The Effects of Nuclear Weapons www.nukegate.org

Errors in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons: www.nukegate.org Glasstone's book ignores tactical nuclear weapons like the low yield cleaner air burst neutron bomb to credibly deter invasions, and ignores simple civil defense like smoke screens and improvised foxhole and earth shelters proved in nuclear tests, and uses unobstructed terrain data to exaggerate collateral damage from nuclear weapons thermal, nuclear radiation and blast effects! It is no longer a reliable or trustworthy reference book.

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

News and the Culture of Lying, by Paul H Weaver

Paul H Weaver, News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works, Macmillan, 1994, pages 1-2, 22-26, and 220:

"Journalists need officials' events and information to make news stories. Officials need journalists' attention to gain public support for their projects and careers. The two engage in barter ... news isn't simply a report of what happened ... it's a story about crisis and emergency response ... They enact, select, and narrate events in the image of the genre's overarching drama of urgent public danger ... The news stops representing the real world and begins to falsify it ... into an exercise in deceit, manipulation, and exploitation. ...

"The media themselves, of course, routinely deny the thesis I am propounding ... They vehemently reject the notion that they are foisting a manipulative alternative reality on the public. They resent any judgement that their behavior might be undermining constitutional values ... the role of the press as they see it is to be the servant and enabler of democracy. This view ... the image of the journalist as an observer and reporter who has no point of view - is the emblem and product of a historic shift [i.e., Joe Pulitzer’s flashy front page headline-promoted muckraking scandal story-based popularization of newspapers, making him rich, which changed the media culture by bankrupting honesty] ...

"Thus was born the concept of news as a story about crisis ... There was no such thing ... nearly all journalists have a nagging, fugitive, contrary awareness of a reality that is sharply at odds with the myth. ... Once in a while it is exposed [Example given in detail: President Carter threatened to sue the Washington Post in 1981 when it's "Ear" gossip column repeated a false rumor that President Carter had bugged Ronald Reagan. The Washington Post was forced by the threat of libel action to issue a ham-fisted apology, admitting in print: "We weren't there. ... Perhaps it is foolish to expect people to read newspapers with rabbinical or judicial care, to sift out the fair from the unfair, or the justified from the unjustified inferences that can be drawn from a collection of words, even when those words don't add up to what an angry subject thinks they do." - Washington Post, 14 October 1981, page A27.]

"In other words, the Post was admitting that it publishes, without correction or other caution, news reports based on statements that it believes to be untrue. The Post was saying that it considers such reports to be up-to-standard journalism ... the news media routinely write up as real news, actions and sentiments that they believe to be fabrications. [Weaver also exposes the corruption of the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee who published the hoax story about an 8 year old crack addict, winning the paper's reporter the Pulitzer Prize, which he was forced to return!] ...

"My intellectual involvement with news began almost thirty years ago in the ivory towers of Harvard University, where I wrote a PhD thesis on the politics of the press, and in particular, on the way the news genre itself ... shapes public opinion and current events. ... I liked journalism ... quit my academic career and joined the staff of Fortune magazine. Over the decade that followed, I worked as a writer, editor, Washington bureau chief ... In the media world, news events usually had a double identity. On the surface there was a made-up public story put out for the purpose of manipulating others ... This, I eventually realized, was the insight that had eluded me at Harvard. ...

"The only cure ... is to take away from the political system as it exists the communications structures that give citizens the illusion that they're participating when they're being manipulated ... The cure for the journalism and journalistic politics that are displacing liberal values is an effort on everyone's part to recover the largely but by no means entirely lost perspectives and skills of active citizenship."

Paul H Weaver, News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works, Macmillan, 1994, pages 198-199:

"Thus the crises news covers aren't the hard realities we automatically take them to be. They are, or soon become, a highly artificial propaganda in which what the media covers is a fabrication and the impression it conveys is unreal. ... half a dozen commercial airplane crashes killing a few hundred people a year are big, big news ... By contrast, two million car crashes a year killing forty thousand people are treated as a ... insignificant story. ... illegal drugs that kill a few thousand Americans a year are a very big story ... two legal drugs that kill several hundred thousand people a year are scarcely covered or are ignored altogether. Such coverage does not paint a picture of reality, it bamboozles."

Of course, there's a deeper problem here covered in Weaver's chapter 2, "Pulitzer's Revolution": "There's nothing accidental about the tendency of news to promote an illiberal and undemocratic politics. ... Today the Pulitzer name is famous because of the program of prizes for journalistic excellence administered by Columbia University ... He was sui generis, a loner who did things his own way, unrespectable, controversial, reviled, rebellious - and as I said - the man who practically singlehandedly founded modern journalism. ... Pulitzer was an outsider given to sharp resentment of in-groups yet also intensely interested in social acceptance and success. Journalism was a magnificient way to pursue both ... Pulitzer developed muckraking news stories ... and found large audiences. ... When [in 1883] Pulitzer bought the [New York] World, it had a daily circulation of some 11,000 ... In May 1885 ... daily circulation was 125,000 ... By 1895 ... Pulitzer had raised ... circulation to 540,000 ... Pulitzer was taking events out of their official context and framing them in stories with a sharp dramatic focus ... by incorporating into journalism the elements of drama. ... There were villains and heroes. Stories had beginnings, middles, turning points, endings. Not least, there was spectacle ... directly reflecting the hopes and fears of the audience."

Basically, the media's corruption is well explained by two quotations: (1) Dr Samuel Johnson said: "Wickedness is always easier than virtue, for it takes the short-cut to everything", and (2) Anon said: "All power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely". The mass media has absolute power, so is absolutely corrupt.

In other words, fiction sells better than fact, so journalism was corrupted accordingly. The victim is the culprit, Joe Public. If Joe Public could resist drugs like fake news, it would go bankrupt. But it's addicted. Fake news, story telling, was established in place of reality. The further from reality it gets, the harder its agenda of evil is enforced by censorship of the truth as being unpopular. We end up with compulsive liars in charge of "science" and "news", a world in which any remaining partially honest politicians or others rapidly become hated victims of corrupted, bigoted, self-deceived, fake communist "equality" blather.

However, Weaver points out on page 187 that once fake news raises a hue and cry, it develops a momentum all of its own, because politicians latch on to it and use it to set up a whole industry or department, which is automatically dedicated to censoring out or distorting the truth in order to protect itself from attack: "Media politicians ... know they can't be picky when it comes to deciding which news stories they'll hitch their wagons to. They try to take a ride on more or less anything plausible that comes along and labor opportunistically to find some way to derive personal or organizational benefit ..."

Weaver, page 3: "Emergencies and crises open up a giant loophole in this textbook image of constitutional society. When society's survival is endangered, the . . . limits of representative democracy recede . . . Representation and deliberation are put on hold since there isn't time to hear everyone out . . ." (Disagree a bit, there, mate. There's never time to hear everyone out even when there's not a state of emergency! There's always some kind of emergency engineered by the powers that be, be it debt, fuel, pollution, or war. This is why governments are very careful not to simply get a credible deterrent and keep shelters from the last war in good condition! To do so would prevent the crises that so regularly give the many so-called "democratic governments" the far-reaching, long-lived emergency powers they need to do what they want, as effective hypocritical, propaganda driven dictatorships . . .)

Weaver, pages 6-7: "The central fact about the interaction between news media and the people they cover is that the people being covered know the media are watching and behave accordingly. As a result, the actions the media covers as news aren't spontaneous events but self-conscious efforts to create favorable impressions. . . . the news media are aware that newsmakers are performing, but they nonetheless treat newsmakers' fabrications as authentic . . . Thus, both parties deny the manipulative nature of their roles in making the news . . . For groups and organizations seeking subsidies . . . misleading news images of crisis that they initiate . . . get inhibited constitutional institutions to provide the special-interest benefits they want."

Weaver, page 14: "In 1964, during his campaign for the presidency, Lyndon Johnson said over and over again that he intended and planned 'no wider war in Vietnam'. He would never send 'American boys to die in Asian jungles'. It was his Republican opponent Barry Goldwater [who wanted to deter/stop an invasion of South Vietnam using tactical nuclear weapons, just as then used to deter Russians from invading Western Europe], who was the dangerous, war-minded hawk, Johnson insisted. The election turned on this issue. Johnson was elected in a landslide, and within weeks the administration announced the military buildup . . ."

Weaver, page 67: "News in our time . . . must maintain the fiction that they [journalist and official] are merely telling it like it is when in fact they're putting on a dog and pony show to activate the extraordinary powers and immunities of the emergency state." (John Locke argued in his "Second Treatise on Civil Government" that emergencies and crises were the only way for a "democracy" to legitimise - or at least authorize - dictatorial acts such as bad wars or suspension of freedom in the name of the general good. This sadly goes too far with anti-nuclear scare-mongering and fear-mongering fake news caused by unnecessary secrecy that covers up key data from public view, debate, analysis and policy forming! However, there is hope too: Weaver on page 20 quotes American opinion polls that show that the percentage of people with a "great deal of confidence" in press and TV fell from 23% and 19%, respectively, in 1973, to merely 11% and 12% in 1993! In other words, by 1993 nearly 90% of the public recognised there were problems. On page 124, Weaver even debunks the anti-Nixon bias of CBS News with Walter Cronkite during 1968 election campaign coverage; by chasing "fashion" around in endless circles you lose your sense of direction, your moral compass and become corrupted.)

28,000 Recently declassified UK Atomic Weapons Establishment reports on the effects of nuclear tests (updated: 13 November 2026)