The Taiping Rebellion was a widespread civil war in southern China from 1850 to 1864, led by heterodox Christian convert Hong Xiuquan, against the ruling Qing Dynasty. About 20 million people died, mainly civilians, in one of the deadliest military conflicts in history.
The data fiddles seem to be due to Quaker, Lewis F. Richardson’s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels pacifist propaganda, based on just 70 or so books about wars since 1820. Did he accidentally anc conveniently (for his politics) bodge his statistics through ignorance, or did he deliberately force the casualty data to fit an exponential rise, in order to support disarmament propaganda popular due to the tremendous destruction that he experienced in WWI, and then claimed that the more money is spent on am arms race in peacetime, the worst the state of that country after a war? This applied to the Kaiser's Germany before and after WWI, but Richardson's lesson (basically an extension of the popular but lying Great Illusion thesis of Sir Normal Angell, where nobody can profit from war or commit genocide so we don't need to fear disarming and peacefully surrendering to the nth Reich, as discussed in a previous post) proved disastrous for Britain in the 1930s.
Like fellow pacifist Lord Philip Noel-Baker, Richardson refused to learn the lessons of appeasement and arms race failure on the 1930s, and continued promoting his disproved arms race thesis when the Cold War began! Dr Quincey Wright’s A Study of War, 2nd ed., 1965, extends much further back in history. Getting’s extrapolations from his false data predicted 360 million deaths in WWIII before 1999, and 3.6 billion dead from WWIV before 2050. These extrapolations from false non-nuclear casualty data proved to be very handy statistics for the nuclear disarmament and CND lobby, with Robin Clarke publishing Getting’s false data table as the frontispiece to his 1971 book The Science of War and Peace, accompanied by an introduction in which Clarke claimed on page 11 that the rise of human population is similar to the alleged rise of war victims:
The Earth's population, now around 3,500 million people, seems bound to double by the end of the century ... A precisely similar line of reasoning leads us to expect that in the second half of this century more than 400 million people (about 10 percent of the Earth's population) will be killed in about 120 wars. The largest of these wars will alone claim ten times as many victims as did World War I and II together: some 360 million people - more than now live in the whole of Africa - will be swept off the face of the Earth.
The essential deception is the subjective definition of a war as “legally declared or involving over 50,000 troops” (reference: Robin Clarke, The Science of War and Peace, Jonathan Cape, London, 1971, page 227). Talking about legality in the context of war is missing the point that most wars are started due to laws in the first place, since not everybody accepts the legality of laws imposed by dictatorships or quangos of lawyers: laws rather than weapons are the basis for many wars. So if you have a civil war or rebellion where one side is essentially unarmed and is massacred, it doesn’t count to the pacifists who set up their definition of warfare to suit their own biases. Similarly, the 40 million starved to death by Stalin and the 6 million Hitler gassed using hydrogen cyanide are judged “peaceful” ethnic cleansing, not an inhumane barbaric warfare. The problem for the pacifist is never “peaceful” genocide, it’s always guns in the hands of those who oppose genocide. It’s always hot blooded war, not cold blooded genocide in gas chambers or concentration camps. The reason is pretty obvious: they have to think that way, or their disarmament argument disappears.
Hitler's Reichstag fire method of imposing groupthink by means of Nazi-style intimidating coercion
1. Invent a fake "risk" or "threat", complete with fake "evidence".
2. Invent a fake solution to the fake "risk" or "threat".
3. Widely publish the lying exaggerations of the fake "risk" or "threat".
4. Denounce and censor out all dissent, calling it evil or insane "risk-taking".
5. Drum up pressure on politicians to "act now" against the fake "risk" or "threat".
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| Ward Wilson anti nuclear deterrence book sales UN promotions page |
Ward Wilson's January 2013 book Five Myths about Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin, publisher) is over ten times as long as his 2008 paper The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence, but makes the same key political points. His neglect of the capabilities of nuclear weapons against military targets is made clear in his 5 November 2012 article, Myth, Hiroshima and Fear: How we Overestimated the Usefulness of the Bomb, where he claims: "The most important “fact” about nuclear weapons is that they carry an enormously powerful emotional freight. People fear them." This is not "fact" but the effect of propaganda, the exaggeration of nuclear weapons effects by the politicians for deterrence; by the military to end WWII, and by the pacifists to encourage "peaceful resolutions" such as oppressive dictatorships, in place of fighting for freedom. You can contrive an argument that mathematically a single rock or knife is "potentially" capable of killing everybody on the planet, if a lunatic up behind each person, but this is not a credible threat, unlike smaller and far more probable risks of violence involving smaller numbers of casualties. The problem with Wilson is that he ignores the smaller more credible and realistic risks of nuclear terrorism and focusses on incredible and unrealistic uses of nuclear weapons to cater to popular mythology.
The myths of Ward Wilson are as follows:
1. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, claims Wilson, didn't end WWII because Japan was already finished and would have surrendered anyway (e.g. when the USSR declared war on Japan, which was a promise Stalin made: to declare war on Japan within 3 months of the end of the war in the European theatre). LeMay said that nearly 50 years ago. We also know that city bombing doesn't cause instant defeat, from a USSBS study of the effects of bombing on Germany (USSBS Summary Report and Overall Report on the European War), where the war ended after a switch from city civilian bombing to bombing transportation/logistics/oil/fuel dumps. It was a lack of fuel and other logistics (ammunition, food, etc.) which literally stopped enemy tanks in their tracks and grounded enemy aircraft. Bombing the enemy's logistics routes and supply depots worked. Shooting at heavy armour, or bombing civilians in their air raid bunkers/cellars, failed to have any real impact. Shooting holes in fuel tankers, cratering railway lines, cracking fuel depots helped to stop enemy tanks and aircraft more effectively than bombing civilians. However, Wilson then transfers this failure of conventional warfare against cities to nuclear deterrence, buttressing his argument with a claim that terrorism against civilians almost always "fails". That's sophistry, because terrorism is almost always done by minority groups, craving publicity. The 9/11 terrorism in New York or the 7/7 terrorism in London was not a serious attempt to "win" a war with a handful of fanatics against America and Britain and replace their governments. They were about publicising Bin Laden's Al Queda jihad organization. The terrorist threat of nuclear weapons is the only real nuclear war threat we have, because we have a protected second-strike capability which deters and effectively stops any escalation to world war. So what Wilson needs to address is the fact that if nuclear terrorism is analogous to conventional terrorism (as he claims), surprise terrorist attacks are a reality which have not proved preventable by political means. So we must prepare for them, and accept that - as with conventional terrorism - it's the main risk we face.
2. Wilson argues that killing civilians (with conventional weapons) almost never wins wars, and tries to impose this argument on to anti-nuclear propaganda, using the sophistry of conflating the concept of nuclear deterrence with the concept of conventional civilian bombing. Again, Wilson ignores the protected second-strike nuclear deterrent capability that deters escalation to world war. He also ignores counterforce targetting. Typically, real planning goes like this: primary targets are enemy nuclear weapons in silos to be hit by relatively low-yield earth-penetrator weapons with roughly 100 times lower yield than the 1954 Bravo nuclear test which caused beta skin burns to the downwind inhabitants on Rongelap. Since Nagasaki, cities have ceased to be primary nuclear targets because as missile accuracy has improved, allowing surgical strikes with lower yield warheads (thanks partly to MIRV multiple warhead technology, which limits the yield of individual nuclear explosions, and partly to new earth-penetrator warhead technology). As as Philip J. Dolan (who also edited the 1963 nuclear bombing field manual FM 101-31) pointed out on page 1 of the Damage to Military Field Equipment chapter of the 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, a primary function of nuclear weapons is counterforce. Putting a bomb on Moscow would be a last resort of escalation, equivalent to Hitler using his 12,000 tons of stockpiled tabun nerve gas on Britain in 1945 (which he never did), not the first. Without basic civil defense, you can't "stop worrying and love the bomb" (as Stanley Kubrick put it), but you can control escalation and use the lower yield-options (Nevada test size, not Eniwetok multimegaton H-bomb test size) in the first place against military targets. No nuclear winter, no Hiroshima-like flash burns casualties. Thermal effects are negligible for even very shallow earth penetrators (example: a thermal yield of merely 1.8% for Hurricane, a 1952 British nuclear test at just 2.7 metres depth).
The campaign against the neutron bomb to deter massed tank invasions (which is a different thing from actually exploding neutron bombs in a war!), was similarly opposed by sophstry and ignorance in the unclassified literature, but such arguments were debunked by British nuclear test expert Charles S. Grace in a letter to the New Scientist which we quoted years ago:
“You published an article ‘Armour defuses the neutron bomb’ by John Harris and Andre Gsponer (13 March, p 44). To support their contention that the neutron bomb is of no military value against tanks, the authors make a number of statements about the effects of nuclear weapons. Most of these statements are false ... Do the authors not realise that at 280 metres the thermal fluence is about 20 calories per square centimetre – a level which would leave a good proportion of infantrymen, dressed for NBC conditions, fit to fight on? ... Perhaps they are unaware of the fact that a tank exposed to a nuclear burst with 30 times the blast output of their weapon, and at a range about 30 per cent greater than their 280 metres, was only moderately damaged, and was usable straight afterwards. ... we find that Harris and Gsponer’s conclusion that the ‘special effectiveness of the neutron bomb against tanks is illusory’ does not even stand up to this rather cursory scrutiny. They appear to be ignorant of the nature and effects of the blast and heat outputs of nuclear weapons, and unaware of the constraints under which the tank designer must operate.”
- C. S. Grace, Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, Wiltshire, New Scientist, 12 June 1986, p. 62.
(The misleading article by Gsponer and Harris is now linked to uncritically as if it were fact on Wikipedia's neutron bomb article, without mention or linking to Grace's debunking! There's a saying in disarmament propaganda circles, that some mud sticks and repeating falsehoods often enough makes everybody believe them, no matter if they are correct or not. Notice that Grace is party to the classified data and is also co-author of the unclassified textbook Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Effects and Survivability. Gsponer weirdly claims in the Abstract of his 2008 arxiv physics preprint, http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0512268.pdf that "at no point did theWestern governments effectively try to stop Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, which suggests that its existence was useful as a foreign policy tool, as is confirmed by its use as a major justification to wage two wars on Iraq" [abstract, p. i], which again is sophistry. Iraq's dictator Saddam used nerve gas in 1988 and the first Gulf War against Iraq was triggered by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, threatening oil price stability. Thus, nuclear weapons were not used as a "major justification" for the first war on Iraq. Similarly, in the second war on Iraq, the immediate cause was the risk of nerve gas on long range missiles after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, not nuclear weapons. See Prime Minister Blair's infamous "dossier", linked here, for the proof of this. Gsponer's other "physics" papers on arxiv, getting excited over quaternions, contain no impressive predictions in terms of making checkable physics predictions, either. Not that checkable predictions are valued by the media in the age of saturation by string theory hype. When mathematical physicists fail, they attempt to obfuscate, hiding behind epicycle type modelling or dreams, with no hard, checkable physics: "when other roads are barred, take something very easy and make it very hard". "When does physics depart the realm of testable hypothesis and come to resemble theology? Peter Woit argues that string theory isn’t just going in the wrong direction, it’s not even science. Not Even Wrong shows that what many physicists call superstring “theory” is not a theory at all. It makes no predictions, not even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the subject to survive and flourish. Peter Woit explains why the mathematical conditions for progress in physics are entirely absent from superstring theory today, offering the other side of the story." There are always some guys who lap up pseudoscience, be it flat earth, epicycles, eugenics, string theory, ESP, aliens, or the popular myth of nuclear annihilation at the touch of a button. No surprise then that stringy hype fantasies are promoted by the some of the same guys who promote nuclear annihilation fantasies and disarmament utopias, while sneering at civil defense. Putting a plastic sheet on a tank will easily make it safe from radiation, they say, but doing the same against fallout is no good. Their radiation cross-section shielding propaganda is indistinguishable from medieval witchcraft propaganda, so don't mention DNA repair proteins like p53.)
“The first objection to battlefield ER weapons is that they potentially lower the nuclear threshold because of their tactical utility. In the kind of potential strategic use suggested where these warheads would be held back as an ultimate countervalue weapon only to be employed when exchange had degenerated to the general level, this argument loses its force: the threshold would long since have been crossed before use of ER weapons is even contemplated. In the strategic context, it is rather possible to argue that such weapons raise the threshold by reinforcing the awful human consequences of nuclear exchange: the hostages recognize they are still (or once again) prisoners and, thus, certain victims.”
- Dr Donald M. Snow (Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies, University of Alabama), “Strategic Implications of Enhanced Radiation Weapons”, Air University Review, July-August 1979 issue (online version linked here).
"The neutron bomb, so-called because of the deliberate effort to maximize the effectiveness of the neutrons, would necessarily be limited to rather small yields - yields at which the neutron absorption in air does not reduce the doses to a point at which blast and thermal effects are dominant. The use of small yields against large-area targets again runs into the delivery problems faced by chemical agents and explosives, and larger yields in fewer packages pose a less stringent problem for delivery systems in most applications. In the unlikely event that an enemy desired to minimize blast and thermal damage and to create little fallout but still kill the populace, it would be necessary to use large numbers of carefully placed neutron-producing weapons burst high enough to avoid blast damage on the ground [500 metres altitude for a neutron bomb of 1 kt total yield], but low enough to get the neutrons down. In this case, however, adequate radiation shielding for the people would leave the city unscathed and demonstrate the attack to be futile.'3. Wilson claims that nuclear deterrence failed to restrain aggression in the Cuban Missiles Crisis, ignoring the fact that America had a first strike capability at the time and had a much larger nuclear weapons and missiles stockpile than the USSR in 1962, which America knew due to U2 aircraft surveys. Kennedy's threat on TV on 22 October 1962 to respond with the "full" strike retaliation, helped to ensure that both the nuclear IRBMS and short-range air defense missiles were removed from Castro's fanatical regime in Cuba, helping to stabilize the Cold War and reduce the risk of an escalation of the Cuban crisis. The only myths are those which people like Wilson and also the Pugwash/Rotblat /Chamberlain/World Peace Council (Stalin) peace movement persist in. Some of these people are not even communists, but merely deluded idealists who get a hearing because they tell a story people prefer to listen to, full of false hope and fanatical zeal. The problem with this Pollyanna idealism is that it relies on lying about the effects of nuclear weapons, which leaves ordinary Toms, Dicks and Harry's with the idea that nuclear weapons vaporize the planet and it is silly to duck and cover to avoid the blast winds and debris on seeing a flash brighter than the sun in silence. By using exaggerations and lies, this movement will needlessly maximise (not minimise) the effects of nuclear weapons against civilians, by ensuring people are unprepared and unknowledgeable to take fast action. As for the "threat" from our own nuclear weapons and the need to use it to prevent nuclear war:
- Dr Harold L. Brode, RAND Corporation, Blast and Other Threats, pp. 5-6 in Proceedings of the Symposium on Protective Structures for Civilian Populations, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, Symposium held at Washington, D.C., April 19-23, 1965.
"The United States' overseas conflicts are limited wars only from the U.S. perspective; to adversaries, they are existential. It should not be surprising if they use every weapon at their disposal to stave off total defeat [this is relevant to North Korea, Iran]. ...
"The United States' nuclear weapons are now so accurate that it can conduct successful counterforce attacks using the smallest-yield warheads in the arsenal, rather than the huge warheads that the FAS/NRDC [anti-civil defense biased] simulation modeled. And to further reduce the fallout, the weapons can be set to detonate as air bursts, which would allow most of the radiation to dissipate in the upper atmosphere. We ran multiple HPAC scenarios against the identical target set used in the FAS/NRDC study but modeled low-yield air bursts rather than high-yield ground bursts. The fatality estimates plunged from 3-4,000,000 to less than 700 - a figure comparable to the number of civilians reportedly killed since 2006 in Pakistan by U.S. drone strikes. ... regardless of which way the wind blew. ...
"Of course, a deterrent threat also needs to be credible - that is, an adversary needs to be convinced that a retaliatory threat will actually be executed."
- Prof. Keir A. Lieber and prof. Daryl G. Press, The Nukes We Need, Foreign Affairs, 2009, v88, n6, pp.39-51 (quotations from pages 42, 47 and 49).
4. Wilson next tries to address Thatcher's argument that both world wars occurred when no nuclear deterrent existed, and no world war had occurred since there have been nuclear weapons: he merely asserts that there were "risks" and that the absence of a world war since 1945 doesn't disprove those risks. Using this kind of double negative he is only one step away from Neville Chamberlain's favored use of triple-negatives, again more sophistry. Wilson's reasoning obfuscates two different risks: the risk of some use of nuclear weapon, and the risk of a major nuclear war of world war magnitude. For deterrence to work, the use of nuclear weapons needs to be credible, but that doesn't mean that there is a significant risk of an all-out world war involving nuclear weapons. Hitler had tabun nerve gas in 1938, and by 1945 had 12,000 tons of it. It was never used, partly because of a serious German rubber shortage (for gas masks in the event of retaliation), and partly because the Nazi regime was deterred by concerns that the allies might also have developed and stockpiled nerve gas. They had not, but their charcoal absorber gas masks were effective against it and standard mustard (liquid agent) skin contamination countermeasures, like sealing refuge rooms to keep out droplets, were also valid against the skin hazard from nerve gas spray or droplets. This deterrence of escalation from high explosives and incendiaries to tabun nerve gas during WWII is evidence that escalation can be controlled even within the most "total" kind of world war known.
5. Wilson ends up with the claim that nuclear weapons were not "used" militarily in the Cold War, so they are "useless weapons". Duh! During the Cold War, nuclear weapons were used for deterrence during the Cold War, and did that job. What Wilson is doing here is sophistry, using two opposite meaning for the word "used" (explosion and non-explosion). What Wilson needs to learn is that if I buy insurance, there are two ways to benefit for the money spent: by getting peace of mind (reduced worry about the risk of war) and by having a countermeasure in case of disaster.
If you crash your car, you might be killed and the insurance cover will then do you no direct good (although there may be a payout to relatives). If you don't need an insurance payout, by Wilson's argument, the insurance cover will have proved to be a complete waste of money, like an unexploded nuclear bomb in the Cold War nuclear stockpile. Actually, Wilson is contriving a very ignorant three-card-trick, where it's obvious where the con is: a self-contradictory series of arguments. He argues in one of his "myths" that there was a "risk" during the Cold War, then in his final argument he backtracks and pretends that there was no risk so that nuclear weapons had no "use" in the Cold War.
On pages 155-7 of the 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn explained precisely why nuclear deterrence did not prevent all conventional wars:
"to the extent that we try to use the threat of a general war to deter the minor provocations ... the threat is too dangerous to be lived with. ... Therefore, in the long run the West will need 'safe-looking' limited war forces to handle minor and moderate provocations. ... We must not look too dangerous to our enemies. ... We must not appear to be excessively aggressive, irresponsible, trigger-happy, or accident-prone, today or in the future." (Emphasis by Kahn.)
In other words, if you try to deter petty theft by using the death penalty, you will end up with major riots everytime a hungry kid steals a candy bar. It doesn't work in practice. The protected second-strike nuclear retaliation capability cannot by itself safely be used as a credible threat to prevent a conventional war, invasion, or terrorism. If you use a hammer to crack a nut, expect to make a mess.
Herman Kahn explained why wars and provocations are not deterred by nuclear weapons as due to credibility gap. The more nuclear weapons of high yield each side has, the harder it is use those nuclear weapons to deter provocations and low-intensity conventional wars. This is due to the lack of credibility involved: nobody believes that anyone will cause Hiroshima-type effects in response to minor provocations, because of the risk of second-strike retaliation and escalation. Therefore, such countervalue (city bombing) threats lack credibility and undermine nuclear deterrence if made in an effort to deter minor provocations. Nobody makes such threats to deter minor provocations. Low level (conventional) limited wars continue.
But as the number of strategic nuclear weapons in the world is reduced, and as their yield is reduced due to retirement of higher yield ground burst weapons and their replacement by lower yield earth penetrator warheads, nuclear war becomes more likely because the credibility gap decreases. Escalation is limited to the stockpile, which is falling. Nuclear wars become more credible as yields and stockpile figures decrease. You can start to threaten to use nuclear weapons to end conventional wars again, just as in August 1945 when a third nuclear bomb was prepared for use after Nagasaki. The argument that “nuclear weapons don’t deter war, only nuclear war” will disappear, reducing suffering and unhappiness in the world. Surely this is a realistic and safer objective than utopian disarmanent, and one that must be turned into a hard reality by those who genuinely prefer peace to mindless, Chamberlain-disproven propaganda.
Wilson's propaganda is analogous to Norman Angell's 1908 Great Illusion in terms of sophistry (Angell explained all the financial, human, moral, and other reasons why war is great illusion, but he ignored or discounted evidence which didn't fit into his theory from the American civil war, the English civil war, and all meaningful comparisons between peaceful life under a dictatorship of evil, and the human/financial/moral costs of war). (Naturally, WWI proved Angell right, not wrong, because of the waste of money on all the expensive and usually fruitless helling of fortified positions (trenches), so he was knighted and given a Nobel Peace Prize, and then did his best along with many others to ensure Britain was unprepared for war in the 1930s, helping, as Herman Kahn points out, to achieve "peace in our time" in September 1938, to use Neville Chamberlain's words. To this end, he and others managed to ignore the problems for the Jews, seeing it as a trivial concern compared to a preventative war.) There's little purpose, Wilson argues, to a nuclear weapon that merely deters other weapons of the same kind, and in any case, he argues that nuclear weapons don't even deter nuclear weapons, because of nuclear proliferation and the incredibility of a threat to blow the world up if an opponent launches an attack.
Debunking the argument that popular prejudice and popular pseudoscience should take precedence over facts (the argument behind witchcraft and other dangerous nonsense)
Wilson's sophistry may be related to Thomas Schelling's 1959 argument on page 1 of RAND memorandum RM-2510, Nuclear Weapons and Limited War:
"It is argued, of course, that there are political disadvantages in our using nuclear weapons in limited war ... a worldwide revulsion against nuclear weapons ... a political distinction that rests on the reactions of allies and neutrals."
This Schelling "argument" caters to the misinformed, propaganda-fed media "revulsion" in preference to catering to a rational consideration against using nuclear weapons to deter enemy tanks. Such an argument is a mere a chickening out of the hard job of correcting widespread misapprehensions. If the media reports lies, that's not a reason to surrender and force yourself to believe and promote those lies! The job of government is not to base policy on widespread fashionable delusion, but to speak up for the facts. The position of Schelling iss like the 1960s Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argument that public apathy over civil defense was an adequate reason to abandon civil defense. The harder and more rewarding job is not to surrender to utopian-based popular delusions, but to fight for truth to get a fair hearing. Worldwide revulsion is due to anti-nuclear propaganda which is an exaggeration (due to considering only all-out nuclear war on civilian targets) ignoring the rational facts about tactical nuclear weapons for hard military targets.
You should never cater to misapprehensions just because they are widespread or have many fanatics behind them. Facts are not determined by consensus of biased opinions or fears, but by objective evidence. The basic problem behind the Nazi regime was eugenics, which had a worldwide pseudoscience movement behind it. People who could have debunked it were intimidated, and they mostly kept quiet because they thought it was a "harmless pseudoscience" until the holocaust. This allowed the small number of very loud media fanatics, including Medical Nobel Laureates such as Alexis Carrell, to promote gas chamber eugenics without any effective media opposition.
“The epithet ‘denier’ is increasingly used to bash anyone who dares to question orthodoxy. ... The concept of denialism is itself inflexible, ideological and intrinsically anti-scientific. It is used to close down legitimate debate by insinuating moral deficiency in those expressing dissident views. ... Edward Skidelsky of the University of Exeter, UK, has argued, crying denialism is a form of ad hominem argument: ‘the aim is not so much to refute your opponent as to discredit his motives’. The expanding deployment of the concept, he argues, threatens to reverse one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment - ‘the liberation of historical and scientific inquiry from dogma’.”
- Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, New Scientist, 15 May 2010, p. 44.
“It is a principle which permits a state in the selfish pursuit of power to disregard its treaties ... Such a principle, stripped of all disguise, is surely the mere primitive doctrine that might is right, and if this principle were established through the world, the peoples of the world would be kept in bondage of fear, and all hopes of settled peace and of security, of justice and liberty, among nations, would be ended.”
- King George VI, 3 September 1939.
“I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.”
- Voltaire, 6 February 1770.
Voltaire put the case for freedom of speech clearly: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Modern “liberalism” reverses Voltaire’s approach and argues for groupthink censorship. First to be prejudiced in deciding what moralistic or ethical dogmas to accept, then to oppose or ignore contrary evidence without objectively answering it, on the mere basis that the search for truth or facts is offensive to the futures of high-earning science “professionals” or politicians who make money “teaching” popular lies and subject (not objective) reasoning disguised as ethical and moral profundity.
“The student ... is accustomed to being told what he should believe, and to the arbitration of authority. ... Ultimately, self-confidence requires a rational foundation. ... we should face our tasks with confidence based upon a dispassionate appreciation of attested merits. It is something gained if we at least escape the domination of inhibiting ideas.”
- Cecil Alec Mace, The Psychology of Study, 1963, p90.
The great civil defense psychology researcher, Irving L. Janis (author of Air War and Emotional Stress, demonstrating how the few people who ducked and covered instinctively in Hiroshima were saved blast debris and displacement injuries, and Groupthink), and Leon Mann discuss the use of popular deceptions to influence decision making in Decision Making: A Psychological Analysis of Conflict, Choice, and Commitment (1977), page 146:
"... if a man has chosen a highly rewarding job that unexpectedly turns out to require dishonest practices, he may begin to devalue the importance of honesty ..."
If you do that, you can fool yourself into believing that pigs fly and that exaggerations of gas warfare as annihilating all life in cities in the 1930s helped to prevent WWII from ever occurring, or that the use gas and gas war countermeasures as a deterrent in WWII did not help to prevent gas use, because the world was annihilated by poison gas in WWII. Believing and spreading lies has its penalties, as Janis and Mann state on page 340:
"The decision maker, insensitive to the changing realities that make the course of action obsolete, tries right up to the bitter end to maintain illusions based on fanciful rationalizations [e.g. Wilson's "myths"], invented to bolster the choice. ... until at last an unequivocal confrontation makes him realize that he cannot go on that way, which shocks and depresses him. ... In such cases, the bolstering is excessive since it is not merely a patch here and there put in to strengthen weak spots but rather has become the mainstay of support for a worn-out fabric that would otherwise fall apart. ... The need for effective confrontations that challenge fantasies and illusions is acute whenever a decision maker continues to ignore or deny negative feedback that should send him scurrying to find a better means of achieving his goals."
The problem here, as Max Planck pointed out in his autobiography, is that media dominating dictators of popular fashion who tell the public what they want to hear, bolstered by sophistry, can go on ignoring or downplaying the facts which discredit their arguments until they literally die off. If their motives for spreading falsehoods look good, they can get away with it, even if it ends up turning a limited war into a world war, like the popular policy of appeasement did in the 1930s, when Churchill's calls for early intervention were ignored and unpopular. Wilson is headed in the same direction, because getting rid of nuclear weapons will return the world to a pre-nuclear era, when two world wars did occur.
But this is not the only cost of Wilson's arguments. There is also the groupthink sophistry cost, because false reasoning to "justify" policy leads to Stalinist-type censorship of all objectivity by opposing arguments. Because Wilson can't get out of his hole, he digs deeper, piling up more vacuous "logic", all contrived to fit popular sentiment. The only way to deal with the fact he is wrong is for him to deliberately misquote opposing arguments and then attack the misquotations he himself has introduced, to ignore criticisms altogether, to dismiss the facts as "simple" or "simplistic", or simply to pick and choose weak criticisms to focus on (picking fights with strawmen), ignoring the tougher objective criticisms he can't handle. Hence a Stalinist dictatorship, in which "rude" Trotsky figures (who dare to challenge evil lies) are hated and subjected to false attacks because they are right and demoralizing. If there were no public appetite willing to lap up lies, there would have been no communists or fascists, or those who preach the rebirth of such bigoted and false dictatorship in the new name of moral environmentalism, such as B. F. Skinner's 1972 Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which argued for an end to freedom in order to save the world from a false doom. This is just Hitler's scaremongering tactic for dictatorship (e.g. the Reichstagg fire, used as an excuse to impose dictatorship). Malthus faked a disaster prediction by assuming that food supply increases slower (linearly) than the exponential rise in population. Logically, food production increases just in step with population (unless we turn politically into a new USSR with collective farms that don't work; or conversely, it increases faster than population if we improve farming efficiency with GM crops). Nevertheless, Malthus's lie is still popular and regularly reappears in new cloaks.
Above: Julian Simon and Herman Kahn in their 1984 book The Resourceful Earth disproved Malthus's claim that the food per person decreases as population increases. T. R. Malthus had falsely asserted in his 1798 Essay on Population: "Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years, or increases in geometric ratio ... whereas the means of subsistence, under the circumstances favourable to industry, could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetric ratio." He was wrong: food production increases at least in proportion to population size (as a geometrical progression if population size increases that way, not arithmetically), as the graph above proves. Malthus claimed further than the only way that the food per person could be increased were through disaster (war, famine, disease, earthquakes, etc.) killing people, leaving more food for survivors. He was an armchair pseudoscientist of the calibre of Aristotle. Charles Darwin promoted Malthus and claimed he inspired Darwin's theory of evolution, since the struggle for food against starvation when the population increased would end in the survival of the fittest.
Arrhenius in 1896 claimed CO2 causes global warming because it's a greenhouse gas, ignoring the fact it is trivial in comparison to H2O vapour which through condensation into droplet clouds cools the surface with a negative-feedback mechanism that Arrhenius didn't know about. Arrhenius was famous for his chemical reaction rate equation: speed of reaction ~ exp(-z/T) where T is temperature and z is a constant. In plain English, for small values of z/T, i.e. z/T << 1, Arrhenius's exp(-z/T) -> 1 - z/T, while for large values, z/T >> 1, we find an asymptotic limit: exp(-z/T) -> 1. So the hotter the test tube, the faster the reaction rate (because the molecules are going faster, basic kinetic theory). The cooler it is, the slower the reaction rate. But his law includes a maximum possible rate of reaction, because at high temperatures the molecules hit so hard that they come apart again, so you reach an equilibrium between formation and decomposition rates where negative feedback (decomposition) prevents any further increase in reaction rate!
Pity Arrhenius didn't look in the sky and notice that there are clouds that form from evaporated water, providing a negative feedback mechanism against H2O (and CO2) global warming! Pity he didn't realise that an absence of negative feedback (clouds) for H2O - if his simplistic CO2 model were applied to it - falsely predicts no life on earth (a runaway H2O greenhouse effect). Pity that not 1 of the 21 IPCC models include the real H2O negative feedback loop demonstrated by Spencer's papers. I just wish there was a technical showdown dealing with cloud cover feedback in the popular press.
Let's continue with Clarke's 1971 book The Science of War and Peace. Clarke on page 212 explains Ernest Hass's November 1968 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argument for a global movement against the "common enemy" of a coming ice age (that was before the consensus of ignorant opinion switched from "global dimming" and thus fear-mongering about a looming ice age, to fear-mongering about CO2 heat death):
Even if the threat of the next ice age is not imminent, Dr Hass suggests, we will lose little and gain much by fighting this common enemy. 'Why should we not replace the present args race among nations with a common fight against a global opponent?' he asks. 'If we actually have to expect the next ice age, we will have won first prize with this change of attitude. Even if the Antarctic ice cap does not show any tendency toward sliding into the ocean, it will have caused us to utilize huge invested means, presently completely unproductive, for the expansion or the improvement of our common living space [the Nazi demand for lebensraum].'
Dr Hass's article, "Common Enemy Sought ... and Found?" in the November 1968 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is the application of Hitler's Mein Kampf lebensraum demand, complete with defensive propaganda to ensure exaggerated threats and lying arguments, similar to the Reichstag fire that Hitler used to consolidate power and cut down all potential opponents (the lefties of course try to tarnish Dubya with 9/11 as a Reichstag Fire type excuse for the war on terror, but it does't wash; it's the fascists who excuse terrorists). It's wrong because deliberate exaggerations for propaganda are "ends-justify-the-means" fanaticism, which is precisely the evil lying that ends in horror, and spending billions on a false threat diverts money to egotistical megalomaniacs from where it is needed now to provide clean water, sanitation, and other simple foundations for humanity like sustainable farming. Lying for propaganda is a slippery slope to hell, because as in the USSR and Nazi regimes, it can only be maintained by forcefully silencing dissenters who can disprove the lies, so you end up with a paranoid Big Brother dictatorship claiming to be loved by all, when in fact it is a delusion enforced by fear and threat:
All dictatorial regimes are held together by lies, which then leads to truthful statements that the regime is under "threat" from internal and/or external dissenters. Quite so. If a dictatorial regime is built on a tissue of lies, then dissenters who expose the facts are indeed a "threat" to the regime! So dictatorships are right to claim (and fear) a "threat" from all dissenters. But the root of the problem is the lie of the dictatorship in the first place. I recently had a technical discussion with a geologist and environmental politics MA student, Martin Lack, about CO2 global pollution effects exaggerations on James Delingpole's internet site, during which Lack stated falsehoods, then claimed he didn't have time to discuss my reply, and refused to be drawn into an argument. On such subjects, it's not good enough to "agree to disagree". The details are everything, and either you get into the details, or you concede you are wrong. The problem comes when people are disproved by observation and experiment-based facts, but refuse to admit it, and simply go on believing in a faulty assumption as if it were a tenant of a dogmatic religion. If you can't accept fact over "authority" or "consensus" politics, then you're not a scientist; you've returned to metaphysics where fashionable Aristotle belief outweighs fact.
"One of the primary pioneering theorists on apocalyptic global warming is Guenther Schwab (1902-2006), an Austrian Nazi. ... Schwab had been a strong nature lover since boyhood, and by the 1920's he became very active in the emerging environmental movement in Austria. Later, he joined the Nazi Party. While this may sound odd to many who have bought into the Marxian propaganda over the years that the Nazis were right wing capitalistic extremists, greens who signed up for the Nazi Party were actually very typical of the day. The most widely represented group of people in the Nazi Party was the greens, and Guenther Schwab was just one of among many. The greens' interest in lonely places found a solitary niche in the singleness of Adolf Hitler, who ruled the Third Reich from his spectacular mountain compound, high in the Bavarian Alps called the Berghof. In English, this could easily be translated as Mountain Home, Bavaria.
"After the war in the 1950's, Guenther Schwab's brand of environmentalism also played a fundamental role in the development of the green anti-nuclear movement in West Germany. The dropping of the atom bomb and the nuclear fallout of the Cold War helped to globalize the greens into an apocalyptic 'peace' movement with Guenther Schwab being one of its original spokesmen. The unprecedented destruction in Germany brought on by industrialized warfare never before seen in the history of the world only served to radicalize the German greens into an apocalyptic movement. Their hatred toward global capitalism became even more vitriolic precisely because the capitalists were now in charge of a dangerous nuclear arsenal that threatened the entire planet.
"Later, Guenther Schwab joined the advisory panel of "The Society of Biological Anthropology, Eugenics and Behavior Research." Schwab was especially concerned with the burgeoning population explosion of the Third World that he was sure would eventually overrun Europe. By advocating modern racial science based on genetics, Schwab believed that the population bomb, together with its associated environmental degradation, could be averted. Here, Schwab shows his basic commitment to the Nazi SS doctrine of 'blood and soil' - an explosive concoction of eugenics and environmentalism loaded with eco-imperialistic ambitions that had devastating consequences on the Eastern Front in World War II.
"The success of Schwab's book helped him to establish an international environmental organization called "The World League for the Defense of Life." Not surprisingly, Werner Haverbeck, former Hitler Youth member and Nazi environmental leader of the Reich's League for Folk National Character and Landscape, later became the chairman of Schwab's organization. In 1973, Haverbeck blamed the environmental crisis in Germany on American capitalism. It was an unnatural colonial import that had infected Germany like a deadly foreign body.
"Both Schwab's organization and Haverbeck were also instrumental in establishing the German Green Party in 1980. Such embarrassing facts were later managed with a little housecleaning and lots of cosmetics, which was further buoyed by characterizing such greens as extreme 'right wing' ecologists - a counterintuitive label that continues to misdirect and plague all environmental studies of the Third Reich. Worst of all is that Haverbeck's wife is also a Holocaust denier.
"Long before Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," green Nazi Guenther Schwab played a large role in catalyzing the frightening theory of global warming."
- Mark Musser, "The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory", American Thinker, February 15, 2011.
"I sincerely believe any arms race with the Soviet Union would act to our benefit. I believe that we can out-invent, out-research, out-develop, out-engineer, and out-produce the USSR in any area from sling shots to space weapons, and in doing so become more and more prosperous while the Soviets become progressively poorer."
- General Curtis E. LeMay, America is in Danger, Funk and Wagnalls, NY, 1968.
"So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil."
- President Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983.
"... the ideas of the liberal left are all so utterly impractical, stupid and wrong that none of them stands up to close scrutiny ... which is why they have to ... close down the argument ... by smearing the right-wing ... The evil genius behind this cunning strategy was an Italian Marxist called Antonio Gramsci who recognised that for the left to win ... the left needed to infiltrate the university campuses, the arts and the media and create a cultural climate in which to be right wing was not merely a political affiliation but proof positive of moral deficiency. ... Were the most prolific mass-murderers in history - Mao and Stalin - right wing? They were not. Nor, technically, was National Socialist Adolf Hitler [or the notorious Cambodian communist Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, who "cleansed" his country of 2 million people]."
- James Delingpole, How to be right, Headline, 2007, page 138.
Although the Cold War was prevented from escalating into WWIII by Reagan's decisive leadership, the USSR was coming close to it when exceeding Western nuclear power by the deployment of the SS-20 from 1976-88, together with the immense propaganda effort against the neutron bomb by its Moscow-based World Peace Council. Every year there was a certain significant risk of war. The longer the Cold War lasted via Western appeasement of the USSR, the higher the cumulative risk of war. Physiology or Medicine Nobel Laureate Professor George Wald in an anti-war speech on 4 March 1969 (Boston Globe, 8 March, 1969) stated that he asked a
"very distinguished professor of government at Harvard ... what sort of odds he would lay on the possibility of a full-scale nuclear war within the foreseeable future. 'Oh', he said comfortably, 'I think I can give you a pretty good answer to that question. I estimate the probability of full-scale nuclear war, provided that the situation remains about as it is now, at 2 percent per year.' Anybody can do the simple calculation [cumulative war probability = 1 - 0.98{time in years}] that shows that 2 percent per year means that the chance of having a full-scale nuclear war by 1990 is about one in three [i.e., 1 - 0.9820 years = 0.3], and by 2000 it is about 50-50 [i.e., 1 - 0.9830 years = 0.5]."
What these people didn't appreciate was that appeasement and disarmament was no solution to this risk, encouraging aggression and world war as it did in the 1930s; Reagan's effort to end the arms race by Star Wars and strength was not uniquely "risking war" since there was an increasing risk of war if the Cold War continued forever. The ending of the Cold War with the fall of the Warsaw Pact the the coming of democracy to Eastern Europe in 1989 was required. As Wald's estimate shows, from 1970-90 (the USSR had marshalled nuclear parity and war potential by about 1970 or so) the risk of general war may have been 30% and if the Cold War continued there would have been over 50% chance of a general nuclear war between 1970-2010.
Philip J. Dolan, co-editor with Glasstone of the 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons, surveyed objective estimates of the risk of nuclear war and found them lower than Wald's figure, but still significant. For his 1981 Stanford Research Institute report on effects from a nuclear war, published as Appendix A of the U.S. National Council on Radiological protection (NCRP) symposium The Control of Exposure to the Public of Ionising Radiation in the Event of Accident or Attack, Dolan cited an objective army calculation that estimated a 3% risk per decade, which he compared to subjective public opinion polls that forecast a risk of about 10% per decade. Nevertheless, there was a significant risk of a general nuclear war while the Cold War continued, and it was necessary to end that risk as soon as possible.
Notice that, as explained in detail in an earlier post (linked here), President Reagan's "Star Wars" plan of March 1983 was not his first option, which was civil defense. Nor was "Star Wars" a new concept: it was the rebirth of an idea developed and opposed more than two decades previously, ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile systems). In 1956, America began to contract ABM research, which led to successful tests of the Nike-Zeus ABM system at Kwajalein Atoll, which successfully intercepted missiles fired from California in 1962-3. This was a long range ABM missile, and one early argument was that the enemy could fire loads of MIRVs with "penetration-aids" such as decoy warheads, aluminium balloons, chaff (pieces of wire), and thereby clog up the defensive radar with too many "targets". However, as people like Samuel Cohen pointed out, in outer space the ABM warhead radiation (either a neutron bomb warhead or high-yield X-ray ablation warhead) has a very great range, and can effectively neutralize a vast "envelope" of space above a potential target, even if the ABM radar and computers can't identify the actual nuclear warheads within the cloud of debris. In reality, of course, heavy "penetration aids" grossly reduce the nuclear payload of an ICBM (an advantage for the defender with ABM!), while lightweight radar reflectors (like wire chaff or metallic balloons) quickly get slowed down and burned up in the atmosphere, unlike heavy nuclear warheads, so they can then be distinguished and ignored. Therefore, the Nike-Zeus system with long-range "Spartan" ABM missiles was supplemented with short-range "Sprint" ABM missiles which would intercept the warheads in the atmosphere (which filters out light penetration aids).
This was all worked out in a classified 23-volume ABM report by Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute in 1964, which took 200 analysts a year of research. President Johnson's U.S. Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, in 1967 decided to deploy a very limited form of this ABM system under the name Sentinel at a cost of $5 billion, to protect American cities against a limited or accidental attack, including a possible nuclear war with nuclear proliferation countries like China. This came under attack from former science adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Dr Jerome Wiesner, in his heavily-biased June 1967 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article The Cold War is Dead, but the Arms Race Rumbles On: "Today, the same groups that pressed Kennedy [who authorized the 1962-3 ABM tests!] to build those weapons are leading the fight for the new ABM system and using most of the same arguments." The sad result was that a campaign against ABM was launched, focussed on the claims by a group of 49 Senators led by Edward "Chappaquiddick" Kennedy that it would:
1. Not work
2. Increase the risk of nuclear accidents
3. Upset the nuclear balance
4. Lead to a new arms race
5. Cost too much
6. Increase the risk of war
7. Make talks with the Russians less likely
8. Imperil the test ban treaty
(List from page 93 of Robin Clarke, The Science of War and Peace, 1971.)
In 1969, U.S. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird explained every argument against ABM was wrong: it was proved against limited accidental attacks or small-scale nuclear proliferation nuclear attacks and would therefore reduce the escalation risks in these events, stabilizing the nuclear balance against accidents. Since the Russians had already deployed their own ABM system to defend Moscow, it would not lead to a new arms race, but would help civil defence against any nuclear attack by limiting the number of incoming warheads that land on cities. It was dirt cheap compared to conventional warfare in Vietnam. It reduced the risk of war, by making an enemy attack less likely to succeed. It made favorable talks from a position of strength with the Russians more likely, instead of encouraging further belligerence (as Laird told a Congressional Armed Services Committee on 20 March 1969, ABM gave "the Soviet Union added incentive for productive arms control talks"). It did not imperil the nuclear test ban treaty because both the Spartan and Sprint warheads were well-established technology. It would have led to proper EMP protection of the West, a safeguard against natural solar storms as well as high altitude nuclear war. But the appeasers prevailed as cash disappeared down the drain in Vietnam. Reagan had to call the USSR an "evil empire" in 1983 to overcome the ABM haters and psychologically bankrupt the ideological lies of the already-financially bankrupt USSR.
In the 1960s, as in the 1930s, the concept of moral relativism reigned supreme, aided and abetted by the spiraling costs and casualties in the Vietnam War (the U.S. Defence Department budget rose from $47.8 billion in 1961 to $80.6 billion in 1970). The 1965 second edition of Professor Quincey Wright's A Study of War analyzed the warlikeness of 652 tribes, running to 40 chapters, 1,637 pages, 52 appendices. However, a close look at his data show that - despite the World Wars of the twentieth century - the war problem has been improving (once you take account of the world's exponentially rising population). For example, in both the 16th and 17th centuries, nations spent 65% of their time at war, but this fell to 38% in the 18th century and to just 18% in the 20th century (up to 1964), despite the two World Wars. The average duration of wars remained around 3 years, and percentage of forces killed in war actually fell from 25% in the 17th century to 15% in the 18th, 10% in the 19th, and just 6% in the 20th (up to 1964). The only reason why war deaths have gone up as a whole is the increase in the population, since the risk of death to soldiers has fallen over the years (most of the military deaths in wars before the 20th century were from diseases like cholera from contaminated water and infected minor wounds, before the advent of antibiotics, water purification, and sanitation)! Given civil defence and ABM, even aerial bombardment can be limited, and the upward trend in civilian war deaths (13% of the dead in WWI, 70% in WWII, and 84% in the Korean War) can be reversed. Lt Col Fielding L. Greaves stated in the December 1962 Military Review that 14,542 wars occurred from 3600 BC to 1962 AD, an average of 2.6 wars per year! But Wright's book gives an average of 0.63 wars per year in the 16th century, 0.64 in the 17th, 0.38 in the 18th, 0.89 in the 19th, and only 0.30 in the 20th (up to 1964).
In particular, thermonuclear weapons can never achieve the high levels of destruction inherent in the fanaticism of "primitive" guerrilla wars like the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864-70, which was started off by a war against Brazil by the dictator of Paraguay (Francisco Solano López). This led to an alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay on 1 May 1865 which eventually killed 83.5% of the 1.337 million population of Paraguay. López by June 1864 was outnumbered by 10 to 1, but he did not surrender and led a savage guerrilla war until he was killed on 1 March 1870.
President Truman dropped two nuclear weapons on Japanese cities to rapidly end the war for humanitarian reasons, avoiding an Iwo Jima type conventional invasion of the Japanese home islands, accompanied by over a million civilian casualties. Blast and flame thrower conventional weapons are no less lethal than nuclear weapons, even after radiation exaggerations. As it was, Hiroshima convinced Stalin that the war was coming to its end, so he declared war on Japan, which tipped the balance of Japanese morale and caused them to surrender (Japan had been holding out in the hope that Russia, a traditional ally of Japan, would help negotiate a more favourable conditional surrender with America). By giving a warning to the Vietcong to evacuate forest areas ahead of nuclear clearing, a proper demilitarized zone could have been blasted through the rainforest between North and South Vietnam with megaton yield Redwing-Navajo style (5% fission yield, 95% clean) air burst weapons, allowing safe policing to avoid Vietcong invasion of the South, without the pitfall traps and ambushes inherent in the hopeless task of policing a jungle! If America wanted to defend South Vietnam, it should have used nuclear weapons for this forest blowdown purpose, creating a physical barrier between the North and the South. Otherwise, it should have given up. The disaster in Vietnam was the "King Canute effect", the political determination to go against science and win a war by relying essentially on aerial bombardment with conventional weapons, which had failed to defeat morale in WWII even in cities which lacked the continuous cover of thousands of square miles of tropical rainforest!
Above: nuclear weapons effects interested Australians helped evaluate the tree blowdown effects of nuclear weapons in a rainforest during Operation Blowdown, a joint Australian-British-American explosive test (0.05 kt on a 43 m high tower) in a rainforest at Iron Range, Northern Queensland, Australia, on 18 July 1963 to assess the dynamic pressures required for tree blowdown which could be scaled up using forest blowdown data from the 110 kt Koon and 14.8 Mt Bravo 1954 nuclear tests near forested islands in Bikini Atoll. In particular, the Australian experiment proved the difficulty in moving through the blowdown area as a function of dynamic pressure. Earlier 1950s Australian-British nuclear weapons detonations in Australia had been not provided blowdown data since they were conducted small islands at Monte Bello and to deserts at Emu Field and Maralinga (Jack R. Kelso and C. C. Clifford, Jr., Operation Blowdown, U.S. Defense Atomic Support Agency report AD0351230, June 1964).
“Senator Barry M. Goldwater’s public attempts during the 1964 presidential campaign to promote the notion of ‘conventional nuclear weapons’ ran up against the taboo. In May 1964, Goldwater argued publicly that nuclear weapons should have been used at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to defoliate trees and that, in similar fashion, ‘low-yield atomic weapons’ should be used as defoliants along South Vietnam’s borders. UN Secretary-General U Thant immediately criticized the idea while the Pentagon responded to ‘Goldwater’s folly’ by describing technical characteristics of nuclear weapons, arguing that it was absurd to call them conventional weapons. ...
“Samuel Cohen, a weapons physicist at the RAND Corporation who had advocated use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean War, and who was one of the rare enthusiasts for such an option in the Vietnam War, also ran up against the taboo mindset. As he recalled, ‘anyone in the Pentagon who was caught thinking seriously of using nuclear weapons in this conflict would find his neck in the wringer in short order’.He nevertheless attempted to interest Washington in the virtues of ‘discriminate’ nuclear weapons in Vietnam. He recalled, ‘I put my mind to work on how nuclear weapons might be used to thwart the Vietcong.’ He gave a presentation on tactical nuclear weapons to key planners in the State Department in 1965, but it quickly became evident that however intrigued his audience was from a technical point of view, they were ‘adamantly opposed to the development and use of such weapons from a political point of view’. ...
“Even Henry Kissinger was forced to confront the normative limitations on material power. Although he had written a book extolling the use of tactical nuclear weapons [Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy], once in the White House he found to his regret that nuclear nations ‘could not necessarily use this power to impose their will. The capacity to destroy proved difficult to translate into a plausible threat even against countries with no capacity for retaliation.’ He attributed this to the awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons. But as Kissinger knew well, sub-kiloton weapons are not all that awesome. So he was being a little disingenuous. Further, as the willingness of the North Vietnamese to fight the United States illustrated, material power alone does not make deterrence work. One of the major lessons of Vietnam for students and practitioners of international relations has been the normative and political limits on material power. Nowhere was this illustrated more clearly than in the nonuse of nuclear weapons during the war.”
– Nina Tannenwald, “Nuclear Weapons and the Vietnam War”, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 29, No. 4, pp. 675–722, August 2006 (quotations from pages 695-696, and 719).
On 9 April 2008, the 400-pages secret 1993 Center for Air Force History report by Victor B. Anthony and Richard R. Sexton, The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia: The War in Northern Laos 1954-1973, ADA512223, was released. It showed that U.S. Air Force chief of staff General Thomas D. White decided to drop nuclear weapons from SAC B-47 bombers, to blow the cover of communist guerrilla insurgents in North Vietnam and Laos, using the recommendations of the U.S. Air Force report, Atomic Weapons in Limited Wars in Southeast Asia, combatting the Soviet airlift of arms to Laos via Hanoi. The recommendation was based on the failure of conventional weapons to achieve outright victory despite causing mass destruction (worse than that from the nuclear weapon detonation at Hiroshima, 1945) in the 1950-3 Korean War, as Samuel Cohen illustrated with photo comparisons in his book The Truth About the Neutron Bomb.
A Top Secret 1970 Office of Air Force History report, The Air Force in Southeast Asia: Toward a Bombing Halt, 1968, show how in January 1968, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, requested nuclear weapons to repel the North Vietnamese attack on American forces at Khe Sanh and in the demilitarised zone in the middle of Vietnam. This would have enabled America to resist and repel the impending Tet Offensive by the Vietcong! But President Johnson’s Joint Chiefs of Staff denied Air Force chief of staff General John P. McConnell’s requests for the use of nuclear weapons, even low-yield relatively clean nuclear weapons, to defend U.S. Marine bases. Instead, they were restricted to indiscriminate unsatisfactory conventional weapons, napalm, high explosive (project "Rolling Thunder"), CS gas and chemical defoliant, which failed to demoralize the Vietcong into defeat, and killed 3,600,000 people! Not only that, but Johnson publically stated that he would never use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, thereby guaranteeing to the Vietcong that America would be limited to the conventional strategic bombing which had failed to shock the leadership of Japan into prompt surrender in WWII. Only the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their political effect in pushing Stalin into finally declaring war against Japan (ending Japanese hopes that Stalin would negotiate a settlement for Japan with America), ended WWII! Political correctness still ignores war facts. When President Nixon took control in January 1969, he considered nuclear war, but wanted to peace with China, despite the fact China’s nuclear stockpile was insignificant.
Above: Fig 6.24b in the 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons: 175 trees/acre natural Pisona tree stand on Rukoji (codenamed Victor by America) Island of Bikini Atoll, subjected to 2.4 psi peak overpressure at 11.8 miles (19 km) from the 14.8 megaton Castle-Bravo thermonuclear surface burst of 1 March 1954 (see the film Military Effects Studies on Operation Castle). The range could be extended and local fallout averted by air bursting the weapon. Pisona is a beech-like broadleaf tree and those in this forest stand has an average height of 80 feet with an average stem diameter at its base of 3 feet. This nuclear test (the largest American nuclear test ever) also produced light tree damage (no stem breakage, just 30% branch breakage) to a Pisonia forest on Eniirikku (codenamed Uncle by America) Island, 75,400 feet or about 14 miles from ground zero, where the peak overpressure was 1.7 psi, according to page 28 of W. L. Fons and Theodore G. Storey, Operation Castle, Project 3.3, Blast Effects on Tree Stand, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Division of Fire Research, Secret - Restricted Data, report WT-921, March 1955. For information on the use of nuclear weapons for safe, cost-efficient anti-insurgency in jungles, please see section 11, Forest Stands, in Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Washington, D.C., technical manual TM 23-200, November 1957, Confidential, and its 1981 update, Chapter 15, Damage to Forest Stands, in the Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, DNA-EM-1, Stanford Research Institute, Secret.
Above: one of the best tested and proved military uses of nuclear weapons, apart from ending World War and preventing a World War, is counter-insurgency against guerrillas taking cover in forests. This photo from the 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons shows the tropical Pisonia forest blowdown effects at Eniirikku (Uncle codename) Island in Bikini Atoll, some 9,300 feet from a 110 kiloton yield thermonuclear surface burst, Operation Castle shot Koon in 1954. This is similar to American beech forests with a mean tree height of 50 feet and a mean diameter at the stem base of 2 feet (American nuclear weapon test report WT-921 states that at 8,800 feet from this test, where the peak overpressure was 4.2 psi, some 58% of trees were snapped; the location and details behind the Glasstone 1957 photo above are identified in Figure 3.8 on page 38 of report WT-921).
The blow-down effect rapidly (in seconds) stops and demoralizes jungle insurgents over terrific areas, without the guaranteed massacre from sending ground-troops in to the jungles to be killed or incapacitated by excrement-spiked poles in pitfall traps, mosquito carried diseases, and ambush. Using this weapon in Vietnam, instead of President Johnson's open statement "we will not use nuclear weapons in Vietnam", could have quickly demoralized the insurgents. For low-fission yield (relatively clean), Navajo-like designs, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission during the Vietnam war quoted a price of just $600,000 per 2-megaton thermonuclear weapon (see Glasstone's 1967 Sourcebook on Atomic Energy and Calder's 1968 book Unless Peace Comes, page 47). It was a dirt cheap way to cleanly and humanely convince the North Vietnamese to surrender. Instead, Americans gave in to political correctness, fought effectively with both hands tied behind their backs, damaged their economy, lost the war, and set off a wave of communist expansion unseen since the late 1940s. Using nuclear weapons for blowdown in Vietnam would have preserved the environment, cheaply escalated the arms race, bankrupting the USSR into reform sooner, demoralized the lefty self-aggrandising, politically-correct Stalinists throughout the world's media and lefty culture, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives and billions of dollars for use making the world a better place, with clean water and sanitation for all. The trees grew back rapidly after nuclear explosions because the fallout automatically decays faster than inversely with time after detonation, leaving a pristine environment, unlike chemical defoliants like agent orange! (Health benefits of low dose rate radiation hormesis are proved later on in this post, below.)
Above: President Johnson exploited nuclear fear and civil defense apathy in this famous 1964 election campaign TV ad, supposedly showing a young girl being blinded by the Trinity nuclear test in 1945, instead of taking Bert the Turtle's "duck and cover" advice! This deceptive scare-mongering in politics proved a vote winner over factual evidence, just as groupthink fashions always do. Result: during the Vietnam war President Johnson had to keep issuing public statements reassuring the evil commies (Vietcong) that he would not use nuclear weapons (see, for instance, Reagan's criticisms of Johnson's statements included in appendices of the 1982 book With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War). If he had gone in for nuclear forest blowdown to create a impenetrable belt between the North and the South in Vietnam, the leaf cover would have absorbed the thermal flash, thus preventing any skin flash burns even in kids who didn't duck and cover. Instead, he chose to try to nepalm the kids instead, which caused deeper burns than a nuclear flash, and hardened enemy resolve, instead of convincing them to surrender.
Notice that the tropical forest was not ignited due to the humidity; it did not burn contrary to anti-civil defense lies which are popularized by propaganda. As we explained in a previous post, an error was made in analyzing firestorm ignition at Hiroshima, where thermal radiation was blamed due to ignorance of humidity effects on ignitions in dry Nevada desert nuclear tests. Humidity in air is much higher in tropical forests, coastal cities and cities built around rivers than in dry deserts. This had a big effect both on thermal flash transmission through the air (infrared radiation is absorbed by humid air very efficiently), and on the ability of the the thermal radiation to cause a sustained ignition. If you expose thin damp paper to an intense thermal pulse, it can penetrate far enough to start to dry out the paper and ignite it before the pulse ends. But the thermal pulse cannot dry out thick damp wood. Therefore, it causes a few leaves to "smoke" and burn, but they are unable to cause sustained ignition or firespread.
"... more than 10 billion pounds of TNT was dropped on Germany, Japan and Italy during World War II, this equalled more than 50 pounds for every man, woman and child. ... Arithmetically considered, the result should have been the total annihilation of one and all. ... During the Vietnam War, more than 25 billion pounds of TNT were dropped ... an average of 730 pounds for each of a total population of 34 million. ... yet the USA was unable to kill enough people, or to disrupt economic life, transportation or communication sufficiently."
- Senator Foy D. Kohler, Foreword to Leon Gouré's War Survival in Soviet Strategy (Centre for Advanced International Studies, Miami, Florida, 1976, p. xv).
"I think we're going to have to start a civil defense program. ... the United States should never put itself in a position, as it has many times, of guaranteeing to an enemy or a potential enemy what it won't do. ... President Johnson, in the Vietnam War, kept over and over again insisting, oh no, no, no we'll never use nuclear weapons in Vietnam ... the Soviet Union has used propaganda campaigns to stop us from putting a weapon that we - a great deterrent weapon - that we had developed and they didn't have - and an economical weapon - and that was the neutron warhead. They've got more than 20,000 tanks massed there opposite the NATO line. The neutron warhead could have neutralized those tanks but again we stopped it ... Woodrow Wilson ran for his second term on the promise or the pledge that he kept us out of wars. ... he took insult after insult ... finally the Germans declared open warfare on all shipping in the Atlantic Ocean, regardless of whether you were a neutral nation or not. And the Lusitania was sunk and, finally, we were in a war. ... the Kaiser got the idea from ... the policy that the United States was determined not to go to war. So he ignored that possibility ... Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for his third term, and ran on his own personal promise, 'I will not send young Americans, your sons, to fight.' ... you've got an ambassador who is assuring von Ribbentrop that the United States wouldn't go to war ... Hitler at this time said, we can count on it ... the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. ... I say that we are going to war ... backing away from the Soviet Union. We will one day find ourselves pushed to the point where there is no retreat and we have no further choice."
- Ronald Reagan, interviewed by Robert Scheer in 1980, pages 233-58 of Scheer's With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Secker and Warburg, London, 1983.
Above: the Secret report by Freeman Dyson, Robert Gomer, Steven Weinberg, and S. Courtenay Wright, Tactical Nuclear Weapons in Southeast Asia, Study S-266, Jason Division, DAHC 15-67C-0011, Washington DC, March 1967 (declassified in December 2002), wrongly used the civil defence (not military capabilities) unclassified nuclear weapons compendium by Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, where it should have used the secret military nuclear weapons effects compendium, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons. It therefore uses guesswork about forest blowdown effects, ignoring essentially all of the hard-won secret data from extensive experiments at nuclear tests and after blast blowdown in the Australian rainforest. After ignoring forest blowdown data by inventing false and spurious guesses, it then launches a strawman dismissal of nuclear weapons capabilities by showing problems with low-yield tactical nuclear effects on personnel in the open, airfields, bridges, and tunnel systems. Page 1 states misleadingly: “Among both military experts and the general public, there is wide agreement that the use of nuclear weapons in Southeast Asia would offer the U.S. no military advantage commensurate with its political cost.” Page 13 states: “TWN of higher yield are extremely effective in blowing down trees. ... The main weakness of tree blowdown as a method of interdiction is that a tree can only be blown down once.” There is no justification given for needing to blow down trees more than once! The report claims that the enemy can easily “cut a new trail through the fallen trunks”, ignoring the fact that the purpose of blowdown is to remove cover. Anyone trying to cut a path through tree trunks of fallen trees would be exposed to aerial view, and could be easily stopped and deterred! This is simply ignored by the report, which also ignores the effect on morale, and the cost-effectiveness of nuclear weapons (relatively clean 2 megaton warheads for $600,000 each works out at 30 cents per ton of TNT equivalent!). Page 14 falsely claims: “Men could climb over the trees and work independently of outside supplies.” Even ignoring morale defeat, the authors totally ignore the petrol supply and parts required by chainsaws, the difficulty and time taken to cut a path through the blown down trees, and the fact that such people would be “sitting duck” targets while they were doing that, taking months.
Above: in an air burst there is a delay between detonation and the first entry of dust into the fireball, if indeed any dust enters at all. The mushroom stem and skirts in the 1962 Dominic air burst above is composed of pure water vapour due to low altitude humid air, which has been sucked up in the afterwinds to higher altitudes, expanding, cooling, and thus condensing into visible white fog. It has never mixed with fireball fission products and is uncontaminated, not fallout. If the fireball has time to buoyantly transform from a sphere into a hollow doughnut or "toroid" before the dust stem enters it, the afterwind swept-up dust will avoid contact with the radioactive fireball completely, and will merely travel up through the hollow middle, around the top, and cascade back over the sides without mixing with the fireball and becoming contaminated, as shown by the following photo of the Buster-Charlie nuclear air burst in the Nevada (14 kilotons, 30 October 1951):
Above: the lack of significant fallout contamination from air burst neutron bombs and forest blowdown weapons proved by both nuclear test data and computer simulations of dust sweep up by the afterwinds. "HOB" is height of burst, F1 is American nuclear test air burst data curve for the integrated 24 hour dose rate pattern ("early fallout"), expressed as a fraction of that from a land surface burst, with burst height H feet and weapon yield W kilotons as the variables. Thus, F1 = 1 for zero height of burst, but is F1 = 0.1 for either a 1 kiloton air burst at 186 feet (56.7 metres) altitude, or a 1 megaton air burst at 1,860 feet (567 metres) altitude. Hence, the dose rates within the early (24 hour deposition) fallout pattern are reduced by a factor of ten relative to a surface burst for these altitudes; protection factors against early fallout increase at least exponentially with burst altitude! Because 72% of the fission products have half-lives less than 24 hours, and the decay rate of fallout as a whole is proportional to time-1.2, the absence of local fallout allows a great deal of radioactive decay and dispersion in the atmosphere, reducing the hazard. Essentially all of the non-local fallout is due to particles so small that they have a negligible dry fall-out rate and are deposited instead with rainfall after they eventually mix with rainclouds. This fallout goes straight down the drain.
F2 is the fallout height-of-burst effect scaling law given on page 5-97 (Problem 5-12) in Chapter 5 of Philip J. Dolan's 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, DNA-EM-1, based on the theory that the fraction of local fallout is equal to the fraction of the fireball volume which intersects the Earth's surface at final thermal maximum. This formula was included by Dolan in his October 1973 draft revision of the 3rd edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, but was deleted from the final 1977 published version co-edited with Glasstone after the new analysis of atmospheric nuclear test data and fallout sweep-up was done. As the graph above shows, Dolan's formula closely matches the fraction of debris mixed with dust within about 14 seconds of a 200 kiloton air burst. After this time, the cooling of the fission products in the fireball reduces their adherence to incoming particles of mushroom stem dust which are being sucked into the cloud. In addition, the formation of the hollow mushroom "toroid" by this time ensures that most future incoming dust travels through the hole in the middle of the toroid and then cascades back around the outside, without ever having the opportunity to mix vigorously with the fission products.
