1929 photo of Dr Samuel Glasstone for a Leeds Mercury newspaper love story (plus Glasstone's WWI TNT effects experience, and Russian translations of Glasstone and classified Russian nuclear weapons manuals)

For an amusing break from news of the North Korean Missile Crisis, have a look at the photo story newspaper clipping from The Leeds Mercury 15 February 1929 (the day after Valentine's Day).

Samuel Glasstone's photo was published for a love story on page 4 of The Leeds Mercury newspaper, England, Friday 15 February 1929 (newspaper clipping copyright Johnston Press plc, c/o British Newspaper Archive; however the actual photographs are not necessarily the copyright of the publisher).

I found this amusing article while searching for another photo of Glasstone (the one on a blog post in 2006 is from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's 1967 third edition of Sourcebook on Atomic Energy).  As we noted in the 2006 blog post about Glasstone and Dolan, Glasstone was a chemistry lecturer at Sheffield University and in May 1928 gave a series of five BBC radio broadcasts on "chemistry in daily life", which formed the basis for his first book, published in 1929.

Violette Collingwood, who Glasstone married, illustrated that first book, and also helped him to edit the classified 1950 (Korean War era) book on Radiological Defense, Volume II as Walmer E. Strope describes in detail in his Autobiography of a Nerd (chapter 9, page 115): "In the summer of 1950, as the Marines were desperately trying to halt the North’s invasion of South Korea, we received word from AFSWP that Samuel Glasstone would be arriving to accomplish the final editing of RD2. ... Glasstone arrived but not by himself. He had his wife with him. She, it turned out, did not come to keep house for Sam. She was his help-meet at work; not a secretary, mind you, but a full-fledged partner. Fortunately, the office I had reserved for Glasstone was large enough for the Glasstones. They sat across from each other at a library table and passed our drafts back and forth."

(Note that extracts from the Glasstone's edited Radiological Defense volume 2, The Principles of Military Defense Against Atomic Weapons, can be found here.)

In addition, she also helped Glasstone with the editing of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons 1957 (see Glasstone's 1 February 1957 letter to Colonel Dent L. Lay of the AFSWP).

According to the amusing 15 February 1929 newspaper article, Glasstone had spotted a photo of botany student Collingwood exhibited at a London studio:

"The portrait of Miss Collingwood is the one exhibited in a London studio, which so attracted Dr Glasstone that he sought an introduction to the lady.  As a result of the meeting they are to be married in June."

Update (26 September 2017): more about Samuel Glasstone

There is an interesting article about Samuel Glasstone on page 4 of the 14 May 1928 Sheffield Daily Telegraph which explains that he was engaged at Brunner Mond on chemistry research during World War I, including at Silvertown, where the Brunner Mond TNT factory blew up:

The Brunner Mond munitions plant at Silvertown where Glasstone worked during the war (in the East End of London) suffered a devastating explosion of 50 tons of TNT on 19 January 1917, destroying 900 houses, killing 73 people, injuring nearly 500, and causing damage to 70,000 homes (these self-goal accidental war effects were a classified secret until 1950, unsurprisingly):

Above: the Silvertown explosion hit London’s Royal Docks in the East End of London on January 19, 1917.

"Brunner Mond had established a factory at Crescent Wharf in 1893 to manufacture soda. Two years into the First World War, the Army was facing a crippling shell shortage. The War Office decided to use the factory’s surplus capacity to purify TNT from 1915 onwards, despite opposition from Brunner Mond and the fact that the factory was in a highly populated area. Their fears became a reality at 6.52pm on January 19 when a fire in the melt-pot room caused an explosion of 50 tonnes of TNT. ... streets of houses were destroyed in what is still regarded as the biggest explosion in the history of London. Fires raged in the nearby flour mill and on ships in the dock. ... Among the dead was Dr Andreas Angel, an Oxford professor doing voluntary war work as the plant’s chief chemist. He was attempting to help put out the fire when the explosion happened." - http://www.londonsroyaldocks.com/forgotten-stories-1917-silvertown-explosion-part-one/

"Historian Graham Hill, who co-wrote with Howard Bloch The Silvertown Explosion: London 1917, said: “It was said that by the turn of the century every household in the country owned or had at least one product that had come from Silvertown.” Said Graham: “The Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, said two years before the explosion: ‘Even after utilising every workshop and factory capable of turning out munitions, we found that output would be inadequate unless we supplemented our resources by setting up emergency buildings.’” Despite warnings from Brunner Mond’s chief chemist at the time, Dr Francis Arthur Freeth, that there would be a catastrophe sooner or later, the Ministry of Munitions believed it was worth taking the risk and the factory began TNT production in September 1915." - http://www.londonsroyaldocks.com/forgotten-stories-1917-silvertown-explosion-part-two/ 

UPDATE (4 November 2017): Russian edition of Samuel Glasstone's 1962 revision of the Effects of Nuclear Weapons, and some classified Russian manuals on nuclear weapons capabilities and effects

ABOVE: Russia's translation of the 1962 edition of Samuel Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons (ENW), now on Internet Archive with other related Russian materials from 1960-2014, linked here.  There are some interesting differences to the original American Department of Defense book: Russia excluded the appendix listing all nuclear weapons tests (although it included the other two appendices about nuclear weapons safety and the detection of nuclear tests), and it also removed the "bibliographies" at the end of each chapter in the 1962 version (in fact, what Glasstone called "bibliographies" were actually just further reading lists, since when you get and read the documents he lists you find very little of it is used in ENW, and there is a lot of material in ENW for which you can find no source whatever in his "bibliographies"!).  The Russians have also changed all the graphs from the original American imperial units of pressure, psi, to metric units.

ABOVE: Russian nuclear weapons manual from 1960 (extracts of some vital pages are linked in Internet Archive here, with the full book linked here).  Russia's own nuclear weapons effects manuals contained critical mass curves and illustrations of the use of smoke trails laid by rockets just prior to nuclear tests, to allow the path of the Mach stem to be filmed (the smoke is blown by the blast winds when the shock front arrives, but if the camera is some distance away you also get an optical detection of the precise location of the blast since the higher density air in the shock front refracts light and causes the illusion of a "break" in the rocket trains, akin to looking at a spoon in a glass of water from above at a slanted angle!).

ABOVE: Russian military nuclear warfare manual published in 1963, the year after the Cuban missile crisis, How to operate in the conditions of application of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapon (manual to soldier and sailor), by the USSR's Department of Defense, Moscow.  It is 127 x 198 mm in size, with 99 illustrations and 128 pages.  Sold to us by an ebayer in Kiev, Ukraine.  (Since most of the information is in illustrations, only minimal use of an English-Russian dictionary is required. For more technical Russian nuclear weapons documents, the situation is similar, since the mathematics and graphs display the data as plain as day regardless of language.)

ABOVE: a 1974 USSR warning poster on the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effect from nuclear explosions.  In the same year, 1974, the USSR published a 234 pages long hardback book on the EMP, consisting of Russian translations of extracts from American research reports and journal articles on various aspects of the EMP (below). It is interesting that the EMP report extracts were edited, as for Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons, to bring out the most relevant information, deliberately excluding the lengthy bibliographies and irrelevant waffle that leads nowhere and is of no help (typically about half the text of the American reports).

ABOVE: the 1974 USSR Russian language 234 page long hardback book of extracts from American reports on the EMP covers all mechanisms of EMP, and interestingly is focused on good approximations for analytical calculations of the EMP strength.  For example, as shown in Equation 57 on page 72 (above right), for approximate calculations of the maximum EMP field strengths from the E1 or magnetic dipole mechanism in high altitude bursts, the calculation can be divided into two parts: the Compton current contribution (the non-attenuated field is proportional to the Compton current integrated along the radial line from burst to observer in retarded time), which is then multiplied by the exponential attenuation factor due to the conductivity of the air (the exponent contains the air conductivity integrated over distance in retarded time).  



As a result of the Ukrainian civil war, Ukraine having been a USSR nuclear weapons site during the Cold War, some in Ukraine have been selling Russian nuclear weapons literature on ebay. Finding, translating and correlating the information with Russian internet hosted military sites has led to a complete analysis of what Russia knows on nuclear weapons effects, particularly Russian military nuclear weapons effects on tanks, personnel, etc.  This is a big improvement on the older analysis of Russian nuclear and Russian public civil defence information, which was based on Western information such as Glasstone's American Effects of Nuclear Weapons (all editions of which were translated into Russian, as an unclassified general public information book).  The most detailed Russian information is a limited, copy-numbered distribution (officers only): http://militera.lib.ru/manuals/up_spec-podgotovka-inzh-voisk/index.html (English translation here):

Educational literature

Group of authors

Nuclear weapon. A Manual for Officers

---

The website "Military literature": militera.lib.ru

Edition: Nuclear weapons. A Manual for officers. - Moscow: Military Publishing, 1987.

Book on the site: http://militera.lib.ru/manuals/up_nuclear-weapon/index.html
Nuclear weapon. Manual for officers / Fourth edition, revised and enlarged. - Moscow: Military Publishing, 1987. - 168 p.

Annotation of the publishing house: This Handbook is a revised edition of the manual "Nuclear Weapons", published in 1969. The new edition specifies the characteristics of the striking effect of nuclear explosions on personnel search, armament, military equipment and other objects. The focus of the manual is on the detrimental effect of ground and air nuclear explosions. Questions related to the protection of troops from nuclear weapons and the assessment of the results of nuclear explosions are excluded from the Manual, since they are devoted to published manuals and handbooks. The manual is intended for officers and warrant officers of all types of the Armed Forces, as well as for cadets of military schools.

This book, Nuclear Weapons - A Manual for Officers, is the Russian equivalent not of Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons, therefore, but rather of Philip J. Dolan's Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons.  It is vitally important to read and study, because it shows just what the Russians were planning to do with their nuclear weapons if war broke out.  It contains extensive tables of data on the capabilities of nuclear weapons blast and initial nuclear radiation against a wide variety of military targets, aircraft, tanks and other military vehicles, with nuclear test photos of damage to these targets to help the user understand the tabulated information.  Unlike the extremely long American manual, the Russian book is relatively more concise, compressing nuclear test data into tables and graphs rather than trying to formulate theoretical models and then testing their predictions against test data (the preferred American analysis method, at least since the 1972 edition of US Effects Manual EM-1). Moreover, the earlier editions of Nuclear Weapons - A Manual for Officers, are much longer and contain photos of damaged Russian military equipment at Russian nuclear weapons tests.  The best edition is the 328 pages long 1961 edition, crammed with photos of damage caused by the 1950s Russian nuclear weapons test programme prior to the 1958 moratorium. (We will compare the 1961 and 1987 editions in detail in an update below, later in this post, when time permits.)

Russian classified Nuclear Weapons Effects Publications and the East-West Wiki schism over the Swan device design

The civil war between pro-Westerners in the Western parts of Ukraine, and generally pro-Russian immigrants in the East (near the largely imaginary border between Russia and Ukraine) has led some Ukrainians selling off cold war era (1955-1987) Russian military nuclear weapons effects manuals, printed with "Official Use Only" and serial number in the top right of the outer cover and title pages.  These are worth a blog post since they are the Russian equivalent to the classified American Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Weapons Employment manuals.  Formerly we only had access to unclassified Russian publications, mainly Russian civil defence (rather than military defence) manuals, the nuclear effects data in which was mostly unclassified Western literature.

Before we get into the details, I want to draw attention to a key distinction between the Russian language and English language Wikipedia sites on Nuclear Weapons: they have differing designs shown for the American 1956 Swan nuclear weapon (tested that year as the 15 kt Redwing Inca shot).  This is of importance because Swan was a very special miniaturised warhead of use in tactical weapons and also as the fission (primary) stage in thermonuclear weapons.

According to the Russian Nuclear Weapons Wikipedia article (but not the American one), the name Swan appears to reflect the radial symmetry of the device itself, which is one point implosion (the American article claims it is two point implosion) as follows:

The Swan fission implosion design is allegedly a heart-shaped, one-point implosion fission weapon, with a radial cross-section resembling the curve of the neck and head of swan, according to animation on the Russian Wiki article, "Nuclear Weapons".  This differs substantially from the two-point Swan design on the English "Nuclear Weapons" Wikipedia article!  There is a special lens system of explosives: the outer shell which ignites is a fast-burning explosive like TNT, whereas the inner region of the heart shaped shell is filled with slower burning explosive, so that the compressive implosion wave is shaped to converge around the fissile core, despite the implosion having been initiated at one point only!  The Swan device was successfully tested in 1956 as the 15.2 kt Redwing-Inca shot, which notes that Swan was one-point safe (which clearly is not strictly true for the Russian one-point implosion Swan design, the whole point of which depends on a single point of high explosive initiation!).  However, the Russian article's one-point implosion Swan illustration is an ingenious design and if the "one point implosion" at the base of the heart was shielded/protected from accidental ignition (such as by fireproof impact-absorbers), then the remainder of it would be one-point safe.  While the outer heart-shaped design of the high explosive system may make sense, note that the design above has the fissile core system placed far too close to the top of the heart: there is too little thickness of explosive above it (or to the right of the core in the lower sequence of implosion images) to produce uniform compression.  The Russian graphic is unreliable for this reason.  You can get a single detonator one-point implosion to work with a heart shaped TNT charge, but you need the fissile material to be located closer to the centre (so that it receives similar implosive impulses from all sides, at the same time!).  The mixture of crazy ingenuity, and slip shod inattention to important details, permeates a great deal of Russian nuclear weapons information, and we will encounter further examples of this.  Again, I'm not claiming that the Russian illustration of the Swan device is in any way accurate or has any connection to the actual Swan design; I'm merely commenting on an interesting difference between Russian and American ideas.

Excerpt from a 1974 USSR nuclear weapons design poster showing critical masses under different conditions.

1974 USSR nuclear weapons effects poster depicting capabilities of a 1 megaton explosion.

USSR troops train for nuclear weapons fallout monitoring and decontamination. Unlike America and Britain, which had separate Radiac survey meters (meters with the ionisation chamber or miniature geiger counter tube in the main boxes for measuring 0.1-300 R/hour gamma dose rates, for use in the first 2 weeks after an explosion) and contamination meters with probes on cables (for use during decontamination more than 2 weeks after an explosion, measuring dose rates below 500 mR/hour), the Russians instead used a single instrument which covers the entire range of dose rates by using multiple geiger tubes in the probe unit.  

Russians practice duck and cover against nuclear explosions despite their Marxist overseas propaganda units hypocritically sneering at Westerners doing the same!

2014 official Russian Civil Defense Manual Extract: nothing fundamental has changed since the Cold War.  Compare Figure 1.8 on page 42 (above right) to the similar earlier illustration in this blog post from the the year 1960, based on 1950s Russian nuclear test data (linked here for your convenience) showing survival in deep tunnel shelters near ground zero and survival in good trenches close to ground zero!

13 November 2017 update: detailed review of the limited distribution 1961 and 1987 editions of the Russian effects data manual, Nuclear Weapon - A Manual for Officers

Russian MIG-15 fighter jets and tanks were exposed to nuclear tests.  Most of the content is military effects.  Note that invading forces, while actually on the move in offensive attacks and invasions, are highly vulnerable to nuclear weapons effects like neutrons and the wind sandstorm blast "precursor" for detonations above a dark sandy surface (they are more vulnerable than civilians in modern concrete buildings, who had a 50% survival rate at just 0.12 mile from ground zero in Hiroshima, according to Glasstone).  The opposite is true for troops in defensive dugouts, which are relatively safe from blast, heat and radiation.  Therefore, nuclear weapons are an effective defensive weapon that can stop invasions, of use by dug in troops to prevent an enemy invasion of a peaceful country.  They could have deterred the invasion of Belgium in 1914, the invasion of Poland in 1939, the invasion of Russia in 1941, of Afghanistan in 1979 and of Kuwait in 1992.  In short, they can deter precisely the kind of military invasions that resulted in all the world wars and major wars of history.

Ядерное оружие

 Пособие для офицеров

(Nuclear weapon 

Manual for officers)

Above: the 1961 Russian Nuclear Weapon - A Manual for Officers book contains an extensive collection of Russian nuclear test damage photos on all kinds of military equipment, fortifications, and some Russian type houses to illustrate the definitions of damage criteria in data tables which cover nuclear weapon yields of 1 kiloton to 300 kilotons. The book even includes a chapter on "Some issues of organizing and conducting military operations in the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons" which discusses the use of tactical nuclear weapons with coloured diagrams (below):

Use of tactical nuclear weapons with regards to offensive and defensive forces in the 1961 Russian restricted distribution book, Nuclear Weapons - A Manual for Officers.

Above: the 1961 Russian manual Nuclear Weapon - A Manual for Officers also includes vitally important data on the survival of field defense fortifications which are similar to improvised civil defense shelters and countermeasures, such as shallow pits for preventing blast wind displacement damage to vehicles, and wood pole and earth shelters, as well as the good old trench type shelters which prevented rapid knockout blows by high explosives in World War I.

1961 Russian Nuclear Weapon book: field fortifications damage distances chart in original colour: red is for 150 kilotons, green for 30 kilotons and blue for 8 kilotons yield.  (This is a photo.  The small scanned PDF extracts file is in greyscale.  Eventually, the entire 1961 manual will be scanned in original colour, but that will take time, and the extracts on Internet Archive will do for the present, as the data is also contained in tables.  The coloured diagrams are for quick, emergency use in a war.)

1961 Russian book colour illustration of the terrain effects on blast overpressures: if you are on a hill with a view of a nuclear explosion, the blast is reflected and there is an increase in overpressure (this is partly due to the conversion of dynamic pressure into overpressure, and partly the doubling of pressure that momentarily occurs as the reflected shock front reflects and collides with further incoming compressed air).  But if you are on the opposite side of the hill to the explosion, you get a reduced blast overpressure (compared to unobstructed terrain), due to diffraction (which is the opposite of reflection).

1961 Russian Nuclear Weapons book illustration of fallout overlap from 8 and 30 kiloton tests; note the downwind "hotspots" of 500 R/hour from each weapon.  This is based on research from original Russian nuclear test data.

1961 edition of the USSR Nuclear Weapon Manual for Officers military effects of tactical weapons A

1961 edition of the USSR Nuclear Weapon Manual for Officers military effects of tactical weapons B

1961 Russian Nuclear Weapons book poster-style illustrations of damage to military field equipment.  None of these full colour plates are reprinted in the much briefer 1987 edition of the manual, so it appears that they were colour photos of military posters included in the longer 1961 edition.  

Above: Comparison of the 1961 and 1987 editions of the USSR Nuclear Weapon Manual for Officers.  Both the 1961 and 1987 editions of Nuclear Weapons - Manual for Officers are hardcover published by the USSR military publishing agency Voenizdat, in Moscow, but they are very different in superficial appearance.  The 1961 book is 328 pages long and 150x227 mm with colour illustrations, whereas the 1987 edition is just 168 pages long with no colour and 145x220mm.  (You almost get the impression just by comparing these editions of the book that in 1961 the USSR's star was rising with Gagarin that year becoming the first person in space and Khrushchev's peace shattering 50 megaton nuclear test, while in 1987 it was on the wane due to the concessions made in order to agree to the INF treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in that year.)

UPDATE (4 December 2017):

English translations of examples of thermal data from the 1961 Russian manual, for 50 kt nuclear test (TABLE 3).

Above: as a test of the source of the Russian data tables, Table 3 in the 1961 edition shows very different data on thermal effects to Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons.  It gives Russian test data from a 50 kiloton burst, showing that glass only begins to melt at 700-800 cal/cm^2, while white boards only ignite at 150 cal/cm^2 (although they temporarily smoke or char at 40)!  (Note that in the Russian table, кал/cm2 = cal/cm2.)

The  key data from the 1969 Russian Nuclear Weapons manual has now been added between the 1961 and 1987 editions, here.  The 1969 edition is actually longer than even the 1961 edition, with 388 pages!  Although at first glance the 1969 air burst blast overpressure curves look similar to those in the 1987 edition, there are subtle differences.  In addition, it contains interesting differences in the presentation of EMP capabilities.  See the section on pages 174-6 of the 1969 edition:

"§ 22. порающее действие электромагнитного импульса п способы защиты от него":

§ 22. The damaging effect of the electromagnetic pulse and the methods of protection against it.

(This post is under revision. To be updated with detailed data summaries from the Russian nuclear testing based Nuclear Weapons - A Manual for Officers manuals, and Russian nuclear testing damage photos.)

Update (9 December 2017):

I've uploaded two 1939 Cement and Concrete Association Air Raid Shelter design booklets, relevant to civil defence, to internet archive here.  The important point here is that cheap shelters were falsely "ridiculed" by Marxists like Professor Haldane and Professor Cyril Joad in Britain prior to WWII.  The same nonsense is endlessly repeated by all sorts of people with an authoritarian mindset bordering on fascism or communist groupthink today, who falsely claim to be liberals (the sort of "liberals" who are bigoted, screaming, abusive, nasty patronising morons; I had a speech defect due to a hearing problem as a child and am unfortunately an expert in exposing this hypocritical nonsense as a result).  Raymond Briggs, the children's cartoon illustrator, has repeatedly restated this nonsense.  In When the wind blows - a cartoon booklet against civil defence in the Cold War which was made into an animated film that that editor of the Home Office's Civil Protection magazine debunked in a review headed "An Ill Wind for Civil Protection" - he claimed that simple shelters don't protect against fallout.  In his more recent family history based film, he repeats the same nonsense against his family's Morrison shelter providing no shelter from glass in World War II - his parents had incorrectly sited it near a glass window without any protection from flying glass (all the WWII booklets tell you to block the windows of a room used for shelter, to stop flying glass).

The reality is this: false attacks on cheap effective civil defence were made by Lord Noel Baker from his 1926 BBC speech on gas war onward and by the so-called "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War group" (not a Cambridge University affiliation) from 1935 onwards, which gained attention because the facts were kept secret.  For example, gas masks were deemed useless because mustard gas spray droplets affects the skin, while sheltering indoors against mustard gas was deemed useless because gases eventually diffuse into buildings through cracks and door seals.  The reality in this example, and it applies also to nerve gas/liquid today, is that the combination of being indoors and having a gas mask provides protection against both skin contamination and inhalation risks.  However, when you read "criticisms" of civil defence today, the "reductionist problem" (of breaking the argument up into skin and lung risks, and showing that gas masks don't protect the skin, etc.) remains strongly believed by anti-civil defence bigots.  Another example of sophistry is the bigoted comparison of shelter costs with the costs of building hospitals, instead of comparing shelter costs with the costs of fighting wars.

THE "PAUCITY OF ALTERNATIVES"-FASCIST AGENDA OF BIGOTRY AND HATRED TOWARDS THE FACTS

Let's get this straight: in 1948 the Labour Prime Minister of Britain, Attlee, instituted both work on nuclear deterrence (building nuclear weapons) and re-started the Civil Defence Corps, in response to the threat of a Russian nuclear and conventional war capability (Russia didn't test its bomb until 1949, but the scope of its fellow-traveller nuclear research spying had become clear with case of nuclear spy Dr Alan Nunn May in 1946).  In 2002, the Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a war against Iraq in response to a possible "45 minute" missile launch chemical/nuclear threat.  The point, for those who need it spelled out in the most lucid way possible (I guess that's almost the entire membership of CND and the pseudo Democratic Party in the USA) is this: by attacking both credible (tactical not strategic) nuclear deterrence (that worked against the USSR in the 60s under Kennedy and in the 80s under Reagan) and also civil defence using false arguments, these pseudo "peace agendas,"  just like those of Lord Noel Baker and the "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War group" in the 1920s-1930s caused a costly war.  The costs involved, in lives and money, in using conventional weapons for regime change proved way higher than credible nuclear deterrence and civil defence.

There seems to be no way to debunk the liars.  Let's again state the facts: stockpiles of weapons before WWI and WWII were insignificant compared to the vast amounts of weapons used in the wars, which as we've shown (in previous posts, see links below this blog post) were equivalent to nuclear wars.  The reality is that nuclear weapons are easier and cheaper to deliver than the equivalent in conventional weapons, which means less crisis instability than the huge conventional weapons mobilizations needed in 1914 which induced tensions and excuses for aggression!  In addition, the effects of nuclear weapons are more effective against aggressive forces on the move, such as the troops invading Belgium in 1914 or the tanks invading Poland in 1939 (not dug in defensively, or in modern concrete buildings like those that survived near ground zero in Hiroshima, where people are relatively well protected).  This means that nuclear weapons can and do deter the invasions that trigger off large wars, but this means public education to debunk the fascist liars.

Updates, 10-15 December 2017:

A new compendium of key extracts of British civil defence publications giving the scientific basis for low cost countermeasures to make deterrence credible is linked here on internet archive (removing irrelevant administrative and bureaucratic material, and including only the key facts that debunk liars "nuclear weapons don't work to end war"-style propaganda).  For comparison, an English translation of DTIC's pdf of AD773427, the 1973 Russian Civil Defense manual, is available for online browsing on internet archive at the link here.  Again, we see that cheap, simple countermeasures are effective for civilians, but ineffective for invading forces on the move: nuclear weapons can credibly deter the invasions that set off terrible wars, without the collateral damage to civilians that you get with conventional weapons that failed to deter two world wars and many other conventional wars!

Furthermore, nuclear arms races have provably allowed negotiations from a position of strength (not weakness) for peace with freedom and security, as Maggie Thatcher explained in Parliament on TV on 22 November 1990. A tactically armed, credible nuclear deterrence based world is a world of peace and security, a world in which you can't launch military conquests on a whim without being easily stopped in your tracks. That's real peace!

Here's the transcript.  UK Prime Minister, 22 November 1990, in House of Commons (source Hansard House of Commons 181/445-53):

"Ten years ago, the eastern part of Europe lay under totalitarian rule, its people knowing neither rights nor liberties. Today, we have a Europe in which democracy, the rule of law and basic human rights are spreading ever more widely, where the threat to our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw pact has been removed: where the Berlin wall has been torn down and the cold war is at an end. 

"These immense changes did not come about by chance. They have been achieved by strength and resolution in defence, and by a refusal ever to be intimidated. No one in eastern Europe believes that their countries would be free had it not been for those western Governments who were prepared to defend liberty, and who kept alive their hope that one day east Europe too would enjoy freedom. 

"But it was no thanks to the Labour party, or to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament of which the right hon. Gentleman is still a member. It is this Government who kept the nuclear weapons which ensured that we could never be blackmailed or threatened. When Brezhnev deployed the SS20s, Britain deployed the cruise missiles and was the first to do so. And all these things were done in the teeth of the opposition of the hon. Gentlemen opposite—and their ladies. [Laughter[ The SS20s could never have been negotiated away without the bargaining strength which cruise and Pershing gave to the west. 

"Should we be censured for our strength? Or should the Labour party be censured for its weakness? ... socialists who put expediency before principle."

(Text here.) Video of this speech is available. Thatcher also gave a fine contribution to the final episode of the 1989 pro-USSR biased 12 hour documentary "The Nuclear Age", explaining clearly that conventional weapons failed to deter two world wars, this being the basic rationale for nuclear deterrence. The documentary ignored the opportunity to follow up on this piece of important wisdom, and then gave a long and boring repetition of all the nasty, vile, USSR foreign affairs department backed false propaganda claims that nuclear weapons don't deter wars/kill civilians not aggressive plans, etc.

The fundamental reason for nuclear weapons is political: we have nuclear weapons to defend our political system from enemy takeover (empire builders).  This is a key point to make, because the key effects are also political: deterrence of war, not blasts or radiation, is the key effect of nuclear weapons.

The approach of fascism that "defeats" this is the pseudo liberal agenda of mokusatsu, a Japanese word meaning to "kill with silence" or to "ignore". Moku = silence; satsu = kill. Mokusatsu was the word Japanese Premier Suzuki used to the press on 28 July 1945, to express his Cabinet's response at that time to the 26 July 1945 Potsdam Declaration, which demanded unconditional surrender of Japan's armed forces (not of its government). This word was transmitted by Tokyo radio and led President Truman to authorise the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There is an interesting claim that the word "mokusatsu" had been used ambiguously or mistakenly by Premier Suzuki, to the fury of his Cabinet who had merely wanted a silence on the Potsdam Declaration until they had finished deciding how to respond. In any case, the point is that the word was taken to signify a fascist response, akin to the silence that Hitler gave to Britain's 1 September 1939 ultimatum for Germany to withdraw its troops from Poland to avoid a war.

Dictators have opted for silence when a reasonable discussion is needed. CND has ignored this blog exposing its errors since 2006 when it started, and other in publishing ignored an earlier book exposing the falsehoods, written in August 1990.  To kill with silence is the fascist tactic used by all the deluded pseudo liberals.  Another example is Hitler's last minute cancellation of booked pre-war meeting with Churchill, after he heard that Churchill supported the Jewish minority. A good way, in my humble opinion, to assess the reasonableness of people is to see if they are prepared to tolerate meaningful dissent - not screaming bleating liars - but real arguments, based on facts not falsehoods.

Update: 17 December 2017

Oh, and by the way, it is Roosevelt the Democrat who launched the Manhattan Project to nuke people, and it was Truman the Democrat who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons in 1945, and it was Johnson the Democrat who ordered the carpet bombing in Vietnam twenty years later.  Just in case there are any fascist pseudo Democrats who forget the facts.

Add caption

Above: Britain's official leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, is a lifelong IRA supporter, and CND supporter and USSR communist supporter (no witchhunt there, he has been open in the past).  His shadow cabinet colleague Diane Abbott is a bigoted racist who falsely stated that all white people are racist in the 15 November 1985 issue of Socialist Action as highlighted on this 1987 Tory poster.  Their friend Ken Livingstone, now a former Mayor of London, is currently just suspended from the Labour Party (a suspension that only occurred under enormous media pressure from haters of Nazis) due to his recent crackpot claim that Hitler was a Zionist Jew supporter.  These are the people who get their pathetic and nasty "voices heard" on nuclear deterrence, to the exclusion of the facts.

Diane Abbott false and racist claim that all white people are racist on page 5 of the 15 November 1985 issue of Socialist Action.  This proven racist is now the Shadow Home Secretary in the opposition (Shadow) Cabinet, House of Commons.

15 November 1985 issue of Socialist Action, front cover.

15 November 1985 issue of Socialist Action, page 5: Diane Abbott's racism in claiming "You have to start from an understanding that all white people are racist."  For the full issue, please see https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/socialist-action-uk/index.htm or the internet archive back up at: https://archive.org/details/15November1985SocialistActionIssueWithDianeAbbottClaimThatAllWhitePeopleAreRacist

This helps to quell claims of taking statements out of context, the usual lying BBC tactic used by Marxists.

Jeremy Corbyn article on page 6 of the 1 February 1985 issue of Socialist Action calling for strikes and disputes to be used for political revolution, which is still his undemocratic tactic today.  When his argument fails, he brings in racist thugs.  His tactics have won him his current position as Shadow Prime Minister, House of Commons.

Socialist Action, 1 February 1985 issue containing claim in an article on page 6 by Jeremy Corbyn that Marxist based political strikes and dispute based revolution is needed because his argument alone fails to win support in parliament:

"... defeat of the Tory government will be brought about by a series of disputes, of which parliament is only part.  It's struggle and activity outside parliament that is the key to that. ... We have ensured that all the Campaign Group [now Corbyn's flying picket Group is called Momentum] are on the picket lines.  We also send speakers to rallies ... I personally have been involved in picketing a number of power stations ... to stop the coal supplies coming in from abroad, to stop the oil movements, and to stop the switch-over to nuclear power [he also campaigns against nuclear deterrence as a CND supporter, anything to increase the threat of war, whether civil war, race war, class war, religious war, or Marxist war]."


Update on 27 December 2017, concerning efforts of the British government to ban fascist, anti-liberal "no platforming" of alternatives to mainstream dogma

I feel I must blog an update about the efforts to end the suppression in British universities of free speech and liberal enquiry by fascists enemies of freedom disguised as socialists, British Minister for Universities and Science, Jo Johnson.  Anyone who wants to state the facts on nuclear weapons effects, the people who institute racism, the errors in mainstream climate change computer models, or the real cause of wars (appeasement, not deterrence!), has long been "no platformed" by fascist hate inciting pseudo socialists, who ironically claim that any statement of the truth is offensive to them!

This is what was really behind "Red" Ken Livingstone's hate attack on Zionist Jews, in which he claimed Hitler supported that.  His attempt, like that of Corbyn and BBC Palestinian terrorist supporters, is to use lying propaganda to associate any statement of facts with "far right" politics, when in fact the far left and far right are indistinguishable in their hatred, their racist bigotry, their mad delusions that Jews are the terrorists when in fact they were in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago and the Islamic invasion of Jerusalem happened much later (BBC bigot Jeremy Bowen has repeatedly insisted that Jerusalem is the third most important site for Islam, without having the decency to add the fact that it is the FIRST most important site for Jews and that Israel is the only Jewish state in the world, contrasted with enormous Islamic areas of North Africa and the Middle East).  It's clear who is lying here, and that the lies consist of suppressing the freedom of criticism of those lies!

"In his speech this afternoon, the Minister for Universities and Science will stress the importance of universities being places that “open minds, not close them”, challenging the rise in “no platforming” measures on UK campuses.

"In their original form, such measures were intended to prevent talks given by far-right groups, However, in recent years, the use of “no platforming” boycotts has been extended by some student unions to include a range of other issues, including speakers who support Israel. 

In October, a new higher education regulator was unveiled – the Office for Students. Under proposals submitted by Mr Johnson, universities could face a variety of penalties from the new body – including fines, suspension or deregulation – for failing to uphold free speech.

“Universities should be places that open minds not close them, where ideas can be freely challenged," Mr Johnson will tell the audience at Limmud. 

“In universities in America and worryingly in the UK, we have seen examples of groups seeking to stifle those who do not agree with them.

“We must not allow this to happen. Young people should have the resilience and confidence to challenge controversial opinions and take part in open, frank and rigorous discussions. That is why the new regulator, the Office for Students, will go even further to ensure that universities promote freedom of speech within the law.”

However, Mr Johnson will also discuss the need for universities to prevent hatred, extremism or racism, saying that “a racist or antisemitic environment is by definition an illiberal one that is completely in opposition to the liberal tradition of our universities”.

Welcoming the move, Marie van der Zyl, vice-president of the Board of Deputies, who is attending Limmud, said: “Over the last couple of years, Jewish students have been subjected to the most outrageous abuse and intimidation when seeking to discuss Israel, including when they are discussing the routes to peace. Notorious incidents occurred at King's College London and University College London. Regrettably universities often find themselves floundering, unable or unwilling to provide adequate protection for these events. This must urgently change.

“We are pleased to note that the minister will note exceptions for where there is a risk of extremism or hatred, including antisemitism. To aid this, we would urge universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism which the government adopted last year.”

The Union of Jewish Students also welcomed Mr Johnson's remarks but cautioned that there was a role for no-platforming on campus.

UJS campaigns manager Liron Velleman said: "No-platform policies for those who continue to threaten or incite violence continue to be an important tool against fascism used by the National Union of Students, students unions and student groups. Additionally, we have welcomed the increased focus in recent years on a duty of care for students and the introduction of external speaker guidelines by many institutions.

"Freedom of speech on campus is a fundamental democratic right but there continues to be a role for clear and precise no-platform policies to be used in the fight against violent racism and other forms of discrimination."

- https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/jo-johnson-to-use-limmud-speech-for-pledge-on-free-speech-at-universities-1.450898

I'd like to add a fact of my own.  This fascist attitude of suppression of any non-dogmatic facts permeates not just the three universities I attended (to study physics, mathematics and later programming and journalism), but also the mass media, which caters for only the best funded research and effectively suppresses radical data that needs attention!