Rescue of trapped survivors in megaton equivalent World War II attacks, and a review of Bolsover's CND "Civil Defence, The Cruellest Confidence Trick"
Above: "The War Game", a 1965 Peter Watkins BBC propaganda film, is debunked below. See also our discussion of Phil Bolsover's CND "Civil Defence - the Cruellest Confidence Trick", linked here.
Above: the 1965 Peter Watkins BBC film "The War Game" was inaccurate (effectively pro-USSR World Peace Council and CND anti-civil defence) propaganda, a Goebbels-style pseudo-documentary (banned from transmission but widely used by CND for propaganda), based entirely upon falsehoods, ignoring Dr Glasstone's evidence in the 1962/4 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (which concludes in paragraph 7.76 on page 350: "only certain sections - usually the older and slum areas - of a very few cities in the United States [which has more wooden frame housing than Europe] would be susceptible to fire storm development"), falsely claiming in the end credits that it is factual since it is based on the effects of nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada in 1954. There were no nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada in 1954!
World War II intensive incendiary bombing experience proved beyond all doubt that it is only possible to create firestorms in multistorey wooden buildings which don't exist in modern cities; the most intense firestorm with the strongest winds occurred only in the section of Hamburg consisting of overcrowded medieval multistorey wooden building.
George R. Stanbury, the Home Office scientist who conducted Civil Defence research on blast, heat and radiation protection at Monte Bello for Operation HURRICANE, Britain’s first nuclear test in 1952, explains in detail how the Hamburg firestorm was produced in his originally restricted article, ‘The Fire Hazard from Nuclear Weapons’, Fission Fragments, U.K. Home Office, Scientific Adviser’s Branch, London, No. 3, August 1962, pp. 22-6:
'We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation ... we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ... Firstly ... the collapse of buildings would snuff out any incipient fires. Air cannot get into a pile of rubble, 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This is not just guesswork; it is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb [V1 cruise missile] incidents in London supported by a wealth of experience gained generally in the last war. Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general. Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited, it by no means follows that a continuing and destructive fire will develop. ... A window of two square metres would let in about 105 calories at the 5 cal/cm2 range. The heat liberated by one magnesium incendiary bomb is 30 times this and even with the incendiary bomb the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5; in a large room it is very much less. Thus even if thermal radiation does fall on easily inflammable material which ignites, the chance of a continuing fire developing is still quite small. In the Birmingham and Liverpool studies, where the most generous values of fire-starting chances were used, the fraction of buildings set on fire was rarely higher than 1 in 20.'
In Hiroshima, 40 kg/m2 of combustibles per unit of total ground area was necessary to create even the relatively weak firestorm with low intensity fire winds in that city, so all firestorms occurred in city areas with wooden buildings, like Hiroshima or the medieval part of Hamburg. The combustible fuel load in the firestorm area of Hamburg in 1943 was 156 kg/m2. (These data are taken from page 11-143 of Philip J. Dolan's originally secret Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Defence Nuclear Agency: unfortunately the declassified version of chapter 11 is the only chapter not available as a PDF file, although it is available on microfiche at the British Library reference depository in Boston Spa. Dolan states on page 11-143: "The intensity of a large fire depends, in part, on the average amount of combistible material per unit area. In Hamburg, where 45 percent of the firestorm area was covered by buildings containing about 70 lbs/ft2 of fuel, the average loading was 32 lbs/ft2. A strong firestorm was produced in the area from the World War II incendiary bomb raid. In Hiroshima the average fuel loading [for the firestorm area] is estimated to have been 8 lbs/ft2." Dolan also points out in Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons that few fires are predicted: "The low incidence of predicted indoor ignitions results from the low elevation angle of the fireball. The artificial horizon of trees and buildings obscures the fireball from most residential windows ... the average elevation angle of the artificial horizon is about 6 degrees for New Orleans.") In typical American surburbs the fuel loading is just 10-24 kg/m2, according to the 1979 U.S. Office of Technology Assessment report The Effects of Nuclear War.
The first recorded ‘firestorm’ was in warehouses filled with combustibles at the Surrey Docks in London, not in city buildings (it occurred on 7-8 September 1940, requiring 300 water pumps and killing 306 people). The role of the building construction in firestorm history was analysed by L. E. Frost and E.L. Jones, ‘The Fire Gap and the Greater Durability of Nineteenth-Century Cities’, published in Planning Perspectives, vol. 4 (1989), pp. 333-47. Each medieval city was built of inflammable ‘tinderbox’ wooden houses, using trees from the surrounding countryside.
By 1800, Britain had cut down most of its easily accessible forests for fuel and to build wooden houses, so the price of wood rapidly increased due to the expense of transporting wood long distances, until it finally exceeded the originally higher price of brick and stone. So from then on all new buildings were built of brick when wooden ones decayed or burned in fires. This replacement of wooden houses with brick and later reinforced concrete construction rapidly reduced the fire risk. Also, in 1932, British Standard 476 was issued, which specified the fire resistance of building materials. In addition, new cities were built with wider streets and rubbish disposal to prevent tinder accumulation in alleys, which created more effective fire breaks. You can't make brick or concrete burn by increasing the number of matches: ignition is not solely dependent upon raising the temperature! Wooden cities did not need incendiaries or nuclear weapons to burn, as proved by the Great Fire of London in 1666, the fires of Hamburg in 1842, Chicago in 1871, Baltimore in 1904, San Francisco in 1906, and Tokyo in 1923 killing 142,807 and destroying 575,000 dwellings in Tokyo and Yokohama, although some deaths were from the earthquake which caused the fire by upsetting thousands of cooking braziers in paper screen and bamboo filled wooden houses (a mechanism similar to the blast ignition of the firestorm in Hiroshima, but of course far more devastating).
Civil defence also played a large part in determining the number of people killed: the fire brigade is always overwhelmed but where civilians can stamp out fine kindling fires, loss of life can be averted. The 13 March 1945 incendiary air raid on Osaka destroyed 135,000 wooden houses in a firestorm, but due to an effective, convincing air raid warning (which was not given in Hiroshima or Nagasaki!), most people had taken cover and evacuated the wooden buildings, limiting fatalities to fewer than 4,000 people, under 0.03 people per home destroyed! Even in the most intense firestorm, that in Hamburg which uprooted trees with hurricane intensity winds, 40,000 were killed out of a population in the same area of 280,000, i.e. around 14% of the people in the actual firestorm area (the total population of Hamburg was even greater, 1,760,000). This data is given by George R. Stanbury of the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch in Fission Fragments, No. 7, May 1965, pp. 59-61: "though 40,000 people were killed in the Hamburg fire storm, another 240,000 came out alive from the same area." (Stanbury's data is from detailed Home Office research in Germany: Kathleen F. Earp's Deaths from fire in large scale air attack with special reference to the Hamburg fire storm, Home Office report CD/SA 28, 1953. Higher percentages abound for Deseden such as 20% - which is implied by the CND quoted "statistic" of 135,000 firestorm deaths in Dresden - but this is a complete lie due to Nazi propaganda spread in a book by convicted fascist historian David Irving; the accurate number killed in Dresden is 24,000-40,000.) In Hiroshima, mortality did not depend on the firestorm but upon the type of building and the posture of the person at the time of detonation. Glasstone and Dolan report (Table 12.17 on page 546) that the median (50%) lethal range in Hiroshima for the general population in Hiroshima was 0.8 mile but in concrete buildings it was only 0.12 mile, a 44-fold difference in median lethal areas. Any line of sight shadowing from thermal radiation in Hiroshima reduced the outdoor median lethal range from 1.3 miles to 0.4 miles, according to a plot of data from page 103 of the book Medical effects of the atomic bomb in Japan, Based on the Six Volume Report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw Hill, New York, 1956). Hence, mortality in Hiroshima was mainly a function of thermal flash shadowing at the time of detonation, irrespective of the subsequent firestorm!
"Measurements were made to determine the irradiance and time necessary to produce glow and flaming ignition in ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and maple. The results of this study are presented in the form of graphs of irradiance as a function of time for several moisture contents for each type of wood. In all cases on the graphs, the locations of the areas of char, persistent glowing ignition, and persistent flaming ignition are shown. The values of Q, total thermal energy necessary to produce sustained burning (with or without flame), can be easily computed from these data. They range from a minimum value of about 19 cal/sq cm for very dry pine to several thousand calories/sq cm for wood with a very high moisture content. It was concluded that for sound solid woods of a normal moisture content, it is almost impossible to start continued ignition with nuclear weapons of a size less than about 100 Mt at a distance where blast damage would not be severe."
- F. W. Brown, Ignition of Thick Wood Specimens by High-Temperature Thermal Radiation, Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory, California, report AD0475535, 1965.
As early as 1950, the U.K. Home Office was well aware of the lying propaganda exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons and attacking civil defence countermeasures for communist appeasement:
Above: the 1950 U.K. Home Office Scientific Adviser's Branch report The Number of Atomic Bombs Equivalent to the Last War Air Attacks on Great Britain and Germany, CD/SA 16 (National Archives document reference HO 225/16) was written by the scientists of the British Mission to Japan who in 1945 surveyed the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from nuclear weapons and compared that damage to what they had surveyed from conventional bombing in England during World War II. It was Top Secret until 1958, and then only degraded to Restricted (for another 22 years). It was never published, but formed the backdrop to British civil defence planning. It found that due to the non-linear scaling of blast damage areas and casualties from bombs, the effects are not directly proportional to the energy of the explosives: it estimated that the 60,670 civilians killed by bombing England in World War II was equivalent to the effects from 52 nuclear bombs, while the damage to Germany was equivalent to 330. The few megatons of TNT equivalent dropped in World War II in the form of many small bombs was equivalent to a far greater amount of explosive equivalent in the form of a few hundred nuclear weapons (we will go into the numbers in detail later in this post):
"This figure for the weight of high explosive equivalent to the atomic bomb for causing casualties increases as the amount of protection of the population increases. Thus for the night raiding conditions on London in the last war, where something like 60% of the population were in houses, 35% in shelter and 5% in the open [Home Guard, air raid wardens, fire watchers, police, etc.], the number killed in inner London per ton of bombs was 4."
Scaling up this figure of 4 killed per ton to 20 kt by the two-thirds of energy power law (for blast diffraction type damage and casualties) gives a prediction of 4(20,000)2/3 = 2,950 killed. By contrast, for unwarned people standing outdoors with no protection at Smithfield Market in London on 8 March 1945 (photograph below), the 1 ton TNT warhead of a supersonic V2 killed 110, about 28 times as many people who were killed on average after taking warning. Scaling the 110 from 1 ton up to 20 kt gives 110(20,000)2/3 = 81,000 killed, which is on the order of the casualty rates for Hiroshima and Nagasaki (allowing for differences in population density, etc.) where no effective air raid warning was given and no countermeasures were taken, not even "duck and cover" to avoid line-of-sight flash burns, flying glass, etc.:
"If those Hiroshima children had been sitting under their desks when the bomb exploded, they would probably not have been burned."
- Professor Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope, 1984.
In World War II, Dyson - who in 1948 clarified the Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga approaches to renormalization for the "second" or field quantization of quantum mechanics, i.e. "quantum field theory" - was a civilian statistician in the operations research section of the U.K. Royal Air Force Bomber Command, and knew that civil defence negated the effectiveness of bombing, since it deterred wind carried gas attacks which would toughen resolve and escalate the conflict. In 1962 Dyson objected to expensive civil defence in his article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 18, No. 3, p. 14, where he points out that building expensive shelters will just accelerate an arms race, making the enemy build more offensive weapons or use ground bursts to produce very intense blast in order to overcome the civil defence countermeasures, and this will result in increased collateral damage like fallout on neighbouring countries. However, he ignored the fact that hardening missile silos (which was done repeatedly in the 1960s through the 1980s, increasing the missile hardness for about one thousand Minuteman missiles and 54 Titan missiles from 25 psi to over 3,000 psi peak overpressure, using reinforced concrete silos with lined, shock-absorber walls and special protective lids), brought about exactly the "problem" he was talking about, without providing any civil defence countermeasures against a terrorist nuclear attack. Furthermore, the arms race was not a giant waste of time; it diverted the Soviet Union from a policy of successful expansion to unsuccessful, costly arms production which strained its economy and forced reform and a reduction in the use of military forces to restrain civil unrest, Gorbachev's policy of "perestroika", leading to the fall of communist. Dyson did not object to cheap "duck and cover" and related "improvised" civil defence countermeasures which are vital and highly effective for many kinds of terrorist attacks, and is intended not to guarantee safety but to reduce risks of serious injury like seatbelts in cars, lifeboats on ships, ambulances and hospitals, etc.
Above: Figure 20 of the 1952 U.K. Home Office Civil Defence Rescue Manual, showing the effects of a 0.001 kt V2 inertially guided rocket on Smithfield Market, London, 8 March 1945. The market fell onto the railway line below, killing 110 and trapping many others. During World War II, cranes were often needed in heavy rescue to shore up or remove debris, quickly freeing trapped personnel while alive as soon as they were located using trained dogs.
Above Phil Bolsover, author of a 1974 children's book called One day in Russia 1917 (which justifies Lenin's Communist revolution, by explaining the problems of imperialism), wrote the May 1980 best-selling CND booklet, Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick, in response to the civil defence booklet Protect and Survive published that month by the U.K. Government. The dust jacket of Bolsover's One Day in Russia 1917 states: "On November 7th, the discontent of the Russian soldiers, workers and peasants had reached such a peak that, under the leadership of Lenin and his party, the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Petrograd (later renamed Leningrad) [renamed Saint Petersburg when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991]. Philip Bolsover creates the atmosphere of those turbulent times by introducing us to several characters and showing us their everyday lives, surrounded by the spirit of revolution." Bolsover writes on pages 9-10:
"There had been the great strikes and demonstrations led by 30,000 workers from the now famous Putilov metal plant [in Petrograd, between 3-5 July 1917]; the peasant revolt against the landowners; the mass desertions from the army; and, simultaneously, the creation of soviets, or councils, of workers in factories, peasants in villages, soldiers and sailors in the armed forces.
"The Tsar's government, aware of growing discontent, had prepared an elaborate military plan to deal with revolt, and had brought in 160,000 soldiers to strengthen the city's garrison. But in the end this was worse than useless, for the soldiers, many of them newly conscripted from factories and villages, joined the demonstrators, taking their arms with them."
Above: a still from the biased BBC "documentary" film the War Game, attacking Civil Defence (the cover photos from the first edition of the pamphlet are stills from the same film): the main worry for CND in the second edition (March 1982) of Civil Defence: the Cruellest Confidence Trick seemed to be not the bomb itself, but the threat of surviving a nuclear war only to be shot under martial law for being Communist agents. This photo is printed filling two pages of the second edition, which states on page 36:
"In the minds of civil defence organisers, repressive measures by police and military [would be instigated before nuclear attack]. Before a nuclear attack: 1, arrest of 'political subversives'. Undoubtedly, active members of the peace movement, opposing nuclear war [in fact: opposing the intimidation of the Soviet Union by President Reagan, to bring them to the negotiating table and make them sue for peace or face bankrupcy in an arms race they could not win against the free world], would be considered subversive ..."
Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick creates a similar one-sided impression to Bolsover's romantic justification to kids for a Communist revolution, and also itself created massive CND protests against the defence of the West from Communism. Russia in 1917 was in an appalling state during the misery of World War I, but so were many other countries which resisted Communism. Bolsover repeatedly contrasts the extreme poverty of the people to the Tsar's corrupt, high-taxation, inefficient, greedy imperialism, without pointing out that - as George Orwell explained in a rather different kid's "fairy story" book about the 1917 revolution - Lenin's Communist revolution did not bring about the utopia it promised. We explained in detail in the earlier Glasstone and Dolan post that the end of Communism in Russia and Europe from 1989-92 was not unconnected to the strength of the West during the 1980s, bankrupting the Soviet Union which tried and failed to beat the West in the arms race. This ended the Cold War, not the surrender of the West to Soviet intimidation.
Bolsover's 1980 CND plan, published openly in the CND Manifesto "About CND" on page 24 of Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick, simply was for "Britain to abandon nuclear weapons, as a first step to the creation of a British foreign policy based on the principles of peace and co-operation." Bolsover was clearly aware that a similar doom-mongering disarmament-appeasement policy, led by the British Government during the 1930s, encouraged terrorism from an aggressive dictatorship (as detailed in the previous post).
In brief summary (we will examine all the points in detail later on, most of which have already been explained on an earlier post linked here), Bolsover tries to debunk civil defence by falsely claiming that if any fallout dust gets inside a building being used as a shelter and contaminates someone, the protection is useless. In fact gamma ray dosages come from a median radius of 15 metres at 1 metre height over smooth, unobstructed, uniformly contaminated terrain, so half the dose comes from an area of 700 m2, and the percentage coming from the fallout within a few square metres is negligible; therefore even in the worst case (if your building has no roof), surviving outer walls will still protect you against most of the radiation which is direct gamma rays coming in the horizontal direction, not straight upwards from the tiny percentage of the dose contributed from nearby fallout under your feet (for the 15 metres median radius for gamma ray fallout doses and a 103 metres mean free path for 0.7 MeV gamma ray Compton effect air scatter implied by data in Glasstone and Dolan 1977, the fraction of direct radiation is simply e-15/103 = 0.86, so only 14% is air scatter).
Then he moves on to blast effects on page 4, which he deals with by false arithmetic: he quotes a civil defence planning assumption made by the head of the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch for a worst case all-out war in which Britain gets 200 megatons from Russia, assumes that this all-out war assumption is the only scenario applicable to the case for civil defence, ignores equivalent megatonnage and heads his chapter "13,000 Hiroshima bombs", adding that the sum total of the conventional explosives used by all countries in World War II was only 5 megatons. We explained the scientific problem with this comparison in detail in the previous post. In short, casualties and damaged areas aren't proportional to the energy of the bomb, but go at most as the two-thirds power of yield (ignoring the loss of energy due to damage done over vast distances, which makes bigger bombs still less effective than using many small bombs), so the 5 megatons in the form of 50,000,000 explosives each of about 0.1 ton in World War II are equivalent to 50,000,000(0.1/1,000,000)2/3 = 1,000 one megaton nuclear weapons!
In fact, of course, the heaviest bombing in history was received by Vietnam: America dropped 11.3 megatons of TNT equivalent in the form small conventional explosives, some 331 kg of high explosive for every man, woman and child in Vietnam, at a cost of $150,000 million, without winning:
"... more than 10 billion pounds of TNT was dropped on Germany, Japan and Italy during World War II, this equalled more than 50 pounds for every man, woman and child. ... Arithmetically considered, the result should have been the total annihilation of one and all. ... During the Vietnam War, more than 25 billion pounds of TNT were dropped ... an average of 730 pounds for each of a total population of 34 million. ... yet the USA was unable to kill enough people, or to disrupt economic life, transportation or communication sufficiently."
- Senator Foy D. Kohler, Foreword to Leon Gouré's War Survival in Soviet Strategy (Centre for Advanced International Studies, Miami, Florida, 1976, p. xv).
Above: the CND "firestorm" propaganda seems to have been based on biased, inaccurate 1965 BBC "documentary" called The War Game.
Having lied that destructive power is proportional to energy released, Bolsover goes on to lie about thermal ignition (which we have dealt with in previous posts linked here, here, here and here), quoting from the CND publication Civil Defence and Nuclear War which Bolsover falsely claims is "based on the [U.K.] Civil Defence Manual Pamphlet No. 1 ["Nuclear Weapons"] and on the U.S. Department of Defence book Effects of Nuclear Weapons":
"supposing that a 10 megaton bomb had exploded on the ground at King's Cross station ... King's Cross itself would be in the middle of a crater nearly a mile wide [wrong, it would be only 0.11 mile wide in London due to the gravitational potential energy conservation problem; they are quoting the underwater crater for the heavy cased 10 megaton MIKE test on porous coral in 1952, where the coral is crushed to silt by the shock wave out to half a mile radius, an entirely different mechanism!] and deep enough to hold Nelson's Column and to penetrate the deepest part of the London Underground. [Again, this claim is totally wrong.]
"... The enormous number of separate fires that would be started simultaneously over hundreds of square miles would not stay isolated [wrong; few ignitions occur and in brick or concrete building fires you don't have the firebrand or hot wall radiation mechanisms for spreading fires that you do with wooden houses in 1945 Japan, Hamburg, Dresden, etc.] In the big fire raids of World War II when thousands of incendiaries were dropped on Hamburg, Toyko, Dresden and other cities, the fires all joined together to make a single holocaust or "fire storm". These huge pillars of fire caused winds of up to 150 mph, strong enough to uproot trees, to rush in towards the burning area. [Wrong; those winds only occurred in the Hamburg firestorm, due to medieval multistorey crowded wood frame buildings over the small wooden area of the city: fires elsewhere were less intense and the 150 mph strong winds not occur in Hiroshima where the firestorm developed slowly over a period of hours or more and the survivors escape or put out fires manually in brick or concrete buildings.] People caught in the street in the firestorm were soon burned to death. The ... temperature of that air was 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly as hot as molten glass. ... Others were killed by carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas produced by the enormous fire. [Contrast this to Hiroshima, and then think about the fact that modern cities - unlike the medieval firstorm devastated part of Hamburg - are not wood but 80% or more non-combustible brick, steel, or concrete.]"
On page 12 of the second edition of Bolsover's Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick booklet, published in March 1982, he repeats that lying CND quotation but falsely attributes it as a direct quotation from the U.S. Department of Defence book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons! Switching back to page 7 of Bolsover's first edition (May 1980), he rejects all the evidence of sharp burns shadows from Hiroshima, Nagasaki and nuclear tests which prove that the majority of the thermal radiation which causes burns travels in the direct line from the bomb:
"Some Government experts have maintained that because houses would shield each other from heat rays [simple line-of-sight shadowing of windows from the fireball; the blast wave arrives after most of the thermal flash energy delivery] a nuclear explosion over a British city would not cause a fire storm. [Wrong: Bolsover ignores the fact that unlike the areas of wooden buildings in the 1945 firestorm cities, modern cities are not built out of wood, but out of incombustible steel, concrete and brick.] This is not true. The heat from a nuclear explosion is reflected by clouds and diffused by the dust and mist that are always in the atmosphere, so that it appears to come from every direction at once. [Wrong: most sunlight comes directly from the direction of the sun, and the relative dimness of the blue sky around the sun shows that only a small fraction of the sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere. Cloud cover between the sun and you actually reduces the intensity of sunlight, and this shielding is even more effective for nuclear explosions on the horizon, where a great thickness of cloud lies between the fireball and you, reducing the threat. Scattered radiation was not significant at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or nuclear tests, as shown by the sharp shadowing effects which proved that burns were caused by direct, unscattered, line-of-sight thermal radiation. Even if there is a thick cloud layer above both the fireball and the target, the vast majority of the cloud reflected "Lambert plane" thermal radiation received by the target still comes from the direction of the explosion.]
"It is quite possible to be fatally burned by the flash of a nuclear explosion even if you are sheltering behind a brick wall, and it is possible for houses to be set on fire even if they are not in the direct line [of sight] of the explosion [Wrong: to get thermal radiation ignition of fires or burns outside from scattered thermal radiation, you would need to be so close to a bomb burst in a foggy atmosphere that the initial nuclear radiation and blast would be fatal, because at longer distances the fog would attenuate the thermal radiation to a trivial intensity.]"
On this last point, Bolsover quite apart from ignoring the attenuation of thermal radiation by fog (the omission of the effects of atmospheric visibility on thermal transmission is one of the failings of Glasstone and Dolan 1977), he is also ignoring the fact that highly scattered, diffusive thermal radiation, coming from many angles, is less effective in starting fires because it spreads out more (reducing the exposure per unit area, and thus the ignition risk) after entering a window than the line-of-sight direct radiation:
"In a room, for instance, the thermal radiation coming through the window would be spread over the walls and floor instead of falling on an area the size of the window."
- George R. Stanbury, ‘The Fire Hazard from Nuclear Weapons’, Fission Fragments, U.K. Home Office, Scientific Adviser’s Branch, London, No. 3, August 1962, pp. 22-6:
Having thus lied (by ignoring equivalent megatonnage) that nuclear blast destruction could be a more destructive than conventional weapons, and that World War II wooden city firestorm data is applicable to modern brick and concrete buildings, Bolsover then lies about radiation. Protect and Survive states:
"The further you can get within your home, from the radioactive dust that is on or around it, the safer you will be ... Still greater protection is necessary ... you should build an inner refuge."
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Nuclear War Survival Skills author Cresson H. Kearny explains how to do this simply in the YouTube video linked here (you just get cardboard boxes, line them with two plastic bags, and place them on and around a table for use as a shelter, then fill the plastic bag lined boxes up with water, or with anything else that is dense, e.g. soil or reasonably heavy household items such as books, clothing, bedding, etc., to absorb the gamma radiation coming in from fallout).
Alternatively, Protect and Survive points out that you can use the the cupboard under the stairs and pile items to absorb radiation on the stairs, and around the cupboard. Bolsover uses the biased BBC anti-nuclear propaganda Panorama documentary of 10 March 1980 to try to discredit Kearny's improvised core shelter:
"They [the BBC Panorama team] found that the householder would need 100 bags or similar containers [most rolls of plastic bags contain roughly that number], strength enough to lift a ton of earth [use water, clothing, bedding, books, etc., instead, carry water in buckets one at a time or use a hose pipe as Kearny does; you don't need to carry all the shielding matter in a single go, fallout is carried by the wind and takes time to arrive and be deposited, and more time is then needed to accumulate a radiation dose while it decays], and a number of floor joists to take the weight [simply use the ground floor for the refuge room in a house; in multistorey buildings floors are generally concrete and will provide adequate protection from fallout on the roof and "skyshine" scattered gamma rays without additional shielding]. ...
"You must, the Government tells you, be prepared to live in the fallout room with your family for 14 days [by which time 99.9% of the 1-hour fission product radioactivity level has decayed], after which you have been under your table or your doors for 48 hours [by which time 99% of the 1-hour fission product radioactivity has decayed]. Water is the first essential; you'll need three-and-a-half gallons for each person, but 'you should try to stock twice as much water as you'll need for drinking, so that you have enough for washing'. [If you use plastic bag lined boxes full of water for radiation shielding, you can use that water once most of the fallout radiation has decayed.]"
The fear-mongering BBC Panorama television programme propaganda of 10 March 1980 which falsely attacked Protect and Survive countermeasures achieved its anti-civil defence purpose, according to the following letter, published in the Guardian newspaper on 13 March 1980:
"Watching these programmes with an increasing feeling of distress and alarm, I realise that if there is to be a nuclear attack I do not want to survive and I do not want my children to survive. ... I do not want us to spend days and weeks behind an improvised and useless screen of sandbags and cushions, probably suffering agonies from radiation burns and sickness, aware that friends, neighbours and countless others are dead and dying.
"And if we were relatively unscathed and did come out after some time from our shelter, whatever sort of world would we find? How could we begin to cope with the destruction and the devastation, the lack of food, water, light, heat, communications, the knowledge of suffering all around, and the certainty that we ourselves were doomed to die, lingeringly and in pain ...
"My feeling at the moment is that if the unbelievable does happen, I want my preparation for it to be a pill for all of use, quick, painless and final."
Above: lethal fallout hazards are clearly visible (see post here for a photograph of lethal visible fallout hazards and Dr Miller’s photographs of individual fallout particles in his excellent report AD476572 linked here); for a burst on silicate soil the lethal close-in fallout consists of tiny, spherical, shiny marbles created from molten grains of soil which can easily be distinguished from normal dust. Fallout particles from other types of detonation also have distinctive features and it is easy to distinguish the type of burst from a glance at the appearance of the fallout particles: sea water surface bursts produce salt slurry fallout, bursts on steel towers or steel frame buildings have a black glossy appearance from the black iron(II) oxide, while bursts on calcium carbonate like limestone (or coral) produce grey/white calcium hydroxide fallout particles, like those on Rongelap and the Lucky Dragon fishing boat from the BRAVO nuclear test in 1954. As testified by the Scientific Director of that nuclear test, Dr Alvin C. Graves, to the U.S. Congressional Hearings on The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man back in June 1957, surface bursts deposit roughly 100 tons of soil for every kiloton of explosive yield (this was easily established from the specific radioactivity of the fallout, e.g. by measuring the number of fissions per gram from the radioactivity emitted; roughly 1% of the crater mass is sucked into the fireball and mushroom by the afterwinds), so dust or visible rainfall downwind of a nuclear explosion can be used as a simple indication of the need to evacuate or take cover: the fallout on Rongelap and the Lucky Dragon in 1954 was clearly visible and was compared to snowfall. While taking cover you can easily measure the radiation level without any special instruments simply by improvising a self-calibrating electroscope from a jar or can, a piece of metal cooking foil, some insulating thread or floss, and cling film.
See Kearny's Oak Ridge National Laboratory report linked here. It just consists of a jar or can containing two aluminium foil plates, made by folding standard aluminium cooking foil over a few times to give 8 ply/thicknesses, with each plate having sides about 4 by 3 cm long, in order to achieve calibration accuracy by geometry, see Kearny’s report ORNL-5040 which gives details of the calibration accuracy tests and dry bucket construction for high humidity conditions; an independent report linked here points out that in high humidity air the electroscope must be charged within the “dry bucket” described by Kearny in ORNL-5040 or the humid air will discharge a comb or rubbed plastic ruler before it can be used to charge the electroscope. Charging the plates using a rubbed plastic ruler or plastic comb, or by unwinding plastic tape quickly, makes the plates charge up with like charges, so that they repel each other, and move apart a considerable distance. Timing how long it takes for the places to fall together accurately tells you the fallout gamma radiation dose rate, because radiation ionizes the air, allowing the ions to carry away charge from the plates, so they no longer repel and thus they approach one another as seen in the dental X-ray demonstration.
Such radiation level measurements tell you the protective factor of a refuge and also tell you how long you need to either take shelter or evacuate for: you can easily estimate the total infinite time future dose from decaying fallout since it is roughly four times the beginning radiation level (in dose units per hour) multiplied by the time (in hours) after the explosion that exposure begins. The dose rate from fission products falls by a factor of 10 for every 7 fold increase in time until 200 days, and then it falls even faster. The total dose from a bomb with a cobalt jacket instead of uranium is actually less than that because each neutron absorbed by cobalt in the bomb leads to the release of a total of only 2.5 MeV of gamma radiation energy from cobalt-60, compared to uranium-238 when fissioned by one neutron, which emits 6 MeV as delayed fission product gamma rays, and about 200 MeV altogether! (Glasstone and Dolan, 1977, p. 12.) Total gamma radiation doses are approximately directly proportional to the total gamma ray energy emitted, so a uranium-238 jacket emits 6/2.5 = 2.4 times as much residual gamma radiation as a cobalt-60 jacket, and emits 200/2.5 = 80 times as much energy in total! This is why Stanley Kubrick's cobalt-60 hype is a complete lie: the fallout hazard from any design of nuclear weapon is always easily survivable. The relatively low decay rates of fallout nuclides with long half lives simply allows time for natural weathering or deliberate decontamination, before getting a significant dose from them.
On page 15, Bolsover lies about the effects of radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
"In March, 1977, 32 years after the two small atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were still 366,523 people registered as Hibakusha - sufferers from the effects of the bombs."
In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. (Data: Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pages 1-27.) Over 40 years, in 36,500 survivors monitored, there were 176 leukemia deaths which is 89 more than the control (unexposed) group got naturally. There were 4,687 other cancer deaths, but that was merely 339 above the number in the control (unexposed) group, so this is statistically a much smaller rise than the leukemia result. Natural leukemia rates, which are very low in any case, were increased by 51% in the irradiated survivors, but other cancers were merely increased by just 7%. Adding all the cancers together, the total was 4,863 cancers (virtually all natural cancer, nothing whatsoever to do with radiation), which is just 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, the total increase over the natural cancer rate due to bomb exposure was only 9%, spread over a period of 40 years. There was no increase whatsoever in genetic malformations.
See also the more extensive reviews of long term radiation effects in the recent blog posts on lying radiation effects exaggerations here and here.
Bolsover begins on page 1 of Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick (1st ed., May 1980) by stating that his motivation is the publication of Protect and Survive: "The Government has produced a pamphlet Protect and Survive which purports to provide us all with a do-it-yourself guide in nuclear war. The sale of this pamphlet is on one hand a careful political move at a time when efforts are being made to work up a renewal of the cold war; and on the other hand a mass confidence trick, a public fraud of the most heartless kind because it deals in human lives. ... Nuclear weapons - always more of them, always getting bigger [false: they had been getting smaller since the 1960s due to the development of MIRV technology, putting many very small warheads on one missile to avoid collateral damage by reducing the total yield, an effect of "equivalent megatonnage" which we will explain below] - have been a cloud on the far horizon, real, but not so real that people were forced to look at them steadily, to see what they could do to each one of us. ... How many will be contaminated inside the shelters; how many will be affected if they emerge for even a few minutes? How many will appear unaffected after an attack, but will, in fact, be in the first stages of a lingering death? ...
"1. We must throw away our costly, terribly dangerous nuclear weapons.
"2. We must tell the Americans we are not stupid enough to remain their advanced nuclear base; that we will not allow them to make our country a target by basing H-bombers, Cruise missiles and nuclear-armed submarines here. ... [Emphasis by Bolsover.]
"The Government would maintain that these proposals are not realistic. Mrs Thatcher might say in her best captain-of-the-school voice that they are wet. The Defence Minister and his generals would call them mad.
"But these people want us to sit under our tables to protect ourselves against H-bombs that have a power of millions of tons of dynamite. That idea is not so much wet as waterlogged."
The previous post compiled most of the strongest evidence available for backing the civil defence case (there is an additional compilation of relevant facts in the post linked here). Civil defence consists of the population knowing what to do to minimise the effects of terrorism, instead of giving in to terrorism. Moreover, it's effectiveness in Hiroshima was such that the casualty rate for randomly located people in concrete buildings was 120 times lower than outdoors, as proved by the fact that the median lethal distance for personnel in modern buildings was many times smaller than it was for personnel exposed, standing without any evasive action or cover, outdoors.
This is because unprepared people can easily be simultaneously subjected to several different effects from a nuclear detonation, e.g. blast wind drag, flying debris, thermal radiation, and nuclear radiation. Eliminating just one or two of the effects by duck or cover countermeasures therefore causes a disproportionate increase in survival probability simply by eliminating synergism (the fact that combined injuries are more lethal as a whole than the sum of risks if the injuries were received separately, a fact that also applies to aircraft!).
Above: nuclear radiation when received in addition to burns and blast injuries proves more lethal than the sum of the risks from the individual radiation, burns and blast injuries if received separately: this "synergism" is due to the way that radiation reduces the white blood cell count, and thus resistance to infections, for several weeks after exposure when burns and injuries from flying glass and other debris are healing. If the burns and blast effects are averted by simple "duck and cover" evasive action, then the LD50 for nuclear radiation is therefore dramatically increased. Synergism in humans is far greater than in mice, as seen when data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is compared to peacetime radiation accident data. (Illustration is taken from: T.C. Pellmar and G. D. Ledney, Combined Injury: Radiation in Combination with Trauma, Infectious Disease, or Chemical Exposures, U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, Bethesda, MD, NATO report RTG-099 2005.)
Ignoring practical limitations like anti-Civil Defence propaganda, you would find that it's "theoretically possible" for one rock to be used to kill an infinite number of people, if they meekly give in without a struggle or opposition. It's not possible to kill an infinite number of people by exploding one nuclear bomb: in fact, it's possible for most people to survive even very high yield deliverable nuclear explosions in modern brick and concrete cities (which are not built with medieval style crowded wooden buildings like Hamburg or Hiroshima), as proved by a detailed study of nuclear test effects. America, Russia, Britain, France and China tested 520 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, totalling 478.7 megatons, with a mean yield of 921 kilotons. The mean yield of the 5,192 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed Russian nuclear stockpile as of January 2009: 0.317 Mt. That's a total of 1,646 Mt, less than four times the total sum of atmospheric nuclear tests which have already taken place without destroying the ozone layer, causing a nuclear winter, or "overkilling" everybody. The mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile as of January 2007: 0.257 Mt. That's a total yield of 1,172 Mt, little more than twice the total yield of all the nuclear bombs tested in the atmosphere.
So a terrorist explodes a nuclear bomb. Light travels faster than air shock, so many people within range of window breakage effects would have the chance to duck and cover, or at least turn away, to reduce the risks of being blinded by flying glass. (As Glasstone noted, the eyes are relatively transparent - unlike skin - so they do not heat up to the same extent as skin, and - contrary to typical propaganda - nobody had their eyes "burned out" at Hiroshima. A small retinal burn with a minimal impact upon eyesight will occur if the fireball is within the field of view. Eyesight loss in Hiroshima was primarily due to flying glass fragments.)
Closer to the explosion, some people within buildings will be trapped by the collapse of those buildings. This isn't unprecedented or specifically a nuclear weapons problem. Buildings collapse in earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and conventional TNT bombing in warfare. The effects of area attacks by conventional bombing in World War II were often comparable to nuclear weapons effects due to the "equivalent megatonnage" two-thirds of yield scaling law: a single one megaton TNT bomb produces the same area of blast diffraction damage as not one million separate one-ton TNT bombs (which simple arithmetic tells you!), but to only 10,000 one ton TNT bombs, since 10,000(1/1,000,000)2/3 = 1(1)2/3.
So only 10 kt of TNT delivered as 1 ton bombs dropped randomly over a large area target will produce the same area destruction as a single 1 megaton bomb. The smaller the individual bomb size, the smaller the total number of bombs you need to deliver in order to produce the same amount of destruction you get from a single bomb. This is why the two megatons of total yield from the 11 million conventional bombs with an average yield of around 175 kg (according to the British Home Office, which measured the destruction in Britain from bombing in World War II, and organized rescue) dropped during World War II bombing is comparable to a nuclear war consisting of not merely 2 separate one megaton bombs dropped on cities, but to one consisting of 11,000,000(0.175/1,000,000)2/3 = 344 one megaton bombs, contrary to political propaganda which ignores the science and tries to compare the amount of energy.
In other words, the physical destruction of World War II was comparable to that caused in a nuclear war involving 344 nuclear weapons of one megaton yield each, dropped on cities. Stating this fact isn't a matter of our "minimising" the destruction of nuclear weapons, because World War II was the most destructive war in history, but it is about debunking lying exaggerations which are popularly believed due to false propaganda which makes civil defence appear hopeless.
The nuclear war equivalent of World War II would be even greater if we included the fact that the blast yield fraction from a nuclear bomb is less than that for the explosion of TNT, and there are other factors which would also influence the calculation, like the depletion of blast energy with distance in nuclear explosions due to the damage done, which introduces an extra exponential attenuation factor observed by Penney at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which acts to reduce the effective scaling law to less than the two-thirds power of yield, and thus suggests that even more nuclear weapons are needed to be equivalent to World War II destruction.
To demonstrate how well known equivalent megatonnage was in the 1980s, in 1983 Britain's 4 Polaris submarines each carried 16 SLBMs, each MIRVed with 3 warheads of 40 kilotons each; a total of 192 warheads and a linear sum of 7.68 megatons. But the equivalent megatonnage (EMT) was not 192(0.04) = 7.68 megatons, but 192(0.042/3) = 22.46 megatons. Having exactly the same total yield distributed over a greater number of low yield warheads increases the overall power, but when using low yield nuclear weapons (including neutron bombs) it reduces collateral damage because the area damaged by each individual bomb is smaller, and can be accurately targeted on military objectives, not innocent civilians. (The Polaris A3 missile was 9.45 m high, 1.37 m in diameter, 12.7 metric tons and had a range of 4,500 km with a maximum speed of 11,000 km/hour.)
Above: Figure 143 in the 1960 U.K. Home Office Civil Defence Handbook No. 7, Rescue, from pages 218-9 (this PDF link contains key pages from the 1952 Rescue manual, the 1957 Rescue instructors handbook and the 1960 Civil Defence Handbook No. 7, Rescue):
"Specially trained dogs were used with conspicuous success on a number of occasions during the later stages of the last war, and proved their value as an adjunct to rescue reconnaissance, especially in the 'third stage of rescue' [i.e. the exploration of likely survival points in heavily damaged buildings; which comes after firstly giving first aid to casualties found outdoors and secondly performing immediate, quick light rescue in lightly or moderately damaged buildings]. A searching dog, trained to locate human scent, can lead to a very considerable saving of time and labour in the definite location and extrication of casualties. The dogs when brought to the scene of rescue operations can often quickly provide an indication of a trapped or buried person which might take some time to determine by normal rescue reconnaissance methods. Highly trained dogs and handlers may well play an important part in rescue operations in any future war ..."
Now we know that World War II air raids with hundreds of heavy bombers dropping kilotons of bombs in single air raids was comparable to nuclear air burst explosions over cities like Hiroshima (the firestorms at Hamburg and other European cities were even worst than that at Hiroshima), we can use that experience to look at what can be done about rescuing survivors trapped under rubble close to ground zero after a nuclear explosion. The point is, the U.K. Home Office Civil Defence Rescue Manual (H. M. Stationery Office, London, 1st edition, 1952; revised in 1960 as the 260 pages Civil Defence Handbook No. 7, Rescue although the revisions were purely to the new backpack rescue equipment and the Preface on page iii states: "In this handbook, which is a revised edition of the Rescue Manual, no changes have been made in the principles of rescue techniques", and Civil Defence Instructors Notes, Rescue Section (H. M. Stationery Office, London, 1st edition, 1957) are not based on either "arm chair theory" nor even on peacetime disasters and the experience of the fire brigade in rescuing people after gas vapour explosions in houses.
Above: the 1960 Civil Defence Handbook No. 7, Rescue, was based on the practical experience of World War II bombing, when repeated attacks by bomber aircraft, V1 subsonic cruise missiles and V2 inertially guided supersonic rockets led to an effective rescue scheme. As shown in the previous post, the greatest casualty rate is always to personnel standing outside: they get physically blown off their feet and carried by the blast winds, sustaining injury upon impact and also being hit by flying debris (especially window glass fragments and roof tiles). They are the first to be rescued and given first aid first. Then lightly to moderately damaged buildings are searched and marked when cleared of trapped casualties. Finally, voids in heavily damaged buildings are assessed for trapped casualties by trained dogs, and outdoor rubble blocking streets is removed quickly by bulldozers to permit heavy rescue including cranes and other mechanical aids, to temporarily shore up debris against further collapse, allowing the rapid yet safe extrication of trapped survivors during World War II air raids. Notice the last illustration above, showing the improvised use of doors or other suitable items salvaged from rubble debris as stretchers. The civil defence training stresses the fact that the enormous scale of destruction in a nuclear attack on a city necessitates training in several expedient or improvisation techniques including the use of debris as stretchers, and the supervision of large numbers of untrained personnel in rescue (unlike standard fire brigade training).
Most peacetime fire brigade experience has little validity in the mass casualty situation of an air raid during a war in which repeated attacks are being made, because vast numbers of houses are devastated almost simultaneously and heavy equipment must be used to safely extricate people very quickly, before they die due from dust and smoke inhalation, fallout radiation dose accumulation, or exposure to further attacks (nuclear, chemical or conventional) due to the war. During World War II, civil defence rescue teams were perpetually ready for gas attacks, not just conventional bombing. After massive area bombing incidents, rescue parties were prepared to use doors and blankets as improvised stretchers, and rescue party teams were prepared to supervise untrained personnel in emergency light rescue work, maximizing efficiency, which is not included in peacetime fire brigade training. Such improvised means for mass rescue and first aid after a nuclear attack were absent at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where surveys showed that few survivors offered assistance to others, due to disorganization stemming from a lack of preparation and training. During the Cold War, the 1960 restricted Civil Defence Pocket Book No. 2, Military Support in Civil Defence, showed that military personnel would be deployed for basic radiation monitoring, reconnaissance of damaged areas, light rescue and first aid, in order to relieve pressure on civil defence resources. Radiation dangers in a nuclear war situation emphasise the need to rapidly extricate and evacuate trapped survivors before fallout radiation doses become excessive. As explained in testimony by Dr Kellogg to Congress in 1957 (quoted in the earlier post linked here), this is because fallout, like other nuclear effects, does not travel and descend instantaneously; there is plenty of evidence from the tests of Castle and Redwing that the biggest bombs which contaminate the largest areas have the longest fallout arrival times near the detonation (for the 14.8 Mt Bravo test the fallout arrival on islands and lagoon rafts directly under the mushroom was well instrumented using special "incremental fallout collector" machines which consecutively exposed a series of fallout collection trays to fallout, showing a mean fallout arrival time of 28 minutes after detonation actually under the mushroom head, with a peak dose rate at about 65 minutes, according to the weapon test report WT-915), which is due to the higher mushroom cloud in such big explosions and thus the extra delay time for the descent of the large fallout particles from that great altitude (see the nuclear weapon test reports linked here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
In very low yield detonations like the 1.2 kt Sugar test in the Nevada in 1951, fallout under the mushroom cloud occured much sooner (immediately downwind of the crater it began arriving within 2-3 minutes), but the fallout danger areas were much smaller in such low-yield detonations, so that anybody could simply walk or run in the cross-wind direction out of the visibly contaminated area, well before receiving a lethal fallout dose. For example, Edward A. Schuert's U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report WT-1465 (document ADA304431), Operation Plumbbob: Fallout Studies and Assessment of Radiological Phenomena, shows in Fig. 4.1 that fallout under the mushroom (at one statute mile downwind) from the 1957 Plumbbob-Diablo test (17 kt atop a 500 foot high steel tower) began at 6 minutes after detonation and the dose rate peaked at 15 minutes; Fig. 4.2 shows that at 2.5 miles downwind of Plumbbob-Shasta (again 17 kt atop a 500 ft steel tower) fallout began at 8 minutes and the dose rate peaked at 18 minutes.
In 1951, George R. Stanbury and others at the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch did experiments on the rescue of personnel from areas contaminated with simulated radioactive fallout: The hazard from inhaled fission products in rescue operations after an atomic bomb explosion, report CD/SA 23. Stanbury was able to investigate nuclear weapons test fallout hazards when surveying damage to civil defence structures in Monte Bello, after the first British nuclear test of 1952 which he attended. So there was no "armchair theory" involved in determining that casualties could be rescued after a nuclear attack (unlike the ignorant critics of civil defence).
Another well known factor demanding prompt action to release trapped survivors is that casualties who are trapped and crushed under a mass of rubble (not merely surviving in a void in the rubble) must be extricated and given plenty of fluid rapidly, because removing weights from trapped, crushed personnel causes the toxins (which have built up in the blood-starved muscles) to enter the blood stream and cause potentially fatal kidney damage. This danger can only be averted by the early removal of casualties and by giving them plenty of fluid (to dilute toxins in the blood stream to below the fatal concentration), either before or immediately upon removal. The risks of injuring people by immediately using bulldozers and cranes to quickly remove rubble and get straight to trapped survivors was found to be much smaller in World War II London, when using dogs to first quickly survey rubble for survivor locations than the risk of killing people by the delays caused by insisting on the very slow "safe" hand-removal of street rubble (which in practice could never be completed without mechanical assistance in time to recover trapped survivors alive before another enemy air raid):
"In the last war it was found that at major incidents the use of heavy mechanical plant was frequently necessary in support of rescue operations. Such equipment was used in the quick removal of debris; to lift blocks of brickwork or masonry; to take the weight of collapsed floors and girders so that voids could be explored and casualties extricated; to haul off twisted steelwork and other debris and to break up sections of reinforced concrete.
"In future all these tasks may be required and heavy clearance may have to be effected to enable rescue and other Civil Defence vehicles to approach within measurable distance of their tasks. The problem of debris will be fact be a major factor in Civil Defence operations.
"Heavy mechanical plant may be required for the following purposes:
"(a) To assist in the removal of persons injured or trapped. At this stage mainly heavy plant is needed, particularly mobile cranes with sufficient length of boom or jib to reach for long distances over the wreckage of buildings.
"(b) To force a passage for Civil Defence vehicles and fire appliances to enable them to reach areas where major rescue and other problems exist and require urgent operational action.
"(c) To make certain safety measures - e.g., to pull down unsafe structures.
"(d) To clear streets and pavements to help restore communications and to afford access for the repair of damaged mains and pipes beneath the streets.
"(e) For the final clearance of debris and the tidying of sites. This is a long term and not an operational requirement.
"Urgent Rescue Operations
"During rescue operations in London in the last war the machines used with great success included heavy 3.5-5 ton mobile cranes, mounted on road wheels, with a 30-40 ft jib; medium heavy 2-3.5 ton mobile cranes, mounted on road wheels, with a 26 ft jib; heavy crawler [tracked] tractor bulldozers; medium crawler [tracked] tractor bulldozers]; mechanical shovels and compressors, three stage, mounted on road wheels.
"In the case of a large or multiple incident where access was obstructed by considerable quantities of scattered debris, a bulldozer or tractor was first employed in order to clear one or more approaches by which other equipment and personnel could reach the scene of operations.
"Next, all debris of manhandling size was loaded into one-yard skips and discharged by the crane into lorries, giving increased manoeuvring space to the Services operating on the site.
"Heavy mobile cranes were then brought up to the incident where, used under the skilled direction of the rescue party Leader, they were invaluable for removing girders and large blocks of masonry which obstructed access to casualties or persons trapped. The necessary chains and wire ropes for these operations formed part of the standard equipment of the heavy and medium-heavy mobile cranes.
"The work was, of course, carried out in close co-operation with the Rescue Parties who also used various forms of light mechanical equipment, such as jacks and ratchet lifting tackle for work in confined spaces.
"Compressors sometimes proved valuable for breaking up large masonry such as fallen walls, into sections of a size and weight within the handling and lifting capacity of the cranes. This method was only ever used when it was known [using witnesses and dogs] that there were no casualties under the masonry.
"Mobile cranes and other heavy mechanical plant were withdrawn as soon as all casualties had been removed, to be available for use at other incidents."
- Home Office Civil Defence Rescue Manual, H. M. Stationery Office, London, 1952, chapter XI: Use of Heavy Mechanical Plant in Rescue, Demolition and Clearance Operations, pp. 97-98.
There are summaries of the effects of some of the individual V1 cruise missile and V2 inertially guided rocket effects on London and the Home Counties of England linked here. Both the V1 and the V2 carried warheads approximately equivalent to 1 ton of TNT. The V1 travelled subsonically, allowing air raid warnings and at least duck and cover protection against displacement and flying debris. The V2, by contrast, was a supersonic rocket, so the first sound from it was the blast wave of the explosion itself, giving no effective warning. A comparison of the effects of the two weapons indicates the usefulness of warning. For instance, the maximum number of people ever killed by a V1 was 76 (at Korte van Ruysbroeckstraat, Antwerp, 8:19 pm on 21 January 1945), while the maximum number of people killed by the V2 was 567 (Cinema Rex, Avenue de Keyser, Antwerp, 3:23 pm on 16 December 1944).
The political aspects of CND's attack on Civil Defence
We have examined chain of influence from the Soviet Union's "World Peace Council" propaganda bureau and CND in a previous post in detail. The CND tactics and the events of the 1980s mirrored the events of the 1930s, except that the free elected democracy remained strong in the 1980s and kept ahead of the dictatorship instead of pursuing appeasement and weakness as occurred in the 1930s which caused World War II. In the House of Commons "Civil Defence" debate of 20 February 1980, the Minister of State for the British Home Office, Leon Brittan, stated that civil defence backs up the credible deterrence of evil and therefore forces an arms race:
"It is important to consider the relationship between civil defence and military defence, as my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell pointed out. Our central military strategy is to deter attack by an aggressor, and civil defence contributes to deterrence. Indeed, it is essential that our civil preparedness should be adequate if the credibility of our deterrent strategy is to be maintained. Our military preparedness and our civil preparedness are therefore closely related, and we must make sure that the balance between the two is sensible and realistic."
In the same "Civil Defence" debate, Mr. Archie Hamilton stated:
"We know that the Soviet Union dominates the world. Recent experience in Afghanistan proves that. It is prepared to exploit any weakness that it may find. ... The advantage held by the Soviet Union is that it is on the attack while we are on the defensive. In a democracy it is harder to prepare for war. There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviet Union will use military means when it believes that that will achieve its aims at acceptable cost.
"Britain is almost totally dependent on our nuclear deterrent. Unfortunately, our conventional forces are insignificant in comparison with the vast conventional forces of the Soviet bloc. Nuclear weapons will deter only if this country is prepared to use them. If the Soviet Union feels that we are not prepared to use them, the invasion of Britain may come into the category of an acceptable loss.
"I believe that the Soviet Union is entitled to take the view that, as we have no civil defence worth speaking of, at the same time we have no wish to use our nuclear weapons and virtually no will to resist."
In the previous post, we made the point that in 1932 former and future Prime Minister Baldwin openly claimed in the House of Commons that there is no protection possible against air raids, encouraging the secret rearmament of fascist states. Then, once the threat had been produced by the denial of civil defence countermeasures, the Government in 1938 had to issue to every household in Britain The Protection Of Your Home Against Air Raids. Similarly, Bolsover in each edition (1980 and 1982) of Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick quotes denials of civil defence from various personalities ignorant of the facts concerning the effects of nuclear weapons:
"In the event of nuclear war ... there will be no survivors - all will be obliterated. ... the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. [Wrong: the arms race bankrupted and thus defeated the Soviet Union!]"
- Lord Louis Mountbatten, former Chief of the British Defence Staff, speech at Strasbourg, 11 May 1979.
"As our own White Paper put it as long ago as 1957, there was then no means of protecting the population against the consequences of a nuclear war. There are none today ... [Wrong!]"
- Lord Zuckerman, Chief Scientific Adviser to the War Office, 1964-71, letter to The Times, 21 January 1980.
"The survivors, of any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide."
- President Carter's 15 January 1981 farewell speech following Reagan's election.
"... after exposure to a high dose of radiation some animal or plant species will suffer much more than others and this will seriously upset the ecological balance. For example, the killing of birds may result in a large increase in insect populations, which are much less sensitive to radiation, and this in turn would cause enormous damage to plants. A rapid increase in insect population, particularly disease vectors, may have serious effects on the health of both man and animals. Other important ecological consequences of a nuclear war may result from large-scale fires ... [Wrong: Rotblat just considered gamma radiation whereas insects are so small that they are fried or sterilized by short-range beta radiation which cannot penetrate through the feathers of birds or the clothes of people; see the extensive 1966 research on beta effects from fallout upon insects by Joseph D. Teresi and Curtis L. Newcombe, An Estimate of the Effects of Fallout Beta Radiation on Insects and Associated Invertebrates, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report AD0633024]"
- Nobel Laureate Joseph Rotblat, Professor of Physics, London University, Nuclear Radiation in Warfare, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1981.
The effectiveness of "duck and cover" against explosion produced flying debris and bodily displacement by blast winds is the whole basis for taking cover on a battlefield: it is not propaganda or trickery. Under random bombardment by high explosive shells, troops lying down in the open are only 40% as likely to be killed by blast as those standing up with the whole body area exposed to the blast winds and horizontally travelling debris. Troops in shell craters or ditches had only 20% of the mortality risk of those standing in the open. (Those in open trenches had only 10% of the risk of being killed as those standing in the open, while for those in thick earth-covered trench shelters the risk was only 1% of that from standing in the open.) The value of "duck and cover" against nuclear weapons is even greater, because in addition to protection from blast winds and debris, it easily eliminates the main danger from the direct thermal radiation to bare skin and part of the direct nuclear radiation due to self-shielding along the long axis of the body.
Bolsover's CND Propaganda and the Neutron Bomb
The greatest deception CND ever did (with Soviet Union "World Peace Council" propaganda backing) was lying about Samuel Cohen's neutron bomb. On page 22 of the May 1980 1st edition of Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick Bolsover states:
"If such a [unilateral disarmament] movement is strong enough, nothing can stand against it - Government policies can be changed, decisions cancelled, bases dismantled, weapons scrapped. The campaign against the neutron bomb is an example. When America proposed to arm NATO forces with this horrible [tactical, anti-tank, rather than collateral damage causing] weapon - to bring it to European countries [to negate the superior Soviet/Warsaw Pact conventional forces and tank invasion threat], and of course Britain - a massive campaign forced the postponement and possible cancellation of the project. It can be done again."
We gave the facts of the neutron bomb previously, e.g., here (RERF cover-up), here (history of radiation effects lies by geneticists who ignorant of DNA repair enzymes, yet asserted in 1957 that they knew things they didn't), here (Samuel Cohen's latest book), and here (full scientific details and political history/propaganda of deployment).
President John F. Kennedy on the need for British civil defence to credibly deter thugs
Future U.S. President John F. Kennedy worked in the American Embassy in London while Britain was trying to prevent war by falsely claiming civil defence is just a "fraud and a plot of Ministers to create a war psychology", and compiled vital information about it in his published 1940 thesis called Why England Slept (which we have already quoted in the previous post in connection to Sir Edward Grey's propaganda about the cause of World War I, which was largely his fault as blundering British Foreign Minister). Kennedy wrote in Why England Slept that public apathy in England towards civil defence encouraged fascist aggression by sending Hitler the message that Britain was unprepared to really threaten to stop the Nazis:
"In England we can see vividly where democracy failed. In the case of A.R.P. [Air Raid Precautions, later renamed civil defence], for example, the Government failed to get enough volunteers until after the Munich crisis had driven home the seriousness of the situation. But Germany had 12,000,000 members by 1936 ... We cannot tell anyone to keep out of our hemisphere unless our armaments and the people behind these armaments [emphasis by Kennedy] are prepared to back up the command ..."
For this reason, Kennedy refused in Why England Slept to place the blame for Nazi appeasement on the Prime Minister (Chamberlain). Kennedy quotes Herbert Morrison, the Labour Leader in 1939, describing as follows the severe Labour Party abuse he received about civil defence, the main objections being completely paranoid and to a certain extent also contradictory, namely that (1) civil defence is obviously so very effective it will produce a war psychology, intimidating Hitler, and that (2) civil defence is obviously so very ineffective that it is a complete fraud:
"At the beginning I got plenty of abuse from the irresponsibles because I said that Labour administrators must play their full part in Air Raid Precautions, which was denounced as a fraud and a plot of Ministers to create war psychology. For Labour local authorities to cooperate with state departments in this task was treachery. Anyway, no Air Raid Precautions could possibly be effective [the quacks alleged]."
This 1930s attack on civil defence by irresponsible, paranoid Labour authorities was repeated in 1982 when Britain's Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, was forced to cancel the civil defence exercise "Hard Rock" after 24 of 52 Labour county councils refused to cooperate. President Ronald Reagan's American civil defence program met exactly the same fate:
"New York City's City Council voted to reject the Reagan Administration's Crisis Relocation Plan and New York Mayor Ed Koch stated that it would be 'impossible to evacuate in any timely, acceptible way.' Hundreds of local governments throughout the nation also refused to cooperate with the new federally sponsored civil defence program even before it was funded."
- Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, 1982.
As discussed in the previous post, President Kennedy in Why England Slept attributes the problem of appeasement to Sir Edward Grey's excuse for blunders he made as Foreign Secretary which led to World War I:
"The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable."
- Sir Edward Grey, quoted by Kennedy, Why England Slept.
Actually, Grey was lying because the first declaration of war in World War I was by Germany and if he had clearly communicated Britain's position to Germany before it mobilized, instead of obfuscating in inept indecision and political fear, World War I Prime Minister Lloyd George was certain the disaster was not stopped by Grey's incompetence:
"It is a mistaken view of history to assume that its episodes were entirely due to fundamental causes ... and that they were not precipitated or postponed by the intervention of personality ... Of one thing there can be no doubt; he [British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey] failed calamitously in his endeavours to avert the Great War ... [failures which were caused by] Grey's hesitations during the fateful days when the thunderclouds were deepening and rapidly darkening the sky ..."
- David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 1933.
"In 1914, Grey played a key role in the July Crisis leading to the outbreak of World War I. His attempts to mediate the dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia by a "Stop in Belgrade" came to nothing, owing to the tepid German response. He also failed to clearly communicate to Germany that a breach of the treaty not merely to respect but also to protect the neutrality of Belgium — of which both Britain and Germany were signatories — would cause Britain to declare war against Germany. When he finally did make such communication, German forces were already massed at the Belgian border, and Helmuth von Moltke convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II it was too late to change the plan of attack. Thus when Germany declared war on France (3 August) and broke the treaty by invading Belgium (4 August), the British Cabinet voted almost unanimously to declare war on August 4, 1914." - Wikipedia.
Kennedy explains in Why England Slept the indirect role of Grey's World War I excuse in causing World War II:
"Armaments were looked upon as something horrible, as being the cause of war, not a means of defence. Again and again, through the 'thirties, opponents of rearament quoted Grey ... Closely linked with this attitude towards armaments and the League [of Nations] was the great hope the British people put into their efforts towards disarmament in general ..."
To demonstrate the value of civil defence, consider the following facts. In 1938, Britain had 38 million gas masks manufactured and ready for issue, while Germany had only 9 million in 1939 due to a rubber shortage (although Hitler was invading European countries, none had tropical rubber trees, unlike British colonies). According to Moore (1987), Germany had 10,000 tons of poison gas ready for use in 1939, while Britain had only 1,000 tons. Did England's gas masks make Germany use gas against England? No, having civil defence instead helps to deter an attack. Another factor is the wind direction and speed, which - as in the case of nuclear fallout - does not increase the confidence of offensive military planners in such weapons: the only reliable thing about gas or nuclear fallout is the fact that they will cause civilian panic if the population is scared, unprepared and ignorant. (This applies to the 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas the Nazis produced during World War II, which would have been absorbed by the activated charcoal in all British gas masks carried all the time by everyone; skin absorption lethality requires much higher doses than inhalation.)
It is important to point out that innocent Jews were being herded into concentration camps or otherwise abused by the Nazis during the 1930s, while Hitler invaded country after country and disarmament fanatics quoted Grey's lie and attacked the civil defence which was needed to allow Britain to deter Hitler: on 2 August 1937, the British Manchester Guardian newspaper openly published the fact that no less than 40 concentration camps were then under construction in Germany. Nobody cared. In 1938, the 209th (revised) edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf was openly published stating on page 372 for the first time clearly stating that he wanted the Jewish problem to be "ausgerottet". Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels insisted that the ends justify the means in his speech at Stuttgart on 4 September 1938: "The methods by which a people forces its way upwards are of no moment; only the goal which is achieved is important."
Likewise, the Bolshevik communist Yaroslavsky declared: "Whatever coincides with the interests of the Proletarian Revolution is ethical." (Watkins, 1978.)
America had 3,000,000 troops in Europe in 1945, but by 1947 the number had fallen to below 500,000, while the Soviet Union had been expanding. Within seven years of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin had occupied ten additional countries including Armenia, Belorussia, Georgia, Outer Mongolia, and the Ukraine. Together with the Nazis, the Soviet Union jointly invaded Poland in 1939 and by the end of 1940 under the Nazi-Soviet Pact they had acquired Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldavia. As a result of World War II, by 1947 the Soviet Union had also acquired Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania. But the first flashpoint was Berlin, surrounded by the Soviet acquired East German territory, leading to the Berlin blockade by the Soviets from 1948-9: the Soviets tried to "peacefully" starve Berlin into submission and surrender, and only failed due to a massive airlift of food and supplies.
After World War II, President Truman slashed the American military from 12 million to 1.5 million personnel with the military budget falling from £90 billion/year to just $11 billion/year. This was reflected by the renaming of the U.S. War Department the "Department of Defense" in 1949 (Britain's War Office was renamed the "Ministry of Defence" on April fools day in 1963). This post war disarmament was not mirrored by the Soviet Union, which acquired Czechoslovakia in a Soviet organized coup in 1948 and Hungary in 1949, the year the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon. In 1950, the Soviet Union backed a communist revolutionary war in Korea which was one step too far for President Truman, who explained his defence of Korea (using conventional weapons) on 10 April 1951:
"In the simplest terms what we are doing in Korea is this: we are trying to prevent a Third World War ... The communists in the Kremlin are engaged in a monstrous conspiracy to stamp out freedom all over the world."
But, as explained in a previous post, President Truman made the error of giving a personal guarantee to Britain's Prime Minister Attlee that he would under no circumstances use nuclear weapons to defend Korea, which communist spies in the British government leaked to the Kremlin, effectively giving them a free hand to do whatever they wanted in Korea until the election of President Eisenhower, who took a stronger approach and finally ended the war in 1953:
"... it was a vindication of the strategy of the nuclear deterrent. It was only when they thought atomic weapons were about to be used against them that the Communists concluded an armistice agreement. This fact is still not fully appreciated in the West."
- Major Edgar O'Ballance (1918-2009), Korea: 1950-1953, 1969.
Korea checked Soviet territorial expansion and accelerated the arms race while they sought military superiority over the free world. The terrific bombing in Vietnam during the Cold War was due to very strong communist diehard idealists, demonstrating the problems of trying to impose capitalist democracy on primitive societies. France's war against communist insurgency in Vietnam after World War II was first supported by President Eisenhower on 8 May 1953, when he announced $60 million support. However the Pentagon Papers showed that he also stated in 1953:
"I can conceive of no greater tragedy than for the U.S. to become involved in an all-out war in Indiochina [Vietnam]."
France was defeated in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, where 6,000 French troops were killed or wounded and 10,000 were captured. Vietnam was consequently divided on a piece of paper at Geneva on 21 July 1954, with democracy in the South and communists in the North, and Eisenhower supported the South. The communists in the North then fought a war of terrorism against the South which was unable to support itself without American backing, escalating gradually into the heaviest conventional bombing war in history by the late 1960s. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union ruthlessly suppressed uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Prague (1968).
During this time, there were repeated calls for disarmament in the belief that it would increase security, despite the fact that British disarmament after World War I reduced security and led to World War II, as was well appreciated back in 1946:
"In a world made bombless by treaty, the first to violate the treaty would gain an enormous advantage. Under such conditions the opportunities for world dominance would be breathtaking!"
- Frederick S. Dunn, The Common Problem, in Bernard Brodie (Ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, 1946.
Another delusion is economic interdependence, which was claimed to be a means to make war impossible. This is debunked because in 1914, Britain and Germany were each other's "biggest trading partner" but still went to war (as pointed out by the Tofflers in War and Antiwar, 1993, who also emphasise that the Cold War was in some respects as devastating as a World War, since 8.4 million soldiers were killed in World War II compared to 7.2 million soldiers killed in 155 conflicts during the Cold War period of 1945-92).
By the early 1970s, the arms race against America was becoming a heavy burden upon the Soviet Union. On 11 June 1971 even Premier Leonid Brezhnev (the Soviet leader from 1964-1982) admitted in his propaganda speech called "Achieving International Peace" that there was an effect of the arms race upon Soviet economic development, and called for an end to the need for more arms by encouraging Western disarmament fanatics and Vietnam peace protestors to lobby their governments for peaceful surrender to communist aggression:
"Socialism is sufficiently strong to ensure both reliable defences and economic development, although it is true that without the great expenditure on defence we would have ensured a much faster advance of our economy ... In the United States the 'Peace' movement is assuming an increasingly mass-scale and is bringing strong pressure to bear on the government. Resistance to the increase in military spending is growing in other NATO countries, too."
Brezhnev had used Soviet tanks to brutally suppress the unarmed 1968 Prague Spring reformers who wanted more freedom, just as his predecessor Khrushchev had used tanks to suppress the Hungarian uprising in 1956. His definition of "peace" therefore differed from the one used by Jesus. Brezhnev funded a Moscow-based "World Peace Council" to globally exaggerate and misrepresent the effects of nuclear weapons in order to encourage citizens of nuclear defended democracies to demonstrate against their weapons. Moscow's World Peace Council funded propaganda and the demonstrations it produced was successful in forcing President Carter to delay the deployment of Samuel Cohen's neutron bomb, which was purely about deterring massed tank invasions of the type used in Hungary 1956 and Prague 1968, without fallout or collateral blast damage risks, and it boosted CND too.
The economic decay of the Soviet Union under drug addict Premier Brezhnev
The American defence budged increased dramatically during the Vietnam era after 1965, with the Vietnam War, but the arms race cost the Soviet Union even more, and the stresses upon Premier Brezhnev had made him drug dependent, addicted to sedatives as explained by Daniel Wolf in his article "The Bizarre Secrets of a Lost Empire", published in Sunday Times, 12 February 1995:
"November, 1974. In sub-zero temperatures, Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet general secretary, waved to Gerald Ford as the US president entered Airforce One to return to Washington DC. The two leaders had just completed a summit meeting about strategic nuclear arms limitation, and Brezhnev was pleased with the results. ... He and the Soviet Union were at the pinnacle of their power: they had strategic nuclear parity with the United States and were supporting a wave of successful national liberation struggles in the Third World. But on that bitter winter evening Brezhnev was falling apart, as the state he ran was beginning to do. ... Brezhnev's personal doctor between 1975 and 1982 maintains that he had taken a drug overdose ... 'So let me make it clear: Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was taking sedatives and tranquillisers, but in such huge quantities that he was effectively a drug addict. We always called them 'sedatives' to avoid stating the facts, and he would too, to fool himself, but it wasn't the truth.'
"The truth is that, for the last seven years of his life, Brezhnev was a mental cripple. His doctors needed four to six weeks to prepare him for public meetings, and even then things would go wrong: film of Brezhnev's public speeches in the late 1970s shows a decrepit amnesiac who could hardly mouth even the robotic language of Soviet-speak.
"Some people close to Brezhnev found it convenient to keep him in this state: the country was run by a ''troika'' KGB chief Yuri Andropov, defence minister Dimitri Ustinov and, looming over them, the ''grey cardinal'', Mikhail Suslov, sour and pedantic guardian of the ideology, the sacred texts that justified their every action. Between them, these men had power without responsibility: if things went wrong, they could always blame Brezhnev.
"The story of Brezhnev's addiction is not just a bizarre tale of the truth behind the facade: it is a perfect cameo of the Soviet system. It was a world of absolute secrecy and ultimate absurdity. The passion for secrecy was an essential component of the system, a logical consequence of its origins as a conspiratorial regime built up by a small group of fanatics. ... perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Brezhnev-era offensive was the Soviet attempt to win the battle of ideas by fostering the western peace movement of the late 1970s. The Russians tried very hard to stoke up the peace movement, and their paw marks can be found all over some of the main events, particularly the neutron bomb and cruise missile campaigns. Their operations have been known about in the intelligence and foreign affairs community for some years, but this is the first time that senior Soviet figures of the time have admitted it on camera. ...
"Soviet central committee documents confirm that by 1976 the leadership was committed to fostering the peace movement. Its chance was just around the corner. In the mid-1970s KGB intelligence learned that America was developing the neutron bomb, a weapon with lower blast and higher radiation emissions than conventional nuclear weapons.
"According to General Nikolai Leonov, KGB head of analysis, the Russians knew in advance about the neutron bomb. This allowed them to launch an extensive and co-ordinated propaganda campaign the very moment that President Jimmy Carter announced, in July 1977, the weapon's development and possible deployment in Europe.
"There were shoals of Moscow radio propaganda broadcasts; 28 communist parties published statements denouncing the ''barbarous nature'' of the weapon; an ''International Week of Action'' was called by the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council for August 1977. Hundreds of meetings, demonstrations and protests were organised across the world.
"In Britain, when we examined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) archives, we confirmed that peace campaigning was a big part of communist activities. Communists were certainly active in CND: the chairman of CND at that time, John Cox, was a well-known party member and former member of the executive committee of the CPGB (1971-73). In the mid-1970s, two of CND's three full-time workers were Communist party members. In Holland epicentre of the Soviet campaign communists were prominent and successful. ...
"The anti-neutron-bomb campaign was the breakthrough for the Russians, and the peace movement took off. In the end, it was a close-run thing. A few years later, hundreds of thousands came out on the streets to protest at the siting of missiles, and western governments only just held their nerve. One of the leading figures in the Soviet peace campaign, Tair Tairov, believes it was a good thing that they did. 'If they hadn't, that would have given the Soviet leadership a false argument, or a distorted vision of their power, which they would have misused. Moscow would have celebrated, started dictating to Western Europe, and that perhaps could have brought on a real tragedy...'
"To understand these East-West confrontations, you have to start with the ideological claim of the party. The Soviet Union was not just a state but a mission: it existed to lead the working class to communism all over the world. By that mission, party leaders from Lenin through Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev justified their power over all aspects of Soviet life. Without the mission, what would the party leaders be but just another bunch of criminal dictators battening on a ravaged, bleeding nation? With it, they were messengers of an 'inevitable' future.
"In the words of Mikhail Kapitsa, former deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union: 'This ideology cost us billions and billions. Billions for nothing. Billions for just ideas.'
"The best proof that the Soviet Union was the ideology came with its collapse. In the summer of 1988, Eduard Shevardnadze, then foreign minister, announced the abandonment of the central ideological principle, ''the class struggle in international relations''. The trouble was that without the ideology, the whole gigantic, ruinous structure made no sense. Within a year the Berlin Wall had fallen. Within three, the Soviet Union was no more."
Phil Bolsover in the Foreword to the March 1982 second edition of his CND pamphlet Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick, states:
"Since this pamphlet was first published early in 1980, the movement for nuclear disarmament in Britain has been transformed by an astonishing increase in national support. National membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has grown from 2,500 to (at the time of writing) 40,000, with local group membership estimated at 300,000. Many new local organisations with the same basic aims as CND have been set up all over the country. ... 250,000 people marched through London in October 1981, to protest against nuclear weapons ...
"Of course the Government itself had been partly responsible for the revival of the nuclear disarmament campaign. In 1979-80, at a time of heightened international tension [due to the Brezhnev's Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to impose communist dictatorship], it made three important decisions: it decided to spend £5,000 million (later estimates said £7,000 million) on four Trident submarines, one of the most destructive weapons ever invented; it agreed to install 160 American owned and operated cruise missiles in Britain, and it issued Protect and Survive."
On page 56 of that edition, Bolsover points out that Protect and Survive was published after John F. Wallace (member of NATO's Civil Defence Committee) in the February 1980 NATO Review wrote:
"In the final analysis, the military ability to fight, and even to survive, is going to depend on what is happening in the civil sector."
Civil defence in British mainstream Party Politics
In 1935, the then Labour Party Leader in Britain, Clement Attlee (who later - when Prime Minister - secretly ordered the clandistine manufacture of Britain's first nuclear bomb), declared:
"There is no security in armaments, and we shall be no party to piling them up."
(Quoted in Gilbert and Gott, The Appeasers, 1967.)
The Labour Party was in opposition to the Conservatives who were in power, and who were already appeasing Hitler in the belief that "peaceful co-existence" with the Nazis was possible and desirable, compared to the risk from confrontation and war. This was due essentially to (1) the lying popular exaggeration of the effects of aerial bombardment, and (2) the lying popular denial of the effectiveness of civil defence. So there was no effective political opposition in the House of Commons to what the Conservatives were doing in making friends with Hitler. Churchill was ignored.
Unlike the 1930s when British political opinion was united in offering the hand of friendship and collaboration to Hitler up to and after the Munich crisis, in the 1980s the appeasement of the Soviet Union became a Party Political issue in Britain. The Conservatives led by Thatcher issued Civil Defence handbooks like Protect and Survive in order to strengthen Western will to resist Soviet intimidation, while in 1982 the Labour Party committed itself to unilateral nuclear disarmament. The Labour Party remained out of power in Britain until it had abandoned that policy.
President Reagan's propaganda against the Soviet Union
On 29 November 1982, Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State and author of the 1957 endorsement of clean nuclear warfare against military targets, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, wrote an article in Newsweek called "How to Deal with Moscow":
"... economic stagnation must raise serious doubts in the minds of some Soviet leaders whether the country's security is compatible over the long term with an unrestrained arms race."
President Reagan's administration decided to follow Kissinger's idea and issue psychological propaganda to demoralize Moscow's World Peace Council, instead of letting them reap all the kudos of their lying "peace" propaganda. On 15 January 1983, U.S. National Security Adviser William Clark wrote an open letter to Cardinal Bernardin stating:
"For moral, political and military reasons, the United States does not target the Soviet civilian population ... We do not threaten the existence of Soviet civilisation by threatening Soviet cities. Rather, we hold at risk the war-making capability of the Soviet Union ..."
Then on 1 February 1983, U.S. Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger stated in his Annual Report to Congress:
"The Reagan administration's policy is that in no circumstances may such weapons be used deliberately for the purpose of destroying populations."
Finally, President Reagan himself came up with the ultimate peace "vision" (Reagan's term, not his critics!) and announced it in his television address on 23 March 1983:
"I've become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence ... Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive."
Defence is the biggest threat you can make to an empire which has economically crippled itself by making offensive weapons. Reagan took away the Soviet dream, paving the way for communist reform and collapse.
Above: "The War Game", a 1965 Peter Watkins BBC propaganda film, is debunked below. See also our discussion of Phil Bolsover's CND "Civil Defence - the Cruellest Confidence Trick", linked here.
Above: the 1965 Peter Watkins BBC film "The War Game" was inaccurate (effectively pro-USSR World Peace Council and CND anti-civil defence) propaganda, a Goebbels-style pseudo-documentary (banned from transmission but widely used by CND for propaganda), based entirely upon falsehoods, ignoring Dr Glasstone's evidence in the 1962/4 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (which concludes in paragraph 7.76 on page 350: "only certain sections - usually the older and slum areas - of a very few cities in the United States [which has more wooden frame housing than Europe] would be susceptible to fire storm development"), falsely claiming in the end credits that it is factual since it is based on the effects of nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada in 1954. There were no nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada in 1954!
World War II intensive incendiary bombing experience proved beyond all doubt that it is only possible to create firestorms in multistorey wooden buildings which don't exist in modern cities; the most intense firestorm with the strongest winds occurred only in the section of Hamburg consisting of overcrowded medieval multistorey wooden building.
George R. Stanbury, the Home Office scientist who conducted Civil Defence research on blast, heat and radiation protection at Monte Bello for Operation HURRICANE, Britain’s first nuclear test in 1952, explains in detail how the Hamburg firestorm was produced in his originally restricted article, ‘The Fire Hazard from Nuclear Weapons’, Fission Fragments, U.K. Home Office, Scientific Adviser’s Branch, London, No. 3, August 1962, pp. 22-6:
'We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation ... we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ... Firstly ... the collapse of buildings would snuff out any incipient fires. Air cannot get into a pile of rubble, 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This is not just guesswork; it is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb [V1 cruise missile] incidents in London supported by a wealth of experience gained generally in the last war. Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general. Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited, it by no means follows that a continuing and destructive fire will develop. ... A window of two square metres would let in about 105 calories at the 5 cal/cm2 range. The heat liberated by one magnesium incendiary bomb is 30 times this and even with the incendiary bomb the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5; in a large room it is very much less. Thus even if thermal radiation does fall on easily inflammable material which ignites, the chance of a continuing fire developing is still quite small. In the Birmingham and Liverpool studies, where the most generous values of fire-starting chances were used, the fraction of buildings set on fire was rarely higher than 1 in 20.'
In Hiroshima, 40 kg/m2 of combustibles per unit of total ground area was necessary to create even the relatively weak firestorm with low intensity fire winds in that city, so all firestorms occurred in city areas with wooden buildings, like Hiroshima or the medieval part of Hamburg. The combustible fuel load in the firestorm area of Hamburg in 1943 was 156 kg/m2. (These data are taken from page 11-143 of Philip J. Dolan's originally secret Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Defence Nuclear Agency: unfortunately the declassified version of chapter 11 is the only chapter not available as a PDF file, although it is available on microfiche at the British Library reference depository in Boston Spa. Dolan states on page 11-143: "The intensity of a large fire depends, in part, on the average amount of combistible material per unit area. In Hamburg, where 45 percent of the firestorm area was covered by buildings containing about 70 lbs/ft2 of fuel, the average loading was 32 lbs/ft2. A strong firestorm was produced in the area from the World War II incendiary bomb raid. In Hiroshima the average fuel loading [for the firestorm area] is estimated to have been 8 lbs/ft2." Dolan also points out in Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons that few fires are predicted: "The low incidence of predicted indoor ignitions results from the low elevation angle of the fireball. The artificial horizon of trees and buildings obscures the fireball from most residential windows ... the average elevation angle of the artificial horizon is about 6 degrees for New Orleans.") In typical American surburbs the fuel loading is just 10-24 kg/m2, according to the 1979 U.S. Office of Technology Assessment report The Effects of Nuclear War.
The first recorded ‘firestorm’ was in warehouses filled with combustibles at the Surrey Docks in London, not in city buildings (it occurred on 7-8 September 1940, requiring 300 water pumps and killing 306 people). The role of the building construction in firestorm history was analysed by L. E. Frost and E.L. Jones, ‘The Fire Gap and the Greater Durability of Nineteenth-Century Cities’, published in Planning Perspectives, vol. 4 (1989), pp. 333-47. Each medieval city was built of inflammable ‘tinderbox’ wooden houses, using trees from the surrounding countryside.
By 1800, Britain had cut down most of its easily accessible forests for fuel and to build wooden houses, so the price of wood rapidly increased due to the expense of transporting wood long distances, until it finally exceeded the originally higher price of brick and stone. So from then on all new buildings were built of brick when wooden ones decayed or burned in fires. This replacement of wooden houses with brick and later reinforced concrete construction rapidly reduced the fire risk. Also, in 1932, British Standard 476 was issued, which specified the fire resistance of building materials. In addition, new cities were built with wider streets and rubbish disposal to prevent tinder accumulation in alleys, which created more effective fire breaks. You can't make brick or concrete burn by increasing the number of matches: ignition is not solely dependent upon raising the temperature! Wooden cities did not need incendiaries or nuclear weapons to burn, as proved by the Great Fire of London in 1666, the fires of Hamburg in 1842, Chicago in 1871, Baltimore in 1904, San Francisco in 1906, and Tokyo in 1923 killing 142,807 and destroying 575,000 dwellings in Tokyo and Yokohama, although some deaths were from the earthquake which caused the fire by upsetting thousands of cooking braziers in paper screen and bamboo filled wooden houses (a mechanism similar to the blast ignition of the firestorm in Hiroshima, but of course far more devastating).
Civil defence also played a large part in determining the number of people killed: the fire brigade is always overwhelmed but where civilians can stamp out fine kindling fires, loss of life can be averted. The 13 March 1945 incendiary air raid on Osaka destroyed 135,000 wooden houses in a firestorm, but due to an effective, convincing air raid warning (which was not given in Hiroshima or Nagasaki!), most people had taken cover and evacuated the wooden buildings, limiting fatalities to fewer than 4,000 people, under 0.03 people per home destroyed! Even in the most intense firestorm, that in Hamburg which uprooted trees with hurricane intensity winds, 40,000 were killed out of a population in the same area of 280,000, i.e. around 14% of the people in the actual firestorm area (the total population of Hamburg was even greater, 1,760,000). This data is given by George R. Stanbury of the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch in Fission Fragments, No. 7, May 1965, pp. 59-61: "though 40,000 people were killed in the Hamburg fire storm, another 240,000 came out alive from the same area." (Stanbury's data is from detailed Home Office research in Germany: Kathleen F. Earp's Deaths from fire in large scale air attack with special reference to the Hamburg fire storm, Home Office report CD/SA 28, 1953. Higher percentages abound for Deseden such as 20% - which is implied by the CND quoted "statistic" of 135,000 firestorm deaths in Dresden - but this is a complete lie due to Nazi propaganda spread in a book by convicted fascist historian David Irving; the accurate number killed in Dresden is 24,000-40,000.) In Hiroshima, mortality did not depend on the firestorm but upon the type of building and the posture of the person at the time of detonation. Glasstone and Dolan report (Table 12.17 on page 546) that the median (50%) lethal range in Hiroshima for the general population in Hiroshima was 0.8 mile but in concrete buildings it was only 0.12 mile, a 44-fold difference in median lethal areas. Any line of sight shadowing from thermal radiation in Hiroshima reduced the outdoor median lethal range from 1.3 miles to 0.4 miles, according to a plot of data from page 103 of the book Medical effects of the atomic bomb in Japan, Based on the Six Volume Report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw Hill, New York, 1956). Hence, mortality in Hiroshima was mainly a function of thermal flash shadowing at the time of detonation, irrespective of the subsequent firestorm!
"Measurements were made to determine the irradiance and time necessary to produce glow and flaming ignition in ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and maple. The results of this study are presented in the form of graphs of irradiance as a function of time for several moisture contents for each type of wood. In all cases on the graphs, the locations of the areas of char, persistent glowing ignition, and persistent flaming ignition are shown. The values of Q, total thermal energy necessary to produce sustained burning (with or without flame), can be easily computed from these data. They range from a minimum value of about 19 cal/sq cm for very dry pine to several thousand calories/sq cm for wood with a very high moisture content. It was concluded that for sound solid woods of a normal moisture content, it is almost impossible to start continued ignition with nuclear weapons of a size less than about 100 Mt at a distance where blast damage would not be severe."
- F. W. Brown, Ignition of Thick Wood Specimens by High-Temperature Thermal Radiation, Naval Civil Engineering Laboratory, California, report AD0475535, 1965.
As early as 1950, the U.K. Home Office was well aware of the lying propaganda exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons and attacking civil defence countermeasures for communist appeasement:
Above: the 1950 U.K. Home Office Scientific Adviser's Branch report The Number of Atomic Bombs Equivalent to the Last War Air Attacks on Great Britain and Germany, CD/SA 16 (National Archives document reference HO 225/16) was written by the scientists of the British Mission to Japan who in 1945 surveyed the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from nuclear weapons and compared that damage to what they had surveyed from conventional bombing in England during World War II. It was Top Secret until 1958, and then only degraded to Restricted (for another 22 years). It was never published, but formed the backdrop to British civil defence planning. It found that due to the non-linear scaling of blast damage areas and casualties from bombs, the effects are not directly proportional to the energy of the explosives: it estimated that the 60,670 civilians killed by bombing England in World War II was equivalent to the effects from 52 nuclear bombs, while the damage to Germany was equivalent to 330. The few megatons of TNT equivalent dropped in World War II in the form of many small bombs was equivalent to a far greater amount of explosive equivalent in the form of a few hundred nuclear weapons (we will go into the numbers in detail later in this post):
"This figure for the weight of high explosive equivalent to the atomic bomb for causing casualties increases as the amount of protection of the population increases. Thus for the night raiding conditions on London in the last war, where something like 60% of the population were in houses, 35% in shelter and 5% in the open [Home Guard, air raid wardens, fire watchers, police, etc.], the number killed in inner London per ton of bombs was 4."
Scaling up this figure of 4 killed per ton to 20 kt by the two-thirds of energy power law (for blast diffraction type damage and casualties) gives a prediction of 4(20,000)2/3 = 2,950 killed. By contrast, for unwarned people standing outdoors with no protection at Smithfield Market in London on 8 March 1945 (photograph below), the 1 ton TNT warhead of a supersonic V2 killed 110, about 28 times as many people who were killed on average after taking warning. Scaling the 110 from 1 ton up to 20 kt gives 110(20,000)2/3 = 81,000 killed, which is on the order of the casualty rates for Hiroshima and Nagasaki (allowing for differences in population density, etc.) where no effective air raid warning was given and no countermeasures were taken, not even "duck and cover" to avoid line-of-sight flash burns, flying glass, etc.:
"If those Hiroshima children had been sitting under their desks when the bomb exploded, they would probably not have been burned."
- Professor Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope, 1984.
In World War II, Dyson - who in 1948 clarified the Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga approaches to renormalization for the "second" or field quantization of quantum mechanics, i.e. "quantum field theory" - was a civilian statistician in the operations research section of the U.K. Royal Air Force Bomber Command, and knew that civil defence negated the effectiveness of bombing, since it deterred wind carried gas attacks which would toughen resolve and escalate the conflict. In 1962 Dyson objected to expensive civil defence in his article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 18, No. 3, p. 14, where he points out that building expensive shelters will just accelerate an arms race, making the enemy build more offensive weapons or use ground bursts to produce very intense blast in order to overcome the civil defence countermeasures, and this will result in increased collateral damage like fallout on neighbouring countries. However, he ignored the fact that hardening missile silos (which was done repeatedly in the 1960s through the 1980s, increasing the missile hardness for about one thousand Minuteman missiles and 54 Titan missiles from 25 psi to over 3,000 psi peak overpressure, using reinforced concrete silos with lined, shock-absorber walls and special protective lids), brought about exactly the "problem" he was talking about, without providing any civil defence countermeasures against a terrorist nuclear attack. Furthermore, the arms race was not a giant waste of time; it diverted the Soviet Union from a policy of successful expansion to unsuccessful, costly arms production which strained its economy and forced reform and a reduction in the use of military forces to restrain civil unrest, Gorbachev's policy of "perestroika", leading to the fall of communist. Dyson did not object to cheap "duck and cover" and related "improvised" civil defence countermeasures which are vital and highly effective for many kinds of terrorist attacks, and is intended not to guarantee safety but to reduce risks of serious injury like seatbelts in cars, lifeboats on ships, ambulances and hospitals, etc.
Above: Figure 20 of the 1952 U.K. Home Office Civil Defence Rescue Manual, showing the effects of a 0.001 kt V2 inertially guided rocket on Smithfield Market, London, 8 March 1945. The market fell onto the railway line below, killing 110 and trapping many others. During World War II, cranes were often needed in heavy rescue to shore up or remove debris, quickly freeing trapped personnel while alive as soon as they were located using trained dogs.
Above Phil Bolsover, author of a 1974 children's book called One day in Russia 1917 (which justifies Lenin's Communist revolution, by explaining the problems of imperialism), wrote the May 1980 best-selling CND booklet, Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick, in response to the civil defence booklet Protect and Survive published that month by the U.K. Government. The dust jacket of Bolsover's One Day in Russia 1917 states: "On November 7th, the discontent of the Russian soldiers, workers and peasants had reached such a peak that, under the leadership of Lenin and his party, the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Petrograd (later renamed Leningrad) [renamed Saint Petersburg when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991]. Philip Bolsover creates the atmosphere of those turbulent times by introducing us to several characters and showing us their everyday lives, surrounded by the spirit of revolution." Bolsover writes on pages 9-10:
"There had been the great strikes and demonstrations led by 30,000 workers from the now famous Putilov metal plant [in Petrograd, between 3-5 July 1917]; the peasant revolt against the landowners; the mass desertions from the army; and, simultaneously, the creation of soviets, or councils, of workers in factories, peasants in villages, soldiers and sailors in the armed forces.
"The Tsar's government, aware of growing discontent, had prepared an elaborate military plan to deal with revolt, and had brought in 160,000 soldiers to strengthen the city's garrison. But in the end this was worse than useless, for the soldiers, many of them newly conscripted from factories and villages, joined the demonstrators, taking their arms with them."
Above: a still from the biased BBC "documentary" film the War Game, attacking Civil Defence (the cover photos from the first edition of the pamphlet are stills from the same film): the main worry for CND in the second edition (March 1982) of Civil Defence: the Cruellest Confidence Trick seemed to be not the bomb itself, but the threat of surviving a nuclear war only to be shot under martial law for being Communist agents. This photo is printed filling two pages of the second edition, which states on page 36:
"In the minds of civil defence organisers, repressive measures by police and military [would be instigated before nuclear attack]. Before a nuclear attack: 1, arrest of 'political subversives'. Undoubtedly, active members of the peace movement, opposing nuclear war [in fact: opposing the intimidation of the Soviet Union by President Reagan, to bring them to the negotiating table and make them sue for peace or face bankrupcy in an arms race they could not win against the free world], would be considered subversive ..."
Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick creates a similar one-sided impression to Bolsover's romantic justification to kids for a Communist revolution, and also itself created massive CND protests against the defence of the West from Communism. Russia in 1917 was in an appalling state during the misery of World War I, but so were many other countries which resisted Communism. Bolsover repeatedly contrasts the extreme poverty of the people to the Tsar's corrupt, high-taxation, inefficient, greedy imperialism, without pointing out that - as George Orwell explained in a rather different kid's "fairy story" book about the 1917 revolution - Lenin's Communist revolution did not bring about the utopia it promised. We explained in detail in the earlier Glasstone and Dolan post that the end of Communism in Russia and Europe from 1989-92 was not unconnected to the strength of the West during the 1980s, bankrupting the Soviet Union which tried and failed to beat the West in the arms race. This ended the Cold War, not the surrender of the West to Soviet intimidation.
Bolsover's 1980 CND plan, published openly in the CND Manifesto "About CND" on page 24 of Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick, simply was for "Britain to abandon nuclear weapons, as a first step to the creation of a British foreign policy based on the principles of peace and co-operation." Bolsover was clearly aware that a similar doom-mongering disarmament-appeasement policy, led by the British Government during the 1930s, encouraged terrorism from an aggressive dictatorship (as detailed in the previous post).
In brief summary (we will examine all the points in detail later on, most of which have already been explained on an earlier post linked here), Bolsover tries to debunk civil defence by falsely claiming that if any fallout dust gets inside a building being used as a shelter and contaminates someone, the protection is useless. In fact gamma ray dosages come from a median radius of 15 metres at 1 metre height over smooth, unobstructed, uniformly contaminated terrain, so half the dose comes from an area of 700 m2, and the percentage coming from the fallout within a few square metres is negligible; therefore even in the worst case (if your building has no roof), surviving outer walls will still protect you against most of the radiation which is direct gamma rays coming in the horizontal direction, not straight upwards from the tiny percentage of the dose contributed from nearby fallout under your feet (for the 15 metres median radius for gamma ray fallout doses and a 103 metres mean free path for 0.7 MeV gamma ray Compton effect air scatter implied by data in Glasstone and Dolan 1977, the fraction of direct radiation is simply e-15/103 = 0.86, so only 14% is air scatter).
Then he moves on to blast effects on page 4, which he deals with by false arithmetic: he quotes a civil defence planning assumption made by the head of the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch for a worst case all-out war in which Britain gets 200 megatons from Russia, assumes that this all-out war assumption is the only scenario applicable to the case for civil defence, ignores equivalent megatonnage and heads his chapter "13,000 Hiroshima bombs", adding that the sum total of the conventional explosives used by all countries in World War II was only 5 megatons. We explained the scientific problem with this comparison in detail in the previous post. In short, casualties and damaged areas aren't proportional to the energy of the bomb, but go at most as the two-thirds power of yield (ignoring the loss of energy due to damage done over vast distances, which makes bigger bombs still less effective than using many small bombs), so the 5 megatons in the form of 50,000,000 explosives each of about 0.1 ton in World War II are equivalent to 50,000,000(0.1/1,000,000)2/3 = 1,000 one megaton nuclear weapons!
In fact, of course, the heaviest bombing in history was received by Vietnam: America dropped 11.3 megatons of TNT equivalent in the form small conventional explosives, some 331 kg of high explosive for every man, woman and child in Vietnam, at a cost of $150,000 million, without winning:
"... more than 10 billion pounds of TNT was dropped on Germany, Japan and Italy during World War II, this equalled more than 50 pounds for every man, woman and child. ... Arithmetically considered, the result should have been the total annihilation of one and all. ... During the Vietnam War, more than 25 billion pounds of TNT were dropped ... an average of 730 pounds for each of a total population of 34 million. ... yet the USA was unable to kill enough people, or to disrupt economic life, transportation or communication sufficiently."
- Senator Foy D. Kohler, Foreword to Leon Gouré's War Survival in Soviet Strategy (Centre for Advanced International Studies, Miami, Florida, 1976, p. xv).
Above: the CND "firestorm" propaganda seems to have been based on biased, inaccurate 1965 BBC "documentary" called The War Game.
Having lied that destructive power is proportional to energy released, Bolsover goes on to lie about thermal ignition (which we have dealt with in previous posts linked here, here, here and here), quoting from the CND publication Civil Defence and Nuclear War which Bolsover falsely claims is "based on the [U.K.] Civil Defence Manual Pamphlet No. 1 ["Nuclear Weapons"] and on the U.S. Department of Defence book Effects of Nuclear Weapons":
"supposing that a 10 megaton bomb had exploded on the ground at King's Cross station ... King's Cross itself would be in the middle of a crater nearly a mile wide [wrong, it would be only 0.11 mile wide in London due to the gravitational potential energy conservation problem; they are quoting the underwater crater for the heavy cased 10 megaton MIKE test on porous coral in 1952, where the coral is crushed to silt by the shock wave out to half a mile radius, an entirely different mechanism!] and deep enough to hold Nelson's Column and to penetrate the deepest part of the London Underground. [Again, this claim is totally wrong.]
"... The enormous number of separate fires that would be started simultaneously over hundreds of square miles would not stay isolated [wrong; few ignitions occur and in brick or concrete building fires you don't have the firebrand or hot wall radiation mechanisms for spreading fires that you do with wooden houses in 1945 Japan, Hamburg, Dresden, etc.] In the big fire raids of World War II when thousands of incendiaries were dropped on Hamburg, Toyko, Dresden and other cities, the fires all joined together to make a single holocaust or "fire storm". These huge pillars of fire caused winds of up to 150 mph, strong enough to uproot trees, to rush in towards the burning area. [Wrong; those winds only occurred in the Hamburg firestorm, due to medieval multistorey crowded wood frame buildings over the small wooden area of the city: fires elsewhere were less intense and the 150 mph strong winds not occur in Hiroshima where the firestorm developed slowly over a period of hours or more and the survivors escape or put out fires manually in brick or concrete buildings.] People caught in the street in the firestorm were soon burned to death. The ... temperature of that air was 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly as hot as molten glass. ... Others were killed by carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas produced by the enormous fire. [Contrast this to Hiroshima, and then think about the fact that modern cities - unlike the medieval firstorm devastated part of Hamburg - are not wood but 80% or more non-combustible brick, steel, or concrete.]"
On page 12 of the second edition of Bolsover's Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick booklet, published in March 1982, he repeats that lying CND quotation but falsely attributes it as a direct quotation from the U.S. Department of Defence book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons! Switching back to page 7 of Bolsover's first edition (May 1980), he rejects all the evidence of sharp burns shadows from Hiroshima, Nagasaki and nuclear tests which prove that the majority of the thermal radiation which causes burns travels in the direct line from the bomb:
"Some Government experts have maintained that because houses would shield each other from heat rays [simple line-of-sight shadowing of windows from the fireball; the blast wave arrives after most of the thermal flash energy delivery] a nuclear explosion over a British city would not cause a fire storm. [Wrong: Bolsover ignores the fact that unlike the areas of wooden buildings in the 1945 firestorm cities, modern cities are not built out of wood, but out of incombustible steel, concrete and brick.] This is not true. The heat from a nuclear explosion is reflected by clouds and diffused by the dust and mist that are always in the atmosphere, so that it appears to come from every direction at once. [Wrong: most sunlight comes directly from the direction of the sun, and the relative dimness of the blue sky around the sun shows that only a small fraction of the sunlight is scattered by the atmosphere. Cloud cover between the sun and you actually reduces the intensity of sunlight, and this shielding is even more effective for nuclear explosions on the horizon, where a great thickness of cloud lies between the fireball and you, reducing the threat. Scattered radiation was not significant at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or nuclear tests, as shown by the sharp shadowing effects which proved that burns were caused by direct, unscattered, line-of-sight thermal radiation. Even if there is a thick cloud layer above both the fireball and the target, the vast majority of the cloud reflected "Lambert plane" thermal radiation received by the target still comes from the direction of the explosion.]
"It is quite possible to be fatally burned by the flash of a nuclear explosion even if you are sheltering behind a brick wall, and it is possible for houses to be set on fire even if they are not in the direct line [of sight] of the explosion [Wrong: to get thermal radiation ignition of fires or burns outside from scattered thermal radiation, you would need to be so close to a bomb burst in a foggy atmosphere that the initial nuclear radiation and blast would be fatal, because at longer distances the fog would attenuate the thermal radiation to a trivial intensity.]"
On this last point, Bolsover quite apart from ignoring the attenuation of thermal radiation by fog (the omission of the effects of atmospheric visibility on thermal transmission is one of the failings of Glasstone and Dolan 1977), he is also ignoring the fact that highly scattered, diffusive thermal radiation, coming from many angles, is less effective in starting fires because it spreads out more (reducing the exposure per unit area, and thus the ignition risk) after entering a window than the line-of-sight direct radiation:
"In a room, for instance, the thermal radiation coming through the window would be spread over the walls and floor instead of falling on an area the size of the window."
- George R. Stanbury, ‘The Fire Hazard from Nuclear Weapons’, Fission Fragments, U.K. Home Office, Scientific Adviser’s Branch, London, No. 3, August 1962, pp. 22-6:
Having thus lied (by ignoring equivalent megatonnage) that nuclear blast destruction could be a more destructive than conventional weapons, and that World War II wooden city firestorm data is applicable to modern brick and concrete buildings, Bolsover then lies about radiation. Protect and Survive states:
"The further you can get within your home, from the radioactive dust that is on or around it, the safer you will be ... Still greater protection is necessary ... you should build an inner refuge."
Oak Ridge National Laboratory Nuclear War Survival Skills author Cresson H. Kearny explains how to do this simply in the YouTube video linked here (you just get cardboard boxes, line them with two plastic bags, and place them on and around a table for use as a shelter, then fill the plastic bag lined boxes up with water, or with anything else that is dense, e.g. soil or reasonably heavy household items such as books, clothing, bedding, etc., to absorb the gamma radiation coming in from fallout).
Alternatively, Protect and Survive points out that you can use the the cupboard under the stairs and pile items to absorb radiation on the stairs, and around the cupboard. Bolsover uses the biased BBC anti-nuclear propaganda Panorama documentary of 10 March 1980 to try to discredit Kearny's improvised core shelter:
"They [the BBC Panorama team] found that the householder would need 100 bags or similar containers [most rolls of plastic bags contain roughly that number], strength enough to lift a ton of earth [use water, clothing, bedding, books, etc., instead, carry water in buckets one at a time or use a hose pipe as Kearny does; you don't need to carry all the shielding matter in a single go, fallout is carried by the wind and takes time to arrive and be deposited, and more time is then needed to accumulate a radiation dose while it decays], and a number of floor joists to take the weight [simply use the ground floor for the refuge room in a house; in multistorey buildings floors are generally concrete and will provide adequate protection from fallout on the roof and "skyshine" scattered gamma rays without additional shielding]. ...
"You must, the Government tells you, be prepared to live in the fallout room with your family for 14 days [by which time 99.9% of the 1-hour fission product radioactivity level has decayed], after which you have been under your table or your doors for 48 hours [by which time 99% of the 1-hour fission product radioactivity has decayed]. Water is the first essential; you'll need three-and-a-half gallons for each person, but 'you should try to stock twice as much water as you'll need for drinking, so that you have enough for washing'. [If you use plastic bag lined boxes full of water for radiation shielding, you can use that water once most of the fallout radiation has decayed.]"
The fear-mongering BBC Panorama television programme propaganda of 10 March 1980 which falsely attacked Protect and Survive countermeasures achieved its anti-civil defence purpose, according to the following letter, published in the Guardian newspaper on 13 March 1980:
"Watching these programmes with an increasing feeling of distress and alarm, I realise that if there is to be a nuclear attack I do not want to survive and I do not want my children to survive. ... I do not want us to spend days and weeks behind an improvised and useless screen of sandbags and cushions, probably suffering agonies from radiation burns and sickness, aware that friends, neighbours and countless others are dead and dying.
"And if we were relatively unscathed and did come out after some time from our shelter, whatever sort of world would we find? How could we begin to cope with the destruction and the devastation, the lack of food, water, light, heat, communications, the knowledge of suffering all around, and the certainty that we ourselves were doomed to die, lingeringly and in pain ...
"My feeling at the moment is that if the unbelievable does happen, I want my preparation for it to be a pill for all of use, quick, painless and final."
Above: lethal fallout hazards are clearly visible (see post here for a photograph of lethal visible fallout hazards and Dr Miller’s photographs of individual fallout particles in his excellent report AD476572 linked here); for a burst on silicate soil the lethal close-in fallout consists of tiny, spherical, shiny marbles created from molten grains of soil which can easily be distinguished from normal dust. Fallout particles from other types of detonation also have distinctive features and it is easy to distinguish the type of burst from a glance at the appearance of the fallout particles: sea water surface bursts produce salt slurry fallout, bursts on steel towers or steel frame buildings have a black glossy appearance from the black iron(II) oxide, while bursts on calcium carbonate like limestone (or coral) produce grey/white calcium hydroxide fallout particles, like those on Rongelap and the Lucky Dragon fishing boat from the BRAVO nuclear test in 1954. As testified by the Scientific Director of that nuclear test, Dr Alvin C. Graves, to the U.S. Congressional Hearings on The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man back in June 1957, surface bursts deposit roughly 100 tons of soil for every kiloton of explosive yield (this was easily established from the specific radioactivity of the fallout, e.g. by measuring the number of fissions per gram from the radioactivity emitted; roughly 1% of the crater mass is sucked into the fireball and mushroom by the afterwinds), so dust or visible rainfall downwind of a nuclear explosion can be used as a simple indication of the need to evacuate or take cover: the fallout on Rongelap and the Lucky Dragon in 1954 was clearly visible and was compared to snowfall. While taking cover you can easily measure the radiation level without any special instruments simply by improvising a self-calibrating electroscope from a jar or can, a piece of metal cooking foil, some insulating thread or floss, and cling film.
See Kearny's Oak Ridge National Laboratory report linked here. It just consists of a jar or can containing two aluminium foil plates, made by folding standard aluminium cooking foil over a few times to give 8 ply/thicknesses, with each plate having sides about 4 by 3 cm long, in order to achieve calibration accuracy by geometry, see Kearny’s report ORNL-5040 which gives details of the calibration accuracy tests and dry bucket construction for high humidity conditions; an independent report linked here points out that in high humidity air the electroscope must be charged within the “dry bucket” described by Kearny in ORNL-5040 or the humid air will discharge a comb or rubbed plastic ruler before it can be used to charge the electroscope. Charging the plates using a rubbed plastic ruler or plastic comb, or by unwinding plastic tape quickly, makes the plates charge up with like charges, so that they repel each other, and move apart a considerable distance. Timing how long it takes for the places to fall together accurately tells you the fallout gamma radiation dose rate, because radiation ionizes the air, allowing the ions to carry away charge from the plates, so they no longer repel and thus they approach one another as seen in the dental X-ray demonstration.
Such radiation level measurements tell you the protective factor of a refuge and also tell you how long you need to either take shelter or evacuate for: you can easily estimate the total infinite time future dose from decaying fallout since it is roughly four times the beginning radiation level (in dose units per hour) multiplied by the time (in hours) after the explosion that exposure begins. The dose rate from fission products falls by a factor of 10 for every 7 fold increase in time until 200 days, and then it falls even faster. The total dose from a bomb with a cobalt jacket instead of uranium is actually less than that because each neutron absorbed by cobalt in the bomb leads to the release of a total of only 2.5 MeV of gamma radiation energy from cobalt-60, compared to uranium-238 when fissioned by one neutron, which emits 6 MeV as delayed fission product gamma rays, and about 200 MeV altogether! (Glasstone and Dolan, 1977, p. 12.) Total gamma radiation doses are approximately directly proportional to the total gamma ray energy emitted, so a uranium-238 jacket emits 6/2.5 = 2.4 times as much residual gamma radiation as a cobalt-60 jacket, and emits 200/2.5 = 80 times as much energy in total! This is why Stanley Kubrick's cobalt-60 hype is a complete lie: the fallout hazard from any design of nuclear weapon is always easily survivable. The relatively low decay rates of fallout nuclides with long half lives simply allows time for natural weathering or deliberate decontamination, before getting a significant dose from them.
On page 15, Bolsover lies about the effects of radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
"In March, 1977, 32 years after the two small atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were still 366,523 people registered as Hibakusha - sufferers from the effects of the bombs."
In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. (Data: Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pages 1-27.) Over 40 years, in 36,500 survivors monitored, there were 176 leukemia deaths which is 89 more than the control (unexposed) group got naturally. There were 4,687 other cancer deaths, but that was merely 339 above the number in the control (unexposed) group, so this is statistically a much smaller rise than the leukemia result. Natural leukemia rates, which are very low in any case, were increased by 51% in the irradiated survivors, but other cancers were merely increased by just 7%. Adding all the cancers together, the total was 4,863 cancers (virtually all natural cancer, nothing whatsoever to do with radiation), which is just 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, the total increase over the natural cancer rate due to bomb exposure was only 9%, spread over a period of 40 years. There was no increase whatsoever in genetic malformations.
See also the more extensive reviews of long term radiation effects in the recent blog posts on lying radiation effects exaggerations here and here.
Bolsover begins on page 1 of Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick (1st ed., May 1980) by stating that his motivation is the publication of Protect and Survive: "The Government has produced a pamphlet Protect and Survive which purports to provide us all with a do-it-yourself guide in nuclear war. The sale of this pamphlet is on one hand a careful political move at a time when efforts are being made to work up a renewal of the cold war; and on the other hand a mass confidence trick, a public fraud of the most heartless kind because it deals in human lives. ... Nuclear weapons - always more of them, always getting bigger [false: they had been getting smaller since the 1960s due to the development of MIRV technology, putting many very small warheads on one missile to avoid collateral damage by reducing the total yield, an effect of "equivalent megatonnage" which we will explain below] - have been a cloud on the far horizon, real, but not so real that people were forced to look at them steadily, to see what they could do to each one of us. ... How many will be contaminated inside the shelters; how many will be affected if they emerge for even a few minutes? How many will appear unaffected after an attack, but will, in fact, be in the first stages of a lingering death? ...
"1. We must throw away our costly, terribly dangerous nuclear weapons.
"2. We must tell the Americans we are not stupid enough to remain their advanced nuclear base; that we will not allow them to make our country a target by basing H-bombers, Cruise missiles and nuclear-armed submarines here. ... [Emphasis by Bolsover.]
"The Government would maintain that these proposals are not realistic. Mrs Thatcher might say in her best captain-of-the-school voice that they are wet. The Defence Minister and his generals would call them mad.
"But these people want us to sit under our tables to protect ourselves against H-bombs that have a power of millions of tons of dynamite. That idea is not so much wet as waterlogged."
The previous post compiled most of the strongest evidence available for backing the civil defence case (there is an additional compilation of relevant facts in the post linked here). Civil defence consists of the population knowing what to do to minimise the effects of terrorism, instead of giving in to terrorism. Moreover, it's effectiveness in Hiroshima was such that the casualty rate for randomly located people in concrete buildings was 120 times lower than outdoors, as proved by the fact that the median lethal distance for personnel in modern buildings was many times smaller than it was for personnel exposed, standing without any evasive action or cover, outdoors.
This is because unprepared people can easily be simultaneously subjected to several different effects from a nuclear detonation, e.g. blast wind drag, flying debris, thermal radiation, and nuclear radiation. Eliminating just one or two of the effects by duck or cover countermeasures therefore causes a disproportionate increase in survival probability simply by eliminating synergism (the fact that combined injuries are more lethal as a whole than the sum of risks if the injuries were received separately, a fact that also applies to aircraft!).
Above: nuclear radiation when received in addition to burns and blast injuries proves more lethal than the sum of the risks from the individual radiation, burns and blast injuries if received separately: this "synergism" is due to the way that radiation reduces the white blood cell count, and thus resistance to infections, for several weeks after exposure when burns and injuries from flying glass and other debris are healing. If the burns and blast effects are averted by simple "duck and cover" evasive action, then the LD50 for nuclear radiation is therefore dramatically increased. Synergism in humans is far greater than in mice, as seen when data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is compared to peacetime radiation accident data. (Illustration is taken from: T.C. Pellmar and G. D. Ledney, Combined Injury: Radiation in Combination with Trauma, Infectious Disease, or Chemical Exposures, U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, Bethesda, MD, NATO report RTG-099 2005.)
Ignoring practical limitations like anti-Civil Defence propaganda, you would find that it's "theoretically possible" for one rock to be used to kill an infinite number of people, if they meekly give in without a struggle or opposition. It's not possible to kill an infinite number of people by exploding one nuclear bomb: in fact, it's possible for most people to survive even very high yield deliverable nuclear explosions in modern brick and concrete cities (which are not built with medieval style crowded wooden buildings like Hamburg or Hiroshima), as proved by a detailed study of nuclear test effects. America, Russia, Britain, France and China tested 520 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, totalling 478.7 megatons, with a mean yield of 921 kilotons. The mean yield of the 5,192 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed Russian nuclear stockpile as of January 2009: 0.317 Mt. That's a total of 1,646 Mt, less than four times the total sum of atmospheric nuclear tests which have already taken place without destroying the ozone layer, causing a nuclear winter, or "overkilling" everybody. The mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile as of January 2007: 0.257 Mt. That's a total yield of 1,172 Mt, little more than twice the total yield of all the nuclear bombs tested in the atmosphere.
So a terrorist explodes a nuclear bomb. Light travels faster than air shock, so many people within range of window breakage effects would have the chance to duck and cover, or at least turn away, to reduce the risks of being blinded by flying glass. (As Glasstone noted, the eyes are relatively transparent - unlike skin - so they do not heat up to the same extent as skin, and - contrary to typical propaganda - nobody had their eyes "burned out" at Hiroshima. A small retinal burn with a minimal impact upon eyesight will occur if the fireball is within the field of view. Eyesight loss in Hiroshima was primarily due to flying glass fragments.)
Closer to the explosion, some people within buildings will be trapped by the collapse of those buildings. This isn't unprecedented or specifically a nuclear weapons problem. Buildings collapse in earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and conventional TNT bombing in warfare. The effects of area attacks by conventional bombing in World War II were often comparable to nuclear weapons effects due to the "equivalent megatonnage" two-thirds of yield scaling law: a single one megaton TNT bomb produces the same area of blast diffraction damage as not one million separate one-ton TNT bombs (which simple arithmetic tells you!), but to only 10,000 one ton TNT bombs, since 10,000(1/1,000,000)2/3 = 1(1)2/3.
So only 10 kt of TNT delivered as 1 ton bombs dropped randomly over a large area target will produce the same area destruction as a single 1 megaton bomb. The smaller the individual bomb size, the smaller the total number of bombs you need to deliver in order to produce the same amount of destruction you get from a single bomb. This is why the two megatons of total yield from the 11 million conventional bombs with an average yield of around 175 kg (according to the British Home Office, which measured the destruction in Britain from bombing in World War II, and organized rescue) dropped during World War II bombing is comparable to a nuclear war consisting of not merely 2 separate one megaton bombs dropped on cities, but to one consisting of 11,000,000(0.175/1,000,000)2/3 = 344 one megaton bombs, contrary to political propaganda which ignores the science and tries to compare the amount of energy.
In other words, the physical destruction of World War II was comparable to that caused in a nuclear war involving 344 nuclear weapons of one megaton yield each, dropped on cities. Stating this fact isn't a matter of our "minimising" the destruction of nuclear weapons, because World War II was the most destructive war in history, but it is about debunking lying exaggerations which are popularly believed due to false propaganda which makes civil defence appear hopeless.
The nuclear war equivalent of World War II would be even greater if we included the fact that the blast yield fraction from a nuclear bomb is less than that for the explosion of TNT, and there are other factors which would also influence the calculation, like the depletion of blast energy with distance in nuclear explosions due to the damage done, which introduces an extra exponential attenuation factor observed by Penney at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which acts to reduce the effective scaling law to less than the two-thirds power of yield, and thus suggests that even more nuclear weapons are needed to be equivalent to World War II destruction.
To demonstrate how well known equivalent megatonnage was in the 1980s, in 1983 Britain's 4 Polaris submarines each carried 16 SLBMs, each MIRVed with 3 warheads of 40 kilotons each; a total of 192 warheads and a linear sum of 7.68 megatons. But the equivalent megatonnage (EMT) was not 192(0.04) = 7.68 megatons, but 192(0.042/3) = 22.46 megatons. Having exactly the same total yield distributed over a greater number of low yield warheads increases the overall power, but when using low yield nuclear weapons (including neutron bombs) it reduces collateral damage because the area damaged by each individual bomb is smaller, and can be accurately targeted on military objectives, not innocent civilians. (The Polaris A3 missile was 9.45 m high, 1.37 m in diameter, 12.7 metric tons and had a range of 4,500 km with a maximum speed of 11,000 km/hour.)
Above: Figure 143 in the 1960 U.K. Home Office Civil Defence Handbook No. 7, Rescue, from pages 218-9 (this PDF link contains key pages from the 1952 Rescue manual, the 1957 Rescue instructors handbook and the 1960 Civil Defence Handbook No. 7, Rescue):
"Specially trained dogs were used with conspicuous success on a number of occasions during the later stages of the last war, and proved their value as an adjunct to rescue reconnaissance, especially in the 'third stage of rescue' [i.e. the exploration of likely survival points in heavily damaged buildings; which comes after firstly giving first aid to casualties found outdoors and secondly performing immediate, quick light rescue in lightly or moderately damaged buildings]. A searching dog, trained to locate human scent, can lead to a very considerable saving of time and labour in the definite location and extrication of casualties. The dogs when brought to the scene of rescue operations can often quickly provide an indication of a trapped or buried person which might take some time to determine by normal rescue reconnaissance methods. Highly trained dogs and handlers may well play an important part in rescue operations in any future war ..."
Now we know that World War II air raids with hundreds of heavy bombers dropping kilotons of bombs in single air raids was comparable to nuclear air burst explosions over cities like Hiroshima (the firestorms at Hamburg and other European cities were even worst than that at Hiroshima), we can use that experience to look at what can be done about rescuing survivors trapped under rubble close to ground zero after a nuclear explosion. The point is, the U.K. Home Office Civil Defence Rescue Manual (H. M. Stationery Office, London, 1st edition, 1952; revised in 1960 as the 260 pages Civil Defence Handbook No. 7, Rescue although the revisions were purely to the new backpack rescue equipment and the Preface on page iii states: "In this handbook, which is a revised edition of the Rescue Manual, no changes have been made in the principles of rescue techniques", and Civil Defence Instructors Notes, Rescue Section (H. M. Stationery Office, London, 1st edition, 1957) are not based on either "arm chair theory" nor even on peacetime disasters and the experience of the fire brigade in rescuing people after gas vapour explosions in houses.
Above: the 1960 Civil Defence Handbook No. 7, Rescue, was based on the practical experience of World War II bombing, when repeated attacks by bomber aircraft, V1 subsonic cruise missiles and V2 inertially guided supersonic rockets led to an effective rescue scheme. As shown in the previous post, the greatest casualty rate is always to personnel standing outside: they get physically blown off their feet and carried by the blast winds, sustaining injury upon impact and also being hit by flying debris (especially window glass fragments and roof tiles). They are the first to be rescued and given first aid first. Then lightly to moderately damaged buildings are searched and marked when cleared of trapped casualties. Finally, voids in heavily damaged buildings are assessed for trapped casualties by trained dogs, and outdoor rubble blocking streets is removed quickly by bulldozers to permit heavy rescue including cranes and other mechanical aids, to temporarily shore up debris against further collapse, allowing the rapid yet safe extrication of trapped survivors during World War II air raids. Notice the last illustration above, showing the improvised use of doors or other suitable items salvaged from rubble debris as stretchers. The civil defence training stresses the fact that the enormous scale of destruction in a nuclear attack on a city necessitates training in several expedient or improvisation techniques including the use of debris as stretchers, and the supervision of large numbers of untrained personnel in rescue (unlike standard fire brigade training).
Most peacetime fire brigade experience has little validity in the mass casualty situation of an air raid during a war in which repeated attacks are being made, because vast numbers of houses are devastated almost simultaneously and heavy equipment must be used to safely extricate people very quickly, before they die due from dust and smoke inhalation, fallout radiation dose accumulation, or exposure to further attacks (nuclear, chemical or conventional) due to the war. During World War II, civil defence rescue teams were perpetually ready for gas attacks, not just conventional bombing. After massive area bombing incidents, rescue parties were prepared to use doors and blankets as improvised stretchers, and rescue party teams were prepared to supervise untrained personnel in emergency light rescue work, maximizing efficiency, which is not included in peacetime fire brigade training. Such improvised means for mass rescue and first aid after a nuclear attack were absent at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where surveys showed that few survivors offered assistance to others, due to disorganization stemming from a lack of preparation and training. During the Cold War, the 1960 restricted Civil Defence Pocket Book No. 2, Military Support in Civil Defence, showed that military personnel would be deployed for basic radiation monitoring, reconnaissance of damaged areas, light rescue and first aid, in order to relieve pressure on civil defence resources. Radiation dangers in a nuclear war situation emphasise the need to rapidly extricate and evacuate trapped survivors before fallout radiation doses become excessive. As explained in testimony by Dr Kellogg to Congress in 1957 (quoted in the earlier post linked here), this is because fallout, like other nuclear effects, does not travel and descend instantaneously; there is plenty of evidence from the tests of Castle and Redwing that the biggest bombs which contaminate the largest areas have the longest fallout arrival times near the detonation (for the 14.8 Mt Bravo test the fallout arrival on islands and lagoon rafts directly under the mushroom was well instrumented using special "incremental fallout collector" machines which consecutively exposed a series of fallout collection trays to fallout, showing a mean fallout arrival time of 28 minutes after detonation actually under the mushroom head, with a peak dose rate at about 65 minutes, according to the weapon test report WT-915), which is due to the higher mushroom cloud in such big explosions and thus the extra delay time for the descent of the large fallout particles from that great altitude (see the nuclear weapon test reports linked here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
In very low yield detonations like the 1.2 kt Sugar test in the Nevada in 1951, fallout under the mushroom cloud occured much sooner (immediately downwind of the crater it began arriving within 2-3 minutes), but the fallout danger areas were much smaller in such low-yield detonations, so that anybody could simply walk or run in the cross-wind direction out of the visibly contaminated area, well before receiving a lethal fallout dose. For example, Edward A. Schuert's U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report WT-1465 (document ADA304431), Operation Plumbbob: Fallout Studies and Assessment of Radiological Phenomena, shows in Fig. 4.1 that fallout under the mushroom (at one statute mile downwind) from the 1957 Plumbbob-Diablo test (17 kt atop a 500 foot high steel tower) began at 6 minutes after detonation and the dose rate peaked at 15 minutes; Fig. 4.2 shows that at 2.5 miles downwind of Plumbbob-Shasta (again 17 kt atop a 500 ft steel tower) fallout began at 8 minutes and the dose rate peaked at 18 minutes.
In 1951, George R. Stanbury and others at the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch did experiments on the rescue of personnel from areas contaminated with simulated radioactive fallout: The hazard from inhaled fission products in rescue operations after an atomic bomb explosion, report CD/SA 23. Stanbury was able to investigate nuclear weapons test fallout hazards when surveying damage to civil defence structures in Monte Bello, after the first British nuclear test of 1952 which he attended. So there was no "armchair theory" involved in determining that casualties could be rescued after a nuclear attack (unlike the ignorant critics of civil defence).
Another well known factor demanding prompt action to release trapped survivors is that casualties who are trapped and crushed under a mass of rubble (not merely surviving in a void in the rubble) must be extricated and given plenty of fluid rapidly, because removing weights from trapped, crushed personnel causes the toxins (which have built up in the blood-starved muscles) to enter the blood stream and cause potentially fatal kidney damage. This danger can only be averted by the early removal of casualties and by giving them plenty of fluid (to dilute toxins in the blood stream to below the fatal concentration), either before or immediately upon removal. The risks of injuring people by immediately using bulldozers and cranes to quickly remove rubble and get straight to trapped survivors was found to be much smaller in World War II London, when using dogs to first quickly survey rubble for survivor locations than the risk of killing people by the delays caused by insisting on the very slow "safe" hand-removal of street rubble (which in practice could never be completed without mechanical assistance in time to recover trapped survivors alive before another enemy air raid):
"In the last war it was found that at major incidents the use of heavy mechanical plant was frequently necessary in support of rescue operations. Such equipment was used in the quick removal of debris; to lift blocks of brickwork or masonry; to take the weight of collapsed floors and girders so that voids could be explored and casualties extricated; to haul off twisted steelwork and other debris and to break up sections of reinforced concrete.
"In future all these tasks may be required and heavy clearance may have to be effected to enable rescue and other Civil Defence vehicles to approach within measurable distance of their tasks. The problem of debris will be fact be a major factor in Civil Defence operations.
"Heavy mechanical plant may be required for the following purposes:
"(a) To assist in the removal of persons injured or trapped. At this stage mainly heavy plant is needed, particularly mobile cranes with sufficient length of boom or jib to reach for long distances over the wreckage of buildings.
"(b) To force a passage for Civil Defence vehicles and fire appliances to enable them to reach areas where major rescue and other problems exist and require urgent operational action.
"(c) To make certain safety measures - e.g., to pull down unsafe structures.
"(d) To clear streets and pavements to help restore communications and to afford access for the repair of damaged mains and pipes beneath the streets.
"(e) For the final clearance of debris and the tidying of sites. This is a long term and not an operational requirement.
"Urgent Rescue Operations
"During rescue operations in London in the last war the machines used with great success included heavy 3.5-5 ton mobile cranes, mounted on road wheels, with a 30-40 ft jib; medium heavy 2-3.5 ton mobile cranes, mounted on road wheels, with a 26 ft jib; heavy crawler [tracked] tractor bulldozers; medium crawler [tracked] tractor bulldozers]; mechanical shovels and compressors, three stage, mounted on road wheels.
"In the case of a large or multiple incident where access was obstructed by considerable quantities of scattered debris, a bulldozer or tractor was first employed in order to clear one or more approaches by which other equipment and personnel could reach the scene of operations.
"Next, all debris of manhandling size was loaded into one-yard skips and discharged by the crane into lorries, giving increased manoeuvring space to the Services operating on the site.
"Heavy mobile cranes were then brought up to the incident where, used under the skilled direction of the rescue party Leader, they were invaluable for removing girders and large blocks of masonry which obstructed access to casualties or persons trapped. The necessary chains and wire ropes for these operations formed part of the standard equipment of the heavy and medium-heavy mobile cranes.
"The work was, of course, carried out in close co-operation with the Rescue Parties who also used various forms of light mechanical equipment, such as jacks and ratchet lifting tackle for work in confined spaces.
"Compressors sometimes proved valuable for breaking up large masonry such as fallen walls, into sections of a size and weight within the handling and lifting capacity of the cranes. This method was only ever used when it was known [using witnesses and dogs] that there were no casualties under the masonry.
"Mobile cranes and other heavy mechanical plant were withdrawn as soon as all casualties had been removed, to be available for use at other incidents."
- Home Office Civil Defence Rescue Manual, H. M. Stationery Office, London, 1952, chapter XI: Use of Heavy Mechanical Plant in Rescue, Demolition and Clearance Operations, pp. 97-98.
There are summaries of the effects of some of the individual V1 cruise missile and V2 inertially guided rocket effects on London and the Home Counties of England linked here. Both the V1 and the V2 carried warheads approximately equivalent to 1 ton of TNT. The V1 travelled subsonically, allowing air raid warnings and at least duck and cover protection against displacement and flying debris. The V2, by contrast, was a supersonic rocket, so the first sound from it was the blast wave of the explosion itself, giving no effective warning. A comparison of the effects of the two weapons indicates the usefulness of warning. For instance, the maximum number of people ever killed by a V1 was 76 (at Korte van Ruysbroeckstraat, Antwerp, 8:19 pm on 21 January 1945), while the maximum number of people killed by the V2 was 567 (Cinema Rex, Avenue de Keyser, Antwerp, 3:23 pm on 16 December 1944).
The political aspects of CND's attack on Civil Defence
We have examined chain of influence from the Soviet Union's "World Peace Council" propaganda bureau and CND in a previous post in detail. The CND tactics and the events of the 1980s mirrored the events of the 1930s, except that the free elected democracy remained strong in the 1980s and kept ahead of the dictatorship instead of pursuing appeasement and weakness as occurred in the 1930s which caused World War II. In the House of Commons "Civil Defence" debate of 20 February 1980, the Minister of State for the British Home Office, Leon Brittan, stated that civil defence backs up the credible deterrence of evil and therefore forces an arms race:
"It is important to consider the relationship between civil defence and military defence, as my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell pointed out. Our central military strategy is to deter attack by an aggressor, and civil defence contributes to deterrence. Indeed, it is essential that our civil preparedness should be adequate if the credibility of our deterrent strategy is to be maintained. Our military preparedness and our civil preparedness are therefore closely related, and we must make sure that the balance between the two is sensible and realistic."
In the same "Civil Defence" debate, Mr. Archie Hamilton stated:
"We know that the Soviet Union dominates the world. Recent experience in Afghanistan proves that. It is prepared to exploit any weakness that it may find. ... The advantage held by the Soviet Union is that it is on the attack while we are on the defensive. In a democracy it is harder to prepare for war. There is no doubt in my mind that the Soviet Union will use military means when it believes that that will achieve its aims at acceptable cost.
"Britain is almost totally dependent on our nuclear deterrent. Unfortunately, our conventional forces are insignificant in comparison with the vast conventional forces of the Soviet bloc. Nuclear weapons will deter only if this country is prepared to use them. If the Soviet Union feels that we are not prepared to use them, the invasion of Britain may come into the category of an acceptable loss.
"I believe that the Soviet Union is entitled to take the view that, as we have no civil defence worth speaking of, at the same time we have no wish to use our nuclear weapons and virtually no will to resist."
In the previous post, we made the point that in 1932 former and future Prime Minister Baldwin openly claimed in the House of Commons that there is no protection possible against air raids, encouraging the secret rearmament of fascist states. Then, once the threat had been produced by the denial of civil defence countermeasures, the Government in 1938 had to issue to every household in Britain The Protection Of Your Home Against Air Raids. Similarly, Bolsover in each edition (1980 and 1982) of Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick quotes denials of civil defence from various personalities ignorant of the facts concerning the effects of nuclear weapons:
"In the event of nuclear war ... there will be no survivors - all will be obliterated. ... the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. [Wrong: the arms race bankrupted and thus defeated the Soviet Union!]"
- Lord Louis Mountbatten, former Chief of the British Defence Staff, speech at Strasbourg, 11 May 1979.
"As our own White Paper put it as long ago as 1957, there was then no means of protecting the population against the consequences of a nuclear war. There are none today ... [Wrong!]"
- Lord Zuckerman, Chief Scientific Adviser to the War Office, 1964-71, letter to The Times, 21 January 1980.
"The survivors, of any, would live in despair amid the poisoned ruins of a civilization that had committed suicide."
- President Carter's 15 January 1981 farewell speech following Reagan's election.
"... after exposure to a high dose of radiation some animal or plant species will suffer much more than others and this will seriously upset the ecological balance. For example, the killing of birds may result in a large increase in insect populations, which are much less sensitive to radiation, and this in turn would cause enormous damage to plants. A rapid increase in insect population, particularly disease vectors, may have serious effects on the health of both man and animals. Other important ecological consequences of a nuclear war may result from large-scale fires ... [Wrong: Rotblat just considered gamma radiation whereas insects are so small that they are fried or sterilized by short-range beta radiation which cannot penetrate through the feathers of birds or the clothes of people; see the extensive 1966 research on beta effects from fallout upon insects by Joseph D. Teresi and Curtis L. Newcombe, An Estimate of the Effects of Fallout Beta Radiation on Insects and Associated Invertebrates, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report AD0633024]"
- Nobel Laureate Joseph Rotblat, Professor of Physics, London University, Nuclear Radiation in Warfare, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1981.
The effectiveness of "duck and cover" against explosion produced flying debris and bodily displacement by blast winds is the whole basis for taking cover on a battlefield: it is not propaganda or trickery. Under random bombardment by high explosive shells, troops lying down in the open are only 40% as likely to be killed by blast as those standing up with the whole body area exposed to the blast winds and horizontally travelling debris. Troops in shell craters or ditches had only 20% of the mortality risk of those standing in the open. (Those in open trenches had only 10% of the risk of being killed as those standing in the open, while for those in thick earth-covered trench shelters the risk was only 1% of that from standing in the open.) The value of "duck and cover" against nuclear weapons is even greater, because in addition to protection from blast winds and debris, it easily eliminates the main danger from the direct thermal radiation to bare skin and part of the direct nuclear radiation due to self-shielding along the long axis of the body.
Bolsover's CND Propaganda and the Neutron Bomb
The greatest deception CND ever did (with Soviet Union "World Peace Council" propaganda backing) was lying about Samuel Cohen's neutron bomb. On page 22 of the May 1980 1st edition of Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick Bolsover states:
"If such a [unilateral disarmament] movement is strong enough, nothing can stand against it - Government policies can be changed, decisions cancelled, bases dismantled, weapons scrapped. The campaign against the neutron bomb is an example. When America proposed to arm NATO forces with this horrible [tactical, anti-tank, rather than collateral damage causing] weapon - to bring it to European countries [to negate the superior Soviet/Warsaw Pact conventional forces and tank invasion threat], and of course Britain - a massive campaign forced the postponement and possible cancellation of the project. It can be done again."
We gave the facts of the neutron bomb previously, e.g., here (RERF cover-up), here (history of radiation effects lies by geneticists who ignorant of DNA repair enzymes, yet asserted in 1957 that they knew things they didn't), here (Samuel Cohen's latest book), and here (full scientific details and political history/propaganda of deployment).
President John F. Kennedy on the need for British civil defence to credibly deter thugs
Future U.S. President John F. Kennedy worked in the American Embassy in London while Britain was trying to prevent war by falsely claiming civil defence is just a "fraud and a plot of Ministers to create a war psychology", and compiled vital information about it in his published 1940 thesis called Why England Slept (which we have already quoted in the previous post in connection to Sir Edward Grey's propaganda about the cause of World War I, which was largely his fault as blundering British Foreign Minister). Kennedy wrote in Why England Slept that public apathy in England towards civil defence encouraged fascist aggression by sending Hitler the message that Britain was unprepared to really threaten to stop the Nazis:
"In England we can see vividly where democracy failed. In the case of A.R.P. [Air Raid Precautions, later renamed civil defence], for example, the Government failed to get enough volunteers until after the Munich crisis had driven home the seriousness of the situation. But Germany had 12,000,000 members by 1936 ... We cannot tell anyone to keep out of our hemisphere unless our armaments and the people behind these armaments [emphasis by Kennedy] are prepared to back up the command ..."
For this reason, Kennedy refused in Why England Slept to place the blame for Nazi appeasement on the Prime Minister (Chamberlain). Kennedy quotes Herbert Morrison, the Labour Leader in 1939, describing as follows the severe Labour Party abuse he received about civil defence, the main objections being completely paranoid and to a certain extent also contradictory, namely that (1) civil defence is obviously so very effective it will produce a war psychology, intimidating Hitler, and that (2) civil defence is obviously so very ineffective that it is a complete fraud:
"At the beginning I got plenty of abuse from the irresponsibles because I said that Labour administrators must play their full part in Air Raid Precautions, which was denounced as a fraud and a plot of Ministers to create war psychology. For Labour local authorities to cooperate with state departments in this task was treachery. Anyway, no Air Raid Precautions could possibly be effective [the quacks alleged]."
This 1930s attack on civil defence by irresponsible, paranoid Labour authorities was repeated in 1982 when Britain's Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, was forced to cancel the civil defence exercise "Hard Rock" after 24 of 52 Labour county councils refused to cooperate. President Ronald Reagan's American civil defence program met exactly the same fate:
"New York City's City Council voted to reject the Reagan Administration's Crisis Relocation Plan and New York Mayor Ed Koch stated that it would be 'impossible to evacuate in any timely, acceptible way.' Hundreds of local governments throughout the nation also refused to cooperate with the new federally sponsored civil defence program even before it was funded."
- Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, 1982.
As discussed in the previous post, President Kennedy in Why England Slept attributes the problem of appeasement to Sir Edward Grey's excuse for blunders he made as Foreign Secretary which led to World War I:
"The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable."
- Sir Edward Grey, quoted by Kennedy, Why England Slept.
Actually, Grey was lying because the first declaration of war in World War I was by Germany and if he had clearly communicated Britain's position to Germany before it mobilized, instead of obfuscating in inept indecision and political fear, World War I Prime Minister Lloyd George was certain the disaster was not stopped by Grey's incompetence:
"It is a mistaken view of history to assume that its episodes were entirely due to fundamental causes ... and that they were not precipitated or postponed by the intervention of personality ... Of one thing there can be no doubt; he [British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey] failed calamitously in his endeavours to avert the Great War ... [failures which were caused by] Grey's hesitations during the fateful days when the thunderclouds were deepening and rapidly darkening the sky ..."
- David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 1933.
"In 1914, Grey played a key role in the July Crisis leading to the outbreak of World War I. His attempts to mediate the dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia by a "Stop in Belgrade" came to nothing, owing to the tepid German response. He also failed to clearly communicate to Germany that a breach of the treaty not merely to respect but also to protect the neutrality of Belgium — of which both Britain and Germany were signatories — would cause Britain to declare war against Germany. When he finally did make such communication, German forces were already massed at the Belgian border, and Helmuth von Moltke convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II it was too late to change the plan of attack. Thus when Germany declared war on France (3 August) and broke the treaty by invading Belgium (4 August), the British Cabinet voted almost unanimously to declare war on August 4, 1914." - Wikipedia.
Kennedy explains in Why England Slept the indirect role of Grey's World War I excuse in causing World War II:
"Armaments were looked upon as something horrible, as being the cause of war, not a means of defence. Again and again, through the 'thirties, opponents of rearament quoted Grey ... Closely linked with this attitude towards armaments and the League [of Nations] was the great hope the British people put into their efforts towards disarmament in general ..."
To demonstrate the value of civil defence, consider the following facts. In 1938, Britain had 38 million gas masks manufactured and ready for issue, while Germany had only 9 million in 1939 due to a rubber shortage (although Hitler was invading European countries, none had tropical rubber trees, unlike British colonies). According to Moore (1987), Germany had 10,000 tons of poison gas ready for use in 1939, while Britain had only 1,000 tons. Did England's gas masks make Germany use gas against England? No, having civil defence instead helps to deter an attack. Another factor is the wind direction and speed, which - as in the case of nuclear fallout - does not increase the confidence of offensive military planners in such weapons: the only reliable thing about gas or nuclear fallout is the fact that they will cause civilian panic if the population is scared, unprepared and ignorant. (This applies to the 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas the Nazis produced during World War II, which would have been absorbed by the activated charcoal in all British gas masks carried all the time by everyone; skin absorption lethality requires much higher doses than inhalation.)
It is important to point out that innocent Jews were being herded into concentration camps or otherwise abused by the Nazis during the 1930s, while Hitler invaded country after country and disarmament fanatics quoted Grey's lie and attacked the civil defence which was needed to allow Britain to deter Hitler: on 2 August 1937, the British Manchester Guardian newspaper openly published the fact that no less than 40 concentration camps were then under construction in Germany. Nobody cared. In 1938, the 209th (revised) edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf was openly published stating on page 372 for the first time clearly stating that he wanted the Jewish problem to be "ausgerottet". Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels insisted that the ends justify the means in his speech at Stuttgart on 4 September 1938: "The methods by which a people forces its way upwards are of no moment; only the goal which is achieved is important."
Likewise, the Bolshevik communist Yaroslavsky declared: "Whatever coincides with the interests of the Proletarian Revolution is ethical." (Watkins, 1978.)
America had 3,000,000 troops in Europe in 1945, but by 1947 the number had fallen to below 500,000, while the Soviet Union had been expanding. Within seven years of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin had occupied ten additional countries including Armenia, Belorussia, Georgia, Outer Mongolia, and the Ukraine. Together with the Nazis, the Soviet Union jointly invaded Poland in 1939 and by the end of 1940 under the Nazi-Soviet Pact they had acquired Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldavia. As a result of World War II, by 1947 the Soviet Union had also acquired Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania. But the first flashpoint was Berlin, surrounded by the Soviet acquired East German territory, leading to the Berlin blockade by the Soviets from 1948-9: the Soviets tried to "peacefully" starve Berlin into submission and surrender, and only failed due to a massive airlift of food and supplies.
After World War II, President Truman slashed the American military from 12 million to 1.5 million personnel with the military budget falling from £90 billion/year to just $11 billion/year. This was reflected by the renaming of the U.S. War Department the "Department of Defense" in 1949 (Britain's War Office was renamed the "Ministry of Defence" on April fools day in 1963). This post war disarmament was not mirrored by the Soviet Union, which acquired Czechoslovakia in a Soviet organized coup in 1948 and Hungary in 1949, the year the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon. In 1950, the Soviet Union backed a communist revolutionary war in Korea which was one step too far for President Truman, who explained his defence of Korea (using conventional weapons) on 10 April 1951:
"In the simplest terms what we are doing in Korea is this: we are trying to prevent a Third World War ... The communists in the Kremlin are engaged in a monstrous conspiracy to stamp out freedom all over the world."
But, as explained in a previous post, President Truman made the error of giving a personal guarantee to Britain's Prime Minister Attlee that he would under no circumstances use nuclear weapons to defend Korea, which communist spies in the British government leaked to the Kremlin, effectively giving them a free hand to do whatever they wanted in Korea until the election of President Eisenhower, who took a stronger approach and finally ended the war in 1953:
"... it was a vindication of the strategy of the nuclear deterrent. It was only when they thought atomic weapons were about to be used against them that the Communists concluded an armistice agreement. This fact is still not fully appreciated in the West."
- Major Edgar O'Ballance (1918-2009), Korea: 1950-1953, 1969.
Korea checked Soviet territorial expansion and accelerated the arms race while they sought military superiority over the free world. The terrific bombing in Vietnam during the Cold War was due to very strong communist diehard idealists, demonstrating the problems of trying to impose capitalist democracy on primitive societies. France's war against communist insurgency in Vietnam after World War II was first supported by President Eisenhower on 8 May 1953, when he announced $60 million support. However the Pentagon Papers showed that he also stated in 1953:
"I can conceive of no greater tragedy than for the U.S. to become involved in an all-out war in Indiochina [Vietnam]."
France was defeated in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, where 6,000 French troops were killed or wounded and 10,000 were captured. Vietnam was consequently divided on a piece of paper at Geneva on 21 July 1954, with democracy in the South and communists in the North, and Eisenhower supported the South. The communists in the North then fought a war of terrorism against the South which was unable to support itself without American backing, escalating gradually into the heaviest conventional bombing war in history by the late 1960s. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union ruthlessly suppressed uprisings in Hungary (1956) and Prague (1968).
During this time, there were repeated calls for disarmament in the belief that it would increase security, despite the fact that British disarmament after World War I reduced security and led to World War II, as was well appreciated back in 1946:
"In a world made bombless by treaty, the first to violate the treaty would gain an enormous advantage. Under such conditions the opportunities for world dominance would be breathtaking!"
- Frederick S. Dunn, The Common Problem, in Bernard Brodie (Ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order, 1946.
Another delusion is economic interdependence, which was claimed to be a means to make war impossible. This is debunked because in 1914, Britain and Germany were each other's "biggest trading partner" but still went to war (as pointed out by the Tofflers in War and Antiwar, 1993, who also emphasise that the Cold War was in some respects as devastating as a World War, since 8.4 million soldiers were killed in World War II compared to 7.2 million soldiers killed in 155 conflicts during the Cold War period of 1945-92).
By the early 1970s, the arms race against America was becoming a heavy burden upon the Soviet Union. On 11 June 1971 even Premier Leonid Brezhnev (the Soviet leader from 1964-1982) admitted in his propaganda speech called "Achieving International Peace" that there was an effect of the arms race upon Soviet economic development, and called for an end to the need for more arms by encouraging Western disarmament fanatics and Vietnam peace protestors to lobby their governments for peaceful surrender to communist aggression:
"Socialism is sufficiently strong to ensure both reliable defences and economic development, although it is true that without the great expenditure on defence we would have ensured a much faster advance of our economy ... In the United States the 'Peace' movement is assuming an increasingly mass-scale and is bringing strong pressure to bear on the government. Resistance to the increase in military spending is growing in other NATO countries, too."
Brezhnev had used Soviet tanks to brutally suppress the unarmed 1968 Prague Spring reformers who wanted more freedom, just as his predecessor Khrushchev had used tanks to suppress the Hungarian uprising in 1956. His definition of "peace" therefore differed from the one used by Jesus. Brezhnev funded a Moscow-based "World Peace Council" to globally exaggerate and misrepresent the effects of nuclear weapons in order to encourage citizens of nuclear defended democracies to demonstrate against their weapons. Moscow's World Peace Council funded propaganda and the demonstrations it produced was successful in forcing President Carter to delay the deployment of Samuel Cohen's neutron bomb, which was purely about deterring massed tank invasions of the type used in Hungary 1956 and Prague 1968, without fallout or collateral blast damage risks, and it boosted CND too.
The economic decay of the Soviet Union under drug addict Premier Brezhnev
The American defence budged increased dramatically during the Vietnam era after 1965, with the Vietnam War, but the arms race cost the Soviet Union even more, and the stresses upon Premier Brezhnev had made him drug dependent, addicted to sedatives as explained by Daniel Wolf in his article "The Bizarre Secrets of a Lost Empire", published in Sunday Times, 12 February 1995:
"November, 1974. In sub-zero temperatures, Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet general secretary, waved to Gerald Ford as the US president entered Airforce One to return to Washington DC. The two leaders had just completed a summit meeting about strategic nuclear arms limitation, and Brezhnev was pleased with the results. ... He and the Soviet Union were at the pinnacle of their power: they had strategic nuclear parity with the United States and were supporting a wave of successful national liberation struggles in the Third World. But on that bitter winter evening Brezhnev was falling apart, as the state he ran was beginning to do. ... Brezhnev's personal doctor between 1975 and 1982 maintains that he had taken a drug overdose ... 'So let me make it clear: Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev was taking sedatives and tranquillisers, but in such huge quantities that he was effectively a drug addict. We always called them 'sedatives' to avoid stating the facts, and he would too, to fool himself, but it wasn't the truth.'
"The truth is that, for the last seven years of his life, Brezhnev was a mental cripple. His doctors needed four to six weeks to prepare him for public meetings, and even then things would go wrong: film of Brezhnev's public speeches in the late 1970s shows a decrepit amnesiac who could hardly mouth even the robotic language of Soviet-speak.
"Some people close to Brezhnev found it convenient to keep him in this state: the country was run by a ''troika'' KGB chief Yuri Andropov, defence minister Dimitri Ustinov and, looming over them, the ''grey cardinal'', Mikhail Suslov, sour and pedantic guardian of the ideology, the sacred texts that justified their every action. Between them, these men had power without responsibility: if things went wrong, they could always blame Brezhnev.
"The story of Brezhnev's addiction is not just a bizarre tale of the truth behind the facade: it is a perfect cameo of the Soviet system. It was a world of absolute secrecy and ultimate absurdity. The passion for secrecy was an essential component of the system, a logical consequence of its origins as a conspiratorial regime built up by a small group of fanatics. ... perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Brezhnev-era offensive was the Soviet attempt to win the battle of ideas by fostering the western peace movement of the late 1970s. The Russians tried very hard to stoke up the peace movement, and their paw marks can be found all over some of the main events, particularly the neutron bomb and cruise missile campaigns. Their operations have been known about in the intelligence and foreign affairs community for some years, but this is the first time that senior Soviet figures of the time have admitted it on camera. ...
"Soviet central committee documents confirm that by 1976 the leadership was committed to fostering the peace movement. Its chance was just around the corner. In the mid-1970s KGB intelligence learned that America was developing the neutron bomb, a weapon with lower blast and higher radiation emissions than conventional nuclear weapons.
"According to General Nikolai Leonov, KGB head of analysis, the Russians knew in advance about the neutron bomb. This allowed them to launch an extensive and co-ordinated propaganda campaign the very moment that President Jimmy Carter announced, in July 1977, the weapon's development and possible deployment in Europe.
"There were shoals of Moscow radio propaganda broadcasts; 28 communist parties published statements denouncing the ''barbarous nature'' of the weapon; an ''International Week of Action'' was called by the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council for August 1977. Hundreds of meetings, demonstrations and protests were organised across the world.
"In Britain, when we examined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) archives, we confirmed that peace campaigning was a big part of communist activities. Communists were certainly active in CND: the chairman of CND at that time, John Cox, was a well-known party member and former member of the executive committee of the CPGB (1971-73). In the mid-1970s, two of CND's three full-time workers were Communist party members. In Holland epicentre of the Soviet campaign communists were prominent and successful. ...
"The anti-neutron-bomb campaign was the breakthrough for the Russians, and the peace movement took off. In the end, it was a close-run thing. A few years later, hundreds of thousands came out on the streets to protest at the siting of missiles, and western governments only just held their nerve. One of the leading figures in the Soviet peace campaign, Tair Tairov, believes it was a good thing that they did. 'If they hadn't, that would have given the Soviet leadership a false argument, or a distorted vision of their power, which they would have misused. Moscow would have celebrated, started dictating to Western Europe, and that perhaps could have brought on a real tragedy...'
"To understand these East-West confrontations, you have to start with the ideological claim of the party. The Soviet Union was not just a state but a mission: it existed to lead the working class to communism all over the world. By that mission, party leaders from Lenin through Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev justified their power over all aspects of Soviet life. Without the mission, what would the party leaders be but just another bunch of criminal dictators battening on a ravaged, bleeding nation? With it, they were messengers of an 'inevitable' future.
"In the words of Mikhail Kapitsa, former deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union: 'This ideology cost us billions and billions. Billions for nothing. Billions for just ideas.'
"The best proof that the Soviet Union was the ideology came with its collapse. In the summer of 1988, Eduard Shevardnadze, then foreign minister, announced the abandonment of the central ideological principle, ''the class struggle in international relations''. The trouble was that without the ideology, the whole gigantic, ruinous structure made no sense. Within a year the Berlin Wall had fallen. Within three, the Soviet Union was no more."
Phil Bolsover in the Foreword to the March 1982 second edition of his CND pamphlet Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick, states:
"Since this pamphlet was first published early in 1980, the movement for nuclear disarmament in Britain has been transformed by an astonishing increase in national support. National membership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has grown from 2,500 to (at the time of writing) 40,000, with local group membership estimated at 300,000. Many new local organisations with the same basic aims as CND have been set up all over the country. ... 250,000 people marched through London in October 1981, to protest against nuclear weapons ...
"Of course the Government itself had been partly responsible for the revival of the nuclear disarmament campaign. In 1979-80, at a time of heightened international tension [due to the Brezhnev's Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to impose communist dictatorship], it made three important decisions: it decided to spend £5,000 million (later estimates said £7,000 million) on four Trident submarines, one of the most destructive weapons ever invented; it agreed to install 160 American owned and operated cruise missiles in Britain, and it issued Protect and Survive."
On page 56 of that edition, Bolsover points out that Protect and Survive was published after John F. Wallace (member of NATO's Civil Defence Committee) in the February 1980 NATO Review wrote:
"In the final analysis, the military ability to fight, and even to survive, is going to depend on what is happening in the civil sector."
Civil defence in British mainstream Party Politics
In 1935, the then Labour Party Leader in Britain, Clement Attlee (who later - when Prime Minister - secretly ordered the clandistine manufacture of Britain's first nuclear bomb), declared:
"There is no security in armaments, and we shall be no party to piling them up."
(Quoted in Gilbert and Gott, The Appeasers, 1967.)
The Labour Party was in opposition to the Conservatives who were in power, and who were already appeasing Hitler in the belief that "peaceful co-existence" with the Nazis was possible and desirable, compared to the risk from confrontation and war. This was due essentially to (1) the lying popular exaggeration of the effects of aerial bombardment, and (2) the lying popular denial of the effectiveness of civil defence. So there was no effective political opposition in the House of Commons to what the Conservatives were doing in making friends with Hitler. Churchill was ignored.
Unlike the 1930s when British political opinion was united in offering the hand of friendship and collaboration to Hitler up to and after the Munich crisis, in the 1980s the appeasement of the Soviet Union became a Party Political issue in Britain. The Conservatives led by Thatcher issued Civil Defence handbooks like Protect and Survive in order to strengthen Western will to resist Soviet intimidation, while in 1982 the Labour Party committed itself to unilateral nuclear disarmament. The Labour Party remained out of power in Britain until it had abandoned that policy.
President Reagan's propaganda against the Soviet Union
On 29 November 1982, Henry Kissinger, former U.S. Secretary of State and author of the 1957 endorsement of clean nuclear warfare against military targets, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, wrote an article in Newsweek called "How to Deal with Moscow":
"... economic stagnation must raise serious doubts in the minds of some Soviet leaders whether the country's security is compatible over the long term with an unrestrained arms race."
President Reagan's administration decided to follow Kissinger's idea and issue psychological propaganda to demoralize Moscow's World Peace Council, instead of letting them reap all the kudos of their lying "peace" propaganda. On 15 January 1983, U.S. National Security Adviser William Clark wrote an open letter to Cardinal Bernardin stating:
"For moral, political and military reasons, the United States does not target the Soviet civilian population ... We do not threaten the existence of Soviet civilisation by threatening Soviet cities. Rather, we hold at risk the war-making capability of the Soviet Union ..."
Then on 1 February 1983, U.S. Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger stated in his Annual Report to Congress:
"The Reagan administration's policy is that in no circumstances may such weapons be used deliberately for the purpose of destroying populations."
Finally, President Reagan himself came up with the ultimate peace "vision" (Reagan's term, not his critics!) and announced it in his television address on 23 March 1983:
"I've become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence ... Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive."
Defence is the biggest threat you can make to an empire which has economically crippled itself by making offensive weapons. Reagan took away the Soviet dream, paving the way for communist reform and collapse.
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