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.
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 Uncle Sam's folk.)
This means that they can invade territory with relative impunity, since the West won't deter such provocations by flexible response - the aim of Russia is to push the West into a policy of massive retaliation of direct attacks only, and then use smaller provocations instead - and Russia can then use its tactical nuclear weapons to "defend" its newly invaded territories by declaring them to now be part of Mother Russia and under Moscow's nuclear umbrella. Russia has repeatedly made it clear - for decades - that it expects a direct war with NATO to rapidly escalate into nuclear WWIII and it has prepared civil defense shelters and evacuation tactics to enable it. Herman Kahn's public warnings of this date back to his testimony to the June 1959 Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, but for decades were deliberately misrepresented by most media outlets. President Kennedy's book "Why England Slept" makes it crystal clear how exactly the same "pacifist" propaganda tactics in the 1930s (that time it was the "gas bomb knockout blow has no defense so disarm, disarm, disarm" lie) caused war, by using fear to slow credible rearmament in the face of state terrorism. By the time democracies finally decided to issue an ultimatum, Hitler had been converted - by pacifist appeasement - from a cautious tester of Western indecision, into an overconfident aggressor who simply ignored last-minute ultimatums.
Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons (US Government) is written in a highly ambiguous fashion (negating nearly every definite statement with a deliberately obfuscating contrary statement to leave a smokescreen legacy of needless confusion, obscurity and obfuscation), omits nearly all key nuclear test data and provides instead misleading generalizations of data from generally unspecified weapon designs tested over 60 years ago which apply to freefield measurements on unobstructed radial lines in deserts and oceans. It makes ZERO analysis of the overall shielding of radiation and blast by their energy attenuation in modern steel and concrete cities, and even falsely denies such factors in its discussion of blast in cities and in its naive chart for predicting the percentage of burns types as a function of freefield outdoor thermal radiation, totally ignoring skyline shielding geometry (similar effects apply to freefield nuclear radiation exposure, despite vague attempts to dismiss this by non-quantitative talk about some scattered radiation arriving from all angles). It omits the huge variations in effects due to weapon design e.g. cleaner warhead designs and the tactical neutron bomb. It omits quantitative data on EMP as a function of burst yield, height and weapon design.
It omits most of the detailed data collected from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the casualty rates as a function of type of building or shelter and blast pressure. It fails to analyse overall standardized casualty rates for different kinds of burst (e.g. shallow underground earth penetrators convert radiation and blast energy into ground shock and cratering against hard targets like silos or enemy bunkers). It omits a detailed analysis of blast precursor effects. It omits a detailed analysis of fallout beta and gamma spectra, fractionation, specific activity (determining the visibility of the fallout as a function of radiation hazard, and the mass of material to be removed for effective decontamination), and data which does exist on the effect of crater soil size distribution upon the fused fallout particle size distribution (e.g. tests like Small Boy in 1962 on the very fine particles at Frenchman Flats gave mean fallout particle sizes far bigger than the pre-shot soil, proving that - as for Trinitite - melted small soil particles fuse together in the fireball to produce larger fallout particles, so the pre-shot soil size distribution is irrelevant for fallout analysis).
By generally (with few exceptions) lumping "effects" of all types of bursts together into chapters dedicated to specific effects, it falsely gives the impression that all types of nuclear explosions produce similar effects with merely "quantitative differences". This is untrue because air bursts eliminate fallout casualties entirely, while slight burial (e.g. earth penetrating warheads) eliminates thermal (including fires and dust "climatic nuclear winter" BS), the initial radiation and severe blast effects, while massively increasing ground shock, and the same applies to shallow underwater bursts. So a more objective treatment to credibly deter all aggression MUST emphasise the totally different collateral damage effects, by dedicating chapters to different kinds of burst (high altitude/space bursts, free air bursts, surface bursts, underground bursts, underwater bursts), and would include bomb design implications on these effects in detail. A great deal of previously secret and limited distributed nuclear effects data has been declassified since 1977, and new research has been done. Our objectives in this review are: (a) to ensure that an objective independent analysis of the relevant nuclear weapons effects facts is placed on the record in case the currently, increasingly vicious Cold War 2.0 escalates into some kind of limited "nuclear demonstration" by aggressors to try to end a conventional war by using coercive threats, (b) to ensure the lessons of tactical nuclear weapon design for deterring large scale provocations (like the invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939 which triggered world wars) are re-learned in contrast to Dulles "massive retaliation" (incredible deterrent) nonsense, and finally (c) to provide some push to Western governments to "get real" with our civil defense, to try to make credible our ageing "strategic nuclear deterrent". We have also provided a detailed analysis of recently declassified Russian nuclear warhead design data, shelter data, effects data, tactical nuclear weapons employment manuals, and some suggestions for improving Western thermonuclear warheads to improve deterrence.
‘The evidence from Hiroshima indicates that blast survivors, both injured and uninjured, in buildings later consumed by fire [caused by the blast overturning charcoal braziers used for breakfast in inflammable wooden houses filled with easily ignitable bamboo furnishings and paper screens] were generally able to move to safe areas following the explosion. Of 130 major buildings studied by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey ... 107 were ultimately burned out ... Of those suffering fire, about 20 percent were burning after the first half hour. The remainder were consumed by fire spread, some as late as 15 hours after the blast. This situation is not unlike the one our computer-based fire spread model described for Detroit.’
- Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 3: What the Planner Needs to Know About Fire Ignition and Spread, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, Panel 27.
The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, US Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Theatre, report 92, volume 2 (May 1947, secret):
Volume one, page 14:
“... the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only:
“... capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).”
Volume two examines the firestorm and the ignition of clothing by the thermal radiation flash in Hiroshima:
Page 24:
“Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.” [Contrast this to the obfuscation and vagueness in Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons!]
Page 88:
“Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 unclassified USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims]
“... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.”
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!
The basic fact is that nuclear weapons can deter/stop invasions unlike the conventional weapons that cause mass destruction, and nuclear collateral damage is eliminated easily for nuclear weapons by using them on military targets, since for high yields at collateral damage distances all the effects are sufficiently delayed in arrival to allow duck and cover to avoid radiation and blast wind/flying debris injuries (unlike the case for the smaller areas affected by smaller yield conventional weapons, where there is little time on seeing the flash to duck and cover to avoid injury), and as the original 1951 SECRET American Government "Handbook on Capabilities of Atomic Weapons" (limited report AD511880L, forerunner to today's still secret EM-1) stated in Section 10.32:
"PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT ITEM TO BE REMEMBERED WHEN ESTIMATING EFFECTS ON PERSONNEL IS THE AMOUNT OF COVER ACTUALLY INVOLVED. ... IT IS OBVIOUS THAT ONLY A FEW SECONDS WARNING IS NECESSARY UNDER MOST CONDITIONS TO TAKE FAIRLY EFFECTIVE COVER. THE LARGE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES IN JAPAN RESULTED FOR THE MOST PART FROM THE LACK OF WARNING."
As for Hitler's stockpile of 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas, whose strategic and also tactical use was deterred by proper defences (gas masks for all civilians and soldiers, as well as UK stockpiles of fully trial-tested deliverable biological agent anthrax and mustard gas retaliation capacity), it is possible to deter strategic nuclear escalation to city bombing, even within a world war with a crazy terrorist, if all the people are protected by both defence and deterrence.
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: 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 lord Zuckerman in the 70s 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 calling for conscription instead. The abolishment of UK conscription for national service 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?
The 1946 Report of the British Mission to Japan, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compiled by a team of 16 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during November 1945, which included 10 UK Home Office civil defence experts (W. N. Thomas, J. Bronowski, D. C. Burn, J. B. Hawker, H. Elder, P. A. Badland, R. W. Bevan, F. H. Pavry, F. Walley, O. C. Young, S. Parthasarathy, A. D. Evans, O. M. Solandt, A. E. Dark, R. G. Whitehead and F. G. S. Mitchell) found: "Para. 26. Reinforced concrete buildings of very heavy construction in Hiroshima, even when within 200 yards of the centre of damage, remained structurally undamaged. ... Para 28. These observations make it plain that reinforced concrete framed buildings can resist a bomb of the same power detonated at these heights, without employing fantastic thicknesses of concrete. ... Para 40. The provision of air raid shelters throughout Japan was much below European standards. ... in Hiroshima ... they were semi-sunk, about 20 feet long, had wooden frames, and 1.5-2 feet of earth cover. ... Exploding so high above them, the bomb damaged none of these shelters. ... Para 42. These observations show that the standard British shelters would have performed well against a bomb of the same power exploded at such a height. Anderson shelters, properly erected and covered, would have given protection. Brick or concrete surfac shelters with adequate reinforcement would have remained safe from collapse. The Morrison shelter is designed only to protect its occupants from the refuge load of a house, and this it would have done. Deep shelters such as the refuge provided by the London Underground would have given complete protection. ... Para 60. Buildings and walls gave complete protection from flashburn."
Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons in Table 12.21 on p547 flunks making this point by giving data without citing its source to make it credible to readers: it correlated 14% mortality (106 killed out of 775 people in Hiroshima's Telegraph Office) to "moderate damage" at 500m in Hiroshima (the uncited "secret" source was NP-3041, Table 12, applying to unwarned people inside modern concrete buildings).
"A weapon whose basic design would seem to provide the essence of what Western morality has long sought for waging classical battlefield warfare - to keep the war to a struggle between the warriors and exclude the non-combatants and their physical assets - has been violently denounced, precisely because it achieves this objective." - Samuel T. Cohen (quoted in Chapman Pincher, The secret offensive, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1985, Chapter 15: The Neutron Bomb Offensive, p210).
The reality is, dedicated enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons were used to credibly deter the concentrations of force required for triggering of WWIII during the 1st Cold War, and the thugs who support Russian propaganda for Western disarmament got rid of them on our side, but not on the Russian side. Air burst neutron bombs or even as subsurface earth penetrators of relatively low fission yield (where the soil converts energy that would otherwise escape as blast and radiation into ground shock for destroying buried tunnels - new research on cratering shows that a 20 kt subsurface burst creates similar effects on buried hard targets as a 1 Mt surface burst), they cause none of the vast collateral damage to civilians that we see now in Ukraine and Gaza, or that we saw in WWII and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. This is 100% contrary to CND propaganda which is a mixture of lying on nuclear explosion collateral damage, escalation/knockout blow propaganda (of the type used to start WWII by appeasers) and lying on the designs of nuclear weapons in order to ensure the Western side (but not the thugs) gets only incredible "strategic deterrence" that can't deter the invasions that start world wars (e.g. Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939.) "Our country entered into an agreement in Budapest, Hungary when the Soviet Union was breaking up that we would guarantee the independence of Ukraine." - Tom Ramos. There really is phoney nuclear groupthink left agenda politics at work here: credible relatively clean tactical nuclear weapons are banned in the West but stocked by Russia, which has civil defense shelters to make its threats far more credible than ours! We need low-collateral damage enhanced-neutron and earth-penetrator options for the new Western W93 warhead, or we remain vulnerable to aggressive coercion by thugs, and invite invasions. Ambiguity, the current policy ("justifying" secrecy on just what we would do in any scenario) actually encourages experimental provocations by enemies to test what we are prepared to do (if anything), just as it did in 1914 and the 1930s.
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.)
There is more to Fuchs' influence on the UK H-bomb than I go into that paper; Chapman Pincher alleged that Fuchs was treated with special leniency at his trial and later he was given early release in 1959 because of his contributions and help with the UK H-bomb as author of the key Fuchs-von Neumann x-ray compression mechanism patent. For example, Penney visited Fuchs in June 1952 in Stafford Prison; see pp309-310 of Frank Close's 2019 book "Trinity". Close argues that Fuchs gave Penney a vital tutorial on the H-bomb mechanism during that prison visit. That wasn't the last help, either, since the UK Controller for Atomic Energy Sir Freddie Morgan wrote Penney on 9 February 1953 that Fuchs was continuing to help. Another gem: Close gives, on p396, the story of how the FBI became suspicious of Edward Teller, after finding a man of his name teaching at the NY Communist Workers School in 1941 - the wrong Edward Teller, of course - yet Teller's wife was indeed a member of the Communist-front "League of women shoppers" in Washington, DC.
Chapman Pincher, who attended the Fuchs trial, writes about Fuchs hydrogen bomb lectures to prisoners in chapter 19 of his 2014 autobiography, Dangerous to know (Biteback, London, pp217-8): "... Donald Hume ... in prison had become a close friend of Fuchs ... Hume had repaid Fuchs' friendship by organising the smuggling in of new scientific books ... Hume had a mass of notes ... I secured Fuchs's copious notes for a course of 17 lectures ... including how the H-bomb works, which he had given to his fellow prisoners ... My editor agreed to buy Hume's story so long as we could keep the papers as proof of its authenticity ... Fuchs was soon due for release ..."
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. "
'Apparently, the dirty stem [of MIKE shot] was due to the coral particles, debris, and water which were sucked high into the air. Around the base of the stem, there appeared to be a curtain of water which soon dropped back around the area where the island of Elugelab had been.' - Operation IVY, 1952, U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency report DNA 6036F, page 187.
Stanbury also compares all these data with the upwind fallout data in the June 1957 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which was based on the MIKE data for upwind fallout. Stanbury concluded: 'We are forced, therefore, to conclude that the heavy upwind contamination for a wind speed of 15 miles per hour, which is deduced from Table 9.71 of Effects of Nuclear Weapons is incompatible with the presently accepted physical model of the explosion which explains the megaton trial data so well. For lower wind speeds, however, it is clear that contamination could extend further upwind; in the limiting case of still air some contamination could cover the whole area under the mushroom cloud ... Conversely, of course, higher winds would result in less upwind contamination; for example with a wind speed of 30 miles per hour it seems probable that only the largest particles (1000 microns) would fall upwind of ground zero and contamination would not extend outside the area of total destruction.' I cannot find Frank H. Shelton's 1957 AFSWP paper Physical Aspects of Fall-Out online so will reproduce here some of the quotations from it which Stanbury used:
'Fall-out from a detonation of the order of a megaton will begin to arrive on the ground over an area the order of the size of the visible cloud, almost like a blanket at about 15 to 20 minutes for a large yield surface burst on an island or presumably on land. Fall-out from a shot of the order of a megaton on a barge in water will begin to arrive at the surface at about 30-40 minutes [due to the smaller average particle sizes in water surface bursts]. ... The above fall-out is exclusive of the vicinity of the crater and throw-out. ... The radiation will build up on the ground under the cloud and reach a peak in about 100 minutes for a detonation of the order of a megaton.'
Stanbury comments upon Shelton's statement that, at distances downwind from megaton detonations, the time to peak fallout dose rate from time of arrival is about equal to the arrival time (a statement based on Philip D. LaRiviere's report, USNRDL-TR-137): 'At long ranges (greater than 50 miles) the phenomena are much more complex. In the size range from 250 down to about 75 microns [diameter], particles are increasingly affected by such factors as diffusion, wind shear, etc., and they are falling from an increasingly greater range of heights. All these statistical variations tend to increase the average time of deposition at any place roughly in proportion to the average time taken to travel the intervening distance.' Stanbury adds that the Americans gave Britain (in exchange for the British test fallout data) the fact that the dose rate at one hour after burst was 10 R/hour at 9 miles upwind in 1954, and he adds that Val Paterson (head of the U.S. Federal Civil Defense Administration in 1954) gave a figure of 50 R/hour at one hour after burst, 6 miles upwind.
‘The increased efficiency with which superweapons disperse radioactive materials is to some extent counter-acted by the delay in arrival of fallout from the high source cloud and the rapid rate of decay which occurs in the interim.’ – R.L. Stetson, E.A. Schuert, W.W. Perkins, T.H. Shirasawa, and H.K. Chan, Distribution and Intensity of Fallout, Operation Castle, Project 2.5a, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, weapon test report WT-915, January 1956, classified ‘Secret – Restricted Data’ (only 240 copies printed), p. 101.
ABOVE: the useful fallout data collected at hundreds of nuclear tests was classified Secret - Restricted Data during the cold war; only 78 copies of this 1972 U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency (U.S. Department of Defense) report DNA 1251F were printed, summarising nuclear testing local fallout chemistry (solubility, fission product fractionation and neutron induced activity composition) and measured radiation properties. It was not made widely available, and is still secret now (only the front pages and last pages of the report have been declassified, all of the pages containing fallout information are still secret). Only vague, misleading reports about fallout were published, which left people highly confused on the subject of whether fallout is visible or not, how soluble it is, amd so on, and therefore undermined civil defence countermeasures by falsely making the public believe that 'nothing is really known on the subject for certain', rather thanthe truth that 'the facts are known but are being deliberately withheld from civil defence public information for reasons of secrecy.' The declassified versions of the 1251 series of reports omitted vitally important, essential fallout data and so were worse than useless for civil defence because what little was published was filled with errors, for example:
ABOVE: the obvious errors in this official 1963 U.S. Department of Defense DASA-1251 fallout pattern (re-issued in 1979 as DASA-1251-EX without any corrections) for a 110 kt 91% fission coral land surface burst in 1954, Castle-Koon (otherwise known as Operation Castle-shot number 3). First of all, the East-West width of Bikini Atoll is shown to be 40 statute miles, when in fact it is only 27 statute miles. Because all the fallout readings on rafts inside the lagoon and on the islands depend on this scale, the fallout pattern above is completely misleading, but that has not stopped it from being used in numerous fallout prediction model comparisons over the past 45 years. Second, the contours shown don't include data points so no information on the accuracy of the contours can be inferred (it is like a scientist drawing a curve of best fit, then deleting the data points; you are deprived from seeing how well the curve fits the data!). ABOVE: the correct map scale for Bikini Atoll, taken from Castle weapon test report WT-916. Let's now try to establish the correct fallout pattern for Castle-Koon. The error-filled DASA-1251 (the 1963 compilation of 'useful' fallout patterns, which misses out the reliable information in many cases and presents poor quality data in an even worse format), claimed of Castle-Koon:
'The fallout occurred ideally with respect to the measurement stations so that more readings than usual were available.'
'... most of the Koon pattern area was covered by an array of fallout collection stations, so this pattern is probably reasonably accurate [unlike Zuni which is wrongly reported as being inaccurate!].'
‘... most of the Koon pattern area was covered by an array of fallout collection stations, so this pattern is probably reasonably accurate.’ - Mathias J. Sagartz, Testing of the AIRRAD Fallout Prediction Code, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, report SAND97-2613, 1997, p. 19. ABOVE: here is a better version of the Castle-Koon fallout pattern than that in the 1963 DASA-1251 compilation: it has the correct scale and it includes the data points from which the contours were constructed. It is taken from page 49 of the 1959 weapon test report WT-934. Notice that this version is quite different in detail, and that the upwind portion of the pattern is based on imaginative curve-drawing, not scientific evidence of the upwind extent of the fallout.
ABOVE: here is yet another version of the Castle-Koon fallout pattern. This one is from weapon test report WT-916, and we can ignore it since it is based on island readings only, and excludes data from the rafts anchored in the lagoon (the raft data is reliable, as the ratio of fallout gamma dose rate on a raft to nearby adjacent land was reliably measured to be 1/7, due to fallout sinking in the surrounding water). It is included to show how the fallout contour shapes are modified according to how much information you have available. ABOVE: this is the source of the error-filled Castle-Koon fallout pattern used in the 1963 DASA-1251 fallout compilation, which comes from page 78 of 1956 weapon test report WT-915. Notice that the distance scale shown is totally wrong, and this error was inherited by the compilers of DASA-1251 in 1963, as I've pointed out before on this blog, particularly here (and in less detail here):
'WT-915 gives the distance from Enyu to Namu Islands to be 54 km, whereas it is actually 32 km, an exaggeration factor of 1.69 for the upwind fallout maps on Bikini Atoll for Castle shots Bravo, Koon, and Union. Since area depends on the square of distance, this means that the fallout areas are exaggerated by the factor 2.86. Morgenthau, et al. [DASA-1251, 1963], corrected the scale on the Bravo map of Bikini Atoll, but made the situation worse for the Koon and Union maps, where the distance from Enyu to Namu becomes 59 km and 56 km, and the distance exaggeration factors are 1.84 and 1.74, for Koon and Union, respectively. These imply fallout area exaggeration factors of 3.39 and 3.03, respectively.'
The great interest in Castle-Koon is that it is the only land surface burst ever conducted in the yield range of most modern nuclear warheads, 110 kt (of which 100 kt was fission).
Above: my fallout contour plot using all of the data for Castle-Koon fallout measurements from reports WT-915 and WT-916. There is a lot of uncertainty but the data are sufficient to at least provide some constraints on estimates of the size of the 250 R/hour at 1 hour gamma dose rate fallout hazard area from a 110 kt, 90% fission land surface burst!
It is worth summarizing some of the more reliable Nevada nuclear test empirical data for surface bursts JOHNIE BOY (0.5 kt, 1962), SUGAR (1.2 kt, 1951) and SMALL BOY (1.65 kt, 1962) which is tabulated on page 61 of Hillyer G. Norment's DELFIC report DNA 5159F-1, 1979 (his data for Pacific shots KOON and ZUNI are from error filled reports and are both obsolete). At 1 hour after burst, a measured gamma dose rate on point-source-calibrated survey meters of 100 R/hr at 1 m height over contaminated Nevada desert (corresponding to an ideal smooth plane dose rate of roughly 200 R/hr for a survey meter which isn't partially shielded by its own batteries and by the person holding it) occurred in an elliptical belt 0.25 km wide extending 2.73 km downwind from 0.5 kt JOHNIE BOY, 0.49 km wide extending 3.74 km downwind from 1.2 kt SUGAR, and 0.84 km wide extending 5.66 km downwind from 1.65 kt SMALL BOY. It should be noted that the exact depth of burst has a greater effect on the dangerous levels of fallout than the wind velocity. The wind doesn't affect the fallout dose rates very much, because if you double the wind speed, the same amount of fallout gets deposited over twice the area with therefore only half the concentration than for the lower wind speed, so the increase in downwind distance reached by any given fallout particle is largely offset by the fact that the particles are spread out over a greater tract of ground. Thus, in practice there is relatively little wind effect on fallout, apart from obviously determining the directions which the fallout plumes travel.
However, the fallout contour data show a great dependence on the exact depth or height of burst. Very shallow depths of burst greatly increase the cratering efficiency, producing more intense close-in fallout contours due to the extra activity carried by large particles contaminated at early times by the cratering ejecta mechanism. For example, the 1000 R/hr contour at 1 hour extended 1.38 km downwind and 0.26 km in width after the JOHNIE BOY 0.5 kt shot at 0.584 m depth, but such dose rates were confined to the crater in the 1.2 kt SUGAR burst detonated 1.067 m above ground!
Perhaps the best set of data comes from the 1962 SMALL BOY shot (1.65 kt Nevada burst at 3.05 m height above ground):
1000 R/hr at 1 hr reached 1.0 km downwind with a width of 0.28 km 500 R/hr at 1 hr reached 1.62 km downwind with a width of 0.41 km 200 R/hr at 1 hr reached 2.22 km downwind with a width of 0.54 km 100 R/hr at 1 hr reached 5.66 km downwind with a width of 0.84 km 50 R/hr at 1 hr reached 8.10 km downwind with a width of 1.42 km
Above: Dr Carl F. Miller's fallout model from 1963 is based on a semi-empirical analysis of the Pacific nuclear test fallout patterns from CASTLE and REDWING nuclear test operations in 1954 and 1956, in combination with a theoretical analysis of all the physics and chemistry of the fallout mechanism itself. (C. F. Miller, Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures, Stanford Research Institute, January 1963, vol 1 - AD410522, vol. 2 - AD410521.) Miller's model predicts an earliest fallout arrival time of 4W0.2 minutes after burst, where W is the total weapon yield in kilotons. Hence, fallout under the mushroom cloud begins to arrive at 16 minutes after burst for 1 Mt, 22 minutes after burst for 5 Mt, and 30 minutes after burst for 25 Mt. (These data are from the DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 6, What the Planner Needs to Know About Fallout, U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, report CPG 2-1AG, June 1973, Panel 29.)
Above: the earth penetrator warhead destroys hardened underground targets by ground shock and cratering with a low fission yield and can dramatically reduce fallout by trapping fission products deep within the crater ejecta layer. (The data for SEDAN is scaled back to 1 hour after burst using the decay rate curve, and thus exaggerates the radiation levels which occurred far downwind when the arrival time was greater than 1 hour.)
Above: Nevada nuclear test data shows the effect of burial on dose rate contours. Very shallow depths can enhance local fallout, but greater depths reduce it. Notice that the 100 R/hr contour at 1 hour after burst extends several km downwind for 1.2 kt surface or shallow detonations in dry soil, but much less than 1 km downwind for the bursts of 0.42-31 kt yields at depths of 34-110 m in hard rock.
Nevada surface bursts had yields from only 0.02-1.65 kilotons, while other Pacific surface bursts were in the multimegaton range, with massive fireballs that extended over the ocean or lagoon, sucking up sea water which affected the fallout. As Glasstone and Dolan explain on page 420 (paragraph 9.78) of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, they were also conducted under conditions of extreme wind shear (directional change in the wind with altitude) which was done to confine the fallout more locally to the test area in a wide, shorter fallout pattern than would be the case in the absence of wind shear (where you get a long narrow fallout pattern that goes further and means having to patrol shipping over that longer tract of ocean).
The full Secret - Restricted Data set of eight reports in the 1251 series are:
F. K. Kawahara and H. Lee, Indexed Bibliography of the United States and British Documents on Characteristics of Local Fallout, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, report USNRDL-469 (DASA-1251 Volume 1), June 1961, Confidential.
M. Morgenthau, et al., Compilation of Fallout Patterns and related Test Data, U.S. Army Nuclear Defense Laboratory, report NDL-TR-34 (DASA-1251 Volume 2), 2 parts, August 1963, Secret - Restricted Data.
M. Morgenthau and R. L. Showers, Supplement - Foreign Nuclear Tests, U.S. Army Nuclear Defense laboratory, NDL-TR-34-Supplement (DASA-1251, Volume 2-Supplement), October 1964, Secret - Restricted Data.
R. L. Showers, et al., Part 3 - Nougat Through Niblick, U.S. Army Nuclear Defense Laboratory, report NDL-TR-34-Part 3 (DASA-1251, Vol. 2, Part 3), March 1966, Secret - Restricted Data.
F. K. Kawahara, et al., Annotated Compendium of Data on Physical and Chemical Properties of Fallout, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, report USNRDL-497 (DASA-1251, Vol. 3), November 1966, Secret - Restricted Data.
J. D. O'Connor and G. R. Crocker, Annotated Compendium of Data on Radiochemical and Radiation Characteristics of Fallout, Part 1: Specific Activity, Activity-Size Distribution and Decay, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, report NRDL-68-2 (DASA-1251, Vol. 4, Part 1), September 1968, Secret - Restricted Data.
L. R. Bunney, J. D. O'Connor and G. R. Crocker, Annotated Compendium of Data on Radiochemical and Radiation Characteristics of Fallout, Part 2: Radiochemical Composition, Induced Activity, and Gamma Spectra, U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory, report NOLTR 72-137 (DNA-1251F, Vol. 4, Part 2), May 1972, Secret - Restricted Data.
P. D. LaRiviere, et al., Transport and Distribution of Local (Early) Fallout From Nuclear Weapons Tests, Stanford Research Institute, SRI-4-3338/NDL-TR-65 (DASA-1251, Vol. 5), May 1965, Secret - Restricted Data.
Above: the table of fallout areas for measured dose rate contours in PLUMBBOB-SMOKY, 31 August 1957, Nevada, is taken from page 808 of the Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Congress of the United States, 86th Congress, The Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, June 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26, 1959, Part 1, U.S. Covernment Printing Office, Washington, 1959, 966 pages.
Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Congress of the United States, 86th Congress, The Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, June 22, 23, 24, 25, and 26, 1959, Part 1, U.S. Covernment Printing Office, Washington, 1959, 966 pages:
These hearings contain very important local fallout data, mainly in the testimony of the engineer Dr Terry Triffet of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, California, but including useful contributions from many others, too.
Triffet's written testimony covers pages 61-100, mainly tables summarizing the fallout properties his team recorded at two stations (Station A - YFNB29 at 41,400 ft WSW of ground zero and Station B - LST611 at 313,000 ft NW of ground zero) for 5.01 Mt 87% fission coral reef surface burst Redwing-Tewa and also at two stations (Station A -YFNB13 at 39,800 ft W of ground zero and Station B - YAG39 at 111,000 ft N of ground zero) for 4.5 Mt 5% fission barge water surface burst Redwing-Navajo.
The first reference he gives in his testimony is to his report with LaRiviere, Characterization of Fallout, Project 2.63, Operation Redwing, Secret - Restricted Data. The 1961 version of that report has now been declassified and on pages 61, 77 and 79 the various graphs Triffet gave in his unclassified 1959 congressional testimony can be identified according to the nuclear test, while Dr Carl F. Miller's USNRDL-466 pages 20-21 give the distances of the stations from ground zero (as well as, on other pages, tables of neutron induced activity atoms-per-fission ratios and more detailed vital fractionation data for the samples from each of the fallout collection stations at those tests).
Comparing Triffet's 1959 congressional testimony to his 1961 secret report, you can see that he has done a very good job in summarising the best four sets of fallout data in the 1959 report to Congress, and he has converted the Navajo test data from its real fission yield of only 5% (very clean, 95% fusion yield) by multiplying up the reported fissions per square foot by a factor of 10.
Triffet's 1959 testimony to Congress doesn't directly quote specific activities for each location in units of fissions per gram, but he gives these indirectly these by revealing both the mass of fallout deposited per unit area (grams/sq. foot) and the activity deposited per unit area (fissions per sq. foot). By dividing the latter (fissions per sq. foot) into the former (grams/sq. foot), you of course obtain the specific activity, measured in fissions/gram. This is extremely important because it tells you how much bulk the fallout has, i.e. whether it is visible in dangerous deposits. Since you know the amount of fission in the bomb, you can use the specific activity of the fallout to calculate the total mass of fallout deposited from the mushroom cloud:
136 metric tons per total yield kiloton for the 3.53 Mt, 15% fission Zuni land surface burst (calculated using the best collected sample, the largest deposit of fallout mass which was from barge YFNB 29, pages 67 and 127 for 2.6 sq. foot sized collector trays in report WT-1317);
201 metric tons per total yield kiloton for the 5.01 Mt, 87% fission Tewa land surface burst (calculated using the best collected sample, the largest deposit of fallout mass which was from barge YFNB 29, pages 67 and 127 for 2.6 sq. foot sized collector trays in report WT-1317),
1,375 metric tons per total yield kiloton for the 365 kt, 73% fission Flathead ocean surface burst (calculated using the best collected sample, the largest deposit of fallout mass which was from barge YFNB 13, pages 67 and 127 for 2.6 sq. foot sized collector trays in report WT-1317);
655 metric tons per total yield kiloton for the 4.5 Mt, 5% fission Navajo ocean surface burst (calculated using the best collected sample, the largest deposit of fallout mass which was from barge YFNB 13, pages 67 and 127 for 2.6 sq. foot sized collector trays in report WT-1317).
'An explosion of any kind, detonated near the surface of the earth, causes material to be thrown up or drawn into a chimney of hot rising gases and raised aloft. In a nuclear explosion, two important processes occur: (1) radioactive elements, which are produced and vaporized in the process, condense into or on this material; and (2) a large amount of non-radioactive material, rises thousands of feet into the air before the small particles begin to fall back. This permits the winds to scatter them over large areas of the earth's surface. Thus, when the particles reach the surface of the earth they are far from their place of origin and contain, within or on their surface, radioactive elements. Whether they are solid particles produced from soil minerals, or liquid (salt-containing) particles produced from sea water, they are called fallout. ... radioactive elements can be subclassified into two groups by source. The first group contains the fission-product elements that are produced in the fission process ... The second group consists of the elements produced by the capture of neutrons released in both fission and fusion. The kinds and amounts of these neutron-induced radioactive elements in the fallout differ from one detonation to another depending upon the type of weapon used and the chemical elements in the environment at the point of detonation.'
On page 5, Dr Miller explains the radiation phenomena of fallout very simply and clearly:
'The potential hazard from the three types of nuclear radiations lies in the capacity of the different types of radiation to penetrate material, both living and inanimate, especially when the radioactive source is not in contact with the material irradiated. Thus, from fallout deposited on the ground, gamma rays are the only ones emitted that can penetrate large distances into the human body. The shorter-range beta particles can penetrate a short distance into material when their source is either in contact with its surface or is part of the material (i.e., an internal source). In general, alpha particles are not a fallout hazard because the alpha emitters are so extremely diluted and long-lived.
'The gamma rays, then, constitute an external hazard; the beta particles are often termed a contact and internal hazard; and the alpha rays constitute an internal hazard, of any. But since the major source of alpha particles in fallout is from the decay of unreacted uranium or plutonium, which are very long-lived radionuclides [i.e. the specific activity is very low because the emission of the radiation from each atom is spread over such an immensely long period of time compared to the very rapid decay rate of most of the fission products in fallout], the alpha particle hazard is negligible compared with that of the gamma and beta rays derived from other radioactive elements. ...
'The two radioactive emissions that are of concern in fallout, therefore, are the gamma radiations as an external source of hazard, and the beta particles as a contact or internal source of hazard. ... Both types of radiations cause injury to living organisms by producing ionization along their paths through living tissue. In other words, the rays or particles transfer energy to the electrons of the atoms in the material they penetrate. This causes the electrons to leave their orbits around the nucleus of the atom so that the atom takes on, for a short time, a positive charge.
'A specified amount of energy is required to ionize the atom: for every ion-pair formed by the passing of a gamma ray or beta particle near an atom, the ray or particle loses an equivalent amount of energy. The amount is not the same for all materials penetarted because the energy required to ionize an atom differs from one chemical element to another.'
Moving on to the physical chemistry of fallout creation, Dr Miller states on page 111:
'In summary, the over-all fallout particle formation process ... may be described as follows. In the first period of condensation, when the liquid and gas phases predominate in the fireball, the more refractory [unreactive] elements are dissolved into the liquid phase of the carrier material [i.e. molten glassy silicate sand from the Nevada desert] . The larger fallout particles, which fall away from the fireball while they are in the liquid state, will contain only these more refractory radionuclides. These particles will land nearest to the point of detonation.
'The smaller particles, that stay in the rising fireball for a longer period of time ... should carry radioelements that were condensed on their surfaces [because the fireball cooled below the melting point of the carrier prior to these particles being contaminated, so that the contamination lands on the outer solidified surface of the fallout particle and is then unable to diffuse into the particle, a process which can only occur if the soil particle is still molten when it is contaminated by fission products]. The smallest of the particles would make up the world-wide fallout or would be deposited at large distances from ground zero. (The world-wide fallout from air, sea water, tower, and surface bursts also contains vapor-condensed particles which have activity more or less uniformly distributed through their volumes.)
'The intermediate size particles, that deposit at intermediate distances from ground zero, should contain radioelements that were condensed during both [fission product and carrier soil] periods of condensation.'
To theoretically estimate the mass of fallout produced by this process, Dr Miller argues on page 133 that in a surface burst after the blast and heat flash have carried away some energy, half the remaining energy in the fireball 'is used to heat, dissociate, and expand the gas molecules from the air and half the energy is used to vaporize, dissociate and expand the gaseous products from the soil.'
For Nevada silicate soil with a melting point of 1400 C, Dr Miller calculates on page 151 that 7.5% of the total energy of a 1 kt Nevada surface burst is used to melt the sand into fused spheres of glassy fallout, and Dr Miller shows that this calculation is substantiated by test data:
'For a low yield tower shot [the Inca shot of Redwing, as identified by comparing the named test fallout particle photos in WT-1317 to the identical but unnamed test particle photos in USNRDL-TR-208], Adams [USNRDL-TR-208, 1957] estimated that about 3 percent of the energy was used in heating the soil and tower materials. Since it is expected that a larger fraction of the energy would be utilized in a surface burst, the two estimates are in relative agreement.'
Dr Miller then calculates on page 154 that this 7.5% of the 1 kt surface burst bomb energy will melt 192 metric tons of Nevada silicate soil into fallout, i.e. about 3.8% of the cratered mass. Clearly, therefore, about 192 metric tons of fallout per kiloton of total yield can be expected for a Nevada type silicate soil surface burst. This figure also agrees closely with the range of 136-201 metric tons per kiloton of total yield derived above from the Redwing coral soil surface burst fallout specific activities for Zuni and Tewa. For ocean water surface bursts, Dr Miller explains on pages 329-30:
'Because the end of the first period of condensation for a water shot occurs at about 0 C, very little fractionation of the fission products (with possible exception of the rare gas elements) should occur, especially for the larger yield detonations. This longer period of condensation for the water before the final sea water fallout particles are formed by vapor condensation should result in more thorough mixing of the water and the fission products, as well as in rather uniform concentrations of the radioactive elements in all fallout particles or drops. ... In warm (dry) climates and over land areas ... the fallout pattern would extend much further downwind than would be estimated from use of the simple scaling system for land surface detonations. This is simply because the droplets, decreasing in size and density as the water evaporates, would be carried to greater distances and dispersed over a larger area. Under these conditions, the deposit levels would all be decreased.'
Returning to the 1959 Congressional Hearings, Triffet picks out the most reliable data from the massive test report in his congressional testimony, although two of the graphs he gives in the written testimony are virtually fictional: the 'Near Station' and 'Distant Station' graphs he gives on page 76 of the 1959 hearings are linked to close-in and distant locations in the Tewa fallout pattern, but are actually Zuni trivial fallout collection graphs for collection stations on YFNB13 (with the dose rates multiplied up by a factor of 1,000 to make them look more impressive) and YAG39 (with the dose rates multiplied by by a factor of 10). We'll ignore those two graphs, and just concentrate on the accurate tables of information Triffet provides which are based directly on the Characterization of Fallout report.
'We are particularly indebted to Dr Paul Tompkins and his associates of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory.'
Officially, the 22-26 June 1959 on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War hearings were supposed to be centred around studying the consequences of a hypothetical nuclear war utilizing the actual global wind patterns for 17 October 1958, in which 1,446 megatons consisting of 263 weapons of 1-10 megatons (mean yield 5.5 megatons) with 50% fission yield, were ground surface burst on 224 North American targets (111 Air Force installations, 71 population and industrial target areas such as cities, 21 Atomic Energy Commission nuclear installations, 12 Army installations, 5 Navy installations and 4 Marine Corps installations) by Russian bombers, ICBMs and submarine-delivered missiles, and 2,500 megatons were dropped on Russia by North America in retaliation. But in fact, this attack study only takes up a few pages of the Hearings near the beginning and a few pages near the end: the majority of the volume is a study of all the details of the effects of nuclear weapons tests without any reference whatsoever to any particular nuclear attack scenario.
(The results of the hypothetical attack mentioned were calculated by electronic computer with the results published on pages 855-858. It was found that out of 150 million Americans - of whom 42 million lived in the 12 largest cities - 19.7 million people would be killed on the first day, with a further 22.2 million fatally injured. The worst single casualty rate was in New York City with 3,364,000 killed in the first 24 hours and an additional 2,634,000 fatally injured. Initial effects were based on scaled-up Hiroshima-Nagasaki nuclear casualty data, with fallout doses extrapolated from Pacific nuclear weapons testing data. On page 858 it is stated that the mean gamma radiation dose to all North American survivors for the first 3 months after the attack was computed to be 110 R, but the non-injured survivors received a mean dose of only 60 R. Those survivors, Herman Kahn declared, would certainly not envy the casualties. Assuming no ‘duck and cover’ and no civil defence against fallout, 13% of the population would be killed on the day of the attack, while 15% would die later from burns and radiation. Thus a total of 28% or 49 million would be killed. Of 46 million American houses, 26% would be demolished, and 21% damaged. The land area covered by fallout gamma dose rates exceeding 0.1 R/hr would fall from 46% at 2 days to 15% at 2 weeks and to only 5.8% at 12 weeks.)
The first nuclear testing expert witness to testify on the effects of nuclear weapons at those 1959 hearings was the physicist Dr Frank Shelton, the Technical Director of the Defense Atomic Support Agency, Department of Defense. On page 15, Shelton states:
'An accumulation of about 700 rem [=700 cSv] in 48 hours for an unshielded person can be expected to occur over about 1,500 square miles from a 10 megaton surface burst (50 % fission); that is, an area that could be about 100 miles long and about 17 miles at the maximum width. Few people appreciate the fact that, for the same bomb, second degree burns on the exposed face and hands and the ignition of fine kindling fueld can encompass an area of about 25 miles radius or about 2,000 square miles in the immediate vicinity and perhaps dense population of the target area. That is, this thermally affected area could be substantially larger than that of the lethal fallout area. And, if there is some shielding of personnel in the downwind fallout areas, the thermal effects area would certainlly be the larger of the two.'
This is all complete nonsense, based on the flawed thermal radiation transmission theory used in the 1957 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons and its flawed thermal effects data, which was not corected until the February 1964 (not the April 1962) edition, after new studies had been independently done by two different laboratories.
‘Reliance on the Effects of Nuclear Weapons has its shortcomings ... I was twenty miles from a detonation ... near ten megatons. The thermal flash did not produce the second-degree burn on the back of my neck, nor indeed any discomfort at all.’
'If a potential response level of humans (or other objects) to the intensity of the four phenomena is selected, such as the intensity that could result in a large fraction of fatalities, then statements can be made about the relative order in the size of the affected areas enclosed by each of the phenomena for the selected response level. For example, the relative sizes of the areas enclosed by the four phenomena from the detonation of a standard nuclear weapon in the megaton range near the surface of the earth, where the perimeter of the affected areas is defined by a (potential) response level equivalent to about 50 percent human fatalities, are, largest to smallest: (1) fallout, (2) thermal radiation, (3) blast, and (4) initial nuclear radiations.
'In this example, the area covered by radiation levels high enough to produce [in the absence of any countermeasures, e.g. for people remaining exposed to fallout in open outdoor areas with no kind of radiation shielding or decontamination whatsoever] the stated minimum level of potential response would be nearly 100 times larger than the area affected by thermal radiation and giving the same effective response (i.e., about 50 percent deaths).'
Shelton after blundering on the thermal effects by following Glasstone, then more usefully states on pages 40-41:
'Blast overpressure is itself not a very significant casualty agent. ... However, secondary effects and injuries caused by crumbling buildings, flying debris and translation of man himself are certainly very significant. Extensive blast injury can be expected at distances at which brick apartment houses collapse ... I would expect extensive window damage at 25 miles from a 1-megaton burst, and it would be an extreme hazard out to about 7 miles. Don't stand behind windows in an attack. First you will get burned and then you will have fine glass splinters driven into you very deeply within distances like 7 miles from a 1-megaton burst. ... Glass in any disaster like the Texas City disaster is one of the primary materials found in the normal home which can result in blinding and all other types of effects due to the flying small splinters of glass.'
Notice the vital fact here: serious glass injuries occur out to 7 miles from a 1 megaton surface burst but windows are broken out to 25 miles!
This is off-topic for the blog post here, but it is important to quote it for civil defence purposes: duck-and-cover civil defence advice is based on nuclear test evidence. Ducking and covering stops you getting thermal flash burns and blinded by flying glass. That's not silly or stupid advice, judging by the numbers of people who were burned and injured by flying glass in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Preventing such injuries actually increases the chance of survival from nuclear radiation, by preventing infectioned wounds from existing when the white blood cell count (which fights infection) and platelet count (which clots blood to prevent excessive bleeding) is low after nuclear radiation exposure (the synergistic LD50 for nuclear radiation is lowest in the case of simultaneous burns and other trauma, which is why so many people were killed at low radiation doses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - see paragraph 12.112 of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons).
Above: Triffet's 1959 Congressional testimony focussed on fallout from land and ocean water surface bursts, summarizing the data from his and Philip D. LaRiviere's Characterization of Fallout report for two locations from each of the approximately 5 megaton Redwing shots Tewa (land surface burst) and Navajo (ocean water surface burst). Above: Triffet's 1961 WT-1317 fallout pattern for the 4.5 Mt, 5% fission (very clean) Navajo surface water shot at Bikini Atoll in 1956. This fallout pattern, like those Triffet gives in WT-1317 for Zuni, Flathead and Tewa, combines all data and reconciles the lagoon and atoll radiation measurements with the ocean survey data, unlike the DASA-1251 compendium which gives disjointed data without closed contours and is based on an inaccurate report (WT-1344).
Above: Triffet's comparison of the cabbage-shaped fallout pattern from the 5.01 megaton land surface Tewa shot at Bikini Atoll in 1956 (left) to the banana-shaped fallout pattern from the 1.2 kiloton land surface Sugar shot in the Nevada in 1951. This created a lot of interesting discussion in the 1959 U.S. Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War testimony, because Dr Triffet argued that the complexity of the 5 megaton burst fallout pattern was due to its large yield: having a large yield meant a very high mushroom cloud, which was more likely to be subjected to directional 'wind shear' in the wind layers all the way up to 100,000 feet than the case of the lower cloud from a 1.2 kiloton surface burst which only rises to say 10,000 feet. (The downwind hotspots in Pacific test fallout patterns had already been publicised by Dr Paul C. Tompkins, scientific director of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, in his testimony before the Holifield Civil Defence Hearings, House Government Operations Committee, May 2, 1958, pages 209-210: 'the major residual radiation threat does not occur within range of physical damage.' Dr Tompkins added that the peak fallout dose rate in large Pacific surface bursts occurs not at the crater but typically in a hotspot 50-75 miles downwind.)
On pages 109-110 of the 1959 U.S. Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, Triffet explains to Representative Holifield:
'The contours from the large burst are very irregular compared with those from the small burst. This is because the megaton burst produces a cloud which rises into the high level winds, and these may vary in direction. ... Notice the contours of the 1 kiloton burst. The cloud did not get into the high-level winds in this case; consequently, it is easy to see how the contours could be generalized into a cigar shape. ... There is another factor that should be brought out, too, and that is that the winds over the Eniwetok Proving Grounds [which included Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls] have a tendency to vary more than the winds over the United States - the high-level winds, that is.'
The next day (page 208 in the printed Hearings), meteorologist Charles Shafer pointed out to Representative Holifield:
'With regard to irregularities of fallout deposition, Dr Triffet showed yesterday an analysis of a multimegaton detonation in the Pacific in which there was a tremendous fanning out of the fallout with several hot spots. I would like to make it clear to the committee that ... we do not have that type of wind behavior in the United States except possibly in the Gulf States in the summertime, only one season out of four.'
Above: Triffet's 1959 Congressional testimony gamma dose rate decay curves for Tewa stations A (barge YFNB 29) and B (ship LST 611). Curve B is essentially valid for unfractionated fallout and also serves therefore to describe the decay rate of all fallout from sea water surface bursts, where the water's low boiling point (only 100 C) in comparison to the boiling point of soil means that it takes so long for fallout droplets to condense in a water surface burst that there is no fission product fractionation possible.
Above: Triffet's 1959 U.S. Congressional testimony curves showing land surface burst mass deposit in a sequence of small circular trays 8 cm in diameter, together with the gamma dose rate from the fallout deposited over a much larger area of the barge or ship. The masses deposited in the sequentially exposed collection trays are more irregular and erratic (because of the small size of the trays) than the gamma dose rate which comes from a massive area of tens of metres around the detector, and so averages out the effect of a lot more fallout mass being deposited, but despite this sampling difference, the curves do show the relationship between the transitory period of fallout deposition, and the way that the dose rate from the radiation builds up, peaks where the rate of arrival of fallout compensates for decay, and then falls.
Above: Triffet's 1959 U.S. Congressional testimony curves showing sea water surface burst mass deposit in a sequence of small circular trays 8 cm in diameter, together with the gamma dose rate from the fallout deposited over a much larger area of the barge or ship. Notice especially that the gamma dose rate curve varies fairly abruptly with the rate of fallout deposition, which is due to a large fraction of the dose rate during deposition being due to 'skyshine' from airborne wind carried particles. Once the cloud is blown past the detector, the dose rate falls rapidly (faster than the decay rate) because that source of radiation is physically removed by the wind.
Above: the incremental fallout collector of the type used for nuclear test operations Castle, Redwing and Plumbbob. A stack of hundreds of circular fallout collection plates, 8 cm in diameter, were exposed to fallout incrementally for periods of a few minutes then replaced, with the exposed tray being carried down automatically by an elevator system powered by compressed air. This instrument, manufactured by the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in large numbers for automatic fallout sampling on the ground at many locations in the fallout area, was more innovative than any of the radiation monitoring instruments. The first version was used at Mike shot in 1952 and was simply a box with an array of trays in fixed positions and a moving belt (motorized with a clock) with slots cut in it above the trays, so that each tray would be exposed to fallout for a 2 or 5 minutes interval, depending on the distance from ground zero. This was replaced by the elevator system (above) which allowed larger trays to be exposed and to collect larger samples of fallout. The beauty of this system is that the time of arrival of fallout, and the duration of fallout deposition, can be ascertained to enable the deposition-contamination hazard duration to be assessed (you can't do this by measuring the radiation level, because the radiation continues after the fallout mass has stopped arriving). The whole effort began in 1951 when simple open fallout collection trays were exposed in an effort to collect the Nevada Sugar and Uncle fallout, but of course became filled with blast wave wind carried non-radioactive dust, so it was not clear what proportion of the immense mass of the deposition in the open trays was fallout and what was blast raised dust from the desert. So incremental collectors were invented to expose trays in turn for a certain number of minutes before covering the tray and keeping the contents safe for later analysis in the laboratory.
... This post (like the previous one) is as yet incomplete and is to be continued as time permits (dealing with local fallout patterns, cloud activity by rocket instrument survey, and deposited fallout mass and radiation characterization for Ivy, Castle and Redwing surface bursts, plus the Nevada surface bursts and shallow underground cratering tests).
posted by Nuclear Weapons Effects 8:56 pm5 comments
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Professor Bridgman's Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects
I read Glasstone and Dolan's book in 1988 when aged 16 on the recommendation of the local Emergency Planning Officer, Brode's paper at the university library in 1990, and Dolan's manual in 1993 after being told by the library staff at AWE Aldermaston that it had been declassified (I had requested the earlier TM 23-200 Capabilities of Atomic Weapons which had been cited in various Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch civil defence reports). So it is quite a while since I saw something as comprehensive as Dr Bridgman's book on this subject!
The most surprising thing about most of the published nuclear weapons effects literature (nearly all originating from Glasstone's book) is the theoretical nature of the information provided. I had expected something a lot briefer but based more directly on nuclear test data, and was a little disappointed that the amount of nuclear test data in the book was relatively limited, and that most of the graphs were just curves without any data points shown: the reader has to trust the publication and the editors. In addition, the different kinds of nuclear explosion (underwater, surface burst, air burst, high altitude) were not dealt with separately: instead, you had bits and pieces about each kind of burst scattered in each chapter which is concerned with one type of effect (blast, thermal, nuclear radiation, EMP, etc.). This misleadingly gives the impression to the general reader that all kinds of nuclear explosions produce similar effects, with merely some quantitative differences in the relative magnitudes of those different effects. Nothing could be further from reality: just compare an underwater burst to a high altitude burst!
I think that to improve public understanding of nuclear weapons effects for civil defence purposes, a handbook is needed which has the effects phenomenology (not the damage criteria) organized by burst type (chapter 1: space bursts, chapter 2: air bursts, chapter 3: surface bursts, chapter 4: underground bursts, chapter 5: underwater bursts) so there can be no confusion. I don't think that this will involve much repetition because the blast and thermal effects of air bursts are quite different to those of surface bursts (different blast wave waveforms and different thermal radiation pulses), so there is no overlap. In addition, while the physics needs to be explained concisely as done by Dr Bridgman's book, there is a need for all theoretical prediction graphs given to be justified by the incorporation of nuclear test data points, so the user can judge the reliability of the source of the predictions.
First, it's a book that's more important than Glasstone and Dolan 1977, and about as important for civil defence as Dolan's Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons or Brode's Review of Nuclear weapons Effects. The reason is that it is quantitative. professor Bridgman doesn't analyze all the nuclear test data, but he does provide most of the theoretical physics equations. To the extent that Bridgman's book is based upon solid physical laws and solid facts - provided that the equations are applied with the right assumptions and that the mechanism they are applied to is the most important mechanism for the effect being considered - it is valuable and reliable.
His book 'Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects', 1st edition, is a 535 pages long hardbound textbook published by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency in July 2001 as a single volume which I bought on the internet at www.Amazon.com from a seller in America. In December 2008, Volume 2 of a revised edition of the book, containing chapters 2, 3 and 4 (these chapters deal in mathematical detail with the physics design of nuclear weapons, such as fission efficiency calculations as a bomb core expands and loses neutrons, compression of nuclear cores by chemical explosive implosion systems, tritium boosting of fission reactions, and the detailed physics of Teller-Ulam fusion systems) was published (252 pages). A revision of the weapons effects chapters (1 and 5-15) is currently in preparation and will be issued separately as Volume 1 when completed.
The first edition is not secret but is marked 'Distribution Limited' on the dust wrapper, front hard cover and on the title page: 'Distribution of this book is authorized to U.S. Government agencies and their Contractors; Administrative or Operational Use, July 2001. Other requests for this book shall be referred to Director, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, 8725 John J. Kingman Road, Ft. Belvoir, VA 22060-6201.' As a result, I will not be reviewing the mathematical physics of chapters 2, 3 and 4 of the book, pages 72-195 of the first edition, which deal with nuclear explosive details themselves. Those chapters, while unclassified, contain extensive detailed calculations of the (a) neutron multiplication factors in plutonium and uranium spheres of various sizes and densities (implosion compressions), (b) the effect of neutron reflectors (e.g., beryllium) on the fissile core behaviour, (c) the calculation of 'alpha' (the neutron multiplication rate of a fission reaction, measured by the time between successive fission 'generations'), (d) the implosive shock pressure needed to compress metallic uranium and plutonium in various kinds of implosion weapons, (e) the effect of kinetic dissassembly and fuel burn up on fission efficiency in a nuclear explosion, and (f) the calculation of fusion yields by the compression of fuel capsules using ablative X-ray radiation recoil from a fission bomb, and by the 'boosting' system whereby a small amount of fusion material in the centre of a fissile bomb core releases high energy neutrons which greatly increase the efficiency of the fission reactions. All of these topics are exactly the kind of thing I do not want to discuss in mathematical detail on this blog. The mathematical physics information in the book on these subject areas may not be enough to qualify someone to design the latest Los Alamos thermonuclear warhead, but it is certainly not the kind of thing anyone would want to make easily available to any terrorist/rogue nation which already had access to fissile material. I'll avoid the details of three chapters altogether here, since the interest is improved understanding of nuclear weapons effects for civil defence.
The front flap of the dust wrapper states that the book evolved from the class notes for courses given to graduate students at AFIT:
'The notes were motivated by the lack of a textbook covering all of the effects of nuclear weapons. The well known Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Glasstone and Dolan offers complete coverage but, by design, does not develop the physical and mathematical modelling underlying those effects. If Glasstone and Dolan were regarded as "Effects 101", then this book is "Effects 201".
'One chapter is devoted to each of the following weapon effects: X-rays, thermal, air blast, underground shock, under water shock, nuclear radiation, the electromagnetic pulse, residual radiation (fall-out), dust and smoke, and space effects. ... Empirical [non-theoretical, data generalizing] formulae are avoided as much as possible ...
'This book complements the Handbook of Nuclear Weapons Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from DWSA's Effects Manual One (EM-1) [Defense Special Weapons Agency, Alexandria, VA, September 1996] edited by John Northrop. That handbook is a collection of methods and data for predicting nuclear weapon free field intensities and specific target responses. The present book develops the theory behind those calculations found in the handbook.'
The back flap of the dust wrapper states:
'Charles J. Bridgman ... was posted to the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project at Sandia Base where he trained as an atomic weapons officer. He was assigned to the Strategic Air Command as a Nuclear Officer responsible for the Mark 5, 6 and 7 weapons and later was a member of the military assembly team to become operational on the Mark 17, the first operational thermonuclear weapon. Dr. Bridgman joined the AFIT faculty in 1959 as an Air Force Captain. In 1963 he became a civilian member of the Department of Engineering Physics. He was appointed professor and chair of the nuclear engineering committee in 1968. Dr bridgman chaired the nuclear engineering programme for 20 years. During that time he led the conversion of the AFIT nuclear engineering program from a nuclear-power-reactor focused curricula to a nuclear-effects focussed curricula. During those years, he was a frequent lecturer and consultant to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirkland AFB, New Mexico. ... He has chaired over 100 AFIT MS theses and 14 PhD dissertions. Dr. Bridgman served as the School Associate Dean for research from 1989 to 1997. He retired from that position in 1997 and continues, since that date, to maintain office hours at AFIT as a Professor Emeritus. Dr. Bridgman is a Fellow of the American nuclear Society.'
The first impression you get is that the book is a more in-depth treatment of the subjects covered by Glasstone and Dolan, excluding the damage photographs.
In the Preface, Dr Bridgman writes: 'Some comments about Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are in order. The design of nuclear explosives in the United States is by law the exclusive province of the Department of Energy, not the Department of Defense. This book is intended for DoD students. The inclusion of Chapters 2, 3 and 4 is not intended to prepare students to become bomb designers. Those chapters would be woefully inadequate for that task. Rather the inclusion of these three chapters is based on the author's firm conviction that to understand the effects of a nuclear explosion, one has to understand the source. For this reason, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 consist of elementary models of the physical processes occurring during the fission and fusion explosion. They do not include design considerations.'
The Acknowledgements pages show that a long list of experts checked, contributed suggestions, and corrected the draft version of the book.
1: Atomic and Nuclear Physics Fundamentals (pages 1-71)
At first glance, this chapter looks like routine basic physics. However, a close reading shows that it is very carefully written, and physically deep as well as being more relevant to the subject matter of the book than the typical atomic and nuclear physics textbook.
On page 3, Figure 1-1, 'Energy partition in uranium as a function of temperature', shows at temperatures below 100,000 K, 100% of the energy in uranium is in the kinetic energy of the material (ions and electrons). But at higher temperatures, the energy carried between those charges by radiation starts to become more important. At 1,000,000 K temperature (100 eV energy per particle) 1% of the total energy density is present as photon radiation and 99% is in the kinetic energy of moving matter. At 10,000,000 K (1 keV), 8% is in radiation and 92% in matter. At a temperature of about 32,000,000 K (3.2 keV), which is about twice the core temperature of the sun, there is an even split with 50% of the energy in uranium plasma carried by x-ray radiation and 50% by the ions and electrons of the matter present. Finally, at 100,000,000 K (10 keV), only 9% of the energy density in the uranium is present in the kinetic energy of matter (particles), and 91% is present as x-rays.
This matter-radiation energy distribution occurs because of the Stefan-Boltzmann radiation law, whereby the amount of energy in radiation increases very rapidly as temperature increases: the radiant power is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. Dr Bridgman comments on page 3:
'Thus in temperature regions where the radiation constitutes a large fraction of the energy present, added yield appears mostly as additional radiation and results in only a fourth root increase in temperature. ... In summary, the presence of nuclear radiation from the nuclear reactions themselves, and even more important, the presence of electromagnetic radiation arising from the plasma nature of the exploded debris, make the nuclear explosion unlike a chemical explosion and like the interior of a star.'
Obviously, because of the small mass of a nuclear weapon fireball compared to the immense gravitating mass of the sun, gravitation cannot confine the nuclear weapon fireball as it confines the sun, so the former is able to explode, due to lack of gravitational confinement.
On page 5, Dr Bridgman tabulates physical conversion factors for nuclear weapons effects:
1 cal = 4.186 J 1 bar = 100 kPa 1 kbar = 100 MPa 1 atmosphere = 1.013 bars 1 eV = 1.602*10-19 J 1 kt = 1012 cal
Page 6 is more interesting and gives the formula (equation 1-1) for the energy density of electromagnetic radiation in space as a function of electric and magnetic field strengths (albeit with an error, the term for magnetic energy density should be (1/2)*(mu_0)*H2 or (1/2)*(1/mu_0)*B2, but not (1/2)*[(mu_0)*H]2 as printed, where mu_0 is the magnetic permeability of the vacuum, H is magnetic field strength and B is magnetic flux density, B =(mu_0)*H).
Bridgman then discriminates the electromagnetic spectrum into classical (Maxwellian continuous electromagnetic waves) and quantum waves by suggesting that waves of up to 1016 Hz are classical Maxwellian waves, and those of higher frequency are quantum radiation. This is interesting because the mainstream view generally in physics holds that the classical Maxwell radiation is completely superseded by quantum theory, and is just an approximation.
It's always interesting to see classical radiation theory being defended for use in radio theory (long wavelengths, low frequencies) as still a valid theory. If classical and quantum theories of radiation are both correct and apply to different frequencies and situations, this contradicts the mainstream ideas. For example, is radio emission - by a large ensemble of accelerating conduction electrons along the surface of a radio transmitter antenna - physically comparable to the quantum emission of radiation associated with the leap of an electron between an excited state and the ground state of an atom? It's possible that the radio emission is the Huygens summation of lots of individual photons emitted by the acceleration of electrons along the antenna due to the applied electric field feed, but it's pretty obvious that when analyze an individual electron being accelerated and thereby induced to emit radiation, you will get continuous (non-discrete) radiation if an acceleration is continuously applied as an oscillating electric field intensity, but you will get discrete photons emitted by electrons if you cause the electrons to accelerate in quantum leaps between energy states.
From quantum field theory, it's clear as Feynman explains in his book QED (Princeton University Press, 1985; see particularly Figure 65), the atomic (bound) electron is endlessly exchanging unobserved (virtual) photons with the nucleus and any other electrons. This exchange is what produces the electromagnetic force, and because the virtual photons are emitted at random intervals, the Coulomb force between small (unit) charges is chaotic instead of the smooth classical approximate law derived by Coulomb using large numbers of charges (where the quantum field chaos is averaged out by large numbers, like the way that the random ~500 m/s impacts of individual air molecules against a sail are averaged out to produce a less chaotic smoothed force on large scales).
Therefore, in an atom (or very near other charges in general) the electrons move chaotically due to the chaotic exchange of virtual photons with the nucleus and other charges like other electrons, and when an electron jumps between energy levels in an atom, the real photon you see emitted is just the resultant energy remaining after all the unobserved virtual photon contributions have been subtracted: so the distinction between classical and quantum waves is physically extremely straightforward!
Bridgman then gives a discussion of quantum radiation theory which is interesting. Max Planck was guided to the quantum theory of radiation from the failure of the classical theories of radiation to account for the distribution of radiant emission energy from an ideal (black body or cavity) radiator of heat as a function of frequency. One theory by Rayleigh and Jeans was accurate for low frequencies but wrongly predicted that the radiant energy emission tends towards infinity with increasing frequency, while another theory by Wien was accurate for high frequencies but underestimated the radiant energy emission at low frequencies. There were several semi-empirical formulae proposed by mathematical jugglers to connect the two laws together so that you have one equation that approximates the empirical data, but only Planck's theory was accurate and had a useful theoretical mechanism behind it which made other predictions.
There was general agreement that heat radiation is emitted in a similar way to radio waves (which had already been modelled classically by Maxwell in 1865): the surface of a hot object is covered by electrically charged particles (electrons) which oscillate at various frequencies and thereby emit radiation according to Larmor's formula for the electromagnetic emission of radiation by an accelerating charge (charges are accelerating while they oscillate; acceleration is the change of velocity dv/dt).
The big question is what the distribution of energy is between the different oscillators. If all the oscillators in a hot body had the same oscillation frequency, we would have the monochromatic emission of radiation which would be similar to a laser! Actually, that does not happen normally with hot bodies where you get a naturally wide statistical distribution of oscillator frequencies.
However, it's best to think in these terms to understand what is physically occurring behind Planck's equation for the distribution, although this was first understood not by Planck in 1901 but by Einstein in 1916 when Einstein was studying the stimulated emission of radiation (the principle behind the laser). In a hot object, the oscillators are receiving and emitting radiation.
Radiation received by an oscillator from adjacent oscillating charges can either cause that oscillator to emit stimulated (laser like) radiation of the same frequency as the radiation that the oscillator receives, or alternatively it can cause the oscillator to emit radiation spontaneously.
What Einstein realized was that the probability that an oscillator will undergo the stimulated emission of radiation is proportional to the intensity (not the frequency) of the radiation, whereas the probability that it will emit radiation spontaneously is independent of the intensity of the radiation. For the thermal equilibrium of radiation being emitted from a black body cavity, the ratio for an oscillator of the:
This formula is Planck's radiation distribution law, albeit without the multiplier of 8*Pi*h*(f/c)3. Notice that 1/[ehf/(kT) - 1] has two asymptotic limits for frequency f:
(1) for hf >> kT, the exponential term in the denominator becomes large compared to the subtracted number of 1, so we have the approximation: 1/[ehf/(kT) - 1] ~ ehf/(kT).
(2) for hf << kT, the approximation ex = 1 + x is accurate for small x, which gives: 1/[ehf/(kT) - 1] ~ 1/[1 + (hf/(kT)) -1] = kT/(hf).
The energy E = hf is Planck's quantum energy, where f is frequency. The energy E = kT is the classical relationship between temperature and emitted energy.
Spontaneous emission of radiation predominates in black body radiation where the ration of hf/(kT) is high, i.e. for high frequencies in the spectrum, while more laser-like stimulated emissions are predominant for low frequencies. This is because the intensity of the radiation is highest at the lower frequencies, causing a a greater chance of stimulated emission.
So Planck's blackbody radiation spectrum law is a composite of two different things:
(1) the distribution of intensity of radiation (which is greatest for the lowest frequencies and falls for higher frequencies)
(2) the distribution of energy as a function of frequency, which is not merely dependent upon the intensity as a function of frequency, but also depends on the photon energy as a function of frequency, which is not a constant! Since Planck uses E = hf, the energy carried per quantum increases in direct proportion to the frequency, which means that the energy-versus-frequency distribution differs from the intensity-versus-frequency distribution. The intensity (rate of photon emission) falls off with increasing energy, but the energy per unit photon increases according to E = hf, so the energy-versus-frequency distribution is different from the intensity-versus-frequency distribution.
Really, to understand the mechanism behind the quantum theory of radiation, you need to have graphs not just Planck's energy-versus-frequency distribution law, but additional graphs showing the underlying distribution of oscillator frequencies in the blackbody which determine the energy emission when you insert Planck's E = hf law.
I.e., Planck argued that a black body with N oscillators (radiation emitting conduction electrons on the surface of the filament of a light bulb, for instance) will contain Xe-E/(kT) oscillators in the ground state with E = hf = 0 (i.e. X oscillators are not emitting any radiation), Xe-2E/(kT) = Xe-2hf/(kT) in the next highest state, Xe-3E/(kT) = Xe-3hf/(kT) in the state after that, and so on:
N = X + Xe-2hf/(kT) + Xe-3hf/(kT) + ...
This gives you the distribution of intensity as a function of frequency f.
Planck then argued that the relative energy emitted by each oscillator is given by multiplying each term in the expansion by the relevant energy per unit photon, e.g., E = hf, E = 2hf, E = 3hf:
The ratio of [E(total)]/N is the mean energy per quantum in black body radiation, and by summing the two series and dividing the sums we find:
Mean energy per photon in blackbody radiation, [E(total)]/N = hf/[ehf/(kT) - 1].
Planck's radiation law is:
Ef = (8*Pi*f2/c3)*[mean energy per photon in blackbody radiation]
Therefore it is comforting to see that the complexity of the Planck distribution is due to the average energy per photon being hf/[ehf/(kT) - 1], and apart from this factor, the law is really very simple! If the average intensity per photon was constant (independent of frequency), then the radiation law would be that the energy per unit frequency would be proportional to the square of the frequency. This of course gives rise to the "ultraviolet catastrophe" of the Rayleigh-Jeans law, which suggests that you get infinite energy emitted at extremely highly frequencies (e.g., ultraviolet light). Planck's radiation law shows that the error in the Rayleigh-Jeans law is that there is actually a variation, as a function of frequency, of the mean energy of the emitted electromagnetic waves.
The mean photon energy hf/[ehf/(kT) - 1] has two asymptotic limits for frequency. For hf >> kT, we find that hf/[ehf/(kT) - 1] ~ hfe-hf/(kT), and for hf << kT, we find that hf/[ehf/(kT) - 1] ~ kT. Therefore, at high frequencies, Planck's law E = hf controls the blackbody radiation with spontaneous emission of radiation. This gives an average energy per photon of hfe-hf/(kT) at high frequencies. But at low frequencies, stimulated emission of radiation predominates and the average energy per photon is then E = kT.
It's a tragic shame that the Planck distribution law is not presented clearly in terms of the mechanisms behind it in popularizations of physics. To make it clearly understood, you need to understand the two mechanisms for radiation involved (spontaneous emission which predominates at the low intensities accompanying the high frequency component of the blackbody curve, and stimulated laser-like emission which predominates at the high intensities which accompany the low frequency part of the curve), and you need to understand that intensities are highest at the lower frequencies because there are more oscillators with the lower frequencies than higher ones. The reason why the energy emitted at any given frequency does not follow the intensity law is the variation in average energy per photon as a function of the frequency. By plotting a graph of the number of oscillators as a function of frequency and another graph of the mean energy per oscillator as a function of frequency, it is is possible to understand exactly how the Planckian distribution of energy versus frequency is produced.
Sadly this is not done in any physics textbook or popular physics book I've seen (and I've seen a lot of them), which just give the equation and an energy-versus-frequency graph and don't explain the mechanism for the events physically occurring in nature that give rise to the mathematical structure of the formula and the graph! I think historically what happened was that Planck guessed the law from a very ad hoc theory around 1900, publishing the initial paper in 1901 but then around 1910 Planck improved the original theory a lot to a simple theory of statistics for a resonators with discrete oscillating frequencies, yet the actual mechanism with the spontaneous and stimulated emissions of radiation contributing was only established by Einstein 1916. So textbook authors get confused and over-simplify the facts by ignoring the well-established physical mechanism for the blackbody Plankian radiation distribution. In general, most popular physics textbooks are authored by mathematical fanatics with a false and dogmatic religious-type ill-founded belief that physical mechanisms don't occur in nature, and that by eradicating all physical processes from physics textbooks the illusion can be maintained that nature is mathematical, rather than the reality that the mathematics is a way of describing physical processes. The problem with the more abstract mathematical models in physics is that they are just approximations that statistically work well for large numbers, and you get into trouble if you don't have a clear understanding of the distinction between the physical process occurring and the way that the equation works:
‘It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of time. How can all that be going on in that tiny space? Why should it take an infinite amount of logic to figure out what one tiny piece of spacetime is going to do? So I have often made the hypothesis that ultimately physics will not require a mathematical statement, that in the end the machinery will be revealed, and the laws will turn out to be simple, like the chequer board with all its apparent complexities.’ - R. P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, November 1964 Cornell Lectures, broadcast and published in 1965 by BBC, pp. 57-8.
Compton effect
Bridgman gives a nice discussion on pages 17-18 of the Compton effect, which is a particle-type (rather than wave-type) interaction similar to a billiard ball collision. A gamma ray or X-ray hits an electron, scattering and imparting momentum (thus kinetic energy) to it, while a new "scattered" gamma ray (of lower energy than the incident gamma ray) moves off at an angle, like a billiard ball hitting another, imparting some energy to it and scattering off at an angle itself with reduced energy. Compton scattering is therefore described quite simply if the electrons are free like billiard balls. In reality, of course, most electrons are usually bound to atoms, but if the binding energy of the electron to the atom is much smaller than the energy of the incoming gamma ray, then it is a good approximation to ignore the binding energy and treat the electron as if it were free.
Photoelectric effect
Bridgman explains on p. 19 that when a bound electron is absorbed by a photon (rather than "scattering" from it as in the Compton process), the electron will be ejected emitted if the energy of the photon exceeded the binding energy of the electron to the atom. The energy the electron will have will be the energy of the incident photon minus the binding energy of the electron to the atom. This is the phoetelectric equation of Einstein, 1905. Obviously, Einstein's equation is just approximate because the impact of the photon will not merely affect the electron (as he assumed); some of the impact energy will also be passed on via Coulomb field interactions to the nucleus and thence the rest of the material. However, because momentum is conserved and the electron is nearly two thousand times less massive than the nucleus, the impact motion induced in the nucleus will be nearly two thousand times less than that induced in the electron, so that the vast majority of the kinetic energy will remain with the electron instead of being passes on to the nucleus and the rest of the material. So Einstein's photoelectric effect equation is a very good approximation to the real, more complicated, physical dynamics.
Pair-production
Bridgman discusses pair-production on pp. 20-21. If a gamma ray of energy exceeding the rest mass equivalent of two electrons passes through an electric field of strength 1.3*1018 v/m or more (i.e., at 33 femtometres from the centre of an electron/proton, or closer), the quanta in the electric field are intense enough to potentially interact with the field of the gamma ray and thereby decompose it into two opposite electric charges, each of which acquires a mass from the vacuum "Higgs field" (or whatever field will be discovered to contribute mass - i.e. gravitational charge - to fermions). This threshold field strength for pair-production was derived by Julian Schwinger (Schwinger’s critical threshold for pair production is Ec = m2c3/(e*h-bar). Source: equation 359 in http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0608140 or equation 8.20 in http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0510040, which corresponds to the limiting range out to which the vacuum contains virtual fermionic annihilation-creation spacetime loops, which polarize themselves radially around real charges like a capacitor's dielectric material, and thus shield part of the charge of the electron, causing the "running couplings" in QFT and the attendant need to renormalize electric charge which appears stronger at small distances where there is less shielding.
(It's fascinating that Schwinger's threshold field strength required for pair production - vital for the IR cutoff in QFT - is physically being totally ignored in all the popular books on QFT, QM, and Hawking radiation. E.g., Hawking radiation is supposed to be gamma ray emission resulting from interactions after spontaneous pair production in the vacuum near the event horizon R = 2GM/c2 of a black hole, but when you take account of Schwinger's threshold it turns out that you will only get Hawking radiation if the black hole has an electric charge proportional to the square of the mass of the black hole! Big uncharged black holes can't physically radiate any Hawking radiation. However, fundamental charged particles are extremely efficient Hawking radiators and a corrected form of the Hawking radiation mechanism will physically explain the emission and thus exchange of electromagnetic field quanta by fundamental particles.)
A proper theory of pair-production will explain how bosonic energy acquires rest mass when it becomes fermionic energy, and this isn't a part of the Standard Model of particle physics (mass is described by various types of problematic "Higgs fields" in the existing Standard Model, none of which have been detected, and all of which are ad hoc epicycles, which don't contribute anything to the predictive power of the Standard Model; there's no evidence for electroweak symmetry and the Weinberg mixing angle for the neutral electromagnetic and weak field gauge bosons is totally ad hoc and doesn't specifically require a Higgs field, or prove that the two fields are unified in the way expected at high energy).
Bohr model of the atom
Bridgman deals very nicely with the Bohr atom on pages 22-29. J. J. Thomson "discovered" (or at least measured a fixed charge-to-mass ratio, for cathode rays) the electron in 1897, and then developed a theory of the atom as a mixed pudding of positive and negative charges. He argued that there could not be a separation of charges within the atom, because that would make the atom unstable and liable to collapse. However, it's hard to see how a mixture of positive and negative charges will be more stable. Rutherford settled the matter by having two research students, Geiger and Marsden, fire alpha particles through thin gold foil and measure the angles of scatter. Some of the alpha particles were scattered back towards the source, and from the distribution of scattering angles Rutherford was able to deduce that the simplest working hypothesis that fitted the data was a central positively charged massive nucleus surrounded by the negatively charged electrons.
Bohr then suggested that the electrons orbit the nucleus rather like planets orbiting the sun, but with the Coulomb attraction of negative and positive charge replacing gravitation. Hence, for hydrogen atoms Bohr set the Coulomb force between an electron and a proton equal to the centripetal acceleration force, F = -mv2/r. Rearranging the result allowed the orbital speed of the atomic electron to be deduced, v = (e2/{4*Pi*permittivity*MR})1/2 where M is the electron's mass and R is the radius of the orbit. The linear momentum is then p = Mv, the angular momentum is L = pR, and the kinetic energy is E = (1/2)Mv2.
Bridgman points out in on page 24 that:
"Bohr's unique contribution was his postulate that the electron's angular momentum, L, could take only discrete values [integer multiples of L = pR = n*h-bar, where n = 1, 2, 3, etc.]."
This leads to the correct quantization, which for the total (potential plus kinetic) electron energy gives rise to the line spectra formulae for the wavelengths of light emitted by atomic electrons, such as the Lyman, Balmer, and Paschen series formulae.
Bridgman adds in an enlightening footnote on that page:
"At first exposure one is tempted to ask the question 'How on earth did Bohr come to that conclusion? Why not discrete linear momentum, or energy, or etc.?' Certainly the answer is not obvious from our foreshortened discussion. The actual historical logic can be found in Jammer where it can be seen that the correct postulate came only after several unsuccessful ones."
Rutherford rejected Bohr's hypothesis because it failed to explain why the acceleration of the orbiting electron did not cause it to continuously radiate energy as electromagnetic waves, and thus slow and spiral into the nucleus and oblivion within a second. Rutherford wrote to discourage Bohr:
“There appears to me one grave difficulty in your hypothesis which I have no doubt you fully realize [conveniently not mentioned in your paper], namely, how does an electron decide with what frequency it is going to vibrate at when it passes from one stationary state to another? It seems to me that you would have to assume that the electron knows beforehand where it is going to stop.”
- Ernest Rutherford's letter to Niels Bohr, 20 March 1913, in response to Bohr’s model of quantum leaps of electrons which explained the empirical Balmer formula for line spectra. (Quotation from: A. Pais, “Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World”, 1985, page 212.)
Bohr never came up with an mechanism that explained the failure of classical electromagnetism; instead he worked out a Mach-type "positivist" philosophy of against asking awkward questions of models that make accurate predictions (which Ptolemy's epicycle followers had hundreds of years earlier used to try to suppress Copernicus), the complementary and correspondence principles which Einstein attacked at the Solvay Congress of modern physics in 1927 and thereafter. According to Bohr, nature corresponds to classical physics on large scales here the action is much bigger than Planck's constant, and to quantum mechanics on small scales where the action is on the order of Planck's constant. Wave descriptions of matter complement rather than contradict particle descriptions, and we must religiously believe in his dogma that there is no possibility of reconciling classical and quantum physics; we must believe that nature has discontinuities and must not ask questions or try to find answers, because it is a waste of time. (This is like the false belief in the 19th century - before stellar line spectra were detected - that nobody would ever know the composition of stars, because they are too hot and too far away to investigate.)
Bohr therefore opposed quantum field theory in the modern second quantization form of Feynman's path integrals (central to the Standard Model today) at the 1948 Pocono conference:
" ... Bohr ... said: '... one could not talk about the trajectory of an electron in the atom, because it was something not observable.' ... Bohr thought that I didn't know the uncertainty principle ... it didn't make me angry, it just made me realize that ... [ they ] ... didn't know what I was talking about, and it was hopeless to try to explain it further. I gave up, I simply gave up ..."
- Richard P. Feynman, in Jagdish Mehra, The Beat of a Different Drum, Oxford, 1994, pp. 245-248. (For the story of how Dyson and Bethe overcame hostility and forced the scientific community to lower their guard against path integrals, see Dyson's YouTube video linked here.)
Feynman completely debunks the uncertainty principle (first quantization) quantum mechanics philosophy in his 1985 book QED:
‘I would like to put the uncertainty principle in its historical place: When the revolutionary ideas of quantum physics were first coming out, people still tried to understand them in terms of old-fashioned ideas ... But at a certain point the old-fashioned ideas would begin to fail, so a warning was developed that said, in effect, “Your old-fashioned ideas are no damn good when ...” If you get rid of all the old-fashioned ideas and instead use the ideas that I’m explaining in these lectures – adding arrows [path amplitudes] for all the ways an event can happen – there is no need for an uncertainty principle!’
- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, pp. 55-56 (footnote).
‘When we look at photons on a large scale – much larger than the distance required for one stopwatch turn [i.e., wavelength] – the phenomena that we see are very well approximated by rules such as “light travels in straight lines [without overlapping two nearby slits in a screen]“, because there are enough paths around the path of minimum time to reinforce each other, and enough other paths to cancel each other out. But when the space through which a photon moves becomes too small (such as the tiny holes in the [double slit] screen), these rules fail – we discover that light doesn’t have to go in straight [narrow] lines, there are interferences created by the two holes, and so on. The same situation exists with electrons: when seen on a large scale, they travel like particles, on definite paths. But on a small scale, such as inside an atom, the space is so small that [individual random field quanta exchanges become important because there isn't enough space involved for them to average out completely, so] there is no main path, no “orbit”; there are all sorts of ways the electron could go, each with an amplitude. The phenomenon of interference becomes very important, and we have to sum the arrows [in the path integral for individual field quanta interactions, instead of using the average which is the classical Coulomb field] to predict where an electron is likely to be.’
- Richard P. Feynman, QED, Penguin Books, London, 1990, Chapter 3, pp. 84-5.
In QED, the explanation for the question, "why doesn't the orbiting electron radiate and spiral into the nucleus?" is simply: equilibrium between emission and reception. The orbital electron is radiating intensely, but because there is a well-established equilibrium between the intense rate of emission and the intense rate of reception, the radiation appears as invisible "field quanta" to us instead of doing work (e.e., it doesn't make any electrons jump energy levels!). Whenever you have an equilibrium of emission and reception, you just have a zero point field. If you think of the motion of air molecules hitting you, it is not possible to extract that particle energy usefully to do work. Air pressure exerts a force, but it's not possible to get useful work out of it. The vacuum field of virtual photons or field quanta is similar; electrons are bombarded on all sides and there is no useful net work done, no net electric current or anything. So the radiation from a lot of orbiting electrons soon creates an equilibrium and once the electrons are receiving as much radiant power in virtual photons as they radiate, they have attained a "ground state", ceasing to spiral into the nucleus because there is no longer any useful work being done on them to push them in towards the nucleus.
Bridgman then explains the various types of radiation emission from the nucleus, alpha particles (which escape from the nucleus as stable configurations by "quantum tunnelling" through the quantized binding field), beta particles (which have a continuous energy spectrum with a mean energy of usually one-third of the total energy released in beta decay, the remainder of the energy being carried by an antineutrino), and gamma rays (which are released from the nucleus in discrete energies which suggests a shell structure for the nucleons in the nucleus, analogous to Bohr's explanation of the line spectra of light from atomic electrons).
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 (Fission Explosives: Neutronics, Fission Explosives: Thermodynamics, and Fusion Explosives)
Neglecting the detailed calculations of nuclear weapon design and prediction of efficiency, the general physics of how a chemical explosive like TNT compresses a solid metal uranium or plutonium core, is of interest because it indicates the minimum possible size for a spherical implosion nuclear weapon. Smaller sizes for cannon shells can be achieved by gun-type assembly, or by linear implosion where a piece of fissile material is simply compressed in one dimension rather than in three dimensions; these designs are both less efficient than spherical implosion but are necessary to fit a nuclear weapon into a small-diameter cannon shell.
On page 121, Bridgman gives curves from M. van Thiel's Compendium of Shock Data (Livermore Radiation Lab., report UCRL-50108, v. 1, June 1966) which show how much pressure is needed to achieve given increases in the density of metallic uranium and (alpha phase) plutonium. Doubling the density of plutonium metal requires 4.9 Mbar, and 10 Mbar is needed to do the same to uranium. Doubling the density will shrink the radius by a factor of 21/3 = 1.26, so a 6.2 kg solid plutonium core (the Nagasaki bomb had 6.2 kg of plutonium, but it was not solid since it had an initiator in the centre) shrinks from 4.2 cm radius to just 3.3 cm radius, a reduction of 0.9 cm due to compression.
Work energy, E = Fx = PAx = (4.9*106*105)*(4*Pi*(0.0422))*(0.009 metres) = 9.8*107 J. [This calculation is mine, a back-of-the-envelope estimate and is not based on the detailed numerical calculations of implosion in Bridgman's book; it is not accurate for bomb design just to give an indication of what kind of mass is needed so that the bulk and mass of the terrorist threat can be seen.]
This is the amount of implosion energy needed to double the density of a 6.2 kg solid plutonium core. However, Newton's 3rd law tells us that you can't make a force act in one direction; you always get an equal and opposite reaction force. So in implosion, only 50% of the force of the TNT explosion goes inward as a shock wave to compress the core (the rest acts outwards).
Since TNT produces 4.2*1012 J per kt, for the 50% efficiency suggested by Newton's 3rd law you need 46 kg of TNT to compress a plutonium core to double density.
However, this calculation omits the fact that the core isn't all compressed simultaneously. As the shock wave from the TNT reaches the core, it compresses first the outside of the core, and gradually compresses more of the core as it progresses inward, taking something like 8 microseconds to reach the middle and rebound. So the implosion process is extremely complicated to model and requires sophisticated computer calculations. Adding a natural uranium or lead tamper around the core might seem like a good idea to delay the expansion of the core and allow a fission chain reaction to spontaneously set off a nuclear explosion, but that is wrong: it adds more mass to the bomb, and requires more TNT to compress, and the extra force of the rebounding implosion wave when it reaches the centre will disassemble the core just as before.
This indicates the minimum size and mass of an efficient implosion weapon, which might be smuggled in by terrorists. It won't fit into a suitcase. It does not even indicate that terrorists can produce a nuclear weapon from so much plutonium and TNT, because you have to inject neutrons to start the chain reaction during the few microseconds it takes for the implosion shock wave to travel through the core, compressing it. Once the shock wave reaches the centre of the core a few microseconds after reaching it (at velocities on the order of 10 km/s after entering the core), it rebounds and soon causes the core to expand and become subcritical again. The requirement for bomb design - even for the simplest device - is complex and involves detailed calculations and design to ensure that the the neutron chain reaction is initiated at the right time after the TNT has been detonated simultaneously at many points around the surface.
It shows that the theft is plutonium by itself is not a particularly great threat: terrorists would need a great deal more technology to make a nuclear weapon from a piece of plutonium than to simply use conventional explosives like TNT for terrorism. The main threat is therefore rogue states which can afford to invest heavily in the technology and research required to make neutron initiators correctly linked to the electrical firing system and simultaneous detonators of the TNT system.
Miniaturization technology like beryllium neutron reflectors and tritium boosting are so expensive that - regardless of what informatin they had on the subject - these improvements would not be available to terrorists, so any terrorist nuclear weapon which posed a massive threat would itself be large in physical size and therefore difficult to deliver, not at all the "suitcase bomb."
It would be easier for terrorists to use conventional chemical explosives than nuclear explosives. Only with a massive investment in laboratory technology and research could the firing and neutron initiation system for a threatening nuclear weapon be produced.
Injecting 1 gram of tritium gas into the hollow core of an 83 kt fission weapon "boosts" its yield by a factor of about 50% to 124 kt, of which 0.135 kt is due to the fusion of tritium and nearly 41 kt is due to additional neutrons induced in the core material by the fusion neutrons. This technology is beyond most nations; even America finds tritium production a costly business. The nuclear reaction cross-sectional area for the fusion of tritium + deuterium into helium and a neutron plus 17.6 MeV of energy is roughly 100 times higher than the cross-section for deuterium + deuterium fusion, so the tritium + deuterium reaction (which produces 1.49*1024 neutrons/kt and 80.6 kt/kg of energy when fused) is all-important in thermonuclear weapons. This requires the use of lithium deuteride capsules which are ablated by X-rays in the Teller-Ulam system, which again requires elaborate laboratory technology plus very sophisticated three dimensional calculations using computers for research and development, which we need not discuss.
Bridgman discusses the temperature and partition between X-rays and case shock (kinetic) energy in the exploding bomb using a similar treatment to Brode's 1968 published article in the Annual Review of Nuclear Science, vol. 18, but in greater depth. The total energy at explosion time is the sum of X-ray energy aVT4 (where a is the radiation constant which is 4/c times the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, V is volume, and T is temperature) and material energy MCT (where M is mass, C is the specific heat capacity of that mass at constant volume which is 3R/2 for a perfect solid or 3R = 0.02494 cal/(g*K) for an ideal gas such as the highly ionized bomb vapours, and T is temperature): E = aVT4 + MCT. For heavy inefficient nuclear weapons (such as a terrorist improvised device) very little energy is emitted in X-rays by this formula, so it can't be used to initiate a Teller-Ulam thermonuclear reaction. A bomb temperature of 11.6 million K corresponds to X-ray radiation quanta of 1 keV. DNA-EM-1 considers X-ray energies from 1 keV to 10 keV for modern nuclear weapons, corresponding to peak bomb temperatures of 11.6 to 116 million K. Only for a high yield-to-mass ratio is there a large proportion of the yield emitted in X-rays which can initiate a Teller-Ulam thermonuclear charge reaction.
In the chapter on X-ray effects, page 197, Bridgman states that a weapon with a several cm thick dense outer casing and a yield of a few kilotons will be relatively "cold" with an X-ray radiating temperature of 1 keV or less. However, if the outer casing is thin and of lower atomic number, it can be fully ionized and can emit X-rays with a mean energy of several keV. Efficient megaton yield weapons can emit 10 keV X-rays. These X-rays can be used to pump an X-ray laser or to indiscriminately ablate, deflect and destroy re-entry vehicles in outer space over a wide volume during a concentrated nuclear attack. X-ray weapons for high altitude use need special design to minimise the fission yield and the prompt gamma ray output (including that due to inelastic neutron scatter in the case), or there can be substantial damaging EMP effects at ground level.
"Ablation can be explained very simply and is very well understood because it's the mechanism by which fission primary stages ignite fusion stages inside thermonuclear weapons: 80% of the energy of a nuclear explosion is in X-rays and the X-ray laser would make those X-rays coherent and focus some of them on to the metal case of an incoming enemy missile. The result is the blow-off or 'ablation' of a very thin surface layer of the metal (typically a fraction of a millimetre). Although only a trivial amount of material is blown off, it has a very high velocity and carries a significant momentum. The momentum isn't immense but it creates a really massive force on account of the small time (about 10 nanoseconds) over which it is imparted (this is because force is the rate of change of momentum, i.e. F = dp/dt), and since pressure is simply force per unit area, you get an immense pressure due to Newton's 3rd law of motion (action and reaction are equal and opposite, the rocket principle).
"Hans Bethe and W. L. Bade in their paper Theory of X-Ray Effects of High Altitude Nuclear Bursts and Proposed Vehicle Hardening Method (AVCO Corp., Mass., report RAD-TR-9(7)-60-2, April 1960) proposed that missiles can be hardened against X-ray induced ablative recoil by using a layer of plastic foam to absorb reduce the force within the missile by spreading out the change of momentum over a longer period of time, but although this will protect some internal components from shock damage, the missile skin can still be deflected, dented and destroyed by ablation recoil."
Bridgman's book quantifies the X-ray ablation effect on pp. 212-5:
"The energy deposited by X-ray absorption occurs in a very short time, essentially the time duration of the x-ray pulse, perhaps several shakes [1 shake = 10 nanoseconds] for the direct x-rays. because of inertia, the target material will not significantly expand, contract or translate in such a short time. Thus, the energy deposited can be regarded as an instantaneous increase in material internal energy."
He considers a graphite (carbon) heat shield exposed to 10 cal/cm2 of 4 keV x-rays. The sublimation energy (energy to vaporize a solid directly) of pyrolytic carbon is 191 cal/gram = 800 kJ/kg. The 10 cal/cm2 deposits 1.54 MJ/kg of energy on the front surface of the carbon, so it vaporizes and "blows off" the surface. For a fluence of 10 cal/cm2, the 4 keV x-ray vaporization extends to an effective depth of 81 microns in the pyrolytic carbon. (For double that x-ray fluence, i.e. 20 cal/cm2, the depth of surface blow-off will be increased by a factor of 1/lne2 ~ 1.44.) On p. 213, Bridgman explains:
"... the vaporized material is often referred to as a blow-off ... there is a rocket exhaust-like momentum which is discharged in a very short time. A time rate of change of momentum to the left of the front surface must be balanced by an equal and opposite time rate of change of momentum or pressure to the right into the shield. This equal and opposite pressure becomes a shock wave into the solid material ..."
Bridgman computes the kinetic energy of the blow-off in the example (for 10 cal/cm2 of 4 keV x-rays striking pyrolytic carbon) to be 58.9 kJ/m2, corresponding to a blow-off velocity of 813 m/s. Assuming that the x-ray pulse lasts 20 ns, the ablation recoil force will be on the order of F = dp/dt ~ mv/t implying an immense pressure of 72 kbar or 72,000 atmospheres.
Bridgman adds that a 4 keV x-rays fluence of 5 cal/cm2 deposits just under the sublimation energy of the carbon shield, so it will not be able to cause any blow-off, but it will still deposit energy in the outer 0.5 mm of the shield, and impart momentum, producing a peak surface pressure on the shield of 14.9 kbar or about 15,000 atmospheres.
Bridgman on page 247 calculates that the fireball surface radiating temperature at the time that the shock wave departs from it ("breakaway" time according to Glasstone and Dolan) decreases from 300,000 K for a sea level burst to 75,000 K for a burst altitude of 20 km. This occurs at 3.13Wkt0.44 ms after a W kt burst at sea level (Bridgman quotes this formula from page 233 of Northrop's book).
Blast Effects
Bridgman derives Glasstone and Dolan's "Rankine-Hugoniot equations" for idea shock fronts on pages 281-4. He gives a graph of Mach stem heights (not included in Glasstone and Dolan, but included in the Capabilities series from 1957 onwards) on page 293. On pages 295-297 he quotes research by Charles Needham on the correlation of nuclear test data on blast from high yield devices, which showed that you get a natural reduction in peak pressures from megaton yield devices because the blast wave energy refracts upwards into the lower density air at higher altitudes where the shock radius is on the order of the 4.3 miles or 6.9 km scale height of the atmosphere (the height at which sea-level air density falls by a factor of e = 2.718):
"During the research which went into the 1 kt nuclear blast standard, we looked very carefully at the blast data from the Pacific as well as from Nevada. We found that the majority of measured pressures from the Pacific data, whether at ground level or from airborne gauges, did not cube root scale to the same pressure versus radius curve that the Nevada Test Site data did. We found that the multimegaton data consistently fell below the calculated curves and the NTS data which agreed with the one-dimensional calculations. Further, we found that the data from small yields shot in the Pacific (there were a few) did agree with the NTS data. More sophisticated two-dimensional calculations confirmed that as the shock radius became an appreciable fraction of the scale height in the atmosphere, more energy went up than out."
Bridgman then gives an analysis of blast gust loading on aircraft. (On p. 495, he also points out that thermal radiation can also be important for aircraft metal skins which can melt at 580 C and can only safely take a temperature of 204 C, corresponding to a 20% change in skin elasticity.) He then gives an analysis of blast loading on buildings. He 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: deflection at time t,
where A is the cross-sectional face-on area of the building facing to the blast (e.g., 163 square metres), f is the natural frequency of oscillation of the building (e.g., 5 Hz), M is the mass of the building, Pt is the overpressure at time t, CD is the drag coefficient of the building to wind pressure (CD = 1.2 for a rectangular building), and qt is the dynamic pressure at time t. (There is a related calculation of the peak deflection of a structure on pages 250-284 of the 1957 edition of the Effects of Nuclear Weapons.) Bridgman points out that this equation ignores:
(1) the fact that the net force from the overpressure suddenly ends once the shock front has engulfed the building and is pressing on the rear side with a similar pressure to that that on the front side, and
(2) the end of the building oscillations due to energy loss from causing damage or destruction of the walls and other components of the building.
The effect of these limitations can easily be incorporated into the model by (1) calculating the time taken for the shock front to transverse the length of the building, and (2) using nuclear test data to indicate the peak pressure associated with a given degree of damage or destruction (this allows the amount of deflection of walls to be correlated to the probability that the wall fails).
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 and transformed into slow-moving (relative to the shock front) 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:
Bridgman discusses the neutron output spectra given by Glasstone and Dolan (1977), which are of course simplified from more detailed data in Dolan's formerly classified manual, EM-1. The pure fission weapon output indicates that 50% of the neutrons available escape and therefore 50% are captured in the weapon debris. For the typical thermonuclear weapon, fewer neutrons escape. Prompt gamma rays are not produced by fusion, but can be produced when neutrons are inelastically scattered by some nuclei, exciting nucleons within those nuclei to a high energy state.
Residual Radiation
Page 401 stated that the mass of fallout produced by a surface burst varies from 800 tons/kt for 1 kt to 300 tons/kt for 1 Mt total yield. Bridgman presents the details of the fallout particle-size distribution, cloud rise, diffusion and deposition as mathematical models.
The book then goes into the biological effects radiation. Animals are approximately 70% water, so most of the radiation interactions in the body are related to the ionization of water molecules by radiation. Water molecules, H2O, when ionized form H+ ions and OH- ions. At low dose rates the rate at which these are produced is small, so there are unlikely to be two nearby. At higher dose rates, it is more likely that there will be nearby ions, so mixed-up recombination can form molecules like the oxidising agent hydrogen peroxide, 2OH -> H2O2, which is a chemical poison in high concentrations. Cell nuclei contain chromosomes consisting of DNA molecules. Genes are sections of DNA which carry the instructions for producing a particular protein molecule. Protein molecules in the nucleus work as enzymes, repairing damage to DNA and controlling cellular processes like division. Eggs are examples of single cells. Bridgman discusses only the basic physical processes involved in the biological effects of radiation, and does not evaluate all of the mechanisms and experimental evidence for non-linear dose -effects response in long-term effects.
It would be good if the book included a look at some of the ways that radiation damage can be prevented or reduced by harmless natural vitamins and minerals. According to the March 1990 U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency study guide DNA1.941108.010, report HRE-856, Medical Effects of Nuclear Weapons (the guide book to a course sponsored by the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, AFRRI, Bethesda, Maryland), the free radicals and hydrogen peroxide molecules created from ionized water can be converted back into water molecules by vitamins A, C, and E, glutathione, and the mineral selenium. Vitamins A, C, and E, glutathione help to scavenge free radicals as they are formed by ionization and prevent oxidation type damage. The natural enzyme catalase breaks down hydrogen peroxide into harmless water and oxygen. Selenium as a dietary supplement has a similar function in combination with glutathione. Animal experiments on the benefits of vitamin E for protection against large doses of radiation are reported graphically in that guide. In control experiments (no vitamin E supplement present in the body at exposure time), there was 90% lethality within 30 days after 750 R and 100% lethality within 30 days after 850 R. When vitamin E was supplied, there was 100% survival at 30 days after 750 R and 60% survival at 30 days after exposure to 850 R. Hence, vitamin E can cause a massive enhancement on survival probability after radiation damage, by helping to eliminate radiation caused free radicals before them can cause any damage to DNA. Ignorant anti civil defence propaganda ignores all the hard won scientific evidence and then claims falsely that there is no protection possible by any means, least of all dietary supplements. It is true that the doses of natural anti-oxidants needed for protection against lethal radiation exposure can cause toxic side-effects in some cases, but if the alternative is the lethal effect of radiation then such side effects may be acceptable. The guide also shows that the LD50 from radiation only at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 was 600 rads, compared to just 260 rads for 97 Nagasaki personnel with who received thermal burns in addition to nuclear radiation. The nuclear radiation proved more lethal in combination with thermal burns because the burns wounds became infected at a time when the radiation temporarily suppressed the white blood cell count (which occurs from 1-8 weeks after exposure), preventing the infections from being fought effectively by the immune system. Preventing thermal burns by simply ducking and covering therefore massively increases the nuclear radiation LD50.
Dust and Smoke Effects
Bridgman's Chapter 13 is on "Dust and Smoke Effects" which of course is not included at all in Glasstone and Dolan (1977). Hype began in 1983 by Carl Sagan et al. ("TAPPS") for a new temporary ice age due to a temperature reduction caused by smoke clouds from mass fires blocking sunlight after a nuclear attack. In firestorms like that at Hamburg or Hiroshima (after a nuclear detonation), a wood-frame construction, highly flammable city (which no longer exist in modern countries), the soot was accompanied by moisture and all visible sign of it had come down as a "black rain" within an hour or so of the explosion. We have documented in some detail many of the gross falsehoods about thermal ignition due to nuclear weapons in forests and cities in an earlier post. Early editions of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons grossly exaggerated thermal ignition.
Smoke and dust clouds are rapidly produced near at ground level which shield material from ignition by the remainder of the thermal radiation flash; the early part of the flash does not penetrate deeply enough into the material to cause ignition, just ablation type smoke emission which shields the underlying material. This is before shadowing effects in a forest or city are included (at significant distances, the thermal pulse is over by the time the blast arrives and causes the possible displacement of objects which shield thermal radiation). While it is true that a room in a wooden hut deliberately crammed full of inflammable rubbish, with a large window facing ground zero without any obstruction, underwent nearly immediate "flashover" after the Encore nuclear test, an identical set up nearby with a tidy room without the inflammables did not undergo burn down: some items were scorched, but they burned out without setting the room on fire. In addition, people in brick or concrete buildings near ground zero in the Hiroshima firestorm were able to put out fires and prevent their buildingd from burning down.
"These fires will be set by the thermal flash of thousands of separate nuclear bursts. However, the bulk of the burning and smoke generation will occur hours after the nuclear fireballs have risen to their ultimate altitudes. This the smoke, like the smoke from any fire, should remain in the troposphere. This should be the case even if violent fire storms were generated [like Hiroshima and Hamburg]. These tropospheric smoke particles would be subject to the same removal mechanisms [as tropospheric fallout], namely rainout. The mean-life of tropospheric particles was given as about 20 days ... recent observations from the Gulf War oil field fires, indicated that the tropopause rose with the top of the smoke cloud preventing stratospheric injection. It was postulated that the stable air resisted descrnding to replace the buoyant air. Furthermore the real smoke particles cooled at night and became negatively bouyant [descending at night]."
Space Effects
Chapter 14 is "Space Effects". Bridgman begins by pointing out that explosions above 100 km altitude occur in a virtual vacuum, so there is no significant local x-ray fireball at the burst altitude (which requires air around the bomb to absorb x-rays), although x-rays going downward will produce an x-ray heated pancake of air at an altitude of around 80 km, centred below the detonation point. (X-rays and neutrons are more penetrating than x-rays of course, and will be mainly absorbed in a layer at an altitude of around 30 km.)
However, although they don't produce local x-ray fireballs around the detonation location, high altitude bursts above 100 km do produce UV (ultraviolet) fireballs around the detonation location! The mechanism for the UV fireball in bursts above 100 km is simple and depends on the bomb casing and debris shock wave, which typically carries around 16% of the explosion energy according to Bridgman (x-rays carry 70%, and the rest is nuclear radiation, including 3.8% in residual beta radiation):
"The debris front sweeps up the thin air that it does encounter, imparting kinetic energy to those air molecules. The energized air molecules in the debris-air collision front emit ultraviolet radiation in the 3 to 6 eV range. Thus UV radiation travels outward ahead of the debris-air collision front, at light speed. The cool air ahead of the front ... absorbs the UV radiation ... which produces an [ionized] UV fireball. ... Recombination between the ionized or dissociated molecules in the UV fireball is very slow due to the low density of the particles at altitudes of 100 km and higher. As a result, the UV fireball has a lifetime of 3 to 15 minutes. During this lifetime both magnetic buoyancy and buoyancy due to the heating of the ionized aur cause the UV fireball to rise, lofting the ionized region hundreds of kilometres upward. ...
"Outside of the UV fireball, especially below it, some UV radiation will be absorbed by the air, heating that air without achieving ionization. This heated neutral air will also rise as it expands."
The expanding ionized UV fireball acts as a diamagnetic cavity or bubble, excluding the earth's magnetic field and thus causing the earth's magnetic "field lines" to be excluded and compressed outside the bubble. This causes a magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) shock wave, producing the slow MHD-EMP to be propagated. Even when the actual expansion halts, the buoyant rise of the ionized bubble through the magnetic field produces another MHD-EMP effect from the motion of the ionized charge in the bubble (electrons quickly escape, leaving a net positive charge of slower moving ions in the bubble). KINGFISH (410 kt at 95 km altitude on 1 November 1962) is used by Bridgman to illustrate the UV fireball and the downward beta and ion "kinetic energy patch" or streamer, which follows the direction of the earth's magnetic field lines (the charged particles spiral around the earth's magnetic field vector).
Bridgman adds that the local UV fireball diminishes at very great altitudes and may not be formed above 500 km (it was trivial in the STARFISH test at 400 km altitude). In such extremely high altitude bursts, the only local light source is the bomb debris itself. The bomb debris and any accompanying re-entry vehicle mass (after it cools by emitting most of its energy as x-rays) is an expanding shell which is assumed to carry 16% of the total explosion energy as kinetic energy, E = (1/2)Mv2, implying a bomb debris velocity of 1,640 km/s for a 1 Mt weapon with a mass of 500 kg. This is of the same order of magnitude as the measured STARFISH debris velocity. Bridgman points out that this debris kinetic energy can produce large forces when striking nearby space satellites or re-entry vehicles.
On page 471, Bridgman gives a neat explanation of the Argus "magnetic reflection" effect of trapped electron shells. Electrons spiral around the earth's cived magnetic field vectors from conjugate points at 100-200 km altitude in each hemisphere, being "reflected" back at each conjugate point. How does the reflection process work? Bridgman explains that the conservation of energy applies to the kinetic energy of the electron's velocity component perpendicular to, and the kinetic energy of the electron's velocity component parallel to, the earth's magnetic field vector or imaginary "line".
Therefore, the sum (1/2)Mvperpendicular2 + (1/2)Mvparallel2 is a constant. Hence, as the electron approaches the conjugate point where the magnetic field lines converge together, its velocity perpendicular to the lines increases at the expense of its velocity parallel to the lines, due to conservation of energy. So the electron ever slows down in its approach toward the conjugate point as the magnetic field lines converge, but momentum carries it on past that point at which it would simply stop altogether (and merely cicle the magnetic field line), so there is then a force on it to reverse its direction parallel to the field line, and it begins to spiral back around the field line towards the other conjugate point. There the process is repeated, unless the electron happens to be captured by an air molecule in the low density air at 100-200 km. The capture of a sufficient flux of electrons at the conjugate points by air causes auroral effects; this is also the mechanism for the natural "northern lights" and "southern nights" (where cosmic radiation trapped by the earth's magnetic field gradually leaks into the atmosphere at magnetic conjugate points in each hemisphere).
In addition to simply bouncing north-south between conjugate points, the trapped electrons drift eastwards (in the same direction as the earth's rotation, but much faster than earth's rotation) and rapidly form a trapped shell of electrons surrounding the planet. Bridgman explains that the eastward drift is similar in mechanism to the reflection effect (in other words, you resolve the electron motion in two perpendicular directions and apply conservation of energy to the sum of these two kinetic energy components), but instead of the mechanism being the convergence of magnetic field lines near the pole, the mechanism is the vertical decrease in earth's magnetic field strength with increasing altitude above the earth.
Bridgman then discusses the effect of electron belts on communications and radar. In the natural atmosphere, there is an electrically conductive "ionosphere" caused by solar and cosmic radiation at altitudes above 60 km. The higher "D" and "E" layers typically contain 10 times as many electrons per cubic centimeter in the daytime than at night, due to the absense of solar radiation produced ionization at night when many electrons can recombine with ions. The lowest or "D" layer is around 80 km and contains around 1010 electrons/m3; the "E" layer is around 100 km up and contains around 2*1011 electrons/m3 in the daytime, while the "F" layer is at 250-500 km up and contains 1012 electrons/m3 in the daytime. Because of these free electrons, the layers are electrically conductive and can thus reflect radio waves like a metal plate (or like visible light reflecting off a mirror), but less effectively because the electron density and thus conductivity is much smaller.
LF radio waves are reflected back to earth by the lowest or "D" layer; MF is reflected back by the "E" layer, but HF radio waves penetrate both of those layers (albeit with some refraction) and are only finally reflected back to earth by the "F" layer. At frequencies above 30 MHz, an increasing fraction of the radio waves are able to penetrate through all the layers and escape into outer space.
The patches of ionization and the electron shells produced by a high altitude nuclear explosion are in effect additional or enhanced ionospheres. If the electron densities are pumped very high, even VHF and UHF signals (which are not normally affected by the natural ionosphere) can be stopped or seriously attenuated by the electron shells, which can degrade communications like satellite links which pass through the ionosphere (although you can easily increase the up-link power from an earth based transmitter to a satellite to overcome attenuation, the transmission power from the satellite is limited by its small power supply, so if there is a large attenuation in signal strength, it may not be possible to receive a down-link signal from the satellite which exceeds the noise level sufficiently). See also EM-1 chapters here and here.
(This blog post will be updated as time permits; I intend to briefly review the civil defence related effects physics in each chapter. It would be a good idea if the effects material were published as a revised and updated replacement of the traditional unclassified Glasstone book.)
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.’
“FY 1997 Plans: ... Provide text to update Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... Update the unclassified textbook entitled, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. ... Continue revision of Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... FY1999 Plans ... Disseminate updated The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.”
‘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.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: ‘My Lords, if we are going into the question of lethality of weapons and seek thereby to isolate the nuclear as distinct from the so-called conventional range, is there not a danger that the public may think that Vimy, Passchendaele and Dresden were all right—sort of tea parties—and that nuclear war is something which in itself is unacceptable?’
Lord Trefgarne: ‘My Lords, the policy of making Europe, or the rest of the world, safe for conventional war is not one that I support.’
Mr. Bill Walker (Tayside, North): ‘I remind the House that more people died at Stalingrad than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Yet people talk about fighting a conventional war in Europe as if it were acceptable. One rarely sees demonstrations by the so-called peace movement against a conventional war in Europe, but it could be nothing but ghastly and horrendous. The casualties would certainly exceed those at Stalingrad, and that cannot be acceptable to anyone who wants peace’
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."