www.nukegate.org Glasstone's book exaggerates urban nuclear weapons effects by using unobstructed terrain data, without the concrete jungle shielding of blast winds and radiation by cities!
Update 22 January 2007: BBC Panorama's documentary 'How To Poison A Spy' reports that radiological surveys of the Po-210 trail throughout the contaminated London hotels and restaurants indicates that the really massive lethal quantity of radioactive Po-210 (several billion becquerels) was administered in the tea Litvinenko drank when he visited the Russians and former KGB men Andrei Lugovoi and Dimitri Kovtun at the London Sushi Bar, Piccadilly Circus, on 16 October 2006. Other contamination elsewhere was much less intense. Litvinenko always drank tea, never alcohol. The tea was ordered for Litvinenko in advance of his arrival, and was then poisoned. When Litvinenko arrived, the poisoned drink was waiting and he drank some - but not all - of it. Therefore he received less than the intended contamination, which is the reason why he took until 24 November 2006 to get a lethal dose from radiation. Because of the 138 days radiological half-life of Po-210, he continued to accumulate substantial radiation doses each day until he died, over a month after being contaminated by the 'spiked' tea. The BBC programme visited Laboratory Number 12, in Moscow which is allegedly the official government poison factory that prepared the Po-210 solution to be administered in Litvinenko's tea. The broadcast programme also reports that recently Russians were officially authorized to pursue enemies overseas.
What will happen if a dirty radioactive terrorist bomb explodes, and the first warning is radiation casualties turning up in hospitals? Well we can guess from recent events surrounding the failure of medics in University College Hospital, London, to diagnose in time Litvinenko's acute radiation poisoning from internal exposure to the heavy metal nuclide polonium-210, the most deadly radioactive material on earth due to its short half-life of about 138 days.
Polonium-210 (Po-210) like plutonium-239 (and everything else if you look far enough, say to supernovae debris) is natural in the sense that it occurs in nature in trace amounts, which is exactly the reason why it was possible for Marie Curie to discover and isolate a tiny amount of it (after years of purification), after starting with a ton of the radioactive uranium ore, pitchblend. Plutonium is also an alpha emitter like Po-210 but plutonium is far less toxic: plutonium was discovered in trace amounts in nature around 1950 by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, and has a 24,400 years half life so each atom of that emits only one alpha particle per 35,100 years, which is a comparatively low dose rate.
The average life i.e. the average time taken for a single atom to decay is always 1/(ln 2) = 1.44 times the half-life, which enables you to calculate the specific activity if the half life is known, or to calculate the half-life without waiting for a measurable decrease in the radioactivity, which of course is the situation for long half lives of thousands or billions of years; you simply measure the specific activity in units of:
(decays/second per atom) = Becquerels/atom = Bq/atom = 1/(average life of atom measured in seconds) = (ln 2)/(half-life measured in seconds)
so you can calculate the half-life by measuring the specific activity per radiocative atom in a pure sample of the decaying nuclide (uncontaminated by other isotopes):
half-life (in seconds) = (ln 2)/(specific activity in Bq per atom) = 0.6931/(specific activity in Bq per atom)
Conversely, the specific activity is
specific activity, Bq/atom = 0.6931/(half-life measured in seconds)
Hence, the longer the half-life, the lower the specific radioactivity, and the lower the danger; whereas the shorter the half-life, the more toxic it is.
Summary of radiological incompetence timeline:
21 November:Sun article quotes toxicologist Professor John Henry (who was treating Litvinenko), arguing that Litvinenko was poisoned by radiation. (See below.)
23 November: London Daily Express article (published 24 November) quotes Geoff Bellingan, the director of critical care at University College, London, saying: "Radiation poisoning is ... unlikely." (see below.)
24 November: Litvinenko dies and cause of death is announced as radiation poisoning.
Medical diagnosis by "consensus of experts" is therefore not really any more productive than physics string theory is productive physics due to being done by a "consensus of experts". Neither is science, which is not a matter of consensus in practice (unless you want to risk being herded off a cliff with fellow lemmings), but is a matter of hard facts gathered experimentally.
What they should have done is to have taken samples from the patient and monitored them for alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. A high school physics student learns to measure radiation and identify types of radiation (although isotope identification usually requires more elaborate instruments which measure particle energies, not just types of particle). Incompetence with radiotherapists in Britain has been widely emphasised recently, including the case of the girl with cancer who 17 times received a massive radiation overdose in Glasgow.
You might expect that hospitals in the U.K., particularly in London - where dirty bomb threats of radioactive contamination have been raging for years - would have trained radiological and lab staff with suitable instruments to measure samples for radiation. There are two highly ionising (high LET, linear energy transfer; ie, the radiation gives up its energy quickly in matter to produce high doses): alpha and beta. Gamma rays are more penetrating so they go through matter without being stopped (or imparting energy) so easily.
The BBC report shows typical journalistic incompetence, claiming that Po-210 is natural. Well, Marie Curie who discovered it started from a ton of radioactive pitchblend (good uranium ore) and got 1 gram of radium and only a trace of polonium, after several years work in chemically extracting it from the residue after she had isolated radium. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission around 1950 announced that it has identified plutonium-239 in pitchblend.
If you look hard enough, everything occurs in nature somewhere (supernovae explosions have neutron densities high enough to create all possible radionuclides), so in that sense, all are "natural", or - rather - the word "natural" becomes a sneer word for journalists to use to cover up natural background radiation variations with location and altitude and instead attack minor variations in that due to human activity.
There is nothing "natural" about the dose of Po-210 which poisoned Litvinenko; intense sources of radiation are easily and quickly measured, and the natural distribution of such things is way too low to ever produce acute radiation syndrome in anyone (long-term risks are another matter).
"A FORMER Russian spy may have been poisoned with radioactive thallium at a London restaurant, a medical expert said. "John Henry, a toxicologist treating Alexander Litvinenko, says the former KGB man may need a bone marrow transplant.
"He said: "The thallium is the least of it - the radioactivity seems more important.
"In terms of thallium, I do not think I have see a worse case of this.
"It is too early to say how long it will be before he's out of danger. He is very ill at the moment."
"Prof Henry said it was likely the poison had been swallowed.
"Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism unit is leading the hunt for the culprits.
"A top Moscow politician has admitted Litvinenko may have been poisoned by the KGB.
"Viktor Ilyukhin — deputy chairman of the Russian parliament’s security committee — declared: “I can’t exclude that possibility.”
"He said of the dad of one, whose food is feared to have been spiked at a sushi bar: “That former KGB officer had been irritating the Russian authorities for a long time and possibly knew some state secrets.
“So when our special services got the chance to operate not only inside but outside the country, they decided to get rid of him.”
"Litvinenko, 44, is continuing to fight for life at London’s University College Hospital — guarded by armed police.
"He was in intensive care, with medics putting his chances of survival at 50:50.
"Litvinenko is able to talk and make jokes, but his condition remains serious in intensive care.
"Shocking pictures taken yesterday and released by his family showed the appalling effects of the highly-toxic chemical thallium.
"Litvinenko was pictured pale and weak in his hospital bed — his hair all gone.
"Ravaged ... poisoned ex-KGB man Alexander Litvinenko in London hospital yesterday Litvinenko’s white cell count — a gauge of his immune system — was nearly zero.
"Prof Henry said damage to his blood cells and bone marrow indicated a radioactive element. "Exiled Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky said after visiting Litvinenko for a second time: “He is really in very bad shape.” Countryman Ilyukhin said the former KGB colonel, who fled Moscow for Britain five years ago, may have been targeted for probing a Russian journalist’s murder. "Anna Politkovskaya — a leading critic of Russian president Vladimir Putin — was gunned down at her Moscow flat.
"Ilyukhin said Litvinenko may have been set “to reveal the truth about Anna Politkovskaya’s assassination”.
"The Kremlin has branded his comments “sheer nonsense”. And one counter-intelligence agent insisted a “hit” by the KGB — now renamed the FSB — would have been more PROFESSIONAL.
"He told a Russian paper: “If it was necessary we would find a different, less fussy and public method to get rid of him.”
Litvinenko was poisoned three weeks ago — but thallium takes around a fortnight to kick in. The police probe is set to focus on two meetings Litvinenko had on November 1. The first was at a London hotel where he had tea with two Russian men — one a former KGB officer.
"The second meeting was at a sushi bar in Piccadilly with an Italian academic.
"It has emerged that Litvinenko made a secret tape revealing assassinations sanctioned by the Kremlin — in case he was murdered. It was being examined by MI5."
TODAY's "Daily Express" newspaper (24 November 2006, page 17) carries an article written last night (23 November) by John Twomey which states:
"POISON RIDDLE DEEPENS AFTER EX-SPY SUFFERS A HEART ATTACK
"FORMER Soviet spy Alexander Litvinenko was on the brink of death last night as doctors admitted they have no idea what is killing him.
"As Scotland Yard hunted the hitmen, there was speculation that he may have been armed with a new drug unknown to Britain's foremost poison experts.
"Mr Litvinenko's condition deteriorated on Wednesday night after he suffered heart failure at London's University College Hospital. Last night he was on a life support machine. ...
"The ex-KGB colonel, a bitter critic of President Putin, fell ill on November 1 after meeting an ex-KGB major called Vladimir at a London hotel and an Italian academic at a nearby sushi bar.
"Scotland Yard was only called last Friday and there has been confusion ever since over which poison was used.
"Toxicologists brought in to treat the 43-year-old appear to be baffled. Geoff Bellingan, the hospital's director of critical care, said: "We are now convinced that the cause of Mr Litvinenko's condition was not a heavy metal like thallium. Radiation poisoning is also unlikely. {EVER HEARD OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD - WHEREBY YOU ACTUALLY CHECK FACTS WITH A SOMETHING CALLED A ZINC SULPHIDE PHOSPHOR SCINTILLATION DETECTOR, OR EVEN AN OBSOLETE SCHOOL-TYPE PHYSICS DEPARTMENT END-WINDOWED GEIGER COUNTER TO FIND OUT WHAT THE FACTS ARE, BEFORE MAKING CONCLUSIONS?} Despite extensive {ISN'T THE WORD YOU MEAN ACTUALLY: INCOMPETENT?} tests, we are still unclear as to the cause of his condition."
Twomey's article proceeds to quote an unnamed security source suggesting that a slow acting poison was administered to give the murders time to escape from the country, and to have "a deterrent effect on dissidents and potential rebels because victims suffer so much pain and their loved ones are forced to look on helplessly as they die an agonising death".
Twomey concludes: "Mr Litvinenko defected to Britain in 2000 and has accused Russia of bombing Moscow and blaming it on Chechen rebels. The Italian he met at the sushi bar, Professor Mario Scaramella, showed him a death list on which both their names appeared."
It is disgusting that the cause, Po-210, was not diagnosed within 24 hours of admission to hospital. They knew he was poisoned, and should have checked his symptoms for all three types of poisoning agent: biological, chemical and radiological. Radiation poisoning is the fastest to check for because any radiation poison sufficient to produce acute effects also is sufficiently intense to be detected in seconds by any suitable radioactivity instrument. The medical profession, who use radiotherapy and x-rays routinely, have no excuse of ignorance in radiation matters, and should have ensure proper checks are made. What would happen if a dirty bomb exploded, or a nuclear explosion at a power plant? How would the medical profession respond? Taking days wondering what each casualty is suffering from, then throwing up their arms in confusion?
Chelating agents have bad side effects, but they offer some possibility of removing heavy metal poisons including radioactive ones, and in a case this bad - if diagnosis had been correctly made before the victim actually died - such measures could have offered a possibility of therapy.
"Mr Litvinenko's condition deteriorated rapidly in hospital.
"Radiation briefing Police probing the death of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko have found above-normal levels of radiation at three locations in London.
"Mr Litvinenko's death has been linked to the presence of a "major dose" of radioactive polonium-210 in his body.
"Scotland Yard confirmed traces were also found at his home, a sushi bar and a hotel, but the risk to others was said by health experts to be very low.
"The Kremlin has denied UK citizen Mr Litvinenko's claims it was involved.
"The traces were found at the Itsu sushi restaurant in Piccadilly, the Millennium Hotel, Grosvenor Square, and at Mr Litvinenko's home in Muswell Hill, north London, Scotland Yard said.
"Officers are looking at CCTV footage and interviewing witnesses, trying to find out who he met around the time he fell ill on 1 November, said Peter Clarke, head of the Counter Terrorism Command which is leading the investigation.
"Tests are also being carried out at the two London hospitals where Mr Litvinenko had been treated, University College and the Barnet General, the Health Protection Agency said. Professor Pat Troop from the HPA told a news conference Mr Litvinenko would have had to either eaten, inhaled or been given the dose of polonium-210 though a wound. She said the type of death was an "unprecedented event in the UK".
"RADIATION TYPES
"Alpha particles are stopped by a sheet of paper [this is a generalization based on low energy alphas, some high-energy alpha particles are as penetrating as low-energy beta particles and go through several sheets of paper] and cannot pass through unbroken skin.
"Beta particles are stopped by an aluminium sheet [this is vague and misleading, high energy alphas from Sr-90 decays can go through a couple of millimetres of aluminium or so]
"Gamma rays are stopped by thick lead [this is so vague and imprecise that it is unhelpful]
"Dr Troop said the HPA investigation would also look at the number of people who had come into contact with Mr Litvinenko during his stay in hospital: "We are working with staff to draw up a list, we are working through that," she said. "There will be a minimum of tens of people. He was in hospital for several weeks and a number of staff looked after him."
"As the conference drew to a close, a heckler interrupted saying he was from Ukraine and had also been the victim of poisoning.
"A post-mortem examination on Mr Litvinenko has not been held yet.
"The delay is believed to be over concerns about the health implications for those present at the examination.
"But Roger Cox from the HPA said a large quantity of alpha radiation emitted from polonium-210 had been detected in Mr Litvinenko's urine.
"The Home Office said anybody concerned should contact NHS Direct on 0845 4647, who have been briefed about this issue.
"Meanwhile, the government's civil contingencies committee Cobra has met to discuss the case. 'Sheer nonsense'
"Friends have said Mr Litvinenko was poisoned because of his criticism of Russia.
"In a statement dictated before he died at University College Hospital on Thursday, the 43-year-old accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of involvement in his death.
"Mr Litvinenko had recently been investigating the murder of his friend, Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another critic of the Putin government.
"LITVINENKO TIMELINE
"1 Nov - Alexander Litvinenko meets two Russian men at a London hotel and then meets Italian academic Mario Scaramella at a sushi bar in Piccadilly. Hours later he falls ill and is admitted to Barnet General Hospital 17 Nov - Mr Litvinenko is transferred to UCH 19 Nov - Reports say Mr Litvinenko is poisoned with thallium 21 Nov - A toxicologist says he may have been poisoned with "radioactive thallium" 22 Nov - Mr Litvinenko's condition deteriorates overnight. Thallium and radiation ruled out 23 Nov - The ex-spy dies in intensive care
"Mr Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov reiterated the Kremlin's earlier dismissal of allegations of involvement in the poisoning as "sheer nonsense".
"Mr Putin himself has said Mr Litvinenko's death was a tragedy, but he saw no "definitive proof" it was a "violent death".
"Police have been examining two meetings Mr Litvinenko had on 1 November - one at a London hotel with a former KGB agent and another man, and a rendezvous with Italian security consultant Mario Scaramella, at the sushi restaurant in the West End.
"Mr Litvinenko, who was granted asylum in the UK in 2000 after complaining of persecution in Russia, fell ill later that day.
"In an interview with Friday's Telegraph newspaper, former KGB bodyguard Andrei Lugovoi said he had met Mr Litvinenko at the Millennium Hotel but vigorously denied any involvement in the poisoning.
"Mr Scaramella, who is involved in an Italian parliamentary inquiry into Russian secret service activity, said they met because he wanted to discuss an e-mail he had received."
"It is a naturally occurring radioactive material that emits highly hazardous alpha (positively charged) particles.
"It was first discovered by Marie Curie at the end of the 19th century.
"There are very small amounts of polonium-210 in the soil and in the atmosphere, and everyone has a small amount of in their body.
"But at high doses, it damages tissues and organs.
"However the substance, historically called radium F, is very hard for doctors to identify.
"Philip Walker, professor of physics, University of Surrey said: "This seems to have been a substance carefully chosen for its ability to be hard to detect in a person who has ingested it."
"What is the risk to other people from the dose Mr Litvinenko received?
"It cannot pass through the skin, and must be ingested or inhaled into the body to cause damage.
"And because the radiation has a very short range, it only harms nearby tissue, so those who came into contact with him are at very little risk.
"William Gelletly, professor of physics at the University of Surrey, said: "Polonium-210 is very unlikely to have contaminated any staff who treated Mr Litvinenko or anyone who came in contact with him since they would have had to ingest or breathe in the contaminated fluids from his body."
"Professor Dudley Goodhead, Medical Research Council Radiation and Genome Stability Unit, said: "To poison someone much larger amounts are required and this would have to be man-made, perhaps from particle accelerator or a nuclear reactor." "
Notice Po-210 has a half-life of 140 days, and is a high-energy alpha emitter. Plutonium-239 for contrast has a half-life of 24,400 years so the specific activity of Po-210 (decays per second or Becquerels, per gram) is way higher. The shorter the half life, the more decays per second!Po-210 was used with beryllium as the neutron source (initiator) in the early 1945 nuclear weapons. Alpha particles hitting beryllium fission it, releasing neutrons. This was responsible for most of the deaths after the Windscale nuclear reactor fire in England in 1957. The pile was producing Po-210 for British nuclear bomb tests in Maralinga, but the government kept that secret, claiming that only iodine-131 had been released. (They didn't want the Americans to know Britain was still using obsolete 1945 nuclear initiator technology!)
UPDATE: for acute radiation syndrome, the maximum duration of effective poisoning is always the smaller than the time between initial symptoms and death. Therefore, he wasn't poisoned over many months, or he would have been in chronic health for many months before dying (there is a report that the police are wasting time on this issue). Litvinenko received a dose over a period of time of less than two weeks. He was probably poisoned during a single meal.
The Po-210 then takes time to become located in tissue and irradiate the tissue with a lethal dose of radiation. This is why the death wasn't instant. It is reported that he had a low blood cell count. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other high-dose accidents, irradiation of bone marrow suppressed the white blood cell count to a minimum about 2-4 weeks after exposure. This is usually when death occurs. There is also a suppression of platelets, and their absence prevents blood clotting properly. The bone marrow irradiation relies - in the case of internal poisoning (rather than x/gamma rays or neutrons) - on Po-210 being deposited in the bone.
So from the symptoms, he received a dose over a short period of time (one meal probably) and he died probably 2-4 weeks after that from acute radiation effects on the blood and lymph systems, and from radiation damage to the cardio-vascular system.
I will just add that Putin is innocent until proved guilty, and we should not seek to blame him just because he is ex-KGB and their methods were murderous. Evidence is required before judgement. Finding traces of impurties in the Po-210 samples recovered from the hotel and the restaurant may enable the source to be identified. Po-210 is licenced and impossible to acquire legally without a licence. It is impossible that the source could be more than a few years old due to the short 138 days half-life. Impurities in the sample will serve as a forensic 'fingerprint' to indicate if the source is controlled by Putin in Russia. Even if Putin is responsible, it might not be possible for Britain to arrest him because the Russians have more military power than we do (more nuclear weapons etc.) so it would be a disaster to even think of doing anything other than going through the UN. I actually think Putin is doing a good job in Russia, he just appears very heavy-handed towards dissenters.
Another thing: the radioactive contamination problem is being confused by the BBC. The dose needed to kill a man from no symptoms to acute radiation syndrome death in a week or two is nothing to do with the dose needed for cancer risks. The BBC reported falsely that anyone else contaminated would have died. This is total nonsense. Long term effects like significantly increased risk of leukemia and lung cancer can occur after very much smaller doses, as proved by studies on exposure to radium, radon, and strontium-90 of human beings (uranium miners, radium watch dial painters in the 1920s, and animals in extensive experiments during the 1950s). In fact, for high-LET alpha particle radiation the bombardment of internal tissue by even a single particle is enough to trigger a cancer risk. (For low-LET radiation like gamma rays there may be a threshold needed to either damage or to simply overwhelm natural radiation repair mechanisms in human cells like protein P53.) Long-term effects from alpha particles require doses millions of times smaller than that administered to Litvinenko. Therefore people who may have inhaled traces could be at enhanced cancer risk. The scientific approach to this is far from the BBC.
BRITAIN'S ITV (INDEPENDENT TV) NEWS GOES THE OTHER WAY TO THE BBC:
"Cabinet minister Peter Hain has launched an extraordinary attack on Russia's President Putin following the death of former spy Alexander Litvinenko.
"The outspoken Northern Ireland Secretary, indicated that relations with Moscow had hit a low as he exhorted the Russian president to return to democratic processes.
"Referring to "some murky murders" in recent times, he accused Vladimir Putin of damaging "individual liberty and democracy" in Russia.
"His comments reveal how frosty the relationship between London and Moscow has become following the apparent poisoning of the ex-KGB agent.
"Earlier, the Home Secretary John Reid had confirmed that detectives were now treating the death as "suspicious". Until now police had said they were treating it as an unexplained death.
"Mr Reid said: "As at this stage, they're saying to me that they now regard the death as suspicious. That wasn't the case yesterday, for instance."
"Customers of a restaurant and hotel visited by radiation victim Alexander Litvinenko are facing an anxious wait after giving medical samples for tests.
"A number of them were asked to submit urine for analysis after traces of deadly polonium-210 were discovered at the central London premises. The police are continuing their hunt for the source of the poison.
"The Conservatives have now demanded the Government make a Commons statement over the death.
"Shadow Home Secretary David Davis made the plea and called for cooperation with police inquiries from all concerned, including if necessary the Russian authorities.
"He said: "It is essential that other dissidents living in Britain are reassured about their safety and there are also questions about how Polonium-210 came to be used in Britain."
"Cobra, the Government's emergency planning committee, chaired by Home Office minister Tony McNulty, met on Saturday to discuss the affair.
"Mr Litvinenko died on Thursday night after being exposed to highly toxic radioactive isotope polonium 210 - which if ingested will rapidly lead to organ and tissue damage.
"As a result his hair fell out, his body wasted away and his organs slowly failed.
"In a statement read out after his death, he accused Vladimir Putin of what he believes would be the Kremlin's first political assassination in the West since the Cold War.
"He said: "You may succeed in silencing one man. But a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life."
"A post-mortem examination of Mr Litvinenko's body has been delayed while a risk assessment is carried out to see if it is safe to perform the procedure and what precautions may be necessary.
"An inquest into his death is expected to be opened in the coming days at St Pancras Coroner's Court in north London.
'Czechoslovakia's former comrades from North Korea claim that they have successfully completed their first underground nuclear test. The U.S. agencies initially couldn't confirm the report but South Korea and Australia have detected tremor so the communist report is probably true. Later, USGS described it as a 4.2 magnitude earthquake, confirming the report, too. ...
'The success comes exactly at the time when North Korea is completing the construction of the modern socialist economy that will exceed and supersede the imperialist nations. Blah blah blah - I've been hearing these things for the first one half of my life.
'Of course, the Democratic People's Republic - or, more precisely, the Totalitarian Party Leader's Dictatorship - is far from being the first dangerous country that has opened this Pandora's box so it would be exaggerated to paint the situation as a real crisis. Nevertheless, it is annoying, especially because the socialist nation seems to have untested ballistic missiles able to reach the U.S. territory.' - Harvard University Assistant Professor of physics Lubos Motl's Reference Frame.
The BBC reports: 'Outcry at N Korea 'nuclear test'. North Korea's claim that it has successfully tested a nuclear weapon has sparked international condemnation.
'The White House called for a swift response from the UN Security Council, calling Pyongyang's move "provocative".
'Japan and South Korea also condemned the test and even Pyongyang's closest ally China expressed its "resolute opposition", calling the move "brazen".
'North Korean state media said the underground test had brought "happiness to our people". The test, which South Korean media said took place in Gilju in Hamgyong province at 1036 (0136 GMT), has still to be confirmed.
'N KOREA NUCLEAR PROGRAMME
Believed to have 'handful' of nuclear weapons
But not thought to have any small enough to put in a missile
Could try dropping from airplane, though world watching closely
'But both the US and Japan said they had detected seismic waves. Russia said it was "100% certain" a nuclear test had occurred.
'The size of the bomb is uncertain. South Korean reports put it as low as 550 tons of destructive power but Russia said it was between five and 15 kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb of 1945 was 12.5-15 kilotons.
'The BBC's diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says North Korea's claimed test does not necessarily mean it has a fully-fledged nuclear bomb or warhead that it can deliver to a target. The US led calls for a swift UN response. White House spokesman Tony Snow said: "We expect the UN Security Council to take immediate actions to respond to this unprovoked act."
'Unpardonable'
'UN atomic agency head Mohamed ElBaradei said the reported test was a grave threat to world security.
'Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who is in Seoul for a meeting with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, called the claimed test "unpardonable" and urged the council to take "undaunted" action.
'The region was "entering a new, dangerous nuclear age", he said.
'He said Japan and the US would step up co-operation on the missile defence system they began after a North Korean missile test in 1998.
'We expect the UN Security Council to take immediate actions to respond to this unprovoked act.' - Tony Snow, White House spokesman
'President Roh said the claimed test had created a "severe situation" that threatened stability in the region. He said Seoul would react "sternly and calmly".
'The South Korean military - which has been put on a heightened state of alert - had the capability to cope with any North Korean provocation, he said.
'Seoul also suspended a scheduled aid shipment of concrete to North Korea, the state news agency reported.
'The North has relied on international help to feed its 23 million people for more than a decade and there are concerns the latest move could further compromise its ability to feed its most vulnerable people.
'In an unusually strong statement against its ally, China said the claimed test "defied the universal opposition of international society".
'The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Beijing says China's statement is an indication of how strongly it is angered by North Korea's action, although Beijing will still be loath to support tougher sanctions against Pyongyang.
'Historic event'
'When it announced the test, the North's KCNA media agency described it as an "historic event that brought happiness to our military and people".
'KOREAN NUCLEAR CRISIS
Sept 2005: At first hailed as a breakthrough, North Korea agrees to give up nuclear activities
Next day, N Korea says it will not scrap its activities unless it gets a civilian nuclear reactor
US imposes financial sanctions on N Korea businesses
July 2006: N Korea test-fires seven missiles
UN Security Council votes to impose sanctions over the tests
Oct 2006: N Korea claims to have carried out nuclear test
'It said the test would maintain "peace and stability" in the region and was "a great leap forward in the building of a great prosperous, powerful socialist nation".
'The development comes three days after the UN Security Council agreed on a formal statement urging North Korea to cancel any planned nuclear test and return to disarmament talks.
'Pyongyang pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and has refused for a year to attend talks aimed at ending its nuclear ambitions.
'North Korea's official media has long warned that the US was preparing to attack and developing a nuclear capability was the only way to prevent this.
'The UN Security Council imposed an embargo on the import and export of missile-related materials in July after North Korea test-fired several missiles.
'If confirmed, the test would make North Korea the ninth country known to have nuclear weapons.'
Trinity, Crossroads, Sandstone, with proper discussion of the implosion Nagasaki type design and the gun type Hiroshima design, Greenhouse nuclear tests including explanation of the transit-time measurement of implosion in nuclear tests (the transit time is the time between electrical initiation of the implosion and the first measured appearance of gamma rays from the bomb using an ion chamber and oscilloscope), 'alpha' measurement (the rate of increase – multiplication rate of fission – determined by measuring nuclear radiation rise using ionisation chamber near bomb wired to remove oscilloscope, although this is subject to EMP disruption), filmed fireball expansion rate to determine total bomb yield and fallout sampling to determine fission efficiency and hence fission yield), fusion in the George nuclear test at Eniwetok Atoll and fusion boosting in the Item nuclear test. Operations Ranger and Buster Jangle at Nevada test site, including the 1 kt Jangle Sugar ("surface") burst test and its crater and the 1 kt underground Uncle shot 17 feet below ground test: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1029925633034771721&q=nuclear+explosion
Biggest nuclear test ever, the 50 megatons Russian test on 30 October 1961 with massively exaggerated voice-over for example the ‘110 mile wide’ fireball diameter is exaggerated by a factor of over twenty, since the true air burst fireball diameter for 50 megatons was 5.2 miles not 110 miles! The claimed ‘40 miles’ height of the mushroom cloud is also an exaggeration, by a factor of over 50%, and the vague '30 miles' blast devastation area claimed is totally meaningless (cracked windows occur out to many times the range of high velocity glass fragment injuries and structural damage to buildings, so blast devastation is a subjective - meaningless - thing unless you specify exactly what damage criterion you mean, and to what sort of structure, or the overpressure level, you are referring to). At least it does honestly admit that there was no local fallout because it was 2 mile high air burst): http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2046393742348211186&q=nuclear+explosion
There is also the latest declassified data in this blog on measured EMP from high altitude 1962 tests (relevant since North Korea has missiles which can be used to detonate high air bursts), firestorm mechanism at Hiroshima, long term effects, etc.:
Communism versus capitalism: This is not a political blog. I've had some false suggestions sent to me that some of the underlying ideas or motivations are right-wing. This is false. See for example the cover of the 3rd edition of neutron bomb inventor Sam Cohen's book here. That is not worshipping George W. Bush's nuclear politics very much!
What does annoy me are fake scientific arguments for political purposes. If you want total nuclear disarmament or even perhaps communism, that is fine, but I don't like the idea of exaggerating scientific information to try to bring about a destablising of democracy in a sneaky way. It is dangerous to put people off civil defence because you don't know what conditions nuclear weapons will be used under, or in what quantities, so you cannot claim to know for certain that everyone will be killed. That is actually an impossible outcome under the stockpiles available today.
A nuclear free world would be difficult to accomplish for practical reasons such as the widespread distribution of uranium and thorium deposits, and nuclear physics knowledge. Moreover, such a state would be destabilizing - even it was accompanied by a DEVALUATION of nuclear effects hype - because any country breaking the ban by making nuclear weapons would be able to hold the world to ransom under the threat of devastating cities.
(World communism is another solution suggested which simply is not very practical. Communism fails because people are not satisfied with it. Democracy of course does not exist, because in the free world money can be used to buy publicity and propaganda, so power falls into the hands of the corrupt and wealthy who can out-shout, out-spend, and out-bully rivals. But it is a better situation in some ways to communism which is a dictatorship system with even less safeguards against genocide than democracies have. Democracies generally have to fake evidence of weapons of mass destruction, before they can go to war on false premises, or declare a state of emergency, hold people without charge and accidentally shoot and kill innocent, wrongly-identified 'suspects'. Dictators simply do the same things without insulting the public with propaganda that is transparent. Far better to live in a democracy, where public is free to vote for whichever tyrant has the most lying propaganda and spin, than in a dictatorship where fewer efforts are made to cover up the farce. After all, Sputnik in 1957 did not carry a star spangled banner, not did Gargarin, the first person in space in 1961. Live in a democracy and you'll be spared all the money wasting of new innovations that dictatorships spend, because the brave politicians will spend it on clever schemes to make themselves rich when they leave office.)
Update 13 Oct 06 regarding comments above on capitalism: I saw a TV programme here in the UK on 12 October 2006 advising people to invest their spare cash in property in Romania, since it is due to join the EU in a few years. Watching that programme is a bit surreal. The people in Romania have on average very little technology, most of the roads are dirt tracks, it looks like the UK did in the 18th century. But here is a TV programme advising us to buy up all the cheap houses there so that we can make a fortune out of the poor people there by renting them houses at huge profits once the economic boom begins in Romania when it enters the EU. If any communists want propaganda, get a copy of that TV programme! I'm pro-capitalism probably by inherited prejudices more than by reason, but there is something sickeningly diabolical about the 'Matthew effect' in capitalism: the rich always get richer, the poor ... unless there is an economic crash, that is. (Maybe the economic crash will be caused by the 'peak oil crisis'; perhaps a peak oil expert like Lubos Motl's great friend Quantoken will drop by and make a comment?)
The world is supposedly going to suffer panic share selling and economic collapse when oil production passes its peak and begins to subside, anyday now: "The oil coming out of Saudis biggest oil fields now contains more than 50% water, and they are injecting 3 barrels of sea water to get one barrel of this mixed liquid out. That's a fact, not fiction. How much longer do you think the oil can continue to flow from the ground?" - Quantoken, comment on: http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/01/meeting-quantoken.html
'Almost Half of Earth's Easy-Flowing Oil is near the Persian Gulf ... By 2012 A.D. shortages will be severe.'
Unless Tony Smith's suggestions for alternative energy sources there are taken seriously, the side-effect of such an oil-shortage induced world economic crisis could well be the seed of war. Wars are especially hard to stop when there are limited supplies and resources, that have to be fought over.
"The Central England Temperature Record (CET) is the oldest continuous dataset for temperature anywhere in the world.
"Its principal finding this year is that the average temperature for 2006 was almost certainly the highest ever seen in 347 years of CET measurements.
"Researchers cannot be absolutely certain until the year has ended. The average temperature for the year up to 13 December stands at 10.84C. In the 1950s, the CET showed an average of about 9.4C. 'This year sees the highest average temperature recorded since the CET series began in 1659, and the rise above the average is significantly higher than that for the two hottest years we have experienced,' said Professor Phil Jones of [University of East Anglia's] Climatic Research Unit. "
19 July 2006 was the hottest July day in England ever, and I needed air conditioning the whole month (which is not usually needed at all in England). See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/5193970.stm
What I don't like is the idea of spending money on this which just isn't effective, as oil and coal will probably escalate in price as they become more depleted, reducing CO2 pollution naturally. Far better to make the best of the warming as your rational instinct tells you! Northern wastelands previously unhabitable will become new wildlife retreats. There is nothing unnatural about what is occurring, the idea climate change is a disaster because it causes change is a logical fallacy. Things are always changing. It may be tough on polar bears on the disintegrating ice sheets, until things settle down, but that's life. Ice ages have naturally occurred and then melted many times, sometimes very rapidly, causing problems for wildlife.
"From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies [by Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller and other geneticists who worked on plants, who falsely hyped their insect and plant data as valid for mammals like humans during the June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on fallout effects], it appeared that the number (or frequency) of mutations in a given population ... is proportional to the total dose ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions need to be revised, at least for mammals. [Mammals are biologically closer to humans, in respect to DNA repair mechanisms, than short-lived insects whose life cycles are too small to have forced the evolutionary development of advanced DNA repair mechanisms, unlike mammals that need to survive for decades before reproducing.] When exposed to X-rays or gamma rays, the mutation frequency in these animals has been found to be dependent on the exposure (or dose) rate ...
"At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 R/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. [Emphasis added.] There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent ... with adult female mice ... a delay of at least seven weeks between exposure to a substantial dose of radiation, either neutrons or gamma rays, and conception causes the mutation frequency in the offspring to drop almost to zero. ... recovery in the female members of the population would bring about a substantial reduction in the 'load' of mutations in subsequent generations."
As we explain below, the government should have published its nuclear weapons effects research based on the nuclear test data in order to substantiate the scientific basis for civil defense. Hiding the factual scientific evidence for public civil defense advice behind a solid wall of secrecy is a guaranteed way to allow the advice to be falsely ridiculed and ignored by ignorant 'scientists' with a political agenda, thereby maximising the scale of tragedy in the event that civil defense is needed in a disaster. Allowing the popular media to wrongly discredit civil defence also increases the risk of war by encouraging dictators and terrorists to spend money trying to get hold of weapons of mass destruction in the belief that there is no effective defense against such weapons. It's vital to publish the facts!
My father was a Civil Defence Corps instructor in Colchester the 1950s. After the local basic instructor course, for the advanced instructor course he attended the government Civil Defence College, Easingwold (which still exists, now named the Emergency Planning College). At the time he left in 1957 (when he had to work abroad for 12 years until 1969), Britain's Civil Defence Corps was at its largest size since the wartime Blitz. Civil defence Corps membership peaked at 336,265 by May 1956 (reported in The Times, 2 May 1956, page 6). This would have been enough to make a large difference in the event of a war or disaster. However, my father found that even when he left in 1956, the British Civil Defence Corp was doomed by secrecy. The American fallout fiasco at the 15 megaton Castle-Bravo Bikini Atoll surface burst on 1 March 1954 (when they didn't evacuate inhabited atolls directly downwind for two days, and also failed to warn or spot a Japanese ship directly downwind) was being exploited by Soviet Union "peace" propaganda, far-left wing political groups, and genuine but ignorant pacifist groups.
Despite the fact that the BBC still fakes all nuclear explosion films with the sound of the blast falsely superimposed on the explosion flash, to make civil defense duck and cover seem stupid (actually, like thunder after lightning, the blast wave travels slower than light so the flash occurs in silence until the blast arrives, which can be many seconds later for the case of large areas of devastation from a nuclear explosion, giving plenty of time for “duck and cover” action to avoid flying glass when the blast finally arrives), the BBC did make one honest film about the Soviet Union’s “peace offensive” propaganda lies, the four-part 1995 “Messengers from Moscow” documentary. This documentary provides essential evidence of Soviet KGB and related "World Peace Council" propaganda lies discussed in an earlier blog post. Dimitri K. Simes reviewed “Messengers from Moscow” in the 1 June 1995 issue of Confirmation Time:
Our government had the facts from British nuclear tests, but even in 1956 every piece of information such as scientific British nuclear test data and even basic pamphlets of civil defence countermeasures against biological and chemical warfare of relevance to civil defence and of any value in convincing the public and the next generation Civil Defence Corp members that planning and training was based on hard facts, was either Restricted or Official Use Only. A propaganda war ensued, in which all convincing Western nuclear test data was withheld, so that enemy anti-civil defence lies was allowed to go unopposed. The Civil Defence Corp gradually declined and was closed in 1968. The secrecy did not increase security. Enemies armed with nuclear weapons were testing their weapons, and had their own supply of nuclear effects data; in any case secrecy failed to stop the atom spies like Fuchs giving the blueprints of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union even before Hiroshima! The idea that the public is best-served by keeping civil defence validation data secret is therefore crazy. It's very interesting to look at the Soviet Union's Cold War civil defence history. Until 1971, the Soviet civil defence organization was under control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but that year (coinciding with the Soviet nuclear missile program approaching parity with the West, the failure of American efforts in Vietnam, and the American decision to withdraw 2,100 Davy Crockett tactical nuclear weapons from Western Europe), it was put under the control of the Soviet Ministry of Defence, and it had a vastly increased budget from 1973.
Physics and mathematics professors John Dowling and Evans M. Harrell's 1987 American book Civil Defense: A Choice of Disasters (American Institute of Physics, New York) states in Table 1 on page 119 the following per capita expenditures for civil defence (defense for Americans), which shows how the Soviet Union was investing in civil defence for war preparedness (the Soviet figure is what it would cost a democratic country to duplicate the Soviet civil defence preparedness; obviously the Soviet system was not democratic but socialist, so it didn't involve the same actual costs that it would take for a democracy, i.e. the Soviets did not pay out the same wages and tended to less democratic methods to make its citizens train in civil defence):
France: $0.15
U. S.: $0.75
U. K.: $1.15
Italy: $2.00
Denmark: $6.50
U. S. S. R.: $11.30
Switzerland: $33.00
(Note that at the same time that the Soviet Union was transferring its civil defense organization from civilian to direct military control with massively increased resources in the early 1970s when the Soviet Union's nuclear missile stockpile and main battle tank collection was beginning to rival Western military capabilities to defend Western Europe, America transferred its civil defense from military control to a civilian agency. At the same time, as discussed elsewhere, President Nixon was pressed into détente with the Soviet Union in order to deflect media harrassment over his personal involvement in the Watergate controversy. The transfer of American civil defence from control by the Pentagon to a civilian agency had actually been recommended in several research reports on civil defence by nuclear weapons effects researchers in the late 1960s, in the belief that it would reduce secrecy problems. Actually, it increased secrecy problems because civilian agencies tended to have greater numbers of uncleared personnel who had to be kept out of discussions involving classified data, so that the flow of key information was seriously impeded, and being out of the Pentagon they were physically more removed from discussions of the problems with others who were doing very similar analyses.)
§ Lord Renton My Lords, while I thank my noble friend for that reply, may I ask him whether he is aware of the serious conflicts of evidence and the consequent misunderstandings with regard to this vital matter? Will he therefore ensure that publication of the report is given the highest priority and the widest possible circulation when it is published?
§ Lord Elton My Lords, the report will rest on very thorough research. It will be published as an official document available to the public and a copy will be placed in your Lordships' Library.
Lord Shinwell My Lords, with great respect to the noble Lord, Lord Renton, may I ask the noble Lord the Minister how it is possible to estimate or determine the casualties that are likely to result from the use of nuclear weapons when the nuclear weapons have not been used? Do we not have to wait for what happens, and when it happens shall we not know what is going to happen? We shall be destroyed.
...
§ Lord Mishcon My Lords, will the noble Lord the Minister agree that the public of this country deserve a full, frank and simple account of what the Government feel, on scientific advice, to be the effects of nuclear war, in so far as one can carry that hypothesis through? Does the Minister feel that that may well encourage people to support, in so far as is practicable, a civil defence policy, whereas if the Government are not frank people will disbelieve?
§ Lord Elton My Lords, it is the purpose of the report to reveal what we believe the effects of certain nuclear weapons would be if they were used. That will no doubt contribute to the understanding of the public of the need for civil defence, as the noble Lord rightly suggests. ...
§ Lord Jenkins of Putney My Lords, is it not the case that the fortunate people in such an event would be not the survivors but those of us who were lucky enough to catch the full benefit of the blast? ...
§ Lord Renton My Lords, with regard to the question—if I may say so, the shrewd question—raised by the noble Lord, Lord Shinwell, is my noble friend aware that there have been nuclear tests in various parts of the world and that a great deal of scientific evidence has been accumulated as a result of those tests which would give us some indication of what could be done to help people who were not damaged by a direct hit by a nuclear bomb, but were on the wide perimeters of such an attack?
Home Secretary Hurd replied: "We are updating our estimates and information and that will be published. One of the difficulties about this subject is the way in which some people persist in believing that the only possibility worth considering is a massive nuclear attack. That is simply not so. Civil defence planning and training must deal with a whole range of possibilities, including, of course, conventional attack."
"Will my right hon. Friend please make it clear that a increasing number of countries are capable of joining the nuclear powers and therefore any hostilities of this sort could come from one of those, which would create a very different scale of casualties from that following action by one of the super powers? Therefore, it would be quite wrong to reject civil defence purely and merely because some people believe that a major confrontation is quite incomprehensible."
(For fairly up-to-date civil defense countermeasures against chemical and biological terrorism, see the 2004 U. S. Department of State publication No. 11162, Responding to a Biological or Chemical Threat in the United States, while for convincing scientific data on casualty predictions see G. O. Rogers et al., Evaluating Protective Actions for Chemical Agent Emergencies, Oak Ridge National Laboratory for FEMA and the U. S. Army, ORNL-6615, 1990. Other useful information can be found here, here, here, here and here. The Hague Declaration of 1899 Concerning Asphyxiating Gases supposedly “banned” the use of “projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” Despite this 1899 ban on poison gas, all sides used it extensively in World War I. So much for trusting security to making written promises. In his 1923 book The World Crisis, Winston Churchill summarised the wishful thinking of people towards warfare including chemical warfare in 1911: “It is too foolish, too fantastic to be thought of in the twentieth century ... No one would do such things. Civilisation has climbed above such perils. The interdependence of nations in trade and traffic, the sense of public law, the Hague Convention, Liberal principles, the Labour party, high finance, Christian charity, common sense have rendered such nightmares impossible.” Despite the wishful thinking of the 1899 Hague Convention banning chemical warfare, chemical warfare was used by both sides in World War I, and was used in gas chambers in World War II.)
Above: the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch forerunner during World War II ensured that every civilian and soldier had a reliable gas mask, which deterred Hitler from using nerve gases tabun and sarin (discovered in the late 30s by German chemists) against England. He was not being a nice guy: he was deterred by the fact that in highly dispersed form, nerve gas inhalation (not merely skin contact, which requires far larger doses and far more nerve gas to overcome disperson by the wind) is prevented by the activated charcoal absorbers in the cannisters of standard gas masks! If Hitler had used nerve gas, it would have been largely ineffective and would have led to a retaliation with mustard gas against Germany, which did not have enough gas masks due to a rubber shortage. (In Britain, rubber was stockpiled for gas masks long before war broke out and by September 1939, no less than 38 million gas masks had been issued to civilians.) Civil defence thereby helped to negate weapons of mass destruction.
Above: school girls skipping in Britain during a World War II gas mask drill (such drills had to apply to sports recreation outdoors, as well as indoor activities). Cynical, evil anti-civil defence propaganda by falsely claims that because gas masks helped to negate the threat of, and thus deter, gas attacks, they 'were never used and therefore a waste of time and money; no more use than home fire insurance in a year when your home doesn't burn down'. Such people miss the whole point:civil defence is not just like a worthwhile insurance policy, but it actually helps to deter the enemy from attacking because it undermines the gains to be had from making an attack! If America had better aircraft security and defences against terrorists prior to 9/11, and the terrorists had been thus deterred, then we can envisage that terrorism-supporting anti security propaganda would doubtless have cynically and nefariously claimed that the defence measures were a 'waste of time and money' because they were never needed. The gas masks that deterred Hitler from using weapons of mass destruction were successful because they were never used against gas, they were successful because they were used as a deterrent; similarly nuclear weapons in the cold war were not a waste of time because they were never dropped, they were a success, in combination with some civil defence planning, for deterring the Soviet Union from launching an invasion of the West through nuclear intimidation.
Above: this picture answers the question 'why didn't Hitler use his nerve gas against Britain in World War II?' Britain's comprehensive issue of gas masks for all civilian situations - including babies, children, telephone operators, the unconscious and people with acute breathing disorders - meant that Nazi nerve gas production was rendered impotent and obsolete; for it was simply inadequate to gas Britain. The LDt50 (i.e., the air concentration and exposure time product which has units of dosage*time/volume, and which gives rise to 50% lethality) for skin exposure to Nazi tabun and sarin nerve gases were 3,700 and 3,100 times the inhalation LDt50's, respectively. Issuing gas masks increased the amount of nerve gas needed by a factor of 3,700 for tabun and 3,100 for sarin. To overcome dispersion by the weather, the Nazis would have had to drench the country with nerve gas to get it on people's skin assuming people were out of doors, but they simply couldn't make enough nerve gas to do this. Thus, because of Britain's civil defence - which didn't even know about nerve gas, although they did know that the pores in activated charcoal absorbers will absorb any dangerously reactive molecules apart from carbon monoxide - the Nazis were effectively deterred from making what would have been an ineffective attack inviting effective retaliation. These scientific facts are totally ignored in evil anti-civil defence propaganda which ignores the fact that simple civil defence countermeasures in Britain successfully averted weapons of mass destruction during World War II.
Above: the 1963 Civil Defence Handbook No. 10, Advising the Householder on Protection against Nuclear Attack, was cynically written by the Central Office of Information for either the illiterate or the inmates of lunatic asylums, and contained no justification or nuclear test experience to substantiate the crazy-sounding advice it offered. It quickly led to the closure of the Civil Defence Corps when it was held up and ridiculed in the House of Commons. It teaches the lesson that for civil defence, it is no good to dictatorially hand out 'official' nonsense-sounding advice, while keeping the facts that justify it secret. That is what communist and fascist dictatorships do, on the false grounds of 'secrecy' and 'national security' (in fact, some dictatorships are more open to their citizens that this). Instead of patronising citizens by refusing to reveal the solid scientific evidence for each protective measure, the facts must be disclosed to forestall cynical anti-civil defense propaganda. By contrast, the 1950 edition of the U.S. Department of Defense Effects of Atomic Weapons, edited by Dr Glasstone, on pages 392-9 justifies each protective action:
'If a person is in the open when the sudden illumination is apparent, then the best plan is instantaneously to drop to the ground, while curling up so as to shade the bare arms and hands, neck and face with the clothed body. ... A person who is inside a building or home when a sudden atomic bomb attack occurs should drop to the floor, with the back to the window, or crawl behind or beneath a table, desk, counter, etc.; this will also provide a shield against splintered glass due to the blast wave. The latter may reach the building some time after the danger from radiation has passed, and so windows should be avoided for about a minute, since the shock wave continues for some time after the explosion. ... planning will be necessary to avoid panic, for mass hysteria could convert a minor incident into a major disaster.'
It is estimated that Mongol invaders exterminated 35 million Chinese between 1311-40, without modern weapons. Communist Chinese killed 26.3 million dissenters between 1949 and May 1965, according to detailed data compiled by the Russians on 7 April 1969. The Soviet communist dictatorship killed 40 million dissenters, mainly owners of small farms, between 1917-59. Conventional (non-nuclear) air raids on Japan killed 600,000 during World War II. The single incendiary air raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 killed 140,000 people (more than the total for nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined) at much less than the $2 billion expense of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs! Non-nuclear air raids on Germany during World War II killed 593,000 civilians.
J. K. S. Clayton (formerly with the Weapons Department of the RAE Farnborough which he joined in 1946), as Director of the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch oversaw Thatcher’s brilliant ‘Protect and Survive’ era civil defence assault on the Soviet Union (which was controversial because it presented facts about how to protect against nuclear weapons blast, heat and fallout without giving the nuclear test data which validated those facts). Clayton wrote about the basis of Protect and Survive policy in his lengthy and brilliant introduction, 'The Challenge - Why Home Defence?', to the Home Office 1977 Training Manual for Scientific Advisers:
'Since 1945 we have had nine wars - in Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam, between China and India, China and Russia, India and Pakistan and between the Arabs and Israelis on three occasions. We have had confrontations between East and West over Berlin, Formosa and Cuba. There have been civil wars or rebellions in no less than eleven countries and invasions or threatened invasions of another five. Whilst it is not suggested that all these incidents could have resulted in major wars, they do indicate the aptitude of mankind to resort to a forceful solution of its problems, sometimes with success. ...
'Let us consider what a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom might mean. It will be assumed that such an attack will only occur within the context of a general nuclear war which means that the UK is only one of a number of targets and probably by no means the most important. It follows that only part of the enemy's stock of weapons is destined for us. If the Warsaw Pact Nations constitute the enemy - and this is only one possible assumption - and if the enemy directs the bulk of his medium range and intermediate range weapons against targets in Western Europe behind the battle front, then Western Europe would receive about 1,000 megatons. Perhaps the UK could expect about one fifth of this, say 200 Mt. Let us assume rather arbitrarily that this would consist of 5 x 5 Mt, 40 x 2 Mt, 50 x 1 Mt and 100 x 1/2 Mt.
'An attack of this weight would cause heavy damage over about 10,000 square kilometres, moderate to heavy damage over about 50,000 square kilometres, and light damage over an additional 100,000 square kilometres. (Light damage means no more than minor damage to roofs and windows with practically no incidence of fire.) We can compare the heavy damage to that suffered by the centre of Coventry in 1940. This will amount to approximately 5% of the land area of the UK. Another 15% will suffer extensive but by no means total damage by blast and fire; another 40% will suffer superficial damage. The remaining 40% will be undamaged. In other words, four-fifths of the land area will suffer no more than minor physical damage. Of course, many of the undamaged areas would be affected by radioactive fallout but this inconvenience would diminish with the passage of time.
'Policy to meet the Threat
'The example just given of the likely severity of the attack - which is, of course, only one theoretical possibility - would still leave the greater part of the land area undamaged and more people are likely to survive than to perish. Government Home Defence policy must therefore be aimed to increase the prospects of the survivors in their stricken environment.'
Clayton's decisive civil defence actions based on the Miller fallout data were later strongly supported by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (a former research chemist, unlike most scientifically ignorant politicians) who - despite her widely perceived domestic policy failings as a right-wing woman - backed the morality of civil defence and on foreign policy issues stood up to terrorist state dictator Leonid Brezhnev, echoing Clayton's pragmatic outlook on war in her address to the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament on 23 June 1982, when she pointed out that in the years since the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 million people were killed by 140 non-nuclear conflicts, so:
‘The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. It is the disposition on the part of some states to impose change on others by resorting to force against other nations ... Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace.’
On 29 October 1982, Thatcher stated of the Berlin Wall:
‘You may chain a man, but you cannot chain his mind. You may enslave him, but you will not conquer his spirit. In every decade since the war the Soviet leaders have been reminded that their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles ... one day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.’
Leonid Brezhnev fortunately died on 10 November 1982, while Reagan and Thatcher challenged the Soviet Union's nuclear superiority with increased civil defence efforts coupled to military expenditure in a successful effort to bankrupt and reform the corrupt Soviet terrorist system.
On 22 November 1990, she was able to declare: ‘Today, we have a Europe ... where the threat to our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact has been removed; where the Berlin Wall has been torn down and the Cold War is at an end. These immense changes did not come about by chance. They have been achieved by strength and resolution in defence, and by a refusal ever to be intimidated.’
'The case for civil defence stands regardless of whether a nuclear deterrent is necessary or not. ... Even if the U.K. were not itself at war, we would be as powerless to prevent fallout from a nuclear explosion crossing the sea as was King Canute to stop the tide.' - U.K. Home Office leaflet, Civil Defence, 1982.
Empirical data (above, calculated by Joseph Friedlander) proves that the amount of collateral damage and collateral (large area) casualti...
