout decontamination research at nuclear tests for the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory.

For example, when decontaminating land surface burst fallout from portland cement concrete by fire-hosing, the fallout protection factor afforded by this decontamination is 25 for a fallout deposit of 100 g/m2, 50 for 330 g/m2, and 125 for 1,000 grams/m2. These deposits of 100, 330, and 1,000 g/m2 typically correspond to 1 hour reference gamma exposure rates of 300, 1,000 and 3,000 R/hr respectively. Hence the best efficiency for decontamination occurs where the danger is most severe. Where the fallout is very light, decontamination is less efficient because the smaller number of smaller sized fallout particles involved tend to quickly get caught or trapped in small crevices, cracks or surface irregularities, where water flushing is less effective. (These data are from Radiological Recovery of Fixed Military Installations, U.S. Army Chemical Corps Technical Manual TM-3-225 (1958). This fire-hosing method uses 4-cm diameter hoses, each crewed by 2-4 people, with 100 gallons/minute of water at 5 atmospheres pressure to decontaminate 700 m2/hour; fallout is flushed into underground drains to decay, so the radiation is safely absorbed below ground level.)

Nevada nuclear weapon test experience: dry fallout on paved areas 0.6-1.6 km from nuclear tests Sugar and Uncle in 1951 was successfully removed: ‘High-pressure water hosing was found to be the most rapid and effective ... None of the tested procedures [including dry sweeping and vacuum cleaning] resulted in significant contamination of the operator’s protective clothing.’ – J. C. Maloney, Decontamination of Paved Areas (U.S. test report WT-400, 1952, Ch. 5). The contamination per unit area of vertical walls was only 0.3-10% of that on horizontal ground and roofs (Jangle Project 6.2, WT-400, 1952).

F. T. Underwood of the U.K. Home Office reported fallout adherence: over 90% of fallout particles exceeding 1 mm in diameter rolled or bounced off roofs with a 45-degree slope. But 95% of fallout particles less than 0.2 mm in diameter adhered to a 45-degree ceramic tiled roof. For a 45-degree roof slope, 90% of the retained fallout on 0.13 cm thick PVC (glued to the roof) was removed by just 1 litre/m2 (0.1 cm of rain). Without PVC, fallout grains roll into, and lodge in, small pits and crevices (reports CD/SA-103 and CD/SA-125, 1961-5).

Experience of fallout in unprotected civilian areas of America was obtained after four 1953 Nevada shots on 91-m high towers: Annie, Badger, Simon, and Harry. The 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, pp. 231-2, show that Nevada staff washed vehicles on highways where the infinite time dose exceeded 5 R (using the t-1.2 formula, Dinfinity = 5RT, where R is dose rate at start time T after burst).

The highest public fallout is listed as being 97 km downwind from the Harry test, where the peak outside dose rate was 1 R/hr on Highway 93 at 2 hours after burst: ‘The ratio of dose rate readings on the outside of the car to inside varied from unity to about 4/1 ... One bus read 250 mR/hr outside and an average of 100 mR/hr inside with a high inside reading over the rear seat of 140 mR/hr at H + 8.75 hours.’ At St George, Utah (210 km downwind), the Harry fallout reached 0.42 R/hr at 3.75 hours with a measured peak air concentration at the same time of 154,000 Bq/m3.. The 4,500 inhabitants were requested by radio to stay indoors for two hours to avert skin contact.

Decontamination of Farms: roads, paved areas, building surfaces, vehicles, aircraft and ships can be decontaminated by water hosing. For fields, single-pass deep-ploughing to 20-25 cm depth (3,250 m2/hour using an old 125 horse-power tractor with a 3-share plough) reduced the above-ground fallout gamma radiation by an average factor of 6.7 (U.S. Army Chemical Corps technical manual TM-3-225, 1958).

If needed, fallout can be deep-ploughed to a depth below the roots of the crops to prevent root uptake, or the long-term agricultural uptake of Sr-90 and Cs-137 can simply be dramatically diluted by adding calcium and potassium salts to contaminated soil. About 2.6% of the Earth’s crust is potassium, which minimises Cs-137 uptake, but there is often a shortage of calcium so Sr-89 and Sr-90 can contaminate food. However, in chalky, limestone or coral soils there is plenty of calcium (which blocks Sr-89 and -90 uptake), but little potassium, so Cs-137 is important. Adding potassium chloride to the coral soil of Bikini Atoll (scene of 76.8 Mt of tests) in the 1990s reduced the Cs-137 in coconuts from 3,700 Bq/kg to 185 Bq/kg. Growing crops with low calcium content reduces the uptake of Sr-89, -90 (potatoes contain only 1 mg of calcium per 10 calories).

City decontamination: Britain planned decontamination by fire-hosing residential areas where the 1-hour reference gamma dose rate was 500-3,000 R/hr (Home Office report SA/PR-97, 1965, originally secret). At lower levels, there are few casualties indoors anyway (200 R producing a casualty), while higher levels expose decontamination crews to excessive doses even 5 days after detonation, so evacuation is then a better option. Decontamination is feasible at 1-5 days after detonation, when a 1-hour outdoor dose rate of 500-3,000 R/hr has decayed to 10 R/hr. Decontamination crews restricted to areas below 10 R/hr cannot get more than 10 x 8 = 80 R in an 8 hour shift.

The three key stages during radiological recovery after first aid, rescue and fire spread prevention: (1) evacuation of people with inadequate shielding from heavy fallout areas; (2) sheltering for 1-5 days in the part of the house furthest from the roof and outside walls, with as much mass around the ‘inner refuge’ as possible, and staying indoors as much as possible for a month, and (3) outdoor decontamination.

Washing skin removes 97.5% of fallout with a diameter of 0.02 mm, and removes 100% of fallout of 0.1-mm diameter or more. For clothes, 90% of the fallout on denim overalls is removed in 5 minutes by a washing machine (100 revolutions per minute, 1% detergent), for particle diameters over 0.01 mm. (Reference: E. Neale and E.H. Letts, Radiological Decontamination: Removal of Dry Fallout from Skin and Clothing, U.K. Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, report PTP-R-16, 1958.)

Internal fallout contamination of humans: inhalation of fallout in Britain from the American and Russian tests of 1958 peaked at 3.7-Bq/day of beta emitters between January-June 1959, when the total fallout intake from food was 120-Bq/day. The maximum concentration of plutonium in the air was lower than natural radon-222. For Sr-90, the intake in Britain in 1959 was 0.33-Bq/day from food, 0.015-Bq/day inhalation, and tap water contained 0.016-Bq/litre (reference: The Hazards to Man of Nuclear and Allied radiations: Second Report to the Medical Research Council, H. M. Stationery Office, London, 1960).

The initial danger is due to eating fallout: even after years of fallout from nuclear tests, 80% of the Sr-90 in milk in Britain during 1958 was from cows eating fresh fallout deposited on the grass and soil, and only 20% was due to chemical uptake by roots and ingestion of older fallout in the soil. (J.D. Burton et al., Nature, Vol. 185, 1960, p. 498.)

Decontamination of water and milk: boiling water does not remove fallout or affect radioactivity. Filtering removes fallout particles, but it is the dissolved, soluble radioactivity that causes the major ingestion problem. Activated charcoal cartridges or ion exchange softens tap water by removing calcium carbonate ions, and also remove dissolved fission products. Distillation also makes water safe. Milk is decontaminated by filtering with on-exchange resin, but this also removes the calcium from the milk.

On 7, 11, 14 and 17 July 1962 low-yield nuclear weapons were detonated near ground level in Nevada, and the 100-kt Sedan Nevada test occurred on 6 July. Fallout on grass 560 km downwind in Salt Lake City was relatively soluble, so milk contained enough I-131 to give a total I-131 intake from milk of 1,370-Bq. Families switched to using milk powder. Out of 759 milk producers in the area, 285 switched their cows from pasture to uncontaminated dry feed, and 211 stopped selling milk but instead used it to make long-life products like cheese, which outlive I-131 (which has a half-life of only 8 days).

After Britain’s Windscale nuclear accident of October 1957, the concentration of I-131 in contaminated milk was 500 times higher than that in tap water from reservoirs in the same areas. Ion-exchange interaction of soluble nuclides with soil or rock slows down the migration of dissolved radioactivity in groundwater and surface rain run-off. It was 30 days after the Chernobyl reactor accident in 1986 when tap water, obtained from a river in the nearby city of Kiev, attained a peak activity of 370-Bq/litre, which returned to natural background within a year. The 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on fallout, p. 233, shows that the maximum contamination of tap water 3 days after any 1953 Nevada nuclear test was only 44-Bq/litre (at Bunkerville, Nevada, where the gamma outdoor infinity dose was 7 R), compared to 3,200-Bq/litre in an irrigation canal.

The ocean food chain: concentrates iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn) in clams, fish and fish-eating birds. But soil usually contains plenty of soluble iron and zinc that dilutes their uptake to insignificance. In oceans, natural potassium and calcium similarly dilute the uptake of cesium-137 and strontium-90, respectively. But oxygen dissolved in the ocean soon oxidises soluble ferrous (2+) iron into insoluble ferric (3+) iron, which precipitates as a solid. Soluble iron, zinc and cobalt are extremely rare in seawater and are therefore taken up in ocean food chains. A month after the 1.69 Mt Nectar shot at Eniwetok in 1954, 95% of the activity of fish was Fe-55, 3.1% was Zn-65, and the rest cobalt. The activity in sea birds at Bikini, in 1954-6, was mainly Zn-65. Fe-55 gave 73.5% of the activity of a clam kidney at Eniwetok, 74 days after the 1.85 Mt 1956 Apache shot (cobalt-57, -58, and -60 contributed 9.6, 9.2, and 1.8%; fission products gave 3.5%). Zn-65 in fish at Bikini, 2 months after 1956 Operation Redwing, gave 35-58% of the activity, Fe-55 gave 15-56%, and cobalt gave the rest (U.S. report UWFL-51, 1957).

The fallout uptake after the 10.4 Mt Mike land surface burst in 1952 were measured at and near the islands of Rigili, Bogombogo-Bogallua, Engebi, Aomon-Aaraan, and Runit, in Eniwetok Atoll (U.S. test report WT-616, 1953). The activity per gram of muscle tissue of rats was similar to that in their lung tissue, so ingestion rather than inhalation was the mechanism of internal contamination by fallout. The average ratio of beta activities collected at 7 days and measured at 30 days, to the adjacent land gamma dose rate at 1 hour, (Bq/kg)/(R/hr), was 1.8 for lagoon water, 8,800 for plankton, 15,000 for land plants, 2,800 for crab muscle, 120 for the muscle of plankton-eating fish, and 58 for rat muscle (DASA-1251, 1963, was used for gamma dose rates). Half the water is flushed out of Eniwetok lagoon (which has a mean depth of 48 m) in 15 days.

Farm and food decontamination after fallout is particularly important. In 1960-1, Kendal D. Moll of Stanford Research Institute showed in Post-Attack Farm Problems that while a 400 Mt Russian first-strike on American military bases would kill 2% of the population (assuming a fallout protection factor of 20), farm food output falls by 10%. For 19,000 Mt, he found that a population reduction by 12% occurs with a 65% fall in food output. Norman Hanunian stated in his 1966 RAND Corporation report Dimensions of Survival, p. 33: ‘the possible post-attack state of the farm sector ... constitutes the greatest threat to national viability.’

It is worth summarizing some of the more reliable Nevada nuclear test empirical data for surface bursts JOHNIE BOY (0.5 kt, 1962), SUGAR (1.2 kt, 1951) and SMALL BOY (1.65 kt, 1962) which is tabulated on page 61 of Hillyer G. Norment's DELFIC report DNA 5159F-1, 1979 (his data for Pacific shots KOON and ZUNI are from error filled reports and are both obsolete). At 1 hour after burst, a measured gamma dose rate on point-source-calibrated survey meters of 100 R/hr at 1 m height over contaminated Nevada desert (corresponding to an ideal smooth plane dose rate of roughly 200 R/hr for a survey meter which isn't partially shielded by its own batteries and by the person holding it) occurred in an elliptical belt 0.25 km wide extending 2.73 km downwind from 0.5 kt JOHNIE BOY, 0.49 km wide extending 3.74 km downwind from 1.2 kt SUGAR, and 0.84 km wide extending 5.66 km downwind from 1.65 kt SMALL BOY. It should be noted that the exact depth of burst has a greater effect on the dangerous levels of fallout than the wind velocity. The wind doesn't affect the fallout dose rates very much, because if you double the wind speed, the same amount of fallout gets deposited over twice the area with therefore only half the concentration than for the lower wind speed, so the increase in downwind distance reached by any given fallout particle is largely offset by the fact that the particles are spread out over a greater tract of ground. Thus, in practice there is relatively little wind effect on fallout, apart from obviously determining the directions which the fallout plumes travel.

However, the fallout contour data show a great dependence on the exact depth or height of burst. Very shallow depths of burst greatly increase the cratering efficiency, producing more intense close-in fallout contours due to the extra activity carried by large particles contaminated at early times by the cratering ejecta mechanism. For example, the 1000 R/hr contour at 1 hour extended 1.38 km downwind and 0.26 km in width after the JOHNIE BOY 0.5 kt shot at 0.584 m depth, but such dose rates were confined to the crater in the 1.2 kt SUGAR burst detonated 1.067 m above ground!

Perhaps the best set of data comes from the 1962 SMALL BOY shot (1.65 kt Nevada burst at 3.05 m height above ground):

1000 R/hr at 1 hr reached 1.0 km downwind with a width of 0.28 km
500 R/hr at 1 hr reached 1.62 km downwind with a width of 0.41 km
200 R/hr at 1 hr reached 2.22 km downwind with a width of 0.54 km
100 R/hr at 1 hr reached 5.66 km downwind with a width of 0.84 km
50 R/hr at 1 hr reached 8.10 km downwind with a width of 1.42 km





Above: Dr Carl F. Miller's fallout model from 1963 is based on a semi-empirical analysis of the Pacific nuclear test fallout patterns from CASTLE and REDWING nuclear test operations in 1954 and 1956, in combination with a theoretical analysis of all the physics and chemistry of the fallout mechanism itself. (C. F. Miller, Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures, Stanford Research Institute, January 1963, vol 1 - AD410522, vol. 2 - AD410521.) Miller's model predicts an earliest fallout arrival time of 4W0.2 minutes after burst, where W is the total weapon yield in kilotons. Hence, fallout under the mushroom cloud begins to arrive at 16 minutes after burst for 1 Mt, 22 minutes after burst for 5 Mt, and 30 minutes after burst for 25 Mt. (These data are from the DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 6, What the Planner Needs to Know About Fallout, U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, report CPG 2-1AG, June 1973, Panel 29.)



Above: the earth penetrator warhead destroys hardened underground targets by ground shock and cratering with a low fission yield and can dramatically reduce fallout by trapping fission products deep within the crater ejecta layer. (The data for SEDAN is scaled back to 1 hour after burst using the decay rate curve, and thus exaggerates the radiation levels which occurred far downwind when the arrival time was greater than 1 hour.)



Above: Nevada nuclear test data shows the effect of burial on dose rate contours. Very shallow depths can enhance local fallout, but greater depths reduce it. Notice that the 100 R/hr contour at 1 hour after burst extends several km downwind for 1.2 kt surface or shallow detonations in dry soil, but much less than 1 km downwind for the bursts of 0.42-31 kt yields at depths of 34-110 m in hard rock.

Fallout information in previous posts on this blog can be found at:

http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/04/white-house-issues-new-civil-defence.html

http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/05/clean-nuclear-weapons-tests-worked.html

http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/04/fallout-prediction-and-common-sense-in.html

http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/clean-nuclear-weapon-tests-navajo-and.html

The posts here are supposed to be particularly important information. However the arrangement of the information is haphazard and I'm compiling a book on the application of science to nuclear reactions, with chapters ranging from the big bang evidence to nuclear forces, nuclear explosions, and all of the effects produced. This will be available freely as PDF page files on my domain http://quantumfieldtheory.org/ as soon as possible. It will be edited more carefully (and will of course be better organized) than this blog, and will contain far more detailed information on each topic.

Update:

Articles by Dr Miller and others in the August 1958 Journal of Colloid Science:

Heiman W. J.
Variation of gamma radiation rates for different elements following an underwater nuclear detonation.
Journal of Colloid Science, pp:329-336; vol. 13, issue 4, August 1958:

“Calculations are made of the gamma radiation rates for the 13 radioisotopes contributing the major portion of gamma radiation from a deep underwater nuclear detonation. These calculations are carried out for 14 different times after the burst ranging from 40 min to 3 years. The gamma emitters include activities induced in sea water and possible bomb components as well as fission products.”


Miller Carl F., Cole Richard, Heiman Warren J.
Decontamination reactions of synthesized fallout debris for nuclear detonations : I. Nuclear detonation in sea water.
Journal of Colloid Science, pp:337-347; vol. 13, issue 4, August 1958:

“The expected general composition of fall-out from a nuclear detonation in a homogeneous liquid medium (sea water) is discussed, Simplified contaminants each containing a single fission product element and sea water applied to a painted surface were decontaminated by water washing. Decontamination as a function of initial level or surface density of most of the FP elements used was found to follow the modified Freundlich relationship R = aI/sup n/ in which I is the initial level, R is the level remaining after decontamination, and a and n are constants for each element.”


Miller Carl F., Cole Richard, Lane W. B., Mackin J. L.
Decontamination reactions of synthesized fallout debris for nuclear detonations : II. Land-surface nuclear detonation.
Journal of Colloid Science, pp:348-357; vol. 13, issue 4, August 1958:

“The decontamination of San Francisco harbor bottom soil, Nevada test site soil, and a commercial clay from a paint surface was done with stirred and sprayed water, The surface density of soil remaining after decontamination was found to depend on the initial condition according to the equation, R/sub m/ = R/ sub M/(1-e/sup -ay/) in which R/sub M/ is a constant related to tbe mean particle size remaining, a is a constant related to the mean particle size and density of the deposited soil, and y is the surface density of the initial deposit. Estimates are made for the gamma radiation intensity over the contaminated and decontaminated surfaces for the case in which the surface area is large and the soil is fallout from a surface land atomic detonation.”

Above: The Control of Exposure of the Public to Ionizing Radiation in the Event of Accident or Attack, Proceedings of a Symposium Sponsored by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), April 27-29, 1981, Held at the International Conference Center, Reston, Virginia. (The proceedings were published on May 15, 1982, by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, Bethesda, Md.) The NCRP was chartered by U.S. Congress in 1964 to analyze and publish information on radiation protection issues.


In several previous posts quotations are made from Dr Carl F. Miller's enlightening acceptance speech for an award (published beginning on page 99), which give a first-hand idea of the awesome task of obtaining the vital early-time data on arrival and deposit characteristics of fallout during the 1950s American atmospheric nuclear test series in the Pacific and also at the Nevada test site. Dr Miller's 60 rads gamma dose more than doubled his natural leukemia risk from 0.5% to over 1%, and he tragically died from leukemia in August 1981. A longer excerpt from the Session B Discussion text is as follows, and illuminates the whole subject very clearly:

'Mr Greene [Jack C. Greene, Moderator]: 'As all should know, much of the work that Jim Sartor described [in a summary of decontamination data] was done under the very able direction of Dr Carl Miller who is with us today and will join the panel.

'Carl, I am very pleased to use this occasion to present to you a "certificate of appreciation" from the Planning Committee for this symposium, joined by members of the former NAS Advisory Committee on Civil Defense and others who have worked with you over the years. Here's what the certificate says:

'We hereby present a Certificate of Appreciation to Carl F. Miller. Dr Miller's many years of dedicated research have combined the best of theoretical and applied work and have resulted in an unparalleled contribution to our understanding of the physical and chemical characteristics of radioactive fallout, as well as the means for protecting against it. It is specially meaningful to those of us who have known and admired Carl over the years to have an opportunity to publicly acknowledge and honor the work of this extraordinary, versatile and innovative scientist.'

'We will start the discussion period by giving Carl five minutes to comment on anything he chooses.

'Dr Miller: Thank you very much. I appreciate this commendation and your comments. I might add here that thanks should also be given to my co-workers who helped me and did most of the hard work - this includes, of course, Pete [Peter O. Strom of Sandia National Laboratories] and Jim [James D. Sartor of Woodward-Clyde Consultants] who just completed their presentations. Sitting here and listening, I was impressed with many of the talks that were given. Starting with Lew Spencer's, I think he did a very good job in giving the outline for the hazards to be discussed. One thing that occurred to me and probably occurs to a lot of you is that the real hazards in a nuclear attack are not from radiation - the real hazards are in the blast and other initial effects. Though his paper was clearly limited to the radiation effects, he knows, and you know, that the countermeasures against the other hazards would be more difficult to achieve.

'Someone talked a little about risks. One thing that usually comes to my mind when risks are discussed goes back to World War II when I was in Burma working with the Chinese Fifth Army as an artillery-man. We (and they) used to be supplied by airplanes that would fly over and parachute-drop food and ammunition and so forth. The thing about risk was that we used to watch the behavior of the Chinese soldiers - they would make bets on who could catch a sack of peanuts dropping down and they would truly try. I don't know what the LD50 for that "exposure" was or might be, but it was exceedingly high for a good catcher. It was a high risk game in a rather high risk environment. However, in the (now) old days, some of us at the then existing U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory did about the same thing with fallout at nuclear weapons tests.

'In 1954, some civilians and Navy men were on a specially outfitted ship - a monstrosity bedecked with all kinds of sprinklers for testing the Navy washdown system [i.e., the continuous spraying of decks by fire sprinklers, to flush fallout off the deck as it landed]. On one test, we were about 20 miles away when a 10-megaton shot was detonated. At the time, one piece of data we were interested in obtaining was the early time decay; also, additional data on the characteristics of the fallout were desired. My job was to put out a series of funnels, tubes, and other things on this ship to collect some of the fallout. The ship was sailed on a pathway that led to an area directly underneath the expanding cloud so as to be exposed to a maximum amount of fallout. The ship, called the YAG-39, was highly instrumented with gamma detectors; it was accompanied by a sister ship, the YAG-40, which was operated by remote control but without the washdown system. Fallout arrived about 20 minutes after detonation, at which time I collected the first few drops of "hot" washdown water from tubing that extended from the deck to the bottom of the ship across from where the radioactive assay equipment was located.

'In 1957, at the Nevada Test Site, personnel from NRDL and the AEC sat in an underground shelter a mile away when Shot Diablo was detonated. Some of us collected fallout particles as they fell out of the sky from this event. We didn't chase after them on the outside of the shelter because we had little funnels and tubes running to the outside from inside. One could hear that stuff trickle down into containers in a deep cave from which we picked out single particles for assay. I was trying to do gamma spectrometry on particles. I picked up one little particle, and the spectrometer just about blew up, so I quickly put it back and got a smaller one. That didn't work either: it was too hot. Finally, I got a teeny one, but it was still too hot. So I took it back in and smashed it into smaller pieces, picked up a chip with tweezers and found out it didn't blank out the spectrometer. Of course, after about a half-hour or so, one could hardly get a reading on it anymore, because of the rapid decay rate. Many people received some gamma exposure on ventures such as these. I did as well. ...

'I like the way Jim Sartor brought out the character of the fallout, and Pete Strom, too. With most of the local fallout that we're talking about, a lot of the larger particles are fused or melted to form little glassy marbles. The tower shots had iron in them so they were magnetic and we could separate hot fallout particles from tower shots with magnetism. The radioactive atoms that could be absorbed into, or by, body organs were the few that plated out on the surface of the fallout particles during the later stages of condensation in the fireball. That's why the elements iodine, strontium, ruthenium and a few other isotopes of that nature have been found in organs of animals and humans.'



Above: this is a summary of the decontamination data tables presented by James Sartor which Dr Miller was commenting on. This type of empirical field information is vital for informed decision making about how best to deal with a nuclear fallout disaster of any kind, be it an accident or a weapon attack.

The volume also contains other information of background importance. Dr Clarence Lushbaugh goes through the history of the LD50, i.e., the estimated dose which kills 50% of exposed people. He reveals that even before the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project had determined a figure of 500 +/- 100 R as the human LD50, based on extrapolations from animal data, and shows that the commonly quoted 450 R estimate of the LD50 stems not directly from any particular analysis of evidence, but instead from an average of the guesses made by 24 consultants to the U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project who met at San Francisco in 1947 under the chairmanship of Dr R. R. Newell. (This 450 R human LD50 estimate was first published in 1950 by S. Warren and J. Z. Bowers in "Acute Radiation Syndrome in Man," Ann. Int. Med., v32, pp207-16.)

Dr Lushbaugh also comments on the disagreement which occurred in 1959, when Dr Payne Harris testified before the U.S. Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that the human LD50 was 700 R +/- 25%, based on Oak Ridge and Yugoslavian accident data, while Drs Cronkite and Bond testified using Marshallese evidence plus dog and swine data that the human LD50 was 350 R. As a result of this disagreement (one estimate above the previous LD50 estimate of 450 R, and the other estimate below that figure), the 450 R estimate continued to be used as the best available consensus. Lushbaugh however notes that he and Dr Auxier, using the best available data for shielding by buildings in Japan and the best empirical estimates of the radiation doses (confirmed by measurements of neutron induced activity in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with thermoluminescent data which allow measurement gamma ray doses in roof tiles at various distances because some radiation energy is transferred to the ceramic as energy trapped in the crystalline structure, which is released as light when the material is subsequently heated), found an LD50 estimate of 260 REM, assuming a relative biological effectiveness (RBE) factor of 2 for neutrons. (REM = exposure in roentgens multiplied by RBE.) Lushbaugh comments that this low figure of the LD50 from Hiroshima and Nagasaki data is due to the blast and burn trauma the people took from the shock wave and thermal radiation which accompanied the nuclear radiation. (C. C. Lushbaugh and J. Auxier, "Reestimation of Human LD50 Radiation Levels at Hiroshima and Nagasaki", Radiation Research, v39, p526, 1969.)

He reports another study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki effects which found that a 50% incidence of epilation (hair loss) occurred at a dose of 310 REM if the neutron RBE is 4, and 50% incidence of hemorrhage (i.e., platelet suppression in blood due to irradiation of the bone marrow where blood cells are produced; the reduction in the platelet count causes small vessels to leak, producing small but visible skin hemorrhages below the outer skin layer). Some of these data will be obsolete now because they were based on the 1965 dosimetry of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which has been updated with improved radiation transport models (although the 'improved" estimates of the yields of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs may be a step backward, because the yields depend on random chances of the time of initiation of the chair reaction after fissile assembly, and other chance factors, and so should be evaluated from the actual measured blast effects data like the crushing of petrol tins and the overturning of stone slabs of known mass, as Penney did in his 1970 report, not on computer simulations of bomb dynamics).

Lushbaugh also discusses the effects of protracted exposure, where the body can repair some of the damage if the radiation is received at a low dose rate. A man accidentally irradiated by a Co-60 radiotherapy source in Mexico in 1964 for 106 days at a gamma exposure rate of 9-16 R/day (total dose 980-1,700 R) was still alive 17 years later, but four others who suffered daily exposure rates as least twice that amount were all killed within 80 days due to suppressed blood cell counts, hemorrhages and infections accompanying the reduced white blood cell count.

Another interesting item in the report is the table of neutron induced activities due in soils on different bedrocks (igneous, shale, sandstone, limestone and sediment) as part of Dr Peter Strom's paper on page 81. This shows that the initial beta Al-28 radioactivity induced in soil is on the order of 1,000 times as intense as that of Na-24. This is partly due to the higher typical abundance of aluminium than sodium in most soils, but is mainly due to the shorter half life of Al-28 (2.3 minutes, contrasted to 15 hours for Na-24). The faster something decays, the more intense the decay rate (decays/second, i.e., Becquerels) during its decay.

The typical igneous rock sample (at least half silicon dioxide, by mass) initially (i.e., at zero time) would give an beta activity from neutron induced Al-28 which is 550 times that from Na-24. After an hour (26 half lives of Al-28, but only 1/15th of a half life of Na-24) the ratio is only 0.0000088. Hence, despite the initial higher radiation levels from Al-28, it is always trivial within a fraction about half an hour of a nuclear explosion, as compared to other nuclides.

There are two interesting appendices in the volume. The first is by Philip J. Dolan of SRI International and is entitled Appendix A: Characteristics of the Nuclear Radiation Environment Produced by Several Types of Disasters, Summary Volume. On page 264, Dolan comments that:

'The hypothetical attack selected for use is a strategic attack on U.S. military installations, military supporting industrial and logistics facilities, other basic industries, and major population centers.

'The attack consists of 1,444 weapons with a total of 6,559 megatons, of which 5,051 weapons are surface burst. ...

'More than 67 million persons are located in areas receiving unit-time [1 hour reference time, although fallout is obviously not deposited everywhere within 1 hour of detonation so these unit-time figures are gross exaggerations if applied to distances of several hours downwind] reference dose rates in excess of 3,000 R/hr, more than 159 million in areas receiving in excess of 300 R/hr, and more than 188 million in areas in excess of 30 R/hr.

'The dose rates mentioned above would not necessarily exist since the deposition would take place over an extended time period and the fallout is decaying while deposition takes place. The four-day doses, which consider arrival time and which represent most of the lifetime accumulations, corresponding to the above-mentioned unit-time dose rates are 5,400, 360, and 24 roentgens, respectively. Shielding or relocation could reduce these accumulated doses.'

On page 265, Dolan adds:

'The four major ways to reduce adverse effects of fallout are: shelter, relocation, decontamination, and minimization of ingestion and inhalation ...

'The effectiveness of shelters usually is described in terms of a protective factor (PF), which is the ratio of the dose rate that would be measured 3 feet above an (imaginary) infinite smooth plane to the dose rate expected inside the shelter (accounting for surroundings as well as protection afforded by the shelter). About 20 percent of the urban population and 19 percent of the rural population of the U.S. could be afforded a PF of 1,000 or more (subways, mines, caves, and some basements) without evacuation, while about 75 percent of the urban population and 43 percent of the rural population could be afforded PF's of 100 or greater. ...

'The consequences of a multiweapon nuclear attack would certainly be grave, but exact numbers have large uncertainties. Estimates of 20 to 160 million short term fatalities have been made, with the majority of the survivors receiving doses from >10 to a few hundred rem. Nevertheless, recovery should be possible if plans exist and are carried out to restore social order and to mitigate the economic disruption.'

Commenting on the uranium and plutonium hazards of nuclear weapon accidents on page 272, Dolan states:

'Uranium taken internally represents a heavy-metal poison hazard in quantities less than those required to be a radiation hazard.

'Less than 10^{-4} of the plutonium eaten by man is absorbed from the intestine. Inhalation is a more probable route of deposition, but once the cloud has passed, inhalation requires that the plutonium be resuspended. This is an inefficient process.

'"Soluble" plutonium may be cleared from the lung within a year or so and will be translocated primarily to bone and liver. "Insoluble" plutonium will be retained much longer in the lung and will be translocated principally to lymph nodes. Plutonium dispersed in a weapon accident is expected to be in the form of insoluble oxides.

'Two accidents of this type are recorded. ... The first occurred near Palomares, Spain on January 17, 1966. A B-52 collided in flight with a tanker during a refueling operation, and 4 weapons were dropped. One weapon was found on the beach undamaged, and one was recovered intact from the sea at a much later date. The other 2 weapons resulted in high explosive detonations on impact with the earth. The resulting contamination covered about 650 acres with a concentration of about 5 micrograms per square metre or more.

'The second accident occurred near Thule, Greenland on January 21, 1968. A B-52 crashed on an ice floe just off the coast. Snow was falling at the time of the accident, and the precipitation increased after the accident. Most of the plutonium sank with the aircraft debris, and the rest was trapped under the snow and the ice. ... The worst consequence of such an accident is likely to be a partial denial of the use of a relatively small area.'

The second appendix is by Dr Alvin M. Weinberg, Appendix B: Civil Defense and Nuclear Energy, pages 275-7:

'The rejection of nuclear energy has been catalyzed by the articulate and influential energy radicals in the Western world. ... I continue to believe, and preach, the obvious: that defensive systems are less threatening than offensive systems: 100 million Americans can't be killed with Russian ABM's or civil defense ... Escalation of defense is not nearly as threatening as is escalation of offense. ... The ultimate issue is not how many people are going to be killed in a nuclear war: it is how can we both maintain our freedoms and avoid nuclear war. ...

'Nuclear power is an instrument of peace because it reduces pressure on oil. The energy crisis is primarily a crisis of liquid fuels. Insofar as nuclear power can replace oil, it helps stabilize the world order.

'The world today uses about 60 million barrels of oil per day; of that, about 18 million barrels per day came through the Straits of Hormuz before the Iran/Iraq war. A nuclear reactor of 1,000 megawatts electric output uses the equivalent of about 25,000 barrels of residual oil per day. If the world had 1,000 reactors operating now, the primary energy supplied by uraniu to those 1,000 reactors would exceed 18 million barrels of oil per day that go through the Straits of Hormuz. To be sure, the substitution is not direct, since what would be displaced is residual oil, not gasoline or other higher distillates. But with an expenditure of about $10-15 thousand per daily barrel of capital equipment, refineries could convert the residual oil into higher distillates [i.e., break the longer hydrocarbon molecules into smaller ones]. So to speak, residual oil, made available by conversion from oil-fired to nuclear power plants, is the best feedstock for a synthetic fuel plant. To make high distillates from coal requires an expenditure of about $100,000 per daily barrel. To make high distillates from residual oil takes only about one tenth as much. ...

'This simple-minded argument cannot be ignored: substitution of nuclear energy for oil reduces the pressure on oil and therefore reduces the political pressures that lead first to political instability, then to war, and possibly eventually to nuclear war. We forget that the immediate cause of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was the decision by the United States to prevent Japan from moving into Indonesia to get oil. The Japanese entry into World War II demonstrated how oil can trigger a world conflagration. ...

'I do not know whether nuclear energy, which is now in a state of moratorium [following Three Mile Island controversy in 1979], will get started again. ... That people will eventually acquire more sensible attitudes towards low level radiation is suggested by an analogy, pointed out by William Clark, between our fear of very low levels of radiation insult and of witches. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, people knew that their children were dying and their cattle were getting sick because witches were casting spells on them. During these centuries no fewer than 500,000 witches were burned at the stake. Since the witches were causing the trouble, if you burn the witches, then the trouble will disappear. Of course, one could never be really sure that the witches were causing the trouble. Indeed, though many witches were killed, the troubles remained. The answer was not to stop killing the witches - the answer was: kill more witches. ...

'I want to end on a happy note. The Inquisitor of the south of Spain, Alonzo Frias, in 1610 decided that he ought to appoint a committee to examine the connection between witches and all these bad things that were happening. The committee could find no real correlation ... So the Inquisitor decided to make illegal the use of torture to extract a confession from a witch. ...

'I don't know whether the modern witch - low level radiation and the hysteria that is exhibited about nuclear energy - will be resolved soon enough for nuclear energy to play a proper part in avoiding the oil confrontation. After all, it took 200 years for the Inquisition to run its course on witches. I only hope that our attitude towards nuclear energy will become more sensible long before 200 years have gone by. The possible alternative - nuclear war sparked by competition for dwindling oil - is far too horrible to accept, whether or not we have civil defense.'

10 Comments:

At 9:08 pm, Blogger nige said...

Update

There is a fairly extensive list of Dr Carl F. Miller's reports on the U.S. Department of Energy "Opennet", https://www.osti.gov/opennet (these are listed below, straight from the search, note some reports are duplicated in the list several times).

Dr Miller's 11 July 1957 U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report "Gamma Decay of Fission Products from the Slow-Fission of U235", USNRDL-TR-187 and his related report on 4 August 1958 with P. Loeb, "Ionization Rate and Photon Pulse Decay of Fission Products from the Slow-Neutron Fission of U235" (USNRDL-TR-247), were the first theoretical gamma dose rate decay curve from fallout fission products.

The results from these reports were discussed during the U.S. Congressional Hearings of 22-26 June 1959 before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, "Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War" (pages 77, 113ff, 181, 187, and 189-223).

See also the U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, May 1959, "Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests", page 1969.

Dr Miller's research overturned the reliance on the t^{-1.2} decay rate, by showing that for times beyond 100-200 days after the explosion the real radiation level falls below that predicted by the t^{-1.2} decay law used in the 1950 and 1957 editions of Glasstone's "Effects of Atomic/Nuclear Weapons" book.

Dr Miller, apart from this theoretical work, also did empirical correlation and analysis of fallout decay rates measured from fallout collected after nuclear tests, in his report: "Analysis of Fallout, Part II, Decay Characteristics of Radioactive Fallout", USNRDL-TR-221, 9 May 1958.

This research led to the U.S. Defense Atomic Support Agency fallout decay rate analysis project by Philip J. Dolan, "Theoretical Dose Rate Decay Curves for Contamination Resulting from Land Surface Burst Nuclear Weapons", Secret-Restricted Data, Defense Atomic Support Agency Technical Analysis Report DASA-528, 6 August 1959.

Dolan analysed two situations: fission weapons using U235, and thermonuclear weapons using U238, in each case allowing for fractionation (loss of most Kr and Xe fission fragment decay chains from the hot fireball and their near absence in local fallout due to depletion from large, fast falling particles), and neutron induced activities U237, U239, Np239 and Np240.

Dolan concluded that the fallout from both fission and thermonuclear weapons decayed at t^{-1.23} for 1 hour to 100 days, to within an accuracy of +/- 9% for fission weapons and +/- 25% for thermonuclear weapons. Beyond 100 days, the true radiation level decreases faster than this formula and in the interval of 3-6 years after a nuclear explosion the dose rate is about 10 times lower than predicted by t^{-1.23} (if extrapolated from times less than 100 days). Beyond 10 years, the contribution of Cs-137 (30 years half-life) predominates unless there is a lot of neutron induced Co-60 (5.3 years half-life).

A slightly revised version of the curve for a thermonuclear weapon (using better fractionation and neutron induced activity estimates than Dolan used) was incorporated into the 1962/64/77 editions of "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons".

Dr Miller's reports (titles listed on Opennet):

INTRODUCTION TO LONG TERM BIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WAR MILLER, C.F. ; LARIVIERE, P.D. NV0004820

GAMMA DECAY OF FISSION PRODUCTS FROM THE SLOW NEUTRON FISSION OF U-235 MILLER, C.F. NV0004827 USNRDLTR187

ANALYSIS OF RADIOLOGICAL DECONTAMINATION DATA OBTAINED FROM FIELD TESTS MILLER, C.F. NV0006275 USNRDLTR321

THEORY OF DECONTAMINATION, PART-1 MILLER, C.F. NV0008303 USNRDL460

IONIZATION RATE AND PHOTON PULSE DECAY OF FISSON PRODUCTS FROM THE SLOW-NEUTRON FISSION OF U-235 MILLER, C.F. ; LOEB, P. NV0007984 USNRDLTR247

RESPONSE CURVES FOR USNRDL 4-PI IONIZATION CHAMBER MILLER, C.F. NV0007924 USNRDLTR155

THE IMPACTION OF AIRBORNE PARTICLES ON PLATE COLLECTORS MILLER, C.F. NV0009218

THE MASS CONTOUR RATIO FOR FALLOUT AND FALLOUT SPECIFIC ACTIVITY FOR SHOT SMALL BOY MILLER, C.F. ; YU, O.S. NV0009224 TRC6815

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: SURFACE DETONATION COULOMB C FINAL REPORT MILLER, C.F. NV0009397 URS7575

BIOLOGICAL AND RADIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF FALLOUT FROM NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS CHAPTER 3 DISTRIBUTION OF LOCAL FALLOUT MILLER, C.F. NV0009491 URS7021TRC68

FALLOUT MODELS AND RADIOLOGICAL COUNTERMEASURE EVALUATIONS MILLER, C.F. NV0009521 MU5116

THE RADIOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT AND RECOVERY OF CONTAMINATED AREAS MILLER, C.F. NV0014454 CEX571

OPERATION CENIZA-ARENA: THE RETENTION OF FALLOUT PARTICLES FROM VOLCAN IRAZU (COSTA RICA) BY PLANTS AND PEOPLE PART ONE MILLER, C.F. ; LEE, H. NV0015704

OPERATION CENIZA-ARENA: THE RETENTION OF FALLOUT PARTICLES FROM VOLCAN IRAZU (COSTA RICA) BY PLANTS AND PEOPLE PART TWO MILLER, C.F. NV0015705

OPERATION CENIZA-ARENA: THE RETENTION OF FALLOUT PARTICLES FROM VOLCAN IRAZU (COSTA RICA) BY PLANTS AND PEOPLE PART TWO APPENDICES MILLER, C.F. NV0015706

CONTAMINATION BEHAVIOR OF FALLOUT-LIKE PARTICLES EJECTED BY VOLCANO IRAZU MILLER, C.F. NV0015707
FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL COUNTERMEASURES VOLUME II MILLER, C.F. NV0015169

FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL CONTERMEASURES VOLUME I MILLER, C.F. NV0015170

PROPOSED DECAY SCHEMES FOR SOME FISSION-PRODUCT AND OTHER RADIONUCLIDES MILLER, C.F. NV0016122 USNRDLTR160

MODELS FOR ESTIMATING THE ABSORBED DOSE FROM ASSIMILATION OF RADIONUCLIDES IN BODY ORGANS OF HUMANS MILLER, C.F. ; BROWN, S.L. NV0015847 OCDOS62135

OPERATION CENIZA-ARENA: THE RETENTION OF FALLOUT PARTICLES FROM VOLCAN IRAZU ( COSTA RICA ) BY PLANTS AND PEOPLE MILLER, C.F. NV0019176 USNRDLTRC6817

METHOD FOR ESTIMATING THE INDUCED ACTIVITIES FROM NUCLEAR DETONATIONS MILLER, C.F. NV0028440

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: BALLOON-MOUNTED SHOT PRISCILLA ( OPERATION PLUMBBOB ) MILLER, C.F. NV0039124

FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL COUNTERMEASURES VOLUME I MILLER, C.F. NV0060437

ESTIMATING COST AND EFFECTIVENESS OF DECONTAMINATING LAND TARGETS VOLUME I ESTIMATING PROCEDURE AND COMPUTATIONAL TECHNIQUE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT LEE, H. ; MILLER, C.F. NV0060039 USNRDLTR435

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: TOWER DETONATIONS DIABLO AND SHASTA MILLER, C.F. NV0060934 URS7573

ASSESSMENT OF NUCLEAR WEAPON REQUIREMENTS FOR ASSURED DESTRUCTION MILLER, C.F. NV0060933 URS7576

INTERACTION OF FALLOUT WITH FIRES FINAL REPORT STROM, P.O. ; MILLER, C.F. NV0060929 URS7084

THE IMPACTION OF AIRBORNE PARTICLES ON PLATE COLLECTORS MILLER, C.F. NV0060928 MU6358

THE CONTAMINATION BEHAVIOR OF FALLOUT-LIKE PARTICLES EJECTED BY VOLCANO IRAZU MILLER, C.F. NV0060794 MU5779

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: SURFACE DETONATION COULOMB C FINAL REPORT MILLER, C.F. NV0060922 URS7575

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: BALLOON-MOUNTED SHOT PRISCILLA FINAL REPORT MILLER, C.F. NV0060921 URS7574

BIOLOGICAL AVAILABILITY AND UPTAKE OF FISSION PRODUCTS IN FALLOUT MILLER, C.F. NV0060775

A THEORY OF FORMATION OF FALLOUT FROM LAND-SURFACE NUCLEAR DETONATIONS AND DECAY OF THE FISSION PRODUCTS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT MILLER, C.F. ; COOPER, E.P. NV0060038 USNRDLTR425

EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS CHAPTER IX RESIDUAL NUCLEAR RADIATION AND FALLOUT SOURCES OF RESIDUAL RADIATION ( DRAFT REVISION ) BROUGH, T.G. ; MILLER, C.F. NV0060036

WATER TRANSPORT OF PARTICULATE MATTER ON AN IDEAL SURFACE AT 0.04 SLOPE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT MILLER, C.F. ; HEISKELL, R.H. ; CREW, R.J. ; et.al. NV0060035 USNRDLTR416

ANALYSIS OF RADIOLOGICAL DECONTAMINATION DATA OBTAINED FROM FIELD TESTS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT TECHNICAL REPORT USNRDL-TR-321 MILLER, C.F. NV0060031 USNRDLTR321

THEORY OF DECONTAMINATION, PART I RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT TECHNICAL REPORT USNRDL-460 MILLER, C.F. NV0060027 USNRDL460

RESPONSE CURVES FOR USNRDL 4-PI IONIZATION CHAMBER MILLER, C.F. ; STROPE, W.E. NV0060025 USNRDLTR155

FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL CONTERMEASURES VOLUME I MILLER, C.F. NV0015170

PROPOSED DECAY SCHEMES FOR SOME FISSION-PRODUCT AND OTHER RADIONUCLIDES MILLER, C.F. NV0016122 USNRDLTR160

MODELS FOR ESTIMATING THE ABSORBED DOSE FROM ASSIMILATION OF RADIONUCLIDES IN BODY ORGANS OF HUMANS MILLER, C.F. ; BROWN, S.L. NV0015847 OCDOS62135

OPERATION CENIZA-ARENA: THE RETENTION OF FALLOUT PARTICLES FROM VOLCAN IRAZU ( COSTA RICA ) BY PLANTS AND PEOPLE MILLER, C.F. NV0019176 USNRDLTRC6817

METHOD FOR ESTIMATING THE INDUCED ACTIVITIES FROM NUCLEAR DETONATIONS MILLER, C.F. NV0028440

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: BALLOON-MOUNTED SHOT PRISCILLA ( OPERATION PLUMBBOB ) MILLER, C.F. NV0039124 DNAPLUMBBOB240

MODELS FOR ESTIMATING THE ABSORBED DOSE FROM ASSIMILATION OF RADIONUCLIDES IN BODY ORGANS OF HUMANS MILLER, C.F. ; BROWN, S.L. NV0065069 OCDOS62135

THE MASS CONTOUR RATIO FOR FALLOUT AND FALLOUT SPECIFIC ACTIVITY FOR SHOT SMALL BOY, FINAL REPORT MILLER, C.F. ; YU, O.S. NV0065066 TRC6815

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: TOWER DETONATIONS DIABLO AND SHASTA MILLER, C.F. NV0060934 URS7573

ASSESSMENT OF NUCLEAR WEAPON REQUIREMENTS FOR ASSURED DESTRUCTION MILLER, C.F. NV0060933 URS7576

INTERACTION OF FALLOUT WITH FIRES FINAL REPORT STROM, P.O. ; MILLER, C.F. NV0060929 URS7084

THE IMPACTION OF AIRBORNE PARTICLES ON PLATE COLLECTORS MILLER, C.F. NV0060928 MU6358

THE CONTAMINATION BEHAVIOR OF FALLOUT-LIKE PARTICLES EJECTED BY VOLCANO IRAZU MILLER, C.F. NV0060794 MU5779

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: SURFACE DETONATION COULOMB C FINAL REPORT MILLER, C.F. NV0060922 URS7575

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: BALLOON-MOUNTED SHOT PRISCILLA FINAL REPORT MILLER, C.F. NV0060921 URS7574

BIOLOGICAL AVAILABILITY AND UPTAKE OF FISSION PRODUCTS IN FALLOUT MILLER, C.F. NV0060775

A THEORY OF FORMATION OF FALLOUT FROM LAND-SURFACE NUCLEAR DETONATIONS AND DECAY OF THE FISSION PRODUCTS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT MILLER, C.F. ; COOPER, E.P. NV0060038 USNRDLTR425

EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS CHAPTER IX RESIDUAL NUCLEAR RADIATION AND FALLOUT SOURCES OF RESIDUAL RADIATION ( DRAFT REVISION ) BROUGH, T.G. ; MILLER, C.F. NV0060036

WATER TRANSPORT OF PARTICULATE MATTER ON AN IDEAL SURFACE AT 0.04 SLOPE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT MILLER, C.F. ; HEISKELL, R.H. ; CREW, R.J. ; et.al. NV0060035 USNRDLTR416

ANALYSIS OF RADIOLOGICAL DECONTAMINATION DATA OBTAINED FROM FIELD TESTS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT TECHNICAL REPORT USNRDL-TR-321 MILLER, C.F. NV0060031 USNRDLTR321

THEORY OF DECONTAMINATION, PART I RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT TECHNICAL REPORT USNRDL-460 MILLER, C.F. NV0060027 USNRDL460

RESPONSE CURVES FOR USNRDL 4-PI IONIZATION CHAMBER MILLER, C.F. ; STROPE, W.E. NV0060025 USNRDLTR155

FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL CONTERMEASURES VOLUME I MILLER, C.F. NV0015170

PROPOSED DECAY SCHEMES FOR SOME FISSION-PRODUCT AND OTHER RADIONUCLIDES MILLER, C.F. NV0016122 USNRDLTR160

MODELS FOR ESTIMATING THE ABSORBED DOSE FROM ASSIMILATION OF RADIONUCLIDES IN BODY ORGANS OF HUMANS MILLER, C.F. ; BROWN, S.L. NV0015847 OCDOS62135

OPERATION CENIZA-ARENA: THE RETENTION OF FALLOUT PARTICLES FROM VOLCAN IRAZU ( COSTA RICA ) BY PLANTS AND PEOPLE MILLER, C.F. NV0019176 USNRDLTRC6817

METHOD FOR ESTIMATING THE INDUCED ACTIVITIES FROM NUCLEAR DETONATIONS MILLER, C.F. NV0028440

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: BALLOON-MOUNTED SHOT PRISCILLA ( OPERATION PLUMBBOB ) MILLER, C.F. NV0039124 DNAPLUMBBOB240

ANALYSIS OF RADIOLOGICAL DECONTAMINATION DATA OBTAINED FROM FIELD TESTS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT TECHNICAL REPORT USNRDL-TR-321 MILLER, C.F. NV0060031 USNRDLTR321

THEORY OF DECONTAMINATION, PART I RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT TECHNICAL REPORT USNRDL-460 MILLER, C.F. NV0060027 USNRDL460

RESPONSE CURVES FOR USNRDL 4-PI IONIZATION CHAMBER MILLER, C.F. ; STROPE, W.E. NV0060025 USNRDLTR155

FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL CONTERMEASURES VOLUME I MILLER, C.F. NV0015170
PROPOSED DECAY SCHEMES FOR SOME FISSION-PRODUCT AND OTHER RADIONUCLIDES MILLER, C.F. NV0016122 USNRDLTR160
MODELS FOR ESTIMATING THE ABSORBED DOSE FROM ASSIMILATION OF RADIONUCLIDES IN BODY ORGANS OF HUMANS MILLER, C.F. ; BROWN, S.L. NV0015847 OCDOS62135
OPERATION CENIZA-ARENA: THE RETENTION OF FALLOUT PARTICLES FROM VOLCAN IRAZU ( COSTA RICA ) BY PLANTS AND PEOPLE MILLER, C.F. NV0019176 USNRDLTRC6817

METHOD FOR ESTIMATING THE INDUCED ACTIVITIES FROM NUCLEAR DETONATIONS MILLER, C.F. NV0028440

SOME PROPERTIES OF RADIOACTIVE FALLOUT: BALLOON-MOUNTED SHOT PRISCILLA ( OPERATION PLUMBBOB ) MILLER, C.F. NV0039124 DNAPLUMBBOB240

 
At 11:59 pm, Blogger nige said...

In addition to the decontamination, shielding by existing buildings (even if doors and windows are broken by air blast, allowing ingress of fallout to the same contamination density as outdoors) is useful for reducing dosage before the dose rate has decayed enough to allow lengthy decontamination efforts.

This is because the majority of the dose comes to you horizontally from an average radius of 15 metres around you on smooth contaminated terrain. Hence, relatively little dosage is coming from the fallout directly under your feet and nearby. The long range of fallout gamma rays in air means that 50% of the gamma dosage comes from distances beyond 15 metres from you, and 50% from fallout deposited within 15 metres radius. Typically 85% of this is direct gamma radiation, and only about 15% is air scattered gamma rays. When you calculate the average angle that gamma rays are coming to you from, it is very close to horizontal because of the large distances from which the majority of the dose (direct gamma rays) originate.

Hence, if you went on to contaminated ground and built a house (without decontaminating the ground below you at all), you would still get very good protection against gamma radiation even though the floor below you was contaminated: the walls of the building would be attenuating the majority of the gamma ray dose which comes from large distances almost horizontally (not vertically up at you). So even if the contamination density on the floor (becquerels per square metre) is the same indoors as outdoors (due to the roof being ripped off by blast or whatever), any surviving outer walls would provide you with useful gamma radiation shielding against the lateral exposure to long range, almost horizontally-travelling direct gamma rays.

In reality, most of the fallout area where protection is needed is outside the severely blast damaged area, so the majority of buildings which require fallout shielding will not be that badly damaged. Broken doors and windows will let some fallout in, but since fallout grains are quite large (like sand) most will not ingress very far and the average contamination density on the floor of a building with broken windows/doors will be small compared to that outdoors.

Fallout protection factors

The protection factor of any building is greatest near the middle of the floor furthest from the roof, i.e., well away from fallout that is mainly located beyond outside walls and on the roof. Ingress of fallout within a building makes little difference, since the fallout doses come from the major amounts of contamination on large contaminated areas, not small quantities of fallout. This is illustrated by the fact that a person standing on uniformly contaminated terrain doesn’t receive all their dose from the nearby fallout they are standing on, instead 50% of the gamma rays come from fallout deposited over 15 metres away. The minimum protection factor in a building occurs near windows at outside walls, and on the floor below a contaminated roof.

Caravans have a protective factor of 1.4-1.8, single storey modern bungalows have a protection factor of 5-6, while brick bungalows have a protective factor of 8-9. British brick multi-storey buildings have protection factors of 10-20, while British brick house basements have protective factors of 90-150. These figures can easily be increased by at least a factor of 2-3 by making a protected ‘inner core’ or ‘refuge’ within the building at a central point, giving additional shielding.

A thickness of 1 foot / 30 centimetres of packed earth (density 1.6 grams per cubic centimetre) shields 95% of fallout gamma radiation, giving an additional protective factor of about 20. A thickness of 2 feet / 60 centimetres of packed earth provides a protective factor of about 400.

Cresson H. Kearny produced expedient shelter plans for various types of high-protection factor improvised fallout shelters:

http://www.minionreport.com/radmanuals_files/1979%20Plans%20for%20Expedient%20Fallout%20Shelters.pdf

The most important for emergency use (where rapid protection is desirable) are the "car over trench shelter" (dig a trench the right size to drive your car over, putting the excavated earth to the sides for added shielding, then drive your car over it), "tilt up doors and earth" shelter (if your house is badly damaged, build a fallout shelter against any surviving wall of the house by putting doors against it and piling earth on top in accordance to the plans), and the "above ground door-covered shelter" (basically a trench with excavated earth piles at the sides, doors placed on top, then a layer of earth piled on top of the doors). All these shelters can be constructed very quickly under emergency conditions (in a time of some hours, e.g., comparable to the time taken for fallout to arrive in the major danger area downwind from a large nuclear explosion).

 
At 1:00 am, Blogger nige said...

The full version of the extracted report referred to above by Kearny,

http://www.minionreport.com/radmanuals_files/1979%20Plans%20for%20Expedient%20Fallout%20Shelters.pdf

is:

G. A. Cristy and C. H. Kearny, "Expedient Shelter Handbook", Oak Ridge National Laboratory, August 1974, report AD0787483, 318 pages:

"This manual is designed to assist local civil defense organizations prepare plans consistent with the changing strategic conditions of the seventies. The Defense Civil Preparedness Agency is moving into a new program of 'all-hazards, all-contingencies' planning which will involve developing a crisis-oriented evacuation capability. This capability will increase the survivability of the population in the event of a nuclear attack and will be a counter against certain 'nuclear blackmail' threats. Planning for the development of shelter capabilities for either an 'in-place' or evacuated posture will require an ability to rapidly build large numbers of new expedient shelters in addition to upgrading existing fallout shelters. Detailed step-by-step instructions and pictorial design drawings of fifteen expedient shelters are included in the Appendices. The instructions and drawings for any of these shelters can be preprinted by local C.D. organizations for rapid dissemination in a crisis."

Kearny of course went on to write the Oak Ridge National Laboratory publication "Nuclear War Survival Skills", although in some ways that is more controversial (it doesn't include nuclear test data to justify all the claims made) and might be simply far too lengthy for most people to read in an emergency, http://www.survivalring.org/pdf/nuclearsurvivalskills.pdf

 
At 4:54 pm, Blogger nige said...

Update:

I've just found a very informative 10 page article by Dr Carl F. Miller, "Physical Damage from Nuclear Explosions", published on pages 1-10 of the August 1963 book "Ecological Effects of Nuclear War" edited by G. M. Woodwell, the book being the Proceedings of a Symposium Sponsored by the Ecological Society of America at the Thirteenth Meeting of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, Amherst, Massachusetts, Brookhaven National Laboratory, report BNL 917 (C-43), AEC document TID-4500, 41st ed, and it is available online in its entirity for download at:

http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/servlets/purl/4601031-6SQeHm/4601031.PDF

(2 MB, PDF document)

This contains vital information which is not included in any edition of "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons", for example the contamination factors for plants measured at several nuclear tests (which is vital for determining what the hazards to growing crops are after fallout occurs, what decontamination is needed, etc.).

 
At 3:01 pm, Blogger nige said...

The key declassified report by Dr Carl F. Miller is USNRDL-466, which since this post was written (which links to a copy of that report on a U.S. government run server), has been removed from the U.S. government document collection or the link has become corrupted. Hence the link in this post to USNRDL-466 does not work any longer.

An alternative server also hosts that crucial report by Dr Miller here:

http://survival-training.info/Library/Nuclear/Nuclear%20-%20Decontamination%20of%20Fallout%20-%20Part%20II%20-%20Composition%20of%20Contaminants%20-%20C.%20Miller.pdf

Table 11 (on page 41 of the original document) contains all of the originally Secret - Restricted Data on neutron induced activities U-239/Np-239, U-237, and Np-240 in the fallout from 13 different key Jangle, Castle, Redwing and Plumbbob fallout producing tests.

Notice that i(1) on the top line of the table data is the reference 1 hour dose rate assuming 1 atom/fission, so that allows you to work out the atoms/fission ratios from the 1 hour dose rates given in that table.

E.g., the Sugar and Uncle shots of Jangle in 1951 both produced 1-hour reference dose rates of 0.106 units due to U-239, which itself would produce 0.1799 units if there was 1 atom/fission of U-239 produced.

Hence, Sugar and Uncle both produced 0.106/0.1799 = 0.59 atoms/fission of U-239 and Np-239 (ignore the data given in the table for Np-239 because that is for the actual Np-239 atoms per fission created by 1 hour, not the total Np-239; since Np-239 is created from the decay of U-239, the total amount of Mp-239 produced is identical to the amount of U-239 produced, but because U-239 has a half life of 23.5 minutes, only 83% of the Np-239 has actually been formed within 1 hour of detonation).

As the table shows, only thermonuclear weapons produce significant quantities of U-237.

It is also worthy of note that the fission bomb tests Diablo and Shasta of Plumbbob in 1957 both produced only 0.10 atom/fission of U-239/Np-239, which is only about one-sixth of the production in the 1951 Sugar and Uncle tests.

The reason is that the 1951 tests Sugar and Uncle were old-fashioned implosion bombs with thick U-238 neutron "reflectors" that (instead of simply reflecting neutrons back) captured a large proportion of neutrons emitted from the core, whereas the 1957 tests Diablo and Shasta did not employ U-238 as a thick neutron reflector. The smaller amounts of U-238 contained in Diablo and Shasta was present in the highly-enriched uranium that was used in the composite uranium-plutonium cores that were in use at that time.

Notice also that Castle-Bravo produced 0.56 atoms/fission of U-239/Np-239, 0.10 atoms/fission of U-237, and 0.14 atoms/fission of Np-240, according to Dr Miller's secret data.

Japanese investigators tried to measure the capture/fission ratios from the Castle-Bravo fallout that landed on the "Lucky Dragon No. 5" which was 100 miles downwind of the detonation (it was just north-west of Rongelap when fallout arrived).

To avoid secrecy, Dr Miller quoted the (unclassified) Japanese findings in his unclassified 1963 "Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures" SRI report and also in his 1964 SRI report "Biological and Radiological Effects of Fallout from Nuclear Explosions": the data from the Japanese physicists suggest a figure of 0.30 atoms/fission for U-239/Np-239 and 0.15 atoms/fission for U-237.

These figures are wrong: the first is too low and the second is too high. You can't chemically separate small quantities of these nuclides because they are quite similar chemically, so you can't distinguish the beta particles, only the gamma ray energies using a crystal and scintillation counter. The problem of accurate determination comes down to the quality of the equipment and the quality of the samples of the fallout. The fallout that had been subjected to spray and wind on the decks of the "Lucky Dragon No. 5" for two weeks on the voyage back to Japan was not idea, and nor was the calibration of the instruments which the Japanese physicists used.

The American data is far more reliable. In addition, the Japanese physicists did not know about fission product fractionation (see table 8 on page 35 of the declassified report by Dr Miller for fully corrected detailed fractionation data downwind from the Redwing 1956 tests), which reduced the accuracy of their determination of capture atoms/fission. This is because, in order to determine the number of say U-239 atoms/fission, you need to determine not only the number of U-239 atoms in your sample, but also the number of fissions. If you try to determine the number of fissions by measuring the number of Sr-90 atoms present and using the production ratio of Sr-90 on standard "M" shaped fission fragment abundance graphs, you will underestimate the number of fissions, because Sr-90 is depleted from local fallout due to the fireball temperature. The correct way to work out the amount of fission in a sample is to determine the number of atoms of something that is not fractionated, such as Nb-95 (the Americans originally in the 1950s used Mo-99 as the reference nuclide, switching to Nb-95 in the 1960s because it is more abundant in fallout, and is thus easier to measure with greater accuracy).

One other measurement of interest for the 1956 Redwing series is in the report by M. Morgenthau, H.E. Shaw, L.M. Hardin, R.C. Tomkins, and P.W. Krey, Preliminary Report, Operation Redwing, Project 2.65, Land Fallout Studies, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Sandia Base, Albuquerque, ITR-1319, January 1957: the Redwing-Lacrosse 40 kt test produced 0.2 atom/fission of Np-239.

In his 1959 report The Decontamination of Surfaces Contaminated with Fallout from Nuclear Detonations at Sea, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense laboratory, report USNRDL-TR-329, Dr Miller makes it clear that although Np-239 and U-237 can contrubute 50% of the gamma dose rate some days after a thermonuclear explosion, neutron induced activity from Na-24 in sea water is trivial by comparison.

Dr terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere support this with detailed tables of neutron induced activity from a variety of different thermonuclear weapons (clean and dirty fission yields) tested during Operation Redwing in 1956, in their report Characterization of Fallout, weapon test report WT-1317 (1961):

http://glasstone.blogspot.com/2006/03/clean-nuclear-weapon-tests-navajo-and.html

 
At 10:49 pm, Blogger nige said...

I've just found that another of Dr Carl F. Miller's vital fallout reports is available to download in PDF format (12.8 MB file size) on line:

Miller, Carl F., The Radiological Assessment and Recovery of Contaminated Areas, September 28, 1960, report CEX-57.1, 70 pp., U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civil Effects Test Operations, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (this is cited in the 1962 and 1964 editions of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons):

http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/techreports/Pages/viewtext.php?s=search&tid=116&route=basicsearch.php&start=36&sterms=fallout&s=browse#

http://digicoll.manoa.hawaii.edu/techreports/PDF/CEX-57.1.pdf

 
At 12:12 am, Blogger nige said...

Corrections in bold to the following paragraph taken from the second-to-last comment above:

"These figures are wrong: the first is too low and the second is too high. You can't chemically separate small quantities of these nuclides because they are quite similar chemically, and you can't distinguish them on the basis of the emitted beta particles, only by their gamma ray energies using a sodium iodide crystal and scintillation counter. The problem of accurate determination comes down to the quality of the equipment and the quality of the samples of the fallout. The fallout that had been subjected to spray and wind on the decks of the "Lucky Dragon No. 5" for two weeks on the voyage back to Japan was not ideal, and nor was the calibration of the instruments which the Japanese physicists used."

As another update, there is another very important report by Dr Carl Miller available online as a PDF file now:

Dr Carl F. Miller, Biological and Radiological Effects of Fallout from Nuclear Explosions, Chapter 1: The Nature of Fallout and Chapter 2: Formation of Fallout Particles, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, SRI Project No, IMU-4536, March 1964, 89 pages with excellent illustrations of fallout from nuclear tests and tables of fallout particle radionuclide solubility (tables 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3), quantitative uptake of various fallout radionuclides in rabbits 20 days after the Plumbbob-Smoky nuclear test in the Nevada in 1957 (table 2.4), fission product yields for seven types of fissile material and nuclear weapon designs (table 2.5), and the effect of fireball heat in fractionating the deposition of fission products upon the fallout particles which fall out of the fireball at different fireball temperatures - e.g. the biggest fallout particles that land near ground zero fall out of the fireball while it is still extremely hot, so they contain virtually no volatile fission products which have yet to start condensing in the fireball, but smaller particles fall out of the fireball after it has cooled and so they are plated with more volatile fission product decay chains (table 2.9 shows the experimentally observed fission product fractionation range in deposited and cloud fallout samples for four different Redwing tests A, B, C and D, which are identified in the declassified WT-1317 report as Redwing shots Zuni, Tewa, Flathead and Navajo, respectively; note that WT-1317 also gives the absolute distances of the various collection stations from ground zero, allowing fractionation to be correlated to distance from ground zero and to median fallout particle size since the relation of particle size to distance is a simply determined by the measured fallout time of the peak dose rate at each location):

http://stinet.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=0476572&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

 
At 10:24 pm, Blogger nige said...

Some vital reports by Dr. Carl F. Miller:

Accession Number : AD0476572
Title : BIOLOGICAL AND RADIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF FALLOUT FROM NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS. CHAPTER 1: THE NATURE OF FALLOUT. CHAPTER 2: FORMATION OF FALLOUT PARTICLES
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD476572&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
Corporate Author : STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA
Personal Author(s) : Miller, Carl F.

Handle / proxy Url : http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD476572
Report Date : MAR 1964
Pagination or Media Count : 89
Abstract : Contents: The Nature of Fallout; Local Fallout; World-Wide Fallout; Potential Hazards from Fallout; Radioactive Decay; The Standard Intensity and Contour Properties. Formation of Fallout Particles; General Description of Fallout Formation Processes; The Structure and Composition of Individual Fallout Particles; Solubility Properties of Fallout; Radioactive Elements in Fallout; The Condensation Process.

also:

FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL COUNTERMEASURES, VOLUME 1
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD410522&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf

The major purpose of this report is to outline and discuss these physical processes and the important parameters on which they depend.


Accession Number : AD0410522
Title : FALLOUT AND RADIOLOGICAL COUNTERMEASURES, VOLUME 1
Corporate Author : STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA
Personal Author(s) : Miller, Carl F.
Handle / proxy Url : http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD410522
Report Date : JAN 1963
Pagination or Media Count : 402

Abstract : The major purpose of this report is to outline and discuss these physical processes and the important parameters on which they depend. The data, data analyses, data correlation schemes, and discussions presented here are organized to emphasize size basic principles so that an appropriate methodology can be applied in evaluating the radiological consequences of nuclear war. An explosion of any kind, detonated near the surface of the earth, causes material to be thrown up or drawn into a chimney of hot rising gases and raised aloft. In a nuclear explosion, two important processes occur: (1) radioactive elements, which are produced and vaporized in the process, condense into or on this material; and (2) a large amount of non-radioactive material, rises thousands of feet into the air before the small particles begin to fall back. This permits the winds to scatter them over large areas of the earth's surface. Thus, when the particles reach the surface of the earth they are far from their place of origin and contain, within or on their surface, radioactive elements. Whether they are solid particles produced from soil minerals, or liquid (salt- containing) particles produced from sea water, they are called fallout. The composition of fallout can be described in terms of two or three components. One is the inactive carrier; this consists of the environmental material at the location of the detonation and is the major component in a near-surface detonation. The second component includes all the radioactive elements in the fallout.

and:

Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures. Volume 2
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD410521&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf
Title : Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures. Volume 2. Corporate Author : STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA. Personal Author(s) : Miller, Carl F.

Accession Number : AD0410521
Title : Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures. Volume 2
Corporate Author : STANFORD RESEARCH INST MENLO PARK CA
Personal Author(s) : Miller, Carl F.
Handle / proxy Url : http://handle.dtic.mil/100.2/AD410521
Report Date : JAN 1963
Pagination or Media Count : 290
Descriptors : *RADIOACTIVE CONTAMINATION, *FALLOUT, CLEANING, SEA WATER
Subject Categories : RADIO COUNTERMEASURES
RADIOACTIVITY, RADIOACTIVE WASTES & FISSION PROD

 
At 10:28 pm, Blogger nige said...

I want to publish the review that the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch did of Dr Carl F. Dr Miller's 1963 Stanford Research Institute report "Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures". It shows just how important that report was for planning in this country. I read that review around 1992. Later I bought Dr Miller's report from NTIS in microfilm print-out. It is the key report, the only calculation of the actual mass of fallout produced by a surface burst, the fractionation of the different products on the fallout as it condenses while the fireball cools, and the effects of fractionation on the decay rate and decontamination effectiveness. So it answered all the concerns and questions the British Home Office had about fallout and enabled them to formulate their civil defence planning against fallout with a lot more confidence than they would otherwise have had, which eventually led to the U.K./ civil defence assault against Soviet funded WPC propaganda in 1980. The refusal to give in to Soviet propaganda and intimidation caused the Soviet union to go financially and then politically bankrupt (Gorbachev had to cut military spending when it went militarily bankrupt), and they were already morally bankrupt.

I gather from the reports which I read that when Dr Miller moved from NRDL to SRI around 1960, Dr Edward C. Freiling came in to NRDL from outside and took over Miller's former position at NRDL. Freiling initially made a complete mess of the fractionation analysis, publishing a paper in Science journal in 1961 which added confusion by plotting the data in a useless way (Miller corrects Freiling's data in his 1963 report, and in subsequent reports on fractionation Freiling used Miller's 1963 study, citing it). I think the decision was taken to close down NRDL around 1969 when the fractionation question had been sorted out and the fallout from surface bursts was fully understood. To my mind, the fact that Dr Freiling tried falsely to deal with fractionation by an empirical correlation scheme instead of working out the mechanisms for the fission product separation in the fireball, indicates that Dr Miller's model for the mechanisms was unique and extremely important, and probably would not have been done properly by others if he hadn't been so motivated from his field experience of collecting and analyzing fallout.

 
At 2:07 pm, Blogger nige said...

The British Home Office report reviewing in great detail Dr Carl F. Miller's 1963 Stanford Research Institute report "Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures volume 1" is:

HO 227/74

HO 227 Home Office: Scientific Adviser's Branch and successors: Reports (SA/PR Series)

Fallout and radiological counter-measures Vol 1
Former reference (Department) SA/PR 74
1963

 

Post a Comment

<< Home

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."