As we predicted a month ago, the discovery of a Novichok trail across Salisbury (in a toilets block in the park, in a industrial bin where a spare fake Nina Ricci perfume Novichok spray was discarded, etc)has allowed the police to identify the Russian assassins using the trail for data reduction of CCTV, and on 5 September 2018, the British Government released the names of the Russian GRU state controlled nerve agent assassins who contaminated hundreds of innocent people in Salisbury, seriously injuring four and killing one person with fake Nina Ricci perfume containing the world's most deadly nerve agent, Novichok.
The British press reported fears of a Third World War, pointing out that Putin's state paid Novichok nerve agent assassins Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov are merely following in the footsteps of the 2006 radioactive polonium-210 murderers of exile Alexander Litvenko, the invasion of Eastern Ukraine by thinly disguised Russian government mercenaries, and the 2014 annexation of Crimea:
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| UK newspapers dated Thursday 6 September 2018 on Russian Novichok arrest warrants for Putin GRU officers |
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| The Sun 6 September 2018 on naming of Putin GRU Novichok spies in UK |
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| The Sun 6 September 2018 on Putin GRU Novichok assassination in UK |
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The Sun's 6 September 2018 editorial "TARGET RUSSIA" condemns shadow Prime Minister Jeremy "CND" Corbyn's denial of Russian GRU Novichok on Salisbury.
The Mirror (aka The Corbyn Communist) dated 6 September 2018 on Putin's GRU Novichok assassination in UK quotes Prime Minister May reaction, promising to dismantle Russian threat; despite the fact that Russia has over 15,000 nuclear weapons, compared to Britain's less liberal 120.
"Vlad's Brute Force" headline in The Mirror aka The Communist, 6 September 2018, bemoans the Russian danger, but conveniently fails to point out that Putin has over 120 times as many nuclear warheads than the UK. As we've pointed out, many wars begin with dialogue (aka promises/threats), the favourite "alternative" to deterrence, spouted by Shadow Prime Minister Jeremy "CND" Corbyn, a lifelong nasty hated of honesty, proponent of militant class war, race war, religious war, "divide and rule" communist tactics, and anti civil defence, anti-deterrence, nuclear weapons effects liar, and his gang of thugs who prefer violence, dressed up George Orwell style as the exact opposite, e.g. "peace propaganda" or "disarmament for peace", the very same hatred of deterrence and civil defence to make deterrence credible, used by nasty bigoted 1930s pseudo "pacifists" George Lansbury, Clement Attlee, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain.
Lansbury resigned as Labour Leader because the Conservative was no appeasing Hitler enough by disarming completely, Baldwin lied about the very existence of a Nazi threat until it was suddenly in 1935 too big - he claimed - to stop, while Attlee as Labour leader (in opposition to Baldwin and then Chamberlain) openly stated that he opposed rearmament and wanted dialogue with lying fascists instead of deterring them.
Today the Labour Leader is even more deluded that Lansbury or Attlee, who repented the error of his pacifist ways when Prime Minister after WWII and ordered Britain's nuclear deterrent, to deter war. He had seen the failure of dialogue from a position of weakness with lying fascists, which time and again escalates a crisis into a war, instead of positive actions like deterrence which make dialogue with thugs more profitable. Reagan successfully negotiated from a position of great strength; Chamberlain failed to influence the Nazis significantly when negotiating from a weaker position. Strength enables you to keep the peace; weakness invites aggression and abuse, contrary to hypocritical propaganda from Marxist historians and politicians.
The Mirror aka The Communist 6 September 2018 advises the UK with 120 nuclear warheads to GET THOUGH ON RUSSIA which has over 15,000!
Economic sanctions by the USA on Japan (after it invaded China) led Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor, hence war in the Pacific.
Likewise, any attempt to punish Russia economically is a repeat of the disastrous terms of 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which tried to economically punish an already bankrupt Germany for WWI.
The result of that "economic punishment" was ultimately WWII, 40 million killed.
"Pacifist" ideas that economic punishments are a safe alternative to credible deterrence and civil defence countermeasures against surprise attacks, are therefore a lunacy which ignores lessons from the origins of WWII in both European and Pacific theatres where economic punishments led to the rise of the Nazis who invaded Poland with Russia in September 1939, and the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941 which sprung from American sanctions against Japan after it invaded China!
Daily Express, 6 September 2018 front page news of President Putin's GRU Novichok assassin team identification, commenting on the "Smirking assassins sent by Putin".
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| Daily Express 6 September 2018 on Putin GRU Novichok assassins identification: timeline of attack. |
Daily Express, 6 September 2018 pointing out that this was not a rogue Novichok attack by Porton Down scientists as Russia and Jeremy Corbyn first claimed, but a state sponsored GRU attack in which assassins flew from Moscow to Britain with Novichok in fake Nina Ricci perfume and then flew back to Moscow.
The police assembled proof of that not just from Novichok samples but from 11,000 hours of CCTV footage showing the assassins arriving from Moscow at Gatwick, going to Salisbury, leaving a trail of Novichok traces, and returning to Moscow via Heathrow.
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| Daily Mail 6 September 2018 front page photo of Russian assassins who used Novichok nerve agent to murder in the UK despite Russia/Corbyn denials. |
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| Daily Mail 6 September 2018 on the Russian assassins who used Novichok nerve agent to murder in the UK despite the "weasel words" of Jeremy Corbyn. They also show the perfume spray bottle used to murder with Novichok nerve agent. |
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Daily Mail 6 September 2018 on the deluded denialism of the Novichok attack in the UK by Russia and the bigoted, Marxist and vindictive "divide and rule" race war, class war, and religious war advocate, CND's nasty nuclear weapons effects and civil defence liar, Jeremy Corbyn.
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| Daily Mail 6 September 2018 EDITORIAL on the deluded denialism by Corbyn of Putin Novichok attack and the threat of WWIII if Russia is not deterred credibly. |
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| Daily Mail 6 September 2018 EDITORIAL on the deluded denialism by Corbyn of Putin Novichok attack. |
Daily Mail 6 September 2018 EDITORIAL on the deluded denialism by Corbyn of Putin Novichok attack and the threat of WWIII if Russia is not deterred credibly from further reckless acts of aggression against the West.
But all the media is now deluded by the CND propaganda into thinking that economic sanctions against an enemy is a way to avert (not cause) WWIII, despite the facts that economic sanctions against Germany led to a hatred that escalated into the Third Reich and WWII in the European Theatre, whereas economic sanctions by the USA against Japan after it invaded China provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor, and tens of millions of deaths in the Pacific Theatre of WWII.
Dialogue or economic sanctions with fascist liars leads to threats, hatred and war, when unsupported by really credible deterrence. Time and again Chamberlain flew to have a dialogue with Hitler, three times in all, and all he achieved were signed paper peace agreements that had absolutely no value in preventing surprise attacks, bombing, or six million innocent people being gassed and starved to death in concentration camps. That was his notion of "pacifism". The alternative is what we used to keep the Cold War from getting too hot: nuclear deterrence. Everytime we pulled back from nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, it started to turn very hot:
(1) the Korean War 1950-3 escalated into slaughter after Cambridge Spy Ring in the UK Foreign Office tipped off Stalin that Attlee had got Truman to secretly agree not to use nuclear weapons! Eisenhower reversed that policy and a ceasefire was agreed!
(2) President Johnson, by publically refusing to consider the use of nuclear deterrence to end the Vietnam War and relying instead on supposedly less dangerous conventional weapons, escalated the Vietnam War into bloodshed many times worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki (megatons of conventional bombs fell on Vietnam, equivalent in collateral damage to thousands of today's MIRV submegaton nuclear weapons, using two-thirds power scaling as verified from actual experience).
(3) The 1970s ABM treaty and the West's moral and military decline in Vietnam led to an increasing Russian nuclear stockpile relative to that of the West by 1973, and this led to Russian expansionism and risk taking, such as backing terrorists across the world and invading Afghanistan in 1979, which cultivated the insurgency culture that persists today. Russian nuclear weapon delivery missiles were less accurate than American ones, but they had a "countervalue" targetting policy and were targetting Western cities - large targets - not hard to hit hardened silos, unlike the West's "counterforce" policy, a factor that CND's naive propaganda ignored in the Cold War.
Further reading: https://glasstone.blogspot.com/2015/10/russian-anti-terrorism-policing-world.html
Other news
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| MD3 revitalised by Nuclear Enterprises Technology Ltd from 1989 to 1991 for the UK RAF using old Radiac Survey Meter No 2 units, available from an ebay trader for £20 plus £5.05 postage. Six screws in the base can be removed to expose a hidden beta window, allowing the meter to be used as a sensitive beta fallout contamination meter for decontamination work in the aftermath of nuclear attack. These are also useful for high dose rates near nuclear reactors in Navy submarines and high level waste dumps, although the civilian nuclear industry normally prefers its high dose rate meters to have probes on the end of a long stick (like the traditional Russian civil defence radiation meters, which had probes supplied with long handles). |
On a more cheerful note, many of the reliable Radiac Survey Meter No 2 (field tested at UK nuclear tests during Operation Buffalo in 1956 at Maralinga, Australia) were upgraded to completely modern electronics which use only two 1.5 volt D cells by the excellent UK radiation meter firm NE Technology Limited (formerly Nuclear Enterprises Ltd, originally a part of electronics and music giant EMI, but now taken over by Thermo Eberline) between 1989-1991, remarked "MD3" and they are now being sold by a trader on ebay for just £20 each plus £5.05 postage (for UK addresses). These meters have a removable base plate under which there is a hinged 3mm thick aluminium "beta window" which can be opened and closed to make the meter sensitive to beta radiation from fallout, which is useful for using it as a contamination meter (the beta intensity from nearby fallout in those nuclear tests was over 10 times the environmental gamma dose rate, so contaminated items could be easily located, since fallout betas are typically around 0.4 MeV in average energy and most are quickly attenuated by a few feet of air). It is normally covered by the base plate for storage purposes, to prevent water causing corrosion or breakage of the delicate beta window. The original version of the meter used vacuum tubes (values) which required high voltage obsolete radio batteries, but as stated the upgraded units just take two D cells!
On the subject of Nuclear Enterprises Ltd, take a look at the modern looking motherboard (full of logic gate ICs) inside of its 1970 "Contamination Monitor CM6", which has a probe on a weight switch handle, so that when you pick up the probe, the meter and loudspeaker switch on. Using a dual phosphor (zinc sulphide coated perspex) DP2R probe, it can discriminate between alpha and beta contamination, flashing up the appropriate warning light on a modern type display screen based on the bridge instruments of Star Trek's Starship Enterprise:
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| Nuclear Enterprises Contamination Monitor CM6 from 1970, containing a single motherboard with digital logic system. |
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Nuclear Enterprises Contamination Monitor CM6 from 1970, showing DP2R alpha-beta discrimination probe. A portable PCM5, which uses 2 D cells, is also shown for size comparison at the left. The probes used by CM6 and PCM5 are identical, both using PET100 screw in connectors. The 1980s CM7 however used an incompatible probe, due to a switch of technology to a gas proportional counter for the CM7. As any physics student knows, a geiger counter used at below-plateau voltage becomes a proportional counter, since electron avalanche multiplication ceases at lower voltages. In this state, it is a proportional counter, in the simple sense that the current pulses are proportional to the energy deposited by the particle. Since beta particles commonly have lower energies than alphas, this proportional counter can discriminate between typical beta and typical alpha particles.
However, geiger counter types use low pressure gas and so need tougher mica windows to prevent breakage from the 14.7 psi or 101 kPa ambient air pressure, than the very thin mylar foil - aluminized clingfoil - which allows half or more of the alpha particles to penetrate to hit zinc sulphide in a DP2R scintillation probe. Hence, using a geiger tube containing low pressure gas would lead to a probe that (a) only lets through a small percentage of alphas, and is thus insensitive by nuclear industry criteria, or (b) breaks too easily and is unreliable for use a personnel contamination "frisker" probe (this happens if the geiger window is made extra thin to increase sensitivity). Therefore, the CM7 proportional counter used the same kind of mylar foil as the scintillation probe, but could not use low pressure gas (which would allow normal air pressure to rupture the foil too easily, and it would be hard to replace and reset the pressure after damage). So ambient pressure gas was used, and that had to be a special gas like butane or xenon, in order to get a reliable proportional counter to work with sensitivity at ambient pressure. In some butane filled proportional counters, damage led to fires or explosions, when the damaged probe leaked butane and short circuited, causing a spark. Xenon filled alpha-beta probes are more safer but far expensive, and can still be punctured.
The scintillation dual probe is still the best way to discriminate alpha from fissile materials from low energy betas from C14, tritium and fission products. Alphas hitting silver activated zinc sulphide plated on the CM6's DP2R probe's internal perspex plate, on the side of the phosphor facing the thin mylar foil window you can see at the top of the probe, produce brighter light flashes (half a million photons of visible light for a typical alpha particle) than betas hitting the perspex layer (a few tens of thousands of photons of light per beta particle), so the photomultiplier produces larger voltage pulses for alpha particles hitting the probe, than for beta particles.
This difference in the voltage enables the circuitry to distinguish alpha from beta particles. Logic gates in an "alpha radiation channel" on the motherboard, of the "radio squelch" circuit type, ignore the weaker voltage pulses from beta particles and produce a "beep" sound for every alpha particle (and turn on a red "Alpha" warning light on the panel if the alpha intensity exceeds 1 "Derived Working Limit (DWL)". A separate channel for beta particles ignores the high voltage alpha particle pulses, and just measures the lower voltage pulses from betas. A typical 0.4 MeV fission product beta particle naturally deposits only 10% of the energy of a 4 MeV fissile material alpha particle, so the discrimination is very simple in principle. In practice, the alpha channel always works very well, but there are problems with the beta channel due to alpha particles which are nearly at the end of their range (about 1 inch in air) hitting the zinc sulphide with little energy remaining, and producing weak flashes which are indistinguishable from beta particles.
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| Nuclear Enterprises CM6 spring-loaded rocker probe switch: the weight of the probe its holder (black pronged device to the right) turns the instrument into sleep mode; picking up the probe allows the holder to rise 5cm, turning on the switch mechanism (left side of arm). The motherboard also contains circuits to set off alarms and light indicators for alpha and beta contamination, to make the loudspeaker click for beta particles but beep for alpha particles, and to stop the 1 mA analogue meter on the dial from being damaged by excess current (dial current is limited to a maximum of 1 mA for full-scale deflection, marked 10 DWL's or 10 times the Derived Working Limit). |
I'm still kind of baffled by the assassins' possession of a "back-up" bottle of nerve agent, and their careless disposal of it. Why would they take the risk of causing unintended casualties, and maybe giving clues to the police?
ReplyDeleteI agree with your assessment of deterrence vs appeasement; if you aren't ready, willing, and able to use a weapon, it is not providing any deterrence value. So enemies are more likely to make agressive moves and start a war, paradoxically requiring you to physically use the weapons which could have just been used as deterrence.
On the other hand, the link about the Vietnam war, and "two-thirds power scaling as verified from actual experience" struck me as being akin to cnd or post wwi weapon effects exaggeration propaganda, at least from a science vs truth perspective. In numerous previous posts, you have provided real-world data from actual weapons tests and wartime analysis, all of which contradict the claim that buildings fail at the same overpressure regardless of duration. For example, it was found during wwii, that a 1 ton yield ground burst would collapse brick buildings out to a radius of 70 ft, an overpressure of about 30 psi. But for kiloton and larger yields, the critical overpressure is closer to 10-15 psi. For a blast wave to damage a target, it must create sufficient loading to overcome the strength of the target, but it must also last long enough for parts of the target to be moved beyond the elastic limit. This requires that force be sustained while the inertia of those parts is overcome. All target materials have a finite density, as well as finite bulk moduluses and (crucially) elastic moduluses. As a result, no object will be destroyed instantaneously by blast loading, even if the forces greatly exceed the static strength of that object.On the flip side, if a structure does not break due to a sudden force, the inertia of it will continue its deformation past the point where the blast load is balanced by elastic forces. Then it will start to bounce back, even if the load is still present. Thus, if the force is too weak to cause failure within the first quarter cycle of a structures natural vibratory frequency, it will not cause failure regardless of how long it is applied, and if a force diminishes greatly during that first quarter cycle, then it may have to be stronger (e.g. higher overpressure) than would be required to have the same effect if it had been nearly constant during that time period.
The "propaganda" part of this is that you regularly say that buildings will absorb more energy from a longer duration blast wave, even if it only cau ses elastic deformation. However, you seem unwilling to use this fact when comparing subkiloton conventional weapons to multi-kiloton nuclear ones. Sorry if I come off as offensive; only constructive criticism is meant. The are few places where anyone even comes close to discussing the truth about nuclear weapons, and they are an important issue. So I want those few places to come as close to the actual truth as possible.
Nice one here, technology rules the world
ReplyDeleteWhat we are seeing right now with Iran, is a failure of the United States and NATO to use deterrence when they had a chance. Instead, we started by PAYING them not to build nuclear weapons (which in and of themselves are not a significant threat anyhow). Then we put sanctions. They react to that, as per normal, with acts of aggression. We respond by assassinating their general. More Tit for tat escalations can be expected.
ReplyDeleteIf we had Continued the "old" policy of nuclear deterrence backed by overexaggerated effects and the threat of annihilation, we wouldn't be in this position now. Iran wouldn't have even tried to build nuclear weapons, or attack as they did so recently.
Had we let them make their overrated, ineffective strategic nuclear arsenal, and prepared to defend neighboring nations in the event of an invasion, then we wouldn't be in this position now. Even if they were to use a nuclear weapon, the damage would be minor and could be avoided 100% by ABM. Chances are they wouldn't use their arsenal as anything other than a regional political bargaining chip, though.
Sanctions are the worst of both worlds. They antagonize aggressive nations while doing nothing to actually stop their agressive tendencies.