Please also click here (text in blue typeface is hyperlinked to source documents) for more detailed key declassified nuclear testing and capability documents compilation (EM-1 related USA research reports plus UK nuclear weapon test reports on blast and radiation), from nukegate.org. A long introduction is provided above blog posts to debunk all of the populist pro-disarmament groupthink "strategic deterrence" mythology, originating from fake civilian effects data invented by falsely applying free-field effects to modern urban targets (and also from the non-inclusion of tactical nuclear weapons effects data or even the collateral damage avoidance civil defense chapter which appeared in 1957-64 editions, in the 1977 propaganda Carter era Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of nuclear weapons, due to the present world crisis). The key problem is that Russia now has relatively clean tactical neutron bombs, but we disarmed all of ours in 1992, creating a major deterrence gap against tactical nuclear warfare or similar major provocations; yes, in "theory" we could always escalate to strategic retaliation, but most people and Western leaders would certainly regard such escalation as more risky than tit-for-tat deterrence. As Kennedy put it, we need more options than humiliation or all-out counter city nuclear war. As with Russian use of Po-210 and Novichok in the UK in 2006-18, and sarin in Syria, "no first use" doctrines make no sense where the enemy refuses to admit to first use, or even to admit to illegally invading Ukraine and starting a war! Against liars, peace agreements are never worth the paper they are written on (we saw this in 1938 appeasement ego trips). Peace propaganda, where it attacks life-saving civil defense for credible war deterrence (in order to claim falsely "there is no alternative to disarmament but annihilation") is enemy supporting propaganda, and now desperately needs debunking. The sort of people indulging in this sort of lying to ensure deterrence is undermined are thugs who will not be reasoned with, but they have the ear of the Nobel Prize committee, the UN Security Council, and the mass media such as the BBC which refuses to objectively fact-check their lies on nuclear weapons, and backs their fake "news" based on outright lies. Relatively clean neutron bombs, of total yield 1 kiloton or less, can be used to avert collateral damage, either by air bursting at a height to eliminate significant blast and thermal damage, or they can be placed into earth-penetrator warheads to debunk tunnels and hard shelters: for example, 0.01 kiloton detonated at 15 metres in dry soil, which is possible by proven earth penetrator warhead delivery, is equivalent to a 15/(0.01.3) = 60 m depth when scaled up to 1 kiloton reference yield, so it AVOIDS ALL COLLATERAL DAMAGE, including thermal flash burns and fire effects entirely, all air blast damage, and trap the very small amount of radioactivity in fused silicate "glass" (like Trinitite) deep underground. This suppressed collateral damage energy is transformed into extra ground shock and cratering action, producing a crater radius of 15 metres and destruction of buried hard tunnels and bunkers to several crater radii, as explained in field manual FM 5-106. Such credible deterrents (tactical nuclear weapons) were proof tested in the first Cold War where they were USED (yes USED) to DETER enemy invasions. This is the most important USE of nuclear weapons, but is ignored in all propaganda! They are now being used by Russia to deter our decisive intervention in the Russian-Ukraine war, because we don't have W33, Mk54, W48, or W79 dedicated tactical deterrents of invasions any longer. We argue that the future of peaceful nuclear deterrence is not to ban tactical nuclear weapons of invasions that set off 100% of the world wars of history (Belgium 1914, Poland 1939), but to have these credible deterrents replace incredible "city busting" MAD policy, which failed in the 1930s despite media saturation of exaggerated effects of gas bomb knock-out blows, etc.

ABOVE: Lt.-Gen. James M. Gavin, who states in his book War and Peace in the Space Age, Hutchinson, London, 1959, pp. 102, 116-118:

"The Luftwaffe was the first to learn that there is more to air power than an all-out bombing offensive. The British had foreseen the value of the interceptor, and so the world's greatest manned aircraft battle, the Battle of Britain, was decided in their favor. ... As the war came to an end, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey was appointed to move in the wake of the advancing armies and assess the results of our bombing effort. The findings were reported in our 200 detailed reports. They were never, in my opinion, given the recognition that they deserved. One of the most interesting aspects of our bombing effort was that German production increased in the same ratio as our bombing effort until late in 1944 - until 'well after the ground armies were ashore to make good the job at which the aeroplanes had been unsuccessful'. ... I became increasingly interested in these problems. It was with great pleasure, therefore, that I received orders to the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group [WSEG] in March of 1949. The Director of WSEG, Dr Philip Morse, assigned me the project of studying the possible tactical employment of nuclear weapons. I devoted the entire summer of 1949 to reading everything on the subject ... and talking to our scientists. ... I had become convinced that nuclear weapons had a tremendous field for tactical application, in fact, in the long run, probably the most promising field of all. One of the recommendations in the study was that we should reconsider our then current policy of allocating all fissionable material to strategic use. This recommendation was very unpopular with my air force colleagues and, for the study to be accepted, had to be striken from it. It made little difference, since the study was stamped 'Top Secret' ... Dr Oppenheimer was present at one of the conferences and he expressed a view in which I found myself in complete agreement. That is, that more important than trying to devise new ways and means of destroying a bigger portion of the human race, we should try to find ways and means of living with the powers we had already created. ...

"If the urban bombing concept were to remain policy, and thermonuclear weapons were to be added to it, and if that concept were morally and militarily unsound in the beginning, it certainly would be more so with the H-bomb added. I believed that it was unsound and that Dr Oppenheimer's views were valid. ... an increasing number of people were talking about the possible tactical uses of nuclear weapons. An advance group in the JCS headed by Brigadier General Don Zimmerman, USAF, had done particularly good work in this area. ... I recall a figure used by General Zimmerman that when we exceeded 25 B-29 bombers delivering high-explosives instead of using one carrying an atomic bomb, we were making an uneconomical use of our resources. Thus, we approached the Korean crisis ... with our newest form of firepower, nuclear fire power, packaged for strategic use. ... General Nichols and I went to the office of General Ridgway and urged that he recommend to the Chief of Staff that he in turn recommend to the President that we use nuclear weapons against the North Korean forces. It would have been militarily inexcusable to allow the 8th Army to be destroyed without even using the most powerful weapons in our arsenal. Yet, we almost did so! We had already made two combat bombing strikes of about 175 B-29s without decisive results. The situation in the summer of 1950 offered us a number of well worth-while tactical nuclear targets, if we had had the moral courage to make the decision to use them."

Due to the failure to use tactical nuclear weapons to deter escalation in the Korean War, 2,500,000 people were killed (including 36,000 Americans and 1,100 British) by conventional fighting and the key cities in Korea were flattened by 635,000 tons of conventional bombs (635 kilotons, including 32,557 tons of napalm) and half the country has had to live in a totalitarian dictatorship ever since. It is analogous to the way Hitler bombed Guernica, killing a third of the population, on 26 April 1937 supposedly to support Franco in the Spanish civil war,  but in fact sending out a message of intimidation to Britain and France! Similarly, in Vietnam the Vietcong were supplied by the 1,000 miles Ho Chi Minh Trail which was no wider than 40 miles, and used cover of rainforests (passing through Laos and Cambodia, well away from centres of population to avoid civilian casualties!). A few 99.9% clean 10 megaton air bursts like the revolutionary Dominic-Houstonic Ripple II test of 30 October 1962 would have literally "blown their cover", and allowed the trail to be shut down to win the war, as proved by the 15 megaton Bravo test, where the Pisonia forest on Victor island at 11.8 miles got 2.4 psi peak overpressure, sustaining "Moderate damage" - that photo is in the 1957 Glasstone Effects of Nuclear Weapons, page 241 (shown below). But secret "Jason" anti-nuclear propaganda enforced by anti-nuclear bigot Steven Weinberg and comrades simply lied (see declassified Jason report S-266) that the Vietcong could cut a path through a blown down rainforest with chainsaws at night without any problems moving the debris, being heard, or seen! Also, he claimed the Vietcong could then use the chainsaw-cut route without being spotted or stopped by American helicopter gunships!  Weinberg reportedly refused to sign off that secret "Jason" report unless it recommended banning tactical nuclear weapons to end the Vietnam war peacefully, by making up ridiculous lies about the efficiency of chainsaws to somehow move thousands of tons of timber. Weinberg even claims on page 13: "The main weakness of tree blowdown as a method of interdiction is that a tree can only be blown down once." It only needs to be blown down once. You're creating a barrier 20 km wide at any point along a 1,000 mile trail, which you can then focus resources on to halt supplies getting through! You don't need to blow trees down more than once! If somehow they managed to cut a path through the 20 km of blown down debris to allow any significant movement of supplies, you've got the rest of the 1,000 mile long trail to repeat the trick on! The Vietcong would cheaply be defeated this way (contrary to the lying weasel words of the thugs supporting them in secret Jason reports). RESULT: over 7.6 megatons of conventional bombs were dropped in the Vietnam War by the USAF (including botched attempts to conventionally - or chemically with Agent Orange - shut down the Ho Chi Ming Trail in Laos and Cambodia), with the result that 3,300,000 were killed, but the war of attrition was lost due to the inflation of the American economy caused by the immense expense of conventional warfare ($139 billion was spent on that war by US DOD). (No wonder, with arrogant bigoted stupidity like this, that Weinberg's Standard Model contains elementary errors in electroweak symmetry as we have pointed out, and he also promoted quack superstring theory nonsense entirely disconnected with reality in his textbook, without understanding the key quantum gravity evidence. It may not a coincidence that a lot of aloof "quantum field theory" bigots are also smug lying self-serving world war enginnering "disarmers" who don't give a damn about reality.)

By focussing exclusively on civilian (not military!) targets, but using solely free-field desert or ocean "effects data" unsuited to cities, Glasstone's data is an exaggeration of casualties by a factor of well over 100, on Hiroshima evidence for people unshielded outdoors, compared to those in lower floors of concrete buildings or simple low-cost dual-use shelters! Glasstone and Dolan 1977 actually give this evidence but only in their usual in highly abstract form that is widely ignored in Table 12.17 on p546 - though you need to square their median lethality radii to get the relative casualty areas for the open and for concrete buildings in Hiroshima - and for simple cheap British WWII type large earth covered Anderson shelters and concrete arches in Table 5.160 (collapse at 45-60 psi overpressure for 20-25 ft span Anderson type shelters with 5ft earth cover at crown; 220-280 psi for collapse of buried 8" thick 16 ft span concrete arch with 4' earth cover at crown). They also show in Table 7.35 on p287 that white cotton (8 oz per square yard) requires 32, 48 and 85 cal/cm^2 thermal exposure to ignite in nuclear bursts of 35 kt, 1.4 megaton and 20 megatons, respectively, compared to their data for bare skin blistering at 4-7 cal/cm^2 in their Figure 12.65 on p565. In Figure 12.70 on p567 they show a survivor with only burns to bare skin in Hiroshima, with no burns under a cap and clothing, at 5.5-6 cal/cm^2 (which the 1979 US Office of Technology Assessment "Effects of Nuclear War" falsely claim is "lethal"). But by removing the crucial nuclear testing photographs and the civil defense chapter evidence from the 1957 edition, the 1977 edition became a gift to anti-civil defense, nuclear disarmament fanatics (scroll down to see the original reason for this in the US Strategic Bombing Command row with Oppenheimer regarding strategic bombing deterrence failure prior to WWII and during WWII, vs tactical deterrence of the invasions that actually set off world wars).

BELOW: the June 1957 edition of Glasstone's "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" debunked firestorms using examples from Operation Castle nuclear tests 110 kt Koon and 15 megaton Bravo: no firestorms occurred in natural pisonia forests at 1.76 miles from 110 kt surface burst and at 11.8 miles from 15 megatons surface burst, contrary to that book's claims about the ignition energies of fine forest kindling at such distances from such yields! The problem is, Glasstone totally failed to point this out in the 1957 edition where he gives the photos OUT OF CONTEXT, like everything else in the book (from secret weapon test report WT-921 and the secret film "Military Effects Studies on Operation Castle")! Glasstone then deleted these vital photos from all future editions of his book, along with the Nevada bomb test 100 psi peak overpressure proved shelter design in Figure 12.54 on page 522 of the 1957 edition, the photos of blast walls protecting transformers and machinery at Nagasaki (pages 514-5) and photos of shallow trenches protecting road graders and bullzozers at 30 psi peak overpressure at the Teapot-MET nuclear test (pages 516-7)! Further, the results for civil defence from the Upshot-Knothole Encore nuclear test on thermal ignition in dry Nevada desert conditions (pages 318-321, including photos) is deleted from the 1977 edition. The result is a total disconnection with reality, removing the key nuclear test data showing factual evidence for thermal ignition and how to avoid it! This turned "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1977" into a left-wing bogus effects propaganda book, omitting all military effects and all key nuclear test data! In particular, the 1977 removal of the final "Principles of protection" chapter took out the vitally important data in the earlier editions. The result is a confused and misleading book, completely ignoring all tactical nuclear weapons effects experience for credibly deterring the invasions that set off both world wars (for example, the third-party invasions of Belgium in 1914 and of Poland in 1939, which both triggered World Wars; invasions which could NOT be credibly deterred by a "strategic deterrent"!). The entire "arms control and disarmament" Russian front is paranoid in censoring all the truth from public debate.

Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons (like all subsequent editions) massively exaggerated the outdoor lethal fallout areas for megaton surface bursts: Glasstone (1957) claims that the 3000 R/hr at 1 hour elliptical area under 15 miles/hour wind extends 22 miles downwind, with 3.1 miles maximum width, giving an area of (Pi/4)(Length = 22)(Width = 3.1) = 54 square miles, contrasted to just 28 square miles in Figure 4-14B of the 1957 Confidential TM 23-200 (forerunner of EM-1) Capabilities of Atomic Weapons! Similarly, for 1000 R/hr Glasstone (1957) gives an area of (Pi/4)(40)(6.8) = 212 square miles, contrasted to just 100 square miles given in the Confidential TM 23-200 (1957) Fig. 4-14B. (George R. Stanbury OBE of the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch spotted this exaggeration, and compared both sets of data to Tewa nuclear test fallout pattern to ascertain that Glasstone's data was in error; he also debunked the firestorm theory by showing that shadows cast by high rise concrete buildings in modern cities shield the thermal flash, preventing firestorms and related phenomena like soot generated "nuclear winter"; Stanbury's extensive data was kept secret by the UK government, as discussed below, just as it had kept secret evidence on gas mask effectiveness in the 1920a and 1930s, allowing mad "disarmer" Lord Noel-Baker to dismiss gas masks for long enough to enable appeasers to help Hitler massacre millions.) Glasstone (1957) Table 7.65 states that shredded newspaper is ignited by 4 cal/cm^2 for 10 megatons; Glasstone (1964) Table 7.44 states it needs 11 cal/cm^2 to ignite for the same yield! Similarly, for 10 megatons, 10 oz/yard^2 blue cotton denim is stated to ignite at just 13 cal/cm^2 in Table 7.61 of Glasstone (1957), contrasted to 44 cal/cm^2 in Table 7.40 of Glasstone (1964)! No explanation is given for the massive changes, and no references are provided. However, recently declassified documents prove that the equilibrium water content at different humidity levels produces massive changes in ignition energies because it takes 540 calories to evaporate just 1 gram of boiling water (plus still more energy to get the water to 100C). No mention of this highly relevant quantitative fact is given by Glasstone, although he was a Professor of physical chemistry! Glasstone does mention on page 303 of the 1957 edition, vaguely, in connection with clothing ignition - without any numbers or even stating what humidity level his data apply to: "The moisture content is also an important factor; the larger the amount of moisture in the fabric, the greater is the energy required to ignite it." Most modern cities, including London, New York, San Francisco, and Moscow, are built beside rivers, lakes or the ocean, so have relatively higher humidity levels than specimens left to dry out in the Nevada desert at nuclear tests.

ABOVE: Confidential classified nuclear weapon test report WT-775 proves that the large effect of humidity and thus fuel water content on thermal ignition energy was known prior to the 1957 Glasstone Effects of Nuclear Weapons but, like the secret classified US Strategic Bombing Survey 6 volumes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which proved the facts of the firestorm in direct contrast to lies circulated in Glasstone's book, the data was simply excluded from publication. The equilibrium moisture content of unpainted wood or fine kindling is about 20% of the relative humidity, so at 80% humidity "dry" wood exposed to that humid air will contain 0.2*80 = 16% water. Since all common fire fuel ignites at temperatures well above the boiling point of water, each gram of water in fire fuel takes away in excess of 540 calories of energy in boiling off, and it is this fact that makes ignition energy a function of moisture content. Crumpled newspaper, outdoors with a direct view of the fireball unobscured by city buildings, or inside on the top floors of buildings with such a view, facing the fireball, could be ignited "instantly" with "flashover" firespread after drying out at the 19% humidity of the Nevada test site for the Encore nuclear test, but the ignition energy is substantially greater for typical building contents at a more typical 50-80% city humidity level. Also note that even at 19% humidity in Nevada, it took between 5 and 20 minutes for the first 10% of fences to burn in Nevada: contrary to the instantaneous flashover burning for dry crumpled newspaper. Cars only ignited in these Nevada nuclear tests at 19% humidity where the upholstry had been deliberately ripped to expose inflammable seat stuffing, and even then they burned slowly! Glasstone omits all this key evidence from Effects of Nuclear Weapons, leaving instead confusion and ignorance that was exploited by Russian fronts for Western disarmament.

Note that the secret six volumes on the nuclear strike on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which state the opposite to the USSBS's unclassified report and Glasstone's books) referred to by General Gavin - US Strategic Bombing Survey reports #92 and #93 - prove modern concrete buildings remained intact near ground zero, the vast majority of Hiroshima fires were delayed and due to overturned charcoal breakfast cooking braziers in wood frame and bamboo homes not obsolete in city centres, and only black color blackout curtains showed sustained ignition at ground zero, etc. In other words, the strategic use of nuclear weapons have always been a COMPLETE lying scam based on deliberately-misleading Glasstone style unclassified 1930s air war type propaganda, enforced by secrecy! As in the 1930s, both "military" strategic bombing propagandarists and Hitler-backing "peaceniks" combined to assert knockout blow and "end of the world" bombing obfuscations that led to appeasement and world war, not to peaceful, credible deterrence of the invasions that set off world wars. The basic problem here is that strategic bombing advocates used secrecy on the truth about Hiroshima to fake The Effects of Nuclear Weapons to suit their agenda, just as such people did with tragic results for appeasement and World War II in the 1920s and 1930s. We have to get the truth out now, against the combined "arms control and disrmament" mass media supporting Russian propaganda fronts to, as Joseph Friedlander kindly put it in a recent email to me, "get them to not use their most effective weapons"! Sam Cohen after 1977 Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons openly published (in books) a letter he wrote to US DOD complaining that the neutron bomb wasn't in Glasstone's book Effects and the public was being allowed to remain supplied only with enemy propaganda from fake "peaceniks" like CND.  Why?  Dolan had the neutron bomb (including the calculation method for blast wave and thermal modification by high D+T neutron yield, ignored by all "peacenik" propaganda fronts) in his secret DNA-EM-1 Capabilities, published (for the reading pleasure of those with security clearance only) back in 1972!  No excuse for not having it in 1977 Glasstone and Dolan, therefore!  As "Dr Strangelove" would put it, the whole point of a deterrent is that the other side KNOWS ABOUT IT.  You don't keep a deterrent secret, unless you're playing some kind of three-card trick.  Why is there any nuclear weapons secrecy, anyway?  Plutonium isn't for sale.

Project Vista, the secret 1951 Korean War study of tactical nuclear weapons to halt or deter invasions by J. R. Oppenheimer and others (which ultimately led to Samuel Cohen's "neutron bomb" deterrent, the hard-won W79 disarmed by loons in the 1990s to encourage invasions and wars), led to the August 1953 book Atomic Weapons in Land Combat by Colonel G. C. Reinhardt and Lieutenant Colonel W. R. Kintner of the US Army. We will now quote the key findings in the second edition (August 1954) of this book. On page 22, they explain that US Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Gordon Dean stated in October 1951: "There is now a new kind of atomic warfare more promising as a means of halting aggressors without risk of destroying large parts of the world in the process." On page 107, they argue that base surge radiation from underwater bursts such as the "spectacular" 25 July 1946 Baker nuclear test under Bikini Lagoon "has produced an exaggerated fear. The truth is that no beaches suitable for amphibious operations are close enough to deep water for a nominal atomic bomb to cause a base surge." In plate 20 on page 151, they show that it took a peak overpressure of 24 psi to cause concrete building with 10" thick walls and 6" thick floors to collapse in Hiroshima, showing resistance of modern city buildings to collateral damage. On page 164 they point out that mines in a minefield with a firing pressure of 400 lbs and a solid pressure plate 5" in diameter require blast overpressures of over 20 psi to detonate: "Within that circle, tanks (yours or the enemy's) may range with comparative safety." On page 176 they point out that the Presidential "Authority to commit atomic weapons on the battlefield confers upon each general an almost magical influence over the conflict, equivalent to throwing in whole new divisions in a fraction of the time such a move would have previously entailed." (Although this can, of course, be vandalised if the President is surrounded by indecisive groupthink defeatists, who allow the enemy time to "dig in" and build hard improvised shelters, instead of stopping invasion columns quickly, when they are crossing borders and vulnerable to nuclear effects.) On page 204 they point out:

"Records of early engagements in 1914 describe the carnage in model 1870 formations on battlefields beginning to be dominated by machine gun fire [before trench warfare]. Armies were forced into trench warfare, to relearn after 50 years the lessons of the American Civil War [where 30 miles of trenches were constructed during the 292 days Siege of Petersburg, 1864-5, with machine gun emplacements, shelters and 70,000 casualties]. Almost four years of world conflict passed before World War I armies recovered the lost art of infiltration though it had been thoroughly registered in the history of Braddock's defeat and decades of Colonial-Indian fighting."

On page 213, Reinhardt and Kintner argue: "American emphasis on atomic weapons is a correct application of the principle of economy of force. ... The widespread campaign to stigmatize the use of atomic weapons as morally wrong cannot be ignored in a conflict where psychological and ideological overtones are proving almost as vital as military encounter. Ruthless aggression is inherently more reprehensible than the means to stop it. Nevertheless, emotional appeals to outlaw atomic weapons presents a problem to United States politico-military planners wich should not be underestimated." They argue on pages 219-20 that once Chinese forces had "dug in along the Korean front" they were virtually immune to conventional (or nuclear) attack: "We have not yet digested the unpalatable fact that those armies were able to operate against us for several years while our Air Force commanded the skies above the battlefield." They correctly conclude on pages 223-5 that deterrence must operate to prevent/stop against invasions while they are occurring, not after the invaders have "dug in" and are virtually immune to attack:

"Tactical atomic task forces can be hurled against local aggression anywhere in the world ... Striking before the invading armies have time to dig in and consolidate, they can quickly render them ineffective. But what, you ask, if the true sponsors of aggression then decide to come to the rescue of their trojan column? It is for this contingincy that our atomic retaliation capability should be poised. When a major power openly associates itself with aggression, America's atomic reprisal, swift and overwhelming [delivered by cruise missiles from ships or aircraft, or Trident MIRV tactical warheads from submarines, or even by ICBMs or drones], would be understood and approved throughout the world, whether it be confined to military targets or in reprisal for atomic attacks on the cities of the USA or our Allies [thus, as Herman Kahn and Samuel Cohen argued later, tactical nuclear deterrence needs to be backed up by strategic nuclear deterrence to keep escalation at bay, just as ABM and civil defense are needed against "accidental" enemy limited nuclear demonstration attacks on cities, to reduce escalation risks and casualties]. ... In a competition between atomic technologies the free world should suffer neither in numbers nor in scientific improvements. ... none save romanticists have ever discovered a battlefield lacking in horror, whether its weapons have been tomahawks or machine guns. ... If the forces of aggression dream of easy victory, won through ruthless acceptance of losses by its waves of troops, they would do well to re-evaluate their hopes in light of the development of atomic weapons and what those weapons represent in battlefield potential. Surely the free peoples, who developed them solely to protect their freedom, will - if forced to - use them with a skill and determination that cannot be overcome."

There's an excellent and very personal account of this controversy in section H, "Project Vista", of chapter 5 of Lt-General James M. Gavin's 1958 book War and Peace in the Space Age where Gavin describes in detail his involvement in the Korean War background to "Project Vista", the major 1951 study of tactical nuclear deterrence of world wars, which developed into a war between the US Air Force strategic bombing deterrence advocates like Norstad and LeMay and the former wartime Los Alamos director, J. R. Oppenheimer, who was a very hard line proponent of ending wars using tactical nuclear deterrence, which really got to people like Teller and also Generals Norstad and LeMay in the USAF, who were obsessed with strategic nuclear deterrence (bombing cities, not deterring invasions; thus the key reason why tactical nuclear effects aren't in the Glasstone book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons whose unclassified contents range in 1957 was dictated by the strategic deterrence supporter US Atomic Energy Commission Chair, Lewis Strauss):

"Unfortunately, the early enthusiasm of the Air Force began to wane when it was realised that increasing emphasis on tactical air support and tactical airlift would conflict with Air Force views on strategic air power. At the same time, the Air Force began to suspect the views of Dr Oppenheimer. Earlier he had opposed the development of the thermonuclear bomb and now he was recommending a diversion of our nuclear resources to the tactical battle. ... This ... ran contrary to the basic theory of the strategic air power enthusiasts; that an all-out air offensive was the only sound tactic, and any diversion to defense was a waste. Dr Oppenheimer's work with Vista came under close scrutiny. ... In November 1951, at a Vista conference at Caltech, Dr Dubridge presented a preliminary draft of its proposed report, including a chapter that Oppenheimer had written. It produced an explosion in the Air Force. Oppenheimer had transformed Vista into an exercise for rewriting US strategy - an exercise introduced by a veiled suggestion the Air Force doctrine was based upon the slaughter of civilians. ... Oppenheimer had proposed that a substantial part of the atomic stockpile should be diverted from SAC [LeMay's Strategic Air Command] to the direct support of the ground battle. ... The objective, as stated in Vista, was 'bringing the battle back to the battlefield.' In December of 1951, Oppenheimer, Dubridge and Lauritsen went to Paris and talked to Eisenhower. Norstad entered an uncompromising dissent to the Vista report. [Footnote reference: "The Hidden Struggle for the H-Bomb", Fortune, May 1953, p109.] About a year or so later, I mentioned the Vista report to General Norstad and he used strong langauge in his denunciation of it. ... Unfortunately, Dr Oppenheimer was in trouble, and his participation in Vista added to the aura of suspicion with which the Big Bomber advocates were now surrounding him. As The Reporter expressed it in an editorial some years later, [December 26, 1957]: [Oppenheimer's] urging that ways be found to bring war back to the battlefield was considered preposterous if not treasonable. ... There was something quite sinister in a scientist who concerned himself with defense as Oppenheimer did. ... The Vista report was submitted to the Secretaries of the several services in February of 1952. It has never been officially approved." (SOURCE: pages 133-4 of the 1959 UK edition of Gavin's War and Peace in the Space Age.)

To emphasise this point: certain well-meaning military elements (like Norstad and LeMay of SAC) and certain well-meaning scientists (like Teller) put the boot into Oppenheimer's secret plan to focus on tactical nuclear deterrence of the invasions that set off both world wars. Instead, they went along with the incredible deterrent, called by Dulles "massive retaliation," or by Herman Kahn "Type 1 Deterrence", which failed in 1914 and in 1939. What we need is a way of deterring or stopping invasions that spark wars. Merely deploying tactical W79 neutron bombs in the 1980s brought out mass protests by Russians and fellow travellers, which proved it was a credible deterrent. Russia stopped further invasions in this period, and the USSR collapsed (after a few more Western defensive kicks, including SDI/Star Wars advanced ABM defense propaganda). Massive retaliation, by contrast, was a failure in WWII according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey, and is riddled with incredible ambiguity (it's an incredible deterrent that can't credibly deter the provocations that led to both world wars). Lt General Gavin, in the US Army, along with General Maxwell D. Taylor, masterminded President Kennedy's "flexible response" deterrent policy. This was undermined by the unilateral disarmament of all dedicated tactical nuclear weapons in 1992, to appease "arms control and disarmament" lunacy, itself due to Glasstone's failure to include the neutron bomb in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. This has to change if we are to have peace.

Just in case you think that Lt General Gavin's account of tactical nuclear weapons politics above is "theoretical opinion" by a desk-bound bureaucrat, let's add a bit more context from his book, Chapter 5: Combat is a Crucible,. Gavin on 9 July 1943, as Commander of the 505th parachute Combat Team, spearheaded a 3,000 strong airborne invasion of Sicily, which aimed to secure the airfield and beaches 6 hours prior to the main amphibious landing. At the last moment, 35 miles/hour winds scattered the paratroops over rugged landscape, their carbines jammed in combat, and the usual "fog of war" quickly descended:

"Now, 24 hours later, I surveyed the results of the first day's fighting. As well as I could tell, it had been an absolute shambles. The regiment was scattered like chaff in the wind, and possibly destroyed. ... It had been a hard day ... First, there was the inadequacy of our weapons. It is nothing short of homocidal to send American young men into combat with weapons not up to the job that confronts them. We needed a more reliable, faster-firing hand weapon than the carbine. And above all, we needed a tank killer ... Next, training had to be more realistic, so tough and exacting that combat would be a welcome relief. ... George Patton's last words to us before we left Africa came home with meaning: 'No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country." ... The bazooka rockets were bouncing off the tanks and the tanks were then chewing the troopers to pieces. The next day we actually buried some troopers with pieces of bazooka ground into them by tank tracks. We captured one tank by grenading the crew when they came out ... The tank had four bazooka hits on it, none of which penetrated. ... In their post-war account of the Sicilian fighting, the Germans reported their first capture of a bazooka. They sent it back to Germany, tested it, found its defects and corrected them, and went into production on an improved model. When we landed in Normandy less than a year later, we were met with a large bazooka, about 3.5 inches in diameter. We were still equipped with the small 2.36-inch size. As a matter of fact, our infantry was still equipped with the 2.36-inch bazooka seven years later, in July of 1950, when it was attacked by Russian T-34 tanks manned by the North Koreans. ... once again ... the rockets were bouncing off the tanks. ... There are numerous examples of weapons ... being delayed because the individuals who have funding control do not, or simply will not, understand the need of the fighting man in the field." (Quote: pages 69-75 of the 1959 UK edition of Gavin's book. I don't need to say that the final sentence here might as well have come out of President Zelensky's mouth a minute ago, regarding the supply of weapons to Ukraine after Russia's invasion. Will they ever learn?)

Regarding war crimes, Lt General Gavin also participated in the paratroop invasion of mainland Europe including the liberation of a concentration aka extermination camp near Ludwigslust, Mecklenburg (War and Peace in the Space Age, UK edition, 1959, page 197): "It seemed incredible that man could be so inhuman to his fellow man, and to all of us who liberated that camp it will remain forever in our memories as a symbol of totalitarianism. If there ever had been doubt about what we were fighting for, at that moment it was removed forever from our minds. It was to rid the earth of man's inhumanity to man, to protect and foster the way of life of free men, and, if necessary, to fight for that way of life. It is too bad that so many must see in order to believe. ... The way to freedom was not easy. Nature and recurring war combined to test our physical mettle and spiritual dedication." Gavin sums up the problem with the following very hard-hitting and politically-inexpedient quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, contrasting American "freedom" to Russian "imperialism" agendas:

"The American struggles against the obstacles that nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men. The former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization ... The conquests of the American are therefore gained by the ploughshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centres all the authority of society ... The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe."

BELOW: Secret "For Official Use" and individually numbered Russian nuclear defense manual (169 pages long, T. F. Myasnikova, technical editor) entitled "КРАТКИЙ СПРАВОЧНИК ПО БОЕВЫМ СВОЙСТВАН ЯДЕРНОГО ОРУЖИЯ" [= "A Brief Guide to the Combat Properties of Nuclear Weapons"] states: "Ядерное оружие обладает значительно большей разрушительной силой по сравнению с обычными видами оружия, но существуют простые и надежные методы защиты от него. ... В этом руководстве представлен краткий обзор ядерного оружия, средств и методов защиты от ядерной угрозы, а также инструкции о том, как действовать в случае применения ядерного оружия." [= "Nuclear weapons have significantly greater destructive power than conventional weapons, but there are simple and reliable methods of protecting against them. ... This guide provides a brief overview of nuclear weapons, the means and methods of defending against a nuclear threat, and instructions on what to do in the event of a nuclear weapon being used."] The manual contains data tables on damage to Russian military equipment based on Russian nuclear weapons tests, as shown BELOW (this manual is the 2nd edition, dated 1969, but since Russian atmospheric nuclear tests ended in 1962, the data is still valid today). The Russian peak overpressure unit is the kg/cm^2 which equal to 1 atmosphere or 14.7 psi in classic American units or 101 kPa in Western SI units (1 kg/cm^2 = 10 tons/m^2 = 1 atmosphere = 14.7 psi = 101 kPa). Page 104 states that for 1 kiloton-1 megaton yields, Russian "Basement shelters for the population (type III shelters)" require 2-4 kg/cm^2 or 30-60 psi for destruction (making them harder than the concrete buildings surviving near ground zero in Hiroshima), while hydroelectric dams and underground utility pipes for water, sewage and gas supply require 10-15 kg/cm^2 or 150-225 psi for destruction. The hardest targets listed (on page 100) are the concrete runways at airports, which require in excess of 20 kg/cm^2 or 300 psi for destruction by cracking and spalling (ground shock effects). Note particularly Table 41 at pages 92-93, where severe damage (destruction) radii are given for Russian tactical nuclear missiles, cruise missiles, jet fighters, jet bombers, nuclear artillery guns, anti-aircraft guns, mortars, light and heavy machine guns, light and heavy grenade launchers, for air and surface bursts and for 13 yield classes from 1 kiloton to 1 megaton (including the calculated damage pressures in kg/cm^2, separately shown for surface and air bursts). Also, note that it compiles Russian data on measured EMP from nuclear tests in Tables 23 and 24 on page 71, showing the induced voltages as a function of weapon yield, type of conductor (aerial or underground buried power cable), and distance from ground zero. This proves Russian capabilities to use EMP effects from nuclear weapons. For example, Table 23 shows that 10 kV was induced in a 10m aerial at 3.3 km from a 1 megaton low altitude detonation. Note also that Russia found (Table 38) that forest area fires (not isolated fires) cannot occur after surface bursts in coniferous forests even at megaton yields, because of the low angle of elevation of the fireball and because the blast wave following the heat flash blows out most fires, although fire areas can occur at certain distances from ground zero in deciduous and mixed forests for higher-yield surface bursts. This detailed analysis proves Russian preparation for tactical nuclear war is true.

According to the Levada Center, 39 percent of Russians believe that the use of nuclear weapons during Russia's war against Ukraine could be justified. pic.twitter.com/H4p8OI5YbV

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) December 2, 2024

Update, November 20, 2024: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-issues-warning-us-with-new-nuclear-doctrine-2024-11-19/: "Putin issues warning to United States with new nuclear doctrine, by Guy Faulconbridge and Anton Kolodyazhnyy, November 20, 2024 12:20 AM GMT MOSCOW, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks, and Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles. Putin approved the change days after two U.S. officials and a source familiar with the decision said on Sunday that U.S. President Joe Biden's administration allowed Ukraine to use U.S.-made weapons to strike deep into Russia. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine. The updated Russian nuclear doctrine, establishing a framework for conditions under which Putin could order a strike from the world's biggest nuclear arsenal, was approved by him on Tuesday, according to a published decree. ... The U.S. National Security Council said it had not seen any reason to adjust the U.S. nuclear posture. ... Putin is the primary decision-maker on the use of Russia's nuclear arsenal. ... The doctrine said any attack by a non-nuclear power supported by a nuclear power would be considered a joint attack, and that any attack by one member of a military bloc would be considered an attack by the entire alliance ... Lavrov said Russia would do everything to avoid nuclear war, and pointed out that it was the U.S. which used nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. ... Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said ... "Nuclear deterrence is aimed at ensuring that a potential adversary understands the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies"."

Jerusalem Post, AUGUST 26, 2024 14:55, https://www.jpost.com/international/internationalrussia-ukraine-war/article-816333: "... Russia planned overwhelming strikes across Western Europe, with nuclear weapons intended for use in combination with other destructive weapons and means. The files show that Russia retained the capability to carry nuclear weapons on surface ships, which increases the risks of escalation or even accidents. They also suggest that Russia views tactical nuclear weapons as potentially decisive in conflicts ... Russia's military strategy is described as aiming for "total war," with tactical nuclear weapons seen as crucial for achieving war-winning objectives. The files ... also reference a "demonstration strike," or the detonation of a nuclear weapon in a remote area, "in a period of immediate threat of aggression" before an actual conflict to scare Western countries. The file said that a strike like this would show "the intention to use nuclear weapons." Recent Russian exercises have involved rehearsing the use of tactical nuclear weapons, consistent with the strategies outlined in the leaked documents. This preparation includes loading anti-ship missiles with nuclear warheads and practicing the handling and deployment of nuclear warheads, suggesting that the threat of nuclear escalation remains a significant aspect of Russia's military planning."

Max Seddon and Chris Cook, "Leaked Russian military files reveal criteria for nuclear strike", Financial Times newspaper (UK), 28 Feb 2024: "The exercises offer a rare insight into how Russia views its nuclear arsenal as a cornerstone of its defence policy — and how it trains forces to be able to carry out a nuclear first strike in some battlefield conditions. ... The slides summarise the threshold as a combination of factors where losses suffered by Russian forces “would irrevocably lead to their failure to stop major enemy aggression”, a “critical situation for the state security of Russia”. ... Russia’s military is also expected to be able to use tactical nuclear weapons for a broad array of goals, including “containing states from using aggression ... or escalating military conflicts”, “stopping aggression”, preventing Russian forces from losing battles or territory, and making Russia’s navy “more effective”. Putin said last June that he felt “negatively” about using tactical nuclear strikes, but then boasted that Russia had a larger non-strategic arsenal than NATO countries. “Screw them, you know, as people say,” Putin said. ... The documents reflect patterns seen in exercises the Russian military held regularly before and since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. ... While Russia’s president has the sole authority to launch a first nuclear strike, the low threshold for tactical nuclear use set out in the documents conforms with a doctrine some western observers refer to as “escalating to de-escalate”. Under this strategy a tactical weapon could be used to try to prevent Russia from becoming embroiled in a sprawling war, particularly one in which the US might intervene. Using what it calls “fear inducement”, Moscow would seek to end the conflict on its own terms by shocking the country’s adversary with the early use of a small nuclear weapon — or securing a settlement through the threat to do so."

Dr Mark B. Schneider, The Leaked Russian Nuclear Documents and Russian First Use of Nuclear Weapons, National Institute for Public Policy, Information Series Issue No. 579, March 18, 2024: "Typically, Western press reporting on Russian nuclear issues involves interviewing the normal coterie of left-wing “experts” who are more interested in reducing the U.S. nuclear deterrent than understanding Russian nuclear strategy and its implications. In contrast, the Financial Times presented an insightful analysis concerning the meaning of the Russian documents. Still, the analysts who historically have been most accurate in their assessment of Russian nuclear weapons policy were not among them (e.g., Dr. Stephen Blank, Dr. Keith Payne, and Mr. Dave Johnson). Russian nuclear weapons policy is very dangerous; it is closely tied to military aggression and repeated high-level nuclear threats.

"In 2015, in the time frame of the leaked Russian documents, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg observed, “Russia’s recent use of nuclear rhetoric, exercises and operations are deeply troubling ... Russia’s nuclear sabrerattling is unjustified, destabilizing and dangerous.” Since then, the situation has clearly gotten worse. The Biden Administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review also noted that: "The Russian Federation’s unprovoked and unlawful invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a stark reminder of nuclear risk in contemporary conflict. ... In brandishing Russia’s nuclear arsenal in an attempt to intimidate Ukraine [and NATO] ... Russia’s leaders have made clear that they view these weapons as a shield behind which to wage unjustified aggression against their neighbors. Irresponsible Russian statements and actions raise the risk of deliberate or unintended escalation". ... Medvedev even threatened “the further existence of the entire human civilization” if Russia ends up defeated in Ukraine by the West ... in 2014, Russian expatriate Nikolai Sokov reported “... all large-scale military exercises that Russia conducted beginning in 2000 featured simulations of limited nuclear strikes.” The January 2016 report of NATO’s Secretary General noted that Russia “... simulated nuclear attacks on NATO Allies (e.g., ZAPAD) and on partners (e.g., March 7, 2013 simulated attacks on Sweden) ...

"Russian nuclear exercises against non-nuclear Sweden are particularly important because Sweden, like Ukraine (against which Russian nuclear threats are frequent), is not supposed to be subject to nuclear attack under Russian negative assurances (i.e., Russia’s pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.) Yet, in March 2022, “Swedish TV4 Nyheterna has reported that Russian bombers ‘armed with nuclear warheads’ entered EU airspace before being intercepted by Swedish fighter jets." ... the United States cannot depend upon Russia’s observance of the so-called “nuclear taboo” to protect the West from Russian nuclear attack. ... Only credible nuclear deterrence can safeguard the West, yet nuclear deterrence is under attack by the disarmament groups globally. The context of this is a Russian nuclear modernization program which according to Putin has already achieved 95% and will continue even after 100% is achieved. ... Despite the clear and present danger of Russian aggression and even nuclear escalation, as Dr. Keith Payne has pointed out, the Biden Administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review “appears frozen in the naively-optimistic post-Cold War years; it suggests no urgency with regard to U.S. responses to mounting threats.”

KEY FAILURES OF TODAY'S "MINIMAL DETERRENCE" (KAHN'S "TYPE 1 DETERRENT" AKA THE DREADNOUGHTS THAT FAILED TO DETER THE INVASION OF BELGIUM IN 1914 THAT TRIGGERED WWI), PROVING THE NEED FOR THE SUCCESSFUL CREDIBLE DETERRENT OF TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO DETER INVASIONS THAT SET OFF WARS:

1. It doesn't deter world war situations, which both occurred because of invasions of 3rd parties (invasion of Belgium 1914, Poland 1939), akin to the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine by Russia. In other words, you need credible deterrence of major provocations.

2. It doesn't even deter a direct attack by fanatical opponents, such as the October 2023 Hamas surprise attack on Israel or the December 1941 Pearl Harbor surprise attack or the 9/11 attack by war-crazy thugs.

3. It assumes sanity on the enemy side, while mental pressures are brought to bear on the sanity of the opponent in response to major provocations, e.g. "sanctions" against the enemy hardens their resolve (aided by internal state propaganda of the enemy, blaming hardships on you), just as "pressure" such as napalming Vietnam failed to deter the Tet Offensive. If you ban your use of overwhelming force to credibly stop or deter an opponent, you don't end in a fairy tale land of mutual love and understanding, but with a battle-hardened opponent, with the fighting mentality of a wounded animal. In other words, you get the opposite result.

4. The only people who can be safely and credibly deterred with "minimal deterrence" are not terrorist states, but generally established democracies, who you don't have fights with anyway (see Dr Weart's "Never at War: Why Democracies will not Fight One Another"), so you've reduced deterrence down to a level where it's only credible in situations where NOT needed! Duh! Try explaining this with any hardened fanatical "pacifist" and you soon see they're fanatical ranting lunatics obsessed with moronic "taboos" or war-making eugenics "Russian communist" pseudoscience genocide schemes, and not the least interested in what they claimed they're concerned with, PEACE!

"By 2035, the same year DOD reported that the Chinese will reach rough numerical parity with U.S. deployed forces, 100% of U.S. nuclear weapons (the warheads and bombs) will have exceeded their design lives by an average of 30 years. ... The United States has agonized for years about how to sustain its nuclear weapons. During the Bush Administration, the plan was the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), which would have been a “new” weapon with a “new” design to replace the W-76 submarine-launched warhead. Its “newness” was its peril and it was cancelled before the end of the design phase of development to satisfy those who believed the U.S. shouldn’t build “new” nuclear weapons. ... Similarly, the United States is refurbishing the B-61 gravity bomb so that it may remain in service in the extended deterrence mission. ... The United States invented plutonium in 1941. Yet, it has not been able to build a plutonium pit for the nuclear weapons stockpile since 1989, when the Rocky Flats plant was shut down. ... Just consider: General Anthony Cotton, USAF, the current head of U.S. STRATCOM, informed Congress this Spring that “Russia continues to update its warhead production complex and is producing hundreds of warheads each year.” Further, he explained that Russia is exporting its Highly Enriched Uranium to the People’s Republic of China for its CFR-600 fast breeder reactors, which produce plutonium."

- Tim Morrison, There’s More than One Kind of Deterrence Failure, https://www.hudson.org/missile-defense/theres-more-one-kind-deterrence-failure-tim-morrison

John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State, 12 January 1954 Massive Retaliation Doctrine Speech, Council of Foreign Relations, New York (published in the US Department of State Bulletin v30 n761, 25 January 1954): "We want, for ourselves and other free nations, a maximum deterrent at a bearable cost. ... Local defences must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retalitory power. ... Otherwise, for example, a potential aggressor who is glutted with manpower might be tempted to attack in confidence that resistance would be confined to manpower."

The Economist, 2 February 1954: "In a situation where war is not declared and aggression can be waged by proxy [e.g. today's USA/UK/Ukaine-Russian war], the decision for or against using atomic weapons may be far less simple in fact than it appears ... More than ever before, those who think in terms of stopping or winning wars by atomic bombing have to reckon with reprisals in kind [assuming that you do not disarm the enemy in a successful first strike to prevent retaliation, or that you or the enemy doesn't have an efficient system of ABM and civil defense to make the "retaliation" a pathetic "token gesture"] ... Against what kind of aggression is 'massive retaliatory power' to be used? ... there seems to be the risk that the strict and literal application of the Dulles doctrine could turn minor and limited hostilities into major conflict." [Therefore, to deter escalation you need a broad spectrum of credible deterrents against the full range of enemy provocations.]

Field Marshall Montgomery, British Deputy to SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe), "A Look Through a Window at World War III", Royal United Services Institute Journal, November 1954: "I want to make it absolutely clear that we at SHAPE are basing all our operational planning on using atomic and thermonuclear weapons for our defence. With us it is no longer: 'They may possibly be used.' It is very definitely: 'They will be used, if we are attacked.' The reason for this action is that we cannot match the strength that could be brought against us unless we use nuclear weapons. ... In fact, we have reached the point of no return as regards the use of atomic and thermonuclear weapons in a hot war ... The problem will be, how to force the enemy to concentrate his armed forces sufficiently to offer a worth-while nuclear target, without exposing our own forces to destruction by the enemy's nuclear attack."

Prime Minister Winston Churchill, 1 March 1955, House of Commons: "There is a widespread belief through the free world that, but for American nuclear superiority, Europe would have already been reduced to satellite status and the Iron Curtain would have reached the Atlantic and the Channel ... We, too, must possess substantial deterrent power on our own." (Churchill's Minister of Defence, Harold Macmillan, then argued for tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East and the Far East, and stated that leaving nuclear deterrence to the USA "surrenders our power to influence American policy and then, strategically and tactically, it equally deprives us of any influence over the selection of targets and use of our vital striking forces." In the 1957 Labour Party Annual Conference at Brighton, the British Labour Party's shadow Foreign Secretary, Aneurin "Nye" Bevan, begged delegates to reject the Noel-Baker nuclear disarmament plan: "if you carry this resolution and follow out all of its implications and do not run away from it, you will send a British Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the Conference Chamber". A more telling fact is statistical: despite all the one-sided mass-media anti-nuclear, anti-radiation and anti-civil defence propaganda, Christopher Driver's 22 March 1964 Observer newspaper article "The Rise and Fall of CND" reported that British public opinion polls showed that only 20% of people disapproved of the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945, and this percentage only increased to 33% when CND's propaganda influence peaked, in 1957-60, due to ICBM testing and and fallout news scares from tests. The problems of not having a credible deterrent were still remembered from the 1930s despite media saturation with Russian Sputnik/Comintern style "peace propaganda" lies. As Clausewitz stated in Book 6, Chapter 5 of On War: "A conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would like to make his entry into our state unopposed." Stalin also said as much when interviewed by the writer H. G. Wells in 1934: "Communists ... would be very pleased to drop violent methods if the class agreed to give way ..." Contrary to CND people there's never been the slightest problem with our nuclear weapons being too big or "nuclear overkill," since reducing nuclear yields by removing boost gas and secondary stages is the easiest thing in the world, similarly, while bleach exists to remove the colour from flags, there have never been an difficulty in having "peace conferences" and agreeing to compromise on "peace at any price" with dictators; all of the difficulties have been in the opposite direction, e.g. designing nuclear weapons as credible deterrents to stop the sorts of provocations that escalate into world wars where the democracy has to declare war first as in 1914 and 1939. It was Lenin who wrote: "As long as capitalism and socialism exist, we cannot live in peace: in the end one or the other will triumph.")

ABOVE: Time magazine of 10 November 1961, pages 19 and 25, reporting on arguments to test the "neutron bomb", also showing example of a shelter in Nagasaki and Russian civil defense. Although tested by Kennedy, the neutron bomb never made it into any edition of Glasstone's "Effects of Nuclear Weapons", any more than photos of surviving shelters in Nagasaki (which had been included the 1950 "Effects of Atomic Weapons" but were removed from "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" 1957-77, a sure proof of the use of secrecy to undermine credible nuclear deterrence: if you can't even combat enemy nuclear propaganda in peace, how can you combat the enemy on the battlefield in war?. This blog has been now updated (December 2024) to provide additional background testimonial evidence to show how secrecy was used to suppress Oppenheimer's plans for tactical nuclear deterrence, due to opposition by strategic bombing advocates who kept the Strategic Bombing Survey reports on Hiroshima and Nagasaki secret!

RAPID BLAST WAVE ATTENUATION BY WORK DONE IN CAUSING DAMAGE TO MODERN CITIES, DISPROVING STRATEGIC COUNTERVALUE DETERRENT PROPAGANDA BY GLASSTONE'S BOOK

ABOVE: weak blast waves oscillate buildings within the "elastic" deformation range, absorbing up ~1% of the intercepted blast wave energy, whereas blast waves strong enough to oscillate the building well into the "plastic" deformation range can demolish modern steel and concrete city buildings (which mostly remained standing after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki air bursts) can absorb typically 10 times more energy or ~10% of the intercepted blast wave energy. Successive interactions in a large city causes a vast amount of shielding, as compared to tests conducted over flat desert or ocean. Although blast waves last longer at higher yields, their cube-root scaled-up blast effects radii contain more buildings along any radial line than for the smaller distances of destruction at lower yields, thus offsetting the extra energy at any given scaled "free field" peak overpressure. This was demonstrated by a study comparing blast effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where most of the buildings were wooden to "free field" nuclear tests by Penney, but it was suppressed by Bethe and Glasstone in the American "Bible" Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, which uses energy conservation violating "free field" blast and radiation data from tests over ideal unobstructed terrain. We exposed this delusion in 1990 in Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, which was then censored by CND liar-duped publishers. Part of our problem is that vital blast ductility data for determining blast energy absorption by city buildings (omitted from Glasstone and Dolan's book) is in Northrop's 1996 EM-1 book, which not "secret" but is still officially banned from open publication by law in the USA, because it gives some information relevant to military nuclear capabilities; similarly the unclassified but "Limited Distribution" DTRA published book by AFIT Professor Bridgman, Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects which can be used to demonstrate the exaggerations in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons when Glasstone's free-field (unobstructed terrain) nuclear effects predictions from desert and ocean nuclear tests are improperly applied to concrete cities. Bridgman, for instance, considers a building with an exposed area of 163 square metres, a mass of 455 tons and natural frequency of 5 oscillations per second, and finds that a peak overpressure of 10 psi (69 kPa) and peak dynamic pressure of 2.2 psi (15 kPa) at 4.36 km ground range from a 1 Mt air burst detonated at 2.29 km altitude, with overpressure and dynamic pressure positive durations of 2.6 and 3.6 seconds, respectively, produces a peak deflection of 19 cm in the building about 0.6 second after shock arrival. The peak deflection is computed from Bridgman's formula on p. 304. This 19 cm computed maximum deflection allows us to estimate how much energy is permanently and irreversibly absorbed from the blast wave by a building (if damaged, additional energy is absorbed and is transformed into slow-moving - relative to the shock front velocity - debris which falls to the ground and is quickly stopped after the blast has passed it) by: E = Fx, where F is force (i.e., product of total pressure and area) and x is distance moved in direction of force due to the applied force from the blast wave.

If the average pressure for the first 0.5 second is equal to 12 psi (83 kPa) then the average force on the building during this time is 13 million Newtons, and the energy absorbed is: E = Fx = 13,000,000*0.19 = 2.6 MJ, which is removed from the blast wave in the form of oscillations of the building. Successive absorption by building after building rapidly absorbs blast energy in this way.

Although you could say the blast wave from a 50% blast nuclear megaton warhead contains 2.1 x 10^15 Joules, the blast wave energy rapidly decreases as it dumps hot air behind it to form the fireball (Glasstone omits the fireball energy partition after blast breakaway, but the DELFIC mushroom cloud module shows that, to fit observed cloud parameters theoretically, fully 45% of the yield is hot air dumped behind the blast that powers the mushroom cloud rise and expansion, so 50-45 = 5% of total yield (or 1/10 of original blast yield) remains in the blast wave after the negative phase fully develops). In addition, the blast forms a 3-d hemisphere so that the percentage of the total blast energy in the Mach front intercepting buildings near the surface is small and gets smaller as the blast propagates! It is only that part which causes damage that gets attenuated; furthermore the yield scaling issue increases the building shielding effect for larger yields, because the radial distance being considered is increased. For example, in the example above, 10 psi peak overpressure (69 kPa in SI units) occurs at 4.36 km from a 1 megaton strategic bomb, but the 163 square metres of the building is only a small fraction, f, of the blast hemisphere at that range, namely f = 163/(2*Pi*4360^2) = 163/120,000,000 = 1.37*10^{-6}. So if the blast still contained 5% of the total weapon yield at this stage (1/10 of the original blast yield), the total blast energy striking the building's surface area would be just (2.1 x 10^14 )* 1.37*10^{-6} = 2.9*10^8 Joules, proving that the oscillations of the building removed 2.6MJ of 290MJ blast energy intercepted, nearly 1%, which is a similar fraction to Penney's finding in Hiroshima (below).

You get additional, greater, energy loss due to damage done to buildings close to the fireball. For n such buildings in a radial line, the cumulative removal of blast energy fraction is: exp(-2.6n/290), which is greater for the larger blast damage distances in built up areas predicted for effects of higher yields! So increasing the yield increases the shielding for any given free-field pressure (the distance of which scales up with yield)!

Even with wooden 1-storey houses predominating in Hiroshima, Lord Penney who took away the overpressure debris (crushed petrol cans, etc) for analysis in England in 1945 found the blast energy at Hiroshima decreased exponentially due to blast attenuation caused by damage done, by comparing his results to the free-field Maralinga desert values for British nuclear tests without a precursor. This was all ignored by Uncle Sam (Glasstone)!

ABOVE: error by DTRA regarding energy absorption by buildings. U.S. Government's DTRA DISPATCH magazine article "Building Effects on Airblast from Nuclear Detonations in Urban Terrain" falsely conflates the abrupt shock front with the length of the entire blast wave, claiming that since buildings are 2000 denser than blast waves: "the air will move 2000 times father than the structure in the same time interval. Thus while the building is moving 1cm. the shock has moved more than 20m, and the energy is a small fraction of 1% the blast energy." The key error here is the statement that "the shock has moved 20 m". They meant the shock front, which isn't the same thing as the entire blast wave, the thickness of which is dependent on bomb yield, and is what moves drag-sensitive buildings with large window openings where the overpressure quickly equalises. So they are totally wrong. They are absurdly arguing that only 1/2000 of the dynamic pressure (kinetic energy per unit volume of air) of air presents a force upon buildings, or presumably upon ships sails (which are denser than air), or eardrums (again which are denser than air). The shoddy, imprecise form of their statement makes it hard to understand precisely what they are saying, but it seems to be that they are assuming falsely that the blast wave consists only of a shock front, which will move 20 m past the building (without moving it significantly) before the building has moved 1 cm, but the density of the building and the location of the shock front relative to the building is IRRELEVANT while the mass of air BEHIND the shock front is delivering energy to the building, as proved by the absence from the relevant equations of both building density and shock front location after it has passed, but winds are still blowing. It's not the shock front that causes the building to oscillate, but the wind pressure behind the shock front. The building density, and the distance the shock FRONT moves beyond the building, have no relevance to thickness the layer of air BEHIND the shock front, which is what is pushing the building, and this thickness increases with bomb yield! (However, most of the push to the building occurs due to the highest dynamic pressure, i.e. the air just behind the discontinuity or "shock front".) As a result, the actual energy absorption by a building is more than 100 times greater than DTRA's ratio of densities claims. Small-scale models of buildings, whether absolutely rigid or made from glass mirrors don't in any way, shape or form model the energy captured in oscillations by thousands of tons of reinforced concrete of real buildings.

The wind (dynamic) pressure induced motion effects which have nothing to do with the relative density of the shock front compared to the building. The amount of energy picked up from either the wind pressure of normal breezes or the blast wave of a nuclear explosion, by a building in oscillatory energy is the time-integrated form of Newtonian equation E = F.x, where force F = P.A, where P is dynamic pressure and A is area, and x is the amount of displacement induced. There's no density of the building in these equations, and no dependence on the shock front, but rather the integrated dynamic pressure over the entire duration of the blast at the location of interest (if the building delays the passage of the shock front instead of letting it pass freely through windows etc, then there's an additional term for the time-integrated overpressure contribution). As dynamic pressure is removed by the building - not by the shock front but by the air behind it, lasting seconds in higher yield detonations - the overpressure also falls as the blast restores itself to the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions (overpressure energy is transformed into dynamic pressure energy, thus weakening overpressure as well as dynamic pressure). If DTRA were correct that only the front part (shock front) of a blast wave is relevant to delivery of energy and delivers only 1/2000 of the energy of the blast, then by analogy our eardrums and ship sails would be similarly so inefficient at picking up energy from the dynamic pressure of sound and the wind, respectively, that they couldn't work! Notice that their computer codes in 2013 falsely EXCLUDED any absorption of energy by the blast in oscillating thousands of tons of reinforced concrete, causing damage (much larger, huge amounts of energy are required to actually destroy reinforced concrete by permanent deformation; the springy oscillations of a building in a gale or blast wave take up far less energy than actual destruction requires), contrary to what John von Neumann pointed out (that buildings are NOT rigid but absorb energy from the blast, decreasing the blast parameters like pressures and impulses as the blast propagates through a city, unlike desert or ocean in unobstructed terrain nuclar tests!) in the 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons (removed by Glasstone from future editions, just as he removed the civil defence chapter from the 1977 edition!).

ABOVE: Appendix A of Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons gives a specific calculated example that allows the absorption of blast energy by oscillating modern concrete buildings to be calculated: a reinforced concrete building of 952 metric tons, 75x75ft, 38 ft high (thus horizontal area of 265 square metres), resisting force 4 psi, is subjected to a peak overpressure and dynamic pressure loading of 32 psi (242,000 Pascals) decaying to zero in 0.32 second. Calculated peak deflection of middle of the building was 0.88 foot or 0.27 m (the top would be deflected twice this amount). Reinforced concrete is relatively ductile, but any cracking absorbs even more energy than the simple calculation of the kinetic energy of blast-induced oscillation. So the blast wave energy absorbed from the simple physics law E = Fx = PAx where P is pressure loading, A is exposed area of building being loaded, and x is the displacement(or more precisely from the integral form of this, where energy absorbed is force integrated over displacement, as shown above) is about E = Fx = (242,000)(265)(0.27) = 17,000,000 Joules. This energy is removed from the blast wave by being transferred from the blast into the kinetic energy of oscillating the building! Hard fact!

ABOVE: The resisting force of 4 psi used in the 1950 Glasstone book can be updated with the following static yield resistances for various modern city buildings using Table 15.6 on page 525 of the 1996 Northrop Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1: 3.0 psi and 0.3 second natural period of oscillation for 3-8 story reinforced concrete buildings (type 15.2.2), 1.25 psi and 0.3 second for brick houses (type 15.2.3), 0.5 psi and 0.25 second for wooden houses (type 15.2.5), or 2.0 psi and 0.6 second for 3-10 story steel-frame office buildings (type 15.2.10). The "nominal" ductility ratios (the ratios of displacement required for collapse/severe damage to the maximum elastic response before plastic response begins) for these four types of buildings are given by Northrop as 7.5, 4, 7.5 and 10, respectively. The maximum amount of energy absorbed in destroying the buildings is simply the area under the curve of loading versus displacement before collapse. Since this relative area is 0.5 unit for the triangle shaped slope up to a ductility ratio of 1, and is roughly a constant height rectangle for the plastic zone from a ductility ratio of 1 up to the failure limit (severe damage/collapse of building), the ratio of total energy absorbed by a building in its destruction, to the maximum energy that can be absorbed in purely elastic oscillations by a buildings (up to ductility ratio of 1 unit, where the dimensionless ductility ratio u = maximum extension under applied load / extension at elastic limit of Hooke's Law) is simply [0.5 + (7.5 - 1)]/0.5, [0.5 + (4 - 1)]/0.5, [0.5 + (7.5 - 1)]/0.5, and [0.5 + (10 - 1)]/0.5, or 14, 7, 14, and 19, respectively, for those four building types. It is to be noticed that the greatest amounts of plastic range energy absorption are for the most predominant two kinds of modern city centre buildings, namely reinforced concrete and steel frame multistory buildings. These buildings, with up to 8 and 10 stories, respectively, in these calculations, also have a cumulative effect in shielding free-field thermal and nuclear radiations.

The Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, on page 57 has a section written by John von Neumann and Fredrick Reines of Los Alamos (it is attributed to them in a footnote) stating clearly: "the structures ... have the additional complicating property of not being rigid. This means that they do not merely deflect the shock wave, but they also absorb energy from it at each reflection. The removal of energy from the blast in this manner decreases the shock pressure at any given distance from the point of detonation to a value somewhat below that which it would have been in the absence of dissipative objects, such as buildings." Glasstone removed this from future (1957-77) editions, not because it is wrong (it isn't), but apparently because it debunks official nuclear lies used for strategic deterrence in the same way that gas and incendiary bombing effects was exaggerated in the 1930s to try to deter war!

ABOVE: The two terms for blast wave energy. It's really very simple: the first term above is the kinetic energy contained in the dynamic (wind) pressure of the blast, while the second term represents the internal energy of the blast (manifested as heat and related static overpressure). So the theoretical basis for the calculation of blast energy absorption by a city is not rocket science, and it's not based on speculations or guesswork. And this is not "new" either, since Brode's 1954 equations for calculating blast wave's with a computer include energy balance, and you can with modern computers easily incorporate the irreversible energy losses due to the blast wave successively oscillating, one after another, the buildings with with it interacts as it travels outward in a modern city. William G. Penney gives the real basis for calculating the energy loss due to blast damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his 1970 paper, which contains numerous detailed, precise calculations and measurements showing how the act of causing destruction to steel and concrete, in addition to the mere oscillations of buildings, reduced the energy content of the blast and thus the pressure fell more quickly with distance in those cities, than measured in unobstructed desert or ocean during his nuclear testing programme. (In 1985 John Malik of Los Alamos simply ignored in his report, LA-8819, all Penney's hard won facts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, without going into details at all. Glasstone and Dolan reference Penney's 1970 paper, but simply ignore its findings on blast attenuation in Hiroshima and Nagasak. So much for scientific progress! Note also that Penney's 12 kt yield for Hiroshima is lower than the current estimate of 16 kt, implying even more blast absorption in Hiroshima than Penney found, because the unattenuated free field pressures from 16 kt will be greater than those from 12 kt!)

Now consider the energy absorption in the plastic region for reinforced concrete. The calculations of energy absorption in oscillating a building are for the small "elastic response" region of the pressure-displacement curve. But vast amounts of energy are absorbed beyond that elastic limit, and yet at pressures lower than required to make a reinforced concrete building collapse (always ignored by ignorant shelter critics, as Lord Baker explained, for shelter design in his 1978 book which we reviewed in detail a few posts back). There is a summary of the key building parameters America uses in calculating the effects of nuclear blast on buildings of various kinds in Table 15.6 on page 525 of Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects, Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1: building 15.2.2 (3-8 story reinforced concrete, small window area) has a severe damage ductility ratio of 7.5, i.e. it fails and collapses (severe damage) when the displacement is 7.5 times the maximum elastic response. Put another way, the plastic limit for reinforced concrete is 7.5 times the elastic displacement limit. Northrop's figure 15.7 shows the extension versus applied pressure load. The energy absorbed in the elastic limit is a triangle terminating at a displacement of 1 ductility unit (units are extension/elastic limit extension), so it has an area of 0.5 units (energy absorption for oscillating the building, see diagram below). But the plastic response is not a triangle but a unit high rectangle which starts at one unit and extends to 7.5 units (severe damage/collapse), its area is thus 7.5 - 1 = 6.5 units, so it absorbs 6.5/0.5 = 13 times as much energy as that used to oscillate the building elastically! So reinforced concrete buildings can absorb 13 times more energy in being damaged, than they can absorb in oscillating elastically. The ratio of total energy absorbed to flatten the buildings, to the maximum energy that can be absorbed elastic oscillate it, is (6.5 + 0.5)/0.5 = 14. Thus, the total energy absorption by a building can be 14 times that involved in merely oscillating it!

ABOVE: model of a building having a blast, the simple engineering graph from EM-1 showing the ratio of energy needed to total a building to that which merely oscillates it. The axes depict loading force and displacement, respectively, so the areas under the curve beautifully correspond to energy absorbed, allowing us to calculate the total energy needed to flatten a city very easily (from a simple, standard physics formula, energy E = Fx), in terms of multiples of the energy needed to just oscillate the buildings elastically. Northrop's data for other types of buildings are as follows: type 15.2.5 wood frame house has the same 7.5 ductility ratio for collapse, so it can absorb in plastic deformation 13 times the elastic oscillatory energy; type 15.2.3 brick house has a ductility ratio of 4 for severe damage, and a type 15.2.10 3-10 story steel-frame office building has a ductility ratio of 10 for severe damage. This is precisely Lord Baker's principle of the Morrison table shelter (for details, please see Lord Baker's 1978 book about the problems with explaining this to the bureaucratic nutters who don't understand the physics behind engineering, the brilliantly titled Enterprise versus Bureaucracy) where the plastic deformation of steel is used to absorb many times more energy than it can absorb elastically. In other words, it's the damage done (plastic deformation of reinforced concrete) that really absorbs vast amounts of blast energy, not the smaller energy absorption from elastic oscillations of a building! Northrop's table 15.6 shows that the reinforced concrete building, type 15.2.2, has a natural period of oscillation of about 0.3 second, and a static yield resistance of about 3 psi. Northrop's Figure 15.10 shows it has 50% probability of severe damage at 2.85 km from a 1 megaton surface burst on an ideal, unobstructed desert surface with no blast energy absorption by buildings intervening between that target and ground zero! For comparison, a similar 1 megaton surface burst in unobstructed desert is shown in Northrop's Figure 15.11 to have 50% probability of destroying a typical British brick house at 4.42 km ground range (50% severe damage probability), whereas Figure 15.18 gives a range of only 2.74 km for collapse of 3-10 story steel-frame buildings from a 1 megaton surface burst on unobstructed, open terrain.

ABOVE: Glasstone and Dolan are also completely wrong in adding scattered radiation to direct radiation exposure, because radiation-absorbing objects by definition self-shield the contributions coming from different directions, so the energy/unit-area "exposures" don't add up in the real world (unlike the "theoretical example" of an imaginary mathematical point in space). For example, if the side of a person facing the fireball receives 10 cal/cm^2 an the other side receives another 10 cal/cm^2 from cloud-scatter or air-scatter, no surface receives 10+10 = 20 cal/cm^2, which is just a mathematical fiction! Instead, scattered radiation generally exposes a larger area to similar or lower exposure than the direct exposure. This is just one of many fictions that have become groupthink religion in anti-nuclear propaganda. We have already given in many posts extensive evidence proving that concrete buildings in Hiroshima and modern cities absorb thermal, nuclear and blast effects in a way totally ignored by Glasstone's unobstructed desert analysis. Strategic nuclear deterrence is thus bunk, if based on nuclear test effects data from unobstructed desert or open ocean. We need tactical nuclear deterrence to stop invasions and the use of force, not an incredible threat of bombs on cities, which is analogous to the gas and incendiary bombing exaggerations of the 1920s and 1930s which failed to deter WWII. The exaggerations were made by both lying disarmers (to scare people into disarmament) and by lying proponents of aerial bombing in war (to scare enemies into surrender). The resulting pseudo "consensus of expert opinion" from both groups had tragic consequences. Strategic bombing, megatons of ~100 kg high explosive on Germany, equivalent to a large nuclear attack however you scale the megatonnage (by the 2/3 power of blast yield for peak overpressure over unobstructed terrain, or by an even weaker function of yield for initial nuclear radiation), also failed to produce military results when civilians were bombed. The two low yield nuclear weapons dropped over mostly wooden houses in Japan did not produce the results publically claimed (for propaganda) for modern concrete cities. We've been blogging this for years, ignored by the loons who prefer anti-nuclear lies about strategic nuclear deterrence!

So to correct Glasstone for urban areas:

(1). Simply use Lord Penney's exponential attenuation formula from Hiroshima to reduce peak overpressures in cities: exp(-R/3.25) for R being radial distance through a city in kilometres. This reduces peak overpressure by 50% at 2.2 km. (Obviously precise effects depend on details, but this is a "baseline" for minimal blast attenuation, in cities with predominantly wood frame buildings.)

(2). Simply use George R. Stanbury's formula for predicting the thermal flash shadowing, by calculating the number of exposed upper floors that can geometrically "see" the fireball as a function of range, so that the number of computed flash burns correspond to the number of windows that can see the fireball (e.g. for 50 ft wide streets, 3 miles from a 1 megaton surface burst, only the highest floor can "see" the fireball since the angle from the top of the fireball to building top artificial skyline is 13.5 degrees; if the buildings are on average 10 floors high, the percentage burns and fire risk is therefore 1/10 for one side of a building with 4 sides, i.e. 1/40 which is smaller than the 1/10 assumed by some simplistic propaganda; but you then get into the issue of the size of the windows and whether the people inside are protected by shadows from walls or furnishings or internal office cubicle partitions or even other people in between the target and the fireball in the office, all of which reduce the simplistic "theoretical" estimates of the number of people burned, instead of assuming that no buildings or screening exists at all as in anti-nuclear propaganda for so-called "arms control" (war via appeasement/disarmament as in the 1930s). Stanbury points out there, and in his August 1962 Restricted UK Home Office Scientific Advisory branch Fission Fragments article on Fires from nuclear weapons, that to produce firestorms in Germany - the allies tried hard to achieve this in 1943 to end the war (and firestorms produce the associated soot clouds for climatic "nuclear winter" effects hype) you needed 50% of buildings to be initially ignited, which was only possible in the (now burned and gone) medieval wooden areas of Hamburg and Hiroshima (due to blast-overturned charcoal braziers in wooden houses in Japan, not the thermal flash which was obstructed by rooms and other buildings). Stanbury's studies of the thermal flash shielding in Liverpool and Birmingham showed that the thermal radiation is shielded to such an extent you simply can't get to within an order of magnitude of that 50% ignition incidence needed for a Hamburg style intense firestorm (or, therefore, nuclear winter due to Hamburg type firestorm soot clouds penetrating the stratosphere)!

ABOVE: Smokescreens of both white fog smoke and black soot smoke can be seen to the right of the fireball in the 15 kiloton Grable nuclear test, Nevada, 1953. (Smokescreens were again proof tested at Operation Teapot in 1955.) The technology to lay down smokescreens is well-established, and smoke screen generators are fitted to many tanks. The same can be fitted around building windows, preventing fires, firestorms, soot cloud "nuclear winters", simply triggered by early warning radar like air raid sirens before the flash and EMP of an explosion arrive! Glasstone's mention of smokescreens is typical of the many failures of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, failing to make the nuclear test data clear (you cannot even tell from Glasstone whether smokescreens have been analysed in theory or in nuclear tests, let alone the vital details needed for this to be used for civil defense). Part of the problem here is the deceptively non-quantitative treatment of scattered radiation by Glasstone, another exercise in obfuscation.

The effect of scattered thermal radiation diffusing into shadows was insignificant at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where burns from thermal radiation were only received in an unobstructed radial line from the fireball, so that any shielding provided virtually complete protection from thermal flash. The 110 Castle-3 shot at Bikini Atoll in 1954 was fired during a moderate rainstorm to obtain data on the reduction of blast and thermal effects by rainfall. There are no films that show the fireball because the water content of the air absorbed the thermal and visible transmission. Heavy rain or fog absorbs the thermal radiation locally around the fireball, rather than creating a large amount of dangerously wide-angle scattered radiation at great distances. Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, gives data for Pacific test conditions in Figure 6.39 on page 248, on the effect of scattered thermal radiation from a burst at 1 km altitude, at various distances and for different fields of view:

At 10 km ground range, 43% of the thermal radiation in unobstructed terrain is direct (from the fireball), and 57% is scattered, but the angular distribution of scattering is not extreme (most of the scattering comes from air relatively near the fireball): the total (direct plus scattered) is 80% for a 30 degrees field of view (only 20% of the thermal radiation comes from angles exceeding 30 degrees from the radial line to the burst). Only 4% of the total thermal radiation at 10 km comes from angles beyond 90 degrees (i.e. 96% comes from the hemisphere around a target facing the burst).

At 30 km ground range, 16% of the thermal radiation in unobstructed terrain is direct (from the fireball), and 84% is scattered, but the angular distribution of scattering is not extreme (most of the scattering comes from air relatively near the fireball): the total (direct plus scattered) is 70% for a 40 degrees field of view (only 30% of the thermal radiation comes from angles exceeding 40 degrees from the radial line to the burst). Only 6% of the total thermal radiation at 10 km comes from angles beyond 90 degrees (i.e. 94% comes from the hemisphere around a target facing the burst).

Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, gives graphs of the thermal radiation spectrum, showing differences with burst altitude and yield. Figure 6.19 shows that a 1 kt surface burst gives a thermal spectrum which peaks at 1.1 micron (Planck radiating temperature = 2000 K), compared to 0.4 micron (Planck radiating temperature = 5000 K) for 1 kt air bursts at 1-30 km altitude. Figure 6.21 shows there is much less difference between the spectra for surface and air bursts for 1 megaton yield: 0.70 micron peak in the thermal spectrum (Planck radiating temperature = 3800 K) for a megaton surface burst, compared with 0.52 microns (Planck radiating temperature = 4500 K) for a 30 km altitude megaton burst.

Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, in Figure 16.10 uses hydrodynamic calculations to prove that the maximum fire wind velocity in a firestorm is only a weak function of the fire intensity, for example a fire with a radius of 10 km will create a maximum fire wind velocity of 17 m/s for a fire intensity of 25 kW/m2, but this only increases to 36 m/s if the fire intensity is increased to 240 kW/m2.

Remember also that nuclear test evidence shows that the risk of clothing or other items burning is less for real levels of office humidity than for target materials left to dry out in the Nevada at the lower humidity of Nevada nuclear tests like Encore; clothing shields thermal radiation and increases burns energy requirements contrary to Glasstone.

Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, Table 14.5 on page 501 also points out that while people standing nude 2 metres behind glass windows watching the nuclear blast approach them will receive a 50% median dose of 3 glass fragment abdominal wall penetrations at a peak overpressure of 7 psi, it takes 15 psi if they are wearing clothing! If they duck and cover, they will can avoid the directional flying glass (and the thermal burns) completely. What Northrop doesn't tell you is that in a built up city, the dynamic pressure needed to energise those glass fragments to lethal velocities don't exist 2 metres behind glass windows in general; only behind those windows facing the fireball with an unobstructed view. Other windows on all all sides of the building will certainly break if the overpressure is high enough, but the blast wind (dynamic pressure) is directional and so the windows will not be blasted inwards with the same speed (at lower pressures they can even fail in the negative phase and be sucked outwards, with no hazard whatsoever to occupants!). Northop (1996) in chapter 14 on personnel casualties gives very high mortality rates based on unprotected head impacts, particularly for standing personnel, e.g. 5 psi for 50% mortality for people standing in buildings swept through by blast winds. Again, this assumes the blast winds are not obstructed and attenuated by the other surrounding buildings in a city, but it also suggests a simple civil defense precaution to accompany duck and cover in a crisis situation: bicycle helmets can be kept under emergency table "shelters" and can be put on quickly before the blast arrives, after a nuclear explosion, to minimise head trauma from flying debris or bodily translation and impact for high dynamic pressures and long blast durations. With duck and cover, you can avoid wind drag or injury from flying debris and you can keep away from a blast reflecting surface, then Northop shows in Figures 14.2 and 14.3 that you have 50% chance of surviving 37 psi peak overpressure from 1 megaton if you are lying down perpendicular to the direction of approach of the blast wave, or 62 psi if your are lying parallel to the direction of the blast (i.e., lying down facing away from the flash). In other words, blast is then very survivable!

(3). Simply allow nuclear radiation doses in modern cities to be attenuated severely by a factor of about 100 (from the 2011 Los Alamos report unobstructed desert "free field" initial nuclear radiation dose data study for the shadowing by intervening the buildings of in New York City) - before you include the actual shielding by a building people are in, which is much better for INR than Glasstone claims, because essentially ALL of the urban area outdoor 100-fold reduced radiation dose is SCATTERED, not direct, so it is energy-degraded and not the highest-energy direct gamma and neutrons (which are attenuated severely on the transit through all the buildings in the radial line from the bomb)! Putting in "/100" to the computer formulae is not rocket-science! Simple. Nothing in the universe is perfect, but this correction is easy, and gives a minimal baseline for realism for the urban effects of nuclear weapons, lacking in all anti-nuclear diatribes. For higher yield weapons, the increased ranges for given radiation doses will lead to increased attenuation, since at increased ranges there will be more concrete buildings intervening in the the radial line from fireball to target, and although scattered radiation builds up at greater distances, it has lower energy than unscattered radiation and therefore is less penetrating (easier to shield). The most penetrating and wide-angle scattered nuclear radiation dose is from neutrons, but for the full range of 13 different nuclear weapon designs in the 1984 EM-1, the effective mean free-path for the surface burst neutron dose over the distance 1-2 km only ranges from 189 to 221 metres (the latter being weapon type 13, the neutron bomb). (The neutron dose will essentially completely arrived - except for a small portion due to delayed neutrons from fission products like bromine-90 - before blast damage occurs to those buildings lcated near the crater.) Glasstone is widely ignored when pointing out in one table in the last chapter - contrary to many free-field charts and graphs - that 50% survival in modern concrete buildings in Hiroshima occurred at 0.12 mile for the 16 kt air burst at 600 m; this scales up by the cube-root scaling law to predict 50% survival at 1.2 miles from a 16 megaton air burst at 6 km altitude; initial radiation dose distances scale as a weaker function of yield than blast.

Additionally, the blast effects data (relating say overpressure to casualties) is way off in left-wing anti-nuclear propaganda. The actual Hiroshima and Nagasaki data proves much greater survival than bogus theoretical assessments: in reality, 100% people are not nude standing behind windows facing the blast while wearing roller-skates to ensure they are frictionlessly blown straight out of the 42nd floor by a 3psi blast, and killed by the impact from the gravitational fall to the pavement 420 feet below. Instead of the 1979 US Office of technology assessment claim that 50% of people are killed at 5psi, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than twice this was needed for the same effect, even without effective duck and cover or taking shelter (CLICK HERE FOR REPORT CONTAINING THE EVIDENCE FOR THIS). Although blast duration increases with yield, this has no effect if the pressure is below the threshold for damage, so Glasstone's curves are wrong for not reverting to cube-root scaling at high yields (impulse rules at low yields, peak pressures rule at high yields; Glasstone ignores this transition in his nonographs for building damage, which is corrected by by the secret EM-1; report Dirkwood Corp report DC-P-1060 found that the blast mortality effect was 50% at 32 psi peak overpressure in modern non-seismic concrete buildings in Hiroshima, or 17 psi for 1 megaton, without duck-and-cover to reduce exposure to flying glass, debris and blast wind drag; contrasted to 5 psi in anti-nuclear disarmament propaganda lies). By contrast, the low yield 10 kiloton "neutron bomb" effect was even apparent with fission weapons in secret British nuclear testing in 1953 (Totem-1 shot, photos below courtesy of Charles S. Grace):

ABOVE: "nuclear war" in populist fiction = end of the world. In fact, as shown by President Kennedy's letter to Life magazine readers above, not everybody agrees that "the survivors will envy the dead". As discussed in detail below, during the 1930s "arms control and disarmament" (aka Nazi appeasement and collaboration) lying by knights and lords with Nobel Peace Prizes hanging around their necks repeatedly brainwashed (with great success) the gullible mass media that mustard gas was 360,000,000 times more lethal than it was in 1918 when simple gas masks provided protection (far greater protection is available today with more modern defense equipment than was issued in 1918). The exaggeration factor was a game-changer. Now you get a whole class of mass media liars who say things like "we must lie about nuclear weapons effects to prevent a nuclear war". The problem is, as in the 1930s, lying ends up causing war by undermining credible deterrence! Tell the truth! Kennedy in a 1961 speech on civil defense argued further that civil defense was needed to prevent WWIII due to "escalation" in a nuclear weapon accident (or apparent "demonstration" strike). If you ban civil defense and ABM because youre faked nuclear effects model show they can be overcome by a massive attack, then you have no defense against nuclear weapons "accidents" (the "fog of war" propaganda tactic in a major crisis is to use diversionary explosions and ambiguity to reduce chances of retaliation, so first the enemy says "we did not launch attack", then eventually you may get "perhaps someone exceeded their authority or some bomb fired itself", etc., etc., so there is 0% clarity and 0% immediate justification to respond, other than waving a white flag and asking for "peace talks" to "resolve the problem without escalation"). So you need civil defense and ABM to mitigate the consequences of conventional or nuclear LIMITED aka "accidental" (note the quote marks!) demonstration strikes, to avoid escalating to all-out nuclear war.

This is 100% diametrically opposed to "arms control and disarmament" (Russian-front) Western anti-civil defense and anti-ABM propaganda spin (Russia itself has both, naturally), which claims that such defenses reduce rather than increase the all-out nuclear threshold! We give many examples below disproving this gormless trash. It's based on the concept that ambulances, hospitals, doctors, car seatbelts, fire stations, first aid training etc causes more accidents than otherwise, by causing a "false sense of security and thus reckless conduct". But statistical evidence disproves this kind of gullible confidence trick. For example, the lack of any civil defense or ABM defense in the UK against "Iraq's WMD's" in 2002 did not reduce reckless conduct by the UK, but on the contrary was used to justify preventative war by Tony Blair in a now-notorious government publication called "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction"! This is what always happens when your options are limited. In October 1962, Kennedy decided to evacuate American cities within Russian IRBM range from Cuba, then invade to remove the nuclear threat; he was unable because in 1961 his advisers had cut evacuation planning out of Herman Kahn's civil defense scheme (Kennedy had only implemented the fallout basement shelter identification and stocking part of Kahn's scheme). This was due to claims that evacuation, taking time, would be no use in a surprise Russian attack (Kahn's concept in his book was based on the 1 September 1939 Operation Pied Piper evacuation of vulnerable people - kids, the pregnant, etc. - from London 48 hours before declaring war to reduce risks of a surprise attack, not evacuating after an enemy surprise attack is detected). If you can't mitigate "accidental" strikes or "demonstration" strikes, you get sucked into war very easily because even a single enemy detonation can have cause 120 times as many casualties if people are in the open than inside concrete buildings or simple shelters: this is the paucity of alternatives dilemma. There is no CND "ignorance" here; it's DELIBERATE LYING for political ends (supporting the enemy), as explained by Herman Kahn and Bruce-Briggs in their 1972 book Things to Come, where they define groupthink anti-nuclear style "educated incapacity" as:

"an acquired or learned inability to understand or see a problem, much less a solution ... when a problem or the solution lies outside the accepted framework ..."

For the correct application of Hiroshima's lessons to modern higher yield nuclear war threats from Russia, see for instance the 1970s congressional testimony of T. K. Jones of Boeing Corporation in hearings linked HERE (February-March 1976 congressional Civil Defense Review), and HERE (November 1976 Nuclear War Survival hearings). Whenever the factual evidence surfaces, it is falsely labelled "controversial" or "wrong" by lying mainstream media charlatans, fraudsters, and bigoted snake oil salesmen, and ignored for political left-wing propaganda purposes, or the "arms controllers" simply tell lies claiming falsely that civil defense is a joke, just as they did in the 1930s (when civilian gas masks were discounted as a simple solution to deter Hitler from dropping his gas bombs on cities for a knockout blow!) and 1970s, debunked by T. K. Jones' famous 1979 letter to congress, extract below, which led to his being appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces on June 1, 1981 under the new Reagan Administration, which aimed to win the Cold War by science and technology, not lose freedom via Russian nuclear coercion. Note that while the ACDA - i.e. the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, whose faked nuclear weapons/war effects calculations lay behind the disastrous 1970s nuclear parity SALT farce which now results in dictators again intimidating democracies as was the case in the 1930s due to disarmament scams for "peace" which led to WWII - claimed 50% of people are killed at 5 psi peak overpressure from a megaton, while in fact U.S. classified Defense Nuclear Agency research showed that Russian public shelters were built to take 150 psi i.e. surviving within the 0.83 mile fireball radius of a 5 megaton surface burst, Russian apartment basement shelters were built to survive 60 psi, and good Russian improvised expedient shelters built outside cities survived 40 psi in American blast tests and gave upwards of 200 fallout protection factor (i.e., reducing the maximum hotspots of 20,000 rads to a survivable 100 rads and averting casualties).

ACDA disarmament bigots simply lied in the traditional "H. G. Wells" 1930s-sci-fi-style of disarmament fantasy, in testimony to congress, about the motivation and the detailed work of those people who disproved them, they ignored the classified data on blast and fallout shielding in their "effects" models, or their calculations assumed that people failed to use fallout shelters in order to deceptively "reduce" fallout protection factors by a factor of 7, by simply assuming people would go outside to be exposed to unshielded fallout (like most people, they also massively exaggerated the mean gamma ray energy of fallout during the sheltering period, as we have previously exposed, which is debunked by the measurements after the Redwing Zuni and Tewa tests) - they also lied that Jones didn't include fallout casualties when in fact he did include fallout correctly, finding that you don't get fallout casualties with the high degree of radiation shielding in shelters, an exact analogy to the situation where the 100,000 protection factor of activated charcoal gas mask filters gave no gas casualties in 1938 research, and disarmament bigots tried to claim that was some kind of ignorant dismissal of the horrors of true gas war so they would "arbitrarily" assume that only say 50% of people put on gas masks in order to then falsely claim that gas masks were somehow "calculated" to only work for 50% of people - i.e. only those assumed to be actually wearing them! - a travesty and abuse of scientific modelling (like lying that you have done detailed calculations proving that car seat belts make no difference in accidents, when in fact you have merely assumed that nobody wears the seat belts!), when in fact the true excellence of gas mask protection was proved to successfully deter Hitler from using gas on civilians with gas masks, saving millions contrary to the hate attacks on civil defence by disarmament propaganda deceivers (who recognised that civil defence made deterrence credible, and so was a threat to their bigoted plans for peace at any price):

ABOVE: extracts from the famous 1979 T. K. Jones Boeing Corporation letter, page 2, debunking "arms control" nuclear weapons effects liars in detail. This really exasperated my dad, John B. Cook, who was a Civil Defence Corps instructor in the 1950s, but was old enough to live through the 1930s appeasement era when Philip Noel-Baker repeated lied on the effects of gas bombs, claiming gas masks will never work, because babies and the elderly won't put them on properly, blah, blah, so we must ban evil civil defence and instead guarantee peace by appeasing the Nazis because of we don't, they will DEFINITELY gas us all with a massive gas bomb raid on day 1 of war. In fact, Philip Noel-Baker did this first in a BBC radio speech in 1927, 6 years before Hitler was elected. Family members who knew the truth from gas attacks in WWII - largely negated by simple gas masks and going into shelters for droplets of persistent liquids like mustard agent - had to put up with this lying BBC and other media propaganda for disarmament throughout the 1930s, to the joy of the Nazis who were secretly rearming and preparing for invasions (not necessarily war, since Hitler would have been quite happy to "peacefully" invade the world and then use efficient gas chambers to dispose of those whose race or views he found to be "offensive", like modern snowflakes today). What really irritated dad, however, was that Philip Noel-Baker, having lied about gas effects in his February 1927 BBC radio broadcast and throughout the 1930s to great applause from pacifists who effectively did Hitler's bidding, was made a Lord and a Nobel Peace prize winner for appeasement propaganda lies that led to world war, and then did the same thing all over again during the cold war, issuing nuclear weapons lies. In a 1980 House of Lords debate on Civil Defence, he lied that the air burst in Hiroshima produced lethal fallout: "It covers everything in Hiroshima not already rendered lethal, and so those who have escaped the flash, the blast, the fire, will die within a short time. The first atomic bomb weighed two kilograms. It was little larger than a cricket ball. ... In 1978, more than 2,000 died in Hiroshima from its long-term effects."

Every word here is totally untrue, and easily disproved, but nobody in the House of Lords explained the facts to him, so this he quotes on page 5 of his 1980 Ecology Party book "How to Survive the Nuclear Age", and on page 6 he adds an attack on civil defence: "I feel the same outrage in 1980 when the Home Office [UK Government civil defence] propose to circulate a a copy of a pamphlet entitled Protect and Survive to every citizen. ... To strengthen the walls and ceilings as the pamphlet suggests, he needed a garden, a spade, sandbags, and the strength to dig and transport a ton of earth." However, the infirm or elderly don't need to hire an army of helpers to make a fallout shelter, because - contrary to Philip Noel-Baker - you can simply use water from a hose to fill up water filled bags inside boxes which do the shielding, as explained in the Home Office scientific advisory branch Fission Fragments magazine article (reprinted in the Royal Observer Corps Journal, vol. 27, issue 2, February 1985, page 26, below). In any case, in actual implementation, you would have some organization for civil defence in time of crisis, with people in nighbourhoods helping one another (lending hose pipes, helping to assemble emergency shelters around tables in homes, etc). Noel-Baker ends his case by absurdly calling for disarmament as a "sure way to avoid the war", by again ignoring the lessons of his own 1930s disarmament war effects propaganda which led to appeasement and thus the encouragement of enemy aggression, triggering the Second World War: "This is not a utopian dream. It is the system by which David Lloyd George disarmed Germany in 1919..." This claim typifies Noel-Baker's absurd, self-contradictory nonsense, since DLG's 1919 "system" led to another, far worse, world war, not to peace.

In that 1980 Ecology Party book "How to Survive the nuclear age", there is after the deceptions from Labour Party Lord Noel-Baker, a summary of civil defence shelter advice, but then the book ends with the transcript of the final big speech from Lord Mountbatten to the arms control anti-nuclear propaganda institute SIPRI at Strasbourg on 11 May 1979 (the IRA tragically ended his appeasement campaign with a bomb on his boat off the coast of Sligo, Ireland, on 27 August 1979): "A military confrontation between the nuclear powers could entail the horrifying risk of nuclear warfare [hardly likely if we have overwhelming superiority for credible deterrence, as we should have had - but did not have - in the 1930s to deter Hitler]. ... A new world war can hardly fail to involve the all-out use of nuclear weapons [this is debunked by former NATO General Sir John Hackett's book "The Third World War" which shows how escalation risks will be controlled even in the event of a Russian first-strike on Britain, provided that we are prepared for nuclear war - this book will be discussed in detail later in this blog post, below]. ... Let us all resolve to take all possible practical steps to ensure that we do not, through our own folly, go over the edge."

ABOVE: the most advanced and latest American "counterforce" nuclear weapons, the oralloy (Oak Ridge Alloy, aka U235 loaded secondary stage) W88 nuclear warheads were designed to knock out the huge well shock-insulated Russian SS-18 missile silos when they had a physical vulnerability number of 52L7, corresponding to a peak overpressure of 7000 psi, which is well within the crater radius. This is highly relevant today, since ehe SS-18 (in Russian nomenclature: R-36M2) is still in service (like the American W88), and the Russians have 46 of them, each with 10 warheads of 800 kilotons each, i.e. a total of 10x46 = 460 nuclear warheads and 3680 megatons. These 211 ton SS-18s are due to be replaced with the latest 208 ton Sarmat (RS-28) missiles (which made its first test flight on 20 April 2022, during the Ukraine war), extending the range from 11,000 km for the SS-18 to 18,000 km for the Sarmat. Unfortunately, as this declassified report shows, as with the Russian civil defense shelters, the silo hardness was underrated and the physical vulnerability is not 52L7 as originally supposed. The SS-18 silos could take much higher peak overpressures than 7000 psi and related ground shock, cratering throwout, etc. (The current "best guess" - and this is not proof tested due to the ban on atmospheric nuclear testing - is that it takes a peak overpressure of 10,000 psi to blow the silo door off the SS-18 silo and wreck the missile, which occurs at a distance from the warhead similar to its inertial gyroscopic CEP targetting error if the accurate GPS satellite navigation system is taken out by high altitude bursts, so to get a high kill probability you need to target many warheads per silo, a hugely inefficient strategy when all the enemy has to do is launch the SS-18 out of the silo before your warheads arrive!) In addition to this underestimate of the hardness of vital military "counterforce" targets in Russia, the Americans also massively over-estimated the cratering and ground shock effects for high yields in ordinary soils (not easily broken coral reefs!). (For references, please see the earlier blog posts about cratering exaggerations linked here and here.) The points we want people to take away, or at least openly investigate and question are:

(1) countervalue (anti-city) effects of nuclear weapons are bunk because, aside from the mistakes and deliberate omissions Glasstone and Dolan made for propaganda purposes in their 1977 edition, if the chips really do go down, you or your opponent can simply evacuate cities - most of which self-evacuate at 5pm every weekday, anyhow - evacuation is not a miracle, despite what Scientific American or Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says - before issuing an ultimatum, just as the UK did with evacuating kids from London in Operation Pied Piper on 1 September 1939 before issuing an ultimatum and then declaring war 48 hours later,

(2) you or your opponent can not only safeguard the civilians in cities by evacuating them (or putting the people into shelters/basements etc if you have them, as the Russians do, and as thankfully the Ukrainians do which is a key reason they have been able to fight the Russian invasion, as a result of having previously been part of the civil defense obsessed USSR), but 100% of missiles in silos can also be safeguarded from destruction by simply firing them out of their silos, if seriously threatened by a counterforce (anti-silo) enemy attack. In other words, if you decide to credibly target enemy nuclear weapons (a very costly strategy in terms of the number of W88 warheads per silo for any significant chance of damaging a >7000psi peak overpressure-requiring SS-18 missile silo, which are about as well protected as the concrete and steel around most nuclear power reactor cores), your targetting policy will encourage the enemy to launch first, to save their missiles from being taken out! So using nuclear weapons to target other nuclear weapons in hardened silos (or hidden in the sea in submarines!), apart from being extremely inefficient and costly in terms of your stockpile, is also a policy that provokes the risk of enemy "launch on warning" crisis instability because you are, if "successful", removing the enemy's protected second strike retaliation capability, and once the second strike option is gone, they are pushed back into the old first-strike aka launch-on-warning policy, which is extremely dangerous if their radar operators mistake some third party's missile testing for a launch against them, etc., etc. So the obsessive "disarmament fantasy" of only using nuclear weapons to try to deter other nuclear weapons in silos by targeting them, is a dangerous illusion that provokes crisis instability and risks an accidental nuclear war, in addition to being an exceptionally ineffective deterrent! All you do with that delusion is to deter the enemy from a second-strike policy, and force the enemy into a dangerous first-strike/launch on warning policy! If you can knock out the enemy warheads in their silos, the enemy will simply ensure that there is a very high probability that their missiles have been launched out of their silos before your warheads arrive, so you will be uselessly destroying EMPTY missiles silos! (your warheads take 25 minutes to arrive for an ICBM between continents, and 10 minutes for a back door attack of an SLBM launched from a submarine; less time is required for a Russian sub to hit NY or LA because they are beside oceans, unlike Moscow and most Russian targets that are well inland!).

(3) In any case, how do you target enemy SLBMs in submarines hidden at sea? Similarly, the most numerous Russian ICBM in their stockpile is the mobile SS-27 Mod 2/RS-24, of which they have 135 missiles on 16-wheeled mobile launch vehicles which can move around, with 4 separate MIRV nuclear megaton warheads per missile and a range of 11,000 km. How do you target them as they move around during a crisis situation? They can easily move position enough to survive an nuclear warhead in the US stockpile during the 25 minutes while your missiles are on the way to hit them in a crisis situation, so you are literally trying to hit a moving target - do you really believe America will be able to reprogram the target locations for ICBM warheads in flight as they are moving? The whole idea would be amusing if it wasn't so tragic (there was an effort to create a warhead which could track its moving target and adjust its trajectory accordingly, the MARV - Maneuverable Reentry Vehicle - the only known Western MARV was the Pershing II warhead, which disarmed as part of the INF treaty to appease Russia/pro-disarmament politicians in the West). So the whole idea of using nuclear weapons to hit enemy nuclear weapons before they are launched is crazy and dangerous. It's no joke that all the disarmament propaganda claims falsely that nuclear weapons have only the purpose of targetting other nuclear weapons in silos. That policy is dangerous, because it just encourages the enemy to get the weapons out of their silos before your weapons can arrive, so you are not deterring the enemy to launch their weapons, but forcing them to launch on warning, a lunatic policy! Nuclear weapons are only effective in a counterforce operation against armies on the move, either as a deterrent or to physically stop invasions without collateral damage by air burst enhanced neutron weapons. The only real use of nuclear weapons should be, as Oppenheimer said, as a tactical threat to stop the military invasions and attacks that triggered two world wars.

Nuclear weapons are exceptionally good at deterring (or stopping) armies on the move! Not so if they are dispersed in defensive positions like hasty earth covered emergency civil defense shelters that resist 40 psi peak overpressure and give a protection factor of 200 or more against radiation; but the point is that they deter enemy military offensives and once the enemy has crossed your border you are within your rights to stop them; the credible threat will prevent invasions this way, ending world war. (Nuclear weapons are also effective at destroying enemy nuclear weapons in flight, e.g. the 2 kt W66 neutron warhead in the American Sprint ABM missile could melt down the fissile material in Russian nuclear warheads in flight in the atmosphere, and the 5 Mt W71 x-ray warhead of the Spartan ABM missile would ablate, deflect and destroy Russian warheads in space; they also knock down trees to create demilitarised zones in jungle warfare which enable easy identification of insurgents entering those zones for attacks.)

There is a compendium of classic 1960s and 1970s arguments for civil defense, and their political suppression by left-wingers and fools, in Nobel Laureate Dr Eugene P. Wigner's Collected Works, part B, volume VIII, edited by Jagdish Mehra (Springer, 1998, 258 pages). Wigner on 28 April 1976 testified before the U.S. Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production (page 144 in their printed hearings, online version is LINKED HERE) that the new Russian evacuation plans - as shown in its 1969 Civil Defense Manual (translated as ORNL-TR-2306, Oak Ridge National Lab.) - are very effective (the Russian civil defense plan includes only essential workers commuting into cities for 12-hour shifts, and using shelters):

"Indeed an easy calculation shows that, if the USSR carries out its city evacuation plans, the total number of casualties that all the nuclear weapons in our missiles could cause would be a good deal less than 50% the losses they suffered in World War II. A reasonable estimate, based on the Oak Ridge [National Laboratory] test of a blast resistant 'expedient shelter', described in the USSR civil defense handbooks, gives for the loss which our missile carried nuclear weapons could cause, about 3% of the USSR population. What about our own situation? ... An evacuation plan [costs] $1.2 billion .... a blast resistant shelter system similar to that of China ... would cost around $35 billion."

In 1979, in a joint article with hydrogen bomb advocate Dr Edward Teller in the U.S. Senate Congressional Record (2 August 1979, page S-11490), Wigner points out that Kahn's Type I deterrence is inadequate to prevent war (Type I is also called "mutual assured destruction", if both sides have parity via "arms control" delusions): "... I believe that the so called Mutual Assured Destruction is nonsense, because suppose even if the attacked nation could retaliate, if the other nation pretends that it does not believe it and makes a demand, is there any point in resisting? What good does it do if it can destroy hundreds of thousands of the aggressors' lives ..."

In his 26 May 1964 address to Mercer County NJ Civil Defense organization (reprinted in his Collected Works, part B, Vol. 8, p35 et seq.), Wigner explains that "people who are against Civil Defense often have some element of frustration ... and they find more easily time for, and outlet in, their opposition," as explained by Robert Waelder's article Protest and Revolution Against Western Societies, in M.A. Kaplan (ed), The Revolution in World Politics (New York, 1962, p 18), i.e. it is the same as the mechanism for Marxist agitators, some of which are openly Marxist and others pretend to be libertarian while remaining faithful to the bigoted dictators. Wigner's address continues: "Much more literature - I think 80% - is against than for Civil Defense and much of it is completely irresponsible. A few weeks ago I read an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which the author said that a complete fallout [cheaper than blast] shelter program would cost $50 billion. Now $50 billion is more than would be spent on the complete blast [and fallout] shelter program which I mentioned [$35 billion]. But ... who will contradict it?"

In Publication 82 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Civil Defense, 1966, edited by H. Eyring, Wigner remarks on page 121: "Dr Rapoport said, in a note to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that it is possible that surrender to Hitler would have led to fewer deaths ... My view is the opposite in this case: I believe that if the West had shown clear resolve and determination from the start, WWII could have been averted."

After Leon Goure wrote his May 1972 report, "Soviet Civil Defense - urban Evacuation and Dispersal" (Centre for Advanced International Studies, Miami University, DTIC report AD0745136), Wigner and J. S. Gailar wrote in their joint article "Russian Evacuation Plans - the Fears they Create" in the September-October 1974 issue of Survive (v7, n5, pp 4-5): "If the leadership of the USSR should change and become more aggressive, it would have, under the present circumstances, a terribly tempting option: to stage an evacuation and to provoke a confrontation when this is completed." Wigner later testified to the U.S. Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production, Civil Preparedness and Limited Nuclear War (28 April 1976, pp 143-7) that the principal danger: "is the possibility of the USSR evacuating its cities, dispersing their population, and the making demands on us, under the threat of a nuclear attack, approximating those made by Hitler on Czechoslovakia which led to the Munich Pact."

The only reply Wigner received was a nonsense filled 11-page article attacking all these lessons from Russian Civil Defense, headed "Limited Nuclear War" by Sidney D. Drell and Frank von Hippel, and published in the November 1976 issue of Scientific American, the editor of which, Dennis Flanagan, refused to publish Wigner's rebuttal, entitled "We heartily disagree", just as Kahn's rebuttal to the nonsense review of his book on Civil Defense in 1961 had been refused by Scientific American, leading Kahn to expand it into his 1962 book "Thinking about the unthinkable". Wigner's and A. A. Broyles rebuttal to Scientific American was finally published instead as "We heartily disagree" in the Journal of Civil Defense, v10, pp. 4-8, July-August 1977 issue, pointing out that the Russian casualties with civil defense would be 4% on Wigner's unclassified estimate or 2% using T. K. Jones's classified data estimate (utilizing secret data on the survival of foxholes in nuclear tests, in the 1972 DNA-EM-1 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons), and that the Russian improvised lined, covered trench shelters survive a peak overpressure of 40 psi as well as heat flash and fallout radiation, and adds that contrary to the nonsense in Scientific American, the Russians did test their plans by evacuating the city of Sevastopol in a drill which led to improvements in their plans.

H-bomb proponent Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and A. A. Broyles in May 1973 had jointly authored the American Security Council report, "Without civil defense we are in a glass house", which basically argues that you can't have a deterrent for world war if you are not prepared to use that deterrent when your bluff is called. If you are in Chamberlain's position in 1938 or Baldwin's in 1935, you are scared of using the deterrent because it is like "throwing stones in glass houses", because - if you can't shelter people because you refuse to have shelters and you also won't have a plan to evacuate kids from London (Operation Pied Piper, 1939) before you declare war - then you can easily be scared and coerced by Hitler or other dictators, who can see clearly that your "deterrent" is a complete bluff and totally, pathetically useless, because a weapon you can't use is not a credible deterrent. Naturally, as we keep repeating on this blog, this is what the defeatists who love Putin and other dictators want since surrender has two vital steps: (1) get rid of the shield (civil defense) since that makes the sword credible as an alternative to disarmament, and (2) point out that a sword without a shield is an incredible deterrent that is useless, so we had better disarm (and surrender)! Arms control delusions like supposed "parity" (a balance of weapons on both sides, as if democracies need detering like dictatorships), when one side has credible civil defense and the other doesn't, is like a duel between two people, similarly armed, but with one wearing body armour and the other totally unprotected! Not on that, but the dictator is the one wearing the body armour!

ABOVE: long-haired scientist Thomas K. Jones, better known as T. K. Jones, (pictured testifying before the Joint Committee on Defense Production, in Science magazine, 10 December 1976 after his Congressional Testimony raised the wrath of crackpot Scientific American and Bulletin of Atomic Scientist fans) was the "fall guy" of Reagan's civil defense, doing the explosive tests for Boeing Corporation on Russian civil defense shelter designs and testifing on their consequences for strategic nuclear deterrence - basically debunking strategic nuclear deterrence and McNamara's/Glasstone's totally fake news on urban nuclear weapons effects entirely, since 98% of Russians would survive the US nuclear stockpile when dispersed in shelters - which inspired Cresson Kearny's Oak Ridge National Laboratory manual, Nuclear War Survival Skills. President Ronald Reagan, prior to his election as US President, was leaked secret CIA reports on Russian civil defense tests of shelters and evidence of their tests of city evacuation plans for instance by evacuating Sevastopol in Crimea and also, in 1975, Lytkarino (a suburb of Moscow containing 40,000 people). A clue to who helped him was shown by Reagan's decision to controversially appoint T. K. Jones as Under-Secretary for Defense for Research and Engineering! A book was then published called With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, ignoring the key scientific evidence entirely, and merely trying to ridicule Reagan's appoinment of T. K. Jones (who is quoted on the front cover), as a left wing Democratic supporting political instrument - like Duncan Campbell's similarly vacuous War Plan UK. This was left-politics versus hard science. It often appears to work because Mr Joe Public loves a tall-story fairy tale!

If proof of this is needed, Robert Scheer, a fellow in arms control at Stanford University and the author of With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, became "Truthdig" editor-in-chief, a propagandarist who claims that ending WWII with nuclear weapons made Truman guilty of "the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history", so he needs to check his facts on the numbers gassed in the Holocaust, or starved in Ukraine by Stalin, unless he denies those deliberate acts of terrorism like the other left wing Holocaust deniers who confuse racism and anti-racism, terrorism and anti-terrorism. When you actually check the facts: (1) Secretary Stimson (U.S. Secretary of War) knew he has a secret nuclear weapons program of investment of billions of dollars to justify to Congress after WWII ended and didn't want to hold back using the bomb for that reason, so he promoted Hiroshima as being a military target (it did have military bases, particularly at Hiroshima Castle just north of ground Zero, but it was also a highly populated civilian city), (2) Hiroshima's air raid shelters were unoccupied because Japanese Army officers were having breakfast when B29s were detected far away, says Yoshie Oka, the operator of the Hiroshima air raid sirens on 6 August 1945, (3) Colonel Tibbets, former bomber of Germany before becoming the Hiroshima pilot as commander of the 509th Composite Group, explains how his pilots and crew were ridiculed heavily for lack of accomplishments, while preparing for weeks on Tinian Island. According to Tibbet's own book The Tibbets Story a poem was published before Hiroshima called "Nobody knows" lampooning the 509th's results: "Nobody knows. Into the air the secret rose; Where they're going, nobody knows; Tomorrow they'll return again; But we'll never know where they've been. Don't ask us about results or such; Unless you want to get in Dutch. But take it from one who is sure of the score, the 509th is winning the war. When the other Groups are ready to go; We have a program of the whole damned show; And when Halsey's 5th shells Nippon's shore; Why, shucks, we hear about it the day before. And MacArthur and Doolittle give out in advance; But with this new bunch we haven't a chance; We should have been home a month or more; For the 509th is winning the war." Tibbets was therefore determined create maximum effects after his group had been ridiculed at Tinian Island for not attacking Japan during weeks of preparations on the island, rehearsing the secret nuclear attacks while other B29s were taking took flak trying to bomb Japan into surrender with conventional bombs. He writes in The Tibbets Story that regular morning flights of small groups of weather and phototographic survey planes that did not make significant attacks over possible nuclear target cities, helped to reduce civil defense readiness in the cities, as well as reducing the air defense risks, since Japan was rationing its use of its limited remaining air defense in 1945.

The November 1976 Scientific American anti-civil defense article claimed that civil defense was discredited since: "In the 1960s the US adopted a strategic policy giving top priority to the prevention of nuclear war through deterrence ...", to which Wigner and Broyles responded to this claim in "We heartily disagree" in the July-August 1977 Journal of Civil Defense: "How do you deter an attack unless you convince an enemy that you will fight the war that he is starting?"

Dictators often start wars which their people don't need: the Persian war against the Greeks, Hannibal's war against Rome, the Tartar's invasions of Europe, the Turks' invasion of Hungary, the invasions of Napoleon. You have to accept that aggression is not necessarily a completely rational activity! All that counts for deterrence is that it is credible. If you don't prepare to fight with strategic nuclear weapons, then they are just a pointless bluff, a paper tiger as the Chinese put it, not a credible deterrent. Which is precisely what the disarmers want, of course, since nuclear parity, with the shift away from credible nuclear deterrence to incredible foolery, is only one step away from admitting the uselessness of the strategic nuclear stockpile, disarming and surrendering!

ABOVE: the 11 October 1952 cover of Picture Post showed clearly the "separation of effects" in an air burst (31 kiloton air burst at 3,440 ft, the Charlie shot of 22 April 1952, Nevada test site), where the fireball cools and forms into toroidal shape (with the radioactivity in the ring) before the "stem" of popcorned dust from the desert is sucked through the middle, before cascading harmlessly around the periphery without mixing with the fission products in the toroidal ring. Despite the visual proof that intense radioactive fallout can be avoided by air bursts, anti-nuclear propaganda helped by Russian fronts continued to raise fallout fears to promote Western arms control and disarmament, leaving the field clear for undeterred Russian conventional invasions and wars.

Professor John J. Mearsheimer, "The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent", Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 50-66 (FULL ARTICLE LINKED HERE):

"The conventional wisdom about Ukraine's nuclear weapons is wrong. In fact, as soon as it declared independence, Ukraine should have been quietly encouraged to fashion its own nuclear deterrent. Even now, pressing Ukraine to become a nonnuclear state is a mistake. A nuclear Ukraine makes sense for two reasons. First, it is imperative to maintain peace between Russia and Ukraine. That means ensuring that the Russians, who have a history of bad relations with Ukraine, do not move to reconquer it. ... Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression. ... A conventional war between Russia and Ukraine would entail vast military casualties and the possible murder of many thousands of civilians. Russians and Ukrainians have a history of mutual enmity; this hostility, combined with the intermixing of their populations, raises the possibility that war between them could entail Bosnian style ethnic cleansing and mass murder. This war could produce millions of refugees clamoring at the borders of Western Europe. ... There is also the threat of escalation beyond the borders of Russia and Ukraine. For example, the Russians might decide to reconquer other parts of the former Soviet Union in the midst of a war, or might try to take back some of Eastern Europe. Poland and Belarus might join forces with Russia against Ukraine or gang up with Ukraine to prevent a Russian resurgence. The Germans, Americans or Chinese could get pulled in by their fear of a Russian victory. (Doubters should remember that the United States had no intention of fighting in Europe when war broke out in 1914 and again in 1939.) ...

"Russia has dominated an unwilling and angry Ukraine for more than two centuries, and has attempted to crush Ukraine's sense of self-identity. Recent history witnessed the greatest horrors in this relationship: Stalins government murdered an astounding 12 million Ukrainians during the 1930s. ... A Ukrainian conventional deterrent is not a viable option because Ukraine cannot build an army powerful enough to stop a Russian attack. Ukraine's army might put up dogged resistance, but it would eventually be defeated. Russia is simply too powerful. ... Conventional military power is significantly more expensive than nuclear military power and requires a larger military; hence it requires far more popular mobilization. ... A security guarantee from the West is theoretically possible but not a practical strategy for maintaining Ukrainian sovereignty. Extending deterrence to Germany during the Cold War was a demanding and expensive job; extending deterrence further east to Ukraine would be even more difficult. ... Vilifying nuclear weapons is a fashionable sport in the West. ... This view of nuclear weapons is simplistic and flies in the face of the inherent logic of nuclear deterrence, as well as the history of the Cold War. In fact, nuclear weapons often diminish international violence, and Ukrainian nuclear weapons would be an effective deterrent against a Russian conventional attack or nuclear blackmail. In the pre-nuclear world of industrialized great powers, there were two world wars between 1900 and 1945 in which some 50 million Europeans died. In the nuclear age, the story is very different. Only some 15,000 Europeans were killed in minor wars between 1945 and 1990, and there was a stable peace between the superpowers that became increasingly robust over time. ... Moreover, there is always the possibility that nuclear weapons might be used inadvertently or accidentally in the course of a conventional war, which provides further incentives for caution."

Professor Cyril Joad, "Why War?", Penguin Special book, August 1939, page 71: "Mr. Churchill and Sir Norman Angell ... The most convincing comment that I have heard on the whole lunatic business was made at a meeting which I attended as an undergraduate at Oxford in the year before the war. The meeting was addressed by a Cabinet Minister. "There is," he said, "just one way in which you can make your country secure and have peace, and that is to be so much stronger than any prospective enemy that he dare not attack you, and this is, I submit to you, gentlemen, a self-evident proposition." A small man got up at the back of the hall and asked him whether the advice he had just given was the advice he would give to Germany. ... the questioner proceeded to drive home the moral which his question had implied. "Here," he pointed out, "are two nations or groups of nations likely to quarrel. How shall each be secure and keep the peace? Our Cabinet Minister tells us in the profundity of his wisdom, that both will be secure, both will keep the peace when each is stronger than the other. And this, he thinks, is a self-evident proposition." This time there was loud applause. It remains to add that the Cabinet Minister was Winston Churchill, his questioner Sir Norman Angell [author of the 1908 anti-deterrence book, The Great Illusion and winner of the 1933 Nobel Peace Prize]."

Notice the point that Angell fails to explain why mutual deterrence won't keep the peace! If any mass-media "nuclear overkill" lies were true and we only needed 0.02 kiloton W54 sized nuclear warheads, we'd have 0.02 kiloton nuclear weapons. The reason why we have higher yields is lying isn't a credible deterrent when the chips go down, and what we have is a bare minimum to carry out a minimal deterrent function. It's easy to reduce nuclear weapon yields by removing boost gas, secondary stages, etc. The actual problem is the exact opposite of what 100% of quack mass media liars rant: if actually we want to reduce the risk of war including escalation to nuclear war, we need a credible deterrent which we don't have (see facts below). As regards huge stockpiles, this bankrupts the dictatorship as seen in the 1980s. It's a small price to pay, compared to the cost of a world war. Angell simply sneers at mutual deterrence, without (1) saying what's wrong with it, (2) investigating how to make it stable, (3) explaining why there's something wrong with "Si vis Pacem, para Bellum". Herman Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War discovered these pseudo-pacifists were key to starting WWII by duping the public with the illusion of security through disarmament (using itallics to emphasise this point!). What's actually needed, Kahn showed is credible deterrence including civil defence in order to reduce collateral damage such as radiation exposure to civilians (this is discussed in detail below, with quotations from Kahn's various books). This quotation of Angell versus Churchill in a 1913 deterrence debate is important because Churchill's pre-WWI naval Dreadnought deterrence ("We need eight, and we won't wait!") proved an incredible deterrent against the invasion of Belgium in 1914 which triggered WWI! So deterrence must be credible against the spectrum of provocations that result in wars, not just against a subset of the spectrum of possible provocations!

But Churchill's so-called "brilliant oratory" during the 1930s again failed to sway public opinion early enough to credible deter the Nazis from invading Poland in 1939 and triggering WWII. He failed to defeat the anti-deterrence movement led by Norman Angell and Philip Noel-Baker. So there are important lessons to learn here. In the end, the "anti-war movement" - which had become by 1939 a Nazi Fifth Column in the UK - had to be forceably shut down (with oppressive press censorship) once war broke out, as enemy collaboration or defeatism. However, they re-started again in 1945 when wartime censorship was lifted, and were never debunked by scientists, historians or journalists who could see the dangers from attacking them, i.e. the fascist mentality of such self-righteous lying quacks and charlatans, which were identical to the pseudo-scientist mindsets of Nazi eugenics pseudoscience and Marxism pseudoscience. The anti-nuclear quacks immediately focussed on nuclear weapons radiation, just as they had focussed on gas fear-mongering in the 1920s and 1930s! The journalists, historians and scientists who should have called out the liars instead backed anti-nuclear liars, instead of repudiating them and using nuclear weapons to deter war! Historians like AJP Taylor were accused by Herman Kahn of fiddling their analysis of Hitler and war origins, simply in order to "justify" a delusional anti-nuclear agenda (e.g., AJP Taylor was a founder of unilateral nuclear disarmament organisation "CND"!). There is still a taboo on mentioning the fact that Glasstone's and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons states in Table 5.160 that a large cheap WWII Anderson shelter (light 10-gage corrugated steel hemispherical arch with 20-25 ft span and 5 ft earth cover at the crown) requires 45-60 psi peak overpressure for collapse, while an 8" thick reinforced hemispherical buried concrete arch with 16 ft span and 4 ft earth cover at the crown requires 220-280 psi peak overpressure for collapse, i.e. survival within half-a-mile from a one megaton surface burst, proving relatively cheap, credible, effective civil defence (Glasstone's book, however, generally is misleading "free field" effects data from nuclear tests in deserts, omitting the blast and radiation shielding caused by energy absorption by concrete building skylines in cities; the only parts of Glasstone quoted by the CND people are the falsehoods; the media let them get away with it!).

"Who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West and the civilisation of the ages will fall with as great a shock as that of Rome? ... all gas experts are agreed that it would be impossible to devise means to protect the civil population from this form of attack [gas attacks]."

- Professor Philip Noel-Baker, "Foreign Affairs and How They Affect Us", BBC Radio, February 1927 (false claim, repudiated in secret discussions by UK Government Chemical Warfare Research Department, but not in public, thus enabling this form of "pacifist" lying to be used by Nazis to engineer appeasement leading to World War II; see also p31 of T. H. O'Brien's appalling UK official WWII history "Civil Defence" which dumbly mentions this episode without following up the implications for fascist appeasement!).

"Any use of nuclear weapons will escalate into a general war. There is no defence against such weapons ... nuclear warfare will destroy civilsation, and perhaps exterminate mankind. To hope for salvation from Civil Defence is a dangerous self-deluding pipe dream."

- Lord Noel-Baker (yes, the same liar quoted above, whose BBC radio show propaganda in February 1927 helped the Nazis kill 40 million people, unopposed by UK government secrecy obsessed "expert" thugs who refused to say anything in response to tell the public the facts they had that debunked Noel-Baker!), The Times, 25 January 1980.

(Thus, the same anti-civil defence "pacifists" who laid the seeds for WWII in 1927 were at it in 1980, simply changing "gas" to "nuclear"! The thug was allowed to go on a Nobel Peace Prize winning anti-civil defence lying crusade because the "journalists", "historians", and "scientists" didn't want to upset the apple cart by telling the public the truth in time to credibly deter another war, exactly what also happened with lying war-mongering appeaser and BBC Brains Trust radio "expert" Professor Cyril Joad who recommended a peace deal with the Nazis in his August 1939 book "Why War?" which on p71 quoted Normal Angell before WWI allegedly "debunking" Winston Churchill as a war-monger responsible for WWI via the old pre-WWI naval arms race, viz "We want eight [Dreadnoughts] and we won't wait!" Joad was eventually kicked out of the BBC for being convicted of dodging his rail fare, not kicked out for helping Hitler's fascist "peace" propaganda - something that has also proved true for many other "untouchable stars" like Sir Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, et al. Journalism, the legal profession, scientific principles, etc., having first made heroes of liars who "filter out the unpleasant facts the public don't want to be concerned with", then always get to cover-up ahem "set aside" 100% of "issues" in their support of big pseudo-pacifist "star" liars, until the problem is so out of control they finally have to publish it, when they "switch over" and start saying the exact opposite about the "star", usually when the star is dead and it's too late, making believe that they did their best to oppose the liars, when in fact the evidence proves the exact opposite: they make as much money out of the star as they can, appeasing the thug in the process. The problem is that quacks and charlatans have always filled the BBC and other mass media outlets and pumped out endless lying about weapons effects, without any competent opposition whatsoever. You have to appreciate that this is simply because "war news" sells better on TV, than "deterrence evidence"! So today you have endless TV "history" shows about Hitler starting WWII, but none about the cause in the gas knockout blow esaggerations and gas mask lying or Anderson shelter lying by pseudo-pacifists, or even the lying origins of Hitler's eugenics in British pseudo-scientists like Darwin's cousin, eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, or his fan club - including the French Nobel Medical Laureate Dr Alexis Carrell who proposed to Hitler the use of gas chambers for "peaceful" mass murder of "state enemies" in his eugenics pseudoscience Nazi bestseller, "Man the Unknown". It's nearly all pathetic propaganda to enforce the false AJP Taylor style orthodoxy that there are no lessons about civil defence and pseudoscience lying from "expert conssensus" to be learned to ensure peace!)

Prof. P. J. Noel Baker: "Foreign Affairs and How They Affect Us - How Nations Settle Their Quarrels" BBC radio 7pm Tue 15th Feb 1927, Radio Times program advert: "At any period in history between the fall of the old Roman Empire and the present century, there was only one answer to the question, 'How do nations settle their quarrels?' It was by war or the threat of war. Now, in the League of Nations, the world has a tribunal before which such quarrels can be judged from the point of view of right rather than might. It would be useless to pretend that the Council of the League is a purely judicial body untouched by political considerations, but at least it contains in every case enough disinterested opinion to ensure that the moral view gets representation, and the sanction behind its decisions is international opinion, and not merely the big battalions of any one Power or group of Powers. Professor Noel Baker was one of the British delegation in Paris when the League was established, and he worked for several years subsequently in the League Secretariat, so he is qualified to speak with knowledge of both the ideal and the actual character of the League."

Eventually - far too late to help deter a war - in 1938, when the war threat induced appeasement and coercion situation was way out of control, some scientists began popular books debunking gas knockout blow liars, but all in a very weak, very gentle way that has been widely ignored. For example, Professor Kendall FRS wrote Breathe Freely! The Truth about Poison Gas which contained key facts but was poorly organized, like Herman Kahn's 1960 On Thermonuclear War. Kendall pointed out on page 52 that with proper defences (gas masks and training) in 1918 it took 4,000 tons of German mustard gas to kill 540 British troops: "Gas defence had progressed to the point where it took nearly 8 tons of mustard gas to kill a single man [with modern NBC clothing and modern respirators etc, even fewer casualties would occur]," and on page 110 he points out that popular mass media gas-knockout-blow hysteria "loved to quote the fact that 1 ton of mustard gas is sufficient to kill 45,000,000 people". If you compare the truth, 1/8 killed per ton with simple 1918 gas masks to 45,000,000 per ton killed in propaganda (for no protection), the exaggeration factor by the mass media was 45,000,000/(1/8) = 360,000,000. This 360,000,000 protection factor is so large that it makes civil defense into a game changer. In other words, giving out gas masks totally eliminates the naive toxicity "overkill" exaggerations at the basis of anti-deterrence propaganda that leads to virtue-signalling disarmament propaganda spin, and thus war. Very large reductions occur with civil defence in nuclear warfare, when you properly take account of city skyline blast and radiation absorption and the actual protection afforded by low cost modern concrete buildings and dual-use underground car park basement shelters. The point is, the 1920s and 1930s lying opposition to WMD deterrence made credible by civil defence against "limited/accidental attacks" etc, by "internationalists" aka appeasers/defeatists, is central to the entire problem of foreign affairs and maintaining a peaceful world. By lying about gas/nuclear knockout blows, you get a Nobel Peace Prize for removing credible deterrence and allowing the invasions that set off major wars, which risks nuclear escalation against battle-hardened opponents once the economic and human costs of conventional war spiral out of control. This key lesson still goes unheeded due to fake news mass media scams! Russia has always recognised the truth about the power of nuclear weapons when the chips go down:

Ministry of Defense of the USSR, NUCLEAR WEAPONS - MANUAL FOR OFFICERS, "FOR PERSONAL USE" (i.e. CONFIDENTIAL) (individually numbered), CHAPTER ONE, NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THEIR MEANS OF USE, p3: "A nuclear explosion can inflict heavy losses on the enemy in manpower and military equipment, destroy lower structures over large areas, have a strong moral impact on the enemy's troops, and create favorable conditions for the side using nuclear weapons, to achieve success in battle."

Below: 13 July 2024 Russian State TV Channel 1 (Putin's Kremlin controlled Russian language propaganda channel for the Russian people): "Any confrontation with the NATO bloc is possible only with the use of nuclear weapons. There is simply no other option. If NATO's military organization surpasses us, it is absolutely futile for us to enter into such an armed confrontation with conventional means of destruction only."

NO: this is not "just a bluff". Putin has over 2000 tactical neutron bombs; we have damn all now. OK? We DID have dedicated tactical nuclear weapons until 1992, and they deterred Russian invasions, but since then we have cut back our deterrence to a bare minimum which excludes the deterrence of conventional wars which risk escalating (like the invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939) into a World War, despite Herman Kahn's warnings of the dangers from minimum deterrence in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War.

Russian propagandists:

"Any confrontation with the NATO bloc is possible only with the use of nuclear weapons. There is simply no other option. If NATO's military organization surpasses us, it is absolutely futile for us to enter into such an armed confrontation with… pic.twitter.com/LYIRrj17Ig

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) July 13, 2024

"If we are able to use these weapons, and the enemy does not have them, their military effect can only be matched by his use of larger-yield dirty weapons - with the political and propaganda penalties their use implies. Of course the converse will also be true." - Samuel T. Cohen, Low-yield fusion weapons for limited wars, RAND report R-347, 1 June 1959, Secret - Restricted Data classified, p.2 (note this report is based on Livermore laboratory's very clean low yield Dove and Starling devices, developed after the successful testing of 95% clean 4.5 megaton Navajo and 85% clean 3.53 megaton Zuni at Bikini Atoll in 1956 which had lead pushers; Cohen's declassified paper is now in Eisenhower's Presidential Library with annotation on the front cover proving President Eisenhower was briefed on it in 1959!).

"There is another way in which we can have too narrow a focus. We can refuse to entertain or consider seriously ideas which seem to be 'crackpot' or unrealistic, but which are really just unfamiliar. In more casual days one could dismiss a bizarre-sounding notion with a snort or comment about it being impractical or implausible. Things moved slowly, and no real harm was done if a new idea took several years to prove itself. Indeed, allowing a notion to stay around for several years before giving it serious intellectual attention meant that most of the 'half-baked' ones got scuttled and never had to be considered seriously at all." - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p125.

"At times, the costs and risks of trying to shift the balance of power are too great, forcing great powers to wait for more favorable circumstances. But the desire for more power does not go away, unless a state achieves the ultimate of hegemony. Since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, however, the world is condemned to perpetual great-power competition. ... They will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability. Simply put, great powers are primed for offense. ... a great power will defend the balance of power when looming change favors another state ... states recognise that the more powerful they are relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival. Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon ... Great powers ... have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system. This dilemma is captured in brutally frank comments that Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that Poland, which was not an independent state at the time, might regain its sovereignty. 'Restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us,' he believed, and therefore he advocated that Prussia [today, North East Germany] should 'smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out'." - Professor John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001, chapter 1.

According to the 1984 Guinness Book of Records (published for sale at Christmas 1983), page 219: "Mass killings ....The greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign nation against the government of another is that of 26,300,000 Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse-tung between 1959 and May 1965. This accusation was made by an agency of the USSR Government in a radio broadcast on 7 Apr 1969. ... The Walker Report published by the US Senage Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death roll within China since 1949 between 32.25 and 61.7 million. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Jean-Pierre Dujardin in Figaro magazine of 19-25 Nov 1979. USSR The total death roll in the Great Purge or Yezhovshchina, in the USSR, in 1936-8 ... was administered by the Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del (NKVD), or People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Soviet security service ... On 17 Aug 1942, Stalin indicated to Churchill in Moscow that 10 million kulaks had been liquidated for resisting the collectivization of their farms. ... Genocide ... It has been estimated that 35,000,000 Chinese were wiped out in the Mongolian invasion of 1210-19." This information about Chinese and Russian socialism mass killing of resistance in the 20th century is also given on pages 193-4 the 1975 Guinness Book of Records, 22nd edition issued in October 1975, which also points out on pages 187-8 that over a million were killed during the 1st Battle of the Somme in 1916 France, 1.3-1.5 million were killed during the 880 days siege of Leningrad in WWII. (These horrific war casualties are dwarfed by the natural disasters table on page 212, giving 75 million dead of plague in 1347-51, 21.64 million dead of flu pandemic in 1918, 9.5 million dead from famine in China in 1877-8, 3.7 million dead in a flood in China in 1931, and 1.5 million dead from famine and typhus in Ireland in 1846-51.) So much for propaganda that nuclear deterrence "risks" are particularly horrific statistics in history! Tens of millions were killed by socialist dictators in modern times, without nuclear bombs. Similarly huge numbers were killed by natural disease pandemics and extreme weather. The key difference is that we can now deter invasions.

"Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of utterly destroying the other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. ... Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. ... But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this. ...

"Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. ... A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints. ... When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists’ civil rights. ... If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb. Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory.

"How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, and are then left hanging? The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. ... In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives? ... A Fashion in Thinking. Without any [objective] censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development. In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons—maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. ...

"The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. ... [George] Kennan’s advice to his own country—to begin unilateral disarmament—belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the officials in Moscow’s Old Square roar with laughter at your political wizards! ... But in fact, members of the US antiwar movement became accomplices in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there. Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? ... To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, in this case, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal. ... Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism. The Communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes."

- Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University, A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978.

ABOVE: as Herman Kahn predicted in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War, the paranoid anti-arms race groupthink mob insanity of "disarmament and arms control" public coercion after the first World War was not a fluke, but instead was a standard human reaction to the end of a war. It sowed the seeds of another war! Similarly, after Cold War 1.0 ended in 1991, opposition to disarmament and arms control virtually disappeared, so enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons (which deterred the kind of invasions and conventional warfare that led to both World Wars, including nuclear weapons use twice in the second one), were removed unilaterally by the West, allowing Russian aggression to trigger Cold War 2.0. This is basically a repetition of the way fake "pacifist" disarmament propaganda lying by Lord Noel-Baker (who in a BBC radio broadcast in February 1927 first claimed that there was no defense against gas WMD except disarmament) and Sir Norman Angell (who had been at it since 1908 with his "Great Illusion" anti-deterrence book, see his pre-WWI argument with Churchill reported by Professor Cyril Joad in the latter's 1939 book "Why War?"), engineered disaster via populist weapons effects lying, "knockout blow" deceptions, and lying denials of civil defense effectiveness to negate threats (all the lessons of these lies have NOT been learned, and people like Lord Noel-Baker, who lied about gas knockout blows on BBC radio in February 1927, were still doing exactly the same thing with nuclear weapons fallout lies in 1980 in response to "Protect and Survive"!).

You won't find any objective analysis of this in any "history book", all of which follow left wing Marxism propaganda or the anti-nuclear biased CND bigot AJP Taylor, in denying the facts using a data-dump of horseshit propaganda to bury the truth. In reality, as the cartoon published in the 17 May 1919 Daily Herald by Will Dyson shows, people did predict another war by 1940 as a result of the 1919 "peace deal" by Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Baron Sonnino. But most people prefer to believe lies, a fact shown clearly by an unbiased view of history, or even by an unbiased view of "superstring theory" in physics. But don't dare to stand up for truth, because you'll be subject to lying ad hominem attacks and denied a right to reply and debunk the liars. Power corrupts absolutely because the cowardly crowd backs "fashion", not fact.

This was explained back in 1532 by Machiavelli in The Prince: “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.”

It was also later explained by John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859: “A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind ...”

And don't forget Professor F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1960, p. 379: “The very magnitude of the power over men’s minds that a highly centralised and government-dominated system of education places in the hands of the authorities ought to make one hesitant before accepting it too readily.”

This attitude encourages the mainstream media or "liberals" to censor anything that debunks their agenda. To recap, anti-deterrence propaganda from bigoted liars is the orthodoxy, and infects nuclear weapons discussions, deterrence discussions, and the entire "arms control and disarmament" movement with crap. Mainstream media would shut down the internet to "protect" people from potential "error". It's all Stalinist censorship, made plain by Orwell's book 1984, but ignored as "taboo" by thug censors masquerading as "liberals".

Kahn made the following point about disarmament and arms control: reducing nuclear stockpiles and unilaterally eliminating Type II Deterrence (i.e. deterrence of the provocations that cause war, e.g., disarming in 1992 the West's W79 neutron bombs to deter the invasions that set off both World Wars) doesn't make you safer, because it increases the risk of war as proved by history. Reducing the risk of an "accidental" nuclear war is best done using ABM, civil defense, plus safeguards inside nuclear weapons, than by disarmanent which increases the risk of war by reducing credible deterrence of war. The idea that unilateral disarmament protects you is like saying that nuclear-unarmed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were safe from nuclear attack in August 1945 because they were so-called "Nuclear Free Zones"! Similarly, the fact the world was non-nuclear in 1939 didn't stop nuclear weapons being manufactured and used to end that war! All of the CND arguments are fake news, just as all the arguments by Angell in 1908 against deterrence were fake news. Fakes news sells - as proved by the sale of fairy tales and "fiction". Even if you don't like particular uses or yields of nuclear weapons, there is a choice of tailored nuclear warhead yields and designs, and types of employment to produce different effects, with widely variable cleanliness, neutron output, EMP output, and the separation of heat, blast and fallout effects in air and subsurface bursts, to deter invasions without the collateral damage that accompanies conventional warfare.

"It is entirely plausible that the Nobel Peace Prize [albeit on a more rational and honest planet] should have been awarded to the designers of the first SLBM (submarine launched ballistic missile) systems, for in being so well hidden under the seas, this kind of weapon has made war much less likely during these years and, further, let each side relax somewhat more in the knowledge that such war was unlikely." - George H. Quester, "Maritime Issues In Avoiding Nuclear War", Armed Forces and Society, v13, issue 2, Winter 1987, p. 199.

ABOVE: the Russians have recently released a PDF of their detailed technical nuclear effects analysis of the survival of their cheap civil defense dual-use style (basement car park etc in peacetime) nuclear war shelters: "Civil defense shelters. Designs and calculations" by VA Kotlyarevsky, VI Ganushkin, AA Kostin, et al.; edited by VA Kotlyarevsky. - M.: Stroyizdat, 1989 (607 pages long, 144 references, full of equations and graphs). (Russian: "Убежища гражданской обороны. Проекты и расчеты" / В.А. Котляревский, В.И. Ганушкин, А.А. Костин и др.; под редакцией В. А. Котляревского. - М.: Стройиздат, 1989. https://tehne.com/library/ubezhishcha-grazhdanskoy-oborony-konstrukcii-i-raschet-moskva-1989 ) This tells you that these are not "just for show", but are blast and radiation hardened double-blast door, very high overpressure surviving, very intense fallout surviving protection that fundamentally alters the strategic balance and undermines our nuclear deterrent. This should nukegate the "Scientific American" and other pro-Russian, Western deterrent undermining thugs.

ABOVE: Kahn pointed out in On Thermonuclear War 1960 that the way to prevent invasions and wars in the Middle East is nuclear proliferation of CREDIBLE deterrents (not just nuclear weapons, but also ABM and civil defense shelters to mitigate the civilian collateral damage) that really DETER/HALT INVASIONS (the key is to focus on the 1914 invasion of Belgium by mobilization and concentrated force, triggering WWI and the same for Poland in 1939, triggering WWII): if both sides have a credible, stable nuclear deterrent against INVASIONS (i.e., stable = safe from destruction in an enemy 1st strike, so that nuclear retaliation is guaranteed), you get mutual deterrence and thus peace, not war. And even if one side DOES try an attack, a neutron bomb air burst can discriminately halt the aggression, without any collateral damage (of the sort caused by conventional warfare such as the invasions by the Russians in Ukraine and by Hamas in Israel). Conventional weapons are not a substitute because their mobilization along frontiers causes "crisis instability" as occurred in 1914, leading to war. This is why compact, long-range nuclear weapons to prevent this kind of 1914 mobilization "crisis instability" trigger problem, are required. Nuclear escalation can be deterred, just as gas war escalation was deterred against terrorist states successfully in WWII, by a combination of credible civil defense plus retaliation threats capability. The "all out" use of nuclear weapons is simply a form of nuclear disarmament, that leaves the aggressor open to retaliation by the other side's protected 2nd strike (retaliation) force. We have to get this message out past the fake news and "taboo" superstitions of anti-deterrent warmongering paranoid disarmament quacks and charlatans masquerading as "peace advocates". If you want a "two-state solution" and one of those two states is intent on the racist extermination of the other, it shouldn't require Einstein to declare that pressurised "peace talks" are going to be "double-talk"; the slavery issue of 1861 in America wasn't resolved by a "two-state solution" with the southern Confederacy one state and the northern Union the other, nor was the protestant-catholic conflict in Northern Ireland resolved by a "two-state solution", but by a single-state solution with power sharing. You don't resolve a conflict by pressurised "peace talks" or "declarations" between leading opponents in bad faith, but only by genuine accommodation of differences at grass roots or street level. This is why conflicts and wars come before peace settlements. If you really want a "two-state solution" between bitter rivals, you need a credible deterrent to keep the peace. Machiavelli or Marx? Truth or lying? That's the choice.

Glasstone and Dolan stated in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), Table 12.17 on page 546, that the median distance in Hiroshima for survival after 20 days was 0.12 miles for people in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for people standing outdoors. Therefore the median distances for survival in modern city buildings and in the open differed by a factor of 11 for Hiroshima; the difference in areas was thus a factor of 112 or about 120. Hence, taking cover in modern city buildings reduces the casualty rates and the risks of being killed by a factor of 120 for Hiroshima conditions, contrary to popular media presented political propaganda that civil defence is hopeless. This would reduce 500,000 casualties for people unprotected in the open (assumed generally throughout Glasstone's book and about 100% of anti-nuclear propaganda) to 4,000 casualties, if people are on the lower floors of concrete buildings.

(NOTE: back in 1990, I completed the unpublished book Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, debunking Glasstone's "free fields" blast and radiation calculations for modern cities. Basically, the oscillation of, and at higher pressures the plastic zone damage of, modern reinforced concrete city buildings by blast waves is easy to calculate, and irreversibly absorbs free-field blast energy, quickly lowering the overpressure and dynamic pressure to values way lower than measured over unobstructed desert and ocean at nuclear weapons tests and reported by Glasstone. Penney measured this blast energy absorption effect at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the majority of buildings were single storey wood-frame, not concrete. Dr John von Neuman predicted this blast energy attenuation by causing destruction in Los Alamos blast wave secret reports LA-1020/LA-1021, from which it entered Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons, but Dr Bethe deleted this information from the unclassified summary version, LA-2000, and it was deleted from the later Glasstone Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, and replaced with a denial of this fact, despite the fact it is a consequence from the principle of conservation of energy, and the exclusion of the effect makes the blast treatment wrong. Similarly, throughout the 1950s the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch calculated thermal effects allowing for skyline shadowing, disproving firestorms and related nuclear winter using this mechanism, but secrecy was used to prevent the information getting wide coverage. Glasstone also mis-calculates all other nuclear effects, for example fallout and cratering are both based on debunked simplifications, exaggerating the effects by large factors. Glasstone entirely ignores all political and military effects of nuclear weapons, as well as the influence of clean secondary stages on the effects of nuclear weapons, e.g. the separation of effects for the air burst neutron bomb. Glasstone's book is really: "The fake effects of nuclear weapons on civilian targets, ignoring the blast and radiation skyline shielding"! Some declassified exaggerations in nuclear threats from Russian tactical nuclear weapons, debunking populist CND/Nukemap nuclear weapons effects propaganda, are presented in NUCLEAR WEAPONS COLLATERAL DAMAGE EXAGGERATIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR CIVIL DEFENSE. This is treated as "heresy" by the deluded quacks and charlatans of war-making "disarmament" taboos.).

"The critical point is whether the Soviets and the Europeans believe that we can keep our casualties to a level we would find acceptable ... In such an eventuality, the Soviets would be deterred from such provocative acts as a ground attack on Europe ... But if they do not believe that we can keep casualties to a level we would find acceptable, the Soviets may feel safe in undertakng these extremely provocative adventures ... this in itself creates an extremely dangerous negotiating situation - one in which the possibility of extreme pressure and blackmail will always be in the background, if not the foreground. ... 'Will the survivors envy the dead?' Unless the President believes that the postwar world will be worth living in, he will in all likelihood be deterred from living up to our alliance obligations." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton Uni. Press, 1960, page 35. This is Kahn's key argument, explaining the Ukraine war today; a fact always ignored by 100% of "nuclear critics". On page 34, Kahn gives a "notorious" table relating casualties to calculated recovery times for GDP; the GDP recovers in one year if 1% are killed, 100 years if 90% are killed. This difference is similar to the observed 120-fold difference in risk of being killed in Hiroshima if people are outdoors and totally unshielded, to the risk when shielded by the lower floors of modern city concrete buildings. So efficient civil defense warnings make nuclear deterrence over 100 times more credible, reducing casualties and the time taken for economic recovery from 100 years to under 1 year!

Kahn on page 48 of On Thermonuclear War easily debunks J. B. S. Haldane's genetic defects naive propaganda lie for nuclear war, because spreading out damage in time allows survival, whereas having all the damage kill 100% immediately doesn't permit survival. Kahn considers two nuclear attacks (Table 8): an initial 1,500 megatons on 150 targets, and a later wargasm of 20,000 megatons on 400 targets. He then goes into radiation effects lying propaganda by left-wing anti-nuclear disarmament fanatics, before giving the fallout gamma radiation effects much later on, in Tables 23 and 24. For the 1,500 megaton attack, only 1% of the area of the USA gets 6000-10,000R in the first 48 hours outdoors, requiring shelter protection factors of 40-65; for the 20,000 megaton attack, 50% of the area gets this radiation so you need 50 times more good shelter. As a result of these calculations, Kahn argues on p111: "we recommend that about $150 million be spent on identifying, counting, labelling and improving the best radiation protection in every neighbourhood so that people will know where to go...", adding that radiation meters are needed to enable people to go outdoors after 48 hours briefly to decontaminate or evacuate heavy fallout areas before getting a lethal radiation dose in structures offering poor protection. All this was, Kahn points out, published in a 1958 RAND Corp report ignored by President Eisenhower to save a few bucks (it was mostly implemented by Kennedy in 1961). In Tables 12, 13 and 14 Kahn shows how to deal with strontium-90 fallout contaminated food: on page 65 he points out that the linear no-threshold radiation effects theory is fake news for civil defense since the radium dial painters required 20,000 - 30,000 strontium units equivalent to get bone cancer, whereas the official safety limit is just 67 units! So simply by kicking out bad "science" (political "theory" standards) and keeping to actual radiation effects data, you resolve a problem by feeding food with over 25,000 strontium units to animals, and reserving less contaminated food for human consumption. Commenting generally on this kind of fashionable nuclear exaggeration mentality, Kahn explains on p160:

"... we are likely to suffer from the same movement towards 'responsible' budgets, pacifism, and unilateral and universal disarmament that swept through England in the 1920s and 1930s. The effect then was that England prematurely disarmed herself to such an extent that she first lost her voice in world affairs, and later her independence in a war that was caused as much by English weakness as by anything else."

Kahn adds to this on page 568:

"It is difficult and even impossible for most Americans to believe that they have an enemy. This is particularly true of intellectuals and 'men of good will'. ... that all sane men are reasonable and it ought to be easy to clear up misunderstandings by a few meetings and agreements (that is, they believe in what the psychiatrist calls a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' in the sense that 'good will generates good will' ..." Kahn testified to congress that Newman hadn't read his book!

Russian propagandists threaten with tactical nuclear strikes on Ukraine. They think that after that, Europe will immediately stop "demonizing and isolating Russia" and will immediately "line up at our door to say hello." pic.twitter.com/6kgmkMc5p3

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 4, 2024

Senator John F. Kennedy forecast in a speech to the Senate on 14 August 1958: "... the deterrent ratio might well shift to the Soviets so heavily, during the years of the gap, as to open to them a shortcut to world domination ... Their missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly, but surely, advance - through Sputnik diplomacy, limited 'brush fire' wars, indirect non-overt aggression, intimidation and subversion, increased prestige or influence, and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the free world will shift against us." (If the Russians have 2,000 to 10,000 tactical neutron bombs and we have none, our "strategic balance" of ICBMs etc will be incredible retaliation, so our tactical deterrent "gap" in defenses puts us into the situation that Kennedy forecast.)

Kennedy's 1961 decision to back Kahn's crash civil defense program was apparently due to his attending the June 1959 nuclear war hearings (at which Herman Kahn first found fame); yet even earlier Kennedy had observed first-hand the appeasement of the Nazis while working for his father, the US Ambassador, for 6 months in 1939, writing his 150-pages thesis on "Appeasement at Munich: The inevitable result of the slowness of the British democracy to change from a disarmament policy"! This thesis was edited into the 1940 UK bestselling book "Why England Slept" by the New York Times journalist Arthur Krock (with a foreword by Henry Luce), in which Kennedy pointed out that the refusal of pro-disarmament northern left-wing councils to instigate civil defence (then called air raid precautions) supported fascist appeasement! However, Kennedy's interest in arms race, disarmament, and war issues goes back even further, to the year 1932, when he was 15 and in hospital, according to the author Kay Halle: "Joseph Kennedy Sr asked me if I would stop with him while we were in the hospital to see his young son who was in there quite ill. ... We went into his bedroom, his room at the hospital, and you could hardly see him, he was so buried in the bed under masses of books. ... I was awfully interested because the book he was reading was World Crisis by Winston Churchill [the book recommended as the best study of war and deterrence and its failure, by Herman Kahn in On Thermonuclear War]."

(Kay Halle quote source: Robin Cross, "JFK: A Hidden Life", Bloomsbury, London, 1992. Robin Cross's JFK book also points out that Kennedy "had always been a supporter of a vigorous defense policy. In 1948-9 he had attacked the Truman administration over the economies it had made in the defense establishment, advocating an air force of 70 groups, rather than the 55 groups proposed ... in the 1950s, he had urged the re-arming of Europe, if necessary with US help ... In the Senate in the summer of 1954 he had opposed the Eisenhower administration's reduction in the size of the army ... In May 1955 ... he claimed that the administration had 'guessed short' on the military strength of the Soviet Union ... It was by this consistent route that in 1958 Jack Kennedy arrived at the momentous discovery of the 'missile gap', which was to provide one of the principal themes of his 1960 presidential campaign." Kennedy was on the same page as Kahn. In 1957, America had no proof-tested ICBM, just the 3,000 mile range Jupiter IRBM, while the Russians had successfully tested ICBMs the rockets of which successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik, on 4 October 1957. Although by putting Jupiter IRBMs into Turkey America could cancel out the small ICBM "missile gap", there was concern that just a few Russian ICBM nuclear blasts over American cities could wipe out Western Cold War resolve, as had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When elected, Kennedy reversed Eisenhower's civil defense policy, as well as increasing the Minuteman ICBM order by 75%, the Western Europe tactical nuclear weapon stockpile by 60%, and the total number of American nuclear weapons by 100%, in an early effort at bankrupting the Russians with an arms race; a policy abandoned for a time after the Vietnam disaster, but re-instigated in the 1980s by Reagan with the desired effects.)

Nicola Smith and Susie Coen in the Telegraph, 21 August 2024: "US prepares for threat of joint Chinese, Russian and North Korean nuclear strike. Joe Biden secretly approved change to America’s nuclear defence plan in March... The United States is making plans to counter the… pic.twitter.com/jXWnTBijZC

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 22, 2024

"Most people, not unreasonably, think of conventional weapons as being less escalatory and thus more usable than nuclear ones. But today’s low-yield nukes—20 kilotonnes of explosive power, roughly Hiroshima-size—can be delivered with extreme precision and less collateral damage. “The line between low-yield tactical nuclear weapons and precision-guided conventional weapons in terms of both their operational effects and perceived impact is blurring,” says CNAS." - If a China and America war went nuclear, who would win? After 45 days of conventional fighting nukes would be tempting, wargamers suggest, The Economist, Aug 22nd 2024, https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/08/22/if-a-china-and-america-war-went-nuclear-who-would-win

"People May Not Care Simply Because They Do Not care. ... The following (paraphrased) quotations are typical of the bureaucrat or decision maker who simply cannot imagine that his safe, snug world can really be dangerous. (The quotations are not exclusive. The determined do-nothing advocate will go through each in turn.)

1. The problem is hypothetical. You cannot prove that it exists. There is no need to get hysterical.

2. The problem is there, but there are many other problems. In your parochialism [limited views] and naivety, you have gotten hysterical. We have known about this problem for some time and we are not excited. Why are you?

3. The problem is there. It is insoluble. (Or, it is too late to do anything.) For God's sake don't rock the (political or public relations) boat. [This is based on Kahn's dealings with people like his boss at RAND Corporation, just prior to his leaving to found the Hudson Institute.]

The key words in the above are hypothetical, parochial, naive, and hysterical. That is, any specialist who raises a problem in his specialty is accused of being hypothetical and parochial, of not taking a practical over-all view. ... I can remember an occasion when I was discussing with one of these critics what seemed to me like a problem approaching potentially crisis proportions. He insisted that I was comparing hypothetical Soviet programs with hard American programs. I pointed out with some asperity that the Soviets up to that time had refused to allow our staff access to their records; naturally we would have some trouble proving that these programs existed and would actually meet the hypothetical dates. On the other hand, our staff did have access to U.S. data, so it was easy to show that our counter programs were not as firm as advertised. ... A typical hypothetical possibility is illustrated by the ominous possibilities for Hitler-type blackmail tactics created by the waning of our Type II and Type III Deterrence capability" - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, pp347-8.

"There is a great deal of worry today that the Russians may make impressive gains utilizing only 'ambiguous challenges', without presenting us with any direct challenges. ... Their success to date in using 'ambiguous challenges' should be nothing to what they could do if they could afford and desired to be unambiguous. ... I think we can expect much firmer, confident and imaginative behavor, if not audacious and reckless conduct, from Khrushchev and his successors that we had from Stalin [a prediction that was confirmed by the 1961 Berlin Wall, 50 megaton test and the 1962 Cuban missiles crisis, etc.]" - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, p348

"As the picture of horror of a modern thermonuclear war grows, we tend to ... we emphasise the impact of our capabilities on the enemy's mind rather than on his body [italic emphasis is Kahn's own]. ... Type I Deterrence is the deterrence of a direct attack [Dulles' massive retaliation]. ... Type II Deterrence is defined as using strategic threats to deter an enemy from engaging in very provocative acts [e.g. invasion of Poland 1939, invasion of Belgium 1914, invasion of Ukraine 2022] ... Type III Deterrence might be called 'tit-for-tat' [e.g. Kennedy's decision to resume USA nuclear tests in 1962 in response to Russia's 50 megaton test in late 1961, etc.]." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, p126. Regarding "knockout blow" propaganda scams in the media/politics, Kahn on p350 argues that the same delusional lie occurred before each major war, including WWI and WWII, both to sell the war to the public and to justify not planning for a long-duration war of attrition which seemed "defeatist". For example, mass media "pacifist" morons believed and hyped that, prior to WWI: "interdependence of nations was so great that the sheer interruption of normal commerce would cause a collapse after a few weeks or months in much the same way that people argue today that if the A country (big cities) is destroyed, the B country (small cities, rural areas) must also necessarily collapse [after a countervalue nuclear strike on cities]. Therefore, almost everybody expected the war of 1914 to be short ... the famous Schlieffen Plan ... called for them to destroy the French in about 6 weeks, then move their army to the Russian front and destroy the Russians in the next few weeks... [Hitler in 1939 simply aimed to repeat this, dismissing Schlieffen Plan's failure in WWI as sabotage from internal enemies of the state]." (Quote from Kahn, OTW, p350.)

"To understand this attitude ... in 1961 Herman Kahn’s 1960 radically innovative book on the nuclear deterrence of war in general (not merely “massive retaliation” to deter all-out “doomsday” attacks, as was the previous policy by Dulles) was “reviewed” by controversial lawyer James Roy Newman in Scientific American. Newman, a complete bastard to Britain - he drafted the notorious and paranoid McMahon 1946 US Atomic Energy Act, which illegally and unilaterally ended Britain’s wartime agreement to continue postwar collaboration on nuclear energy - hadn’t read Kahn’s book (any more than he had read the vital Churchill-Roosevelt Hyde Park agreement for post-war continuation of nuclear collaboration of September 19, 1944 or consulted the UK government on the topic, when drafting the quack Atomic Energy Act passed by Congress in 1946!), and just scanned the first part of Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War briefly and taken some quotes and tables out of context to criticise (despite the title, its purpose is the credible deterrence of major provocations, not just the fighting of WWIII if deterrence fails). Moreover, he denied the existence of the author, because the publisher hadn’t provided much biography! We don’t need that kind of abuse from such bigots, do we?" - https://nigecook.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Anti-civil defense fanatic Lawrence Freedman (the guy who got the Sunday Express by drop my feature on the exaggerated collateral damage from nuclear weapons in 1995) has a new article in the New York Times (3 October 2024): "Putin Keeps Threatening to Use Nuclear Weapons. Would…

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) October 4, 2024

The explanation of the neutron bomb's invasion deterrent history in the 1958 low yield relatively clean "peaceful" Livermore nuclear explosives Dove and Starling is given by Samuel Cohen in his 6 December 1984 interview, conducted by Robert Del Tredici in Beverley Hills, California (published on pages 157-9 of his 1987 book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb,):

"I was in the Efficiency Group at Los Alamos. Our job was to figure out the yield of the bomb that was burst over Nagasaki. ... On the evening of Hiroshima, when Oppenheimer was describing in very crude terms the catastrophe that had taken place over that city, the scientists who were listening to him were a bunch of howling savages, embullient beyond imagination, as pleased as punch ... Oppenheimer is rightfully called the father of the atomic bomb, but equally rightfully he could be called the father of the tactical nuclear weapon because he did the first conceptual spadework for using nuclear weapons strictly in a battlefield way instead of just decimating cities in a holocaust [thus led to his legendary dispute with Teller who just wanted massive retaliation H-bombs as a deterrent and bargaining chip for peace with Russia] ... He professed to be sufficiently guilt-ridden and aghast and appalled over the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that he never wanted that to happen again. So he recommended we design lower-yield weapons that wouldn't wipe out cities ... The basic concept is to be able to have a battlefield nuclear weapon that won't have all these nasty side effects ... If it's going to be used to get what we call the 'separation of effects', in other words, to get rid of the blast and heat [collateral damage to civilians], it not only has to be air burst, but it has to be burst high ... between 2,000 and 3,000 feet. ... it's a kind of micro-mini hydrogen bomb. ...

"I'd had the idea for the neutron bomb about 8 years before I figured out how to put it together. I put together the actual concept in the summer of 1958. It came about purely by accident when I visited the Livermore Laboratory in the spring of 1958. I asked if anyone had any new ideas going around, and they said they really didn't, though they had begun work on some peaceful nuclear explosives. And the head of the division said, 'Before you go home, you ought to take a look at these', and he showed me designs for some of the peaceful devices. And there they were: the neutron bomb characteristics. One of those designs was called Dove. Dove, by the way, for 'Dove of Peace'. ... Well, there were two, Dove and Starling; both derived the major share of their energy from fusing deuterium and tritium. ... The question I asked was, 'How many neutrons come out of this thing?' They made a few back-of-the-envelope calculations and the answer was: a hell of a lot. Then I took these calculations home and made my own calculations about the military effects of such a weapon, and, voila, the neutron bomb! Then I put together the military concept of how to use this bomb and went off on a big sales campaign. ...

"Ever since Day 1 we've patterned our nuclear war-fighting strategies after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ... So what we're basically proposing here [using conventional Teller or Dulles "massive retaliation" MAD mutual-assured-destruction H bombs-on-cities crap] to deter war is the threat of our own suicide. ... it's all based on the premise that if we cross that nuclear threshold one more time, we'll bring on the beginning of the end. So you get people like Jonathan Schell [author of "Fate of the Earth" which lies that the 15 megaton Bravo test blinded everyone at Rongelap and that radiation can't be stopped easily by simple earth covered shelters proved at nuclear tests] and Carl Sagan with the idea of nuclear winter and everything else. It's Armageddon. I don't find their ideas credible, and I'll tell you why: because in order to get these results from using nuclear weapons against cities, you have to have nations willing to use them that way. ... You know what the United States has to do if it wants to survive? It has to accept the fact that there will probably be a nuclear war, and it has to prepare to fight it and win it. ... It's been U.S. national policy for more than a quarter of a century that nuclear weapons are actually unusable weapons. That's horseshit, and you can quote me on that. ... Let the allies develop their own neutron bomb. As a matter of fact, let's sell it to them! They should have discriminate weapons for their own self-defense. The United States doesn't need to take on the burden of defending all the rest of the world. That [the UK policy of 1914 regarding Belgium's invasion and 1939 regarding Poland's invasion, not to mention 2022 regarding Ukraine's invasion] is in fact the best way of getting into a nuclear war ..."

The technical history of Livermore's development of enhanced-neutron tactical nuclear weapons goes back to a study of lightweight, thin H-bomb casings by Dr Herbert York, discussed in detail below with regard to recently declassified data on the designs of two American H-bombs of roughly similar physical size but different mass, composition and yield: the W47 and the B28. York showed that the pressure and duration of the x-ray energy coupling causing the fusion stage's compression force are both functions of the case thickness. So if you reduce the outer casing thickness to make the bomb lighter, you have less compression force and it lasts a shorter period of time. To ensure a successful fusion burn in this situation, you have to reduce the amount of dense material like uranium in the fusion stage and replace it with easier to compress fusion fuel. This occurred in progressive Livermore designs with smaller sizes and lighter casings during the 1950s, starting with a device called Linda, then Flute, then Piccolo. These had thin oralloy (highly enriched U235) pushers (3.8mm thick for Piccolo), but clean versions with lead pushers in place of U235 were designed, and the combination of the high percentage of fusion yield with the thin pusher and outer casing gave the enhanced neutron Dove design.

(The paragraph above about the link between speed of fusion burn and tamper thickness in low yield neutron bomb design is not speculative, and is confirmed not just by the recent book by Tom Ramos, but earlier by nuclear weapons effects expert Charles S. Grace of the Royal Military College of Science in his 1994 Nuclear Weapons Principles, Effects and Survivability on 23: "It is possible to produce comparatively low-yield weapons with only a small fission trigger to initiate a fusion stage. If it is designed so that the nuclear reactions proceed as fast as possible, the tamper need not be very thick, and a large proportion of the energetic fusion neutrons will escape." Grace around that time very kindly responded to a letter from me and provided photos of British military equipment exposed at the UK nuclear tests for my book, Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, as well as telephoning me, which was helpful. He was a very powerful advocate of the neutron bomb to deter invasions, writing a letter to the New Scientist to debunk anti-nuclear bomb propaganda. He did a lot of research using Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston facilities on simple protection against nuclear attack, and his book also points out that Glasstone and Dolan are completely misleading regarding thermal effects, stating on page 41: "Adequate protection for the skin greatly reduces the risk of thermal casualties. ... wearing a well-designed NBC suit over combat clothing, and a respirator and gloves ... the thermal energy from [1 kiloton yield] tactical weapons needed to cause extensive second-degree burns is about 1.3 MJ/m^2 [i.e., 31 cal/cm^2 since 4.186 J = 1 Calorie, and 1 m^2 = 10^4 cm^2; for bare skin only 160 kJ/m^2 or 3.8 cal/cm^2 is needed; thus there is a huge difference between Glasstone and Dolan and the actual risk, and Grace points out that if clothing ignites, people can simply roll out the flames on the ground, without getting burned!]." Grace's book also gives the military effects of nuclear weapons - ignored entirely by Glasstone and Dolan - including photos of vehicles exposed at 370 m range to 10 kiloton Totem-1 nuclear test on a 100 ft high tower in Australia in 1953. A side-on tank was not overturned by 230 kPa peak overpressure, but was displaced 2.5 m with a peak acceleration of 30g. The mudguards and trailer were damaged, but: "After the burst the tank was able to be driven off, and its gun was fired after sand and debris had been removed from the barrel. The lighter scout car was beyond repair. Had crews been in the vehicles they would have received a radiation dose of around 100,000 cGy [R] ... they would have been incapacitated virtually instantaneously.")

BBC won't report Reuters any more than USA news will, sad yet what happens in corrupt despotic regimes claiming that lying is "free speech on nuclear weapons": Russian nuclear test chief says Moscow is ready to resume testing 'at any moment' https://t.co/SYlfwJXHan

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 18, 2024

This Russian State TV Channel 1 broadcast on a proposed nuclear test on a fake "plywood" based city to make the fake plywood burn for YouTube viewers, is a load of complete CND anti-nuclear propaganda crap. George R Stanbury of UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch civil… https://t.co/ustSLjl1SN

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 16, 2024

"Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is deficient. ... a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy [spying problem plus whole notion of democracy requiring voters to be informed] or await their consequences with patience. These are qualities which more especially belong to an individual or an aristocracy; and they are precisely the qualities by which a nation, like an individual, attains a dominant position. ... The mass of the people may be led astray by ignorance or passion ..." - Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America 1835 (Vintage NT 1954 ed, v1, pp243-5, as quoted by H. Kahn, OTW, p579; note that Kahn's full quotation backs the notion of elitism aristocracy as the solution, aka the clan dynasties in USA politics such as the Kennedy and Bush political families. On page 407 of OTW, Kahn also appears to back elitism in discussing how von Mannstein was able to bypass jobsworths in the General Staff and get a direct meeting with Hitler to modify the Schlieffen Plan's to outflank the new French Magoniot Line defenses by invading through the Ardennes Forest with the latest Panzer tanks; Hitler had many defects but at least he was prepared to listen seriously to "crackpot" sounding ideas from the lower ranks and implement them, unlike so many openly fascist "top dogs" today).

"There seems to be little point in discussing the view that finds a solution in a totally disarmed world. ... The violator would then have an incredible advantage if the agreement ever broke down ..." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton Uni. Press, 1960, page 5. Kahn adds added that the world of 1914 and 1939 was non-nuclear, there was an international ban on chemical weapons (the Hague Convention of 1899) prior to WWI in which chemical weapons were used without restraint, and that there was agreement amongst experts that WWII would start with a gas knockout blow against cities, when in fact no gas was ever dropped on cities during WWII (pesticide Zyklon B, crystals which emits non-persistent hydrogen cyanide gas on exposure to the air, was used in gas chambers but the Nazis never dropped any of their 12,000 tons of tabun nerve agent on cities thanks to retaliation risks and the universal issue of gas masks). So disarmament propaganda was just that, lying blathering by politicians to earn "peace prizes".

"It would be disastrous to have a conspicious gap in the spectrum of deterrents and capabilities [strategic and tactical to cover all kinds of dangerous provocations]. For example, when President Eisenhower remarked at a press conference that it was unthinkable that he would call out federal troops to enforce federal law ... some Southerners immediately did something to make it thinkable [Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to Little Rock's Central High School to reinforce Arkansas' National Guard in allowing 9 black students to enroll at the school in 1957]." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p286. The point is, saying something is "unthinkable so we don't need to prepare for it" is not cost-effective when it encourages and invites the enemy to invade and provoke you. Lying blathering peacenik enemy collaboration always backfires by inviting aggression. (Even Trump had this problem, when some of his supporters misinterpreted his peaceful speech - questioning why the postal ballots showed higher support for Biden than the polling station in-person votes - and invaded the Capitol on 6 January 2021.) If you want to deter evil, you have to avoid ambiguity and to be open and also clear that nothing is "unthinkable" and state in advance precisely what you will do in any eventuality, so as to make deterrence unequivocally effective. You want the enemy to be clear what they will have coming to them if they provoke you: "with the record of the 1930s plainly before us, we should all be able to realise that it is possible for all these kinds of deterrence to be strained." - Kahn, OTW, p286.

No wonder the Leninist lawyer James Roy Newman of the "elitist communist" Scientific American hated Kahn in his "review"! I first read Kahn's On Thermonuclear War in 1990, and have just finished re-reading it in September 2024 due to the Ukraine war. My view of the book is now very different to the notes I made in 1990 when reading Kahn during the writing of my own unpublished August 1990 dated manuscript Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory. The basic problem is that Kahn has two theses in one volume. The first 310 pages of On Thermonuclear War debunks populist nuclear weapons and war myths, such as fallout gamma rays and strontium-90 in food killing everyone; the second part, pages 311-651 is an analysis of the history of war and extrapolations of that history to various kinds of deterrence and nuclear war. As his preface says (page x): "This book is dedicated to the goal of anticipating, avoiding, and alleviating crises." (Italic emphasis is Kahn's own.) The problem with Kahn's On Thermonuclear War is precisely the same as that with Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons: jumbled up presentation (if you are discussing one type of nuclear explosion, you need to discuss the effects that type produces, not separate effects into different chapters, so readers are misled and think heavy fallout occurs from air bursts, etc.,) and you need to show how deterrence of certain kinds of nuclear attack even within a nuclear war is necessary to retain "bargaining chips", "cities as hostages", etc. Otherwise 100% of readers do what journalists do with "Nukemap" and simply assume the entire enemy stickpile is used in a single knockout blow on cities, in which 100% of people unprotected, by even "duck and cover"! This increased casualties by a factor of 120 in Hiroshima, and is where you get the 120 fold exaggerations of nuclear war casualty predictions from. By the omission of key (secret classified) data on neutron bombs to deter invasions in the first place, or survival of people and vehicles in simple, cheap trench shelters at nuclear tests, for example, you depart 180 degrees from reality.

"But how many murders are they [lying journalists, politicians, fellow-travelling Western nuke designers who won't disclose the truth to the media] responsible for? Basically, nuclear deterrence using tactical nuclear weapons to deter the invasions that set off both World Wars, i.e. the invasion of Belgium in 1914 by concentrated force and of Poland in 1939 by concentrated force (from the East by Russia and from the West by Germany), could have prevented many millions of deaths since 1945, but evil folk prevented this, wanting war to continue. ... Hiroshima was entirely vaporized by a nuclear explosion on 6 August 1945, says CND. In that case, this US Air Force film of the slight scorching on otherwise undamaged materials, proving the effectiveness of “duck and cover” for shielding, is fake news. But it’s not. What’s fake news is everything every published on nuclear weapons effects by Bulletin of Atomic scientists, Scientific American, all newspapers, and all TV shows on the subject ... In fact, Hiroshima casualty data published [in the massively-effects-exaggerating] Glasstone book “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” (1962-77 editions) proves that being indoors in the lower floors of a concrete building reduces the LD50 radius from 1.3 miles in the open to 0.12 miles for lower floors of concrete buildings. Since area is proportional to radius squared, this means a protection factor of 120 for Hiroshima burst conditions (16 kt, 600m altitude). This shielding factor would for a densely populated modern city reduce 500,000 (half a million) killed for people outdoors totally unshielded to “just” 4,000 killed indoors on the lower floors of modern city concrete buildings! Er, this result of 4,000 killed just happens to be precisely the number mentioned by the Independent newspaper article (quote above!) of pensioners murdered by cold and starvation due to financial destitution due to Sir Keir Starmer’s “tough decision” to end winter fuel allowances, in order to pay massive salary rises to public sector employees." - https://nigecook.substack.com/p/another-assassination-attempt-on

Kahn makes a further essential point about "secrecy" (there ain't any secrecy when the other side has spies like Fuchs) covering up alleged gross delusional failings in Western nuclear weapons design, effects and capabilities on page 384 of On Thermonuclear War, where he quotes extensively from chapter 6 "Torpedoes" of Rowland and Boyd's US Navy Bureau of Ordnance in World War II (published by the US Navy), proving how the secrecy of US torpedo design, development, testing and stockpiling led to tragic groupthink delusions of supremacy and of having the best torpedoes in the world, that were only debunked in actual combat during the 1941-3 period of WWII: "As each defect was exposed, the morale of the submariners who risked their lives to take the war to the enemy suffered, the enemy was given further respite ... the problem was compounded by the Bureau's reluctance to accept the fleet evaluation of its weapon. This reluctance was born ... from misplaced confidence in its own past work. ... Security, a necessary concern of the armed forces, became such a fetish that measures designed to protect a device from enemy eyes actually hid its defects from those who made the regulations. Ironically, some of those defects were already known to the foreign powers who later became our allies or enemies. ... even when the torpedo exploded properly, it lacked the punch submariners desired. ... each defect concealed another ... The Bureau was reluctant to believe that the secret weapon long regarded as one of our greatest assets should turn out to be a liability." (Kahn gives many other similar examples of bureaucratic secretive nonsense backfiring even in WWI, in Chapter 8 of OTW. American Colonel Billy Mitchell of the American Air Force was the first to suggest paratroopers to get over enemy lines, and predicted a Japanese attack on Pearl harbor (he was demoted and then court martialled on the direct orders of President Calvin Coolidge). Tanks and gas are both treated in detail by Kahn: both were kept so secret that the military didn't have a clue about them when first used on the battlefield so their initial "factor of surprise" was lost and the enemy was given the chance to negate them after bungled first-use:

"The first use of tanks in September 1916 completely ignored the tactical and strategic ideas of the innovators and was carried out as a sort of field trial. ... The German poison gas story has some interesting analogies with the British tank story. This too had an uphill fight with the authorities. Again, even after the weapon had been developed the command did not wish to take the risk of using the untried weapon on a large scale, though the inventors urged it, until the military had developed some experience on the capabilities and limitations of gas warfare. It was first tried on April 22, 1915 and proved a tremendous tactical success. In fact, a five-mile gap was opened in the Allied lines, but the Germans were not prepared to exploit the opportinity. They were not really making an attack, they were just trying an experiment. The British reaction ... was very fast. ... Sir William Ramsay had guessed from the description of the battle reports that chlorine had been used and came to the War Office with a protective measure, some sample mouth-pads made of flannel or wool soaked in hyposulphite of soda. British women were asked to furnish 1,000,000 at once. Thanks to their help and Red Cross efforts, the necessary quantity came in several days. Within a fortnight, every man in the British army at the front was supplied with a rudimentary respirator. ... History is full of examples of impractical notions, or, equally important, notions that proved to be just fine but which were tested prematurely. ... The most spectacular military event of World War I, the development of two parallel lines of trenches ... while predicted by Bloch, came as a complete surprise. ... given the examples of such warfare in the American Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War - it is hard to see how military experts could have overlooked the possibility that the widespread availability of machine guns and barbed wire might result in static trench warfare, but the military planners on both sides completely overlooked the possibility [as they did for submarines blocking logistics supplies, depth charges, and particularly SAS type infiltration tactics to overcome trench warfare: French Captain Laffargue wrote a proposal for this which the Allies laughed at, but when a copy of the proposal fell into German hands, Ludendorff at once (quote from Captain G. C. Wynne on p357 of Kahn's OTW): "translated into German and issued as an official German training manual, eventually becoming the basis of General Ludendorff's textbook ... [leading to German implementation of the enemy's plan so] the Germans so effectively broke through the British position in March 1918, and the Chemin des Dames position in May ...". SO, UNLESS WE ARE TO REPEAT SUCH MISTAKES, WE MUST NOT ALLOW PETTY HUBRIS OF "JOBSWORTH BUREAUCRATS" TO BLOCK INNOVATIONS NEEDED TO WIN WARS!

ABOVE: Kahn was treated with the "shoot the messenger" reaction against Machiavelli, merely for speaking truth to power in 1960: "If the above deterrents are to work reliably, there must always be in the background the knowledge that if they did not, other kinds of deterrents or corrections would come in. It could be disastrous to have a conspicuous gap in the spectrum of deterrents and capabilities. For example, when President Eisenhower remarked at a press conference that it was unthinkable that he would call out federal troops to enforce federal law in the Southern states, some Southerners immediately did something to make it thinkable. Something similar may happen if he convinces the Soviets that he means what he says when he says that "war is preposterous." I suspect that many in the West are guilty of the worst kind of wishful thinking when, in discussing deterrence, they identify the unpleasant with the impossible. It is particularly hard to understand why this is so when almost all who write on this subject were adults during the later part of the Hitler era and presumably were educated in some of the ways in which all these types of deterrence can be strained." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, page 286. Will the left ever learn facts from history?

ABOVE: Nazi supporting "peace" propaganda flooded the UK and USA in the 1930s, as it still does. Comintern's legacy is a repetition of the 1920s and 1930s anti-deterrent mindset, falsely portrayed by Russian "Fifth Column" propaganda fronts as "pacifism" or "peace" arguments. When communists were rejected as unpopular at the election polls, they adopted subversive methods, trying to undermine war readiness (deterrence) to help Russia get in a position to start WWIII, just as they had helped the Nazis in the 1930s do exactly the same thing (while being awarded "Nobel Peace Prizes" for their propaganda; look at the history of 1920s and 1930s gas war anninilation "Nobel peace Prize" liars Lord Noel-Baker, Sir Norman Angell et al.). The result wasn't an end to the arms race or militarism, but an escalation on the enemy side, and an erosion of technical competence and military preparedness on the side of the democracies. Banning the TV transmission of classic "Tom and Jerry" cartoons for "portraying violence as normal to kids" and banning "Action Man" style toy guns for "encouraging deterrence of dictators to kids" in the West, didn't stop Russia's Hitler Youth movement from preparing for war. All this just helped the enemy prepare for WWIII. The paranoid conspiracies aren't the supposed "war mongers" on the side of the democracies, but by the real war mongers on the side of the dictatorships and their fellow travelling "Sputniks", in infiltrating the Western political systems, mass media, and educational establishments with delusional fanatical anti-Western-nuclear bias. Numerous articles sent to "New Scientist" in the 1990s proving the errors in popular propaganda it published by anti-nuclear fanatics like "Rob Edwards" (co-author of the 1982 book "Fuelling the nuclear arms race: the links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons") were simply rejected because they contradicted populist lies "New Scientist" published weekly from such people! This made it appear that there was no opposition to such Russian Fifth Column propaganda lies! Result: no civil defence option and no tactical nuclear deterrent option against "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction" in 2002, and instead WAR. Which is precisely what these lying thugs want. Once the press, the teachers, and the corrupt pseudo-liberal MPs or Lords use enforced "speech filtering" to completely corrupt free debate (it's not that much different to a dictatorship, except that "no platforming censorship" is used in the West, while bullets and poison is used in the dictatorships), you have crackpots and quacks in charge of "democracy", which is a travesty of the term!

If you ban civil defense and nuclear deterrence of dictatorships, then you are left only with the option of WAR against every invasion or WMD threat which your delusional censorship encourages and promotes!

That's not pacifism. On the contrary, it's needless fascist based genocidal war that could be stopped!

As regards "child soldiers": we're constantly reminded of the plight of kids in wars, so why should they be denied the right to defend democracy in countries with ageing populations, when a failure of deterrence and dictatorial occupation will ruin the lives of kids?

All these fanatically anti-civil defense, anti-deterrent so-called "pacifists" - when pressed for their solution to terrorism - claim we can use "non-violent opposition" to enemy attacks; but we saw what happens to kids in this situation in the Holocaust and wars! If we're not going to have a nuclear deterrent, and we're not going to allow kids to learn how to protect themselves, the results are evil and immoral. These facts are conveniently declared to be "taboo"!

"... in letters to me dated April 10, 1979, and June 18, 1979, representatives of the DOE stated that my open research, and a national contest that I conducted, would lead to the generation and transmission of classified data - this in spite of the fact that all of the information that I was seeking would come from unclassified published sources. It has also become obvious that at least one of the three concepts discussed in the disputed Morland article is currently unclassified in the Soviet Union, and that when it was discussed openly here in 1976 by a Soviet scientist, the U.S. government, acting through the Energy Research and Development Agency, classified his speeches (Morland might have stood a better chance of publishing his article in the USSR).

"The concepts discussed in the Morland article deal with basic applied physics, and they are certainly no longer 'secret' - if they were, four other nations would not now have operating thermonuclear weapons. Even though the DOE now admits that this type of information is in the public domain, it is still trying to suppress the circulation of this data, in order to maintain a false illusion of secrecy, and to maintain a real monopoly over the dissemination of weapons-related information, and over the public discussion of American nuclear policies, policies which affect nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons. ... What happened next will be discussed in the description of the accompanying diagram, when the concept of isentropic compression is explained. ... As can be seen from the enclosed diagram, the basic bomb consists of two boosted fission triggers at opposite ends of a mass of lithium-6 deuteride fusion fuel, all contained in an outer casing of uranium-238. ... This arrangement requires that the outer weapon casing play an essential role (as medium to absorb x-rays and re-emit them into the fuel mass) ... there are two triggers in the bomb. The purpose of this is to allow a symmetrical compression of the fusion fuel between them, as well as allowing an x-ray source at each end of the bomb. These two fission triggers must fire simultaneously, or no fusion will occur. ... This sudden elevation in temperature of the fusion fuel, following the isentropic compression, begins the larger main fusion reaction in the weapon. ... " [Emphasis added.]

- Chuck Hansen, August 27, 1979 letter to Senator Charles Percy, published in full in the Sunday, September 16, 1979 special edition of the Madison Press Connection.

It must be emphasised (see the latest blog post here for the physical and mathematical details) that adiabatic "non-shock isentropic compression" of low density fusion fuel was first suggested during the April 1946 Los Alamos Super Conference, but was ignored by Teller and the American mainstream until investigated and tested by Nuckolls during totally clean secondary tests (including a 99.9% clean Ripple II 10 megaton test on 30 October 1962). Isentropic compression is compression without heat transfer between the fusion fuel and its surroundings, involving a gradually increasing compression - more like the pressure variations in a sound wave than the pressure discontinuity at a shock front. Shock waves involve "isothermal compression" at the shock front, which radiates wasted energy as heat in all directions, reducing the kinetic energy used to compress the fusion fuel. The key thing to focus on is the fact that you want to compress fusion fuel to cause fusion, and the fusion then releases heat which opposes compression, dispersing the remaining fusion fuel, and ending fusion. What you are trying to do is to compress fusion fuel so it releases nuclear energy (including heat) as a result of nuclear fusion, not waste energy radiating heat into the surroundings before you compress the fuel (such heat waste opposes compression of the fusion fuel). To the extent that you heat the fuel and cause it to radiate energy during compression, you defeat your purpose and get an inefficient compression (akin to pre-initiation in primary stage fission weapons if they are pre-heated by neutron induced fissions).

Teller ignored all this, and indeed until March 1951 he claimed to have a "no go theorem" against compression, and then he used ablative recoil exploding pushers to give relatively ineffective shock compression of fusion stages in his "Sausage" design, the standard 1950s thermonuclear system. Nuckolls and the Russians, however, used gentler isentropic compression (by using a low-density pusher like beryllium on a clean LiD fusion fuel capsule; with any dense U238 placed in the outer casing of the bomb, rather than used as the pusher in contact with the fusion fuel), which enabled more of the primary stage x-ray energy to be used to compress the fusion stage to high density, with less energy being wasted on heat transfer during compression. If you do any sort of work, e.g. hammering nails into wood, charging a battery, or running an engine, some energy will be used in achieving the objective, and some will be wasted as heat. If you want maximum work efficiency, you need to minimise waste heat (i.e. you want to reduce the rise in entropy S, so that the change in entropy dS ~ 0, which is the definition of the ideal of "isentropic compression"), which means losing the shock wave-producing dense ablative shell on the fusion fuel in the "Sausage" designs tested in the 1950s by the USA, which resists isentropic compression. With a dense pusher, you get shock compression which radiates heat before the shock even reaches the core and compresses it, so you only get core compression factor of 20-30, whereas if you use a low-density ablator like beryllium, aluminium or plastic on the fusion fuel, you can achieve nearly isentropic compression factors of 1,000 or more! I.e.. the core density is increased by a factor of 1,000, so that the fusion rate is much faster and more efficient (more fusion is accomplished before the bomb blows itself apart). The latter compression is even sufficient to ignite deuterium fusion, according to Russian claims about their 1960s-1970s cleaner isentropic bomb tests for "peaceful uses" (and tactical nuclear weapons), giving a far cheaper and longer-life warhead than the deuterium-tritium fuel used in the low yield American "Dove" and "Starling" designs of neutron bombs! ("Isotropic compression" just means equal from all directions, and has nothing to do with "isentropic compression".) Similarly, the first implosion bombs used dense U238 neutron reflectors around the core, requiring inefficient shock compression, whereas lower density beryllium reflectors allowed greater efficiency quasi-isentropic compression in fission designs.

A great deal of the popular media's confusion over thermonuclear weapons designs is down to misunderstanding the nature of the x-ray pulse from the fission primary stage. Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons usefully explains that most (over 80%) of the energy can be released x-rays generated by inelastic fission fragment collisions, on a time scale of the order 1 shake or 10 nanoseconds. However, that is only true for a bare fissile metal core, so in reality the considerable mass of chemical implosion debris (mainly carbon, oxygen and hydrogen ions) around that core diffuses the x-rays with a random-walk that slows the x-ray emission into typicaly a 100-times longer pulse than 10 nanoseconds, i.e. around 1 microsecond. It is for this reason that early thermonuclear weapons had heavy outer cases, to contain the diffusive x-ray emission pulse from the fission primary stage's ionized low-Z element fireball, enabling more of that energy to be coupled into fusion stage before the outer casing is destroyed and the coupling ends. Because of this, the fusion stage is not abruptly compressed over a 10 nanosecond time period as implied by Glasstone's unclassified statement that most of the fission energy is emitted in the last shake, but more gradually over a time of up to 1 microsecond. The design of the fission primary stage therefore determines the nature of the x-ray pulse waveform. This problem has been known since the beginning, which is why a gun-type fission weapon was selected in 1946 for the fusion "Super" primary stage, because it would eliminate the implosion debris fireball x-ray diffusion problem, and also why Gamow designed a cylindrical implosion "Greenhouse-George" primary, to enable x-rays from a bare side of a fissile core to initiate fusion without the complexity of x-ray shielding and transport through low-Z barriers, as occurs with spherical implosion primary stages.

Above: the Russian compact (e.g. MIRV or tactical neutron) nuclear bomb concept is simply to use two small fission devices to compress a relative low-density prolate-spheroid shaped secondary stage (e.g. LiD fusion fuel, rather than U235 pusher with fusion boosting, as used in the American W88 warhead), a concept illustrated in Russian military books by reprinting a full-page nuclear weapon design diagram on page 54 of the 5 December 1955 Life magazine! Using two primaries to compress a prolate spheroid charge of low-density fusion fuel (one at each end) means you don't have to disperse x-rays from a single primary uniformly (for isotropic compression) around the secondary stage using "reflective focussing" from the inside of a massive pear shaped casing (as for their 1.6 megaton 1955 RDS37 design) or a massive egg shaped casing (as for the 250 kt Los Alamos Redwing-Huron "Egg" design with a spherical secondary, tested at Bikini in 1956), or even to use a low-density "foam x-ray disperser" as used in British two-stage thermonuclear Grapple tests (and later Livermore compact spherical secondary stage designs for MIRV missiles). Also, by not having a dense pusher on the secondary stage (you can add U238 to the outer casing if you want to boost the fission yield, as shown above), it is easier to compress it, so you get greater compression than is the case for the inclusion of dense metal in the secondary, giving far more efficient ("nearly isentropic") compression for a very efficient fusion burn which can use cheap deuterium to initiate it, rather than requiring costly tritium-deuterium fusion (needed for the smaller compressions achieved in modern Western secondaries with dense metal pushers), thus not only miniaturizing the H bomb but also enabling nearly clean tactical neutron bombs to be produced very cheaply, without needing large amounts of costly tritium (which has a half life of only 12.3 years, so has to be regularly produced by the costly irradiation of lithium, placed in gas proof capsules inside the core of a nuclear reactor).

Ironically, Chuck Hansen, the author of US Nuclear Weapons, re-invented the Russian "Project 49" double-primary H-bomb independently in a 27 August 1979 letter to Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, only to have this double-primary design dismissed as "wrong" by American nuclear weaponeers, some of whom didn't even know that: (a) Teller and Ulam had stated that one or more primary stages could be used to ignite a H-bomb in their 1951 breakthrought paper, and (b) you can get both primary stages to detonate simultaneously by simply wiring up the electronic neutron guns for each primary into a parallel circuit, and doing the same for their electrical detonators and x-unit capacitors and krytron switches. Hardened groupthink dogma orthodoxy is is hard to debunk! (The Russian double primary idea was even earlier suggested by journalist John McPhee to nuclear weaponeer Dr Ted Taylor with this dismissive result, as reported in McPhee's 1974 book, The Curve of Binding Energy. Note that Howard Morland's design relied on Edward Teller's single-primary H-bomb illustration in his article "Hydrogen Bomb", in the Encyclopedia Americana, v14.)

GEORGE GAMOW'S ASYMMETRIC-IMPLOSION FISSION BOMB DESIGN FOR USE AS AN EFFICIENT DIRECTED X-RAY SOURCE FOR RUSSIAN PROJECT 49 DOUBLE PRIMARY NEUTRON BOMBS

ABOVE: declassified originally "TOP SECRET" 1946 nuclear weapons design study for Dr von Karman, General Considerations of Explosives and Explosions of fission and thermonuclear weapons by Los Alamos nuclear weaponeer Dr George Gamow (he designed the "Greenhouse-George" 1951 radiation imploded fusion capsule using a special cylinder implosion fission primary to allow x-rays to escape from the sides) throws light on the Russian fission primary stage designs used in their very compact neutron bombs. In the West, spherical or prolate spheroid shaped linear implosion primaries are used, but the Russian language Wikipedia and other Russian language military internet pages (which are completely separate from Western Wikipedia, not simply translations!) for years have contained diagrams of a special single-detonation point implosion lens system, which is now revealed to be due to George Gamow (full declassified report is LINKED HERE). The key benefits for this revolutionary Gamow design in tactical neutron bomb design are:

(a) the fissile mass is off-centre, so x-rays escape in a preferential direction with little shielding by chemical explosive debris, thus maximising the exposure of a fusion fuel capsule to x-rays from an implosion fission primary, and

(b) the fact

only one detonation point is required

(which can be shielded by a steel cover to protect that point from accidental impact etc), minimises the size of the x-unit capacitor, battery, etc, as compared to spherical implosions where a lot of points need simultaneous ignition for successful implosion (see French nuclear test flash x-ray photos below!). The West uses a "no-go theorem" to rule out this design called "one-point safety", whereby the implosion system must be safe from effective compression of the fissile core occurring from a detonation at any single point on the outside. However, for such very low yield (sub kiloton) fission weapons, safety concerns can be relaxed in a world war situation where mass production of nuclear shells is required, and the neutron gun must be fired at the optimum compression time to achieve a significant nuclear yield. The single point of detonation can be protected both (a) mechanically by a steel impact cap over it (so if dropped, any impact detonation will occur at the wrong point, and (b) electrically by a fuse in series with the detonator which will blow at a current rating below that required to fire the detonator. When the weapon's detonation is actually required, the fuse can be mechanically changed for a high-current conductor just before detonation.

A feature of this Gamow design is that although the off-centre fissile core is simultaneously compressed in time, the force is anisotropic (being naturally greater on the side with the most explosives), so the hollows in the fissile cores need to be displaced similarly to compensate (so that side of the fissile core with weaker implosion pressure is thinner). Although you would expect the ansiotropy of implosion to physically shift the core towards the fusion capsule and thus block the x-ray channel, this doesn't happen in reality because the time scale of the macroscopic acceleration of the core (taking many microseconds) is massive, compared to the relatively trivial timescale of the very fast nuclear reactions such as fission and x-ray ablation phenomena! It appears from Russian information that they use this kind of fission primary to massively reduce the mass and firing circuit complexity of their double-primary ignited neutron bombs. Dr Gamow illustrated technical reports himself, as he did for his wonderful kid's physics books on a big bang, etc.

ABOVE: note that a single Gamow asymmetric implosion fission stage can also be used to enhance the neutrons and prompt gamma rays in a preferential direction, for use in either ABM defensive neutron warheads (to take out incoming MIRV warheads), or to create a directed prompt gamma ray and prompt Compton current, for a non-lethal localized and directed EMP collateral-damage-averting nuclear weapon (as described using old tech, 3 decades ago in the November 1994 issue of Electronics World, by yours truly), and this Gamow off-centre implosion is depicted in an August 6, 2015-uploaded animated video and labelled "Swan" by Russian Wikipedia user "Guga50", which is currently displayed on the Russian Wikipedia article "Nuclear Weapons" (this Russian "Nuclear Weapons" Wikipedia article is not just a translation of the Western Wikipedia "Nuclear Weapons" article, which shows an entirely different "Swan"-labelled design; a symmetric prolate spheroid with 2-point detonation, not an asymmetric 1-point detonation implosive; my point here is just to point out a discrepancy rather than to say "one is right and one is wrong", since both types are certainly possible from the pure scientific standpoint and it is likely the American "Swan" design is the two-point implosion system, but the Russian Wikipedia design is backed by the design Western nuclear weaponeer Gamow explains in detail in his originally top secret 1946 report and the general Russian custom to take short cuts for cheapness that are "ruled out" by Western bureaucrats with bigger weapons budgets to blow at the taxpayers expense), which states: "... the 1st fission stage cannot provide a sufficient amount of X-ray radiation energy, which is necessary to ensure the explosion of "large" thermonuclear stages. In three-stage devices, the 1st fission stage (with an explosion power of up to tens of kilotons) is used for the radiation implosion of the 2nd ("small") thermonuclear stage (with an explosion power of several hundred kilotons), and the radiation of this 2nd thermonuclear stage (together with the radiation of the 1st stage) is used for the radiation implosion of the 3rd ("large") thermonuclear stage ... In "Tsar Bomba" (AN-602), the first two and the second two stages were placed symmetrically on 2 sides of the third ("large") thermonuclear stage, according to the so-called "bifilar" scheme." (Note: the Russian Wikipedia page on the neutron bomb points out that the casing is composed of "transparent" elements, i.e. those with small cross sections for 14.1 Mev neutron reactions, such as nickel, chromium and tungsten.)

Russian language Wikipedia https://ru.wikipedia.org "Nuclear Weapons" page, section on "Swan" (translated from Russian into English; 14 October 2024): "The described scheme of spherical implosion is archaic and has hardly been used since the mid-1950s. The principle of operation of the “Swan” type design (English: swan) is based on the use of a fissile assembly of a special shape, which, in the process of implosion initiated at one point by one fuse, is compressed in the longitudinal direction and turns into a supercritical sphere. The shell itself consists of several layers of explosive with different detonation rates, which is made on the basis of an alloy of octogen and plastic in the required proportion and filler - polystyrene foam, so that between it and the nuclear assembly located inside there remains a space filled with polystyrene foam. This space introduces the necessary delay due to the fact that the speed of detonation of the explosive exceeds the speed of the shock wave in the polystyrene foam. The shape of the charge strongly depends on the detonation speed of the shell layers and the speed of propagation of the shock wave in polystyrene, which is hypersonic under these conditions. The shock wave from the outer layer of explosive reaches the inner spherical layer simultaneously over the entire surface. A significantly lighter tamper is made not from 238U, but from beryllium, which reflects neutrons well. It can be assumed that the unusual name of this design - "Swan" (first tested by Inca in 1956) was suggested by the shape of the swan's neck. Thus, it was possible to abandon the spherical implosion and, thereby, solve the extremely difficult problem of sub-microsecond synchronization of fuses on a spherical assembly and thus simplify and reduce the diameter of the implosion nuclear weapon from 2 m in the “Fat Man” to 30 cm or less in modern nuclear weapons."

[Original Russian: "Описанная схема сферической имплозии архаична и с середины 1950-х годов почти не применяется. Принцип действия конструкции типа «Swan» ( англ. swan — лебедь), основан на использовании делящейся сборки особой формы, которая в процессе инициированной в одной точке одним взрывателем имплозии, сжимается в продольном направлении и превращается в надкритическую сферу. Сама оболочка состоит из нескольких слоёв взрывчатого вещества с разной скоростью детонации, которую изготавливают на основе сплава октогена и пластика в нужной пропорции и наполнителя — пенополистирола, так что между ним и находящейся внутри ядерной сборкой остаётся заполненное пенополистиролом пространство. Это пространство вносит нужную задержку за счёт того, что скорость детонации взрывчатки превышает скорость движения ударной волны в пенополистироле. Форма заряда сильно зависит от скоростей детонации слоёв оболочки и скоростью распространения ударной волны в полистироле, которая в данных условиях гиперзвуковая. Ударная волна от внешнего слоя взрывчатки достигает внутреннего сферического слоя одновременно по всей поверхности. Существенно более лёгкий тампер выполняется не из 238U, а из хорошо отражающего нейтроны бериллия. Можно предположить, что необычное название данной конструкции — «Лебедь» (первое испытание — Inca в 1956 г.) было подсказано формой шеи лебедя. Таким образом оказалось возможным отказаться от сферической имплозии и, тем самым, решить крайне сложную проблему субмикросекундной синхронизации взрывателей на сферической сборке и таким образом упростить и уменьшить диаметр имплозивного ядерного боеприпаса с 2 м у «Толстяка» до 30 см и менее в современных ядерных боеприпасах."]

Nuclear war threat discussion efforts in the Presidential Election Debate on TV in September 2024, Trump v. Harris, note only Trump was concerned with nuclear war (Harris was in the Democratic party, whose president on 6 and 9 August 1945 used two nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state, which explains this clearly):

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on Putin nuclear threat being ignored by left wingers: pic.twitter.com/p13yNTRz9C

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on need for America to get tough not appease dictatorial terrorists like Harris did which started and sustained the Vietnam style massacres of Ukraine and Gaza wars instead of DETERRING WAR USING… pic.twitter.com/av9rfK2CPK

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on how Biden Admin destroyed American military credibility, thus WWIII risks now in Ukraine war plus Gaza war: pic.twitter.com/zUM62ADTdB

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump debate biased by moderators trying to shut off Trump responses to liar: pic.twitter.com/JwKkFPub9h

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on Biden Admin deliberately left-wing pandering appeasement show-off crass method pulling out from Afghanistan and its effects on Putin: pic.twitter.com/cGpTU82bxn

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on how Democrats engineered the riots in Washington DC then tried to blame Trump: pic.twitter.com/g75NdMturH

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump 10 September 2024 presidential election debate on HYPOCRISY OF LAW use by pseudo "Democrats": pic.twitter.com/QaCNxD5CW9

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Herman Kahn is clear, in On Thermonuclear War, about the mobilization problem for bulky conventional weapons (unlike compact nukes out of sight in subs, ICBMs or airfield igloos) triggering off wars such as WWI, quoting on page 359 the assistant chief of the French General Staff, General Boisdeffre's explanation to Russian Tsar Nicholas: "The mobilization is the declaration of war. To mobilize is to oblige one's neighbor to do the same. ... Otherwise, to leave a million men on one's frontier, without doing the same simultaneously, is to deprive oneself of all possibility of moving later; it is placing oneself in a situation of an individual who, with a pistol in his pocket, should should let his neighbor put a weapon to his forehead without drawing his own." Kahn also emphasises the ironic pacifism of the Liberal Party Cabinet of the UK Government which set off WWI by declaring war on Germany (which had not declared war on Britain and did not want war with Britain):

"The [August 1914 WWI-declaring British Liberal Party government] Cabinet was overwhelmingly pacific. At least three-quarters of its members were determined not to be drawn into a European quarrel, unless Great Britain were herself attacked, which was not likely. ... They did not believe that if Germany attacked France, she would attack her through Belgium [triggering WWI via the 1839 Treaty of London, an analogy to our guarantee to defend Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum]..." - Churchill, The World Crisis, v1, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923, p211 (quoted by Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p387). Winston Churchill, himself a Liberal government minister when war was declared in 1914 (he had to rejoin the Conservatives after the Liberal Party was run-over by its role in declaring WWI) was anti-militarism expenditure in general, like his father Lord Randolph Churchill (who in 1886 resigned as Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, in an effort to reduce arms expenditure). On 13 May 1901, Winston Churchill, Boer War hero and newly elected Conservative MP, took up his late father's anti-militarism position in his speech to the House of Commons: "I regard it as a grave mistake in Imperial policy to spend thirty millions a year on the Army. I hold that the continued increase in Army expenditure cannot be viewed by supporters of the Government without the greatest alarm and apprehension, and by Members who represent working class constituencies without extreme dislike. I desire to urge considerations of economy on His Majesty’s Government, and as a practical step that the number of soldiers which they propose to keep ready for expeditionary purposes should be substantially reduced. ... Once you are so unfortunate as to be drawn into a war, no price is too great to pay for an early and victorious peace. All economy of soldiers or supplies is the worst extravagance in war. I am concerned only with the Estimates for the ordinary service of the year, which are increasing at such a rate that it is impossible to view them without alarm. Does the House realise what British expenditure on armaments amounts to? See how our Army Estimates have grown - seventeen millions in 1894, eighteen in 1897, nineteen in 1899, twenty-four in 1900, and finally in the present year no less than twenty-nine millions eight hundred thousand." However, by 1908 Churchillhad reversed this, in the light of Germany militarism, which required British expenditure on an arms race to maintain credible deterrence. Churchill was a realistic, deterrence-supporting pacifist, not a warmonger. Conventional weapons only failed as a credible deterrent in 1914 because of the instability caused by the need to mobilize them along frontiers, something not needed with long-range nuclear weapons now!

Herman Kahn on p371 states of Churchill's The World Crisis, volume 1: "I know of no better textbook on the subject of war, prewar preparations, and peacetime risks. ... Let me now quote Churchill on the possibility of a surprise attack. He is discussing the tension during the 1911 Agadir crisis. Lloyd George had just made a speech with the idea of forcing the German government to back down. The Germans did not like it ... 'It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of ... No one would do such things. Civilisation has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong.' (W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis, v1, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1923, p45)." Kahn then explains the analogy of 1930s fears of gas annihilation to thermonuclear ignorance and propaganda:

"War, unrestricted war, seemed like an unbelievable nightmare and therefore somehow unreal. The very terror of war [annihilation by exaggerated gas or incendiary or high explosive bombing on cities] powerfully reinforced all those who wished to reject military solutions or palliatives in favor of much more attractive schemes for world government or universal disarmament or some major step in that direction.[Italics are Herman Kahn's own.] ... In fact it was not until April 1939, after the second invasion of Czechoslovakia, that the British went all out ... It was by that time far too late." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p377. When Kahn was writing, the USA had massive nuclear superiority in both tactical and strategic weapons. Today, however, the situation is reversed and Kahn's warning is pertinent again: Russia and its allies China, North Korea and Iran have superiority. (We also need to remember the 1939-40 phoney war; it was Churchill not Hitler who initiated city bombing in 1940, deliberately in order to divert enemy bombing from RAF airfields that were needed to retain air superiority and prevent an invasion succeeding. Churchill was only able to do this because Britain had civil defense to mitigate the effects of the retaliation when the RAF were unable to entirely stop enemy attacks. Without civil defense, either Churchill wouldn't have been able to do this, so the airfields might have been put out and an invasion done, or else casualty rates 60 times higher could have resulted in the Blitz (the ratio of WWI bombing casualties per ton of bombs on unprotected civilians, to WWII, when people had shelters).

On page 378 of On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn emphasises (italics are Kahn's own): "The whole history of the 1933-1939 period is a clear example of the failure of Type II [deterrence of major provocations like invasion of an ally] and Type III Deterrence [deterrence of minor provocations like rearmament, militarization, etc.]. These failures occurred because neither the British nor the French [don't forget the USA which passed its Neutrality Act in 1935!] had the resolve to use their superior military power or their superior resources to check German aggression until it was too late. ... The longer they put off using their superior power the less credible it became that it would ever be used. Finally their power itself became inferior so that even when its use was seriously threatened, the German government was no longer impressed." Kahn quotes Churchill: "We had been reduced in those five years [of anti-war disarmament and then anti-war appeasement propaganda about gas knockout blow escalations wiping out humanity, 1933-1938, cumulating in the worthless piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler on 30 September 1938 promising peace for our time] from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengable that we never cared to think about it. We have been reduced from a position where the very word 'war' was considered one which would be used only by persons qualifying for a lunatic asylum." - Winston Churchill, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, G. P. Putnam's Sons, NY, 1941, p60 (quoted by Herman Kahn on page 379 of On Thermonuclear War, where Kahn comments: "Hitler and some of his staff were victims of overconfidence. By the time the war started, they felt that they had more than enough of a lead to win. ... the war would doubtless be short [precisely the delusion of Russia when invading Ukraine, in 2022] ..."

Herman Kahn on page 378 of On Thermonuclear War quotes Air Marshall Sir John Slessor's Central Blue Praeger, NY, 1957, which states the reality on page 161: by 1938 Britain was spending £300 million a year on arms, contrasted to well over £1000 million a year then being spent on arms by the Nazis. Thus, the Nazis were far outrunning Britain so that every day of peace that "Chamberlain bought with his peace agreements" actually gave the Nazis a bigger lead; Britain was not "buying time for rearmament to fight" contrary to financially illiterate historians, journalists and other Chamberlain "pacifism" fans to this day, rather, Chamberlain was helping the Nazis prepare better than the UK by delaying war! If the enemy is getting way bigger than you by the day, you don't do yourself any favours by delaying the fight. The fact that this is still "disputed" by left wing historians to back disarmament in the face of Russia today just demonstrates how Comintern's legacy of infiltration of the Western universities and mass media continues to this day.

One final thought from Kahn's On Thermonuclear War is his Figure 8 on page 469, showing the relationship between missile accuracy, warhead yield, and the 50% probable target peak overpressure at the intended ground zero (the intended ground zero never debunked with 100% probability in reality, due to inaccuracies in the missile guidance system, never mind the risk of warhead malfunction/ABM interception): in 1960 American 10 megaton warheads were placed on missiles with good accuracy gyroscopes, CEP = 1 mile, which gave 50% probability of delivering 100 psi peak overpressure to the intended ground zero, destroying typical 1960 era primitive (not shock protected) missile silos. So the USA could take out hard Russian ICBMs at that time. But the corresponding 10 megaton Russian warheads were (supposedly) on less accurate missiles, CEP = 5 miles, which would only deliver about average 4 psi peak overpressure at the intended "ground zero" (because they would on average miss targets by miles), so Russia couldn't in 1960 usefully target American ICBM's in their silos! If they did so, they would fail with high probability, because the hard targets would on average receive only 4 psi, not the 100 psi needed to wreck them. Thus, Russia had to target wood-frame American houses with ICBM's in 1960, the only yank assets that could be wrecked by 4 psi, not missile silos. In effect, missile accuracy forced America and Russia to have different nuclear war strategies: America could use "counterforce" targetting on hard Russian silos, but the less accurate Russian missiles of the same yield class would have to be targetted on "soft countervalue" targets, like residential areas. This asymmetry in USA and Russian targetting was often promoted by "arms control and disarmament" promoters like Hans Bethe as preventing a direct comparison; Bethe wrote articles in journals denying Russian superiority in megatonnage because they had less accurate missiles. But this is fake news, because Russia's a dictatorship, America isn't. Which is more dangerous, Russia wiping out American civilians or America wiping out Russian ICBMs? Duh. One strategy is evil, the other is just war.

Kahn also went into the problem with populist notions of "knockout blow" 1st strikes, versus 2nd strikes in nuclear war. In summary, Russia now has superiority in tactical neutron weapons, protected deep shelters and the secret Metro 2 underground railway to evacuate the dictators from the Kremlin to safe rural bunkers in the event of a nuclear strike on Moscow (as well as many dual-purpose cheap but hard underground car parks/shelters and tube stations/shelters and basement cafes/shelters, with double blast doors fitted for civilians), and it has placed a large number of ICBMs on mobile launchers which can move around (out of the 4 psi damage zone) while USA ICBMs are inflight. So, since America doesn't have such civil defense or mobile ICBM launchers or neutron bombs, it doesn't really have a credible deterrent against Russia, but Russia has a credible deterrent against American nuclear leverage. This was claimed to reduce nclear war risks by demonstrating to Russia that it has nothing to fear from America unless Russia launches a first strike on America, when what survived of American military assets (e.g. some Trident SLBMs) could disarm themselves by setting off a firework display over the Kremlin (while the Russians survive in hard double-blast doored shelters). This limited American "second strike capability" was supposed to be "safe deterrence". However, as we have seen, it hasn't stopped Russia invading Ukraine, using Novichok and Polonium-210 in the UK, etc. In other words, it's "minimal deterrence" that leaves open the key risk Kahn warned about, a repetition of the 1930s fiasco that was designed to minimise the risk of "accidental war" by peace treaties with dictators (who interpreted them as signs of virtual signalling weakness to be laughed at and ignored), but did the opposite, causing WWII. Mathematically, the error is that the Iwo Jima proved Lanchester Equations of war are being disregarded in preference to Morgenstern and von Neumann's "Minimax theorem" of game theory. The Lanchester Equations prove that the probability of victory in war (i.e. the rate of disarmament of the weaker side) is proportional to the square of the ratio of forces (surviving a 1st strike) and you need thus to risk using as much force as you can; the Minimax theorem by contrast says that to win a rule-abided game you should take minimal risks and not "escalate to win". The Minimax theorem is disproved by the US Strategic Bomb Survey WWII pre-nuclear attacks data, as well as the results in Vietnam and other wars of "gradual punishment" to try to coerce the enemy into defeat. The Lanchester equations model the history of victorious combats. All current Western nuclear policy is based on Minimax (the McNamara legacy), not Lanchester!

To recap for clarity in the reader's mind: Kahn's 1960 On Thermonuclear War was written while Eisenhower/Dulles "Massive retaliation" (aka "MAD" = Musual Assured Destruction, aka "Type 1 Deterrence") was in play, although General Maxwell D. Taylor (later Kennedy's limited nuclear war adviser), Henry Kissinger (in his 1957 "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy"), and people like Kahn's childhood friend and RAND Corporation colleague, physicist Samuel Cohen, were already advocating cleaner enhanced neutron weapons to credibly deter the invasions that triggered terrible conventional wars like WWI, WWII, the 1950-53 Korean War, etc. (note that contrary to "arms control and disarmament" liars, the "neutron bomb" is not limited to low kiloton yields, but can be used as a 10 megaton Ripple II 99.9% clean device for the case of wide area fronts of tanks crossing borders, provided a precursor burst of similar yield is detonated 5-25 seconds in advance, in order to reduce air density in the target area behind the shock front of the first burst, and so provide hydrodynamic enhancement of neutrons from the second explosion). Kahn considered a wide range of deterrent postures and kinds of wars in his book, and countermeasures in excruciating detail and cold-bloodedness, which put off many idealists from even bothering to read it carefully, let alone implement all of its recommendations! The key problem Kahn found for today's "minimal deterrence policy" was that arms control plus Russian tactical nuclear weapons and shelters superiority, kills off any hope deterring the kinds of "Type II deterrence" needed to prevent enemies from invading 3rd parties, i.e. the invasion of Ukraine 2022 couldn't be credibly deterred by saying "if you do that, Putin, I'll kill myself by disarming my country by firing all my weapons at you for an imaginary knockout blow" (most of which will be negated by Russian ABM, or negated by Russian shelters, or negated by Russian mobile ICBM's simply starting their engines and driving outside the 4psi blast overturning radius while the pre-programmed ICBM's are in flight from USA to their previous locations in Russia identified on satellite photos prior to pressing the button)!" This simply isn't a credible deterrent to kind of situations which have initiated 100% of the world wars in history! WTF has gone wrong with these people? Comintern propaganda has infected top dogs for decades with "Jaw, jaw, not war, war" appeasement crap (Winston Churchill was the only person in human history in the Cabinet of the country triggering BOTH World Wars, tried to deter BOTH, and FAILED both times, but is somehow remembered in propaganda history as a "great orator" despite failing to sway public opinion pre-WWI and pre-WWII to deter the wars; he may have been the most sensible person on both occasions but the result was still a World War each time!). Maybe it's partly down to luddite opposition to progress (the sin of nuclear technology stagnation caused by decades of bans of tests for improved, more credible nuclear deterrent warhead options), and partly down to nostalgic "last war" style military inertia, of the kind that sent Polish horse mounted (cavalry) divisions into battle with Panzer tanks in 1939. The key problem is that the current "protected second strike capability" ("we will never strike first!") is that the enemy leadership may develop the mentality of Hamas in October 2023. If so, that very limited "minimum deterrence" will fail, and there will be a nuclear war. Also, Russia has threatened to nuke non-nuclear Sweden and non-nuclear Ukraine, just as America nuked non-nuclear Japan in 1945 twice, so the CND fantasy of securing a "nuclear free zone" by unilateral disarmament is just a pipe dream. If we continue as we have done until now, Russia and other enemy states will become an ever more war-minded alliance intent on our nuclear annihilation.

"Russia has launched several air attacks on Ukraine this week, costing Moscow a reported £1.1bn. Last night, Kyiv came under drone attack for the third night in four days, with debris injuring people and damaging buildings." - https://t.co/oNs8lwTTmZ And when the Roubles run out,…

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 29, 2024

"The threat of Russian escalation is almost absent in the conversation. It is as if the limit of their conventional powers has been exposed by the humiliation of Kursk, along with the emptiness of their nuclear rhetoric. The latter cannot be entirely ignored, if the Kremlin feels…

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 29, 2024

Democrats in 2021 accelerated the pull out from Afghanistan to the extent that people flooded runways and later fell off undercarriages of the escaping aircraft (worse than the organized rooftop queue for the last Helicopters leaving Saigon, in 1975!), to pacify disarmers, peace protestors, liberals etc., like Putin and Hamas, then Putin and Hamas realise they can invade Ukraine (2022) and Israel (2023) with impunity. INNOCENT PEOPLE ARE KILLED WHEN YOU GIVE A GREEN LIGHT TO DICTATORS. We need credible deterrence. Like, NOW, to stop these invasions. Duh. The entire problem is down to the lying left wing Lenin lawyer "virtual signalling" political tactic lampooned years ago by Bob Monkhouse's advice to succeed by "faking sincerity" ("Nukemap" lying crap is an excellent example of how the old 1930s "guaranteed gas knockout blow annihilation within hours of war being declared" propaganda horsecrap is resurrected for mainstream media lying fake "pacicism" today). That deliberate abusive lying propaganda by the herd mentality "autistic groupthink" thugs of left wing bigots backfires, just as with right wing thugs, and costs lives.

Tip for deluded and lazy journalists who don't have time to check the full facts below: there's a very brief summary of deliberate fake news and nuclear weapons lying ("Nukemap liars etc") effects evidence debunking CND and other pro-Russian nuclear superiority (unilateral Western disarmament/arms control) "elitist virtual signalling" fascism linked here. It's about time for the fashion obsessed mass media to stop repeating 1930s lying propaganda (with "gas escalation annihilation" changed to "nuclear escalation annihilation" by paranoid lying pseudo-pacifists who engineer every invasion, every war, every massacre and ban civil defense shelters into the bargain, using lying to win so-called "Nobel peace prizes" from charlatans dressed up as celebrity elitists with pseudo Communist political cards on open display): "there is no way to prevent immediate gas annihilation of humanity due to aerial war escalation in a war, so we must disarm to prevent disaster and accommodate the Nazi terrorists as friends and collaborators in the name of God". Maybe it's about time, too, for those claiming to be "PhD historians" and "PhD physicists" to get out of their ivory towers of elitist fascist "communism" (i.e. the deliberate "pipe dream" of equality of money, not the achievable reality of equality of freedom of speech, the kind of humane decency no card-carrying/BBC supporting, elitist "Communist" will ever support in any way, shape or form, because they know their lies will instantly be exposed as such in free debate) and start to tell the truth, not one-sided pro-eugenics or other pseudoscience crap that panders to mass delusions like fairy tales.

The UK and France are eager to allow Ukraine to strike military targets deep within Russian territory, while the US and Germany are opposed - Financial Times

The reason for Germany and the US reluctance is that the Biden administration and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are…

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 28, 2024

It's impossible to tell precisely why this 1930s "gas war will escalate within hours and wipe out everybody" pro-Nazi appeasement escalation-doomsday lying and Vietnam era "don't escalate to win" anti-military lunacy is still prevailing in America and Germany, but nuclear heebie jeebies based on fake "Nukemap" style crap is certainly a big factor, plus the fact that both countries lost major wars with costly financial and psychosis implications (Germany lost WWI and WWII; America lost Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). Someday victory may become fashionable again, probably only after "virtue signalling faked pacifist sincerity" is debunked by Putin.

Looks like the commie Russian siding thug Joseph Rotblat, a Nobel Peace Laureate for giving the green card to Putin like fellow "pacifists" did to the Kaiser to begin WWI and to Hitler, starting WWII. But from his "diplomacy" he wants WWIII by provoking war, not Western… https://t.co/jfs2CEe2KV

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 29, 2024

The Russian multistaged 1000 megaton (1 Gt) bomb design goes back to Leo Szilard's anti-H bomb "doomsday machine" propaganda news conference of 1950. As Herman Kahn argued, it's not a credible deterrent, is hard to deliver (it would be the size of a large submarine), and the… https://t.co/zgErh5mnVN

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 22, 2024

Russian state TV channel 1 admits invasion causin pain, but then adds that Russia is a nuclear state. Get prepared for possible Putin resumption of nuclear weapons coercion, or other nuclear saber rattling such as an EMP test as occurred on 22 October 1962, during Cuban crisis! https://t.co/I0gtQpb8OI

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 15, 2024

“We are ready to use weapons, including any weapons — including the weapons you mentioned — if it is a question of the existence of the Russian state or damage to our sovereignty and independence,” Putin added in the interview ... - https://www.news18.com/world/putin-says-russian-nuclear-weapons-more-advanced-than-in-us-8814525.html

"For Russia, the strategic defeat means the end of its statehood and thousand-year history. Then the question arises - why should we be afraid? Isn't it better to go to the end?" - Putin

He says it's logical.
Following formal logic, that means the end of Putin. pic.twitter.com/XpJTzWQH9c

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 20, 2024

Are you a retired NATO F-16 pilot? Then you are needed to help defend liberty against the Ruskies. Ukraine doesn't have enough F-16 pilots available. https://t.co/Mdto9HhPMc

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 15, 2024

I arrived in Moscow for the BBC in 2000 on the day Russia admitted to the Kursk submarine disaster. Now, in Kursk, Putin’s struggling with new disaster - as his war vs Ukraine rebounds

I’ve witnessed Russia’s long slide to this point, close-up. It’s all in my book - out today 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/VREwcF6R4m

— Sarah Rainsford (@sarahrainsford) August 15, 2024

Offensive is usually the best form of defence - looks like AFU really understand combined arms manoeuvre warfare ⁦@HamishDBG⁩ ⁦@Barnes_Joe⁩ https://t.co/7yrqb3FN5Y

— Hamish DBG (@HamishDBG) August 27, 2024

"The incursion into Kursk region by the AFU is in favor of Russia," Russians are told by their TV channels, because an attack on Russian territory closes the possibility of negotiations with Ukraine.

And what else would be in Russia's favor? pic.twitter.com/q2a8FkD0nR

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 28, 2024

Answer: in case Putin at some point hits the vodka, sees red at the invasion of Russia, and presses a button. Hitler had 12,000 tons of tabun by 1945 - equivalent to Russia's nuclear stockpile in terms of killing potential - but never used a drop of it. But the RISK was… https://t.co/eHzQLYxY8x

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 15, 2024

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy on Putin's (aka Russian State TV Channel 1's) recent nuclear war threats: Zelenskyy thinks that Putin loves life too much to start a nuclear war. True, up to a point, but: (1) Putin could escalate nuclear threats without much risk of being wiped out… pic.twitter.com/9wTNFVKUaT

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 27, 2024

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

The basic fact is that nuclear weapons can deter/stop invasions unlike the conventional weapons that cause mass destruction, and nuclear collateral damage is eliminated easily for nuclear weapons by using them on military targets, since for high yields at collateral damage distances all the effects are sufficiently delayed in arrival to allow duck and cover to avoid radiation and blast wind/flying debris injuries (unlike the case for the smaller areas affected by smaller yield conventional weapons, where there is little time on seeing the flash to duck and cover to avoid injury), and as the original 1951 SECRET American Government "Handbook on Capabilities of Atomic Weapons" (limited report AD511880L, forerunner to today's still secret EM-1) stated in Section 10.32:

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

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

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

For a review of this site see: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/02/are-nuclear-weapons-100-times-less.html which states: "Cook is a master researcher who digs up incredible piles of research on all topics nuclear and the following is digest of various writings of his gathered for easy access centered on the remarkable thesis that the effects of nuclear weapons, while literally awesome, have been exaggerated or misunderstood to an even greater extent, with perhaps very considerable military consequences." Also see some key extracts from this blog published over at http://www.militarystory.org/nuclear-detonations-in-urban-and-suburban-areas/ and blog statistics (over 2.3 million views) linked here (populist pseudo-critics love to falsely claim that "nobody takes any notice of the truth, justifying their decision to ignore the facts by following the fake fashion herd groupthink agenda"). (Or, for Field Marshall Slim's "the more you use, fewer you lose" success formula for ending war by winning in Burma against Japan - where physicist Herman Kahn served while his friend Sam Cohen was calculating nuclear weapon efficiencies at the Los Alamos Manhattan Project, which again used "overkill" to convince the opponent to throw in the towel - please see my post on the practicalities of really DETERRING WWIII linked here; this is the opposite of the failure to escalate formula used to drag out war until bankrupcy aka the Vietnam effect.)

This blog's url is now "www.nukegate.org". When this nuclear effects blog began in 2006, "glasstone.blogspot.com" was used to signify the key issue of Glasstone's obfuscating Effects of Nuclear Weapons, specifically the final 1977 edition, which omitted not just the credible deterrent "use" of nuclear weapons but the key final "Principles of protection" chapter that had been present in all previous editions, and it also ignored the relatively clean neutron bombs which had been developed in the intervening years, as a credible deterrent to the concentrations of force needed for aggressive invasions, such as the 1914 invasion of Belgium and the 1939 invasion of Poland; both of which triggered world wars. Those editors themselves were not subversives, but both had nuclear weapons security clearances which constituted political groupthink censorship control, regarding which designs of nuclear weapons they could discuss and the level of technical data (they include basically zero information on their sources and the "bibliographies" are in most cases not to their classified nuclear testing sources but merely further reading); the 1977 edition had been initially drafted in 1974 solely by EM-1 editor Dolan at SRI International, and was then submitted to Glasstone who made further changes. The persistent and hypocritical Russian World Peace Council's and also hardline arms controllers propaganda tactic - supported by some arms industry loons who have a vested interest in conventional war - has been to try to promote lies on nuclear weapons effects to get rid of credible Western nuclear deterrence of provocations that start war. Naturally, the Russians have now stocked 2000+ tactical neutron weapons of the sort they get the West to disarm.

This means that they can invade territory with relative impunity, since the West won't deter such provocations by flexible response - the aim of Russia is to push the West into a policy of massive retaliation of direct attacks only, and then use smaller provocations instead - and Russia can then use its tactical nuclear weapons to "defend" its newly invaded territories by declaring them to now be part of Mother Russia and under Moscow's nuclear umbrella. Russia has repeatedly made it clear - for decades - that it expects a direct war with NATO to rapidly escalate into nuclear WWIII and it has prepared civil defense shelters and evacuation tactics to enable it. Herman Kahn's public warnings of this date back to his testimony to the June 1959 Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, but for decades were deliberately misrepresented by most media outlets. President Kennedy's book "Why England Slept" makes it crystal clear how exactly the same "pacifist" propaganda tactics in the 1930s (that time it was the "gas bomb knockout blow has no defense so disarm, disarm, disarm" lie) caused war, by using fear to slow credible rearmament in the face of state terrorism. By the time democracies finally decided to issue an ultimatum, Hitler had been converted - by pacifist appeasement - from a cautious tester of Western indecision, into an overconfident aggressor who simply ignored last-minute ultimatums.

Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons (US Government) is written in a highly ambiguous fashion (negating nearly every definite statement with a deliberately obfuscating contrary statement to leave a smokescreen legacy of needless confusion, obscurity and obfuscation), omits nearly all key nuclear test data and provides instead misleading generalizations of data from generally unspecified weapon designs tested over 60 years ago which apply to freefield measurements on unobstructed radial lines in deserts and oceans. It makes ZERO analysis of the overall shielding of radiation and blast by their energy attenuation in modern steel and concrete cities, and even falsely denies such factors in its discussion of blast in cities and in its naive chart for predicting the percentage of burns types as a function of freefield outdoor thermal radiation, totally ignoring skyline shielding geometry (similar effects apply to freefield nuclear radiation exposure, despite vague attempts to dismiss this by non-quantitative talk about some scattered radiation arriving from all angles). It omits the huge variations in effects due to weapon design e.g. cleaner warhead designs and the tactical neutron bomb. It omits quantitative data on EMP as a function of burst yield, height and weapon design.

It omits most of the detailed data collected from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the casualty rates as a function of type of building or shelter and blast pressure. It fails to analyse overall standardized casualty rates for different kinds of burst (e.g. shallow underground earth penetrators convert radiation and blast energy into ground shock and cratering against hard targets like silos or enemy bunkers). It omits a detailed analysis of blast precursor effects. It omits a detailed analysis of fallout beta and gamma spectra, fractionation, specific activity (determining the visibility of the fallout as a function of radiation hazard, and the mass of material to be removed for effective decontamination), and data which does exist on the effect of crater soil size distribution upon the fused fallout particle size distribution (e.g. tests like Small Boy in 1962 on the very fine particles at Frenchman Flats gave mean fallout particle sizes far bigger than the pre-shot soil, proving that - as for Trinitite - melted small soil particles fuse together in the fireball to produce larger fallout particles, so the pre-shot soil size distribution is irrelevant for fallout analysis).

By generally (with few exceptions) lumping "effects" of all types of bursts together into chapters dedicated to specific effects, it falsely gives the impression that all types of nuclear explosions produce similar effects with merely "quantitative differences". This is untrue because air bursts eliminate fallout casualties entirely, while slight burial (e.g. earth penetrating warheads) eliminates thermal (including fires and dust "climatic nuclear winter" BS), the initial radiation and severe blast effects, while massively increasing ground shock, and the same applies to shallow underwater bursts. So a more objective treatment to credibly deter all aggression MUST emphasise the totally different collateral damage effects, by dedicating chapters to different kinds of burst (high altitude/space bursts, free air bursts, surface bursts, underground bursts, underwater bursts), and would include bomb design implications on these effects in detail. A great deal of previously secret and limited distributed nuclear effects data has been declassified since 1977, and new research has been done. Our objectives in this review are: (a) to ensure that an objective independent analysis of the relevant nuclear weapons effects facts is placed on the record in case the currently, increasingly vicious Cold War 2.0 escalates into some kind of limited "nuclear demonstration" by aggressors to try to end a conventional war by using coercive threats, (b) to ensure the lessons of tactical nuclear weapon design for deterring large scale provocations (like the invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939 which triggered world wars) are re-learned in contrast to Dulles "massive retaliation" (incredible deterrent) nonsense, and finally (c) to provide some push to Western governments to "get real" with our civil defense, to try to make credible our ageing "strategic nuclear deterrent". We have also provided a detailed analysis of recently declassified Russian nuclear warhead design data, shelter data, effects data, tactical nuclear weapons employment manuals, and some suggestions for improving Western thermonuclear warheads to improve deterrence.

‘The evidence from Hiroshima indicates that blast survivors, both injured and uninjured, in buildings later consumed by fire [caused by the blast overturning charcoal braziers used for breakfast in inflammable wooden houses filled with easily ignitable bamboo furnishings and paper screens] were generally able to move to safe areas following the explosion. Of 130 major buildings studied by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey ... 107 were ultimately burned out ... Of those suffering fire, about 20 percent were burning after the first half hour. The remainder were consumed by fire spread, some as late as 15 hours after the blast. This situation is not unlike the one our computer-based fire spread model described for Detroit.’

- Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 3: What the Planner Needs to Know About Fire Ignition and Spread, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, Panel 27.

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, US Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Theatre, report 92, volume 2 (May 1947, secret):

Volume one, page 14:

“... the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only:

“... capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).”

Volume two examines the firestorm and the ignition of clothing by the thermal radiation flash in Hiroshima:

Page 24:

“Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.” [Contrast this to the obfuscation and vagueness in Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons!]

Page 88:

“Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 unclassified USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims]

“... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.”

There is now a relatively long introduction at the top of this blog, due to the present nuclear threat caused by disarmament and arms control propaganda, and the dire need to get the facts out past pro-Russian media influencers or loony mass media which has never cared about nuclear and radiation effects facts, so please scroll down to see blog posts. The text below in blue is hyperlinked (direct to reference source materials, rather than numbered and linked to reference at the end of the page) so you can right-click on it and open in a new tab to see the source. This page is not about opinions, it provides censored out facts that debunk propaganda, but for those who require background "authority" nonsense on censored physics facts, see stuff here or here. Regarding calling war-mongering, world war causing, terrorism-regime-supporting UK disarmers of the 20th century "thugs" instead of "kind language": I was put through the Christianity grinder as a kid so will quote Jesus (whom I'm instructed to follow), Matthew 23:33: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell?" The fake "pacifist" thugs will respond with some kindly suggestion that this is "paranoid" and that "Jesus was rightfully no-platformed for his inappropriate language"! Yeah, you guys would say that, wouldn't ya. Genuine pacifism requires credible deterrence! Decent people seem to be very confused about the facts of this. Jesus did not say "disarm to invite your annihilation by terrorists". You can't "forgive and forget" when the enemy is still on the warpath. They have to be stopped, either by deterrence, force, defense, or a combination of all these.

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

ABOVE: The June 1957 edition of Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons was the first to include the effects of blast duration (which increases with the cube-root of weapon yield) on blast damage from nuclear weapons. This is very important for wind drag loading to drag-sensitive targets, but has less effect for diffraction-sensitive targets which respond to peak pressures, especially where the blast pressure rapidly equalizes around the structure (e.g. utility poles or buildings with large expanses of glass which shatters, allowing rapid pressure equalization). For example, Glasstone 1957, Fig. 6.41b (p253, using Fig. 3.94a on p109 to convert scaled distances to overpressures from a surface burst on open deserted terrain) shows that for yields of 1 kt, 20 kt (approximately the 16 kt Hiroshima and 21 kt Nagasaki yields), and 1 megaton, peak overpressures of 55, 23 and 15 psi, respectively, are required for collapse (severe damage) to modern multistory reinforced concrete buildings with light walls (Fig. 6.41a shows that about 5 psi will demolish a wood frame house - no longer in modern city centres - regardless of yield). Notice that this means that modern cities are extremely resistant to blast from ~1 kt neutron bombs, requiring more than twice the peak overpressure for collapse than was needed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also notice that very large amounts of energy are absorbed from the blast in causing severe damage to modern reinforced concrete city buildings, causing rapid attenuation of free-field pressure so that ocean and desert test validated cube-root damage scaling laws break down for high yield bursts in modern cities (see latest blog post here for examples of calculations of this energy absorption in both oscillating a building in the elastic deflection engineering graph zone, and the much larger energy absorption in causing plastic zone distortion to reinforced concrete - basically the former typically absorbs about 1% of blast energy, whereas the latter takes up something like 10 times more energy, or 10%, a factor entirely dismissed by Glasstone and Dolan but analyzed by Penney). Above a megaton or so, the increasing blast duration has less and less effect on the peak overpressure required for severe damage, because for destruction a threshold blast loading exists, regardless of the blast duration. (A 1 mile/hour wind will not blow a wall down, regardless of how long it lasts. In other words, large impulses cease to be damage criteria if the blast pressure drops below a threshold needed for damage.) Glasstone 1957 Fig 6.41c on p255 shows that automobiles suffer severe damage 36 psi peak overpressure for 1 kt, 18 psi for 20 kt, and 12 psi for 1 megaton. These pressures for destruction of automobiles are similar to the severe damage data given for multistorey steel frame office buildings with light walls. The key point here is that low-yield (around 1 kt) tactical nuclear weapons produce far less collateral damage to civilian infrastructure than high yield bursts, and even the effects of the latter are exaggerated severely for modern cities when using wooden house data in unobstructed terrain at ocean or desert terrain nuclear tests. Collateral damage is eliminated by exploiting the fact that higher pressures are needed for air blast damage at lower yields, and using earth penetrator warheads or air bursts to constrain air blast pressures to civilian infrastructure, ensuring that they are not collapsed (causing casualties in modern steel or concrete buildings).

Note that the later (1962/4 and 1977) editions of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons replace the correct (curved line conversion) blast duration nomographs in the 1957 edition with simplistic Wn yield scaling (where n = 0.4 for drag sensitive targets), which is a simplification which fails to correctly model the fact that blast duration effects on overpressures are eliminated at very high yields because a minimum threshold blast pressure is needed to cause damage.

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

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

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

- Dr Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, 1957, pp. 180-3, 228-9.

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

(Quoted in 2006 on this blog here.

All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of DELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace":

"Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.

ABOVE: Why didn't Britain declare war on Russia when it jointly invaded Poland with the Nazis, or even later when Russia invaded Finland single-handed? Answer: Comintern had stuffed the British mass media, British universities, and even the Labour Party with Russian stooges! Barrister Denis Pritt, Labour MP, simply blamed the British government for not cosying up to Communist dictatorial Russia (in the same way Chamberlain had cosied up to Adolf Hitler's Nazis)! Pritt in 1936 went to watch the "Trial of the Sixteen" in Moscow, a show trial purge of Stalin's criticis that made a mockery of the law, but be defended Stalinism in his tract, "The Zinoviev Trial". He was only finally kicked out of the Labour Party after he defended Russia's invasion of Finland in popular Penguin Book Specials. But he wasn't alone. The communists of the British media used the same tactics as the Nazis to undermine or destroy critics, so they managed to churn out one-sided propaganda nearly as bad as the media saturation with anti-nuclear, anti-CO2 crap today.

Russian project 49 dual-primary thermonuclear weaponeer Dr Yuri Trutnev has an officially "proatom.ru"-published technical history of the design of the Russian nuclear weapons (which differ from UK-USA designs fundamentally) here (extracted from Russian "Atomic Strategy" No. 18, August 2005): "the problem of ensuring spherically symmetric compression of the secondary module was radically solved, since the time of “symmetrization” of the energy around the secondary module was much less than the time of compression of this module. ... The first two-stage thermonuclear charge, designated RDS-37, was developed in 1955 and successfully tested on November 22, 1955. The energy release of the charge in the experiment was 1.6 Mt, and since for safety reasons at the Semipalatinsk test site the charge was tested at partial power, the predicted full-scale energy release of the charge was ~ 3 Mt. The energy release amplification factor in RDS-37 was about two orders of magnitude, the charge did not use tritium, the thermonuclear fuel was lithium deuteride, and the main fissile material was U-238. ... Particular attention should be paid to the works of 1958. This year, a new type of thermonuclear charge, “product 49,” was tested [the double-primary H-bomb], which was the next step in the formation of a standard for thermonuclear charges (its development was completed in 1957, but testing on the SIP did not take place). The ideologists of this project and the developers of the physical charge circuit were Yu. N. Babaev and I. The peculiarity of the new charge was that, using the basic principles of the RDS-37, it was possible to: • significantly reduce overall parameters due to a new bold solution to the problem of transfer of X-ray radiation, which determines implosion; • simplify the layered structure of the secondary module, which turned out to be an extremely important practical decision. According to the conditions of adaptation to specific carriers, “product 49” was developed in a smaller overall weight category compared to the RDS-37 charge, but its specific volumetric energy release turned out to be 2.4 times greater.

"The physical design of the charge turned out to be extremely successful; the charge was transferred to service and subsequently underwent modernization associated with the replacement of primary energy sources. In 1958, together with Yu. N. Babaev, we managed to develop 4 thermonuclear charges, which were tested on the field in 7 full-scale tests, and all of them were successful. This work was practically implemented within 8 months of 1958. All of these charges used a new circuit, first introduced in Product 49. Their energy release ranged from 0.3 to 2.8 Mt. In addition, in 1958, under my leadership M. V. Fedulov also developed the lightest thermonuclear charge at that time according to the “product 49” design, which was also successfully tested. Work on the miniaturization of thermonuclear weapons was new at that time, and it was met with a certain misunderstanding and resistance. ... One of the well-known pages in the history of work on thermonuclear weapons of the USSR is the creation of a superbomb - the most powerful thermonuclear charge. I will dwell on some points of this development. ... Among the features of this charge, it should be noted that the large volume of the charge (due to its high energy release) required significant amounts of X-ray energy to carry out implosion. The developed nuclear charges did not satisfy this condition, and therefore, a previously developed two-stage thermonuclear charge with a relatively low energy release was used as the primary source of the “super-powerful charge”. This charge was developed by me and Yu. N. Babaev. ... In the next project (a return to the untested 1958 system) that I supervised, every effort was made to ensure near-perfect implosion symmetry. This brilliant work led to success, and in 1962, the problem of implementing thermonuclear ignition was solved in a special device. In other full-scale tests that followed, this success was consolidated, and as a result, thermonuclear ignition provided the calculated combustion of the secondary module with an energy release of 1 Mt. My co-authors in this development were V.B. Adamsky, Yu.N. Babaev, V.G. Zagrafov and V.N. Mokhov. ... This principle has found a variety of applications in the creation of fundamentally new types of thermonuclear charges, from special devices for the use of nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes to significant military applications." (Note there is a 2017 filmed interview of Trutnev - in Russian - linked here.)

This is the basis for both the Russian isentropic-compressed pure fusion secondary (99.85% clean) neutron bomb and related progress with strategic warheads:

“In 1966, VNIIEF conducted a successful test of the second generation charge, in which an almost doubling of the power density was achieved by increasing the contribution of fission reactions in the thermonuclear module. These results were subsequently used to create new third-generation products.” - A. A. Greshilov, N. D. Egupov and A. M. Matushchenko, Nuclear shield (official Russian nuclear weapons history), 2008, p171 (linked here: https://elib.biblioatom.ru/text/greshilov_yaderny-schit_2008/p171/ ). Note that first double-primary Project 49 Russian test on 23 February 1958 was rapidly weaponised as the 1364 kg 8F12/8F12N warhead for the 8K63 missile in 1959, according to http://militaryrussia.ru/blog/index-0-5.html which also gives a table of yields and masses of other Russian warheads: the 2.3 megaton warhead 8K15 for the 8K65 missile had a mass of 1546 kg; the 5 megaton 8F116 warhead for the 8K64 and 8K65 missiles had a mass of 2175 kg; the 6 megaton 8F117 for the 8K64 and other missiles had a mass of 2200 kg, etc. The diagram below shows a cut-away through the shells in the isentropically-compressed megaton secondary stage of the first Russian weapon without a central fission neutron-producing sparkplug (1.1 megaton Russian test number 218 at Novaya Zemlya on 24 December 1962, an air drop detonating at 1320 m altitude). This diagram was declassified in the official Russian "History of the domestic nuclear project - Report by the scientific director of RFNC-VNIIEF, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences R.I. Ilkaeva at the General Meeting, Department of Physical Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences December 17, 2012, RAS", after John H. Nuckolls' summary of the similar, 99.9% clean 10 megaton Ripple-2, tested 30 October 1962 as detailed in posts below (the detailed interior design analysis of the Russian megaton nuclear warhead for the R13 - which is on display in a Russian nuclear warhead design museum - is from the Russian sites here and here).

"... it is an important defect of 'arms control' agreements that the punishment or correction of even outright violation is not done automatically ... [in 1934 Ramsay] MacDonald and his supporters urged one of the least aggressive nations in Europe to disarm itself to a level equal with their potential attackers ... Probably as much as any other single group I think that these men of good will can be charged with causing World War II. [Italics are Kahn's own.] ... In March 1934, Stanley Baldwin, in answer to a statement by Winston Churchill to the effect that Germany was rearming and growing stronger than Great Britain, made his famous statement: 'If all our efforts at agreement fail [why 'all' and how do you define 'failure' until after the enemy secretly breaks the agreement and enemy starts a war, when it is too late?] ... in air strength and air power this country shall no longer be inferior to any country within striking distance of its shores'. In spite of this pledge, by 1935 the Germans had achieved parity or even air superiority and their rate of expansion was much larger than that of the British; thus the disparity grew with the years. ... On March 16, 1935, Hitler decreed conscription ... In April, the League [of Nations, the old version of the UN] ... unanimously voted that treaties should not be broken by unilateral action. ... At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to 'retaliate' if they attacked him. ... The technique he used is such an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs that it is of extreme value to all who are concerned with the problem of maintaining a peaceful and secure world to go over the story in some detail." - Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, pp. 390-392, 403. (Kahn then gives a long discussion of the "you have the choice"-way Hitler blackmailed President Hacha into signing over his country to the Nazis in March 1939, despite the worthless Munich agreement of 1938, using first-hand testimony from Hitler's translator at the 14 March 1939 Hitler-Hacha meeting, Paul Schmidt: "There were, said Hitler, 'two possibilities. The first was that the invasion of the German troops might develop into a battle. The resistance would then be broken down by force of arms with all available means. The other was that the entry of the German troops should take place in a peaceable manner ...'." Now the issue is this: Hitler used "peace" as an option to get what he wanted without violence. But populist propaganda claims Hitler was "violent". Nope: Hitler preferred to "peacefully" invade, "peacefully" gas opponents in gas chambers with musicians playing classical music at the deportation camp railway stations to prevent violence starting, etc. Reagan made the point in his March 1983 "evil empire" speech that the most evil thugs of all that instigate genocide hide behind the cloak of spurious pacifism!)

https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth/ (Peter Vanderwicken in the Harvard Business Review Magazine, May-June 1995): "The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works ... The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity. What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. ... The architect of the transformation was not a political leader or a constitutional convention but Joseph Pulitzer, who in 1883 bought the sleepy New York World and in 20 years made it the country’s largest newspaper. Pulitzer accomplished that by bringing drama to news—by turning news articles into stories ... His journalism took events out of their dry, institutional contexts and made them emotional rather than rational, immediate rather than considered, and sensational rather than informative. The press became a stage on which the actions of government were a series of dramas. ... The press swarmed on the story, which had all the necessary dramatic elements: a foot-dragging bureaucracy, a study finding that the country’s favorite fruit was poisoning its children, and movie stars opposing the pesticide. Sales of apples collapsed. Within months, Alar’s manufacturer withdrew it from the market, although both the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration stated that they believed Alar levels on apples were safe. The outcry simply overwhelmed scientific evidence. That happens all too often, Cynthia Crossen argues in her book Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America. ... Crossen writes, “more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause.” “Most members of the media are ill-equipped to judge a technical study,” Crossen correctly points out. “Even if the science hasn’t been explained or published in a U.S. journal, the media may jump on a study if it promises entertainment for readers or viewers. And if the media jump, that is good enough for many Americans.” ... A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Such an “emergency government can’t govern,” Weaver concludes. “Not only does public support for emergency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, but officials acting in the emergency mode can’t make meaningful public policies. According to the classic textbook definition, government is the authoritative allocation of values, and emergency government doesn’t authoritatively allocate values.” (Note that Richard Rhodes' Pulitzer prize winning books such as The making of the atomic bomb which uncritically quote Hiroshima firestorm lies and survivors nonsense about people running around without feet, play to this kind of emotional fantasy mythology of nuclear deterrence obfuscation so loved by the mass media.)

“... Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution ... It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea ....” – Ronald Reagan, Moscow State University, May 31, 1988 (quoted at our physics site, www.quantumfieldtheory.org). Text in blue on this blog is hyperlinked directly to reference material (so can be opened in another tab by right-clicking on it):

ABOVE: "missile gap" propaganda debunked by secret 1970s data; Kennedy relied on US nuclear superiority. Using a flawed analysis of nuclear weapons effects on Hiroshima - based on lying unclassified propaganda reports and ignorant dismissals of civil defense shelters in Russia (again based on Hiroshima propaganda by groves in 1945) - America allowed Russian nuclear superiority in the 1970s. Increasingly, the nuclear deterrent was used by Russia to stop the West from "interfering" with its aggressive invasions and wars, precisely Hitler's 1930s strategy with gas bombing knockout-blow threats used to engineer appeasement. BELOW: H-bomb effects and design secrecy led to tragic mass media delusions, such as the 18 February 1950 Picture Post claim that the H-bomb can devastate Australia (inspiring the Shute novel and movie "On the Beach" and also other radiation scams like "Dr Strangelove" to be used by Russia to stir up anti Western disarmament movement to help Russia win WWIII). Dad was a Civil Defense Corps Instructor in the UK when this was done (the civil defense effectiveness and weapon effects facts on shelters at UK and USA nuclear tests were kept secret and not used to debunk lying political appeasement propaganda tricks in the mass media by sensationalist "journalists" and Russian "sputniks"):

Message to mass-media journalists: please don't indulge in lying "no defence" propaganda as was done by most of the media in previous pre-war crises!

ABOVE: Russian State TV Channel 1 on the nuclear threat, 4 June 2024. This is not a matter of unthinkable escalation or a knockout blow that will disarm Russia entirely (by firing all its weapons at the West!). It is a matter of coercive threats, which may or may not be accompanied by "demonstration strikes". Putin knows that unlike former USSR territories (e.g. Ukraine) which have heavy duty shelters in cities, the West doesn't have such civil defense to make its nuclear deterrent credible, so there is an exploitable asymmetry for Putin. This Russian state TV Channel 1 "propaganda" is Russian language: it's not aimed at the West, but at Russians, to prepare the road for possible nuclear warfare with the West. This is not about the usual image of an escalatory WWIII, but about establishing Russian hegemony, by making the West back down! As in the 1930s, popular media "selective journalism" (mainstream fake/fashionable fairy tale news) ignores real threats, by using the trick of hyping up deception (knockout blows, escalation, etc.) to make reality appear "unthinkable". Don't be taken in again by this mass media scam, please!

Again, to recap: the biggest threat is nuclear coercion as occurred when Russia broke a ceasefire and resumed nuclear testing in 1961, and built the Berlin Wall, then in 1962 put nuclear weapons into Cuba's fanatical dictatorship. This is not the mainstream media portrayal of the "nuclear threat" (immediate knockout blow, total disarmament in a few seconds by exploding everything in the stockpile, which is loved by TV, newspapers, magazines, and films and which - like the gas bomb knockout blow hype of the 1930s - makes war appear "unthinkable" to support appeasement, disarmament and arms control delusions which are bits of paper that simply can't stop the real threats from dictatorships). At some point there may be a serious deliberate escalation to end the war, and we need to be prepared and ready to step up deterrence against this, or to respond rationally in some other way. The supply of F16s by NATO members to Ukraine to bomb targets in Russia will allow Putin the excuse he feels he needs to escalate nuclear threats further, so we must prepare. This is not "defeatism", but preparing for freedom to prevail, to win the war, to deter escalation, and to survive.

ABOVE: Example of a possible Russian 1985 1st Cold War SLBM first strike plan. The initial use of Russian SLBM launched nuclear missiles from off-coast against command and control centres (i.e. nuclear explosions to destroy warning satellite communications centres by radiation on satellites as well as EMP against ground targets, rather than missiles launched from Russia against cities, as assumed by 100% of the Cold War left-wing propaganda) is allegedly a Russian "fog of war" strategy. Such a "demonstration strike" is aimed essentially at causing confusion about what is going on, who is responsible - it is not quick or easy to finger-print high altitude bursts fired by SLBM's from submerged submarines to a particular country because you don't get fallout samples to identify isotopic plutonium composition. Russia could immediately deny the attack (implying, probably to the applause of the left-wingers that this was some kind of American training exercise or computer based nuclear weapons "accident", similar to those depicted in numerous anti-nuclear Cold War propaganda films). Thinly-veiled ultimatums and blackmail follow. America would not lose its population or even key cities in such a first strike (contrary to left-wing propaganda fiction), as with Pearl Harbor in 1941; it would lose its complacency and its sense of security through isolationism, and would either be forced into a humiliating defeat or a major war.

Before 1941, many warned of the risks but were dismissed on the basis that Japan was a smaller country with a smaller economy than the USA and war was therefore absurd (similar to the way Churchill's warnings about European dictators were dismissed by "arms-race opposing pacifists" not only in the 1930s, but even before WWI; for example Professor Cyril Joad documents in the 1939 book "Why War?" his first hand witnessing of Winston Churchill's pre-WWI warning and call for an arms-race to deter that war, as dismissed by the sneering Norman Angell who claimed an arms race would cause a war rather than avert one by bankrupting the terrorist state). It is vital to note that there is an immense pressure against warnings of Russian nuclear superiority even today, most of it contradictory. E.g. the left wing and Russian-biased "experts" whose voices are the only ones reported in the Western media (traditionally led by "Scientific American" and "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"), simultaneously claim Russia imposes such a terrible SLBM and ICBM nuclear threat that we must desperately disarm now, while also claiming that Russian tactical nuclear weapons probably won't work so aren't a threat that needs to be credibly deterred! This only makes sense as Russian siding propaganda. In similar vein, Teller-critic Hans Bethe also used to falsely "dismiss" Russian nuclear superiority by claiming (with quotes from Brezhnev about the peaceful intentions of Russia) that Russian delivery systems are "less accurate" than Western missiles (as if accuracy has anything to do with high altitude EMP strikes, where the effects cover huge areas, or large city targets. Such claims would then by repeatedly endlessly in the Western media by Russian biased "journalists" or agents of influence, and any attempt to point out the propaganda (i.e. he real world asymmetry: Russia uses cheap countervalue targetting on folk that don't have civil defense, whereas we need costly, accurate counterforce targetting because Russia has civil defense shelters that we don't have) became a "Reds under beds" argument, implying that the truth is dangerous to "peaceful coexistence"!

“Free peoples ... will make war only when driven to it by tyrants. ... there have been no wars between well-established democracies. ... the probability ... that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident [is] less than one chance in a thousand. ... there have been more than enough to provide robust statistics ... When toleration of dissent has persisted for three years, but not until then, we can call a new republic ‘well established.’ ... Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders ... using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation ... Republican behaviour ... in quite a few cases ... created an ‘appeasement trap.’ The republic tried to accommodate a tyrant as if he were a fellow republican; the tyrant concluded that he could safely make an aggressive response; eventually the republic replied furiously with war. The frequency of such errors on both sides is evidence that negotiating styles are not based strictly on sound reasoning.” - Spencer Weart, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (Yale University Press)

The Top Secret American intelligency report NIE 11-3/8-74 "Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict" warned on page 6: "the USSR has largely eliminated previous US quantitative advantages in strategic offensive forces." page 9 of the report estimated that the Russian's ICBM and SLBM launchers exceed the USAs 1,700 during 1970, while Russia's on-line missile throw weight had exceeded the USA's one thousand tons back in 1967! Because the USA had more long-range bombers which can carry high-yield bombs than Russia (bombers are more vulnerable to air defences so were not Russia's priority), it took a little longer for Russia to exceed the USA in equivalent megatons, but the 1976 Top Secret American report NIE 11-3/8-76 at page 17 shows that in 1974 Russia exceeded the 4,000 equivalent-megatons payload of USA missiles and aircraft (with less vulnerability for Russia, since most of Russia's nuclear weapons were on missiles not in SAM-vulnerable aircraft), amd by 1976 Russia could deliver 7,000 tons of payload by missiles compared to just 4,000 tons on the USA side. These reports were kept secret for decades to protect the intelligence sources, but they were based on hard evidence. For example, in August 1974 the Hughes Aircraft Company used a specially designed ship (Glomar Explorer, 618 feet long, developed under a secret CIA contract) to recover nuclear weapons and their secret manuals from a Russian submarine which sank in 16,000 feet of water, while in 1976 America was able to take apart the electronics systems in a state-of-the-art Russian MIG-25 fighter which was flown to Japan by defector Viktor Belenko, discovering that it used exclusively EMP-hard miniature vacuum tubes with no EMP-vulnerable solid state components.

There are four ways of dealing with aggressors: conquest (fight them), intimidation (deter them), fortification (shelter against their attacks; historically used as castles, walled cities and even walled countries in the case of China's 1,100 mile long Great Wall and Hadrian's Wall, while the USA has used the Pacific and Atlantic as successful moats against invasion, at least since Britain invaded Washington D.C. back in 1812), and friendship (which if you are too weak to fight, means appeasing them, as Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler for worthless peace promises). These are not mutually exclusive: you can use combinations. If you are very strong in offensive capability and also have walls to protect you while your back is turned, you can - as Teddy Roosevelt put it (quoting a West African proverb): "Speak softly and carry a big stick." But if you are weak, speaking softly makes you a target, vulnerable to coercion. This is why we don't send troops directly to Ukraine. When elected in 1960, Kennedy introduced "flexible response" to replace Dulles' "massive retaliation", by addressing the need to deter large provocations without being forced to decide between the unwelcome options of "surrender or all-out nuclear war" (Herman Kahn called this flexible response "Type 2 Deterrence"). This was eroded by both Russian civil defense and their emerging superiority in the 1970s: a real missiles and bombers gap emerged in 1972 when the USSR reached and then exceeded the 2,200 of the USA, while in 1974 the USSR achieve parity at 3,500 equivalent megatons (then exceeded the USA), and finally today Russia has over 2,000 dedicated clean enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons and we have none (except low-neutron output B61 multipurpose bombs). (Robert Jastrow's 1985 book How to make nuclear Weapons obsolete was the first to have graphs showing the downward trend in nuclear weapon yields created by the development of miniaturized MIRV warheads for missiles and tactical weapons: he shows that the average size of US warheads fell from 3 megatons in 1960 to 200 kilotons in 1980, and from a total of 12,000 megatons in 1960 to 3,000 megatons in 1980.)

The term "equivalent megatons" roughly takes account of the fact that the areas of cratering, blast and radiation damage scale not linearly with energy but as something like the 2/3 power of energy release; but note that close-in cratering scales as a significantly smaller power of energy than 2/3, while blast wind drag displacement of jeeps in open desert scales as a larger power of energy than 2/3. Comparisons of equivalent megatonnage shows, for example, that WWII's 2 megatons of TNT in the form of about 20,000,000 separate conventional 100 kg (0.1 ton) explosives is equivalent to 20,000,000 x (10-7)2/3 = 431 separate 1 megaton explosions! The point is, nuclear weapons are not of a different order of magnitude to conventional warfare, because: (1) devastated areas don't scale in proportion to energy release, (2) the number of nuclear weapons is very much smaller than the number of conventional bombs dropped in conventional war, (3) because of radiation effects like neutrons and intense EMP, it is possible to eliminate physical destruction by nuclear weapons by a combination of weapon design (e.g. very clean bombs like 99.9% fusion Dominic-Housatonic, or 95% fusion Redwing-Navajo) and burst altitude or depth for hard targets, and create a weapon that deters invasions credibly (without lying local fallout radiation hazards), something none of the biased "pacifist disarmament" lobbies (which attract Russian support) tell you, and (4) people at collateral damage distances have time to take cover from radiation and flying glass, blast winds, etc from nuclear explosions (which they don't in Ukraine and Gaza where similar blast pressures arrive more rapidly from smaller conventional explosions). There's a big problem with propaganda here.

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

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

Duncan Campbell's War Plan UK relies on the contradiction of claiming that the deliberately exaggerated UK Government worst-case civil defense "exercises" for training purposes are "realistic scenarios" (e.g. 1975 Inside Right, 1978 Scrum Half, 1980 Square Leg, 1982 Hard Rock planning), while simultaneously claiming the very opposite about reliable UK Government nuclear effects and sheltering effectiveness data, and hoping nobody would spot his contradictory tactics. He quotes extensively from these lurid worst-case scenario UK civil defense exercises ,as if they are factually defensible rather than imaginary fiction to put planners under the maximum possible stress (standard UK military policy of “Train hard to fight easy”), while ignoring the far more likely limited nuclear uses scenario of Sir John Hackett's Third World War. His real worry is the 1977 UK Government Training Manual for Scientific Advisers which War Plan UK quotes on p14: "a potential threat to the security of the United Kingdom arising from acts of sabotage by enemy agents, possibly assisted by dissident groups. ... Their aim would be to weaken the national will and ability to fight. ... Their significance should not be underestimated." On the next page, War Plan UK quotes J. B. S. Haldane's 1938 book Air Raid Precautions (ARP) on the terrible destruction Haldane witnessed on unprotected people in the Spanish civil war, without even mentioning that Haldane's point is pro-civil defense, pro-shelters, and anti-appeasement of dictatorship, the exact opposite of War Plan UK which wants Russia to run the world. On page 124 War Plan UK the false assertion is made that USA nuclear casualty data is "widely accepted" and true (declassified Hiroshima casaulty data for people in modern concrete buildings proves it to be lies) while the correct UK nuclear casualty data is "inaccurate", and on page 126, Duncan Campbell simply lies that the UK Government's Domestic Nuclear Shelters- Technical Guidance "ended up offering the public a selection of shelters half of which were invented in the Blitz ... None of the designs was ever tested." In fact, Frank Pavry (who studied similar shelters surviving near ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 with the British Mission to Japan_ and George R. Stanbury tested 15 Anderson shelters at the first UK nuclear explosion, Operation Hurricane in 1952, together with concrete structures, and many other improvised trench and earth-covered shelters were nuclear tested by USA and UK at trials in 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1958, and later at simulated nuclear explosions by Cresson Kearny of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA, having also earlier been exposed to early Russian nuclear tests (scroll down to see the evidence of this). Improved versions of war tested and nuclear weapons tested shelters! So war Plan UK makes no effort whatsoever to dig up the facts, and instead falsely claims the exact opposite of the plain unvarnished truth! War Plan UK shows its hypocrisy on page 383 in enthusiastically praising Russian civil defense:

"Training in elementary civil defence is given to everyone, at school, in industry or collective farms. A basic handbook of precautionary measures, Everybody must know this!, is the Russian Protect and Survive. The national civil defence corps is extensive, and is organized along military lines. Over 200,000 civil defence troops would be mobilized for rescue work in war. There are said to be extensive, dispersed and 'untouchable' food stockpiles; industrial workers are issued with kits of personal protection apparatus, said to include nerve gas counteragents such as atropine. Fallout and blast shelters are provided in the cities and in industrial complexes, and new buildings have been required to have shelters since the 1950s. ... They suggest that less than 10% - even as little as 5% - of the Soviet population would die in a major attack. [Less than Russia's loss of 12% of its population in WWII.]"

'LLNL achieved fusion ignition for the first time on Dec. 5, 2022. The second time came on July 30, 2023, when in a controlled fusion experiment, the NIF laser delivered 2.05 MJ of energy to the target, resulting in 3.88 MJ of fusion energy output, the highest yield achieved to date. On Oct. 8, 2023, the NIF laser achieved fusion ignition for the third time with 1.9 MJ of laser energy resulting in 2.4 MJ of fusion energy yield. “We’re on a steep performance curve,” said Jean-Michel Di Nicola, co-program director for the NIF and Photon Science’s Laser Science and Systems Engineering organization. “Increasing laser energy can give us more margin against issues like imperfections in the fuel capsule or asymmetry in the fuel hot spot. Higher laser energy can help achieve a more stable implosion, resulting in higher yields.” ... “The laser itself is capable of higher energy without fundamental changes to the laser,” said NIF operations manager Bruno Van Wonterghem. “It’s all about the control of the damage. Too much energy without proper protection, and your optics blow to pieces.” ' - https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/llnls-nif-delivers-record-laser-energy

NOTE: the "problem" very large lasers "required" to deliver ~2MJ (roughly 0.5 kg of TNT energy) to cause larger fusion explosions of 2mm diameter capsules of frozen D+T inside a 1 cm diameter energy reflecting hohlraum, and the "problem" of damage to the equipment caused by the explosions, is immaterial to clean nuclear deterrent development based on this technology, because in a clean nuclear weapon, whatever laser or other power ignition system is used only has to be fired once, so it needs to be less robust than the NIF lasers which are used repeatedly. Similarly, damage done to the system by the explosion is also immaterial for a clean nuclear weapon, in which the weapon is detonated once only! This is exactly the same point which finally occurred during a critical review of the first gun-type assembly nuclear weapon, in which the fact it would only ever be fired once (unlike a field artillery gun) enabled huge reductions in the size of the device, into a practical weapon, as described by General Leslie M. Groves on p163 of his 1962 book Now it can be told: the story of the Manhattan Project:

"Out of the Review Committee's work came one important technical contribution when Rose pointed out ... that the durability of the gun was quite immaterial to success, since it would be destroyed in the explosion anyway. Self-evident as this seemed once it was mentioned, it had not previously occurred to us. Now we could make drastic reductions in ... weight and size."

This principle also applies to weaponizing NIF clean fusion explosion technology. General Groves' book was reprinted in 1982 with a useful Introduction by Edward Teller on the nature of nuclear weapons history: "History in some ways resembles the relativity principle in science. What is observed depends on the observer. Only when the perspective of the observer is known, can proper corrections be made. ... The general ... very often managed to ignore complexity and arrive at a result which, if not ideal, at least worked. ... For Groves, the Manhattan project seemed a minor assignment, less significant than the construction of the Pentagon. He was deeply disappointed at being given the job of supervising the development of an atomic weapon, since it deprived him of combat duty. ... We must find ways to encourage mutual understanding and significant collaboration between those who defend their nation with their lives and those who can contribute the ideas to make that defense successful. Only by such cooperation can we hope that freedom will survive, that peace will be preserved."

General Groves similarly comments in Chapter 31, "A Final Word" of Now it can be told:

"No man can say what would have been the result if we had not taken the steps ... Yet, one thing seems certain - atomic energy would have been developed somewhere in the world ... I do not believe the United States ever would have undertaken it in time of peace. Most probably, the first developer would have been a power-hungry nation, which would then have dominated the world completely ... it is fortunate indeed for humanity that the initiative in this field was gained and kept by the United States. That we were successful was due entirely to the hard work and dedication of the more than 600,000 Americans who comprised and directly supported the Manhattan Project. ... we had the full backing of our government, combined with the nearly infinite potential of American science, engineering and industry, and an almost unlimited supply of people endowed with ingenuity and determination."

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

Additionally, the test was made in a hurry before an atmospheric teat ban treaty, and this rushed use of a standard air drop steel casing made the tested weapon much heavier than a properly weaponized Ripple II. The key point is that a 10 kt fission device set off a ~10 Mt fusion explosion, a very clean deterrent. Applying this Ripple II 1,000-factor multiplicative staging figure directly to this technology for clean nuclear warheads, a 0.5 kg TNT D+T fusion capsule would set off a 0.5 ton TNT 2nd stage of LiD, which would then set off a 0.5 kt 3rd stage "neutron bomb", which could then be used to set off a 500 kt 4th stage or "strategic nuclear weapon". In practice, this multiplication factor of 1,000 given by Ripple II in 1962 from 10 kt to 10 Mt may not be immediately achievable to get from ~1 kg TNT yield to 1 ton TNT, so a few more tiny stages may be needed for the lower yield. But there is every reason to forecast that with enough research, improvements will be possible and the device will become a reality. It is therefore now possible not just in "theory" or in principle, but with evidence obtained from practical experimentation, using suitable already-proved technical staging systems used in 1960s nuclear weapon tests successfully, to design 100% clean fusion nuclear warheads! Yes, the details have been worked out, yes the technology has been tested in piecemeal fashion. All that is now needed is a new, but quicker and cheaper, Star Wars program or Manhattan Project style effort to pull the components together. This will constitute a major leap forward in the credibility of the deterrence of aggressors.

ABOVE: as predicted, the higher the input laser pulse for the D+T initiator of a clean multiplicatively-staged nuclear deterrent, the lower the effect of plasma instabilities and asymmetries and the greater the fusion burn. To get ignition (where the x-ray energy injected into the fusion hohlraum by the laser is less than the energy released in the D+T fusion burn) they have had to use about 2 MJ delivered in 10 ns or so, equivalent to 0.5 kg of TNT equivalent. But for deterrent use, why use such expensive, delicate lasers? Why not just use one-shot miniaturised x-ray tubes with megavolt electron acceleration, powered a suitably ramped pulse from a chemical explosion for magnetic flux compression current generation? At 10% efficiency, you need 0.5 x 10 = 5 kg of TNT! Even at 1% efficiency, 50 kg of TNT will do. Once the D+T gas capsule's hohlraum is well over 1 cm in size, to minimise the risk of imperfections that cause asymmetries, you don't any longer need focussed laser beams to enter tiny apertures. You might even be able to integrate many miniature flash x-ray tubes (each designed to burn out when firing one pulse of a MJ or so) into a special hohlraum. Humanity urgently needs a technological arms race akin to Reagan's Star Wars project, to deter the dictators from invasions and WWIII. In the conference video above, a question was asked about the real efficiency of the enormous repeat-pulse capable laser system's efficiency (not required for a nuclear weapon whose components only require the capability to be used once, unlike lab equipment): the answer is that 300 MJ was required by the lab lasers to fire a 2 MJ pulse into the D+T capsule's x-ray hohlraum, i.e. their lasers are only 0.7% efficient! So why bother? We know - from the practical use of incoherent fission primary stage x-rays to compress and ignite fusion capsules in nuclear weapons - that you simply don't need coherent photons from a laser for this purpose. The sole reason they are approaching the problem with lasers is that they began their lab experiments decades ago with microscopic sized fusion capsules and for those you need a tightly focussed beam to insert energy through a tiny hohlraum aperture. But now they are finally achieving success with much larger fusion capsules (to minimise instabilities that caused the early failures), it may be time to change direction. A whole array of false "no-go theorems" can and will be raised by ignorant charlatan "authorities" against any innovation; this is the nature of the political world. There is some interesting discussion of why clean bombs aren't in existence today, basically the idealized theory (which works fine for big H-bombs but ignores small-scale asymmetry problems which are important only at low ignition energy) understimated the input energy required for fusion ignition by a factor of 2000:

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

In the final diagram above, we illustrate an example of what could very well occur in the near future, just to really poke a stick into the wheels of "orthodoxy" in nuclear weapons design: is it possible to just use a lot of (perhaps hardened for higher currents, perhaps no) pulsed current driven microwave tubes from kitchen microwave ovens, channelling their energy using waveguides (simply metal tubes, i.e. electrical Faraday cages, which reflect and thus contain microwaves) into the hohlraum, and make the pusher of dipole molecules (like common salt, NaCl) which is a good absorber of microwaves (as everybody knows from cooking in microwave ovens)? It would be extremely dangerous, not to mention embarrassing, if this worked, but nobody had done any detailed research into the possibility due to groupthink orthodoxy and conventional boxed in thinking! Remember, the D+T capsule just needs extreme compression and this can be done by any means that works. Microwave technology is now very well-established. It's no good trying to keep anything of this sort "secret" (either officially or unofficially) since as history shows, dictatorships are the places where "crackpot"-sounding ideas (such as douple-primary Project "49" Russian thermonuclear weapon designs, Russian Sputnik satellites, Russian Novichok nerve agent, Nazi V1 cruise missiles, Nazi V2 IRBM's, etc.) can be given priority by loony dictators. We have to avoid, as Edward Teller put it (in his secret commentary debunking Bethe's false history of the H-bomb, written AFTER the Teller-Ulam breakthrough), "too-narrow" thinking (which Teller said was still in force on H-bomb design even then). Fashionable hardened orthodoxy is the soft underbelly of "democracy" (a dictatorship by the majority, which is always too focussed on fashionable ideas and dismissive of alternative approaches in science and technology). Dictatorships (minorities against majorities) have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of concern for the fake "no-go theorems" used by Western anti-nuclear "authorities" to ban anything but fashionable groupthink science.

ABOVE: 1944-dated film of the Head of the British Mission to Los Alamos, neutron discoverer James Chadwick, explaining in detail to American how hard it was for him to discover the neutron, taking 10 years on a shoe-string budget, mostly due to having insufficiently strong sources of alpha particles to bombard nuclei in a cloud chamber! The idea of the neutron came from his colleague Rutherford. Chadwick reads his explanation while rapidly rotating a pencil in his right hand, perhaps indicating the stress he was under in 1944. In 1946, when British participation at Los Alamos ended, Chadwick wrote the first detailed secret British report on the design of a three-stage hydrogen bomb, another project that took over a decade. In the diagram below, it appears that the American Mk17 only had a single secondary stage like the similar yield 1952 Mike design. The point here is that popular misunderstanding of the simple mechanism of x-ray energy transfer for higher yield weapons may be creating a dogmatic attitude even in secret nuclear weaponeer design labs, where orthodoxy is followed too rigorously. The Russians (see quotes on the latest blog post here) state they used two entire two-stage thermonuclear weapons with a combined yield of 1 megaton to set off their 50 megaton test in 1961. If true, you can indeed use two-stage hydrogen bombs as an "effective primary" to set off another secondary stage, of much higher yield. Can this be reversed in the sense of scaling it down so you have several bombs-within-bombs, all triggered by a really tiny first stage? In other words, can it be applied to neutron bomb design?

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

The 1946 Report of the British Mission to Japan, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compiled by a team of 16 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during November 1945, which included 10 UK Home Office civil defence experts (W. N. Thomas, J. Bronowski, D. C. Burn, J. B. Hawker, H. Elder, P. A. Badland, R. W. Bevan, F. H. Pavry, F. Walley, O. C. Young, S. Parthasarathy, A. D. Evans, O. M. Solandt, A. E. Dark, R. G. Whitehead and F. G. S. Mitchell) found: "Para. 26. Reinforced concrete buildings of very heavy construction in Hiroshima, even when within 200 yards of the centre of damage, remained structurally undamaged. ... Para 28. These observations make it plain that reinforced concrete framed buildings can resist a bomb of the same power detonated at these heights, without employing fantastic thicknesses of concrete. ... Para 40. The provision of air raid shelters throughout Japan was much below European standards. ... in Hiroshima ... they were semi-sunk, about 20 feet long, had wooden frames, and 1.5-2 feet of earth cover. ... Exploding so high above them, the bomb damaged none of these shelters. ... Para 42. These observations show that the standard British shelters would have performed well against a bomb of the same power exploded at such a height. Anderson shelters, properly erected and covered, would have given protection. Brick or concrete surfac shelters with adequate reinforcement would have remained safe from collapse. The Morrison shelter is designed only to protect its occupants from the refuge load of a house, and this it would have done. Deep shelters such as the refuge provided by the London Underground would have given complete protection. ... Para 60. Buildings and walls gave complete protection from flashburn."

Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons in Table 12.21 on p547 flunks making this point by giving data without citing its source to make it credible to readers: it correlated 14% mortality (106 killed out of 775 people in Hiroshima's Telegraph Office) to "moderate damage" at 500m in Hiroshima (the uncited "secret" source was NP-3041, Table 12, applying to unwarned people inside modern concrete buildings).

"A weapon whose basic design would seem to provide the essence of what Western morality has long sought for waging classical battlefield warfare - to keep the war to a struggle between the warriors and exclude the non-combatants and their physical assets - has been violently denounced, precisely because it achieves this objective." - Samuel T. Cohen (quoted in Chapman Pincher, The secret offensive, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1985, Chapter 15: The Neutron Bomb Offensive, p210).

The reality is, dedicated enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons were used to credibly deter the concentrations of force required for triggering of WWIII during the 1st Cold War, and the thugs who support Russian propaganda for Western disarmament got rid of them on our side, but not on the Russian side. Air burst neutron bombs or even as subsurface earth penetrators of relatively low fission yield (where the soil converts energy that would otherwise escape as blast and radiation into ground shock for destroying buried tunnels - new research on cratering shows that a 20 kt subsurface burst creates similar effects on buried hard targets as a 1 Mt surface burst), they cause none of the vast collateral damage to civilians that we see now in Ukraine and Gaza, or that we saw in WWII and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. This is 100% contrary to CND propaganda which is a mixture of lying on nuclear explosion collateral damage, escalation/knockout blow propaganda (of the type used to start WWII by appeasers) and lying on the designs of nuclear weapons in order to ensure the Western side (but not the thugs) gets only incredible "strategic deterrence" that can't deter the invasions that start world wars (e.g. Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939.) "Our country entered into an agreement in Budapest, Hungary when the Soviet Union was breaking up that we would guarantee the independence of Ukraine." - Tom Ramos. There really is phoney nuclear groupthink left agenda politics at work here: credible relatively clean tactical nuclear weapons are banned in the West but stocked by Russia, which has civil defense shelters to make its threats far more credible than ours! We need low-collateral damage enhanced-neutron and earth-penetrator options for the new Western W93 warhead, or we remain vulnerable to aggressive coercion by thugs, and invite invasions. Ambiguity, the current policy ("justifying" secrecy on just what we would do in any scenario) actually encourages experimental provocations by enemies to test what we are prepared to do (if anything), just as it did in 1914 and the 1930s.

ABOVE: 0.2 kt (tactical yield range) Ruth nuclear test debris, with lower 200 feet of the 300 ft steel tower surviving in Nevada, 1953. Note that the yield of the tactical invasion-deterrent Mk54 Davy Crockett was only 0.02 kt, 10 times less than than 0.2 kt Ruth.

It should be noted that cheap and naive "alternatives" to credible deterrence of war were tried in the 1930s and during the Cold War and afterwards, with disastrous consequences. Heavy "peaceful" oil sanctions and other embargoes against Japan for its invasion of China between 1931-7 resulted in the plan for the Pearl Harbor surprise attack of 7 December 1941, with subsequent escalation to incendiary city bombing followed nuclear warfare against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Attlee's pressure on Truman to guarantee no use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean War (leaked straight to Stalin by the Cambridge Spy Ring), led to an escalation of that war causing the total devastation of the cities of that country by conventional bombing (a sight witnessed by Sam Cohen, that motivated his neutron bomb deterrent of invasions), until Eisenhower was elected and reversed Truman's decision, leading not to the "escalatory Armageddon" assertions of Attlee, but to instead to a peaceful armistice! Similarly, as Tom Ramos argues in From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Kennedy's advisers who convinced him to go ahead with the moonlit 17 April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba without any USAF air support, which led to precisely what they claimed they would avoid: an escalation of aggression from Russia in Berlin, with the Berlin Wall going up on 17 August 1961 because any showing weakness to an enemy, as in the bungled invasion of Cuba, is always a green light to dictators to go ahead with revolutions, invasions and provocations everywhere else. Rather than the widely hyped autistic claims from disarmers and appeasers about "weakness bringing peace by demonstrating to the enemy that they have nothing to fear from you", the opposite result always occurs. The paranoid dictator seizes the opportunity to strike first. Similarly, withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021 was a clear green light to Russia to go ahead with a full scale invasion of Ukraine, reigniting the Cold War. von Neumann and Morgenstein's Minimax theorem for winning games - minimise the maximum possible loss - fails with offensive action in war because it sends a signal of weakness to the enemy, which does not treat war as a game with rules to be obeyed. Minimax is only valid for defense, such as civil defense shelters used by Russia to make their threats more credible than ours. The sad truth is that cheap fixes don't work, no matter how much propaganda is behind them. You either need to militarily defeat the enemy or at least economically defeat them using proven Cold War arms race techniques (not merely ineffective sanctions, which they can bypass by making alliances with Iran, North Korea, and China). Otherwise, you are negotiating peace from a position of weakness, which is called appeasement, or collaboration with terrorism.

"Following the war, the Navy Department was intent to see the effects of an atomic blast on naval warships ... the press was invited to witness this one [Crossroads-Able, 23.5 kt at 520 feet altitude, 1 July 1946, Bikini Atoll]. ... The buildup had been too extravagant. Goats that had been tethered on warship decks were still munching their feed, and the atoll's palm trees remained standing, unscathed. The Bikini test changed public attitudes. Before July 1, the world stood in awe of a weapon that had devastated two cities and forced the Japanese Empire to surrender. After that date, the bomb was still a terrible weapon, but a limited one." - Tom Ramos (LLNL nuclear weaponeer and nuclear pumped X-ray laser developer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Prevent Nuclear War, Naval Institute Press, 2022, pp43-4.

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

ILLUSTRATION: the threat of WWII and the need to deter it was massively derided by popular pacifism which tended to make "jokes" of the Nazi threat until too late (example of 1938 UK fiction on this above; Charlie Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator" is another example), so three years after the Nuremberg Laws and five years after illegal rearmament was begun by the Nazis, in the UK crowds of "pacifists" in Downing Street, London, support friendship with the top racist, dictatorial Nazis in the name of "world peace". The Prime Minister used underhand techniques to try to undermine appeasement critics like Churchill and also later to get W. E. Johns fired from both editorships of Flying (weekly) and Popular Flying (monthly) to make it appear everybody "in the know" agreed with his actions, hence the contrived "popular support" for collaborating with terrorists depicted in these photos. The same thing persists today; the 1920s and 1930s "pacifist" was also driven by "escalation" and "annihilation" claims explosions, fire and WMD poison gas will kill everybody in a "knockout blow", immediately any war breaks out.

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

"Fuchs reasoned that [the very low energy, 1-10 kev, approximately 10-100 lower energy than medical] x-rays from the [physically separated] uranium explosion would reach the tamper of beryllium oxide, heat it, ionize the constituents and cause them to implode - the 'ionization implosion' concept of von Neumann but now applied to deuterium and tritium contained within beryllium oxide. To keep the radiation inside the tamper, Fuchs proposed to enclose the device inside a casing impervious to radiation. The implosion induced by the radiation would amplify the compression ... and increase the chance of the fusion bomb igniting. The key here is 'separation of the atomic charge and thermonuclear fuel, and compression of the latter by radiation travelling from the former', which constitutes 'radiation implosion'." (This distinction between von Neumann's "ionization implosion" INSIDE the tamper, of denser tamper expanding and thus compressing lower density fusion fuel inside, and Fuchs' OUTSIDE capsule "radiation implosion", is key even today for isentropic H-bomb design; it seems Teller's key breakthroughs were not separate stages or implosion but rather radiation mirrors and ablative recoil shock compression, where radiation is used to ablate a dense pusher of Sausage designs like Mike in 1952 etc., a distinction not to be confused for the 1944 von Neumann and 1946 Fuchs implosion mechanisms!

It appears Russian H-bombs used von Neumann's "ionization implosion" and Fuchs's "radiation implosion" for RDS-37 on 22 November 1955 and also in their double-primary 23 February 1958 test and subsequently, where their fusion capsules reportedly contained a BeO or other low-density outer coating, which would lead to quasi-isentropic compression, more effective for low density secondary stages than purely ablative recoil shock compression. This accounts for the continuing classification of the April 1946 Superbomb Conference (the extract of 32 pages linked here is so severely redacted that it is less helpful than the brief but very lucid summary of its technical content, in the declassified FBI compilation of reports concerning data Klaus Fuchs sent to Stalin, linked here!). Teller had all the knowledge he needed in 1946, but didn't go ahead because he made the stupid error of killing progress off by his own "no-go theorem" against compression of fusion fuel. Teller did a "theoretical" calculation in which he claimed that compression has no effect on the amount of fusion burn because the compressed system is simply scaled down in size so that the same efficiency of fusion burn occurs, albeit faster, and then stops as the fuel thermally expands. This was wrong. Teller discusses the reason for his great error in technical detail during his tape-recorded interview by Chuck Hansen at Los Alamos on 7 June 1993 (C. Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, 2nd ed., pp. II-176-7):

"Now every one of these [fusion] processes varied with the square of density. If you compress the thing, then in one unit's volume, each of the 3 important processes increased by the same factor ... Therefore, compression (seemed to be) useless. Now when ... it seemed clear that we were in trouble, then I wanted very badly to find a way out. And it occurred to be than an unprecedentedly strong compression will just not allow much energy to go into radiation. Therefore, something had to be wrong with my argument and then, you know, within minutes, I knew what must be wrong ... [energy] emission occurs when an electron and a nucleus collide. Absorption does not occur when a light quantum and a nucleus ... or ... electron collide; it occurs when a light quantum finds an electron and a nucleus together ... it does not go with the square of the density, it goes with the cube of the density." (This very costly theoretical error, wasting five years 1946-51, could have been resolved by experimental nuclear testing. There is always a risk of this in theoretical physics, which is why experiments are done to check calculations before prizes are handed out. The ban on nuclear testing is a luddite opposition to technological progress in improving deterrence.)

(This 1946-51 theoretical "no-go theorem" anti-compression error of Teller's, which was contrary to the suggestion of compression at the April 1946 superbomb conference as Teller himself refers to on 14 August 1952, and which was corrected only by comparison of the facts about compression validity in pure fission cores in Feb '51 after Ulam's argument that month for fission core compression by lens focussed primary stage shock waves, did not merely lead to Teller's dismissal of vital compression ideas. It also led to his false equations - exaggerating the cooling effect of radiation emission - causing underestimates of fusion efficiency in all theoretical calculations done of fusion until 1951! For this reason, Teller later repudiated the calculations that allegedly showed his Superbomb would fizzle; he argued that if it had been tested in 1946, the detailed data obtained - regardless of whatever happened - would have at least tested the theory which would have led to rapid progress, because the theory was wrong. The entire basis of the cooling of fusion fuel by radiation leaking out was massively exaggerated until Lawrence Livermore weaponeer John Nuckolls showed that there is a very simple solution: use baffle re-radiated, softened x-rays for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel, e.g. very cold 0.3 kev x-rays rather than the usual 1-10 kev cold-warm x-rays emitted directly from the fission primary. Since the radiation losses are proportional to the fourth-power of the x-ray energy or temperature, losses are virtually eliminated, allowing very efficient staging as for Nuckolls' 99.9% 10 Mt clean Ripple II, detonated on 30 October 1962 at Christmas Island. Teller's classical Superbomb was actually analyzed by John C. Solem in a 15 December 1978 report, A modern analysis of Classical Super, LA-07615, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by mainstream historian Alex Wellerstein, FOIA 17-00131-H, 12 June 2017; according to a list of FOIA requests at https://www.governmentattic.org/46docs/NNSAfoiaLogs_2016-2020.pdf. However, a google search for the documents Dr Wellerstein requested shows only a few at the US Gov DOE Opennet OSTI database or otherwise online yet e.g. LA-643 by Teller, On the development of Thermonuclear Bombs dated 16 Feb. 1950. The page linked here stating that report was "never classified" is mistaken! One oddity about Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" is that the even if fusion rates were independent of density, you would still want compression of fissile material in a secondary stage such as a radiation imploded Alarm Clock, because the whole basis of implosion fission bombs is the benefit of compression; another issue is that even if fusion rates are unaffected by density, inward compression would still help to delay the expansion of the fusion system which leads to cooling and quenching of the fusion burn.)

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

In fact (see Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear warhead designer Nuckolls' explanation in report UCRL-74345): "The rates of burn, energy deposition by charged reaction products, and electron-ion heating are proportional to the density, and the inertial confinement time is proportional to the radius. ... The burn efficiency is proportional to the product of the burn rate and the inertial confinement time ...", i.e. the fusion burn rate is directly proportional to the fuel density, which in turn is of course inversely proportional to the cube of its radius. But the inertial confinement time for fusion to occur is proportional to the radius, so the fusion stage efficiency in a nuclear weapon is the product of the burn rate (i.e., 1/radius^3) and time (i.e., radius), so efficiency ~ radius/(radius^3) ~ 1/radius^2. Therefore, for a given fuel temperature, the total fusion burn, or the efficiency of the fusion stage, is inversely proportional to the square of the compressed radius of the fuel! (Those condemning Teller's theoretical errors or "arrogance" should be aware that he pushed hard all the time for experimental nuclear tests of his ideas, to check if they were correct, exactly the right thing to do scientifically and others who read his papers had the opportunity to point out any theoretical errors, but was rebuffed by those in power, who used a series of contrived arguments to deny progress, based upon what Harry would call "subconscious bias", if not arrogant, damning, overt bigotry against the kind of credible, overwhelming deterrence which had proved lacking a decade earlier, leading to WWII. This callousness towards human suffering in war and under dictatorship existed in some UK physicists too: Joseph Rotblat's hatred of anything to deter Russia be it civil defense or tactical neutron bombs of the West - he had no problem smiling and patting Russia's neutron bomb when visiting their labs during cosy groupthink deluded Pugwash campaigns for Russian-style "peaceful collaboration" - came from deep family communist convictions, since his brother was serving in the Red Army in 1944 when he alleged he heard General Groves declare that the bomb must deter Russia! Rotblat stated he left Los Alamos as a result. The actions of these groups are analogous to the "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" in the 1930s. After Truman ordered a H-bomb, Bradbury at Los Alamos had to start a "Family Committee" because Teller had a whole "family" of H-bomb designs, ranging from the biggest, "Daddy", through various "Alarm Clocks", all the way down to small internally-boosted fission tactical weapons. From Teller's perspective, he wasn't putting all eggs in one basket.)

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

There is more to Fuchs' influence on the UK H-bomb than I go into that paper; Chapman Pincher alleged that Fuchs was treated with special leniency at his trial and later he was given early release in 1959 because of his contributions and help with the UK H-bomb as author of the key Fuchs-von Neumann x-ray compression mechanism patent. For example, Penney visited Fuchs in June 1952 in Stafford Prison; see pp309-310 of Frank Close's 2019 book "Trinity". Close argues that Fuchs gave Penney a vital tutorial on the H-bomb mechanism during that prison visit. That wasn't the last help, either, since the UK Controller for Atomic Energy Sir Freddie Morgan wrote Penney on 9 February 1953 that Fuchs was continuing to help. Another gem: Close gives, on p396, the story of how the FBI became suspicious of Edward Teller, after finding a man of his name teaching at the NY Communist Workers School in 1941 - the wrong Edward Teller, of course - yet Teller's wife was indeed a member of the Communist-front "League of women shoppers" in Washington, DC.

Chapman Pincher, who attended the Fuchs trial, writes about Fuchs hydrogen bomb lectures to prisoners in chapter 19 of his 2014 autobiography, Dangerous to know (Biteback, London, pp217-8): "... Donald Hume ... in prison had become a close friend of Fuchs ... Hume had repaid Fuchs' friendship by organising the smuggling in of new scientific books ... Hume had a mass of notes ... I secured Fuchs's copious notes for a course of 17 lectures ... including how the H-bomb works, which he had given to his fellow prisoners ... My editor agreed to buy Hume's story so long as we could keep the papers as proof of its authenticity ... Fuchs was soon due for release ..."

Chapman Pincher wrote about this as the front page exclusive of the 11 June 1952 Daily Express, "Fuchs: New Sensation", the very month Penney visited Fuchs in prison to receive his H-bomb tutorial! UK media insisted this was evidence that UK security still wasn't really serious about deterring further nuclear spies, and the revelations finally culminated in the allegations that the MI5 chief 1956-65 Roger Hollis was a Russian fellow-traveller (Hollis was descended from Peter the Great, according to his elder brother Chris Hollis' 1958 book Along the Road to Frome) and GRU agent of influence, codenamed "Elli". Pincher's 2014 book, written aged 100, explains that former MI5 agent Peter Wright suspected Hollis was Elli after evidence collected by MI6 agent Stephen de Mowbray was reported to the Cabinet Secretary. Hollis is alleged to have deliberately fiddled his report of interviewing GRU defector Igor Gouzenko on 21 November 1945 in Canada. Gouzenko had exposed the spy and Groucho Marx lookalike Dr Alan Nunn May (photo below), and also a GRU spy in MI5 codenamed Elli, who used only duboks (dead letter boxes), but Gouzenko told Pincher that when Hollis interviewed him in 1945 he wrote up a lengthy false report claiming to discredit many statements by Gouzenko: "I could not understand how Hollis had written so much when he had asked me so little. The report was full of nonsense and lies. As [MI5 agent Patrick] Stewart read the report to me [during the 1972 investigation of Hollis], it became clear that it had been faked to destroy my credibility so that my information about the spy in MI5 called Elli could be ignored. I suspect that Hollis was Elli." (Source: Pincher, 2014, p320.) Christopher Andrew claimed Hollis couldn't have been GRU spy Elli because KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky suggested it was the KGB spy Leo Long (sub-agent of KGB spy Anthony Blunt). However, Gouzenko was GRU, not KGB like Long and Gordievsky! Gordievsky's claim that "Elli" was on the cover of Long's KGB file was debunked by KGB officer Oleg Tsarev, who found that Long's codename was actually Ralph! Another declassified Russian document, from General V. Merkulov to Stalin dated 24 Nov 1945, confirmed Elli was a GRU agent inside british intelligence, whose existence was betrayed by Gouzenko. In Chapter 30 of Dangerous to Know, Pincher related how he was given a Russian suitcase sized microfilm enlarger by 1959 Hollis spying eyewitness Michael J. Butt, doorman for secret communist meetings in London. According to Butt, Hollis delivered documents to Brigitte Kuczynski, younger sister of Klaus Fuchs' original handler, the notorious Sonia aka Ursula. Hollis allegedly provided Minox films to Brigitte discretely when walking through Hyde Park at 8pm after work. Brigitte gave her Russian made Minox film enlarger to Butt to dispose of, but he kept it in his loft as evidence. (Pincher later donated it to King's College.) Other more circumstantial evidence is that Hollis recruited the spy Philby, Hollis secured spy Blunt immunity from prosecution, Hollis cleared Fuchs in 1943, and MI5 allegedly destroyed Hollis' 1945 interrogation report on Gouzenko, to prevent the airing of the scandal that it was fake after checking it with Gouzenko in 1972.

It should be noted that the very small number of Russian GRU illegal agents in the UK and the very small communist party membership had a relatively large influence on nuclear policy via infiltration of unions which had block votes in the Labour Party, as well the indirect CND and "peace movement" lobbies saturating the popular press with anti-civil defence propaganda to make the nuclear deterrent totally incredible for any provocation short of a direct all-out countervalue attack. Under such pressure, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government abolished the UK Civil Defence Corps, making the UK nuclear deterrent totally incredible against major provocations, in March 1968. While there was some opposition to Wilson, it was focussed on his profligate nationalisation policies which were undermining the economy and thus destabilizing military expenditure for national security. Peter Wright’s 1987 book Spycatcher and various other sources, including Daily Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp's book Walking on Water, documented that on 8 May 1968, the Bank of England's director Cecil King, who was also Chairman of Daily Mirror newspapers, Mirror editor Cudlipp and the UK Ministry of Defence's anti-nuclear Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, met at Lord Mountbatten's house in Kinnerton Street, London, to discuss a coup e'tat to overthrow Wilson and make Mountbatten the UK President, a new position. King's position, according to Cudlipp - quite correctly as revealed by the UK economic crises of the 1970s when the UK was effectively bankrupt - was that Wilson was setting the UK on the road to financial ruin and thus military decay. Zuckerman and Mountbatten refused to take part in a revolution, however Wilson's government was attacked by the Daily Mirror in a front page editorial by Cecil King two days later, on 10 May 1968, headlined "Enough is enough ... Mr Wilson and his Government have lost all credibility, all authority." According to Wilson's secretary Lady Falkender, Wilson was only told of the coup discussions in March 1976.

CND and the UK communist party alternatively tried to claim, in a contradictory way, that they were (a) too small in numbers to have any influence on politics, and (b) they were leading the country towards utopia via unilateral nuclear disarmament saturation propaganda about nuclear weapons annihilation (totally ignoring essential data on different nuclear weapon designs, yields, heights of burst, the "use" of a weapon as a deterrent to PREVENT an invasion of concentrated force, etc.) via the infiltrated BBC and most other media. Critics pointed out that Nazi Party membership in Germany was only 5% when Hitler became dictator in 1933, while in Russia there were only 200,000 Bolsheviks in September 1917, out of 125 million, i.e. 0.16%. Therefore, the whole threat of such dictatorships is a minority seizing power beyond it justifiable numbers, and controlling a majority which has different views. Traditional democracy itself is a dictatorship of the majority (via the ballot box, a popularity contest); minority-dictatorship by contrast is a dictatorship by the fanatically motivated minority by force and fear (coercion) to control the majority. The coercion tactics used by foreign dictators to control the press in free countries are well documented, but never publicised widely. Hitler put pressure on Nazi-critics in the UK "free press" via UK Government appeasers Halifax, Chamberlain and particularly the loathsome UK ambassador to Nazi Germany, Sir Neville Henderson, for example trying to censor or ridicule appeasement critics David Low, to fire Captain W. E. Johns (editor of both Flying and Popular Flying, which had huge circulations and attacked appeasement as a threat to national security in order to reduce rearmament expenditure), and to try to get Winston Churchill deselected. These were all sneaky "back door" pressure-on-publishers tactics, dressed up as efforts to "ease international tensions"! The same occurred during the Cold War, with personal attacks in Scientific American and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and by fellow travellers on Herman Kahn, Eugene Wigner, and others who warned we need civil defence to make a deterrent of large provocations credible in the eyes of an aggressor.

Chapman Pincher summarises the vast hypocritical Russian expenditure on anti-Western propaganda against the neutron bomb in Chapter 15, "The Neutron Bomb Offensive" of his 1985 book The Secret Offensive: "Such a device ... carries three major advantages over Hiroshima-type weapons, particularly for civilians caught up in a battle ... against the massed tanks which the Soviet Union would undoubtedly use ... by exploding these warheads some 100 feet or so above the massed tanks, the blast and fire ... would be greatly reduced ... the neutron weapon produces little radioactive fall-out so the long-term danger to civilians would be very much lower ... the weapon was of no value for attacking cities and the avoidance of damage to property can hardly be rated as of interest only to 'capitalists' ... As so often happens, the constant repetition of the lie had its effects on the gullible ... In August 1977, the [Russian] World Peace Council ... declared an international 'Week of action' against the neutron bomb. ... Under this propaganda Carter delayed his decision, in September ... a Sunday service being attended by Carter and his family on 16 October 1977 was disrupted by American demonstrators shouting slogans against the neutron bomb [see the 17 October 1977 Washington Post] ... Lawrence Eagleburger, when US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, remarked, 'We consider it probably that the Soviet campaign against the 'neutron bomb cost some $100 million'. ... Even the Politburo must have been surprised at the size of what it could regard as a Fifth Column in almost every country." [Unfortunately, Pincher himself had contributed to the anti-nuclear nonsense in his 1965 novel "Not with a bang" in which small amounts of radioactivity from nuclear fallout combine with medicine to exterminate humanity! The allure of anti-nuclear propaganda extends to all who which to sell "doomsday fiction", not just Russian dictators but mainstream media story tellers in the West. By contrast, Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons doesn't even mention the neutron bomb, so there was no scientific and technical effort whatsoever by the West to make it a credible deterrent even in the minds of the public it had to protect from WWIII!]

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

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

So why on earth doesn't the West take the cheap efficient option of cutting expensive oralloy and maximising cheap natural (mostly lithium-7) LiD in the secondary? Even Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons on p17 (para 1.55) states that "Weight for weight ... fusion of deuterium nuclei would produce nearly 3 times as much energy as the fission of uranium or plutonium"! The sad answer is "density"! Natural LiD (containing 7.42% Li6 abundance) is a low density white/grey crystalline solid like salt that actually floats on water (lithium deuteroxide would be formed on exposure to water), since its density is just 820 kg/m^3. Since the ratio of mass of Li6D to Li7D is 8/9, it would be expected that the density of highly enriched 95% Li6D is 739 kg/m^3, while for 36% enriched Li6D it is 793 kg/m^3. Uranium metal has a density of 19,000 kg/m^3, i.e. 25.7 times greater than 95% enriched li6D or 24 times greater than 36% enriched Li6D. Compactness, i.e. volume is more important in a Western MIRV warhead than mass/weight! In the West, it's best to have a tiny-volume, very heavy, very expensive warhead. In Russia, cheapness outweights volume considerations. The Russians in some cases simply allowed their more bulky warheads to protrude from the missile bus (see photo below), or compensated for lower yields at the same volume using clean LiD by using the savings in costs to build more warheads. (The West doubles the fission yield/mass ratio of some warheads by using U235/oralloy pushers in place of U238, which suffers from the problem that about half the neutrons it interacts with result in non-fission capture, as explained below. Note that the 720 kiloton UK nuclear test Orange Herald device contained a hollow shell of 117 kg of U235 surrounded by a what Lorna Arnold's book quotes John Corner referring to a "very thin" layer of high explosive, and was compact, unboosted - the boosted failed to work - and gave 6.2 kt/kg of U235, whereas the first version of the 2-stage W47 Polaris warhead contained 60 kg of U235 which produced most of the secondary stage yield of about 400 kt, i.e. 6.7 kt/kg of U235. Little difference - but because perhaps 50% of the total yield of the W47 was fusion, its efficiency of use of U235 must have actually been less than the Orange Herald device, around 3 kt/kg of U235 which indicates design efficiency limits to "hydrogen bombs"! Yet anti-nuclear charlatans claimed that the Orange Herald bomb was a con!)

ABOVE: USA nuclear weapons data declassified by UK Government in 2010 (the information was originally acquired due to the 1958 UK-USA Act for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes, in exchange for UK nuclear weapons data) as published at http://nuclear-weapons.info/images/tna-ab16-4675p63.jpg. This single table summarizes all key tactical and strategic nuclear weapons secret results from 1950s testing! (In order to analyze the warhead pusher thicknesses and very basic schematics from this table it is necessary to supplement it with the 1950s warhead design data declassified in other documents, particularly some of the data from Tom Ramos and Chuck Hansen, as quoted in some detail below.) The data on the mass of special nuclear materials in each of the different weapons argues strongly that the entire load of Pu239 and U235 in the 1.1 megaton B28 was in the primary stage, so that weapon could not have had a fissile spark plug in the centre let alone a fissile ablator (unlike Teller's Sausage design of 1951), and so the B28 it appears had no need whatsoever of a beryllium neutron radiation shield to prevent pre-initiation of the secondary stage prior to its compression (on the contrary, such neutron exposure of the lithium deuteride in the secondary stage would be VITAL to produce some tritium in it prior to compression, to spark fusion when it was compressed). Arnold's book indeed explains that UK AWE physicists found the B28 to be an excellent, highly optimised, cheap design, unlike the later W47 which was extremely costly. The masses of U235 and Li6 in the W47 shows the difficulties of trying to maintain efficiency while scaling down the mass of a two-stage warhead for SLBM delivery: much larger quantities of Li6 and U235 must be used to achieve a LOWER yield! To achieve thermonuclear warheads of low mass at sub-megaton yields, both the outer bomb casing and the pusher around the the fusion fuel must be reduced:

"York ... studied the Los Alamos tests in Castle and noted most of the weight in thermonuclear devices was in their massive cases. Get rid of the case .... On June 12, 1953, York had presented a novel concept ... It radically altered the way radiative transport was used to ignite a secondary - and his concept did not require a weighty case ... they had taken the Teller-Ulam concept and turned it on its head ... the collapse time for the new device - that is, the amount of time it took for an atomic blast to compress the secondary - was favorable compared to older ones tested in Castle. Brown ... gave a female name to the new device, calling it the Linda." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp137-8. (So if you reduce the outer casing thickness to reduce warhead weight, you must complete the pusher ablation/compression faster, before the thinner outer casing is blown off, and stops reflecting/channelling x-rays on the secondary stage. Making the radiation channel smaller and ablative pusher thinner helps to speed up the process. Because the ablative pusher is thinner, there is relatively less blown-off debris to block the narrower radiation channel before the burn ends.)

"Brown's third warhead, the Flute, brought the Linda concept down to a smaller size. The Linda had done away with a lot of material in a standard thermonuclear warhead. Now the Flute tested how well designers could take the Linda's conceptual design to substantially reduce not only the weight but also the size of a thermonuclear warhead. ... The Flute's small size - it was the smallest thermonuclear device yet tested - became an incentive to improve codes. Characteristics marginally important in a larger device were now crucially important. For instance, the reduced size of the Flute's radiation channel could cause it to close early [with ablation blow-off debris], which would prematurely shut off the radiation flow. The code had to accurately predict if such a disaster would occur before the device was even tested ... the calculations showed changes had to be made from the Linda's design for the Flute to perform correctly." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp153-4. Note that the piccolo (the W47 secondary) is a half-sized flute, so it appears that the W47's secondary stage design miniaturization history was: Linda -> Flute -> Piccolo:

"A Division's third challenge was a small thermonuclear warhead for Polaris [the nuclear SLBM submarine that preceeded today's Trident system]. The starting point was the Flute, that revolutionary secondary that had performed so well the previous year. Its successor was called the Piccolo. For Plumbbob [Nevada, 1957], the design team tested three variations of the Piccolo as a parameter test. One of the variants outperformed the others ... which set the stage for the Hardtack [Nevada and Pacific, 1958] tests. Three additional variations for the Piccolo ... were tested then, and again an optimum candidate was selected. ... Human intuition as well as computer calculations played crucial roles ... Finally, a revolutionary device was completed and tested ... the Navy now had a viable warhead for its Polaris missile. From the time Brown gave Haussmann the assignment to develop this secondary until the time they tested the device in the Pacific, only 90 days had passed. As a parallel to the Robin atomic device, this secondary for Polaris laid the foundation for modern thermonuclear weapons in the United States." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp177-8. (Ramos is very useful in explaining that many of the 1950s weapons with complex non-spherical, non-cylindrical shaped primaries and secondaries were simply far too complex to fully simulate on the really pathetic computers they had - Livermore got a 4,000 vacuum tubes-based IBM 701 with 2 kB memory in 1956, AWRE Aldermaston in the Uk had to wait another year for theirs - so they instead did huge numbers of experimental explosive tests. For instance, on p173, Ramos discloses that the Swan primary which developed into the 155mm tactical shell, "went through over 100 hydrotests", non-nuclear tests in which fissile material is replaced with U238 or other substitutes, and the implosion is filmed with flash x-ray camera systems.)

"An integral feature of the W47, from the very start of the program, was the use of an enriched uranium-235 pusher around the cylindrical secondary." - Chuck Hansen, Swords 2.0, p. VI-375 (Hansen's source is his own notes taken during a 19-21 February 1992 nuclear weapons history conference he attended; if you remember the context, "Nuclear Glasnost" became fashionable after the Cold War ended, enabling Hansen to acquire almost unredacted historical materials for a few years until nuclear proliferation became a concern in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea). The key test of the original (Robin primary and Piccolo secondary) Livermore W47 was 412 kt Hardtack-Redwood on 28 June 1958. Since Li6D utilized at 100% efficiency would yield 66 kt/kg, the W47 fusion efficiency was only about 6%; since 100% fission of u235 yields 17 kt/kg, the W47's Piccolo fission (the u235 pusher) efficiency was about 20%; the comparable figures for secondary stage fission and fusion fuel burn efficiencies in the heavy B28 are about 7% and 15%, respectively:

ABOVE: the heavy B28 gave a very "big bang for the buck": it was cheap in terms of expensive Pu, U235 and Li6, and this was the sort of deterrent which was wanted by General LeMay for the USAF, which wanted as many weapons as possible, within the context of Eisenhower's budgetary concerns. But its weight (not its physical size) made it unsuitable for SLBM Polaris warheads. The first SLBM warhead, the W47, was almost the same size as the B28 weapon package, but much lighter due to having a much thinner "pusher" on the secondary, and casing. But this came at a large financial cost in terms of the quantities of special nuclear materials required to get such a lightweight design to work, and also a large loss of total yield. The fusion fuel burn efficiency ranges from 6% for the 400 kt W47 to 15% for the 1.1 megaton B28 (note that for very heavy cased 11-15 megaton yield tests at Castle, up to 40% fusion fuel burn efficiency was achieved), whereas the secondary stage ablative pusher fission efficiency ranged from 7% for a 1.1 inch thick natural uranium (99.3% U238) ablator to 20% for a 0.15 inch thick highly enriched oralloy (U235) ablator. From the brief description of the design evolution given by Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), it appears that when the x-ray channelling outer case thickness of the weapon is reduced to save weight, the duration of the x-ray coupling is reduced, so the dense metal pusher thickness must be reduced if the same compression factor (approximately 20) for the secondary stage is to be accomplished (lithium deuteride, being of low density, is far more compressable by a given pressure, than dense metal). In both examples, the secondary stage is physically a boosted fission stage. (If you are wondering why the hell the designers don't simply use a hollow core U235 bomb like Orange Herald instead of bothering with such inefficient x-ray coupled two-stage designs as these, the answer is straightforward: the risk of large fissile core meltdown by neutrons Moscow ABM defensive nuclear warheads, neutron bombs.)

The overall weight of the W47 was minimized by replacing the usual thick layer of U238 pusher with a very thin layer of fissile U235 (supposedly Teller's suggestion), which is more efficient for fission, but is limited by critical mass issues. The W47 used a 95% enriched Li6D cylinder with a 3.8mm thick U235 pusher; the B28 secondary was 36% enriched Li6D, with a very heavy 3cm thick U238 pusher. As shown below, it appears the B28 was related to the Los Alamos clean design of the TX21C tested as 95% clean 4.5 megatons Redwing-Navajo in 1956 and did not have a central fissile spark plug. From the declassified fallout composition, it is known the Los Alamos designers replaced the outer U238 pusher of Castle secondaries with lead in Navajo. Livermore did the same for their 85% clean 3.53 megatons Redwing-Zuni test, but Livermore left the central fission spark plug, which contributed 10% of its 15% fission yield, instead of removing the neutron shield, using foam channel filler for slowing down the x-ray compression, and thereby using primary stage neutrons to split lithium-6 giving tritium prior to compression. Our point is that Los Alamos got it wrong in sticking too conservatively to ideology: for clean weapons they should have got rid of the dense lead pusher and gone for John H. Nuckolls idea (also used by Fuchs in 1946 and the Russians in 1955 and 1958) of a low-density pusher for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel. This error is the reason why those early cleaner weapons were extremely heavy due to unnecessary 2" thick lead or tungsten pushers around the fusion fuel, which massively reduced their yield-to-weight ratios, so that LeMay rejected them!

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

This is justified by the data given for a total U238 capture-to-fission ratio of 1 in the 11 megaton Romeo test and also the cross-sections for U235 capture and fission on the AWE graph for relevant neutron energy range of about 1-14 Mev. If half the neutrons are captured in U238 without fission, then the maximum fission yield you can possibly get from "x" kg of U238 pusher is HALF the energy obtained from 100% fission of "x" kg of U238. Since with U238 only about half the atoms can undergo fission by thermonuclear neutrons (because the other half undergo non-fission capture), the energy density (i.e., the Joules/kg produced by the fission explosion of the pusher) reached by an exploding U238 pusher is only half that reached by U235 (in which there is less non-fission capture of neutrons, which doubles the pusher mass without doubling the fission energy release). So a U235 pusher will reach twice the temperature of a U238 pusher, doubling its material heating of fusion fuel within, prolonging the fusion burn and thus increasing fusion burn efficiency. 10 MeV neutron energy is important since it allows for likely average scattering of 14.1 MeV D+T fusion neutrons and it is also the energy at which the most important capture reaction, the (n,2n) cross-section peaks for both U235 (peak of 0.88 barn at 10 Mev) and U238 (peak of 1.4 barns at 10 Mev). For 10 Mev neutrons, U235 and U238 have fission cross-sections of 1.8 and 1 barn, respectively. For 14 Mev neutrons, U238 has a (n,2n) cross section of 0.97 barn for U237 production. So ignoring non-fission captures, you need 1.8/1 = 1.8 times greater thickness of pusher for U238 than for U235, to achieve the same amount of fission. But this simple consideration ignores the x-ray ablation requirement of the explosing pusher, so there are several factors requiring detailed computer calculations, and/or nuclear testing.

Note: there is an extensive collection of declassified documents released after Chuck Hansen's final edition, Swords 2.0, which are now available at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/*, being an internet-archive back-up of a now-removed US Government Freedom of Information Act Reading Room. Unfortunately they were only identified by number sequence, not by report title or content, in that reeding room, and so failed to achieve wide attention when originally released! (This includes extensive "Family Committee" H-bomb documentation and many long-delayed FOIA requests submitted originally by Hansen, but not released in time for inclusion in Swords 2.0.) As the extract below - from declassified document RR00132 - shows, some declassified documents contained very detailed information or typewriter spaces that could only be filled by a single specific secret word (in this example, details of the W48 linear implosion tactical nuclear warhead, including the fact that it used PBX9404 plastic bonded explosive glued to the brittle beryllium neutron reflector around the plutonium core using Adiprene L100 adhesive!).

ABOVE: Declassified data on the radiation flow analysis for the 10 megaton Mike sausage: http://nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/RR00198.pdf Note that the simplistic "no-go theorem" given in this extract, against any effect from varying the temperature to help the radiation channelling, was later proved false by John H. Nuckolls (like Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" was later proved false), since lowered temperature delivers energy where it is needed while massively reducing radiation losses (which go as the fourth power of temperature/x-ray energy in kev).

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

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

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

ABOVE secret reports on Australian-British nuclear test operations at Maralinga in 1956 and 1957, Buffalo and Antler, proved that even at 10 psi peak overpressure for the 15 kt Buffalo-1 shot, the dummy lying prone facing the blast was hardly moved due to the low cross-sectional area exposed to the blast winds, relative to standing dummies which were severely displaced and damaged. The value of trenches in protecting personnel against blast winds and radiation was also proved in tests (gamma radiation shielding of trenches had been proved at an earlier nuclear test in Australia, Operation Hurricane in 1952). (Antler report linked here; Buffalo report linked here.) This debunks the US Department of Defense models claiming that people will automatically be blown out of the upper floors of modern city buildings at very low pressures, and killed by the gravitational impact with the pavement below! In reality, tall buildings mutually shield one another from the blast winds, not to mention the radiation (proven in the latest post on this blog), and on seeing the flash most people will have time to lie down on typical surfaces like carpet which give a frictional resistance to displacement, ignored in fiddled models which assume surfaces have less friction than a skating rink; all of this was omitted from the American 1977 Glasstone and Dolan book "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons". As Tuck's paper below on the gamma radiation dose rate measurements on ships at Operation Crossroads, July 1946 nuclear tests proved, contrary to Glasstone and Dolan, scattered radiation contributions are small, so buildings or ships gun turrets provided excellent radiation "shadows" to protect personnel. This effect was then calculated by UK civil defence weapons effects expert Edward Leader-Williams in his paper presented at the UK's secret London Royal Society Symposium on the Physical Effects of Atomic Weapons, but the nuclear test data as always was excluded from the American Glasstone book published the next year, The Effects of Atomic Weapons in deference to lies about the effects in Hiroshima, including an "average" casualty curve which deliberately obfuscated huge differences in survival rates in different types of buildings and shelters, or simply in shadows!

Note: the DELFIC, SIMFIC and other computer predicted fallout area comparisons for the 110 kt Bikini Atoll Castle-Koon land surface burst nuclear test are false since the distance scale of Bikini Atoll is massively exaggerated on many maps, e.g. in the Secret January 1955 AFSWP "Fall-out Symposium", the Castle fallout report WT-915, and the fallout patterns compendium DASA-1251! The Western side of the Bikini Atoll reef is at 165.2 degrees East, while the most eastern island in the Bikini Atoll, Enyu, is at 165.567 degrees East: since there are 60 nautical miles per degree by definition, the width of Bikini Atoll is therefore (165.567-165.2)(60) = 22 nautical miles, approximately half the distance shown in the Castle-Koon fallout patterns. Since area is proportional to the square of the distance scale, this constitutes a serious exaggeration in fallout casualty calculations, before you get into the issue of the low energy (0.1-0.2 MeV) gamma rays from neutron induced Np239 and U237 in the fallout enhancing the protection factor of shelters (usually calculated assuming hard 1.17 and 1.33 MeV gamma rads from Co60), during the sheltering period of approximately 1-14 days after detonation.

"Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr Dulles calls 'brinkmanship'. This is a policy adopted from a sport ... called 'Chicken!' ... If one side is unwilling to risk global war, while the other side is willing to risk it, the side which is willing to run the risk will be victorious in all negotiations and will ultimately reduce the other side to complete impotence. 'Perhaps' - so the practical politician will argue - 'it might be ideally wise for the sane party to yield to the insane party in view of the dreadful nature of the alternative, but, whether wise or not, no proud nation will long acquiesce in such an ignominious role. We are, therefore, faced, quite inevitably, with the choice between brinkmanship and surrender." - Bertrand Russell, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1959, pp30-31.

Emphasis added. Note that Russell accepts lying about nuclear weapons just as gas weapons had been lied about in the 1920s-30s by "arms controllers" to start WWII, then he simply falls into the 1930s Cambridge Scientists Antiwar Group delusional propaganda fraud of assuming that any attempt to credibly deter fascism is immoral because it will automatically result in escalatory retaliation with Herman Goering's Luftwaffe drenching London with "overkill" by poison gas WMDs etc. In particular, he forgets that general disarmament pursued in the West until 1935 - when Baldwin suddenly announced that the Nazis had secretly produced a massive, unstoppable warmachine in two years - encouraged aggressors to first secretly rearm, then coerce and invade their neighbours while signing peace promises purely to buy more time for rearmament, until a world war resulted. Not exactly a great result for disarmament propaganda. So after obliterating what Reagan used to call (to the horror of commie "historians") the "true facts of history" from his mind, he advocates some compromise with the aggressors of the 30 September 1938 Munich Agreement peace-in-our-time sort, the historically proved sure fire way to really escalate a crisis into a major war by showing the green lamp to a loon to popular media acclaim and applause for a fairy tale utopian fantasy; just as the "principled" weak, rushed, imbecile withdrawl from Afghanistan in 2021 encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022, and also the green lamp for Hamas to invade Israel in 2023.

"... deterrence ... consists of threatening the enemy with thermonuclear retaliation should he act provocatively. ... If war is 'impossible', how can one threaten a possible aggressor with war? ... The danger, evoked by numerous critics, that such research will result in a sort of resigned expectation of the holocaust, seems a weak argument ... The classic theory of Clausewitz defines absolute victory in terms of disarmament of the enemy ... Today ... it will suffice to take away his means of retaliation to hold him at your mercy." - Raymond Aron, Introduction to Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 9-12. (This is the commie support for arms control and disarmament has achieved, precisely the weakening of the West to take away credible deterrence.)

"75 years ago, white slavery was rampant in England. ... it could not be talked about openly in Victorian England, moral standards as to the subjects of discussion made it difficult to arouse the community to necessary action. ... Victorian standards, besides perpetuating the white slave trade, intensified the damage ... Social inhibitions which reinforce natural tendencies to avoid thinking about unpleasant subjects are hardly uncommon. ... But when our reluctance to consider danger brings danger nearer, repression has gone too far. In 1960, I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war ... people are willing to argue that it is immoral to think and even more immoral to write in detail about having to fight ... like those ancient kings who punished messengers who brought them bad news. That did not change the news; it simply slowed up its delivery. On occasion it meant that the kings were ill informed and, lacking truth, made serious errors in judgement and strategy. ... We cannot wish them away. Nor should we overestimate and assume the worst is inevitable. This leads only to defeatism, inadequate preparations (because they seem useless), and pressures toward either preventative war or undue accommodation." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 17-19. (In the footnote on page 35, Kahn notes that original nuclear bullshitter, the 1950 creator of fake cobalt-60 doomsday bomb propaganda, Leo Szilard, was in the usual physics groupthink nutters club: "Szilard is probably being too respectful of his scientific colleagues who also seem to indulge in ad hominem arguments - especially when they are out of their technical specialty.")

"Ever since the catastropic and disillusioning experience of 1914-18, war has been unthinkable to most people in the West ... In December 1938, only 3 months after Munich, Lloyd's of London gave odds of 32 to 1 that there would be no war in 1939. On August 7, 1939, the London Daily Express reported the result of a poll of its European reporters. 10 out of 12 said, 'No war this year'. Hitler invaded Poland 3 weeks later." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 39. (But as the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 proved, even the label "war" is now "controversial": the aggressor now simply declares they are on a special operation of unifying people under one flag to ensure peace! So the reason why there is war in Ukraine is that Ukraine is resisting. If it waved a white flag, as the entire arms control and disarmament lobby insists is the only sane response to a nuclear-armed aggressor, there would be "peace," albeit on Russia's terms: that's why they disarmed Ukraine in 1994. "Peace propaganda" of "disarmers"! Free decent people prefer to fight tyranny. But as Kahn states on pp. 7-9:

"Some, most notably [CND's pseudo-historian of arms race lying] A. J. P. Taylor, have even said that Hitler was not like Hitler, that further appeasement [not an all-out arms race as was needed but repeatedly rejected by Baldwin and Chamberlain until far too late; see discussion of this fact which is still deliberately ignored or onfuscated by "historians" of the A. J. P. Taylor biased anti-deterrence left wing type, in Slessor's The Central Blue, quoted on this blog] would have prevented World War II ... If someone says to you, 'One of us has to be reasonable and it is not going to be me, so it has to be you', he has a very effective bargaining advantage, particularly if he is armed with thermonuclear bombs [and you have damn all civil defense, ABM, or credible tactical deterrent]. If he can convince you he is stark, staring mad and if he has enough destructive power ... deterrence alone will not work. You must then give in or accept the possibility of being annihilated ... in the first instance if we fight and lose; in the second if we capitulate without fighting. ... We could still resist by other means ranging from passive resistance of the Gandhi type to the use of underground fighting and sabotage. All of these alternatives might be of doubtful effectiveness against [the Gulag system, KGB/FSB torture camps or Siberian salt mines of] a ruthless dictatorship."

Sometimes people complain that Hitler and the most destructive and costly war and only nuclear war of history, WWII, is given undue attention. But WWII is a good analogy to the danger precisely because of the lying WMD gas war propaganda-based disarmament of the West which allowed the war, because of the attacks by Hitler's fans on civil defense in the West to make even the token rearmament after 1935 ineffective as a credible deterrent, and because Hitler has mirrors in Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon and Stalin. Kahn explains on p. 173: "Because history has a way of being more imaginative and complex than even the most imaginative and intelligent analysts, historical examples often provide better scenarios than artificial ones, even though they may be no more directly applicable to current equipment, postures, and political situations than the fictional plot of the scenario. Recent history can be especially useful.")

"One type of war resulting at least partly from deliberate calculation could occur in the process of escalation. For example, suppose the Soviets attacked Europe, relying upon our fear of their reprisal to deter a strategic attack by us; we might be deterred enough to pause, but we might evacuate our cities during this pause in the hope we could thereby convince the Soviets we meant business. If the Soviets did not back down, but continued their attack upon Europe, we might decide that we would be less badly off if we proceeded ... The damage we would receive in return would then be considerably reduced, compared with what we would have suffered had we not evacuated. We might well decide at such a time that we would be better off to attack the Soviets and accept a retalitory blow at our dispersed population, rather than let Europe be occupied, and so be forced to accept the penalty of living in the hostile and dangerous world that would follow." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 51-2.

"We must recognise that the stability we want in a system is more than just stability against accidental war or even against an attack by the enemy. We also want stability against extreme provocation [e.g. invasion of allies, which then escalates as per invasion of Belgium 1914, or Poland 1939]." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 53(footnote).

Note: this 1962 book should not be confused with Kahn's 1984 "updated" Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, which omits the best material in the 1962 edition (in the same way that the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons omits the entire civil defense chapter which was the one decent thing in the 1957 and 1962/4 editions!) and thus shows a reversion to the less readable and less helpful style of his 1960 On Thermonuclear War, which severely fragmented and jumbled up all the key arguments making it easy for critics to misquote or quote out of context. For example, Kahn's 1984 "updated" book starts on the first page of the first chapter with the correct assertion that Johnathan Schell's Fate of the Earth is nonsense, but doesn't say why it's nonsense, and you have to read through to the final chapter - pages 207-8 of chapter 10 - to find Kahn writing in the most vague way possible, without a single specific example, that Schell is wrong because of "substantive inadequacies and inaccuracies", without listing a single example such as Schell's lying that the 1954 Bravo nuclear test blinded everyone well beyond the range of Rongelap, and that it was impossible to easily shield the radiation from the fallout or evacuate the area until it decays, which Schell falsely attributed to Glasstone and Dolan's nonsense in the 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons! Kahn eventually in the footnote on page 208 refers readers to an out-of-print article for facts: "These criticisms are elaborated in my review of The Fate of the Earth, see 'Refusing to Think About the Unthinkable', Fortune, June 28, 1982, pp. 113-6. Kahn does the same for civil defense in the 1984 book, referring in such general, imprecise and vague terms to Russian civil defence, with no specific data, that it is a waste of time, apart possibly one half-baked sentence on page 177: "Variations in the total megatonnage, somewhat surprisingly, do not seem to affect the toll nearly as much as variations in the targetting or the type of weapon bursts." Kahn on page 71 quotes an exchange between himself and Senator Proxmire during the US Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production, Civil preparedness and limited nuclear war where on page 55 of the hearings, Senator Proxmire alleges America would escalate a limited conflict to an all-out war because: "The strategic value and military value of destroying cities in the Soviet Union would be very great." Kahn responded: "No American President is likely to do that, no matter what the provocation." Nuclear war will be limited, according to Herman Kahn's analysis, despite the bullshit fron nutters to the contrary.

Kahn on page 101 of Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s correctly and accurately condemns President Carter's 1979 State of the Union Address, which claimed falsely that just a single American nuclear submarine is required by America and has an "overwhelming" deterrent against "every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union". Carter ignored Russian retaliation on cities if you bomb theirs: America has avoided the intense Russian protection efforts that make the Russian nuclear threat credible, namely civil defense shelters and evacuation plans, and also the realpolitik of deterrence of world wars, which so far have only been triggered due to invasions of third parties (Belgium '14, Poland '39). Did America strategically nuke every city in Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022? No, debunking Proxmire and the entire Western pro-Russian "automatic escalation" propaganda lobby, and it didn't even have tactical neutron bombs to help deter the Russians like Reagan in the 1980s, because in the 1990s America had ignored Kahn's argument, and went in for MINIMAL deterrence of the least credible sort (abolishing the invasion-deterring dedicated neutron tactical nuclear stockpile entirely; the following quotation is from p101 of Kahn's Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s):

"Minimum deterrence, or any predicated on an escessive emphasis on the inevitably of mutual homocide, is both misleading and dangerous. ... MAD principles can promote provocation - e.g. Munich-type blackmail on an ally. Hitler, for example, did not threaten to attack France or England - only Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It was the French and the British who finally had to threaten all-out war [they could only do this after rearmament and building shelters and gas masks to reduce the risk of reprisals in city bombing, which gave more time for Germany to prepare since it was rearming faster than France and Britain which still desperately counted on appeasement and peace treaties and feared provoking a war by an arms-race due to endless lying propaganda from Lord Grey that his failure to deter war in 1914 had been due to an arms-race rather than the incompetence of the procrastination of his anti-war Liberal Party colleagues in the Cabinet] - a move they would not and could not have made if the notion of a balance of terror between themselves and Germany had been completely accepted. As it was, the British and French were most reluctant to go to war; from 1933 to 1939 Hitler exploited that reluctance. Both nations [France and Britain] were terrified by the so-called 'knockout blow', a German maneuver that would blanket their capitals with poison gas ... The paralyzing effect of this fear prevented them from going to war ... and gave the Germans the freedom to march into the Ruhr, to form the Anschluss with Austria, to force the humiliating Munich appeasement (with the justification of 'peace in our time'), and to take other aggressive actions [e.g. against the Jews in the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, etc.] ... If the USSR were sufficiently prepared in the event a war did occur, only the capitalists would be destroyed. The Soviets would survive ... that would more than justify whatever sacrifice and destruction had taken place.

"This view seems to prevail in the Soviet military and the Politburo even to the present day. It is almost certain, despite several public denials, that Soviet military preparations are based on war-fighting, rather than on deterrence-only concepts and doctrines..." - Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, 1984, pages 101-102.

Kahn adds, in his footnote on p111, that "Richard Betts has documented numerous historical cases in which attackers weakened their opponents defenses through the employment of unanticipated tactics. These include: rapid changes in tactics per se, false alarms and fluctuating preparations for war ... doctrinal innovations to gain surprise. ... This is exactly the kind of thing which is likely to surprise those who subscribe to MAD theories. Those who see a need for war-fighting capabilities expect the other side to try to be creative and use tactical innovations such as coercion and blackmail, technological surprises, or clever tactics on 'leverage' targets, such as command and control installations. If he is to adhere to a total reliance on MAD, the MADvocate has to ignore these possibilities." See Richard Betts, "Surprise Despite Warning: Why Sudden Attacks Succeed", Political Science Quarterly, Winter 1980-81, pp. 551-572.)

Compare two situations: (1) Putin explodes a 50 megaton nuclear "test" of the warhead for his new nuclear reactor powered torpedo, Poseidon, a revamped 1961 Tsar Bomba, or detonates a high-altitude nuclear EMP "test" over neutral waters but within the thousands of miles range of USA or UK territory; (2) Putin invades Poland using purely conventional weapons. Our point here is that both nuclear AND conventional weapons trigger nuclear threats and the risk of nuclear escalation, as indeed they have done (for Putin's nuclear threats scroll down to videos with translations below). So the fashionable CND style concept that only nuclear weapons can trigger nuclear escalation is bullshit, and is designed to help Russia start and win WWIII to produce a world government, by getting us to undertake further unilateral (not multilateral) disarmament, just as evolved in the 1930s, setting the scene for WWII. Japan for example did not have nuclear weapons in August 1945, yet triggered not just tactical nuclear war (both cities had some military bases and munitions factories, as well as enormous numbers of civilians), and the decision to attack cities rather than just "test" weapons obove Tokyo bay as Teller demanded but Oppenheimer rejected (for maximum impact with a very small supply of nuclear weapons) showed some strategic nuclear war thinking. Truman was escalating to try to shock Japan into rapid surrender emotionally (many cities in Japan had already been burned out in conventional incendiary air raids, and the two nuclear attacks while horrible for civilians in those cities contributed only a fraction of the millions killed in WWII, despite anti-nuclear propaganda lies to the contrary). Truman's approach escalating to win is the opposite of the "Minimax game theory" (von Neumann's maths and Thomas Schelling's propaganda) gradual escalation approach that's currently the basis of nuclear deterrence planning despite its failure wherever it has been tried (Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc). Gradual escalation is supposed to minimise the maximum possible risk (hence "minimax" name), but it guarantees failure in the real world (unlike rule abided games) by maximising the build up of resentment. E.g. Schelling/Minimax say that if you gradually napalm civilians day after day (because they are the unprotected human shields used by terrorists/insurgents; the Vietcong are hiding in underground tunnels, exactly like Hamas today, and the Putin regime's metro 2 shelter tunnels under Russia) you somehow "punish the enemy" (although they don't give a toss about the lives of kids which is why you're fighting them!) and force them to negotiate for peace in good faith, then you can pose for photos with them sharing a glass of champagne and there is "world peace". That's a popular fairy tale, like Marxist mythology.

Once you grasp this fact, that nuclear weapons have been and will again be "used" explosively without automatic escalation, for example provocative testing as per the 1961 Russian 50 megaton bomb test, or the 1962 high altitude EMP bursts, you should be able to grasp the fact that the "escalation" deception used to dismiss civil defense and tactical nuclear deterrence against limited nuclear war, is fake news from Russian fellow-travellers like Corbyn. Once you assign a non-unity probability to "escalation", you're into conventional war territory: if you fight a conventional war, it can "escalate" to nuclear war as on 6 August 1945. Japan did not avoid nuclear attack by not having nuclear weapons on 6 August 1945. If it had nuclear weapons ready to be delivered, a very persuasive argument could be made that unless Truman wanted to invite retaliation, World War II would have remained strategically non-nuclear: no net strategic advantage would have been achieved by nuclear city bombing so only war-ending tactical nuclear threats could have prevailed in practice. But try explaining this to the groupthink pseudosocialist bigoted mass murderers who permeate fake physics with crap; it's no easier to explain to them the origins of particle masses or even dark energy/gravitation; in both cases groupthink lying hogwash persists because statements of proved facts are hated and rejected if them debunk religious style fairy tales the mass media loves. There were plenty of people warning that mass media gas war fear mongering was disguised Nazi supporting propaganda in the 1930s, but the public listened to that crap then just as it accepted the "eugenics" (anti-diversity evolution crap of Sir Galton, cousin of Darwin) basis for Hitler's Mein Kampf without question, just as they accepted the lying propaganda from the UK "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" which like CND and all other arms control and disarmament lobbies supporting terrorist states today, did more than even Hitler to deliberately lay the foundations for the Holocaust and World War II, while never being criticised in the UK media! Thus, it's surely time for people to oppose evil lying on civil defence to save lives in all disasters from storms to conventional war, to collateral damage risks in nuclear terrorism by mad enemies. At some point, the majority has to decide to either defend itself honestly and decently against barbarism, or be consumed by it as a price for believing bullshit. It's time for decent people to oppose lying evil regarding the necessity to have credible tactical (not incredible strategic) nuclear weapons, as Oppenheimer called for in his 1951 speech, to deter invasions.

Democracy can't function when secrecy is used to deliberately cover-up vital data from viewing by Joe Public. Secrecy doesn't protect you from enemies who independently develop weapons in secret, or who spy from inside your laboratories:

"The United States and Great Britain resumed testing in 1962, and we spared no effort trying to find out what they were up to. I attended several meetings on that subject. An episode related to those meetings comes to mind ... Once we were shown photographs of some documents ... the photographer had been rushed. Mixed in with the photocopies was a single, terribly crumpled original. I innocently asked why, and was told that it had been concealed in panties. Another time ... questions were asked along the following lines: What data about American weapons would be most useful for your work and for planning military technology in general?"

- Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, Hutchinson, London, 1990, pp225-6.

ABOVE: The British government has now declassified detailed summary reports giving secret original nuclear test data on the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) damage due to numerous nuclear weapons, data which is still being kept under wraps in America since it hasn't been superseded because Western atmospheric nuclear tests were stopped late in 1962 and never resumed - even though the Russians have even more extensive data - completely debunking Glasstone and Dolan's disarmament propaganda nonsense in the 1962, 1964 and 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons which ignores EMP piped far away from low altitude nuclear tests by power and communications cables and falsely claims instead that such detonations don't produce EMP damage outside the 2psi blast radius! For a discussion of the new data and also a link to the full 200+ pages version (in addition to useful data, inevitably like all official reports it also contains a lot of "fluff" padding), please see the other (physics) site: https://nige.wordpress.com/2023/09/12/secret-emp-effects-of-american-nuclear-tests-finally-declassified-by-the-uk-and-at-uk-national-archives/ (by contrast, this "blogspot" uses old non-smartphone proof coding, no longer properly indexed any long longer by "google's smartphone bot"). As long ago as 1984, Herman Kahn argued on page 112 of his book Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s: "The effects of an EMP attack are simply not well understood [in the West, where long powerlines were never exposed on high altitude nuclear tests, unlike the Russian's 1962 Operation K, so MHD-EMP or E3 damage wasn't even mentioned in the 1977 Glasstone and Dolan Effects of Nuclear Weapons], but the Soviets seem to know - or think they know - more than we do."

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

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

ABOVE: Moscow Metro and Metro-2 (secret nuclear subway) horizonially swinging blast doors take only 70 seconds to shut, whereas their vertically rising blast doors take 160 seconds to shut; both times are however far shorter than the arrival time of Western ICBMs or even SLBMs which take 15-30 minutes by which time the Russian shelters are sealed from blast and radiation! In times of nuclear crisis, Russia planned to evacuate from cities those who could not be sheltered, and for the remainder to be based in shelters (similarly to the WWII British situation, when people slept in shelters of one kind or another when there was a large risk of being bombed without notice, particularly in supersonic V2 missile attacks where little warning time was available).

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

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

NUKEGATE - Western tactical neutron bombs were disarmed after Russian propaganda lie. Russia now has over 2000... "Disarmament and arms control" charlatans, quacks, cranks, liars, mass murdering Russian affiliates, and evil genocidal Marxist media exposed for what it is, what it was in the 1930s when it enabled Hitler to murder tens of millions in war. Glasstone's and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons deceptions totally disproved. Professor Brian Martin, TRUTH TACTICS, 2021 (pp45-50): "In trying to learn from scientific publications, trust remains crucial. The role of trust is epitomised by Glasstone’s book The Effects of Atomic Weapons. Glasstone was not the author; he was the editor. The book is a compilation of information based on the work of numerous contributors. For me, the question was, should I trust this information? Was there some reason why the editors or authors would present fraudulent information, be subject to conflicts of interest or otherwise be biased? ... if anything, the authors would presumably want to overestimate rather than underestimate the dangers ... Of special interest would be anyone who disagreed with the data, calculations or findings in Glasstone. But I couldn’t find any criticisms. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was treated as the definitive source, and other treatments were compatible with it. ... One potent influence is called confirmation bias, which is the tendency to look for information that supports current beliefs and dismiss or counter contrary information. The implication is that changing one’s views can be difficult due to mental commitments. To this can be added various forms of bias, interpersonal influences such as wanting to maintain relationships, overconfidence in one’s knowledge, desires to appear smart, not wanting to admit being mistaken, and career impacts of having particular beliefs. It is difficult to assess the role of these influences on yourself. "

Honest Effects of Nuclear Weapons!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons exaggerations completely undermine credible deterrence of war: Glasstone exaggerates urban "strategic" nuclear weapons effects by using effects data taken from unobstructed terrain (without the concrete jungle shielding of blast winds and radiation by cities!), and omits the most vital uses and most vital effects of nuclear weapons: to DETER world war credibly by negating the concentrations of force used to invade Belgium, 1914 (thus WWI) and Poland (WWII). Disarmament and arms control funded propaganda lying says any deterrent which is not actually exploded in anger is a waste of money since it isn't being "used", a fraud apparently due to the title and content of Glasstone's book which omits the key use and effect of nuclear weapons, to prevent world wars: this is because Glasstone and Dolan don't even bother to mention the neutron bomb or 10-fold reduced fallout in the the Los Alamos 95% clean Redwing-Navajo test of 1956, despite the neutron bomb effects being analysed for its enhanced radiation and reduced thermal and blast yield in detail in the 1972 edition of Dolan's edited secret U.S. Department of Defense Effects Manual EM-1, "Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons", data now declassified yet still being covered-up by "arms control and disarmament" liars today to try to destroy credible deterrence of war in order to bolster their obviously pro-Russian political anti-peace agenda. "Disarmament and arms control" charlatans, quacks, cranks, liars, mass murdering Russian affiliates, and evil genocidal Marxist media exposed for what it is, what it was in the 1930s when it enabled Hitler to murder tens of millions in war .

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

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

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

Monday, March 01, 2010

How weapons and war effects lies for disarmament and peaceful co-existence just forced Britain to collaborate with evil racist thugs at Munich in 1938

“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

- British Prime Minister Chamberlain, radio broadcast, 27 September 1938.

The 1935 effectively pro-Nazi “pacifist” conspiracy between Labour and Conservatives to pander to popular British pro-disarmament pacifist media sentiments

“There is no security in armaments and we shall be no party to piling them up.”

– Labour Party Leader of the Opposition Clement Attlee, 1935 (two years after Hitler took power and began rearming Germany; quotation from Gilbert and Gott, The Appeasers, 1967). Troubled by the failure of unilateral disarmament to save millions of lives in WWII, Attlee 12 years later as Prime Minister ordered the stockpiling of the first British nuclear weapons to deter WWIII from starting.

“Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm ... I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.”

– Conservative Prime Minister Stanley “the bomber will always get through” Baldwin, who won the 1935 general election with a large majority by lying to get votes for popular pacifism, denying Winston Churchill’s unpopular “warmongering” claims that Hitler was rearming Germany and must be deterred effectively (speech in House of Commons, 12 November 1936). (Some pro-Baldwin historians – not Winston Churchill – claim Baldwin was referring to an earlier non-existing election than 1935, but this makes no difference to the lying.)

“The circle is a vicious one: the more the public is duped, the more its deceivers can claim to express the public’s will.”

- Arianna Huffington, How to overthrow the government, Regan Books, 2000, p. 22.

“He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

- Abraham Lincoln, 1858.







“If we handle Hitler right, my belief is that he will become gradually more pacific. ... I would feel confident if it were not for ... alarmists by profession and Jews.”

- Sir Neville Henderson, British Ambassador to Berlin, telegram to the British Foreign Secretary, February 1939 (H.M.S.O., Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, London, 1949, Third Series, IV, p. 593).

“Hitler has gone straight off the deep end again [violating the 1938 peace agreement]. It has all come very unexpectedly ... What distresses me more than anything else is the handle which it will give to the critics ...”

- Sir Neville Henderson, British Ambassador to Berlin, telegram to the British Foreign Secretary, 15 March 1939 (H.M.S.O., Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, London, 1949, Third Series, IV, p. 595).

“Kapitulieren werden wir nie.” (We will never capitulate.)

- Adolf Hitler, speech at the Bürgerbräukeller, Munich, 8 November 1939.

"At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to 'retaliate' if they attacked him. The Munich crisis had an incredible sequel in March 1939. ... Hitler occupied the rest of Czechslovakia. The technique he used is such an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs that it is of extreme value to all who are concerned with the problem of maintaining a peaceful and secure world ..."

- Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 403.


Fanaticism is marked by lying, obfuscation, and suppressing facts (such as the higher rate of German arms spending than British “rearmament” after 1935, despite endless lies to the contrary from recent revisionist historians who claim Baldwin and Chamberlain were buying time rather than simply losing time; if you run slower than your competitor then the longer the race goes on, the bigger the gap) in the belief that “the ends justify the means”. Politically “correct” idealism dressed in the camouflage of ethical pacifist morality backed up by brainwashing lying propaganda and suppression of factual evidence to the contrary actually proved historically to cause the greatest disasters ever to befall humanity: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is this lying “politically correct” fanaticism that is used to defend exaggerations and lies for political ends. The plight of the Jews was arrogantly and abusively swept aside in the false war effects exaggerations of the pacifist movement. Exaggeration and lying about weapons effects in the mere hope it will be justified by ending war proved to be the worst kind of fanaticism, by encouraging aggressors and war, i.e. precisely what it claimed to prevent. Weapons effects exaggerations both motivated aggression in 1914, and prevented early action against Nazi aggression in the mid-1930s, as this blog post will document.

Herman Kahn explained how lying weapons effects exaggerations nurtured World War II in a culture of fear in place of a relatively limited war to disarm the Nazis, in the following testimony to the 1959 hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, page 883:

“... before World War II, for example, many of the staffs engaged in estimating the effects of bombing over-estimated by large amounts. This was one of the main reasons that at the Munich Conference and earlier occasions the British and the French chose appeasement to standing firm or fighting. Incidentally, these staff calculations were more lurid than the worst imaginations of fiction.”


Herman Kahn goes on to explain how such exaggerations of weapons effects in popular media disarmament propaganda encouraged the secret proliferation of Nazi weapons, in his book On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press, 1960, pp. 390-1:

“... in spite of the tremendous scale of the violations it still took the Germans five years, from January 1933 when Hitler came in to around January 1938, before they had an army capable of standing up against the French and the British. At any time during that five-year period if the British and the French had had the will, they probably could have stopped the German rearmament program.... it is an important defect of ‘arms control’ agreements that the punishment or correction of even outright violation is not done automatically ... but takes an act of will ... one of the most important aspects of the interwar period [was] the enormous and almost uncontrollable impulse toward disarmament ... As late as 1934, after Hitler had been in power for almost a year and a half, [British Prime Minister] Ramsey McDonald still continued to urge the French that they should disarm themselves by reducing their army by 50 per cent, and their air force by 75 per cent.

“In effect, MacDonald and his supporters urged one of the least aggressive nations in Europe to disarm itself to a level equal with their potential attackers, the Germans. ... Probably as much as any other single group I think that these men of good will can be charged with causing World War II. [Emphasis by Herman Kahn.] ... Hitler came into power in January 1933 and almost immediately Germany began to rearm ... but it was not until October 14, 1933 [that] Germany withdrew from a disarmament conference and the League of Nations ... Hitler's advisors seem to have been greatly worried that this action might trigger off a violent counteraction - for example, a French occupation of the Ruhr. But the British and the French contented themselves with denouncing the action.”


The evil thing is that both during the 1930s when the Nazi menace was gathering strength, and during the Cold War when the communist menace was doing the same, weapons effects exaggerations were enforced and rewarded by the military, the politicians, the media and the public. The military involvement in fiddling the figures has always been particularly sadistic, because they hold in their hand the "top secret" classification stamp, and act both as data sources and data censors: critics either don't have access to the facts, or if they do, they are bound by strict secrecy laws. All power corrupts, said Lord Acton, and the military have always been severely tempted to present political leaders with a selection of data and calculations that back-up their projects. The mechanism is not outright corruption but often the exact opposite (a creeping corruption caused by a general incredulity or hostility to new plans, where ideas must be dressed-up with exaggerations, just in order to get attention and approval from high authority):

“The German analysis predicted that the submarine campaign would force England to make peace within five months, thus promising a short road to victory. This prediction was crucial for the final decision to go ahead ...”

- Fred C. Ikle, Every War Must End, Columbia University press, N.Y., revised ed., 1991, p. 43.

The posthumorous prizes of the war-mongerer Alfred Nobel and the "Soviet World Peace" council's prize for lying propaganda, the "Lenin Peace Prize", rewarded lying exaggerations designed to disarm those who love freedom and peace, and make them appease the world's most evil lying terrorists. While Winston Churchill is today a widely tolerated historical figure, in the 1930s, when his warnings of racist lying evil could have been used tackle the Nazis from the start and prevent the holocaust, he was attacked by liars like Cyril M. Joad, who led the 1933 Oxford Union pacifist motion which sent out a very clear signal to the new German Chancellor, Hitler, and even in August 1939 published the mass-market appeasement-supporting Penguin book, Why War? Like fellow liars Sir Austin Chamberlain and Sir Normal Angell, Joad only profited with fame, cheers and applause from his lying war-mongering propaganda which falsified the risks from an early intervention to stop evil.

Nobody dared to condemn weapons-effects-lying pacifist propaganda then, and nobody dares to condemn it today. We still reward the lying exaggeration of the effects of nuclear weapons in our fashionable groupthink delusion that, by making civil defense and weapons effects "unthinkable", or by disarming, we make ourselves safe and secure from terrorism, war and genocide.

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


What about the bigger risk than conflict? Who speaks up about the far bigger risk that, if only we had disarmed and surrendered the Nazis would have been able to continue their thousand years of third reich evil, totally unopposed? Why do supposedly rational animals collectively believe in what they know deep down are complete lies? Why ad hominem attacks on those who report the facts? The answer is simple: fashionable groupthink is really fascism under disguise. When we believe in popular lies, we're doing what the supporters of Nazism and communism did, namely believing in the enforcement of a consensus of lies in the belief that "the ends justify the means". The fact that weapons effects lying has been counterproductive in the past (causing appeasement until World War became necessary) has been swept under the carpet in a fashionable groupthink of self-deception:

"Fascism is not a doctrinal creed; it is a way of behaving towards your fellow man. What, then, are the tell-tale hallmarks of this horrible attitude? Paranoid control-freakery; an obsessional hatred of any criticism or contradiction; the lust to character-assassinate anyone even suspected of it; a compulsion to control or at least manipulate the media ... the majority of the rank and file prefer to face the wall while the jack-booted gentlemen ride by."

– Frederick Forsyth, Daily Express, 7 October 2005, p. 11.


There is nothing wrong with fashion or consensus, as long as you are honest about what you are doing. What's wrong is lying that fashionable groupthink is the same thing as the right thing to do because "so many people can't all be wrong", when deep down you know it is wrong. This usually ignored problem is actually rampant due to human nature, even in the supposedly most rational areas, like "not even wrong" superstring theory, the myth that human beings should not change the climate because such change is "unnatural" and human beings cannot adapt to climate change (despite having adapted and indeed flourished under much more rapid rates of climate change during the past ten thousand years), and other pseudoscientific claims which are lies made to gain funding grants. Sure, it is worth funding research in some of these areas, that's not at issue; what is at issue is whether lying propaganda hype should be funded by taxpayers or not. In 1980, the supreme statement of arrogant, ignorant and apathic stupidity was made by the United Nations report Nuclear Weapons, claiming that theoretical lies about nuclear weapons effects are to be revered and worshipped like sacrosanct truths!

How weapons effects lying for "peace propaganda" is just the arrogant media dictatorship of ignorant authority figures, falsely claimed to be science experts

An earlier blog post discussed the 1930s lying attacks by Cambridge "peace" scientists on British civil defence efforts to get the country ready to deter the Nazis. Sir Normal Angell, whose pre-WWI best-seller The Great Illusion claimed war to be just a great illusion that nobody could profit from (so we can safely disarm) was disproved in both World Wars, but still emerged a hero figure to the pacifist movement with a knighthood and a Nobel Peace Prize, and Sir Austin Chamberlain (half-brother of Prime Minister Chamberlain, who went to Germany to collect Hitler's autograph on a lying peace declaration). More recent examples from the Cold War era will also be discussed. The key reason why these people were not blamed was their "good intentions". The path to hell is paved with good intentions. Disarmament and a refusal to credibly deter aggressors is always a peaceful, civilized "good intention". But it has repeatedly backfired, encouraging the very disasters it claims to aim to solve. Sloppy calculations are to blame.

Howard Morland, a disgruntled U. S. Air Force pilot discharged for questioning Vietnam tactics, interviewed some of the modern physics professors who were involved in the public hyping of nuclear weapons effects exaggerating "peace propaganda" during the Cold War, exposing alleged incompetence of the basic physics involved, and more importantly arrogant assertion of false guesswork claims, just as occurs in the hype for 1st quantization and string theory, in his book The Secret that Exploded (Random House, New York, 1981):

"[Pages 61-2.] The first interview ... with Bernard Feld, the editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, ... Feld told me ... he thought that the cruise missile warhead was a pure fission weapon (it has a yield of 200 kilotons) and that it used about 10 kg of plutonium. This statement was entirely incorrect, I later realized; the magisterial quality of Feld's delivery suggested a virtual pride in his ignorance of the subject. He also told me that fifty to a hundred nuclear weapons, not ten thousand, were all we needed for deterrence. ... The next day - Friday, July 7 [1978] - I had my first interview with Philip Morrison, also at MIT. Morrison, a professor emeritus of theoretical physics whose elegantly written book reviews provide some of the most reliably enjoyable reading in Scientific American ... talked about Herbert York's book The Advisors and the idea of fission weapons boosted by fusion reactions. He said he thought that it was a tritium-tritium, not a tritium-deuterium fusion reaction, which did the boosting. It turns out this too was wrong. ...

"[Page 138.] My next target was Sidney Drell ... Drell offered no resistance to the opportunity to examine my drawings. I explained each one to him. 'Is that correct?' I queried, after proffering a description which I then thought was correct, though I now know it to be wrong. 'Yes,' he replied ... I endeavored to extract from him some information about radiation pressure: 'Would gamma or X-rays be more suitable for compressing the fusion fuel?' 'That is a designer's option,' Drell said.

"[Page 145 mentions basic calculational errors by Postol, who gave Lynn Eden "firestorm" exaggerations, based in part upon falsely correlating blast effects on obsolete charcoal braziers in overcrowded 1945 Hiroshima wood frame housing, with thermal radiation, exposing a complete ignorance of the Hiroshima firestorm findings in the long-declassified 6-volume U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey interviews with survivors.] Ted Postol, the scientist from the Argonne National Laboratory ... Postol calculated the radiation pressure inside the casing of the Teller diagram to be 1012 atmospheres ... His calculations, which sounded very erudite, turned out to be flawed ..."


In the section on his interview with Herbert York, Morland writes critically about the groupthink necessary in the peace propaganda movement (it is this groupthink consensus that allowed Hitler to get away with evil in the 1930s):

"... in the interest of unity, all decisions had to be supported by all members before they could be taken. Every decision had to be unanimous. York said that he had noticed at the University of California at San Diego, where he worked, that charismatic student leaders used the consensus method to control groups. The purpose of Robert's Rules of Order was to prevent the domination of a group by one individual [like Winston Churchill standing almost alone against Hitler in the 1930s] or by a small circle; that is why charismatic leaders [Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Chamberlain] prefer consensus to parliamentary procedure. It suppresses dissent and makes the group more easily dominated by making all dissent appear obstructionist."


Many of the incorrect statements Morland collected were from alleged experts who had authored "authoritative sounding" articles in journals like the Scientific American or Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, based on false understanding about nuclear weapons effects. It's not rocket science that they failed at, but basic physics. It is commonplace for widely hailed "intellectual mathematicians" to go into physics and fail to understand anything properly, while being cheered and applauded by the mainstream who always think of science as being just a political activity based on authority, rather than based on facts and results.

"... wisdom itself cannot flourish, and even the truth not be established, without the give and take of debate and criticism. The facts, the relevant facts ... are fundamental to an understanding of the issue of policy."

- J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1950 (quoted by Howard Morland, The Secret that Exploded, Random House, New York, 1981; unnumbered preliminary page).


As mentioned in a previous post, my father was a civil defence instructor in Britain who could see where things were going for recruitment with civil defense having its hands tied behind its back by official secrecy, while being pounded even in the mid-1950s by anti-civil defense propaganda concerning nuclear weapons effects and countermeasures.

He left in 1957 when Britain's Civil Defence Corps was at its largest size since the wartime Blitz (a peak membership of 336,265 by May 1956, reported in The Times, 2 May 1956, page 6). He left Britain for West Africa, first Ghiana, then Nigeria where between 1961-1969 as the accountant to the Holman Brothers road building equipment manufacturer and servicer with depots throughout the country, he observed the mechanism behind outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War which started on 6 July 1967. Nigeria had gained its independence in 1960, but tribal tensions only escalated when oil was discovered in the delta at Biafra and it was obvious that the proceeds would be diverted from the local population to the Federal Government (dominated by another tribe), so Biafra tried to declare itself an independent state to keep some of its own oil revenues for its people. The British Government (Labour's Harold Wilson) continued shipping arms to the Federal Nigerian Government for them to fight against relatively unarmed Biafrans (although they eventually received some support from the French, who were after their oil, like Harold Wilson), amid mounting charges of genocide from news media led by BBC journalist Frederick Forsyth who "left the BBC in 1968 after controversy arose over his alleged bias towards the Biafran cause and accusations that he falsified segments of his reports. Returning to Biafra as a freelance reporter, Forsyth wrote his first book, The Biafra Story in 1969."

In 1995, a BBC Timewatch documentary on the war was broadcast under the title "Fighting a War without Guns" (the Federal side has guns, the insurgents didn't, but they still put up a terrific fight), a title which in a way sums up the whole problem with weapons effects exaggerations for war. Humans come supplied with two arms and the mental capacity to improvise effective weapons, and don't necessarily need very advanced weapons like bombs or guns to start a war. Numerically, what's the formula for the killing capacity of a stick, a stone, or a machette? There isn't one, because unlike once-only bullets and bombs, primitive weapons are reusable, just as gas chambers and torture tools are reusable. In fact, the Biafrans with more primitive weapons plus photographs of dying, starving, children (issued by Markpress, the Biafran Government's public relations firm) splashed across the world's newspaper front pages, were able to continue a war of slaughter against a well-equipped modern army. "Ethnic cleansing" simply did not begin and end with Auschwitz. War isn't the worst conceivable nightmare: if it were, there simply would be no war. Even if both sides have no guns, they will still have sticks, stones, etc.

Pacifist non-interventionism groupthink by the United Nations in 1994 led to genocide of 937,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus by the Interahamwe in Rwanda in 1994 when they voted to withdraw most of the UN peacekeepers (protests from the local UN commander Romeo Dallaire were simply ignored in favour of the consensus from New York). Additionally, the UN voting on new member states for its human rights commission elected Gadaffi-era terrorist Libya (behind the Lockerbie bombing) and the Sudan whose state-sponsored Janjaweed "ethnic cleansing" massacred thousands of innocent people in Darfur. Political doctrines of the "pacifist" no-war type cause a tribal aggressiveness via fanatical ideological propaganda, leading to increasing risk-taking, increasing censorship of real facts, and irrational exaggerations of non-existent or trivial dangers simply in order to deflect attention from the real risks of genocide. These people are awarded peace prizes for trying to make the world ideologically better, even if the attempt leads to a world war. The mass-media mostly refuses to effectively debunk idealistic, pseudo-ethical, lying propaganda, because it knows the penalty is bankrupcy: the public don't want to face reality, preferring ideals, and won't buy hard facts if there is any fictional big-brand name "ethical" propaganda lying alternative on sale. This is why lying fiction is always more popular in cults than facts. You can't get rid of war or even make it "more humane" by disarmament. As in the 1930s, that just gives an incentive to aggressors to make feared arms in secret.

(Before you think that nuclear bombs are today too enormous to make in secret in a dictatorship, remember that democratic countries like America and Britain made them in secret, and not just during the war! Democratic Britain clandestinely made its first nuclear bomb under a postwar Labour Government led by 1930s pacifist Clement Attlee, without any Parliamentary debate despite it being peacetime.)

The efficiency of simple dispersal and improvised protection against explosions was most obvious in Vietnam, where America used its giant B-52 bombers to drop 11.3 megatons of TNT equivalent in the form of small conventional explosives, i.e. two-and-a-half times the Second World War strategic bombing load on Japan, Germany and axis occupied countries (such small blasts are far more efficient than an equal total yield of nuclear bombs, due to energy wasted in overkill, with the damaged area and casualties scaling less than proportionately with bomb yield, as we will see later), which was some 331 kg of high explosive for every man, woman and child in Vietnam, at a cost of $150,000 million, without winning the war:

"... 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).

After the Cold War, Harvard politican scientist Samuel Huntington addressed the problem of the next battleground in an article in Foreign Affairs and in an interview in the 28 June 1993 issue of Time. In ancient times, most wars were made between kings or tribes. Both twentieth century World Wars and the Cold War were between ideologies such as imperialism versus democracy or democracy versus dictatorships of fascism or communism. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the nature of war has continued its evolution and wars have predominantly been between rival religious "civilizations" (as termed by Huntington). E.g., the Croatian versus Serbian Civil War which started in the former Yugoslavia after the Soviet Union collapsed (sparked when Croatia declared itself independent on 29 May 1991), was a war between people who spoke the same language but followed different religions or forms of "civilization". In the 1993 Time interview, Huntington argued:

"The conflicts among civilizations will be increasingly central: the West and Islam, Islam and Hindu civilizations in India, Islam vs. the slavic Orthodox Russian civilization, China and Japan as civilizations. ... Islam is the most strict religion in the world outside of Christianity. There is no separation between religion and politics. ... The most significant dividing line in Europe now is the line where Western Christianity ends and Orthodox Christianity and Islam begin. That is a line which hasn't changed much in several hundred years. Its significance was suppressed during the cold war. ... In Asia there is the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India, which could involve Pakistan. ... the Asian and virtually all the Middle Eastern Islamic states are increasing their military strength. There is this Confucian-Islamic connection between China and North Korea on one hand and Middle Eastern states like Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya on the other. ... The cold war was relatively simple. The Russians certainly had no martyr complex. They were rational in ways we tend to think of as rationality. It is not clear that people in these other civilizations think in the same way."


In a famous speech, President Ronald Reagan stated that hitherto, "peacemaking" has been corrupted by political ideologies (such as weapons effects and war effects exaggerations to support pacifism towards dictatorial ideologies like fascism and Marxism, as shown by Reagan's civil defense and ABM/Starwars innovations, discussed in detail later in this post), leading to suffering and war, not peace and salvation: in future peacemaking must cease to be an ideology of lying exaggerations, and must focus on achieving religious or spiritual harmony. The inner resolve to fight and win the battle for the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, does not come merely from having an arms stockpile. It comes from a belief in the highest possible moral standards. War is an extension of politics, so weapons are political instruments, but the deep cause of war or political disagreement is hatred, either ideological or unspiritual. Solve the deep spiritual or religious cause of conflict, and then the symptom of political fighting, warfare, is healed. A deep-rooted cancer may not be healed just by easing symptoms, like trying to outlaw the use of weapons in war. We must resist the temptation of sinking into an immorally lax approach towards the deeper spiritual meaning of life. President Reagan stood firmly on very high moral ground in order to credibly denounce the false doctrine of hatred toward life, liberty, and freedom. Reagan capitalised on American spirituality and moral superiority in order to resist communist propaganda, and to help to reform evil. Peacemakers stand on the moral high ground of truth to reform evil terrorists.

Today, the main thrust of military activity is rightly dedicated to counterinsurgency, in which terrorism is being largely prevented by military operations. But the apparent success of this policy should not lead to general war complacency, or else defense and civil defense weaknesses will grow and soon be exploited by terrorist groups or other enemies in an unexpected, carefully planned surprise attack, as occurred on 11 September 2001. The Hague Declaration of 1899 Concerning Asphyxiating Gases banned the use of “projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” In his 1923 book The World Crisis, Winston Churchill summarised the wishful thinking of people towards warfare including chemical warfare in 1911:

“It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century ... No one would do such things. Civilisation has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible.”


Despite the wishful thinking of the 1899 Hague Convention banning chemical warfare, chemical warfare was used by both sides in World War I, and was used in gas chambers in World War II. The mechanism for war is an extension of political disagreement, which will always be possible. Karl von Clausewitz's posthumous 1832 On War argued that war is fundamentally a political problem:

“War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.”


It was not until Herman Kahn's On Thermonuclear War of 1960 that the first hint of a problem with the popular exaggeration of weapons and war capabilities became public. But the first crisis in the simplistic exaggeration of weapons effects of relevance to nuclear weapons occurred during the American Civil War of 1861-5 between the industrialized free Northern Federal Union states (150,000 men under arms within two months) and the slavery-supporting Southern Confederacy (112,000 men were armed within two months). Despite vastly superior resources and funding, the Union army led by Grant and backed by President Lincoln was nearly defeated by a smaller, war-weary Confederate army led by Lee during nine-months of trench warfare in the Siege of Petersburg. Conventionally, war was dominated by rules of engagement like those of a duel, in which little or no cover was utilized, and massed concentrations of troops or cavalry were exposed to fire:

“... the thinning out of ranks made them less vulnerable to incoming fire. ... gains were ameliorated further when men took to lying down to shoot or, better still, made a point of firing from trenches or behind cover, instead of standing up in the open as so recently in the past decade.”


- Kenneth Macksey, Technology in War: the Impact of Science on Weapon Development and Modern Battle (Arms and Armour Press, London, 1986, p. 26).


Above: An expensive Dictator mortar at the Siege of Petersburg, American Civil War, 1864.
Such weapons came with the promise of striking a knockout blow, but the very high protective factor of simple countermeasures, like trenches, negated most of the blast and debris danger (unless the trench was literally within the crater rupture zone radius). Huge quantities of munitions had to be fired, creating a war of attrition backed by constant supplies from an arms manufacturing industry. The facts about American Civil War countermeasures and thus almost certain defeat were not widely known so Germany ignored the American lessons of trench countermeasures in 1914, and therefore believed its big guns could strike a quick knockout blow. Trenches turned the planned short-duration war into a long-duration war of attrition, allowing a Naval blockade to defeat Germany. Germany faced exactly the same problem with its false expectation of using gas against trenches (gas masks were immediately improvised, as Herman Kahn explains in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War), and then submarines armed with torpedoes to try to achieve a Naval knockout blow or blockade of shipping against Britain. Germany submarines were simply detected with improvised ultrasonic-frequency hydrophones (waterproofed microphones, suspended underwater, were in 1918 supplemented with the asdic technique of sending out sonic waves to bounce back from submarines, and thus map their exact positions underwater, leading to the development of modern sonar), which allowed precise depth-charging to supplement the secret magnetic minefields guarding Naval bases and ports. German submarine action backfired completely when the Lusitania was torpedoed on 7 May 1915, causing America to enter the war. Ships subsequently sailed in convoys protected by anti-submarine warfare.

Modern machine guns and large caliber mortars failed to deliver their promised “knockout blow” in the American Civil War, but the lesson was ignored by Germany fifty years later in 1914, again in 1939, and continues to be ignored in virtually all media propaganda about all kinds of weapons today, despite the failure of the Nazi Blitz to defeat Britain, the failure of the first nuclear bomb dropped on Japan by itself to end World War II (the bomb on Hiroshima had to be followed by Nagasaki three days later, plus the Russian declaration of war, before Japan finally accepted a conditional surrender), and despite the failure of many megatons of explosives in aerial bombardment to knock out the North Vietcong, leading to American failure in the Vietnam War! The American Civil War was the first time in history that industrialized warfare was tried and it was blunted by simple improvised trench defenses to create a long-duration war of attrition, requiring the expenditure of vast quantities of ammunition and explosives in a failed effort to overcome very modest, low-cost defenses, as explained by Kenneth Macksey in his brilliant analysis, Technology in War: the Impact of Science on Weapon Development and Modern Battle (Arms and Armour Press, London, 1986, pp. 28-29):

“Trench Warfare – The Lines of Petersburg

“When Grant deluded Lee as to his true intentions after the Wilderness Campaign, managing suddenly to appear in mid-June [1864] with massed forces at Petersburg ... an army of 65,000 was insufficient to overcome the 40,000 men Lee had rushed to the spot by rail. ... the Confederates extended their entrenchment to their right, always in time to meet each assault while fiercely contesting Grant’s further attempts to cut the line to Richmond or the one running Westward from Petersburg. ... The attack on the Redoubt at Petersburg on 30th July demonstrated in utter confusion the inability ... a mine containing four tons of black powder was to be exploded beneath the Redoubt and its [Confederate] defenders. ... among the Confederates initial shock was overcome and a counter-stroke launched in the afternoon. Artillery sealed off the flanks of the 500-yard breach in the defences ...

“The [Union] Federals were flung back with the loss of 3,793 men. That day the Confederates lost 1,182, including those blown up. ... Grant strove fitfully to break the deadlock ... creating for the logistic support of his troops a comprehensive conglomeration of base depots, camps and railway spurs leading to within artillery range of the enemy. Facing the Confederate capital the entrenched front was some 37 miles long, manned by 90,000 well-provisioned Federal troops on one side, and 60,000 deprived but fanatically determined Confederates on the other. Try as he would to smash through, Grant was defeated. ...

“Had Grant’s exploits comprised the sole Federal effort in 1864, they could well have led to his and President Lincoln’s downfall in an election year. The disgruntled General McClellan was campaigning for the Democratic candidacy with a call for an end to the war. He might have won if General William Sherman, taking advantage of the drain of Confederate strength to the East, had not struck the decisive blow in the West.”


Therefore, the many miles of effective enemy improvised trench shelters dispersed and protected soldiers from mortar fire and machine guns, thereby negating ignorant exaggerations of expensive weapons effects for a knockout blow, and extending to nine months the failed Siege of Petersburg by Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in 1864-5 during the American Civil War. Ignoring this vital lesson from trench warfare and believing warmongering exaggerations of high explosive shelling and machine guns made by inventors and the arms industry, German’s leaders attempted in 1914 a “knockout blow” by offensive firepower, which failed due to trench defenses. Gas masks then negated poison gas, a desperate tactic developed to try to overcome trench defences. Trenches brought time which allowed Naval action to grind down and defeat German ambitions.

Instead of finally learning the lesson from World War I that exaggerations of weapons effects and downplaying defensive countermeasures have caused war and suffering, exaggerations of weapons effects while downplaying countermeasures was a tactic used before World War II in an effort to make all sensible people avoid war. (The Nazis blamed German defeat in World War I not on the false military assumption of a quick knockout blow due to ignorance of the effectiveness of simple trench countermeasures, but on the 500,000 Jews in Germany, 0.76% of German's population.) The “lying for peace” policy failed for the obvious reason that it was only effective for those peaceful states where it was completely unnecessary, but it was ineffective for the belligerent states where it was necessary. The fascists repeatedly made and broke false peace promises to buy time and lull fears, while for propaganda Hitler in 1936 put forward a lying but applauded Nazi 25-year-peace-plan to successfully detract attention and concern over his war preparations. Exaggeration of weapons effects and false attacks on civil defense as warmongering actually encouraged proliferation of precisely the most feared weapons to disarmed states which saw aerial warfare as a means to achieve aggressive intimidation of peace-loving states.

What happened was that towards the end of World War I, when Germany was being defeated by trench warfare in combination with Naval action, two new military technologies were used with limited success: tanks and aircraft. Like the first nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, neither the tanks nor the aircraft of World War I accomplished any manner of knockout blow despite the element of surprise. Nevertheless, following the lying exaggerations of knockout blow potential of explosives, mortars, machine guns, big guns, gas and submarines in earlier combat, both tanks and aircraft were widely and loudly touted in postwar propaganda and media futurist speculation as capable of achieving a knockout blow, if used in surprise against a defenseless target. The order by British General Sir Douglas Haig to send the infantry out of trenches and into enemy machine gun fire as standing targets in the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916 achieved only a record number of casualties, nearly 60,000 on the first day. This disaster motivated General Haig to test the innovative idea from Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. C. Fuller for British armoured tanks to lead an invasion.

The idea of the tank was simply to allow a safe passage over the barbed wire lines and ditch fortifications of the enemy in a heavily armed and steel-protected tracked vehicle, thereby overcoming the stalemate of trench warfare defenses against machine guns and high explosives. Fuller's plan was tested in the Battle of Cambrai, 20 November 1917. The 476 tanks successfully crossed the lines but moved too far ahead of the unarmoured infantry and cavalry they led, and were unable to completely overrun enemy guns. The tank attack degenerated and failed to achieve a knockout blow due to lack of any radio coordination between tanks, infantry, air support, and commanders, as Royal Tank Regiment Major Kenneth Macksey clearly explained in Technology in War (Arms and Armour Press, London, 1986, p. 94):

“Once tanks and artillery had overcome the enemy machine-guns, the vehicles pulled back to rally and replenish, and the troops had to await orders by telephone to engage targets not included in the initial programme. The infantry, having caught up with the tanks, felt unable to progress without armour, as did the cavalry. ... A few tanks carrying radio, which were used for the first time here as report centres, barely contributed. It usually took two or three hours to arrange a fresh attack. ... German troops reinforced the sector massively by means of a remarkable nose-to-tail traffic in railway trains from far afield – a movement that neither long-range guns nor bombing aircraft could prevent. Using several mobile anti-aircraft guns to check the tanks at Fontaine, the Germans stabilized the situation and rapidly built up a counter-stroke.”


Therefore, the tank in World War I lacked adequate two-way radio communications, which were finally developed during the 1920s and formed the basis of the Nazi “Blitzkrieg” (lightning war) plan for World War II, which - just like other exaggerated weapons fantasies - worked well on completely unprotected targets in surprise attacks (any weapons do that), but led to false confidence and a major defeat during the Battle of Stalingrad, during which the tanks travelled so far into enemy territory that their logistics became vulnerable, so they ran out of sufficient fuel, munitions, and air support. Only when the vulnerable supply chain logistics for the delivery of fuel and ammunition was maintained (which severely limited the scope of Blitzkrieg), were tanks successfully able to overcome strong city defenses. In the Battle of Stalingrad, between 17 July 1942 and 2 February 1943 the Nazis were bogged down in house-to-house fighting during the summer, fall and winter, and despite their desperate efforts using both tanks and bomber aircraft Blitzkrieg, they failed to overcome defenses despite causing over a million casualties.

Until 1974, when Fred Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret was published, the tank was still widely hyped as being a brilliant success in the hands of Field-Marshall Montgomery against the German tanks of Rommel, where Monty dug his tanks in to be ready to meet the Germans in surprise for an advantage at the 1942 Battle of Alam Halfa Ridge, for example. The problem with this false interpretation of history was that the true facts were secret, and Monty exploited the situation as he had been instructed to do, claiming on TV repeatedly that he simply figured out what Rommel's actions were likely to be and prepared to stop him. The reason why Monty knew what to do with his tanks was the breaking of the Enigma code and later the Fish code. The Official Secrets Act prevented him from disclosing the source of his knowledge about Rommel's tank movements, until intelligence expert Winterbotham's 1974 book. German Enigma coding machines fell into British hands before the war, and they were able to work out how to decode all of the German coded radio transmissions sent between German forces and Berlin. West Germany continued to make and sell Enigma machines around the world after the war, so Britain refused to declassify the fact it had broken the codes, which enabled it British Intelligence to decode secret radio signals sent by countries in Africa, the Middle East and South America. After 1943, the reason for British speedy "intuition" of enemy movements and plans was the down to the speed of the world's first programmable computer, Colossus, and a team of scientists back at Betchley Park in England, where it was finding possible code keys for the radio messages German forces were transmitting back to Berlin.

After the Stalingrad defeat for Nazi tanks and bombers, the Soviet Union failed to learn the correct lesson (it was trapped all the while in the social revolution phase of Marxism as defined by Marx's Communist Manifesto of 1848, unable to ever achieve the promised freedom of equality without relaxing state police control and toppling due to insurgency), and thus bankrupted itself by building up a massive stockpile of main battle tanks (which were vulnerable to the neutron bomb), even after Moscow found it necessary to use 22 divisions to suppress the largely unarmed Hungarian revolution of 1956:

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

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

- Dr Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, 1957, pp. 180-3, 228-9.


Major Kenneth Macksey concluded his brilliant analysis of history, Technology in War: The Impact of Science on Weapon Development and Modern Battle (Arms and Armour Press, London, 1986, p. 221): "the underestimation of land weapon defences before 1914 and the overestimation of the offensive power of air weapons before 1939 led to serious miscalculations, unfounded assumptions, and mistaken ambitions."

It is the duty of civilized humanity to try to avert such disastrous casualty-causing mistakes and the culture of weapons effects hype which leads to them. The 9/11 terrorist attacks using hijacked American commercial aircraft in 2001 highlight the perils of trusting peacetime security to the elimination of “visible weapons” threats. The first Nazi bomber aircraft used in war was a converted civilian airliner, a Junkers Ju-52 which on 14 August 1936 bombed and destroyed a Republican battleship in the Spanish Civil War. Such aircraft were used again on 26 April 1937, bombing the town of Guernica, which surrendered without resistance two days later. It is not just a kamikaze or military bomber that can be improvised quickly using peaceful civilian aircraft: Britain actually used the flat-decked civilian container ship SS Atlantic Conveyor as an aircraft carrier for vertical-take off Harrier jet planes and helicopters during the Falklands War. In fact, the first British nuclear weapon test of 3 October 1952 used a 25 kt nuclear bomb inside the hull of a ship specifically to discover the effects of a subversive nuclear attack underwater in a harbor!

Major Macksey makes the point at the beginning of his book Technology in War (Arms and Armour Press, London, 1986, p. 7) that modern weapons, unstripped of popular media lying hype, have always had problems which chop down their vastly exaggerated capabilities over older weapons systems: “The first Industrial Revolution struck its roots in war and continued to be motivated by recurrent themes devised by inventors, promoted by entrepreneurs and governments seeking riches, fulfilment, aggrandizement, security and power. ... Indeed, in terms of accuracy and rate of fire, the long-bow that dominated battlefields in the 14th and 15th centuries remained superior to the 17th-century musket still in front-line service at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.”

A machine gun fires faster than a longbow, but it creates more noise, advertising an audible warning to troops to get down, to take cover. The flash of light ahead of the blast wave from a nuclear explosion does just the same, contrary to lies in films of explosions where the bang soundtrack is falsely synchronized with the flash.

Nuclear winter and related lies debunked by actual firestorm data

The “nuclear winter” is a deception, a cutback version of Stonier’s “new ice age” myth from his book “Nuclear Disaster”, which we review later in this post. Of thousands of nuclear test explosions, the one “nuclear winter” from the Hiroshima fire storm blocked out the sun for 25 minutes (from burst time at 8:15 am until 8:40) in Hiroshima as shown by the meteorological sunshine records printed in Figure 6 (3H) of Drs. Ashley W. Oughterson, Henry L. Barnett, George V. LeRoy, Jack D. Rosenbaum, Averill A. Liebow, B. Aubrey Schneider, and E. Cuyler Hammond, Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs: The Report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, Volume 1, Office of the Air Surgeon, report NP-3036, April 19, 1951, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Nobody is recorded as being a casualty from the 25 minutes of sunlight deprivation!

The reason? The soot is hydroscopic. It absorbs water and falls out in black rain. The firestorm took 30 minutes to start and was at peak intensity 2-3 hours later, so radioactive mushroom cloud been blown many miles downwind before the black rain occurred over Hiroshima, contrary to ignorant lies about “fallout radiation”. The soot doesn’t freeze the planet. The soot was instead rapidly precipitated in a self-induced rainout as was pointed out back in 1983 by J. B. Knox in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report UCRL-89907, which nuclear propaganda ignored. No other nuclear explosion ever created a firestorm. Even those near naturally forested Pacific islands failed to ignite the vegetation by thermal radiation.

Targeting oil wells instead of cities reduces the moisture effect, but the soot doesn't rise high enough from burning oil wells, as proved when Saddam set fire to all of Kuwait’s oil fields. This has all been intensively researched and documented. Regarding the non-soot dust injected into the stratosphere, unlike soot it’s not a strong absorber of sunlight and weather records were intensively studied for signs of both nuclear winter and ozone depletion during hundreds of megatons of atmospheric 1945-62 nuclear tests, with failure.

The initial gamma radiation from a nuclear explosion produces more ozone than it destroys. Gamma radiation produces large amounts of ozone from atmospheric oxygen regardless of the burst altitude, but ozone-destroying nitrogen oxides are only produced by the high-density air blast of low-altitude nuclear explosions. Those nitrogen oxides then combine with water vapour in the turbulent toroidal circulation of the mushroom cloud to form nitric acid, which does not destroy ozone but simply gets deposited, very diluted, in rain. This was proved in the 1970s when aircraft were flown through mushroom clouds from Chinese nuclear tests. In high altitude nuclear explosions, there is no compressed blast wave that forms nitrogen oxides, so you actually get a boost to the ozone layer since the explosion produces vast amounts of ozone due to the gamma radiation.

Even the “nuclear winter” from mass fires, dust, and other effects from the well-established 100 million megatons K-T explosion 65 million years ago failed to wipe out plants and mammals. Instead, it made extinct the dangerous cold-blooded reptiles that were preventing freedom for peaceful mammal evolution. The idea that there is no protection and no possibility of surviving against a big explosion is false. Claiming that nuclear wars cannot be won if you lie and exaggerate the effects of nuclear weapons and the effects of nuclear war while downplaying countermeasures, is exactly what encouraged the terrorists to exploit the most feared weapons in the 1930s while peace-loving nations disarmed and thus effectively signed the death warrant for six million Jews on “peace treaties” with liars.

One of the Scientific American’s Cold War publishers, Gerard Piel, had a long history of lying and publishing lies about fires from nuclear weapons to attack civil defense readiness, just as his predecessors did in Britain during the 1930s (which made the Prime Minister appease Hitler, encouraging him to start WWII). Typical example of lie:

“A heading in one recent report concerned with effects of nuclear detonations reads, ‘Megatons Mean Fire Storms,’ and the report predicts that a 20-megaton nuclear burst is sure to produce a 300-square mile fire storm. [Reference: Gerard Piel (then the anti-civil defense publisher of the Scientific American), ‘The Illusion of Civil Defense,’ published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1962, pp. 2-8.] The report further states that blastproof bomb shelters afforded no protection in World War II fire storms, and the reader is left to conclude that vast fire storm areas in which there will be no survivors are an assured consequence of future nuclear attacks. ... the 40,000-50,000 persons killed by the fire storm at Hamburg constituted only 14 to 18 percent of the people in the fire storm area and 3 to 4 percent of Hamburg’s total population at the time of the attack. ... Two of three buildings in a 4.5 square mile area were burning 20 minutes after the incendiary attack began at Hamburg, and similar figures were reported for other German fire storm cities.”

- Robert M. Rodden, Floyd I. John, and Richard Laurino, Exploratory Analysis of Fire Storms, Stanford Research Institute, AD616638, 1965, pages 1, 5.

Media lying about the thermal ignitions (leading to lies about firestorms and nuclear winter caused by the soot of such fires blocking sunlight) can be traced back to the secret classification of the full three-volume 1947 report on Hiroshima by the Strategic Bombing Survey, which was edited out of the brief single volume “summary” that the openly published a year earlier, 1946. Here is the key revelation (originally ‘secret’ May 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima, pp. 4-6):

‘Six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet [975 m] of air zero stated that black cotton black-out curtains were ignited by flash heat… A large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was, however, in agreement that a great majority of the original fires were started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires ... There had been practically no rain in the city for about 3 weeks. The velocity of the wind ... was not more than 5 miles [8 km] per hour.... Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion... almost no effort was made to fight this conflagration ... There were no automatic sprinkler systems in building...’ [Emphasis added.]

No modern city today is built out of 1945 Hiroshima style wood frame houses with charcoal stoves amid bamboo furnishings and paper screens. Even Hiroshima is no longer built like that, it’s a modern steel, concrete, and brick city and would not suffer a firestorm if a bomb dropped on it again.

Even where city firestorms have actually occurred in obsolete wooden city areas of Japan and Europe, there was not a nuclear winter. What about the theoretical predictions that a nuclear attack on oil supplies will cause a nuclear winter, made by the founder of nuclear winter hype, Paul Crutzen? Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army invaded Kuwait and set all of its oil wells on fire as it was driven back into Iraq by America in 1991.

Peter Aldhous, ‘Oil-well climate catastrophe?’, Nature, vol. 349 (1991), p. 96:

“The fears expressed last week centred around the cloud of soot that would result if Kuwait’s oil wells were set alight by Iraqi forces ... with effects similar to those of the ‘nuclear winter’ ... Paul Crutzen, from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, has produced some rough calculations which predict a cloud of soot covering half of the Northern Hemisphere within 100 days. Crutzen ... estimates that temperatures beneath such a cloud could be reduced by 5-10 degrees C ...”

Dr Richard D. Small of Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation, California, responded in Nature, vol. 350 (1991), pp. 11-12, that 16,000 metric tons of actual soot is produced from 220,000 metric tons of oil burned every day, and anyway:

“My estimates of the smoke produced by destruction of Kuwait’s oil wells and refineries and the smoke stabilization altitude do not support any of the purported impacts. The smoke is not injected high enough to spread over large areas of the Northern Hemisphere, nor is enough produced to cause a measurable temperature change or failure of the monsoons.”

It turned out that the nuclear winter hype was false, because even if you do somehow manage to start a firestorm in the modern world (the overcrowded fire-hazard wooden medieval areas of Hamburg, Dresden, and Hiroshima weren’t rebuilt with wood after they burned in firestorms), it simply doesn’t produce a stable layer of soot in the stratosphere like the computer simulation. At Hiroshima the soot returned to the ground promptly because it is hydroscopic: it forms water droplets, rain. (It wasn’t fallout: the firestorm took over 20 minutes to get doing, by which time the radioactive mushroom cloud had been blown miles downwind.)


Above: the target for Sam Cohen's neutron bomb was these T-54/55 Russian main battle tanks, which had the highest production run of any tank ever made (over 86,000 were manufactured). They were manufactured chiefly for the invasion of Western Europe, once tactical nuclear weapons had been removed by political lobbying of Western disarmament activists via the Kremlin-controlled World Peace Council based in Moscow.

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” – Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

“The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.” – Edmund Burke, Second Speech on Conciliation with America (1775)

“Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security.” – Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

“Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.” – Edmund Burke, Speech on the Petition of the Unitarians (1792)

How uncritical acceptance of eugenics pseudoscience by groupthink reverence in the 1930s helped to set the scene for the Holocaust, not the promised “utopia through lies”

You may think that science needs to be perverted in order to safeguard humanity. Wrong. Lying does the opposite. Here is the disproof of the frequently made claim that “lying safeguards peace”. Many people prefer desperately try to live in George Orwell’s “big brother” world of 1984 groupthink, despite the fact that many millions of people have died defending freedom. Nazism sprang from a pseudoscience that few wanted to debunk until they saw the final solution’s results in 1945. They thought the lies of eugenics were a fashionable scientific idea in the 1930s, so hardly anybody opposed it when they had a chance (as we will document later in this post, in reviewing Wheeler-Bennett's Munich:Prologue to Tragedy and President Kennedy's Why England Slept, which present a very different first-hand history to the later pro-fascist revisionists who did not live through the 1930s). Instead, in the 1930s up to the Munich conference in 1938 and even beyond, Hitler’s Nazi racist eugenics was fashionable science that was regarded as “harmless” by the world’s leaders, media, and public who were blinded by lies on aerial gas attacks, just like support for pseudoscience against civil defense by Nobel Laureates today.

I recommend a study of the 1935 Alexis Carrel book “Man, the Unknown”, which advocated the pseudoscientific use of eugenics to create a “super-race”. Notice particularly that the book was hyped and praised around the world because the author and eugenicist Carrel had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912. In the 1936 Nazi edition, carrel added the following passage: “(t)he German government has taken energetic measures against the propagation of the defective, the mentally diseased, and the criminal.”

Carrel wrote:

“Those who have ... misled the public in important matters [which to the Nazis meant the Jews], should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gasses.”

On 2 August 1937, well before the final solution of gas chambers and well before the Munich crisis when Prime Minister Chamberlain so eagerly shook hands with Hitler before the cameras of the world's press, Britain's Manchester Guardian newspaper reported the construction of 40 new concentration camps in Germany. The proud man of peace had to turn a blind eye to racism because Britain had no civil defense and because Britain exaggerated the strategic bombing threat.

(Eugenics was pseudoscience, and contrary to Darwin's evolutionary theory of the "survival of the fittest" instead of being supported by it, because the whole basis of biology is to allow the variations necessary for evolution to occur where it is most necessary. E.g., by definition you can't plan a "super-race" in advance to survive a new strain of super-flu virus which itself hasn't even yet evolved. Put another way, if the "super-race" idea was so clever, nature could have used simple cloning in reproduction, omitting the much harder and more complex reproduction methods necessary to preserve the potential for variation in offspring. Variation and thus the individual uniqueness intrinsic to diversity has always been vital to survival of the fittest in evolution, because the definition of "fittest" is completely subjective, varying with the environment and circumstances, rather than a universally defined parameter: it you put all its your eggs in one basket, then all your eggs will be vulnerable. Blonde hair and blue eyes might correlate to increased skin cancer risks under certain environmental conditions, or inbred stupidity. By analogy, if you artificially "clone" people mentally by teaching everyone in the same classroom in precisely the same way, instead of allowing individual variation through differing individual projects and field experience, you make them all into mental clones, ending up with the risk of groupthink failure, one reason why Hitler lost his war after literally "shooting the messengers" in removing real critics from his circle of advisers, and why groupthink-type political control of some failed Western military projects have caused them to end in failure.)

Now whose idea was it to gas six million Jews? A Nobel prize winner? Who is responsible? Obviously his pseudoscience was warped and misapplied still further by the evil Nazis, but he certainly did nothing to help prevent the Holocaust by his lying pseudoscience. Nor did the media which praised the lying pseudoscience. The guy actually thought his eugenics by gassing races which allegedly “misled the public in important matters” was a benefit to humanity. This is what can happen when people let lies in science get out of hand. Lies need to be exposed and sorted out, not praised and hyped by the media. There are other examples of the terrible dangers that can occur when a conspiracy of hysterically paranoid and fanatically science-hating nutters in the media, and their fan clubs in the misled general public, tries to lynch those who just want a fair hearing for facts.

We need to know the facts, even if they are unpleasant, because technology and its application depend ultimately upon facts in science.

If science is held up by nutters, the future development of life saving technology will be held up. Particle physics based on facts led to various unexpected innovations in medicine. If Lord Kelvin had been allowed to stop research on radioactivity (which contradicted his false “vortex atom” theory), radiotherapy against cancer would have been affected. Thus, theoretical lies are a danger.

You might love the “big brother"”of fashionable consensus, but this can be a grave danger. Science isn’t a religion of worshipping status quo consensus or fashionable lies! Science is not some kind of fanatical, lying, obfuscating religion hell bent on promoting lies supporting the extermination of races, by gassing human beings.

“The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.” [Doublethink defined in George Orwell’s 1948 novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, part 1, chapter 3, p 32.]

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four, Chancellor Press, London, 1984, p225.

“Groupthink is a type of thought within a deeply cohesive in-group whose members try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. It is a second potential negative consequence of group cohesion. ... cohesiveness prevented contradictory views from being expressed and subsequently evaluated. As defined by Janis, ‘A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.’ ... Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by making decisions as a group. During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance.” - Wikipedia.

“We are told that if the deterrent is to be credible, we must take measures to minimize the casualties of a nuclear war, and thus show the enemy that we are not afraid of such a war. Civil Defense measures, are, therefore, being urged on the public. ‘Protect and Survive’ is the slogan in the United Kingdom, and similar campaigns are being mounted in other countries. The suggested civil defense measures would be laughable if they did not carry such tragic consequences. They will not convince the enemy, but they may lull the population into a false sense of security. If the public is made to believe that the casualty toll can be greatly reduced by civil defense measures, then a nuclear war becomes more likely.”

- Professor Joseph Rotblat, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1981, page 34.


As we discuss later in this post, everything Rotblat stated was disproved by both World Wars. Rotblat followed Sir Norman Angell, Sir Joseph Chamberlain, and other peace activists in making up claims which are false. If Britain or America were led by a Hitler intent on world domination, then having civil defense would truly increase the risk of war. If the enemy wants to attack and is worried about our having civil defense, they will attack now instead of waiting for us to get civil defense which will mitigate the effects! Rotblat is not just absurdly illogical in his contrived lies, he omits the facts on the effects of nuclear weapons (making false claims). The same claim was made about gas masks issued to everybody in Britain before World War II. If we don’t have them, we’re safe from war. No hospital? Then you cannot get ill. If we have civil defense, there is war psychology. If we have hospitals, we will think ourselves into ill health. If you want health, be positive and have no insurance. If you have a seatbelt in a car, are you more likely to have an accident? What about lifeboats and lifejackets on ships? Hospitals? Ambulances? First aid kits? Insurance? Get rid of all this, and you will be guaranteed to be safer: “If the public is made to believe that the casualty toll can be greatly reduced by civil defense measures, then a nuclear war becomes more likely.” - Rotblat.



William Chipman (head of FEMA’s civil defense in Reagan’s administration) had previously debunked all of the Rotblat-style lying propaganda against civil defense in his report Civil defense for the 1980s - Current Issues U. S. Department of Defense, Defense Civil Preparedness Agency (DCPA), 13 July 1979, PDF version linked here (note that DCPA was incorporated within FEMA two days later, on 15 July 1979; unlike DCPA, FEMA is not a U. S. Department of Defense agency, but includes natural disaster planning for earthquakes, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes as well as terrorist warfare). In particular, see on pages 47-48 President Kennedy’s request for civil defense evacuation of Miami and other coastal cities in Florida during the Cuban missiles crisis to Assistant Secretary of Defense for Civil Defense, Steuart L. Pittman, who had to reply to Kennedy that he had no plans ready to evacuate those cities: “after the crisis was over, his [Kennedy’s] personal concern over his limited civil defense options led him to sign a memorandum directing a significant speedup of the U. S. civil defense preparations.” Chipman comments on page 48: “the American President was concerned about civil defense ... in 1962, the notion of vulnerability being stabilizing held little attraction for the Chief Executive.” Chipman has recently written about Readiness for Terrorist Nuclear Threats for Strategic Defense, recommending republication of revised civil defense manuals:

“Revise the following materials to emphasize terrorist threats: (a) FEMA publication H-21, Nuclear Attack Environment Handbook, August 1990, to provide a handbook essential to training at EMI and in the States; (b) FEMA H-20, Protection in the Nuclear Age, 1985, a 38-page booklet for the citizen on weapons effects and means of protection; and (c) standby emergency public information (EPI) videos of c. 1989 on weapons effects and means of protection, and parallel radio EPI materials. Conclusion: It is essential to develop readiness to reduce casualties, should terrorists detonate a nuclear weapon in the U.S. Their interest in killing our citizens is now undeniable, and the casualties from a nuclear burst in a U.S. city could exceed those in New York by more than an order of magnitude (be over 10 times as great). While massive casualties can only be reduced, not eliminated, it would be imprudent to neglect steps with potential to reduce casualties substantially.”


Contrary to lies from Rotblat about civil defense or ABM making nuclear war “more likely”, it was actually the lack of such preparations in 1962 which forced Kennedy into relying on a military blockade and issuing the 22 October 1962 ultimatum to the Soviet Union on American TV: “The 1930’s taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked, ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. ... To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. ... It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” The problem with this “I will start World War III if you fire one nuclear missile”-policy is called escalation: it contained the risk that if some Russians had managed to launch just one single nuclear missile from Cuba, by misunderstanding, accident or insanity, then the risk of escalation and the price in human lives would have been much higher than with adequate civil defense, which can in crises provide a mechanism to reduce the scale of a potential disaster and to de-escalate a crisis.

Kennedy increased civil defense spending because he had seen the tragedy of the lack of civil defense in Britain at Munich, while studying the origins of World War II first-hand for his excellent civil defense college thesis Why England Slept, where he points out that Rotblat-style left-wing political attacks on Britain's civil defense in the 1930s led to a lack of preparation in civil defense and thus intimidation of the Prime Minister by Hitler's war threats at Munich, escalating the 1930s crises. Adequate civil defense would have stabilized the crises by preventing so much political intimidation, panic, wanton fear, procrastination, and indecision. On 2 August 1937, well before the final solution of gas chambers and well before the Munich crisis when Prime Minister Chamberlain so eagerly shook hands with Hitler before the cameras of the world's press, Britain's Manchester Guardian newspaper reported the construction of 40 new concentration camps in Germany. The proud man of peace had to turn a blind eye to racism because Britain had no civil defense and because Britain exaggerated the strategic bombing threat.

While a 23 year old student in 1940, President John F. Kennedy wrote a penetrating analysis of the cause of World War II, published as Why England Slept. Unlike other history books, it draws the political lessons which Kennedy later used, as American President, to avert war during the Cuban missiles crisis in October 1962. A few of the key points from John F. Kennedy's book “Why England Slept”, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1962 (first published 1940) must be quoted since they are so vital today:

Page 7: “What had England been doing while Hitler was building up this tremendous German Army?... To say that all the blame must rest on the shoulders of Neville Chamberlain or of Stanley Baldwin is to overlook the obvious. As the leaders, they are, of course, gravely and seriously responsible. But, given the conditions of democratic government, a free press, public elections, and a cabinet responsible to Parliament and thus to the people, given rule by the majority, it is unreasonable to blame the entire situation on one man or group.”

[The fault therefore lies in greed of the democratic system to save money by cutting back on necessary defences, and to use lying exaggerations of the effects of weapons and lying underplaying of the value of civil defense to save lives and to make deterrence and coercion of thugs credible, to defend a lack of funding for civil defense. Kennedy pointed out that the American President, Roosevelt, in a speech in Chicago in October 1937 recommended a policy to “quarantine the aggressors”, but Roosevelt’s subsequent requests for higher American defence spending were not approved by Congress: even President Roosevelt's winter 1939 Naval appropriation for 1940 was cut down from $1,300 million to $800 million, by U. S. Congress. Therefore, even a keyed-up leader who wants to act may be rendered unable to deter a Pearl Harbor by the consensus of elected representatives in a democracy. The only way is to overcome apathy, to answer critics convincingly, and to fight through the media for defense measures. Secrecy and an unwillingness to defend civil defense in the media can lead to a failure of deterrence by democracies.]

Page 9: “I do not believe necessarily that if Hitler wins the present war he will continue on his course towards world domination. He may well be too exhausted, or he may be satisfied with what he has obtained. But, in the light of what has happened in the last five years, we cannot depend on it.”

Page 13: “In a Democracy, especially, where a majority must share the idea before it becomes part of the national viewpoint, it is necessary to study the fundamentals upon which the public’s opinions are based.”

Page 14: “... the Englishman had to be taught the need for armaments; his natural instincts were strongly against them. Internally, armaments were a menace to his economic security, as they must be paid for out of higher taxes; externally, they were a menace to his conception of a peaceful World order based on the League of Nations.”

Page 16: “The statement of Lord Grey, British Foreign Minister, made in 1914, that, ‘The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable,’ had a tremendous effect on post-war British opinion. Armaments were looked upon as something horrible, as being the cause of war, not a means of defence. Again and again, through the ‘thirties, opponents of rearmament quoted Grey.”

Page 46: “[B.H.] Liddell-Hart [author of ‘The Defence of Britain’] held that for a country situated as was Britain, her greatest strength would lie in building up her defences in order to prevent a knockout blow, and then blockading the enemy into surrender. This theory was excellent...” [This blockade policy was adapted by President Kennedy later during the Cuban missiles crisis on 22 October 1962.]

Page 84: “... the German locomotive industry, for example, was assigned to the manufacture of tanks... It is difficult to keep track of manufacturing in a foreign country, especially in a country like Germany, where all the preparations were guarded in totalitarian secrecy... Britain... had to go through the preliminary ‘tooling-up’ period, which cost her nearly two years.”

Page 99: “Hitler’s propaganda and speeches were so effective that they numbed any reaction that the British felt from the reintroduction of conscription or the invasion of the Rhineland.”

Page 169: “... I believe, as I have stated frequently, that leaders are responsible for their failures only in the governing sector and cannot be held responsible for the failure of a nation as a whole... I believe it is one of democracy’s failings that it seeks to make scapegoats for its own weaknesses.”

Page 170: “Herbert Morrison, the able British Labour Leader... was being criticised in 1939 for co-operating with the Government in their voluntary National Service: ‘At the beginning I got plenty of abuse from the irresponsibles because I said that Labour administrators must play their full part in A.R.P. [Air Raid Precautions, later renamed civil defence], which was denounced as a fraud and a plot... to create war psychology. For Labour local authorities to co-operate with state departments in this task was treachery... no A.R.P. could possibly be effective’.”

Page 171: “... England has been a testing-ground. It has been a case of a democratic form of government, with a capitalistic economy, trying to compete with the new totalitarian system, based on an economy of rigid state control.”

Page 176-7: “In England we can see vividly where democracy failed. In the case of the A.R.P., for example, the Government failed to get volunteers until after Munich had driven home the seriousness of the situation. But Germany had 12,000,000 members by 1936. She needed no such shock to build up this vital defence measure. Should England have forced people to join? Yes, if the A.R.P. is considered the vital thing. No, if the democratic system is considered the important factor, as freedom of the individual is in essence democracy.

“Again we witnessed the struggle between the National Government and the local government as to who should bear the burden of the cost of the A.R.P. Should the Government have forced the local authorities to provide their quotas? Freedom of local governments from centralised control is one of the cornerstones upon which we have erected our democracy.

“Should the Trade Unions have been forced to co-operate with the Government long before May of 1940? Should strikes have been outlawed, labour standards disregarded, men forced to go into trades and do work to which they were opposed? The smashing of the Trade Union is symbolic of Fascism. The right of labour to strike, the right to decent wages and decent hours, have been what democracy has boasted is fundamental to its success...”

Page 177: “We must be prepared to recognise democracy’s weaknesses and capitalism’s weaknesses in competition with a totalitarian form of government. We must realise that one is a system geared for peace, the other for war. We must recognise that while one may have greater endurance, it is not immune to swift destruction by the other.”

Page 178: “... we must realise that a democracy finds it difficult to keep up this sustained effort over a long period of time, for the interests of the individual are not directly concerned with armaments. He must make a great personal sacrifice to build them up [hence the immense cold war defence spending tax revenue per person of population here, so often quoted by Richard Rhodes and freedom cynics as a waste of money on deterrent arms never used in anger], and it is hard to maintain this sacrifice year in and year out. Especially it is complicated by the fact that a democracy’s free Press gives the speeches of the totalitarian leaders who state their case in such a ‘reasonable’ manner that it is hard always to see them as a menace.”

Page 179: “... the dictator is able to know exactly how much the democracy is bluffing, because of the free Press, radio, and so forth, and so can plan his moves accordingly.”

This claim by Kennedy misses one tragic and inadvertent bluff: Prime Minister Chamberlain actually was bluffing when repeatedly trying to assure peace to Hitler at Munich and in countless signed agreements and peace treaties, but then finally – having convinced Hitler that Britain had no stomach for war – he had to do the opposite and declare war (at the threat of his Cabinet all resigning if he didn't declare war) when Hitler effectively broke the camel’s back by adding the final straw of invading Poland. Chamberlain did issue Hitler a threat of war in the case of Poland, but this was too late to have any deterrent effect.

Precisely the same thing was done in 1914 by British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, who refused to clearly threaten war against Germany if Germany invaded Belgium until it was too late for all the mobilization and preparation in Germany to be stopped. Chamberlain in 1938-9 and Grey in 1914 both first convinced Germany that Britain was too weak to defend Poland/Belgium - so Britain failed to credibly deter invasions - then having convinced the enemy it was weak, it then declared war with its back against the wall. It’s like an armed policeman failing to threaten an armed thug out of desire to maintain “good manners” and not to invite any risk of escalating the situation, and then – when dying from being shot by the thug – feverishly trying to shoot the thug in the back out of revenge. That is not the purpose of issuing weapons. Weapons are not issued to enable people to take revenge. The armed policeman doesn’t behave weakly out of social niceties and then take revenge after being shot and killed. He tries to de-escalate situation and deter the thug from shooting by threatening to shoot first at the first signs of trouble, because (counter-intuitively to those who live in idealistic ivory towers), human nature in general respects strength but disrespects weakness!

Page 180: “We must always keep our armaments equal to our commitments. Munich should teach us that; we must realise that any bluff will be called. We cannot tell anyone to keep out of our hemisphere unless our armaments and the people behind these armaments are prepared to back up the command, even to the ultimate point of going to war. ... If we had not been surrounded by oceans three and five thousand miles wide, we ourselves might be caving in at some Munich of the Western World.”


Clearly, it is possible that some people will behave differently in some circumstances if they have health insurance, lifeboats, seatbelts, and civil defense, and it is even possible that a peace-loving, freedom-loving democracy will be able to declare a war in exceptional circumstances when it has civil defense, that it could not declare without civil defense. However, Rotblat ignores the actual fact that the utility of civil defense in helping to start a war was a benefit to humanity, because the effects of bombs were less than 100% lethal, unlike concentration camp diseases and starvation ending up with Zyklon B pesticide in gas chambers. Hitler didn’t declare war on Britain. He invaded Poland, and Britain finally declared war on Hitler because Britain finally wanted to do something, albeit far too late to avert another World War. Rotblat ignores in particular the fact that if Britain had civil defense sooner than August 1939, it could have threatened Hitler earlier and more credibly called Hitler's bluff when he had only a 6-week munitions supply, and put the Nazis out of business either by deterring Nazi invasions and racist excesses (Nazi racism did not begin with the gas chambers, but was plain from the very beginning), or else militarily stopped him with a limited war, before the Nazis had built up strength through their invasions.

Hitler had been brainwashed by appeasement from Prime Minister Chamberlain (contract photo linked here) that Britain would never start another war under any circumstances, so Hitler thought he was safe from a world war (the Nazis at Munich had only a 6-weeks munitions supply and could have been stopped relatively easily as we will prove later in the post, using both the actual figures for the 1930s arms race and the intelligence estimates which were given to Chamberlain). Civil defense did vitally contribute to a war psychology in Britain that enabled Britain to stand up to Hitler, but it was implemented far too late to help to intimidate Hitler into not invading most of Europe. Silence from Rotblat on this issue! In 1981, the military strength of the Soviet Union was at a peak ratio to that of the West, and Rotblat supported the propaganda coming from the Kremlin-controlled World Peace Council, whose aim it was to soften up Western Europe for invasion, by unilateral disarmament.

Civil defense, implemented far too late to avert World War II by allowing opposition to the Nazis when they could be stopped, at least allowed Britain to finally oppose Hitler, instead of allowing world Nazi domination. Tragic? That depends on whether you view death by bombs or orderly annihilation in “peaceful” gas chambers and concentration camps (or Siberian salt mines) any differently. Rotblat worked at Los Alamos on the nuclear bomb, but left when Germany was defeated. He didn’t want the bomb dropped on Japan: he preferred conventional warfare against Japan, the planned million casualties in an invasion, or maybe he thought that there was some other way out. He feared the Nazis more than Stalin, despite the fact that Stalin actually murdered millions more than Hitler (40 millions). Rotblat was entitled to say what he wanted and do what he wanted in a free world but he is not entitled to impunity from criticism. He repeated lies attacking civil defense for political ends during the Cold War.

Rotblat is not the only Nobel Laureate to win big prizes for telling lies, as we will see. Nobel himself exaggerated weapons effects for profit when selling explosives to both sides in the Crimean War, which provided blood money to fund supposedly glorious prizes. Odd that Rotblat accepted capitalist-funded military-industrial complex prize money! Nobel Peace Prizes were also awarded for lies to Sir Norman Angell (lies: Hitler can't hurt anyone because war is a great illusion, no nation can gain from war, wars cost the initiators so much that nobody sane will start one, so don't fear Hitler) and Sir Austin Chamberlain (lie: peace can be secured and we can all sleep soundly by collecting autographs from thugs on worthless bits of paper, peace treaties).

Introduction

[There is] a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered looks strange; what looks strange is therefore improbable; what seems improbable need not be considered seriously.

— Thomas C. Schelling, in Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, Stanford University Press, 1962, p. vii.

“The idea that warfare might destroy civilization, perhaps even exterminate humanity, was already familiar to the public in the 1930s. … the public felt it would be chemical explosives and poison gas that might bring a new dark age. The image of a new world war ... leading to utter destruction and barbarism, was widespread in popular journalism and stories, and even in a movie, Things to Come [1936]. During the 1930s this imagery may have retarded the acceptance of civil defense in the most threatened nation, Great Britain, where many argued that precautions would be futile.”

- Dr Spencer R. Weart, “History of American attitudes to civil defense”, chapter 2 of Professors John Dowling and Evans M. Harrell (editors), Civil Defense: A Choice of Disasters, American Institute of Physics, New York, 1987, p. 11.

Although detection of the first Russian nuclear weapon test in 1949 sparked the publication of Glasstone’s civil defense data manual, Effects of Atomic Weapons, in 1950, Dr Weart points out in Civil Defense: A Choice of Disasters that it was the communist-backed invasion of South Korean in the Korean War of 1950-53 that led President Truman to create the Federal Civil Defense Administration as an insurance against escalation to nuclear warfare, and on page 13 he states that in 1951 alone it handed out 20,000,000 copies of Survival Under Atomic Attack. Dr Weart adds on page 24 that during the October 1962 crisis: “The largest building supplies store in Washington sold out of sandbags on the day after Kennedy’s speech announcing a blockade of Cuba.” The first chapter by Dr Paul P. Craig in Civil Defense: A Choice of Disasters on page 3 makes the point that the Battle of Britain was actually won by a combination of imperfect civil defense with the relatively ineffective Royal Air Force fighter defense, that could only shoot down an average of 10% of the enemy bombers on each raid. However, because civil defense minimized casualties, it enabled Britain to survive repeated bombing raids, during which more and more of the Nazi bombers could be shot down, proving that civil defense and relatively ineffective air defense in combination together can lead to victory:

"... though the Royal Air Force was able to down only about 10% of the incoming planes, by the time three or four raids were mounted by the Nazi's, only 65% or so of the initial planes were still flying. An attrition rate of 10% per raid was quite enough to effectively demolish the Nazi attack [in combination with civil defense mitigation of the effects of a long run of repeated attacks], and to allow England to finally win the Battle of Britain."


Page ix of the Preface by the editors (physics professor John Dowling and mathematics professor Evans M. Harrell) of Civil Defense: A Choice of Disasters points out that the increasing accuracy of satellite and inertially guided missile systems and the development of MIRVed missiles in the 1960s led to a massive reduction in the explosive yields of individual nuclear warheads on both sides as the Cold War progressed (from 9-25 megatons in the 1950s to the 100 kt W76 warheads and 475 kt W88 warheads and similar Russian equivalents):

"The higher the accuracy, the lower the yield needed. MIRVing means more warheads to contend with, but they generally have lower yields. A successful SDI [ABM system] would ensure that few warheads would penetrate our defenses, and consequently, make civil defense much, much easier. A successful SDI would make a strong case for implementing a comprehensive civil defense program. Often the consideration of interaction between the arms race and civil defense has been left out of the debate."


Herman Kahn points out in Appendix III of his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War that if the severe damage radius of a nuclear explosion is R and the missile Circular Error Parameter (CEP) distance (the radius from the intended target within which 50% of warheads fall) is C, then the probability of a target surviving n warheads is simply S = (1/2)x where x = n(R/C)2. (Note that Kahn's formula assumes 0% survival chance for a direct hit, which is obviously incorrect for very hard buried targets like the bunker under the Kremlin which is reportedly deeper than the crater rupture zone depth for the revised crater dimensions law at high yields, but such deep targets can still be destroyed either by earth-penetrator warheads or by a repeated sequence of ground bursts in the craters formed by prior detonations.) Since R generally scales as only the cube-root of the bomb yield, it follows that for constant survival probability the payoff from a given increase in missile accuracy is larger than the effect from varying the weapon yield. Hence, many individual bombs each with smaller yields but improved accuracy are preferred to a fewer heavier higher-yield warheads, since they are more destructive to hardened counterforce targets (missiles in silos, underground enemy command posts, tanks, submarines, etc.) while producing less collateral damage to civilians since the amount of fallout radioactivity (unlike blast and cratering areas) scales directly with the yield.

There is an immense blast collateral damage inefficiency of the nuclear bomb as compared to conventional weapons, due to the fact that blast damage areas due to peak overpressure are proportional to the two-thirds power of yield. E.g., a 1 kg TNT bomb is a thousand million times smaller in blast energy than a 1 megaton blast, but it produces equal peak overpressures over an area equal to (10-9)2/3 = 10-6 of that of a 1 megaton blast. Therefore, one million separate 1 kg TNT bombs, or 1 kiloton of TNT, is exactly equivalent to a single explosion of 1 megaton of TNT. This explains why the blast effects from a megaton bomb are approximately equal to a 1 kiloton World War II conventional bomber attack, with a hundred or more aircraft each scattering a few tons of TNT in small bombs over a large area target (so that there is little probability of severe blast area overlap, i.e. the wasteful "overkill" effect). But all nuclear weapons media propaganda ignores such facts, presenting a megaton explosion over a city as an unparalleled disaster, a thousand times worse than a large World War II attack!



Above: some of Penney's 1970 published data for the attenuation of peak blast overpressure by the act of causing destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which lowers the peak overpressure in a city relative to that over unobstructed terrain. This effect means that the desert nuclear test-validated cube-root distance scaling law severely exaggerates peak overpressures at large distances from nuclear weapons exploding in or over cities. The very first edition of Glasstone's nuclear effects handbook, The Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, on page 57 has a section written by John von Neumann and Fredrick Reines of Los Alamos (it is attributed to them in a footnote) stating factually:

"... the structures ... have the additional complicating property of not being rigid. This means that they do not merely deflect the shock wave, but they also absorb energy from it at each reflection.

"The removal of energy from the blast in this manner decreases the shock pressure at any given distance from the point of detonation to a value somewhat below that which it would have been in the absence of dissipative objects, such as buildings."


This was removed from future editions. This isn't speculative guesswork: it's down to the conservation of energy. I emailed Dr Harold L. Brode and other experts about why it isn't included in American nuclear weapons effects manuals. Dr Brode kindly replied with some relevant and interesting facts about non-radial energy flows in Mach waves and the transfer of energy from the blast wave to flying debris (which, alas, travels slower than the supersonic shock front because the blast wind is always slower than the shock front velocity). It is true that the energy loss from the blast wave near ground level is partially offset by downward diffraction of energy from the diverging blast wave at higher altitudes. However, this downward diffraction process is not a 100% efficient compensator for energy loss, particularly for the kinetic energy of the air (the dynamic pressure or wind drag effect). The dynamic pressure (which in unobstructed desert or ocean nuclear tests makes the blast more hazardous for higher yield weapons) is an air particle effect not a wave effect so it does not diffract like a wave, and it is cut down severely when transferring its energy to building debris. Even if every house absorbs just 1% of the incident energy per unit of area incident to the blast, then the destruction of a line of 100 houses cuts the blast energy down to 0.99100 = 0.366 of what it would be over a desert surface. Basically, this chops down the collateral blast damage from large yield weapons detonated in cities and affects the usual scaling laws, making nuclear weapons even less dangerous than predicted by the textbook equations and curves.

Kahn also points out that disarmament propaganda efforts continued to help the fascist states by hindering deterrence and civil defense efforts right up to the outbreak of World War II in Europe, and America’s pacifist neutrality up to that time towards fascists did not protect it against a surprise attack from Japan. So it’s no good having an "unthinkable" view of weapons which can’t actually deter those aggressive actions which will escalate after horrific conventional warfare to end only with nuclear attacks. In World War II, the failure to credibly deter Japan from attacking caused the escalation to conventional fighting and the counter-escalation by the use of two nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which finished the war. In order to reduce the risk of being attacked by nuclear weapons, you need to have effective civil defense. Disarmament is not an option because having no weapons did not save millions of people from extermination by the fascists and communists of Hitler and Stalin. Trying to “find common ground” was the appeasement policy tried by Chamberlain, which also proved to be helpful to the Nazis, as explained in the review of the Wheeler-Bennett book Munich: Prologue to Tragedy, below.

Si vis pacem, para bellum: if you wish for peace, prepare for war; at the very least have some civil defense so that your potential civilian targets are not too appealing to terrorists. Don't be weak if you want peace, or you will be intimidated and pushed into a corner sooner or later, where you will have to fight with your back to the wall or surrender. Peace activism has always resorted to lying about weapons effects and the effects of war, while downplaying the effects of not having war. As we shall see later on, Herman Kahn correctly argued in On Thermonuclear War that a lack of credible civil defence and assertiveness in Britain encouraged thugs and led to war, which could have been prevented at minimal cost if Britain had been less pacifist in the 1930s. (Herman Kahn's excellent 1960 RAND Corporation paper P-1888-RC, The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence, linked here, argues that it is no good for nuclear weapons just to deter nuclear war, they must also deter "Pearl Harbor" or "Munich"-type crises, such as when Hitler invaded Czechosolvakia in 1938 through the failure of deterrence: nuclear weapons must deter not only nuclear war but also invasions and threats that would otherwise escalate rapidly towards World War.) It is the lying from the disarmament activists on civil defense which was most exploited in Nazi 1930s propaganda to force Britain's leaders (supported by the equally mis-informed population) to support appeasement. Two of the key lies in the 1930s:

(1) Weapons cause wars and suffering. The "weapons cause wars" lie asserts falsely that World War I was caused by a weapons arms race, not by British Foreign Minister Lord Edward Grey behaving weakly towards Germany in 1914, which was also exactly how British Prime Minister Chamberlain (acting, as he said, as "his own Foreign Secretary") behaved towards Germany nearly 25 years later. In each case, World War resulted. Lord Grey in 1914 failed to make it clear to Germany in good time that Britain would go to war if Germany invaded Belgium: "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."

The Germany Navy during the Kaiser's War Cabinet on 8 December 1912 set a date for war 18 months in the future, as reported in the Diary of Admiral Muller: "General von Moltke [German army chief] said: I believe war is unavoidable; war the sooner the better. But we ought to do more to press to prepare the popularity of a war against Russia. The Kaiser supported this. Tirpitz [German Navy chief] said that the navy would prefer to see the postponement of the great fight for one and a half years." British historian A. J. P. Taylor's 1969 War by Timetable argues that railway timetables made World War I inevitable, and were the reason why Moltke was able to convince the Kaiser to go ahead on 1 August, when 11,000 trains were mobilizing German troops according to an inflexible plan. Millions of soldiers had to be transported using complex, inflexible railway timetables such as the Schlieffen Plan of 1897-1906, which took almost a decade to complete. Taylor points out that each country had just one railway mobilization plan (Plan 17 in France, Plan A in Russia, etc.), and there were no electronic computers available with which to quickly modify these plans. For example, when the Tsar wanted to mobilize against Austria, he had to order general mobilization, because there was no alternative plan and planning was too lengthy and complex to quickly modify. The British Foreign Secretary Grey ignored these "technical" facts about the use of 11,000 trains in inflexible mobilization timetables, which led him to warn the Kaiser too late that Britain would go to war, making WWI inevitable.

Prime Minister Chamberlain's peace guarantee with Hitler signed at Munich on 30 September 1938 (online facsimile linked here) misled Hitler yet again into believing that Britain was determined not to fight another war, thus giving Hitler the psychological freedom to do exactly as he wished. When eventually, nearly a year later, Chamberlain did give Hitler an ultimatum to withdraw from Poland or face war, Germany had become so strong from the resources of the invaded territories and the totalitarian mass production of arms that it was a worthless threat that Hitler did not even bother responding to. (Even then, his bluff called, Chamberlain still didn't want to declare war and was only forced to do so by his Cabinet, which threatened to resign if he didn't declare war.)

Britain had to declare war on Germany, just as it had done in 1914. The failure to honestly threaten the enemy at the earliest possible time did not reduce aggression and the risk of war, but encouraged and increased it. If you believe in peace, don't encourage thugs by collaborating with their evil, or promising them peace, or trying to make friends with them by offering to collaborate with them: they just read that as a sign of your pathetic weakness and will walk all over you. This counter-intuitive fact (extensively documented in this blog post, below) is ignored by those who have a misguided understanding of human nature. The simplistic disarmament propaganda with its "weapons cause suffering"-hype ignores the fact that 75% of the few hundred thousand population of Hiroshima survived the nuclear bomb (particularly those who were not standing up in a direct line of sight to the explosion behind glass windows, and who did not duck and cover in the interval between the light flash and the delayed blast arriving and driving glass fragments into them) compared to the 0% survival rate in pesticide Zyklon B gas chambers, and the appalling death rates from starvation and disease in unheated concentration camps. How could disarmament ever prevent such cold blooded massacres? Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia without firing a shot, Hitler gassed millions using insecticide without firing a shot. Therefore, contrary to disarmament promises of a utopia without weapons in the 1930s, those people failed to acknowledge (and shamelessly still fail to acknowledge today) that it is not the bullet or the bomb which were the underlying problem of Hitler. Anything, including pesticide, can be used as an efficient weapon against people who are pathetically defenseless.

Hitler didn't declare war on Britain first in 1939. Despite promising Hitler peace at Munich in 1938, Chamberlain was eventually forced by his cabinet into declaring war on Germany. Admittedly, weakness from disarmament and soft talk did reduce Britain's priority rating as a Nazi target, but this delay was of no help because it just gave the Nazis more time to prepare for war (they were arming faster than Britain at all times before war was declared) and without American lend-lease and later military support, Britain would have been invaded and terrorized once the Nazis had finished their higher-priority invasions.

(2) Disarm so thugs won't kill you. This is a popular claim. In the 1920s and 1930s disarmament was falsely popularized on the basis of a lie by Lord Edward Grey, the British Foreign Minister who failed to intimidate Germany soon enough in 1914. Grey excused himself by fabricating the widely-repeated lie:

“The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable.” - Lord Edward Grey, quoted by John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept, 1940 thesis, reprinted by Greenwood, 1981, pp. 6-7


Actually, as Kennedy explained in his thesis on the cause of World War II, Grey's claim sowed the seeds for World War II, leading to a false belief in disarmament and diplomacy to overcome insecurity and fear by collaboration, written treaties, and public smiling hand-shaking with the most evil thugs in human history:


Above: the finest hour of the appeasing peace maker: Prime Minister Chamberlain shakes the hand of Chancellor Hitler, after conceding the Sudentenland to the Nazis, believing that by convincing Hitler that England would never resort to violence, Nazi aggression would be averted rather than encouraged. As we shall see, Chamberlain was not "buying time" by appeasement to rearm England at anything like the Nazi rate of rearmament, because he knew democratic England couldn't rival the munitions output of a totalitarian state, so England was losing the arms race, the gap was widening and the situation was ever getting worse for war as time was lost, not improving. This is contrary to Chamberlain's lying excuse later when accused in the book Guilty Men, after his peace efforts were proved to have actually encouraged aggression by convincingly misleading Hitler into believing than Britain would never fight back no matter how bad the Nazis were: see for instance the pathetic and gullible text of Chamberlain's worthless "peace" paper which Hitler happily autographed for him on 30 September 1938, linked here. Chamberlain really was fooled by Hitler as we shall see further on in this post, and the true fact is, England's civil defence efforts to decrease vulnerability to air attack were so pathetic and poorly funded by Chamberlain's government that England didn't even test its air raid shelters against real explosives until mid-1939 (ref.: T. H. O'Brien, Civil Defence, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1955, p. 196, PDF linked here)

“The 1930s taught us a clear lesson. Aggressive conduct, if allowed to grow unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word. Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere.”


- President John F. Kennedy's television address to the nation, 22 October 1962 (6 days after the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba). It should be clearly pointed out that pacifist propaganda during the Cold War claiming that Kennedy allowed the Soviet's to "save face" during the Cuban missiles crisis by removing obsolete American missiles from Turkey in exchange for the removal of new short and intermediate range missiles from Cuba, is a fraud. Removing obsolete missiles from Turkey doesn't compensate, and anyway it was not a public offer but a behind the scenes deal done after the public speeches by Kennedy which exposed that Andrei Gromyko had lied to Kennedy's face when denying that the Soviet's had placed missiles in Cuba. In particular, the excellent discussion of Kennedy's decision making process by Irving Janis in his book Groupthink, which contrasts the bad decision-making process ("groupthink") Kennedy used during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion (when everyone around the table felt pressure to achieve unanimity, to suppress doubts, to censor contrary views, and to try to pacify and prematurely justify the plan to the group leader), with the very different, revised decision-making process Kennedy used during the Cuban missiles Crisis, when contrarian views were encouraged, leading to detailed investigations by war-gaming sessions for all possible eventualities, before any actions were taken.

“If history teaches us anything, it is that we must resist aggression or it will destroy our freedoms. Appeasement does not work. As was the case in the 1930s, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbors. Only 14 days ago, Saddam Hussein promised his friends he would not invade Kuwait. And 4 days ago, he promised the world he would withdraw. And twice we have seen what his promises mean: His promises mean nothing.”


- President George H. W. Bush, 8 August 1990 (6 days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait).

“We fight for a free way of life against a new barbarism - an ideology whose followers have killed thousands on American soil, and seek to kill again on even a greater scale. ... Now, I know some people doubt the universal appeal of liberty, or worry that the Middle East isn’t ready for it. Others believe that America’s presence is destabilizing, and that if the United States would just leave a place like Iraq, those who kill our troops or target civilians would no longer threaten us. Today I’m going to address these arguments. I’m going to describe why helping the young democracies of the Middle East stand up to violent Islamic extremists is the only realistic path to a safer world for the American people. I’m going to try to provide some historical perspective to show there is a precedent for the hard and necessary work we’re doing, and why I have such confidence in the fact we’ll be successful. ...

“The enemy who attacked us despises freedom, and harbors resentment at the slights he believes America and Western nations have inflicted on his people. He fights to establish his rule over an entire region. And over time, he turns to a strategy of suicide attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight. ... The enemy I have just described is not al Qaeda, and the attack is not 9/11, and the empire is not the radical caliphate envisioned by Osama bin Laden. Instead, what I’ve described is the war machine of Imperial Japan in the 1940s, its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and its attempt to impose its empire throughout East Asia. ... even the most optimistic among you probably would not have foreseen that the Japanese would transform themselves into one of America's strongest and most steadfast allies, or that the South Koreans would recover from enemy invasion to raise up one of the world’s most powerful economies, or that Asia would pull itself out of poverty and hopelessness as it embraced markets and freedom. ...

“The militarists of Japan and the communists in Korea and Vietnam were driven by a merciless vision for the proper ordering of humanity. They killed Americans because we stood in the way of their attempt to force their ideology on others. Today, the names and places have changed, but the fundamental character of the struggle has not changed. Like our enemies in the past, the terrorists who wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places seek to spread a political vision of their own - a harsh plan for life that crushes freedom, tolerance, and dissent.

“Like our enemies in the past, they kill Americans because we stand in their way of imposing this ideology across a vital region of the world. This enemy is dangerous; this enemy is determined; and this enemy will be defeated.

“We’re still in the early hours of the current ideological struggle, but we do know how the others ended - and that knowledge helps guide our efforts today. The ideals and interests that led America to help the Japanese turn defeat into democracy are the same that lead us to remain engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq. ...

“Critics also complained when America intervened to save South Korea from communist invasion. Then as now, the critics argued that the war was futile, that we should never have sent our troops in, or they argued that America's intervention was divisive here at home. ...

“Without Americans’ intervention during the war and our willingness to stick with the South Koreans after the war, millions of South Koreans would now be living under a brutal and repressive regime. The Soviets and Chinese communists would have learned the lesson that aggression pays. The world would be facing a more dangerous situation. The world would be less peaceful. ...

“Finally, there’s Vietnam. ... In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, The Quiet American. It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism - and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’

“After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.

“In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: ‘What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they’ve never seen and may never have heard of?’ [from Senator J. William Fulbright’s The Crippled Giant, where Fulbright naively argues at great length that there is no difference between democracy and dictatorship for the very poor people, so fighting for their freedom is a waste of effort] ...

“The world would learn just how costly these miss-impressions would be. In Cambodia [where North Vietnamese troops had camps and supplies], the [communist] Khmer Rouge began [on 16 April 1975] a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, [communist North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon and claimed victory over South Vietnam on 30 April 1975, due to the withdrawl of American support, so] former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea. ...

“There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle - those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that ‘the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.’ ...

“We must remember the words of the enemy. We must listen to what they say. Bin Laden has declared that ‘the war [in Iraq] is for you or us to win. If we win it, it means your disgrace and defeat forever.’ ...

“I recognize that history cannot predict the future with absolute certainty. I understand that. But history does remind us that there are lessons applicable to our time. And we can learn something from history.”


- President George W. Bush, August 22, 2007 speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Missouri.



Above: British Prime Minister Chamberlain and German Chancellor Hitler stand side by side in 1938. Chamberlain and the British public believed that Hitler could not really gain from his invasions, due to a false theory of Norman Angell, published in a bestseller before World War I. Angell claimed to logically disprove the "illusion" of war and of conquest. He falsely claimed that no conqueror could gain anything from war, because when it multiplies its territory to size x as a result of invasions, the increased cost of upkeep for the expanded territory divides out the total wealth by exactly the same factor, x, perfectly cancelling out the gains, so there is no net change, thus war is a "great illusion":

"For a modern nation to add to its territory no more adds to the wealth of the people of such nation than it would add to the wealth of Londoners if the City of London were to annex the county of Hertford." - Norman Angell, The Great Illusion, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1913, p. xi.


WWI was started by Germany which was left bankrupt afterwards, so Angell was believed, being knighted in 1931 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933. But Germany did not fail in WWI due to the paltry reason Angell predicted; when Germany was allowed to invade countries in the 1930s due to appeasement, it did profit, because it simply carried away the wealth or set up slave labour factories and concentration camps to manufacture goods without renumerating the workers according to Angell's idealistic formula. Angell and other appeasers ignored the possibility that an aggressor would exploit invaded countries.

Germany in WWI failed to win, not because Angell had proclaimed war a "great illusion" or because it gained nothing from invasions, but simply because it overestimated its offensive gun shelling and related military power by reason of ignoring simple improvised countermeasures used effectively in the American Civil War. These countermeasures were plain old trenches, nothing sophisticated, but they cut down field casualty rates so much that the "knockout blow" expected from its arms stockpile was negated and failed to occur. Recognising reluctantly that trenches efficiently protect people against blast winds and the flying debris of explosions, Germany then came up with a weapon of so-called mass destruction called "poison gas" to overcome people in trenches. This was soon negated by the simple improvised countermeasure called the "gas mask". Such simple countermeasures as trenches and gas masks checked the offensive capability of Germany and stopped it from achieving a knockout blow. But this countermeasure fact was not the lesson widely learned from WWI and promoted to the public in the 1920s and 1930s.

Instead, Angell and others argued the other way (against the effectiveness of countermeasures) and invented the untested, speculative, utopian fantasy theory that, if only weak, soft talk replaced tough threats and hard action, the dictatorial thugs in Germany, Italy and Japan would be somehow magically converted into loving, trustworthy and peaceful democrats, thus negotiating a way around the exaggerated effects of weapons on the cause of wars, by means of Nobel Peace Prize winning disarmament, turning a blind eye to racism, personal hand-shaking with thugs, and signing worthless agreements on paper with thugs in what is called "appeasement":

“The statement of Lord Grey, British Foreign Minister, made in 1914, that, ‘The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable,’ had a tremendous effect on post-war British opinion. Armaments were looked upon as something horrible, as being the cause of war, not a means of defense. ... but England’s failure to rearm has not prevented her from becoming engaged in a war; in fact, it may cost her one. The causes of war go deeper than armaments.” - John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept, reprinted by Greenwood, 1981, pp. 6-7


We will return to President Kennedy's attack on Lord Grey later in this post. Exaggerating enemy offensive weapons is exactly the same thing as underestimating your own civil defence against the enemy. In response to the Berlin crisis and wall in 1961, Kennedy stepped up American civil defense, which gave him a stronger negotiating position in 1962, when Soviet Premier Khrushchev put missiles in Cuba.

The people who lied to try to make Britain vulnerable to thugs

“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

- Alfred Nobel, to World Peace Conference campaigner Baroness Bertha von Suttner, August 1892.


There is some doubt over Nobel's sincerity because in his letter dated April fools day 1890 to Baroness von Suttner, refering to her anti-war novel Lay down Your Arms, he had cynically joked that he hoped to read it: "in case of universal peace". Nobel's prizes, including his peace prize, were after his death funded by the profits he made in selling dynamite to both sides in the Crimean War. The problem with his claim and also many of his peace prizes in the 1920s and 1930s is that they went to people who make war by lying about the destructiveness of high explosives and of gas. The idea is that if you lie to grossly misrepresent weapons effects and capabilities, and to dismiss all notion of countermeasures, then peaceful people will surrender their arms in fear and encourage your murder by the thugs who don't disarm or secretly rearm like the Nazis did, creating what Paul Mercer memorably called the "peace of the dead" (see his excellent 465-pages long 1986 book mentioned in an earlier post, 'Peace' of the Dead: The Truth behind the Nuclear Disarmers, Policy Research Publications, London):

"... all gas experts are agreed that it would be impossible to devise means to protect the civil population from this form of attack."


- Lie about civil defence against gas warfare by Professor Noel-Baker in his February 1927 pro-disarmament, weapons effects exaggerating BBC broadcast, quoted by Terence O'Brien, Civil Defence, H.M. Stationery Office, 1955, p. 31.

O'Brien states that this lie produced resentment in secret meetings, but was never publically denounced, so Noel-Baker's lie was left to stand unopposed: "The Chemical Warfare Research Department emphatically disputed the accuracy both of the details of the picture and of this general statement." In fact, everybody in Britain was issued gas masks and advice on gas-proofing rooms in World War II, which helped to negate the threat of an attack, by making gas useless as a weapon! Despite this, Noel-Baker won a Nobel Peace Prize like Austin Chamberlain who negotiated with fascists in Italy to get peace treaties worth zip before World War II (these are discussed in detail later in this post), became a Lord, and continued lying with exaggerations of weapons effects, such as in his lying speech during the House of Lords debate, 5 March 1980 Hansard, vol 406 cc260-386:

Lord NOEL-BAKER:

"... I want to argue that no measure of civil defence, in any war which we can realistically expect to have, will save a single life, and that to nurse a hope of safety from civil defence is to indulge a self-deceiving, futile and dangerous illusion—self-deceiving and futile because, as I said, civil defence will not save our lives; dangerous because it diverts attention from the only policy that gives us any genuine hope. It makes the public think that there will be safety where no safety is. It obscures the fact that the only way to avert disaster is to avert the war, and to abolish those offensive weapons without which aggressions cannot be begun. ... Hiroshima, 6th August 1945, 8.15 a.m., a perfect summer day: gentle breezes, sunshine, a blue sky. A blue sky is for happiness in Japan. The streets are full of people: people going to work, people going to shop, people—smaller people—going to school. The air raid siren sounds but no one runs, no one goes to shelter. There is only a single aircraft in this enemy raid. The aircraft steers a course across the city. Above the centre, something falls. It falls and falls-20 seconds, 30 seconds, 40—and then there is a sudden searing flash of blinding light, hotter and brighter than a thousand suns. ... There are no ashes, even on the pavement—nothing but their black shadows on the stones. ... For two kilometres in all directions every building, every structure is levelled to the ground. The people inside are buried in the ruins of their homes. Lorries, vans, men and women, babies, prams, are picked up and hurled, like bullets, 100 metres through the air. ... Then the fireball touches the earth. Conflagrations spring up in every quarter. Swept by tornado winds, they rush together in a single firestorm. ... The fall-out comes down again. It covers everything in Hiroshima not already rendered lethal and so those who have escaped the flash, the river, the blast, the fire, will die within a shorter or a longer time. My Lords, the first atom bomb weighed two kilogrammes—less than 5 lbs. It was a little larger than a cricket ball. It killed 140,000 people on that August day. In 1978 more than 2,000 died in Hiroshima of its long-delayed effects. ... Against such a danger civil defence offers us no help ..."


Lord Noel Baker's claim "the only way to avert disaster is to avert the war, and to abolish those offensive weapons without which aggressions cannot be begun" falsely assumes that Hitler's aggression relied on his offensive weapons. Actually, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and most other annexed countries in the 1930s without firing a shot. Additionally, most of the mass murder done by Hitler was not due to weapons of war like bombs or bullets, but by concentration camp disease, starvation, and the use of the pesticide Zyklon B for the cold-blooded extermination of millions of people in gas chambers. How will disarmament prevent people being gassed with pesticides or starved to death? It's complete and utter lunacy!

The same problem existed with Stalin's Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The majority of the mass murder or "ethnic cleansing" was done in a cold blooded way, not by dropping bombs on the people. Noel Baker's disarmament propaganda conveniently just ignores all such facts. Actually, every single statement of Lord Noel Baker on nuclear weapons effects in Hiroshima is a complete and utter lie:

1. The thermal fluence never vaporised anyone at ground zero and has never vaporized more than 1 mm of wood from such a weapon, regardless of distance; while Oughterson and Warren's Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan in 1956 proved that duck and cover prevented burns and the burns-radiation synergism which killed so many. Most of the casualties in both cities were due to blast and thermal radiation, with infected wounds made worse by the synergism of initial radiation exposure, which lowers the white blood cell count; see the PDF linked here of James W. Brooks et al., "The Influence of External Body Radiation on Mortality from Thermal Burns", Annals of Surgery, vol. 136 (1952), pp. 533–45. (See also: G. H. Blair et al., "Experimental Study of Effects of Radiation on Wound Healing", in D. Slome, Editor, Wound Healing, Pergamon, N.Y., 1961.)

2. All structures weren't levelled for 2 km; only obsolete wood-frame buildings no longer used in modern cities were damaged, displacing breakfast cooking stoves which caused thousands of fires that burned them down. Glasstone and Dolan, 1977, page 546, gives 50% survival in concrete buildings at 0.12 mile in Hiroshima. Such modern city buildings remained standing and afforded excellent protection.

3. People blasted along could have avoided that (along with flash burns) by duck and cover, as the blast doesn't travel at the speed of light but is delayed after the flash. Ignorance of nuclear weapons effects proved lethal in Hiroshima; it didn't disprove civil defence countermeasures!!

4. The fireball didn't touch the ground; fires were due to overturned cooking stoves in wooden homes filled with paper screens and bamboo furnishings. Modern city buildings are of non-flammable brick and concrete and steel construction.

5. There was no significant radioactive fallout (the cloud had been blown miles away before the sooty convective rainfall from the fires started more 20 minutes after detonation), there was just a trivial (in comparison to initial radiation) amount of fast-decaying neutron induced activity near ground zero, plus a trivial amount of cloud seeded activity downwind due to the entrainment of salt crystals and moist air before the firestorm had even begun (this is similar to the trivial rainout downwind from Pacific air bursts King in 1952 and Cherokee in 1956).

6. The percentage of deaths due to delayed effects has always been dwarfed by the natural cancer and natural genetic defect rates, see for instance Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pp. 1-27. In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the natural leukemia number of 176 in the unexposed control group, due to the thermal unstability of DNA which is naturally broken due to random molecular impacts from the Brownian motion of water molecules at body temperature, 37 °C. There were 4,687 other, "solid", tumour cancer deaths, which was 339 above the unexposed matched control group. Hence in the 36,500 Hiroshima survivors over 40 years there were 4,863 cancers of all kinds, which is 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, 12.2% naturally died from cancer over 40 years who weren’t exposed to radiation, while for the irradiated bomb survivors the figure was 13.3%. No increase whatsoever in genetic malformations could be detected: any effect was so low it was lost in the statistical noise of natural genetic defects - the effect of body temperature on DNA again - for the sample size. Nature is a way, way, way bigger problem than radiation from nuclear bombs.

7. The first nuclear weapon did not weigh 2 kg. The fissile core alone had a mass of 6.2 kg, and that was surrounded by tons of mass in the form of high explosive and other components.



Above: This diagram is from a British civil defence manual giving casualties in World War II. Terence H. O'Brien's brilliant 1955 history, Civil Defence, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1955, p. 11 (online PDF linked here) makes the point that the British Government was grossly misled about casualty rates from bombs before World War II:

"The two heavy raids on London of June and July 1917, for example, together caused 832 casualties (216 fatal), which amounted to 121 casualties for each ton of bombs dropped; and these casualty figures were to have much significance for the planning authorities of the future."


This 121 casualties/ton was coupled with the guess that Hitler would drop 600 tons of bombs a day on England (O'Brien page 96), to predict up to 121 x 30 x 600 = 2,200,000 casualties/month. In addition, it was guessed that 25% of the bombs dropped by the Nazis would be lingering mustard gas liquid, causing immense contamination and skin burn problems, like radioactive fallout. Herman Kahn pointed out on pages 390-1 of his 1960 study of appeasement, On Thermonuclear War, that these falsehoods led to World War II, because they frightened Prime Minister Chamberlain and most of the British media and public into repeatedly guaranteeing British pacifism, encouraging unimpeded aggression and thus increasing the risk of "accidental war" by misleading the Nazis into thinking that this country would be too scared of the predicted consequences to ever go to war, regardless of whatever the Nazis did.

The 121 casualties/ton number depended upon a complete lack of warning and thus a complete lack of "duck and cover". In the World War II Blitz, as we shall see, Britain received 71,270 metric tons of high explosive (O'Brien, p. 680; this figure is just the high explosive payloads, not the entire mass of all missiles and bombs), of which 49% fell in the heavy Blitz period of 1940, 31% fell in 1941, 4% in 1942, and 3% fell in 1943. In all, the bombing of Britain killed 60,595 and seriously injured 86,182, giving 146,777 casualties in total (O'Brien, page 678).

Hence, World War II produced 2 casualties/ton of explosive, just 1.7% of the 121 casualties/ton of the 1917 bombing! Why were casualty rates reduced by a factor of 60 in World War II? The diagram above explains the major reason why: it is from a British civil defence manual quoted in an earlier blog post, linked here (an addition factor is active defenses: World War II bombing proved less - not more - accurate than World War I bombing, owing to barriage balloons to prevent low level attacks, fighter defenses, anti-aircraft guns and missiles, etc.). Duck and cover under strong tables, "Morrison shelters" saved the most lives in World War II, because the public were warned of air raids using the new invention of radar stations to detect impending bomber attacks. They had time to take cover, even if that was just lying down to reduce the body area exposed to air blast winds and flying debris. Before World War II, Prime Minister Chamberlain's government hampered all preparations apart from gas warfare research:

"It seems fair to say that a large part of the nation continued right up to the startling international events of 1938 to comfort themselves with the idea that the war which ended in 1918 had been 'a war to end war.' ... Owing to the slowness with which funds were made available for defence, technical experiments of various kinds, urgently needed to provide the planners with information, were long delayed. The formulation of policy regarding air raid shelters, for example, was seriously hampered by a lack of data which only up-to-date experiment could provide. ... Still suffering from the exhaustion, material and moral, of the 1914-18 ordeal the people were most reluctant to believe in the probability of another world-wide catastrophe. Planning for air raid precautions thus lacked the public support it might otherwise have received - until the catastrophe was imminent.

"It appeared in retrospect to one who had taken a leading official part for thirty years in defence preparations that 'our traditional policy of peace was carried this time to the verge of risk and beyond'. [Lord Hankey, Government Control in War, 1945, p. 82.]"

- Terence H. O'Brien, Civil Defence, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1955, p. 6. (O'Brien points out on page 196 that Anderson shelters were deployed in panic after Munich in 1938, without being properly tested against high explosive blast until mid-1939, and were only found to be liable to ground water flooding after being issued!)


World War II was therefore the result of exactly the same weapons effects miscalculation that caused World War I. Germany started World War I as a short war in which its offensive capability would produce a decisive result quickly, by ignoring the efficiency of the trench in negating offensive high explosive shelling. It then tried to overcome the trench with gas, but was largely negated by the immediate invention of the improvised gas mask. Germany then developed skin blistering mustard gas, but by that time the allies had developed tanks. Hence, simple immediately improvised countermeasures - while not perfect - were able to reduce casualty rates sufficiently to convert the short duration planned war of overwhelming offensive firepower into a long duration war of attrition, in which there was time for the production of new armaments to come into play, negating the assumption Germany had made that only the stockpile of existing weapons would play a part (which would be true only in a short war).

There was never any need for miscalculations because the efficiency of trench sheltering against shelling had been amply demonstrated in the American Civil War, the lessons of which were ignored in Europe. O'Brien explains on page 12 that the false official predictions of World War II grew from seeds sown in the British Committee of Imperial Defence's November 1921 report, in which France was chosen as the hypothetical enemy for the next war:

"France's Air Force could drop an average weight of 1,500 tons of bombs on Britain each month by using only twenty bombing days in the month and only fifty percent of its aircraft. London, which would be an enemy's chief objective, could be bombed on the scale of about 150 tons in the first 24 hours, 110 tons in the second 24 hours, and 75 tons in each succeeding 24 hours for an indefinite period. It was to be anticipated that an enemy would put forth his maximum strength at the onset."


As a result, in December 1923 the U.K. Home Office set up an Air Raid Precautions sub-committee, which met first under the chairmanship of Sir John Anderson on 15 May 1924. So why were Anderson's shelters only first tested against high explosive blast in mid-1939, just before the war? What happened was that precise-sounding but wholly vacuous "predictions" of both the type and the effects of air attack were produced, with the effect that the committee concentrated to the exclusion of almost everything else upon the threat of gas, just like the threat of wind and weather dependent radioactive fallout is commonly exaggerated by doom-mongering exaggerations of nuclear war today.

The horrific and wrong predictions of the scale of the attack (not to mention the assumed casualty rates) were conjured up by the Air Staff to get more funding to build up a force of bomber aircraft for retaliation, in the belief that this was the only means of defence. This is similar to the "missile gap" claims made after the Soviet launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, when it was misleadingly claimed in the Top Secret Gaither Report of November 1957 that the Soviet Union might have or soon have a massive missile superiority, allegedly in order to get better funding for American research. (By analogy to the missile gap, on 24 September 2002, Prime Minister Tony Blair repeated the tactic to argue for a war against Iraq by publishing Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, which contained statements that later turned out to be large exaggerations; Iraq had used nerve gas in the 1980s against the Kurds, and had later invaded Kuwait, provoking the first Gulf War, both of which would have justified toppling Saddam, without the need for spurious guesswork.) O'Brien explains on page 18:

"The Air Staff had given emphatic expression to the view that, whatever defence measures might be adopted, the determining factor in defeating air attack would be the strength of the counter-attack carried out by Britain's bombing aircraft against the enemy in his own country."



Above: conventional warfare is not a "soft option". No that's not Hiroshima. It's the so-called "soft option" of the appeasers. It's conventional warfare. It's Pyongyang, Korea, 1953, at the end of the war that killed 54,246 American soldiers and two million Koreans in the first large-scale combat against communism. It led to troop training with nuclear weapon test explosions at the Nevada test site. The neutron bomb inventor, Samuel Cohen, reprints such photos beside those of Hiroshima in his book The Truth About the Neutron Bomb, as a comparison. His point is that neutron bombs can prevent such destruction; they cause less collateral damage than conventional weapons, since a 1 kt neutron bomb air burst at 500 m altitude produces no significant thermal, blast or fallout on the ground. But it does have the deterrence of initial 14.1 MeV neutron flash radiation to tanks, which can't be protected from such high energy neutrons. The short-term and long-term effects of burns and blast injuries from incendiaries and fragmentation bombs far outweigh any effects of nuclear radiation when the facts are examined objectively (Cohen debunks the once popular lie that a man who died after millions of rads to the fingers in a criticality experiment - actually touching a supercritical plutonium bomb core - illustrates nuclear weapon radiation injuries!).




Above: the new Blitz-experience-based Shelter at Home handbook, published in June 1941, marked a shift of civil defence policy away from cold, damp, flooded outdoor shelters toward the more popular home Morrison protected bed shelter. The British Government under Prime Minister Chamberlain had failed to properly fund civil defence research against high explosives in good time before World War II, resulting in idealistic solutions which were not properly tested for practical effectiveness before being deployed in panic after the September 1938 Munich crisis (when Prime Minister Chamberlain was intimidated in his second meeting with Hitler). The panic civil defence countermeasures were outdoor trenches in public parks and the "Anderson" shelter, a corrugated steel arch buried in the ground and covered with earth.

Most of the Nazi bombing of Britain occurred during the Blitz (between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941), when the U.K. Government's Shelter Census of central London in November 1940 found that 60% of the public were sleeping in their own homes during air raids, instead of getting up and dressed to go to a shelter upon the attack warning siren. Only 4% used the Underground system shelters, 9% used other public air raid shelters, and 27% used domestic Anderson shelters (Morrison indoor shelters were not even introduced until March 1941). The 60% who did not go out to any kind of shelter during air raids:

"stayed in their homes, sleeping downstairs, under stairs, under tables, in cupboards."


(For this census, see the "Home Shelters" tab at the internet site linked here, but beware that it falsely states that Morrison shelters were available, which was completely incorrect in November 1940.)

"... distribution of 'Andersons' had begun before their testing had been completed. At the opening of 1939 'load tests' had shown that 'Andersons' were strong enough to bear the weight of any debris falling on them from the type of house for which they were intended. But it was not until some months later [Sectional Steel Shelters, Cmd. 6055, July 1939] that a series of 'explosion tests' proved conclusively [that they] could withstand without damage a 500 lb. [227 kg] high explosive bomb falling at least fifty feet away [equivalent to a 12 kt Hiroshima nuclear bomb some 50(12,000/0.227)1/3 = 1,880 feet away: thus, Anderson shelters would have survived undamaged at ground zero after the air burst that high over Hiroshima] ... It was established at the same time that they would protect their occupants against blast from a bomb of this size bursting in the open at a distance of thirty feet or more. But this soundness of the 'Andersons' from a structural soundpoint, it soon became clear, was counterbalanced by an important practical defect, namely liability to flooding."

- Terence H. O'Brien, Civil Defence, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1955, p. 196.


There were very good reasons for the failure of 60% of the public to utilize outdoor shelters: Britain has a cool, wet climate with a high water table, so any below ground structure rapidly became damp and cold during the winter, and flooded by rain. Before World War II it was believed that Nazi bombing would be in the daytime for reasons of accuracy, like World War I bombing. In fact, the Blitz was nighttime bombing, when people were trying to sleep, because anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft found it much harder to shoot down bombers in the dark at nighttime, despite searchlights and early radar sets. London was bombed 57 consecutive nights. Most people simply did not have time, upon hearing the air raid warning siren, to get dressed and go out to a cold, damp or flooded public or back yard Anderson shelter, which in winter were often dark to allow some people to try to sleep and uncomfortable compared to a home bed (London's underground rail communal shelters being an exception to the rule). Attempts to evacuate millions of women and children proved a failure, since most evacuees returned home after a few months of the outbreak of war, when the predicted air raids had still not occurred.

See Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1950, online HTML version linked here, and Terence H. O'Brien, Civil Defence, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1955, online PDF linked here. O'Brien at pp. 325-7 points out that the Government plan was to evacuate 4,000,000 women and kids before the outbreak of war in early September 1939, but unknown to the Government fewer than half of those decided to leave, and furthermore:

"By Christmas more than one-half of the 1,500,000 mothers and children concerned had returned home; in the London and Liverpool areas about two-thirds of the evacuated children had returned. (The first count taken in January 1940 disclosed that about 900,000 had returned.) ... this evacuation scheme had, as Mr Titmuss says, 'largely failed to achieve its object of removing for the duration of the war most of the mothers and children in the target areas'."


Consequently, there was a shift based on these experiences away from the large failures of the "outdoor" shelter and evacuation policy, towards providing better protection within the home itself. Sir John Fleetwood Baker and his assistant Edward Leader-Williams at the Ministry of Home Security developed an indoor shelter which could absorb the energy of the falling debris from the collapse of a normal house. There is a really brilliant scientific proof film (in the linked Cambridge University engineering faculty internet site, right click on the video link to choose to save the 7 MB mpg video file) showing precisely the mechanism by which the Morrison shelter deflects slightly in order to absorb the kinetic energy of a falling house by plastic deformation; Baker simply puts his own pocket watch inside a tiny model Morrison shelter within a model house, and then slams down a 10 pound load to represent the debris of the collapsing house, and his watch remains safe!

These Morrison table shelters were named after the Minister of Home Security (Herbert Morrison) and were introduced in March 1941. More than 500,000 were issued by November 1941, and they simply consisted of a strong dinner table containing a mattress for sleeping. They were 6' 6" long x 4' wide x 2' 9" high with a top consisting of 1/8" solid steel plate, with welded wire mesh sides and a metal lath floor. One wire side lifted up, allowing people to crawl inside the structure, where there was sleeping space for several people. These were placed in a ground floor (or basement) "refuge room", a technique revived for blast, thermal flash and fallout radiation shielding by the U.K. Government in its 1980 civil defence manual against nuclear attack, Protect and Survive. Edward Leader-Williams, assistant to Morrison shelter designer Sir John Baker during the experiments, worked in the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch until 1965, and in 1955 initiated the basic Protect and Survive "inner refuge" research against nuclear war.

"In one examination of 44 severely damaged houses it was found that three people had been killed, 13 seriously injured, and 16 slightly injured out of a total of 136 people who had occupied Morrison shelters; thus 120 out of 136 escaped from severely bomb-damaged houses without serious injury. Furthermore it was discovered that the fatalities had occurred in a house which had suffered a direct hit, and some of the severely injured were in shelters sited incorrectly within the houses." - Wikipedia


The 22 May 1940 booklet Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter had already marked a change in policy as the discomfort and flooding of outdoor Anderson shelters became clear. As a result of the experience gained during the Blitz bombing, it was revised and greatly improved in June 1941 to create the new handbook (featuring the indoor Morrison shelter), Shelter at Home, which states:

“people have often been rescued from demolished houses because they had taken shelter under an ordinary table ... strong enough to bear the weight of the falling bedroom floor.”


The discovery of this table "duck and cover" effectiveness in air raids led to a revolutionary shelter design; the indoor Morrison table shelter of 1941. (For publication dates of these booklets, see T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence, H.M. Stationery Office, 1955, pages 371 and 529.) It is the forerunner to the “inner core refuge” adopted for protection against thermal flash, blasted flying debris and fallout radiation in a nuclear war in the 1980 booklet Protect and Survive.


Above: the facts about the life-saving ability of the Morrison table shelter during aerial bombing in World War II Britain: it protects against the collapse of buildings regardless of whether that collapse is caused by TNT, a hurricane, an earthquake, or a nuclear bomb. A U.K. Government press release from November 1941, Morrison Shelters in Recent Air Raids, states:

“A report of Ministry of Home Security experts on 39 cases of bombing incidents in different parts of Britain covering all those for which full particulars are available in which Morrison shelters were involved shows how well they have stood up to severe tests of heavy bombing.

“All the incidents were serious. Many of the incidents involved direct hits on the houses concerned, a risk against which it was never claimed these shelters would afford protection. In all of them the houses in which shelters were placed were within the radius of damage by bombs; in 24 there was complete demolition of the house on the shelter.

“A hundred and nineteen people were sheltering in these ‘Morrisons’ and only four were killed. So that 115 out of 119 people were saved. Of these only 7 were seriously injured and 14 slightly injured while 94 escaped uninjured. The majority were able to leave their shelters unaided.”


The top set of instructions for building the Morrison shelter and using it as a table between air-raids are taken from the instruction manual for building the Morrison shelter, How to put up your Morrison “Table” Shelter, issued by the Ministry of Home Security, H.M. Stationery Office, March 1941 (National Archives document reference HO 186/580), which states:

“The walls of most houses give good shelter from blast and splinters from a bomb falling nearby. The bomb, however, may also bring down part of the house, and additional protection from the fall of walls, floors and ceilings is therefore very essential. This is what the indoor shelter has been designed to give. Where to put it up, which floor? Ground floor if you have no basement. Basement, if you have one. ... Protect windows of the shelter room with fabric netting or cellulose film stuck to the glass (as recommended in Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter). The sides of your table shelter will not keep out small glass splinters.”


According to the article, "Air Raid Precautions" in Nature, vol. 146, p. 125, 27 July 1940, "more than 700,000 copies" of Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter, were sold by the end of July 1940.

Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter



Above: The U.K. Government film, Your Home as an Air-Raid Shelter was issued in 1940 to accompany a manual of the same title, giving improved information based on bombing experience.

“The public outcry about conditions in the largest public shelters, often without sanitation or even lighting, and the appalling inadequacy of the over-loaded and ill-equipped rest centres for the bombed-out led to immediate improvements, but cost Sir John Anderson his job. ... His successor as Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison ...

“The growing reluctance of many people to go out of doors led the new Home Secretary to look again at the need for an indoor shelter… The result was the Morrison shelter, which resembled a large steel table … During the day it could be used as a table and at night it could, with a slight squeeze, accommodate two adults and two small children, lying down. The first were delivered in March 1941 and by the end of the war about 1,100,000 were in use, including a few two-tier models for larger families. Morrisons were supplied free to people earning up to £350 a year and were on sale at about £7 to people earning more. … the Morrison proved the most successful shelter of the war, particularly during the ‘hit and run’ and flying-bomb raids when a family had only a few seconds to get under cover. It was also a good deal easier to erect than an Anderson, and while most people remember their nights in the Anderson with horror, memories of the Morrison shelter are usually good-humoured.

“... A government leaflet, Shelter at Home, pointed out that ‘people have often been rescued from demolished houses because they had taken shelter under an ordinary table... strong enough to bear the weight of the falling bedroom floor’. I frequently worked beneath the solid oak tables in the school library during ‘imminent danger periods’ and, particularly before the arrival of the Morrison, families became accomplished at squeezing beneath the dining table during interrupted meals. ... Although the casualties were mercifully far fewer than expected, the damage to property was far greater. From September 1940 to May 1941 in London alone 1,150,000 houses were damaged ...”


- Norman Longmate, How we Lived Then - A history of everyday life during the Second World War, Pimlico, 1971.





Above: in the major British Cold War civil defence drive of 1981, the British Home Office shamelessly promoted the tried and tested World War II Morrison shelter as the "Type 2" in its 1981 manual, Domestic Nuclear Shelters, and included the World War II Anderson shelter which the Home Office had successfully tested at the first British nuclear weapon test, Hurricane in 1952 at Monte Bello (see U.K. National Archives document reference DEFE 16/933), as the "Type 3". Their "Type 1" was simply Cresson H. Kearny's earth and door covered trench shelter from the U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory reports on blast tests of the shelters, plus his Expedient Shelter Handbook and his Nuclear War Survival Skills, which in turn were based on American blast and fallout radiation shielding tests of the Soviet Union civil defense manual shelters. In part, therefore, Britain's ability to credibly site cruise missiles and neutron weapons in the 1980s against the Soviet expansionism and massive SS-20 threat, was derived from translations and tests of research published in Russian in the Brezhnev era Soviet civil defense manual! Kearny in 1987 improved the improvised fallout radiation "core shelters" by developing the method of stacking water-filled plastic bag lined boxes on a table to provide shielding where earth or sand was not available.

For data on tests of successful improvised shelters against chemical weapons, see the 2001 Oak Ridge National Laboratory report, ORNL/TM-2001/154, linked here; similar chemical warfare protective actions to those described and defended empirically in this report were to be included in a revised edition of Protect and Survive in the late 1980s which was never published after the Cold War ended. Note that the idea of sealing up an inner refuge room with duct tape against poison gas - based on 1930s Porton Down experiments - dates right back to the 1938 British Government civil defence handbook distributed to all 14,000,000 households after the Munich crisis in September 1938, The Protection of Your Home Against Air-Raids.




Above: London's deep underground rail (tube) station shelters were not always safer than "duck and cover" sheltering at home. The tube station shelter at Balham was flooded, drowning 68 people on 14 October 1940, by a Nazi bomb which blasted a crater in Balham High Road, rupturing the water mains. A bus crashed into the crater (photos above; notice the that the brick buildings beside the massive crater have had the nearby walls knocked down, but the floors have not collapsed), and the water leaked into tube shelter that was 9 metres below. The underground railway line was repaired quickly and reopened in January 1941. An even bigger disaster was caused on 3 March 1943 by a poorly designed shelter entrance at Bethnal Green tube station, when the noisy firing of anti-aircraft rockets from the nearby Victoria Park caused a crowd to surge down the darkened entrance staircase. A woman carrying a bundle and a baby fell over when reaching the bottom, causing a pile up in the narrow stairwell, which killed 173 people by suffocation. The shelter entrance was immediately redesigned, with better entrance lighting, hand rails and crush barriers added outside all deep shelters to prevent an excessive crowd pressure from occurring. (These changes are described in Terence H. O’Brien’s Civil Defence, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1955, pages 544-5.)



American President Reagan and British Prime Minister Thatcher, contrary to Foot's appeasing Labour Party (which adopted a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament to appease the USSR at the 1983 election), in the early 1980s were developing a Western psychological strength to oppose Soviet nuclear and expansionist intimidation through the promotion of Protect and Survive and Nuclear War Survival Skills as a reply to the Soviet civil defense preparations, backed up with cruise missiles and neutron bombs to combat the Soviet threat of SS-20 missiles and massive numbers of Soviet/Warsaw Pact tanks, and later an ABM project called SDI or Star Wars, to reduce the number of incoming warheads. Journalist Robert Scheer interviewed Reagan and his key personnel, concluding in 1982:

"The ultimate political aim of these nuclear hawks is to intimidate, disrupt and eventually transform the Soviet Union by the threat of nuclear war. What this strategy greatly underestimates is the very real likelihood that it will lead to a very real catastrophe, or as Desmond Ball realistically fears, a confrontation in which our only choices are war or capitulation."

- Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Secker and Warburg, London, 1983, page 122.


The publisher's dust wrapper quotes Reagan's Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategic and Theatre Nuclear Forces, T. K. Jones, explaining how ordinary dirt can shield gamma radiation from fallout, and states that Reagan's appointed head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Eugene Rostow, stated that the political situation was then "a pre-war and not a post-war world". The blurb explains this: "According to this view, the Soviets, like Hitler, are bent on world conquest. Therefore the United States must meet this challenge with the determination to shrink the Soviet empire and fundamentally alter Soviet society."

Scheer ignored the continuing risk of nuclear war if the Soviet Union was not crippled by the arms race and reformed by the strength of Western resolve. Reagan and Bush wanted to end the threat of nuclear war, negotiating from a position of strength, not weakness. A world in which the Soviet Union never reformed, and existed forever, would have had an eternal risk. Having an operation to save your life from a fatal condition carries a risk itself; in other words, Scheer was blind to the relative risks, to the facts. Notice that other writers at that time were more realistic. A former Intelligence Officer of the British Army, Donald James, prophetically wrote The Fall of the Russian Empire, June 1982, the prologue of which refers to "the great events of the 1980s which finally swept away the Soviet Union." He predicts the "death of Leonid Brezhnev after so long an illness" (Brezhnev died in November 1982) and correctly guessed the final leader of the Soviet Union would have the name Mikhail.

Now let's consider the research of Scheer's With Enough Shovels in detail. Robert Scheer (born 1936) was a political journalist for the Los Angeles Times. Before becoming President, Ronald Reagan spent many hours arguing about civil defense and the Soviet threat with Scheer, and first appears on page xiv of the book:

"Let me also acknowledge my indebtedness to Ronald Reagan ... Reagan is a man of strong convictions and a sense of humor, confident that his ideas can withstand challenge. At the beginning of one of our grueling sessions he leaned over to me and said in a stage whisper, 'You know we'll have to stop meeting like this'."


Scheer's states on page 3 (the first page of chapter one):

"This book is about how our leaders during the time of Ronald Reagan have come to plan for waging and winning a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and how they are obsessed with a strategy of confrontation - including nuclear brinkmanship - which aims to force the Soviets to shrink their empire and fundamentally alter their society."


Reagan's head of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) was Louis O. Giuffrida who told ABC news (Quoted by Scheer, page 3):

"Nuke war ... would be a terrible mess, but it wouldn't be unmanageable."


Reagan's head of ACDA (U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency), Eugene V. Rostow (1913-2002), the highest ranking Democrat in Republican Reagan's Administration, had written a letter to Frank R. Barnett (published in an article by Robert Sherrill in The Nation, 11-18 August 1979, and quoted by Scheer, pages 5 and 129) stating:

"I fully agree, as you know, with your estimate that we are living a pre-war and not a post-war world, and that our posture today is comparable to that of Britain, France, and the United States during the Thirties. Whether we are at the Rhineland or the Munich watershed remains to be seen ..."


Reagan's executive director for ACDA's General Advisory Board, Charles Kupperman, a former defense analyst for the Committee on the Present Danger, told Scheer in 1981:

"... I think the images Americans have been brought up with on nuclear war are not accurate, and it is certainly a more popular argument to say there's no survivors, no way you can win a nuclear war, that it is too horrible to think about. That appeals to human emotions ... I think it is possible for any society to survive, and I would think that a democratic society would want to survive. ... I think it is possible to win, in the classical sense. ... It means that it is clear after the war that one side is stronger than the other side, the weaker side is going to accede to the demands of the stronger side." (Quoted by Scheer, pp. 130-1.)

"... the thing is, nuclear weapons have certain effects and if you take steps to deny those effects, you save a lot of people. And unless you are right in the middle of ground zero, you are not going to have a lot of burn victims if you take those steps. ... Hiroshima, after it was bombed, was back and operating three days later." (Quoted by Scheer, pp. 184-5.)


Reagan's friend and adviser, Laurence W. Beilenson, author of The Treaty Trap and Power through Subversion, told Scheer (pages 101 and 111):

"There had been diplomacy as long as there has been war ... diplomacy and treaties have coexisted happily with war all through the ages. If they could prevent war, why haven't they?

"... we killed more people when we bombed Tokyo with conventional weapons than we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We also destroyed more houses and made more people homeless than we ever did with nuclear weapons."


The diplomatic effects of nuclear weapons on war are complex and are discussed in the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 19 June 1946. Even two nuclear weapons on Japan did not, directly, lead to surrender. It is true that the Japanese declaration of war against Japan was as effective or more effective on the leadership of Japan than the direct news of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, without Hiroshima, Stalin would not have declared war against Japan so soon, and the war could have continued for much longer, costing millions of lives. Therefore, the nuclear weapons had an important indirect political effect in promptly ending the war, by means of pushing Stalin into finally declaring war on Japan, instead of stalling for longer while many thousands died from the fighting every single day. Stalin only finally declared war on Japan because his spies had told him that America was producing nuclear weapons to end the war soon, so Stalin was forced to act fast when he received news of Hiroshima, in order to qualify as a winning ally on the Far Eastern front. It was this indirect effect of the use of nuclear weapons (the pressure on Stalin to quickly declare war on Japan) which ended Japan’s hopes, leading to surrender:



Page 28: On 26 June 1945 there was a meeting of the Supreme War Guidance Council of Japan in the presence of the Emperor: “At this meeting, the Emperor, taking an active part despite his custom to the contrary, stated that he desired the development of a plan to end the war as well as one to defend the home islands. This was followed by a renewal of earlier efforts to get the Soviet Union to intercede with the United States, which were effectively answered by the [Soviet-American joint] Potsdam Declaration on 25 July and the Russian declaration of war [against Japan] on 9 August. The atomic bombings considerably speeded up these political manoeuvrings within the government. This in itself was partly a morale effect, since there is ample evidence that members of the Cabinet were worried by the prospect of further atomic bombings, especially on the remains of Tokyo. The bombs did not convince the military that defense of the home islands was impossible, if their behavior in government councils is adequate testimony. It did permit the Government to say, however, that no army without the weapon could possibly resist an enemy who had it, thus saving ‘face’ for the Army leaders [for taking the Potsdam surrender terms].”

Beilenson also co-authored an article called "A New Nuclear Strategy" with neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen in the 24 January 1982 New York Times, which stated (quoted by Scheer, p. 180):

"The fruit of diplomacy is a treaty, and all nations, including our own, have habitually broken treaties. The champion treaty breaker, the Soviet Union, believes that violating compacts for the sake of advantage is a virtue."


Reagan's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) civil defense division chief William Chipman told Scheer in 1981 (p. 111):

"... it's still an explosion, and just as if a shell went off down the road, you'd rather be lying down than standing up, and you'd rather be in a foxhole than lying down. It's the same thing."


Chipman had on 19 June 1980 told the Subcommittee on Health and Human Research (quoted in Scheer's book):

"Senator, we have done, through the last decade or so, a great deal of post-attack research. People have looked at radiological problems, economic problems, psychological problems, problems of disease control and public health in the year or so following an attack. And in all these years of research, no factor had been found which would preclude recovery. ...

"Someone mentioned the Black Death, and I was impressed a few weeks ago in reading about that during the period of the Hundred Years' War. Here was a catastrophe that killed a third of the population of England. And yet these people were able to mount an expeditionary force to France and fight the Battle of Poitiers six or eight years after the epidemic. I do not know what this says about the ethics of the human race, but it shows there is a certain resilience and toughness to society."


Reagan's Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering was Thomas K. Jones, who had served as a consultant for Nixon's SALT I treaty negotiating team in 1973, before studying the effectiveness of the Soviet civil defense programme by actually using high explosive experiments at Boeing in 1974. Jones testified on 17 November 1976 before the hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production (Scheer p. 139):

"... my original view, and the view I held during the time I was on the SALT delegation, was that there was no defense against nuclear war and that there was no realistic recovery from it. It was not until we started looking at what the Soviets were doing, and then went back and tried to correlate this with the recovery of Europe in World War II, the recovery of the Japanese cities - Hiroshima and Nagasaki - for example, that we began to realize that recovery is feasible. ...

"For example, American impressions, which formerly included my own beliefs, are that Hiroshima was put out of business for a very long time. It turns out, however, that the day after the blast, bridges in downtown Hiroshima were open to traffic. Two days later, the trains started to run again, and three days later, some of the streetcar lines were back in operation.

"The U.S. survey team came into the area two months after the bomb, and the surviving residents were back on their original homesites, starting to erect shelter out of whatever materials they could find. It is also very relevant to note, sir, that the U.S. team that surveyed Japanese cities prepared a list of very detailed recommendations as to how you should posture society to survive a nuclear war, and that all of those recommendations are contained in the Soviet civil defense documents, with improvements of their own added."


Jones obtained the originally secret, detailed U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports from Paul Nitze (1907-2004) who had been the vice-chairman of the Strategic Bombing Survey (Nitze had personally been in Japan surveying the damage), and who was Jones' boss on the SALT treaty delegations in 1973. Jones told Scheer in 1981 (Scheer, pp. 21-3):

"Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. ... Turns out, with the Russian approach, if there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it."




Cresson Kearny's Oak Ridge National Laboratory Nuclear War Survival Skills, ADA328301 (1979), which contains all the evidence for the civil defence T. K. Jones was discussing. Kearny's blast and fallout shielding evidence was completely ignored by Scheer. Scheer was engaged in a political diatribe. I think that part of the reason why civil defense was being taken less seriously at that time was that the excellent civil defense chapter in Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1964 was completely removed from the 1977 edition which was published during Carter’s administration, which also tried to appease the Soviet Union by delaying the deployment of the neutron bomb.

Reagan himself explained such a winnable nuclear war scenario to a group of newspaper editors on 16 October 1981:

"I could see where you could have the exchange of tactical [nuclear counterforce] weapons against troops in the field without it bringing either one of the major powers to pushing the [nuclear countervalue] button." (Scheer, p. 131.)


In 1957, Henry Kissinger, in his book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (Harper, New York, 1957, pp. 180-3, 228-9) explained how counterforce (tactical nuclear war) could be kept limited without escalating to a countervalue use of second-strike strategic weapons:

‘With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears when we think of [Hiroshima and Nagasaki]. The high casualty estimates for nuclear war are based on the assumption that the most suitable targets are those of conventional warfare: cities to interdict communications ... With cities no longer serving as key elements in the communications system of the military forces, the risks of initiating city bombing may outweigh the gains which can be achieved. ...

‘The elimination of area targets will place an upper limit on the size of weapons it will be profitable to use. Since fall-out becomes a serious problem only in the range of explosive power of 500 kilotons and above, it could be proposed that no weapon larger than 500 kilotons will be employed unless the enemy uses it first. [The average warhead yield of both America and Russia is today well below 500 kilotons - thanks for MIRV technology - so the fallout is no longer on the Bravo test scale of 1954.] Concurrently, the United States could take advantage of a new development which significantly reduces fall-out by eliminating the last stage of the fission-fusion-fission process.’


William L. Laurence, a New York Times Science Correspondent recruited by the Manhattan Project to document nuclear explosions, observed the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki from the observation B-29 bomber, as well as the 1946 nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, and in 1951 explained why the threat of tactical nuclear war was needed in The Hell Bomb (Hollis and Carter, London, 1951, pp. 72-87):

"... our giving up the right to use the H-bomb as a tactical weapon against [Soviet] armies would leave her free to march into the countries of western Europe. It would then be too late to stop her, for we could not drop the H-bomb on the cities of western Europe. The only time to stop Russia's armies is before they cross into the territory of our allies, during the crucial period when they are mobilized in large numbers and on the march.

"The American people, and the other free peoples of the world, could not agree to such a scheme to disarm them in advance and thus give the masters of the Kremlin a free hand. To do so would not prevent war, it would encourage it. Instead of being preventable, it would become inevitable. We wouldn't even save our cities from the fate of strategic bombing with A- and H-bombs, since the Kremlin has never kept its promises when they did not suit its purposes. ...

"These are the brutal facts that would confront us were we to renounce the right to use A- and H-bombs as tactical weapons against armies in the field [lacking the concrete buildings of modern cities for protection]. As long as we retain that right, the chances are good that we could prevent global war, for no nation would be likely to risk such a war in the face of the possibility that the main bulk of its armies might be wiped out at the outset. ...

"... Our justification for building the hydrogen bomb is thus not merely to prevent its use, but to prevent World War III, and to win it if it comes."


Reagan's Secretary of Defense, Caspar W. Weinberger, is quoted from the 23 August 1982 "Washington Talk" column of The New York Times in Scheer's prelims, as stating:

"I worry that we will not have enough time to get strong enough to prevent nuclear war. I think of World War II and how long it took to prepare for it, to convince people that rearmament for war was needed. I fear we will not be ready. I think time is running out ... but I have faith."


Defense Secretary Weinberger had earlier stated at the Congressional Hearings before the Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives, 10 September to 1 October 1981:

"... our top priority is on doing whatever is necessary to ensure nuclear force parity, across the full range of plausible nuclear war fighting scenarios, with the Soviet Union. ... we will work steadily on expanding our capabilities for deterring or prosecuting a global war with the Soviet Union, a war that could be lengthy or be preceded by a prolonged mobilization buildup, rather than confining our planning to address only short wars in selected theatres. This ultimately will lead to larger force requirements ..." (Scheer, p. 129.)


Reagan's Deputy Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci had on 13 January 1981 stated to the U.S. Senate's Committee on Armed Services:

"I think we need to have a counterforce capability. Over and above that, I think we need to have a war fighting capability. I think the Soviets are developing a nuclear war fighting capability, and we are going to have to do the same. That is a very large order." (Scheer, p. 129.)


Reagan's Energy Secretary, James B. Edwards, stated: "I want to come out of it number one, not number two." (Scheer, p. 6.)

Reagan's senior Soviet specialist on the National Security Council staff was former Harvard historian Richard Pipes, who had critized President Carter's nuclear strategy in a speech published on 6 November 1978 in Aviation Week and Space Technology: "deeply imbedded in all our plans is the notion of punishing the aggressor rather than defeating him." Pipes published an article called "Soviet Global Strategy" in the April 1980 issue of Commentary, arguing:

"The ultimate purpose of Western counterstrategy should be to compel the Soviet Union to turn inward - from conquest to reform. Only by blunting its external drive can the Soviet regime be made to confront its citizenry and to give an account of its policies. It is a well-known fact of modern Russian history that whenever Russian governments suffered serious setbacks abroad - in the Crimean war, in the 1904-5 war with Japan, and in World War I - they were compelled by internal pressure to grant the citizenry political rights. We should help the population of the Soviet Union bring its government under control. A more democratic Russia would be less expansionist and certainly easier to live with." (Quoted by Scheer, p. 131.)


Reagan acted:

"A senior White House official said Reagan approved an eight-page national security document that 'undertakes a campaigh aimed at internal reform in the Soviet Union and shrinkage of the Soviet empire'." - Helen Thomas, White House correspondent for United Press International, 21 May 1982. (Quoted by Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels, Secker and Warburg, London, 1983, p. 7.)








Above: These graphs are from the 1987 edition of the Pentagon's book, Soviet Military Power. U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger from September 1981 was forced to declassify a summary of previously secret Pentagon intelligence on the Soviet Union's increasing threat, publishing it as the annual book Soviet Military Power. This was done in order to overcome anti-nuclear and anti-civil defense propaganda, and the figures were defended against "critics" in research reports like ADA227470. Soviet Military Power clarified the immense dangers from new generations of Soviet weaponry (like the immense SS-18 missiles deployed while America remained static at 1,000 Minutemen and 54 Titan II ICBMs), which permitted President Reagan to justify taking countermeasures to negate and reform the Soviet Union's aggressive militarism, by forcing it to the arms negotiating position from a position of strength, not appeasing weakness. This is precisely what British Prime Minister Chamberlain should have done to reform the Nazis from their policy of racism and expansionism in the 1930s, although the weapons effects exaggerations were severe in both the 1930s and 1980s. However, as Herman Kahn pointed out, Hitler seemed willing to actually go to war in the 1930s, simply because he believed Goering's lies of the power of air bombardment to win a war. In order to nullify the Nazi threat it would have been necessary to demonstrate the efficiency of civil defense countermeasures against bombing and the efficiency of air defense against bombers, as well as developing efficient anti-tank rockets. Chamberlain was misled on both counts. In addition, Chamberlain persisted in ignoring and downplaying warnings of Nazi racism against the Jews. From 1933 Nazi racism was obvious and from 1936, news of concentration camp construction in Germany was being reported in the British press, but despite this Chamberlain persisted in flying to Germany repeatedly to shake hands with Hitler.

Concentration camps and eugenics were both British inventions adopted by the Nazis. Britain's Kitchener used concentration camps in the Boar War (1899-1902) in the deportation of 154,000 women and children from burned down Boar homesteads, as part of his scorched-earth policy. The conditions were bad, and 26,000 died. Eugenics was developed in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of evolutionist Charles Darwin. Our point is that Prime Minister Chamberlain's tolerance towards Hitler (until war finally broken out, when he developed a more sensible view of Hitler and also tried to cover up the lies of appeasement as "buying time" despite the widening ratio of military strength between Germany and Britain throughout the years of appeasement) was clouded by the fashions of the time, which were generally pro-eugenics, hostile to Jews, and laissez faire toward concentration camps. It was only after the holocaust was revealed that the evil of eugenics began to become crystal clear in the minds of such people. However, eugenics had always been quackery: the facts of evolutionary history show that you need diversity in order for evolution to occur, and it is diversity which provides strength. The eugenics "argument" is basically that diversity should be eliminated virtually to the point of having a race of clones. This is not strength, but weakness, because it means that emerging biological and other threats that one clone is susceptible to will also be threats to all the others. Basically, eugenics places all your eggs in one basket.



Above: Reagan’s civil defense effort was opposed by the two-hour long ABC film aired on 20 November 1983, called The Day After, which led to a complaint about the “Reagan-like” voice of the President’s broadcast after nuclear attack, in the 21 November 1983 Washington Post. (ABC responded by changing the fictional President's voice to a more generic accent, in all later broadcasts and video releases of The Day After!) President Reagan watched an advance video preview of the The Day After at Camp David on 10 October 1983, noting in his diary (published in his 1990 memoirs):

“I ran the tape of the movie ABC is running Nov. 20. It’s called THE DAY AFTER in which Lawrence, Kansas is wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done, all $7 million worth. It’s very effective and left me greatly depressed ...”






Above: the 1992 BBC broadcast attack on Herman Kahn’s civil defense facts by Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box: To The Brink Of Eternity. The clip of Kahn saying:

"Even if you irrationally decide to go to war, that doesn't mean that you have to fight it in a wildly irrational fashion,"


is taken out of context: Kahn is referring to the lesson of Britain's decision to go to war with Hitler in September 1939. Because of the pathetic year-on-year rate of Britain's rearmament compared to Germany's after 1935, Britain was in the most feeble state to go to war at that time. Kahn's argument is Britain should rationally have decided to go to war in say 1934 and stopped Germany's illegal rearmament with minimal combat (Britain was still more powerful in 1934), or surrendered completely to the Nazi threat. By leaving war until 1939, Britain was either (1) deliberately allowing the Nazis to prepare better for war than Britain (remember that in 1939 America was neutral and there was not even any sight of lend-lease on the horizon) or (2) behaving irrationally. Britain was declaring war irrationally, having been duped by lying weapons-effects-exaggerating appeasers into not declaring war when it had a chance of winning without American help. This is the first thing you need to understand about Kahn's statement. The second thing is that even though Britain declared war at a time which was irrational (it should have done that earlier, when the ratio of British to German strength was higher), it did not fight the war in an irrational fashion, nor did Germany. Neither side immediately despatched 100% of their bombers filled with weapons of mass destruction like gas or germs to kill the other side, despite the appeasers' pre-war certainty that war would escalate instantly into mass destructions with a million casualties a month predicted in Britain.

This is Kahn's second point: even Hitler didn't immediately try to annihilate the world's population with his stockpile of mustard liquid contaminant or Nazi-discovered tabun nerve gas, of which thousands of tons were manufactured but never used by the Nazis because they didn't have enough gas masks to deal with mustard gas retaliation, owing to a rubber shortage. Kahn is following A. J. P. Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War standpoint on Hitler here; Hitler was a bigoted egotistical dictator, but so are most politicians at heart; most politicians are simply so inept that they fail to obtain enough power to corrupt them absolutely (a point long ago observed by 19th century historian Lord Action: “And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”). In other words, Hitler was not a unique thug; thugs are common. Taylor's point is that Hitler's 1930s propaganda was true to the extent that he was doing his best for the "Aryan" German. Hitler believed Britain wouldn't fight under any circumstances because that was what the leading British politicians and newspaper editors were saying when they exaggerated the effects of weapons and stated that Britain would be wiped out in war, so war was unthinkable. Kahn draws the lesson from this that war must never be unthinkable to the public again, if war is to be averted by unequivocal deterrence.

Curtis additionally gets the facts about Kahn wrong by claiming that Kahn's "flexible response" strategy was debunked by the Cuban missile crisis. Kahn makes it clear that "flexible response" was needed once the Soviet Union had a balance with America, not before that time. The Soviet Union was still behind America in 1962, so Kennedy could afford to promise massive retaliation in response to any missile being fired from Cuba in order to encourage Soviet caution with the missiles in Cuba. Massive retaliation would have been an empty promise if the Soviet Union had an immense stockpile of nuclear weapons in 1962. It didn't. Kahn had proposed flexible response for the late 1960s onwards.

Duck and cover simple countermeasures were ignore by Kahn

Kahn never really made the civil defense case effectively by getting to grips with the details of survival in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in different kinds of buildings, the effectiveness of "duck and cover", and the detailed scientific studies on nuclear weapons effects from tests remained Secret – Restricted Data until recent years. Politicians, policy makers, and even many nuclear weapons effect computation scientists are unaware of the vital data from Hiroshima, Nagasaki and nuclear tests!

YOU GET WAR BY RENOUNCING TO THUGS THE FIRST USE OF WEAPONS: IT DOES NOT HELP TO REDUCE ACCIDENTAL WAR RISKS, SINCE HITLER AND THE OTHERS DID NOT COPY BRITISH DISARMAMENT TO EMBRACE PEACE (EXCEPT IN LYING PEACE PROPAGANDA); INSTEAD, THEY TOOK ADVANTAGE OF PRIME MINISTER CHAMBERLAIN'S PEACE PROMISES TO ESCALATE THEIR INVASIONS AGGRESSIVELY, IN THE BELIEF BRITAIN WOULD NEVER FIGHT BACK

In April 1984, President Ronald Reagan told a press conference that General MacArthur should have been "allowed to lead us to a victory in Korea". Instead, MacArthur was fired by President Truman for requesting atomic bombs or radiological weapons to help overcome massive conventional weapons superiority. Truman in December 1950 gave to British Prime Minister Attlee a secret guarantee to never use nuclear weapons in Korea, news of which was promptly leaked to the communists by the British spy who was head of the American Department of the Foreign Office, Donald Maclean. This was a carte blanche to the communists in Korea that American nuclear weapons were out of the picture, so the conventional war dragged on until President Eisenhower gained office and took tactical nuclear war far more seriously; suddenly the communists were then interested in negotiating a peaceful settlement of differences!

"I think we're going to have to start a civil defense program. ... the United States should never put itself in a position, as it has many times, of guaranteeing to an enemy or a potential enemy what it won't do. ... President Johnson, in the Vietnam War, kept over and over again insisting, oh no, no, no we'll never use nuclear weapons in Vietnam ... the Soviet Union has used propaganda campaigns to stop us from putting a weapon that we - a great deterrent weapon - that we had developed and they didn't have - and an economical weapon - and that was the neutron warhead. They've got more than 20,000 tanks massed there opposite the NATO line. The neutron warhead could have neutralized those tanks but again we stopped it ... Woodrow Wilson ran for his second term on the promise or the pledge that he kept us out of wars. ... he took insult after insult ... finally the Germans declared open warfare on all shipping in the Atlantic Ocean, regardless of whether you were a neutral nation or not. And the Lusitania was sunk and, finally, we were in a war. ... the Kaiser got the idea from ... the policy that the United States was determined not to go to war. So he ignored that possibility ... Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for his third term, and ran on his own personal promise, 'I will not send young Americans, your sons, to fight.' ... you've got an ambassador who is assuring von Ribbentrop that the United States wouldn't go to war ... Hitler at this time said, we can count on it ... the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

"... I say that we are going to war if a man like Carter continues giving the wrong signals, backing away from the Soviet Union. We will one day find ourselves pushed to the point where there is no retreat and we have no further choice."


- Ronald Reagan, interviewed by Robert Scheer in 1980, pages 233-58 of Scheer's With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Secker and Warburg, London, 1983. (See Richard Sincere's excellent "Shovelling appeasement" review of Scheer's political diatribe in the 4 February 1983 Washington Times, linked here.)

"The only sure way to avoid war is to surrender without fighting. ... The other way is based on the belief that in an all out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause. Then a nobel nation believing in peace extends the hand of friendship and says there is room in the world for both of us."


- Ronald Reagan, 1963 speech, Are Liberals Really Liberal? (Source: Ronald Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America, Free Press, New York, 2001, p. 442.)

"The thing that our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to recognise is that their whole reasonable 'let's talk this over' solution to the threat of the bomb is appeasement, and appeasement does not give you a choice between peace and war."


- Ronald Reagan, 1964. (Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson, Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster, Crown Publishers, New York, 2009, p. 40.)

"Enough evidence of weakness or lack of will power could tempt the Soviets as it once tempted Hitler and the rulers of Japan."


- Ronald Reagan, 1975. (Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson, Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster, Crown Publishers, New York, 2009, p. 40.)

Martin and Annelise Anderson's 2009 book, Reagan's Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World from Nuclear Disaster gives transcripts from declassified U.S. National Security Council (NSC) meetings of Reagan during which communism was fought using secret techniques. On page 63 they quote Reagan from the secret 6 July 1981 NSC meeting transcript:

"The Soviets have spoken as plainly as Hitler did in 'Mein Kampf'. They have spoken [of] world domination - at what point do we dig in our heels?"


In a meeting between on 19 July 1981 in Ottawa, the French President Mitterrand told Reagan that French intelligence had recruited a KGB spy called Colonel Vladimir I. Vetrov, whose files disclosed that the Soviet Union: "had been running their research and development on the back of the West for years. Given the massive transfer of technology in radars, computers, machine tools, and semiconductors from U.S. to USSR, the Pentagon had been in an arms race with itself." (Quotation from Thomas C. Reed, At the Abyss, Ballentine Books, N.Y., 2004, p. 267.)

Reagan in response bankrupted the already economically weak Soviet Union by selling Saudi Arabia the "AWACS" early warning aircraft system (against opposition from Congress and Israel), and in response Saudi Arabia pumped out of the ground enough oil to flood the market after the US-USSR Geneva summit of November 1985, thus bringing the price of oil crashing down from over $40 a barrel in 1981 to just $13 a barrel in March 1986, devaluing the Soviet oil from Siberia: "a devastating drop for the economy of the Soviet Union" (Anderson's, p. 341).

The Saudis also donated $1 million a month to the anti-communists (the Contras) in Latin America. (This success at selling arms for favors led to the Iran-Contra Affair, approved by Reagan on 7 January 1986. Oliver North on the NSC staff sold anti-tank missiles to Iran via Israel; Iran released five American hostages and North gave the profits to the Contras.) But it was the financial pressure on the Soviet economy from the loss of oil revenue which gave Reagan the leverage to make Gorbachev agree to arms cuts at the Reykjavik conference on 11-12 October 1986. Gorbachev himself admitted in his 1996 memoirs that the Soviet Union could no longer afford to buy American grain and also had to cut Siberian oil supplies to Eastern Europe in order to compensate for the loss of revenues caused by the falling price of oil: "a sharp drop in oil prices cost the Soviet Union nearly half of its hard currency earnings." (Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs, Doubleday, N.Y., 1996, p. 468.) Gorbachev was certain that Reagan engineered the drop in oil prices as a lethal attack on the Soviet economy, as he argued to Reagan at Reykjavik, when Reagan asked Gorbachev why he had stopped buying American grain to feed his people:

"It is very simple. You can tell them that the money with which the Russians could have bought grain ended up in the United States and Saudi Arabia because of the sharp drop in oil prices."


- Mikhail Gorbachev to Ronald Reagan, 12 October 1986, U.S. National Security Archive, "Transcript of Reagan-Gorbachev Summit in Reykjavik: Part 3", FBIS-USR-93-113 (page 11 of the PDF file linked here).

The Anderson's explain on page 342 of Reagan's Secret War:

"... the Soviets were in a dilemma, their dreams of taking over the world drifting away. The new leaders, led by Gorbachev, were beginning to realize that much change was needed to rescue their economy. In effect, the Soviets had given up trying to conquer the world and accepted the inevitable. The Cold War was close to being over. The Soviets were now focused on rescuing their country ..."


Aside from veteran anti-appeaser Thatcher mentioned in the earlier posts linked here and here, someone else who encouraged and supported Reagan's successful war against communism in the 1980s was Pope John Paul II, a Pole and in 1978 the first non-Italian Pope since the 1520s. He was against the communist tyranny in his home country, Poland, where his visit in June 1979 had sown the seeds of hope against communism. On 15 January 1981, the Pope received a deligation of the anti-communist Polish Solidarity movement, headed by Lech Walesa, and gave them encouragement. Throughout the 1980s, the Pope was exchanging secret letters with Reagan and organizing personal meetings between his Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli, and Reagan in the White House. (This is documented in Reagan's Secret War.)

As explained in a previous post, Bishop Casaroli had in early 1978 arranged for Pope Paul VI to give the neutron bomb inventor Samuel Cohen the Medal of Peace for developing a nuclear weapon which did not cause collateral damage to civilians. Pope John Paul II in June 1979 elevated Casaroli from Bishop to Cardinal, and made him Vatican Secretary of State, and Cohen was invited to attend, which he did. After Mass, Casaroli introduced Cohen to Pope John Paul II: "in glowing terms as the Father of the Neutron Bomb. ... the Pope was one cool customer. He didn’t bat an eyelash. We shook hands, he expressed his pleasure over meeting me. I expressed mine. ... I appreciated his own efforts for peace."

With both the Pope and his Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Casaroli, aware of the perils of communist threats and the efforts of American weapons designers like Cohen to negate the Warsaw Pact tank threat with nuclear weapons without risking collateral damage, Casaroli met Reagan on 15 December 1981. On 23 December Reagan sent Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev a Top Secret personal letter, stating:

"The most elementary rights of the Polish people have been violated daily: massive arrests without any legal procedures; incarcerations of trade union leaders and intellectuals in overcrowded jails and freezing detention camps; suspension of all rights of assembly and association; and, last but not least, brutal assault by security forces on citizens. ...

"The United States cannot accept suppression of the Polish peoples. ... The United States will have no choice but to take concrete measures affecting the full range of our relationship." (Quoted by the Anderson's, pp. 87-8.)


The same day, Reagan broadcast a nationwide address on TV about the communist suppression in Poland, from the White House at 9pm:

"The men who rule them and their totalitarian allies fear the very freedom that the Polish people cherish. They have answered the stirrings of liberty with brute force, killings, mass arrests, and the setting up of concentration camps."


Reagan ordered the secret U.S. Department of Defense annual report Soviet Military Power to be declassified and published openly from the end of 1981 onwards, and he declared the Soviet Union an "evil empire" in a publicised speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on 8 March 1983. Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, a former KGB director, found that the Soviet Union's World Peace Council propaganda effort was being opposed by counter-propaganda from Reagan. Reagan's civil defense initiative was widely opposed, so he simply switched to a new American ABM program to outwit the Soviet military, called Star Wars, in his speech on 23 March 1983:

"My fellow Americans ... 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 ... It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. ... What if a free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reach our soil or that of our allies? ... Tonight, consistent with our obligations of the ABM treaty ... I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves."


Reagan's strategy was far from being a new idea: si vis pacem, para bellum. Convince the world your will is weak, and you invite war. British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey in July 1914: "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." As President John F. Kennedy wrote in his book Why England Slept, Grey chose to lie that it was not his weakness that led to World War I (fellow Cabinet Minister Lloyd George emphasises the tragedy of Grey's weakness in his War Memoirs), but the arms race in Europe:

“The statement of Lord Grey, British Foreign Minister, made in 1914, that, ‘The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable,’ had a tremendous effect on post-war British opinion. Armaments were looked upon as something horrible, as being the cause of war, not a means of defense. ... but England’s failure to rearm has not prevented her from becoming engaged in a war; in fact, it may cost her one. The causes of war go deeper than armaments.”


(John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept, reprinted by Greenwood, 1981, pp. 6-7.)

This fact is highly counter-intuitive to those who simplistically believe that the best way to avoid war is to disarm and/or guarantee to all potential aggressors that you are unprepared for any attack. So it is still today widely ignored. Few embrace the fact that civil defense helps to deter attacks, since you invite attack and blackmail by being unprepared and vulnerable to terrorism and intimidation.

"Whether or not Hitler paid attention to the Oxford students' vote [against fighting for liberty on 9 February 1933, just 10 days after Hitler became German Chancellor], there is little doubt that his aggressive policies were encouraged by the existence of strong pacifist sentiments in England and France. In October 1933, Hitler felt confident enough to withdraw from the international Disarmament Conference which had been meeting before he became Chancellor; this action was an official notification to the world that he intended to rearm Germany. Four days later, [Labour Party Leader George] Lansbury spoke for the Labour Party in the House of Commons: 'We will not support an increase in armaments, but we shall also refuse to support our own or any other government in an endeavour to apply penalties or sanctions against Germany. ...' The great nations were not about to disarm, as Lansbury well knew. His policy meant that England would simply do nothing ... The pacifists of England and France, by announcing their unwillingness to fight, made Hitler more reckless in risking war and made the war more terrible when it came." [Contrary to lying Prime Minister Chamberlain's propaganda, at no point did the rate of British rearmament after 1935 match the Nazis, so all the while that war was being delayed by appeasement, the relative situation was getting worse, with the Nazi lead increasing not falling.]


- Professor Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel, NYRB, N.Y., 2006, p. 121.

Britain's appeasement of Hitler during the 1930s was driven by the fear that the German air force would wipe out England in one fantastic bombing raid of lingering mustard gas liquid, incendiaries, and high explosives. Logically you would think that appeasing a dictator's demands would have made war less likely, but it didn't. This is a counter-intuitive fact about human nature. Being weak to a tyrant doesn't reduce the risk of accidental war. Telling a tyrant you won't strike first doesn't make the tyrant less likely to press the button; it makes the tyrant more likely to escalate to war, because the tyrant thinks the enemy will surrender under pressure.



Above: Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech at the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987, a video clip beginning after Reagan has pointed out that "In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind - too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself."

On 12 August 1987, Reagan addressed the American people (the Anderson's, p. 347):

"The Soviets are now negotiating with us because we're negotiating from strength."


On 4 November 1987 Reagan broadcast an address to America at 8pm (the Anderson's, p. 357):

"Our plan depended upon unflagging solidarity and steadfastness of purpose, even under immense pressure. And the pressure was put on. Had the nuclear freeze and unilateral disarmament protesters won, Europe would now be condemned to live in the shadow of Soviet nuclear-armed INF [intermediate nuclear forces] missiles. ... That resolve has now made it possible to achieve an historic agreement - an agreement that will eliminate a whole class of United States and Soviet INF missiles from the face of the planet. ... We will closely watch the condition of human rights within the Soviet Union. It is difficult to imagine that a government that continues to repress freedom in its own country, breaking faith with its own people, can be trusted to keep agreements with others ... I visited Berlin. I stood there alongside the cruel wall that symbolizes so powerfully the scar that divides the European continent. It's time for that wound to heal and that scar to disappear."


Gorbachev agreed to visit America to sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty on 8 December 1987, which destroyed 1,846 Soviet and 846 American weapons, helping to equalize the excess Soviet stockpile of short and medium range missiles, de-escalating the arms race at the same time. On 31 May 1988, during his visit to Russia to negotiate the details of his first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) with Gorbachev (which was signed in 1991, and reduced the highly dangerous Soviet ICBMs by 4,100 and American ICBMs by 500), Reagan gave his speech on the virtues of freedom versus communism at Moscow State University, Gorbachev's alma mater:

"Standing here before a mural of your revolution, I want to talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now, quietly sweeping the globe without bloodshed or conflict. Its effects are peaceful, but they will fundamentally alter our world ... It's easy to underestimate because it's not accompanied by banners or fanfare. It's been called the technological or information revolution, and as its emblem, one might take the tiny silicon chip ... we're emerging from the economy of the Industrial Revolution - an economy confined to and limited by the Earth's physical resources, as one economist titled his book, 'The Economy in Mind', in which ... the freedom to create is the most precious natural resource. Think of that little computer chip. Its value isn't in the sand from which it was made but in the microscopic architecture designed into it ... Or take the example of the satellite relaying this broadcast around the world, which replaces thousands of tons of copper mined from the Earth and molded into wire. ...

"The key is freedom - freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication. The renowned scientist, scholar, and founding father of this university, Mikhail Lomonosov, knew that. 'It is common knowledge', he said, 'that the achievements of science are considerable and rapid, particularly once the yoke of slavery is cast off and replaced by the freedom of philosophy.'

"Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the successful ones; often several times. ... And that's why it's so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world."


Reagan first visited the Berlin Wall in 1967, and the Anderson's explain that he was moved enough to challenge Robert Kennedy in a broadcast to tell the Soviet Union to remove the wall as a sign of goodwill in treaty negotiations: starting with Günter Litwin who was shot trying to climb over on 24 August 1961, a total of 171 people died attempting to escape at the Berlin Wall between its foundation on 13 August 1961 and its fall on 9 November 1989. The 2009 book, Reagan's Secret War, reprints declassified letters and meeting transcripts sent by Reagan to Soviet leaders throughout the 1980s, pressurizing them over the repression of Solidarity in Poland in 1981, over the treatment of dissenters by the secret police, the censorship of critics, and the restrictions on travel for the inmates of the Soviet Union. It was Reagan's pressure backed up with military resolve over Star Wars which caused Gorbachev to introduce perestroika in June 1987, leading to appointment by Gorbachev of Egon Krenz as Head of the East German Communist Party in October 1989. Gorbachev had withdrawn Soviet troops, leading to increasing protests for liberty in East Germany. On 9 November 1989 there were 750,000 demonstrators opposed by only 3,000 East German police. Krenz decided to diffuse the situation by relaxing travel restrictions, issuing a press statement which stated that travel permits would be issued at border points from 8 am on 10 November. At 7 pm on 9 November by Krenz's confused chief public relations spokesman, Günter Schabowski, was asked on television when the travel permits would be available and said "immediately", because Krenz had not explained the time it would begin. The confusion caused the 750,000 protestors, who were denied permits at checkpoints, to knock the wall down. On 28 November 1989, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced his plan for the unification of East and West Germany. In a "domino effect", the symbolic fall of the Berlin Wall caused the Soviet Union to break up.

"The ultimate purpose of Western counterstrategy should be to compel the Soviet Union to turn inward - from conquest to reform. Only by blunting its external drive can the Soviet regime be made to confront its citizenry and to give an account of its policies. It is a well-known fact of modern Russian history that whenever Russian governments suffered serious setbacks abroad - in the Crimean war, in the 1904-5 war with Japan, and in World War I - they were compelled by internal pressure to grant the citizenry political rights. We should help the population of the Soviet Union bring its government under control. A more democratic Russia would be less expansionist and certainly easier to live with."


- Reagan's senior Soviet specialist on the National Security Council staff, former Harvard historian Richard Pipes, in his article, "Soviet Global Strategy," published in Commentary, April 1980.

"A senior White House official said Reagan approved an eight-page national security document that 'undertakes a campaign aimed at internal reform in the Soviet Union and shrinkage of the Soviet empire'."


- Helen Thomas, White House correspondent for United Press International, 21 May 1982. (Quoted by Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels, Secker and Warburg, London, 1983, p. 7.)



Scheer's book is terribly naive on physics, denying that fallout radiation can easily be shielded by something as simple as earth or water. He was ignorant that the bigger the explosion, the longer the delay time that the blast takes to cover the bigger area of damage, giving most of the potentially hurt people enough time to duck and cover. He was ignorant that the thermal radiation pulse takes longer to deliver energy in bigger bombs, giving people time to duck and cover before being burned. He believed that any civil defense possible in Hiroshima would be useless against bigger nuclear bombs, when the opposite is of course the case, because the blast and fallout takes longer to arrive over larger areas, while the thermal radiation pulse duration scales up with the square root of bomb yield, taking ever longer to deliver its energy as the yield increases. Maybe Scheer, like most people, was misled by films like The Atomic Cafe:



Above: The Atomic Cafe, a 1982 documentary composed of historical nuclear age film clips from the Trinity test of 16 July 1945 to the height of the Cold War, tries to ridicule duck and cover by editing out the blast wave delay time in the film of soldiers in trenches near the Nevada Dog test, thus falsely superimposing the blast arrival for the soldiers on the flash of the explosion. Such editing falsely suggests that the blast wave travels at the velocity of light. It also edits the discussion of soldiers to make it appear that the sand blown up from the desert, which had never entered the fireball or been close enough to acquire neutron induced activity, was somehow magically contaminated.

An air burst like Hiroshima produces no significant local fallout; see post linked here for the measured radiation map of the test and the post linked here for the measured residual radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The firestorm took 30 minutes to begin and was not producing soot rainout until nearly an hour after the detonation, when the radioactive cloud was many miles downwind and was therefore not involved. The residual radiation measured in Japan, was neutron induced activity in the ground (which gave trivial doses in comparison to the initial nuclear radiation received in the first 20 seconds), plus a trivial salt slurry fallout which was mapped out downwind, and was due to the entrainment of salt crystals from the coastal low altitude air, as also occurred in the Pacific air bursts King and Cherokee, but not in Nevada tests which were far from the coast, as confirmed by cloud seeding rainout models.

It also presents a generally distorted view of the effects of nuclear weapons by showing the firestorm area of Hiroshima without stating it was due to obsolete wooden city construction with the overturning of charcoal cooking braziers in houses starting the thousands of fires which merged into a firestorm 30 minutes later, by which time many people had time evacuate the inner area on foot.

“... government films ... with Bert the Turtle teaching children how to ‘duck and cover’ were made suspect by such Hollywood films as Fail-Safe, Dr Strangelove, and On the Beach. The trade of New York for Moscow in Fail-Safe, the military running amuck in Dr Strangelove, and the impossible radiation scenario in On the Beach were, respectively, implausible, greatly exaggerated, and scientifically flawed. ...

“A recent film, The Atomic Café, points up the whole civil defense controversy. An audience viewing this film greets the ‘duck and cover’ clips from official government films with derisive laughter.”


- Professors John Dowling and Evans M. Harrell, Editors, Preface to Civil Defense: A Choice of Disasters, American Institute of Physics, 1987, page vii.

“This story reminds me of Nevil Shute's On the Beach, published in 1957, a novel describing the extinction of mankind by radiological warfare. [Shute was the deputy chief design engineer behind the airship R101 design, which crashed killing 48 people on its maiden voyage of 1930: this technically pseudo-scientific novel - published as being a realistic scenario - of his about nuclear warfare beautifully illustrates the lazy, poorly researched, incompetent, grandiose, cranks who were still being glorified as great airship designers in 1957 despite failure] ... The book and the film created an enduring myth, a myth which entered consciously or subconsciously into all subsequent thinking about nuclear war [Helen Caldicott credits On the Beach as the childhood cinema experience in Australia which led her later to dismiss civil defense as hopeless]. The myth pictures nuclear war as a silent inexorable death from which there is no escape, with radioactive cobalt sweeping slowly down the sky from the northern to the southern hemisphere. The people of Australia, after the northern hemisphere is dead, live out their lives quietly and bravely to the end. The Australian government provides a supply of euthanasia pills for citizens to use when the symptoms of radiation sickness become unpleasant. Parents are advised to give the pills to their children first before they become sick. There is no hope of survival ... On the Beach is technically flawed in many ways. Almost all the details are wrong: radioactive cobalt would not substantially increase the lethality of large hydrogen bombs [you only get 2.5 MeV of gamma rays per neutron captured in cobalt, spread out over many years, compared to 200 MeV including 6 MeV of residual gamma rays from fission products for every neutron fissioning U-238; the slower the release of a given amount of energy as radiation, the lower the dose rate, so you then have the time to decontaminate before getting a large dose]; fallout would not descend uniformly over large areas ... people could protect themselves from the radioactivity by sheltering under a few feet of dirt [or by sleeping in a simple core shelter improvised by tables stacked with plastic-bag lined boxes filled with water, and surrounded by furnishings] ..."

- Professor Freeman Dyson, "The Future Needs Us", in his book The Scientist as Rebel, NYRB, New York, 2008, pp. 42-3.

“The distribution of casualties of different types in Japanese buildings was greatly influenced by where the people happened to be at the time of the explosion. Had they been forewarned and knowledgeable about areas of relative hazard and safety, there would probably have been fewer casualties even in structures that were badly damaged.” – Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), pp. 547-8


From chapter XII, "Principles of Protection: Basis for Protective Action", in the 1962/64 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (a PDF file of it is linked here; this chapter was removed from the 1977 edition to make way for a chapter on the EMP):

'In Japan, where little evasive action was taken, the survival probability depended upon whether the individual was outdoors or inside a building and, in the latter case, upon the type of structure. At distances between 0.3 and 0.4 mile from ground zero in Hiroshima the average survival rate, for at least 20 days after the nuclear explosion, was less than 20 percent. Yet in two reinforced concrete office buildings, at these distances, almost 90 percent of the nearly 800 occupants survived more than 20 days, although some died later of radiation injury.'


Note that 85% of the total mortality within concrete buildings occurred within 20 days of the explosion, and 99% occurred within 48 days: see Fig. 61 on p. 104 of Wayne L. Davis, William L. Baker and Donald L. Summers, Analysis of Japanese Nuclear Casualty Data (Dirkwood Corporation, Albuquerque, DC-FR-1045, 1966, linked here), based on 35,099 personnel (24,044 in Hiroshima and 11,055 in Nagasaki).

The percentage of deaths due to delayed effects has always been dwarfed by the natural cancer and natural genetic defect rates, see for instance Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pp. 1-27. In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the natural leukemia number of 176 in the unexposed control group, due to the thermal unstability of DNA which is naturally broken due to random molecular impacts from the Brownian motion of water molecules at body temperature, 37 °C. There were 4,687 other, "solid", tumour cancer deaths, which was 339 above the unexposed matched control group. Hence in the 36,500 Hiroshima survivors over 40 years there were 4,863 cancers of all kinds, which is 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, 12.2% naturally died from cancer over 40 years who weren’t exposed to radiation, while for the irradiated bomb survivors the figure was 13.3%. No increase whatsoever in genetic malformations could be detected: any effect was so low it was lost in the statistical noise of natural genetic defects - the effect of body temperature on DNA again - for the sample size. Nature is a way, way, way bigger problem than radiation from nuclear bombs.

'Furthermore, of approximately 3,000 school students who were in the open and unshielded within a mile of ground zero at Hiroshima, about 90 percent were dead or missing after the explosion. But of nearly 5,000 students in the same zone who were shielded in one way or another, only 26 percent were fatalities. These facts bring out clearly the greatly improved chances of survival from a nuclear explosion that could result from the adoption of suitable warning and protective measures. [Table 11.17 on page 553 states that 50% survival after 20 days in Hiroshima occurred at 0.12 mile from ground zero for personnel in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for personnel outdoors; an 11-fold difference in distances and a 120-fold difference in areas, casualty rates and the probability of becoming a casualty.] ... survival in Hiroshima was possible in buildings at such distances that the overpressure in the open was 15 to 20 pounds per square inch.' - Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Chapter XII, Principles of Protection.


Professor Freeman Dyson, reviewing Thomas Stonier's book Nuclear Disaster (Meridian Books, 1963) in his 2006 book The Scientist as Rebel (pp. 74-6) makes the following points about the exaggerations of weapons effects, delivery capabilities, the use of gas and biological weapons of mass destruction, and on on, which led to the appeasement of the Nazis, encouraging their aggression:

"When Neville Chamberlain declared war on Hitler in 1939, one of his first acts was to empty London hospitals of their patients. Chamberlain expected catastropic air attacks to begin immediately; the hospitals were asked to handle 250,000 civilian casualties within the first two weeks, besides another 250,000 people who were expected to become permanently insane. ...

"We made only one mistake; none of us in those days could imagine that England would survive six years of war against Hitler, achieve most of the political objectives for which the war had been fought, suffer only one third the casualties that we had had in World War I, avoid the massive and indiscriminate use of poison gas and biological weapons [due to civil defense preparedness], and finally emerge into a world in which our moral and humane values were largely intact. ...

"In the 1930s we held views about war very similar to those of Stonier, and these views turned out to be wrong. The experts who so grossly overestimated the effectiveness of bombing in 1939 made many technical errors, but their major mistake was a psychological one. They failed completely to foresee that the direct involvement of civilian populations in warfare would strengthen their spirit and social cohesion."


Chapter 12 of Stonier's 1963 book Nuclear Disaster, which we will review in detail later in this post, claimed falsely a nuclear winter would be caused by the dust caused in a nuclear war, after claiming falsely that brick and concrete cities would burn in intense firestorms like the wooden medieval buildings of Hamburg: the Hiroshima firestorm, in a city of wooden buildings with fewer stories height, was less intense and the Secret 1947 six volumes of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report disclose that the thermal ignitions were due to thousands of overturned charcoal cooking braziers and partly to black coloured wartime blackout curtains in windows. In addition, Stonier discusses the spread of historical plagues by falsely claiming that insects as disease vectors would survive gamma radiation better than insect predators like birds. He cites but ignores the content of Dr Ralph F. Palumbo's paper (Radiation Botany, Vol. 1, pp. 182-9, 1962) on the rapid recovery of plants at Bogombogo (codenamed Belle by the Americans) Island in Eniwetok Atoll, just 2.55 statute miles from ground zero of both the 10.4 Mike test of 1952 and the 1.69 Nectar test of 1954 (Palumbo's full paper was discussed in detail in the earlier blog post linked here, and a PDF of the paper is linked here). Despite immense initial nuclear radiation, blast, water wave innundation, thermal radiation, and fallout, there were no insect plagues to wipe out the vegetation, which quickly regrew! Stonier blew it by concentrating on gamma radiation, which has trivial effects on insects at doses which are lethal in birds, ignoring beta radiation where the situation is exactly reversed (the feathers and skin of birds stop beta radiation which can't reach deep tissue; insects being much smaller get more severe effects than just superficial skin burns). Stonier also exaggerates by assuming 20 megaton yields and drawing the wrong lessons from World War I. His epilogue on page 180 ignores the fact that simple trenches were able to prevent complete and instant annihilation from high explosive shelling, dragging out the war for years despite the use of an immense amount of TNT per soldier on the battlefield! He ignores how this lesson of World War I evolved into the Anderson Shelter of World War II, protecting civilians. Instead, on page 180 Stonier chooses to draw a straw man style World War I lesson from France's useless Maginot Line:

"Following World War I, the French, by building the Maginot Line, helped delude themselves into a false sense of security with an extension of World War I concepts. This magnificient engineering feat not only failed to save France from a determined enemy in World War II, but 'Maginot Line psychology' probably contributed substantially to the fall of that unhappy country. ... national security is assured only in a world in which any and all potential enemies are disarmed. ... In order to achieve this utopian goal, which would include the creation of new social institutions such as a world legal system, it is first necessary to change fundamental social attitudes. This is not nearly as difficult as it is often assumed."


The French assumed that Germans would attack directly from Germany, not via Belgium. The Nazis invaded Belgium, by-passing the Maginot Line by simply driving their tanks through the Ardennes Forest to invade France, a route which the Maginot Line fortifications had ignored. The problem is that in the 1930s Stonier's ideals were represented by the League of Nations, which failed to stop World War II: a majority of members voted to do nothing that could possibly provoke an angry response from Hitler, because they had well and truly deluded themselves that another war would exterminate humanity by high explosive blast, incendiaries, gas bombs, and biological warfare. So the threat from the Nazis appeared smaller than the threat from war, Churchill's warnings went unheeded or opposed as "war-mongering" and the "peace-makers" signed ever more worthless pacts and agreements with the Nazis to enable themselves to believe that they were doing all they could for humanity. The lesson of the Ardennes Forest is not - contrary to Stonier - that all defenses should be rejected because they can be circumvented. That is just like claiming that seatbelts, hospitals, ambulances, lifeboats, life guards, etc., are useless because they cann't always save peoples lives if the disaster is too overwhelming. This is wrong. The lesson is that France should have not merely build a defense line and then disarmed with the delusion of safety. France should have additionally retained enough protected military strength to inflict unacceptible damage upon an aggressor or combination of aggressors, thus deterring an attack and giving also some political leverage to force the enemy to renounce the terrorism of the Jews and other minority groups. This is exactly what President Reagan did to help the people living in the tyranny of the Soviet Union. Reagan didn't need to start a war, just to remain strong enough to get the most draconian restrictions of communism lifted. Once that happened, tyranny collapsed by itself.

The Atomic Café, like other popular bias propaganda, presents the film of wooden houses being blown up in Nevada tests and the visible effects of Bravo fallout, without stating that city construction is now far more resistant concrete, brick and steel frame buildings (graphs below from Hiroshima), and that fallout decays very rapidly since 72% of fission products have half lives of less than 24 hours, and fallout radiation can be readily shielded by improvising countermeasures in the time between the explosion and the delayed deposition of wind carried material. Although historically interesting, it is politically-biased by falsely making countermeasures appear useless: contrary to the falsified film clips of nuclear explosions, the blast is delayed like thunder after lightning, giving most people in the otherwise hazardous area enough time for "duck and cover" against flying glass and debris (and the thermal flash in the case of high yield weapons), even if there is no attack warning given. By 1982, Western (not Soviet!) civil defence had been effectively but falsely ridiculed by the Soviet Union's Brezhnev-controlled, Moscow-based "World Peace Council" and related pressure groups for many years.



Above: graph showing the factual evidence for civil defence against the nuclear weapon explosion at Hiroshima, 6 August 1945, from Dr Ashley W. Oughterson and Dr Shields Warren (editors), Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, Vol. VI, Document NP-3041, as presented by Dr Clayton S. White, The Nature of the Problems Involved in Estimating the Immediate Casualties from Nuclear Explosions, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission report CEX-71.1, 1971 (downloadable as a PDF file from this link). White shows at pages 16 and 26 that the data from the Hiroshima post office, the concrete building shown at point 1 in the graph (i.e., 50% survival at 0.12 mile from ground zero) has been simplified by averaging survival for all locations in that building: the actual 50% survival distance varied from about 0.08 mile for the ground floor of a concrete building (which was well protected from direct initial nuclear radiation, by the mass above) to about 0.23-0.32 mile for the upper floors, where there was little protection from the air burst's intense initial nuclear radiation dose that escaped after some elastic scatter in the steel nose forging of the gun-type assembly weapon design (click here for a review of the doses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as calculated by the latest dosimetry). On page 20, White states:

"This of course indicates that ... one should be alert for the possibility of many more early survivors in case of a nuclear conflict than have been estimated over the past several years."


The graph above is the source of the data in Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), Table 12.17 on page 546, which states that the distance from ground zero in Hiroshima for 50% survival (i.e. the median survival distance) after 20 days was 0.12 miles for people in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for people standing outdoors. Therefore there was a ratio of 1.3/0.12 = 11 for the median survival distance for modern city buildings, to that for people flash burned, irradiated and blasted while standing in the open. This ratio of distance implies a ratio of median lethal areas of 112 = 120. Hence, taking cover in modern city buildings would reduce the risk of being killed by a factor of 120 for Hiroshima conditions, contrary to popular media presented political propaganda that civil defence is hopeless.


Above: duck and cover effectiveness against blast missiles such as flying glass and wall debris in houses, as well as bodily translation from the blast winds entering windows and demolished walls and throwing people against debris; from FEMA's June 1987 Attack Enviroment Manual, Chapter 2. For the detailed analysis of the effect of lying down on reducing blast injuries from the area exposed to flying debris and blast winds, see Anatol Longinow, et al., “People Survivability in a Direct Effects Environment and Related Topics”, IIT Research Institute, report AD764114, May 1973 (259 pages, PDF download linked here), and also their report “Casualties Produced by Impact and Related Topics of People Survivability in a Direct Effects Environment”, ADA011108, August 1974 (228 pages PDF linked here).

“The high incidence of flash burns caused by thermal radiation among both fatalities and survivors in Japan was undoubtedly related to the light and scanty clothing being worn ... If there had been an appreciable cloud cover or haze below the burst point, the thermal radiation would have been attenuated somewhat and the frequency of the flash burns would have been much less. Had the weather been cold, fewer people would have been outdoors, and they would have been wearing more extensive clothing. Both the number of people and individual skin areas exposed to thermal radiation would then have been greatly reduced ... These facts emphasize the influence of circumstances of exposure on the casualties produced by a nuclear weapon and indicate that shielding of some type can be an important factor in survival.” – Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), pp. 545-6


Oughterson and Warren (1956) and Glasstone and Dolan (1977) state that the ground range for children standing outdoors in school grounds without any line-of-sight thermal radiation shielding was 1.3 miles for 50% survival in Hiroshima; this corresponds to a free-field peak overpressure of 3 psi and 5 cal/cm2 thermal radiation exposure.

All Japanese and most American political anti-civil defence propaganda groups have censored out the influence of building type on survival rates, but Wayne L. Davis, William L. Baker and Donald L. Summers studied 35,000 people exposed to nuclear weapons in Japan and state in their 322 page long report Analysis of Japanese Nuclear Casualty Data (Dirkwood Corporation, Albuquerque, DC-FR-1045, 1966) that for the unshielded general population of Hiroshima (not just school children) the 50% survival (i.e. median lethal) ground range was 0.75 mile outdoors where the free-field peak overpressure was 7.9 psi and the thermal radiation was 15 cal/cm2.

They found a median lethal distance of 0.48 mile (13 psi free-field peak overpressure and 30 cal/cm2 out of shadows) for people shielded outside by buildings, trees, etc., between them and the fireball, and for people in vehicles (graph and table below, prepared to White's group):




Dirkwood Corporation analyzed the nuclear radiation doses in Japan using DS86 dosimetry in the 1990 report by R. L. Stohler, Japanese Nuclear Casualty Data Combined Injury and Mortality Analysis, ADA219691.



Above: Dr White's analysis of the casualty-causing phenomena of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion, 6 August 1945, using data his team obtained from numerous 1950s nuclear weapons test experiments on window glass acceleration, bodily translation and flying debris impact injuries. See, for example, the simple yet effective mathematical model developed for predicting the motion of blast wind accelerated people, glass fragments and other debris: I. Gerald Bowen, et a., “A Model Designed to Predict the Motion of Objects Translated by Classical Blast Waves”, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Civil Effects Test Operations report CEX-58.9 (1961), ADA394861; for Plumbbob 1957 nuclear test data on the filmed motion of flying dummies, see Rinaldo V. Taborelli, I Gerald Bowen and E. Royce Fletcher, “Tertiary Effects of Blast - Displacement”, preliminary report ITR-1469 (1957; this “interim test report” contains some information which was edited out of the final version) and the final version, weapon test report WT-1469. For similar effects from high explosives see their 1962 report DASA-1336, their 1966 report DASA-1859, and their 1971 report DASA-2710. Translation impact research is contained in DASA-1245 and, for flying debris from Teapot nuclear tests, see WT-1168 and AECU-3350, while Plumbbob biological effects data is in report WT-1470. The velocity of horizontally flying debris is dependent on the blast wind pressure and to some extent by the duration of the blast winds. For small objects like glass fragments, the winds last longer than the time taken for the object to reach its "terminal velocity" in the blast wind, so the wind duration is then irrelevant, but heavier objects take longer to be accelerated to that velocity so they reach higher velocities if the blast duration is longer (higher explosion energy yields). In the case of falling debris from the actual collapse of buildings, the vertical velocity of the debris is independent of the blast wave pressure and duration, as discovered in some drop tests first made by Mr Galileo (Newton discovered - by combining Galileo's result with Kepler's laws of planetary motion - that the motion of falling debris merely depends on our planet's mass and radius): for fall height S metres, the building collapse debris velocity - unless retarded significantly by air drag or obstructions - is 4.43S1/2 m/s (from v = [2gS]1/2). But staircase cupboards and strong tables (the Morrison effect) have regularly resisted the debris load when a small building collapses. (Taller buildings have stronger wall construction and are more resistant to collapse anyway, as seen in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

The peak overpressures and other data shown are "free-field" and apply to a nuclear weapon test in the unobstructed Nevada desert, not to the built up area of Hiroshima. This analysis of Hiroshima using nuclear test data was done to allow the results to be correctly scaled to other burst conditions, weapon yields, population distribution, type of buildings, etc. Thus, British Atomic Weapons Research Establishment founder Dr William Penney personally investigated the actual peak overpressures in Hiroshima in 1945 by sensitive blast peak overpressure indicators like the volume reduction of blast crushed empty petrol cans, the bending of steel poles, and so on, and found that the use of energy by the blast wave in causing destruction exponentially reduced the peak overpressure with distance, relative to that on an unobstructed desert:



The very first edition of Glasstone's nuclear effects handbook, The Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, on page 57 has a section written by John von Neumann and Fredrick Reines of Los Alamos (it is attributed to them in a footnote) stating factually:

"... the structures ... have the additional complicating property of not being rigid. This means that they do not merely deflect the shock wave, but they also absorb energy from it at each reflection.

"The removal of energy from the blast in this manner decreases the shock pressure at any given distance from the point of detonation to a value somewhat below that which it would have been in the absence of dissipative objects, such as buildings."




Above: David I. Feinstein of IIT Research Institute, Chicago, Illinois, developed a computer model (based on effects measured at nuclear tests), showing the large differences in protection between different types of building. Hiroshima and Nagasaki only burned down because they were overwhelmingly composed of wood-frame houses containing easily overturned charcoal cooking braziers which were aflame at the times of the attack (breakfast time Hiroshima; lunch preparation time Nagasaki).

Brick, concrete, and steel frame buildings are far more fire resistant (the Twin Towers fires were due to the injection of aviation fuel, which nuclear weapons don't provide). Feinstein's report AD676183 is based on a 10 megaton nuclear surface burst, which has a longer blast wind drag duration than the smaller Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, so the speed attained by blast carried debris is greater and casualty rates are higher for blast for any fixed peak overpressure. There are huge differences in the median (50%) lethal peak overpressure for different situations: outdoors, 50% of people standing without any thermal radiation shadowing will be killed by burns and wind drag impacts for 3.0 psi, but inside a 7-story load-bearing brick warehouse 9.2 psi is needed. The types of buildings predominating in all modern cities provide immensely more protection than was generally available in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the predictions above, people are assumed to be standing with no "duck and cover" countermeasures. Injuries are here due primarily to flying glass, flying debris, bodily displacement by wind drag, and flash burns.

Because the blast wave takes time to arrive after the flash over large areas, unlike the popular impression based solely upon the always-lying television propaganda films of nuclear detonations whereby the blast effect is without exception falsely superimposed on the first flash of the explosion, there is enough warning time over most of the damaged area for people to effectively duck and cover even if there is no attack warning given (due to government secrecy or incompetence), since lying prone allows the body length to attenuate some of the direct initial gamma radiation mid-line dose by self-shielding of tissue (see U.K. National Archives report HO 225/14, linked here), cuts down exposure to the thermal radiation by shadowing, and eliminates most dangers from wind drag and the exposed body area to flying glass and other debris as will be illustrated later in this post with data from Hiroshima. Note that Feinstein's model for standing personnel is accurate, but the results predicted for prone personnel are exaggerations because they ignore the shielding from thermal radiation by shadowing and do not properly account for the sliding resistance to translation. In addition, covering under a strong table or under a strong staircase - the "Morrison shelter" effect in WWII Britain, also demonstrated by 1950s nuclear tests on brick houses - protects reasonably well against the debris collapse of a house, since the weight of falling debris when a house collapses is completely unaffected by the strength of the blast wave.



Above: Dr Shields Warren and Dr Ashley Webster Oughterson compiled detailed data on the survival of groups of people at various distances in Hiroshima according to the degree of protection they had in their book Medical effects of the atomic bomb in Japan, by the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw Hill, New York, 1956, p. 103). The high casualty rates from thermal radiation in Japan are not generally applicable to other situations. The U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment study The Effects of Nuclear War in 1979 pointed out that on a cold winter night typically only 1 % of the population would be exposed to thermal radiation, compared to typically 25 % for the summer and daytime. In addition, the weather (atmospheric visibility) affects thermal transmission from bomb to target, just as the wind direction affects fallout delivery to a target in a surface burst. Nobody therefore can assert that a nuclear weapon explosion will automatically produce the effects exhibited on Hiroshima. Even if the atmospheric conditions were similar, other factors would be different and the results would not be the same.



Above: at Hiroshima any opaque object like a hat prevented burns, so if personnel had ducked and covered when they saw the bomb fall, they would have avoided the thermal burns and flying glass injuries which caused the lethal synergism of combined infected wounds and radiation-depressed white blood cell counts, where the radiation exposure would not have caused a lethal effect if unaccompanied by burns and other trauma (see the diagram below). Experiments on glass window breakage similarly show that even just by ducking 10, 20 and 24 degrees angle below the horizontal from behind from a glass window, reduces the number of skin-penetrating, blast-wind accelerated, high velocity glass fragments to a unit area of skin to about 40 %, 15 % and only 10 %, respectively, of the values horizontally behind the window (ref.: page 21 of Dr E. Royce Fletcher's report Glass Fragment Hazard from Windows Broken by Airblast, ADA105824, DNA 5593T, 1980; clothing also provides a measure of protection). This demonstrates that even feeble "duck and cover" reduces not just the thermal flash exposure from nuclear weapons, but also the blast fragment laceration hazard.

Some 3 metres behind a glass window 1.37 x 1.83 metres in size, bare skin can be exposed to 140 incised wounds, the maximum number possible for a median glass fragment velocity of 40 m/s; this is reduced to 8 wounds if clothing is worn. For higher median velocities, the necessary shock wave is stronger, making more fragments with smaller individual mass, so the momentum per fragment in fact falls despite the increase in velocity. (See Figure 16 on page 31 of E. Royce Fletcher, Donald R. Richmond, and John T. Yelverton, “Glass Fragment Hazard from Windows Broken by Airblast,” Lovelace Biomedical an Environmental Research Foundation, report ADA105824, DNA-5593T, 1980. Hence clothing can provide protection factors as high as 140/8 = 18 for reducing the number of glass fragment wounds, permitted the use of clothed parts of the body to shield unclothed parts.)



Above: the data from 11,055 Nagasaki case histories allowed Wayne L. Davis, William L. Baker and Donald L. Summers, in their report Analysis of Japanese Nuclear Casualty Data (Dirkwood Corporation, Albuquerque, DC-FR-1045, 1966, Figure 29, page 43), to analyze the relationship between the percentage of body area burned (up to 40% for unclothed flash burns from the direct line-of-sight thermal flash, since the back and sides will not be exposed if facing the explosion, and up to 100% for flame burns due to fires ignited by overturned charcoal lunch cooking braziers in blasted wooden houses) and mortality for 2nd degree (blistering) and 3rd degree (charring) skin burns. 1st degree burns were basically similar to sunburn and did not result in lethal infections. These curves above apply to combined synergism of thermal and nuclear radiation exposures. Most of the casualties in both cities were due to blast and thermal radiation, with infected wounds made worse by the synergism of initial radiation exposure, which lowers the white blood cell count; see the PDF linked here of James W. Brooks et al., "The Influence of External Body Radiation on Mortality from Thermal Burns", Annals of Surgery, vol. 136 (1952), pp. 533–45. (See also: G. H. Blair et al., "Experimental Study of Effects of Radiation on Wound Healing", in D. Slome, Editor, Wound Healing, Pergamon, N.Y., 1961.) Notice that for both types of burns, if only 20% of the surface area of the body was burned (either blistering or charring), the mortality rate was less than 10%. In medicine, the “rule of nines” allows the percentage of the body surface area to be quickly estimated:

Head and neck equal ................... 9%
Anterior trunk equals ....................18%
Posterior trunk equals ..................18%
Upper extremities (each 9%) ........18%
Lower extremities (each 18%) ......36%
Perineum ..................................... 1%

This demonstrates that a reduction of the area of skin exposed to the fireball thermal radiation can be vitally important in reducing the risk of mortality in nuclear war. Duck and cover is not a fraud. The protection afforded by clothing was established by Nevada nuclear tests and is reported in Capabilities of Atomic Weapons TM 23-200, November 1957 (dark clothing may flame and smoke at the higher exposure levels, but if the person is lying on the ground they can roll over to extinguish flames as the thermal pulse subsides):



Above: American data for thermal energy needed for burns under clothing, from page 6.2b of the 1960 (change 2 pages revision) Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, TM 23-200, Confidential.


Above: the 3-storey Bank of Japan was a modern type concrete building which survived 0.25 mile from ground zero in Hiroshima where the peak overpressure was 18 psi. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that half of the 100 people in the building survived; there were injuries to those standing near windows from horizontally flying glass window fragments, debris, nuclear and thermal radiation. No ignitions occurred in the building from blast or thermal radiation effects, and it was not ignited by burning wooden buildings 25 feet away. At 1.5 hours after the explosion, however, a firebrand from burning trees in the surrounding firestorm of wooden buildings containing overturned charcoal cooking braziers started a fire on the second storey: "The survivors extinguished the blaze with water buckets, preventing further damage. A little later, a fire started on the third floor. It was beyond control when discovered and the third floor burned out. But the fire did not spread to the lower floors." (This quotation is from Panel 26 of the DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 3, CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, PDF linked here; see also the September 1989 revision, FEMA-127, online PDF linked here, which gives later research data on the fuel loading of cities and the effect of blast in blowing out thermal ignition apart from open pans of ignited liquid fuel or the Encore instant flashover due to the ignition of rooms stuffed full of flammable kindling with windows having a direct view of the fireball.)

“Once a mass fire has formed, the usual prognosis for people trapped within the fire area is not very favorable. [However] ... records show that more than 85 per cent of the 280,000 people in the firestorm area of Hamburg survived ... (Earp, Kathleen F., Deaths from Fire in Large Scale Air Attack with Special Reference to the Hamburg Fire Storm, U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch report CD/SA-28, 1953; U.K. National Archives document reference: HO 225/28).” - Dr Abraham Broido, “Surviving Fire Effects of Nuclear Detonations”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1963, pp. 20-3.


This fire-fighting also saved the Geibi Bank Company building in Hiroshima which again was not ignited by thermal radiation, despite being close enough to receive a peak overpressure of 8 psi. Firebrands from the firestorm around it caused some furnishing and curtains on the 1st and 3rd floors to ignite: "The fires were extinguished with water buckets by the building occupants. Negligible fire damage resulted. ... If one assumes that Americans can do what the unsuspecting residents of Hiroshima did, self-help measures ... would appear to be effective."



A SANE POLICY (Harvard Crimson, Monday, October 30, 1961):

It has been brought to our attention that certain elements among the passengers and crew favor the installation of "life" boats on this ship. These elements have advanced the excuse that such action would save lives in the event of a maritime disaster such as the ship striking an iceberg. Although we share their concern, we remain unalterably opposed to any consideration of their course of action for the following reasons:

1. This program would lull you into a false sense of security.

2. It would cause undue alarm and destroy your desire to continue your voyage in this ship.

3. It demonstrates a lack of faith in our Captain.

4. The apparent security which "life" boats offer will make our Navigators reckless.

5. These proposals will distract our attention from more important things i.e. building unsinkable ships. They may even lead our builders to false economies and the building of ships that are actually unsafe.

6. In the event of being struck by an iceberg (we will never strike first) the "life" boats would certainly sink along with the ship.

7. If they do not sink, you will only be saved for a worse fate, inevitable death on the open sea.

8. If you should be washed ashore on a desert island, you will be unaccustomed to the hostile environment and will surely die of exposure.

9. If you should be rescued by a passing vessel, you would spend a life of remorse mourning over your lost loved ones.

10. The panic engendered by a collision with an iceberg would destroy all vestiges of civilized human behavior. We shudder at the vision of one man shooting another for the possession of a "life" boat.

11. Such a catastrophe is too horrible to contemplate. Anyone who does contemplate it obviously advocates it.

- Committee for a Sane Navigational Policy: Stephan A. Khiney '62, Robert Fresco '63, Richard W. Bulliet '62, Donald M. Scott '62.


This 1961 Harvard Crimson parody of the vacuous political objections to President Kennedy's civil defence program to a rejection of lifeboats for ships was quoted and expanded upon by strategist and civil defence advocate Herman Kahn in his 1962 book Thinking About the Unthinkable, where Kahn points out that the anti-lifeboat fanatics could add the deceptive complaint that adding lifeboats to a ship increases the weight on the ship, thereby increasing the rate of sinking in a disaster, making the problem worse! The point is, "objections" to civil defence are vacuous and are supported not by facts or by science, but by political bias, groupthink and wishful thinking. (This 1961 lifeboats analogy to civil defence is adapted to ambulances in the August 1962 magazine Fission Fragments, issue number 3, pages 14-5, located in the U.K. National Archives as document HO 229/3, edited by W. F. Greenhalgh of the Home Office civil defence Scientific Adviser’s Branch, London. In the 1980s, after the compulsory introduction of car seat belts, they used those as the analogy instead in official civil defence publications such as the November 1981 U.K. Government publication Civil Defence - Why We Need It which states: "Why bother with civil defence? Why bother with wearing a seat belt in a car? Because a seat belt is reckoned to lessen the chance of serious injury in a crash." The first publication of the ship analogy to civil defence is at page 3 of the 1938 British Home Office public civil defence manual, The Protection Of Your Home Against Air Raids: “On board ship, both crew and passengers are instructed where to go and what to do, not when danger threatens, but beforehand. The captain considers it a matter of ordinary routine and everyday precaution that everything is in readiness for a shipwreck which he hopes will never happen.”)

In fact, the analogy of civil defence to lifeboats goes a lot deeper: for many years lifeboats were in fact "debunked" and ridiculed as silly, expensive, useless, etc. That came to a dramatic end in 1912 with the testimony of Commander Charles Lightoller, the Second Officer aboard the Titanic, who was ordered to fill a grossly inadequate number of lifeboats, choosing who would survive and who would die. He recommended to the inquiry that lifeboat capacity be based on numbers of passengers and crew instead of ship tonnage, that lifeboat drills should be conducted regularly on ships so passengers know where their lifeboats are and crew know how to operate them, and that early warnings of ice and collision should be given by radio communications in all passenger ships. Summarizing the points made in Walter Lord's minute-by-minute account of the disaster based on interviews with 63 survivors, A Night to Remember (Longmans, Green and Corgi, London, 1956), Dr Tom Stonier explained this obvious analogy between the inadequate disaster preparations of the Titanic and the panic due to the inadequacy of civil defence for nuclear attack in Hiroshima, on page 55 his 1964 book Nuclear Disaster (Penguin, London):

"The immediate survivors of a disaster are ... frequently so frightened or so stunned that they cannot utilize the resources available to them with the greatest effectiveness, nor can they muster the courage to conduct rescue operations. Nowhere is the incapacitating effect of fear more clearly illustrated than by the events that followed the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Of sixteen hundred men, women, and children in the ice water, only thirteen people were picked up by the half-empty lifeboats nearby. Only one of the eighteen boats made the attempt to return and rescue them. The others failed to lend assistance out of fear of being swamped. In boat after boat, the suggestion to go back and help was countered by the sentiment, 'Why should we lose our lives in a useless attempt to save others from the ship?'

"The damaging effect of fear is therefore not so much that it elicits the flight reaction, which is a healthy, normal, and life-saving response, but that it leads to a paralysis of judgement and action that tends to prevent the maximum use of available resources and thereby prevents preserving the maximum number of lives."


Robert Jungk's book, Children of the Ashes (Heinemann, London, 1961) cites a report in Hiroshima by American psychologist Woodbury Sparks called Panic Among A-Bomb Casualties at Hiroshima which showed that due to their surprise at the effects of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion, only 26 percent (153 out of a random sample of 589) of bomb survivors in Hiroshima gave any assistance at all to anybody else after the explosion. Only 5% of people trapped alive by blast debris in Hiroshima were freed by others, while 50% freed themselves before the firestorm took hold. Because British brick houses produce heavier debris than Japanese wooden houses, only 25% of people trapped alive under the stairs or a strong table (Morrison shelter) in collapsed houses after air raids in Britain could free themselves, although the fire risk was lower because bricks do not burn as U.K. Home Office proved. Organised rescue efforts (see the earlier post, linked here) could therefore increase the survival chance even in demolished wooden buildings substantially.

For a detailed statistical analysis of the paltry attempt at rescue in Japan, see Table 6 on p. 101 of Wayne L. Davis, William L. Baker and Donald L. Summers, Analysis of Japanese Nuclear Casualty Data (Dirkwood Corporation, Albuquerque, DC-FR-1045, 1966, linked here), based on 35,099 personnel (24,044 in Hiroshima and 11,055 in Nagasaki). The figure of 5% rescued was a maximum.

"Case histories collected by investigators in Japan during 1945 illustrate both the effectiveness of shelters and the dangers inherent in apathy of the population, which suffered needless casualties by ignoring air raid warnings. Adequate shelters and immediate response to warnings are essential to survival in nuclear attack." - Francis X. Lynch (Atomic Bomb Unit, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C.), "Adequate Shelters and Quick Reaction to Warning: A Key to Civil Defense", Science, v142 (1963), pp. 665 - 667.


In addition, the line-of-sight thermal flash burns casualties and flying glass and debris wounds in Hiroshima could have been averted by simple "duck and cover" if the air raid precautions had been more effective, and if the population was aware of the facts. Even today, propaganda films of nuclear explosions with the blast bang falsely superimposed on the visible flash for dramatic effect or deception, carries the false message that duck and cover is no use because the blast arrives simultaneously with the flash. It does not. Not only was the population of Hiroshima exposed to the bombs, but most people outdoors turned to watch the bomb fall from the B-29, which led to the high incidence of flash burns (70% of injuries and 50% of deaths were due to a synergism between flash burn infections and sub-lethal doses of radiation, according to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Effects of Atomic Bombs on Health and Medical Services in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pacific War report 13, 1947 and the 1977 International Symposium on Damage and After Effects of the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), which were too numerous to be treated, leading to infections which proved lethal in combination with the depressed white blood cell count for a few weeks after >100 R nuclear radiation exposure:

"In the first week after the Hiroshima bombing, burns received no more than ointments and salt-water compresses. Wounds were often not even dressed."

- Drs. Oughterson and Warren, Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956, p. 77.

From the 1940s onwards, a succession of anti-civil defence writers have falsely claimed that Hiroshima type mass burns are inevitable in any nuclear war - regardless of the atmospheric visibility, the type and yield of detonation, the average shielding of the population from a potential fireball - and have usually finished up by listing the immense civilian medical requirements needed to treat a single badly burned petrol soaked casualty in peacetime, who, despite the attention of many doctors and the use of immense quantities of blood plasma and antibiotics, died anyway. Implying falsely that thermal flash burns are like being soaked in petrol and cremated in peacetime and that this failure of immense medical efforts doesn't imply failure of technique, they insist politically that the prevention of injury should be by surrender to terrorists rather than civil defence duck and cover, without examining whether surrendering to terrorists will result in tragedy:

"A 20-year-old man was recently hospitalized in the burn unit of one of Boston's teaching hospitals after an automobile accident in which the gasoline tank exploded, resulting in extensive third-degree burns. During his hospitalization, he received 281 units of fresh-blood plasma, 147 units of fresh-frozen red blood cells, 37 units of platelets, and 36 units of albumin. He underwent six operative procedures, during which wounds involving 85% of his body surface were closed with homograft, cadaver allograft and artificial skin. Throughout his hospitalization, he required mechanical ventilation and monitoring with central venous lines, arterial lines, and an intermittent pulmonary artery line. Despite these heroic [sic.] measures, which stretched the resources of one of the country's most comprehensive medical institutions [using resources that could have been used for other people], he died on his 33rd hospital day. His injuries were likened by the person who supervised his care to those described for many of the victims of the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima [this incompetent comparison of petrol burns to flash burns probably explains the incompetence of the treatment given and the outcome]."

- Dr Howard Hiatt, Harvard School of Public Health, "Preventing the Last Epidemic", Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 244 (1980), pp. 2314-5.

It should be emphasised here that not all American medical professionals are so callous towards human life that they promote deceptions for political propaganda. For example, Dr Jane M. Orient has denounced pseudo-scientific attacks on civil defense in The Lancet, 18 November 1988, pp. 1185-6, and in an article called Medical Preparedness for Nuclear War, linked here (although the peer-review system, dominated by the groupthink of appeasement, has been used to censor her vital papers from publication in some journals).

Contrary to the American medical propaganda about the civilian medical panic and failure with small numbers of severely burned patients, is a vast improvements in military medical experience of the treatment of mass burns casualties in combat situations since Hiroshima:

N. Ben-Hur and H. Soroff, "Combat Burns in the 1973 October War and the Anti-Tank Missile Burn Syndrome", Burns, vol. 1, pp. 217-21 (1975).

M. S. Zaki and S. M. Talaat, "Mass Casualties in Burns", Medical Journal of Cairo University, Vol. 44, IV (1976).

B. Sørensen, "Management of Burns Occurring as Mass Casualties after Nuclear Explosion", Burns, vol. 6, pp. 33-6 (1979), which gives data from a burns unit showing that people with less than 40% body area burns can usually be successfully treated for lethal shock (flash burns from direct thermal radiation cannot burn larger areas; scattered thermal radiation did not cause burns in Hiroshima or Nagasaki):

Anti-shock treatment: During the first 48 hours post burn a quantity of fluid equivalent to 15 per cent of the body weight per 24 hours should be drunk. For every litre of fluid, 5 grams (one teaspoonful) of salt should be consumed.

(a) Remove all clothing from burned areas;
(b) if possible, hold burned area under cool water for one-half to one hour, then wash with soap and water;
(c) leave all burned areas uncovered, i.e. without dressing, ointment etc;
(d) do not lie on burned areas;
(e) after 48 h or so the burn will be covered by a dry crust. Leave the crust quite alone until it falls off of its own accord (10 to 14 days).


Lies about thermal radiation causing complete permanent blindness to all

“They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn't see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can't go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing. Time comes, and this tremendous flash out there is so bright that I duck, and I see this purple splotch on the floor of the truck. I said, "That's not it. That's an after-image." So I look back up, and I see this white light changing into yellow and then into orange. Clouds form and disappear again – from the compression and expansion of the shock wave [the Wilson cloud chamber effect]. ... I am about the only guy who actually looked at the damn thing – the first [nuclear] Trinity test. Everybody else had dark glasses, and the people at six miles couldn't see it because they were all told to lie on the floor. I'm probably the only guy who saw it with the human eye. Finally, after about a minute and a half, there's suddenly a tremendous noise – BANG, and then a rumble, like thunder – and that's what convinced me. Nobody had said a word during this whole thing. We were all just watching quietly. But this sound released everybody – released me particularly because the solidity of the sound at that distance meant that it had really worked.

“The man standing next to me said, ‘What's that?’ I said, ‘That was the Bomb.’ The man was William Laurence. [The only journalist who attended the Trinity test, Science Correspondent for the New York Times, who forgot that sound travels slower than light, a vitally important fact for duck and cover: people need to know that particularly for the most destructive higher yield explosions, the blast - and thus all sound of the explosion - is delayed long after the flash, over large areas of destruction.]”

- Professor Richard P. Feynman, “Los Alamos from Below”, in his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, W. W. Norton Company, Inc., February 1985.



As Glasstone and Dolan point out in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the eye was not subject to burns like skin was at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. This is because of the natural reflex reaction is for the eyelid to close on seeing a bright flash, just as people blink when a camera flash goes off: any curiosity to look at the fireball is a delayed and different matter to the automatic reflex reaction blink. In order to get retinal burns to rabbits in high yield, low altitude nuclear tests, the eyes had to be cruelly held open with forceps while facing the fireball, to prevent the automatic blink reflex from cutting off the thermal exposure before enough of the thermal pulse energy had been delivered to cause a burn. Eye injuries where survival is possible are limited to burns to the eyelids if the person does not duck and cover, and relatively small burns equal in size to the fireball image on the retina at the back of the eye. This is a small size where survival is possible for people with an unobstructed line-of-sight of the fireball, so these retinal burns are of limited consequence. Jonathan Schell (a staff writer for The New Yorker) had to tell falsehoods, developing a confused fantasy of gross deception about retinal burns, after claiming to use Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons as a source in his book The Fate of the Earth (Pan Books, London, 1982, p. 53):

"People hundreds of miles away [after a 20 Mt surface burst on New York] who looked at the burst would be temporarily blinded and would risk permanent eye injury. (After the test of a 15 Mt bomb in Bikini Atoll, in the South Pacific, in March of 1954, small animals were found to have suffered retinal burns at a distance of 345 miles.)"


This concentrates falsehoods: (1) even in a vacuum with no atmospheric attenuation, the fireball image on the retina would be a trivial area at large distances! (2) The 15 Mt Bravo surface burst test in March 1954 was detonated just 80 miles from totally unprotected islanders at Ailinginae Atoll, there was no possibility of eye injury. (3) Bikini Atoll is in the North Pacific, not the South Pacific. (4) The only test which produced the eye injuries at 345 statute miles was Teak, a high altitude burst which had already been exaggerated and had the exaggeration debunked in the March 1963 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“During the Teak shot [of 3.8 Mt yield, 77 km altitude over Johnston Island, 1958, rabbits received retinal burns] lesions ... approximately 2 mm in diameter at about 40 miles, but only 0.5 mm at 300 miles [U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, 22-26 June 1959 hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, pp. 248-50]. These results have been interpreted as implying that everyone caught in the open within hundreds of miles of a nuclear detonation would be instantly and permanently blinded. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a matter of fact, chances of finding a large number of cases of retinal burns are extremely unlikely, and since only the more serious burns centrally located in the visual field produce a loss of visual acuity, cases involving a considerable loss of vision will be even more rare. The animals used in the Teak experiments had been dark-adapted [so their pupils had expanded to the maximum size, allowing in a maximum amount of light]. They were oriented so as to be looking at the fireball. The altitude of the detonation maximized the fireball dimensions and minimized the duration of delivery of the thermal pulse to a time short compared to the blink reflex time of either rabbit or man. ... The second Hardtack high altitude burst, called Orange [3.8 Mt at 43 km altitude over Johnston Island], produced no thermal radiation effects [due to atmospheric shielding] because of cloud cover that existed at detonation time.”


- Dr Abraham Broido, “Surviving Fire Effects of Nuclear Detonations”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 1963, pp. 20-3.


Above: Soviet Union propaganda on civil defence simultaneously said civil defence was useless when broadcasting outside the Soviet Union, while saying the exact opposite in internal broadcasts. Source: John Dowling and Evans M. Harrell, Civil Defense: a Choice of Disasters (American Institute of Physics, New York, 1987, p. 195; we will discuss this book in detail below after Stonier's book).

Should we protect ourselves from nuclear weapon effects?

The title above is that of Oak Ridge National Laboratory nuclear effects physicist Carsten M. Haaland in Appendix B to the book edited by Professors John Dowling and Evans M. Harrell, Civil Defense: a Choice of Disasters (American Institute of Physics, New York, 1987; the book is a symposium proceeding of a study group of the Forum on Physics and Society of the AIP), which puts the civil defense case quite clearly as we shall see. This blog post reviews that book, along with Nuclear Attack: Civil Defence, a Symposium compiled and edited by the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies (Brassey’s, Oxford, 1982), and Dr Thomas Stonier’s 1964 book Nuclear Disaster which is the best researched (yet still defective) of the attacks on civil defence.

THERE IS AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN A BROAD SPECTRUM OF THREAT SCENARIOS, NOT JUST THE WORST CASE, AND EVEN THE MOST EVIL PEOPLE IN HISTORY HAVE BEEN INTIMIDATED INTO RESTRAINT

Hitler was appeased while he was rearming Germany faster than Britain was rearming in the 1930s, on the false beliefs that:

(1) Every ton of TNT bombs would kill well over 100 people, as in two surprise air raids on an unprepared England with no civil defence in 1917. Rebuttal: civil defence in England by 1942 had reduced this to 4 fatalities per ton of bombs dropped, equivalent to 40,000 killed by a single 20 kiloton explosion, 4(20,000)2/3 = 2,900. Without civil defence, there could be 74,000 killed by a 20 kiloton bomb, because 100(20,000)2/3 = 74,000. (Above 20 kilotons, the 2/3 power of yield scaling for blast damage areas and casualty rates has two opposing modifications. Firstly, as Lord Penney discovered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over very large distances the cumulative depletion of blast energy in causing damage to successive houses in any radial line becomes substantial and reduces the blast pressure, reducing the scaled damage distances for larger weapons. Secondly, the blast duration is longer for larger weapons, so the wind pressure loading becomes important for many types of buildings in the megaton range, increasing damage. These rough scaling calculations ignore the effects of blast energy partition, height of burst, population density variation, etc.)

(2) Persistent mustard gas would be dropped on civilian targets as the war escalated, preventing civil defence rescue efforts! Rebuttal: the Nazis were extremely evil, but that didn’t make the war escalate to uncontrolled use of weapons of mass destruction, especially since Britain had more gas masks by 1939 than Germany, despite having a smaller stockpile of gas bombs. Like radioactive fallout, gas warfare was militarily unattractive for use as a weapon compared to blast, because of uncertainties in weather prediction (wind and rain). Incendiary bombs only proved more effective than high explosives against old city areas filled with highly inflammable wooden buildings, which no longer exist in modern cities.

(3) The war would be an all-out event, with every high explosive, incendiary and persistent mustard gas bomb the Nazis had dropped on England as rapidly as possible, creating firestorms and leaving blasted, contaminated rubble. If people didn’t die in the blast from high explosives, they would be burned in the firestorm from the incendiaries. Any few who survived blast and fire would envy the dead, while they died slow and lingering deaths from skin blisters and lungs choking with fluid after the inhalation of toxic, blistering mustard gas. Rebuttal: this belief was widely held as a “common sense” extrapolation of first world war techniques to aerial bombardment against cities, but it was an extremely unlikely "worse case" scenario with low probability (why should an enemy gamble all their bombs in one "all-out" attack and then be left with no reserve in case the attack fails from unexpected defenses, bad weather, etc., escalating the war with devastating tit-for-tat retaliation?), which was falsely promoted as being certain due to tit-for-tat escalation in war, in order to "justify" appeasing terrorists.

All three illusions apply to nuclear weapons effects exaggerations: by exaggerating the size of the bombs, the weight of the attack, the way in which weapons would be used, the targetting policy, etc., you can create a “doomsday scenario”, and then brainwash yourself and fellow travellers that your worst-case scenario is the “only realistic” situation, and use it to preach the doctrine that the Nazis, Communists or other dictatorial terrorist states must be appeased and surrendered to, “in order to preserve life on Earth”. This is exactly what the terrorists want to achieve. Fear. Intimidation. Surrender through terror.

On the contrary, chapter 12 of Glasstone and Dolan’s 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons states that the median lethal distance outdoors in Hiroshima was 1.3 miles, while in reinforced concrete buildings it was 0.12 mile, so the difference in lethal areas was a factor of (1.3/0.12)2 = 120. Civil defence air raid precautions to take cover in reinforced concrete buildings would therefore have had a major benefit in Hiroshima. Even ducking and covering in the open reduced mortality to 100 days in Hiroshima by a large factor, due to shadowing and thus reducing or avoiding serious heat flash burns, as is clear from the table on page 103 of Drs. Oughterson and Warren’s 1956 Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw-Hill, New York).

In his 1960 book On Thermonuclear Warstrategist Herman Kahn explained:

‘... some experts insist on talking as if the only choices were immediate surrender, immediate preventative war, or eventual world annihilation. This is certainly not the case now and, with luck and skill, never will be the case.’


Kahn argued that civil defence was another choice: having civil defence first shows that you are not bluffing with your nuclear deterrent, and are not completely unprepared to defend liberty, and secondly gives you countermeasures to mitigate the effects of terrorism. An absence of civil defence encouraged the secret rearmament of fascist states in the 1930s. America, Russia, and Britain all built their first nuclear weapons in secret. Disarmament and a lack of civil defence led to a false sense of security in the 1930s. Being weak does not prevent intimidation, rather it encourages terrorists to secretly arm and then intimidate:

“How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing.”


- Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, address to the British public after his meeting with Hitler at Munich after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, 27 September 1938.

“After the Munich agreement, the Labour Party were relieved that we had escaped the war. Now [there is war] they want to know why we did not call Hitler’s bluff. If we get through this war successfully, then it will be to Munich that we shall owe it. In the condition our armaments were in at that time, if we had called Hitler’s bluff and he had called ours, I do not think we could have survived a week [this was a civil defence issue, since Hitler had too few long range bombers to attack Britain successfully in 1938, but was arming faster than Britain was, so the situation was getting worse: Britain was getting into a worse position, not “buying time” as Chamberlain’s excuse claimed].”


- Neville Chamberlain (who as British Prime Minister flew and met Hitler twice, gaining useless "peace agreements" signed by Hitler on worthless pieces of paper, ditching Czechoslovakia to the Nazis in the process, which gave them immense mineral and industrial war making resources for them to arm way faster than Britain), arrogant excuse for appeasement to the National Union in 1940.

“If a potential aggressor sees that the object nation, whilst posing an ability to give as good as it gets, has taken no civil protective measures at all against the possibility of attack, then the credibility of that nation’s deterrent posture will be low. The aggressor will be tempted to assume that its armed forces, conventional or nuclear, are no more than a costly bluff by a country that never intends to fight for its survival if need be. Political and military pressure may be exerted on it without fear and without limit, and its position will be at grave risk. But if, on the other hand, such a nation is seen to have taken in time of peace positive Civil Defence measures in anticipation of attack, then the credibility of its deterrent posture will be enhanced ...”


- Air Marshal Sir Leslie Mavor (1916-91), Principal of the Home Office Home Defence College, Easingwold 1973-80, Introduction to Nuclear Attack: Civil Defence, a Symposium compiled and edited by the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies (Brassey’s, Oxford, 1982), p. 4.

The “disarm and surrender to avoid war” strategy of unilateral disarmament organisations like CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) led them to tactics like attacking civil defence as useless, by only considering a fraudulently exaggerated attack scenario which would overwhelm practical civil defence preparations (ignoring the lesson of 1930s threat exaggerations). So CND ignored the broad spectrum of risks, ranging from collateral damage from EMP or fallout being blown across the country from a nuclear conflict in a nearby country, to conventional high explosive, gas bombs or small nuclear weapons dropped on a limited number of either military or political targets. World War II never escalated from high explosive to mustard gas bombing, not despite the fears and preparations like gas masks in the late 1930s, but because of those preparations. Civil defence precautions for a gas attack helped prevent WWII from escalating to gas bombing raids.

“Civil defense, as an element of the strategic balance, should assist in maintaining perceptions of that balance favorable to the U.S.”

- President James E. Carter, Presidential Directive 41, September 1978.

“The foreign policy of the United States should reflect a national strategy of peace through strength. The general principles and goals of this strategy would be: ... to create a strategic and civil defense which would protect the American people against nuclear war at least as well as the Soviet population is protected. [Third of eight goals.] ... since 1977, the United States has moved from essential equivalence to inferiority in strategic nuclear forces with the Soviet Union. ... We reject the mutual-assured-destruction (MAD) strategy of the Carter Administration which limits the President during crises to a Hobson's choice between mass mutual suicide and surrender.”

- Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Republican party election platform, quoted by Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Secker and Warburg, London, 1983, pp. 127-8.

High energy physicist Dr John Hassard, the biggest civil defence critic contributor in the Dowling and Harrell AIP book, was director of the”Physicians for Social Responsibility Task Force on Nuclear War Evacuation” and at the time of writing in 1987 was a member of the Washington, D.C. (not Moscow) based “American Committee for East-West Accord”. Backing up Reagan’s attempt to end the arms race by bankrupting a expansive totalitarian dictatorship by an arms race was generally considered foolish and dangerous, so many people behaved towards the Soviet Union exactly as the appeasers behaved in the 1930s: they believed that civil defence against the threat of bombing from Hitler was dangerous, would provoke war or cause Hitler to simply increase the size of the bombing attack, negating civil defence. They chose to see any civil defence effort as increasing the danger.

Hassard writes on page 99: “From a purely pragmatic point of view, it could be added here that a population in cars, trains, and buses is far more vulnerable to the direct effects of nuclear weapons that it would otherwise be.”

In fact, people can duck and cover against thermal radiation and flying debris wherever they are, so the benefit gained from distance (due to the rapid fall in both hazardous radiation and blast with increasing distance) soon exceeds the protective factor of staying under cover in a target area. The evacuation of women and children from British cities prior to the declaration of war in 1939 did not provoke a Nazi attack on the evacuating population; the attacking force would have found it more difficult to target such a dispersing, distributed evacuating population, than “sitting ducks”.

Hassard on page 164 also claimed that the lifeboat analogy to civil defence was misleading because nuclear confrontations can be controlled, unlike “icebergs in the night”. This is wrong because he is ignoring the fact the Titanic did of course try to avoid the iceberg, and by steering it minimised the impact damage and gave time to lower the lifeboats! It was the panic and lack of drill that led to so many deaths, not a lack of effort to avoid hitting the iceberg. Hassard then makes the false claim that civil defence is like a lifeboat that will not float, although on pages 91-101 he gives some facts suggesting the opposite:

“In 1961, for hurricane Carla, for example, between 1/2 and 3/4 of a million people were evacuated without a single major reported accident or fatality. [Mattie E. Treatwell, Hurricane Carla, September 3-4, 1961, Office of Civil Defence, Denton, Texas, 1961; Hearings of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and urban Affairs, 95th Congress, 2nd Session, January 1979.] ... President Reagan has even used nuclear winter as an argument in favor of his strategic defense initiative [to reduce the scale of nuclear disaster by intercepting some warheads, making civil defence more effective] ... Ultimately, the most lasting impact of the discovery of nuclear winter may be an acceleration into research and development of very low yield (one or two kiloton) weapons, capable of earth penetration, and accurate enough to hit individually specified buildings. [Which reduces the collateral damage and makes civil defence more effective.]”

Controversy and democratic liberty





Above: Hitler's exaggerated threat against Britain put pressure on the British Government to coerce the man behind these newspaper cartoons, David Low, to stop:

Lord Halifax contacted the manager of the Evening Standard to see if Low could be toned down. He said:

"You cannot imagine the frenzy that these cartoons cause. As soon as a copy of the Evening Standard arrives, it is pounced on for Low’s cartoon, and if it is of Hitler, as it generally is, telephones buzz, tempers rise, fevers mount, and the whole governmental system of Germany is in uproar. It has hardly subsided before the next one arrives. We in England can’t understand the violence of the reaction."

It wasn’t only Hitler complaining about Low. In 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain singled out Low while appealing to newspapers to temper their critical commentary of Germany. Chamberlain said:

"Such criticism might do a great deal to embitter relations when we on our side are trying to improve them. German Nazis have been particularly annoyed by criticisms in the British press, and especially by cartoons. The bitter cartoons of Low of the Evening Standard have been a frequent source of complaint."


John A. Wheeler-Bennett's brilliant first-hand history, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (Macmillan, London, 1948), which was used by Herman Kahn in the RAND Corporation studies of dealing with dictatorship using civil defense to increase the credibility of deterrence, tells on pages 197-9 how he (Wheeler-Bennett) and two friends raised £318,000 for Jewish and other refugees from the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia due to Prime Minister Chamberlain's concession to Hitler, and flew to Czechoslovakia to try to save as many as possible from Nazi persecution (their aircraft was blown up by a time bomb on the next flight, killing all aboard):

"Much sympathy had been aroused in Britain by the sorry plight of the refugees who had fled the Sudentenland [of Czechoslovakia] before the advance of the German occupying forces. With vivid memories of what had happened in Germany and in Austria to those who, by reason of race, nationality or political creed, had found themselves in opposition to the principles of the Third Reich, thousands of Czechs, as well as Jews ... had fled from their homes ... In response to a letter to The Times, signed by Major-General Sir Neill Malcolm, at that time League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Viscount Duncannon and myself [The Times, 4 October 1938], the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Harry Twyford, opened a Mansion House Fund for the relief of these unfortnate people ... The Lord Mayor wished to superintend personally the setting-up of a committee for the distribution of these funds, and, accompanied by Sir Neill Malcolm and myself, he flew to Prague on October 10. On arrival we found that the situation was even worse than we had anticipated. ... Such is the story of the Munich Agreement, the great humiliation of the Western democracies ...

"... The best that could have been said for it was that, though irretrievable in itself, it had at least gained - at a terrible price - a breathing-space in which Britain and France might prepare, materially and spiritually, for the forthcoming and inevitable conflict. Had this been true, the Czechs would not have been sacrificed in vain. In fact, however, Munich only stands as a milestone between the years the locusts had eaten and the months which they were about to devour [Chamberlain was still deluded, and Britain was only rearming at a small fraction of the rate that Germany was, so every day Britain's differential situation was getting worse, not better]."


Wheeler-Bennett researched this book while editing for publication the official German foreign policy documents captured in the war, and while writing the history of the Nurenberg trials. He points out on page 16 of Munich: Prologue to Tragedy that Chamberlain's delusions about Hitler were childish, like any negotiations with terrorist thugs:

"There is something tragically hideous and pathetic in this belief of Mr Chamberlain that he could match wits and exchange troths with Hitler, who, only shortly before, is reported to have confessed that 'he was ready to guarantee every frontier and to conclude a non-aggression pact with anyone,' but that 'anyone who was so fussy that he had to consult his own conscience about whether he could keep a pact, whatever that pact or whatever the situation, was a fool. He could conclude any pact and yet be ready to break it next day in cold blood, if that was in the interests of Germany'."


Describing the prelude to the Munich meeting between Prime Minister Chamberlain and Chancellor Hitler on 22 September 1938, Wheeler-Bennett tells on page 129 how the British Ambassador told Chamberlain of the following threat he received from Field-Marshal Hermann Göring the previous week:

"If England makes war on Germany, no one knows what the ultimate end will be. But one thing is quite certain. Before the war is over there will be very few Czechs left alive and little of London left standing."


Chamberlain had previously met Hitler at Berchtesgaden where Hitler had laid out his demands. At Munich Chamberlain now informed Hitler that he had conceded everything. Hitler was taken aback by the level of appeasement, then he quickly upped his demands (Wheeler-Bennett, pp. 132-3):

"... when Mr Chamberlain ... looked confidently down the green baize-covered board-room table for the Führer's reactions, there was a moment of incredulous silence. Then, to crystallize the matter, Hitler asked directly: 'Do I understand that the British, French, and Czechoslovak Governments have agreed to the transfer of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Germany?' 'Yes,' replied the Prime Minister. There was another pause, a longer one this time, and then the Führer replied incisively: 'I am extremely sorry, but that's no longer of any use' (Es tut mir fürchtbar leid, aber das geht mir nicht mehr)."


When offered an inch, Hitler would take one mile. That was his modus operandi: 'In March 1938 Henlein, referring to the government in Prague, told Hitler: "We must always demand so much that we can never be satisfied".' Offered all he wanted by Chamberlain at Munich, Hitler struggled to quickly come up with still further demands, but succeeded. Chamberlain was shocked that Hitler suddenly increased the demands from those made to his face at Berchtesgaden. It was the thin end of the wedge, and Hitler arranged his meeting with Chamberlain to involve constant explosions of temper (Wheeler-Bennett, page 133):

"A debate of some acrimony followed, Hitler reiterating the failure of the Anglio-French Plan to meet the new contingencies, Mr Chamberlain refusing to accept the new German proposals. During this time the Prime Minister was treated to a typical example both of the Führer's theatre-craft and of his temperamental nature. In the course of the discusson they were frequently disturbed by couriers who handed urgent despatches to Hitler. These the Führer would scan swiftly, and then, his face contorted with rage, would shout: 'Two more Germans killed by the Czechs; I will be avenged for every one of them. The Czechs must be annihilated'. At length, after three hours, and many repetitions of this scene, Mr Chamberlain withdrew, 'full of foreboding', but not before he had exacted from Hitler an extension of his assurance that he would not move his troops into Czechoslovakia while the negotiations continued, a concession which it was easy for the Führer to make since the zero hour for 'Operation Green' [the invasion] had not yet arrived."


Chamberlain conceded to Hitler, explaining the reasons in a pacifist broadcast:

"However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues that that. I am myself a man of peace to the very depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me; but, if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of force, I should feel that it must be resisted." (Wheeler-Bennett, page 158; this appeasing broadcast by Chamberlain was published in The Times, 27 September 1938.)


This statement proves that Chamberlain did not believe that Hitler was a megalomaniac threat, even after meeting him twice and having to concede the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia to him at Munich in 1938. Chamberlain was not buying time for rearmament. He knew that by giving Hitler the Sudetenland he was handing Hitler 70% of Czech iron and steel, 86% of her chemical resources, 70% of her electric power, and so on, which would be used for arms production. He knew he was making Britain's position relative to the Nazis worse, not buying time for rearmament (although after he had to declare war, Chamberlain deceived himself that he had always done the right thing, because he thought any efforts for peace were morally unassailable by definition). Chamberlain as an egotistic politician flattered himself that he could negotiate tyranny without being deceived:

"The truth is that Mr Chamberlain had developed as blind a confidence in his political intuition as ever as ever the Führer subsequently achieved, and his faith in his own influence with Hitler was as great. 'You see,' he is said to have replied to one of his Cabinet colleagues who had pointed out to him that Hitler had made promises in the past and broken them, 'you see, my dear fellow, this time it is different; this time he has made the promises to me'." (Wheeler-Bennett, p. 182.)


Wheeler-Bennett points out on page 216 that Chamberlain had no excuse for this self-deception because Hitler had published a full explanation of his belief in political lies for propaganda in Mein Kampf back in 1926, first published in English in 1933, where Hitler wrote that big lies are more likely to be believed by the average person than small ones: "it is more readily captured by a big lie than a small one. ... even from the most impudent lie something will always stick."

At the time of Munich in 1938, Britain did not have the civil defence preparations ready for a war so Chamberlain was unable to make any credible threat:

"In these days, too, began the somewhat futile process of 'fitting' the population for gas-masks, which were only to be distributed 'in emergency' and, in any case, were virtually non-existent." (Wheeler-Bennett, page 159; in a footnote he states that M. Bonnet received a request for a million gas masks for France during the Munich discussions of 25-26 September, but was unable to help because Britain at that time only had enough for the population of London, with none spare for the rest of the country, let alone France. He mentions that this lack of civil defence during the Munich crisis caused one third of the population of Paris to flee the city in panic.)


After the Munich agreement had prevented war in 1938, criticisms of Chamberlain began in the 3 October 1938 House of Commons Debate, where Duff Cooper stated:

"It was not for Serbia that we fought in 1914. It was not even for Belgium, although it occasionally suited some people to say so. We were fighting then, as we should have been fighting last week, in order that one Great Power should not be allowed, in disregard of treaty obligations, of the laws of nations and the decrees of morality, to dominate by brutal force the continent of Europe." (Wheeler-Bennett, p. 186; Hansard, House of Commons Debates, 3 October 1938, column 32.)


Richard Law added dry humour to that debate (Wheeler-Bennett, p. 186; Hansard column 114):

"We have now obtained, by peaceful means, what we have fought four wars to prevent from happening, namely, the domination of Europe by a single power."


Prime Minister Chamberlain closed the debate by declaring laconically:

"Our policy of appeasement ... is to obtain the collaboration of all nations, not excluding the totalitarian States, in building up a lasting peace for Europe." (Wheeler-Bennett, p. 189; House of Commons, 3 October 1938.)


Churchill took longer to respond, but on 5 October 1938 he told the House of Commons:

"This is the consequence of five years of futile good intention; five years of eager search for the line of least resistance; five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power; five years of neglect of air defenses. We have been reduced in those five years from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengeable that we never cared to think about it. We have been reduced from a position where the very word 'war' was considered one which would be used only by persons qualifying for a lunatic asylum."


This is what the policy of "peace through disarmament" brings you: vulnerability, the encouragement of terrorism, the inability to defend liberty in other countries. Without American lend-lease, Britain would have certainly have lost its liberty to the Nazis in World War II, due to appeasers like Chamberlain and Baldwin. All the time the appeasement was going on, Germany was arming faster than Britain. Still today, Chamberlain's "buying time" lie of 1940 persists in arms control delusion literature:

“Scholars typically define appeasement as a policy of satisfying grievances through one-sided concessions to avoid war for the foreseeable future and, therefore, as an alternative to balancing. They traditionally interpret British appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s as a naïve attempt to maintain peace with Germany by satisfying his grievances. The standard conceptualization of appeasement and the empirical treatment of the 1930s, however, are theoretically limiting and historically incorrect. Appeasement is a strategy of sustained, asymmetrical concessions with the aim of avoiding war, at least in the short term. There are three distinct variations of appeasement: (1) resolving grievances (to avoid war for the foreseeable future); (2) diffusing secondary threats (to focus on a greater threat); and (3) buying time (to rearm and/or secure allies against the current threat). British appeasement was primarily a strategy of buying time for rearmament against Germany. British leaders understood the Nazi menace and did not expect that appeasement would avoid an eventual war with Germany. They believed that by the time of the Rhineland crisis of 1936 the balance of power had already shifted in Germany's favor, but that British rearmament would work to reverse the balance by the end of the decade. Appeasement was a strategy to delay an expected confrontation with Germany until the military balance was more favorable.”

- Professors Norrin M. Ripsman and Jack S. Levy, “Wishful Thinking or Buying Time? The Logic of British Appeasement in the 1930s”, International Security, Fall 2008, vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 148-181.


Contrast that to Kahn, who is not blinded by bias from Chamberlain's lies:

"... in spite of the tremendous scale of the violations it still took the Germans five years, from January 1933 when Hitler came in to around January 1938, before they had an army capable of standing up against the French and the British. At any time during that five-year period if the British and the French had had the will, they probably could have stopped the German rearmament program. This ... makes me feel that the treaty provisions were as successful as one had a right to expect. ... it is an important defect of 'arms control' agreements that the punishment or correction of even outright violation is not done automatically ... but takes an act of will by policy level people in the nonviolating governments ... one of the most important aspects of the interwar period [was] the enormous and almost uncontrollable impulse toward disarmament ... there developed an enormous impulse to remove this disease or at least its manifestations. As late as 1934, after Hitler had been in power for almost a year and a half, [British Prime Minister] Ramsey McDonald still continued to urge the French that they should disarm themselves by reducing their army by 50 per cent, and their air force by 75 per cent.

"In effect, MacDonald and his supporters urged one of the least aggressive nations in Europe to disarm itself to a level equal with their potential attackers, the Germans. ... Probably as much as any other single group I think that these men of good will can be charged with causing World War II. [Emphasis by Herman Kahn.] ... It is ... one thing to fear and detest an evil [war] and quite a different thing to ignore all of the realistic aspects of the problem [the need to actually prevent war not by utopian, worthless treaties with thugs, but instead by means of exerting force against thugs to curtail their power before their capability becomes too great to safely oppose]. ... Hitler came into power in January 1933 and almost immediately Germany began to rearm ... but it was not until October 14, 1933 [that] Germany withdrew from a disarmament conference and the League of Nations ... Hitler's advisors seem to have been greatly worried that this action might trigger off a violent counteraction - for example, a French occupation of the Ruhr. But the British and the French contented themselves with denouncing the action."

- Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press, 1960, pp. 390-1.


First, despite the resources acquired by invasions, Nazi Germany only had a 6-weeks supply of munitions in September 1938, and the position of France was actually deteriorating relative to Germany: in other words, France should have acted rather than delayed since German armament was occurring faster than French armament. Furthermore, the combined naval power of France and Britain in September 1938 still outweighed that of Germany; their relative weakness to Germany then was only in air power.

France then had 1,454 aircraft, Britain 1,550, but the German Luftwaffe had 3,356, although these were mainly tactical, short-range aircraft incapable of reaching Britain from Germany, and Britain's Thames Estuary was already protected by a revolutionary, secret radar-guided air defense system. These figures are from Appendix B of Stephen Roskill's Hankey, Man of Secrets, 1931-1963, Vol. III (Collins, London, 1974). For example, 3,356 German aircraft is the actual number atthe time of Chamberlain's appeasement at Munich, contrasted to the A. I. Sitrep British intelligence report for 31 August 1938 (available to Chamberlain as Prime Minister at that time) which estimated a threat of only 2,650 German aircraft.

Hence, the intelligence information on the German threat which Chamberlain actually had available was even more favorable to the suggestion that Hitler could have been resisted at that time, than the situation as we now know it. Germany had acquired many resources from its invasions, but in September 1938 it was still short of vital military resources such as oil and rubber. It was militarily prepared with only a 6-week munitions supply for a series of invasions, not to fight a World War! In August 1939, just before warfare started, Germany, Italy, France and Britain actually had 4,210, 1,531, 1,234, and 1,750 aircraft, respectively (source: Anthony P. Adamthwaite, The Making of the Second World War, George Allen and Unwin, London, 2nd ed., 1979, pp. 227-8). Hence, the appeasement at Munich in delaying the war gave a bigger advantage to the Nazis than to anyone else.

"[Just like the Soviet Union during its expansion] At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to 'retaliate' if they attacked him. The Munich crisis had an incredible sequel in March 1939. ... Hitler occupied the rest of Czechslovakia. The technique he used is such an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs that it is of extreme value to all who are concerned with the problem of maintaining a peaceful and secure world ..."

- Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 403.


"The new appeasement was a mood of fear, Hobbesian in its insistence upon swallowing the bad in order to preserve some remnant of the good, pessimistic in its belief that Nazism was there to stay and, however horrible it might be, should be accepted as a way of life with which Britain ought to deal."

- Sir Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement, 1968.


The appeasement and disarmament lies of Neville Chamberlain and Edward Grey

The big lies of Chamberlain and Grey are both extremely important to all discussion of arms control, and we have dealt with them in earlier posts (e.g., the link here):

(1) Chamberlain, who met Hitler twice and conceded to his demands repeatedly, lied in 1940 (after appeasement failed and war began) that he had been buying time for British rearmament when had known all the time knew that his appeasement and concessions to Hitler were allowing Germany to arm faster: Chamberlain told this lie to cover up the incompetence that allowed World War II when he was criticised during his lifetime by books like Guilty Men.

(2) Grey, Britain's Foreign Minister in 1914, lied after failing to make Britain's position clear in time to Germany, to cover up his own incompetence that allowed World War I. Grey conveniently blamed weapons, not people, for World War I.


Both of these lies seriously affect the arms control, disarmament, peace and war. This is because the lies of Chamberlain and Grey have been repeatedly used as propaganda. John F. Kennedy, President during the Cuban Missiles Crisis, in his 1940 book Why England Slept first focussed on the lie of Edward Grey:

“The statement of Lord Grey, British Foreign Minister [responsible for diplomatic failure], made in 1914, that, ‘The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable,’ had a tremendous effect on post-war British opinion. Armaments were looked upon as something horrible, as being the cause of war, not a means of defense. ... but England’s failure to rearm has not prevented her from becoming engaged in a war; in fact, it may cost her one. The causes of war go deeper than armaments.”

- John F. Kennedy (1917-63), Why England Slept, Wilfred Funk, Inc., New York, 1940, reprinted by Greenwood, 1981, pp. 6-7.


The lie of Grey is explained by his incompetence in World War I:

"In 1914, Grey played a key role in the July Crisis leading to the outbreak of World War I. His attempts to mediate the dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia by a "Stop in Belgrade" came to nothing, owing to the tepid German response. He also failed to clearly communicate to Germany that a breach of the treaty not merely to respect but to protect the neutrality of Belgium — of which both Britain and Germany were signatories — would cause Britain to declare war against Germany. When he finally did make such communication German forces were already massed at the Belgian border and Helmuth von Moltke convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II it was too late to change the plan of attack. Thus when Germany declared war on France (3 August) and broke the treaty by invading Belgium (4 August), the British Cabinet voted almost unanimously to declare war on August 4, 1914."


Barbara W. Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1962 book, The Guns of August, which reportedly influenced Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missiles Crisis that year, records that Lord Grey on 3 August 1914 obscenely begged Parliament to go to war in order to preserve imperialistic "respect and good name and reputation" and to avoid "economic consequences", with the following words (page 141 of the Four Square edition, London, 1964):

“I ask the House from the point of view of British interests to consider what may be at stake. ... if, in a crisis like this, we run away ... we should, I believe, sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world and should not escape the most serious and grave economic consequences.”


This quotation proves that Grey was lying when he claimed: "The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable". Yet, as Kennedy and Kahn pointed out, it was the lie of Grey about arms causing World War I which caused World War II through arms control efforts which led to delusions of achieving security from war through the vulnerability of disarmament for peace, which failed. The lessons are covered up and diligently ignored.

Chamberlain remained Britain's Prime Minister until May 1940 when Churchill took over, retaining Chamberlain in his war cabinet. On 22 September 1940 Chamberlain resigned from the government, and Churchill asked him to accept the Order of the Garter, which he declined. There is little criticism to be made of Chamberlain's service once war had broken out; by contrast Churchill's efforts as First Lord of the Admiralty led to early failures. The issue is purely over Chamberlain's self-deception about Hitler's ambitions during the 1930s which caused the appeasement policy.

"So far as my personal reputation is concerned, I am not in the least disturbed about it. The letters which I am still receiving in such vast quantities so unanimously dwell on the same point, namely without Munich the war would have been lost and the Empire destroyed in 1938 ... I do not feel the opposite view ... has a chance of survival. Even if nothing further were to be published giving the true inside story of the past two years, I should not fear the historian's verdict." - Chamberlain, November 1940.


This quotation proves that Chamberlain was deluded about two things:

(a) weapons effects and capabilities: he was deluded about Hitler's air power in 1938, and

(b) the fact Britain was losing the arms race during 1938-1940: he was deluded that Britain was in a better position when war came in 1939 than it was in 1938 before Hitler had gained Czechoslovakia.



Above: as seen in an earlier post, Chamberlain's appeasement at Munich in 1938 did NOT buy any time for rearmament whatsoever because GERMANY WAS ARMING MUCH FASTER THAN BRITAIN. Every day, the whole of Germany was working to churn out munitions and train for war, while the efforts in Britain were relatively feeble: Chamberlain knew this, too. Chamberlain was unable and unwilling to engage in an arms race on a par with Germany. Fine, he was representing Britain's pacifist sentiment and doing what the majority of the public wanted, his job as Prime Minister. But this does not excuse his lie that appeasement helped Britain. It made World War II worse, not better, because Germany was arming faster, so any delay was making the situation worse. In 1938, Germany was spending $20 million a day on its military build up, compared to just $5 million a day in Britain. Every day, the gap was widening, not decreasing. So, if you want "security through disarmament", study the "little problem" called World War II which was caused by this clever idea.

Before discussing the whole of Stonier's book in detail, the nature of controversy and democratic liberty need to be restated. Many millions fought for liberty, to keep freedom alive by preventing world domination by the suppressive, dictatorial regimes of applied communism and fascism. However, there is always a struggle for facts against false belief systems touted as facts. If there is no freedom to point out errors and to disclose important facts, then liberty in in danger. Hitler didn't single-handedly try to impose a 1,000 year Reich on the world: he had a majority of supporters in 1933. The same goes for Lenin in 1917. Nuclear weapons effects propaganda against Western civil defence and nuclear arms, stemming from the Kremlin backed Moscow based "World Peace Council" during the Cold War, sought to make any threat of war appear worse than any threat from effective surrender (by unilateral disarmament) to the Soviet Union.

In a free democracy, popular lying propaganda (or inaccurate, poorly researched claims) must be actively debunked using the facts, or it will gradually infect and corrupt society. People must be prepared to examine and keep reviewing all of the available evidence on any subject. The only sure way to discover error is to look for error, to keep trying to apply or test a theory with new data, or new applications. You cannot debunk a false belief if you refuse to examine it critically, on a regular basis. You can't debunk a political opinion, but you can debunk a false "fact".

A good example is John Charmley's 1999 book Chamberlain and the Lost Peace, which glorifies Prime Minister Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler and claims that Britain should have never declared war on Germany. Charmley argues that Britain declared war on Germany to save a free Poland, which turned out a failure when the communists invaded Poland, and he adds that the war cost Britain an empire and resulted in the communist domination of half of Europe. However, as Churchill stated the day that war was declared, it was not an imperialistic war to save Poland (any more than World War I was "just" a war of revenge for one assassinated Archduke), but to stop the spread of tyranny. The Cold War arms race was not an abstract conflict of political ideals, but a successful effort to defend personal freedom against the spread of tyranny.

Nuclear winter and insect plagues in “Nuclear Disaster” 1964 by Dr Tom Stonier



Above: biologist Dr Tom Stonier (b. 1927) published a book called Nuclear Disaster” in America in 1963, which was revised (with effects on London, in addition to New York) and published in England by Penguin books as a “Penguin Special” in 1964. I will review the 1964 Penguin edition. Including the 19 pages of bibliography (listing 230 references), the book is brief and concise at 240 pages long, and chapter 12, “Ecological Upsets: Climate and Erosion”, is the first detailed prediction of the “nuclear winter” theory, two decades before Sagan and TTAPS. Apart from initiating the “nuclear winter hoax”, chapter 11, “Ecological Upsets: Plants, Insects and Animals” claims that insects will survive gamma radiation, then destroy irradiated plants and spread epidemic plagues (he ignores the effects of beta radiation on insects). He carefully reviews some of Oughterson and Warren’s data on survival in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Democrat Chet Holifield’s June 1959 Hearings Before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, “Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War”, and many early research reports on the ecological effects of radiation.

But Stonier ignores Kahn’s argument at those 1959 hearings that exaggerations of the form of a war in 1938 (where immediate all-out gas and incendiary attacks were wrongly predicted) led to appeasement of the Nazis, he uses inaccurate thermal ignition data from the 1957 and 1962 editions of Glasstone’s Effects of Nuclear Weapons (which were not corrected until Glasstone’s 1964 reprint), and he falsely applies firestorm data from old wooden parts of European and Japanese cities to modern brick and concrete buildings. Reviewing Stonier’s book here will show the history of the nuclear weapons effects delusions that led to anti-civil defence film propaganda like “The War Game”. The 1964 Penguin introduction is by Robert Jungk (author of early, Richard Rhodes-style, nuclear age history, Brighter than a Thousand Suns), who states:

“Tom Stonier has tried to assemble in comprehensive terms and figures all the available facts about the probable consequences of a nuclear catastrophe. Almost all the material he has used for this sober Apocalypse has been American and almost none European. This is no coincidence. ...”

Jungk claimed that European Governments were not issuing detailed nuclear effects information like America in fear of provoking a public panic and presumably anti-nuclear protests for disarmament, rather than due to habits of secrecy. However, the declassified evidence we have reviewed in the previous posts on this blog show that the secret British reports (including those in the 1960s issues of the restricted British Government journal Fission Fragments) debunked popular misconceptions about firestorms from nuclear attack, and other panic provoking nuclear exaggerations. The whole problem for civil defence in the 1960s was that the British civil service knew the facts but had to keep the scientific reports out of the hands of the scientifically illiterate but elected politicians, whose job it was to decide what to publish and what to withhold. Although an unelected army of civil servants effectively constitutes the mechanism of administration of Britain, i.e. the effective British Government, it is unable to publish anything without the authority of a small handful of elected M.P.’s who form the quango of power as Cabinet Ministers. These generally scientifically illiterate, biased politicians, don’t have the time or the interest to read and approve scientific reports. In addition, the civil service was quite happy to work in a culture of secrecy and to only issue patronising civil defence orders (lacking scientific justification, which they kept secret) to the public. Hostility towards civil defence in England was not helped by keeping the facts secret. There was no scientific publication of the direct effects of British nuclear tests for civil defence due to secrecy, so with the start of anti-civil defence propaganda, civil defence lost public sympathy and could not defend itself against claims of ineffectiveness. Even Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons frequently presents effects graphs without giving the data points or even showing which nuclear tests they came from; this "trust us" authority-based approach does not always make a big fraction of the public trust civil defence (especially when massive changes had to be made in successive editions, without explaining earlier errors). In a free democracy, unlike a dictatorship, most people naturally expect to see detailed evidence before believing what they are told on such important subjects, or they believe it to be propaganda!

Stonier’s introduction on page 19 notes that the bombing of civilians in World War II stemmed from Giulio Douhet’s Blitzkrieg (lightning war) idea. This is what Hitler used with success in the 1930s: the Nazis prepared for a series of short wars of invasion to spread fascism. On page 20, Stonier notes that in World War I, only 5% of the 9.8 million killed were civilians, but in World War II some 48% of the 52 million killed were civilians, and in the Korean war (1950-3) some 84% of the 9.2 million killed were civilians. He then gives a discussion of the firestorms, ignoring the fact that they were limited to areas of German cities that contained 3-5 storey wooden medieval houses, and wooden Japanese cities.

Chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 summarise some important data from Oughterson and Warren’s research at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956). Stonier, pages 27-8 (based on Oughterson and Warren pages 94 and 102-4):

“In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, burn injuries constituted the major problem in medical care; from the day after the bombing on, they accounted for more than one-half of all deaths. Twenty days after the attack it was found that among burned survivors the great majority (80-90%) had suffered flash burns, some (5-15%) had suffered both flash and flame burns, a very few (2-3%) had suffered flame burns only. ... At the Hijima High School in Hiroshima, of 51 girls who were outdoors on the school grounds about half a mile from the [ground zero], all were severely burned and died within a week. However, it was found that where there was some shielding [from the line-of-sight of the fireball thermal flash] the number of deaths from flash burns seemed to be reduced significantly.

“At about a mile ... the mortality among [thermal flash line-of-sight] shielded school children was 14.2%, in contrast to 83.7% among unshielded children. Some of the children who were indoors and were thought to have been protected were undoubtedly exposed to the heat rays through doorways and windows [so civil defence could make the protection factor higher, since there was no “duck and cover” in Hiroshima]. ... at Hiroshima’s Kameyama Hospital, 75% of the patients who received burns at 0.6 mile died within two weeks.”

STONIER ON THE SYNERGISM BETWEEN BURN/DEBRIS WOUNDS AND IRRADIATION

Stonier notes on page 77 that at Hiroshima and Nagasaki the effect of nuclear radiation exposure in suppressing the white blood cell count was important in casualties with concurrent thermal burns or blast injuries (drawing on Oughterson and Warren page 101 and other research into synergism):

“Exposure to radiation can significantly aggravate even minor injuries. ... 100 roentgens ... slows down normal wound-healing processes. The First Military Hospital in Tokyo reported that in those patients who had signs of radiation injury, the healing of wounds was prolonged. The significant point is that small doses of radiation alone are not serious, nor are minor injuries ... But when these two factors are combined, they can cause permanent disability and even death.”

(See also see the PDF linked here of James W. Brooks et al., "The Influence of External Body Radiation on Mortality from Thermal Burns", Annals of Surgery, vol. 136 (1952), pp. 533–45, and G. H. Blair et al., "Experimental Study of Effects of Radiation on Wound Healing", in D. Slome, Editor, Wound Healing, Pergamon, N.Y., 1961.)

Stonier notes on pages 77-8 and 94 that Holifield’s June 1959 Congress hearings (pages 12, 847 and 852-3) extrapolating gross casualty data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki up to 1-10 megaton yields, with no civil defence, found a 1,446 megaton attack could kill 28% of the American population (41.8 million of 150.7 million Americans) and injure 11% (17.2 million). The 60% (91 million) of Americans who were uninjured by initial effects were found to receive a mean fallout gamma exposure of 60 roentgens in the first 90 days, the 11% who were injured survivors received 375 roentgens, so 72% of Americans received a mean fallout dose of 110 roentgens.

Stonier’s point is that the fallout radiation dose to injured survivors would permit infections of wounds in many cases. On page 107 he writes:

“... dysentery ... was by far the commonest cause of disability [among soldiers] during the American Civil War ... there is evidence that from 5 to 10% of the population of the United States harbours Entameba histolytica, the causative organism of amebic dysentery, though without any symptoms [G. W. Anderson and M. G. Arnstein, Communicable Disease Control, 3rd ed., Macmillan, New York, 1953, p. 188]. In many of these cases stress on the individual, such as excessive fatigue or malnutrition, may produce a flare-up of the disease. Since radiation is one of the most effective agents known to reduce resistance to infection, it is probable that among an inadequately-cared-for irradiated population there would be outbreaks of intestinal infections.”

This is important because existing intestinal bacteria are not eradicated by sterile hospital hygiene. Stonier actually underestimates this effect by concentrating on dysentery: in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all kinds of bacteria we all carry naturally in our mouths, skin, and digestive system were able to proliferate through the body and fatally infect wounds where the radiation exposure suppressed the white blood cell count. To emphasise, normally harmless bacteria that we all carry turned lethal to burned and blast wounded casualties who received enough nuclear radiation to suppress their immune systems. It was not therefore merely a problem of a lack of sterile hospitals or sterile wound coverings which caused the high mortality from flash burns and glass fragment wounds to irradiated casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: it was a proliferation or normal bacteria in the mouth, skin and gut in the absence of natural countermeasures due to irradiation. The lesson here is to avoid the combination of wounds and irradiation: “duck and cover”, even if it failed to reduce nuclear radiation exposure, would avert most of the thermal flash burns and blasted glass fragments and debris wounding mechanisms, preventing Hiroshima’s lethal synergism of effects at low radiation doses.

Oughterson and Warren showed that any shadow from the line-of-sight to the fireball prevents thermal flash burns in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and taking cover to avoid flying glass and debris and bodily displacement by blast winds avoided or minimized blast injuries.

STONIER’S FIRESTORM DELUSION

Stonier used the thermal ignition data in the June 1957 and April 1962 editions of Glasstone’s Effects of Nuclear Weapons grossly exaggerated the fire hazard; additionally, the June 1957 edition exaggerated the thermal radiation by fixing the thermal transmission fraction at ~ 0.5 for distances beyond 10 miles! The transmission problem was addressed in the April 1962 revision, but the ignition energy error was not corrected until the February 1964 reprint of Glasstone. Stonier based his analysis on the flawed 1957 thermal effects predictions: 30 cal/cm2 at 18 miles from a 20 megaton air burst, starting 10 fires per acre. This gives Stonier a total of 2 million fires in the 200,000 acres of New York city if ground zero at Columbus Circle on the island of Manhattan: his use of 30 cal/cm2 reflects an arm-waving, false attempt to include thermal shadowing of potential ignition points by trees and buildings in the line from fireball to target, as well as the difficulties of making a sustained fire from the ignition of litter like a newspaper. The fire department cannot put that many fires out, a situation similar to the firestorm in Hiroshima which he describes on page 40 (citing pp. 238-41 of Holifield’s June 1959 nuclear war hearings, pp. 326-7 of Glasstone and the unclassified 1946 report of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey):

“Following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the firestorm developed after 20 minutes, achieved its maximum intensity after about 2 hours, and subsided after 6 hours ... 70% of the fire-fighting equipment was crushed in the collapse of firehouses, and 80% of the fire personnel were unable to respond. Although no subsurface pipes were crushed, no leaks resulted directly from the blast, and the water reservoir itself remained undamaged, the water pressure dropped to zero because 70,000 pipe connections in buildings were broken.”

On page 80, Stonier summarises the problem in Nagasaki:

“At Nagasaki, the Urakami district was totally without water because of 5 major breaks in buried pipes [due to falling rubble]. 6 additional breaks occurred, 4 of them at bridges, and about 5,000 house-service pipes were broken by the collapse of homes exposed to blast, fire, or both.”

After the average yield of individual stockpiled nuclear weapons fell dramatically due to MIRV technology in the 1970s, people like Postol began to reduce Stonier’s 30 cal/cm2 firestorm criterion to much lower figures based on the thermal flash exposure at the firestorm radius in Hiroshima. This was done to keep the fire exaggeration business going for smaller yield weapons, but is contrary to all the facts, because in Hiroshima, fires were started primarily - according to the originally secret Strategic Bombing Survey report of 1947 (declassified in 1972) - by the overturning of thousands of charcoal breakfast cooking braziers inside wooden houses filled with inflammable bamboo furnishings and paper screens! Secondary fires due to blast effects on electrical and gas supplies in modern cities are averted by modern circuit breakers and gas cut-off valves. Additionally, in a surface or low altitude burst, the intense radial - not radiated - EMP due to charge separation would induce kiloamp cable currents as in Nevada tower tests, which would race out at the velocity of light and trip circuit breakers, thus cutting off electrical power, before the blast wave arrived, preventing most secondary fires. The few fires in Hiroshima from thermal flash ignition were observed to start in black coloured air raid curtains in wooden houses.

Unlike the black air raid blackout curtains in Hiroshima, the side of curtains facing the outside in cities are now usually light colour. Even if they are temporarily ignited and then blasted into a room by the arrival of the shock wave, they will not automatically start a sustained fire unless the room is stuffed full of non-fire resistant inflammable junk like one ENCORE nuclear test house in 1953. Stonier makes it clear on page 39 that his firestorm fantasy was based on the 1955 U.S. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization technical manual TM-9-2, The Fire Effects of Bombing Attacks, which stated:

“The effectiveness of fire as a weapon of war was demonstrated in World War II. Structural damage caused by fire accounted for 80% of the total damage to cities attacked by airborne weapons. The great fire attacks on the cities of Germany and Jpaan were scientifically planned ... Lessons learned from these attacks and from the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki should provide valuable guidance to planners ...”

Because the 6 volumes of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which explained the mechanism of the fires and gave survey data on the causes of the fires were classified secret until 1947, that 1955 manual omitted all of the relevant facts needed to evaluate the fire hazard from nuclear weapons! No lesson can be learned without the facts! Stonier was fooled into ignoring the fact that the inflammable fuel loading determined the intensity of the fires produced, although on page 42 he admitted that:

“The firestorm at Hamburg ... was even more intense and lasted longer than the one at Hiroshima.”

The firestorm at Hamburg developed in a congested area of 3-5 storey highly inflammable medieval wooden buildings. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had predominantly 2 storey wooden buildings due to the earthquake risk in Japan, so the lower fuel loading in Japan produced a less intense firestorm than at Hamburg (where the winds uprooted trees). In modern brick and concrete cities, the firestorm risk is extinguished due to insufficient fuel loading regardless of the number of ignition points (or matches used), but instead of recognising the trend, Stonier assumes that modern brick and concrete cities will burn like the multistorey medieval wooden crowded area of Hamburg. So he quotes a description of the Hamburg firestorm from the 1955 U.S. Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization technical manual TM-9-2, The Fire Effects of Bombing Attacks:

“The pillar of burning gases rose more than 2.5 miles high and was about 1.5 miles in diameter. The rapid rise of hot, burning gases caused an influx of new air at the base of the pillar. This onrush of air, or fire wind, reached gale-like proportions as it headed toward the fire centre. One and a half miles from the fire area of Hamburg this draft increased the wind from 11 to 33 miles per hour. At the edge of the fire area, velocities must have been appreciably greater, since trees 3 feet in diameter were uprooted.”

The Hiroshima firestorm due to a nuclear weapon was not dramatic enough, so Stonier used the non-nuclear firestorm at Hamburg, without grasping the lesson that the nuclear bomb failed to produce a bigger firestorm because Hiroshima had a smaller fuel loading per unit area than Hamburg, and that in modern cities which have no wooden houses there would be no firestorm risk! Even in Hiroshima where there was a firestorm, the probability of survival depended on the thermal flash protection and the type of building a person was in, not on the presence of the firestorm that developed slowly enough that most people in brick and concrete buildings were able to prevent ignition or evacuate in safety.

STONIER ON THE FALLOUT PROBLEM

Stonier gives an honest and generally accurate overview of the great success of civil defense countermeasures against fallout which were demonstrated at nuclear weapons tests and in experiments with nuclear reactor waste. The 40 acre White Oak Lake at Oak Ridge in Tennessee used as a liquid nuclear waste dump for fission products from the Manhattan Project in 1943 until the fall of 1955, when it was drained, producing a radioactive lake bed with dry soil containing 7,300 pCi/gram of Cs-137 and 360 pCi/gram of Sr-90 (ref.: S. I. Auerbach, pp. 340-2 in A. W. Klement, Jr., Radioactive Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, report TID-7632, 1962).

Generations of cotton rats (which receive a harmless total of 2.9 rads/week) were studied while living on that contaminated area from 1956-60, and it was found that 86% of their radiation dose was from external gamma radiation (mainly from long-lived Cs-137, Ru-106, and Co-60), 10% was from internal tissue contamination (mainly long-lived Sr-90 in the bones), and the remainder was from radionuclides during their passage through the gut (ref.: Paul B. Dunaway and Stephen V. Kay, "Effects of Ionizing Radiation on Mammal Populations on the White Oak Lake Bed", pp. 333-7 in Vincent Schultz and Alfred W. Klement, Editors, Proceedings of the First National Symposium on Radioecology, Reinhold, N.Y., 1963). This evidence suggests that the long-term radiation hazard in contaminated areas is dominated by the external gamma radiation, not the uptake from dietary contamination. However, in the short-term, iodine-131 is important (because of its 8-day half-life, iodine-131 was not present in the aged nuclear waste).

Stonier on page 66 summarizes the information on gamma radiation shielding by buildings from page 161 of the June 1959 Congressional Hearings on The Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War and page 473 of the 1962 edition of Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons.

These state that a wood-frame house gives a protection factor of 1.7, while lying down in a brick veneer house gives a protection factor of 6, the middle of an underground basement gives 25, and a core shelter (a table surrounded by and piled with furnishings or other shielding materials) substantially increases the total protection factor. Basements of multistorey buildings give much greater protective factors in the range 250-1,000. A foxhole shelter 3 feet in diameter and 4 feet deep gives a protection factor of 40 if fallout is kept out with a cloth or board, but there is no shielding above it. This is because 90% of the gamma dose outside is direct gamma rays from a massive area of fallout contaminated ground - a median distance of 15 metres on smooth ground - so most of the radiation is coming almost horizontally, and this is extremely attenuated by the long slant path it travels through the soil, into the foxhole. The 10% of the air scattered gamma rays or "skyshine" comes from all angles of sky, but this again is mostly from long distances, and hence it is from angles nearly horizonal, so the limited solid angle of overhead sky to which someone in a foxhole is exposed does substantially cut down the gamma dose from skyshine, as well as the direct radiation shielding.

On page 193, Stonier gives the estimate from p. 577 of Knapp's testimony to the March 1960 U.S. "Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Military Operations, Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Civil Defense", that the average outdoor protection factor due to shielding by irregularities in the ground increases from about 1.3 initially to 3 after a month and to 4 after two years, as the fallout is "weathered" into the ground which absorbs more of the radiation. On page 191, Stonier quotes P. E. Moreland's testimony at p. 563 in the same 1960 hearings which quotes some of the detailed secret calculations of the decay rate from fallout outdoors on a smooth surface in Philip J. Dolan's report Theoretical Dose Rate Decay Curves for Contamination Resulting from Land Surface Burst Nuclear Weapons (DASA-528, 1959, classified Secret-Restricted Data) as 2,750t-1.23 (r/hr)/(kt/sq mile) with an accuracy of plus or minus 25% up to 100 days.

Stonier points out on page 81:

"Ground water supplies ... would probably not become appreciably contaminated, because of sedimentation and natural filtration by soils and rock. Furthermore, the rate of movement of water in the ground is very slow, and the resulting 'hold up' time permits considerable decay of the radioactivity."


On page 195, he calculates the contamination hazard to water in a 3,000,000 gallon open reservoir 200 feet in diameter, with a surface area of nearly 3 acres. Assuming 10% of the fallout radioactivity is solubility in water (this is the surface contamination on silicate fallout particles, mainly composed of volatile fission products which only condense after the molten droplets of silicate have solidified into small, insoluble glassy marbles), he finds that a total fallout deposit at one hour after detonation of 640 MCi/square mile of beta activity from fission products will give 1 Ci/gallon of which 0.1 Ci/gallon is water soluble and doesn't settle out to the bottom of the reservoir. Using the 30-day emergency water contamination safety limit of 0.03 mCi/litre stated on page 535 of Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Stonier then finds that the soluble activity decays to the safe limit at 12 days after burst.

Stonier on pages 85-6 notes that 5 years after the 1954 Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, the remaining radioactivity in marine life was almost all due to neutron-capture isotopes of zinc, cobalt and manganese (which are rare in sea water and therefore concentrated in marine food chains), rather than fission products. On the islands, however, the long-term radioactivity was the fission products Cs-137 (90% of the activity in land plants) and Sr-90 (10% of the activity in land plants). Stonier states on p. 86: "This is an unusual situation and is due to the low potassium content of the Marshall Islands soil." But the fact that Sr-90 was only a minor hazard on the coral islands was due to the chemical nature of coral: it is calcium carbonate, and so the plants had an immense amount of calcium (which is chemically fairly similar to strontium) available, diluting the uptake of Sr-90. Since Cs-137 itself is chemically similar to potassium, researchers were later able to reduce the Cs-137 uptake by adding potassium-rich fertilizer to the soil, diluting the uptake of Cs-137 by plants. Taking potassium iodate tablets saturate the thyroid gland, blocking almost all I-131 uptake, works on the same dilution principle of "crowding out" the radionuclide, using a non-radioactive chemically similar element; researchers M. C. Bell and S. L. Bell experimentally found another simple countermeasure against I-131 in milk was simply to feed 2 grams of KI daily to the cattle themselves (this reduces the I-131 in milk by a factor of about 2 or 3 which less than the protection factor from taking personal KI tablets, but still gives a useful reduction of the hazard; see their paper Possible effects of nuclear power reactor accidents on agriculture, University of Tennessee Agriculture Experimental Station report RR 81-11, 1981). Stonier correctly notes that uranium and plutonium is poorly absorbed by food chains and animals.

He then summarizes the 1960 U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service Special Report 22-55, Radioactive Fallout in Time of Emergency: Effects upon Agriculture. This recommends diluting and thus blocking much of the high Sr-90 uptake rates in acidic soils (more acidic than pH 6.5) by applying calcium (chemically similar to strontium) in the form of lime (calcium carbonate, CaCO3, e.g. chalk, limestone, or coral) or gypsium (hydrated calcium sulphate, CaSO4·2H2O). Obviously if the soil is already well-limed this is unnecessary since the Sr-90 uptake rate will be diluted anyway. Alternatively, foods with low calcium content and thus low strontium concentrations can be grown, like potatoes which contain only 10 mg of calcium per 100 calories, unlike leaf crops which contain far more calcium and thus strontium. Another option is that the highly contaminated land can be used for breeding animals, since Sr-90 will concentrate in the inedible bones tissue of animals, not the meat. A later publication by the U.S. Agricultural Research Service is their 1962 Agriculture Handbook 234, Protection of Food and Agriculture Against Nuclear Attack which on p. 12 states that wooden single-storey barns give gamma protection factors of 2, while 2-storey wooden barns with lofts full of hay give a protection factor of 5; moving animals into barns and on to winter feed gives much greater additional protection because it avoids the fallout contact hazard of beta ray doses from skin contamination and the gut exposure to beta radiation from ingested contaminated grass. Page 15 states that 1-5% of the Sr-90 in the soil is removed by each crop cycle; the higher figure applying to sandy, silicate soils which do not chemically bind Sr-90. Farmland and also grassland which is not used for agriculture can have the gamma dose rate reduced by deep plowing to bury the Cs-137, shielding the radiation. On p. 26 it gives data proving that the soil uptake (not fresh fallout particle contamination) of seeds like wheat and corn is trivial compared to the uptake by the leaves of those plants, suggesting the growing of seed crops in highly contaminated areas instead of leaf or stem crops:

"For example, in wheat grown on artificially contaminated soil, the leaves showed 11,422 distintegrations from strontium 90 per second per gram, compared with 638 in the grain. And most of this was in the bran. In corn, the difference was even more striking. About 4,683 counts were observed in the leaves and only 18 in the grain. The same story held true for cesium 137."


Page 18 deals with I-131:

"Available information indicates that from 5-10% of the daily intake of iodine-131 is secreted in milk of dairy cows. ... Milk produced from pastures that received fallout equivalent to a radiation level of 30 roentgens per hour, or higher, 1 hour after a nuclear bomb explosion should not be used immediately for consumption by infants. ... the dairy farmer can confine lacitating animals to the barn before the appearance of fallout in the area and provide forage and feed that had been harvested before the detonation or stored for 2 months after exposure to fallout. Freshly contaminated forage can be fed to non-lacitating stock. ... Freezing of packaged milk for storage before delivery would be one way of handling the problem. ... During the period when fresh milk supplies were not available, reconstituted dry milk or canned milk could be safely used. ... There should be no destruction of milk contaminated with iodine-131, since it can be processed into products such as butter, cheese, powdered milk, and canned milk, and stored for a period of time to allow the [radioactive] decay to take place. If processing facilities are not available locally, or are not adequate to handle all the milk involved, the contaminated milk can be fed to pigs or calves."


Stonier's false claim that insect carried plagues will be enhanced by gamma radiation killing off insect predators (he ignored beta irradiation of insects)

Dr Stonier's chapter 9, "Pestilence and Plague: The Threat of Epidemics" and the remainder of the book is contrived and deceptive, citing in his bibliography - but ignoring in his text - documentary evidence from nuclear test ecological recovery at Eniwetok Atoll near two megaton yield tests which contradicts his case that the insects will inherit the Earth. He entirely ignores the plague of 1348-50 which killed a third of the population in Western Europe as an example of the human recovery potential after a huge disaster (see Jack Hirshleifer, Disaster and Recovery: The Black Death in Western Europe, RAND Corporation report RM4700, 1966, online PDF linked here). Like his ability to ignore the lack of firestorms in modern London buildings and the limited firestorm intensity even in the wooden two-storey buildings of Hiroshima, and to misrepresent the Hamburg firestorm in 3-5 storey medieval wooden overcrowded buildings as illustrative of the threat to modern concrete, steel and brick cities, Stonier misrepresents plague risks.

He delves back selectively through the history of epidemics to find examples that tend to support his thesis (simply ignoring all evidence to the contrary) such as tularemia (a virulent bacterial infection transmitted by tick bites, skin contact, inhalation and ingestion, which concentrating in the lymph nodes, causing weakness and fever but not usually death) outbreak of 1941 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, where 37,000 people were infected. This outbreak resulted from the wartime conscription, which left the crops unharvested in the fields, allowing field mice to proliferate, spreading tularemia through their droppings and ticks on the hay and grain stored in barns, which were used by soldiers for sleeping quarters.

Stonier then studies the second bubonic plague outbreak that began on 14 August 1907 in San Francisco, infecting 167 people of which 89 died, over a year after the city was devastated by the great earthquake and fire of 18 April 1906. This plague was spread by fleas living on rats breeding in the insanitary conditions of the wrecked city, which still lacked functioning sewage disposal systems.

Stonier moves on to the more deadly pneumonic plague which broke out in Oakland, California, 1919, when a hunter infected by flea bites from the fur of a groundhog spread plague, infecting 14 cases of which 13 proved fatal. Stonier then discusses the similar mechanism for the larger-scale pneumonic plague outbreak amongst fur-trappers in Manchouli, Manchuria, 1910-11. That plague killed 60,000 because it was spread first in crowded underground inns in Manchouli, and later (as cases appeared) these infected people panicked and fled on the Chinese Eastern Railway to numerous towns throughout the whole country.

On page 131 Stonier attempts to glue these historical plague examples to the aftermath of nuclear warfare, by claiming that the birds and mammal predators for insect disease vectors will be killed off by 1,000 roentgens of gamma radiation exposure, whereas adult insects will survive 100,000 roentgens and can reproduce at doses of up to 5,000 roentgens. He points out that conifers like pine trees are about as vulnerable as mammals (spruce seeds are killed by 1,000 roentgens, he states on p. 143), but in general plants can withstand 5,000 roentgens of gamma radiation, while mustard seeds can "absorb 92,000 roentgens and still produce viable plants" (Stonier, p. 131). On page 132 Stonier points out that 13 out of 15 flora species were injured or killed over five years by fallout radiation at the world's most highly contaminated fallout location, Gegen Islet at the northern edge of Rongelap Atoll, giving the island a grey rather than green colour as seen from aircraft five years later. Gegen Islet was the downwind fallout hotspot location 100 miles downwind of the 15 Mt Bravo test, giving a 3,000 rads gamma dose within 48 hours, and thousands more at a slower rate, later on. Moving southward in Rongelap Atoll, the radiation doses were smaller, and the damage less. At Kabelle Island, for instance, only 3 species of flora were killed, including the mangroves, and at Eniwetok Islet in Rongerik Atoll (further downwind) only 2 species of flora were affected by fallout. (References: F. R. Fosberg, "Plants and Fall-out", Nature, v. 183, 1959, p. 1448, and Robert A. Conard, Brookhaven National Laboratory report BNL-609, 1961, pp. 85-6.)

Stonier believed that radiation kills off most birds and animals that normally keep eat insects, thus allowing plagues of relatively radiation-resistant insects to breed on the surviving vegetation and spread diseases to surviving humans: "The result: insect plagues. Associated with the spread of insects would be the spread of certain insect-borne diseases." This was based on ecological studies by G. M. Woodwell at Brookhaven National Laboratory, who exposed an oak and pine forest on Long Island, New York, to gamma radiation from cesium-137 (G. M. Woodwell, "Effects of Ionizing Radiation on Terrestrial Ecosystems", Science, v. 138, 1962, pp. 572-7). Stonier observes on p. 135 that "where the oaks received 5 roentgens per day, the defoliation by insects was about five times as great as that observed in control areas." This cesium-137 gamma exposure has no relevance to the overall effects of radioactive fallout, since it ignores the effects of beta radiation (which is easily stopped by tree bark) upon insects.

Stonier cites in his bibliography, but chooses to ignore completely in his text (without explanation) the rapid recovery and lack of insect plagues on Bogombogo Island (codenamed "Belle Island" by America) at the North-West of Eniwetok Atoll in the North Pacific, which was selected for detailed ecological studies following two high yield nuclear weapons tests: Dr Ralph F. Palumbo, Radioactivity and Recovery of the Land Plants at Eniwetok Atoll, 1954-1957, University of Washington report UWFL-66, July 1960 (PDF linked here), see the recovery photos linked here. Bogombogo/Belle Island was 2.55 statute miles (4.10 km) from the centre of Elugelab Island, ground zero of the 10.4 megatons IVY-MIKE thermonuclear weapon test of November 1, 1952, and the 1.69 megatons 80% fission CASTLE-NECTAR test was detonated at the same spot on a barge over the IVY-MIKE crater on May 14, 1954. It received heavy blast and thermal damage, water wave flooding, and fallout radiation including extensive beta and gamma irradiation of plants (gamma of over 850 R/hr at 2 hours after IVY-MIKE according to page 34 of of report WT-615, which - from the mean fallout arrival time and peak dose rate time measured under the cloud - suggests an infinite dose of over 8,000 R, and then another 400 R to 6 months after CASTLE-NECTAR and beta doses near contaminated surfaces are about ten times larger, see Stonier p. 143). Dr Palumbo states in his article "Recovery of the Land Plants at Eniwetok Atoll Following a Nuclear Detonation" (Radiation Botany, vol. 1, 1962, pp. 182-9):

"The Mike detonation of 1952 had removed most of the plants and top soil from Belle Island, resulting in the depletion of some of the elements essential for plant growth. In spite of these deficiencies regrowth of the plants at Belle Island was rapid. ... A photograph of Belle Island taken [on May 22, 1954] eight days following the Nectar detonation shows the extent of the damage sustained by the plants. From the air the island looked brown and desolate. On closer inspection it was found that most of the plants had been scorched by the heat wave and many of them had been blown over or broken by the blast. ... Recovery of the plants was rapid. ... On the eighth day green buds, 1-3 mm in length, were observed on the stems of Scaevola and Messerschmidia plants. On the thirty-fifth day the shoot leaves were 7-15 cm long, covering much of the old stems and giving the plants a green and healthy appearance. By this time many of the other plants had formed new leaves and three species (Portulaca, Triumfetta, and Messerschmidia) had produced new flowers and fruits. The island now had lost its scorched appearance; from the air it looked green rather than brown as it had one month earlier.

"In August, three months after the detonation, the plants were growing well and some species, such as Boerhaavia, had produced new flowers. The leaves of most of the species had grown to maximum size, and the branches had grown almost to the pre-Nectar dimensions."


Stonier fails to mention these Eniwetok Atoll studies on an island 2.55 miles from two large thermonuclear tests. Instead, he discusses the example of islands in Rongelap Atoll, 100-115 miles downwind from the 1954 BRAVO nuclear test. Rongelap received a wide spread of gamma radiation doses, ranging from 3000 rads over the first 48 hours in the north (near the "hot line" of the fallout pattern) down to 175 rads on the main island in the inhabited south of the atoll. Insects could travel throughout the atoll, so insects surviving in the south could repopulate the northern islands.

Stonier completely failed to take into account the fact that beta radiation, which is stopped by the skin of animals and the feathers of birds, can irradiate the entire bodies of small disease-vector insects. This beta radiation fact negates all of his arguments about insects surviving gamma radiation better than their predators:

"Three practical considerations were found to merit attention in the evaluation of the impact of fallout radiation on the terrestrial insects and associated invertebrates. Firstly, the relatively low dose levels that will affect developmental stages as compared to adult stages; secondly, the lower doses required to produce late mortality as compared to those required for early deaths; and thirdly, the relatively low doses that will cause sterility. The calculated potential beta doses indicated that the dose level expected to sterilize a large majority of the organisms considered in this study would be found in areas bounded approximately by the 50 R/hr at 1 hr gamma contour (4,600 beta rads accumulated in about 5 days) for a 1 MT burst, by the 100 R/hr at 1 hr gamma contour (5200 beta rads in about 5 days) for a 10 MT burst and by the 100 R/hr at 1 hr contour (5200 beta rads in about 14 days) for a 100 MT burst."

- Joseph D. Teresi and Curtis L. Newcombe, An Estimate of the Effects of Fallout Beta Radiation on Insects and Associated Invertebrates, AD0633024, 1966.


Citing the report by E. S. Stone et al., "Genetic Studies of Irradiated Natural Populations of Drosophila [fruit flies]" (published in Studies in the Genetics of Drosophila, University of Texas Publication 5721, 1957), Stonier states on p. 132:

"Studies of natural populations of fruit flies were made on Rongelap Atoll ... it was found that these insects readily survived the heavy fallout ... the fly population recovered rapidly. On Rongelap the fruit fly population had a lowered rate of egg development in August 1955 (about a year and a half after the Bravo shot), but by August 1956 this effect was no longer apparent. On Bikini itself, on the other hand, the fruit fly population sampled at that time still showed a lowered rate of egg development, although it did not seem to be a serious handicap to the overall population."


This is wrong because the insect populations in the heavily contaminated islands were not surviving high radiation doses, but were simply being repopulated by insects which survived low radiation doses on islands further to the south in each atoll. In other words, these were not controlled populations. Nobody tagged individual fruit flies: flies killed by beta radiation on the heavily contaminated northern islands were simply replaced by flies moving in later from less contaminated areas, once the intense fallout radiation levels had decayed. In the kind of all-out nuclear war Stonier was analyzing, with the whole land area carpeted with fallout, there would be no areas of surviving insects in slightly contaminated areas to repopulate the highly contaminated areas once the intense radiation had decayed.

Having used data from Bikini and Rongelap atolls where insects surviving in areas of low contamination later spread to repopulate more severely contaminated areas when the intense radiation levels decayed, Stonier reverses this and again ignores the beta radiation effects on insects in his concluding papagraph to Chapter 11, Ecological Upsets: Plants, Insects and Animals on page 144:

"Mushrooming insect populations are likely to spread from the radiation-damaged areas in which they arose, and, like the locusts of biblical times, wreck havoc in previously undamaged areas. Accompanying the insect plagues would be the plant diseases transmitted by insects, particularly those diseases which attack plants that have been injured or weakened by insect or radiation damage. The combined assault of radiation, insects, disease and fire could temporarily strip off the plant cover ... leaving a naked earth to be ravaged by the ever-present forces of erosion."


This is complete fantasy, as we have shown, because Stonier ignored beta radiation effects on insects! In his testimony to the U.S. Congressional Hearings of Subcommittee on Armed Services, Civil Defense Hearings, 1963 page 4938, Stonier stated that the insects would inherit the Earth: "one can envision an assault on the plant cover which would make the locust plagues of Biblical times look like tea parties." (Quoted by Robert U. Ayres, Environmental Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Hudson Institute report HI-518-RR, 1965, volume 1, p. vi.)

Stonier predicts a nuclear winter which may lead to an ice age

In chapter 12, Ecological Upsets: Climate and Erosion, Stonier predicts that a nuclear war will produce a nuclear winter which may trigger a new ice age. This was generally ignored for twenty years until restated with some downward revision of effects but with similarly false targetting assumptions plus expensive media hype by the public relations company TAPPS used in 1983 to attract the media to attend their lavish "Conference on the Long—Term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War", in Washington, D.C. The editor of Nature, Dr John Maddox, in his editorial in 1983 (vol. 312, p. 593) called the ‘nuclear winter’ scandal from TAPPS ‘hype’ because they got publicity by means of handing over $50,000 to a public relations company (the funding came from the Kendall Foundation). This is how political pseudo-science is marketed via media hype, caveat emptor! Lacking this P.R. funding, Stonier went unheard twenty years earlier.

When the buildings of Hiroshima burned, and when forests burn, moisture is carried up in the atmosphere along with the soot. When the column of dusty, hot, humid air reaches cold air at high altitudes, the moisture condenses on to the soot, and you get black rain out. This occurred at Hiroshima: it wasn't contaminated with significant radioactivity because the firestorm only began 30 minutes after the explosion, by which time the airborne radioactive mushroom cloud had been blown many miles downwind from the firestorm area. So there was no nuclear winter at Hiroshima, nor did the ignition of 700 Kuwaiti oil fields by Saddam Hussein's army in 1991:

"At the peak of the [700 Kuwaiti oil field] fires, the smoke absorbed 75 to 80% of the sun’s radiation. The particles were never observed to rise above 6 km and when combined with scavenging by clouds gave the smoke a short residency time in the atmosphere and localized its effects." - Wikipedia article on Nuclear Winter


But the fundamental reason why nuclear winter is a complete hoax is the subtle, sophisticated technical problem that brick and concrete just doesn't burn like wood, which is why 57 consecutive nights of all-out Nazi incendiary Blitzing spectacularly failed to turn London into the firestorm like the wooden medieval area of Hamburg, as documented by George R. Stanbury who was in charge of the British government's firestorm countermeasures during World War II and the Cold War. He 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.") So there is no basis for firestorms and massive atmospheric soot injections, purely from the fact that the medieval wooden cities of Hamburg and Hiroshima have been replaced with modern brick, concrete and steel construction.

Stonier's nuclear winter chapter on page 146 quotes Colonel Lunger describing the dust in the atmosphere after the 10 Mt Mike surface burst on Elugelab Island at Eniwetok Atoll in 1952. Lunger stated on p. 839 the June 1959 Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War that Mike caused:

"an amber glow along the entire horizon. It was the most artificial thing I have ever sensed in my life. We had displaced many millions of tons of coral debris [actually only about 1 million tons, since the mass of lofted fallout was 0.1 megaton per megaton of TNT yield as testified correctly by Dr Alvin C. Graves to the June 1957 Congressional Hearings on The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man] that had been lifted up to forty and fifty thousand feet ..."


Stonier then states on p. 147 that this was similar of volcanic eruption dust like that from Krakatoa in 1883, and states that sunlight intensity measurements showed almost a 10% reduction in sunlight for 3 years after Krakatoa, contributing to the 1 °F global temperature fall in 1884. He adds that volcanic eruption of Tomboro in Indonesia from 7-12 April 1815 caused darkness for 3 days at a distance of 300 miles downwind, and prevented a summer in 1816.

Problems begin when he tries to extrapolate from the massive crater sizes on Pacific atolls of coral to nuclear surface bursts dry soil, which produced immense exaggerations until about 1991, which we have already documented in a earlier post. After the nuclear winter idea was hyped by TTAPS in 1983, Dr Edward Teller had incredible difficulties in declassifying the data on the amount of dust lofted into the atmosphere from a few 1950s nuclear craters. The amount of lofted material was very well known because the specific activity (fissions per gram of mass) of fallout samples taken from all the atmospheric nuclear tests were available, but it was kept secret. This number is also important for civil defence, because it shows the visibility of the fallout deposit that corresponds to any given amount of radioactivity deposited after a surface burst. The mass of crater material lofted is typically 100 metric tons per kiloton, around 1% of the crater volume, and most of it is large particles which settle out within hours to days after detonation.

Stonier, after exaggerating massively the dust lofted, notes on p. 149 that 67% of 2-micron diameter fallout particles are deposited from the stratosphere within 18 months, when there would still be enough dust present to reduce solar radiation by 20%, causing a 7 °F temperature drop ober North America which would shift the wheat growing belt 500 miles south:

"one can readily envisage the mechanism proposed by W. J. Humphreys [Physics of the Air, 2nd ed., McGraw-Hill, N.Y., 1929; 3rd ed., 1940], whereby the land surfaces heat up barely at all throughout most of the year, while water surfaces near the Arctic tend to freeze up more and more each winter. If a sufficiently large part of the North Atlantic were to freeze over to deflect the Gulf Stream, then Europe would freeze over completely. (England is as far north as Labrador, but the west winds picking up heat from the Gulf Stream keep the continent warm.) ... If the detonation of a large number of surface bursts should lead to an ice age, then the distortion of nature would last for millennia."


This is not possible using nuclear weapons, for the reasons already stated. Silicate or coral surface burst fallout particles mainly scatter light, with minimal absorption. Soot is needed for strong absorption of light. There is not enough soot produced in nuclear detonations over any of the possible targets to produce a nuclear winter, let alone an ice age.

TAPPS 1990 OIL REFINERY TARGETTING ASSUMPTION OF CONVENIENCE

President Reagan in 1982 was talking about civil defense for bolstering U. S. deterrence of 40,000 Soviet main battle tanks (ready to invade the West, take over the resources, and thus shore up the impending economic implosion of communism for another few decades), and that “survival talk” was what led Dr Carl Sagan and others to suggest everyone would be frozen by a nuclear winter in 1983. Then the fake “better red than dead” assumptions of the 1983 calculations were revealed. In 1985, Dr R. D. Small and Dr B. W. Bush of Pacific-Sierra Research Corp assessed the smoke from 4,100 megatons distributed as 2 warheads per target on 3,459 counter-force targets in forests and grassland areas (Science, v229, p465). They found the smoke output was 300,000 tons for a January attack and 3,000,000 tons for an August attack. These figures are 100-1,000 times lower than the guesses made by the “nuclear winter” hype of 1982-3, because the smoke is only 3% of the mass of vegetation burned (the rest is CO2 gas and cinders): “The amount varies seasonally and at its peak is less by an order of magnitude than the estimated threshold level necessary for a major attenuation of solar radiation.”

One of the original errors was overestimating the soot production by fire. The fraction of the mass burned that becomes smoke is only 1% for wood, 3% for vegetation, 6% for oil and 8% for plastic. So after some negative publicity about the “errors” in the “nuclear winter” hype, TTAPS (Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack and Sagan) public relations experts in 1990 (Science, v247, p166) changed their targeting assumptions to make use of the figure of 6% soot emission by burning oil, by now assuming that 50% of primary petroleum stocks would be targets. I.e., they assumed that in a nuclear war, both sides would deliberately use nuclear weapons to create as much soot as possible by targeting oil refineries. This allowed them to go on with the hype. They simply ignored the lesson of Hiroshima, that firestorm soot is hydroscopic, absorbs moisture from the air, condenses in the cool air at high altitude, and falls back as rain within a few hours. But then, they ignored all of the civil defense lessons from Hiroshima, so why not also ignore the fate of the soot from fires after a nuclear explosion over an inflammable wood built city? They certainly were consistent in ignoring all of the effects of nuclear explosions in their political spin.

The basic equation for the fraction of sunlight absorbed during x metres of passage through a soot cloud containing s grams of soot per cubic metre is e-7xs. However, smoke is rapidly dispersed and removed by the atmospheric weather systems, wind and rain, as occurred at Hiroshima.

History of Cold War Civil Defence



Above: flowchart of American civil defense from 1950 to the emergence of FEMA in 1979. (From The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Plan for Revitalizing U.S. Civil Defense, U.S. General Accounting Office, report GAO/NSIAD-84-11, 1984.)

In Britain, civil defence was well established during World War II but was closed down until 1948 when the Berlin crisis (the Soviet Union blocked off Berlin’s food supplies, trying to starve it into submission) and a secret British report warning of Russian nuclear weapons development, prompted a revival. In America, civil defence was revived with the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 after the detection of fallout from the first Russian nuclear test on 29 August 1949, and was stepped up during the Soviet backed Korean War of 1950-3 (see graph below). On 8 August 1953, fallout the first Russian thermonuclear weapon (a large single stage fission weapon with fusion boosting from a layer of lithium deuteride around the fissile core) was detected, increasing concern and civil defence research. In March 1954, fallout from a 15 megaton American two-stage thermonuclear surface burst, Bravo, caused fallout contact beta radiation burns to unclothed, unwashed skin areas of Marshallese and the crew of a Japanese tuna trawler over 100 miles downwind, demonstrating some of the dangers from fallout.



On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, which demonstrated that it was ahead of America in the space race, and that it had efficient rocket technology suitable for missiles carrying payloads the size of nuclear weapons. Missiles are supersonic and travel too faster to be intercepted by the fighter aircraft that are used to shoot down bombers, so this development increased the influence of the Soviet Union. (Richard Nixon, in a famous filmed debate with Soviet Premier Krushchev after the Sputnik episode, argued that although the Soviet Union was ahead of America in rocket thrust, all was well because America was ahead of the Soviet Union in the development of colour television.) The aggressive, expanding dictatorship then in 1961 built a wall across Berlin to prevent people fleeing communism, callously shooting people who tried and leaving them to bleed to death, and in October 1962 tried to support Fidel Castro’s communist dictatorship by shipping Cuba 42 intermediate range missiles with megaton thermonuclear warheads that could reach America with little warning time, unlike missiles launched from the Soviet Union. It was later disclosed that short range air defense tactical nuclear weapons had also been shipped to Cuba.

As a result of the Berlin crisis of 1961, President Kennedy asked Congress for an additional $208 million for civil defence on top of the existing $87 million budget for 1962, which was granted, and he published an enthusiastic letter about civil defence in Life on 15 September 1961. This civil defence money was used to identify, signpost and stock (with food, water and radiation meters), the useful sheltering spaces in the basement of existing public buildings.

Kennedy's 1961 American civil defense response to Khrushchev's Berlin crisis was taken directly from the suggestion of Herman Kahn in his testimony to the U.S. Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, 22-26 June 1959, The Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, pp. 882-922, where on p. 913 Kahn called for $100 million of radiation meters (Kahn called for 2 million dose rate meters and 10 million self-reading dosimeters with chargers) and a $150 million utilization of existing structures for fallout protection (identifying, labelling and stocking the basements of public buildings as fallout shelters). Kahn first analyzed this in RAND Corporation reports like RM-2206-RC and P-1888. Kahn pointed out on p. 888 that although the Soviet went into the war in 1939 hand-in-hand with the Nazis by jointly invading Poland (the Nazis invaded Poland from the West; the communists from the East), they had to fight the Nazis when attacked later on and suffered huge losses:

"The Russians lost something like 10 percent of their population, and, they claim, about one-third of their wealth, in World War II."


On page 889, Kahn explains that in addition to this experience in recovery, Russia has more dispersed industry and population so it is less vulnerable than America, and there is in effect a "civil defense gap" between the two countries, undermining stability:

"... the [deterrent balance] situation may not be symmetrical. It is conceivable that there are circumstances in which the Russians could strike the United States and accept our retaliatory blow, when we would not be willing to strike them and accept their retalitatory blow. This has to do partly with the intrinsic vulnerabilities of the two countries. As you know, we are a much more concentrated country that the Russians. But mainly it has to do with their attitude toward war and the seriousness with which they pursue preparations. The Russians, for example, have a very large civil defense program. ... if you look at the Russian manuals, you will notice an enormous increase in understanding, ability, and capability in the last few years. ... the Russians in 1954 and 1955 had a great debate on the theory of the 'minimum deterrent'. Malenkov [Soviet Premier, 1953-55] said, 'And therefore we lucky Russians don't have to have such a large force as we used to have, because if it really is annihilation, nobody will start a war, and we can afford to get away with a much cheaper strategic force. We can start concentrating on consumer goods.'

"He was forced to retract publicly on that argument. Khrushchev [his successor] argued that wars weren't that bad and that the Soviets had to be prepared to fight and win wars in addition to being able to deter them. This was one of the major debates that they seem to have had and Khrushchev seems to be the official winner. As a result the Soviets have gone for a capability to win wars rather than to deter wars. This is a deliberate choice on their part which involves them in great expense."


This is the reason for the Soviet civil defense program, which Kahn on pages 890-1 contrasts with American exaggerations of nuclear war and dismissals of civil defense as irrelevant in the nuclear age:

"As far as I know, Frank Shelton was the first Government official to make the flat statement [in testimony to these 22-26 June 1959 hearings] that the next war would not destroy all human beings, worldwide. ... There was a recent debate in the New Leader magazine between Bertrand Russell and Sidney Hook on 'Was it legitimate, or was it not, to risk killing all human beings in the world in the attempt to resist communism?' This was a serious debate. Nobody raised the question, that the debate was about a hypothetical subject which was not at issue."


On page 892, Kahn explained that civil defense was needed in America as an insurance not just against an imaginary all-out war, but against the real and present thuggery of the Soviet Union in testing the resolve of the West by a series of Munich-style, Nazi like invasions and evil (Berlin starvation attempt 1948, Hungary tank suppression 1956, Berlin wall 1961, Cuban missiles 1962, tank suppression of the Prague Spring 1968, etc.):

"Let me give you an example. In 1956, there was a revolution in Hungary which the Russians suppressed. There was at that time much pressure on the United States to intervene in that revolution to support the Hungarians. I myself felt rather strongly we should do something. ... There are reasons for worrying about a satellite revolt spreading and, if we had intervened, it is quite clear that there would very likely have been a widespread satellite revolt. Particularly if the Russians did nothing ... After all, some of the satellites revolted without any American intervention. ... the Russians are greatly concerned with internal stability. ... They worry about internal revolution in Russia more than we do. ...

"They would, I think, be under pressure to fight if we intervened in Hungary. If the fight was on a high explosive basis, I think we would lose. If the fight was on an atomic basis, I think we would probably still lose, but now there would also be side effects. [Fallout and a risk of escalation in nuclear war under certain circumstances.] ... I mean that if they can evacuate their civilians to places of safety, radiological safety; then we can't kill very many ... There are less than 50 million people in the largest 135 Russian cities. As far as we can tell, it is perfectly possible to evacuate 80 percent of this urban population and have all vital functions in the cities performed. This would leave only 10 million people at risk in 135 cities. Having been alerted, these could evacuate on short notice. ... Even if it did not kill many people such an attack would cause a lot of economic damage in Russia. But the Russians claim to have lost one-third of their wealth in World War II, and they recovered from it. In fact, they recovered by 1951. ...

"In other words, the Russians know that it can pay to accept large amounts of damage [they gained Eastern Europe as a result], rather than surrender, because they have actually gone through the experience. And while that is a very hard way to learn, it is also a very convincing way to learn by having actual experience. This doesn't mean they would be glad to repeat the experience - only that they may be willing to under less pressure than we would be willing to."


Kahn adds on page 897 that the increase due to radiation in a nuclear war (on natural birth defects and natural cancer deaths) is small:

"The point of this story [an ignorant person claiming that without radiation there would be a utopia] is that peace also has its tragedies. ... While some women have a great concern about such possibilities during their pregnancy, it is only in such critical periods or when there is a tragedy in the immediate family that most people think about the burden of life. ... war is horrible ... But so is peace. To some extent the horrors of war are only an increase or intensification of some of the familiar horrors of peace and if you present a government with a sufficiently unpleasant peacetime situation it may decide that it prefers to go to war and accept the postwar world to living or temporizing with the peacetime problem."


Those 22-26 June 1959 hearings included a discussion of the fallout from 170 megatons of 1950s nuclear testing, which included 92 megatons of fission yield (the rest was fusion), and it gives computer predicted casualties (based on scaled up gross survival Hiroshima data, which is an exaggeration as we have seen due to the types of buildings, population distribution and the total lack of flash-blast nuclea effects knowledge in Hiroshima in 1945) for a nuclear war of 3,950 megatons of 50% fission yield, including 1,446 megatons detonating on America via 263 bombs of 1-10 megatons yield landing on 224 targets (these statistics are from pages 1 and 12 of the hearings). The predictions were severe damage (unrepairable) of 11.8 million housing units which was 25% of the total number in America (page 52 of the hearings), with 13% of the total American population killed on the 1st day and another 15% fatally injured and dying from radiation and other effects within 60 days (page 847). Page 857 of the hearings states that the basic survival curves used by the computer program were from Japan and nuclear tests. Even despite this exaggeration and ignoring civil defense, there were more survivors than fatalities. This is why the facts of unburnable brick and concrete in modern cities - as opposed to Hiroshima - is ignored and people like Postol and Eden are still claiming that a Hamburg-style intense firestorms in multistorey medieval wooden buildings now long since gone, could occur in a nuclear war, exaggerating casualties further. Another example, connected with the firstorm myth, is that firestorm soot would cause a "nuclear winter". The 22-26 June 1959 hearings include this at page 839 in the arm-waving testimony from John Wolfe: "The sun will shine through a dust-laden atmosphere ... blizzards and subzero temperatures would add death and discomfort; both food and shelter would be inadequate and production incapacitated." This led to Chairman Holifield enthusing over the Wolfe's nuclear winter, leading to a false claim on the same page from Colonel Lunger that the 10 megaton 1952 Mike test had lifted "... many millions of tons of coral debris ... to forty and fifty thousand feet ..." This contradicts testimony at the June 1957 fallout hearings, by testing director Dr Alvin C. Graves, who stated that the mass of lofted fallout (based on Redwing fallout specific activity) is about 0.1 megaton of debris per megaton of yield, i.e. about 1 million tons for the 10 megatons Mike test. In any case, the vast majority of the fallout descends quickly due to gravity, and so cannot cause a nuclear winter. The mass of vaporized micron sized debris is trivial in either air bursts or surface bursts.

Herman Kahn made the point on page 945 that preparations for the evacuation of cities in civil defense has nothing to do with the speed of a missile, having secret agents in Moscow, or preparing for a war; it is a bargaining chip in a crisis in case the enemy evacuates its cities in order to reduce your weapons's countervalue effectiveness, exerting leverage upon you to surrender to communism):

"In other words, imagine yourself going into a Munich-type conference where the Russians had evacuated their cities and you had not. They may even have done it slowly, say over a period of a week, and now you have to bargain with them, and they are evacuated and you are not. You are going to have some very tough bargaining to do."


In his 1984 book Weapons and Hope, Professor Freeman Dyson recalled a conversation with Herman Kahn on the topic of civil defense. Kahn was worried that the Soviet Union was preparing for World War III, and Dyson said "you are paranoid". Kahn replied: "Didn't you know that?," adding that you had to be paranoid in the 1930s to believe Hitler would kill the Jews, and you had to be paranoid in 1941 to believe that the Japanese would launch a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Chamberlain and basically the whole of England believed that Churchill was paranoid about the Nazis until it was too late to avert a world war. Sometimes it is the mainstream of opinion is living in fairy land, not the person labelled paranoid.

The failure of Britain to deter the Nazis from invasions in the 1930s was not the failure of "minimal deterrence". In the 1959 hearings, his January 1959 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article "How many can be saved?", and his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, Kahn makes it clear that there are three types of deterrence:

(1) deterring a direct attack on yourself (threat of retaliation needed),
(2) deterring the invasion of other countries (threat of first strike needed), and
(3) deterring internal activities in the enemy country (e.g., ethnic extermination).

Hitler did declare war on Britain first; he did not make a direct attack on Britain. He instead invaded other countries. World War II was therefore, Kahn explains, the failure of retaliation-type deterrence. Instead, World War II was the failure of Britain to deter Hitler from invading other countries and terrorizing the Jews. This is a vital distinction to Kahn, and it is essential to understanding the political point of civil defense as a leverage in Munich-style crises.

You can stop a direct attack on yourself by retaliating after you are hit, provided enough of your arms are hidden at sea in submarines or in hardened silos that can resist the enemy first strike. This is called a second-strike capability. Kahn explains that this was not enough for Britain in the 1930s: the whole problem then was that the Nazis were invading countries and terrorizing Jews in them, not fighting Britain. Britain's pacifist 1930s second-strike capability proved of no use in deterring the Nazis from the invasion of other countries and ethnic cleansing.

In order to have a first-strike capability, you need civil defense! It is only by being able to survive the retaliation of the enemy that you can credibly threaten and thus deter provocative actions by Nazi like thugs. Simply having a protected second-strike capability was not enough to coerce the Nazis at Munich or in the many other crises. To summarize Kahn's distinction:

Second-strike capability: you see a thug kicking a child and say to the thug: "If you do that to me, I'll kill you!" Result: the thug continues kicking the child, but (if your promise was credible) leaves you alone.

First-strike capability: you see a thug kicking a child and say to the thug: "If you don't stop now, I'll kill you!" Result: progress (if your promise was credible).

The only way to turn a pacifist deterrent second-strike capability into the "active deterrence" of a first-strike capability, is to have civil defense that makes you look credible. If you can are ready for war and prepared to dodge some of the thugs kicks, you become harder to knock down, and your promise is far, far more credible. Kahn pointed out in the 1959 hearings that if America did not have any civil defense, it did not have a first-strike capability and therefore would be unable to deter the Soviet invasion of Western Europe once the Soviet Union achieved nuclear missile parity with America in the 1960s and 1970s. Kahn feared that America's first strike-capability would disappear without civil defense to make promises credible, leaving America unable to deter anything but a direct attack, and thus encouraging the Soviet Union to use a series of invasions and Munich-style crises to spread (1959 hearings, page 883):

"The most important reason for being quantitative is because one may, in fact, be able to calculate what is happening. ...

"This is of some real interest; before World War II, for example, many of the staffs engaged in estimating the effects of bombing over-estimated by large amounts. This was one of the main reasons that at the Munich Conference and earlier occasions the British and the French chose appeasement to standing firm or fighting. Incidentally, these staff calculations were more lurid than the worst imaginations of fiction."


On page 943, Kahn explained that the same problem continued in the nuclear age:

"Many people object to air and civil defense, not because they underestimate the problem, but because they overestimate it. They think there is nothing significant that can be done to alleviate the consequences of a war."


The next civil defence episode was inspired by research led by civil defence enthusiast Eugene P. Wigner, the designer of the first large scale plutonium production reactors of the Manhattan Project, and a pioneer in the application of the mathematics of group symmetries to particle physics. Wigner, a Hungarian, was appalled by the brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against communism by Soviet tanks, seeing a grave threat from the Soviet Union. He headed a civil defence research effort called “Project Harbor” for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1964, the year he was awarded the Nobel prize for physics, and he initiated a civil defence research project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

(Wigner’s Project Harbor summary report on civil defence 1964 is linked here; the full 600 pages is not available, however notice that this summary report debunks the "threat" of neutron bombs to cities and points out that enhancing fallout radiation using a cobalt or similar casing decreases the initial effects from the weapon and also decreases the total fallout radiation dose; it just changes the dose rates, reducing the intense fission product radiation at early times and increasing the long term lower level radiation which gives plenty of time for decontamination before accumulating the [reduced] dose.)

Wigner recruited experienced military survival experts like the engineer Cresson H. Kearny to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory project to supervise the translation of internal Soviet Union civil defence manuals into English, produce blueprints of the shelter designs, build the shelters from the blueprints using untrained American families, and test them to simulated nuclear explosions made by detonating thousands of tons of TNT during military blast effects studies.



For example, one Soviet civil defence manual by P. T. Egorov, I. A. Shlyakhov and N. I. Alabin (translated into English in 1973 as Oak Ridge National Laboratory report ORNL-TR-2793) contained a design (shown below) for an earth covered shelter made by lining and covering a trench with poles from trees chopped down in forest. American families build them within 48 hours, including felling the trees and making improvised internal furnishings:




This buried-pole shelter survived a peak overpressure of 40 psi in the Misers Bluff test, by detonating 200 tons of TNT beside it, as reported in Oak Ridge National Laboratory report ORNL-5541 (Blast Tests of Expedient Shelters in the Misers Bluff event, by Cresson H. Kearny, Conrad V. Chester and Edwin N. York) so it would have survived at ground zero in Hiroshima, with the earth cover attenuating the lethal nuclear radiation. Page 144 of Kearny’s 1979 Oak Ridge National Laboratory report, Nuclear War Survival Skills, states that this shelter gives a protection factor of 1,000 against fallout radiation. Carsten M. Haaland of Oak Ridge National Laboratory discusses the implications of this in Appendix B: Should we protect ourselves from nuclear weapons effects? (in John Dowling and Evans M. Harrell, Civil Defense: A Choice of Disasters, American Institute of Physics, N.Y., 1987, pp. 171-97):

“In those few areas in the U.S. where conditions might support a firestorm, safe shelters could be constructed based on lessons learned from the Hamburg firestorm of 1943 in which 85% of the 280,000 people within the firestorm survived. If the people in Hiroshima had been in simple buried-pole shelters, not one person need have perished from weapon effects even at ground zero ... the gloominess of a nationwide picture of the U.S. after a nuclear attack suggests that a multilayer missile defense is required in addition to civil defense. ...

“Even if the people of Hiroshima had been inside the modest shelters they had constructed for protection against conventional bombing, the number of fatalities would have been only a small fraction of what it was. These people did not expect a new technology to be used. An air-raid alert throughout Hiroshima at 7 a.m. on 6 August 1945, was called off a half hour later because it appeared to the Japanese that only weather or reconnaissance planes were involved. When the Enola Gay arrived with two weather observation planes at 8:15 a.m., no one paid any attention. Many people were working outside, which increased the number of fatalities. Even so, about 193,000 survived, about 55% of the 350,000 people residing in the city at the time [Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Basic Books, N.Y., 1981, pp. 353 and 364; note that surveys following case histories only give the percentage of people who survived at any location; the absolute number of people in Hiroshima included a large number of Korean prisoners of war being used as slave labour whose presence was not admitted for political reasons in the early years after the war. So the absolute number of casualties in Hiroshima was larger than initially indicated, although this does not affect the percentage killed at any location, which is based on individually traced case histories.] ...

“An examination of Soviet radio broadcasts and publications reveals that they have two messages with opposite meanings concerning civil defense. For internal consumption, the message is that civil defense is effective and necessary. ... studies show that there has been a massive expansion of the Soviet strategic disinformation effort in the 1980s. [Vladimir Bukovsky, Commentary, 25, 1982; Strategic Review, vol. 11, pp. 79 and 81, 1983]. One dimension of Soviet strategic deception is to ‘convince the West that ... preparation for war is a meaningless pursuit.’ [Physicians for Social Responsibility, Director’s Report, Cambridge, MA, 1983, p. 6.]”


The concern about Soviet Union civil defense hypocrisy led Wigner's team to adapt Soviet evacuation and expedient sheltering civil defence to American use in reports like ORNL-4905 Blast Tests of Expedient Shelters (1974) by Cresson H. Hearny and Conrad V. Chester, ORNL-5040 (Cresson H. Kearny, Paul R. Barnes, Conrad V. Chester, and Margaret W. Cortner, The KFM: A Homemade Yet Accurate and Dependable Fallout Meter) and Carsten M. Haaland, Conrad V. Chester and Eugene P. Wigner, Survival of the Relocated Population of the U.S. After a Nuclear Attack, Oak Ridge National Laboratory report ORNL-5041 (1976). This report points out on page 54 that one year after a 50% fission countervalue nuclear attack of 6,559 megatons (5,951 megatons of ground surface bursts) concentrated on American cities and industry, only 108 square miles or 0.004% of the area of coterminous United States would have a residual gamma radiation level above 0.1 R/hour (the very lowest reading possible on the U.K. digital PDRM82 fallout survey meter).



Above: fallout shielding factors throughout a multistorey concrete city building, from the 1973 DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 6, report CPG 2-1A6, Panel 18. Although modern city buildings provide fallout protection, there was concern that they could be damaged by blast, leading to evacuation proposals following Soviet civil defence planning. Obviously, the traffic jams coming out of any major city on a Friday afternoon show that this policy needs special organization: Soviet crisis relocation planning was vitally important against fallout in the town of Pripyat, where people first sheltered for 36 hours in their houses after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, and then 25,000 residents were evacuated using thousands of volunteers and 1,100 buses from Kiev over a period of just 3 hours, clearing a zone of 10 km radius around the reactor. Later, evacuation was increased to a 30 km radius, evacuating 100,000 people.

Chamberlain, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of the Nazis and repeated meetings with Hitler followed family pacifist politics: the 1925 Nobel Prize for Peace was awarded to Neville Chamberlain’s half-brother Sir Austin Chamberlain (1863-1937), who was the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs from 1924-29:

“Together with Aristide Briand of France, [Austin] Chamberlain and Stresemann met at the town of Locarno in October 1925 and signed a mutual agreement (together with representatives from Belgium and Italy) to settle all differences between the nations by arbitration and never resort to war. For his services, Chamberlain was not only awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter. [Austin] Chamberlain also secured Britain's accession to the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which theoretically outlawed war as an instrument of policy. [Austin] Chamberlain famously said that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini [a fascist who later fought with the Nazis] was ‘a man with whom business could be done’.”


Neville Chamberlain followed Austin Chamberlain’s appeasement and paper-signing with Mussolini and in the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war, fruitless delusions which were hyped a success for peace following the 1925 Nobel Peace Prize. In reality, of course, even the Nazi Adolf Hitler himself was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize after a lying propaganda speech about non-aggression! Prizes just reflect groupthink, which may either be justified or just wishful thinking. No quantity of newspaper propaganda, political hand shaking or autographs on treaties, or Nobel Peace Prizes justify surrender to thugs: hot air deters no evil.

John Wheeler-Bennett’s history, Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (Macmillan, London, 1948) - unlike other histories of appeasement - cites John F. Kennedy’s 1940 book Why England Slept in the bibliography at page 491, and conveys the lessons Kennedy derived. Other, more grandiose and revisionist historians like A. J. P. Taylor, ignored such contemporary analyses, or maybe they could not spot them from the astounding heights of their ivory towers. Taylor's Origins of the Second World War was a brief refutation of Churchill's own Nobel Prize-winning history of the war, which Taylor thought biased. Churchill had warned of Nazi rearmament and racism and been ignored until it was too late to avert war; A. J. P. Taylor aligns his history more closely to Hitler's 1930s propaganda that he was just trying to do the best for Germany, ending unemployment, defending against enemies, etc. Hitler certainly wanted to put Germany first, and he was happy to get what he wanted by intimidation at the negotiating table rather than dropping bombs. Taylor's position is basically that of Chamberlain's. He sees Hitler as an opportunistic politician, not a monster. Wheeler-Bennett, pages 268-9:

“Mr Chamberlain ... essentially a business man ... could not conceive how any problem could possibly be settled by a recourse to arms ... . He was confident, therefore, that if certain compromises, certain business deals, could be arrived at ... the Dictators in Berlin and Rome would not have to go to war ...

“... It must, however, be remembered that in 1937 Mr Chamberlain’s attitude to peace and war was very representative of the national reaction of Britain. ...

“... Lord Trenchard’s warning in the House of Lords of thousands of planes dropping in a few hours more bombs than were dropped during the entire period of the First World War [House of Lords Debates, 18 November 1936, column 214]; the gloomy picture drawn by the author of War over England [by Air Commodore Lionel Charlton, published in London, 1936] of the horrors of London during an air raid; the widely publicized theories of the Italian General Douhet [General Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, London, 1927], describing a Blitzkrieg of the air which would paralyse a country at the outbreak of war – struck a chill into the hearts of Londoners, who recalled Mr Baldwin’s disheartening statement [in November 1932] that ‘the bomber will always get through’.”


This is Kennedy’s point: you can’t place all of the blame on Chamberlain because it was a collective failure and a collective delusion of Britain in general: the public, the newspapers, and even Winston Churchill’s efforts to alert everyone. Churchill failed during the early to mid 1930s to have the Nazis stopped before World War II was inevitable (i.e. while British armaments still exceeded the Nazis). The reasons why Churchill failed – i.e. why Britain as a whole decided to “shoot the messenger” (rather than shoot Hitler) in the 1930s – are vitally important if we are to learn lessons of Churchill’s failure in public relations when warning of a real threat. Churchill’s evidence for the Nazi threat did not prove credible enough, while the exaggerations of what the Nazi air force would and could do to London were wrongly accepted as being honest. Directly quoting a passage from Kennedy’s book, Wheeler-Bennett states on page 269:

“Like a boxer who ‘cannot work himself into the proper psychological and physical condition for a fight that he seriously believes – and hopes – will never come off’, the British people could not think themselves into the necessary state of mind for real preparedness because they hoped so dearly that they would never be called upon to fight. [Reference: Why England Slept, by John Kennedy, New York, 1940, p. 157.]”


This is exactly why civil defense was needed politically to credibly deter thugs, in order to counter the doom mongering exaggerations of weapons effects by showing that simple countermeasures provide useful protection. It’s important to now turn to the Nazi Germany. Why wasn’t Hitler stopped before becoming so powerful as being able to sustain years of world war? Wheeler-Bennett provides the answers. The world economic collapse of 1929 caused a great depression in 1930-31 that allowed existing pacifist sentiments in the West to be translated into large cutbacks on armament spending, while at the same time causing unemployment in Germany, creating public sympathy for Hitler’s policies. The two effects together led to tragedy. On page 230, Wheeler-Bennett points out:

“In Britain it has become axiomatic to associate the policy of appeasement almost exclusively with the names of Mr Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax. It should, however, be remembered that Mr Chamberlain only became Prime Minister in May 1937 and Lord Halifax did not take charge of the Foreign Office until February 1938. For the greater part of the period between 1933 and 1938 the Prime Minister of Great Britain was either Mr Ramsey McDonald or Mr Stanley Baldwin ...

“... In an honest but fatal endeavour to achieve universal disarmament, successive Governments had reduced the armaments of Britain to a point at which many believed them to be no longer compatible with the demands of national defence, in the vain hope that others would be moved to emulate such an example of unilateral rectitude.”


The actual reductions in the British armed forces budget were not immense by themselves (the £116 million budget of 1926-7 was cut to £110 million in 1930-1), but in the context of Hitler’s rearmament of Germany, they were a problem. Moreover, in November 1932 former and future British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin declared in public that everyone must know “that no power on earth can protect him from being bombed”. Hitler made no secret of his racism and intentions for territorial expansion, which he published in his book Mein Kampf before election, but Wheeler-Bennett points out on page 235 that Britain and France chose to turn a blind eye and appease Hitler anyway:

“There was general agreement not to take seriously the blue-print of Mein Kampf, with its clear warning that France must be first isolated and then annihilated.”


This convenient “groupthink” consensus of delusion persisted even after 14 October 1933, when Germany withdrew from the Disarmament Conference in Geneva and from the League of Nations. On page 243, Wheeler-Bennett states:

“Within a week of the withdrawl of Germany from Geneva, the leader of the Labour Party, Mr George Lansbury, declared that he would ‘close every recruiting station, disband the Army, dismantle the Navy, and dismiss the Air Force. I would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the world, ‘Do your worst’. [The Star, 23 October 1933.]”


Churchill pointed out the problem with this in 1934, but as Wheeler-Bennett states on page 244, he was ignored:

“... Mr Churchill called the attention of the House to the existence in Germany of ‘an illegal air force rapidly approaching equality with our own’. [House of Commons Debates, 28 November 1934, columns 866-9.] This Mr Baldwin vehemently denied, although he admitted that an air force did exist in Germany. He assured the House that there was neither ‘menace’ nor ‘emergency’, and ‘that Germany’s air strength was not 50% of our strength today’. [Ibid., column 883.]”


Instead of using this superiority in 1934 as a first-strike coercion to stop the illegal Nazi rearmament while there was still time to avoid a world war, the opportunity was squandered for fear of a relatively small preventative war. Notice here that no pacifist Cold War literature has ever addressed this vital point, not even with a silly dismissal: it is just ignored completely, or the situation in later years such as at Munich in 1938, is discussed instead when the Nazis had some longer-range bombers available. Such a preventative war in 1934 (not 1938) would have been truly small-scale and would have nothing like World War II, as Wheeler-Bennett argues on page 245:

“Yet the very fact that illegal rearmament was in progress in Germany should surely have sent Mr Baldwin to the country in a campaign, similar to that which Mr Churchill was waging single-handed, with the object of arousing the British people to an awareness of danger on the Rhine, which he himself had admitted to be Britain’s frontier in Europe. Instead, he applied the soothing syrup of statistics to the first awakening cries of the British public, and lulled them back into the fitful slumber of their false security.”


British public opinion as a result of this is known from the National Peace Ballot of 1935, as Wheeler-Bennett explains on pages 248-9:

“The results of this mass interrogation, published on June 27, disclosed that 11.5 million people took part in it, and that the overwhelming majority were for disarmament. ... The Peace Ballotmade no mention of rearmament ... But there was no disputing the fact that the results of the ballot constituted a serious political lobby in Britain, perhaps the first since the agitation on the Corn Laws. It was a demonstration in favour of disarmament ... despite the defection of Germany. As such it had to be taken seriously by the Government.”


Wheeler-Bennett was author of the 1932 history, Disarmament and Security since Locarno. Unlike modern historians who see everything with the benefit of hindsight, Wheeler-Bennett studied the events as they occurred without prejudice, and he checked the prevailing contemporary claims by using the declassified state archive papers presented at the Nuremberg Trials. In his Introduction to Munich: Prologue to Tragedy (pages 3-8) Wheeler-Bennett sets appeasement in context:

“Surrender to blackmail is always damnable because it sets a higher value upon mere self-protection than upon principles, which, in fact, we know to be sacred and inviolable. Such appeasement is justly condemned because it is felt to be an act of treason against all we stand for – the purchase of life at the expense of those ultimate ends of which the pursuit alone makes life worth living. ...

“Under the shadow of the then unparalleled ravages of the First World War, the peace-makers of Paris sought to repair the damage suffered by the machinery for pacific settlement, to strengthen and extend it beyond all previous limits, and to obviate the errors of the past by recognising the truth that, since peace is indivisible, so must the means of preserving it be indivisible. Under the Covenant of the League of Nations, the principle was acknowledged, for the first time, that a wrong done against one State constituted a wrong against all, and it was hoped that, by the over-all guarantee of the League against aggression, a potential aggressor would be deterred from committing his contemplated crime. ... Japan, Italy, and Germany committed their acts of aggression unchecked and unpunished. ... Mr Anthony Eden voiced the popular opinion of the majority when he declared, that ‘nations cannot be expected to incur automatic military obligations save for areas where their vital interests are concerned’. [I.e., each nation was only prepared to fight for its survival if directly attacked, and was not prepared to go to war to help another country, thereby allowing the fascist thugs to invade and swallow up smaller countries, building up ever more strength, without opposition from stronger countries. Eden’s policy is the opposite of the Good Samaritan. Eden later as Prime Minister in 1956 mishandled Foreign Policy during the Suez Crisis of 1956.] ...

“What, then, is the answer, since all must be agreed that ‘to avoid war must be the highest ambition of statesmanship’?

“It lies surely, first, in the proposition that disarmament must follow – and not precede – the establishment of an effective system of security; that never again must any peace-loving Power become so weak that, either individually or in alliance with others, it is unable to say ‘No’ to a potential aggressor at the earliest symptom of his aggressive designs; that it should have it within its power to insist that disputes be settled in equity and justice. ‘The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear,’ declared Edmund Burke in 1775, and this is as profoundly true today as it was one hundred and seventy five years ago. Appeasement – a necessary and invaluable card in the game of diplomacy – must be played from strength and never from weakness.

“The answer lies, secondly, in that, having the necessary force at our disposal, we should arrive at a broader recognition of our ‘vital interests,’ and a realization that the most vital of all, our way of life, to which we have ever pledged ‘our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour,’ may be threatened by events father afield than we are at first disposed to perceive.

“It was not for Belgium or for Serbia that we fought in 1914; it was not for Czechoslovakia that we might have fought in 1938; it was not for Poland that we fought a year later; it was in defence of a principle, in the words of Mr Duff Cooper, ‘that one Great Power should not be allowed, in disregard of treaty obligations, of the laws of nations and the decrees of morality, to dominate the continent of Europe’. In defence of this principle we have fought many times in the past and must be prepared to fight again in the future, for on the day when we are not prepared to fight for it we shall have forfeited our liberties, our independence, and all the hopes and ideals which we have ever cherished.

“Appeasement, then, must ever stop short of this point. But how to realize in time that the point has been reached? How to prevent Europe from again being plucked like an artichoke, leaf by leaf, until we ourselves remain the tastiest morsel of all – le fond d’ artichaut?

“To this question the answer was given one hundred and forty years ago: ‘Expressions like “The fate of this or that part of Europe does not concern us” or “we limit ourselves to the maintenance of order in such-and-such an area” and so on should never again pass the lips of a ruler or statesman. ... The more vigorously and courageously injustice and force are attacked at their first appearance, the less often will it be necessary to take the field against them in battle”.’ [Quoted from: Friedrich Gentz, A History of the Balance of Power in Europe, 1805.]

“These words, written in the face of Napoleonic aggression ... are still true today. Their purport is clear beyond misunderstanding ... In an imperfect world ... evil, predatory instincts, national passions and hatreds, will continue to exist. Appeasement has its rightful and appropriate place in the solution of problems ... but is inadmissible in dealing with aggression.

“Has the world learned its lesson ... ?”


Michael Foot and Appeasement

Michael Foot (1913-2010) died on 3 March 2010. He led the British Labour Party to defeat in 1983 by adopting a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament which was unpopular. Wikipedia states:

“Associated with the Labour left for most of his career, he was a passionate supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and British withdrawal from the European Economic Community. A passionate orator, he was Labour leader at the 1983 general election when the party received its lowest share of the vote since 1918.”


The point is, Foot was one of the three authors of Guilty Men, a best-selling (200,000 copies sold in weeks) book published by Victor Gollancz in 1940 which named and shamed 15 British public figures for appeasing the Nazis in the 1930s, the “deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler’s blatant bullying”. Foremost was Chamberlain, who remained Prime Minister until May 1940.

Foot could condemn a policy of appeasement and disarmament in the face of the Nazi threat, but in the 1980s he did the opposite in the face of the much bigger nuclear threat from the Soviet Union. Why this hypocrisy, or why this change in his outlook? He didn’t understand the science of the effects of nuclear weapons, as proved by ignorant, gullible assumptions made his own 1999 book, Dr Strangelove, I Presume?, where he falls hook, line and sinker for effects propaganda and ignores civil defence countermeasures even for the decreasing nuclear stockpiles and smaller weapon sizes in the MIRV technology and proliferation age; exactly the attitude of the appeasers of the 1930s whom he attacked in his 1940 book Guilty Men. He hadn’t learned the lesson of appeasement.

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”


– Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents, 1770.

“Thus, a people may prefer a free government, but if, from indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit, they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they will not fight for it when it is directly attacked; if they can be deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if by momentary discouragement, or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to subvert their institutions; in all these cases they are more or less unfit for liberty: and though it may be for their good to have had it even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it.”


- John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 1862.





Above: politicians could ban nuclear weapons, if they raised taxes enough to pay for the conventional arms and conscripted armies needed to replace them, possibly bankrupting democracies in the process just like the Soviet Union. Progress in making the world more secure needs more courageous political efforts than giving up nuclear weapons. Example:

Dr Alvin M. Weinberg, The Control of Exposure of the Public to Ionizing Radiation in the Event of Accident or Attack, Proceedings of a Symposium Sponsored by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), April 27-29, 1981, Held at the International Conference Center, Reston, Virginia. Appendix B: Civil Defense and Nuclear Energy, pages 275-7:

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

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

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

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

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



Above: correlation between wealth and energy consumption from the Oil Drum. Heresy of heresies: not only is the peace/environmental/free love movement making war more likely (just as it did in the 1930s) by lying about the effects of weapons and the effects of war, but it's also making the world more dangerous by false attacks on radiation effects from nuclear power, which make economic pressures more sensitive to oil prices. Plutonium proliferation expert Dr Alexander DeVolpi discusses how supposedly antinuclear crusaders having been using false politics dressed up as science to argue against plutonium demilitarization in his blog post linked here. Another environmentally-friendly and science-friendly option to even more efficiently dispose of plutonium is of course simply to use the plutonium for cheap, healthy, safe, fast, reliable space travel by putting the Project Orion research of Professor Freeman Dyson and Dr Theodore Taylor into operation. As we saw above, President Reagan used oil prices as a leverage to coerce Gorbachev into setting in place freedom-inclined political changes, which led ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The world is today in the opening stages of a financial crisis akin to the 1929 Great Depression: it's occurring more slowly and with less panic. But there are still immense debts, and the full effects have not been felt yet. As with the Great Depression, it will take a few years before the full problem becomes apparent. As the diagram above indicates, there is a correlation between wealth and energy consumption. The correlation is really much better than the diagram shows, because almost all of the scatter of the data points is due to climatic variations. Thus, wealthy countries in a cold climate use more power for heating to stay warm than wealthy countries with a warm climate. But the key point is that wealth and energy consumption are closely correlated. Run out of economic oil, and you are in a crisis. The historical method of dealing with such crises to seize or otherwise secure oil supplies, either directly or via intimidation when the risks of not doing so outweight the risks of war.



Above: David Low's cartoon from the London Evening Standard, 30 October 1945. Britain freely gave America the secret to the cavity magnetron, a small whistle-type electron resonator that efficiently produced the high power microwaves needed for airborne radar and associated defense gadgets (and microwave ovens after the war). Britain also supplied scientists for the Manhattan Project (although they included the spy Dr Klaus Fuchs). Despite this, Britain was banned from access to the wartime nuclear secrets after the war. Instead, on 27 October 1945, President Truman announced 12 points of American peaceful intentions, and promised not to share nuclear secrets with anybody else. Relying on nuclear deterrence allowed a massive reduction in Western conventional military power during the Cold War, helping the West to prosper economically, while the Soviet Union went broke. The dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August panicked Stalin into declaring war on Japan on 7 August, which the Americans had been begging for since the Yalta conference with Stalin. In this indirect way, Hiroshima added extra political pressure on Japan's leaders by taking away their last ditch hope of Russian assistance in brokering a more favorable conditional surrender with America. Nagasaki was the last straw. Unfortunately this success of nuclear weapons, achieved in carefully staged surprise attacks against highly flammable wood frame cities in dry August weather, inspired great efforts by Russia to emulate American efforts in secret in 1949, leading to similar efforts in Britain (again in secret, with no democratic debate). Nuclear proliferation continues unabated while nuclear weapons effects are grossly exaggerated by lying politicians and media warmongers who claim to be lying for peaceful disarmament!



Above: journalist Chapman Pincher's sad book on the British manipulation and secrecy behind the greasy pole climbers of our supposedly "democratic" politics, Inside Story: A Documentary of the Pursuit of Power (Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1978) gives much useful background to the demented politics and science abuse in British government politics. The biggest scandal was former German commie physicist Dr Klaus Fuch's flawed security vetting by MI5 before he was sent by Britain to Los Alamos, and the U.S. Congress used this to ban postwar nuclear cooperation with Britain until after we had independently tested thermonuclear weapons in the late 1960s. However, the real fault, Pincher explains on page 72, was largely down to the failure to detect his "handler" in America, Anatoli Yakovlev, "who worked under the cover of being a vice-consul at the Soviet consulate in New York. It was his highly professional planning which allowed untrained spies like Fuchs and David Greenglass, an American soldier who worked at Los Alamos, to betray secrets of the atomic bomb's detaled structure. It was his control over the spy network, laboriously built up by colleagues, which enabled American couriers like Harry Gold and Julius Rosenberg to pick up not only nuclear secrets for despatch to Moscow but many others, including radar developments.

"Only the stupidity of some Russian delegates to United Nations discussions on the control of atomic energy in 1947 eventually led to the exposure of Yakovlev and his agents. They referred to secret American techniques and even used code-words which alerted the American delegation, led by the admirable Bernard Baruch, to the existence of serious leakages. It took the FBI a long time to track down all the traitors. By that time Yakovlev, who was called as defendant on a capital charge of espionage in New York's Southern District Court on 15 March 1951, had fled home to Russia."

Pincher also provides a very useful analysis of the descent of the British Labour Party into pro-commie unilateral nuclear disarmament policies during the 1970s (which for some reason seems to be glossed over on the Labour Party website history pages). During the 1930s, the Labour Party (particularly at the local council level) was pro-disarmament and anti-civil defence, backing the rival Conservative government of Prime Minister Chamberlain on appeasement of Nazi thugs. When Labour won the 1945 election, former pacifist and appeaser Clement Attlee became Prime Minister and reversed his 1930s viewpoint, and in 1947 he secretly ordered Dr William Penney to built nuclear weapons! As the Cold War developed with the Berlin Crisis (1948) and Korean War (1950-3), the Labour Party clamped down on its left-wing and banned communists until 1973. Pincher records on pages 326-7 that in 1972 the Labour Party:

"sent a delegation to Moscow headed by its General Secretary, Ron Hayward, who stated on his return that 'We believe this visit has built a firm foundation for understanding and friendship between our two parties'. ... The most dangerous symptom in the eyes of the security authorities [MI5, MI6] was the Labour Party's decision in 1973 to lift its ban on its members belonging to Communist and Communist-front organizations, which had been in force previously to avoid infiltration ... It meant that members of the Labour Party, including MPs, were free to join organizations such as the British-Soviet Friendship Society, the International Union of Students, the British Peace Committee, and the World Peace Council, which has its headquarters in Moscow.

"Labour MPs and even ministers are free to appear on Communist Party platforms and do so. They write in the Communist newspaper, the Morning Star, and ... their Communist sympathies are used for Soviet propaganda purposes. The most blatant of these recently was the broadcast made by Alex Kitson, a member of the Labour Party National Executive representing the party at the 1977 celebrations of sixty years of Communist dictatorship in Moscow. He told the Russians, 'You have managed to achieve so much that we are still far from achieving,' with other remarks so contrary to the truth that even some of his extremist friends felt he had gone too far, in view of the thousands suffering in Soviet labour camps and so-called mental institutions. ... The Communists like to latch on to the word 'Labour' just as they latched on to 'Peace', which always means 'Peace at Russia's price'."

Pincher adds on page 328 that former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt "was so appalled with the sell-out to the Left that in 1977 he published a book, What's Left of the Labour Party?, urging Labour voters to support the Tories for at least two elections so that Labour should be forced into the wilderness to cleanse itself."

That's exactly what they did. Pincher explains on page 324 why the 1980s Labour policy of relying on conventional weapons to prevent another World War is wrong:

"Those who cry for unilateral nuclear disarmament but not for total disarmament, because they concde that some kind of defence is necessary, assume that a conventional war fought against Russia would somehow be tolerable. Information to which I have had access indicates that a further global war could be devastating to civilization whether fought with conventional weapons or with [cheaper] H-bombs.

"In the first place, the pattern of big wars fought with automatic weapons, which were used for the first time in the American Civil War, shows them to be exhausting conflicts lasting at least four years. In addition to huge combat and civilian casualties, enormous numbers die from cruelty and malnutrition. Deaths inflicted in 'great' wars have risen exponentially ..."

Making the world "safe" for conventional war means mobilizing a large conscription army and diverting a massive amount of money into keeping it trained and ready for a surprise attack. If that's what the pacifists want from nuclear disarmament, they will make society far more militaristic and increase defence spending enormously, just as occurred for America during the Vietnam conflict, where more bombs were dropped than in any other war in human history, but led to a very costly failure!

The reason why Britain's Labour Party adopted unilateral nuclear disarmament as a major 1983 election promise has less to do with the smoke and mirrors of pacifism and nuclear weapons effects, than appeasement of the Soviet Union. Pincher explains this in chapter 35, "The Unions as a Power Base", where he writes on pages 329-30:

"The Labour government under Wilson and more so under Callaghan has realized that securing continuing union support is the best insurance against electorial defeat. As a result, legislation to increase union power has been pushed through by Labour, which expects union loyalty in return. The Trade Union and Labour Relations Act and the Employment Protection Act have strengthened the rights of union members but the real increase in power has been put into the hands of the trade union leaders and the TUC [trade union council]. Even the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) set up to help resolve disputes, is so organized as to lean heavily in favour of the unions, as a succession of industrial and commercial organizations has discovered. ... during the last few years of the reign of Jack Jones as General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union many regarded him as the most influential man in Britain. ... the TUC worked in the closest collaboration with Michael Foot's Employment Department in formulating the new pro-union laws. ... In August 1974 Hugh Scanlon, then General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, threatened a winter of industrial chaos if Labour failed to win the next election.

"In the motor car industry, where strike action is orchestrated, trade unionists have shown repeatedly that they are prepared to damage the nation's economy for political motives and have largely succeeded ... As soon as the decision to close the [British Leyland union paralyzed Speke, Liverpool] factory was made, the seventeen-week strike was called off and then attempts were made to spread the dispute to Coventry and elsewhere 'in sympathy'. ... The National Executive Committee of the Labour Party which formulates party policy ... is dominated by the trade unions because 60 percent of its members are fromunions or are among the 119 MPs sponsored by unions ...

"It is not surprising therefore that British Communists ... decided long ago that their surest road to political power was by infiltrating the unions. ... Out of a total work force of about 23 million, some 10 million are members of trade unions and of these only about 0.3 percent are members of the Communist Party. Yet they are exerting pressure out of all proportion to their representation. An analysis by Geoffrey Stewart-Smith in 1974 showed that about 10 percent of all officials of the major industrial trade unions were Communists or far-left revolutionary Marxists. ... Those who care about freedom should never forget that, at whatever level Communism has been established anywhere in the world, it has almost always been imposed by quite small minorities."

This is the dictatorial mechanism. On page 333, Pincher writes that National Union of Miners leader, Arthur Scargill, member of the Young Communist League from 1955 to 1962 (who famously clashed with Prime Minister Thatcher on the question of union power later, in the 1980s) destroyed the Prime Minister Heath's Conservative government by the 1973 disruption resulting from the miners' picketing the Saltley coke depot in Birmingham. Scargill told Pincher:

"Saltley, where the police gave in because they couldn't cope with so many pickets preventing lorries taking coke to factories, was a historic day for the trade union movement and for me. It showed that the people could win against authority by sheer weight of numbers."

The problem with this "people could win against authority" argument is that there are tens of millions of people in the country, and the fact that tens of thousands of well-organized pickets can overwhelm the police doesn't prove that they are right, or that they are a majority. Scargill is certainly right to believe that the majority is often wrong, misled, duped by lies from politicians, and exploited by corrupt capitalists out to line their own pockets at the expense of the hard done by workers. But that doesn't mean that industrial action to force management to increase pay is the best solution. The whole capitalist system simply falls apart because the shareholders and fat cat bosses still want to take home their disproportionate bonuses, so the company either goes bankrupt or else has to shrink and lay off workers, to be able to afford to pay the remaining workers higher wages! This increases inequality, rather than reducing it. In the longer term, the company closes because it simply becomes uncompetitive compared to cheaper labour in foreign markets like China.

The way forward is not industrial action, but simply the compulsory Nationalisation of greedy big businesses, with minimal compensation to them and their greedy shareholders (which would eventually have a slight deterrent effect on immorally greedy despots). This could provide a good safeguard against the exploitation of workers by leaders drawing immense undeserved bonuses at their expense. Britain used to oscillate between socialist "Clause 4" public ownership pro-Nationalisation Labour Governments and pro-privitisation Conservative Governments. Each successive Government would squander billions undoing and reversing the costly policies of its predecessor, Nationalization of key induustries by Labour would be followed by Privitisation by Conservatives, and so on, in a costly and fruitless oscillation. What is needed is a fact-based, not dogma-based, decision on which industries need to be in the public ownership, and which are best left to private enterprise with wealthy shareholders reaping the profits. As a simple rule of thumb, private enterprise makes sense for small local businesses like retail, serving a limited number of customers who have ample choice and competition to regulate prices fairly; while public ownership makes more sense for the banking sector where the taxpayers have to bail out the banks when they gamble with their customer's money (the retail sector is not protected in this way by the taxpayers). Apart from the banking sector, the legal profession also urgently needs to be nationalised by all democracies that believe in equality under the law: the present system is unjust because the rich can hire teams of lawyers who can spend longer preparing cases, finding legal loopholes, and so on, than the poor:

"Try pressing a lawyer on whether they think, say, the murderer really did or didn't do it. They won't say. They don't care. They're genuinely not interested. All that matters to them is whether or not the crime's alleged perpetrator was or wasn't found 'guilty under law'. For them, you see, the criminal justice system has absolutely nothing to do with right and wrong. It's ... whether they ... got their guilty-as-sin client off on the right technicality ... They actually believe in their warped imaginations that they have a claim to the moral high ground; that even as they make more and more work for themselves, leeching off society's misfortunes and claiming a greater and greater share of our money, they are genuinely making the world a better, more civilized place."

- James Delingpole, How to be right, Headline, London, 2007, pp. 92-3.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

- Winston Churchill, speech during House of Commons debate on Demobilisation", 22 October 1945.

“... Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.”

- Margaret Thatcher, Thames TV programme “This Week”, 5 February 1976.


Above: Brilliant neuro surgeon Dr Vladymir de Rothschild has suggested a modification to Britain's National Health Service (NHS) to make the service more equal and cut out some of the time-wasters. When WWII ended, Churchill lost the 1945 general election because he wanted to quickly repay the enormous debt from lend-lease to America, while the public wanted a time of prosperity, so the socialists got into power and claimed that WWII had not been a fight against the racism of Hitler but really just a collaboration with Stalin's U.S.S.R. in the name of social equality. As a result, the NHS was set up by Health secretary Aneurin Bevan in 1948, while food rationing continued into the 1950s. To be sure, the social situation in Britain was deplorable before the welfare state, with the genuine poor and needy forced to rely on the vagaries of charity (which tends to fail when most needed, for example after a world economic crisis such as that set off by the 1929 Wall Street crash). My mother was a state registered NHS nurse for her whole career. As Delingpole points out, the problem with any kind of state control quango is that customer service is replaced by the expected supplication of the patient to the state worker, since the customer is forced to pay taxes for a fixed service with no real choice. If you don't get good service, you can't readily get a meaningful tax refund and take your business elsewhere. You must take it or leave it. All power corrupts, and this kind of state quango power can in severe cases corrupt even medics, especially while they are overloaded with patients, many of whom are time wasters. So an attitude develops akin to some of the socialist tendencies in the U.S.S.R., where faith in the system is gradually undermined as the system is abused, then the system hardens itself and loses some of its humanity. The job of making any state quango system work forever without the spur of competition or the rewards of the private sector should not be underestimated. Public service can be flogged. We're not saying that the NHS should be privatised, but that it should be improved with common sense incentives.

Dr de Rothschild envisages that more consultants will start up small clinics in the coming years and would welcome the voucher system as a way of boosting their incomes. He said: “At the heart of my proposals is the idea of effectively devolving spending power to the patients, rather than NHS managers or even GPs. The Government’s current proposals in the Health Bill see control over 80 per cent of NHS budgets pass to GPs, but I believe even more savings can be made by letting patients decide where money is spent via the voucher system."


A small error in Dr de Rothschild's voucher idea is giving more power and patients to popular practices. Actually, there is limit to how many people they can treat, so as with choice on popular state schools, you'll just end up with a decades-long waiting list for them, which will change nothing. Thus, effort must focus on motivating poor practices to be more efficient and become more popular, not the mistake of trying to flood the better practices with too many patients! Effort must be focussed on driving up efficiency and cutting waiting lists everywhere, by treating the patients who need treatment more quickly, and incentivising people to do more exercise, eat more sensibly, and drink less alcohol to reduce some of the most pointless time-wasting accidents, disease, and thus unnecessary sicknesses.



Above: in the 1970s, state control planned to nationalize everything and control everything from the top, including scientific research and production. This was opposed by the campaigns like “Beware of the Elephant” (this advert is from The Guardian 9 Aug 1974 p5), which warned of the dangers from state control. Stalin admitted in his own book, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, that the basic laws of nature are the same in free capitalist countries and socialist dictatorships, leading to stagnation, hubris, corruption, and other symptoms from the bloated, short-sighted elephant of state control unless the leadership is continuously fighting wars or innovating (Stalin pressed forward with nuclear power and space rockets and public criticisms were tempered; the bankrupcy of the USSR in the 80s when Reagan and others set up Star Wars/SDI and W-79 neutron bombs to negate the Soviet SS-20s and Warsaw Pact tank superiority, effectively ended the USSR dream of world domination so criticism of the regime’s short-sighted hubris became harder to censor out and dissent became more openly fashionable).

A good discussion of the anti-profit problem of Marxist socialism (not full communism, but then even the USSR never went fully communist in Marx’s sense) in Britain in the 1970s before the 1979 Trade Union-driven “winter of discontent” (which backfired by ushering in Mrs Thatcher), is given by Sir Keith Joseph, then the Conservatives’ shadow Home Secretary and former chair of Bovis, in a speech at Leith on 8 August 1974 which was published on page 15 of the The Guardian, Friday 9 August 1974 (the same issue of the paper containing the “Beware of the Elephant” campaign advert, shown above):

“Why British industry is on its knees

“In those countries which are our successful competitors, the prestige of industry – ownership and management – is high. Industrialists and managers are recognised as the real creators of wealth, as the men on whose shoulders the whole economy is carried, whose efforts provide employment, find the taxes [corporation tax, etc.] to pay for schools, defence, welfare, whose dividends underpin pensions, insurance policies, and savings.

“In Britain, a large proportion of political and intellectual opinion-formers are convinced that we can dispense with profits. ... No wonder that their utterances and actions alike are so self-contradictory, and that industry suffers. Trade unions suffer from the same politico-economic split personality. As economic men, they want private firms to be healthy and profitable, to be able to afford good wages and conditions for their workers. But as political animals they want to fight capitalism, bash the bourgeoisie, usher in state capitalism, even though they know that the state is a bad employer, which over-mans, underpays, uses the public sector as an economic regulator, and generally depends on Treasury handouts for improvement of wages.

“The fact of the matter is that politicians have over-estimated the ability of government to do good by intervention. We politicians have been guilty of hubris: it is British industry on which nemesis has been visited. We have no right to tell the industrialists: ‘Find your own way out,’ while we are standing on their lifeline. We must get off it.

“Moreover, a substantial part of industrial and other equities are held by institutions – pension funds, insurance companies, small investors through unit trusts. One study suggests that 85 percent of all families are to a greater or lesser extent dependent on the yield of securities. What would happen if there were wholesale failures of companies in which such institutions have invested? ... The liquidity crisis is on us. One firm after another will go to the banks for loans to top up working capital, but loans will add to costs [interest] and cannot be unlimited. Once some companies begin to falter, the effects could be incalculable.”

This is the mechanism for the tipping-towards-economic-collapse and recession in economies where there is too much state-sector fat, living off the excessive taxation of the private sector, in the Marxist pipe-dream that profitability is the root of all evil. Firms lose profitability. They have to downsize, or they borrow from the bank. Eventually they struggle with the interest payments and are stopped by the banks from borrowing more money to pay the interest, especially if interest rates start to rise significantly. Then the government falls because the private sector is not longer profitable enough (or completely bankrupt) to pay enough tax to fund the bloated and unprofitable state sector, so the government is in a debt crisis:



The left, the liberal, and the right: nuclear science in politics

The socialist soft left as well as the communist hard left came from the ideas of Marx, which were cast a fatal blow by the 1989-92 overthrow of the USSR, by the British "New Labour" (indistinguishable from Conservatives, except for total financial ineptitude), and by the adoption of militant Capitalism by the "communist" Chinese. In the past, the left had towards their left the USSR, a utopian promised land of justice and decency. Now that the utopia has been shown for the fraud it always was, all the left have left is their union stranglehold on (1) the Labour party and (2) the media and its dangerous lying blatherings presented as deep, sincere, fact-based profundity about hot air (CO2 induced climate change), nuclear radiation, nuclear weapons, and other vital foundations for the preservation of democratic civilization. The left have always been a dictatorship of falsehood ideology dressed up as social justice, yet in fact has always used the methods of injustice, censorship, and aristocratic authority to stamp upon the facts and the messengers of those facts. If and when this last fortress of lefty fascism is burned to the ground, the lefty lies of Marx will be consigned to the dustbin of pseudoscientific idealisms, in the company of the eugenic Nazism of Mein Kampf. The fascism of both will survive for a while as it does in Capitalist imperial China, as political dictatorship dressed up as democracy, and intolerance towards dissent. However, at some stage this fascism will be exposed for the bigotry it is. The sooner someone does this, the sooner genuine reform of socialism can commence, and the sooner it can move away from squandering Britain's resources, and acquiring massive debt that undermines defences required for national security, by pandering to undemocratic geriatric dictatorial public sector union dodos. The left needs to be made to realize that in a democracy, when it loses an election after effectively bankrupting the country, it is undemocratic to then try to use its union influence and contacts to cause strife to bring down those elected!



Above: for American readers who are unaware of the political Marxist/communist significance of the British Labour Party’s unilateral nuclear disarmament policy decision for the 1983 General Election under its lefty CND affiliated leader Michael Foot, the 1960 novel When the Kissing Had to Stop by Constantine Fitzgibbon (the translator of the 1958 book on Hiroshima and Nagasaki radiation scare mongering effects, Formula for Death), sets the scene nicely. It was reprinted in 1971 and 1978. It tells the story of Marxist biased trade union power in the Labour Party achieving political victory in Britain by promising to close American nuclear bases in Britain, exploiting the Kremlin’s peace propaganda machine nuclear war scare-mongering for politically-corrupt power-seeking ends, e.g. London to Aldermaston marches and CND propaganda. The popular idealism of the CND nuclear scare-mongering backed disarmament of Britain (to avoid any risk of nuclear war) is a cynical front for Moscow to get the removal of the nuclear deterrent from Britain, making way for its sinister “peaceful” invasion of Western Europe. Simultaneously it was able to push its Marxist fellow-travellers into power, making Britain the next Soviet satellite state member in much the same sneaky undemocratic way that Britain has ended up an European Union member. Having thrown out American bases from Britain, the few democrats left end up as revolutionaries, fighting a Red Army occupation to try to avoid being ruthlessly oppressed by Soviet tanks, the gulag, and punishment in Siberian salt mine chain gangs. It was written after Khrushchev’s suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Fitzgibbon joined the Irish Guards when Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, but then transferred to the U.S. Army in December 1941 when America declared war on Germany because his father was Irish, but his mother was American.

Despite having first tested its own fission bomb in 1952 and H-bomb in 1957, Britain remained reliant during the entire Cold War on the Pentagon’s deployment of additional nuclear weapons on British soil to bolster the deterrence of the USSR. The USSR constantly tried, through its “Lord Haw Haw”-like nuclear war scare-mongering Moscow-based and Kremlin-controlled “World Peace Council” to have the neutron bomb and other USSR tank deterrents stopped. It aimed to get Britain to disarm and send home the Americans, so it could be either “peacefully” occupied via a socialist revolution in Whitehall, or else a “conventional” war using the enormous conscription Red Army of the USSR. The conventional armed forces of the Red Army were tested by Brezhnev in Afghanistan in 1979, and eventually were opposed by the Americans under Fred Ikle in the Reagan Administration, who supplied the Taliban with stinger missiles to shoot down Red Army helicopters.



Above: Martin Ceadel’s article, “The First Communist ‘Peace Society’: The British Anti-War Movement 1932–1935”, Twentieth Century British History, volume 1, 1990, pp. 58-86, states: “Communists have often attempted to influence authentic peace societies in Britain, as in other countries. For example, in the 1920s they attempted to penetrate the No More War Movement (NMWM), a socialist-pacifist body; and since 1960 they have been a conspicuous element within the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament [CND]. ... The best known have been the movement which staged a People’s Convention in London on 12 january 1941, while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was still in force, and the British peace Committee, which was launched at a congress in October 1949 as part of the efforts of the [Moscow, Kremlin-affiliated] World Peace Council to undermine the recently concluded North Atlantic Treaty ...”



Above: James Delingpole is author of the excellent book about fanatical fascism today, Watermelons, a reference to the fact that these national socialist dictators (Hitler was a "National Socialist" dictator) are green on the outside and red on the inside, like watermelons, intent on burning down new Reichstag's (just like Hitler did) to declare a "state of emergency" (world nuclear holocaust, or hot air/global warming myths), in order to "justify dictatorship" and banning/shooting all critics:

“Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, published in 1960, was important and unpopular because it revealed the glaring discrepancies between the theory of assured destruction and the actual course of events in the real world. Kahn also annoyed people by speaking plainly of killing and cancer instead of using the customary euphemisms. ... His worries always seemed to me misplaced and exaggerated. ... Failing to convince him that his worries were unfounded, I ended by saying, ‘Oh, it’s no use talking with you. You’re paranoid.’ ‘Of course I’m paranoid,’ he replied cheerfully. ‘Didn’t you know that? I make it my business to be paranoid. You had to be paranoid in 1933 to believe Hitler would exterminate the Jews, and you had to be paranoid in 1941 to believe the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor.’ Kahn’s criticism of the assured destruction strategy was based on historical analogies which may or may not be valid. But he was right in stressing the incompatibility between the assumption of rational behavior upon which the theory of assured destruction is based and the many examples of irrational, paranoid, and unpredictable action which fill the pages of history.”

- Professor Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope, Harper and Row, N.Y., 1984, Chapter 19, Assured destruction, page 242.

“Escalation can succeed, if it either helps crush the enemy’s forces, or if it brings about a change in the enemy’s government favorable to a settlement … the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki … broke the political power of the die-hard faction in Tokyo.”

- Fred C. Ikle, Every War Must End, Columbia University press, N.Y., revised ed., 1991, p. 55.

“In the present as in the past, there are basically two ways to prevent war: by eliminating the sources of conflict that would lead a nation to resort to the use of arms, and by rendering the use of arms so unattractive that a nation would rather tolerate existing conflicts or frustrations than start a war.”

- Fred C. Ikle, Every War Must End, Columbia University press, N.Y., revised ed., 1991, p. 108.

“I must make one admission, and any admission is formidable. The deterrent does not cover the case of lunatics ...”

- Sir Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1 March 1955.

posted by Nuclear Weapons Effects 9:13 am

9 Comments:

At 11:17 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Excellant read friend, you mention it quite often but I can't seem to get the link to work for the pdf ''Capabilities of nuclear weapons'' by Dolan. Any tips? I'll come back next week and see if you reply.
Keep up the good work.

 
At 7:15 am, Blogger nige said...

Anonymous, move cursor over selected chapter (below) and click the right mouse button, then select "Save Target As" (if you are using Windows). That will allow you to see the speed the download is occurring at, allowing diagnosis of any problems. The Adobe PDF file reader is freely available at http://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/

(It will be slow sometimes due to the fluctuating load on the bandwidth of wordpress's hosting servers: they host many blogs.)

The version of Dolan's EM-1 below is July 1972 as revised to pages Change 2 of August 1981 (apart from Dolan's new rainout prediction model from August 1981, which they didn't release; but SRI reports by Dolan and the 1977 ENW suggest its basis). I think it should be entirely re-typeset in the original format and published as the factual basis for civil defense. I think this could be done quickly with the help of OCR software.

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

Part 1. Phenomenology.

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

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

 
At 7:46 am, Blogger nige said...

Part 2. Damage Criteria.

PDF download of Part 2, preliminary pages and contents pages, Change 2, August 1981 (50 pages, 1.7 MB)
Chapter 9. Introduction to Damage Criteria. 187 Pages.
Chapter 10. Personnel Casualties. 38 Pages.
Chapter 11. Damage to Structures. 50 Pages.
Chapter 12. Mechanical Damage Distances for Surface Ships and Submarines Subjected to Nuclear Explosions. 147 Pages.
Chapter 13. Damage to Aircraft. 81 Pages.
Chapter 14. Damage to Military Field Equipment. 46 Pages.
Chapter 15. Damage to Forest Stands. 64 Pages.
Chapter 16. Damage to Missiles. 121 Pages.
Chapter 17. Radio Frequency Signal Degradation Relevant to Communications and Radar Systems. 32 pages.

Appendices A-F. 112 pages.


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

Preliminary pages

Part 1: Physical Phenomena

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

Part 2: Damage Criteria

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

Appendices.

 
At 4:06 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I disagree with your take on Prime Minister Chamberlain. He just wanted to help the Nazis. What's wrong with that?

The guy at least tried to get peace with Hitler! All Churchill wanted was not jaw, jaw but war, war.

If Chamberlain had simply shot his cabinet and continued appeasing Hitler after September 1939, we might all be living in a peaceful Thousand Year Third Reich now.

Peace is good, war is bad. That's what Chamberlain said, and he was right. People who fight for freedom are cowards.

True, 75% of the population of Hiroshima survived the bomb and the firestorm. But I think we should still disarm so that terrorists and aggressors don't feel threatened by us.

We're guaranteed to be safe and secure if we surrender to an aggressor. It's the sensible thing to do. Give peace a chance, again! Maybe the next Hitler won't want to kill the Jews, but some other group instead, so it will be OK?

"A weapon is a danger, even to its owner."

- Nazi propaganda proverb.

"Death makes you free."

- Nazi propaganda proverb.

 
At 4:46 pm, Blogger nige said...

Anonymous,

Chamberlain wasn't a Nazi. He just didn't know weapons effects and believed lies from his military and his pacifist half-brother and other nutters who profited by lying very well, with knighthoods and Nobel Peace Prizes.

Chamberlain's crime was not trying to get peace. It was incompetence, it was keeping from public debate the "secret" classified weapons effects lies that exaggerated Nazi weapons capabilities and led to appeasement and thus World War II.

Chamberlain's crime was believing liars. It's interesting that the military lies about the Nazi threat in the 1930s served the military well, just as they served the pacifist 1930s "ban the bombs" movement that continued campaigning for disarmament in the belief that having weapons would make Britain a target for Nazi bombers!

The same occurred during the Cold War. The military bigwigs had no real interest in cutting down thermal effects exaggerations in the popular media, because exaggerations of nuclear effects resulted in politicians giving them (not civil defense!!!!!) more money to build more bombs! The lie that there is no defense possible, and that the only thing you can do is to purely invest more and more money building up your military, served the interests of the military-industrial complex very well during the Cold War.

I'm not saying that we should cut back on the military, I'm just saying that we should be more honest and think about the fact that if something goes wrong, and terrorists or evil dictators do use nuclear weapons, and the people are "sitting ducks" and don't duck and cover (etc.) to minimize injuries from flash burns, flying glass, wind drag, fallout, etc., then a lot of misery will be caused.

Civil defense is cheap. It's just handing out information, and debunking lying anti-civil defense propaganda from CND. It's not a billion dollar expensive shelter building program. Shelters were no use in Hiroshima or Nagasak because people weren't in them! Forget that, and focus on taking advantage of modern city buildings, taking advantage of modern weather forecasts for accurate fallout prediction, using existing modern technology to cheaply and efficiently reduce suffering. Think Plastic Wrap as Wound Dressing for Thermal Burns, that kind of simple, helpful first aid improvisation against burns wounds that could otherwise be contaminated with fallout and turn lethal ...

There is an interesting paper about policy (not science) aspects of British civil defence history:

UK Nuclear History, Working Paper Number 2, UK Civil Defence and Nuclear Weapons 1953 – 1959, by Robin Woolven, http://www.mcis.soton.ac.uk/Site_Files/pdf/nuclear_history/Working_Paper_No_2.pdf

Page 28 states:

“In the 1957 Defence Debate … [Harold] Macmillan in particular highlighted the shortcomings in the approach of the Labour Party speakers. In his memoirs he recorded: ‘Since the Defence White Paper makes it clear that all our defence – and the economies in defence expenditure are founded on nuclear warfare, it throws the Socialists into still greater confusion. … it would be a mistake to believe that ‘banning the bomb’ - even if it could be agreed and effectively policed – would solve the problem of European security. I went on to observe: “I have been through two major wars fought by conventional weapons. Some people now talk as if those were quite harmless and quite respectable operations. [Hansard 17 April 1957]”.’ “

 
At 5:02 pm, Blogger nige said...

[continued]

Similar sentiments were expressed in 1980s U. K. Parliamentary debates reported in Hansard!

Almost every time nuclear disarmament was debated, the statement was made by some MP or Lord, quite rightly, that "we cannot make Europe safe for conventional war, which isn't a tea party!"

If you look at nuclear weapon designer Samuel T. Cohen's 1983 book, The Truth About the Neutron Bomb, he prints pictures of Korea after conventional warfare, utterly destroyed.

Getting rid of nuclear weapons will just make our society more militaristic, because we'll go back to conventional weapons arms races, and conventional weapons need far more aircraft and personnel to deliver them than compact nuclear weapons. They're also very costly: Vietnam shut down human exploration of the Moon. They couldn't afford to do both.

Another factor is that the nuclear disarmers need to think about conscription. Are they willing to be conscripted if we ban the nuclear bomb? Are they willing to fight a conventional war, very likely a one sided conventional war (in which the other side will use nuclear weapons against them)? If they want to ban nuclear weapons, they have to recognise what the effects of that will be. It will give a new impetus to enemies to get the banned weapons and threaten to use them. It will mean that, not having any nuclear deterrence, we will have to go back to conscripting a massive army, and the first day of the Battle of the Somme will look like a picnic by comparison to the kind of situation that will then be possible. Conventional warfare effects can be much worse than nuclear warfare, as Cohen's book makes plain. Or else we wave a white flag and surrender. Your choice. Just don't try to lie about the consequences of the various options available!

 
At 5:19 pm, Blogger nige said...

Making Europe Safe for Conventional Warfare

See “Defending Post-INF Europe” by Jeffrey Record and David B. Rivkin, Jr., Foreign Affairs, Spring 1988:

“A substantial denuclearization of Europe is at hand. ... Critics and skeptics, among them Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Congressman Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.), recently retired NATO Supreme Commander General Bernard Rogers and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.), contend that any degree of denuclearization of Europe not tied in some way to a redress of the conventional military balance, which continues to favor the Soviet Union, could make Europe safe for conventional warfare on a scale not witnessed since 1945.

“Even partial denuclearization, it is asserted, would work against NATO by removing many of the very weapons that the alliance for almost forty years has judged an effective and comparatively cheap means of deterring the Soviet Union’s use of its numerically superior and geographically advantaged conventional forces in Europe.”

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/node/43070

I don't necessarily agree with this particular evaluation, but I do point out that it shows that nuclear disarmament is accepted to increase the threat of more devastating conventional warfare. Generally, 1 kt of conventional weapons randomly scattered over a city has similar blast effects to a single 1 Mt explosion, hence 0.1% nuclear efficiency. That's why we don't build bigger and bigger nuclear weapons, weapons design has been evolving for lower yields with effects (like the ground shock from the earth penetrator warhead) tailored for specific purposes, not general "collateral damage" which has never been a desired effect because of the influence of the weather on the thermal and fallout effects!

 
At 6:59 pm, Blogger nige said...

See also the "Yes, Prime Minister" nuclear deterrent episode video clip linked here about nuclear disarmament and its replacement with conventional weapons plus conscription...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE&feature=related

 
At 7:22 pm, Blogger nige said...

and the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUzRJfAc-HU

 

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All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of dDELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace": "Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.

Update (19 January 2024): Jane Corbin of BBC TV is continuing to publish ill-informed nuclear weapons capabilities nonsense debunked here since 2006 (a summary of some key evidence is linked here), e.g. her 9pm 18 Jan 2024 CND biased propaganda showpiece Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vgq5/nuclear-armageddon-how-close-are-we which claims - from the standpoint of 1980s Greenham Common anti-American CND propaganda - that the world would be safer without nuclear weapons, despite the 1914-18 and 1939-45 trifles that she doesn't even bother to mention, which were only ended with nuclear deterrence. Moreover, she doesn't mention the BBC's Feb 1927 WMD exaggerating broadcast by Noel-Baker which used the false claim that there is no defence against mass destruction by gas bombs to argue for UK disarmament, something that later won him a Nobel Peace Prize and helped ensure the UK had no deterrent against the Nazis until too late to set off WWII (Nobel peace prizes were also awarded to others for lying, too, for instance Norman Angell whose pre-WWI book The Great Illusion helped ensure Britain's 1914 Liberal party Cabinet procrastinated on deciding what to do if Belgium was invaded, and thus failed deter the Kaiser from triggering the First World War!). The whole basis of her show was to edit out any realism whatsoever regarding the topic which is the title of her programme! No surprise there, then. Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia are currently designing the W93 nuclear warhead for SLBM's to replace the older W76 and W88, and what she should do next time is to address the key issue of what that design should be to deter dictators without risking escalation via collateral damage: "To enhance the flexibility and responsiveness of our nuclear forces as directed in the 2018 NPR, we will pursue two supplemental capabilities to existing U.S. nuclear forces: a low-yield SLBM warhead (W76-2) capability and a modern nuclear sea launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) to address regional deterrence challenges that have resulted from increasing Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities. These supplemental capabilities are necessary to correct any misperception an adversary can escalate their way to victory, and ensure our ability to provide a strategic deterrent. Russia’s increased reliance on non-treaty accountable strategic and theater nuclear weapons and evolving doctrine of limited first-use in a regional conflict, give evidence of the increased possibility of Russia’s employment of nuclear weapons. ... The NNSA took efforts in 2019 to address a gap identified in the 2018 NPR by converting a small number of W76-1s into the W76-2 low-yield variant. ... In 2019, our weapon modernization programs saw a setback when reliability issues emerged with commercial off-the-shelf non-nuclear components intended for the W88 Alteration 370 program and the B61-12 LEP. ... Finally, another just-in-time program is the W80-4 LEP, which remains in synchronized development with the LRSO delivery system. ... The Nuclear Weapons Council has established a requirement for the W93 ... If deterrence fails, our combat-ready force is prepared now to deliver a decisive response anywhere on the globe ..." - Testimony of Commander Charles Richard, US Strategic Command, to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 13 Feb 2020. This issue of how to use nuclear weapons safely to deter major provocations that escalate to horrific wars is surely is the key issue humanity should be concerned with, not the CND time-machine of returning to a non-nuclear 1914 or 1939! Corbin doesn't address it; she uses debunked old propaganda tactics to avoid the real issues and the key facts.

For example, Corbin quotes only half a sentence by Kennedy in his TV speech of 22 October 1962: "it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States", and omits the second half of the sentence, which concludes: "requiring a full retalitory response upon the Soviet Union." Kennedy was clearly using US nuclear superiority in 1962 to deter Khrushchev from allowing the Castro regime to start any nuclear war with America! By chopping up Kennedy's sentence, Corbin juggles the true facts of history to meet the CND agenda of "disarm or be annihilated." Another trick is her decision to uncritically interview CND biased anti-civil defense fanatics like the man (Professor Freedman) who got Bill Massey of the Sunday Express to water down my article debunking pro-war CND type "anti-nuclear" propaganda lies on civil defense in 1995! Massey reported to me that Freedman claimed civil defense is no use against a H-bomb, which he claims is cheaper than dirt cheap shelters, exactly what Freedman wrote in his deceptive letter published in the 26 March 1980 Times newspaper: "for far less expenditure the enemy could make a mockery of all this by increasing the number of attacking weapons", which completely ignores the Russian dual-use concept of simply adding blast doors to metro tubes and underground car parks, etc. In any case, civil defense makes deterrence credible as even the most hard left wingers like Duncan Campbell acknowledged on page 5 of War Plan UK (Paladin Books, London, 1983): "Civil defence ... is a means, if need be, of putting that deterrence policy, for those who believe in it, into practical effect."