Can Britain and America prevail over an alliance of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea in WWIII? The anti-nuclear biased High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, Baroness Catherine Ashton (salary £250,000), never-elected, is behind the WWIII risk today because she pushed the EU at Ukraine, threatening the Russian base in Crimea! American sanctions on Japan in 1940 led to Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, so we need civil defense now. All due to Cathy Ashton's megalomania, self-aggrandisement, conceit and vanity.
Baroness Catherine Ashton, the EU Foreign Affairs supremo who tried to push the EU into the Ukraine to start WWIII between East and West (by intimidating Russia into violating the 1994 Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukrainian independence, signed by UK, US and Russia), is actually the former Vice-Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND, who personally wrote falsehoods in CND propaganda book The neutron bomb.
Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express (3 March 2014, page 12) shows that ex CND Vice-Chairman Baroness Catherine Ashton (now High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs), deliberately pushed into the Ukraine and provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine by trying to steal Ukrainian sovereignty for the European Union, using the same NO-REFERENDUM dangerous method which has been used to steal British liberty (no British party has given the British people a referendum on joining or remaining in the corrupt, warmongering European Union):
"Baroness Catherine Ashton, who goes by the grand title of High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs ... does not have a shred of credibility. She might be paid over £250,000 a year and be head of a vast EU diplomatic operation costing an annual £442 million, but she is a lightweight socialist apparatchik who has never been elected to any public position. She ... was vice-chair of that posturing gang of noisy defeatists, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. ... Baroness Ashton ... helped to provoke the current crisis ... The EU has been desperate to extend its sphere of influence. Ukraine ... was a prime target."
“Number of times word ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ mentioned in statement by Catherine Ashton on Holocaust Remembrance Day: 0,” said Joshua Davidovich, a news editor at the Times of Israel, on Twitter." - http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/01/27/eu-diplomatic-chief-catherine-ashtons-official-statement-on-holocaust-memorial-day-doesnt-mention-jews/ [David: these EU quacks and BBC/Guardian newspaper political activists are mostly anti-Jewish racists, they are fascists, and they are warmongers in sheep's clothing.]
Accused of racism against the Jews for failing to mention the Jewish victims of the holocaust, this Baroness Catherine Ashton is not trying to kill everyone on earth by starting World War III, while President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron lift not a finger to stop her. (To help those who need the data for missile programming and want to retaliate against her after WWIII, the Brussels EU headquarters coordinates are: 50°50′N 4°23′E / 50.84°N 4.38°E.)
Private Eye, 7 March 2014. No joking, this could turn out to be a real crisis.
"The megalomaniacs of Brussels despise national independence and democracy. ... At the entrance to EU Parliament’s visitors’ centre there’s a slogan: “National sovereignty is the root cause of the most crying evils of our times. The only final remedy for this supreme and catastrophic evil is the federal union of the peoples.” " - Leo McKinstry.
Because the EU is not democratic, it is a threat to world peace, especially with unelected, censoring, dictatorial narcissists like Cathy Ashton trying to start WWIII by interfering in national democracy:
From Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another, by Spencer R. Weart, Yale University Press, 1998:
Chapter One: Investigating the Puzzle of Democratic Peace
... Free peoples, Kant explained, are inherently peaceful; they will make war only when driven to it by tyrants [like the EU and its High Representative on Foreign Affairs Cathy Ashton]. ... In our own times, democracies have burned people to death by the tens of thousands in the fires of Hamburg and Hiroshima. Yet in all these wars, one side fell short of what most people would call democracy. The United States, as will be discussed later, never has fought a democratic government basically like its own. ... during the past century there have been no wars between well-established democracies. ... political scientists took up systematic study. Their findings remained almost unknown outside academic circles. ... What was the probability, they asked, that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident? The answer: less than one chance in a thousand. That is a level of certainty not often achieved with laboratory rats, let alone in studies of international relations.
... the lack of wars between democracies is not an artifact caused by the limited number of such regimes - 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." ... In negotiations each regime did tend to behave according to its political culture. Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders undeniably extending their domestic style of behavior abroad by using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation, in ways that made war more likely. Republican behavior was plainly different - so much so that in quite a few cases the difference 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.
Dangerous nuclear weapons fanatic, Baroness Catherine Ashton, head of European Union Foreign Affairs, who promoted Brezhnev's Russian lies about the neutron bomb in her 1977 contribution to chapter 1 of the CND propaganda anti-deterrence lies-filled book The neutron Bomb, of course has now been promoted by the fascists and has caused the Ukraine crisis in another pro-Russian lying "nuclear disarmament" plot to endanger British lives or to try to cause a Third World War.
Anti-nuclear biased Russian-agenda lying "High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs" Baroness Catherine Ashton (salary £250,000), a never-elected European Union top-dog, is the ultimate cause of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Is this dangerous episode yet another deliberate plan between ex-CND Vice Chair Ashton and her CND colleagues in the Kremlim to provide an excuse for invasion or WWIII between East and West? Is Cathy Ashton being paid a secret back-hander by the Kremlin for providing Putin with his perfect excuse to invade Crimea and (soon) other countries which get scared nearby, and rearm, "escalating tensions" with Russia, or even WWIII? Remember, Adolf Hitler had effective support from "disarmament pacifists" in England like 1933 Oxford Union pacifist debate leader professor Cyril Joad, who was still exaggerating weapons effects in his August 1939 Penguin books disarmament best-seller "Why War?" (where he falsely stated that the consensus of publications on war was that everything would be wiped out by incendiary, high explosive and gas immediately a war began). Like today's "pacifists", this encourages thugs to start wars.
Mr McKinstry needs to compare in quantitative detail the level of corruption and slaughter financed by corrupt, dictatorial, anti-democratic "European Union" projects (like funding third world tobacco farmers to cause lung cancer in addition to the "warmongering" politics behind the current Ukraine crisis), with the "eugenics for ethnic fitness" of dictatorships like the USSR. He writes softly instead (Daily Express article of 6 March 2014, page 12):
“Because the EU’s officials are not answerable to the peoples of the nation states ... Brussels overspent its budget last year by a shocking £20 billion. [This] far exceeds anything achieved by oil company Enron. ... we have to pay £14 billion every year in our annual contribution ... a protection racket that fails to provide any protection. ... its own auditors have not given its accounts a clean bill of health for the past 18 years. Brussels has an annual budget of £133 billion ... the EU spends £2.4 billion a year on marketing and publicity ... European officials take an average of 14.6 days off sick every year ... When its Court of Auditors in 2013 found “serious failures” in the award of EU contracts for a £13 billion pipeline between Hungary and Romania the EU said with typical insouciance, “We interpret the rules differently.” [This was precisely Putin’s response to corruption claims over the Winter Olympics.] ... the EU’s foreign service ... has 37 staff in Papua New Guinea and 32 in Mozambique.”
Paul Mercer gives the following 1983 flowchart in his excellent anti-propaganda book, 'Peace' of the Dead: The Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers (Policy Research Publications, London, 1986), page 91:
Soviet Union Politburo, Candidate Member: Boris Ponomarev
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Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, Secretary: Boris Ponomarev
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International Department, Head: Boris Ponomarev; Oleg Kharkhardin (Vice-President of Soviet Peace Committee)
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World Peace Council, President: Romesh Chandra; Oleg Kharkhardin (Vice-President of Soviet Peace Committee)
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International Liaison Forum of Peace Forces, Chairman: Romesh Chandra; Executive Secretary: Oleg Kharkhardin; Vice-Chairmen: Arthur Booth and Sean MacBride
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(member body)
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International Peace Bureau, Chairman: Arthur Booth; President: Sean MacBride; Vice-President: Bruce Kent
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(member body)
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Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), General Secretary: Bruce Kent; Irish CND Committee: Sean MacBride
Mercer states that the delegation which CND sent to Moscow in May 1982 consisted of Lord Hugh Jenkins (1980-1 CND Chairman), Joan Ruddock (then the current CND Chairman), Roger Spiller (who was soon to be elected Vice-Chairman of CND), Sally Davison (full-time National Organiser of CND, 1979-81), and Gerard Holden. On 31 May 1982, Joan Ruddock, the Chairman of CND, was in session with Yuri Zhukov, the Chairman of the Soviet 'World Peace Council' anti-Western propaganda lobby. Soviet news agency TASS on 28 May 1982 reported that Lord Jenkins said CND 'had a high opinion of the Soviet peace initiative', neglecting all the Soviet funded invasions and wars on democracy throughout the world! CND's control by Soviet communism continued right up to the end of the Cold War. For example, see Dr Julian Lewis's article, 'CND's New Stalinist Leader' in the December 1990 issue of Freedom Today (available online):
'CND has appointed the former National Organiser of the British branch of the World Peace Council (WPC) as its new General Secretary – the position held by Bruce Kent when leading CND in the early 1980s. Mr Gary Lefley, who takes up CND's top full-time salaried post in the new year, can accurately be described as an agent of President Brezhnev's propaganda machine at the height of the Soviet "peace offensive" against NATO's planned deployment of cruise and Pershing II missiles. ... Before the 1983 General Election, CND published a list of 120 Labour MPs amongst its members. This total had risen to 133 by the time of the 1987 General Election. Currently, CND refuses to reveal either the total or the names of their supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party. This is undoubtedly because it would run counter to Labour's attempts to conceal its continuing unilateralism. Now that the organisation is to be run by a propagandist for the Brezhnev regime, there is yet another reason for Labour's CND MPs to keep their membership a secret.'
Army personnel helps to put sand bags in the village of Wraysbury, Berkshire [EPA]
Let charity begin at home with a civil defence corps
POLITICS is all about priorities. In an ideal world we would all like to be able to spend unlimited funds helping everyone who is in need. But in the real world you have to decide which causes are the most deserving. And when any government sees its own citizens suffering it is only common sense to say that they must come first. For all of us who truly believe in Britain it is obvious that our obligation to our compatriots when they are in need and in peril must constitute the highest claim on our collective talents and resources.
The real, once Top Secret classified "War Plan UK" for the event of a sneaky "Pearl Harbor"-style surprise attack by Russia, and some of the secret research it provoked ...
Professor Peter Hennessy published some declassified potential Russian target lists in The Secret State (2002, revised 2003 and 2010). Crown Copyright Reserved.
Above: arresting the culprit. Nobody sane in London on 28 June 1914 believed that the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand would spark WWI in early August. As the author of On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn told Professor Freeman Dyson (quoted in Dyson's 1984 book Weapons and Hope): "you had to be paranoid in 1941 to believe the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor", despite the fact that in 1940, President Roosevelt imposed sanctions against Japan to prevent it getting oil, when Japan invaded Vietnam/Indochina.
Above: the British media was the stage for a war of terror between nuclear weapons effects exaggerating CND and Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher's pro-civil defence, pro-deterrence, anti-intimidation elected government. At the 1983 General Election, CND went so far as to try to get voters to elect Neil Kinnock's Labour Party due to its declared unilateral nuclear disarmament policy, which would have removed Britain from its 'unsinkable aircraft carrier' role for American nuclear weapons in the effort to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe! CND did this by exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons as well as downplaying the horrendous suffering that living under communist dictatorship would entail and also downplaying the incredible effectiveness of simple civil defense countermeasures against thermal radiation, blast and fallout radiation! Despite all her widely-attacked and tragic failings on domestic policy, Thatcher stood up for freedom effectively in foreign policy: unlike most scientifically inept politicians, she was a former research chemist, who - despite her widely perceived domestic policy failings as a right-wing woman - backed the morality of civil defence and on foreign policy issues stood up to terrorist state dictator Leonid Brezhnev, echoing Clayton's pragmatic outlook on war in her address to the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament on 23 June 1982, when she pointed out that in the years since the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 million people were killed by 140 non-nuclear conflicts, so:
‘The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. It is the disposition on the part of some states to impose change on others by resorting to force against other nations ... Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace.’
Charles J. Hitch and Roland B. McKean of the RAND Corporation in their 1960 book The Economics of Defence in the Nuclear Age, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, p. 310, stated:
‘With each side possessing only a small striking force, a small amount of cheating would give one side dominance over the other, and the incentive to cheat and prepare a preventative attack would be strong... With each side possessing, say, several thousand missiles, a vast amount of cheating would be necessary to give one side the ability to wipe out the other’s striking capability.’
For example, America used two nuclear weapons against Japan in desperation to stop World War II fighting when it had no nuclear stockpile at all, but resisted from using nuclear weapons at all when it had a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, even when it had superiority over the Soviet Union until the 1960s. At the end of The Economics of Defence in the Nuclear Age, p. 357, the authors stress: ‘the more extensive a disarmament agreement is, the smaller the force that a violator would have to hide in order to achieve complete domination. Most obviously, “the abolition of the weapons necessary in a general or ‘unlimited’ war” would offer the most insuperable obstacles to an inspection plan, since the violator could gain an overwhelming advantage from the concealment of even a few weapons.’
Thus, reducing the scale of nuclear deterrence may not result in increased security. This fact is not opinion, and it doesn't matter if it opposes 'consensus thinking' or 'groupthink'. Such a fact is not a pro-nuclear bias, or propaganda, but is countering lying propaganda. We have to work with natural facts in the real world, regardless of whether popular ideologies and utopias are contrary to them.
Following the 1991 Soviet Union collapse, in 1994 the Ukraine was disarmed of its own nuclear deterrent in exchange for a guarantee called the "Budapest Memorandum", which was signed by Russia as well as the U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister John Major. Article 4 in this Memorandum promised to uphold the territorial integrity of Ukraine (which has included Crimea since 1954), in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. Similarly, Britain had guaranteed the security of Poland on March 31, 1939, precipitating WWII after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and likewise in 1839 Britain had guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium by the Treaty of London, leading to WWI after Germany invaded Belgium in 1914. Now, the Ukraine is reminding us of our 1994 Budapest Memorandum (one day in the distant future, maybe politicians will grow up, stop appeasing disarmament lobbies, and allow countries to keep their own nuclear deterrent to deter aggression against themselves, instead of this system of maximizing the escalation potential, inviting aggressive conflicts and war in the name of "peacemaking").
Britain's last hot war against Russia was the Crimean War, 1853-6. Russia was eventually defeated by an alliance of Britain, France, Sardinia and Turkey (Ottoman Empire). Britain's Crimean War against Russia broke out after gradual escalation stemming from Russian Tsar Nicholas I invasion of Moldavia on 2 July 1853, which initially seemed to be a trifling escalation of a clash between Russia and France's President Napoleon over the control of Palestine in the Middle East. But then Turkey declared war on Russia on 5 October 1853, and on 4 November, Russian ships from its naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea annihilated Turkey's fleet at Sinope, its Black Sea base, the event that forced Britain and France to finally declare war on Russia in March 1854. They were fighting to destroy Russia's Crimean naval base at Sevastopol, which proved harder than expected: Crimea was secured in February 1856, after two years of brutal fighting and a cholera epidemic, with the loss of 25,000 British, 100,000 French and 1,000,000 Russian lives.
British Prime Minister Aberdeen had to resign from his coalition government, Russian Tsar Nicholas I died from pneumonia due to a chill during the conflict, and the Russian debt from the war was so great that his son, Tsar Alexander II, sold the Russian territory of Alaska to America. The poverty of Russia due to war debt made it a target for Marxist-communist revolutionaries like Lenin, while the decline of Russian political influence permitted the Prussian German Empire to unite and arm itself to start WWI.
Despite some changed map boundaries, country names, political ideology, oil and gas reserves, and technology, people don't evolve in 160 years. Key underlying disputes between East and West remain, like the military and religious flashpoints, e.g. Crimea and Palestine in the Middle East, and the financial, human and political costs of invasions:
Ukraine's interior minister accused Russian forces of an "armed invasion" at an airport in Crimea, as tensions escalate. It seems that most Ukrainians fear annexation of their country by Russia.
The legitimately-elected yet "undemocratically" deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, now residing in Moscow, gives Russian President Vladimir Putin the perfect excuse for his military invasion of Ukraine. The problem here is really Iraq and Afghanistan, which have helped push the U.K. to well over £1 trillion in National Debt, not to mention personal and bank debt which is another housing bubble (the threat of negative equity on homes and assets once Britain defaults on interest payments due to rising interest rates, resulting in bank failures that the government must either bail out at public "expense"/debt, or else classic financial ruin, either a la Greece, or else a la Weimar Republic).
We're currently only having to pay 2% interest (historically rock bottom rates), but we're still running a deficit (the debt is still growing bigger), not a surplus (see graphs below). This means we can't afford to even think about talking of another Crimean War (in the first one, Alfred Nobel made his prize-fortune by considerately supplying dynamite to both sides). In the first Crimean War (1853-6) Russia lost to an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia. But Russia won't lose this time: we simply can't afford to fight for the liberty of the Ukraine. If interest rates go up due to economic uncertainty caused by such a war, we'd go bankrupt as is proved by the Money Week magazine graphs below.
The U.K. Government on both sides of Parliament falsely and sneakily conflates "deficit" with "debt", to make it appear that the horrendous cutbacks needed to reduce the deficit - the rate of increase of debt - are somehow cutting the debt itself. Wrong: the debt is still growing bigger - we're still headed out to sea into the storm, and we're not even turning around for a return to shore! Some estimates of the total U.K. debt (which is not an exact science, since you have to allow for depreciation of supposed "assets" into "negative equity" or "debt" when the economy goes completely bust and the gas hisses out of the inflated housing bubble) are that it is now worse than the 913% of GDP that the Weimar Republic had when it collapsed, sowing the seed of WWII.
Cutting the deficit is like reducing the throttle a bit, while still going in the wrong direction. The only way to reduce the debt is to have a surplus. To get rid of the debt means having a surplus for many years into the future. We don't even have a surplus! We've still got a deficit, so the national debt bomb is still growing, but the opposition watermelon parties use smokescreens to cover it up instead of pressurising the government to start reducing the debt mountain. But the fact is, debt interest default will wipe out Britain's credit rating, causing further interest rate rises in a period of international tension, escalating the problems.
The West half of the Ukraine (which borders Europe) is pro-European Union and wants Ukraine to join the European Union. However, the Eastern side of the Ukraine speaks Russian and tends to be Leninist and to feel some empathy with Putin's Russia. Will Russia's President Putin simply "put up" with the deposition of the pro-Putin elected Ukraine president, or will Putin instead decide to take a hand and "offer assistance" to Ukraine? Historically, all of Hitler's invasions in the mid to late 1930s were "excused" on the basis that Hitler was simply "protecting" the pro-Hitler, German-speaking, minorities. For example, when Hitler "invaded" the Sudentenland of Czechoslovakia in September 1938, Hitler's excuse was that he was "providing humanitarian assistance" to nearly four million Germans who were living in the Sudentenland region of Czechoslovakia.
My point is that Hitler always had the "plausible lie"-type excuse that he was merely providing soldiers to act as "peacekeepers" or policemen, to "protect" German minorities in the countries he invaded. Because there are some Germans in a minority in every country, this excuse could be applied also to every country in the world. Propaganda it was, but it helped to "justify" the "peaceful" spread of the Third Reich. Hitler's glib excuse for the German annexation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, etc.: Jackboots were merely being used to "protect German Nationals in bigoted, anti-Nazi countries". (Those who were pacifist/fascist chose to believe Hitler because they wanted to; they had seen falsified pacifist 1930s claims that war would exterminate all the cities with gas, explosives, and incendiaries the moment war started.) This "peaceful invasion" situation, is mirrored by the Russian situation with regard to the Crimean region of the Ukraine today, "justified" by the fact Russia's Navy has a controversial base at Sevastopol (familiar from the 1853-6 war!) in the Crimea for its Black Sea Fleet (click here for details of the serious Ukrainian controversy over this base).
IF Russian President Putin decides to authorize the Russian Army to "provide further assistance" to the pro-Putin, pro-Russian, Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Eastern part of the Ukraine, perhaps adding the extra excuse that the present corrupt Ukrainian President was "democratically elected" and has been "unlawfully dismissed" by the Ukrainian Parliament as a result of a few undemocratic protests in Kiev, while the European Union and America support the pro-European Union Ukrainians in the West of the Ukraine, then the civil war will be beyond Western intervention, because of the debt bomb for the West.
First, an invasion by Russia will cause a really severe civil war in Ukraine. America's Obama and the European Union will then have to either climb down and lose face to Putin, or else we will end up with Ukraine becoming another Vietnam in which both sides (Russia and the West) provide war materiel, protracting and deepening the war. The end result could well be a complete degeneration of West-Russian relations and another very icy Cold War. But instead of Russian dictatorship being deterred effectively as in the past, the crippling national debts of the U.K. and U.S.A. will make them incredible, so their impotence will end up - like Chamberlain at Munich in September 1938 - encouraging aggression and further invasions. Second, with nuclear disarmament today proceeding like 1930s British disarmament, and for the exactly same financial and war-effects-exaggerating reasons as 1930s British disarmament, will we all be conscripted to fight WWIII, without any politically incorrect neutron bombs or other effective tank deterrents?
Update: a few quotations from the bestselling author of The Fourth Protocol about clandestine nuclear attack, Frederick Forsyth, from his 28 February 2014 Daily Express (page 13) newspaper article on the Ukrainian crisis:
Corruption is rampant all over the world
Above: Poor old ex-KGB officer President Putin's hard-line corruption may be due to the fact that, apart from sharing the same Christian name as Lenin, Wikipedia shows his brainwashing by the corrupt USSR:
"Putin joined the KGB in 1975 upon graduation, and underwent a year's training at the 401st KGB school in Okhta, Leningrad. He then went on to work briefly in the Second Chief Directorate (counter-intelligence) before he was transferred to the First Chief Directorate, where among his duties was the monitoring of foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad.[28][29] From 1985 to 1990, the KGB stationed Putin in Dresden, East Germany.[30] Following the collapse of the communist East German government, Putin was recalled to the Soviet Union and returned to Leningrad, where in June 1991 he assumed a position with the International Affairs section of Leningrad State University, reporting to Vice-Rector Yuriy Molchanov.[29] In his new position, Putin maintained surveillance on the student body and kept an eye out for recruits. It was during his stint at the university that Putin grew reacquainted with his former professor Anatoly Sobchak, then mayor of Leningrad.[31] Putin finally resigned from the active state security services with the rank of lieutenant colonel on 20 August 1991 (with some attempts to resign made earlier),[31] on the second day of the KGB-supported abortive putsch against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.[32] Putin later explained his decision: "As soon as the coup began, I immediately decided which side I was on", though he also noted that the choice was hard because he had spent the best part of his life with "the organs".[33]"
We really don't want to make personal comments about President Putin, just in case our names goes on a hit list, and he decides to invade the UK, then perform his great KGB magic trick of making all the people on his list suddenly disappear without fair trial into Siberian salt mines (or maybe mass graves if he decides to lower his salt intake to improve his fitness). By the way, we do have some positive things to write about Putin the Great: he rides well, is great at judo, and swims the butterfly stroke nearly as well as me.
Tribute video of President Putin the Great, engaged in one of the many fine things he does best (which include huge state spending sprees for prestige, giving contracts worth billions to dedicated friends):
Update: James Delingpole points out the funny side of this crisis from our (UK) financially bad situation for a war, in a 3 March 2014 article:
Why are some people so hot for war with Russia? I don't just mean the neo cons and the semi-retired cold warriors still half expecting the squadrons of T54s ...
... Should it merely involve the conscription of every man between 18 and 30 and the immediate doubling of our defence budget? Or are we to go on a proper, Germany-in-late-'44 Götterdämmerung footing and ready the granddads with their pitchforks and prepare the school kids to man the anti-aircraft batteries? ... does that mean I get to fly a Harrier Jump Jet. Because if I do, I must tell you, it will fulfil a long-standing childhood fantasy of mine. Growing up in the Eighties, when General Sir John Hackett had that enormous, bestselling success with his what-if future history The Third World War, a major conflagration with the Soviet Union - possibly ending with the destruction of the whole world - was something all of us British schoolkids half feared ... American schoolchildren of the era, we know, felt just the same way. The tagline of 1984's Red Dawn was: "In our time no foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now." ...
On Breitbart Radio last night, the admirable Frank Gaffney - a former defence adviser to the man who did more than anyone to bring about the end of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan - was ramping up the rhetoric about global conflagration. ... In the US President Obama has been castigated - not unreasonably, it must be said - for making empty threats. (If you're going to make threats, be prepared to carry them through - or don't make them in the first place). ... It is a quarrel in a far-away country between people ...
Here James Delingpole is parodying Prime Minister Chamberlain's September 27, 1938, radio speech to the nation of Britain, dismissing Hitler's aggression as a storm in a teacup:
"... a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war. I can well understand the reasons why the Czech Government have felt unable to accept the terms which have been put before them in the German memorandum. Yet I believe after my talks with Herr Hitler that, if only time were allowed, it ought to be possible for the arrangements for transferring the territory that the Czech Government has agreed to give to Germany to be settled by agreement under conditions which would assure fair treatment to the population concerned. ... However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that. I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me; but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living; but war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark upon it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake, and that the call to risk everything in their defense, when all the consequences are weighed, is irresistible. For the present I ask you to await as calmly as you can the events of the next few days. As long as war has not begun, there is always hope that it may be prevented, and you know that I am going to work for peace to the last moment. Good night."
Chamberlain's 1930s dogmatic policy of "speak softly and carry a big stick" was disproved by its failure in both 1914 (Britain's Foreign Secretary Edward Grey) and 1939 (Chamberlain):
In 1914, Britain's Foreign Secretary Edward Grey made precisely the SAME "hesitancy" error with the Kaiser that Chamberlain - "acting as his own Foreign Secretary" (Chamberlain's own words) - made in the late 1930s! Grey had the worst of all worlds by following the infamous 26 January 1900 "speak softly and carry a big stick" advice of President Ted Roosevelt.
British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, following Ted, refused to clearly threaten war against Germany if Germany invaded Belgium until it was too late for all the mobilization and preparation in Germany to be stopped!
Grey, more interested in fly fishing than foreign affairs, was so obsessed until 1 August 1914 with trying to reach agreement with Germany for British neutrality in exchange for a German promise to avoid the invasion of France, that he failed to tell Germany clearly that Britain would go to war against Germany, if Germany invaded Belgium, until it was too late to prevent German mobilization. The rest of the Cabinet failed to intervene with Grey's disastrously weak negotiations, since they were too busy preparing for war (churchill) or dealing with domestic affairs (literally "affairs" in the case of August 1914 Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith who had 7 kids but was spending Cabinet meetings writing up to 4 love letters to his mistress, Venetia Stanley, according to research by historian Bobbie Neate, the stepdaughter of Asquith's secret love child who has a blog linked here):
In total Britain's August 1914 Prime Minister Herbert Asquith wrote 560 love letters to his mistress Venetia Stanley, while never writing to his three sons serving in France: "Often he would sit in Cabinet writing love letters while vital discussions raged around him. ... The public, of course, had no inkling. ... During the war, the press was strictly censored."
Historian A. J. P. Taylor (a CND star founder) ignored all this, misrepresenting the origin of WWI as just an "arms race", to help achieve unilateral nuclear disarmament with his 1969 War by Timetable book, see also pages here and here (Taylor's arms race theory of WWI, basically just a repeat of Edward Grey's old 1914 lying excuse for blundering into disaster, was very popular with the Vietnam era anti-nuclear, pro-love CND peaceniks).
Lord Grey in 1914 failed to make it clear to Germany in good time that Britain would go to war if Germany invaded Belgium, because Grey was too obsessed with "diplomacy" (even proposing to Germany on 1 August 1914 that Britain would stay neutral, if only Germany left France alone) :
"When he [Lord Grey] finally did make such communication, German forces were already massed at the Belgian border, and Helmuth von Moltke convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II it was too late to change the plan of attack." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Grey,_1st_Viscount_Grey_of_Fallodon#July_Crisis
(See also Prime Minister David Lloyd George's attack on Grey's incompetence and weakness, in his "War Memoirs".)
The Germany Navy during the Kaiser's War Cabinet on 8 December 1912 set a date for war 18 months in the future, as reported in the Diary of Admiral Muller:
"General von Moltke [German army chief] said: I believe war is unavoidable; war the sooner the better. But we ought to do more to press to prepare the popularity of a war against Russia. The Kaiser supported this. Tirpitz [German Navy chief] said that the navy would prefer to see the postponement of the great fight for one and a half years."
"IS STILL SLEEPING": Kennedy's inscription on the reprint of his book when President of the United States.
Finally, as President John F. Kennedy himself proved while working at the American Embassy in London in 1939, Grey was actually responsible for the "arms race" scares in Britain which both encouraged Hitler's rearmament and motivated Britain's pacifist disarmament in the 1930s, thus contributing to WWII (not only to the outbreak of WWI)!
Edward Grey's lying excuse after WWI devastation broke out in 1914 was that the "arms race" (not his own bungling) caused WWI! Here are the words of President John F. Kennedy's 80,000 copy bestselling book Why England Slept, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1962 (first published 1940), page 16 (the original editor's book typescript is in the Kennedy Library archive, linked here):
“The statement of Lord Grey, British Foreign Minister, made in 1914, that, “The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable,’ had a tremendous effect on post-war British opinion. Armaments were looked upon as something horrible, as being the cause of war, not a means of defence. Again and again, through the ‘thirties, opponents of rearmament quoted Grey.”
Of course, Grey wasn't the only one in the Cabinet solely responsible for Britain's declaration of WWI. Winston Churchill, who was First Lord of the Admiralty in August 1914 (in charge of Britain's Navy) and David Lloyd George, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, should have had a better handle on what was going on, but they were too busy with military and domestic matters, and thus accepted Grey's reassurances until it was too late. But the fact is that Grey, had he been more lucid, could have potentially deterred the Kaiser by making Britain's position clearer sooner, instead of getting "the worst of all worlds" by bungling into disaster. By speaking softly and avoiding any threat, Grey minimized the possibility of directly escalating the confrontation himself (thus protecting his own neck and avoiding a row with Cabinet colleagues who were pacifist), but in this end it was not a good policy, because it had the dire, negative effect of conveying the impression of weakness, indecision and exploitable foolishness to the enemy.
(This same situation recurred 25 years later, which again led to lies from the culprit: Chamberlain had the brass cheek to lie that after WWII broke out that he had been buying time for British rearmament at Munich in 1938, when he knew at the time that Germany was arming faster than Britain so every second of postponed war was causing a reduction in the probability of Britain winning the war. Chamberlain knew this. Churchill had warned the Government using a famous Daily Express article in 1934, but lying Prime Minister Baldwin ignored the truth, as did Chamberlain. Afterwards, these dictatorship-supporting thugs got off scot-free by telling lies, just like Grey did in 1914. Chamberlain knew in 1938 that Germany was in an all-out arms race and was arming faster than Britain. If your opponent is arming faster than you are, every second of delay on your part allows the enemy to acquire more weapons than you can, so the imbalance increases! The lying historians today still ignore these facts on rearmament rates - published by President John F. Kennedy in his 1940 thesis and best-selling 80,000 copy book "Why England Slept" - out of ignorance of economics and science, and out of anti-nuclear, anti-arms race bias. In the same way, these lying historians screw up the true history of the biological effects of radiation and DNA repair mechanisms, in suit their political agendas. It is sick.)
Therefore, unlike the assassin of the Archduke and others players, Grey's role in the start of WWI was not merely a trivial convenient excuse for war, because Grey actually had the power to influence the Kaiser, yet failed to do so. Therefore, Grey could have prevented WWI, by acting differently. Likewise, Chamberlain wasn't the only cause of WWII, but he should have understood from Grey's 1914 failure, that the only language of diplomacy is force: action speaks louder than words. Putin understands this.
Update: incorrect propaganda fear-mongering on radiation effects by right-wing (not merely left-wing) continues in recent articles.
Jane Warren writes in a double-page feature in the Daily Express (1 March 2014, pages 36-37) that the genetic deformalities of Igor Pavlovets, who was born on 3 March 1987 nearly one year after the accident by which time iodine-131 had disappeared, were caused by radiation from Chernobyl in 1986:
"Following the explosions at the Chernobyl reactor on April 26, 1986, in what was then the Soviet Union, a generation of children was born with disabilities caused by radiation. Igor was one of the first."
Everyone humane is very glad that Jane Warren got Igor Pavlovets to England and a better life than he would have got in the USSR and the following corrupt regimes, but the good news she doesn't report is that there is extensive objective scientific evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that proves Igor Pavlovets with overwhelming probability did not get his deformalities from the sub-lethal levels of radiation his parents were exposed to. Isn't that great news to report, Jane Warren? (Or is there still a Jane Warren bias against truth when it comes to radiation, as Dr Sanders suggests in his conclusive 2010 book, Radiation Hormesis and the Linear No-Threshold Assumption, published by Springer?)
http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/439/bfm%253A978-3-642-03720-7%252F1.pdf?auth66=1393952668_41a73ccc7c7c7b7f33515bafd90294c7&ext=.pdf
For this evidence that sub-lethal nuclear radiation exposure doesn't produce any statistically significant rise in genetic deformalities, please see the studies made by the official Japanese-American "Radiation Effects Research Foundation", http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/genetics_e/birthdef.html:
"No statistically significant increase in major birth defects or other untoward pregnancy outcomes was seen among children of survivors. Monitoring of nearly all pregnancies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki began in 1948 and continued for six years. During that period, 76,626 newborn infants were examined by ABCC physicians. When surveillance began, certain dietary staples were rationed in Japan, but ration regulations made special provision for women who were at least 20 weeks pregnant. This supplementary ration registration process enabled the identification of more than 90% of all pregnancies and the subsequent examination of birth outcomes."
Genetic defects are not caused by radiation but are instead caused by occasional natural mistakes during the complex epigenetic differentiation of limbs and organs. We don't need to subscribe to left-wing myths about radiation induced mutations, just because of communist propaganda from the Cold War which tried to scare the West into surrendering. If we had surrendered, I fear Igor wouldn't have a life in England. I submitted a brief and polite, factual comment on this to the Daily Express website, so we'll see if Jane Warren continues to use unjustified emotional propaganda and ignore objective evidence on the subject of Igor:
It is great Jane Warren and supporters helped Igor Pavlovets come to England after Chernobyl to receive a far better life than he would have had in the USSR and its successor, but one new piece of good news which she doesn't report is available.
There is strong evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki arguing the case that Igor may not have been deformed by the survivable levels of radiation his parents were exposed to. Instead, genetic defects are caused by occasional natural mistakes during the complex epigenetic differentiation of limbs. For evidence from 76,626 children born after the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki without any statistically significant rise in normal rates of genetic deformalities, see the official Japanese-American "Radiation Effects Research Foundation", http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/genetics_e/birthdef.html:
"No statistically significant increase in major birth defects or other untoward pregnancy outcomes was seen among [76,626] children of survivors."
If uncorrected, this type of scare mongering on radiation undermines everything from safe electric power to the deterrence of World War III. The supposedly "right wing" newspapers might as well move to Moscow when it comes to believing emotional lies and ignoring the extensive data and reassuring facts on radiation safety from Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear warfare. It's a mixture of the journalist's training in appealing to human emotions and superstitions, and bad scientific education. (Say "prove it" to those guys and your request is not taken as a responsible demand for accuracy and precision and research on their part, but as somehow "unfeeling callous cold heartedness". Well, if we disarm and all get wiped out by Siberian salt mines, "nice warm emotional lies" won't cut much ice, as Herman Kahn used to say.) While on the subject of inaccurate, emotional watermelon-style "radiation news reporting", the people of Bikini Atoll are still being duped into staying away from paradise by the fascist thugs, despite the use of potassium fertilizer to prevent Cs-137 uptake being recommended first in 1959 to protect the people of Rongelap (this recommendation was published, but never acted upon by the incompetent groupthink secret committees of loonies).
Setting all the Nazi style, originally secret-classified “Gestapo-like” groupthink crackpot conferences and the angry, bigoted, demented censorship “reports” of undemocratic, mean-spirited, KGB-style, 1930s-British-appeasement-like, CND-worshipping, “nuclear weapons effects expert opinion” aside, please see page 830 of the published June 1959 U.S. Congressional Hearings on “Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War”, linked here, for proof that it was scientifically well understood in 1959 that potassium is in the same group of the Periodic Table of chemistry as cesium, so that adding potassium to the potassium-deficient soil at Bikini, Eniwetok and Rongelap would prevent the uptake of cesium-137 by plants and food chains. If the Guardian and BBC want to expose a "real conspiracy" by America to destroy the world using radiation cover-ups, here is it. But this doesn't suit their political, warped, lying agenda, so these evil bullying, ignorant, propaganda-supporting, complacent, pseudo-liberal "green"-fascist thugs simply help to cover it up as usual.
The facts were also globally published in the following 10 December 1988 New Scientist article, "Potassium could cover up Bikini's radioactivity" (if the American's don't improve their communication skills regarding decontamination successes, the Bikini islanders will forget all about the joys of Bikini and prefer to join the CND disarmers instead, funded to promote emotional hogwash for turning the world communist or "green"):
https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/photos09.php: "The largest contributor to radiation doses from exposure to residual fallout contamination in the Marshall Islands comes from cesium-137. ... coconut crabs (refer photo shown above) form an important and prized source of food in the Marshall Islands and, in certain locations, have been found to contain above average concentrations of cesium-137."
https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php: "Twenty-three nuclear devices were detonated on Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958 with a combined fission yield of 42.2 Megaton (Mt) ... An additional forty-three atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted on Enewetak Atoll about 300 km to the west of Bikini Atoll. The most significant contaminating event in the Marshall Islands nuclear test campaign and the highest yield atmospheric nuclear test ever conducted by the United States involved the detonation of a high-energy thermonuclear on Bikini Atoll on 1 March of 1954. This ground-surface test was code named Bravo and had an estimated explosive yield of 15 Mt. ... Through the early 1980s, scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developed an extensive database of environmental measurements for Bikini Atoll, especially for soils and vegetation growing on Bikini and Eneu Islands. ... During this period, predictive dose assessments for both Bikini and Enewetak Atolls clearly indicated that the most significant pathway for human exposure toresidual fallout contamination in the Marshall Islands was ingestion of cesium-137 contained in locally grown root crops such as coconut, breadfruit, and Pandanus (Robison et al., 1980; 1982). ... One key factor that helps explain why cesium-137 plays such a important role in contributing to radiation exposure in the Marshall Islands is that coral soils are known to contain little or no clay material and very low concentrations of naturally occurring potassium—an alkaline earth element that shares similar properties with cesium. These conditions result in increased uptake of cesium-137 from soil and incorporation into plants relative to the rate of cesium-137 uptake from continental soils. Consequently, the significance of dietary intakes of cesium-137 from eating locally grown foods was initially overlooked because early models in radioecology were based on continental type soils and exposure conditions. ... the most effective and practical method for reducing the uptake of cesium-137 into food crop products was to treat agricultural areas with potassium fertilizer (KCl). The addition of potassium had the added benefit of increasing the growth rate and productivity of some food crops with essentially no adverse environmental impacts. ... experiments show that a single application of 2000 kg per ha of potassium can be effective in reducing the cesium-137 uptake in coconut meat (and juice) to about 5% to 10% of the pretreatment level. ... we have recently demonstrated that the environmental half-life of cesium-137 is more important than radiological decay in controlling the fate and distribution of cesium-137 in coral soils (Robison et al., 2003). For example, the estimated effective half-life of cesium-137 on Bikini, Enewetak, and Rongelap Atolls is around 8 to 9.8 years (95% confidence) compared with its radiological half-life of 30 years. ... cesium-137 is slowly being incorporated into more resistant mineral phases within the soil and, through aging effects, may be becoming less available for soil-to-plant transfer. ... Applying a mean effective cesium-137 half-life of 8.5 years for the data developed for the 1999 Bikini dose assessment (Robison et al., 1997a), the predicted population average effective dose for resettlement of Bikini in 2010, where imported foods are available, is conservatively estimated to be about 0.17 mSv per year (17 mrem per year) or very close to the self-imposed cleanup standard of 0.15 mSv per year adopted by the Republic of the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal. With this understanding and the fact that exposure conditions on Bikini are improving at an accelerated rate, early resettlement of Bikini Atoll may become much more plausible and cost effective."
(Shame on LLNL for providing an unreadably poor-quality, badly uploaded PDF Bikini Atoll datasheet: https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/pdf/bikini_factsheet.pdf They might as well keep it locked in a safe marked "top secret" for all the use it is in making the facts lucid !)
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/02/asia-pacific/bikini-atoll-islanders-fearful-of-return-home has the following (surprisingly high-definition) photo of the 360 kiloton Redwing-Mohawk nuclear explosion on a 300 ft tower at Eniwetok on 3 July 1956, passed off as the 15 megaton Bravo test at Bikini, followed by an account of Bikini Islander radiation fears (which we specifically debunked in the previous post on this blog!!):
Above: 360 kt Redwing-Mohawk on Eberiru Island in Eniwetok Atoll (detonated on a 91 metre tower, on 3 July 1956), a UCRL thermonuclear device employing a compact fusion-boosted Swan-type (11.6" by 22.8", 105 lb) primary fission stage and a Flute-type secondary (thermonuclear) stage. The bomb was 15" in diameter, 46.2" long, with a mass of 1116 lb. The resulting crater was only 8 feet deep. The Japanese article wrongly states that this was the 15 megaton Bravo test in 1954 at Bikini Atoll! The article continues:
"The Marshall Islands on Saturday marked 60 years since the devastating U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, with angry exiled residents saying they are too fearful to ever go home. ... “The government says ‘don’t worry’ (about radiation exposure), but recently we’ve seen many cases of thyroid problems be confirmed in the Fukushima area,” said Kai Sato, a Fukushima University student. [Sato: the half-life of the longest lived thyroid radiation iodine isotope, iodine-131, is only 8 days, it is a myth that continuing long-delayed cancers from the actual radiation exposure back in 1954 are somehow due to continuing low-level radiation at Bikini and everywhere else on earth, which is now mainly natural potassium-40, uranium-238, radon, etc.] “People don’t know what is the correct information to believe.” ... But a U.N. report in 2012 s ... called for the U.S. to provide extra compensation to settle claims by nuclear-affected Marshall islanders and end a “legacy of distrust.” The Nuclear Claims Tribunal awarded more than $2 billion in personal injury and land damage claims arising from the nuclear tests, but stopped paying after a U.S.-provided $150 million compensation fund was exhausted."
I have submitted the following polite fact correcting comment for moderation:
This is a fine article. But I think that the photograph of the nuclear test at the top of the article is not Bravo at Bikini Atoll, but is Redwing-Mohawk on Eberiru Island in Eniwetok Atoll (360 kilotons thermonuclear explosion on a 91 metre tower, on 3 July 1956). For confirmation of this fact, please see http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Redwing.html [that site contains all the classic groupthink errors on nuclear effects, however]
[Update: the mis-captioned Redwing-Mohawk photo was removed and replaced by a correct photo after I submitted my comment.]
At Bikini Atoll (scene for 42 megatons of fission yield in 23 nuclear tests), cesium-137 is only important in food chains in soil deficient in potassium, and cesium-137 uptake by crops at Bikini was diluted by adding potassium chloride fertilizer to soil (potassium is chemically similar to cesium, and thus works by the same dilution mechanism as iodine tablets for thyroid protection).
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php) found that the "effective half-life of cesium-137 on Bikini, Eniwetak, and Rongelap Atolls is around 8 to 9.8 years", not the laboratory radioactive half life figure of 30 years! This is because cesium compounds are relatively water-soluble and cesium-137 (as with iodine-131 and strontium-90) is fractionated in fallout (coated on the outer surface of fallout dust, not fused inside the particles) so it dissolves in rain and is soon weathered out of the local environment, ending up in the ocean (where it's totally insignificant compared to the immense natural radioactivity of sea water from potassium-40). Similarly, if you eat cesium-137, it doesn't build up in your body with a 30 year half life, but is flushed out with water with an effective half life of only about 3 months!
"Large-scale field experiments on Bikini Island have been used to optimize the required amount and application rates of potassium (Figure 3). The results from these experiments show that a single application of 2000 kg per ha of potassium can be effective in reducing the cesium-137 uptake in coconut meat (and juice) to about 5% to 10% of the pretreatment level. Multiple applications (over several months) of the same total amount of potassium produce even better and more consistent results. Moreover, the concentration of cesium-137 in the coconuts following remediation remains low for an extended period of time, so the need for continuous effort and retention of scientific and technical expertise is minimized (Robison et al., 2004)." - https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php#remed
So there is hope for Bikini Atoll. If the American government would publish a revised edition of its book "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" (last revised in 1977), it would help these people to understand the recent progress in decontamination and safety measures against fallout. Thank you for your excellent article.
Bikini Atoll nuclear test: 60 years later and islands still unliveable
Marshall Islanders unable or unwilling to return to traditional home, scene of huge US hydrogen bomb test in 1954 [Emphasis added!]
My comment to the Guardian:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php#remed:
"Large-scale field experiments on Bikini Island ... show that a single application of 2000 kg per ha of potassium can be effective in reducing the cesium-137 uptake in coconut meat (and juice) to about 5% to 10% of the pretreatment level. Multiple applications (over several months) of the same total amount of potassium produce even better and more consistent results. Moreover, the concentration of cesium-137 in the coconuts following remediation remains low for an extended period of time, so the need for continuous effort and retention of scientific and technical expertise is minimized (Robison et al., 2004)."
At Bikini Atoll (scene for 42 megatons of fission yield in 23 nuclear tests), cesium-137 is only important in food chains in soil deficient in potassium, and cesium-137 uptake by crops at Bikini was diluted by adding potassium chloride fertilizer to soil (potassium is chemically similar to cesium, and thus works by the same dilution mechanism as iodine tablets for thyroid protection).
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php) found that the "effective half-life of cesium-137 on Bikini, Eniwetak, and Rongelap Atolls is around 8 to 9.8 years", not the laboratory radioactive half life figure of 30 years! This is because cesium compounds are relatively water-soluble and cesium-137 (as with iodine-131 and strontium-90) is fractionated in fallout (coated on the outer surface of fallout dust, not fused inside the particles) so it dissolves in rain and is soon weathered out of the local environment, ending up in the ocean (where it's totally insignificant compared to the immense natural radioactivity of sea water from potassium-40). Similarly, if you eat cesium-137, it doesn't build up in your body with a 30 year half life, but is flushed out with water with an effective half life of only about 3 months!
There are exaggerations of radiation effects, and a bias against truth when it comes to radiation, as Dr Sanders suggests in his conclusive 2010 book, Radiation Hormesis and the Linear No-Threshold Assumption, published by Springer: http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/439/bfm%253A978-3-642-03720-7%252F1.pdf?auth66=1393952668_41a73ccc7c7c7b7f33515bafd90294c7&ext=.pdf
Hopefully, this will be taken kindly and not with the censorship dished out by people like Dr Alex Wellerstein of "NukeMap" fame, who censors facts of relevance to the groupthink emotional delusion and nonsense on the subject, and relevant also to his "NukeMap" exaggeration of nuclear weapons effects in urban target areas, apparently as simply being "boring", in the true spirit of propaganda that helps in achieving his right-wing Daily Mail newspaper acclaim:
For a debunking of the equations "NukeMap" uses, i.e. Glasstone-type unobstructed, unshadowed desert nuclear test effects - which are exaggerations when applied to modern concrete city targets that absorb the heat flash, nuclear radiation and blast wave energy - see the previous posts, linked here and here.
Above: 13 year old Jamie Edwards achieved nuclear fusion at school in Lancashire, proved by radiation measured by a Geiger counter. However, this is not proof that anybody can make a hydrogen bomb or fusion-powered time-travelling DeLorean, or that we need to "disarm" Britain of school kids who study physics in case they blow up the universe. The fusion problem is quantitative, not qualitative, contrary to newspaper hype today:
And yesterday, in a ‘radiation controlled area’ in a classroom, before an audience of experts, he flicked a switch and stared intently at his Geiger counter until it registered that fusion had indeed taken place – or created ‘a star in a jar’, as Jamie refers to it. Nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers the sun, is very different from nuclear fission, or the splitting of the atom, that occurs in nuclear power stations and is the stuff of atom bombs. However, both release vast amounts of energy. Scientists around the world are replicating Jamie’s experiment, but on a much bigger scale, in the hope of using it on a large scale to fuel cheap, environmentally-friendly power stations. Jamie said: ‘I heard the Geiger counter rapidly go up and I was “What is that?”,’ he said in the afterglow of success. ‘Then I looked over and the neutron counter was right up off the scale nearly, and I thought “We must have done it”.’
The problem is the amount of fusion is trivial. The scaling up of a fusion reactor to a practical power creates problems that don't exist on the small scale, so the proof of principle is not proof of practicality! The only way to get useful energy from fusion reactors is to use plasma (heated by lasers) that is confined using magnetic fields, so at a high enough power (gigawatts) to be economic, you have the problem that any instability or failure of the magnetic plasma confinement system will cause a devastating explosion. The scaled-up system is inherently unstable, and the very high energy fusion neutrons penetrate deeply into the surrounding materials, inducing radioactivity.
Nuclear fusion is really only practical when the fusion fuel is compressed by a fission explosion in a hydrogen bomb, or by intense gravitational pressure in the middle of a star like the sun. Newspaper journalists and politicians and the mathematically sci-fi orientated "physicists" with little grasp of the practical experimental problems that arise from real world scaling laws when you scale up laboratory tests, are too easily taken in and duped by the guys who exaggerate the "potential" of fusion energy projects, in order to get comfy eternal funding grants to play with.
Update (15 March 2014):
Frederick Forsyth has yet another article out, called "EU was reason for the Biblical Floods" (yes, seriously), in the Daily Express, Friday 14 March 2014, page 13. In the interests of freedom of the press and avoiding censorship, a relevant quotation from the article is called for:
Officialdom still seeks to divert the blame away from the useless chieftaincy of the Environment Agency who years ago ordered that the centuries-old practice of dredging the channels should cease [the liars instead naturally lie and blame droughts due to global warming by CO2 for the floods, as expected]. But towering evidence proves it was indeed this insane order that was to blame and now there are more revelations. ... he instruction actually came from the EU in Brussels in a directive of 2007, slavishly adopted by the Brown government in 2008. It was called “making space for water”, ie, flooding, and it was absolutely deliberate. Is it not amazing that British bureaucrats and politicians would prefer to be accused of mass murder rather than have it revealed how utterly servile they are to Brussels? ... a book called The United States Of Europe [the title may explain why Americans don't seem to understand what the fuss is about here, not realizing how many fascists and loons Britain has had to fight off in the nearly one thousand years of the British Empire since its last successful invasion in October 1066, how much blood has been spilled by so many written to preserve the very limited freedoms and very limited independence we enjoy today], strangely enough by a British theorist called Arthur Salter as far back as 1931 – even before Adolf Hitler tried to unify Europe his way. With Frenchman Jean Monnet, Salter was one of the original proposers of the complete political, economic and legal unification of the continent into one single superstate. Today’s successors of course are Mandelson, Blair, Clegg and the BBC, who still continue to deny their real Utopian dream.
So here is what (in part) Salter had to say. “A common political authority ... would be for every country almost as important as, or even more important than, the national governments and would in effect reduce the latter to the status of municipal authorities.” That is our country he was talking about and that is still the ultimate aim of the EU. Those at the heart of what in Brussels is referred to as The Project know perfectly well the end must involve the abolition of the nation state and its reduction to an EU region, Britain included. That is why the fanatics are desperate that you never get a referendum in which you might decide to keep Britain and dump Brussels. As they work quietly for this country’s destruction a referendum is absolutely not what they want.
https://archive.org/details/FalloutPrediction
http://vixra.org/abs/1403.0181
Concise, brief 15-page fallout prediction model, covering both land surface and underwater nuclear explosions, radiation shielding by buildings, fallout solubility as function of particle size, retention on vegetation, gamma ray spectrum versus time, fractionation of fission products, salting by cobalt-60 etc., and effects of environmental neutron induced activities in fallout. Includes literature summaries and data reductions to formulae based on many reports. Written in brochure format for quick browsing, without boring bureaucratic organization. Please note that we have also revised and expanded the overview information included on the British nuclear weapon trial "Operation Hurricane" Internet Archive declassified civil defense documents page, linked here.
Above: the most divisive, politically-incorrect, left-vilified British political leader, photographed behind the turret machine gun of a British Challenger tank, flying a Union Jack flag, in Germany on 17 September 1986. Just thinking about how lucky it is for Putin the Great that he is not facing this hateful, divisive, iron lady. Maggie, like her friend Ronald Reagan, knew the political language of Russia. When she was elected in May 1979, Britain had been effectively bankrupt (but not as badly as by Gordon Brown thirty years later) by the Russians’ socialist infiltration of British communist trade unions, which used block votes and intimidation of members to run the Labour Party. Every time the Labour Party tried to economise on pay, mass strikes resulted, culminating in the infamous 1978-9 “winter of discontent” when even the dead and the rubbish went unburied and uncollected. Britain was the “sick man of Europe”, on a 3-day week to save fuel and electricity, had to ask for a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and had TV transmission banned after 10:30 pm. Regular power cuts forced us to do our school homework by candlelight in the cold, after walking home on streets unlit by lamps. Maggie was rightly labelled the “iron lady” by the Russian propaganda machine; the woman divided Britain by her no-nonsense defeat of both Russia in civil defence and the arms race, and also its friends in the British trade unions. These trade unions were self-defeating monolithic, short-sighted, fascist-groupthink dictatorships, manipulated like CND by the “World Peace Council” and related Moscow-based propagandarists. The trade unions had destroyed the British economy in the 1960s by striking for pay rises much higher than Britain’s rivals overseas in Japan and China, who made better products at much lower prices. We were forced to buy expensive, technologically obsolete British crap that broke down immediately, because of the “import duty” taxation the socialists slapped on cheap foreign goods. Maggie reformed strike law to make decisions to strike democratic, instead of being due to dictatorial intimidation by a handful of hard-communist and underhand Orwellian “big brother” shop stewards and union officials. She cut the 98% socialist tax rate on high earners to motivate and encourage big businesses to be started and run effectively in Britain. She cut state spending to reduce the deficit and bring finances under control, despite the Cold War arms race. She shut down state-owned unprofitable weapons industries that were simply milking the taxpayer to fund the Swiss bank accounts of a few corrupt army and ex-army weapon buyers and weapon consultants, and bought cheaper weapons instead from America. She stopped appeasing Brezhnev’s Russia after he invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 in a surprise attack, and she published the civil defence handbook Protect and Survive in May 1980, countering totalitarian ideology with a determination not to be intimidated by the threat of new Soviet SS-18 nuclear missile deployments. She proved she had the courage to fight by defeating the fascist militants of Argentina when they invaded the Falkland Islands. She reformed Labour’s policy of détente and shaking the hands of fascists, into a radical new military policy called victory. She achieved victory from the European Union too, winning our rebate. She also defeated in elections the nuclear disarmers Michael Foot in 1983 and Neil Kinnock in 1987. But she also had gimmicky political statements, like: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Her wicked excuse for capitalism over socialism, in her final Commons debate as Prime Minister, was that the equalization of wealth using taxation makes everyone poor and demotivated, while capitalism makes everyone better off, including the poorest. What a hateful, loathsome, divisive, warrior-like iron lady she was (but a great leader when facing terrible situations), just like Winston Churchill, who also posed with a machine gun when threatened by dictatorship:
"We were flirting with national bankruptcy after years of socialist maladministration. But someone had discovered huge resources of oil and gas ... we had to oppose and overrule the usual Jeremiahs who said it could not be done and even if it could it would pollute the oceans. They chanted, they demonstrated, they plastered their smug, stupid, holier-than-thou faces all over our newspapers and TV screens. ... Once again, after years of socialism, we have flirted with bankruptcy over these past four years. Now I don't know whether there is some divinity or just benign fate watching over this old land of ours but it has happened again. ... And the Luddites are back, the same dim bigots who said not a word when forests of damaging, life-wrecking, landscape destroying windmills were plastered over every horizon to produce minuscule energy at unaffordable prices. Our screens are filled with the same smug, angry, self-righteous faces that I have been seeing for 60 years supporting one anti-British cause after another. ... Methane does not come out of your kitchen tap; that has been proved to be an invention. The water tables are not poisoned; the drills go down through the aquifers in sealed tubes and the released gas would come up the same way. As for the earth tremors, there are about 2,000 a year in this country. Humans can detect about 200; the rest only a sensitive seismometer can register." - http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/frederick-forsyth/425596/Fracking-could-be-our-next-salvation
'NUCLEAR OPINIONS'
London SE1
From Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another, by Spencer R. Weart, Yale University Press, 1998:
Chapter One: Investigating the Puzzle of Democratic Peace
... This idea had been developed by 1785, when there were scarcely any democracies in existence, by the great philosopher Immanuel Kant. A world where every state was a democracy, he wrote, would be a world of perpetual peace. Free peoples, Kant explained, are inherently peaceful; they will make war only when driven to it by tyrants. ... In our own times, democracies have burned people to death by the tens of thousands in the fires of Hamburg and Hiroshima. Yet in all these wars, one side fell short of what most people would call democracy. The United States, as will be discussed later, never has fought a democratic government basically like its own.
... Beginning in the 1960s, scholars devoted thousands of hours to analyzing wars statistically. For a long time they failed to find any general rules. ... Yet several scholars (including me) did notice, independently, a peculiar regularity: during the past century there have been no wars between well-established democracies. The first articles on this were scarcely noticed, but gradually a few political scientists took up systematic study. Their findings remained almost unknown outside academic circles. ... What was the probability, they asked, that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident? The answer: less than one chance in a thousand. That is a level of certainty not often achieved with laboratory rats, let alone in studies of international relations.
These studies ruled out out the most obvious objections. They showed convincingly that the lack of wars between democracies is not an artifact caused by the limited number of such regimes - there have been more than enough to provide robust statistics (even if the democratic alliances of the Cold War are left out).
... When toleration of dissent has persisted for three years, but not until then, we can call a new republic "well established." For there have been no wars between democracies more than three years old (aside from a few doubtful ancient Greek cases), and wars between such oligarchic republics have been exceedingly rare (only two or three ambiguous cases exist). ...
The most likely candidate for this factor is the political culture of the leadership. If there is to be a stable republican government, the new leaders must rapidly learn to make compromises, or give way to people who will. This has the right time scale of a few years: partly through changes in personnel, partly through personal changes, new beliefs and practices for managing conflicts take hold.
... In negotiations each regime did tend to behave according to its political culture. Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders undeniably extending their domestic style of behavior abroad by using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation, in ways that made war more likely. Republican behavior was plainly different--so much so that in quite a few cases the difference 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.
... Any attempt to impose democratic regimes by force can also undermine a more immediate goal: fostering an international "republican" political culture of peaceful negotiation. ... The puzzle, that is, of exactly how well-established democracies like the Swiss Forest States could maintain centuries of peace, and precisely where there are defects in democracies that make the streets of their cities shudder with explosions.
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), also The exaggerated urban effects of nuclear weapons: proof tested civil defence, and Britain's 1950 studies of nuclear 9/11 and the disappearance of civilian airliner MH370.
"Baroness Catherine Ashton, who goes by the grand title of High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs ... does not have a shred of credibility. She might be paid over £250,000 a year and be head of a vast EU diplomatic operation costing an annual £442 million, but she is a lightweight socialist apparatchik who has never been elected to any public position. She ... was vice-chair of that posturing gang of noisy defeatists, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. ... Baroness Ashton ... helped to provoke the current crisis ... The EU has been desperate to extend its sphere of influence. Ukraine ... was a prime target."
“Number of times word ‘Jew’ or ‘Jewish’ mentioned in statement by Catherine Ashton on Holocaust Remembrance Day: 0,” said Joshua Davidovich, a news editor at the Times of Israel, on Twitter." - http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/01/27/eu-diplomatic-chief-catherine-ashtons-official-statement-on-holocaust-memorial-day-doesnt-mention-jews/ [David: these EU quacks and BBC/Guardian newspaper political activists are mostly anti-Jewish racists, they are fascists, and they are warmongers in sheep's clothing.]
Accused of racism against the Jews for failing to mention the Jewish victims of the holocaust, this Baroness Catherine Ashton is not trying to kill everyone on earth by starting World War III, while President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron lift not a finger to stop her. (To help those who need the data for missile programming and want to retaliate against her after WWIII, the Brussels EU headquarters coordinates are: 50°50′N 4°23′E / 50.84°N 4.38°E.)
Private Eye, 7 March 2014. No joking, this could turn out to be a real crisis. "The megalomaniacs of Brussels despise national independence and democracy. ... At the entrance to EU Parliament’s visitors’ centre there’s a slogan: “National sovereignty is the root cause of the most crying evils of our times. The only final remedy for this supreme and catastrophic evil is the federal union of the peoples.” " - Leo McKinstry.
Because the EU is not democratic, it is a threat to world peace, especially with unelected, censoring, dictatorial narcissists like Cathy Ashton trying to start WWIII by interfering in national democracy:
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Chapter One: Investigating the Puzzle of Democratic Peace
... Free peoples, Kant explained, are inherently peaceful; they will make war only when driven to it by tyrants [like the EU and its High Representative on Foreign Affairs Cathy Ashton]. ... In our own times, democracies have burned people to death by the tens of thousands in the fires of Hamburg and Hiroshima. Yet in all these wars, one side fell short of what most people would call democracy. The United States, as will be discussed later, never has fought a democratic government basically like its own. ... during the past century there have been no wars between well-established democracies. ... political scientists took up systematic study. Their findings remained almost unknown outside academic circles. ... What was the probability, they asked, that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident? The answer: less than one chance in a thousand. That is a level of certainty not often achieved with laboratory rats, let alone in studies of international relations.
... the lack of wars between democracies is not an artifact caused by the limited number of such regimes - 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." ... In negotiations each regime did tend to behave according to its political culture. Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders undeniably extending their domestic style of behavior abroad by using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation, in ways that made war more likely. Republican behavior was plainly different - so much so that in quite a few cases the difference 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.
Dangerous nuclear weapons fanatic, Baroness Catherine Ashton, head of European Union Foreign Affairs, who promoted Brezhnev's Russian lies about the neutron bomb in her 1977 contribution to chapter 1 of the CND propaganda anti-deterrence lies-filled book The neutron Bomb, of course has now been promoted by the fascists and has caused the Ukraine crisis in another pro-Russian lying "nuclear disarmament" plot to endanger British lives or to try to cause a Third World War. |
Anti-nuclear biased Russian-agenda lying "High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs" Baroness Catherine Ashton (salary £250,000), a never-elected European Union top-dog, is the ultimate cause of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Is this dangerous episode yet another deliberate plan between ex-CND Vice Chair Ashton and her CND colleagues in the Kremlim to provide an excuse for invasion or WWIII between East and West? Is Cathy Ashton being paid a secret back-hander by the Kremlin for providing Putin with his perfect excuse to invade Crimea and (soon) other countries which get scared nearby, and rearm, "escalating tensions" with Russia, or even WWIII? Remember, Adolf Hitler had effective support from "disarmament pacifists" in England like 1933 Oxford Union pacifist debate leader professor Cyril Joad, who was still exaggerating weapons effects in his August 1939 Penguin books disarmament best-seller "Why War?" (where he falsely stated that the consensus of publications on war was that everything would be wiped out by incendiary, high explosive and gas immediately a war began). Like today's "pacifists", this encourages thugs to start wars.
Mr McKinstry needs to compare in quantitative detail the level of corruption and slaughter financed by corrupt, dictatorial, anti-democratic "European Union" projects (like funding third world tobacco farmers to cause lung cancer in addition to the "warmongering" politics behind the current Ukraine crisis), with the "eugenics for ethnic fitness" of dictatorships like the USSR. He writes softly instead (Daily Express article of 6 March 2014, page 12):
“Because the EU’s officials are not answerable to the peoples of the nation states ... Brussels overspent its budget last year by a shocking £20 billion. [This] far exceeds anything achieved by oil company Enron. ... we have to pay £14 billion every year in our annual contribution ... a protection racket that fails to provide any protection. ... its own auditors have not given its accounts a clean bill of health for the past 18 years. Brussels has an annual budget of £133 billion ... the EU spends £2.4 billion a year on marketing and publicity ... European officials take an average of 14.6 days off sick every year ... When its Court of Auditors in 2013 found “serious failures” in the award of EU contracts for a £13 billion pipeline between Hungary and Romania the EU said with typical insouciance, “We interpret the rules differently.” [This was precisely Putin’s response to corruption claims over the Winter Olympics.] ... the EU’s foreign service ... has 37 staff in Papua New Guinea and 32 in Mozambique.”
Paul Mercer gives the following 1983 flowchart in his excellent anti-propaganda book, 'Peace' of the Dead: The Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers (Policy Research Publications, London, 1986), page 91:
Soviet Union Politburo, Candidate Member: Boris Ponomarev
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Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, Secretary: Boris Ponomarev
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International Department, Head: Boris Ponomarev; Oleg Kharkhardin (Vice-President of Soviet Peace Committee)
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World Peace Council, President: Romesh Chandra; Oleg Kharkhardin (Vice-President of Soviet Peace Committee)
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International Liaison Forum of Peace Forces, Chairman: Romesh Chandra; Executive Secretary: Oleg Kharkhardin; Vice-Chairmen: Arthur Booth and Sean MacBride
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(member body)
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International Peace Bureau, Chairman: Arthur Booth; President: Sean MacBride; Vice-President: Bruce Kent
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(member body)
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Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), General Secretary: Bruce Kent; Irish CND Committee: Sean MacBride
Mercer states that the delegation which CND sent to Moscow in May 1982 consisted of Lord Hugh Jenkins (1980-1 CND Chairman), Joan Ruddock (then the current CND Chairman), Roger Spiller (who was soon to be elected Vice-Chairman of CND), Sally Davison (full-time National Organiser of CND, 1979-81), and Gerard Holden. On 31 May 1982, Joan Ruddock, the Chairman of CND, was in session with Yuri Zhukov, the Chairman of the Soviet 'World Peace Council' anti-Western propaganda lobby. Soviet news agency TASS on 28 May 1982 reported that Lord Jenkins said CND 'had a high opinion of the Soviet peace initiative', neglecting all the Soviet funded invasions and wars on democracy throughout the world! CND's control by Soviet communism continued right up to the end of the Cold War. For example, see Dr Julian Lewis's article, 'CND's New Stalinist Leader' in the December 1990 issue of Freedom Today (available online):
'CND has appointed the former National Organiser of the British branch of the World Peace Council (WPC) as its new General Secretary – the position held by Bruce Kent when leading CND in the early 1980s. Mr Gary Lefley, who takes up CND's top full-time salaried post in the new year, can accurately be described as an agent of President Brezhnev's propaganda machine at the height of the Soviet "peace offensive" against NATO's planned deployment of cruise and Pershing II missiles. ... Before the 1983 General Election, CND published a list of 120 Labour MPs amongst its members. This total had risen to 133 by the time of the 1987 General Election. Currently, CND refuses to reveal either the total or the names of their supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party. This is undoubtedly because it would run counter to Labour's attempts to conceal its continuing unilateralism. Now that the organisation is to be run by a propagandist for the Brezhnev regime, there is yet another reason for Labour's CND MPs to keep their membership a secret.'
Army personnel helps to put sand bags in the village of Wraysbury, Berkshire [EPA] |
Let charity begin at home with a civil defence corps
POLITICS is all about priorities. In an ideal world we would all like to be able to spend unlimited funds helping everyone who is in need. But in the real world you have to decide which causes are the most deserving. And when any government sees its own citizens suffering it is only common sense to say that they must come first. For all of us who truly believe in Britain it is obvious that our obligation to our compatriots when they are in need and in peril must constitute the highest claim on our collective talents and resources.
The real, once Top Secret classified "War Plan UK" for the event of a sneaky "Pearl Harbor"-style surprise attack by Russia, and some of the secret research it provoked ... |
Professor Peter Hennessy published some declassified potential Russian target lists in The Secret State (2002, revised 2003 and 2010). Crown Copyright Reserved. |
Above: arresting the culprit. Nobody sane in London on 28 June 1914 believed that the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand would spark WWI in early August. As the author of On Thermonuclear War, Herman Kahn told Professor Freeman Dyson (quoted in Dyson's 1984 book Weapons and Hope): "you had to be paranoid in 1941 to believe the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor", despite the fact that in 1940, President Roosevelt imposed sanctions against Japan to prevent it getting oil, when Japan invaded Vietnam/Indochina. |
Above: the British media was the stage for a war of terror between nuclear weapons effects exaggerating CND and Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher's pro-civil defence, pro-deterrence, anti-intimidation elected government. At the 1983 General Election, CND went so far as to try to get voters to elect Neil Kinnock's Labour Party due to its declared unilateral nuclear disarmament policy, which would have removed Britain from its 'unsinkable aircraft carrier' role for American nuclear weapons in the effort to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe! CND did this by exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons as well as downplaying the horrendous suffering that living under communist dictatorship would entail and also downplaying the incredible effectiveness of simple civil defense countermeasures against thermal radiation, blast and fallout radiation! Despite all her widely-attacked and tragic failings on domestic policy, Thatcher stood up for freedom effectively in foreign policy: unlike most scientifically inept politicians, she was a former research chemist, who - despite her widely perceived domestic policy failings as a right-wing woman - backed the morality of civil defence and on foreign policy issues stood up to terrorist state dictator Leonid Brezhnev, echoing Clayton's pragmatic outlook on war in her address to the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament on 23 June 1982, when she pointed out that in the years since the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 million people were killed by 140 non-nuclear conflicts, so:
‘The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. It is the disposition on the part of some states to impose change on others by resorting to force against other nations ... Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace.’
Charles J. Hitch and Roland B. McKean of the RAND Corporation in their 1960 book The Economics of Defence in the Nuclear Age, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, p. 310, stated:
‘With each side possessing only a small striking force, a small amount of cheating would give one side dominance over the other, and the incentive to cheat and prepare a preventative attack would be strong... With each side possessing, say, several thousand missiles, a vast amount of cheating would be necessary to give one side the ability to wipe out the other’s striking capability.’
For example, America used two nuclear weapons against Japan in desperation to stop World War II fighting when it had no nuclear stockpile at all, but resisted from using nuclear weapons at all when it had a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, even when it had superiority over the Soviet Union until the 1960s. At the end of The Economics of Defence in the Nuclear Age, p. 357, the authors stress: ‘the more extensive a disarmament agreement is, the smaller the force that a violator would have to hide in order to achieve complete domination. Most obviously, “the abolition of the weapons necessary in a general or ‘unlimited’ war” would offer the most insuperable obstacles to an inspection plan, since the violator could gain an overwhelming advantage from the concealment of even a few weapons.’
Thus, reducing the scale of nuclear deterrence may not result in increased security. This fact is not opinion, and it doesn't matter if it opposes 'consensus thinking' or 'groupthink'. Such a fact is not a pro-nuclear bias, or propaganda, but is countering lying propaganda. We have to work with natural facts in the real world, regardless of whether popular ideologies and utopias are contrary to them.
Following the 1991 Soviet Union collapse, in 1994 the Ukraine was disarmed of its own nuclear deterrent in exchange for a guarantee called the "Budapest Memorandum", which was signed by Russia as well as the U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister John Major. Article 4 in this Memorandum promised to uphold the territorial integrity of Ukraine (which has included Crimea since 1954), in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons. Similarly, Britain had guaranteed the security of Poland on March 31, 1939, precipitating WWII after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and likewise in 1839 Britain had guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium by the Treaty of London, leading to WWI after Germany invaded Belgium in 1914. Now, the Ukraine is reminding us of our 1994 Budapest Memorandum (one day in the distant future, maybe politicians will grow up, stop appeasing disarmament lobbies, and allow countries to keep their own nuclear deterrent to deter aggression against themselves, instead of this system of maximizing the escalation potential, inviting aggressive conflicts and war in the name of "peacemaking").
Britain's last hot war against Russia was the Crimean War, 1853-6. Russia was eventually defeated by an alliance of Britain, France, Sardinia and Turkey (Ottoman Empire). Britain's Crimean War against Russia broke out after gradual escalation stemming from Russian Tsar Nicholas I invasion of Moldavia on 2 July 1853, which initially seemed to be a trifling escalation of a clash between Russia and France's President Napoleon over the control of Palestine in the Middle East. But then Turkey declared war on Russia on 5 October 1853, and on 4 November, Russian ships from its naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea annihilated Turkey's fleet at Sinope, its Black Sea base, the event that forced Britain and France to finally declare war on Russia in March 1854. They were fighting to destroy Russia's Crimean naval base at Sevastopol, which proved harder than expected: Crimea was secured in February 1856, after two years of brutal fighting and a cholera epidemic, with the loss of 25,000 British, 100,000 French and 1,000,000 Russian lives.
British Prime Minister Aberdeen had to resign from his coalition government, Russian Tsar Nicholas I died from pneumonia due to a chill during the conflict, and the Russian debt from the war was so great that his son, Tsar Alexander II, sold the Russian territory of Alaska to America. The poverty of Russia due to war debt made it a target for Marxist-communist revolutionaries like Lenin, while the decline of Russian political influence permitted the Prussian German Empire to unite and arm itself to start WWI.
Despite some changed map boundaries, country names, political ideology, oil and gas reserves, and technology, people don't evolve in 160 years. Key underlying disputes between East and West remain, like the military and religious flashpoints, e.g. Crimea and Palestine in the Middle East, and the financial, human and political costs of invasions:
Ukraine's interior minister accused Russian forces of an "armed invasion" at an airport in Crimea, as tensions escalate. It seems that most Ukrainians fear annexation of their country by Russia.
The legitimately-elected yet "undemocratically" deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, now residing in Moscow, gives Russian President Vladimir Putin the perfect excuse for his military invasion of Ukraine. The problem here is really Iraq and Afghanistan, which have helped push the U.K. to well over £1 trillion in National Debt, not to mention personal and bank debt which is another housing bubble (the threat of negative equity on homes and assets once Britain defaults on interest payments due to rising interest rates, resulting in bank failures that the government must either bail out at public "expense"/debt, or else classic financial ruin, either a la Greece, or else a la Weimar Republic).
We're currently only having to pay 2% interest (historically rock bottom rates), but we're still running a deficit (the debt is still growing bigger), not a surplus (see graphs below). This means we can't afford to even think about talking of another Crimean War (in the first one, Alfred Nobel made his prize-fortune by considerately supplying dynamite to both sides). In the first Crimean War (1853-6) Russia lost to an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia. But Russia won't lose this time: we simply can't afford to fight for the liberty of the Ukraine. If interest rates go up due to economic uncertainty caused by such a war, we'd go bankrupt as is proved by the Money Week magazine graphs below.
The U.K. Government on both sides of Parliament falsely and sneakily conflates "deficit" with "debt", to make it appear that the horrendous cutbacks needed to reduce the deficit - the rate of increase of debt - are somehow cutting the debt itself. Wrong: the debt is still growing bigger - we're still headed out to sea into the storm, and we're not even turning around for a return to shore! Some estimates of the total U.K. debt (which is not an exact science, since you have to allow for depreciation of supposed "assets" into "negative equity" or "debt" when the economy goes completely bust and the gas hisses out of the inflated housing bubble) are that it is now worse than the 913% of GDP that the Weimar Republic had when it collapsed, sowing the seed of WWII.
Cutting the deficit is like reducing the throttle a bit, while still going in the wrong direction. The only way to reduce the debt is to have a surplus. To get rid of the debt means having a surplus for many years into the future. We don't even have a surplus! We've still got a deficit, so the national debt bomb is still growing, but the opposition watermelon parties use smokescreens to cover it up instead of pressurising the government to start reducing the debt mountain. But the fact is, debt interest default will wipe out Britain's credit rating, causing further interest rate rises in a period of international tension, escalating the problems.
The West half of the Ukraine (which borders Europe) is pro-European Union and wants Ukraine to join the European Union. However, the Eastern side of the Ukraine speaks Russian and tends to be Leninist and to feel some empathy with Putin's Russia. Will Russia's President Putin simply "put up" with the deposition of the pro-Putin elected Ukraine president, or will Putin instead decide to take a hand and "offer assistance" to Ukraine? Historically, all of Hitler's invasions in the mid to late 1930s were "excused" on the basis that Hitler was simply "protecting" the pro-Hitler, German-speaking, minorities. For example, when Hitler "invaded" the Sudentenland of Czechoslovakia in September 1938, Hitler's excuse was that he was "providing humanitarian assistance" to nearly four million Germans who were living in the Sudentenland region of Czechoslovakia.
My point is that Hitler always had the "plausible lie"-type excuse that he was merely providing soldiers to act as "peacekeepers" or policemen, to "protect" German minorities in the countries he invaded. Because there are some Germans in a minority in every country, this excuse could be applied also to every country in the world. Propaganda it was, but it helped to "justify" the "peaceful" spread of the Third Reich. Hitler's glib excuse for the German annexation of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, etc.: Jackboots were merely being used to "protect German Nationals in bigoted, anti-Nazi countries". (Those who were pacifist/fascist chose to believe Hitler because they wanted to; they had seen falsified pacifist 1930s claims that war would exterminate all the cities with gas, explosives, and incendiaries the moment war started.) This "peaceful invasion" situation, is mirrored by the Russian situation with regard to the Crimean region of the Ukraine today, "justified" by the fact Russia's Navy has a controversial base at Sevastopol (familiar from the 1853-6 war!) in the Crimea for its Black Sea Fleet (click here for details of the serious Ukrainian controversy over this base).
IF Russian President Putin decides to authorize the Russian Army to "provide further assistance" to the pro-Putin, pro-Russian, Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Eastern part of the Ukraine, perhaps adding the extra excuse that the present corrupt Ukrainian President was "democratically elected" and has been "unlawfully dismissed" by the Ukrainian Parliament as a result of a few undemocratic protests in Kiev, while the European Union and America support the pro-European Union Ukrainians in the West of the Ukraine, then the civil war will be beyond Western intervention, because of the debt bomb for the West.
First, an invasion by Russia will cause a really severe civil war in Ukraine. America's Obama and the European Union will then have to either climb down and lose face to Putin, or else we will end up with Ukraine becoming another Vietnam in which both sides (Russia and the West) provide war materiel, protracting and deepening the war. The end result could well be a complete degeneration of West-Russian relations and another very icy Cold War. But instead of Russian dictatorship being deterred effectively as in the past, the crippling national debts of the U.K. and U.S.A. will make them incredible, so their impotence will end up - like Chamberlain at Munich in September 1938 - encouraging aggression and further invasions. Second, with nuclear disarmament today proceeding like 1930s British disarmament, and for the exactly same financial and war-effects-exaggerating reasons as 1930s British disarmament, will we all be conscripted to fight WWIII, without any politically incorrect neutron bombs or other effective tank deterrents?
Update: a few quotations from the bestselling author of The Fourth Protocol about clandestine nuclear attack, Frederick Forsyth, from his 28 February 2014 Daily Express (page 13) newspaper article on the Ukrainian crisis:
Corruption is rampant all over the world
Above: Poor old ex-KGB officer President Putin's hard-line corruption may be due to the fact that, apart from sharing the same Christian name as Lenin, Wikipedia shows his brainwashing by the corrupt USSR:
"Putin joined the KGB in 1975 upon graduation, and underwent a year's training at the 401st KGB school in Okhta, Leningrad. He then went on to work briefly in the Second Chief Directorate (counter-intelligence) before he was transferred to the First Chief Directorate, where among his duties was the monitoring of foreigners and consular officials in Leningrad.[28][29] From 1985 to 1990, the KGB stationed Putin in Dresden, East Germany.[30] Following the collapse of the communist East German government, Putin was recalled to the Soviet Union and returned to Leningrad, where in June 1991 he assumed a position with the International Affairs section of Leningrad State University, reporting to Vice-Rector Yuriy Molchanov.[29] In his new position, Putin maintained surveillance on the student body and kept an eye out for recruits. It was during his stint at the university that Putin grew reacquainted with his former professor Anatoly Sobchak, then mayor of Leningrad.[31] Putin finally resigned from the active state security services with the rank of lieutenant colonel on 20 August 1991 (with some attempts to resign made earlier),[31] on the second day of the KGB-supported abortive putsch against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.[32] Putin later explained his decision: "As soon as the coup began, I immediately decided which side I was on", though he also noted that the choice was hard because he had spent the best part of his life with "the organs".[33]"
We really don't want to make personal comments about President Putin, just in case our names goes on a hit list, and he decides to invade the UK, then perform his great KGB magic trick of making all the people on his list suddenly disappear without fair trial into Siberian salt mines (or maybe mass graves if he decides to lower his salt intake to improve his fitness). By the way, we do have some positive things to write about Putin the Great: he rides well, is great at judo, and swims the butterfly stroke nearly as well as me.
Tribute video of President Putin the Great, engaged in one of the many fine things he does best (which include huge state spending sprees for prestige, giving contracts worth billions to dedicated friends):
Update: James Delingpole points out the funny side of this crisis from our (UK) financially bad situation for a war, in a 3 March 2014 article:
Why are some people so hot for war with Russia? I don't just mean the neo cons and the semi-retired cold warriors still half expecting the squadrons of T54s ...
... Should it merely involve the conscription of every man between 18 and 30 and the immediate doubling of our defence budget? Or are we to go on a proper, Germany-in-late-'44 Götterdämmerung footing and ready the granddads with their pitchforks and prepare the school kids to man the anti-aircraft batteries? ... does that mean I get to fly a Harrier Jump Jet. Because if I do, I must tell you, it will fulfil a long-standing childhood fantasy of mine. Growing up in the Eighties, when General Sir John Hackett had that enormous, bestselling success with his what-if future history The Third World War, a major conflagration with the Soviet Union - possibly ending with the destruction of the whole world - was something all of us British schoolkids half feared ... American schoolchildren of the era, we know, felt just the same way. The tagline of 1984's Red Dawn was: "In our time no foreign army has ever occupied American soil. Until now." ...
On Breitbart Radio last night, the admirable Frank Gaffney - a former defence adviser to the man who did more than anyone to bring about the end of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan - was ramping up the rhetoric about global conflagration. ... In the US President Obama has been castigated - not unreasonably, it must be said - for making empty threats. (If you're going to make threats, be prepared to carry them through - or don't make them in the first place). ... It is a quarrel in a far-away country between people ...
"... a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war. I can well understand the reasons why the Czech Government have felt unable to accept the terms which have been put before them in the German memorandum. Yet I believe after my talks with Herr Hitler that, if only time were allowed, it ought to be possible for the arrangements for transferring the territory that the Czech Government has agreed to give to Germany to be settled by agreement under conditions which would assure fair treatment to the population concerned. ... However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that. I am myself a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me; but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted. Under such a domination life for people who believe in liberty would not be worth living; but war is a fearful thing, and we must be very clear, before we embark upon it, that it is really the great issues that are at stake, and that the call to risk everything in their defense, when all the consequences are weighed, is irresistible. For the present I ask you to await as calmly as you can the events of the next few days. As long as war has not begun, there is always hope that it may be prevented, and you know that I am going to work for peace to the last moment. Good night."
Grey, more interested in fly fishing than foreign affairs, was so obsessed until 1 August 1914 with trying to reach agreement with Germany for British neutrality in exchange for a German promise to avoid the invasion of France, that he failed to tell Germany clearly that Britain would go to war against Germany, if Germany invaded Belgium, until it was too late to prevent German mobilization. The rest of the Cabinet failed to intervene with Grey's disastrously weak negotiations, since they were too busy preparing for war (churchill) or dealing with domestic affairs (literally "affairs" in the case of August 1914 Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith who had 7 kids but was spending Cabinet meetings writing up to 4 love letters to his mistress, Venetia Stanley, according to research by historian Bobbie Neate, the stepdaughter of Asquith's secret love child who has a blog linked here):
In total Britain's August 1914 Prime Minister Herbert Asquith wrote 560 love letters to his mistress Venetia Stanley, while never writing to his three sons serving in France: "Often he would sit in Cabinet writing love letters while vital discussions raged around him. ... The public, of course, had no inkling. ... During the war, the press was strictly censored."
Historian A. J. P. Taylor (a CND star founder) ignored all this, misrepresenting the origin of WWI as just an "arms race", to help achieve unilateral nuclear disarmament with his 1969 War by Timetable book, see also pages here and here (Taylor's arms race theory of WWI, basically just a repeat of Edward Grey's old 1914 lying excuse for blundering into disaster, was very popular with the Vietnam era anti-nuclear, pro-love CND peaceniks).
"When he [Lord Grey] finally did make such communication, German forces were already massed at the Belgian border, and Helmuth von Moltke convinced Kaiser Wilhelm II it was too late to change the plan of attack." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Grey,_1st_Viscount_Grey_of_Fallodon#July_Crisis
"General von Moltke [German army chief] said: I believe war is unavoidable; war the sooner the better. But we ought to do more to press to prepare the popularity of a war against Russia. The Kaiser supported this. Tirpitz [German Navy chief] said that the navy would prefer to see the postponement of the great fight for one and a half years."
Edward Grey's lying excuse after WWI devastation broke out in 1914 was that the "arms race" (not his own bungling) caused WWI! Here are the words of President John F. Kennedy's 80,000 copy bestselling book Why England Slept, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1962 (first published 1940), page 16 (the original editor's book typescript is in the Kennedy Library archive, linked here):
“The statement of Lord Grey, British Foreign Minister, made in 1914, that, “The enormous growth of armaments in Europe, the sense of insecurity, and fear caused by them; it was these that made war inevitable,’ had a tremendous effect on post-war British opinion. Armaments were looked upon as something horrible, as being the cause of war, not a means of defence. Again and again, through the ‘thirties, opponents of rearmament quoted Grey.”
(This same situation recurred 25 years later, which again led to lies from the culprit: Chamberlain had the brass cheek to lie that after WWII broke out that he had been buying time for British rearmament at Munich in 1938, when he knew at the time that Germany was arming faster than Britain so every second of postponed war was causing a reduction in the probability of Britain winning the war. Chamberlain knew this. Churchill had warned the Government using a famous Daily Express article in 1934, but lying Prime Minister Baldwin ignored the truth, as did Chamberlain. Afterwards, these dictatorship-supporting thugs got off scot-free by telling lies, just like Grey did in 1914. Chamberlain knew in 1938 that Germany was in an all-out arms race and was arming faster than Britain. If your opponent is arming faster than you are, every second of delay on your part allows the enemy to acquire more weapons than you can, so the imbalance increases! The lying historians today still ignore these facts on rearmament rates - published by President John F. Kennedy in his 1940 thesis and best-selling 80,000 copy book "Why England Slept" - out of ignorance of economics and science, and out of anti-nuclear, anti-arms race bias. In the same way, these lying historians screw up the true history of the biological effects of radiation and DNA repair mechanisms, in suit their political agendas. It is sick.)
Therefore, unlike the assassin of the Archduke and others players, Grey's role in the start of WWI was not merely a trivial convenient excuse for war, because Grey actually had the power to influence the Kaiser, yet failed to do so. Therefore, Grey could have prevented WWI, by acting differently. Likewise, Chamberlain wasn't the only cause of WWII, but he should have understood from Grey's 1914 failure, that the only language of diplomacy is force: action speaks louder than words. Putin understands this.
Update: incorrect propaganda fear-mongering on radiation effects by right-wing (not merely left-wing) continues in recent articles.
Jane Warren writes in a double-page feature in the Daily Express (1 March 2014, pages 36-37) that the genetic deformalities of Igor Pavlovets, who was born on 3 March 1987 nearly one year after the accident by which time iodine-131 had disappeared, were caused by radiation from Chernobyl in 1986:
"Following the explosions at the Chernobyl reactor on April 26, 1986, in what was then the Soviet Union, a generation of children was born with disabilities caused by radiation. Igor was one of the first."
Everyone humane is very glad that Jane Warren got Igor Pavlovets to England and a better life than he would have got in the USSR and the following corrupt regimes, but the good news she doesn't report is that there is extensive objective scientific evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that proves Igor Pavlovets with overwhelming probability did not get his deformalities from the sub-lethal levels of radiation his parents were exposed to. Isn't that great news to report, Jane Warren? (Or is there still a Jane Warren bias against truth when it comes to radiation, as Dr Sanders suggests in his conclusive 2010 book, Radiation Hormesis and the Linear No-Threshold Assumption, published by Springer?)
http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/439/bfm%253A978-3-642-03720-7%252F1.pdf?auth66=1393952668_41a73ccc7c7c7b7f33515bafd90294c7&ext=.pdf
For this evidence that sub-lethal nuclear radiation exposure doesn't produce any statistically significant rise in genetic deformalities, please see the studies made by the official Japanese-American "Radiation Effects Research Foundation", http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/genetics_e/birthdef.html:
"No statistically significant increase in major birth defects or other untoward pregnancy outcomes was seen among children of survivors. Monitoring of nearly all pregnancies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki began in 1948 and continued for six years. During that period, 76,626 newborn infants were examined by ABCC physicians. When surveillance began, certain dietary staples were rationed in Japan, but ration regulations made special provision for women who were at least 20 weeks pregnant. This supplementary ration registration process enabled the identification of more than 90% of all pregnancies and the subsequent examination of birth outcomes."
Genetic defects are not caused by radiation but are instead caused by occasional natural mistakes during the complex epigenetic differentiation of limbs and organs. We don't need to subscribe to left-wing myths about radiation induced mutations, just because of communist propaganda from the Cold War which tried to scare the West into surrendering. If we had surrendered, I fear Igor wouldn't have a life in England. I submitted a brief and polite, factual comment on this to the Daily Express website, so we'll see if Jane Warren continues to use unjustified emotional propaganda and ignore objective evidence on the subject of Igor:
It is great Jane Warren and supporters helped Igor Pavlovets come to England after Chernobyl to receive a far better life than he would have had in the USSR and its successor, but one new piece of good news which she doesn't report is available.
There is strong evidence from Hiroshima and Nagasaki arguing the case that Igor may not have been deformed by the survivable levels of radiation his parents were exposed to. Instead, genetic defects are caused by occasional natural mistakes during the complex epigenetic differentiation of limbs. For evidence from 76,626 children born after the nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki without any statistically significant rise in normal rates of genetic deformalities, see the official Japanese-American "Radiation Effects Research Foundation", http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/genetics_e/birthdef.html:
"No statistically significant increase in major birth defects or other untoward pregnancy outcomes was seen among [76,626] children of survivors."
Setting all the Nazi style, originally secret-classified “Gestapo-like” groupthink crackpot conferences and the angry, bigoted, demented censorship “reports” of undemocratic, mean-spirited, KGB-style, 1930s-British-appeasement-like, CND-worshipping, “nuclear weapons effects expert opinion” aside, please see page 830 of the published June 1959 U.S. Congressional Hearings on “Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War”, linked here, for proof that it was scientifically well understood in 1959 that potassium is in the same group of the Periodic Table of chemistry as cesium, so that adding potassium to the potassium-deficient soil at Bikini, Eniwetok and Rongelap would prevent the uptake of cesium-137 by plants and food chains. If the Guardian and BBC want to expose a "real conspiracy" by America to destroy the world using radiation cover-ups, here is it. But this doesn't suit their political, warped, lying agenda, so these evil bullying, ignorant, propaganda-supporting, complacent, pseudo-liberal "green"-fascist thugs simply help to cover it up as usual.
The facts were also globally published in the following 10 December 1988 New Scientist article, "Potassium could cover up Bikini's radioactivity" (if the American's don't improve their communication skills regarding decontamination successes, the Bikini islanders will forget all about the joys of Bikini and prefer to join the CND disarmers instead, funded to promote emotional hogwash for turning the world communist or "green"):
https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/photos09.php: "The largest contributor to radiation doses from exposure to residual fallout contamination in the Marshall Islands comes from cesium-137. ... coconut crabs (refer photo shown above) form an important and prized source of food in the Marshall Islands and, in certain locations, have been found to contain above average concentrations of cesium-137."
https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php: "Twenty-three nuclear devices were detonated on Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958 with a combined fission yield of 42.2 Megaton (Mt) ... An additional forty-three atmospheric nuclear tests were conducted on Enewetak Atoll about 300 km to the west of Bikini Atoll. The most significant contaminating event in the Marshall Islands nuclear test campaign and the highest yield atmospheric nuclear test ever conducted by the United States involved the detonation of a high-energy thermonuclear on Bikini Atoll on 1 March of 1954. This ground-surface test was code named Bravo and had an estimated explosive yield of 15 Mt. ... Through the early 1980s, scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory developed an extensive database of environmental measurements for Bikini Atoll, especially for soils and vegetation growing on Bikini and Eneu Islands. ... During this period, predictive dose assessments for both Bikini and Enewetak Atolls clearly indicated that the most significant pathway for human exposure toresidual fallout contamination in the Marshall Islands was ingestion of cesium-137 contained in locally grown root crops such as coconut, breadfruit, and Pandanus (Robison et al., 1980; 1982). ... One key factor that helps explain why cesium-137 plays such a important role in contributing to radiation exposure in the Marshall Islands is that coral soils are known to contain little or no clay material and very low concentrations of naturally occurring potassium—an alkaline earth element that shares similar properties with cesium. These conditions result in increased uptake of cesium-137 from soil and incorporation into plants relative to the rate of cesium-137 uptake from continental soils. Consequently, the significance of dietary intakes of cesium-137 from eating locally grown foods was initially overlooked because early models in radioecology were based on continental type soils and exposure conditions. ... the most effective and practical method for reducing the uptake of cesium-137 into food crop products was to treat agricultural areas with potassium fertilizer (KCl). The addition of potassium had the added benefit of increasing the growth rate and productivity of some food crops with essentially no adverse environmental impacts. ... experiments show that a single application of 2000 kg per ha of potassium can be effective in reducing the cesium-137 uptake in coconut meat (and juice) to about 5% to 10% of the pretreatment level. ... we have recently demonstrated that the environmental half-life of cesium-137 is more important than radiological decay in controlling the fate and distribution of cesium-137 in coral soils (Robison et al., 2003). For example, the estimated effective half-life of cesium-137 on Bikini, Enewetak, and Rongelap Atolls is around 8 to 9.8 years (95% confidence) compared with its radiological half-life of 30 years. ... cesium-137 is slowly being incorporated into more resistant mineral phases within the soil and, through aging effects, may be becoming less available for soil-to-plant transfer. ... Applying a mean effective cesium-137 half-life of 8.5 years for the data developed for the 1999 Bikini dose assessment (Robison et al., 1997a), the predicted population average effective dose for resettlement of Bikini in 2010, where imported foods are available, is conservatively estimated to be about 0.17 mSv per year (17 mrem per year) or very close to the self-imposed cleanup standard of 0.15 mSv per year adopted by the Republic of the Marshall Islands Nuclear Claims Tribunal. With this understanding and the fact that exposure conditions on Bikini are improving at an accelerated rate, early resettlement of Bikini Atoll may become much more plausible and cost effective."
(Shame on LLNL for providing an unreadably poor-quality, badly uploaded PDF Bikini Atoll datasheet: https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/pdf/bikini_factsheet.pdf They might as well keep it locked in a safe marked "top secret" for all the use it is in making the facts lucid !)
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/02/asia-pacific/bikini-atoll-islanders-fearful-of-return-home has the following (surprisingly high-definition) photo of the 360 kiloton Redwing-Mohawk nuclear explosion on a 300 ft tower at Eniwetok on 3 July 1956, passed off as the 15 megaton Bravo test at Bikini, followed by an account of Bikini Islander radiation fears (which we specifically debunked in the previous post on this blog!!):
Above: 360 kt Redwing-Mohawk on Eberiru Island in Eniwetok Atoll (detonated on a 91 metre tower, on 3 July 1956), a UCRL thermonuclear device employing a compact fusion-boosted Swan-type (11.6" by 22.8", 105 lb) primary fission stage and a Flute-type secondary (thermonuclear) stage. The bomb was 15" in diameter, 46.2" long, with a mass of 1116 lb. The resulting crater was only 8 feet deep. The Japanese article wrongly states that this was the 15 megaton Bravo test in 1954 at Bikini Atoll! The article continues:
"The Marshall Islands on Saturday marked 60 years since the devastating U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, with angry exiled residents saying they are too fearful to ever go home. ... “The government says ‘don’t worry’ (about radiation exposure), but recently we’ve seen many cases of thyroid problems be confirmed in the Fukushima area,” said Kai Sato, a Fukushima University student. [Sato: the half-life of the longest lived thyroid radiation iodine isotope, iodine-131, is only 8 days, it is a myth that continuing long-delayed cancers from the actual radiation exposure back in 1954 are somehow due to continuing low-level radiation at Bikini and everywhere else on earth, which is now mainly natural potassium-40, uranium-238, radon, etc.] “People don’t know what is the correct information to believe.” ... But a U.N. report in 2012 s ... called for the U.S. to provide extra compensation to settle claims by nuclear-affected Marshall islanders and end a “legacy of distrust.” The Nuclear Claims Tribunal awarded more than $2 billion in personal injury and land damage claims arising from the nuclear tests, but stopped paying after a U.S.-provided $150 million compensation fund was exhausted."
I have submitted the following polite fact correcting comment for moderation:
This is a fine article. But I think that the photograph of the nuclear test at the top of the article is not Bravo at Bikini Atoll, but is Redwing-Mohawk on Eberiru Island in Eniwetok Atoll (360 kilotons thermonuclear explosion on a 91 metre tower, on 3 July 1956). For confirmation of this fact, please see http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Redwing.html [that site contains all the classic groupthink errors on nuclear effects, however]
[Update: the mis-captioned Redwing-Mohawk photo was removed and replaced by a correct photo after I submitted my comment.]
At Bikini Atoll (scene for 42 megatons of fission yield in 23 nuclear tests), cesium-137 is only important in food chains in soil deficient in potassium, and cesium-137 uptake by crops at Bikini was diluted by adding potassium chloride fertilizer to soil (potassium is chemically similar to cesium, and thus works by the same dilution mechanism as iodine tablets for thyroid protection).
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php) found that the "effective half-life of cesium-137 on Bikini, Eniwetak, and Rongelap Atolls is around 8 to 9.8 years", not the laboratory radioactive half life figure of 30 years! This is because cesium compounds are relatively water-soluble and cesium-137 (as with iodine-131 and strontium-90) is fractionated in fallout (coated on the outer surface of fallout dust, not fused inside the particles) so it dissolves in rain and is soon weathered out of the local environment, ending up in the ocean (where it's totally insignificant compared to the immense natural radioactivity of sea water from potassium-40). Similarly, if you eat cesium-137, it doesn't build up in your body with a 30 year half life, but is flushed out with water with an effective half life of only about 3 months!
"Large-scale field experiments on Bikini Island have been used to optimize the required amount and application rates of potassium (Figure 3). The results from these experiments show that a single application of 2000 kg per ha of potassium can be effective in reducing the cesium-137 uptake in coconut meat (and juice) to about 5% to 10% of the pretreatment level. Multiple applications (over several months) of the same total amount of potassium produce even better and more consistent results. Moreover, the concentration of cesium-137 in the coconuts following remediation remains low for an extended period of time, so the need for continuous effort and retention of scientific and technical expertise is minimized (Robison et al., 2004)." - https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php#remed
So there is hope for Bikini Atoll. If the American government would publish a revised edition of its book "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" (last revised in 1977), it would help these people to understand the recent progress in decontamination and safety measures against fallout. Thank you for your excellent article.
Bikini Atoll nuclear test: 60 years later and islands still unliveable
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php#remed:
"Large-scale field experiments on Bikini Island ... show that a single application of 2000 kg per ha of potassium can be effective in reducing the cesium-137 uptake in coconut meat (and juice) to about 5% to 10% of the pretreatment level. Multiple applications (over several months) of the same total amount of potassium produce even better and more consistent results. Moreover, the concentration of cesium-137 in the coconuts following remediation remains low for an extended period of time, so the need for continuous effort and retention of scientific and technical expertise is minimized (Robison et al., 2004)."
At Bikini Atoll (scene for 42 megatons of fission yield in 23 nuclear tests), cesium-137 is only important in food chains in soil deficient in potassium, and cesium-137 uptake by crops at Bikini was diluted by adding potassium chloride fertilizer to soil (potassium is chemically similar to cesium, and thus works by the same dilution mechanism as iodine tablets for thyroid protection).
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php) found that the "effective half-life of cesium-137 on Bikini, Eniwetak, and Rongelap Atolls is around 8 to 9.8 years", not the laboratory radioactive half life figure of 30 years! This is because cesium compounds are relatively water-soluble and cesium-137 (as with iodine-131 and strontium-90) is fractionated in fallout (coated on the outer surface of fallout dust, not fused inside the particles) so it dissolves in rain and is soon weathered out of the local environment, ending up in the ocean (where it's totally insignificant compared to the immense natural radioactivity of sea water from potassium-40). Similarly, if you eat cesium-137, it doesn't build up in your body with a 30 year half life, but is flushed out with water with an effective half life of only about 3 months!
There are exaggerations of radiation effects, and a bias against truth when it comes to radiation, as Dr Sanders suggests in his conclusive 2010 book, Radiation Hormesis and the Linear No-Threshold Assumption, published by Springer: http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/439/bfm%253A978-3-642-03720-7%252F1.pdf?auth66=1393952668_41a73ccc7c7c7b7f33515bafd90294c7&ext=.pdf
Above: 13 year old Jamie Edwards achieved nuclear fusion at school in Lancashire, proved by radiation measured by a Geiger counter. However, this is not proof that anybody can make a hydrogen bomb or fusion-powered time-travelling DeLorean, or that we need to "disarm" Britain of school kids who study physics in case they blow up the universe. The fusion problem is quantitative, not qualitative, contrary to newspaper hype today:
And yesterday, in a ‘radiation controlled area’ in a classroom, before an audience of experts, he flicked a switch and stared intently at his Geiger counter until it registered that fusion had indeed taken place – or created ‘a star in a jar’, as Jamie refers to it. Nuclear fusion, the reaction that powers the sun, is very different from nuclear fission, or the splitting of the atom, that occurs in nuclear power stations and is the stuff of atom bombs. However, both release vast amounts of energy. Scientists around the world are replicating Jamie’s experiment, but on a much bigger scale, in the hope of using it on a large scale to fuel cheap, environmentally-friendly power stations. Jamie said: ‘I heard the Geiger counter rapidly go up and I was “What is that?”,’ he said in the afterglow of success. ‘Then I looked over and the neutron counter was right up off the scale nearly, and I thought “We must have done it”.’
The problem is the amount of fusion is trivial. The scaling up of a fusion reactor to a practical power creates problems that don't exist on the small scale, so the proof of principle is not proof of practicality! The only way to get useful energy from fusion reactors is to use plasma (heated by lasers) that is confined using magnetic fields, so at a high enough power (gigawatts) to be economic, you have the problem that any instability or failure of the magnetic plasma confinement system will cause a devastating explosion. The scaled-up system is inherently unstable, and the very high energy fusion neutrons penetrate deeply into the surrounding materials, inducing radioactivity.
Update (15 March 2014):
Frederick Forsyth has yet another article out, called "EU was reason for the Biblical Floods" (yes, seriously), in the Daily Express, Friday 14 March 2014, page 13. In the interests of freedom of the press and avoiding censorship, a relevant quotation from the article is called for:
Officialdom still seeks to divert the blame away from the useless chieftaincy of the Environment Agency who years ago ordered that the centuries-old practice of dredging the channels should cease [the liars instead naturally lie and blame droughts due to global warming by CO2 for the floods, as expected]. But towering evidence proves it was indeed this insane order that was to blame and now there are more revelations. ... he instruction actually came from the EU in Brussels in a directive of 2007, slavishly adopted by the Brown government in 2008. It was called “making space for water”, ie, flooding, and it was absolutely deliberate. Is it not amazing that British bureaucrats and politicians would prefer to be accused of mass murder rather than have it revealed how utterly servile they are to Brussels? ... a book called The United States Of Europe [the title may explain why Americans don't seem to understand what the fuss is about here, not realizing how many fascists and loons Britain has had to fight off in the nearly one thousand years of the British Empire since its last successful invasion in October 1066, how much blood has been spilled by so many written to preserve the very limited freedoms and very limited independence we enjoy today], strangely enough by a British theorist called Arthur Salter as far back as 1931 – even before Adolf Hitler tried to unify Europe his way. With Frenchman Jean Monnet, Salter was one of the original proposers of the complete political, economic and legal unification of the continent into one single superstate. Today’s successors of course are Mandelson, Blair, Clegg and the BBC, who still continue to deny their real Utopian dream.
So here is what (in part) Salter had to say. “A common political authority ... would be for every country almost as important as, or even more important than, the national governments and would in effect reduce the latter to the status of municipal authorities.” That is our country he was talking about and that is still the ultimate aim of the EU. Those at the heart of what in Brussels is referred to as The Project know perfectly well the end must involve the abolition of the nation state and its reduction to an EU region, Britain included. That is why the fanatics are desperate that you never get a referendum in which you might decide to keep Britain and dump Brussels. As they work quietly for this country’s destruction a referendum is absolutely not what they want.
https://archive.org/details/FalloutPrediction
http://vixra.org/abs/1403.0181
Concise, brief 15-page fallout prediction model, covering both land surface and underwater nuclear explosions, radiation shielding by buildings, fallout solubility as function of particle size, retention on vegetation, gamma ray spectrum versus time, fractionation of fission products, salting by cobalt-60 etc., and effects of environmental neutron induced activities in fallout. Includes literature summaries and data reductions to formulae based on many reports. Written in brochure format for quick browsing, without boring bureaucratic organization. Please note that we have also revised and expanded the overview information included on the British nuclear weapon trial "Operation Hurricane" Internet Archive declassified civil defense documents page, linked here.
Above: the most divisive, politically-incorrect, left-vilified British political leader, photographed behind the turret machine gun of a British Challenger tank, flying a Union Jack flag, in Germany on 17 September 1986. Just thinking about how lucky it is for Putin the Great that he is not facing this hateful, divisive, iron lady. Maggie, like her friend Ronald Reagan, knew the political language of Russia. When she was elected in May 1979, Britain had been effectively bankrupt (but not as badly as by Gordon Brown thirty years later) by the Russians’ socialist infiltration of British communist trade unions, which used block votes and intimidation of members to run the Labour Party. Every time the Labour Party tried to economise on pay, mass strikes resulted, culminating in the infamous 1978-9 “winter of discontent” when even the dead and the rubbish went unburied and uncollected. Britain was the “sick man of Europe”, on a 3-day week to save fuel and electricity, had to ask for a bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and had TV transmission banned after 10:30 pm. Regular power cuts forced us to do our school homework by candlelight in the cold, after walking home on streets unlit by lamps. Maggie was rightly labelled the “iron lady” by the Russian propaganda machine; the woman divided Britain by her no-nonsense defeat of both Russia in civil defence and the arms race, and also its friends in the British trade unions. These trade unions were self-defeating monolithic, short-sighted, fascist-groupthink dictatorships, manipulated like CND by the “World Peace Council” and related Moscow-based propagandarists. The trade unions had destroyed the British economy in the 1960s by striking for pay rises much higher than Britain’s rivals overseas in Japan and China, who made better products at much lower prices. We were forced to buy expensive, technologically obsolete British crap that broke down immediately, because of the “import duty” taxation the socialists slapped on cheap foreign goods. Maggie reformed strike law to make decisions to strike democratic, instead of being due to dictatorial intimidation by a handful of hard-communist and underhand Orwellian “big brother” shop stewards and union officials. She cut the 98% socialist tax rate on high earners to motivate and encourage big businesses to be started and run effectively in Britain. She cut state spending to reduce the deficit and bring finances under control, despite the Cold War arms race. She shut down state-owned unprofitable weapons industries that were simply milking the taxpayer to fund the Swiss bank accounts of a few corrupt army and ex-army weapon buyers and weapon consultants, and bought cheaper weapons instead from America. She stopped appeasing Brezhnev’s Russia after he invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979 in a surprise attack, and she published the civil defence handbook Protect and Survive in May 1980, countering totalitarian ideology with a determination not to be intimidated by the threat of new Soviet SS-18 nuclear missile deployments. She proved she had the courage to fight by defeating the fascist militants of Argentina when they invaded the Falkland Islands. She reformed Labour’s policy of détente and shaking the hands of fascists, into a radical new military policy called victory. She achieved victory from the European Union too, winning our rebate. She also defeated in elections the nuclear disarmers Michael Foot in 1983 and Neil Kinnock in 1987. But she also had gimmicky political statements, like: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Her wicked excuse for capitalism over socialism, in her final Commons debate as Prime Minister, was that the equalization of wealth using taxation makes everyone poor and demotivated, while capitalism makes everyone better off, including the poorest. What a hateful, loathsome, divisive, warrior-like iron lady she was (but a great leader when facing terrible situations), just like Winston Churchill, who also posed with a machine gun when threatened by dictatorship:
"We were flirting with national bankruptcy after years of socialist maladministration. But someone had discovered huge resources of oil and gas ... we had to oppose and overrule the usual Jeremiahs who said it could not be done and even if it could it would pollute the oceans. They chanted, they demonstrated, they plastered their smug, stupid, holier-than-thou faces all over our newspapers and TV screens. ... Once again, after years of socialism, we have flirted with bankruptcy over these past four years. Now I don't know whether there is some divinity or just benign fate watching over this old land of ours but it has happened again. ... And the Luddites are back, the same dim bigots who said not a word when forests of damaging, life-wrecking, landscape destroying windmills were plastered over every horizon to produce minuscule energy at unaffordable prices. Our screens are filled with the same smug, angry, self-righteous faces that I have been seeing for 60 years supporting one anti-British cause after another. ... Methane does not come out of your kitchen tap; that has been proved to be an invention. The water tables are not poisoned; the drills go down through the aquifers in sealed tubes and the released gas would come up the same way. As for the earth tremors, there are about 2,000 a year in this country. Humans can detect about 200; the rest only a sensitive seismometer can register." - http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/frederick-forsyth/425596/Fracking-could-be-our-next-salvation
'NUCLEAR OPINIONS' |
London SE1
From Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another, by Spencer R. Weart, Yale University Press, 1998:
Chapter One: Investigating the Puzzle of Democratic Peace
... This idea had been developed by 1785, when there were scarcely any democracies in existence, by the great philosopher Immanuel Kant. A world where every state was a democracy, he wrote, would be a world of perpetual peace. Free peoples, Kant explained, are inherently peaceful; they will make war only when driven to it by tyrants. ... In our own times, democracies have burned people to death by the tens of thousands in the fires of Hamburg and Hiroshima. Yet in all these wars, one side fell short of what most people would call democracy. The United States, as will be discussed later, never has fought a democratic government basically like its own. ... Beginning in the 1960s, scholars devoted thousands of hours to analyzing wars statistically. For a long time they failed to find any general rules. ... Yet several scholars (including me) did notice, independently, a peculiar regularity: during the past century there have been no wars between well-established democracies. The first articles on this were scarcely noticed, but gradually a few political scientists took up systematic study. Their findings remained almost unknown outside academic circles. ... What was the probability, they asked, that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident? The answer: less than one chance in a thousand. That is a level of certainty not often achieved with laboratory rats, let alone in studies of international relations. These studies ruled out out the most obvious objections. They showed convincingly that the lack of wars between democracies is not an artifact caused by the limited number of such regimes - there have been more than enough to provide robust statistics (even if the democratic alliances of the Cold War are left out). ... When toleration of dissent has persisted for three years, but not until then, we can call a new republic "well established." For there have been no wars between democracies more than three years old (aside from a few doubtful ancient Greek cases), and wars between such oligarchic republics have been exceedingly rare (only two or three ambiguous cases exist). ... The most likely candidate for this factor is the political culture of the leadership. If there is to be a stable republican government, the new leaders must rapidly learn to make compromises, or give way to people who will. This has the right time scale of a few years: partly through changes in personnel, partly through personal changes, new beliefs and practices for managing conflicts take hold. ... In negotiations each regime did tend to behave according to its political culture. Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders undeniably extending their domestic style of behavior abroad by using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation, in ways that made war more likely. Republican behavior was plainly different--so much so that in quite a few cases the difference 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. ... Any attempt to impose democratic regimes by force can also undermine a more immediate goal: fostering an international "republican" political culture of peaceful negotiation. ... The puzzle, that is, of exactly how well-established democracies like the Swiss Forest States could maintain centuries of peace, and precisely where there are defects in democracies that make the streets of their cities shudder with explosions. |