"Our present tactical nuclear armaments were conceived and weaponized in the 1950’s under assumptions that are ill-advised for the 1970’s. Escalation was equated with desperation in an extension of a contestant concept of war. Ten or twenty kilotons was regarded as a “small, tactical” yield, to be used in a European ground battle for real estate after a strategic exchange. In the aftermath of that holocaust, reducing “tactical” collateral damage was only of academic interest. A new strategy - policing our boundaries with individual yields reduced by factors of 100 to 1000, and burst predominantly in the air or underground – could reduce the integrated collateral damage by factors of thousands, even if the number of uses were greatly increased."
Empirical data (above, calculated by Joseph Friedlander) proves that the amount of collateral damage and collateral (large area) casualties per unit of explosive energy decreases as the yield of the explosion increases. (The small effect from increased blast duration at higher yields is more than negated by the increasing absorption of energy in causing damage, depleting blast pressure by irreversibly using up blast energy on larger targets where the number of buildings destroyed in any given radial line increases as yield is scaled up! Similarly, the higher mushroom cloud results in a large average arrival time of fallout, allowing more decay to occur before the majority of the fallout from higher yield surface bursts arrives downwind, thus preventing fallout casualties from scaling directly with yield.) The result of correct (non-linear) yield-area scaling is that large conventional wars involve tens or hundreds of millions of 0.1 ton (100 kg) TNT equivalent explosions have a similar damaging effect to smaller nuclear stockpiles (thousands), so that the overall effects of large nuclear and large conventional wars are similar. Standard lying propaganda to the contrary is based on applying open desert and Hiroshima data (for wood frame city centre buildings) to modern cities and ignoring simple standard civil defense (such as target evacuation or sheltering in concrete buildings and subways).
In the 1980s after Afghanistan was invaded by Moscow, Reagan ordered low yield neutron bombs (with fusion stages stored securely in the USA) to deter further enemy invasions, and an arms race to bankrupt Russia. These neutron bombs unfortunately were quickly disarmed and even the only UK tactical deterrent of invasions the WE177 was disarmed in 1998! If the anti-nuclear people have their way, the world will go back to 1914/1939 and conventional world wars in response to undeterred invasions (or indeed invasions actually triggered by conventional mobilizations of the August 1914 sort). Huge amounts of money are then spent on killing and destruction, destroying homes, families, countries. For some reason, the mass media has never debunked the "pacifists" who get democracies to disarm/appease terrorists, triggering wars. Much of the Western media seems hooked on encouraging the scams that create wars, starvation, and poverty.
"SIR, The advocates of an independent nuclear deterrent use the standard argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not have been destroyed if Japan had had nuclear weapons and would retaliate. ... Iraq and Libya should have the bomb to protect themselves against a nuclear attack by Israel, which everybody believes already has a nuclear arsenal. ... Ultimately all nations would become nuclear weapon states, and what a secure world this would make! I am probably among the very first to have used the nuclear deterrence argument, when I began work on the atom bomb in Liverpool in 1939. My reason for doing this was the belief that if Germany made the bomb, the only way to prevent its use against us would be if we, too, had it and threatened to retaliate [as the UK did, USING the deterrent threat of its own mustard gas and anthrax to deter escalation to gas war against 12,000 tons of German tabun nerve agent!]. ... If Hitler had the bomb it is very likely that his last order from the bunker in Berlin would have been to destroy London, even if that would have brough terrible retribution to Germany [which is precisely what Hitler ordered Speer to do with 12,000 tons of tabun nerve agent, and Speer ignored the order because of UK mustard gas, anthrax, and gas defenses like masks and gas proof shelters, thus permitting the deterrent of credible retaliation and toxic war capabilities to CREDIBLY DETER THAT ESCALATION, as Herman Kahn explained in the 1960s - which was simply ignored by Rotblat and all Western Russian funded anti-nuclear propaganda fronts - as quoted later on this blog]." - Joseph Rotblat, The Times November 6, 1981.
"The case for TridentFrom Lord Boyd-carpenter. SIR, Lord Gladwyn writes in your issue of today (May 28) a long and as one would expect from him well-reasoned letter. But the answer to him is surely contained in a short question. If Poland, or Afghanistan, possessed an independent and effective nuclear weapon, would the one be in danger of invasion, and the other suffering from it?" - The Times, May 29, 1981.
ABOVE: Dr Joseph Rotblat and "anti-nuclear" Pugwash comrades supporting Russian tactical neutron Chief Weapon Designer Boris Litvinov, and publishing easily debunked "anti-nuclear" gibberish lies (were they really trying to help nuclear deterrence end war, after all, by acting as "straw men" or Lenin's "useful idiots"? Let's try to be "nice and charitable to them" by raising this possibility!). If anybody in the mass media such as the BBC is still duped by Glasstone's unobstructed terrain nuclear blast and radiation mythology used to support deluded, paranoid, Kremlin supported taboo based propaganda fronts behind all "arms control and disarmament" lying scams (a repeat of the mass media's 1920s and 1930s "gas bombing knockout blow" propaganda for appeasement, sadly including "nukemap" whose "nuclear secrecy" blog creator simply tries to lie about anyone debunking all those lies to cover up the delusion of using free field effects data for modern concrete cities that attenuate blast and radiation as we proved in 1990) - then please simply click here for our detailed key declassified nuclear testing and capability documents compilation (EM-1 related USA research reports plus UK nuclear weapon test reports on blast and radiation), from nukegate.org. UPDATE: the Russian VNIITF nuclear weapons lab propaganda photo of Pugwash, including Joseph Rotblat with hand on nuclear weapon in September 1997, is now being used by the Russians! Just like the old days of the Cold War when Lenin decreed that "useful idiots" be used to brainwash the West with fake news based disarmament "information". Fans of VNIITF nuclear weapons like Joseph Rotblat, happily touching a Russian nuclear weapon and listening with a big smile on his face to Russian neutron bomb Chief Weapons Designer Boris Litvinov (far right with big eyebrows) can now find it posted online by the Russian VNIITF nuclear weapons lab at their Russian website, located here: https://vniitf.ru/article/meropriyatiya (just in case that link disappears for some reason, like a nuclear bomb going off accidentally at VNIITF which Western "arms control and disarmament" are obsessed about, that site is also backed up at wayback machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250409221150/https://vniitf.ru/article/meropriyatiya). Note that VNIITF is Russia's 2nd nuclear weapons laboratory, founded in 1955 at Snezhinsk in a deliberate effort to made a competitor for Russia's original Sarov lab, VNIIEF (founded in 1946), akin to America's creation of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Teller's insistence to break down groupthink by creating a real competitor to Los Alamos National Laboratory! Boris Litvinov wrote a useful basic summary (omitting some details which can now be filled in with other Russian declassified documents) of his work on clean nuclear weapons design aka "neutron bomb" design, which is included in a 2014 VNIITF collection of his works, which we've extracted and placed online here (that is a direct scan in Russian, so we can't be accused of translation bias in our translation!).
ABOVE: Communist Nuclear Disaster propaganda used Hollywood nuclear war fiction not facts to obscenely lie about the war-deterring peace-inducing effects of nuclear weapons to "justify" claims that however bad life under Russian dictatorship was, it was a case of "Better Red than Dead", and more sinisterly, claimed that putting clock back to a pre-1945 era to "make the world safe" for conventional world war, such as 1914 or 1939 was progressive and "liberal". Note the appeal to children on the April 1986 cover of "Sanity", with its claim that removing the deterrent of WWIII will make a future "free from fear"! Below: Communist Nuclear Disaster propaganda against credible deterrence of conventional wars that cause wasteful destruction, megadeaths, as well as inflation and poverty, and the lying claim that 400 megatons will deter WWIII, based on no-civil defense whereas Russia had extensive civil defense! Moreover, as Herman Kahn explains, civil defense is stabilizing against all key escalation risks including accidental escalation or a bolt out of the blue (surprise attack of the Pearl Harbor sort): by being able to massively reduce the consequences of accidental or limited nuclear war, you give yourself a greater range of options rather than depending solely on counter-attack and thus escalation! Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War debunks the notion that an enemy dictator can easily order an all-out surprise attack, because the Russian civil defense system is based on time-taking massive evacuations of most (non-key workers) folk from cities to rural shelters, and many city shelters are dual use - e.g. underground car parks or subway systems in peacetime, which require a certain amount of time to prepare for WWIII and thus prevent a "bolt out of the blue" attack - and because even in hardline dictatorships a dictator can't personally fire hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons on a mere whim. Despite endless Hollywood films and books about repeatedly close-calls due to accidents in the Cold War, there were be plenty of barriers in the chain of command which would consider him insane or the message to be a failure or training exercise in the command, control and communications system. The only credible uses of nuclear weapons are political and as demonstration or limited attacks, i.e. counterforce, not the all-out countervalue (city strikes) escalation widely hyped by anti-nuclear propaganda lobbies. As for Hitler ordering the use of 12,000 tons of tabun nerve agent from his bunker, there are limits to power, and even if the enemy C3 nuclear control system is so decrepid that it could easily set off an all-out surprise attack or escalation attack, this is not an argument for us to disarm in a cosy "peacedeal" with such lunatics to ensure peace, but an argument for us to get credible civil defense for protection! The Nazis and the left wing in 1936-8 attacked civil defence gas masks in the UK, claiming mustard gas would contaminate skin and kill regardless of masks (idential to the nerve agent arguments against masks today); however the government argued for a combination of shelters (to keep bomb blasted debris and liquid chemical agents like mustard agent off skin) and gas masks (against inhalation of any gas that penetrate shelters), and these were sufficient to help to deter Nazi tabun gas attacks. In the mass media backed Cold War propaganda of 100% of left wing anti-civil defense bigots, gas masks were "useless in WWII since Hitler's 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas was never dropped", but in reality the combination of gas masks and blast shelters were essential, and were indeed used as part of the deterrent to prevent the enemy using gas. Identical arguments apply to protection against fallout radiation and blasted debris to make credible our deterrence of WWIII! Without a credible deterrent, we are back to the 1936-8 appeasement era, backing off from aggressors due to fear, by making fake peacedeals that are not worth the paper they are written on. (Groupthink autism, or as Kahn put it, "educated incapacity" based on war lying! This lying is designed to paralyse the amygdala with fear and prevent any rational discussions of the true proved facts!)
The key problem is that Russia now has relatively clean tactical neutron bombs (see CIA declassified report linked HERE and our translation of Russian tactical nuclear weapons Chief Weapons Designer Boris Litvinov's paper about clean Russian tactical nuclear warheads linked HERE), but we disarmed all of ours in 1990s (having only about 100 multipurpose B61 "tactical" dirty weapons in Europe now, against thousands of Russian dedicated cleaner tactical nuclear weapons), creating a major deterrence gap against invasions, tactical nuclear warfare and other major provocations; yes, in "theory" we could always escalate to strategic retaliation, but most people and Western leaders would certainly regard such escalation as more risky than tit-for-tat deterrence. As Kennedy put it, we need more options than humiliation or all-out counter city nuclear war. As with Russian use of Po-210 and Novichok in the UK in 2006-18, and sarin in Syria, "no first use" doctrines make no sense where the enemy refuses to admit to first use, or even to admit to illegally invading Ukraine and starting a war! Against liars, peace agreements are never worth the paper they are written on (we saw this in 1938 nutcase appeasement ego trips supported by extremists such as fascists and communists in the UK, disguised as populist "peace" sentiment). Peace propaganda, where it attacks life-saving civil defense for credible war deterrence (in order to claim falsely "there is no alternative to disarmament but annihilation") is enemy supporting propaganda, and now desperately needs debunking. The sort of people indulging in this sort of lying to ensure deterrence is undermined are thugs who will not be reasoned with, but they have the ear of the Nobel Prize committee, the UN Security Council, and the mass media such as the BBC which refuses to objectively fact-check their lies on nuclear weapons, and backs their fake "news" based on outright lies masquerading as "virtue signalling" by fake peace deals as an "alternative to credible deterrence." All this is a repeat of exactly what the BBC propaganda did in the 1920s and 30s, in supporting the 1930s League of Nations, which was as impotent then to deter aggressors as the Russian vetoing UN is today, repeating endless hype of fake peace deals from the Treaty of Versailles, the 1925 Locarno Pact, 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, etc., which made war by creating a false sense of security and thus undermining credible deterrence of war, encouraging aggression; these old, old, old Si vis pacem, para bellum lessons are never ever learned because they provoke crazy taboo superstitions from those lying thugs backing dictators by stealth propaganda tricks (Rotblat told us he got into this when his brother was in the Red Army in 1944, and was allegedly a comrade of the West, despite the seizure of half Europe by the Red Army after WWII!). Furthermore, the 1839 Treaty of London by which the UK guaranteed Belgium's security, escalated the invasions of 1914 into World War I! This was repeated in 1939 when the UK gave a similar guarantee to Poland, despite lacking the resources to make the promise credible: when Poland was invaded, we failed to stop the invasion, escalating the conflict into WWII! Despite this, in the 1990s NATO was disarmed of all W79 neutron bomb invasion deterrents and Ukraine was disarmed in exchange for the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on security assurances, bits of paper that (surprise, surprise) failed to deter Russia! There are numerous other examples of peacenik overhyped "peaceful alternatives to war" that have backfired, most notoriously "wonderfully peaceful" American sanctions against Japan that (whoops) resulted in Pearl Harbor and Pacific Theatre WWII.
Charles Glaser, Austin Long, Brian Radzinsky (eds), Managing US Nuclear Operations in the 21st Century (Brookings Institution, 2022), p40 and p209:
[p40] "The roles assigned to US nuclear weapons could change in the future ... The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review [of Trump's 1st term], for instance, clarified the role of US nuclear weapons by raising the possibility of nuclear retaliation in response to a cyberattack that resulted in massive economic damage, substantial social disruption, or significant loss of life. ... current US doctrine retains the possibility of using nuclear weapons first. This is required to maintain the credibility of nuclear threats intended to deter non-nuclear strategic attacks. [p209:] The B-61 Bomb. The US B-61 bomb is the only nuclear weapon forward deployed to NATO and can be carried by US and allied dual-capable aircraft as well as US strategic bombers. Since the first B-61 nuclear gravity bomb entered service in 1968, numerous modifications have been made to improve the B-61's safety, security and reliability. ... With these upgrades and the addition of a US Air Force-supplied tail-kit assembly, the B61-12 life extension program will consolidate and replace four B-61 weapon designs. When fielded, the B61-12 will balance the greater accuracy provided by the modern tail kit with a substantial reduction in yield, with no overall change in military requirements or characteristics [i.e., it ain't a clean neutron bomb]. ... The bomb will be approximately 12 feet long and weigh approximately 825 pounds." (Sadly this book is biased in its treatment of deterrence. The book fails to mention Herman Kahn's superior deterrent war-avoidance option, yet mentions Schelling four times, despite the failed stable balance of terror, etc, he promoted. We discuss the distinction in detail below, since it is crucial to understanding why deterrence failed and led to the Ukraine War, which risks escalation to WWIII!)
"President Richard Nixon asked rhetorically in 1970, “Should a President, in the event of a nuclear attack, be left with the single option of ordering the mass destruction of enemy civilians in the face of the certainty that it would be followed by the mass slaughter of Americans?” [Source: James Schlesinger, Briefing on Counterforce Attacks, pp. 5-6] President Nixon answered his own rhetorical question in 1971, “I must not be—and my successors must not be—limited to the indiscriminate mass destruction of enemy civilians as the sole possible response to challenges. This is especially so when that response involves the likelihood of triggering nuclear attacks on our own population.” [Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1971, Washington, D.C.: USGPO, 1972, p310.]" - Keith B. Payne, James Schlesinger’s Lifelong Creed of Public Service and the Schlesinger Doctrine, March 6, 2019.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, The flexibility of our plans, Speech delivered on August 20, 1980 to the Convocation Ceremonies for the 97th Naval War College Class, Newport, Rhode Island (published by White House in Vital Speeches, October 1, 1980): "At the President's direction, the Department of Defense has, since 1977, been working to increase the flexibility of our plans to make use of the inherent capabilities of our forces. ... This doctrine, as I emphasised earlier, is not a new departure. The U.S. has never had a doctrine based simply and solely on reflexive, massive attacks on Soviet cities. Instead, we have always planned both more selectively (operations limiting urban-industrial damage) and more comprehensively (a range of military targets). Previous Administrations, going back well into the 1960s, recognised the inadequacy of a strategic doctrine that would give us too narrow a range of options. ... This evolution in our doctrine enhances deterrence ... it conveys to the Soviets that any or all of the components of Soviet power can be struck in retaliation, not only their urban-industrial complex."
U.S. Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, The Times August 11, 1981: "I think this [W79 tactical invasion deterring neutron bomb] will increase very largely the ability of the United States and its allies to deter attack upon us and thereby prevent war completely. [I.e., the neutron bomb increases the conventional war threshold massively by decreasing the tactical nuclear threshold and therefore replacing conventional warfare's mass destruction with nuclear deterrence! This lowering of the tactical nuclear threshold to deter conventional war doesn't "lower the strategic nuclear threshold" but instead increases the strategic nuclear threshold, which in the absence of a credible tactical deterrent is extremely low because a conventional NATO-Russia war becomes far more likely, and is accompanied by a high strategic nuclear escalation risk, a factor ignored by Fred Kaplan in his May 1978 "Scientific American" KGB-style hate rant against credible deterrence of war.]"
This speech supported Carter's limited nuclear war planning in Presidential Directive PD59. Note, however, that arms control and disarmament Russian propaganda fronts and fellow travellers prefer to stick to the older and discredited inflexible "massive retaliation balance of terror" dogma, e.g. U.S. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara's statement on page 76 of his 1968 book The Essence of Security that you need to be able to kill 20-25% of Russians and 50% of Russian industrial capacity to "serve as an effective deterrent". However, he admitted later in testimony to Congress that this is not an effective deterrent of invasions (the trigger for both world wars), so he also doubled America's tactical battlefield nuclear stockpile from 3,500 to 7,000 weapons (he is quoted on this later, below). On page 207 of an unclassified 1971 book by McNamara's defense analysts Enthoven and Wayne-Smith, How Much is Enough? it is alleged in Table 11 that 100 megatons can destroy 59% of Russian industry, and that 200-300 megatons will destroy 21-30% of the Russian population. These claims are fake news, based on scaling up Glasstone's unprotected Hiroshima effects, and ignore Russian civil defense, as pointed out in 1976 by Ronald Reagan's civil defence analyst T. K. Jones of Boeing Corporation. The true figures show that with adequate dispersal and shelters, such claims are as incorrect as the "news" in 1936 that one ton of mustard gas dropped on the UK would kill the entire population. Along with the increase in Russian nuclear stockpiles from inferiority in 1963 to superiority in 1970, the microchip computer revolution increased the accuracy of the missile delivery systems from 1.3 km CEP for Titan II in 1963 to just 0.3 km for Minuteman III in 1970, allowing warhead yields to be reduced by roughly the cube of the fall in CEP, i.e. by a factor of about (1.3/0.3)3 = 81. Thus, collateral damage was massively reduced since target destruction could be achieved with a lower nuclear yield. It became feasible to use several very small, accurate MIRV warheads in a "bus" on a single missile, rather than one heavy, megaton yield warhead:
"Everybody's going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around. Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors, and then throw three feet of earth on top." - T. K. Jones, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Strategic and Theatre Nuclear Forces, Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1982. "Protective measures should not be regarded as ineffective solely because they are simple in nature. The white-washing of windows can provide very effective protection against fire resulting from the heat flash from nuclear explosions [only the top windows in cities with a possible sky view of a fireball need be covered; aluminium foil can be used for a less permanent effect on glass, because the thermal flash precedes the blast arrival for modern MIRV warhead yields]." - UK Home Secretary Willy Whitelaw, The Guardian, August 4, 1980.
"What makes the enhanced-radiation reduced-blast warhead different from existing tactical nuclear weapons is that it would destroy less of West Germany ..." - UK Financial Times newspaper, February 5, 1981.
"I should like to invent a substance or a machine wth such terrible power of mass destruction that war would thereby be made impossible forever. ... The day when two army corps will be able to destroy each other in one second, all civilized nations will recoil from war ..." - Alfred Nobel (funder of Nobel Peace Prizes and inventor of chemical explosives, quoted on p35 and p38 of Sampson's Arms Bazaar, 1977).
"Would Angola have been overrun by South Africa or Afghanistan by the Soviet Union if they had had nuclear weapons? Of course they would not have been." - Sir John Boyd, The Times, September 11, 1981.
"... the only nuclear weapons ever used in war, were dropped on a country which had none of its own." - Lord Chalfont, The Times, December 3, 1980.
Professor George H. Quester states in Pre-emption, Prevention, and Proliferation (Routledge, London, 2017 paperback edition), p19: "preventative war comes to look like pre-emption [i.e. Putin invaded Ukraine on the so-called "pretext" that Ukraine was likely to become a NATO and/or EU member, bringing Europeans to Russia's doorstep] To be 'paranoid' is to sense enmity when there is no such enmity in reality. ... Regimes and leaders will vary as to how brutal and violent they would be if no one in the world were ready to resist. Hitler and Mussolini thus strike us as the classic models of the kind of dictators who could never have been successfully appeased, who would have taken all consessions merely as a sign of weakness. Yet aggressive brutes also tend to be paranoid, projecting their own faults on to others. [Emphasis added: we all have sad experiences of the sort of dictatorial, ignorant, abusive, self-serving, mad, egotistic, narcissistic loons in "authority" positions who know nothing but are loved by the mass media!] And we live in a world where even the most democratic and peace-loving of states will be ready to respond to violence with counter-violence [Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, for examples of this FACT that debunk peacenik propaganda deceit from Russian Cominterm insanity fronts]. We really thus have very little experience with a world where other powers are totally disinclined to resist."
Quester's 2017 Pre-emption, Prevention, and Proliferation contains the following "good stuff" that MUST be pointed out here:
[p32:] "If ... the French and Poles had launched a preventative war against newly-Nazi Germany in 1933, and had deposed Hitler ... 'revisionist' analysts all around the world would afterwards have been speculating that Hitler and the Nazis had probably not been serious ... To be really certain that Hitler was so evil that he needed to be deposed, one had to let him demonstrate that evil, in a manner that cost many millions of lives." [This is always the case. If someone simply assassinates an evil thug, they end up becoming a martyr and inflaming tensions. So there are no short-cuts. You need a credible deterrent to end invasions. Typical examples of pre-emptive or preventative wars are Japan's surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, the events of August 1914, September 1939, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Chinese intervention in Korea in 1950, the Israel-Egypt war of 1967, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Falkland Islands invasion of 1982, and of course the recent invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022-now.]
[p45:] "... Clausewitz's observation that 'the aggressor is always peace-loving'. If the victim does not resist, we ... conclude that there is no state of war. If asked to tell when WWII began ... the good student would respond with September 1939 ... not with March 1939, when Hitler's forces occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia. This is simply because the Czechs did not resist, while the Poles did resist." [Trump stated this fact to Zelensky in February 2025: Ukraine STARTED the 2022-now war by resisting Russian invaders, by trying to get EU and NATO membership, etc. This is true: if Ukraine had surrendered, there would have been no war. Putin did not start the war any more than Hitler bombed London in September 1939 to start war. That's the peacenik mythology of "war"; if you surrender, there is no war, so you can always simply sit down and come to an agreement with the next Hitler, with no lives lost and win a Nobel Peace Prize into the bargain! It's because people resist tyranny that there is war, and this is so bloody "taboo" to state due to anti-deterrence CND propaganda that we can't even begin to discuss the diplomatic solution to crises, the language is so corrupted by propaganda. Democrats start wars to kick out aggressors who want "peace on their own terms". If you say "Russia started this war", you are disproved by the facts of history: it is the defender who "starts war" by resisting invasions. Let's not lie: we have to be ready to start a war against the aggressor who invades our territory, or we have no security whatsoever. 100% of left wing Orwellian "doublethink" is lying mythology, taboos, superstitions,obvious stinking crap dressed-up-as-profundity-and-Lord-Jesus's-personally-endorsed-morality. If we REALLY want that kind of fake peace, we can have it right now by surrendering to Putin. The "price of fake peace" is CHEAP: at most it just costs one white flag, usually it's free, just raising both hands at once!]
[p50:] "An important argument for preemption advanced by the Bush administration is that there may be possessors of weapons of mass destruction who can not be deterred ... the only way to protect the American people may be to launch an attack on these WMD systems before they come into use, in what could be labelled either as 'preemption' or 'preventative war'..." [This is the reason the West must get ABM and civil defense, to provide alternatives to WWIII, and tell the anti-civil defense and anti-ABM Scientific American commies to "please off risking the lives of millions to sell a few copies of a glossy propaganda rag or win some elitist dictators some Nobel Peace Prizes!" But we won't, so the lies from the virtue-signalling lying thugs will keep on coming until too late!]
[p95:] "Dictators who claim they are merely pre-empting imminent attacks by others are ... not given a hearing, because dictators hardly ever tell the truth, because such people tend to be paranoid, because they tend to project their own vices on to others." [Sadly, irrational paranoia is more contagious than flu: once you have a number of paranoid dictators with vast strategic and nuclear stockpiles and you believe the populist mass media lies that rational alternatives to paranoia such as ABM and shelters are "more dangerous" than nuclear missiles, you need to have a healthy fear of upsetting them, or you're likely to turn the click back to 1914 or 1939. Freeman Dyson reported a conversation with Herman Kahn in his 1984 book Weapons and hope: Dyson dismissed Kahn's concerns over Russian war preparations as "paranoia", and Kahn responded "of course I'm paranoid!" Kahn's job was to try to avoid a repeat of the world wars, which resulted from groupthink dismissals of warnings from Churchill and others as "paranoia". Paranoia is an irrational fear, not a rational fear (for which, tellingly, there is no word in the damned dictionary). The point is, forget arguing about the definitions which is pedantic trivia, and start making our deterrent credible; si vis pacem, para bellum. If you dont' want to do that: then listen to Trump and surrender to the Russians in the name of peace. Either make war, deter war, or surrender. Statemate war, i.e. Vietnam 2.0 in Ukraine, is the worst of all worlds, maximising the deaths, the severely injured casualties, and sending the USA economy into inflation, and sending out a message that the USA is an insane bunch of politically-correct militarily incompetent loons to every dictatorship considering invasions, across the face of the Earth! We on this www.nukegate.org site focus on the deterrent option, not preventative war. But the latter is discussed in Quester's chapter 6, "Nuclear Preventative War". With superiority in tactical nuclear weapons, the key invasions of Belgium in 1914 and of Poland in 1939 could have been credibly deterred, or at least halted. Anti-tank bazookas, suggested as an alternative by Hans A. Bethe to the neutron bomb, did not either deter or prevent the invasion of Ukraine or many other invasions! Any credible tactical nuclear weapon stockpile that can stop an invasion, can also prevent an invasion, unless the facts are kept secret or distorted by Scientific American style propaganda articles, in an effort to make deterrence fail so they can "prove their anti-nuclear lies" despite the fact it will murder millions of innocent human beings.]
[p172:] "The Japanese attack on the US at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 is often portrayed ... as an unprovoked and outrageous act of perfidy. Yet, as Japanese remember their history, this might also seem as a form of 'preemption', as the US was intensifying its economic pressure on Japan with embargoes ..." [Thus, "economic sanctions" etc are not 100% guaranteed to produce the enemy to surrender and declare peace; they have in the past provoked world war. A fact naturally "taboo" in populist history written by hard commie professors of BS peacenik virtue-signalling, aka real war-mongering evil scum: if you want peace, prepare for war. Don't poke the bear in the expectation it will do what you want and give you a nice big friendly hug! Your sense of "empathy" might differ from your paranoid, mad enemy.]
These Top Secret facts about Russian nuclear tactics from Ironbark/Oleg Penkovsky emphasise the importance of our maintaining a credible tactical nuclear deterrent to prevent wars breaking out through further enemy invasions! Unlike the false economies of the 1930s UK governments, we need to focus on deterring major provocations, instead of either surrender/appease or starting WWIII. Any minimal deterrence system relies upon sequential or chain-type vulnerable links, so the defense is vulnerable because the weakest link will break the chain (e.g. any part of Ukraine border security), so we need a wide spectrum deterrent with reliability-through-redundancy against failure of deterrence (ABM and civil defense). We need counterforce (not countervalue!) "overkill" to ensure that our deterrent will be credible to the sort of paranoid, delusional thugs' invasions which (based on 1914 and 1939) are likely to provoke WWIII, but we also need parallel systems to mitigate the dangers if deterrence fails (ABM, civil defense, and protracted nuclear war capability).The compulsive liars published by Scientific American's so-called (Kremlin front) "arms control and disarmamant" is to look at the "big picture", to announce that 99.999% of the links in the nuclear chain haven't corroded, and that anyone worrying about one rusted link like a lack of a credible deterrent of invasions, is "ignoring the big picture" or focussing on trivia; similarly to those folk, a small hole in a submarine or a small gap in a prison wall should be played down as trivia and inspections should focus on the "big picture" which is "all good". Herman Kahn points out in OTW, however, that it is the weakest link in the chain, the small hole in the submarine, the gap in the wall, which cause complete failure in cheap sequential defense systems. Wars will continue to break out until we get credible overkill to make deterrence as effective as possible, plus ABM/civil defense defensive layers in parallel to produce reliability-through-redundancy. Saving a few bucks by disarming the W79 neutron bomb in the 1990s may not merely have cost hundreds of billions in Ukraine, but huge numbers of human lives in many wars. How much blood is on the hands of all those who publish or refuse to refute anti-nuclear lying propaganda about the deterrence of invasions by neutron bombs? How can anyone humane and civilized claim that murdering millions by refusing to deter wars is "virtue-signalling"? We are under the fascist dictatorship of fashion.
ABOVE: ~20 megaton (LLNL-JRNL-804822 linked here] explosion Bravo seen from USS Estes, note partial obscuration by cloud cover (worse in a city when building skylines block most of the thermal and other radiations, ignored by Glasstone), and the problem of declassified poor quality scans of key documents. There are now FOUR different quality scanned versions of this photo of a half-collapsed warehouse, Tare Island, Bikini Atoll, about 13 nautical miles or 14.75 statute miles from 15 megaton Bravo:
These three copies of Secret-RD nuclear weapon test report WT-901 on Bravo damage are a useful compendium of ACTUAL H-bomb effects radii for specific structures including concrete buildings, which avert the "let's rely on computer models, not test data because computers are more reliable!"-fake news. The test data remains the same, although the yield of Bravo has recently been revised upwards to 22 megatons by re-analysis of the effect of water spray on the fireball's blast expansion in films of the test, according to Dr Greg Spriggs and others at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; please see the paper LLNL-JRNL-804822 linked here, and others, plus a recent TV interview of Dr Spriggs on Bravo yield revision to 22 megatons, discussed in detail later on this blog, below). This means that the blast effects reports above give effects data which occurred at the same distance (unless Bikini Atoll has changed size) but due to a HIGHER yield, 22 megatons not the previously believed 15 megatons! So the effects ARE EVEN LESS IMPRESSIVE IN REALITY THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED!
Today, most MIRV warheads are well under 1 megaton yield! tactical nuclear weapons of W54 yield size are just 0.02 kilotons, FULLY ONE MILLION TIMES LESS THAN THE ~20 MEGATON YIELD OF BRAVO! So please, anti-nuclear fanatics, now go and figure the reality of collateral damage avoidance by tactical nuclear weapons!
ABOVE: (animated gif) Bravo fireball shielding by clouds; analogy to city skyline shielding of most fireball radiation!
ABOVE: This pic of 74 kt Plumbbob-Hood air burst at 450m altitude by a balloon at Nevada in 1957 (it was the largest air burst in Nevada) shows very clearly exactly how local fallout is averted: soil rises up in the stem, reaching the fireball only after it has evolved into a horizontal torus or "ring doughnut with a hole in the middle", the dirt then passes up through the hole in the middle of the fireball, up at the top, colliding with cold air, before cascading back around the periphery and falling out as NON-RADIOACTIVE fallout in the downdraft around the periphery of the toroidal circulation near the outer edge of the fireball! You still get dust, but it ain't contaminated to any significant extent (maybe a very small amount of neutron induced activity from dust irradiated with neutrons near ground zero, but that's all). This detailed mechanism is key to understanding air burst neutron bomb collateral damage aversion. It must be known by everyone, to debunk liars who fear-monger on radiation fallout hazards.
Tactical nuclear weapons as credible deterrents to end war were proof-tested in the first Cold War where they were USED (yes USED) to DETER enemy invasions. This is the most important USE of nuclear weapons, but is ignored in all anti-nuclear propaganda! The whole reason for having tactical nuclear weapons was to avoid the risk of escalation of conventional war into strategic nuclear war, in other words, to impose a "conventional threshold" whereby the concentration of force needed to invade a territory would constitute a tactical nuclear target! (Conventional weapons have failed to deter invasions, and provoked WWI due to the "mobilization problem" where the amount needed to defend a border is used as an excuse by the other side to claim you are preparing for an invasion!) You don't have to actually detonate nuclear weapons to use them, any more than you have to "use" your country's gold reserve to mint coins or make jewellery, to "use" the gold: like gold, the nuclear deterrent can be kept securely in reserve and simply "used" as a bargaining chip for peace negotiations. (American W79 neutron bomb secondary stages were kept securely in the USA by Reagan during the 1980s, ready to be air-freighted in a matter of hours to Europe to rapidly halt an invasion: the USSR collapsed after this plus SDI took away their dream of global "communist" domination.) This deterrent "effect" of nuclear weapons (together with all realistic effects of tactical nuclear weapons) is simply omitted by Glasstone's book! Regarding tactical "escalation risks", history proves that world wars occurred due to escalation of non-nuclear conventional invasions, which can then escalate to nuclear use, e.g. conventional war escalated to strategic nuclear warfare in 1945, so claiming that abolishing tactical nuclear weapons will guarantee no nuclear war is disproved by history! Tactical enhanced neutron nuclear weapons had precisely the opposite effect: deterring escalation of conventional wars into strategic nuclear wars, and deterring conventional invasions and conventional wars from beginning, producing PEACE not war! All this is still being opposed by liars, quacks, bigots and fake news departments in the BBC and other propaganda fronts used by enemy dictators to engineer WAR (they have endless "war correspondents" yet have NEVER produced a single honest rebuttal of nuclear weapons deterrence liars, either those in the UK or in the USA!).
In the 1st Cold War tactical nuclear weapons widened the spectrum of threats covered by our deterrent umbrella. Removing any part of that spectrum of deterrence increases the risk of escalation of a Cold War into a hot war, and of a conventional war into a nuclear war. We argue that the future of peaceful nuclear deterrence is not to ban tactical nuclear deterrence of invasions that set off 100% of the world wars of history (i.e. Belgium 1914, and Poland 1939), but to have these credible deterrents replace incredible "city busting" MAD policy, which failed in the 1930s despite media saturation of exaggerated effects of gas bomb knock-out blows, etc. We have to fight, fight, fight against lying propaganda fronts still being run in part at least by evil liars.
"We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation ... we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ... there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general. ... 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 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. 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 ... 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."
ABOVE: George R. Stanbury, OBE (UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch) worked on the thermal shielding problem for different altitudes of air burst and for surface bursts of varying yields from 1952-64, including writing a "popular" article in the Restricted classified August 1962 Fission Fragments magazine ("published" to a classified circulation list by the UK Government, Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch's civil defence science journal), savagely debunking TV propaganda from fake "academic" experts who hadn't know what they were talking about (not to mention Glasstone, who in his 1957 and 1962 editions of Effects of Nuclear Weapons published fake thermal ignition data, based on very low humidity in the dry Nevada desert during tests, despite evidence debunking him in classified reports from 1953 nuclear tests; Glasstone had clearance for Secret Restricted data to teach nuclear warhead design foundations at Los Alamos, so naughty, no excuse there!). The shielding details can be found in a vast number of classified UK government publications, one example being that shown in excerpts above, which is from a scientific conference symposium report classified CONFIDENTIAL. We uploaded that (George R. Stanbury) full 1959 CONFIDENTIAL classified city skyline thernal shielding report online: here and here. How was such a CONFIDENTIAL report supposed to DEBUNK open publications in the mass media including BBC TV, by liars launching delusional "firestorm" hate attacks on civil defense, armed with Glasstone's fake new Effects of Nuclear Weapons? Was this tragedy due to bureaucracy, or the deliberate use of secrecy in self-sabotage by the UK government to "do in" civil defense simply by keeping all vital data classified, preventing liars being debunked? Dad (JB Cook) was a part-time UK Civil Defence Corps instructor, 1951-7, who (after completing the local instructor course) was sent on the regional HQ Section level course to the staff college at Easingwold by Air Commodore JS Chick (Colchester's Civil Defence Officer, a former WWI fighter pilot), thus contacting Stanbury on nuclear effects, who gave lectures at Easingwold relevant to HQ Section of the Civil Defence Corps. Dad tried to explain to Stanbury and other UK government scientists the level of hostility shown by civil defence recruits to official booklets that summarized secret reports without giving out the details needed to make the claims in the booklets APPEAR credible!
They, unfortunately, were all civil servants and thus could not improve publishing policy, except to push - as much as possible - at internal department meetings, for an expansion of the UK gov's 1956 Nuclear Weapons booklet. The Ministers (MPs in Cabinet) responsible for civil defense were generally "pig ignorant" of science, and usually of authoritarian mindset: they wouldn't give away the secrets needed to make civil defense advice credible "in case it helped the Russians" (Russians had their own nuclear test effects and civil defence data, anyhow, judging by their own immense investment in civil defense!). Ministers also generally considered the "lay public" to have the IQ of "dead sheep", with the curiosity and acumen of "lemmings", so Ministers couldn't understand why any technical data needed to be supplied. Instead, they launched adverts asserting rather than proving with nuclear test scientific data civil defense advice! That was a gift to CND and anti-Western civil defence folk like communists, who claimed it was all money-wasting lying propaganda with no substance behind it! PATHETIC! In the end, when the UK gov decided to reclassify its "Radioactive fallout - provisional scheme of pblic control" (written entirely by Dr John McAulay of the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch - as shown by the draft in the UK National Archives) from unclassified in 1956 when first published by HMSO, to "RESTRICTED" when reprinted in 1957 (!), dad had enough and resigned from the Civil Defence Corps, followed by Air Commodore Chick: "It was absurd and made recruitment of sensible folk impossible!" (Dad and Air Commodore Chick shared an interest in both aircraft and archaeology, and used the Civil Defence Landrover to visit Roman archaeological digs around Colchester, to de-stress from the civil defence situation! In 1957, dad left UK to work in Africa, needing a complete change of environment for health reasons. When he returned, twelve years later in 1969, the Civil Defence Corps was gone by order Harold Wilson obstensibly to "save" a few quid, but essentially 100% due to refusing to refute lying left wing politics and mass media propaganda attacks against its "claims"!)
ABOVE: The insanity of "born secrecy" fact censorship, as revealed by Dr Frank H. Shelton concerning his long slog to get his 1988 book Reflections of a Nuclear Weaponeer past the censors (text in blue typeface is hyperlinked to source documents)! No wonder the public and mass-media are deceived over the capabilities of nuclear deterrence! Shelton debunked Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons by showing that their crater sizes were seriously exaggerated for data obtained from Pacific surface bursts on coral during nuclear tests, and they exaggerated the fallout problem for the kind of modern cleaner tactical nuclear weapons stockpiled by Russia for the invasion of Western Europe (lethal fallout hazards are effectively eliminated by 85% clean 3.53 megaton cleaner bomb Zuni - which had a fissile spark plug in the secondary but a lead pusher rather than U238 pusher on the secondary; Shelton personally changed the 1956 Redwing testing locations to allow fallout studies to prove this fact).
HERMAN KAHN'S CRITICISMS OF STALEMATE WARS AND DEMANDS FOR CREDIBLE (NOT INCREDIBLE) NUCLEAR DETERRENCE OF ALL WARS
William A. McWhirter, Life magazine, 6 December 1968, pp. 110-126 (interview of Herman Kahn): "One day in September, 1967, the U.S. moved a new weapon into the war in Vietnam. ... Its name was Herman Kahn. ... Kahn opened a briefing of senior MACV (Military Advisory Command, Vietnam) officers by stating: 'There are 6 or 7 acceptable ways to win this war, 2 or 3 unacceptable ones, and only one way to lose it, and you've found it.' ... The Left, Kahn argued, by insisting war was unthinkable and impossible, placed the U.S. in a position where it could be blackmailed by an enemy. On the other hand, the Right, according to Kahn, by espousing a U.S. 'nuclear umbrella' to cover the entire globe, not only risked wholesale destruction, but engendered a good deal of fear and hatred from much of the world. ... The whole point of his book [On Thermonuclear War], in fact, was to prevent his own hypothesis from becoming a reality by exposing a U.S. policy which he considered woefully shallow and glib. ... Kahn was bitterly reproached from all sides. His colleagues were horrified that he would attempt to expose to the public what had already been for some years a bitter debate within the closed community. The furor divided RAND into warring camps; there is still a considerable difference of opinion on whether or not Herman was fired before he left RAND to open his own think tank. ... Kahn was caricatured as an enthusiast for nuclear war. He was thought to be the inspiration for Dr Strangelove, an impression that still widely persists. ... 'There is an anti-Herman Kahn hysteria,' admits Herman Kahn. Sam Cohen, a friend at RAND, speculates that Kahn was brilliant enough to have won a Nobel Prize had he remained in physics; Herman, however, never even bothered to finish his PhD. ... 'I'm big, fat and lousy Jewish,' he says, 'and they take it. They take it because they know I'm worried about the country.' ... A Kahn fact is trained to do only one thing: to lead to a Kahn conclusion. The conclusions, in turn, lead to the heart of Herman Kahn: the message. ... 'Maybe man is only the ancestor of the computer, and his only role to develop the circuits that take his place. ...'
"Herman and Jane Kahn live with their two children in the same unimposing, unpainted tract house in Chappaqua, a pleasant suburb about 30 miles north of New York City ... Jane Kahn, who was a RAND secretary when she met Herman, is slender and attractive. She is relaxed and pleasant most of the time, but seems specially coiled for Herman. She yells, bangs dishes, screeches, insults and badgers him. 'Herman,' she will loudly call from one room to the other. 'Herrrmannn. Herman!' ... 'Herman lives in a world all his own,' she says. 'He talks to himself in the shower. I don't really understand him. I mean that. I don't understand him at all. ... He brought home our first child, dropped us off, and went to Washington. When David came, I asked him, 'Well, Herman, which it it, your son or your book [On Thermonuclear War, 1960]? He said that, after all, it was his second child and this was only his first book. He returned from a blizzard in New York. I asked him how the weather was. Fine. He came home from a month in Saigon. How was it? Fine. ... If I didn't know Herman was brilliant, I would have left him a long time ago.' ... The cult of science is shown by Herman to be as coarse, fallible, blustering, impassioned - and as valuable - as any other combination of human energy."
"Following the [Boer] war there was an extreme anti-military, anti-expansionist, isolationist feeling in educated circles. Accompanying this were very serious attempts at arms limitation, as exemplified in the various Hague conferences ["banning" gas war on paper in 1907, for example, something that proved a delusion in WWI when gas was used by everybody] which attempted to limit the use of weapons in warfare. However, England was engaged in a massive arms race with a formidable rival (Imperial Germany) which required investments in expensive new weapons systems (dreadnaughts). This raised a major question of priorities in England. ... Anarchist terrorism of various kinds [anarchists, communists, feminist suffragettes, Irish separatists, etc.] was an everyday occurrence. Throughout the period there was a noticeable breakdown in traditional British standards of public decorum. Speakers were howled down in the House of Commons. Interestingly enough, the group which one would expect to be the principal upholder of traditional standards - the educated elite [see below for Kahn's detailed analysis of "educated incapacity"] - were the worst in this regard. Faced with the possible loss of their priviledges, they became extremely nasty. Some were openly poltting with the potential Ulster insurrectionists, and when the Liberal government ordered troops deployed to suppress the Ulstermen, officers offered their resignations and the army was on the verge of mutiny. In the summer of 1914 it seemed as if the British isles were about to explode, but the impending civil war was diverted by World War I. ... This was not the first time that such unity was gained at the cost of war."
(Emphasis added to key argument.) Without that British Empire involvement, the 1914 war would have been limited. From the Machiavellian implication of this fact, WWIII will be predicted to break out when an opponent to a foreign dictatorship decides to escalate a local war involving that dictatorship, in order to deflect attention from internal political problems and deliberately unify their people by a greater struggle. Kahn argues against ignorance of history on p30: "In fact, historians use analogy all the time. ... Certainly, nothing can be proved by analogy; but it may illustrate, teach, make plausible, and clarify." Kahn then explains on p32 that the 1900-14 period, which he terms the pre-world war age, "La Belle Epoque" aka The Beautiful Era, is key to understanding how a future war will break out, if we learn the 1930s lessons and have an arms race to deter aggression; without such credible nuclear deterrence, Oswald Spengler predicted four world wars per century. What's particularly important for the present world crisis in Herman Kahn and Bruce-Briggs' 1972 Things to Come is their analysis of pseudo-"elitist" Orwellian or pseudo-Democratic left wing propaganda driven "educated incapacity" in educational establishments to enforce lying orthodox dogmas on nuclear war at pages 27-28, 69-70, and 80-82:
[p80:] "EDUCATED INCAPACITY By educated incapacity [a modification of Veblen's term "trained incapacity"] we mean an acquired or learned inability to understand or see a problem, much less a solution. ... Education necessarily involves selection, indoctrination, a special intellectual environment, the development of a framework of accepted 'givens' or 'facts', and learning to think about a subject in a certain required way. However, when a problem or the solution to a problem lies outside the accepted framework, an expert is less likely to understand the situation or see the solution [a typical example of this groupthink wilful blindness is linked here] ... [p81:] The history of medicine is full of instances exemplifying the reluctance of the medical profession to accept new methods. Military history also abounds with blatant cases of this. This is essentially true for all professionals. 'Educated incapacity' describes this type of limitation. Educated incapacity is accentuated in the modern world because huge contemporary organizations proliferate ... beaucracies ... Even business seems to be in danger ... the graduate will be a technician rather than a decision-maker in contact with the pressures and insights of the real world . ... On an increasing number of issues, upper class and upper-middle class elites are having difficulty with relatively simple degrees of reality testing, especially with ... issues of national security, prestige, welfare, race and crime. ... [p82:] a growth of simplistic, theoretic, illusioned, and/or wishful thinking and utopian objective; and a general lack of reality testing and hard-headed or 'tough minded' analysis [which Kahn acquired in the Burmese jungle, WWII, and which was in the 1st Cold War no-platformed by the Conintern style intellectual mission to simply soften-up or morally weaken the West by every means possible, from infiltrating universities to supplying illegal drugs etc, prior to starting WWIII] ... The whole subject of educated incapacity is very controversial. ... The authors of the Pentagon Papers [on Vietnam by Kahn and others] have been called vicious, stupid or ignorant individuals; actually they were highly skilled and highly educated, devoted, dedicated, and decent men who were doing some brilliant things that had little to do with Vietnam, rather like a surgeon operating on a rubber duck. Educated incapacity can thus lead to domestic polarization and to misadventures. ... intellectuals will be discredited as the appropriate people to manage the economy or society. ... Remarks such as Governor George Wallace's about 'pointy-headed professors' may be more widely and openly accepted ..." [E.g., racism and war should not be combatted by suppressing freedom and suppressing deterrence, but by the opposite; rationalism and creativity rather than naivety and fanatical superstition should be used to oppose dictatorial elitism and fascism; honesty not bigotry should oppose authoritarianism, etc. On page 222, Kahn points out that the various types of society are distinguished by money: the annual income per capita in 1972 dollars for the prehistoric hunter-gatherer society was just $50/year, for the 8000BC agricultural society it was up to $500/year, for the industrial revolution of 1800AD it was up to $5000/year, and for post-industrial society it is $50,000/year. The point is, these different systems exist sequentially, but still coexist in the world, causing financial inequalities that are exploited by "divide and rule"-propaganda based warmonging left wing fronts for world revolution, such as the paranoid delusional mass media.]
[p150:] "The US strategic forces [before 1968] were relatively well protected and more numerous than Soviet forces. ... The US could destroy the greater part of Russia's forces. What Russian forces survived a US strike would be relatively limited in effectiveness ... The implicit bargaining advantage this perceived imbalance provided was probably more important than the actual threat. Even a pro forma and operationally meaningless superiority may lead the 'superior' nation to feel it is entitled to political advantages for its extra strength, and that the other government should back down. In the 1970s the American strategic advantage either will have disappeared or come close to disappearing. [p151:] For the first time since World War II the Soviets will have ... even a sense of superiority. We know that the last time the Soviets acted out of a feeling or parity or impending superiority ... they tried to gain immediate political advantage. ... [p180:] The United States has a population of 200,000,000 people, a GNP of £1 trillion dollars, and armed forces of more than 3,000,000. All of Vietnam has a population of 30,000,000, a GNP of $6 billion, and armed forces of 1,000,000. Even if the extreme dove position that all the Vietnamese are against us except a few puppets is true, how could the United States possibly be defeated in Vietnam? ... There is only one answer - treachery. Our boys in the field, brave as they were, could not possibly win because they were stabbed in the back. ... [p181:] Following this line of reasoning, it is not difficult to write a scenario of some sort of resurrection of McCarthyism ..."
US President Ronald Reagan's speech warning against commie propaganda, National Association of Evangelicals, March 8, 1983:
"... that shrewdest of all observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it eloquently, after he had gone on a search for the secret of America’s greatness and genius, and he said: “... if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” ... “In God We Trust” is engraved on our coinage. ... There is sin and evil in the world, and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might. ... There is no room for racism, anti-Semitism, or other forms of ethnic and racial hatred in this country. ... And this brings me to my final point today. ... Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. And everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat. ... We saw this phenomenon in the 1930s. We see it too often today. ... It was C. S. Lewis who, in his unforgettable “Screwtape Letters,” wrote: “The greatest evil is ... is conceived and ordered; moved, seconded, carried and minuted in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” Well, because these “quiet men” do not “raise their voices,” because they sometimes speak in soothing tones of brotherhood and peace, because, like other dictators before them, they’re always making “their final territorial demand,” some would have us accept them at their word and accommodate ourselves to their aggressive impulses. But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simpleminded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. ... The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith."
Evil lying WMD escalation propaganda for "security through arms control/disarmament" (including mass media hate attacks on anyone who told the truth, masterminded by the Prime Ministers Baldwin, Chamberlain and other decrepid lying loons who were supported by the gullible and corrupted fascist mass media) was debunked by Herman Kahn because it permits genocide: (1) escalation to WMD poison gas knock-out blow in 1939 was promised by BBC and other mass-media and "disarmament experts" since February 1927 (when Lord Noel-Baker gave a BBC radio propaganda broadcast lying that gas masks were impossible and all experts agreed this, a point emphatically denied in secret meetings by the Porton gas defense scientists but not in public due to "secrecy") and both sides had gas in 1939, but it wasn't used as a military weapon in WWII or even in gas chambers (where pesticide or CO exhaust were used, not tabun or mustard gas weapons), and (2) the banning of WMD poison gas was established prior to WWI when it was banned and outlawed by the Hague Conventions in 1899 and 1907, prior to WWI, but it was regardless made and used by all sides in WWI. This firmly debunked the "arms control/disarmament will prevent mass destruction"-mythology type CND propaganda hoax, but simply saying so is simply a "taboo", like 100% of facts on Hiroshima (as opposed to lying populist war-mongering, anti-deterrence disarmament propaganda). No newspaper will put this on the front page: they're afraid of exposing the war hoax, or else they profit by selling war news to readers and the "war correspondents or war editors" deliberately suppress the truth, usually by referring to Glasstone's book or "nukemap", or Professor Freedman's opinions on civil defense! On the other hand, in August 1945 conventional war escalated to strategic nuclear war. Would it have done so if we had tactical nuclear weapons to deter the invasions that set off the war in the first place?
"Most Soviet nuclear weapons were tactical, designed for crushing NATO if a conflict arose with Warsaw Pact forces in Europe; the total Soviet arsenal in 1960 of 1,700 bombs and warheads included only about 350 strategic weapons." - Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly, Simon and Schuster, 2008, p86. (Sadly, that's a rare accurate statement Rhodes makes in any of his books, which are mostly based on anti-Kahnian propaganda lies about strategic bombs on cities, originating in the Kremlin to cause Russian appeasement.)
Tactical nuclear weapons have always been the key threat, openly moved to Belarus by Russia for this deterrent signalling purpose, are now being used by Russia to deter our decisive intervention in the Russian-Ukraine war, because we don't have W33, W48, Mk54, or W79 dedicated tactical deterrents to prevent invasions any longer.
"If we are able to use these weapons, and the enemy does not have them, their military effect can only be matched by his use of larger-yield dirty weapons - with the political and propaganda penalties their use implies. Of course the converse will also be true." (Emphasis added)
"Some idea of what the weapons makers are proposing can be gained from a paper written last June by R. G. Schreffler and W. S. Bennett of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Expressing what they said were personal opinions, Schreffler and Bennett envisioned a U.S. tactical nuclear arsenal of perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 small-yield weapons. With these, they said, collateral damage 'can really be made insignificant - literally preferable to the devastation that accompanies conventional warfare.' Had there been the right weapons in Vietnam, they wrote, '. . . it is reasonable to ask if a successful defense might not have been mounted with discriminating use of nuclear weapons and far less collateral damage than Vietnam has already suffered'."
US Defense Secretary McNamara, February 14, 1968 testimony before a subcommittee of the Congressional Committee on Appropriations for 1969:
"I think the answer is we must continue to build tactical nuclear weapons and deploy them ... We have gone ahead to build the weapons and deploy them. I have increased the inventory of such weapons in Europe 100 percent from 3,500 to 7,000." [All were removed in 1992.] - quoted on p213 of March-April 1974 Congressional Hearings, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
Larsen and Kartchner's 2014 On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century in chapter 10 On US Preparedness for Limited Nuclear War by Bruce W. Bennett (of RAND Corp) states at pages 215-7: "In a highly classified document, each president directs the military to plan nuclear options for specific types of contingencies. This document is not available for public review and discussion. ... The intent here is to describe the potential nuclear missions US forces may be tasked to execute ... The US 'nuclear umbrella' is extended to protect US allies and partners ... to assure the ally that it need not develop its own nuclear weapons [if the ally believes the USA has a credible deterrence of invasions, e.g. tactical weapons to deter aggression, without relying on strategic retaliation strikes which may be prone to escalate quickly into WWIII, for which the USA is not adequately prepared with civil defense]. ... The conditions potentially leading to limited US nuclear weapon use may include:
"1. An adversary demonstration nuclear attack. An anniversary uses one or a small number of nuclear weapons ... to signal his capability and will to use nuclear weapons ... The adversary attack might be a pure demonstration (causing little real damage), an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, or a very selective attack against ... military targets such as air bases or ports.
"2. An adversary non-nuclear battlefield breakthrough ...
"3. An adversary selective nuclear attack ... against a city or military target, causing enough direct damage that there would tend to be stronger US incentives to respond with a nuclear weapon.
"4. An adversary incapacitating nuclear attack ... intended to incapacitate key US or allied military or leadership capabilities. ...
"5. The collapse of a nuclear state and/or loss of control of its nuclear weapons [leading to a possible need] to destroy adversary nuclear weapons that may otherwise pose a risk to a US ally or the United States."
Bennett adds on pp221-3 of Larsen and Kartchner's 2014 On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century: "The author believes that conducting a limited nuclear war is indeed possible. It would involve using nuclear weapons with constraints on the number of weapons employed and the objectives of the US attacks. ... Indeed, the new 'Nuclear Employment Strategy' ... says 'The United States will not intentionally target civilian populations or civilian objects'. [Quote: US Department of Defense Report on Nuclear Employment Strategy of the United States p4.] ... The new 'Nuclear Employment Strategy' formalizes the long-held expectation that US presidents would prefer a proportional response to adversary use of nuclear weapons [according to the Law of Armed Conflict, ignored by anti-nuclear fanatics in populist media] ... For example, if an adversary used two nuclear weapons for a nuclear demonstration, an EMP attack, or a nuclear attack on US or allied ground forces, many expect that a US president would be naturally inclined to respond using about two nuclear weapons against similar adversary targets. ... But such a response would not meet the likely public demand to neutralize the threat ... If an adversary government collapses or otherwise loses control of its nuclear forces, those forces could be used against the United States or its partners or could be given to states or organizations that would do so. To prevent this ... the United States may need to launch a preemptive counterforce campaign, including some use of nuclear weapons to more quickly and completely remove the threat. Some US presidents might balk at such a 'first use' of US nuclear weapons, but others may perceive the threat as sufficiently serious to justify such attacks."
Fortunately, Bennett is too conservative here because, as we'll prove in great detail below, Bennett's nuclear effects data for collateral damage, e.g. from Glasstone, is false propaganda debunked by secret data from nuclear tests, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Larsen and Kartchner's 2014 On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century includes a chapter by James M. Smith, the Director of the USAF Institute for National Security, Limited Nuclear Conflict and the American Way of War, summarizing on pages 257-9: "This chapter paints a fairly dark picture of American nuclear experience and expertise, and of the declining position of all things nuclear in American strategic culture, the American way of war, and American military service culture. This bodes ill for the United States' ability to think about, plan for, and acquire the operational capacity to conduct limited nuclear war, if that contingency is forced upon it. ... Deterrence is fundamentally a psychological instrument ... Any perception of a 'crack' in the US arsenal, if not addressed forcefully, could certainly negatively impact others' perception of America's capability and also of its deterrence credibility [i.e., if you can't use a weapon under any circumstances, it's not a credible deterrent any more than poison gas stockpiles on both sides were back in 1939]. ... Credibility is the bedrock of deterrence [so the public and enemy need to know you are ready to make war if needed] ... But there is also a deep and wide deficit in nuclear experience and expertise among the uniformed military leadership. ... As the United States has lost much of its base at the strategic deterrence end of the spectrum, it has also lost almost its entire base for managing a limited nuclear war. Tactical nuclear weapons have been withdrawn .. except for a small number [~100] that remain forward deployed in Europe in support of NATO. Only a small number of NATO-based aircraft and aircrews maintain mission proficiency in their employment. As the Alliance has declared that these are solely political weapons, the morale and incentives to study for and prepare for their possible use have disappeared. Nuclear targetting is a dying art, and only a handful of planners retain interest and expertise in limited nuclear warfighting."
Schelling's War for Coercive Punishment, versus Kahn's Credible Deterrence of the Invasions that set off both World Wars, and Field Marshall William Slim's empirical "the more you lose, the fewer you lose" strategy (as proved theoretically by the Lanchester Equations of war, applied to battles like Iwo Jima) for Clausewitz's war for the disarmament of aggressors, to guarantee peace on earth without risk of resurgence, if deterrence fails
"In his book The Great American Gamble (2008), Keith Payne argues that two major nuclear deterrence schools of thought emerged from the Cold War: a “stable balance of terror” theory attributed to Thomas Schelling, and a “US Advantage” school championed by Herman Kahn. Understanding each school’s basic tenets is critical to this study. ... Schelling argued that a “stable” balance of terror between the United States and the Soviet Union was the best deterrence policy, where no country would be dominant in strategic capability, and no population would be safe from the other. Mutual vulnerability would ensure that both sides acted prudently and cautiously in international relations. ... Schelling maintained that “in the absence of the ‘reciprocal fear of surprise attack’ that might ignite a nuclear war, a ‘stable balance of terror could be established to provide reliable, predictable mutual deterrence.” Therefore, Schelling advised that anything that would incite fear of a possible surprise attack in the enemy (such as missile defenses or civil defense aimed at minimizing the destructive potential of the enemy’s deterrent forces) was “destabilizing,” and worked against deterrence. ... Kahn presented an alternative view of deterrence based on fundamentally different assumptions from Schelling’s. ... Kahn rejected Schelling’s belief that a system which gave the US superiority was “destabilizing.” Indeed, for Kahn the only “stabilizing” force in deterrence was a clear and obvious American strategic superiority that conferred real advantage. Kahn advocated more expansive offensive and defensive US strategic force requirements that would both be able to deter Soviet aggression and protect the American population in case deterrence failed. ... Kahn’s denial-based deterrent posture was not simply deterrence, but “deterrence plus” the ability to prevail in a nuclear war while defending the population from catastrophic loss. To Kahn, the ability to wage nuclear war enhanced deterrence because “deterrence requires the capability to fight, survive, and win along the entire spectrum of nuclear conflict, from limited to total.” ... Kahn would argue, of course, that defense is preferred because Schelling’s deterrence is not stable at all, or at least that Schelling’s deterrence simply ignores the problem of what if deterrence fails? [Schelling switched to the Kahnian doctrine in his foreword to the 2014 compendium On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century, due to the Russian tactical nuclear threat, despite having been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for his early anti-Kahnian game theory of war with "parity" and M.A.D. policy beloved by appeasers/arms controllers and Vietnam war controllers like Robert McNamara.] ... Here is the critical difference between the First and Second Nuclear Age: where in the First Nuclear Age nuclear warfare at any level was “unthinkable” and Schelling’s deterrence assumptions appeared viable, the Second Nuclear Age is one where nuclear war is very possible." [Emphasis added.]
THE GREAT AMERICAN GAMBLE by Dr Keith Payne begins with recommendations on the flyleaf, including Professor William R. Van Cleave, founder of the Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University: "It is no exaggeration to say that this book is now the definitive study and explanation of American strategic nuclear deterrent concepts ... It is essential to understanding the 'why?' of US deterrent and arms control policies."
Dr Keith Payne's 2008 Great American Gamble at pages 2-298 argues lucidly: "The US capability to threaten nuclear retaliation ... and vulnerability of US society to Soviet nuclear attack, were believed [by the Schelling dogma] to be the basic ingredients of a 'stable' balance of terror. ... [p6:] Instead, Kahn emphasised the requirement for US strategic defensive capabilities to help establish an asymmetrical and advantageous imbalance of terror favoring the United States. ... [p27:] The basic structure of NATO's security situation did not change much during the Cold War. In 1987, the US Commander in Chief, US European Command, General Bernard Rogers reported in testimony before the Senate: 'I say to you, as I have said before this committee, that if attacked conventionally today, NATO would face fairly quickly the decision to escalate to the nuclear response in order to try to cause the aggressor to halt his advance' [US Senate, Committee on Armed Services, National Security Strategy Hearing, 100th Congress, 1st Session, 1987, p922].
[p33:] "In contrast to Kahn's insistence on the US need for threat credibility ... Schelling maintained that the 'uncertain element' of what might happen in response to a Soviet attack ... would make extended nuclear deterrence 'work'. Soviet leaders would fear that the United States might not behave rationally, or in the 'fog of war' might 'blunder' toward strategic nuclear war, even if it would not rationally, intentionally choose such a course because it would be self-destructive ... It might be suicidal for the United States to escalate to the employment of strategic nuclear weapons, but the threat of escalation could provide extended deterrence nonetheless because the Soviet leadership could not be certain that US actions would be prudent, or precisely and tightly controlled. [References: Schelling, Arms and Influence pp38-47, 97-98, and Shelling Strategy of Conflict pp188-203] ... [p34:] Kahn ... wanted a deterrent that left little to chance ... Schelling suggested ... that Soviet fears of the uncertain possibility of US nuclear escalation could deter adequately, even in the context of US vulnerability to ... nuclear retaliation. ... with his analogy of 'rocking the boat'. According to Schelling, 'If I say 'Row or I'll tip the boat over and drown us both,' you'll say you don't believe me. But if I rock the boat so that it may tip over, you'll be more impressed. ... to make it work, I must really put the boat in jeopardy.' [Ref: Schelling, Strategy of Conflict p196. The dangers with this whole approach of Schelling is that he relies on the gamble risk-taking to make deterrence credible, while simultaneously arguing not to have ABM/civil defense to mitigate the effects of a failure of deterrence, and then has the temerity to call the resulting half-baked mess a stable balance of terror]. ...
[p35:] "The practice of deterrence is affected dramatically by whether Schelling's 'threat that leaves something to chance,' or Kahn's credibility from a threat that leaves little to chance, is judged to be an adequate basis for reliable deterrence. ... [p39:] Critics of Kahn's work reflected little comprehension ... That was perhaps best illustrated by the reply Kahn received from the editor of Scientific American, Dennis Flanagan, following his offer to write a rebuttal to the review by James newman appearing in Scientific American ... Kahn proposed to title his response to Newman, Thinking About the Unthinkable. Flanagan reportedly replied to Kahn: '... surely it is more profitable [EMPHASIS ADDED] to think about the thinkable ... It is for this reason that we must decline your offer to give us your article'.
[Thus, Kahn was "no-platformed" and unable to reply to Scientific American liars, because it was not "profitable" for Scientific American to publish the truth. The same applies to the mass media today, which refuses to debunk nuclear deterrence liars. Dr Keith Payne and Professor Colin S. Gray, both former Hudson Institute researchers under Herman Kahn, make clear the contrast between Schelling's dangerous game theory based "parity, or strategic balance of terror"-dogma and Herman Kahn's history-based "credible wide-spectrum deterrent", and point out the reasons why nuclear weapons effects are exaggerated - the more you exaggerate, the fewer weapons you need, saving you more bucks! Basically, as Payne explains on p63, Schelling's dogma was helpful because you can simply base your nuclear deterrent force on the number of enemy cities, as if that is a credible deterrent for 3rd party invasions like Ukraine 2022! However, they don't go into the details of the exaggeration of nuclear weapons effects, or how "studies" of civil defense have been repeatedly sabotaged by secretly reducing the true protection afforded by even cheap shelters against blast and radiation. This is, I believe, why they are marginalised. Until they go back to the facts at Hiroshima, Bikini, Nevada, Monte Bello and Maralinga, they won't be speaking the only language that the scientifically-literate public and top politicians like Trump - a key audience worth communicating with - can understand.]"
[p267:] "Indeed, the British declared war despite the fear that the '... bombing of London and the great cities would lead to casualties on the order of hundreds of thousands or even millions within a few weeks. We thought of air warfare in 1939 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today.' [Quote: Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change 1914-1939 p575.] In these cases, there were plausible reasons for the willingness of leaders to take the path to a prospectively catastrophic war despite recognition of the grave uncertainities and fears. ... a 'least miserable' course had to be chosen. Prudence born of the fear of escalation has been overshadowed frequently by such considerations. Leaders under great pressure deliberately and rationally can choose paths that involve potentially fatal risks - not always because they want to, but because they believe they have no tolerable alternatives."
[p269:] "Unfortunately, what was deemed 'unthinkable' by [McGeorge] Bundy may be 'thinkable' or even welcomed by other leaders also capable of rational decision making."
On p271, Payne quotes Professor Bradley Thayer's psychology research-based dismissal of Schelling's theory for stability using strategic parity:
"How the brain interprets actions and makes decisions is complicated, imperfect, greatly depends upon emotions, and varies among humans. ... Accordingly, it is fundamentally naive and dangerous to assume a similar outcome ... in all situations ... universal rationality in the face of a nuclear deterrent threat is irredeemably flawed." - Bradley Thayer, Thinking about nuclear deterrence theory, Comparative Strategy, v26, n4, July-September 2007, p312.
"... the neurophysiology of negative stimulation can be so unpleasant that people will avoid interacting with people who produce such stimuli, even though it may be essential to their job for them to have such interaction. The consequences of this for restricting or withholding negative but vital information may obviously be very serious." - Recent Findings in the Biosciences: Implications for DoD, US Department of Defense 2002 Summer Study (quoted by Payne at p272).
At pp274-5, Payne points out the insanity of Cuban leaders putting pressure on Russia for nuclear war, during the October 1962 crisis: "We now know what we did not even suspect at the time: Fidel Castro and Che Guevara [the bearded terrorist depicted on T-shirts worn by commies] encouraged the Soviet leadership to launch a nuclear attack against the United States, using the Soviet missles stationed in Cuba. Castro and Guevara demanded that the Soviets use their nuclear weapons - with a willingness to accept Cuban national martyrdom as the price of destroying capitalism. Soviet Vice President Mikoyan's response ... 'We see your willingness to die beautifully, but we do not believe it is worth dying beautifully'." [God help US when Russian leaders share the mentality of those Cuban leaders.] [p275:] Similarly, even after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, the Japanese War Minister Korechika Anami sought to continue the war ... 'Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?' ... preserving the Japanese cultural value of honor and sacrifice was a higher priority than avoiding the risk of Japan's societal destruction. ... [p276:] The 1973 Yom Kippur War is an even more striking demonstration ... On October 7, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a massive, well-coordinated. surprise assault against Israel, despite the fact that Israel was widely believed by that time to have a nuclear retaliatory capability. ... For American leaders convinced that prudence in the face of great risk must lead inevitably to cautious behavior, the Arab decision to strike against a punitive nuclear-armed opponent was inexplicable."
[p281:] "The perception of an opponent's weakness also can invite provocation, crisis and escalation: British appeasement of Germany in 1938 over Czechoslovakia contributed to Hitler's underestimation of Britain's likely response to his later attack on Poland ('Our enemies are little worms, I got to know them at Munich' - Adolf Hitler quoted by Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932-1945, The Chronicle of a Dictatorship, v3, 1939-1940, p1663) ... [p282:] "There is sufficient evidence since 1945 to conclude without reservation that, contrary to the centerpiece of the [Schelling] balance of terror's logic, the inherent risks and uncertainties of nuclear escalation do not reliably and predictably prevent deliberate or unwitting leadership behavior that could ignite a deadly escalation process [Emphasis by Payne.] ... Some of Schelling's comments during the cold war suggest his acknowledgement that he was dealing more in the hope that leaders would learn to be prudent and cautious, than the legitimate expectation of such thought and behavior ... [p293:] Deterrence may unexpectedly fail, and US damage-limiting capabilities [e.g. civil defense, ABM, and tactical nuclear warfare to destroy enemy nuclear stockpiles before they are launched] may be the only means for mitigating the catastropic consequences ... [p298:] Ambiguous threats and commitments may be attractive because they leave 'wiggle room' for the deterrer. [But] ambiguity may degrade deterrent effect or even incite provocation. [Emphasis by Payne. Ref: Michael Altfeld, Uncertainty as a Deterrence Strategy: A Critical Assessment, Comparative Strategy v5, n1, pp1-26] Rather than deter, ambiguity of US threat and commitment may offer an opening that provokes opponents who are highly motivated, desperate, or high-risk gamblers."
Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence, 1966, 2008 reprint with additions, at pages 170-171:
"Coercive warfare The theoretical question ... assumed sudden relevance with the initiation of the bombing campaign in North Vietnam in February 1965. ... the bombing of North Vietnam ... was not an all-out interdiction campaign, exclusively designed to cut supplies to the Vietcong; had it been that, there would have been little reason not to do the bombing on a larger scale at the outset. The bombing had an evident measure of coercive intent behind it: it was evidently designed, at least partly, to inflict plain loss of value on the adversary until he began to behave. The bombing was widely discussed, and sometimes explained by the Administration, as a means of putting pressure on the government of North Vietnam ..."
Note that in his original Preface, dated November 15, 1965, Schelling discounts his own analysis of Vietnam with the following "two-way bet" (weasel words indeed): "the several pages on the coercive aspects of the bombing of North Vietnam in 1965 do not mean I approve of it (and, in fact, I am not sure yet)..." (in other words, he'd approve of his own tactic of coercive pressure via bombing North Vietnam if won the war, but not if it failed, what Mr Lenin would doubtless praise as a "useful idiot" book). Schelling's minimal force "war for coercive punishment"-concept had influenced the Vietnam War controllers ike McNamara, simply because it had been published in 1960 as Strategy of Conflict, in the same year as Herman Kahn's credible deterrence argument On Thermonuclear War, but Schelling was preferred because it won greater ill-informed mass media praise, and particularly, less paranoid lying "fake news"-style opposition, from the communist-influenced mass-media. Schelling does admit in small-type footnotes to key problems with his strategy, e.g. Arms and Influence, footnote 17 on page 159:
"As [General] Maxwell Taylor has pointed out [The Uncertain Trumpet, Harper, NY, 1960, pp7-10, 38-9], beliefs in certain thresholds can become embodied in the planning process, thereby become reflected in military capabilities and command procedures, and thus become more tangible, more rigid. If a government sufficiently believes that any nuclear war will inevitably become 'all-out', or that any engagement of Soviet and American troops must become 'all out', there may be inadequate plans and inappropriate forces for the contingency that got ignored [e.g. the present situation of 2,000 Russian neutron bombs opposed by 100 dirty B61 general purpose nuclear bombs]. In the end it is then more dangerous to cross the threshold; choices become more extreme; the threshold is less likely to be crossed but, when crossed, may have to be crossed by a great leap [e.g. starting WWIII]. ... The Vietnamese case [controversy over whether or not to bomb North Vietnam SAM missile sites run by Russians, in case it set off an escalation of Russian reprisals, ending in WWIII] illustrates that many thresholds can become ambiguous, especially if pains are made to make them so. Any Russians at the SAM sites ... could be denied by the Soviet Union to reduce the embarrassment to both sides [oh come on, Russia will do whatever it wants under the circumstances, not whatever you suggest to "reduce embarrassment", mate!] and in other ways the drama of the 'incident' could be played down. The fact that there was no announcement by either side that the sites had been attacked, until several days after the first attack, tended to dilute the incident and make it more casual." (Emphasis added.)
Schelling's argument to not use Kahn's credible deterrent of major provocations, but instead to use conventional bombing as "punishment", consists of pages of rhetoric reinforced like a bad legal contract, by the use of quotations in small-print footnotes that are really inappropriate, e.g. he quotes President Kennedy: "That son of a bitch [Khrushchev] won't pay any attention to words. He has to see you move." (From Arthur M. Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, Houghton Mifflin, 1965, p391.) This is simply not an appropriate argument for using violence for coercion instead of deterrence, because Kennedy did not need to bomb Cuba to resolve the Cuban Missiles Crisis. A naval blockade, and putting nuclear forces on alert, proved to be sufficient deterrence to get the message through Khrushchev's thick skull.
Schelling's recipe of conventional coercive bombing as civilian punishment to induce them to ask the dictators to surrender was tried in WWII and failed; the USSBS found it was counterproductive. Conventional coercive bombing was tried in Vietnam and failed; again, it was counterproductive to have napalmed kids in newspapers. Schelling didn't use mathematics but his advocated war policy was similar to Minimax from game theory: don't risk using overwhelming force, use just enough force to hurt the enemy enough to make them interested in negotiation. That is a recipe for fake peace agreements (to take the heat off, while the enemy prepare for another war or invasion). Clausewitz by contrast argues that you should disarm the opponent (entirely different from napalming kids or bombing cities) to get a trustworthy peace deal! If you can't disarm them, then you shouldn't have a half-baked statemate war that ends in your humiliation (as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), sending a signal of your weakness to the entire world, but instead you need credible nuclear deterrence to deter the enemy from major provocations like invading allies. On page 15 of Arms and Influence Schelling argues that General Sherman admitted to using "barbarity and violence" during his Union army's march through Georgia in the America Civil War, yet it was military attrition and military fatigue than led to Confederacy surrender, not pressure on civilians! The whole of Schelling's argument is an effort to justify Nazi-style coercive control through violence, the very thing that really galvanised the free world into defeating them. The reality is that the only credible nuclear deterrent is tactical nuclear weapons to stop invasions and wars. That is a credible deterrent, because it is not a bluff. It's essential to make this clear now.
It must be emphasised Schelling's call for gradual, minimal-force coercive (limited statemate) war as punishment is the exact opposite to Kahn's evidence based call for credible deterrence of war. Arms races are not new to the cold war, for instance France and Britain were in a naval deterrent arms race between 1840-65, which Britain won by maintaining a 50% superiority until France gave up, due to the economic pressure (see Samuel P. Huntington, "Arms races", in Public Policy: A Yearbook of the Graduate School of Public Administration, Harvard University, Volume VIII, 1958, edited by Carl J. Friedrich and Seymour Harris).
Paul Bracken, professor of management and politics at Yale and former RAND Corp consultant and Hudson Institute staff member, The Second Nuclear Age (St Martin's Griffin, NY, 2013), pages 60-4, and 231: "You Don't Have to Fire a Nuclear Weapon to Use it. This is the single most important lesson of the first nuclear age. Nuclear war didn't occur. But nuclear weapons were used every single day. There were many innovative ways to use the bomb without actually firing it. Some people get upset when told ... Many have grown up in a world where nuclear weapons have been thoroughly demonized, absent from any discussion of their usefulness ... The bomb was used right from the beginning ... Despite this, many observers at the time missed what was happening. ... Consider a few of their uses. The bomb was used to deter a nuclear attack on the United States. That's clear. More than 7,000 bombs were put in Europe to deter an attack there as well. But not just for deterrence. Nuclear weapons were also used for communication and bargaining. Harry Truman used worldwide bomber exercises to ratchet up risk and to communicate to Moscow ... He used the bomber runs to bargain with the Soviets. 'Okay, go ahead, shoot down our airplanes supplying Berlin ... if you fire on them see what I do next!' If that's not using the bomb, I don't know what is. President Eisenhower ordered the 'Long Tom' atomic cannon to Korea in 1953 when the armistice talks there stalled. Film clips were sent to the newspapers of the Long Tom firing an atomic artillery round [15 kt Grable, a tactical nuclear weapon test in Nevada, May 25, 1953, during Korean War which finally ended on July, 27 1953]. ... In the 1980s, new US missiles were installed in Europe, to counter Soviet missiles deployed earlier ... NATO had been foundering in the late 1970s ... Moscow saw a chance to split the alliance even further, using the nuclear issue. Antinuclear emotions were stokes everywhere, as the Soviets tried to drum up bigger street demonstrations and more domestic opposition. ... [p231] The term MAD [Mutual Assured Destruction] was coined by my former colleague Don Brennan of the Hudson Institute, and he meant it as a disparaging description of cold war US strategy. ... Brennan called this thinking 'MAD', which it was. ... As to what current US nuclear strategy toward Russia is, what replaces MAD, no one seems to know or care."
Despite this, McNamara disastrously decided to follow Thomas Schelling's MAD pro-arms control-biased "war as punishment" philosophy (von Neumann's "Minimax" theorem of game theory), in both Vietnam and the broader USA-Russian Cold War, not Herman Kahn's superior deterrent (which was based on deterring the escalations that led to WWI and WWII). See Keith Payne's 2008 Great American Gamble. The reality is, Schelling's fake "war as punishment" game theory of war failed in Vietnam, and led to 1970s Russian resurgence in the Cold War, culminating in Reagan's election and Cold War intensification with Star Wars, etc. Parity in the real world (not rule abided "games") was not and is not stable or safe. Schelling was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for it, like 1930s disarmers/appeasers Lord Noel-Baker and Sir Norman Angell, whose propaganda led to disaster! Victory in war is not achieved by analogy to a rule-abided game, but to the Machiavellian use of overwhelming - not minimal - force to disarm an opponent according to the Lanchester Equations aka Sir William Slim's "the more you use, the fewer you lose" dictum based on battle for Burma, WWII. Minimising the maximum possible risk and using minimal force (the Minimax theory of gambling and rule abided games) leads to the Vietnam style and the current Ukraine-Russian statemate war of failure through attrition and fatigue, maximising the casualties, destruction, and military cost, and failing to make a decisive breakthrough. There is nothing new about this, as Brigadier-General P. R. C. Groves explains on page 84 of his 1934 book Behind the Smoke Screen:
"But the whole conduct of the [First World] War ... bears witness to deadly conservatism. The result in our case was, as Mr Churchill points out in The World Crisis that 'In all British offensives, the British casualties were never less than 3 to 2, and often nearly double the corresponding German losses'. Despite the lessons of the South African [Boer] War, the Russo-Japanese war, the Balkan Wars, and the first engagements of the Great War itself ... our Higher Command adhered to the fixed idea of frontal attack, often without adequate artillery preparation, or even adequate supremacy in numbers and seldom with any effort to gain the cardinal advantage of surprise." (This problem is due to "Parkinson's Law" of bureaucracy, and also to Pournelle's "iron law of bureaucracy", etc. Anyone talking any sense gets censored or "no-platformed" by the big bureaucratic "elitist" groupthink blob of incompetent self-serving, self-rewarding establishment snobbery.)
Despite the endless attacks on tactical nuclear weapons by books, articles and TV interviews given by Robert McNamara in the 1980s (particularly in an episode of the 1989 international TV 13-part series, "The Nuclear Age", entitled "The Education of Robert McNamara"), even in 1988 NATO still relied on tactical nuclear weapons to defend Europe, e.g. an unfortunately named journalist, Henry van Loon, interviewed Supreme Allied Commander General John R. Galvin for the March 1988 Armed Forces International Journal (page 50), who stated: "At this moment I can guarantee only that we can defend ourselves for two weeks against an all-out Warsaw Pact attack - then we will have to use nuclear weapons." (It was as a result of such honesty that McNamara and other arms control propagandarists for pseudo-peace disarmed all dedicated US and UK tactical nuclear bombs and shells in the 1990s, and also coerced Ukraine into surrendering all its nuclear weapons.)
ABOVE: In 1982, at the height of the 1st Russian-West Cold War, the UK Falkland Islands suffered an illegal invasion by the Argentine dictatorship. The USA Secretary of State refused to back the UK, and tried to offer to mediate a fake "peace deal" in which South American "peacekeepers" would mediate to stop the shooting. However, the UK decided to kick the invaders out, despite having to launch a substantial war on land, at sea and in the air, lasting 74 days against the invaders, leading to the loss of 255 British military personnel, 777 injured, some very seriously, and the loss of 5 ships. Because of a shortage of military equipment, a civilian cruise liner, the QE2, was requisitioned to ship troops to the islands, and merchant cargo ships such as Atlantic Conveyor were requisitioned as improvised aircraft carriers for military helicopters (Atlantic Conveyor was sunk by two Exocet missiles). The Falklands War is important because it shows how a country prepared for a nuclear war against one state may be invaded in a conventional surprise attack by another, and have to improvise weapons using civilian ships. This indicates that conventional thinking about the "military resources" of a state is false in an emergency attack. Countries can and do improvise weapons to protect their citizens in war. Simply counting up a country's pre-war "military resources" and using it to argue about war threats is incorrect. Additionally, we need a credible deterrent against invasions, if we are to have security and peace against the aggressive actions of dictators. On 5 April 1982, the Daily Mail called for Lord Carrington, the British Foreign Secretary, to be fired by Maggie Thatcher, and he resigned that day to be replaced by another crazy fool, Francis Pym (who was sacked the next year for deploring successful elections on TV during the 1983 general election campaign!). In their editorial the next day (6 April 1982), the Daily Mail stated:
"Lord Carrington ... had to go. And he knew it. ... let there be no myth ... Lord Carrington and ... two other Ministers from the Foreign Office ... are not scapegoats. It is through the culpable negligence of the over-mighty Department of State ... that Britain was utterly unprepared to deter the Argentines from invading the Falkland Islands. ... For weeks, the languid FO dismissed the gathering storm as if it were a tiresome and distant passing squall. There is only one place on the globe in 1982 where Britain risked blundering into war. ... Lord Carrington preferred to play the world statesman than bother about this ... He was above sending gunboats (or nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarines, the modern and devastatingly effective equivalent). The FO would cope. Diplomacy would do the trick. The past 72 hours tell a different story. ... 1,800 Britons are under foreign domination. Britain is virtually at war. The greater part of the naval strength of this country is being staked on one perilous throw. The maimed government ... is fighting for its political life."
The Falklands War also demonstrated the failure of NATO to protect a member from an attack and invasion. The Daily Mail's front page on 24 April 1982:
"Jelly-bean Reagan ducks Pym as talks get nowhere. WE'RE ON OUR OWN. From John Dickie in Washington. Foreign Secretary Francis Pym is due back in London today from Washington. Empty-handed. He will report to Mrs Thatcher that there is practically no hope at this point of a diplomatic solution. ... US Secretary of State Alexander Haig appealed to Mr Pym for more restraint, more patience, more time. But the Americans had nothing to offer towards ... satisfying Britain's essential demand: Get the Argentine invaders off the islands. President Reagan did not intervene ... Mr Pym waited in vain for a call to the White House. Instead, the jelly-bean-loving President left the talking to Mr Haig. Asked if he planned to see the British Foreign Secretary, Reagan ducked the question with the words: 'It's a nice day...' Mr Pym, after his long talks with Mr Haig, was in a mood bordering on despair. ... He did not conceal his anxiety ... 'I must not shrink from the possibility of the use of force. If all else fails, it might come to that. It is no service to the cause of peace for us to maintain otherwise'."
This illustrates the fact Britain cannot rely on America or NATO today any more than it could in 1982, 1914 or 1939. We need CREDIBLE independent deterrents. Lord Carrington, whose failure to deter the Falklands War led to his resignation as Foreign Secretary on 5 April 1982, ironically had earlier stated in The Times of October 28, 1981: "It is wrong to claim that there is no choice between being 'red or dead'. There is in fact a third choice. It is one which Europe has pursued successfully for half a lifetime - to prevent war and remain free." This proves that fine words are no substitute for taking action to deter provocations and wars.
"I challenge anybody to give us one instance in the world's history where the defenselessness of any nation saved it from being attacked by an aggressor determined to do so." - Sir John Boyd, The Guardian, October 1, 1981.
"I could see where you could have the exchange of tactical weapons against troops in the field without it bringing either one of the major powers to pushing the button." - President Ronald Reagan, The Times, October 21, 1981.
"It is the Soviet Union that appears to be building forces for a 'protracted' conflict (the doctrine of Zatyazhnaya Voyna). ... for deterrence to continue to be successful in the future, we must take steps to offset the Soviet military buildup. If we do not modernize our arsenal now, as the Soviets have been doing for more than 20 years, we will, within a few years, no longer have the ability to retaliate. The Soviet Union would then be in a position to threaten or actually to attack us in the knowledge that we would be incapable of responding. We have seen in Poland, in Afghanistan, in Eastern Europe, and elsewhere, that the Soviet Union does not hesitate to take advantage of a weaker adversary. We cannot allow the Soviet Union to think it could begin a nuclear war with us and win. This is not idle speculation. The Soviet Union has engaged in a frenzied military buildup, in spite of their economic difficulties. They have continued to build greater numbers of nuclear weapons ... They now have over 5000 nuclear warheads on ICBMs compared to about 2000 only five years ago. The have modified the design ... so that many of their land-based missiles are now more accurate, more survivable, and more powerful than our own. They have developed a refiring capability ... They have elaborate plans for civil defence ... whatever they claim their intentions to be, the fact remains that they are designing their weapons in such a way and in sufficient numbers to indicate to us that they think they could begin, and win, a nuclear war." - U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, The Times, August 26, 1982.
"We believe that to be seen to be prepared at home [for nuclear war, i.e. Protect and Survive civil defence plans], as well as capable of military deterrence abd defence, will make war less likely." - UK Home Secretary William Whitelaw, The Times, August 8, 1980. "A civil defence shield not only complements a strong offensive of missiles, submarines, aircraft and soldiers, but above all provides us with a strong deterrent to aggression. The most decisive factor in war is morale, not only on the battlefield, but on the home front. ... Preparedness today means peace tomorrow." - General Sir Walter Walker, The Times, August 20, 1980.
Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 28 November 1934: "To urge the preparation of defence is not to assert the imminence of war. On the contrary, if war were imminent preparations for defence would be too late. I do not believe that war is imminent or that war is inevitable, but it seems very difficult to resist the conclusion that, if we do not begin forthwith to put ourselves in a position of security, it will soon be beyond our power to do so. What is the great new fact which has broken in upon us during the last 18 months? Germany is rearming. ... That mighty Power is now equipping itself once again, 70,000,000 of people, with the technical apparatus of modern war, and at the same time is instilling into the hearts of its youth and manhood the most extreme patriotic nationalist and militarist conceptions. ... The German munition factories are working practically under war conditions, and war material is flowing out from them, and has been for the last 12 months certainly, in an ever broadening flow. Much of this is undoubtedly in violation of the treaties which were signed. Germany is rearming on land; she is rearming also to some extent at sea; but what concerns us most of all is the rearmament of Germany in the air. ... I think it would be a great mistake to neglect the scientific side of defence against aircraft attack—of purely defensive action against aircraft attack. ... We all speak under the uncertainty of the future which has so often baffled human foresight, but I believe that if we maintain at all times in the future an air power sufficient to enable us to inflict as much damage upon the most probable assailant, upon the most likely potential aggressor, as he can inflict upon us, we may shield our people effectually in our own time from all those horrors which I have ventured to describe. If that be so, what are £50,000,000 or a £100,000,000 raised by tax or by loan compared with an immunity like that? Never has so fertile and so blessed an insurance been procurable so cheaply. ... For all these reasons, it seems to me, and I submit to the House, that we ought to decide now to maintain, at all costs, in the next 10 years an Air Force substantially stronger than that of Germany, and that it should be considered a high crime against the State, whatever Government is in power, if that force is allowed to fall substantially below, even for a month, the potential force which may be possessed by that country abroad. That is the object with which I have put this Amendment on the Paper. ... I firmly believe that we may have it in our power to avert from this generation the supreme catastrophe of another war." (This Churchill speech should not be read as proof that his call for air supremacy would have deterred Hitler from invading Poland in 1939 and thus triggering the UK's declaration of WWII. As it was, despite declaring war in 1939 on behalf of Poland, we made no effort to defend Poland, merely sending an expeditionary force to France, which failed to prevent that country's invasion. Churchill was as much duped by air power in 1934 as the appeasers and disarmers!)
Samuel T. Cohen (RAND, neutron bomb inventor), Tactical Nuclear Weapons and U.S. Military Strategy, Orbis, Spring 1971: "The Korean war, a military and political trauma, forced a change in U.S. policy. In 1953 the United States decided to prevent such involvements in the future through a policy of nuclear retaliation against the aggressor. Pragmatically speaking, the Eisenhower policy worked. The United States maintained her foreign commitments while she deterred aggression at levels even substantially below that which had occurred in Korea. It should be realized, however, that during those years the United States held a nuclear arsenal far superior to the Soviet Union's. American involvement in the Vietnam war began under the Flexible Response policy adopted by the Kennedy Administration. [Before President Johnson in 1964 ruled out the use of tactical nuclear deterrents in Vietnam during his 1964 election campaign's "Daisy Advert" against presidential nominee Goldwater's Republican campaign to use tactical nuclear weapons to effectively defoliate the Ho Ching Ming Trail logistics routes, and end the insurgency.] ... the opinions of Denis Healey, then British Defense Secretary, merit our attention: 'I don't think it would, in fact, make sense for NATO to aim at an all-out conventional defense against an all-out Warsaw Pact conventional attack because all Soviet exercises and training assume the use of nuclear weapons from the word "go," so I think an all-out conventional attack is very unlikely ... the other side would use nuclear weapons to begin with and there's a great deal of evidence for that, both in the exercises they do and what they write in their strategic journals. [Source: "The Nuclear Genie, " Radio 4 (London), Aspects of Government Series, April 7, 1970.] ... In 1968, U.S. Congressman Craig Hosmer, a senior member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote to Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford expressing his opinion on the consequences of not modernizing the stockpile to give it discriminate capabilities: '... If indeed, the Soviets have been busy perfecting a family of clean, discriminate tactical nuclear weapons and the time should ever come when they decide to use them against us and our allies, a time will come when the devastation and contamination from tactical nuclear war will come from our stockpile. Or, a time will come when because of the inevitability of such devastation and contamination, the Soviet appetite for Free World territory will have to be appeased'. [Source: Congressional Record, July 31, 1968, pp. H7955-7956.]"
US Defense Secretary McNamara (interviewed by Stewart Alsop in December, 1, 1962 issue of the Saturday Evening Post page 18):
"I believe myself that a counterforce strategy is most likely to apply in circumstances in which both sides have the capability of surviving a first-strike and retaliating selectively. ... a nuclear exchange confined to military targets seems more possible, not less, when both sides have a sure second-strike capability." (NATO's massive retaliation policy, espoused in its Military Committee document MC-14/2, was replaced by "flexible response" in MC-14/3, in 1967.)
A further argument here was the introduction of PAL type "locks" on nuclear weapons. The original classified RAND Corp memorandum on this issue, RM-2251 On the Risk of Accidental or Unauthorized Nuclear Detonation, by Ikle, Aronson and Madamsky, made the point that weapons with "locks" makes possible a wider range of nuclear deployments, than weapons without locks. I.e., you can give "locked" nuclear bombs to forces on the battlefield or aboard tactical aircraft, with a secure (scrambled or encoded) communications link, and the President can then give out the unlock-code over the secure link if and when nuclear use is authorized, e.g. the President can talk to the forces on scrambled radio link to ascertain precisely what the situation on the ground is, before releasing the unlock code. This technology simply eliminates the usual "loose nukes" fears about unauthorized nuclear use causing needless escalation risks. (This context is for limited nuclear war on the battlefield, so command, control and communications issues are ignored. In the event of a general nuclear war in which communications satellites etc were attacked by radiation or EMP, there are other systems in place to control nuclear forces. In April 1982, the US DoD directed the development of the Defense Data Network, DDN, based on RAND Corporation's work on distributed data packet switching to eliminate vulnerable centralized hubs in networks. RAND Corp's Paul Baran realised in 1961 that although the few central hubs in communications networks then in place were only 5% of the network, their destruction in nuclear war studies eliminated 95% of communications. By de-centralizing to a low-level distributed network in which information can by-pass the central hubs and be routed by any node on a mesh-type network, communications losses were reduced by a factor of 20. Data would be broken down into small blocks or "packets", including an address and re-assembly instruction, e.g. part 3 of 10. The computer receiving the packets would re-assemble them in the correct order when all were received. The basic principles involved led to US DoD's ARPANET, and after the development of personal computers in the 1970s, were later used to construct the open internet, which is thus as much a product of nuclear war survival research as modern computers, space travel and nuclear power.)
Sir Lawrence Freedman (professor of war studies at King's College, London) completely misrepresents Kahn in his deceptive Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (2nd ed, 1989) by referring (in an endnote) to Glasstone's bogus free-field nuclear effects treatment as "authoritative" and to the 1946 Atomic Energy Act compiling lawyer James Newman's bogus as well as biased "review" of Kahn's On Thermonuclear War in Scientific American as an assessment of "the distinguished mathematician" (Newman contributed mathematical trivia to Scientific American). Newman's 1946 Atomic Energy Act (written for Senator Brien McMahon) illegally and disastrously terminated the UK-USA postwar nuclear collaboration agreement, causing the Cold War crisis in the first place by failing to deter Russian expansion in the late 1940s. Freedman mentions Kennedy's no-cities policy but then goes on about McNamara's Mutual Assured Destruction dogma (not a strategy!), without noting Kahn's dismissal of its validity for deterring the escalations that led to both world wars, which arose due to invasions of third parties (provocations, not direct attacks on the UK)! So "mutual assured destruction (MAD)" never replaced limited war (counterforce, aka type 2 deterrence) as a credible strategy, but was just type 1 deterrence. At no point in the Cold War after the introduction of tactical nuclear weapons in the 1950s was there a period when type 2 deterrence (limited nuclear war, tactical weapons) was abandoned and type 1 deterrence (MAD) replaced it. But Freedman fails to say so! Finally in chapter 25, on page 377, Freedman tries to introduce "The Schlesinger Doctrine" for limited nuclear war as somehow being a step backward, towards McNamara's 1962 "no cities" policy: he argues that 1973-5 US Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger was a former RAND Corp director of strategic studies (1963-9) and CIA Director (1973) who "shared the growing scepticism on the value of emphasis being accorded assured destruction criteria in US policy." Then on page 393, Freedman states:
But then Freedman uses that Gray and Payne quote as merely a smokescreen to cover up the continuous deterrent requirement since the 1950s for Kahn's type 2 deterrence of major provocations by having a limited nuclear war capability to deter invasions, and, then, in this 1989 2nd edition, Freedman - following the quotation - immediately tries to sneer at the idea that the USSR is "fragile" and can collapse in this way, just at the very time that the USSR was actually collapsing under economic pressure from the Reagan-Bush arms race and SDI! Freedman similarly makes no effort to discuss T. K. Jones' correct and factual dismissal of ACDA fake nuclear collateral damage casualty rates, only mentioning T. K. Jones in footnote 47 on page 477 of his endnotes, using a totally bogus, biased secondary source, namely Robert Scheer's book With Enough Shovels which ignores the facts entirely about the efficiency of simple shelters in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, nuclear and high explosive tests! In summary, Freedman's stuff is entirely fake news/propaganda trash, if seen from the perspective of honest history, and real deterrence of the escalatory causes of all world wars to the present day. A credible deterrent against invasions that escalate into world wars must be the basis for avoiding tactical nuclear warfare. There is also the problem that Freedman promotes repeatedly the CND weapons effects propaganda-biased anti-civil defense fanatical lies, since he was the person who got Bill Massey of the Sunday Express to water down my article debunking pro-war CND type "anti-nuclear" propaganda lies on civil defense in 1995, claiming civil defense is no use against a H-bomb, which Freedman claims falsely is cheaper than dirt cheap shelters, exactly what Freedman wrote in his deceptive letter published in the 26 March 1980 Times newspaper:
"for far less expenditure the enemy could make a mockery of all this [improvised civil defense] by increasing the number of attacking weapons"
which ignores the nuclear weapon tested facts from the fifteen WWII Anderson shelters(together with concrete structures and trenches) proof-tested at the 1952 UK Hurricane nuclear test by the physicists Frank H. Pavry and George R. Stanbury of the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch to the cheap but hard Russian city shelters, e.g. the CHEAP Russian dual-use concept of simply adding blast doors to metro tubes and underground car parks, etc. (as we prove with photos and declassified Russian reports, below). In any case, civil defense makes deterrence credible as even the most hard left wingers like Duncan Campbell acknowledged on page 5 of War Plan UK (Paladin Books, London, 1983): "Civil defence ... is a means, if need be, of putting that deterrence policy, for those who believe in it, into practical effect." (Campbell however, while praising the Russian civil defense propaganda, simply lies in that book that none of British shelters were tested, when they were exposed to UK nuclear tests from the very first shot at Monte Bello onwards, as stated by test director William G. Penney in a BBC radio broadcast at the time which announced that the whole point of the near surface burst, i.e. 2.7 m depth in ship, Hurricane test was to get civil defense data, which was successful with "complete records" being obtained and the test would have been done on a tower otherwise!) Sir Freedman, like CND, and the other propaganda-deceived critics of Kahn, is totally wrong and repeatedly behaves like dangerous fact-censoring loon on the civil defense and tactical nuclear deterrence facts, analogous to the 1930s era liars who declared war is impossible by promoting gas effects myths by an exaggeration factor of 360,000,000, to mislead the public about war stategy, causing failure of credible deterrence, appeasement and thus a second unnecessary world war. This is not hypothetical, since all these "guys" (being polite about liars and loons) have blood on their hands from disarming credible Western tactical deterrence, causing many wars which cause unnecessary deaths and suffering. The mass media is part of this "profitable" money-making war scam. As Thomas Schelling argues in the Foreword to Larsen and Kartchner's On Limited Nuclear War in the 21st Century (Stanford Security Services, 2014, pp xi-xiii:
"During the Cold War the possibility that the president of the United States might authorize nuclear weapons to be used selectively was opposed by hawks as 'hold back SAC', a pusillanimous doctrine. It was also opposed by doves as possibly too much a temptation to a president ... The judgement of the editors of this volume, and my judgement, is that both arguments have merit but ... nuclear restraint ought to be encouraged and facilitated. ... there have been, since 1945, eight or nine wars in which one side has nuclear weapons and chose not to use them ... That's one kind of limited nuclear war, limited 'nuclear' because the weapons were available and undoubtedly influence both sides in the war. ... Exploring alternative possible limits, identifying plausible agreeable limits, communicating suggestions or proposals, or just being seen and heard to discuss the idea of mutually recognised limits and how they may be arrived at is a likely prerequisit to arriving at understanding how nuclear limitation - including the limit of no nuclear use - can be overtly or tactitly identified as common understanding."
Perhaps Schelling had read Dr Keith B. Payne's 2008 Great American Gamble (National Institute Press, 471pp), which is a thorough debunking of Schelling's fast and easy, and repeatedly disproved (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) coercive destruction dogma, relying on fake analogies like law enforcement in society (which doesn't deter even crime, let alone accidents, despite Schelling's sophistry. E.g. Payne's 2008 Great American Gamble at pages 194-9: "Schelling's analogies to pedestrians and neighbors were intended to illustrate how naturally deterrence works; in fact, they illustrate why deterrence cannot be relied on ... pedestrians tragically do walk in front of speeding autos or buses, and occasionally vehicles come over the curb ... Drivers impaired by alcohol often decide to get behind the wheel despite the severe potential costs ... Such high-risk behavior is not the norm, but it is very familiar. In addition, some neighbors do deliberately shoot and kill each other [e.g. war-crazy thug terrorists or even drug or alcohol dependent ageing dictators coming to the end of their natural lives in any case, can't be deterred even in principle; the "threat" of the electric chair didn't exist for say the 9/11 aircraft hijackers who intended to die in their "war", or indeed Kamikaze pilots back in 1945, or for the demented Hitler in his Führerbunker with his cyanide capsule supply handy, thus the failure of deterrence is a real risk]."
Payne's 2008 Great American Gamble at page 266 goes still further against Schelling's claims that fear of escalation is the essence of strong deterrence:
"There are numerous ... examples of leaderships deliberately lighting or embracing the powder key of escalation despite recognition that their own futures were at great risk. Apparently rational leaders ... effectively demonstrate the error embedded in the balance of terror tenets. ... Russia's decision to enter WWI in 1914 was deliberate, for example ... Similarly, British historian Sir Michael Howard has characterized German decision making in 1914 as ... 'very much like madness'. Historian Holger Herwig quotes the Prussian War Minister General Erich von Falkenhayn as observing on August 4, 1914 that, 'even if we go under as a result of this, still it was beautiful.' Professor Herwig goes on to observe, 'These almost surrealistic words ... encapsulate the mood that prevailed among Germany's political and military elite ...'. ... The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 similarly was seen by senior Japanese leaders as a prospectively fatal roll of the dice ..."
"... as you go into battle ... you have capabilities which allow you a lot of options, which give you choices that you can make at the time ... if your guesses have been wrong, your technical preparations are such that you can change quickly in the course of the battle. If you are wrong about the effect of a bomb on an airfield ... you can make the proper reassignment ... to do what is effective. These were the two guiding ideas that I believe I brought into the organization of the report."
Captain Graeme Chamley Wynne (1889-1964, co-author of Military operations, France and Belgium, 1915, Volume I and author of If Germany attacks: The battle in depth in the west), "Pattern for Limited (Nuclear) War: the Riddle of the Schlieffen Plan-1", Royal United Services Journal, v102, n608, November 1957, pp. 488-499:
"The recently published American book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, by Dr Henry A. Kissinger, has illuminated the fog of ideas on this vital modern problem. Summarizing the deliberations of 36 American experts over a period of 18 months, he sees the picture of an ever-present U.S. Strategic Air Force maintained equal to its strongest opponent and ready to deliver the ultimate deterrent ... under the shield of that threat he believes that limited wars are possible. ... the publication in Germany last year of the full text of the long-secret Schlieffen Plan ... nuclear weapons fit into Schlieffen's idea of an enveloping line of fire power ... to close in and force a rapid capitulation. ... the German defeats in the two World Wars were due not to Schlieffen's ideas but to the failure of Germany's military and political leaders to apply them effectively. ... [General Count Schlieffen was Chief of German General Staff from 1892-1905, but was dismissed when 72 by the Kaiser in 1905 and replaced by General von Moltke, who was an ignorant critic of Schlieffen's Plan, despite evidence supporting it from the use of machine guns in the Russian-Japanese war.] As model for his plan, Schlieffen took Hannibal's classic battle of envelopment at Cannae in 216 BC, in which a Roman phalanx of double Hannibal's strength was annihilated. To make up for his disadvantage in numbers (40,000 versus 73,000), Hannibal, the Carthaginian, strung out his foreign auxiliaries ... He thereby gained the great advantage of being able to operate on a broader front than his opponent despite his numerical inferiority. ... These, spread out around the whole depth of the phalanx, had room for each man to make the fullest use of his weapons, whereas the Romans, driven into a confused mass on the centre [thus providing a concentrated target, the key point relevant for tactical nuclear warfare], were so congested in the net closing in upon them from all sides, that they were unable either to use their weapons or to break out. They were rapidly annihilated. ... Hannibal had devised his battle plan as a trick to defeat the Roman phalanx. ... To Schlieffen, Hannibal's victory meant much more than a mere tactical trick. He saw in it the design for the battlefield of the new age of automatic weapons. ... but General von Moltke, Schlieffen's successor, who regarded Schlieffen's unorthodox tactical ideas as impracticable [in the pre-nuclear age], disregarded the plan's three essential requirements. [Reference: German Official History, v4, pp. 508-41. I.e., Moltke refused to position his forces to draw in concentrated enemy forces at weak fronts, then entrap and annihilate the flanks of approaching columns; instead Moltke met force frontally, with concentrated forces versus concentrated force, thus turned WWI into statemate trench war; after 1941 Russia - having studied the problem since 1918 - was eventually to use the technique against the German invasion, helped by its overstretched logistics.] ... Millions of shells were wasted in destroying miles of trenches of secondary or little importance. ... Have British and American military leaders yet seen the flashing beacons of the two World Wars that blazed the doctrine of the Schlieffen Plan? ... Its logical development in the light of modern weapons may well provide a guiding light towards a common understanding for a tactical doctrine suited to a nuclear age."
Captain Wynne continues to drive home his empirical war based thesis (he fought in WWI and was a POW in Germany) for tactical nuclear deterrence/defense analysis by analysing both World Wars I and II in Parts 2 and 3 of "Pattern for Limited (Nuclear) War: the Riddle of the Schlieffen Plan", Royal United Services Journal, vol 103, part II: Feb 1, 1958 pp40-50 and part III: May 1, 1958, pp 215-222. From part II:
"The British White Paper on Defence, 1957, has met strong opposition. Its policy is to rearm for total war ... to destroy destroy an opponent's country and devastate his cities. ... The opposition to such a policy has been summed up by an American committee [Kissinger et al.] which considers total war ... highly improbable. ... both the British and American armies are 50 years out-of-date ... A fundamental error in direction led them into the wilderness of obsolete tactical doctrine with which they fought the Second World War ... The mistake originated in December, 1917, during the first World War ... A committee of three major-generals [including the man who later became Editor of the UK Official History - and then used his position to distort the facts to cover-up his committee's error - was tasked with analyzing and applying German defenses, but they made the mistake of ignoring the key March 1917-dated German textbook on the need for strong mobile defenses, Die Führung der Abwehrschlacht aka The leadership of the defensive battle, which British soldiers had just captured at Arras, and instead focussed attention solely on the companion German technical trench construction manual Allgemeines über Stellenbau aka General information about Construction Work, which just told you how to construct three rows of machine gun nests and infantry dug outs without explaining their tactical use] ... Not only did the committee select the wrong German document as their model; they also misinterpreted it. They mistook the protective infantry in the dug outs between the machine gun nests to be the key centres of resistance and believed the machine gun nests to be supporting weapons. ... The British Army was, therefore, still to fight with rifles and to use machine guns as supporting weapons against a Germany Army fighting with machine guns and using infantry for their protection. ...
"The Battle of St. Quenin. The expected Germany offensive struck a 50-mile sector of the British front on 21 March 1918, and had little difficulty in smashing through this travesty of the German method of defence. ... Within a week, the Germans had penetrated to a depth of 30 miles, inflicting over 85,000 casualties in the British 5th Army alone. Within 3 weeks, the the British Army had 'its back to the wall', or rather the sea ... The Germans halted because their commander could not imagine that the British defence garrison had been almost entirely in the outpost zone. He suspected a strong counter-offensive ... No such British counter-attack formations were, in fact, available; but the Germans, instead of pressing on to the coast, struck elsewhere and thereby saved the British Army from a 1918 edition of Dunkirk [the 1940 ousting of the British Expeditionary Force from France]. The cause of that disaster was given officially as misty weather and a lack of troops ... The real cause was the 'blob' system of defence ... The British Official History had the opportunity, if not the obligation, to unravel the tangle of British battle methods. ... Unfortunately, not one word of all that enlightenment can be found from beginning to end of the History. The editorial viewpoint throughout is that British HQ was right ... The editing of the volumes [British Official History, 1918] and the comments and conclusions, twist the narrative to the outlook of British HQ at the time. To that extent the Official History is not history; it is a rifle-minded illusion of a machine-gun minded war. ...
"A still more important result was that the training of the Army during the interwar years remained unaltered. Its method of attack continued to be the break-in assault on a wide frontage ... Its method of defence remained the 'blob' system of grouping a trench garrison into defended localities. ... So it was that the British Army set out in 1939 to fight the Second World War with basically the same ... battle methods with which it had set out in 1914 ... Once again, it was not given a dog's chance; and for that inexcusable negligence the Official History was mainly responsible. ... Britain re-armed for a war in the air ... a knock-out blow ... to undermine the morale of the population ... The Navy was reduced, as also was the Army, which was to be regarded only as an imperial police force ... The similarity between this re-armament policy and recent White Paper on Defence is in that sense remarkable; for 'air war' read 'nuclear war' and for 'air striking force' read 'hydrogen bombs and guided missiles'. ... The two re-armament policies [German Army vs British RAF] were soon put to the test. At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Britain's independent air striking force ... which had absorbed the bulk of the vast defence expenditure, was grounded ... whereas Germany had a balanced fighting force ...
"Had the British Official History of the first World War done its job, the British Expeditionary Force would not have allowed itself to be marched once again into Belgium, into the jaws of the very same trap from its its predecessor had so narrowly escaped envelopment in August 1914. ... If the mistake made in copying the German method of defence in 1917 had been corrected, the battle frontage could have been held with 4-5 times less manpower, and more effectively [relying on machine guns, not rifles!]. ... El Alamein, October 1942 El Alamein was a great British victory, but ... why [did] Rommel, the most brilliant of Schlieffen's disciples [stick to] rigid defensive [rather than the Schlieffen's mobile defense?] ... he had neither petrol nor ammunition to fight a mobile defence and ... Hitler's order was to fight the battle where he stood. ... Hitler was putting every available man, tank and gun, every shell and every drop of petrol, into a last desperate effort to cross the Volga and outflank the Russian defences of Moscow to the north. ... As a result the British 8th Army at Alamein was able to gain complete command of the air, and a great superiority in manpower, artillery and armour [not to even mention Monty's use of secret decoded orders from Hitler to Rommel, sent by radio transmission which was intercepted and then decoded by computer at Bletchley Park, UK; nevertheless the key point is that Britain won that and subsequent battles by courtesy of Hitler's decision to fight a war on multiple fronts, to ignore Schlieffen's tactics and mount frontal attacks, then to use fixed defenses with no break-out permitted]. ...
"The majority of British and American casualties and the overlong duration of the war were due to these and similar tactical errors. They were covered up at the time ... the maximum German resources [including 70% of the German Army] continued to be sent to the Russian Front. ... The Second World War was not a [knockout blow, essentially gas bombing] war in the air as forecast by the British Government in its re-armament policy of 1936-9. It was not won by the obliteration of cities ... This emphasis on the obsolete tactical ideas with which the British and American Armies fought the second World War is in order to bring to notice the fact that the mistakes have not yet been corrected. Had the British and Americans held their battlefront in Korea (1951-53) with firepower instead of with manpower ... supply difficulties would have been avoided and the front held more effectively ... The British Army will never be able to produce a small, hard-hitting expeditionary force, easily airborne for overseas commitments, until these past mistakes have been corrected and its tactical outlook revolutionized."
Captain Wynne, "Pattern for Limited (Nuclear) War: the Riddle of the Schlieffen Plan-III", Royal United Services Journal, vol 103, part III: May 1, 1958, pp 215-222:
"The numerical superiority of the Russian Army, estimated at the outset at 155 divisions to Germany's 121, was far outweighed by the better German training ... How was it, then, that the Russian Army ... was able in the second World War to hold and systematically to destroy 2/3rds of the German Army? Two reasons ... The first is that the Russians copied the German Schlieffen tactical doctrine [mobile defenses to lure in and then entrap and annihilate invading forces]; and the second is that they practised it, whereas Hitler as the German Supreme commander, discarded it. ... Hitler had other ideas. The defeat of France had seemed to easy that he had appointed himself supreme commander of the German armed forces for the attack on Russia. ... he ordered a frontal assault. ... 'The essential', in the words of Schlieffen's Plan, 'is a strong outflanking wing; with its help all the battles will be won, and by its action every enemy attempt at resistance will be broken.'
"Hitler, however, cared for none of these things. Hungry only for quick victories he hoped to find them by continuing the advance in three divergent directions - towards Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev - with a diversion from the central sector to encircle a Russian force in the Kiev area. So it was that the German armies were driven frontally ... until they found themselves attempting to defend a 1,500 mile battlefiend from Leningrad to the Caucasus, with neither the manpower, weapon power, nor supply columns to maintain it. ... The German tether ended in Hitler's frontal assault on Stalingrad. ... as a tactical operation, Hitler's onslaught was a frontal assault throughout. Like the younger Moltke in 1914, he disregarded Schlieffen's tactical doctrine, while the Russians roughly followed it. ... The Russian zones of resistance, prepared before the War, were based on the German elastic or mobile defence - the invitation to walk on into death traps ... The atomic field gun, self propelled, is stated to fire a shell to a range of 15,000 yards ... neither the United States nor Russia are expected to react with a considerable more powerful shell and a consequent race to the hydrogen bomb, provided the bursts are confined to the tactical area of the battlefield proper and avoid populated districts [ref: Raymond Garhoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age, Praeger, NY 1958] ...
"Schlieffen's tactical doctrine swallows these new weapons in its stride. The highly mobile atomic field gun, a long distance support weapon, will ensure great economy of force; it will almost eliminate the need for heavy and medium tanks, breakup distant enemy concentrations, and deny entry into weak sectors of the defence. ... 'Victory', to quote a leading British military authority, 'will go to the side which is soonest ready with the greater nuclear destructive power' [Field Marshall Monty, The Panorama of War in a Nuclear Age RUSI Journal, November 1956]. ... Why should a Russian leader embark on the hazards of frontal aggression and the risk of total nuclear war ... the task of britain's armed forces is neither to annihilate the Russian people not to destroy the Russian Army. It has to be prepared to defend in limited wars vital areas and interests ... any defence force will have to be prepared to meet and to use small tactical nuclear weapons, such as the atomic field gun, and to hold them ready in reserve. ... The organization of small, hard-hitting, balanced fighting formations for an Expeditionary force will then become practicable ... No need to go back to Hannibal and 216BC to find a parallel for encirclements in pockets of firepower. It may be found in the battles in the Crimea in 1854 AD ... At the battle of the Alma, for example ... 'It seemed impossible for that unimpressive British line ... to withstand the formidable mass of Russian infantry, but an astonishing phenomenon took place. The massive columns came on ... and then, suddenly, the slender line had encircled them ... Packed shoulder to shoulder, the Russians in their dense columns could not aim ... the survivors turned and fled.' [Quoted from C. Woodham Smith, The reason why, Constable, London, 1953, p193.] Schlieffen's ... plan appears to be the clearest link in existence between the battle doctrines before and after the two World Wars." [This paper has the endnote: A shortened version of these three articles, written after a study of the original Schlieffen Papers on their way through London from Washington back to Germany, was sent to the War Office in July, 1956, as a confidential document.]
"In 1978, President Jimmy Carter issued Presidential Directive/NSC-41 (PD-41) entitled, US Civil Defense Policy (Secret ... PD-41 specifically referred to the potential for crisis relocation of urban populations [evacuation of nuclear hazard areas] and called on civil defense as an element of the strategic balance to, '... provide some increase in the number of surviving population and for greater continuity of government, should deterrence and escalation control fail...'." - Keith B. Payne, The Great American Gamble, National Institute Press, 2008, p87.
Even if some fallout radiation is released, simple civil defense precautions such as sheltering in the downwind area while it quickly decays, evacuation and decontamination, prevents casualties. The very high fallout casualty rates "predicted" for megaton surface bursts by US Defense Secretary Schlesinger in the 1974 US Congressional Hearings Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy resulted from assuming 45% of the population had only a protection factor of 3 against gamma radiation, whereas the minimal fallout protection factor Kennedy specified back in 1961 was 40: for details, please see footnote 3 on page 5 of Bruce W. Bennett's RAND Corp report R-2218-AF, Fatality Uncertainties in Limited Nuclear War, i.e., Schlesinger assumed 45% of people had a PF of 3, 20% had 14, 10% had 50, and 25% had 100; nobody had more than 100. Thus, 45% of people in the 1000 rad hotspot covering about 2000 square miles per fission megaton for 15 knot winds in the SEER II fallout model, are simply assumed to be likely fatalities due to this very high 1000/3 = 333 rads dose, entirely due to an assumed lack of protection! President Kennedy's minimum civil defense protection factor of 40 in simple expedient fallout shelters tested by Cresson Kearny of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in reports such as Nuclear War Survival Skills, eliminates such fallout casualties, because 1000/40 = 25 rads! In addition, the "SEER II" type fallout models used in books like Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons and the 1979 OTA report The Effects of Nuclear Warare fake, based on nuclear test measurements, e.g. weapon test report WT-1316 Table 2.11 shows that the maximum fallout dose hotspot of 1,000 rads over two days following the 87% fission 5 megaton Tewa burst covered 520 square miles, rather than the ~10,000 square miles given for that yield by officially accepted fallout computer models, which were falsely "validated" using the fake Castle-Koon fallout pattern map in DASA-1251 and its source report WT-915, which has a massively exaggerated distance scale of Bikini Atoll, causing exaggerated fallout areas (as we pointed out here at nukegate.org back in 2006, and before that in the unpubished 1990 book, Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory). Note also that the fallout areas versus contamination intensities are correlated for both water surface and land surface tests of Redwing in Fig 3.17 of WT-1344, debunking Glasstone and Dolan's claims that downwind fallout areas from water surface bursts in shallow water are not representative of land surface bursts; this has a massive impact because it massively increases the quantity of relevant data on fallout from land bursts, invalidating propaganda models.
Please note that the 1956 UK-Australian air and surface burst nuclear tests of Operation Buffalo were attended by American nuclear testing experts Dr Frank H. Shelton and Dr Alvin C. Graves, by invitation in response to their invitation to Dr William G. Penney to attend the American Operation Teapot Nevada tests the previous year, 1955, the first American tests attended by the British since Crossroads at Bikini in 1946. Our key point about Buffalo at Maralinga is geological: the Maralinga soil consists of a thin silicate sand layer like Yucca Flats at the Nevada test site, but below that very thin surface sand layer, the bedrock at Maralinga is entirely calcium carbonate, like the coral at Bikini and Eniwetok. Therefore, the Buffalo tower shots and air burst which entrained silicate sand top soil at Maralinga produced fallout identical to Nevada tests, but the "Buffalo Round 2" surface burst at Maralinga cratered calcium carbonate, chemically identical to the Mike, Bravo and Zuni multi-megaton yield American nuclear surface bursts at Eniwetok and Bikini. So the British data at one location permits proper checks for low yield surface and low air bursts on American data for the "hotspots" for both Nevada and Pacific surface bursts, proof testing fallout theory. Furthermore, the 1.4kt surface burst "Buffalo-Round 2" was fired in a 90 degrees windshear which separated the mushroom stem fallout (which was blown North by low altitude winds) from the mushroom head fallout (which was blown East by higher altitude winds), permitting the partition of activity in those different portions of the cloud to be confirmed by simply integrating the dose rates over area for respective portions of the fallout pattern. The vital point here is, in the downwind "hotspot" or very intense fallout area, you can shelter until the dose rate quickly decays to a level where evacuation is feasible, then you can evacuate. All the usual left-wing propaganda based claims that fallout "can't be predicted" because of the Bravo nuclear test disaster are fake, and were so even in the 1950s, when there were no weather computers, as we'll prove below.
Many continuing "authoritative" myths about fallout data are perpetuated by Glasstone's poor treatment of the subject, despite the manuscripts for the various editions being "reviewed" by various experts, e.g. as we pointed out in 1990 in Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory and later in blog posts here over a decade ago, Dr Kellogg of RAND Corp in the May-June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man at pages 104-112 lays to rest the myth that the fallout from 1956 Operation Redwing Bikini lagoon surface burst Navajo and Flathead produced significantly less local fallout that land bursts Zuni and Tewa: the October 1956 secret classified interim test report ITR-1354, Fallout Studies in Operation Redwing, in Appendix E used the wrong conversion factor for radiation to fraction of bomb per unit area, to deduce that the water surface bursts produced under half the local fallout of land bursts. That error was pointed out and corrected by Dr Benson L. Tucker of RAND Corp in his 9 July 1957 secret classified report Fraction of Redwing Activity In Local Fallout, which shows that the difference is trivial, 85% for land surface bursts versus about 68% for water surface bursts! Despite this, Glasstone and Dolan continued to quote the false results from the 1956 report even in the 1977 edition of The effects of nuclear weapons. Similarly, Dr Kellogg also pointed out in his published 1957 testimony that RAND Corp physicists Stanley Greenfield and Ralph Rapp in their January 1957 secret report RM-1855, Fallout Computations and Castle-Bravo - A Case Study had solved the Bravo fallout pattern controversy, using the detailed wind data analysis (see AFSWP-1069) in the secret AFSWP report 895 on January 1955 Fallout Symposium (which we have placed online, HERE): "Another example of a fallout pattern which changed its direction during the later stages of the fallout is the March 1, 1954, Castle shot on the Bikini atoll, referred to earlier. In this case, the fallout apparently started out in a direction east-northeast, but a continued veering of the wind caused it to curve more to the east and east-southeast, until one side of it lay across some neighboring atolls. A study of this event by Rand in which the fallout was computed with the shot-time wind alone, and then again with the variable (true) wind, shows clearly how the pattern must have curved as it progressed."
Greenfield and Rapp's RAND study RM-1855 is still secret, yet is the only full analysis of the Bravo fallout using the complete Marshall Islands wind system data. The DASA-1251 fallout patterns compendium claims the January 1955 AFSWP895/WT915 published NRDL fallout patern for Bravo uses a complete fallout analysis, but this is incorrect, since it just uses an ad hoc average of a few balloon holographs-derived wind data, with no full weather system analysis of the true time variation in winds in time and space, taking account of the detailed weather charts for the Marshall Islands published in secret report AFSWP-895, in January 1955 (the fake NRDL Bravo fallout reconstruction, which puts far too much activity in the 3,000 R/hr hotspot as proved by Redwing data in 1956, was included in that January 1955 AFSWP-895 symposium, and does not use the wind data presented for the first time at the symposium!). DASA-1251 also makes the mistake of reproducing all of the fallout patterns from Schuert and others at NRDL (published in AFSWP-895 and WT-915) using fake Bikini Atoll distance scales for close-in fallout from Castle in AFSWP895 and also WT915! Schuert took short cuts, so the NRDL Castle data is unreliable. Even his otherwise excellent unclassified fallout prediction report USNRDL-TR-139 on Redwing fallout has incorrect fallout pattern scales, e.g. the Tewa fallout distance scale shown to be half that in WT1317! It is totally unreliable and causes delusional fake news. See also the secret April 1957 RAND Fallout Symposium (which we placed online HERE), and Dr Rapp's RAND report RM-2334 (AD0337920) Summary report on RAND work on AFSWP fallout project (finally declassified in 2006, linked HERE) which demonstrates how Operation Redwing fallout data confirms their Bravo analysis with a "hotspot" downwind centred near Rongelap Atoll and the Lucky Dragon tuna trawler (which was in the peak fallout spot just north of Rongelap at fallout arrival time), and on page 8 (Fig 1) shows how the NRDL effective fallout activity-size distribution used by them for surface bursts (based on a shallow underground test in 1951!) assumes falsely that 8% of activity on particles is on particles of over 1mm radius (2mm diameter), contrasted to well under 0.01% for all actual surface burst nuclear test data! This 800-factor exaggeration in the fallout activity on >2mm diameter fallout "hotspot area" particles, together with errors on Bikini Atoll fallout map distance scales, is a key reason for severe discrepancies between NRDL fallout patterns and reality. Figure 16 in Dr Rapp's RM-2334 report shows that for a 3.5 megaton surface burst (the Redwing-Zuni test of 1956, for which the spatial distribution of radioactivity in the cloud is known, due to extensive measurements using extensive volleys of rockets fired through different parts of the mushroom at 7 and 15 minutes after detonation, containing radiation survey meters and radio telemetry of data), a downwind hotspot is predicted for 35-70 nautical miles downwind for 20 knots wind, as observed at Operation Redwing in 1956.
ABOVE: from our earlier 2011 analysis of the Bravo fallout mythology (linked here). The weather balloon wind hodograph data for 6 and 9 houra after detonation above are not perfect indicators of the fallout trajectory because fallout particles slow down in the higher density more viscous air at lower altitudes, rather than falling at a uniform speed for all altitudes, but they are included to show (a) that this data exists, (b) this data gives an explanation for the hotline direction from the location of maximum activity at the base of the head of the mushroom cloud, and (c) this data can be combined with other data such as general weather charts of the Marshall Islands as first published in the January 1955 Secret classified AFSWP Fallout Symposium (AFTER Schuert had used bad data in the official NRDL reconstruction of Bravo, vastly exaggerating local fallout areas), as RAND did to establish the accurate Bravo fallout pattern. Note also that Glasstone's preferred 1-hour reference dose rates don't exist in reality in the downwind hotspot from megaton bursts, and it would be preferable to instead used dose rates at 24 or 48 hours, when the local fallout has actually been deposited!
There are vital physics factors to understand here. First of all, there were no particles of that >2mm diameter size in the pre-shot Small Boy silt in the crater zone, so the mechanism which created such large fallout particles in that test, was exactly what occurred for the "Trinitite" in the first nuclear test, Trinity, on July 16, 1945: fireball heat partially melted the particle surfaces to make them "sticky" (or "pop-corned" small particles into fragments which then melted to form small spheres), some of which then agglomerated into larger-sized particles than the pre-shot crater zone soil!You can see this clearly in the photos of Buffalo-1 nuclear fallout at Maralinga in 1956: small spherical particles just "stick" or clump together to form larger particles, looking like a collection of spheres of different sizes glued together! If these hit a hard surface after falling out, they can break and fragment back into small spheres of varying sizes (causing bafflement of theorists who can't understand why really small particles are deposited so close to ground zero!). Secondly, are there really particles larger than say 1 mm diameter in "fallout"? Or are they really better described as contaminated crater ejecta? The Secret-classified 1957 Rand Corporation fallout symposium (which we put online, here) in Appendix C by A. D. Anderson (original pagination page 47, but PDF pagination page 54) contains calculations of this by NRDL using their Dynamic fallout model proving clearly that very large particles never make it into the mushroom! The updraft afterwinds simply aren't strong enough and don't last long enough to raise such large particles right up to very high altitudes, and Anderson states: "By using the method developed in this article, it was found that all particles greater than 2000 microns [2 mm] in diameter ... fell out and reached the ground within 4 minutes after explosion, within 1 mile of ground zero." Also he shows, in his Fig. 1 that such large (~2 mm diameter) particles never reach a great altitude; they rise a little, and then start to fall back quickly, because the updraft below the fireball decreases with time, even while smaller particles are still rising because the velocity of the updraft still delivers sufficient force on the very small particles to enable them to overcome gravity and rise! This "dynamical mechanism", where small particles are still rising while larger particles are falling back, explains why particles conglomerate in the stem: big particles entrained early from the cratering throwout and ejecta are simply falling into the path of the smaller particles that are still rising, thus literally causing impact collisions! (Don't expect to see any equations for such phenomena in groupthink fallout prediction codes, however. With greatest respect, those guys are still in the stone age of physics.)
The key fact to take away is this: RAND found a small sized fallout particle size distribution that modelled a wide range of nuclear test data consistently. Sure, you will get some big particles in the stem and crater ejecta region, but that's mostly "throwout" within the region where you would need hard blast shelters to survive (so fallout is no problem there). The fact that most of the fallout is concentrated on FAR smaller particles than NRDL claimed, MASSIVELY REDUCES the civilian collateral damage, by increasing the arrival time of fallout in the maximum hotspot downwind, thereby allowing time for more radioactive decay to occur before the activity arrives, a factor ignored by Glasstone and Dolan! This key effect with downwind hotspots due to smaller particle size distributions, happens irrespective of wind speed, bcause the vertical fall time of smaller particles is essentially independent of the horizontal wind velocity! QED.
(In the upwind and crater ejecta throwout area, data corrected for the wind speed, weapon total yield and fission yield, and also for true size of Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls in the error-filled maps of atolls in the official secret DASA-1251 compendium for Ivy, Castle and Redwing nuclear tests, shows that the relative 1 hour upwind and crater throwout area dose rates near ground zero are in the ratio of approximately 1:10:100 for water surface bursts, land surface bursts with light cased weapons at Castle and Redwing, and the Ivy-Mike heavy cased 82 ton bomb of 1952, respectively. In other words, the relative fallout dose rate near ground zero or upwind for surface bursts is strongly correlated with the cratering action. The initial partition of energy between x-rays and bomb case shock is strongly dependent on the yield to mass ratio of a nuclear warhead. The relatively heavy case of the Ivy-Mike device in 1952 maximised the initial energy in the case shock which enhanced cratering, throwing large particles into the fireball at early times, mixing fission product radioactivity with the carrier soil efficiently. The later more deliverable lighter cased weapons tested during Castle in 1954 and Redwing in 1956 led to less activity in the "ground zero circle" fallout pattern, including upwind. This is indicated by a change of upwind fallout predictions in Glasstone 1957 and Glasstone 1962/64/77; the Glasstone 1957 data shows heavy upwind fallout from megaton surface bursts based on the scaled 1952 Ivy-Mike data, but the Glasstone 1962/64/77 data shows reduced upwind fallout based on the 1954-6 tests, although some of the 1954 Castle data used was in serious error due to inaccurate scales for shot atolls in the DASA-1251 compendium.)
"By the mid-1980s, US officials observed publicly that US strategy sought to avoid targeting population per se. In 1985, for example, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger stated that, '... our strategy consciously does not target population and, in fact has provisions for reducing civilian casualties." - Keith B. Payne, The Great American Gamble, National Institute Press, 2008, p84.
"NATO's reigning policy for much of the Cold War, 'Flexible Response,' was formally adopted by NATO's Defense Planning Committee in December 1967 as its 'overall strategic concept'." - Keith B. Payne, The Great American Gamble, National Institute Press, 2008, p93.
Edmund O. Stillman, Civilian Sanctuary and Target Avoidance Policy in Thermonuclear War, Hudson Institute, published in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v392, How Wars End, November 1970, pp116-132 (linked here):
"In particular, to spare the enemy population may leave prewar deterrence and intra-war bargaining essentially intact while at the same time mitigating the risk of such a loss of life to the American and allied populations whom it is the business of the government to protect. ... The conventions of war in the Western world have traditionally condemned the murder, enslavement, or torture of conquered and therefore helpless enemy populations, though such acts have regrettably been common enough in history. ... In the late 1950’s, growing Soviet retaliatory power, coupled with the development of more sophisticated United States weapon systems, seemed to increase both the perceived irrationality and the immorality of indiscriminate U.S. nuclear attacks on the Soviet homeland, if they were launched because of any issue that fell short of indiscriminate Soviet attacks on the United States or its allies. ... We may conclude that one major utility of a U.S. sanctuary declaration before mounting a first strike is that it provides a more specific guarantee of safety for the enemy population and strongly motivates the enemy to reciprocate. With some assurance of comparative safety for the U.S. civilian population, a U.S. first strike becomes a more feasible policy ... the United States detonates a one-megaton weapon at 500,000 feet above Peking as a demonstration, together with limited nuclear attacks on selected military targets. Simultaneously the United States begins round-the-clock broadcasts and drops leaflets proclaiming that Chinese nuclear facilities and air defenses have been destroyed. "Your leaders have led you to disaster. Nothing stands between the Chinese people and annihilation but the self-restraint of the United States." With such attacks, the United States is primarily disarming the enemy capacity to harm the United States and targeting the morale of the Chinese people, in an attempt to unhinge Chinese society."
Herman Kahn, Issues of Thermonuclear War Termination, Hudson Institute, published in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v392, How Wars End, November 1970, pp133-172:
"... tragedy comes about precisely from the fact that responsible and reasonable people have not thought the problems through ahead of time ... with the result that very narrow and, in many cases, dangerous contingency plans, preparations, deployment, or procurements are made which foreclose the outcome of nuclear crises and war. ... the first contract Hudson Institute received in the 1960s was to write several scenarios for the onset of a nuclear war ... Today the level of analysis has fallen drastically ... thermonuclear war is thought of in terms of a rather simple and straightforward model. This simple model can be described as follows: First of all, highly apocalyptic expectations ... as the result of accident, miscalculation, blind and/or relentless escalation, or sheer irrationality and/or insanity. Many, if not most, of the weapons will be directed at cities ... each side will try to use up all of its forces as rapidly as possible... This ... not only has wide currency in popular discussion, it has been exploited by the Soviets for political warfare purposes in the era of the Stockholm Appeal and by some non-Communist peace groups and other critics of American policy. [On page 135, Kahn displays a graph showing the probability per decade of a NATO nuclear war falling from ~0.4 in 1955 to a minimum of ~0.05 in 1969, before increasing due to détente causing deterioration of credible deterrence.] ... We can summarize the salient features and effects ...
"(1) Apocalyptic expectations seem to make war unthinkable.
"(2) War occurs anyway as a result of accident, miscalculation, blind and/or relentless escalation, or reckless, irrational and/or insane decision makers...
"A nation might also deliberately seek to demonstrate ... that it is prone to miscalculation or will to start the process of escalation. It might attempt to demonstrate a degree of recklessness ... escalation [to] bring about capitulation by the other side. ... The first question to ask is why a nation would want reliable overkill by a factor of ten. ... it might want to deter even the mad. ... As a result a nation might want a safety factor in its deterrence systems so large as to impress even the irrational and irresponsible ... with the need for caution. In short, a satisfactory deterrent would provide an objective basis for making an opponent see that no matter how skillful, ingenious, or optimistic he is, and no matter how negatively he views his alternatives in a desperate crisis, an attack would entail a virtual certainty of no military gain and a possibility of annihilation."
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v392, How Wars End, November 1970, from which the above Hudson Institute research by Stillman and Kahn is quoted, also at page 51 contains a lengthy analysis of the statistics of "war" termination in the 490 years between 1480-1970 by Professor Quincy Wright, "How Hostilities Have Ended: Peace Treaties and Alternatives", finding that just 137 out of the 311 "wars" were ended by peace treaty (unfortunately, Wright's definition of "war" does not include invasions by overwhelming force where no war resulted, so his "war" statistics are all skewed towards situations where both sides are well armed, which is a subset of the total problem!), and 174 out of 311 were ended without peace treaty (including 34 between 1945-1970), "over 60 were ended by suppression of domestic or colonial insurrection, or with formal declaration of peace by the victors. ... Many annexations of colonial territory [e.g. Hitler's 1930s invasions up to Poland in September 1939] did not involve hostilities of sufficient magnitude to be included in the list of wars. ... Wars ended inconclusively by discontinuance of hostilities without formal action in over 50 cases." In other words, the usual "anti-war" rants fron CND's Jeremy Corbyn and comrades that all wars end by peace negotiation so we can end war by jumping straight to "talks", is more BS (just like everything they allege about the effects of nuclear war). In another paper in that volume (at pages 30-39), "War Prolonged by Misunderstood Signals", Professor George H. Quester argues that far from resolving war, efforts to get to early peace talks were opposed in both World Wars I and II until after mass destruction had worn down the loser: "In World War I, peace feelers on either side were consistently interpreted out of existence ... Similarly in 1940, Hitler's proposals for a negotiated peace with Great Britain after the fall of France were given less than a full hearing in London. ... Too accommodating an approach to war termination may produce concessions which make another war likely in the near future." I.e., the 1918 Armistice ending WWI led to a resurgence and WWII! Similarly, objective studies show that such foolishness in ending WWIII without a decisive military victory will be premature and will therefore simply lead to resurgence, and WWIV. As General McArthur put it after being fired by Truman over Korea: "There is no substitute for victory." However, gratuitous or careless violence (city bombing, napalming kids etc) against civilians to try to suppress dedicated enemy insurgents in Korea and Vietnam undermined the legitimacy of short-term gains and lost the propaganda war for "hearts and minds". War remains a political instrument of power, specifically a demonstration of strength in preparation for a genuinely desired peace negotiation. If you try to bypass the force of war, you get appeasement or pettifogging lies designed to undermine your strength and allow your opponent to launch a successful war against you. Clausewitz argues that war is the act of disarming your opponent to ensure successful peacetalks.
"Another line was drawn by the U.S. decision-makers who decided in 1957 not to test a 60-megaton bomb. That decision remains unchanged even though the Soviets have tested such a bomb." - Herman Kahn, 22 November 1963 Hudson Institute report HI-202-FR, "A Paradigm for the 1965-1975 Strategic Debate", AD436770, p245. Note that Kahn was speaking with insider knowledge here, because he did top secret thermonuclear weapons design work at RAND Corp for nuclear weapons tests, e.g. Dr Tom Ramos states on p118 of From Berkeley to Berlin that Herman Kahn was among those brought in to perform Livermore calculations for the 1954 Castle tests of advanced devices Ramrod and Morgenstern, which used x-rays from the primary stage to rapidly ram a subcritical rod of U235 into another within a hollow thermonuclear cylinder to produce a supercritical sparkplug in that part for more efficient fusion ignition, prior to its compression by x-ray ablation, as suggested by Teller, as an evolutionary development from the original gun-type triggered "Super", or to use x-rays to force inward several Monroe jets of U235 from several subcritical U235 cones placed outside a spherical fusion secondary stage in a "mace" or "morgenstern" shape (this is not actually as radical as it sounds, since the same idea - albeit using conventional explosives - is used to form jets of molten metal for armor penetrating conventional shells), which was suggested by Herbert York; only the latter idea was actually tested as Castle-Koon which Ramos says failed, supposedly due to receiving only half of the required supply of x-rays from a Los Alamos designed primary stage: see artist's impression sketches below (which are based on the conceptual evolution of the simple Ramrod into the more complex Mace/Morgenstern design, as described by Ramos). This also had the advantage of increasing the surface area of the secondary stage, absorbing more x-ray energy, thereby increasing efficiency:
ABOVE: "Teller was fixated on development of a hydride warhead [1953 Nevada "boosting" nuclear tests Ruth and Rae, containing uranium deuteride] ... As the hydride imploded and approached a critical state, nuclear fissions heated up the mass, causing it to expand. The neutrons ... moderated (slowed) by the deuterium in the fuel, were not fast enough to cause further fissions. ... The device gave a sudden, but small, burst of energy, then stopped. ... 'The first explosion [Ruth] left about 125 feet of the 300-foot tower still standing.' ... Teller remained confident and saw no need to make changes to his plan for the Castle event. His thermonuclear device was called the Ramrod, and it was truly a classic Super ... Brown's Megaton Group calculated every aspect of the device ... They had help: RAND physicists, including Albert and Richard Latter, David Griggs, Ernie Plesset, and Herman Kahn, lent their support. They had to decide how far to place the Ramrod from an atomic device, the primary, and what size the primary should be. ... As calculations progressed, it became evident segments of Teller's concept for the Ramrod had to be changed. More calculations brought more changes, with one of the more exotic being an alteration suggested by Herb York that made the device resemble a mace, a Medieval weapon. Teller was concerned the purity of his original Ramrod design was getting lost, so a compromise was offered and designs for two devices were pursued. The Echo event in Castle would feature the Ramrod without significant changes, while the Koon event would test the device with features dictated by code calculations. The Koon device went through one reconfiguration after another. What stymied designers was their inexperience in dealing with radiative transport calculations [more important for a spherical secondary secondary implosion, than the simpler 2-dimensional axial compression of cylindrical sausage shaped secondaries, tested already as Mike in 1952]. ... A minor crisis over the design of the Koon device erupted in July 1953 when they found the choice of materials for the radiation channel was not ideal for the distance they had chosen between the primary and the secondary. ... the Bravo blast contaminated the area around the Echo device, so that event was rescheduled for late April. This meant the Koon device would be tested before its simpler cousin, the Ramrod. ... The resulting test was a bust. ... York, in consultation with Brown, Sewell, and Teller, cancelled the Echo event. ... Montgomery Johnson ... led a team to examine the data from the Koon event. His conclusions about what went wrong have stood up to the passage of time. He determined the calculations of energy flowing throughout the device had been wrong. May agreed ... comparisons of the radiative transport calculations with measurements of the output of the Los Alamos primary had shown they differed by a factor of two. The device's design had been based on those calculations, so it was not optimal and contributed to its failure." - Dr Tom Ramos, From Berkeley to Berlin, Navy Institute Press, 2022, pp. 111-121.
Note that Dr Ramos goes on to describe how these Livermore Radiation Laboratory failures soon inspired the greatest successes in tactical nuclear warheads and MIRV warheads at Operation Redwing in 1956, e.g. the linear implosion Swallow device which led to the 155mm diameter artillery shell which deterred Russian invasions between 1963-92 (replacing the Mk54 Davy Crockett), and the 360 kiloton Mohawk test of the Flute device, a lightwight thermonuclear warhead using a 15 kiloton Swan primary stage. Piccolo, a scaled-down version of the Flute, was adopted as the first thermonuclear warhead for the Polaris SLBM submarine deterrent! This amazing history should be incorporated into school physics education, so everyone will understand deterrence at a technical level, eliminating the usual luddite ignorance of the technology:
"Polaris needed to be compatible with RAND's Counterforce Strategy. Analysts like Brodie and Kaufmann had been preaching the merits of striking military targets as an alternative to Eisenhower's Massive Retaliation strategy, which meant Polaris needed to be accurate enough to put relatively small targets, rather than entire Soviet cities, at risk. ... The weight of the entire reentry body - warhead, heat shields, arming and fusing system, everything - was 850 pounds; by comparison, the Atlas [first USA ICBM] warhead weighed over 3,000 pounds. In January 1960 the USS George Washington, America's first Polaris submarine, was launched for sea trials." - Dr Tom Ramos, From Berkeley to Berlin, Navy Institute Press, 2022, pp181-2.
President Kennedy, March 28, 1961 special message on the defense budget for flexible response:
"Our defense posture must be both flexible and determined. Any potential aggressor contemplating an attack on any part of the Free World with any kind of weapons, conventional or nuclear, must know that our response will be suitable, selective, swift and effective. While he may be uncertain of its exact nature and location, there must be no uncertainty about our determination and capacity to take whatever steps are necessary to meet our obligations. We must be able to make deliberate choices in weapons and strategy, shift the tempo of our production and alter the direction of our forces to meet rapidly changing conditions or objectives at very short notice and under any circumstances. Our weapon systems must be usable in a manner permitting deliberation and discrimination as to timing, scope and targets in response to civilian authority; and our defenses must be secure against prolonged re-attack as well as a surprise first-strike."
US Defense Secretary McNamara, Ann Arbor, Michigan, June 16, 1962 no-cities war policy:
"The United States has come to the conclusion that, to the extent feasible, basic military strategy in a possible general nuclear war should be approached in much the same way that more conventional military operations have been regarded in the past. That is to say, principal military objectives, in the event of a nuclear war stemming from a major attack on the alliance, should be the destruction of the enemy's military forces, not of his civilian population. The very strength and nature of the alliance forces make it possible for us to retain, even in the face of a massive surprise attack, sufficient reserve striking power to destroy an enemy society if driven to it. In other words, we are giving a possible opponent the strongest imaginable incentive to refrain from striking our own cities."
The point is, anti-nuclear propaganda from Kaplan and pro-Russian left wing arms control and disarmament lobbies keeps going on about the early Eisenhower era anti-civil defense, anti-flexible response SIOP's for countervalue nuclear war, but the reality is that such policies were discredited and discarded over fifty years ago as incredible deterrents of the kinds of provocations that triggered all world wars, and instead nuclear war plans now focus primarily on military targets, not city destruction; the vast increase in Russian low-yield tactical neutron bombs in recent times reinforces the fact that the enemy is also on the same page. Killing civilians is not the primary rationale for credible nuclear deterrence. Deterring invasions and wars should be the key motive, regardless of lying propaganda fronts. (For further discussion of the context of Kennedy's no-cities policy, please see pp 137-8 of Herman Kahn's 22 November 1963 Hudson Institute report HI-202-FR, "A Paradigm for the 1965-1975 Strategic Debate", AD436770.)
Do nuclear stockpiles, used for war deterrence, really have any relevance to how many megatons will be used in a non-"knockout blow" World War III? Herman Kahn pointed out that all "arms control and disarmament" delusional propaganda is swept away when a World War breaks out, and both sides produced most of the weapons used in world wars - including 100% of the mustard gas used in World War I and 100% of the nuclear weapons used in World War II - DURING THE WARS, NOT BEFORE THE WARS. So the size of pre-war stockpiles were irrelevant, except where disarmament undermined the deterrence of world wars. The point is, if you disarm before a world war, you reduce your deterrence of world war, thus making world war more likely, WITHOUT reducing the probable number of weapons to be used in the war (because most weapons used in each world war were made during the world war, not before it). As Kahn pointed out, the real Hitler was entirely different to historian A. J. P. Taylor's CND-biased anti-nuclear propaganda "history" version of Hitler. The real Hitler didn't declare war first, he simply tested the water and invaded when he found a lack of credible deterrence. The appeasement policy encouraged Hitler to start WWII. The real cause of World War I, similarly, was not Lord Grey's claimed arms race or stockpiles of deterrent weapons, but the exact opposite. Pre-war stockpiles were intended for a short war, and ran out fast. WWI was won when: (1) we managed to increase explosive shell output DURING THE WAR ITSELF TO EXCEED ENEMY WARTIME WEAPONS PRODUCTION, i.e. "vertical escalation", and (2) when "horizontal escalation" occurred, i.e. the entry of the U.S.A. into World War I. Similarly, in World War II, war termination had nothing to do with pre-war weapons stockpiles being exhausted: there were no nuclear stockpiles in 1939, but two nuclear weapons were used to end the war! Such facts, Kahn argued, completely refute the notion that reducing pre-war weapons stockpiles will reduce the horror of World War III, by somehow determining the course of the war. They are irrelevant to World War III termination. The entire arms control and disarmament community is built upon the quicksand of weapons effects and weapons use lying, the same type of "gas city-bombing knockout-blow on day 1" delusions, peddled by Nazi fellow-travellers in the 1930s, to engineer the appeasement delusion leading to World War II. In other words, like the 12,000 tons of Nazi tabun nerve agent made by the Nazis but never used (even in gas chambers), nuclear facts simply debunk CND's propaganda. The reality is that tactical nuclear deterrence of invasions, to prevent escalation of conventional wars into world wars, is a lesson of all the world wars of history, as is the eternal refusal of people and their leaders to adequately prepare to deter each forthcoming world war:
Popular Flying Magazine, vol. 2, n. 10, January 1934, pages 526-528 and 560: "Where Stands Germany? By the editor (Captain W. E. Johns) ... History is repeating itself very clearly. Another war was made inevitable by the Treaty of Versailles ... In spite of the misery and bloodshed he had caused, Napoleon's return to Paris was a Triumph ... At the end of the Franco-German War of 1870 we see the danger zone removed to a victorious, Bismarck-worshipping Germany, thirsting for more conquests. In 1914 its pent-up eagerness burst the dam of civilisation, and the catastrophe of the Great War was the result. ... Where does Germany stand today? By the Treaty of Versailles she is not permitted to arm, but that she has not kept strictly to the letter of the disarmament clause is no secret ... There are probably more pilots and embryo pilots in Germany that in any country in the world. ... In 1932 no less than 25 new Juvenile (Jungflieger) Groups were formed! ... in Germany, every weekend, there are 1,200 gliders in the air, with 10,000 glider pilots awaiting their turn to fly. Three thousand one hundred and twenty-two 'B' and 'C' certificates have been issued in the last two years ... Make no mistake, these glider pilots are ready-made power-pilots. ... The cost of a thousand aeroplanes today would be nothing to what failure to safeguard ourselves might cost."
Popular Flying Magazine, vol. 5, n. 2, May 1936, pages 63-65: "On the Folly of War (By the editor, Captain W. E. Johns) These words are written in the hope that they will dispell any lingering suspicion that this magazine is a protagonist of the dreadful business of war. Why anyone should think so is more than I can say, but the Royal Commission on the Private Manufacture of and Trading in Arms evidently thinks so, for in its report it has quoted certain statements that have been made on this page and endowed them with a meaning far from the one intended. ... Other nations, with disturbing deliberation and unmistakable purpose, have armed themselves. ... England alone allowed her machinery of war to fall into disrepair and obsolescence. The Disarmament Conference failed, and now they seek the reason. The reason was that England had lost her talking point. With three thousand more aeroplanes in the nation's hangars, our 'friends' would have been more genuine in their anxiety to talk of peace. Surely it must be quite clear to anyone who has watched the march of events since 1918 that England, inadequately armed, was wasting her time by even attending conferences of any sort, where the men who have had the guns have ever called the tune. Following the line of argument of the disarmament theorists, we might as well disband the police force in the hope of ending crime." (The centrefold pages, 84-85, of this May 1936 issue of Popular Flying are a spread of 8 still frames from the 1936 H. G. Wells' next-war movie, Things to Come.)
Herman Kahn (RAND Corp), testimony to US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Hearings on Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 26 June 1959, page 947:
"They can test you experimentally and find out gradually what [provocations such as invasions, limited wars, coercion, etc.] you are willing to take, and they can probably do it reasonably safely. ... I do not believe that one should, even in the most indirect way, threaten massive retaliation for such incidents as Korea and Indochina [Vietnam]. These issues are just not big enough to justify world war III. In fact, the less you talk about massive retaliation the better ... In other words, the Russians test a missile so some Europeans and Americans act as if they have 500 missiles in existence. This is a human reaction ..."
Herman Kahn (RAND Corp), testimony to US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Hearings on Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 26 June 1959, page 888:
"Type 2 deterrence, deterring extremely provocative actions, involves a quite different calculation. It is again a Russian calculation. Only the Russian asks himself: If I do this very provocative thing, which is less than a direct attack on the United States, but which is still very provocative, will the Americans start the all-out war? That must be influenced by whether or not the Americans think they can survive the counterattack. ... Things will be completely reversed from the type 1 [direct attack on USA] deterrence calculations. I must emphasise that in both World War I and World War II it was type 2 deterrence we were talking about. That is, the British declared war on the Germans, and not vice versa [Emphasis added]."
Herman Kahn (RAND Corp), testimony to US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Hearings on Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 26 June 1959, page 904:
"I should like to emphasise: Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. ... I have a book with me today which I recommend to those who want to exaggerate the impact of thermonuclear war. It is called 'Munich: Prologue to Tragedy' ... Wheeler-Bennett ... discusses why Chamberlain and Daladier folded. When they returned from Munich they were cheered by their people in Paris and London, because war had been averted. ... some people began to understand that war had been averted by a sellout of the worst sort. ... The people who criticised Chamberlain and Daladier, with a couple of exceptions ... said 'Hitler was bluffing and you should have stood your ground'. As far as we can tell, Hitler was not bluffing. ... If the other man is not bluffing, and he may not be, then we have to ask ourselves, 'Are we willing to fight or are we not?' "
I.e., drawing "red lines" in speeches and then doing nothing to enforce them when they are violated, actually encourages further aggression, if the opponents want to "test your resolve", a non-existent resolve due to misguided fear and thus weakness. Note that these June 1959 US Congressional hearings illustrate a repetition of the 1930s "knockout blow gas air raid extermination of cities"-type fear-mongering by "pacifists" like Lord Noel-Baker from 1929-39. The first witness on 22 June 1959 was Eugene Quindlen, of the US Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, who claimed Russia would deliver a knock-out blow of 1,446 megatons (all ground surface burst) in 263 weapons of average yield 5.5 megatons, killing 19.7 million within 24 hours, and fatally injuring a further 22.2 million by radiation (the survivors received an average of 110 roentgens within 90 days). Quindlen again testified on 26 June 1959, when he had to be asked repeatedly for the source data he used to calculate the effects of the attack, since casualty calculation data had been excluded from the unclassified June 1957 Glasstone book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
It soon became clear that Quindlen had assumed no protection at all by modern city skylines shielding blast and radiation, or even duck and cover. On page 857, Quindlen submitted a further statement "Method of casualty computation in NDAC damage assessment program", stating: "The casualty percentage tables are based on the Hiroshima-Nagasaki data", referring readers to a "Secret" classified document, "Vulnerability functions for civil defense damage assessment program", prepared for Federal Civil Defense Administration by Stanford Research Institute in April 1956. One problem here is that people indoors on the lower floors of concrete buildings in Hiroshima had 50% survival at 0.12 miles, while school children unshielded outdoors had 50% survival at 1.3 miles range, an area 121 times bigger! Another "problem" is that simple civil defense shelters in combination with target area evacuation and dispersal to rural areas in a crisis causes a reduction to very few casualties! Similarly, fallout radiation protection factors have always been similarly manipulated in such secretive "studies". Page 88 of the hearings gave first hand testimony by Dr Terry Triffet, the fallout project officer at Bikini Atoll for the 1956 thermonuclear test series "Operation Redwing", showing that for a standard 5 megaton 50% fission surface burst the mean gamma ray energy in the sheltering period at a week after detonation was 0.25 Mev at 8 miles, and 0.35 Mev at 60 miles downwind, where it was 0.60 Mev at 12 hours and 0.40 Mev at 24 hours after detonation.
These figures are substantially lower than the assumptions of 0.7-1.25 Mev used for protective faction calculations! This means real protection is greater than predicted, due to the fact that dirty nuclear weapons of high fission in U238 give lower energy gamma spectra due to the low energy gamma emitters Np239 and U237 caused by non-fission capture of neutrons in the U238 pusher. This was simply ignored in casualty estimates! Dr Triffet even tried to stress this problem in the discussion published on page 205: "I thought this might be an appropriate place to comment on the variation of the average energy. It is clear when you think of shielding, because the effectiveness of shielding depends directly on the average energy ... if induced products are important in the bomb, there is a lot of radiations emanating from these, but the energy is low so it operates to reduce the average energy in this period and shielding is immensely more effective." Dr Ralph Lapp then muddled the waters by ignoring Triffet's secret data on the low energy of gammas from Np-239 and U-237 during the sheltering period, and instead arguing that Na-24 has high energy! The discussion then switched to high altitude bursts and Triffet's argument was forgotten. On page 212, the cobalt-60 bomb of science fiction (the "Doomsday Machines" of "anti-nuclear" films like On the Beach and Dr Strangelove, etc) are dismissed in testimony: "Cobalt 60 with a half life of 5.3 years has been mentioned infrequently in the press. The half life is still long compared with times considered to be militarily decisive. The substitution of a 'deadweight' material in the bomb in place of uranium which produces high explosive and radioactive yield does not appear of military value ..."
Every neutron absorbed by Co-59 in the bomb to produce Co-60 gives a resulting 2.5 Mev of radiation which is spread out at a low dose rate over years, thus permitting fallout decontamination to remove the dust or shelter building before a significant dose is accumulated, compared to about 200 Mev of energy - including far more radiation, received at a higher dose rate - from using the same neutron to fission U-238 in the pusher of the bomb! Another issue is that cobalt is refractory, not volatile like the gases and vapours of fission product decay chains, that results in very small size particles of global fallout. In other words, cobalt-60 condenses fast on to large particles, and ends up essentially concentrated in the local fallout, not the global fallout of fictional films. Evidence of this basic chemistry fact includes the example that concentrated large cobalt-60 pellets were found near ground zero after cobalt was placed as a diagnostic into a "inert" secondary stage of a two-stage weapon at Operation Antler, Maralinga, 1957. Another example is cobalt-60 used as a tracer at Operation Redwing, Bikini, 1956, as explained on page 217 of the hearings: "It is interesting to note that the locally deposited cobalt 60 contributed largely to the 1- to 10-year activity in the Redwing sample." Such "technical trivia" are simply ignored by the anti-deterrence film makers!].
Another major problem with fallout calculations is demonstrated at page 866 of the June 1959 hearings which gives assumed fallout protection factors "based on behavior patterns chosen by some social scientists for two particular situations" (completely unstated, of course), "prepared" with a mean protection factor of 6.8 and "unprepared" with a mean fallout protection factor of 2.6. But for realistic civil defense sheltering, you achieve protection factors of 40-100 or more, so these 2.6 and 6.8 protection factors "estimates" are fiddles, a fact proved when you look at detailed secret-classified reports on which they are based, based on assuming that people go outside to get exposed for unshielded radiation for long periods every day, to reduce their fallout protection by large amounts (e.g. assuming people go outdoors for hours each day was used to reduce true protection factors by a factor of 7 for the 1970s anti-civil defense fiddled fallout casualty calculations of the ACDA bigots, as exposed by Reagan's civil defense expert, T. K. Jones)! Herman Kahn, on pages 437-8 of On Thermonuclear War places the blame for such secrecy-abusing anti-civil defense lying propaganda squarely at the feet of the Eisenhower administration's hatred of civil defense. E.g., Ike's Federal Civil Defense Administration director, Val Paterson, was a fiction deluded, crazy knockout-blow extermination BS fanatic, telling the 27 July 1956 Holifield Congressional Hearings Civil Defense for National Survival (pp80-81) that civil defense is "a very nearly hopeless problem". It sure as hell is, if you fake all your data!
"In the summer of 1955, a vast formal program was undertaken to train the entire Soviet population in the fundamentals of atomic defense. A 10 hour course was worked out, providing general information on the atomic bomb, its effects, and the methods of protection against it ... The entire adult population of the Soviet Union was called upon to complete the course by the end of 1956; if Soviet claims are to be accepted, 85.5% of the people did so." - U.S. Congress, 5th Report of the House Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Civil Defense in Western Europe and the Soviet Union, 1959, p42.
This is a repetition of the way civil defense gas masks and shelters were "debunked" by 1920s Lord Noel-Baker et al., thus starting WWII by supporting fascist appeasement: if you secretly assume that hardly anybody uses a gas mask or a shelter, your published so-called "calculated" effectiveness of civil defense is then completely trivial and useless, so you can falsely claim "civil defense is a fraud", and use the resulting paucity of alternatives to either surrender or to go in for appeasement, starting a world war as in the 1930s. This relies on the gullible mass media believing and promoting the lying gibberish attacks on civil defense effectiveness by the thugs employed to kick civil defense in the teeth with propaganda tricks, from within the bureaucracy, to save a few bucks and appease military bigots who refuse a cent to civil defense to save lives if military deterrence fails. Another aspect of those hearings was the arguments between fallout meteorologists on how predictable fallout really is. In 1956, at Operation Redwing, Edward Schuert had correctly predicted the fallout hot lines and danger areas for 3 out of 4 high-yield surface bursts, under simulated combat conditions during unstable meteorological conditions, see his report A Fallout Forecasting Technique With Results Obtained at the Eniwetok Proving Ground, USNRDL-TR-139, but he explained there clearly what the problem was with nuclear tests: “proper firing conditions, which required winds that would deposit the fallout north of the proving ground, occurred only during an unstable synoptic situation of rather short duration.” In other words, as in Nevada, the prevailing winds blow from the West towards the East, meaning that inhabited St George Utah is directly downwind in normal conditions for Nevada shots, and inhabited Rongelap Atoll was directly downwind of the prevailing winds at Bikini; the only way to safely test at either place was to delay firing until a passing weather system temporarily deflected the prevailing winds, to carry the fallout northwards instead of eastwards. This is why fallout prediction was difficult at the nuclear tests and accidents or extreme windshear (e.g., winds blowing in different directions at different altitudes) occurred which gave complicated fallout maps; these were only ones to make front page news, naturally! This fact, as for the blast and thermal exaggerations by unobstructed terrain, was reversed by Glasstone, who claimed in Effects of Nuclear Weapons that nuclear test data underestimated the threat and reduced the fallout prediction problems, when in fact they were known to exaggerate the problems by eliminating city skyline shielding of blast and radiation, and to make fallout prediction harder.
In the June 1959 hearings, meteorologist Charles Shafer explains on page 208 that the extreme windshear of most fallout patterns at Bikini in 1956 were not applicable in general “except to the Gulf States in the summertime.” The 1959 hearings at page 214 also pointed out the conflict of interests between military secrecy on protection afforded by simple foxholes and military improvised shelters against blast and radiation at nuclear tests, and their use for civil defense: "There are many areas where houses are not provided with basements. It would appear that the best protection available to people in such areas would be found in hastily dug foxholes or slit trenches. In view of a similar problem existing in the tactical employment of nuclear weapons, it is reasonable to suppose that field data are available on the performance of such shelters. Those data ought to be made available to the public."
This was ignored. This cheap shelters point is relevant to civil defense against nuclear attack, as explained by Herman Kahn in On Thermonuclear War pages 333-4: very expensive fortifications were tried out by the French after WWI, e.g. their concrete bunker frontier "Maginot Line" bred a sense of false security and the enemy could simply bypass it, and also fly over it to drop paratroops. So defense by itself is insufficient. You also need to be able to use force. From the Siege of Masada to the Maginot Line, history shows that all forms of pure defense are vulnerable in the end, because you can be starved out of any castle by a long siege, no matter how thick the walls are. Shelters suffer the same fate. You need to do more than survive two weeks in a hole, or you might as well surrender and live in tyranny. So the correct role of civil defense is to make your deterrent credible, not to replace deterrence. Shelters don't prevent invasions or bombing.
Ronald Reagan, interviewed by Robert Scheer in 1980, pages 233-58 of Robert Scheer's With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Secker and Warburg, London, 1983: "I think we're going to have to start a civil defense program. ... the United States should never put itself in a position, as it has many times, of guaranteeing to an enemy or a potential enemy what it won't do. ... President Johnson, in the Vietnam War, kept over and over again insisting, oh no, no, no we'll never use nuclear weapons in Vietnam ... the Soviet Union has used propaganda campaigns to stop us from putting a weapon that we - a great deterrent weapon - that we had developed and they didn't have - and an economical weapon - and that was the neutron warhead. They've got more than 20,000 tanks massed there opposite the NATO line. The neutron warhead could have neutralized those tanks but again we stopped it ... Woodrow Wilson ran for his second term on the promise or the pledge that he kept us out of wars. ... he took insult after insult ... finally the Germans declared open warfare on all shipping in the Atlantic Ocean, regardless of whether you were a neutral nation or not. And the Lusitania was sunk and, finally, we were in a war. ... the Kaiser got the idea from ... the policy that the United States was determined not to go to war. So he ignored that possibility ... Franklin Delano Roosevelt ran for his third term, and ran on his own personal promise, 'I will not send young Americans, your sons, to fight.' ... you've got an ambassador who is assuring von Ribbentrop that the United States wouldn't go to war ... Hitler at this time said, we can count on it ... the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. ... I say that we are going to war if a man like Carter continues giving the wrong signals, backing away from the Soviet Union. We will one day find ourselves pushed to the point where there is no retreat and we have no further choice." (Scheer's commie BS is reviewed honestly by Richard Sincere in his excellent "Shovelling appeasement" review of Scheer's political diatribe in the 4 February 1983 Washington Times, linked here.)
ABOVE: Lt.-Gen. James M. Gavin, who states in his book War and Peace in the Space Age, Hutchinson, London, 1959, pp. 102, 116-118:
"If the urban bombing concept were to remain policy, and thermonuclear weapons were to be added to it, and if that concept were morally and militarily unsound in the beginning, it certainly would be more so with the H-bomb added. I believed that it was unsound and that Dr Oppenheimer's views were valid. ... an increasing number of people were talking about the possible tactical uses of nuclear weapons. An advance group in the JCS headed by Brigadier General Don Zimmerman, USAF, had done particularly good work in this area. ... I recall a figure used by General Zimmerman that when we exceeded 25 B-29 bombers delivering high-explosives instead of using one carrying an atomic bomb, we were making an uneconomical use of our resources. Thus, we approached the Korean crisis ... with our newest form of firepower, nuclear fire power, packaged for strategic use. ... General Nichols and I went to the office of General Ridgway and urged that he recommend to the Chief of Staff that he in turn recommend to the President that we use nuclear weapons against the North Korean forces. It would have been militarily inexcusable to allow the 8th Army to be destroyed without even using the most powerful weapons in our arsenal. Yet, we almost did so! We had already made two combat bombing strikes of about 175 B-29s without decisive results. The situation in the summer of 1950 offered us a number of well worth-while tactical nuclear targets, if we had had the moral courage to make the decision to use them."
KEY FAILURES OF TODAY'S "MINIMAL DETERRENCE" (KAHN'S "TYPE 1 DETERRENT" AKA THE DREADNOUGHTS THAT FAILED TO DETER THE INVASION OF BELGIUM IN 1914 THAT TRIGGERED WWI), PROVING THE NEED FOR THE SUCCESSFUL CREDIBLE DETERRENT OF TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO DETER INVASIONS THAT SET OFF WARS:
1. It doesn't deter world war situations, which both occurred because of invasions of 3rd parties (invasion of Belgium 1914, Poland 1939), akin to the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine by Russia. In other words, you need credible deterrence of major provocations.
2. It doesn't even deter a direct attack by fanatical opponents, such as the October 2023 Hamas surprise attack on Israel or the December 1941 Pearl Harbor surprise attack or the 9/11 attack by war-crazy thugs.
3. It assumes sanity on the enemy side, while mental pressures are brought to bear on the sanity of the opponent in response to major provocations, e.g. "sanctions" against the enemy hardens their resolve (aided by internal state propaganda of the enemy, blaming hardships on you), just as "pressure" such as napalming Vietnam failed to deter the Tet Offensive. If you ban your use of overwhelming force to credibly stop or deter an opponent, you don't end in a fairy tale land of mutual love and understanding, but with a battle-hardened opponent, with the fighting mentality of a wounded animal. In other words, you get the opposite result.
4. The only people who can be safely and credibly deterred with "minimal deterrence" are not terrorist states, but generally established democracies, who you don't have fights with anyway (see Dr Weart's "Never at War: Why Democracies will not Fight One Another"), so you've reduced deterrence down to a level where it's only credible in situations where NOT needed! Duh! Try explaining this with any hardened fanatical "pacifist" and you soon see they're fanatical ranting lunatics obsessed with moronic "taboos" or war-making eugenics "Russian communist" pseudoscience genocide schemes, and not the least interested in what they claimed they're concerned with, PEACE!
Herman Kahn (RAND Corp), testimony to US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Hearings on Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 26 June 1959, page 893:
"There are less than 50 million people in the largest 135 Russian cities. As far as we can tell, it is perfectly possible to evacuate 80% of this urban population and have all vital functions in the cities performed. This would leave only 10 million people at risk in 135 cities. Having been alerted, these could evacuate on very short notice."
Herman Kahn (RAND Corp), testimony to US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Hearings on Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 26 June 1959, page 897:
"Only the survivors have children. If current beliefs are true, 1,000 roentgens should at most double the normal [4%] burden of defects, probably less."
Herman Kahn (RAND Corp), testimony to US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Hearings on Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 26 June 1959, page 901:
"In any crisis many will be cynical of the integrity of the Government and will argue that the Government says these [fallout radiation dose] standards are acceptable because it must say so, that conditions are such that it has no choice, but that in fact the standards will result in a drastic level of casualties."
Herman Kahn (RAND Corp), testimony to US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Hearings on Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 26 June 1959, page 900:
"But I might point out, no one has ever seen a bone cancer directly attributable to radioactive material in the bone at less than the equivalent of 20 to 30 microcuries. [I.e. evidence for the dose threshold for the radium dial painters was known even in 1959, but ignored politically by those against deterring war; it is not "news".] ... Ten microcuries of Sr-90 per kilogram of calcium [adults have 1 kg of calcium in their bones] would mean a dose of about 20 roentgens per year in the bones. This would probably cause less than a year's loss of life expectancy."
Most (but not all) of the 1930s and 1950s science fantasy - not even science fiction - "knockout blow"-style attacks on the use of tactical deterrence to end the invasions that trigger large wars, including both world wars, were debunked by Herman Kahn both in the 26 June 1959 Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War (quoted above), and in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War, and Herman Kahn addresses his "critics" in his lengthy (24 pages long) February 1969 dated New Preface to the 1969 paperback edition of OTW published by The Free Press, New York, where he points out that the negative reviews were really the bigoted delusional doublethink or communist-style propaganda, designed to prevent people from taking the book seriously, by inventing false criticisms:
"the reviews that alleged that I had made use of the term 'megadeaths,' or had recommended Doomsday machines [are false] ... the word 'megadeaths' [is] not used in the book [the Wikipedia article "Dr Strangelove" currently falsely claims megadeaths was invented by Kahn rather than liars, citing the 2014 Craig Nelson propaganda book called "The age of radiance".] ... Several associates have urged me to rearrange the book and put at the beginning Lecture III, 'World War I through World War VIII', followed by Lectures I and II. Lecture III does give a broad overview that would perhaps be more useful as an introduction than in the use I made of it - reviewing my argument, and in effect, driving points home. The lecture also seems to most readers and reviewers (including myself) far and away the most interesting part of the book. I would suggest that many readers may well find it best to start with Lecture III, the least technical of the lectures, and yet the one that deals with the most fundamental issues. ... Hitler often presented his views in the following manner: 'One of us has to be sensible, and it isn't going to be me,' or 'Either my way or holocaust.' The only way to deal with such an individual, if he is committed and really means it, is to be able to go to war... it was just this risk of mutual holocaust that frightened Hitler's enemies and enabled him to go as far as he did ... it seems likely that the United States no longer enjoys strategic superiority over the Soviets. It could make a difference. ... Many will argue that because both sides have 'overkill' capability, the notion of strategic superiority is meaningless ... This view could not have been tested until roughly 1968 or 1969. Up to that point ... in any serious crisis the Soviets were more likely to back down than the Americans. A U.S. negotiator could explicitly or implicitly say to a Soviet negotiator, 'As you know, if this ever came to a serious showdown, you would be unable to launch any serious attack on U.S. strategic forces. You could only attack U.S. cities, which would, of course, be suicidal, because it would immediately be followed by a retaliatory city attack of our own. You would therefore be deterred ... Today it is possible for an expert to say that because defense cannot be 100% certain, we cannot depend on defense but must depend on disarmament (as if disarmament could be 100% certain) and escape challenge. ... and yet millions of lives might be saved by ABM if deterrence fails [particularly in "demonstration strikes or accidents", the number 1 real threat!]. ... There had been almost no study of how to win a war - which is one kind of war termination - except by the most brute-force method, namely reducing the enemy to rubble. ... the more clever the fighting strategy and the tactics of fighting, the less damage one has to do, and suffer, in order to attain that objective. ... the same mis-emphasis seems to have plagued our Vietnamese policies to an almost unbelievable extent."
Regarding fake news claims that Kahn invented/recommended nonsense "Doomsday Machines" in On Thermonuclear War, Leo Szilard had called the H-bomb the "doomsday machine" on NBC (claiming it would be encased in cobalt to wipe out life by fallout) and Kahn had merely refuted Leo Szilard's 1950 anti-H-bomb news conference on gigaton cobalt-60 bombs by proving that they are not a credible deterrent any more than M.A.D (= Mutual Assured Destruction) was a credible deterrent, or the poison gas stockpiles on both sides in 1939 was a credible deterrent! Kahn states on page 147 of OTW: "The Doomsday Machine is not sufficiently controllable. ... a failure kills too many people, and kills them too automatically." (This is basically the message of Kubrick's film "Dr Strangelove", although the film is usually presented instead by ignorant "journalists" propaganda as being anti-Kahn, or discrediting Kahn, rather than merely making Kahn's point on the big screen! Kubrick did however play to the popular gullible audience's anti-nuclear prejudice. Kahn had served in the jungle war in Burma in WWII, and was a fanatical propoent of credible nuclear deterrence of World Wars as a result. Kubrick was delusional over all technical details, e.g. cobalt-60's half life is 5.24 years, not 100 years, and the cobalt bomb was debunked in the June 1959 Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, as was the notion that you need mineshafts to shield fallout radiation. Simple, cheap, improvised WWI and WWII style shelters will do!) Kahn's whole argument is against such nonsense, e.g. see On Thermonuclear War pages 297-301: "They [nuclear deterrents] must not be Doomsday Machines, or Homocide Pact Machines. They must not even look like they could be Doomsday Machines if misused, much less when used as authorized. I cannot stress how important it is that it be made clear that we are not developng and planning the use of Doomsday Machines - or even systems which, if they should be used (whether they are good deterrents or not), will dstroy the defender and a large portion of the world along with the aggressor. ... Flexible War Plans. We must not encase the President or the Commander of SAC in concrete. We need to have available a series of options during the very first minutes of the war in order to be able to react safely and surely to varying kinds of warnings and varying kinds of provocations. ... it is almost certain that the course of the war will reveal surprises. We must have the ability to react to those surprises."
Kahn gives examples of such "surprises". E.g., p529: a dictator in 1934 allegedly burned down his own Reichstag to generate the "excuse" to liquidate enemies, a democracy allegedly sank its own battleship Maine off Havana in 1898 to justify war against Spain, and at p28 Kahn gives the example that in his 14 January 1960 speech to the Supreme Soviet, dictator Khrushchev declared that if anybody attacked any socialist state in the world, e.g. Cuba or any South American left wing dictatorship, Russia would launch a nuclear retaliation on the culprit. This particular threat became even more sinister and threatening in October 1962 when he secretly placed 42 IRBMs with megaton thermonuclear warheads into Cuba. Kahn also makes the point on page 199 that in a nuclear war Russia would be likely to air burst weapons to minimise the risks of escalation to radiological warfare - just as Hitler decided not to drop his 12,000 tons of nerve agent tabun on cities, to avoid escalation to gas war - and to maximise the more predictable blast effect: "If the Russians ... air burst their weapons (which is he most efficient way to use a weapon against a soft target), there will be no local fallout effects." The entire "arms control and disarmament" movement is driven by 1930s style exaggeration lying propaganda, so denies any possibility other than "knockout blows" on day 1, completely disarming both sides by all-out ground burst wars with maximum fallout radiation. But evidence exists from World War II that this is not what happens: the knockout blow failed to materialise, as did the gas war prophecy, so as Kahn writes on p319:
"Therefore, one thing that we should try to get out of World Wars I and II is some orientation about what kinds of actions, situations, and capabilities are possible or plausible in the future." (The anti-nuclear folk do the exact opposite, repeating 1920s-30s Nazi style "anti-war" propaganda! Yes, you can always have "peace" aka coercive slavery if you surrender your freedom by lying about weapons effects and disarming yourself. There is nothing good about fanatical lying.)
In summary, Kahn's On Thermonuclear War rejected M.A.D. (Mutual Assured Destruction, aka pure type 1 deterrence) because it fails to deter the major provocations (not direct attacks on UK and USA, but attacks on allies/military outposts) that set off each World War, and called for flexible response instead, to deter escalation of invasions and conventional wars to world war, the basis for 1914 and 1939. OTW begins by rejecting the notion that world government or policemen can solve the problem. In world government, you don't end war, you just rename world wars as civil wars; plus you get more wars (labelled rebellions or insurgency, perhaps) as shown by the history of various world-scale empires in the past. Police to end war? Policemen don't prevent crime. The UN Peacekeepers don't prevent or even end wars. If you made them strong enough to do so, you would just have an international army fighting wars. Wars wouldn't end, no matter what you called them. In addition, you then have the veto problem, or if not, then the problem that the aggressors will (as in the 1930s with the League of Nations) simply withdraw membership. Then you're back to the same wars, maybe renamed - as per Putin's doubletalk - as "special military operations" (as if changing the name of war, somehow changes the fact). Finally you have the "cover themselves with shame" policy of the 14 January 1960 Khrushchev speech: "If one side violates the agreement if assumed, the instigators of this violation will cover themselves with shame, they will be condemned by the peoples of the whole world." Kahn points out on page 249 of OTW that this "cover themselves with shame" deterrent was disproved by Khrushchev himself on 2 December 1959, when he brutally dismissed the 1956 massacre by hos own troops of Hungarian freedom fighters: "international reactionary circles still seek to have the so-called Hungarian question discussed in the United Nations. Let them have it as a souvenir, if this consoles them." Dictatorial thugs who start wars are simply not worried about shame any more than "peaceniks" who lie about nuclear weapons effects to undermine deterrence are ashamed of themselves or deterred by condemnation. They don't care. If moral responsibility were a factor, there would never be any racist genocidal wars, extermination camps, and crime. You have to avoid muddling up heavenly dreams and the harsh reality of life on this planet.
Doomsday propaganda gibberish is actually the result of "Doomsday Clock" nonsense published by Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and other propaganda mass media, not Kahn who debunks it! E.g. aside from coming up with the cobalt bomb Doomsday Machine in 1950, Leo Szilard also published delusional alternatives to nuclear deterrence in the October 1955 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article "Disarmament and the Price of Peace", asserting:
"Russia and America could each take perhaps the following position: We need not engage any longer in the kind of warfare in which people are killed ... We shall simply list all such areas, with a price tag ... and we shall specify that if Area No. 1, for instance, is invaded we shall demolish five medium-sized cities of the 'enemy'." [This seems similar to the plot of the February 23, 1967 Star Trek episode, "A Taste of Armageddon". Like all arms control and disarmament nonsense, it's unrealistic BS. While the Bulletin published endless crap, it had the hypocrisy to sneer at anyone who told the truth and really reduced the risk of war!]
ABOVE: Gas war knockout blow for appeasement propaganda as depicted vividly by H G Wells in his 1936 film Things to Come. Nobody in the mass media would do anything about such propaganda except to praise it, wrongly claiming that such hysteria to undermine the credible deterrence of war was somehow a good thing that would somehow prevent world wars by informing everyone of Wells' BS war fantasy. But it was similar to knock-out blow delusions that preceded - and encouraged - World War I. Similar fictional BS saturated the mass media throughout the Cold War. As a result, reality has been replaced by BS propaganda and made "unthinkable", which is why the same old delusions lead to repeated, unnecessary wars and exterminations. At some point, the truth has to make a comeback. We tell the truth at www.nukegate.org There's a sad story to be told about H. G. Wells' "antiwar" gas knockout blow propaganda in the 1936 film, probably put best by the author Colin Wilson in the Introduction to his Criminal History of Mankind:
"I was about twelve years old when I came upon a bundle of magazines tied with string in a secondhand bookshop - the original edition of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, published in 1920. ... In 1946, Penguin Books republished ten volumes of Wells to celebrate his eightieth birthday, including the condensed version of the Outline, A Short History of the World. It was in this edition that I discovered that strange little postscript entitled ‘Mind at the End of Its Tether’. I found it so
frustrating and incomprehensible that I wanted to tear my hair: ‘Since [1940] a tremendous series of events has forced upon the intelligent observer the realisation that the human story has already come to an end and that Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form played out.’ And this had not been written at the beginning of the Second World War - which might have been understandable - but after Hitler’s defeat. When I came across the earlier edition of the
Short History I found that, like the Outline, it ends on a note of uplift: ‘What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do.’ And the Outline ends with a chapter predicting that mankind will find peace through the League of Nations and world government. (It was Wells who coined the phrase ‘the war to end war’.)
"What had happened? Many years later, I put the question to a friend of Wells, the biblical historian Hugh Schonfield. His answer was that Wells had been absolutely certain that he had the solutions to all the problems of the human race, and that he became embittered when he realised that no one took him seriously. ... The Outline of History plays down the tortures and massacres; in fact, it hardly mentions them. ... Wells’s view of crime was cheerfully pragmatic. In The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind he spoke of it as ‘artificial’, the result of ‘restrictions
imposed upon the normal “natural man” in order that the community may work and exist.’ He seems quite unaware that the history of mankind since about 2500 B.C. is little more than a nonstop record of murder, bloodshed and violence. The brutalities of the Nazi period forced this upon his attention. But it seems to have been the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the revelations of Belsen and Buchenwald, which convinced him that man was bound to destroy himself from the beginning, and that ‘the final end is now closing in on mankind’." The problem for H. G. Wells was the problem for most people and their leaders during the 1920s and 1930s: to get rid of weapons to therefore prevent war, to lead the world in doing so, to create a good example, and to trust in the League of Nations to condemn "warmongers" who prefer to trust in deterrence by threat of force. In other words, everything H. G. Wells stood for was debunked and the nuclear deterrent of 1945 was for him, as for most groupthink authority obsessed persons, bad news. Like idealists Woodrow Wilson, Neville Chamberlain and Stanley Baldwin, Wells wanted war to be ended with bits of paper, not the credible realist threat of annihilation (apart from the annihilation of the Vatican, the bombing of which is called for in his book Crux Ansata!).
DELUSION OF POPULIST ANTI-NUCLEAR BIASED PROPAGANDA HISTORY: THE FACT IS, EVERY WORLD WAR RESULTED FROM THE POPULAR MASS MEDIA KNOCKOUT BLOW (SHORT WAR) DELUSION, AND THE POPULAR MASS MEDIA DELUSION THAT WARS ARE RESOLVABLE OR UNTHINKABLE BECAUSE BOTH SIDES ARE RATIONAL DEMOCRACIES (in fact, the evidence below shows that stable democracies do not have wars, so this is fake): this delusion encouraged the aggressors to invade in 1914 and 1939, safe in the belief that long wars were debunked by economic interdependence and the speed of action of incendiaries, high explosives, and poison gas bombs on cities! Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 7-9:
"Some, most notably [CND's pseudo-historian of anti-nuclear arms race lying propaganda spin] A. J. P. Taylor, have even said that Hitler was not like Hitler, that further appeasement would have prevented World War II [this history basis is actually anti-history speculation, but still biases anti-nuclear "history" BS taught today],... If someone ... can convince you he is stark, staring mad and if he has enough destructive power ... deterrence alone will not work. You must then give in or accept the possibility of being annihilated ... in the first instance if we fight and lose; in the second if we capitulate without fighting. ... We could still resist by other means ranging from passive resistance of the Gandhi type to the use of underground fighting and sabotage. All of these alternatives might be of doubtful effectiveness against [the Gulag system, KGB/FSB torture camps or Siberian salt mines of] a ruthless dictatorship."
In other words, the situation today is similar to the 1930s, because of (not despite) all the contrary propaganda that the lessons of outbreak of the last way must be ignored to "make the world safer"! Anti-nuclear propaganda BS still claims that we should not learn these true lessons from the actual histories of world wars, and that Hitler and the most destructive and costly war and only nuclear war of history, WWII, is given undue attention. But WWII is a good analogy to the danger precisely because of the lying WMD gas war propaganda-based disarmament of the West which allowed the war, because of the attacks by Hitler's fans on civil defense in the West to make even the token rearmament after 1935 ineffective as a credible deterrent, and because Hitler has mirrors in Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Stalin, and all the rest of the war-mongers (particularly their "enablers" in the mass media, populist "science" fantasy, and populist "history", i.e. the thug dictators behind the mass indoctrination of folk with all the nuclear weapons and nuclear war effects lying evil war mongering propaganda today! Kahn explains on p. 173: "Because history has a way of being more imaginative and complex than even the most imaginative and intelligent analysts, historical examples often provide better scenarios than artificial ones ... [E.g. after WWI, populist anti-war propaganda dismissed the possibility of a repeated war triggered by escalation following the invasion of an ally, and instead insisted on the H. G. Wells style myth of immediate all-out knock-out blows using gas against civilian populations in cities; the eternally deluded mass-media overhyped myth designed to ensure a complacent failure of deterrence against the real threat!]"
"One type of war resulting at least partly from deliberate calculation could occur in the process of escalation. For example, suppose the Soviets attacked Europe, relying upon our fear of their reprisal to deter a strategic attack by us; we might be deterred enough to pause, but we might evacuate our cities during this pause in the hope we could thereby convince the Soviets we meant business." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 51-2.
"Relocation of the population from high risk areas near military installations and the protection of the rest of the population against fallout could reduce nationwide fatalities due to fallout ..." - James R. Schlesinger, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Annual Defense Department Report for Financial Year 1976. (Note the delusional propaganda against civil defense hidden - in plain sight - in the word "could". The reality is that Schlesinger had on 11 September 1974 testified to the U.S. Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Arms Control etc., "the likelihood of limited nuclear attacks cannot be challenged on the assumption that massive civilian fatalities and injuries would result." However, even there, Schlesinger was promoting nonsense because his U.S. Department of Defense study assumed that 45% of the population in a fallout area remained essentially unprotected in frame houses with a radiation protection factor of just 3. In other words, essentially no protection. Other similarly delusional anti-civil defense propaganda by ACDA, discussed below, assumed that shelters giving a protection factor of 70 in reality would not be occupied very much after a nuclear attack, with most people stupidly going outside for hours each day, allowing the ACDA to reduce the "effective" protection factor by a factor of 7, so as to reduce a protection factor of 70 to just 10. This was also done in all U.S. Department of Defense civil defense studies. Hence, huge fallout casualties could be predicted by such faked assumptions about civil defense, in order to dismiss civil defense as a "waste of resources"! When Reagan's civil defense expert at Boeing Corporation, T. K. Jones, debunked this propaganda trick, the mass media launched deluded hate attacks on him personally, ignoring the technical arguments entirely. This is what happened to everyone who debunked gas knockout blow liars in the 1930s. Fake "pacifists" go away with it.)
"We must recognise that the stability we want in a system is more than just stability against accidental war or even against an attack by the enemy. We also want stability against extreme provocation [e.g. invasion of allies, which then escalates as per invasion of Belgium 1914, or Poland 1939]." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 53(footnote).
Kahn's 1960 On thermonuclear war is a set of three lectures, and he testified to Congress that negative "reviewers" such as Scientific American hadn't got past lecture 1 (a debunking of popular mass media 1950s exaggerations of nuclear weapons effects made by the arms control and disarmament lobby and by communists to undermine credible deterrence of war for their own agendas, which required war to keep in in jobs). Lecture 2 is war planning for credible deterrence, and Lecture 3 is an analysis of two real world wars and half a dozen hypothetical ones. Chapter VIII - The real past, begins with an analysis of WWI, where (p350) "both the military and political lessons of the American Civil War were ignored ... most people [led particularly by Sir Norman Angell's anti-war propaganda lies book "The Great Illusion"] ... argued that the economic interdependence of nations was so great that the sheer interruption of normal commerce would cause a collapse after a few weeks or months in much the same way that people argue today that if the A country (big cities) is destroyed [in WWIII], then B country (small cities, rural areas) must also necessarily collapse. Therefore, almost everybody expected the war of 1914 to be short ... the famous Schlieffen Plan ... called for them to destroy the French army in about 6 weeks, then move their army to the Russian front and destroy the Russians ... Both sides enormously underestimated the impact of the machine gun [this is false; the problem was such weapons were EXAGGERATED and instead of delivering the promised knockout blow, they led the enemy to adopt duck-and-cover trench warfare, thus slowing down - rather than speeding up - war, in other words what was "underestimated" was the fact that military technology would prevent rather than permit knock-out blows. Kahn does then go on to point out that de Bloch argued that everyone will be in trenches as a result of explosives etc, but de Bloch also falsely claimed that this would make war "impossible". In other words, nobody could predict reality. Human nature is beyond the kind of logic available to humans to predict accurately. Kahn goes on to point out that instead of grasping the truth, even during WWI, people kept on trying to achieve knock-out blows to speed up victory, e.g. poison gas, tanks, submarines, and air bombing. All these innovations were inplemented as cautions scientific experiments, alerting the enemy and losing the "factor of surprise", without achieving the knock-out blow promised. The other side were given the time to invent a defensive measure, or to launch counter-attacks of their own. After WWI, historians for "pacifism" tried to ignore the Schlieffen Plan and instead claim that the war was the result of an arms race mobilization accident and could have been prevented by disarmament and "settling differences peacefully without violence", thus leading to the peaceniks, encouraging and rewarding aggression, hence WWII.]" Kahn summarizes on p378 (italics his own): "The whole history of the 1933-1939 period is a clear example of the failure of Type II and Type III deterrence."
Kahn also debunks the use of strategic "ambiguity" as a deterrent, in the case of an aggressor who keeps testing your resolve: ambiguity worked against the UK in the 1930s where nobody would take the Nazi threat seriously until it was unambiguous (too late), and he also points out that even in 1914, deterrence failed because nobody wanted to use an unambiguous deterrent until others had mobilized, at which time it obviously was too late! E.g. Germany wanted unambiguous proof that Russia was mobilizing, before it mobilized! The UK's Liberal peacenik Government similarly refused to say what would happen if Germany invaded Belgium, thus keeping deterrence of that act weak/ambiguous, until it was too late! The whole point of nuclear weapons is that, being small, you don't need to turn out a million soldiers at your frontier to defend it, causing crisis instability of the 1914 type. You can eliminate the ambiguity that led to the invasion of Belgium in 1914 and of Europe in the 1930s! Instead, the current nuclear "peacenik"-inspired insanity is a policy to try to make the nuclear deterrent as ambiguous as the conventional deterrents in 1914 and 1939, i.e. to engineer a failure, in which the enemy is encouraged to keep testing your resolve and pushing at your ambiguous deterrent to see how far they can go. We're doing this in the Ukraine War: Putin says that anyone assisting Ukraine in attacking Russia is to be viewed as a enemy. We have gradually increased our support to Ukraine, testing how far we can go without triggering WWIII, thus exploiting Russian nuclear deterrent ambiguity. This strategy used to be called after mathematician Bayes' theorem, "Bayesian statistics", whereby you use information gained over time to alter your assessment of the likelyhood of something occurring. E.g. if you haven't a clue to begin with, you start by assuming arbitrarily that the probability of a nuclear war this year is 0.5 (because there are two alternatives, and you have no knowledge which is more likely), and you reduce the probability with each year that goes by without nuclear war breaking out according to the formula given by Bayes' theorem. There is a problem with this, however: Bayes' theorem implicitly assumes that you are dealing with a totally random event, i.e. that the probability of occurrence per unit of time does not change (evolve) over time! You're only quantifying your ignorance of an assumed fixed probability on this naive assumption, and you're making the implicit assumption that there is no mechanism that ensures that the true probability (as opposed to your evolving estimate of it) will really increase over time, so a crisis will escalate into nuclear war sooner or later due to deterioration of your deterrent (e.g. physical corrosion or gradual erosion of political will to use it, causing a gradual failure of credibility of the deterrent to prevent enemy provocations, etc.).
In other words, if you tried to use Bayes' theorem to "predict" the chance of your car going wrong or a person dying, your estimates of the calculated probability of failure will FALSELY decrease year after year before the failure occurs, when in fact they must be increasing, because there is a cumulative, increasing failure mechanism possible for such mechanical or biological systems, whereby the actual risk of failure will increase as time passes, if maintenance is not done. So people will, using Bayes' theorem, become complacent with a deterrent that works well, and start arguing that it is a waste of money to maintain it, simply because it has not failed so far, as if that is evidence proving it is very unlikely to go wrong: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" But in reality, like a 100 year old person, or a car with 100,000 miles on the clock, common sense should tell you that the risk of failure may not really be decreasing with time, and cannot wait for a nuclear deterrent to break down, before maintaining it, upgrading it, or replacing it! E.g. the UK "deterrent" policy for years since abandoning its tactical WE177 nuclear bombs in the 1990s under pressure from the USA, was to have 4 Trident subs; but the threat from a host of enemy states is increasing, so the credibility of our deterrent is being eroded, just as it was in the 1920-1930s, leading to failure of credibility and thus the destruction and slaughter in WWII. Related to this, populist exaggerations of the deterrent threat - to ridicule civil defense that makes deterrence credible, and thus force serious consideration of appeasement/arms control - also acts to make your own deterrent incredible, as Kahn points out on page 376 of OTW: the UK before WWII believed in a knockout blow of 50 physical casualties plus 150 mental casualties per ton of bombs (200 casualties/ton, 75% mental) dropped on the UK, when in fact with civil defense (shelters and masks to deter gas), casualties were lower by a factor of 100 (even when many people became complacent and just ducked and covered, rather than taking shelter in air raids). In other words, no matter how many gas or nuclear bombs you have stockpiled, if you don't have credible civil defense against retaliation (which means something that people understand will work, based on evidence that can survive enemy/fellow traveller type anti-civil defense propaganda attacks), then the enemy can call your bluff, as Hitler did. Rather than increasing deterrence, this "pacifist" backed exaggeration of offensive capabilities by the fake news "ridicule" of civil defense played into enemy hands, and undermined deterrence, increasing the risk of war! It's always been taboo to say this, because these fake "pacifists" have had powerful media fascists/fellow travellers supporting them (throughout history). On p378, Kahn points out that this stupid complacency (partly due to official secrecy on the efficiency of weapons and civil defense countermeasures) was partly financial at its root, since even as late as 1938, the UK allocated a budget of only about £300 million a year for defense, compared to £1,000 million a year being spent by the enemy, as Chamberlain had confirmed when Chancellor of the Exchequer, before becoming Prime Minister:
"The longer they put off using their superior power, the less credible it became that it would ever be used. Finally, their power itself became inferior, so that even when its use was seriously threatened, the German government was no longer impressed. ... the British and French should have known that Hitler was very unlikely to stop at any reasonable point unless confronted with superior power and determination."
ABOVE: Anti-nuclear propaganda focusses on burned out areas of wood-frame housing, overwhelmingly due - according to an extensive survey of Hiroshima inhabitants in the SECRET CLASSIFIED USSBS report 92, volume 2, EXCLUDED FROM ALL UNCLASSIFIED VERSIONS AND GLASSTONE BOOKS - to overturned now-obsolete breakfast charcoal braziers at 8.30am in Hiroshima, NOT to thermal flash ignition. This photo is of a collapsed flimsy warehouse on Eneman Island at 13.1 miles from the largest Western nuclear test, 15 megaton Bravo in 1954. Note that the only fire on this island was due to an electrical short circuit, not thermal effects. The photo on the left of Bravo was taken by an aircraft flying above cloud cover. Targets on the ground are shielded by intervening clouds and building skylines in real cities, which are not well modelled by deserts or atolls. Modern city-style brick houses simply did not burn down at nuclear tests, nor did whitewashed wooden houses, even when they were exposed to the fireball without any intervening city skyline shadowing:
ABOVE: tree snapped off by nuclear blast at 6,000ft range during Operation Tumbler Snapper, Nevada, in 1952 (Project 3.3), but not ignited by the thermal flash.
On page 182 of "award winning journalist" (extreme left wing anti-nuclear propagandarist) Fred J. Cook's 1964 Barry Goldwater: Extremist of the Right (Evergreen Book, New York), the 1964 Republican Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater is quoted arguing that the Ho Ching Ming Trail supply routes of the Vietcong can be stopped since "defoliation of the forests by low-yield atomic weapons could well be done." No reasons are given against this way to peacefully and safely avoid escalating the Vietnam War into the costly, deadly carnage of conventional warfare. On page 183, this book again attacks "Goldwater's militant pronouncements about brinkmanship and defoliating the Vietnam forests ... one can hardly feel comfortable at the thought that here is the man to whom Americans might entrust the decision of peace or war and the custody of nuclear bombs." Instead of discussing the hard facts on how nuclear weapons can end bloodshed and mass destruction by costly conventional war, the author uses precisely the anti-nuclear hysterical smear-mongering that Robert Scheer used later in his similarly bogus attack on Reagan's efforts to end the Cold War by increasing the credibility of our nuclear deterrent to take away any hope of Russian victory in WWIII. Both books (Cook and Scheer) are similar in focussing a lot of attention on "McCarthyism", with the authors claiming that ruthlessly rooting out suspected enemy agents in the government was undemocratic, even after the Fuchs and Cambridge Spy Ring scandals, while hypocritically condemning the freedom of speech by those who oppose the extremist tyranny imposed from bureaucracy against progress in making the world peaceful and secure. Reagan simply made the factual point that in an emergency you can save lives and "win" (i.e. not be exterminated into oblivion) a nuclear war imposed by enemy provocation, simply by evacuating those city folk who can't be sheltered easily to rural areas where they can prepare Cresson Kearny type fallout shelters if needed. In other words, exactly what the UK did on 1 September 1939, 48 hours before war (the mustard gas contamination threat in 1939 is analogous to the "fallout radiation" scare mongering today; note Russia has clean tactical weapons since - like Hitler with gas threats - it doesn't particularly want to escalate into radiological warfare retaliation). Scheer simply ignores all the scientific evidence for this, just as Cook ignored all the evidence for the use of nuclear weapons to deter and stop insurgency with fewerer casualties and costs than conventional warfare. The correctly scaled "equivalent megatonnage" of such conventional wars involving millions of conventional bombs is equivalent to nuclear wars involving thousands of warheads; please read on for a technical debunking of populist media fake news exaggerations, e.g a megaton of conventional weapons in WWII caused casualties and damage equivalent to hundreds of megatons of nuclear weapons, when scaling correctly. But the usual ranting, lying anti-nuclear "card playing" political "virtue signalling" propaganda keeps on coming with less and less impact, working against Goldwater in 1964 (probably largely because Johnson was wrongly seen as a member of the Kennedy tribe, having been his Vice-President), but failing in the hands of the Carter-fan club opponents of Reagan and, recently, also failing to prevent the election of Trump. As for Trump, the hate attack on Goldwater in 1964 included fake news claims of racism (Goldwater's family were Polish Jews) and trigger-happy dangers: "The headboard of Goldwater's bed looks almost like the instrument panel of a jet bomber" (Cook, p16), "From the start, Barry was in many respects a problem child, a little hell-raiser. He was a bundle of physical activity, adventurous, combative, an incorrigible prankster. ... purloining his friends' bicycles and hiding them ..." (Cook, p30), and aged 9 he used his mother's revolver to celebrate 4th July: "... Barry stole to his mother's bedside, carefully extracted the revolver without disturbing her, pointed it at the porch roof and blazed away. The barrage jolted the entire neighborhood ..." (Cook, p31), "Goldwater reads and re-reads Karl von Clausewitz's On War" (Cook p183). Oh dear! How shameful to have a sincere and human patriot stand for presidency! Why not just appoint a mad anti-nuclear bigoted robot to wreck the economy and lead the country into defeat? Most sensible folks grasp the old proverb: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. By contrast, the allegedly anti-nuclear folk don't grasp anything other than lies that soon lose their attractiveness, even to the most gullible "idealists". They keep on launching delusional hate attacks based on lies against anyone who genuinely has new ideas, methods, or real dedication.
Due to the failure to use tactical nuclear weapons to deter escalation in the Korean War, 2,500,000 people were killed (including 36,000 Americans and 1,100 British) by conventional fighting and the key cities in Korea were flattened by 635,000 tons of conventional bombs (635 kilotons, including 32,557 tons of napalm) and half the country has had to live in a totalitarian dictatorship ever since. It is analogous to the way Hitler bombed Guernica, killing a third of the population, on 26 April 1937 supposedly to support Franco in the Spanish civil war, but in fact sending out a message of intimidation to Britain and France! Similarly, in Vietnam the Vietcong were supplied by the 1,000 miles Ho Chi Minh Trail which was no wider than 40 miles, and used cover of rainforests (passing through Laos and Cambodia, well away from centres of population to avoid civilian casualties!). A few 99.9% clean 10 megaton air bursts like the revolutionary Dominic-Houstonic Ripple II test of 30 October 1962 would have literally "blown their cover", and allowed the trail to be shut down to win the war, as proved by the 15 megaton Bravo test, where the Pisonia forest on Victor island at 11.8 miles got 2.4 psi peak overpressure, sustaining "Moderate damage" - that photo is in the 1957 Glasstone Effects of Nuclear Weapons, page 241 (shown below). But secret "Jason" anti-nuclear propaganda enforced by anti-nuclear bigot Steven Weinberg and comrades simply lied (see declassified Jason report S-266) that the Vietcong could cut a path through a blown down rainforest with chainsaws at night without any problems moving the debris, being heard, or seen! Also, he claimed the Vietcong could then use the chainsaw-cut route without being spotted or stopped by American helicopter gunships! Weinberg reportedly refused to sign off that secret "Jason" report unless it recommended banning tactical nuclear weapons to end the Vietnam war peacefully, by making up ridiculous lies about the efficiency of chainsaws to somehow move thousands of tons of timber. Weinberg even claims on page 13: "The main weakness of tree blowdown as a method of interdiction is that a tree can only be blown down once." It only needs to be blown down once. You're creating a barrier 20 km wide at any point along a 1,000 mile trail, which you can then focus resources on to halt supplies getting through! You don't need to blow trees down more than once! If somehow they managed to cut a path through the 20 km of blown down debris to allow any significant movement of supplies, you've got the rest of the 1,000 mile long trail to repeat the trick on! The Vietcong would cheaply be defeated this way (contrary to the lying weasel words of the thugs supporting them in secret Jason reports). RESULT: over 7.6 megatons of conventional bombs were dropped in the Vietnam War by the USAF (including botched attempts to conventionally - or chemically with Agent Orange - shut down the Ho Chi Ming Trail in Laos and Cambodia), with the result that 3,300,000 were killed, but the war of attrition was lost due to the inflation of the American economy caused by the immense expense of conventional warfare ($139 billion was spent on that war by US DOD). (No wonder, with arrogant bigoted stupidity like this, that Weinberg's Standard Model contains elementary errors in electroweak symmetry as we have pointed out, and he also promoted quack superstring theory nonsense entirely disconnected with reality in his textbook, without understanding the key quantum gravity evidence. It may not a coincidence that a lot of aloof "quantum field theory" bigots are also smug lying self-serving world war enginnering "disarmers" who don't give a damn about reality.)
ABOVE: chemical Agent Orange failed to blow the cover of the Ho Ching Ming Trail in Vietnam, but caused toxic pollution. Critics of the war claim that South Vietnamese army recruits "mostly" had full time civilian jobs and were just soldiers "on paper", giving their salaries to their corrupt commanding officers in return for permission to avoid training, and just turning up at base for uniform parade once a week! Nevertheless, the abandonment of Vietnam to communists triggered off a wave of communist insurgency throughout South America, and then escalated the Cold War when Russia invaded Afghanistan. As Lawrence of Arabia said, counterinsurgency is too often like "cutting soup with a knife", e.g. the notorious battle for "Hamburger Hill" in Vietnam involved a victory at the price of massive casualties, only to be abandoned a few days after being won. The only way to actually win any kind of peace against insurgents is to cut off their logistics supplies by blowing their cover at specific points on supply routes, which can then be policed. In Malaya, the UK did this by controlling food supplies, but the failure to stop the Ho Ching Ming Trail allowed insurgency to persist in Vietnam, leading in April 1969 to 543,482 Americans in Vietnam following the Vietcong's Tet Offensive of 1968. The West simply can't afford the costs of such conventional wars, especially when they lead to failure. Negotiations with the enemy are no substitute, any more than those with Hitler in September 1938 at Munich, as was seen in Vietnam 1975 and Afghanistan 2021: they will sign any piece of paper promising whatever you want to get you off their back, then when you pull out, they renegade on the deal. Others see how weak you are, and then you get the copycat "domino effect" (e.g., Putin invading Ukraine 2022, Hamas invading Israel 2023; and the wave of commie invasions following withdrawal from Vietnam, e.g. insurgency everwhere including the Russian invasion of Afghanistan which finally ended the delusion of Cold War détente). Negotiations even between UK and USA led to the opposite effects, e.g. see pp5-6 of "International negotiation - American shortcomings in negotiating with Communist powers - Memorandum prepared at the request of the Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations" (pursuant to S. res. 311, 91st. Cong.), US Senate, Committee on Government Operations, 1970 ( https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044059331991&seq=1 ): "In 1958, when the test ban negotiations started, the United Kingdon was the only country, apart from the Soviet Union and the United States, that had tested nuclear weapons. At that time, the U.S. Government felt it was important that the United Kingdom participate ... At any rate, the British Government took full advantage of this American desire to have them included by arguing they culd not agree to stop testing unless they received American assistance for their weapons development ... Thus it came to pass that the first contribution of the test ban negotiations was to ENHANCE nuclear proliferation. This amendment in the Atomic Energy Act, favoring the British weapons development, became a spur to other countries ..." (This claim by Dr Fred Ikle is in fact technically counter-factual regarding USA-UK interchange, because in fact the USA in 1958 obtained extensive data on UK thermonuclear tests with spherical secondary stages of great use to its own development of "Tuba" etc for compact SLBM and ICBM warheads; and only got one cylindrical secondary design of use from the USA in return, the B28 which the UK produced as "Red Snow", see https://vixra.org/abs/2312.0155 for the technical details.)
ABOVE: Ontos aka M-50 wrecked by 74 kt Hood blast precursor, during project 2.4 of Operation Plumbbob. SOURCE: Robert C. Tompkins, C. Weaver, and G. Peterson, Neutron and Initial Gamma Shielding, Operation Plumbbob Project 2.4, Weapon test report WT-1413, U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Laboratories, AD/A995 035, 1957: "The shielding characteristics of M-48 tanks, Ontos vehicles, and hemispheres of standard and plastic laminated tank armor were studied during Shots Franklin, Lassen, Wilson, and Hood. ... The neutron inside/outside dose ratio in the M-48 tank varied from 0.28 to 0.59 ... The neutron inside/outside dose ratio for the Ontos vehicle was about 0.58 ... An M-48 tank crew can be killed by initial nuclear radiation from a tactical nuclear weapon at ranges where the tank sustains no blast damage. The only observable residual activity induced in tank armor was Mn-56 (half life = 2.58 hours); the dose delivered to the crew by residual radiation was insignificant compared to the initial radiation. The plastic-laminated armor apparently reduced the measured neutron dose twice as effectively as the standard armor, but the spectral data suggests that all the neutron dose may not have been measured." (Note: these were all essentially fission tests with ~1 Mev neutrons; the neutron bomb uses D+T fusion to release far more penetrating 14.1 Mev neutrons.)
There's an excellent and very personal account of this controversy in section H, "Project Vista", of chapter 5 of Lt-General James M. Gavin's 1958 book War and Peace in the Space Age where Gavin describes in detail his involvement in the Korean War background to "Project Vista", the major 1951 study of tactical nuclear deterrence of world wars, which developed into a war between the US Air Force strategic bombing deterrence advocates like Norstad and LeMay and the former wartime Los Alamos director, J. R. Oppenheimer, who was a very hard line proponent of ending wars using tactical nuclear deterrence, which really got to people like Teller and also Generals Norstad and LeMay in the USAF, who were obsessed with strategic nuclear deterrence (bombing cities, not deterring invasions; thus the key reason why tactical nuclear effects aren't in the Glasstone book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons whose unclassified contents range in 1957 was dictated by the strategic deterrence supporter US Atomic Energy Commission Chair, Lewis Strauss):
"Unfortunately, the early enthusiasm of the Air Force began to wane when it was realised that increasing emphasis on tactical air support and tactical airlift would conflict with Air Force views on strategic air power. At the same time, the Air Force began to suspect the views of Dr Oppenheimer. Earlier he had opposed the development of the thermonuclear bomb and now he was recommending a diversion of our nuclear resources to the tactical battle. ... This ... ran contrary to the basic theory of the strategic air power enthusiasts; that an all-out air offensive was the only sound tactic, and any diversion to defense was a waste. Dr Oppenheimer's work with Vista came under close scrutiny. ... In November 1951, at a Vista conference at Caltech, Dr Dubridge presented a preliminary draft of its proposed report, including a chapter that Oppenheimer had written. It produced an explosion in the Air Force. Oppenheimer had transformed Vista into an exercise for rewriting US strategy - an exercise introduced by a veiled suggestion the Air Force doctrine was based upon the slaughter of civilians. ... Oppenheimer had proposed that a substantial part of the atomic stockpile should be diverted from SAC [LeMay's Strategic Air Command] to the direct support of the ground battle. ... The objective, as stated in Vista, was 'bringing the battle back to the battlefield.' In December of 1951, Oppenheimer, Dubridge and Lauritsen went to Paris and talked to Eisenhower. Norstad entered an uncompromising dissent to the Vista report. [Footnote reference: "The Hidden Struggle for the H-Bomb", Fortune, May 1953, p109.] About a year or so later, I mentioned the Vista report to General Norstad and he used strong langauge in his denunciation of it. ... Unfortunately, Dr Oppenheimer was in trouble, and his participation in Vista added to the aura of suspicion with which the Big Bomber advocates were now surrounding him. As The Reporter expressed it in an editorial some years later, [December 26, 1957]: [Oppenheimer's] urging that ways be found to bring war back to the battlefield was considered preposterous if not treasonable. ... There was something quite sinister in a scientist who concerned himself with defense as Oppenheimer did. ... The Vista report was submitted to the Secretaries of the several services in February of 1952. It has never been officially approved." (SOURCE: pages 133-4 of the 1959 UK edition of Gavin's War and Peace in the Space Age.)
To emphasise this point: certain well-meaning military elements (like Norstad and LeMay of SAC) and certain well-meaning scientists (like Teller) put the boot into Oppenheimer's secret plan to focus on tactical nuclear deterrence of the invasions that set off both world wars. Instead, they went along with the incredible deterrent, called by Dulles "massive retaliation," or by Herman Kahn "Type 1 Deterrence", which failed in 1914 and in 1939. What we need is a way of deterring or stopping invasions that spark wars. Merely deploying tactical W79 neutron bombs in the 1980s brought out mass protests by Russians and fellow travellers, which proved it was a credible deterrent. Russia stopped further invasions in this period, and the USSR collapsed (after a few more Western defensive kicks, including SDI/Star Wars advanced ABM defense propaganda). Massive retaliation, by contrast, was a failure in WWII according to the US Strategic Bombing Survey, and is riddled with incredible ambiguity (it's an incredible deterrent that can't credibly deter the provocations that led to both world wars). Lt General Gavin, in the US Army, along with General Maxwell D. Taylor, masterminded President Kennedy's "flexible response" deterrent policy. This was undermined by the unilateral disarmament of all dedicated tactical nuclear weapons in 1992, to appease "arms control and disarmament" lunacy, itself due to Glasstone's failure to include the neutron bomb in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. This has to change if we are to have peace.
Just in case you think that Lt General Gavin's account of tactical nuclear weapons politics above is "theoretical opinion" by a desk-bound bureaucrat, let's add a bit more context from his book, Chapter 5: Combat is a Crucible,. Gavin on 9 July 1943, as Commander of the 505th parachute Combat Team, spearheaded a 3,000 strong airborne invasion of Sicily, which aimed to secure the airfield and beaches 6 hours prior to the main amphibious landing. At the last moment, 35 miles/hour winds scattered the paratroops over rugged landscape, their carbines jammed in combat, and the usual "fog of war" quickly descended (note we quote here Gavin debunking the so-called "bazooka anti-tank alternative to tactical nuclear weapons" Hans Bethe-mythology; the reality is that bazookas are fine for overcoming dispersed tank invasions which are produced by us having a tactical nuclear deterrent to force the enemy to disperse their tanks rather than concentrate them into nuclear targets, but against concentrated tank assaults - which you get when you can't deter the enemy from concentrating force for an invasion because you don't have tactical nuclear weapons - bazookas are simply proved by war experiembe to NOT be the quick-fix alternative to tactical nuclear weapons that compulsive liars claim them to be):
"Now, 24 hours later, I surveyed the results of the first day's fighting. As well as I could tell, it had been an absolute shambles. The regiment was scattered like chaff in the wind, and possibly destroyed. ... It had been a hard day ... First, there was the inadequacy of our weapons. It is nothing short of homocidal to send American young men into combat with weapons not up to the job that confronts them. We needed a more reliable, faster-firing hand weapon than the carbine. And above all, we needed a tank killer ... Next, training had to be more realistic, so tough and exacting that combat would be a welcome relief. ... George Patton's last words to us before we left Africa came home with meaning: 'No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country." ... The bazooka rockets were bouncing off the tanks and the tanks were then chewing the troopers to pieces. The next day we actually buried some troopers with pieces of bazooka ground into them by tank tracks. We captured one tank by grenading the crew when they came out ... The tank had four bazooka hits on it, none of which penetrated. ... In their post-war account of the Sicilian fighting, the Germans reported their first capture of a bazooka. They sent it back to Germany, tested it, found its defects and corrected them, and went into production on an improved model. When we landed in Normandy less than a year later, we were met with a large bazooka, about 3.5 inches in diameter. We were still equipped with the small 2.36-inch size. As a matter of fact, our infantry was still equipped with the 2.36-inch bazooka seven years later, in July of 1950, when it was attacked by Russian T-34 tanks manned by the North Koreans. ... once again ... the rockets were bouncing off the tanks. ... There are numerous examples of weapons ... being delayed because the individuals who have funding control do not, or simply will not, understand the need of the fighting man in the field." (Quote: pages 69-75 of the 1959 UK edition of Gavin's book. I don't need to say that the final sentence here might as well have come out of President Zelensky's mouth a minute ago, regarding the supply of weapons to Ukraine after Russia's invasion. Will they ever learn?)
Regarding war crimes, Lt General Gavin also participated in the paratroop invasion of mainland Europe including the liberation of a concentration aka extermination camp near Ludwigslust, Mecklenburg (War and Peace in the Space Age, UK edition, 1959, page 197): "It seemed incredible that man could be so inhuman to his fellow man, and to all of us who liberated that camp it will remain forever in our memories as a symbol of totalitarianism. If there ever had been doubt about what we were fighting for, at that moment it was removed forever from our minds. It was to rid the earth of man's inhumanity to man, to protect and foster the way of life of free men, and, if necessary, to fight for that way of life. It is too bad that so many must see in order to believe. ... The way to freedom was not easy. Nature and recurring war combined to test our physical mettle and spiritual dedication." Gavin sums up the problem with the following very hard-hitting and politically-inexpedient quotation from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, contrasting American "freedom" to Russian "imperialism" agendas:
"The American struggles against the obstacles that nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men. The former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization ... The conquests of the American are therefore gained by the ploughshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centres all the authority of society ... The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe."
ABOVE: Teller and Ulam in their original 1951 report suggested that "several" fission primaries could be used to ignite the secondary stage, an innovation since February 1958 applied by Russia to low yield very high fusion percentage nuclear weapons, yet ignored entirely in the West. This type of "alternative idea" is crucially important for progress in low cost tactical nuclear weapons design for credible deterrence of invasions! We must test it now, and proceed with civil defence and ABM against escalation risks, as the Russians did decades ago. The thing is, if you have one primary, you have problems with using it for a clean bomb of high yield to mass ratio, because to get x-rays uniformly around the secondary is virtually impossible without a very heavy thick outer casing "hohlraum" to confine the x-rays while they are dispersed uniformly around the secondary (which means a slow fusion ignition, needing a heavy outer casing to confine the x-rays for the slow ignition to take place). So you have to use a dense, thick hohlraum or case (to confine x rays for as long as possible) and a low density plastic disperser of x-rays, which slows down (as well as dispersing) the x ray transport from primary to secondary. This is why the early efforts at clean weapons went wrong, leading to both huge mass to yield ratios and low neutron output! On the other hand, if you have one primary each side of a prolate spheroid shape low density (Li6D etc) secondary as the Russians (Project 49, first tested by Russia on 23 February 1958), you don't need either plastic foam disperser or a very thick outer casing, so the reaction goes very fast, allowing effective neutron bombs as Charles Grace pointed out! That's the Russian approach. Livermore physicist Herbert York and others developed single-primary versions Linda, Flute and Piccolo (all 2.4 times less effective on a total yield to mass basis, than the Russian double-primary system), which led to the lightweight American SLBM warheads, but with a great cost penalty in that they used a U235 pusher and although that could be replaced by lead, you then for low total yields you needed a secondary stage of pressurised expensive radioactive (12.3 years half life) tritium and deuterium gas for a neutron bomb. But the Russian approach, more intuitive and experimental and less a matter of optimising one dogmatic (single primary) concept using computer simulations, showed that ou can use two such double-primary devices to implode another, larger, fusion stage, allowing a cheaper staged device giving over 99% clean weapon, still at relatively low yield. The key information (scattered in various Russian books, papers and news interviewers of the nuclear weaponeers who were recently awarded prizes by Putin) has effectively been declassified in connection with clean peaceful nuclear devices, but it is basically the same technology as used for Russian neutron deterrence. In addition, Herman Kahn pointed out key problems with "sensible" groupthink civil defense procrastination which is vital to deter escalations of limited nuclear warfare, e.g. if you wait until a crisis before you release civil defense manuals or shelter building advice like the UK Government's 1980 Protect and Survive and 1981-2 Domestic Nuclear Shelters Technical Guidance (two editions) to the public, then "virtue-signalling" BBC and other mass media will do what they did in the 1920s and 1930s, i.e. simply dismissing "unfashionable" facts as "lying, war mongering propaganda", and the enemy will use it as an excuse to escalate their war preparations. (Or in the case of so-called "Scientific American", publishing a bogus "review" of Herman Kahn's 1960 "On Thermonuclear War", claiming that the author doesn't exist, misunderstanding the the whole point of civil defense to make deterrence credible so as to avert war, etc., etc.) In addition, it takes time to manufacture radiation meters, to build shelters, and to arrange evacuation plans, and especially, to educate thousands of fake news "journalists" aka deceit financed lying propagandarists who are deluded by the left wing Russian funded Sputnik "conspiracy" (really, "fashionable fascism"). We need to face the facts on Russian progress now. It has been declassified by Russia, on the basis that their relatively clean tactical nuclear weapons were like their nuclear shelters "dual use", i.e. a low yield fusion device could be used for peaceful canal creation or for battlefield defense, just as their underground bunkers are used as car parks in peacetime, an economically viable concept which is completely alien to most extravagance-biased studies of civil defense:
President Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961: "They send arms, agitators, aid, technicians and propaganda to every troubled area. But where fighting is required, it is usually done by others ... With these formidable weapons, the adversaries of freedom plan to consolidate their territory ... We stand, as we have always stood from our earliest beginnings, for the independence and equality of all nations. This nation was born of revolution and raised in freedom. And we do not intend to leave an open road for despotism. ... no amount of arms and armies can help stabilize those governments which are unable or unwilling to achieve social and economic reform and development. Military pacts cannot help nations whose social injustice and economic chaos invite insurgency and penetration and subversion. The most skillful counter-guerrilla efforts cannot succeed where the local population is too caught up in its own misery ... One major element of the national security program which this nation has never squarely faced up to is civil defense. ... Public considerations have been largely characterized by apathy, indifference and skepticism ... But this deterrent concept assumes rational calculations by rational men. And the history of this planet, and particularly the history of the 20th century, is sufficient to remind us of the possibilities of an irrational attack, a miscalculation, an accidental war, or a war of escalation in which the stakes by each side gradually increase to the point of maximum danger, which cannot be either foreseen or deterred. It is on this basis that civil defense can be readily justifiable - as insurance for the civilian population in case of an enemy miscalculation. It is insurance we trust will never be needed - but insurance which we could never forgive ourselves for foregoing in the event of catastrophe. ... there is no point in delaying the initiation of a nation-wide long-range program of identifying present fallout shelter capacity and providing shelter in new and existing structures. Such a program would protect millions of people against the hazards of radioactive fallout in the event of large-scale nuclear attack. [Emphasis added.] ... Therefore, under the authority vested in me by Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1958, I am assigning responsibility for this program to the top civilian authority already responsible for continental defense, the Secretary of Defense. ... no insurance is cost-free; and every American citizen and his community must decide for themselves whether this form of survival insurance justifies the expenditure of effort, time and money. For myself, I am convinced that it does." (This is now "taboo" for obvious reasons, so the version on the JFK Library site is just an extract omitting all the above, and just quoting Kennedy's politically-correct Moon-landing idea fro the end of the speech!)
President Kennedy, TV and radio address July 25, 1961: "We intend to have a wider choice than humiliation or all-out nuclear action. ... In May, I pledged a new start on Civil Defense. Last week, I assigned, on the recommendation of the Civil Defense Director, basic responsibility for this program to the Secretary of Defense, to make certain it is administered and coordinated with our continental defense efforts at the highest civilian level. Tomorrow, I am requesting of the Congress new funds for the following immediate objectives: to identify and mark space in existing structures - public and private - that could be used for fall-out shelters in case of attack; to stock those shelters with food, water, first-aid kits and other minimum essentials for survival; to increase their capacity; to improve our air-raid warning and fallout detection systems, including a new household warning system which is now under development; and to take other measures that will be effective at an early date to save millions of lives if needed. In the event of an attack, the lives of those families which are not hit in a nuclear blast and fire can still be saved - if they can be warned to take shelter and if that shelter is available. We owe that kind of insurance to our families - and to our country. In contrast to our friends in Europe, the need for this kind of protection is new to our shores. But the time to start is now. In the coming months, I hope to let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of attack. I know that you will want to do no less. The addition of $207 million in Civil Defense appropriations [Herman Kahn (RAND Corp), had recommended in his testimony to US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Hearings on Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 26 June 1959, page 915 that $100 million be spent on buying 2 million radiation dose rate meters etc, $150 million be spent on identifying and stocking basement shelter spaces in existing buildings, etc.] brings our total new defense budget requests to $3.454 billion, and a total of $47.5 billion for the year. This is an increase in the defense budget of $6 billion since January, and has resulted in official estimates of a budget deficit of over $5 billion. The Secretary of the Treasury and other economic advisers assure me, however, that our economy has the capacity to bear this new request. ... I realize that no public revenue measure is welcomed by everyone. But I am certain that every American wants to pay his fair share, and not leave the burden of defending freedom entirely to those who bear arms. For we have mortgaged our very future on this defense - and we cannot fail to meet our responsibilities. ... For the choice of peace or war is largely theirs, not ours. It is the Soviets who have stirred up this crisis. It is they who are trying to force a change. It is they who have opposed free elections. ... Three times in my life-time our country and Europe have been involved in major wars. In each case serious misjudgments were made on both sides of the intentions of others, which brought about great devastation."
By focussing exclusively on civilian (not military!) targets, but using solely free-field desert or ocean "effects data" unsuited to cities, Glasstone's data is an exaggeration of casualties by a factor of well over 100, on Hiroshima evidence for people unshielded outdoors, compared to those in lower floors of concrete buildings or simple low-cost dual-use shelters! Glasstone and Dolan 1977 actually give this evidence but only in their usual in highly abstract form that is widely ignored in Table 12.17 on p546 - though you need to square their median lethality radii to get the relative casualty areas for the open and for concrete buildings in Hiroshima - and for simple cheap British WWII type large earth covered Anderson shelters and concrete arches in Table 5.160 (collapse at 45-60 psi overpressure for 20-25 ft span Anderson type shelters with 5ft earth cover at crown; 220-280 psi for collapse of buried 8" thick 16 ft span concrete arch with 4' earth cover at crown). They also show in Table 7.35 on p287 that white cotton (8 oz per square yard) requires 32, 48 and 85 cal/cm2 thermal exposure to ignite in nuclear bursts of 35 kt, 1.4 megaton and 20 megatons, respectively, compared to their data for bare skin blistering at 4-7 cal/cm2 in their Figure 12.65 on p565. In Figure 12.70 on p567 they show a survivor with only burns to bare skin in Hiroshima, with no burns under a cap and clothing, at 5.5-6 cal/cm^2 (which the 1979 US Office of Technology Assessment "Effects of Nuclear War" falsely claim is "lethal"). But by removing the crucial nuclear testing photographs and the civil defense chapter evidence from the 1957 edition, the 1977 edition became a gift to anti-civil defense, nuclear disarmament fanatics (scroll down to see the original reason for this in the US Strategic Bombing Command row with Oppenheimer regarding strategic bombing deterrence failure prior to WWII and during WWII, vs tactical deterrence of the invasions that actually set off world wars).
BELOW: the June 1957 edition of Glasstone's "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" debunked firestorms using examples from Operation Castle nuclear tests 110 kt Koon and 15 megaton Bravo: no firestorms occurred in natural pisonia forests at 1.76 miles from 110 kt surface burst and at 11.8 miles from 15 megatons surface burst, contrary to that book's claims about the ignition energies of fine forest kindling at such distances from such yields! The problem is, Glasstone totally failed to point this out in the 1957 edition where he gives the photos OUT OF CONTEXT, like everything else in the book (from secret weapon test report WT-921 and the secret film "Military Effects Studies on Operation Castle")! Glasstone then deleted these vital photos from all future editions of his book, along with the Nevada bomb test 100 psi peak overpressure proved shelter design in Figure 12.54 on page 522 of the 1957 edition, the photos of blast walls protecting transformers and machinery at Nagasaki (pages 514-5) and photos of shallow trenches protecting road graders and bullzozers at 30 psi peak overpressure at the Teapot-MET nuclear test (pages 516-7)! Further, the results for civil defence from the Upshot-Knothole Encore nuclear test on thermal ignition in dry Nevada desert conditions (pages 318-321, including photos) is deleted from the 1977 edition. The result is a total disconnection with reality, removing the key nuclear test data showing factual evidence for thermal ignition and how to avoid it! This turned "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1977" into a left-wing bogus effects propaganda book, omitting all military effects and all key nuclear test data! In particular, the 1977 removal of the final "Principles of protection" chapter took out the vitally important data in the earlier editions. The result is a confused and misleading book, completely ignoring all tactical nuclear weapons effects experience for credibly deterring the invasions that set off both world wars (for example, the third-party invasions of Belgium in 1914 and of Poland in 1939, which both triggered World Wars; invasions which could NOT be credibly deterred by a "strategic deterrent"!). The entire "arms control and disarmament" Russian front is paranoid in censoring all the truth from public debate.
Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons (like all subsequent editions) massively exaggerated the outdoor lethal fallout areas for megaton surface bursts: Glasstone (1957) claims that the 3000 R/hr at 1 hour elliptical area under 15 miles/hour wind extends 22 miles downwind, with 3.1 miles maximum width, giving an area of (Pi/4)(Length = 22)(Width = 3.1) = 54 square miles, contrasted to just 28 square miles in Figure 4-14B of the 1957 Confidential TM 23-200 (forerunner of EM-1) Capabilities of Atomic Weapons! Similarly, for 1000 R/hr Glasstone (1957) gives an area of (Pi/4)(40)(6.8) = 212 square miles, contrasted to just 100 square miles given in the Confidential TM 23-200 (1957) Fig. 4-14B. George R. Stanbury OBE of the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch spotted this and compared both sets of data to Tewa nuclear test fallout pattern to ascertain the error; he also debunked the firestorm theory by showing that shadows cast by high rise concrete buildings in modern cities shield the thermal flash, preventing firestorms and related phenomena like soot generated "nuclear winter"; Stanbury's extensive data was kept secret by the UK government, as discussed below, just as it had kept secret evidence on gas mask effectiveness in the 1920s and 1930s, allowing evil lying fascism-obsessed thug "disarmer" Lord Noel-Baker to falsely dismiss gas masks for long enough to enable appeasers to help Hitler massacre millions.
Glasstone (1957) Table 7.65 states that shredded newspaper is ignited by 4 cal/cm2 for 10 megatons; Glasstone (1964) Table 7.44 states it needs 11 cal/cm2 to ignite for the same yield! GLASSTONE GAVE NO EXPLANATION WHATSOEVER FOR SUCH CHANGES. Similarly, for 10 megatons, 10 oz/yard2 blue cotton denim is stated to ignite at just 13 cal/cm2 in Table 7.61 of Glasstone (1957), contrasted to 44 cal/cm2 in Table 7.40 of Glasstone (1964)! No explanation is given for the massive changes, and no references are provided. However, recently declassified documents prove that the equilibrium water content at different humidity levels produces massive changes in ignition energies because it takes 540 calories to evaporate (i.e. change the state) just 1 gram of boiling water (plus still more energy to get the water to 100C, before boiling it off). This is necessary for damp fuel simply because the ignition temperature is well above the boiling point of water! Duh! But no mention of this highly relevant quantitative fact is given by Glasstone, although he had been a Professor of physical chemistry!
Glasstone does mention on page 303 of the 1957 edition, vaguely, in connection with clothing ignition (not fire tindering!) - without any numbers or even stating what humidity level his data apply to: "The moisture content is also an important factor; the larger the amount of moisture in the fabric, the greater is the energy required to ignite it." Most modern cities, including London, New York, San Francisco, and Moscow, are built beside rivers, lakes or the ocean, so have relatively higher humidity levels than specimens left to dry out in the Nevada desert at nuclear tests.
ABOVE: Confidential classified nuclear weapon test report WT-775 proves that the large effect of humidity and thus fuel water content on thermal ignition energy was known prior to the 1957 Glasstone Effects of Nuclear Weapons but, like the secret classified US Strategic Bombing Survey 6 volumes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which proved the facts of the firestorm in direct contrast to lies circulated in Glasstone's book, the data was simply excluded from publication. The equilibrium moisture content of unpainted wood or fine kindling is about 20% of the relative humidity, so at 80% humidity "dry" wood exposed to that humid air will contain 0.2*80 = 16% water. Since all common fire fuel ignites at temperatures well above the boiling point of water, each gram of water in fire fuel takes away in excess of 540 calories of energy in boiling off, and it is this fact that makes ignition energy a function of moisture content. Crumpled newspaper, outdoors with a direct view of the fireball unobscured by city buildings, or inside on the top floors of buildings with such a view, facing the fireball, could be ignited "instantly" with "flashover" firespread after drying out at the 19% humidity of the Nevada test site for the Encore nuclear test, but the ignition energy is substantially greater for typical building contents at a more typical 50-80% city humidity level. Also note that even at 19% humidity in Nevada, it took between 5 and 20 minutes for the first 10% of fences to burn in Nevada: contrary to the instantaneous flashover burning for dry crumpled newspaper. Cars only ignited in these Nevada nuclear tests at 19% humidity where the upholstry had been deliberately ripped to expose inflammable seat stuffing, and even then they burned slowly! Glasstone simply OMITS all this key nuclear weapon test evidence from Effects of Nuclear Weapons, leaving instead confusion and ignorance that was exploited by Russian fronts in UK and USA for Western disarmament propaganda, undermining the credibility of our nuclear deterrent against major enemy provocations and invasions.
ABOVE: Hitler's "V6" was the alleged Nazi nuclear weapon. Nazi scientist Dr Eugene Sänger (1905-1964) wrote a lengthy Top Secret report in August 1944, Über einen Raketenantrieb für Fernbomber (German Research Institute for Aviation Secret Command Report UM-3538, LINKED ONLINE HERE) detailing the design for a hybrid V1-V2 style "space plane" codenamed Silbervogel (Silver-bird), very similar in some principles to the NASA Space Shuttle, in order to carry huge incendiary (allegedly nuclear) warheads to New York, Washington D.C., Chicago and Pittsburgh steel plants, to end American involvement in WWII (his report actually contains maps with effects radii, allegedly showing the effects on these targets). This was not a last minute desperate plan to satisfy Hitler's desire for global domination, but the end of a decade of research, Sänger had proposed the concept in his PhD thesis, Raketenflugtechnik (Rocket Flight Engineering) which he published as a book in 1933 after the spacecraft thesis was rejected for being "speculative". He argued that the usual claims about spacecraft speed and immense travel times for spacetravel are bunk because what determines human safety is acceleration, not speed, and even if spacecraft acceleration is limited to just terrestial gravity acceleration a = 1g, in the velocity equation v = at which is then inserted into the relativistic time shift factor, (1 - v2/c2)1/2, then the relativistic time-dilation means that with a poweful propulsion system you can get to the centre of the galaxy in just 18 years or to Andromeda in 26 years (allowing for reversing the thrust direction at half way, to slow down the spacecraft for landing). When Hitler was elected that year, he became a Nazi Party member for a time and was free to proceed with the spacecraft research he wanted to do, which had been prohibited by the straight-laced academics in his university. The 1944 map above showing Sänger's plan to wipe out Manhattan Island, New York, was reprinted as Figure 38 on page 202 of Philip Henshall's 2000 book The Nuclear Axis: Germany, Japan and the Atom Bomb Race, 1939-1945 with the claim it showed a nuclear attack. However, a careful reading of Dr Sänger's report shows an heavy incendiary bomb attack, not necessarily using a nuclear warhead (the gaussian or Bell distribution curve for thermal radiation is not based on a single bomb, but on the statistical distribution of a cluster of chemical incendiaries). In other words, the basic Nazi plan was for annihilation using CONVENTIONAL WEAPONS. A fact deliberately obfuscated!
In a 2006 book called Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo (John Hopkins University press), Professor George H. Quester argues (p5): "World War I did not involve weapons of mass destruction [ignoring all the gas], but it did impose mass destruction by ordinary weapons, once the unthinkable had happened ...", adding (p10): "What we expect the least may cause us the greatest damage and shock, if and when it occurs. The many different ways that nuclear weapons could again come into use range from the very major to the more minor. ... As to the physical impact of such an event, one can envisage nuclear escalations in which no one gets killed and escalations in which millions perish. ... As in all wars and war plans of the past, much will depend on what kinds of targets are hit." He adds (p12): "One often hears references to the 'taboo' on the use of nuclear weapons, but people usually have some difficulty in putting their finger on exactly what they mean by this term. ... it refers to something that we are not willing even to think about ... we simply reject the idea without further thought." (He argues on p15 that the "chemical weapons taboo" was broken by the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, while the hijacked airliner terrorism taboo was broken by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre's Twin Towers in 2001, so calling a threat "taboo" is the height of stupidity.) On page 19, Quester argues: "Some of the scenarios will become possible because nuclear warheads will be improved to have lower yields of radioactivity and blast and heat ... destroying less of the surrounding countryside in the process of repulsing an armored attack. ... the advanced deep-penetration nuclear warheads of the United states or some other major power could be legitimately used to dig out and destroy such a [terrorist] bunker. The world would be less likely to condemn, and more likely to applaud, if the next use of nuclear weapons had the effect of preempting a WMD attack against a major population centre..."
Quester in Chapter 2, "Some Scenarios of Nuclear Escalation" of Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo describes seven kinds of escalatory nuclear war: beginning with "ambiguous attacks" exploiting the fog of surprise war by making it unclear whether there has even been a direct "attack" (which could be done by a high altitude EMP strike or "test" just outside the opponent's airspace, but ensuring the EMP effects reach the opponent; similarly a dictator can "secretly test" a fallout maximising bomb upwind from an opponent's territory, e.g underwater for the same kind of ambiguity), attacks with minimal collateral damage to civilians (e.g. tactical counterforce or high altitude EMP demonstration strikes deliberately over an opponent to intimidate them and their allies), or clear nuclear strikes that may be dressed up with the camouflage of "uncertainty" over who authorised them (are they "just" accidents, insubordination, madness, terrorism, etc?). Quester gives the example of an aircraft or drone crashing into a nuclear waste dump or reactor. Does this break a "nuclear taboo" or not? Do we respond to it by escalating to all-out strategic WWIII? Quester even goes as far as to raise the issue of a "fizzle", an inadvertent nuclear weapon misfire. If a state intentionally drops a megaton "demonstration" weapon, which misfires with only a low kiloton yield (instead of the intended one megaton) due to primary stage boost gas supply failure, it could be a "futile and ridicule provoking act..." (p27). On the other hand, Quester argues on the same page: "An entirely conventional attack could be mistaken for a nuclear attack" if modern high-yield conventional weapons (like WWII's massive "Grand Slam" and "Tallboy" bombs) were used, whose yields overlapped the yields of tactical nuclear weapons (providing that fallout samples were not readily available, which would depend on the depth of burst and weather). Thus Quester argues (p28): "one could imagine many cases of false accusation of nuclear weapons use..." The point is, if a dictator should feel any need to fake a "plausible excuse" for "nuclear retaliation", he could do so using this method of falsely accusing an opponent of first use! Again, Quester argues that the nuclear testing coercion method could be used to shut down an enemy with EMP, running back to Teller's 1945 argument with Oppenheimer over "testing" the first nuclear bomb over Tokyo Bay:
"Similarly ambiguous as to whether it should be counted as a violation of the nuclear taboo would be the initiation of nuclear testing during an ongoing crisis. While the intent would clearly be to intimidate and shake up the opposing side, most analysts would be quick to say that this does not really amount to a crossing of the line. In the past, the Soviets tested massive thermonclear weapons during periods of tension with the West. ... Such tests would have come closer to the line if they were conducted in close physical proximity to the opposing side or perhaps high in the air over some disputed territory or over international waters. ... Pushing such a marginal case further, a possessor of nuclear weapons might choose to conduct a 'test' detonation at the tensest time of some political or military crisis, a detination which might ... inflict substantial electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effects. Where the nuclear explosion did not directly violate the sovereignty of other countries, as determined by existing boundaries ... this might be viewed as nothing more than saber-rattling ..." - Quester, Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo, p29. Clearly this sort of "fog of war" attack could do immense economic damage (by shutting off electric power until massive custom-made transformers are repaired or replaced) without inviting MAD type retaliation; most people might want tit-for-tat deterrence, not escalation to a general countervalue WWIII. Again, the "mad general" or "Dr Strangelove" theory of "accidental" nuclear war can be illuminated by simple KGB/FSB style "Fourth Protocol" plots: Putin sent two agents to the UK with Novichok to launch a nerve agent attack in Salisbury in 2018. He denied the whole thing, but the fact is, he could similarly provide the agents with a nuclear device, smuggled in by Russian submarine and landed on a UK beach in an inflatable boat like those currently arriving with war-migrants from France! If he can arrange agents to fly in with Russian Novichok nerve agent, then why not "Fourth Protocol" style compact tactical nuclear weapon? If we can't discover or stop boats full of illegally entering war migrants, we similarly can't expect to discover or stop boats set loose with enemy agents armed with nuclear weapons, coming ashore from Russian ships or submarines far off our coast. Again, Putin revels in such "ambiguity" over his attacks, blaming his Novichok attack on the UK Government, for example. (This was similar in many ways to an earlier attack using polonium-210 in London in 2006.) This evidence proves the Russian "fog of war" tactics are real: if we plan only for a declared Russian attack, we are deluded! Quester goes on to examine (p43) the use of nuclear weapons within a country in a state of "civil war", e.g. if some Russian seized territory manages to put up a good fight for liberty, it is possible that tactical nuclear weapons could be used in those rebel-held parts of Russia to quell the rebellion, particularly low yield weapons that avert collateral damage to buildings. In Chapter 3, "Likely World Reaction", Quester argues that as in all "fog of war" cases, a wide range of media responses are possible, ranging from confusion over the facts to terror, hysteria, anger and outrage, so that (p60): "one has to find just the right retaliatory targets and still leave other targets untouched - as hostages kept alive to assure restraint by the guilty party."
Another problem of the "nuclear taboo" is the fact that smaller groups of countries bordering large states with huge armies might need to use tactical nuclear weapons for defense, simply to overcome that inequality in the conventional military manpower, as was the number one issue for NATO during the 1st Cold War (see quote below from Field Marshall Monty's 1954 article, "A look through a window at World War III"), but has now become Russia's policy in case of war with NATO! Nobody but a fool can call official enemy military nuclear defense plans a "taboo," and think this label means you can simply ignore them and not take precautions against them. If Russia did implement its tactical nuclear war plan against NATO logistics during an escalation of the Ukraine-Russian war, it will use ambiguity to reduce the risk of effective NATO retaliation. E.g., clandestine nuclear attacks could be denied by the perpetrator. In this situation, a "no first use pledge" would prevent effective retaliation by the USA or NATO. You would have to try to prove the culprit, prior to retaliating. Russia could simply claim that a clandestine attack was part of a Western conspiracy to justify a first strike on Russia, or it could say that it was down to terrorists or rogue groups with stolen nuclear weapons. "Make noise in East, while attacking from the West" has been a key part of military diversionary tactics for millennia, and is all the more valid, according to Quester, with E=mc2. Ultimately, after the nuclear taboo is broken for once and for all, we will be able to move away from moonshine talk of "nuclear thresholds" to enforcing "conventional thresholds" with credible tactical nuclear deterrence to ensure the dispersal of enemy military forces to concentrations too low for launching successful invasions (i.e., if you have tactical nuclear weapons, dictators will be deterred from concentrating forces for an invasion, because doing so will create a nuclear target; war is then a matter of infiltration tactics which can be stopped by standard military security precautions at borders, producing a more peaceful world). At that time, conventional warfare can be deterred, and humanity can concentrate instead on applying the nuclear deterrent spin-offs to peaceful technology, such as cheap and clean nuclear explosion-powered spacecraft (e.g. Project Orion, cancelled back in 1963 for purely political reasons).
ABOVE: Herman Kahn made a similar analysis to some of Quester's arguments back in 1960 in On Thermonuclear War, but he was similarly ignored (or subjected to lying hate attacks in the case of "Scientific American" propaganda) by leading "arms control and disarmament" bigots, leading to the Cuban missiles crisis of 1962, as we will prove below. Kahn explained that fake news "history" by CND's "historian" AJP Taylor lied about Hitler in order to avoid learning the lessons of 1930s appeasement and the actual reason for the failure of Dreadnought deterrence in 1914 (you need a spectrum of deterrents to cover all threats, not just one threat!).
Professor Quester goes further in his 260 pages Nuclear Zero? Lessons from the Last Time We Were There (2015), arguing that spying on the Nazi nuclear weapons project in WWII failed to disclose the extent of their program due to dictatorial secrecy (until after Germany was invaded by General Groves' "Alsos" nuclear experts, too late), and he points out that in reality jaw-jaw-not-war-war failed in real crises before world wars (unlike the idealised "democracy vs democracy" imaginary world of the so-called "disarmers" that was debunked by Dr Spencer Weart's Never at war: why democracies will not fight one another) because (pages 1-3): "Messages that were intended to reassure would thus be seen as tricks. Countries fearing that others were cheating [as, for example, Russia did - even before Putin became effective Fuhrer - when it continued illegal Novichok production under Yeltsin as disclosed by Dr Vil S. Mirzayanov in his 2009 State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program] on the nuclear weapons ban, or fearing that they themselves would be falsely accused of cheating, would thus feel driven, themselves, to cheat. [Manhattan Project in USA was supposedly secret nuclear weapons program in a "democracy", as was the UK nuclear weapons program under hard line socialist Attlee, who covered it up from public sight until Churchill was elected and had to announce it prior to the first UK nuclear test in 1952; basically every damn nuclear weapon proliferation program has been clandestine, for obvious reasons, regardless of whether in a "democracy" or a "dictatorship", while every damn "pacifist" has claimed that it is absurd that any country could secretly produce nuclear weapons in a disarmed world]. ... there may be false alarms in a future world about whether someone else is cheating and producing nuclear weapons. ... some rogue state might seize upon nuclear weapons as a reinsurance against being subjected to regime change ... when it had been convicted of massive genocide within the territory it had controlled. ... The sad possibility remains that what is dismissed [by arms control/disarmament propaganda arguments] as hypothetical here would turn out to be recurrent and quite natural, as countries disagree and regimes contend."
Quester then argues in Nuclear Zero? Lessons from the Last Time We Were There, page 6, that the whole problem stems from science fiction, namely left winger (Stalin interviewer/apologist) Mr H. G. Wells' 1914 World Set Free because the key physical fact, the multiplying neutron induced chain reaction, came to Leo Szilard in London in 1934, just after he had read Wells' novel, which coincided with him hearing a Rutherford lecture on the neutron (predicted by Rutherford and in 1932 discovered by his student, Chadwick, who headed the British Mission to Los Alamos, and also designed our first 3-stage top secret UK H-bomb idea). Szilard had recently arrived in London from Germany, fleeing the Nazis, and was obsessed with the Nazi risk, so you could argue that Hitler was responsible for nuclear weapons development, in this manner; as a chemist expert in chemical chain reactions like explosions, and an obsessive patenter of ideas, Szilard patented his basic ideas for neutron-induced nuclear fission chain reactions for energy release in London in 1934, although at that time he had no idea about which isotopes to try! This proves that lone individuals, not just top secret military committees, can come up with key ideas! Szilard (like Churchill, but unlike the "pacifists" in the UK at the time, including the elected government and most voters) was aware that Germany was capable of secret weapons development and manufacture in violation of disarmament agreements it had signed up to following WWI. Quester argues (p9): "On the dimension of secrecy, the Germans had also become accustomed to violating the disarmament provisions of Versailles as much as possible, with virtually every German in effect being part of a patriotic conspiracy to deny information to the inspectors representing the victors of World War I [one exception was Captain WE Johns, editor of the two UK magazines Popular Flying and Flying, who was secretly provided information on German rearmament by the Commandant of his former POW camp in Bavaria, which he published in his magazine to the wrath of the government - e.g. see his January 1934 Popular Flying "Where Stands Germany?" 3-pages long article which directly warned that Germany was rearming for war, also the Disarmament Commission which in response to such articles dismissed the magazine as a warmonger, before Chamberlain's government put pressure on its publisher to get Johns fired in January 1939, a disgusting travesty of "democracy" obviously censored out of all milk-and-water, half-baked "history books" on appeasement methodology written by the AJP taylor school of CND biased lying drivel]. ... The Weimar experience unhappily shows that even a political democracy {and after Weimar, even Hitler was initially elected by voters], if it feels unfairly treated in terms of international affairs, can accept policies of secrecy and cheating on international commitments." Quester then argues that the only reason we're not living in the 1,000 year Third Reich is that Walter Bothe's boron electrodes contaminated neutron moderating carbon graphite with a strong neutron absorber, a practical error "left unchallenged" by the practically incompetent uncertainty principle Nazi theorist Heisenberg, so the Nazis thought expensive heavy water (not cheap graphite) was needed for fission of natural uranium. As a result, the delicate heavy water distillation stills were repeatedly sabotaged and bombed, preventing a Nazi nuclear bomb and success in WWII. This very lucky error will never be made again!
Finally, Quester argues that the very effective (thus rejected!) postwar Bernard Baruch nuclear weapons disarmament plan was debunked by the United Nations "veto" problem (Nuclear Zero? Lessons from the Last Time We Were There, page 109): "... Baruch is particularly castigated for insisting that there be very strict inspection of a nuclear-disarmed world, and, where violations were detected of the pledge not to produce nuclear weapons, that the punishments for this not be subject to the veto in the United Nations Security Council." THIS IS THE KEY PROBLEM AS PROVED BY ALL DATA. Whenever you bring up the 1930s experience, someone argues "all we need is policemen to replace the nuclear arsenals." The UN was supposed to do this, but failed like the League of Nations with the Nazis, because if you have the enemy on the Security Council, they veto any proposal to stop their invasions of you. Duh. Baruch wasn't that dumb. He realised, from Hitler and Stalin's invasions of 1939-40, that you need automatic enforcement to stop threats to world peace, not some plan that the enemy will simply veto (pages 111-2):
"... some of this skepticism about Baruch's logic may overdo the 'realist' assumption that all powers [dictators and democracies] are alike ... When confronting a brazen and tough-minded foreign dictatorship, such democracies are often unwilling to bite the bullet of actually condemning foreign violations of disarmament agreements, instead drawing one 'red line' after another about actions that will not be tolerated ... negotiation rather than actual punishment of the violator. Such was the experience of the victorious allies in World War I as even the democratic Weimar Republic repeatedly violated its pledges at Versailles. It certainly was the experience of the British and French when confronting [with smiles, flowers, and handshakes, in front of Nazi flags or saluting crowds in popular praised mass media photos] Hitler, even before Munich. More recently, this has been the experience of the United Nations in confronting [sic] violations of nonproliferation pledges by North Korea, iran, and Iraq, before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Clausewitz captured a great deal of the dilemma here in his statement that 'the aggressor is always peace-loving', since a tough-minded aggressive regime can always violate agreements ... then confront the rest of the world with the choice of remaining at peace or of initiating a war. ... World War II began in Europe not in March of 1939 when the Germans violated pledges by invading the rest of Czechoslovakia, but in September 1939 when ... the Poles did resist. It is the side that resists an aggression that makes it a war ... [This is the key point. To the Nazi fellow travelling 1939 "peacenik", Hitler was a man to be reasoned with. Indeed he was a "man of peace" by CND standards, in which pesticide Zyklon B in gas chambers as recommended by such Nobel prize winners as Medical Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrell's nazi-bestselling Man the Unknown is an act of peace, unlike the so-called "barbarity" of nuclear weapons deterring world war. These thugs simply censor out all the evidence that disproves them, like certain other holocaust deniers.] ... The 'Munich syndrome' is often criticised for excessively governing American responses to the Communist ... yet it has to be remembered that the lessons of Munich and the failure to confront Hitler, were very parallel to ... desire to beat the Nazis in a race for nuclear weapons. The opponent in both cases after all was the same Hitler."
[We're a bit critical of Quester's argument style here, unfortunately. His analysis is illuminating, but the problem is, as for Herman Kahn's discussion of the same thing in On Thermonuclear War, all the subversively supporting/fellow travelling so-called fact "critics" - who express undying love for authoritarianism and dictatorship in all its pathetic and evil forms, and instead - as explained by Orwell clearly in 1984 see freedom as terrorism fill the left wing dominated traditional media including TV, book publishing, magazines, and overpaid government funded "big science" and will just ignore subtle or complicated arguments, especially where they are effective. You are fighting a war against thugs so you must try to use words like bullets, not keep to some kind of unbiased intellectual debate on the abstract hypothetical philosophy of alien species. That was Herman Kahn's key error in 1960! This is a matter of deterring tyranny, not holding a polite tea party parlour game of chess, which ends peacefully. Millions of lives are at stake. Be as lucid and direct as possible, please. Yes, in the UK the Russian supporting terrorist thugs are now trying to censor Orwell's 1984 from schools because it doesn't fit their agenda. But when those who tell the truth are in risk of being drowned out by hoardes of lying thugs, truth must aim for maximum clarity!]
Note that the secret six volumes on the nuclear strike on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which state the opposite to the USSBS's unclassified report and Glasstone's books) referred to by General Gavin - US Strategic Bombing Survey reports #92 and #93 - prove modern concrete buildings remained intact near ground zero, the vast majority of Hiroshima fires were delayed and due to overturned charcoal breakfast cooking braziers in wood frame and bamboo homes not obsolete in city centres, and only black color blackout curtains showed sustained ignition at ground zero, etc. In other words, the strategic use of nuclear weapons have always been a COMPLETE lying scam based on deliberately-misleading Glasstone style unclassified 1930s air war type propaganda, enforced by secrecy! As in the 1930s, both "military" strategic bombing propagandarists and Hitler-backing "peaceniks" combined to assert knockout blow and "end of the world" bombing obfuscations that led to appeasement and world war, not to peaceful, credible deterrence of the invasions that set off world wars. The basic problem here is that strategic bombing advocates used secrecy on the truth about Hiroshima to fake The Effects of Nuclear Weapons to suit their agenda, just as such people did with tragic results for appeasement and World War II in the 1920s and 1930s. We have to get the truth out now, against the combined "arms control and disrmament" mass media supporting Russian propaganda fronts to, as Joseph Friedlander kindly put it in a recent email to me, "get them to not use their most effective weapons"! Sam Cohen after 1977 Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons openly published (in books) a letter he wrote to US DOD complaining that the neutron bomb wasn't in Glasstone's book Effects and the public was being allowed to remain supplied only with enemy propaganda from fake "peaceniks" like CND. Why? Dolan had the neutron bomb (including the calculation method for blast wave and thermal modification by high D+T neutron yield, ignored by all "peacenik" propaganda fronts) in his secret DNA-EM-1 Capabilities, published (for the reading pleasure of those with security clearance only) back in 1972! No excuse for not having it in 1977 Glasstone and Dolan, therefore! As "Dr Strangelove" would put it, the whole point of a deterrent is that the other side KNOWS ABOUT IT. You don't keep a deterrent secret, unless you're playing some kind of three-card trick. Why is there any nuclear weapons secrecy, anyway? Plutonium isn't for sale.
Project Vista, the secret 1951 Korean War study of tactical nuclear weapons to halt or deter invasions by J. R. Oppenheimer and others (which ultimately led to Samuel Cohen's "neutron bomb" deterrent, the hard-won W79 disarmed by loons in the 1990s to encourage invasions and wars), led to the August 1953 book Atomic Weapons in Land Combat by Colonel G. C. Reinhardt and Lieutenant Colonel W. R. Kintner of the US Army. We will now quote the key findings in the second edition (August 1954) of this book. On page 22, they explain that US Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Gordon Dean stated in October 1951: "There is now a new kind of atomic warfare more promising as a means of halting aggressors without risk of destroying large parts of the world in the process." On page 107, they argue that base surge radiation from underwater bursts such as the "spectacular" 25 July 1946 Baker nuclear test under Bikini Lagoon "has produced an exaggerated fear. The truth is that no beaches suitable for amphibious operations are close enough to deep water for a nominal atomic bomb to cause a base surge." In plate 20 on page 151, they show that it took a peak overpressure of 24 psi to cause concrete building with 10" thick walls and 6" thick floors to collapse in Hiroshima, showing resistance of modern city buildings to collateral damage. On page 164 they point out that mines in a minefield with a firing pressure of 400 lbs and a solid pressure plate 5" in diameter require blast overpressures of over 20 psi to detonate: "Within that circle, tanks (yours or the enemy's) may range with comparative safety." On page 176 they point out that the Presidential "Authority to commit atomic weapons on the battlefield confers upon each general an almost magical influence over the conflict, equivalent to throwing in whole new divisions in a fraction of the time such a move would have previously entailed." (Although this can, of course, be vandalised if the President is surrounded by indecisive groupthink defeatists, who allow the enemy time to "dig in" and build hard improvised shelters, instead of stopping invasion columns quickly, when they are crossing borders and vulnerable to nuclear effects.) On page 204 they point out:
"Records of early engagements in 1914 describe the carnage in model 1870 formations on battlefields beginning to be dominated by machine gun fire [before trench warfare]. Armies were forced into trench warfare, to relearn after 50 years the lessons of the American Civil War [where 30 miles of trenches were constructed during the 292 days Siege of Petersburg, 1864-5, with machine gun emplacements, shelters and 70,000 casualties]. Almost four years of world conflict passed before World War I armies recovered the lost art of infiltration though it had been thoroughly registered in the history of Braddock's defeat and decades of Colonial-Indian fighting."
On page 213, Reinhardt and Kintner argue: "American emphasis on atomic weapons is a correct application of the principle of economy of force. ... The widespread campaign to stigmatize the use of atomic weapons as morally wrong cannot be ignored in a conflict where psychological and ideological overtones are proving almost as vital as military encounter. Ruthless aggression is inherently more reprehensible than the means to stop it. Nevertheless, emotional appeals to outlaw atomic weapons presents a problem to United States politico-military planners wich should not be underestimated." They argue on pages 219-20 that once Chinese forces had "dug in along the Korean front" they were virtually immune to conventional (or nuclear) attack: "We have not yet digested the unpalatable fact that those armies were able to operate against us for several years while our Air Force commanded the skies above the battlefield." They correctly conclude on pages 223-5 that deterrence must operate to prevent/stop against invasions while they are occurring, not after the invaders have "dug in" and are virtually immune to attack:
"Tactical atomic task forces can be hurled against local aggression anywhere in the world ... Striking before the invading armies have time to dig in and consolidate, they can quickly render them ineffective. But what, you ask, if the true sponsors of aggression then decide to come to the rescue of their trojan column? It is for this contingincy that our atomic retaliation capability should be poised. When a major power openly associates itself with aggression, America's atomic reprisal, swift and overwhelming [delivered by cruise missiles from ships or aircraft, or Trident MIRV tactical warheads from submarines, or even by ICBMs or drones], would be understood and approved throughout the world, whether it be confined to military targets or in reprisal for atomic attacks on the cities of the USA or our Allies [thus, as Herman Kahn and Samuel Cohen argued later, tactical nuclear deterrence needs to be backed up by strategic nuclear deterrence to keep escalation at bay, just as ABM and civil defense are needed against "accidental" enemy limited nuclear demonstration attacks on cities, to reduce escalation risks and casualties]. ... In a competition between atomic technologies the free world should suffer neither in numbers nor in scientific improvements. ... none save romanticists have ever discovered a battlefield lacking in horror, whether its weapons have been tomahawks or machine guns. ... If the forces of aggression dream of easy victory, won through ruthless acceptance of losses by its waves of troops, they would do well to re-evaluate their hopes in light of the development of atomic weapons and what those weapons represent in battlefield potential. Surely the free peoples, who developed them solely to protect their freedom, will - if forced to - use them with a skill and determination that cannot be overcome."
BELOW: Secret "For Official Use" and individually numbered Russian nuclear defense manual (169 pages long, T. F. Myasnikova, technical editor) entitled "КРАТКИЙ СПРАВОЧНИК ПО БОЕВЫМ СВОЙСТВАН ЯДЕРНОГО ОРУЖИЯ" [= "A Brief Guide to the Combat Properties of Nuclear Weapons"] states: "Ядерное оружие обладает значительно большей разрушительной силой по сравнению с обычными видами оружия, но существуют простые и надежные методы защиты от него. ... В этом руководстве представлен краткий обзор ядерного оружия, средств и методов защиты от ядерной угрозы, а также инструкции о том, как действовать в случае применения ядерного оружия." [= "Nuclear weapons have significantly greater destructive power than conventional weapons, but there are simple and reliable methods of protecting against them. ... This guide provides a brief overview of nuclear weapons, the means and methods of defending against a nuclear threat, and instructions on what to do in the event of a nuclear weapon being used."] The manual contains data tables on damage to Russian military equipment based on Russian nuclear weapons tests, as shown BELOW (this manual is the 2nd edition, dated 1969, but since Russian atmospheric nuclear tests ended in 1962, the data is still valid today). The Russian peak overpressure unit is the kg/cm^2 which equal to 1 atmosphere or 14.7 psi in classic American units or 101 kPa in Western SI units (1 kg/cm^2 = 10 tons/m^2 = 1 atmosphere = 14.7 psi = 101 kPa). Page 104 states that for 1 kiloton-1 megaton yields, Russian "Basement shelters for the population (type III shelters)" require 2-4 kg/cm^2 or 30-60 psi for destruction (making them harder than the concrete buildings surviving near ground zero in Hiroshima), while hydroelectric dams and underground utility pipes for water, sewage and gas supply require 10-15 kg/cm^2 or 150-225 psi for destruction. The hardest targets listed (on page 100) are the concrete runways at airports, which require in excess of 20 kg/cm^2 or 300 psi for destruction by cracking and spalling (ground shock effects). Note particularly Table 41 at pages 92-93, where severe damage (destruction) radii are given for Russian tactical nuclear missiles, cruise missiles, jet fighters, jet bombers, nuclear artillery guns, anti-aircraft guns, mortars, light and heavy machine guns, light and heavy grenade launchers, for air and surface bursts and for 13 yield classes from 1 kiloton to 1 megaton (including the calculated damage pressures in kg/cm^2, separately shown for surface and air bursts). Also, note that it compiles Russian data on measured EMP from nuclear tests in Tables 23 and 24 on page 71, showing the induced voltages as a function of weapon yield, type of conductor (aerial or underground buried power cable), and distance from ground zero. This proves Russian capabilities to use EMP effects from nuclear weapons. For example, Table 23 shows that 10 kV was induced in a 10m aerial at 3.3 km from a 1 megaton low altitude detonation. Note also that Russia found (Table 38) that forest area fires (not isolated fires) cannot occur after surface bursts in coniferous forests even at megaton yields, because of the low angle of elevation of the fireball and because the blast wave following the heat flash blows out most fires, although fire areas can occur at certain distances from ground zero in deciduous and mixed forests for higher-yield surface bursts. This detailed analysis proves Russian preparation for tactical nuclear war is true.
According to the Levada Center, 39 percent of Russians believe that the use of nuclear weapons during Russia's war against Ukraine could be justified. pic.twitter.com/H4p8OI5YbV
Update, November 20, 2024:https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-issues-warning-us-with-new-nuclear-doctrine-2024-11-19/: "Putin issues warning to United States with new nuclear doctrine, by Guy Faulconbridge and Anton Kolodyazhnyy, November 20, 2024 12:20 AM GMT MOSCOW, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks, and Moscow said Ukraine had struck deep inside Russia with U.S.-made ATACMS missiles. Putin approved the change days after two U.S. officials and a source familiar with the decision said on Sunday that U.S. President Joe Biden's administration allowed Ukraine to use U.S.-made weapons to strike deep into Russia. Russia had been warning the West for months that if Washington allowed Ukraine to fire U.S., British and French missiles deep into Russia, Moscow would consider those NATO members to be directly involved in the war in Ukraine. The updated Russian nuclear doctrine, establishing a framework for conditions under which Putin could order a strike from the world's biggest nuclear arsenal, was approved by him on Tuesday, according to a published decree. ... The U.S. National Security Council said it had not seen any reason to adjust the U.S. nuclear posture. ... Putin is the primary decision-maker on the use of Russia's nuclear arsenal. ... The doctrine said any attack by a non-nuclear power supported by a nuclear power would be considered a joint attack, and that any attack by one member of a military bloc would be considered an attack by the entire alliance ... Lavrov said Russia would do everything to avoid nuclear war, and pointed out that it was the U.S. which used nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. ... Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said ... "Nuclear deterrence is aimed at ensuring that a potential adversary understands the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies"."
Max Seddon and Chris Cook, "Leaked Russian military files reveal criteria for nuclear strike", Financial Times newspaper (UK), 28 Feb 2024: "The exercises offer a rare insight into how Russia views its nuclear arsenal as a cornerstone of its defence policy — and how it trains forces to be able to carry out a nuclear first strike in some battlefield conditions. ... The slides summarise the threshold as a combination of factors where losses suffered by Russian forces “would irrevocably lead to their failure to stop major enemy aggression”, a “critical situation for the state security of Russia”. ... Russia’s military is also expected to be able to use tactical nuclear weapons for a broad array of goals, including “containing states from using aggression ... or escalating military conflicts”, “stopping aggression”, preventing Russian forces from losing battles or territory, and making Russia’s navy “more effective”. Putin said last June that he felt “negatively” about using tactical nuclear strikes, but then boasted that Russia had a larger non-strategic arsenal than NATO countries. “Screw them, you know, as people say,” Putin said. ... The documents reflect patterns seen in exercises the Russian military held regularly before and since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. ... While Russia’s president has the sole authority to launch a first nuclear strike, the low threshold for tactical nuclear use set out in the documents conforms with a doctrine some western observers refer to as “escalating to de-escalate”. Under this strategy a tactical weapon could be used to try to prevent Russia from becoming embroiled in a sprawling war, particularly one in which the US might intervene. Using what it calls “fear inducement”, Moscow would seek to end the conflict on its own terms by shocking the country’s adversary with the early use of a small nuclear weapon — or securing a settlement through the threat to do so."
John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State, 12 January 1954 Massive Retaliation Doctrine Speech, Council of Foreign Relations, New York (published in the US Department of State Bulletin v30 n761, 25 January 1954): "We want, for ourselves and other free nations, a maximum deterrent at a bearable cost. ... Local defences must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retalitory power. ... Otherwise, for example, a potential aggressor who is glutted with manpower might be tempted to attack in confidence that resistance would be confined to manpower."
The Economist, 2 February 1954: "In a situation where war is not declared and aggression can be waged by proxy [e.g. today's USA/UK/Ukaine-Russian war], the decision for or against using atomic weapons may be far less simple in fact than it appears ... More than ever before, those who think in terms of stopping or winning wars by atomic bombing have to reckon with reprisals in kind [assuming that you do not disarm the enemy in a successful first strike to prevent retaliation, or that you or the enemy doesn't have an efficient system of ABM and civil defense to make the "retaliation" a pathetic "token gesture"] ... Against what kind of aggression is 'massive retaliatory power' to be used? ... there seems to be the risk that the strict and literal application of the Dulles doctrine could turn minor and limited hostilities into major conflict." [Therefore, to deter escalation you need a broad spectrum of credible deterrents against the full range of enemy provocations.]
Field Marshall Montgomery, British Deputy to SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe), "A Look Through a Window at World War III", Royal United Services Institute Journal, November 1954: "I want to make it absolutely clear that we at SHAPE are basing all our operational planning on using atomic and thermonuclear weapons for our defence. With us it is no longer: 'They may possibly be used.' It is very definitely: 'They will be used, if we are attacked.' The reason for this action is that we cannot match the strength that could be brought against us unless we use nuclear weapons. ... In fact, we have reached the point of no return as regards the use of atomic and thermonuclear weapons in a hot war ... The problem will be, how to force the enemy to concentrate his armed forces sufficiently to offer a worth-while nuclear target, without exposing our own forces to destruction by the enemy's nuclear attack."
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, 1 March 1955, House of Commons: "There is a widespread belief through the free world that, but for American nuclear superiority, Europe would have already been reduced to satellite status and the Iron Curtain would have reached the Atlantic and the Channel ... We, too, must possess substantial deterrent power on our own." (Churchill's Minister of Defence, Harold Macmillan, then argued for tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East and the Far East, and stated that leaving nuclear deterrence to the USA "surrenders our power to influence American policy and then, strategically and tactically, it equally deprives us of any influence over the selection of targets and use of our vital striking forces." In the 1957 Labour Party Annual Conference at Brighton, the British Labour Party's shadow Foreign Secretary, Aneurin "Nye" Bevan, begged delegates to reject the Noel-Baker nuclear disarmament plan: "if you carry this resolution and follow out all of its implications and do not run away from it, you will send a British Foreign Secretary, whoever he may be, naked into the Conference Chamber". A more telling fact is statistical: despite all the one-sided mass-media anti-nuclear, anti-radiation and anti-civil defence propaganda, Christopher Driver's 22 March 1964 Observer newspaper article "The Rise and Fall of CND" reported that British public opinion polls showed that only 20% of people disapproved of the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945, and this percentage only increased to 33% when CND's propaganda influence peaked, in 1957-60, due to ICBM testing and and fallout news scares from tests. The problems of not having a credible deterrent were still remembered from the 1930s despite media saturation with Russian Sputnik/Comintern style "peace propaganda" lies. As Clausewitz stated in Book 6, Chapter 5 of On War: "A conqueror is always a lover of peace; he would like to make his entry into our state unopposed." Stalin also said as much when interviewed by the writer H. G. Wells in 1934: "Communists ... would be very pleased to drop violent methods if the class agreed to give way ..." Contrary to CND people there's never been the slightest problem with our nuclear weapons being too big or "nuclear overkill," since reducing nuclear yields by removing boost gas and secondary stages is the easiest thing in the world, similarly, while bleach exists to remove the colour from flags, there have never been an difficulty in having "peace conferences" and agreeing to compromise on "peace at any price" with dictators; all of the difficulties have been in the opposite direction, e.g. designing nuclear weapons as credible deterrents to stop the sorts of provocations that escalate into world wars where the democracy has to declare war first as in 1914 and 1939. It was Lenin who wrote: "As long as capitalism and socialism exist, we cannot live in peace: in the end one or the other will triumph.")
ABOVE: Time magazine of 10 November 1961, pages 19 and 25, reporting on arguments to test the "neutron bomb", also showing example of a shelter in Nagasaki and Russian civil defense. Although tested by Kennedy, the neutron bomb never made it into any edition of Glasstone's "Effects of Nuclear Weapons", any more than photos of surviving shelters in Nagasaki (which had been included the 1950 "Effects of Atomic Weapons" but were removed from "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" 1957-77, a sure proof of the use of secrecy to undermine credible nuclear deterrence: if you can't even combat enemy nuclear propaganda in peace, how can you combat the enemy on the battlefield in war?. This blog has been now updated (December 2024) to provide additional background testimonial evidence to show how secrecy was used to suppress Oppenheimer's plans for tactical nuclear deterrence, due to opposition by strategic bombing advocates who kept the Strategic Bombing Survey reports on Hiroshima and Nagasaki secret!
RAPID BLAST WAVE ATTENUATION BY WORK DONE IN CAUSING DAMAGE TO MODERN CITIES, DISPROVING STRATEGIC COUNTERVALUE DETERRENT PROPAGANDA USING IDEAL FLAT DESERT TERRAIN FOR BLAST WAVE PARAMETERS IN ALL EDITIONS OF GLASSTONE'S BOOK THE EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, EVEN THE FINAL 1977 EDITION WHICH ACTUALLY CITES PENNEY'S PAPER DISPROVING THIS!
ABOVE: Penney told J B Cook that he spent £450 on baggage excess in Japan, air-lifting critical "blast pressure sensitive" debris from Hiroshima to London to ensure it was properly analysed, plus did specific nuclear air bursts at Maralinga to provide comparisons to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to determine blast attenuation by damage done to a city! Glasstone cited Penney's 1970 data report, yet completely ignored (and even contradicted) it! This was simply a cover-up.
ABOVE: weak blast waves oscillate buildings within the "elastic" deformation range, absorbing up ~1% of the intercepted blast wave energy, whereas blast waves strong enough to oscillate the building well into the "plastic" deformation range can demolish modern steel and concrete city buildings (which mostly remained standing after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki air bursts) can absorb typically 10 times more energy or ~10% of the intercepted blast wave energy. Successive interactions in a large city causes a vast amount of shielding, as compared to tests conducted over flat desert or ocean. Although blast waves last longer at higher yields, their cube-root scaled-up blast effects radii contain more buildings along any radial line than for the smaller distances of destruction at lower yields, thus offsetting the extra energy at any given scaled "free field" peak overpressure. This was demonstrated by a study comparing blast effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where most of the buildings were wooden to "free field" nuclear tests by Penney, but it was suppressed by Bethe and Glasstone in the American "Bible" Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, which uses energy conservation violating "free field" blast and radiation data from tests over ideal unobstructed terrain. We exposed this delusion in 1990 in Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, which was then censored by CND liar-duped publishers. Part of our problem is that vital blast ductility data for determining blast energy absorption by city buildings (omitted from Glasstone and Dolan's book) is in Northrop's 1996 EM-1 book, which not "secret" but is still officially banned from open publication by law in the USA, because it gives some information relevant to military nuclear capabilities; similarly the unclassified but "Limited Distribution" DTRA published book by AFIT Professor Bridgman, Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects which can be used to demonstrate the exaggerations in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons when Glasstone's free-field (unobstructed terrain) nuclear effects predictions from desert and ocean nuclear tests are improperly applied to concrete cities. Bridgman, for instance, considers a building with an exposed area of 163 square metres, a mass of 455 tons and natural frequency of 5 oscillations per second, and finds that a peak overpressure of 10 psi (69 kPa) and peak dynamic pressure of 2.2 psi (15 kPa) at 4.36 km ground range from a 1 Mt air burst detonated at 2.29 km altitude, with overpressure and dynamic pressure positive durations of 2.6 and 3.6 seconds, respectively, produces a peak deflection of 19 cm in the building about 0.6 second after shock arrival. The peak deflection is computed from Bridgman's formula on p. 304. This 19 cm computed maximum deflection allows us to estimate how much energy is permanently and irreversibly absorbed from the blast wave by a building (if damaged, additional energy is absorbed and is transformed into slow-moving - relative to the shock front velocity - debris which falls to the ground and is quickly stopped after the blast has passed it) by: E = Fx, where F is force (i.e., product of total pressure and area) and x is distance moved in direction of force due to the applied force from the blast wave.
If the average pressure for the first 0.5 second is equal to 12 psi (83 kPa) then the average force on the building during this time is 13 million Newtons, and the energy absorbed is: E = Fx = 13,000,000*0.19 = 2.6 MJ, which is removed from the blast wave in the form of oscillations of the building. Successive absorption by building after building rapidly absorbs blast energy in this way.
Although you could say the blast wave from a 50% blast nuclear megaton warhead contains 2.1 x 10^15 Joules, the blast wave energy rapidly decreases as it dumps hot air behind it to form the fireball (Glasstone omits the fireball energy partition after blast breakaway, but the DELFIC mushroom cloud module shows that, to fit observed cloud parameters theoretically, fully 45% of the yield is hot air dumped behind the blast that powers the mushroom cloud rise and expansion, so 50-45 = 5% of total yield (or 1/10 of original blast yield) remains in the blast wave after the negative phase fully develops). In addition, the blast forms a 3-d hemisphere so that the percentage of the total blast energy in the Mach front intercepting buildings near the surface is small and gets smaller as the blast propagates! It is only that part which causes damage that gets attenuated; furthermore the yield scaling issue increases the building shielding effect for larger yields, because the radial distance being considered is increased. For example, in the example above, 10 psi peak overpressure (69 kPa in SI units) occurs at 4.36 km from a 1 megaton strategic bomb, but the 163 square metres of the building is only a small fraction, f, of the blast hemisphere at that range, namely f = 163/(2*Pi*4360^2) = 163/120,000,000 = 1.37*10^{-6}. So if the blast still contained 5% of the total weapon yield at this stage (1/10 of the original blast yield), the total blast energy striking the building's surface area would be just (2.1 x 10^14 )* 1.37*10^{-6} = 2.9*10^8 Joules, proving that the oscillations of the building removed 2.6MJ of 290MJ blast energy intercepted, nearly 1%, which is a similar fraction to Penney's finding in Hiroshima (below).
You get additional, greater, energy loss due to damage done to buildings close to the fireball. For n such buildings in a radial line, the cumulative removal of blast energy fraction is: exp(-2.6n/290), which is greater for the larger blast damage distances in built up areas predicted for effects of higher yields! So increasing the yield increases the shielding for any given free-field pressure (the distance of which scales up with yield)!
ABOVE:error by DTRA regarding energy absorption by buildings. U.S. Government's DTRA DISPATCH magazine article "Building Effects on Airblast from Nuclear Detonations in Urban Terrain" falsely conflates the abrupt shock front with the length of the entire blast wave, claiming that since buildings are 2000 denser than blast waves: "the air will move 2000 times father than the structure in the same time interval. Thus while the building is moving 1cm. the shock has moved more than 20m, and the energy is a small fraction of 1% the blast energy." The key error here is the statement that "the shock has moved 20 m". They meant the shock front, which isn't the same thing as the entire blast wave, the thickness of which is dependent on bomb yield, and is what moves drag-sensitive buildings with large window openings where the overpressure quickly equalises. So they are totally wrong. They are absurdly arguing that only 1/2000 of the dynamic pressure (kinetic energy per unit volume of air) of air presents a force upon buildings, or presumably upon ships sails (which are denser than air), or eardrums (again which are denser than air). The shoddy, imprecise form of their statement makes it hard to understand precisely what they are saying, but it seems to be that they are assuming falsely that the blast wave consists only of a shock front, which will move 20 m past the building (without moving it significantly) before the building has moved 1 cm, but the density of the building and the location of the shock front relative to the building is IRRELEVANT while the mass of air BEHIND the shock front is delivering energy to the building, as proved by the absence from the relevant equations of both building density and shock front location after it has passed, but winds are still blowing. It's not the shock front that causes the building to oscillate, but the wind pressure behind the shock front. The building density, and the distance the shock FRONT moves beyond the building, have no relevance to thickness the layer of air BEHIND the shock front, which is what is pushing the building, and this thickness increases with bomb yield! (However, most of the push to the building occurs due to the highest dynamic pressure, i.e. the air just behind the discontinuity or "shock front".) As a result, the actual energy absorption by a building is more than 100 times greater than DTRA's ratio of densities claims. Small-scale models of buildings, whether absolutely rigid or made from glass mirrors don't in any way, shape or form model the energy captured in oscillations by thousands of tons of reinforced concrete of real buildings.
The wind (dynamic) pressure induced motion effects which have nothing to do with the relative density of the shock front compared to the building. The amount of energy picked up from either the wind pressure of normal breezes or the blast wave of a nuclear explosion, by a building in oscillatory energy is the time-integrated form of Newtonian equation E = F.x, where force F = P.A, where P is dynamic pressure and A is area, and x is the amount of displacement induced. There's no density of the building in these equations, and no dependence on the shock front, but rather the integrated dynamic pressure over the entire duration of the blast at the location of interest (if the building delays the passage of the shock front instead of letting it pass freely through windows etc, then there's an additional term for the time-integrated overpressure contribution). As dynamic pressure is removed by the building - not by the shock front but by the air behind it, lasting seconds in higher yield detonations - the overpressure also falls as the blast restores itself to the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions (overpressure energy is transformed into dynamic pressure energy, thus weakening overpressure as well as dynamic pressure). If DTRA were correct that only the front part (shock front) of a blast wave is relevant to delivery of energy and delivers only 1/2000 of the energy of the blast, then by analogy our eardrums and ship sails would be similarly so inefficient at picking up energy from the dynamic pressure of sound and the wind, respectively, that they couldn't work! Notice that their computer codes in 2013 falsely EXCLUDED any absorption of energy by the blast in oscillating thousands of tons of reinforced concrete, causing damage (much larger, huge amounts of energy are required to actually destroy reinforced concrete by permanent deformation; the springy oscillations of a building in a gale or blast wave take up far less energy than actual destruction requires), contrary to what John von Neumann pointed out (that buildings are NOT rigid but absorb energy from the blast, decreasing the blast parameters like pressures and impulses as the blast propagates through a city, unlike desert or ocean in unobstructed terrain nuclar tests!) in the 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons (removed by Glasstone from future editions, just as he removed the civil defence chapter from the 1977 edition!).
ABOVE: Appendix A of Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons gives a specific calculated example that allows the absorption of blast energy by oscillating modern concrete buildings to be calculated: a reinforced concrete building of 952 metric tons, 75x75ft, 38 ft high (thus horizontal area of 265 square metres), resisting force 4 psi, is subjected to a peak overpressure and dynamic pressure loading of 32 psi (242,000 Pascals) decaying to zero in 0.32 second. Calculated peak deflection of middle of the building was 0.88 foot or 0.27 m (the top would be deflected twice this amount). Reinforced concrete is relatively ductile, but any cracking absorbs even more energy than the simple calculation of the kinetic energy of blast-induced oscillation. So the blast wave energy absorbed from the simple physics law E = Fx = PAx where P is pressure loading, A is exposed area of building being loaded, and x is the displacement(or more precisely from the integral form of this, where energy absorbed is force integrated over displacement, as shown above) is about E = Fx = (242,000)(265)(0.27) = 17,000,000 Joules. This energy is removed from the blast wave by being transferred from the blast into the kinetic energy of oscillating the building! Hard fact!
The Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, on page 57 has a section written by John von Neumann and Fredrick Reines of Los Alamos (it is attributed to them in a footnote) stating clearly: "the structures ... have the additional complicating property of not being rigid. This means that they do not merely deflect the shock wave, but they also absorb energy from it at each reflection. The removal of energy from the blast in this manner decreases the shock pressure at any given distance from the point of detonation to a value somewhat below that which it would have been in the absence of dissipative objects, such as buildings." Glasstone removed this from future (1957-77) editions, not because it is wrong (it isn't), but apparently because it debunks official nuclear lies used for strategic deterrence in the same way that gas and incendiary bombing effects was exaggerated in the 1930s to try to deter war!
Now consider the energy absorption in the plastic region for reinforced concrete. The calculations of energy absorption in oscillating a building are for the small "elastic response" region of the pressure-displacement curve. But vast amounts of energy are absorbed beyond that elastic limit, and yet at pressures lower than required to make a reinforced concrete building collapse (always ignored by ignorant shelter critics, as Lord Baker explained, for shelter design in his 1978 book which we reviewed in detail a few posts back). There is a summary of the key building parameters America uses in calculating the effects of nuclear blast on buildings of various kinds in Table 15.6 on page 525 of Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects, Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1: building 15.2.2 (3-8 story reinforced concrete, small window area) has a severe damage ductility ratio of 7.5, i.e. it fails and collapses (severe damage) when the displacement is 7.5 times the maximum elastic response. Put another way, the plastic limit for reinforced concrete is 7.5 times the elastic displacement limit. Northrop's figure 15.7 shows the extension versus applied pressure load. The energy absorbed in the elastic limit is a triangle terminating at a displacement of 1 ductility unit (units are extension/elastic limit extension), so it has an area of 0.5 units (energy absorption for oscillating the building, see diagram below). But the plastic response is not a triangle but a unit high rectangle which starts at one unit and extends to 7.5 units (severe damage/collapse), its area is thus 7.5 - 1 = 6.5 units, so it absorbs 6.5/0.5 = 13 times as much energy as that used to oscillate the building elastically! So reinforced concrete buildings can absorb 13 times more energy in being damaged, than they can absorb in oscillating elastically. The ratio of total energy absorbed to flatten the buildings, to the maximum energy that can be absorbed elastic oscillate it, is (6.5 + 0.5)/0.5 = 14. Thus, the total energy absorption by a building can be 14 times that involved in merely oscillating it!
ABOVE: model of a building having a blast, the simple engineering graph from EM-1 showing the ratio of energy needed to total a building to that which merely oscillates it. The axes depict loading force and displacement, respectively, so the areas under the curve beautifully correspond to energy absorbed, allowing us to calculate the total energy needed to flatten a city very easily (from a simple, standard physics formula, energy E = Fx), in terms of multiples of the energy needed to just oscillate the buildings elastically. Northrop's data for other types of buildings are as follows: type 15.2.5 wood frame house has the same 7.5 ductility ratio for collapse, so it can absorb in plastic deformation 13 times the elastic oscillatory energy; type 15.2.3 brick house has a ductility ratio of 4 for severe damage, and a type 15.2.10 3-10 story steel-frame office building has a ductility ratio of 10 for severe damage. This is precisely Lord Baker's principle of the Morrison table shelter (for details, please see Lord Baker's 1978 book about the problems with explaining this to the bureaucratic nutters who don't understand the physics behind engineering, the brilliantly titled Enterprise versus Bureaucracy) where the plastic deformation of steel is used to absorb many times more energy than it can absorb elastically. In other words, it's the damage done (plastic deformation of reinforced concrete) that really absorbs vast amounts of blast energy, not the smaller energy absorption from elastic oscillations of a building! Northrop's table 15.6 shows that the reinforced concrete building, type 15.2.2, has a natural period of oscillation of about 0.3 second, and a static yield resistance of about 3 psi. Northrop's Figure 15.10 shows it has 50% probability of severe damage at 2.85 km from a 1 megaton surface burst on an ideal, unobstructed desert surface with no blast energy absorption by buildings intervening between that target and ground zero! For comparison, a similar 1 megaton surface burst in unobstructed desert is shown in Northrop's Figure 15.11 to have 50% probability of destroying a typical British brick house at 4.42 km ground range (50% severe damage probability), whereas Figure 15.18 gives a range of only 2.74 km for collapse of 3-10 story steel-frame buildings from a 1 megaton surface burst on unobstructed, open terrain.
ABOVE: Glasstone and Dolan are also completely wrong in adding scattered radiation to direct radiation exposure, because radiation-absorbing objects by definition self-shield the contributions coming from different directions, so the energy/unit-area "exposures" don't add up in the real world (unlike the "theoretical example" of an imaginary mathematical point in space). For example, if the side of a person facing the fireball receives 10 cal/cm^2 an the other side receives another 10 cal/cm^2 from cloud-scatter or air-scatter, no surface receives 10+10 = 20 cal/cm^2, which is just a mathematical fiction! Instead, scattered radiation generally exposes a larger area to similar or lower exposure than the direct exposure. This is just one of many fictions that have become groupthink religion in anti-nuclear propaganda. We have already given in many posts extensive evidence proving that concrete buildings in Hiroshima and modern cities absorb thermal, nuclear and blast effects in a way totally ignored by Glasstone's unobstructed desert analysis. Strategic nuclear deterrence is thus bunk, if based on nuclear test effects data from unobstructed desert or open ocean. We need tactical nuclear deterrence to stop invasions and the use of force, not an incredible threat of bombs on cities, which is analogous to the gas and incendiary bombing exaggerations of the 1920s and 1930s which failed to deter WWII. The exaggerations were made by both lying disarmers (to scare people into disarmament) and by lying proponents of aerial bombing in war (to scare enemies into surrender). The resulting pseudo "consensus of expert opinion" from both groups had tragic consequences. Strategic bombing, megatons of ~100 kg high explosive on Germany, equivalent to a large nuclear attack however you scale the megatonnage (by the 2/3 power of blast yield for peak overpressure over unobstructed terrain, or by an even weaker function of yield for initial nuclear radiation), also failed to produce military results when civilians were bombed. The two low yield nuclear weapons dropped over mostly wooden houses in Japan did not produce the results publically claimed (for propaganda) for modern concrete cities. We've been blogging this for years, ignored by the loons who prefer anti-nuclear lies about strategic nuclear deterrence!
ABOVE: Smokescreens of both white fog smoke and black soot smoke can be seen to the right of the fireball in the 15 kiloton Grable nuclear test, Nevada, 1953. (Smokescreens were again proof tested at Operation Teapot in 1955.) The technology to lay down smokescreens is well-established, and smoke screen generators are fitted to many tanks. The same can be fitted around building windows, preventing fires, firestorms, soot cloud "nuclear winters", simply triggered by early warning radar like air raid sirens before the flash and EMP of an explosion arrive! Glasstone's mention of smokescreens is typical of the many failures of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, failing to make the nuclear test data clear (you cannot even tell from Glasstone whether smokescreens have been analysed in theory or in nuclear tests, let alone the vital details needed for this to be used for civil defense). Part of the problem here is the deceptively non-quantitative treatment of scattered radiation by Glasstone, another exercise in obfuscation.
The effect of scattered thermal radiation diffusing into shadows was insignificant at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where burns from thermal radiation were only received in an unobstructed radial line from the fireball, so that any shielding provided virtually complete protection from thermal flash. The 110 Castle-3 shot at Bikini Atoll in 1954 was fired during a moderate rainstorm to obtain data on the reduction of blast and thermal effects by rainfall. There are no films that show the fireball because the water content of the air absorbed the thermal and visible transmission. Heavy rain or fog absorbs the thermal radiation locally around the fireball, rather than creating a large amount of dangerously wide-angle scattered radiation at great distances. Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, gives data for Pacific test conditions in Figure 6.39 on page 248, on the effect of scattered thermal radiation from a burst at 1 km altitude, at various distances and for different fields of view:
At 10 km ground range, 43% of the thermal radiation in unobstructed terrain is direct (from the fireball), and 57% is scattered, but the angular distribution of scattering is not extreme (most of the scattering comes from air relatively near the fireball): the total (direct plus scattered) is 80% for a 30 degrees field of view (only 20% of the thermal radiation comes from angles exceeding 30 degrees from the radial line to the burst). Only 4% of the total thermal radiation at 10 km comes from angles beyond 90 degrees (i.e. 96% comes from the hemisphere around a target facing the burst).
At 30 km ground range, 16% of the thermal radiation in unobstructed terrain is direct (from the fireball), and 84% is scattered, but the angular distribution of scattering is not extreme (most of the scattering comes from air relatively near the fireball): the total (direct plus scattered) is 70% for a 40 degrees field of view (only 30% of the thermal radiation comes from angles exceeding 40 degrees from the radial line to the burst). Only 6% of the total thermal radiation at 10 km comes from angles beyond 90 degrees (i.e. 94% comes from the hemisphere around a target facing the burst).
Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, gives graphs of the thermal radiation spectrum, showing differences with burst altitude and yield. Figure 6.19 shows that a 1 kt surface burst gives a thermal spectrum which peaks at 1.1 micron (Planck radiating temperature = 2000 K), compared to 0.4 micron (Planck radiating temperature = 5000 K) for 1 kt air bursts at 1-30 km altitude. Figure 6.21 shows there is much less difference between the spectra for surface and air bursts for 1 megaton yield: 0.70 micron peak in the thermal spectrum (Planck radiating temperature = 3800 K) for a megaton surface burst, compared with 0.52 microns (Planck radiating temperature = 4500 K) for a 30 km altitude megaton burst.
Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, in Figure 16.10 uses hydrodynamic calculations to prove that the maximum fire wind velocity in a firestorm is only a weak function of the fire intensity, for example a fire with a radius of 10 km will create a maximum fire wind velocity of 17 m/s for a fire intensity of 25 kW/m2, but this only increases to 36 m/s if the fire intensity is increased to 240 kW/m2.
Remember also that nuclear test evidence shows that the risk of clothing or other items burning is less for real levels of office humidity than for target materials left to dry out in the Nevada at the lower humidity of Nevada nuclear tests like Encore; clothing shields thermal radiation and increases burns energy requirements contrary to Glasstone.
Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, Table 14.5 on page 501 also points out that while people standing nude 2 metres behind glass windows watching the nuclear blast approach them will receive a 50% median dose of 3 glass fragment abdominal wall penetrations at a peak overpressure of 7 psi, it takes 15 psi if they are wearing clothing! If they duck and cover, they will can avoid the directional flying glass (and the thermal burns) completely. What Northrop doesn't tell you is that in a built up city, the dynamic pressure needed to energise those glass fragments to lethal velocities don't exist 2 metres behind glass windows in general; only behind those windows facing the fireball with an unobstructed view. Other windows on all all sides of the building will certainly break if the overpressure is high enough, but the blast wind (dynamic pressure) is directional and so the windows will not be blasted inwards with the same speed (at lower pressures they can even fail in the negative phase and be sucked outwards, with no hazard whatsoever to occupants!). Northop (1996) in chapter 14 on personnel casualties gives very high mortality rates based on unprotected head impacts, particularly for standing personnel, e.g. 5 psi for 50% mortality for people standing in buildings swept through by blast winds. Again, this assumes the blast winds are not obstructed and attenuated by the other surrounding buildings in a city, but it also suggests a simple civil defense precaution to accompany duck and cover in a crisis situation: bicycle helmets can be kept under emergency table "shelters" and can be put on quickly before the blast arrives, after a nuclear explosion, to minimise head trauma from flying debris or bodily translation and impact for high dynamic pressures and long blast durations. With duck and cover, you can avoid wind drag or injury from flying debris and you can keep away from a blast reflecting surface, then Northop shows in Figures 14.2 and 14.3 that you have 50% chance of surviving 37 psi peak overpressure from 1 megaton if you are lying down perpendicular to the direction of approach of the blast wave, or 62 psi if your are lying parallel to the direction of the blast (i.e., lying down facing away from the flash). In other words, blast is then very survivable!
ABOVE: "nuclear war" in populist fiction = end of the world. In fact, as shown by President Kennedy's letter to Life magazine readers above, not everybody agrees that "the survivors will envy the dead". As discussed in detail below, during the 1930s "arms control and disarmament" (aka Nazi appeasement and collaboration) lying by knights and lords with Nobel Peace Prizes hanging around their necks repeatedly brainwashed (with great success) the gullible mass media that mustard gas was 360,000,000 times more lethal than it was in 1918 when simple gas masks provided protection (far greater protection is available today with more modern defense equipment than was issued in 1918). The exaggeration factor was a game-changer. Now you get a whole class of mass media liars who say things like "we must lie about nuclear weapons effects to prevent a nuclear war". The problem is, as in the 1930s, lying ends up causing war by undermining credible deterrence! Tell the truth! Kennedy in a 1961 speech on civil defense argued further that civil defense was needed to prevent WWIII due to "escalation" in a nuclear weapon accident (or apparent "demonstration" strike). If you ban civil defense and ABM because youre faked nuclear effects model show they can be overcome by a massive attack, then you have no defense against nuclear weapons "accidents" (the "fog of war" propaganda tactic in a major crisis is to use diversionary explosions and ambiguity to reduce chances of retaliation, so first the enemy says "we did not launch attack", then eventually you may get "perhaps someone exceeded their authority or some bomb fired itself", etc., etc., so there is 0% clarity and 0% immediate justification to respond, other than waving a white flag and asking for "peace talks" to "resolve the problem without escalation"). So you need civil defense and ABM to mitigate the consequences of conventional or nuclear LIMITED aka "accidental" (note the quote marks!) demonstration strikes, to avoid escalating to all-out nuclear war.
This is 100% diametrically opposed to "arms control and disarmament" (Russian-front) Western anti-civil defense and anti-ABM propaganda spin (Russia itself has both, naturally), which claims that such defenses reduce rather than increase the all-out nuclear threshold! We give many examples below disproving this gormless trash. It's based on the concept that ambulances, hospitals, doctors, car seatbelts, fire stations, first aid training etc causes more accidents than otherwise, by causing a "false sense of security and thus reckless conduct". But statistical evidence disproves this kind of gullible confidence trick. For example, the lack of any civil defense or ABM defense in the UK against "Iraq's WMD's" in 2002 did not reduce reckless conduct by the UK, but on the contrary was used to justify preventative war by Tony Blair in a now-notorious government publication called "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction"! This is what always happens when your options are limited. In October 1962, Kennedy decided to evacuate American cities within Russian IRBM range from Cuba, then invade to remove the nuclear threat; he was unable because in 1961 his advisers had cut evacuation planning out of Herman Kahn's civil defense scheme (Kennedy had only implemented the fallout basement shelter identification and stocking part of Kahn's scheme). This was due to claims that evacuation, taking time, would be no use in a surprise Russian attack (Kahn's concept in his book was based on the 1 September 1939 Operation Pied Piper evacuation of vulnerable people - kids, the pregnant, etc. - from London 48 hours before declaring war to reduce risks of a surprise attack, not evacuating after an enemy surprise attack is detected). If you can't mitigate "accidental" strikes or "demonstration" strikes, you get sucked into war very easily because even a single enemy detonation can have cause 120 times as many casualties if people are in the open than inside concrete buildings or simple shelters: this is the paucity of alternatives dilemma. There is no CND "ignorance" here; it's DELIBERATE LYING for political ends (supporting the enemy), as explained by Herman Kahn and Bruce-Briggs in their 1972 book Things to Come, where they define groupthink anti-nuclear style "educated incapacity" as:
"an acquired or learned inability to understand or see a problem, much less a solution ... when a problem or the solution lies outside the accepted framework ..."
ACDA disarmament bigots simply lied in the traditional "H. G. Wells" 1930s-sci-fi-style of disarmament fantasy, in testimony to congress, about the motivation and the detailed work of those people who disproved them, they ignored the classified data on blast and fallout shielding in their "effects" models, or their calculations assumed that people failed to use fallout shelters in order to deceptively "reduce" fallout protection factors by a factor of 7, by simply assuming people would go outside to be exposed to unshielded fallout (like most people, they also massively exaggerated the mean gamma ray energy of fallout during the sheltering period, as we have previously exposed, which is debunked by the measurements after the Redwing Zuni and Tewa tests) - they also lied that Jones didn't include fallout casualties when in fact he did include fallout correctly, finding that you don't get fallout casualties with the high degree of radiation shielding in shelters, an exact analogy to the situation where the 100,000 protection factor of activated charcoal gas mask filters gave no gas casualties in 1938 research, and disarmament bigots tried to claim that was some kind of ignorant dismissal of the horrors of true gas war so they would "arbitrarily" assume that only say 50% of people put on gas masks in order to then falsely claim that gas masks were somehow "calculated" to only work for 50% of people - i.e. only those assumed to be actually wearing them! - a travesty and abuse of scientific modelling (like lying that you have done detailed calculations proving that car seat belts make no difference in accidents, when in fact you have merely assumed that nobody wears the seat belts!), when in fact the true excellence of gas mask protection was proved to successfully deter Hitler from using gas on civilians with gas masks, saving millions contrary to the hate attacks on civil defence by disarmament propaganda deceivers (who recognised that civil defence made deterrence credible, and so was a threat to their bigoted plans for peace at any price):
ABOVE: extracts from the famous 1979 T. K. Jones Boeing Corporation letter, page 2, debunking "arms control" nuclear weapons effects liars in detail. This really exasperated my dad, John B. Cook, who was a Civil Defence Corps instructor in the 1950s, but was old enough to live through the 1930s appeasement era when Philip Noel-Baker repeated lied on the effects of gas bombs, claiming gas masks will never work, because babies and the elderly won't put them on properly, blah, blah, so we must ban evil civil defence and instead guarantee peace by appeasing the Nazis because of we don't, they will DEFINITELY gas us all with a massive gas bomb raid on day 1 of war. In fact, Philip Noel-Baker did this first in a BBC radio speech in 1927, 6 years before Hitler was elected. Family members who knew the truth from gas attacks in WWII - largely negated by simple gas masks and going into shelters for droplets of persistent liquids like mustard agent - had to put up with this lying BBC and other media propaganda for disarmament throughout the 1930s, to the joy of the Nazis who were secretly rearming and preparing for invasions (not necessarily war, since Hitler would have been quite happy to "peacefully" invade the world and then use efficient gas chambers to dispose of those whose race or views he found to be "offensive", like modern snowflakes today). What really irritated dad, however, was that Philip Noel-Baker, having lied about gas effects in his February 1927 BBC radio broadcast and throughout the 1930s to great applause from pacifists who effectively did Hitler's bidding, was made a Lord and a Nobel Peace prize winner for appeasement propaganda lies that led to world war, and then did the same thing all over again during the cold war, issuing nuclear weapons lies. In a 1980 House of Lords debate on Civil Defence, he lied that the air burst in Hiroshima produced lethal fallout: "It covers everything in Hiroshima not already rendered lethal, and so those who have escaped the flash, the blast, the fire, will die within a short time. The first atomic bomb weighed two kilograms. It was little larger than a cricket ball. ... In 1978, more than 2,000 died in Hiroshima from its long-term effects."
Every word here is totally untrue, and easily disproved, but nobody in the House of Lords explained the facts to him, so this he quotes on page 5 of his 1980 Ecology Party book "How to Survive the Nuclear Age", and on page 6 he adds an attack on civil defence: "I feel the same outrage in 1980 when the Home Office [UK Government civil defence] propose to circulate a a copy of a pamphlet entitled Protect and Survive to every citizen. ... To strengthen the walls and ceilings as the pamphlet suggests, he needed a garden, a spade, sandbags, and the strength to dig and transport a ton of earth." However, the infirm or elderly don't need to hire an army of helpers to make a fallout shelter, because - contrary to Philip Noel-Baker - you can simply use water from a hose to fill up water filled bags inside boxes which do the shielding, as explained in the Home Office scientific advisory branch Fission Fragments magazine article (reprinted in the Royal Observer Corps Journal, vol. 27, issue 2, February 1985, page 26, below). In any case, in actual implementation, you would have some organization for civil defence in time of crisis, with people in nighbourhoods helping one another (lending hose pipes, helping to assemble emergency shelters around tables in homes, etc). Noel-Baker ends his case by absurdly calling for disarmament as a "sure way to avoid the war", by again ignoring the lessons of his own 1930s disarmament war effects propaganda which led to appeasement and thus the encouragement of enemy aggression, triggering the Second World War: "This is not a utopian dream. It is the system by which David Lloyd George disarmed Germany in 1919..." This claim typifies Noel-Baker's absurd, self-contradictory nonsense, since DLG's 1919 "system" led to another, far worse, world war, not to peace.
In that 1980 Ecology Party book "How to Survive the nuclear age", there is after the deceptions from Labour Party Lord Noel-Baker, a summary of civil defence shelter advice, but then the book ends with the transcript of the final big speech from Lord Mountbatten to the arms control anti-nuclear propaganda institute SIPRI at Strasbourg on 11 May 1979 (the IRA tragically ended his appeasement campaign with a bomb on his boat off the coast of Sligo, Ireland, on 27 August 1979): "A military confrontation between the nuclear powers could entail the horrifying risk of nuclear warfare [hardly likely if we have overwhelming superiority for credible deterrence, as we should have had - but did not have - in the 1930s to deter Hitler]. ... A new world war can hardly fail to involve the all-out use of nuclear weapons [this is debunked by former NATO General Sir John Hackett's book "The Third World War" which shows how escalation risks will be controlled even in the event of a Russian first-strike on Britain, provided that we are prepared for nuclear war - this book will be discussed in detail later in this blog post, below]. ... Let us all resolve to take all possible practical steps to ensure that we do not, through our own folly, go over the edge."
ABOVE: the most advanced and latest American "counterforce" nuclear weapons, the oralloy (Oak Ridge Alloy, aka U235 loaded secondary stage) W88 nuclear warheads were designed to knock out the huge well shock-insulated Russian SS-18 missile silos when they had a physical vulnerability number of 52L7, corresponding to a peak overpressure of 7000 psi, which is well within the crater radius. This is highly relevant today, since ehe SS-18 (in Russian nomenclature: R-36M2) is still in service (like the American W88), and the Russians have 46 of them, each with 10 warheads of 800 kilotons each, i.e. a total of 10x46 = 460 nuclear warheads and 3680 megatons. These 211 ton SS-18s are due to be replaced with the latest 208 ton Sarmat (RS-28) missiles (which made its first test flight on 20 April 2022, during the Ukraine war), extending the range from 11,000 km for the SS-18 to 18,000 km for the Sarmat. Unfortunately, as this declassified report shows, as with the Russian civil defense shelters, the silo hardness was underrated and the physical vulnerability is not 52L7 as originally supposed. The SS-18 silos could take much higher peak overpressures than 7000 psi and related ground shock, cratering throwout, etc. (The current "best guess" - and this is not proof tested due to the ban on atmospheric nuclear testing - is that it takes a peak overpressure of 10,000 psi to blow the silo door off the SS-18 silo and wreck the missile, which occurs at a distance from the warhead similar to its inertial gyroscopic CEP targetting error if the accurate GPS satellite navigation system is taken out by high altitude bursts, so to get a high kill probability you need to target many warheads per silo, a hugely inefficient strategy when all the enemy has to do is launch the SS-18 out of the silo before your warheads arrive!) In addition to this underestimate of the hardness of vital military "counterforce" targets in Russia, the Americans also massively over-estimated the cratering and ground shock effects for high yields in ordinary soils (not easily broken coral reefs!). (For references, please see the earlier blog posts about cratering exaggerations linked here and here.) The points we want people to take away, or at least openly investigate and question are:
(1) countervalue (anti-city) effects of nuclear weapons are bunk because, aside from the mistakes and deliberate omissions Glasstone and Dolan made for propaganda purposes in their 1977 edition, if the chips really do go down, you or your opponent can simply evacuate cities - most of which self-evacuate at 5pm every weekday, anyhow - evacuation is not a miracle, despite what Scientific American or Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says - before issuing an ultimatum, just as the UK did with evacuating kids from London in Operation Pied Piper on 1 September 1939 before issuing an ultimatum and then declaring war 48 hours later,
(2) you or your opponent can not only safeguard the civilians in cities by evacuating them (or putting the people into shelters/basements etc if you have them, as the Russians do, and as thankfully the Ukrainians do which is a key reason they have been able to fight the Russian invasion, as a result of having previously been part of the civil defense obsessed USSR), but 100% of missiles in silos can also be safeguarded from destruction by simply firing them out of their silos, if seriously threatened by a counterforce (anti-silo) enemy attack. In other words, if you decide to credibly target enemy nuclear weapons (a very costly strategy in terms of the number of W88 warheads per silo for any significant chance of damaging a >7000psi peak overpressure-requiring SS-18 missile silo, which are about as well protected as the concrete and steel around most nuclear power reactor cores), your targetting policy will encourage the enemy to launch first, to save their missiles from being taken out! So using nuclear weapons to target other nuclear weapons in hardened silos (or hidden in the sea in submarines!), apart from being extremely inefficient and costly in terms of your stockpile, is also a policy that provokes the risk of enemy "launch on warning" crisis instability because you are, if "successful", removing the enemy's protected second strike retaliation capability, and once the second strike option is gone, they are pushed back into the old first-strike aka launch-on-warning policy, which is extremely dangerous if their radar operators mistake some third party's missile testing for a launch against them, etc., etc. So the obsessive "disarmament fantasy" of only using nuclear weapons to try to deter other nuclear weapons in silos by targeting them, is a dangerous illusion that provokes crisis instability and risks an accidental nuclear war, in addition to being an exceptionally ineffective deterrent! All you do with that delusion is to deter the enemy from a second-strike policy, and force the enemy into a dangerous first-strike/launch on warning policy! If you can knock out the enemy warheads in their silos, the enemy will simply ensure that there is a very high probability that their missiles have been launched out of their silos before your warheads arrive, so you will be uselessly destroying EMPTY missiles silos! (your warheads take 25 minutes to arrive for an ICBM between continents, and 10 minutes for a back door attack of an SLBM launched from a submarine; less time is required for a Russian sub to hit NY or LA because they are beside oceans, unlike Moscow and most Russian targets that are well inland!).
(3) In any case, how do you target enemy SLBMs in submarines hidden at sea? Similarly, the most numerous Russian ICBM in their stockpile is the mobile SS-27 Mod 2/RS-24, of which they have 135 missiles on 16-wheeled mobile launch vehicles which can move around, with 4 separate MIRV nuclear megaton warheads per missile and a range of 11,000 km. How do you target them as they move around during a crisis situation? They can easily move position enough to survive an nuclear warhead in the US stockpile during the 25 minutes while your missiles are on the way to hit them in a crisis situation, so you are literally trying to hit a moving target - do you really believe America will be able to reprogram the target locations for ICBM warheads in flight as they are moving? The whole idea would be amusing if it wasn't so tragic (there was an effort to create a warhead which could track its moving target and adjust its trajectory accordingly, the MARV - Maneuverable Reentry Vehicle - the only known Western MARV was the Pershing II warhead, which disarmed as part of the INF treaty to appease Russia/pro-disarmament politicians in the West). So the whole idea of using nuclear weapons to hit enemy nuclear weapons before they are launched is crazy and dangerous. It's no joke that all the disarmament propaganda claims falsely that nuclear weapons have only the purpose of targetting other nuclear weapons in silos. That policy is dangerous, because it just encourages the enemy to get the weapons out of their silos before your weapons can arrive, so you are not deterring the enemy to launch their weapons, but forcing them to launch on warning, a lunatic policy! Nuclear weapons are only effective in a counterforce operation against armies on the move, either as a deterrent or to physically stop invasions without collateral damage by air burst enhanced neutron weapons. The only real use of nuclear weapons should be, as Oppenheimer said, as a tactical threat to stop the military invasions and attacks that triggered two world wars.
Nuclear weapons are exceptionally good at deterring (or stopping) armies on the move! Not so if they are dispersed in defensive positions like hasty earth covered emergency civil defense shelters that resist 40 psi peak overpressure and give a protection factor of 200 or more against radiation; but the point is that they deter enemy military offensives and once the enemy has crossed your border you are within your rights to stop them; the credible threat will prevent invasions this way, ending world war. (Nuclear weapons are also effective at destroying enemy nuclear weapons in flight, e.g. the 2 kt W66 neutron warhead in the American Sprint ABM missile could melt down the fissile material in Russian nuclear warheads in flight in the atmosphere, and the 5 Mt W71 x-ray warhead of the Spartan ABM missile would ablate, deflect and destroy Russian warheads in space; they also knock down trees to create demilitarised zones in jungle warfare which enable easy identification of insurgents entering those zones for attacks.)
In 1979, in a joint article with hydrogen bomb advocate Dr Edward Teller in the U.S. Senate Congressional Record (2 August 1979, page S-11490), Wigner points out that Kahn's Type I deterrence is inadequate to prevent war (Type I is also called "mutual assured destruction", if both sides have parity via "arms control" delusions): "... I believe that the so called Mutual Assured Destruction is nonsense, because suppose even if the attacked nation could retaliate, if the other nation pretends that it does not believe it and makes a demand, is there any point in resisting? What good does it do if it can destroy hundreds of thousands of the aggressors' lives ..."
In his 26 May 1964 address to Mercer County NJ Civil Defense organization (reprinted in his Collected Works, part B, Vol. 8, p35 et seq.), Wigner explains that "people who are against Civil Defense often have some element of frustration ... and they find more easily time for, and outlet in, their opposition," as explained by Robert Waelder's article Protest and Revolution Against Western Societies, in M.A. Kaplan (ed), The Revolution in World Politics (New York, 1962, p 18), i.e. it is the same as the mechanism for Marxist agitators, some of which are openly Marxist and others pretend to be libertarian while remaining faithful to the bigoted dictators. Wigner's address continues: "Much more literature - I think 80% - is against than for Civil Defense and much of it is completely irresponsible. A few weeks ago I read an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which the author said that a complete fallout [cheaper than blast] shelter program would cost $50 billion. Now $50 billion is more than would be spent on the complete blast [and fallout] shelter program which I mentioned [$35 billion]. But ... who will contradict it?"
The only reply Wigner received was a nonsense filled 11-page article attacking all these lessons from Russian Civil Defense, headed "Limited Nuclear War" by Sidney D. Drell and Frank von Hippel, and published in the November 1976 issue of Scientific American, the editor of which, Dennis Flanagan, refused to publish Wigner's rebuttal, entitled "We heartily disagree", just as Kahn's rebuttal to the nonsense review of his book on Civil Defense in 1961 had been refused by Scientific American, leading Kahn to expand it into his 1962 book "Thinking about the unthinkable". Wigner's and A. A. Broyles rebuttal to Scientific American was finally published instead as "We heartily disagree" in the Journal of Civil Defense, v10, pp. 4-8, July-August 1977 issue, pointing out that the Russian casualties with civil defense would be 4% on Wigner's unclassified estimate or 2% using T. K. Jones's classified data estimate (utilizing secret data on the survival of foxholes in nuclear tests, in the 1972 DNA-EM-1 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons), and that the Russian improvised lined, covered trench shelters survive a peak overpressure of 40 psi as well as heat flash and fallout radiation, and adds that contrary to the nonsense in Scientific American, the Russians did test their plans by evacuating the city of Sevastopol in a drill which led to improvements in their plans.
H-bomb proponent Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and A. A. Broyles in May 1973 had jointly authored the American Security Council report, "Without civil defense we are in a glass house", which basically argues that you can't have a deterrent for world war if you are not prepared to use that deterrent when your bluff is called. If you are in Chamberlain's position in 1938 or Baldwin's in 1935, you are scared of using the deterrent because it is like "throwing stones in glass houses", because - if you can't shelter people because you refuse to have shelters and you also won't have a plan to evacuate kids from London (Operation Pied Piper, 1939) before you declare war - then you can easily be scared and coerced by Hitler or other dictators, who can see clearly that your "deterrent" is a complete bluff and totally, pathetically useless, because a weapon you can't use is not a credible deterrent. Naturally, as we keep repeating on this blog, this is what the defeatists who love Putin and other dictators want since surrender has two vital steps: (1) get rid of the shield (civil defense) since that makes the sword credible as an alternative to disarmament, and (2) point out that a sword without a shield is an incredible deterrent that is useless, so we had better disarm (and surrender)! Arms control delusions like supposed "parity" (a balance of weapons on both sides, as if democracies need detering like dictatorships), when one side has credible civil defense and the other doesn't, is like a duel between two people, similarly armed, but with one wearing body armour and the other totally unprotected! Not on that, but the dictator is the one wearing the body armour!
If proof of this is needed, Robert Scheer, a fellow in arms control at Stanford University and the author of With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, became "Truthdig" editor-in-chief, a propagandarist who claims that ending WWII with nuclear weapons made Truman guilty of "the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history", so he needs to check his facts on the numbers gassed in the Holocaust, or starved in Ukraine by Stalin, unless he denies those deliberate acts of terrorism like the other left wing Holocaust deniers who confuse racism and anti-racism, terrorism and anti-terrorism. When you actually check the facts: (1) Secretary Stimson (U.S. Secretary of War) knew he has a secret nuclear weapons program of investment of billions of dollars to justify to Congress after WWII ended and didn't want to hold back using the bomb for that reason, so he promoted Hiroshima as being a military target (it did have military bases, particularly at Hiroshima Castle just north of ground Zero, but it was also a highly populated civilian city), (2) Hiroshima's air raid shelters were unoccupied because Japanese Army officers were having breakfast when B29s were detected far away, says Yoshie Oka, the operator of the Hiroshima air raid sirens on 6 August 1945, (3) Colonel Tibbets, former bomber of Germany before becoming the Hiroshima pilot as commander of the 509th Composite Group, explains how his pilots and crew were ridiculed heavily for lack of accomplishments, while preparing for weeks on Tinian Island. According to Tibbet's own book The Tibbets Story a poem was published before Hiroshima called "Nobody knows" lampooning the 509th's results: "Nobody knows. Into the air the secret rose; Where they're going, nobody knows; Tomorrow they'll return again; But we'll never know where they've been. Don't ask us about results or such; Unless you want to get in Dutch. But take it from one who is sure of the score, the 509th is winning the war. When the other Groups are ready to go; We have a program of the whole damned show; And when Halsey's 5th shells Nippon's shore; Why, shucks, we hear about it the day before. And MacArthur and Doolittle give out in advance; But with this new bunch we haven't a chance; We should have been home a month or more; For the 509th is winning the war." Tibbets was therefore determined create maximum effects after his group had been ridiculed at Tinian Island for not attacking Japan during weeks of preparations on the island, rehearsing the secret nuclear attacks while other B29s were taking flak trying to bomb Japan into surrender with conventional bombs. He writes in The Tibbets Story that regular morning flights of small groups of weather and phototographic survey planes that did not make significant attacks over possible nuclear target cities, helped to reduce civil defense readiness in the cities, as well as reducing the air defense risks, since Japan was rationing its use of its limited remaining air defense in 1945.
The November 1976 Scientific American anti-civil defense article claimed that civil defense was discredited since: "In the 1960s the US adopted a strategic policy giving top priority to the prevention of nuclear war through deterrence ...", to which Wigner and Broyles responded to this claim in "We heartily disagree" in the July-August 1977 Journal of Civil Defense: "How do you deter an attack unless you convince an enemy that you will fight the war that he is starting?"
Dictators often start wars which their people don't need: the Persian war against the Greeks, Hannibal's war against Rome, the Tartar's invasions of Europe, the Turks' invasion of Hungary, the invasions of Napoleon. You have to accept that aggression is not necessarily a completely rational activity! All that counts for deterrence is that it is credible. If you don't prepare to fight with strategic nuclear weapons, then they are just a pointless bluff, a paper tiger as the Chinese put it, not a credible deterrent. Which is precisely what the disarmers want, of course, since nuclear parity, with the shift away from credible nuclear deterrence to incredible foolery, is only one step away from admitting the uselessness of the strategic nuclear stockpile, disarming and surrendering!
ABOVE: just when Moscow communist backed CND propaganda against Prime Minister "Maggie's" endorsement of President Reagan's nuclear arms race acceleration against Russia and her civil defense "Protect and Survive" and "Domestic Nuclear Shelters Technical Guidance" was peaking in 1982, Argentina decided to illegally seize the Falkland Islands from the UK. The event turned into a test of ultra left wing Labour "pacifist" Tony Benn against his own left wing association, Tribune, with him storming out of the 5 April 1982 meeting after he was booed and jeered for opposing war as impossible against such a large country in South America, claimed Reagan would side with Argentina against the UK, and compared the UK Falklands War Task Force to the Suez crisis of 1956! This is similar to the anti-nuclear gibberish such ill-informed, militarily and diplomatically decrepid fools spout at all times. However, with British citizens under threat by Argentina, such "pacifist" lunacy was rightly ridiculed even by the majority of far left. Pacifists in the UK government continued delusional "peace talks" while the Task Force sailed to South America. The problem with endless peace talks is that against a stronger enemy, it undermines military chances of success, e.g. removing any chance of a surprise counter strike.
ABOVE: the 11 October 1952 cover of Picture Post showed clearly the "separation of effects" in an air burst (31 kiloton air burst at 3,440 ft, the Charlie shot of 22 April 1952, Nevada test site), where the fireball cools and forms into toroidal shape (with the radioactivity in the ring) before the "stem" of popcorned dust from the desert is sucked through the middle, before cascading harmlessly around the periphery without mixing with the fission products in the toroidal ring. Despite the visual proof that intense radioactive fallout can be avoided by air bursts, anti-nuclear propaganda helped by Russian fronts continued to raise fallout fears to promote Western arms control and disarmament, leaving the field clear for undeterred Russian conventional invasions and wars.
"The conventional wisdom about Ukraine's nuclear weapons is wrong. In fact, as soon as it declared independence, Ukraine should have been quietly encouraged to fashion its own nuclear deterrent. Even now, pressing Ukraine to become a nonnuclear state is a mistake. A nuclear Ukraine makes sense for two reasons. First, it is imperative to maintain peace between Russia and Ukraine. That means ensuring that the Russians, who have a history of bad relations with Ukraine, do not move to reconquer it. ... Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression. ... A conventional war between Russia and Ukraine would entail vast military casualties and the possible murder of many thousands of civilians. Russians and Ukrainians have a history of mutual enmity; this hostility, combined with the intermixing of their populations, raises the possibility that war between them could entail Bosnian style ethnic cleansing and mass murder. This war could produce millions of refugees clamoring at the borders of Western Europe. ... There is also the threat of escalation beyond the borders of Russia and Ukraine. For example, the Russians might decide to reconquer other parts of the former Soviet Union in the midst of a war, or might try to take back some of Eastern Europe. Poland and Belarus might join forces with Russia against Ukraine or gang up with Ukraine to prevent a Russian resurgence. The Germans, Americans or Chinese could get pulled in by their fear of a Russian victory. (Doubters should remember that the United States had no intention of fighting in Europe when war broke out in 1914 and again in 1939.) ...
"Russia has dominated an unwilling and angry Ukraine for more than two centuries, and has attempted to crush Ukraine's sense of self-identity. Recent history witnessed the greatest horrors in this relationship: Stalins government murdered an astounding 12 million Ukrainians during the 1930s. ... A Ukrainian conventional deterrent is not a viable option because Ukraine cannot build an army powerful enough to stop a Russian attack. Ukraine's army might put up dogged resistance, but it would eventually be defeated. Russia is simply too powerful. ... Conventional military power is significantly more expensive than nuclear military power and requires a larger military; hence it requires far more popular mobilization. ... A security guarantee from the West is theoretically possible but not a practical strategy for maintaining Ukrainian sovereignty. Extending deterrence to Germany during the Cold War was a demanding and expensive job; extending deterrence further east to Ukraine would be even more difficult. ... Vilifying nuclear weapons is a fashionable sport in the West. ... This view of nuclear weapons is simplistic and flies in the face of the inherent logic of nuclear deterrence, as well as the history of the Cold War. In fact, nuclear weapons often diminish international violence, and Ukrainian nuclear weapons would be an effective deterrent against a Russian conventional attack or nuclear blackmail. In the pre-nuclear world of industrialized great powers, there were two world wars between 1900 and 1945 in which some 50 million Europeans died. In the nuclear age, the story is very different. Only some 15,000 Europeans were killed in minor wars between 1945 and 1990, and there was a stable peace between the superpowers that became increasingly robust over time. ... Moreover, there is always the possibility that nuclear weapons might be used inadvertently or accidentally in the course of a conventional war, which provides further incentives for caution."
Notice the point that Angell fails to explain why mutual deterrence won't keep the peace! If any mass-media "nuclear overkill" lies were true and we only needed 0.02 kiloton W54 sized nuclear warheads, we'd have 0.02 kiloton nuclear weapons. The reason why we have higher yields is lying isn't a credible deterrent when the chips go down, and what we have is a bare minimum to carry out a minimal deterrent function. It's easy to reduce nuclear weapon yields by removing boost gas, secondary stages, etc. The actual problem is the exact opposite of what 100% of quack mass media liars rant: if actually we want to reduce the risk of war including escalation to nuclear war, we need a credible deterrent which we don't have (see facts below). As regards huge stockpiles, this bankrupts the dictatorship as seen in the 1980s. It's a small price to pay, compared to the cost of a world war. Angell simply sneers at mutual deterrence, without (1) saying what's wrong with it, (2) investigating how to make it stable, (3) explaining why there's something wrong with "Si vis Pacem, para Bellum". Herman Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War discovered these pseudo-pacifists were key to starting WWII by duping the public with the illusion of security through disarmament (using itallics to emphasise this point!). What's actually needed, Kahn showed is credible deterrence including civil defence in order to reduce collateral damage such as radiation exposure to civilians (this is discussed in detail below, with quotations from Kahn's various books). This quotation of Angell versus Churchill in a 1913 deterrence debate is important because Churchill's pre-WWI naval Dreadnought deterrence ("We need eight, and we won't wait!") proved an incredible deterrent against the invasion of Belgium in 1914 which triggered WWI! So deterrence must be credible against the spectrum of provocations that result in wars, not just against a subset of the spectrum of possible provocations!
But Churchill's so-called "brilliant oratory" during the 1930s again failed to sway public opinion early enough to credible deter the Nazis from invading Poland in 1939 and triggering WWII. He failed to defeat the anti-deterrence movement led by Norman Angell and Philip Noel-Baker. So there are important lessons to learn here. In the end, the "anti-war movement" - which had become by 1939 a Nazi Fifth Column in the UK - had to be forceably shut down (with oppressive press censorship) once war broke out, as enemy collaboration or defeatism. However, they re-started again in 1945 when wartime censorship was lifted, and were never debunked by scientists, historians or journalists who could see the dangers from attacking them, i.e. the fascist mentality of such self-righteous lying quacks and charlatans, which were identical to the pseudo-scientist mindsets of Nazi eugenics pseudoscience and Marxism pseudoscience. The anti-nuclear quacks immediately focussed on nuclear weapons radiation, just as they had focussed on gas fear-mongering in the 1920s and 1930s! The journalists, historians and scientists who should have called out the liars instead backed anti-nuclear liars, instead of repudiating them and using nuclear weapons to deter war! Historians like AJP Taylor were accused by Herman Kahn of fiddling their analysis of Hitler and war origins, simply in order to "justify" a delusional anti-nuclear agenda (e.g., AJP Taylor was a founder of unilateral nuclear disarmament organisation "CND"!). There is still a taboo on mentioning the fact that Glasstone's and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons states in Table 5.160 that a large cheap WWII Anderson shelter (light 10-gage corrugated steel hemispherical arch with 20-25 ft span and 5 ft earth cover at the crown) requires 45-60 psi peak overpressure for collapse, while an 8" thick reinforced hemispherical buried concrete arch with 16 ft span and 4 ft earth cover at the crown requires 220-280 psi peak overpressure for collapse, i.e. survival within half-a-mile from a one megaton surface burst, proving relatively cheap, credible, effective civil defence (Glasstone's book, however, generally is misleading "free field" effects data from nuclear tests in deserts, omitting the blast and radiation shielding caused by energy absorption by concrete building skylines in cities; the only parts of Glasstone quoted by the CND people are the falsehoods; the media let them get away with it!).
- Professor Philip Noel-Baker, "Foreign Affairs and How They Affect Us", BBC Radio, February 1927 (false claim, repudiated in secret discussions by UK Government Chemical Warfare Research Department, but not in public, thus enabling this form of "pacifist" lying to be used by Nazis to engineer appeasement leading to World War II; see also p31 of T. H. O'Brien's appalling UK official WWII history "Civil Defence" which dumbly mentions this episode without following up the implications for fascist appeasement!).
"Any use of nuclear weapons will escalate into a general war. There is no defence against such weapons ... nuclear warfare will destroy civilsation, and perhaps exterminate mankind. To hope for salvation from Civil Defence is a dangerous self-deluding pipe dream."
(Thus, the same anti-civil defence "pacifists" who laid the seeds for WWII in 1927 were at it in 1980, simply changing "gas" to "nuclear"! The thug was allowed to go on a Nobel Peace Prize winning anti-civil defence lying crusade because the "journalists", "historians", and "scientists" didn't want to upset the apple cart by telling the public the truth in time to credibly deter another war, exactly what also happened with lying war-mongering appeaser and BBC Brains Trust radio "expert" Professor Cyril Joad who recommended a peace deal with the Nazis in his August 1939 book "Why War?" which on p71 quoted Normal Angell before WWI allegedly "debunking" Winston Churchill as a war-monger responsible for WWI via the old pre-WWI naval arms race, viz "We want eight [Dreadnoughts] and we won't wait!" Joad was eventually kicked out of the BBC for being convicted of dodging his rail fare, not kicked out for helping Hitler's fascist "peace" propaganda - something that has also proved true for many other "untouchable stars" like Sir Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, et al. Journalism, the legal profession, scientific principles, etc., having first made heroes of liars who "filter out the unpleasant facts the public don't want to be concerned with", then always get to cover-up ahem "set aside" 100% of "issues" in their support of big pseudo-pacifist "star" liars, until the problem is so out of control they finally have to publish it, when they "switch over" and start saying the exact opposite about the "star", usually when the star is dead and it's too late, making believe that they did their best to oppose the liars, when in fact the evidence proves the exact opposite: they make as much money out of the star as they can, appeasing the thug in the process. The problem is that quacks and charlatans have always filled the BBC and other mass media outlets and pumped out endless lying about weapons effects, without any competent opposition whatsoever. You have to appreciate that this is simply because "war news" sells better on TV, than "deterrence evidence"! So today you have endless TV "history" shows about Hitler starting WWII, but none about the cause in the gas knockout blow esaggerations and gas mask lying or Anderson shelter lying by pseudo-pacifists, or even the lying origins of Hitler's eugenics in British pseudo-scientists like Darwin's cousin, eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, or his fan club - including the French Nobel Medical Laureate Dr Alexis Carrell who proposed to Hitler the use of gas chambers for "peaceful" mass murder of "state enemies" in his eugenics pseudoscience Nazi bestseller, "Man the Unknown". It's nearly all pathetic propaganda to enforce the false AJP Taylor style orthodoxy that there are no lessons about civil defence and pseudoscience lying from "expert conssensus" to be learned to ensure peace!)
Below: 13 July 2024 Russian State TV Channel 1 (Putin's Kremlin controlled Russian language propaganda channel for the Russian people): "Any confrontation with the NATO bloc is possible only with the use of nuclear weapons. There is simply no other option. If NATO's military organization surpasses us, it is absolutely futile for us to enter into such an armed confrontation with conventional means of destruction only."
NO: this is not "just a bluff". Putin has over 2000 tactical neutron bombs; we have damn all now. OK? We DID have dedicated tactical nuclear weapons until 1992, and they deterred Russian invasions, but since then we have cut back our deterrence to a bare minimum which excludes the deterrence of conventional wars which risk escalating (like the invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939) into a World War, despite Herman Kahn's warnings of the dangers from minimum deterrence in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War.
Russian propagandists:
"Any confrontation with the NATO bloc is possible only with the use of nuclear weapons. There is simply no other option. If NATO's military organization surpasses us, it is absolutely futile for us to enter into such an armed confrontation with… pic.twitter.com/LYIRrj17Ig
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) July 13, 2024
"If we are able to use these weapons, and the enemy does not have them, their military effect can only be matched by his use of larger-yield dirty weapons - with the political and propaganda penalties their use implies. Of course the converse will also be true." - Samuel T. Cohen, Low-yield fusion weapons for limited wars, RAND report R-347, 1 June 1959, Secret - Restricted Data classified, p.2 (note this report is based on Livermore laboratory's very clean low yield Dove and Starling devices, developed after the successful testing of 95% clean 4.5 megaton Navajo and 85% clean 3.53 megaton Zuni at Bikini Atoll in 1956 which had lead pushers; Cohen's declassified paper is now in Eisenhower's Presidential Library with annotation on the front cover proving President Eisenhower was briefed on it in 1959!).
"There is another way in which we can have too narrow a focus. We can refuse to entertain or consider seriously ideas which seem to be 'crackpot' or unrealistic, but which are really just unfamiliar. In more casual days one could dismiss a bizarre-sounding notion with a snort or comment about it being impractical or implausible. Things moved slowly, and no real harm was done if a new idea took several years to prove itself. Indeed, allowing a notion to stay around for several years before giving it serious intellectual attention meant that most of the 'half-baked' ones got scuttled and never had to be considered seriously at all." - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p125.
"At times, the costs and risks of trying to shift the balance of power are too great, forcing great powers to wait for more favorable circumstances. But the desire for more power does not go away, unless a state achieves the ultimate of hegemony. Since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, however, the world is condemned to perpetual great-power competition. ... They will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability. Simply put, great powers are primed for offense. ... a great power will defend the balance of power when looming change favors another state ... states recognise that the more powerful they are relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival. Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon ... Great powers ... have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system. This dilemma is captured in brutally frank comments that Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that Poland, which was not an independent state at the time, might regain its sovereignty. 'Restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us,' he believed, and therefore he advocated that Prussia [today, North East Germany] should 'smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out'." - Professor John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001, chapter 1.
According to the 1984 Guinness Book of Records (published for sale at Christmas 1983), page 219: "Mass killings ....The greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign nation against the government of another is that of 26,300,000 Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse-tung between 1959 and May 1965. This accusation was made by an agency of the USSR Government in a radio broadcast on 7 Apr 1969. ... The Walker Report published by the US Senage Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death roll within China since 1949 between 32.25 and 61.7 million. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Jean-Pierre Dujardin in Figaro magazine of 19-25 Nov 1979. USSR The total death roll in the Great Purge or Yezhovshchina, in the USSR, in 1936-8 ... was administered by the Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del (NKVD), or People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Soviet security service ... On 17 Aug 1942, Stalin indicated to Churchill in Moscow that 10 million kulaks had been liquidated for resisting the collectivization of their farms. ... Genocide ... It has been estimated that 35,000,000 Chinese were wiped out in the Mongolian invasion of 1210-19." This information about Chinese and Russian socialism mass killing of resistance in the 20th century is also given on pages 193-4 the 1975 Guinness Book of Records, 22nd edition issued in October 1975, which also points out on pages 187-8 that over a million were killed during the 1st Battle of the Somme in 1916 France, 1.3-1.5 million were killed during the 880 days siege of Leningrad in WWII. (These horrific war casualties are dwarfed by the natural disasters table on page 212, giving 75 million dead of plague in 1347-51, 21.64 million dead of flu pandemic in 1918, 9.5 million dead from famine in China in 1877-8, 3.7 million dead in a flood in China in 1931, and 1.5 million dead from famine and typhus in Ireland in 1846-51.) So much for propaganda that nuclear deterrence "risks" are particularly horrific statistics in history! Tens of millions were killed by socialist dictators in modern times, without nuclear bombs. Similarly huge numbers were killed by natural disease pandemics and extreme weather. The key difference is that we can now deter invasions.
"Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of utterly destroying the other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. ... Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. ... But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this. ...
"Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. ... A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints. ... When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists’ civil rights. ... If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb. Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory.
"How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, and are then left hanging? The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. ... In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives? ... A Fashion in Thinking. Without any [objective] censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development. In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons—maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. ...
"The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. ... [George] Kennan’s advice to his own country—to begin unilateral disarmament—belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the officials in Moscow’s Old Square roar with laughter at your political wizards! ... But in fact, members of the US antiwar movement became accomplices in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there. Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? ... To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, in this case, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal. ... Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism. The Communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes."
- Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University, A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978.
ABOVE: as Herman Kahn predicted in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War, the paranoid anti-arms race groupthink mob insanity of "disarmament and arms control" public coercion after the first World War was not a fluke, but instead was a standard human reaction to the end of a war. It sowed the seeds of another war! Similarly, after Cold War 1.0 ended in 1991, opposition to disarmament and arms control virtually disappeared, so enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons (which deterred the kind of invasions and conventional warfare that led to both World Wars, including nuclear weapons use twice in the second one), were removed unilaterally by the West, allowing Russian aggression to trigger Cold War 2.0. This is basically a repetition of the way fake "pacifist" disarmament propaganda lying by Lord Noel-Baker (who in a BBC radio broadcast in February 1927 first claimed that there was no defense against gas WMD except disarmament) and Sir Norman Angell (who had been at it since 1908 with his "Great Illusion" anti-deterrence book, see his pre-WWI argument with Churchill reported by Professor Cyril Joad in the latter's 1939 book "Why War?"), engineered disaster via populist weapons effects lying, "knockout blow" deceptions, and lying denials of civil defense effectiveness to negate threats (all the lessons of these lies have NOT been learned, and people like Lord Noel-Baker, who lied about gas knockout blows on BBC radio in February 1927, were still doing exactly the same thing with nuclear weapons fallout lies in 1980 in response to "Protect and Survive"!).
You won't find any objective analysis of this in any "history book", all of which follow left wing Marxism propaganda or the anti-nuclear biased CND bigot AJP Taylor, in denying the facts using a data-dump of horseshit propaganda to bury the truth. In reality, as the cartoon published in the 17 May 1919 Daily Herald by Will Dyson shows, people did predict another war by 1940 as a result of the 1919 "peace deal" by Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Baron Sonnino. But most people prefer to believe lies, a fact shown clearly by an unbiased view of history, or even by an unbiased view of "superstring theory" in physics. But don't dare to stand up for truth, because you'll be subject to lying ad hominem attacks and denied a right to reply and debunk the liars. Power corrupts absolutely because the cowardly crowd backs "fashion", not fact.
This was explained back in 1532 by Machiavelli in The Prince: “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.”
It was also later explained by John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859: “A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind ...”
And don't forget Professor F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1960, p. 379: “The very magnitude of the power over men’s minds that a highly centralised and government-dominated system of education places in the hands of the authorities ought to make one hesitant before accepting it too readily.”
This attitude encourages the mainstream media or "liberals" to censor anything that debunks their agenda. To recap, anti-deterrence propaganda from bigoted liars is the orthodoxy, and infects nuclear weapons discussions, deterrence discussions, and the entire "arms control and disarmament" movement with crap. Mainstream media would shut down the internet to "protect" people from potential "error". It's all Stalinist censorship, made plain by Orwell's book 1984, but ignored as "taboo" by thug censors masquerading as "liberals".
Kahn made the following point about disarmament and arms control: reducing nuclear stockpiles and unilaterally eliminating Type II Deterrence (i.e. deterrence of the provocations that cause war, e.g., disarming in 1992 the West's W79 neutron bombs to deter the invasions that set off both World Wars) doesn't make you safer, because it increases the risk of war as proved by history. Reducing the risk of an "accidental" nuclear war is best done using ABM, civil defense, plus safeguards inside nuclear weapons, than by disarmanent which increases the risk of war by reducing credible deterrence of war. The idea that unilateral disarmament protects you is like saying that nuclear-unarmed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were safe from nuclear attack in August 1945 because they were so-called "Nuclear Free Zones"! Similarly, the fact the world was non-nuclear in 1939 didn't stop nuclear weapons being manufactured and used to end that war! All of the CND arguments are fake news, just as all the arguments by Angell in 1908 against deterrence were fake news. Fakes news sells - as proved by the sale of fairy tales and "fiction". Even if you don't like particular uses or yields of nuclear weapons, there is a choice of tailored nuclear warhead yields and designs, and types of employment to produce different effects, with widely variable cleanliness, neutron output, EMP output, and the separation of heat, blast and fallout effects in air and subsurface bursts, to deter invasions without the collateral damage that accompanies conventional warfare.
"It is entirely plausible that the Nobel Peace Prize [albeit on a more rational and honest planet] should have been awarded to the designers of the first SLBM (submarine launched ballistic missile) systems, for in being so well hidden under the seas, this kind of weapon has made war much less likely during these years and, further, let each side relax somewhat more in the knowledge that such war was unlikely." - George H. Quester, "Maritime Issues In Avoiding Nuclear War", Armed Forces and Society, v13, issue 2, Winter 1987, p. 199.
ABOVE: the Russians have recently released a PDF of their detailed technical nuclear effects analysis of the survival of their cheap civil defense dual-use style (basement car park etc in peacetime) nuclear war shelters: "Civil defense shelters. Designs and calculations" by VA Kotlyarevsky, VI Ganushkin, AA Kostin, et al.; edited by VA Kotlyarevsky. - M.: Stroyizdat, 1989 (607 pages long, 144 references, full of equations and graphs). (Russian: "Убежища гражданской обороны. Проекты и расчеты" / В.А. Котляревский, В.И. Ганушкин, А.А. Костин и др.; под редакцией В. А. Котляревского. - М.: Стройиздат, 1989. https://tehne.com/library/ubezhishcha-grazhdanskoy-oborony-konstrukcii-i-raschet-moskva-1989 ) This tells you that these are not "just for show", but are blast and radiation hardened double-blast door, very high overpressure surviving, very intense fallout surviving protection that fundamentally alters the strategic balance and undermines our nuclear deterrent. This should nukegate the "Scientific American" and other pro-Russian, Western deterrent undermining thugs.
ABOVE: Kahn pointed out in On Thermonuclear War 1960 that the way to prevent invasions and wars in the Middle East is nuclear proliferation of CREDIBLE deterrents (not just nuclear weapons, but also ABM and civil defense shelters to mitigate the civilian collateral damage) that really DETER/HALT INVASIONS (the key is to focus on the 1914 invasion of Belgium by mobilization and concentrated force, triggering WWI and the same for Poland in 1939, triggering WWII): if both sides have a credible, stable nuclear deterrent against INVASIONS (i.e., stable = safe from destruction in an enemy 1st strike, so that nuclear retaliation is guaranteed), you get mutual deterrence and thus peace, not war. And even if one side DOES try an attack, a neutron bomb air burst can discriminately halt the aggression, without any collateral damage (of the sort caused by conventional warfare such as the invasions by the Russians in Ukraine and by Hamas in Israel). Conventional weapons are not a substitute because their mobilization along frontiers causes "crisis instability" as occurred in 1914, leading to war. This is why compact, long-range nuclear weapons to prevent this kind of 1914 mobilization "crisis instability" trigger problem, are required. Nuclear escalation can be deterred, just as gas war escalation was deterred against terrorist states successfully in WWII, by a combination of credible civil defense plus retaliation threats capability. The "all out" use of nuclear weapons is simply a form of nuclear disarmament, that leaves the aggressor open to retaliation by the other side's protected 2nd strike (retaliation) force. We have to get this message out past the fake news and "taboo" superstitions of anti-deterrent warmongering paranoid disarmament quacks and charlatans masquerading as "peace advocates". If you want a "two-state solution" and one of those two states is intent on the racist extermination of the other, it shouldn't require Einstein to declare that pressurised "peace talks" are going to be "double-talk"; the slavery issue of 1861 in America wasn't resolved by a "two-state solution" with the southern Confederacy one state and the northern Union the other, nor was the protestant-catholic conflict in Northern Ireland resolved by a "two-state solution", but by a single-state solution with power sharing. You don't resolve a conflict by pressurised "peace talks" or "declarations" between leading opponents in bad faith, but only by genuine accommodation of differences at grass roots or street level. This is why conflicts and wars come before peace settlements. If you really want a "two-state solution" between bitter rivals, you need a credible deterrent to keep the peace. Machiavelli or Marx? Truth or lying? That's the choice.
The Russians appear to have been deceived by some of American propaganda on first strike capabilities. The unclassified 751 pages 1987 Brookings Institute compendium, Managing nuclear operations edited by Carter, Steinbruner and Zraket, in Fig 15-2 on p510 gives a chart taken from a 1974 Russian report by K. V. Tarsakanov, Matematika i vooruzhennaya bor'ba = Mathematics and armed struggle which on page 184 indicates the Russians intended to destroy 80% of military targets, 60% of economic and 20% of population in the USA. Fig 17-2 on p580 of Managing nuclear operations claims that Russia intended to use high altitude SLBM bursts from nearby offshore submarines for EMP to cut communications and early warning within 5 minutes of a "Standard Scenario for Soviet Attack", followed by SLBM attacks on coastal targets within 15 minutes, and ICBM detonations at 30 minutes. Two Russian submarines offshore on East and West coasts could hit all coastal cities by power supply disabling EMP by simply firing megaton warheads vertically upwards 100 km; each warhead would take out the power to cities on one coast within a few minutes of launch and without any risk of interception.
Glasstone and Dolan stated in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), Table 12.17 on page 546, that the median distance in Hiroshima for survival after 20 days was 0.12 miles for people in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for people standing outdoors. Therefore the median distances for survival in modern city buildings and in the open differed by a factor of 11 for Hiroshima; the difference in areas was thus a factor of 112 or about 120. Hence, taking cover in modern city buildings reduces the casualty rates and the risks of being killed by a factor of 120 for Hiroshima conditions, contrary to popular media presented political propaganda that civil defence is hopeless. This would reduce 500,000 casualties for people unprotected in the open (assumed generally throughout Glasstone's book and about 100% of anti-nuclear propaganda) to 4,000 casualties, if people are on the lower floors of concrete buildings.
(NOTE: back in 1990, I completed the unpublished book Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, debunking Glasstone's "free fields" blast and radiation calculations for modern cities. Basically, the oscillation of, and at higher pressures the plastic zone damage of, modern reinforced concrete city buildings by blast waves is easy to calculate, and irreversibly absorbs free-field blast energy, quickly lowering the overpressure and dynamic pressure to values way lower than measured over unobstructed desert and ocean at nuclear weapons tests and reported by Glasstone. Penney measured this blast energy absorption effect at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the majority of buildings were single storey wood-frame, not concrete. Dr John von Neuman predicted this blast energy attenuation by causing destruction in Los Alamos blast wave secret reports LA-1020/LA-1021, from which it entered Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons, but Dr Bethe deleted this information from the unclassified summary version, LA-2000, and it was deleted from the later Glasstone Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, and replaced with a denial of this fact, despite the fact it is a consequence from the principle of conservation of energy, and the exclusion of the effect makes the blast treatment wrong. Similarly, throughout the 1950s the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch calculated thermal effects allowing for skyline shadowing, disproving firestorms and related nuclear winter using this mechanism, but secrecy was used to prevent the information getting wide coverage. Glasstone also mis-calculates all other nuclear effects, for example fallout and cratering are both based on debunked simplifications, exaggerating the effects by large factors. Glasstone entirely ignores all political and military effects of nuclear weapons, as well as the influence of clean secondary stages on the effects of nuclear weapons, e.g. the separation of effects for the air burst neutron bomb. Glasstone's book is really: "The fake effects of nuclear weapons on civilian targets, ignoring the blast and radiation skyline shielding"! Some declassified exaggerations in nuclear threats from Russian tactical nuclear weapons, debunking populist CND/Nukemap nuclear weapons effects propaganda, are presented in NUCLEAR WEAPONS COLLATERAL DAMAGE EXAGGERATIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR CIVIL DEFENSE. This is treated as "heresy" by the deluded quacks and charlatans of war-making "disarmament" taboos.).
"The critical point is whether the Soviets and the Europeans believe that we can keep our casualties to a level we would find acceptable ... In such an eventuality, the Soviets would be deterred from such provocative acts as a ground attack on Europe ... But if they do not believe that we can keep casualties to a level we would find acceptable, the Soviets may feel safe in undertakng these extremely provocative adventures ... this in itself creates an extremely dangerous negotiating situation - one in which the possibility of extreme pressure and blackmail will always be in the background, if not the foreground. ... 'Will the survivors envy the dead?' Unless the President believes that the postwar world will be worth living in, he will in all likelihood be deterred from living up to our alliance obligations." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton Uni. Press, 1960, page 35. This is Kahn's key argument, explaining the Ukraine war today; a fact always ignored by 100% of "nuclear critics". On page 34, Kahn gives a "notorious" table relating casualties to calculated recovery times for GDP; the GDP recovers in one year if 1% are killed, 100 years if 90% are killed. This difference is similar to the observed 120-fold difference in risk of being killed in Hiroshima if people are outdoors and totally unshielded, to the risk when shielded by the lower floors of modern city concrete buildings. So efficient civil defense warnings make nuclear deterrence over 100 times more credible, reducing casualties and the time taken for economic recovery from 100 years to under 1 year!
Kahn on page 48 of On Thermonuclear War easily debunks J. B. S. Haldane's genetic defects naive propaganda lie for nuclear war, because spreading out damage in time allows survival, whereas having all the damage kill 100% immediately doesn't permit survival. Kahn considers two nuclear attacks (Table 8): an initial 1,500 megatons on 150 targets, and a later wargasm of 20,000 megatons on 400 targets. He then goes into radiation effects lying propaganda by left-wing anti-nuclear disarmament fanatics, before giving the fallout gamma radiation effects much later on, in Tables 23 and 24. For the 1,500 megaton attack, only 1% of the area of the USA gets 6000-10,000R in the first 48 hours outdoors, requiring shelter protection factors of 40-65; for the 20,000 megaton attack, 50% of the area gets this radiation so you need 50 times more good shelter. As a result of these calculations, Kahn argues on p111: "we recommend that about $150 million be spent on identifying, counting, labelling and improving the best radiation protection in every neighbourhood so that people will know where to go...", adding that radiation meters are needed to enable people to go outdoors after 48 hours briefly to decontaminate or evacuate heavy fallout areas before getting a lethal radiation dose in structures offering poor protection. All this was, Kahn points out, published in a 1958 RAND Corp report ignored by President Eisenhower to save a few bucks (it was mostly implemented by Kennedy in 1961). In Tables 12, 13 and 14 Kahn shows how to deal with strontium-90 fallout contaminated food: on page 65 he points out that the linear no-threshold radiation effects theory is fake news for civil defense since the radium dial painters required 20,000 - 30,000 strontium units equivalent to get bone cancer, whereas the official safety limit is just 67 units! So simply by kicking out bad "science" (political "theory" standards) and keeping to actual radiation effects data, you resolve a problem by feeding food with over 25,000 strontium units to animals, and reserving less contaminated food for human consumption. Commenting generally on this kind of fashionable nuclear exaggeration mentality, Kahn explains on p160:
"... we are likely to suffer from the same movement towards 'responsible' budgets, pacifism, and unilateral and universal disarmament that swept through England in the 1920s and 1930s. The effect then was that England prematurely disarmed herself to such an extent that she first lost her voice in world affairs, and later her independence in a war that was caused as much by English weakness as by anything else."
Kahn adds to this on page 568:
"It is difficult and even impossible for most Americans to believe that they have an enemy. This is particularly true of intellectuals and 'men of good will'. ... that all sane men are reasonable and it ought to be easy to clear up misunderstandings by a few meetings and agreements (that is, they believe in what the psychiatrist calls a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' in the sense that 'good will generates good will' ..." Kahn testified to congress that Newman hadn't read his book!
Russian propagandists threaten with tactical nuclear strikes on Ukraine. They think that after that, Europe will immediately stop "demonizing and isolating Russia" and will immediately "line up at our door to say hello." pic.twitter.com/6kgmkMc5p3
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 4, 2024
Senator John F. Kennedy forecast in a speech to the Senate on 14 August 1958: "... the deterrent ratio might well shift to the Soviets so heavily, during the years of the gap, as to open to them a shortcut to world domination ... Their missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly, but surely, advance - through Sputnik diplomacy, limited 'brush fire' wars, indirect non-overt aggression, intimidation and subversion, increased prestige or influence, and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the free world will shift against us." (If the Russians have 2,000 to 10,000 tactical neutron bombs and we have none, our "strategic balance" of ICBMs etc will be incredible retaliation, so our tactical deterrent "gap" in defenses puts us into the situation that Kennedy forecast.)
Kennedy's 1961 decision to back Kahn's crash civil defense program was apparently due to his attending the June 1959 nuclear war hearings (at which Herman Kahn first found fame); yet even earlier Kennedy had observed first-hand the appeasement of the Nazis while working for his father, the US Ambassador, for 6 months in 1939, writing his 150-pages thesis on "Appeasement at Munich: The inevitable result of the slowness of the British democracy to change from a disarmament policy"! This thesis was edited into the 1940 UK bestselling book "Why England Slept" by the New York Times journalist Arthur Krock (with a foreword by Henry Luce), in which Kennedy pointed out that the refusal of pro-disarmament northern left-wing councils to instigate civil defence (then called air raid precautions) supported fascist appeasement! However, Kennedy's interest in arms race, disarmament, and war issues goes back even further, to the year 1932, when he was 15 and in hospital, according to the author Kay Halle: "Joseph Kennedy Sr asked me if I would stop with him while we were in the hospital to see his young son who was in there quite ill. ... We went into his bedroom, his room at the hospital, and you could hardly see him, he was so buried in the bed under masses of books. ... I was awfully interested because the book he was reading was World Crisis by Winston Churchill [the book recommended as the best study of war and deterrence and its failure, by Herman Kahn in On Thermonuclear War]."
(Kay Halle quote source: Robin Cross, "JFK: A Hidden Life", Bloomsbury, London, 1992. Robin Cross's JFK book also points out that Kennedy "had always been a supporter of a vigorous defense policy. In 1948-9 he had attacked the Truman administration over the economies it had made in the defense establishment, advocating an air force of 70 groups, rather than the 55 groups proposed ... in the 1950s, he had urged the re-arming of Europe, if necessary with US help ... In the Senate in the summer of 1954 he had opposed the Eisenhower administration's reduction in the size of the army ... In May 1955 ... he claimed that the administration had 'guessed short' on the military strength of the Soviet Union ... It was by this consistent route that in 1958 Jack Kennedy arrived at the momentous discovery of the 'missile gap', which was to provide one of the principal themes of his 1960 presidential campaign." Kennedy was on the same page as Kahn. In 1957, America had no proof-tested ICBM, just the 3,000 mile range Jupiter IRBM, while the Russians had successfully tested ICBMs the rockets of which successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik, on 4 October 1957. Although by putting Jupiter IRBMs into Turkey America could cancel out the small ICBM "missile gap", there was concern that just a few Russian ICBM nuclear blasts over American cities could wipe out Western Cold War resolve, as had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When elected, Kennedy reversed Eisenhower's civil defense policy, as well as increasing the Minuteman ICBM order by 75%, the Western Europe tactical nuclear weapon stockpile by 60%, and the total number of American nuclear weapons by 100%, in an early effort at bankrupting the Russians with an arms race; a policy abandoned for a time after the Vietnam disaster, but re-instigated in the 1980s by Reagan with the desired effects.)
Nicola Smith and Susie Coen in the Telegraph, 21 August 2024: "US prepares for threat of joint Chinese, Russian and North Korean nuclear strike. Joe Biden secretly approved change to America’s nuclear defence plan in March... The United States is making plans to counter the… pic.twitter.com/jXWnTBijZC
"People May Not Care Simply Because They Do Not care. ... The following (paraphrased) quotations are typical of the bureaucrat or decision maker who simply cannot imagine that his safe, snug world can really be dangerous. (The quotations are not exclusive. The determined do-nothing advocate will go through each in turn.)
1. The problem is hypothetical. You cannot prove that it exists. There is no need to get hysterical.
2. The problem is there, but there are many other problems. In your parochialism [limited views] and naivety, you have gotten hysterical. We have known about this problem for some time and we are not excited. Why are you?
3. The problem is there. It is insoluble. (Or, it is too late to do anything.) For God's sake don't rock the (political or public relations) boat. [This is based on Kahn's dealings with people like his boss at RAND Corporation, just prior to his leaving to found the Hudson Institute.]
The key words in the above are hypothetical, parochial, naive, and hysterical. That is, any specialist who raises a problem in his specialty is accused of being hypothetical and parochial, of not taking a practical over-all view. ... I can remember an occasion when I was discussing with one of these critics what seemed to me like a problem approaching potentially crisis proportions. He insisted that I was comparing hypothetical Soviet programs with hard American programs. I pointed out with some asperity that the Soviets up to that time had refused to allow our staff access to their records; naturally we would have some trouble proving that these programs existed and would actually meet the hypothetical dates. On the other hand, our staff did have access to U.S. data, so it was easy to show that our counter programs were not as firm as advertised. ... A typical hypothetical possibility is illustrated by the ominous possibilities for Hitler-type blackmail tactics created by the waning of our Type II and Type III Deterrence capability" - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, pp347-8.
"There is a great deal of worry today that the Russians may make impressive gains utilizing only 'ambiguous challenges', without presenting us with any direct challenges. ... Their success to date in using 'ambiguous challenges' should be nothing to what they could do if they could afford and desired to be unambiguous. ... I think we can expect much firmer, confident and imaginative behavor, if not audacious and reckless conduct, from Khrushchev and his successors that we had from Stalin [a prediction that was confirmed by the 1961 Berlin Wall, 50 megaton test and the 1962 Cuban missiles crisis, etc.]" - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, p348
"As the picture of horror of a modern thermonuclear war grows, we tend to ... we emphasise the impact of our capabilities on the enemy's mind rather than on his body [italic emphasis is Kahn's own]. ... Type I Deterrence is the deterrence of a direct attack [Dulles' massive retaliation]. ... Type II Deterrence is defined as using strategic threats to deter an enemy from engaging in very provocative acts [e.g. invasion of Poland 1939, invasion of Belgium 1914, invasion of Ukraine 2022] ... Type III Deterrence might be called 'tit-for-tat' [e.g. Kennedy's decision to resume USA nuclear tests in 1962 in response to Russia's 50 megaton test in late 1961, etc.]." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, p126. Regarding "knockout blow" propaganda scams in the media/politics, Kahn on p350 argues that the same delusional lie occurred before each major war, including WWI and WWII, both to sell the war to the public and to justify not planning for a long-duration war of attrition which seemed "defeatist". For example, mass media "pacifist" morons believed and hyped that, prior to WWI: "interdependence of nations was so great that the sheer interruption of normal commerce would cause a collapse after a few weeks or months in much the same way that people argue today that if the A country (big cities) is destroyed, the B country (small cities, rural areas) must also necessarily collapse [after a countervalue nuclear strike on cities]. Therefore, almost everybody expected the war of 1914 to be short ... the famous Schlieffen Plan ... called for them to destroy the French in about 6 weeks, then move their army to the Russian front and destroy the Russians in the next few weeks... [Hitler in 1939 simply aimed to repeat this, dismissing Schlieffen Plan's failure in WWI as sabotage from internal enemies of the state]." (Quote from Kahn, OTW, p350.)
"To understand this attitude ... in 1961 Herman Kahn’s 1960 radically innovative book on the nuclear deterrence of war in general (not merely “massive retaliation” to deter all-out “doomsday” attacks, as was the previous policy by Dulles) was “reviewed” by controversial lawyer James Roy Newman in Scientific American. Newman, a complete bastard to Britain - he drafted the notorious and paranoid McMahon 1946 US Atomic Energy Act, which illegally and unilaterally ended Britain’s wartime agreement to continue postwar collaboration on nuclear energy - hadn’t read Kahn’s book (any more than he had read the vital Churchill-Roosevelt Hyde Park agreement for post-war continuation of nuclear collaboration of September 19, 1944 or consulted the UK government on the topic, when drafting the quack Atomic Energy Act passed by Congress in 1946!), and just scanned the first part of Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War briefly and taken some quotes and tables out of context to criticise (despite the title, its purpose is the credible deterrence of major provocations, not just the fighting of WWIII if deterrence fails). Moreover, he denied the existence of the author, because the publisher hadn’t provided much biography! We don’t need that kind of abuse from such bigots, do we?" - https://nigecook.substack.com/p/coming-soon
Anti-civil defense fanatic Lawrence Freedman (the guy who got the Sunday Express by drop my feature on the exaggerated collateral damage from nuclear weapons in 1995) has a new article in the New York Times (3 October 2024): "Putin Keeps Threatening to Use Nuclear Weapons. Would…
The explanation of the neutron bomb's invasion deterrent history in the 1958 low yield relatively clean "peaceful" Livermore nuclear explosives Dove and Starling is given by Samuel Cohen in his 6 December 1984 interview, conducted by Robert Del Tredici in Beverley Hills, California (published on pages 157-9 of his 1987 book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb,):
"I was in the Efficiency Group at Los Alamos. Our job was to figure out the yield of the bomb that was burst over Nagasaki. ... On the evening of Hiroshima, when Oppenheimer was describing in very crude terms the catastrophe that had taken place over that city, the scientists who were listening to him were a bunch of howling savages, embullient beyond imagination, as pleased as punch ... Oppenheimer is rightfully called the father of the atomic bomb, but equally rightfully he could be called the father of the tactical nuclear weapon because he did the first conceptual spadework for using nuclear weapons strictly in a battlefield way instead of just decimating cities in a holocaust [thus led to his legendary dispute with Teller who just wanted massive retaliation H-bombs as a deterrent and bargaining chip for peace with Russia] ... He professed to be sufficiently guilt-ridden and aghast and appalled over the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that he never wanted that to happen again. So he recommended we design lower-yield weapons that wouldn't wipe out cities ... The basic concept is to be able to have a battlefield nuclear weapon that won't have all these nasty side effects ... If it's going to be used to get what we call the 'separation of effects', in other words, to get rid of the blast and heat [collateral damage to civilians], it not only has to be air burst, but it has to be burst high ... between 2,000 and 3,000 feet. ... it's a kind of micro-mini hydrogen bomb. ...
"I'd had the idea for the neutron bomb about 8 years before I figured out how to put it together. I put together the actual concept in the summer of 1958. It came about purely by accident when I visited the Livermore Laboratory in the spring of 1958. I asked if anyone had any new ideas going around, and they said they really didn't, though they had begun work on some peaceful nuclear explosives. And the head of the division said, 'Before you go home, you ought to take a look at these', and he showed me designs for some of the peaceful devices. And there they were: the neutron bomb characteristics. One of those designs was called Dove. Dove, by the way, for 'Dove of Peace'. ... Well, there were two, Dove and Starling; both derived the major share of their energy from fusing deuterium and tritium. ... The question I asked was, 'How many neutrons come out of this thing?' They made a few back-of-the-envelope calculations and the answer was: a hell of a lot. Then I took these calculations home and made my own calculations about the military effects of such a weapon, and, voila, the neutron bomb! Then I put together the military concept of how to use this bomb and went off on a big sales campaign. ...
"Ever since Day 1 we've patterned our nuclear war-fighting strategies after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ... So what we're basically proposing here [using conventional Teller or Dulles "massive retaliation" MAD mutual-assured-destruction H bombs-on-cities crap] to deter war is the threat of our own suicide. ... it's all based on the premise that if we cross that nuclear threshold one more time, we'll bring on the beginning of the end. So you get people like Jonathan Schell [author of "Fate of the Earth" which lies that the 15 megaton Bravo test blinded everyone at Rongelap and that radiation can't be stopped easily by simple earth covered shelters proved at nuclear tests] and Carl Sagan with the idea of nuclear winter and everything else. It's Armageddon. I don't find their ideas credible, and I'll tell you why: because in order to get these results from using nuclear weapons against cities, you have to have nations willing to use them that way. ... You know what the United States has to do if it wants to survive? It has to accept the fact that there will probably be a nuclear war, and it has to prepare to fight it and win it. ... It's been U.S. national policy for more than a quarter of a century that nuclear weapons are actually unusable weapons. That's horseshit, and you can quote me on that. ... Let the allies develop their own neutron bomb. As a matter of fact, let's sell it to them! They should have discriminate weapons for their own self-defense. The United States doesn't need to take on the burden of defending all the rest of the world. That [the UK policy of 1914 regarding Belgium's invasion and 1939 regarding Poland's invasion, not to mention 2022 regarding Ukraine's invasion] is in fact the best way of getting into a nuclear war ..."
The technical history of Livermore's development of enhanced-neutron tactical nuclear weapons goes back to a study of lightweight, thin H-bomb casings by Dr Herbert York, discussed in detail below with regard to recently declassified data on the designs of two American H-bombs of roughly similar physical size but different mass, composition and yield: the W47 and the B28. York showed that the pressure and duration of the x-ray energy coupling causing the fusion stage's compression force are both functions of the case thickness. So if you reduce the outer casing thickness to make the bomb lighter, you have less compression force and it lasts a shorter period of time. To ensure a successful fusion burn in this situation, you have to reduce the amount of dense material like uranium in the fusion stage and replace it with easier to compress fusion fuel. This occurred in progressive Livermore designs with smaller sizes and lighter casings during the 1950s, starting with a device called Linda, then Flute, then Piccolo. These had thin oralloy (highly enriched U235) pushers (3.8mm thick for Piccolo), but clean versions with lead pushers in place of U235 were designed, and the combination of the high percentage of fusion yield with the thin pusher and outer casing gave the enhanced neutron Dove design.
(The paragraph above about the link between speed of fusion burn and tamper thickness in low yield neutron bomb design is not speculative, and is confirmed not just by the recent book by Tom Ramos, but earlier by nuclear weapons effects expert Charles S. Grace of the Royal Military College of Science in his 1994 Nuclear Weapons Principles, Effects and Survivability on 23: "It is possible to produce comparatively low-yield weapons with only a small fission trigger to initiate a fusion stage. If it is designed so that the nuclear reactions proceed as fast as possible, the tamper need not be very thick, and a large proportion of the energetic fusion neutrons will escape." Grace around that time very kindly responded to a letter from me and provided photos of British military equipment exposed at the UK nuclear tests for my book, Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, as well as telephoning me, which was helpful. He was a very powerful advocate of the neutron bomb to deter invasions, writing a letter to the New Scientist to debunk anti-nuclear bomb propaganda. He did a lot of research using Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston facilities on simple protection against nuclear attack, and his book also points out that Glasstone and Dolan are completely misleading regarding thermal effects, stating on page 41: "Adequate protection for the skin greatly reduces the risk of thermal casualties. ... wearing a well-designed NBC suit over combat clothing, and a respirator and gloves ... the thermal energy from [1 kiloton yield] tactical weapons needed to cause extensive second-degree burns is about 1.3 MJ/m^2 [i.e., 31 cal/cm^2 since 4.186 J = 1 Calorie, and 1 m^2 = 10^4 cm^2; for bare skin only 160 kJ/m^2 or 3.8 cal/cm^2 is needed; thus there is a huge difference between Glasstone and Dolan and the actual risk, and Grace points out that if clothing ignites, people can simply roll out the flames on the ground, without getting burned!]." Grace's book also gives the military effects of nuclear weapons - ignored entirely by Glasstone and Dolan - including photos of vehicles exposed at 370 m range to 10 kiloton Totem-1 nuclear test on a 100 ft high tower in Australia in 1953. A side-on tank was not overturned by 230 kPa peak overpressure, but was displaced 2.5 m with a peak acceleration of 30g. The mudguards and trailer were damaged, but: "After the burst the tank was able to be driven off, and its gun was fired after sand and debris had been removed from the barrel. The lighter scout car was beyond repair. Had crews been in the vehicles they would have received a radiation dose of around 100,000 cGy [R] ... they would have been incapacitated virtually instantaneously.")
BBC won't report Reuters any more than USA news will, sad yet what happens in corrupt despotic regimes claiming that lying is "free speech on nuclear weapons": Russian nuclear test chief says Moscow is ready to resume testing 'at any moment' https://t.co/SYlfwJXHan
This Russian State TV Channel 1 broadcast on a proposed nuclear test on a fake "plywood" based city to make the fake plywood burn for YouTube viewers, is a load of complete CND anti-nuclear propaganda crap. George R Stanbury of UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch civil… https://t.co/ustSLjl1SN
"Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is deficient. ... a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy [spying problem plus whole notion of democracy requiring voters to be informed] or await their consequences with patience. These are qualities which more especially belong to an individual or an aristocracy; and they are precisely the qualities by which a nation, like an individual, attains a dominant position. ... The mass of the people may be led astray by ignorance or passion ..." - Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America 1835 (Vintage NT 1954 ed, v1, pp243-5, as quoted by H. Kahn, OTW, p579; note that Kahn's full quotation backs the notion of elitism aristocracy as the solution, aka the clan dynasties in USA politics such as the Kennedy and Bush political families. On page 407 of OTW, Kahn also appears to back elitism in discussing how von Mannstein was able to bypass jobsworths in the General Staff and get a direct meeting with Hitler to modify the Schlieffen Plan's to outflank the new French Magoniot Line defenses by invading through the Ardennes Forest with the latest Panzer tanks; Hitler had many defects but at least he was prepared to listen seriously to "crackpot" sounding ideas from the lower ranks and implement them, unlike so many openly fascist "top dogs" today).
"There seems to be little point in discussing the view that finds a solution in a totally disarmed world. ... The violator would then have an incredible advantage if the agreement ever broke down ..." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton Uni. Press, 1960, page 5. Kahn adds added that the world of 1914 and 1939 was non-nuclear, there was an international ban on chemical weapons (the Hague Convention of 1899) prior to WWI in which chemical weapons were used without restraint, and that there was agreement amongst experts that WWII would start with a gas knockout blow against cities, when in fact no gas was ever dropped on cities during WWII (pesticide Zyklon B, crystals which emits non-persistent hydrogen cyanide gas on exposure to the air, was used in gas chambers but the Nazis never dropped any of their 12,000 tons of tabun nerve agent on cities thanks to retaliation risks and the universal issue of gas masks). So disarmament propaganda was just that, lying blathering by politicians to earn "peace prizes".
"It would be disastrous to have a conspicious gap in the spectrum of deterrents and capabilities [strategic and tactical to cover all kinds of dangerous provocations]. For example, when President Eisenhower remarked at a press conference that it was unthinkable that he would call out federal troops to enforce federal law ... some Southerners immediately did something to make it thinkable [Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to Little Rock's Central High School to reinforce Arkansas' National Guard in allowing 9 black students to enroll at the school in 1957]." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p286. The point is, saying something is "unthinkable so we don't need to prepare for it" is not cost-effective when it encourages and invites the enemy to invade and provoke you. Lying blathering peacenik enemy collaboration always backfires by inviting aggression. (Even Trump had this problem, when some of his supporters misinterpreted his peaceful speech - questioning why the postal ballots showed higher support for Biden than the polling station in-person votes - and invaded the Capitol on 6 January 2021.) If you want to deter evil, you have to avoid ambiguity and to be open and also clear that nothing is "unthinkable" and state in advance precisely what you will do in any eventuality, so as to make deterrence unequivocally effective. You want the enemy to be clear what they will have coming to them if they provoke you: "with the record of the 1930s plainly before us, we should all be able to realise that it is possible for all these kinds of deterrence to be strained." - Kahn, OTW, p286.
No wonder the Leninist lawyer James Roy Newman of the "elitist communist" Scientific American hated Kahn in his "review"! I first read Kahn's On Thermonuclear War in 1990, and have just finished re-reading it in September 2024 due to the Ukraine war. My view of the book is now very different to the notes I made in 1990 when reading Kahn during the writing of my own unpublished August 1990 dated manuscript Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory. The basic problem is that Kahn has two theses in one volume. The first 310 pages of On Thermonuclear War debunks populist nuclear weapons and war myths, such as fallout gamma rays and strontium-90 in food killing everyone; the second part, pages 311-651 is an analysis of the history of war and extrapolations of that history to various kinds of deterrence and nuclear war. As his preface says (page x): "This book is dedicated to the goal of anticipating, avoiding, and alleviating crises." (Italic emphasis is Kahn's own.) The problem with Kahn's On Thermonuclear War is precisely the same as that with Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons: jumbled up presentation (if you are discussing one type of nuclear explosion, you need to discuss the effects that type produces, not separate effects into different chapters, so readers are misled and think heavy fallout occurs from air bursts, etc.,) and you need to show how deterrence of certain kinds of nuclear attack even within a nuclear war is necessary to retain "bargaining chips", "cities as hostages", etc. Otherwise 100% of readers do what journalists do with "Nukemap" and simply assume the entire enemy stickpile is used in a single knockout blow on cities, in which 100% of people unprotected, by even "duck and cover"! This increased casualties by a factor of 120 in Hiroshima, and is where you get the 120 fold exaggerations of nuclear war casualty predictions from. By the omission of key (secret classified) data on neutron bombs to deter invasions in the first place, or survival of people and vehicles in simple, cheap trench shelters at nuclear tests, for example, you depart 180 degrees from reality.
"But how many murders are they [lying journalists, politicians, fellow-travelling Western nuke designers who won't disclose the truth to the media] responsible for? Basically, nuclear deterrence using tactical nuclear weapons to deter the invasions that set off both World Wars, i.e. the invasion of Belgium in 1914 by concentrated force and of Poland in 1939 by concentrated force (from the East by Russia and from the West by Germany), could have prevented many millions of deaths since 1945, but evil folk prevented this, wanting war to continue. ... Hiroshima was entirely vaporized by a nuclear explosion on 6 August 1945, says CND. In that case, this US Air Force film of the slight scorching on otherwise undamaged materials, proving the effectiveness of “duck and cover” for shielding, is fake news. But it’s not. What’s fake news is everything every published on nuclear weapons effects by Bulletin of Atomic scientists, Scientific American, all newspapers, and all TV shows on the subject ... In fact, Hiroshima casualty data published [in the massively-effects-exaggerating] Glasstone book “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” (1962-77 editions) proves that being indoors in the lower floors of a concrete building reduces the LD50 radius from 1.3 miles in the open to 0.12 miles for lower floors of concrete buildings. Since area is proportional to radius squared, this means a protection factor of 120 for Hiroshima burst conditions (16 kt, 600m altitude). This shielding factor would for a densely populated modern city reduce 500,000 (half a million) killed for people outdoors totally unshielded to “just” 4,000 killed indoors on the lower floors of modern city concrete buildings! Er, this result of 4,000 killed just happens to be precisely the number mentioned by the Independent newspaper article (quote above!) of pensioners murdered by cold and starvation due to financial destitution due to Sir Keir Starmer’s “tough decision” to end winter fuel allowances, in order to pay massive salary rises to public sector employees." - https://nigecook.substack.com/p/another-assassination-attempt-on
Kahn makes a further essential point about "secrecy" (there ain't any secrecy when the other side has spies like Fuchs) covering up alleged gross delusional failings in Western nuclear weapons design, effects and capabilities on page 384 of On Thermonuclear War, where he quotes extensively from chapter 6 "Torpedoes" of Rowland and Boyd's US Navy Bureau of Ordnance in World War II (published by the US Navy), proving how the secrecy of US torpedo design, development, testing and stockpiling led to tragic groupthink delusions of supremacy and of having the best torpedoes in the world, that were only debunked in actual combat during the 1941-3 period of WWII: "As each defect was exposed, the morale of the submariners who risked their lives to take the war to the enemy suffered, the enemy was given further respite ... the problem was compounded by the Bureau's reluctance to accept the fleet evaluation of its weapon. This reluctance was born ... from misplaced confidence in its own past work. ... Security, a necessary concern of the armed forces, became such a fetish that measures designed to protect a device from enemy eyes actually hid its defects from those who made the regulations. Ironically, some of those defects were already known to the foreign powers who later became our allies or enemies. ... even when the torpedo exploded properly, it lacked the punch submariners desired. ... each defect concealed another ... The Bureau was reluctant to believe that the secret weapon long regarded as one of our greatest assets should turn out to be a liability." (Kahn gives many other similar examples of bureaucratic secretive nonsense backfiring even in WWI, in Chapter 8 of OTW. American Colonel Billy Mitchell of the American Air Force was the first to suggest paratroopers to get over enemy lines, and predicted a Japanese attack on Pearl harbor (he was demoted and then court martialled on the direct orders of President Calvin Coolidge). Tanks and gas are both treated in detail by Kahn: both were kept so secret that the military didn't have a clue about them when first used on the battlefield so their initial "factor of surprise" was lost and the enemy was given the chance to negate them after bungled first-use:
"The first use of tanks in September 1916 completely ignored the tactical and strategic ideas of the innovators and was carried out as a sort of field trial. ... The German poison gas story has some interesting analogies with the British tank story. This too had an uphill fight with the authorities. Again, even after the weapon had been developed the command did not wish to take the risk of using the untried weapon on a large scale, though the inventors urged it, until the military had developed some experience on the capabilities and limitations of gas warfare. It was first tried on April 22, 1915 and proved a tremendous tactical success. In fact, a five-mile gap was opened in the Allied lines, but the Germans were not prepared to exploit the opportinity. They were not really making an attack, they were just trying an experiment. The British reaction ... was very fast. ... Sir William Ramsay had guessed from the description of the battle reports that chlorine had been used and came to the War Office with a protective measure, some sample mouth-pads made of flannel or wool soaked in hyposulphite of soda. British women were asked to furnish 1,000,000 at once. Thanks to their help and Red Cross efforts, the necessary quantity came in several days. Within a fortnight, every man in the British army at the front was supplied with a rudimentary respirator. ... History is full of examples of impractical notions, or, equally important, notions that proved to be just fine but which were tested prematurely. ... The most spectacular military event of World War I, the development of two parallel lines of trenches ... while predicted by Bloch, came as a complete surprise. ... given the examples of such warfare in the American Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War - it is hard to see how military experts could have overlooked the possibility that the widespread availability of machine guns and barbed wire might result in static trench warfare, but the military planners on both sides completely overlooked the possibility [as they did for submarines blocking logistics supplies, depth charges, and particularly SAS type infiltration tactics to overcome trench warfare: French Captain Laffargue wrote a proposal for this which the Allies laughed at, but when a copy of the proposal fell into German hands, Ludendorff at once (quote from Captain G. C. Wynne on p357 of Kahn's OTW): "translated into German and issued as an official German training manual, eventually becoming the basis of General Ludendorff's textbook ... [leading to German implementation of the enemy's plan so] the Germans so effectively broke through the British position in March 1918, and the Chemin des Dames position in May ...". SO, UNLESS WE ARE TO REPEAT SUCH MISTAKES, WE MUST NOT ALLOW PETTY HUBRIS OF "JOBSWORTH BUREAUCRATS" TO BLOCK INNOVATIONS NEEDED TO WIN WARS!
ABOVE: Kahn was treated with the "shoot the messenger" reaction against Machiavelli, merely for speaking truth to power in 1960: "If the above deterrents are to work reliably, there must always be in the background the knowledge that if they did not, other kinds of deterrents or corrections would come in. It could be disastrous to have a conspicuous gap in the spectrum of deterrents and capabilities. For example, when President Eisenhower remarked at a press conference that it was unthinkable that he would call out federal troops to enforce federal law in the Southern states, some Southerners immediately did something to make it thinkable. Something similar may happen if he convinces the Soviets that he means what he says when he says that "war is preposterous." I suspect that many in the West are guilty of the worst kind of wishful thinking when, in discussing deterrence, they identify the unpleasant with the impossible. It is particularly hard to understand why this is so when almost all who write on this subject were adults during the later part of the Hitler era and presumably were educated in some of the ways in which all these types of deterrence can be strained." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, page 286. Will the left ever learn facts from history?
ABOVE: Nazi supporting "peace" propaganda flooded the UK and USA in the 1930s, as it still does. Comintern's legacy is a repetition of the 1920s and 1930s anti-deterrent mindset, falsely portrayed by Russian "Fifth Column" propaganda fronts as "pacifism" or "peace" arguments. When communists were rejected as unpopular at the election polls, they adopted subversive methods, trying to undermine war readiness (deterrence) to help Russia get in a position to start WWIII, just as they had helped the Nazis in the 1930s do exactly the same thing (while being awarded "Nobel Peace Prizes" for their propaganda; look at the history of 1920s and 1930s gas war anninilation "Nobel peace Prize" liars Lord Noel-Baker, Sir Norman Angell et al.). The result wasn't an end to the arms race or militarism, but an escalation on the enemy side, and an erosion of technical competence and military preparedness on the side of the democracies. Banning the TV transmission of classic "Tom and Jerry" cartoons for "portraying violence as normal to kids" and banning "Action Man" style toy guns for "encouraging deterrence of dictators to kids" in the West, didn't stop Russia's Hitler Youth movement from preparing for war. All this just helped the enemy prepare for WWIII. The paranoid conspiracies aren't the supposed "war mongers" on the side of the democracies, but by the real war mongers on the side of the dictatorships and their fellow travelling "Sputniks", in infiltrating the Western political systems, mass media, and educational establishments with delusional fanatical anti-Western-nuclear bias. Numerous articles sent to "New Scientist" in the 1990s proving the errors in popular propaganda it published by anti-nuclear fanatics like "Rob Edwards" (co-author of the 1982 book "Fuelling the nuclear arms race: the links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons") were simply rejected because they contradicted populist lies "New Scientist" published weekly from such people! This made it appear that there was no opposition to such Russian Fifth Column propaganda lies! Result: no civil defence option and no tactical nuclear deterrent option against "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction" in 2002, and instead WAR. Which is precisely what these lying thugs want. Once the press, the teachers, and the corrupt pseudo-liberal MPs or Lords use enforced "speech filtering" to completely corrupt free debate (it's not that much different to a dictatorship, except that "no platforming censorship" is used in the West, while bullets and poison is used in the dictatorships), you have crackpots and quacks in charge of "democracy", which is a travesty of the term!
If you ban civil defense and nuclear deterrence of dictatorships, then you are left only with the option of WAR against every invasion or WMD threat which your delusional censorship encourages and promotes!
That's not pacifism. On the contrary, it's needless fascist based genocidal war that could be stopped!
As regards "child soldiers": we're constantly reminded of the plight of kids in wars, so why should they be denied the right to defend democracy in countries with ageing populations, when a failure of deterrence and dictatorial occupation will ruin the lives of kids?
All these fanatically anti-civil defense, anti-deterrent so-called "pacifists" - when pressed for their solution to terrorism - claim we can use "non-violent opposition" to enemy attacks; but we saw what happens to kids in this situation in the Holocaust and wars! If we're not going to have a nuclear deterrent, and we're not going to allow kids to learn how to protect themselves, the results are evil and immoral. These facts are conveniently declared to be "taboo"!
"... in letters to me dated April 10, 1979, and June 18, 1979, representatives of the DOE stated that my open research, and a national contest that I conducted, would lead to the generation and transmission of classified data - this in spite of the fact that all of the information that I was seeking would come from unclassified published sources. It has also become obvious that at least one of the three concepts discussed in the disputed Morland article is currently unclassified in the Soviet Union, and that when it was discussed openly here in 1976 by a Soviet scientist, the U.S. government, acting through the Energy Research and Development Agency, classified his speeches (Morland might have stood a better chance of publishing his article in the USSR).
"The concepts discussed in the Morland article deal with basic applied physics, and they are certainly no longer 'secret' - if they were, four other nations would not now have operating thermonuclear weapons. Even though the DOE now admits that this type of information is in the public domain, it is still trying to suppress the circulation of this data, in order to maintain a false illusion of secrecy, and to maintain a real monopoly over the dissemination of weapons-related information, and over the public discussion of American nuclear policies, policies which affect nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons. ... What happened next will be discussed in the description of the accompanying diagram, when the concept of isentropic compression is explained. ... As can be seen from the enclosed diagram, the basic bomb consists of two boosted fission triggers at opposite ends of a mass of lithium-6 deuteride fusion fuel, all contained in an outer casing of uranium-238. ... This arrangement requires that the outer weapon casing play an essential role (as medium to absorb x-rays and re-emit them into the fuel mass) ... there are two triggers in the bomb. The purpose of this is to allow a symmetrical compression of the fusion fuel between them, as well as allowing an x-ray source at each end of the bomb. These two fission triggers must fire simultaneously, or no fusion will occur. ... This sudden elevation in temperature of the fusion fuel, following the isentropic compression, begins the larger main fusion reaction in the weapon. ... " [Emphasis added.]
It must be emphasised (see the latest blog post here for the physical and mathematical details) that adiabatic "non-shock isentropic compression" of low density fusion fuel was first suggested during the April 1946 Los Alamos Super Conference, but was ignored by Teller and the American mainstream until investigated and tested by Nuckolls during totally clean secondary tests (including a 99.9% clean Ripple II 10 megaton test on 30 October 1962). Isentropic compression is compression without heat transfer between the fusion fuel and its surroundings, involving a gradually increasing compression - more like the pressure variations in a sound wave than the pressure discontinuity at a shock front. Shock waves involve "isothermal compression" at the shock front, which radiates wasted energy as heat in all directions, reducing the kinetic energy used to compress the fusion fuel. The key thing to focus on is the fact that you want to compress fusion fuel to cause fusion, and the fusion then releases heat which opposes compression, dispersing the remaining fusion fuel, and ending fusion. What you are trying to do is to compress fusion fuel so it releases nuclear energy (including heat) as a result of nuclear fusion, not waste energy radiating heat into the surroundings before you compress the fuel (such heat waste opposes compression of the fusion fuel). To the extent that you heat the fuel and cause it to radiate energy during compression, you defeat your purpose and get an inefficient compression (akin to pre-initiation in primary stage fission weapons if they are pre-heated by neutron induced fissions).
Teller ignored all this, and indeed until March 1951 he claimed to have a "no go theorem" against compression, and then he used ablative recoil exploding pushers to give relatively ineffective shock compression of fusion stages in his "Sausage" design, the standard 1950s thermonuclear system. Nuckolls and the Russians, however, used gentler isentropic compression (by using a low-density pusher like beryllium on a clean LiD fusion fuel capsule; with any dense U238 placed in the outer casing of the bomb, rather than used as the pusher in contact with the fusion fuel), which enabled more of the primary stage x-ray energy to be used to compress the fusion stage to high density, with less energy being wasted on heat transfer during compression. If you do any sort of work, e.g. hammering nails into wood, charging a battery, or running an engine, some energy will be used in achieving the objective, and some will be wasted as heat. If you want maximum work efficiency, you need to minimise waste heat (i.e. you want to reduce the rise in entropy S, so that the change in entropy dS ~ 0, which is the definition of the ideal of "isentropic compression"), which means losing the shock wave-producing dense ablative shell on the fusion fuel in the "Sausage" designs tested in the 1950s by the USA, which resists isentropic compression. With a dense pusher, you get shock compression which radiates heat before the shock even reaches the core and compresses it, so you only get core compression factor of 20-30, whereas if you use a low-density ablator like beryllium, aluminium or plastic on the fusion fuel, you can achieve nearly isentropic compression factors of 1,000 or more! I.e.. the core density is increased by a factor of 1,000, so that the fusion rate is much faster and more efficient (more fusion is accomplished before the bomb blows itself apart). The latter compression is even sufficient to ignite deuterium fusion, according to Russian claims about their 1960s-1970s cleaner isentropic bomb tests for "peaceful uses" (and tactical nuclear weapons), giving a far cheaper and longer-life warhead than the deuterium-tritium fuel used in the low yield American "Dove" and "Starling" designs of neutron bombs! ("Isotropic compression" just means equal from all directions, and has nothing to do with "isentropic compression".) Similarly, the first implosion bombs used dense U238 neutron reflectors around the core, requiring inefficient shock compression, whereas lower density beryllium reflectors allowed greater efficiency quasi-isentropic compression in fission designs.
A great deal of the popular media's confusion over thermonuclear weapons designs is down to misunderstanding the nature of the x-ray pulse from the fission primary stage. Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons usefully explains that most (over 80%) of the energy can be released x-rays generated by inelastic fission fragment collisions, on a time scale of the order 1 shake or 10 nanoseconds. However, that is only true for a bare fissile metal core, so in reality the considerable mass of chemical implosion debris (mainly carbon, oxygen and hydrogen ions) around that core diffuses the x-rays with a random-walk that slows the x-ray emission into typicaly a 100-times longer pulse than 10 nanoseconds, i.e. around 1 microsecond. It is for this reason that early thermonuclear weapons had heavy outer cases, to contain the diffusive x-ray emission pulse from the fission primary stage's ionized low-Z element fireball, enabling more of that energy to be coupled into fusion stage before the outer casing is destroyed and the coupling ends. Because of this, the fusion stage is not abruptly compressed over a 10 nanosecond time period as implied by Glasstone's unclassified statement that most of the fission energy is emitted in the last shake, but more gradually over a time of up to 1 microsecond. The design of the fission primary stage therefore determines the nature of the x-ray pulse waveform. This problem has been known since the beginning, which is why a gun-type fission weapon was selected in 1946 for the fusion "Super" primary stage, because it would eliminate the implosion debris fireball x-ray diffusion problem, and also why Gamow designed a cylindrical implosion "Greenhouse-George" primary, to enable x-rays from a bare side of a fissile core to initiate fusion without the complexity of x-ray shielding and transport through low-Z barriers, as occurs with spherical implosion primary stages.
Ironically, Chuck Hansen, the author of US Nuclear Weapons, re-invented the Russian "Project 49" double-primary H-bomb independently in a 27 August 1979 letter to Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, only to have this double-primary design dismissed as "wrong" by American nuclear weaponeers, some of whom didn't even know that: (a) Teller and Ulam had stated that one or more primary stages could be used to ignite a H-bomb in their 1951 breakthrought paper, and (b) you can get both primary stages to detonate simultaneously by simply wiring up the electronic neutron guns for each primary into a parallel circuit, and doing the same for their electrical detonators and x-unit capacitors and krytron switches. Hardened groupthink dogma orthodoxy is is hard to debunk! (The Russian double primary idea was even earlier suggested by journalist John McPhee to nuclear weaponeer Dr Ted Taylor with this dismissive result, as reported in McPhee's 1974 book, The Curve of Binding Energy. Note that Howard Morland's design relied on Edward Teller's single-primary H-bomb illustration in his article "Hydrogen Bomb", in the Encyclopedia Americana, v14.)
GEORGE GAMOW'S ASYMMETRIC-IMPLOSION FISSION BOMB DESIGN FOR USE AS AN EFFICIENT DIRECTED X-RAY SOURCE FOR RUSSIAN PROJECT 49 DOUBLE PRIMARY NEUTRON BOMBS
(a) the fissile mass is off-centre, so x-rays escape in a preferential direction with little shielding by chemical explosive debris, thus maximising the exposure of a fusion fuel capsule to x-rays from an implosion fission primary, and
(b) the fact
only one detonation point is required
(which can be shielded by a steel cover to protect that point from accidental impact etc), minimises the size of the x-unit capacitor, battery, etc, as compared to spherical implosions where a lot of points need simultaneous ignition for successful implosion (see French nuclear test flash x-ray photos below!). The West uses a "no-go theorem" to rule out this design called "one-point safety", whereby the implosion system must be safe from effective compression of the fissile core occurring from a detonation at any single point on the outside. However, for such very low yield (sub kiloton) fission weapons, safety concerns can be relaxed in a world war situation where mass production of nuclear shells is required, and the neutron gun must be fired at the optimum compression time to achieve a significant nuclear yield. The single point of detonation can be protected both (a) mechanically by a steel impact cap over it (so if dropped, any impact detonation will occur at the wrong point, and (b) electrically by a fuse in series with the detonator which will blow at a current rating below that required to fire the detonator. When the weapon's detonation is actually required, the fuse can be mechanically changed for a high-current conductor just before detonation.
A feature of this Gamow design is that although the off-centre fissile core is simultaneously compressed in time, the force is anisotropic (being naturally greater on the side with the most explosives), so the hollows in the fissile cores need to be displaced similarly to compensate (so that side of the fissile core with weaker implosion pressure is thinner). Although you would expect the ansiotropy of implosion to physically shift the core towards the fusion capsule and thus block the x-ray channel, this doesn't happen in reality because the time scale of the macroscopic acceleration of the core (taking many microseconds) is massive, compared to the relatively trivial timescale of the very fast nuclear reactions such as fission and x-ray ablation phenomena! It appears from Russian information that they use this kind of fission primary to massively reduce the mass and firing circuit complexity of their double-primary ignited neutron bombs. Dr Gamow illustrated technical reports himself, as he did for his wonderful kid's physics books on a big bang, etc.
ABOVE: note that a single Gamow asymmetric implosion fission stage can also be used to enhance the neutrons and prompt gamma rays in a preferential direction, for use in either ABM defensive neutron warheads (to take out incoming MIRV warheads), or to create a directed prompt gamma ray and prompt Compton current, for a non-lethal localized and directed EMP collateral-damage-averting nuclear weapon (as described using old tech, 3 decades ago in the November 1994 issue of Electronics World, by yours truly), and this Gamow off-centre implosion is depicted in an August 6, 2015-uploaded animated video and labelled "Swan" by Russian Wikipedia user "Guga50", which is currently displayed on the Russian Wikipedia article "Nuclear Weapons" (this Russian "Nuclear Weapons" Wikipedia article is not just a translation of the Western Wikipedia "Nuclear Weapons" article, which shows an entirely different "Swan"-labelled design; a symmetric prolate spheroid with 2-point detonation, not an asymmetric 1-point detonation implosive; my point here is just to point out a discrepancy rather than to say "one is right and one is wrong", since both types are certainly possible from the pure scientific standpoint and it is likely the American "Swan" design is the two-point implosion system, but the Russian Wikipedia design is backed by the design Western nuclear weaponeer Gamow explains in detail in his originally top secret 1946 report and the general Russian custom to take short cuts for cheapness that are "ruled out" by Western bureaucrats with bigger weapons budgets to blow at the taxpayers expense), which states: "... the 1st fission stage cannot provide a sufficient amount of X-ray radiation energy, which is necessary to ensure the explosion of "large" thermonuclear stages. In three-stage devices, the 1st fission stage (with an explosion power of up to tens of kilotons) is used for the radiation implosion of the 2nd ("small") thermonuclear stage (with an explosion power of several hundred kilotons), and the radiation of this 2nd thermonuclear stage (together with the radiation of the 1st stage) is used for the radiation implosion of the 3rd ("large") thermonuclear stage ... In "Tsar Bomba" (AN-602), the first two and the second two stages were placed symmetrically on 2 sides of the third ("large") thermonuclear stage, according to the so-called "bifilar" scheme." (Note: the Russian Wikipedia page on the neutron bomb points out that the casing is composed of "transparent" elements, i.e. those with small cross sections for 14.1 Mev neutron reactions, such as nickel, chromium and tungsten.)
Russian language Wikipedia https://ru.wikipedia.org "Nuclear Weapons" page, section on "Swan" (translated from Russian into English; 14 October 2024): "The described scheme of spherical implosion is archaic and has hardly been used since the mid-1950s. The principle of operation of the “Swan” type design (English: swan) is based on the use of a fissile assembly of a special shape, which, in the process of implosion initiated at one point by one fuse, is compressed in the longitudinal direction and turns into a supercritical sphere. The shell itself consists of several layers of explosive with different detonation rates, which is made on the basis of an alloy of octogen and plastic in the required proportion and filler - polystyrene foam, so that between it and the nuclear assembly located inside there remains a space filled with polystyrene foam. This space introduces the necessary delay due to the fact that the speed of detonation of the explosive exceeds the speed of the shock wave in the polystyrene foam. The shape of the charge strongly depends on the detonation speed of the shell layers and the speed of propagation of the shock wave in polystyrene, which is hypersonic under these conditions. The shock wave from the outer layer of explosive reaches the inner spherical layer simultaneously over the entire surface. A significantly lighter tamper is made not from 238U, but from beryllium, which reflects neutrons well. It can be assumed that the unusual name of this design - "Swan" (first tested by Inca in 1956) was suggested by the shape of the swan's neck. Thus, it was possible to abandon the spherical implosion and, thereby, solve the extremely difficult problem of sub-microsecond synchronization of fuses on a spherical assembly and thus simplify and reduce the diameter of the implosion nuclear weapon from 2 m in the “Fat Man” to 30 cm or less in modern nuclear weapons."
[Original Russian: "Описанная схема сферической имплозии архаична и с середины 1950-х годов почти не применяется. Принцип действия конструкции типа «Swan» ( англ. swan — лебедь), основан на использовании делящейся сборки особой формы, которая в процессе инициированной в одной точке одним взрывателем имплозии, сжимается в продольном направлении и превращается в надкритическую сферу. Сама оболочка состоит из нескольких слоёв взрывчатого вещества с разной скоростью детонации, которую изготавливают на основе сплава октогена и пластика в нужной пропорции и наполнителя — пенополистирола, так что между ним и находящейся внутри ядерной сборкой остаётся заполненное пенополистиролом пространство. Это пространство вносит нужную задержку за счёт того, что скорость детонации взрывчатки превышает скорость движения ударной волны в пенополистироле. Форма заряда сильно зависит от скоростей детонации слоёв оболочки и скоростью распространения ударной волны в полистироле, которая в данных условиях гиперзвуковая. Ударная волна от внешнего слоя взрывчатки достигает внутреннего сферического слоя одновременно по всей поверхности. Существенно более лёгкий тампер выполняется не из 238U, а из хорошо отражающего нейтроны бериллия. Можно предположить, что необычное название данной конструкции — «Лебедь» (первое испытание — Inca в 1956 г.) было подсказано формой шеи лебедя. Таким образом оказалось возможным отказаться от сферической имплозии и, тем самым, решить крайне сложную проблему субмикросекундной синхронизации взрывателей на сферической сборке и таким образом упростить и уменьшить диаметр имплозивного ядерного боеприпаса с 2 м у «Толстяка» до 30 см и менее в современных ядерных боеприпасах."]
Nuclear war threat discussion efforts in the Presidential Election Debate on TV in September 2024, Trump v. Harris, note only Trump was concerned with nuclear war (Harris was in the Democratic party, whose president on 6 and 9 August 1945 used two nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state, which explains this clearly):
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on Putin nuclear threat being ignored by left wingers: pic.twitter.com/p13yNTRz9C
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on need for America to get tough not appease dictatorial terrorists like Harris did which started and sustained the Vietnam style massacres of Ukraine and Gaza wars instead of DETERRING WAR USING… pic.twitter.com/av9rfK2CPK
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on how Biden Admin destroyed American military credibility, thus WWIII risks now in Ukraine war plus Gaza war: pic.twitter.com/zUM62ADTdB
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump debate biased by moderators trying to shut off Trump responses to liar: pic.twitter.com/JwKkFPub9h
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on Biden Admin deliberately left-wing pandering appeasement show-off crass method pulling out from Afghanistan and its effects on Putin: pic.twitter.com/cGpTU82bxn
Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on how Democrats engineered the riots in Washington DC then tried to blame Trump: pic.twitter.com/g75NdMturH
Key part of US presidential debate ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump 10 September 2024 presidential election debate on HYPOCRISY OF LAW use by pseudo "Democrats": pic.twitter.com/QaCNxD5CW9
Herman Kahn is clear, in On Thermonuclear War, about the mobilization problem for bulky conventional weapons (unlike compact nukes out of sight in subs, ICBMs or airfield igloos) triggering off wars such as WWI, quoting on page 359 the assistant chief of the French General Staff, General Boisdeffre's explanation to Russian Tsar Nicholas: "The mobilization is the declaration of war. To mobilize is to oblige one's neighbor to do the same. ... Otherwise, to leave a million men on one's frontier, without doing the same simultaneously, is to deprive oneself of all possibility of moving later; it is placing oneself in a situation of an individual who, with a pistol in his pocket, should should let his neighbor put a weapon to his forehead without drawing his own." Kahn also emphasises the ironic pacifism of the Liberal Party Cabinet of the UK Government which set off WWI by declaring war on Germany (which had not declared war on Britain and did not want war with Britain):
"The [August 1914 WWI-declaring British Liberal Party government] Cabinet was overwhelmingly pacific. At least three-quarters of its members were determined not to be drawn into a European quarrel, unless Great Britain were herself attacked, which was not likely. ... They did not believe that if Germany attacked France, she would attack her through Belgium [triggering WWI via the 1839 Treaty of London, an analogy to our guarantee to defend Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum]..." - Churchill, The World Crisis, v1, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923, p211 (quoted by Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p387). Winston Churchill, himself a Liberal government minister when war was declared in 1914 (he had to rejoin the Conservatives after the Liberal Party was run-over by its role in declaring WWI) was anti-militarism expenditure in general, like his father Lord Randolph Churchill (who in 1886 resigned as Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, in an effort to reduce arms expenditure). On 13 May 1901, Winston Churchill, Boer War hero and newly elected Conservative MP, took up his late father's anti-militarism position in his speech to the House of Commons: "I regard it as a grave mistake in Imperial policy to spend thirty millions a year on the Army. I hold that the continued increase in Army expenditure cannot be viewed by supporters of the Government without the greatest alarm and apprehension, and by Members who represent working class constituencies without extreme dislike. I desire to urge considerations of economy on His Majesty’s Government, and as a practical step that the number of soldiers which they propose to keep ready for expeditionary purposes should be substantially reduced. ... Once you are so unfortunate as to be drawn into a war, no price is too great to pay for an early and victorious peace. All economy of soldiers or supplies is the worst extravagance in war. I am concerned only with the Estimates for the ordinary service of the year, which are increasing at such a rate that it is impossible to view them without alarm. Does the House realise what British expenditure on armaments amounts to? See how our Army Estimates have grown - seventeen millions in 1894, eighteen in 1897, nineteen in 1899, twenty-four in 1900, and finally in the present year no less than twenty-nine millions eight hundred thousand." However, by 1908 Churchillhad reversed this, in the light of Germany militarism, which required British expenditure on an arms race to maintain credible deterrence. Churchill was a realistic, deterrence-supporting pacifist, not a warmonger. Conventional weapons only failed as a credible deterrent in 1914 because of the instability caused by the need to mobilize them along frontiers, something not needed with long-range nuclear weapons now!
Herman Kahn on p371 states of Churchill's The World Crisis, volume 1: "I know of no better textbook on the subject of war, prewar preparations, and peacetime risks. ... Let me now quote Churchill on the possibility of a surprise attack. He is discussing the tension during the 1911 Agadir crisis. Lloyd George had just made a speech with the idea of forcing the German government to back down. The Germans did not like it ... 'It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of ... No one would do such things. Civilisation has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong.' (W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis, v1, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1923, p45)." Kahn then explains the analogy of 1930s fears of gas annihilation to thermonuclear ignorance and propaganda:
"War, unrestricted war, seemed like an unbelievable nightmare and therefore somehow unreal. The very terror of war [annihilation by exaggerated gas or incendiary or high explosive bombing on cities] powerfully reinforced all those who wished to reject military solutions or palliatives in favor of much more attractive schemes for world government or universal disarmament or some major step in that direction.[Italics are Herman Kahn's own.] ... In fact it was not until April 1939, after the second invasion of Czechoslovakia, that the British went all out ... It was by that time far too late." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p377. When Kahn was writing, the USA had massive nuclear superiority in both tactical and strategic weapons. Today, however, the situation is reversed and Kahn's warning is pertinent again: Russia and its allies China, North Korea and Iran have superiority. (We also need to remember the 1939-40 phoney war; it was Churchill not Hitler who initiated city bombing in 1940, deliberately in order to divert enemy bombing from RAF airfields that were needed to retain air superiority and prevent an invasion succeeding. Churchill was only able to do this because Britain had civil defense to mitigate the effects of the retaliation when the RAF were unable to entirely stop enemy attacks. Without civil defense, either Churchill wouldn't have been able to do this, so the airfields might have been put out and an invasion done, or else casualty rates 60 times higher could have resulted in the Blitz (the ratio of WWI bombing casualties per ton of bombs on unprotected civilians, to WWII, when people had shelters).
On page 378 of On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn emphasises (italics are Kahn's own): "The whole history of the 1933-1939 period is a clear example of the failure of Type II [deterrence of major provocations like invasion of an ally] and Type III Deterrence [deterrence of minor provocations like rearmament, militarization, etc.]. These failures occurred because neither the British nor the French [don't forget the USA which passed its Neutrality Act in 1935!] had the resolve to use their superior military power or their superior resources to check German aggression until it was too late. ... The longer they put off using their superior power the less credible it became that it would ever be used. Finally their power itself became inferior so that even when its use was seriously threatened, the German government was no longer impressed." Kahn quotes Churchill: "We had been reduced in those five years [of anti-war disarmament and then anti-war appeasement propaganda about gas knockout blow escalations wiping out humanity, 1933-1938, cumulating in the worthless piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler on 30 September 1938 promising peace for our time] from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengable that we never cared to think about it. We have been reduced from a position where the very word 'war' was considered one which would be used only by persons qualifying for a lunatic asylum." - Winston Churchill, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, G. P. Putnam's Sons, NY, 1941, p60 (quoted by Herman Kahn on page 379 of On Thermonuclear War, where Kahn comments: "Hitler and some of his staff were victims of overconfidence. By the time the war started, they felt that they had more than enough of a lead to win. ... the war would doubtless be short [precisely the delusion of Russia when invading Ukraine, in 2022] ..."
Herman Kahn on page 378 of On Thermonuclear War quotes Air Marshall Sir John Slessor's Central Blue Praeger, NY, 1957, which states the reality on page 161: by 1938 Britain was spending £300 million a year on arms, contrasted to well over £1000 million a year then being spent on arms by the Nazis. Thus, the Nazis were far outrunning Britain so that every day of peace that "Chamberlain bought with his peace agreements" actually gave the Nazis a bigger lead; Britain was not "buying time for rearmament to fight" contrary to financially illiterate historians, journalists and other Chamberlain "pacifism" fans to this day, rather, Chamberlain was helping the Nazis prepare better than the UK by delaying war! If the enemy is getting way bigger than you by the day, you don't do yourself any favours by delaying the fight. The fact that this is still "disputed" by left wing historians to back disarmament in the face of Russia today just demonstrates how Comintern's legacy of infiltration of the Western universities and mass media continues to this day.
One final thought from Kahn's On Thermonuclear War is his Figure 8 on page 469, showing the relationship between missile accuracy, warhead yield, and the 50% probable target peak overpressure at the intended ground zero (the intended ground zero never debunked with 100% probability in reality, due to inaccuracies in the missile guidance system, never mind the risk of warhead malfunction/ABM interception): in 1960 American 10 megaton warheads were placed on missiles with good accuracy gyroscopes, CEP = 1 mile, which gave 50% probability of delivering 100 psi peak overpressure to the intended ground zero, destroying typical 1960 era primitive (not shock protected) missile silos. So the USA could take out hard Russian ICBMs at that time. But the corresponding 10 megaton Russian warheads were (supposedly) on less accurate missiles, CEP = 5 miles, which would only deliver about average 4 psi peak overpressure at the intended "ground zero" (because they would on average miss targets by miles), so Russia couldn't in 1960 usefully target American ICBM's in their silos! If they did so, they would fail with high probability, because the hard targets would on average receive only 4 psi, not the 100 psi needed to wreck them. Thus, Russia had to target wood-frame American houses with ICBM's in 1960, the only yank assets that could be wrecked by 4 psi, not missile silos. In effect, missile accuracy forced America and Russia to have different nuclear war strategies: America could use "counterforce" targetting on hard Russian silos, but the less accurate Russian missiles of the same yield class would have to be targetted on "soft countervalue" targets, like residential areas. This asymmetry in USA and Russian targetting was often promoted by "arms control and disarmament" promoters like Hans Bethe as preventing a direct comparison; Bethe wrote articles in journals denying Russian superiority in megatonnage because they had less accurate missiles. But this is fake news, because Russia's a dictatorship, America isn't. Which is more dangerous, Russia wiping out American civilians or America wiping out Russian ICBMs? Duh. One strategy is evil, the other is just war.
Kahn also went into the problem with populist notions of "knockout blow" 1st strikes, versus 2nd strikes in nuclear war. In summary, Russia now has superiority in tactical neutron weapons, protected deep shelters and the secret Metro 2 underground railway to evacuate the dictators from the Kremlin to safe rural bunkers in the event of a nuclear strike on Moscow (as well as many dual-purpose cheap but hard underground car parks/shelters and tube stations/shelters and basement cafes/shelters, with double blast doors fitted for civilians), and it has placed a large number of ICBMs on mobile launchers which can move around (out of the 4 psi damage zone) while USA ICBMs are inflight. So, since America doesn't have such civil defense or mobile ICBM launchers or neutron bombs, it doesn't really have a credible deterrent against Russia, but Russia has a credible deterrent against American nuclear leverage. This was claimed to reduce nclear war risks by demonstrating to Russia that it has nothing to fear from America unless Russia launches a first strike on America, when what survived of American military assets (e.g. some Trident SLBMs) could disarm themselves by setting off a firework display over the Kremlin (while the Russians survive in hard double-blast doored shelters). This limited American "second strike capability" was supposed to be "safe deterrence". However, as we have seen, it hasn't stopped Russia invading Ukraine, using Novichok and Polonium-210 in the UK, etc. In other words, it's "minimal deterrence" that leaves open the key risk Kahn warned about, a repetition of the 1930s fiasco that was designed to minimise the risk of "accidental war" by peace treaties with dictators (who interpreted them as signs of virtual signalling weakness to be laughed at and ignored), but did the opposite, causing WWII. Mathematically, the error is that the Iwo Jima proved Lanchester Equations of war are being disregarded in preference to Morgenstern and von Neumann's "Minimax theorem" of game theory. The Lanchester Equations prove that the probability of victory in war (i.e. the rate of disarmament of the weaker side) is proportional to the square of the ratio of forces (surviving a 1st strike) and you need thus to risk using as much force as you can; the Minimax theorem by contrast says that to win a rule-abided game you should take minimal risks and not "escalate to win". The Minimax theorem is disproved by the US Strategic Bomb Survey WWII pre-nuclear attacks data, as well as the results in Vietnam and other wars of "gradual punishment" to try to coerce the enemy into defeat. The Lanchester equations model the history of victorious combats. All current Western nuclear policy is based on Minimax (the McNamara legacy), not Lanchester!
To recap for clarity in the reader's mind: Kahn's 1960 On Thermonuclear War was written while Eisenhower/Dulles "Massive retaliation" (aka "MAD" = Musual Assured Destruction, aka "Type 1 Deterrence") was in play, although General Maxwell D. Taylor (later Kennedy's limited nuclear war adviser), Henry Kissinger (in his 1957 "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy"), and people like Kahn's childhood friend and RAND Corporation colleague, physicist Samuel Cohen, were already advocating cleaner enhanced neutron weapons to credibly deter the invasions that triggered terrible conventional wars like WWI, WWII, the 1950-53 Korean War, etc. (note that contrary to "arms control and disarmament" liars, the "neutron bomb" is not limited to low kiloton yields, but can be used as a 10 megaton Ripple II 99.9% clean device for the case of wide area fronts of tanks crossing borders, provided a precursor burst of similar yield is detonated 5-25 seconds in advance, in order to reduce air density in the target area behind the shock front of the first burst, and so provide hydrodynamic enhancement of neutrons from the second explosion). Kahn considered a wide range of deterrent postures and kinds of wars in his book, and countermeasures in excruciating detail and cold-bloodedness, which put off many idealists from even bothering to read it carefully, let alone implement all of its recommendations! The key problem Kahn found for today's "minimal deterrence policy" was that arms control plus Russian tactical nuclear weapons and shelters superiority, kills off any hope deterring the kinds of "Type II deterrence" needed to prevent enemies from invading 3rd parties, i.e. the invasion of Ukraine 2022 couldn't be credibly deterred by saying "if you do that, Putin, I'll kill myself by disarming my country by firing all my weapons at you for an imaginary knockout blow" (most of which will be negated by Russian ABM, or negated by Russian shelters, or negated by Russian mobile ICBM's simply starting their engines and driving outside the 4psi blast overturning radius while the pre-programmed ICBM's are in flight from USA to their previous locations in Russia identified on satellite photos prior to pressing the button)!" This simply isn't a credible deterrent to kind of situations which have initiated 100% of the world wars in history! WTF has gone wrong with these people? Comintern propaganda has infected top dogs for decades with "Jaw, jaw, not war, war" appeasement crap (Winston Churchill was the only person in human history in the Cabinet of the country triggering BOTH World Wars, tried to deter BOTH, and FAILED both times, but is somehow remembered in propaganda history as a "great orator" despite failing to sway public opinion pre-WWI and pre-WWII to deter the wars; he may have been the most sensible person on both occasions but the result was still a World War each time!). Maybe it's partly down to luddite opposition to progress (the sin of nuclear technology stagnation caused by decades of bans of tests for improved, more credible nuclear deterrent warhead options), and partly down to nostalgic "last war" style military inertia, of the kind that sent Polish horse mounted (cavalry) divisions into battle with Panzer tanks in 1939. The key problem is that the current "protected second strike capability" ("we will never strike first!") is that the enemy leadership may develop the mentality of Hamas in October 2023. If so, that very limited "minimum deterrence" will fail, and there will be a nuclear war. Also, Russia has threatened to nuke non-nuclear Sweden and non-nuclear Ukraine, just as America nuked non-nuclear Japan in 1945 twice, so the CND fantasy of securing a "nuclear free zone" by unilateral disarmament is just a pipe dream. If we continue as we have done until now, Russia and other enemy states will become an ever more war-minded alliance intent on our nuclear annihilation.
"Russia has launched several air attacks on Ukraine this week, costing Moscow a reported £1.1bn. Last night, Kyiv came under drone attack for the third night in four days, with debris injuring people and damaging buildings." - https://t.co/oNs8lwTTmZ And when the Roubles run out,…
"The threat of Russian escalation is almost absent in the conversation. It is as if the limit of their conventional powers has been exposed by the humiliation of Kursk, along with the emptiness of their nuclear rhetoric. The latter cannot be entirely ignored, if the Kremlin feels…
Democrats in 2021 accelerated the pull out from Afghanistan to the extent that people flooded runways and later fell off undercarriages of the escaping aircraft (worse than the organized rooftop queue for the last Helicopters leaving Saigon, in 1975!), to pacify disarmers, peace protestors, liberals etc., like Putin and Hamas, then Putin and Hamas realise they can invade Ukraine (2022) and Israel (2023) with impunity. INNOCENT PEOPLE ARE KILLED WHEN YOU GIVE A GREEN LIGHT TO DICTATORS. We need credible deterrence. Like, NOW, to stop these invasions. Duh. The entire problem is down to the lying left wing Lenin lawyer "virtual signalling" political tactic lampooned years ago by Bob Monkhouse's advice to succeed by "faking sincerity" ("Nukemap" lying crap is an excellent example of how the old 1930s "guaranteed gas knockout blow annihilation within hours of war being declared" propaganda horsecrap is resurrected for mainstream media lying fake "pacicism" today). That deliberate abusive lying propaganda by the herd mentality "autistic groupthink" thugs of left wing bigots backfires, just as with right wing thugs, and costs lives.
The UK and France are eager to allow Ukraine to strike military targets deep within Russian territory, while the US and Germany are opposed - Financial Times
The reason for Germany and the US reluctance is that the Biden administration and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are…
It's impossible to tell precisely why this 1930s "gas war will escalate within hours and wipe out everybody" pro-Nazi appeasement escalation-doomsday lying and Vietnam era "don't escalate to win" anti-military lunacy is still prevailing in America and Germany, but nuclear heebie jeebies based on fake "Nukemap" style crap is certainly a big factor, plus the fact that both countries lost major wars with costly financial and psychosis implications (Germany lost WWI and WWII; America lost Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). Someday victory may become fashionable again, probably only after "virtue signalling faked pacifist sincerity" is debunked by Putin.
Looks like the commie Russian siding thug Joseph Rotblat, a Nobel Peace Laureate for giving the green card to Putin like fellow "pacifists" did to the Kaiser to begin WWI and to Hitler, starting WWII. But from his "diplomacy" he wants WWIII by provoking war, not Western… https://t.co/jfs2CEe2KV
The Russian multistaged 1000 megaton (1 Gt) bomb design goes back to Leo Szilard's anti-H bomb "doomsday machine" propaganda news conference of 1950. As Herman Kahn argued, it's not a credible deterrent, is hard to deliver (it would be the size of a large submarine), and the… https://t.co/zgErh5mnVN
Russian state TV channel 1 admits invasion causin pain, but then adds that Russia is a nuclear state. Get prepared for possible Putin resumption of nuclear weapons coercion, or other nuclear saber rattling such as an EMP test as occurred on 22 October 1962, during Cuban crisis! https://t.co/I0gtQpb8OI
"For Russia, the strategic defeat means the end of its statehood and thousand-year history. Then the question arises - why should we be afraid? Isn't it better to go to the end?" - Putin
— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 20, 2024
Are you a retired NATO F-16 pilot? Then you are needed to help defend liberty against the Ruskies. Ukraine doesn't have enough F-16 pilots available. https://t.co/Mdto9HhPMc
I arrived in Moscow for the BBC in 2000 on the day Russia admitted to the Kursk submarine disaster. Now, in Kursk, Putin’s struggling with new disaster - as his war vs Ukraine rebounds
I’ve witnessed Russia’s long slide to this point, close-up. It’s all in my book - out today 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/VREwcF6R4m
"The incursion into Kursk region by the AFU is in favor of Russia," Russians are told by their TV channels, because an attack on Russian territory closes the possibility of negotiations with Ukraine.
Answer: in case Putin at some point hits the vodka, sees red at the invasion of Russia, and presses a button. Hitler had 12,000 tons of tabun by 1945 - equivalent to Russia's nuclear stockpile in terms of killing potential - but never used a drop of it. But the RISK was… https://t.co/eHzQLYxY8x
Ukrainian President Zelenskyy on Putin's (aka Russian State TV Channel 1's) recent nuclear war threats: Zelenskyy thinks that Putin loves life too much to start a nuclear war. True, up to a point, but: (1) Putin could escalate nuclear threats without much risk of being wiped out… pic.twitter.com/9wTNFVKUaT
There is now a relatively long introduction at the top of this blog, due to the present nuclear threat caused by disarmament and arms control propaganda, and the dire need to get the facts out past pro-Russian media influencers or loony mass media which has never cared about nuclear and radiation effects facts, so please scroll down to see blog posts. The text below in blue is hyperlinked (direct to reference source materials, rather than numbered and linked to reference at the end of the page) so you can right-click on it and open in a new tab to see the source. This page is not about opinions, it provides censored out facts that debunk propaganda, but for those who require background "authority" nonsense on censored physics facts, see stuff here or here. Regarding calling war-mongering, world war causing, terrorism-regime-supporting UK disarmers of the 20th century "thugs" instead of "kind language": I was put through the Christianity grinder as a kid so will quote Jesus (whom I'm instructed to follow), Matthew 23:33: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell?" The fake "pacifist" thugs will respond with some kindly suggestion that this is "paranoid" and that "Jesus was rightfully no-platformed for his inappropriate language"! Yeah, you guys would say that, wouldn't ya. Genuine pacifism requires credible deterrence! Decent people seem to be very confused about the facts of this. Jesus did not say "disarm to invite your annihilation by terrorists". You can't "forgive and forget" when the enemy is still on the warpath. They have to be stopped, either by deterrence, force, defense, or a combination of all these.
ABOVE: The June 1957 edition of Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons was the first to include the effects of blast duration (which increases with the cube-root of weapon yield) on blast damage from nuclear weapons. This is very important for wind drag loading to drag-sensitive targets, but has less effect for diffraction-sensitive targets which respond to peak pressures, especially where the blast pressure rapidly equalizes around the structure (e.g. utility poles or buildings with large expanses of glass which shatters, allowing rapid pressure equalization). For example, Glasstone 1957, Fig. 6.41b (p253, using Fig. 3.94a on p109 to convert scaled distances to overpressures from a surface burst on open deserted terrain) shows that for yields of 1 kt, 20 kt (approximately the 16 kt Hiroshima and 21 kt Nagasaki yields), and 1 megaton, peak overpressures of 55, 23 and 15 psi, respectively, are required for collapse (severe damage) to modern multistory reinforced concrete buildings with light walls (Fig. 6.41a shows that about 5 psi will demolish a wood frame house - no longer in modern city centres - regardless of yield). Notice that this means that modern cities are extremely resistant to blast from ~1 kt neutron bombs, requiring more than twice the peak overpressure for collapse than was needed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also notice that very large amounts of energy are absorbed from the blast in causing severe damage to modern reinforced concrete city buildings, causing rapid attenuation of free-field pressure so that ocean and desert test validated cube-root damage scaling laws break down for high yield bursts in modern cities (see latest blog post here for examples of calculations of this energy absorption in both oscillating a building in the elastic deflection engineering graph zone, and the much larger energy absorption in causing plastic zone distortion to reinforced concrete - basically the former typically absorbs about 1% of blast energy, whereas the latter takes up something like 10 times more energy, or 10%, a factor entirely dismissed by Glasstone and Dolan but analyzed by Penney). Above a megaton or so, the increasing blast duration has less and less effect on the peak overpressure required for severe damage, because for destruction a threshold blast loading exists, regardless of the blast duration. (A 1 mile/hour wind will not blow a wall down, regardless of how long it lasts. In other words, large impulses cease to be damage criteria if the blast pressure drops below a threshold needed for damage.) Glasstone 1957 Fig 6.41c on p255 shows that automobiles suffer severe damage 36 psi peak overpressure for 1 kt, 18 psi for 20 kt, and 12 psi for 1 megaton. These pressures for destruction of automobiles are similar to the severe damage data given for multistorey steel frame office buildings with light walls. The key point here is that low-yield (around 1 kt) tactical nuclear weapons produce far less collateral damage to civilian infrastructure than high yield bursts, and even the effects of the latter are exaggerated severely for modern cities when using wooden house data in unobstructed terrain at ocean or desert terrain nuclear tests. Collateral damage is eliminated by exploiting the fact that higher pressures are needed for air blast damage at lower yields, and using earth penetrator warheads or air bursts to constrain air blast pressures to civilian infrastructure, ensuring that they are not collapsed (causing casualties in modern steel or concrete buildings).
Note that the later (1962/4 and 1977) editions of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons replace the correct (curved line conversion) blast duration nomographs in the 1957 edition with simplistic Wn yield scaling (where n = 0.4 for drag sensitive targets), which is a simplification which fails to correctly model the fact that blast duration effects on overpressures are eliminated at very high yields because a minimum threshold blast pressure is needed to cause damage.
J. R. Oppenheimer (opposing Teller), February 1951: "It is clear that they can be used only as adjuncts in a military campaign which has some other components, and whose purpose is a military victory. They are not primarily weapons of totality or terror, but weapons used to give combat forces help they would otherwise lack. They are an integral part of military operations. Only when the atomic bomb is recognized as useful insofar as it is an integral part of military operations, will it really be of much help in the fighting of a war, rather than in warning all mankind to avert it." (Quotation: Samuel Cohen, Shame, 2nd ed., 2005, page 99.)
‘The Hungarian revolution of October and November 1956 demonstrated the difficulty faced even by a vastly superior army in attempting to dominate hostile territory. The [Soviet Union] Red Army finally had to concentrate twenty-two divisions in order to crush a practically unarmed population. ... With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears when we think of [World War II nuclear city bombing like Hiroshima]. The high casualty estimates for nuclear war are based on the assumption that the most suitable targets are those of conventional warfare: cities to interdict communications ... With cities no longer serving as key elements in the communications system of the military forces, the risks of initiating city bombing may outweigh the gains which can be achieved. ...
‘The elimination of area targets will place an upper limit on the size of weapons it will be profitable to use. Since fall-out becomes a serious problem [i.e. fallout contaminated areas which are so large that thousands of people would need to evacuate or shelter indoors for up to two weeks] only in the range of explosive power of 500 kilotons and above, it could be proposed that no weapon larger than 500 kilotons will be employed unless the enemy uses it first. Concurrently, the United States could take advantage of a new development which significantly reduces fall-out by eliminating the last stage of the fission-fusion-fission process.’
- Dr Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, 1957, pp. 180-3, 228-9.
Note that sometimes the "nuclear taboo" issue is raised against this analysis by Kissenger: if anti-nuclear lying propaganda on weapons effects makes it apparently taboo in the Western pro-Russian disarmament lobbies to escalate from conventional to tactical nuclear weapons to end war as on 6 and 9 August 1945, then this "nuclear taboo" can be relied upon to guarantee peace for our time. However, this was not only disproved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by the Russian tactical nuclear weapons reliance today, the Russian civil defense shelter system detailed on this blog which showed they believed a nuclear war survivable based on the results of their own nuclear tests, and the use of Russian nuclear weapons years after Kissinger's analysis was published and criticised, for example their 50 megaton test in 1961 and their supply of IRBM's capable of reaching East Coast mainland USA targets to the fanatical Cuban dictatorship in 1962. So much for the "nuclear taboo" as being any more reliable than Chamberlain's "peace for our time" document, co-signed by Hitler on 30 September 1938! We furthermore saw how Russia respected President Obama's "red line" for the "chemical weapons taboo": Russia didn't give a toss about Western disarmament thugs prattle about what they think is a "taboo", Russia used chlorine and sarin in Syria to keep Assad the dictator and they used Novichok to attack and kill in the UK in 2018, with only diplomatic expulsions in response. "Taboos" are no more valid to restrain madmen than peace treaties, disarmament agreements, Western CND books attacking civil defense or claiming that nuclear war is the new 1930s gas war bogyman, or "secret" stamps on scientific facts. In a word, they're crazy superstitions.)
All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of DELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace":
"Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.
ABOVE: Why didn't Britain declare war on Russia when it jointly invaded Poland with the Nazis, or even later when Russia invaded Finland single-handed? Answer: Comintern had stuffed the British mass media, British universities, and even the Labour Party with Russian stooges! Barrister Denis Pritt, Labour MP, simply blamed the British government for not cosying up to Communist dictatorial Russia (in the same way Chamberlain had cosied up to Adolf Hitler's Nazis)! Pritt in 1936 went to watch the "Trial of the Sixteen" in Moscow, a show trial purge of Stalin's criticis that made a mockery of the law, but be defended Stalinism in his tract, "The Zinoviev Trial". He was only finally kicked out of the Labour Party after he defended Russia's invasion of Finland in popular Penguin Book Specials. But he wasn't alone. The communists of the British media used the same tactics as the Nazis to undermine or destroy critics, so they managed to churn out one-sided propaganda nearly as bad as the media saturation with anti-nuclear, anti-CO2 crap today.
Russian project 49 dual-primary thermonuclear weaponeer Dr Yuri Trutnev has an officially "proatom.ru"-published technical history of the design of the Russian nuclear weapons (which differ from UK-USA designs fundamentally) here (extracted from Russian "Atomic Strategy" No. 18, August 2005): "the problem of ensuring spherically symmetric compression of the secondary module was radically solved, since the time of “symmetrization” of the energy around the secondary module was much less than the time of compression of this module. ... The first two-stage thermonuclear charge, designated RDS-37, was developed in 1955 and successfully tested on November 22, 1955. The energy release of the charge in the experiment was 1.6 Mt, and since for safety reasons at the Semipalatinsk test site the charge was tested at partial power, the predicted full-scale energy release of the charge was ~ 3 Mt. The energy release amplification factor in RDS-37 was about two orders of magnitude, the charge did not use tritium, the thermonuclear fuel was lithium deuteride, and the main fissile material was U-238. ... Particular attention should be paid to the works of 1958. This year, a new type of thermonuclear charge, “product 49,” was tested [the double-primary H-bomb], which was the next step in the formation of a standard for thermonuclear charges (its development was completed in 1957, but testing on the SIP did not take place). The ideologists of this project and the developers of the physical charge circuit were Yu. N. Babaev and I. The peculiarity of the new charge was that, using the basic principles of the RDS-37, it was possible to: • significantly reduce overall parameters due to a new bold solution to the problem of transfer of X-ray radiation, which determines implosion; • simplify the layered structure of the secondary module, which turned out to be an extremely important practical decision. According to the conditions of adaptation to specific carriers, “product 49” was developed in a smaller overall weight category compared to the RDS-37 charge, but its specific volumetric energy release turned out to be 2.4 times greater.
"The physical design of the charge turned out to be extremely successful; the charge was transferred to service and subsequently underwent modernization associated with the replacement of primary energy sources. In 1958, together with Yu. N. Babaev, we managed to develop 4 thermonuclear charges, which were tested on the field in 7 full-scale tests, and all of them were successful. This work was practically implemented within 8 months of 1958. All of these charges used a new circuit, first introduced in Product 49. Their energy release ranged from 0.3 to 2.8 Mt. In addition, in 1958, under my leadership M. V. Fedulov also developed the lightest thermonuclear charge at that time according to the “product 49” design, which was also successfully tested. Work on the miniaturization of thermonuclear weapons was new at that time, and it was met with a certain misunderstanding and resistance. ... One of the well-known pages in the history of work on thermonuclear weapons of the USSR is the creation of a superbomb - the most powerful thermonuclear charge. I will dwell on some points of this development. ... Among the features of this charge, it should be noted that the large volume of the charge (due to its high energy release) required significant amounts of X-ray energy to carry out implosion. The developed nuclear charges did not satisfy this condition, and therefore, a previously developed two-stage thermonuclear charge with a relatively low energy release was used as the primary source of the “super-powerful charge”. This charge was developed by me and Yu. N. Babaev. ... In the next project (a return to the untested 1958 system) that I supervised, every effort was made to ensure near-perfect implosion symmetry. This brilliant work led to success, and in 1962, the problem of implementing thermonuclear ignition was solved in a special device. In other full-scale tests that followed, this success was consolidated, and as a result, thermonuclear ignition provided the calculated combustion of the secondary module with an energy release of 1 Mt. My co-authors in this development were V.B. Adamsky, Yu.N. Babaev, V.G. Zagrafov and V.N. Mokhov. ... This principle has found a variety of applications in the creation of fundamentally new types of thermonuclear charges, from special devices for the use of nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes to significant military applications." (Note there is a 2017 filmed interview of Trutnev - in Russian - linked here.)
"... it is an important defect of 'arms control' agreements that the punishment or correction of even outright violation is not done automatically ... [in 1934 Ramsay] MacDonald and his supporters urged one of the least aggressive nations in Europe to disarm itself to a level equal with their potential attackers ... Probably as much as any other single group I think that these men of good will can be charged with causing World War II. [Italics are Kahn's own.] ... In March 1934, Stanley Baldwin, in answer to a statement by Winston Churchill to the effect that Germany was rearming and growing stronger than Great Britain, made his famous statement: 'If all our efforts at agreement fail [why 'all' and how do you define 'failure' until after the enemy secretly breaks the agreement and enemy starts a war, when it is too late?] ... in air strength and air power this country shall no longer be inferior to any country within striking distance of its shores'. In spite of this pledge, by 1935 the Germans had achieved parity or even air superiority and their rate of expansion was much larger than that of the British; thus the disparity grew with the years. ... On March 16, 1935, Hitler decreed conscription ... In April, the League [of Nations, the old version of the UN] ... unanimously voted that treaties should not be broken by unilateral action. ... At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to 'retaliate' if they attacked him. ... The technique he used is such an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs that it is of extreme value to all who are concerned with the problem of maintaining a peaceful and secure world to go over the story in some detail." - Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, pp. 390-392, 403. (Kahn then gives a long discussion of the "you have the choice"-way Hitler blackmailed President Hacha into signing over his country to the Nazis in March 1939, despite the worthless Munich agreement of 1938, using first-hand testimony from Hitler's translator at the 14 March 1939 Hitler-Hacha meeting, Paul Schmidt: "There were, said Hitler, 'two possibilities. The first was that the invasion of the German troops might develop into a battle. The resistance would then be broken down by force of arms with all available means. The other was that the entry of the German troops should take place in a peaceable manner ...'." Now the issue is this: Hitler used "peace" as an option to get what he wanted without violence. But populist propaganda claims Hitler was "violent". Nope: Hitler preferred to "peacefully" invade, "peacefully" gas opponents in gas chambers with musicians playing classical music at the deportation camp railway stations to prevent violence starting, etc. Reagan made the point in his March 1983 "evil empire" speech that the most evil thugs of all that instigate genocide hide behind the cloak of spurious pacifism!)
https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth/ (Peter Vanderwicken in the Harvard Business Review Magazine, May-June 1995): "The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works ... The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity. What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. ... The architect of the transformation was not a political leader or a constitutional convention but Joseph Pulitzer, who in 1883 bought the sleepy New York World and in 20 years made it the country’s largest newspaper. Pulitzer accomplished that by bringing drama to news—by turning news articles into stories ... His journalism took events out of their dry, institutional contexts and made them emotional rather than rational, immediate rather than considered, and sensational rather than informative. The press became a stage on which the actions of government were a series of dramas. ... The press swarmed on the story, which had all the necessary dramatic elements: a foot-dragging bureaucracy, a study finding that the country’s favorite fruit was poisoning its children, and movie stars opposing the pesticide. Sales of apples collapsed. Within months, Alar’s manufacturer withdrew it from the market, although both the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration stated that they believed Alar levels on apples were safe. The outcry simply overwhelmed scientific evidence. That happens all too often, Cynthia Crossen argues in her book Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America. ... Crossen writes, “more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause.” “Most members of the media are ill-equipped to judge a technical study,” Crossen correctly points out. “Even if the science hasn’t been explained or published in a U.S. journal, the media may jump on a study if it promises entertainment for readers or viewers. And if the media jump, that is good enough for many Americans.” ... A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Such an “emergency government can’t govern,” Weaver concludes. “Not only does public support for emergency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, but officials acting in the emergency mode can’t make meaningful public policies. According to the classic textbook definition, government is the authoritative allocation of values, and emergency government doesn’t authoritatively allocate values.” (Note that Richard Rhodes' Pulitzer prize winning books such as The making of the atomic bomb which uncritically quote Hiroshima firestorm lies and survivors nonsense about people running around without feet, play to this kind of emotional fantasy mythology of nuclear deterrence obfuscation so loved by the mass media.)
“... Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution ... It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea ....” – Ronald Reagan, Moscow State University, May 31, 1988 (quoted at our physics site, www.quantumfieldtheory.org). Text in blue on this blog is hyperlinked directly to reference material (so can be opened in another tab by right-clicking on it):
ABOVE: "missile gap" propaganda debunked by secret 1970s data; Kennedy relied on US nuclear superiority. Using a flawed analysis of nuclear weapons effects on Hiroshima - based on lying unclassified propaganda reports and ignorant dismissals of civil defense shelters in Russia (again based on Hiroshima propaganda by groves in 1945) - America allowed Russian nuclear superiority in the 1970s. Increasingly, the nuclear deterrent was used by Russia to stop the West from "interfering" with its aggressive invasions and wars, precisely Hitler's 1930s strategy with gas bombing knockout-blow threats used to engineer appeasement. BELOW: H-bomb effects and design secrecy led to tragic mass media delusions, such as the 18 February 1950 Picture Post claim that the H-bomb can devastate Australia (inspiring the Shute novel and movie "On the Beach" and also other radiation scams like "Dr Strangelove" to be used by Russia to stir up anti Western disarmament movement to help Russia win WWIII). Dad was a Civil Defense Corps Instructor in the UK when this was done (the civil defense effectiveness and weapon effects facts on shelters at UK and USA nuclear tests were kept secret and not used to debunk lying political appeasement propaganda tricks in the mass media by sensationalist "journalists" and Russian "sputniks"):
Message to mass-media journalists: please don't indulge in lying "no defence" propaganda as was done by most of the media in previous pre-war crises!
ABOVE: Example of a possible Russian 1985 1st Cold War SLBM first strike plan. The initial use of Russian SLBM launched nuclear missiles from off-coast against command and control centres (i.e. nuclear explosions to destroy warning satellite communications centres by radiation on satellites as well as EMP against ground targets, rather than missiles launched from Russia against cities, as assumed by 100% of the Cold War left-wing propaganda) is allegedly a Russian "fog of war" strategy. Such a "demonstration strike" is aimed essentially at causing confusion about what is going on, who is responsible - it is not quick or easy to finger-print high altitude bursts fired by SLBM's from submerged submarines to a particular country because you don't get fallout samples to identify isotopic plutonium composition. Russia could immediately deny the attack (implying, probably to the applause of the left-wingers that this was some kind of American training exercise or computer based nuclear weapons "accident", similar to those depicted in numerous anti-nuclear Cold War propaganda films). Thinly-veiled ultimatums and blackmail follow. America would not lose its population or even key cities in such a first strike (contrary to left-wing propaganda fiction), as with Pearl Harbor in 1941; it would lose its complacency and its sense of security through isolationism, and would either be forced into a humiliating defeat or a major war.
Before 1941, many warned of the risks but were dismissed on the basis that Japan was a smaller country with a smaller economy than the USA and war was therefore absurd (similar to the way Churchill's warnings about European dictators were dismissed by "arms-race opposing pacifists" not only in the 1930s, but even before WWI; for example Professor Cyril Joad documents in the 1939 book "Why War?" his first hand witnessing of Winston Churchill's pre-WWI warning and call for an arms-race to deter that war, as dismissed by the sneering Norman Angell who claimed an arms race would cause a war rather than avert one by bankrupting the terrorist state). It is vital to note that there is an immense pressure against warnings of Russian nuclear superiority even today, most of it contradictory. E.g. the left wing and Russian-biased "experts" whose voices are the only ones reported in the Western media (traditionally led by "Scientific American" and "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"), simultaneously claim Russia imposes such a terrible SLBM and ICBM nuclear threat that we must desperately disarm now, while also claiming that Russian tactical nuclear weapons probably won't work so aren't a threat that needs to be credibly deterred! This only makes sense as Russian siding propaganda. In similar vein, Teller-critic Hans Bethe also used to falsely "dismiss" Russian nuclear superiority by claiming (with quotes from Brezhnev about the peaceful intentions of Russia) that Russian delivery systems are "less accurate" than Western missiles (as if accuracy has anything to do with high altitude EMP strikes, where the effects cover huge areas, or large city targets. Such claims would then by repeatedly endlessly in the Western media by Russian biased "journalists" or agents of influence, and any attempt to point out the propaganda (i.e. he real world asymmetry: Russia uses cheap countervalue targetting on folk that don't have civil defense, whereas we need costly, accurate counterforce targetting because Russia has civil defense shelters that we don't have) became a "Reds under beds" argument, implying that the truth is dangerous to "peaceful coexistence"!
“Free peoples ... will make war only when driven to it by tyrants. ... there have been no wars between well-established democracies. ... the probability ... that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident [is] less than one chance in a thousand. ... there have been more than enough to provide robust statistics ... When toleration of dissent has persisted for three years, but not until then, we can call a new republic ‘well established.’ ... Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders ... using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation ... Republican behaviour ... in quite a few cases ... created an ‘appeasement trap.’ The republic tried to accommodate a tyrant as if he were a fellow republican; the tyrant concluded that he could safely make an aggressive response; eventually the republic replied furiously with war. The frequency of such errors on both sides is evidence that negotiating styles are not based strictly on sound reasoning.” - Spencer Weart, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (Yale University Press)
The Top Secret American intelligency report NIE 11-3/8-74 "Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict" warned on page 6: "the USSR has largely eliminated previous US quantitative advantages in strategic offensive forces." page 9 of the report estimated that the Russian's ICBM and SLBM launchers exceed the USAs 1,700 during 1970, while Russia's on-line missile throw weight had exceeded the USA's one thousand tons back in 1967! Because the USA had more long-range bombers which can carry high-yield bombs than Russia (bombers are more vulnerable to air defences so were not Russia's priority), it took a little longer for Russia to exceed the USA in equivalent megatons, but the 1976 Top Secret American report NIE 11-3/8-76 at page 17 shows that in 1974 Russia exceeded the 4,000 equivalent-megatons payload of USA missiles and aircraft (with less vulnerability for Russia, since most of Russia's nuclear weapons were on missiles not in SAM-vulnerable aircraft), amd by 1976 Russia could deliver 7,000 tons of payload by missiles compared to just 4,000 tons on the USA side. These reports were kept secret for decades to protect the intelligence sources, but they were based on hard evidence. For example, in August 1974 the Hughes Aircraft Company used a specially designed ship (Glomar Explorer, 618 feet long, developed under a secret CIA contract) to recover nuclear weapons and their secret manuals from a Russian submarine which sank in 16,000 feet of water, while in 1976 America was able to take apart the electronics systems in a state-of-the-art Russian MIG-25 fighter which was flown to Japan by defector Viktor Belenko, discovering that it used exclusively EMP-hard miniature vacuum tubes with no EMP-vulnerable solid state components.
There are four ways of dealing with aggressors: conquest (fight them), intimidation (deter them), fortification (shelter against their attacks; historically used as castles, walled cities and even walled countries in the case of China's 1,100 mile long Great Wall and Hadrian's Wall, while the USA has used the Pacific and Atlantic as successful moats against invasion, at least since Britain invaded Washington D.C. back in 1812), and friendship (which if you are too weak to fight, means appeasing them, as Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler for worthless peace promises). These are not mutually exclusive: you can use combinations. If you are very strong in offensive capability and also have walls to protect you while your back is turned, you can - as Teddy Roosevelt put it (quoting a West African proverb): "Speak softly and carry a big stick." But if you are weak, speaking softly makes you a target, vulnerable to coercion. This is why we don't send troops directly to Ukraine. When elected in 1960, Kennedy introduced "flexible response" to replace Dulles' "massive retaliation", by addressing the need to deter large provocations without being forced to decide between the unwelcome options of "surrender or all-out nuclear war" (Herman Kahn called this flexible response "Type 2 Deterrence"). This was eroded by both Russian civil defense and their emerging superiority in the 1970s: a real missiles and bombers gap emerged in 1972 when the USSR reached and then exceeded the 2,200 of the USA, while in 1974 the USSR achieve parity at 3,500 equivalent megatons (then exceeded the USA), and finally today Russia has over 2,000 dedicated clean enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons and we have none (except low-neutron output B61 multipurpose bombs). (Robert Jastrow's 1985 book How to make nuclear Weapons obsolete was the first to have graphs showing the downward trend in nuclear weapon yields created by the development of miniaturized MIRV warheads for missiles and tactical weapons: he shows that the average size of US warheads fell from 3 megatons in 1960 to 200 kilotons in 1980, and from a total of 12,000 megatons in 1960 to 3,000 megatons in 1980.)
The term "equivalent megatons" roughly takes account of the fact that the areas of cratering, blast and radiation damage scale not linearly with energy but as something like the 2/3 power of energy release; but note that close-in cratering scales as a significantly smaller power of energy than 2/3, while blast wind drag displacement of jeeps in open desert scales as a larger power of energy than 2/3. Comparisons of equivalent megatonnage shows, for example, that WWII's 2 megatons of TNT in the form of about 20,000,000 separate conventional 100 kg (0.1 ton) explosives is equivalent to 20,000,000 x (10-7)2/3 = 431 separate 1 megaton explosions! The point is, nuclear weapons are not of a different order of magnitude to conventional warfare, because: (1) devastated areas don't scale in proportion to energy release, (2) the number of nuclear weapons is very much smaller than the number of conventional bombs dropped in conventional war, (3) because of radiation effects like neutrons and intense EMP, it is possible to eliminate physical destruction by nuclear weapons by a combination of weapon design (e.g. very clean bombs like 99.9% fusion Dominic-Housatonic, or 95% fusion Redwing-Navajo) and burst altitude or depth for hard targets, and create a weapon that deters invasions credibly (without lying local fallout radiation hazards), something none of the biased "pacifist disarmament" lobbies (which attract Russian support) tell you, and (4) people at collateral damage distances have time to take cover from radiation and flying glass, blast winds, etc from nuclear explosions (which they don't in Ukraine and Gaza where similar blast pressures arrive more rapidly from smaller conventional explosions). There's a big problem with propaganda here.
(These calculations, showing that even if strategic bombing had worked in WWII - and the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded it failed, thus the early Cold War effort to develop and test tactical nuclear weapons and train for tactical nuclear war in Nevada field exercises - you need over 400 megaton weapons to give the equivalent of WWII city destruction in Europe and Japan, are often inverted by anti-nuclear bigots to try to obfuscate the truth. What we're driving at is that nuclear weapons give you the ability to DETER the invasions that set off such wars, regardless of whether they escalate from poison gas - as feared in the 20s and 30s thus appeasement and WWII - or nuclear. Escalation was debunked in WWII where the only use of poison gases were in "peaceful" gas chambers, not dropped on cities. Rather than justifying appeasement, the "peaceful" massacre of millions in gas chambers justified war. But evil could and should have been deterred. The "anti-war" propagandarists like Lord Noel-Baker and pals who guaranteed immediate gas knockout blows in the 30s if we didn't appease evil dictators were never held to account and properly debunked by historians after the war, so they converted from gas liars to nuclear liars in the Cold War and went on winning "peace" prices for their lies, which multiplied up over the years, to keep getting news media headlines and Nobel Peace Prizes for starting and sustaining unnecessary wars and massacres by dictators. There's also a military side to this, with Field Marshall's Lord Mountbatten, Lord Carver and War Office scientific adviser Lord Zuckerman in the Cold War arguing for UK nuclear disarmament and a re-introduction of conscription instead. These guys were not pacifist CND thugs who wanted Moscow to rule the world, but they were quoted by them attacking the deterrent, but not of course quoting them calling for conscription instead. The abolishment of UK conscription for national service announced in 1960 was due to the H-bomb, and was a political money-saving plot by Macmillan. If we disarmed our nuclear deterrent and spend the money on conscription plus underground shelters, we might well be able to resist Russia as Ukraine does, until we run out of ammunition etc. However, the cheapest and most credible deterrent is tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the concentration of aggressive force by terrorist states..)
Duncan Campbell's War Plan UK relies on the contradiction of claiming that the deliberately exaggerated UK Government worst-case civil defense "exercises" for training purposes are "realistic scenarios" (e.g. 1975 Inside Right, 1978 Scrum Half, 1980 Square Leg, 1982 Hard Rock planning), while simultaneously claiming the very opposite about reliable UK Government nuclear effects and sheltering effectiveness data, and hoping nobody would spot his contradictory tactics. He quotes extensively from these lurid worst-case scenario UK civil defense exercises ,as if they are factually defensible rather than imaginary fiction to put planners under the maximum possible stress (standard UK military policy of “Train hard to fight easy”), while ignoring the far more likely limited nuclear uses scenario of Sir John Hackett's Third World War. His real worry is the 1977 UK Government Training Manual for Scientific Advisers which War Plan UK quotes on p14: "a potential threat to the security of the United Kingdom arising from acts of sabotage by enemy agents, possibly assisted by dissident groups. ... Their aim would be to weaken the national will and ability to fight. ... Their significance should not be underestimated." On the next page, War Plan UK quotes J. B. S. Haldane's 1938 book Air Raid Precautions (ARP) on the terrible destruction Haldane witnessed on unprotected people in the Spanish civil war, without even mentioning that Haldane's point is pro-civil defense, pro-shelters, and anti-appeasement of dictatorship, the exact opposite of War Plan UK which wants Russia to run the world. On page 124 War Plan UK the false assertion is made that USA nuclear casualty data is "widely accepted" and true (declassified Hiroshima casaulty data for people in modern concrete buildings proves it to be lies) while the correct UK nuclear casualty data is "inaccurate", and on page 126, Duncan Campbell simply lies that the UK Government's Domestic Nuclear Shelters- Technical Guidance"ended up offering the public a selection of shelters half of which were invented in the Blitz ... None of the designs was ever tested." In fact, Frank Pavry (who studied similar shelters surviving near ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 with the British Mission to Japan_ and George R. Stanbury tested 15 Anderson shelters at the first UK nuclear explosion, Operation Hurricane in 1952, together with concrete structures, and many other improvised trench and earth-covered shelters were nuclear tested by USA and UK at trials in 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1958, and later at simulated nuclear explosions by Cresson Kearny of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA, having also earlier been exposed to early Russian nuclear tests (scroll down to see the evidence of this). Improved versions of war tested and nuclear weapons tested shelters! So war Plan UK makes no effort whatsoever to dig up the facts, and instead falsely claims the exact opposite of the plain unvarnished truth! War Plan UK shows its hypocrisy on page 383 in enthusiastically praising Russian civil defense:
"Training in elementary civil defence is given to everyone, at school, in industry or collective farms. A basic handbook of precautionary measures, Everybody must know this!, is the Russian Protect and Survive. The national civil defence corps is extensive, and is organized along military lines. Over 200,000 civil defence troops would be mobilized for rescue work in war. There are said to be extensive, dispersed and 'untouchable' food stockpiles; industrial workers are issued with kits of personal protection apparatus, said to include nerve gas counteragents such as atropine. Fallout and blast shelters are provided in the cities and in industrial complexes, and new buildings have been required to have shelters since the 1950s. ... They suggest that less than 10% - even as little as 5% - of the Soviet population would die in a major attack. [Less than Russia's loss of 12% of its population in WWII.]"
'LLNL achieved fusion ignition for the first time on Dec. 5, 2022. The second time came on July 30, 2023, when in a controlled fusion experiment, the NIF laser delivered 2.05 MJ of energy to the target, resulting in 3.88 MJ of fusion energy output, the highest yield achieved to date. On Oct. 8, 2023, the NIF laser achieved fusion ignition for the third time with 1.9 MJ of laser energy resulting in 2.4 MJ of fusion energy yield. “We’re on a steep performance curve,” said Jean-Michel Di Nicola, co-program director for the NIF and Photon Science’s Laser Science and Systems Engineering organization. “Increasing laser energy can give us more margin against issues like imperfections in the fuel capsule or asymmetry in the fuel hot spot. Higher laser energy can help achieve a more stable implosion, resulting in higher yields.” ... “The laser itself is capable of higher energy without fundamental changes to the laser,” said NIF operations manager Bruno Van Wonterghem. “It’s all about the control of the damage. Too much energy without proper protection, and your optics blow to pieces.” ' - https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/llnls-nif-delivers-record-laser-energy
NOTE: the "problem" very large lasers "required" to deliver ~2MJ (roughly 0.5 kg of TNT energy) to cause larger fusion explosions of 2mm diameter capsules of frozen D+T inside a 1 cm diameter energy reflecting hohlraum, and the "problem" of damage to the equipment caused by the explosions, is immaterial to clean nuclear deterrent development based on this technology, because in a clean nuclear weapon, whatever laser or other power ignition system is used only has to be fired once, so it needs to be less robust than the NIF lasers which are used repeatedly. Similarly, damage done to the system by the explosion is also immaterial for a clean nuclear weapon, in which the weapon is detonated once only! This is exactly the same point which finally occurred during a critical review of the first gun-type assembly nuclear weapon, in which the fact it would only ever be fired once (unlike a field artillery gun) enabled huge reductions in the size of the device, into a practical weapon, as described by General Leslie M. Groves on p163 of his 1962 book Now it can be told: the story of the Manhattan Project:
"Out of the Review Committee's work came one important technical contribution when Rose pointed out ... that the durability of the gun was quite immaterial to success, since it would be destroyed in the explosion anyway. Self-evident as this seemed once it was mentioned, it had not previously occurred to us. Now we could make drastic reductions in ... weight and size."
This principle also applies to weaponizing NIF clean fusion explosion technology. General Groves' book was reprinted in 1982 with a useful Introduction by Edward Teller on the nature of nuclear weapons history: "History in some ways resembles the relativity principle in science. What is observed depends on the observer. Only when the perspective of the observer is known, can proper corrections be made. ... The general ... very often managed to ignore complexity and arrive at a result which, if not ideal, at least worked. ... For Groves, the Manhattan project seemed a minor assignment, less significant than the construction of the Pentagon. He was deeply disappointed at being given the job of supervising the development of an atomic weapon, since it deprived him of combat duty. ... We must find ways to encourage mutual understanding and significant collaboration between those who defend their nation with their lives and those who can contribute the ideas to make that defense successful. Only by such cooperation can we hope that freedom will survive, that peace will be preserved."
General Groves similarly comments in Chapter 31, "A Final Word" of Now it can be told:
"No man can say what would have been the result if we had not taken the steps ... Yet, one thing seems certain - atomic energy would have been developed somewhere in the world ... I do not believe the United States ever would have undertaken it in time of peace. Most probably, the first developer would have been a power-hungry nation, which would then have dominated the world completely ... it is fortunate indeed for humanity that the initiative in this field was gained and kept by the United States. That we were successful was due entirely to the hard work and dedication of the more than 600,000 Americans who comprised and directly supported the Manhattan Project. ... we had the full backing of our government, combined with the nearly infinite potential of American science, engineering and industry, and an almost unlimited supply of people endowed with ingenuity and determination."
Additionally, the test was made in a hurry before an atmospheric teat ban treaty, and this rushed use of a standard air drop steel casing made the tested weapon much heavier than a properly weaponized Ripple II. The key point is that a 10 kt fission device set off a ~10 Mt fusion explosion, a very clean deterrent. Applying this Ripple II 1,000-factor multiplicative staging figure directly to this technology for clean nuclear warheads, a 0.5 kg TNT D+T fusion capsule would set off a 0.5 ton TNT 2nd stage of LiD, which would then set off a 0.5 kt 3rd stage "neutron bomb", which could then be used to set off a 500 kt 4th stage or "strategic nuclear weapon". In practice, this multiplication factor of 1,000 given by Ripple II in 1962 from 10 kt to 10 Mt may not be immediately achievable to get from ~1 kg TNT yield to 1 ton TNT, so a few more tiny stages may be needed for the lower yield. But there is every reason to forecast that with enough research, improvements will be possible and the device will become a reality. It is therefore now possible not just in "theory" or in principle, but with evidence obtained from practical experimentation, using suitable already-proved technical staging systems used in 1960s nuclear weapon tests successfully, to design 100% clean fusion nuclear warheads! Yes, the details have been worked out, yes the technology has been tested in piecemeal fashion. All that is now needed is a new, but quicker and cheaper, Star Wars program or Manhattan Project style effort to pull the components together. This will constitute a major leap forward in the credibility of the deterrence of aggressors.
ABOVE: as predicted, the higher the input laser pulse for the D+T initiator of a clean multiplicatively-staged nuclear deterrent, the lower the effect of plasma instabilities and asymmetries and the greater the fusion burn. To get ignition (where the x-ray energy injected into the fusion hohlraum by the laser is less than the energy released in the D+T fusion burn) they have had to use about 2 MJ delivered in 10 ns or so, equivalent to 0.5 kg of TNT equivalent. But for deterrent use, why use such expensive, delicate lasers? Why not just use one-shot miniaturised x-ray tubes with megavolt electron acceleration, powered a suitably ramped pulse from a chemical explosion for magnetic flux compression current generation? At 10% efficiency, you need 0.5 x 10 = 5 kg of TNT! Even at 1% efficiency, 50 kg of TNT will do. Once the D+T gas capsule's hohlraum is well over 1 cm in size, to minimise the risk of imperfections that cause asymmetries, you don't any longer need focussed laser beams to enter tiny apertures. You might even be able to integrate many miniature flash x-ray tubes (each designed to burn out when firing one pulse of a MJ or so) into a special hohlraum. Humanity urgently needs a technological arms race akin to Reagan's Star Wars project, to deter the dictators from invasions and WWIII. In the conference video above, a question was asked about the real efficiency of the enormous repeat-pulse capable laser system's efficiency (not required for a nuclear weapon whose components only require the capability to be used once, unlike lab equipment): the answer is that 300 MJ was required by the lab lasers to fire a 2 MJ pulse into the D+T capsule's x-ray hohlraum, i.e. their lasers are only 0.7% efficient! So why bother? We know - from the practical use of incoherent fission primary stage x-rays to compress and ignite fusion capsules in nuclear weapons - that you simply don't need coherent photons from a laser for this purpose. The sole reason they are approaching the problem with lasers is that they began their lab experiments decades ago with microscopic sized fusion capsules and for those you need a tightly focussed beam to insert energy through a tiny hohlraum aperture. But now they are finally achieving success with much larger fusion capsules (to minimise instabilities that caused the early failures), it may be time to change direction. A whole array of false "no-go theorems" can and will be raised by ignorant charlatan "authorities" against any innovation; this is the nature of the political world. There is some interesting discussion of why clean bombs aren't in existence today, basically the idealized theory (which works fine for big H-bombs but ignores small-scale asymmetry problems which are important only at low ignition energy) understimated the input energy required for fusion ignition by a factor of 2000:
In the final diagram above, we illustrate an example of what could very well occur in the near future, just to really poke a stick into the wheels of "orthodoxy" in nuclear weapons design: is it possible to just use a lot of (perhaps hardened for higher currents, perhaps no) pulsed current driven microwave tubes from kitchen microwave ovens, channelling their energy using waveguides (simply metal tubes, i.e. electrical Faraday cages, which reflect and thus contain microwaves) into the hohlraum, and make the pusher of dipole molecules (like common salt, NaCl) which is a good absorber of microwaves (as everybody knows from cooking in microwave ovens)? It would be extremely dangerous, not to mention embarrassing, if this worked, but nobody had done any detailed research into the possibility due to groupthink orthodoxy and conventional boxed in thinking! Remember, the D+T capsule just needs extreme compression and this can be done by any means that works. Microwave technology is now very well-established. It's no good trying to keep anything of this sort "secret" (either officially or unofficially) since as history shows, dictatorships are the places where "crackpot"-sounding ideas (such as douple-primary Project "49" Russian thermonuclear weapon designs, Russian Sputnik satellites, Russian Novichok nerve agent, Nazi V1 cruise missiles, Nazi V2 IRBM's, etc.) can be given priority by loony dictators. We have to avoid, as Edward Teller put it (in his secret commentary debunking Bethe's false history of the H-bomb, written AFTER the Teller-Ulam breakthrough), "too-narrow" thinking (which Teller said was still in force on H-bomb design even then). Fashionable hardened orthodoxy is the soft underbelly of "democracy" (a dictatorship by the majority, which is always too focussed on fashionable ideas and dismissive of alternative approaches in science and technology). Dictatorships (minorities against majorities) have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of concern for the fake "no-go theorems" used by Western anti-nuclear "authorities" to ban anything but fashionable groupthink science.
ABOVE: 1944-dated film of the Head of the British Mission to Los Alamos, neutron discoverer James Chadwick, explaining in detail to American how hard it was for him to discover the neutron, taking 10 years on a shoe-string budget, mostly due to having insufficiently strong sources of alpha particles to bombard nuclei in a cloud chamber! The idea of the neutron came from his colleague Rutherford. Chadwick reads his explanation while rapidly rotating a pencil in his right hand, perhaps indicating the stress he was under in 1944. In 1946, when British participation at Los Alamos ended, Chadwick wrote the first detailed secret British report on the design of a three-stage hydrogen bomb, another project that took over a decade. In the diagram below, it appears that the American Mk17 only had a single secondary stage like the similar yield 1952 Mike design. The point here is that popular misunderstanding of the simple mechanism of x-ray energy transfer for higher yield weapons may be creating a dogmatic attitude even in secret nuclear weaponeer design labs, where orthodoxy is followed too rigorously. The Russians (see quotes on the latest blog post here) state they used two entire two-stage thermonuclear weapons with a combined yield of 1 megaton to set off their 50 megaton test in 1961. If true, you can indeed use two-stage hydrogen bombs as an "effective primary" to set off another secondary stage, of much higher yield. Can this be reversed in the sense of scaling it down so you have several bombs-within-bombs, all triggered by a really tiny first stage? In other words, can it be applied to neutron bomb design?
ABOVE: 0.2 kt (tactical yield range) Ruth nuclear test debris, with lower 200 feet of the 300 ft steel tower surviving in Nevada, 1953. Note that the yield of the tactical invasion-deterrent Mk54 Davy Crockett was only 0.02 kt, 10 times less than than 0.2 kt Ruth.
It should be noted that cheap and naive "alternatives" to credible deterrence of war were tried in the 1930s and during the Cold War and afterwards, with disastrous consequences. Heavy "peaceful" oil sanctions and other embargoes against Japan for its invasion of China between 1931-7 resulted in the plan for the Pearl Harbor surprise attack of 7 December 1941, with subsequent escalation to incendiary city bombing followed nuclear warfare against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Attlee's pressure on Truman to guarantee no use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean War (leaked straight to Stalin by the Cambridge Spy Ring), led to an escalation of that war causing the total devastation of the cities of that country by conventional bombing (a sight witnessed by Sam Cohen, that motivated his neutron bomb deterrent of invasions), until Eisenhower was elected and reversed Truman's decision, leading not to the "escalatory Armageddon" assertions of Attlee, but to instead to a peaceful armistice! Similarly, as Tom Ramos argues in From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Kennedy's advisers who convinced him to go ahead with the moonlit 17 April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba without any USAF air support, which led to precisely what they claimed they would avoid: an escalation of aggression from Russia in Berlin, with the Berlin Wall going up on 17 August 1961 because any showing weakness to an enemy, as in the bungled invasion of Cuba, is always a green light to dictators to go ahead with revolutions, invasions and provocations everywhere else. Rather than the widely hyped autistic claims from disarmers and appeasers about "weakness bringing peace by demonstrating to the enemy that they have nothing to fear from you", the opposite result always occurs. The paranoid dictator seizes the opportunity to strike first. Similarly, withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021 was a clear green light to Russia to go ahead with a full scale invasion of Ukraine, reigniting the Cold War. von Neumann and Morgenstein's Minimax theorem for winning games - minimise the maximum possible loss - fails with offensive action in war because it sends a signal of weakness to the enemy, which does not treat war as a game with rules to be obeyed. Minimax is only valid for defense, such as civil defense shelters used by Russia to make their threats more credible than ours. The sad truth is that cheap fixes don't work, no matter how much propaganda is behind them. You either need to militarily defeat the enemy or at least economically defeat them using proven Cold War arms race techniques (not merely ineffective sanctions, which they can bypass by making alliances with Iran, North Korea, and China). Otherwise, you are negotiating peace from a position of weakness, which is called appeasement, or collaboration with terrorism.
"Following the war, the Navy Department was intent to see the effects of an atomic blast on naval warships ... the press was invited to witness this one [Crossroads-Able, 23.5 kt at 520 feet altitude, 1 July 1946, Bikini Atoll]. ... The buildup had been too extravagant. Goats that had been tethered on warship decks were still munching their feed, and the atoll's palm trees remained standing, unscathed. The Bikini test changed public attitudes. Before July 1, the world stood in awe of a weapon that had devastated two cities and forced the Japanese Empire to surrender. After that date, the bomb was still a terrible weapon, but a limited one." - Tom Ramos (LLNL nuclear weaponeer and nuclear pumped X-ray laser developer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Prevent Nuclear War, Naval Institute Press, 2022, pp43-4.
ILLUSTRATION: the threat of WWII and the need to deter it was massively derided by popular pacifism which tended to make "jokes" of the Nazi threat until too late (example of 1938 UK fiction on this above; Charlie Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator" is another example), so three years after the Nuremberg Laws and five years after illegal rearmament was begun by the Nazis, in the UK crowds of "pacifists" in Downing Street, London, support friendship with the top racist, dictatorial Nazis in the name of "world peace". The Prime Minister used underhand techniques to try to undermine appeasement critics like Churchill and also later to get W. E. Johns fired from both editorships of Flying (weekly) and Popular Flying (monthly) to make it appear everybody "in the know" agreed with his actions, hence the contrived "popular support" for collaborating with terrorists depicted in these photos. The same thing persists today; the 1920s and 1930s "pacifist" was also driven by "escalation" and "annihilation" claims explosions, fire and WMD poison gas will kill everybody in a "knockout blow", immediately any war breaks out.
"Fuchs reasoned that [the very low energy, 1-10 kev, approximately 10-100 lower energy than medical] x-rays from the [physically separated] uranium explosion would reach the tamper of beryllium oxide, heat it, ionize the constituents and cause them to implode - the 'ionization implosion' concept of von Neumann but now applied to deuterium and tritium contained within beryllium oxide. To keep the radiation inside the tamper, Fuchs proposed to enclose the device inside a casing impervious to radiation. The implosion induced by the radiation would amplify the compression ... and increase the chance of the fusion bomb igniting. The key here is 'separation of the atomic charge and thermonuclear fuel, and compression of the latter by radiation travelling from the former', which constitutes 'radiation implosion'." (This distinction between von Neumann's "ionization implosion" INSIDE the tamper, of denser tamper expanding and thus compressing lower density fusion fuel inside, and Fuchs' OUTSIDE capsule "radiation implosion", is key even today for isentropic H-bomb design; it seems Teller's key breakthroughs were not separate stages or implosion but rather radiation mirrors and ablative recoil shock compression, where radiation is used to ablate a dense pusher of Sausage designs like Mike in 1952 etc., a distinction not to be confused for the 1944 von Neumann and 1946 Fuchs implosion mechanisms!
It appears Russian H-bombs used von Neumann's "ionization implosion" and Fuchs's "radiation implosion" for RDS-37 on 22 November 1955 and also in their double-primary 23 February 1958 test and subsequently, where their fusion capsules reportedly contained a BeO or other low-density outer coating, which would lead to quasi-isentropic compression, more effective for low density secondary stages than purely ablative recoil shock compression. This accounts for the continuing classification of the April 1946 Superbomb Conference (the extract of 32 pages linked here is so severely redacted that it is less helpful than the brief but very lucid summary of its technical content, in the declassified FBI compilation of reports concerning data Klaus Fuchs sent to Stalin, linked here!). Teller had all the knowledge he needed in 1946, but didn't go ahead because he made the stupid error of killing progress off by his own "no-go theorem" against compression of fusion fuel. Teller did a "theoretical" calculation in which he claimed that compression has no effect on the amount of fusion burn because the compressed system is simply scaled down in size so that the same efficiency of fusion burn occurs, albeit faster, and then stops as the fuel thermally expands. This was wrong. Teller discusses the reason for his great error in technical detail during his tape-recorded interview by Chuck Hansen at Los Alamos on 7 June 1993 (C. Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, 2nd ed., pp. II-176-7):
"Now every one of these [fusion] processes varied with the square of density. If you compress the thing, then in one unit's volume, each of the 3 important processes increased by the same factor ... Therefore, compression (seemed to be) useless. Now when ... it seemed clear that we were in trouble, then I wanted very badly to find a way out. And it occurred to be than an unprecedentedly strong compression will just not allow much energy to go into radiation. Therefore, something had to be wrong with my argument and then, you know, within minutes, I knew what must be wrong ... [energy] emission occurs when an electron and a nucleus collide. Absorption does not occur when a light quantum and a nucleus ... or ... electron collide; it occurs when a light quantum finds an electron and a nucleus together ... it does not go with the square of the density, it goes with the cube of the density." (This very costly theoretical error, wasting five years 1946-51, could have been resolved by experimental nuclear testing. There is always a risk of this in theoretical physics, which is why experiments are done to check calculations before prizes are handed out. The ban on nuclear testing is a luddite opposition to technological progress in improving deterrence.)
(This 1946-51 theoretical "no-go theorem" anti-compression error of Teller's, which was contrary to the suggestion of compression at the April 1946 superbomb conference as Teller himself refers to on 14 August 1952, and which was corrected only by comparison of the facts about compression validity in pure fission cores in Feb '51 after Ulam's argument that month for fission core compression by lens focussed primary stage shock waves, did not merely lead to Teller's dismissal of vital compression ideas. It also led to his false equations - exaggerating the cooling effect of radiation emission - causing underestimates of fusion efficiency in all theoretical calculations done of fusion until 1951! For this reason, Teller later repudiated the calculations that allegedly showed his Superbomb would fizzle; he argued that if it had been tested in 1946, the detailed data obtained - regardless of whatever happened - would have at least tested the theory which would have led to rapid progress, because the theory was wrong. The entire basis of the cooling of fusion fuel by radiation leaking out was massively exaggerated until Lawrence Livermore weaponeer John Nuckolls showed that there is a very simple solution: use baffle re-radiated, softened x-rays for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel, e.g. very cold 0.3 kev x-rays rather than the usual 1-10 kev cold-warm x-rays emitted directly from the fission primary. Since the radiation losses are proportional to the fourth-power of the x-ray energy or temperature, losses are virtually eliminated, allowing very efficient staging as for Nuckolls' 99.9% 10 Mt clean Ripple II, detonated on 30 October 1962 at Christmas Island. Teller's classical Superbomb was actually analyzed by John C. Solem in a 15 December 1978 report, A modern analysis of Classical Super, LA-07615, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by mainstream historian Alex Wellerstein, FOIA 17-00131-H, 12 June 2017; according to a list of FOIA requests at https://www.governmentattic.org/46docs/NNSAfoiaLogs_2016-2020.pdf. However, a google search for the documents Dr Wellerstein requested shows only a few at the US Gov DOE Opennet OSTI database or otherwise online yet e.g. LA-643 by Teller, On the development of Thermonuclear Bombs dated 16 Feb. 1950. The page linked here stating that report was "never classified" is mistaken! One oddity about Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" is that the even if fusion rates were independent of density, you would still want compression of fissile material in a secondary stage such as a radiation imploded Alarm Clock, because the whole basis of implosion fission bombs is the benefit of compression; another issue is that even if fusion rates are unaffected by density, inward compression would still help to delay the expansion of the fusion system which leads to cooling and quenching of the fusion burn.)
In fact (see Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear warhead designer Nuckolls' explanation in report UCRL-74345): "The rates of burn, energy deposition by charged reaction products, and electron-ion heating are proportional to the density, and the inertial confinement time is proportional to the radius. ... The burn efficiency is proportional to the product of the burn rate and the inertial confinement time ...", i.e. the fusion burn rate is directly proportional to the fuel density, which in turn is of course inversely proportional to the cube of its radius. But the inertial confinement time for fusion to occur is proportional to the radius, so the fusion stage efficiency in a nuclear weapon is the product of the burn rate (i.e., 1/radius^3) and time (i.e., radius), so efficiency ~ radius/(radius^3) ~ 1/radius^2. Therefore, for a given fuel temperature, the total fusion burn, or the efficiency of the fusion stage, is inversely proportional to the square of the compressed radius of the fuel! (Those condemning Teller's theoretical errors or "arrogance" should be aware that he pushed hard all the time for experimental nuclear tests of his ideas, to check if they were correct, exactly the right thing to do scientifically and others who read his papers had the opportunity to point out any theoretical errors, but was rebuffed by those in power, who used a series of contrived arguments to deny progress, based upon what Harry would call "subconscious bias", if not arrogant, damning, overt bigotry against the kind of credible, overwhelming deterrence which had proved lacking a decade earlier, leading to WWII. This callousness towards human suffering in war and under dictatorship existed in some UK physicists too: Joseph Rotblat's hatred of anything to deter Russia be it civil defense or tactical neutron bombs of the West - he had no problem smiling and patting Russia's neutron bomb when visiting their labs during cosy groupthink deluded Pugwash campaigns for Russian-style "peaceful collaboration" - came from deep family communist convictions, since his brother was serving in the Red Army in 1944 when he alleged he heard General Groves declare that the bomb must deter Russia! Rotblat stated he left Los Alamos as a result. The actions of these groups are analogous to the "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" in the 1930s. After Truman ordered a H-bomb, Bradbury at Los Alamos had to start a "Family Committee" because Teller had a whole "family" of H-bomb designs, ranging from the biggest, "Daddy", through various "Alarm Clocks", all the way down to small internally-boosted fission tactical weapons. From Teller's perspective, he wasn't putting all eggs in one basket.)
Chapman Pincher wrote about this as the front page exclusive of the 11 June 1952 Daily Express, "Fuchs: New Sensation", the very month Penney visited Fuchs in prison to receive his H-bomb tutorial! UK media insisted this was evidence that UK security still wasn't really serious about deterring further nuclear spies, and the revelations finally culminated in the allegations that the MI5 chief 1956-65 Roger Hollis was a Russian fellow-traveller (Hollis was descended from Peter the Great, according to his elder brother Chris Hollis' 1958 book Along the Road to Frome) and GRU agent of influence, codenamed "Elli". Pincher's 2014 book, written aged 100, explains that former MI5 agent Peter Wright suspected Hollis was Elli after evidence collected by MI6 agent Stephen de Mowbray was reported to the Cabinet Secretary. Hollis is alleged to have deliberately fiddled his report of interviewing GRU defector Igor Gouzenko on 21 November 1945 in Canada. Gouzenko had exposed the spy and Groucho Marx lookalike Dr Alan Nunn May (photo below), and also a GRU spy in MI5 codenamed Elli, who used only duboks (dead letter boxes), but Gouzenko told Pincher that when Hollis interviewed him in 1945 he wrote up a lengthy false report claiming to discredit many statements by Gouzenko: "I could not understand how Hollis had written so much when he had asked me so little. The report was full of nonsense and lies. As [MI5 agent Patrick] Stewart read the report to me [during the 1972 investigation of Hollis], it became clear that it had been faked to destroy my credibility so that my information about the spy in MI5 called Elli could be ignored. I suspect that Hollis was Elli." (Source: Pincher, 2014, p320.) Christopher Andrew claimed Hollis couldn't have been GRU spy Elli because KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky suggested it was the KGB spy Leo Long (sub-agent of KGB spy Anthony Blunt). However, Gouzenko was GRU, not KGB like Long and Gordievsky! Gordievsky's claim that "Elli" was on the cover of Long's KGB file was debunked by KGB officer Oleg Tsarev, who found that Long's codename was actually Ralph! Another declassified Russian document, from General V. Merkulov to Stalin dated 24 Nov 1945, confirmed Elli was a GRU agent inside british intelligence, whose existence was betrayed by Gouzenko. In Chapter 30 of Dangerous to Know, Pincher related how he was given a Russian suitcase sized microfilm enlarger by 1959 Hollis spying eyewitness Michael J. Butt, doorman for secret communist meetings in London. According to Butt, Hollis delivered documents to Brigitte Kuczynski, younger sister of Klaus Fuchs' original handler, the notorious Sonia aka Ursula. Hollis allegedly provided Minox films to Brigitte discretely when walking through Hyde Park at 8pm after work. Brigitte gave her Russian made Minox film enlarger to Butt to dispose of, but he kept it in his loft as evidence. (Pincher later donated it to King's College.) Other more circumstantial evidence is that Hollis recruited the spy Philby, Hollis secured spy Blunt immunity from prosecution, Hollis cleared Fuchs in 1943, and MI5 allegedly destroyed Hollis' 1945 interrogation report on Gouzenko, to prevent the airing of the scandal that it was fake after checking it with Gouzenko in 1972.
It should be noted that the very small number of Russian GRU illegal agents in the UK and the very small communist party membership had a relatively large influence on nuclear policy via infiltration of unions which had block votes in the Labour Party, as well the indirect CND and "peace movement" lobbies saturating the popular press with anti-civil defence propaganda to make the nuclear deterrent totally incredible for any provocation short of a direct all-out countervalue attack. Under such pressure, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government abolished the UK Civil Defence Corps, making the UK nuclear deterrent totally incredible against major provocations, in March 1968. While there was some opposition to Wilson, it was focussed on his profligate nationalisation policies which were undermining the economy and thus destabilizing military expenditure for national security. Peter Wright’s 1987 book Spycatcher and various other sources, including Daily Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp's book Walking on Water, documented that on 8 May 1968, the Bank of England's director Cecil King, who was also Chairman of Daily Mirror newspapers, Mirror editor Cudlipp and the UK Ministry of Defence's anti-nuclear Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, met at Lord Mountbatten's house in Kinnerton Street, London, to discuss a coup e'tat to overthrow Wilson and make Mountbatten the UK President, a new position. King's position, according to Cudlipp - quite correctly as revealed by the UK economic crises of the 1970s when the UK was effectively bankrupt - was that Wilson was setting the UK on the road to financial ruin and thus military decay. Zuckerman and Mountbatten refused to take part in a revolution, however Wilson's government was attacked by the Daily Mirror in a front page editorial by Cecil King two days later, on 10 May 1968, headlined "Enough is enough ... Mr Wilson and his Government have lost all credibility, all authority." According to Wilson's secretary Lady Falkender, Wilson was only told of the coup discussions in March 1976.
CND and the UK communist party alternatively tried to claim, in a contradictory way, that they were (a) too small in numbers to have any influence on politics, and (b) they were leading the country towards utopia via unilateral nuclear disarmament saturation propaganda about nuclear weapons annihilation (totally ignoring essential data on different nuclear weapon designs, yields, heights of burst, the "use" of a weapon as a deterrent to PREVENT an invasion of concentrated force, etc.) via the infiltrated BBC and most other media. Critics pointed out that Nazi Party membership in Germany was only 5% when Hitler became dictator in 1933, while in Russia there were only 200,000 Bolsheviks in September 1917, out of 125 million, i.e. 0.16%. Therefore, the whole threat of such dictatorships is a minority seizing power beyond it justifiable numbers, and controlling a majority which has different views. Traditional democracy itself is a dictatorship of the majority (via the ballot box, a popularity contest); minority-dictatorship by contrast is a dictatorship by the fanatically motivated minority by force and fear (coercion) to control the majority. The coercion tactics used by foreign dictators to control the press in free countries are well documented, but never publicised widely. Hitler put pressure on Nazi-critics in the UK "free press" via UK Government appeasers Halifax, Chamberlain and particularly the loathsome UK ambassador to Nazi Germany, Sir Neville Henderson, for example trying to censor or ridicule appeasement critics David Low, to fire Captain W. E. Johns (editor of both Flying and Popular Flying, which had huge circulations and attacked appeasement as a threat to national security in order to reduce rearmament expenditure), and to try to get Winston Churchill deselected. These were all sneaky "back door" pressure-on-publishers tactics, dressed up as efforts to "ease international tensions"! The same occurred during the Cold War, with personal attacks in Scientific American and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and by fellow travellers on Herman Kahn, Eugene Wigner, and others who warned we need civil defence to make a deterrent of large provocations credible in the eyes of an aggressor.
Chapman Pincher summarises the vast hypocritical Russian expenditure on anti-Western propaganda against the neutron bomb in Chapter 15, "The Neutron Bomb Offensive" of his 1985 book The Secret Offensive: "Such a device ... carries three major advantages over Hiroshima-type weapons, particularly for civilians caught up in a battle ... against the massed tanks which the Soviet Union would undoubtedly use ... by exploding these warheads some 100 feet or so above the massed tanks, the blast and fire ... would be greatly reduced ... the neutron weapon produces little radioactive fall-out so the long-term danger to civilians would be very much lower ... the weapon was of no value for attacking cities and the avoidance of damage to property can hardly be rated as of interest only to 'capitalists' ... As so often happens, the constant repetition of the lie had its effects on the gullible ... In August 1977, the [Russian] World Peace Council ... declared an international 'Week of action' against the neutron bomb. ... Under this propaganda Carter delayed his decision, in September ... a Sunday service being attended by Carter and his family on 16 October 1977 was disrupted by American demonstrators shouting slogans against the neutron bomb [see the 17 October 1977 Washington Post] ... Lawrence Eagleburger, when US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, remarked, 'We consider it probably that the Soviet campaign against the 'neutron bomb cost some $100 million'. ... Even the Politburo must have been surprised at the size of what it could regard as a Fifth Column in almost every country." [Unfortunately, Pincher himself had contributed to the anti-nuclear nonsense in his 1965 novel "Not with a bang" in which small amounts of radioactivity from nuclear fallout combine with medicine to exterminate humanity! The allure of anti-nuclear propaganda extends to all who which to sell "doomsday fiction", not just Russian dictators but mainstream media story tellers in the West. By contrast, Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons doesn't even mention the neutron bomb, so there was no scientific and technical effort whatsoever by the West to make it a credible deterrent even in the minds of the public it had to protect from WWIII!]
So why on earth doesn't the West take the cheap efficient option of cutting expensive oralloy and maximising cheap natural (mostly lithium-7) LiD in the secondary? Even Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons on p17 (para 1.55) states that "Weight for weight ... fusion of deuterium nuclei would produce nearly 3 times as much energy as the fission of uranium or plutonium"! The sad answer is "density"! Natural LiD (containing 7.42% Li6 abundance) is a low density white/grey crystalline solid like salt that actually floats on water (lithium deuteroxide would be formed on exposure to water), since its density is just 820 kg/m^3. Since the ratio of mass of Li6D to Li7D is 8/9, it would be expected that the density of highly enriched 95% Li6D is 739 kg/m^3, while for 36% enriched Li6D it is 793 kg/m^3. Uranium metal has a density of 19,000 kg/m^3, i.e. 25.7 times greater than 95% enriched li6D or 24 times greater than 36% enriched Li6D. Compactness, i.e. volume is more important in a Western MIRV warhead than mass/weight! In the West, it's best to have a tiny-volume, very heavy, very expensive warhead. In Russia, cheapness outweights volume considerations. The Russians in some cases simply allowed their more bulky warheads to protrude from the missile bus (see photo below), or compensated for lower yields at the same volume using clean LiD by using the savings in costs to build more warheads. (The West doubles the fission yield/mass ratio of some warheads by using U235/oralloy pushers in place of U238, which suffers from the problem that about half the neutrons it interacts with result in non-fission capture, as explained below. Note that the 720 kiloton UK nuclear test Orange Herald device contained a hollow shell of 117 kg of U235 surrounded by a what Lorna Arnold's book quotes John Corner referring to a "very thin" layer of high explosive, and was compact, unboosted - the boosted failed to work - and gave 6.2 kt/kg of U235, whereas the first version of the 2-stage W47 Polaris warhead contained 60 kg of U235 which produced most of the secondary stage yield of about 400 kt, i.e. 6.7 kt/kg of U235. Little difference - but because perhaps 50% of the total yield of the W47 was fusion, its efficiency of use of U235 must have actually been less than the Orange Herald device, around 3 kt/kg of U235 which indicates design efficiency limits to "hydrogen bombs"! Yet anti-nuclear charlatans claimed that the Orange Herald bomb was a con!)
ABOVE: USA nuclear weapons data declassified by UK Government in 2010 (the information was originally acquired due to the 1958 UK-USA Act for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes, in exchange for UK nuclear weapons data) as published at http://nuclear-weapons.info/images/tna-ab16-4675p63.jpg. This single table summarizes all key tactical and strategic nuclear weapons secret results from 1950s testing! (In order to analyze the warhead pusher thicknesses and very basic schematics from this table it is necessary to supplement it with the 1950s warhead design data declassified in other documents, particularly some of the data from Tom Ramos and Chuck Hansen, as quoted in some detail below.) The data on the mass of special nuclear materials in each of the different weapons argues strongly that the entire load of Pu239 and U235 in the 1.1 megaton B28 was in the primary stage, so that weapon could not have had a fissile spark plug in the centre let alone a fissile ablator (unlike Teller's Sausage design of 1951), and so the B28 it appears had no need whatsoever of a beryllium neutron radiation shield to prevent pre-initiation of the secondary stage prior to its compression (on the contrary, such neutron exposure of the lithium deuteride in the secondary stage would be VITAL to produce some tritium in it prior to compression, to spark fusion when it was compressed). Arnold's book indeed explains that UK AWE physicists found the B28 to be an excellent, highly optimised, cheap design, unlike the later W47 which was extremely costly. The masses of U235 and Li6 in the W47 shows the difficulties of trying to maintain efficiency while scaling down the mass of a two-stage warhead for SLBM delivery: much larger quantities of Li6 and U235 must be used to achieve a LOWER yield! To achieve thermonuclear warheads of low mass at sub-megaton yields, both the outer bomb casing and the pusher around the the fusion fuel must be reduced:
"York ... studied the Los Alamos tests in Castle and noted most of the weight in thermonuclear devices was in their massive cases. Get rid of the case .... On June 12, 1953, York had presented a novel concept ... It radically altered the way radiative transport was used to ignite a secondary - and his concept did not require a weighty case ... they had taken the Teller-Ulam concept and turned it on its head ... the collapse time for the new device - that is, the amount of time it took for an atomic blast to compress the secondary - was favorable compared to older ones tested in Castle. Brown ... gave a female name to the new device, calling it the Linda." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp137-8. (So if you reduce the outer casing thickness to reduce warhead weight, you must complete the pusher ablation/compression faster, before the thinner outer casing is blown off, and stops reflecting/channelling x-rays on the secondary stage. Making the radiation channel smaller and ablative pusher thinner helps to speed up the process. Because the ablative pusher is thinner, there is relatively less blown-off debris to block the narrower radiation channel before the burn ends.)
"Brown's third warhead, the Flute, brought the Linda concept down to a smaller size. The Linda had done away with a lot of material in a standard thermonuclear warhead. Now the Flute tested how well designers could take the Linda's conceptual design to substantially reduce not only the weight but also the size of a thermonuclear warhead. ... The Flute's small size - it was the smallest thermonuclear device yet tested - became an incentive to improve codes. Characteristics marginally important in a larger device were now crucially important. For instance, the reduced size of the Flute's radiation channel could cause it to close early [with ablation blow-off debris], which would prematurely shut off the radiation flow. The code had to accurately predict if such a disaster would occur before the device was even tested ... the calculations showed changes had to be made from the Linda's design for the Flute to perform correctly." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp153-4. Note that the piccolo (the W47 secondary) is a half-sized flute, so it appears that the W47's secondary stage design miniaturization history was: Linda -> Flute -> Piccolo:
"A Division's third challenge was a small thermonuclear warhead for Polaris [the nuclear SLBM submarine that preceeded today's Trident system]. The starting point was the Flute, that revolutionary secondary that had performed so well the previous year. Its successor was called the Piccolo. For Plumbbob [Nevada, 1957], the design team tested three variations of the Piccolo as a parameter test. One of the variants outperformed the others ... which set the stage for the Hardtack [Nevada and Pacific, 1958] tests. Three additional variations for the Piccolo ... were tested then, and again an optimum candidate was selected. ... Human intuition as well as computer calculations played crucial roles ... Finally, a revolutionary device was completed and tested ... the Navy now had a viable warhead for its Polaris missile. From the time Brown gave Haussmann the assignment to develop this secondary until the time they tested the device in the Pacific, only 90 days had passed. As a parallel to the Robin atomic device, this secondary for Polaris laid the foundation for modern thermonuclear weapons in the United States." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp177-8. (Ramos is very useful in explaining that many of the 1950s weapons with complex non-spherical, non-cylindrical shaped primaries and secondaries were simply far too complex to fully simulate on the really pathetic computers they had - Livermore got a 4,000 vacuum tubes-based IBM 701 with 2 kB memory in 1956, AWRE Aldermaston in the Uk had to wait another year for theirs - so they instead did huge numbers of experimental explosive tests. For instance, on p173, Ramos discloses that the Swan primary which developed into the 155mm tactical shell, "went through over 100 hydrotests", non-nuclear tests in which fissile material is replaced with U238 or other substitutes, and the implosion is filmed with flash x-ray camera systems.)
"An integral feature of the W47, from the very start of the program, was the use of an enriched uranium-235 pusher around the cylindrical secondary." - Chuck Hansen, Swords 2.0, p. VI-375 (Hansen's source is his own notes taken during a 19-21 February 1992 nuclear weapons history conference he attended; if you remember the context, "Nuclear Glasnost" became fashionable after the Cold War ended, enabling Hansen to acquire almost unredacted historical materials for a few years until nuclear proliferation became a concern in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea). The key test of the original (Robin primary and Piccolo secondary) Livermore W47 was 412 kt Hardtack-Redwood on 28 June 1958. Since Li6D utilized at 100% efficiency would yield 66 kt/kg, the W47 fusion efficiency was only about 6%; since 100% fission of u235 yields 17 kt/kg, the W47's Piccolo fission (the u235 pusher) efficiency was about 20%; the comparable figures for secondary stage fission and fusion fuel burn efficiencies in the heavy B28 are about 7% and 15%, respectively:
ABOVE: the heavy B28 gave a very "big bang for the buck": it was cheap in terms of expensive Pu, U235 and Li6, and this was the sort of deterrent which was wanted by General LeMay for the USAF, which wanted as many weapons as possible, within the context of Eisenhower's budgetary concerns. But its weight (not its physical size) made it unsuitable for SLBM Polaris warheads. The first SLBM warhead, the W47, was almost the same size as the B28 weapon package, but much lighter due to having a much thinner "pusher" on the secondary, and casing. But this came at a large financial cost in terms of the quantities of special nuclear materials required to get such a lightweight design to work, and also a large loss of total yield. The fusion fuel burn efficiency ranges from 6% for the 400 kt W47 to 15% for the 1.1 megaton B28 (note that for very heavy cased 11-15 megaton yield tests at Castle, up to 40% fusion fuel burn efficiency was achieved), whereas the secondary stage ablative pusher fission efficiency ranged from 7% for a 1.1 inch thick natural uranium (99.3% U238) ablator to 20% for a 0.15 inch thick highly enriched oralloy (U235) ablator. From the brief description of the design evolution given by Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), it appears that when the x-ray channelling outer case thickness of the weapon is reduced to save weight, the duration of the x-ray coupling is reduced, so the dense metal pusher thickness must be reduced if the same compression factor (approximately 20) for the secondary stage is to be accomplished (lithium deuteride, being of low density, is far more compressable by a given pressure, than dense metal). In both examples, the secondary stage is physically a boosted fission stage. (If you are wondering why the hell the designers don't simply use a hollow core U235 bomb like Orange Herald instead of bothering with such inefficient x-ray coupled two-stage designs as these, the answer is straightforward: the risk of large fissile core meltdown by neutrons Moscow ABM defensive nuclear warheads, neutron bombs.)
The overall weight of the W47 was minimized by replacing the usual thick layer of U238 pusher with a very thin layer of fissile U235 (supposedly Teller's suggestion), which is more efficient for fission, but is limited by critical mass issues. The W47 used a 95% enriched Li6D cylinder with a 3.8mm thick U235 pusher; the B28 secondary was 36% enriched Li6D, with a very heavy 3cm thick U238 pusher. As shown below, it appears the B28 was related to the Los Alamos clean design of the TX21C tested as 95% clean 4.5 megatons Redwing-Navajo in 1956 and did not have a central fissile spark plug. From the declassified fallout composition, it is known the Los Alamos designers replaced the outer U238 pusher of Castle secondaries with lead in Navajo. Livermore did the same for their 85% clean 3.53 megatons Redwing-Zuni test, but Livermore left the central fission spark plug, which contributed 10% of its 15% fission yield, instead of removing the neutron shield, using foam channel filler for slowing down the x-ray compression, and thereby using primary stage neutrons to split lithium-6 giving tritium prior to compression. Our point is that Los Alamos got it wrong in sticking too conservatively to ideology: for clean weapons they should have got rid of the dense lead pusher and gone for John H. Nuckolls idea (also used by Fuchs in 1946 and the Russians in 1955 and 1958) of a low-density pusher for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel. This error is the reason why those early cleaner weapons were extremely heavy due to unnecessary 2" thick lead or tungsten pushers around the fusion fuel, which massively reduced their yield-to-weight ratios, so that LeMay rejected them!
This is justified by the data given for a total U238 capture-to-fission ratio of 1 in the 11 megaton Romeo test and also the cross-sections for U235 capture and fission on the AWE graph for relevant neutron energy range of about 1-14 Mev. If half the neutrons are captured in U238 without fission, then the maximum fission yield you can possibly get from "x" kg of U238 pusher is HALF the energy obtained from 100% fission of "x" kg of U238. Since with U238 only about half the atoms can undergo fission by thermonuclear neutrons (because the other half undergo non-fission capture), the energy density (i.e., the Joules/kg produced by the fission explosion of the pusher) reached by an exploding U238 pusher is only half that reached by U235 (in which there is less non-fission capture of neutrons, which doubles the pusher mass without doubling the fission energy release). So a U235 pusher will reach twice the temperature of a U238 pusher, doubling its material heating of fusion fuel within, prolonging the fusion burn and thus increasing fusion burn efficiency. 10 MeV neutron energy is important since it allows for likely average scattering of 14.1 MeV D+T fusion neutrons and it is also the energy at which the most important capture reaction, the (n,2n) cross-section peaks for both U235 (peak of 0.88 barn at 10 Mev) and U238 (peak of 1.4 barns at 10 Mev). For 10 Mev neutrons, U235 and U238 have fission cross-sections of 1.8 and 1 barn, respectively. For 14 Mev neutrons, U238 has a (n,2n) cross section of 0.97 barn for U237 production. So ignoring non-fission captures, you need 1.8/1 = 1.8 times greater thickness of pusher for U238 than for U235, to achieve the same amount of fission. But this simple consideration ignores the x-ray ablation requirement of the explosing pusher, so there are several factors requiring detailed computer calculations, and/or nuclear testing.
Note: there is an extensive collection of declassified documents released after Chuck Hansen's final edition, Swords 2.0, which are now available at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/*, being an internet-archive back-up of a now-removed US Government Freedom of Information Act Reading Room. Unfortunately they were only identified by number sequence, not by report title or content, in that reeding room, and so failed to achieve wide attention when originally released! (This includes extensive "Family Committee" H-bomb documentation and many long-delayed FOIA requests submitted originally by Hansen, but not released in time for inclusion in Swords 2.0.) As the extract below - from declassified document RR00132 - shows, some declassified documents contained very detailed information or typewriter spaces that could only be filled by a single specific secret word (in this example, details of the W48 linear implosion tactical nuclear warhead, including the fact that it used PBX9404 plastic bonded explosive glued to the brittle beryllium neutron reflector around the plutonium core using Adiprene L100 adhesive!).
ABOVE: Declassified data on the radiation flow analysis for the 10 megaton Mike sausage: http://nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/RR00198.pdf
Note that the simplistic "no-go theorem" given in this extract, against any effect from varying the temperature to help the radiation channelling, was later proved false by John H. Nuckolls (like Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" was later proved false), since lowered temperature delivers energy where it is needed while massively reducing radiation losses (which go as the fourth power of temperature/x-ray energy in kev).
Russian propagandists are discussing the best way to scare the West - testing a nuclear Tsar Bomb or checking bomb shelters.
pic.twitter.com/qWCaxjvfM8
ABOVE secret reports on Australian-British nuclear test operations at Maralinga in 1956 and 1957, Buffalo and Antler, proved that even at 10 psi peak overpressure for the 15 kt Buffalo-1 shot, the dummy lying prone facing the blast was hardly moved due to the low cross-sectional area exposed to the blast winds, relative to standing dummies which were severely displaced and damaged. The value of trenches in protecting personnel against blast winds and radiation was also proved in tests (gamma radiation shielding of trenches had been proved at an earlier nuclear test in Australia, Operation Hurricane in 1952). (Antler report linked here; Buffalo report linked here.) This debunks the US Department of Defense models claiming that people will automatically be blown out of the upper floors of modern city buildings at very low pressures, and killed by the gravitational impact with the pavement below! In reality, tall buildings mutually shield one another from the blast winds, not to mention the radiation (proven in the latest post on this blog), and on seeing the flash most people will have time to lie down on typical surfaces like carpet which give a frictional resistance to displacement, ignored in fiddled models which assume surfaces have less friction than a skating rink; all of this was omitted from the American 1977 Glasstone and Dolan book "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons". As Tuck's paper below on the gamma radiation dose rate measurements on ships at Operation Crossroads, July 1946 nuclear tests proved, contrary to Glasstone and Dolan, scattered radiation contributions are small, so buildings or ships gun turrets provided excellent radiation "shadows" to protect personnel. This effect was then calculated by UK civil defence weapons effects expert Edward Leader-Williams in his paper presented at the UK's secret London Royal Society Symposium on the Physical Effects of Atomic Weapons, but the nuclear test data as always was excluded from the American Glasstone book published the next year, The Effects of Atomic Weapons in deference to lies about the effects in Hiroshima, including an "average" casualty curve which deliberately obfuscated huge differences in survival rates in different types of buildings and shelters, or simply in shadows!
Note: the DELFIC, SIMFIC and other computer predicted fallout area comparisons for the 110 kt Bikini Atoll Castle-Koon land surface burst nuclear test are false since the distance scale of Bikini Atoll is massively exaggerated on many maps, e.g. in the Secret January 1955 AFSWP "Fall-out Symposium", the Castle fallout report WT-915, and the fallout patterns compendium DASA-1251! The Western side of the Bikini Atoll reef is at 165.2 degrees East, while the most eastern island in the Bikini Atoll, Enyu, is at 165.567 degrees East: since there are 60 nautical miles per degree by definition, the width of Bikini Atoll is therefore (165.567-165.2)(60) = 22 nautical miles, approximately half the distance shown in the Castle-Koon fallout patterns. Since area is proportional to the square of the distance scale, this constitutes a serious exaggeration in fallout casualty calculations, before you get into the issue of the low energy (0.1-0.2 MeV) gamma rays from neutron induced Np239 and U237 in the fallout enhancing the protection factor of shelters (usually calculated assuming hard 1.17 and 1.33 MeV gamma rads from Co60), during the sheltering period of approximately 1-14 days after detonation.
"Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr Dulles calls 'brinkmanship'. This is a policy adopted from a sport ... called 'Chicken!' ... If one side is unwilling to risk global war, while the other side is willing to risk it, the side which is willing to run the risk will be victorious in all negotiations and will ultimately reduce the other side to complete impotence. 'Perhaps' - so the practical politician will argue - 'it might be ideally wise for the sane party to yield to the insane party in view of the dreadful nature of the alternative, but, whether wise or not, no proud nation will long acquiesce in such an ignominious role. We are, therefore, faced, quite inevitably, with the choice between brinkmanship and surrender." - Bertrand Russell, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1959, pp30-31.
Emphasis added. Note that Russell accepts lying about nuclear weapons just as gas weapons had been lied about in the 1920s-30s by "arms controllers" to start WWII, then he simply falls into the 1930s Cambridge Scientists Antiwar Group delusional propaganda fraud of assuming that any attempt to credibly deter fascism is immoral because it will automatically result in escalatory retaliation with Herman Goering's Luftwaffe drenching London with "overkill" by poison gas WMDs etc. In particular, he forgets that general disarmament pursued in the West until 1935 - when Baldwin suddenly announced that the Nazis had secretly produced a massive, unstoppable warmachine in two years - encouraged aggressors to first secretly rearm, then coerce and invade their neighbours while signing peace promises purely to buy more time for rearmament, until a world war resulted. Not exactly a great result for disarmament propaganda. So after obliterating what Reagan used to call (to the horror of commie "historians") the "true facts of history" from his mind, he advocates some compromise with the aggressors of the 30 September 1938 Munich Agreement peace-in-our-time sort, the historically proved sure fire way to really escalate a crisis into a major war by showing the green lamp to a loon to popular media acclaim and applause for a fairy tale utopian fantasy; just as the "principled" weak, rushed, imbecile withdrawl from Afghanistan in 2021 encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022, and also the green lamp for Hamas to invade Israel in 2023.
"... deterrence ... consists of threatening the enemy with thermonuclear retaliation should he act provocatively. ... If war is 'impossible', how can one threaten a possible aggressor with war? ... The danger, evoked by numerous critics, that such research will result in a sort of resigned expectation of the holocaust, seems a weak argument ... The classic theory of Clausewitz defines absolute victory in terms of disarmament of the enemy ... Today ... it will suffice to take away his means of retaliation to hold him at your mercy." - Raymond Aron, Introduction to Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 9-12. (This is the commie support for arms control and disarmament has achieved, precisely the weakening of the West to take away credible deterrence.)
"75 years ago, white slavery was rampant in England. ... it could not be talked about openly in Victorian England, moral standards as to the subjects of discussion made it difficult to arouse the community to necessary action. ... Victorian standards, besides perpetuating the white slave trade, intensified the damage ... Social inhibitions which reinforce natural tendencies to avoid thinking about unpleasant subjects are hardly uncommon. ... But when our reluctance to consider danger brings danger nearer, repression has gone too far. In 1960, I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war ... people are willing to argue that it is immoral to think and even more immoral to write in detail about having to fight ... like those ancient kings who punished messengers who brought them bad news. That did not change the news; it simply slowed up its delivery. On occasion it meant that the kings were ill informed and, lacking truth, made serious errors in judgement and strategy. ... We cannot wish them away. Nor should we overestimate and assume the worst is inevitable. This leads only to defeatism, inadequate preparations (because they seem useless), and pressures toward either preventative war or undue accommodation." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 17-19. (In the footnote on page 35, Kahn notes that original nuclear bullshitter, the 1950 creator of fake cobalt-60 doomsday bomb propaganda, Leo Szilard, was in the usual physics groupthink nutters club: "Szilard is probably being too respectful of his scientific colleagues who also seem to indulge in ad hominem arguments - especially when they are out of their technical specialty.")
"Ever since the catastropic and disillusioning experience of 1914-18, war has been unthinkable to most people in the West ... In December 1938, only 3 months after Munich, Lloyd's of London gave odds of 32 to 1 that there would be no war in 1939. On August 7, 1939, the London Daily Express reported the result of a poll of its European reporters. 10 out of 12 said, 'No war this year'. Hitler invaded Poland 3 weeks later." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 39. (But as the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 proved, even the label "war" is now "controversial": the aggressor now simply declares they are on a special operation of unifying people under one flag to ensure peace! So the reason why there is war in Ukraine is that Ukraine is resisting. If it waved a white flag, as the entire arms control and disarmament lobby insists is the only sane response to a nuclear-armed aggressor, there would be "peace," albeit on Russia's terms: that's why they disarmed Ukraine in 1994. "Peace propaganda" of "disarmers"! Free decent people prefer to fight tyranny. But as Kahn states on pp. 7-9:
"Some, most notably [CND's pseudo-historian of arms race lying] A. J. P. Taylor, have even said that Hitler was not like Hitler, that further appeasement [not an all-out arms race as was needed but repeatedly rejected by Baldwin and Chamberlain until far too late; see discussion of this fact which is still deliberately ignored or onfuscated by "historians" of the A. J. P. Taylor biased anti-deterrence left wing type, in Slessor's The Central Blue, quoted on this blog] would have prevented World War II ... If someone says to you, 'One of us has to be reasonable and it is not going to be me, so it has to be you', he has a very effective bargaining advantage, particularly if he is armed with thermonuclear bombs [and you have damn all civil defense, ABM, or credible tactical deterrent]. If he can convince you he is stark, staring mad and if he has enough destructive power ... deterrence alone will not work. You must then give in or accept the possibility of being annihilated ... in the first instance if we fight and lose; in the second if we capitulate without fighting. ... We could still resist by other means ranging from passive resistance of the Gandhi type to the use of underground fighting and sabotage. All of these alternatives might be of doubtful effectiveness against [the Gulag system, KGB/FSB torture camps or Siberian salt mines of] a ruthless dictatorship."
Sometimes people complain that Hitler and the most destructive and costly war and only nuclear war of history, WWII, is given undue attention. But WWII is a good analogy to the danger precisely because of the lying WMD gas war propaganda-based disarmament of the West which allowed the war, because of the attacks by Hitler's fans on civil defense in the West to make even the token rearmament after 1935 ineffective as a credible deterrent, and because Hitler has mirrors in Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon and Stalin. Kahn explains on p. 173: "Because history has a way of being more imaginative and complex than even the most imaginative and intelligent analysts, historical examples often provide better scenarios than artificial ones, even though they may be no more directly applicable to current equipment, postures, and political situations than the fictional plot of the scenario. Recent history can be especially useful.")
"One type of war resulting at least partly from deliberate calculation could occur in the process of escalation. For example, suppose the Soviets attacked Europe, relying upon our fear of their reprisal to deter a strategic attack by us; we might be deterred enough to pause, but we might evacuate our cities during this pause in the hope we could thereby convince the Soviets we meant business. If the Soviets did not back down, but continued their attack upon Europe, we might decide that we would be less badly off if we proceeded ... The damage we would receive in return would then be considerably reduced, compared with what we would have suffered had we not evacuated. We might well decide at such a time that we would be better off to attack the Soviets and accept a retalitory blow at our dispersed population, rather than let Europe be occupied, and so be forced to accept the penalty of living in the hostile and dangerous world that would follow." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 51-2.
"We must recognise that the stability we want in a system is more than just stability against accidental war or even against an attack by the enemy. We also want stability against extreme provocation [e.g. invasion of allies, which then escalates as per invasion of Belgium 1914, or Poland 1939]." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 53(footnote).
Note: this 1962 book should not be confused with Kahn's 1984 "updated" Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, which omits the best material in the 1962 edition (in the same way that the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons omits the entire civil defense chapter which was the one decent thing in the 1957 and 1962/4 editions!) and thus shows a reversion to the less readable and less helpful style of his 1960 On Thermonuclear War, which severely fragmented and jumbled up all the key arguments making it easy for critics to misquote or quote out of context. For example, Kahn's 1984 "updated" book starts on the first page of the first chapter with the correct assertion that Johnathan Schell's Fate of the Earth is nonsense, but doesn't say why it's nonsense, and you have to read through to the final chapter - pages 207-8 of chapter 10 - to find Kahn writing in the most vague way possible, without a single specific example, that Schell is wrong because of "substantive inadequacies and inaccuracies", without listing a single example such as Schell's lying that the 1954 Bravo nuclear test blinded everyone well beyond the range of Rongelap, and that it was impossible to easily shield the radiation from the fallout or evacuate the area until it decays, which Schell falsely attributed to Glasstone and Dolan's nonsense in the 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons! Kahn eventually in the footnote on page 208 refers readers to an out-of-print article for facts: "These criticisms are elaborated in my review of The Fate of the Earth, see 'Refusing to Think About the Unthinkable', Fortune, June 28, 1982, pp. 113-6. Kahn does the same for civil defense in the 1984 book, referring in such general, imprecise and vague terms to Russian civil defence, with no specific data, that it is a waste of time, apart possibly one half-baked sentence on page 177: "Variations in the total megatonnage, somewhat surprisingly, do not seem to affect the toll nearly as much as variations in the targetting or the type of weapon bursts." Kahn on page 71 quotes an exchange between himself and Senator Proxmire during the US Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production, Civil preparedness and limited nuclear war where on page 55 of the hearings, Senator Proxmire alleges America would escalate a limited conflict to an all-out war because: "The strategic value and military value of destroying cities in the Soviet Union would be very great." Kahn responded: "No American President is likely to do that, no matter what the provocation." Nuclear war will be limited, according to Herman Kahn's analysis, despite the bullshit fron nutters to the contrary.
Kahn on page 101 of Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s correctly and accurately condemns President Carter's 1979 State of the Union Address, which claimed falsely that just a single American nuclear submarine is required by America and has an "overwhelming" deterrent against "every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union". Carter ignored Russian retaliation on cities if you bomb theirs: America has avoided the intense Russian protection efforts that make the Russian nuclear threat credible, namely civil defense shelters and evacuation plans, and also the realpolitik of deterrence of world wars, which so far have only been triggered due to invasions of third parties (Belgium '14, Poland '39). Did America strategically nuke every city in Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022? No, debunking Proxmire and the entire Western pro-Russian "automatic escalation" propaganda lobby, and it didn't even have tactical neutron bombs to help deter the Russians like Reagan in the 1980s, because in the 1990s America had ignored Kahn's argument, and went in for MINIMAL deterrence of the least credible sort (abolishing the invasion-deterring dedicated neutron tactical nuclear stockpile entirely; the following quotation is from p101 of Kahn's Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s):
"Minimum deterrence, or any predicated on an escessive emphasis on the inevitably of mutual homocide, is both misleading and dangerous. ... MAD principles can promote provocation - e.g. Munich-type blackmail on an ally. Hitler, for example, did not threaten to attack France or England - only Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It was the French and the British who finally had to threaten all-out war [they could only do this after rearmament and building shelters and gas masks to reduce the risk of reprisals in city bombing, which gave more time for Germany to prepare since it was rearming faster than France and Britain which still desperately counted on appeasement and peace treaties and feared provoking a war by an arms-race due to endless lying propaganda from Lord Grey that his failure to deter war in 1914 had been due to an arms-race rather than the incompetence of the procrastination of his anti-war Liberal Party colleagues in the Cabinet] - a move they would not and could not have made if the notion of a balance of terror between themselves and Germany had been completely accepted. As it was, the British and French were most reluctant to go to war; from 1933 to 1939 Hitler exploited that reluctance. Both nations [France and Britain] were terrified by the so-called 'knockout blow', a German maneuver that would blanket their capitals with poison gas ... The paralyzing effect of this fear prevented them from going to war ... and gave the Germans the freedom to march into the Ruhr, to form the Anschluss with Austria, to force the humiliating Munich appeasement (with the justification of 'peace in our time'), and to take other aggressive actions [e.g. against the Jews in the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, etc.] ... If the USSR were sufficiently prepared in the event a war did occur, only the capitalists would be destroyed. The Soviets would survive ... that would more than justify whatever sacrifice and destruction had taken place.
"This view seems to prevail in the Soviet military and the Politburo even to the present day. It is almost certain, despite several public denials, that Soviet military preparations are based on war-fighting, rather than on deterrence-only concepts and doctrines..." - Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, 1984, pages 101-102.
Kahn adds, in his footnote on p111, that "Richard Betts has documented numerous historical cases in which attackers weakened their opponents defenses through the employment of unanticipated tactics. These include: rapid changes in tactics per se, false alarms and fluctuating preparations for war ... doctrinal innovations to gain surprise. ... This is exactly the kind of thing which is likely to surprise those who subscribe to MAD theories. Those who see a need for war-fighting capabilities expect the other side to try to be creative and use tactical innovations such as coercion and blackmail, technological surprises, or clever tactics on 'leverage' targets, such as command and control installations. If he is to adhere to a total reliance on MAD, the MADvocate has to ignore these possibilities." See Richard Betts, "Surprise Despite Warning: Why Sudden Attacks Succeed", Political Science Quarterly, Winter 1980-81, pp. 551-572.)
Compare two situations: (1) Putin explodes a 50 megaton nuclear "test" of the warhead for his new nuclear reactor powered torpedo, Poseidon, a revamped 1961 Tsar Bomba, or detonates a high-altitude nuclear EMP "test" over neutral waters but within the thousands of miles range of USA or UK territory; (2) Putin invades Poland using purely conventional weapons. Our point here is that both nuclear AND conventional weapons trigger nuclear threats and the risk of nuclear escalation, as indeed they have done (for Putin's nuclear threats scroll down to videos with translations below). So the fashionable CND style concept that only nuclear weapons can trigger nuclear escalation is bullshit, and is designed to help Russia start and win WWIII to produce a world government, by getting us to undertake further unilateral (not multilateral) disarmament, just as evolved in the 1930s, setting the scene for WWII. Japan for example did not have nuclear weapons in August 1945, yet triggered not just tactical nuclear war (both cities had some military bases and munitions factories, as well as enormous numbers of civilians), and the decision to attack cities rather than just "test" weapons obove Tokyo bay as Teller demanded but Oppenheimer rejected (for maximum impact with a very small supply of nuclear weapons) showed some strategic nuclear war thinking. Truman was escalating to try to shock Japan into rapid surrender emotionally (many cities in Japan had already been burned out in conventional incendiary air raids, and the two nuclear attacks while horrible for civilians in those cities contributed only a fraction of the millions killed in WWII, despite anti-nuclear propaganda lies to the contrary). Truman's approach escalating to win is the opposite of the "Minimax game theory" (von Neumann's maths and Thomas Schelling's propaganda) gradual escalation approach that's currently the basis of nuclear deterrence planning despite its failure wherever it has been tried (Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc). Gradual escalation is supposed to minimise the maximum possible risk (hence "minimax" name), but it guarantees failure in the real world (unlike rule abided games) by maximising the build up of resentment. E.g. Schelling/Minimax say that if you gradually napalm civilians day after day (because they are the unprotected human shields used by terrorists/insurgents; the Vietcong are hiding in underground tunnels, exactly like Hamas today, and the Putin regime's metro 2 shelter tunnels under Russia) you somehow "punish the enemy" (although they don't give a toss about the lives of kids which is why you're fighting them!) and force them to negotiate for peace in good faith, then you can pose for photos with them sharing a glass of champagne and there is "world peace". That's a popular fairy tale, like Marxist mythology.
Once you grasp this fact, that nuclear weapons have been and will again be "used" explosively without automatic escalation, for example provocative testing as per the 1961 Russian 50 megaton bomb test, or the 1962 high altitude EMP bursts, you should be able to grasp the fact that the "escalation" deception used to dismiss civil defense and tactical nuclear deterrence against limited nuclear war, is fake news from Russian fellow-travellers like Corbyn. Once you assign a non-unity probability to "escalation", you're into conventional war territory: if you fight a conventional war, it can "escalate" to nuclear war as on 6 August 1945. Japan did not avoid nuclear attack by not having nuclear weapons on 6 August 1945. If it had nuclear weapons ready to be delivered, a very persuasive argument could be made that unless Truman wanted to invite retaliation, World War II would have remained strategically non-nuclear: no net strategic advantage would have been achieved by nuclear city bombing so only war-ending tactical nuclear threats could have prevailed in practice. But try explaining this to the groupthink pseudosocialist bigoted mass murderers who permeate fake physics with crap; it's no easier to explain to them the origins of particle masses or even dark energy/gravitation; in both cases groupthink lying hogwash persists because statements of proved facts are hated and rejected if them debunk religious style fairy tales the mass media loves. There were plenty of people warning that mass media gas war fear mongering was disguised Nazi supporting propaganda in the 1930s, but the public listened to that crap then just as it accepted the "eugenics" (anti-diversity evolution crap of Sir Galton, cousin of Darwin) basis for Hitler's Mein Kampf without question, just as they accepted the lying propaganda from the UK "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" which like CND and all other arms control and disarmament lobbies supporting terrorist states today, did more than even Hitler to deliberately lay the foundations for the Holocaust and World War II, while never being criticised in the UK media! Thus, it's surely time for people to oppose evil lying on civil defence to save lives in all disasters from storms to conventional war, to collateral damage risks in nuclear terrorism by mad enemies. At some point, the majority has to decide to either defend itself honestly and decently against barbarism, or be consumed by it as a price for believing bullshit. It's time for decent people to oppose lying evil regarding the necessity to have credible tactical (not incredible strategic) nuclear weapons, as Oppenheimer called for in his 1951 speech, to deter invasions.
Democracy can't function when secrecy is used to deliberately cover-up vital data from viewing by Joe Public. Secrecy doesn't protect you from enemies who independently develop weapons in secret, or who spy from inside your laboratories:
"The United States and Great Britain resumed testing in 1962, and we spared no effort trying to find out what they were up to. I attended several meetings on that subject. An episode related to those meetings comes to mind ... Once we were shown photographs of some documents ... the photographer had been rushed. Mixed in with the photocopies was a single, terribly crumpled original. I innocently asked why, and was told that it had been concealed in panties. Another time ... questions were asked along the following lines: What data about American weapons would be most useful for your work and for planning military technology in general?"
- Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, Hutchinson, London, 1990, pp225-6.
Nuclear saber-rattling from Russian propagandists. They think tactical nuclear weapons aren't enough, and strategic ones should be used.
Review of Peter Kuran's excellent "Neutron Bomb Movie".
Below is a brief clip for review purposes from a longer newsreel of President Eisenhower, enthusiastically promoting the 96% clean fusion Poplar nuclear test (detonated 12 July 1958). On 30 October 1962, Kennedy tested… pic.twitter.com/y4QpR5eCum
More news of Russian TV population preparation for nuclear escalations, which the Western media and politicians continue to ignore as propaganda, just as Novichok and the Ukraine invasion prep was ignored as propaganda bluff, until it took us by "surprise". We need to prepare now https://t.co/tiFmJw0Htq
ABOVE: The British government has now declassified detailed summary reports giving secret original nuclear test data on the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) damage due to numerous nuclear weapons, data which is still being kept under wraps in America since it hasn't been superseded because Western atmospheric nuclear tests were stopped late in 1962 and never resumed - even though the Russians have even more extensive data - completely debunking Glasstone and Dolan's disarmament propaganda nonsense in the 1962, 1964 and 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons which ignores EMP piped far away from low altitude nuclear tests by power and communications cables and falsely claims instead that such detonations don't produce EMP damage outside the 2psi blast radius! For a discussion of the new data and also a link to the full 200+ pages version (in addition to useful data, inevitably like all official reports it also contains a lot of "fluff" padding), please see the other (physics) site: https://nige.wordpress.com/2023/09/12/secret-emp-effects-of-american-nuclear-tests-finally-declassified-by-the-uk-and-at-uk-national-archives/ (by contrast, this "blogspot" uses old non-smartphone proof coding, no longer properly indexed any long longer by "google's smartphone bot"). As long ago as 1984, Herman Kahn argued on page 112 of his book Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s: "The effects of an EMP attack are simply not well understood [in the West, where long powerlines were never exposed on high altitude nuclear tests, unlike the Russian's 1962 Operation K, so MHD-EMP or E3 damage wasn't even mentioned in the 1977 Glasstone and Dolan Effects of Nuclear Weapons], but the Soviets seem to know - or think they know - more than we do."
ABOVE: Moscow Metro and Metro-2 (secret nuclear subway) horizonially swinging blast doors take only 70 seconds to shut, whereas their vertically rising blast doors take 160 seconds to shut; both times are however far shorter than the arrival time of Western ICBMs or even SLBMs which take 15-30 minutes by which time the Russian shelters are sealed from blast and radiation! In times of nuclear crisis, Russia planned to evacuate from cities those who could not be sheltered, and for the remainder to be based in shelters (similarly to the WWII British situation, when people slept in shelters of one kind or another when there was a large risk of being bombed without notice, particularly in supersonic V2 missile attacks where little warning time was available).
NUKEGATE - Western tactical neutron bombs were disarmed after Russian propaganda lie. Russia now has over 2000... "Disarmament and arms control" charlatans, quacks, cranks, liars, mass murdering Russian affiliates, and evil genocidal Marxist media exposed for what it is, what it was in the 1930s when it enabled Hitler to murder tens of millions in war. Glasstone's and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons deceptions totally disproved. Professor Brian Martin, TRUTH TACTICS, 2021 (pp45-50): "In trying to learn from scientific publications, trust remains crucial. The role of trust is epitomised by Glasstone’s book The Effects of Atomic Weapons. Glasstone was not the author; he was the editor. The book is a compilation of information based on the work of numerous contributors. For me, the question was, should I trust this information? Was there some reason why the editors or authors would present fraudulent information, be subject to conflicts of interest or otherwise be biased? ... if anything, the authors would presumably want to overestimate rather than underestimate the dangers ... Of special interest would be anyone who disagreed with the data, calculations or findings in Glasstone. But I couldn’t find any criticisms. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was treated as the definitive source, and other treatments were compatible with it. ... One potent influence is called confirmation bias, which is the tendency to look for information that supports current beliefs and dismiss or counter contrary information. The implication is that changing one’s views can be difficult due to mental commitments. To this can be added various forms of bias, interpersonal influences such as wanting to maintain relationships, overconfidence in one’s knowledge, desires to appear smart, not wanting to admit being mistaken, and career impacts of having particular beliefs. It is difficult to assess the role of these influences on yourself. "
Dr Harold L. Brode’s new book, Nuclear Weapons in the Cold War
‘Why is it that many of those who mourn for the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seldom exhibit the same compassion for victims of the fire raids on the other 63 Japanese cities and the many others who suffered from massive bombing in Europe and elsewhere during World War II? The same level of grieving does not seem to be extended to those many citizens destroyed by the vast number of conventional high explosive and incendiary bombs. Why is it an often-ignored fact that, in both Germany and Japan, vastly more people were killed or injured by non-nuclear means? ... What of the more than 100,000 ... lost in that firebombing raid on Tokyo, that took place five months before the atomic bombings? What about the horrible losses of life in Hamburg, Deseden, Kassel, or Darmstadt in Germany, or in Coventry or London in England, all due to conventional, not nuclear, bombing? ... The Holocaust carried out by Hitler’s Germany did not use nuclear weapons to kill millions. Nor did Stalin’s Soviet Union use atomic bombs to destroy another 20 million lives. And even today, millions continue to suffer at the hands of other despots, none of whom need to, or have chosen to, resort to nuclear weaponry.. ... Rather, should we not focus on ways to avoid the misery, greed and perceived needs that propel nations (or radical groups, or even individuals) to commit acts of violence or to wage war - regardless of the particular tools they use for destruction?’
– Dr Harold Brode, Nuclear Weapons in the Cold War, pages 346-347.
‘During the critical period 8-15 February [1968], the U.S. command realized [conventional] bombing was not sufficiently effective. ... The air campaign dropped over 110,000 tons of bombs and napalm on the area around Khe Sanh during the 77-day siege ... the most heavily bombed target in the history of conventional warfare.’
– report DSWA-TR-97-25 quoted by Dr Harold Brode, Nuclear Weapons in the Cold War, page 287.
Despite the most extensive use of napalm, Agent Orange and high explosives in the history of warfare in Vietnam, America lost. Conventional weapons proved insufficient for a clean victory against crazy fanatics.
‘After World War II ended, the western allies rapidly demobilized and disbanded their wartime forces [unlike the USSR].’ – Dr Harold Brode on the reason behind the American nuclear deterrent, Nuclear Weapons in the Cold War, page 263.
‘General Westmoreland [head of the U.S. Army in Vietnam and former commander of West Point military Academy] had earlier [before 1968] recommended that tactical nuclear weapons be deployed to South Vietnam in preparation for the defense of Khe Sanh [a U.S. Marine base in the demilitarized zone between north and south Vietnam, which in January 1968 came under seige from the communist Vietcong, a siege lasting 77 days and resulting the use of over 60 kilotons of napalm and over 50 kilotons of conventional explosives]. ... by 9 February 1968, the situation had become so critical that the use of nuclear weapons to save Khe Sanh was being seriously considered. However, a decision was eventually made by the administration that no nuclear weapons were to be deployed. ... President Johnson’s advisors, including McNamara, told him that we could not win the war in Vietnam, and that invading North Vietnam, or using nuclear weapons, ran the risk of drawing the Chinese - and perhaps even the Soviets - into more active participation. ... In the end, Khe Sanh was successfully defended without nuclear weapons, and the North Vietnamese Army withdrew. ... Such careful tit-for-tat tactics resulted most often in plans for only minimal responses, and led to the repeated objection of possible employment of nuclear weapons. ... Public support for use of nuclear weapons seems to be restricted to responses to any nuclear attack on the U.S.’
– Dr Harold Brode, Nuclear Weapons in the Cold War, pages 287-8.
The tragedy here is that conventional weapons were more expensive and less demoralizing and thus ultimately failed in Vietnam, leaving the country devastated with tremendous effects on American deterrence. Some indication of the relative importance given to tactical nuclear weapons for deterrence of invasions by military aggressors, rather than strategic nuclear weapons to threaten innocent civilian cities, is given by the average yields of nations in Brode's Table 11-1: Pakistan's nuclear weapons have an average yield of only 68 kt, Russia's are 106 kt, America's are 131 kt, France's are 134 kt, Israel's are 141 kt, Britain's are 234 kt, India's are a substantial 448 kt, and China's are a whopping 1.365 megatons. At least for American and British nuclear weapons, the higher average yields are misleading; individual weapons have flexible yields since the insertion of boost gas into the weapon core can be omitted from the arming sequence to prevent ignition of the secondary stage and thus to lower the yield of a strategic weapon to a small tactical weapon. (In some weapons, the precise time delay between the detonation of the explosive implosion system and the firing of the neutron initiator is variable, altering the fission primary stage yield to give even more control.)
According to Brode's Table 15-3, the number of tactical nuclear weapons (nuclear cannon shells, Davy Crockett Army bazookas, depth charges, torpedoes, and ADMs) in America's stockpile peaked at 22,723 in 1964, when America had 8,028 strategic weapons (warheads in ICBMs, SLBMs, and bomber aircraft). The total number of American tactical and strategic nuclear bombs and warheads is shown to peak in 1966 at 31,700 (11,232 strategic warheads and bombs, and 20,468 tactical weapons). Finally, the peak number of American strategic nuclear weapons peaked in 1975, at 15,748, when America also had 11,305 tactical nuclear weapons, a total of 27,052 American nuclear weapons. The number of American SLBMs peaked at 6,720 in 1978, while the number of American ICBM warheads finally peaked at 2,593 in 1988.
“In the 1950s, at the RAND Corporation, Leon Goure, a political scientist who was born in Russia and was particularly familiar with the USSR, proposed an idea his professional peers considered ridiculous. He pointed out that the Soviet Union was actually a union of many disparate peoples and made up of numerous distinct ethnic groups. In his mind, it was conceivable that this union would quickly fail if the iron fist of Stalin was ever relaxed.”
– Dr Harold L. Brode, Nuclear Weapons in Cold War, page 16.
As editor of the 1992 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, Dr Brode uses and cites many of his and his associates generally unavailable technical reports, for example Nuclear weapons effects relevant to surface ships (by H. L. Brode, Richard D. Small and L. Schlessinger, Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation, PSR Note 477, DNA-TR-81-237), Nuclear Radiation Influences on Military Effectiveness, PSR Report 1317, June 1982 AD-B089109, Brode's RAND Corporation report RM-1831 on Sam Cohen's early neutron bomb high altitude burst concept, and repeatedly quotes from Nuclear Weapons that went to War (W. C. Yengst, S. J. Lukasik, and M. A. Jensen, SAID report DSWA-TR-97-25, September 1998).
“At Los Alamos during World War II, there was no moral issue with respect to working on the atomic bomb. Everyone was agreed on the necessity of stopping Hitler and the Japanese from destroying the free world. It was not an academic question; our friends and relatives were being killed and we, ourselves, were desperately afraid.”
- Joseph Otto Hirshfelder (editor with Glasstone of the 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons), quoted by Brode, Nuclear Weapons in Cold War, page 348
The key problem for the anti-nuclear or disarmament agenda lobby is that, as Dr Brode explains on page 263: “After World War II ended, the Western allies rapidly demobilized and disbanded their wartime forces. As a consequence, the Soviet’s conventional forces soon vastly outnumbered and outgunned those of the U.S. and its European allies.” Truman tried to deter Soviet expansion across Europe by the threat of nuclear weapons, but it partly failed until the standoff of the Berlin Airlift, because spies had told Stalin that America did not have the means at that time to build up an immense stockpile of nuclear weapons. Then Russia tested a nuclear weapon in 1949 and Truman authorized hydrogen bomb research in response.
The point is that nuclear weapons stockpiles are tailored to suit objectives which would simply need a larger stockpile of conventional weapons. The idea that a nuclear weapon is immensely more destructive than conventional weapons is debunked by the fact that, if our nuclear stockpile were more than adequate, we could easily cut the yields and numbers of weapons. Suppose that a single 1 kiloton bomb hidden aboard a Trident submarine was all we need. Well, why do we have anything more? The controversy of disarmament stems entirely from ignorance of the effects of nuclear weapons, and thus their deterrent capabilities. The smaller the stockpile we have, the greater the risk of an enemy being undeterred by it. Dr Brode begins by discussing the paradox that ever since Hiroshima, a vast number of apparent geniuses predicted that the Cold War would certainly end with a bang and not a whimper, at least unless we disarmed or at least accommodate the expansionist needs of Joe Stalin! Violet Bonham-Carter, daughter of the Liberal British Prime Minister who declared war against Germany in 1914, in a speech on 20 October 1938 attacked a populist war terror-mongering appeasement dogma as being “peace at any price.”
Hal Brode, RAND Corporation’s legendary nuclear effects expert and editor of the 1992 edition of effects manual EM1, “Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons”, has cut no corners and omitted no gripping controversy in the entire field of nuclear weapons and cold warfare. Topics covered, in entertaining style and great depth of research, span from nuclear bomb effects during tests and combat use in Japan, to the failure of deterrence in the different wars since 1945, and from nuclear accidents and beneficial effects of low dose rate radiation. He discloses new facts about secret research at RAND Corporation by people like neutron bomb inventor Sam Cohen.
The illustration of the French nuclear test Licorne on the front cover is appropriate, since Dr Brode deals with nuclear weapons and accidents by all countries, not just the USA. The book includes 19 pages of references, including this blog, which is quoted on pages 242-5. In a nutshell, Brode has produced a more logical, better organized, better researched textbook on nuclear weapons and cold war history than the populist, “politically correct” books by Richard Rhodes and renowned academic historians. There are some interesting technical points, for example it is well known that the 15 megaton Bravo nuclear test was connected to an island 1.4 miles away by 12 vacuum tubes, and that these tubes carried about 1 kt of explosive energy from the explosion, as discovered from the filmed sequence below by the neutron time of arrival experiment officer, Sterling Colgate, in his discussion (Los Alamos Science issue 28, 2003, page 39):
Brode explains in Nuclear Weapons in the Cold War that the secondary 1 kt explosion of the 12 vacuum pipes combined with the strong updraft from main 15 megaton explosion to throw out the concrete foundations of the pipelines with such force that they produced secondary craters when they fell back. (The 15 megaton explosion about 2.25 km from Station 1200 caused a peak overpressure of 130 psi; by the cube-root scaling law 15 megatons produces the same pressure at 25 times the distance for 1 kt, so you get a similar 130 psi peak overpressure at 90 m from 1 kiloton and at 2.25 km from 15 megatons.)
Dr Brode explains on pages 27-8 that his first involvement with the arms industry was as a sheet metal machinist with North American Aviation at Mines Field in Los Angeles in 1941, assembling the B-25 bombers used in the very first American air strike on Tokyo, Japan, April 18, 1942. Brode explains on page 30 that 250,000 Chinese civilians were “assassinated” by Japan in retaliation for that air raid. He remembers the announcement that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 (page 28):
“I was listening to the Sunday morning radio broadcast of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in my parent’s living room when the broadcast was interrupted with the news of that attack. At the time, I had been working nights, building bombers and fighters at North American Aviation and was attending junior college during the day. The next day, Monday, the United States declared war on Japan. Then four days later, Germany declared war on the United States.”
Brode spent the year 1943-4 at the University of Minnesota cramming two years of maths and physics into one, before serving in the US Army Air Corps as a 2nd Lieutenant. On page 44 he lists the 52 million casualties of World War II by country, dividing the mortality into civilian and military deaths. Poland, the country whose invasion triggered off Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, lost 17.2% of its population, many in concentration camps, with only 2% of the fatalities being military deaths. The USSR lost 20.6 million, 10.4% of its population, half of which were civilians. Germany lost 6.85 million or 9.5% of its population, with again about half of the deaths civilian. By using nuclear weapons, America kept its casualties to half a million, 0.4% of the population, all military personnel.
He quotes Nagasaki nuclear bomber pilot Major General Charles W. Sweeny’s testimony (page 45):
“Today, millions of people in America and Japan are alive because we ended the war when we did. This is not to celebrate the use of atomic weapons. Quite the contrary. It is my fervent hope that my mission is the last such mission ever flown. But that does not mean that back in 1945, given the events of war and the recalcitrance of the enemy, President Truman was not obliged to use all the weapons at his disposal to end the war.”
Harold Brode thanks Hiroshima and Nagasaki and resulting rapid surrender (the offensive war was by then over for Japan regardless of the nuclear air bursts, but a massive defensive war in the home islands of Japan was still on the cards for Prime Minister Hideki Tojo) for maybe sparing his life as a 22-year-old scheduled for the second D-Day of World War II, planned for 1 November 1945 (pages 84-5):
“Invasion of the Japanese home islands … had been estimated to lead to the probable deaths of between 400,000 and one million U.S. soldiers and sailors. In addition, as many as half a million British troops would have been at risk … 800,000 Japanese defenders and civilians were expected to be casualties. I personally have always been grateful that the war in the Pacific was brought to a conclusion when it was. At the time that the first atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, I was … a 22-year-old second lieutenant in the Army Air Forces … in charge of a small detachment of 18-year-old draftees who were destined (but ill-prepared and totally inexperienced) to join the invasion … We were scheduled to land on D-day-plus-one and immediately scatter into the interior of that likely hostile country ... Those two nuclear weapons destroyed many lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – but, by ending the war, they saved a great many others … possibly including my own.”
Prime Minister Hideki Tojo who planned the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that started the war was, as Brode explains at page 340, fiercely opposed to surrender even after two nuclear weapons had burned down many of the wooden houses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and killed about a quarter of their populations.
After a detailed review of German nuclear weapons research, Brode details the science of implosion type nuclear weapons during the American Manhattan Project of World War II. Gun type assembly (used at Hiroshima) was not feasible for the heavy plutonium isotope 239 contaminated by isotope Pu-240 which has a high spontaneous fission rate because (page 69):
“To get the plutonium to a super-critical state before it blew itself apart required a critical mass assembly at speeds of more than 6 miles/sec (~ 31,700 ft/sec) – much faster than simple howitzer devices could have managed.”
He adds that John von Neumann’s Mach wave reflection theory (pages 70-1):
“… convinced his fellow scientists at Los Alamos that the blast from a nuclear burst would be greatly enhanced if its shock wave were to reflect off the ground from a burst height high above the target … the four radars in each weapon were wired in pairs, so either one pair of the other could trigger the weapon when both radars in one pair or the other agreed that the right altitude had been reached, so they would not detonate prematurely. In addition … a barometric fuse, set to go off at a somewhat lower altitude, was included as a further backup.” (The detail about the radar fuses comes because his uncle, Robert B. Brode, was on the Manhattan Project and developed the bomb’s radar fuse systems.)
John von Neumann’s second contribution, after selecting the air burst altitude, was to apply mathematics to Seth Neddermeyer’s implosion theory for the Trinity and Nagasaki weapons (pages 71-2):
“In fact, von Neumann and Robert Richtmyer invented (and later published) a numerical scheme that proved essential to many such subsequent calculations, and has been in wide use at weapons laboratories and elsewhere ever since. Subsequently, in doing my own calculations of both nuclear and high explosive blast waves, I employed von Neumann’s and Richtmyer’s ingenious ‘artificial viscosity’ scheme. Their technique allowed computer programs to numerically integrate right through shock wave discontinuities, and still accurately represented the physics and hydrodynamics of explosive phenomena.”
Brode points out that the Neumann-Richtymer technique for computing implosion system behavior (with smothing over discontinuities by the use of artificial viscosity) was published openly by Pergamon Press of New York under the heading “The point source solution” in volume 6 of a compilation of von Neumann’s works edited by A. J. Taub in 1963. So much for the secrecy of computer models of implosion bomb physics. Anyone can numerically integrate the Neumann-Richtymer equations for any implosion system in Fortran on any modern computer!
The major British contribution to the Manhattan Project was James Tuck’s argument in April 1944 to use high explosive “lenses” to focus point source detonation waves by modifying the speed of the detonation wave by the use of shaped charges of fast and slow-burning explosive. The effect is exactly the same as the way light is refracted by the effect of a shaped lens of glass slowing down light relative to its speed through the air. (Being denser, glass has a higher electron charge density than air, thus “loading” the photons passing through glass with more electromagnetic field interactions, which slows down light.) Explosive lenses reduce the number of detonators needed for implosion and make the compression of the core more uniform (page 82): “… X-ray images showed successful compressions of the heavy metal cores without any of the devastating jetting that had been feared and was so important to avoid.”
THE COLD WAR PERIOD
Dr Brode begins this with a review of the Russian spying in the Manhattan Project. He explains that, apart from the well-known spies like Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, David Greenglass, and the Rosenbergs, who sold the principles of bomb design, others like George Koval – finally recognised by Putin in 2002 for stealing American secrets – gave Stalin the vital U235 gaseous diffusion barrier design used at Oak Ridge (pages 92-3):
“In recent times, Russian President Putin awarded posthumously the highest Russian award to George Koval … Koval was born in Iowa in 1913 … his parents emigrated to a Siberian establishment … he was then trained by the GRU for his role as a spy. And he returned to the US in 1940. As an American citizen, with no trace of a foreign accent, he was subsequently drafted … Koval was sent back to school at the City College of New York in the Army Specialized Training Program … Later … assigned … to support the Manhattan Project. While in that assignment, he also learned details of the Oak Ridge operations … Koval continued to spy in the US from 1940 to 1948 … Only years later did his spying activity become known in the United States.”
Dr Brode points out on page 119 that 63% of the total cost of the Manhattan Project ($1.89 billion in 1944 dollars, or $27.3 billion in 2006 dollars, allowing for inflation) was spent on the massive Oak Ridge plants for U235 separation by the gaseous diffusion process, pumping acidic UF6 gas at high pressure through porous nickel barriers. The plant was the first wide scale use of teflon, which coated all the compressor pumps to avoid corrosive destruction from UF6. The barriers themselves were acid etched from a tin-nickel alloy, and later by fusing powdered nickel together, developed to optimally withstand the gas pressure while allowing the lighter and faster U-235F6 molecules to diffuse through, without dissolving due to the acidity over a 6 month operational life. (There are some minor typographical errors in the book like commas out of place occasionally, and on page 129 the error occurs that 5% of natural uranium is U235; of course 0.71% of natural uranium is U-235, unless it has been depleted as in the natural nuclear reactors of Oklo, Gabon, whose waste has been safely confined for 1.7 billion years, to the annoyance of the anti-nuclear folk.)
After discussing the spies, Brode moves on to secrecy during the hydrogen bomb program, and his personal interactions with Robert Oppenheimer, Director of wartime Los Alamos, who was a personal friend of Brode’s uncle, the Manhattan Project physicist Robert B. Brode, 1900-86 (page 134):
“I first met Robert Oppenheimer and his wife Kitty at my Uncle’s home in Berkeley. My aunt and uncle were close friends of the Oppenheimers and the Fermis, and, of course, with the many other scientists who had been a part of that wartime effort. In 1948 I attended Oppenheimer’s graduate seminar on nuclear physics … I found him impatient and even rather sarcastic, especially with students who dared to ask questions.”
Dr Brode did his PhD in Theoretical Nuclear Physics at Cornell from 1948-51 under supervision of his thesis advisor and PhD Committee Chairman, the celebrated Nobel Laureate Hans A. Bethe. It was Bethe who first tried to calculate the nuclear fusion rates in stars prior to WWII, and who with Freeman Dyson in 1947 persuaded Oppenheimer of the validity of Feynman’s path integral approach to calculating the Lamb shift in the hydrogen atom’s ground state energy level. Brode points out that Bethe had been the theoretical group leader at Los Alamos (leading to lifelong friction between Teller and Bethe, stemming from the low priority of H- bomb research during WWII). While minimising H-bomb research during WWII to the irritation of Teller, Bethe did some early studies of nuclear weapons effects while at Los Alamos, e.g. fireballs, blast wave pressures, and thermal radiation pulses (see Bethe’s Los Alamos report LA-2000, or LA-1020 for fuller details). Brode explains on page 338 that prior to the Teller-Ulam hydrogen bomb design of March 1951 which employed X-ray coupling between separate stages, Bethe opposed the H bomb on three arguments in his seminar on the subject:
“In the first part, he explained why a thermonuclear weapon was physically impossible, a view that turned out to be spectacularly wrong. In the second part, he hypothesized that even if they were feasible, there was no need … In his concluding section (in case audiences were not convinced by the first two points), he spoke of the immorality ... they were not persuasive enough to lead President Truman [who authorized the H bomb development program before the Teller-Ulam discovery, much to the fury of many orthodox scientists who wanted a plan to implement instead of a program that begins with fumbling for ideas in the dark] or the U.S. Congress to forego post-war funding for thermonuclear research. ”
Bethe, states Brode on page 339, was a complex man, opposing the further development of nuclear weapons in the united states, despite the failure of the small postwar nuclear stockpile to prevent the Berlin Blockade of 1948, the Red revolution in Czechoslovakia, the Korean War outbreak in 1950, etc.
RICHARD P. FEYNMAN
During Brode’s PhD research at Cornell, he had a job as a graduate assistant, grading papers from students of Bethe, Richard Feynman, and others (page 142):
“In my job as a graduate assistant … I seldom got much guidance from Professor Feynman. For him, I had to define the ‘correct’ answers for myself and then defend them with no help from him. My problem was that his exam questions were often a bit obtuse and seldom led to simple answers.”
EDWARD TELLER
After discussing Edward Teller’s testimony to the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearings, in which Teller cast doubt on Oppenheimer’s motivations because of his resistance to the H-bomb even after Russian exploded a nuclear weapon in 1949, Brode suggests (pages 145-6):
“… Dr Teller was credited with influencing then-President Reagan to sponsor research into advanced technology for shooting down Soviet ICBMs [Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI; or “Star Wars” in President Reagan’s language] … So, perhaps the world should also give some credit to Edward Teller for his contribution to the successful end to the Cold War, because that SDI or Star Wars effort did force the USSR to pursue vastly more expansive and expensive research … These efforts placed inordinate demands on the Soviet defenses and further strained their already overburdened military budgets. …
“Edward Teller was a frequent consultant at RAND … Teller would hold daily marathon seminars, where he probed ideas for new thermonuclear weapons designs. These were rather informal gatherings that frequently went on all day long … He would often suggest as many as half a dozen or more ideas during the course of a single day, and one or more of us would inevitably be designated to go off and more thoroughly investigate his suggested innovations. … this man was a true genius, and some of his ideas proved invaluable. Unfortunately, out of his plethora of concepts and suggested avenues of research, only a few proved worth further pursuit, but, as that old hand put it: ‘Who among us has even one good idea per day, or per week, for that matter?’”
JOHN VON NEUMANN
Brode describes on how he at RAND Corporation beat computer innovator John von Neumann in 1955 publish (Journal of Applied Physics, v26, n6, pp766-75) the first full electronic computer solutions to point source, free air blast waves, using von Neumann’s own artificial viscosity equation (page 147):
“… with excellent support at RAND, I managed to produce results that von Neumann was still trying to squeeze out of an early electronic computer at Princeton for the Institute for Advanced Studies. I had scooped the one true expert!”
ISADOR RABI AND EUGENE WIGNER
After the Cuban Missiles Crisis of 1962, Harold Brode was recruited by Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner to determine the efficiency of civil defence countermeasures against nuclear weapons effects, in Project Harbor, which was ignored by people like Bethe, and was opposed by Isador Rabi (page 148):
“After the war, Rabi was appointed to the General Advisory Council for the first Atomic Energy Commission, and subsequently served as a member of The Presidential Science Advisory Committee (PSAC). In 1963, during a review of the National Civil Defense Program before the PSAC … in a conference room in the White House Executive Office Building … right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when many citizens felt the imminent threat of nuclear war … Dr Rabi did not favor the Civil Defense findings that Wigner, Teller and others of us were espousing. Thus, while Wigner made his presentation, Rabi sat at the opposite end of that great PSAC conference table and read a newspaper, loudly turning pages while he held the paper up in front of himself, thereby making certain everybody could see … Wigner was deeply offended by Rabi’s obvious scorn.”
THE SAFETY SYSTEMS OF THE FIRST NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Brode deals with permissive action links to physically prevent unauthorised use of nuclear weapons, and the safety of nuclear weapons in accidents. He begins with a detailed discussion of the safety of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons, both of which used special radar circuits and a backup barometric circuit developed by a team led by his uncle, Robert B. Brode (pages 153-4):
“… it is not surprising that the fusing of each weapon was designed with a succession of safety and redundancy measures: First, a safety tape was pulled out when the bomb was released from the bomb bay, and that started a timer set for fifteen seconds. That was to avoid premature detonation … That mechanism also turned on the power to each bomb’s radar fuses. Secondly, a barometric sensor delayed the functioning of the radar sensors … Thirdly, a set of four radar fuses were set to sense the appropriate distance to the ground … Each pair was wired in series so both radars in either pair had to agree that the selected altitude had been reached before the weapon would detonate, thus assuring a high probability … There was, of course, also a non-radar backup, another barometric fuse …”
MICROCHIP, COMPUTER, INTERNET, GPS, TEFLON, ETC. FROM WAR RESEARCH
Brode explains how hydrogen bomb improvements financed early computer development (page 163):
“In a kind of synergism, the development of high-speed computers had been stimulated by the computational needs of the nuclear weapons developers. The ability to carry out complex and repetitive numerical calculators was vital to their weapon research. Consequently, for some years, nearly all the first new electronic computers went directly to the Los Alamos Laboratory …”
The space race of course was driven by the fear of the Russian ICBM, which Russia successful tested first (in adition to the first satellite in orbit, Sputnik). Brode explains how carbon-based plastic ablation shields proved vital to protect ICBM warheads during re-entry. These plastics were used by Edward Teller as sheet type “radiation mirrors” to protect the inside of the casing of a nuclear weapon from destruction by X-rays, while reflecting X-rays from the fission stage to the fusion stage. The surface of the plastic is an insulator so it absorbs X-ray or heat, re-radiates from the surface layer, and ablates, without transmitting heat or the recoil pressure that a dense metal produces in ablation (pages 190-1):
“Only after years of experimentation did the missile designers develop lightweight ablative carbon phenolic heat shields. These light plastics, being poor conductors of heat, i.e., good insulators, protected the inner workings of the missiles, even while getting so hot on their surfaces as to vaporize. Their outer surfaces would evaporate and blow away, thus effectively carrying off the heat generated by re-entry.”
As noted, Teflon was first manufactured for the Oak Ridge UF6 gas pumps, high-speed computers for H-bomb design and military code breaking, internet to RAND’s Arpanet to allow communications after an EMP in nuclear war by routing messages by any available cables (without a single central hub). Microchips and GPS were first funded to develop miniature guidance systems for accurate missiles (pages 195-6):
“Our first true ICBM, the ATLAS, became operational in 1959 … In the beginning, this long-range missile was unreliable, inaccurate, and extremely vulnerable. … In October of 1959 the first ATLAS missiles went on combat alert, armed with its 3.8-MT nuclear warhead. … IRBMS were added to our Armed Forces to augment the shrinking roles and diminished capabilities of the tactical bombers. … submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) such as Polaris and Poseidon missiles also became operational.”
Brode explains on page 197 that ATLAS-D and –E missiles were hardened to 25 psi peak overpressure by simply storing them “horizontally in covered underground pits” before launch. (This caused delays because ATLAS was liquid fuelled, but all modern missiles use solid fuel and can easily be stored sideways.) The first unlined vertical silos gave the ATLAS an impressive 100 psi peak overpressure protection (roughly survival at the fireball radius and near the crater edge for wet soil and small yields). Later silo development using linings of shock absorbers gave really large increases to missile hardness. This increasing hardness meant that to destroy the missile in the silo by a first strike, you needed either a much higher yield or a much more accurate missile delivery system, thus driving the development of satellite GPS missile guidance and tiny high-speed computers, employing integrated circuits. By 1963, Brode reports on page 198, TITAN-II missile silos were capable of surviving inside a nuclear fireball, at a peak overpressure of 300 psi. The silo would be sited in rock to minimize crater shock effects. Finally, MINUTEMAN missiles arrived which were designed to take 1,000 psi peak overpressure.
It was this survivability of close-in nuclear weapons effects, as calculated by Brode, that guaranteed American retaliation capability and so deterred Russia, in the event that the submarines were tailed and torpedoed. As the Russians surged ahead in the arms race, the thousand MINUTEMAN missiles were upgraded with additional shock absorbers in the silos and multiple independently targetable (MIRV) and decoy warheads like chaff wire and metal foil balloons shaped like warheads to statistically saturate Russia’s Galosh ABM system around Moscow.
BRODE ON SAM COHEN’S HIGH ALTITUDE BURST IDEA
Dr Brode gives a personal account of his own accidental over-exposure to 200 rads of dental X-rays to his head, which stopped his beard growing for a month. Personal experiences too of attending nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert helped to motivate his studies of fellow RAND Corporation physicist Sam Cohen’s neutron bomb and high altitude bursts for defensive shields without blast damage (pages 220-221):
“But Sam was an ever-imaginative contributor to the nuclear weapons business. And later, when thermonuclear weapons of megaton yields became a reality, he also envisioned the use of very large-yield weapons … high above the atmosphere … He reasoned correctly that the blast from such a space burst, detonated at such a high altitude, would cause little or no blast damage on the ground.”
Sam Cohen was arguing for space burst nuclear weapons to shoot down Russian bombers or missiles while they were still airborne, a question that ultimately led to the Starfish test and the high altitude EMP discovery, and to Edward Teller’s Star Wars project that precipitated the end of the USSR.
Brode also includes numerous summary tables of nuclear weapons data, listing nuclear crises, nuclear accidents, nuclear tests, etc. For example, Brode explains on pages 291-2 that the CIA assessed the risk of a Syrian-Egyptian invasion of Israel as non-existent when they attacked on 6 October 1973. Israel responded to the attack by assembling 13 nuclear weapons in an tunnel under the Negev desert and as Syrian tanks swept in across the Golan Heights, on 8 October 1973, Israeli Prime Minister Mrs Golda Meir authorized Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to activate the 13 Israeli nuclear warheads and distribute them to air force units. Brode comments on page 292:
"The fact that Israel was known to have nuclear weapons, and would likely use them against attacking countries if it was about to be overrun, must have weighed heavily on the Syrian and Eygptian planners and may have influenced the limited nature of their objectives. ... The existence today of perhaps hundreds of nuclear weapons in the Israeli arsenal may be serving currently as a sobering deterrent to any such possible further aggression in the region. This Israeli nuclear arsenal poses a definite obstacle for neighboring countries (such as Iran) that might otherwise contemplate attacks aimed at the destruction of Israel. But, it is also quite possible that the early existence of an Israeli nuclear capability had served as a motivation in Iran's apparent interest in developing its own nuclear weapons arsenal."
The crisis escalated further on 24 October 1973 when President Nixon, preoccupied with Watergate, left Henry Kissinger to order a DEFCON-3 alert which prepared American B-52 nuclear bombers for war, after intelligence reports indicated that Russia was preparing to defend Egypt in its war with Israel. Thus, if Israel had dropped nuclear weapons on Egypt and Syria, as it prepared to do, then Russia would have retaliated against Israel, and America would have gone to Israel's assistance, possibly escalating to a general nuclear war (Henry Kissinger's early view on tactical nuclear war in his controversial 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy was that any nuclear weapon below 500 kilotons yield or air burst averts serious fallout, and may be more decisive and less costly in human lives than a protracted conventional war).
The Quemoy and Matsu crisis of the 1950s is analogous in some respects to the crisis of the China versus Japan today over the Senkaku Islands. Chiang Kai-Shek moved 78,000 Taiwanese troops to the Taiwan Islands of Quemoy and Matsu to protect those islands from a threat of Chinese invasion. China then shelled the islands and shot down an American military aircraft in the vicinity, capturing the crew. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff then recommended to President Eisenhower than Secretary of States John Foster Dulles the use of nuclear weapons to retaliate against China. The threat of nuclear attack caused China to stop shelling the islands and release the captured Americans. Brode also discusses the Suez crisis of 1956, although from a biased American point of view whereby Egypt closed the Suez Canal and then Israel, France and Britain invaded Egypt illegally in revenge, before Eisenhower forced them to withdraw and leave Egypt alone. In fact, Eisenhower had pre-empted the nationalizing of the Canal, by first offering Egypt a loan for the building of the Aswan Dam, and then withdrawing the offer of the loan when Egypt refused to side with America in the Cold War. Egypt nationalized the British Suez Canal to pay for the Dam because America tied the loan to political considerations. Brode correctly concludes on page 268 that after Eisenhower intervened: “the winner was the Soviet Union. The French and British backed down under U.S. pressure. And France felt the onus of being without its own nuclear cards to play.”
It is clear that such events cause nuclear proliferation, as in the case of France. The leading French H-bomb designer Robert Dautray was a holocaust survivor who in 2007 explained his work in terms of the holocaust: “Their non-violence led them to death.” (The father of the bomb finally reveals his secrets, by Bernard Le Solleu, Ouest-France, March 17, 2007, p. 42.)
Links to some newly-released declassified nuclear weapons effects reports vital for civil defense:
Louis Costrell, Operation JANGLE: Nevada Proving Grounds, October-November 1951, Gamma Radiation Measurements, Jangle Sugar (1.2 kt surface burst) and Jangle Uncle (1.2 kt shallow earth penetrator type underground burst), weapon test report: WT 329, ADA078575 (PDF of document downloadable from the DTIC page is linked here):
Gamma ray dosage rates were determined as a function of time and distance. The method of measurement and the equipment used is described. Dose rates as a function of time were obtained for 27 stations on the surface burst and for 29 stations on the underground burst. Total dose data was obtained by integration of the dose rates. Dose rate and integrated dose as a function of time are presented for all of the stations. One hour dose rate contours are presented as well as 10 minute, 1 hour, and 10 hour integrated dose contours. All of the above mentioned data is presented in the form of curves. In addition 10 second dose versus distance curves for the surface and underground bursts are presented on a single graph for ready comparison.
Jangle Sugar 1 hr dose pattern graph WT 329
Jangle Sugar dose rate graphs WT 329
Jangle Uncle 1 hr dose pattern graph WT 329
Jangle Uncle dose rate graphs WT 329
John S. Malik, Operation Buster-Jangle: Project 10.6. The Measurement of Gamma-Ray Intensity vs Time, ADA995063 (PDF of document downloadable from the DTIC page is linked here):
Gamma-ray intensity vs. time data in the range from a few milliseconds to about 20 sec were obtained on tests C and E of Operation Buster and the underground test (Shot F) of Operation Jangle. The equipment consisted of a detector consisting of a solution of terphenyl in toluene surrounding a coaxial phototube, the output of which was fed into a 5.5-decade pseudo-log circuit which in turn was direct-coupled to the plates of a 3-in. battery-operated scope tube. The face of the scope was photographed with a 16-mm strip-film camera. The data seem to indicate that the source of the gamma radiation for these times is due to neutron capture in the nitrogen of the air, followed in about 0.2 sec by gamma rays from the decay of fission fragments, the latter modified by shock hydrodynamics and rise of the fireball.
Richard K. Laurino and I. G. Poppoff, Contamination Patterns at Operation JANGLE, ADA078578 (PDF of document downloadable from the DTIC page is linked here):
The distributions of contamination resulting from bursts at Operation JANGLE have previously been represented on maps as iso-intensity contours. This report uses the data and maps of three projects, and combines this information. The result is two modified iso-intensity maps-one for the surface burst at Operation JANGLE, and one for the underground burst. These modified iso-intensity patterns are believed to be more useful than the maps which were previously made because a wider range of intensities is presented.
There are also some declassified British documents on nuclear weapons at the U.K. National Archives. For example ES 1/495 gives high quality Trinity nuclear test photos sent to AWRE at Aldermaston by Los Alamos, which are not always easy to obtain elsewhere, and there is an interesting declassified Top Secret paper called The Rationale for the United Kingdom Strategic Nuclear Deterrent Force, DEFE 5/192:
For some of the British nuclear weapons test data debunking American exaggerations of test effects, click here.
Britain's first H-bomb, 300 kt radiation imploded Alarm Clock design called Short Granite, seen on 15 May 1957 off Malden Island, from the deck of HMS Warrior (UK National Archives, reference ADM 1/26765). Taylor instability mixed many thin shells of U and Li6D in the Alarm Clock, reducing yield.
The Rationale for the United Kingdom Strategic Nuclear Deterrent Force, DEFE 5/192, Top Secret - UK eyes only, makes it clear in paragraphs 12-13 that Britain's nuclear deterrent is there to prevent conventional wars, not just nuclear war. For one thing, conventional war with Russia could escalate into nuclear war with Russia, because it has nuclear weapons. Therefore, deterring conventional war is part of the package for deterring nuclear war, if the adversary has nuclear weapons. The more countries have nuclear weapons, the further this deterrence of conventional war must extend, leading to a more peaceful world. Seeing that even Hitler - who had 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas ready by 1945 - was prevented from using nerve gas, it is clear that even the craziest dictators can be restrained from using weapons of mass destruction by deterrence; fear of retaliation.
Rationale for UK strategic nuclear deterrent, 1972 top secret report
Maintenance of the UK Independent Strategic Nuclear Capability, UK National Archives document DEFE 5/197.Note that UK definition of assured destruction is detonating warheads over five enemy cities, rather than stopping a military attack by detonating a neutron bomb over a tank column. There are very serious problems with trying to stop a megalomaniac dictator by attacking his civilian cities. First, it does not stop his tanks, ships, or missiles. Second, he may have ABM and civil defense. Third, he may be happy to sit safe in his well protected Führerbunker during the attack, knowing that for an enemy to bomb his cities will strengthen his standing with his own people as a propaganda exercise (this is what occurred in Germany, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.). It is a stronger, more credible deterrent to bomb concentrated enemy tank columns, making them disperse by the threat of the neutron bomb, so that the dispersed force can be taken out with handheld anti-tank rockets and conventional air strikes. The advantage of the neutron bomb, then, is that it is a credible deterrent against conventional dictatorial invasions of the Blitzkrieg sort. It upsets dictatorships.
The British declassified report has deleted sections justified by the comment: Retained under section 3(4) of the Public Records Act of 1958, which is the British equivalent to the use of sub-section (b)(3) of the title 5 of the U.S. Code, Section 552, which defines matters exempt from disclosure in America, presumably because of the continuing secrecy concerning what target damage to enemies is judged to be adequate deterrence. How that secrecy of the details of the deterrent threat is supposed to be compatible with a credible deterrent to a potential adversary is not explained, but judging by President Putin's invasion of Ukraine last year despite the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine's security by the UK and USA, it is clear that it's not a very strong deterrent. If the basis of the UK's deterrence is causing relatively minor destruction to soft civilian targets (in 1962 Britain in secret defined effective deterrence as the credible ability to detonate nuclear weapons over five enemy cities), rather than debunking hard targets under the Kremlin or at least military bases, tank depots, etc., it is not adequate to deter a Vietcong style megalomaniac (who does not mind losing windows in five cities); we need tactical nuclear deterrence for military targets.
The best deterrent, judging from the opposition to it generated by the USSR during the Cold War, is the neutron bomb. If you deter massed invasions and troop or tank concentrations by the neutron bomb, then you force the enemy to disperse and that in itself prevents Blitzkrieg. It completely destroys the credibility of their plans for invasions, thus making the world safer.
According to Figures 6.41a and 3.94a in Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons, it takes a peak overpressure of 70 psi to demolish (i.e. severe or type A damage) a British WWII type reinforced concrete surface shelter, regardless of bomb yield. According to Figures 6.41b and 3.94a in the same book, it takes a peak overpressure of 50 psi for 1 kiloton (terrorist or neutron bomb) yield or 15 psi for 1 megaton yield to collapse a typical modern city-type multistory reinforced concrete frame building with light walls. These figures are justified by the survival of multistory concrete buildings with typical large window areas, near ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But when you look at chapter 11, Damage to Structures, in the declassified 1972 Secret American effects manual EM1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons (which is the basis for the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons),severe damage to reinforced concrete building (building type 11-3) is predicted at only 17 psi peak overpressure for 1 kt, and 11 psi for 1 megaton (above 1 megaton, peak overpressures are independent of the yield: a wall isn't pushed over regardless of the impulse or how long you push for, if the peak overpressure is too low to cause it to crack). It turns out that the difference is due to the fact that the 1972 EM1 book absurdly assumes small window areas, which is defined by Glasstone as 5% window area, which maximises the loading on the building. In reality, modern city concrete buildings tend to have much larger areas of glass which breaks easily, reducing the blast loading.
In the earlier 1962 edition of the Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons (then designated TM 23-200, and just renamed from Capabilities of Atomic Weapons), reinforced concrete buildings are severely damaged at a peak overpressure of 24.5 psi for 10 kt and 14 psi for 1 Mt. The November 1957 edition of Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, Figure 7-20 shows that simple US Army field command posts with 4 feet of earth cover require a peak overpressure of 80 psi for fail, for surface bursts; Figure 7-22 shows that simple unrevetted open foxholes and trenches (similar to the standard protection against shelling in the American Civil War, in WWII and in England during the 1938 Munich crisis) in the dry soil of Nevada resists 20 psi.
The shameful thing is that the application of such effective, simple, cheap field-tested countermeasure effectiveness data remained secret for so long, and remains obscured from discussions of nuclear weapons. Modern concrete city buildings and simple trenches for rural areas offer immense, low cost protection:
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Secret classified report by British H-bomb casualty expert Edward Leader-Williams, National Archives document CAB 21/4053, proving that cheap civil defence shelters even without any evacuation of the central area can reduce casualties from a 2 megaton H-bomb on London to 59,000 people, and a combination of evacuating the central area plus shelter for people on the outskirts can reduce casualties to absolutely zero! Of course, the enemy could try to re-target the missiles on shelters, but there is still an immense saving of life and a reduction in the incentive for an enemy attack. The cost is far cheaper in both lives and in the effect on our trillion-plus national debt, to deal with nuclear proliferation risks, than launching a preventative war abroad. We could have built proper civil defence for all our cities at a fraction of the immense foreign wars of the last 15 years, and the shelters could double up as peacetime emergency accommodation to deal with the immigration of war refugees. But scare-mongering by CND (of which Prime Minister Tony Blair was a former member) who attacked the civil defence option and their lying exaggerations of WMD threats ensured that as many people were killed as could be by spending money on offensive actions leading today to IS, and that the objective choices were not made by politicians. By making civil defense taboo, deterrence becomes incredible and appeasement is followed by war.
Above: London's eight large WWII 16.5 ft internal diameter tube shelters were tested and found to offer excellent blast and radiation protection. Their cost is dirt cheap compared to preventative wars like Iraq, 2003. Although, as proved at Nagasaki, these shelters are useless in a surprise attack if normally unoccupied, they are useful if they are used as normal accommodation for central city workers in a period of international crisis (as in WWII blitz). Furthermore, in peace time they could be used to offer emergency accommodation to the flood of war refugees and EU immigrants who are causing a massive housing crisis in London. At a cost of £35-£42 per person in WWII, even allowing for inflation, this is cheap accommodation compared to traditional London housing today. In addition, civil defense training in the UK would produce large rescue teams for emergency use like flooding, overseas earthquake damage rescue, etc. Harold Wilson only abolished the Civil Defence Corps in 1968 because of pressure from extremists who supported Marxism and wanted to appease Brezhnev, and also to save a paltry sum of money for squandering on steel industry nationalization, subsidies, etc.
How to achieve peace through tested, proved and practical declassified countermeasures against the effects of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and conventional weapons. Credible deterrence through simple, effective protection against invasions and collateral damage. Discussions of the facts as opposed to inaccurate, misleading lies of the "disarm or be annihilated" political dogma variety. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda debunked by the hard facts. Walls not wars. Walls bring people together by stopping attacks by "divide and rule" style divisive terrorists, contrary to simplistic Vatican propaganda.
Historically, it has been proved that having weapons is not enough to guarantee a reasonable measure of safety from terrorism and rogue states; countermeasures are also needed, both to make any deterrent credible and to negate or at least mitigate the effects of a terrorist attack. Some people who wear seatbelts die in car crashes; some people who are taken to hospital in ambulances, even in peace-time, die. Sometimes, lifebelts and lifeboats cannot save lives at sea. This lack of a 100% success rate in saving lives doesn't disprove the value of everyday precautions or of hospitals and medicine. Hospitals don't lull motorists into a false sense of security, causing them to drive faster and cause more accidents. Like-minded ‘arguments’ against ABM and civil defense are similarly vacuous.
‘As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile-defense construction in Europe will be removed.’
‘The [ABM] treaty was in 1972 ... The theory ... supporting the ABM treaty [which prohibits ABM, thus making nations vulnerable to terrorism] ... that it will prevent an arms race ... is perfect nonsense because we have had an arms race all the time we have had the ABM treaty, and we have seen the greatest increase in proliferation of nuclear weapons that we have ever had. ... So the ABM treaty preventing an arms race is total nonsense. ...
‘The Patriot was not a failure in the Gulf War - the Patriot was one of the things which defeated the Scud and in effect helped us win the Gulf War. One or two of the shots went astray but that is true of every weapon system that has ever been invented. ...
‘President Bush said that we were going ahead with the defensive system but we would make sure that nobody felt we had offensive intentions because we would accompany it by a unilateral reduction of our nuclear arsenal. It seems to me to be a rather clear statement that proceeding with the missile defence system would mean fewer arms of this kind.
‘You have had your arms race all the time that the ABM treaty was in effect and now you have an enormous accumulation and increase of nuclear weapons and that was your arms race promoted by the ABM treaty. Now if you abolish the ABM treaty you are not going to get another arms race - you have got the arms already there - and if you accompany the missile defence construction with the unilateral reduction of our own nuclear arsenal then it seems to me you are finally getting some kind of inducement to reduce these weapons.’
Before the ABM system is in place, and afterwards if ABM fails to be 100% effective in an attack, or is bypassed by terrorists using a bomb in a suitcase or in a ship, civil defense is required and can be effective at saving lives:
‘Paradoxically, the more damaging the effect, that is the farther out its lethality stretches, the more can be done about it, because in the last fall of its power it covers vast areas, where small mitigations will save very large numbers of people.’
‘The purpose of a book is to save people [the] time and effort of digging things out for themselves. ... we have tried to leave the reader with something tangible – what a certain number of calories, roentgens, etc., means in terms of an effect on the human being. ... we must think of the people we are writing for.’
‘During World War II many large cities in England, Germany, and Japan were subjected to terrific attacks by high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Yet, when proper steps had been taken for the protection of the civilian population and for the restoration of services after the bombing, there was little, if any, evidence of panic. It is the purpose of this book to state the facts concerning the atomic bomb, and to make an objective, scientific analysis of these facts. It is hoped that as a result, although it may not be feasible completely to allay fear, it will at least be possible to avoid panic.’
‘The consequences of a multiweapon nuclear attack would certainly be grave ... Nevertheless, recovery should be possible if plans exist and are carried out to restore social order and to mitigate the economic disruption.’
‘Suppose the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had been 1,000 times as powerful ... It could not have killed 1,000 times as many people, but at most the entire population of Hiroshima ... [regarding the hype about various nuclear "overkill" exaggerations] there is enough water in the oceans to drown everyone ten times.’
In 1996, half a century after the nuclear detonations, data on cancers from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was published by D. A. Pierce et al. of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF (Radiation Research vol. 146 pp. 1-27; Science vol. 272, pp. 632-3) for 86,572 survivors, of whom 60% had received bomb doses of over 5 mSv (or 500 millirem in old units) suffering 4,741 cancers of which only 420 were due to radiation, consisting of 85 leukemias and 335 solid cancers.
‘Today we have a population of 2,383 [radium dial painter] cases for whom we have reliable body content measurements. . . . All 64 bone sarcoma [cancer] cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy [1,000 rads], while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy.’
‘... it is important to note that, given the effects of a few seconds of irradiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a threshold near 200 mSv may be expected for leukemia and some solid tumors. [Sources: UNSCEAR, Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation, New York, 1994; W. F. Heidenreich, et al., Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1999), p. 205; and B. L. Cohen, Radiat. Res., vol. 149 (1998), p. 525.] For a protracted lifetime natural exposure, a threshold may be set at a level of several thousand millisieverts for malignancies, of 10 grays for radium-226 in bones, and probably about 1.5-2.0 Gy for lung cancer after x-ray and gamma irradiation. [Sources: G. Jaikrishan, et al., Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. S149 (for natural exposure); R. D. Evans, Health Physics, vol. 27 (1974), p. 497 (for radium-226); H. H. Rossi and M. Zaider, Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1997), p. 85 (for radiogenic lung cancer).] The hormetic effects, such as a decreased cancer incidence at low doses and increased longevity, may be used as a guide for estimating practical thresholds and for setting standards. ...
‘Though about a hundred of the million daily spontaneous DNA damages per cell remain unrepaired or misrepaired, apoptosis, differentiation, necrosis, cell cycle regulation, intercellular interactions, and the immune system remove about 99% of the altered cells. [Source: R. D. Stewart, Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. 101.] ...
‘[Due to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986] as of 1998 (according to UNSCEAR), a total of 1,791 thyroid cancers in children had been registered. About 93% of the youngsters have a prospect of full recovery. [Source: C. R. Moir and R. L. Telander, Seminars in Pediatric Surgery, vol. 3 (1994), p. 182.] ... The highest average thyroid doses in children (177 mGy) were accumulated in the Gomel region of Belarus. The highest incidence of thyroid cancer (17.9 cases per 100,000 children) occurred there in 1995, which means that the rate had increased by a factor of about 25 since 1987.
‘This rate increase was probably a result of improved screening [not radiation!]. Even then, the incidence rate for occult thyroid cancers was still a thousand times lower than it was for occult thyroid cancers in nonexposed populations (in the US, for example, the rate is 13,000 per 100,000 persons, and in Finland it is 35,600 per 100,000 persons). Thus, given the prospect of improved diagnostics, there is an enormous potential for detecting yet more [fictitious] "excess" thyroid cancers. In a study in the US that was performed during the period of active screening in 1974-79, it was determined that the incidence rate of malignant and other thyroid nodules was greater by 21-fold than it had been in the pre-1974 period. [Source: Z. Jaworowski, 21st Century Science and Technology, vol. 11 (1998), issue 1, p. 14.]’
‘Professor Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to the accumulated dose of radiation. ... Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957 Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress.’ – Abstract of thesis by Jennifer Caron, Edward Lewis and Radioactive Fallout: the Impact of Caltech Biologists Over Nuclear Weapons Testing in the 1950s and 60s, Caltech, January 2003.
Dr John F. Loutit of the Medical Research Council, Harwell, England, in 1962 wrote a book called Irradiation of Mice and Men (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London), discrediting the pseudo-science from geneticist Edward Lewis on pages 61, and 78-79:
‘... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls. …
‘What Lewis did, and which I have not copied, was to include in his table another group - spontaneous incidence of leukemia (Brooklyn, N.Y.) - who are taken to have received only natural background radiation throughout life at the very low dose-rate of 0.1-0.2 rad per year: the best estimate is listed as 2 x 10-6 like the others in the table. But the value of 2 x 10-6 was not calculated from the data as for the other groups; it was merely adopted. By its adoption and multiplication with the average age in years of Brooklyners - 33.7 years and radiation dose per year of 0.1-0.2 rad - a mortality rate of 7 to 13 cases per million per year due to background radiation was deduced, or some 10-20 per cent of the observed rate of 65 cases per million per year. ...
‘All these points are very much against the basic hypothesis of Lewis of a linear relation of dose to leukemic effect irrespective of time. Unhappily it is not possible to claim for Lewis’s work as others have done, “It is now possible to calculate - within narrow limits - how many deaths from leukemia will result in any population from an increase in fall-out or other source of radiation” [Leading article in Science, vol. 125, p. 963, 1957]. This is just wishful journalese.
‘The burning questions to me are not what are the numbers of leukemia to be expected from atom bombs or radiotherapy, but what is to be expected from natural background .... Furthermore, to obtain estimates of these, I believe it is wrong to go to [1950s inaccurate, dose rate effect ignoring, data from] atom bombs, where the radiations are qualitatively different [i.e., including effects from neutrons] and, more important, the dose-rate outstandingly different.’
‘From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies [by Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller and other geneticists who worked on plants, who falsely hyped their insect and plant data as valid for mammals like humans during the June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on fallout effects], it appeared that the number (or frequency) of mutations in a given population ... is proportional to the total dose ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions need to be revised, at least for mammals. [Mammals are biologically closer to humans, in respect to DNA repair mechanisms, than short-lived insects whose life cycles are too small to have forced the evolutionary development of advanced DNA repair mechanisms, unlike mammals that need to survive for decades before reproducing.] When exposed to X-rays or gamma rays, the mutation frequency in these animals has been found to be dependent on the exposure (or dose) rate ...
‘At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 R/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. [Emphasis added.] There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent ... with adult female mice ... a delay of at least seven weeks between exposure to a substantial dose of radiation, either neutrons or gamma rays, and conception causes the mutation frequency in the offspring to drop almost to zero. ... recovery in the female members of the population would bring about a substantial reduction in the 'load' of mutations in subsequent generations.’
George Bernard Shaw cynically explains groupthink brainwashing bias:
‘We cannot help it because we are so constituted that we always believe finally what we wish to believe. The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed, we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against, but that this evidence was staring us in the face all the time.’
From the essay titled ‘What is Science?’ by Professor Richard P. Feynman, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and published in The Physics Teacher, vol. 7, issue 6, 1968, pp. 313-20:
‘... great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
‘We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields - radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners' airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. ... you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’
Richard P. Feynman, ‘This Unscientific Age’, in The Meaning of It All, Penguin Books, London, 1998, pages 106-9:
‘Now, I say if a man is absolutely honest and wants to protect the populace from the effects of radioactivity, which is what our scientific friends often say they are trying to do, then he should work on the biggest number, not on the smallest number, and he should try to point out that the [natural cosmic] radioactivity which is absorbed by living in the city of Denver is so much more serious [than the smaller doses from nuclear explosions] ... that all the people of Denver ought to move to lower altitudes.'
Feynman is not making a point about low level radiation effects, but about the politics of ignoring the massive natural background radiation dose, while provoking hysteria over much smaller measured fallout pollution radiation doses. Why is the anti-nuclear lobby so concerned about banning nuclear energy - which is not possible even in principle since most of our nuclear radiation is from the sun and from supernova debris contaminating the Earth from the explosion that created the solar system circa 4,540 million years ago - when they could cause much bigger radiation dose reductions to the population by concentrating on the bigger radiation source, natural background radiation. It is possible to shield natural background radiation by the air, e.g. by moving the population of high altitude cities to lower altitudes where there is more air between the people and outer space, or banning the use of high-altitude jet aircraft. The anti-nuclear lobby, as Feynman stated back in the 1960s, didn't crusade to reduce the bigger dose from background radiation. Instead they chose to argue against the much smaller doses from fallout pollution. Feynman's argument is still today falsely interpreted as a political statement, when it is actually exposing pseudo-science and countering political propaganda. It is still ignored by the media. It has been pointed out by Senator Hickenlooper on page 1060 of the May-June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man:
‘I presume all of us would earnestly hope that we never had to test atomic weapons ... but by the same token I presume that we want to save thousands of lives in this country every year and we could just abolish the manufacture of [road accident causing] automobiles ...’
Dihydrogen monoxide is a potentially very dangerous chemical containing hydrogen and oxygen which has caused numerous severe burns by scalding and deaths by drowning, contributes to the greenhouse effect, accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals, and contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape: 'Dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.'
Protein P53, discovered only in 1979, is encoded by gene TP53, which occurs on human chromosome 17. P53 also occurs in other mammals including mice, rats and dogs. P53 is one of the proteins which continually repairs breaks in DNA, which easily breaks at body temperature: the DNA in each cell of the human body suffers at least two single strand breaks every second, and one double strand (i.e. complete double helix) DNA break occurs at least once every 2 hours (5% of radiation-induced DNA breaks are double strand breaks, while 0.007% of spontaneous DNA breaks at body temperature are double strand breaks)! Cancer occurs when several breaks in DNA happen to occur by chance at nearly the same time, giving several loose strand ends at once, which repair proteins like P53 then repair incorrectly, causing a mutation which can be proliferated somatically. This cannot occur when only one break occurs, because only two loose ends are produced, and P53 will reattach them correctly. But if low-LET ionising radiation levels are increased to a certain extent, causing more single strand breaks, P53 works faster and is able deal with faster breaks as they occur, so that multiple broken strand ends do not arise. This prevents DNA strands being repaired incorrectly, and prevents cancer - a result of mutation caused by faults in DNA - from arising. Too much radiation of course overloads the P53 repair mechanism, and then it cannot repair breaks as they occur, so multiple breaks begin to appear and loose ends of DNA are wrongly connected by P53, causing an increased cancer risk.
1. DNA-damaging free radicals are equivalent to a source of sparks which is always present naturally.
2. Cancer is equivalent the fire you get if the sparks are allowed to ignite the gasoline, i.e. if the free radicals are allowed to damage DNA without the damage being repaired.
3. Protein P53 is equivalent to a fire suppression system which is constantly damping out the sparks, or repairing the damaged DNA so that cancer doesn’t occur.
In this way of thinking, the ‘cause’ of cancer will be down to a failure of a DNA repairing enzyme like protein P53 to repair the damage.
'For the mindset that engendered and enables this situation, which jeopardizes the existence of the United States as a nation as well as the lives of millions of its citizens, some American physicians and certain prestigious medical organizations bear a heavy responsibility.
Charles J. Hitch and Roland B. McKean of the RAND Corporation in their 1960 book The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, pp. 310-57:
‘With each side possessing only a small striking force, a small amount of cheating would give one side dominance over the other, and the incentive to cheat and prepare a preventative attack would be strong ... With each side possessing, say, several thousand missiles, a vast amount of cheating would be necessary to give one side the ability to wipe out the other’s striking capability. ... the more extensive a disarmament agreement is, the smaller the force that a violator would have to hide in order to achieve complete domination. Most obviously, “the abolition of the weapons necessary in a general or ‘unlimited’ war” would offer the most insuperable obstacles to an inspection plan, since the violator could gain an overwhelming advantage from the concealment of even a few weapons.’
Disarmament after World War I caused the following problem which led to World War II (reported by Winston S. Churchill in the London Daily Express newspaper of November 1, 1934):
‘Germany is arming secretly, illegally and rapidly. A reign of terror exists in Germany to keep secret the feverish and terrible preparations they are making.’
British Prime Minister Thatcher's address to the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament on 23 June 1982, where she pointed out that in the years since the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 million people had been killed by 140 non-nuclear conflicts:
‘The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. It is the disposition on the part of some states to impose change on others by resorting to force against other nations ... Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace.’
J. D. Culshaw, the then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his article in the Scientific Advisory Branch journal Fission Fragments, September 1972 (issue No. 19), classified 'Restricted':
'Apart from those who don't want to know or can't be bothered, there seem to be three major schools of thought about the nature of a possible Third World War ...
* 'The first group think of something like World War II but a little worse ...
* '... the second of World War II but very much worse ...
* 'and the third group think in terms of a catastrophe ...
'When the Armageddon concept is in favour, the suggestion that such problems exist leads to "way out" research on these phenomena, and it is sufficient to mention a new catastrophic threat [e.g., 10 years later this was done by Sagan with "nuclear winter" hype, which turned out to be fake because modern concrete cities can't produce firestorms like 1940s wooden-built areas of Hamburg, Dresden and Hiroshima] to stimulate research into the possibilities of it arising. The underlying appeal of this concept is that if one could show that the execution of all out nuclear, biological or chemical warfare would precipitate the end of the world, no one but a mad man would be prepared to initiate such a war. [However, as history proves, plenty of mad men end up gaining power and leading countries into wars.]'
J. K. S. Clayton, then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his introduction, entitled The Challenge - Why Home Defence?, to the 1977 Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch Training Manual for Scientific Advisers:
'Since 1945 we have had nine wars - in Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam, between China and India, China and Russia, India and Pakistan and between the Arabs and Israelis on three occasions. We have had confrontations between East and West over Berlin, Formosa and Cuba. There have been civil wars or rebellions in no less than eleven countries and invasions or threatened invasions of another five. Whilst it is not suggested that all these incidents could have resulted in major wars, they do indicate the aptitude of mankind to resort to a forceful solution of its problems, sometimes with success. ...'
It is estimated that Mongol invaders exterminated 35 million Chinese between 1311-40, without modern weapons. Communist Chinese killed 26.3 million dissenters between 1949 and May 1965, according to detailed data compiled by the Russians on 7 April 1969. The Soviet communist dictatorship killed 40 million dissenters, mainly owners of small farms, between 1917-59. Conventional (non-nuclear) air raids on Japan killed 600,000 during World War II. The single incendiary air raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 killed 140,000 people (more than the total for nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined) at much less than the $2 billion expense of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs! Non-nuclear air raids on Germany during World War II killed 593,000 civilians. The argument that the enemy will continue stocking megaton fallout weapons if we go to cleaner weapons is irrelevant for deterrence, since we're not planning to start war, just to credibly deter invasions. You should not try to lower your standards of warfare to those of your enemy to appease groupthink taboos, or you will end up like Britain's leaders in the 1930s, trying to collaborate with fascists for popular applause.
On 29 October 1982, Thatcher stated of the Berlin Wall: ‘In every decade since the war the Soviet leaders have been reminded that their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles ... one day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.’
On 22 November 1990, she said: ‘Today, we have a Europe ... where the threat to our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact has been removed; where the Berlin Wall has been torn down and the Cold War is at an end. These immense changes did not come about by chance. They have been achieved by strength and resolution in defence, and by a refusal ever to be intimidated.’
‘... peace cannot be guaranteed absolutely. Nobody can be certain, no matter what policies this or any other Government were to adopt, that the United Kingdom would never again be attacked. Also we cannot tell what form such an attack might take. Current strategic thinking suggests that if war were to break out it would start with a period of conventional hostilities of uncertain duration which might or might not escalate to nuclear conflict. ... while nuclear weapons exist there must always be a chance, however small, that they will be used against us [like gas bombs in World War II]. ... as a consequence of war between other nations in which we were not involved fall out from nuclear explosions could fall on a neutral Britain. ... conventional war is not the soft option that is sometimes suggested. It is also too easily forgotten that in World War II some 50 million people died and that conventional weapons have gone on killing people ever since 1945 without respite.’ - - The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Lord Gray of Contin), House of Lords debate on Civil Defence (General Local Authority Functions) Regulations, Hansard, vol. 444, cc. 523-49, 1 November 1983.
‘All of us are living in the light and warmth of a huge hydrogen bomb, 860,000 miles across and 93 million miles away, which is in a state of continuous explosion.’ - Dr Isaac Asimov.
‘Dr Edward Teller remarked recently that the origin of the earth was somewhat like the explosion of the atomic bomb...’ – Dr Harold C. Urey, The Planets: Their Origin and Development, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p. ix.
‘But compared with a supernova a hydrogen bomb is the merest trifle. For a supernova is equal in violence to about a million million million million hydrogen bombs all going off at the same time.’ – Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), The Nature of the Universe, Pelican Books, London, 1963, p. 75.
‘In fact, physicists find plenty of interesting and novel physics in the environment of a nuclear explosion. Some of the physical phenomena are valuable objects of research, and promise to provide further understanding of nature.’ – Dr Harold L. Brode, The RAND Corporation, ‘Review of Nuclear Weapons Effects,’ Annual Review of Nuclear Science, Volume 18, 1968, pp. 153-202.
‘It seems that similarities do exist between the processes of formation of single particles from nuclear explosions and formation of the solar system from the debris of a [4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, type Ia] supernova explosion. We may be able to learn much more about the origin of the earth, by further investigating the process of radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons tests.’ – Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001), University of Arkansas, ‘Radioactive Fallout in Astronomical Settings: Plutonium-244 in the Early Environment of the Solar System,’ pages 83-96 of Radionuclides in the Environment: A Symposium Sponsored By the Division of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology At the 155th Meeting of the American Chemical Society, San Francisco, California, April 1-3, 1968, edited by Symposium Chairman Dr Edward C. Freiling (1922-2000) of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Advances in Chemistry Series No. 93, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.
Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001) in 1956 correctly predicted the existence of water-moderated natural nuclear reactors in flooded uranium ore seams, which were discovered in 1972 by French physicist Francis Perrin in three ore deposits at Oklo in Gabon, where sixteen sites operated as natural nuclear reactors with self-sustaining nuclear fission 2,000 million years ago, each lasting several hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW. The radioactive waste they generated remained in situ for a period of 2,000,000,000 years without escaping. They were discovered during investigations into why the U-235 content of the uranium in the ore was only 0.7171% instead of the normal 0.7202%. Some of the ore, in the middle of the natural reactors, had a U-235 isotopic abundance of just 0.440%. Kuroda's brilliant paper is entitled, 'On the Nuclear Physical Stability of the Uranium Minerals', published in the Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 25 (1956), pp. 781–782 and 1295–1296.
A type Ia supernova explosion, always yielding 4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, results from the critical mass effect of the collapse of a white dwarf as soon as its mass exceeds 1.4 solar masses due to matter falling in from a companion star. The degenerate electron gas in the white dwarf is then no longer able to support the pressure from the weight of gas, which collapses, thereby releasing enough gravitational potential energy as heat and pressure to cause the fusion of carbon and oxygen into heavy elements, creating massive amounts of radioactive nuclides, particularly intensely radioactive nickel-56, but half of all other nuclides (including uranium and heavier) are also produced by the 'R' (rapid) process of successive neutron captures by fusion products in supernovae explosions. Type Ia supernovae occur typically every 400 years in the Milky Way galaxy. On 4 July 1054, Chinese astronomers observed in the sky (without optical instruments) the bright supernova in the constellation Taurus which today is still visible as the Crab Nebula through telescopes. The Crab Nebula debris has a diameter now of 7 light years and is still expanding at 800 miles/second. The supernova debris shock wave triggers star formation when it encounters hydrogen gas in space by compressing it and seeding it with debris; bright stars are observed in the Orion Halo, the 300 light year diameter remains of a supernova. It is estimated that when the solar system was forming 4,540 million years ago, a supernova occurred around 100 light years away, and the heavy radioactive debris shock wave expanded at 1,000 miles/second. Most of the heavy elements including iron, silicon and calcium in the Earth and people are the stable end products of originally radioactive decay chains from the space burst fallout of a 7 x 1026 megatons thermonuclear explosion, created by fusion and successive neutron captures after the implosion of a white dwarf; a supernova explosion.
How would a 1055 megaton hydrogen bomb explosion differ from the big bang? Ignorant answers biased in favour of curved spacetime (ignoring quantum gravity!) abound, such as claims that explosions can’t take place in ‘outer space’ (disagreeing with the facts from nuclear space bursts by Russia and America in 1962, not to mention natural supernova explosions in space!) and that explosions produce sound waves in air by definition! There are indeed major differences in the nuclear reactions between the big bang and a nuclear bomb. But it is helpful to notice the solid physical fact that implosion systems suggest the mechanism of gravitation: in implosion, TNT is well-known to produce an inward force on a bomb core, but Newton's 3rd law says there is an equal and opposite reaction force outward. In fact, you can’t have a radially outward force without an inward reaction force! It’s the rocket principle. The rocket accelerates (with force F = ma) forward by virtue of the recoil from accelerating the exhaust gas (with force F = -ma) in the opposite direction! Nothing massive accelerates without an equal and opposite reaction force. Applying this fact to the measured 6 x 10-10 ms-2 ~ Hc cosmological acceleration of matter radially outward from observers in the universe which was predicted accurately in 1996 and later observationally discovered in 1999 (by Perlmutter, et al.), we find an outward force F = ma and inward reaction force by the 3rd law. The inward force allows quantitative predictions, and is mediated by gravitons, predicting gravitation in a checkable way (unlike string theory, which is just a landscape of 10500 different perturbative theories and so can’t make any falsifiable predictions about gravity). So it seems as if nuclear explosions do indeed provide helpful analogies to natural features of the world, and the mainstream lambda-CDM model of cosmology - with its force-fitted unobserved ad hoc speculative ‘dark energy’ - ignores and sweeps under the rug major quantum gravity effects which increase the physical understanding of particle physics, particularly force unification and the relation of gravitation to the existing electroweak SU(2) x U(1) section of the Standard Model of fundamental forces.
Even Einstein grasped the possibility that general relativity's lambda-CDM model is at best just a classical approximation to quantum field theory, at the end of his life when he wrote to Besso in 1954:
‘I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the [classical differential equation] field principle, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, [non-quantum] gravitation theory included ...’
‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Professor Richard P. Feynman (quoted by Professor Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, New York, 2006, p. 307).
‘The expression of dissenting views may not seem like much of a threat to a powerful organization, yet sometimes it triggers an amazingly hostile response. The reason is that a single dissenter can puncture an illusion of unanimity. ... Among those suppressed have been the engineers who tried to point out problems with the Challenger space shuttle that caused it to blow up. More fundamentally, suppression is a denial of the open dialogue and debate that are the foundation of a free society. Even worse than the silencing of dissidents is the chilling effect such practices have on others. For every individual who speaks out, numerous others decide to play it safe and keep quiet. More serious than external censorship is the problem of self-censorship.’
— Professor Brian Martin, University of Wollongong, 'Stamping Out Dissent', Newsweek, 26 April 1993, pp. 49-50
In 1896, Sir James Mackenzie-Davidson asked Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895: ‘What did you think?’ Röntgen replied: ‘I did not think, I investigated.’ The reason? Cathode ray expert J. J. Thomson in 1894 saw glass fluorescence far from a tube, but due to prejudice (expert opinion) he avoided investigating that X-ray evidence! ‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Richard Feynman, in Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006, p. 307.
Mathematical symbols in this blog: your computer’s browser needs access to standard character symbol sets to display Greek symbols for mathematical physics. If you don’t have the symbol character sets installed, the density symbol 'r' (Rho) will appear as 'r' and the 'p' (Pi) symbol will as 'p', causing confusion with the use of 'r' for radius and 'p' for momentum in formulae. This problem exists with Mozilla Firefox 3, but not with Microsoft Explorer which displays Greek symbols.
Mean yield of the 5,192 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed Russian nuclear stockpile as of January 2009: 0.317 Mt. Total yield: 1,646 Mt.
Mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile as of January 2007: 0.257 Mt. Total yield: 1,172 Mt.
For diffraction damage where damage areas scale as the two-thirds power of explosive yield, this stockpile's area damage potential can be compared to the 20,000,000 conventional bombs of 100 kg size (2 megatons of TNT equivalent total energy) dropped on Germany during World War II: (Total nuclear bomb blast diffraction damaged ground area)/(Total conventional blast diffraction damaged ground area to Germany during World War II) = [4,552*(0.257 Mt)2/3]/[20,000,000*(0.0000001 Mt)2/3] = 1,840/431 = 4.3. Thus, although the entire U.S. stockpile has a TNT energy equivalent to 586 times that of the 2 megatons of conventional bombs dropped on Germany in World War II, it is only capable of causing 4.3 times as much diffraction type damage area, because any given amount of explosive energy is far more efficient when distributed over many small explosions than in a single large explosion! Large explosions are inefficient because they cause unintended collateral damage, wasting energy off the target area and injuring or damaging unintended targets!
In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. (Data: Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pages 1-27.) Over 40 years, in 36,500 survivors monitored, there were 176 leukemia deaths which is 89 more than the control (unexposed) group got naturally. There were 4,687 other cancer deaths, but that was merely 339 above the number in the control (unexposed) group, so this is statistically a much smaller rise than the leukemia result. Natural leukemia rates, which are very low in any case, were increased by 51% in the irradiated survivors, but other cancers were merely increased by just 7%. Adding all the cancers together, the total was 4,863 cancers (virtually all natural cancer, nothing whatsoever to do with radiation), which is just 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, the total increase over the natural cancer rate due to bomb exposure was only 9%, spread over a period of 40 years. There was no increase whatsoever in genetic malformations.
‘If defense is neglected these weapons of attack become effective. They become available and desirable in the eyes of an imperialist dictator, even if his means are limited. Weapons of mass destruction could become equalizers between nations big and small, highly developed and primitive, if defense is neglected. If defense is developed and if it is made available for general prevention of war, weapons of aggression will become less desirable. Thus defense makes war itself less probable. ... One psychological defense mechanism against danger is to forget about it. This attitude is as common as it is disastrous. It may turn a limited danger into a fatal difficulty.’
Advice of Robert Watson-Watt (Chief Scientist on the World War II British Radar Project, defending Britain against enemy attacks): ‘Give them the third best to go on with, the second best comes too late, the best never comes.’
All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of dDELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace": "Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.
Update (19 January 2024): Jane Corbin of BBC TV is continuing to publish ill-informed nuclear weapons capabilities nonsense debunked here since 2006 (a summary of some key evidence is linked here), e.g. her 9pm 18 Jan 2024 CND biased propaganda showpiece Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vgq5/nuclear-armageddon-how-close-are-we which claims - from the standpoint of 1980s Greenham Common anti-American CND propaganda - that the world would be safer without nuclear weapons, despite the 1914-18 and 1939-45 trifles that she doesn't even bother to mention, which were only ended with nuclear deterrence. Moreover, she doesn't mention the BBC's Feb 1927 WMD exaggerating broadcast by Noel-Baker which used the false claim that there is no defence against mass destruction by gas bombs to argue for UK disarmament, something that later won him a Nobel Peace Prize and helped ensure the UK had no deterrent against the Nazis until too late to set off WWII (Nobel peace prizes were also awarded to others for lying, too, for instance Norman Angell whose pre-WWI book The Great Illusion helped ensure Britain's 1914 Liberal party Cabinet procrastinated on deciding what to do if Belgium was invaded, and thus failed deter the Kaiser from triggering the First World War!). The whole basis of her show was to edit out any realism whatsoever regarding the topic which is the title of her programme! No surprise there, then. Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia are currently designing the W93 nuclear warhead for SLBM's to replace the older W76 and W88, and what she should do next time is to address the key issue of what that design should be to deter dictators without risking escalation via collateral damage: "To enhance the flexibility and responsiveness of our nuclear forces as directed in the 2018 NPR, we will pursue two supplemental capabilities to existing U.S. nuclear forces: a low-yield SLBM warhead (W76-2) capability and a modern nuclear sea launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) to address regional deterrence challenges that have resulted from increasing Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities. These supplemental capabilities are necessary to correct any misperception an adversary can escalate their way to victory, and ensure our ability to provide a strategic deterrent. Russia’s increased reliance on non-treaty accountable strategic and theater nuclear weapons and evolving doctrine of limited first-use in a regional conflict, give evidence of the increased possibility of Russia’s employment of nuclear weapons. ... The NNSA took efforts in 2019 to address a gap identified in the 2018 NPR by converting a small number of W76-1s into the W76-2 low-yield variant. ... In 2019, our weapon modernization programs saw a setback when reliability issues emerged with commercial off-the-shelf non-nuclear components intended for the W88 Alteration 370 program and the B61-12 LEP. ... Finally, another just-in-time program is the W80-4 LEP, which remains in synchronized development with the LRSO delivery system. ... The Nuclear Weapons Council has established a requirement for the W93 ... If deterrence fails, our combat-ready force is prepared now to deliver a decisive response anywhere on the globe ..." - Testimony of Commander Charles Richard, US Strategic Command, to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 13 Feb 2020. This issue of how to use nuclear weapons safely to deter major provocations that escalate to horrific wars is surely is the key issue humanity should be concerned with, not the CND time-machine of returning to a non-nuclear 1914 or 1939! Corbin doesn't address it; she uses debunked old propaganda tactics to avoid the real issues and the key facts.
For example, Corbin quotes only half a sentence by Kennedy in his TV speech of 22 October 1962: "it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States", and omits the second half of the sentence, which concludes: "requiring a full retalitory response upon the Soviet Union." Kennedy was clearly using US nuclear superiority in 1962 to deter Khrushchev from allowing the Castro regime to start any nuclear war with America! By chopping up Kennedy's sentence, Corbin juggles the true facts of history to meet the CND agenda of "disarm or be annihilated." Another trick is her decision to uncritically interview CND biased anti-civil defense fanatics like the man (Professor Freedman) who got Bill Massey of the Sunday Express to water down my article debunking pro-war CND type "anti-nuclear" propaganda lies on civil defense in 1995! Massey reported to me that Freedman claimed civil defense is no use against a H-bomb, which he claims is cheaper than dirt cheap shelters, exactly what Freedman wrote in his deceptive letter published in the 26 March 1980 Times newspaper: "for far less expenditure the enemy could make a mockery of all this by increasing the number of attacking weapons", which completely ignores the Russian dual-use concept of simply adding blast doors to metro tubes and underground car parks, etc. In any case, civil defense makes deterrence credible as even the most hard left wingers like Duncan Campbell acknowledged on page 5 of War Plan UK (Paladin Books, London, 1983): "Civil defence ... is a means, if need be, of putting that deterrence policy, for those who believe in it, into practical effect."
The radiation scare-mongering fanatics ignore the fact that nearly all the cancers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were natural as proved by the incidence in unexposed groups. They simply lie that all cancers are due to radiation. This is a deliberate piece of misinformation, and the media aid spreading anti-nuclear propaganda.
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