Declassified data on effects of nuclear weapons and effective countermeasures against them: The cross-section for graviton scatter, scaled by Feynman’s rules from the weak interaction

President Barack Obama, Prague, Czech Republic, 5 April 2009:

“In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons. ... Terrorists are determined to buy, build or steal one. Our efforts to contain these dangers are centered on a global non-proliferation regime, but as more people and nations break the rules, we could reach the point where the center cannot hold.”

Dr Clayton S. White, M.D., “Biological Effects of Blast,” report DASA-1271, 1961, pp. 32-36:

“The area of complete destruction at Hiroshima [the area of the firestorm which developed to a maximum intensity 2-3 hours after the explosion was] about 1.2 mile radius (4 square miles), a range at which 4-5 psi existed. At this range there was an overall survival of near 90 percent. ... one must not confuse the area of complete destruction of houses ... with ‘complete destruction’ of people. ... The gloomy habit of confusing the two concepts is, I am afraid, as prevalent as it is unrealistic and, indeed, untrue. ... Think of the differences in casualties which might have occurred in Hiroshima had the population just been mostly indoors.”

Above: the overcrowding of wood-frame buildings in 1945 Hiroshima was such that 42 percent of the ground areas in the main firestorm areas was covered with wooden buildings containing charcoal braziers, paper screens, and bamboo furnishings. This compared to 45 percent ground coverage by buildings in the central wooden medieval part of Hamburg which suffered a firestorm in July 1943. (Source: secret USSBS report The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, May 1947, volume 2. This originally secret volume is not the misleading 1946 pamphlet, which omits all vital data.) U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, never-published full May 1947 report 92 on Hiroshima, volume 2, typeset edition pages 126-8 (quoted on pages 176 and 98 of Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945):

“Structural damage by blast to multistory, steel- and reinforced concrete-frame structures did not extend beyond 2,000 feet from GZ. The buildings within this radius sustained an average of 12 percent structural damage. The average for all the buildings of this type in Hiroshima was 8 percent.”

These are modern city buildings. The burned out areas in old photos are congested (a roof to ground area averaging 42% in firestorm areas) wood frame houses. On page 98, Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 quotes the secret 1947 USSBS Hiroshima report, vol 1, pp 13-14 (typeset edition):

“... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits.”

The electric power was rapidly cut off by the overload, so sustained heat came from charcoal fires in Hiroshima's houses (due to breakfast, i.e. 8:15 local time).

Above: overcrowded wood frame housing containing charcoal braziers on the edge of the damaged area in Hiroshima (U.S. National Archives photo). How many cities in the world which contain this type of overcrowded wooden housing with charcoal braziers are targets for nuclear terrorism today? Note also that formerly secret measurements of the specific activity of fallout show that only about 1% of the crater volume becomes lofted fallout dust, most of which falls back rapidly: nuclear tests in the 1950s thus confirmed that there is no significant nuclear winter (cooling) from the cratered dust lofted as fallout. This scare story relies on the carbon soot from large-scale firestorms (not just fires) which are supposed to inject a stable, non-humid, layer of hydroscopic carbon soot to altitudes where it can be warmed and achieve stable stable buoyancy, blocking out sunlight from lower altitudes. Thus contravenes the facts black rain in Hiroshima, which rapidly precipitated the soot. Robock's poorly researched but politically correct (peer-reviewer passed) Climactic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts (Atmos. Chem. Phys., v7, pp. 2003–2012, 2007) saves the nuclear disaster delusion by falsely ignoring all factual data on firestorm dust from Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

The authors assume that all targeted cities will produce mass fires with efficient pyroconvective pumping, that these fires will consume basically all available flammable material in the target cities, and that rainout will only remove 20% of the soot before it reaches the upper atmosphere. These are not valid assumptions, and real-world experience with atmospheric nuclear weapons detonations does not bear them out. ... even Brode's relatively extreme views are incompatible with the bizarre assumptions made in the 2007 Toon et al. study, and consequently the many studies that now use its conclusions to model the effects of regional nuclear conflict. The extremely low 20% rainout value is particularly problematic- the authors have no real justification for it other than "because we used it in 1990, and it arguably happens this way in some forest fires." ... Indeed, neither Hiroshima or Nagasaki appears to fit the assumptions made in the study - rainout at Hiroshima seems to have been pretty pronounced (the famous black rain), and Nagasaki failed to develop into a full-blown firestorm due to the local topography. In any case, rainout after a nuclear explosion is not the same as rainout resulting from a forest fire, as is attested by this 1988 study and this 1979 study of rainout following the atomic bombings in Japan. In short, Toon et al. really didn't do their research - at all.

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, secret, unpublished three-volume May 1947 report

The 14 October to 26 November 1945 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of Hiroshima is the key compendium of data, with much more data than any nuclear test report from the 1950s. A 1946 British Mission to Japan report includes photographs of air raid shelters which survived near ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but gives the survival data of 15,000 school children (in teams clearing firebreaks mainly outdoors), without stating the survival rates inside modern buildings. This is also done in Manhattan District report on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the 1950-77 editions of The Effects of Atomic Weapons and The Effects of Nuclear Weapons where no breakdown of survival data in different kinds of buildings and in the open is provided. In particular, the cause of the Hiroshima firestorm was determined by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in its secret May 1947 report, but this was omitted from publications such as its unclassified report and the book, The Effects of Atomic Weapons.

Beginning with an incendiary raid on Tokyo on 9 March 1945 which Japanese records showed killed 83,793 and burned out 267,000 buildings (25% of Tokyo’s buildings), sixty-four Japanese cities were destroyed by non-nuclear air raids. The detailed and objective analysis of these incendiary air raids was classified “Restricted” in April 1947 by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in its unpublished limited distribution typeset and printed report Number 90, Effects of Incendiary Bomb Attacks on Japan, (108 MB PDF linked here). Part 3 (pages 65-118) documents the effects of the 9 March 1945 Tokyo incendiary raid, with photos on pages 104-109 very similar to the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (combustible light frame buildings burned out with their steel distorted by the fires, and piles of charred bodies in streets). By omitting to publish this, an objective comparison of nuclear with conventional attacks was prevented.

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, USSBS report 92, volume 2 (typeset May 1947 edition, secret)

Volume one, page 14: “the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only “capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).” Page 85 of volume one explains why so many people were outdoors in Hiroshima at 8:15 on 6 August 1945:

“Conditions on Morning of Attack. The morning of 6 August 1945 was clear with a small amount of clouds at high altitude. Wind was from the south with a velocity of about 4.5 miles per hour. Visibility was 10 to 15 miles. An air-raid ‘alert’ was sounded throughout Hiroshima Prefecture at 0709 hours [the weather survey B-29 aircraft flying one hour ahead of the nuclear bomber]. ‘All-clear’ was sounded at 0731 hours. The following circumstances account in part for the high number of casualties resulting from the atomic bomb:
(1) Only a few persons remained in the air-raid shelters after the ‘all-clear’ sounded.

(2) No ‘alert’ was sounded to announce the approach of the planes involved in the atomic-bomb attack.

(3) The explosion occurred during the morning rush hours when people had just arrived at work or were hurrying to their places of business. This concentrated the population in the center of the city ...”

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

Page 24: “Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.”

Page 28: “Wood poles as far as 10,000 feet in a southerly direction from AZ [air zero] and 13,000 feet in a northerly direction were flash-burned but the burns, generally not much more than a discoloration of the wood, were in all cases only on the side of the pole facing AZ. ... it is logical to conclude that wood (ignition temperature approximately 450 F) was not raised to its ignition temperature, except possibly in its most easily ignitable condition, such as dry-rotted. Surface spalling or roughening of granite by heat was observed near GZ and as far as 2,400 feet from AZ. This condition was only noticeable where the granite was directly exposed to rays from the bomb (surfaces facing AZ but shielded from it were not spalled) indicating that extremely high temperatures lasted only a fraction of a second. Asphalt road surfaces and asphalt-painted surfaces also were flash-burned, distinct shadows of objects being cast upon them, which again indicated that the radiated heat from the bomb created a temperature which was high but of short duration. ... Blisters as much as one-sixteenth inch high were raised on exposed tile at GZ (2,000 feet from AZ), decreasing in size as the distance from AZ increased until they were barely visible at 4,400 feet from AZ (4,000 feet from GZ).”

Page 34: “The fire wind seems to have reached its maximum velocity about 2 to 3 hours after the bomb explosion, following which it began to diminish in intensity. ... the heavier rain began about 3,500 feet west of GZ and extended westward about 5,000 feet. Light rain was reported to have fallen near the center of the city. ... Rain fell almost exclusively in the northwest area of the city ... accounted for by the light natural wind from the southeast which blew particles of hot carbon northwestward to a cooler area where moisture condensed about them and fell as rain.”

Page 44: “A special effort was made to determine the probable cause of initial ignition in buildings in which there was fire and the reason for non-ignition in buildings in which there was no fire. By observation and by interrogation of persons who were in or near the buildings when the bomb detonated it was established that the probable causes of initial ignition in 40 of the 58 fire-resistive [not wood frame] buildings in which there was fire were as follows: 8 by heat radiation from the bomb (primary fire); 3 by blast disturbance of telephone or chemical laboratory equipment (secondary fire); and 29 by fire spread from exposing buildings.”

Page 45: “Direct Ignition by the Atomic Bomb. ...

“(1) Each of the eight fire-resistive buildings in which primary fire was reported had unprotected windows facing AZ. Black cotton black-out curtains or light-weight paper, or both, were reported to have ignited initially in most of these buildings. All buildings in Hiroshima whose windows were not equipped with steel-roller shutters, which were considered light-proof, were required to have black-out curtains. Among the eight buildings which had primary fires, the farthest from AZ was Building 64 [Hiroshima Communications Hospital] at 5,300 feet [from AZ, or 4,900 feet from GZ].

“(2) A doctor who was in the first story of Building 64, a hospital 5,300 feet from AZ, stated that he discovered fire in the second story 10 minutes after the detonation, but was unable to identify the source. ... Cotton black-out curtains were drawn across the second-story windows only. ... Contents in the second story were totally damaged by fire, but in the first story only a few pieces of wooden furniture near the windows in the south wall facing AZ were scorched ...”

Page 70: “Direct Ignition by the Atomic Bomb. None of the 8 non-combustible buildings which had [contents] fire in them was reported to have had its contents ignited by radiated heat from the bomb. All except 3 (Buildings 46, 78, and 81) of the 12 non-combustible buildings had at least some unprotected wall openings facing AZ at the time of detonation of the bomb. The contents of these 3 buildings were shielded from direct radiated heat from the bomb by a blank wall, closed fire shutters, or another building. ...

Pages 74-75: “Combustible Construction. a. General. ... combustible buildings were load-bearing, brick-wall structures with wooden floors or roof, or both; steel-frame structures with wooden purlins and studs ... It was established that the probable cause of initial ignition in 23 of the 41 buildings which had fire was as follows: 3 by secondary fire (electrical equipment, stoves and industrial furnaces), and 20 by fire spread from exposing buildings. ... No eyewitness testimony was obtained to the effect that any one of the 41 fire-damaged combustible buildings was ignited directly by flash heat from the bomb.

“b. Direct Ignition by the Atomic Bomb. Although none of the 41 fire-damaged combustible buildings was reported to have been ignited by radiated heat from the bomb, it is considered probable that the contents of a few of the buildings which had unshielded wall openings facing AZ and which were within 4,000 feet of AZ were ignited in this manner. Since wooden poles and other exposed wood, even near GZ, were only flash burned by the bomb, it seems unlikely that exposed wood outside or inside buildings was ignited directly. ...

“c. Ignition by Secondary Fire. It was established that the initial ignition in three combustible buildings (3 [Hiroshima Electric Company’s Yagurashita Substation 900 feet from GZ], 37 [Takano Bath House 4,200 feet from GZ], and 72 [Toyo Light Alloy Company 6,200 feet from GZ]) was probably by secondary fire. These comprise 13 percent of the cases in which the probable cause was determined in this class of building. Building 3, an electric substation, was ignited by short circuits in electric generating and transforming equipment after the blast had collapsed the combustible roof. ... Building 37, a public bath house, was ignited by a hot stove after the blast had collapsed the combustible roof so that it fell on the stove. The combustible debris and contents were completely consumed. Building 72, an aluminum foundry, was ignited by a hot stove ...”

Page 88: “Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims] ... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.”

Page 110: “The most common failure of wood-frame buildings was buckling of the relatively slender columns ... This resulted usually either from a mass displacement of the building away from the blast, or from panel walls being blown in and carrying the columns along.”

Pages 126-8: “Structural damage by blast to multistory, steel- and reinforced concrete-frame structures did not extend beyond 2,000 feet from GZ. The buildings within this radius sustained an average of 12 percent structural damage. The average for all the buildings of this type in Hiroshima was 8 percent.”

Page 96 gives the mean destructive distance for multistory steel and reinforced concrete frame (both earthquake and non-earthquake resistant) buildings at 700 feet, compared to 9,200 feet for Japanese (wood-pole constructed) wooden houses. The damaged areas are proportional to the square of the radius, so although the Japanese wooden houses were only destroyed out to a radius about 13 times greater than modern city buildings, they were destroyed over an that was 173 times greater. Thus, for a similar bomb yield and altitude, the number of damaged buildings in a modern city would be 173 times less than in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

Page 126 states that the effects would have been stronger near ground zero for a lower burst height, but “lowering the height of detonation would have increased the amount of shielding of one structure by another”, thereby preventing the wide-area Mach stem enhanced blast and thermal effects like flash burns. Penney published extensive evidence of blast wave attenuation by the work energy done in causing damage (the force F due to a blast pushing a wall distance D in the direction of the blast uses energy E = FD, so energy is continually lost from the blast wave in a city, in doing damage).

Although fashionable books on Hiroshima tend to print pictures of the “blasted” twisted metal beams of the Odamasa Store (former Taiyo Theatre), USSBS building 52 at 2,800 feet from ground zero, page 322 explains it is an effect of fire: “Severe distortion caused by burning of combustible construction and contents.” Furthermore, similar twisting of metal frames in wooden buildings occurred in the Toyko incendiary attack, but those photos remained Restricted. It is not a special “nuclear” effect, nor are the burned bodies in the streets of Tokyo photographed after the main non-nuclear attack, despite all the polemic and inaccurate claims attacking civil defense.

Volume three states on page 29:

“The atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima, although it was an extremely powerful blast weapon, caused relatively little structural damage to the 81 important bridges. Scattered throughout the entire city, the bridges, 260 to 15,600 feet from ground zero (GZ), connected islands to islands and islands to the mainland, forming an adequate and efficient bridge system. ... impressive evidence of the ability of the bridges to resist the forces of the Hiroshima atomic bomb (air-burst at 2,000 feet0 was found in the facts that (1) 10 of 19 timber bridges studied were undamaged, (2) 10 of 15 concrete bridges had no damage, and (3) 14 of 23 steel bridges were undamaged.”

This is illustrated by the survival of the nuclear target point, the distinctive T-shaped Aioi bridge at the intersection of the Ota and Motoyasu Rivers (located 1,000 feet from ground zero due to the Hiroshima bombing error). Volume three at page 40 explains: “This bridge of plate-girder design received physical damage of a spectacular and interesting nature but it continued to carry unrestricted highway, pedestrian, and street railway traffic. The longitudinal steel girders suffered no great structural damage although a slight lateral deformation indicated that they had been highly stressed.” Bridge 20 over the Motoyasu River at 2,900 feet from ground zero retained clear “shadows” of non-scorched asphalt cast by the hand railings, one of the pieces of evidence which allowed geometric determination of the burst location and altitude.

EMP effects in Hiroshima may have been masked by blast and fire damage, as indicated in volume three, pages 191-6: “Of the 7 substations of the Chugoku Electric Co., the Sendamachi substation and steam-electric plant at 7,700 feet from GZ were heavily damaged by fires which spread to the area. The Otemachi substation, 2,400 feet from GZ, was heavily damaged by blast and fires started by the short-circuited equipment. The Dambara, Misasa, and Eba substations were only slightly damaged at distances from GZ of 5,500 feet and beyond. ... Analysis of the Damage. The Hiroshima substation, 15,000 feet from GZ, was undamaged by blast as a direct effect, but the tremendous overload created by the short-circuited damaged electrical equipment in the city of Hiroshima tripped the circuit breakers in the substation and immediately interrupted all electrical services in the Hiroshima area.”

Above: the reason why there is statistically reliable data on high doses of radiation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is simply the fact that many people - far from being instantly vaporized along with all buildings near ground zero - survived all of the nuclear explosion effects within the Hiroshima firestorm in the Bank of Japan and Geibi Bank Company, and extinguished fires 2-3 hours after the nuclear explosion when firebrands (burning cinders) were blown through broken windows from the wooden areas firestorm surrounding these modern concrete city buildings. The photos above are from the U.S. Department of Defense DCPA Attack Environment Manual 1973, chapters 3 and 8, which documents the successful firefighting in modern buildings within the Hiroshima firestorm. The diagram on the right shows substantial radiation protection factors in modern city buildings from fallout radiation. Amateur fire-fighting in the Hiroshima nuclear attack is more applicable to modern cities today which contain fire-sprinkler systems in vulnerable buildings and fewer wooden houses:

“The study involves the development of techniques to evaluate the effect of fire defenses on building fires caused by a nuclear burst and the incorporation of the fire-defense techniques in a fire-spread model. ... Preliminary computations indicate that within a few hours about 1/4 of the manpower available in a tract can suppress all fires created by the initial ignition of 1/2 or less of the buildings. Most of the manpower, particularly those in the self-help teams, can be diverted to other activities after several minutes of effort. The preliminary results show that ordinary citizens with minimal instruction and training can bring about very pronounced reductions in the total fire damage.”

- Arthur N. Takata, Mathematical Modelling of Fire Defenses, IIT Research Institute, report AD0688941, 1969 (See also part 2, AD0705388.)

The U.S. Department of Defense's 1973 DCPA Attack Environment Manual, chapter 3, panel 26 used the examples of successful amateur fire-fighting modern Western-type city buildings in Hiroshima as proof that people can survive in modern city buildings exposed near ground zero within the firestorm of a nuclear explosion (due to overcrowded wooden housing areas). The data came from reports which remained limited or secret in distribution, however. Panel 27 in chapter 3 of the 1973 DCPA Attack Environment Manual states:

"The evidence from Hiroshima indicates that blast survivors, both injured and uninjured, in buildings later comsumed by fire 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 within the first half hour. The remainder were consumed by fire spread, some as late as 15 hours after the blast."

This proves that the rapid room flashover filmed Upshot-Knothole Encore test effect in a litter-filled wooden and imflammable materials-filled room with a large window facing the fireball with no obstructions or "shadowing", did not occur in the 80% humidity conditions of Hiroshima, far higher than in the drier Nevada test site desert (the humidity in Hiroshima was 80% and in Nagasaki it was 71%, see table VI of William E. Loewe, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report UCRL-90258, 1983). Although humidity has relatively little effect on the ignition energy for thin fine kindling materials, the proportionate effect is far greater for thicker fuels with the same equilibrium moisture content. The thermal flash can dry out damp paper; but it cannot dry out damp wood (a maximum of 0.85 mm of the surface of wood was charred by 50 cal/cm² from a 30 kt test in 1955 as proved by Kyle Laughlin in weapon test report WT-1198, 1957). Therefore, rapid flashover does not occur in realistic city humidity (most cities are beside rivers, lakes or the ocean). It did not occur in most buildings in Hiroshima.

Panel 3 of chapter 3 of the 1973 DCPA Attack Environment Manual also points out that the predictions of thermal burns in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons omit protection due to shadows by tall buildings in modern cities, and duck and cover evasive action: "Persons caught in the open or near windows can also take advantage of the relative slow pace of the thermal pulse from large-yield weapons. ... Further out, even more time would be available. In the light damage area (1 to 2 psi), evasive action within the first four seconds would avoid significant burn injury."

Above: buildings protect against thermal burns and fire ignition by the simple shadowing effect. The badly injured people in Hiroshima in many documented survivor accounts of serious burn and flying glass injuries had moved into a position (behind windows or outdoors) with a direct radial line to the fireball, to watch the B-29 bomb carrying aircraft.

In The Number of Atomic Bombs Equivalent to the Last War Air Attacks on Great Britain and Germany (National Archives piece HO 225/16, 1950, Top Secret for 8 years then Restricted until 1980), the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch points out nuclear war damage and casualties tends to be exaggerated by the media’s incorrect use of Hiroshima. For example, it found that actual WWII damage on Britain was found to be equivalent to 52 Hiroshima bomb’s “for the night raiding conditions on London in the last war, where something like 60% of the population were in houses, 35% in shelter and 5% in the open ...”

Above: conventional warfare dropped 240 kilotons of bombs on Germany in the month of March 1945 alone, equivalent to 15 times the 16 kt Hiroshima nuclear bomb, i.e., one Hiroshima every 2 days during March 1945.

Note that in both WWI and WWII the vast majority of the weapons and explosives used were manufactured during the war itself, so prior disarmamant would not have assured that no weapons were used. One assumption in most disarmament propaganda is that a war is an instant all-out blitz; this assumption was made prior to WWI and was proved false, and again before WWII and was proved false again. The whole of the second-strike capability of hardened silos and hidden submarines designed by RAND Corporation strategists in the late 1950s was specifically aimed at removing any temptation for such a short knock-out war. This second-strike system remains and takes away any rational incentive to launch a surprise all-out attack. This is why, as President Obama stated, the major risk from nuclear weapons is a limited nuclear attack due to terrorism and rogue states. A nuclear attack will have a similar effect to large WWII air raids, but the effects will be easier to mitigate than V2 warheads, if people are informed about the reality of nuclear weapons effects phenomenology, and duck before the blast wave arrives, stamp out fires, and take cover from fallout. EMP will often rapidly disconnect the electrical fire risk by activating circuit breakers in substations, as at the Nevada test site after EMP pick up in long cables which carried thousands of amps from close-in locations to the control point 30 miles away (not only to the 2 psi overpressure range gives in Glasstone and Dolan, which confuses the range to which cables pick up EMP with the range to which currents can be carried by cables!).

Distributing the same explosive energy over many small bombs (rather than a single large bomb) in conventional is actually more damaging, since people have no time to respond near a small bomb that explodes. Additionally, the overpressure-damaged area from a bomb scales up only as the two-thirds power of the explosive energy, and is equivalent to megatons of nuclear weapons per month. The Manhattan Project in 1945 at best could produce only two bombs per month. There is a tendency among many politicians, historians, disarmers, and others to down-play conventional warfare and to exaggerate the effects of nuclear weapons, by misleadingly selective use of statistics. (Source: Overall Report, European War, USSBS, 1945, charts 3 and 4. Chart 1 in this document shows that 2,697,473 tons of bombs were dropped on the occupied countries in Europe by the US Army Air Force and the RAF, including 50.3% on Germany, 21.8% on France and 13.7% on Italy. In 1945, essentially all of the bombing was on Germany. The fact that civilian damage can be accomplished by conventional warfare led the British Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (William Waldegrave) to explain in the 28 July 1988 House of Commons debate on Disarmament (Hansard HC Deb 28 July 1988 vol 138 c778): "Britain and Europe have suffered dreadfully from conventional wars during this century, and modern conventional weapons are many times more destructive than those of 40 years ago. ... That is why we must insist that nuclear arms control must not make Europe safe for conventional war ..." Nuclear weapons were clearly not responsible for WWI or WWII, despite false and misleading anti-civil defense propaganda spread by Noel Baker, Joseph Rotblat and others who found it immoral to use nuclear weapons for ending WWII but were happy to work on them when it happened to suit their personal pet politics. When a terrorist uses a weapon and thousands of people don't duck and cover against blast, glass and radiation, what does the great "free" media of fashionable groupthink prejuduce do then? Laugh at the needless suffering? Pretend that they followed the consensus of politically dogmatic consensus that was justified by the long term ambition to end nuclear deterrence and go back to conventional war, and to do this by telling lies about civil defense? Or do what it usually does, and learn the lessons when it is too late to prevent needless suffering? here.)

London received 71 major raids (over 100 tons/raid) in the Blitz from 7 Sept 1940 to 16 May 1941, consisting of 18,291 tons or 18.291 kilotons of high explosive, over twice the blast yield (8 kt) of the 16 kt Hiroshima nuclear bomb (O’Brien, Civil Defence, 1955, Appendix IV, p681). These explosives were mainly 50 kg and 250 kg (B’Brien, p505), an average of about 0.1 ton of explosive per bomb. The scaled area equivalent megatonnage for overpressure damage areas and casualties from the London Blitz is therefore 4 thermonuclear weapons, each with a total yield of 2 megatons (1 megaton of which is blast):

(4 bombs) x (1 megaton TNT blast yield)^2/3 = (182,910 bombs of 0.1 ton each) x (10^-7 megatons blast yield)^2/3.

In a surprise attack, conventional weapons give practically no time for defensive countermeasures, unlike the slower flash prior which acts as a warning prior to the delayed air blast and fallout arrival over the wide areas of destruction for a single nuclear weapon, as explained by Professor Joseph O. Hirschfelder, “The Effects of Atomic Weapons”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August-September 1950, vol. VI, no. 8-9, pp. 236-40 and 285-6 (quotation from page 238):

“Because of the comparatively long duration of the thermal radiation, exposed personnel can greatly reduce their exposure by ducking behind an obstacle or dropping prone. Ducking behind an obstacle would also considerably reduce the exposure to gamma rays and place the person in a more sheltered position to withstand the flying debris which will shower the area a few seconds later when the blast wave passes. It takes the blast wave one second to reach one-half mile, three seconds to reach one mile, and seven seconds to reach two miles.”

Dr Samuel Glasstone in 1950 compared psychological fears of radiation to ignorance of gas warfare in Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, page 289, paragraph 8.116: “perhaps the most important application of radiological warfare would be its psychological effect as a mystery weapon, analogous to the initial use of poison gas ... The obvious method to combat radiological warfare in this case is to understand and be prepared for it.” By educating people in simple effective fallout countermeasures, the use of fallout in warfare by ground bursting nuclear weapons may be discouraged, like gas in WWII. In the event of a disaster, panic can be replaced by actions that will reduce the danger. The gas illusion:

“In the next war, with its overwhelming air raids, its gases blotting out life over square miles, its bacilli, possibly its rays, munitions works and the services of the rear will be special objects of attack.”

- Irwin Will, The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1921, p77 (best-seller first published by Dutton in April 1921, 23rd printing, October 1921).

“The chemical Warfare Research Department [prior to 1927] had been making experiments to determine how long persons could remain under certain conditions in a ‘gas-proof’ room ... a broadcast in February [1927] by Professor Noel Baker, on ‘Foreign Affairs and How They Affect Us’ ... claimed, ‘all gas experts are agreed that it would be impossible to devise means to protect the civil population from this form of attack’. The Chemical Warfare Research Department emphatically disputed the accuracy both of the details of the picture and of this general statement. They considered it unfortunate that statements of this nature should have been broadcast to the public, particularly after the Cabinet’s decision that the time was not ripe for education of the public in defensive measures.”

- T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence (official U.K. history), 1955, p31.

Like civil defense attacking polemics today, Noel-Baker had made completely false claims about "all experts" agreeing that gas masks and civil defense are useless in that influential and dangerous February 1927 BBC radio broadcast, Foreign Affairs and How they Affect Us, which as O'Brien states, the British committee on civil defence chickened out of censoring or even bothering to correct. Like all committees, they agreed that there was a problem, but then agreed to do nothing because they didn't want the work of censoring all BBC hot air on gas. In the true spirit of British democratic debate, they only considered censorship, not standing up to the falsehood and demolishing it with facts. The Cabinet had decided it was secret, so their hands were tied as they were bound by the Official Secrets Act. However, Noel-Baker was not telling the truth and 1915 British gas mask inventor Professor J. B. S. Haldane (who one of the experts on the gas civil defence committee advising the Cabinet) had published a very different view of gas warfare in his 1925 book Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare. It is a fact therefore that was a lie for Noel-Baker to make his claim on the consensus of experts that he did in 1927. Here are Noel-Baker's lying february 1927 BBC broadcast words of political Correctness and groupthink ideology:

“‘In the first phase of the next war,’ says a high authority, ‘there is little doubt that the belligerents will resort to gas bomb attack on a vast scale. This form of attack upon great cities, such as London or Paris, might entail the loss of millions of lives in the course of a few hours. Gas clouds so formed would be heavier than air and would flow into the cellars and tubes in which the population had taken refuge. As the bombardment continued, the gas would thicken up until it flowed through the streets of the city in rivers. All gas experts are agreed that it would be impossible to devise means to protect the civil population from this form of attack’."

(Source: Peter Adey, Aerial Life, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p189.)

Noel-Baker, athlete and Quaker disarmer typical of the ideologues exaggerating weapons effects and denying facts about the efficiency of civil defence countermeasures today, won a Nobel Peace prize and become a Lord, but his lies about civil defence helped to enable Hitler to murder millions. I have yet to find any historian who addresses the ideology whereby lies about civil defence for utopian dreams of disarmament are compared to Adolf Hitler's or Joseph Stalin's ideological lies of eugenics or Marxism; all are ideologies where "the ends justify the means" and since the ends are not achieveable in the real world, all of these ideologies which rely on lying fear-mongering about the alleged evils of weapons, minority races, or genuine democracy. His ranting failed to achieve peace and actually made the situation worse, removign support for Churchill and allowing public empathy to side with Hitler even to the point of the British football being forced to give the Nazi salute in Germany. Support for appeasement due in large part to the anti-civil defense groupthink polemics in the 1930s which played up WWI effects, but Noel-Baker did not do this by accident or genuine error, since he was still continuing the same inaccurate anti-civil defense ranting in 1980 to deny any possibility of civil defense being of value under any circumstances (this time by examining only the worst and least probable possibility, proved in WWII to be a contrived, unbalanced piece of sophistry. This is like denying the value of hospitals, seat-belts or life-boats by the trick of only considering worst-case eventualities where they are of minimal utility. House of Lords Home and Civil Defence Debate on 5 March 1980 (Hansard, vol 406 cc260-386):

“... 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. ... My Lords, the first atom bomb weighed two kilogrammes—less than 5 lbs [sic]. ... Against such a danger civil defence offers us no help ...”

But this is another falsehood of the same type as his 1927 BBC broadcast on gas: as WWII indicated (where gas was not used against Britain or Germany), by reducing the scale of the disaster if a terrorist or accidental nuclear explosion should occur, civil defense could help avoid escalation to a massive war by minimizing the effects even within war itself, stabilizing the political situation.

Denying civil defense facts, apart from maximising casualties, is a constraining act which forces only military responses in a crisis. Noel-Baker was never openly criticised for his propaganda and also dismissed civil defence against biological warfare in a letter to the New Scientist (14 Dec 1961, no 265, p700), after they published an article called “Biological agents in warfare and defence” by Dr LeRoy D. Fothergill of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps:

“May I express my gratitude to you for publishing the article ... Dr Fothergill writes with admirable restraint ... very little progress has been made in ... defending the citizen ... there is at present no defence against them, and none likely in the measurable future.”

Fothergill’s article (aimed at raising concern to encourage more research and defences) gave outdoor data for wind dispersion of spores released by a ship off the Californian coast in 1950. Being inside with the windows closed gives good protection while the cloud is blown past (even anthrax has a half life of only 25 minutes outdoors in bright sunlight in dry air and less in humid air; see Field Manual FM 3-3, 1992, Fig. B-1). Noel-Baker deceptively seized on an omission as if proof that countermeasures do not exist, exactly what he had done in 1927 when the government kept civil defence experiments and weapons effects facts secret.

“In May 1929, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom sponsored a conference in Frankfurt on ‘modern methods of warfare and the protection of civil populations’. ... While the overall objective of the proceedings was to enhance pleas for disarmament, individual participants did so by calling attention to the stakes of future wars ... conference speakers emphasized that ‘the worst of the past gives little idea of what would be the horrible reality of a future war,’ one where ‘the civil population ... will be massacred by gas bombs from thousands of aeroplanes ...’”

– Professor Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp149-50 (citing Getrud Woker, “The Effects of Chemical Warfare,” in Les methodes modernes de guerre et la protection des populations civiles / Chemical Warfare: An Abridged Report of Papers Read at an International Conference at Frankfurt, London, 1930, p45).

“Most of the books and pamphlets on the subject seem to me to be of the nature of propaganda ... a great many opponents of the Government state that such things as gas-masks and gas-proof rooms are completely useless, that London could be wiped out in a single air raid ... a frightful responsibility rests on those who expose British children to such a death in order to score a point ... In 1915 ... I was at that time a captain in a British infantry battalion and was brought out of the trenches to St. Omer, where I assisted my father in the design of some of the first gas masks. ... one would be safe in a phosgene concentration of one part per thousand, of which a single breath would probably kill an unprotected man. Hence in practice such a mask is a very nearly complete protection. ... These gases can penetrate into houses, but very slowly. So even in a badly-constructed house one is enormously safer than in the open air. ... even if a new gas is produced, it is very unlikely that it will get through our respirators. ... Now all the poisonous gases and vapours used in war are heavier than air, so it is thought that they would inevitably flood cellars ... But within a short time it would be mixed with many times its volume of air. Now air containing one part in 10,000 of phosgene is extremely poisonous. But its density exceeds that of air by only one part in 4,000.”

- Professor J. B. S. Haldane, A.R.P., 1938.

“Ever since the Armistice, three classes of writers have been deluding the long-suffering British public with lurid descriptions of their approaching extermination in the next war ... pure sensationalists, ultra-pacifists, and military experts. ... they do want to get their manuscript accepted for the feature page of the Daily Drivel or the Weekly Wail. In order to do that, they must pile on the horrors thick ... The amount of damage done by such alarmists cannot be calculated, but is undoubtedly very great. ... It is significant that they concentrate almost unanimously on poison gas, and that the dangers of high explosive and incendiary bombs are seldom stressed. The reason, of course, is obvious – poison gas has a much greater news value. It is still a new and mysterious form of warfare, it is something which people do not understand, and what they do not understand they can readily be made to fear. ... Millions of people, perhaps, have been impressed by the authority and reputation of Mr H. G. Wells into believing that this picture represents the plain truth.”

- Professor James Kendall (a 1917 Chemical Warfare Liaison Officer), Breathe Freely! The Truth About Poison Gas, G. Bell & Sons, London, 1938, pp. 11-13.

“... in spite of the tremendous scale of the violations it still took the Germans five years, from January 1933 when Hitler came in to around January 1938, before they had an army capable of standing up against the French and the British. At any time during that five-year period if the British and the French had had the will, they probably could have stopped the German rearmament program ... one of the most important aspects of the interwar period [was] the enormous and almost uncontrollable impulse toward disarmament ... As late as 1934, after Hitler had been in power for almost a year and a half, [British Prime Minister] Ramsey McDonald still continued to urge the French that they should disarm themselves by reducing their army by 50 per cent, and their air force by 75 per cent. In effect, MacDonald and his supporters urged one of the least aggressive nations in Europe to disarm itself to a level equal with their potential attackers, the Germans. ... Probably as much as any other single group I think that these men of good will can be charged with causing World War II. [Emphasis by Kahn.]. ... At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to ‘retaliate’ if they attacked him. ... an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs ”

- H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, pp. 390-1 and 403.

Future President John F. Kennedy college thesis, Why England Slept, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1962 (first published 1940), pages 7, 169, 170 and 179:

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

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

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

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

Kennedy stuck to his guns with civil defense. After the first Russian nuclear weapon test, he wrote a public letter to President Truman warning of the risk of an "atomic Pearl Harbor", published in the New York Times of 10 October 1949. Kennedy also attended the 22-26 June 1959 nuclear war congressional hearings which featured Herman Kahn on civil defense, and Kennedy used the supposed missile gap as the basis for his Presidential election campaign (which in the even only appeared in about 1975 when the USSR achieved parity and went on bankrupting itself by churning out more missiles). Kennedy set up the public fallout shelter allocation in 1961. All of this goes back to his time in the American Embassy in 1939 and the research he did into the connection between British civil defense apathy in the 1930s and appeasement (even encouragement) of fear exploiting Nazi thugs. He could see that aggressors are all alike: they are all self-deluded, they all have an ideology, and they all use fear-mongering lies.

Professor Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge University Press, 2012) finds that (p176): “a variety of voices reflected on the enormous destructive potential of air power in interwar Britain, and many determined to prevent the imagined horrors of the next war from coming true. Several important constituent bodies of the nation – including key segments of women, trades unionists, and members of the state itself – worked fervently for disarmament and to challenge efforts to accept aerial and perhaps even chemical attacks as somehow inevitable in a future war.”

Pro-disarmament propaganda which was based entirely on exaggeration of weapons and war effects (ignoring the real dangers of ideologies like racist eugenics and ethnic cleansing) and denials of civil defense efficiency went largely unopposed until 1938, partly due to official secrecy to keep both the enemy and the public ignorant (while they were being sold exaggerations by the media). To be heard, disarmament activists had the temerity to falsely dismiss all countermeasures, to exaggerate the scale of potential attacks, and to ignore the fact that countermeasures were a tried and tested solution (unlike disarmament without civil defense, i.e. complete vulnerability). Public apathy allowed doom exaggerations to be mainly supported or allowed to circulate without correction. How many newspapers, popular historians, or TV stations stand up and publish the facts on nuclear weapons and Hiroshima today? None. Civil defense has never had any backing and has always been violently opposed by ideologies which prefer war. When Noel-Baker claimed to have an "authority" which proved a consensus of gas war experts who knew gas had no countermeasure, he was simply lying to the nation. In any case, his claim that science is determined by a religious type consensus, was again lying to the nation, because science is distinguished from political agreements by its factual evidence rather than its fashionable popularity and the number of votes its adverts gain. Never mind how "unpopular" or "unfashionable" it is for a gas mask or duck and cover evasive action to protect the public, it is fact:

For a full analysis of the small amount of fallout measured in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see W. McRaney and J. McRaney, Radiation dose reconstruction U.S. occupation forces in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 1945-1946, DNA 5512F, 1980, and for a comparison of the fallout pattern to self-induced rainout computer predictions see Charles R. Molenkamp, An Introduction to Self-Induced Rainout, URCL-52669, 1979, and Numerical Simulation of Self-Induced Rainout Using a Dynamic Convective Cloud Model, UCRL-83583, 1980. Neutron-induced activity dose rate and decay rate data from the 2002 Japanese dosimetry project (DS02) is linked here and is verified by neutron induced activity in debris from both cities. The only fully scientific (quantitative) discussion of the relative contributions of initial flash radiation, neutron induced activity, and fallout as a function of burst altitude is given in Chapter 5 (Nuclear Radiation Phenomena) of Dolan’s effects manual EM-1.

White shows that Hiroshima’s Post Office, 0.12 mile from ground zero, was gutted by fire hours later well in the firestorm, but over 50% of its 400 occupants had already survived the explosion and escaped. Photos of the final burned out areas show firestorm effects which occurred after survivors had time to escape, not unsurvivable, instant Encore-type thermal radiation-induced newspaper-filled inflammable room flashover in a dry desert. The firestorm in Hiroshima took 2-3 hours to reach a maximum intensity. The secret (full) U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey May 1947 report on Hiroshima interviewed over 1,000 survivors, and their evidence was that the fires were started by the blast wave overturning the obsolete charcoal braziers in obsolete city-centre wooden housing slums, which were full of inflammable paper screens and bamboo furnishings. The report shows that no building in Hiroshima had any fire-sprinkler system, and that the only fires started inside modern buildings by thermal radiation were in black coloured (heat absorbing) blackout air-raid curtains within 2,500 feet of air zero (close to ground zero). These and firebrands entering the Bank of Hiroshima through broken windows were easily extinguished by survivors with water buckets, in the centre of the "firestorm".

This obsolete mechanism caused the firestorm, not thermal flash ignition, which cannot directly ignite sound wood. The danger from exaggerations of weapons effects in order to underplay civil defense and leave yourself vulnerable to an enemy was clearly demonstrated in the 1930s, when British Government scientists exaggerated war effects. They exaggerated the effects by using the July 1917 surprise attack bombing data, when people stood outdoors during the air raid, or watched the explosions ignorantly from behind glass windows: exactly the situation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were again surprise attacks. This exaggeration by using 1917 data led to Nazi appeasement in the 1930s, when they could have been stopped with minimal casualties if civil defense effectiveness was understood earlier. Civil defense did work to prevent a poison gas attack by the Nazis, despite gas masks never being 100% effective: the efficiency of the countermeasure was sufficient that the Nazis never tried to use their 12,000 tons stockpile of tabun nerve gas in WWII.

Civil defense did not need to be 100% effective in order to remove the attractiveness of "weapons of mass destruction" to coercive thugs wishing to threaten civilian targets. Exaggerations of weapons effects, by downplaying or ignoring simple countermeasure effectiveness prior to World War I, actually encouraged the warmongers to plan for WWI prior to 1914 in the belief of achieving a quick victory using big guns and other offensive weapons. By ignoring the efficiency of simple improvised blast and flying missile defenses like trenches against explosive blast, shelling, mortar fire, shrapnel and machine guns in the American Civil War, European planners exaggerated weapons effects predictions.

This exaggeration led to WWI by falsely predicting a quick and easy outcome from the use of offensive bombardment and machine guns against completely exposed and unprotected opponents. Simple trenches and gas masks in WWI proved highly effective at reducing casualties, thereby turning the war into a protracted affair that Germany had not prepared for. Thus, two world wars have proven conclusively that deceptive exaggerations and attacks on defensive countermeasures against explosive and contaminating weapons effects like blast and persistent mustard and nerve gas did not guarantee peace. Instead, weapons effects exaggerations for "peace" actually encouraged thugs to acquire precisely the most scare-mongered weapons for coercive intimidation, and to use them to threaten the unprepared into appeasement, causing wars.

Some myths debunked: 1. nobody was "vaporized": people are 70% water which has far too high a specific heat capacity and latent heat of vaporization even at ground zero, 2. fallout and neutron induced activity were insignificant compared to the initial nuclear radiation doses, because of the height of burst, 3. the long term effects of radiation were trivial compared to the natural cancer rate in an unexposed control group, and genetic effects were insignificant, 4. conventional weapons killed more people and resulted in more deaths and suffering because conventional wars lasted for years: the "blunt knife" is more dangerous overall, because it is likely to slip and cause injuries, because you need to use more force on a blunt knife to achieve any given result, 5. shallow underground bursts avert collateral damage around bunkers, while retaining credible deterrence. Downwind fallout can be washed or brushed off, and nuclear radiation is attenuated by buildings, 6. nuclear weapons with individually larger areas of effects are actually easier to protect against than an immense number of conventional weapons, because the blast wave is delayed for a longer period of time after the bright visible flash over most of the damaged area: fashionable lying "films" falsely superimpose the sound on the flash to "discredit" civil defense, one of the most sinister deceptions. The same applies to fallout: the further an effect has to travel, the longer it takes to arrive, so there is time to evacuate or to take cover in a safe building. Conventional weapons failed to deter two world wars, which explains why Cold War nuclear weapons were relied upon for deterrence. Anti-civil defense propaganda for nuclear disarmament politics is reducing not only deterrence but public safeguards against nuclear terrorism. Nuclear disarmament will put the clock back to the pre-nuclear era of conventional world wars. Nuclear safeguards and inspections will simply drive proliferation further underground, or risk war in themselves (just as 1930s efforts to oppose proliferation risked starting a war).

“If individuals feel they can do little about possible dangers, they have to flee from such threats by the use of denial. ... such individuals are not prepared to deal with the danger situation when it appears. ... In the early days of training for nuclear disaster, we stressed the number of casualties that even a nominal bomb could produce. Our listeners were alarmed, thinking, ‘How could we care for a thousand burn cases when only four or five such cases demoralize our hospital?’ The result of this approach was to lose our audiences.”

– Albert J. Glass, MD, “Mass Psychology: the Determinants of Behavior under Emergency Conditions,” Mass Burns: Proceedings of a Workshop, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. (linked here), pp. 11-20 (quotations from pages 13-14).

Exposed burned skin evaporates water at the rate of 10 litres/m²/day, which dries out and cools the body temperature, and this water evaporation rate is the actual physical mechanism behind the well-known dehydration, hypothermia, and shock in serious burns victims. The exposed burned skin also offers direct entry to the body tissues for bacterial infections (sepsis) which overwhelm the immune system and in combination with lowered temperature due to evaporation, escalate to pulmonary complications, and also allow direct contamination with radioactive fallout particles after a nuclear attack. Because severely burned victims reject food, they soon lose the energy needed to recover due to the cooling from water evaporation from the burned areas. At Hiroshima nothing was done to address the causal mechanism for burns mortality, instead efforts were made to treat dehydration by providing more fluids and antibiotics for infection. Reversing this whole approach, in order to actually prevent the underlying causes of these secondary effects in an emergency situation (nuclear attack), it has been found that simply covering exposed severe burns wounds with plastic film has been proved to avoid or reduce the immense evaporation of water which actually causes all of these immediate dehydration, shock, and hypothermia effects, and also much of the infection and contamination danger in the first place.

See Carl Jelenko, III, MD, “The Burn Surface as a Parasite: Water Loss, Caloric Demands, and Therapeutic Implications” and E. J. L. Lowbury, “The Prevention of Sepsis in Burns” (which shows in table 2 that 70% mortality from infected burns is reduced to 5% mortality if the burns are not infected) in Mass Burns: Proceedings of a Workshop, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. (linked here).

Think Plastic Wrap as Wound Dressing for Thermal Burns

ACEP (American College of Emergency Physicians) News

August 2008

By Patrice Wendling

Elsevier Global Medical News

CHICAGO - Ordinary household plastic wrap makes an excellent, biologically safe wound dressing for patients with thermal burns en route to the emergency department or burn unit. The Burn Treatment Center at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Iowa City, has advocated prehospital and first-aid use of ordinary plastic wrap or cling film on burn wounds for almost two decades with very positive results, Edwin Clopton, a paramedic and ED technician, explained during a poster session at the annual meeting of the American Burn Association. “Virtually every ambulance in Iowa has a roll of plastic wrap in the back,” Mr. Clopton said in an interview. “We just wanted to get the word out about the success we’ve had using plastic wrap for burn wounds,” he said. Dr. G. Patrick Kealey, newly appointed ABA president and director of emergency general surgery at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, said in an interview that plastic wrap reduces pain, wound contamination, and fluid losses. Furthermore, it’s inexpensive, widely available, nontoxic, and transparent, which allows for wound monitoring without dressing removal. “I can’t recall a single incident of it causing trouble for the patients,” Dr. Kealey said.

Professor Eugene P. Wigner, “Why Civil Defense: A consideration of its effects if war comes, if not, and on the likelihood of nuclear war”, The Technology Review, v66 (1964), no. 8, pp. 21-23:

“No one, least of all the soldier, thought it ill-fitting or cowardly to seek protection ... rather than to meet enemy shells fatally in the open. ... Let us assume, for example, that the United States and the Soviet Union reach some accord on gradual disarmament, and that many weapons and missiles are destroyed. ... If some small country, ruled by a dictator, built or otherwise acquired a few megaton-size weapons, its ruler might be tempted to threaten the U.S. with a few bombs with primitive delivery systems, such as mined merchant ships or concealed bombs in cities, to gain a free hand in his part of the world. ... It often has been said that the protection of our population might make our leaders more aggressive ... The absence of civil defense also could generate aggressiveness in leaders aware of the advantages of striking the first blow.”

'Restricted' classified U.K. Home Office Scientific Adviser's Branch journal Fission Fragments, W. F. Greenhalgh, Editor, London, Issue Number 3, August 1962, pages 22-26:

'The fire hazard from nuclear weapons

'by G. R. Stanbury, BSc, ARCS, F.Inst.P.

'We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation from nuclear attack. We hope to show that there is good scientific justification for the assessments we have made, and we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ...

'Firstly ... the collapse of buildings would snuff out any incipient fires. Air cannot get into a pile of rubble, 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This is not just guess work; it is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb [V1 cruise missile] incidents in London supported by a wealth of experience gained generally in the last war.

'Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general.

'Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited, it by no means follows that a continuing and destructive fire will develop.

'The effect of shielding in a built-up area was strikingly demonstrated by the firemen of Birmingham about 10 years ago with a 144:1 scale model of a sector of their city which they built themselves; when they put a powerful lamp in the appropriate position for an air burst they found that over 50% of the buildings were completely shielded. More recently a similar study was made in Liverpool over a much larger area, not with a model, but using the very detailed information provided by fire insurance maps. The result was similar.

'It is not so easy to assess the chance of a continuing fire. A window of two square metres would let in about 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 [which burns for 15 minutes, not the few seconds or less for a nuclear flash] the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5; in a large room it is very much less.

'Thus even if thermal radiation does fall on easily inflammable material which ignites, the chance of a continuing fire developing is still quite small. In the Birmingham and Liverpool studies, where the most generous values of fire-starting chances were used, the fraction of buildings set on fire was rarely higher than 1 in 20.

'And this is the basis of the assertion [in Nuclear Weapons] that we do not think that fire storms are likely to be started in British cities by nuclear explosions, because in each of the five raids in which fire storms occurred (four on Germany - Hamburg, Darmstadt, Kassel, Wuppertal and a "possible" in Dresden, plus Hiroshima in Japan - it may be significant that all these towns had a period of hot dry weather before the raid) the initial fire density was much nearer 1 in 2. Take Hamburg for example:

'On the night of 27/28th July 1943, by some extraordinary chance, 190 tons of bombs were dropped into one square mile of Hamburg. This square mile contained 6,000 buildings, many of which were [multistorey wooden] medieval.

'A density of greater than 70 tons/sq. mile had not been achieved before even in some of the major fire raids, and was only exceeded on a few occasions subsequently. The effect of these bombs is best shown in the following diagram, each step of which is based on sound trials and operational experience of the weapons concerned.

'102 tons of high explosive bombs dropped -> 100 fires

'88 tons of incendiary bombs dropped, of which:

'48 tons of 4 pound magnesium bombs = 27,000 bombs -> 8,000 hit buildings -> 1,600 fires

'40 tons of 30 pound gel bombs = 3,000 bombs -> 900 hit buildings -> 800 fires

'Total = 2,500 fires

'Thus almost every other building [1 in 2 buildings] was set on fire during the raid itself, and when this happens it seems that nothing can prevent the fires from joining together, engulfing the whole area and producing a fire storm (over Hamburg the column of smoke, observed from aircraft, was 1.5 miles in diameter at its base and 13,000 feet high; eyewitnesses on the ground reported that trees were uprooted by the inrushing air).

'When the density was 70 tons/square mile or less the proportion of buildings fired during the raid was about 1 in 8 or less and under these circumstances, although extensive areas were burned out, the situation was controlled, escape routes were kept open and there was no fire storm.'

Glasstone and Dolan, “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” 1977, paras 12.14, 12.17, 12.22, pp. 545-7:

“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, because of the warm summer weather ... 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 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, and there would have been fewer casualties from flash burns. ... The death rate in Japan was greatest among individuals who were in the open at the time of the explosions; it was less for persons in residential (wood-frame and plaster) structures and least of all for those in concrete buildings. 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. ... 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.”

Above: eighteen people visiting Hiroshima survived and took trains home to Nagasaki and then survived the second explosion. Nine survivors of Hiroshima who travelled to Nagasaki avoided blasted glass and flying debris at the second nuclear explosion because they knew that the blast effect (breaking windows and blasting glass fragments and other debris horizontally) was slightly delayed after the flash (like thunder after lightning), so they had time to literally duck and cover from part of the heat flash and horizontally flying glass and debris. Robert Trumbull - the New York Times Pacific and Asia war correspondent, 1941-79 who had been in Iwo Jima - documented the facts in his 1957 book Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Personal Experiences of Nine Men who Lived Through Both Atomic Bombings. Here are their experiences and ages on 9 August 1945:

Kenshi Hirata, 26, accountant at Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company, Hiroshima (Trumbull pp. 25, 61, and 119): “‘through an open window what looked like a golden lightning flash ... had blown up out of the earth. The weird light was everywhere. I immediately thought of an air-raid, and hurled myself prostrate in the passage.’ Hirata’s quick action probably saved him serious injury, if not his life. ... Because it was the middle of summer, which is exceptionally hot in southern Japan, most of the people of Hiroshima were very thinly clad that morning, so they had less than ordinary protection against burns, Hirata observed. ... [Back in Nagasaki] ‘I shouted to my aged father ... ‘Lie face downward!’ In the immediate moment I was expecting that terrific explosion blast and roar.’ ... Kenshi and his father were unharmed. ‘But in two or three minutes ... I saw people running out of their houses, holding their hands over injuries on their heads, faces, and bodies. Most of these were wounds caused by flying pieces of glass.”

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 29, Mitsubishi ship designer who died in 2010, aged 93 (Trumbull pp. 28 and 109): “‘Suddenly there was a flash like the lighting of a huge magnesium flare,’ Yamaguchi recalls. The young ship designer was so well drilled in air-raid precaution techniques that he reacted automatically. He flung his hands to his head, covering his eyes with his fingers and stopping his ears with his two thumbs. Simultaneously he dropped to the ground, face down. ... ‘As I prostrated myself, there came a terrific explosion’ ... [The left side of his face and arm facing the fireball were burned, and he returned to Nagasaki, experiencing the second nuclear explosion on the sixth-floor of the headquarters office of Mitsubishi.] Spelling out the danger of flying glass, he urged them to keep windows open during an air-raid alert, and at the instant of the flash to seize at once upon any shelter available ... the second A-bomb confirmed young Yamaguchi’s words, exploding in a huge ball of fire about a mile away. Yamaguchi’s lecture ... was not lost upon his colleagues. With the young designer’s words still fresh in their minds, they leaped for the cover of desks and tables. ‘As a result,’ said Yamaguchi, ‘my section staff suffered the least in that building. In other sections there was a heavy toll of serious injuries from flying glass’.”

Shigeyoshi Morimoto, 46, maker of kites for air defense of Japanese ships, used his Hiroshima experience to take cover in Nagasaki after seeing the flash, before the windows were blasted in. Tsuitaro Doi, 47, was on his Hiroshima hotel bed, a thin floor mattress called a “futon” when he saw the explosion flash (Trumbull pages 42 and 106-7): “I quickly rolled over and covered my head with the futon ... The floor of the room and my futon were covered with tiny bits of shattered glass. I noticed that I had a slight cut on one arm, and another on the leg, where I wasn’t covered. ... [He returned home to Nagasaki] “Doi was telling his wife in detail about the bomb. ‘If you ever see that flash,’ he said, ‘immediately prostrate yourself on the floor, or the ground if you are outside. ...’ As he was saying these words, the windows lighted as if giant searchlights had been turned directly into the house. ... Mrs Doi startled, jumped to her feet impulsively and turned to run out of the house. Doi grabbed her and pulled her and the baby down as the blast wave shattered all the glass in the little cottage and ripped off the wood and paper sliding doors. As the flimsy house steadied Doi opened his eyes, and saw that the interior of the room was a wreck. But neither he nor his wife nor the baby was hurt.”

Shinji Kinoshita, 50, was hit by falling roof slabs in a Hiroshima warehouse but returned home to Nagasaki and was just outside the door of his family home when the bomb fell (Trumbull p105): “he was momentarily blinded by a flash that seemed to cover the sky. Like the other survivors of the Hiroshima attack, Kinoshita realized at once what the strange, blinding light meant, and reacted without a second’s hesitation. He threw himself face first on the ground, at the same time shouting into the house, ‘Cover yourself with futons!’”

Masao Komatsu, 40, was hit by falling beam in a Hiroshima warehouse and was on board a train in Nagasaki when the bomb fell (Trumbull, p101): “the interior of the coach was bathed in a stark, white light. Komatsu immediately dived for the floor. ‘Get down!’ he screamed at the other passengers. Some recovered sufficiently from the daze of the blinding light to react promptly to his warning. Seconds later came the deafening crack of the blast, and a shock wave that splintered all the windows on both sides of the train. The passengers who had not dived under the seats were slashed mercilessly from waist to head by glass flying at bullet speed.”

Takejiro Nishioka, 55, publisher of Nagasaki’s leading newspaper in 1945 who became Governor of the Nagasaki Prefecture in 1957. In Hiroshima on business on 6 August 1945, he survived the first nuclear explosion and noted the delay of the blast wave after the visible flash. When he returned to Nagasaki he was not allowed to publish the facts, and only survived by diving into an air raid shelter when he saw the flash after a single B-29 appeared over the city. He explained (Trumbull, p92):

“I had observed in Hiroshima that when the flash came, there would be a few seconds before it was followed by the blast wave ... I have often bitterly regretted the law that gagged me as a newspaperman, and forced me to confine my communications to the governor’s ear alone.”

Japan only permitted civil defense advice against nuclear attack to be published after the second nuclear attack on Nagasaki, which was too late. Even at ground zero, the blast wave was delayed after the first flash because of the height of burst, so quick reactions could limit exposure to flying glass. Proof of the efficiency of duck and cover advice against the blast wind and flying debris was given by Nagasaki’s police chief Mizuguchi, who had been told Nishioka’s advice by the Nagasaki governor and had passed it to his first-grade middle school student son, who was with three friends in Daikoku-Machi street, Nagasaki, when the flash occurred (Trumbull pp. 114-5):

“The police chief’s son remembered his father’s warning at once. Hauling his friend with him by the hand, he dashed for a shelter on the pavement ... The two boys in the shelter were saved; the other two, who stayed on the street, seemed to vanish ... Mizuguchi’s wife, at the same moment, happened to be standing just outside their house, under the eves, with a baby in her arms. The instant she saw the flash, she recalled her husband’s words of the night before and rushed back into the house. She opened a closet and, with the baby still in her arms, crowded inside and pulled shut the sliding door. ... The room, and the area outside the house, was covered with innumerable sharp, pointed slivers of shattered glass. Clearly, she had escaped serious injury by shutting herself in the closet. ...

“Nishioka was bitterly upbraided by Hiromasa Nakamura, chief of the foreign affairs sections of the Nagasaki Prefectural Office, for not briefing other government officials on the happenings at Hiroshima and the efficacy of bomb shelters. ... ‘I could only tell him that I was indeed anxious to tell everyone in Nagasaki what I had learned, but that if I had done so, I would have been liable for violation of the law against spreading ‘wild rumors’, and could have been arrested and convicted.”

Akira Iwanaga (25, engineer at Mitsubishi ship yard, a friend and colleague of Yamaguchi). After surviving at Hiroshima, he arrived in Nagasaki just as the bomb exploded, aboard the same train as another double-survivor, Masao Komatsu (Trumbull p101). Sakajiro Mishima, 36, dockside worker at Mitsubishi ship yard, also survived both nuclear explosions. Yamaguchi’s friend Kuniyoshi Sato, along with Masako Suga and her baby boy and Hiroshi Shibuta were all also double-survivors of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another double-survivor is Mrs Kazuko Sadamaru (aged 20 in 1945), who was interviewed aged 80 in 2005 in The Observer (London, Sunday 24 July 2005). She was a nurse in a Nagasaki’s Ohmura Naval Hospital but on 5 August 1945 had to accompany a soldier to Hiroshima by train, where she survived and returned to Nagasaki before the second bomb:

‘“I never wanted to speak out about my experience. I haven’t published anything or talked to anyone because I didn’t want anyone to know. I only became a nurse because I wanted to devote myself to patients and the country. I never dreamt Japan would lose the war. I worked and worked believing Japan would win. I cannot forget the events on 6 and 9 August 1945. I saw the flashes and the mushroom clouds of both A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So many were exposed to the A-bomb but I am one of the few people who have experienced the two bombs, and still I am in good health. It was fate that I was there, but I had good luck in that I survived both bombs.” Despite being close to both bombs, she suffered only a temporary abnormal white blood cell count and loss of hair.”’

“No statistically significant increase in major birth defects or other untoward pregnancy outcomes was seen among children of survivors. ... The incidence of major birth defects (594 cases or 0.91%) among the 65,431 registered pregnancy terminations for which parents were not biologically related accords well with a large series of contemporary Japanese births at the Tokyo Red Cross Maternity Hospital, where radiation exposure was not involved and overall malformation frequency was 0.92%. No untoward outcome showed any relation to parental radiation dose or exposure. ... Since many birth defects, especially congenital heart disease, are not detected in the neonatal period, repeat examinations were conducted at age eight to ten months. Among the 18,876 children re-examined at that age, 378 had one or more major birth defect (2.00%), compared with 0.97% within two weeks of birth. Again, there was no evidence of relationships to radiation dose.”

– RERF, Birth defects among the children of atomic-bomb survivors (Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons explosion irradiated survivors).

The Hiroshima-Nagasaki nuclear attacks RERF life-span study (LSS) from 1950 to 2000 for leukemia deaths and from 1958 to 1998 for solid cancer occurrence showed that for 49,204 survivors in the leukemia study group, there were an excess of 94 leukemia deaths attributed to radiation, risk of 94/49,204 or 0.191% (above the natural number of cancers in the unexposed control group), and an excess of 848 solid (tumour) cancer deaths in 44,635 survivors, a risk of 848/44,635 or 1.90%. In each case, the excess radiation cancer risk was smaller than the natural risk of 0.22% for leukemia and 15.69% for solid (tumour) cancer deaths. It is significant that the natural cancer death risk was higher than the radiation cancer death risk for both leukemia and solid tumours unless the dose exceeded about 1 Gray (100 R or 100 cGy). E.g., 48% of leukemia deaths from doses of 10-100 R were due to radiation and 52% were natural (a bigger risk than radiation). Likewise, only 16% of solid tumour cancer deaths for doses of 10-100 R were due to radiation (84% were natural):

“If all residents in the hazardous fallout region adopt a shelter-in-place strategy, the total number of acute radiation casualties is estimated to be ~ 3,600, as compared to ~ 100,000 casualties if all are outdoors and unsheltered. Some further reductions in casualties can be realized if those in the poorest shelters transit to better shelters soon after the detonation.”

– Larry D. Brandt and Ann S. Yoshimura, Analysis of Sheltering and Evacuation Strategies for a Chicago Nuclear Detonation Scenario, Sandia National Laboratories, Report SAND2011-6720, August 2011, page 5. (PDF here.)

“We have shown that common estimates of weapon effects that calculate a ‘radius’ for thermal radiation are clearly misleading for surface bursts in urban environments. In many cases only a few unshadowed vertical surfaces, a small fraction of the area within a thermal damage radius, receive the expected heat flux.”

– R. E. Marrs, W. C. Moss, and B. Whitlock, Thermal Radiation from Nuclear Detonations in Urban Environments, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, UCRL-TR-231593, June 2007, page 11. (PDF here.)

“Reliance on The Effects of Nuclear Weapons for valid conclusions has its shortcomings. For example, in the 1954 test series in the Pacific, I was on the deck of the YAG-39 which was on station at about twenty miles from the shot point of a detonation with a yield near ten megatons. The thermal flash did not produce the predicted second degree burn on the back of my neck or indeed any discomfort at all.”

- Dr Carl F. Miller, Dialogue, Scientist and Citizen, vol. 8, combined issues 4-5 (February-March 1966), page 17.

“Models developed at Applied Research Associates (ARA) and Los Alamos National Laboratory have shown similar reductions in injuries from the initial radiation [J.T. Goorley, Nuclear Weapon Effects for Urban Consequences, Los Alamos National Laboratory, LA-UR 09-00703 and LA-UR-10-01029] ... Like the thermal analysis, these studies indicate that the ambient radiation levels from a low-yield, ground-level nuclear detonation in an urban environment could be significantly reduced.”

– Brooke Buddemeier, “Reducing the Consequences of a Nuclear Detonation: Recent Research”, The bridge (ISSN 0737-6278, National Academy of Engineering), Vol. 40, No. 2, Summer 2010, pp. 28–38 (quotation from page 30).

After studying hundreds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, Dr. Irving L. Janis reported that the bright flash arriving at light speed ahead of the blast wave allowed them to take evasive action in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a fact ignored in computer models of blast casualties (Psychological Effects of Atomic Bombing, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Publication No. L54-134, 14 May 1954, page 4):

“A substantial proportion of the survivors reacted automatically to the brilliant flash of the A-bomb as a danger signal, even though they knew nothing about the existence of atomic weapons at that time. Some who were not located near ground zero took prompt action – such as falling to a prone position – which minimized exposure to the blast and to the secondary heat waves. In many other cases, however, the opportunity to minimize the danger was missed because the individual remained fixed or because the action which was taken proved to be inappropriate.”

Dr G. Andrew Mickley explains how workers who returned to Nagasaki after surviving at Hiroshima were able to use their experience to survive the second nuclear explosion, and to help others to prepare, in his paper “Psychological Factors in Nuclear Warfare”, Chapter 8 in Textbook of Military Medicine; Part I, Warfare, Weaponry, and the Casualty; Volume 2: Medical Consequences of Nuclear Warfare, U.S. Army, 1989, pp. 184-5:

“The benefits of training are confirmed by the remarkable experiences of nine persons who survived the Hiroshima bombing and then fled to Nagasaki in time for the second atomic bomb. They remembered very well what they had done that allowed them to live, and they quickly instructed others in Nagasaki: “Yamaguchi's lecture on A-bomb precautions, he pointed out later, was not lost upon his colleagues. With the young designer's words still fresh in their minds [on 9 August 1945, in Nagasaki] they leaped for the cover of desks and tables. “As a result,” said Yamaguchi, “my section staff suffered the least in that building. In other sections there was a heavy toll of serious injuries from flying glass.” (Quoted from Robert Trumbull, Nine who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki, New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1957.)”

Robert Trumbull’s Nine who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki (E. P. Dutton and Co., N.Y., 1957) interviewed nine of the sixteen who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions (travelling to homes in Nagasaki immediately by train after surviving at Hiroshima). The double-survivor Takejira Nishioka (a newspaper publisher) observed in Hiroshima that the blast wave was delayed after the flash, and, being friends with the Governor of Nagasaki Prefecture, tried (but failed) to get permission to send out a warning prior to the Nagasaki nuclear attack that people can avoid being knocked down or hit by horizontally-blasted window glass and debris if they duck and cover on seeing the very bright visible flash. Duck and cover also provides shielding from thermal and nuclear radiation, because it increases the fraction of the free-field air radiation dose which is attenuated through obstructions before reaching a person, as was known in 1949 (HO 225/14, The advantage of lying prone in reducing the dose of gamma rays from an airburst atomic bomb).

The advice was experimentally verified in the 37 kt Plumbbob-Priscilla nuclear test of 1957, where a standing dummy and a lying dummy were actually filmed being hit by a 5.3 psi peak overpressure blast wave. The lying dummy was completely unmoved, but the standing dummy was accelerated to 21 ft/s in just 0.5 seconds, and blasted a distance of 22 feet. However, in humans the feet rotate forward (because the centre of the body mass is above mid-height) so head-first impacts at the maximum velocity are prevented by the laws of physics, and the only risk to the head is from the vertical fall, and even this is delayed for the blast duration, giving at least 0.5 second of extra time to use the arms to protect the head. Even in the 43.7 kt Plumbbob-Smoky nuclear test where the dummies were in a “blast precursor” desert sandstorm with a very much high dynamic pressure, the lying dummy was only blown half the distance of the standing one. In 1964, the 0.5 kt Snowball explosion confirmed the data and showed that goats are a proxy for humans in translation experiments (DASA-1859). Experiments prove that 77% (23/30) of goats survived a blast which gave them a velocity of 51-78 ft/sec and a decelerative tumbling displacement of 59-151 ft (I. G. Bowen, D. R. Richmond and C. S. White, Translational Effects of Blast Waves, “Minutes of the Tripartite Technical Cooperation Program, Panel N-1, Sub-group N, 14-16 March 1963”, Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 11 March 1963, page 57). In a built-up area, most people will never even reach the peak velocity observed in desert tests, because they will be stopped by obstructions after typically 10 ft, before they have even been accelerated to the optimum velocity. Therefore, any injury will be less serious, due to the smaller velocity at the time of impact.

On 27 September 1956 dummy men were exposed to the 15 kt Buffalo-1 nuclear test at Maralinga (similar yield to Hiroshima). Dummies standing facing the burst were blown ~0.35p_psi² feet (p = peak overpressure, psi). But the dummies lying facing radially towards or away from ground zero were only blown 10% of this distance, because of (1) the smaller area exposed to the blast wind and dust, and (2) the greater area in contact with the ground, providing frictional resistance against drag. References: W. J. H. Butterfield, E. G. Hardy and E. R. Drake Seager, The effects of blast on dummy men exposed in the open, Operation Buffalo, Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, report AWRE-T2/59, 1959 National Archives documents DEFE 16/165, A. R. F. Martin, The effects of blast on dummies and scout cars, Operation Antler, report AWRE-T6/59, ES 5/270, 1959, and the research on the reduced blast displacement of lying dummies exposed to large conventional explosions: DASA 2710.

George Monbiot, The Guardian, Tuesday 5 April 2011: “The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all: I’ve discovered that when the facts don’t suit them, the movement resorts to the follies of cover-up they usually denounce. ... Dr Caldicott is the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner. ... Caldicott’s response ... a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so – all 423 pages. It ... strongly contradicts her claims ... For the last 25 years anti-nuclear campaigners have been racking up the figures for deaths and diseases caused by the Chernobyl disaster, and parading deformed babies like a medieval circus. They now claim 985,000 people have been killed ... there have been 6,848 cases of [treatable] thyroid cancer among young children – arising ‘almost entirely’ from the Soviet Union’s failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131 [which has a half life of only 8 days, so cattle can be taken out of fields and given winter feed while it decays, or else the milk can be dry powdered or used to make cheese, or even frozen; if people must drink contaminated milk, they can block iodine-131 uptake by daily 130 mg potassium iodate tablets, which nuclear industries stock for emergency distribution].”

Weapons effects exaggerations against civil defense are escalated by successive journalists and editors, who increase circulation against ever increasing noise levels from rival journals by publishing lying scare mongering which is “justified” by the allegedly moralistic pseudo-ethical assumption that “the ends justify the means”. Environmentalists who worship subjective, fashionable groupthink like a religion scream and conflate natural cancers with the effects of radiation. Like a Gordian Knot, any attempt to pull apart this scam “orthodoxy” just hardens the dogma, because its proponents do not believe in it on the basis of hard objective science, but just as an emotional, ethical, moralistic piece of patronising high-horse politics. As Glasstone pointed out in the 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons, it is like the gas effects fear-mongering exaggerations propaganda before WWII (which claimed that gas would destroy civilization and lied that there was no defense).

“The unsuspecting layman naturally swallows it whole ... but they do want to get their manuscript accepted for the feature page of the Daily Drivel or the Weekly Wail. In order to do that, they must pile on the horrors thick.” – James Kendall, Breathe Freely!, quoted by Fair (ADA488135, linked here).

An early example of “ends justify the means” exaggeration of weapons effects is Will Irwin’s 1921 book, The Next War, exaggerating gas war into the end of civilization to “justify” 1920s disarmament. This was followed by a chorus of others, before appeasers like Chamberlain stepped in to “guarantee peace in our time” by shaking Hitler’s hand (while Britain only rearmed at a fraction of the rate of Germany, so as “not to risk another war”). Instead, this increased the danger of war:

“These weapons often appear mysterious and sinister to the general public. I think that much of the responsibility for this feeling falls on our government which, by placing great restriction on the public discussion of these weapons by military officers, has fostered this miasma of ignorance. ... the government perpetuates the mysteriousness of these weapons by its restrictions. Until I retired as Commanding General, U.S. Army Chemical Corps Research and Development Command, I was under such restrictions. ... An uninformed public will not support urgently needed research and development on these weapons, nor will it be prepared psychologically for their use against us. ... Only knowledge of these weapons will make them less terrifying.

“In 1959, after hearings on research in CBR (Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Warfare), the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives stated that. ‘There is an urgent need for greater public understanding of the dangers and uses of CBR if proper support is to be given to our defenses and countermeasures’. ... The attitude of our government not only prevents the public from learning of these weapons: it is also greatly responsible for the failure of our military personnel to learn about them. ... The military, in our country, are not a caste apart, but simply an extension of the civilian populace.”

- Brigadier General J.H. Rothschild, Tomorrow’s Weapons, McGraw-Hill, N.Y., 1964, pp. xi-xiii.

Rothschild explains on page 1 that his June 1959 Harper’s Magazine article arguing for greater defense against chemical and biological weapons was opposed by letters of protest “against war itself”. He then explains on page 2 that chemical and biological weapons are not uniquely invisible. Bullets are also invisible while flying through the air. On page 3 he adds that in WWI only 2% of gassed American Expeditionary Force casualties died, compared to 25.8% of non-gas casualties, adding: “Exposed to one of the nerve gases, available since World War II, the casualty will either die or recover completely. Though a person under the effects of the nerve gases looks as though he is suffering greatly, men who have been accidentally exposed to them, and have recovered, say that they do not remember suffering at all. This is at great variance with the experience of casualties resulting from bullets, shell fragments, flame throwers, and land mines.”

Matthew Meselson, reviewing Rothschild’s book using sophistry on page 35 of the October 1964 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, fell into a false argument, claiming that the use of chemical weapons in WWII would have caused them to be used in the Korean War with “additional casualties.” In fact, the use of chemical weapons in WWI did not cause them to be used in WWII, and the use of nuclear weapons in WWII did not cause them to be used during the Cold War. Furthermore, because America kept to “conventional” weapons during the Korean War, it had to drop 635,000 tons of explosives and napalm bombs on Korea, more than in the entire Pacific theatre during WWII, ruining Korea’s cities, with immense casualties and suffering. Escalating to demoralise the enemy, as in August 1945, may stop wars and so stop further physical use of the feared weapon.

Biologist J. B. S. Haldane summarised the psychology of denial and duplicity in claiming gas warfare “unthinkable” in his 1925 book Callinicus: “First are a number of out-and-out Pacifists, who object to all war, and apparently hope to make it more difficult ... With them are associated a group of sentimentalists who appear to me definitely to be the Scribes and Pharisees of our age. ... They salve their consciences for such behaviour by attacking, in the name of their God or their ideals, every novelty ... In particular they are distinguished by a ferocious opposition to, and contempt for, any attempt at the solution of human problems by honest and simple intellectual effort.”

Attacks on civil defense are akin to attacking home fire insurance, hospitals, ambulances, seatbelts, lifeboats, and other damage reducing precautions on the false allegation that they deflect attention from utopian accident prevention, or that they are “inefficient” and “the survivors would envy the dead”. The “false sense of security” and “recklessness” historically is shown to occur not with civil defense, but with a lack of civil defense, leading to either appeasement or a maximum amount of damage, escalating the problems.

“Is it really necessary for peace on this planet that an increasing number of governments have the power to destroy the lives of millions of Americans on short notice? Do the opponents of civil defense not see that such power also provides a temptation to use it, at least for blackmail? Mr Margolis points repeatedly and emphatically to the public apathy with regard to civil defense. ... But, in any case, if history is any guide, public apathy toward a measure would in no way prove the undesirability thereof.”

- Dr Eugene P. Wigner, “Civil Defense: Wigner on Project Harbor”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1966, pp. 21-22 (quotation on page 22).

Sunday, November 13, 2011

The cross-section for graviton scatter, scaled by Feynman’s rules from the weak interaction

Article finished at 2am on 30 Nov. (7.3 MB PDF file, 63 pages, downloadable here.) Also hosted at http://rxiv.org/abs/1111.0111, the General Science Journal, and (with some extra material) as the brief mail-order paperback book, Quantum Gravity and the Standard Model, ISBN 978-1-4709-9745-8, which is being listed on Amazon for those who want to help ensure a warmer global future (by turning trees into paper).

Dr Tommaso Dorigo comments on his post Higgs Expectations:

"... in order to really prove that our understanding of electroweak symmetry breaking is flawed and that there is no Higgs boson we would need a much, much more solid evidence than a mere "95% exclusion". I would not be satisfied with anything less than a 99.9% exclusion (over three sigma) across the full mass range.

But I do not honestly believe that we will ever get into such a situation. I do believe, in fact, that the particle is there, and that it will be found very soon! So stay tuned and place your bets if you haven't already. Time is running short.

We avoid the usual electroweak symmetry breaking problem, by changing electromagnetism from U(1) to a massless SU(2) gauge theory (which works out correctly, yielding Maxwell's equations from the Yang-Mills, because charged massless vector bosons can't propagate asymmetrically), so that SU(2) becomes a complete electroweak theory. (This is fine for the weak bosons, while the apparent discrepancy between weak isospin charges and fractional quark electric charges disappears with a vacuum polarization model, which predicts that 1/3 or 2/3 of the electric charge energy of quarks is present as strong colour charge.) U(1) is not abandoned altogether; it is dark energy, which also predicts gravity. The mass of SU(2) weak bosons is then produced by the Glashow-Weinberg mixing of U(1) gravity with SU(2) electromagnetism. Instead of a electroweak symmetry being broken to yield Nambu-Goldstone "Higgs" bosons, the weak interaction emerges from a simple mixing of SU(2) electromagnetism with U(1) gravity. I'll try to get a briefer paper done, ready to replace the Higgs boson.

Update (7 December 2011):

http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/alejandro_rivero_fermion_mass_coincidences_and_other_fun_ideas-85187?nocache=1

"Then Koide went some steps beyond and considered quarks and leptons with substructure, so that lepton mass quotients could predict the Cabibbo angle too, even if this is a mixing between quarks."

{(sqrt(M_e)+sqrt(M_mu)+sqrt(M_tau))^2} /( M_e + M_mu +M_tau) = 2/3

The key factor of 2/3 in the Koide relationship is the fractional electric charge of the up/charm/truth quarks, which arises from a mixing effect. It's the 2/3 electric charge of up/charm/truth quarks that's so interesting. The -1/3 charge of the down/strange/bottom quarks is very easily predicted by analysis of vacuum polarization for the case of the omega minus baryon (Fig. 31 in http://rxiv.org/pdf/1111.0111v1.pdf). It appears that the square root of the product of two very different masses gives rise to an intermediate mass (see http://nige.wordpress.com/2009/08/26/koide-formula-seen-from-a-different-perspective/ for the simple maths) that the Koide relationship implies a bootstrap model of fundamental particles (akin to the bootstrap concept Geoffrey Chew was trying to develop to explain the S-matrix in the 1960s before quarks were discovered). The square root of the product of the masses of a neutrino and a massive weak boson may give an electron mass, for instance. This seems to be the deeper significance of the Koide formula, from my perspective for what it's worth. All fundamental particles are connected by various offshell field quanta exchanges, so their "charges" are dependent on other charges around them. This means that the ordinary approach of analysis fails, because of the reductionist fallacy. If your mathematical model of rope is the same for 100 one-foot lengths as for a single 100 foot length, it leads to customer complaints when you automatically send a sailor the former, not the latter. It's no good patiently explaining to the sailor that mathematically they are identical, and the universe is mathematical. If the Koide formula is correct, then it points to an extension of the square root nature of the Dirac equation. Dirac made the error of ignoring Maxwell's 1861 paper on magnetic force mechanisms: the chiral handedness of magnetism (the magnetic field curls left-handed around the direction of propagation of an electron) is explained in Maxwell's theory by the spin of "field quanta" (Maxwell had gear cogs, but in QFT it's just the spin angular momentum of field quanta). Maxwell's theory makes EM an SU(2) Yang-Mills theory, throwing a different light on the Dirac's spinor. It just so happens that the Yang-Mills equations automatically reduce to Maxwell's if the field quanta are massless, because of the infinite self-inductance of electrically charged field quanta, so SU(2) Maxwellian electromagnetism in practice looks indistinguishable from Abelian U(1), explaining the delusions in modern physics.

The very interesting results Alejandro Rivero gives are from equation 4 on page 3 of his paper http://www.vixra.org/abs/1111.0062, which solves the Koide formula by writing one mass in terms of the two lepton other generation masses. Koide's formula also implies (my 2009 post):

Me + Mm + Mt = 4 * [(Me * Mm)^1/2 + (Me * Mt)^1/2 + (Mm * Mt)^1/2]

where Me = electron mass, Mm = muon mass, Mt = tauon mass. I.e., the simple sum of lepton masses equals four times the sum of square roots of the products of all combinations of the masses, making it seem that if Koide's formula is physically meaningful, then Geoffrey Chew's bootstrap theory of particle democracy must apply to masses (gravitational charge) in 4-d. At high energy, early in the universe, tauons, muons and electrons were all represented and we only see an excess of electrons today because the other generations have decayed, although some of the other masses may actually exist as dark matter, and thus still undergoes the interaction of graviton exchange, which determines the Koide mass spectrum today (this dark matter is analogous to right-handed neutrinos). The basic physics of the Koide formula seems to be the Chew bootstrap applied to gravitation (Chew applied it to the strong force, pre-QCD):

"By the end of the 1950s, [Geoffrey] Chew was calling this [analytic development of Heisenberg’s empirical scattering or S-matrix] the bootstrap philosophy. Because of analyticity, each particle’s interactions with all others would somehow determine its own basic properties and ... the whole theory would somehow ‘pull itself up by its own bootstraps’.” - Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong, Jonathan Cape, London, 2006, p148. (Emphasis added.)

The S-matrix went out when the SM was developed (although S-matrix results were used to help determine the Feynman rules), but at some stage a Chew-type bootstrap mechanism for Koide's mass formula may be needed to further develop a physical understanding for the underlying theory of mass mixing, leading to a full theory of mixing angles for both gravitation (mass) and weak SU(2) interactions of leptons and quarks.

"... publishing a groundbreaking idea in peer-reviewed journals can be nearly impossible."

- Louise Riofrio

Before you can get past peer review, you must convince the "peers" to listen, which is impossible if they believe in an "alternative" which has no evidence to support it (you can't discredit something that's not scientific to begin with):

“Scepticism is ... directed against the view of the opposition and against minor ramifications of one’s own basic ideas, never against the basic ideas themselves. Attacking the basic ideas evokes taboo reactions ... scientists only rarely solve their problems, they make lots of mistakes ... one collects ‘facts’ and prejudices, one discusses the matter, and one finally votes. But while a democracy makes some effort to explain the process so that everyone can understand it, scientists either conceal it, or bend it ... No scientist will admit that voting plays a role in his subject. Facts, logic, and methodology alone decide – this is what the fairy-tale tells us. ... This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else ... It is the vote of everyone concerned that decides fundamental issues ... and not the authority of big-shots hiding behind a non-existing methodology. ... Science itself uses the method of ballot, discussion, vote, though without a clear grasp of its mechanism, and in a heavily biased way.”

– Professor Paul Feyerabend, “Against Method”, 1975, final chapter.

“The notion that a scientific idea cannot be considered intellectually respectable until it has first appeared in a ‘peer’ reviewed journal did not become widespread until after World War II. Copernicus’s heliocentric system, Galileo’s mechanics, Newton’s grand synthesis – these ideas never appeared first in journal articles. They appeared first in books, reviewed prior to publication only by their authors, or by their authors’ friends. ... Darwinism indeed first appeared in a journal, but one under the control of Darwin’s friends. ... the refereeing process works primarily to enforce orthodoxy. ... ‘peer’ review is NOT peer review.”

– Professor Frank J. Tipler, Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?

In 2006, the bestsellers by Lee Smolin and Peter Woit “Not Even Wrong” and “The Trouble with Physics” were published, showing that superstring theory has become a dogmatic consensus, like epicycles being “defended” by less-than-objective methods. Right on cue, the world’s greatest genius behind M-theory, Ed Witten, happened to write a letter to Nature (v. 444, p. 265, 16 November 2006), headlined:

“Answering critics can add fuel to controversy.

“SIR — Your Editorial “To build bridges, or to burn them” and News Feature “In the name of nature” raise important points about criticism of science and how scientists should best respond (Nature 443, 481 and 498–501; 2006). The News Feature concerns radical environmentalists and animal-rights activists, but the problem covers a wider area, often involving more enlightened criticism of science from outside the scientific establishment and even, sometimes, from within.

“The critics feel ... that their viewpoints have been unfairly neglected by the establishment. ... They bring into the public arena technical claims that few can properly evaluate. ... We all know examples from our own fields ... Responding to this kind of criticism can be very difficult. It is hard to answer unfair charges of élitism without sounding élitist to non-experts. A direct response may just add fuel to controversies. Critics, who are often prepared to devote immense energies to their efforts, can thrive on the resulting ‘he said, she said’ situation. [Critics must never be permitted to thrive.]

“Scientists in this type of situation would do well to heed the advice in Nature’s Editorial. Keep doing what you are doing. And when you have the chance, try to patiently explain why what you are doing is interesting and exciting, and may even be useful one day.

“Edward Witten
Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Drive,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540, USA.”

The next letter on that Nature page (from genetics engineer Boris Striepen) stated: “How and why did our public image change from harmless geeks to state- and industry-sponsored evil-doers worthy to be a target? More importantly, what do we do about it? And how do we communicate more effectively what we are doing, why we are doing it and what the opportunities and challenges of modern science are?”

Answer:

“Centralization of information and decision-making at the top has been destructive to most organizations. The Greeks had a word for the notion that the best decisions can only be made on the basis of the fullest information at the highest level. They called it hubris. In a living scientific organization, decisions must be pushed down to the lowest level at which they can be sensibly made. ... Leadership would be decentralized throughout, not concentrated at the top. ... It would also facilitate the downward transmission of goals, the only things that can be usefully passed down from above, and make room for the upward transmission of results, which should be the basis for reward. It should be obvious that this structure need not be imposed from above. There is no reason to await a decision from the top to do so. Everyone in the chain has the flexibility to organize his own life and thereby to decide whether he is to be a manager or a leader.”

- Gregory H. Canavan, The Leadership of Philosopher Kings, Los Alamos National Laboratory, report LA-12198-MS, December 1992.

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). Hubris also has tragic consequences for science (e.g. Lysenkoism in Stalin's time, or eugenics in Hitler's), just as they do for political economy as is now being well demonstrated by the socialist era debt problems of Greece and other Eurozone economies. But our point concerns the destruction of science by this same mechanism of short-sighted dictatorship by the media-loved band of "mainstream" superstringers who don't have a falsifiable theory or even address the fundamental data that needs explaining. Other analogies abound in Health Physics nuclear quackery political-expedience limbo, and CO2-rich hot-air.

Ex-NASA climatologist Dr Roy Spencer ends his latest Climategate 2.0 blog post:

"But when only one hypothesis is allowed as the explanation for climate change (e.g. “the science is settled”), the bias becomes so thick and acrid that everyone can smell the stench. Everyone except the IPCC leadership, that is."

Like the Emperor's New Clothes, when the word goes around that the leadership is faulty, nobody dares overthrow the leader, or they bungle it. It's precisely like the situation of Stalin or Hitler, who have got to the top by having a private army of bodyguards and propaganda chiefs, so that people like Delingpole can be pushed down by Dr Goebbels, aka the BBC's biased "elite documentary maker," Sir-Lord-God-Nobel Haw Haw of the Regal Society of Pseudoscientific Quacks, dedicated to the "laudable" politically-correct challenge diverting our limited funds in a time of austerity from saving human lives in drought and famine hit areas of humanity, to instead line the pockets of swindling carbon credit traders. The claim that democracy would allow the people to overthrow a scientific dictatorship of quacks funded by political expediency is laughable and is well disproved by all examples of scientific corruption in history, from the injection of false Aristotlean physics into medieval Christianity by Thomas Aquinas, to 11-dimensional superstring M-"theory" (which contains no theory, merely a vacuous framework in which 10⁵⁰⁰ different metastable vacuum states can sit, all of which contain the same faulty spin-2 graviton framework assumption).

Everybody can smell the stench from this piece of vile pseudophysics with its Gestapo response to critics, its abuse of the peer-review system for censorship of criticisms, and its patiently false "greenhouse" assumption which relies on the implicit assumption of an invisible non-existent glass ceiling to prevent water vapour from becoming cloud cover. The liars of the mainstream lyingly call critics "climate change deniers", when climate change is natural: the argument is about whether the earth is a "greenhouse" that is super-sensitive to CO2 injections or not; the case for NOT being the earth is NOT a greenhouse. If the earth were a greenhouse, there would be no oceans (71% of surface area) and no cloud cover which varies in direct response to CO2. In fact, if you pump in CO2 and you increase cloud cover, which reflects back more sunlight into space, keeping the surface cool. This is negative feedback, totally ignored by all IPCC models, which make the same collective politically-correct mistake of assuming that the greenhouse effect is true (where IR-absorbing water vapour is unable to form clouds, and so has only a politically-correct positive feedback). In a greenhouse, water vapour is prevented from rising to from cloud cover that cools the greenhouse, because of the implicit glass ceiling (i.e. the falsely assumed lack of buoyancy of sunshine IR-warmed moist ocean surface water vapour).

Dr Roy Spencer, http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/11/climategate-2-0-bias-in-scientific-research/:

"In the case of global warming research, the alternative (non-consensus) hypothesis that some or most of the climate change we have observed is natural is the one that the IPCC must avoid at all cost. This is why the Hockey Stick was so prized: it was hailed as evidence that humans, not Nature, rule over climate change. [Actually the climate is always varying so there is 50% chance of rising temperatures, 50% of falling temperatures. This reduces the statistical value of correlations of CO2 and temperature when you take account of the fact that there is a 50% chance of a spurious, coincidental correlation.]

"The Climategate 2.0 e-mails show how entrenched this bias has become among the handful of scientists who have been the most willing participants and supporters of The Cause. These scientists only rose to the top because they were willing to actively promote the IPCC’s message with their particular fields of research.

"Unfortunately, there is no way to “fix” the IPCC, and there never was. The reason is that its formation over 20 years ago was to support political and energy policy goals, not to search for scientific truth. I know this not only because one of the first IPCC directors told me so, but also because it is the way the IPCC leadership behaves. If you disagree with their interpretation of climate change, you are left out of the IPCC process. They ignore or fight against any evidence which does not support their policy-driven mission, even to the point of pressuring scientific journals not to publish papers which might hurt the IPCC’s efforts.

"I believe that most of the hundreds of scientists supporting the IPCC’s efforts are just playing along, assured of continued funding. In my experience, they are either: (1) true believers in The Cause; (2) think we need to get away from using fossil fuels anyway; or (3) rationalize their involvement based upon the non-zero chance of catastrophic climate change."

Michael Mann's hockey stick curve was faked to show constant temperature until CO2 began rising. IPCC/NASA gurus on the Horizon BBC2 "Science under Attack" propaganda film claimed that humanity emits 7 times more CO2 than nature, when in fact natural sources of CO2 emit 30 times more (even the IPCC 4th assessment report lists in its un-hyped small print that humanity's emission is 29 Gt of CO2 from all fossil fuels etc, compared to 771 Gt from all natural land and ocean emissions). It's well within the natural climate fluctuations of CO2, and the scare-propaganda relies entirely on censoring out the evidence of natural variability by tricks like switching temperature proxies at 1960 and 1980 so as to try to produce a hockey stick curve.

Before 1960 they use tree rings as the major proxy, which is false because tree growth is sensitive to cloud cover and rainfall, not particularly CO2 levels. From 1960-80 they used temperature station records near expanding "heat islands" like industrial factories and cities. After 1980 they used satellites which can't tell the temperature under the cloud cover where all negative-feedback from cloud cover actually occurs. No prizes for guessing that the satellite "temperature data" didn't properly include negative feedback from the extra cloud cover resulting from the extra evaporation of water due to rising CO2. They're complete fanatics, who don't donate a single brain cell to objectivity, let alone half a brain!

"... [Dr Andy] Dessler has ... used models which DO NOT ALLOW cloud changes to affect temperature, in order to support his case that cloud changes do not affect temperature!"

- Dr Roy Spencer, ex-NASA climatologist, http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/09/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-my-initial-comments-on-the-new-dessler-2011-study/

This quotation is the smoking gun: Dr Roy Spencer's latest paper was shot down by peer-review, then he was contacted by a "critic" whose paper is in proof, and is claiming that cloud cover doesn't have negative feedback (i.e. cancel out CO2 injection effects on climate, the entire AGW scam) simply because the mainstream model doesn't include cloud cover. If ever there was a circular argument, this is it. It's a groupthink "ends justify the means" delusion, where they think they can safely suppress the facts because "making the environment cleaner" is an unassailable objective, never minds the diversion of funds from lifesaving charities into carbon trading scams. Stalin didn’t personally murder 40 million in collectivization of farming in the 30s, instead like Hitler he deluded himself with false “science” into believing that it was well-intentioned. The biggest danger is “well-intentioned pseudoscientific dogma”: the “safe” belief that it was necessary step on the road to global communist utopia, likewise Hitler gassed 6 million “safe” in his eugenics pseudoscience belief he was ethnically "cleansing" humanity genetically. Yeah, right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Nobody will ever get through to people like Al Gore, they're all completely deluded and have invested all they have in a pseudoscience politically-expedient belief system which devalues objectivity.

AGW is debunked by Dr Roy Spencer: negative feedback from H2O is being censored out by circular arguments, just as criticisms of eugenics in the 1930s were censored out using ad hominem attacks and unproved assertions by “authorities” like famous eugenicists such as gas chamber promoter Medical Nobel Laureates like Alexis Carrell (who suggested murdering people in gas chambers in his evil but then-fashionable and widely media-loved 1935 pro-eugenics best seller, “Man the Unknown”). If you warm the ocean surface a bit (which covers 71% of the globe, unlike a greenhouse) the evaporated water forms extra clouds which cool the altitudes below the clouds and due to convective rising of warm air there is no mechanism for vertical mixing so the surface stays cool (rainfall doesn’t originate from the upper surfaces of clouds, and raindrops undergo air drag and pass on their heat to the air rapidly to the surrounding air anyway, before reaching the surface). In a "greenhouse" this convection infrared-warmed moist air evaporated from an ocean to form sunlight-blocking clouds at several thousand feet altitude can't happen due to a glass ceiling, which all IPCC “greenhouse effect” models implicitly assume! It is obvious therefore that there is no greenhouse effect possible on a planet with water oceans, only in glass ceiling greenhouses and on planets which don’t have water oceans (Mars and Venus). Modern-day eugenicists just want to profit from the green carbon credits, selling quack books and quack newspaper articles, acquiring cult status, etc. Actually the climate is always varying so there is 50% chance of rising temperatures, 50% of falling temperatures. This reduces the statistical value of correlations of CO2 and temperature when you take account of the fact that there is a 50% chance of an apparent "correlation". The lie is finally starting to unravel:

"... [Dr Andy] Dessler has ... used models which DO NOT ALLOW cloud changes to affect temperature, in order to support his case that cloud changes do not affect temperature!"

- Dr Roy Spencer, ex-NASA climatologist, http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/09/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-my-initial-comments-on-the-new-dessler-2011-study/

Nothing gained in search for ‘theory of everything’
By Dr Robert Matthews
Financial Times, London. Published: June 2 2006 19:45

“They call their leader The Pope, insist theirs is the only path to enlightenment and attract a steady stream of young acolytes to their cause. A crackpot religious cult? No, something far scarier: a scientific community that has completely lost touch with reality and is robbing us of some of our most brilliant minds.

“Yet if you listened to its cheerleaders – or read one of their best-selling books or watched their television mini-series – you, too, might fall under their spell. You, too, might come to believe they really are close to revealing the ultimate universal truths, in the form of a set of equations describing the cosmos and everything in it. Or, as they modestly put it, a “theory of everything”.

“This is not a truth universally acknowledged. For years there has been concern within the rest of the scientific community that the quest for the theory of everything is an exercise in self-delusion. This is based on the simple fact that, in spite of decades of effort, the quest has failed to produce a single testable prediction, let alone one that has been confirmed. …

“Most theorists pay at least lip-service to falsifiability, popularised by the philosopher Karl Popper, according to which scientific ideas must open themselves up to being proved wrong. Yet those involved in the quest for the theory of everything believe themselves immune from such crass demands. Mr Woit quotes a superstring theorist [lenny susskind] dismissing the demand for falsifiability as “pontification by the ‘Popperazi’ about what is and what is not science”. …

“Coming from a community that refers to Prof Witten as The Pope this is a bit rich. But it also suggests the whole field is now propped up solely by faith. Woit provides plenty of evidence for this: the insistence of M-theorists that in the quest for ultimate answers, theirs is “the only game in town”; the lectures with titles such as The Power and the Glory of String Theory; the cultivation of the media to ensure wide-eyed coverage of every supposed “revelation”. …

“But why should the rest of us care? The reason is simple: the quest for the theory of everything has soaked up vast amounts of intellectual effort and resources at a time when they are desperately needed elsewhere. … the huge intellectual effort needed to enter the field compelling them to plough on regardless of the prospects of success. It is time they were put out of their misery by being told to either give up or find funding from elsewhere (charities supporting faith-based pursuits have been suggested as one alternative).

“Academic institutions find it hard enough to fund fields with records of solid achievement. After 20-odd years, they are surely justified in pulling the plug on one that has disappeared up its Calabi-Yau manifold.”

The writer is visiting reader in science at Aston University, Birmingham

Malcolm Gladwell, a former science writer for the Washington Post, in 2000 wrote The Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Co.). Gladwell explains on pages 258-9 that fashion is often counter intuitive:

“The world … does not accord with our intuition. … Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions. Without the evidence … careful psychological testing demonstrated the powerful influence of context. … human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules. … We like to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we are and how we act is something permanently set up by our genes and our temperament. … We are actually powerfully influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the personalities of those around us.”

Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (Lawrence Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: the Cognitive Development Approach to Socialization,” in D. A. Goslin, Ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, Rand-McNally, Co., Chicago, 1969, pp. 347-380) has found that peoples go through six stages of ethical development:

(1) Conformity to rules and obediance to authority, to avoid punishment.

(2) Conformity to gain rewards.

(3) Conformity to avoid rejection.

(4) Conformity to avoid censure. (Chimps and baboons.)

(5) Arbitrariness in enforcing rules, for the common good.

(6) Conscious revision and replacement of unhelpful rules.

The same steps could be expected to apply to scientific ethical development. However, the disguised form of politics which exists in science, where decisions are taken behind closed doors and with no public discussion of evidence, stops at stage (4), the level of ethics that chimpanzees and baboons have been observed to achieve socially in the wild. Jean-Jacques Rousseau states in The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, 1st ed., 1762, book III, chapter 4, Democracy:

“In the strict sense of the term, there has never been a true democracy, and there never will be. It is contrary to the natural order that the greatest number should govern ... One can hardly imagine that all the people would sit permanently in an assembly to deal with public affairs; and one can easily see that they could not appoint commissions for that purpose without the form of administration changing.”

If that is true of so-called democracy with all its efforts to inform the public and to collect votes, then it is all the more pertinent to science itself, where a handful of big-shots decide behind closed doors what to publish, what to censor, and where the majority of the rank and file behave like chimpanzees and baboons, brainwashing themselves with the falsehood that elitist liar censorship is the correct scientific methodology because they believe they have no chance of changing it (exactly the groupthink in the USSR/Nazi/Saddam/Gadaffi/etc/etc evil regimes of tyranny). The so-called enlightenment that began roughly with Copernicus in 1500, has ended up replacing a system of religion with another faith-based system, the “superstring.” Ed Witten and arXiv are not holding a gun to your head, you’re holding your own gun to your own head.

“… when innovations creep into their games and constant changes are made in them, the children cease to have a sure standard of what is right … There can be no worse evil … Change … is most dangerous …” - Plato (429-347 B.C.), The Laws, Book VII, 360 B.C.

This attitude of Plato towards innovations is explained well by a study of his book Timaeus, in which Plato claims that the universe is mathematically described by Euclid’s five regular geometric polygons (perfectly inscribed within a sphere): earth atoms are cubic, air is octahedrons, energy is tetrahedrons, water is icosahedrons; the universe is a dodecahedron. Curved spacetime geometry continues such speculation, as is the 10/11-dimensional M-theory of spin-2 gravitons. Plato insistence that innovation and change even in games is most dangerous, because they may be confused, is very convenient for status quo.

“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 …” - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.

“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.” - Professor F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1960, p. 379.

“The Correspondence Principle says that every new theory must contain the old theory as a sub-set ... the Correspondence Principle ... would have forced the retention of phlogiston and of caloric ... political systems develop procedures which outlaw the change of those systems.” - Ivor Catt, letter to author dated 28 April 1997.

“Children lose interest … because a natural interest in the world around them has been replaced by an unnatural acceptance of the soundness of certain views, the correctness of particular opinions and the validity of specific claims.” - David Lewis, You can teach your child intelligence, Book Club Associates, London, 1982, p. 258.

“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, p. 225.

The final solution to the Ed Witten/AGW/eugenics/consensus problem

Objective censorship! Replace arbitrarily subjective “peer”-review (which only works where someone has peers, and doesn’t work for real scientific innovations, which are not merely incremental increases in phlogiston theory) with objective censorship, that favours the publication of checkable and confirmed scientific results over disproved, deluded, bitter media-hyped, overpaid, unethical, ranting, spin-2 graviton liars and the deluded consensus funding committees, book publishers, journal editors, “peer”-reviewers, and “prize” committees who rewarded evil, like Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrel’s eugenics gas chamber plans. We need more censorship of lying thugs, so that the facts have a chance of being taken seriously! Everyone who conforms to “peer”-review and arXiv is anti-Einstein:

“[Einstein’s] final manuscript was prepared and sent to the Physical Review. It was returned to him accompanied by a lengthy referee report in which clarifications were requested. Einstein was enraged and wrote to the editor [27 July 1936] that he objected to his paper being shown to colleagues before publication … Einstein … never published in the Physical Review again.”

– Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord, the Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982, p. 495.

Publish the facts, and see how long it takes for the tipping point to be reached. If you view the glass as half-empty and think “I need to conform to eugenics (or whatever) because it is mainstream and I will be hissed at if I don’t fully conform”, you are at the ethical level of a chimp. While everybody thinks like that, we have a situation akin to everybody dropping litter in the park, “safe” in the belief that if they stop dropping litter, it makes no difference because everyone else will continue to do so. Until that mindset changes, the place remains a dump.

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“Appeasement seldom works in the long term ... appeasement will not prevent every possible attack.”

Survival at high overpressures from nuclear bombs in Japan, by easy shielding of outdoor radiations

Source: L. Wayne Davis, “Prediction of Urban Casualties and the Medical Load from a High-Yield Nuclear Burst” (based on over 35,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki case histories), Dirkwood Corporation paper DC-P-1060. By contrast, the widely circulated 1979 U. S. Office of Technology Assessment report, “The Effects of Nuclear War”, assumes that just 5-6 psi produces 50% mortality (the computer model this estimate is from ignores floor resistance, like an ice-skating rink in multistory buildings, thus assuming that the blast blows people out of high-rise buildings to be killed by gravity in the fall to the ground), compared to over 15 psi for people indoors at Nagasaki (people indoors were largely protected from blast-duration dependent wind drag effects, and longer duration blast reduces the vertically falling debris load on survivors by blowing debris horizontally, often reducing rather than increasing the overall hazard). Table 5 in the 1979 report “arbitrarily” assumes that 6.7 cal/sq. cm is lethal to people outdoors, whereas the Dirkwood report shows that 16 cal/sq. cm was lethal to 50% of personnel exposed outdoors in thin summer clothing in Hiroshima, and larger amounts are required for higher weapon yields. Clothing and shadows from buildings, trees, fences, and vehicles offered substantial protection. The U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports on Hiroshima and Nagasaki document how people were able to roll and beat out ignited dark colored clothing at very high thermal exposures, usually without sustaining serious burns. Once people are protected against the radiation, flying debris and wind drag by taking cover, Glasstone and Dolan’s 1977 “Effects of Nuclear Weapons” shows in Table 12.38 that an effective peak overpressure of 62 psi is required for 50% lethality from blast effects. Their Table 12.43 shows that the average mass of flying glass fragments decreases with increasing overpressure, from 1.45 grams at 1.9 psi to 0.13 grams at 5.0 psi, making protection against high velocity flying glass splinters and other debris possible. M. K. Drake, et al., “Collateral Damage”, Science Applications, Inc., Defense Nuclear Agency report DNA 4734Z, ADA071371, 1978, page 5-86: “For personnel inside structures, the probability of being hit by glass fragments decreases rapidly as a person moves laterally from behind a window. At 25 degrees from the edge of a window pane, the density of glass fragments is approximately one-tenth the density of fragments measured directly behind the window. ... This was extremely evident in injuries of British civilians during World War II. As the people learned to quit looking out of their windows during bomb raids, the number of glass casualties decreased dramatically.” (Like lightning before thunder, the painfully bright first flash of a nuclear explosion arrives ahead of the slower blast wave, proving a useful warning to duck and cover over large areas of destruction. Fallout consists of small particles which take time to arrive, allowing evacuation or improvised radiation shielding. Fallout predictions only failed during early 1950s tests due to inadequate knowledge of the fallout mechanism and inadequate weather predictions. Modern city buildings with modern fire-resistant furnishings are even less prone to ignition than black air-raid blackout curtains in wartime Hiroshima, which generally failed to start sustained fires. The Hiroshima firestorm was caused by thousands of overturned charcoal stoves in paper screen filled congested wooden housing areas, so overcrowded they were a peacetime fire risk, according to the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey report. With no firestorms, there can be no nuclear winter. In Hiroshima, where there was a firestorm, sunshine was blocked out for 25 minutes as proved by the Hiroshima meteorological sunshine recorder data.)

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President Barack Obama, Prague, Czech Republic, 5 April 2009:

Glasstone and Dolan, “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” 1977, paras 12.14, 12.17, 12.22, pp. 545-7:

Sunday, November 13, 2011

The cross-section for graviton scatter, scaled by Feynman’s rules from the weak interaction

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Declassified data on effects of nuclear weapons and effective countermeasures against them

“Appeasement seldom works in the long term ... appeasement will not prevent every possible attack.”

Thermal flash survivability

Blast wave survivability - the secret facts

Survival at high overpressures from nuclear bombs in Japan, by easy shielding of outdoor radiations

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Dr Samuel Glasstone, “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” 1962/4, page 631:

Do you think Cold War anti-civil defense propaganda needs to be debunked now?

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