Hiroshima's air raid shelters were unoccupied because Japanese Army officers were having breakfast when B29s were detected far away, says Yoshie Oka, the operator of the Hiroshima air raid sirens on 6 August 1945
Above: benefits objective scientific comparisons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear war survivors to an unexposed control group with similar diagnosis methods (which wasn't done after Chernobyl or any other radiation propaganda study, in which natural cancers were reported as radiation effects) proves that overall, the nuclear radiation exposure increased survival and lifespan. Dr Sanders in his 2010 book Radiation Hormesis and the Linear No Threshold Assumption, has disproved the LNT (linear no threshold) propaganda by objective human and animal radiation effects data.
Review of documentary, Hiroshima: the aftermath, UK Channel 5 TV, 6 July 2015, 8pm (online here)
This documentary is very important because it proves the reason why no final air raid warning was given in Hiroshima, by interviewing the military personnel in charge of air raid warnings both in Tokyo (by radio identification of B29 call signs) and in Hiroshima's main military base, particularly Yoshie Oka, a female army B29 tracker based in the military bunker at Hiroshima Castle, near ground zero. Hiroshima and Nagasaki both had enough air raid shelters for the people, which remained intact and shielded most of the radiation, but only 400 of the more than 70,000 shelter places in Nagasaki were occupied, and a similar situation occurred for Hiroshima. Thus, the failure of the warning system in the surprise attack caused the casualties.
Above: it is a myth that the holocaust in World War II was that done to the unwarned populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. This Daily Express Giles drawing was published on 3 February 1944, showing that atrocities during CONVENTIONAL warfare were occurring long before August 1945, killing MORE people despite less apparent "violence": e.g. starvation and disease of Anne Frank and others in concentration camps or gas chambers, and in Japanese forced labour camps, and human experimentation on prisoners of war. (Note that Giles was NOT sitting in an armchair located out of harms way but was of course actually in the thick of the war, as Captain in the Coldstream Guards, sent to record the devastation of conventional warfare in the devastating battle Arnhem. For more about his wartime work, see Giles at War by P. Tory, 1994.) Churchill approved nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Facts debunk a popular myth that Oppenheimer didn't know anything about radiation hazards. He specifically used the neutron bomb effect in 1945. Sam Cohen, who worked in the Manhattan project, later developed the idea into a clear bomb to deter tank and infantry street fighting in modern concrete cities, to prevent conventional war, saving many millions of deaths. Propaganda from Russian comrades against the neutron bomb was never seriously opposed by the Pentagon, so conventional war is not credibly deterred today. (Oppenheimer agreed with a suggestion from Kenneth Bainbridge after the Trinity test on 16 July 1945 that "Now we are all so [expletives deleted]", which sought to spread the blame around to everyone, even though Edward Teller had urged Oppenheimer unsuccessfully to have a demonstration test before the Japanese, before dropping the bomb on a city. Oppenheimer simply told him scientists should stay out of "politics" and "war", and refused to circulate the petition which Teller showed him. The illiberal, conservative hypocrisy of Oppenheimer is testified by Feynman and Feynman's sponsor Freeman Dyson, who was abused verbally by Oppenheimer for daring to advocate non-orthodox but correct relativistic quantum mechanics, the path integral multipath interference mechanism for quantum field theory, where vacuum particles constitute a non-classical Coulomb field that create atomic electron position indeterminancy by discrete, random, stochastic, interactions represented by Feynman diagrams. Sam Cohen also explains that Oppenheimer was an irrational bully, a cruel self-obsessed egotist (you probably have to be such a person to be a "leader" of politics-physics, simply to climb the greasy pole of hypocrisy, obfuscation and corruption in today's mainstream physics which is a dogmatic cult valuing consensus and voting far more than free interpretation of the factual evidence). The problems with Teller's idea to demonstrate a bomb by exploding one in Tokyo bay were the kind of practical matters that Teller always avoided or messed up. (The detailed design for the first H bomb was done by Richard Garwin, not Teller and certainly not Ulam who merely suggested using a fission bomb to compress fissile material more efficiently than using TNT.) A 1 ton TNT explosion 0.1 mile away gives similar pressure and visual effects to 1 kiloton at 1 mile or 1 megaton at 10 miles. That's cube-root scaling: the peak pressure (about 1 psi) and blast wind speed (40 miles/hour) is the same in each case, so the only thing that distinguishes the three events for an observer is that the effects occur quicker for the smaller explosions (blast arrives at 0.4 seconds for 0.1 mile from 1 ton TNT, 4 seconds for 1 mile from 1 kiloton, and 40 seconds for 10 miles from 1 megaton). Teller completely misunderstands the Hiroshima firestorm effect in his 1962 book The Legacy of Hiroshima, which is probably typical of nuclear warhead designers who with the exception of former LANL Director Harold Agnew, do not care about the actual physics of nuclear weapons effects or data from Hiroshima, just like most "nuclear historians" who preserve a dangerous secrecy!)
“I knew [Stalin’s spy Dr Klaus] Fuchs, who was in my division [at Los Alamos in WWII], but only slightly, which undoubtedly was the way he wanted most people to know him. His assignment was to calculate how the high explosive system that detonated the Nagasaki bomb (the one I worked on) should be designed. … it was Fuch’s turn to give a seminar. Oppenheimer not only found time to attend but was so fascinated with what Fuchs had to say that he stayed throughout his recitation. … When Fuchs had finished, Oppenheimer got up and praised him to high heaven … to expose another side of Oppenheimer’s personality, which could be intolerant and downright sadistic, he showed up at a seminar to hear Dick Erlich, a very bright young physicist with a terrible stuttering problem, which got even worse when he became nervous. Poor Dick, who was having a hard enough time at the blackboard explaining his equations, went into a state of panic when Oppenheimer walked in unexpectedly. His stuttering became pathetic, but with one exception everyone loyally stayed on trying to decipher what he was trying to say. This exception was Oppenheimer, who sat there for a few minutes, then got up and said to Dick: “You know, we’re all cleared to know what you’re doing, so why don’t you tell us.”
“With that he left,
leaving Dick absolutely devastated and unable to continue. Also devastated were the rest of us … Fuchs … finally was caught and sent to prison in England … I think he should have been shot … American commies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg … getting atomic bomb secrets during the war from Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, an Army enlisted man at Los Alamos who was in my barracks and whom I knew somewhat … should have been executed for treason, but Greenglass, a real loyal family type more than willing to rat on his own sister, copped a plea by helping the government prosecute her and her husband and send them off to the electric chair, Greenglass got away with murder and received a relatively light jail sentence.”
- Samuel T. Cohen, Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb, pp. 24-25. (Emphasis added.)
“I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture … ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”
– J. R. Oppenheimer, filmed wiping away crocodile tears in the 1965 TV show, “The Decision to Drop the Bomb” (Emphasis added to all, an effort to spread blame on everyone, despite the disagreement of others, like Edward Teller, that he doesn't mention. Teller testified Oppenheimer was hard to understand.)
Air raid sirens had been sounded hours earlier when the Hiroshima mission weather survey plane (flying far ahead of the bomb carrying Enola Gay) flew over Hiroshima, but that was a false alarm. Some have speculated that no effort to give another air raid alarm was made when the final three B29s appeared - the Enola Gay with the bomb, a blast measurement plane which dropped parachute-delivered radio-telemetry blast pressure gauges (because nobody had ever tested the gun type Hiroshima bomb unlike the implosion Nagasaki weapon to measure the yield), and another plane lingering behind with British and other observers - because of this "crying wolf" effect. But this is simply not true. Many people were travelling outdoors, and school children were in work parties clearing firebreaks outdoors, at 8:15am when the Hiroshima explosion occurred.
In modern cities, all concrete buildings offer good radiation and blast shelter, unlike the predominant wooden houses of Hiroshima. In Pacific nuclear tests, concrete buildings with simple earth buttressing survived close proximity to the biggest American multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons ever made.
Yoshie Oka, who is still alive, explained that she tracked the final B29s and sent a message to higher authority in good time, but no order came back to sound the air raid alarm until 8:13am, just two minutes before the explosion, because the officers were all having breakfast at the same time and nobody was on hand to immediately order the air raid sirens! When she was given the order, she was unable to put the authorization code into the air raid siren system before the flash of the bomb came through the window. Therefore, it was an air raid blunder that prevented people taking shelters in Hiroshima.
Naturally, following politically-correct CND type propaganda, the survival possibilities from the simple but effective air raid shelters was ignored in the Channel 5 program, which tried to contrast the American celebrations of Japanese surrender with the misery of the people burned outdoors in Hiroshima. It also obfuscated the mechanisms and time scales for mortality, claiming initially that the population was "instantly" vaporised, then at 11 minutes 9 seconds into the program claiming they died in "five seconds" before finally declaring at the end that they died over many decades. The reality is that blast injuries killed within a few days, while thermal and nuclear radiation killed on average within a month, as the official detailed Japanese study confirmed: fires started in now-obsolete city wooden houses with charcoal braziers that were overturned by blast, along with paper screens etc, not due to thermal radiation which did not start the firestorm in Hiroshima (click here). (Direct link to Japanese graph of casualty rate versus time, here. From a few days after the bombing onwards, the local newspapers like the Hiroshima Chugoku Shimbun restarted, and published daily casualty lists, so there is extensive data available on casualty versus time for different kinds of buildings, as shown in the Dirkwood report on 35,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualties which uses the Hiroshima USSBS building index linked here.)
“The low incidence of predicted indoor ignitions results from the low elevation angle of the fireball. The artificial horizon of trees and buildings obscures the fireball from most residential windows ... the average elevation angle of the artificial horizon is about 6 degrees for New Orleans.”
- Philip J. Dolan, editor, CAPABILITIES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, 1972, classified secret restricted data, chapter 11, Damage to Structures, thermal radiation fire predictions.
“The intensity of a large fire depends, in part, on the average amount of combustible material per unit area. In Hamburg, where 45 percent of the firestorm area was covered by buildings containing about 70 lbs/ft2 of fuel, the average loading was 32 lbs/ft2. A strong firestorm was produced in the area from the World War II incendiary bomb raid. In Hiroshima the average fuel loading [for the firestorm area] is estimated to have been 8 lbs/ft2. [In typical American surburbs the fuel loading is just 10-24 kg/m2, according to the 1979 U.S. Office of Technology Assessment report The Effects of Nuclear War, which vastly exaggerates blast, thermal radiation, and nuclear radiation effects by ignoring Dolan, despite access to classified data.]”
- Philip J. Dolan, editor, CAPABILITIES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, 1972, originally classified secret restricted data, chapter 11, Damage to Structures, page 11-143.
Only massive overdoses of radiation can cause cancer or other injury: smaller doses unbind anti-cancer P53 from its MDM2 inhibitor, increasing anti-cancer DNA repair enzyme metabolism and lifespan:
Chernobyl's 1.8 mR/hour = 0.018 mSv/hour = 18 microSieverts/hour, in the hormesis range, with reduced cancer. After an hour, many of your cancer preventing P53 DNA-repair molecules start to unbind from their MDM2 inhibitor, boosting the portion of your metabolism used for repairing DNA double strand breaks and repairing radiation damage. Over-responding, P53 the the centre of a enzymes giving mechanisms to repair DNA and also cuts down natural cancer and genetic risks, increasing lifespan. It's covered up by secrecy from biased, ill-informed, complacent anti-nuclear quacks.
"DNA damage induces phosphorylation (P) of p53 (at the Mdm2 binding site) and Mdm2, preventing Mdm2 from binding to p53. As a result, the p53 level increases, and stops cells from entering cell cycle until the DNA is repaired. If repair fails, p53 initiates apoptosis (programmed cell death). Mechanisms resulting in a decrease in p53 steady-state levels are indicated with green arrows and those resulting in increases p53 levels are indicated with red arrows. Solid lines indicate active mechanisms and broken lines indicate inactivated mechanisms. Figure taken from [3]. ...
"In the cell, p53 protein binds DNA, which in turn stimulates another gene to produce a protein called p21 that interacts with a cell division-stimulating protein (cdk2). When p21 is complexed with cdk2, the cell cannot pass through to the next stage of cell division. The growth arrest stops the progression of cell cycle, preventing replication of damaged DNA. Mutant p53 can not longer bind DNA in an effective way, and as a consequence the p21 protein is not made available to act as the "stop signal" for cell division. Thus cells divide uncontrollably, and form tumours [4].
- Proctor and Gray (2008), The p53-Mdm2 System, February 2009, model of the month by Vijayalakshmi Chelliah. Original models: BIOMD0000000188 and BIOMD0000000189
Above: How radiation suppresses cancer (by activating P53 as we explained above). Note the gamma dose rates.
Exaggerations of radiation effects and suppression of benefits are deliberate lies beyond the pale
Note that only 10.7% (848) of the 7,851 solid cancers in 44,635 Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivors were caused by the bomb! Note also that only 46% (94) of the total of 204 leukemias in 49,204 Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivors were caused by the bomb! These are trivial compared to deaths from wind farms, coal, etc (in December 1952, nearly four thousand people died in London from coal smog. Thus, Britain's nuclear industry, just as nuclear weapons were made to more safely deter war than the equivalent megatonnage of conventional arms, which would be more expensive, dangerous as proved two world wars with many megadeaths, and would require conscription).
These data are STILL being censored by fear mongering media like Richard Rhodes, The New Yorker, pseudo-scientific journals edited and peer reviewed by ignorant and biased quacks who make their money from hating reality and creating science fiction. If you think it may be a little rude to treat fanatically biased terror supporting thugs who are obsessed with exploiting and increasing the suffering of others with malicious scare mongering, try to find a single unbiased quotation about Hiroshima or nuclear testing in Richard Rhodes books. It is simply unprofessional and nasty behaviour which we are truthfully calling completely disgusting, unethical, unprofessional, dangerous, deluded, fanatical and complacent, because the data are VITAL for survival in nuclear terrorism:
Los Alamos report on Trident W76 warhead development history (declassified): LA-14066-H, Tracing the Origins of the W76: 1966-Spring 1973 (U) by Betty L. Perkins. Note the "Confetti argument" section where legendary Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Harold Agnew (the man who personally filmed the Hiroshima explosion using a cine camera in a B29, see photos below) points out that the effects of Hiroshima on substantial buildings was NOT impressive. (Also on Scribd; also item 548 in the DOE declassified PDF documents list, all FOIA requests). Compare that to the American Office of Technology Assessment's widely hyped lies on the Effects of Nuclear War, 1979. For a refutation of Rotblat-CND Hiroshima and fallout radiation effects deceptions by the hard truth, please see Radiation scare mongering debunked.
Harold Agnew LANL Director and Hiroshima film cameraman, debunked Hiroshima exaggerations with "confetti argument".
Hiroshima ground zero, after 6 August 1945, quite a different story from American propaganda. Modern city type concrete buildings and the people in them survived near ground zero, which is in the foreground of this photo (photo source here or here). The media's secrecy over real radiation health effects is tragic in the cost to humanity, even before the cost in conventional war casualties is included.
Surface burst blast effects on modern city buildings: surface bursts also result in immense thermal radiation shadowing which prevents fires and burns in modern cities (apart from a few upper windows on buildings facing the fireball near ground zero) even in megaton yield bursts, and very substantial initial radiation shielding and fallout radiation shielding, all of which are usually ignored totally by popular hype ("Nukemap" or Carey Sublette FAS-cist style anti-civil defense, anti-deterrence, brainwashing propaganda) of Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons data, applied from unobstructed deserts to cities with no correction for shielding by buildings. Such deceivers win acclaim, like Richard Rhodes who denied civil defense in Hiroshima in his popular deceptive books on atomic and hydrogen bombs.
Note that, in the table above, for a 0.5 kiloton ordinary nuclear blast you can avoid any severe damage at 150 metres distance, hence the 1 kiloton neutron bomb (with enhanced neutron and suppressed blast and heat) air burst at 500 metres altitude will avert the kind of devastation you get in conventional warfare and even civil wars in Syria, Ukraine, etc. As in the 1980s when Reagan deployed the W79 neutron warhead in Europe, the threat of a neutron bomb then has a deterrent effect on people planning invasions: they tend to want to negotiate and end their Cold War, instead of losing a war.
American sanctions against the anti-West nuclear Iran are lifted in July 2015 (just like American sanctions against North Korea were lifted in deal in 1994 which promised international inspections of nuclear plants, but instead led to North Korea's nuclear weapon tests and ICBM development), releasing to Iran £100 billion in frozen assets and £20 billion annually from oil exports. Iran has a track record of hiding the construction of two uranium enrichment plants, before spies found them. The American-Iranian deal means that Russia will be able to sit on the International Atomic Energy Authority inspection panel to hold up justice as usual by groupthink veto; Russia has a vested interest in preparing Iran for war with Israel (and therefore America) by supplying Russian S-300 surface to air missiles to Iran. (Back in April 2015, Putin lifted his ban on delivery of S-300 missiles to Iran.) In 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Israel must be "wiped off the face of the earth", and allies of Israel "will burn in the fires of the Islamic nation's fury." Israel fears that the lifting of the sanctions against Iran will lead to an arms race and nuclear war, while America is lifting the sanctions in an effort to outdo Russia in being friendly to Iran, to win friendship with cash (always a disaster, as proved in the Cold War, where rival sides' attempts to win over megalomaniac dictators just increased their egotism and craziness). Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the deal a "bad mistake of historic proportions". He explained: "Iran will get a cash bonanza of billions of dollars, which will enable it to pursue its aggression."
We do not have a truly free media when fashion prevents the facts from being openly and freely discussed to ascertain the truth on nuclear weapons deterrent capabilities for ending warfare. The perils from pseudoscience surviving in popular culture on the basis of "gut feeling" censorship of truth was revealed when the consequences of eugenics pseudoscience were exposed in 1945. Science is not a particular method (methods change as a result of science, as Feyerabend explained), but an objective attitude, an interest in understanding and expanding upon the data from every objective angle, and of critically testing ideas and theories, and contrasting them to alternative models. Censorship due to bias is anti-science, and leads to disaster, as in anti diversity eugenics. Resources end up focussed on dealing with false scare-mongering paranoia, just as eugenics ended up being used by racists and holocaust deniers. If everyone was objective, the money-making eugenicists and racist holocaust deniers could be ignored, and the real problems could be solved.
Why do CND people dogmatically reject truth, and go espousing the old weapons effects exaggerations that in the 1930s proved invaluable to enemies for coercion, appeasement, and megadeaths by costly "conventional" warfare?
Here is a positive suggestion. If the survivors of Hiroshima and the so-called "politically correct" of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the media really want to do something towards eliminating the megadeaths caused by conventional war and the squandering of money on hate based propaganda campaigns against the only proved deterrents we have, perhaps one day they could accept the truth and consider the possibility to back cheap, fact-proved, effective civil defense to eliminate most of the collateral damage and casualties, allowing relatively clean (low fission yield) tactical nuclear weapons to credibly deter conventional wars (the costly Trident-type strategic second strike capability can be retained to deter escalation, just as our mustard gas and gas masks in WWII deterred 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas being sent over in bombers, V1 cruise missiles and V2 rockets).
Professor Baker proof tested these cheap, effective indoor and outdoor WWII British shelters are ideal for use against conventional and nuclear war, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes. Where houses were completely demolished, 97.5% survived in shelters. This fact has enormous utility for civil wars in Ukraine and Syria, if adequate warning sirens systems can be put in place.
Even if adequate warning systems and air raid sirens are not available or are unreliable, as for the V1 and particularly the V2 rocket attacks in WWII, then there is another system, again proof tested in war, which consists of indoor wooden scaffolding in offices, bedrooms, etc., to protect people against building collapse, as shown in the fully proof tested June 1941 official British handbook, Shelter at Home, which was the idea behind the 1980s Protect and Survive and Domestic nuclear shelters, technical guidance manuals. Edward Leader Williams who helped Lord Baker proof test indoor shelters in WWII, proposed indoor table type blast and fallout sheltering against the H bomb in 1955, in response to the Strath report.
The popular CND-hyped myth that the city was vaporized in a nanosecond or so just doesn't survive a reality check: in the Bank of Japan near ground zero, survivors remained right through the surrounding firestorm, extinguishing the few firebrands that were blow in, using water buckets.
What about solid cancer tumors? During the period from 1958-98, in 44,635 survivors, 7,851 malignancies (first primary) were observed, of which 848 were due to radiation (10.7% due to radiation). Almost 90% of these cancers were not due to radiation, but were natural cancers (RERF). What about the blood cancers, leukemia? From 1950-2000 in 49,204 survivors there were 94 leukemia deaths due to bomb radiation (RERF data).
REVIEW OF HIROSHIMA: THE AFTERMATH
Freedom of factual criticism in objective science versus subjective opinion or fashionable dogma, the findings of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty
“There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just … the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Above: for the trivial fallout and residual radiation patterns measured at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the soil activity versus depth, see the original December 1945 classified report by the US Naval Technical Mission to Japan, linked here or here. The originally classified Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons has a detailed prediction method for the neutron induced activity and the effect of burst altitude on fallout (omitted from the unclassified Glasstone and Dolan propaganda scare mongering bible, Effects of Nuclear Weapons). (Click here for some other editions of the secret Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, which should have been published widely decades ago to reassure people about radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
The joint Japanese-American Hiroshima and Nagasaki Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) confirmed the following cancers of the blood (leukemia) and tissue (solid tumors) from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in well over 40,000 survivors over a period of about five decades (note that the excess leukemia rate peaked in 1952 and fell rapidly thereafter and is no longer showing up). The "excess" is derived from comparing the measured rates of cancer in irradiated survivors to a carefully matched group of people of the same age, smoking habits, etc., to establish the natural cancer rates with the same diagnosis systems to avoid bias (this was not done after Chernobyl, when 100% of cancers and birth defects were claimed to be radiation effects by anti-nuclear propaganda money making, terror exploiting big business corporations).
Note that only 10.7% (848) of the 7,851 solid cancers in 44,635 survivors were caused by the bomb! Note also that only 46% (94) of the total of 204 leukemias in 49,204 survivors were caused by the bomb! (These data are from the RERF official peer reviewed, published data tables below.) Result: about 90% of cancers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were natural. Why isn't that fact newspaper and TV news headline, after all the scare mongering propaganda about radiation:
Conversion of metric units is: 1 Gy (Gray) = 100 rads = 1 Joule/kilogram of energy absorbed. However, note that the doses in RERF tables are not air doses (measured on civil defense radiac meters) but internal doses, e.g. bone marrow doses which are shielded by the surrounding tissue and thus are lower than the air dose by about the factor 1.5. In other words, you have to multiply RERF doses by about 1.5 to get air doses that are measured on normally calibrated radiation meters.
As usual for media anti-nuclear propaganda "education", the TV program totally ignores the published DS02 research program which established the radiation dosimetry for different kinds of buildings and exposure sources (prompt and delayed), and thus fails to discriminate between the immediate nuclear radiation received within 20 seconds (neutrons and gamma rays from the fireball before it ascended to 60,000 feet) and the subsequent rainout of firestorm soot by condensed moisture. The fires took 20 minutes to begin to merge, and 2-3 hours to reach peak firestorm intensity, which:
(1) allowed many survivors to escape the firestorm area in good time, having survived in concrete buildings,
(2) the soot rainout process proved by Hiroshima debunks the "stable soot cloud" theory behind "nuclear winter", even if modern tall city concrete buildings didn't block out the heat flash by George R. Stanbury's shadowing effect, and
(3) allowed the radioactive cloud to be blown many miles downwind before the black rain was even formed over Hiroshima. Therefore, the radioactive cloud was blown away before the firestorm created soot rainout.
The two never mixed to any appreciable extent, because the action of the wind in blowing fallout away before the firestorm begam. So the local radioactive fallout in Hiroshima when actually measured (as recorded in the book Hiroshima by John Hersey in 1946, and other studies) was trivial and contributed an insignificant percentage of the total radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Essentially all of the dose came within 20 seconds from initial radiation, not fallout. It is shameful that this myth, started by Stalin's alleged communist spy and propagandarist Willfred aka Peter Burchett in 1945, continues, aided by well known propaganda organizations like CND and the Kremlin, that obfuscate the truth and deliberately distort the facts. As for the inhabitants of Rongelap after their exposure on 1 March 1954, the lingering radiation years afterwards is soon dwarfed by natural background radiation, and so contributes an insignificant percentage of the total dose, most of which comes soon after a nuclear explosion (owing to the rapid decay rate).
Nevertheless, the program does document the rapid recovery of trams, railway, electricity, and the rapid rebuilding of Hiroshima.
Dr Sanders has actually tested plutonium for safety, proving evidence of a threshold dose for lung cancer, and also proving evidence that gamma radiation reduces the harm from alpha radiation by hormesis. As the references above prove, this is peer reviewed research, included in top journals and in his 2010 book published by Springer. It is the effect of DNA repair by protein P53 which is kicked into action by radiation, which unbinds it from its MDM2 inhibitor. DNA repair enzymes, controlled by P53, prevent the proliferation of cancer below the threshold dose rate. Only higher dose rates than the threshold, which overwhelm P53 repair systems, result in an increase in natural cancer rates. This is still censored out, because a pseudoscientific "no threshold" dogma was established by anti-nuclear geneticists before P53 had even been discovered.
Plutonium-239 is even less harmful per gram than the Americium-241 in your household smoke detector, which emits higher energy alpha particles and also has a specific activity (decays per second per gram) which is more than fifty times lower than Americium-241.
Plutonium-239 emits 5.25 MeV energy alpha particles. Your smoke detector's Americium-241 emits more damaging 5.49 MeV alpha particles!
The specific radioactivity of Americium-241 is 3.2 curies/gram, whereas plutonium-239 is only 0.062 curies/gram.
Note that the formula for specific activity is false as given by anti-civil defense crackpot Joseph Rotblat in his shoddy, biased, inaccurate and ill informed mouthpiece book, Nuclear Radiation in Warfare. The truth is, the specific activity per gram is equal to number of radioactive atoms in a gram, divided by the effective mean life, which is bigger than the half life by a factor of 1/(natural logarithm of 2).
So plutonium-239 certainly is a lot less dangerous than the familiar household element that we rely on for safety in efficient, reliable smoke detectors, just as we rely on plutonium to deter world wars. (As someone rude might add: "Stick that fact in your pipe and smoke it, antinuclear dictators of the deluded media." The deeper question, however, is why the so-called "nuclear industry" doesn't explain any true facts credibly, failing to reply to arrogant, patronising, authoritative-sounding, drivel and deceit. It is running scared, just like the American nuclear deterrence people, who are deterred by first the "threat" of enemy propaganda and secondly the "threat" of an end to pseudo-"United Nations" unity, something that only exists in pipe dreams.)
Natural thermal instability of DNA at 37 C body temperature causes the vast majority of the DNA damage: 2 mSv/year radiation is trivial!
“Compared to notorious killers like driving, smoking or drinking, nuclear risks – though objectively carrying little danger in their modern deployments – stir the deepest fears ... we are being bombarded with cosmic radiation ... 6.2 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation a year ... Familiar risks like car accidents, though far more likely to kill people, are still better accepted. ... About 35 years ago ... the nuclear industry approached Fischhoff, who is now a professor of decision science at Carnegie Mellon University ... He found an industry that struggled to explain, without condescension or untoward complexity ... "The nuclear industry had done a terrible job communicating the facts ..." Fischhoff said ... "It continues to do a horrible job of communicating." ... call-backs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are frequent, for good reason – and they seriously stigmatize the industry, in the psychological sense of the word, said David Ropeik, a former television reporter ... "We have a particularly good memory for the scary stuff," Ropeik added. ... During his work as a television reporter, he reported on nuclear power plants like they were a "second Satan" for two decades, he said. ... "We have very little ... that will make it clear to people what's going on in a credible way," Fischhoff said.”
– Paul Voosen, Humans “Wired” for Terror Over Remote Radiation Threats, New York Times, 18 March 2011.
What Fischhoff should do, is start the rebuilding with the foundation, Hiroshima.
“I’m assuming everyone knows that [Richard] Broinowski is Helen Caldicott’s brother and so he’s just another mouthpiece for her misinformation ... Caldicott is not a radiation scientist who has spent countless hours studying the effects of radiation on people. She’s ... someone who has made a name for herself by making outrageous, unsubstantiated claims about nuclear power. ... she’s held up as some fount of all nuclear wisdom we need to tell people the truth about her.” (Terry Krieg, 22 February 2012.) [This is unhelpful, because it lacks specific examples of their agenda, so it backfires.]
We have to be sure our facts about nuclear power are right, as the latest exchange with Helen Caldicott shows.
By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 13th April 2011
"My request to Helen Caldicott was a simple one: I asked her to give me sources for the claims she had made about the effects of radiation. Helen had made a number of startling statements during a television debate, and I wanted to know whether or not they were correct. ...
"At first I asked for general sources for her claims. She sent me nine documents: press releases, newspapers articles and an advertisement. Only one of them was linked to a scientific publication, the BEIR VII report published by the National Academy of Sciences. She urged me to read it. I did so and discovered that, far from supporting her claims, it starkly contradicts them. For example, it says:
- The risk of radiation-induced mutations ... “is sufficiently small that it has not been detected in humans, even in thoroughly studied irradiated populations such as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
- Regarding transmissible genetic damage from the exposure of future parents, such as “spontaneous abortions, congenital malformations, neonatal mortality, stillbirths, and the sex ratio of offspring ... there is no consistent evidence of an association of any such outcomes with exposure to environmental sources of radiation.”
- “On balance, the existing evidence does not support the conclusion that rates of childhood leukemia have increased as a result of radiation exposures from the Chernobyl accident.”
"I began to wonder whether Helen has actually read this report, or was hoping that, at 423 pages, it would scare me away. ... She claimed that isotopes of krypton, xenon and argon “can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease.” When I asked her for a source, she told me, “This is also described in my book.” In fact her book says (page 55): “There have never been any epidemiological studies performed on the effects of exposure to the noble gases xenon and krypton.” This flatly contradicts her own claim. When I pressed her for better sources, her publishers wrote to me and said she did not have time to find them. Now she has had time – time enough to write an article for the Guardian attacking me – but still hasn’t supported the claims I questioned.
"Then she appears to suggest that iodine-131 can “continuously irradiate small volumes of cells ... over many years”. As it has a half life of 8 days, this seems unlikely. ... Then she makes a remarkable allegation. As a result of a conspiracy hatched with the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 1959 the World Health Organisation has “made no more statements on health and radioactivity.” This is completely false ... the WHO currently runs an Ionizing Radiation Programme and a Radiation and Environmental Health Programme .... It has set up an International Research Advisory Committee “to identify gaps and under-discovered areas on health effects from low-dose exposures to ionizing radiation”. In 2006 it published a 167-page report titled Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident. As for the alleged conspiracy, this is a story that has been circulating among anti-nuclear campaigners for many years, becoming ever more lurid. ... This is what happens when we fail to be as sceptical about the ideas we like as we are about the ideas we don’t. Incidentally, Helen has still not provided a shred of evidence for her claim that the recent report by another UN agency – the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation – into the Chernobyl disaster is “a total cover-up”. Twice I have asked her to substantiate this allegation; twice she has replied with accusations about the WHO. Is she aware that these are different agencies?
"But perhaps most alarming is her continued reliance on the report by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko, which claims that 980,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl. As its critics have pointed out, this figure cannot possibly be correct, as it arises from the extraordinary assumption that all increased deaths since 1986 from a host of diseases – including many which have no known connection with radiation – were caused by Chernobyl. The report has not been peer-reviewed and the academy which published it has distanced itself from it.
"Continuing to use such a severely flawed document for your central claims about the health impacts of radiation hardly inspires confidence. ... I think these points are worth making, for several reasons. I believe that journalists should not stand by while misinformation is spread. If there is any value in journalism, it lies in trying to winnow fact from fiction, and helping people to form a more accurate view of the world. If, on the basis of falsehoods and exaggerations, we make the wrong decisions, the consequences can be momentous. ...
"What if, for example, the continuing dangers of radioactive pollution for the people in the nations around Chernobyl have been so greatly exaggerated that they have been exposed to 25 years of unnecessary terror and distress? What if this has caused serious and widespread psychological problems, as the UN Scientific Committee suggests(Page 513)? What if we have exploited vulnerable people – those born with deformities and genetic diseases – by parading their conditions as examples of the damage radiation has done, when the evidence suggests that they are not? What if the same burdens are inflicted on the people of Japan?
"If that has happened, is it not a terrible thing to bear? Don’t we have a duty to interrogate ourselves as scrupulously as we can to ensure that we have not and will not do such a thing? ... If we spread misinformation, we could inadvertently achieve the opposite."
Journalists did that long ago, starting with misinformation published widely after Hiroshima, 1945.
Hiroshima cloud seen from ground level: the stem and fireball are separated due to the height of burst. By the time fireball soot rainout started, 2 hours later, the mushroom with most of the radioactivity, had been blown many miles downwind from Hiroshima, explaining why there was no significant fallout (click here for Hiroshima fallout map; note that the doses were proved to be insignificant compared to natural background radiation over the period for long term effects):
Modern city buildings made of concrete did not blast or burn down, unlike the predominant wooden buildings in Hiroshima. Recovery was very rapid.
Journalism on nuclear war has changed since the 1945 Chugoku Shimbun. The consensus now allows editing all of the facts out of a newspaper, leaving superstitions, anecdotal fear mongering:
Trains resume almost immediately in Hiroshima.
Cleaning up debris in Hiroshima, prior to rebuilding work.
Modern bridges and modern steel/concrete buildings survived even close to ground zero. The aiming point for the bomb a T-shaped bridge in the centre of the city. It survived.
Trade is soon restored in Hiroshima.
75% of the population of Hiroshima survived, most making a full recovery. What about solid cancer tumors? During the period from 1958-98, in 44,635 survivors, 7,851 malignancies (first primary) were observed, of which 848 were due to radiation (10.7% due to radiation). Almost 90% of these cancers were not due to radiation, but were natural cancers (RERF). What about the blood cancers, leukemia? From 1950-2000 in 49,204 survivors there were 94 leukemia deaths due to bomb radiation (RERF data).
Nuclear weapons effects secrecy allowed Stalin's - aka Wilfred Burchett's - myths to circulate: for the air bursts on Japan the radiation dose was received in 20 seconds, causing a minimum in white blood cell count 30 days later. Fallout was trivial in comparison. This has been confirmed by radiation measurements in the cities. The false correlation between delayed effects and lingering radiation is still loved and claimed to be "uncontroversial journalism" by certain deluded media.
Rebuilding work in Hiroshima. A majority of homes were rebuilt within 4 years.
Makeshift homes in Hiroshima, employing surviving debris outside the firestorm.
Hiroshima recovered fast from nuclear attack, beginning within days of the explosion with trams, trains, and electricity restored in some areas, even before any help from outside arrived:
Hiroshima power lines were repaired, soon after nuclear explosion.
Trams operation was restored in Hiroshima within days of nuclear attack.
Even without air raid shelters (which survived close to ground zero in Hiroshima), many modern buildings near ground zero, made of brick or concrete, did offer protection from blast winds, heat flash, and radiation shielding. This is a fact applicable to civil defense considerations today, even without special shelters.
The documentary Hiroshima: the Aftermath unlike previous Cold War propaganda on the subject, at least makes some admission of the rapid recovery from nuclear warfare!
John Hersey's 1946 book Hiroshima summarizes the rapid recovery thus:
"In Hiroshima, all utilities and transportation services were disrupted for varying lengths of time. In general however services were restored about as rapidly as they could be used by the depleted population. Through railroad service was in order in Hiroshima on 8 August, and electric power was available in most of the surviving parts on 7 August, the day after the bombing. ... Rolling transportation suffered extensive damage. The damage to railroad tracks, and roads was comparatively small, however. The electric power transmission and distribution systems were badly wrecked. The telephone system was approximately 80% damaged, and no service was restored until 15 August."
This is confirmed by other studies of the rapid recovery of Hiroshima, before significant help arrived.
Above: the actual Nevada nuclear test EMP effects data in the 1964 Capabilities of nuclear weapons page 13-2 is a summary of E.G. & G.s 1961 secret report by B. J. Stralser, Electromagnetic Effects from Nuclear Tests, which describes the EMP effects on tripping circuit breakers over 30 miles away from kiloton yield Nevada tower bursts. Additional EMP data was obtained in the 1962 Nevada surface burst Small Boy, a deliberate EMP effects test.
1964 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, the one which compares American nuclear fallout predictions to the 1956 British Buffalo Round 2 ground burst nuclear test at Maralinga, Australia, has been kindly emailed to me as a PDF by
Fina Martinez-Myers
702-794-5112
Nuclear Testing Archive
National Security Technologies, LLC
Contractor to the U.S. Department of Energy
Title: TM 23-200/OP NAV INSTRUCTION 03400/C/ AFM 136-1/FMFM 11-2 "CAPABILITIES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS (U) ( 1964 )
Author(s):
Subject Terms: NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Document Location: Location - NNSA/NSO Nuclear Testing Archive Address - P.O. Box 98521 City - Las Vegas State - NV Zip - 89193-8521 Phone - (702)794-5106 Fax - (702)794-5107 Email - CIC@NV.DOE.GOV
Document Type: REPORT
Publication Date: 1964 Dec 31
Declassification Status: Declassified
Document Pages: 0214
Accession Number: NV0105483
OpenNet Entry Date: 2006 Jul 01
Fig 4-4 in 1964 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons compares the actual fallout pattern from the 1956 Buffalo-2 surface burst in Australia with the idealized model based on Nevada tests. For a different plot of this Buffalo-1 fallout pattern, please see http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA956123:
The Buffalo-2 test was used to determine the partition of radioactivity between stem and cloud, based on the measured wind shear, which acted to separate the two components of the fallout pattern (the stem went only northwards, whereas the cloud top went due eastwards before the particles settled out, see the hodograph of wind pattern above). This is very useful for civil defense, because it comparison of the wind pattern to the fallout map makes it clear precisely why the fallout has spread out like a fan, and you can then develop simple methods to extrapolate from this solid example to make allowances for wind shear in fallout prediction. In addition, Buffalo-2 was instrumented to measure EMP, which is also unclassified now:
‘The first attempt at a theory of [surface burst] radioflash was by [T.S.] Popham, in 1954, who suggested that radio signals were due to currents carried by Compton electrons arising from gamma rays produced in the nuclear explosion… Both the period and amplitude of the radio signal would be expected to increase very slightly with yield.’
– J. B. Taylor, A Theory of Radioflash, U.K. Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston, report AWRE-O33/59, October 1959, originally classified "Confidential", pp. 3-18.
Fig 1b in Taylor's report AWRE-O33/59 plots the radiated EMP electric field as measured from a kiloton surface burst (presumably the Buffalo-2 shot in 1956 at the Marcoo site in Maralinga): the peak field measured at a distance of 300 km is 28.1 v/m in the NEGATIVE direction at a time of 5 microseconds. Zero field is at 17.2 microseconds. Peak positive is at 23 microseconds with 15.4 v/m and second zero is at 42.5 microseconds. Second negative is at 54 microseconds with about 3.75 v/m.
Buffalo Round 2 was a 1.4 kiloton fission bomb (an AWRE declassified photo of bomb being set up for the test is shown above) surface burst on Maralinga soil, which is calcium carbonate topped with a thin layer of silicate sand. This Maralinga soil produced silicate sand (Nevada test like) fallout for tower bursts like Buffalo Round 1 which produced no significant crater, proving that for low altitude bursts the fallout is caused by the sweep-up of loose desert sand by the afterwinds and updraft under the rising fireball. But for the surface burst Buffalo Round 2, the fallout particles were composed of calcium oxide surrounded by calcium carbonate which must have come from the calcium calcium subsoil, like the American tests on coral islands in Bikini and Eniwetok Atoll. This proved that the cratering ejecta provides the fallout material in a surface burst. The 1964 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, TM 23-200, uses this British surface burst to check its fallout model (the illustration was deleted from the 1972 edition and does not appear in the 1957 edition).
In other news, a new colour photo of the surviving 44 kiloton Plumbbob-Smoky nuclear tower burst tower in Nevada has been published:
The significance of the tower remains is that they were not vaporized by the heat of the 44 kt explosion, 700 feet above the ground. For Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the yields were smaller and the burst heights larger, no buildings were vaporized at all. For a detailed description of this, see Plumbbob weapon test report WT-1488, page 59:
"Observations of the remains of towers and shielding material after detonation at several ground zeros indicate that large masses of material are not vaporized. Observation of the residue of the Smoky tower indicated that a very significant portion of that tower remained including the upper 200 feet of steel. Another example similar to Shot Smoky was Shot Apple II, Teapot Series. Even though the total yield of Shot Apple II was about 32 kt, the floor of the cab and the main tower support columns remained intact. The results of the [11 kt] Shot Fizeau tower melt studies (Reference 3) show that about 85 percent of tower material was accounted for after the detonation and that only the upper 50 feet of tower was vaporized . No melting occurred beyond 175 feet from the top of the tower although the fireball theoretically engulfed more than 400 feet of the tower."
Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons 1964 proves this by the following graph showing the small surface ablation of various metal spheres placed within 400 feet from the 23 kt Teapot-Met nuclear test in 1955:
29 kt Teapot-Apple 2 nuclear test house survived 1955 shot and remains in Nevada today, 60 years later.
J. E. Kester and R. B. Ferguson, Operation Teapot, Project 5.4, Evaluation of Fireball Lethality Using Basic Missile Structures
Much of the 29 kt Teapot Apple 2 bomb support tower 500 ft high was neither vaporized nor melted, nor was lethally radioactive!
J. E. Kester and R. B. Ferguson report in Operation Teapot, Project 5.4, Evaluation of Fireball Lethality Using Basic Missile Structures, WT-1134 (originally Secret – Restricted Data), AD0340137, that within the 23 kt Teapot-Met (Nevada, 15 April 1955, 400 ft steel bomb tower) although the bomb test steel tower was blown down, it was not vaporized and much survived despite having been engulfed by the fireball itself, as stated on page 30:
“... nearly 225 feet of the main support members of the shot tower were still intact and laid out radially from their original position.”
Page 116 of WT-1134 states that after the 2 kt Moth shot atop a 300 foot triangular tower on 22 February 1955: “The three tower legs were laid out approximately radially from their pre-shot positions. The longest tower leg found was about 200 ft long. The other two legs appeared to be about 150 ft long. All three guy cables were still attached ... A few large pieces of the tower, about 20 to 30-ft long, were strewn to ranges of about 200 feet.” It adds that after the 7 kt Tesla shot atop a 300 ft square tower on 1 March 1955: “the four tower legs ... were laid out radially from their original position ... The tower legs remained intact to lengths of about 125 feet. All four guy cables were still attached ...” The 43 kt Turk nuclear test was fired atop a 500 ft square tower, leaving 100 ft lengths of tower lengths on the ground (page 118). The 8 kt Bee shot atop a 500 ft tower failed to even knock down most of the tower (pages 120-1): “A large portion of this tower was still standing after the shot. ... It is estimated that at least 150 feet of the tower was essentially undamaged and standing erect with an additional 50 to 75 feet of the tower slightly melted and drooped over at the top.” The 14 kt Apple 1shot atop a 500 ft square tower results (page 121): “The main support members of the shot tower still remained to lengths of about 150 feet with the top 25 to 50 feet being crushed and split ... Some of the legs remained attached to the base.” The 23 kt Met shot was atop a 400 ft square tower (pages 123-4): “About 225 feet of the tower legs were still intact with the top 25 to 50 feet being crushed, split and slightly melted ....”
“Observations of the remains of towers and shielding material after detonation at several ground zeros indicate that large masses of material are not vaporized. Observations of the residue of the Smoky tower [44 kt bomb atop a 700 foot high steel tower] indicated that a very significant portion of that tower remained, including the upper 200 feet of steel. Another example similar to Shot Smoky was ShotApple II [29 kt atop a 500 ft steel tower], Teapot Series. Even though the total yield of Shot Apple II was about [29 kt], the floor of the cab [housing the nuclear bomb itself, at the top of the tower] and the main tower support columns remained intact. The results of the ShotFizeau [11 kt atop a 500 ft steel tower] tower melt studies (W. K. Dolen and A. D. Thornborough, Fitzeau Tower Melt Studies, Sandia report SC-4185, 1958, Secret) show that about 85 percent of tower material was accounted for after the detonation and that only the upper 50 feet of tower was vaporized. No melting occurred beyond 175 feet from the top of the tower although the fireball theoretically engulfed more than 400 feet of the tower.”
- Dr Kermit H. Larson, et al., Distribution, Characteristics, and Biotic Availability of Fallout, Operation Plumbbob, weapon test report WT-1488, ADA077509, July 1966, page 59.
American public enthusiasm for nuclear weapons effects studies, Nevada 1953 troop tests for Korean War deterrence:
Above: No significant danger from Kubrick's Colbalt 60 bomb sci fi, debunked in 1954 by USAEC's health physicists.
An analogy to the anti-nuclear religion of dogmatic pseudoscience is Michael Mann's error in denying natural climate change: Mann's interpretation of ice sublimation and tree ring proxies relies on an implicit assumption of positive feedback from H2O, not the reality of negative feedback from condensed atmospheric water clouds, an assumption which suppresses the much wider range of natural past climate fluctuations, since it completely ignores the fact that when temperature rises, you get more water evaporation and clouds blocking sunshine for photosynthesis or ice sublimation of heavy oxygen-18 in water molecules, so these proxies record less apparent temperature effects than really occur when you take account of cloud cover being a function of temperature. As with Sternglass's pseudoscientific correlation of infant mortality to trivial (compared to natural background) fallout nuclear radiation during the Cold War, CO2 correlations to temperature using ice core and tree ring proxies are inaccurate, since they ignore cloud cover (negative feedback from water evaporating and forming clouds, a thermostat that regulates temperature). Plant growth by photosynthesis and ice molecule sublimation are both a function of direct sunlight exposure providing energy to break chemical bonds, not merely ambient temperature as Michael Mann implicitly assumes.
Deniers of the facts, and the deaths they cause by diverting limited resources from real dangers.
Many millions of people have been killed in conventional wars since 1945. That's the real problem to be addressed by nuclear deterrence and civil defense. Conventional wars in Europe were deterred by Reagan's W79 neutron bomb deployment, during the 1980s. That event was greeted with condemnation, but the Cold War soon ended, with a negotiation from a position of strength. The W79 tactical nuclear weapon is a purely defensive weapon against conventional warfare, since it causes minimal damage to civilian targets, but maximises damage to mobile, active military invading forces. If they are dug in deep in defensive, they are safe like civilians in modern concrete cities, so tactical nuclear weapons are purely defensive weapons against an invading army on the move on foot, in tanks and APCs. The point of tactical nuclear weapons is that they keep the enemy penned into defensive positions, preventing invasions. Russia did not want to stock it, because we were not prepared for, or interested in, any invasion of Russia. CNDs propaganda war against the neutron bomb, masterminded by Baroness Cathy Ashton, proves this.
Why not put tactical nuclear weapons to their original purpose of saving lives by deterring or rapidly ending conventional wars? As Hiroshima's experience of survival of modern concrete buildings and the people in them proves (see below), you get less destruction of modern concrete-built cities and less lives lost if you have cheap effective but working civil defense and tactical nuclear weapons, a situation you need in civil wars regardless of whether nuclear or "conventional" weapons are used.
The truth is simple to grasp: when a 1 kt tactical neutron bomb detonates 500 metres over a target you get far less heat and blast effects than you get with conventional weapons! What you do get is a burst of neutrons which stop insurgents in tanks, APCs, and in the open. The neutrons are rapidly attenuated by city concrete buildings, but not by steel armour. Popular propaganda myths that the enemy can absorb the 14.1 MeV DT fusion neutrons with plastic or thermal neutron (0.025 eV) absorbers used in reactors (boron, cadmium) are false. As neutron bomb developer Samuel Cohen shows, the neutrons are scattered to a greater extent in air than gamma rays, so they arrive from many directions (not merely from the direction of the bomb), so the modifications needed to a tank or APC to make it absorb the high energy bomb neutrons would prohibit its function as an effective fighting vehicle. This is not true of the much heavier mass of shielding in all modern concrete city buildings (which would prohibit movement of a tank) and simple earth covered shelters, such as were used in Britain and Japan in WWII (see below for the reason why air raid warnings failed in Japan in August 1945). The credible deterrent capability of this innovation offers a real alternative to the millions of "conventional warfare" casualties in protracted battles in Korea, Vietnam and recent wars like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria:
Since Putin invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, early last year, approximately 31,000 visitors from Ukraine have come to this blog. We hope to continue to encourage a realistic approach to both proof tested cheap civil defense countermeasures against bombing, and the practical, credible use of nuclear deterrence to end conventional warfare, invasions, and mass killing. Political paper promises like the 1938 Hitler-Chamberlain peace deal or the 1994 Bucharest Memorandum cater to utopian lawyers and nuclear radiation pseudoscience, and are the ideal of the enemies of realistic life saving deterrence and protective countermeasures. The non-United Nations has actually been responsible for many protracted, horrific conventional wars since 1945 in trying to bring together of conflicting interests, so that realistic, prompt, effective resolutions are prohibited by veto. This is the fundamental, intrinsic flaw of international peace keeping. If everyone must agree before decisive action is taken, nothing will be done in time to save lives. We see this effect in all forms of groupthink, where vetoes are used to hold up, if not prevent, all realistic hopes of progress.
As occurred tragically in the 1930s when criticisms of Nazi eugenics "science" were censored out as being quackery by a media which was deluded by fashionable best selling books like Man the Unknown by gas chamber eugenics proponent Medical Nobel Laureate eugenicist Dr Alexis Carrel and other big shots, the popular media prefers to cater to groupthink consensus, and to get quotes from bigots, instead of digging up the truth.
In other news, Alex Wellerstein has been censoring out polite comments pointing out errors in his "nuclear secrecy" blog. He managed to delete some of my comments without my having any copy of the information, so I guess I just don't have the time or interest in reading and making constructive suggestions anyone. There is no problem for me in people honestly being biased against nuclear weapons provided they do not manipulate the data and then censor out the facts using untruths about rudeness. In fact, Wellerstein's New Yorker article, which he thinks is exciting (as opposed to the facts we have dug up on this blog), does not dig up anything new, just the sensational words that convey no hard data of use to anyone for any purpose, and have blocked popular understanding of nuclear science since 1945:
"Being able to write something for them has been a real capstone to the summer for me. It was a lot of work, in terms of the writing, the editing, and the fact-checking processes. But it is really a nice piece for it. I am incredibly grateful to the editor and fact-checker who worked with me on it, and gave me the opportunity to publish it. Something to check off the bucket list."
So now we know what Alex finds exciting, a bucket list. Of course the New Yorker published John Hersey's Hiroshima, a literary-journalistic piece of anti-science propaganda to capture attention by scare mongering and ignoring a comparison to deaths in conventional and incendiary warfare, that ignored or failed to investigate the survival of air raid shelters and people in modern city concrete buildings in Hiroshima, and that even managed to mislead Einstein on the effects of nuclear weapons, thus helping to create the megadeaths of conventional war since 1945.
Truth isn't actually what concerns "fact" checkers of magazines, which consider a fact to be a spelling or whether one statement agrees with the policy of a powerful bigoted media baron. News or history for them is something to be manipulated by selectively censoring out critics and comparisons to all interpretations of the data! Well, at least he ticked one thing off a bucket list. Hopefully, he therefore will not feel the need to keep on sensationalizing nuclear fears for cash like CND, Caldicott, North Korea and Scientific American.
LAWYERS, POLITICIANS, FILM AND TV PROPAGANDA EXPLOITING FAME OBSESSED STARS AGAINST JUSTICE, HUMAN RIGHTS, EQUALITY, AND DEMOCRACY: THE EUROPEAN UNION'S THREAT TO THE SURVIVAL OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION
"The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble." - Court reporter Charles Dickens (author's narrative in Bleak House, Chapter 39).
"I went as a spectator [17 March 1968 pro-Vietcong "peace" demonstration, Trafalgar Square, London] ... Vanessa Redgrave read out messages ... in a voice like the Queen's. She concluded: 'I feel that my presence here today speaks for itself.' ... Police on the outskirts of London ... stopped several coach-loads of students ... and removed marbles for throwing under the [police] horses' hooves, pepper (invisible on TV) for throwing in police faces, and sachets full of red paint to simulate blood ... elements in the production of a drama for television ..."
- Peter Laurie, Scotland Yard, 1970, pages 105-106.
Last year we exposed how an unelected former CND neutron bomb proved deceiver in the so called "European Union" dictatorship was risking World War III by provoking a war with Russia over greedy efforts to exploit the possibility of Ukraine's membership of the EU (click here). The bestselling Fourth Protocol nuclear terrorism warning author, Frederick Forsyth, has now explained in an open article directed to President Barack Obama why the European Union needs addressing to secure peace:
"A brief briefing to educate the president of the United States. ... The European Union, under the title Corpus Juris, intends to institute a single binding criminal justice system on all Europe, based on the Code Napoleon, the prevailing European system. It abolishes trial by jury, Magna Carta, presumption of innocence and lay magistrates. The Code Napoleon insists on a single examining magistrate, the presumption of guilt until the defendant can prove innocence, a single judge assisted by two law assessors in place of a jury of 12 ordinary citizens, and detention in custody on the whim of the accuser magistrate. Would you Americans want such a law code? In short, Mr President, if we are not going to abolish our pound and join the euro; if we are not going to abolish our already too porous borders and join the Schengen Treaty; and if we are not going to abolish a law code that puts the citizen first and dates to 1315, what are we doing in the EU?"
Above: socialist fascism can arise in any country with a ruined economy, or an economically failing superstate like the USSR or today's European Union (UK national debt now over £1.4 trillion and still rising due to a continuing deficit, which will cripple the economy in the case of any large instability such as war, which could massively increase the historically small interest rates currently being paid). Such a socialist style debt bomb country, run by profiteering political-class lawyers, including Lords, must increase crime rates to profit sufficiently from the criminal trial cases they need for their lavish lifestyle, which includes anti-truth activism for attacking nuclear deterrence, radiation, clean power, etc. In the 1930s, the socialist Sir Oswald Mosley started riots with police in London, but probably partly because the economic conditions were better in England than in Germany, things did not get as far out of control as when Hitler rose to power. Nevertheless, a pro-Nazi appeasement agenda set in, where top UK politicians were urged to shake hands with Hitler, ostensibly to guarantee peace by collaborating or condoning terrorism of the Jews after the 1935 racist Nuremberg Laws were passed in Germany. (Photos from P. Laurie, Scotland Yard, 1970.)
DETERRENCE OF MAJOR CRIMES AND WARS: THE ROLE OF LAWS, PUNISHMENT AND EFFECTIVE ENFORCEMENT
There is a popular delusion that "laws prevent crime". It is false, because criminals often do not even study the law. The idea that a law on a piece of paper will prevent a crime is disproved by the data (graph above). Preventative detention used to prevent a lot of crime (graph above), but was abolished in 1965, by which time it had already lost force due to the use of "diminished responsibility" to let off the guilty in 1956. The police and crown prosecution service have limited funds and cannot prosecute all crimes, especially when there is no public gain to be had from deterrence or stopping repeat offenses (e.g. weak sentences). This is highly relevant to the problem of trying to use "laws" to prevent larger crimes like invasions of Ukraine, and aggressive wars. Peter Laurie explains how deterrence worked in his 1970 book Scotland Yard, page 279:
"In reality, those who get arrested, persecuted and punished are extremely unlucky. But what matters is not the physical effect on them, so much as the deterrence which their example sets for the rest of us. The whole system of the police, courts and prisons works because the fate of the unfortunate few is designed to be extremely public ..." (Emphasis added in bold.)
Naturally, the more effective deterrence is at preventing crime, the less money for criminal lawyers, because of the fewer cases (again, see the facts in the graph above). Therefore, a concerted move is being made to rescind the notion that "justice should be seen to be done", and to make as many courts as possible (family courts, etc) operate behind a cloak of secrecy, to minimise the deterrence of crime. This provides "work" for the whole criminal law fraternity, putting champagne and caviar on the tables of the lawyers:
"The overall deterrence of the combined law-enforcement system, we might say, is the product of two factors: the chance of detection multiplied by the severity of the sentence. ... Police can only affect one half of this equation - the chance of detection - but they are judged by the success of the whole of it."
- Peter Laurie, Scotland Yard, 1970, page 264.
Laurie goes on to explain that incredible deterrence was attempted in London in the early 1800s, when London became a cesspool for crime which parish constables could not detect, so that draconian punishments were put in place to try to make up for the failure to reprimand criminals: over 400 different types of offence were then supposed to be punished by hanging. But in reality, most juries would not convict petty criminals because of the sentence of hanging, and crime rates soared. The system did not prevent organized crime. This is like the present system of strategic counterforce nuclear deterrence, which fails to stop or deter conventional wars! In order to make deterrence credible, better detection and prosecution was needed. The Metropolitan Police were formed in 1829, finally allowing the four hundred hanging offences to be cut down to fifteen in 1839, and to just four in 1861 (murder, treason, piracy and arson in warships):
"A further defect of the draconian eighteenth-century system was its failure to provide for an escalating ladder of deterrents. It tried to divide society into two: the righteous and the wicked, but those who are as likely to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, steal lambs too.
"We now have an elaborate ladder of punishments which has two functions: (i) to deter any crime, (ii) to deter people who have steeled themselves to one level of crime from stepping up to a more serious one. ... the abolition of capital punishment ... crams the same number of crimes into a smaller range of punishments. The effect of this is first seen at the top of the ladder, in the armed robbery figures. It is the almost universal opinion of the police that murder and robbery with violence have increased since the end of this ultimate sanction. ... However fair the English system of trial - and abolitionists can point to some irreparable failures - it was nevertheless true that, unless the CID chose us, we would not get hanged." (Source: P. Laurie, Scotland yard, 1970, pp. 265-266. Emphasis added in bold.)
In other words, an single type of punishment, without a ladder with a range of credible punishments to deter escalation to more serious offences, effectively gives criminals a carte blanche to do whatever they want, and can actually encourage the most serious offences, because the punishments exactly the same in any case. Laurie's point about the CID choosing who got hanged in the spirit of the law (regardless of whether they were technically guilty in the letter of the law) is that Derek Bentley's friend murdered a policeman in his presence, and there was a dispute over whether this was caused or not by Bentley's words of advice to his friend "let him have it", and whether Bentley should have been let off scot free for being involved in a police killing, due to being mentally unbalanced. In the end, the police prosecuted Bentley as an accessory to murder, and he was hanged inflaming the wrath and tears of the "law to the letter, not spirit of the law" human rights lawyers who in the 1930s loudly applauded Prime Minister Chamberlain's repeated attempts to shake Hitler's hand long after the racist and ultimately genocidal "Nuremberg Laws" were passed in Germany in 1935. Result: as the graph above shows, the one doubtful hanging caused a huge increase in violence and murder rates in London when hanging was abolished for "diminished responsibility" and finally abolished for all cases, sane or insane. The only people to profit were, of course, criminal lawyers and the law society.
Above: while some credible deterrence against serious crime existed in Britain (before 1965), the police were able to concentrate on diffusing tensions in society, for example by the well publicised football match with strikers in the General Strike of 1926 and by training to help defend Britain against Russian invasion parachutists and looters in 1964. Once credible deterrence ended, pressures existed to try to prevent crime by other means, such as secret police tactics of the repressive techniques (not tension diffusing) of trying to recruit informers so that people spy on others in an effort to find criminals before serious crimes or terrorism occurs. These pictures are from Laurie's 1970 Scotland Yard. Laurie explains on page 180 that there were three ways to prevent crime: luck (stop and search), police records (keeping tabs on known offenders) and information (informants). He also explains what is today the mainstream technique for anti-terrorism, which is needed if we have no effective civil defense training: taping a percentage of private phone calls and other personal information exchanges and using a computer to scan it for keywords relevant to terrorism/crime.
Laurie explained in Scotland Yard in 1970, page 223, that without credible deterrence for serious crimes like like murder or terrorism, the police has to try to adopt the secret police tactics of the SS or the KGB in snooping on people, just as Herman Kahn predicted on page 97 of his 1968 book The Year 2000:
"Furthermore, there is the unpleasant prediction by Kahn ... A capacity for listening and recording temporarily, or even permanently, can be made very inexpensive. One can imagine the legal or illegal magnetic or other recordings of an appreciable percentage of the telephone conservations that take place ... scan these conversations rapidly by means of a high speed computer - at least for key phrases - and then record conversations that meet some criteria of special interest or placement in a more permanent file ... If one imagines this ability - and what governments could resist it, if it was cheap and discreet enough - coupled with a national 'voice-print' file [similar to finger print type forensic databases] which would identify anonymous speakers, added to all the other personal information available, it is apparent that one would have little freedom ... the honest man has no need to worry ... But it is the slight inaccuracy that alarms; for 'honest' one should read, 'Government approved'."
A TRUTH ABOUT LIBERTY: FACT CENSORSHIP BY FAMOUS MEDIA LOVED BIGOTS
Eugenics is wrong because it claims strength comes from a lack of diversity, whereas evolution shows diversity is strength, for providing the foundations for evolution! Nazi or communist clones are not what we need, because they share the same weaknesses, and weakness is subjective. For example, height might be useful for changing light bulbs, but not necessarily for crews of cramped spaceships, aircraft or or tanks. Weight might be useful for surviving winter without central heating or a supermarket nearby, but not for running marathons. What you need for success in one thing may be the exact opposite of what you need for success in another. This is why eugenics is pseudo-science, but Darwin wouldn't condemn the eugenicists because of bias (he is also supposed to have ignored Mendel's paper on genetics out of elitist quackery) and his half cousin, Sir Francis Galton, claimed that success is an inherited attribute, an argument used by racists, that reminds you of the quack theory of Larmarckism, the obsolete evolutionary theory inheritance of acquired characteristics which he claimed to oppose!
Galton simply ignored a rival theory that explains the correlation between his measure of "success" and that of offspring. The rival theory is the Biblical "Matthew Effect", namely the fact that success, as he defines it, breeds money, which pays for education and research, and thus an environment for offspring which is more conducive to further success! In other words, if you are born in a family of poor miners with no access at home to study time and facilities, then you're more likely to end up a miner than a mathematics professor, regardless of what your brain is like. If you don't have a swimming pool within a hundred miles of home, you're less likely to end up an Olympic swimmer. If you are born in a backward third world country, you are less likely to be exposed to the fertile soil needed for Galton's measure of "success", regardless of how large your brain capacity is. If you do not speak English, you are less likely to spell English words correctly.
This is not a "speculative theory" requiring peer reviewed publication and thousands of citations and Nobel Prizes to become acceptable. You don't need to wait for someone to be awarded a Nobel prize for publishing a paper showing that a hammer can bruise your thumb before you can state that fact. It is not your personal "limited and bitter experience," that critics can sneer at. You do not need "multiple sources to confirm a fact in writing" that anyone can confirm themselves by simply observing that physical fact. Yet, British quack eugenicist Galton was permitted to lay the foundations for Hitler's racial holocaust, and it appears to still be taboo to point out the errors in eugenics theory. This appears to be down to the continuing very convenient and illegal use of eugenics in crank "peer review" to censor out alternative ideas and being a danger to conservative orthodoxy, an falsehood ironically propounded by allegedly "liberals". If you can't or won't provide honest answers to critics, then you are an illiberal groupthink-founding dogmatic danger, as shown by what the greatest Liberal said about censorship.
Freedom of factual criticism in objective science versus subjective opinion or fashionable dogma, the findings of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty
“There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just … the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The assumption that we are infallible can we justify the suppression of opinions we think false. Ages are as fallible as individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling ...”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another … in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism … An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“[For people] to refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. … Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. … he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think …”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“… the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character …”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage … But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. … It is easy for any one to imagine an ideal public, which leaves the freedom and choice of individuals in all uncertain matters undisturbed, and only requires them to abstain from modes of conduct which universal experience has condemned. But where has there been seen a public which set any such limit to its censorship? … In its interferences with personal conduct it is seldom thinking of anything but the enormity of acting or feeling differently from itself; and this standard of judgment, thinly disguised, is held up to mankind as the dictate of religion and philosophy, by nine tenths of all moralists and speculative writers. These teach that things are right because they are right; because we feel them to be so. They tell us to search in our own minds and hearts for laws of conduct binding on ourselves and on all others. What can the poor public do but apply these instructions, and make their own personal feelings of good and evil, if they are tolerably unanimous in them, obligatory on all the world?”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them: how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be originality.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“… the general or prevailing opinion in any subject is rarely or never the whole truth; it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“When there are persons to be found, who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
This last quotation really is the root cause of wars, when bigoted dogma by the democratic majority censors out the views and facts of minority opponents, causing wars. This censorship mindset of bigoted democratic “might is right” dictators is the error made by Hitler and Stalin, but instead of recognising that it is wrong and needs to be replaced by more open debate and less censorship, the “when in a hole, keep digging” mindset insists that if censorship is not working, we need more of it, not less. This is what happened when conventional weapons failed in Vietnam.
“In countries of more advanced civilisation and of a more insurrectionary spirit, the public, accustomed to expect everything to be done for them by the State, or at least to do nothing for themselves without asking from the State not only leave to do it, but even how it is to be done, naturally hold the State responsible for all evil which befalls them, and when the evil exceeds their amount of patience, they rise against the government and make what is called a revolution; whereupon somebody else, with or without legitimate authority from the nation, vaults into the seat, issues his orders to the bureaucracy, and everything goes on much as it did before; the bureaucracy being unchanged, and nobody else being capable of taking their place. A very different spectacle is exhibited among a people accustomed to transact their own business.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The "people" who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the "self-government" spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority: the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Review of documentary, Hiroshima: the aftermath, UK Channel 5 TV, 6 July 2015, 8pm (online here)
This documentary is very important because it proves the reason why no final air raid warning was given in Hiroshima, by interviewing the military personnel in charge of air raid warnings both in Tokyo (by radio identification of B29 call signs) and in Hiroshima's main military base, particularly Yoshie Oka, a female army B29 tracker based in the military bunker at Hiroshima Castle, near ground zero. Hiroshima and Nagasaki both had enough air raid shelters for the people, which remained intact and shielded most of the radiation, but only 400 of the more than 70,000 shelter places in Nagasaki were occupied, and a similar situation occurred for Hiroshima. Thus, the failure of the warning system in the surprise attack caused the casualties.
Above: it is a myth that the holocaust in World War II was that done to the unwarned populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. This Daily Express Giles drawing was published on 3 February 1944, showing that atrocities during CONVENTIONAL warfare were occurring long before August 1945, killing MORE people despite less apparent "violence": e.g. starvation and disease of Anne Frank and others in concentration camps or gas chambers, and in Japanese forced labour camps, and human experimentation on prisoners of war. (Note that Giles was NOT sitting in an armchair located out of harms way but was of course actually in the thick of the war, as Captain in the Coldstream Guards, sent to record the devastation of conventional warfare in the devastating battle Arnhem. For more about his wartime work, see Giles at War by P. Tory, 1994.) Churchill approved nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. |
Facts debunk a popular myth that Oppenheimer didn't know anything about radiation hazards. He specifically used the neutron bomb effect in 1945. Sam Cohen, who worked in the Manhattan project, later developed the idea into a clear bomb to deter tank and infantry street fighting in modern concrete cities, to prevent conventional war, saving many millions of deaths. Propaganda from Russian comrades against the neutron bomb was never seriously opposed by the Pentagon, so conventional war is not credibly deterred today. (Oppenheimer agreed with a suggestion from Kenneth Bainbridge after the Trinity test on 16 July 1945 that "Now we are all so [expletives deleted]", which sought to spread the blame around to everyone, even though Edward Teller had urged Oppenheimer unsuccessfully to have a demonstration test before the Japanese, before dropping the bomb on a city. Oppenheimer simply told him scientists should stay out of "politics" and "war", and refused to circulate the petition which Teller showed him. The illiberal, conservative hypocrisy of Oppenheimer is testified by Feynman and Feynman's sponsor Freeman Dyson, who was abused verbally by Oppenheimer for daring to advocate non-orthodox but correct relativistic quantum mechanics, the path integral multipath interference mechanism for quantum field theory, where vacuum particles constitute a non-classical Coulomb field that create atomic electron position indeterminancy by discrete, random, stochastic, interactions represented by Feynman diagrams. Sam Cohen also explains that Oppenheimer was an irrational bully, a cruel self-obsessed egotist (you probably have to be such a person to be a "leader" of politics-physics, simply to climb the greasy pole of hypocrisy, obfuscation and corruption in today's mainstream physics which is a dogmatic cult valuing consensus and voting far more than free interpretation of the factual evidence). The problems with Teller's idea to demonstrate a bomb by exploding one in Tokyo bay were the kind of practical matters that Teller always avoided or messed up. (The detailed design for the first H bomb was done by Richard Garwin, not Teller and certainly not Ulam who merely suggested using a fission bomb to compress fissile material more efficiently than using TNT.) A 1 ton TNT explosion 0.1 mile away gives similar pressure and visual effects to 1 kiloton at 1 mile or 1 megaton at 10 miles. That's cube-root scaling: the peak pressure (about 1 psi) and blast wind speed (40 miles/hour) is the same in each case, so the only thing that distinguishes the three events for an observer is that the effects occur quicker for the smaller explosions (blast arrives at 0.4 seconds for 0.1 mile from 1 ton TNT, 4 seconds for 1 mile from 1 kiloton, and 40 seconds for 10 miles from 1 megaton). Teller completely misunderstands the Hiroshima firestorm effect in his 1962 book The Legacy of Hiroshima, which is probably typical of nuclear warhead designers who with the exception of former LANL Director Harold Agnew, do not care about the actual physics of nuclear weapons effects or data from Hiroshima, just like most "nuclear historians" who preserve a dangerous secrecy!) |
Air raid sirens had been sounded hours earlier when the Hiroshima mission weather survey plane (flying far ahead of the bomb carrying Enola Gay) flew over Hiroshima, but that was a false alarm. Some have speculated that no effort to give another air raid alarm was made when the final three B29s appeared - the Enola Gay with the bomb, a blast measurement plane which dropped parachute-delivered radio-telemetry blast pressure gauges (because nobody had ever tested the gun type Hiroshima bomb unlike the implosion Nagasaki weapon to measure the yield), and another plane lingering behind with British and other observers - because of this "crying wolf" effect. But this is simply not true. Many people were travelling outdoors, and school children were in work parties clearing firebreaks outdoors, at 8:15am when the Hiroshima explosion occurred.
In modern cities, all concrete buildings offer good radiation and blast shelter, unlike the predominant wooden houses of Hiroshima. In Pacific nuclear tests, concrete buildings with simple earth buttressing survived close proximity to the biggest American multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons ever made.
Yoshie Oka, who is still alive, explained that she tracked the final B29s and sent a message to higher authority in good time, but no order came back to sound the air raid alarm until 8:13am, just two minutes before the explosion, because the officers were all having breakfast at the same time and nobody was on hand to immediately order the air raid sirens! When she was given the order, she was unable to put the authorization code into the air raid siren system before the flash of the bomb came through the window. Therefore, it was an air raid blunder that prevented people taking shelters in Hiroshima.
Naturally, following politically-correct CND type propaganda, the survival possibilities from the simple but effective air raid shelters was ignored in the Channel 5 program, which tried to contrast the American celebrations of Japanese surrender with the misery of the people burned outdoors in Hiroshima. It also obfuscated the mechanisms and time scales for mortality, claiming initially that the population was "instantly" vaporised, then at 11 minutes 9 seconds into the program claiming they died in "five seconds" before finally declaring at the end that they died over many decades. The reality is that blast injuries killed within a few days, while thermal and nuclear radiation killed on average within a month, as the official detailed Japanese study confirmed: fires started in now-obsolete city wooden houses with charcoal braziers that were overturned by blast, along with paper screens etc, not due to thermal radiation which did not start the firestorm in Hiroshima (click here). (Direct link to Japanese graph of casualty rate versus time, here. From a few days after the bombing onwards, the local newspapers like the Hiroshima Chugoku Shimbun restarted, and published daily casualty lists, so there is extensive data available on casualty versus time for different kinds of buildings, as shown in the Dirkwood report on 35,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualties which uses the Hiroshima USSBS building index linked here.)
“The low incidence of predicted indoor ignitions results from the low elevation angle of the fireball. The artificial horizon of trees and buildings obscures the fireball from most residential windows ... the average elevation angle of the artificial horizon is about 6 degrees for New Orleans.”
- Philip J. Dolan, editor, CAPABILITIES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, 1972, classified secret restricted data, chapter 11, Damage to Structures, thermal radiation fire predictions.
“The intensity of a large fire depends, in part, on the average amount of combustible material per unit area. In Hamburg, where 45 percent of the firestorm area was covered by buildings containing about 70 lbs/ft2 of fuel, the average loading was 32 lbs/ft2. A strong firestorm was produced in the area from the World War II incendiary bomb raid. In Hiroshima the average fuel loading [for the firestorm area] is estimated to have been 8 lbs/ft2. [In typical American surburbs the fuel loading is just 10-24 kg/m2, according to the 1979 U.S. Office of Technology Assessment report The Effects of Nuclear War, which vastly exaggerates blast, thermal radiation, and nuclear radiation effects by ignoring Dolan, despite access to classified data.]”
- Philip J. Dolan, editor, CAPABILITIES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, 1972, originally classified secret restricted data, chapter 11, Damage to Structures, page 11-143.
Only massive overdoses of radiation can cause cancer or other injury: smaller doses unbind anti-cancer P53 from its MDM2 inhibitor, increasing anti-cancer DNA repair enzyme metabolism and lifespan:
Chernobyl's 1.8 mR/hour = 0.018 mSv/hour = 18 microSieverts/hour, in the hormesis range, with reduced cancer. After an hour, many of your cancer preventing P53 DNA-repair molecules start to unbind from their MDM2 inhibitor, boosting the portion of your metabolism used for repairing DNA double strand breaks and repairing radiation damage. Over-responding, P53 the the centre of a enzymes giving mechanisms to repair DNA and also cuts down natural cancer and genetic risks, increasing lifespan. It's covered up by secrecy from biased, ill-informed, complacent anti-nuclear quacks. |
"DNA damage induces phosphorylation (P) of p53 (at the Mdm2 binding site) and Mdm2, preventing Mdm2 from binding to p53. As a result, the p53 level increases, and stops cells from entering cell cycle until the DNA is repaired. If repair fails, p53 initiates apoptosis (programmed cell death). Mechanisms resulting in a decrease in p53 steady-state levels are indicated with green arrows and those resulting in increases p53 levels are indicated with red arrows. Solid lines indicate active mechanisms and broken lines indicate inactivated mechanisms. Figure taken from [3]. ...
"In the cell, p53 protein binds DNA, which in turn stimulates another gene to produce a protein called p21 that interacts with a cell division-stimulating protein (cdk2). When p21 is complexed with cdk2, the cell cannot pass through to the next stage of cell division. The growth arrest stops the progression of cell cycle, preventing replication of damaged DNA. Mutant p53 can not longer bind DNA in an effective way, and as a consequence the p21 protein is not made available to act as the "stop signal" for cell division. Thus cells divide uncontrollably, and form tumours [4].
- Proctor and Gray (2008), The p53-Mdm2 System, February 2009, model of the month by Vijayalakshmi Chelliah. Original models: BIOMD0000000188 and BIOMD0000000189
Above: How radiation suppresses cancer (by activating P53 as we explained above). Note the gamma dose rates. |
Exaggerations of radiation effects and suppression of benefits are deliberate lies beyond the pale
Note that only 10.7% (848) of the 7,851 solid cancers in 44,635 Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivors were caused by the bomb! Note also that only 46% (94) of the total of 204 leukemias in 49,204 Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivors were caused by the bomb! These are trivial compared to deaths from wind farms, coal, etc (in December 1952, nearly four thousand people died in London from coal smog. Thus, Britain's nuclear industry, just as nuclear weapons were made to more safely deter war than the equivalent megatonnage of conventional arms, which would be more expensive, dangerous as proved two world wars with many megadeaths, and would require conscription).
Los Alamos report on Trident W76 warhead development history (declassified): LA-14066-H, Tracing the Origins of the W76: 1966-Spring 1973 (U) by Betty L. Perkins. Note the "Confetti argument" section where legendary Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Harold Agnew (the man who personally filmed the Hiroshima explosion using a cine camera in a B29, see photos below) points out that the effects of Hiroshima on substantial buildings was NOT impressive. (Also on Scribd; also item 548 in the DOE declassified PDF documents list, all FOIA requests). Compare that to the American Office of Technology Assessment's widely hyped lies on the Effects of Nuclear War, 1979. For a refutation of Rotblat-CND Hiroshima and fallout radiation effects deceptions by the hard truth, please see Radiation scare mongering debunked.
Harold Agnew LANL Director and Hiroshima film cameraman, debunked Hiroshima exaggerations with "confetti argument". |
Hiroshima ground zero, after 6 August 1945, quite a different story from American propaganda. Modern city type concrete buildings and the people in them survived near ground zero, which is in the foreground of this photo (photo source here or here). The media's secrecy over real radiation health effects is tragic in the cost to humanity, even before the cost in conventional war casualties is included.
Surface burst blast effects on modern city buildings: surface bursts also result in immense thermal radiation shadowing which prevents fires and burns in modern cities (apart from a few upper windows on buildings facing the fireball near ground zero) even in megaton yield bursts, and very substantial initial radiation shielding and fallout radiation shielding, all of which are usually ignored totally by popular hype ("Nukemap" or Carey Sublette FAS-cist style anti-civil defense, anti-deterrence, brainwashing propaganda) of Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons data, applied from unobstructed deserts to cities with no correction for shielding by buildings. Such deceivers win acclaim, like Richard Rhodes who denied civil defense in Hiroshima in his popular deceptive books on atomic and hydrogen bombs.
Note that, in the table above, for a 0.5 kiloton ordinary nuclear blast you can avoid any severe damage at 150 metres distance, hence the 1 kiloton neutron bomb (with enhanced neutron and suppressed blast and heat) air burst at 500 metres altitude will avert the kind of devastation you get in conventional warfare and even civil wars in Syria, Ukraine, etc. As in the 1980s when Reagan deployed the W79 neutron warhead in Europe, the threat of a neutron bomb then has a deterrent effect on people planning invasions: they tend to want to negotiate and end their Cold War, instead of losing a war. |
American sanctions against the anti-West nuclear Iran are lifted in July 2015 (just like American sanctions against North Korea were lifted in deal in 1994 which promised international inspections of nuclear plants, but instead led to North Korea's nuclear weapon tests and ICBM development), releasing to Iran £100 billion in frozen assets and £20 billion annually from oil exports. Iran has a track record of hiding the construction of two uranium enrichment plants, before spies found them. The American-Iranian deal means that Russia will be able to sit on the International Atomic Energy Authority inspection panel to hold up justice as usual by groupthink veto; Russia has a vested interest in preparing Iran for war with Israel (and therefore America) by supplying Russian S-300 surface to air missiles to Iran. (Back in April 2015, Putin lifted his ban on delivery of S-300 missiles to Iran.) In 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Israel must be "wiped off the face of the earth", and allies of Israel "will burn in the fires of the Islamic nation's fury." Israel fears that the lifting of the sanctions against Iran will lead to an arms race and nuclear war, while America is lifting the sanctions in an effort to outdo Russia in being friendly to Iran, to win friendship with cash (always a disaster, as proved in the Cold War, where rival sides' attempts to win over megalomaniac dictators just increased their egotism and craziness). Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the deal a "bad mistake of historic proportions". He explained: "Iran will get a cash bonanza of billions of dollars, which will enable it to pursue its aggression."
Why do CND people dogmatically reject truth, and go espousing the old weapons effects exaggerations that in the 1930s proved invaluable to enemies for coercion, appeasement, and megadeaths by costly "conventional" warfare?
Here is a positive suggestion. If the survivors of Hiroshima and the so-called "politically correct" of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the media really want to do something towards eliminating the megadeaths caused by conventional war and the squandering of money on hate based propaganda campaigns against the only proved deterrents we have, perhaps one day they could accept the truth and consider the possibility to back cheap, fact-proved, effective civil defense to eliminate most of the collateral damage and casualties, allowing relatively clean (low fission yield) tactical nuclear weapons to credibly deter conventional wars (the costly Trident-type strategic second strike capability can be retained to deter escalation, just as our mustard gas and gas masks in WWII deterred 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas being sent over in bombers, V1 cruise missiles and V2 rockets). |
The popular CND-hyped myth that the city was vaporized in a nanosecond or so just doesn't survive a reality check: in the Bank of Japan near ground zero, survivors remained right through the surrounding firestorm, extinguishing the few firebrands that were blow in, using water buckets.
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REVIEW OF HIROSHIMA: THE AFTERMATH
Freedom of factual criticism in objective science versus subjective opinion or fashionable dogma, the findings of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty
“There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just … the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Above: for the trivial fallout and residual radiation patterns measured at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the soil activity versus depth, see the original December 1945 classified report by the US Naval Technical Mission to Japan, linked here or here. The originally classified Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons has a detailed prediction method for the neutron induced activity and the effect of burst altitude on fallout (omitted from the unclassified Glasstone and Dolan propaganda scare mongering bible, Effects of Nuclear Weapons). (Click here for some other editions of the secret Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, which should have been published widely decades ago to reassure people about radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) |
The joint Japanese-American Hiroshima and Nagasaki Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) confirmed the following cancers of the blood (leukemia) and tissue (solid tumors) from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in well over 40,000 survivors over a period of about five decades (note that the excess leukemia rate peaked in 1952 and fell rapidly thereafter and is no longer showing up). The "excess" is derived from comparing the measured rates of cancer in irradiated survivors to a carefully matched group of people of the same age, smoking habits, etc., to establish the natural cancer rates with the same diagnosis systems to avoid bias (this was not done after Chernobyl, when 100% of cancers and birth defects were claimed to be radiation effects by anti-nuclear propaganda money making, terror exploiting big business corporations).
Note that only 10.7% (848) of the 7,851 solid cancers in 44,635 survivors were caused by the bomb! Note also that only 46% (94) of the total of 204 leukemias in 49,204 survivors were caused by the bomb! (These data are from the RERF official peer reviewed, published data tables below.) Result: about 90% of cancers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were natural. Why isn't that fact newspaper and TV news headline, after all the scare mongering propaganda about radiation:
Conversion of metric units is: 1 Gy (Gray) = 100 rads = 1 Joule/kilogram of energy absorbed. However, note that the doses in RERF tables are not air doses (measured on civil defense radiac meters) but internal doses, e.g. bone marrow doses which are shielded by the surrounding tissue and thus are lower than the air dose by about the factor 1.5. In other words, you have to multiply RERF doses by about 1.5 to get air doses that are measured on normally calibrated radiation meters. |
As usual for media anti-nuclear propaganda "education", the TV program totally ignores the published DS02 research program which established the radiation dosimetry for different kinds of buildings and exposure sources (prompt and delayed), and thus fails to discriminate between the immediate nuclear radiation received within 20 seconds (neutrons and gamma rays from the fireball before it ascended to 60,000 feet) and the subsequent rainout of firestorm soot by condensed moisture. The fires took 20 minutes to begin to merge, and 2-3 hours to reach peak firestorm intensity, which:
(1) allowed many survivors to escape the firestorm area in good time, having survived in concrete buildings,
(2) the soot rainout process proved by Hiroshima debunks the "stable soot cloud" theory behind "nuclear winter", even if modern tall city concrete buildings didn't block out the heat flash by George R. Stanbury's shadowing effect, and
(3) allowed the radioactive cloud to be blown many miles downwind before the black rain was even formed over Hiroshima. Therefore, the radioactive cloud was blown away before the firestorm created soot rainout.
The two never mixed to any appreciable extent, because the action of the wind in blowing fallout away before the firestorm begam. So the local radioactive fallout in Hiroshima when actually measured (as recorded in the book Hiroshima by John Hersey in 1946, and other studies) was trivial and contributed an insignificant percentage of the total radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Essentially all of the dose came within 20 seconds from initial radiation, not fallout. It is shameful that this myth, started by Stalin's alleged communist spy and propagandarist Willfred aka Peter Burchett in 1945, continues, aided by well known propaganda organizations like CND and the Kremlin, that obfuscate the truth and deliberately distort the facts. As for the inhabitants of Rongelap after their exposure on 1 March 1954, the lingering radiation years afterwards is soon dwarfed by natural background radiation, and so contributes an insignificant percentage of the total dose, most of which comes soon after a nuclear explosion (owing to the rapid decay rate).
Nevertheless, the program does document the rapid recovery of trams, railway, electricity, and the rapid rebuilding of Hiroshima.
Dr Sanders has actually tested plutonium for safety, proving evidence of a threshold dose for lung cancer, and also proving evidence that gamma radiation reduces the harm from alpha radiation by hormesis. As the references above prove, this is peer reviewed research, included in top journals and in his 2010 book published by Springer. It is the effect of DNA repair by protein P53 which is kicked into action by radiation, which unbinds it from its MDM2 inhibitor. DNA repair enzymes, controlled by P53, prevent the proliferation of cancer below the threshold dose rate. Only higher dose rates than the threshold, which overwhelm P53 repair systems, result in an increase in natural cancer rates. This is still censored out, because a pseudoscientific "no threshold" dogma was established by anti-nuclear geneticists before P53 had even been discovered. Plutonium-239 is even less harmful per gram than the Americium-241 in your household smoke detector, which emits higher energy alpha particles and also has a specific activity (decays per second per gram) which is more than fifty times lower than Americium-241. Plutonium-239 emits 5.25 MeV energy alpha particles. Your smoke detector's Americium-241 emits more damaging 5.49 MeV alpha particles! The specific radioactivity of Americium-241 is 3.2 curies/gram, whereas plutonium-239 is only 0.062 curies/gram. Note that the formula for specific activity is false as given by anti-civil defense crackpot Joseph Rotblat in his shoddy, biased, inaccurate and ill informed mouthpiece book, Nuclear Radiation in Warfare. The truth is, the specific activity per gram is equal to number of radioactive atoms in a gram, divided by the effective mean life, which is bigger than the half life by a factor of 1/(natural logarithm of 2). So plutonium-239 certainly is a lot less dangerous than the familiar household element that we rely on for safety in efficient, reliable smoke detectors, just as we rely on plutonium to deter world wars. (As someone rude might add: "Stick that fact in your pipe and smoke it, antinuclear dictators of the deluded media." The deeper question, however, is why the so-called "nuclear industry" doesn't explain any true facts credibly, failing to reply to arrogant, patronising, authoritative-sounding, drivel and deceit. It is running scared, just like the American nuclear deterrence people, who are deterred by first the "threat" of enemy propaganda and secondly the "threat" of an end to pseudo-"United Nations" unity, something that only exists in pipe dreams.) |
Natural thermal instability of DNA at 37 C body temperature causes the vast majority of the DNA damage: 2 mSv/year radiation is trivial! |
“Compared to notorious killers like driving, smoking or drinking, nuclear risks – though objectively carrying little danger in their modern deployments – stir the deepest fears ... we are being bombarded with cosmic radiation ... 6.2 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation a year ... Familiar risks like car accidents, though far more likely to kill people, are still better accepted. ... About 35 years ago ... the nuclear industry approached Fischhoff, who is now a professor of decision science at Carnegie Mellon University ... He found an industry that struggled to explain, without condescension or untoward complexity ... "The nuclear industry had done a terrible job communicating the facts ..." Fischhoff said ... "It continues to do a horrible job of communicating." ... call-backs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are frequent, for good reason – and they seriously stigmatize the industry, in the psychological sense of the word, said David Ropeik, a former television reporter ... "We have a particularly good memory for the scary stuff," Ropeik added. ... During his work as a television reporter, he reported on nuclear power plants like they were a "second Satan" for two decades, he said. ... "We have very little ... that will make it clear to people what's going on in a credible way," Fischhoff said.”
– Paul Voosen, Humans “Wired” for Terror Over Remote Radiation Threats, New York Times, 18 March 2011.
What Fischhoff should do, is start the rebuilding with the foundation, Hiroshima.
“I’m assuming everyone knows that [Richard] Broinowski is Helen Caldicott’s brother and so he’s just another mouthpiece for her misinformation ... Caldicott is not a radiation scientist who has spent countless hours studying the effects of radiation on people. She’s ... someone who has made a name for herself by making outrageous, unsubstantiated claims about nuclear power. ... she’s held up as some fount of all nuclear wisdom we need to tell people the truth about her.” (Terry Krieg, 22 February 2012.) [This is unhelpful, because it lacks specific examples of their agenda, so it backfires.]
We have to be sure our facts about nuclear power are right, as the latest exchange with Helen Caldicott shows.
By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 13th April 2011
"My request to Helen Caldicott was a simple one: I asked her to give me sources for the claims she had made about the effects of radiation. Helen had made a number of startling statements during a television debate, and I wanted to know whether or not they were correct. ...
"At first I asked for general sources for her claims. She sent me nine documents: press releases, newspapers articles and an advertisement. Only one of them was linked to a scientific publication, the BEIR VII report published by the National Academy of Sciences. She urged me to read it. I did so and discovered that, far from supporting her claims, it starkly contradicts them. For example, it says:
- The risk of radiation-induced mutations ... “is sufficiently small that it has not been detected in humans, even in thoroughly studied irradiated populations such as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
- Regarding transmissible genetic damage from the exposure of future parents, such as “spontaneous abortions, congenital malformations, neonatal mortality, stillbirths, and the sex ratio of offspring ... there is no consistent evidence of an association of any such outcomes with exposure to environmental sources of radiation.”
- “On balance, the existing evidence does not support the conclusion that rates of childhood leukemia have increased as a result of radiation exposures from the Chernobyl accident.”
"I began to wonder whether Helen has actually read this report, or was hoping that, at 423 pages, it would scare me away. ... She claimed that isotopes of krypton, xenon and argon “can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease.” When I asked her for a source, she told me, “This is also described in my book.” In fact her book says (page 55): “There have never been any epidemiological studies performed on the effects of exposure to the noble gases xenon and krypton.” This flatly contradicts her own claim. When I pressed her for better sources, her publishers wrote to me and said she did not have time to find them. Now she has had time – time enough to write an article for the Guardian attacking me – but still hasn’t supported the claims I questioned.
"Then she appears to suggest that iodine-131 can “continuously irradiate small volumes of cells ... over many years”. As it has a half life of 8 days, this seems unlikely. ... Then she makes a remarkable allegation. As a result of a conspiracy hatched with the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 1959 the World Health Organisation has “made no more statements on health and radioactivity.” This is completely false ... the WHO currently runs an Ionizing Radiation Programme and a Radiation and Environmental Health Programme .... It has set up an International Research Advisory Committee “to identify gaps and under-discovered areas on health effects from low-dose exposures to ionizing radiation”. In 2006 it published a 167-page report titled Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident. As for the alleged conspiracy, this is a story that has been circulating among anti-nuclear campaigners for many years, becoming ever more lurid. ... This is what happens when we fail to be as sceptical about the ideas we like as we are about the ideas we don’t. Incidentally, Helen has still not provided a shred of evidence for her claim that the recent report by another UN agency – the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation – into the Chernobyl disaster is “a total cover-up”. Twice I have asked her to substantiate this allegation; twice she has replied with accusations about the WHO. Is she aware that these are different agencies?
"But perhaps most alarming is her continued reliance on the report by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko, which claims that 980,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl. As its critics have pointed out, this figure cannot possibly be correct, as it arises from the extraordinary assumption that all increased deaths since 1986 from a host of diseases – including many which have no known connection with radiation – were caused by Chernobyl. The report has not been peer-reviewed and the academy which published it has distanced itself from it.
"Continuing to use such a severely flawed document for your central claims about the health impacts of radiation hardly inspires confidence. ... I think these points are worth making, for several reasons. I believe that journalists should not stand by while misinformation is spread. If there is any value in journalism, it lies in trying to winnow fact from fiction, and helping people to form a more accurate view of the world. If, on the basis of falsehoods and exaggerations, we make the wrong decisions, the consequences can be momentous. ...
"What if, for example, the continuing dangers of radioactive pollution for the people in the nations around Chernobyl have been so greatly exaggerated that they have been exposed to 25 years of unnecessary terror and distress? What if this has caused serious and widespread psychological problems, as the UN Scientific Committee suggests(Page 513)? What if we have exploited vulnerable people – those born with deformities and genetic diseases – by parading their conditions as examples of the damage radiation has done, when the evidence suggests that they are not? What if the same burdens are inflicted on the people of Japan?
"If that has happened, is it not a terrible thing to bear? Don’t we have a duty to interrogate ourselves as scrupulously as we can to ensure that we have not and will not do such a thing? ... If we spread misinformation, we could inadvertently achieve the opposite."
Journalists did that long ago, starting with misinformation published widely after Hiroshima, 1945.
Hiroshima cloud seen from ground level: the stem and fireball are separated due to the height of burst. By the time fireball soot rainout started, 2 hours later, the mushroom with most of the radioactivity, had been blown many miles downwind from Hiroshima, explaining why there was no significant fallout (click here for Hiroshima fallout map; note that the doses were proved to be insignificant compared to natural background radiation over the period for long term effects): |
Modern city buildings made of concrete did not blast or burn down, unlike the predominant wooden buildings in Hiroshima. Recovery was very rapid. |
Trains resume almost immediately in Hiroshima. |
Cleaning up debris in Hiroshima, prior to rebuilding work. |
Modern bridges and modern steel/concrete buildings survived even close to ground zero. The aiming point for the bomb a T-shaped bridge in the centre of the city. It survived. |
Trade is soon restored in Hiroshima. |
75% of the population of Hiroshima survived, most making a full recovery. What about solid cancer tumors? During the period from 1958-98, in 44,635 survivors, 7,851 malignancies (first primary) were observed, of which 848 were due to radiation (10.7% due to radiation). Almost 90% of these cancers were not due to radiation, but were natural cancers (RERF). What about the blood cancers, leukemia? From 1950-2000 in 49,204 survivors there were 94 leukemia deaths due to bomb radiation (RERF data). |
Nuclear weapons effects secrecy allowed Stalin's - aka Wilfred Burchett's - myths to circulate: for the air bursts on Japan the radiation dose was received in 20 seconds, causing a minimum in white blood cell count 30 days later. Fallout was trivial in comparison. This has been confirmed by radiation measurements in the cities. The false correlation between delayed effects and lingering radiation is still loved and claimed to be "uncontroversial journalism" by certain deluded media. |
Rebuilding work in Hiroshima. A majority of homes were rebuilt within 4 years. |
Makeshift homes in Hiroshima, employing surviving debris outside the firestorm. |
Hiroshima recovered fast from nuclear attack, beginning within days of the explosion with trams, trains, and electricity restored in some areas, even before any help from outside arrived: |
Hiroshima power lines were repaired, soon after nuclear explosion. |
Trams operation was restored in Hiroshima within days of nuclear attack. |
Even without air raid shelters (which survived close to ground zero in Hiroshima), many modern buildings near ground zero, made of brick or concrete, did offer protection from blast winds, heat flash, and radiation shielding. This is a fact applicable to civil defense considerations today, even without special shelters. |
The documentary Hiroshima: the Aftermath unlike previous Cold War propaganda on the subject, at least makes some admission of the rapid recovery from nuclear warfare! |
John Hersey's 1946 book Hiroshima summarizes the rapid recovery thus:
"In Hiroshima, all utilities and transportation services were disrupted for varying lengths of time. In general however services were restored about as rapidly as they could be used by the depleted population. Through railroad service was in order in Hiroshima on 8 August, and electric power was available in most of the surviving parts on 7 August, the day after the bombing. ... Rolling transportation suffered extensive damage. The damage to railroad tracks, and roads was comparatively small, however. The electric power transmission and distribution systems were badly wrecked. The telephone system was approximately 80% damaged, and no service was restored until 15 August."
This is confirmed by other studies of the rapid recovery of Hiroshima, before significant help arrived.
Above: the actual Nevada nuclear test EMP effects data in the 1964 Capabilities of nuclear weapons page 13-2 is a summary of E.G. & G.s 1961 secret report by B. J. Stralser, Electromagnetic Effects from Nuclear Tests, which describes the EMP effects on tripping circuit breakers over 30 miles away from kiloton yield Nevada tower bursts. Additional EMP data was obtained in the 1962 Nevada surface burst Small Boy, a deliberate EMP effects test. |
1964 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, the one which compares American nuclear fallout predictions to the 1956 British Buffalo Round 2 ground burst nuclear test at Maralinga, Australia, has been kindly emailed to me as a PDF by
National Security Technologies, LLC
Contractor to the U.S. Department of Energy
Title: TM 23-200/OP NAV INSTRUCTION 03400/C/ AFM 136-1/FMFM 11-2 "CAPABILITIES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS (U) ( 1964 )
Author(s):
Subject Terms: NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Document Location: Location - NNSA/NSO Nuclear Testing Archive Address - P.O. Box 98521 City - Las Vegas State - NV Zip - 89193-8521 Phone - (702)794-5106 Fax - (702)794-5107 Email - CIC@NV.DOE.GOV
Document Type: REPORT
Publication Date: 1964 Dec 31
Declassification Status: Declassified
Document Pages: 0214
Accession Number: NV0105483
OpenNet Entry Date: 2006 Jul 01
Fig 4-4 in 1964 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons compares the actual fallout pattern from the 1956 Buffalo-2 surface burst in Australia with the idealized model based on Nevada tests. For a different plot of this Buffalo-1 fallout pattern, please see http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA956123: |
The Buffalo-2 test was used to determine the partition of radioactivity between stem and cloud, based on the measured wind shear, which acted to separate the two components of the fallout pattern (the stem went only northwards, whereas the cloud top went due eastwards before the particles settled out, see the hodograph of wind pattern above). This is very useful for civil defense, because it comparison of the wind pattern to the fallout map makes it clear precisely why the fallout has spread out like a fan, and you can then develop simple methods to extrapolate from this solid example to make allowances for wind shear in fallout prediction. In addition, Buffalo-2 was instrumented to measure EMP, which is also unclassified now:
‘The first attempt at a theory of [surface burst] radioflash was by [T.S.] Popham, in 1954, who suggested that radio signals were due to currents carried by Compton electrons arising from gamma rays produced in the nuclear explosion… Both the period and amplitude of the radio signal would be expected to increase very slightly with yield.’
– J. B. Taylor, A Theory of Radioflash, U.K. Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston, report AWRE-O33/59, October 1959, originally classified "Confidential", pp. 3-18.
Fig 1b in Taylor's report AWRE-O33/59 plots the radiated EMP electric field as measured from a kiloton surface burst (presumably the Buffalo-2 shot in 1956 at the Marcoo site in Maralinga): the peak field measured at a distance of 300 km is 28.1 v/m in the NEGATIVE direction at a time of 5 microseconds. Zero field is at 17.2 microseconds. Peak positive is at 23 microseconds with 15.4 v/m and second zero is at 42.5 microseconds. Second negative is at 54 microseconds with about 3.75 v/m.
Buffalo Round 2 was a 1.4 kiloton fission bomb (an AWRE declassified photo of bomb being set up for the test is shown above) surface burst on Maralinga soil, which is calcium carbonate topped with a thin layer of silicate sand. This Maralinga soil produced silicate sand (Nevada test like) fallout for tower bursts like Buffalo Round 1 which produced no significant crater, proving that for low altitude bursts the fallout is caused by the sweep-up of loose desert sand by the afterwinds and updraft under the rising fireball. But for the surface burst Buffalo Round 2, the fallout particles were composed of calcium oxide surrounded by calcium carbonate which must have come from the calcium calcium subsoil, like the American tests on coral islands in Bikini and Eniwetok Atoll. This proved that the cratering ejecta provides the fallout material in a surface burst. The 1964 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, TM 23-200, uses this British surface burst to check its fallout model (the illustration was deleted from the 1972 edition and does not appear in the 1957 edition).
In other news, a new colour photo of the surviving 44 kiloton Plumbbob-Smoky nuclear tower burst tower in Nevada has been published:
The significance of the tower remains is that they were not vaporized by the heat of the 44 kt explosion, 700 feet above the ground. For Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the yields were smaller and the burst heights larger, no buildings were vaporized at all. For a detailed description of this, see Plumbbob weapon test report WT-1488, page 59:
"Observations of the remains of towers and shielding material after detonation at several ground zeros indicate that large masses of material are not vaporized. Observation of the residue of the Smoky tower indicated that a very significant portion of that tower remained including the upper 200 feet of steel. Another example similar to Shot Smoky was Shot Apple II, Teapot Series. Even though the total yield of Shot Apple II was about 32 kt, the floor of the cab and the main tower support columns remained intact. The results of the [11 kt] Shot Fizeau tower melt studies (Reference 3) show that about 85 percent of tower material was accounted for after the detonation and that only the upper 50 feet of tower was vaporized . No melting occurred beyond 175 feet from the top of the tower although the fireball theoretically engulfed more than 400 feet of the tower."
Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons 1964 proves this by the following graph showing the small surface ablation of various metal spheres placed within 400 feet from the 23 kt Teapot-Met nuclear test in 1955:
29 kt Teapot-Apple 2 nuclear test house survived 1955 shot and remains in Nevada today, 60 years later. |
J. E. Kester and R. B. Ferguson, Operation Teapot, Project 5.4, Evaluation of Fireball Lethality Using Basic Missile Structures
Much of the 29 kt Teapot Apple 2 bomb support tower 500 ft high was neither vaporized nor melted, nor was lethally radioactive! |
J. E. Kester and R. B. Ferguson report in Operation Teapot, Project 5.4, Evaluation of Fireball Lethality Using Basic Missile Structures, WT-1134 (originally Secret – Restricted Data), AD0340137, that within the 23 kt Teapot-Met (Nevada, 15 April 1955, 400 ft steel bomb tower) although the bomb test steel tower was blown down, it was not vaporized and much survived despite having been engulfed by the fireball itself, as stated on page 30:
“... nearly 225 feet of the main support members of the shot tower were still intact and laid out radially from their original position.”
Page 116 of WT-1134 states that after the 2 kt Moth shot atop a 300 foot triangular tower on 22 February 1955: “The three tower legs were laid out approximately radially from their pre-shot positions. The longest tower leg found was about 200 ft long. The other two legs appeared to be about 150 ft long. All three guy cables were still attached ... A few large pieces of the tower, about 20 to 30-ft long, were strewn to ranges of about 200 feet.” It adds that after the 7 kt Tesla shot atop a 300 ft square tower on 1 March 1955: “the four tower legs ... were laid out radially from their original position ... The tower legs remained intact to lengths of about 125 feet. All four guy cables were still attached ...” The 43 kt Turk nuclear test was fired atop a 500 ft square tower, leaving 100 ft lengths of tower lengths on the ground (page 118). The 8 kt Bee shot atop a 500 ft tower failed to even knock down most of the tower (pages 120-1): “A large portion of this tower was still standing after the shot. ... It is estimated that at least 150 feet of the tower was essentially undamaged and standing erect with an additional 50 to 75 feet of the tower slightly melted and drooped over at the top.” The 14 kt Apple 1shot atop a 500 ft square tower results (page 121): “The main support members of the shot tower still remained to lengths of about 150 feet with the top 25 to 50 feet being crushed and split ... Some of the legs remained attached to the base.” The 23 kt Met shot was atop a 400 ft square tower (pages 123-4): “About 225 feet of the tower legs were still intact with the top 25 to 50 feet being crushed, split and slightly melted ....”
“Observations of the remains of towers and shielding material after detonation at several ground zeros indicate that large masses of material are not vaporized. Observations of the residue of the Smoky tower [44 kt bomb atop a 700 foot high steel tower] indicated that a very significant portion of that tower remained, including the upper 200 feet of steel. Another example similar to Shot Smoky was ShotApple II [29 kt atop a 500 ft steel tower], Teapot Series. Even though the total yield of Shot Apple II was about [29 kt], the floor of the cab [housing the nuclear bomb itself, at the top of the tower] and the main tower support columns remained intact. The results of the ShotFizeau [11 kt atop a 500 ft steel tower] tower melt studies (W. K. Dolen and A. D. Thornborough, Fitzeau Tower Melt Studies, Sandia report SC-4185, 1958, Secret) show that about 85 percent of tower material was accounted for after the detonation and that only the upper 50 feet of tower was vaporized. No melting occurred beyond 175 feet from the top of the tower although the fireball theoretically engulfed more than 400 feet of the tower.”
- Dr Kermit H. Larson, et al., Distribution, Characteristics, and Biotic Availability of Fallout, Operation Plumbbob, weapon test report WT-1488, ADA077509, July 1966, page 59.
American public enthusiasm for nuclear weapons effects studies, Nevada 1953 troop tests for Korean War deterrence:
Above: No significant danger from Kubrick's Colbalt 60 bomb sci fi, debunked in 1954 by USAEC's health physicists. |
Many millions of people have been killed in conventional wars since 1945. That's the real problem to be addressed by nuclear deterrence and civil defense. Conventional wars in Europe were deterred by Reagan's W79 neutron bomb deployment, during the 1980s. That event was greeted with condemnation, but the Cold War soon ended, with a negotiation from a position of strength. The W79 tactical nuclear weapon is a purely defensive weapon against conventional warfare, since it causes minimal damage to civilian targets, but maximises damage to mobile, active military invading forces. If they are dug in deep in defensive, they are safe like civilians in modern concrete cities, so tactical nuclear weapons are purely defensive weapons against an invading army on the move on foot, in tanks and APCs. The point of tactical nuclear weapons is that they keep the enemy penned into defensive positions, preventing invasions. Russia did not want to stock it, because we were not prepared for, or interested in, any invasion of Russia. CNDs propaganda war against the neutron bomb, masterminded by Baroness Cathy Ashton, proves this.
Why not put tactical nuclear weapons to their original purpose of saving lives by deterring or rapidly ending conventional wars? As Hiroshima's experience of survival of modern concrete buildings and the people in them proves (see below), you get less destruction of modern concrete-built cities and less lives lost if you have cheap effective but working civil defense and tactical nuclear weapons, a situation you need in civil wars regardless of whether nuclear or "conventional" weapons are used.
The truth is simple to grasp: when a 1 kt tactical neutron bomb detonates 500 metres over a target you get far less heat and blast effects than you get with conventional weapons! What you do get is a burst of neutrons which stop insurgents in tanks, APCs, and in the open. The neutrons are rapidly attenuated by city concrete buildings, but not by steel armour. Popular propaganda myths that the enemy can absorb the 14.1 MeV DT fusion neutrons with plastic or thermal neutron (0.025 eV) absorbers used in reactors (boron, cadmium) are false. As neutron bomb developer Samuel Cohen shows, the neutrons are scattered to a greater extent in air than gamma rays, so they arrive from many directions (not merely from the direction of the bomb), so the modifications needed to a tank or APC to make it absorb the high energy bomb neutrons would prohibit its function as an effective fighting vehicle. This is not true of the much heavier mass of shielding in all modern concrete city buildings (which would prohibit movement of a tank) and simple earth covered shelters, such as were used in Britain and Japan in WWII (see below for the reason why air raid warnings failed in Japan in August 1945). The credible deterrent capability of this innovation offers a real alternative to the millions of "conventional warfare" casualties in protracted battles in Korea, Vietnam and recent wars like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria:
Since Putin invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, early last year, approximately 31,000 visitors from Ukraine have come to this blog. We hope to continue to encourage a realistic approach to both proof tested cheap civil defense countermeasures against bombing, and the practical, credible use of nuclear deterrence to end conventional warfare, invasions, and mass killing. Political paper promises like the 1938 Hitler-Chamberlain peace deal or the 1994 Bucharest Memorandum cater to utopian lawyers and nuclear radiation pseudoscience, and are the ideal of the enemies of realistic life saving deterrence and protective countermeasures. The non-United Nations has actually been responsible for many protracted, horrific conventional wars since 1945 in trying to bring together of conflicting interests, so that realistic, prompt, effective resolutions are prohibited by veto. This is the fundamental, intrinsic flaw of international peace keeping. If everyone must agree before decisive action is taken, nothing will be done in time to save lives. We see this effect in all forms of groupthink, where vetoes are used to hold up, if not prevent, all realistic hopes of progress. |
As occurred tragically in the 1930s when criticisms of Nazi eugenics "science" were censored out as being quackery by a media which was deluded by fashionable best selling books like Man the Unknown by gas chamber eugenics proponent Medical Nobel Laureate eugenicist Dr Alexis Carrel and other big shots, the popular media prefers to cater to groupthink consensus, and to get quotes from bigots, instead of digging up the truth.
In other news, Alex Wellerstein has been censoring out polite comments pointing out errors in his "nuclear secrecy" blog. He managed to delete some of my comments without my having any copy of the information, so I guess I just don't have the time or interest in reading and making constructive suggestions anyone. There is no problem for me in people honestly being biased against nuclear weapons provided they do not manipulate the data and then censor out the facts using untruths about rudeness. In fact, Wellerstein's New Yorker article, which he thinks is exciting (as opposed to the facts we have dug up on this blog), does not dig up anything new, just the sensational words that convey no hard data of use to anyone for any purpose, and have blocked popular understanding of nuclear science since 1945:
"Being able to write something for them has been a real capstone to the summer for me. It was a lot of work, in terms of the writing, the editing, and the fact-checking processes. But it is really a nice piece for it. I am incredibly grateful to the editor and fact-checker who worked with me on it, and gave me the opportunity to publish it. Something to check off the bucket list."
So now we know what Alex finds exciting, a bucket list. Of course the New Yorker published John Hersey's Hiroshima, a literary-journalistic piece of anti-science propaganda to capture attention by scare mongering and ignoring a comparison to deaths in conventional and incendiary warfare, that ignored or failed to investigate the survival of air raid shelters and people in modern city concrete buildings in Hiroshima, and that even managed to mislead Einstein on the effects of nuclear weapons, thus helping to create the megadeaths of conventional war since 1945.
Truth isn't actually what concerns "fact" checkers of magazines, which consider a fact to be a spelling or whether one statement agrees with the policy of a powerful bigoted media baron. News or history for them is something to be manipulated by selectively censoring out critics and comparisons to all interpretations of the data! Well, at least he ticked one thing off a bucket list. Hopefully, he therefore will not feel the need to keep on sensationalizing nuclear fears for cash like CND, Caldicott, North Korea and Scientific American.
LAWYERS, POLITICIANS, FILM AND TV PROPAGANDA EXPLOITING FAME OBSESSED STARS AGAINST JUSTICE, HUMAN RIGHTS, EQUALITY, AND DEMOCRACY: THE EUROPEAN UNION'S THREAT TO THE SURVIVAL OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION
"The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble." - Court reporter Charles Dickens (author's narrative in Bleak House, Chapter 39).
"I went as a spectator [17 March 1968 pro-Vietcong "peace" demonstration, Trafalgar Square, London] ... Vanessa Redgrave read out messages ... in a voice like the Queen's. She concluded: 'I feel that my presence here today speaks for itself.' ... Police on the outskirts of London ... stopped several coach-loads of students ... and removed marbles for throwing under the [police] horses' hooves, pepper (invisible on TV) for throwing in police faces, and sachets full of red paint to simulate blood ... elements in the production of a drama for television ..."
- Peter Laurie, Scotland Yard, 1970, pages 105-106.
Last year we exposed how an unelected former CND neutron bomb proved deceiver in the so called "European Union" dictatorship was risking World War III by provoking a war with Russia over greedy efforts to exploit the possibility of Ukraine's membership of the EU (click here). The bestselling Fourth Protocol nuclear terrorism warning author, Frederick Forsyth, has now explained in an open article directed to President Barack Obama why the European Union needs addressing to secure peace:
"A brief briefing to educate the president of the United States. ... The European Union, under the title Corpus Juris, intends to institute a single binding criminal justice system on all Europe, based on the Code Napoleon, the prevailing European system. It abolishes trial by jury, Magna Carta, presumption of innocence and lay magistrates. The Code Napoleon insists on a single examining magistrate, the presumption of guilt until the defendant can prove innocence, a single judge assisted by two law assessors in place of a jury of 12 ordinary citizens, and detention in custody on the whim of the accuser magistrate. Would you Americans want such a law code? In short, Mr President, if we are not going to abolish our pound and join the euro; if we are not going to abolish our already too porous borders and join the Schengen Treaty; and if we are not going to abolish a law code that puts the citizen first and dates to 1315, what are we doing in the EU?"
Above: socialist fascism can arise in any country with a ruined economy, or an economically failing superstate like the USSR or today's European Union (UK national debt now over £1.4 trillion and still rising due to a continuing deficit, which will cripple the economy in the case of any large instability such as war, which could massively increase the historically small interest rates currently being paid). Such a socialist style debt bomb country, run by profiteering political-class lawyers, including Lords, must increase crime rates to profit sufficiently from the criminal trial cases they need for their lavish lifestyle, which includes anti-truth activism for attacking nuclear deterrence, radiation, clean power, etc. In the 1930s, the socialist Sir Oswald Mosley started riots with police in London, but probably partly because the economic conditions were better in England than in Germany, things did not get as far out of control as when Hitler rose to power. Nevertheless, a pro-Nazi appeasement agenda set in, where top UK politicians were urged to shake hands with Hitler, ostensibly to guarantee peace by collaborating or condoning terrorism of the Jews after the 1935 racist Nuremberg Laws were passed in Germany. (Photos from P. Laurie, Scotland Yard, 1970.)
DETERRENCE OF MAJOR CRIMES AND WARS: THE ROLE OF LAWS, PUNISHMENT AND EFFECTIVE ENFORCEMENT
There is a popular delusion that "laws prevent crime". It is false, because criminals often do not even study the law. The idea that a law on a piece of paper will prevent a crime is disproved by the data (graph above). Preventative detention used to prevent a lot of crime (graph above), but was abolished in 1965, by which time it had already lost force due to the use of "diminished responsibility" to let off the guilty in 1956. The police and crown prosecution service have limited funds and cannot prosecute all crimes, especially when there is no public gain to be had from deterrence or stopping repeat offenses (e.g. weak sentences). This is highly relevant to the problem of trying to use "laws" to prevent larger crimes like invasions of Ukraine, and aggressive wars. Peter Laurie explains how deterrence worked in his 1970 book Scotland Yard, page 279:
"In reality, those who get arrested, persecuted and punished are extremely unlucky. But what matters is not the physical effect on them, so much as the deterrence which their example sets for the rest of us. The whole system of the police, courts and prisons works because the fate of the unfortunate few is designed to be extremely public ..." (Emphasis added in bold.)
Naturally, the more effective deterrence is at preventing crime, the less money for criminal lawyers, because of the fewer cases (again, see the facts in the graph above). Therefore, a concerted move is being made to rescind the notion that "justice should be seen to be done", and to make as many courts as possible (family courts, etc) operate behind a cloak of secrecy, to minimise the deterrence of crime. This provides "work" for the whole criminal law fraternity, putting champagne and caviar on the tables of the lawyers:
"The overall deterrence of the combined law-enforcement system, we might say, is the product of two factors: the chance of detection multiplied by the severity of the sentence. ... Police can only affect one half of this equation - the chance of detection - but they are judged by the success of the whole of it."
- Peter Laurie, Scotland Yard, 1970, page 264.
Laurie goes on to explain that incredible deterrence was attempted in London in the early 1800s, when London became a cesspool for crime which parish constables could not detect, so that draconian punishments were put in place to try to make up for the failure to reprimand criminals: over 400 different types of offence were then supposed to be punished by hanging. But in reality, most juries would not convict petty criminals because of the sentence of hanging, and crime rates soared. The system did not prevent organized crime. This is like the present system of strategic counterforce nuclear deterrence, which fails to stop or deter conventional wars! In order to make deterrence credible, better detection and prosecution was needed. The Metropolitan Police were formed in 1829, finally allowing the four hundred hanging offences to be cut down to fifteen in 1839, and to just four in 1861 (murder, treason, piracy and arson in warships):
"A further defect of the draconian eighteenth-century system was its failure to provide for an escalating ladder of deterrents. It tried to divide society into two: the righteous and the wicked, but those who are as likely to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, steal lambs too.
"We now have an elaborate ladder of punishments which has two functions: (i) to deter any crime, (ii) to deter people who have steeled themselves to one level of crime from stepping up to a more serious one. ... the abolition of capital punishment ... crams the same number of crimes into a smaller range of punishments. The effect of this is first seen at the top of the ladder, in the armed robbery figures. It is the almost universal opinion of the police that murder and robbery with violence have increased since the end of this ultimate sanction. ... However fair the English system of trial - and abolitionists can point to some irreparable failures - it was nevertheless true that, unless the CID chose us, we would not get hanged." (Source: P. Laurie, Scotland yard, 1970, pp. 265-266. Emphasis added in bold.)
In other words, an single type of punishment, without a ladder with a range of credible punishments to deter escalation to more serious offences, effectively gives criminals a carte blanche to do whatever they want, and can actually encourage the most serious offences, because the punishments exactly the same in any case. Laurie's point about the CID choosing who got hanged in the spirit of the law (regardless of whether they were technically guilty in the letter of the law) is that Derek Bentley's friend murdered a policeman in his presence, and there was a dispute over whether this was caused or not by Bentley's words of advice to his friend "let him have it", and whether Bentley should have been let off scot free for being involved in a police killing, due to being mentally unbalanced. In the end, the police prosecuted Bentley as an accessory to murder, and he was hanged inflaming the wrath and tears of the "law to the letter, not spirit of the law" human rights lawyers who in the 1930s loudly applauded Prime Minister Chamberlain's repeated attempts to shake Hitler's hand long after the racist and ultimately genocidal "Nuremberg Laws" were passed in Germany in 1935. Result: as the graph above shows, the one doubtful hanging caused a huge increase in violence and murder rates in London when hanging was abolished for "diminished responsibility" and finally abolished for all cases, sane or insane. The only people to profit were, of course, criminal lawyers and the law society.
Above: while some credible deterrence against serious crime existed in Britain (before 1965), the police were able to concentrate on diffusing tensions in society, for example by the well publicised football match with strikers in the General Strike of 1926 and by training to help defend Britain against Russian invasion parachutists and looters in 1964. Once credible deterrence ended, pressures existed to try to prevent crime by other means, such as secret police tactics of the repressive techniques (not tension diffusing) of trying to recruit informers so that people spy on others in an effort to find criminals before serious crimes or terrorism occurs. These pictures are from Laurie's 1970 Scotland Yard. Laurie explains on page 180 that there were three ways to prevent crime: luck (stop and search), police records (keeping tabs on known offenders) and information (informants). He also explains what is today the mainstream technique for anti-terrorism, which is needed if we have no effective civil defense training: taping a percentage of private phone calls and other personal information exchanges and using a computer to scan it for keywords relevant to terrorism/crime.
Laurie explained in Scotland Yard in 1970, page 223, that without credible deterrence for serious crimes like like murder or terrorism, the police has to try to adopt the secret police tactics of the SS or the KGB in snooping on people, just as Herman Kahn predicted on page 97 of his 1968 book The Year 2000:
"Furthermore, there is the unpleasant prediction by Kahn ... A capacity for listening and recording temporarily, or even permanently, can be made very inexpensive. One can imagine the legal or illegal magnetic or other recordings of an appreciable percentage of the telephone conservations that take place ... scan these conversations rapidly by means of a high speed computer - at least for key phrases - and then record conversations that meet some criteria of special interest or placement in a more permanent file ... If one imagines this ability - and what governments could resist it, if it was cheap and discreet enough - coupled with a national 'voice-print' file [similar to finger print type forensic databases] which would identify anonymous speakers, added to all the other personal information available, it is apparent that one would have little freedom ... the honest man has no need to worry ... But it is the slight inaccuracy that alarms; for 'honest' one should read, 'Government approved'."
A TRUTH ABOUT LIBERTY: FACT CENSORSHIP BY FAMOUS MEDIA LOVED BIGOTS
Eugenics is wrong because it claims strength comes from a lack of diversity, whereas evolution shows diversity is strength, for providing the foundations for evolution! Nazi or communist clones are not what we need, because they share the same weaknesses, and weakness is subjective. For example, height might be useful for changing light bulbs, but not necessarily for crews of cramped spaceships, aircraft or or tanks. Weight might be useful for surviving winter without central heating or a supermarket nearby, but not for running marathons. What you need for success in one thing may be the exact opposite of what you need for success in another. This is why eugenics is pseudo-science, but Darwin wouldn't condemn the eugenicists because of bias (he is also supposed to have ignored Mendel's paper on genetics out of elitist quackery) and his half cousin, Sir Francis Galton, claimed that success is an inherited attribute, an argument used by racists, that reminds you of the quack theory of Larmarckism, the obsolete evolutionary theory inheritance of acquired characteristics which he claimed to oppose!
Galton simply ignored a rival theory that explains the correlation between his measure of "success" and that of offspring. The rival theory is the Biblical "Matthew Effect", namely the fact that success, as he defines it, breeds money, which pays for education and research, and thus an environment for offspring which is more conducive to further success! In other words, if you are born in a family of poor miners with no access at home to study time and facilities, then you're more likely to end up a miner than a mathematics professor, regardless of what your brain is like. If you don't have a swimming pool within a hundred miles of home, you're less likely to end up an Olympic swimmer. If you are born in a backward third world country, you are less likely to be exposed to the fertile soil needed for Galton's measure of "success", regardless of how large your brain capacity is. If you do not speak English, you are less likely to spell English words correctly.
This is not a "speculative theory" requiring peer reviewed publication and thousands of citations and Nobel Prizes to become acceptable. You don't need to wait for someone to be awarded a Nobel prize for publishing a paper showing that a hammer can bruise your thumb before you can state that fact. It is not your personal "limited and bitter experience," that critics can sneer at. You do not need "multiple sources to confirm a fact in writing" that anyone can confirm themselves by simply observing that physical fact. Yet, British quack eugenicist Galton was permitted to lay the foundations for Hitler's racial holocaust, and it appears to still be taboo to point out the errors in eugenics theory. This appears to be down to the continuing very convenient and illegal use of eugenics in crank "peer review" to censor out alternative ideas and being a danger to conservative orthodoxy, an falsehood ironically propounded by allegedly "liberals". If you can't or won't provide honest answers to critics, then you are an illiberal groupthink-founding dogmatic danger, as shown by what the greatest Liberal said about censorship.
Freedom of factual criticism in objective science versus subjective opinion or fashionable dogma, the findings of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty
“There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just … the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The assumption that we are infallible can we justify the suppression of opinions we think false. Ages are as fallible as individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling ...”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another … in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism … An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“[For people] to refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. … Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. … he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think …”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“… the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character …”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage … But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. … It is easy for any one to imagine an ideal public, which leaves the freedom and choice of individuals in all uncertain matters undisturbed, and only requires them to abstain from modes of conduct which universal experience has condemned. But where has there been seen a public which set any such limit to its censorship? … In its interferences with personal conduct it is seldom thinking of anything but the enormity of acting or feeling differently from itself; and this standard of judgment, thinly disguised, is held up to mankind as the dictate of religion and philosophy, by nine tenths of all moralists and speculative writers. These teach that things are right because they are right; because we feel them to be so. They tell us to search in our own minds and hearts for laws of conduct binding on ourselves and on all others. What can the poor public do but apply these instructions, and make their own personal feelings of good and evil, if they are tolerably unanimous in them, obligatory on all the world?”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them: how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be originality.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“… the general or prevailing opinion in any subject is rarely or never the whole truth; it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“When there are persons to be found, who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
This last quotation really is the root cause of wars, when bigoted dogma by the democratic majority censors out the views and facts of minority opponents, causing wars. This censorship mindset of bigoted democratic “might is right” dictators is the error made by Hitler and Stalin, but instead of recognising that it is wrong and needs to be replaced by more open debate and less censorship, the “when in a hole, keep digging” mindset insists that if censorship is not working, we need more of it, not less. This is what happened when conventional weapons failed in Vietnam.
“In countries of more advanced civilisation and of a more insurrectionary spirit, the public, accustomed to expect everything to be done for them by the State, or at least to do nothing for themselves without asking from the State not only leave to do it, but even how it is to be done, naturally hold the State responsible for all evil which befalls them, and when the evil exceeds their amount of patience, they rise against the government and make what is called a revolution; whereupon somebody else, with or without legitimate authority from the nation, vaults into the seat, issues his orders to the bureaucracy, and everything goes on much as it did before; the bureaucracy being unchanged, and nobody else being capable of taking their place. A very different spectacle is exhibited among a people accustomed to transact their own business.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The "people" who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the "self-government" spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority: the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
“The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
23 Comments:
Rae West who has been associated with both electromagnetism maverick Ivor Catt and space landings criticisms, runs the internet site http://www.big-lies.org which like another site which I'll mention in a minute, claims Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions are myths, basing the claim on the fact that concrete buildings survived near ground zero, which is contrary to CND and eugenicist associate Joseph Rotblat, a fellow Nobel prize winner like gas chamber inventor Dr Alexis Carrel, who was awarded the Medical Nobel prize for serving humanity before the world turned against eugenics.
What we see here is the harm that CND and Joseph Rotblat's lies do, since they are exploited by people who point out the lie (that no modern buildings survived near ground zero in Hiroshima) and then draw a false, sensationalist conclusion: nuclear weapons are "fake". The correct conclusion is that CND and Joseph Rotblat are dangerous loons like the media's beloved author of gas chamber eugenics best-seller "Man the Unknown", the medical Nobel laureate Dr Alexis Carrel.
These people are responsible for millions of deaths. What do you have to say about the denial of the H bomb, the A bomb and the neutron bomb on Rae West's site www.big-lies.org?
Notice that it also presents a "Capricorn One" conspiracy theory of the 1969 Moon Landings, a fact that is proved firstly by the directional S band two way radio voice-TV signals from the Moon in 1969 (which were picked up by directional dish antennas pointing at the Moon in countries across the world, including Australia, as the Earth rotated, not merely by an alleged conspiracy of Americans, since America was out of view of the Moon half the time due to Earth's daily rotation). The costs and risks of faking that with would have been far more than the actual costs of the Apollo project, and all the other alleged discrepancies of the Moon landings are fake, not real discrepancies. E.g. Rae West and friends claimed thing like the cross-hairs being the "wrong" colour against the background image on some Moon photos, sometimes appearing dark lines in front of an image, sometimes bright lines. However, they assumed the lens marks were ink or paint, whereas they were diamond scratches in glass, which work by diffraction, so showing up dark on a light background - due to light diffracted by one side of the scratch valley in the glass - and light on dark backgrounds, due to picking up light diffracted in that case by the other side of the valley of the scratch.
Thus, the "discrepancies" are not actually there, as with Hiroshima concrete buildings surviving at ground zero the claims are simply failure to understand the details of the physics, and assuming that NASA's arrogant and stupid attempt to "prevent controversy and prevent understanding" by attacking critics instead of informing them of the truth, is evidence for a "conspiracy and cover up". The only conspiracy at NASA is one of arrogant stupidity, groupthink (Feynman's exposure of the Challenger explosion cover up due to incompetence over the rigid, non ductile behaviour of runner on cold mornings) and corrupt squandering of taxpayer funds.
Anonymous,
Raeto West is firmly in on the side of mainstream media attitudes, as is Ivor Catt. Both of these people, whom I have had the misfortune to meet, make statements that do not, in my "limited and bitter experience", are an attempt to use the media's own subjectivist propaganda against itself, out to gain popularity by breaking taboos.
This differs from objective research, but is just the kind of subjective research that you get from the mainstream. Take the Moon landings of Raeto West, the author of "Programming the Pet" and an economics graduate: he was friendly until objective techniques were used to tear apart his delusions. Then he became increasingly unfriendly, falsely taking the criticisms of his claims as a personal affront, and as evidence of uncritical thinking. This is as paranoid as Al Gore's claim that merely asking critical questions of NASA about Moon landings or the Hockey Stick curve should label anyone a quack. Both are deluded in the same way: they refuse to engage with objective facts and try to "close down arguments" using personal abuses.
Ivor Catt claimed to be that he against the subjective nature of orthodox dogma in electromagnetism and its subjectively censorship of questions and corrections of errors, then he censored out my questions and corrections of errors in his work, using subjective arguments, not objectivity. Check the dictionary definition of "hypocrite"!
I am indebted to Ivor Catt and also Peter Woit (who also has a few good ideas in solid science, but has a bad attitude, relying on elite authority rather than purely objective arguments) for at least making one very important fact crystal clear to me at an early age: the key reason why humanity is not making progress is NOT simply the blocking of progress by subjective, groupthink censorship (peer reviewers, fashion mobs in the media, bigots on their high horses). It is, instead, more about the emulation of subjective censorship by the alternatives to the mainstream. Or as Al Gore says, if the leading critics of mainstream climate change science are loons like deniers of the NASA Moon landings, why should anyone listen to any eccentrics?
The reality is not only that the truth is often not the most popular (hyped, or sensationalist) "alternative" idea, but way down the list, and the truth is also that many of the most scientific radical innovations that could possibly be done by one person in a few weeks, are instead done by a string of different people spread over decades or centuries because the psychological effects of mainstream bigotry on alternative idea theorists. Such theorists often copy mainstream subjective hype based marketing methods and arguing techniques to try to get their preliminary work published, methods "work" if you are famous or fashionable, but don't work if they are neither famous nor fashionable. Then they take the advice "when in a hole, stop digging" and give up further testing, critical analysis and theory development, for a lack of motivation. If you know it won't be even read by "peer reviwers", why bother. In other words, psychological problems affect human scientific development.
The nicest example is the development of the functioning aeroplane on a shoe string budget by the Wright brothers, while the highly funded professor Samuel P. Langley failed, by groupthink theoretical work, time wasting academic "milking the grant" tactics, and massive prior-to-success media publicity! Langley was celebrated in the media before making a successful flight merely for getting lavish funding or celebrity status for nothing really, while the Wright brothers were at first censored out as being lying quacks by the newspapers. That's the kind of truth that Rae West and Ivor catt should be educating people about, not sensationalist lying crap about conspiracy theories of the Moon landings or AIDS being confused for malaria (that claim coming from Ivor Catt was probably the final straw for me, since my father had malaria regularly in Africa and the symptoms are clear and cannot be confused for general immune system problems).
What you will find is that, like Helen Caldicott as quoted in the post above, some of the people with the most widely hyped "alternative ideas" do for counter-mainstream science dogma what Dresden-exaggerating biased historian David Irving did for anybody who was accurate statistics on the Nazi holocaust, or what Enoch Powell's April 20, 1968 address to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre, did for people who were concerned about the unaffordable of housing due to excessive numbers (not colours) of migrants! In other words, these people are not really "critics", they are more accurately described as self-promoting egotists, who perhaps understandably hate political correctness, but do more any anyone else to increase political correctness by their sloppy disregard for objective factual accuracy.
Claiming that immigrants may cause a suffering, invasion or war is fair enough when you look at what Germans in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia led to on 30 September 1938. But subjective use of the most extreme possible fear-mongering was a racist threat against objective debate. With "friends" like these you don't need enemies. So you have to avoid collaboration, which is a form of groupthink against progress. This is undoubtedly why so many of the economic, radical, successful innovations of the world, including the Wright aeroplane, have come from committed mavericks, not educated experts in positions hyped by the media as the "most likely" source of advances. The real problems of nuclear weapons, their effects, and radiation paranoia are all down to the groupthink insanity of "big science" (consensus of subjective collaboration), the very thing that guaranteed Nazi and Soviet failure!
Sorry but touch typing led to several typing errors above, e.g. "but do more any anyone else to increase" should read "but do more THAN anyone else to increase". I think the basic message is clear enough, however. We need to avoid collaboration in areas which are controversial, or we will end up with one groupthink delusion being opposed by another groupthink delusion, which is not a system that ends up with truth.
One fact on Rae West's site that everyone who does favors objective truth in science will applaud (groupthink consensus peer review censors will hate it):
"Shirley Williams in 1971 in The Times complained that increased science spending hadn't increased GNP."
Shirley Williams, a Labour party politician, was British Minister of State for Education and Science from 29 August 1967–13 October 1969. Ha ha ha. We all know why this is true (corrupt quacks in mainstream positions, milking their grants, rather than shutting them off by discovering good solutions, which is too much hard work for them anyway).
It is the Sir Jimmy Saville effect at work in nuclear radiation fear mongering by conventional war mongering terrorists and appeasers of genocidal racists, like Sir Joseph Rotblat.
Except Sir Jimmy Saville was applauded as a peace and justice hero while he abused thousands of innocent kids while working for the BBC and fronting kids TV programs, defended by "human rights lawyers" who made cash for defending child abusers and were sanctified by affiliation in the 1970s with people like Harriet Harman, the present Labour leader in the House of Commons (she simply "ridicules" the notion she was affiliated with an evil association as legal representative in the 70s as being a "smear", doubtless Hitler and Stalin would do similar, very conveniently) whereas the death count for conventional war casualties during the Pugwash Sir Joseph Rotblat runs into millions, probably far more than the 6 million murdered by Hitler.
However, he is a hero to the evil anti liberal bigots, just like Sir Jimmy Saville, Hitler and Stalin. So to even mention the truth is to allow the bigots to censor out the news, just as the BBC initially tried to deal with allegations against its star Sir Jimmy Saville by simply censoring out the transmission of "taboo" programs which exposed the TRUTH.
I agree that CND and Pugwash anti-nuclear propaganda movements are anti liberty, fear mongering, exaggeration making and thus terrorist genocide supporting pro-conventional war whether they admit it or not, because that is what it amounts to.
What is safer and cheaper, a thousand warheads of 1 megaton each of which can be equipped with advanced PAL systems to prevent unauthorized access by puncturing capacitor banks and smashing neutron generator tubes and vacuum tube firing switches, or the equivalent megatonnage in conventional weapons, many millions of bombs, requiring vast fleets of expensive delivery systems? Which has been proved to deter world war?
Hiroshima was a surprise attack that caught the population off guard and unprotected, like the first use of gas at Ypres in 1915, before gas masks and the threat of retaliation, before the wind direction could be used to provide a warning of a possible attack, and so on.
CND want to repeat the error of the 1930s in pretending gas masks and other cheap safeguards (sealed rooms against liquid agents) are a scam, and shaking hands with genocidal enemies with gas chambers or gulags.
Worse than that, their left wing strategy is to make factual discussions TABOO, to "close down the argument" and allow lies to go unchallenged for fear of personal abuse.
We need to expose fascist Goebbels type propaganda from the likes of "hero" figures such as the Nobel Peace prize winner Sir Joseph Rotblat like Sir Jimmy Saville, and the incalculable harm these quack bigots do to the cause world peace, humanity, human values, and truth. Moreover, we need to expose the media bigots who claim to dig up the truth but actually support fascism under camouflage of hating nuclear radiation.
The sooner we achieve success, the sooner peace will come. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to make FACTUAL arguments, but not to try to close down the debate using lies and personal abuse (the usual tactic of mainstream losers and quacks who exploit the taxpayer for pseudoscientific Marxist causes).
Just a note about Sir Joseph Rotblat's, "Greenpeace"'s and CND's plutonium 239 scaremongering:
In 1976, these people were debunked in their claims by the University of Colorado's Dr Petr Beckmann, the founder of Golem Press, Boulder, Colorado.
His book "Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" first disprove the claim that plutonium is highly toxic:
1. Pesticides can generally be FAR more toxic, e.g. he proves that arsenic trioxide is 50 times more toxic than plutonium-239. They have to be, to kill the hardy insects and blights that are resist or thrive on mildly toxic substances! Does this mean we cannot put pesticides on the crops we eat? Duh! Similarly, plutonium-239 dioxide is virtually insoluble. If you inhale it, you cough it up and swallow it, where it is then eliminated with no significant take up from the gut (0.07% typically, based on measurements published in a peer reviewed journal back in 1948 and in republished in an Appendix to the 1950 edition of Samuel Glasstone's book "The Effects of Atomic Weapons"), or it gets carried safely out of the lungs by mucociliary, absorptive, and phagocytic mechanisms. Very little of it remains in the lungs for long, unlike the case for non-radioactive asbestos fibres which hook themselves in lung alveoli!
2. Caffeine is only 10 times less toxic than plutonium-239! Vitamin A is highly toxic too in fairly similar amounts, although in the context of hormesis, Vitamin A is vital in very small doses for health!
Dr Beckmann naturally found extreme censorship by everyone, from the pig ignorant jobsworths running the reactors to what he calls in his book the "Penthouse proletariat" of the anti-nuclear publishing cartel which seeks its life mission as the need to hurl ignorant abuse at anyone who dares tell the truth about evil liars.
Here is a quotation from page 12 of "Health Hazards of NOT going nuclear":
"Nor are these superstitions shared and disseminated merely by a self-destructive intellectual elite gone berserk in its hatred of the system that elevated it to its present position. These myths have made inroads among honest citizens concerned about the safety of their communities. Even some scientists ... Politicians ... are perking up their ears: ever ready to cater prejudices that will bring votes, they are probing whether nuclear can be made into a dirty word, as dirty as profits maybe, so they can gallantly wage an anti-nuclear campaign to save the widows and orphans from the greedy corporations. ... The so-called nuclear debate is replete with myths, distortions and outright falsehoods; but it is compounded by the most exasperating of them all, the myth that there is a nuclear debate at all. What debate? There is no debate, only a monologue ... especially by the TV networks, of purile 'what if' fantasies limited exclusively to nuclear power, never applied to fossil burning plants [e.g. the lethal smogs in 1952-3 London and present day China, that kill thousands, unlike the long term radiation from Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, or Springfield, home to the Simpson's reactor]. There has been ... excessive coverage of the hit and run tactics of Ralph Nader, whose ignorance of nuclear power is matched only by his arrogance ..."
Sir: I disagree with Dr Petr Beckmann's book "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" (Golem press, 1976). The man filled the book with revenge against the bigots, even cynically dedicating it on the flyleaf:
"To Ralph Nader and all who worship the water he walks on."
It is no good merely attacking sensationalism and bias in the media. You have to make your counter attack rise above the mud slinging rhetoric. Beckmann's approach to anti nuclear propaganda is rather like James Delingpole's approach to dealing with natural climate change denialism by Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, England. It's a failure, because he just uses mainstream propaganda tactics, but without the groupthink backing of a vast grass roots funding and chanting organization like the green Marxist hippies, and that is harmful. It is like trying to deal with Nazi gas chambers by setting up rival gas chambers; you drag yourself down to their level (Britain did in fact actually gas Adolf Hitler on 14 October 1918, at Ypres Salient in Belgium, but in violent conflict and after Germany started gas warfare, not cold blooded gas chamber genocide). For example, Dr Beckmann writes on page 15 ignoring Sir Joseph Rotblat and Frank Barnaby (an AWRE health physicist who measured gamma radiation fallout doses in different parts of a dummy exposed to real fallout at Maralinga in 1956):
"Among nuclear scientists, there is only a handful of critics of nuclear power. Best known among them is Henry W. Kendall of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is active in the Union of Concerned Scientists. Kendall, who still nurses an old grudge against the AEC [US Atomic Energy Commission, which was responsible for nuclear testing], now acts as an adviser to Ralph Nader ... The typical 'distinguished scientist' opposing nuclear power, sometimes a Nobel Prize winner [the Matthew Effect again, why continue to endlessly laud rich arrogant egotistic winners of prizes awarded by undemocratic secretive committees which distribute warmongering profits from a man who supplied explosive to BOTH SIDES in the blood thirsty Crimean War?], is a man of quite different ilk. He ... has a penchant for embracing political causes. Linus Pauling, for example ... is known to the general public mainly for his escapades such as posing as a one man picket in front of the White House to protest the Vietnam War. His proposed cure for the common cold ... has recently been disproved [a fact he never accepted despite his lack of evidence for his claims, which proving his bigotry and pesudoscience, and his failure to correctly interpret the structure of DNA from diffraction x rays in 1953] ... Barry Commoner is ... better known to the public as a doomsday prophet, an opponent of economic growth, an advocate of nationalizing the railroads and energy ... who has recently endorsed Marxist economics (The New Yorker, 'Energy', 16 February 1976). ... Ehrlich, Tamplin or Goffman ... seem to have tried for a quicker way to glory, and they now specialize in horror stories that are reprinted in Sunday supplements to scare the gullible. The Science fiction produced by Tamplin, Goffman, Sternglass and others has been refuted many times ..."
Dr Petr Beckmann, PhD, DSc, Fellow of the IEEE, was an engineer born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, behind the Iron Curtain, where he obtained both his PhD and his DSc doctorates, worked for the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences until 1963, then defected to the West during a "visit" to the University of Colorado. I think this is why his 1976 book, "Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear", is such a shambles. It has an Iron Curtain-type muddled feel to the presentation of facts, that resonates very badly, even with the unprejudiced!
On page 62 he writes:
"Nuclear critics have spent much time disputing the existence of a [radiation effects]threshold. For example, Gofman and Tamplin, in their grotesquely biased book POISONED POWER, devote much space to arguing (but presenting no evidence) against it."
On page 59, he points out that even back in 1976 long term radiation effects WERE known from Hiroshima and Nagasaki effects data compared to a matched control group:
"There are 24,000 Japanese who were exposed to an average of about 130 rems [note that 1 rem = 1 cSv or centisievert, which is close to 1 R in self-shielded deep tissue or bone marrow or an unshielded air exposure of about 1.5 R]in the two bomb explosions in 1945 ... 15,000 people in Great Britain were exposed to heavy doses of X-rays (almost 400 rems) in treating arthritis ... thousands of miners inhaled radon ... some of them received doses to the lungs approaching 5000 rems. Between 1915 and 1935 there were 775 American women employed in painting radium ... they used to lick their brushes to point them ... probability of dying of cancer for the average American stands at 16.8% ..."
The book consists mostly of polemic and reprints of scare mongering newspaper and Reader's Digest anti nuclear propaganda, with arrows added to point out lies.
For example, in his ironically titled (dry humour) chapter "WE ALMOST LOST OUR MARBLES!", he reprints in facsimile (presumably using the "fair use for critical review" clause in copyright laws) the Reader's Digest anti nuclear propaganda article reviewing a boon by journalist John G. Fuller (author of bestselling books: "Exeter, the interrupted journey", "The Day of St Anthony's Fire", "Fever!", and "200,000,000 Guinea Pigs"), "We almost lost Detroit". The arrows points out the lies that nuclear reactors are really just Hiroshima, killing "hundreds of thousands of human beings." (Anyone critical of lies was simply ignored as "complacent".)
On page 76, he complains:
"Fuller's book [We Almost Lost Detroit] was put out by Reader's Digest press with an advertising budget of $30,000. And it does its job. The title alone will scare many ... the New York Times Book Review of November 30, 1975, plugged the book with a review claiming that it 'is a sobering and necessary reminder that democracy has yet to control technology. ... They knew what the public did not - a mistake could trigger a nuclear explosion'."
Dr Petr Beckmann's 1976 book "Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear" on page 181 he claims that a motive behind the anti-nuclear scientists is:
"... an affluent elite afraid that affluence of everybody could engulf them. Some of the privileges of these upper-class elitists have been lost long ago and forever: the privilege of having colored servants, for example."
I just can't believe this kind of communist propaganda being used FOR nuclear power. Beckmann makes no effort to disguise his motive. He wants cheap nuclear power to equalize society, eliminating differences in wealth to eliminate elitism; equality.
Only a committed communist could write like this. Sadly, he was biased against free enterprise by his communist Iron Curtain upbringing, even though he hated the corrupted USSR hypocrites. As the failure of the USSR in the 80s proved, you need capitalism to have a thriving economy, to motivate free enterprise, which improves the lot for everyone in the world as wealth diffuses outwards. Socialism chains free enterprise; communism kills it. He ends his book on page 182 with the follow words (which in the last sentences are in tune with John Stuart Mill's On Liberty):
"The glory of the arts and sciences in antiquity was buried for a thousand years by a doctrinaire and intolerant institution - the medieval Church [which was really not too different to today's Islamic State, when you consider for example the Spanish Inquisition's torture chamber equipment and massacres in the name of God] - that considered science the work of the devil. For a thousand years, Western civilization was stifled in debilitating ignorance, poverty and backwardness. It was held captive by an institution that had not come to power by the sword. It had merely acquired for itself a monopoly on learning and the dissemination of information."
I prefer to discuss nuclear reactor safety, to political motivation.
You've shown in this post (implied by survival of steel towers directly under Nevada tests, and by concrete in Hiroshima, Bikini Atoll, Eniwetok, etc.) and previous posts about Fukushima reactor safety that the thick steel reactor containment vessel and concrete containment building of a nuclear reactor are proof against close-in cratering effects of nuclear weapon explosions. You explained in a previous post that cratering is easy in pacific coral which is porous and collapses to dust at low pressures, whereas hard rock is equivalent to reinforced concrete and produces very small craters even for high yields. The big rocks in the crater never get broken down to dust, they never get sucked up to form fallout. Only the dust does. Similarly, unless an earth penetrator warhead actually hits the small steel reactor core straight on, it won't break it up. Look at the graph in this post about how little steel is ablated at different distances from the fireball in 1955 Nevada test MET. Even if some reactor debris leaks out in the nuclear weapon strike, very little of the activity of the reactor is volatile xenon, krypton, and iodine due to their generally fast decay rates and thus the reactor's preferential accumulation of long lived refractory decay chain products like cesium, strontium, plutonium. These have fairly high boiling points so they tend to end up condensing fast as the fireball cools, on to large rocks which remain in the reactor confines. Little escapes far. It is a lie to assume that 100% of the reactor contents will add to fallout in a nuclear attack on a nuclear reactor, contrary to CND propaganda. Metal X-ray ablation data in the 1972 declassified "Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons" verifies the 1955 MET test data! Sure, a nuclear bomb can make a crater in dry soil, but the effects are exaggerated if you think that the entire crater volume is vaporized or even pulverized. As cratering data show, the strength of the pre-blast soil is a major factor in determining crater size, so there are severe limits. "In his "Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear", chapter 7, "Terrorism and Sabotage" Petr Beckmann makes a similar point, page 137-138:
"... Ralph Nader ... now claims that it is possible for a saboteur to 'blow up a plant with sophisticated weaponry from a hilltop ... rupture the entire pressure vessel' (Ralph Nader on PBS, WETA-TV, Washington, D.C., 25 February 1975) ... The containment building is made of concrete 3.5 feet thick, with steel reinforcement ... That makes the walls much stronger than, for example, the roofs of the German submarine bases on the French Atlantic coast, which were bombed round the clock by the allied air forces with [multi ton TNT] 'blockbuster' bombs, but withstood even direct hits. ... the rest is sheer propaganda. Plutonium is primarily an alpha emitter, which means that its radiation is absorbed in the air after a few inches, and a sheet of paper is sufficient to shield oneself against its radiation at close quarters. It is far from being the most toxic substance known to man. When eaten or absorbed in the blood stream, it is ten times less toxic than lead arsenate and hundreds of thousands of times less toxic than ... diptheria or botulism toxin [this is called "botox" in marketing for cosmetics, which has an LD50 or 50% lethal dose in humans of 1–2 ng/kg when safely injected into the faces of the rich anti-nuclear propaganda folks to avert wrinkles, or when eaten, or of 10–13 ng/kg when inhaled]. Caffeine, some of which you probably had this morning in your coffee, is only 10 times less toxic than plutonium. (Relative toxicity is measured by comparing the weights for 50% lethal doses given to the same type of mammal ...)."
My copy of Beckmann's Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear is the fourth reprint from August 1977. The copyright page states:
First printing July 1976
Second printing September 1976
Third printing January 1977
Fourth printing August 1977
I think the worst statement it makes is on page 20, asking a "rhetorical" question:
"The Friend of the Earth, Ralph Nader, and the other anti-nuclear crusaders have been given the facts often enough; the facts that show non-nuclear methods of power generation to be more dangerous to human health and lives. They have never seriously disputed the point; they have merely ignored it. What kind of morality is it that keeps the public death toll unnecessarily high? What kind of ethics is it that sacrifices human lives?"
The straightforward answer is: the same "ethics" as the Marxist ethics that enabled Stalin to murder 20-40 million Ukrainians and others in the 1930s collectivization farming scheme, the same "ethics" that enabled Medical Nobel Laureate Dr Alexis Carrel to be a help in the Nazi gassing of millions of human beings for pseudoscientific eugenics. The same "ethics" of today's anti-neutron bomb thugs.
That's the answer.
On page 56, Beckmann points out that soil and cosmic background radiation varies from just 53 millirems/year in Dallas, Texas, to 107-157 in the high altitude city of Denver, Colorado, since cosmic radiation is 35 millirem/year at sea level, and roughly doubles with each mile of increasing altitude (due to reduced air shielding from outer space radiation). On the same page, he adds that thorium rich monazite sands in southern India and parts of Brazil give doses up to 1,500 millirem/year, a chest x-ray gives 50 millirem/year and a coast-to-coast jet flight over America gives 5 millirem. Natural potassium 40 in fruit like bananas and in muscle (protein, meat) mean that we eat naturally radioactive food, giving us at least 20 millirem/year. These doses of radiation are way higher than those from nuclear test fallout and nuclear reactor leaks, so why on earth aren't the anti nuclear people more concerned about the bigger problem (natural radiation exposures, which can be reduced dramatically by simple actions like avoiding aircraft, eating less fruit, avoiding mountains and hills, keeping away from thorium rich beach sand)? Why do they ignore the easy-to-reduce natural radiation, and rudely, ignorantly yak on about the smaller radiation contribution from industry? Why ignore the smelly elephant in the room and complain about burping baby? It's obvious, of course.
They're not interested in radiation, civil defense, or nuclear war. They are interested in money, fame, and maybe some kind of utopian politics of groupthink, like having groupies and winning prizes for having good intentions, such as enabling millions to die from conventional war and other real threats, which they ignore.
Pete Beckmann's "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear" is anti-elitism but that does not make him a pro-communist economy wrecker. Please let me explain this.
He quotes Midge Decter and Professor E. N. Luttwak speeches in the July 1975 issue of "Commentary" which contains the post-Vietnam Symposium on the subject "Has America Lost Its Nerve?":
Midge Decter, Commentary, July 1975:
"The ruling elites [after failure in Vietnam, after Watergate, after emerging Russian superpower in the arms race] no longer have the conviction that the system, the civilization, is good and no longer wish to assume the responsibility of defending and cherishing it [well, frankly, the same can be said of the public relations offices of nuclear power and nuclear deterrence, who are also running scared] ... I can't remember when I last heard ... a genuinely kind word about the system ... they are spoiled rotten and cosmically greedy ... Anything less than an uninterrupted flow of success, accompanied by an uninterrupted round of applause, they call evil. They have, blessed Americans, forgotten what evil is."
Professor E. N. Luttwak, Commentary, July 1975:
"DDT, undoubtedly the greatest life-giving discovery [by getting rid of malarial and yellow fever mosquitoes and other disease carrying critters killing many millions in Africa, Asia and South America, impeding the will to succeed in farming these areas] is now a dirty word ... the hungry are violently deplored, as if these were not the inescapable consequences of these core attitudes."
On pages 175-178 of The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, 1976, Pete Beckmann develops his explanation of anti-nuclear motives from those particular comments:
"What possible self-interest could there be in opposing the cleanest, safest, and cheapest kind of electric power? What possible self-interest could there be in opposing economic growth in general? Plenty. perhaps the clearest indication is given by the population controllers ... The credo of the population controllers is simple: 'There are too many of you others.' ... They do not want to share their privileges ... The privilege of being fawned over as the people who set the tone. The privilege of esteem accorded to those who drivel rather than produce.
"The privilege of living the good life of being sensitive, aware, concerned, involved and relevant, without being tainted by 'materialistic' subjects such as physics, chemistry, engineering, business ... Thirty five percent of American youth, an unparalleled proportion anywhere or at any time, go to college. ... No wonder the Penthouse Proletariat is frustrated. ... Who crowded the beaches with beer drinking steel workers? Who made cars and gasoline so cheap that an entire nation was put on wheels? What gave people electricity at the laughable price of a nickel a kilowatt hour? ... Capitalism; science; technology. Stop it! ... I want it all to myself. ...
"A privilege shared with everybody is no longer a privilegium or priva lex (private law); it becomes lex publica. ... I am talking of the upper middle class intellectuals who lust after esteem and influence more ferociously than any robber baron ever lusted after money [think about the motivation of your leader David Cameron and his Eton schooling system which prepared him to lead like so many old Etonians before him; do you really believe his Godly claims, or is he an egotist?] ...
"Would people give up fire and the wheel because both were, at times, used as instruments of torture? [A better analogy is campaigning for giving up chlorination of swimming pools, simply because chlorine was the "fearful" gas used in the first big "WMD" gas attack at Ypres in April 1915 by the Germans. Anything that is totally safe to bacteria is likely to be totally safe to humans, too, so that is delusion.] Could Ralph Nader make them give up electricity, by waging a psychological campaign that associates 'electric' with 'chair' ...
"Of course the endangered class does not realize what their true motivation is. Of course they kid each other, and above all themselves, that they are motivated exclusively by legitimate humane concerns. ... To question the party line as decreed by the Politbureau [Moscow] is to be an enemy of the people, claim the Soviets ... But once you discard what is claimed ... and instead watch the thrust of the action and its effects ... the technophobia, the corporation baiting ... the fight against economic growth, the maligning of the profit motive, the professed hatred of 'materialistic' values, the totalitarian trends ... all fall into place. They are the actions of the somebodies who dread becoming nobodies."
I've just noticed that on page 149, Dr Beckmann points out that "an oil supertanker stores the energy of a two-megaton hydrogen bomb," and on page 180 he explains why the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists's subscribers are self indulgent elitists:
"Median family income [for Bulletin of Atomic Scientist subscribers] fell in the top 5% range of all U.S. households."
The readers of the Bulletin are deluded, narcissistic elitists like the political ruling class, insulated from the problems of the majority, the 95% they look down on, by wealth and bigotry.
The top five percent who subscribe to the bulletin probably are more likely to have parents and friends who are rich lawyers and, unlike the majority of the other 95% of the population, can afford to pay £10 a kilowatt hour for "clean, moral" energy generated by inferior race slaves, whipped into running on generator treadmills.
Similarly, they are rich enough that they can emigrate to Australia when, through their anti deterrence propaganda, Russia takes over America and Western Europe.
RE: Rich lawyers. beware that 50% of the U.S. Congress are rich lawyers so you may get sued for telling the truth. Nuclear truth is soon to be made illegal, you know
I've just been re-reading Dr Petr Beckmann's "The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear", and it is very poorly organized and edited (probably in part because he had to do it himself, without the big editorial teams of major anti-nuclear publishing houses and mags like New Yorker, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Scientific American, New Scientist, et al.).
However, it does contain some more nuggets that are worth mentioning. On page 139, Beckmann points out that although anti-nuclear propaganda claims that a few ounces of plutonium in the air will wipe out humanity, THREE TONS of plutonium was put into the air by nuclear testing, WITHOUT any of the tragedies of non nuclear power like the 3,900 deaths in London during a single week in December 1952 due to coal smog, sulphur dioxide from Battersea coal power station and numerous home fires, etc. I can't help recalling the end of conscription due to the H bomb deterrence in 1960. People celebrated the first nuclear reactor in Britain as a life saver. No nuclear disaster has ever produced 3,900 deaths in a single week.
The lie that a small amount of something very toxic "can" cause numerous deaths is debunked on that page by Beckmann's somewhat flippant remark that a single pin, inserted into heart, can in principle wipe out the whole of humanity.
Again, I prefer the analogy of the chlorination of tap water at water treatment plants, or swimming pools. 'Danger: this chlorine was the first "Weapon of Mass Destruction" when the Germans released it on Britain at Ypres, 22 April 1915. It's evil. How can we use terrible chlorine to keep our water safe to drink, when the SAME stuff killed so many? How IGNORANT of the horrors of people suffering crippling long term pneumonia risks and lung lessons due to the hydrochloric acid formed in lung fluid by inhaled chlorine? If only we can get educational message, unhindered by any 'technical trivial' about doses or dose rates needed for net benefit versus net injury, we can rejoice in being awarded Nobel Peace Prizes for SAVING HUMANITY FROM EVIL CHLORINE, one of the most deadly gases as proved at Ypres."
Here is a useful quote Beckmann gives on this very topic of lying "overkill" -
Dr R. Philip Hammond, "Nuclear Power Risks", American Scientist [NOT to be confused with the left wing, more famous and anti-nuclear James Newman lawyer propaganda monologue, the Scientific American], volume 62, pages 155-160 (1974):
"Stating that these materials are present in a reactor ... is scaremongering. It is equivalent to saying that the chlorine gas stored at the city waterworks and swimming pools is sufficient to poison everybody in the city 8,726 times."
On page 140, Dr Beckmann disproves the myth that Caldicott star turns are genuine heroic evil-fighting Super Woman style scientists who are being horribly abused by fact talkers like me, and are suffering for truth. Rather the opposite:
"... Nazis branded Einstein's theory a 'Jewish hoax,' ... the genuine scientist who challenges conventional wisdom faces the hostility of the world that does not like to have its sacred cows slaughtered. Galileo had to revoke his statements under threat ... of torture. Giordano Bruno was burned ... Einstein was driven into exile together with many non-Jewish scientists ... But Gofman, Tamplin, and Co. are in the very opposite position. Today it is the genuine and hardworking scientist whom much of the world regards as some kind of Dr Frankenstein ... Sternglasses ... have access to the lavish funds of the various environmental foundations ... travel the lucrative lecture circuit, they bask in the publicity of the mass media ... while posing as prophets, martyrs and saviors rejected by a callous, profit greedy establishment. They have, in short, discovered a short-cut to the glory that they failed to reach by conscientious and responsible hard work."
Amen to that.
On page 139 he explains:
"Statements of this type are made by the Naders, Koupals and Comeys, political propagandarists ... But what about radiologists like Sternglass, Gleesaman, Gofman, Tamplin and Cochran? The only thing notable about these ex-scientists is that they get a lot of publicity every time they make one of their wild charges. They have been refuted, time and again, by scientific committees and professional organizations [so what, why are groupthink committees and money making professions unions so awed, what matters in science should be facts, not votes or consensus] ... but these rejections ... do not make the news."
Ultimately, the problem is due to the guy on the street finding technical scientific data boring or time wasting in its present form. The biggest selling newspapers cater to that guy to some extent, although there is also a pollution of the media by humanities graduates brainwashed in communist ideology by professors like AJP Taylor or science graduates brainwashed in anti-civil defense, anti-nuclear war ideology by HA Bethe or the students of the students of these people, who become lecturers, etc.
The BBC pension fund managers fund the Green environmentalists by investing BBC pension pots in them. Sure this explains the official policy of the BBC's Roger Harrabin to broadcast only the words of Putin and Satan on the denial of natural climate change, but be careful. The BBC have enormous legal teams to stamp out and suppress or ignore all the true news. If you criticise them, the amount of censorship they give you will increase from 100% to infinity. Let that be a lesson to you! ;-)
I note, without comment, that Dr Alex W. now seems to have deleted the stuff about his New Yorker "bucket list".
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-33735038
2 August 2015 Last updated at 23:06 BST
BBC finally admits: "The tram that survived the Hiroshima bomb. One of the few remaining trams which survived the Hiroshima bomb has been restored to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the attack. ... After the blast, the city's tram system was back up and running in only three days. The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes takes a trip on the iconic tram through Hiroshima."
However, the BBC still manages to give the usual myths about thousands of degrees raging, vaporizing everything except the tram. In fact, the heat flash didn't last long enough to heat up more than a 0.1 mm thickness of material at ground zero to such temperatures; the usual nuclear surface charring effect that creates a dark smoke screen which protects the underlying material. You can put your hand into an oven at 250 C for a few seconds, without your hand being raised to 250 C. It takes TIME for heat to diffuse into any object, and you don't have time for that thermal diffusion heating with a rapidly radiating (cooling) nuclear fireball (e.g., see chapter 9 of the the 1972 DNA EM-1, "Capabilities of nuclear weapons" for the temperature rises produced in any material, and the tiny "skin depth" they apply to).
The BBC also repeats the usual radiation myths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, making no discrimination between fallout and initial flash radiation, or between short term and delayed effects. It's duty is to obfuscate, to make unclear. Not to inform or provide fact based news that enlightens and refutes myths. It's just politically biased propaganda. For further debunking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki biased propaganda by delusioned "scientists" who exploit suffering with myths, please see:
http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/of-sample-of-1881-burns-cases-in.html
Censored comment from Alex's blog Nuclear Secrecy:
"...created such terrible means of doing violence to ourselves, to the extremes of potential extinction?"
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/07/17/now-we-are-all-sons-of-bitches/#comment-227379
In 1937, people were saying that about gas, based on ignoring gas masks and going indoors to keep liquids off skin, resulting in appeasement and WWII, in which the main gas used was hydrogen cyanide, in gas chambers not "scary" bombs. So I disagree with your use of the word "violence". But since anything factual is easily dismissed as rude, maybe I should not read the Richard Rhodes style polemics that ignore the effect on modern buildings and air raid shelters on casualties. On a more positive note, the original Trinity fallout pattern is interesting, so thank you for posting that.
Nigel Cook
He also censored a comment politely requesting a source for his posting of a fallout pattern from the Trinity explosion.
The problem with this sort of censorship by Alex is that it misinforms his readers into believing that 100% of his readership are basically in agreement with him.
Censorship of criticism shows an agenda of hatred towards truth and genuine information. It doesn't surprise me much. His blog's name "Nuclear Secrecy" is really good when you interpret it in terms of his own agenda of keeping the nuclear facts secret and publishing emotional misinformation about weapons effects, like Nukemap. So at least, in some sense, he is being "honest".
The problem with his offense at me describing, on my blog, untruth tellers as "liars" and radiation/nuclear weapons effects obfuscators as scare mongering "drivel" writers, is that it would force me to play the game by the rules of the wicked, and slow down public perception of the facts.
Suppose you discover that Hitler, for example, is a pseudoscientific quack eugenicist. You're banned from using words like "liar" or "drivel" to describe Mein Kampf, by law-makers like "Godwin". So you go in for polite criticisms. We British have an old saying:
"Soft words butter no turnips."
Hitler's Nazis DID in fact employ a German adage to suppress "rudeness":
"Harte Worte machen Wunden" (Harsh words make wounds).
So now we know what Alex's agenda is. We should be thankful he enlightened us.
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