Thermal radiation shielding by crater ejecta in the 1.4 kt Buffalo 2 test, Maralinga, 1956

For some time sequence data, click here.  The crater ejecta is thrown up within mere milliseconds, ahead of the main thermal pulse from the fireball, drastically reducing the thermal radiation in a terrorist type surface burst, even before building skyline shielding is included in the analysis for a city (rather than an unobstructed desert like Maralinga, Australia, seen in the Buffalo-2 test of 1956).

Buffalo 2 crater throwout stream trajectories, and cloud rise.  Effective early mixing of sand and bomb debris produces a relatively large amount of stem radioactivity.

Buffalo-2 cloud rise and mixing.

For the fallout pattern data on stem and cloud head fallout from this test, see the previous post.

Compare the surface burst 1.4 kt Buffalo-2 burst (above) to the 15 kt burst on a 100 ft aluminium tower, Buffalo-1 (photos below):

15 kt Buffalo-1 burst on top of a 100 ft aluminium tower.  There is no crater throwout cone to shield the fireball because cratering is effectively suppressed by the height of burst, although precursor dust has some shielding effect as in the Trinity test of 1945.

Key data from some British nuclear weapon trial research reports (summary of some British nuclear weapons reports, linked here and here).

Islamic State plan for world domination, Part 1, the Islamic State in 2020: "storm in a teacup" to be ignored or discounted as "war-mongering propaganda", like the Nazis threat was minimized by the British proto-racists, fascists and appeasers.

Islamic State plan for world domination, Part 2: assassination of HM Queen of England on 15 August 2015: again the "politically correct" will blow raspberries and ignore dangers.

International Business Times on assassination plot by Islamic State to murder the Queen of England in VJ day ceremony

Update (21 September 2015):

Jeremy Corbyn anti Trident anti nuclear agenda propaganda: if we "save" £100 billion (7% of the National Debt), we can spend it on the NHS instead!  Unfortunately, we already spend £100 billion per year (or more) on the NHS.  That's its budget now.  We we get rid of nuclear deterrence and simply end up unable to deter provocations that lead to a third world war (which Putin is currently rehearsing close to UK airspace, according to the latest news), the cost to the NHS of casualties from the resulting war could be considerably higher.

This is related to the anti-interventionist stance in Syrian civil war, which is now causing a crisis of refugees across Europe, in addition to the 200,000 dead in the war itself, which continues.  Non-interventionism and disarmament to save cash may sound a great "peace" agenda, but it simply turns the murder weapons from sniper bullets and IEDs to starvation, cold and disease in concentration camps, set up for ethnic cleansing.  When the NHS began in 1948 "it had a budget of £437 million (roughly £9 billion at today’s value)", therefore in real terms the NHS budget has multiplied by a factor of over 10 since it began, despite all the hype about "cutbacks" and "underfunding".

Putin prepares for nuclear war with the UK, 21 September 2015 news report:

"Pilots in one of the two Russian supersonic bombers intercepted near UK skies last week had started the countdown to arm a nuclear bomb, sources revealed last night. The discovery was made after RAF specialists analyzed a four-second signal transmitted from one of the Tupolev Tu-160 bombers, known by Nato as "Blackjacks", in the days following Thursday's incursion. Analysts at RAF Boulmer, Britain's Control and Reporting Centre, confirmed that the Russian bombers had begun the sequence to arm nuclear weapons while carrying out the incursion. It is not the first time they have done this and comparison with a similar signal transmitted by a TU-95 "Bear" bomber revealed Russian air crew had begun the countdown during an incursion last year, as well. The Sunday Express revealed that the bomber involved in the February 2014 incident had been carrying a submarine-busting nuclear depth charge designed to attack Britain's Trident-carrying Vanguard submarines. "All I can say is that we now know it related to the first stage of arming a nuclear device," said a senior RAF source last night.  "There are several additional arming procedures which, thankfully, were not carried out."  Last week's air incursion, which was intercepted by Two RAF Typhoon jets, was the seventh this year by Russian forces. RAF Boulmer, in Longhoughton. Northmberland, is the headquarters of the Air Surveillance and Control System force and the nerve centre of UK air security operations. Once a target is tracked the information is fed into the NATO network operated by the Combined Air Operations Centre at Uedem, Germany and the RAF's Air Defence Operations Centre at Air Command, High Wycombe.  However it was only when a female analyst decoded last week's transmission that it was realised Russia had carried out a similar exercise last year. Aviation expert Justin Bronk, of the Royal United Services Institute think tank, said the revelation confirmed a "worrying" development in Russian strategy. "Putin does not allow his air force to fly with cruise missiles because he is so worried about defections, but dual purpose bombs such as nuclear depth charges are a different matter. And these are designed to be a direct threat to or nuclear deterrent. ... Britain's Nimrod fleet, which was scrapped as part of the SDR in 2010, used to perform so-called "delousing" exercises, whereby it would give advanced warning of Russian aircraft when Trident-carrying Vanguard submarines set off on patrol. ...

Nato aircraft were "scrambled" more than 500 times over Europe in 2014, a fourfold increase over the previous year. Almost 90 per cent of those flights involved Russian incursions."

Seeing that Richard Rhodes (author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb in which quotation marks are used to try to validate a scare-mongering Japanese claim of seeing nuclear survivors running around without feet and false claims are made that the incorrect single mortality curve for Hiroshima which ignored grossly differing survival rates in different situations - 50% survival at 0.12 mile from ground zero in modern concrete city buildings versus 1.3 mile radius for personnel outdoors, according to the 1962-1977 editions of Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons) in his more recent, openly prejudiced anti-nuclear rant Arsenals of Folly poured a great deal of opprobrium on Reagan for U2 and other aircraft incursions bordering Russian airspace during the Cold War, perhaps he will write a similar book critical of Putin's nuclear bomber buzzing of Britain and Continental Europe today?  Dream on!

The disarmament agenda of the "pacifists" of the 1930s tells you that it's the defense of (limited) freedom which causes protests. Anyone who dares to ask for more freedom, more democracy, and more liberty is hated by those political elitists whose power comes from ignorant, subjective populism, which is catering to prejudice and delusion.

Britain's New Labour Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is anti-nuclear, anti-Trident renewal. He won a majority in the leadership after "Red" Ed Miliband was defeated in the May 2015 general election. At least Corbyn is honest (to start with), in the sense we know he's a Marxist-communist at the hard left of socialism.  He is not pretending to be otherwise, although that may come yet (Hitler pretended to be a pacifist, and to want peace when it suited him, on his road to war).  Note that Britain's £1.4 trillion national debt is exactly the same as that of bankrupt Greece when expressed per capita, since Greece has one sixth the population and one sixth the national debt of Britain, each person in each country has £22,000 of national debt.  The reason why Greece is in credit crisis is that Britain is able to go on borrowing more money at a reasonable interest rate (running a deficit, or an growing debt) is that people trust Britain's economy more.  The Greek economy and government has a null credit rating because it is corrupt: tax collection doesn't work, the state spends vast sums employing people in unproductive work, etc.

The criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn and Marxists generally on the left of socialism in Britain is that they will spend huge sums re-nationalizing the railways, etc., thus increasing the inefficient, subsidised public sector of the economy which live off tax revenue, and also in the process trying to do that by taxing to death (or driving away from Britain by threats of high tax) the Marxist-hating "capitalist, imperialist, immoral" private sector of the economy, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.  Already, however, we have the worst of all worlds, since the debt is there, as bad per person as Greece's, awaiting a crisis to spark off a large increase in interest rates from their rock bottom level today of under 1%, and thus Britain's bankrupcy (a return to the 1970s when we relied on an IMF bailout).  Instead of reducing the debt, the "Conservative" prime minister David Cameron has actually increased it to record levels, far higher than in May 2010 when Labour lost power: he has continued to allow the deficit (rate of increase of debt) to rise, far from reducing the debt.  The deficit is the time-derivative of the debt, so simple calculus tells you that the day the deficit finally falls to 0, the debt problem will be far from solved: on that day, the debt will be at its maximum!

Furthermore, David Cameron is now plagued by allegations from his former funder, of taking part in weird Oxford University "Pig gate" ceremony.  Thus, the credibility of all of Britain's "political elite" is next to absolute zero, just like the future credibility of our nuclear deterrent.  It's a repeat of the 1930s financial crisis, "disarmament makes enemies feel safe to provoke us"-propaganda, and the war crimes will follow from our lack of money, arms and civil defense.  A problem with leaving civil defense to be implemented in a period of international tension is that you need it set up in times of peace, because as events in Britain around 22 October 1962 showed, when there is an imminent threat of war, politicians can become paranoid that civil defense is so effective it will - like mobilization in August 1914 - act as a trigger for war itself.  However, Putin's invasion of Crimea - supposedly protected by Britain under the 1994 Bucharest Memorandum - in January last year proves that there are provocations that seriously need addressing.  Putin has just agreed a deal for building a new airbase in Belarus for Su-27 fighters, the first full scale base in that country since the USSR was abolished.  Putin is partly responsible for the Syrian massacre, by backing President Assad and supplying him weapons, killing 50,000 a year and driving over half a million refugees out annually (due to destroyed cities and homes).  This can crudely be compared to the fascist role in the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, when Hitler propped up General Franco's regime against freedom fighters which included an international brigade (George Orwell and many others).  Freedom was lost in Spain, and then WWII started.

Last month, it was questioned in the press whether Russia is "actively preparing" for war in Europe after 80,000 Russians were mobilized for massive military exercises (4,000 military exercises were scheduled for this year).

Above: "Ian Kearns, director of the London-based European Leadership Network, which conducted the study, said the war games 'are contributing to a climate of mistrust' that have 'on occasion become the focal point for some quite close encounters between the NATO and Russian militaries.'  The research found signs that 'Russia is preparing for a conflict with NATO and NATO is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia.'  The ELN study said NATO plans approximately 270 exercises this year, while Russia has announced 4,000 drills at all levels."

Let's see how many of the "pacifists" start campaigning for either credible nuclear deterrence (neutron bombs to deter those massed lines of tanks from invading) or civil defense to mitigate the damage of war and save lives.  The 1930s experience of appeasement, plus the Cold War experience shows that you don't ever get pro-civil defense rallies or pro-deterrence marches.  Most people always prefer to leave it too late to deter a world war or a cold war, then they complain about the consequences when the events escalate without provocation.  Facts: (1) Appeasement failed to achieve peace in the 1930s.  (2) Rearmament ended the Cold War in the 1980s. These facts are usually camouflaged with a lot of nonsense.  A fact of human nature is that any perceived weakness, of either will or actual strength, encourages aggression, coercion, and thus war.