Please also click here (text in blue typeface is hyperlinked to source documents) for more detailed key declassified nuclear testing and capability documents compilation (EM-1 related USA research reports plus UK nuclear weapon test reports on blast and radiation), from nukegate.org.

Update, Tuesday 19 November 2024: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4v0rey0jzo: "Vladimir Putin has approved changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine, setting out new conditions under which the country would consider using its arsenal. The doctrine now says an attack from a non-nuclear state, if backed by a nuclear power, will be treated as a joint assault on Russia. The update was proposed in September and rubber stamped on Tuesday [19 November 2024], the 1,000th day of the war with Ukraine. It also follows Washington’s decision on Monday to allow Ukraine to fire long-range US missiles into Russia. Under the changes, a large attack on Russia with conventional missiles, drones or aircraft could meet the criteria for a nuclear response, as could an attack on Belarus or any critical threat to Russia's sovereignty. Any aggression against Russia by a state which is a member of a coalition would be seen by Moscow as aggression from the whole group. The updates expand the number of countries and coalitions, and the kinds of military threats, subject to a possible nuclear response, according to state-run news agency Tass."

Jerusalem Post, AUGUST 26, 2024 14:55, https://www.jpost.com/international/internationalrussia-ukraine-war/article-816333: "... Russia planned overwhelming strikes across Western Europe, with nuclear weapons intended for use in combination with other destructive weapons and means. The files show that Russia retained the capability to carry nuclear weapons on surface ships, which increases the risks of escalation or even accidents. They also suggest that Russia views tactical nuclear weapons as potentially decisive in conflicts ... Russia's military strategy is described as aiming for "total war," with tactical nuclear weapons seen as crucial for achieving war-winning objectives. The files ... also reference a "demonstration strike," or the detonation of a nuclear weapon in a remote area, "in a period of immediate threat of aggression" before an actual conflict to scare Western countries. The file said that a strike like this would show "the intention to use nuclear weapons." Recent Russian exercises have involved rehearsing the use of tactical nuclear weapons, consistent with the strategies outlined in the leaked documents. This preparation includes loading anti-ship missiles with nuclear warheads and practicing the handling and deployment of nuclear warheads, suggesting that the threat of nuclear escalation remains a significant aspect of Russia's military planning."

Max Seddon and Chris Cook, "Leaked Russian military files reveal criteria for nuclear strike", Financial Times newspaper (UK), 28 Feb 2024: "The exercises offer a rare insight into how Russia views its nuclear arsenal as a cornerstone of its defence policy — and how it trains forces to be able to carry out a nuclear first strike in some battlefield conditions. ... The slides summarise the threshold as a combination of factors where losses suffered by Russian forces “would irrevocably lead to their failure to stop major enemy aggression”, a “critical situation for the state security of Russia”. ... Russia’s military is also expected to be able to use tactical nuclear weapons for a broad array of goals, including “containing states from using aggression ... or escalating military conflicts”, “stopping aggression”, preventing Russian forces from losing battles or territory, and making Russia’s navy “more effective”. Putin said last June that he felt “negatively” about using tactical nuclear strikes, but then boasted that Russia had a larger non-strategic arsenal than NATO countries. “Screw them, you know, as people say,” Putin said. ... The documents reflect patterns seen in exercises the Russian military held regularly before and since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. ... While Russia’s president has the sole authority to launch a first nuclear strike, the low threshold for tactical nuclear use set out in the documents conforms with a doctrine some western observers refer to as “escalating to de-escalate”. Under this strategy a tactical weapon could be used to try to prevent Russia from becoming embroiled in a sprawling war, particularly one in which the US might intervene. Using what it calls “fear inducement”, Moscow would seek to end the conflict on its own terms by shocking the country’s adversary with the early use of a small nuclear weapon — or securing a settlement through the threat to do so."

Dr Mark B. Schneider, The Leaked Russian Nuclear Documents and Russian First Use of Nuclear Weapons, National Institute for Public Policy, Information Series Issue No. 579, March 18, 2024: "Typically, Western press reporting on Russian nuclear issues involves interviewing the normal coterie of left-wing “experts” who are more interested in reducing the U.S. nuclear deterrent than understanding Russian nuclear strategy and its implications. In contrast, the Financial Times presented an insightful analysis concerning the meaning of the Russian documents. Still, the analysts who historically have been most accurate in their assessment of Russian nuclear weapons policy were not among them (e.g., Dr. Stephen Blank, Dr. Keith Payne, and Mr. Dave Johnson). Russian nuclear weapons policy is very dangerous; it is closely tied to military aggression and repeated high-level nuclear threats.

"In 2015, in the time frame of the leaked Russian documents, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg observed, “Russia’s recent use of nuclear rhetoric, exercises and operations are deeply troubling ... Russia’s nuclear sabrerattling is unjustified, destabilizing and dangerous.” Since then, the situation has clearly gotten worse. The Biden Administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review also noted that: "The Russian Federation’s unprovoked and unlawful invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is a stark reminder of nuclear risk in contemporary conflict. ... In brandishing Russia’s nuclear arsenal in an attempt to intimidate Ukraine [and NATO] ... Russia’s leaders have made clear that they view these weapons as a shield behind which to wage unjustified aggression against their neighbors. Irresponsible Russian statements and actions raise the risk of deliberate or unintended escalation". ... Medvedev even threatened “the further existence of the entire human civilization” if Russia ends up defeated in Ukraine by the West ... in 2014, Russian expatriate Nikolai Sokov reported “... all large-scale military exercises that Russia conducted beginning in 2000 featured simulations of limited nuclear strikes.” The January 2016 report of NATO’s Secretary General noted that Russia “... simulated nuclear attacks on NATO Allies (e.g., ZAPAD) and on partners (e.g., March 7, 2013 simulated attacks on Sweden) ...

"Russian nuclear exercises against non-nuclear Sweden are particularly important because Sweden, like Ukraine (against which Russian nuclear threats are frequent), is not supposed to be subject to nuclear attack under Russian negative assurances (i.e., Russia’s pledge not to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states.) Yet, in March 2022, “Swedish TV4 Nyheterna has reported that Russian bombers ‘armed with nuclear warheads’ entered EU airspace before being intercepted by Swedish fighter jets." ... the United States cannot depend upon Russia’s observance of the so-called “nuclear taboo” to protect the West from Russian nuclear attack. ... Only credible nuclear deterrence can safeguard the West, yet nuclear deterrence is under attack by the disarmament groups globally. The context of this is a Russian nuclear modernization program which according to Putin has already achieved 95% and will continue even after 100% is achieved. ... Despite the clear and present danger of Russian aggression and even nuclear escalation, as Dr. Keith Payne has pointed out, the Biden Administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review “appears frozen in the naively-optimistic post-Cold War years; it suggests no urgency with regard to U.S. responses to mounting threats.”

BELOW: Secret "For Official Use" and individually numbered Russian nuclear defense manual (169 pages long, T. F. Myasnikova, technical editor) entitled "КРАТКИЙ СПРАВОЧНИК ПО БОЕВЫМ СВОЙСТВАН ЯДЕРНОГО ОРУЖИЯ" [= "A Brief Guide to the Combat Properties of Nuclear Weapons"] states: "Ядерное оружие обладает значительно большей разрушительной силой по сравнению с обычными видами оружия, но существуют простые и надежные методы защиты от него. ... В этом руководстве представлен краткий обзор ядерного оружия, средств и методов защиты от ядерной угрозы, а также инструкции о том, как действовать в случае применения ядерного оружия." [= "Nuclear weapons have significantly greater destructive power than conventional weapons, but there are simple and reliable methods of protecting against them. ... This guide provides a brief overview of nuclear weapons, the means and methods of defending against a nuclear threat, and instructions on what to do in the event of a nuclear weapon being used."] The manual contains data tables on damage to Russian military equipment based on Russian nuclear weapons tests, as shown BELOW (this manual is the 2nd edition, dated 1969, but since Russian atmospheric nuclear tests ended in 1962, the data is still valid today). The Russian peak overpressure unit is the kg/cm^2 which equal to 1 atmosphere or 14.7 psi in classic American units or 101 kPa in Western SI units (1 kg/cm^2 = 10 tons/m^2 = 1 atmosphere = 14.7 psi = 101 kPa). Page 104 states that for 1 kiloton-1 megaton yields, Russian "Basement shelters for the population (type III shelters)" require 2-4 kg/cm^2 or 30-60 psi for destruction (making them harder than the concrete buildings surviving near ground zero in Hiroshima), while hydroelectric dams and underground utility pipes for water, sewage and gas supply require 10-15 kg/cm^2 or 150-225 psi for destruction. The hardest targets listed (on page 100) are the concrete runways at airports, which require in excess of 20 kg/cm^2 or 300 psi for destruction by cracking and spalling (ground shock effects). Note particularly Table 41 at pages 92-93, where severe damage (destruction) radii are given for Russian tactical nuclear missiles, cruise missiles, jet fighters, jet bombers, nuclear artillery guns, anti-aircraft guns, mortars, light and heavy machine guns, light and heavy grenade launchers, for air and surface bursts and for 13 yield classes from 1 kiloton to 1 megaton (including the calculated damage pressures in kg/cm^2, separately shown for surface and air bursts). Also, note that it compiles Russian data on measured EMP from nuclear tests in Tables 23 and 24 on page 71, showing the induced voltages as a function of weapon yield, type of conductor (aerial or underground buried power cable), and distance from ground zero. This proves Russian capabilities to use EMP effects from nuclear weapons. For example, Table 23 shows that 10 kV was induced in a 10m aerial at 3.3 km from a 1 megaton low altitude detonation. Note also that Russia found (Table 38) that forest area fires (not isolated fires) cannot occur after surface bursts in coniferous forests even at megaton yields, because of the low angle of elevation of the fireball and because the blast wave following the heat flash blows out most fires, although fire areas can occur at certain distances from ground zero in deciduous and mixed forests for higher-yield surface bursts. This detailed analysis proves Russian preparation for tactical nuclear war is true.

KEY FAILURES OF TODAY'S "MINIMAL DETERRENCE" (KAHN'S "TYPE 1 DETERRENT" AKA THE DREADNOUGHTS THAT FAILED TO DETER THE INVASION OF BELGIUM IN 1914 THAT TRIGGERED WWI):

1. It doesn't deter world war situations, which both occurred because of invasions of 3rd parties (invasion of Belgium 1914, Poland 1939), akin to the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine by Russia. In other words, you need credible deterrence of major provocations.

2. It doesn't even deter a direct attack by fanatical opponents, such as the October 2023 Hamas surprise attack on Israel or the December 1941 Pearl Harbor surprise attack or the 9/11 attack by war-crazy thugs.

3. It assumes sanity on the enemy side, while mental pressures are brought to bear on the sanity of the opponent in response to major provocations, e.g. "sanctions" against the enemy hardens their resolve (aided by internal state propaganda of the enemy, blaming hardships on you), just as "pressure" such as napalming Vietnam failed to deter the Tet Offensive. If you ban your use of overwhelming force to credibly stop or deter an opponent, you don't end in a fairy tale land of mutual love and understanding, but with a battle-hardened opponent, with the fighting mentality of a wounded animal. In other words, you get the opposite result.

4. The only people who can be safely and credibly deterred with "minimal deterrence" are not terrorist states, but generally established democracies, who you don't have fights with anyway (see Dr Weart's "Never at War: Why Democracies will not Fight One Another"), so you've reduced deterrence down to a level where it's only credible in situations where NOT needed! Duh! Try explaining this with any hardened fanatical "pacifist" and you soon see they're fanatical ranting lunatics obsessed with moronic "taboos" or war-making eugenics pseudoscience genocide schemes, and not the least interested in what they claimed they're concerned with, PEACE!

ABOVE: weak blast waves oscillate buildings within the "elastic" deformation range, absorbing up ~1% of the intercepted blast wave energy, whereas blast waves strong enough to oscillate the building well into the "plastic" deformation range can demolish modern steel and concrete city buildings (which mostly remained standing after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki air bursts) can absorb typically 10 times more energy or ~10% of the intercepted blast wave energy. Successive interactions in a large city causes a vast amount of shielding, as compared to tests conducted over flat desert or ocean. Although blast waves last longer at higher yields, their cube-root scaled-up blast effects radii contain more buildings along any radial line than for the smaller distances of destruction at lower yields, thus offsetting the extra energy at any given scaled "free field" peak overpressure. This was demonstrated by a study comparing blast effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where most of the buildings were wooden to "free field" nuclear tests by Penney, but it was suppressed by Bethe and Glasstone in the American "Bible" Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, which uses energy conservation violating "free field" blast and radiation data from tests over ideal unobstructed terrain. We exposed this delusion in 1990 in Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, which was then censored by CND liar-duped publishers. Part of our problem is that vital blast ductility data for determining blast energy absorption by city buildings (omitted from Glasstone and Dolan's book) is in Northrop's 1996 EM-1 book, which not "secret" but is still officially banned from open publication by law in the USA, because it gives some information relevant to military nuclear capabilities; similarly the unclassified but "Limited Distribution" DTRA published book by AFIT Professor Bridgman, Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects which can be used to demonstrate the exaggerations in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons when Glasstone's free-field (unobstructed terrain) nuclear effects predictions from desert and ocean nuclear tests are improperly applied to concrete cities. Bridgman, for instance, considers a building with an exposed area of 163 square metres, a mass of 455 tons and natural frequency of 5 oscillations per second, and finds that a peak overpressure of 10 psi (69 kPa) and peak dynamic pressure of 2.2 psi (15 kPa) at 4.36 km ground range from a 1 Mt air burst detonated at 2.29 km altitude, with overpressure and dynamic pressure positive durations of 2.6 and 3.6 seconds, respectively, produces a peak deflection of 19 cm in the building about 0.6 second after shock arrival. The peak deflection is computed from Bridgman's formula on p. 304. This 19 cm computed maximum deflection allows us to estimate how much energy is permanently and irreversibly absorbed from the blast wave by a building (if damaged, additional energy is absorbed and is transformed into slow-moving - relative to the shock front velocity - debris which falls to the ground and is quickly stopped after the blast has passed it) by: E = Fx, where F is force (i.e., product of total pressure and area) and x is distance moved in direction of force due to the applied force from the blast wave.

If the average pressure for the first 0.5 second is equal to 12 psi (83 kPa) then the average force on the building during this time is 13 million Newtons, and the energy absorbed is: E = Fx = 13,000,000*0.19 = 2.6 MJ, which is removed from the blast wave in the form of oscillations of the building. Successive absorption by building after building rapidly absorbs blast energy in this way.

Although you could say the blast wave from a 50% blast nuclear megaton warhead contains 2.1 x 10^15 Joules, the blast wave energy rapidly decreases as it dumps hot air behind it to form the fireball (Glasstone omits the fireball energy partition after blast breakaway, but the DELFIC mushroom cloud module shows that, to fit observed cloud parameters theoretically, fully 45% of the yield is hot air dumped behind the blast that powers the mushroom cloud rise and expansion, so 50-45 = 5% of total yield (or 1/10 of original blast yield) remains in the blast wave after the negative phase fully develops). In addition, the blast forms a 3-d hemisphere so that the percentage of the total blast energy in the Mach front intercepting buildings near the surface is small and gets smaller as the blast propagates! It is only that part which causes damage that gets attenuated; furthermore the yield scaling issue increases the building shielding effect for larger yields, because the radial distance being considered is increased. For example, in the example above, 10 psi peak overpressure (69 kPa in SI units) occurs at 4.36 km from a 1 megaton strategic bomb, but the 163 square metres of the building is only a small fraction, f, of the blast hemisphere at that range, namely f = 163/(2*Pi*4360^2) = 163/120,000,000 = 1.37*10^{-6}. So if the blast still contained 5% of the total weapon yield at this stage (1/10 of the original blast yield), the total blast energy striking the building's surface area would be just (2.1 x 10^14 )* 1.37*10^{-6} = 2.9*10^8 Joules, proving that the oscillations of the building removed 2.6MJ of 290MJ blast energy intercepted, nearly 1%, which is a similar fraction to Penney's finding in Hiroshima (below).

You get additional, greater, energy loss due to damage done to buildings close to the fireball. For n such buildings in a radial line, the cumulative removal of blast energy fraction is: exp(-2.6n/290), which is greater for the larger blast damage distances in built up areas predicted for effects of higher yields! So increasing the yield increases the shielding for any given free-field pressure (the distance of which scales up with yield)!

Even with wooden 1-storey houses predominating in Hiroshima, Lord Penney who took away the overpressure debris (crushed petrol cans, etc) for analysis in England in 1945 found the blast energy at Hiroshima decreased exponentially due to blast attenuation caused by damage done, by comparing his results to the free-field Maralinga desert values for British nuclear tests without a precursor. This was all ignored by Uncle Sam (Glasstone)!

ABOVE: error by DTRA regarding energy absorption by buildings. U.S. Government's DTRA DISPATCH magazine article "Building Effects on Airblast from Nuclear Detonations in Urban Terrain" falsely conflates the abrupt shock front with the length of the entire blast wave, claiming that since buildings are 2000 denser than blast waves: "the air will move 2000 times father than the structure in the same time interval. Thus while the building is moving 1cm. the shock has moved more than 20m, and the energy is a small fraction of 1% the blast energy." The key error here is the statement that "the shock has moved 20 m". They meant the shock front, which isn't the same thing as the entire blast wave, the thickness of which is dependent on bomb yield, and is what moves drag-sensitive buildings with large window openings where the overpressure quickly equalises. So they are totally wrong. They are absurdly arguing that only 1/2000 of the dynamic pressure (kinetic energy per unit volume of air) of air presents a force upon buildings, or presumably upon ships sails (which are denser than air), or eardrums (again which are denser than air). The shoddy, imprecise form of their statement makes it hard to understand precisely what they are saying, but it seems to be that they are assuming falsely that the blast wave consists only of a shock front, which will move 20 m past the building (without moving it significantly) before the building has moved 1 cm, but the density of the building and the location of the shock front relative to the building is IRRELEVANT while the mass of air BEHIND the shock front is delivering energy to the building, as proved by the absence from the relevant equations of both building density and shock front location after it has passed, but winds are still blowing. It's not the shock front that causes the building to oscillate, but the wind pressure behind the shock front. The building density, and the distance the shock FRONT moves beyond the building, have no relevance to thickness the layer of air BEHIND the shock front, which is what is pushing the building, and this thickness increases with bomb yield! (However, most of the push to the building occurs due to the highest dynamic pressure, i.e. the air just behind the discontinuity or "shock front".) As a result, the actual energy absorption by a building is more than 100 times greater than DTRA's ratio of densities claims. Small-scale models of buildings, whether absolutely rigid or made from glass mirrors don't in any way, shape or form model the energy captured in oscillations by thousands of tons of reinforced concrete of real buildings.

The wind (dynamic) pressure induced motion effects which have nothing to do with the relative density of the shock front compared to the building. The amount of energy picked up from either the wind pressure of normal breezes or the blast wave of a nuclear explosion, by a building in oscillatory energy is the time-integrated form of Newtonian equation E = F.x, where force F = P.A, where P is dynamic pressure and A is area, and x is the amount of displacement induced. There's no density of the building in these equations, and no dependence on the shock front, but rather the integrated dynamic pressure over the entire duration of the blast at the location of interest (if the building delays the passage of the shock front instead of letting it pass freely through windows etc, then there's an additional term for the time-integrated overpressure contribution). As dynamic pressure is removed by the building - not by the shock front but by the air behind it, lasting seconds in higher yield detonations - the overpressure also falls as the blast restores itself to the Rankine-Hugoniot conditions (overpressure energy is transformed into dynamic pressure energy, thus weakening overpressure as well as dynamic pressure). If DTRA were correct that only the front part (shock front) of a blast wave is relevant to delivery of energy and delivers only 1/2000 of the energy of the blast, then by analogy our eardrums and ship sails would be similarly so inefficient at picking up energy from the dynamic pressure of sound and the wind, respectively, that they couldn't work! Notice that their computer codes in 2013 falsely EXCLUDED any absorption of energy by the blast in oscillating thousands of tons of reinforced concrete, causing damage (much larger, huge amounts of energy are required to actually destroy reinforced concrete by permanent deformation; the springy oscillations of a building in a gale or blast wave take up far less energy than actual destruction requires), contrary to what John von Neumann pointed out (that buildings are NOT rigid but absorb energy from the blast, decreasing the blast parameters like pressures and impulses as the blast propagates through a city, unlike desert or ocean in unobstructed terrain nuclar tests!) in the 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons (removed by Glasstone from future editions, just as he removed the civil defence chapter from the 1977 edition!).

ABOVE: Appendix A of Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons gives a specific calculated example that allows the absorption of blast energy by oscillating modern concrete buildings to be calculated: a reinforced concrete building of 952 metric tons, 75x75ft, 38 ft high (thus horizontal area of 265 square metres), resisting force 4 psi, is subjected to a peak overpressure and dynamic pressure loading of 32 psi (242,000 Pascals) decaying to zero in 0.32 second. Calculated peak deflection of middle of the building was 0.88 foot or 0.27 m (the top would be deflected twice this amount). Reinforced concrete is relatively ductile, but any cracking absorbs even more energy than the simple calculation of the kinetic energy of blast-induced oscillation. So the blast wave energy absorbed from the simple physics law E = Fx = PAx where P is pressure loading, A is exposed area of building being loaded, and x is the displacement(or more precisely from the integral form of this, where energy absorbed is force integrated over displacement, as shown above) is about E = Fx = (242,000)(265)(0.27) = 17,000,000 Joules. This energy is removed from the blast wave by being transferred from the blast into the kinetic energy of oscillating the building! Hard fact!

ABOVE: The resisting force of 4 psi used in the 1950 Glasstone book can be updated with the following static yield resistances for various modern city buildings using Table 15.6 on page 525 of the 1996 Northrop Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1: 3.0 psi and 0.3 second natural period of oscillation for 3-8 story reinforced concrete buildings (type 15.2.2), 1.25 psi and 0.3 second for brick houses (type 15.2.3), 0.5 psi and 0.25 second for wooden houses (type 15.2.5), or 2.0 psi and 0.6 second for 3-10 story steel-frame office buildings (type 15.2.10). The "nominal" ductility ratios (the ratios of displacement required for collapse/severe damage to the maximum elastic response before plastic response begins) for these four types of buildings are given by Northrop as 7.5, 4, 7.5 and 10, respectively. The maximum amount of energy absorbed in destroying the buildings is simply the area under the curve of loading versus displacement before collapse. Since this relative area is 0.5 unit for the triangle shaped slope up to a ductility ratio of 1, and is roughly a constant height rectangle for the plastic zone from a ductility ratio of 1 up to the failure limit (severe damage/collapse of building), the ratio of total energy absorbed by a building in its destruction, to the maximum energy that can be absorbed in purely elastic oscillations by a buildings (up to ductility ratio of 1 unit, where the dimensionless ductility ratio u = maximum extension under applied load / extension at elastic limit of Hooke's Law) is simply [0.5 + (7.5 - 1)]/0.5, [0.5 + (4 - 1)]/0.5, [0.5 + (7.5 - 1)]/0.5, and [0.5 + (10 - 1)]/0.5, or 14, 7, 14, and 19, respectively, for those four building types. It is to be noticed that the greatest amounts of plastic range energy absorption are for the most predominant two kinds of modern city centre buildings, namely reinforced concrete and steel frame multistory buildings. These buildings, with up to 8 and 10 stories, respectively, in these calculations, also have a cumulative effect in shielding free-field thermal and nuclear radiations.

The Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, on page 57 has a section written by John von Neumann and Fredrick Reines of Los Alamos (it is attributed to them in a footnote) stating clearly: "the structures ... have the additional complicating property of not being rigid. This means that they do not merely deflect the shock wave, but they also absorb energy from it at each reflection. The removal of energy from the blast in this manner decreases the shock pressure at any given distance from the point of detonation to a value somewhat below that which it would have been in the absence of dissipative objects, such as buildings." Glasstone removed this from future (1957-77) editions, not because it is wrong (it isn't), but apparently because it debunks official nuclear lies used for strategic deterrence in the same way that gas and incendiary bombing effects was exaggerated in the 1930s to try to deter war!

ABOVE: The two terms for blast wave energy. It's really very simple: the first term above is the kinetic energy contained in the dynamic (wind) pressure of the blast, while the second term represents the internal energy of the blast (manifested as heat and related static overpressure). So the theoretical basis for the calculation of blast energy absorption by a city is not rocket science, and it's not based on speculations or guesswork. And this is not "new" either, since Brode's 1954 equations for calculating blast wave's with a computer include energy balance, and you can with modern computers easily incorporate the irreversible energy losses due to the blast wave successively oscillating, one after another, the buildings with with it interacts as it travels outward in a modern city. William G. Penney gives the real basis for calculating the energy loss due to blast damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in his 1970 paper, which contains numerous detailed, precise calculations and measurements showing how the act of causing destruction to steel and concrete, in addition to the mere oscillations of buildings, reduced the energy content of the blast and thus the pressure fell more quickly with distance in those cities, than measured in unobstructed desert or ocean during his nuclear testing programme. (In 1985 John Malik of Los Alamos simply ignored in his report, LA-8819, all Penney's hard won facts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, without going into details at all. Glasstone and Dolan reference Penney's 1970 paper, but simply ignore its findings on blast attenuation in Hiroshima and Nagasak. So much for scientific progress! Note also that Penney's 12 kt yield for Hiroshima is lower than the current estimate of 16 kt, implying even more blast absorption in Hiroshima than Penney found, because the unattenuated free field pressures from 16 kt will be greater than those from 12 kt!)

Now consider the energy absorption in the plastic region for reinforced concrete. The calculations of energy absorption in oscillating a building are for the small "elastic response" region of the pressure-displacement curve. But vast amounts of energy are absorbed beyond that elastic limit, and yet at pressures lower than required to make a reinforced concrete building collapse (always ignored by ignorant shelter critics, as Lord Baker explained, for shelter design in his 1978 book which we reviewed in detail a few posts back). There is a summary of the key building parameters America uses in calculating the effects of nuclear blast on buildings of various kinds in Table 15.6 on page 525 of Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects, Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1: building 15.2.2 (3-8 story reinforced concrete, small window area) has a severe damage ductility ratio of 7.5, i.e. it fails and collapses (severe damage) when the displacement is 7.5 times the maximum elastic response. Put another way, the plastic limit for reinforced concrete is 7.5 times the elastic displacement limit. Northrop's figure 15.7 shows the extension versus applied pressure load. The energy absorbed in the elastic limit is a triangle terminating at a displacement of 1 ductility unit (units are extension/elastic limit extension), so it has an area of 0.5 units (energy absorption for oscillating the building, see diagram below). But the plastic response is not a triangle but a unit high rectangle which starts at one unit and extends to 7.5 units (severe damage/collapse), its area is thus 7.5 - 1 = 6.5 units, so it absorbs 6.5/0.5 = 13 times as much energy as that used to oscillate the building elastically! So reinforced concrete buildings can absorb 13 times more energy in being damaged, than they can absorb in oscillating elastically. The ratio of total energy absorbed to flatten the buildings, to the maximum energy that can be absorbed elastic oscillate it, is (6.5 + 0.5)/0.5 = 14. Thus, the total energy absorption by a building can be 14 times that involved in merely oscillating it!

ABOVE: model of a building having a blast, the simple engineering graph from EM-1 showing the ratio of energy needed to total a building to that which merely oscillates it. The axes depict loading force and displacement, respectively, so the areas under the curve beautifully correspond to energy absorbed, allowing us to calculate the total energy needed to flatten a city very easily (from a simple, standard physics formula, energy E = Fx), in terms of multiples of the energy needed to just oscillate the buildings elastically. Northrop's data for other types of buildings are as follows: type 15.2.5 wood frame house has the same 7.5 ductility ratio for collapse, so it can absorb in plastic deformation 13 times the elastic oscillatory energy; type 15.2.3 brick house has a ductility ratio of 4 for severe damage, and a type 15.2.10 3-10 story steel-frame office building has a ductility ratio of 10 for severe damage. This is precisely Lord Baker's principle of the Morrison table shelter (for details, please see Lord Baker's 1978 book about the problems with explaining this to the bureaucratic nutters who don't understand the physics behind engineering, the brilliantly titled Enterprise versus Bureaucracy) where the plastic deformation of steel is used to absorb many times more energy than it can absorb elastically. In other words, it's the damage done (plastic deformation of reinforced concrete) that really absorbs vast amounts of blast energy, not the smaller energy absorption from elastic oscillations of a building! Northrop's table 15.6 shows that the reinforced concrete building, type 15.2.2, has a natural period of oscillation of about 0.3 second, and a static yield resistance of about 3 psi. Northrop's Figure 15.10 shows it has 50% probability of severe damage at 2.85 km from a 1 megaton surface burst on an ideal, unobstructed desert surface with no blast energy absorption by buildings intervening between that target and ground zero! For comparison, a similar 1 megaton surface burst in unobstructed desert is shown in Northrop's Figure 15.11 to have 50% probability of destroying a typical British brick house at 4.42 km ground range (50% severe damage probability), whereas Figure 15.18 gives a range of only 2.74 km for collapse of 3-10 story steel-frame buildings from a 1 megaton surface burst on unobstructed, open terrain.

We have already given in many posts extensive evidence proving that concrete buildings in Hiroshima and modern cities absorb thermal, nuclear and blast effects in a way totally ignored by Glasstone's unobstructed desert analysis. Strategic nuclear deterrence is thus bunk, if based on nuclear test effects data from unobstructed desert or open ocean. We need tactical nuclear deterrence to stop invasions and the use of force, not an incredible threat of bombs on cities, which is analogous to the gas and incendiary bombing exaggerations of the 1920s and 1930s which failed to deter WWII. The exaggerations were made by both lying disarmers (to scare people into disarmament) and by lying proponents of aerial bombing in war (to scare enemies into surrender). The resulting pseudo "consensus of expert opinion" from both groups had tragic consequences. Strategic bombing, megatons of ~100 kg high explosive on Germany, equivalent to a large nuclear attack however you scale the megatonnage (by the 2/3 power of blast yield for peak overpressure over unobstructed terrain, or by an even weaker function of yield for initial nuclear radiation), also failed to produce military results when civilians were bombed. The two low yield nuclear weapons dropped over mostly wooden houses in Japan did not produce the results publically claimed (for propaganda) for modern concrete cities. We've been blogging this for years, ignored by the loons who prefer anti-nuclear lies about strategic nuclear deterrence!

So to correct Glasstone for urban areas:

(1). Simply use Lord Penney's exponential attenuation formula from Hiroshima to reduce peak overpressures in cities: exp(-R/3.25) for R being radial distance through a city in kilometres. This reduces peak overpressure by 50% at 2.2 km. (Obviously precise effects depend on details, but this is a "baseline" for minimal blast attenuation, in cities with predominantly wood frame buildings.)

(2). Simply use George R. Stanbury's formula for predicting the thermal flash shadowing, by calculating the number of exposed upper floors that can geometrically "see" the fireball as a function of range, so that the number of computed flash burns correspond to the number of windows that can see the fireball (e.g. for 50 ft wide streets, 3 miles from a 1 megaton surface burst, only the highest floor can "see" the fireball since the angle from the top of the fireball to building top artificial skyline is 13.5 degrees; if the buildings are on average 10 floors high, the percentage burns and fire risk is therefore 1/10 for one side of a building with 4 sides, i.e. 1/40 which is smaller than the 1/10 assumed by some simplistic propaganda; but you then get into the issue of the size of the windows and whether the people inside are protected by shadows from walls or furnishings or internal office cubicle partitions or even other people in between the target and the fireball in the office, all of which reduce the simplistic "theoretical" estimates of the number of people burned, instead of assuming that no buildings or screening exists at all as in anti-nuclear propaganda for so-called "arms control" (war via appeasement/disarmament as in the 1930s). Stanbury points out there, and in his August 1962 Restricted UK Home Office Scientific Advisory branch Fission Fragments article on Fires from nuclear weapons, that to produce firestorms in Germany - the allies tried hard to achieve this in 1943 to end the war (and firestorms produce the associated soot clouds for climatic "nuclear winter" effects hype) you needed 50% of buildings to be initially ignited, which was only possible in the (now burned and gone) medieval wooden areas of Hamburg and Hiroshima (due to blast-overturned charcoal braziers in wooden houses in Japan, not the thermal flash which was obstructed by rooms and other buildings). Stanbury's studies of the thermal flash shielding in Liverpool and Birmingham showed that the thermal radiation is shielded to such an extent you simply can't get to within an order of magnitude of that 50% ignition incidence needed for a Hamburg style intense firestorm (or, therefore, nuclear winter due to Hamburg type firestorm soot clouds penetrating the stratosphere)!

The effect of scattered thermal radiation diffusing into shadows was insignificant at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where burns from thermal radiation were only received in an unobstructed radial line from the fireball, so that any shielding provided virtually complete protection from thermal flash. The 110 Castle-3 shot at Bikini Atoll in 1954 was fired during a moderate rainstorm to obtain data on the reduction of blast and thermal effects by rainfall. There are no films that show the fireball because the water content of the air absorbed the thermal and visible transmission. Heavy rain or fog absorbs the thermal radiation locally around the fireball, rather than creating a large amount of dangerously wide-angle scattered radiation at great distances. Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, gives data for Pacific test conditions in Figure 6.39 on page 248, on the effect of scattered thermal radiation from a burst at 1 km altitude, at various distances and for different fields of view:

At 10 km ground range, 43% of the thermal radiation in unobstructed terrain is direct (from the fireball), and 57% is scattered, but the angular distribution of scattering is not extreme (most of the scattering comes from air relatively near the fireball): the total (direct plus scattered) is 80% for a 30 degrees field of view (only 20% of the thermal radiation comes from angles exceeding 30 degrees from the radial line to the burst). Only 4% of the total thermal radiation at 10 km comes from angles beyond 90 degrees (i.e. 96% comes from the hemisphere around a target facing the burst).

At 30 km ground range, 16% of the thermal radiation in unobstructed terrain is direct (from the fireball), and 84% is scattered, but the angular distribution of scattering is not extreme (most of the scattering comes from air relatively near the fireball): the total (direct plus scattered) is 70% for a 40 degrees field of view (only 30% of the thermal radiation comes from angles exceeding 40 degrees from the radial line to the burst). Only 6% of the total thermal radiation at 10 km comes from angles beyond 90 degrees (i.e. 94% comes from the hemisphere around a target facing the burst).

Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, also gives graphs of the thermal radiation spectrum, showing differences with burst altitude and yield. Figure 6.19 shows that a 1 kt surface burst gives a thermal spectrum which peaks at 1.1 micron (Planck radiating temperature = 2000 K), compared to 0.4 micron (Planck radiating temperature = 5000 K) for 1 kt air bursts at 1-30 km altitude. Figure 6.21 shows there is much less difference between the spectra for surface and air bursts for 1 megaton yield: 0.70 micron peak in the thermal spectrum (Planck radiating temperature = 3800 K) for a megaton surface burst, compared with 0.52 microns (Planck radiating temperature = 4500 K) for a 30 km altitude megaton burst.

Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, in Figure 16.10 uses hydrodynamic calculations to prove that the maximum fire wind velocity in a firestorm is only a weak function of the fire intensity, for example a fire with a radius of 10 km will create a maximum fire wind velocity of 17 m/s for a fire intensity of 25 kW/m2, but this only increases to 36 m/s if the fire intensity is increased to 240 kW/m2.

Remember also that nuclear test evidence shows that the risk of clothing or other items burning is less for real levels of office humidity than for target materials left to dry out in the Nevada at the lower humidity of Nevada nuclear tests like Encore; clothing shields thermal radiation and increases burns energy requirements contrary to Glasstone.

Northrop's 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from EM-1, Table 14.5 on page 501 also points out that while people standing nude 2 metres behind glass windows watching the nuclear blast approach them will receive a 50% median dose of 3 glass fragment abdominal wall penetrations at a peak overpressure of 7 psi, it takes 15 psi if they are wearing clothing! If they duck and cover, they will can avoid the directional flying glass (and the thermal burns) completely. What Northrop doesn't tell you is that in a built up city, the dynamic pressure needed to energise those glass fragments to lethal velocities don't exist 2 metres behind glass windows in general; only behind those windows facing the fireball with an unobstructed view. Other windows on all all sides of the building will certainly break if the overpressure is high enough, but the blast wind (dynamic pressure) is directional and so the windows will not be blasted inwards with the same speed (at lower pressures they can even fail in the negative phase and be sucked outwards, with no hazard whatsoever to occupants!). Northop (1996) in chapter 14 on personnel casualties gives very high mortality rates based on unprotected head impacts, particularly for standing personnel, e.g. 5 psi for 50% mortality for people standing in buildings swept through by blast winds. Again, this assumes the blast winds are not obstructed and attenuated by the other surrounding buildings in a city, but it also suggests a simple civil defense precaution to accompany duck and cover in a crisis situation: bicycle helmets can be kept under emergency table "shelters" and can be put on quickly before the blast arrives, after a nuclear explosion, to minimise head trauma from flying debris or bodily translation and impact for high dynamic pressures and long blast durations. With duck and cover, you can avoid wind drag or injury from flying debris and you can keep away from a blast reflecting surface, then Northop shows in Figures 14.2 and 14.3 that you have 50% chance of surviving 37 psi peak overpressure from 1 megaton if you are lying down perpendicular to the direction of approach of the blast wave, or 62 psi if your are lying parallel to the direction of the blast (i.e., lying down facing away from the flash). In other words, blast is then very survivable!

(3). Simply allow nuclear radiation doses in modern cities to be attenuated severely by a factor of about 100 (from the 2011 Los Alamos report unobstructed desert "free field" initial nuclear radiation dose data study for the shadowing by intervening the buildings of in New York City) - before you include the actual shielding by a building people are in, which is much better for INR than Glasstone claims, because essentially ALL of the urban area outdoor 100-fold reduced radiation dose is SCATTERED, not direct, so it is energy-degraded and not the highest-energy direct gamma and neutrons (which are attenuated severely on the transit through all the buildings in the radial line from the bomb)! Putting in "/100" to the computer formulae is not rocket-science! Simple. Nothing in the universe is perfect, but this correction is easy, and gives a minimal baseline for realism for the urban effects of nuclear weapons, lacking in all anti-nuclear diatribes. For higher yield weapons, the increased ranges for given radiation doses will lead to increased attenuation, since at increased ranges there will be more concrete buildings intervening in the the radial line from fireball to target, and although scattered radiation builds up at greater distances, it has lower energy than unscattered radiation and therefore is less penetrating (easier to shield). The most penetrating and wide-angle scattered nuclear radiation dose is from neutrons, but for the full range of 13 different nuclear weapon designs in the 1984 EM-1, the effective mean free-path for the surface burst neutron dose over the distance 1-2 km only ranges from 189 to 221 metres (the latter being weapon type 13, the neutron bomb). (The neutron dose will essentially completely arrived - except for a small portion due to delayed neutrons from fission products like bromine-90 - before blast damage occurs to those buildings lcated near the crater.) Glasstone is widely ignored when pointing out in one table in the last chapter - contrary to many free-field charts and graphs - that 50% survival in modern concrete buildings in Hiroshima occurred at 0.12 mile for the 16 kt air burst at 600 m; this scales up by the cube-root scaling law to predict 50% survival at 1.2 miles from a 16 megaton air burst at 6 km altitude; initial radiation dose distances scale as a weaker function of yield than blast.

Additionally, the blast effects data (relating say overpressure to casualties) is way off in left-wing anti-nuclear propaganda. The actual Hiroshima and Nagasaki data proves much greater survival than bogus theoretical assessments: in reality, 100% people are not nude standing behind windows facing the blast while wearing roller-skates to ensure they are frictionlessly blown straight out of the 42nd floor by a 3psi blast, and killed by the impact from the gravitational fall to the pavement 420 feet below. Instead of the 1979 US Office of technology assessment claim that 50% of people are killed at 5psi, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki more than twice this was needed for the same effect, even without effective duck and cover or taking shelter (CLICK HERE FOR REPORT CONTAINING THE EVIDENCE FOR THIS). Although blast duration increases with yield, this has no effect if the pressure is below the threshold for damage, so Glasstone's curves are wrong for not reverting to cube-root scaling at high yields (impulse rules at low yields, peak pressures rule at high yields; Glasstone ignores this transition in his nonographs for building damage, which is corrected by by the secret EM-1; report Dirkwood Corp report DC-P-1060 found that the blast mortality effect was 50% at 32 psi peak overpressure in modern non-seismic concrete buildings in Hiroshima, or 17 psi for 1 megaton, without duck-and-cover to reduce exposure to flying glass, debris and blast wind drag; contrasted to 5 psi in anti-nuclear disarmament propaganda lies).

For the correct application of Hiroshima's lessons to modern higher yield nuclear war threats from Russia, see for instance the 1970s congressional testimony of T. K. Jones of Boeing Corporation in hearings linked HERE (February-March 1976 congressional Civil Defense Review), and HERE (November 1976 Nuclear War Survival hearings). Whenever the factual evidence surfaces, it is falsely labelled "controversial" or "wrong" by lying mainstream media charlatans, fraudsters, and bigoted snake oil salesmen, and ignored for political left-wing propaganda purposes, or the "arms controllers" simply tell lies claiming falsely that civil defense is a joke, just as they did in the 1930s (when civilian gas masks were discounted as a simple solution to deter Hitler from dropping his gas bombs on cities for a knockout blow!) and 1970s, debunked by T. K. Jones' famous 1979 letter to congress, extract below, which led to his being appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces on June 1, 1981 under the new Reagan Administration, which aimed to win the Cold War by science and technology, not lose freedom via Russian nuclear coercion. Note that while the ACDA - i.e. the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, whose faked nuclear weapons/war effects calculations lay behind the disastrous 1970s nuclear parity SALT farce which now results in dictators again intimidating democracies as was the case in the 1930s due to disarmament scams for "peace" which led to WWII - claimed 50% of people are killed at 5 psi peak overpressure from a megaton, while in fact U.S. classified Defense Nuclear Agency research showed that Russian public shelters were built to take 150 psi i.e. surviving within the 0.83 mile fireball radius of a 5 megaton surface burst, Russian apartment basement shelters were built to survive 60 psi, and good Russian improvised expedient shelters built outside cities survived 40 psi in American blast tests and gave upwards of 200 fallout protection factor (i.e., reducing the maximum hotspots of 20,000 rads to a survivable 100 rads and averting casualties).

ACDA disarmament bigots simply lied in the traditional "H. G. Wells" 1930s-sci-fi-style of disarmament fantasy, in testimony to congress, about the motivation and the detailed work of those people who disproved them, they ignored the classified data on blast and fallout shielding in their "effects" models, or their calculations assumed that people failed to use fallout shelters in order to deceptively "reduce" fallout protection factors by a factor of 7, by simply assuming people would go outside to be exposed to unshielded fallout (like most people, they also massively exaggerated the mean gamma ray energy of fallout during the sheltering period, as we have previously exposed, which is debunked by the measurements after the Redwing Zuni and Tewa tests) - they also lied that Jones didn't include fallout casualties when in fact he did include fallout correctly, finding that you don't get fallout casualties with the high degree of radiation shielding in shelters, an exact analogy to the situation where the 100,000 protection factor of activated charcoal gas mask filters gave no gas casualties in 1938 research, and disarmament bigots tried to claim that was some kind of ignorant dismissal of the horrors of true gas war so they would "arbitrarily" assume that only say 50% of people put on gas masks in order to then falsely claim that gas masks were somehow "calculated" to only work for 50% of people - i.e. only those assumed to be actually wearing them! - a travesty and abuse of scientific modelling (like lying that you have done detailed calculations proving that car seat belts make no difference in accidents, when in fact you have merely assumed that nobody wears the seat belts!), when in fact the true excellence of gas mask protection was proved to successfully deter Hitler from using gas on civilians with gas masks, saving millions contrary to the hate attacks on civil defence by disarmament propaganda deceivers (who recognised that civil defence made deterrence credible, and so was a threat to their bigoted plans for peace at any price):

ABOVE: extracts from the famous 1979 T. K. Jones Boeing Corporation letter, page 2, debunking "arms control" nuclear weapons effects liars in detail. This really exasperated my dad, John B. Cook, who was a Civil Defence Corps instructor in the 1950s, but was old enough to live through the 1930s appeasement era when Philip Noel-Baker repeated lied on the effects of gas bombs, claiming gas masks will never work, because babies and the elderly won't put them on properly, blah, blah, so we must ban evil civil defence and instead guarantee peace by appeasing the Nazis because of we don't, they will DEFINITELY gas us all with a massive gas bomb raid on day 1 of war. In fact, Philip Noel-Baker did this first in a BBC radio speech in 1927, 6 years before Hitler was elected. Family members who knew the truth from gas attacks in WWII - largely negated by simple gas masks and going into shelters for droplets of persistent liquids like mustard agent - had to put up with this lying BBC and other media propaganda for disarmament throughout the 1930s, to the joy of the Nazis who were secretly rearming and preparing for invasions (not necessarily war, since Hitler would have been quite happy to "peacefully" invade the world and then use efficient gas chambers to dispose of those whose race or views he found to be "offensive", like modern snowflakes today). What really irritated dad, however, was that Philip Noel-Baker, having lied about gas effects in his February 1927 BBC radio broadcast and throughout the 1930s to great applause from pacifists who effectively did Hitler's bidding, was made a Lord and a Nobel Peace prize winner for appeasement propaganda lies that led to world war, and then did the same thing all over again during the cold war, issuing nuclear weapons lies. In a 1980 House of Lords debate on Civil Defence, he lied that the air burst in Hiroshima produced lethal fallout: "It covers everything in Hiroshima not already rendered lethal, and so those who have escaped the flash, the blast, the fire, will die within a short time. The first atomic bomb weighed two kilograms. It was little larger than a cricket ball. ... In 1978, more than 2,000 died in Hiroshima from its long-term effects."

Every word here is totally untrue, and easily disproved, but nobody in the House of Lords explained the facts to him, so this he quotes on page 5 of his 1980 Ecology Party book "How to Survive the Nuclear Age", and on page 6 he adds an attack on civil defence: "I feel the same outrage in 1980 when the Home Office [UK Government civil defence] propose to circulate a a copy of a pamphlet entitled Protect and Survive to every citizen. ... To strengthen the walls and ceilings as the pamphlet suggests, he needed a garden, a spade, sandbags, and the strength to dig and transport a ton of earth." However, the infirm or elderly don't need to hire an army of helpers to make a fallout shelter, because - contrary to Philip Noel-Baker - you can simply use water from a hose to fill up water filled bags inside boxes which do the shielding, as explained in the Home Office scientific advisory branch Fission Fragments magazine article (reprinted in the Royal Observer Corps Journal, vol. 27, issue 2, February 1985, page 26, below). In any case, in actual implementation, you would have some organization for civil defence in time of crisis, with people in nighbourhoods helping one another (lending hose pipes, helping to assemble emergency shelters around tables in homes, etc). Noel-Baker ends his case by absurdly calling for disarmament as a "sure way to avoid the war", by again ignoring the lessons of his own 1930s disarmament war effects propaganda which led to appeasement and thus the encouragement of enemy aggression, triggering the Second World War: "This is not a utopian dream. It is the system by which David Lloyd George disarmed Germany in 1919..." This claim typifies Noel-Baker's absurd, self-contradictory nonsense, since DLG's 1919 "system" led to another, far worse, world war, not to peace.

In that 1980 Ecology Party book "How to Survive the nuclear age", there is after the deceptions from Labour Party Lord Noel-Baker, a summary of civil defence shelter advice, but then the book ends with the transcript of the final big speech from Lord Mountbatten to the arms control anti-nuclear propaganda institute SIPRI at Strasbourg on 11 May 1979 (the IRA tragically ended his appeasement campaign with a bomb on his boat off the coast of Sligo, Ireland, on 27 August 1979): "A military confrontation between the nuclear powers could entail the horrifying risk of nuclear warfare [hardly likely if we have overwhelming superiority for credible deterrence, as we should have had - but did not have - in the 1930s to deter Hitler]. ... A new world war can hardly fail to involve the all-out use of nuclear weapons [this is debunked by former NATO General Sir John Hackett's book "The Third World War" which shows how escalation risks will be controlled even in the event of a Russian first-strike on Britain, provided that we are prepared for nuclear war - this book will be discussed in detail later in this blog post, below]. ... Let us all resolve to take all possible practical steps to ensure that we do not, through our own folly, go over the edge."

ABOVE: the most advanced and latest American "counterforce" nuclear weapons, the oralloy (Oak Ridge Alloy, aka U235 loaded secondary stage) W88 nuclear warheads were designed to knock out the huge well shock-insulated Russian SS-18 missile silos when they had a physical vulnerability number of 52L7, corresponding to a peak overpressure of 7000 psi, which is well within the crater radius. This is highly relevant today, since ehe SS-18 (in Russian nomenclature: R-36M2) is still in service (like the American W88), and the Russians have 46 of them, each with 10 warheads of 800 kilotons each, i.e. a total of 10x46 = 460 nuclear warheads and 3680 megatons. These 211 ton SS-18s are due to be replaced with the latest 208 ton Sarmat (RS-28) missiles (which made its first test flight on 20 April 2022, during the Ukraine war), extending the range from 11,000 km for the SS-18 to 18,000 km for the Sarmat. Unfortunately, as this declassified report shows, as with the Russian civil defense shelters, the silo hardness was underrated and the physical vulnerability is not 52L7 as originally supposed. The SS-18 silos could take much higher peak overpressures than 7000 psi and related ground shock, cratering throwout, etc. (The current "best guess" - and this is not proof tested due to the ban on atmospheric nuclear testing - is that it takes a peak overpressure of 10,000 psi to blow the silo door off the SS-18 silo and wreck the missile, which occurs at a distance from the warhead similar to its inertial gyroscopic CEP targetting error if the accurate GPS satellite navigation system is taken out by high altitude bursts, so to get a high kill probability you need to target many warheads per silo, a hugely inefficient strategy when all the enemy has to do is launch the SS-18 out of the silo before your warheads arrive!) In addition to this underestimate of the hardness of vital military "counterforce" targets in Russia, the Americans also massively over-estimated the cratering and ground shock effects for high yields in ordinary soils (not easily broken coral reefs!). (For references, please see the earlier blog posts about cratering exaggerations linked here and here.) The points we want people to take away, or at least openly investigate and question are:

(1) countervalue (anti-city) effects of nuclear weapons are bunk because, aside from the mistakes and deliberate omissions Glasstone and Dolan made for propaganda purposes in their 1977 edition, if the chips really do go down, you or your opponent can simply evacuate cities - most of which self-evacuate at 5pm every weekday, anyhow - evacuation is not a miracle, despite what Scientific American or Bulletin of Atomic Scientists says - before issuing an ultimatum, just as the UK did with evacuating kids from London in Operation Pied Piper on 1 September 1939 before issuing an ultimatum and then declaring war 48 hours later,

(2) you or your opponent can not only safeguard the civilians in cities by evacuating them (or putting the people into shelters/basements etc if you have them, as the Russians do, and as thankfully the Ukrainians do which is a key reason they have been able to fight the Russian invasion, as a result of having previously been part of the civil defense obsessed USSR), but 100% of missiles in silos can also be safeguarded from destruction by simply firing them out of their silos, if seriously threatened by a counterforce (anti-silo) enemy attack. In other words, if you decide to credibly target enemy nuclear weapons (a very costly strategy in terms of the number of W88 warheads per silo for any significant chance of damaging a >7000psi peak overpressure-requiring SS-18 missile silo, which are about as well protected as the concrete and steel around most nuclear power reactor cores), your targetting policy will encourage the enemy to launch first, to save their missiles from being taken out! So using nuclear weapons to target other nuclear weapons in hardened silos (or hidden in the sea in submarines!), apart from being extremely inefficient and costly in terms of your stockpile, is also a policy that provokes the risk of enemy "launch on warning" crisis instability because you are, if "successful", removing the enemy's protected second strike retaliation capability, and once the second strike option is gone, they are pushed back into the old first-strike aka launch-on-warning policy, which is extremely dangerous if their radar operators mistake some third party's missile testing for a launch against them, etc., etc. So the obsessive "disarmament fantasy" of only using nuclear weapons to try to deter other nuclear weapons in silos by targeting them, is a dangerous illusion that provokes crisis instability and risks an accidental nuclear war, in addition to being an exceptionally ineffective deterrent! All you do with that delusion is to deter the enemy from a second-strike policy, and force the enemy into a dangerous first-strike/launch on warning policy! If you can knock out the enemy warheads in their silos, the enemy will simply ensure that there is a very high probability that their missiles have been launched out of their silos before your warheads arrive, so you will be uselessly destroying EMPTY missiles silos! (your warheads take 25 minutes to arrive for an ICBM between continents, and 10 minutes for a back door attack of an SLBM launched from a submarine; less time is required for a Russian sub to hit NY or LA because they are beside oceans, unlike Moscow and most Russian targets that are well inland!).

(3) In any case, how do you target enemy SLBMs in submarines hidden at sea? Similarly, the most numerous Russian ICBM in their stockpile is the mobile SS-27 Mod 2/RS-24, of which they have 135 missiles on 16-wheeled mobile launch vehicles which can move around, with 4 separate MIRV nuclear megaton warheads per missile and a range of 11,000 km. How do you target them as they move around during a crisis situation? They can easily move position enough to survive an nuclear warhead in the US stockpile during the 25 minutes while your missiles are on the way to hit them in a crisis situation, so you are literally trying to hit a moving target - do you really believe America will be able to reprogram the target locations for ICBM warheads in flight as they are moving? The whole idea would be amusing if it wasn't so tragic (there was an effort to create a warhead which could track its moving target and adjust its trajectory accordingly, the MARV - Maneuverable Reentry Vehicle - the only known Western MARV was the Pershing II warhead, which disarmed as part of the INF treaty to appease Russia/pro-disarmament politicians in the West). So the whole idea of using nuclear weapons to hit enemy nuclear weapons before they are launched is crazy and dangerous. It's no joke that all the disarmament propaganda claims falsely that nuclear weapons have only the purpose of targetting other nuclear weapons in silos. That policy is dangerous, because it just encourages the enemy to get the weapons out of their silos before your weapons can arrive, so you are not deterring the enemy to launch their weapons, but forcing them to launch on warning, a lunatic policy! Nuclear weapons are only effective in a counterforce operation against armies on the move, either as a deterrent or to physically stop invasions without collateral damage by air burst enhanced neutron weapons. The only real use of nuclear weapons should be, as Oppenheimer said, as a tactical threat to stop the military invasions and attacks that triggered two world wars.

Nuclear weapons are exceptionally good at deterring (or stopping) armies on the move! Not so if they are dispersed in defensive positions like hasty earth covered emergency civil defense shelters that resist 40 psi peak overpressure and give a protection factor of 200 or more against radiation; but the point is that they deter enemy military offensives and once the enemy has crossed your border you are within your rights to stop them; the credible threat will prevent invasions this way, ending world war. (Nuclear weapons are also effective at destroying enemy nuclear weapons in flight, e.g. the 2 kt W66 neutron warhead in the American Sprint ABM missile could melt down the fissile material in Russian nuclear warheads in flight in the atmosphere, and the 5 Mt W71 x-ray warhead of the Spartan ABM missile would ablate, deflect and destroy Russian warheads in space; they also knock down trees to create demilitarised zones in jungle warfare which enable easy identification of insurgents entering those zones for attacks.)

There is a compendium of classic 1960s and 1970s arguments for civil defense, and their political suppression by left-wingers and fools, in Nobel Laureate Dr Eugene P. Wigner's Collected Works, part B, volume VIII, edited by Jagdish Mehra (Springer, 1998, 258 pages). Wigner on 28 April 1976 testified before the U.S. Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production (page 144 in their printed hearings, online version is LINKED HERE) that the new Russian evacuation plans - as shown in its 1969 Civil Defense Manual (translated as ORNL-TR-2306, Oak Ridge National Lab.) - are very effective (the Russian civil defense plan includes only essential workers commuting into cities for 12-hour shifts, and using shelters):

"Indeed an easy calculation shows that, if the USSR carries out its city evacuation plans, the total number of casualties that all the nuclear weapons in our missiles could cause would be a good deal less than 50% the losses they suffered in World War II. A reasonable estimate, based on the Oak Ridge [National Laboratory] test of a blast resistant 'expedient shelter', described in the USSR civil defense handbooks, gives for the loss which our missile carried nuclear weapons could cause, about 3% of the USSR population. What about our own situation? ... An evacuation plan [costs] $1.2 billion .... a blast resistant shelter system similar to that of China ... would cost around $35 billion."

In 1979, in a joint article with hydrogen bomb advocate Dr Edward Teller in the U.S. Senate Congressional Record (2 August 1979, page S-11490), Wigner points out that Kahn's Type I deterrence is inadequate to prevent war (Type I is also called "mutual assured destruction", if both sides have parity via "arms control" delusions): "... I believe that the so called Mutual Assured Destruction is nonsense, because suppose even if the attacked nation could retaliate, if the other nation pretends that it does not believe it and makes a demand, is there any point in resisting? What good does it do if it can destroy hundreds of thousands of the aggressors' lives ..."

In his 26 May 1964 address to Mercer County NJ Civil Defense organization (reprinted in his Collected Works, part B, Vol. 8, p35 et seq.), Wigner explains that "people who are against Civil Defense often have some element of frustration ... and they find more easily time for, and outlet in, their opposition," as explained by Robert Waelder's article Protest and Revolution Against Western Societies, in M.A. Kaplan (ed), The Revolution in World Politics (New York, 1962, p 18), i.e. it is the same as the mechanism for Marxist agitators, some of which are openly Marxist and others pretend to be libertarian while remaining faithful to the bigoted dictators. Wigner's address continues: "Much more literature - I think 80% - is against than for Civil Defense and much of it is completely irresponsible. A few weeks ago I read an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in which the author said that a complete fallout [cheaper than blast] shelter program would cost $50 billion. Now $50 billion is more than would be spent on the complete blast [and fallout] shelter program which I mentioned [$35 billion]. But ... who will contradict it?"

In Publication 82 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Civil Defense, 1966, edited by H. Eyring, Wigner remarks on page 121: "Dr Rapoport said, in a note to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that it is possible that surrender to Hitler would have led to fewer deaths ... My view is the opposite in this case: I believe that if the West had shown clear resolve and determination from the start, WWII could have been averted."

After Leon Goure wrote his May 1972 report, "Soviet Civil Defense - urban Evacuation and Dispersal" (Centre for Advanced International Studies, Miami University, DTIC report AD0745136), Wigner and J. S. Gailar wrote in their joint article "Russian Evacuation Plans - the Fears they Create" in the September-October 1974 issue of Survive (v7, n5, pp 4-5): "If the leadership of the USSR should change and become more aggressive, it would have, under the present circumstances, a terribly tempting option: to stage an evacuation and to provoke a confrontation when this is completed." Wigner later testified to the U.S. Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production, Civil Preparedness and Limited Nuclear War (28 April 1976, pp 143-7) that the principal danger: "is the possibility of the USSR evacuating its cities, dispersing their population, and the making demands on us, under the threat of a nuclear attack, approximating those made by Hitler on Czechoslovakia which led to the Munich Pact."

The only reply Wigner received was a nonsense filled 11-page article attacking all these lessons from Russian Civil Defense, headed "Limited Nuclear War" by Sidney D. Drell and Frank von Hippel, and published in the November 1976 issue of Scientific American, the editor of which, Dennis Flanagan, refused to publish Wigner's rebuttal, entitled "We heartily disagree", just as Kahn's rebuttal to the nonsense review of his book on Civil Defense in 1961 had been refused by Scientific American, leading Kahn to expand it into his 1962 book "Thinking about the unthinkable". Wigner's and A. A. Broyles rebuttal to Scientific American was finally published instead as "We heartily disagree" in the Journal of Civil Defense, v10, pp. 4-8, July-August 1977 issue, pointing out that the Russian casualties with civil defense would be 4% on Wigner's unclassified estimate or 2% using T. K. Jones's classified data estimate (utilizing secret data on the survival of foxholes in nuclear tests, in the 1972 DNA-EM-1 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons), and that the Russian improvised lined, covered trench shelters survive a peak overpressure of 40 psi as well as heat flash and fallout radiation, and adds that contrary to the nonsense in Scientific American, the Russians did test their plans by evacuating the city of Sevastopol in a drill which led to improvements in their plans.

H-bomb proponent Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, and A. A. Broyles in May 1973 had jointly authored the American Security Council report, "Without civil defense we are in a glass house", which basically argues that you can't have a deterrent for world war if you are not prepared to use that deterrent when your bluff is called. If you are in Chamberlain's position in 1938 or Baldwin's in 1935, you are scared of using the deterrent because it is like "throwing stones in glass houses", because - if you can't shelter people because you refuse to have shelters and you also won't have a plan to evacuate kids from London (Operation Pied Piper, 1939) before you declare war - then you can easily be scared and coerced by Hitler or other dictators, who can see clearly that your "deterrent" is a complete bluff and totally, pathetically useless, because a weapon you can't use is not a credible deterrent. Naturally, as we keep repeating on this blog, this is what the defeatists who love Putin and other dictators want since surrender has two vital steps: (1) get rid of the shield (civil defense) since that makes the sword credible as an alternative to disarmament, and (2) point out that a sword without a shield is an incredible deterrent that is useless, so we had better disarm (and surrender)! Arms control delusions like supposed "parity" (a balance of weapons on both sides, as if democracies need detering like dictatorships), when one side has credible civil defense and the other doesn't, is like a duel between two people, similarly armed, but with one wearing body armour and the other totally unprotected! Not on that, but the dictator is the one wearing the body armour!

ABOVE: long-haired scientist Thomas K. Jones, better known as T. K. Jones, (pictured testifying before the Joint Committee on Defense Production, in Science magazine, 10 December 1976 after his Congressional Testimony raised the wrath of crackpot Scientific American and Bulletin of Atomic Scientist fans) was the "fall guy" of Reagan's civil defense, doing the explosive tests for Boeing Corporation on Russian civil defense shelter designs and testifing on their consequences for strategic nuclear deterrence - basically debunking strategic nuclear deterrence and McNamara's/Glasstone's totally fake news on urban nuclear weapons effects entirely, since 98% of Russians would survive the US nuclear stockpile when dispersed in shelters - which inspired Cresson Kearny's Oak Ridge National Laboratory manual, Nuclear War Survival Skills. President Ronald Reagan, prior to his election as US President, was leaked secret CIA reports on Russian civil defense tests of shelters and evidence of their tests of city evacuation plans for instance by evacuating Sevastopol in Crimea and also, in 1975, Lytkarino (a suburb of Moscow containing 40,000 people). A clue to who helped him was shown by Reagan's decision to controversially appoint T. K. Jones as Under-Secretary for Defense for Research and Engineering! A book was then published called With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, ignoring the key scientific evidence entirely, and merely trying to ridicule Reagan's appoinment of T. K. Jones (who is quoted on the front cover), as a left wing Democratic supporting political instrument - like Duncan Campbell's similarly vacuous War Plan UK. This was left-politics versus hard science. It often appears to work because Mr Joe Public loves a tall-story fairy tale!

If proof of this is needed, Robert Scheer, a fellow in arms control at Stanford University and the author of With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, became "Truthdig" editor-in-chief, a propagandarist who claims that ending WWII with nuclear weapons made Truman guilty of "the most atrocious act of terrorism in world history", so he needs to check his facts on the numbers gassed in the Holocaust, or starved in Ukraine by Stalin, unless he denies those deliberate acts of terrorism like the other left wing Holocaust deniers who confuse racism and anti-racism, terrorism and anti-terrorism. When you actually check the facts: (1) Secretary Stimson (U.S. Secretary of War) knew he has a secret nuclear weapons program of investment of billions of dollars to justify to Congress after WWII ended and didn't want to hold back using the bomb for that reason, so he promoted Hiroshima as being a military target (it did have military bases, particularly at Hiroshima Castle just north of ground Zero, but it was also a highly populated civilian city), (2) Hiroshima's air raid shelters were unoccupied because Japanese Army officers were having breakfast when B29s were detected far away, says Yoshie Oka, the operator of the Hiroshima air raid sirens on 6 August 1945, (3) Colonel Tibbets, former bomber of Germany before becoming the Hiroshima pilot as commander of the 509th Composite Group, explains how his pilots and crew were ridiculed heavily for lack of accomplishments, while preparing for weeks on Tinian Island. According to Tibbet's own book The Tibbets Story a poem was published before Hiroshima called "Nobody knows" lampooning the 509th's results: "Nobody knows. Into the air the secret rose; Where they're going, nobody knows; Tomorrow they'll return again; But we'll never know where they've been. Don't ask us about results or such; Unless you want to get in Dutch. But take it from one who is sure of the score, the 509th is winning the war. When the other Groups are ready to go; We have a program of the whole damned show; And when Halsey's 5th shells Nippon's shore; Why, shucks, we hear about it the day before. And MacArthur and Doolittle give out in advance; But with this new bunch we haven't a chance; We should have been home a month or more; For the 509th is winning the war." Tibbets was therefore determined create maximum effects after his group had been ridiculed at Tinian Island for not attacking Japan during weeks of preparations on the island, rehearsing the secret nuclear attacks while other B29s were taking took flak trying to bomb Japan into surrender with conventional bombs. He writes in The Tibbets Story that regular morning flights of small groups of weather and phototographic survey planes that did not make significant attacks over possible nuclear target cities, helped to reduce civil defense readiness in the cities, as well as reducing the air defense risks, since Japan was rationing its use of its limited remaining air defense in 1945.

The November 1976 Scientific American anti-civil defense article claimed that civil defense was discredited since: "In the 1960s the US adopted a strategic policy giving top priority to the prevention of nuclear war through deterrence ...", to which Wigner and Broyles responded to this claim in "We heartily disagree" in the July-August 1977 Journal of Civil Defense: "How do you deter an attack unless you convince an enemy that you will fight the war that he is starting?"

Dictators often start wars which their people don't need: the Persian war against the Greeks, Hannibal's war against Rome, the Tartar's invasions of Europe, the Turks' invasion of Hungary, the invasions of Napoleon. You have to accept that aggression is not necessarily a completely rational activity! All that counts for deterrence is that it is credible. If you don't prepare to fight with strategic nuclear weapons, then they are just a pointless bluff, a paper tiger as the Chinese put it, not a credible deterrent. Which is precisely what the disarmers want, of course, since nuclear parity, with the shift away from credible nuclear deterrence to incredible foolery, is only one step away from admitting the uselessness of the strategic nuclear stockpile, disarming and surrendering!

ABOVE: the 11 October 1952 cover of Picture Post showed clearly the "separation of effects" in an air burst (31 kiloton air burst at 3,440 ft, the Charlie shot of 22 April 1952, Nevada test site), where the fireball cools and forms into toroidal shape (with the radioactivity in the ring) before the "stem" of popcorned dust from the desert is sucked through the middle, before cascading harmlessly around the periphery without mixing with the fission products in the toroidal ring. Despite the visual proof that intense radioactive fallout can be avoided by air bursts, anti-nuclear propaganda helped by Russian fronts continued to raise fallout fears to promote Western arms control and disarmament, leaving the field clear for undeterred Russian conventional invasions and wars.

Professor John J. Mearsheimer, "The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent", Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 50-66 (FULL ARTICLE LINKED HERE):

"The conventional wisdom about Ukraine's nuclear weapons is wrong. In fact, as soon as it declared independence, Ukraine should have been quietly encouraged to fashion its own nuclear deterrent. Even now, pressing Ukraine to become a nonnuclear state is a mistake. A nuclear Ukraine makes sense for two reasons. First, it is imperative to maintain peace between Russia and Ukraine. That means ensuring that the Russians, who have a history of bad relations with Ukraine, do not move to reconquer it. ... Ukrainian nuclear weapons are the only reliable deterrent to Russian aggression. ... A conventional war between Russia and Ukraine would entail vast military casualties and the possible murder of many thousands of civilians. Russians and Ukrainians have a history of mutual enmity; this hostility, combined with the intermixing of their populations, raises the possibility that war between them could entail Bosnian style ethnic cleansing and mass murder. This war could produce millions of refugees clamoring at the borders of Western Europe. ... There is also the threat of escalation beyond the borders of Russia and Ukraine. For example, the Russians might decide to reconquer other parts of the former Soviet Union in the midst of a war, or might try to take back some of Eastern Europe. Poland and Belarus might join forces with Russia against Ukraine or gang up with Ukraine to prevent a Russian resurgence. The Germans, Americans or Chinese could get pulled in by their fear of a Russian victory. (Doubters should remember that the United States had no intention of fighting in Europe when war broke out in 1914 and again in 1939.) ...

"Russia has dominated an unwilling and angry Ukraine for more than two centuries, and has attempted to crush Ukraine's sense of self-identity. Recent history witnessed the greatest horrors in this relationship: Stalins government murdered an astounding 12 million Ukrainians during the 1930s. ... A Ukrainian conventional deterrent is not a viable option because Ukraine cannot build an army powerful enough to stop a Russian attack. Ukraine's army might put up dogged resistance, but it would eventually be defeated. Russia is simply too powerful. ... Conventional military power is significantly more expensive than nuclear military power and requires a larger military; hence it requires far more popular mobilization. ... A security guarantee from the West is theoretically possible but not a practical strategy for maintaining Ukrainian sovereignty. Extending deterrence to Germany during the Cold War was a demanding and expensive job; extending deterrence further east to Ukraine would be even more difficult. ... Vilifying nuclear weapons is a fashionable sport in the West. ... This view of nuclear weapons is simplistic and flies in the face of the inherent logic of nuclear deterrence, as well as the history of the Cold War. In fact, nuclear weapons often diminish international violence, and Ukrainian nuclear weapons would be an effective deterrent against a Russian conventional attack or nuclear blackmail. In the pre-nuclear world of industrialized great powers, there were two world wars between 1900 and 1945 in which some 50 million Europeans died. In the nuclear age, the story is very different. Only some 15,000 Europeans were killed in minor wars between 1945 and 1990, and there was a stable peace between the superpowers that became increasingly robust over time. ... Moreover, there is always the possibility that nuclear weapons might be used inadvertently or accidentally in the course of a conventional war, which provides further incentives for caution."

Professor Cyril Joad, "Why War?", Penguin Special book, August 1939, page 71: "Mr. Churchill and Sir Norman Angell ... The most convincing comment that I have heard on the whole lunatic business was made at a meeting which I attended as an undergraduate at Oxford in the year before the war. The meeting was addressed by a Cabinet Minister. "There is," he said, "just one way in which you can make your country secure and have peace, and that is to be so much stronger than any prospective enemy that he dare not attack you, and this is, I submit to you, gentlemen, a self-evident proposition." A small man got up at the back of the hall and asked him whether the advice he had just given was the advice he would give to Germany. ... the questioner proceeded to drive home the moral which his question had implied. "Here," he pointed out, "are two nations or groups of nations likely to quarrel. How shall each be secure and keep the peace? Our Cabinet Minister tells us in the profundity of his wisdom, that both will be secure, both will keep the peace when each is stronger than the other. And this, he thinks, is a self-evident proposition." This time there was loud applause. It remains to add that the Cabinet Minister was Winston Churchill, his questioner Sir Norman Angell [author of the 1908 anti-deterrence book, The Great Illusion and winner of the 1933 Nobel Peace Prize]."

Notice the point that Angell fails to explain why mutual deterrence won't keep the peace! If any mass-media "nuclear overkill" lies were true and we only needed 0.02 kiloton W54 sized nuclear warheads, we'd have 0.02 kiloton nuclear weapons. The reason why we have higher yields is lying isn't a credible deterrent when the chips go down, and what we have is a bare minimum to carry out a minimal deterrent function. It's easy to reduce nuclear weapon yields by removing boost gas, secondary stages, etc. The actual problem is the exact opposite of what 100% of quack mass media liars rant: if actually we want to reduce the risk of war including escalation to nuclear war, we need a credible deterrent which we don't have (see facts below). As regards huge stockpiles, this bankrupts the dictatorship as seen in the 1980s. It's a small price to pay, compared to the cost of a world war. Angell simply sneers at mutual deterrence, without (1) saying what's wrong with it, (2) investigating how to make it stable, (3) explaining why there's something wrong with "Si vis Pacem, para Bellum". Herman Kahn in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War discovered these pseudo-pacifists were key to starting WWII by duping the public with the illusion of security through disarmament (using itallics to emphasise this point!). What's actually needed, Kahn showed is credible deterrence including civil defence in order to reduce collateral damage such as radiation exposure to civilians (this is discussed in detail below, with quotations from Kahn's various books). This quotation of Angell versus Churchill in a 1913 deterrence debate is important because Churchill's pre-WWI naval Dreadnought deterrence ("We need eight, and we won't wait!") proved an incredible deterrent against the invasion of Belgium in 1914 which triggered WWI! So deterrence must be credible against the spectrum of provocations that result in wars, not just against a subset of the spectrum of possible provocations!

But Churchill's so-called "brilliant oratory" during the 1930s again failed to sway public opinion early enough to credible deter the Nazis from invading Poland in 1939 and triggering WWII. He failed to defeat the anti-deterrence movement led by Norman Angell and Philip Noel-Baker. So there are important lessons to learn here. In the end, the "anti-war movement" - which had become by 1939 a Nazi Fifth Column in the UK - had to be forceably shut down (with oppressive press censorship) once war broke out, as enemy collaboration or defeatism. However, they re-started again in 1945 when wartime censorship was lifted, and were never debunked by scientists, historians or journalists who could see the dangers from attacking them, i.e. the fascist mentality of such self-righteous lying quacks and charlatans, which were identical to the pseudo-scientist mindsets of Nazi eugenics pseudoscience and Marxism pseudoscience. The anti-nuclear quacks immediately focussed on nuclear weapons radiation, just as they had focussed on gas fear-mongering in the 1920s and 1930s! The journalists, historians and scientists who should have called out the liars instead backed anti-nuclear liars, instead of repudiating them and using nuclear weapons to deter war! Historians like AJP Taylor were accused by Herman Kahn of fiddling their analysis of Hitler and war origins, simply in order to "justify" a delusional anti-nuclear agenda (e.g., AJP Taylor was a founder of unilateral nuclear disarmament organisation "CND"!). There is still a taboo on mentioning the fact that Glasstone's and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons states in Table 5.160 that a large cheap WWII Anderson shelter (light 10-gage corrugated steel hemispherical arch with 20-25 ft span and 5 ft earth cover at the crown) requires 45-60 psi peak overpressure for collapse, while an 8" thick reinforced hemispherical buried concrete arch with 16 ft span and 4 ft earth cover at the crown requires 220-280 psi peak overpressure for collapse, i.e. survival within half-a-mile from a one megaton surface burst, proving relatively cheap, credible, effective civil defence (Glasstone's book, however, generally is misleading "free field" effects data from nuclear tests in deserts, omitting the blast and radiation shielding caused by energy absorption by concrete building skylines in cities; the only parts of Glasstone quoted by the CND people are the falsehoods; the media let them get away with it!).

"Who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West and the civilisation of the ages will fall with as great a shock as that of Rome? ... all gas experts are agreed that it would be impossible to devise means to protect the civil population from this form of attack [gas attacks]."

- Professor Philip Noel-Baker, "Foreign Affairs and How They Affect Us", BBC Radio, February 1927 (false claim, repudiated in secret discussions by UK Government Chemical Warfare Research Department, but not in public, thus enabling this form of "pacifist" lying to be used by Nazis to engineer appeasement leading to World War II; see also p31 of T. H. O'Brien's appalling UK official WWII history "Civil Defence" which dumbly mentions this episode without following up the implications for fascist appeasement!).

"Any use of nuclear weapons will escalate into a general war. There is no defence against such weapons ... nuclear warfare will destroy civilsation, and perhaps exterminate mankind. To hope for salvation from Civil Defence is a dangerous self-deluding pipe dream."

- Lord Noel-Baker (yes, the same liar quoted above, whose BBC radio show propaganda in February 1927 helped the Nazis kill 40 million people, unopposed by UK government secrecy obsessed "expert" thugs who refused to say anything in response to tell the public the facts they had that debunked Noel-Baker!), The Times, 25 January 1980.

(Thus, the same anti-civil defence "pacifists" who laid the seeds for WWII in 1927 were at it in 1980, simply changing "gas" to "nuclear"! The thug was allowed to go on a Nobel Peace Prize winning anti-civil defence lying crusade because the "journalists", "historians", and "scientists" didn't want to upset the apple cart by telling the public the truth in time to credibly deter another war, exactly what also happened with lying war-mongering appeaser and BBC Brains Trust radio "expert" Professor Cyril Joad who recommended a peace deal with the Nazis in his August 1939 book "Why War?" which on p71 quoted Normal Angell before WWI allegedly "debunking" Winston Churchill as a war-monger responsible for WWI via the old pre-WWI naval arms race, viz "We want eight [Dreadnoughts] and we won't wait!" Joad was eventually kicked out of the BBC for being convicted of dodging his rail fare, not kicked out for helping Hitler's fascist "peace" propaganda - something that has also proved true for many other "untouchable stars" like Sir Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, et al. Journalism, the legal profession, scientific principles, etc., having first made heroes of liars who "filter out the unpleasant facts the public don't want to be concerned with", then always get to cover-up ahem "set aside" 100% of "issues" in their support of big pseudo-pacifist "star" liars, until the problem is so out of control they finally have to publish it, when they "switch over" and start saying the exact opposite about the "star", usually when the star is dead and it's too late, making believe that they did their best to oppose the liars, when in fact the evidence proves the exact opposite: they make as much money out of the star as they can, appeasing the thug in the process. The problem is that quacks and charlatans have always filled the BBC and other mass media outlets and pumped out endless lying about weapons effects, without any competent opposition whatsoever. You have to appreciate that this is simply because "war news" sells better on TV, than "deterrence evidence"! So today you have endless TV "history" shows about Hitler starting WWII, but none about the cause in the gas knockout blow esaggerations and gas mask lying or Anderson shelter lying by pseudo-pacifists, or even the lying origins of Hitler's eugenics in British pseudo-scientists like Darwin's cousin, eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, or his fan club - including the French Nobel Medical Laureate Dr Alexis Carrell who proposed to Hitler the use of gas chambers for "peaceful" mass murder of "state enemies" in his eugenics pseudoscience Nazi bestseller, "Man the Unknown". It's nearly all pathetic propaganda to enforce the false AJP Taylor style orthodoxy that there are no lessons about civil defence and pseudoscience lying from "expert conssensus" to be learned to ensure peace!)

Prof. P. J. Noel Baker: "Foreign Affairs and How They Affect Us - How Nations Settle Their Quarrels" BBC radio 7pm Tue 15th Feb 1927, Radio Times program advert: "At any period in history between the fall of the old Roman Empire and the present century, there was only one answer to the question, 'How do nations settle their quarrels?' It was by war or the threat of war. Now, in the League of Nations, the world has a tribunal before which such quarrels can be judged from the point of view of right rather than might. It would be useless to pretend that the Council of the League is a purely judicial body untouched by political considerations, but at least it contains in every case enough disinterested opinion to ensure that the moral view gets representation, and the sanction behind its decisions is international opinion, and not merely the big battalions of any one Power or group of Powers. Professor Noel Baker was one of the British delegation in Paris when the League was established, and he worked for several years subsequently in the League Secretariat, so he is qualified to speak with knowledge of both the ideal and the actual character of the League."

Eventually - far too late to help deter a war - in 1938, when the war threat induced appeasement and coercion situation was way out of control, some scientists began popular books debunking gas knockout blow liars, but all in a very weak, very gentle way that has been widely ignored. For example, Professor Kendall FRS wrote Breathe Freely! The Truth about Poison Gas which contained key facts but was poorly organized, like Herman Kahn's 1960 On Thermonuclear War. Kendall pointed out on page 52 that with proper defences (gas masks and training) in 1918 it took 4,000 tons of German mustard gas to kill 540 British troops: "Gas defence had progressed to the point where it took nearly 8 tons of mustard gas to kill a single man [with modern NBC clothing and modern respirators etc, even fewer casualties would occur]," and on page 110 he points out that popular mass media gas-knockout-blow hysteria "loved to quote the fact that 1 ton of mustard gas is sufficient to kill 45,000,000 people". If you compare the truth, 1/8 killed per ton with simple 1918 gas masks to 45,000,000 per ton killed in propaganda (for no protection), the exaggeration factor by the mass media was 45,000,000/(1/8) = 360,000,000. This 360,000,000 protection factor is so large that it makes civil defense into a game changer. In other words, giving out gas masks totally eliminates the naive toxicity "overkill" exaggerations at the basis of anti-deterrence propaganda that leads to virtue-signalling disarmament propaganda spin, and thus war. Very large reductions occur with civil defence in nuclear warfare, when you properly take account of city skyline blast and radiation absorption and the actual protection afforded by low cost modern concrete buildings and dual-use underground car park basement shelters. The point is, the 1920s and 1930s lying opposition to WMD deterrence made credible by civil defence against "limited/accidental attacks" etc, by "internationalists" aka appeasers/defeatists, is central to the entire problem of foreign affairs and maintaining a peaceful world. By lying about gas/nuclear knockout blows, you get a Nobel Peace Prize for removing credible deterrence and allowing the invasions that set off major wars, which risks nuclear escalation against battle-hardened opponents once the economic and human costs of conventional war spiral out of control. This key lesson still goes unheeded due to fake news mass media scams! Russia has always recognised the truth about the power of nuclear weapons when the chips go down:

Ministry of Defense of the USSR, NUCLEAR WEAPONS - MANUAL FOR OFFICERS, "FOR PERSONAL USE" (i.e. CONFIDENTIAL) (individually numbered), CHAPTER ONE, NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THEIR MEANS OF USE, p3: "A nuclear explosion can inflict heavy losses on the enemy in manpower and military equipment, destroy lower structures over large areas, have a strong moral impact on the enemy's troops, and create favorable conditions for the side using nuclear weapons, to achieve success in battle."

Below: 13 July 2024 Russian State TV Channel 1 (Putin's Kremlin controlled Russian language propaganda channel for the Russian people): "Any confrontation with the NATO bloc is possible only with the use of nuclear weapons. There is simply no other option. If NATO's military organization surpasses us, it is absolutely futile for us to enter into such an armed confrontation with conventional means of destruction only."

NO: this is not "just a bluff". Putin has over 2000 tactical neutron bombs; we have damn all now. OK? We DID have dedicated tactical nuclear weapons until 1992, and they deterred Russian invasions, but since then we have cut back our deterrence to a bare minimum which excludes the deterrence of conventional wars which risk escalating (like the invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939) into a World War, despite Herman Kahn's warnings of the dangers from minimum deterrence in his 1960 book On Thermonuclear War.

Russian propagandists:

"Any confrontation with the NATO bloc is possible only with the use of nuclear weapons. There is simply no other option. If NATO's military organization surpasses us, it is absolutely futile for us to enter into such an armed confrontation with… pic.twitter.com/LYIRrj17Ig

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) July 13, 2024

"If we are able to use these weapons, and the enemy does not have them, their military effect can only be matched by his use of larger-yield dirty weapons - with the political and propaganda penalties their use implies. Of course the converse will also be true." - Samuel T. Cohen, Low-yield fusion weapons for limited wars, RAND report R-347, 1 June 1959, Secret - Restricted Data classified, p.2 (note this report is based on Livermore laboratory's very clean low yield Dove and Starling devices, developed after the successful testing of 95% clean 4.5 megaton Navajo and 85% clean 3.53 megaton Zuni at Bikini Atoll in 1956 which had lead pushers; Cohen's declassified paper is now in Eisenhower's Presidential Library with annotation on the front cover proving President Eisenhower was briefed on it in 1959!).

"There is another way in which we can have too narrow a focus. We can refuse to entertain or consider seriously ideas which seem to be 'crackpot' or unrealistic, but which are really just unfamiliar. In more casual days one could dismiss a bizarre-sounding notion with a snort or comment about it being impractical or implausible. Things moved slowly, and no real harm was done if a new idea took several years to prove itself. Indeed, allowing a notion to stay around for several years before giving it serious intellectual attention meant that most of the 'half-baked' ones got scuttled and never had to be considered seriously at all." - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p125.

"At times, the costs and risks of trying to shift the balance of power are too great, forcing great powers to wait for more favorable circumstances. But the desire for more power does not go away, unless a state achieves the ultimate of hegemony. Since no state is likely to achieve global hegemony, however, the world is condemned to perpetual great-power competition. ... They will seize these opportunities if they have the necessary capability. Simply put, great powers are primed for offense. ... a great power will defend the balance of power when looming change favors another state ... states recognise that the more powerful they are relative to their rivals, the better their chances of survival. Indeed, the best guarantee of survival is to be a hegemon ... Great powers ... have little choice but to pursue power and to seek to dominate the other states in the system. This dilemma is captured in brutally frank comments that Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck made during the early 1860s, when it appeared that Poland, which was not an independent state at the time, might regain its sovereignty. 'Restoring the Kingdom of Poland in any shape or form is tantamount to creating an ally for any enemy that chooses to attack us,' he believed, and therefore he advocated that Prussia [today, North East Germany] should 'smash those Poles till, losing all hope, they lie down and die; I have every sympathy for their situation, but if we wish to survive we have no choice but to wipe them out'." - Professor John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001, chapter 1.

According to the 1984 Guinness Book of Records (published for sale at Christmas 1983), page 219: "Mass killings ....The greatest massacre ever imputed by the government of one sovereign nation against the government of another is that of 26,300,000 Chinese during the regime of Mao Tse-tung between 1959 and May 1965. This accusation was made by an agency of the USSR Government in a radio broadcast on 7 Apr 1969. ... The Walker Report published by the US Senage Committee of the Judiciary in July 1971 placed the parameters of the total death roll within China since 1949 between 32.25 and 61.7 million. An estimate of 63.7 million was published by Jean-Pierre Dujardin in Figaro magazine of 19-25 Nov 1949. USSR The total death roll in the Great Purge or Yezhovshchina, in the USSR, in 1936-8 ... was administered by the Narodny Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del (NKVD), or People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the Soviet security service ... S. V. Utechin, an expert on Soviet affairs, regarded estimates of 8,000,000 or 10,000 victims as 'probably now exaggerations'. On 17 Aug 1942, Stalin indicated to Churchill in Moscow that 10 million kulaks had been liquidated for resisting the collectivization of their farms. ... Genocide ... It has been estimated that 35,000,000 Chinese were wiped out in the Mongolian invasion of 1210-19." This information about Chinese and Russian socialism mass killing of resistance in the 20th century is also given on pages 193-4 the 1975 Guinness Book of Records, 22nd edition issued in October 1975, which also points out on pages 187-8 that over a million were killed during the 1st Battle of the Somme in 1916 France, 1.3-1.5 million were killed during the 880 days siege of Leningrad in WWII. (These horrific war casualties are dwarfed by the natural disasters table on page 212, giving 75 million dead of plague in 1347-51, 21.64 million dead of flu pandemic in 1918, 9.5 million dead from famine in China in 1877-8, 3.7 million dead in a flood in China in 1931, and 1.5 million dead from famine and typhus in Ireland in 1846-51.) So much for propaganda that nuclear deterrence "risks" are particularly horrific statistics in history! Tens of millions were killed by socialist dictators in modern times, without nuclear bombs. Similarly huge numbers were killed by natural disease pandemics and extreme weather. The key difference is that we can now deter invasions.

"Any of our contemporaries readily identifies two world powers, each of them already capable of utterly destroying the other. However, the understanding of the split too often is limited to this political conception: the illusion according to which danger may be abolished through successful diplomatic negotiations or by achieving a balance of armed forces. The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating, that the rifts are more numerous than one can see at first glance. ... Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture, especially if it is spread over a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking. ... But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development bears little resemblance to all this. ...

"Every conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. ... A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; thousands of hasty (and irresponsible) critics cling to him at all times; he is constantly rebuffed by parliament and the press. He has to prove that his every step is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Indeed, an outstanding, truly great person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind does not get any chance to assert himself; dozens of traps will be set for him from the beginning. Thus mediocrity triumphs under the guise of democratic restraints. ... When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists’ civil rights. ... If they have misled public opinion by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, even if they have contributed to mistakes on a state level, do we know of any case of open regret voiced by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No; this would damage sales. A nation may be the worse for such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. It is most likely that he will start writing the exact opposite to his previous statements with renewed aplomb. Because instant and credible information is required, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be refuted; they settle into the readers’ memory.

"How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, and are then left hanging? The press can act the role of public opinion or miseducate it. ... In the Communist East, a journalist is frankly appointed as a state official. But who has voted Western journalists into their positions of power, for how long a time, and with what prerogatives? ... A Fashion in Thinking. Without any [objective] censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development. In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons—maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. ...

"The mathematician Igor Shafarevich, a member of the Soviet Academy of Science, has written a brilliantly argued book entitled Socialism; this is a penetrating historical analysis demonstrating that socialism of any type and shade leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death. ... [George] Kennan’s advice to his own country—to begin unilateral disarmament—belongs to the same category. If you only knew how the youngest of the officials in Moscow’s Old Square roar with laughter at your political wizards! ... But in fact, members of the US antiwar movement became accomplices in the betrayal of Far Eastern nations, in the genocide and the suffering today imposed on thirty million people there. Do these convinced pacifists now hear the moans coming from there? Do they understand their responsibility today? Or do they prefer not to hear? ... To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die; there is little such readiness in a society raised in the cult of material well-being. Nothing is left, in this case, but concessions, attempts to gain time, and betrayal. ... Liberalism was inevitably pushed aside by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could not stand up to communism. The Communist regime in the East could endure and grow due to the enthusiastic support from an enormous number of Western intellectuals who (feeling the kinship!) refused to see communism’s crimes, and when they no longer could do so, they tried to justify these crimes."

- Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Commencement Address at Harvard University, A World Split Apart, June 8, 1978.

ABOVE: as Herman Kahn predicted in his 1960 On Thermonuclear War, the paranoid anti-arms race groupthink mob insanity of "disarmament and arms control" public coercion after the first World War was not a fluke, but instead was a standard human reaction to the end of a war. It sowed the seeds of another war! Similarly, after Cold War 1.0 ended in 1991, opposition to disarmament and arms control virtually disappeared, so enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons (which deterred the kind of invasions and conventional warfare that led to both World Wars, including nuclear weapons use twice in the second one), were removed unilaterally by the West, allowing Russian aggression to trigger Cold War 2.0. This is basically a repetition of the way fake "pacifist" disarmament propaganda lying by Lord Noel-Baker (who in a BBC radio broadcast in February 1927 first claimed that there was no defense against gas WMD except disarmament) and Sir Norman Angell (who had been at it since 1908 with his "Great Illusion" anti-deterrence book, see his pre-WWI argument with Churchill reported by Professor Cyril Joad in the latter's 1939 book "Why War?"), engineered disaster via populist weapons effects lying, "knockout blow" deceptions, and lying denials of civil defense effectiveness to negate threats (all the lessons of these lies have NOT been learned, and people like Lord Noel-Baker, who lied about gas knockout blows on BBC radio in February 1927, were still doing exactly the same thing with nuclear weapons fallout lies in 1980 in response to "Protect and Survive"!).

You won't find any objective analysis of this in any "history book", all of which follow left wing Marxism propaganda or the anti-nuclear biased CND bigot AJP Taylor, in denying the facts using a data-dump of horseshit propaganda to bury the truth. In reality, as the cartoon published in the 17 May 1919 Daily Herald by Will Dyson shows, people did predict another war by 1940 as a result of the 1919 "peace deal" by Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Baron Sonnino. But most people prefer to believe lies, a fact shown clearly by an unbiased view of history, or even by an unbiased view of "superstring theory" in physics. But don't dare to stand up for truth, because you'll be subject to lying ad hominem attacks and denied a right to reply and debunk the liars. Power corrupts absolutely because the cowardly crowd backs "fashion", not fact.

This was explained back in 1532 by Machiavelli in The Prince: “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.”

It was also later explained by John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859: “A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind ...”

And don't forget Professor F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1960, p. 379: “The very magnitude of the power over men’s minds that a highly centralised and government-dominated system of education places in the hands of the authorities ought to make one hesitant before accepting it too readily.”

This attitude encourages the mainstream media or "liberals" to censor anything that debunks their agenda. To recap, anti-deterrence propaganda from bigoted liars is the orthodoxy, and infects nuclear weapons discussions, deterrence discussions, and the entire "arms control and disarmament" movement with crap. Mainstream media would shut down the internet to "protect" people from potential "error". It's all Stalinist censorship, made plain by Orwell's book 1984, but ignored as "taboo" by thug censors masquerading as "liberals".

Kahn made the following point about disarmament and arms control: reducing nuclear stockpiles and unilaterally eliminating Type II Deterrence (i.e. deterrence of the provocations that cause war, e.g., disarming in 1992 the West's W79 neutron bombs to deter the invasions that set off both World Wars) doesn't make you safer, because it increases the risk of war as proved by history. Reducing the risk of an "accidental" nuclear war is best done using ABM, civil defense, plus safeguards inside nuclear weapons, than by disarmanent which increases the risk of war by reducing credible deterrence of war. The idea that unilateral disarmament protects you is like saying that nuclear-unarmed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were safe from nuclear attack in August 1945 because they were so-called "Nuclear Free Zones"! Similarly, the fact the world was non-nuclear in 1939 didn't stop nuclear weapons being manufactured and used to end that war! All of the CND arguments are fake news, just as all the arguments by Angell in 1908 against deterrence were fake news. Fakes news sells - as proved by the sale of fairy tales and "fiction". Even if you don't like particular uses or yields of nuclear weapons, there is a choice of tailored nuclear warhead yields and designs, and types of employment to produce different effects, with widely variable cleanliness, neutron output, EMP output, and the separation of heat, blast and fallout effects in air and subsurface bursts, to deter invasions without the collateral damage that accompanies conventional warfare.

"It is entirely plausible that the Nobel Peace Prize [albeit on a more rational and honest planet] should have been awarded to the designers of the first SLBM (submarine launched ballistic missile) systems, for in being so well hidden under the seas, this kind of weapon has made war much less likely during these years and, further, let each side relax somewhat more in the knowledge that such war was unlikely." - George H. Quester, "Maritime Issues In Avoiding Nuclear War", Armed Forces and Society, v13, issue 2, Winter 1987, p. 199.

ABOVE: the Russians have recently released a PDF of their detailed technical nuclear effects analysis of the survival of their cheap civil defense dual-use style (basement car park etc in peacetime) nuclear war shelters: "Civil defense shelters. Designs and calculations" by VA Kotlyarevsky, VI Ganushkin, AA Kostin, et al.; edited by VA Kotlyarevsky. - M.: Stroyizdat, 1989 (607 pages long, 144 references, full of equations and graphs). (Russian: "Убежища гражданской обороны. Проекты и расчеты" / В.А. Котляревский, В.И. Ганушкин, А.А. Костин и др.; под редакцией В. А. Котляревского. - М.: Стройиздат, 1989. https://tehne.com/library/ubezhishcha-grazhdanskoy-oborony-konstrukcii-i-raschet-moskva-1989 ) This tells you that these are not "just for show", but are blast and radiation hardened double-blast door, very high overpressure surviving, very intense fallout surviving protection that fundamentally alters the strategic balance and undermines our nuclear deterrent. This should nukegate the "Scientific American" and other pro-Russian, Western deterrent undermining thugs.

ABOVE: Kahn pointed out in On Thermonuclear War 1960 that the way to prevent invasions and wars in the Middle East is nuclear proliferation of CREDIBLE deterrents (not just nuclear weapons, but also ABM and civil defense shelters to mitigate the civilian collateral damage) that really DETER/HALT INVASIONS (the key is to focus on the 1914 invasion of Belgium by mobilization and concentrated force, triggering WWI and the same for Poland in 1939, triggering WWII): if both sides have a credible, stable nuclear deterrent against INVASIONS (i.e., stable = safe from destruction in an enemy 1st strike, so that nuclear retaliation is guaranteed), you get mutual deterrence and thus peace, not war. And even if one side DOES try an attack, a neutron bomb air burst can discriminately halt the aggression, without any collateral damage (of the sort caused by conventional warfare such as the invasions by the Russians in Ukraine and by Hamas in Israel). Conventional weapons are not a substitute because their mobilization along frontiers causes "crisis instability" as occurred in 1914, leading to war. This is why compact, long-range nuclear weapons to prevent this kind of 1914 mobilization "crisis instability" trigger problem, are required. Nuclear escalation can be deterred, just as gas war escalation was deterred against terrorist states successfully in WWII, by a combination of credible civil defense plus retaliation threats capability. The "all out" use of nuclear weapons is simply a form of nuclear disarmament, that leaves the aggressor open to retaliation by the other side's protected 2nd strike (retaliation) force. We have to get this message out past the fake news and "taboo" superstitions of anti-deterrent warmongering paranoid disarmament quacks and charlatans masquerading as "peace advocates". If you want a "two-state solution" and one of those two states is intent on the racist extermination of the other, it shouldn't require Einstein to declare that pressurised "peace talks" are going to be "double-talk"; the slavery issue of 1861 in America wasn't resolved by a "two-state solution" with the southern Confederacy one state and the northern Union the other, nor was the protestant-catholic conflict in Northern Ireland resolved by a "two-state solution", but by a single-state solution with power sharing. You don't resolve a conflict by pressurised "peace talks" or "declarations" between leading opponents in bad faith, but only by genuine accommodation of differences at grass roots or street level. This is why conflicts and wars come before peace settlements. If you really want a "two-state solution" between bitter rivals, you need a credible deterrent to keep the peace. Machiavelli or Marx? Truth or lying? That's the choice.

Glasstone and Dolan stated in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977), Table 12.17 on page 546, that the median distance in Hiroshima for survival after 20 days was 0.12 miles for people in concrete buildings and 1.3 miles for people standing outdoors. Therefore the median distances for survival in modern city buildings and in the open differed by a factor of 11 for Hiroshima; the difference in areas was thus a factor of 112 or about 120. Hence, taking cover in modern city buildings reduces the casualty rates and the risks of being killed by a factor of 120 for Hiroshima conditions, contrary to popular media presented political propaganda that civil defence is hopeless. This would reduce 500,000 casualties for people unprotected in the open (assumed generally throughout Glasstone's book and about 100% of anti-nuclear propaganda) to 4,000 casualties, if people are on the lower floors of concrete buildings.

(NOTE: back in 1990, I completed the unpublished book Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, debunking Glasstone's "free fields" blast and radiation calculations for modern cities. Basically, the oscillation of, and at higher pressures the plastic zone damage of, modern reinforced concrete city buildings by blast waves is easy to calculate, and irreversibly absorbs free-field blast energy, quickly lowering the overpressure and dynamic pressure to values way lower than measured over unobstructed desert and ocean at nuclear weapons tests and reported by Glasstone. Penney measured this blast energy absorption effect at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the majority of buildings were single storey wood-frame, not concrete. Dr John von Neuman predicted this blast energy attenuation by causing destruction in Los Alamos blast wave secret reports LA-1020/LA-1021, from which it entered Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons, but Dr Bethe deleted this information from the unclassified summary version, LA-2000, and it was deleted from the later Glasstone Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957-77, and replaced with a denial of this fact, despite the fact it is a consequence from the principle of conservation of energy, and the exclusion of the effect makes the blast treatment wrong. Similarly, throughout the 1950s the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch calculated thermal effects allowing for skyline shadowing, disproving firestorms and related nuclear winter using this mechanism, but secrecy was used to prevent the information getting wide coverage. Glasstone also mis-calculates all other nuclear effects, for example fallout and cratering are both based on debunked simplifications, exaggerating the effects by large factors. Glasstone entirely ignores all political and military effects of nuclear weapons, as well as the influence of clean secondary stages on the effects of nuclear weapons, e.g. the separation of effects for the air burst neutron bomb. Glasstone's book is really: "The fake effects of nuclear weapons on civilian targets, ignoring the blast and radiation skyline shielding"! Some declassified exaggerations in nuclear threats from Russian tactical nuclear weapons, debunking populist CND/Nukemap nuclear weapons effects propaganda, are presented in NUCLEAR WEAPONS COLLATERAL DAMAGE EXAGGERATIONS: IMPLICATIONS FOR CIVIL DEFENSE. This is treated as "heresy" by the deluded quacks and charlatans of war-making "disarmament" taboos.).

"The critical point is whether the Soviets and the Europeans believe that we can keep our casualties to a level we would find acceptable ... In such an eventuality, the Soviets would be deterred from such provocative acts as a ground attack on Europe ... But if they do not believe that we can keep casualties to a level we would find acceptable, the Soviets may feel safe in undertakng these extremely provocative adventures ... this in itself creates an extremely dangerous negotiating situation - one in which the possibility of extreme pressure and blackmail will always be in the background, if not the foreground. ... 'Will the survivors envy the dead?' Unless the President believes that the postwar world will be worth living in, he will in all likelihood be deterred from living up to our alliance obligations." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton Uni. Press, 1960, page 35. This is Kahn's key argument, explaining the Ukraine war today; a fact always ignored by 100% of "nuclear critics". On page 34, Kahn gives a "notorious" table relating casualties to calculated recovery times for GDP; the GDP recovers in one year if 1% are killed, 100 years if 90% are killed. This difference is similar to the observed 120-fold difference in risk of being killed in Hiroshima if people are outdoors and totally unshielded, to the risk when shielded by the lower floors of modern city concrete buildings. So efficient civil defense warnings make nuclear deterrence over 100 times more credible, reducing casualties and the time taken for economic recovery from 100 years to under 1 year!

Kahn on page 48 of On Thermonuclear War easily debunks J. B. S. Haldane's genetic defects naive propaganda lie for nuclear war, because spreading out damage in time allows survival, whereas having all the damage kill 100% immediately doesn't permit survival. Kahn considers two nuclear attacks (Table 8): an initial 1,500 megatons on 150 targets, and a later wargasm of 20,000 megatons on 400 targets. He then goes into radiation effects lying propaganda by left-wing anti-nuclear disarmament fanatics, before giving the fallout gamma radiation effects much later on, in Tables 23 and 24. For the 1,500 megaton attack, only 1% of the area of the USA gets 6000-10,000R in the first 48 hours outdoors, requiring shelter protection factors of 40-65; for the 20,000 megaton attack, 50% of the area gets this radiation so you need 50 times more good shelter. As a result of these calculations, Kahn argues on p111: "we recommend that about $150 million be spent on identifying, counting, labelling and improving the best radiation protection in every neighbourhood so that people will know where to go...", adding that radiation meters are needed to enable people to go outdoors after 48 hours briefly to decontaminate or evacuate heavy fallout areas before getting a lethal radiation dose in structures offering poor protection. All this was, Kahn points out, published in a 1958 RAND Corp report ignored by President Eisenhower to save a few bucks (it was mostly implemented by Kennedy in 1961). In Tables 12, 13 and 14 Kahn shows how to deal with strontium-90 fallout contaminated food: on page 65 he points out that the linear no-threshold radiation effects theory is fake news for civil defense since the radium dial painters required 20,000 - 30,000 strontium units equivalent to get bone cancer, whereas the official safety limit is just 67 units! So simply by kicking out bad "science" (political "theory" standards) and keeping to actual radiation effects data, you resolve a problem by feeding food with over 25,000 strontium units to animals, and reserving less contaminated food for human consumption. Commenting generally on this kind of fashionable nuclear exaggeration mentality, Kahn explains on p160:

"... we are likely to suffer from the same movement towards 'responsible' budgets, pacifism, and unilateral and universal disarmament that swept through England in the 1920s and 1930s. The effect then was that England prematurely disarmed herself to such an extent that she first lost her voice in world affairs, and later her independence in a war that was caused as much by English weakness as by anything else."

Kahn adds to this on page 568:

"It is difficult and even impossible for most Americans to believe that they have an enemy. This is particularly true of intellectuals and 'men of good will'. ... that all sane men are reasonable and it ought to be easy to clear up misunderstandings by a few meetings and agreements (that is, they believe in what the psychiatrist calls a 'self-fulfilling prophecy' in the sense that 'good will generates good will' ..." Kahn testified to congress that Newman hadn't read his book!

Russian propagandists threaten with tactical nuclear strikes on Ukraine. They think that after that, Europe will immediately stop "demonizing and isolating Russia" and will immediately "line up at our door to say hello." pic.twitter.com/6kgmkMc5p3

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 4, 2024

Senator John F. Kennedy forecast in a speech to the Senate on 14 August 1958: "... the deterrent ratio might well shift to the Soviets so heavily, during the years of the gap, as to open to them a shortcut to world domination ... Their missile power will be the shield from behind which they will slowly, but surely, advance - through Sputnik diplomacy, limited 'brush fire' wars, indirect non-overt aggression, intimidation and subversion, increased prestige or influence, and the vicious blackmail of our allies. The periphery of the free world will shift against us." (If the Russians have 2,000 to 10,000 tactical neutron bombs and we have none, our "strategic balance" of ICBMs etc will be incredible retaliation, so our tactical deterrent "gap" in defenses puts us into the situation that Kennedy forecast.)

Kennedy's 1961 decision to back Kahn's crash civil defense program was apparently due to his attending the June 1959 nuclear war hearings (at which Herman Kahn first found fame); yet even earlier Kennedy had observed first-hand the appeasement of the Nazis while working for his father, the US Ambassador, for 6 months in 1939, writing his 150-pages thesis on "Appeasement at Munich: The inevitable result of the slowness of the British democracy to change from a disarmament policy"! This thesis was edited into the 1940 UK bestselling book "Why England Slept" by the New York Times journalist Arthur Krock (with a foreword by Henry Luce), in which Kennedy pointed out that the refusal of pro-disarmament northern left-wing councils to instigate civil defence (then called air raid precautions) supported fascist appeasement! However, Kennedy's interest in arms race, disarmament, and war issues goes back even further, to the year 1932, when he was 15 and in hospital, according to the author Kay Halle: "Joseph Kennedy Sr asked me if I would stop with him while we were in the hospital to see his young son who was in there quite ill. ... We went into his bedroom, his room at the hospital, and you could hardly see him, he was so buried in the bed under masses of books. ... I was awfully interested because the book he was reading was World Crisis by Winston Churchill [the book recommended as the best study of war and deterrence and its failure, by Herman Kahn in On Thermonuclear War]."

(Kay Halle quote source: Robin Cross, "JFK: A Hidden Life", Bloomsbury, London, 1992. Robin Cross's JFK book also points out that Kennedy "had always been a supporter of a vigorous defense policy. In 1948-9 he had attacked the Truman administration over the economies it had made in the defense establishment, advocating an air force of 70 groups, rather than the 55 groups proposed ... in the 1950s, he had urged the re-arming of Europe, if necessary with US help ... In the Senate in the summer of 1954 he had opposed the Eisenhower administration's reduction in the size of the army ... In May 1955 ... he claimed that the administration had 'guessed short' on the military strength of the Soviet Union ... It was by this consistent route that in 1958 Jack Kennedy arrived at the momentous discovery of the 'missile gap', which was to provide one of the principal themes of his 1960 presidential campaign." Kennedy was on the same page as Kahn. In 1957, America had no proof-tested ICBM, just the 3,000 mile range Jupiter IRBM, while the Russians had successfully tested ICBMs the rockets of which successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik, on 4 October 1957. Although by putting Jupiter IRBMs into Turkey America could cancel out the small ICBM "missile gap", there was concern that just a few Russian ICBM nuclear blasts over American cities could wipe out Western Cold War resolve, as had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When elected, Kennedy reversed Eisenhower's civil defense policy, as well as increasing the Minuteman ICBM order by 75%, the Western Europe tactical nuclear weapon stockpile by 60%, and the total number of American nuclear weapons by 100%, in an early effort at bankrupting the Russians with an arms race; a policy abandoned for a time after the Vietnam disaster, but re-instigated in the 1980s by Reagan with the desired effects.)

Nicola Smith and Susie Coen in the Telegraph, 21 August 2024: "US prepares for threat of joint Chinese, Russian and North Korean nuclear strike. Joe Biden secretly approved change to America’s nuclear defence plan in March... The United States is making plans to counter the… pic.twitter.com/jXWnTBijZC

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 22, 2024

"Most people, not unreasonably, think of conventional weapons as being less escalatory and thus more usable than nuclear ones. But today’s low-yield nukes—20 kilotonnes of explosive power, roughly Hiroshima-size—can be delivered with extreme precision and less collateral damage. “The line between low-yield tactical nuclear weapons and precision-guided conventional weapons in terms of both their operational effects and perceived impact is blurring,” says CNAS." - If a China and America war went nuclear, who would win? After 45 days of conventional fighting nukes would be tempting, wargamers suggest, The Economist, Aug 22nd 2024, https://www.economist.com/asia/2024/08/22/if-a-china-and-america-war-went-nuclear-who-would-win

"People May Not Care Simply Because They Do Not care. ... The following (paraphrased) quotations are typical of the bureaucrat or decision maker who simply cannot imagine that his safe, snug world can really be dangerous. (The quotations are not exclusive. The determined do-nothing advocate will go through each in turn.)

1. The problem is hypothetical. You cannot prove that it exists. There is no need to get hysterical.

2. The problem is there, but there are many other problems. In your parochialism [limited views] and naivety, you have gotten hysterical. We have known about this problem for some time and we are not excited. Why are you?

3. The problem is there. It is insoluble. (Or, it is too late to do anything.) For God's sake don't rock the (political or public relations) boat. [This is based on Kahn's dealings with people like his boss at RAND Corporation, just prior to his leaving to found the Hudson Institute.]

The key words in the above are hypothetical, parochial, naive, and hysterical. That is, any specialist who raises a problem in his specialty is accused of being hypothetical and parochial, of not taking a practical over-all view. ... I can remember an occasion when I was discussing with one of these critics what seemed to me like a problem approaching potentially crisis proportions. He insisted that I was comparing hypothetical Soviet programs with hard American programs. I pointed out with some asperity that the Soviets up to that time had refused to allow our staff access to their records; naturally we would have some trouble proving that these programs existed and would actually meet the hypothetical dates. On the other hand, our staff did have access to U.S. data, so it was easy to show that our counter programs were not as firm as advertised. ... A typical hypothetical possibility is illustrated by the ominous possibilities for Hitler-type blackmail tactics created by the waning of our Type II and Type III Deterrence capability" - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, pp347-8.

"There is a great deal of worry today that the Russians may make impressive gains utilizing only 'ambiguous challenges', without presenting us with any direct challenges. ... Their success to date in using 'ambiguous challenges' should be nothing to what they could do if they could afford and desired to be unambiguous. ... I think we can expect much firmer, confident and imaginative behavor, if not audacious and reckless conduct, from Khrushchev and his successors that we had from Stalin [a prediction that was confirmed by the 1961 Berlin Wall, 50 megaton test and the 1962 Cuban missiles crisis, etc.]" - H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, p348

"As the picture of horror of a modern thermonuclear war grows, we tend to ... we emphasise the impact of our capabilities on the enemy's mind rather than on his body [italic emphasis is Kahn's own]. ... Type I Deterrence is the deterrence of a direct attack [Dulles' massive retaliation]. ... Type II Deterrence is defined as using strategic threats to deter an enemy from engaging in very provocative acts [e.g. invasion of Poland 1939, invasion of Belgium 1914, invasion of Ukraine 2022] ... Type III Deterrence might be called 'tit-for-tat' [e.g. Kennedy's decision to resume USA nuclear tests in 1962 in response to Russia's 50 megaton test in late 1961, etc.]." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, p126. Regarding "knockout blow" propaganda scams in the media/politics, Kahn on p350 argues that the same delusional lie occurred before each major war, including WWI and WWII, both to sell the war to the public and to justify not planning for a long-duration war of attrition which seemed "defeatist". For example, mass media "pacifist" morons believed and hyped that, prior to WWI: "interdependence of nations was so great that the sheer interruption of normal commerce would cause a collapse after a few weeks or months in much the same way that people argue today that if the A country (big cities) is destroyed, the B country (small cities, rural areas) must also necessarily collapse [after a countervalue nuclear strike on cities]. Therefore, almost everybody expected the war of 1914 to be short ... the famous Schlieffen Plan ... called for them to destroy the French in about 6 weeks, then move their army to the Russian front and destroy the Russians in the next few weeks... [Hitler in 1939 simply aimed to repeat this, dismissing Schlieffen Plan's failure in WWI as sabotage from internal enemies of the state]." (Quote from Kahn, OTW, p350.)

"To understand this attitude ... in 1961 Herman Kahn’s 1960 radically innovative book on the nuclear deterrence of war in general (not merely “massive retaliation” to deter all-out “doomsday” attacks, as was the previous policy by Dulles) was “reviewed” by controversial lawyer James Roy Newman in Scientific American. Newman, a complete bastard to Britain - he drafted the notorious and paranoid McMahon 1946 US Atomic Energy Act, which illegally and unilaterally ended Britain’s wartime agreement to continue postwar collaboration on nuclear energy - hadn’t read Kahn’s book (any more than he had read the vital Churchill-Roosevelt Hyde Park agreement for post-war continuation of nuclear collaboration of September 19, 1944 or consulted the UK government on the topic, when drafting the quack Atomic Energy Act passed by Congress in 1946!), and just scanned the first part of Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War briefly and taken some quotes and tables out of context to criticise (despite the title, its purpose is the credible deterrence of major provocations, not just the fighting of WWIII if deterrence fails). Moreover, he denied the existence of the author, because the publisher hadn’t provided much biography! We don’t need that kind of abuse from such bigots, do we?" - https://nigecook.substack.com/p/coming-soon

Anti-civil defense fanatic Lawrence Freedman (the guy who got the Sunday Express by drop my feature on the exaggerated collateral damage from nuclear weapons in 1995) has a new article in the New York Times (3 October 2024): "Putin Keeps Threatening to Use Nuclear Weapons. Would…

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) October 4, 2024

The explanation of the neutron bomb's invasion deterrent history in the 1958 low yield relatively clean "peaceful" Livermore nuclear explosives Dove and Starling is given by Samuel Cohen in his 6 December 1984 interview, conducted by Robert Del Tredici in Beverley Hills, California (published on pages 157-9 of his 1987 book, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb,):

"I was in the Efficiency Group at Los Alamos. Our job was to figure out the yield of the bomb that was burst over Nagasaki. ... On the evening of Hiroshima, when Oppenheimer was describing in very crude terms the catastrophe that had taken place over that city, the scientists who were listening to him were a bunch of howling savages, embullient beyond imagination, as pleased as punch ... Oppenheimer is rightfully called the father of the atomic bomb, but equally rightfully he could be called the father of the tactical nuclear weapon because he did the first conceptual spadework for using nuclear weapons strictly in a battlefield way instead of just decimating cities in a holocaust [thus led to his legendary dispute with Teller who just wanted massive retaliation H-bombs as a deterrent and bargaining chip for peace with Russia] ... He professed to be sufficiently guilt-ridden and aghast and appalled over the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that he never wanted that to happen again. So he recommended we design lower-yield weapons that wouldn't wipe out cities ... The basic concept is to be able to have a battlefield nuclear weapon that won't have all these nasty side effects ... If it's going to be used to get what we call the 'separation of effects', in other words, to get rid of the blast and heat [collateral damage to civilians], it not only has to be air burst, but it has to be burst high ... between 2,000 and 3,000 feet. ... it's a kind of micro-mini hydrogen bomb. ...

"I'd had the idea for the neutron bomb about 8 years before I figured out how to put it together. I put together the actual concept in the summer of 1958. It came about purely by accident when I visited the Livermore Laboratory in the spring of 1958. I asked if anyone had any new ideas going around, and they said they really didn't, though they had begun work on some peaceful nuclear explosives. And the head of the division said, 'Before you go home, you ought to take a look at these', and he showed me designs for some of the peaceful devices. And there they were: the neutron bomb characteristics. One of those designs was called Dove. Dove, by the way, for 'Dove of Peace'. ... Well, there were two, Dove and Starling; both derived the major share of their energy from fusing deuterium and tritium. ... The question I asked was, 'How many neutrons come out of this thing?' They made a few back-of-the-envelope calculations and the answer was: a hell of a lot. Then I took these calculations home and made my own calculations about the military effects of such a weapon, and, voila, the neutron bomb! Then I put together the military concept of how to use this bomb and went off on a big sales campaign. ...

"Ever since Day 1 we've patterned our nuclear war-fighting strategies after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ... So what we're basically proposing here [using conventional Teller or Dulles "massive retaliation" MAD mutual-assured-destruction H bombs-on-cities crap] to deter war is the threat of our own suicide. ... it's all based on the premise that if we cross that nuclear threshold one more time, we'll bring on the beginning of the end. So you get people like Jonathan Schell [author of "Fate of the Earth" which lies that the 15 megaton Bravo test blinded everyone at Rongelap and that radiation can't be stopped easily by simple earth covered shelters proved at nuclear tests] and Carl Sagan with the idea of nuclear winter and everything else. It's Armageddon. I don't find their ideas credible, and I'll tell you why: because in order to get these results from using nuclear weapons against cities, you have to have nations willing to use them that way. ... You know what the United States has to do if it wants to survive? It has to accept the fact that there will probably be a nuclear war, and it has to prepare to fight it and win it. ... It's been U.S. national policy for more than a quarter of a century that nuclear weapons are actually unusable weapons. That's horseshit, and you can quote me on that. ... Let the allies develop their own neutron bomb. As a matter of fact, let's sell it to them! They should have discriminate weapons for their own self-defense. The United States doesn't need to take on the burden of defending all the rest of the world. That [the UK policy of 1914 regarding Belgium's invasion and 1939 regarding Poland's invasion, not to mention 2022 regarding Ukraine's invasion] is in fact the best way of getting into a nuclear war ..."

The technical history of Livermore's development of enhanced-neutron tactical nuclear weapons goes back to a study of lightweight, thin H-bomb casings by Dr Herbert York, discussed in detail below with regard to recently declassified data on the designs of two American H-bombs of roughly similar physical size but different mass, composition and yield: the W47 and the B28. York showed that the pressure and duration of the x-ray energy coupling causing the fusion stage's compression force are both functions of the case thickness. So if you reduce the outer casing thickness to make the bomb lighter, you have less compression force and it lasts a shorter period of time. To ensure a successful fusion burn in this situation, you have to reduce the amount of dense material like uranium in the fusion stage and replace it with easier to compress fusion fuel. This occurred in progressive Livermore designs with smaller sizes and lighter casings during the 1950s, starting with a device called Linda, then Flute, then Piccolo. These had thin oralloy (highly enriched U235) pushers (3.8mm thick for Piccolo), but clean versions with lead pushers in place of U235 were designed, and the combination of the high percentage of fusion yield with the thin pusher and outer casing gave the enhanced neutron Dove design.

(The paragraph above about the link between speed of fusion burn and tamper thickness in low yield neutron bomb design is not speculative, and is confirmed not just by the recent book by Tom Ramos, but earlier by nuclear weapons effects expert Charles S. Grace of the Royal Military College of Science in his 1994 Nuclear Weapons Principles, Effects and Survivability on 23: "It is possible to produce comparatively low-yield weapons with only a small fission trigger to initiate a fusion stage. If it is designed so that the nuclear reactions proceed as fast as possible, the tamper need not be very thick, and a large proportion of the energetic fusion neutrons will escape." Grace around that time very kindly responded to a letter from me and provided photos of British military equipment exposed at the UK nuclear tests for my book, Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory, as well as telephoning me, which was helpful. He was a very powerful advocate of the neutron bomb to deter invasions, writing a letter to the New Scientist to debunk anti-nuclear bomb propaganda. He did a lot of research using Atomic Weapons Establishment Aldermaston facilities on simple protection against nuclear attack, and his book also points out that Glasstone and Dolan are completely misleading regarding thermal effects, stating on page 41: "Adequate protection for the skin greatly reduces the risk of thermal casualties. ... wearing a well-designed NBC suit over combat clothing, and a respirator and gloves ... the thermal energy from [1 kiloton yield] tactical weapons needed to cause extensive second-degree burns is about 1.3 MJ/m^2 [i.e., 31 cal/cm^2 since 4.186 J = 1 Calorie, and 1 m^2 = 10^4 cm^2; for bare skin only 160 kJ/m^2 or 3.8 cal/cm^2 is needed; thus there is a huge difference between Glasstone and Dolan and the actual risk, and Grace points out that if clothing ignites, people can simply roll out the flames on the ground, without getting burned!]." Grace's book also gives the military effects of nuclear weapons - ignored entirely by Glasstone and Dolan - including photos of vehicles exposed at 370 m range to 10 kiloton Totem-1 nuclear test on a 100 ft high tower in Australia in 1953. A side-on tank was not overturned by 230 kPa peak overpressure, but was displaced 2.5 m with a peak acceleration of 30g. The mudguards and trailer were damaged, but: "After the burst the tank was able to be driven off, and its gun was fired after sand and debris had been removed from the barrel. The lighter scout car was beyond repair. Had crews been in the vehicles they would have received a radiation dose of around 100,000 cGy [R] ... they would have been incapacitated virtually instantaneously.")

BBC won't report Reuters any more than USA news will, sad yet what happens in corrupt despotic regimes claiming that lying is "free speech on nuclear weapons": Russian nuclear test chief says Moscow is ready to resume testing 'at any moment' https://t.co/SYlfwJXHan

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 18, 2024

This Russian State TV Channel 1 broadcast on a proposed nuclear test on a fake "plywood" based city to make the fake plywood burn for YouTube viewers, is a load of complete CND anti-nuclear propaganda crap. George R Stanbury of UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch civil… https://t.co/ustSLjl1SN

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 16, 2024

"Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy; they require, on the contrary, the perfect use of almost all those in which it is deficient. ... a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles. It cannot combine its measures with secrecy [spying problem plus whole notion of democracy requiring voters to be informed] or await their consequences with patience. These are qualities which more especially belong to an individual or an aristocracy; and they are precisely the qualities by which a nation, like an individual, attains a dominant position. ... The mass of the people may be led astray by ignorance or passion ..." - Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America 1835 (Vintage NT 1954 ed, v1, pp243-5, as quoted by H. Kahn, OTW, p579; note that Kahn's full quotation backs the notion of elitism aristocracy as the solution, aka the clan dynasties in USA politics such as the Kennedy and Bush political families. On page 407 of OTW, Kahn also appears to back elitism in discussing how von Mannstein was able to bypass jobsworths in the General Staff and get a direct meeting with Hitler to modify the Schlieffen Plan's to outflank the new French Magoniot Line defenses by invading through the Ardennes Forest with the latest Panzer tanks; Hitler had many defects but at least he was prepared to listen seriously to "crackpot" sounding ideas from the lower ranks and implement them, unlike so many openly fascist "top dogs" today).

"There seems to be little point in discussing the view that finds a solution in a totally disarmed world. ... The violator would then have an incredible advantage if the agreement ever broke down ..." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Princeton Uni. Press, 1960, page 5. Kahn adds added that the world of 1914 and 1939 was non-nuclear, there was an international ban on chemical weapons (the Hague Convention of 1899) prior to WWI in which chemical weapons were used without restraint, and that there was agreement amongst experts that WWII would start with a gas knockout blow against cities, when in fact no gas was ever dropped on cities during WWII (pesticide Zyklon B, crystals which emits non-persistent hydrogen cyanide gas on exposure to the air, was used in gas chambers but the Nazis never dropped any of their 12,000 tons of tabun nerve agent on cities thanks to retaliation risks and the universal issue of gas masks). So disarmament propaganda was just that, lying blathering by politicians to earn "peace prizes".

"It would be disastrous to have a conspicious gap in the spectrum of deterrents and capabilities [strategic and tactical to cover all kinds of dangerous provocations]. For example, when President Eisenhower remarked at a press conference that it was unthinkable that he would call out federal troops to enforce federal law ... some Southerners immediately did something to make it thinkable [Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to Little Rock's Central High School to reinforce Arkansas' National Guard in allowing 9 black students to enroll at the school in 1957]." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p286. The point is, saying something is "unthinkable so we don't need to prepare for it" is not cost-effective when it encourages and invites the enemy to invade and provoke you. Lying blathering peacenik enemy collaboration always backfires by inviting aggression. (Even Trump had this problem, when some of his supporters misinterpreted his peaceful speech - questioning why the postal ballots showed higher support for Biden than the polling station in-person votes - and invaded the Capitol on 6 January 2021.) If you want to deter evil, you have to avoid ambiguity and to be open and also clear that nothing is "unthinkable" and state in advance precisely what you will do in any eventuality, so as to make deterrence unequivocally effective. You want the enemy to be clear what they will have coming to them if they provoke you: "with the record of the 1930s plainly before us, we should all be able to realise that it is possible for all these kinds of deterrence to be strained." - Kahn, OTW, p286.

No wonder the Leninist lawyer James Roy Newman of the "elitist communist" Scientific American hated Kahn in his "review"! I first read Kahn's On Thermonuclear War in 1990, and have just finished re-reading it in September 2024 due to the Ukraine war. My view of the book is now very different to the notes I made in 1990 when reading Kahn during the writing of my own unpublished August 1990 dated manuscript Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory. The basic problem is that Kahn has two theses in one volume. The first 310 pages of On Thermonuclear War debunks populist nuclear weapons and war myths, such as fallout gamma rays and strontium-90 in food killing everyone; the second part, pages 311-651 is an analysis of the history of war and extrapolations of that history to various kinds of deterrence and nuclear war. As his preface says (page x): "This book is dedicated to the goal of anticipating, avoiding, and alleviating crises." (Italic emphasis is Kahn's own.) The problem with Kahn's On Thermonuclear War is precisely the same as that with Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons: jumbled up presentation (if you are discussing one type of nuclear explosion, you need to discuss the effects that type produces, not separate effects into different chapters, so readers are misled and think heavy fallout occurs from air bursts, etc.,) and you need to show how deterrence of certain kinds of nuclear attack even within a nuclear war is necessary to retain "bargaining chips", "cities as hostages", etc. Otherwise 100% of readers do what journalists do with "Nukemap" and simply assume the entire enemy stickpile is used in a single knockout blow on cities, in which 100% of people unprotected, by even "duck and cover"! This increased casualties by a factor of 120 in Hiroshima, and is where you get the 120 fold exaggerations of nuclear war casualty predictions from. By the omission of key (secret classified) data on neutron bombs to deter invasions in the first place, or survival of people and vehicles in simple, cheap trench shelters at nuclear tests, for example, you depart 180 degrees from reality.

"But how many murders are they [lying journalists, politicians, fellow-travelling Western nuke designers who won't disclose the truth to the media] responsible for? Basically, nuclear deterrence using tactical nuclear weapons to deter the invasions that set off both World Wars, i.e. the invasion of Belgium in 1914 by concentrated force and of Poland in 1939 by concentrated force (from the East by Russia and from the West by Germany), could have prevented many millions of deaths since 1945, but evil folk prevented this, wanting war to continue. ... Hiroshima was entirely vaporized by a nuclear explosion on 6 August 1945, says CND. In that case, this US Air Force film of the slight scorching on otherwise undamaged materials, proving the effectiveness of “duck and cover” for shielding, is fake news. But it’s not. What’s fake news is everything every published on nuclear weapons effects by Bulletin of Atomic scientists, Scientific American, all newspapers, and all TV shows on the subject ... In fact, Hiroshima casualty data published [in the massively-effects-exaggerating] Glasstone book “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” (1962-77 editions) proves that being indoors in the lower floors of a concrete building reduces the LD50 radius from 1.3 miles in the open to 0.12 miles for lower floors of concrete buildings. Since area is proportional to radius squared, this means a protection factor of 120 for Hiroshima burst conditions (16 kt, 600m altitude). This shielding factor would for a densely populated modern city reduce 500,000 (half a million) killed for people outdoors totally unshielded to “just” 4,000 killed indoors on the lower floors of modern city concrete buildings! Er, this result of 4,000 killed just happens to be precisely the number mentioned by the Independent newspaper article (quote above!) of pensioners murdered by cold and starvation due to financial destitution due to Sir Keir Starmer’s “tough decision” to end winter fuel allowances, in order to pay massive salary rises to public sector employees." - https://nigecook.substack.com/p/another-assassination-attempt-on

Kahn makes a further essential point about "secrecy" (there ain't any secrecy when the other side has spies like Fuchs) covering up alleged gross delusional failings in Western nuclear weapons design, effects and capabilities on page 384 of On Thermonuclear War, where he quotes extensively from chapter 6 "Torpedoes" of Rowland and Boyd's US Navy Bureau of Ordnance in World War II (published by the US Navy), proving how the secrecy of US torpedo design, development, testing and stockpiling led to tragic groupthink delusions of supremacy and of having the best torpedoes in the world, that were only debunked in actual combat during the 1941-3 period of WWII: "As each defect was exposed, the morale of the submariners who risked their lives to take the war to the enemy suffered, the enemy was given further respite ... the problem was compounded by the Bureau's reluctance to accept the fleet evaluation of its weapon. This reluctance was born ... from misplaced confidence in its own past work. ... Security, a necessary concern of the armed forces, became such a fetish that measures designed to protect a device from enemy eyes actually hid its defects from those who made the regulations. Ironically, some of those defects were already known to the foreign powers who later became our allies or enemies. ... even when the torpedo exploded properly, it lacked the punch submariners desired. ... each defect concealed another ... The Bureau was reluctant to believe that the secret weapon long regarded as one of our greatest assets should turn out to be a liability." (Kahn gives many other similar examples of bureaucratic secretive nonsense backfiring even in WWI, in Chapter 8 of OTW. American Colonel Billy Mitchell of the American Air Force was the first to suggest paratroopers to get over enemy lines, and predicted a Japanese attack on Pearl harbor (he was demoted and then court martialled on the direct orders of President Calvin Coolidge). Tanks and gas are both treated in detail by Kahn: both were kept so secret that the military didn't have a clue about them when first used on the battlefield so their initial "factor of surprise" was lost and the enemy was given the chance to negate them after bungled first-use:

"The first use of tanks in September 1916 completely ignored the tactical and strategic ideas of the innovators and was carried out as a sort of field trial. ... The German poison gas story has some interesting analogies with the British tank story. This too had an uphill fight with the authorities. Again, even after the weapon had been developed the command did not wish to take the risk of using the untried weapon on a large scale, though the inventors urged it, until the military had developed some experience on the capabilities and limitations of gas warfare. It was first tried on April 22, 1915 and proved a tremendous tactical success. In fact, a five-mile gap was opened in the Allied lines, but the Germans were not prepared to exploit the opportinity. They were not really making an attack, they were just trying an experiment. The British reaction ... was very fast. ... Sir William Ramsay had guessed from the description of the battle reports that chlorine had been used and came to the War Office with a protective measure, some sample mouth-pads made of flannel or wool soaked in hyposulphite of soda. British women were asked to furnish 1,000,000 at once. Thanks to their help and Red Cross efforts, the necessary quantity came in several days. Within a fortnight, every man in the British army at the front was supplied with a rudimentary respirator. ... History is full of examples of impractical notions, or, equally important, notions that proved to be just fine but which were tested prematurely. ... The most spectacular military event of World War I, the development of two parallel lines of trenches ... while predicted by Bloch, came as a complete surprise. ... given the examples of such warfare in the American Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War - it is hard to see how military experts could have overlooked the possibility that the widespread availability of machine guns and barbed wire might result in static trench warfare, but the military planners on both sides completely overlooked the possibility [as they did for submarines blocking logistics supplies, depth charges, and particularly SAS type infiltration tactics to overcome trench warfare: French Captain Laffargue wrote a proposal for this which the Allies laughed at, but when a copy of the proposal fell into German hands, Ludendorff at once (quote from Captain G. C. Wynne on p357 of Kahn's OTW): "translated into German and issued as an official German training manual, eventually becoming the basis of General Ludendorff's textbook ... [leading to German implementation of the enemy's plan so] the Germans so effectively broke through the British position in March 1918, and the Chemin des Dames position in May ...". SO, UNLESS WE ARE TO REPEAT SUCH MISTAKES, WE MUST NOT ALLOW PETTY HUBRIS OF "JOBSWORTH BUREAUCRATS" TO BLOCK INNOVATIONS NEEDED TO WIN WARS!

ABOVE: Kahn was treated with the "shoot the messenger" reaction against Machiavelli, merely for speaking truth to power in 1960: "If the above deterrents are to work reliably, there must always be in the background the knowledge that if they did not, other kinds of deterrents or corrections would come in. It could be disastrous to have a conspicuous gap in the spectrum of deterrents and capabilities. For example, when President Eisenhower remarked at a press conference that it was unthinkable that he would call out federal troops to enforce federal law in the Southern states, some Southerners immediately did something to make it thinkable. Something similar may happen if he convinces the Soviets that he means what he says when he says that "war is preposterous." I suspect that many in the West are guilty of the worst kind of wishful thinking when, in discussing deterrence, they identify the unpleasant with the impossible. It is particularly hard to understand why this is so when almost all who write on this subject were adults during the later part of the Hitler era and presumably were educated in some of the ways in which all these types of deterrence can be strained." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, page 286. Will the left ever learn facts from history?

ABOVE: Nazi supporting "peace" propaganda flooded the UK and USA in the 1930s, as it still does. Comintern's legacy is a repetition of the 1920s and 1930s anti-deterrent mindset, falsely portrayed by Russian "Fifth Column" propaganda fronts as "pacifism" or "peace" arguments. When communists were rejected as unpopular at the election polls, they adopted subversive methods, trying to undermine war readiness (deterrence) to help Russia get in a position to start WWIII, just as they had helped the Nazis in the 1930s do exactly the same thing (while being awarded "Nobel Peace Prizes" for their propaganda; look at the history of 1920s and 1930s gas war anninilation "Nobel peace Prize" liars Lord Noel-Baker, Sir Norman Angell et al.). The result wasn't an end to the arms race or militarism, but an escalation on the enemy side, and an erosion of technical competence and military preparedness on the side of the democracies. Banning the TV transmission of classic "Tom and Jerry" cartoons for "portraying violence as normal to kids" and banning "Action Man" style toy guns for "encouraging deterrence of dictators to kids" in the West, didn't stop Russia's Hitler Youth movement from preparing for war. All this just helped the enemy prepare for WWIII. The paranoid conspiracies aren't the supposed "war mongers" on the side of the democracies, but by the real war mongers on the side of the dictatorships and their fellow travelling "Sputniks", in infiltrating the Western political systems, mass media, and educational establishments with delusional fanatical anti-Western-nuclear bias. Numerous articles sent to "New Scientist" in the 1990s proving the errors in popular propaganda it published by anti-nuclear fanatics like "Rob Edwards" (co-author of the 1982 book "Fuelling the nuclear arms race: the links between nuclear power and nuclear weapons") were simply rejected because they contradicted populist lies "New Scientist" published weekly from such people! This made it appear that there was no opposition to such Russian Fifth Column propaganda lies! Result: no civil defence option and no tactical nuclear deterrent option against "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction" in 2002, and instead WAR. Which is precisely what these lying thugs want. Once the press, the teachers, and the corrupt pseudo-liberal MPs or Lords use enforced "speech filtering" to completely corrupt free debate (it's not that much different to a dictatorship, except that "no platforming censorship" is used in the West, while bullets and poison is used in the dictatorships), you have crackpots and quacks in charge of "democracy", which is a travesty of the term!

If you ban civil defense and nuclear deterrence of dictatorships, then you are left only with the option of WAR against every invasion or WMD threat which your delusional censorship encourages and promotes!

That's not pacifism. On the contrary, it's needless fascist based genocidal war that could be stopped!

As regards "child soldiers": we're constantly reminded of the plight of kids in wars, so why should they be denied the right to defend democracy in countries with ageing populations, when a failure of deterrence and dictatorial occupation will ruin the lives of kids?

All these fanatically anti-civil defense, anti-deterrent so-called "pacifists" - when pressed for their solution to terrorism - claim we can use "non-violent opposition" to enemy attacks; but we saw what happens to kids in this situation in the Holocaust and wars! If we're not going to have a nuclear deterrent, and we're not going to allow kids to learn how to protect themselves, the results are evil and immoral. These facts are conveniently declared to be "taboo"!

"... in letters to me dated April 10, 1979, and June 18, 1979, representatives of the DOE stated that my open research, and a national contest that I conducted, would lead to the generation and transmission of classified data - this in spite of the fact that all of the information that I was seeking would come from unclassified published sources. It has also become obvious that at least one of the three concepts discussed in the disputed Morland article is currently unclassified in the Soviet Union, and that when it was discussed openly here in 1976 by a Soviet scientist, the U.S. government, acting through the Energy Research and Development Agency, classified his speeches (Morland might have stood a better chance of publishing his article in the USSR).

"The concepts discussed in the Morland article deal with basic applied physics, and they are certainly no longer 'secret' - if they were, four other nations would not now have operating thermonuclear weapons. Even though the DOE now admits that this type of information is in the public domain, it is still trying to suppress the circulation of this data, in order to maintain a false illusion of secrecy, and to maintain a real monopoly over the dissemination of weapons-related information, and over the public discussion of American nuclear policies, policies which affect nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons. ... What happened next will be discussed in the description of the accompanying diagram, when the concept of isentropic compression is explained. ... As can be seen from the enclosed diagram, the basic bomb consists of two boosted fission triggers at opposite ends of a mass of lithium-6 deuteride fusion fuel, all contained in an outer casing of uranium-238. ... This arrangement requires that the outer weapon casing play an essential role (as medium to absorb x-rays and re-emit them into the fuel mass) ... there are two triggers in the bomb. The purpose of this is to allow a symmetrical compression of the fusion fuel between them, as well as allowing an x-ray source at each end of the bomb. These two fission triggers must fire simultaneously, or no fusion will occur. ... This sudden elevation in temperature of the fusion fuel, following the isentropic compression, begins the larger main fusion reaction in the weapon. ... " [Emphasis added.]

- Chuck Hansen, August 27, 1979 letter to Senator Charles Percy, published in full in the Sunday, September 16, 1979 special edition of the Madison Press Connection.

It must be emphasised (see the latest blog post here for the physical and mathematical details) that adiabatic "non-shock isentropic compression" of low density fusion fuel was first suggested during the April 1946 Los Alamos Super Conference, but was ignored by Teller and the American mainstream until investigated and tested by Nuckolls during totally clean secondary tests (including a 99.9% clean Ripple II 10 megaton test on 30 October 1962). Isentropic compression is compression without heat transfer between the fusion fuel and its surroundings, involving a gradually increasing compression - more like the pressure variations in a sound wave than the pressure discontinuity at a shock front. Shock waves involve "isothermal compression" at the shock front, which radiates wasted energy as heat in all directions, reducing the kinetic energy used to compress the fusion fuel. The key thing to focus on is the fact that you want to compress fusion fuel to cause fusion, and the fusion then releases heat which opposes compression, dispersing the remaining fusion fuel, and ending fusion. What you are trying to do is to compress fusion fuel so it releases nuclear energy (including heat) as a result of nuclear fusion, not waste energy radiating heat into the surroundings before you compress the fuel (such heat waste opposes compression of the fusion fuel). To the extent that you heat the fuel and cause it to radiate energy during compression, you defeat your purpose and get an inefficient compression (akin to pre-initiation in primary stage fission weapons if they are pre-heated by neutron induced fissions).

Teller ignored all this, and indeed until March 1951 he claimed to have a "no go theorem" against compression, and then he used ablative recoil exploding pushers to give relatively ineffective shock compression of fusion stages in his "Sausage" design, the standard 1950s thermonuclear system. Nuckolls and the Russians, however, used gentler isentropic compression (by using a low-density pusher like beryllium on a clean LiD fusion fuel capsule; with any dense U238 placed in the outer casing of the bomb, rather than used as the pusher in contact with the fusion fuel), which enabled more of the primary stage x-ray energy to be used to compress the fusion stage to high density, with less energy being wasted on heat transfer during compression. If you do any sort of work, e.g. hammering nails into wood, charging a battery, or running an engine, some energy will be used in achieving the objective, and some will be wasted as heat. If you want maximum work efficiency, you need to minimise waste heat (i.e. you want to reduce the rise in entropy S, so that the change in entropy dS ~ 0, which is the definition of the ideal of "isentropic compression"), which means losing the shock wave-producing dense ablative shell on the fusion fuel in the "Sausage" designs tested in the 1950s by the USA, which resists isentropic compression. With a dense pusher, you get shock compression which radiates heat before the shock even reaches the core and compresses it, so you only get core compression factor of 20-30, whereas if you use a low-density ablator like beryllium, aluminium or plastic on the fusion fuel, you can achieve nearly isentropic compression factors of 1,000 or more! I.e.. the core density is increased by a factor of 1,000, so that the fusion rate is much faster and more efficient (more fusion is accomplished before the bomb blows itself apart). The latter compression is even sufficient to ignite deuterium fusion, according to Russian claims about their 1960s-1970s cleaner isentropic bomb tests for "peaceful uses" (and tactical nuclear weapons), giving a far cheaper and longer-life warhead than the deuterium-tritium fuel used in the low yield American "Dove" and "Starling" designs of neutron bombs! ("Isotropic compression" just means equal from all directions, and has nothing to do with "isentropic compression".) Similarly, the first implosion bombs used dense U238 neutron reflectors around the core, requiring inefficient shock compression, whereas lower density beryllium reflectors allowed greater efficiency quasi-isentropic compression in fission designs.

A great deal of the popular media's confusion over thermonuclear weapons designs is down to misunderstanding the nature of the x-ray pulse from the fission primary stage. Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons usefully explains that most (over 80%) of the energy can be released x-rays generated by inelastic fission fragment collisions, on a time scale of the order 1 shake or 10 nanoseconds. However, that is only true for a bare fissile metal core, so in reality the considerable mass of chemical implosion debris (mainly carbon, oxygen and hydrogen ions) around that core diffuses the x-rays with a random-walk that slows the x-ray emission into typicaly a 100-times longer pulse than 10 nanoseconds, i.e. around 1 microsecond. It is for this reason that early thermonuclear weapons had heavy outer cases, to contain the diffusive x-ray emission pulse from the fission primary stage's ionized low-Z element fireball, enabling more of that energy to be coupled into fusion stage before the outer casing is destroyed and the coupling ends. Because of this, the fusion stage is not abruptly compressed over a 10 nanosecond time period as implied by Glasstone's unclassified statement that most of the fission energy is emitted in the last shake, but more gradually over a time of up to 1 microsecond. The design of the fission primary stage therefore determines the nature of the x-ray pulse waveform. This problem has been known since the beginning, which is why a gun-type fission weapon was selected in 1946 for the fusion "Super" primary stage, because it would eliminate the implosion debris fireball x-ray diffusion problem, and also why Gamow designed a cylindrical implosion "Greenhouse-George" primary, to enable x-rays from a bare side of a fissile core to initiate fusion without the complexity of x-ray shielding and transport through low-Z barriers, as occurs with spherical implosion primary stages.

Above: the Russian compact (e.g. MIRV or tactical neutron) nuclear bomb concept is simply to use two small fission devices to compress a relative low-density prolate-spheroid shaped secondary stage (e.g. LiD fusion fuel, rather than U235 pusher with fusion boosting, as used in the American W88 warhead), a concept illustrated in Russian military books by reprinting a full-page nuclear weapon design diagram on page 54 of the 5 December 1955 Life magazine! Using two primaries to compress a prolate spheroid charge of low-density fusion fuel (one at each end) means you don't have to disperse x-rays from a single primary uniformly (for isotropic compression) around the secondary stage using "reflective focussing" from the inside of a massive pear shaped casing (as for their 1.6 megaton 1955 RDS37 design) or a massive egg shaped casing (as for the 250 kt Los Alamos Redwing-Huron "Egg" design with a spherical secondary, tested at Bikini in 1956), or even to use a low-density "foam x-ray disperser" as used in British two-stage thermonuclear Grapple tests (and later Livermore compact spherical secondary stage designs for MIRV missiles). Also, by not having a dense pusher on the secondary stage (you can add U238 to the outer casing if you want to boost the fission yield, as shown above), it is easier to compress it, so you get greater compression than is the case for the inclusion of dense metal in the secondary, giving far more efficient ("nearly isentropic") compression for a very efficient fusion burn which can use cheap deuterium to initiate it, rather than requiring costly tritium-deuterium fusion (needed for the smaller compressions achieved in modern Western secondaries with dense metal pushers), thus not only miniaturizing the H bomb but also enabling nearly clean tactical neutron bombs to be produced very cheaply, without needing large amounts of costly tritium (which has a half life of only 12.3 years, so has to be regularly produced by the costly irradiation of lithium, placed in gas proof capsules inside the core of a nuclear reactor).

Ironically, Chuck Hansen, the author of US Nuclear Weapons, re-invented the Russian "Project 49" double-primary H-bomb independently in a 27 August 1979 letter to Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, only to have this double-primary design dismissed as "wrong" by American nuclear weaponeers, some of whom didn't even know that: (a) Teller and Ulam had stated that one or more primary stages could be used to ignite a H-bomb in their 1951 breakthrought paper, and (b) you can get both primary stages to detonate simultaneously by simply wiring up the electronic neutron guns for each primary into a parallel circuit, and doing the same for their electrical detonators and x-unit capacitors and krytron switches. Hardened groupthink dogma orthodoxy is is hard to debunk! (The Russian double primary idea was even earlier suggested by journalist John McPhee to nuclear weaponeer Dr Ted Taylor with this dismissive result, as reported in McPhee's 1974 book, The Curve of Binding Energy. Note that Howard Morland's design relied on Edward Teller's single-primary H-bomb illustration in his article "Hydrogen Bomb", in the Encyclopedia Americana, v14.)

GEORGE GAMOW'S ASYMMETRIC-IMPLOSION FISSION BOMB DESIGN FOR USE AS AN EFFICIENT DIRECTED X-RAY SOURCE FOR RUSSIAN PROJECT 49 DOUBLE PRIMARY NEUTRON BOMBS

ABOVE: declassified originally "TOP SECRET" 1946 nuclear weapons design study for Dr von Karman, General Considerations of Explosives and Explosions of fission and thermonuclear weapons by Los Alamos nuclear weaponeer Dr George Gamow (he designed the "Greenhouse-George" 1951 radiation imploded fusion capsule using a special cylinder implosion fission primary to allow x-rays to escape from the sides) throws light on the Russian fission primary stage designs used in their very compact neutron bombs. In the West, spherical or prolate spheroid shaped linear implosion primaries are used, but the Russian language Wikipedia and other Russian language military internet pages (which are completely separate from Western Wikipedia, not simply translations!) for years have contained diagrams of a special single-detonation point implosion lens system, which is now revealed to be due to George Gamow (full declassified report is LINKED HERE). The key benefits for this revolutionary Gamow design in tactical neutron bomb design are:

(a) the fissile mass is off-centre, so x-rays escape in a preferential direction with little shielding by chemical explosive debris, thus maximising the exposure of a fusion fuel capsule to x-rays from an implosion fission primary, and

(b) the fact

only one detonation point is required

(which can be shielded by a steel cover to protect that point from accidental impact etc), minimises the size of the x-unit capacitor, battery, etc, as compared to spherical implosions where a lot of points need simultaneous ignition for successful implosion (see French nuclear test flash x-ray photos below!). The West uses a "no-go theorem" to rule out this design called "one-point safety", whereby the implosion system must be safe from effective compression of the fissile core occurring from a detonation at any single point on the outside. However, for such very low yield (sub kiloton) fission weapons, safety concerns can be relaxed in a world war situation where mass production of nuclear shells is required, and the neutron gun must be fired at the optimum compression time to achieve a significant nuclear yield. The single point of detonation can be protected both (a) mechanically by a steel impact cap over it (so if dropped, any impact detonation will occur at the wrong point, and (b) electrically by a fuse in series with the detonator which will blow at a current rating below that required to fire the detonator. When the weapon's detonation is actually required, the fuse can be mechanically changed for a high-current conductor just before detonation.

A feature of this Gamow design is that although the off-centre fissile core is simultaneously compressed in time, the force is anisotropic (being naturally greater on the side with the most explosives), so the hollows in the fissile cores need to be displaced similarly to compensate (so that side of the fissile core with weaker implosion pressure is thinner). Although you would expect the ansiotropy of implosion to physically shift the core towards the fusion capsule and thus block the x-ray channel, this doesn't happen in reality because the time scale of the macroscopic acceleration of the core (taking many microseconds) is massive, compared to the relatively trivial timescale of the very fast nuclear reactions such as fission and x-ray ablation phenomena! It appears from Russian information that they use this kind of fission primary to massively reduce the mass and firing circuit complexity of their double-primary ignited neutron bombs. Dr Gamow illustrated technical reports himself, as he did for his wonderful kid's physics books on a big bang, etc.

ABOVE: note that a single Gamow asymmetric implosion fission stage can also be used to enhance the neutrons and prompt gamma rays in a preferential direction, for use in either ABM defensive neutron warheads (to take out incoming MIRV warheads), or to create a directed prompt gamma ray and prompt Compton current, for a non-lethal localized and directed EMP collateral-damage-averting nuclear weapon (as described using old tech, 3 decades ago in the November 1994 issue of Electronics World, by yours truly), and this Gamow off-centre implosion is depicted in an August 6, 2015-uploaded animated video and labelled "Swan" by Russian Wikipedia user "Guga50", which is currently displayed on the Russian Wikipedia article "Nuclear Weapons" (this Russian "Nuclear Weapons" Wikipedia article is not just a translation of the Western Wikipedia "Nuclear Weapons" article, which shows an entirely different "Swan"-labelled design; a symmetric prolate spheroid with 2-point detonation, not an asymmetric 1-point detonation implosive; my point here is just to point out a discrepancy rather than to say "one is right and one is wrong", since both types are certainly possible from the pure scientific standpoint and it is likely the American "Swan" design is the two-point implosion system, but the Russian Wikipedia design is backed by the design Western nuclear weaponeer Gamow explains in detail in his originally top secret 1946 report and the general Russian custom to take short cuts for cheapness that are "ruled out" by Western bureaucrats with bigger weapons budgets to blow at the taxpayers expense), which states: "... the 1st fission stage cannot provide a sufficient amount of X-ray radiation energy, which is necessary to ensure the explosion of "large" thermonuclear stages. In three-stage devices, the 1st fission stage (with an explosion power of up to tens of kilotons) is used for the radiation implosion of the 2nd ("small") thermonuclear stage (with an explosion power of several hundred kilotons), and the radiation of this 2nd thermonuclear stage (together with the radiation of the 1st stage) is used for the radiation implosion of the 3rd ("large") thermonuclear stage ... In "Tsar Bomba" (AN-602), the first two and the second two stages were placed symmetrically on 2 sides of the third ("large") thermonuclear stage, according to the so-called "bifilar" scheme." (Note: the Russian Wikipedia page on the neutron bomb points out that the casing is composed of "transparent" elements, i.e. those with small cross sections for 14.1 Mev neutron reactions, such as nickel, chromium and tungsten.)

Russian language Wikipedia https://ru.wikipedia.org "Nuclear Weapons" page, section on "Swan" (translated from Russian into English; 14 October 2024): "The described scheme of spherical implosion is archaic and has hardly been used since the mid-1950s. The principle of operation of the “Swan” type design (English: swan) is based on the use of a fissile assembly of a special shape, which, in the process of implosion initiated at one point by one fuse, is compressed in the longitudinal direction and turns into a supercritical sphere. The shell itself consists of several layers of explosive with different detonation rates, which is made on the basis of an alloy of octogen and plastic in the required proportion and filler - polystyrene foam, so that between it and the nuclear assembly located inside there remains a space filled with polystyrene foam. This space introduces the necessary delay due to the fact that the speed of detonation of the explosive exceeds the speed of the shock wave in the polystyrene foam. The shape of the charge strongly depends on the detonation speed of the shell layers and the speed of propagation of the shock wave in polystyrene, which is hypersonic under these conditions. The shock wave from the outer layer of explosive reaches the inner spherical layer simultaneously over the entire surface. A significantly lighter tamper is made not from 238U, but from beryllium, which reflects neutrons well. It can be assumed that the unusual name of this design - "Swan" (first tested by Inca in 1956) was suggested by the shape of the swan's neck. Thus, it was possible to abandon the spherical implosion and, thereby, solve the extremely difficult problem of sub-microsecond synchronization of fuses on a spherical assembly and thus simplify and reduce the diameter of the implosion nuclear weapon from 2 m in the “Fat Man” to 30 cm or less in modern nuclear weapons."

[Original Russian: "Описанная схема сферической имплозии архаична и с середины 1950-х годов почти не применяется. Принцип действия конструкции типа «Swan» ( англ. swan — лебедь), основан на использовании делящейся сборки особой формы, которая в процессе инициированной в одной точке одним взрывателем имплозии, сжимается в продольном направлении и превращается в надкритическую сферу. Сама оболочка состоит из нескольких слоёв взрывчатого вещества с разной скоростью детонации, которую изготавливают на основе сплава октогена и пластика в нужной пропорции и наполнителя — пенополистирола, так что между ним и находящейся внутри ядерной сборкой остаётся заполненное пенополистиролом пространство. Это пространство вносит нужную задержку за счёт того, что скорость детонации взрывчатки превышает скорость движения ударной волны в пенополистироле. Форма заряда сильно зависит от скоростей детонации слоёв оболочки и скоростью распространения ударной волны в полистироле, которая в данных условиях гиперзвуковая. Ударная волна от внешнего слоя взрывчатки достигает внутреннего сферического слоя одновременно по всей поверхности. Существенно более лёгкий тампер выполняется не из 238U, а из хорошо отражающего нейтроны бериллия. Можно предположить, что необычное название данной конструкции — «Лебедь» (первое испытание — Inca в 1956 г.) было подсказано формой шеи лебедя. Таким образом оказалось возможным отказаться от сферической имплозии и, тем самым, решить крайне сложную проблему субмикросекундной синхронизации взрывателей на сферической сборке и таким образом упростить и уменьшить диаметр имплозивного ядерного боеприпаса с 2 м у «Толстяка» до 30 см и менее в современных ядерных боеприпасах."]

Nuclear war threat discussion efforts in the Presidential Election Debate on TV in September 2024, Trump v. Harris, note only Trump was concerned with nuclear war (Harris was in the Democratic party, whose president on 6 and 9 August 1945 used two nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state, which explains this clearly):

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on Putin nuclear threat being ignored by left wingers: pic.twitter.com/p13yNTRz9C

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on need for America to get tough not appease dictatorial terrorists like Harris did which started and sustained the Vietnam style massacres of Ukraine and Gaza wars instead of DETERRING WAR USING… pic.twitter.com/av9rfK2CPK

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on how Biden Admin destroyed American military credibility, thus WWIII risks now in Ukraine war plus Gaza war: pic.twitter.com/zUM62ADTdB

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump debate biased by moderators trying to shut off Trump responses to liar: pic.twitter.com/JwKkFPub9h

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on Biden Admin deliberately left-wing pandering appeasement show-off crass method pulling out from Afghanistan and its effects on Putin: pic.twitter.com/cGpTU82bxn

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate, ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump on how Democrats engineered the riots in Washington DC then tried to blame Trump: pic.twitter.com/g75NdMturH

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Key part of US presidential debate ignored by left wing BBC excerpts. Trump 10 September 2024 presidential election debate on HYPOCRISY OF LAW use by pseudo "Democrats": pic.twitter.com/QaCNxD5CW9

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) September 11, 2024

Herman Kahn is clear, in On Thermonuclear War, about the mobilization problem for bulky conventional weapons (unlike compact nukes out of sight in subs, ICBMs or airfield igloos) triggering off wars such as WWI, quoting on page 359 the assistant chief of the French General Staff, General Boisdeffre's explanation to Russian Tsar Nicholas: "The mobilization is the declaration of war. To mobilize is to oblige one's neighbor to do the same. ... Otherwise, to leave a million men on one's frontier, without doing the same simultaneously, is to deprive oneself of all possibility of moving later; it is placing oneself in a situation of an individual who, with a pistol in his pocket, should should let his neighbor put a weapon to his forehead without drawing his own." Kahn also emphasises the ironic pacifism of the Liberal Party Cabinet of the UK Government which set off WWI by declaring war on Germany (which had not declared war on Britain and did not want war with Britain):

"The [August 1914 WWI-declaring British Liberal Party government] Cabinet was overwhelmingly pacific. At least three-quarters of its members were determined not to be drawn into a European quarrel, unless Great Britain were herself attacked, which was not likely. ... They did not believe that if Germany attacked France, she would attack her through Belgium [triggering WWI via the 1839 Treaty of London, an analogy to our guarantee to defend Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum]..." - Churchill, The World Crisis, v1, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923, p211 (quoted by Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p387). Winston Churchill, himself a Liberal government minister when war was declared in 1914 (he had to rejoin the Conservatives after the Liberal Party was run-over by its role in declaring WWI) was anti-militarism expenditure in general, like his father Lord Randolph Churchill (who in 1886 resigned as Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, in an effort to reduce arms expenditure). On 13 May 1901, Winston Churchill, Boer War hero and newly elected Conservative MP, took up his late father's anti-militarism position in his speech to the House of Commons: "I regard it as a grave mistake in Imperial policy to spend thirty millions a year on the Army. I hold that the continued increase in Army expenditure cannot be viewed by supporters of the Government without the greatest alarm and apprehension, and by Members who represent working class constituencies without extreme dislike. I desire to urge considerations of economy on His Majesty’s Government, and as a practical step that the number of soldiers which they propose to keep ready for expeditionary purposes should be substantially reduced. ... Once you are so unfortunate as to be drawn into a war, no price is too great to pay for an early and victorious peace. All economy of soldiers or supplies is the worst extravagance in war. I am concerned only with the Estimates for the ordinary service of the year, which are increasing at such a rate that it is impossible to view them without alarm. Does the House realise what British expenditure on armaments amounts to? See how our Army Estimates have grown - seventeen millions in 1894, eighteen in 1897, nineteen in 1899, twenty-four in 1900, and finally in the present year no less than twenty-nine millions eight hundred thousand." However, by 1908 Churchillhad reversed this, in the light of Germany militarism, which required British expenditure on an arms race to maintain credible deterrence. Churchill was a realistic, deterrence-supporting pacifist, not a warmonger. Conventional weapons only failed as a credible deterrent in 1914 because of the instability caused by the need to mobilize them along frontiers, something not needed with long-range nuclear weapons now!

Herman Kahn on p371 states of Churchill's The World Crisis, volume 1: "I know of no better textbook on the subject of war, prewar preparations, and peacetime risks. ... Let me now quote Churchill on the possibility of a surprise attack. He is discussing the tension during the 1911 Agadir crisis. Lloyd George had just made a speech with the idea of forcing the German government to back down. The Germans did not like it ... 'It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of ... No one would do such things. Civilisation has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour Party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible. Are you quite sure? It would be a pity to be wrong.' (W. S. Churchill, The World Crisis, v1, Charles Scribner's Sons, NY, 1923, p45)." Kahn then explains the analogy of 1930s fears of gas annihilation to thermonuclear ignorance and propaganda:

"War, unrestricted war, seemed like an unbelievable nightmare and therefore somehow unreal. The very terror of war [annihilation by exaggerated gas or incendiary or high explosive bombing on cities] powerfully reinforced all those who wished to reject military solutions or palliatives in favor of much more attractive schemes for world government or universal disarmament or some major step in that direction.[Italics are Herman Kahn's own.] ... In fact it was not until April 1939, after the second invasion of Czechoslovakia, that the British went all out ... It was by that time far too late." - Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, p377. When Kahn was writing, the USA had massive nuclear superiority in both tactical and strategic weapons. Today, however, the situation is reversed and Kahn's warning is pertinent again: Russia and its allies China, North Korea and Iran have superiority. (We also need to remember the 1939-40 phoney war; it was Churchill not Hitler who initiated city bombing in 1940, deliberately in order to divert enemy bombing from RAF airfields that were needed to retain air superiority and prevent an invasion succeeding. Churchill was only able to do this because Britain had civil defense to mitigate the effects of the retaliation when the RAF were unable to entirely stop enemy attacks. Without civil defense, either Churchill wouldn't have been able to do this, so the airfields might have been put out and an invasion done, or else casualty rates 60 times higher could have resulted in the Blitz (the ratio of WWI bombing casualties per ton of bombs on unprotected civilians, to WWII, when people had shelters).

On page 378 of On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn emphasises (italics are Kahn's own): "The whole history of the 1933-1939 period is a clear example of the failure of Type II [deterrence of major provocations like invasion of an ally] and Type III Deterrence [deterrence of minor provocations like rearmament, militarization, etc.]. These failures occurred because neither the British nor the French [don't forget the USA which passed its Neutrality Act in 1935!] had the resolve to use their superior military power or their superior resources to check German aggression until it was too late. ... The longer they put off using their superior power the less credible it became that it would ever be used. Finally their power itself became inferior so that even when its use was seriously threatened, the German government was no longer impressed." Kahn quotes Churchill: "We had been reduced in those five years [of anti-war disarmament and then anti-war appeasement propaganda about gas knockout blow escalations wiping out humanity, 1933-1938, cumulating in the worthless piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler on 30 September 1938 promising peace for our time] from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengable that we never cared to think about it. We have been reduced from a position where the very word 'war' was considered one which would be used only by persons qualifying for a lunatic asylum." - Winston Churchill, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, G. P. Putnam's Sons, NY, 1941, p60 (quoted by Herman Kahn on page 379 of On Thermonuclear War, where Kahn comments: "Hitler and some of his staff were victims of overconfidence. By the time the war started, they felt that they had more than enough of a lead to win. ... the war would doubtless be short [precisely the delusion of Russia when invading Ukraine, in 2022] ..."

Herman Kahn on page 378 of On Thermonuclear War quotes Air Marshall Sir John Slessor's Central Blue Praeger, NY, 1957, which states the reality on page 161: by 1938 Britain was spending £300 million a year on arms, contrasted to well over £1000 million a year then being spent on arms by the Nazis. Thus, the Nazis were far outrunning Britain so that every day of peace that "Chamberlain bought with his peace agreements" actually gave the Nazis a bigger lead; Britain was not "buying time for rearmament to fight" contrary to financially illiterate historians, journalists and other Chamberlain "pacifism" fans to this day, rather, Chamberlain was helping the Nazis prepare better than the UK by delaying war! If the enemy is getting way bigger than you by the day, you don't do yourself any favours by delaying the fight. The fact that this is still "disputed" by left wing historians to back disarmament in the face of Russia today just demonstrates how Comintern's legacy of infiltration of the Western universities and mass media continues to this day.

One final thought from Kahn's On Thermonuclear War is his Figure 8 on page 469, showing the relationship between missile accuracy, warhead yield, and the 50% probable target peak overpressure at the intended ground zero (the intended ground zero never debunked with 100% probability in reality, due to inaccuracies in the missile guidance system, never mind the risk of warhead malfunction/ABM interception): in 1960 American 10 megaton warheads were placed on missiles with good accuracy gyroscopes, CEP = 1 mile, which gave 50% probability of delivering 100 psi peak overpressure to the intended ground zero, destroying typical 1960 era primitive (not shock protected) missile silos. So the USA could take out hard Russian ICBMs at that time. But the corresponding 10 megaton Russian warheads were (supposedly) on less accurate missiles, CEP = 5 miles, which would only deliver about average 4 psi peak overpressure at the intended "ground zero" (because they would on average miss targets by miles), so Russia couldn't in 1960 usefully target American ICBM's in their silos! If they did so, they would fail with high probability, because the hard targets would on average receive only 4 psi, not the 100 psi needed to wreck them. Thus, Russia had to target wood-frame American houses with ICBM's in 1960, the only yank assets that could be wrecked by 4 psi, not missile silos. In effect, missile accuracy forced America and Russia to have different nuclear war strategies: America could use "counterforce" targetting on hard Russian silos, but the less accurate Russian missiles of the same yield class would have to be targetted on "soft countervalue" targets, like residential areas. This asymmetry in USA and Russian targetting was often promoted by "arms control and disarmament" promoters like Hans Bethe as preventing a direct comparison; Bethe wrote articles in journals denying Russian superiority in megatonnage because they had less accurate missiles. But this is fake news, because Russia's a dictatorship, America isn't. Which is more dangerous, Russia wiping out American civilians or America wiping out Russian ICBMs? Duh. One strategy is evil, the other is just war.

Kahn also went into the problem with populist notions of "knockout blow" 1st strikes, versus 2nd strikes in nuclear war. In summary, Russia now has superiority in tactical neutron weapons, protected deep shelters and the secret Metro 2 underground railway to evacuate the dictators from the Kremlin to safe rural bunkers in the event of a nuclear strike on Moscow (as well as many dual-purpose cheap but hard underground car parks/shelters and tube stations/shelters and basement cafes/shelters, with double blast doors fitted for civilians), and it has placed a large number of ICBMs on mobile launchers which can move around (out of the 4 psi damage zone) while USA ICBMs are inflight. So, since America doesn't have such civil defense or mobile ICBM launchers or neutron bombs, it doesn't really have a credible deterrent against Russia, but Russia has a credible deterrent against American nuclear leverage. This was claimed to reduce nclear war risks by demonstrating to Russia that it has nothing to fear from America unless Russia launches a first strike on America, when what survived of American military assets (e.g. some Trident SLBMs) could disarm themselves by setting off a firework display over the Kremlin (while the Russians survive in hard double-blast doored shelters). This limited American "second strike capability" was supposed to be "safe deterrence". However, as we have seen, it hasn't stopped Russia invading Ukraine, using Novichok and Polonium-210 in the UK, etc. In other words, it's "minimal deterrence" that leaves open the key risk Kahn warned about, a repetition of the 1930s fiasco that was designed to minimise the risk of "accidental war" by peace treaties with dictators (who interpreted them as signs of virtual signalling weakness to be laughed at and ignored), but did the opposite, causing WWII. Mathematically, the error is that the Iwo Jima proved Lanchester Equations of war are being disregarded in preference to Morgenstern and von Neumann's "Minimax theorem" of game theory. The Lanchester Equations prove that the probability of victory in war (i.e. the rate of disarmament of the weaker side) is proportional to the square of the ratio of forces (surviving a 1st strike) and you need thus to risk using as much force as you can; the Minimax theorem by contrast says that to win a rule-abided game you should take minimal risks and not "escalate to win". The Minimax theorem is disproved by the US Strategic Bomb Survey WWII pre-nuclear attacks data, as well as the results in Vietnam and other wars of "gradual punishment" to try to coerce the enemy into defeat. The Lanchester equations model the history of victorious combats. All current Western nuclear policy is based on Minimax (the McNamara legacy), not Lanchester!

To recap for clarity in the reader's mind: Kahn's 1960 On Thermonuclear War was written while Eisenhower/Dulles "Massive retaliation" (aka "MAD" = Musual Assured Destruction, aka "Type 1 Deterrence") was in play, although General Maxwell D. Taylor (later Kennedy's limited nuclear war adviser), Henry Kissinger (in his 1957 "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy"), and people like Kahn's childhood friend and RAND Corporation colleague, physicist Samuel Cohen, were already advocating cleaner enhanced neutron weapons to credibly deter the invasions that triggered terrible conventional wars like WWI, WWII, the 1950-53 Korean War, etc. (note that contrary to "arms control and disarmament" liars, the "neutron bomb" is not limited to low kiloton yields, but can be used as a 10 megaton Ripple II 99.9% clean device for the case of wide area fronts of tanks crossing borders, provided a precursor burst of similar yield is detonated 5-25 seconds in advance, in order to reduce air density in the target area behind the shock front of the first burst, and so provide hydrodynamic enhancement of neutrons from the second explosion). Kahn considered a wide range of deterrent postures and kinds of wars in his book, and countermeasures in excruciating detail and cold-bloodedness, which put off many idealists from even bothering to read it carefully, let alone implement all of its recommendations! The key problem Kahn found for today's "minimal deterrence policy" was that arms control plus Russian tactical nuclear weapons and shelters superiority, kills off any hope deterring the kinds of "Type II deterrence" needed to prevent enemies from invading 3rd parties, i.e. the invasion of Ukraine 2022 couldn't be credibly deterred by saying "if you do that, Putin, I'll kill myself by disarming my country by firing all my weapons at you for an imaginary knockout blow" (most of which will be negated by Russian ABM, or negated by Russian shelters, or negated by Russian mobile ICBM's simply starting their engines and driving outside the 4psi blast overturning radius while the pre-programmed ICBM's are in flight from USA to their previous locations in Russia identified on satellite photos prior to pressing the button)!" This simply isn't a credible deterrent to kind of situations which have initiated 100% of the world wars in history! WTF has gone wrong with these people? Comintern propaganda has infected top dogs for decades with "Jaw, jaw, not war, war" appeasement crap (Winston Churchill was the only person in human history in the Cabinet of the country triggering BOTH World Wars, tried to deter BOTH, and FAILED both times, but is somehow remembered in propaganda history as a "great orator" despite failing to sway public opinion pre-WWI and pre-WWII to deter the wars; he may have been the most sensible person on both occasions but the result was still a World War each time!). Maybe it's partly down to luddite opposition to progress (the sin of nuclear technology stagnation caused by decades of bans of tests for improved, more credible nuclear deterrent warhead options), and partly down to nostalgic "last war" style military inertia, of the kind that sent Polish horse mounted (cavalry) divisions into battle with Panzer tanks in 1939. The key problem is that the current "protected second strike capability" ("we will never strike first!") is that the enemy leadership may develop the mentality of Hamas in October 2023. If so, that very limited "minimum deterrence" will fail, and there will be a nuclear war. Also, Russia has threatened to nuke non-nuclear Sweden and non-nuclear Ukraine, just as America nuked non-nuclear Japan in 1945 twice, so the CND fantasy of securing a "nuclear free zone" by unilateral disarmament is just a pipe dream. If we continue as we have done until now, Russia and other enemy states will become an ever more war-minded alliance intent on our nuclear annihilation.

"Russia has launched several air attacks on Ukraine this week, costing Moscow a reported £1.1bn. Last night, Kyiv came under drone attack for the third night in four days, with debris injuring people and damaging buildings." - https://t.co/oNs8lwTTmZ And when the Roubles run out,…

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 29, 2024

"The threat of Russian escalation is almost absent in the conversation. It is as if the limit of their conventional powers has been exposed by the humiliation of Kursk, along with the emptiness of their nuclear rhetoric. The latter cannot be entirely ignored, if the Kremlin feels…

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 29, 2024

Democrats in 2021 accelerated the pull out from Afghanistan to the extent that people flooded runways and later fell off undercarriages of the escaping aircraft (worse than the organized rooftop queue for the last Helicopters leaving Saigon, in 1975!), to pacify disarmers, peace protestors, liberals etc., like Putin and Hamas, then Putin and Hamas realise they can invade Ukraine (2022) and Israel (2023) with impunity. INNOCENT PEOPLE ARE KILLED WHEN YOU GIVE A GREEN LIGHT TO DICTATORS. We need credible deterrence. Like, NOW, to stop these invasions. Duh. The entire problem is down to the lying left wing Lenin lawyer "virtual signalling" political tactic lampooned years ago by Bob Monkhouse's advice to succeed by "faking sincerity" ("Nukemap" lying crap is an excellent example of how the old 1930s "guaranteed gas knockout blow annihilation within hours of war being declared" propaganda horsecrap is resurrected for mainstream media lying fake "pacicism" today). That deliberate abusive lying propaganda by the herd mentality "autistic groupthink" thugs of left wing bigots backfires, just as with right wing thugs, and costs lives.

Tip for deluded and lazy journalists who don't have time to check the full facts below: there's a very brief summary of deliberate fake news and nuclear weapons lying ("Nukemap liars etc") effects evidence debunking CND and other pro-Russian nuclear superiority (unilateral Western disarmament/arms control) "elitist virtual signalling" fascism linked here. It's about time for the fashion obsessed mass media to stop repeating 1930s lying propaganda (with "gas escalation annihilation" changed to "nuclear escalation annihilation" by paranoid lying pseudo-pacifists who engineer every invasion, every war, every massacre and ban civil defense shelters into the bargain, using lying to win so-called "Nobel peace prizes" from charlatans dressed up as celebrity elitists with pseudo Communist political cards on open display): "there is no way to prevent immediate gas annihilation of humanity due to aerial war escalation in a war, so we must disarm to prevent disaster and accommodate the Nazi terrorists as friends and collaborators in the name of God". Maybe it's about time, too, for those claiming to be "PhD historians" and "PhD physicists" to get out of their ivory towers of elitist fascist "communism" (i.e. the deliberate "pipe dream" of equality of money, not the achievable reality of equality of freedom of speech, the kind of humane decency no card-carrying/BBC supporting, elitist "Communist" will ever support in any way, shape or form, because they know their lies will instantly be exposed as such in free debate) and start to tell the truth, not one-sided pro-eugenics or other pseudoscience crap that panders to mass delusions like fairy tales.

The UK and France are eager to allow Ukraine to strike military targets deep within Russian territory, while the US and Germany are opposed - Financial Times

The reason for Germany and the US reluctance is that the Biden administration and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are…

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 28, 2024

It's impossible to tell precisely why this 1930s "gas war will escalate within hours and wipe out everybody" pro-Nazi appeasement escalation-doomsday lying and Vietnam era "don't escalate to win" anti-military lunacy is still prevailing in America and Germany, but nuclear heebie jeebies based on fake "Nukemap" style crap is certainly a big factor, plus the fact that both countries lost major wars with costly financial and psychosis implications (Germany lost WWI and WWII; America lost Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan). Someday victory may become fashionable again, probably only after "virtue signalling faked pacifist sincerity" is debunked by Putin.

Looks like the commie Russian siding thug Joseph Rotblat, a Nobel Peace Laureate for giving the green card to Putin like fellow "pacifists" did to the Kaiser to begin WWI and to Hitler, starting WWII. But from his "diplomacy" he wants WWIII by provoking war, not Western… https://t.co/jfs2CEe2KV

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 29, 2024

The Russian multistaged 1000 megaton (1 Gt) bomb design goes back to Leo Szilard's anti-H bomb "doomsday machine" propaganda news conference of 1950. As Herman Kahn argued, it's not a credible deterrent, is hard to deliver (it would be the size of a large submarine), and the… https://t.co/zgErh5mnVN

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 22, 2024

Russian state TV channel 1 admits invasion causin pain, but then adds that Russia is a nuclear state. Get prepared for possible Putin resumption of nuclear weapons coercion, or other nuclear saber rattling such as an EMP test as occurred on 22 October 1962, during Cuban crisis! https://t.co/I0gtQpb8OI

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 15, 2024

“We are ready to use weapons, including any weapons — including the weapons you mentioned — if it is a question of the existence of the Russian state or damage to our sovereignty and independence,” Putin added in the interview ... - https://www.news18.com/world/putin-says-russian-nuclear-weapons-more-advanced-than-in-us-8814525.html

"For Russia, the strategic defeat means the end of its statehood and thousand-year history. Then the question arises - why should we be afraid? Isn't it better to go to the end?" - Putin

He says it's logical.
Following formal logic, that means the end of Putin. pic.twitter.com/XpJTzWQH9c

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) June 20, 2024

Are you a retired NATO F-16 pilot? Then you are needed to help defend liberty against the Ruskies. Ukraine doesn't have enough F-16 pilots available. https://t.co/Mdto9HhPMc

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 15, 2024

I arrived in Moscow for the BBC in 2000 on the day Russia admitted to the Kursk submarine disaster. Now, in Kursk, Putin’s struggling with new disaster - as his war vs Ukraine rebounds

I’ve witnessed Russia’s long slide to this point, close-up. It’s all in my book - out today 👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/VREwcF6R4m

— Sarah Rainsford (@sarahrainsford) August 15, 2024

Offensive is usually the best form of defence - looks like AFU really understand combined arms manoeuvre warfare ⁦@HamishDBG⁩ ⁦@Barnes_Joe⁩ https://t.co/7yrqb3FN5Y

— Hamish DBG (@HamishDBG) August 27, 2024

"The incursion into Kursk region by the AFU is in favor of Russia," Russians are told by their TV channels, because an attack on Russian territory closes the possibility of negotiations with Ukraine.

And what else would be in Russia's favor? pic.twitter.com/q2a8FkD0nR

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 28, 2024

Answer: in case Putin at some point hits the vodka, sees red at the invasion of Russia, and presses a button. Hitler had 12,000 tons of tabun by 1945 - equivalent to Russia's nuclear stockpile in terms of killing potential - but never used a drop of it. But the RISK was… https://t.co/eHzQLYxY8x

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 15, 2024

Ukrainian President Zelenskyy on Putin's (aka Russian State TV Channel 1's) recent nuclear war threats: Zelenskyy thinks that Putin loves life too much to start a nuclear war. True, up to a point, but: (1) Putin could escalate nuclear threats without much risk of being wiped out… pic.twitter.com/9wTNFVKUaT

— nukegate.org (@Nukegate) August 27, 2024

ABOVE: The 1996 Northrop EM-1 (see extracts below showing protection by modern buildings and also simple shelters very close to nuclear tests; note that Northrop's entire set of damage ranges as a function of yield for underground shelters, tunnels, silos are based on two contained deep underground nuclear tests of different yield scaled to surface burst using the assumption of 5% yield ground coupling relative to the underground shots; this 5% equivalence figure appears to be an exaggeration for compact modern warheads, e.g. the paper “Comparison of Surface and Sub-Surface Nuclear Bursts,” from Steven Hatch, Sandia National Laboratories, to Jonathan Medalia, October 30, 2000, shows a 2% equivalence, e.g. Hatch shows that 1 megaton surface burst produces identical ranges to underground targets as a 20 kt burst at >20m depth of burst, whereas Northrop would require 50kt) has not been openly published, despite such protection being used in Russia! This proves heavy bias against credible tactical nuclear deterrence of the invasions that trigger major wars that could escalate into nuclear war (Russia has 2000+ dedicated neutron bombs; we don't!) and against simple nuclear proof tested civil defence which makes such deterrence credible and of course is also of validity against conventional wars, severe weather, peacetime disasters, etc.

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.

We have uploaded an online-viewable version of the full text of the 1982 edition of the UK Goverment's Domestic Nuclear Shelters - Technical Guidance, including secret UK and USA nuclear test report references and extracts proving protection against collateral damage, for credible deterrence (linked here).

For a review of this site see: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/02/are-nuclear-weapons-100-times-less.html which states: "Cook is a master researcher who digs up incredible piles of research on all topics nuclear and the following is digest of various writings of his gathered for easy access centered on the remarkable thesis that the effects of nuclear weapons, while literally awesome, have been exaggerated or misunderstood to an even greater extent, with perhaps very considerable military consequences." Also see some key extracts from this blog published over at http://www.militarystory.org/nuclear-detonations-in-urban-and-suburban-areas/ and blog statistics (over 2.3 million views) linked here (populist pseudo-critics love to falsely claim that "nobody takes any notice of the truth, justifying their decision to ignore the facts by following the fake fashion herd groupthink agenda"). (Or, for Field Marshall Slim's "the more you use, fewer you lose" success formula for ending war by winning in Burma against Japan - where physicist Herman Kahn served while his friend Sam Cohen was calculating nuclear weapon efficiencies at the Los Alamos Manhattan Project, which again used "overkill" to convince the opponent to throw in the towel - please see my post on the practicalities of really DETERRING WWIII linked here; this is the opposite of the failure to escalate formula used to drag out war until bankrupcy aka the Vietnam effect.)

This blog's url is now "www.nukegate.org". When this nuclear effects blog began in 2006, "glasstone.blogspot.com" was used to signify the key issue of Glasstone's obfuscating Effects of Nuclear Weapons, specifically the final 1977 edition, which omitted not just the credible deterrent "use" of nuclear weapons but the key final "Principles of protection" chapter that had been present in all previous editions, and it also ignored the relatively clean neutron bombs which had been developed in the intervening years, as a credible deterrent to the concentrations of force needed for aggressive invasions, such as the 1914 invasion of Belgium and the 1939 invasion of Poland; both of which triggered world wars. Those editors themselves were not subversives, but both had nuclear weapons security clearances which constituted political groupthink censorship control, regarding which designs of nuclear weapons they could discuss and the level of technical data (they include basically zero information on their sources and the "bibliographies" are in most cases not to their classified nuclear testing sources but merely further reading); the 1977 edition had been initially drafted in 1974 solely by EM-1 editor Dolan at SRI International, and was then submitted to Glasstone who made further changes. The persistent and hypocritical Russian World Peace Council's and also hardline arms controllers propaganda tactic - supported by some arms industry loons who have a vested interest in conventional war - has been to try to promote lies on nuclear weapons effects to get rid of credible Western nuclear deterrence of provocations that start war. Naturally, the Russians have now stocked 2000+ tactical neutron weapons of the sort they get the West to disarm.

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.”

There is now a relatively long introduction at the top of this blog, due to the present nuclear threat caused by disarmament and arms control propaganda, and the dire need to get the facts out past pro-Russian media influencers or loony mass media which has never cared about nuclear and radiation effects facts, so please scroll down to see blog posts. The text below in blue is hyperlinked (direct to reference source materials, rather than numbered and linked to reference at the end of the page) so you can right-click on it and open in a new tab to see the source. This page is not about opinions, it provides censored out facts that debunk propaganda, but for those who require background "authority" nonsense on censored physics facts, see stuff here or here. Regarding calling war-mongering, world war causing, terrorism-regime-supporting UK disarmers of the 20th century "thugs" instead of "kind language": I was put through the Christianity grinder as a kid so will quote Jesus (whom I'm instructed to follow), Matthew 23:33: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell?" The fake "pacifist" thugs will respond with some kindly suggestion that this is "paranoid" and that "Jesus was rightfully no-platformed for his inappropriate language"! Yeah, you guys would say that, wouldn't ya. Genuine pacifism requires credible deterrence! Decent people seem to be very confused about the facts of this. Jesus did not say "disarm to invite your annihilation by terrorists". You can't "forgive and forget" when the enemy is still on the warpath. They have to be stopped, either by deterrence, force, defense, or a combination of all these.

Above: Edward Leader-Williams on the basis for UK civil defence shelters in SECRET 1949 Royal Society's London Symposium on physical effects of atomic weapons, a study that was kept secret by the Attlee Government and subsequent UK governments, instead of being openly published to enhance public knowledge of civil defence effectiveness against nuclear attack. Leader-Williams also produced the vital civil defence report seven years later (published below for the first time on this blog), proving civil defence sheltering and city centre evacuation is effective against 20 megaton thermonuclear weapons. Also published in the same secret symposium, which was introduced by Penney, was Penney's own Hiroshima visit analysis of the percentage volume reduction in overpressure-crushed empty petrol cans, blueprint containers, etc., which gave a blast partition yield of 7 kilotons (or 15.6 kt total yield, if taking the nuclear blast as 45% of total yield, i.e. 7/0.45 = 15.6, as done in later AWRE nuclear weapons test blast data reports). Penney in a 1970 updated paper allowed for blast reduction due to the damage done in the city bursts.

ABOVE: The June 1957 edition of Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons was the first to include the effects of blast duration (which increases with the cube-root of weapon yield) on blast damage from nuclear weapons. This is very important for wind drag loading to drag-sensitive targets, but has less effect for diffraction-sensitive targets which respond to peak pressures, especially where the blast pressure rapidly equalizes around the structure (e.g. utility poles or buildings with large expanses of glass which shatters, allowing rapid pressure equalization). For example, Glasstone 1957, Fig. 6.41b (p253, using Fig. 3.94a on p109 to convert scaled distances to overpressures from a surface burst on open deserted terrain) shows that for yields of 1 kt, 20 kt (approximately the 16 kt Hiroshima and 21 kt Nagasaki yields), and 1 megaton, peak overpressures of 55, 23 and 15 psi, respectively, are required for collapse (severe damage) to modern multistory reinforced concrete buildings with light walls (Fig. 6.41a shows that about 5 psi will demolish a wood frame house - no longer in modern city centres - regardless of yield). Notice that this means that modern cities are extremely resistant to blast from ~1 kt neutron bombs, requiring more than twice the peak overpressure for collapse than was needed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also notice that very large amounts of energy are absorbed from the blast in causing severe damage to modern reinforced concrete city buildings, causing rapid attenuation of free-field pressure so that ocean and desert test validated cube-root damage scaling laws break down for high yield bursts in modern cities (see latest blog post here for examples of calculations of this energy absorption in both oscillating a building in the elastic deflection engineering graph zone, and the much larger energy absorption in causing plastic zone distortion to reinforced concrete - basically the former typically absorbs about 1% of blast energy, whereas the latter takes up something like 10 times more energy, or 10%, a factor entirely dismissed by Glasstone and Dolan but analyzed by Penney). Above a megaton or so, the increasing blast duration has less and less effect on the peak overpressure required for severe damage, because for destruction a threshold blast loading exists, regardless of the blast duration. (A 1 mile/hour wind will not blow a wall down, regardless of how long it lasts. In other words, large impulses cease to be damage criteria if the blast pressure drops below a threshold needed for damage.) Glasstone 1957 Fig 6.41c on p255 shows that automobiles suffer severe damage 36 psi peak overpressure for 1 kt, 18 psi for 20 kt, and 12 psi for 1 megaton. These pressures for destruction of automobiles are similar to the severe damage data given for multistorey steel frame office buildings with light walls. The key point here is that low-yield (around 1 kt) tactical nuclear weapons produce far less collateral damage to civilian infrastructure than high yield bursts, and even the effects of the latter are exaggerated severely for modern cities when using wooden house data in unobstructed terrain at ocean or desert terrain nuclear tests. Collateral damage is eliminated by exploiting the fact that higher pressures are needed for air blast damage at lower yields, and using earth penetrator warheads or air bursts to constrain air blast pressures to civilian infrastructure, ensuring that they are not collapsed (causing casualties in modern steel or concrete buildings).

Note that the later (1962/4 and 1977) editions of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons replace the correct (curved line conversion) blast duration nomographs in the 1957 edition with simplistic Wn yield scaling (where n = 0.4 for drag sensitive targets), which is a simplification which fails to correctly model the fact that blast duration effects on overpressures are eliminated at very high yields because a minimum threshold blast pressure is needed to cause damage.

J. R. Oppenheimer (opposing Teller), February 1951: "It is clear that they can be used only as adjuncts in a military campaign which has some other components, and whose purpose is a military victory. They are not primarily weapons of totality or terror, but weapons used to give combat forces help they would otherwise lack. They are an integral part of military operations. Only when the atomic bomb is recognized as useful insofar as it is an integral part of military operations, will it really be of much help in the fighting of a war, rather than in warning all mankind to avert it." (Quotation: Samuel Cohen, Shame, 2nd ed., 2005, page 99.)

‘The Hungarian revolution of October and November 1956 demonstrated the difficulty faced even by a vastly superior army in attempting to dominate hostile territory. The [Soviet Union] Red Army finally had to concentrate twenty-two divisions in order to crush a practically unarmed population. ... With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears when we think of [World War II nuclear city bombing like Hiroshima]. The high casualty estimates for nuclear war are based on the assumption that the most suitable targets are those of conventional warfare: cities to interdict communications ... With cities no longer serving as key elements in the communications system of the military forces, the risks of initiating city bombing may outweigh the gains which can be achieved. ...

‘The elimination of area targets will place an upper limit on the size of weapons it will be profitable to use. Since fall-out becomes a serious problem [i.e. fallout contaminated areas which are so large that thousands of people would need to evacuate or shelter indoors for up to two weeks] only in the range of explosive power of 500 kilotons and above, it could be proposed that no weapon larger than 500 kilotons will be employed unless the enemy uses it first. Concurrently, the United States could take advantage of a new development which significantly reduces fall-out by eliminating the last stage of the fission-fusion-fission process.’

- Dr Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, 1957, pp. 180-3, 228-9.

Note that sometimes the "nuclear taboo" issue is raised against this analysis by Kissenger: if anti-nuclear lying propaganda on weapons effects makes it apparently taboo in the Western pro-Russian disarmament lobbies to escalate from conventional to tactical nuclear weapons to end war as on 6 and 9 August 1945, then this "nuclear taboo" can be relied upon to guarantee peace for our time. However, this was not only disproved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by the Russian tactical nuclear weapons reliance today, the Russian civil defense shelter system detailed on this blog which showed they believed a nuclear war survivable based on the results of their own nuclear tests, and the use of Russian nuclear weapons years after Kissinger's analysis was published and criticised, for example their 50 megaton test in 1961 and their supply of IRBM's capable of reaching East Coast mainland USA targets to the fanatical Cuban dictatorship in 1962. So much for the "nuclear taboo" as being any more reliable than Chamberlain's "peace for our time" document, co-signed by Hitler on 30 September 1938! We furthermore saw how Russia respected President Obama's "red line" for the "chemical weapons taboo": Russia didn't give a toss about Western disarmament thugs prattle about what they think is a "taboo", Russia used chlorine and sarin in Syria to keep Assad the dictator and they used Novichok to attack and kill in the UK in 2018, with only diplomatic expulsions in response. "Taboos" are no more valid to restrain madmen than peace treaties, disarmament agreements, Western CND books attacking civil defense or claiming that nuclear war is the new 1930s gas war bogyman, or "secret" stamps on scientific facts. In a word, they're crazy superstitions.)

(Quoted in 2006 on this blog here.

All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of DELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace":

"Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.

ABOVE: Why didn't Britain declare war on Russia when it jointly invaded Poland with the Nazis, or even later when Russia invaded Finland single-handed? Answer: Comintern had stuffed the British mass media, British universities, and even the Labour Party with Russian stooges! Barrister Denis Pritt, Labour MP, simply blamed the British government for not cosying up to Communist dictatorial Russia (in the same way Chamberlain had cosied up to Adolf Hitler's Nazis)! Pritt in 1936 went to watch the "Trial of the Sixteen" in Moscow, a show trial purge of Stalin's criticis that made a mockery of the law, but be defended Stalinism in his tract, "The Zinoviev Trial". He was only finally kicked out of the Labour Party after he defended Russia's invasion of Finland in popular Penguin Book Specials. But he wasn't alone. The communists of the British media used the same tactics as the Nazis to undermine or destroy critics, so they managed to churn out one-sided propaganda nearly as bad as the media saturation with anti-nuclear, anti-CO2 crap today.

Russian project 49 dual-primary thermonuclear weaponeer Dr Yuri Trutnev has an officially "proatom.ru"-published technical history of the design of the Russian nuclear weapons (which differ from UK-USA designs fundamentally) here (extracted from Russian "Atomic Strategy" No. 18, August 2005): "the problem of ensuring spherically symmetric compression of the secondary module was radically solved, since the time of “symmetrization” of the energy around the secondary module was much less than the time of compression of this module. ... The first two-stage thermonuclear charge, designated RDS-37, was developed in 1955 and successfully tested on November 22, 1955. The energy release of the charge in the experiment was 1.6 Mt, and since for safety reasons at the Semipalatinsk test site the charge was tested at partial power, the predicted full-scale energy release of the charge was ~ 3 Mt. The energy release amplification factor in RDS-37 was about two orders of magnitude, the charge did not use tritium, the thermonuclear fuel was lithium deuteride, and the main fissile material was U-238. ... Particular attention should be paid to the works of 1958. This year, a new type of thermonuclear charge, “product 49,” was tested [the double-primary H-bomb], which was the next step in the formation of a standard for thermonuclear charges (its development was completed in 1957, but testing on the SIP did not take place). The ideologists of this project and the developers of the physical charge circuit were Yu. N. Babaev and I. The peculiarity of the new charge was that, using the basic principles of the RDS-37, it was possible to: • significantly reduce overall parameters due to a new bold solution to the problem of transfer of X-ray radiation, which determines implosion; • simplify the layered structure of the secondary module, which turned out to be an extremely important practical decision. According to the conditions of adaptation to specific carriers, “product 49” was developed in a smaller overall weight category compared to the RDS-37 charge, but its specific volumetric energy release turned out to be 2.4 times greater.

"The physical design of the charge turned out to be extremely successful; the charge was transferred to service and subsequently underwent modernization associated with the replacement of primary energy sources. In 1958, together with Yu. N. Babaev, we managed to develop 4 thermonuclear charges, which were tested on the field in 7 full-scale tests, and all of them were successful. This work was practically implemented within 8 months of 1958. All of these charges used a new circuit, first introduced in Product 49. Their energy release ranged from 0.3 to 2.8 Mt. In addition, in 1958, under my leadership M. V. Fedulov also developed the lightest thermonuclear charge at that time according to the “product 49” design, which was also successfully tested. Work on the miniaturization of thermonuclear weapons was new at that time, and it was met with a certain misunderstanding and resistance. ... One of the well-known pages in the history of work on thermonuclear weapons of the USSR is the creation of a superbomb - the most powerful thermonuclear charge. I will dwell on some points of this development. ... Among the features of this charge, it should be noted that the large volume of the charge (due to its high energy release) required significant amounts of X-ray energy to carry out implosion. The developed nuclear charges did not satisfy this condition, and therefore, a previously developed two-stage thermonuclear charge with a relatively low energy release was used as the primary source of the “super-powerful charge”. This charge was developed by me and Yu. N. Babaev. ... In the next project (a return to the untested 1958 system) that I supervised, every effort was made to ensure near-perfect implosion symmetry. This brilliant work led to success, and in 1962, the problem of implementing thermonuclear ignition was solved in a special device. In other full-scale tests that followed, this success was consolidated, and as a result, thermonuclear ignition provided the calculated combustion of the secondary module with an energy release of 1 Mt. My co-authors in this development were V.B. Adamsky, Yu.N. Babaev, V.G. Zagrafov and V.N. Mokhov. ... This principle has found a variety of applications in the creation of fundamentally new types of thermonuclear charges, from special devices for the use of nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes to significant military applications." (Note there is a 2017 filmed interview of Trutnev - in Russian - linked here.)

This is the basis for both the Russian isentropic-compressed pure fusion secondary (99.85% clean) neutron bomb and related progress with strategic warheads:

“In 1966, VNIIEF conducted a successful test of the second generation charge, in which an almost doubling of the power density was achieved by increasing the contribution of fission reactions in the thermonuclear module. These results were subsequently used to create new third-generation products.” - A. A. Greshilov, N. D. Egupov and A. M. Matushchenko, Nuclear shield (official Russian nuclear weapons history), 2008, p171 (linked here: https://elib.biblioatom.ru/text/greshilov_yaderny-schit_2008/p171/ ). Note that first double-primary Project 49 Russian test on 23 February 1958 was rapidly weaponised as the 1364 kg 8F12/8F12N warhead for the 8K63 missile in 1959, according to http://militaryrussia.ru/blog/index-0-5.html which also gives a table of yields and masses of other Russian warheads: the 2.3 megaton warhead 8K15 for the 8K65 missile had a mass of 1546 kg; the 5 megaton 8F116 warhead for the 8K64 and 8K65 missiles had a mass of 2175 kg; the 6 megaton 8F117 for the 8K64 and other missiles had a mass of 2200 kg, etc. The diagram below shows a cut-away through the shells in the isentropically-compressed megaton secondary stage of the first Russian weapon without a central fission neutron-producing sparkplug (1.1 megaton Russian test number 218 at Novaya Zemlya on 24 December 1962, an air drop detonating at 1320 m altitude). This diagram was declassified in the official Russian "History of the domestic nuclear project - Report by the scientific director of RFNC-VNIIEF, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences R.I. Ilkaeva at the General Meeting, Department of Physical Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences December 17, 2012, RAS", after John H. Nuckolls' summary of the similar, 99.9% clean 10 megaton Ripple-2, tested 30 October 1962 as detailed in posts below (the detailed interior design analysis of the Russian megaton nuclear warhead for the R13 - which is on display in a Russian nuclear warhead design museum - is from the Russian sites here and here).

"... it is an important defect of 'arms control' agreements that the punishment or correction of even outright violation is not done automatically ... [in 1934 Ramsay] MacDonald and his supporters urged one of the least aggressive nations in Europe to disarm itself to a level equal with their potential attackers ... Probably as much as any other single group I think that these men of good will can be charged with causing World War II. [Italics are Kahn's own.] ... In March 1934, Stanley Baldwin, in answer to a statement by Winston Churchill to the effect that Germany was rearming and growing stronger than Great Britain, made his famous statement: 'If all our efforts at agreement fail [why 'all' and how do you define 'failure' until after the enemy secretly breaks the agreement and enemy starts a war, when it is too late?] ... in air strength and air power this country shall no longer be inferior to any country within striking distance of its shores'. In spite of this pledge, by 1935 the Germans had achieved parity or even air superiority and their rate of expansion was much larger than that of the British; thus the disparity grew with the years. ... On March 16, 1935, Hitler decreed conscription ... In April, the League [of Nations, the old version of the UN] ... unanimously voted that treaties should not be broken by unilateral action. ... At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to 'retaliate' if they attacked him. ... The technique he used is such an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs that it is of extreme value to all who are concerned with the problem of maintaining a peaceful and secure world to go over the story in some detail." - Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, pp. 390-392, 403. (Kahn then gives a long discussion of the "you have the choice"-way Hitler blackmailed President Hacha into signing over his country to the Nazis in March 1939, despite the worthless Munich agreement of 1938, using first-hand testimony from Hitler's translator at the 14 March 1939 Hitler-Hacha meeting, Paul Schmidt: "There were, said Hitler, 'two possibilities. The first was that the invasion of the German troops might develop into a battle. The resistance would then be broken down by force of arms with all available means. The other was that the entry of the German troops should take place in a peaceable manner ...'." Now the issue is this: Hitler used "peace" as an option to get what he wanted without violence. But populist propaganda claims Hitler was "violent". Nope: Hitler preferred to "peacefully" invade, "peacefully" gas opponents in gas chambers with musicians playing classical music at the deportation camp railway stations to prevent violence starting, etc. Reagan made the point in his March 1983 "evil empire" speech that the most evil thugs of all that instigate genocide hide behind the cloak of spurious pacifism!)

https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth/ (Peter Vanderwicken in the Harvard Business Review Magazine, May-June 1995): "The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works ... The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity. What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. ... The architect of the transformation was not a political leader or a constitutional convention but Joseph Pulitzer, who in 1883 bought the sleepy New York World and in 20 years made it the country’s largest newspaper. Pulitzer accomplished that by bringing drama to news—by turning news articles into stories ... His journalism took events out of their dry, institutional contexts and made them emotional rather than rational, immediate rather than considered, and sensational rather than informative. The press became a stage on which the actions of government were a series of dramas. ... The press swarmed on the story, which had all the necessary dramatic elements: a foot-dragging bureaucracy, a study finding that the country’s favorite fruit was poisoning its children, and movie stars opposing the pesticide. Sales of apples collapsed. Within months, Alar’s manufacturer withdrew it from the market, although both the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration stated that they believed Alar levels on apples were safe. The outcry simply overwhelmed scientific evidence. That happens all too often, Cynthia Crossen argues in her book Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America. ... Crossen writes, “more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause.” “Most members of the media are ill-equipped to judge a technical study,” Crossen correctly points out. “Even if the science hasn’t been explained or published in a U.S. journal, the media may jump on a study if it promises entertainment for readers or viewers. And if the media jump, that is good enough for many Americans.” ... A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Such an “emergency government can’t govern,” Weaver concludes. “Not only does public support for emergency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, but officials acting in the emergency mode can’t make meaningful public policies. According to the classic textbook definition, government is the authoritative allocation of values, and emergency government doesn’t authoritatively allocate values.” (Note that Richard Rhodes' Pulitzer prize winning books such as The making of the atomic bomb which uncritically quote Hiroshima firestorm lies and survivors nonsense about people running around without feet, play to this kind of emotional fantasy mythology of nuclear deterrence obfuscation so loved by the mass media.)

“... Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution ... It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea ....” – Ronald Reagan, Moscow State University, May 31, 1988 (quoted at our physics site, www.quantumfieldtheory.org). Text in blue on this blog is hyperlinked directly to reference material (so can be opened in another tab by right-clicking on it):

ABOVE: "missile gap" propaganda debunked by secret 1970s data; Kennedy relied on US nuclear superiority. Using a flawed analysis of nuclear weapons effects on Hiroshima - based on lying unclassified propaganda reports and ignorant dismissals of civil defense shelters in Russia (again based on Hiroshima propaganda by groves in 1945) - America allowed Russian nuclear superiority in the 1970s. Increasingly, the nuclear deterrent was used by Russia to stop the West from "interfering" with its aggressive invasions and wars, precisely Hitler's 1930s strategy with gas bombing knockout-blow threats used to engineer appeasement. BELOW: H-bomb effects and design secrecy led to tragic mass media delusions, such as the 18 February 1950 Picture Post claim that the H-bomb can devastate Australia (inspiring the Shute novel and movie "On the Beach" and also other radiation scams like "Dr Strangelove" to be used by Russia to stir up anti Western disarmament movement to help Russia win WWIII). Dad was a Civil Defense Corps Instructor in the UK when this was done (the civil defense effectiveness and weapon effects facts on shelters at UK and USA nuclear tests were kept secret and not used to debunk lying political appeasement propaganda tricks in the mass media by sensationalist "journalists" and Russian "sputniks"):

Message to mass-media journalists: please don't indulge in lying "no defence" propaganda as was done by most of the media in previous pre-war crises!

ABOVE: Russian State TV Channel 1 on the nuclear threat, 4 June 2024. This is not a matter of unthinkable escalation or a knockout blow that will disarm Russia entirely (by firing all its weapons at the West!). It is a matter of coercive threats, which may or may not be accompanied by "demonstration strikes". Putin knows that unlike former USSR territories (e.g. Ukraine) which have heavy duty shelters in cities, the West doesn't have such civil defense to make its nuclear deterrent credible, so there is an exploitable asymmetry for Putin. This Russian state TV Channel 1 "propaganda" is Russian language: it's not aimed at the West, but at Russians, to prepare the road for possible nuclear warfare with the West. This is not about the usual image of an escalatory WWIII, but about establishing Russian hegemony, by making the West back down! As in the 1930s, popular media "selective journalism" (mainstream fake/fashionable fairy tale news) ignores real threats, by using the trick of hyping up deception (knockout blows, escalation, etc.) to make reality appear "unthinkable". Don't be taken in again by this mass media scam, please!

Again, to recap: the biggest threat is nuclear coercion as occurred when Russia broke a ceasefire and resumed nuclear testing in 1961, and built the Berlin Wall, then in 1962 put nuclear weapons into Cuba's fanatical dictatorship. This is not the mainstream media portrayal of the "nuclear threat" (immediate knockout blow, total disarmament in a few seconds by exploding everything in the stockpile, which is loved by TV, newspapers, magazines, and films and which - like the gas bomb knockout blow hype of the 1930s - makes war appear "unthinkable" to support appeasement, disarmament and arms control delusions which are bits of paper that simply can't stop the real threats from dictatorships). At some point there may be a serious deliberate escalation to end the war, and we need to be prepared and ready to step up deterrence against this, or to respond rationally in some other way. The supply of F16s by NATO members to Ukraine to bomb targets in Russia will allow Putin the excuse he feels he needs to escalate nuclear threats further, so we must prepare. This is not "defeatism", but preparing for freedom to prevail, to win the war, to deter escalation, and to survive.

ABOVE: Example of a possible Russian 1985 1st Cold War SLBM first strike plan. The initial use of Russian SLBM launched nuclear missiles from off-coast against command and control centres (i.e. nuclear explosions to destroy warning satellite communications centres by radiation on satellites as well as EMP against ground targets, rather than missiles launched from Russia against cities, as assumed by 100% of the Cold War left-wing propaganda) is allegedly a Russian "fog of war" strategy. Such a "demonstration strike" is aimed essentially at causing confusion about what is going on, who is responsible - it is not quick or easy to finger-print high altitude bursts fired by SLBM's from submerged submarines to a particular country because you don't get fallout samples to identify isotopic plutonium composition. Russia could immediately deny the attack (implying, probably to the applause of the left-wingers that this was some kind of American training exercise or computer based nuclear weapons "accident", similar to those depicted in numerous anti-nuclear Cold War propaganda films). Thinly-veiled ultimatums and blackmail follow. America would not lose its population or even key cities in such a first strike (contrary to left-wing propaganda fiction), as with Pearl Harbor in 1941; it would lose its complacency and its sense of security through isolationism, and would either be forced into a humiliating defeat or a major war.

Before 1941, many warned of the risks but were dismissed on the basis that Japan was a smaller country with a smaller economy than the USA and war was therefore absurd (similar to the way Churchill's warnings about European dictators were dismissed by "arms-race opposing pacifists" not only in the 1930s, but even before WWI; for example Professor Cyril Joad documents in the 1939 book "Why War?" his first hand witnessing of Winston Churchill's pre-WWI warning and call for an arms-race to deter that war, as dismissed by the sneering Norman Angell who claimed an arms race would cause a war rather than avert one by bankrupting the terrorist state). It is vital to note that there is an immense pressure against warnings of Russian nuclear superiority even today, most of it contradictory. E.g. the left wing and Russian-biased "experts" whose voices are the only ones reported in the Western media (traditionally led by "Scientific American" and "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"), simultaneously claim Russia imposes such a terrible SLBM and ICBM nuclear threat that we must desperately disarm now, while also claiming that Russian tactical nuclear weapons probably won't work so aren't a threat that needs to be credibly deterred! This only makes sense as Russian siding propaganda. In similar vein, Teller-critic Hans Bethe also used to falsely "dismiss" Russian nuclear superiority by claiming (with quotes from Brezhnev about the peaceful intentions of Russia) that Russian delivery systems are "less accurate" than Western missiles (as if accuracy has anything to do with high altitude EMP strikes, where the effects cover huge areas, or large city targets. Such claims would then by repeatedly endlessly in the Western media by Russian biased "journalists" or agents of influence, and any attempt to point out the propaganda (i.e. he real world asymmetry: Russia uses cheap countervalue targetting on folk that don't have civil defense, whereas we need costly, accurate counterforce targetting because Russia has civil defense shelters that we don't have) became a "Reds under beds" argument, implying that the truth is dangerous to "peaceful coexistence"!

“Free peoples ... will make war only when driven to it by tyrants. ... there have been no wars between well-established democracies. ... the probability ... that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident [is] less than one chance in a thousand. ... there have been more than enough to provide robust statistics ... When toleration of dissent has persisted for three years, but not until then, we can call a new republic ‘well established.’ ... Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders ... using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation ... Republican behaviour ... in quite a few cases ... created an ‘appeasement trap.’ The republic tried to accommodate a tyrant as if he were a fellow republican; the tyrant concluded that he could safely make an aggressive response; eventually the republic replied furiously with war. The frequency of such errors on both sides is evidence that negotiating styles are not based strictly on sound reasoning.” - Spencer Weart, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (Yale University Press)

The Top Secret American intelligency report NIE 11-3/8-74 "Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict" warned on page 6: "the USSR has largely eliminated previous US quantitative advantages in strategic offensive forces." page 9 of the report estimated that the Russian's ICBM and SLBM launchers exceed the USAs 1,700 during 1970, while Russia's on-line missile throw weight had exceeded the USA's one thousand tons back in 1967! Because the USA had more long-range bombers which can carry high-yield bombs than Russia (bombers are more vulnerable to air defences so were not Russia's priority), it took a little longer for Russia to exceed the USA in equivalent megatons, but the 1976 Top Secret American report NIE 11-3/8-76 at page 17 shows that in 1974 Russia exceeded the 4,000 equivalent-megatons payload of USA missiles and aircraft (with less vulnerability for Russia, since most of Russia's nuclear weapons were on missiles not in SAM-vulnerable aircraft), amd by 1976 Russia could deliver 7,000 tons of payload by missiles compared to just 4,000 tons on the USA side. These reports were kept secret for decades to protect the intelligence sources, but they were based on hard evidence. For example, in August 1974 the Hughes Aircraft Company used a specially designed ship (Glomar Explorer, 618 feet long, developed under a secret CIA contract) to recover nuclear weapons and their secret manuals from a Russian submarine which sank in 16,000 feet of water, while in 1976 America was able to take apart the electronics systems in a state-of-the-art Russian MIG-25 fighter which was flown to Japan by defector Viktor Belenko, discovering that it used exclusively EMP-hard miniature vacuum tubes with no EMP-vulnerable solid state components.

There are four ways of dealing with aggressors: conquest (fight them), intimidation (deter them), fortification (shelter against their attacks; historically used as castles, walled cities and even walled countries in the case of China's 1,100 mile long Great Wall and Hadrian's Wall, while the USA has used the Pacific and Atlantic as successful moats against invasion, at least since Britain invaded Washington D.C. back in 1812), and friendship (which if you are too weak to fight, means appeasing them, as Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler for worthless peace promises). These are not mutually exclusive: you can use combinations. If you are very strong in offensive capability and also have walls to protect you while your back is turned, you can - as Teddy Roosevelt put it (quoting a West African proverb): "Speak softly and carry a big stick." But if you are weak, speaking softly makes you a target, vulnerable to coercion. This is why we don't send troops directly to Ukraine. When elected in 1960, Kennedy introduced "flexible response" to replace Dulles' "massive retaliation", by addressing the need to deter large provocations without being forced to decide between the unwelcome options of "surrender or all-out nuclear war" (Herman Kahn called this flexible response "Type 2 Deterrence"). This was eroded by both Russian civil defense and their emerging superiority in the 1970s: a real missiles and bombers gap emerged in 1972 when the USSR reached and then exceeded the 2,200 of the USA, while in 1974 the USSR achieve parity at 3,500 equivalent megatons (then exceeded the USA), and finally today Russia has over 2,000 dedicated clean enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons and we have none (except low-neutron output B61 multipurpose bombs). (Robert Jastrow's 1985 book How to make nuclear Weapons obsolete was the first to have graphs showing the downward trend in nuclear weapon yields created by the development of miniaturized MIRV warheads for missiles and tactical weapons: he shows that the average size of US warheads fell from 3 megatons in 1960 to 200 kilotons in 1980, and from a total of 12,000 megatons in 1960 to 3,000 megatons in 1980.)

The term "equivalent megatons" roughly takes account of the fact that the areas of cratering, blast and radiation damage scale not linearly with energy but as something like the 2/3 power of energy release; but note that close-in cratering scales as a significantly smaller power of energy than 2/3, while blast wind drag displacement of jeeps in open desert scales as a larger power of energy than 2/3. Comparisons of equivalent megatonnage shows, for example, that WWII's 2 megatons of TNT in the form of about 20,000,000 separate conventional 100 kg (0.1 ton) explosives is equivalent to 20,000,000 x (10-7)2/3 = 431 separate 1 megaton explosions! The point is, nuclear weapons are not of a different order of magnitude to conventional warfare, because: (1) devastated areas don't scale in proportion to energy release, (2) the number of nuclear weapons is very much smaller than the number of conventional bombs dropped in conventional war, (3) because of radiation effects like neutrons and intense EMP, it is possible to eliminate physical destruction by nuclear weapons by a combination of weapon design (e.g. very clean bombs like 99.9% fusion Dominic-Housatonic, or 95% fusion Redwing-Navajo) and burst altitude or depth for hard targets, and create a weapon that deters invasions credibly (without lying local fallout radiation hazards), something none of the biased "pacifist disarmament" lobbies (which attract Russian support) tell you, and (4) people at collateral damage distances have time to take cover from radiation and flying glass, blast winds, etc from nuclear explosions (which they don't in Ukraine and Gaza where similar blast pressures arrive more rapidly from smaller conventional explosions). There's a big problem with propaganda here.

(These calculations, showing that even if strategic bombing had worked in WWII - and the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded it failed, thus the early Cold War effort to develop and test tactical nuclear weapons and train for tactical nuclear war in Nevada field exercises - you need over 400 megaton weapons to give the equivalent of WWII city destruction in Europe and Japan, are often inverted by anti-nuclear bigots to try to obfuscate the truth. What we're driving at is that nuclear weapons give you the ability to DETER the invasions that set off such wars, regardless of whether they escalate from poison gas - as feared in the 20s and 30s thus appeasement and WWII - or nuclear. Escalation was debunked in WWII where the only use of poison gases were in "peaceful" gas chambers, not dropped on cities. Rather than justifying appeasement, the "peaceful" massacre of millions in gas chambers justified war. But evil could and should have been deterred. The "anti-war" propagandarists like Lord Noel-Baker and pals who guaranteed immediate gas knockout blows in the 30s if we didn't appease evil dictators were never held to account and properly debunked by historians after the war, so they converted from gas liars to nuclear liars in the Cold War and went on winning "peace" prices for their lies, which multiplied up over the years, to keep getting news media headlines and Nobel Peace Prizes for starting and sustaining unnecessary wars and massacres by dictators. There's also a military side to this, with Field Marshall's Lord Mountbatten, Lord Carver and War Office scientific adviser Lord Zuckerman in the Cold War arguing for UK nuclear disarmament and a re-introduction of conscription instead. These guys were not pacifist CND thugs who wanted Moscow to rule the world, but they were quoted by them attacking the deterrent, but not of course quoting them calling for conscription instead. The abolishment of UK conscription for national service announced in 1960 was due to the H-bomb, and was a political money-saving plot by Macmillan. If we disarmed our nuclear deterrent and spend the money on conscription plus underground shelters, we might well be able to resist Russia as Ukraine does, until we run out of ammunition etc. However, the cheapest and most credible deterrent is tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the concentration of aggressive force by terrorist states..)

Britain was initially in a better position with regards to civil defense than the USA, because in WWII Britain had built sufficient shelters (of various types, but all tested against blast intense enough to demolish brick houses, and later also tested them at various nuclear weapon trials in Monte Bello and Maralinga, Australia) and respirators for the entire civilian population. However, Britain also tried to keep the proof testing data secret from Russia (which tested their own shelters at their own nuclear tests anyway) and this meant it appeared that civil defense advice was unproved and would not work, an illusion exploited especially for communist propaganda in the UK via CND. To give just one example, CND and most of the UK media still rely on Duncan Campbell's pseudo-journalism book War Plan UK since it is based entirely on fake news about UK civil defense, nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, fallout, blast, etc. He takes for granted that - just because the UK Government kept the facts secret - the facts don't exist, and to him any use of nuclear weapons which spread any radioactivity whatsoever will make life totally impossible: "What matters 'freedom' or 'a way of life' in a radioactive wasteland?" (Quote from D. Campbell, War Plan UK, Paladin Books, May 1983, p387.) The problem here is the well known fallout decay rate; Trinity nuclear test ground zero was reported by Glasstone (Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950) to be at 8,000 R/hr at 1 hour after burst, yet just 57 days later, on September 11, 1945, General Groves, Robert Oppenheimer, and a large group of journalists safely visited it and took their time inspecting the surviving tower legs, when the gamma dose rate was down to little more than 1 R/hr! So fission products decay fast: 1,000 R/hr at 1 hour decays to 100 at 7 hours, 10 at 2 days, and just 1 at 2 weeks. So the "radioactive wasteland" is just as much a myth as any other nuclear "doomsday" fictional headline in the media. Nuclear weapons effects have always been fake news in the mainstream media: editors have always regarded facts as "boring copy". Higher yield tests showed that even the ground zero crater "hot spots" were generally lower, due to dispersal by the larger mushroom cloud. If you're far downwind, you can simply walk cross-wind, or prepare an improvised shelter while the dust is blowing. But point any such errors out to fanatical bigots and they will just keep making up more nonsense.

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."

Update: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility, NIF, using ultraviolet wavelength laser beam pulses of 2MJ on to a 2mm diameter spherical beryllium shell of frozen D+T inside a 1 cm-long hollow gold cylinder "hohlraum" (which is heated to a temperature where it then re-radiates energy at much higher frequency, x-rays, on to the surface of the beryllium ablator of the central fusion capsule, which ablates causing it to recoil inward (as for the 1962 Ripple II nuclear weapon's secondary stage, the capsule is compressed efficiently, mimicking the isentropic compression mechanism of a miniature Ripple II clean nuclear weapon secondary stage), has now repeatedly achieved nuclear fusion explosions of over 3MJ, equivalent to nearly 1 kg of TNT explosive. According to a Time article (linked her) about fusion system designer Annie Kritcher, the recent breakthrough was in part due to using a ramping input energy waveform: "success that came thanks to tweaks including shifting more of the input energy to the later part of the laser shot", a feature that minimises the rise in entropy due to shock shock wave generation (which heats the capsule, causing it to expand and resist compression) and increases isentropic compression which was the principle used by LLNL's J. H. Nuckolls to achieve the 99.9% clean Ripple II 9.96 megaton nuclear test success in Dominic-Housatonic on 30 October 1962. Nuckolls in 1972 published the equation for the idealized input power waveform required for isentropic, optimized compression of fusion fuel (Nature, v239, p139): P ~ (1 - t)-1.875, where t is time in units of the transit time (the time taken for the shock to travel to the centre of the fusion capsule), and -1.875 a constant based on the specific heat of the ionized fuel (Nuckolls has provided the basic declassified principles, see extract linked here). To be clear, the energy reliably released by the 2mm diameter capsule of fusion fuel was roughly a 1 kg TNT explosion. 80% of this is in the form of 14.1 MeV neutrons (ideal for fissioning lithium-7 in LiD to yield more tritium), and 20% is the kinetic energy of fused nuclei (which is quickly converted into x-rays radiation energy by collisions). Nuckolls' 9.96 megaton Housatonic (10 kt Kinglet primary and 9.95 Mt Ripple II 100% clean isentropically compressed secondary) of 1962 proved that it is possible to use multiplicative staging whereby lower yield primary nuclear explosions trigger off a fusion stage 1,000 times more powerful than its initiator. Another key factor, as shown on our ggraph linked here, is that you can use cheap natural LiD as fuel once you have a successful D+T reaction, because naturally abundant, cheap Li-7 more readily fissions to yield tritium with the 14.1 MeV neutrons from D+T fusion, than expensively enriched Li-6, which is needed to make tritium in nuclear reactors where the fission neutron energy of around 1 MeV is too low to to fission Li-7. It should also be noted that despite an openly published paper about Nuckolls' Ripple II success being stymied in 2021 by Jon Grams, the subject is still being covered up/ignored by the anti-nuclear biased Western media! Grams article fails to contain the design details such as the isentropic power delivery curve etc from Nuckolls' declassified articles that we include in the latest blog post here. One problem regarding "data" causing continuing confusion about the Dominic-Housatonic 30 October 1962 Ripple II test at Christmas Island, is made clear in the DASA-1211 report's declassified summary of the sizes, weights and yields of those tests: Housatonic was Nuckolls' fourth and final isentropic test, with the nuclear system inserted into a heavy steel Mk36 drop case, making the overall size 57.2 inches in diameter, 147.9 long and 7,139.55 lb mass, i.e. 1.4 kt/lb or 3.0 kt/kg yield-to-mass ratio for 9.96 Mt yield, which is not impressive for that yield range until you consider (a) that it was 99.9% fusion and (b) the isentropic design required a heavy holhraum around the large Ripple II fusion secondary stage to confine x-rays for relatively long time during which a slowly rising pulse of x-rays were delivered from the primary to secondary via a very large areas of foam elsewhere in the weapon, to produce isentropic compression.

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:

The early calculations on ICF (inertial-confinement fusion) by John Nuckolls in 1972 had estimated that ICF might be achieved with a driver energy as low as 1 kJ. ... In order to provide reliable experimental data on the minimum energy required for ignition, a series of secret experiments—known as Halite at Livermore and Centurion at Los Alamos—was carried out at the nuclear weapons test site in Nevada between 1978 and 1988. The experiments used small underground nuclear explosions to provide X-rays of sufficiently high intensity to implode ICF capsules, simulating the manner in which they would be compressed in a hohlraum. ... the Halite/Centurion results predicted values for the required laser energy in the range 20 to 100MJ—higher than the predictions ..." - Garry McCracken and Peter Stott, Fusion, Elsevier, 2nd ed., p149.

In the final diagram above, we illustrate an example of what could very well occur in the near future, just to really poke a stick into the wheels of "orthodoxy" in nuclear weapons design: is it possible to just use a lot of (perhaps hardened for higher currents, perhaps no) pulsed current driven microwave tubes from kitchen microwave ovens, channelling their energy using waveguides (simply metal tubes, i.e. electrical Faraday cages, which reflect and thus contain microwaves) into the hohlraum, and make the pusher of dipole molecules (like common salt, NaCl) which is a good absorber of microwaves (as everybody knows from cooking in microwave ovens)? It would be extremely dangerous, not to mention embarrassing, if this worked, but nobody had done any detailed research into the possibility due to groupthink orthodoxy and conventional boxed in thinking! Remember, the D+T capsule just needs extreme compression and this can be done by any means that works. Microwave technology is now very well-established. It's no good trying to keep anything of this sort "secret" (either officially or unofficially) since as history shows, dictatorships are the places where "crackpot"-sounding ideas (such as douple-primary Project "49" Russian thermonuclear weapon designs, Russian Sputnik satellites, Russian Novichok nerve agent, Nazi V1 cruise missiles, Nazi V2 IRBM's, etc.) can be given priority by loony dictators. We have to avoid, as Edward Teller put it (in his secret commentary debunking Bethe's false history of the H-bomb, written AFTER the Teller-Ulam breakthrough), "too-narrow" thinking (which Teller said was still in force on H-bomb design even then). Fashionable hardened orthodoxy is the soft underbelly of "democracy" (a dictatorship by the majority, which is always too focussed on fashionable ideas and dismissive of alternative approaches in science and technology). Dictatorships (minorities against majorities) have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of concern for the fake "no-go theorems" used by Western anti-nuclear "authorities" to ban anything but fashionable groupthink science.

ABOVE: 1944-dated film of the Head of the British Mission to Los Alamos, neutron discoverer James Chadwick, explaining in detail to American how hard it was for him to discover the neutron, taking 10 years on a shoe-string budget, mostly due to having insufficiently strong sources of alpha particles to bombard nuclei in a cloud chamber! The idea of the neutron came from his colleague Rutherford. Chadwick reads his explanation while rapidly rotating a pencil in his right hand, perhaps indicating the stress he was under in 1944. In 1946, when British participation at Los Alamos ended, Chadwick wrote the first detailed secret British report on the design of a three-stage hydrogen bomb, another project that took over a decade. In the diagram below, it appears that the American Mk17 only had a single secondary stage like the similar yield 1952 Mike design. The point here is that popular misunderstanding of the simple mechanism of x-ray energy transfer for higher yield weapons may be creating a dogmatic attitude even in secret nuclear weaponeer design labs, where orthodoxy is followed too rigorously. The Russians (see quotes on the latest blog post here) state they used two entire two-stage thermonuclear weapons with a combined yield of 1 megaton to set off their 50 megaton test in 1961. If true, you can indeed use two-stage hydrogen bombs as an "effective primary" to set off another secondary stage, of much higher yield. Can this be reversed in the sense of scaling it down so you have several bombs-within-bombs, all triggered by a really tiny first stage? In other words, can it be applied to neutron bomb design?

ABOVE: 16 kt at 600m altitude nuclear explosion on a city, Hiroshima ground zero (in foreground) showing modern concrete buildings surviving nearby (unlike the wooden ones that mostly burned at the peak of the firestorm 2-3 hours after survivors had evacuated), in which people were shielded from most of the radiation and blast winds, as they were in simple shelters.

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.

ABOVE: 16 February 1950 Daily Express editorial on H Bomb problem due to the fact that the UN is another virtue signalling but really war mongering League of Nations (which oversaw Nazi appeasement and the outbreak of WWII); however Fuchs had attended the April 1946 Super Conference during which the Russian version of the H-bomb involving isentropic radiation implosion of a separate low-density fusion stage (unlike Teller's later dense metal ablation rocket implosion secondary TX14 Alarm Clock and Sausage designs) were discussed and then given to Russia. The media was made aware only that Fuchs hade given the fission bomb to Russia. The FBI later visited Fuchs in British jail, showed him a film of Harry Gold (whom Fuchs identified as his contact while at Los Alamos) and also gave Fuchs a long list of secret reports to mark off individually so that they knew precisely what Stalin had been given. Truman didn't order H-bomb research and development because Fuchs gave Stalin the A-bomb, but because he gave them the H-bomb. The details of the Russian H-bomb are still being covered up by those who want a repetition of 1930s appeasement, or indeed the deliberate ambiguity of the UK Cabinet in 1914 which made it unclear what the UK would do if Germany invaded Belgium, allowing the enemy to exploit that ambiguity, starting a world war. The key fact usually covered up (Richard Rhodes, Chuck Hansen, and the whole American "expert nuclear arms community" all misleadingly claim that Teller's Sausage H-bomb design with a single primary and a dense ablator around a cylindrical secondary stage - uranium, lead or tungsten - is the "hydrogen bomb design") here is that two attendees of the April 1946 Super Conference, the report author Egon Bretscher and the radiation implosion discoverer Klaus Fuchs - were British, and both contributed key H-bomb design principles to the Russian and British weapons (discarded for years by America). Egon Bretscher for example wrote up the Super Conference report, during which attendees suggested various ways to try to achieve isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel (a concept discarded by Teller's 1951 Sausage design, but used by Russia and re-developed in America on Nuckolls 1962 Ripple tests), and after Teller left Los Alamos, Bretscher took over work on Teller's Alarm Clock layered fission-fusion spherical hybrid device before Bretscher himself left Los Alamos and became head of nuclear physics at Harwell, UK,, submitting UK report together with Fuchs (head of theoretical physics at Harwell) which led to Sir James Chadwick's UK paper on a three-stage thermonuclear Super bomb which formed the basis of Penney's work at the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. While Bretscher had worked on Teller's hybrid Alarm Clock (which originated two months after Fuchs left Los Alamos), Fuchs co-authored a hydrogen bomb patent with John von Neumann, in which radiation implosion and ionization implosion was used. Between them, Bretscher and Fuchs had all the key ingredients. Fuchs leaked them to Russia and the problem persists today in international relations.

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.

Update (4 January 2024): on the important world crisis, https://vixra.org/abs/2312.0155 gives a detailed review of "Britain and the H-bomb" (linked here), and why the "nuclear deterrence issue" isn't about "whether we should deter evil", but precisely what design of nuclear warhead we should have in order to do that cheaply, credibly, safely, and efficiently without guaranteeing either escalation or the failure of deterrence. When we disarmed our chemical and biological weapons, it was claimed that the West could easily deter those weapons using strategic nuclear weapons to bomb Moscow (which has shelters, unlike us). That failed when Putin used sarin and chlorine to prop up Assad in Syria, and Novichok in the UK to kill Dawn Sturgess in 2018. So it's just not a credible deterrent to say you will bomb Moscow if Putin invades Europe or uses his 2000 tactical nuclear weapons. An even more advanced deterrent, the 100% clean very low yield (or any yield) multiplicative staged design without any fissile material whatsoever, just around the corner. Clean secondary stages have been proof-tested successfully for example in the 100% clean Los Alamos Redwing Navajo secondary, and the 100% clean Ripple II secondary tested 30 October 1962, and the laser ignition of very tiny fusion capsules to yield more energy than supplied has been done on 5 December 2022 when a NIF test delivered 2.05 MJ (the energy of about 0.5 kg of TNT) to a fusion capsule which yielded 3.15 MJ, so all that is needed is to combine both ideas in a system whereby suitably sized second stages - ignited in the first place by a capacitative charged circuit sending a pulse of energy to a suitable laser system (the schematic shown is just a sketch of principle - more than one laser would possibly be required for reliability of fusion ignition) acting on tiny fusion capsule as shown - are encased to two-stage "effective primaries" which each become effective primaries of bigger systems, thus a geometric series of multiplicative staging until the desired yield is reached. Note that the actual tiny first T+D capsule can be compressed by one-shot lasers - compact lasers used way beyond their traditional upper power limit and burned out in a firing a single pulse - in the same way the gun assembly of the Hiroshima bomb was based on a one-shot gun. In other words, forget all about textbook gun design. The Hiroshima bomb gun assembly system only had to be fired once, unlike a field artillery piece which has to be ready to be fired many thousands of times (before metal fatigue/cracks set in). Thus, by analogy, the lasers - which can be powered by ramping current pulses from magnetic flux compressor systems - for use in a clean bomb will be much smaller and lighter than current lab gear which is designed to be used thousands of times in repeated experiments. The diagram below shows cylindrical Li6D stages throughout for a compact bomb shape, but spherical stages can be used, and once a few stages get fired, the flux of 14 MeV neutrons is sufficient to go to cheap natural LiD. To fit it into a MIRV warhead, the low density of LiD constrains such a clean warhead will have a low nuclear yield, which means a tactical neutron deterrent of the invasions that cause big wars; a conversion of incredible strategic deterrence into a more credible combined strategic-tactical deterrent of major provocations, not just direct attacks. It should also be noted that in 1944 von Neumann suggested that T + D inside the core of the fission weapon would be compressed by "ionization compression" during fission (where a higher density ionized plasma compresses a lower density ionized plasma, i.e. the D + T plasma), an idea that was - years later - named the Internal Booster principle by Teller; see Frank Close, "Trinity", Allen Lane, London, 2019, pp158-159 where Close argues that during the April 1946 Superbomb Conference, Fuchs extended von Neumann's 1944 internal fusion boosting idea to an external D + T filled BeO walled capsule:

"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.)

ABOVE: the FBI file on Klaus Fuchs contains a brief summary of the secret April 1946 Super Conference at Los Alamos which Fuchs attended, noting that compression of fusion fuel was discussed by Lansdorf during the morning session on 19 April, attended by Fuchs, and that: "Suggestions were made by various people in attendance as to the manner of minimizing the rise in entropy during compression." This fact is vitally interesting, since it proves that an effort was being made then to secure isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel in April 1946, sixteen years before John H. Nuckolls tested the isentropically compressed Ripple II device on 30 October 1962, giving a 99.9% clean 10 megaton real H-bomb! So the Russians were given a massive head start on this isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel for hydrogen bombs, used (according to Trutnev) in both the single primary tests like RDS-37 in November 1955 and also in the double-primary designs which were 2.5 times more efficient on a yield-to-mass basis, tested first on 23 February 1958! According to the FBI report, the key documents Fuchs gave to Russia were LA-551, Prima facie proof of the feasibility of the Super, 15 Apr 1946 and the LA-575 Report of conference on the Super, 12 June 1946. Fuchs also handed over to Russia his own secret Los Alamos reports, such as LA-325, Initiator Theory, III. Jet Formation by the Collision of Two Surfaces, 11 July 1945, Jet Formation in Cylindrical lmplosion with 16 Detonation Points, Secret, 6 February 1945, and Theory of Initiators II, Melon Seed, Secret, 6 January 1945. Note the reference to Bretscher attending the Super Conference with Fuchs; Teller in a classified 50th anniversary conference at Los Alamos on the H-bomb claimed that after he (Teller) left Los Alamos for Chicago Uni in 1946, Bretscher continued work on Teller's 31 August 1946 "Alarm Clock" nuclear weapon (precursor of the Mike sausage concept etc) at Los Alamos; it was this layered uranium and fusion fuel "Alarm Clock" concept which led to the departure of Russian H-bomb design from American H-bomb design, simply because Fuchs left Los Alamos in June 1946, well before Teller invented the Alarm Clock concept on 31 August 1946 (Teller remembered the date precisely simply because he invented the Alarm Clock on the day his daughter was born, 31 August 1946! Teller and Richtmyer also developed a variant called "Swiss Cheese", with small pockets or bubbles of expensive fusion fuels, dispersed throughout cheaper fuel, in order to kinder a more cost-effective thermonuclear reaction; this later inspired the fission and fusion boosted "spark plug" ideas in later Sausage designs; e.g. security cleared Los Alamos historian Anne Fitzpatrick stated during her 4 March 1997 interview with Robert Richtmyer, who co-invented the Alarm Clock with Teller, that the Alarm Clock evolved into the spherical secondary stage of the 6.9 megaton Castle-Union TX-14 nuclear weapon!).

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.)

Above: declassified illustration from a January 1949 secret report by the popular physics author and Los Alamos nuclear weapons design consultant George Gamow, showing his suggestion of using x-rays from both sides of a cylindrically imploded fission device to expose two fusion capsules to x-rays to test whether compression (fusion in BeO box on right side) helps, or is unnecessary (capsule on left side). Neutron counters detect 14.1 Mev T+D neutrons using time-of-flight method (higher energy neutrons traver faster than ~1 Mev fission stage neutrons, arriving at detectors first, allowing discrimination of the neutron energy spectrum by time of arrival). It took over two years to actually fire this 225 kt shot (8 May 1951)! No wonder Teller was outraged. A few interesting reports by Teller and also Oppenheimer's secret 1949 report opposing the H bomb project as it then stood on the grounds of low damage per dollar - precisely the exact opposite of the "interpretation" the media and gormless fools will assert until the cows come home - are linked here. The most interesting is Teller's 14 August 1952 Top Secret paper debunking Hans Bethe's propaganda, by explaining that contrary to Bethe's claims, Stalin's spy Klaus Fuch had the key "radiation implosion"- see second para on p2 - secret of the H-bomb because he attended the April 1946 Superbomb Conference which was not even attended by Bethe!  It was this very fact in April 1946, noted by two British attendees of the 1946 Superbomb Conference before collaboration was ended later in the year by the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, statement that led to Sir James Cladwick's secret use of "radiation implosion" for stages 2 and 3 of his triple staged H-bomb report the next month, "The Superbomb", a still secret document that inspired Penney's original Tom/Dick/Harry staged and radiation imploded H-bomb thinking, which is summarized by security cleared official historian Arnold's Britain and the H-Bomb.  Teller's 24 March 1951 letter to Los Alamos director Bradbury was written just 15 days after his historic Teller-Ulam 9 March 1951 report on radiation coupling and "radiation mirrors" (i.e. plastic casing lining to re-radiate soft x-rays on to the thermonuclear stage to ablate and thus compress it), and states: "Among the tests which seem to be of importance at the present time are those concerned with boosted weapons. Another is connected vith the possibility of a heterocatalytic explosion, that is, implosion of a bomb using the energy from another, auxiliary bomb. A third concerns itself with tests on mixing during atomic explosions, which question is of particular importance in connection with the Alarm Clock."

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!]

"The Lance warhead is the first in a new generation of tactical mini-nukes that have been sought by Army field leading advocates: the series of American generals who have commanded the North Atlantic Treaty organization theater. They have argued that the 7,000 unclear warheads now in Europe are old, have too large a nuclear yield and thus would not be used in a war. With lower yields and therefore less possible collateral damage to civilian populated areas, these commanders have argued, the new mini-nukes are more credible as deterrents because they just might be used on the battlefield without leading to automatic nuclear escalation. Under the nuclear warhead production system, a President must personally give the production order. President Ford, according to informed sources, signed the order for the enhanced-radiation Lance warhead. The Lance already has regular nuclear warheads and it deployed with NATO forces in Europe. In addition to the Lance warhead, other new production starts include: An 8-inch artillery-fired nuclear warhead to replace those now in Europe. This shell had been blocked for almost eight years by Sen. Stuart Symington (D-Mo.), who had argued that it was not needed. Symington retired last year. The Pentagon and ERDA say the new nuclear 8-inch warhead would be safer from stealing by terrorists. Starbird testified. It will be "a command disable system" to melt its inner workings if necessary. ... In longer-term research, the bill contains money to finance an enhanced-radiational bomb to the dropped from aircraft." - Washington post, 5 June 1977.

This debunks fake news that Teller's and Ulam's 9 March 1951 report LAMS-1225 itself gave Los Alamos the Mike H-bomb design, ready for testing! Teller was proposing a series of nuclear tests of the basic principles, not 10Mt Ivy-Mike which was based on a report the next month by Teller alone, LA-1230, "The Sausage: a New Thermonuclear System". When you figure that, what did Ulam actually contribute to the hydrogen bomb? Nothing about implosion, compression or separate stages - all already done by von Neumann and Fuchs five years earlier - and just a lot of drivel about trying to channel material shock waves from a primary to compress another fissile core, a real dead end. What Ulam did was to kick Teller out of his self-imposed mental objection to compression devices. Everything else was Teller's; the radiation mirrors, the Sausage with its outer ablation pusher and its inner spark plug. Note also that contrary to official historian Arnold's book (which claims due to a misleading statement by Dr Corner that all the original 1946 UK copies of Superbomb Conference documentation were destroyed after being sent from AWRE Aldermaston to London between 1955-63), all the documents did exist in the AWRE TPN (theoretical physics notes, 100% of which have been perserved) and are at the UK National Archives, e.g. AWRE-TPN 5/54 is listed in National Archives discovery catalogue ref ES 10/5: "Miscellaneous super bomb notes by Klaus Fuchs", see also the 1954 report AWRE-TPN 6/54, "Implosion super bomb: substitution of U235 for plutonium" ES 10/6, the 1954 report AWRE-TPN 39/54 is "Development of the American thermonuclear bomb: implosion super bomb" ES 10/39, see also ES 10/21 "Collected notes on Fermi's super bomb lectures", ES 10/51 "Revised reconstruction of the development of the American thermonuclear bombs", ES 1/548 and ES 1/461 "Superbomb Papers", etc. Many reports are secret and retained, despite containing "obsolete" designs (although UK report titles are generally unredacted, such as: "Storage of 6kg Delta (Phase) -Plutonium Red Beard (tactical bomb) cores in ships")! It should also be noted that the Livermore Laboatory's 1958 TUBA spherical secondary with an oralloy (enriched U235) outer pusher was just a reversion from Teller's 1951 core spark plug idea in the middle of the fusion fuel, back to the 1944 von Neumann scheme of having fission material surrounding the fusion fuel. In other words, the TUBA was just a radiation and ionization imploded, internally fusion-boosted, second fission stage which could have been accomplished a decade earlier if the will existed, when all of the relevant ideas were already known. The declassified UK spherical secondary-stage alternatives linked here (tested as Grapple X, Y and Z with varying yields but similar size, since all used the 5 ft diameter Blue Danube drop casing) clearly show that a far more efficient fusion burn occurs by minimising the mass of hard-to-compress U235 (oralloy) sparkplug/pusher, but maximising the amount of lithium-7, not lithium-6. Such a secondary with minimal fissionable material also automatically has minimal neutron ABM vulnerability (i.e., "Radiation Immunity", RI). This is the current cheap Russian neutron weapon design, but not the current Western design of warheads like the W78, W88 and bomb B61.

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!

Compare these data for the 20 inch diameter, 49 inch, 1600 lb, 1.1 megaton bomb B28 to the 18 inch diameter, 47 inch, 700 lb, 400 kt Mk47/W47 Polaris SLBM warhead (this is the correct yield for the first version of the W47 confirmed by UK data in Lorna Arnold Britain and the H-bomb 2001 and AB 16/3240; Wikipedia wrongly gives the 600 kt figure in Hansen, which was a speculation or a later upgrade). The key difference is that the W47 is much lighter, and thus suitable for the Polaris SLBM unlike the heavier, higher yield B28. Both B28 and W47 used cylindrical sausages, but they are very different in composition; the B28 used a huge mass of U238 in its ablative sausage outer shell or pusher, while the W47 used oralloy/U235 in the pusher. The table shows the total amounts of Pu, Oralloy (U235), Lithium-6 (excluding cheaper lithium-7, which is also present in varying amounts in different thermonuclear weapons), and tritium (which is used for boosting inside fissile material, essentially to reduce the amount of Pu and therefore the vulnerability of the weapon to Russian enhanced neutron ABM warhead meltdown). The B28 also has an external dense natural U (99.3% U238) "ablative pusher shell" whose mass is not listed in this table. The table shows that the 400 kt W47 Polaris SLBM warhead contains 60 kg of U235 (nearly as much as the 500 kt pure fission Mk18), which is in an ablative pusher shell around the lithium deuteride, so that the cylinder of neutron-absorbing lithium-6 deuteride within it keeps that mass of U235 subcritical, until compressed. So the 400 kt W47 contains far more Pu, U235, Li6 and T than the higher yield 1.1 megaton B28: this is the big $ price you pay for reducing the mass of the warhead; the total mass of the W47 is reduced to 44% of the mass of the B28, since the huge mass of cheap U238 pusher in the B28 is replaced by a smaller mass of U235, which is more efficient because (as Dr Carl F. Miller reveals in USNRDL-466, Table 6), about half of the neutrons hitting U238 don't cause fission but instead non-fission capture reactions which produce U239, plus the n,2n reaction that produces U237, emitting a lot of very low energy gamma rays in the fallout. For example, in the 1954 Romeo nuclear test (which, for simplicity, we quote since it used entirely natural LiD, with no expensive enrichment of the Li6 isotope whatsoever), the U238 jacket fission efficiency was reduced by capture as follows: 0.66 atom/fission of U239, 0.10 atom/fission of U237 and 0.23 atom/fission of U240 produced by fission, a total of 0.66 + 0.10 + 0.23 ~ 1 atom/fission, i.e. 50% fission in the U238 pusher, versus 50% non-fission neutron captures. So by using U235 in place of U238, you virtually eliminate the non-fission capture (see UK Atomic Weapons Establishment graph of fission and capture cross-sections for U235, shown below), which roughly halves the mass of the warhead, for a given fission yield. This same principle of using an outer U235/oralloy pusher instead of U238 to reduce mass - albeit with the secondary cylindrical "Sausage" shape now changed to a sphere - applies to today's miniaturised, high yield, low mass "MIRV" warheads. Just as the lower-yield W47 counter-intuitively used more expensive ingredients than the bulkier higher-yield B28, modern compact, high-yield oralloy-loaded warheads literally cost a bomb, just to keep the mass down! There is evidence Russia uses alternative ideas.

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).

ABOVE: Hans A. Bethe's disastrous back-of-the-envelope nonsense "non-go theorem" against lithium-7 fission into tritium by 14.1 Mev D+T neutrons in Bravo (which contained 40% lithium-6 and 60% lithium-7; unnecessarily enriched - at great expense and effort - from the natural 7.42% lithum-6 abundance). It was Bethe's nonsense "physics" speculation, unbacked by serious calculation, who caused Bravo to go off at 2.5 times the expected 6 megatons and therefore for the Japanese Lucky Dragon tuna trawler crew in the maximum fallout hotspot area 80 miles downwind to be contaminated by fallout, and also for Rongelap's people to be contaminated ("accidents" that inevitably kickstarted the originally limited early 1950s USSR funded Communist Party anti-nuclear deterrence movements in the West into mainstream media and thus politics). There was simply no solid basis for assuming that the highly penetrating 14.1 Mev neutrons would be significantly slowed by scattering in the fuel before hitting lithium-7 nuclei. Even teller's 1950 report LA-643 at page 17 estimated that in a fission-fusion Alarm Clock, the ratio of 14 Mev to 2.5 Mev neutrons was 0.7/0.2 = 3.5. Bethe's complacently bad guesswork-based physics also led to the EMP fiasco for high altitude bursts, after he failed to predict the geomagnetic field deflection of Compton electrons at high altitude in his secret report “Electromagnetic Signal Expected from High-Altitude Test”, Los Alamos report LA-2173, October 1957, Secret. He repeatedly caused nuclear weapons effects study disasters. For the true utility of lithium-7, which is actually BETTER than lithum-6 at tritium production when struck by 14.1 Mev D+T fusion neutrons, and its consequences for cheap isentropically compressed fusion capsules in Russian neutron bombs, please see my paper here which gives a graph of lithium isotopic cross section versus neutron energy, plus the results when Britain used cheap lithium-7 in Grapple Y to yield 3 megatons (having got lower yields with costly lithium-6 in previous tests!).

Update (15 Dec 2023): PDF uploaded of UK DAMAGE BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS (linked here on Internet Archive) - secret 1000 pages UK and USA nuclear weapon test effects analysis, and protective measures determined at those tests (not guesswork) relevant to escalation threats by Russia for EU invasion (linked here at wordpress) in response to Ukraine potentially joining the EU (this is now fully declassified without deletions, and in the UK National Archives at Kew):

Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorist liars debunked by secret American government evidence that simple shelters worked, REPORT LINKED HERE (this was restricted from public view and never published by the American government, and Glasstone's lying Effects of Nuclear Weapons book reversed its evidence for propaganda purposes, a fact still covered by all the lying cold war pseudo "historians" today), Operation Hurricane 1952 declassified nuclear weapon test data (here), declassified UK nuclear tested shelter research reports (here), declassified EMP nuclear test research data (here), declassified clandestine nuclear bombs in ships attack on Liverpool study (here), declassified fallout decontamination study for UK recovery from nuclear attack (here), declassified Operation Buffalo surface burst and near surface burst fallout patterns, water decontamination, initial radiation shielding at Antler nuclear tests, and resuspension of deposited fallout dust into the air (inhalation hazard) at different British nuclear tests, plus Operation Totem nuclear tests crater region radiation surveys (here), declassified Operation Antler nuclear blast precursor waveforms (here), declassified Operation Buffalo nuclear blast precursor waveforms (here), declassified UK Atomic Weapons Establishment nuclear weapons effects symposium (here), and declassified UK Atomic Weapons Establishment paper on the gamma radiation versus time at Crossroads tests Able and Baker (here, paper by inventor of lenses in implosion weapons, James L. Tuck of the British Mission to Los Alamos and Operation Crossroads, clearly showing how initial gamma shielding in an air burst can be achieved with a few seconds warning and giving the much greater escape times available for residual radiation dose accumulations in an underwater burst; key anti-nuclear hysteria data kept covered up by Glasstone and the USA book Effects of Nuclear Weapons), and Penney and Hicks paper on the base surge contamination mechanism (here), and Russian nuclear warhead design evidence covered-up by both America and the so-called arms control and disarmament "experts" who always lie and distort the facts to suit their own agenda to try to start a nuclear war (linked here). If they wanted "peace" they'd support the proved facts, available on this blog nukegate.org since 2006, and seek international agreement to replace the incredible, NON-war deterring strategic nuclear weapons with safe tactical neutron warheads which collateral damage averting and invasion-deterring (thus war deterring in all its forms, not only nuclear), plus civil defence against all forms of collateral damage from war, which reduces escalation risks during terrorist actions, as proved in wars which don't escalate because of effective civil defence and credible deterrence (see below). Instead, they support policies designed to maximise civilian casualties and to deliberately escalate war, to profit "politically" from the disasters caused which they blame falsely on nuclear weapons, as if deterrence causes war! (Another lie believed by mad/evil/gullible mainstream media/political loons in "authority".) A good summary of the fake news basis of "escalation" blather against credible tactical nuclear deterrence of the invasions that set off wars is inadvertently provided by Lord David Owen's 2009 "Nuclear Papers" (Liverpool Uni Press), compiling his declassified nuclear disarmament propaganda reports written while he was UK Foreign Secretary 1977-9. It's all Carter era appeasement nonsense. For example, on pp158-8 he reprints his Top Secret 19 Dec 1978 "Future of the British Deterrent" report to the Prime Minister which states that "I am not convinced by the contention ... that the ability to destroy at least 10 major cities, or inflict damage on 30 major targets ... is the minimum criterion for a British deterrent." (He actually thinks this is too strong a deterrent, despite the fact it is incredible for the realpolitik tactics of dictators who make indirect provocations like invading their neighbours!) The reality Owens ignores is that Russia had and still has civil defence shelters and evacuation plans, so threatening some damage in retaliation is not a credible deterrent against the invasions that set off both world wars. On page 196, he gives a Secret 18 April 1978 paper stating that NATO then had 1000 nuclear artillery pieces (8" and 155mm), 200 Lance and Honest John tactical nuclear missile systems, 135 Pershing; all now long ago disarmed and destroyed while Russian now has over 2000 dedicated tactical nuclear weapons of high neutron output (unlike EM1's data for the low yield option of the multipurpose NATO B61). Owen proudly self-congratulates on his Brezhnev supporting anti-neutron bomb ranting 1978 book, "Human Rights", pp. 136-7. If Owen really wants "Human Rights", he needs to back the neutron bomb now to deter the dictatorships which destroy human rights! His 2009 "Nuclear Papers" at p287 gives the usual completely distorted analysis of the Cuban missiles crisis, claiming that despite the overwhelming American tactical and strategic nuclear superiority for credible deterrence in 1962, the world came "close" to a nuclear war. It's closer now, mate, when thanks to your propaganda we no longer have a credible deterrent, civil defence, tactical neutron warheads. Pathetic.

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.

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."

BELOW: declassified British nuclear war planning blast survival data showing that even without special Morrison table shelters, the American assumption that nobody can survive in a demolished house is false, based on detailed WWII British data (the majority of people in houses flattened within 77 ft from V1 Nazi cruise missiles survived!), and secret American reports (contradicting their unclassified propaganda) proved that blast survival occurred at 16 psi overpressure in Hiroshima's houses, e.g. see limited distribution Dirkwood corp DC-P-1060 for Hiroshima, also the secret 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons DNA-EM-1 table 10-1, and WWII report RC-450 table 8.2, p145 (for determining survival of people sheltered in brick houses, the WWII A, B, C, and D damage versus casualty data from V1 blast was correlated to similar damage from nuclear blast as given Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons page 249, Fig. 6.41a, and page 109 Fig. 3.94a, which show that A, B, C, and D damage to brick houses from nuclear weapons occur at peak overpressures of 9, 6, 3 and 0.5 psi, respectively; the longer blast from higher yields blows the debris over a wider area, reducing the load per unit area falling on to people sheltered under tables etc), and the declassified UK government assessment of nuclear terrorist attack on a port or harbour, as well as the confidential classified UK Government analysis of the economic and social effects from WWII bombing (e.g. the recovery times for areas as a function of percentage of houses destroyed):

Unofficial Russian video on the secret Russian nuclear shelters from Russian Urban Exploration, titled "Проникли на секретный Спецобъект Метро!" = "We infiltrated a secret special facility of the Metro!":

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).

fCo2fnIEVVDG-6K0Kwk9cik87id46Qw5l0qJSBtQ/s1600/Moscow%20bomb%20shelter6.png"/>

ABOVE: originally SECRET diagrams showing the immense casualty reductions for simple shelters and local (not long distance as in 1939) evacuation, from a UK Home Office Scientific Advisers’ Branch report CD/SA 72 (UK National Archives document reference HO 225/72), “Casualty estimates for ground burst 10 megaton bombs”, which exposed the truth behind UK Cold War civil defence (contrary to Russian propaganda against UK defence, which still falsely claims there was no scientific basis for anything, playing on the fact the data was classified SECRET). Evacuation plus shelter eliminates huge casualties for limited attacks; notice that for the 10 megaton bombs (more than 20 times the typical yield of today’s MIRV compact warheads!), you need 20 weapons, i.e. a total of 10 x 20 = 200 megatons, for 1 million killed, if civil defence is in place for 45% of people to evacuate a city and the rest to take shelter. Under civil defence, therefore, you get 1 million killed per 200 megatons. This proves that civil defence work to make deterrence more credible in Russian eyes. For a discussion of the anti-civil defence propaganda scam in the West led by Russian agents for Russian advantage in the new cold war, just read posts on this blog started in 2006 when Putin's influence became clear. You can read the full PDF by clicking the link here. Or see the files here.

ABOVE: the originally CONFIDENTIAL classified document chapters of Dr D.G. Christopherson’s “Structural Defence 1945, RC450”, giving low cost UK WWII shelter effectiveness data, which should also have been published to prove the validity of civil defence countermeasures in making deterrence of future war more credible by allowing survival of “demonstration” strikes and “nuclear accidents / limited wars” (it’s no use having weapons and no civil defence, so you can’t deter aggressors, the disaster of Munich appeasement giving Hitler a green light on 30 September 1938, when Anderson shelters were only issued the next year, 1939!). For the original WWII UK Government low cost sheltering instruction books issued to the public (for a small charge!) please click here (we have uploaded them to internet archive), and please click here for further evidence for the effectiveness of indoor shelters during WWII from Morrison shelter inventor Baker's analysis, please click here (he titled his book about WWII shelters "Enterprise versus Bureaucracy" which tells you all you need to know about the problems his successful innovations in shelter design experienced; his revolutionary concept was that the shelter should be damaged to protect the people inside because of the vast energy absorption soaked up in the plastic deformation of steel - something which naive fools can never appreciate - by analogy, if your car bumper is perfectly intact after impact you're unlikely to be because it has not absorbed the impact energy which has been passed on to you!). We have also placed useful declassified UK government nuclear war survival information on internet archive here and here. There is also a demonstration of how proof-tested WWII shelters were tested in 1950s nuclear weapon trials and adapted for use in Cold War nuclear civil defence, here, thus permanently debunking the somewhat pro-dictatorship/anti-deterrence Jeremy Corbyn/Matthew Grant/Duncan Campbell anti-civil defence propaganda rants which pretend to to based on reality, but obviously just ignore the hard, yet secret, nuclear testing facts upon which UK government civil defence was based as my father (a Civil Defence Corps instructor) explained here back in 2006. The reality is that the media follows herd fashion to sell paper/airtime; it doesn't lead it. This is why it backed Nazi appeasement (cheering Chamberlain's 1938 handshakes with Hitler for instance) and only switched tune when it was too late to deter Nazi aggression in 1939; it made the most money that way. We have to face the facts!

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. "

Honest Effects of Nuclear Weapons!

ABOVE (VIDEO CLIP): Russian State TV Channel 1 war inurer and enabler, NOT MERELY MAKING "INCREDIBLE BLUFF THREATS THAT WE MUST ALL LAUGH AT AND IGNORE LIKE DR GOEBBELS THREATS TO GAS JEWS AND START A WORLD WAR" AS ALMOST ALL THE BBC SCHOOL OF "JOURNALISM" (to which we don't exactly belong!) LIARS CLAIM, but instead preparing Russians mentally for nuclear war (they already have nuclear shelters and a new Putin-era tactical nuclear war civil defense manual from 2014, linked and discussed in blog posts on the archive above), arguing for use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine war in 2023: "We should not be afraid of what it is unnecessary to be afraid of. We need to win. That is all. We have to achieve this with the means we have, with the weapons we have. I would like to remind you that a nuclear weapon is not just a bomb; it is the heritage of the whole Russian people, suffered through the hardest times. It is our heritage. And we have the right to use it to defend our homeland [does he mean the liberated components of the USSR that gained freedom in 1992?]. Changing the [nuclear use] doctrine is just a piece of paper, but it is worth making a decision."

NOTE: THIS IS NOT ENGLISH LANGUAGE "PROPAGANDA" SOLELY ADDRESSED AS A "BLUFF" TO UK AND USA GOV BIGOTED CHARLATANS (those who have framed photos of hitler, stalin, chamberlain, baldwin, lloyd george, eisenhower, et al., on their office walls), BUT ADDRESSED AT MAKING RUSSIAN FOLK PARTY TO THE NEED FOR PUTIN TO START A THIRD WORLD WAR! Duh!!!!! SURE, PUTIN COULD PRESS THE BUTTON NOW, BUT THAT IS NOT THE RUSSIAN WAY, ANY MORE THAN HITLER SET OFF WWII BY DIRECTLY BOMBING LONDON! HE DIDN'T. THESE PEOPLE WANT TO CONTROL HISTORY, TO GO DOWN THE NEXT "PUTIN THE GREAT". THEY WANT TO GET THEIR PEOPLE, AND CHINA, NORTH KOREA, IRAN, ET Al. AS ALLIES, BY APPEARING TO BE DEFENDING RATIONALITY AND LIBERTY AGAINST WAR MONGERING WESTERN IMPERIALISM. For the KGB mindset here, please read Chapman Pincher's book "The Secret offensive" and Paul Mercer's "Peace of the Dead - The Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers". Please note that the link to the analysis of the secret USSBS report 92, The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (which google fails to appreciate is a report with the OPPOSITE conclusions to the lying unclassified reports and Glasstone's book on fire, is on internet archive in the PDF documents list at the page "The effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan" (the secret report 92 of the USSBS, not the lying unclassified version or the Glasstone book series). If you don't like the plain layout of this blog, you can change it into a "fashionable" one with smaller photos you can't read by adding ?m=1 to the end of the URL, e.g. https://glasstone.blogspot.com/2022/02/analogy-of-1938-munich-crisis-and.html?m=1

PLEASE BEAR WITH US - THIS SITE WAS DEVELOPED IN 2006 BEFORE GOOGLE SMARTPHONE BOT CACHING (GOOGLE BOTS CAN'T INDEX THIS FORMAT ANYMORE AS IT IS SIMPLY UNSUITABLE TO SMARTPHONES WHICH DIDN'T EXIST BACK IN 2006 - WILL MOVE TO A NEW DOMAIN SOON TO OVERCOME THIS. (HOPEFULLY THE TEXT WILL ALSO BE EDITED AND RE-WRITTEN TO TAKE OUT TYPING ERRORS AND DEAD LINKS DATING BACK TO 2006 WHEN THE BLOG BEGAN - A LOT HAS CHANGED SINCE THEN!)

Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons exaggerations completely undermine credible deterrence of war: Glasstone exaggerates urban "strategic" nuclear weapons effects by using effects data taken from unobstructed terrain (without the concrete jungle shielding of blast winds and radiation by cities!), and omits the most vital uses and most vital effects of nuclear weapons: to DETER world war credibly by negating the concentrations of force used to invade Belgium, 1914 (thus WWI) and Poland (WWII). The facts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the shielding of blast and radiation effects by modern concrete buildings in the credible nuclear deterrence of invasions (click here for data) which - unlike the countervalue drivel that failed to prevent WW2 costing millions of human lives - worked in the Cold War despite the Western media's obsession with treating as Gospel truth the lying anti-nuclear propaganda from Russia's World Peace Council and its allies (intended to make the West disarm to allow Russian invasions without opposition, as worked in Ukraine recently)! If we have credible W54's and W79's tactical nukes to deter invasions as used to Cold War, pro Russian World Peace Council inspired propaganda says: "if you use those, we'll bomb your cities", but they can bomb our cities with nuclear if we use conventional weapons, or even if we fart, if they want - we don't actually control what thugs in dictatorships - it is like saying Hitler had 12,000 tons of tabun nerve agent by 1945, so lying we had to surrender for fear of it. Actually, he had to blow his brains out because he had an incredible deterrent, as retaliation risk plus defence (masks) negated it!

Credible deterrence necessitates simple, effective protection against concentrated and dispersed invasions and bombing. The facts can debunk massively inaccurate, deliberately misleading CND "disarm or be annihilated" pro-dictatorship ("communism" scam) political anti-nuclear deterrence dogma. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda effects lies on blast and radiation for modern concrete cities is debunked by solid factual evidence kept from public sight for political reasons by the Marx-media which is not opposed by the remainder of the media, and the completely fake "nuclear effects data" sneaks into "established pseudo-wisdom" by the back-door. Another trick is hate attacks on anyone telling the truth: this is a repeat of lies from Nobel Peace Prize winner Angell and pals before WWI (when long-"outlawed" gas was used by all sides, contrary to claims that paper agreements had "banned" it somehow) and WWII (when gas bombing lies prior to the war by Angell, Noel-Baker, Joad and others were used as an excuse to "make peace deals" with the Nazis, again, not worth the paper they were printed on). Mathematically, the subset of all States which keep agreements (disarmament and arms control, for instance) is identical to the subset of all States which are stable Democracies (i.e., tolerating dissent for the past several years), but this subset is - as Dr Spencer Weart's statistical evidence of war proves in his book Never at War: Why Democracies Won't Fight One Another - not the bloody war problem! Because none of the disarmaments grasp set theory, or bother to read Dr Weart's book, they can never understand that disarmament of Democracies doesn't cause peace but causes millions of deaths.

PLEASE CLICK HERE for the truth from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the shielding of blast and radiation effects by modern concrete buildings in the credible nuclear deterrence of invasions which - unlike the countervalue drivel that failed to prevent WW2 costing millions of human lives - worked in the Cold War despite the Western media's obsession with treating as Gospel truth the lying anti-nuclear propaganda from Russia's World Peace Council and its allies (intended to make the West disarm to allow Russian invasions without opposition, as worked in Ukraine recently)! Realistic effects and credible nuclear weapon capabilities are needed for deterring or stopping aggressive invasions and attacks which could escalate into major conventional or nuclear wars. Credible deterrence is through simple, effective protection against concentrated and dispersed invasions and aerial attacks, debunking inaccurate, misleading CND "disarm or be annihilated" left political anti-nuclear deterrence dogma. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda effects lies on blast and radiation for modern concrete cities is debunked by solid factual evidence kept from public sight for political reasons by the Marx-media.

Glasstone's and Nukemap's fake Effects of Nuclear Weapons effects data for unobstructed deserts, rather than realistic blast and radiation shielding concrete jungles which mitigate countervalue damage as proved in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Penney and Stanbury, undermine credible world war deterrence just as Philip Noel-Baker's 1927 BBC radio propaganda on gas war knock-out blow lies were used by Nazi propaganda distributing "pacifist disarmers" to undermine deterrence of Hitler's war, murdering tens of millions deliberately through lies (e.g. effective gas masks don't exist) that were easy to disprove, but supported by the mainstream fascist leaning press in the UK. There is not just one country, Russia, which could trigger WW3, because we know from history that the world forms alliances once a major war breaks out, apart from a few traditional neutral countries like Ireland and Switzerland, so a major US-China war over Taiwan could draw in support from Russia and North Korea, just as the present Russian invasion and war against Ukraine has drawn in Iranian munitions support for Russia. So it is almost certain that a future East-vs-West world war will involve an alliance of Russia-China-North Korea-Iran fighting on multiple fronts, with nuclear weapons being used carefully for military purposes (not in the imaginary 1930s massive "knockout blow" gas/incendiary/high explosive raids against cities that was used by the UK media to scare the public into appeasing Hitler and thus enabling him to trigger world war; Chamberlain had read Mein Kampf and crazily approved Hitler's plans to exterminate Jews and invade Russia starting a major war, a fact censored out of biased propaganda hailing Chamberlain as a peacemaker).

Realistic effects and credible nuclear weapons capabilities are VITAL for deterring or stopping aggressive invasions and attacks which could escalate into major conventional or nuclear wars debunk Marx media propagandarists who obfuscate because they don't want you to know the truth, so activism is needed to get the message out against lying frauds and open fascists in the Russian supporting Marx mass media, which sadly includes government officialdom (still infiltrated by reds under beds, sorry to Joe MaCarthy haters, but admit it as a hard fact that nuclear bomb labs in the West openly support Russian fascist mass murders; I PRAY THIS WILL SOON CHANGE!).

ABOVE: Tom Ramos at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (quoted at length on the development details of compact MIRV nuclear warhead designs in the latest post on this blog) explains how the brilliant small size primary stage, the Robin, was developed and properly proof-tested in time to act as the primary stage for a compact thermonuclear warhead to deter Russia in the 1st Cold War, something now made impossible due to Russia's World Peace Council propaganda campaigns. (Note that Ramos has a new book published, called From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War which describes in detail in chapter 13, "First the Flute and Then the Robin", how caring, dedicated nuclear weapons physicists in the 1950s and 1960s actually remembered the lesson of disarmament disaster in the 1930s, and so WORKED HARD to develop the "Flute" secondary and the "Robin" primary to enable a compact, light thermonuclear warhead to help deter WWIII! What a difference to today, when all we hear from such "weaponeers" now is evil lying about nuclear weapons effects on cities and against Western civil defence and against credible deterrence on behalf of the enemy.)

ABOVE: Star Wars filmmaker Peter Kuran has at last released his lengthy (90 minutes) documentary on The neutron bomb. Unfortunately, it is not yet being widely screened in cinemas or on DVD Blu Ray disc, so you have to stream it (if you have fast broadband internet hooked up to a decent telly). At least Peter managed to interview Samuel Cohen, who developed the neutron bomb out of the cleaner Livermore devices Dove and Starling in 1958 (Ramos says Livermore's director, who invented a wetsuit, is now trying to say Cohen stole the neutron bomb idea from him! Not so, as RAND colleague and 1993 Effects Manual EM-1 editor Dr Harold L. Brode explains in his recent brilliant book on the history of nuclear weapons in the 1st Cold War (reviewed in a post on this blog in detail) that Cohen was after the neutron bomb for many years before Livermore was even built as a rival to Los Alamos. Cohen had been into neutrons when working in the Los Alamos Efficiency Group of the Manhattan project on the very first nuclear weapons, used with neutron effects on people by Truman, back in 1945 to end a bloody war while the Livermore director was in short pants.)

For the true effects in modern city concrete buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, disproving the popular lies for nudes in open deserts used as the basis for blast and radiation calculations by Glasstone and Nukemap, please click here The deceptive bigots protraying themselves as Federation of American Scientists genuine communist disarmers in the Marx media including TV scammers have been suppressing the truth to sell fake news since 1945 and in a repetition of the 1920s and 1930s gas war media lying for disarmament and horror news scams that caused disarmament and thus encouraged Hitler to initiate the invasions that set off WWII!

Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons exaggerations completely undermine credible deterrence of war: Glasstone exaggerates urban "strategic" nuclear weapons effects by using effects data taken from unobstructed terrain (without the concrete jungle shielding of blast winds and radiation by cities!), and omits the most vital uses and most vital effects of nuclear weapons: to DETER world war credibly by negating the concentrations of force used to invade Belgium, 1914 (thus WWI) and Poland (WWII). Disarmament and arms control funded propaganda lying says any deterrent which is not actually exploded in anger is a waste of money since it isn't being "used", a fraud apparently due to the title and content of Glasstone's book which omits the key use and effect of nuclear weapons, to prevent world wars: this is because Glasstone and Dolan don't even bother to mention the neutron bomb or 10-fold reduced fallout in the the Los Alamos 95% clean Redwing-Navajo test of 1956, despite the neutron bomb effects being analysed for its enhanced radiation and reduced thermal and blast yield in detail in the 1972 edition of Dolan's edited secret U.S. Department of Defense Effects Manual EM-1, "Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons", data now declassified yet still being covered-up by "arms control and disarmament" liars today to try to destroy credible deterrence of war in order to bolster their obviously pro-Russian political anti-peace agenda. "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 .

ABOVE: 11 May 2023 Russian state TV channel 1 loon openly threatens nuclear tests and bombing UK. Seeing how the Russian media is under control of Putin, this is like Dr Goebbels rantings, 80 years past. But this doesn't disprove the world war threat any more than it did with Dr Goebbels. These people, like the BBC here, don't just communicate "news" but attempt to do so selectively and with interpretations and opinions that set the stage for a pretty obviously hate based political agenda with their millions of viewers, a trick that worked in the 1st Cold War despite Orwell's attempts to lampoon it in books about big brother like "1984" and "Animal Farm". When in October 1962 the Russians put nuclear weapons into Cuba in secret without any open "threats", and with a MASSIVELY inferior overall nuclear stockpile to the USA (the USA had MORE nuclear weapons, more ICBMs, etc.), the media made a big fuss, even when Kennedy went on TV on 22 October and ensured no nuclear "accidents" in Cuba by telling Russia that any single accidentally launched missile from Cuba against any Western city would result in a FULL RETALITORY STRIKE ON RUSSIA. There was no risk of nuclear war then except by accident, and Kennedy had in his 25 May 1961 speech on "Urgent National Needs" a year and a half before instigated NUCLEAR SHELTERS in public basement buildings to help people in cities survive (modern concrete buildings survive near ground zero Hiroshima, as proved by declassified USSBS reports kept covered up by Uncle Sam). NOE THAT THERE IS A CREDIBLE THREAT OF NUCLEAR TESTS AND HIROSHIMA TYPE INTIMIDATION STRIKES, THE BBC FINALLY DECIDES TO SUPPRESS NUCLEAR NEWS SUPPOSEDLY TO HELP "ANTI-NUCLEAR" RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA TRYING TO PREVENT US FROM GETTING CREDIBLE DETERRENCE OF INVASIONS, AS WE HAD WITH THE W79 UNTIL DISARMERS REMOVED IT IN THE 90s! This stinks of prejudice, the usual sort of hypocrisy from the 1930s "disarmament heroes" who lied their way to Nobel peace prizes by starting a world war!

The facts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the shielding of blast and radiation effects by modern concrete buildings in the credible nuclear deterrence of invasions (click here for data) which - unlike the countervalue drivel that failed to prevent WW2 costing millions of human lives - worked in the Cold War despite the Western media's obsession with treating as Gospel truth the lying anti-nuclear propaganda from Russia's World Peace Council and its allies (intended to make the West disarm to allow Russian invasions without overwhelming, effective deterrence or opposition, as worked in Ukraine recently)!

Realistic effects and credible nuclear weapon capabilities are required now for deterring or stopping aggressive invasions and attacks which could escalate into major conventional or nuclear wars. Credible deterrence necessitates simple, effective protection against concentrated and dispersed invasions and bombing. The facts can debunk massively inaccurate, deliberately misleading CND "disarm or be annihilated" pro-dictatorship ("communism" scam) political anti-nuclear deterrence dogma. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda effects lies on blast and radiation for modern concrete cities is debunked by solid factual evidence kept from public sight for political reasons by the Marx-media, which is not opposed by the fashion-obsessed remainder of the media, and so myths sneak into "established pseudo-wisdom" by the back-door.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

The exaggerated urban effects of nuclear weapons: proof tested civil defence

Our problem is the pseudo-scientific groupthink prejudice and ignorance of the media, which publishes false indoctrination; sycophantic "ridicule" of cheap, effective duck and cover (the flash of an expolsion travels faster than the blast wave).  By dismissing civil defence as a credible option for reducing risks and for negating the effects of terrorist threats and actions, 100% of the "response" emphasis is placed on military action, disarmament idealism, or appeasement of terrorism (all of which have strong advocates in the media, the money-spinning professional pseudo-science peace/environmentalism dogma industries, and  related fashion/fascist politics).  There are few strong civil defence advocates in the government, Parliament, the popular media, the military, the scientific community.  But civil defence must become a component of all humane war, reducing or eliminating collateral damage, mortality, injury and suffering to civilians.

ABOVE: dirt cheap countermeasures worked against blast.  Earth cover was blown off this Anderson shelter in London during the 1940 Blitz.  This damage to the shelter absorbed blast energy, permitting survival inside, just as car bumpers and "crumple zones" absorb impact energy and thus afford protection.  Tables indoors offered similar protection against house collapse and flying debris.



Above: 20 July 1940 London Board of Education "duck and cover" school drill for air raid. The bigger the bomb, the bigger the average time between the light-velocity flash of the explosion and the arrival of the blast wave.  It is a fact that 76.5% of kids ducking and covering in totally demolished houses survived in 2,340 V1 cruise missile attacks on London within 70 ft of the 1 ton TNT equivalent explosion (type A damage, complete collapse).  This data, given in both the 1957 Capabilities of Atomic Weapons and the 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, is proved by Dr Derman Christopherson's Confidential report RC-450, Structural Defence.  Bigger yield explosions increase the average arrival time of the blast within the flattened area (for any given pressure, the arrival time increases in proportion to the cube-root of the explosion energy yield, i.e. it takes 10 times longer for 1 psi to arrive in a 1 megaton bomb than in a 1 kiloton bomb), and the thermal and initial nuclear radiation (due to hydrodynamic enhancement of fission product gamma rays, a blast effect on the average air density between bomb and target) are both delivered more slowly as the yield is increased, giving people more time to avoid most of the potential exposure by taking cover.  As the original Secret-classified American Handbook on Capabilities of Atomic Weapons (AD511880L) admitted on page 81: "The large number of casualties in Japan resulted for the most part from the lack of warning."

"The entire Free World, despite its intellectual sophistication, is being held hostage by fear.  This fear of the unknown has proliferated for the past 80 years through propaganda, unsound pronouncements of world leaders, and misleading labels compounded by a public press that has neglected its own mandate to seek out and tell the truth."

 - James W. Hammond, Poison gas: the myths versus reality, Preface (Greenwood Press, 1999).


June 1950 British ATOMIC WARFARE handbook with Foreword by Prime Minister Clement Attlee











Above: America is preparing for urban nuclear detonations due to nuclear proliferation, which itself stems from the attraction to dictatorships of exaggerated urban nuclear weapons effects hype from the cold war era.  In the Cold War, exaggerations aided nuclear deterrence of the tremendous conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact, which was relatively cheaply (compared to conscripting half the population into a conventional army).  For example, houses were built with a clear radial line-of-sight to the fireball in the unobstructed Nevada desert in 1953 Operation Upshot Knothole test Encore which proved that if we knock all the houses down in a city to prevent any shadowing effects, thermal radiation still cannot ignite a whitewashed wooden house, but will ignite one packed with inflammables at the (very dry) 19% relative humidity of that test.  The same stunt was repeated in 1955 at Operation Teapot, shot Apple 2, where again thermal, blast and nuclear radiation effects were exaggerated by failing to simulate the shadowing and shielding of a modern city.  In Hiroshima, the secret USSBS report 92 volume 2 showed that there was an enormous difference in mean areas of effectiveness for destruction of modern city buildings and the predominant wooden houses which are not found in modern city centres, which would be the targets for nuclear attack:













President John F. Kennedy
Delivered in person before a joint session of Congress
May 25, 1961:

 “One major element of the national security program which this nation has never squarely faced up to is civil defense. … Public considerations have been largely characterized by apathy, indifference and skepticism ... this deterrent concept assumes rational calculations by rational men. And the history of this planet, and particularly the history of the 20th century, is sufficient to remind us of the possibilities of an irrational attack, a miscalculation, an accidental war, which cannot be either foreseen or deterred. It is on this basis that civil defense can be readily justifiable - as insurance for the civilian population in case of an enemy miscalculation. It is insurance we trust will never be needed - but insurance which we could never forgive ourselves for foregoing in the event of catastrophe. ... no insurance is cost-free; and every American citizen and his community must decide for themselves whether this form of survival insurance justifies the expenditure of effort, time and money. For myself, I am convinced that it does.”

 “If a man reads or hears a criticism of anything in which he has an interest, watch whether his first question is as to its fairness and truth. If he reacts to any such criticism with strong emotion; if he bases his complaint on the ground that it is not in ‘good taste,’ or that it will have a bad effect - in short, if he shows concern with any question except ‘is it true?’ he thereby reveals that his own attitude is unscientific. Likewise if in his turn he judges an idea not on its merits but with reference to the author of it; if he criticizes it as ‘heresy’; if he argues that authority must be right because it is authority; if he takes a particular criticism as a general depreciation; if he confuses opinion with facts; if he claims that any expression of opinion is ‘unquestionable’; if he declares that something will ‘never’ come about, or it is ‘certain’ that any view is right. The path of truth is paved with critical doubt, and lighted by the spirit of objective enquiry... We learn from history that in every age and every clime the majority of people have resented what seems in retrospect to have been purely matter of fact … We learn too that nothing has aided the persistence of falsehood, and the evils resulting from it, more than the unwillingness of good people to admit the truth … Always the tendency continues to be shocked by natural comment, and to hold certain things too ‘sacred’ to think about. I can conceive no finer ideal of a man’s life than to face life with clear eyes instead of stumbling through it like a blind man, an imbecile, or a drunkard – which, in a thinking sense, is the common preference. How rarely does one meet anyone whose first reaction to anything is to ask: ‘is it true?’ Yet, unless that is a man’s natural reaction, it shows that truth is not uppermost in his mind, and unless it is, true progress is unlikely.”

- Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Why Don’t We Learn from History?, PEN Books, 1944; revised edition, Allen and Unwin, 1972.






Above: in declassified 532 page November 2003 Los Alamos report LA-14066-H on the W76 nuclear warhead, Los Alamos legend Dr Harold Agnew (who flew on the Hiroshima mission, as the observer who personally filmed the only movie of the Hiroshima explosion ever made, and was the Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1970-1979) is quoted as writing to Geller on 10 Oct 1972 that the Hiroshima nuclear bomb's effects on people inside modern city buildings "wasn't all that impressive" (those of concrete which survived, not the widespread wooden buildings which contained breakfast charcoal braziers and paper screens, which burned down after the blast upset them), and you can all see the evidence for this statement in the photo-filled secret 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima, extracts linked here.  Agnew argued that it was like throwing "confetti" at the enemy.  Even against delicate nuclear missiles, filled with explosive fuels, nuclear weapons have to be placed very accurately to have any reliable effect against a hole in the ground.  The "millions of degrees" of propaganda books are confined to the microseconds and to the tiny volume of the weapon.  The large fireball is no hotter than a conventional explosive because its volume scaled up with the yield, keeping the energy density (energy per unit volume of the fireball) and thus temperature constant.

And the high temperature of the large fireball doesn't last for long enough to penetrate more than a fraction of millimetre of sand or to melt anything thicker than a grain of sand!  (See Hardtack report WT-1625 ADA995345 at page 12, or Redwing report USNRDL-TR-208, or Teapot report AD0340137 Evaluation of Fireball Lethality using Basic Missile Structures.)  Hot air cools fast, and rises fast, carrying the fission products and radiation up with it!  By the time some of it falls back in the downwind direction, educated not deluded people can take adequate cover or evacuate in the cross-wind direction.  You won't find this factual evidence for the severe limitations of nuclear weapons in any of the popular and fashionably prejudiced propaganda books, nor in any of the lying popular media articles, books, propaganda documents.

Line-of-sight shielding of thermal, nuclear radiation and blast due to energy absorption by intervening modern concrete and steel frame city buildings: Kyle Millage's Applied Research Associated 2011 report (PDF linked here):


Nobody has ever been "vaporised" by thermal radiation from a nuclear explosion, e.g. in Hiroshima even at ground zero you're talking about ~100 calories per square centimetre in the open.  Useful information: heat of vaporization of water from its boiling point = 2257 J/g = 540 calories/gram.  (An additional energy of 1 cal/gram is needed to raise the temperature of water by each C from its ambient temperature, i.e. to get from 37 C body temperature to 100 C you need 63 cal/gram, then you add the 540 cal/gram needed for the phase transition from liquid to steam, giving a total of 540 + 63 = 603 calories to vaporize 1 gram or 1 cubic cm of water.)  Density of water or skin (70% water) = 1 gram/cubic centimetre.

Therefore, 100 calories per square centimetre (ground zero Hiroshima) is only enough energy to vaporize a layer of water or skin 100/603 = 1/6 cm thick, less than 2 mm thick.

In fact, even less will be vaporized because some heat is reflected by the skin, and much is absorbed by clothing which provides protection, contrary to much propaganda based on peacetime car accident burns when clothing was soaked in gasoline, irrelevant to nuclear explosions.  (For more detailed thermal effects modelling and calculations see Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, linked here.)  If clothing ignites, it can be extinguished easily by rolling it out.  Remember, contrary to propaganda, thermally ignited clothing is easier to extinguish than petrol soaked clothing in peacetime car accident victims.  The 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report documents the fact that clothing ignition could be beaten out.

The main danger in cities is not from thermal radiation or fires, because modern city buildings absorb almost all of the thermal and much of the nuclear radiation.  So the really widespread danger is flying glass and blast winds, which are dealt with by duck and cover on seeing the bright flash, which arrives prior to the blast wave.






 American nuclear weapons safety in accidents (a comment on a fashionable deception):

“... one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe … It would have been bad news – in spades.” - popular deception used to support unilateral disarmament while keeping us vulnerable to enemy terrorists!
  • Even if a nuclear explosion occurs, it's likely to be less powerful than the charge of conventional explosive in it.  The reasons are technical and due to the very difficult electronics problems in firing a lot of detonators simultaneously with a battery whose internal resistance is always too high to provide enough current under the load (even though the battery contains enough energy to fire all the detonators, it can't do so at the same time, directly).
  • No practical battery pack in a deliverable nuclear weapon with 32 or more point implosion nuclear weapon has ever been capable of setting off the nuclear weapon directly because of the tremendous current needed.  This has nothing to do with the energy in the battery, which is of course adequate.  The problem is that batteries have an internal resistance which limits the amount of current (which limits the rate at which they deliver energy).
  •  To overcome this, implosion weapons from Trinity onward have used an X-unit containing a bank of high-capacitance capacitors.  Energy is first transferred from the battery to the capacitors during a charging taking about a minute or so, then - at detonation time - the capacitor bank is discharged by a very special, high-current switch which can cleanly deliver an abrupt pulse with a rapid rise time (either a special krytron cold-cathode gas filled tube, or an explosive switch which fires a pointed metal stud through two metal conductors which are separated by a plastic insulator).
  • This charging of the X-unit means a very severe limitation on the yield of accidental nuclear weapons.  If you drop a nuclear bomb, even if switches are triggered in the impact, the X-unit is not going to be charged up at the right time to cause a full yield nuclear detonation.  Nuclear weapons have "one-point safety", so if you were to close the switches and fire the weapon before the X-unit is adequately charged, which takes many seconds, inadequate current will be delivered to the detonators (which are connected in a parallel circuit, requiring an immense current to fire simultaneously).  So most likely, all the detonators will just warm slightly, without firing.  Even if there is enough current and one does fire (the one with the least resistance, the weakest link in the circuit, which gets hottest), it is a one-point explosion with the nuclear fission equivalent of just 4 pounds of TNT or about 2 kg of TNT.  This nuclear explosion will be dwarfed by the explosion of the conventional explosives in the weapon, which in implosion devices greatly exceed 2 kg of TNT equivalent.
  • To get a higher-yield nuclear explosion, modern warheads need not only simultaneous detonators to be fired by a recently charged-up capacitor bank, they also need the neutron gun to be fired about the time of maximum core compression, a matter of very careful timing, roughly millisecond or so after the X-unit is discharged by the special high-current switch to cause the implosion!  Here, again, the electronics timing circuit is fully in control, and makes the weapon safe.
  • The American bombs also contain disabling devices that prevent unauthorized or accidental nuclear explosions due to impact or theft, so the probability of random switch closures occurring at the right times for charging the capacitor bank, firing the detonators, then firing the neutron gun, is so astronomically insignificant you should worry more about the finite probability of everyone on earth being killed by a car accident on the same day, so we go extinct.
  • For modern thermonuclear weapons, there is an additional switch which needs to be set off at a suitable time during the preparation in advance of the explosion: the fission stage boosting from deuterium and tritium gas mixture, which is injected into the hollow core prior to the explosion.  (Some older weapons had the gas in sealed pits which avoided this, but since tritium has a half-life of only about 12 years, this meant that the pits had to be regularly taken out, unsealed, and re-gassed.  A separate gas reservoir in the weapon allows tritium gas to replenished more easily after it decays.)

Herman Kahn, testimony to the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 86th Congress, 22-26 June 1959, Part 1, at pages 883 and 943:


“... before World War II, for example, many of the staffs engaged in estimating the effects of bombing overestimated by large amounts. This was one of the main reasons that at the Munich Conference, and earlier occasions, the British and the French chose appeasement ... Many people object to air and civil defense, not because they underestimate the problem, but because they overestimate it. They think there is nothing significant that can be done ...”
Jaw, Jaw, not War War: the peace agreement to prevent World War 2.   It didn't work.  Duh!
The popular analysis about "banning weapons of mass destruction" is wrong because you cannot stop weapons being made in secret, as they were by the Nazis from 1933 despite being banned by law.  The signing of worthless treaties by dictators proved in WWII to be a cause, not a prevention for war, because it allowed enemies to win arms races by rearming faster than democracies, while being appeased by agreement-deluded Nobel Peace Prize seekers who had the popular gullible media hacks on their side, who knew what the readers wanted to hear and fabricated out of whole cloth suitable "facts". First, intelligence is never 100% certain.  If there is a risk of such weapons existing, you have to act before absolutely certain, proved, indisputable information arises in the form of a Pearl Harbor or 9/11 type surprise attack.  This fact explains why people like Herman Kahn were worried about the risk of a "missile gap" after Sputnik in 1957.  It is best not to wait for 100% certain proof of a secret enemy threat to arrive in a surprise strike and blow you up, before taking precautions against that risk.  Secondly, the popular media always presents a false two-option choice which omits any mention of civil defence as an option: the choice is either "do nothing" or spend billions of dollars/pounds on bombing the enemy, starting a war that kills many times more civilians than those killed in Hiroshima by the surprise nuclear attack there.  Seeing the national debt is over £1 trillion in Britain and is $12 trillion in the USA, it's surprising that cheap civil defence countermeasures aren't taken seriously against "weapons of mass destruction".  The costs of shelters and gas masks in WWII, proof tested at nuclear and chemical tests in the 1950s, were trivial compared to the costs in money and also lives of recent wars.
Philip J. Dolan's secret 1972 U.S. Department of Defense Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons DNA-EM-1, chapter 11, Damage to Structures, explains that due to building shadowing effects in modern cities, few fires are predicted: "The low incidence of predicted indoor ignitions results from the low elevation angle of the fireball. The artificial horizon of trees and buildings obscures the fireball from most residential windows ... the average elevation angle of the artificial horizon is about 6 degrees for New Orleans."  This is verified by the latest 2012 computer simulations of nuclear attacks on major American cities!




The urban building skyline in any modern city like Washington DC and New York City would turn a 10 kt surface burst effectively into a shallow buried underground burst, from the standpoint of thermal and nuclear radiations, which are massively reduced by the shielding effects of the buildings that intervene in the radial line between people and the fireball.  Because the blast wave moves more slowly than the various forms of radiation, even the buildings very close to the detonation will have a significant shielding effect.  Typical city centre reinforced concrete buildings with large window areas allow rapid equalization of blast pressure once the windows shatter, which cuts the blast loading and reduces structural damage.  Any kind of material, even leaves or paper, shields the thermal radiation (even if the paper or leaves receive enough exposure to "smoke", the smoke absorbs thermal radiation and protects material situated behind it, as was demonstrated in many cases of protected thermal flash "shadows" cast observably in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the predominant type of building was single-storey wooden, now obsolete in cities which are potential nuclear targets).



Concrete buildings cast shadows and also shield radiations and blast, disproving CND anti-civil defence propaganda (see below).


Above: the house blown up by a Nevada nuclear explosion actually proved cheap civil defense, because the simple lean-to shelter in it survived.  Such countermeasures are also proved against other threats like hurricanes and conventional bombing.  Bigger nuclear explosions don't increase the weight of a falling house, but decrease the weight of debris per unit area by blowing more of the debris downrange, thus increasing survival for a given overpressure, rather than reducing it as insisted upon by misleading propaganda.



 

Above: director of the U.S. Pacific Theatre Strategic Bombing Survey, Paul Nitze, personally surveyed the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after their nuclear attacks in 1945, and testified to Congressional Hearings, Civil Preparedness and Limited Nuclear War, on 28 April 1976 that this experience is still relevant because most nuclear weapons even then no longer have megaton yields because of the move to smaller warheads with missiles that carry several low-yield weapons, rather than a single high-yield weapon.   He explained that "equivalent megatonnage" (i.e., warhead energy raised to the 2/3 power, W2/3, to allow for the correct area damage yield-scaling) shows that most warheads are similar to Hiroshima-Nagasaki sized today, not to the 15 megaton Bravo bomb that caused heavy fallout in 1954.  He also explained that most of the people who did take cover in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki were survivors. As Glasstone and Dolan pointed out in Table 12.17 of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the 50% survival radius in modern concrete buildings in Hiroshima was 0.12 mile, compared to 1.3 mile for people outdoors and unshielded. So, since area scales as the square of radius, in the buildings now typical in modern city centres, the survival chance is 120 times better than for people without shielding in Hiroshima (1.32/0.122).

http://archive.org/stream/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima#page/n5/mode/2up




The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (the secret 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report 92, and related nuclear testing civil defense data):

http://archive.org/stream/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima#page/n5/mode/2up

This report contains the evidence that the thermal flash did not cause the firestorm in Hiroshima (which was due to fire spread from overturned breakfast braziers in overcrowded city center wooden houses, a peacetime fire hazard which no longer exists in modern concrete and steel cities), proving just how seriously the effects of nuclear weapons were exaggerated.  The danger is that false "education" propaganda based on a lack of proper understanding leads to unpreparedness for nuclear terrorism, causing a real threat.

Exaggerations also cause a threat in another way, because unstable regimes are attracted to these weapons since their effects have been exaggerated, to try to use the threats to coerce the free democracies.  (It wasn't the pseudoscientifically exaggerated gas bomb air raids of the 1930s that were 100% effective and murdered 6 million defenseless human beings, it was the gas chambers of eugenics pseudoscience ideologues that murdered 6 million defenseless human beings.)

USSBS report 92 vol 2: water buckets put out Hiroshima fires
Hiroshima was an optimum air burst for widespread damage; surface bursts cause less destruction due to the attenuation of blast, heat, initial radiation, EMP and fallout radiation by shielding through successive buildings.  For the proof of this in recent computer-based nuclear weapons city skyline effects attenuation/shielding research on reduction of severe blast, heat, initial nuclear radiation, fallout radiation and EMP effects by city urban targets: please click here.  Note that this May 1947 secret Pacific Theatre USSBS report number 92 is based on the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of Hiroshima, 14 October-26 November 1945. It directly contradicts the propaganda implicit in the earlier unclassified (widely published) 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey propaganda booklet (of confusingly similar title) which omits all vital firestorm origin evidence and the data on the survival in modern city buildings which protected against the heat flash, nuclear radiation and blast. Secret report 92 on Hiroshima is now declassified, and may be found in the U.K. National Archives, documents AIR 48/160, AIR 48/161, and AIR 48/162; along with those for Nagasaki AIR 48/163, AIR 48/164 and AIR 48/165.  A few low-quality page scans from another copy of volume 2 can also be found online here, here, and here. (That copy, numbered 21, is clearly stamped as having been in the Library of the British Ministry of Works, and it is simply typical of the British Government's civil service on civil defense matters to ensure that useful data is not reprinted by HMSO to increase widespread public understanding of the real nuclear weapons hazards and the mitigation of those hazards, but ends up being sold off for use in expensive, glossy profit-making anti-civil defense propapaganda coffee-table photo compilation books, which concentrate on catering to existing prejudices by focussing on the destruction of obsolete, overcrowded city centre wooden dwellings by fire due to charcoal breakfast braziers, rather than emphasising the relevant nuclear terrorism pro-civil defense data on the survival of modern city buildings in which fires were easily extinguished by survivors, even in the middle of the firestorm.)

Herman Kahn then testified on page 12 of the 1976 Hearings on Civil Preparedness and Limited Nuclear War that tragic results occurred from the gas war effects exaggerations by pacifists in the 1920s-1930s,  preventing instead of preserving peace, while the deluded fears about gas bombing on cities never materialized in WWII (despite the 12,000 tons of stockpiled German tabun nerve gas found in 1945):


Exaggerations of weapons, like the gas extermination myth before WWII (which was used to "justify" first disarmament and later the tragic appeasement policies), actually feed the emotional delusions that cause wars.  Lies cannot be relied upon to deter wars and terrorist extortion, on the contrary, they backfire and encourage it!  What happened in the 1930s was an appeasement policy based on gas "knockout blow" aerial attack delusions which were due to popular media-promoted and "pacifist" (warmonger) promoted lies about war effects.  The people who did this were rewarded with knighthoods and popular acclaim, while Churchill who wanted to avoid war by deterring aggressors with an arms race, were falsely dismissed as "warmongers" by the lying pseudo-pacifists.  As Kahn points out, even if weapons are capable of severe effects in the case of a surprise attack on people standing in the open without taking any cover, this does not mean that they will be used that way in practice.  Fear of escalation, even once WWII had begun, deterred escalation to gas bombs on cities.  A major part of that was due to civil defense, which made such attacks less likely to pay off.  But if you exaggerate the weapons effects by falsely pretending there is no defense, you end up being coerced by enemies until you have your back to a wall and can't run away from the reality.  Then you have to finally face the problems in the pressure of a crisis situation, and the problem may then be so large that you have a major war, very costly in lives and resources:


"A lack of knowledge of modern war and of our defense gives rise to unrealistic ideas which may take on fantastic proportions and cause reactions of terror and anxiety. ... Ignorance may be combatted by obtaining in peacetime information about modern means of making war and about our defense. ... The more knowledge we have about something, the less we need to grope in supposition and misunderstanding ... We should try to obtain a conception about the ways modern weapons operate - their possibilities, but also their limitations. ... We don't hesitate to read about the diseases of the human body in order to obtain knowledge and find cures. ... It does not pay to stick our heads in the sand and say that somebody else will have to take care of that.  Our generation, which has survived two world wars and is now trying to survive the current cold war, is clearly destined to have war or the threat of war always with us. ...  It is urgent that we do not jell into stereotypical thinking and that we try to arrive at our own opinions.  There is a dangerous tendency to simplify the problems ..."

- Dr Walo von Greyerz, Psychology of Survival: Human reactions to the catastrophes of war, Elsevier, New York, 1962, pp 73-74 and 89-90.
Above: Two British Prime Ministers on threats of weapons of mass destruction.  In June 1950, Britain's Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee responded to Russia's August 1949 nuclear weapon test with a personally written and signed Foreword to the UK Home Office, Civil Defence Manual of Basic Training, v2, pamphlet 6, Atomic Warfare, June 1950. (Linked here, 5.9 MB PDF file.)  This Attlee civil defence handbook pointed out clearly on page 9 that the high casualty rate in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions were due to a lack of simple, cheap civil defence countermeasures:


"The [casualty] figures by the British Mission to Japan from the experience of the high air burst bombs used in Japan and under similar conditions apply to persons in a British city.  It must be stressed however that they apply to persons caught in the open with no warning or suitable shelter, and that even ordinary houses will give some degree of protection ..."
(Emphasis as in original.  See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.) 
Attlee also authorized preparations for the testing of standard WWII type civil defence countermeasures at the first ever British nuclear weapon test, Operation Hurricane, in 1952 (Churchill was elected Prime Minister in late 1951 and oversaw the actual test).  By comparison, the September 2002 Foreword to another weapons of mass destruction threat report by another British Labour Party Prime Minister, Tony Blair, Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, omitted any mention of relatively cheap civil defence countermeasures against Iraq's missiles and nerve gas, inventing a scenario with only two options: (1) doing nothing against the threat, or (2) starting an offensive war to disarm the aggressor of weapons of mass destruction.  (Iraq had used nerve gas in the 1980s against Iran and the Kurds, and in a vast sand swept desert landscape like Iraq it's easy to hide weapons of mass destruction at night when satellite's can't observe activities.  Some of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were discovered but this is played down by certain elements of the media.)  The point is, the standard and wrong popular media treatment of the Iraq war in 2002 is that it would be justified by weapons of mass destruction, and unjustified if those weapons didn't exist.





CND civil defence attacker Philip Bolsover's (a former communist party member, see Dr Julian Lewis, "When is a smear not a smear?", Salisbury Review, October 1984) glorification of the Communist revolution in Russia, written for kids.  Dust wrapper blurb: "On November 7th, the discontent of the Russian soldiers, workers and peasants had reached such a peak that, under the leadership of Lenin and his party, the Bolshevik Revolution took place in Petrograd (later renamed Leningrad) [renamed Saint Petersburg when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991]. Philip Bolsover creates the atmosphere of those turbulent times by introducing us to several characters and showing us their everyday lives, surrounded by the spirit of revolution."

Communist author Phil Bolsover wrote the official British CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) publication, CND The Cruellest Confidence Trick, published in May 1980 (the same month as the UK Government published it's civil defence handbook, Protect and Survive, followed by Domestic Nuclear Shelters).   George Stanbury of the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch had already in 1964 disproved firestorm ignition in modern high-rise cities due to the building "mutual shadowing" effect which was not present in Hiroshima or the Nevada desert in nuclear tests.  Bolsover ignored Stanbury's argument because the official UK handbooks omitted Stanbury's actual data and calculations, giving on the conclusions with no evidence or literature references to back it up.  The evidence existed, it was not secret but was limited in distribution, and journalists made no effort to dig it up. Instead, 100% of nuclear cold war journalism was biased in favour of  false,prejudiced conclusion.
Bolsover's May 1980 argument used a false emotion-based comparison of total energy releases, ignoring the proper casualty scaling laws and the increasing effectiveness of duck and cover due to the increasing blast arrival time following the first flash over the larger areas of window destruction which occur for higher yield explosions (see graphs of actual data proving this, given and discussed in detail later in this post, below). Duck and cover was proved in Hiroshima, but the data was kept secret and later limited by America.  Bolsover was author of the 1974 children's book, One Day in Russia 1917, glorifying the Communist revolution in Russia in October 1917 from the standpoint of the hard-done-by peasants who suffered under the Tsar's tyranny.  Bolsover and the biased BBC Panorama team also claimed in his March 1982 revised Civil Defence: The Cruellest Confidence Trick that people couldn't carry the shielding material needed to protect against fallout.  Cresson H. Kearny responded by pointing out that you can just line boxes or drawers with plastic bags containing water, which shields radiation.  Water is useful to have handy in bulk because it is also drinkable and can be used for putting out fires.  Another false claim was using 1940 inefficient manual rescue data to "disprove" civil defence rescue in falout areas.  First, only the downwind portion of the blasted area is highly contaminated by fallout, and people who are survive under a table in a collapsed house (see photos and data later in this post) are shielded by the rubble from the fallout radiation, which isn't a gas.  Second, the 1940 rescue data Bolsover uses was from inexperienced civil defence at the start of the Blitz; by the end of the war search dogs and heavy rescue cranes and bulldozers were being used to speed up rescue greatly which in nuclear disaster would be relevant about 2 days after the explosion (when fallout radiation is just 1% of the 1 hour level), which would cut radiation exposure of rescue teams in nuclear disaster.
Phil Bolsover CND March 1982 book Civil Defence the Cruellest Confidence Trick 2nd ed was cited and used by Duncan Campbell's War Plan UK which popularized falsehoods attacking all civil defense.  It's falsehoods still permeate all censorship "arguments" used to keep the facts "taboo" in the popular media today, which is highly deluded by the Marxist/Communist false indoctrination on nuclear attack effects.

Just as the "Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group" had published books and pamphlets in the 1930s claiming that civil defence was all lies for propaganda to support a doomsday WWII war against the Nazis in which the whole of humanity would be blasted to death by high explosives, burned to death by incendiary bombs, and gassed to death by mustard gas and other secret gases, so in the 1980s when the USSR needed deterring from its massive militarism and invasions, the "Scientists Against Nuclear Arms (SANA)" did precisely the same thing as their 1930s counterparts had done: exaggerate weapons effects and dismiss cheap countermeasures for civil defence.  Just as Nazi eugenics had been passed off as acceptable groupthink fashion and a lesser threat than gas in war in the 1930s, so in the 1980s dictatorial Marxist communism was passed off as a smaller threat to humanity than nuclear deterrence to defend liberty.  To accomplish this, the effects of war and the usefulness of civil defence countermeasures were falsified.  They did this to try to further, through the "worst form" of propaganda, an abuse of science to further political agenda - not an objective unbiased fact-searching, critical scientific agenda.  As early as 1950, the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch was well aware of the lying propaganda exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons and attacking civil defense countermeasures for communist appeasement:



Above: the 1950 U.K. Home Office Scientific Adviser's Branch "Top Secret" classified report The Number of Atomic Bombs Equivalent to the Last War Air Attacks on Great Britain and Germany, CD/SA 16 (National Archives document reference HO 225/16)  (It was regraded from "Top Secret" to "Restricted" in 1958, but was never published.)

Table 6.1 in Confidential American manual TM 23-200 Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, 1957, and Table 10-1 in Secret American manual DNA-EM-1 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, 1972, contain data on survival in collapsed brick houses in V1 cruise missile attacks from Dr Derman G. Christopherson's Confidential-classified British Ministry of Home Security Research and Experiments Department report RC-450, Structural Defence, 1945 (UK National Archives document HO 195/16, a complete post-war revision of the unclassified 1939 pre-war Air Raid Precautions Handbook number 5, Structural Defence).

Dr Christopherson (1915-2000), an engineer, was awarded an OBE for writing Structural Defence, 1945. In that book he gave the scientific basis for "duck and cover": he found that in a survey of over 1,000 people in 2-3 story brick houses in England, over 75% survived total demolition of their homes, if they had a slight warning and could "duck and cover".  This is something that is only indirectly asserted/implied in all early British and American civil defence (e.g. the American "duck and cover" film and the British bar-chart on relative survival rates in different positions on page 12 of the 1950 unclassified publication Basic methods of protection against high explosive missiles), but it is not directly referenced and so lacked the ability to give credibility to cheap countermeasures.  (Christopherson's V1 casualty data is online in Stephen M. Gilbert's PhD thesis: 7.84 MB PDF, linked here.)

The two graphs below demonstrate that for a given population protection (Western houses, wooden houses, outdoors, shelters), the casualties per ton of bomb yield decreases as yield increases, the fact that damage radii scale as the cube-root of yield implies that lethal areas increase as the square of that or the two-thirds power of yield, so that the casualties per unit yield scales as the (2/3 - 1) = -1/3 power.  In fact, as the diagram below shows, the rate of fall in the casualties per ton with increasing bomb poweris even greater, about the power -1/2, because some people will instinctively duck on seeing the very bright flash, and because the average blast arrival time over the median lethal area increases with yield, this instinctive reaction is more effective for larger explosions with a greater arrival time of potentially injurious blast!





The larger the explosion, the FEWER casualties per unit energy release for similar conditions, because (1) the area of destruction scales up less than in direct proportion to the energy release, and (2) the larger areas of destruction mean an increasing average blast wave arrival time, allowing more time for "duck and cover" between the flash and the blast and sound arrival.  For 1 psi peak overpressure (flying glass from window breakage), at 1 kiloton yield you have 4 seconds to "duck and cover", but at 1 megaton you have 40 seconds to "duck and cover" before 1 psi blast arrives.  These laws of physics mean that smaller explosions cause MORE casualties per unit energy than larger explosions do.  As the graph above proves, there is experimental evidence to substantiate these laws of physics.  It is also easier to spend a few seconds lying flat to avoid blast winds and horizontally blasted glass fragments in a nuclear explosions, than to spend months doing so during the repeated conventional air raids, which are required to deliver the same amount of energy!  Propagandarists of fashionable groupthink always dismiss the evidence, and do a direct comparison of conventional and nuclear as if it were valid, a massive exaggeration.  In addition, liars deny that duck and cover becomes more credible as yield increases.  (Source: H. M. Government, Health and Safety Executive (Commission), Advisory Committee on Major Hazards, Second Report, 1979, Figure 3. PDF: http://consultations.hse.gov.uk/gf2.ti/f/4194/126437.1/pdf/-/acmh2.pdf.)
Exaggerations as attacks on civil defence based on ignorance not facts, and fear mongering, all sell in the media.  Truth doesn't sell!  The mainstream media is - when it comes to anything concerning radiation or nuclear physics - a dictatorial fear-mongering terrorist, lying and supporting liars in pursuit of wealth and power, while being awarded for the job with prizes for lying.  As Orwell defined it in 1984, "protective stupidity" or crimestop is: "the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments ... and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction."

This exaggeration of weapons effects and ignorance of civil defence effectiveness occurred before, in the mid 1930s, causing the appeasement of dictatorships and consequently a world war.  Fear-mongering lies was the Nazi and USSR dictatorship technique of paralyzing the enemy with fear and censoring dissent, and it's precisely the technique used today by the chicken-yellow and corrupted media/politicians/historians/scientists who revel in fascism.  Civil defence was proved valid in WWII to mitigate all kinds of weapons effects against civilians.  The evidence is simply being ignored.  





Illustrated London News 24 Aug 1940  See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.
Illustrated London News 24 Aug 1940  See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.
Illustrated London News 24 Aug 1940  See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.




"Critics" of duck and cover ever since, including prominent physicists and historians, have ignored these secret data (Christopherson's report was declassified in 1975, long ago!) and used the pseudo-scientific technique of "ridicule" to dismiss the facts. (See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.)  Philip D. Bulson gives a potted history of this Ministry of Home Security research on civil defence countermeasures against explosions in his 1997 book Explosive Loading of Engineering Structures (Chapman and Hall, London, publishers, page 9):
"[Mathematical physicist Sir Geoffrey I.] Taylor wrote many valuable papers on the dynamics of shock waves for the Civil Defence Research Committee in the early days of the Second World War, and it is from these that much of the analysis has been taken.  His work was summarized lucidly by D. G. Christopherson in 1945 [Structural Defence, 1945, RC-450] and the latter's summary has been consulted frequently by the author in writing the chapters of this book.  In the summer of 1945 Christopherson wrote his seminal report on the structural effects of air attack, the information having been collected during the Second World War by the Research and Experiments Department, Ministry of Home Security, and much of it coming from experiments carried out on behalf of that Department by the Building Research Station and Road Research Laboratory.  Contributions were also drawn from the work of the National Defence Research Committee in the USA.  Christopherson's report, entitled Structural Defence, covered every aspect of the subject from the theory of blast waves in air, earth or water to the general theory of structural behaviour and the design of protective structures of all types.  Christopherson was educated at Oxford, was a fellow at Harvard and then a postgraduate at Oxford before joining the Research and Experiments Department of the Ministry of Home Security in 1941.  He left, after writing Structural Defence in the space of two or three months after victory in Europe, to join the Engineering Department at Cambridge University in 1945."


British National Archives V2 data.  
The first V1 in England hit Swanscombe in Kent on 13 June 1944, the last of 6,725 fired at Britain hit Orpington in Kent on 27 March 1945. Altogetherm 2,340 V1s hit London, killing 5,475 and injuring 16,000 injured. V2 rocket bombardment of London totalled about 1,400 and began in September 1944. Over the next few months, nearly 1,400 struck London. Because they were supersonic, V2s killed and injured more people since they gave no warning, unlike the slower-moving V1, whose noisy pulse jet engine cut-out and thus gave a warning of impending impact and explosion.
Summary:

V1: duck and cover, 76.5% survival in flattened houses within 70 ft of ground zero (RC-450).

V2: no duck and cover, 38% survival in flattened houses within 70 ft of ground zero (S118).

Hence, duck and cover doubled survival rates in totally destroyed brick buildings, as well as halving the percentages of both seriously and lightly injured survivors!  Since the flash of a nuclear explosion precedes the blast arrival over most of the area where houses are flattened (there is even more time over the much wider area of broken windows), people informed about nuclear weapons can achieve V1 survival rates, over 75% survival in demolished buildings.

Outside the 70 ft range of "grade A" complete destruction to British brick houses in V1 and V2 attacks (1 ton TNT equivalent), there is a "grade B" partial collapse area from 70-100 ft radius, where there was only 2.7% killed in V1 (duck and cover) attacks (RC-450) and 7.5% killed in V2 (no duck and cover) attacks (S-118).  In the 100-300 ft radius zone, "C grade" damaged houses (90% of people totally unhurt indoors for V2s) remained standing out to with wrecked roofs and badly cracked walls (beyond economic repair), while in the 300-600 ft zone 99.5% of people were unhurt indoors for V2s and houses had repairable "D grade" damage, mostly broken windows.

The peak overpressure for A, B, C and D damage limits, i.e. 70, 100, 300 and 600 ft from a surface burst of 1 ton of TNT are 30, 15, 2.5 and 1 psi.  The blast overpressures for house collapse decreases with increasing bomb yield, due to the increasing blast duration.  In 1959, the equivalent peak overpressures for A, B, C, and D damage from 20 kt nuclear weapons were assessed to be 11, 6, 1.5 and 0.75 psi in the Home Office publication Nuclear Weapons.  (Unfortunately, the stupid secrecy over the basis of this analysis kept the basic scientific data from both politicians and the public, and even from later Home Office investigators.  By the 1980s, everybody who had done the 1945-59 analysis had retired from the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch (then renamed the Scientific Research and Development Branch) and didn't understand the detailed origins of the blast casualty data, particularly the allowance for blast duration and duck and cover using detailed V1 and V2 data.  E.g., Dr S Hadjipavlous and Dr G. Carr-Hill wrote the Home Office Scientific Research and Development Branch report 34/86, A Review of the Blast Casualty Rules Applicable to UK Houses, 1986, which only gives American data plus an early Blitz conventional bombing report from Solly Zuckerman (not the vital yet confidential  V1 and V2 analysis of duck and cover effectiveness).  (See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.)

Professor Thomas, after completing report S118, headed the British Mission to Japan, to compare shelter survival in the nuclear weapon attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to conventional bombing on London. His staff in Hiroshima and Nagasaki included Frank H. Pavry, who in 1952 went to Monte Bello with George R. Stanbury of the Home Office Scientific Advisory Brancy and confirmed the nuclear shelter survival data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki by exposing 15 Anderson shelters to heavy blast effects at the first British nuclear weapons test, Operation Hurricane; Pavry also later exposed several models of the London underground to simulated nuclear attack explosions to confirm that it would give good protection against blast and cratering from megaton surface bursts.


The main threat from blast outdoors is being blown along if standing up.  Direct blast injury (air forced into the blood stream through lung damage) occurs only at very high overpressures.  Lying prone reduces this by both reducing the cross-sectional area exposed to blast winds, and by increasing the ground friction (body area in contact with the ground), which provides the contact force resisting displacement by wind drag.  Indoors, some early calculations (above right) neglected the floor friction and "predicted" that people would be blown straight out of buildings.  Nuclear test data from Nevada, however, showed that lying dummies were unmoved at 5.3 psi.  Increasing the blast duration (by going to higher yield nuclear weapons) does not increase the peak wind speed for 5.3 psi.  If the force from a given wind speed is unable to push someone along or blow a house down, increasing the duration of that force does not increase damage (if you push something with less force than is needed to move it or destroy it, increasing the time you push for has no effect; thus the threshold for damage or displacement is independent of impulse and depends merely on the force per unit area, or pressure).  Naive 1960s computer models which neglected indoor floor drag on prone personnel (treating the floor like an ice rink, with no friction) falsely predicted they would be blown out and killed by the fall to the ground.  This skyscraper gravity fall miscalculation in secret reports was then falsely correlated to visible house damage photos from 5 psi brick house collapse in the 29 kt Apple-2 nuclear test (Nevada, 1955) by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment report The Effects of Nuclear War, which falsely claimed 50% mortality at 5-6 psi (house collapse pressure).  In fact, much higher peak overpressures are correlated with 50% mortality, and easy survival countermeasures against house collapse were proved in WWII (see below).


"... the impulse criterion breaks down for the atomic bomb.  The position is that the blast impulse [pressure integrated over blast duration time] is only the criterion of damage so long as the maximum blast pressure is substantially greater than the static strength of the target ... If the effective blast pressure exceeds the static strength of the structure, failure must be expected, whereas if it is less no failure can occur however long the duration of the blast." - UK Home Office, Civil Defence Manual of Basic Training, v2, pamphlet 6, Atomic Warfare, June 1950, page 12.  There is a minimum threshold peak overpressure that is required for damage, regardless of bomb size or blast duration!  Only if this threshold is exceeded, can damage occur.  If you push on a wall with less force than the yielding force of the wall, it won't fall over, regardless how long you push.  The blast duration effect is most important for sub-kiloton energy yields and blast wind-drag sensitive targets (e.g., people standing up, not people lying down!).

In addition, for house collapse injury the blast winds for higher-yield weapons reduce the vertical weight of debris falling per unit area by spreading it over a larger area, mostly down range.  The roof is blown off, etc.  This means that the weight of debris falling vertically down on people sheltering under tables is reduced.  The outer walls absorb much blast wind pressure energy, which reduces translation, so that people lying prone under tables indoors are far safer from both wind drag, body area exposed to horizontally flying debris, and vertically falling debris than people standing behind windows.  (See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.)

ABOVE: Dr F. C. Ikle's book The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction (1958) demonstrates that with any kind of basic cheap civil defense, people were less vulnerable than buildings in WWII conventional and nuclear attacks, e.g. page 16: "Hamburg, for instance, lost only 3.3 % of its population, but 48% of its dwellings in the air raids.  In Frankfurt, less than 1% of the population was killed in air raids, but over one third of the dwellings were destroyed.  Air raid deaths in Kobe amounted to barely 1% of the population, but over one half of the housing was lost."  (See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.)  Like Anderson shelters or the "crumple zones" in cars, the damage done to a house absorbs blast energy and thereby reduce the danger from the blast wave, as long as people duck and cover (on seeing the very bright flash, which arrives before the blast wave) to avoid flying and falling debris.  On page 215, Ikle points out that: "Hamburg, which had lost half of its housing [in the worst firestorm in history in the wooden medieval part of the city centre, far worse than the relatively weak firestorm in nuclear-bombed Hiroshima], had recovered its prewar population by 1950, and Greater London's population in 1948 was only about 2 % below its prewar size."  Discounting sensible, temporary evacuation from fire and radioactivity areas, there was no panic either (contrary to prewar propaganda by Cambridge Scientists' Antiwar Group), as Ikle explains on page 15: "Reports from very large disasters of the past fail to show any significant mass panic among the afflicted population.  Findings from Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg, and other large bombings in World War II do not indicate that serious mass panic occurred at any time."

On page 37, Ikle explains that the skin contamination danger from nerve gas is analogous to that mustard gas (which is easier to make than nerve gas, and so has a similar cost per unit toxic dose): "Mustard gas, for example, which was first used some forty years ago, affects the skin as well as the respiratory organs, so that gas masks do not offer adequate protection."  However, as in WWII mustard gas risks, skin contamination hazards don't negate the value of gas masks: the inhalation threat is larger than the skin contamination by droplets if people remain indoors in shelters, so in practice cheap gas masks are adequate.  Ikle quotes the 1956 British Statement on Defence (Cmd. 9691, p 28): "Having regard to the difficulties of mounting a successful gas attack [Britain stockpiled C7 civilian gas masks for all ages in the entire population from 1953 in the cold war, an improvement on the earlier WWII version], it appears improbable that even the most deadly nerve gases would be used against urban areas by an enemy who had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them available to him."

 Ikle also lists in Table 16 on page 159 the economic disruption to UK cities from devastating air raids (using Research and Experiments Department research by the Ministry of Home Security, see also HO 225/13: The economic and social effects of the German air attacks on certain British cities).  E.g., the destruction of Coventry by the 14-15 November 1940 Blitz air raid caused an average 4.5 days loss of work per worker (2.0 days lost for personal reasons, and 2.5 days lost due to business disruption).  For the heavy raid on Clydebank on 14-15 March 1941, an average of 8.7 days work were lost per worker.  Ikle also points out on page 163: "Only 1.3 to 1.7 % of England's working population was ever engaged in full-time civil defence activities, as compared with the 11 to 23 % who were in the armed forces."  He adds on that page that 7 months after the Hamburg firestorm, the building trade in the city had recovered 80% of its pre-destruction strength.
WWII casualty data in Christopherson's Structural Defence, 1945 has been substantiated at more recent explosions since 1945.


Radiation is't up to its scare-mongering image, either!  Radiation unbinds cancer-suppressing p53 from its inhibitor MDM2, thus reducing cancer and genetic defects at 0.7 mGy/hour, increasing lifespan.  Try looking for that benefit of Fukishima's strontium-90 leak in the Hitler money-spinning media.  Guess what, it's censored out by the Nazis.  Do you want to know the science?  The mechanism for DNA repair and cancer avoidance by p53 is as follows (note that other tumour suppressor genes also exist, e.g. PTEN regulates the growth rate of cells, but p53 is central):



1. Once activated by radiation, p53 arrests the cell cycle at the G1/S regulation point by activating the expression of a transducer gene like the kinase inhibitor p21 (which stops the cell division cycle by binding to CDK2), or the Growth Arrest and DNA Damage "GADD45" gene, and then – while the cell cycle is stopped – it repairs the DNA damage using a DNA repair enzyme like p53 R2, GADD45, p48 or XPC.

2. If the damage is beyond safe repair, p53 uses genes like DR5, Plg3, AIP1, Noxa, Bax-2, Puma or Fas to produce proteins that kill the cell by "apoptosis" (programmed cell death), to prevent it from turning carcinogenic. P53 is so effective at preventing cancer that most cancers (over 50% of human tumours including lung, colon, breast, cervical and bladder cancer) actually only arise when defective mutations of the p53 gene (TP53) occur because the defective p53 cannot activate p21 to stop a cell’s division for repair work (reference: M. Hollstein, et al., "p53 mutations in human cancers," Science, v253, 1991, pp.49-53).





Page 14 of the Confidential-classified American manual of 1917, Defensive Measures Against Gas Attacks, states: "The value of gas-proof dugouts and cellars has been clearly demonstrated.  This should be borne in mind in view of the inflammation of the skin produced by mustard gas."  Like mustard gas, persistent nerve agents are spread in liquid droplets which can be kept off the skin by simply remaining indoors because of their low volatility and hence low vapor pressure.  Sarin evaporates 3 times more slowly than water at 15 C.

(Source: UK Home Office, Civil Defence Manual for Technical Reconnaissance Officers, Part 2, 1953, Table 1, Restricted.  Page 17 of this manual notes that the standard WWII charcoal absorber gas masks afforded complete protection against nerve gas, despite the fact that British pro-communist or anti-civil defense historians assume that nerve gas somehow made obsolete the standard indoor skin protection methods developed for Lewisite and mustard gas blister agents, and standard gas masks.  This widespread myth of nerve gas negating simple defenses is just not true.  Page 17 also notes that the 12 kilotons of tabun stockpiled by Germany in WWII was cheaper to make than sarin, which offset the increased toxicity of sarin, adding: "In the weapon charging used in Germany, the Tabun was mixed with 20% chlorobenzene, apparently in an attempt to increase the density of the charging for ballistic reasons, though the admixture also has the effect of masking the [fruity] odor of the gas.")




BRITISH GOVERNMENT, HOUSE OF COMMONS DEBATE ON CIVIL DEFENCE, 24 March 1983, extracts (Hansard vol 39 cc1083-99 1083 8.28 pm):

Neil Thorne, MP (Ilford, South): I am delighted that the important subject of civil defence is being debated so early in the evening. I am particularly pleased to open the debate, as I have recently become chairman of the National Council for Civil Defence. … Those who support nuclear disarmament are convinced that the only type of war that we can ever expect is an all-out nuclear holocaust. They completely ignore the fact that there have been dozens of wars since the second world war and that none of them has been nuclear. … I am pleased that The Times has chosen today to publish a letter written by Lord Renton as president of the National Council for Civil Defence, supported by Lord Mottistone, my vice-chairman, and by hon. Members on the Opposition side of the House, including the Labour Member for Bradford, North (Mr. Ford), the Liberal Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Ross) and myself. The letter says:

Hostile attacks for which we should be prepared, include:  
1. A conventional attack in which no nuclear bombs are dropped.
2. One or two nuclear bombs dropped on us as 'blackmail' to bring a conventional war to an end.
3. An 'all-out' nuclear holocaust, or even 'germ' or chemical warfare on a large scale. 
Some people wrongly assume that this third possibility is the only one which is conceivable, arguing that there would be no survivors and that all civil defence preparations are a waste of time even to protect people on the periphery and in remote areas from fall-out. Their argument is then falsely extended to the denial of civil defence in all circumstances. In the past 30 years all the great powers have been involved in conventional wars and no nuclear weapons have been used. The greatest danger is therefore that of a conventional attack, especially after the recent massive increase in Soviet conventional arms. Even the possibility of one or two bombs being dropped is also much more realistic than an 'all-out' attack.  If conventional weapons only are used, or if there is only a limited use of nuclear missiles, adequate civil defence preparations made well in advance could save millions of lives. 
Although beyond the present statutory scope of civil defence, there is also the need to protect people from the effects of peacetime nuclear disasters and of fall-out drifting over this country from a nuclear attack elsewhere. The same preparations are then required as for dealing with a limited nuclear attack here. Those who declare 'nuclear-free zones' and refuse to have anything to do with civil defence are either victims of ignorance or prejudice, or are content to give an enemy a tremendous advantage. Failure to co-operate in providing civil defence is irresponsible and callous. Unfortunately, that sums up the attitude of a growing sector of the population. …
Much public criticism of civil defence arose over the issue by the Home Office of a publication called "Protect and Survive". That booklet was subject to considerable misrepresentation and derision and clearly was not an appropriate document for peacetime information. It was originally intended to be issued to supplement a massive media campaign to give people advice in a crisis. A new publication is now proposed which will examine the whole spectrum of the threat …

There is a great need for research into all aspects of civil defence. We spend enormous sums of money on military research and development, but have not done nearly enough in civil defence. This will become much more important if the recently announced experiments [Reagan's ABM laser pumped by X-rays from a nuclear test underground in Nevada] are successful in producing some kind of laser ray which will be able to control an atomic explosion. Those who at the moment are putting their heads in the sand will then have no possible excuse for not playing a full part in civil defence. … if it is possible to devise an antidote [SDI/Star Wars ABM] that is sufficient to neutralise the majority of these horrible weapons, civil defence will have an even more important role. It will then be much easier for all citizens to appreciate how much good can be done. … It is vital that we get this message across. I ask my hon. and learned Friend to consider bringing out some kind of publication that can be issued to the population as a whole, specifying the sort of thing that is required and what civil defence sets out to do. … Something produced efficiently and expertly and, I hope, in the near future, would be extremely welcome and would make a major contribution. … The Home Office could do much to encourage people who, at their own expense, are producing such documents. …

Certain statements have been made recently by learned bodies about the impossibility of coping with a nuclear holocaust. … The Home Office has a major task in distinguishing fact from fiction.  The boundary between science fiction and fact in nuclear matters is very fine. The Home Office must be the arbiter of what is fact and what is fiction. When learned bodies make statements, the Home Office must be quite clear about their accuracy. That would be a significant contribution and would fend off any irresponsible interpretation. … It is vital that the Home Office takes up the reins of the information cycle properly to equip the population to consider the issues in a balanced way. …I must ask my hon. and learned Friend the Minister to look carefully into whether it is necessary to finance a publicity campaign with this in mind. … There is only so much that the private individual can do and can be expected to pay for out of his own pocket. … I fear that the only way that we can do that is with the help of the Home Office, spending money on informing people and bringing out a proper publicity campaign to show precisely what can be done and what can be achieved if we set about it properly.

Mr. John Wheeler, MP (Paddington):

The policy of deterrence adopted by Britain and its NATO allies has to date proved supremely successful in preventing such an attack. Western Europe has been fortunate to avoid war since 1945, in stark contrast to the misfortunes in so many other parts of the world. Nevertheless, the sheer horror of such a nuclear attack is insufficient reason for ignoring it. Any responsible Government must take realistic steps to mitigate its effect on the population. Indeed, unless a Government take such steps it can be argued that the credibility of their deterrence policy would be greatly reduced. … Part of the problem is that several Labour local authorities are refusing to co-operate. I am sorry that the Labour party and the Liberal and Social Democratic parties are not represented here. It is remarkable that when we are talking about the survival of the British people only one party should trouble itself to take part in the debate. The Labour authorities prefer to put their heads in the sand, thinking that if they refuse to contemplate a threat it will just go away. Recently, Mr. Kenneth Livingstone, the leader of the Greater London council, declared London a nuclear-free zone. Presumably, those of us who live in Greater London can now sleep soundly.  Unfortunately, the fact that a nuclear attack is horrific does not mean that it is impossible, and if it is possible, the House must consider steps to mitigate its effects. … substantial resources are being allocated to civil defence both in the Soviet Union and in China. …

Early steps must be taken to examine the role of the local authorities in the provision of these measures. It is not good enough to say, "We are declaring a particular city a nuclear-free zone," and then to forget about the subject. Nor is it good enough to say, "But it will cost money and the ratepayers or the taxpayers will not want to find it." That is not the case. The Government must take a real initiative to examine what can be done to develop real civil defence programmes throughout the country.

The provision of well-designed literature by the Home Office, explaining the issue and what can be done, would be invaluable. The Home Department has already shown itself more than capable of producing excellent literature in connection with its crime prevention campaigns. I am sure that a similar range of literature could be designed to promote the concept of civil defence. At present, those who merely seek one-sided disarmament or who feel that there is no point in trying to provide any civil defence are getting the best of the argument. Now is the time to promote a real campaign. In raising this subject for debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South has rendered us a great service.

Mr. John Loveridge, MP (Upminster):

We are to have Trident missiles for the defence of the United Kingdom and to deter any threat of attack against our kingdom, but will people across the world believe in them if we do not provide the most elementary and minimal safeguards for our population and cities which are unprepared and undefended? … Our weakness in having the Trident missile without some security for the civil population can only egg on the hawks in Moscow to take risks that otherwise their colleagues might not allow them to take. These risks will probably be at their greatest in the mid-1980s when it seems likely that Russia’s military strength will be at a peak compared to that of the Western allies. It is likely to fall proportionately thereafter. We must encourage the doves and not the hawks. …

The Government … should educate the public in measures for self- and mutual support … should plan to meet the dangers of disease from chemicals, gas and radioactive fallout. … If such steps were taken, the United Kingdom could approach and encourage the United States and Russia to get together to form a world emergency help service. Threats are worldwide. We should consider the famine in Ethiopia ...

How much easier it is likely to be for us all if we work together to meet future accidents and the threat of other nations that, for religious or other motives, might acquire atomic weapons and threaten humanity with them. How much easier it would be to control and safeguard the world against that if the great powers worked together. If each country took proper steps to protect its own civilian population, diplomatic measures should prove easier to arrange. ... It is not sufficient to provide deep shelters for officialdom and the military. The people who need protection are the people and the children of these islands.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Patrick Mayhew, MP):

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mr. Thorne) on his initiative in choosing this subject for debate and on his recent appointment as chairman of the National Council for Civil Defence. … It is also pleasant to acknowledge that my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Mr. Loveridge) is the vice-president of that organisation.

It is extremely important to have frequent opportunities to discuss civil defence. The subject should attract the support of all hon. Members, whatever their views about world alignments or nuclear deterrence. Everyone should acknowledge that, since we cannot guarantee that there will never in any circumstances be an attack upon this country, it is our humanitarian duty to provide appropriate protection for our people. All the Government's efforts in defence and in foreign policy are bent to avoiding any risk of attack and to doing our best to avoid a breach of the peace in western Europe that has been maintained for the past 38 years. But none of us can guarantee that such a horrific event will not occur, and it is against that possibility—a low risk at present—that we must provide appropriate civil defence.

It is fair to say that civil defence had been a Cinderella subject for successive Governments for more than a decade, until this Government came to office in May 1979. It is only just to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to acknowledge that, under his administration, civil defence has been rescued from that status. Much more attention has been paid to it, and the amount of money devoted to it from public funds has been increased by 60 per cent. following a review, the results of which he announced in August 1980. … We have 12 scientists working on civil defence, and their activities include much detailed research on weapon effects, casualties, shelter policies, and the effect of chemical attack. Scientific advisers also help in other matters, including training. … For my part I find if difficult to understand the conscience that would lead someone to say, “No, I cannot bring myself to help my fellow citizens,” in the sort of emergency that we are discussing. … if a new house were required to have shelter accommodation built into it the overall cost would rise by about 25 per cent. The risk of war at the present time, as long as we remain members of NATO, is so low as not to justify that additional expense for those why buy new houses. It is the old story, that if one does not contribute to NATO or spend the sums that we spend on our armed forces, with very good reason, there is more money available for that sort of protection. However, one is then limited to trying to protect one's people from a war that one has done nothing to prevent.

[Wrong.  Civil defence actually has a deterrent role against the threat of a nuclear, chemical or other attack, because it reduces the effectiveness of the attack, thereby denigrating the benefit-to-risks calculation of an opponent who contemplates such an attack.  During WWII Britain’s gas masks and gas proof rooms knowledge acted as a deterrent against 12,000 tons of Nazi tabun nerve gas.  Britain had mustard gas to retaliate against the Germany, but that is no deterrent, for the reason that Germany had very effective gas proofed cellars and some gas masks and protective clothing for civil defence decontamination workers who would not be in the gas proofed cellars during gas attacks.  Therefore, Britain’s main deterrent against 12,000 tons of Nazi tabun nerve gas was NOT Britain’s mustard gas stockpile, but rather Britain’s gas masks and knowledge of simple improvised gas-proofing to keep liquid drops of contamination and most gas out of homes, using emergency window covers or refuge rooms without windows, even if other windows were broken by blast.  Thus, Britain deterred Nazi tabun nerve gas using (1) activated charcoal in its general purpose war gas mask canisters, plus (2) knowledge of how to keep a rain of tabun droplets and vapour from contaminating skin or a refuge room in a home or shelter, not by relying on gas “retaliation”.  This point is absolutely crucial.]

BRITISH GOVERNMENT, HOUSE OF COMMONS DEBATE ON CIVIL DEFENCE, 26 October 1983, extracts (Hansard, vol 47, cc336-74, 7:50pm):

Hon. Douglas Hurd, MP (Witney):

Because of the horrors involved in any outbreak of war people are naturally reluctant to think clearly about civil defence. This makes it an easy subject for vague political emotion and a difficult subject for rational debate. … If, against our expectation, the deterrent were to break down there would be a wide range of possible actions by the enemy who attacked us. There might be a period of conventional warfare, at the end of which diplomacy would stop the war. There might be a strike, as a demonstration, by a single nuclear weapon and such a weapon might be either small or big. Such a strike might be directed against a city or a military target. … We are now faced with the possibility of smaller, more accurate weapons. … There is a wide range of possibilities, beginning with conventional warfare and stretching to a massive nuclear attack. … So, although it would be convenient to be more precise, it would also in our judgment be intellectually dishonest.  Critics of civil defence often home in on the worst option as if it were the only one. … I cannot understand the logic of people who say—they have been saying it again in the past few days—that, because the consequences of a massive nuclear attack would be horrific, there is no point in planning, through civil defence, to deal with conventional warfare or a single nuclear strike. … the range of risks show that we do not accept all the assumptions about the nature of an attack which are made in the BMA [British Medical Association; a health industry socialist trade union] report. … a letter sent from the Home Office in April [1983] was taken by the authors of the BMA report as reflecting on their professional integrity.* … It would not matter to the survivors how they had voted, what their professional bodies had said, or whether their local authority had called their town or village a nuclear-free zone. If the worst came to the worst, all that would be irrelevant. In those circumstances the survivors would turn out and help. As that is so, there is surely everything to be said for planning and training which would make that help not haphazard but effective.

* - This April 1983 internal letter from the Home Office scientific advisory branch on civil defence, referred to by Douglas Hurd in the House of Commons, in the strongest terms criticised the propaganda bias in the BBC and Guardian-hyped 3 March 1983 BMA nuclear weapons effects exaggerations.  The letter was leaked and published by the Guardian newspaper:

 “The style of this [BMA report] presentation, and the arbitrary conclusions in favour of the SANA figures [SANA = Scientists Against Nuclear Arms, a political lobby group against cheap civil defense and against the only type of deterrence which has prevented World War in history] where they were deemed by the inquiry to conflict with Home Office figures, reflected a high degree of bias towards the CND case, and lack of cogent argument or analysis. The report must be regarded as strongly influenced by CND — type propaganda; it cannot be regarded as an objective, scientific document.”

Mr Bill Walker, MP (North Tayside):

It is important that my hon. Friend should be told that, before the 1939 war, some local authorities in this country refused to build Anderson shelters. If I am called to speak in the debate I shall draw attention to that fact, because the effect of their decisions was horrendous.




Mr Robert Banks, MP (Harrogate):

I base my arguments strongly on the need to protect people from conventional attack, but as a double insurance it is better to escalate that protection to include nuclear attack. We need long-term planning. Those who criticise "Protect and Survive" as a leaflet are justified in their criticisms because it was designed originally to be used during a period of extreme tension and crisis and gave advice to householders on what measures they could take with the material that they had to hand.

Mr Neil Thorne, MP (Ilford South):

As chairman of the National Council for Civil Defence, I meet many local emergency planning officers who wish to serve the public in a typically selfless way, but who are being frustrated by misguided local politicians at every turn … I cannot understand how those who shout the loudest about survival and unilateral nuclear disarmament are blind to the basic humanitarian need to protect the population against every eventuality. No one I have ever met claims that there would be no survivors, even in a nuclear conflict. Civil defence is designed to cater not only for nuclear conflict. If that is so, surely it is every human being's obligation to offer help and assistance.

Ms Harriet Harman, MP (Peckham):

As the hon. Gentleman is chairman of the National Council for Civil Defence, can he tell the House how much notice hon. Members will have to return to their constituencies in the event of a nuclear emergency? Will only hon. Members such as myself—or even hon. Members such as myself — be able to reach their constituencies? How much warning will be given to enable us to join our constituents in a nuclear shelter?

Mr Neil Thorne, MP (Ilford South):

I am sorry that the hon. Lady has been present for so little time that she did not hear much of the previous debate. In a time of conflict varying lengths of time apply. In the second world war six months elapsed before any hostilities of any magnitude took place which affected the civilian population but — [Interruption.] Labour Members may have more information than I. They may know what the Kremlin has in mind while I do not.

Mr Bill Walker, MP (North Tayside):

Does my hon. Friend agree that aerial attacks against the United Kingdom did not commence until many months after the war started and the main attacks took place in 1940?

Mr Neil Thorne, MP (Ilford South):

That is exactly the point that I was making. Labour Members seem to think that they will have only four minutes in which to make preparations. That is clearly not the case. The idea that there would be no adequate warning and that an attack would come entirely out of the blue confines one to believing that that could happen only if some madman were to have his finger on a nuclear button somewhere in the middle east causing a nuclear attack to descend upon us without prior warning so that there would be no preparation for conflict.

Mr Edward Leigh, MP (Gainsborough and Horncastle):

Tonight Opposition Members have said that civil defence does not make any sense. If that is so, why does virtually every country in the world— from neutral Switzerland to the Soviet Union—have civil defence? The answer is that no one can foretell what horrors war will bring or whether we shall have to face a conventional or a nuclear attack.

BRITISH GOVERNMENT, HOUSE OF COMMONS DEBATE ON CIVIL PROTECTION IN PEACETIME, 21 February 1986, extracts (Hansard, vol 92, cc587-627, 9:41 am):

Mr. Robert Banks, MP (Harrogate):

Does my hon. Friend agree that the horror of Hiroshima was due to the enormous fire that raged through the city and that its enormity was largely because the houses were made of wood? Therefore, the effect of the fire after the dropping of the nuclear bomb was quite different from the effect of a fire if a nuclear bomb were to be dropped on a city that was constructed of more robust material.

Sir Hector Monro, MP:

That is true, When I visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki [in late 1945 just after the war ended] I found that there were acres and acres of complete devastation, with occasionally a concrete building still standing above the wreckage. Fire was the serious result of high-explosive bombardment in other cities that I visited in Japan - for example, in Tokyo and Yokohama - apart from the nuclear bombardment.

Mr. Gerald Bowden, MP (Dulwich):

We have seen from the approach of many local authorities and individuals that civil defence is seen to be in conflict with the disarmament movement, or, to put it more precisely, the disarmament movement has found a target in civil defence in the past. We must try to disabuse people who think that there is a natural conflict. Civil defence is complementary to disarmament just as much as it is for those who believe in armament to protect ourselves against nuclear attack.

Therefore, we need an all-party all-element approach —a co-ordinated approach to the problem. Those local authorities who display nuclear-free zone signs are being contemptuous, and that is no way to respond to the real hazards which exist. That is simply a way of showing utter and complete contempt for the real needs of those that the authorities are there to serve. I hope that the Bill will do a great deal towards re-establishing in the public mind the need to follow through those thoughts to their logical end, to combat those who seek to ridicule any form of civil defence or protection.

Sir Nicholas Bonsor:

[On 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima a 10 year old boy] went swimming with his friends. He dived into the water and while he was beneath the surface he felt an almighty explosion. ... he survived. [Both infrared radiation and nuclear radiation is shielded efficiently by water; water molecules absorb wideband infrared as well as neutrons and gamma rays very well.] … I believe that the provision of peacetime civil protection is essential and I am delighted to put the Bill before the House.

Professor H. G. Barnett’s book “Innovation: the Basis of Cultural Change”, 1953, pages 69-70: 

“It would be unrealistic to believe that dogmatism in science ended … flagrant examples as the Nazi doctrine of Aryan racial supremacy and the Communist credo of dialectic materialism … less publicized instances … are known in every discipline in small or large degree. Every area of knowledge at the present time has its ‘big names’ whose opinions in science … prevail over the views of lesser lights just because they are recognised … Dogmatism is a frequent concomitant of a systematized creed and a well-institutionalized priestly hierarchy … unified control with a discipline that is dedicated to its unquestioning support. This condition directly parallels the requirement for authoritative secular administration. … there be only one source of truth … the source be afforded enough power to enforce its dictates. … Heretical views may not be tolerated … because they threaten the economic and the ideological commitment …” 

If you debunk any exaggeration, the debunking has no news value because it fails to motivate and inspire people to the degree that the exaggeration does. You can only kick out one king by imposing another. The medical Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrell popularized the use of gas chambers for eugenics pseudoscience (yes, it occurs in Carrell's best-selling book Man the Unknown, 1935, not in volume 1 of Hitler's Mein Kampf, although that book is also filled with eugenics nonsense). Guess who the media claims invented the gas chamber?  The medical laureate eugenicist?  No.

In 1940 the 64-page UK Government handbook Air Raids: What you must know, what you must do, included evidence for the effectiveness of the simple and cheap countermeasures it contained, thus debunking the ineffectiveness claims made by J. B. S. Haldane's communist lobby in 1940 (when the USSR was in alliance with the Nazis, invading Poland with the USSR's Katryn Forest Massacre).  Haldane's communists in Britain's left wing media published propaganda for fatally expensive deep shelters instead of countermeasures of more practical value in surprise air raids (expensive deep shelters would draw vital resources away from the war offensive, would not defeat the enemy, nor provide any protection against an enemy invasion).  During the Cold War, the effectiveness data was omitted due to secrecy and simple cheap and effective countermeasures were again derided by communist and ignorant propaganda which asserted that nothing can deflect a blast or heat flash, or absorb radiation.

The 64-pages long June 1940 staple bound paperback book by Ministry of Home Security, Air Raids - What You Must Know, What You Must Do contains a Foreword by Sir John Anderson, Minister of Home Security: 
 "This book is written to help you and your family and friends. ... A great deal of information has been collected as a result of experience gained in actual air raids, and from this ... you will be able to face the dangers of air raids with the sure conviction ... and with the calmness and assurance that come from a knowledge of the way in which these dangers can be met. ... the people of this country will be enabled to defeat every attempt the enemy may make to weaken its morale and paralyse its war effort.

 "In this war every man and woman is in the front line. A soldier at the front who neglects the proper protection of his trench does more than endanger his own life; he weakens a portion of his country's defences ... You, too, will have betrayed your trust if you neglect to take the steps which it is your responsibility to take for the protection of yourself and your family.

"This is a contribution to the winning of final victory which you personally can make and which no one else can make for you.  I am confident you will make it."
This book is well illustrated (see photos) and has chapters on civil defence, high explosives and countermeasures like Anderson shelter, dealing with incendiary bombs and war gases, and first aid.  It has an appendix giving a table of war gases, and a listing of selected official publications.
To back up the gas protection evidence (which is still valid today for nerve gas, whose molecules are heavier and actually less penetrating than the smaller molecules of older war gases), the government published a 7-page printed report on experiments to determine the effectiveness of anti-gas protection of houses and of people wearing gas masks or not wearing gas masks in sealed rooms.  This Experiments in Anti-Gas Protection of Houses ARP report was published by the Home Office Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Department to disprove fears circulated by various critics in 1937 (especially the Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group which published a book claiming to entirely discredit all air raid precautions), that the gas masks and gas proof rooms did not work, were unreliable, or were just armchair advice invented to support anti-Nazi warmongering rather than appeasement policies:

"The experiments were conducted by the Chemical Defence Research Department under the aegis of a special Sub-Committee of the Chemical Defence Committee. That Sub-Committee was composed of eminent experts not in Government employment, and included a number of distinguished University professors and scientists."

This report first summarises the protective anti-gas advice published in ARP Handbook 1 in 1937, and then gives the results of experimental tests at Porton Down, using a draughty game-keeper's cottage with windows shut:

"... over a ton of chlorine gas was released 20 yards from the house so that the wind carried it straight on to the unprotected room. ... Human beings who occupied this unprotected room found that gas penetrated slowly into the room, and after about seven minutes it became necessary for them to put on their respirators. ... In another experiment the house was surrounded at a distance of 20 yards by large shallow trays which were filled with mustard gas ... Animals were placed in an unprotected room ... Observations made upon the animals ... showed that none of them were seriously harmed by the mustard gas.  The third type of gas used was tear gas ... after 3/4 of an hour the strength of the gas inside the house was still very much less than that outside."

The report then goes over the same experiments done on a protected room with door and window frames sealed up and shows:

"The animals in the 'gas protected' room, however, were unaffected and remained normal, nothwithstanding the severity of the trial."

In no case could toxic concentrations of a gas penetrate into a sealed up room before the gas outside had been blown away or evaporated by the weather.

RADIATION HYSTERIA AFTER 447 MEGATONS OF ATMOSPHERIC NUCLEAR TESTS FROM 1945-62, DISTRIBUTING 5 TONS OF PLUTONIUM IN THE ATMOSPHERE



Edward Teller points out on page 177 of his 1962 book The Legacy of Hiroshima (Macmillan and Co., London edition) that the fallout from the 1945-62 atmospheric nuclear weapons testing was identical to that from large nuclear attack, yet the fallout doses were very well below the observed 1,000 rad (or 10 Gy or about 1,000 roentgens) threshold for bone cancer at low dose rates in the radium dial painters:

"The bones of humans throughout the world today are getting an average of about 0.002 roentgens a year from Strontium-90 in the fallout. The rest of the body is being exposed to about the same amount of radioactivity, mostly from the fallout's Cesium-137. ... People living at sea level in the United States are exposed to 0.034 roentgens of radiation from cosmic rays each year.  This is 17 times the amount obtained from Strontium-90 in the world-wide fallout.  Exposure to cosmic rays in Denver, about 5,000 feet above sea level, is 0.05 roentgens a year.  If such small doses of radiation really were dangerous, we had better evacuate Denver."

Teller's point here is simply that this demonstrates plain dishonesty.   If you are worried about radiation, the biggest source of radiation is natural background radiation, which varies widely.  Why not campaign to ban air travel to reduce exposure to cosmic radiation which increases rapidly with altitude.  At sea level we have atmospheric shielding which is equivalent to a radiation shield of a 10 metres thickness of water, i.e. 10 tons of atmospheric shielding per square metre.  But you have much less atmospheric shielding in an aircraft at high altitude, or even in a city at high altitude like Denver, which is a mile above sea level.  So if radiation is bugging you, your first concern is to campaign about the biggest hazard and to ban unnecessary exposures to natural radiation, not the trivial fallout from nuclear tests!  Teller proves thus that the radiation-informed anti-fallout people weren't bothered about nuclear radiation at all; they were using it as a propaganda tool to get appeasement of the USSR.  This fact is very useful, because it allows us to tell who the liars really are.

Note that 3% of the 67,500 nuclear bombs ever made were actually exploded in nuclear tests (a total of 2,065 actual nuclear test explosions).  That's pretty substantial because detonating all the nuclear bombs every made would be 33 times as many as the tests.  Yet the nuclear testing fallout is dwarfed by natural background radiation.  After Rongelap Island was repopulated in June 1957, three years after its evacuation due to heavy fallout 110 miles downwind from the 15 megaton Bravo test in March 1954, the total lifetime fallout dose commitment from June 1957 onwards was just 17 mSv from external gamma rays, plus an internal exposure of 22 mSv from Cesium-137 internally (mainly from coconuts, arrowroots and coconut crabs), 1.9 mSv from Zinc-65 in fish, 0.53 mSv from Strontium-90, 0.48 mSv from Iron-55, and 0.34 mSv from cobalt-60.  (Edward Lessard, et al., 1984.)  The point is, cesium-137 was far and away the most important long-lived nuclide for long-term fallout exposure.  It was proved that simply adding 2 tons/hectare of potassium (in potassium chloride) to the soil around the coconut trees on Bikini Atoll reduced the cesium-137 uptake by a factor of 10-20.  (Only 300 kg of potassium per acre helpfully reduced Cs-137 in other crop plants too.  Potassium is chemically similar to cesium, so even a small addition of potassium dilutes the small mass of cesium-137 in highly contaminated soil, thereby reducing uptake substantially.  This  is precisely the same principle as used in blocking the iodine-131 uptake in thyroid glands by taking KI tablets.)  In addition, it has been found at Bikini, Eniwetok and Rongelap Atoll that the effective half-life of biologically-available Cesium-137 is only 9 years (not the 30 year radioactive half life) because it gets washed out of the soil by rain and diluted to insignificance in the sea (where naturally radioactive potassium-40 dwarfs all the cesium-137 ever produced by nuclear weapons tests). You don't have to bother about the plutonium, which is insoluble and is rejected by plants.

None of the anti-radiation campaigners argued that we should protect against the bigger and more easily preventable risks of "natural" cosmic rays before dealing with global fallout, despite the fact that cosmic rays are high-LET radiations which cause more biological damage than bomb fallout (plutonium occurs in insoluble compounds, which is discriminated against by plants and animals, and is coughed up, swallowed and rapidly eliminated when inhaled or ingested).

The plutonium alpha radiation hazard myth is one of the worst deceptions of nuclear weapons and anti-nuclear media propaganda. The 5.5 MeV alpha particles from fallout have range of only 4.1 cm in air and only 35 microns (or 0.035 mm) in human tissue or water.  Since plutonium had a relatively high boiling point compared to gaseous fission products, it doesn't coat the outer surfaces of fallout particles, but ends up trapped inside in the solidified silicate glass, which seals in the plutonium in an insoluble form and also shields the alpha radiation!  Plutonium-239 isn't even the major source of alpha radiation in fallout, since alpha emitters with shorter half lives have a higher specific activity.  As Dr Edward T. Bramlitt - the health physicist who ensured safety during the decontamination of Eniwetok Atoll - pointed out, 80% of the alpha particles from the 1952 Mike nuclear test is now from Am-241, not plutonium-239.  Am-241 is the familiar ionization sources used in household smoke detectors, so nobody campaigns against the widespread use of Am-241!  In fallout Am-241 forms from the decay of Pu-241, which is a beta emitter which has a half life of 13 years.

Pu-241 is present in "bomb-grade" plutonium as a minor impurity, but it is present to a larger extent in normal reactor waste plutonium and in hydrogen bomb fallout; in both cases this due to repeated neutron capture in uranium-238 and subsequent beta decays.  In addition, of the remaining alpha activity in Mike and Bravo test fallout, over 50% is due to Pu-240, not Pu-239.  This is due to the higher specific activity from the shorter half life of Pu-240.  The longer the half life, the fewer atoms decay each second, so the lower the radio activity emission rate per atom!  This fact is never mentioned by anti-nuclear propaganda, which claims falsely that long half lives are bad!  Actually, if the naturally radioactive carbon-14 and potassium-40 in our bodies had short half lives of a few seconds, instead of very long half lives, the radiation would be lethal.  Very long half lives ensure that the radiation emitted per atom per second is extremely low.  (Reference: Bramlitt's discussion of alpha radiation from fallout, published in the book: Jack C. Green and Daniel J. Strom, editors, Would the insects inherit the earth, and other subjects of concern to those who worry about nuclear war, Pergamon, London, 1988.)

Teller backs this up by discussing the abusive reception of his proposal to reduce heavy fallout by replacing uranium-238 pusher's in nuclear weapons with non-fissionable X-ray ablation materials like lead or tungsten.  Teller supported the development and testing successfully in 1956 of the Redwing-Navajo 4.5 megaton land surface burst of only 5% fission and 95% fusion yield and also the 3.53 megaton 15% fission Redwing-Zuni test, which also produced much lower fallout doses than the dirty 87% fission Redwing-Tewa test (a survivable 150 rads maximum even without any shielding in the downwind area over 48 hours from Zuni, compared to a lethal 1000 rads outdoor dose from Tewa), as seen in the declassified nuclear Weapon Test report WT-1316:




Teller explained the fact that nobody in the "peace" and "anti-fallout" movement campaigned for these cleaner weapons, but instead opposed them, demonstrated that the real issue for those radiation campaigners was nothing to do with nuclear radiation fears.  Instead, they were campaigning against nuclear deterrence in general, wanting to return the world to the more "conventional" weapons which led to two world wars.

Teller wrote on page 70 of The Legacy of Hiroshima about the tragic accident leading to the cancellation of Dr Mark M. Mills's Hardtack-Pinion 1958 clean nuclear test, a 4% fission, 96% fusion 9 megaton bomb designed to prove to United Nations observers (who would measure the fallout) that no dangerous fallout was created:

"Mills, in April of 1958, was working in the Pacific Proving Grounds.  A new series of tests was approaching, and Mills was involved in some important preparations.  On the evening of April 7, he found it necessary to move from one island to another in the Eniwetok chain, and he requested a helicopter. ... Dr Harry Keller, and an Air Force medical officer, Col. Ernest A. Pinson, flew with Mills in the helicopter's cabin.  Flying low near the edge of the lagoon, the helicopter was caught in a squall.  It crashed into 8 feet of water. ... The passengers were trapped ... Colonel Pinson was able to float and breathe from the air bubble that formed ... he kicked out a cabin window ... he returned with the pilots to rescue his friends from the cabin.  They found Harry Keller unconscious ... Mark Mills ... was found, still strapped in his seat, dead."

 Left to right: Ernest Lawrence, Lewis Strauss, Edward Teller and Mark Mills. (The White House, 24 June 1957.)



Dr Mills testifying to the 1957 Congressional Hearings The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man.  Lacking Edward Teller's Hungarian accent and excitable enthusiasm, he was easier to understand.

Mills had convinced President Eisenhower of the need for a clean bomb fallout demonstration on 24 June 1957, when he attended the White House with Ernest Lawrence, Edward Teller and Lewis Strauss.  The same year, Mills had testified about fallout to the Congressional Hearings on The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man.  Without his drive, the clean bomb demonstration program was soon shelved, ostensibly due to (1) "bad weather" at Eniwetok for fallout (it was always bad weather at Eniwetok for fallout, since the prevailing winds blew towards the east, while the safe fallout area was to the north), and (2) the nuclear test cessation time limitation (atmospheric testing was halted from 1959-61).  It's tragic that relatively clean nuclear weapons technology has been discarded as an arms control measure, to limit fallout and the possibility of rain-out (in thunderstorm weather) in case of the use of surface burst nuclear weapons against hardened targets that require appreciable total yields.


The lead "pusher" used in place of U-238 in 95% clean Navajo and 85% clean Zuni was not totally inert, because lead does undergo a (n, 2n) reaction (releasing 2 neutrons when capturing 1 neutron) with high energy thermonuclear neutrons.  Lead has a cross-section of nearly 2 barns for this reaction when hit by the 14.1 MeV neutrons released by tritium + deuterium fusion, compared to less than 0.6 barns for a beryllium-9 tamper.  Lead is thus more useful as a neutron reflector than beryllium when the neutron energy is above 11 MeV, in addition to be being denser than beryllium and therefore a better inertial tamper and ablative fusion capsule "pusher"!  Notice the plots for the fission of lithium-6 and lithium-7 as a function of neutron energy in clean weapons.  For the neutron-induced fission of lithium into tritium and an alpha particle, you must use lithium-6 if the neutron energy is below about 4 MeV, but for neutrons above 4.7 MeV it is actually easier to fission lithium-7 with neutrons, since it then has a bigger cross-section!  For 14.1 MeV fusion neutrons the cross-section for lithium-7 fission by neutrons is over 10 times larger than for lithium-6 fission.  Furthermore, the fission of lithium-7 by neutrons releases a neutron in addition to tritium and an alpha particle, whereas the fission of lithium-6 only releases tritium and an alpha particle!  So once a thermonuclear reaction that generates 14.1 MeV neutrons is efficiently started, the 14.1 MeV neutrons have a good chance of inducing fission of lithium-7, releasing easy-to-fuse tritium and neutrons, thereby creating relatively "clean" energy from very inexpensive natural lithium-7 deuteride (contrasted to expensively enriched lithium-6 deuteride).  Weapons that release a high percentage of their yield from tritium + deuterium fusion will release most of their energy in the form of 14.1 MeV neutrons.  Conservation of momentum and conservation of energy ensures that 80% of the 17.6 MeV of energy (i.e. 14.1 MeV) of energy released in tritium + deuterium fusion is in the form of 14.1 MeV neutrons.  If you have a 95% fusion bomb with a lead pusher, like the successful 1956 Redwing-Navajo test, most of the energy is initially in the form of 14.1 MeV neutrons.  This is why the interactions of 14.1 MeV neutrons with lead and lithium-7 are so important to understand.


Explaining the facts about the effects of nuclear weapons against a tide of propaganda


Above: Samuel Glasstone (left), 3 May 1897 – 16 Nov 1986, and Philip J. Dolan (right), 5 October 1923 – 5 January 1992, the Editors of the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, both had Secret - Restricted Data security clearance and thefefore were limited in what they could include in the way of references to secret reports in that book.  They debunked many of the myths of nuclear weapons, but without always being able to give the references to secret technical reports that provided the back-up data.  However, Dolan's now-declassified 1972 Secret - Restricted Data Effects Manual EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, provides much more information, as does his two informative contributions to two major 1980s studies: Appendix A, Characteristics of the Nuclear Radiation Environment Produced by Several Types of Disasters, Summary Volume, in the 1981 U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements symposium, The Control of Exposure of the Public to Ionizing Radiation in the Event of Accident or Attack, and Dolan's discussion of nuclear terrorism risks on pages 17-21 of the 1988 book Would the insects inherit the earth, Pergamon, London.

The biography in the 1988 book states:

"Mr Dolan has more than 37 years of experience in research areas dealing with nuclear weapons and their effects, beginning with an assignment to the Manhattan District at Los Alamos in 1948.  Subsequent Army assignments included those in the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C. (both of which were successor organizations to the Manhattan District and predecessors to the Defense Nuclear Agency); he was appointed as an instructor in Nuclear Weapons Employment at the Army Command and General Staff College, and as Nuclear Effects Project Officer for the Ballistic Missile Defense Office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency.  After retiring from U.S. Army in 1967, Mr Dolan worked as a physicist at the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute for one year, and then managed the Nuclear Studies Program at Stanford Research Institute (later SRI).

"In 1981, he joined Lockheed Missiles and Space Company.  Mr Dolan's experience includes fabrication of special nuclear components in the laboratory, as well as analytical studies.  He had published over 70 technical papers and reports, including several on both nuclear weapons proliferation and assessments of the nuclear technologies of existing nuclear powers; publications include U.S. Army FM 101-31, Nuclear Weapons Employment (1963), DNA-EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons (1972), and with S. Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977).  Mr Dolan received his B.S. from the United States Military Academy, West Point (1945) and his M.S. in physics from the University of Virginia (1956)."

In that 1988 book, pages 17-21, Dolan responds to the question "Do you think it is inevitable that sooner or later some terrorist organization will fabricate a perhaps crude but nevertheless workable nuclear device, and either seriously threaten its use, or actually cause it to be detonated?"  Dolan replies:

"I will give a qualified yes in answer to the question.  I think that it probably is inevitable that a nuclear device will be used by terrorists at some time in the future, either as a serious threat or with an actual explosion.  The qualification arises from the fact that I believe that there is some probability that the acquisition may come about by theft of a weapon rather than by fabrication.  That is not to say that fabrication would be impossible.  A great deal has been written about clandestine fabrication of nuclear weapons during the last decade. ... In addition to the popular press, various unclassified journals and other technical publications contain such details as the chemical and metallurgical properties of plutonium and uranium.  No doubt, there is enough information available in the open literature to enable a group to build a nuclear warhead. ... We must agree that a dedicated group could put together a possibly very inefficient device that would produce somewhere between a few tens of tons and a few kilotons of yield, which would be adequate for their purpose. ...

"Natural uranium consists mainly of two isotopes, U-235 (about 0.7%) and U-238 (about 99.3%).  The less abundant isotope is the readily fissionable species, and the uranium must be highly enriched in U-235 to be of practical use in a weapon.  Two processes, gaseous diffusion and gas centrifuge, make use of the mass difference between the isotopes to selectively remove U-238. ... Plutonium is made by bombarding U-238 with neutrons to produce U-239 by neutron capture.  Subsequently, two beta decays produce first Np-239, which has a short half-life, and then the long-lived Pu-239.  Similarly, U-233 is made by neutron capture in the thorium-232 ... Pu-239 is the most widely available special nuclear material.  In addition to being produced for weapon use, it is made as a by-product within the fuel of power reactors. ... Plutonium represents only about 0.5% of the spent fuel from a light-water power reactor. ... More than a ton of this spent fuel must be processed to obtain enough plutonium for one weapon. ... some of the plutonium atoms capture neutrons and become Pu-240.  Subsequently, neutron captures can also produce Pu-241 and Pu-242.  Plutonium that is made for weapons is removed from the reactor before large amounts of these heavier isotopes can be formed.

"Weapon plutonium typically contains 6-8% Pu-240 and only trace amounts of Pu-241 and Pu-242.  When the reactor is run to optimize fuel usage for power production, the heavier isotopes, together with some Pu-238 that is also produced, account for 30-35% of the plutonium in the spent fuel.  Pu-240 and Pu-241 fission spontaneously, producing a continuous neutron background.  Pu-241 and daughter products are gamma emitters. ... If during the assembly process, a chain reaction is initiated at or just after a state of criticality has been attained, the special nuclear material will return to a subcritical state before it ever reaches a significant degree of supercriticality, and a full-scale nuclear explosion will not occur. ... Slow assembly times and high neutron backgrounds both increase the probability of the pre-initiation described above. ... A gun-assembly weapon made with reactor-grade plutonium ... would have little chance of success. ... they likely will be constrained to an implosion-type weapon.  Such a weapon requires a high degree of sophistication in the design and fabrication of the electronics and the high explosives. ... Theft of a weapon would be a formidable undertaking, but so would be theft of weapons-grade special nuclear material.  Theft of reactor-grade plutonium might be easier to accomplish, but that would entail the additional difficulties of handling, design, and construction discussed above.

"The United States' weapons systems are equipped with tamper-proof protective devices that are designed to prevent unauthorized use even by legitimate custodians.  Successful employment of these systems by terrorists must be considered an extremely remote possibility.  On the other hand, if a weapon were obtained from a country other than the United States, the possibility of successful use is probably not so remote."

On page 41 of the same book edited by Greene and Strom, Stanley Martin, who was director of Stanford Research Institute's Fire Research Department (Martin worked at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory during nuclear tests in the 1950s), debunked nuclear firestorms and related firestorm-smoke nuclear winter delusions:

"First, firestorms are a very unlikely result of nuclear explosions, even of air bursts of megaton yield. ... Fatalities due to fire in Hiroshima were estimated at less than 3% of the population at risk, and the fire severity was estimated to be less than in the firestorm events in Germany by more than an order of magnitude. ... I hope we will not repeat the mistake, and choose to ignore the lesson history teaches."

The biography of Stanley Martin included in the book states:

"His career, which started in the early 1950s ... began with the measurements of thermal radiation from the fireballs of atmospheric nuclear explosions, and was followed by impressively diverse experimental and analytical efforts to understand and forecast the incendiary potential of nuclear weapons.  Subsequently, at URS Research Company and then Stanford Research Institute, Mr Martin's activities branched into peace-time concerns for fire and explosion safety."

On pages 56-57, Walmer Strope's ("Jerry" Strope's) 1960s nuclear weapons research program for civil defense is discussed, which first worked out the details of firestorm casualty assessment.  Strope came to fame at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory for his monumental 1948 analysis of the fallout pattern from the 1946 Baker underwater test (a terrific undertaking, which combined an innovative analysis of diverse dose rate and accumulated dose measurements from film-badge dosimeters and geiger counters, with photographs from different angles of the radioactive plumes falling from the mushroom cloud).  Strope, along with Dr Carl F. Miller, in 1957 occupied a simple earth-covered fallout shelter 1 mile from ground zero at the 17 kt Plumbbob-Diablo nuclear test, which survived the blast and fallout (previously, shelters had been left unoccupied at nuclear tests). Strope became Assistant Director for Research in the U.S. Department of Defense's Office for Civil Defense in 1961, when President Kennedy authorized the first massive research budget for civil defense against nuclear weapons firestorms and fallout (the origin of this research effort was actually Herman Kahn's recommendations in the major 1958 RAND Corporation report on Non-military Defense, which Kahn repeated in his June 1959 testimony to Congressional hearings on Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, attended by Senator John F. Kennedy).

Strope, as Assistant Director for Research, headed Post-Attack Research Division from 1962-73, and in 1973-74 he was the Deputy Assistant Director for Research of the DCPA (Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, forerunner to FEMA), editing the DCPA Attack Environment Manual which summarized some of the research data.  Strope points out on page 56 of the 1988 Greene and Strom book:

"In 1956, a computerized damage assessment system was developed by FCDA (Federal Civil Defense Administration) that permitted analysis of a nationwide nuclear attack.  The early studies demonstrated that relatively modest fallout protection factors could be effective in preventing fatalities from fallout radiation."

Strope's Table 1 on page 57 shows that from 1962-71 he spent $28,682,094 on shelter research, $20,217,292 on support system research (firestorms etc), $16,169,570 on post-attack research (fallout and other medical after effects of nuclear war) and $21,035,001 on systems evaluation (including strategic analysis, attack sociology and psychology), a total of $86,103,957.  Most of this research ended up in secret, limited or simply unpublished research gathering dust in archives.  It's time these facts were published.

“Ever since the first atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, millions and millions of words have been … written … [claiming] that a war fought with these weapons will result in the sudden extinction of civilisation. The historian, of course, knows better. He knows that few civilisations and few nations have been wiped out by mechanical means. Civilisations and nations die, as a rule, from a disease of the soul, a paralysis of the spiritual force that gave them birth and sustained their growth.”

- Australian Army Journal, Editorial, October-November 1949.



After the 1992 version of Effects Manual EM-1 was declassified (with deletions) for a Freedom of Information Act request, the declassified portions were assembled by Dr Northrop into an unclassified book of only 736 pages, Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from DWSA's Effects Manual One (EM-1).  Some inconsistencies between the full version of EM-1 and Northrop's book arise from the nature of the classified data that isn't included, which makes the unclassified book misleading (readers always seem tend to assume for nuclear effects that, what isn't published, doesn't exist).  For example, the 1991 crater size revised scaling law for strategic surface bursts (below) and initial nuclear radiation outputs are given for 13 different Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons in Chapter 8 of the full version of EM-1, but only the full data for four of them (weapons 3, 5, 8 and 13; unboosted and boosted fission, single yield thermonuclear, and neutron bomb) were declassified and included in Northrop's unclassified book.


Above: crater size scaling from the 1972 edition of EM-1 was published in Glasstone and Dolan 1977, but was debunked as a massive exaggeration in 1991.  (Further data on Glasstone's 1977 exaggeration of crater sizes is given by Bruce G. Blair in his 1993 book The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, pages 137-9, which ) The roughly 1 kt yield surface bursts used for dry soil crater size data had low X-ray yield output and high bomb case shock yield; more modern higher yield weapons reverse this and the X-rays are not effective at cratering in a surface burst.  In addition, the Glasstone crater scaling law omits the increasing proportion of the cratering energy which is used not through hydrodynamic blasting of soil, but in work against gravity, lifting soil out of the crater and dumping it around the rim and ejecta lip.  The energy needed to blast soil out of a hemisphere is proportional to the volume of the hemisphere, so the hydrodynamic energy use in cratering is proportional to the cube of the effective radius (the crater depth is less than the radius because of the fallback and slumping of ejecta to the bottom); but the gravitational energy use in cratering is proportional not to the cube of the effective crater radius, but to the fourth power of that radius because the gravity energy is mgh, where m is the crater mass (density times crater volume or cube of radius) and the crater depth or effective height that material has to be lifted up while being dumped around the hole.  This means that at low, subkiloton yields, hydrodynamic scaling predominates (depth and radius of crater scale as roughly the cube-root of yield), but at higher yields a greater fraction of the total cratering energy is used in lifting soil out of the hole against gravity, and this changing partition of the crater energy use reduces the effective hydrodynamic yield and reduces predicted crater sizes.

“Recently the U.S. Department of Defense reviewed the pertinent historical evidence gathered during nuclear tests and developed new models of the vulnerability of underground structures to nuclear explosions. These calculations differed substantially from those derived from earlier models. For example, the dimensions of a crater produced by a nuclear explosion were estimated to be considerably smaller than previously thought. To give a specific comparison, the radius of a crater produced by a one-megaton nuclear explosion on the surface of wet soil would be 651 feet according to the old formula, whereas the new formula estimated the radius to be 394 feet. ... Comparable differentials typically hold across the spectrum of weapon yields and soil varieties. ... Under the new formula the pertinent calculations for this location’s geological composition (dry soft rock, according to U.S. analysts) indicate a crater radius of only 180 feet for a one-megaton weapon, or 262 feet for a nine-megaton weapon.” - Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, Brookings Institution, 1993, pp. 137-9
‘Data on the coral craters are incorporated into empirical formulas used to predict the size and shape of nuclear craters. These formulas, we now believe, greatly overestimate surface burst effectiveness in typical continental geologies ... coral is saturated, highly porous, and permeable ... When the coral is dry, it transmits shocks poorly. The crushing and collapse of its pores attenuate the shock rapidly with distance ... Pores filled with water transmit the shock better than air-filled pores, so the shock travels with less attenuation and can damage large volumes of coral far from the source.’
– L. G. Margolin, et al., Computer Simulation of Nuclear Weapons Effects, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, UCRL-98438 Preprint, 25 March 1988, p. 5.


D. E. Burton, et al., Blast induced subsidence in the craters of nuclear tests over coral, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., UCRL-91639, 1985:
“The craters from high-yield nuclear tests at the Pacific Proving Grounds are very broad and shallow in comparison with the bowl-shaped craters formed in continental rock at the Nevada Test Site and elsewhere. Attempts to account for the differences quantitatively have been generally unsatisfactory. We have for the first time successfully modeled the Koa Event, a representative coral-atoll test. On the basis of plausible assumptions about the geology and about the constitutive relations for coral, we have shown that the size and shape of the Koa crater can be accounted for by subsidence and liquefaction phenomena. If future studies confirm these assumptions, it will mean that some scaling formulas based on data from the Pacific will have to be revised to avoid overestimating weapons effects in continental geology.”

In addition to this Glasstone and Dolan crater error correction being omitted from the unclassified Northrop book, data for all 13 weapons were declassified in the 1984 Weapons Effects 2.1 DOS computer program (ZIP file here; for screen prints see below).  (This DOS program will run under Windows XP, the you need to right-click on the program file "WE.exe", select "properties" and on the "memory" tab change all settings to the maximum memory option listed.)  Our check of the initial nuclear radiation with declassified weapons test data show an excellent agreement with this program.  However, the program and the data are entirely inappropriate for all modern city urban targets, where not only direct neutrons and gamma rays but also most of the wide-angle scattered radiation will suffer immense degradation in surface bursts or low air bursts, due to the many high rise buildings shielding the skyline exposure from a target (not merely the shielding of the single building a person happens to be in).  This effect was not present in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, where the predominant type of building even in the city centre were single story wood frame buildings.

Kyle Millage's report on urban effects (10 kt on Washington DC White House and on New York City):

Neutron radiation shielding as function of angle and neutron energy: 14 MeV neutrons from T + D fusion in a neutron bomb are extremely hard to shield even with borated plastic, but the typically ~ 1 MeV neutrons from a a fission weapon are easy to shield with water, soil or concrete.






The old, contemporary and modern designs of fission weapons refer to different designs of implosion system, the details remain classified (in addition to spherical implosion of a plutonium core in a neutron reflector, there is also linear and prolate spheroid implosion; all of these fission weapons have a thinner tamper and thinner high explosive system than the 1945 Nagasaki bomb model, and so they leak relatively more neutron and prompt gamma radiation for a similar yield) .

The Northrop/EM1 Recipe model.  Notice that a 1 kt surface burst has a thermal yield fraction of only 4.5%, as compared to 17% at 10 megatons yield.  This is simply because the crater ejecta radius that absorbs and thereby shields a portion of the fireball's thermal radiation output, scales more slowly with increasing weapon yield than does the radius of the fireball at final thermal maximum radiating power.  Therefore, for 1 kt yield, the crater ejecta throwout cone of dirt engulfs a larger proportion of the hot fireball than is the case for a 10 megaton burst, where the fireball is relatively large compared to the cratering throwout and ejecta.  (You can see this cratering effect on the fireball very clearly in several films of the fireball engulfed by the crater throwout ejecta during the 1956 British 1.4 kt Buffalo-2 nuclear surface burst at Marcoo site, Maralinga).
Northrop EM1 thermal radiation spectrum data: notice that the surface burst 1 kt weapon has a thermal spectrum which peaks at a much higher wavelength than a 1 km altitude air burst.  This is not due to air density variation (which has a relatively trivial effect on the thermal spectrum, in going from 1 km to 0 km burst altitude), but is instead due to the cooling effect of the dirt put into the fireball by the crater ejecta and throwout in a surface burst.  This means that in a surface burst, not only is the total amount of thermal radiation reduced by crater throwout shielding, but in addition the thermal radiation is composed mainly of infrared radiation (not visible and ultraviolet), and this infrared radiation is far more easily shielded by the normal water vapor content of most modern cities which are usually located near the ocean, a river or a lake.  Humid air is a good wide-band absorber of infrared radiation, an effect not observed in the dry desert nuclear tests in Nevada, but seen in Pacific ocean surface bursts which failed to produce firestorms in natural forested islands within the shot atolls.
Northrop EM1 visibility ranges for thermal radiation attenuation: typical city visibility is usually less than that in the dry, clear air of the Nevada desert.  The 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons showed a variety of thermal radiation curves for different atmospheric conditions, but these were misleadingly replaced with a single transmission curve in the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which also failed to point out the shadowing effect in modern cities which virtually eliminates the thermal flash hazard for most people in buildings whose windows will usually not have a direct view of the fireball, contrary to naive "burns radius" and "ignition" radii calculated in Glasstone and Dolan for the Nevada desert (unobstructed terrain).



EM1 blast arrival times for 1 kt terrorist burst: notice that over most of the area of broken windows and glass fragment danger, people who see the indirect (sky-scattered) but still painfully bright flash of a nuclear explosion will have plenty of time to duck and cover before the sound/blast wave arrive and break windows. This was not the case with WWII sized bombs, where the smaller distances of effects meant that evasive action was hardly possible on seeing the flash of a conventional (1 ton of TNT or less) explosion.  This is important for nuclear terrorism, where radar early warning systems may be no use (e.g. for a nuclear bomb which has been smuggled in, aboard a light aircraft, a ship, submarine, or even in radiation-shielded parts disguised within diplomatic embassy freight, or postal packets).
The 0.5 kt Johnie Boy nuclear test (Nevada, 1962) was detonated at 23 inches depth, so its fallout is in many ways representative of the heavy, fast-arriving fallout (large flakes over 1 cm in diameter were photographed in Fig. 3.5 of weapon test report WT-2289) expected from a surface burst in a modern city.  Because the fallout arrives so rapidly from such a low yield surface burst, over a small area directly downwind it actually delivers higher dose rates than fallout from megaton weapons (where fallout is delayed for longer due to the smaller size of most of the particles, and the greater cloud height and updraft, which allows more of the radioactivity to decay before fallout reaches the ground).  For this reason, if people duck and cover to avoid blast winds and glass debris effects, fallout is the main hazard.  Either shelter in buildings or high protective factors (preferably over 100) for a few hours before evacuation, or else rapid evacuation (running crosswind) if the debris situation permits it, is required to avoid lethal fallout doses downwind.  Contrary to much propaganda, fallout was predicted accurately by computer models prior to the 1962 Nevada tests.  Uncertainty over the precise yield are irrelevant to the problem of calculating the area of relatively high fallout danger that needs special shelter or priority evacuation (the cloud height, necessary for determining the wind structure of relevance to fallout, is only a weak function of the bomb yield).  This need for rapid shelter or evacuation in a city surface burst is analogous to the situation after a shallow underwater burst offshore, where the base surge and rainout arrive rapidly, with similarly high dose rates.



Effects of Atomic Weapons 1950: underwater burst radiation hazards in an adjacent city (based on 1946 Baker test at Bikini Atoll).


Professor Leon Goure of the Centre for Advanced International Studies, University of Miami, wrote War Survival in Soviet Strategy which was printed in April 1976 and reprinted in August.  It argued that cheap and simple Soviet civil defense was capable of reducing casualties in a nuclear war to very low levels.  Foy D. Kohler's Foreword makes the point very lucidly by referring to conferences at Goure's Centre in the University of Miami in 1976, during which the usual exaggerations of nuclear war were debunked: "Nearly all of the experts at our conference viewed the reasoning behind the overkill concept as 'absurd'. ... A statement of identical technical validity is that the world's inventory of artillery shells, small arms ammunition, or for that matter, kitchen knives or rocks can kill the human population several times over. ... more than 10 billion pounds of TNT was dropped on Germany, Japan and Italy during World War II.  This equalled more than 50 pounds for every man, woman and child ... During the Vietnam War, more than 25 billion pounds of TNT were dumped ... an average of some 3,000 pounds for each person in prime target areas; yet the U.S. was unable to kill enough people or to disrupt economic life, transportation and communications sufficiently to even avoid a humiliating defeat in the war."

Above: Alfred E. Moss (father of Sterling Moss, racing driver), invented and patented a forerunner to the WWII Morrison Shelter (Patent 544,710 “A Protective Shield for Beds and the like,” made on 20 Sept 1940 and accepted by the Patent Office on 24 April 1942).  Moss was inspired to make an indoor shelter for his family due to repeated night air raids during the cold wet winter of 1940, when only outdoor Anderson shelters were available in his area (which in winter were often flooded by ground water, and were cold and damp).  (The Anderson shelter had originally been designed for indoor use, but exaggerated incendiary fire risks led to the decision to use them outdoors instead.)  Sir John Baker and his assistant Edward Leader-Williams developed and fully proof-tested a cheaper and more effective indoor shelter, the “Morrison” table shelter (named after the Minister for Home Security, Herbert Morrison), with a 3-mm steel top that was designed to absorb energy by being dented like a car bumper (3mm of steel was equivalent in strength to a typical wooden table top, but the L-beams and legs enabled larger impacts to be withstood than a typical table). “A [house collapse resisting] shelter should be designed to absorb some part of the applied energy in its own partial collapse; complete resistance was far too costly ... The Morrison table shelter was ... designed to withstand the debris load of a house by its own partial collapse, whilst still giving adequate protection to the occupants.” - George R. Stanbury, “Scientist in Civil Defence: Part 1”, UK Home Office's Scientific Advisory Branch journal Fission Fragments (issue 17, June 1971, UK National Archives: HO 229/17).   (See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.)  This "Table shelter" concept was adapted to include nuclear fallout radiation shielding in the 1980 UK Government publication Protect and Survive, an update on the original June 1941 Shelter at Home manual (below):


Sgt Harrington with Mr and Mrs Dermott at shelter which survived house demolition St Johns Rd London 29 July 1944

Trench shelter in field for hop-pickers in Kent during 1940 Blitz. According to an unpublished section on trenches and foxholes damage in the Secret American manual DNA-EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, even in the dry, loose, sand and gravel soil of the Nevada test site it took a 22 psi blast overpressure to cause 50% filling of trenches and foxholes (mostly due to dust blown up by the blast wave precursor it seems, not the collapse of the sides of the trench!) with their long axis perpendicular to the direction of ground zero (higher overpressures were required for other orientations).  "Trenches and foxholes in damp soil with stable vegetation or dry silty will receive moderate and severe damage at less than those shown in Figure 7-22 [20 psi peak overpressure distance is shown]." - Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, Confidential, 1957, TM 23-200, page 7-52.    Even if a trench is half filled with loose sand, people can extricate themselves without assistance.  If the sand is not loose, there is no problem because the sides hold up.  Open trenches give complete protection against direct nuclear and thermal radiations, so that only the relatively small dose contribution from wide-angle air scatter directly above the trench can enter.

Civil Defence Manual of Basic Training, vol 2, pamphlet 5, Basic Methods of Protection against High Explosive Missiles, 1951, p 25: "A few tools such as picks, shovels and crowbars were always kept in shelters to help the occupants to force a way out if they were trapped by debris."  Pamphlet 6 in this manual, Atomic Weapons, was issued in June 1950 with a signed Foreword written by British Prime Minister Clement Attlee (the man who as Labour Leader in 1935 had impractically called for the disarmament of Britain in order to persuade Hitler than we would not fight): "... we must proceed with our Civil Defence preparations on the basis that, in the event of war, we might be subjected to atomic attack and with the object of minimising the casualties which must inevitably accompany such an attack."  Atomic Weapons stated on page 9: "The figures ... by the British Mission to Japan from the experience of the high air bursts used in Japan ... apply to persons caught in the open with no warning or suitable shelter ... even ordinary houses will give some degree of protection by lessening the intensity of the rays that penetrate them."  (See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.)

Anderson shelters survived Blitz bombing: Illustrated London News, 24 August 1940

Add caption

Aldwych tube London 21 October 1940: effective Blitz air raid shelter. Also proved against nuclear weapons blast and cratering by Frank H. Pavry in 1963.

Peter Laurie's 1979 Beneath the City Streets points out on page 33 that 75% of WWII British bomb casualties were caused by flying glass, and since flying glass was also the largest casualty cause in Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear air bursts (see Glasstone and Dolan, 1977), most of these casualties could have simply been avoided by duck and cover, no matter how much false "ridicule" is placed on the scientific fact that a flash of light travels faster than a blast wave!  See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.



Above: in 1979 Peter Laurie's book Beneath the City Streets pointed out some of the limitations of nuclear weapons in a book that was Duncan Campbell's acknowledged starting point for his widely-cited book War Plan UK, yet Campbell simply ignored all the relevant facts which Laurie produced and instead tried to "ridicule" civil defence nuclear weapons countermeasures without considering the facts at all.  Campbell's tactic of assertive, ignorance-based political/antinuclear dismissals of the awesome effectiveness of cheap WWII conventional and nuclear bombing countermeasures by popular Communist-appeasing historians continue to this day:

“The government was not not willing to over-invest, as it saw it, in defence, so many measures were of more propagandistic than practical value* [*source cited: J. S. Meisel, “Air-Raid Shelter Policy and Its Critics in Britain before the Second World War,” Twentieth Century British History, v5, 1994, pp300-14].  The bulk of the population were to look after themselves, the poor would be issued with cheap shelters* [*source cited: D. Gloster, “Architecture and the Air Raid: Shelter Technologies and the British Government, 1938-1944,” MSC Dissertation, Imperial College, London, 1997]. ... The Anderson shelter, mass-produced from corrugated iron, was to be self-assembled by the householder, who would have to part-bury it and cover it in earth. ... As a supplement, millions of very cheap civilian gas masks (very different from those for the forces ...) were issued at the time of Munich. ... The left argued that these defensive preparations were inadequate.  They demanded more protection: scientists and architects of the left campaigned for better gas protection and serious deep shelters.  The Communist Party launched a powerful campaign against the policies of Sir John Anderson as head of ARP and later Home Secretary.  The Party thought that its campaign was in part responsible for his replacement by Herbert Morrison in October 1940. ... The effect of the bombs was spectacularly less than the Home Office predicted [for conditions of no shelters!].”

- Professor David Edgerton, Britain’s War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War, Penguin, 2012, pp36-37.  (Emphasis added in bold to left-wing political authority referrals.)

Edgerton omits to admit that the Home Office casualty predictions were for no shelters, and the difference between predictions and results were due to the high degree of protection afforded by dirt-cheap shelters.  He omits all the vital evidence, e.g. Christopherson’s 1946 report on the effectiveness of cheap shelters, declassified back in 1975.  (See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.)  Edgerton uncritically repeats inaccurate and misleading 1930s Communist claims about gas masks.  Military gas masks were robust enough to fight in on the battlefield and thus had a larger cannister for high concentrations of gas during outdoor use, yet they used the same activated charcoal absorber filling as the civilian masks designed for the lower gas concentrations which leak into a house, as proved in experiments declassified back in 1937, yet ignored by historians.  J. B. S. Haldane’s proposed “Maginot Line” of costly deep shelters was investigated but was debunked (money was better spent on arms to end the war; deep shelters are expensive and at Nagasaki they were unoccupied due to surprise attack; the way to get around surprise attack is through knowledgable "duck and cover" countermeasures, not useless and fatally expensive white elephants).  A danger is uncritical, yet seemingly scholarly, references to peer-reviewed, fashion-biased, secondary sources (journals or theses).  Edgerton references biased and ill-informed secondary sources, ignoring the primary sources!  This whole subject is submerged in prejudiced indoctrination and groupthink sneers, masquerading as good scholarship.

(This was exactly the same problem as the religion of "peer-reviewed science".  E.g., in the 1930s the adoration of "authority" figures like eugenics fanatic and Medical Nobel Laureate Alexis Carrell, who suggested gas chambers in 1935 for eugenics, led to the censorship of facts which discredited the eugenics-basis of Hitler's Nazis.  This censorship of facts by eugenics bigots in positions of influence within science prevented the Nazi ideology being discredited.  It was all done by "old boys club" of groupthink "we love eugenics"-fashion-type "Communist" fascists, who refused to acknowledge the existence of contrary facts and the media colluded with them, with censorship of facts passed off as professionalism and dedicated ethical standards, excellent prize-winning moralism, etc.  In fact, it's not scholarship at all, and is the underlying mechanism for the all discredited pseudosciences that use authority, from Marxism to Nazism.)



Easy protection in sarin nerve gas attacks in Syria (22 August 2013 update):
    
Reuters photo of Syrian "activist" wearing gas mask.
22 Aug 2013 REUTERS Yazan Homsy photo: SYRIA gas mask in hands of a soldier.
Above: people resting indoors are less vulnerable to chemical agents than soldiers fighting outside, because they are breathing more slowly (less air intake) and also because the house keeps out a lot of gas.  This is a matter of large scale wind eddies, not laboratory type microscopic diffusion of gas molecules through keyholes.  If it is raining outdoors, little rain gets inside.  Nerve "gases" are liquid droplets which evaporate a vapor that is rapidly dispersed to safe concentrations by the wind.  On 16 July 2013, British Foreign Secretary The Rt Hon William Hague MP issued a written statement to Parliament: "There is evidence of attacks using chemical weapons in Syria - including sarin. We believe that the use of chemical weapons is sanctioned and ordered by the Assad regime. ... We plan to equip the moderate armed opposition with 5000 escape hoods, nerve-agent pre-treatment tablets (NAPs) and chemical weapons detector paper. Escape hoods protect against sarin gas for approximately 20 minutes, allowing a person to move away from an affected area but not enabling them to continue to fight. They do not require fitting or extensive training to be effective. Pre-treatment with NAPs gives a person who is exposed to a nerve agent (including sarin) a greater chance of reaching a place where atropine can be administered under medical supervision. Chemical weapons detector paper enables the basic detection of chemical weapons agents. The capability to detect quickly whether chemical weapons agents are present will inform decisions on whether or not to remain in an area and so potentially save lives." 
What is unacceptable here is giving Syrian rebel soldiers 5000 gas hoods, while leaving the civilian children unprotected!

 Allegations of 1,300 sarin nerve gas victims of the Assad regime at a Damascus suburb in the Syrian civil war have been in the media.  As stated above, cheap gas masks and/or plastic sheeting and tape to cover holes in blast-broken windows and cracks in door frames will keep out sarin droplets and vapour for the time taken for the sarin liquid to evaporate and disperse to harmless concentrations (sarin takes 3 times longer than water to evaporate).  Arguments over civilian gas masks in the UK date right back to the 1930s.  Phosgene was a major WWI gas, but was easily protected against, and sarin had actually less serious long term effects than phosgene.  Phosgene and chlorine worked by acid burning to lungs and eyes, resulting in the risk of long-term tissue scarring and injury.  Sarin, like all nerve gases, does not have these direct long term effects (indirect long-term effects from sarin can of course occur, e.g. if a person is unable to breathe due to chest muscle contractions, brain damage may result if proper treatment is not provided).  Sarin causes muscular contraction which causes a tensing of muscles, easily seen by a contraction of eye pupils to points, and by convulsions.  Once the eye pupil contraction has been definitely and unambiguously determined, atropine injections can be administered until the pupils return to the normal size.

Following a fatality from sarin droplets in 1953 at a Porton Down experiment, a full-cycle respiration pump was invented to force air into and out of the lungs of a nerve gas casualty.  Normal first-aid CPR respiration techniques don't work on severe nerve gas victims, because the lung muscles are so tense that when air is blown into the lungs, they can't inflate or return to a deflated state.  Therefore, air needs to be pumped in and then sucked out (a full cycle) to ensure adequate oxygen is available.  (The lungs, being directly exposed to inhaled nerve gas, are more seriously affected than the heart.)

According to the declassified CIA's National Intelligence Estimate NIE-18, The Probability of Soviet Employment of BW and CW in the Event of Attacks upon the US, Appendix B, pages 11-12:

"Approximately 5 tons of GB [Sarin] used in present munitions would be required to obtain a concentration for 50% lethality, in an open area of one square mile, under favorable weather conditions ... Effective dissemination ... requires the following conditions. ... Low or medium wind velocity. ... Shallow layer of cool air below a warm layer. ... Openings in the buildings through which outside air can penetrate, such as windows or air conditioning inlet ducts (openings can be obtained by employing high explosive munitions concurrently with CW [chemical warfare] agents). ...

"Theoretically, complete protection against the nerve gases requires not only a well-fitted gas mask but also special impermeable clothing.  However, except in the immediate vicinity of bursts, the concentrations which probably will be encountered will be such that gas masks will provide adequate protection for all but a few of the personnel in the target area."

Quite often, gas masks are dismissed as a sarin countermeasure because if liquid droplets of sarin (which evaporate like rainwater, but 3 times more slowly) land on the skin, they are absorbed.  However:

(1) protection against a rain of liquid droplets of sarin is possible using waterproof rain wear or being indoors,

(2) the toxicity of sarin vapor (evaporated from liquid drops) via skin absorption is less than than via direct lung inhalation.  In other words, if you wear a gas mask and remain indoors, higher concentrations of sarin vapor are needed to get through your skin than are needed for lung and eye absorption.

The whole point of civil defence, like wearing a car seat-belt, is not to guarantee safety in all situations; instead, the point is to reduce the level of risk, reduce the number of casualties, and reduce suffering.

In real world weather situations, sealing up broken windows in rooms with plastic sheets and duct tape and wearing cheap gas masks will provide sufficient protection for most people, while the sarin outside evaporates and is blown away and dispersed to harmless concentrations.

The people who sneer at civil defence countermeasures in order to be awarded Nobel Prizes or (un)United Nations publicity effectively have blood on their hands, just as the people who sneer at car seat belts using false logic.See also this 69 MB PDF of the Ministry of Home Security's 1941 handbook "Shelter at Home", based on actual results of 1940 bombing.

28 August 2013 update: alternative courses of action, military strikes versus civil defence


Glasstone and Dolan write in the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, pages 611-612 (paragraphs 12.209-12.211):

"From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies, ... The mutation frequency appeared to be independent of the rate at which the radiation dose was received. ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions must be revised, at least for mammals. ... in male mice ... For exposure rates from 90 down to 0.8 roentgen per minute ... the mutation frequency per roentgen decreases as the exposure rate is decreased. ... in female mice ... The radiation-induced mutation frequency per roentgen decreases continuously with the exposure rate from 90 roentgens per minute downward. At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 roentgen/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent or negligible, no matter how large the total (accumulated) exposure to the female gonads, at least up to 400 roentgens."







Above: land equivalent 48 hour downwind fallout doses from even dirty H-bombs would be survivable in a modern city concrete building with a protection factor of 10 or more, and people could evacuate from the path of the fallout, which is even more predictable with modern weather computers today than in the 1950s.

"Outrageous, unsubstantiated statements are made concerning the hazards of ionizing radiation, in spite of a vast published, peer-reviewed literature … The result of this deception is not insignificant: literally millions of lives are less healthy … annual billions of dollars spent needlessly to protect us from radiation that we need for optimal health. Radiophobia limits the political will of people and governments … Radiophobia prevents the logical and safe burial of nuclear wastes. Radiophobia causes serious psychological effects leading to loss of life (>100,000 abortions and >1,000 suicides attributed to Chernobyl fallout).  My career was initially funded by the AEC, starting at the Radiobiology Laboratory at Texas A & M … All graduate students in the lab participated in a large reproduction study with rats who received continuous gamma irradiation … I can remember their discussions about why rats receiving 20 mSv/day [2 R/day] (~ 7 Sv per year) lived longer … I spent about 25 years (1968-93) working on inhalation toxicology of transuranics [plutonium, etc.] in the Biology department at PNL … A large practical threshold of 2-10 Gy [2,000-10,000 R, for low dose rates of ~10 mR/hour] is seen in humans for thorotrast patients (liver cancer) and radium dial painters (bone cancer)."



Above: In unstressed cells, the level of p53 DNA repair protein is minimised via its binding to protein MDM2, which is the oncogene that normally inhibits p53. (Second illustration from http://p53.free.fr/p53_info/p53_dev.html.  See also Lawrence Donehower et al., "Mice deficient for p53 are developmentally normal but susceptible to spontaneous tumours," Nature 356: 215-221.)

MDM2 levels increase with p53, causing a negative-feedback "regulation loop" thereby keeping p53 at a low level in normal cells.  Low level radiation exposure increases tumor-suppressor levels, reducing cancer:


Radiation causes stress mediators (like ATM and CHK2) to "activate" p53 by separating the protein p53 from its inhibitor, MDM2. This increases the level of active p53, not bound to MDM2, for 12 hours after irradiation. Thus, low level radiation causes an increase in tumor-suppressing p53, reducing the cancer and genetic risks by repairing DNA damage that would otherwise lead to cancer or genetic defects in offspring.

Direct measurements reported by Jamie Lamkin in his book, Investigating the Role of p53 in the Germ Cell Apoptotic Pathway (Rhode Island College, 2011, Chapter 2, "Effect of Radiation Exposure on p53 in Mouse Germ Cells," Figure 9), determined that the p53 level in cells showed a 5-fold increase in tumor-suppressing p53 levels, peaking at 6 hours after exposure of mice to 5 Gy of Cs-137 gamma radiation given over a 44 minutes exposure time.  This proves the radiation stimulated repair potential for DNA damage, but at high dose rates, some DNA damage can occur before p53 levels rise enough to suppress damage.


The mechanism for DNA repair and cancer avoidance by p53 is as follows (note that other tumour suppressor genes also exist, e.g. PTEN regulates the growth rate of cells, but p53 is central):

1. Once activated by radiation, p53 arrests the cell cycle at the G1/S regulation point by activating the expression of a transducer gene like the kinase inhibitor p21 (which stops the cell division cycle by binding to CDK2), or the Growth Arrest and DNA Damage "GADD45" gene, and then – while the cell cycle is stopped – it repairs the DNA damage using a DNA repair enzyme like p53 R2, GADD45, p48 or XPC.

2. If the damage is beyond safe repair, p53 uses genes like DR5, Plg3, AIP1, Noxa, Bax-2, Puma or Fas to produce proteins that kill the cell by "apoptosis" (programmed cell death), to prevent it from turning carcinogenic. P53 is so effective at preventing cancer that in most cancers (over 50% of human tumours including lung, colon, breast, cervical and bladder cancer) only arise when defective mutations of the p53 gene (TP53) occur because the defective p53 cannot activate p21 to stop a cell’s division for repair work (reference: M. Hollstein, et al., "p53 mutations in human cancers," Science, v253, 1991, pp.49-53).

Proof of the importance of p53 is shown by the fact that most of those who inherit a mutated p53 gene suffer from childhood cancers (Li-Fraumeni syndrome). Similar early vulnerability to cancer was also observed in p53-deficient mice (Reference: Lawrence A. Donehower, et al., "Mice deficient for p53 are developmentally normal but susceptible to spontaneous tumours," Nature, v356, 1992, pp. 215-21).

Toshiyuki Norimura, et al., "p53-dependent apoptosis suppresses radiation-induced teratogenesis [birth defects]," Nature Med. 1996 May;2(5):577-80: "This reciprocal relationship of radiosensitivity to anomalies and to embryonic or fetal lethality supports the notion that embryonic or fetal tissues have a p53-dependent "guardian" of the tissue that aborts cells bearing radiation-induced teratogenic [birth defect-causing] DNA damage." 

It should be noted that p53 suppresses all kinds of DNA damage, both that leading to cancer and that in germ cell DNA that leads to genetic defects in offspring.  p53 cancer-suppression is stimulated by radiation, which releases p53 from its MDM2 inhibitor.  These are hard scientific facts which explain the scientific evidence of lifespain increase in controlled mice irradiation experiments, and the bone cancer threshold dose rate evidence from human radium dial painters whose bones were measured to accurately determine their radium content.  Cancer occurs when low levels of p53 repair multiple double-strand breaks (entire chromosome breaks) too slowly, allowing mistakes to occur, mainly due to the loss of sections of DNA which contain tumor suppressor genes or cell cycle regulation genes (p53 or PTEN).  The cell which no longer has these vital genes then starts undergoing uncontrolled proliferation without adequate DNA repair mechanisms in place.  The second stage is that the defective cells undergo evolution as more and more errors accumulate in their DNA.  This accounts for the delay time of years that it usually takes for a cancer evolve aggressive characteristics, like a special network of blood supply vessels and extra insulin and insulin growth factor (IGF) receptors, both of which speed up the rate of growth of the cancer.  These facts are relevant to the long term risks from exposure to high dose-rate, high dose radiation, because someone who knows they have been exposed can take precautions to reduce the risk of the secondary stage of evolution of aggressive cancers.  Minimal intake of simple sugars and regular exercise (to keep blood insulin levels low), help to reduce the risk of aggressive tumors evolving in this second stage.

"Chromosome breaks occur at all dose rates, but the … dose rate dependence … depends on the presence of two breaks in close proximity at the same time. The probability of this occurring will be greater at high dose rates than at low, since the breaks are assumed to stay open for only a few minutes [before repair by a DNA repair enzyme, like P53]. Unless another break is produced close by within this period, the first will reconstitute and no injury will be seen. … Austrian miners from Schneeberg and Joachimsthal [inhaled radon gas resulting in lung cancer after an average period of] about seventeen years, and during this time the lungs of the miners will have received a dose of at least 1,000 rads and possibly more."
  • Dr Peter Alexander, Atomic Radiation and Life, Penguin Books, 1957, pages 59, 148-9.
Cancer arises from incorrectly repaired, multiple uncorrected double-strand breaks at high dose rates, or in situations where DNA repair enzymes are dysfunctional due to loss, mutation, or breakdown of the activator mechanism which releases DNA repair proteins from binding their normal inhibitors in healthy cells, when radiation stress occurs. At normal mammal cell temperatures, the Brownian motion of water molecules is sufficient to induce single-strand DNA breaks (only one strand in the double helix of DNA being broken) at a rate of 2 per cell per second. These single-strand breaks are easily repaired without shutting down the cell cycle, because the double-helix ensures that the other strand of DNA continues to hold the molecule together, preventing any risk of the transposition of sections of DNA within genes along chromosomes. Since base-pairs are always "matched up" between one strand and the other in the double-helix of DNA, with the base in one strand being paired with a base in the other strand, correct repair of single strand breaks is easy. A missing base in a single strand break is simply replaced with a base that pairs with the remaining DNA base in the unbroken strand.

Double strand breaks, in which both strands in the double helix are severed

In addition, natural double-strand breaks in which both strands in the double-helix of a DNA molecule are broken occur at the natural rate of 0.5 per cell per hour (i.e., 0.007% of all natural DNA breaks). Unlike single-strand breaks, these double-strand breaks completely sever the chromosome at the break point, since DNA consists of two strands of DNA in the double-helix form. If two double-strand breaks occur in rapid succession within a chromosome, a free section of DNA is completely unleashed, which in the fluid environment of the cell may rotate or even be lost before the loose ends are reconnected by a DNA repair enzyme. If the wrong ends of severed DNA segments are connected during the repair process, a cancer may occur, depending on which genes have been transposed or lost by the error.

Cancer growth is accelerated by high blood insulin and insulin-like growth factors like IGF-1, since cancer cells typically have more insulin and insulin factor receptors than healthy cells. Aggressive cancers proliferate by rapid cellular division, so they have a higher metabolism than healthy cells. Blood glucose levels control insulin levels. While all healthy cells require glucose that is obtained from food of all types, simple sugars are broken down into glucose more rapidly than complex sugars in the form of starch. Simple sugar ingestion may preferentially fuel cancer proliferation by delivering 20 calories/minute to the blood stream, compared to just 2 calories/minute for complex sugar breakdown from foods like potato starch. Obtaining glucose through the slow breakdown of complex sugars in starch or in fat minimises the blood glucose level and therefore minimises the insulin level, which limits the rate of proliferation of cancer. Alarmingly, these facts have been obfuscated and dismissed by oversimplifications that merely claim that "all cells need glucose." The research literature indicates that low glucose and low insulin can reduce cancer cells to a fasting condition with slow proliferation. Another area of research needed is "insulin potentiation therapy" where a combination of reduced blood glucose with excess insulin and insulin-like growth factors has been suggested to starve aggressive fast-proliferating cancer cell that fail to respond to other treatment. To starve cancer, insulin is used to increase cancer metabolism while simultaneously depriving cancer of sufficient glucose (fuel). Cancer cells can have up to 10 times more IGF receptors than non-cancer cells, and so suffer greater effects from a variation in insulin than healthy cells, which survive fasting.  It is easy to measure blood sugar levels during this treatment to prevent brain damage, but very few controlled experiments have even been undertaken to discover how to optimise such radical ideas, due it seems to political and financial inertia of traditional drugs industry research which seeks only new chemicals.  It you want to beat cancer, you first must kill the demented hostility/apathy from the intellectual dictatorship of basically fascist capitalists who wear the cloaks of moralistic socialists and preach subjective radiation dogmas as a modern substitute for witchcraft superstition and taboos.






This extensive and accurate dose-effects data debunks the claims of Linus Pauling in the 1950s that fallout strontium-90 caused bone cancer during nuclear testing.  See graph above relating radium to plutonium and strontium, which all have safe doses with thresholds for cancer which get larger for lower dose rates, e.g. see graph below for bone cancer threshold dose data in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (very high dose rates):







Linus Pauling versus radiation facts
"Small doses of any drug possess a bio-positive effect while the large dose of the same compound has the opposite bio-negative effect. In short, all drugs have opposite effects in two dose extremes. The young scientist that worked on this hypothesis for his PhD under the famous Stanford immunologist, George Fegan, to show that vitamin C could be dangerous in bigger doses while it is a stimulant and good for the health in very small doses never made it and had to leave science research altogether because Linus Pauling, the great hero of science, destroyed the young scientist completely. It was Pauling himself that had induced Fegan to work on the good effects of vitamin C on the immune system in the first place. The hormetic effect of vitamin C could not be swallowed by Pauling. Pauling could never agree with vitamin C being poisonous in larger doses! Later he fought an expensive legal battle against his own colleague, a former Director of the Pauling Institute, for showing that cancer growth is stimulated by vitamin C in larger doses, but Pauling lost the battle and was disgraced. Pauling got the second Nobel (Peace) Prize, after his first for the discovery of vitamin C, by the same antipathy towards hormesis. Edward Teller was the father of American Nuclear deterrent against the communists. While Teller was testing atomic weapons, he showed the hormetic effect of radiation by accident. In very small doses radiation stimulates the immune system and increases human life span, radiation hormesis. It also slows the ageing processes by the hormetic effect of working as an anti-oxidant. … The famous Teller-Pauling debates that followed took the whole of America by surprise. Pauling succeeded in demonizing Teller to the extent that the Swedish Nobel Academy gave Pauling the Nobel Peace Prize, his second Nobel! There are many such frauds that have occurred in science … However the technology industry has become a big money spinner and that feeds society with the myth about science."

- Professor B. M. Hegde, MD, FRCP(Lond.), FRCP(Edin.), FRCP(Glas.), FRCP(Dub.), FACC(U.S.A.), FAMS, "Hormesis", http://www.bmhegde.com/hormesis.htm

"The increasing veneration for the state, the admiration of power, and of bigness for bigness’ sake, the enthusiasm for ‘organization’ of everything (we now call it ‘planning’) and that ‘inability to leave anything to the simple power of organic growth’...are all scarcely less marked in England now than they were in [Nazi] Germany."- Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), The Road to Serfdom, 1944.

"The subtle change in meaning to which the word ‘freedom’ was subjected in order that this argument sound plausible is important. To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached…The demand for the new freedom was [in contrast]…only a name for the old demand of an equal distribution of wealth."- Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), The Road to Serfdom, "The Great Utopia"

(Two diametrically opposed kinds of "freedom" can be defined: freedom from state control, and the Nazi/socialist freedom for state coercion to oppress criticisms of the enforcement of utopian dogma.)

This doublethink is best demonstrated by the history of nuclear weapons effects and radiation effects, both of which are "defended" by emotional propaganda which declared it immoral or unethical not to tell lying exaggerations.  This closes down all discussions before the facts have even been aired.  The only people the media now prefer to report are subjective pseudoscientists who have political affiliations within the professional money-making side of the large-scale industry of "science" but use that political muscle to issue fashionable groupthink.  There is no objectivity involved, no comparison with natural risks which are larger than those from radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by massive factors: even at high dose rates (where DNA repair mechanisms like enzyme protein P53 are of minimal utility, as compared to low dose rates) you need a radiation dose of 10-100 cGy (rads) to merely equal to natural cancer risk.  Below that dose, the natural risk of cancer from copying errors and chemical breaks in DNA exceed the risk from radiation:

Above: Radiation Effects Research Foundation (funded by Uncle Sam and Japan) results of the Life Span Study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki irradiated survivors.

The excess leukemias were 94 out of 49,204 irradiated survivors: a risk of 0.19% from radiation

The excess solid tumors were 848 out of 44,635: a risk of 1.9% from radiation.  These general effects have long been known:



Above: improved cancer treatment gives better than a 50% chance of surviving 5 years with leukemia and better than 97% chance of surviving thyroid cancer more than 5 years, provided you don't have to rely on a USSR-type British NHS (National Health Service) which is an ineffective, monolithic, demotivating, failure at everything except for its "success" in spending taxpayer's money in promoting itself as "the envy of the world" (in true Stalinist propaganda fashion).

Cancer research: insulin and sugar

Aggressive, fast-spreading cancer cells spend a much greater fraction of their time dividing, which is why they are more vulnerable to radiation than non-cancer cells.  This is the basis for radiotherapy treatments, and was discovered by J. Bergonie and L. Tribondeau in 1906 (Acad. Sci. Paris, v143, p983; English version in Radiation research, v11, 1960, p32): "The sensitivity of cells to irradiation is in direct proportion to their reproductive activity ..."  By the same token, fast dividing cancer cells can't regulate their metabolism and so are more vulnerable to starvation than non-cancer cells. This means that effective fasting to reduce insulin levels (which accelerates cancer cell spread) can reduce the spread of aggressive cancer and give time for other treatments or natural defenses to work.  A study back in 2002 by P. J. Goodwin, et al., "Fasting insulin and outcome in early-stage breast cancer," , v20, pp42-51 concluded: "Fasting insulin level is associated with outcome in women with early breast cancer. High levels of fasting insulin identify women with poor outcomes ..."  This research merely correlates the risk of mortality with the insulin level once cancer is detected; it does not check the influence of insulin level on the risk of cancer risk in the first place.  In addition, blood glucose levels show a stronger correlation to cancer spread than insulin: P. Muti, et al., "Fasting glucose is a risk factor for breast cancer",  v11 (2002), pp.1361-8, which found that "There is some evidence that glucose and other factors related to glucose metabolism, such as insulin and insulin-like growth-factors (IGFs) may contribute to breast cancer development. ... These results indicate that chronic alteration of glucose metabolism is related to breast cancer development."

The primary driver of insulin is carbohydrate, including starch, not fat.  In 2005, a study of 1.3 million Koreans correlated sugar consumption to cancer risk.  Despite this research and the mechanism for aggressive cancer fuelling by insulin and glucose, there is (1) a reluctance to fund research into this simple approach and (2) a widespread dissemination of inaccurate claims and obfuscation on the link between sugar and aggressive cancer proliferation. e.g. the downright deception propaganda of the website "Caring4Cancer":

"The concept that sugar feeds cancer is not useful. Sugar feeds every cell in our bodies. Our bodies need glucose, or simple sugar, for energy. Even if you cut every bit of sugar out of your diet, your body will make sugar from other sources, such as protein and fat. So cancer cells need sugar to grow, just like healthy cells. It helps to remember that there is nothing particular about sugar that “feeds” cancer cells any more than sugar feeds all cells in our body."

It is a complete deception, it simply ignores the factual evidence that aggressive fast-proliferating cancer cells are continuously dividing with vast power requirements, and so are more vulnerable to starvation during fasting than healthy cells, which are not spending all their time dividing!  The ignorant statement is drivel (like saying that throwing water on a fire is no help, because everyone knows water contains oxygen and hydrogen).  The page then correctly states that an increase in sugar increases blood insulin levels, which cause cancer cells to "rev up" and spread faster, but this confuses the accelerator pedal for the fuel.  To kill cancer you need to make the cancer cells "rev up", but without supplying the fuel sugars they need to do so, so they starve and are killed.  Research which looks at the situation where blood sugar and blood insulin levels are connected is missing this whole point, that an effective treatment for cancer is to desynchronise insulin from sugar.  You can do this on a short-term treatment basis by simply administering insulin without administering sugar, killing the cancer cells by cutting off their fuel supply (sugar) while maintaining the cancer accelerator (insulin) so that the cancer cells are forced to try to continue dividing, with inadequate fuel, and so die.

If you reduce blood sugar and blood insulin falls, then the cancer cells go into fasting like normal cells (due to the fall in insulin), and survive, ready to spread aggressively when sugar and insulin levels increase.  A good analogy to this is the tactic of cutting off fuel and logistics supplies for enemies in war, while they are on the offensive: the tanks and aircraft run out of fuel and are vulnerable.  But if they are holed up and on the defensive when their fuel is destroyed, they won't budge and you are in a long, protracted conflict of attrition.  With cancer, you don't want to to help the cancer cells survive by making them go into a fasting state by reducing the insulin level; you want them to be killed by starvation as they try to replicate quickly.

The linkage between blood sugar and blood insulin in research to covers up this simple mechanism for killing cancer cells by starvation.  Cutting the throttle (reducing the insulin) while cutting the fuel (sugar) allows cancer cells to throttle back and survive fasting.  What you need to do to kill cancer cells by starvation is to force them to divide faster (increased insulin), while reducing blood sugar to starve them when they try to do this.  It seems that this point isn't getting through to cancer researchers.  It is not a long-term solution, but a short-term treatment to kill cancer.  Obviously, you can't and don't want to increase insulin while reducing blood sugar for long periods, but merely for the time it takes to kill off an aggressive proliferating cancer.

The insulin-like growth hormone activator IGF-1 is involved in the ageing process and disease. By promoting rapid cell division and inhibiting cell death, high levels of IGF-1 in the blood promote cancer proliferation and ageing. Malignant cells are continuously dividing, with high energy requirements and cannot survive fasting. Non-cancer cells can regulate their metabolism to survive fasting. Fasting affects cancer risks. Pity this isn't being researched by anyone (drug companies have a very different approach, looking for profit-making drug solutions, not testing out simple ideas based on the mechanism for aggressive cancer proliferation!).

Exaggerated risks of radiation
There is such a thing as "minimising risk", but there is also such a thing as "exaggerating risk".  The media are guilty of not publishing the truth.  Note that in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki table above, even for 0.1-1 Gy (or 10-100 cGy or rads), 52% of leukemia deaths were natural and a smaller proportion, 48% due to bomb radiation, while for the same dose all other (solid tumor) cancers, 84% of the cancer deaths were natural and 16% were bomb radiation.  We're dealing with massive radiation doses compared to natural background, which is 0.01 mRad/hr in London, i.e. 1 rad or 1 cGy is equal to 100,000 hours or 11.4 years exposure to external radiation from natural background, chiefly cosmic rays and gamma rays from natural uranium in the soil.  However, the risks are real enough.

Dr Carl F. Miller, the author of Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures, of the U.S. Naval Radiological Lab and later Stanford Research Institute, collected Operation Castle H-bomb test fallout samples on the deck of Liberty ship YAG-39 near ground zero in 1954, personally measuring a dose (with his own dosimeter) near the upper end of the 10-100 rad interval from those tests and others such as Plumbbob Diablo and Coulomb B in 1957, and tragically did get leukemia in 1980.  This was over 50% likely due to fallout exposure, and less than 50% likely to be natural leukemia incidence.  One of the 64 Marshallese on Rongelap, Lekoj Anjain (son of the 1954 Mayor of Rongelap, John Anjain) who received about 175 cGy aged 1 in 1954, contracted fatal leukemia in 1972.  His sister Mijjua Anjain in 1966 was the first from Rongelap diagnosed with a thyroid tumor, which like others, was treated successfully (the first thyroid nodules had been discovered in 1963), a result of a massive (up to 20,000 cGy for children 1 year old in 1954) thyroid iodine-131, iodine-132, and iodine-133 dose from drinking fallout water contaminated in the open rainwater cistern.  Two children on Rongelap suffered growth retardation due to thyroid damage (hormone deficiency), also due to drinking water contaminated with iodine isotopes on the day of the fallout.

As with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, anti-radiation propaganda has ever since sought to conflate the extremely low level radiation persisting on Rongelap with long-term radiation effects due not to persisting low dose rate contamination, but to delayed effects from the high dose received outside on 1-2 March 1954, which caused all of the long-term effects.  Although many people less than 1 rad from drinking milk after Nevada tests in America, there are good reasons from the Hiroshima threshold dose thyroid cancer data to suppose that zero percent of them got thyroid cancer; after nuclear tests and later Chernobyl, the lack of a proper control group leads to natural cancer incidences being reported as fallout radiation effects.  Greenpeace and other anti-nuclear politics movements persuaded the people in 1984 that low-dose rate radiation was causing the long-term effects which were actually due to doses received back in 1954.

The dose intervals are fiddled in the RERF table so that an artificially large number of survivors are clumped into the 0.005-0.1 dose interval and only half that number are in the 0.1-1 dose interval: this statistical trick hides the decline (so to speak) in the cancer risk from low doses, where there is actually evidence of a hormesis and "threshold" dose of up to a few cGy at high dose rates for initial radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the threshold is about one thousand times greater for low dose rates, as evidence from the radium dial painters shows, see graph below).

Above: a costly Uncle Sam-funded dosimetry project measured the bone radium doses for the WWI radium dial painters, discovering evidence for a ~10mrad/hour (1000 times natural background) dose rate threshold for cancer.  This graph is adapted from Dr Charles L. Sander's recent book, Radiation Hormesis and the Linear-No-Threshold Assumption (Springer, 2010 edition), which - like the declassified Hiroshima damage data - has been studiously ignored by the media.  As our annotations on the graph show, we wish to emphasise the dose rate influence that seems to be inadequately thought about by Dr Sanders (as well as Dr Luckey and others) in the context of radiation hormesis.  The fact is, the "threshold" dose for net injury is inversely proportional to the dose rate.  Hiroshima (initial flash radiation) and the X-ray machine deliver doses in a short space of time (seconds), so the dose rate is high, and the threshold dose is low.  This is why Dr Alice Stewart found a large rise in childhood leukemias where the mothers has X-rays while pregnant: the dose rate was high, so the threshold dose (especially for rapidly dividing cells in infants) was small.  The reason for the dose rate dependence is P53 and other DNA repair enzymes having time to repair double-strand breaks correctly if the dose rate (double-strand break rate) is small, but sticking the wrong ends together (causing cancer) when the DNA is fragmented into lots of pieces all at once (high dose rates).  It's as simple as that.  DNA repair enzymes are overloaded at high dose rates.  At dose rates up to 10 mrad/hour, hormesis evidence shows DNA repair over-compensates for radiation: more metabolism is devoted to DNA repair enzymes and as a result there is a net fall in overall cancer risk (hormesis).

Dr Sander's publisher's book back cover description on Amazon states:

"Current radiation protection standards are based upon the application of the linear no-threshold (LNT) assumption, which considers that even very low doses of ionizing radiation can cause cancer. The radiation hormesis hypothesis, by contrast, proposes that low-dose ionizing radiation is not only safe but is healthy and beneficial. In this book, the author examines all facets of radiation hormesis in detail, including the history of the concept and mechanisms, and presents comprehensive, up-to-date reviews for major cancer types. It is explained how low-dose radiation can in fact decrease all-cause and all-cancer mortality and help to control metastatic cancer. Attention is also drawn to biases in epidemiological research when using the LNT assumption. The author shows how proponents of the LNT assumption consistently reject, manipulate, and deliberately ignore an overwhelming abundance of published data and falsely claim that no reliable data are available at doses of less than 100 mSv. The consequence of the LNT assumption is a radiophobia that is very costly in terms of lives and money."

At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dosimetry and effects data is better at the lower doses than the higher doses (mostly survivors in concrete buildings with large protection factors) because of (1) the errors in calculating the shielding for survivors of large doses, and (2) the statistically larger number of low-dose survivors (see table above).  The standard error for x cancers out of a large population (compared to the number x) is +/-100/x1/2 %, which is 10% error for a result of 100, about 3% for 1000 and 1% for 10000.  So you get more accuracy for more effects, especially as the high dose (well shielded) survivor dosimetry is more error-prone for the concrete buildings near ground zero than for people either in wooden homes or outdoors at the greatest distances in the study.  So Dr Sanders is correct here.

Unfortunately, he writes about dose thresholds, and doesn't fully analyze the dose rate dependence.  The problem is that the medical diagnostic health physics industry uses high dose rates to ensure quick and unblurred X-rays (while keeping the total dose as low as reasonably achievable), and have a vested interest in turning a blind or bigoted eye to dose rate evidence.  You don't want patients to be scared off by high dose rate X-ray machines, do you?  Where jobs depend on a technology or science, i.e. in any professional science areas, you get some (often overwhelming) doublethink that hold back progress: people don't want to risk damaging the foundations of their discipline or even being ostracised socially in their profession for rocking a boat.  This grass roots groupthink is always more effective in suppressing genuine discussion than high-handed obvious censorship, which is a target than can be attacked, rather than hidden in widespread prejudice.

Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski, Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, "Radiation Risks in the 20th Century; Reality, Illusions and Risks", Lecture at the Discovery of Polonium and Radium; It's Scientific and Philosophical Consequences, Benefits and Treats for Mankind, International Conference (100th Anniversary of the Discovery of Polonium and Radium by Marie Sklodowska- Curie), held 17-20 September 1998:

"Between 1945 and 1980 there were 541 nuclear atmospheric tests performed, with a total energy yield of 440 Mt. In these explosions, about 3 tones of plutonium (that is, almost 15,000 "deadly" 200 gram doses) were injected into the global atmosphere, and, behold, a miracle: we are still alive! The average individual radiation dose from all these nuclear explosions, accumulated between 1945 and 1998, is about 1 mSv, that is. less than 1% of natural dose (UNSCEAR, 1998). In the record years of 1961 and 1962, there were 176 atmospheric explosions, with a total yield of 84 Mt. The maximum deposition, on the surface of the Earth, of radionuclides from these explosions occurred in 1964. The average individual dose accumulated from this fallout, between 1961 and 1964, was about 0.35 mSv. The global nuclear arsenal being about 50,000 weapons, with a combined explosive power of about 13,000 Mt (Rotblat, 1981; Waldheim, 1991), is only 30 times higher than the megatonnage already released by all previous nuclear tests in the atmosphere.  ... At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, short-term radiation doses of less than 200 mSv did not cause induction of cancers among the atomic bomb survivors (UNSCEAR, 1993). Among survivors exposed to much higher doses, no adverse genetic effects in their progeny have been detected during 50 years of study (Sankaranarayanan, 1997). Until recently, such information from the study of survivors has been ignored. Instead, the driving force of radiophobia has been the linear no-threshold theory, assumed for relationship between radiation and its effects on the living organism (essentially, the assumption that the detrimental effects of radiation are proportional to dose, and that there is no dose at which such effects are not detrimental). It is on this assumption, that the International Commission of Radiological Protection (ICRP) arbitrarily based its rules of radiation protection in 1959. This was an administrative decision, not an effect of scientific proof. It was based not on science, but on political considerations, which influenced the philosophy and practice of radiation protection (Taylor, 1980). ... The absurdity of the no-threshold theory was brought to light after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, when minute doses - for example, reaching in the United States 0.004% of the average natural dose, or 0.3% at the rest of the Northern Hemisphere - were used to calculate 53,400 cancer deaths over the next 50 years (Goldman et al., 1987). ... The bomb survivor data, however, are not relevant for such estimations, because of the difference in the dose rate."



L. E. Feinendegen, MD, "Evidence for beneficial low level radiation effects and radiation hormesis", British Journal of Radiology, 2005, v. 78, no. 925, p. 3:

"Adaptive protection causes DNA damage prevention and repair and immune stimulation. It develops with a delay of hours, may last for days to months, decreases steadily at doses above about 100 mGy to 200 mGy and is not observed any more after acute exposures of more than about 500 mGy. Radiation-induced apoptosis and terminal cell differentiation also occur at higher doses and add to protection by reducing genomic instability and the number of mutated cells in tissues. At low doses, reduction of damage from endogenous sources by adaptive protection maybe equal to or outweigh radiogenic damage induction. Thus, the linear-no-threshold (LNT) hypothesis for cancer risk is scientifically unfounded and appears to be invalid in favour of a threshold or hormesis. This is consistent with data both from animal studies and human epidemiological observations on low-dose induced cancer. The LNT hypothesis should be abandoned and be replaced by a hypothesis that is scientifically justified and causes less unreasonable fear and unnecessary expenditure."


Above: low dose rate hormesis for bone tumors in mice injected with Sr-90 (M. Finkel et al., Second U.N. International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, geneva, 1958, v22, p65, published by the United Nations, 1959).  This data, along with the human evidence from bone irradiation in radium dial painters who gave evidence for a >1000 R threshold dose for bone cancer (for doses spread over 25 years, which would be similar to strontium-90 bone retention), experimentally debunked the idea that the small strontium-90 in bones from global fallout due to H-bomb tests in the 1950s caused cancer.  Linus Pauling and many others with a political edge over scientific objectivity chose to use their personalities and emotional socialism media domination to portray the illusion that such data simply doesn't exist, and that all radiation is as evil is witchcraft was viewed in the medieval period.  The media listened to them.  The human suffering costs are high:

Maurice Tubiana, MD, Ludwig E. Feinendegen, MD, Chichuan Yang, MD and Joseph M. Kaminski, MD, "The Linear No-Threshold Relationship Is Inconsistent with Radiation Biologic and Experimental Data", Radiology, 2009, v. 251, p. 13:

"The French Academies report (10) concluded that the LNT model and its use for assessing the risks associated with low doses are not based on scientific evidence. In contrast, the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) VII report (11) and that of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) (12) recommended the use of the LNT model. ... Deinococcus radiodurans bacteria have error-free repair mechanisms that can tolerate doses of 7 kGy (17) ... The two main repair systems for DSBs are homologous recombination and nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ). ... At low doses of x-rays, homologous recombination is error free, while NHEJ is low error prone. ... Defects in DNA repair systems are associated with a higher cancer incidence in animals and in humans. ... The concept that cancer induction proceeds similarly after low and high doses and dose rates is inconsistent with biologic evidence.  ... Contrary to previous claims, there was no increase in leukemia or other cancers (except thyroid cancer) in regions contaminated after the Chernobyl accident where thyroid doses ranged up to 1 Sv (123). The increase in thyroid cancer among young children is correlated with dose (124), and a threshold at 200 mSv is compatible with data (125). ... The data suggest that a combination of error-free DNA repair and elimination of preneoplastic cells furnishes practical thresholds ...

"The Chernobyl accident showed that overestimating radiation risks could be more detrimental than underestimating them. Misinformation partially led to traumatic evacuations of about 200 000 individuals, an estimated 1250 suicides, and between 100 000 and 200 000 elective abortions outside the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (164,165). [Emphasis added. So much for the ethical morality behind the "logic" of the "precautionary principle's" exaggerations and censorship of the data in the name of "safety".] ... DNA repair systems are very effective at low doses or dose rates (about 5–10 mGy/min) and become more error prone with increasing dose and dose rate. ... The elimination of mutant cells by death or proliferation arrest is a crucial defense. Most human cancers display defects in apoptosis or other means of eliminating mutant cells (167). Damaged cells can be eliminated after low doses by means of death, senescence, or immune response. Low-dose-rate irradiation (approximately 10 mGy/min) is less carcinogenic (per unit dose) than high-dose-rate irradiation (1 Gy/min)."




Above: hormesis for a 3000 Rad dose by single exposure at 10.3 Rad/minute of flour beetles to X-rays (J. M. Cork, Radiation research, 1957, v7, p551).  Commenting on this data in the 1961 Pergamon Press revised edition of the textbook by Bacq and Alexander, Fundamentals of Radiobiology, on page 442 stated: "Perhaps the hypothesis that all effects of ionizing radiation are inevitably deleterious has outlived its usefulness ... certain levels of radiation can be tolerated by animal population ..."  Robin H. Mole in 1957 published evidence in Nature v180, p456, showing that mice and guinea pigs given 1 R/week had increased lifespans, which is now well substantiated and is a hormesis effect due to the over-stimulation of DNA repair enzymes like P53 by low-level radiation, with beneficial health effects.  This of course violates the "precautionary principle".  When the linear, no-threshold dogma set in, with the 1956 presidential election hinging on the nuclear testing radioactive fallout issue, it was politically concerned with left winger scientists using it to peddle USSR-appeasement.  A pitched technical battle in the mainstream media ensued:

"Strontium-90 ... without doubt the most technical subject ever injected into a political campaign.  In no previous campaign had so many scientists been inspired to send so many statements to newspapers.  Never had the voting public had such a difficult, if not insuperable, job of trying to understand the arguments involved."

- Newsweek, "The 'Unpleasant Debate'," 26 November 1956, page 64.

The result was that the "precautionary principle" triumphed at the US Congressional Hearings in May-June 1957, becoming dogma before the facts on DNA repair enzymes like P53 as a low dose rate hormesis mechanism were finally uncovered beginning about twenty years later, in the late 1970s.

Anyone complaining about emotional groupthink on radiation is now abused with lying ad hominem sneers.  This is what Churchill predicted on 4 June 1945.   Clement Attlee had to keep rationing going postwar, because there was a lack of money for social reforms, thanks to his decision in 1935 to ignore Churchill and thereby to allow WWII to increase Britain's national debt to record heights.  Churchill's reluctance to implement the reforms were due to the financial constraints.  In 1951, after the true socialist face of Joseph Stalin had been revealed in the Cold War, Attlee was thrown out in the general election.  Churchill was back in, and ended rationing, which throws light on Attlee's socialist popularity, once a WWIII threat from the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" emerged.  Which was more important then, ivory tower political idealism, or liberty?


Above: in the 10.4 megaton Mike nuclear test on Elugelab Island, Eniwetok Atoll, 1952, the rats (species Rattus exulans) of Engebi survived the heat, blast, and fallout as explained by Neal O. Hines in his book Proving ground: An account of the radiobiological studies in the Pacific, 1946-1961, dramatically on pages 143, 151, 209-212, and 297:

Page 143: "On ... November 8 [7 days after Mike] ... At Engebi the group went ashore on an island ... that had been swept by the blast and by the succeeding surge of water. ... survey meters indicated radiation was at 2 to 2.5 R/hr [about 1,000 R/hr at 1 hour after detonation, allowing for t-1.2 fallout decay] ...

Page 151: "The exposure of Engebi to the effects of the Mike shot made it seem impossible that rats had survived.  The view was expressed in a subsequent summary by [Frank] Lowman, who said that there was 'little probability that rats had lived through the heat, the shock wave, the rush of water, and the nuclear radiations that Mike had inflicted on the island.  Members of the rat colonies apparently did live through the holocaust, however, and the questions presented by this circumstance would intrigue the investigators for years."

Page 209: "Their nests, composed of loosely matted grass stems, usually are built in burrows 6-12 inches below the surface of the ground, but occasionally the tunnels extend to 18-24 inches below the surface, or nests are found immediately beneath boards, slabs of concrete, or protective rubble. ... In 1955 the rats of Engebi were living on a treeless plain ... they fed on the seeds of Lepturus, Thuarea, and Fimbristylis, and on the leaves of Triumfetta and Sida, all common grass plants."

In 1954, the rats that of Engebi surviving Mike were exposed to the 1.69 megaton Castle-Nectar test, which is discussed on page 212:

"After the Nectar detonation concentrations [of I-131] in the thyroid were at levels considered excessive ... within 9 weeks activity in the thyroid was so low that measurement was difficult. ... most of the radioactivity in muscle was due to the presence of cesium-137, and no strontium-89/90 was found in that tissue. ... In January, 1955, the bones of rats contained strontium 89/90 in amounts approximating the maximum permissible dose, but no bone tumors have been discovered and none was found in specimens collected later."

Page 297: "The survival of the rats in the face of repeated atomic bombardment had seemed in 1955 a circumstance approaching the phenomenal.  Even more so was the continued health of the colonies ... The case was important because it seemed to bear so directly on one of the broadest of the unanswered questions of the nuclear age, the effect on warm-blooded, vertebrate animals of continued exposure to low-level irradiation."


Above: the rapid fall in cesium-137 uptake by plants and animals with distance from the lip of the Redwing-Cactus nuclear surface burst crater in 1967 (note that in 12 years later, in 1979 this particular crater was used as a convenient dump for contaminated soil during the Eniwetok Atoll cleap up campaign, and then it simply topped with a concrete dome).

The Syrian nerve gas attack and the stability of the Middle East (update):

Russia's President Putin is on President Assad's side in the Syrian civil war, and chooses to discount evidence for Assad's use of sarin nerve gas.  President Obama is headed towards cruise missile strikes on the Syrian nerve gas missile launchers.  Britain's Parliament voted against military action in the Syrian civil war.  There are a large number of factors involved.  Thousands of civilians, including children, have already been killed by "conventional" weapons, without any Western involvement.  Assad is not a direct threat to the West, whereas some of the militant opposition groups might be.  The close proximity of nuclear Iran and nuclear Israel, and terrorists in Lebanon makes Syria more likely to escalate into a general Middle East insurgency than was the case with Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan.  Appeasement of dictatorship and civilian slaughter sends out a message of weakness to all thugs and terrorists, but taking action may unify and harden Islamic oppositions to Western influence over large areas.  During the 1930s, Britain and America kept out of the Spanish civil war, despite the fact that fascist General Franco was being supported by fascists in Italy and Germany.  Spain was, however, neutral during WWII.  Getting involved in the Syrian civil war, largely a conflict between the Sunni and Shia Muslims, could potentially lead to another cold war with Russia.  Syria also has a great deal of modern Russian weapons, missile systems as well as chemical weapons.  It's better equipped than Libya was.

Marxist historians, calling nuclear facts "lies", rudeness and calling people "liars", and smear tactics by the Nazi national socialist thugs (update on 2 October 2013):



Thank God for Ed Milliband, Britain's Labour Party shadow Prime Minister!  His late father, the well known Marxist academic Ralph Millband, had been called a Queen hater by the Daily Mail newspaper, and he has responded by "slandering" the newspaper by calling the journalists who published the facts "liars".

Churchill said that WWII was an "unnecessary war": those who fought against Hitler had no need to do so, because by forcefully opposing the Nazis as soon as they repeatedly flouted the military restrictions of Treaty of Versailles in 1933-5, the excesses of Nazism could have been restrained for the time necessary for Hitler's massive national socialist debt-ridden overspending to have bankrupt Germany (just as Reagan did with the USSR).  As we have pointed out before, every second without war during an "arms race" which you are losing against a higher-spending fanatical terrorist regime is actually a wasted second of time, because you are arming slower than the evil regime, and the probability of subduing the opponent in war is diminishing, not increasing.  If a gap is ever widening, the sooner you take action, the better the prospects of peace.  Some of the communists whose propaganda led Britain into WWII peril fought in the war, but communist propaganda for appeasement helped to cause the war in the first place.  (If a surgeon first knocks your brains out and then tries to partially repair the damage later, does he become a "great medical hero"?) 

To be lucid we must be honest and call spades what they are, i.e. spades, insteading of sticking to the socially "nice" wording (evilly threat-enforced) system of Adolf Hitler (translated from the German: "hard words make wounds").  Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was taken in by Hitler's (bogus) display of "good manners" and "high breeding" (the Nazi tactics of a "an iron fist inside a nice velvet glove").  Never trust a man who is so cold blooded that he man modulate his voice and words into "social nicety".  If he can cover-up his feelings that well, you have no idea of what he is really thinks about anything, you don't really "know" him, and you certainly do not understand or correctly predict his ambitions and sneaky methods.

There are two forms of propaganda: good and bad.  Good-form propaganda (traditionally called "light or white propaganda" during WWII) consists of not-covering up your ulterior motive or agenda, but making clear exactly what you want.  Bad-form propaganda (called "dark propaganda" in WWII) consists of keeping your motivating light carefully hidden from sight, to deliberately mislead the public into supporting a policy which it objects to.  This is totally relevant and essential to understanding civil defense and the effects of nuclear weapons, because during the 1930s and again during the Cold War, communists and Nazis used bad-form propaganda to help their political causes by claiming to disprove the possibility of cheap, effective knowledge-base civil defense.
The "liar" rudeness problem and censorship: if a famous person like Ed Milliband calls a newspaper which calls his late Marxist father a Queen hater, nobody censors him out of the media and screams abuse at him for "being rude" by using the word "liar".  Nobody falsely calls him "autistic" or "ill-informed" or " Instead, it is accepted that it is not rude to call people liars, if that is an accurate description.  But, if you are not famous, and you call liars "liars" for publishing patiently false indoctrinating propaganda that results in millions of needless deaths in unnecessary bombing without civil defence for civilian protection and additional deaths due to the money wastage and effects on world economic food subsidies, you can be dismissed by groupthink censors for being "rude".
Britain DAILY MAIL 1 October 2013: defending freedom of speech against a rude/slandering Marxist at the top of British politics?!

Let's examine the media's "rudeness" doublethink.  Rod Little states, in The Spectator, 1 October 2013:

Sorry, Ed Miliband, your dad hated Britain 

Despite Ed Miliband's protestations, Ralph Miliband was a Marxist when Marxism was threatening our way of life. 

It doesn’t matter how much Ed Miliband’s lip quivers, his dad was, as The Daily Mail suggested, a far left wing intellectual whose gratitude to the country which took him in extended only to wishing it might be dismantled, root and branch. That Ralph Miliband was also an urbane north London émigré does not alter, either, the fact that he was, like so many academics, seduced by Marxism.
Our universities are virtually the only places in the civilised world where this absurd and discredited creed continues to prosper; much of it today is simply attitudinalising nonsense; when Miliband began his work, under the tutelage of the horrible Harold Laski, it was a potent threat to our way of life.
DAILY MAIL 28 September 2013: the shame and irony is that - despite his Marxism, and lying smear campaign against the truth, Ed Milliband is actually the BEST politician in Britain today, far better than Eton-educated millionaire David Cameron who has failed to decrease the national debt or even to cancel out the rate of increase of the national debt (i.e. deficit).  Politics is ludricrously warped and corrupted in this country.

An evil legacy and why we won't apologise

By DAILY MAIL COMMENT

PUBLISHED: 00:11, 1 October 2013


... Of course, it was not the Mail that first drew the prominent Marxist sociologist Professor Ralph Miliband — a man who was not averse to publicity — into the public arena. This was the decision of his son who, for two years running, has told Labour conferences how his refugee father fled Nazi persecution to Britain. ...

[It was a choice between the gas chamber or fighting in the Royal Navy - even the mass murderer Joseph Stalin fought against Hitler, after Hitler threatened his life.]

In his tetchy and menacing response, which we publish in full on these pages, the Labour leader expresses just pride in his father’s war record as a volunteer in the Royal Navy.

 But he cites this, and his father’s affection for his shipmates (which, as shown on these pages, was riven by class hatred), as if it were conclusive proof that he loved this country.

So how is it that shortly after his arrival in Britain, the 17-year-old Miliband senior had confided to his diary:

 ‘The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose [the war] to show them how things are’?Isn’t it permissible to surmise that a man who had expressed such views joined the Royal Navy not so much to fight for Britain as to fight, like the Soviet Union, against the Nazis?

Yes, as his son argues, Mr Miliband Snr may have felt gratitude for the security, freedom and comfort he enjoyed in Britain. ...

Under Stalin’s Communism, countless millions were murdered, tortured, starved to death, executed or sent to endure a sub-human existence in the gulags.

Religion, the family and the very spirit of the individual were brutally crushed. The arts, newspapers — justice itself — were ruthlessly controlled by the commissars.

Freedom of expression was purged. Even as late as the Seventies, dissidents were locked in mental asylums, while the Press was controlled by the State for another two decades.

Truly, Ralph Miliband and Hobsbawm were, in the withering phrase often attributed to Lenin, the ‘useful idiots’ who validated this most pernicious doctrine, which has spread poverty and misery wherever it has triumphed.

That’s why the Mail — which is not Pravda — said that readers who love this country would be truly disturbed if they understood about Miliband’s father’s views. ...

More chillingly, the father’s disdain for freedom of expression can be seen in his son’s determination to place the British Press under statutory control.

Next week the Privy Council, itself an arm of the state, will meet to discuss plans — following a stitch-up with Hacked Off over late-night pizzas in Mr Miliband’s office — for what will ultimately be a politically controlled body to oversee what papers are allowed to publish.

Put to one side that Mr Miliband’s close involvement with degenerates such as Damian McBride gives him scant right to claim the moral high ground on anything. 

If he crushes the freedom of the Press, no doubt his father will be proud of him from beyond the grave, where he lies 12 yards from the remains of Karl Marx.

But he will have driven a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation ...


********************
The effective use of nuclear deterrence is to hold military targets vulnerable and so deter offensive actions. Civilian cities are protected by "concrete jungle" skylines which rapidly attenuate radiations (nuclear, thermal) and blast wave energy, which is depleted in a cumulative way as damage is done.  The fireball is hot, but cools rapidly as it expands and radiates thermal energy, and it is ionized and thus opaque to thermal radiation so it does not deliver as much thermal energy to targets within it as "predicted" by naive point-source free-air calculations.  Within a fireball, only the air in direct contact with a surface delivers energy because the fireball is opaque (a thermal radiation absorber, due to the nitrogen dioxide it contains, i.e. the red-brown coloured gas that makes the fireball look like fire).  It cools quickly, first by radiation emission, and then by convective mixing as it rises off the ground and sucks in the "afterwinds" of cool air.  With cheap widespread-knowledge-based civil defense, nuclear weapons lose their civilian "collateral damage" unthinkability, thus the propaganda of CND is effectively vaporized even if the BBC and Guardian refuse to report the truth. Truth increases, rather than reduces, nuclear deterrence by advanced nations with advanced nuclear weapons technology, and reduces terrorist threats by making them more survivable, if not deterring them in the first place by making them ineffective!

Above: the U.S. Army manual Atomic Weapons Employment (Department of the Army, PAM 39-1, 72 pages long, dated 12 June 1956, printed "For Official Use Only") details 10 different nuclear weapons systems with yields of 2 kt to 5 Mt for use against military targets not civilians: high air burst, low air burst, surface burst, and 50 feet subsurface bursts (earth penetrator), delivered to targets by aircraft, free rockets, guided missiles, artillery shells.  Likewise for the U.S. Army Field Manual, Nuclear Weapons Employment (FM 101-31-1) is 159 pages long, dated February 1968, based on a 1963 version by Philip J. Dolan.  Dolan also edited the Secret-Restricted Data classified 1972 effects manual DNA-EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, Part 2 of which states on page 14-1: "One of the primary uses of nuclear weapons wouldbe for the destruction of military field equipment."  (Part 1 of DNA-EM-1 is also available, here.) Dolan is co-editor with Glasstone of the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which contains very basic unclassified data applying to "ideal conditions" in unobstructed deserts and unobstructed ocean, not modern high-rise "concrete jungles".
Above: American Soviet Military Power statistics were challenged: several denials of the USSR's emerging threat in the 1980s were made in response to Reagan's warnings to the public.  One claimed that the USSR should have more missiles because they were "less accurate" than American missiles.  This was debunked because the USSR didn't need accurate missiles to target large city targets.  You only need accurate missiles for counterforce (silo-debunking) surgical strikes, not for countervalue (city) targetting!  The second argument (illustration above) is more subtle, but again false.  The argument is that the USSR missiles were more vulnerable than the American missiles, balancing everything our, or giving America an effective superiority.  But "vulnerability" for USSR missiles only exists in the case of the Americans launching a surprise first-strike against the USSR.  But American policy was not to start a nuclear war in such a way, unlike Lenin's creed and the USSR invasion of Poland in a secret surprise attack from east in 1939 in collaboration with the Nazis, so therefore the July 1982 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argument above is specious.  (Superficially plausible, but actually wrong ... Misleading in appearance, esp. misleadingly attractive...)
****************

(We have an "agenda". It's to fight for truth, against Marxist dictatorial fascists who tell lies with impunity and censor truth as taboo by alleging that it is being "rude", because they have no objective answer to proved facts, but still dogmatically believe that their false, warped, evil "idealism" permits them, just as Hitler's "science" of eugenics, to do evil in the name of "integrity".)

GCHQ and Britain's M15 secret intelligence service against terrorism: a few comments


 1. In WWII secret intelligence in Britain developed the Colossus computer to break the German's Fish code (Enigma was relatively easy to break).  These code breaking successes helped to win WWII by feeding vital information about German military movement orders (in virtually real time) to British and American military Generals.  E.g., Monty's successes in North Africa were not due to Monty's brilliant "intuition" about Rommel's movements (as Monty claimed, right into the 1970s, to help cover-up the fact Britain had broken the German codes).  They were due to the secret intelligence telegraps he was receiving from British electronics computers decoding top secret German radio traffic.

 2. In peacetime, secret intelligence has failed to warn credibly of terrorist attacks, such as Pearl Harbor (1941), 9/11 (2001), and 7/7 (2005).  These failures are used to argue not that there is a limit to what secret peacetime intelligence can do against diffused secret gangs of thugs, but rather that "not enough resources" or MONEY is being spent on the vast GCHQ system.  Wrong.  Organized crime, like terrorism, is unpreventable by the state.  It was even unpreventable in the USSR and Warsaw Pact and in Nazi Germany despite the vast secret police networks, which totally eliminated human rights to dissent or the pursuit of liberal non-conformist ideas like democracy.

 3. For example, the uprisings in Communist Hungary in 1956, the Prague Spring in 1968, Tiananmen Square in 1989. Sure, in all these cases the tanks rolled out for the protestors and the authorities quickly used overwhelming force to suppress them.  But the whole point is that SECRET POLICE CANNOT PREVENT REVOLTS, ORGANIZED CRIME (WHATEVER DEFINITION THE WORD "CRIME" IS GIVEN BY THE LAWS, E.G. DEMOCRACY WAS A "CRIME" IN DICTATORSHIPS).  EVEN WITH A MICROPHONE AND CCTV CAMERA IN EVERY BEDROOM, IT IS SIMPLY NOT POSSIBLE TO PICK UP EVERY COVERT CLUE.  PEOPLE COMMUNICATE DELIBERATELY IN A WAY THAT CIRCUMVENTS DETECTION.

 Civil defence is NOT therefore "disproved" by the GCHQ, any more that it is "disproved" by our theoretical ability to burn the paint off the Kremlin using Trident.  People don't want an incredible deterrent.  To make deterrence credible, we must be ready to fight at all times.  Retaliation ability by itself, at enormous expense and danger, is not good enough.  We want more than the ability to retaliate or depend on half baked intelligence guesswork.  We need the ability to effectively mitigate damage in any attack, and thus save ourselves the need to seek Pyrrhic victory in retaliation!

'WHEN IS A SMEAR NOT A SMEAR?'


Several years ago the political analyst, S. E. Finer, wrote a book about pressure groups, concluding that the more noise an organisation makes publicly, the more this indicates its lack of real influence in the corridors of power. People shouting on the streets are usually obliged to do so because of their failure to influence the policy process.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has, in its time, managed to rustle up more shouters on the streets than most: it turned out about 150,000 and 100,000 in 1981 and 1982 respectively, and characteristically claimed a quarter of a million on each occasion. In order to frustrate yet another such cavalier exaggeration in October 1983, the Coalition for Peace Through Security commissioned an expert photographic analysis which showed the true figure on that occasion to be approximately 98,000 for march and rally combined. So as to show 'progress' on their own grossly inflated estimates for the previous two years, the CND had felt obliged to claim 400,000 – a total ruled out as absolutely impossible by our aerial survey. Yet, when our findings were made known to the media, the very first question asked by a radio interviewer was: "Isn't this an attempt by the CPS to smear the CND?" No matter that the accuracy of our survey and the inaccuracy of the CND 'guesstimate' were beyond question; it was just 'bad form' to criticise the Holy Movement – irrespective of the validity of the criticism.

The late Senator Joseph McCarthy certainly has a lot to answer for: his campaign of wild and often unsubstantiated allegations of Communist activity has almost succeeded in giving anti-Communism in general a bad name. There is today a great propensity for 'reverse McCarthyism', a willingness to dismiss any charge of far Left misbehaviour, however accurate, as just 'Reds-under-the-Bed’ – even when the Reds are no longer under the bed, but in it. Have you noticed, for example, how the allies of the Militant Tendency (in what currently passes for the Labour Party) continually refer to the feeble attempts being made to keep these revolutionary Trotskyists in check as a 'witch-hunt'? Now, the whole point about a witch-hunt is that it was always unjust, because witches were non-existent and the poor wretches accused and killed for sorcery were totally innocent of any crime. Had they really possessed evil supernatural powers, the injustice of hunting for witches would have been far from self-evident.

So it is with the 'smearing' of the CND by its opponents. Basically, this organisation sails under false colours. It claims to be a 'broadly-based movement', even going to the trouble of setting up and administering a miniscule sub-group of 'Tories Against Cruise and Trident', whose members need not belong to the Tory Party and whose supporters are openly admitted to include people who do not even vote Conservative.

The CND is not only one-sided in its disarmament recommendations, it is also grossly one-sided in its political affiliations. Of course significant numbers of ordinary apolitical folk, worried (and who isn't?) about the potential horror of a nuclear war, exist in the CND at grass-roots level; but this is most definitely not reflected anywhere near the top of the hierarchy. Even the traditional, ever-present strand of British pacifism which does so much to give CND a veneer of respectability in the country at large, is heavily outnumbered by the ideologically committed in the leadership clique.

Take the December 1983 Annual Conference elections, for example, when the six CND officers and 20 CND Council members were chosen. Here is a breakdown of the officers:

Chair: [sic] Joan Ruddock – a committed Left-wing Labourite who has repeatedly belittled the existence of a Soviet threat, advocates a neutral Britain out of NATO, and recently admitted: "My life has become one of greater and greater commitment to Socialism." (City Limits, 2 March 1984)

Vice-Chair: (i) Professor Michael Pentz – former Communist Party local government candidate, now (like so many other ex-CP members) on the hard Left of the Labour Party. Has been involved with the Soviet front body, the World Federation of Scientific Workers, as well as the British arm of the Kremlin-backed World Peace Council.

(ii) Joy Hurcombe – like Ruddock, a former Labour Parliamentary candidate on the Left of the Party. Deeply involved in the controversial, Trotskyist-dominated Labour CND group.

(iii) Roger Spiller – a full-time trade union official and Labour activist, on the Tribune wing of the Party. Delegated as an 'Observer' representing the CND at the World Peace Council's phony Prague Peace Assembly in 1983.

(iv) Meg Beresford – who has described herself as a 'Socialist Feminist'.

Treasurer: Mick Elliott – delegate in 1980 to the World Peace Council's so-called World Parliament [!] of Peoples for Peace in Bulgaria, which according to Vladimir Bukovsky unanimously voted to endorse the puppet régime in Afghanistan, installed by Soviet tanks the previous December. Which way did Elliott vote? Elliott was also 'Parliamentary Adviser' to Richard Caborn, a pro-Soviet World Peace Council member – and the MP installed by the hard Left after a constituency coup in Sheffield led to the ousting as Labour candidate of the former Secretary of State for Defence Fred Mulley.

Of the combined total of 26 CND officers and Council members elected at the 1983 Annual Conference, at least 20 are committed Communists, Labourites or 'Socialists' of one description or another. Of the 20 Council members chosen, a summary can be given as follows:

Four open members of the British Communist Party – (i) Professor Vic Allen – Arthur Scargill's eminence grise and a leading member of the British-Soviet Friendship Society. Now serving on the CND's International Committee, which organises delegations to the so-called Soviet Peace Committee and other World Peace Council fronts, (ii) Jon Bloomfield – the CND's other 'Observer' at the Prague Peace Assembly, (iii) Mary Brennan – who calls herself a 'Catholic, Communist, Doctor', (iv) lan Davison – Secretary of Scottish CND and a senior figure in the CND 'establishment’.

Nine known Labourites – (i) & (ii) the Trotskyists Dick Withecombe and Judith Bonner. The latter wrote in her CND election manifesto: "our allies are not NATO generals and the likes of Mountbatten who support the butchering of liberation movements in Central America and Northern Ireland". (iii) & (iv) Two defeated Left-wing Labour MPs, Joan Lestor and Bob Cryer. (v), (vi) & (vii) Labour activists Walter Wolfgang, Penny Auty and the unspeakable Helen John – the last of whom is a close political ally of Ken Livingstone, is a veteran Greenham Common camper, and had her fares paid to the 1983 Prague Peace Assembly by the Women's International Democratic Federation, a notorious Soviet front organisation. (viii) Candy Atherton – a leading light in the 1982 anti-Falklands Task Force agitation within the CND and the Labour Party. Finally, (ix) Jenny Edwards – a full-time employee at CND Head Office until late 1983, when Labour's Camden Council took her on with a five-figure salary at the ratepayers' expense as a full-time 'Peace Officer' for the Borough.

One 'unaffiliated Socialist' – James Hinton – of the far Left persuasion.

Even of the remaining six, (i) & (ii) Annajoy David and Dan Plesch appear to stand well to the Left of Centre; (iii) Paul Johns (of Christian CND) was happy to write an article for the Communist Morning Star newspaper in January 1984, and (iv) Giles Perritt (formerly of Schools Against the Bomb) described himself as a 'Labour supporter' at a conference in the spring of 1983.

Nor should we forget the (non-elected) Vice-Presidents of the CND, 11 in all, including Labour Leftists Lord (Hugh) Jenkins, Ron Todd (Transport & General Workers Union), Frank Allaun (of the pro-Soviet British Peace Assembly, and Labour Action for Peace), and Jo Richardson; ex-Communist Party members E. P. Thompson and Phil Bolsover; and, last but not least, Dr John Cox who was elected to the Executive Committee of the British Communist Party at its 38th Congress in November 1983. This was, of course, the memorable assembly when CND General Secretary Bruce Kent referred to the Communists as "partners in the cause for peace in this world", and praised the nauseatingly pro-Moscow paper, the Morning Star, for its "steady, honest and generous coverage of the whole disarmament case". (A measure of its honesty, and of its conception of 'Peace', can be gauged from its banner headline on the death of Andropov, just three months later. "MAN OF PEACE DIES", it said of the butcher of the Hungarians, the architect of Soviet psychiatric abuse of dissidents, and the ruthless former head of the KGB.)

The notion of 'smearing' is that of making broad, unspecific and untrue allegations. The person-by-person analysis just set out is as specific as can be. Furthermore, it is accurate – Bruce Kent's response to a similar account published in the Daily Telegraph mainly being to assert that the CND Council would also include many more delegates from the regions, and that the "entire Council then forms its Executive". What he failed to predict was that of the 25 places on the CND Executive, more than half were to be filled from the 26 individuals elected by the Annual Conference, who in December 1983 constituted almost a clean sweep for the Left, as we have seen.

In any case several of the other Executive Members turned out to exhibit exactly the same sort of Leftist orientation, including Labourites Jane Mayes and Jane Oberman, and Communists Paul Nicholls and Alan McKinnon. Such are the convolutions of the CND's internal 'democratic' procedures, that the first three of these – all of whom were rejected by the Annual Conference as ordinary Council members – nevertheless have managed to find their way indirectly, not only onto the Council after all, but also onto the national CND Executive as well...

However, let me leave the last word on whether or not it is a 'smear' to denounce the CND as a Left-wing front, to the National Election Agent of the Communist Party of Great Britain, John Peck. According to the January 1984 issue of World Marxist Review, Peck gave the following reassurance to yet another Kremlin-backed 'Peace' symposium in Prague: "some participants in the campaign [for nuclear disarmament] tend to equate the Soviet Union with the United States as being equally responsible for the arms race. But these are in a minority. The national leadership of the CND see the main threat as emanating from the United States." [My emphasis]

A smear is not a smear, it seems, when it comes from the mouth of a Communist.

[This article also appeared in The Defence Campaigner, Summer 1984]







Marxist (un)Unite HEROES shut down 10% of Scotland's GDP to save one great union official, Stephen Deans (23 October 2013 update):
HARD PROOF THAT MARXISM ND MEDIA CENSORSHIP IS A "POTENT FORCE" IN BRITAIN TODAY.

Here's another story to warm the cockles of the hearts of Karl Marx and his Highgate Cemetery next-plot-neighbor Professor Ralph Milliband, which also demonstrates the continuing suppression of nuclear weapons effects and civil defense effectiveness data by the British Marxist politics media "science" reporters.  Scotland's loss-making Grangemouth oil cracking and plastics-from-oil production chemical plant run by Ineos, which turns out 10% of Scotland's GDP, has been shut down with the loss of all the jobs after the Unite union rejected a vital economic survival plan which involved salary freezes and pension pot cutbacks to save the plant!  The plant has lost £150 million a year for the past four years!  Rather than survive, they prefer to lose their jobs to save face and prevent acknowledging the realities of the recession and the competition in raw plastic prices from more cost-effective chemical plants abroad.

Suggestion to Marxists in Parliament like Ed Milliband: award the union official Stephen Deans with a Knighthood, recommend Unite for the Nobel Peace Prize for unifying the workforce in self-sacrifice of their jobs, and give him a safe seat in a bigoted union dominated constituency at the next by-election, with a front-bench job in the Shadow Cabinet.  Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister, is trying to come up with ideas to reopen a plant that makes £150 million annual loss to "save the jobs".  Following this way of thinking, why not also just borrow an extra £150 million a year from the Chinese commie comrade investors to prop up the loss at the chemical plant at general taxpayer's expense, so you don't have to make any pay freezes or pension plan cutbacks?  That's what we did in the 1970s with all the union bloated USSR-type-state-subsidised, overpaid and under-performing (relative to Britain's competitors in the real world beyond our shores) big industries like steel,  aerospace, nuclear, ship building, etc.

For that matter, seeing that the national debt is still rising and has passed £1 trillion, why not simply use the 1980s USSR solution to massive uneconomic state funded spending, and seek to simply run up the national credit card by borrowing another £1 trillion (£1 million million) every year from the Chinese commie comrades and giving it out equally to everybody in the 63,000,000 UK population?  £1 trillion divided into 63 million works out as a "salary" of £15,873 per person in the UK.  When the bills for the interest repayments comes in, we can simply borrow more and more to pay the interest!  What a financially ingenious long-term plan this is.  A sure way to win loads of votes in the next election for the responsible people who vote for disguised Marxism, anyway ... (There you go, Commies.  See?  We can be "nice" and "polite" and "loving" to Commies on this blog.)

1 November 2013 update:

Common sense prevailed over the Arthur Scargill type Marxism in the end. (The Unite official Stephen Deans whose suspension for alleged involvement in the Falkirk Labour Party Candidate union rigging scandal led to the original dispute, has not been awarded a Knighthood yet for Uniting the workers in an effort to lose jobs, etc.  Both sides took a more common sense approach.)  However, Marxist green environmentalist groupthink dogma continues to threaten popular media coverage of unexaggerated facts and thus to effectively curtail or demolish freedom of speech on on pseudo-taboo topics like saving lives and preventing effective terrorism.  Fredrick Forsyth commented on the Ralph Milliband scandal as follows (Daily Express, Friday 18 October 2013, p15):

"... throughout the Cold War, the USSR's dedicated friends, the fellow-travellers ... pretended to love this country as they preached a creed to destroy its democracy, freedoms, rights and liberties on the weird grounds that it would be better off it it were like East Germany.  And the trendy left called them intellectuals.  They were as thick as planks. As Reuters' man in East Germany, I used to watch delegations of them being given the rehearsed runaround in the Workers' Paradise - trade unionists, academics.  They wold be shown a phoney factory ... and drink in the propaganda.  They were wined and dined and loved it all.  They never went near the wall where ordinary East Germans were shot down as they tried to escape ... I despised them all, not for their immorality- for like Prof Milliband they all thought they were deeply moral, but for their crass stupidity."

Stupidity also reigns in other areas like superstring theory, where censorship is used to declare facts "taboo" and to close down debates before the facts are in or have been checked or discussed.  As with Medical Nobel Laureate Dr Alexis Carrell, Nazi-collaborating gas chamber eugenics proponent of 1935 best-seller Man the Unknown, the kind of stupidity we are talking about is not one that the gullible media understand.  To them, stupidity is the truth, which is always taboo, rude, unacceptable, uncivilized, etc.  To them, cleverness means choosing an exciting fantasy dream world of utopian fiction over the hard truth of the real world.
UPDATE: please see also the posts on NUCLEAR DETONATIONS IN URBAN AND SUBURBAN AREAS (updated 3 January 2014 with latest secret UK National Archives files from 1984), and Britain's 1950 studies of nuclear 9/11 and the disappearance of civilian airliner MH370.

posted by Nuclear Weapons Effects 8:02 am

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

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."