The January 1955 secret Fallout symposium of the AFSWP. LAST UPDATED 3 August 2018 with Opennet's declassified An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons Primary Physics, a declassified neutron bomb report LA-9004, evidence from a Russian dissident for Putin's Novichok nerve gas, CND leader Corbyn racial hatred of Jews in news, and latest August 2018 Novichok nerve agent poisoning news
Thank you to Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive, Mission Support and Test Services (MSTS), Contractor for the Nevada National Security Site of Uncle Sam, for today emailing me a scan in two parts of the terrific (formerly) secret January 1955 AFSWP Fall-Out Symposium, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons project report AFSWP-895, which I've put on internet archive (link is here). This is the first major analysis (566 pages in its declassified form) of data from Operation Castle on fallout, the first major fallout hazard experience to be documented in great detail in 1954! The report was listed but a PDF was not previously available on the U.S. Department of Energy Opennet site (which currently highlights Edward Teller's dismissal of secrecy delusions in the PDF linked here). Secrecy is damaging, as mentioned in the previous post on this blog, because it keeps the public uninformed of the key technical arguments that underpin scientific controversies, allowing abusive propaganda from bigoted, ranting communist lunatics to become "mainstream dogma", accepted by deluded, elitist pseudo-socialists as occurred after Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton used "authority" to push eugenics pseudo-science with a pipe dream camouflage of utopia.
AFSWP895: January 1955 Fallout Symposium, secret, front cover.
Bikini Atoll map with accurate scale in Nautical Miles: the East-West length is about 22 nautical miles, as contrasted to the inaccurate USNRDL map scales which give a width of about 33 nautical miles, 50% too much! (Thus, fallout areas in Bikini Atoll are exaggerated by 1.5 squared, a factor of 2.25.) The inaccurate maps were proliferated in other fallout reports that "compiled" inaccurate data together without checking the scales (e.g., DASA-1251, the fallout patterns compendium). As we reported in an earlier post, this had disastrous consequences for one computer prediction method, which was sold on the basis that it reliably reproduced the false Castle-3 shot pattern (the version with the inaccurate distance scale, leading to more than a doubling of areas).
The report also contains new photos of the fireball and cloud from the 13.5 megaton Yankee shot of Operation Castle, taken from an RB-36, including the times of each photo (which is very useful, because it shows you the evolution of the fireball into the mushroom), at pages 91-110. On pages 110-121 there is an excellent summary of the fallout study results of the Nevada 1.2 kiloton surface burst and shallow subsurface (earth penetrator warhead simulation) bursts Sugar and Uncle, respectively, from 1951, including photos of the differences in the nature of the fallout, comparing this data to photos of fallout from the 1952 Ivy-Mike surface burst of 10.4 megatons at Eniwetok Atoll.
On pages 123-138 there is a nice paper by Dr Carl F. Miller, called "Physical and Chemical Nature of the Contaminant: Interpretation of Castle Observations", giving the fallout deposited mass per unit area for specific unit-time radiation dose rates, the averaged gamma ray energy, graphs of decay rates, and a detailed table of fallout solubility (ionic fraction of radioactivity when the fallout is mixed with water), comparing land and surface tests of Operation Castle.
(Compare this fallout solubility data to the later USNRDL reports WT-917 and WT-918. Note that 1958 Hardtack tests report WT-1625 on page 13 briefly interprets and summarises the solubility data from Castle in WT-917 and from Redwing in WT-1317 (the WT-1317 pdf file held on the Opennet database is corrupted and will not open, but we uploaded the full WT-1317 report to internet archive, linked here, before this occurred): the land surface bursts of Castle gave 5% fallout solubility, compared to 58-73% solubility for the water surface barge bursts, whereas the Redwing effective land bursts Zuni and Tewa gave 5-25% and 8-18% solubility, respectively, using rainwater and sea water. (These percentages don't apply to individual nuclides, since the soluble fraction mainly consists volatile decay chain nuclides like I, Sr, Cs, etc., which coat the outer surfaces of fallout particles; whereas the insoluble activity is mainly refractory nuclides that condense in the inside of molten particles, like Zr, Mo, U, Pu, etc. The overall percentage of solubility is therefore the average solubility of gamma emitters, which varies with time as the fallout mixture decays, and the relative percentage of activity coming from soluble nuclides rather than insoluble nuclides, evolves.)
On pages 139-153 there is an interesting paper by Dr Chris S. Cook, called "Radiological Nature of the Contaminant: Source Gamma Energy Spectra", giving data on the fallout gamma ray spectra determined using a sodium iodide scintillation crystal and a photomultiplier tube (the scintillation or flash brightness is proportional to the energy of the gamma ray, so with a pulse height discriminator circuit you can determine the spectrum). This is vital because the penetrating power of the gamma rays from fallout determines the protective factor of a fallout shelter, and the production of low energy gamma emitters in fallout, particularly neptunium-239 and uranium-237 (produced by the capture of a high energy neutron, above about 1 MeV, by U-238, followed by the ejection of two neutrons, i.e. a so-called n,2n reaction) reduces the danger in the fallout sheltering period of 1-14 days after a dirty bomb (with a uranium jacket on the fusion stage). Cook reports on page 139:
"Prior to 10 days following the detonation, a large fraction of the radiations are concentrated in the vicinity of 100 kev [0.1 Mev]".
This approximately 0.1 Mev radiation is the neutron activated U-237 and Np-239 (the time of peak percentage contribution of a nuclide to T^{1.2} fallout decay is equal to the half life multiplied by 1.2/ln 2 which is a multiplication factor of 1.44). The best data available from Castle on this was from Union, shot 4, a water surface burst. However, excellent gamma spectrum data was obtained from land surface burst Zuni in 1956, reported in WT-1317 and related papers like USNRDL-TR-146, Spectrometric Analysis of Gamma Radiation from Fallout from Operation Redwing, which was discussed on page 19 of our Nuclear Weapons - Collateral Damage Exaggerations report. Miller gives an excellent compilation of neutron capture to fission ratios for nuclear tests up to 1960 in tables 4 and 6 of USNRDL466, although the numbers are deleted from that table in the declassified document, so you have to instead fill in the table spaces by calculating the capture atom/fission ratios using the ratios of the dose rates in gives in table 11; for example Jangle S gave 0.106/0.1799 = 0.59 atom of U-239 per fission. Although Navajo and Flathead are deleted from that table, the capture atoms to fission ratios are reported for those shots in other reports, when you look carefully. One piece of data is given by the declassified WT-1317 e.g. the data in Table 3.14 on page 65 states that Flathead produced 0.41 atoms of Np-239 per fission, and more data is in the declassified NV0110837. The U239 and Np239 capture-to-fission ratios of Redwing thermonuclear weapons 3.8Mt 50% fission Cherokee, 3.53 Mt 15% fission Zuni, and 4.5 Mt 5% Navajo are reported respectively to to be 0.500, 0.427 and 0.125 respectively, on page 12 of WT-1315, shown below:
There is earlier Upshot-Knothole nuclear test fallout data on average gamma ray energy in WT-814, based on the measurement of the attenuation of gamma rays by shields of varying thickness, rather than by gamma spectrometry (the electronics needed to discriminate energy intervals from sodium iodine crystal scintillation photomultiplier pulse heights were being developed in the early 1950s).
AFSWP 895: fractionation of Sr89 Ba140 and Mo99 as function of fallout particle diameter in Operation Castle. Note that Mo-99 is normally unfractionated since it is refractory (has a high melting point), whereas the gaseous precursors in the decay chains of strontium and barium make them effectively volatile, so they don't condense very effectively on fast-falling particles of early fallout. This graph gives data from samples collected at 18.5 statute miles from ground zero (97,730 feet). (There is a history of fractionation data collection at nuclear tests on pages 17-19 of Hardtack report WT-1625, other versions of which - with slightly different data deleted in delassification - are located here and here.)
AFSWP 895: speed of rotation of radioactive torus or toroidal circulation inside rising fireball from a 30 kiloton nuclear weapon at 1 minute, taken from Dr Kellogg's presentation (he gave an unclassified version, omitting this data on the measured speeds in the vortex, to the unclassified May 1957 congressional hearings on The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man).
AFSWP 895: Dr Kellogg's illustration showing why the cloud top heights were inaccurately measured and reported in early H-bomb tests like Mike, whose height was originally wrongly reported as 25 miles not 20 miles, due to horizontal projections from the edge being confused for the top of the cloud.
AFSWP 895: fallout from 1953 Nevada nuclear test Badger of Operation Upshot Knothole showing paths of fallout at different altitudes in the mushroom cloud: because the winds have different speeds and directions at different altitudes, there the cloud separates accordingly and fallout is distributed over a larger area than would be the case without this wind shear. This diffusion of fallout spreads the same total amount of radioactivity over a greater area, reducing doses and dose rates to lower levels than simplistic predictions (the classic cigar shaped fallout pattern) indicate.
AFSWP 895: fallout distribution in the mushroom head and in the stem of the cloud as used in the US Army Signal Corps fallout prediction method. Note that 90% is assumed to be in the mushroom head, and that 10% is in the stem (at lower altitudes), but the average size of the particles in the stem are larger than those in the mushroom head. This type of analysis, based on trying to reconcile theory with observed fallout data, is the source of the statement about the assumed distribution in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
AFSWP 895: Lulejian's effort to model fallout distribution doses to 48 hours across Rongelap Atoll in the 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 based on wind data analysis, combined with radiation measurements made on atoll islands. The only Castle test where the entire fallout pattern was measured was 13.5 megaton Yankee, using ships and aircraft to survey the ocean and then to correct the measurements for the large protective factor of the water (when the fallout hits the water, most of the activity, whether soluble or in micron sized insoluble metallic particles within the relatively large calcium hydroxide flakes, ends up dispersed within the 100 metre thick surface water above the thermocline, attenuating the surface dose rate to something on the order of 500-1000 times less than the dose rate you get when the same amount of fallout is deposited on a land surface). 1956 Redwing nuclear tests showed that water surface bursts like Yankee in the 80% humidity air of Bikini atoll produce similar local fallout distributions to land surface bursts, and Yankee probably gave a very similar fallout distribution to Bravo's shot time wind fallout pattern. This is similar to RAND Corporation's analysis of the Bravo fallout. AFSWP 895 also gives Schuert's elaborate and misleading Bravo fallout reconstruction (later reprinted in USNRDL report WT-915), which puts too much activity in the highest dose rate contours, violating the area versus dose rate plots given by four land and water shots in Redwing, when scaled to 1 fission megaton (see WT-1316, Figure 2.45). (Also, see Kelloggs testimony on page 105 of the 1957 congressional hearing Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, where Kellogg notes that the percentages of local fallout for land and water surface bursts in Redwing were actually very similar, and an earlier analysis to the contrary ignored Na-24 and use the wrong conversion factor between dose rate and activity; unfortunately the corrected data was ignored and the earlier mistaken analysis is quoted by Glasstone and Dolan 1977, and is also quoted by Chuck Hansen in his 1988 book US Nuclear Weapons. To summarise, the initial analysis of the Flathead and Navajo water surface burst tests of Redwing indicated only about 30% of activity down in 24 hours, but the reanalysis by B. L. Tucker of RAND Corp, allowing for Na-24 and the correct dose rate to fissions conversion factor, gave 65-70%, which is within the error limits on land burst data. The actual percentage refers to effective gamma dose rates not specific nuclides; refractory nuclides are concentrated on large particles which arrive in local fallout, while volatile nuclides that condense at late times on the remaining very small particles in the cloud, mostly come down later on more distant fallout.) For Yankee's dose rate versus area data, see table here. (This was discussed in previous posts on this blog.) There is a detailed discussion of the time and space wind data available for the Marshall Islands around the time of the Bravo shot, here.
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer summation fallout prediction method for 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis. This was developed by Stanley Greenfield of RAND Corporation, who states on page 348: "The first problem that was tried on the machine [an IBM 701 computer] was the Castle-Bravo shot", using the shot time winds measured from the USS Curtiss, a ship near Bikini Atoll. The predicted Bravo fallout pattern is shown below:
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer prediction of fallout using shot time winds for 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis. Notice that the fallout is predicted to essentially miss Rongelap Atoll (which is located from roughly 100 nautical miles East to 115 miles ESE, from ground zero). Hence, there really was a wind shift that contaminated the islanders on the south of Rongelap (and nearby Americans on Rongerik Atoll, just to the east of Rongelap). Even if the IBM 701 had been available to predict the fallout from Bravo on 1 March 1954, it would not have predicted the danger unless supplemented with a modern weather prediction including the changing wind pattern in the 6-7 hours following the detonation!
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer prediction of fallout doses from a 50 megaton nuclear test as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis. Note that the 1500 R dose would be reduced to a survivable 37.5 R by a protection factor of 40, the minimal specification for fallout shelters.
AFSWP 895 IBM701 computer prediction of fallout doses from a 1 megaton nuclear test as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis. This is using the same model which successfully explained Bravo, and shows that with simple fallout shelters, fallout can be survived.
AFSWP 895: example of tabulated outdoor fallout areas for dose rates and accumulated doses from yields of 1 to 50 megatons. Many different fallout models were compared in AFSWP-895, differences being due to different weighting in the activity distribution in the cloud and as a function of particle size, which affected how much activity came under the influence of winds blowing in different directions at different altitudes. However, fallout distributions in the clouds were measured in detail in 1956 Redwing tests (using rockets with radiation meters and radio telemetry of data, see weapon test report WT-1315) and detailed particle size distributions (see WT-1317 and USNRDL-TR-314), so such disagreements are now resolved and fallout is very predictable with modern data from the 1956 Redwing series as well as modern weather prediction computer programs that include jet stream trajectory forecasts. (Naturally, the ground deposited spectrum of fallout particle sizes at any particular location is biased in favor of the particle sizes that have a falling speed which results in their landing at that location, so this data needs to be backtracked to the cloud from a large number of representative locations to see what the overall distribution of particles is initially in the cloud when the toroidal downdraft has stopped operating. Cloud samples are also biased in the same kind of way, because the largest fallout particles fall out before a sampling aircraft can safely get near the cloud. Dr Edward C. Freiling's 1970 book Radionuclides in the environment, contains many papers graphically demonstrating this with data from cloud samples for Pacific shots in Castle, Redwing, and various 1962 Nevada surface bursts, such as Johnie Boy and Small Boy. There is plenty of data, and shots on the differing soil particle size distributions in Nevada and the Pacific all tend to give a similar particle size distribution, closely approximating an inverse fourth power of particle radius, above 1 micron.)
UPDATES: 30 January 2018
Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive has also kindly supplied a PDF of the 1957 RAND Fallout Symposium (which we've uploaded to internet archive here), which contains an application of Anderson's dynamic fallout model to the 1.2 kiloton Sugar nuclear test in Nevada, 1951, to explain particle size distributions by tracking particles from the crater to their maximum height and then fall (rather than the usual false assumption that fallout occurs from a stabilised cloud). This is listed on the DOE Opennet site but no PDF was previously available. It also contains Schuert's demonstration that the time and space variation of the downwind wind structure correctly predicts the 3.53 megaton Zuni fallout pattern of Redwing (which is the only one of his four shot analyses which cannot be adequately analysed using merely shot time winds near ground zero; the other shots more easily predicted being Tewa, Flathead and Navajo), and summaries of the fractionation data for I-131 and several other nuclides in the 5.01 megaton harbour type surface burst Tewa at Bikini Atoll in 1956 in table 2 of appendix B:
1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: 5.01 megaton Tewa fallout radionuclide fractionation (depletion factor for volatile precursor decay chains) versus particle size and type for close-in samples from Bikini Atoll. Note that I-131 is less severely fractionated than Sr-89, that the larger the fallout particles, the greater the depletion, and that spherical shaped particles have more severe fractionation than angular particles. This is also seen in Tables 2 and 4 of USNRDL-TR-386 (AD232901) for the "Whim" sample of Zuni fallout (the test is identified in WT-1317): melted (spherical or "altered") particles had only 0.018 of the Sr-89 of unfractionated fission products, whereas unaltered (angular) particles has 0.65 and so were almost unfractionated, so they must have picked up the activity which was left behind after the melted particles were formed. (For general data on Tewa, see the preliminary report of the test linked here.) Note that the cloud sample data on Redwing fractionation is summarised in WT-1625, table 3.11 on page 47: fractionation was severest for lower altitudes in the cloud, where larger particles resided. For example, only 0.51 of the expected unfractionated abundance of Sr-90 was observed at 41,000 feet altitude in the Zuni cloud, compared to a factor of 2 (enrichment) at 55,000 feet in the same cloud. In table 3.2 on page 42 of the same report, for the 1958 Hardtack tests, it is shown that 1.31 megaton land surface burst Koa deposited 98% of its refractory Mo-99 within 24 hours, contrasted to only 64% of its volatile decay chain for Cs-137. In the 9 megaton Oak surface burst test (effectively a land surface burst since the 15 feet of water above the reef at ground zero was trivial compared to the fireball radius), the corresponding figures were 89% of Mo-99 and 49% of Cs-137 deposited in 24 hours. Volatile nuclides are concentrated on small, slow-falling particles located high in the cloud.
1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: Edward A. Schuert's predictions of the fallout hotlines for the 3.53 megaton Zuni test using different assumptions (shot time winds near ground zero, the space and time variation of the winds in the downwind areas through which fallout actually descends, and even vertical motions), compared to the ocean measured fallout intensities extrapolated to a land surface at 1 hour after detonation.
1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: Anderson's U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory dynamic fallout model analysis of the largest fallout particles (almost 2 mm in diameter) motions in the 1.2 kiloton Sugar test (Nevada, 1951). Note that contrary to simplistic fallout models which assume that all fallout begins from the stabilised cloud 5 minutes or so after burst, no 1.95 mm diameter fallout particles remained airborne after 3.5 minutes in this test. Anderson's model starts with dust being raised by the afterwinds from the crater, rising while that updraft force exceeds gravitation, then falling. In this way, particles of different sizes rise to different peak altitudes in the cloud (the heaviest remaining mostly in the cloud stem, and the smallest rising higher). This model thus provides the airborne distribution of particle sizes versus altitudes, and predicts fallout arrival times.
1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: Anderson's comparison of predicted accurate fallout distribution (solid line) being deposited 10 minutes after the 1.2 kiloton sugar test, with the inaccurate model prediction based on the false assumption of fallout beginning for all particle at 5 minutes from uniform mushroom distribution (dashed line). Anderson predicts a smaller average particle size.
Neutron bomb secrets on Opennet: while searching Opennet, I found something else that is vitally important, already available for download as a PDF. It's Johndale C. Solem's great 1982 Secret Los Alamos report LA-9004 on the neutron bomb, The ultra-low yield antitank weapon, the teeny tiny tacnuke, complete with declassified markings showing it was "Nuclear Weapon Data Sigma 1: Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information", in a limited edition of just 79 printed copies:
LA-9004 from 1982, secret (now declassified with deletions of design information) states in its abstract (page 3) that: "Estimates of collateral damage indicate that such a device could be used in close proximity to civilian populations with minimal hazard."
LA-9004 then describes the kiloton W79 neutron warhead (44 cm long, 200 lbs including firing system, capable of being fired 32 km from a 8" howitzer), and explains correctly that the whole point of such weapons is to deter the concentrated blitzkrieg assaults that started WWI in 1914 (the invasion of Belgium by concentrated force) and WWII in 1939 (the invasion of Poland by concentrated force). The principle of concentration of force can be deterred with nuclear weapons, thus preventing the invasions that trigger wars. By forcing enemies to disperse their forces, any attacks that are made can be dealt with using conventional weapons like handheld anti-tank rockets (no use against concentrated firepower, but useful against dispersed forces), preventing invasion and WWIII:
"Denying an aggressor force the use of massed formations of armor is the single most important aspect of the W79."
LA-9004 then goes on to suggest a lower yield version of the W79 for use against individual tanks, like the Kennedy era portable 0.02 kt W54 that could be fired by individual soldiers, air burst at 15 metres altitude to eliminate local fallout, blast and heat collateral damage. Page 5:
"Tank crews within 25 m of the weapon would be immediately incapacitated. Civilian populations 300 m from the point of detonation would be completely safe. ... Beyond 300 m, exposed personnel might be temporarily blinded from looking directly at the detonation, but would suffer no burns to exposed skin. ... The effect of blast on civilian structures near the battlefield would be trivial. Three hundred metres from the point of detonation windows would rattle but not break. ... the fallout would be expected to be confined to the battlefield itself. ... The principal advantage of such a device in reducing collateral damage from local fallout is that it simply does not produce much in the way of fission fragments or activated weapon debris."
LA-9004 then points out, on pages 7-8, that such a defensive low yield weapon with no significant risk of collateral damage is of no significant use to terrorists, contrasted to easy-to-procure alternatives.
UPDATE (5 February 2018): origins of fallout decay data in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons
Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive has kindly supplied a PDF of the US DOE Opennet document NV0060036, the 15 April 1960 draft revision of the fallout decay activity section in Glasstone book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which was done by T. G. Brough and Dr Carl F. Miller of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, California. We have placed this PDF on internet archive, here. The reason for investigating this is that the fallout decay graphs and tables in the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan are identical to those in the 1962/4 editions, which differ from the 1957 edition. Therefore, the current version was developed between 1957-1962, and this chapter revised draft by Brough and Miller from 1960 was clearly influential. However, it is clear that Glasstone performed extensive additional changes to the 1960 draft before it was published in 1962.
In paragraph 9.6 of the revision, Brough and Miller explain: "the maximum radiation intensity of fallout from megaton detonations occurs at 50 to 75 miles downwind from the explosion centre."
They state in that paragraph that 1 fission megaton of fallout spread uniformly over 10,000 square miles would produce 410 R/hr at 3 feet height, with 10 R/hr of this 410 R/hr being neutron induced activity, and then they clearly explain that this dose rate is reduced in reality by the effect of the "fractionation losses" (i.e. the observed depletion of volatile nuclides from local fallout), which:
"reduce the above mentioned radiation level at 1 hour from a value of 410 to 162 roentgens per hour."
This is far more specific and quantitative than the vague, entirely qualitative discussion of fractionation that made it into the 1962-1977 book!
Above: Brough and Miller's calculated revision to Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons fallout decay rate and accumulated dose graphs, which differ from those actually published in the 1962-77 editions! Paragraph 9.111 at page 21 of their draft chapter revision also explains clearly than Glasstone's final version, just how the gamma ray energy of fallout varies with time and with the 0.105 MeV low energy contribution to the gamma ray spectrum caused by the neutron induced Np-239 content which is inevitable in dirty weapons with U-238 jackets that capture neutrons, and are not solely fissioned by neutrons (a fact essential for understanding how much shielding is needed to protect yourself against it, bearing in mind that fallout protection factors are calculated using the standard pseudo assumption that the gamma rays are like those from cobalt-60, which emits 1.17 and 1.33 MeV high energy gammas, a mean of 1.25 MeV, way higher than fallout):
"... the weighted mean energy of the gamma rays is about 0.92 Mev/photon at 1 hour after fission. The mean value decreases with time during the first and second day after fission, and remains between 0.5 and 0.6 Mev/photon up to about 3 weeks after fission ... If the mixture contained neutron induced activities, such as U-239 - Np-239 in large amounts, the mean energy at early times would be much lower."
They even gave a table (Table 9.111 in the draft) showing that the mean energy of fission product gamma rays is 0.61 MeV (less than half the 1.25 MeV Co-60 average) at 24 hours, and 0.52 MeV at 2 days after burst, and remains around 0.5 MeV for the rest of the standard 2 week civil defense fallout sheltering period! This is without the reduction caused by the very low energy gamma rays from neutron induced Np-239 and U-237.
These facts, deleted from Glasstone's published final version, reflect WT-1317 coauthor Dr Terry Triffet's June 1959 round table conference testimony on page 205 of the US Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, where he explains that this low gamma ray energy in dirty weapons increases the protective factor of shelters far above that usually assumed!
Brough and Miller's draft revision states at page 27 that their decay rates assume 8 MeV neutron fission of U-238, giving at 1 hour after burst 3600 R/hr per fission kiloton yield deposited per square mile, which is reduced to 1480 R/hr by fractionation, to which Np-239 adds 144 R/hr (this is a small percentage contribution at 1 hour, but becomes a much bigger contribution at 96 hours after burst due to differing decay rates of fission products and Np-239 which has a half life of 56 hours).
Update (8 March 2018): double agent Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia nerve agent skin contamination in Salisbury on Sunday 4 March 2018.
Inhalation or ingestion in food of nerve agents produces symptoms too rapidly (i.e. a matter of seconds) for Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia to have walked capably as seen on CCTV video at 3:47 pm on Sunday to a bench where they were found with totally "white eyes" (i.e. the pupils contracted to invisibly small points due to nerve agent) at 4:03 pm. At 4:15pm police and paramedics arrived and were contaminated, suffering injury.
The victims would have collapsed where they were exposed, with no contamination to others, if poisoned by any nerve agent through ingestion or inhalation at the Zizzi restaurant in Salisbury. Skin absorption is much slower, since the dead layer of skin (tens of microns thick) slows down the infusion of nerve agent into the blood stream and thence to nerve endings.
Eye pupils contract to invisibly tiny points due to muscle contraction, so that the eyes appear totally white and glazed; a temporary nerve agent effect that lasts until atropine is administered:
"Her eyes were just completely white, they were wide open, but just white and she was frothing at the mouth." - Jamie Paine, eyewitness.
Eyewitnesses Jamie Paine, Freya Church and Graham Mulcock said that Yulia was unconcious, while Sergei had lost his sight, but could still move his arm past his eyes while slumped, facing the sky.
Colonel Skripal of the Russian FSB (Putin's successor to KGB) was British Intelligence MI6's most valuable double agent for ten years, and gave us the details of Russian agents working in the West, for which he was sentenced as a traitor to 13 years in jail by Putin in 2006. But in 2010, he was traded with the infamous Russian honey trap spy, "Anna Chapman" (aka Anna Kushchyenko, born 1982) and 9 others in a spy swap. President Putin declared at that time that Skripal and other defectors were "traitors" who "will kick the bucket" because they had "betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange - those 30 pieces of silver - they will choke on them."
Putin is seeking 70% of the vote and another 6 years in power in the forthcoming Russian elections, to be held on 18 March. Because defectors are "traitors" to the Russian Nationalists who vote for Putin, their assassination may be politically helpful. In addition, it may deter opponents of Putin from standing in his way. In 2006, the FSB was granted the Russian legal authority to liquidate enemies abroad, on Putin's orders. Former Colonel Alexander Litvinenko was then assassinated with Po-210 (of Russian isotopic composition) in his teapot by Russian agents, in a London restaurant in 2006.
After Skripal was traded for Russian spies in 2010, he bought a £260,000 four-bedroom house in Salisbury with cash, and reportedly gave guest lectures about the FSB to British military students. Skripal was described as friendly and happy by local shopkeeper Ebru Ozturk, 41, and by his neighbour James Puttock. However, he was very impatient with the delay of service of his lunch in the Zizzi restaurant after arriving at 2:30pm. This possibly suggests that he had a meeting scheduled for around 3:30pm (with assassin?). It is even possible that the meeting was deliberately scheduled to occur on the bench they were found on, the seat being sprayed with liquid nerve agent by the assassin, so that no face-to-face meeting occurred (i.e. they may have been poisoned by sitting on the seat).
Paragraph 20 in the 1972 Medical Manual of Defence Against Chemical Agents (Ministry of Defence publication J.S.P. 312) explains this difference in symptoms following inhalation/ingestion and (slower) skin absorption, and the fact that the policeman treating the victims himself was contaminated and seriously affected proves that the source must have been skin contamination:
The weather was relatively cool (around 7-10C) that Sunday afternoon, with a thaw that day melting all of the record early spring snowfall across Britain that had occurred on 28 February-1 March, so liquids would have evaporated gradually from skin, leaving contamination present for the time scale of the pre-hospitalisation emergency. The manual also gives a nice differential diagnosis table (Table V, pages 45-46) specifically to IMMEDIATELY identify the type of nerve gas poisoning, from a proper, full analysis of all the symptoms observed (and to distinguish other gases):
The point about the differential diagnosis table for chemical warfare symptoms is that you regularly see baffled and confused reporters on TV news talking about the symptoms seen in various gas attacks in Syria, which is simply unnecessary. This military UK chemical war medicine book was published in 1972 by H. M. Stationery Office (UK government bookshop/publisher), with unclassified, unlimited distribution permitted.
Ironically, the corresponding 1965 UK government civil defence manual, The Detection and Identification of War Gases, was classified Restricted (banning it from the eyes of the "free" press). It contains very useful data in Table I (page 47) on the evaporation rates, relative to water, of nerve gases. For example, nerve liquids tabun and sarin are stated to take 86 times and 2.95 times, respectively longer to evaporate than water at 15C.
For mustard gas and lewisite (not nerve gases, but blister agents) the table gives evaporation times, respectively, 58 and 9.5 times slower than water. This kind of comparison with water seems more useful to really grasping the nature of the threat by understanding the persistence of liquid nerve agents, than the usual statements giving specific persistence times in hours in most chemical war handbooks (these times are usually for something like for 90% of a deposit of 10 grams/square metre to evaporate under standard laboratory conditions, or for a range of different surfaces, which makes the data hard to comprehend and understand by reference to normal experiences). We all know that the persistence of water spills and droplets depends on their size, on the temperature, etc. Giving persistence relative to water is more helpful for grasping the magnitude of the delayed hazard.
Some additional interesting facts that the media are not alluding to at present:
(1) This nerve liquid poisoning of former double agent Colonel Skripal, aged 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, seems at first glance to have been bungled by the FSB (Putin's modernised KGB), just as the poisoning of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko by alpha radiation from Po-210 in his teapot (which has longish 138 days half life!) in London in 2006. Why use these agents, nerve agents and radioactive materials which can be fingerprinted to Lubyanka Moscow FSB headquarters (by isotopic impurities and so on, since Po-210 is produced by irradiating bismuth with neutrons in a reactor, the results depending on irradiation time)? Why not use a commonplace chemical poison bought in Britain, or shoot the person? Thus, clearly Putin's FSB is deliberately sending out a signal to deter dissidents by making them fear the reach of Russian influence abroad, in Britain. He is not trying to quietly make people disappear, but to provoke terror.
(2) This is an old tactic, reminding us of Stalin's order for his enemy Trotsky (author of The Revolution Betrayed, an attack on Stalin) to be eliminated by an agent using an ice pick in Mexico (a country that never gets ice!), or of the umbrella-type injector used to fire a small pellet containing lethal ricin into the back of the thigh of Bulgarian (Warsaw Pact) communist dissident Georgi Markov, aged 49, at a bus stop in London on 7 September 1978. Markov had been standing at the bus stop to get a bus to the BBC at Bush House. Four days later he died in hospital in London from ricin poisoning. His was a slow, painful death that allowed the assassin to escape and led to blanket news scare stories that probably deterred other dissidents from speaking out against communist Bulgaria.
This is probably the point about the skin contamination with nerve liquid on Sunday and the teapot contaminated with polonium-210 twelve years ago: these poisons acted slowly enough to allow the assassins to escape Scot free (which would be less likely if the attack was clearer to identify, such as an assassin's gun shot), and also maximised the suffering of the victims, thereby making news headlines and thus helping to deter future episodes. Most dissidents will probably shut up and hide away now. It does however bring back memories of the Cold War.
The prolonging of the Syrian civil war to help Moscow's friend Assad win, by Russian vetoes on (pseudo) "United Nations" propaganda lies (a nasty fascist tactic to prolong terror by replacing actions with double talk and utopian fantasy, costing many thousands of lives), and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine and the seizure of Crimea in January 2014 have already shown the situation plainly. Is Russia really that impoverished? It doesn't have the colossal national debts (trillions of dollars, trillions of pounds) that West has. Overall, the "wealth" of the West is more or less cancelled out by its debt obligations. Russia's economy is weak compared to the West, but by the very fact, it is more resilient to crises on stock markets, debt interest rate hikes, and so on. It is investing heavily in new nuclear weapon delivery systems, according to Putin's recent 1 March 2018 speech to Russia's Federal Assembly, such as underwater nuclear drones.
Above: President Putin is taking the approach of Ronald Reagan or "Iron Lady" Thatcher by standing up to the West and its allies, including dissidents such as Colonel Sergei Skripal, which boosts his popularity for forthcoming Russian elections. In a way, he is justified in asserting Russian nationalism and challenging the Western hostility towards Russia that is hypocritical in that, as soon as someone like Trump is elected, or Brexit is voted in, the socialist media goes off democracy! Certainly if you want strong leadership, Putin is that. Similarly, Islam is a strong religion in the sense that its followers are generally less hypocritical and undisciplined than many Christians. It boils down to moral compass values: do you put principled ideals ahead of practical realities, like military power and enforcing discipline? We can respect Putin for his toughness, without agreeing with everything he does.
We should use Cold War successes to deter the kind of invasions that trigger off major wars. Appeasement was a not a failure because Chamberlain went to meet the dictators in September 1938; it was a failure because, when he went, he lacked the military power to make his wishes credible (Reagan met Gorbachev at the October 1987 summit with a very different outcome, because Reagan's handshake "appeasement" was backed up with immense thermonuclear power!). The lesson is that you get peace only when you negotiate from a position of strength, not weakness.
Update (13 March 2018):
Russia has been given until midnight to explain how the Russian made nerve agent came to be used against a Russian dissident in the UK. The nerve agent was named by the British Government yesterday as Russian Novichok class (the Russian for "newcomer"), some of which are reportedly 5-8 times more lethal than VX (which North Korea used last year at an airport to eliminate Kim Jong-Nam, the defector and half brother of dictator Kim Jong-Un). Novichok works in the same way as all other organophosphate nerve agents, causing muscles to contract tightly by inhibiting the enzyme acetylcholinesterase which normally breaks down acetylcholine, the chemical that triggers muscular contraction. Therefore, atropine is still valid and helps to counteract Novichok by relaxing muscles.
The UK government's response, in waiting a week before instructing almost 500 people who were in the affected areas to wash their clothes and wipe their phones clean, seems to be the usual groupthink civil defence bureaucracy which combines official secrecy with fear of causing a panic, and ends up giving out advice that is so over-simplified that it appears to be directed at two-year-olds. The ultimatum to Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who has the same poker faced lawyer mentality of the USSR's Brezhnev era Andrei Gromyko (who denied the existence of Russian missiles in Cuba to President Kennedy's face in 1962), is likely to lead to an escalation of the crisis, instead of deterring aggression and thus keeping civil relations. Sanctions failed against Japan (1937-1941) and Iraq (1992-2002), unlike credible deterrence (i.e. Reagan's experience, in the 1980s).
Update (18 March 2018):
Britain's Foreign Secretary has disclosed that there is evidence Russia has for the past 10 years been building up an illegal stockpile of Novichok nerve agent, contrary to its treaty obligations:
Boris Johnson has said the UK is in possession of evidence that Russia has been exploring nerve-agent based assassinations and that the country has been stockpiling deadly chemical weapons in the last decade.
The Foreign Secretary in particular claimed Britain has reason to believe Moscow has been collecting the “military grade” Novichok nerve agent that the UK Government says was deployed in the Salisbury attack.
He made the comments moments after a senior Russian diplomat claimed his country has no stockpile of any nerve agent, and even suggested the source of the chemical used in Salisbury was the UK’s Porton Down military laboratory.
- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-russia-nerve-agent-stockpiling-chemical-weapon-assassinations-a8261771.html
This has implications for other Russian weapons of mass destruction, for example their nuclear weapons stockpile figures, which may similarly be misleading. In other words, there is reason to distrust claims of disarmament in accordance to paper treaties, just as occurred from 1933 onward in Germany. Because you acquire a signed declaration, you feel assured that you have achieved peace. If, however, one side is dishonest, then your confidence becomes not only groundless, but dangerously deceptive, because you will point to the paper and signature as an excuse to disarm relative to the (secretly rearming) aggressor.
After the 1930s "disarmament of Germany" delusion, "arms control" used international inspectors to verify the crushing of specific numbers of missile shells, i.e. the relatively large delivery systems. However, as we saw when arms control inspectors were trying to assess Iraq's WMDs before 2002, it is harder to police chemical war agents and even the small masses of nuclear fissile materials inside warheads, due to secrecy and the amounts of material involved. Iraq probably hid its chemical weapons in barrels under the desert sands, where they remain. Is that "destruction" or "stockpiling"? Just because you can't readily find a needle in the proverbial haystack, does that disprove that the needle exists there somewhere? Or is it more like a game of hide and seek?
SUMMARY
Russian now has illegal stockpiles of Novichok nerve gas for war use, which it denies having. Due to the appeasement of Putin, there are 346,000 confirmed dead in Syria, another 56,900 missing presumed dead, 13,100,000 living in misery, and 5,600,000 refugees. In August 2012, President Obama, who had already received the Nobel Peace Prize, stated that the: "red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised." Putin supplied Assad to gas 400 kids and 1,100 adults in Damascus. President Obama withdrew his stated "red line". Last April, Trump ordered retaliation against Assad's air base in response to Assad's sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun. Too little, too late. But Trump was not President when the Syrian war began at Deraa in March 2011, when Assad massacred pro-democracy supporters. Somebody else was. Guess who?
Again, I'll repost the following call for common sense in the face of this new gas threat:
Daily Express columnist calls for gas mask civil defence, Daily Express, 15 April 2017, page 19.
Doubtless, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will continue to hurl abuse at anyone who wants civil defence to help save lives, but at least he is thereby showing his true colours of anti-Western hatred:
Update (22 March 2018) on the Novichok A234 nerve agent and Russian denials/propaganda
Novichok nerve agent A234 used by Putin against Britain in an attack on 4 March 2018 is today the top news for chemistry experts.
"Novichok – choline esterase inhibitors (Novichok 5 and Novichok 7). They are
effecting very rapidly, penetrate through the skin and respiratory system. Novichok 5
exceeds effectiveness of soman by 10 times and of VX by 5 to 8 times. Novichok 5
(Substance A-232) and its ethyl-analog (Substance A-234) can be produced in binary
form by using acetonitrile and an organic phosphate compound.12 System of agent A232
components was successfully tested in Nukus Uzbekistan, in the military chemical
proving ground in 1992. Existence of the “Foliant” program and Novichok were
revealed in 1992 by chemists Lev Fedorov and Vil Mirzayanov in an article of the
newspaper Moscow News. ... Russia has officially never acknowledged the existence of the group Novichok."
- GYÖRGYI VÁSÁRHELYI and LÁSZLÓ FÖLDI, "History of Russia’s chemical weapons", AARMS HISTORY, Volume 6, issue No. 1 (2007), pages 135–146.
(NOTE THE DATE OF 2007 OF THAT PAPER, WHICH DISPROVES LYING RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA CLAIMS THAT PORTON DOWN HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE ATTACK.)
One depiction of the chemical structure of the Novichok A234 agent which was illegally used by Russia to commit a terrorist act in Britain, 4 March 2018. In olden times, this would have constituted an act of war, not an opportunity for Stalinist propaganda from Russia. Britain can test the properties of such chemicals in powerful chemical molecule simulations by computer, or by using trace amounts. Contrary to Russian propaganda, this is entirely different from making enough of the agent in a military grade for an attack. The evidence points strongly towards Putin, since he is behind covert attacks on Ukraine, Georgia, Crimea, London in 2006 using radioactive Po-210, and supplying Assad with nerve gas in Syria.
"Much of what is publicly known about Novichok agents comes from Vil Mirzayanov, an analytical chemist who worked for the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT), a notorious chemical weapons laboratory. Mirzayanov developed methods to detect nerve agents created and tested in the U.S.S.R.’s chemical weapons facilities. His techniques would be used to monitor the environment for any traces of the agents that might reveal the labs’ activities to foreign intelligence services.
"In the late 1980s, Mirzayanov’s analytical techniques revealed that nerve agents were befouling the air and water around one of these facilities, posing a major health risk. So he went public, revealing details of the U.S.S.R.’s chemical weapons program to Moscow News in 1992. Officials arrested and imprisoned Mirzayanov, but eventually dropped the case against him. In 1995, he immigrated to the U.S., where he subsequently wrote a book about his experiences, titled “State Secrets: An Insider’s Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program. Mirzayanov writes that the USSR produced a few tons of Novichok-5 and tens of tons of Novichok-7. According to Tucker, the USSR carried out open-air tests of Novichok-5 in the early 1990s on the Ustyurt Plateau, a desert area ... Novichok-5 and -7 act very rapidly, penetrating the skin and respiratory system."
- https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/i12/Nerve-agent-attack-on-spy-used-Novichok-poison.html
The Novichok A234 nerve agent (the ethyl analog of Novichok-5) used in the UK has probably helped foster popularity for Putin (by reinforcing the eternal myth that Russia is surrounded by aggressive imperialists) in the recent Russian elections whereby he was re-elected for a fourth term; another 6 years as Russian President or dictator in effect, due to his tough suppression of any credible alternatives/critics.
Russian propaganda in the UK is, as in the Cold War, now exploiting the UK's pathetic bureaucratic official secrecy system to claim some conspiracy theory, that the evidence for Novichok A234 is a British invention, just as they did 12 years ago for the Po-210 poisoning. My opinion on secrecy follows that of Edward Teller (see link at the top of this blog post to Teller's call for less secrecy). We need to declassify what we know about Novichok nerve agent A234, to destroy this propaganda.
Please also see recent comments to this post concerning the need for an urgent effort to stockpile CREDIBLE nuclear deterrents and also civil defense countermeasures against invasions by Russian troops supported by Novichok nerve agent. Waiting for another crisis before acting may be too late.
In 2008, the former USSR chemical warfare scientist Dr Vil S. Mirzayanov (born 1935 in Russia) exposed Russian Novichok nerve gas research in his book State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program. The continuing denial by Russia is proof that they are being as dishonest about Novichok as they were about Russian missiles in Cuba in October 1962, when Kennedy had to declassify and publish on TV top secret photos of missiles taken from a U2 spy plane. The West needs to declassify the truth to debunk enemy obfuscation and propaganda.
Dr Mirzayanov has recently described the horrifying effects of his invention, Novichok:
Vil Mirzayanov described the use of the lethal toxins as a 'brazen' attack by Vladimir Putin, who 'thinks he can use everything to kill enemies'. Mr Mirzayanov says a large dose of Novichok 'paralyses' victims before 'it causes convulsions, you can't breathe and after that you die'. The exiled scientist shocked the world in 1992 when he revealed that promises by the Soviet Union to reduce its chemical weapon stockpiles were hollow. He worked in the top-secret Moscow laboratory where a new generation of even more potent poisons was being perfected. These gruesome chemical weapons, named 'Novichok' after the Russian for 'newcomer', were designed to be even more lethal than VX or sarin. At the time, one former top Soviet military adviser described them as 'political weapons', adding: 'They have a powerful moral and psychological effect.' ...
Speaking from his home in New Jersey last night, Mr Mirzayanov, 83, described the top-secret laboratory as a 'criminal enterprise'.
'It's a brazen attack,' he said. 'Putin thinks he can use everything to kill enemies. They don't tolerate any opponents. They should be punished. It's an open demonstration of this Russian terrorism. The Russian government is telling people who are thinking about revealing more secrets that they can expect the same fate.' Asked how the nerve agent works, he added: 'It's for paralysing people, it causes you convulsions and you can't breathe and after that you die. If you get enough of a dose of it. It's real torture, it's impossible to imagine. Even in low doses the pain can go on for weeks. You cannot imagine the horror, it's so bad.'
The Novichok family of nerve agents were secretly developed over two decades at a research facility 50 miles outside the Russian capital. ...
Describing his work, Mr Mirzayanov said: 'They were normal laboratories, they were not underground or anything. They were testing and developing. There were around 1,000 people working on this, it was a big deal. You have to test it on animals and after that you have to study the chemical properties... so many laboratories were involved.'
In 1987, one physicist at the laboratory was saved despite being exposed to the chemical when a ventilator stopped working. Witnesses described how he staggered out of the room, describing seeing bright hallucinations before collapsing and being rushed to hospital by the KGB. He was left with permanent injuries after being critically ill for ten days and unable to walk for six months.
- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5492781/Scientist-reveals-horror-lethal-nerve-agent-Novichok.html
Above: In his 2008 book about Novichok, Dr Mirzayanov discredits the so-called Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (CWC) as being a deliberately loop-hole filled Russian negotiated front to allow Russia to build up a clandestine stockpile of nerve gas, which Russia lied about. In the book Dr Mirzayanov explains that, after he had disclosed the facts of Novichok to the media in September 1992, the successor to the KGB arrested him for "disclosing state secrets", hardly an action they would take if Russia's stockpile of illegal Novichok nerve gas was imaginary or a joke.
He was sent to Matrosskaya Tishina maximum security prison as punishment. He states in the book that the Russians attached sixty "secret and top secret" Russian government reports on Novichok to his indictment, which he was able to: "copy out legally during my study of the case materials ... 51 of them are attached to this book in the Annexes. From these documents, it is possible to get some idea of how the Novichok program ... was going on in the Soviet Union, then in Russia."
So there are actual secret and top secret classified Russian documents on Novichok that discredit Russian denials as complete lies. Dr Mirzayanov also explains in his 2008 book that the chemical arms control delusions have failed with Novichok: "After his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize and Russia's signing of the Agreement on the Nonproduction and Elimination of Chemical Weapons (CWC) on September 23, 1989, by Edward Shevardnadze, Mikhail Gorbachev ... signed Resolution no 844-186 of the Central Committee of CPSU and Council of Ministers on October 6, 1989, sanctioning the start up of the binary [Novichok nerve gas] weapons program. Already a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Gorbachev on April 23, 1991 awarded the Lenin Prize to the leaders of the Military Chemical Complex for the successful development, testing and production of these arms. Despite the fall of the Communist regime, the Novichok program continued ..."
Update, 28 March 2018: Novichok was sprayed on the front door of Sergei Skripal's house
In the introduction to his 2008 book about Russia's illegal and covert Novichok nerve gas program, State Secrets, Dr Vil Mirayanov writes:
"Even though the concept of Democracy was beginning to catch on fire in Russia, nothing was fundamentally changing. I became involved with the Democratic Movement at my institute, and tried to persuade people to stop producing chemical agents, and I appealed to Moscow's Mayor Gravril Popov, but there were no results. Reluctantly at first, then more resolutely, I became a whistleblower. ... If I hadn't spoken up, who would have? Probably no one in the rest of the world would have known about Novichok.
"I appealed to the world community to pay attention to this problem in my first article published in the Moscow newspaper Kuranty in 1991, but there was no reaction. Then two more articles appeared in the September of 1992 issues of Moscow News and The Baltimore Sun, which resulted in my arrest for 'divulging state secrets'. This was the beginning of my persecution ... Despite my revelations and the ratification of the CWC [Chemical Weapons Convention] by Russia, the Novichok program was not put under international control and ... the binary components [which when mixed together produce the nerve agent] are not on the list of controlled compounds of CWC. This is very troubling because there are no guarantees that Russia isn't continuing such secret programs. These are all extremely compelling reasons for amending the CWC to include these chemicals, but nothing has been done about it. I am sure I am not the only person who has noticed that these loopholes that were written into the CWC could very well have been built in intentionally."
What Dr Mirayanov is saying is plain truth about the old Stalinist trick of pushing for arms control agreements that contain loopholes; if they succeed and get the useless piece of paper, then go ahead and violate the spirit of the agreement. On the other hand, if other nations refuse to agree to a useless (misleading) arms control agreement that contains loopholes, then they put on a grand show of denouncing the rest of the world as warmongers who don't want arms control and then go on building their stockpile up. Either way, the result is much the same. Stalin began this in 1946 by vetoing the Baruch Plan for postwar nuclear arms control (which contained good verification procedures) and proposing instead a rival scheme, which left out the careful inspections and so would not stop Russia secretly producing nuclear weapons! The problem in 1946 was that it was just a decade since Hitler had violated German arms control laws, so nobody was being fooled by signatures on papers that were not backed up by proper inspections.
As Herman Kahn points out lucidly in On Thermonuclear War, Khrushchev did the same in the 1950s, long before the Cuban Missile Crisis, he claimed that anybody violating a test ban treaty (by detonating a bomb in a large underground cavity or cave, to decouple the seismic signal) would "cover themselves in shame". He didn't exactly cover himself in shame in October 1962 when he lied about the presence of Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba, forcing Kennedy to publish the top secret U2 spy plane photos on TV to convince the public of which side of the story was the truth. The point is, yet again, that laws don't work anywhere: people break them, countries break them when their leaders are powerful enough to do so. The pieces of paper signed by Hitler in 1938 guaranteed no WWII. They were illusions. All that really counts is enforcement, and that will always risk confrontations and violence.
Update: Easter Sunday 1 April 2018, recent UK newspaper clippings highlights
Easter 2018 news of President Putin's latest 200 tons Satan 2 Sarmat missile, which can take 12 warheads 6,000 miles with up to 20 times the speed of sound:
Daily Express 17 March 2018, page 22: journalist Richard Madeley explains how the world is in denial of the new Cold War, a fact that bigoted pseudo-pacifists love to ignore.
Daily Mail 27 March 2018 page 1 exposing demonstrations by Jews against persecution by the hard left wing racism of Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, his friends and his supporters.
Above: Daily Express 27 March 2018 on page 2 reports that Labour MP Luciana Berger, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, states: "Anti-Semitism is very real and its alive in the Labour Party." The latest outrage is Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn's Facebook posting showing solidarity with abnormal racists who drew a hate attack painting of Jews. Corbyn later simply claimed he wished he had looked more closely at the racist painting before endorsing it. Now, if I was a lawyer, I'd explain to Corbyn that such excuses of incompetence to cover for racism are not adequate. (You cannot excuse yourself for homicide by saying you simply didn't look closely enough at who you were stabbing with your knife.) The question a court would have to address, is "did you defend racism, yes or no?", not "can you come up with an excuse off the top of your head for defending racism". Put another way, a judge would be happy to listen to claims about mitigating circumstances when deciding what punishment is due (the length of imprisonment or the fine), but that is a completely separate issue from the question of whether someone broke a law. E.g., if you had an eyesight problem or were in a hurry when driving, and consequently kill someone, such an excuse does not refute all responsibility for the terror you caused.
Hate inciting racist Rael Salah was supported by Corbyn, who opposed his extradition and then invited him for tea at House of Commons, because it fits into Corbyn's anti-Western agenda of destroying democracy to impose a Marxist state.
To understand this tragic situation of how millions of Britons are now being fooled by fake news into backing someone with similar views to Hitler, let's get back to fundamentals. The USSR-Nazi Pact in August 1939 lasted until June 1941, a grey era in USSR history textbooks since Stalin deleted the facts just as he literally had Trotsky airbrushed out of all photos featuring Lenin, after Trotsky wrote The Revolution Betrayed. This August 1939 to June 1941 period of Nazi-Russian collaboration included the joint invasion, in September 1939, of Poland by Germany and Russia, Russia's invasion of Finland, and the Russian genocide against Poles (the Katryn Forest Massacre). All during the Cold War, Marxists in the West like Corbyn called for CND type unilateral nuclear disarmament to allow Russia to impose its brand of dictatorship on the West. The real drive behind Corbyn now is the young, who have been exposed by biased Nation Union of Teachers "anti-war" propaganda to a fairy tale version of history, in which wicked imperialists caused the Cold War against loving, honest Marxists. Not true. We got the bomb in the first place to end World War. Don't forget that, please.
http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/ blog statistics today 1 April 2018 show that March 2018 corresponds to 48,859 page views, a record number. The "all time" page views of 1,713,360 is only for the period of May 2010 to end March 2018, and excludes the four years 2006-2010. It is worth publishing this, because the CND fanatics use a specious argument that if something isn't proved to be mainstream, they can ignore it for being a minority viewpoint (no matter how crucial the point is), while if something is mainstream, then they ignore it for being "populist". They also attack the messenger while ignoring the message, but that is pretty commonplace among pseudo-liberals who claim to be progressive, yet cling on to fallacies long ago proven to be dangerous, illusory dogma. It is interesting that France and Russia both now have a higher number of total page views than local visitors in the UK.
War declared against the racists of anti nuclear deterrence (CND), anti-civil defence, and pro Hamas terrorism supporter Corbyn by Sir David Garrard, £1.5 million Labour Party donor
Update: 2 April 2018 on calls for police to arrest the criminal friends, followers and racists of anti-nuclear CND bigot Jeremy Corbyn
Daily Express 2 April 2018 pages 6 and 7 exposing pressure on UK police to arrest Labour Party racists led by Corbyn.
Above: Daily Express 2 April 2018, pages 6 and 7, exposing pressure on UK police to arrest friends and colleagues of "uh oh" Jeremy Corbyn for charges of inciting racial hatred and related hate crimes. Enforcement of law is needed for law to be upheld. (The Uh Oh Jeremy Corbyn thing is from a comment on this blog; for readers who are lucky not to live in the UK, the Brownshirt gang of racists who beat up Jews are called Momentum now, and they sing "Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh Jeremy Corbyn" lovingly to their "dear leader" almost every day on BBC TV to make him seem nice. The commenter added an "Uh" before the "Oh", for reality.)
ABOVE: Another Labour supporter, Labour Peer Lord Sugar tweeted a photoshopped picture of Comrade Corbyn with Comrade Hitler in order apparently to boost Nazi support for Corbyn (although he later claimed it was some sort of sick "joke"), then deleted it on orders of Corbyn's comrade Dr Goebbels aka IRA terrorism lover Comrade McDonnell, who continues to display a plaque to IRA terrorists in his study, according to the Daily Telegraph.
Update 4 April 2018:
The Times front 4 April 2018 exposing racism of antinuclear anti civil defence leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Daily Express page 6 of 4 April 2018 exposing racism of antinuclear anti civil defence leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn and Putin are now joining forces to argue that Russian Novichok was not used against the UK on 4 March 2018, which as we argued in an earlier update (above) is all due to secrecy by Prime Minister May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who refuses to learn the lesson of Prime Minister Tony Blair's official UK Government "dodgy dossier" on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, issued in 2002 to justify actions against dictator Saddam (I put that dossier on Internet Archive, linked here, to preserve it for history). Sigh. Let's go back over this again. In 2002, Prime Minister Tony Blair issued that dossier which excluded the scientific data, which was secret. The weapons were never found after the Iraq war, so some people then pretended they didn't exist, despite the fact that Iraq provably had weapons stocks and didn't provide any evidence of destroying them at any point. Now, if a regime has a stockpile and destroys it, it tries to publicise the fact that the stockpile was destroyed. It doesn't justify a war on itself by keeping the destruction secret. So the weapons were probably just hidden (somewhere in thousands of square miles of desert sand, needles in haystacks impossible to locate ever, like the tomb of Cleopatra). The lesson is that you need to publish the evidence to prevent any controversy. Instead of which, the UK Government has invited Russia to launch a propaganda war, claiming that Russia never made any Novichok, that Porton or MI5 are terrorists, etc. This is now escalating the confrontation with a country which has many times the nuclear weapon stockpile of the UK, and far better civil defence shelters left over from the USSR, many of which have been re-equipped with new radiation meters and supplies. We should not be allowing Putin and his Comrade Corbyn to feed fake news to the BBC, the Guardian and the Daily Mirror. We need to publish the full facts, to avoid the obfuscation of secrecy. In October 1962, Kennedy published the full evidence - top secret U2 spy plane photos - to the people of the world to justify his claims about the covert, lying delivery of Russian nuclear missiles to Cuba, just off the coast of America. He proved his case with evidence, instead of relying on a lot of secretive bungling bureaucrats who make contradictory statements that fuel an escalation of the crisis.
UPDATE: 5 April 2018
Daily Express 5 April 2018 page 4 on calls for police to investigate Jeremy Corbyn racism supporters. Ex-Labour peer Lord Sugar, Lord Polak, Baroness Altmann, Lord Beecham, Lord Carlile, Baroness Deech, Lord Leigh, Lord Mitchell, Lord Palmer and Lord Turnbery have at last written a letter to the Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, requesting support against Corbyn's fans. However, Corbyn is effectively appealing to Putin for support by rejecting claims that Russian aggression led to the Novichok attack on 4 March 2018, and Corbyn has also just attended a satirical Passover dinner, ridiculing not only Jews but when his friends shouted "f*** the police". So the police is not really in a position to intervene now. It is too late. Anyone trying to prosecute or arrest racists who are followers of Corbyn must weigh up the risks of finding their front door smeared with Novichok, or facing retaliatory actions when Corbyn is PM. The evidence for Comrade Corbyn's Russian spy involvement is known by all:
The Sun 21 February 2018 page 10 asks vital security questions that Corbyn calls "harassment" by the media: yet evidence exists that Corbyn is a threat to UK national security, and recent evidence proves that his Marxist criminal mindset is unaltered from his 1980s USSR spy period, when he was a stooge for Russian "divide and rule" attempts to pervert democracy in the UK. Yet he is being given secret information on Novichok which is denied to Joe Public, and then he is abusing this position of trust to support Putin. Corbyn refuses to release his East German Stasi police files for public viewing. He is a secretive manipulator, a liar on nuclear weapons deterrence, and as we exposed in a earlier post, a shameful bigot towards civil defence to save lives in the wars that his kind refuse to deter around the world. In Reagan's terms, he is becoming the focus of evil in world.
Update: 6 April 2018
Above: 1967 Civil Defence Instructors General and Supplementary Notes on "Protect and Survive" (then called "Civil Defence Handbook 10: Advising the Householder on Protection against nuclear attack"). In this open (unclassified) publication (sold by H.M. Stationery Office for 7 shillings and 6 pence), the training note G32:1, dated January 1967 (just a before the oversimplified handbook was ridiculed in the House of Commons for being idiotically simple, leading to the entire UK Civil Defence Corps being closed by Marxist PM Harold Wilson in March 1968), states: "There are many additions and alternatives which could be given to the advice contained in the handbook, but it is essential that this advice is not allowed to become over complicated by reference to too many refinements." This is the key problem with groupthink government bureaucracy on nuclear weapons deterrence and civil defence. It is oversimplified, and lacks credibility: it looks stupid.
Above: 1953 "Restricted" classified Civil Defence Instructors Notes containing secretive data on the adaptation of refuge rooms and WWII shelters for nuclear warfare (which at that time, in 1953, was not available to the public in unclassified Civil Defence Corps publications). This was the information used when my father was an instructor in the Colchester Civil Defence Corps in the 1950s, with the result being an exploitation of the public "information vacuum" by Communist Party propaganda and ignorant scare mongering Marxist media who wanted Britain to disarm and to have no civilian protection against the Russian nuclear weapons first tested in 1949. Data was declassified and publicised in the usual groupthink bureaucratic "too little, too late" manner, to appear like a bungled, very tardy propaganda response to wonderfully honest Marxist data on the impossible chance of anybody surviving a Russian attack. In the meanwhile, nuclear weapons were rendered an incredible deterrent and Russia massacred civilians who protested for their freedom in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, and armed terrorists to try to bring down democratically elected governments across the world.
If anyone wants to know how the statistical evidence for how incredibly effective at lifesaving the simple, low cost indoor table shelter was in Britain in WWII, please click here (97.5% survival in completely demolished homes; vital knowledge for ongoing wars throughout the world whose deterrence nasty CND people like Corbyn resolutely oppose for political Marxist agenda reasons, while also opposing lifesaving low cost, practical, proved civil defence to maximise casualties). If anyone wants to know just how effective 3-storey high above-ground (not underground!) earth and concrete shelters were at withstanding the 130 psi blast just 1.4 mile from a 15 megaton nuclear bomb at Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954, please click here (not vapourised, didn't cease to exist, photographed and still there now). If anyone wants to see original nuclear test data reports on gamma radiation and blast in low cost open trench and Anderson shelters justifying British civil defence manuals, please click here. If anyone wants to see how recent American research proves Penney's Hiroshima data on blast and radiation attenuation due to energy used up in causing damage (negating Glasstone's use of unobstructed desert terrain data for blast waves), please click here or here.
UPDATE (7 MAY 2018): EXTRACTS FROM U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY'S OPENNET REPORT 1177129, DECLASSIFIED SECRET-RESTRICTED DATA "AN INTRODUCTION TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS PRIMARY PHYSICS", BY MILES BARON, 2005, LOS ALAMOS REPORT LA-CP-05-0823
Above: unclassified extracts of data from An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons Primary Physics, Los Alamos, originally SECRET RESTRICTED DATA, by Miles Baron. Note that the secret data Los Alamos are now using indicates that the fission of one atom of plutonium releases 220 MeV, ten percent more energy that the generic unclassified figure of 200 MeV stated in the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons. Other figures given include 16.6 kg for the critical mass of (chemically) stabilized delta-phase plutonium-239. Such data is listed in unclassified publications, but there are generally a range of alternative numbers given from older declassified papers, so it is very interesting to see relatively up to date July 2005 data used in a secret-classified Los Alamos document. In 2006, we published declassified versions of Glasstone's own originally secret weapon design summary (in two versions, with and without thermonuclear design supplements, dated 1963/4 and 1972, respectively), An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons, with PDFs of four versions linked here: 1962, 1963, 1972a and 1972b. The critical masses and other nuclear weapon design data from Baron's 2005 report can therefore be directly compared to Glasstone 1963 and 1972, to see the evolution of knowledge!
Above: some interesting nuclear weapon design radiation data reports have been declassified to Opennet, with extensive deletions of secret data, the most important being the Sprint neutron bomb radiation output report (far right above): LA-6871-MS, L. C. Harrison et al., Output for the Sprint Warhead, Secret - Atomic Weapon Data Category Sigma 1, Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information. This report (in classified form) is a complete set of calculated radiation outputs and debris motions from the first deployment of Samuel Cohen's "neutron bomb", the kiloton W66 Sprint warhead, which was for use in melting and thus deforming the fissile material of enemy incoming nuclear warheads as part of a clean, low yield nuclear ABM (anti-ballistic system). This was prior to the main "neutron bomb controversy" when the Russians lied about the effects and capabilities of the neutron bomb via the World Peace Council's anti-nuclear CND Russian-front and other bigoted, nasty authority-not-fact pseudo-scientific dogmatic left wing fascists in the Western media and its "groupthink science", in order to maintain their ability to start WWIII with a concentrated tank invasion of Europe. (While pretending to be "peace" lovers!) Although this report LA-6871-MS was heavily "santized", nevertheless it still contains the most important data needed, an interesting list in Table I of the compositions and masses of all components in the Sprint missile itself, from the 1.5 kg silica phenolic ablative heat shielding nose cap (ablation of phenolic ablators on warhead noses are discussed in detail in Part 2 of Dolan's 1972 EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons), to the 149 kg second stage motor. This data is used in order to calculate the effect of the Sprint missile delivery system on the neutron and gamma radiation outputs from the warhead within it, because there is no time available in this last-ditch terminal phase interception ABM system to eject the warhead from its missile system, prior to detonating it! We can easily use the tabulated data on masses and compositions in the declassified version of LA-6871-MS, in conjunction with the output spectrum of the enhanced neutron warhead published in Northrop's 1996 EM-1 handbook, and Dolan's schematic of the Sprint missile system in the 1972 edition of EM-1, to replicate the calculations in LA-6871-MS. What is emerging is a great deal of very valuable data on the true effects of vitally important enhanced neutron warheads, both for ABM and to deter invasions by concentrated military forces. The Sprint missile system is very important.
Further reading on Opennet:
1. Secret (now declassified) report detailing why we need the W79 enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons to deter Russian expansionism (LA-12063-MS, dated 1991), please click here for Opennet's PDF.
2. Secret (now declassified) Quarterly Progress to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Part 3 Weapons, by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, July-September 1958 (PDF on Opennet linked here). This summarises the interesting plan details concerning conversion of the nuclear weapons, including the clean weapons, tested at Bikini Atoll in Operation Hardtack, 1958, into stockpiled nuclear deterrents. Earlier versions of these US AEC to the JCAE reports on weapons development in the 1950s were accidentally put on the shelves of Los Alamos National Laboratory's public library section and ended up in the news (they were quickly removed from the shelves). This particular report discusses the 2000 lb stockpile production of the Class D Mark 28 thermonuclear weapon, the 1600 lb Mark 49 Y1 thermonuclear warhead for the IRBM, and the 2800 lb Class D missile warhead, the Mark 27. It also mentions the early development effort to produce the Davy Crockett battlefield tactical weapon (finally proof tested in 1962 as the 0.02 kt, two point implosion Mark 54 weapon). It also discusses, on page 3, the "clean" version of the W-41, adding: "Both versions [clean and dirty] will be produced."
This is a vital statement for debunking simple civil defense criticisms and common objections against credible nuclear deterrence (i.e. fallout mythology fear peddling by CND fascists). OK, in the end General LeMay was anti-clean weapons (he wanted a bigger bang for the buck, using U238 pushers not inert tungsten or lead, as used respectively in the clean tests of Hardtack 1958 and Redwing 1956 at Bikini Atoll), and he managed to convince Eisenhower to deploy what he wanted in the megaton range, but nevertheless, clean weapons could be adopted today as a step towards the elimination of incredible (high collateral damage) nuclear deterrence, and a step towards the deterrence of not only a nuclear first strike, but also the conventional invasions that set off large wars which escalate (as in August 1945) to nuclear war. Key clean bomb tests in the 1950s were Poplar, Zuni, and Navajo (click here for the proof test results of clean bombs eliminating fallout collateral damage).
The report also goes on to discuss, on pages 330-331, the thermonuclear weapons design progress which Britain disclosed to America at their first joint warhead design meeting on 25-27 August, 1958:
"During the first meeting it became obvious that the United Kingdom has achieved an advanced state of weapon research and development both in the fission and thermonuclear fields. Moreover, it appeared that certain advances made by the United Kingdom would be of benefit to the United States [e.g. Britain detonated only spherical shaped secondaries in 1957-8 thermonuclear tests using the radiation channel filled with plastic foam to produce isotropic X-ray delivery to the spherical shape, whereas America concentrated on cylindrical secondaries whose dense metal pusher surfaces were ablated by soft x-rays "reflected" or rather re-radiated from just a layer of plastic foam on the inner surface of the outer case of the warhead]. Despite these achievements, however, the British apparently do not have an appreciation that plutonium produced from uranium subjected to higher burnup [i.e. with more neutron capture isotopes, nuclides Pu-240, Pu-241, Pu-242, Am-241, etc., some having higher spontaneous fission and thus higher neutron background that could pre-detonate slowly-assembled fissile cores] in their power reactors is usable in weapons. This knowledge would be of great significance to their civilian power programs. In addition, they have apparently not exerted major effort toward making their weapons one-point safe [i.e. invulnerable to accidents].
"Highlights of the second meeting, held in Albuquerque, September 15-17 [1958], are as follows:
"1. We provided the British with blueprints, material specifications, and relevant theoretical and experimental information related to our [Polaris submarine SLBM] XW-47 warhead, Mark 28, 44, 45, and 48 warheads, and ... for our TX-41 and TX-46 weapons now under development.
"2. The British provided similar information on their high-yield fission bomb, now in stockpile, 2,200 pound thermonuclear bomb, small ... device, two boosted fission designs, planned 1,500 pound thermonuclear weapon, and proposed 6 inch gun [nuclear canon shell] device.
"3. Both parties discussed in detail neutron sources for initiators, high explosive specifications, yields and designs, and mechanical and electrical components.
"We have several observations resulting from these meetings. The British ... have tested radiation-implosion, two-stage devices corresponding to our knowledge in 1954-55. ... This [an implosion design] is a new technique to United States implosion designers and holds a great deal of interest for us. ... there are specific developments which the United Kingdom scientists have made which hold a great deal of interest for us and which might offer advantages in our weapons systems."
This limited example of USA-UK collaboration to halt the USSR and Warsaw Pact beautifully illustrates the progress which could be achieved in ending the bloodshed of conventional warfare by collaboration for peace, not the deluded arms control/disarmament farce which failed to halt bloodshed since 1945, but a collaboration between different weapons labs to make more credible nuclear deterrents which can halt aggression, invasion, and war with less collateral damage, and this will finally bring real peace through security, i.e low cost credible defense of democratic freedom.
5 July 2018 Update on new Novichok nerve agent poisoning victims in Amesbury, 8 miles north of Salisbury at 10:15 and 15:30 on Saturday 30 June 2018
30 June 2018 Amesbury Novichok A234 poisoning timeline from DAILY MAIL.
Dawn Sturgess, 44, and partner Charlie Rowley, 45, have reportedly had their hands contaminated with high concentrations of Novichok A234, the same substance smeared on the door knob of Sergei Skripal, 67, in March. The new poisoning victims have reportedly - on the basis of the high concentrations of Novichok - handled the original Novichok A234 container used to carry the agent from Moscow to Salisbury by Putin's spies in March. Naturally, they discarded before taking a flight back to Russia, and they did not put it in a bin (which they knew might have been searched after the poisoning was discovered). The original container would not be a test tube labelled clearly "Novichok A234", but something camouflaged as an innocent object. All other contaminated areas have been decontaminated by the weather (rainfall, wind, etc.) or by the decontamination efforts of police and the military in March. What has happened is that the Russian spies took a container of nerve agent through customs into England of a form which would not arouse suspicion. A cavity in the back of a wrist watch, or inside a USB memory stick, or inside a laptop, phone or tablet, would be the most likely locations (e.g. you can plug a half-size 2.5 inch HDD-replacing SSD laptop, leaving ample room in the half-empty SSD enclosure for a pack of Novichok). After the nerve agent was removed, the entire object would be discarded. Since it had not been decontaminated, and might have remained inside a bag hidden in undergrowth at the edge of a field or park, it would not have been washed clean internally by the weather, and could still be a hazard.
Someone then finds it, takes it home, charges it and uses it. Ms Sturgess collapsed at 10:15 am on Saturday 30 June 2018, and Mr Rowley collapsed at the same flat in Amesbury at 3:30pm that same day. Clearly that had recently discovered the missing Novichok A234 container, without realising the danger or its true significance. It is not speculative to argue that after all this time, the object causing this severe contamination of their hands must have been the original container used by the Russians, and that this object would now be located in the Mr Rowley's flat in Amesbury. The fact that she fell ill first suggests that she was contaminated significantly first, or to a greater extent, than Mr Rowley. Her home is reportedly in a hostel in Salisbury, where she may have found the A234 container.
The Porton Down chemical warfare centre should be able to identify the original container from the high concentration of A234, i.e. the quantitative contamination density on it (micrograms of A234 per square metre), just as in 2006 the teapot poisoned with Po-210 was identified from the concentration of alpha activity (in becquerels per square metre) that it contained. This is completely at odds with the gormless Russian propaganda being restated by pig-ignorant "science reporters" on Channel 4 "news", a front for dishonesty and delusions. (They are currently repeating Russian "questions" as to whether Britain has created this latest poisoning to take away credit from Russian's glorious hosting of the football World Cup, despite such "questions" being classic Russian propaganda tricks.) What is interesting is whether finding the actual container will indicate:
(1) The total amount of A234 originally smuggled into Britain (just measure its volume!),
(2) The people responsible, because there might be fingerprints on it from before it was opened: think from the mindset of the assassin by supposing you are Putin's agent and you carry the poison through customs into Britain (inside your specially modified watch, phone, laptop, or ipad). That object will have fingerprints on it, because the poison is sealed inside aluminium foil (or plastic), to allow you to safely carry it. You are not going to be wearing gloves all the way from Moscow to Salisbury, which would be unnecessary and suspicious! You might well wear gloves when you finally open the back of the watch or the back of the laptop or USB stick to remove the poison pack, which you tear open at the front door of Skripal's house, apply it to the doorknob, and then place it into a rucksack or bag, followed by gloves. The container may still have traces of fingerprints on it. Put another way, if the object had been doused in petrol and burned to cinders to carefully destroy the evidence, then it is unlikely that Sturgess would have touched it. If they didn't bother to destroy the container, maybe they didn't bother to scrub the fingerprints off it, either. Far more likely, the agents smeared Novichok A234 on the Skripal's door knob in March wearing gloves, then put the container into a rucksack or other bag with the gloves, zipped it up, and then dumped the whole thing in a the long grass of a park in Salisbury or Amesbury where it was discovered on Saturday morning by Dawn Sturgess who took it, or part of its contents, home and was contaminated. If the object is bulky, there is a chance of tracking where it has been using standard forensic techniques. (It is known for certain that both Sturgess and Rowley visited a park, Queen Elizabeth Gardens, in Salisbury on Friday 29 June 2018, but that is not necessarily where they found the contaminated object.)
(3) Whether the Novichok A234 was smuggled in two precursor chemical parts as a "binary" agent, whereby two relatively harmless chemicals are mixed together to form lethal substance, just before it is used. This option is a complete unknown, but it might have been used in case customs officials opened and inspected one (or both) of the precursor substances.
16 July 2018 UPDATE: NOVICHOK REPORTEDLY SPRAYED FROM PERFUME BOTTLE
It has now been reported by Matthew Rowley, brother of Novichok casualty Charlie Rowley, that the source of the Novichok A234 was a perfume bottle discovered by Mr Rowley (who is still alive and now conscious in hospital, and who has spoken about the events with his brother). If correct, Ms Sturgess (who was hospitalised before Mr Rowley) received a larger dose from spraying her wrist with Novichok in the belief it was a harmless perfume.
Mr Rowley reportedly discovered the perfume bottle (which the police found in his house and sent to Porton for analysis), and he took longer to be taken ill, and to a lesser (non-fatal) degree. Ms Sturgess was affected sooner and died, presumably as a result of exposure to a much larger dose of Novichok, as a result of spraying the perfume bottle on her skin. The basic standard treatments for Novichok at present are atropine to relax muscles (just enough to keep the eye pupils at normal 2-4mm diameter, instead of contracted to points which is what nerve agent does due to continued muscular contraction), sedatives to relax the brain, and an artificial respirator machine (with tubed air into the lungs) to take over breathing if the atropine dose needed is so great that the muscles are completely unable to function for normal breathing. Clearly, Ms Sturgess had such a large dose that this treatment, which succeeded with the previous Novichok cases, failed due to heart failure; her son Ewan has reported that Ms Sturgess's sister was with her when she died and "her heart slowed down and she just gave in." (Thus, possibly, a heart-and-lung machine may help in such high dose cases.)
If these reports about the source being a perfume bottle are correct (they are based on a visitor to Mr Rowley in hospital), then as we suggested in the previous update (above, item (1) ), the police will be able to determine the total amount of Novichok from the size of the perfume bottle, and the purity of the residue inside the bottle. It is possible that the perfume bottle was smuggled through customs in hand luggage if it was less than 50ml (larger bottles of liquid are banned from hand luggage, in case they contain explosives or acids for aircraft hijacks or sabotage). It could also have been smuggled in within hold luggage. If so, the Novichok was not in binary form (two inert precursors which are mixed to form the deadly nerve agent).
The police are having difficulties due to the heat exhaustion problems of working in hazmat chemical protection suits indoors in the UK's exceptionally hot weather at present. However, due to hydrolysis decay by rain outdoors since March, and the low volatility (i.e. long persistence) of Novichok (which is a skin threat to a far greater extent than an inhalation threat), gloves are probably all that is really needed for outdoor searches. The correct analogy is that while the more volatile nerve agents evaporate easily and therefore constitute an inhalation danger in enclosed spaces, Novichok A234 is more like a thick oil or grease which does not evaporate rapidly, and is therefore more of a danger to the skin than to the lungs, like VX which had to be deployed as a liquid droplet spray, not a vapour.
As already explained in the previous update, the Novichok A234 in a perfume bottle would have been sprayed on the door handle of the Skripal's house by someone wearing gloves for protection, who would then immediately have stowed the perfume and the gloves into some kind of container, possibly a rucksack or handbag, before discarding them.
The perfume bottle nozzle would obviously be contaminated; although Novichok A234 in undiluted form is too viscus - like treacle or honey - to spray from a perfume bottle, a non-water based volatile solvent/thinner could easily have been added, like a small quantity of petrol or alcohol. This would have allowed the Novichok to have been sprayed, and the solvent would then quickly evaporate from the door handle, leaving behind a thin layer of pure Novichok A234. Thus, the exact place where Mr Rowley found the perfume bottle may lead to further discoveries of evidence (bag, gloves, maybe the container in which the perfume bottle was smuggled in), as well as helping to map the route taken by the assassin after spraying. If we envisage the sequence of events from the perspective of the assassin taking safety precautions it is as follows:
1. Assassin arrives at Skripal house with Novichok in perfume bottle held in some kind of secure container (an assassin would not want a perfume bottle of Novichok loose in a handbag or pocket, in case it leaked or more likely, some movement caused the depression of the nozzle button on the top!).
2. Assassin puts on gloves, then takes out the perfume bottle of Novichok from its container (box, plastic bag, rucksack, or original transit container).
3. Wearing glove, assassin uses perfume bottle to spray A234 and alcohol mixture on door handle, where alcohol evaporates to leave pure A234 residue.
4. Assassin replaces perfume bottle into container, along with glove (probably removed by peeling it "inside out" to avoid contamination of the other hand by any droplets on outside of glove), and places that into the container.
5. Assassin discards container in shrubs or long grass in a park early in the morning or late at night, to avoid drawing attention to themselves (as might occur if they tried to burn the evidence). They might not want to place the evidence in a town centre bin, where a police search may find it quickly, and where CCTV cameras may identify the assassin easily.
It is also possible that due to cold weather in March, the assassin had gloves on the whole time and simply carried to perfume bottle in one hand, and kept it in the gloved hand after spraying it, in order to avoid unpacking and repacking the bottle in front of the Skripal's front door (in case seen by a neighbour or passer by). In this case, the perfume bottle might have been dumped by itself or with the gloves in the park. Either way, the discovery of the delivery container will be a major step forward in understanding how the attack was accomplished, particularly as the survivor who reportedly found the perfume bottle will be able to identify exactly where it was found, allowing a pin-point search for any other objects which may still exist in that vicinity, like gloves, bags, etc.
Update: 25 July 2018 on Novichok A234 container description by Charlie Rowley
Novichok victim Charlie Rowley has been released from hospital and has given an interview to ITV news in which he has confirmed that he discovered the Novichok bottle, apparently in a sealed, unopened packet: a 3 x 3 inch size box, 1/2 inch thick, containing a glass bottle in a cellophane wrapper with a dispenser separate. He accidentally spilt some on his hand but washed it off. His partner sprayed it on her wrist, however, and then rubbed her wrists together, falling ill 15 minutes later. She did not wash it off:
Above: Charlie Rowley, 45, who discovered the Novichok A234 disguised as a perfume bottle, and was poisoned by it, says he found it actually looking new and unopened in a 3 x 3 inch x 1/2 inch thick box, wrapped in a cellophane wrapper, containing a separate spray dispenser top which had to be inserted. He accidentally spilled some of the oily, unscented liquid on his hand while inserting the spray top on the bottle, but he washed it off his hands and so received only a small, survivable dose (the oily liquid is only slowly absorbed through skin). His partner Dawn Sturgess, 44, sprayed it on one wrist and then rubbed her wrists together, but did not wash it off. She fell ill just 15 minutes later due to that lethal dose, which required so much atropine to counter muscular contraction that it led to lethal heart failure, despite artificial ventilation (Charlie took longer to fall ill, due to his smaller dose). She died on 8 July. If this was a "spare" unused Novichok poisoned "perfume" pack, then Russian assassin unit had more than one smuggled into the UK.
UPDATE: 3 August 2018 on Novichok perfume bottle location and fascism by Corbyn
It has been reported that Novichok victim Charley Rowley believes he found the discarded Russian assassin's Novichok perfume bottle pack that killed Dawn Sturgess in Salisbury in two industrial waste containers by The Cloisters Pub in the city centre, which have now been taken to the chemical and biological defence establishment at Porton for analysis and testing. Normal bins are emptied weekly by the council, but industrial waste containers can be left to fill up for months before removal. In other news, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who alleged that Russia did not make the Novichok attack on Britain, has now released an Iranian TV interview video praising as his "brothers" the Hamas terrorists who murdered 600 innocent people. Corbyn continues claiming that his support for the USSR and Warsaw Pact human rights abusers in the 1980s, Hamas, the IRA and other terrorists is in the name of peace or freedom of speech, but mainstream Jews have complained that he is a hater of the Jewish homeland of Israel and that his words are the opposite of his actions. His disgusting CND lies on nuclear weapons and civil defence prevent peace and freedom of speech.
UPDATE: 5 August 2018 on Novichok assassination breakthrough
Police have discovered that the Novichok nerve agent used in a perfume spray bottle to spray the door handle of the home of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on Saturday 3 March 2018 may have been prepared in a toilet block in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens, Salisbury, where low level Novichok contamination has now been discovered. A spare spray bottle discarded in containers near The Cloisters Pub contaminated Charlie Rowley and killed Dawn Sturgess on 8 July. From these pin-pointed locations on a map, in relation to the Skripal's house, the police will be able to deduce the route taken by assassins, and then use this route for data reduction, to help focus attention on appropriate CCTV footage to identify the attackers.
AFSWP895: January 1955 Fallout Symposium, secret, front cover. |
Bikini Atoll map with accurate scale in Nautical Miles: the East-West length is about 22 nautical miles, as contrasted to the inaccurate USNRDL map scales which give a width of about 33 nautical miles, 50% too much! (Thus, fallout areas in Bikini Atoll are exaggerated by 1.5 squared, a factor of 2.25.) The inaccurate maps were proliferated in other fallout reports that "compiled" inaccurate data together without checking the scales (e.g., DASA-1251, the fallout patterns compendium). As we reported in an earlier post, this had disastrous consequences for one computer prediction method, which was sold on the basis that it reliably reproduced the false Castle-3 shot pattern (the version with the inaccurate distance scale, leading to more than a doubling of areas). |
The report also contains new photos of the fireball and cloud from the 13.5 megaton Yankee shot of Operation Castle, taken from an RB-36, including the times of each photo (which is very useful, because it shows you the evolution of the fireball into the mushroom), at pages 91-110. On pages 110-121 there is an excellent summary of the fallout study results of the Nevada 1.2 kiloton surface burst and shallow subsurface (earth penetrator warhead simulation) bursts Sugar and Uncle, respectively, from 1951, including photos of the differences in the nature of the fallout, comparing this data to photos of fallout from the 1952 Ivy-Mike surface burst of 10.4 megatons at Eniwetok Atoll.
On pages 123-138 there is a nice paper by Dr Carl F. Miller, called "Physical and Chemical Nature of the Contaminant: Interpretation of Castle Observations", giving the fallout deposited mass per unit area for specific unit-time radiation dose rates, the averaged gamma ray energy, graphs of decay rates, and a detailed table of fallout solubility (ionic fraction of radioactivity when the fallout is mixed with water), comparing land and surface tests of Operation Castle.
(Compare this fallout solubility data to the later USNRDL reports WT-917 and WT-918. Note that 1958 Hardtack tests report WT-1625 on page 13 briefly interprets and summarises the solubility data from Castle in WT-917 and from Redwing in WT-1317 (the WT-1317 pdf file held on the Opennet database is corrupted and will not open, but we uploaded the full WT-1317 report to internet archive, linked here, before this occurred): the land surface bursts of Castle gave 5% fallout solubility, compared to 58-73% solubility for the water surface barge bursts, whereas the Redwing effective land bursts Zuni and Tewa gave 5-25% and 8-18% solubility, respectively, using rainwater and sea water. (These percentages don't apply to individual nuclides, since the soluble fraction mainly consists volatile decay chain nuclides like I, Sr, Cs, etc., which coat the outer surfaces of fallout particles; whereas the insoluble activity is mainly refractory nuclides that condense in the inside of molten particles, like Zr, Mo, U, Pu, etc. The overall percentage of solubility is therefore the average solubility of gamma emitters, which varies with time as the fallout mixture decays, and the relative percentage of activity coming from soluble nuclides rather than insoluble nuclides, evolves.)
On pages 139-153 there is an interesting paper by Dr Chris S. Cook, called "Radiological Nature of the Contaminant: Source Gamma Energy Spectra", giving data on the fallout gamma ray spectra determined using a sodium iodide scintillation crystal and a photomultiplier tube (the scintillation or flash brightness is proportional to the energy of the gamma ray, so with a pulse height discriminator circuit you can determine the spectrum). This is vital because the penetrating power of the gamma rays from fallout determines the protective factor of a fallout shelter, and the production of low energy gamma emitters in fallout, particularly neptunium-239 and uranium-237 (produced by the capture of a high energy neutron, above about 1 MeV, by U-238, followed by the ejection of two neutrons, i.e. a so-called n,2n reaction) reduces the danger in the fallout sheltering period of 1-14 days after a dirty bomb (with a uranium jacket on the fusion stage). Cook reports on page 139:
"Prior to 10 days following the detonation, a large fraction of the radiations are concentrated in the vicinity of 100 kev [0.1 Mev]".
This approximately 0.1 Mev radiation is the neutron activated U-237 and Np-239 (the time of peak percentage contribution of a nuclide to T^{1.2} fallout decay is equal to the half life multiplied by 1.2/ln 2 which is a multiplication factor of 1.44). The best data available from Castle on this was from Union, shot 4, a water surface burst. However, excellent gamma spectrum data was obtained from land surface burst Zuni in 1956, reported in WT-1317 and related papers like USNRDL-TR-146, Spectrometric Analysis of Gamma Radiation from Fallout from Operation Redwing, which was discussed on page 19 of our Nuclear Weapons - Collateral Damage Exaggerations report. Miller gives an excellent compilation of neutron capture to fission ratios for nuclear tests up to 1960 in tables 4 and 6 of USNRDL466, although the numbers are deleted from that table in the declassified document, so you have to instead fill in the table spaces by calculating the capture atom/fission ratios using the ratios of the dose rates in gives in table 11; for example Jangle S gave 0.106/0.1799 = 0.59 atom of U-239 per fission. Although Navajo and Flathead are deleted from that table, the capture atoms to fission ratios are reported for those shots in other reports, when you look carefully. One piece of data is given by the declassified WT-1317 e.g. the data in Table 3.14 on page 65 states that Flathead produced 0.41 atoms of Np-239 per fission, and more data is in the declassified NV0110837. The U239 and Np239 capture-to-fission ratios of Redwing thermonuclear weapons 3.8Mt 50% fission Cherokee, 3.53 Mt 15% fission Zuni, and 4.5 Mt 5% Navajo are reported respectively to to be 0.500, 0.427 and 0.125 respectively, on page 12 of WT-1315, shown below:
There is earlier Upshot-Knothole nuclear test fallout data on average gamma ray energy in WT-814, based on the measurement of the attenuation of gamma rays by shields of varying thickness, rather than by gamma spectrometry (the electronics needed to discriminate energy intervals from sodium iodine crystal scintillation photomultiplier pulse heights were being developed in the early 1950s).
AFSWP 895: fractionation of Sr89 Ba140 and Mo99 as function of fallout particle diameter in Operation Castle. Note that Mo-99 is normally unfractionated since it is refractory (has a high melting point), whereas the gaseous precursors in the decay chains of strontium and barium make them effectively volatile, so they don't condense very effectively on fast-falling particles of early fallout. This graph gives data from samples collected at 18.5 statute miles from ground zero (97,730 feet). (There is a history of fractionation data collection at nuclear tests on pages 17-19 of Hardtack report WT-1625, other versions of which - with slightly different data deleted in delassification - are located here and here.) |
AFSWP 895: speed of rotation of radioactive torus or toroidal circulation inside rising fireball from a 30 kiloton nuclear weapon at 1 minute, taken from Dr Kellogg's presentation (he gave an unclassified version, omitting this data on the measured speeds in the vortex, to the unclassified May 1957 congressional hearings on The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man). |
AFSWP 895: Dr Kellogg's illustration showing why the cloud top heights were inaccurately measured and reported in early H-bomb tests like Mike, whose height was originally wrongly reported as 25 miles not 20 miles, due to horizontal projections from the edge being confused for the top of the cloud. |
AFSWP 895: fallout from 1953 Nevada nuclear test Badger of Operation Upshot Knothole showing paths of fallout at different altitudes in the mushroom cloud: because the winds have different speeds and directions at different altitudes, there the cloud separates accordingly and fallout is distributed over a larger area than would be the case without this wind shear. This diffusion of fallout spreads the same total amount of radioactivity over a greater area, reducing doses and dose rates to lower levels than simplistic predictions (the classic cigar shaped fallout pattern) indicate. |
AFSWP 895: fallout distribution in the mushroom head and in the stem of the cloud as used in the US Army Signal Corps fallout prediction method. Note that 90% is assumed to be in the mushroom head, and that 10% is in the stem (at lower altitudes), but the average size of the particles in the stem are larger than those in the mushroom head. This type of analysis, based on trying to reconcile theory with observed fallout data, is the source of the statement about the assumed distribution in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons. |
AFSWP 895: Lulejian's effort to model fallout distribution doses to 48 hours across Rongelap Atoll in the 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 based on wind data analysis, combined with radiation measurements made on atoll islands. The only Castle test where the entire fallout pattern was measured was 13.5 megaton Yankee, using ships and aircraft to survey the ocean and then to correct the measurements for the large protective factor of the water (when the fallout hits the water, most of the activity, whether soluble or in micron sized insoluble metallic particles within the relatively large calcium hydroxide flakes, ends up dispersed within the 100 metre thick surface water above the thermocline, attenuating the surface dose rate to something on the order of 500-1000 times less than the dose rate you get when the same amount of fallout is deposited on a land surface). 1956 Redwing nuclear tests showed that water surface bursts like Yankee in the 80% humidity air of Bikini atoll produce similar local fallout distributions to land surface bursts, and Yankee probably gave a very similar fallout distribution to Bravo's shot time wind fallout pattern. This is similar to RAND Corporation's analysis of the Bravo fallout. AFSWP 895 also gives Schuert's elaborate and misleading Bravo fallout reconstruction (later reprinted in USNRDL report WT-915), which puts too much activity in the highest dose rate contours, violating the area versus dose rate plots given by four land and water shots in Redwing, when scaled to 1 fission megaton (see WT-1316, Figure 2.45). (Also, see Kelloggs testimony on page 105 of the 1957 congressional hearing Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, where Kellogg notes that the percentages of local fallout for land and water surface bursts in Redwing were actually very similar, and an earlier analysis to the contrary ignored Na-24 and use the wrong conversion factor between dose rate and activity; unfortunately the corrected data was ignored and the earlier mistaken analysis is quoted by Glasstone and Dolan 1977, and is also quoted by Chuck Hansen in his 1988 book US Nuclear Weapons. To summarise, the initial analysis of the Flathead and Navajo water surface burst tests of Redwing indicated only about 30% of activity down in 24 hours, but the reanalysis by B. L. Tucker of RAND Corp, allowing for Na-24 and the correct dose rate to fissions conversion factor, gave 65-70%, which is within the error limits on land burst data. The actual percentage refers to effective gamma dose rates not specific nuclides; refractory nuclides are concentrated on large particles which arrive in local fallout, while volatile nuclides that condense at late times on the remaining very small particles in the cloud, mostly come down later on more distant fallout.) For Yankee's dose rate versus area data, see table here. (This was discussed in previous posts on this blog.) There is a detailed discussion of the time and space wind data available for the Marshall Islands around the time of the Bravo shot, here. |
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer summation fallout prediction method for 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis. This was developed by Stanley Greenfield of RAND Corporation, who states on page 348: "The first problem that was tried on the machine [an IBM 701 computer] was the Castle-Bravo shot", using the shot time winds measured from the USS Curtiss, a ship near Bikini Atoll. The predicted Bravo fallout pattern is shown below: |
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer prediction of fallout using shot time winds for 15 megatons Castle Bravo test on 1 March 1954 as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis. Notice that the fallout is predicted to essentially miss Rongelap Atoll (which is located from roughly 100 nautical miles East to 115 miles ESE, from ground zero). Hence, there really was a wind shift that contaminated the islanders on the south of Rongelap (and nearby Americans on Rongerik Atoll, just to the east of Rongelap). Even if the IBM 701 had been available to predict the fallout from Bravo on 1 March 1954, it would not have predicted the danger unless supplemented with a modern weather prediction including the changing wind pattern in the 6-7 hours following the detonation! |
AFSWP 895: IBM701 computer prediction of fallout doses from a 50 megaton nuclear test as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis. Note that the 1500 R dose would be reduced to a survivable 37.5 R by a protection factor of 40, the minimal specification for fallout shelters. |
AFSWP 895 IBM701 computer prediction of fallout doses from a 1 megaton nuclear test as determined by a RAND Corporation analysis. This is using the same model which successfully explained Bravo, and shows that with simple fallout shelters, fallout can be survived. |
AFSWP 895: example of tabulated outdoor fallout areas for dose rates and accumulated doses from yields of 1 to 50 megatons. Many different fallout models were compared in AFSWP-895, differences being due to different weighting in the activity distribution in the cloud and as a function of particle size, which affected how much activity came under the influence of winds blowing in different directions at different altitudes. However, fallout distributions in the clouds were measured in detail in 1956 Redwing tests (using rockets with radiation meters and radio telemetry of data, see weapon test report WT-1315) and detailed particle size distributions (see WT-1317 and USNRDL-TR-314), so such disagreements are now resolved and fallout is very predictable with modern data from the 1956 Redwing series as well as modern weather prediction computer programs that include jet stream trajectory forecasts. (Naturally, the ground deposited spectrum of fallout particle sizes at any particular location is biased in favor of the particle sizes that have a falling speed which results in their landing at that location, so this data needs to be backtracked to the cloud from a large number of representative locations to see what the overall distribution of particles is initially in the cloud when the toroidal downdraft has stopped operating. Cloud samples are also biased in the same kind of way, because the largest fallout particles fall out before a sampling aircraft can safely get near the cloud. Dr Edward C. Freiling's 1970 book Radionuclides in the environment, contains many papers graphically demonstrating this with data from cloud samples for Pacific shots in Castle, Redwing, and various 1962 Nevada surface bursts, such as Johnie Boy and Small Boy. There is plenty of data, and shots on the differing soil particle size distributions in Nevada and the Pacific all tend to give a similar particle size distribution, closely approximating an inverse fourth power of particle radius, above 1 micron.) |
UPDATES: 30 January 2018
Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive has also kindly supplied a PDF of the 1957 RAND Fallout Symposium (which we've uploaded to internet archive here), which contains an application of Anderson's dynamic fallout model to the 1.2 kiloton Sugar nuclear test in Nevada, 1951, to explain particle size distributions by tracking particles from the crater to their maximum height and then fall (rather than the usual false assumption that fallout occurs from a stabilised cloud). This is listed on the DOE Opennet site but no PDF was previously available. It also contains Schuert's demonstration that the time and space variation of the downwind wind structure correctly predicts the 3.53 megaton Zuni fallout pattern of Redwing (which is the only one of his four shot analyses which cannot be adequately analysed using merely shot time winds near ground zero; the other shots more easily predicted being Tewa, Flathead and Navajo), and summaries of the fractionation data for I-131 and several other nuclides in the 5.01 megaton harbour type surface burst Tewa at Bikini Atoll in 1956 in table 2 of appendix B:
1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: Edward A. Schuert's predictions of the fallout hotlines for the 3.53 megaton Zuni test using different assumptions (shot time winds near ground zero, the space and time variation of the winds in the downwind areas through which fallout actually descends, and even vertical motions), compared to the ocean measured fallout intensities extrapolated to a land surface at 1 hour after detonation.
1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: Anderson's U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory dynamic fallout model analysis of the largest fallout particles (almost 2 mm in diameter) motions in the 1.2 kiloton Sugar test (Nevada, 1951). Note that contrary to simplistic fallout models which assume that all fallout begins from the stabilised cloud 5 minutes or so after burst, no 1.95 mm diameter fallout particles remained airborne after 3.5 minutes in this test. Anderson's model starts with dust being raised by the afterwinds from the crater, rising while that updraft force exceeds gravitation, then falling. In this way, particles of different sizes rise to different peak altitudes in the cloud (the heaviest remaining mostly in the cloud stem, and the smallest rising higher). This model thus provides the airborne distribution of particle sizes versus altitudes, and predicts fallout arrival times.
1957 RAND Fallout Symposium: Anderson's comparison of predicted accurate fallout distribution (solid line) being deposited 10 minutes after the 1.2 kiloton sugar test, with the inaccurate model prediction based on the false assumption of fallout beginning for all particle at 5 minutes from uniform mushroom distribution (dashed line). Anderson predicts a smaller average particle size.
Neutron bomb secrets on Opennet: while searching Opennet, I found something else that is vitally important, already available for download as a PDF. It's Johndale C. Solem's great 1982 Secret Los Alamos report LA-9004 on the neutron bomb, The ultra-low yield antitank weapon, the teeny tiny tacnuke, complete with declassified markings showing it was "Nuclear Weapon Data Sigma 1: Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information", in a limited edition of just 79 printed copies:
LA-9004 from 1982, secret (now declassified with deletions of design information) states in its abstract (page 3) that: "Estimates of collateral damage indicate that such a device could be used in close proximity to civilian populations with minimal hazard."
LA-9004 then describes the kiloton W79 neutron warhead (44 cm long, 200 lbs including firing system, capable of being fired 32 km from a 8" howitzer), and explains correctly that the whole point of such weapons is to deter the concentrated blitzkrieg assaults that started WWI in 1914 (the invasion of Belgium by concentrated force) and WWII in 1939 (the invasion of Poland by concentrated force). The principle of concentration of force can be deterred with nuclear weapons, thus preventing the invasions that trigger wars. By forcing enemies to disperse their forces, any attacks that are made can be dealt with using conventional weapons like handheld anti-tank rockets (no use against concentrated firepower, but useful against dispersed forces), preventing invasion and WWIII:
"Denying an aggressor force the use of massed formations of armor is the single most important aspect of the W79."
LA-9004 then goes on to suggest a lower yield version of the W79 for use against individual tanks, like the Kennedy era portable 0.02 kt W54 that could be fired by individual soldiers, air burst at 15 metres altitude to eliminate local fallout, blast and heat collateral damage. Page 5:
"Tank crews within 25 m of the weapon would be immediately incapacitated. Civilian populations 300 m from the point of detonation would be completely safe. ... Beyond 300 m, exposed personnel might be temporarily blinded from looking directly at the detonation, but would suffer no burns to exposed skin. ... The effect of blast on civilian structures near the battlefield would be trivial. Three hundred metres from the point of detonation windows would rattle but not break. ... the fallout would be expected to be confined to the battlefield itself. ... The principal advantage of such a device in reducing collateral damage from local fallout is that it simply does not produce much in the way of fission fragments or activated weapon debris."
LA-9004 then points out, on pages 7-8, that such a defensive low yield weapon with no significant risk of collateral damage is of no significant use to terrorists, contrasted to easy-to-procure alternatives.
UPDATE (5 February 2018): origins of fallout decay data in Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons
Martha DeMarre of the Nuclear Testing Archive has kindly supplied a PDF of the US DOE Opennet document NV0060036, the 15 April 1960 draft revision of the fallout decay activity section in Glasstone book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which was done by T. G. Brough and Dr Carl F. Miller of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, California. We have placed this PDF on internet archive, here. The reason for investigating this is that the fallout decay graphs and tables in the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan are identical to those in the 1962/4 editions, which differ from the 1957 edition. Therefore, the current version was developed between 1957-1962, and this chapter revised draft by Brough and Miller from 1960 was clearly influential. However, it is clear that Glasstone performed extensive additional changes to the 1960 draft before it was published in 1962.
In paragraph 9.6 of the revision, Brough and Miller explain: "the maximum radiation intensity of fallout from megaton detonations occurs at 50 to 75 miles downwind from the explosion centre."
They state in that paragraph that 1 fission megaton of fallout spread uniformly over 10,000 square miles would produce 410 R/hr at 3 feet height, with 10 R/hr of this 410 R/hr being neutron induced activity, and then they clearly explain that this dose rate is reduced in reality by the effect of the "fractionation losses" (i.e. the observed depletion of volatile nuclides from local fallout), which:
"reduce the above mentioned radiation level at 1 hour from a value of 410 to 162 roentgens per hour."
This is far more specific and quantitative than the vague, entirely qualitative discussion of fractionation that made it into the 1962-1977 book!
Above: Brough and Miller's calculated revision to Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons fallout decay rate and accumulated dose graphs, which differ from those actually published in the 1962-77 editions! Paragraph 9.111 at page 21 of their draft chapter revision also explains clearly than Glasstone's final version, just how the gamma ray energy of fallout varies with time and with the 0.105 MeV low energy contribution to the gamma ray spectrum caused by the neutron induced Np-239 content which is inevitable in dirty weapons with U-238 jackets that capture neutrons, and are not solely fissioned by neutrons (a fact essential for understanding how much shielding is needed to protect yourself against it, bearing in mind that fallout protection factors are calculated using the standard pseudo assumption that the gamma rays are like those from cobalt-60, which emits 1.17 and 1.33 MeV high energy gammas, a mean of 1.25 MeV, way higher than fallout):
"... the weighted mean energy of the gamma rays is about 0.92 Mev/photon at 1 hour after fission. The mean value decreases with time during the first and second day after fission, and remains between 0.5 and 0.6 Mev/photon up to about 3 weeks after fission ... If the mixture contained neutron induced activities, such as U-239 - Np-239 in large amounts, the mean energy at early times would be much lower."
They even gave a table (Table 9.111 in the draft) showing that the mean energy of fission product gamma rays is 0.61 MeV (less than half the 1.25 MeV Co-60 average) at 24 hours, and 0.52 MeV at 2 days after burst, and remains around 0.5 MeV for the rest of the standard 2 week civil defense fallout sheltering period! This is without the reduction caused by the very low energy gamma rays from neutron induced Np-239 and U-237.
These facts, deleted from Glasstone's published final version, reflect WT-1317 coauthor Dr Terry Triffet's June 1959 round table conference testimony on page 205 of the US Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, where he explains that this low gamma ray energy in dirty weapons increases the protective factor of shelters far above that usually assumed!
Brough and Miller's draft revision states at page 27 that their decay rates assume 8 MeV neutron fission of U-238, giving at 1 hour after burst 3600 R/hr per fission kiloton yield deposited per square mile, which is reduced to 1480 R/hr by fractionation, to which Np-239 adds 144 R/hr (this is a small percentage contribution at 1 hour, but becomes a much bigger contribution at 96 hours after burst due to differing decay rates of fission products and Np-239 which has a half life of 56 hours).
Update (8 March 2018): double agent Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia nerve agent skin contamination in Salisbury on Sunday 4 March 2018.
Inhalation or ingestion in food of nerve agents produces symptoms too rapidly (i.e. a matter of seconds) for Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia to have walked capably as seen on CCTV video at 3:47 pm on Sunday to a bench where they were found with totally "white eyes" (i.e. the pupils contracted to invisibly small points due to nerve agent) at 4:03 pm. At 4:15pm police and paramedics arrived and were contaminated, suffering injury.
The victims would have collapsed where they were exposed, with no contamination to others, if poisoned by any nerve agent through ingestion or inhalation at the Zizzi restaurant in Salisbury. Skin absorption is much slower, since the dead layer of skin (tens of microns thick) slows down the infusion of nerve agent into the blood stream and thence to nerve endings.
Eye pupils contract to invisibly tiny points due to muscle contraction, so that the eyes appear totally white and glazed; a temporary nerve agent effect that lasts until atropine is administered:
"Her eyes were just completely white, they were wide open, but just white and she was frothing at the mouth." - Jamie Paine, eyewitness.
Eyewitnesses Jamie Paine, Freya Church and Graham Mulcock said that Yulia was unconcious, while Sergei had lost his sight, but could still move his arm past his eyes while slumped, facing the sky.
Colonel Skripal of the Russian FSB (Putin's successor to KGB) was British Intelligence MI6's most valuable double agent for ten years, and gave us the details of Russian agents working in the West, for which he was sentenced as a traitor to 13 years in jail by Putin in 2006. But in 2010, he was traded with the infamous Russian honey trap spy, "Anna Chapman" (aka Anna Kushchyenko, born 1982) and 9 others in a spy swap. President Putin declared at that time that Skripal and other defectors were "traitors" who "will kick the bucket" because they had "betrayed their friends, their brothers in arms. Whatever they got in exchange - those 30 pieces of silver - they will choke on them."
Putin is seeking 70% of the vote and another 6 years in power in the forthcoming Russian elections, to be held on 18 March. Because defectors are "traitors" to the Russian Nationalists who vote for Putin, their assassination may be politically helpful. In addition, it may deter opponents of Putin from standing in his way. In 2006, the FSB was granted the Russian legal authority to liquidate enemies abroad, on Putin's orders. Former Colonel Alexander Litvinenko was then assassinated with Po-210 (of Russian isotopic composition) in his teapot by Russian agents, in a London restaurant in 2006.
After Skripal was traded for Russian spies in 2010, he bought a £260,000 four-bedroom house in Salisbury with cash, and reportedly gave guest lectures about the FSB to British military students. Skripal was described as friendly and happy by local shopkeeper Ebru Ozturk, 41, and by his neighbour James Puttock. However, he was very impatient with the delay of service of his lunch in the Zizzi restaurant after arriving at 2:30pm. This possibly suggests that he had a meeting scheduled for around 3:30pm (with assassin?). It is even possible that the meeting was deliberately scheduled to occur on the bench they were found on, the seat being sprayed with liquid nerve agent by the assassin, so that no face-to-face meeting occurred (i.e. they may have been poisoned by sitting on the seat).
Paragraph 20 in the 1972 Medical Manual of Defence Against Chemical Agents (Ministry of Defence publication J.S.P. 312) explains this difference in symptoms following inhalation/ingestion and (slower) skin absorption, and the fact that the policeman treating the victims himself was contaminated and seriously affected proves that the source must have been skin contamination:
The weather was relatively cool (around 7-10C) that Sunday afternoon, with a thaw that day melting all of the record early spring snowfall across Britain that had occurred on 28 February-1 March, so liquids would have evaporated gradually from skin, leaving contamination present for the time scale of the pre-hospitalisation emergency. The manual also gives a nice differential diagnosis table (Table V, pages 45-46) specifically to IMMEDIATELY identify the type of nerve gas poisoning, from a proper, full analysis of all the symptoms observed (and to distinguish other gases):
The point about the differential diagnosis table for chemical warfare symptoms is that you regularly see baffled and confused reporters on TV news talking about the symptoms seen in various gas attacks in Syria, which is simply unnecessary. This military UK chemical war medicine book was published in 1972 by H. M. Stationery Office (UK government bookshop/publisher), with unclassified, unlimited distribution permitted.
Ironically, the corresponding 1965 UK government civil defence manual, The Detection and Identification of War Gases, was classified Restricted (banning it from the eyes of the "free" press). It contains very useful data in Table I (page 47) on the evaporation rates, relative to water, of nerve gases. For example, nerve liquids tabun and sarin are stated to take 86 times and 2.95 times, respectively longer to evaporate than water at 15C.
For mustard gas and lewisite (not nerve gases, but blister agents) the table gives evaporation times, respectively, 58 and 9.5 times slower than water. This kind of comparison with water seems more useful to really grasping the nature of the threat by understanding the persistence of liquid nerve agents, than the usual statements giving specific persistence times in hours in most chemical war handbooks (these times are usually for something like for 90% of a deposit of 10 grams/square metre to evaporate under standard laboratory conditions, or for a range of different surfaces, which makes the data hard to comprehend and understand by reference to normal experiences). We all know that the persistence of water spills and droplets depends on their size, on the temperature, etc. Giving persistence relative to water is more helpful for grasping the magnitude of the delayed hazard.
Some additional interesting facts that the media are not alluding to at present:
(1) This nerve liquid poisoning of former double agent Colonel Skripal, aged 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, seems at first glance to have been bungled by the FSB (Putin's modernised KGB), just as the poisoning of former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko by alpha radiation from Po-210 in his teapot (which has longish 138 days half life!) in London in 2006. Why use these agents, nerve agents and radioactive materials which can be fingerprinted to Lubyanka Moscow FSB headquarters (by isotopic impurities and so on, since Po-210 is produced by irradiating bismuth with neutrons in a reactor, the results depending on irradiation time)? Why not use a commonplace chemical poison bought in Britain, or shoot the person? Thus, clearly Putin's FSB is deliberately sending out a signal to deter dissidents by making them fear the reach of Russian influence abroad, in Britain. He is not trying to quietly make people disappear, but to provoke terror.
(2) This is an old tactic, reminding us of Stalin's order for his enemy Trotsky (author of The Revolution Betrayed, an attack on Stalin) to be eliminated by an agent using an ice pick in Mexico (a country that never gets ice!), or of the umbrella-type injector used to fire a small pellet containing lethal ricin into the back of the thigh of Bulgarian (Warsaw Pact) communist dissident Georgi Markov, aged 49, at a bus stop in London on 7 September 1978. Markov had been standing at the bus stop to get a bus to the BBC at Bush House. Four days later he died in hospital in London from ricin poisoning. His was a slow, painful death that allowed the assassin to escape and led to blanket news scare stories that probably deterred other dissidents from speaking out against communist Bulgaria.
This is probably the point about the skin contamination with nerve liquid on Sunday and the teapot contaminated with polonium-210 twelve years ago: these poisons acted slowly enough to allow the assassins to escape Scot free (which would be less likely if the attack was clearer to identify, such as an assassin's gun shot), and also maximised the suffering of the victims, thereby making news headlines and thus helping to deter future episodes. Most dissidents will probably shut up and hide away now. It does however bring back memories of the Cold War.
The prolonging of the Syrian civil war to help Moscow's friend Assad win, by Russian vetoes on (pseudo) "United Nations" propaganda lies (a nasty fascist tactic to prolong terror by replacing actions with double talk and utopian fantasy, costing many thousands of lives), and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine and the seizure of Crimea in January 2014 have already shown the situation plainly. Is Russia really that impoverished? It doesn't have the colossal national debts (trillions of dollars, trillions of pounds) that West has. Overall, the "wealth" of the West is more or less cancelled out by its debt obligations. Russia's economy is weak compared to the West, but by the very fact, it is more resilient to crises on stock markets, debt interest rate hikes, and so on. It is investing heavily in new nuclear weapon delivery systems, according to Putin's recent 1 March 2018 speech to Russia's Federal Assembly, such as underwater nuclear drones.
Above: President Putin is taking the approach of Ronald Reagan or "Iron Lady" Thatcher by standing up to the West and its allies, including dissidents such as Colonel Sergei Skripal, which boosts his popularity for forthcoming Russian elections. In a way, he is justified in asserting Russian nationalism and challenging the Western hostility towards Russia that is hypocritical in that, as soon as someone like Trump is elected, or Brexit is voted in, the socialist media goes off democracy! Certainly if you want strong leadership, Putin is that. Similarly, Islam is a strong religion in the sense that its followers are generally less hypocritical and undisciplined than many Christians. It boils down to moral compass values: do you put principled ideals ahead of practical realities, like military power and enforcing discipline? We can respect Putin for his toughness, without agreeing with everything he does.
We should use Cold War successes to deter the kind of invasions that trigger off major wars. Appeasement was a not a failure because Chamberlain went to meet the dictators in September 1938; it was a failure because, when he went, he lacked the military power to make his wishes credible (Reagan met Gorbachev at the October 1987 summit with a very different outcome, because Reagan's handshake "appeasement" was backed up with immense thermonuclear power!). The lesson is that you get peace only when you negotiate from a position of strength, not weakness.
Update (13 March 2018):
Russia has been given until midnight to explain how the Russian made nerve agent came to be used against a Russian dissident in the UK. The nerve agent was named by the British Government yesterday as Russian Novichok class (the Russian for "newcomer"), some of which are reportedly 5-8 times more lethal than VX (which North Korea used last year at an airport to eliminate Kim Jong-Nam, the defector and half brother of dictator Kim Jong-Un). Novichok works in the same way as all other organophosphate nerve agents, causing muscles to contract tightly by inhibiting the enzyme acetylcholinesterase which normally breaks down acetylcholine, the chemical that triggers muscular contraction. Therefore, atropine is still valid and helps to counteract Novichok by relaxing muscles.
The UK government's response, in waiting a week before instructing almost 500 people who were in the affected areas to wash their clothes and wipe their phones clean, seems to be the usual groupthink civil defence bureaucracy which combines official secrecy with fear of causing a panic, and ends up giving out advice that is so over-simplified that it appears to be directed at two-year-olds. The ultimatum to Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who has the same poker faced lawyer mentality of the USSR's Brezhnev era Andrei Gromyko (who denied the existence of Russian missiles in Cuba to President Kennedy's face in 1962), is likely to lead to an escalation of the crisis, instead of deterring aggression and thus keeping civil relations. Sanctions failed against Japan (1937-1941) and Iraq (1992-2002), unlike credible deterrence (i.e. Reagan's experience, in the 1980s).
Update (18 March 2018):
Britain's Foreign Secretary has disclosed that there is evidence Russia has for the past 10 years been building up an illegal stockpile of Novichok nerve agent, contrary to its treaty obligations:
Boris Johnson has said the UK is in possession of evidence that Russia has been exploring nerve-agent based assassinations and that the country has been stockpiling deadly chemical weapons in the last decade.
The Foreign Secretary in particular claimed Britain has reason to believe Moscow has been collecting the “military grade” Novichok nerve agent that the UK Government says was deployed in the Salisbury attack.
He made the comments moments after a senior Russian diplomat claimed his country has no stockpile of any nerve agent, and even suggested the source of the chemical used in Salisbury was the UK’s Porton Down military laboratory.- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-russia-nerve-agent-stockpiling-chemical-weapon-assassinations-a8261771.html
This has implications for other Russian weapons of mass destruction, for example their nuclear weapons stockpile figures, which may similarly be misleading. In other words, there is reason to distrust claims of disarmament in accordance to paper treaties, just as occurred from 1933 onward in Germany. Because you acquire a signed declaration, you feel assured that you have achieved peace. If, however, one side is dishonest, then your confidence becomes not only groundless, but dangerously deceptive, because you will point to the paper and signature as an excuse to disarm relative to the (secretly rearming) aggressor.
After the 1930s "disarmament of Germany" delusion, "arms control" used international inspectors to verify the crushing of specific numbers of missile shells, i.e. the relatively large delivery systems. However, as we saw when arms control inspectors were trying to assess Iraq's WMDs before 2002, it is harder to police chemical war agents and even the small masses of nuclear fissile materials inside warheads, due to secrecy and the amounts of material involved. Iraq probably hid its chemical weapons in barrels under the desert sands, where they remain. Is that "destruction" or "stockpiling"? Just because you can't readily find a needle in the proverbial haystack, does that disprove that the needle exists there somewhere? Or is it more like a game of hide and seek?
SUMMARY
Russian now has illegal stockpiles of Novichok nerve gas for war use, which it denies having. Due to the appeasement of Putin, there are 346,000 confirmed dead in Syria, another 56,900 missing presumed dead, 13,100,000 living in misery, and 5,600,000 refugees. In August 2012, President Obama, who had already received the Nobel Peace Prize, stated that the: "red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilised." Putin supplied Assad to gas 400 kids and 1,100 adults in Damascus. President Obama withdrew his stated "red line". Last April, Trump ordered retaliation against Assad's air base in response to Assad's sarin attack on Khan Sheikhoun. Too little, too late. But Trump was not President when the Syrian war began at Deraa in March 2011, when Assad massacred pro-democracy supporters. Somebody else was. Guess who?
Again, I'll repost the following call for common sense in the face of this new gas threat:
Daily Express columnist calls for gas mask civil defence, Daily Express, 15 April 2017, page 19. |
Update (22 March 2018) on the Novichok A234 nerve agent and Russian denials/propaganda
Novichok nerve agent A234 used by Putin against Britain in an attack on 4 March 2018 is today the top news for chemistry experts. |
"Novichok – choline esterase inhibitors (Novichok 5 and Novichok 7). They are effecting very rapidly, penetrate through the skin and respiratory system. Novichok 5 exceeds effectiveness of soman by 10 times and of VX by 5 to 8 times. Novichok 5 (Substance A-232) and its ethyl-analog (Substance A-234) can be produced in binary form by using acetonitrile and an organic phosphate compound.12 System of agent A232 components was successfully tested in Nukus Uzbekistan, in the military chemical proving ground in 1992. Existence of the “Foliant” program and Novichok were revealed in 1992 by chemists Lev Fedorov and Vil Mirzayanov in an article of the newspaper Moscow News. ... Russia has officially never acknowledged the existence of the group Novichok."
- GYÖRGYI VÁSÁRHELYI and LÁSZLÓ FÖLDI, "History of Russia’s chemical weapons", AARMS HISTORY, Volume 6, issue No. 1 (2007), pages 135–146.
(NOTE THE DATE OF 2007 OF THAT PAPER, WHICH DISPROVES LYING RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA CLAIMS THAT PORTON DOWN HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE ATTACK.)
One depiction of the chemical structure of the Novichok A234 agent which was illegally used by Russia to commit a terrorist act in Britain, 4 March 2018. In olden times, this would have constituted an act of war, not an opportunity for Stalinist propaganda from Russia. Britain can test the properties of such chemicals in powerful chemical molecule simulations by computer, or by using trace amounts. Contrary to Russian propaganda, this is entirely different from making enough of the agent in a military grade for an attack. The evidence points strongly towards Putin, since he is behind covert attacks on Ukraine, Georgia, Crimea, London in 2006 using radioactive Po-210, and supplying Assad with nerve gas in Syria. |
"Much of what is publicly known about Novichok agents comes from Vil Mirzayanov, an analytical chemist who worked for the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology (GosNIIOKhT), a notorious chemical weapons laboratory. Mirzayanov developed methods to detect nerve agents created and tested in the U.S.S.R.’s chemical weapons facilities. His techniques would be used to monitor the environment for any traces of the agents that might reveal the labs’ activities to foreign intelligence services.
"In the late 1980s, Mirzayanov’s analytical techniques revealed that nerve agents were befouling the air and water around one of these facilities, posing a major health risk. So he went public, revealing details of the U.S.S.R.’s chemical weapons program to Moscow News in 1992. Officials arrested and imprisoned Mirzayanov, but eventually dropped the case against him. In 1995, he immigrated to the U.S., where he subsequently wrote a book about his experiences, titled “State Secrets: An Insider’s Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program. Mirzayanov writes that the USSR produced a few tons of Novichok-5 and tens of tons of Novichok-7. According to Tucker, the USSR carried out open-air tests of Novichok-5 in the early 1990s on the Ustyurt Plateau, a desert area ... Novichok-5 and -7 act very rapidly, penetrating the skin and respiratory system."
- https://cen.acs.org/articles/96/i12/Nerve-agent-attack-on-spy-used-Novichok-poison.html
The Novichok A234 nerve agent (the ethyl analog of Novichok-5) used in the UK has probably helped foster popularity for Putin (by reinforcing the eternal myth that Russia is surrounded by aggressive imperialists) in the recent Russian elections whereby he was re-elected for a fourth term; another 6 years as Russian President or dictator in effect, due to his tough suppression of any credible alternatives/critics.
Russian propaganda in the UK is, as in the Cold War, now exploiting the UK's pathetic bureaucratic official secrecy system to claim some conspiracy theory, that the evidence for Novichok A234 is a British invention, just as they did 12 years ago for the Po-210 poisoning. My opinion on secrecy follows that of Edward Teller (see link at the top of this blog post to Teller's call for less secrecy). We need to declassify what we know about Novichok nerve agent A234, to destroy this propaganda.
Please also see recent comments to this post concerning the need for an urgent effort to stockpile CREDIBLE nuclear deterrents and also civil defense countermeasures against invasions by Russian troops supported by Novichok nerve agent. Waiting for another crisis before acting may be too late.
In 2008, the former USSR chemical warfare scientist Dr Vil S. Mirzayanov (born 1935 in Russia) exposed Russian Novichok nerve gas research in his book State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program. The continuing denial by Russia is proof that they are being as dishonest about Novichok as they were about Russian missiles in Cuba in October 1962, when Kennedy had to declassify and publish on TV top secret photos of missiles taken from a U2 spy plane. The West needs to declassify the truth to debunk enemy obfuscation and propaganda. |
Dr Mirzayanov has recently described the horrifying effects of his invention, Novichok:
Vil Mirzayanov described the use of the lethal toxins as a 'brazen' attack by Vladimir Putin, who 'thinks he can use everything to kill enemies'. Mr Mirzayanov says a large dose of Novichok 'paralyses' victims before 'it causes convulsions, you can't breathe and after that you die'. The exiled scientist shocked the world in 1992 when he revealed that promises by the Soviet Union to reduce its chemical weapon stockpiles were hollow. He worked in the top-secret Moscow laboratory where a new generation of even more potent poisons was being perfected. These gruesome chemical weapons, named 'Novichok' after the Russian for 'newcomer', were designed to be even more lethal than VX or sarin. At the time, one former top Soviet military adviser described them as 'political weapons', adding: 'They have a powerful moral and psychological effect.' ...
Speaking from his home in New Jersey last night, Mr Mirzayanov, 83, described the top-secret laboratory as a 'criminal enterprise'.
'It's a brazen attack,' he said. 'Putin thinks he can use everything to kill enemies. They don't tolerate any opponents. They should be punished. It's an open demonstration of this Russian terrorism. The Russian government is telling people who are thinking about revealing more secrets that they can expect the same fate.' Asked how the nerve agent works, he added: 'It's for paralysing people, it causes you convulsions and you can't breathe and after that you die. If you get enough of a dose of it. It's real torture, it's impossible to imagine. Even in low doses the pain can go on for weeks. You cannot imagine the horror, it's so bad.'
The Novichok family of nerve agents were secretly developed over two decades at a research facility 50 miles outside the Russian capital. ...
Describing his work, Mr Mirzayanov said: 'They were normal laboratories, they were not underground or anything. They were testing and developing. There were around 1,000 people working on this, it was a big deal. You have to test it on animals and after that you have to study the chemical properties... so many laboratories were involved.'
In 1987, one physicist at the laboratory was saved despite being exposed to the chemical when a ventilator stopped working. Witnesses described how he staggered out of the room, describing seeing bright hallucinations before collapsing and being rushed to hospital by the KGB. He was left with permanent injuries after being critically ill for ten days and unable to walk for six months.
- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5492781/Scientist-reveals-horror-lethal-nerve-agent-Novichok.html
Update, 28 March 2018: Novichok was sprayed on the front door of Sergei Skripal's house
Easter 2018 news of President Putin's latest 200 tons Satan 2 Sarmat missile, which can take 12 warheads 6,000 miles with up to 20 times the speed of sound:
Daily Express 17 March 2018, page 22: journalist Richard Madeley explains how the world is in denial of the new Cold War, a fact that bigoted pseudo-pacifists love to ignore. |
Daily Mail 27 March 2018 page 1 exposing demonstrations by Jews against persecution by the hard left wing racism of Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn, his friends and his supporters. |
http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/ blog statistics today 1 April 2018 show that March 2018 corresponds to 48,859 page views, a record number. The "all time" page views of 1,713,360 is only for the period of May 2010 to end March 2018, and excludes the four years 2006-2010. It is worth publishing this, because the CND fanatics use a specious argument that if something isn't proved to be mainstream, they can ignore it for being a minority viewpoint (no matter how crucial the point is), while if something is mainstream, then they ignore it for being "populist". They also attack the messenger while ignoring the message, but that is pretty commonplace among pseudo-liberals who claim to be progressive, yet cling on to fallacies long ago proven to be dangerous, illusory dogma. It is interesting that France and Russia both now have a higher number of total page views than local visitors in the UK. |
War declared against the racists of anti nuclear deterrence (CND), anti-civil defence, and pro Hamas terrorism supporter Corbyn by Sir David Garrard, £1.5 million Labour Party donor
Daily Express 2 April 2018 pages 6 and 7 exposing pressure on UK police to arrest Labour Party racists led by Corbyn. |
ABOVE: Another Labour supporter, Labour Peer Lord Sugar tweeted a photoshopped picture of Comrade Corbyn with Comrade Hitler in order apparently to boost Nazi support for Corbyn (although he later claimed it was some sort of sick "joke"), then deleted it on orders of Corbyn's comrade Dr Goebbels aka IRA terrorism lover Comrade McDonnell, who continues to display a plaque to IRA terrorists in his study, according to the Daily Telegraph. |
Update 4 April 2018:
The Times front 4 April 2018 exposing racism of antinuclear anti civil defence leader Jeremy Corbyn. |
Daily Express page 6 of 4 April 2018 exposing racism of antinuclear anti civil defence leader Jeremy Corbyn. |
Corbyn and Putin are now joining forces to argue that Russian Novichok was not used against the UK on 4 March 2018, which as we argued in an earlier update (above) is all due to secrecy by Prime Minister May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who refuses to learn the lesson of Prime Minister Tony Blair's official UK Government "dodgy dossier" on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, issued in 2002 to justify actions against dictator Saddam (I put that dossier on Internet Archive, linked here, to preserve it for history). Sigh. Let's go back over this again. In 2002, Prime Minister Tony Blair issued that dossier which excluded the scientific data, which was secret. The weapons were never found after the Iraq war, so some people then pretended they didn't exist, despite the fact that Iraq provably had weapons stocks and didn't provide any evidence of destroying them at any point. Now, if a regime has a stockpile and destroys it, it tries to publicise the fact that the stockpile was destroyed. It doesn't justify a war on itself by keeping the destruction secret. So the weapons were probably just hidden (somewhere in thousands of square miles of desert sand, needles in haystacks impossible to locate ever, like the tomb of Cleopatra). The lesson is that you need to publish the evidence to prevent any controversy. Instead of which, the UK Government has invited Russia to launch a propaganda war, claiming that Russia never made any Novichok, that Porton or MI5 are terrorists, etc. This is now escalating the confrontation with a country which has many times the nuclear weapon stockpile of the UK, and far better civil defence shelters left over from the USSR, many of which have been re-equipped with new radiation meters and supplies. We should not be allowing Putin and his Comrade Corbyn to feed fake news to the BBC, the Guardian and the Daily Mirror. We need to publish the full facts, to avoid the obfuscation of secrecy. In October 1962, Kennedy published the full evidence - top secret U2 spy plane photos - to the people of the world to justify his claims about the covert, lying delivery of Russian nuclear missiles to Cuba, just off the coast of America. He proved his case with evidence, instead of relying on a lot of secretive bungling bureaucrats who make contradictory statements that fuel an escalation of the crisis. |
UPDATE: 5 April 2018
Daily Express 5 April 2018 page 4 on calls for police to investigate Jeremy Corbyn racism supporters. Ex-Labour peer Lord Sugar, Lord Polak, Baroness Altmann, Lord Beecham, Lord Carlile, Baroness Deech, Lord Leigh, Lord Mitchell, Lord Palmer and Lord Turnbery have at last written a letter to the Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, requesting support against Corbyn's fans. However, Corbyn is effectively appealing to Putin for support by rejecting claims that Russian aggression led to the Novichok attack on 4 March 2018, and Corbyn has also just attended a satirical Passover dinner, ridiculing not only Jews but when his friends shouted "f*** the police". So the police is not really in a position to intervene now. It is too late. Anyone trying to prosecute or arrest racists who are followers of Corbyn must weigh up the risks of finding their front door smeared with Novichok, or facing retaliatory actions when Corbyn is PM. The evidence for Comrade Corbyn's Russian spy involvement is known by all:
The Sun 21 February 2018 page 10 asks vital security questions that Corbyn calls "harassment" by the media: yet evidence exists that Corbyn is a threat to UK national security, and recent evidence proves that his Marxist criminal mindset is unaltered from his 1980s USSR spy period, when he was a stooge for Russian "divide and rule" attempts to pervert democracy in the UK. Yet he is being given secret information on Novichok which is denied to Joe Public, and then he is abusing this position of trust to support Putin. Corbyn refuses to release his East German Stasi police files for public viewing. He is a secretive manipulator, a liar on nuclear weapons deterrence, and as we exposed in a earlier post, a shameful bigot towards civil defence to save lives in the wars that his kind refuse to deter around the world. In Reagan's terms, he is becoming the focus of evil in world.
Update: 6 April 2018
Above: 1967 Civil Defence Instructors General and Supplementary Notes on "Protect and Survive" (then called "Civil Defence Handbook 10: Advising the Householder on Protection against nuclear attack"). In this open (unclassified) publication (sold by H.M. Stationery Office for 7 shillings and 6 pence), the training note G32:1, dated January 1967 (just a before the oversimplified handbook was ridiculed in the House of Commons for being idiotically simple, leading to the entire UK Civil Defence Corps being closed by Marxist PM Harold Wilson in March 1968), states: "There are many additions and alternatives which could be given to the advice contained in the handbook, but it is essential that this advice is not allowed to become over complicated by reference to too many refinements." This is the key problem with groupthink government bureaucracy on nuclear weapons deterrence and civil defence. It is oversimplified, and lacks credibility: it looks stupid.
Above: 1953 "Restricted" classified Civil Defence Instructors Notes containing secretive data on the adaptation of refuge rooms and WWII shelters for nuclear warfare (which at that time, in 1953, was not available to the public in unclassified Civil Defence Corps publications). This was the information used when my father was an instructor in the Colchester Civil Defence Corps in the 1950s, with the result being an exploitation of the public "information vacuum" by Communist Party propaganda and ignorant scare mongering Marxist media who wanted Britain to disarm and to have no civilian protection against the Russian nuclear weapons first tested in 1949. Data was declassified and publicised in the usual groupthink bureaucratic "too little, too late" manner, to appear like a bungled, very tardy propaganda response to wonderfully honest Marxist data on the impossible chance of anybody surviving a Russian attack. In the meanwhile, nuclear weapons were rendered an incredible deterrent and Russia massacred civilians who protested for their freedom in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, and armed terrorists to try to bring down democratically elected governments across the world.
If anyone wants to know how the statistical evidence for how incredibly effective at lifesaving the simple, low cost indoor table shelter was in Britain in WWII, please click here (97.5% survival in completely demolished homes; vital knowledge for ongoing wars throughout the world whose deterrence nasty CND people like Corbyn resolutely oppose for political Marxist agenda reasons, while also opposing lifesaving low cost, practical, proved civil defence to maximise casualties). If anyone wants to know just how effective 3-storey high above-ground (not underground!) earth and concrete shelters were at withstanding the 130 psi blast just 1.4 mile from a 15 megaton nuclear bomb at Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954, please click here (not vapourised, didn't cease to exist, photographed and still there now). If anyone wants to see original nuclear test data reports on gamma radiation and blast in low cost open trench and Anderson shelters justifying British civil defence manuals, please click here. If anyone wants to see how recent American research proves Penney's Hiroshima data on blast and radiation attenuation due to energy used up in causing damage (negating Glasstone's use of unobstructed desert terrain data for blast waves), please click here or here.
UPDATE (7 MAY 2018): EXTRACTS FROM U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY'S OPENNET REPORT 1177129, DECLASSIFIED SECRET-RESTRICTED DATA "AN INTRODUCTION TO NUCLEAR WEAPONS PRIMARY PHYSICS", BY MILES BARON, 2005, LOS ALAMOS REPORT LA-CP-05-0823
Above: unclassified extracts of data from An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons Primary Physics, Los Alamos, originally SECRET RESTRICTED DATA, by Miles Baron. Note that the secret data Los Alamos are now using indicates that the fission of one atom of plutonium releases 220 MeV, ten percent more energy that the generic unclassified figure of 200 MeV stated in the 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons. Other figures given include 16.6 kg for the critical mass of (chemically) stabilized delta-phase plutonium-239. Such data is listed in unclassified publications, but there are generally a range of alternative numbers given from older declassified papers, so it is very interesting to see relatively up to date July 2005 data used in a secret-classified Los Alamos document. In 2006, we published declassified versions of Glasstone's own originally secret weapon design summary (in two versions, with and without thermonuclear design supplements, dated 1963/4 and 1972, respectively), An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons, with PDFs of four versions linked here: 1962, 1963, 1972a and 1972b. The critical masses and other nuclear weapon design data from Baron's 2005 report can therefore be directly compared to Glasstone 1963 and 1972, to see the evolution of knowledge! |
Above: some interesting nuclear weapon design radiation data reports have been declassified to Opennet, with extensive deletions of secret data, the most important being the Sprint neutron bomb radiation output report (far right above): LA-6871-MS, L. C. Harrison et al., Output for the Sprint Warhead, Secret - Atomic Weapon Data Category Sigma 1, Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information. This report (in classified form) is a complete set of calculated radiation outputs and debris motions from the first deployment of Samuel Cohen's "neutron bomb", the kiloton W66 Sprint warhead, which was for use in melting and thus deforming the fissile material of enemy incoming nuclear warheads as part of a clean, low yield nuclear ABM (anti-ballistic system). This was prior to the main "neutron bomb controversy" when the Russians lied about the effects and capabilities of the neutron bomb via the World Peace Council's anti-nuclear CND Russian-front and other bigoted, nasty authority-not-fact pseudo-scientific dogmatic left wing fascists in the Western media and its "groupthink science", in order to maintain their ability to start WWIII with a concentrated tank invasion of Europe. (While pretending to be "peace" lovers!) Although this report LA-6871-MS was heavily "santized", nevertheless it still contains the most important data needed, an interesting list in Table I of the compositions and masses of all components in the Sprint missile itself, from the 1.5 kg silica phenolic ablative heat shielding nose cap (ablation of phenolic ablators on warhead noses are discussed in detail in Part 2 of Dolan's 1972 EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons), to the 149 kg second stage motor. This data is used in order to calculate the effect of the Sprint missile delivery system on the neutron and gamma radiation outputs from the warhead within it, because there is no time available in this last-ditch terminal phase interception ABM system to eject the warhead from its missile system, prior to detonating it! We can easily use the tabulated data on masses and compositions in the declassified version of LA-6871-MS, in conjunction with the output spectrum of the enhanced neutron warhead published in Northrop's 1996 EM-1 handbook, and Dolan's schematic of the Sprint missile system in the 1972 edition of EM-1, to replicate the calculations in LA-6871-MS. What is emerging is a great deal of very valuable data on the true effects of vitally important enhanced neutron warheads, both for ABM and to deter invasions by concentrated military forces. The Sprint missile system is very important.
Further reading on Opennet:
1. Secret (now declassified) report detailing why we need the W79 enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons to deter Russian expansionism (LA-12063-MS, dated 1991), please click here for Opennet's PDF.
2. Secret (now declassified) Quarterly Progress to the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Part 3 Weapons, by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, July-September 1958 (PDF on Opennet linked here). This summarises the interesting plan details concerning conversion of the nuclear weapons, including the clean weapons, tested at Bikini Atoll in Operation Hardtack, 1958, into stockpiled nuclear deterrents. Earlier versions of these US AEC to the JCAE reports on weapons development in the 1950s were accidentally put on the shelves of Los Alamos National Laboratory's public library section and ended up in the news (they were quickly removed from the shelves). This particular report discusses the 2000 lb stockpile production of the Class D Mark 28 thermonuclear weapon, the 1600 lb Mark 49 Y1 thermonuclear warhead for the IRBM, and the 2800 lb Class D missile warhead, the Mark 27. It also mentions the early development effort to produce the Davy Crockett battlefield tactical weapon (finally proof tested in 1962 as the 0.02 kt, two point implosion Mark 54 weapon). It also discusses, on page 3, the "clean" version of the W-41, adding: "Both versions [clean and dirty] will be produced."
This is a vital statement for debunking simple civil defense criticisms and common objections against credible nuclear deterrence (i.e. fallout mythology fear peddling by CND fascists). OK, in the end General LeMay was anti-clean weapons (he wanted a bigger bang for the buck, using U238 pushers not inert tungsten or lead, as used respectively in the clean tests of Hardtack 1958 and Redwing 1956 at Bikini Atoll), and he managed to convince Eisenhower to deploy what he wanted in the megaton range, but nevertheless, clean weapons could be adopted today as a step towards the elimination of incredible (high collateral damage) nuclear deterrence, and a step towards the deterrence of not only a nuclear first strike, but also the conventional invasions that set off large wars which escalate (as in August 1945) to nuclear war. Key clean bomb tests in the 1950s were Poplar, Zuni, and Navajo (click here for the proof test results of clean bombs eliminating fallout collateral damage).
The report also goes on to discuss, on pages 330-331, the thermonuclear weapons design progress which Britain disclosed to America at their first joint warhead design meeting on 25-27 August, 1958:
"During the first meeting it became obvious that the United Kingdom has achieved an advanced state of weapon research and development both in the fission and thermonuclear fields. Moreover, it appeared that certain advances made by the United Kingdom would be of benefit to the United States [e.g. Britain detonated only spherical shaped secondaries in 1957-8 thermonuclear tests using the radiation channel filled with plastic foam to produce isotropic X-ray delivery to the spherical shape, whereas America concentrated on cylindrical secondaries whose dense metal pusher surfaces were ablated by soft x-rays "reflected" or rather re-radiated from just a layer of plastic foam on the inner surface of the outer case of the warhead]. Despite these achievements, however, the British apparently do not have an appreciation that plutonium produced from uranium subjected to higher burnup [i.e. with more neutron capture isotopes, nuclides Pu-240, Pu-241, Pu-242, Am-241, etc., some having higher spontaneous fission and thus higher neutron background that could pre-detonate slowly-assembled fissile cores] in their power reactors is usable in weapons. This knowledge would be of great significance to their civilian power programs. In addition, they have apparently not exerted major effort toward making their weapons one-point safe [i.e. invulnerable to accidents].
"Highlights of the second meeting, held in Albuquerque, September 15-17 [1958], are as follows:
"1. We provided the British with blueprints, material specifications, and relevant theoretical and experimental information related to our [Polaris submarine SLBM] XW-47 warhead, Mark 28, 44, 45, and 48 warheads, and ... for our TX-41 and TX-46 weapons now under development.
"2. The British provided similar information on their high-yield fission bomb, now in stockpile, 2,200 pound thermonuclear bomb, small ... device, two boosted fission designs, planned 1,500 pound thermonuclear weapon, and proposed 6 inch gun [nuclear canon shell] device.
"3. Both parties discussed in detail neutron sources for initiators, high explosive specifications, yields and designs, and mechanical and electrical components.
"We have several observations resulting from these meetings. The British ... have tested radiation-implosion, two-stage devices corresponding to our knowledge in 1954-55. ... This [an implosion design] is a new technique to United States implosion designers and holds a great deal of interest for us. ... there are specific developments which the United Kingdom scientists have made which hold a great deal of interest for us and which might offer advantages in our weapons systems."
This limited example of USA-UK collaboration to halt the USSR and Warsaw Pact beautifully illustrates the progress which could be achieved in ending the bloodshed of conventional warfare by collaboration for peace, not the deluded arms control/disarmament farce which failed to halt bloodshed since 1945, but a collaboration between different weapons labs to make more credible nuclear deterrents which can halt aggression, invasion, and war with less collateral damage, and this will finally bring real peace through security, i.e low cost credible defense of democratic freedom.
5 July 2018 Update on new Novichok nerve agent poisoning victims in Amesbury, 8 miles north of Salisbury at 10:15 and 15:30 on Saturday 30 June 2018
30 June 2018 Amesbury Novichok A234 poisoning timeline from DAILY MAIL. |
Dawn Sturgess, 44, and partner Charlie Rowley, 45, have reportedly had their hands contaminated with high concentrations of Novichok A234, the same substance smeared on the door knob of Sergei Skripal, 67, in March. The new poisoning victims have reportedly - on the basis of the high concentrations of Novichok - handled the original Novichok A234 container used to carry the agent from Moscow to Salisbury by Putin's spies in March. Naturally, they discarded before taking a flight back to Russia, and they did not put it in a bin (which they knew might have been searched after the poisoning was discovered). The original container would not be a test tube labelled clearly "Novichok A234", but something camouflaged as an innocent object. All other contaminated areas have been decontaminated by the weather (rainfall, wind, etc.) or by the decontamination efforts of police and the military in March. What has happened is that the Russian spies took a container of nerve agent through customs into England of a form which would not arouse suspicion. A cavity in the back of a wrist watch, or inside a USB memory stick, or inside a laptop, phone or tablet, would be the most likely locations (e.g. you can plug a half-size 2.5 inch HDD-replacing SSD laptop, leaving ample room in the half-empty SSD enclosure for a pack of Novichok). After the nerve agent was removed, the entire object would be discarded. Since it had not been decontaminated, and might have remained inside a bag hidden in undergrowth at the edge of a field or park, it would not have been washed clean internally by the weather, and could still be a hazard.
Someone then finds it, takes it home, charges it and uses it. Ms Sturgess collapsed at 10:15 am on Saturday 30 June 2018, and Mr Rowley collapsed at the same flat in Amesbury at 3:30pm that same day. Clearly that had recently discovered the missing Novichok A234 container, without realising the danger or its true significance. It is not speculative to argue that after all this time, the object causing this severe contamination of their hands must have been the original container used by the Russians, and that this object would now be located in the Mr Rowley's flat in Amesbury. The fact that she fell ill first suggests that she was contaminated significantly first, or to a greater extent, than Mr Rowley. Her home is reportedly in a hostel in Salisbury, where she may have found the A234 container.
The Porton Down chemical warfare centre should be able to identify the original container from the high concentration of A234, i.e. the quantitative contamination density on it (micrograms of A234 per square metre), just as in 2006 the teapot poisoned with Po-210 was identified from the concentration of alpha activity (in becquerels per square metre) that it contained. This is completely at odds with the gormless Russian propaganda being restated by pig-ignorant "science reporters" on Channel 4 "news", a front for dishonesty and delusions. (They are currently repeating Russian "questions" as to whether Britain has created this latest poisoning to take away credit from Russian's glorious hosting of the football World Cup, despite such "questions" being classic Russian propaganda tricks.) What is interesting is whether finding the actual container will indicate:
(1) The total amount of A234 originally smuggled into Britain (just measure its volume!),
(2) The people responsible, because there might be fingerprints on it from before it was opened: think from the mindset of the assassin by supposing you are Putin's agent and you carry the poison through customs into Britain (inside your specially modified watch, phone, laptop, or ipad). That object will have fingerprints on it, because the poison is sealed inside aluminium foil (or plastic), to allow you to safely carry it. You are not going to be wearing gloves all the way from Moscow to Salisbury, which would be unnecessary and suspicious! You might well wear gloves when you finally open the back of the watch or the back of the laptop or USB stick to remove the poison pack, which you tear open at the front door of Skripal's house, apply it to the doorknob, and then place it into a rucksack or bag, followed by gloves. The container may still have traces of fingerprints on it. Put another way, if the object had been doused in petrol and burned to cinders to carefully destroy the evidence, then it is unlikely that Sturgess would have touched it. If they didn't bother to destroy the container, maybe they didn't bother to scrub the fingerprints off it, either. Far more likely, the agents smeared Novichok A234 on the Skripal's door knob in March wearing gloves, then put the container into a rucksack or other bag with the gloves, zipped it up, and then dumped the whole thing in a the long grass of a park in Salisbury or Amesbury where it was discovered on Saturday morning by Dawn Sturgess who took it, or part of its contents, home and was contaminated. If the object is bulky, there is a chance of tracking where it has been using standard forensic techniques. (It is known for certain that both Sturgess and Rowley visited a park, Queen Elizabeth Gardens, in Salisbury on Friday 29 June 2018, but that is not necessarily where they found the contaminated object.)
(3) Whether the Novichok A234 was smuggled in two precursor chemical parts as a "binary" agent, whereby two relatively harmless chemicals are mixed together to form lethal substance, just before it is used. This option is a complete unknown, but it might have been used in case customs officials opened and inspected one (or both) of the precursor substances.
16 July 2018 UPDATE: NOVICHOK REPORTEDLY SPRAYED FROM PERFUME BOTTLE
It has now been reported by Matthew Rowley, brother of Novichok casualty Charlie Rowley, that the source of the Novichok A234 was a perfume bottle discovered by Mr Rowley (who is still alive and now conscious in hospital, and who has spoken about the events with his brother). If correct, Ms Sturgess (who was hospitalised before Mr Rowley) received a larger dose from spraying her wrist with Novichok in the belief it was a harmless perfume.
Mr Rowley reportedly discovered the perfume bottle (which the police found in his house and sent to Porton for analysis), and he took longer to be taken ill, and to a lesser (non-fatal) degree. Ms Sturgess was affected sooner and died, presumably as a result of exposure to a much larger dose of Novichok, as a result of spraying the perfume bottle on her skin. The basic standard treatments for Novichok at present are atropine to relax muscles (just enough to keep the eye pupils at normal 2-4mm diameter, instead of contracted to points which is what nerve agent does due to continued muscular contraction), sedatives to relax the brain, and an artificial respirator machine (with tubed air into the lungs) to take over breathing if the atropine dose needed is so great that the muscles are completely unable to function for normal breathing. Clearly, Ms Sturgess had such a large dose that this treatment, which succeeded with the previous Novichok cases, failed due to heart failure; her son Ewan has reported that Ms Sturgess's sister was with her when she died and "her heart slowed down and she just gave in." (Thus, possibly, a heart-and-lung machine may help in such high dose cases.)
If these reports about the source being a perfume bottle are correct (they are based on a visitor to Mr Rowley in hospital), then as we suggested in the previous update (above, item (1) ), the police will be able to determine the total amount of Novichok from the size of the perfume bottle, and the purity of the residue inside the bottle. It is possible that the perfume bottle was smuggled through customs in hand luggage if it was less than 50ml (larger bottles of liquid are banned from hand luggage, in case they contain explosives or acids for aircraft hijacks or sabotage). It could also have been smuggled in within hold luggage. If so, the Novichok was not in binary form (two inert precursors which are mixed to form the deadly nerve agent).
The police are having difficulties due to the heat exhaustion problems of working in hazmat chemical protection suits indoors in the UK's exceptionally hot weather at present. However, due to hydrolysis decay by rain outdoors since March, and the low volatility (i.e. long persistence) of Novichok (which is a skin threat to a far greater extent than an inhalation threat), gloves are probably all that is really needed for outdoor searches. The correct analogy is that while the more volatile nerve agents evaporate easily and therefore constitute an inhalation danger in enclosed spaces, Novichok A234 is more like a thick oil or grease which does not evaporate rapidly, and is therefore more of a danger to the skin than to the lungs, like VX which had to be deployed as a liquid droplet spray, not a vapour.
As already explained in the previous update, the Novichok A234 in a perfume bottle would have been sprayed on the door handle of the Skripal's house by someone wearing gloves for protection, who would then immediately have stowed the perfume and the gloves into some kind of container, possibly a rucksack or handbag, before discarding them.
The perfume bottle nozzle would obviously be contaminated; although Novichok A234 in undiluted form is too viscus - like treacle or honey - to spray from a perfume bottle, a non-water based volatile solvent/thinner could easily have been added, like a small quantity of petrol or alcohol. This would have allowed the Novichok to have been sprayed, and the solvent would then quickly evaporate from the door handle, leaving behind a thin layer of pure Novichok A234. Thus, the exact place where Mr Rowley found the perfume bottle may lead to further discoveries of evidence (bag, gloves, maybe the container in which the perfume bottle was smuggled in), as well as helping to map the route taken by the assassin after spraying. If we envisage the sequence of events from the perspective of the assassin taking safety precautions it is as follows:
1. Assassin arrives at Skripal house with Novichok in perfume bottle held in some kind of secure container (an assassin would not want a perfume bottle of Novichok loose in a handbag or pocket, in case it leaked or more likely, some movement caused the depression of the nozzle button on the top!).
2. Assassin puts on gloves, then takes out the perfume bottle of Novichok from its container (box, plastic bag, rucksack, or original transit container).
3. Wearing glove, assassin uses perfume bottle to spray A234 and alcohol mixture on door handle, where alcohol evaporates to leave pure A234 residue.
4. Assassin replaces perfume bottle into container, along with glove (probably removed by peeling it "inside out" to avoid contamination of the other hand by any droplets on outside of glove), and places that into the container.
5. Assassin discards container in shrubs or long grass in a park early in the morning or late at night, to avoid drawing attention to themselves (as might occur if they tried to burn the evidence). They might not want to place the evidence in a town centre bin, where a police search may find it quickly, and where CCTV cameras may identify the assassin easily.
It is also possible that due to cold weather in March, the assassin had gloves on the whole time and simply carried to perfume bottle in one hand, and kept it in the gloved hand after spraying it, in order to avoid unpacking and repacking the bottle in front of the Skripal's front door (in case seen by a neighbour or passer by). In this case, the perfume bottle might have been dumped by itself or with the gloves in the park. Either way, the discovery of the delivery container will be a major step forward in understanding how the attack was accomplished, particularly as the survivor who reportedly found the perfume bottle will be able to identify exactly where it was found, allowing a pin-point search for any other objects which may still exist in that vicinity, like gloves, bags, etc.
Update: 25 July 2018 on Novichok A234 container description by Charlie Rowley
Novichok victim Charlie Rowley has been released from hospital and has given an interview to ITV news in which he has confirmed that he discovered the Novichok bottle, apparently in a sealed, unopened packet: a 3 x 3 inch size box, 1/2 inch thick, containing a glass bottle in a cellophane wrapper with a dispenser separate. He accidentally spilt some on his hand but washed it off. His partner sprayed it on her wrist, however, and then rubbed her wrists together, falling ill 15 minutes later. She did not wash it off:
Above: Charlie Rowley, 45, who discovered the Novichok A234 disguised as a perfume bottle, and was poisoned by it, says he found it actually looking new and unopened in a 3 x 3 inch x 1/2 inch thick box, wrapped in a cellophane wrapper, containing a separate spray dispenser top which had to be inserted. He accidentally spilled some of the oily, unscented liquid on his hand while inserting the spray top on the bottle, but he washed it off his hands and so received only a small, survivable dose (the oily liquid is only slowly absorbed through skin). His partner Dawn Sturgess, 44, sprayed it on one wrist and then rubbed her wrists together, but did not wash it off. She fell ill just 15 minutes later due to that lethal dose, which required so much atropine to counter muscular contraction that it led to lethal heart failure, despite artificial ventilation (Charlie took longer to fall ill, due to his smaller dose). She died on 8 July. If this was a "spare" unused Novichok poisoned "perfume" pack, then Russian assassin unit had more than one smuggled into the UK.
UPDATE: 3 August 2018 on Novichok perfume bottle location and fascism by Corbyn
It has been reported that Novichok victim Charley Rowley believes he found the discarded Russian assassin's Novichok perfume bottle pack that killed Dawn Sturgess in Salisbury in two industrial waste containers by The Cloisters Pub in the city centre, which have now been taken to the chemical and biological defence establishment at Porton for analysis and testing. Normal bins are emptied weekly by the council, but industrial waste containers can be left to fill up for months before removal. In other news, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, who alleged that Russia did not make the Novichok attack on Britain, has now released an Iranian TV interview video praising as his "brothers" the Hamas terrorists who murdered 600 innocent people. Corbyn continues claiming that his support for the USSR and Warsaw Pact human rights abusers in the 1980s, Hamas, the IRA and other terrorists is in the name of peace or freedom of speech, but mainstream Jews have complained that he is a hater of the Jewish homeland of Israel and that his words are the opposite of his actions. His disgusting CND lies on nuclear weapons and civil defence prevent peace and freedom of speech.
UPDATE: 5 August 2018 on Novichok assassination breakthrough
Police have discovered that the Novichok nerve agent used in a perfume spray bottle to spray the door handle of the home of Sergei and Yulia Skripal on Saturday 3 March 2018 may have been prepared in a toilet block in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens, Salisbury, where low level Novichok contamination has now been discovered. A spare spray bottle discarded in containers near The Cloisters Pub contaminated Charlie Rowley and killed Dawn Sturgess on 8 July. From these pin-pointed locations on a map, in relation to the Skripal's house, the police will be able to deduce the route taken by assassins, and then use this route for data reduction, to help focus attention on appropriate CCTV footage to identify the attackers.
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Pro-Russia propaganda, but a different and (partially) logical viewpoint nonetheless:
https://www.rt.com/news/421591-uk-produce-novichok-agent/
The UK government presumes that (a the type of poison used was invented in Russia/USSR. (b only Russia can create this kind of poison, and then (c Russia did the poisoning.
This might well be the case. However, if "Novichok Agents" are so secret, then how can Britain know one when the see it? They would have had to be given a confirmed sample from Russia to compare against the nerve agents used on Skripal, or else have learned (either openly or by espionage) the composition from Russia.
In any case, the UK government is either unable to prove the poison originated in Russia, or perhaps they too have a good understanding of the substance.
Now, knowing how to recognize a substance is not the same as knowing how to create it, but the two often go hand in hand. If an advanced chemist knows the molecular composition and structure of a compound, they can often find ways to make it from other available compounds. If the British government is able to identify Novichok agents as positively as they claim, then they are probably able to chemically synthesize them, too, just like the Russians. I'm not saying that this is a false-flag attack, but this possibility should not be ruled out.
Whoever did the poisoning, whatever poison they used, however they delivered it, whatever the reason, and whatever the political consequences will be, a good supply of gas masks (and some atropine or whatever is the appropriate antidote) is not a bad idea!
What is, IMO, is the weapon system detailed in Los Alamos report LA-9004. The problem, is that it plans on targeting individual tanks (and small groups of tanks) with nuclear warheads. Even North Korea has 5000 tanks. Russia has 20000:
https://www.globalfirepower.com/armor-tanks-total.asp
Say that each of these weapons destroys an average of 5 tanks (some will get less, but some will get many more) Now we need to come up with perhaps 1000 of these nukes, all designed for this specific purpose. And we need them fast! Now, with a more sensible approach, you can have have boarder walls and guards, and maybe a few tactical nuclear weapons, designed to be used on large, dense groups of tanks. Once tanks and personnell disperse into smaller groups, or begin travelling in narrow columns, nukes are no longer a sensible option. A better one, in my opinion would be a strong "home guard" or "citizen's guard," to go with a civil defense program. You could have maybe 2-10% of the population who train periodically, have guns, etc., but are not enlisted in the military in the conventional sense of the term. They can be farmers, factory workers, doctors, or anything else in a society. They don't have to be kept in barracks during times of peace. But if a war starts, they can be ready to fight. Such a force can provide cheap, effective deterrence against an invading force using small arms, and machine guns, cannon, remotely controlled mines and small rockets to attack enemy vehicles and large groups of personnel.
The reason why enormous numbers of small nuclear weapons are impractical is simply an economy of scale. It takes almost as much resources to produce a 30 ton yield warhead as it does to produce a 30 kiloton warhead. The yield proposed in LA-9004 is not given, but it appears to be very low. If Los Alamos is still ignoring attenuation by buildings, the claim of it only "rattling windows" at 300 meters would suggest a yield under .05 kt. With enough blast attenuation, however, even a weapon in the range of a few hundred kt may only "rattle" windows at 300 meters. However, the way the article kept saying it was such a low yield, and would hardly do any blast damage to a tank at 25 m, etc, suggests a warhead below 10 kt in yield. At 10 kt, approximately 500 grams of fissile material are fissioned (or 2.5 grams at .05 kt), but this material is used up throughout a much larger core, of perhaps 3-6 kg mass. This inefficient enough to make this defense impractical.
"Once tanks and personnel disperse into smaller groups, or begin travelling in narrow columns, nukes are no longer a sensible option."
Please remember that the whole point of the neutron bomb is to DETER concentrated personnel/truck/tank/mobile missile launcher invasions, to PREVENTING invasions of the 1914 Belgium sort that set off WWI and the 1939 Poland sort that set off WWII.
We want to DETER war, by PREVENTING APPLICATION of the "principle of concentration of force." As long as we also have handheld anti-tank rockets for dispersed attacks and thus properly defended border walls (unlike the imaginary boundary between Eastern Ukraine and Russia in recent years), then we can hold off WWIII. Nuclear weapons are used to credibly deter war, not to actually blow things up.
"It takes almost as much resources to produce a 30 ton yield warhead as it does to produce a 30 kiloton warhead."
If we NEED to avert collateral damage risks in areas where civilians live JUST beside borders over which armies can invade, then we might need very low yields to CREDIBLY DETER war. The "bigger bank for the buck" argument is moot if the bigger bang is incredible as a deterrent!
Broken windows (which can occur down to about 0.1 psi peak overpressure, if face-on to the blast) don't matter if the wind pressure behind the blast winds behind the shock front are too slow to accelerate the glass fragments to injuring velocities.
There was a massive CND and BBC trickery campaign in the Cold War, in which the impacts of high velocity flying glass from 10 psi peak overpressure on pumpkins placed behind the windows (with no "duck and cover", blinds, curtains or clothing protection at all, naturally!) was deliberately shown when the commentator discussed how far "windows are broken". Shop windows were sometimes broken in Las Vegas during kiloton nuclear tests 70 miles away, but the fragments did not constitute a hazard. The glass was simply cracked, falling with gravitation vertically, and remained beside the window, instead of being blasted into people as occurs at closer rangers, at high wind pressure.
Clearly, therefore, the distance to which the danger from flying glass extends is only a fraction of that at which glass panes facing ground zero can be "broken". At 1 psi peak overpressure, the maximum blast winds are only 70 miles/hour and glass fragments will be accelerated to lower velocities than that! Experiments prove that even ordinary clothing provides substantial protection, and any person standing behind a windows will instinctively turn away or close their eyes due to painfully bright flash. If the flash is attenuated by heavy curtains, those will stop or slow most of the flying glass, too!
If I can just add this: a really hard program of research may produce a better neutron bomb, cleaner and cheaper in terms of fissile material. At present, the low fission yield stage means a very low percentage of that energy is radiated as X-rays and available to compress and heat the secondary (fusion) stage. What is needed is additional energy coupling of other forms of energy to improve the efficiency of the fusion stage in low yield thermonuclear weapons, and as explained in an earlier post, that can be done using proof tested principles of electromagnetic pulse generation via magnetic flux compression in a coil around the fission primary stage, the energy pulse of which can be fed into magnetic field generator coils around the nearby fusion stage (just as has been done, for short duration pulses, in some "peaceful nuclear fusion reactor" experiments). Given research, something like this could cheapen and improve low yield neutron bombs.
"However, if "Novichok Agents" are so secret, then how can Britain know one when the see it? They would have had to be given a confirmed sample from Russia to compare against the nerve agents used on Skripal, or else have learned (either openly or by espionage) the composition from Russia."
There is a large amount of surprisingly updated military use information on nerve gas warfare in the 2014 Russian civil defense manual, which I put on Internet Archive and linked to in the recent post at http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/1929-photo-of-dr-samuel-glasstone-for.html
E.g., see https://archive.org/stream/RUSSIANNUCLEARWEAPONSEFFECTSCOUNTERMEASURES1960TO2014/RUSSIAN%20NUCLEAR%20WEAPONS%20EFFECTS%20COUNTERMEASURES%201960%20TO%202014#page/n881/mode/2up
For example, please see their tables on pages 57-58, linked here, which are far more detailed and militaristic than than anything in their old USSR civil defence manuals on nerve gases. This indicates recent research on this subject by the Kremlin, before than 2014 book which coincided with their use of gas via Assad in Syria and also the invasion of Crimea, etc.
There are also links to various references from defecting Russian scientists on Novichok, here. Let me explain, please: a Russian scientist defects and says "Russia has made a new Novichok nerve gas that is x times more powerful than VX, and here is the formula (waving a piece of paper) for you to check what I say!" We check the chemical compound in a very sophisticated massively parallel processor 3D chemical molecule computer simulation to see exactly what its properties are, compared to known nerve gases like VX. We then validate the claim, strong evidence that it is true, without any risk of being duped by lies (or being killed by accident). Simple.
BTW, Porton Down has been strapped of cash (unlike Putin's scientists!) since the Cold War ended in 1992. They did not even have enough personnel to deal with the decontamination of the recent attack, without getting help from the Army. We are in a terrible state regarding civil defense and military preparedness against Russia, North Korea (which is probably just playing for time in agreeing to a Summit with Trump, like Iraq did for years), China, and terrorists. The government has only authorised an emergency £60 million cash injection into Porton Down after the latest attack happened; too little, too late. We've known for years that nerve gas has been used by the Russians and their allies in the Middle East, e.g. Syria. We've done very little, just spying, no concrete efforts to deter, stop or defend ourselves in war. Yes, a few new gas masks for soldiers to replace the old S10's, but very little for retaliation!
Information on Russia's Novichok program came from people such as the Russia Chemical War scientist Vil Mirzayanov. The thing is, there was very little interest in this until the latest attack. Now Russia is denying everything. It's absurd, because independent experts have verified the properties of the chemical compounds Mirzayanov and other dissidents from Putin have disclosed! They didn't just write down chemical formulae out of their heads as a gimmick. These are really lethal weapons, and we know Russia was dishonest and lied about Po-210 poisoning in London 2006, dishonestly used unmarked military vehicles in invading the Ukraine, etc. The whole obsession of people like commie "socialist" Jeremy Corbyn with believing Russian propaganda, or asking them for more of it (which will come if we send them samples in a travesty of diplomacy), is crazy. I'm all for talking to and negotiating with Putin, but for God's sake let's use gunboat diplomacy and re-arm ourselves to make Putin more sensible. Power is the language he loves; he sees weakness as a joke.
I just want to address some specific flaws in your suggestion:
"Now, with a more sensible approach, you can have have boarder walls and guards, and maybe a few tactical nuclear weapons, designed to be used on large, dense groups of tanks. Once tanks and personnell disperse into smaller groups, or begin travelling in narrow columns, nukes are no longer a sensible option. A better one, in my opinion would be a strong "home guard" or "citizen's guard," to go with a civil defense program. You could have maybe 2-10% of the population who train periodically, have guns, etc., but are not enlisted in the military in the conventional sense of the term. They can be farmers, factory workers, doctors, or anything else in a society. They don't have to be kept in barracks during times of peace. But if a war starts, they can be ready to fight. Such a force can provide cheap, effective deterrence against an invading force using small arms, and machine guns, cannon, remotely controlled mines and small rockets to attack enemy vehicles and large groups of personnel."
I like all your ideas, but not nuclear disarmament! My problems with this are that:
(1) We still need tactical nuclear weapons to make enemy force disperse, i.e. to prevent the sort of concentrated Blitzkrieg that overcame the Belgium defences in 1914 and the Polish in 1939. It's no good saying that once they disperse, we don't need any nuclear bombs.
We (ironically) need nuclear weapons to make the enemy force disperse in the first place, so nuclear weapons are always going to be necessary in order to keep a war conventional by forcing the enemy to use dispersion tactics which enable us to use nun-nuclear tactics.
(2) Your whole approach of civilian mobilization into military conscripts when an invasion is threatened is what was behind the crisis instability of August 1914, when millions of conscripts and defense volunteers were recalled, kitted out with guns and uniforms, and sent to the fronts (borders) by trains or on foot. The problem is that this massive conventional mobilization system was incredibly expensive in logistics and also was perceived by neighbors as a threat! You know, if a country mobilizes huge conventional forces on the border of some country, people in that country want to do likewise, and you get exponentially escalating crisis instability. The tension rises, the economy is busted and war fever breaks out because of fears that he who strikes first has the advantage of surprise. There is also a fear that the logistics needed will run out or devastate the economy. Any accidental gunshot is then perceived as the starting pistol for the war.
So the whole problem of conventional weapons mobilization is that it really doesn't deter war, but makes war more likely. As Thatcher put it in the final episode of the 1989 documentary "The Nuclear Age":
"After all, two world wars have shown that conventional weapons are NOT enough to deter war, and if we want a war-free Europe, we must continue to have a nuclear deterrent."
Conventional weapons are so bulky compared to nuclear weapons, that mobilization preparations (bringing troops to frontiers, etc.) are obvious and cause war hysteria, that often triggers off war on any pretext (like an accidental shooting). Nuclear weapons, by contrast, are the ONLY THINGS THAT HAVE BEEN PROVED TO DETER WWIII. End of story.
"Let me explain, please: a Russian scientist defects and says "Russia has made a new Novichok nerve gas that is x times more powerful than VX, and here is the formula (waving a piece of paper) for you to check what I say!" "We check the chemical compound in a very sophisticated massively parallel processor 3D chemical molecule computer simulation..." Then British weapon laboratories probably could indeed create their own batch of Novichok, if they were so inclined. I'm not saying that they DID, just that they COULD if they wanted to.
The simplest explanation to Skripal's poisoning is that it is Russia, making an example of a defected spy, saying "Don't make an enemy of the Russian government; where ever you are, we will find a way to get even with you. We know how to assassinate people with complete impunity. And, we have some mean military weapons (nerve gas can obviously be either for war or assassination, depending on how much is applied) too, so don't even think about declaring war on us."
What I said about broken windows has nothing to do with whether broken glass is lethal. I was just saying the yield they planned could be large, maybe even a few hundred kt, if blast attenuation was taken into account in LA-9004. If, as usual, the document is ignoring this effect, they are likely talking about something under .05 kt. I also know that the idea is credible deterrence, so that you hopefully don't have to blow anything up. All I said is that this idea of making nuclear weapons to irradiate one tank at a time is foolish. If you would run out of them before you have stopped the invasion, then the enemy might decide to take the loss. But, if you have a military system that will annihilate most of the invading force, that is more credible. If they are in a city and concentrated in one area, it might be best to target that one area with a larger yield. If the whole place is full of enemy tanks, you need to cover it all with lethal effects, and that is going to take a lot more warheads using low yields than high yields (by which I still mean only a few kt). If they are dispersed, then they shouldn't be targeted with nukes at all. Other means should be used. Of course, all of this is the PLAN, which you have ready in order to DETER an invasion which would require it being put into action. It's not so much an issue of collateral damage; the main danger from such a device is initial radiation, there would be little damage to buildings, and citizens could go into air raid shelters or be evacuated prior to the battle. The issue is how many of these things you can make, in a cheap and timely manner.
"If I can just add this: a really hard program of research may produce a better neutron bomb, cleaner and cheaper in terms of fissile material." Yes. But that will be a very, very hard research program indeed, and possibly a fruitless one. Currently, if you make the fissile core in the primary too small, you won't have any yield, not even a ton equivalent, to channel to the secondary. The only way to change that is with better compression of the primary core, and systems with better compression tend to be much bigger. If you have a quarter of the mass, (say, 750 gm instead of 3 kg), you likely have to reduce it to a quarter of the surface area, which means the radius must shrink by 50%. If you reduce the mass by 16 (and now you are starting to get passable efficiency at low yields) you have to reduce the area to 1/16, reduce radius by 75%, and increase density 4 times. To change this pattern, I think the only options will be (a find a fissile material that absorbs neutrons along a shorter path at any given density (b find a material which produces many more neutrons during fission, (c find a material which deflects neutrons very effectively in thin layers, without absorbing them (d devise a way to use a moderator (this has been tried already at Upshot Knothole Ruth and Ray; slowing down the neutrons reduced the speed of the reaction, leading to less fission occurring before disassembly of the core) or (e find something entirely different which is capable of initiating fusion, like spherical implosion in metastable metallic hydrogen, with a metallic deuterium core, or a way of creating antimatter efficiently. A small device capable of initiating fusion without a fissile primary state would be truly revolutionary, and has been researched for a long time. This link provides some preliminary estimations of the effects of such a device:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0510071
Anyhow, keep up the good work. You're providing the data needed to implement civil defense, and the news suggesting that we need it. Now, it's just a matter of getting bigoted people in government to listen!
One more thing: When I talked about a "strong home gaurd", I did not mean people being conscripted, and mobilized to the front lines. I was thinking more along the lines of people who are ready to fight FOLLOWING INVASION, but not always on duty during peacetime. This type of "reserve" can be technically part of the conventional military, as in the US National Guard
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_the_United_States) or as a group of people who are supplied with training and weapons via the government, and would take orders during a time of crisis, but are not officially part of the military:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Guard_(United_Kingdom)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps) (although these were very poorly trained and equipped, but still an example)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkssturm)
Regardless of whether these units are considered part of the conventional military or not, they do not have to be "mobilized." they do not have to be kept in barracks during peace. They can continue working normal jobs in factories, fields, offices, hospitals, while only training periodically. You can't rely on this type of defence entirely, but it is a good back-up for the conventional forces, following an invasion. Walls, powerful weapons, bunkers, etc can all be overcome if an invading force finds a way to disperse, or circumvent a barrier like the Maginot lines. Having a third line of defense makes ANY type of invasion seem much less attractive.
To be clear, I am suggesting something like the following in the case of Britain:
Gas masks and protection against nukes (evacuation, household shelters, public shelters, etc.) for everyone
Civil Defence training for everyone
This equipment and training could probably be given for under $200 per person, even with modern inflation. In the early days of ABM defense, the cost of providing bomb shelters was considered more cost-effective than ABM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Zeus#Perfect_or_nothinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Zeus#Perfect_or_nothing
For Britain, I'm assuming the cost for shelters will be $13B
Rifles (600$ in mass), ammunition (1000rds, under 500$) and a small amount of instruction for training, not the entire basic training used by the army (2000$) plus, 2000 rounds ($1000) for fighting. Some expenses (like more training equipment) can be paid for by volunteer members, if they are so inclined. Anyhow, I estimate that the gov't cost in getting a "citizen soldier", trained and equipped enough to do anything, is probably around $5000, or $15B to get 3 million dispersed "guerilla" or "stay-behind" fighters.
Anti-tank warfare: Potassium Chlorate is an explosive chemical used in ww1. It can be produced using approximately 31 kwh of electricity per kilogram, for a cost (at $.20/kwh) of $6/kg. it is ideal for decentralized production.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5hAct2dmT4
I propose 300,000 separate 100 watt chlorate units, at a cost of $150 a piece, capable of creating 28 kg/yr of product for a total of 4200 large anti-tank remotely operated mines per year. The initial cost would be $45M, and 50.4M/year after that.
In summary, $13B for civil defense, $15B into a "citizen soldier" or "militia" program, and perhaps $200M to add decentralized anti-tank weapons in great quantities. I have to stress that this needs to be IN ADDITION to perhaps as few as 2000 new tactical nuclear weapons such as anti-ship, anti-submarine, and enhanced radiation, with yields of between 1 and 100 kt. $29B is a lot of money, but it is still less than the current UK defense budget. Over a period of a few years, Britain could create an extremely strong credible deterrent, consisting of combined nuclear, conventional, and paramilitary forces, as well as civil defense.
"Currently, if you make the fissile core in the primary too small, you won't have any yield, not even a ton equivalent, to channel to the secondary. The only way to change that is with better compression of the primary core, and systems with better compression tend to be much bigger. ..."
This is completely wrong! You haven't grasped the whole point at all! You can make the primary yield ANYTHING YOU LIKE, even with existing technology (this is WELL ESTABLISHED, and the article and numbers you give are complete obfuscation), by adjusting the time between firing the implosion system and firing the neutron pulse generator. This is how you can get 20 tons of TNT yield from a W54, tested in 1962 successfully. This is totally unclassified, and you are writing inaccurate stuff, and you link to a paper by a propaganda writer who hates credible nuclear deterrence and was debunked by a British military nuclear weapons effects expert for driting lies in the New Scientist in 1986, as we showed in a post back in 2006. There is NO PROBLEM with getting small primary yields.
As I stated in my comment above, the ONLY issue is quite different to what you claim.
Uncompressed but in a good tamper of beryllium, about 4.4 kg of Pu239 is the critical mass. The effective critical mass decreases as the square of the compressed density, so an implosion system which doubles the density, means you can use roughly 1.1 kg of Pu239 to get a critical mass during implosion. If fission was 100%, this would give you almost 20 kt yield, but you can choose anything you like, because the compressed core rebounds outwards as the shock wave reached the middle of the core, and rebounds. By firing the neutron pulse generator at a selected time for a given configuration during the "rebound" of the core, you can achieve any yield you like, 2 tons of TNT, 20 tons of TNT, 0.5 kiloton, etc.
So that is not the problem. You are NOT reducing the amount of fissile material below about 1 kg of Pu239 to reduce the yield; you are instead increasing the delay time between firing the detonators and firing the neutron generator tube.
Now, as I explained above, the issue is then how much fission yield you need which is high if you are using X-rays for coupling, but will be REDUCED if you utilise other means as well, to make the coupling more efficient. You ignored what I wrote:
" At present, the low fission yield stage means a very low percentage of that energy is radiated as X-rays and available to compress and heat the secondary (fusion) stage. What is needed is additional energy coupling of other forms of energy to improve the efficiency of the fusion stage in low yield thermonuclear weapons, and as explained in an earlier post, that can be done using proof tested principles of electromagnetic pulse generation via magnetic flux compression in a coil around the fission primary stage, the energy pulse of which can be fed into magnetic field generator coils around the nearby fusion stage (just as has been done, for short duration pulses, in some "peaceful nuclear fusion reactor" experiments). Given research, something like this could cheapen and improve low yield neutron bombs."
We can reduce the primary fission stage yield in a neutron bomb IF WE INCREASE THE EFFICIENCY OF THE COUPLING. The expense problem is due to tritium, not plutonium. By increasing efficiency of compression, you need less tritium for similar fusion yield!
Obviously by "you can choose anything you like" in my comment refers to the range of yields available up to the highest efficiency achievable, maybe 50% with a large implosion system, spherically symmetric. I.e., 10 kt yield for 1.1 kg of Pu239, or so.
The great ADVANTAGE of using inefficient fission weapons (very small percentage of fission, i.e. 20 tons of TNT from 1.1 kg of Pu239 is a fission efficiency of only about 0.1%), is that you can use VERY COMPACT linear implosion systems, which is how the W79 neutron bomb diameter was small enough to fit into a shell! If you are using a deliberately "inefficient" fission primary for low fission yield, you can forget all the problems of efficient fission bomb design, and deliberately use "inefficient" systems.
What you are aiming for is low fission yield, not the use of a small amount of Pu239! It is vital to grasp this. To make a neutron bomb a more credible deterrent, we're not concerned with the amount of Pu239 in the primary stage, but with:
(1) the percentage of it which gets fissioned, and
(2) the coupling mechanisms used to deliver as much of that (small amount of) energy as possible to the fusion stage, to minimise wastage of tritium. This makes it cheaper!
Thank you Nige for your update about Mirzayanov's Novichok information book "State Secrets: An Insider's Chronicle of the Russian Chemical Weapons Program". I was amazed to see that on the American amazon.com site it has 5 star reviews, but on the UK site www.amazon.co.uk there is only one review by an associate of Corbyn's standpoint which gives only 1 star and claims:
"“Only the Russians” developed this class of nerve agents, said the chemist. “They kept it and are still keeping it in secrecy.” Yet the whole formula for Novichok is printed in the book not much of a secret then. After that I lost trust."
This is totally deluded because Mirzayanov was the one who leaked the formula, disclosing the Novichok program to the world. The fact that Putin keeps refusing to admit the truth over Po-210, Crimea, Ukraine, Syria and now Novichok doesn't stop dissidents from debunking him.
Thanks for pointing that propaganda out! I see a more positive review, helped by the analysis in this post, has now appeared from a friend of the truth www.amazon.co.uk/review/R1YXU3Z9VJRW1
"This is completely wrong!"
If it's so wrong, then why has no nuclear test been conducted with say, 10 grams of fissile material, and a yield of 10-100 tons? Surely a core of less than one cubic centimeter in volume would make for a very compact weapon.
Or, maybe it would take an enormous implosion system weighing tons by itself, and a level of precision in the implosion sequence which has yet to be achieved in any modern nuclear weapon, in order to compress those 10 grams to the point of criticality. The amount of plutonium is not a big issue, at least not until you are talking about needing an atomic bomb for each of your enemy's tanks! Yes, that is exactly what was being considered in LA-9004. Sure, a weapon capable of producing a big yield can be adjusted to create a small yield, but it will still require the same amount of core material. That is easy. What is NOT easy is to MAKE a weapon using a tiny amount of fissile material. If they find a way to do it, using any of the approaches which have been suggested, that's great. If not, we can still have a deterrent using low kiloton yields, and other fighting equipment for deterring threats too small to waste an atomic bomb on.
Also, I didn't link to that article because I liked the author's opinion on normal nuclear deterrence. He was just presenting facts on a NEW APPROACH for creating ton yield nuclear weapons, using no fissile material at all and maybe under a gram of tritium. It looks like devices of this type are a long way off technologically.
You seem to be at cross purposes to whole point the neutron bomb. You think it's about making the most efficient use of tiny amounts of fissile material that is possible. It isn't. It's just about minimising the fission yield, and maximising the tritium-deuterium fusion yield!
I'm not interested in using small amounts of fissile material, like 10 grams of plutonium.
I'm not interested in designing an efficient fission implosion system - quite the opposite. It can be highly inefficient, because I only want my kilogram of fissile material to produce about 0.1% efficiency of fission.
What I am concerned about is maximising the efficient coupling of the energy to the fusion capsule. If the residual fissile material radioactivity is an issue, we could use highly enriched uranium-235, which has a much lower specific activity due to the fact that its half live is much longer than that of plutonium-239.
As a stop-gap, to halt an attack, we could simply use sub-kiloton W54 fission weapons, or bring the kiloton thermonuclear W79 neutron bomb back. This may have to happen, but the W79 is expensive in terms of tritium capsules, which have a half life of only 12 years. We make tritium by irradiating lithium inside nuclear reactors. If we could improve the coupling of energy in the W79 by supplementing the weak x-ray coupling mechanism (which is pathetic at kiloton yields, because the percentage of the energy given off as x-rays is tiny for fission weapons of small yield/mass ratio), we could improve the situation immensely.
One way to do this is use a magnetic field pulse from coils to help compress the ionized fusion capsule, by using power from a nuclear powered magnetic flux compression generator placed around the primary (fission) stage. In this scheme, as a shell of light-velocity radiation streams off the fissioning primary stage, it progressively ionizes the insulator of pre-charged induction coil placed around it, shorting it out. This pushes the existing electromagnetic field energy into an immense electromagnetic pulse, travelling out into the so-far not-yet-reached part of the induction coil, which can be fed into magnetic field generator coils placed around the fusion capsule. Thus, you can supplement x-ray ablation compression of the fusion capsule with magnetic field compression of it, once it has ionized (the expansion of an ionized capsule against magnetic field lines is resisted by a force which depends on the magnetic field strength).
If this system works, it could mean that the x-ray ionised fusion capsule's expansion may be delayed enough (by magnetic field compression) for neutrons from the fission primary stage to arrive. This could allow the replacement of tritium by lithium, because lithium could be fissioned by the neutrons in this configuration, of extended compression (normally this is not possible in neutron bombs, because of the timing mis-match; x-rays compress the fusion stage for a time span shorter than the time taken for neutrons to arrive and fission lithium to produce tritium). If only there was more interest in deterrence outside cash-strapped secret labs, we could probably make great progress.
Wow. Corbyn really is a Lenin wannabe. This alone is a good reason for people to be educated about the millions of people who Lenin and Stalin executed, and the Communists' key role in expanding the Cold War arms race. It is also important to see how the USSR produced nerve gas agents while claiming to be disarming. This is reminiscent of the Nazis who armed Germany secretly in the years leading up to World War Two.
Another important takeaway from the information posted here: It appears that Novichok was developed in Russia, but its chemical structure was leaked to the rest of the world over two decades ago. At this point, many governments around the world have had time to study the structure, and find the most efficient methods of producing it (or rather producing the binary precursors to it). Currently, it is no longer a secret Russian weapon, but more a Russian contribution to the types of weapons which are available. If Novichok has enough advantages over other agents, it is likely that all of NATO have created stockpiles of its precursors, or at least have the capacity to produce such stockpiles. It is even possible that some ex-Soviet satellite countries are capable of manufacturing it. At this point, the type of agent used is not a good way of identifying this as a Russian poison attack. If somebody was shot by an AK-47 (a military rifle invented in the USSR) would we have to assume that a Russian did the shooting? Not really.
Realistically, though, we DO have strong evidence to assume that the Russians did the poisoning here. Nobody else would have an incentive to attack this particular man. For the Russians, however, it would be an opportunity to make an example of a defector, and showcase their abilities to poison people stealthfully, and en masse if they wish. It is also a brazen move showing that the Russian government is willing to attack people within the boarders of other countries, and is not afraid of the repercussions. Britain and the US need to show Russia that we are not afraid either. "Hard-line" negotiations and the expulsions of diplomats are great, but they need to be backed up by preparations such as civil defense. Without these, we remain at the mercy of their army, nuclear arsenal which supposedly is being reduced, and poison gas arsenal which was supposedly non-existent.
"... . If Novichok has enough advantages over other agents, it is likely that all of NATO have created stockpiles of its precursors, or at least have the capacity to produce such stockpiles. ..."
Thanks for your comment, although I really don't see why it is "likely" that Porton Down has prepared stockpiles of Novichok, seeing that the UK Government has a history of using disarmament agreements as an excuse to cut research funding into weapons, even countermeasures, and that their budget was cut so much after the Cold War. The idea that all NATO countries have prepared Novichok stockpiles is, in view of history and the West's obsessive enforcement of chemical weapons convention laws (ignored by Putin with contempt), just totally deluded.
There was a period like this in the mid 1930s, when the Nazis propaganda official, Dr Goebbels, was trying to "ridicule" everyone (people like Winston Churchill) who were warning of secret German rearmament. They denounced the messengers as being warmongers, Jews, capitalists, anti-German racists, and so on, and they made up fake news about any slight defences in the West (like new fighter planes to defend against German bombers, and British gas masks to defend against gas attacks) being war preparations, instead of peaceful deterrence to try to avert war. Leaders like Chamberlain then went to meet Hitler and try to negotiate peace pledges for collaboration, to prevent a war. They proved to be delusions, but at the time these "peace makers" were given applause and positive media coverage, with newspapers hailing Chamberlain as as great peace maker. Because of the following WWII, that approach failed, and now we have to follow successful tactics, like those used by Reagan in helping to pave the way for a peaceful resolution to the Cold War. We need to negotiate from a position of strength, not rely on handshakes and doubletalk.
Nigel:
I think you should explain that not all British Labour Party members are racists who hate the Jews. Similarly, not all Nazi Party members hated the Jews. Some of them are just people who read newspapers like the Mirror and the Guardian, that censor the criticism of racists.
Thanks for pointing that out. However, this blog is about defensible facts relevant to national security and is not about speculations over why people do evil things.
I find every word supporting the deterrence of WWIII offensive. I find all criticism of racists in Corbyn's Labour Party fan base offensive. I read the Guardian and watch BBC news. I find it offensive that that people are being allowed to criticise anything that is wrong.
Please take down this post. Facts are dangerous to know. People would be better off living in ignorance.
Dear Alison:
If you find criticisms of your delusions offensive, then rest assured that I find your rudeness offensive too.
Please apologise to Ken Livingstone. Hitler protected his Jewish former commanding officer, Ernest Hess. This is in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, not the fascist Jew hating Observer, Guardian or Mirror, so it proves that Hitler was not a racist and therefore Ken isn't either:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-two/9379575/Adolf-Hitler-protected-his-Jewish-former-commanding-officer.html
By Matthew Day7:08PM BST 05 Jul 2012
Hitler made the dramatic intervention to protect Ernst Hess, his old company commander from the Flanders trenches of the First World War, who had risen to be a judge in post-war Germany.
In a letter from August 27, 1941 to the Dusseldorf Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, one of the architects of the Final Solution, instructed the secret police to grant Hess "the relief and the protection as per the Fuhrer's wishes".
Himmler also instructed all authorities that Hitler's old comrade in arms was not "to be in-opportuned in any way whatsoever".
The letter was unearthed in a Gestapo file on Hess by Susanne Mauss, editor of the newspaper Jewish Voice from Germany.
If Hitler had protected all Jews, not just his former commander under whom Hitler won the Iron Cross First Class in WWI, then your point would be valid and I'd certainly never have criticised Ken.
But the facts are very different. Hitler had good reason to defend the man under whom he had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class in WWI. So what? That doesn't defend Ken's abusive slurs which appear to me and many others as a typical piece of Marxist incitement of hatred.
Nigel,
If you google "effects of nuclear Weapons" this blog doesn't appear at all on the first page of results
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=effects+of+nuclear+weapons
Instead, it is CND stuff and a Daily Mail article about the lying NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein, historian of science at the American Institute of Physicswhich uses unobstructed desert terrain data from Glasstone's nuclear weapons, ignoring Glasstone's warning that in modern concrete buildings in Hiroshima the median lethal range was reduced from 1.3 miles in the open to 0.12 miles inside modern city buildings. CND uses the same type of lies, as did the Marxists.
The problem with critising Dr Alex Wellerstein is that he deletes fair and honest criticisms from his blog comments while responding to complaints about his unprofessional censorship by making untrue slurs about critics. This means he is leaving only a deceptive selection of comments on his blog, which probably misinformed the Daily Mail.
I'm not responsible for Google's search engine design.
I did write a post long ago exposing the dishonesty of Dr Alex Wellerstein and received one comment from him in response (the only comment he ever made on this blog), a begging request to remove the post (mixed with a lack of comprehension of what I had written), which I did because I was delighted that he had at least bothered to make some sort of response to criticism, and because I'm not here to engage in personal arguments, but to inform people of the facts.
The reality is that the sort of people who make up lies about the effects of nuclear weapons are beyond rational discussion. They're paranoid, thin skinned, abusive bigots who manipulate and issue personal abuse against anyone with a valid criticism.
I am just sick of "discussions" over factual matters with plainly nasty bigots, and liars. If he wants to correct his blog or his Nukemap program rather than just being like a lawyer and adding a disclaimer about "uncertainties" in the notes, then I'll praise that.
There are millions of deluded liars out there and the idea that you can convey useful information to the public by exposing their deceptions is plain wrong. They just turn it from a discussion of facts into a lot of lies about personality, the old ad hominem "trick".
However, I think we should make an exception of CND's Vice-President Jeremy Corbyn, who is openly racist, who invites known racist terrorists to tea in the House of Commons.
Even then, we must keep criticisms to the facts. I've never made any personal comments, but those with a hate agenda claim otherwise because they are unable or unwilling to listen to genuine criticisms, the correction of which might help to make the world a little safer.
Update/correction: I have the blog post and his response saved, and the actual issue was about Feynman, not me. Feynman was of Jewish ancestry and Dr Alex Wellerstein made an inaccurate and in my humble unprofessional (inaccurate, poorly researched) hate attack on Feynman. I submitted a polite comment to Dr Alex Wellerstein's Restricted Data blog, merely quoting Feynman correctly to set the record straight. Dr Alex Wellerstein deleted my comment, leaving his misleading claims standing, so I lost the work I had done in typing the quotation in. The next year later, I found that I had highlighted the section in pencil in a book by Feynman, and I then published a post about it on this blog, here, pointing out that censorship of this kind can lead to a culture of authoritarian fascism as occurred in the 1930s. A few minutes later, I received a comment from Dr Alex Wellerstein, a strange mixture of abuse and apology, so I deleted the post to pacify him (the issue about Feynman was actually about his work on nuclear weapons, not the effects of nuclear weapons, but it was the principle of the censorship which I had objected to). I care about trying to make the world a better place, and not upsetting people if at all possible.
Have you read Dinesh D'Souza, "The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left"? It exposes how communists obfuscate of the truth to the point of reversing everything. They are the racists, but they try to reflect back genuine criticisms on to the critics.
They interpret every fact using absurd conspiracy theories about Jewish capitalists. They assert false opinions about critics being racists. Marxist radicals, when questioned, just egotistically assert their contrived personal feelings are when put under pressure, e.g.
"When I hear people asking questions like that, what I comprehend is just how ignorant and racist those people are. I don't engage with that hatred,"
Said slowly, with long pauses between every other word (as Obama does), it wastes so much time that the TV producer has to move on to something else, and she gets away with it. Idiot viewers are just relieved when it moves on to something else less boring...
No, I haven't read that book. Arrogance is something that seems to be loved by the media nowadays. It has always been a problem. IRA terrorism sympathiser McDonnell, Corbyn's shadow chancellor, has surprised me by making an effort to appear really nice and endearing on TV. Hitler and Stalin were both reported to have a charming personal manner, however. I don't trust much to style or presentation (I was judged on my defective speech and hearing as a child), but on FACTS.
The left use moral relativism and claim that facts aren't substantial because they are always open to interpretation, immediately before hypocritically banning any interpretation other than their own flawed one. Truth is the free analysis of all the facts using the best interpretation, which can only be found by trying a very diverse array of alternative interpretations. That's the method I work on. Marxists are just intolerant, bigots.
It's the racists in the BBC, Guardian and Mirror who are causing this tragedy by refusing to report the facts that debunk Corbyn's lies about being the world's leading anti-racist and the world's greatest peace maker. His involvement with the IRA contributed to violence by backing the terrorist's cause, not opposing terrorism. His involvement with the IRA, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the USSR also backed terrorist causes, and in every single example, when peace has come it has been due to our brave soldiers disarming or beating the terrorists with force, not by having tea with them in the House of Commons or by attending their racist rallies.
Yep, the IRA peace agreement only resulted from brave British operations to disarm the terrorist IRA, the opposite of Corbyn's approach that failed, which was a repeat of Chamberlain's handshakes with Hitler applied to the IRA. In every case, Corbyn got it 100% wrong, but claimed he was the real deal. He is a nasty bigoted liar, like all members of CND. They're evil, they're issuing propaganda and fake news on weapons effects and civil defence like Richard Rhodes, and other American nukemap propaganda liars. They hate the truth and need to be exposed as evil, demented liars, who are nasty egotists, polluting popular culture with delusional manure for cash and acclaim from criminal minded thugs like terrorists.
Nigel B. Cook
Nigel, I think you are taking the wrong approach here. You cannot expect to overturn a corrupt regime from the inside. Reform doesn't occur by discussions within a dictatorship. There is only one mode of progress against an evil dictator, revolution, whether due to many "traitors" within the system, or external force. The concept of a single opponent infiltrating an evil regime to overthrow it using rational arguments is absurd. They just see you as a traitor or whatever, and give you abuse or throw you out of their system.
You cannot reform a dictatorially evil civil defense opposing and nuclear weapons effects lying cult by nice rational arguments, by definition. You simply have to abandon efforts to inform them, accept they're criminals, and launch a revolution that will but them on the defensive. Then, remember the motto of the successful revolutionary: take no prisoners. If they pretend, like Alex, that they are being nice, they're only covering their own dirty lying backs.
Always be abrasive to evil doers, being polite to them gives them the excuse to ignore you, to claim you are equivocal/confused or not truly committed to exposing and fighting evil lies that lead to massacres in Syria, Ukraine, etc.
Yes, but you and whose army? Chamberlain had, as chancellor (i.e. while in the Cabinet, prior to taking over from Baldwin who was the previous Nazi appeasing Prime Minister), limited defence spending to such low levels in 1936-8 that by the time he met Hitler three times in 1938, Britain had LOST the arms race and was STILL CONTINUING to KNOWINGLY rearm SLOWER than Hitler, thus WIDENING the gap and NOT "buying time through appeasement to rearm Britain" as he lying claimed afterwards (a lie repeated by left wing racists to this day, proving again the Nazi-Commie collaboration as it was from August 1939 to June 1941).
In other words, if you are going to be assertive, you have to be able to "take no prisoners", in the words of "Psychologist" above. Basically, corrupt bigoted racists are all powerful, which is why they are where they are.
People who think that if only the Jews had stood up to Hitler sooner, everything would have been rosy, are deluded. Like Corbyn, Hitler smugly manipulated all news of opposition to suit his own evil agenda of racism, e.g. using opposition as an excuse for further terror.
Thank you for the news cutting updates about the racism of the vice chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and current labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
What I find sickening most of all is that (ex-)Labour Peer Lord Alan Sugar is finally denouncing Corbyn using photoshopped tweets of Corbyn in a car beside Adolf Hitler.
That is so sick it's nauseating. If Lord Sugar feels Corbyn does not deserve support, he should use his power to do something useful to help humanity overcome this evil.
Corbyn's tactic of saying he is the world's greatest peacemaker and the world's greatest most committed anti-racist, while actually doing the complete opposite, is Hitler's and Dr Goebbel's propaganda method.
Hitler claimed he was a great guy to pacify critics into appeasement policies which led to war, because he was lying.
Stalin similarly used what George Orwell called "doublethink", e.g. reversing the meanings of words for propaganda purposes.
Peace is war, racism is anti-racism, etc. If Corbyn thinks the Jews are racists regarding Palestine, then Corbyn's "anti-racism" is actually racism.
The man is a propaganda spin doctor and a proved liar regarding his dismissal of civil defence to save lives in war zones across the world, as you have repeatedly exposed for many years on this blog.
Keep it up.
Thank you, I'll try my very best.
It is heartening that some in the media are starting to investigate this subject, and are not being fooled by the lies of Richard Rhodes and other fairy tale accounts of the Cold War any more.
Let's pray there is still time.
Corbyn invited hate preacher Raed Salah to tea at the House of Commons and Corbyn called him “a very honoured citizen”. Rael Salah had already been charged in Israel with inciting racist violence. That proves Corbyn is a racism.
Corbyn similarly met with Hamas whose charter is the terrorism and destruction of Jews. Likewise, Corbyn met with Hezbollah, another racist terrorist group.
He did nothing to oppose them, he encouraged them as he did the IRA, which he wanted to encourage to terrorise people in Northern Ireland.
Corbyn was provably paid £20,000 for similarly honouring Iran’s Press TV channel with an appearance, thus effectively backing a TV station that regularly hosts Holocaust deniers.
Corbyn defended the Rev Stephen Sizer who falsely circulated lies that the Jews of Israel caused 9/11.
Corbyn admitted being a troll who used Facebook for the harassment of Jews by his support of an absurdly antisemitic painting of Jews in a mural, but he claimed he didn't look closely at the racist painting before he defended it, an "excuse" that ignores the Legal precept that
"ignorantia neminem excusat" (ignorance is no excuse).
If he didn't have time to check the racist image he was endorsing, he shouldn't have done so.
Corbyn is a "man of principle" all right: he is a man of racist principle, a man of bigoted principle, a man of intolerant hatred principle, a man of evil principle. Supporters of his terrorism of Jews should be fined if there is not the prison space available for them.
4 April 2018: I just want to restate the key point in this blog post here in the comments section.
I agree 100% with Dr Alex Wellerstein (and Edward Teller) on the matter of government secrecy, which is a dictatorial threat to national security.
We need to abandon "diplomats" like Britain's bungling Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who makes ranting claims about Novichok WITHOUT PUBLISHING THE ACTUAL DATA HE HAS.
We need to publish all of the facts, just like Kennedy did with the "top secret" intelligence from U2 spy planes in the Cuban Missiles Crisis in October, 1962.
That is the only way to start any kind of dialogue with Russia to resolve this matter.
Keeping the facts secret was the stupid UK government policy on nuclear weapons effects and civil defence during the Cold War, which discredited both deterrence and live saving low cost countermeasures, because it allowed unopposed enemy communist propaganda (please see previous post on this blog for documentary evidence of this).
Similarly, secrecy on UK government Novichok nerve agent data is escalating a crisis.
Bloody well publish the evidence. Remember: Kennedy's decision led to the death of an American spy on 27 October 1962, U2 pilot Rudolf Anderson Jr. When a crisis is this bad, we have to risk some exposure of our intelligence gathering techniques, we cannot use official secrecy arguments to keep secret information which is so badly needed to settle this row for once and for all.
We must not publish a falsehood filled selective "dodgy dossier" like Tony Blair did to "justify" the 2002 Iraq War, but the full data we have. This country is supposed to be a free democracy, not a secretive manipulative dictatorial regime. We have spies to get information, and sometimes that data needs to be openly published, to defend freedom.
Porton is now reportedly denying Russia made Novichok, if the BBC is to be trusted.
Apparently, they don't want to Putin to test out all 12 warheads of his new Satan 2 missile on Porton anytime soon.
Can't blame them.
;-)
You have mistyped Raed Salah's name as Rael Salah. Please show this respect for racist friends of Corbyn. Then he might just spare your life when he is Prime Minister of the UK.
Is Corbyn going to attend a 4 hour satire of Islamic Arabs, to balance what he did to Jews?
Racism is hypocrisy, a bias in which "offense" is taken if one race is mocked but not another.
Put it like this. Trump is often rude by personality, regardless of gender or color. He is rude to women, he is rude to women, he is rude to blacks, whites, and every race. He is therefore not a sexist or racist, because he does not discriminate. He's just a tough leader.
But Jeremy Corbyn does discriminate. He is lovely to racists and has never provoked Muslims, but he hates Jews. That's the factor which counts. Racial discrimination, a terrible bias.
I think there is a lot of resentment about the need to help CND nuclear weapons effects lies predominate on the internet. But government policy is exaggerate the effects and ignore civil defense to cause fear, even if that means risking millions of lives. The politicians are not aware of lies. You should write a book exposing all of the deceptions in populist propaganda on the effects of nuclear weapons. A blog is too easy to ignore, like a person shouting out information for free on a roadside. 1.7 million views is not enough. Everyone needs to know the facts, and journalists want books, not blogs, as the basis for their articles on highly controversial subjects.
phd: I completed a book, "Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory" (which included test data to validate blast attenuation by damage done in a city, city skyline radiation screening including allowance for scattered radiation, etc.) in August 1990. No publisher wanted it, not because of technical details, but the whole subject of nuclear effects. They thought it was a subject only fit for official government publications, or that it would not sell enough to justify printing.
So, please, pay attention: the problem is that people like Carl Sagan and Richard Rhodes are effectively fiction writers, who have misled the public into fallacies, that can't be debunked because people aren't interested in the subject.
The situation was the same with gas and incendiary bomb firestorm fiction (lies) in the 1930s, which helped Corbyn (whoops I mean Hitler, sorry, typing error) start WWIII.
So you think that most people tend to prefer nuclear war to be a topic for popular fiction, not popular fact?
:-)
Oh, I see. Russia jointly invaded Poland with Nazis in September 1939, then Russia massacred tens of thousands of the Polish nationals for being alleged Jewish capitalists in the Polish army, and Russia invaded Finland.
But that lasted barely 2 years. In June 1941 after Hitler failed to destroy the RAF and invade Britain in Hitler's "Operation Sea Lion", he invaded Russia instead.
So you see, it was Britain which caused Russia to fight the Nazis. If Britain had been led by someone with the mindset of Corbyn, and done a "peace deal" with racists to avoid frightful war, then it would have been invaded and the Nazi troops would not have been available to invade Russia.
Therefore, Russia might have continued as a collaborator of the Nazis, and Britain might now be part of a Nazi-Russian empire, with Corbyn celebrating the end of the allegedly imperialist, capitalist Jews.
During the Cold War, leading anti-nuclear bigots who knew no facts about the real effects or capabilities of nuclear weapons for deterrence and the real data on survival in modern city buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and also the civil defence shelters in Hiroshima and Nagasaka and at nuclear weapon tests in the 1950s, such as "historians" like A. J. P. Taylor (a founder of anti-nuclear CND) manipulated an lied about the "arms race" causing WWI and WWII in order, deliberately, to try to abuse history for nuclear disarmament. A. J. P. Taylor is worth singling out for the newspaper articles, books, TV appearances, publicity drives, and moreover, for his teaching the current generation of historians (including Sir Martin Gilbert, et al.) at Oxford University.
These ignorant bigots abused history for an agenda of hatred towards the only proven credible deterrence of world war. They continue to do so, so hardly entrenched is the dogma in the books by people like Richard Rhodes. We've been trying on this blog to stem a tide of hatred, but it is very hard because so many evil dupes believe crap from nazis.
But surely WWI and WWII were caused by a nuclear arms race?
Surely the wars dragged on because Britain had so many arms at the beginning of the wars that it could not deter aggression?
Surely if Corbyn had been in charge, and had disarmed Britain of nuclear weapons in 1914 and 1939, war would have been avoided?
Disarm and no aggressor will think twice about invasion and massacre. So will then get peace. ("The peace of the dead", in the words of the title of Paul Mercer's great 1987 book.)
Please don't publish sarcasm like that, which will just be used by liars to claim that this blog allows "confusing" comments to be published.
I will not be allowing any more of that kind of humour, because it always backfires.
We're dealing with hardened, desperate, ranting dictators who will try any excuse to cause harm, to abuse the facts, and to ignore the truth.
Thank you.
Apologies
I've just seen this blog, and I am shocked by it. Your call to replace high yield countervalue warheads with 1 kiloton or subkiloton warheads on ICBMs to deter the aggressive invasions which actually start wars would end conventional wars and negate the basis of my job.
My job is based on trying to get rid of high yield warheads to end deterrence and return the world to the days of world wars, as in the examples you give of 1914 and 1939.
Your approach is to circumvent the entire mythology of the nuclear age by returning the the basic problem of deterring war in general, not just nuclear war.
I am also SHOCKED by your efforts to promote the facts about low cost civil defence to save lives in both conventional and nuclear wars, and also natural disasters where shelters are needed for survival.
You don't understand. The world has been fed the weapons effects myth of Richard Rhodes, A.J.P. Taylor, and other egotists for over a generation. They will never read or back your common sense call.
They will support the United Nations' efforts to keep killing innocent millions through propaganda.
This will keep me in my job, ensuring that suffering, violence, war, and terror continues.
Heil Hitler!
Not amusing, but I'll make an exception and publish that satire. No more, please.
Nigel:
We can all laugh at your idea to deter conventional war using credible nuclear deterrence, 1 kt or subkiloton warheads.
That was used to deter Russian invasions in the 1950s and 1960s, using a range of tactical kiloton yield warheads that would not cause any collateral damage to adjacent civilians.
For 600 m altitude 20 kt bursts like Hiroshima, the median survival range for people in the lower floors of modern concrete buildings is only 0.12 mile or so according to Glasstone, but soldiers on the move or in tanks would stopped due to being irradiated over a wider area because the protection in them is relatively poor. There is no local fallout of concern, as in Hiroshima which was not significantly contaminated.
After these warheads were removed in the 1970s due to Western Communist agitation by Brezhnev's liars called the "World Peace Council" (a USSR front, run by Moscow), Russia was able to invade Afghanistan in December 1979 with impunity. Then Reagan ordered the W79 neutron bomb, and a host of other weapons like Cruise Missiles sited in the UK, to deter further aggression.
Russia was morally defeated by this American build up, and warmonger Gorbachev was forced into concessions on human rights and properly inspected and verified arms control in 1987.
That's the real lesson of the Cold War. It was credible, tactical nuclear weapons that "did in" the USSR, not incredible countervalue strategic weapons. Deter invasions, and you get peace. Remove that deterrent, and you get war.
Yes. They deluded "arms control liars" pretend that tactical nuclear weapons "lower the nuclear threshold", whereas they actually increase it, because they deter the only proved route to nuclear warfare: conventional war!
It was conventional war in WWII that in August 1945 escalated into nuclear war (Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear strikes). Hence, deter conventional war with tactical nuclear weapons, and you won't get nuclear war.
This refutes the entire lying dogma of the Nazis who masquerade as "experts" on nuclear war.
Thank you Nigel.
What I most like about this blog is the lack of egotism, the fact that you put the facts and evidence first and don't try to hype your name or status with the blog.
This is so different to most of the ranting nonsense, which is just an attempt to get money by selling calendars with mushroom clouds or other gimmicks.
I also applaud the decision to call this blog after Glasstone, who was keen to deter war.
"Even though the concept of Democracy was beginning to catch on fire in Russia, nothing was fundamentally changing. I became involved with the Democratic Movement at my institute, and tried to persuade people to stop producing chemical agents, and I appealed to Moscow's Mayor Gravril Popov, but there were no results. Reluctantly at first, then more resolutely, I became a whistleblower. ... If I hadn't spoken up, who would have? Probably no one in the rest of the world would have known about Novichok.
"I appealed to the world community to pay attention to this problem in my first article published in the Moscow newspaper Kuranty in 1991, but there was no reaction. Then two more articles appeared in the September of 1992 issues of Moscow News and The Baltimore Sun, which resulted in my arrest for 'divulging state secrets'. This was the beginning of my persecution ... Despite my revelations and the ratification of the CWC [Chemical Weapons Convention] by Russia, the Novichok program was not put under international control and ... the binary components [which when mixed together produce the nerve agent] are not on the list of controlled compounds of CWC. This is very troubling because there are no guarantees that Russia isn't continuing such secret programs. These are all extremely compelling reasons for amending the CWC to include these chemicals, but nothing has been done about it. I am sure I am not the only person who has noticed that these loopholes that were written into the CWC could very well have been built in intentionally."
- Dr Vil Mirayanov, "State Secrets", 2008, introduction.
He had to publish that book himself, and it was ignored and still is ignored by the fanatical racists of CND, and the Nazi controlled "United Nations" in New York which has done NOTHING about the Syrian Civil War because of Russia's veto. It's the 1930s drivel organ, the effectively WWIII supporting "League of Nations", all over again!!!!
Books only sell if they're either by someone already famous with a huge fan base, or on a subject that there is mass interest in: all CND propaganda for over 50 years has deliberately put people off nuclear deterrence by deliberate fear provoking terrorist hysteria propaganda, JUST like Nazi propaganda in the 1930s on weapons and civil defence.
Overturning that is impossible without media cooperation, and most of them provably don't give a damn about saving lives with either nuclear deterrence that works, or even civil defence that works. What they do care about is their bank accounts; making a quick buck. Thus Richard Rhodes's quoting lies about people running away from Hiroshima without any feet, and ignoring all Glasstone's data on the facts about survival in modern buildings in Hiroshima. Lies sell, facts don't.
Thank you very much for your efforts to make the facts available against the racists and terrorists of CND, and the fanatical liars who know nothing but how to perpetuate evil and terror to line their own pockets.
Richard Rhodes put quotation marks around the report of someone running away with feet after Hiroshima, so that proves it either: (a) must be true, or (b) Rhodes isn't responsible it it is a lie.
I'd draw attention to Figure 1 in my extracts here (the data in which is the basis for Glasstone's data on survival in different situations in Hiroshima):
https://nige.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/dirkwood-report-summary6.pdf
"This data is vital for civil defense but is not being applied to the analysis of casualty rates from nuclear explosions for civil defense, since propaganda from America and Japan instead presents an “average” casualty curve, which covers up and obfuscates the differences in survival rates in different situations. In particular, the curves above disprove the “uniformly lethal firestorm” myth. Blast survivors were not all killed in the firestorm".
Rhodes ignores Glasstone's data and its implications. That's one problem. Another is that he cites and produces reprints of the destroyed areas in the SECRET (full) version of the US Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima, but failed to point out that it makes it very clear that fire damage areas in Hiroshima are fake for modern cities:
"Figure 2: The U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey classified its detailed reports 92 and 93 on the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki “Secret”, and instead published an obfuscating summary report which omits the evidence that the firestorm in Hiroshima was due to the overturning of charcoal cooking braziers in bamboo and paper screen filled wooden houses, not thermal radiation. This caused anti-civil defense propaganda to falsely associate the firestorm radius to the thermal radiation exposure at that radius, instead of correctly associating it to the blast effect in overturning obsolete charcoal braziers. Report 92 on Hiroshima actually states (pages 4-6, May 1947): “Six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet [975 m] of air zero [i.e., (975^2
- 600^2)^{1/2} = 770 m ground range] stated that black cotton black-out curtains were
ignited by flash heat... A large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was, however, in agreement that a great majority of the original fires were started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires....”
The unclassified 1957 U. S. Department of Defense book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons obfuscated this evidence, vaguely stating on pages 322-3: “Definite evidence was obtained from Japanese observers that the thermal radiation caused thin, dark cotton cloth, such as the black-out curtains that were in common use during the war, thin paper, and dry, rotted wood to catch fire at distances up to 3,500 feet (0.66 mile) from ground zero (about 35 calories per square centimetre).” Thus, black coloured curtails [wartime blackout curtains to stop bombers seeing lights from homes in cities for use as bomb targets], thin paper and dry, rotted wood, needed 35 cal/cm2 to ignite in the coastal cities of Japan during August when there was high humidity. White curtains, which are more common now that air raid precautions no longer demand black window curtains, require much higher thermal exposures for ignition than black curtains."
- https://nige.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/dirkwood-report-summary6.pdf
I've also put the photocopy PDF's of the relevant extracts from the secret Hiroshima report on internet archive here to prove all this, years ago (it's still ignored by CND liars):
https://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima
Cheers.
I hadn't seen that report. You should link to it in your debunking of Russian / CND lies about neutron bomb at https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/samuel-glasstone-and-philip-j-dolan.html
http://theconversation.com/the-understandable-fear-of-nuclear-weapons-doesnt-match-reality-73563
The understandable fear of nuclear weapons doesn’t match reality
March 14, 2017 10.48am GMT •Updated March 14, 2017 1.23pm GMT
Mattias Eken
PhD Candidate in Modern History, University of St Andrews
"... In his 2013 book Command and Control, the author Eric Schlosser tried to scare us into perpetual fear of nuclear weapons by recounting stories of near misses and accidents involving nuclear weapons. One such event, the 1980 Damascus incident, saw a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile explode at its remote Arkansas launch facility after a maintenance crew accidentally ruptured its fuel tank. Although the warhead involved in the incident didn’t detonate, Schlosser claims that “if it had, much of Arkansas would be gone”.
"But that’s not quite the case. The nine-megaton thermonuclear warhead on the Titan II missile had a blast radius of 10km, or an area of about 315km². The state of Arkansas spreads over 133,733km², meaning the weapon would have caused destruction across 0.2% of the state. That would naturally have been a terrible outcome, but certainly not the catastrophe that Schlosser evokes.
"Overdoing it
"Claims exaggerating the effects of nuclear weapons have become commonplace, especially after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. In the early War on Terror years, Richard Lugar, a former US senator and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, argued that terrorists armed with nuclear weapons pose an existential threat to the Western way of life. What he failed to explain is how.
"It is by no means certain that a single nuclear detonation (or even several) would do away with our current way of life. Indeed, we’re still here despite having nuked our own planet more than 2,000 times – a tally expressed beautifully in this video by Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto)."
My problems with the 2013 book Command and Control, by the author Eric Schlosser, is quite different to Eken's: the X-unit capacitor banks need charging up from the batteries in a nuclear weapon tens of seconds prior to detonation to provide the short duration huge current required for accurate, simultaneous detonation. You can fire electrical detonators with much lower currents without prior charging, but then they take longer to fire and go off randomly in time over a long period of milliseconds or more, hence you get no nuclear yield (a 1-point detonation of the implosion system). Then nuclear weapons need precise pulses at precise times (aside from the charging of x-unit capacitors in advance): the neutron generator has to fire its pulse at at a given number of nanoseconds after the electrical firing system has started the implosion. This is because the compressed core doesn't remain compressed, but immediately starts to rebound outwards after the shock reaches the middle and reflects back outwards. Eric Schlosser doesn't know the basics and his book contains misleading, emotional quotes from declassified documents that don't contain the key facts. It's so easy to tell the truth, but it won't sell. You have to lie to sell books on this subject. That's why liars like Rhodes and Schlosser get away with it. Their fans then believe the lies. It's a bit like superstitions in religion: loads of people like to believe it is moral to believe in things which don't have solid evidence.
Thanks, but that article ends with:
"Of course, if the effects of nuclear weapons have been greatly exaggerated, there is a very good reason: since these weapons are indeed extremely dangerous, any posturing and exaggerating which intensifies our fear of them makes us less likely to use them. But it’s important, however, to understand why people have come to fear these weapons the way we do.
"After all, nuclear weapons are here to stay; they can’t be “un-invented”. If we want to live with them and mitigate the very real risks they pose, we must be honest about what those risks really are. Overegging them to frighten ourselves more than we need to keeps nobody safe."
- http://theconversation.com/the-understandable-fear-of-nuclear-weapons-doesnt-match-reality-73563
I don't believe that the author of this article comprehends the immense efforts using immense financial resources which have been made by "professional" abusive, nasty liars in the Marxist movement and the Kremlin, not to mention fellow travellers in bullshit academia, a front for pseudo-science. The British and French racist pseudo-scientific eugenicists from Darwin's relative Sir Francis Galton to French Medical Laureate Dr Alexis Carrell who laid the foundations for the Holocaust got away scot free with mass murder, none were hanged after WWII. Similarly, the nuclear weapons effects exaggeration and civil defence "ridicule" liars have managed to murder maybe 100,000,000 people if you add up the deaths they have caused since then. The ploy of CND to exaggerate nuclear effects came originally from secretive government bureaucrats who couldn't or wouldn't publish all the evidence the public needed on nuclear effects and civil defence effectiveness against countermeasures, when it was needed (when the story was fresh in the news):
https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/racist-mass-murdering-fascists-of.html
Bob Darke, Hackney Council Communist Party Councillor, "The Communist Technique in Britain", Penguin Books Special S160, 1952, pages 146-7:
"The Communist Peace Campaign was under way ... Out of the great confusion, the fear and the bewilderment of the post-war world, the Party picked the blackest and most terrifying spectacle of all - the Atomic Bomb. At all peace activities, all meetings, all demonstrations, we were instructed to display large posters declaring 'Ban the Atom Bomb!' ... The pamphlet's subject-material consisted of ... the effects of atomic warfare: the blinding, the maiming, and killing. [Not mentioning the deterrence of world war and the deterrence of effective, concentrated invasion forces that set off wars such as the invasion of Belgium 1914, Poland 1939, Afghanistan 1979, or Kuwait 1990.] ... The non-Party press helped us unwittingly by publishing large maps showing the extent of damage which would occur if an atom bomb fell in the centre of London. There was great jubilation in the Party when we discussed the propaganda value of these maps to our Peace Campaign. ... the Peace Campaign sprang less from a people's spontaneous and natural desire than from the direct decision of the Soviet-controlled Coninform. Every Communist fellow-traveller ... clergymen, artists, actors - all were now canvassed. ... We were instructed to infiltrate innocent peace movements and swing them into line behind us [for evidence of this communist fascism running CND, see link at https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/racist-mass-murdering-fascists-of.html to https://archive.org/stream/UKCivilDefenceCorpsScientificBasis/UK%20Civil%20Defence%20Corps%20scientific%20basis#page/n287/mode/2up and similar stuff on Internet Archive, which disproves CND rants, which are just Kremlin shit]."
What I find it so scary that during the previous Cold War, Russian spies headed by Boris Ponomarev (who was on the Politburo see https://archive.org/stream/UKCivilDefenceCorpsScientificBasis/UK%20Civil%20Defence%20Corps%20scientific%20basis#page/n289/mode/2up ) sent propaganda lies direct to UK schools to instruct Marxist NUTs (National Union of Teachers militants) to indoctrinate kids on propaganda, and this ended up biasing nuclear weapons understanding in Western society. What evil scum.
There were newspaper disclosures of what was going on, please see:
https://archive.org/stream/UKCivilDefenceCorpsScientificBasis/UK%20Civil%20Defence%20Corps%20scientific%20basis#page/n291/mode/2up
But left wing media ignored such evidence (they still do today) and circulated unsubstantiated and lying propaganda.
Wow. Thanks for those very useful references for my college thesis.
Hi Nige. Can I ask you why you are running this blog? It's the human interest story that sells news, not the statistics or other data.
I see you have provided some new American government research on how urban city skylines attenuate blast, thermal radiation and nuclear radiation here: https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/secret-british-wwii-data-dr-d-g.html
Why don't they run their models for Hiroshima and Nagasaki and publish the results to debunk anti-nuclear "Nukemap" lying propaganda?
Are they part of the plot to insult everybody's intelligence?
The Lord Penney, DEJ Samuels and GC Scorgie paper proving the cumulative blast reduction by the city skyline in Hiroshima, "The nuclear explosive yields at Hiroshima and Nagasaki", Phil. Transactions of the Royal Society of London, v266, pp357-424 states clearly on page 417 that fall in apparent nuclear yield deduced from reliable (e.g. bent steel pole of lab measured characteristics; Penney of course spent £450 in excess baggage in 1945 taking all the key evidence from Japan back to London for full lab analysis) blast gauges proved blast pressure reduction with distance, invalidating Glasstone and Dolan's curves for bare desert:
"... the mechanical damage done by the blast and the scattering of the blast by buildings [i.e. diffraction, which reduces pressure, contrary to some statements by Glasstone and Dolan, which is why sound doesn't travel as far in a dense city as over bare ground and visibility is reduced by skyline obstruction due to buildings] in the two cities must to some extent have reduced the blast waves as the waves spread."
The next page quantifies this effect of blast reduction in Table 8 for Hiroshima, where for example at 5700 feet from ground zero in Hiroshima the 4 gallon petrol cans proved that the:
"peak overpressure was down by about half ... clear evidence that the blast was less than it would have been from an explosion over an open site."
On page 419, Table 9 for Nagasaki shows the same blast reduction due to damage done, where the 4 gallon petrol cans at 6400 feet from ground zero in Nagasaki proved that the:
"peak overpressure down by about half ... clear evidence of the reduction of blast by the damage caused and by scattering."
The same Table 9 for Nagasaki also deduces from 4 gallon petrol cans at 7600 ft from GZ:
"overpressure not much over 1 psi ... clear evidence of reduction of blast."
https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/deja-vu-review-of-dr-bridgmans.html
The amount of energy needed to knock any house down is pretty easy to find out from the work equation.
Typical data for such calculations is in a 2001 DTRA book by Bridgman, "Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects":
He considers a building with an exposed area of 163 square metres, a mass of 455 tons and natural frequency of 5 oscillations per second, and finds that a peak overpressure of 10 psi (69 kPa) and peak dynamic pressure of 2.2 psi (15 kPa) at 4.36 km ground range from a 1 Mt air burst detonated at 2.29 km altitude, with overpressure and dynamic pressure positive durations of 2.6 and 3.6 seconds, respectively, produces a peak deflection of 19 cm in the building about 0.6 second after shock arrival. The peak deflection is computed from Bridgman's formula on p. 304: deflection at time t,
xt = [A/(fM)]{integral symbol}[sin(ft)](Pt + CDqt)dt metres,
where A is the cross-sectional face-on area of the building facing to the blast (e.g., 163 square metres), f is the natural frequency of oscillation of the building (e.g., 5 Hz), M is the mass of the building, Pt is the overpressure at time t, CD is the drag coefficient of the building to wind pressure (CD = 1.2 for a rectangular building), and qt is the dynamic pressure at time t. (There is a related calculation of the peak deflection of a structure on pages 250-284 of the 1957 edition of the Effects of Nuclear Weapons.) Bridgman points out that this equation ignores:
(1) the fact that the net force from the overpressure suddenly ends once the shock front has engulfed the building and is pressing on the rear side with a similar pressure to that that on the front side, and
(2) the end of the building oscillations due to energy loss from causing damage or destruction of the walls and other components of the building.
The effect of these limitations can easily be incorporated into the model by (1) calculating the time taken for the shock front to transverse the length of the building, and (2) using nuclear test data to indicate the peak pressure associated with a given degree of damage or destruction (this allows the amount of deflection of walls to be correlated to the probability that the wall fails).
This 19 cm computed maximum deflection allows us to estimate how much energy is permanently and irreversibly absorbed from the blast wave by a building and transformed into slow-moving (relative to the shock front) debris which falls to the ground and is quickly stopped after the blast has passed it by: E = Fx, where F is force (i.e., product of total pressure and area) and x is distance moved in direction of force due to the applied force from the blast wave. If the average pressure for the first 0.5 second is equal to 12 psi (83 kPa) then the average force on the building during this time is 13 million Newtons, and the energy absorbed is:
E = Fx = 13,000,000*0.19 = 2.6 MJ.
For a table and a graph plot of Penney's data on the effect of such energy absorption in Hiroshima, see https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/samuel-glasstone-and-philip-j-dolan.html (section entitled "CUMULATIVE BLAST WAVE PRESSURE REDUCTION BY DAMAGE CAUSED"):
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_8adFNycaanI/Sgr2AKtEmaI/AAAAAAAAAzA/JhHuT3sIaNg/s1600-h/table1.JPG
and
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8adFNycaanI/S025Wc2ZM-I/AAAAAAAABVg/EUa9xkvpWVQ/s1600-h/attenuation.JPG
which gives an empirical equation showing that the peak overpressure in Hiroshima was reduced by the factor exp(-R/3.25) where R is distance from ground zero in kilometres.
This shielding of the blast wave effect gets progressively more important for higher yields and for cities with denser, taller, stronger buildings which can absorb more energy in being pushed into vibrations.
It is insignificant, of course, for the kind of lightweight desktop model buildings that some people used, to try to debunk the fact that oscillating a skyscraper takes up energy!
"empirical equation showing that the peak overpressure in Hiroshima was reduced by the factor exp(-R/3.25) where R is distance from ground zero in kilometres."
That would be very important for damage from a megaton bomb on a large city, because the distances are larger than in Hiroshima. Presumably the the factor of 1/3.25 in the equation would scale in direct proportion to the average mass of the city building (a lot more in a modern steel and concrete skyscraper city, than in the wood frame houses that covered most of Hiroshima) and also in proportion to the area of the ground covered with buildings. (Which is well known for August 1945 Hiroshima, since the US Strategic Bombing Survey published a colour map in its Secret report https://archive.org/details/TheEffectsOfTheAtomicBombOnHiroshima ).
hat I want to know is, does this exponential factor also depend on weapon yield or is independent of yield like the shielding of neutrons or thermal radiation effects?
I keep hearing stone-walling type objections about yield effects in blast attenuation by damage done as the blast spreads out over a city.
The first thing to remember is to look at the damage actually done by a given pressure level in say 20 kt and 10 Mt. There is test data from Nevada, Maralinga and from Pacific high yield shots at Mike, Castle, and Redwing shots for this on different structures, test shelters, etc.
We know how the pressure needed to inflict a certain amount of damage depends on blast duration. If the peak pressure is below that needed for damage, however, no damage occurs regardless of how long the blast wave lasts.
So there is a low pressure threshold that is fixed, and impulse is not a valid criteria for damage at high yields for peak pressures below that needed for damage. It is totally false.
Contrary to universal use of W^{0.4} scaling for drag sensitive targets in the over simplified damage-distance nonographs in the 1962-77 editions of Glasstone and Dolan, the correct damage-distance scaling law is the W^{1/3} for very high yields because the blast duration effect becomes less and less important at high yields, where the blast duration is so long that only the peak pressure is important for determining damage.
Contrary to the impression given in "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons", the real data (tabulated in an Appendix of DNA-EM-1 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, 1972) shows that pressures for damage become independent of yield for very high yields. Only at low yields is there a significant dependency. Thus, thresholds for damage are determined by blast impulse criteria for low yields, but by peak pressure criteria for very high yields (the opposite of the oversimplified claim made by Glasstone).
However, at high pressures where buildings fail, the debris will be accelerated by blast winds during the time those winds last, and this absorbs energy. So moving objects that absorb blast energy like the flying debris will pick up more energy from the blast at high yields, because the blast duration scales as W^{1/3}. Detailed calculations are needed to study this.
On 6 April 2018, Salisbury District Hospital reported that both Sergei Skripal and his daughter are recovering and might therefore be able to provide testimony in court if the police and crown prosecution service decide to take legal action over the assassination attempt, although if Putin is personally charged he may refuse to attend a charge of attempted murder. So justice may yet be done, at least on paper. A public inquiry might be preferable, as was the case over Putin's London assassination of Litvinenko in 2006 using Russian Po-210.
The objection about yield effects and attenuation is separate from the one about the change in overpressure needed to cause damage. For attenuation, it is based on the assumption that buildings absorb a certain amount of energy for a given overpressure, regardless of duration. If a building with a surface area of 163 square meters facing the blast absorbs 2.6 MJ at 10 psi regardless of duration, then that energy loss will have a greater effect at low yield then high yield. A 10 psi blast wave from a megaton yield will have longer duration, and more energy available per unit of area, then a kiloton yield. It would seem that the attenuation would be less for the lower yield, based only on the energy used to deflect the building.
However, if you include the energy used to accelerate debris produced at higher pressures, then any building that gets seriously will absorb more energy from the longer duration blast wave, and thus attenuate it just as much as the short duration one.
Perhaps more importantly, a building (or tree, or hill) will reduce blast effects not only by deforming mechanically, but also by generating air friction, and directing the blast upward. Even if you had an object which hardly moved or deformed at all on exposure to the blast, it would still cause a drastic reduction in overpressure and especially dynamic pressure. This effect can be seen in day-to-day life, with wind. When a wind picks up, it deforms trees (and to a lesser extent buildings), giving up some of its kinetic energy, and giving the trees potential energy. As the wind continues, the trees stop bending (this is assuming a wind too weak to actually break or topple them) and they stop absorbing energy. The wind can blow all day, without them bending any more then they did initially.
However, if you walk between the trees or buildings, you will still feel less wind than if you were on an open plain in the same weather. The objects are not absorbing energy themselves, but rather deflecting it a dissipating it. The same thing happens with a blast wind. It is possible to exert a hydrostatic pressure on a rigid stationary object (e.g. inside a sealed tank of compressed air) without expending energy, but you cannot exert a dynamic pressure on an object without dissipating energy in the form of waste heat and turbulence. Even if a building were perfectly rigid and immovable (a physical impossibility), it would still lead to a loss of energy which is not seen over an open desert or ocean.
Thanks, that's a good point.
"If a building with a surface area of 163 square meters facing the blast absorbs 2.6 MJ at 10 psi regardless of duration, then that energy loss will have a greater effect at low yield then high yield."
But the amount of energy absorbed for 10psi peak overpressure is not fixed at 2.6MJ irrespective of blast duration. The equation I used from page 304 of the 2001 edition of Dr Bridgman's excellent "Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects" (DTRA) to calculate the peak displacement of the centre of mass of a building by blast does include the blast duration, because Bridgman uses the force (pressure times area) integrated over the duration of the blast wave. The energy absorbed, E = xF, is proportional to this maximum displacement, x, in the direction of the force.
Therefore, at higher weapon yields with longer duration blast, the building will suffer larger oscillations, thereby soaking up more blast energy.
Hence, as a first approximation, you'd expect the percentage of energy absorbed from each square metre of the surface of the incident shock front by a building to be unaffected by yield, so that pushing up the yield (and blast duration) at a fixed overpressure will simply mean that buildings sway more violently, absorbing more energy in absolute terms, but a similar percentage of the blast.
If so, then the simple exponential attenuation of blast over a city which Bill Penney deduced at Hiroshima, exp(-R/3.25 kilometres) can be easily extrapolated to modern cities. Just scale the exponent factor 1/3.25 in proportion to the average mass and the average height of the buildings in the city, and also in proportion to the average building density (for Hiroshima this was determined from aerial photographs of the target taken before detonation to be 5,400 buildings per square kilometre). Hence, it is easy to estimate.
The objection about using cube root scaling is different. In most cases, if it takes say 10 psi to break a wall at 20 kt, it will still not break from anything less at higher yields. Whether it is 20 kt, or 20 Mt, the blast loading must exceed a certain value to overcome the mechanical strength of the wall. This is true to some degree even for targets commonly called "impulse sensitive." If these targets did not have some minimum value of loading to cause damage, they would fall down from gravity, or gentle but sustained winds. That doesn't happen.
Duration matters more at yields below a certain threshold, which depends on the target structure. A weak wall which needs a minimum of 10 psi to break for kiloton yields may stand up to well over 20 psi from a ton or (especially) kilogram yield, without any cracking or permanent deflection. Even when a blast wave more than strong enough to destroy an object strikes it (e.g. 20 psi striking a window face-on), it does not instantly break apart. First, the target experiences elastic deformation. The deformation does not happen instantly, because material with inertia has to be moved. If the blast wave is strong enough, AND lasts long enough, it will eventually distort the target to the point that it suffers some kind of damage, like fracturing or plastic deformation. This is as true of a human chest cavity as it is of a window, or a wall, or a tree. You can prove that window glass has elasticity (and thus a finite response time to blast) by looking at a reflection in a window and pushing on it. Even a slight force in the middle of the glass pane will change it into a slightly concave reflector, and distort the reflection. For most "duration insensitive" targets, this effect only comes into play at subkiloton or ton yields. Thus, a house which collapses at 11 psi for 1, 100, or 10000 kt might not collapse until 30 psi from 1 ton of HE.
At even lower yields, another effect comes into play. A house (or whatever target) that collapses at 30 psi from 1 ton will probably collapse due to walls separating at the foundation, or dishing in and breaking up due to excessive flexing. These are all effects which involve the force on the wall as a whole. With a smaller yield (eg. a 3.7 kg cannon shell) the parts of the wall further away from the shell will be exposed to much less overpressure. Now, the force (in the part closest to the shell) has to be enough not only to make the wall fail where loads are concentrated, but to crush the actual material on a small scale. It will take a much greater pressure (force per unit area) to punch a localized hole in a wall then to knock the entire thing over with diffused force. Again, this can be proven easily. A a few kg of force per square centimeter of your fingertip will do no harm to the outside of a door, or a wood frame or cinderblock building. But the same force density, applied to an entire wall by, would cause some real damage.
None of this really matters when comparing data from Hiroshima with a strategic warhead, or even with collateral damage from an enhanced radiation warhead. Hpwever, it all makes a tremendous difference when comparing these kiloton bursts with normal HE bursts measured in kilograms!
Thanks. Just to clarify, I do believe that a simple exponential attenuation law such as Penney found when he visited Hiroshima in October 1945 and measured the effects on 4 gallon petrol tins, blast distorted steel poles, etc., is valid for useful quick calculations of average blast pressures in cities with different types and densities of building.
The best way to explain the yield effect is by analogy to radiation shielding. If you have an exponential or other shielding law (e.g. one with a build up factor for scattered rays), the is not significantly affected by the intensity or the duration of the radiation.
Practically the same percentage of energy is absorbed, regardless of how long the radiation lasts, an regardless of the intensity. (There is strictly speaking, a very small effect due to radiation modifying the shield, e.g. if the radiation is neutrons, then the cumulative absorption of neutrons by the shield material will increase the mass of the shield slightly, giving better shielding! But this is trivial for practical purposes.)
What happens when the duration of the radiation pulse is increased (or intensity is increased) is that the shielding material absorbs more energy, but the fraction or percentage of radiation absorbed by a shield is (for practical purposes) independent of the duration or intensity.
What I'm saying is that there is a simple physical analogy between the oscillation of electrons or nuclei by the energy absorbed from a radiation beam, an the oscillation of buildings by energy absorbed from a blast wave. (Hence Penney's data from Hiroshima which gives a simple exponential formula for energy attenuation with distance in a city.)
I agree. At higher yields, buildings absorb more energy (and more importantly dissipate and deflect it without absorbing it) so the degree of attenuation per kilometer should stay the same. Of course, since a higher yield weapon (in an open area like NTS/PPG tests) will supposedly produce a given overpressure at a longer distance, any given overpressure will be reduced more for a higher yield, because the shock front will have traveled further and been attenuated by more buildings. It's a bit like the difference between initial (or thermal) radiation of a 1 kt burst at 300m vs a 100kt burst at 3km, or a 10Mt burst at 30 km. The increased thickness allows the air to attenuate it more!
The issue with inertially and elastically delayed response to blast loading, and the increased resistance of structures to highly localized loads, is important for other reasons. Cube root scaling says that a 100 kg yield should have 10% of the blast radius on any given target as a 100 tonne yield, and as such should do 1% as much damage. However, for the reasons outlined in a previous comment, the peak overpressure required to damage most buildings will be higher for the 100 kg yield. As such, it will do less than 1% as much damage.
To clarify, this effect is not very important for say, a house or human body, if the yield is over a few kt. On the other hand, it is vital to understand these effects if you are to compare damage and casualties from nuclear warfare with damage from enormous numbers of small blasts, like the numerous conventional bombings of world war 2, the Vietnam war, etc.
Regarding humans, research by UK in WWII using 1 kg TNT conventional weapons on animals and scaling to 70 kg human body mass gave over 200 psi as the lethal peak overpressure for lung rupture, due to air locks stopping blood flow in arteries (bubbles of air being forced into the blood stream). American nuclear tests with animals in trenches at Nevada showed that for kiloton TNT yields, only about 60 psi was needed for the same effect (at higher yields it remains about 60 psi). So there is an blast duration effect on primary blast injury, too.
What was interesting is that, once you screen out the radiation and flying debris/dust (easily done with a few feet of dirt, which in a crisis means that bulldozers and backhoe diggers can very quickly make useful shelters), people can survive close to the crater lip. The UK nuclear tests in the 1950s developed an entrance design to add to the WWII Anderson shelter that would shield scattered nuclear radiation from getting in through the entrance.
It was only finally published in the 1982 UK government book "Domestic nuclear shelters - technical guidance", but as usual they didn't include any of the impressive secret UK nuclear test reports on proof-testing shelters, so it didn't kill off civil defence haters.
I find it curious that the history of the August 1939 - June 1941 Nazi-Russian collaboration, which included as you say the Katryn Forest Massacre by the Russia, the savage invasion of Finland by Russia, and the Russian invasion of Poland in September 1939 in collaboration with the Nazis, is omitted or suppressed in Western history books, NOT just Stalin's textbooks!
Churchill is partly responsible for his balmy drunken pro-Stalin propaganda speeches, his suppression of criticisms of Russia for its 1939-41 atrocities and Nazi collaboration, and its largely successful efforts to dupe Roosevelt into believing that love would win over Stalin!
If you look up the August 1939 - June 1941 Russian-Nazi extermination of Jews in British college history textbooks written by authors who are clearly biased towards Marxism (e.g. when you look at what they write of the Cold War and nuclear deterrence), you find references to the efforts of Stalin to make a pact with the UK before WWII.
The UK didn't like the news of Stalin's 1930s purges and declined to make a pact with the devil, so then Stalin turned to Hitler and made a pact with Hitler: just as Britain's Chamberlain had done when visiting Hitler in September 1939, the "famous piece of paper" bearing the signatures of Hitler and Chamberlain, and promising jaw, jaw, not war, war.
However, this is fake news, or fake history, of the Orwellian liars sort, because there was a secret WAR collaboration annex in the Nazi-Russian August 1939 "peace" pact. Now, as people who disagree with Marxism bias in history try to argue, this was the spark for WWII. It was Stalin's secret decision to agree to jointly invade Poland during September of 1939 which FORCED HITLER to ignore Chamberlain's ultimatum to him to stop his invasion.
Hitler was secretly committed under the terms of the secret annex to the August 1939 pact with Stalin to invade Poland. Thus, Russia sparked off WWII. If Russia hadn't reached a joint commitment in August 1939 to jointly invade Poland with the Nazis, the British ultimatum to Germany about its invasion of Poland might have been replied to, saving lives.
If anyone wants to make controversial historical or technical comments, they are welcome to do so here, but please give a name, and some bona fide url.
I'm getting too many anonymous comments with content that takes up my time to verify, and I am busy like everybody else.
Thanks.
Nigel,
I´d advise you to delete this blog before Jeremy Corbyn is elected Prime Minister and implements his new "doublethink" policy: "tolerance means taking offense at the truth".
Or: "bigotry is tolerance".
Or: "moral relativism means that 2+2 = 5 is just as valid as 2+2 = 4".
Or: "class war is peace".
Or: "religious war is peace".
Or: "gender war is peace".
Or: "one sided nuclear & novichok chemical war (by Russia) is peace because it kills off the cause of progress, capitalism".
Or: "race war rioting is peace because it divides the country under the Tories, thereby allowing Marxists into power due to their peace propaganda spin machine".
Or: "hell is heaven, because by destroying capitalism using appeasement of Stalinist dictators, they use secret pólice to get rid of individualism, free criticisms of bigoted authorities, innovators, real debate, and real progress."
Nigel,
I´d advise you to delete this blog before Jeremy Corbyn is elected Prime Minister and implements his new "doublethink" policy: "tolerance means taking offense at the truth".
Or: "bigotry is tolerance".
Or: "moral relativism means that 2+2 = 5 is just as valid as 2+2 = 4".
Or: "class war is peace".
Or: "religious war is peace".
Or: "gender war is peace".
Or: "one sided nuclear & novichok chemical war (by Russia) is peace because it kills off the cause of progress, capitalism".
Or: "race war rioting is peace because it divides the country under the Tories, thereby allowing Marxists into power due to their peace propaganda spin machine".
Or: "hell is heaven, because by destroying capitalism using appeasement of Stalinist dictators, they use secret pólice to get rid of individualism, free criticisms of bigoted authorities, innovators, real debate, and real progress."
Nige, I recall that you often compare the numerous small conventional explosives used in WW2 to an equivalent megatonnage using an exponent of 2/3 for area damage. Mathematically it makes sense and always seemed true to me, however; the conversation you had above on smaller yields requiring higher peak over-pressures than at high yield seems to that discredit that scaling. Can you still compare conventional bombs to large yield nuclear bombs in that manner (using the yield to the power of 2/3)? What is the correct way of scaling numerous, say, 500 kg bombs to kiloton plus nuclear bombs? Thanks!
Please see the empirical data plotted on a graph in the post https://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/russian-anti-terrorism-policing-world.html which also gives a detailed comparison for examples of conventional to nuclear wars. E.g. the 170 million conventional shells fired at German trenches by the British Army in WWI were equivalent in damage to 408 separate 1 megaton nuclear weapons, while the damage from ~8 Mt of conventional bombs dropped on Vietnam in the 1960s was equivalent to 766 one megaton bombs.
https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-346jad4JH-w/Ui2Gpbk98LI/AAAAAAAADnM/kcZo1Igsk40/s1600/mortality+vs+explosive+energy+yield.JPG
Although longer blast duration blows debris further, at higher yields over a city you get more blast energy absorption by more buildings on a given radial line, for a fixed overpressure. Therefore, the two yield modifying effects work in opposite directions. In addition, the longer blast arrival times for a given overpressure at higher yields means more time for duck and cover to reduce casualties (e.g. 1 psi peak overpressure may arrive at 0.4 second after burst for 1 ton of TNT, 4 seconds for 1 kiloton, and 40 seconds for 1 megaton).
Given simple civil defense shelters like indoor table shelters or outdoor earth-covered trenches, the thermal and blast effects tend to become less effective at causing casualties than initial nuclear radiation, which scales more slowly than 1/3 power of yield. It doesn't scale accurately as a power yield because it is a complicated function of radiation spreading, fireball expansion and rise, radiation attenuation by air and blast suction phase hydrodynamic enhancement effects, but it is maybe equivalent over 1 kt - 1 mt to something like 1/6 or 1/5 power of yield, depending on the dose range being considered. Therefore, for initial nuclear radiation effects where people have good cheap WWII type shelters, the scaling shows that higher yield nuclear weapons have an even SMALLER equivalence to conventional weapons. You need to a tremendous number of nuclear megaton bombs to get anything like the destruction of a conventional war.
Most people looking at the destruction to the concrete buildings in Syrian cities imagine that Hiroshima was worse, but in reality 50% survived on the lower floors of concrete buildings at 0.12 mile from ground zero in Hiroshima, where most concrete buildings remained intact and shielded people from radiation, blast winds, and flying debris. The reality is that the wide areas CND claims were "vaporised" in Hiroshima were burned down hours later as a result of overturned charcoal braziers inside crowded wood frame houses, containing combustible bamboo and paper screen furnishings. That's the truth, born out in the declassified 1947 secret three volume US strategic bombing survey report on Hiroshima, ignored by Glasstone and also by CND etc. The facts need to faced to credibly deter the bigger threat, conventional warfare, which can only be stopped if nuclear deterrence is made credible by addressing sensibly the scare mongering untruths about collateral damage.
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