Above: film of the Effects of Nuclear Weapons, beginning by debunking the radiation myths of Hiroshima. The 1977 edition of the Effects of Nuclear Weapons book, by Glasstone and Dolan, gives further data showing that there is evidence for "threshold" doses below which no negative effects occur:
"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."
- Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd ed., 1977, pp. 611-3.
Above: the theory of the experimentally observed threshold doses for the radium dial painters and for the Hiroshima survivors.
In 1996, half a century after the nuclear detonations, data on cancers from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was published by D. A. Pierce et al. of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF (Radiation Research vol. 146 pp. 1-27; Science vol. 272, pp. 632-3) for 86,572 survivors, of whom 60% had received bomb doses of over 5 mSv (or 500 millirem in old units) suffering 4,741 cancers of which only 420 were due to radiation, consisting of 85 leukemias and 335 solid cancers.
Above: how to lie with statistics, applied by the 'Radiation Effects Research Foundation' (RERF) in its deceiving propaganda online guide, A Brief Description (6 MB) which is U.S. Department of Energy part-funded; you lump together all the low dose-end Hiroshima and Nagasaki lifespan study (LSS) data until you get enough higher dose survivors in the group so that the overall excess risk for that disproportionately large group becomes positive, to cover up the truth.
They are covering up the data at low doses to obfuscate statistical evidence of benefits and threshold for injury (for low doses the dosimetry is most accurate as we shall see, due to the little shielding that the average survivor had; the shielding calculations for large shielding factors at high doses are the major source of dosimetry error as indicated by the temporary epilation dose-response curve).
RERF are also lumping together Hiroshima data (where neutron doses were relatively high) with Nagasaki data (where the hydrogen nuclei - protons - in the implosion TNT shell around the plutonium core substantially slowed down the neutrons that escaped, reducing the neutron doses in Nagasaki to below those from the gun-type assembly Hiroshima bomb). Threshold and beneficial effects of gamma radiation should show up most strongly in the Nagasaki data, where neutron doses were smallest (gamma rays at Nagasaki usually just knocked out electrons from atoms by the Compton effect, but at Hiroshima, the higher contribution of neutrons knocked whole protons out of hydrogen nuclei, which caused more irrepairable DNA damage and probably prevented low dose benefits or threshold response, and this effect is not corrected by simply assigning a relative biological effectiveness of 20 or so to neutron doses).
Thus, lumping the data from both cities together tragically obscures the beneficial effects of gamma radiation at low doses in the resulting statistics; the Nagasaki data is vitally important for fallout decontamination in civil defence.
Additionally, the RERF must publish a full analysis of the effects of average dose rate at Hiroshima and Nagasaki upon the effects of particular dose intervals. Dose rates did vary because the time interval (up to tens of seconds for most of the gamma radiation from the buoyantly rising fireball) over which the initial nuclear radiation was emitted was only a weak function of distance, whereas the doses were a strong function of distance. Because single strands of DNA in each body cell are naturally broken about twice a second in each cell and are naturally repaired, the dose rate variations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been enough to have had some effect on cancer induction. In any case, knowledge of the averaged dose rates are vital for comparison with other human cancer induction data where the dose rate was different.
The statistics in the paper by Chen and others has been alleged to apply to a younger age group than the general population, affecting the significance of the data, although in other ways the data are more valid than Hiroshima and Nagasaki data extrapolations to low doses. For instance, the radiation cancer scare mongering of survivors of high doses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been prejudiced in the sense of preventing a blind to avoid “anti-placebo” effect, e.g. increased fear, psychological stress and worry about the long term effects of radiation, and associated behaviour. The 1958 book about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, “Formula for Death”, makes the point that highly irradiated survivors often smoked more, in the belief that they were doomed to die from radiation induced cancer anyway. Therefore, the fear culture of the irradiated survivors would statistically be expected to result in a deviancy from normal behaviour, in some cases increasing the cancer risks above those due purely to radiation exposure.
For up-to-date data and literature discussions on the effects of DNA repair enzymes on preventing cancers from low-dose rate radiation, please see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis
See the earlier post, linked here, and also the post here on the history of the low-level effects exaggeration. The linear non-threshold (LNT) anti-civil defence dogma results from ignoring the vitally important effects of the dose rate on cancer induction, which have been known and published in papers by Mole and a book by Loutit for about 50 years; the current dogma which is falsely based on merely the total dose, thus ignoring the time-dependent ability of protein P53 and other to cancer-prevention mechanisms to repair broken DNA segments. This is particularly the case for double strand breaks (which form about 4% of radiation induced DNA breaks, and 0.007% of spontaneous breaks at body temperature, i.e. typically 15 natural double strand breaks per cell per day), where the whole double helix gets broken; the repair of single strand breaks is less time-dependent because there is no risk of the broken single strand being joined to the wrong end of a broken DNA segment. Repair is only successful in preventing cancer if the broken ends are rapaired correctly before too many unrepaired breaks have accumulated in a short time; if too many double strand breaks occur quickly, segments can be incorrectly 'repaired' with double strand breaks being miss-matched to the wrong segments ends, possibly inducing cancer if the resulting somatic cell can then undergo division successfully without apoptosis. In these earlier posts, we saw how the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) website was covering up the scientific effects on radiation and presenting false information as propaganda to exaggerate the effects of nuclear weapons and thus devalue civil defence. Now they have removed some of the offensive material and put up some facts (however notice that they omit error-bars from their data points, so they are still not following strictly scientific protocol):
Above: the new graph on the Radiation Effects Research Foundation website (note that the unit 1 Gy = Gray = 1 Joule/kilogram of deposited radiation energy in the target material = 100 cGy = 100 rads), showing the non-linear radiation effects of leukemia, the biggest radiation cancer problem (but notice that this curve only applies to one age group and one year after exposure, and is just a carefully selected subset of the data they now have which we will examine later; notice also how they literally cover-up the latest 2002 DS02 dosimetry data points for low doses, with irrelevant obsolete data points from the superseded 1986 DS86 dosimetry report!):
'As of the year 2000, there were 204 leukemia deaths among 49,204 Life Span Study survivors with a bone marrow dose of at least 0.005 Gy, an excess of 94 cases (46%) attributable to A-bomb radiation. In contrast to dose-response patterns for other cancers [which are generally more survivable and show far less radiation effects response anyway], that for leukemia appears to be nonlinear; low doses may be less effective than would be predicted by a simple linear dose response.'
Above: graph using earlier 1982 data, demonstrating why leukemia is so important: it shows a greater dose-effects response than other cancers. Solid cancers tend to respond better to treatment than leukemia. Notice the log-log scales (with marked discontinuity to linear scale where zero dose is indicated, since of course zero does not appear on a logarithmic axis): this log-log scale is needed to clearly show the effects at low doses, where the results are more accurate due to more people being exposed to lower doses than higher doses. The new presentation tries to cover-up the effects of low doses by using linear (not logarithmic) graph axes! It is very important to emphasise the two essential reasons why the data for low doses is more accurate:
(1) the dosimetry is more accurate for lower doses (the average shielding of survivor is less at low doses, for obvious reasons, making dosimetry far more accurate), and
(2) the sample size of exposed people is bigger than at high doses.
There is evidence that the dosimetry is inaccurate for high doses from the curve of temporary epilation (hair loss) versus dose, which we will discuss later. The problem with dosimetry at the high doses, near ground zero, is that the relatively few survivors at high doses tended to have substantial radiation protection by buildings, so the shielding calculations (which were not checked against atmospheric nuclear test data like the free-field dose data) were very important for survivors with high doses, but were not important for survivors with lower doses (where many people survived despite being outdoors and relatively unprotected). The larger number of people exposed to lower doses also makes the effects curve more accurate at lower doses than at higher doses, because statistically the larger sample at low doses is less likely to be in error due to mistakes in the locations of survivors than the smaller sample for higher doses. These facts would make the lower dose data more accurate, and is why there should be error bars on the data points to show which parts of the data are the most accurate: but the RERF is omitting error bars from data points!
The illustrated ABC Dose/Dose Rate Model that predicts the beneficial effects of radiation and the threshold is described in its formative stages in an earliest post (linked here): this model includes constants A, B and C, and dose or dose rate D, and predicts beneficial effects from low doses or low dose rates by a natural exponential term (beneficial effect = A*e-BD where A is the cancer risk at zero dose or dose rate D, and B is a constant) which, when summed with the usual linear no-threshold curve for high doses/rates, produces:
(A) the observed small benefit of very low doses/rates,
(B) the threshold dose/rate, and then
(C) the linear response at high doses/rates, which is why it can be called an ABC Dose Model (obviously the linear response curve must break down at very high doses because the risk of 1 person getting cancer can never exceed 100%).
There should be two versions of the model, one for acute doses and one for dose rates (chronic exposure). The dose rates involved for initial nuclear radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very high, since most of the radiation was received within a minute. Similar doses received at lower dose rates would not overwork DNA repair mechanisms so much, so they should allow greater repair of DNA and greater beneficial effects by stimulation of the repair mechanisms (like regular workouts at a gym; building up strength).
This model is based on the review, in 2005, of the mechanism behind the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data at low doses, by L. E. Feinendegen in his paper, 'Evidence for beneficial low level radiation effects and radiation hormesis' in the British Journal of Radiology, vol. 78, pp. 3-7:
'Low doses in the mGy range [1 mGy = 0.1 rad, since 1 Gray = 1 Joule/kg = 100 rads] cause a dual effect on cellular DNA. One is a relatively low probability of DNA damage per energy deposition event and increases in proportion to the dose. At background exposures this damage to DNA is orders of magnitude lower than that from endogenous sources, such as reactive oxygen species. The other effect at comparable doses is adaptive protection against DNA damage from many, mainly endogenous, sources, depending on cell type, species and metabolism. Adaptive protection causes DNA damage prevention and repair and immune stimulation. It develops with a delay of hours, may last for days to months, decreases steadily at doses above about 100 mGy to 200 mGy and is not observed any more after acute exposures of more than about 500 mGy. Radiation-induced apoptosis and terminal cell differentiation also occur at higher doses and add to protection by reducing genomic instability and the number of mutated cells in tissues. At low doses reduction of damage from endogenous sources by adaptive protection maybe equal to or outweigh radiogenic damage induction. Thus, the linear-no-threshold (LNT) hypothesis for cancer risk is scientifically unfounded and appears to be invalid in favour of a threshold or hormesis. This is consistent with data both from animal studies and human epidemiological observations on low-dose induced cancer. The LNT hypothesis should be abandoned and be replaced by a hypothesis that is scientifically justified and causes less unreasonable fear and unnecessary expenditure.'
Above: non-cancerous effects of radiation show low dose benefits and threshold evidence.
Notice how in their leukemia effects curve, RERF deliberately cover-up the new DS02 data points using old obsolete and irrelevant DS86 data points! But since they're abusing the earlier DS86 data, let's look at some facts in that DS86 data that they want to hush up:
Above: Y. Shimizu, et al., Life Span Study Report II, Part 2, Cancer Mortality in the Years 1950-1985 Based on the Recently Revised Doses (DS86), Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF-TR-5-88. You can see that small doses up to 5 rads have no effect either way on the leukemia risk, while 6-9 rads in this data seems to cause a reduction in normal leukemia risk from 0.17% to 0.12%. Doses which exceed this are harmful: the P53 repair mechanism was saturated and could not repair radiation induced damage to DNA due to the rate it occurred at the higher doses.
DS86 and DS02 in the RERF curve above refer to the 1986 and 2002 dosimetry systems, which are nuclear radiation transport codes developed originally for predicting the effects of nuclear weapons. The 2002 dosimetry system for Hiroshima and Nagasaki was validated against the measured radiation doses from the 500 kt pure fission IVY-KING nuclear air burst at Eniwetok Atoll, as well as against the early Nevada tests of heavy implosion devices, very similar in design to the Nagasaki bomb: RANGER-FOX, BUSTER JANGLE-CHARLIE, and BUSTER JANGLE-DOG. (Reference: DS02 dosimetry report, pages 167-8.) It was also accurately validated for neutrons by comparing neutron induced residual radioactivity measurements in various impurities in structural steel and other materials in the cities at various distances with the amounts of neutron induced activity predicted by the computer code, and for gamma radiation doses the model was accurately validated by thermoluminescence of crystalline materials in roof tiles and such like (gamma radiation exposure causes electron displacements in crystals, and thus rearranges the crystal structure; this trapped energy can subsequently be emitted as light when the crystal is heated years later, allowing many crystalline materials to behave as accurate gamma dosimeters after correction for background radiation by correlation with similar materials which were at distances that did not receive bomb radiation).
Above: 'Sex and Civil Defense' unhelpfully tries to use humour to discredit lying propaganda hype on the genetic effects of radiation, published in the February 1983 issue of the Journal of Civil Defense page 10, linked here. However, there is no humour to be found in the sad facts about lying radiation propaganda and its effects on the world. Because the scientific community were unable to communicate the facts efficiently against pseudo-scientific propaganda, over 100,000 human lives were lost by abortions after Chernobyl: in 1995, environmentalist Michael Allaby stated on pages 191-7 of his book Facing the Future: the Case for Science (Bloomsbury, London):
'The clear aim of the anti-nuclear movement is to silence all opposition ... theirs are now the only voices heard ... In the Gomel district ... which was one of the most heavily contaminated [after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986], the death rate per thousand newborn babies was 16.3 in 1985, 13.4 in 1986, and 13.1 in 1987; in Kiev region the figures ... were, respectively, 15.5, 12.2, and 12.1.'
The International Atomic Energy Authority has reported that over 100,000 excess abortions were performed throughout Western Europe after the Chernobyl accident (reference: L. E. Ketchum, Lessons of Chernobyl: SNM members try to decontaminate world threatened by fallout, Part I [Newsline], J. Nucl. Med., vol. 28, 1987, pp. 413-22).
Therefore, unjustified fear of radiation promoted by people with axes to grind is not 'harmless scare-mongering quackery for promoting terrorism by communist or other groups of dictatorial thugs', but it has been proved by experience to be nefarious; costing many, many human lives. We rightly denounce the pseudoscience of Nazi eugenics for the Holocaust and we denounce the flawed Marxist utopian ideology which needs to be fostered on people by Stalinism for killing more innocent human beings than the Holocaust in the purges, so scientifically we must place the lethal effects of pseudoscience on low level radiation for political purposes into the same category of fanatical dogma and groupthink that murdered so many people. The lesson? Pseudoscience, when widely promoted and made into mainstream dogma, can result in evil consequences.
‘Today we have a population of 2,383 [radium dial painter] cases for whom we have reliable body content measurements. . . . All 64 bone sarcoma [cancer] cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy [1,000 rads], while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy.’
Dr Philip Abelson, Editor Emeritus of Science journal, in an editorial on 'Risk Assessments of Low-Level Exposures' published in Science, vol. 265, 9 September 1994 issue, p. 1507, wrote:
'The current mode of extrapolating high-dose to low-dose effects is erroneous for both chemicals and radiation. Safe levels of exposure exist. The public has been needlessly frightened and deceived, and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted. A hard-headed, rapid examination of phenomena occurring at low exposures should have a high priority.'
J. Strzelczyk, W. Potter and Z. Zdrojewicz state in their paper, 'Rad-By-Rad (Bit-By-Bit): Triumph of Evidence Over Activities Fostering Fear of Radiogenic Cancers at Low Doses', Dose Response, vol. 5 (2007), issue 4, pp. 275-283:
'Large segments of Western populations hold sciences in low esteem. This trend became particularly pervasive in the field of radiation sciences in recent decades. The resulting lack of knowledge, easily filled with fear that feeds on itself, makes people susceptible to prevailing dogmas. Decades-long moratorium on nuclear power in the US, resentment of "anything nuclear", and delay/refusal to obtain medical radiation procedures are some of the societal consequences. The problem has been exacerbated by promulgation of the linear-no-threshold (LNT) dose response model by advisory bodies such as the ICRP, NCRP and others. This model assumes no safe level of radiation and implies that response is the same per unit dose regardless of the total dose. The most recent (June 2005) report from the National Research Council, BEIR VII (Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation) continues this approach and quantifies potential cancer risks at low doses by linear extrapolation of risk values obtained from epidemiological observations of populations exposed to high doses, 0.2 Sv to 3 Sv. It minimizes the significance of a lack of evidence for adverse effects in populations exposed to low doses, and discounts documented beneficial effects of low dose exposures on the human immune system. The LNT doctrine is in direct conflict with current findings of radiobiology and important features of modern radiation oncology.
'Fortunately, these aspects are addressed in-depth in another major report—issued jointly in March 2005 by two French Academies, of Sciences and of Medicine. The latter report is much less publicized, and thus it is a responsibility of radiation professionals, physicists, nuclear engineers, and physicians to become familiar with its content and relevant studies, and to widely disseminate this information. To counteract biased media, we need to be creative in developing means of sharing good news about radiation with co-workers, patients, and the general public.'
‘An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan. Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 ([low dose rate, gamma radiation emitter] half-life: 5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv, a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv. Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per 100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per 1,000 children under age 19.
‘The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per 100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and income distributions of these persons are the same as for the general population, it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure. ...’
Above: the harmful effects of radiation are approximately linear but there is another effect which also needs to be incorporated into the overall dose-effects curve for radiation, even where the dose rate is high as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki initial nuclear exposure lasting under a minute. This extra effect is the increased stimulation of DNA repair and self-destruction enzymes, which work faster when they detect the free radicals and hydrogen peroxide formed by radiation hitting cellular water, preventing the usual cancer incidence occurring at low doses. This beneficial effect is similar to the hormesis effect that most vitamins and certain minerals have on us: too much sodium kills you, but too little sodium kills you because it’s needed for electrolyte balance. There is a range over which the dose has a benefit: outside that range, it is bad. The radiation hormesis effect exponentially reduces the natural cancer incidence as dose increases, while the harmful component of the overall effect of the dose is more simple and rises linearly. The net result is a curve that dips into negative effects (i.e. benefits of reduced risk, not harmful effects) for a while at low doses, before hitting a threshold equal to the zero dose incidence, and then rising at higher doses into harmful overall results.
‘... it is important to note that, given the effects of a few seconds of irradiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a threshold near 200 mSv may be expected for leukemia and some solid tumors. [Sources: UNSCEAR, Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation, New York, 1994; W. F. Heidenreich, et al., Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1999), p. 205; and B. L. Cohen, Radiat. Res., vol. 149 (1998), p. 525.] For a protracted lifetime natural exposure, a threshold may be set at a level of several thousand millisieverts for malignancies, of 10 grays for radium-226 in bones, and probably about 1.5-2.0 Gy for lung cancer after x-ray and gamma irradiation. [Sources: G. Jaikrishan, et al., Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. S149 (for natural exposure); R. D. Evans, Health Physics, vol. 27 (1974), p. 497 (for radium-226); H. H. Rossi and M. Zaider, Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1997), p. 85 (for radiogenic lung cancer).] The hormetic effects, such as a decreased cancer incidence at low doses and increased longevity, may be used as a guide for estimating practical thresholds and for setting standards. ...
‘Though about a hundred of the million daily spontaneous DNA damages per cell remain unrepaired or misrepaired, apoptosis, differentiation, necrosis, cell cycle regulation, intercellular interactions, and the immune system remove about 99% of the altered cells. [Source: R. D. Stewart, Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. 101.] ...
‘[Due to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986] as of 1998 (according to UNSCEAR), a total of 1,791 thyroid cancers in children had been registered. About 93% of the youngsters have a prospect of full recovery. [Source: C. R. Moir and R. L. Telander, Seminars in Pediatric Surgery, vol. 3 (1994), p. 182.] ... The highest average thyroid doses in children (177 mGy) were accumulated in the Gomel region of Belarus. The highest incidence of thyroid cancer (17.9 cases per 100,000 children) occurred there in 1995, which means that the rate had increased by a factor of about 25 since 1987.
‘This rate increase was probably a result of improved screening [not radiation!]. Even then, the incidence rate for occult thyroid cancers was still a thousand times lower than it was for occult thyroid cancers in nonexposed populations (in the US, for example, the rate is 13,000 per 100,000 persons, and in Finland it is 35,600 per 100,000 persons). Thus, given the prospect of improved diagnostics, there is an enormous potential for detecting yet more [fictitious] "excess" thyroid cancers. In a study in the US that was performed during the period of active screening in 1974-79, it was determined that the incidence rate of malignant and other thyroid nodules was greater by 21-fold than it had been in the pre-1974 period. [Source: Z. Jaworowski, 21st Century Science and Technology, vol. 11 (1998), issue 1, p. 14.]’
Here is a brief explanation from the December 2002 issue of Discover magazine article Is radiation good for you? by Will Hively:
‘Any idiot should be able to poison a plant. That's what Edward Calabrese thought in 1966 as a junior at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. He was in a plant physiology class at the time, and his lab group had been told to dose some peppermint with an herbicide called Phosfon. ... the lesson backfired. Instead of shriveling, the crop grew green and luxuriant. "Either you treated the plants with the wrong chemical, or you mislabeled them," the professor said. "God forbid, you discovered something new."
‘When Calabrese next tried to repeat the experiment, the peppermint shriveled as expected. But the professor had been right: Calabrese had discovered something new. When he sprayed the plants with a diluted dose of the poison, as he had done mistakenly the first time, the plants thrived. By every measure—height, weight, root length—they did about 40 percent better than those that did not get Phosfon. ...
‘Poisons that injure or kill at high doses can have the opposite effect at low doses, he says, and the paradox holds true for every conceivable measure of health—growth, fertility, life span, and immune and mental function. The effect is known as hormesis, from the Greek word for excite. "The implications," he says, "are enormous."
‘During the past decade, Calabrese has combed through tens of thousands of studies for examples of the effect, and he has found them in impressive numbers. Worms exposed to excessive heat, rats given a little dioxin, mice and humans exposed to low-level radiation—all have lived longer, in controlled experiments, than they would have without the toxins. ...
‘It also becomes scary. Using toxins to improve health sounds both irresponsible and suspiciously convenient for polluters. If a little dioxin is good for you, why bother to clean up the Hudson River? If a touch of arsenic can fend off cancer, why lower the allowable amount in drinking water, as the Environmental Protection Agency has urged? "This is one of the major awakenings we are going through," Calabrese says. "We really don't see any exceptions, and that's hard for people to deal with. But I have so much data—this is so overwhelmingly convincing—that I don't think anyone rational could deny that hormesis exists." ... Paracelsus, a 16th-century Swiss-German pharmacologist ... declared: "All things are poison and nothing is without poison. It is the dose that makes a thing a poison." This was common sense of a sort: We all know that even essential nutrients like sodium become toxic in high doses. ...
‘Poisons, the psychiatrist Rudolf Arndt and the pharmacologist Hugo Schulz declared, simply have a lower threshold of toxicity than other substances; taken in the right quantity, they can do good. As the Arndt-Schulz law put it: Poisons are stimulants in small doses. Arndt based his conclusions on animal experiments, Schulz on studies of yeast fermentation. ...
‘Soon after the discovery of X rays in 1895, researchers began publishing reports of radiation hormesis, claiming, for example, that low doses stimulated plants. At the same time, some quacks began touting radioactive patent medicines for every conceivable human ailment. It's not clear how many people exposed themselves to such elixirs, but the fad came to an abrupt halt with several well-publicized poisonings. In 1932, for instance, industrialist Eben Byers died from bone cancer presumably caused by his regular intake of radium supplements. Meanwhile, other researchers had shown that radiation causes chromosome damage in fruit flies—the higher the dose, the more mutations.
‘After World War II, physicists and others unhappy with the spread of nuclear weapons fanned the fear of radiation. By the time Calabrese's generation went to school, all mention of hormesis had dropped out of textbooks. ...
‘The general principle behind hormesis ... is homeostasis: the tendency of an organism to keep itself on an even keel. We respond to a rise in temperature by sweating. We respond to invading microbes by cranking up the immune system. Hormesis occurs when our bodies overcompensate, reaching a new and healthier equilibrium. When the immune system "remembers" foreign proteins, for instance, it can gear up quicker to cope with similar challenges, and the organism becomes more resistant to disease. Friedrich Nietzsche wasn't far off the mark, hormesis researchers say: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Some would even cite weightlifting, running, and character-building experiences as examples of stresses that produce hormesis. ...
‘Drugs typically lock onto receptors that signal the body to produce more of some needed chemical—a hormone, say—or to remove it from circulation. If low doses of poisons act just like medicines, then they should affect the same pathways. Calabrese and Baldwin have identified about 30 types of receptors that drugmakers target. They regulate important functions such as cell division, immune responses, and nerve signals, and they seem likely places where toxins would act. ...
‘As for immune-system stimulants, the best example may be radiation. While most scientists dismissed radiation treatments as quackery after World War II, a handful continued to test it as a way to prevent metastasis in cancer patients. In 1976 and 1979, two small clinical trials at Harvard found that low-dose radiation boosted four-year metastatic cancer survival rates from 40 to 70 percent and from 52 to 74 percent. Five years ago, a study at Tohoku University in Japan reported that patients who received low-dose radiation had an 84 percent chance of surviving for 12 years; those who didn't receive it had only a 50 percent chance of surviving nine years. ...
‘Myron Pollycove ... finds that low-level radiation benefits the body in at least two ways: It stimulates the immune system in the constant search-and-destroy mission against cancerous cells, and it stimulates DNA repair. ... all radiation causes damage, even at low doses, but ... the stimulation it provides more than compensates [at low doses] for the damage. For cancer therapy, they recommend the Japanese procedure, in which patients first get conventional high-dose radiation and/or chemotherapy to kill off tumors, then follow it up with low-dose treatments to stimulate hormesis and fight metastasis.’
THE FACTS ABOUT DNA REPAIR MECHANISMS AND LOW LEVEL RADIATION
The structure of DNA was of course discovered using DNA in a solid crystalline form by X-ray diffraction (Crick and Watson, 1953). However, in the human body DNA is not in that form but is immersed in water at 37 oC and is therefore continually being buffeted by Brownian motion from other molecules. The DNA strands in every single cell on the human body are naturally broken (single strand breaks) 200,000 times every single day, or 2.3 times per second! About 4% of the total number of radiation-induced DNA breaks are double strand breaks (the DNA molecule is a double helix, with two strands in it), and 0.007% of spontaneous DNA breaks are double strand breaks. To prevent every cell rapidly turning cancerous, the human body dedicates a great deal of effort to repairing the damage occurring all the time.
It is well known that the rate at which mammals breathe is depends in part upon the concentration of harmful carbon dioxide in the air. Similarly, the rate at which DNA damage is repaired depends partly upon the rate at which damage is done to DNA.
In the late 1970s, proteins like P53, involved in the repair of the broken DNA strands, were discovered. In the 1960s, French studies were carried out on the effect of background radiation upon protozoans shielded from the natural background radiation by 5 and 10 cm of lead: they grew at 60% and 40%, respectively, of the natural growth rates for normal background radiation! This was the first solid evidence that indicated that background gamma radiation is actually beneficial to life, like vitamins in small doses (vitamins are harmful in excessive doses, but essential in small doses). Soon there was evidence from mice which confirmed this, but obviously human evidence was needed, because DNA repair mechanisms may differ between species:
In 1993, Dr Sohei Kondo's book Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation (Kinki University Press, Osaka) reported two Chinese studies, over 10 years, comparing cancer rates in 74,000 people exposed to 3.5 times the normal background radiation for 16 generations, with a control group of 77,000 people who were exposed to normal background radiation. The group exposed to 3.5 times normal background radiation had the lowest overall cancer rate.
Then, in 1995, James Muckerheide's report 'The Health Effects of Low-Level Radiation: Science, Data, and Corrective Action', was published in Nuclear News, vol. 38, pp. 26-34. Muckerheide presented smaller sample sizes than the Chinese study (12,918 people in Kerala, India, exposed to 4 times normal background, and a control group of 5,938 exposed to normal background), but at least confirmed that there was no rise in cancer rates in the more highly exposed group. Muckerheide has further interesting reports here, here, here, and here. (However, see the concluding notice to this blog post about the harmful effects of high-LET radiation like alpha particles from radon gas which deposit their energy over such a short distance in tissue they overload DNA repair mechanisms and probably have no threshold; some advocates of beneficial effects of radiation do not have reliable data. The beneficial effects of low-LET gamma radiation described in this post do not necessarily apply to internal emitters of high-LET radiation like alpha and beta particles; although we will discuss the evidence from the radium dial painters which shows that there were no bone cancers or leukemias below a threshold alpha emitting radium intake, which was accurately determined from the radioactivity of bone samples after death.)
We shall now discuss the effects documented in the new online effects summary (PDF document). First of all, DS02 reassesses the Hiroshima yield and burst altitude to be 16 kt at 600 metres above ground zero (the 'hypocenter'). For Nagasaki, DS02 uses 21 kt yield at 503 metres burst altitude. We'll discuss the new dose-versus-distance and dose-shielding data later on, after discussing the key effects data as a function of the latest DS02 dose data.
ACUTE RADIATION EFFECTS: HAIR LOSS (EPILATION) AND THE SYNERGISTIC LD50 DOSE FOR ALREADY UNDERNOURISHED, THERMAL FLASH BURNED, BLAST DEBRIS LACERATED NUCLEAR WEAPON CASUALTIES
The summary document states on page 11: ‘Early estimates from survivor interviews measured the LD50 in terms of the distance from the hypocenter at which 50% of people survived: 1,000 to 1,200 meters in Hiroshima and 1,000 to 1,300 meters in Nagasaki. Dose estimation was not possible at that time because of insufficient shielding information. Later analyses of extensive records at RERF were able to make estimates of shielding and to calculate that a bone marrow dose of 2.7 to 3.1 Gy caused 50% mortality within 60 days (with the new DS02 dosimetry system, the corresponding doses would be 2.9 to 3.3 Gy). The data came from about 7,600 survivors in 2,500 households exposed inside Japanese houses located within 1,600 meters of the hypocenter in Hiroshima. Survivors inside Japanese houses received special scrutiny because the homogeneity of such housing structures allowed better estimation of individual radiation doses. The closer one was to the hypocenter, however, the higher the radiation dose received and the more severe the effects of blast and heat in terms of destruction of houses and subsequent fires. It was thus impossible to classify deaths that occurred within a few weeks after the bombings as due to radiation, injuries, or burns.’
Hence, the DS02 measured LD50/60 (lethal dose for 50% for acute radiation syndrome effects occurring within 60 days of exposure) for thermal flash burned, blast debris lacerated nuclear weapon casualties who are suffering from malnutrition due to severe food rationing before exposure, is 290-330 cGy.
Page 11 adds that using this data, 'together with other information from cases involving exposure to accidental radiation or radiation therapy, the United Nations’ Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has estimated the bone marrow LD50/60 at around 2.5 Gy when little or no medical assistance is available and at 5 Gy or more with extensive medical care.'
This is important: these LD50/60 estimates are based on data from radiation exposure to people malnourished with thermal flash burns and blast debris laceration trauma (in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualties), and very ill cancer patients in the case of whole-body gamma radiotherapy data. This is why the figures are so low. In addition, note that the bone marrow dose is only a fraction of the free-in-air dose, because bone marrow is substantially shielded against radiation by the human body (by the soft tissue and also of course by the bone which surrounds the marrow). These two factors account for why the LD50/60 doses reported are relatively low compared to those for healthy people where the exposure is measured in air (by radiation meters) and not caclulated for the shielded bone marrow.
LONG-TERM CANCER EFFECTS
Above: the non-linear dose-response leukemia effects curve published for DS02 data. Page 11 of the summary reports that cataracts also may show a non-linear or theshold dose-effect response: ‘It is unclear how frequently radiation cataracts advance to severe visual impairment, although we have documented in a recent study about a 20–30% excess at 1 Gy of cataracts that prompted cataract surgery. A low-dose threshold may exist below which radiation cataract does not arise, although our recent analyses suggest that there may not be a threshold, or if one exists, it is somewhere in the range of 0 to 0.8 Gy.’
Above: effects of age at time of exposure, and also age attained in the years after exposure, on the leukemia risk for a dose of 100 cGy (1 Gy). Because the immune systems of very young people are still in the process of development, they are relatively vulnerable to cancer and infections.
Above: cynical cover-up (which we have highlighted with a red box) in the table of data published: what they have done is cover-up the threshold or beneficial immune system boosting by low doses, by lumping together all the 0.005-0.1 Gy (0.5-10 cGy or 'rads') dose effects data, instead of breaking it down as they previously did! This is a cynical cover-up of low-dose effects data from the largest irradiated survivor group (30,387 survivors)! By lumping the results together, they manage to get an excess leukemia of just 4 survivors, making their statistics fit fashionable prejudice. If they hadn't lumped together the statistics for that group of 30,387 survivors but had broken down the doses within it, the results would have shown - like earlier results - a 'politically incorrect' threshold and beneficial effects from low doses. So it is a case of the abuse of science. This criticism also applies to the lumping of solid cancer data into the same dose range. Page 17 of the summary states:
‘Excess leukemia was the earliest delayed effect of radiation exposure seen in A-bomb survivors. Japanese physician Takuso Yamawaki in Hiroshima first noted an increase of leukemia cases in his clinical practice in the late 1940s. This led to the establishment of a registry of leukemia and related disorders and to the initial reports on elevated leukemia risks published in the early 1950s. Risks for radiation-induced leukemia differ in two major respects from those for most solid cancers. First, radiation causes a larger percent increase in leukemia rates (but a smaller number of cases since leukemia is relatively rare, even in heavily exposed survivors), and second, the increase appears sooner after exposure, especially in children. The excess leukemias began appearing about two years after radiation exposure, and the excess peaked at about 6–8 years after exposure. Today, little if any excess of leukemia is occurring. Because the LSS cohort was based on the 1950 national census, quantitative descriptions of leukemia risks in A-bomb survivors have been based on cases diagnosed from that year on. As of the year 2000, there were 204 leukemia deaths among 49,204 LSS survivors with a bone marrow dose of at least 0.005 Gy, an excess of 94 cases (46%) attributable to A-bomb radiation (Table 4). In contrast to dose-response patterns for other cancers, that for leukemia appears to be nonlinear; low doses may be less effective than would be predicted by a simple linear dose response. Even for doses in the 0.2 to 0.5 Gy range, however, risk is elevated (Figure 7).’
What they are still doing is for political expediency reasons, deliberately ignoring the effects below 0.2 Gy (20 cGy), which they should be studying closely: this is where the threshold and non-linear response is to be found, and this is where the data is most reliable since there were a vast number of survivors exposed to low doses, contrasted to few survivors from very high doses! Dose estimates at low doses are more reliable (see the suggested dose error at high doses in the graph of epilation effects, above) than at high doses. So the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, which is funded in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, is still issuing propaganda.
Page 19 states: ‘In an unexposed Japanese population, the lifetime risk of leukemia is about seven cases per 1,000 people. For typical survivors in the LSS, who received 0.005 Gy or greater (a mean dose of about 0.2 Gy), the lifetime leukemia risk increases to about 10 cases per 1,000 (or the relative risk is nearly 1.5).’
NO GENETIC EFFECTS WERE OBSERVED
Page 30 of the summary states: ‘While high doses in experimental animals can cause various disorders in offspring (birth defects, chromosome aberrations, etc.), no evidence of clinical or subclinical effects has yet been seen in children of A-bomb survivors.’
Page 46 of the summary adds: ‘One of the earliest concerns in the aftermath of the atomic bombings was how radiation might affect the children of survivors. Efforts to detect genetic effects began in the late 1940s and continue. Thus far, no evidence of increased genetic effects has been found.’
Naturally about 4% of all babies are stillborn or die shortly after birth, 2.7% are born with congenital abnormalities, and 0.011% are born blind due to genetic mutations. In the early days of genetic theory, the idea of dominant and recessive genes held sway. A gene is a section of DNA which carries the instructions for producing a specific protein.
A baby inherits genes from each parent, and while dominant genes always make their presence known, the effect of a recessive gene will only appear if both parents contribute the same recessive gene to the baby, i.e., if the baby has two copies of that recessive gene in each cell nucleus. It is now well established that no genes are entirely dominant or entirely recessive.
Examples of relatively dominant gene effects are haemophilia, which is sex-linked, and the Duchenne type of muscular dystrophy. However, most of the common genetic defects are mainly recessive in nature, such as colour blindness.
In 1950, Dr H. J. Muller and others reported in Genetics, vol. 35, p. 125, that a radiation dose of 390 rem (3.9 Sv or 3.9 Gy for gamma radiation) doubled the natural mutation rate for nine relatively recessive genes which produce visibly obvious effects in the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). For mice (Mus musculus), the corresponding natural 'doubling dose', for seven visibly obvious relatively recessive genetic effects, was 50 rem. (W. L. Russell, Quantitative Biology, vol. 16, 1952, p. 327; T. C. Carter, et al., British Journal of Radiology, New Series, vol. 29, 1956, p. 106.) Hence, the mouse is 390/50 = 7.8 times more sensitive to radiation induced genetic damage than the fruit fly.
In 1956, C. F. Konzak and W. R. Singleton reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 42, p. 78, that using thermal neutrons on maize cereal pollen (Zea mays) gave a genetic doubling dose of just 28 rem, so that maize seemed to be 14 times as sensitive as the fruit fly (although this precise figure is suspect because of the relatively high biological effectiveness of neutron radiation, which is now known to be about 20 more effective than a similar dose of gamma rays).
With such a variation in the 'doubling dose' for natural genetic defects between species, it was widely feared (and hyped in the media) that the human genetic effects of large doses of radiation after a nuclear war may be disastrous for future generations. The effects were statistically calculated for a population of a given size, generation time, and assumed doubling dose: the genetic effects were simply the natural incidence multiplied up linearly by ratio of the received dose to the 'doubling dose' (it was usually assumed that the human was like a mouse and had a doubling dose was 50 rem). Relatively dominant genetic defects would show up in the first generation after radiation exposure, but the more recessive effects could be postponed for generations (until a baby inherited the same defective recessive gene from each parent).
However, serious problems with the linear dose-effects law for genetic damage were immediately evident. In 1954, H. J. Muller and others published a paper called 'A non-linear relation between X-ray dose and recovered lethal mutations' in Genetics, vol. 39, p. 741, which found evidence that the relationship between dose and the incidence of recessive lethal mutations in the fruit fly is extremely non-linear:
'... we may conclude that when the dose was quadrupled the frequency of lethals was not even doubled; that is, the frequency at the higher dose was less than half what it would have been on the linearity principle. ... This marked flattening of the lethal frequency-dosage curve at high doses is interpreted as an effect of selection, operating more strongly at higher doses to kill off preferentially, by chromosome breakage, the descendants of the more susceptible germ cells, in which recessive lethals had been induced at a higher frequency. It is inferred that the germ cells of the period in question are heterogeneous in their susceptibilities, and that there is a strong positive correlation between susceptibility to the chromosome-breaking and that to the recessive-lethal-inducing effect of X-rays.'
Thus, mutations to genes from very large doses are often accompanied by other damage to germ cell such as chromosome breakage, which 'weeds out' that particular germ cell from the potential gene pool. This discovery in 1954 - of an effect of DNA apoptosis, or programmed cell death in the fruit fly, reducing the observable genetic damage at high doses to way, way below what is predicted by a linear dose-effects law - has great significance for not just genetic but also cancer effects in human beings: when the DNA in a non-germ cell is seriously damaged by radiation it can be weeded out by apoptosis, instead of going on to divide and proliferate somatic effects like cancer.
In human beings, no radiation induced effects in descendants has occurred unless the mother was pregnant when irradiated (which is why pregnant mothers are not X-rayed); in the case of a pregnant mother receiving a large dose of radiation the effect is a spontaneous abortion. Notice that the RERF report doesn't give statistical data, to show whether genetic effects in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were actually reduced below the incidence in the control group, or whether they were just statistically insignificant. But, just as with cancer suppression by radiation, mechanisms do exist to suppress genetic effects using apoptosis, or programmed cell death, to the germ cells which are damaged by radiation.
CONTINUING FALSE PROPAGANDA OVER THE RADIOACTIVITY OF FIRESTORM SOOT RAINOUT
Above: false claims about soot-rain fallout from firestorm, on page 5 of a 'Basic Guide to Radiation and Health Sciences' booklet RERF have published, based on radiation prejudice, not scientific facts. In their more detailed summary of data, page 40 falsely claims: ‘Radioactive material in the bomb fireball ascended and cooled, a fraction falling as “black rain” which contaminated the ground (although the black rain was primarily soot particles from the extensive fires). Because of wind directions, the rain fell mainly in northern and western Hiroshima, with the highest measured gamma dose rates from fallout being in the Koi-Takasu area to the southwest, and in eastern Nagasaki, in the Nishiyama area. The maximum estimates of fallout dose from external exposure to gamma rays, assuming that a person remained in one place throughout life, are 0.01 to 0.03 Gy in Koi- Takasu, Hiroshima, and 0.2 to 0.4 Gy in Nishiyama, Nagasaki. [Notice the greater fallout dose in Nagasaki, which did not suffer a raging firestorm like Hiroshima!] The corresponding fallout doses at the hypocenters are believed to be only about 1/10 of these values.’
Page 48 adds: ‘The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs exploded 500 to 600 meters above the ground, and the explosions created huge fireballs that rose with ascending air currents. The material then cooled and started to fall with rain. Because of the wind, the rain did not fall directly on the hypocenters but rather in northwestern Hiroshima, in the Koi-Takasu area, and in eastern Nagasaki, in the Nishiyama area.’
In fact, the radioactive mushroom cloud was blown downwind, away from the fire and soot area, long before any moisture condensed on soot in the cool air above the fires to produce rain:
'About 20 minutes after the detonation of the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima, a mass fire developed showing many characteristics usually associated with fire storms. A wind blew toward the burning area of the city from all directions, reaching a maximum velocity of 30 to 40 miles per hour about 2 to 3 hours after the explosion, decreasing to light or moderate and variable in direction about 6 hours after. The wind was accompanied by intermittent rain, light over the center of the city and heavier about 3,500 to 5,000 feet (0.67 to 0.95 mile) to the north and west. Rain in these circumstances was apparently due to the condensation of moisture on particles from the fire when they reached a cooler area. ...' - The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd ed., 1977, page 305.
The small amounts of fission products deposited on surrounding high hills were from the stem of the mushroom cloud (unlike Nevada tests, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were beside the ocean, so both entrained - and carried to cooler higher altitudes - some sea level moist air containing tiny airborne salt crystals, which created a very small amount of stem salt slurry fallout as was also observed in Pacific air burst tests like KING and CHEROKEE: see the footnote to Table 1 on page 5 of Crocker, O'Connor and Freiling's report USNRDL-TR-899, Physical and Radiochemical Properties of Fallout Particles, 1965 and weapon test report WT-1317), and had nothing to do with the soot and moisture rainout that occurred during the firestorm an hour after the Hiroshima detonation, when the mushroom cloud was many miles downwind. The height attained by the mushroom cloud far exceeded the height attained, much later, by the cloud of soot and moisture due to the fires. The black rain is significant not because it was radioactive (it wasn't significantly contaminated), but because it shows that soot from mass fires tends to be hydroscopic, absorbs moisture and returns to the ground quickly, instead of blocking out the sun as claimed in 'nuclear winter' garbage (firestorms are only possible in wooden cities, and are not possible in modern brick and concrete cities, as proven by World War II data; in modern cities there are not enough ignition points, let alone enough flammable material, as firestorm expert George R. Stanbury proved in his analysis of firestorms at Hamburg and elsewhere). (For a different analysis debunking the 'nuclear winter' hoax of Sagan et al., see Brian Martin's article, 'Nuclear winter: science and politics', Science and Public Policy, Vol. 15, No. 5, October 1988, pp. 321-334.)
'We have studied the process of wet fallout from a tactical nuclear explosion due to scavenging of radioactivity by self-induced rain (rain produced by the explosion itself) using a numerical two-dimensional model of an axisymmetric cloud. Under mid-latitude summertime conditions and for yields of 20 to 100 kilotons, the model shows that self-induced rainout is not significant for low relative humidities, is very important for high relative humidities (> 80%), and is moderately important for relative humidities down to about 50%. When self-induced rainout occurs, it is heavy within a couple of kilometers of ground zero and peaks early in the episode. The model has successfully predicted observed radioactive self-induced rainout for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations (both in the 20 kiloton range), and does not predict rain under conditions typical of U.S. tests in Nevada, where self-induced rainout has not been observed.'
- R. A. Carhart (Department of Physics, University of Illinois) and A. J. Policastro (Energy and Environmental Systems Division, Argonnne National Laboratory, 'Effects of relative humidity and yield on self-induced rainout from tactical nuclear explosions', Simulation, vol. 51, no. 5, pp. 191-194 (1988).
Above: measured neutron induced activity and fallout in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from the DTRA. There are further reports here and here.
‘Nuclear winter’ lies debunked by Saddam Hussein in 1991
Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army invaded Kuwait and set all of its oil wells on fire as it was driven back into Iraq by American in 1991. Paul Crutzen who had started the nuclear winter myth in 1982 before Carl Sagan and others became involved, in 1991 predicted that the burning of Kuwait’s oil wells would cause a nuclear winter which would devastate the northern hemisphere:
‘The fears expressed last week centred around the cloud of soot that would result if Kuwait’s oil wells were set alight by Iraqi forces ... with effects similar to those of the “nuclear winter” ... Paul Crutzen, from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, has produced some rough calculations which predict a cloud of soot covering half of the Northern Hemisphere within 100 days. Crutzen ... estimates that temperatures beneath such a cloud could be reduced by 5-10 degrees C ...’
- Peter Aldhous, ‘Oil-well climate catastrophe?’, Nature, vol. 349 (1991), p. 96.
Dr Richard D. Small of Pacific-Sierra Research Corporation, California, responded in Nature, vol. 350 (1991), pp. 11-12, that 16,000 metric tons of actual soot is produced from 220,000 metric tons of oil burned every day, and anyway:
‘My estimates of the smoke produced by destruction of Kuwait’s oil wells and refineries and the smoke stabilization altitude do not support any of the purported impacts. The smoke is not injected high enough to spread over large areas of the Northern Hemisphere, nor is enough produced to cause a measurable temperature change or failure of the monsoons.’
It is significant that oil soot, being 69% elemental carbon, is the most effective particulate known for absorbing sunlight. The nuclear winter propaganda is a hoax. When you look at the data on liquid petroleum tanks exposed at Nevada nuclear tests, they did not rupture let alone ignite at the damaging overpressures which dented them, and which the nuclear winter propaganda people used in their calculations for the ignition of oil facilities! The nuclear winter hoax people started off by assuming that brick and concrete cities burn, and when that was debunked as unable to cause nuclear winter, they then exaggerated the ignition and effects of nuclear attacks on oil refineries.
Cression H. Kearny explained the following facts in the 1987 revised edition of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory book. Nuclear War Survival Skills (Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine), page 18:
‘Soviet propagandarists promptly exploited belief in unsurvivable “nuclear winter” ... because raging city firestorms are needed to inject huge amounts of smoke into the stratosphere ... according to one discredited theory ... the Soviets changed their descriptions of how a modern city will burn. Thus, in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory translation (ORNL-TR-2793) of Civil Defense, Second Edition (500,000 copies), Moscow, 1970, by Egorov, Shlyakhov and Alabin, we read: “Fires do not occur in zones of complete destruction ... that are characterized by an overpressure exceeding 0.5 kg/cm2 [7.1 psi or 49 kPa] ... because rubble is scattered and covers the burning structures. As a result, the rubble only smoulders, and fires as such do not occur. Firestoms destroyed the centers of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. The old-fashioned buildings of these cities contained large amounts of flammable materials ... In a free country, truth will out – although sometimes too late to effectively counter fast-hitting propaganda.’
HIROSHIMA (6 August 1945, 16 kt at 600 metres burst height) DS02 DOSIMETRY
NAGASAKI (9 August 1945, 21 kt yield at 503 metres burst height) DS02 DOSIMETRY
The DS02 report on page 167 states: ‘Delayed radiation is generated by the emission of neutrons and gamma rays from fission products in the fireball. The low air density in the fireball enhances the transport of these particles and results in their becoming a large contribution to the radiation fluences. For example, delayed radiation contributes more than one-half of the gamma-ray dose out to 1,500 m slant distance at both cities. At Hiroshima, the delayed neutrons add less than 10% to the dose and thermal activation and less than 5% to fast neutron activation at all ranges. However at Nagasaki, the delayed neutrons are significant, having their maximum contribution to thermal neutron activation (approximately 60%) at about 700 m slant range and to the neutron dose (approximately 40%) at the hypocenter. The delayed neutron contribution drops rapidly at distance, and at 2,500 m, it contributes less than 5% to either neutron dose or thermal neutron activation. Delayed neutrons contribute less than 10% to the Nagasaki fast neutron activation at all ranges. ...
‘The improved methods used to calculate the delayed radiation for this work were also used to improve the analysis of several Nevada and Pacific test shots. For those test shots, calculated activation results were compared with measurements of time-dependent and time-integrated neutron and gamma measurements. For example, calculations of time-dependent delayed gamma radiation of the Pacific test shot KING (Kaul and Egbert 1991) showed good agreement with measurements.’
The cited Kaul and Egbert references are:
D. C. Kaul and S. D. Egbert, Debris Gamma Dose Rate Calculations Using a Multi-Dimensional Hydrodynamic Model, presented at Cloud Program Review, DNA/SPWE Meeting held Logicon RDS, Los Angles, California, December 4-5, 1991.
D. C. Kaul, F. Dolatshahi, S. D. Egbert, J. A. Roberts, and W. H. Scott, The Development and Testing of the Air Transport of Radiation Code Version 6 (ATR). Washington, D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency; DNA-TR-91-237; 1992.
DS02 RADIATION SHIELDING FACTORS FOR SURVIVORS PROTECTED BY BUILDINGS
COMPARISON OF DS02 FREE-IN-AIR DOSES IN HIROSHIMA TO THOSE IN NAGASAKI
Above: notice that the Nagasaki bomb (21 kt) produced the largest initial gamma radiation doses, but the Hiroshima bomb, despite its lower yield (16 kt), produced the largest neutron doses of the two weapons. This was due to fact that the bomb core of the Nagasaki bomb was surrounded by a lot of hydrogen nuclei (protons) due to the TNT surrounding the core of that implosion weapon. When neutrons hit protons, they lose a lot more of their energy than when they are scattered by very heavy nuclei such as the steel barrel of the Hiroshima gun-type assembly bomb.
This has a very important effect on the quality of the radiation from the two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Neutron doses are found to be about 20 times as effective at producing cancers than gamma doses. This is because gamma rays tend to knock electrons flying by the Compton effect, but high energy neutrons knock protons flying when they hit hydrogen nuclei. Protons are heavy and can generally cause more damage to DNA than electrons, knocking whole chunks of DNA out rather than just inducing single strand breakage. It is also now clear that merely applying a 'relative biological effectiveness' factor of 20 or so for neutrons is not a complete solution to the difference in effects produced. I.e., neutron radiation is less likely to have a threshold and beneficial effects at low doses than gamma radiation.
For this reason, the RERF must publish separate analyses of the effects for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so that the exact differences in cancer rates, particularly leukemia, will be apparent and correlatable to the known differences in the neutron-to-gamma dose ratios in the two cities.
Because of the higher gamma-to-neutron dose ratio in Nagasaki than in Hiroshima, the effects of a threshold and also beneficial effects at low doses are predicted to be far greater in Nagasaki than in Hiroshima.
By lumping the data from both cities together, this vital effect is being covered up statistically by the RERF. The quality of the dosimetry now permits the data to be resolved in this way to learn more about the effects of radiation at low doses:
‘The results reported in this chapter are state-of-the-art. They were obtained using the best available codes and data and clearly represent the best available data of the air-over-ground neutron and gamma-ray radiation environments for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The agreement between the calculated and measured responses, as shown in the ensuing chapters, is notable. Achieving 10-20% agreement between a controlled measurement and calculation is generally quite acceptable. Achieving similar agreement between measured responses and calculations from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events is remarkable.’ – Page 198 of the DS02 dosimetry report.
OUTDOOR GAMMA DOSE RATES AND GAMMA DOSES FROM NEUTRON-INDUCED ACTIVITY IN THE GROUND
Above: neutron induced gamma radiation in the ground. Page 40 of the summary states: ‘Doses due to induced radioactivity were highest at the hypocenters. Past investigations have suggested that the maximum cumulative doses of residual hypocenter radiation since the bombing are 0.8 Gy in Hiroshima and 0.3 to 0.4 Gy in Nagasaki. At 500 and 1,000 meters from the hypocenters, the respective estimates are about 1/10 and 1/100 of the hypocenter value. The induced radioactivity decayed very quickly with time. In fact, nearly 80% of the above doses were released within a day, about 10% between days 2 and 5, and the remaining 10% from day 6 onward. Considering the extensive fires near the hypocenters that prevented people from entering the cities until day 2, it seems unlikely that any person received more than 20% of the maximum induced doses (0.16 Gy in Hiroshima and 0.06 to 0.08 Gy in Nagasaki.’
EXAGGERATIONS OF THE EFFECTS AT HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI FOR POLITICAL REASONS SINCE 1945
Extract from a previous post: in 1950, the Top Secret British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch report SA/16 concluded:
‘The wide publicity given to the appalling destruction caused by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has possibly tended to give an exaggerated impression of their effectiveness. Perhaps the best way to counteract this impression, and to help to get the atomic bomb to scale, is to consider the numbers of atomic bombs that would have to be dropped on this country and on Germany to have caused the same total amount of damage as was actually caused by attacks with high explosive and incendiary bombs.
‘During the last war a total of 1,300,000 tons [of bombs] were dropped on Germany by the Strategic Air Forces [of Britain and America]. If there were no increase in aiming accuracy, then to achieve the same amount of material damage (to houses, industrial and transportational targets, etc.) would have required the use of over 300 atomic bombs together with some 500,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs for targets too small to warrant the use of an atomic bomb ... the total of 300,000 civilian air raid deaths in Germany could have been caused by about 80 atomic bombs delivered with the accuracy of last war area attacks, or by about 20 atomic bombs accurately placed at the centres of large German cities ...’
This vital report, SA/16, was kept Top Secret for 8 years, and then Restricted for another 22 years. It was never published, for fear of undermining the value of the nuclear deterrent against Russian expansion.
CUMULATIVE BLAST WAVE PRESSURE REDUCTION BY DAMAGE CAUSED
*The average density of ground coverage by buildings in Hiroshima determined from aerial photographs of the target taken before detonation was 5,400 buildings per square kilometre (the values in most British cities vary from about 5,000 near the centre to 2,000 near the outer boundaries). It is recommended that the housing density for modern Western cities be taken as half that in Hiroshima. (Data from Penney, et al., 1970.)Lord William Penney visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the American occupation forces, measured all of the damage and shipped it back to Britain for laboratory analysis. He determined the bending moments for steel poles by the blast wave, the overpressures required to reduce the volume of blueprint containers and petrol cans, and many other natural blast wave gauges. The value of these studies was proved in the 1946 ABLE nuclear test, where the bomb was dropped off target by accident and Penney had to determine the air pressures from the collapse of petrol cans. This is a precise measurement because by filling the petrol can with water before and after partial collapse by blast, the volume reduction is measured, which correlates with the blast wave peak overpressure. Therefore, several items of this type can be used to get a statistically good measurement, unlike the piezoelectric electronic blast sensors used at the TRINITY test in 1945 which were of course wrecked by EMP (as predicted by Enrico Fermi). Later, Penney used empty toothpaste tubes to measure the peak overpressure at early British nuclear tests, averting the risk of EMP damage to electronic sensors.
Penney used the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data to do a secret study of the reduction in peak overpressure caused by the irreversible energy loss from the blast wave as it flattened house after house in each radial line outward from ground zero. Penney found that at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the peak overpressure fell faster than in British nuclear tests at similar scaled burst heights over smooth unobstructed desert. The peak blast overpressure fell exponentially due to the cumulative irreversible energy loss done in blowing up successive buildings.
At a distance of 1.74 km from ground zero in Hiroshima, the peak overpressure was only 50% of what it would have been over an ideal smooth desert without houses. This figure applies only to the wooden houses in Hiroshima where there were 5,400 houses per square kilometre. In most modern Western cities the number of buildings per square kilometre is on average only half that figure, but the buildings are brick or concrete and this means that they can absorb more energy in the act of being blown up by the blast wave. In a modern British city, the peak overpressure could therefore fall by 50% every 340 metres that the shock wave progressed, causing a dramatic reduction in damage at great distances, compared to the effects predicted for unobstructed ideal desert terrain in Glasstone and Dolan’s 1977 book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. The reduction factor for peak blast overpressure at Hiroshima due to destruction caused was: (peak overpressure in built up area) / (peak overpressure over unobstructed ideal desert terrain in nuclear tests) = e-0.41R where R is ground range in kilometres; for typical Western brick and concrete cities they estimated the reduction factor to be e-2.0R.
It is important to note that this irreversible cumulative energy loss from the blast wave is a straightforward consequence of the laws of physics and is not speculative: the work energy E needed to push in a brick wall the distance X against resistance force F is simply E = FX. This is a simple property of physics. The energy lost from the supersonic shock front is converted into relatively slow-moving debris and a heating of the rubble, there is no mechanism for it to get back into the blast wave. This process of irreversible energy loss has nothing to do with the mere scattering of blast waves by multiple reflections between the walls of buildings which is the basis of the obfuscating discussion in Glasstone and Dolan, 1977. Analysis of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki data by Penney showed that after 75 wooden buildings had been damaged in a radial line from ground zero, the peak overpressure had fallen to only half that which would have occurred on an unobstructed ideal desert surface.
Penney kept this secret until 1970 when he gave some details in a published paper comparing the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blast waves to British nuclear test data for ideal terrain. Penney had earlier supported some experiments at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment by W. Worsfold, published in the 1957 secret report The Effects of Shielding a Building from Atomic Blast by Another of the Same Size and Shape, AWRE-E4/57 (declassified only in May 1985) and further experiments in the report AWRE-E8/57. Each individual building causes only a trivial net reduction in the peak overpressure (1-5 % as shown in the following table), but after some tens or hundreds of houses in any radial line from ground zero have been totalled, the blast wave is seriously depleted in energy. Hence, predictions of blast damage using desert nuclear test data with the cube-root scaling law are massive exaggerations.
*Data are computed for a peak overpressure of 50 kPa (7.2 psi) for the total energy loss in the blast wave, which is why there is a dependence on the weapon yield. The longer duration blast winds from a higher yield weapon loses more energy in accelerating blast debris than the shorter duration blast wave from a low yield weapon. However, the amount of reduction in the peak overpressure (at the front of the shock wave) by causing damage will be independent of the blast wave duration. It is therefore recommended that the data for 20 kilotons be used for estimating the percentage reduction in peak overpressure, regardless of the blast wave duration or weapon yield.All buildings tend to absorb approximately the same fraction of the blast wave energy regardless of the peak overpressure when struck because the amount of kinetic energy imparted by the blast wave to the debris and damaged materials increases approximately in direct proportion to the energy in the blast wave. Therefore, regardless of the weapon yield, in a modern American city the blast reduction factor for blast overpressure due to energy loss in causing the damage done to structures will be roughly exp(-d/750) where d is distance in metres. This will obviously have a more dramatic effect on reducing damaged areas for high yield weapons (where the low levels of blast overpressure cover immense distances on unobstructed desert terrain) than low yield weapons (where the damage distances are small in any case).
But even in the case of a 1 kt terrorist surface burst in an American city, the data in Glasstone and Dolan 1977 are still gross exaggerations! The 600 R initial nuclear radiation radius will be reduced from 808 m in Nevada tests to 245 m by buildings due to the elimination of most direct (line of sight) unscattered relativistic radiation by structures long before such structures can be destroyed by the much slower-moving blast wave! The 5 cal/cm2 thermal flash burn radius of 750 m in Nevada tests will be practically eliminated because the thermal pulse from such a small weapon will be over before the fireball becomes buoyant (this happens when its density falls below ambient air density, in the late stages) and rises into view above the structures which have yet to be destroyed by the blast wave. The 5 psi peak overpressure radius for severe damage to light residential structures will be reduced from 442 m in Nevada tests to 350 m, and the 2.5 psi peak overpressure radius for serious flying debris and glass injuries to persons standing behind windows will be reduced from 640 m in Nevada tests to 460 m. Because damaged areas are proportional to the square of the radius, the actual number of casualties and amount of damage reduction is far more impressive than these figures for radii suggest.
Above: the official U.S. nuclear weapons effects horror story; it is a gross exaggeration, showing how the U.S. government lied about the effects of nuclear weapons during the cold war. They predicted blast effects to buildings in cities assuming that the terrain was unobstructed and ignored the irreversible loss of energy in the blast as it flattens house after house in any radial line outward from ground zero, which quickly soaks up the energy in the ground level diverging blast wave and contains the damaged area (particularly in large explosions). They also exaggerated the fire situation by neglecting the fact that piles of concrete and bricks don't burn (as proved in Britain in World War II, and by the fact that firestorms only occurred in wooden medieval cities in Europe such as ancient wooden parts of Hamburg and Dresden, and wooden cities in Japan; and even then this was not due to thermal radiation but due to a mixture of high explosives to damage the houses by blast and incendiaries to get inside, or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki where detonations occurred at breakfast and lunch time respectively so that charcoal cooking braziers were overturned by the blast amidst bamboo and paper screens, starting the tindering fires inside wooden houses), and by ignoring the shielding of thermal radiation by shadowing effects:
Above: dangerous abdominal penetration 3 metres behind windows (when glass fragments have been accelerated to high speed by the blast winds) during OPERATION TEAPOT Nevada nuclear tests in 1955. Notice that at low overpressures, there is no danger from low-overpressure broken windows because the blast wind behind the shock front is far too weak to accelerate the large fragments to high momenta, while at very high overpressures the window gets broken into dust-sized fragments that are simply far too small to carry enough momentum to penetrate clothing or skin. Thus, like Goldilocks' porridge, the peak overpressure ideally needs to be just right (2-5 psi) to break windows into big fragments that carry enough momentum to penetrate the abdomen when accelerated by the blast winds behind the shock front. Ducking and covering under a table or desk would avert this danger, and even dropping flat on the floor would help because the most dangerous fragments are blasted horizontally from the window. Contrary to lying propaganda films of nuclear explosions, the blast wave NEVER ACCOMPANIES THE VISIBLE FLASH, BUT IS ALWAYS DELAYED LIKE THUNDER AFTER LIGHTNING, ALWAYS MAKING DUCK AND COVER POSSIBLE. The graph is taken from: I. G. Bowen, D. R. Richmond, M. B. Wetherbe and C. S. White, Biological effects of blast from bombs. Glass fragments as penetrating missiles and some of the biological implications of glass fragmented by atomic explosions, Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission progress report AECU-3350, June 1956, p. 46.
Above: a more recent report based on nuclear test research at OPERATION TEAPOT in 1955 and OPERATION PLUMBBOB in 1957 for house debris injury and also human displacement by blast is Dr Anatol Longinow's 161 pages long report Survivability in a Nuclear Weapon Environment, DCPA Contract DCPA01-77-0229, for Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, Washington, D.C. 20301, report ADA076026, May 1979, which estimates the following casualties in framed buildings (steel and concrete), of up to four stories with weak exterior walls (weak curtain walls, large glass windows, etc.) when subject to 1 Mt weapon:
90 % survival at a peak overpressure of 5 psi
50 % survival at a peak overpressure of 7 psi
10 % survival at a peak overpressure of 11 psi
Above: because it didn't contain charcoal cooking stoves surrounded by paper screens and bamboo furnishings, this American two-story wood frame house survived unburned 25 cal/cm2 thermal radiation with just white-washed paint (which was quickly charred off) before the house was blown up by 5 psi (35 kPa) peak overpressure at 3,500 feet from 16 kt UPSHOT KNOTHOLE-ANNIE on 17 March 1953, Nevada Test Site; anti-civil defense propaganda in 2004 Cornell-published book by Lynn Eden Whole World on Fire while quoting in detail Dr Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons statement that the house had whitewash on it (just like most wooden houses) completely ignores the fact that Dr Glasstone states in paragraph 7.30 on page 292 of the 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons: 'a material which blackens (or chars) readily in the early stages of exposure to thermal radiation behaves essentially as black, i.e., as a strong absorber irrespective of its original color. [Emphasis added.] On the other hand, if smoke is formed [by dark coloured wood] it will partially shield the underlying material from the subsequent radiation.' Lynn Eden also ignores the facts that:
(1) the ordinary white-washed (quite normal) house did not ignite or burn despite being charred by the thermal flash and covered in black smoke due to thermal radiation. Lynn falsely claims that the whitewash was a 'heroic' precaution to avoid ignition. But it was burned off. Even unpainted poles in Hiroshima didn't catch fire, they just charred. Window blinds were blown in by the blast. So these things which Lynn biasedly sees as bad didn't prevent fire, because as other tests like ENCORE (which we will discuss below in detail) proved it takes more than a brief pulse of heat to set thick wood on fire. Anyway, the safeguards aren't 'bad' but are actually good benefits which would help survival by minimising glass fragments and flash burns. Contrary to the totally false and civil defence demeaning impression given by Lynn Eden's prejudiced, partial quotations from Dr Glasstone's 1957 edition, rooms don't need metal window blinds: in an attack warning you can instantly protect rooms containing beds or upholstered furniture and a window which would potentially let in thermal radiation by simply drawing curtain, or by simply taping sheets of white paper over the inside of the window glass - which will protect against thermal radiation for the crucial interval of time until the delayed arrival of the blast wave!
(2) the basement survived, and
(3) the house was not knocked over by the blast overpressure; the front was cracked by the reflected overpressure and the roof was peeled off by the blast winds, but then the house exploded due to the low pressure (suction) phase of the blast occurring while there was still overpressure trapped inside the house (which had entered through the windows but could not escape as fast as the external pressure dropped). This is vital because it shows that most of the debris (with the exception of window glass) was blown outwards from the exploding house, not inwards against the occupants. Although debris landed on the family car and dented the roof, it could still be driven away after the explosion, illustrating that the debris load from the collapse of a house is not always the end of the universe as portrayed by evil propaganda:
‘We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation ... we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists ... Air cannot get into a pile of rubble 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This ... is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb incidents ... Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another ... Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited ... even with the incendiary bomb the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5 ...’
– George R. Stanbury, ‘The Fire Hazard from Nuclear Weapons’, Fission Fragments, Scientific Civil Defence Magazine, No. 3, August 1962, pp. 22-6, British Home Office, Scientific Adviser’s Branch, originally classified 'Restricted'.
‘Dense smoke, and even jets of flame, may be emitted, but the material does not sustain ignition... smoke formed in the early stages will partially shield the underlying material from subsequent radiation. This behaviour is illustrated in the photographs taken of one of the wood-frame houses exposed in the 1953 Nevada tests... the house front became covered with a thick black smoke... within less than 2 seconds from the explosion, the smoke ceased... Ignition of the wood did not occur... The thermal energy incident upon the material was apparently dissipated in the kinetic energy of the "exploding" surface molecules before the radiation could penetrate into the depth of the material.’
– Dr Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, editors, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defence, 1977, pp. 285-6.
‘The measured total radiation at [9.1-km] from the centre was 0.29 calories/cm2 ... Examination of the specimen exposed at [975 m] shows ... the charred layer does not appear to be thicker than 1/10 millimetre.... scorching of the fir lumber used to support signal wires extended out to about [1.9 km] ... the risk of fire due to the radiation ... is likely to be much less than the risk of fire from causes existing in the buildings at the time of explosion.’ – W. G. Marley and F. Reines, July 16th Nuclear Explosion: Incendiary Effects of Radiation, Los Alamos report LA-364, October 1945, originally Secret, pp. 5-6.
‘Persons exposed to nuclear explosions of low or intermediate yield may sustain very severe burns on their faces and hands or other exposed areas of the body as a result of the short pulse of directly absorbed thermal radiation. These burns may cause severe superficial damage similar to a third-degree burn, but the deeper layers of the skin may be uninjured. Such burns would heal rapidly [emphasis added; this is true unless the person also receives a concurrent massive nuclear radiation dose], like mild second-degree burns.’
– Dr Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, editors, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defence, 1977, p. 561.
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.'
Above: although American wood-frame houses offer less blast protection indoors than brick houses, they mostly have basements which are ideal for improvised shelters such as strong tables, because nuclear test data from OPERATION UPSHOT-KNOTHOLE at Nevada in 1953 and OPERATION TEAPOT at Nevada in 1955 showed that the blast winds carry most of the debris past the house, so that the debris load on the basement is minimal and survival is easy there (below).
'This report contains information on protective capabilities of a variety of different personnel shelters against prompt effects of nuclear weapons. This information was collected from previous studies performed for DCPA in this subject area. Protective capabilities are expressed in terms of 'people survivability functions' which relate the probability of survival (or percent survivors) to the free field overpressure at the shelter site. Respective shelters are described in terms of their geometry and material properties. The following shelter categories are included. (1) Existing Engineered Buildings (Upper Stories and Basements), (2) Designed Basements, (3) Single-Purpose Shelters, (4) Dual-Purpose Shelters, (5) Expedient and Special Purpose Shelters and (6) Expediently Upgraded Shelters.'
'Casualty mechanisms included blast translation terminating in impact with hard surfaces and interaction with debris from the breakup of the building walls, partitions, furniture, etc.'
Above: proof of duck and cover effectiveness for reducing the blast wind drag from standing and lying anthropometric dummy human beings at an ideal peak overpressure of 5.3 psi / 37 kPa (with 0.964 second positive phase duration) at 1,622 metres from PLUMBBOB-PRISCILLA (37 kt, 700 ft balloon, 24 June 1957, Nevada) where the standing dummy was blasted 13 feet in the air before hitting the ground and tumbling for 9 feet, coming to rest 22 feet from the starting point, but the lying dummy was not even moved. In the PLUMBBOB-SMOKY test (44 kt, 700 ft tower, 21 August 1957, Nevada), dummies were exposed to a non-ideal precursor-type blast wave such as occurs over dark coloured desert sand (which is popcorned into a hot dust cloud which increases the density of the air and increases the dynamic pressure and duration of the blast wave while reducing the peak overpressure) and were displaced considerably larger distances by the increased dynamic pressure impulse of the precursor (like a dust storm). However, for cities which are not covered in dark desert sand, a precursor will not occur, as demonstrated by nuclear tests over water and light colour surfaces. (Source: Donald R. Richmond and Clayton S. White, Biological Effects of Blast and Shock, Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, report AD638342, DASA1777, 1966. ‘We were fortunate enough at a 5 psi station in one of the 1957 shots in Nevada to photograph the time-displacement history of a 160-pound [standing] dummy, and we were able from analysis of the movies to determine the maximal velocity reached ... about 21 feet per second. This velocity developed in 0.5 second. The total displacement of the dummy was near 22 feet ... It was this piece of empirical information that helped greatly in getting an analytical “handle” on the “treatment” of man as missile.’ – Dr Clayton S. White, who worked on nuclear weapon blast effects at Nevada test series’ Upshot-Knothole (1953), Teapot (1955) and Plumbbob (1957), Testimony to the U.S. Congressional Hearings, 22-26 June 1959, Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959, pp. 364-5.)
‘... it must be recognised that the amount of protection that will be available to individuals is, in a large degree, directly related to the extent of public knowledge concerning nuclear weapons effects and associated protective measures ... By falling prone and covering exposed portions of the body or getting behind opaque objects, much of the thermal radiation may be avoided, especially in the case of large-yield detonations ... Staying behind thick walls or lying in a deep ditch may help to avoid initial nuclear radiation ... the above actions will also help to decrease the possible danger from the blast wave.’ - Samuel Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense, 1962, pp. 660-1.
Further evidence on blast displacement is available from British nuclear test studies of human displacement. In 1948, R. H. A. Liston of the Atomic Research Establishment, UK, did a theoretical study of the displacement of man by a blast wave (The kinematic effect of blast on a man in the open, ARE Report 1/48), in which he assumed a drag coefficient for a standing man of 0.8, and predicted that a standing 76 kg man would be displaced 20 feet by a blast of 7 psi peak overpressure from a 20 kt bomb. For a peak overpressure of 3 psi, he predicted a displacement of 4 ft. On 27 September 1956 Liston's theory was checked out and found to make perfect predictions for a nearly ideal blast wave and soft ground at the 15 kt BUFFALO-1 nuclear test at Maralinga, Australia, by W. J. H. Butterfield et al., The Effects of Blast on Dummy Men Exposed in the Open, Atomic Weapons Reearch Establishment report AWRE-T2/59 (1959). For a peak overpressure of 6.4 psi, standing dummies facing BUFFALO-1 were displaced 16 feet, while those standing sideways were displaced only 10 feet. At a peak overpressure of 4.3 psi, standing dummies facing the burst were displaced 4 feet, while those standing sideways to the burst were only displaced 3 feet:
Psi_____________Facing burst_____Sideways to burst
10______________10.5 m_____________6 m
8.5_____________9 m________________5 m
6.4_____________5 m________________3 m
4.3_____________1.25 m_____________1 m
2.4_____________0.67 m_____________0 m
Information on the effects of human impacts and displacements are plentiful: car accidents and impact fall statistics are available. A person free-falling 1 m gains a velocity, v = (2gH)1/2 = 4.4 m/s. If the person lands prepared, feet-first with the knees slightly bent (to avoid transmitting the shock to the spine), this fall is usually safe; but head first this impact speed can result in being knocked unconscious and possibly suffering a cracked skull. If a person falls from a great altitude (such as suicide attempts from a high cliff, bridge or aircraft) without a parachute, then air drag becomes important and causes an average terminal velocity of v = [2g/(acceleration coefficient * air density)]1/2 = 51 m/s, which almost always proves to be lethal. However, there are cases of survival due to luck or to landing on soft surfaces, even from great heights. For example, see Christopher K. Kepler, et al., ‘Orthopaedic Injuries Associated With Fall From Floor Forty-Seven’, Journal of Orthopaedic Trauma, vol. 23, No. 2, Feb. 2009, pp. 154-158: ‘This case report provides background reviewing mortality rates associated with falls from height before detailing the clinical history of a patient who survived a fall from a height of 43 stories.’
For a curve of survival incidence versus number of stories fallen, see: Sylvia M. Ramos and Harry M. Delany, ‘Free Falls From Heights: A Persistent Urban Problem’, Journal of the National Medical Association, vol. 78, no. 2, February 1986, pp. 111–115. U.K. data for road accidents indicates that 50% lethal trauma occurs for a person hit by a car moving at only 13.4 m/s (such casualties suffer additional injuries from tumbling after the initial impact). There is also good survival data from patients jumping out of windows in burning hospitals: W. S. Lewis, et al., ‘Jumpers syndrome: The trauma of high free fall as seen at Harlem Hospital’ Journal of Trauma, vol. 5, no. 6, Nov. 1965, pp. 812-8. Suicide attempts from bridges and cliffs as well as parachute failure data also help to determine the exact effects from decelerative impact to different parts of the body, which we will discuss in detail in a later post.
‘Collapse of a brick house is expected to result in approximately 25% mortality, 20% serious injury and 10% light injury to the occupants. Reinforced concrete structures, though much more resistant to blast forces, will produce almost 100% mortality on collapse ... based on data from British World War II experience ... for cases where the population expects bombing and most personnel have selected the safest places in the buildings.’ – Philip J. Dolan, editor, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Department of Defence, DNA-EM-1, 1978, c. 10, p. 5, Secret – Restricted Data. This data comes in part from the effects of the 12,000 German V1 subsonic cruise missiles and V2 supersonic rockets, each armed with a similar-sized 0.001 kt warhead. Because the V1 cruise missile was subsonic and made a well-known pulsating engine sound, people had more time to take cover and therefore each V1 only killed an average of 2.8 people, compared to 5 people per V2 supersonic rocket because there was no warning. The first sound from the V2 was the explosion shock.
The collapse of buildings creates voids since the weight of debris depends just on the mass of the building, not upon the blast pressure, so survival under a strong table or staircase in a brick house proved possible during World War II. In wood frame houses at Hiroshima, about 50% of people trapped were able to free themselves and escape before the firestorm (5% were rescued by others), while in brick houses in Britain only 25% could escape of their own accord, because the brick debris was much heavier. Bricks cannot burn, so there is a lower fire risk in brick houses. The major problem is explained clearly in Robert Jungk's book, Children of the Ashes, Heinemann, London, 1961, which cites a report in Hiroshima by American psychologist Woodbury Sparks called Panic Among A-Bomb Casualties at Hiroshima which showed that due to their surprise at the effects of the nuclear explosion, only 26 percent (153 out of a random sample of 589 bomb survivors in Hiroshima) gave any assistance at all to anybody else after the explosion. Seeing that the majority of the people in each city survived and that a major cause of death was the burning of blast damaged wooden houses containing persons trapped by blast debris, a lot more could have been done if people had been prepared. This is one of the civil defence lessons from Hiroshima: the emotional shock prevented proper action. Effective civil defence training in the solid, unvarnished facts about nuclear effects phenomenology can avert this shock, enabling help to be given more efficiently where and when practical to save lives and minimise injury.
Regarding vehicle displacement, four heavy British Army Daimler Scout Cars were exposed to the 6-kt ANTLER-2 test at Maralinga, 25 September 1957 (report AWRE-T6/59). The car exposed side-on to a peak overpressure of 76-kPa at 527 m was just turned on its side without significant displacement, and cars exposed at 48-kPa or less (671 m or more) were unmoved, although the flash scorched the paint and ‘slightly charred’ tyres facing detonation.
Above: effects of blast wind drag on a standing anthropometric dummy human being at a peak overpressure of 6 psi (41 kPa) during the 0.5 kt SAILOR HAT-CHARLIE shot at Kahoolawe Island in Hawaii on 16 April 1965. The dummy briefly behaves like superman, taking off and flying, then summersaulting gymnastically through the air before hitting the camera. A basketball beside the dummy shows the motion of a less aerodynamic object to this blast wave. You can see the 0.5 kt explosion fireball in the background. Contrary to anti-civil defense propaganda, duck and cover would have saved a human being in this situation: 'it requires about 8 times the blast wind force to move a person who is lying down compared to a standing person. People crouched or lying down also offer a much poorer target to glass shards and debris missiles. [Not to mention thermal radiation shadowing.]' (Panel 11 of DCPA Attack Environment Manual: Chapter 2, What the Planner Needs to Know about Blast and Shock, U.S. Department of Defense, report CPG 2-1A2, June 1973.)
Above: the gas holder paint (actually bitumen) deception by the Americans: the photo on the left was taken by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey and published as Figure 7.50b the 1962 book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons as being ‘Paint on gas holder scorched by the thermal radiation, except where protected by the valve (1.33 miles from ground zero at Hiroshima)’, while that on the right is the British Government’s Photo No. 23 of the Report of the British Mission to Japan, 1946, showing that there was no scorched paint at that distance, but just melted bitumen, stating: ‘Shadow cast by valve-wheel on side of gasholder 1.25 miles from the centre of damage. The bituminous coating on the steel plates was affected by heat radiation except where shielded by the wheel and spindle.’ Since bitumen melts more easily than paint scorches, the American book gives a wildly deceptive exaggeration of the true thermal effect. The shadow effect in fact proves that direct, not scattered, thermal radiation predominates even at large distance where scattering is significant, which makes simple line-of-sight shielding effective. Notice that the valve that cast the shadow has not been vaporised! Anti-civil defense propaganda shows similar shadows cast by people with the false and pathetic claim that (since the person walked away) they ‘must’ certainly have been vaporised. Many political American and British anti-civil defence propaganda organisations, formerly funded by the Soviet Union, published a photo of a human shadow, claiming that the person was vaporised, ‘ceased to exist’. The objective was to discourage any duck-and-cover civil defence as being ‘useless’. In fact, the shadow is not the ash of a vaporised person but the shadow of a person with very painful skin flash burns! The vast amount of energy necessary to vaporise a human being (mainly water), compared to the thermal energy delivered, disproves the vaporisation claim (a myth invented to devalue civil defence by those either ignorant or sinisterly inhumane for political purposes): those exposed directly who did not ‘duck and cover’ received very painful burns, window glass fragments, and unshielded nuclear radiation.
Above: Hiroshima wasn't vaporised. A firestorm developed half an hour later (by which time the radioactive mushroom cloud had been blown several miles downwind) from thousands of blast-overturned charcoal cooking braziers (being used at breakfast time when the Hiroshima bomb was dropped; the Nagasaki bomb was dropped at lunch time) inside wood frame houses filled with bamboo furnishings and paper screens. There had been no rain for many weeks. The mechanisms used to achieve the appalling effects were deliberately exaggerated for military propaganda purposes during the war, because the aim was to end the war, saving a million American and Japanese lives in the invasion of Japan, rather than to inform people how to survive and mitigate the effects for civil defence! This worked, because the two bombs convinced Russia - which Japan had hoped would help it negotiate a surrender - to suddenly declare war on Japan so as to be included as a victor when Japan surrendered. As a result of Russia's declaration of war on Japan (caused directly by the two nuclear attacks), Japan surrendered. America accepted their surrender. The use of two nuclear bombs over just three days was a propaganda tool to make it look as if America had a large number of bombs available, which it didn't due to the very slow production of oralloy (enriched U-235) and Pu-239. The effects of those weapons would have been rather different if used against Western brick and concrete buildings which are not surrounded by tens of thousands of easily inflammable wooden houses. This is the whole reason why the hydrogen bomb was developed, and why much higher yields than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons would be needed today to achieve the same effects.
It's curious how attitudes have changed since World War II. The American Institute of Public Opinion in the United States for the Fall 1945 found that 85 percent of Americans supported the use of atomic bombs against Japan in the war, while a poll taken by Dr Arthur Holly Compton and others of 150 Manhattan Project nuclear weapons researchers at the same time gave exactly the same result! In 1950, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported a Gallup Poll which found that 61 percent of Americans said yes in reply to the question, 'Should the U.S. use the atom bomb if it gets into another world war?'
From Dr Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1962/64 ed., page 631):
'At distances between 0.3 and 0.4 mile from ground zero in Hiroshima the average survival rate, for at least 20 days after the nuclear explosion, was less than 20 percent. Yet in two reinforced concrete office buildings, at these distances, almost 90 percent of the nearly 800 occupants survived more than 20 days, although some died later of radiation injury.
'Furthermore, of approximately 3,000 school students who were in the open and unshielded within a mile of ground zero at Hiroshima, about 90 percent were dead or missing after the explosion. But of nearly 5,000 students in the same zone who were shielded in one way or another, only 26 percent were fatalities. ... survival in Hiroshima was possible in buildings at such distances that the overpressure in the open was 15 to 20 pounds per square inch. ... it is evident ... that the area over which protection could be effective in saving lives is roughly eight to ten times as great as that in which the chances of survival are small.'
Above: photos of exterior and interior of reinforced concrete frame buildings surviving at distances of 210 metres and 1,620 metres from ground zero in Nagasaki. In the interior photo of the building at 210 metres, you can see that the roof sagged down slightly due to the downward regular blast reflection pressure on the roof. The interior was burned out causing the roof plaster to spall due to fire ignited by the bamboo furnishings and paper screens in the surrounding wooden houses which suffered overturned charcoal cooking stoves from the blast of the lunch-time detonation. There is no damage to exterior walls which remained intact and uncracked. If fire sprinklers had been installed, they would have prevented the fires. In the building at 1,620 metres from ground zero, the only damage is broken windows. (Photographs are from Figures 5.54a and b on pp. 140-1 of Glasstone's 1950 Effects of Atomic Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense.)
Above: line-of-sight shadowing in Hiroshima (Glasstone and Dolan, 1977). What really angers people who are against terrorism is the the fact that the anti-civil defence lobby uses this evidence for pseudo-scientific purposes, claiming falsely that anything in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which cast a burns shadow was 'vaporized'. People who cast 'shadows' on otherwise burned materials were not vaporized, they were painfully burned, and if they had ducked and covered behind anything opaque, they wouldn't have been. E.g., ‘A soldier on picket duty at Nagasaki was vaporised by the explosion even though he was 3.5 km from the centre of the blast.’ – Professors Tony Hey and Patrick Walters, The Quantum Universe, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 69. The soldier was only subject to skin reddening because of the brief pulse, which even a leaf or a sheet of paper stopped. The wooden panel behind the person was slightly scorched where shielded by the person. Hey and Walters’ are unaware that it takes more energy to evaporate water (people are 70% water) than to burn dry wood! If the flash had been sufficient to ‘vaporise’ anyone, the wooden panel would have burned first. Totally ignorant and shameful abuse of 'scientific authority' from two physics professors. Shameful to the publishers' physics editor at Cambridge University Press, too.
ABOVE: U.S. Army photo showing how a mere leaf of Fatsia japonica attenuated the heat flash enough to prevent scorching to the bitumen on an electric pole near the Meiji Bridge, 1.3 km range, Hiroshima. It didn't even vaporize the leaf before the pulse ended, let alone did it somehow ignite the wooden pole (most photos claiming to show thermal flash radiation effects in Hiroshima and Nagasaki purely show effects from the fires set off by the blast wave overturning cooking stoves, which developed 30 minutes to 2 hours later).'Even blades of grass cast permanent shadows on otherwise badly scorched wood. The [Hiroshima nuclear bomb heat] flash lasted less time than it took the grass to shrivel.' - Chapman Pincher, Into the Atomic Age, Hutchinson and Co., London, 1950, p. 50.
Above: people in Hiroshima mainly died from combined flash burns and radiation exposure (data from: Dr Ashley Oughterson and Dr Shields Warren, Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956). The graph shows the impact of any kind of light shadow (not nuclear radiation shielding) from the line of sight of the fireball to the person on survival probability. Nuclear radiation interfered with burn recovery, turning mild superficial burns into a lethal source of infection when the white blood cell count was depressed during the recovery phase by the fact that the burns were accompanied by concurrent nuclear radiation exposure. Hiroshima’s wood-frame houses shielded the heat flash, as did vehicles, trees, hills, bridges, tunnels and clothing, and by removing thermal burns, nuclear radiation became survivable. Glass/debris impacts are also avoided by ducking down since the blast is delayed like thunder after lightning. Notice that ‘duck and cover’ action would have increased survival probability at 1.75-2.5 km by a factor of 5.8-5.9.
'Don't stand behind windows in an attack. First you will get burned and then you will have fine glass splinters driven into you very deeply within distances like 7 miles from a 1-megaton burst. ... Glass in any disaster like the Texas City disaster is one of the primary materials found in the normal home which can result in blinding and all other types of effects due to the flying small splinters of glass.'
- Dr Frank H. Shelton, Technical Director of U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, testimony to U.S. Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 22-26 June 1959, page 41. (Although windows are just broken by the peak overpressure out to 25 miles from a 1 Mt surface burst, the hazard from the blast wind pressure accelerating the glass fragments into a missile threat only extends to 7 miles. E.g., many windows were broken in Las Vegas after Nevada tests due to the refraction of blast waves, but the glass fell vertically to the ground without hurting anybody.)
Nuclear radiation by itself was an extremely survivable effect, but in combination with thermal flash burns and blast debris injuries, there was a synergism which decreased the LD50 dramatically. Burns wounds which would not be fatal in the absence of simultaneous radiation exposure proved lethal even where the amount of nuclear radiation was not by itself lethal. The mechanism is that the moderate doses of nuclear radiation depressed the white blood cell count for several weeks after exposure, which proved lethal when the patient also had infected burns wounds, because of the absence of enough white blood cells to combat the infection during this crucial time.
A month before nuclear weapons were exploded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 of August 1945, weather aircraft were sent over the cities daily to ‘accustom the Japanese to seeing daytime flights of two or three bombers’ (autobiography of 509th bombing group commander and Hiroshima pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets). B-29 weather aircraft preceded the nuclear B-29 bomber, giving a false sense of security. In Hiroshima the air-raid warning sounded at 7 am, and the all-clear at 7:30 am, but the bomb was dropped at 8:09 am. People cooked breakfasts with charcoal braziers in inflammable wood homes, with paper screens and bamboo furniture. Blasted red-hot charcoal and screens in the wooden houses started fires. In Nagasaki, the air-raid siren sounded at 7:50 am but was cleared before the bomb fell at 11 am.
Above: photo of the tunnel shelters in the hillside near ground zero, Nagasaki. According to both the originally secret U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey 1947 detailed report on Nagasaki and also the openly-published 1956 book The Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, these tunnel shelters had places for 70,000 people but fewer than 400 were in them when the bomb dropped, because the small number of American aircraft passing daily over the cities for weeks beforehand (to build up weather data and target surveillance, as well as to get the anti-aircraft gunnery crews complacent so that the nuclear bomb aircraft would not be shot down before dropping the bomb) without attacking the cities, had gradually worn down the civil defence response to small groups of aircraft passing overhead. People in the shelters survived all the effects intact, as they provided adequate shielding. If the people had taken used the shelters, they would have survived. This photo is Figure 12.52a on page 389 of Glasstone's The Effects of Atomic Weapons, U.S. Department of Defense, 1950.
The originally ‘secret’ May 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Nagasaki states (vol. 1, p. 10): ‘... the raid alarm was not given ... until 7 minutes after the atomic bomb had exploded ... less than 400 persons were in the tunnel shelters which had capacities totalling approximately 70,000.’ This situation, of most people watching lone B-29 bombers, led to the severe burns by radiation and flying debris injuries in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The originally ‘secret’ May 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima, pp. 4-6:
‘Six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet [975 m] of air zero 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... There had been practically no rain in the city for about 3 weeks. The velocity of the wind ... was not more than 5 miles [8 km] per hour....
‘The fire wind, which blew always toward the burning area, reached a maximum velocity of 30 to 40 miles [48-64 km] per hour 2 to 3 hours after the explosion ... Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion... almost no effort was made to fight this conflagration within the outer perimeter which finally encompassed 4.4 square miles [11 square km]. Most of the fire had burned itself out or had been extinguished on the fringe by early evening ... There were no automatic sprinkler systems in building...’
The vital six secret volumes of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey consist of three volumes on Hiroshima dated May 1947 and three on Nagasaki dated June 1947. (These are completely separate from the brief unclassified summary on the effects published by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1946.) These secret volumes were finally declassified in 1972 and may be inspected at the British National Archives, as documents AIR 48/160, AIR 48/161, AIR 48/162, AIR 48/163, AIR 48/164, and AIR 48/165.
Dr Ashley Oughterson and Dr Shields Warren noted a fire risk in Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956, p. 17):
‘Conditions in Hiroshima were ideal for a conflagration. Thousands of wooden dwellings and shops were crowded together along narrow streets and were filled with combustible material.’
The British Mission to Japan also analysed the damage and casualties in 1945, and comprised of 10 Home Office scientists who had been studying effects of conventional bombing on Britain, and 6 military scientists. One of these Home Office scientists, F.H. Pavry, continued to work on nuclear weapons effects at the Home Office throughout the 1950s, and accompanied by George R. Stanbury (who set up Home Office experiments at the first British nuclear test, Hurricane, 1952) and others, worked out civil defence countermeasures.
The British Mission to Japan, unlike the Americans, discriminated data between the casualties in areas with modern brick houses and those in areas of wood-frame traditional Japanese buildings. The results for Nagasaki were two curves for the percentage dead as a function of distance. For people in wood-frame buildings, the percentage killed was 96*exp(-0.45R2); for brick houses it was 96*exp(-0.63R2). In the formulae, based on the curves published in 1946, R is distance from ground zero in km. Each formula applies to the population ignoring air raid warnings and taking no evasive action. For wood-frame areas, 50% mortality occurs at 1.20 km, compared to 1.02 km for brick areas. (However, this estimate for brick houses only applies to brick houses in a firestorm area, surrounded by tens of thousands of burning wooden houses, and was later rejected by those Home Office scientists when they realized that such firestorm conditions - and thus mortality to trapped people in the buildings - would not apply to modern brick and concrete cities where firestorms cannot occur.)
Above: photos of crude earth covered wood-frame shelters that survived at 90 metres from ground zero in Nagasaki and 274 metres from ground zero in Hiroshima, amidst the debris from blast and fire effects on the surrounding wooden houses. These photos were first published as photographs 17 and 18 in the 1946 H.M. Stationery Office publication of the report of the British Mission to Japan, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They next appeared in a 1963 article by F. X. Lynch entitld 'Adequate Shelters and Quick Reactions to Warning: A key to Civil Defense', published in Science, vol. 142, pp. 665-7, and finally in Cresson H. Kearny's 1979 Oak Ridge National Laboratory publication, Nuclear War Survival Skills. The Japanese wooden frames (they were very short of steel, due to the war effort using up steel to produce aircraft, ships, etc.) were far less protective than the corrugated steel arches of British Anderson shelters, which survived even better when exposed to measured air blast at the Operation HURRICANE nuclear bomb test in 1952. But the basic principle of earth arching worked even with the wooden frame of the Hiroshima shelter, as Kearny's 1979 book explained : 'It's narrow room and a 3-foot-thick earth cover brought about effective earth arching; this kept its yielding wooden frame from being broken.' Earth arching makes the force from the applied air blast loading conduct through the compressed soil, diffracting around the wood or steel frame instead of being passed on to the frame. This arch arching mechanism was a late discovery in the nuclear testing programme, but it was extensively investigated in nuclear tests from 1957 onwards.
The British Mission to Japan found that the mortality for Nagasaki, assuming the standard wartime population density used for proper comparisons in Britain (45 people/acre) would be 65,000 for wood-frame houses or 50,000 for brick houses in firestorm areas. These figures compare directly to the average of 15 for the Nazi V2 rocket landing on brick housing with the same standard population density (12 for people lying down, 25 for people standing up). Because the V2 was supersonic, no air raid warnings could be given (unlike the case of normal bombing and V1 cruise missiles).
According to the report of the British Mission to Japan, wood-frame house damage was severe: ‘Complete collapse of these buildings from blast extended to 1.25 miles from the centre of damage in Hiroshima, and to an average of 1.5 miles in Nagasaki.’ This difference is due to the fact that the Nagasaki bomb was 22-kt, compared to 12-kt for Hiroshima, and blast effects radii scale as roughly {yield}1/3. The report also notes:
‘The provision of air raid shelters throughout Japan was much below European standards. Those along the verges of the wider streets in Hiroshima were comparatively well constructed: they were semi-sunk, [6 m] long, had wooden frames, and [0.5-0.6 m] of earth cover... Exploding so high above them, the bomb damaged none of these shelters.
‘In Nagasaki ... most householders had made their own backyard shelters, usually slit trenches or bolt holes covered with [0.3 m] or so of earth carried on rough poles and bamboos. These crude shelters ... nevertheless had considerable mass and flexibility ... Most of these shelters had their roofs forced in immediately below the explosion; but the proportion so damaged had fallen to 50 % at [274 m] from the centre of damage, and to zero at about [805 m].
‘These observations show that the standard British shelters would have performed well against a bomb of the same power exploded at such a height. Anderson shelters, properly erected and covered, would have given protection. Brick or concrete surface shelters with adequate reinforcement would have remained safe from collapse. The Morrison shelter is designed only to protect its occupants from the debris load of a house, and this it would have done. Deep shelters such as the refuge provided by the London Underground would have given complete protection.’
The report also debunks myths about people being vaporised where shadows were cast on flash-burned material: ‘There were cases where a clump of grass or the leaf of a tree has cast a sharp shadow on otherwise scorched wood. Therefore the most intense flash from the ball of fire had ended in a time less than that required to shrivel vegetation.’ It also notes that: ‘even the thin clothing protected from flash burn.’
Equally important, it debunks some of the horror rumours which were spread: ‘a rumour was current which age has made almost respectable, for it appeared in the London Blitz and before that in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. This was that large numbers of people had been ripped open by the blast, and their entrails exposed; their eyes and tongues were said also to have hung out. Experience in this country [Britain] has shown that blast pressure alone does not in fact cause these sensational effects ... two Nagasaki survivors who had spoken of seeing hundreds or thousands of such bodies on examination reduced their claim to one or two. Flying debris would be expected to produce a few such injuries.’ (Report of the British Mission to Japan, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1946, pp. 17-18.)
This report does not minimise the nuclear radiation effects, noting that exposed pregnant women suffered miscarriages at up to 3.2 km from ground zero in Hiroshima. Because of the variation of effects with distance, the percentage of the total mortality occurring on the first day fell from 92% within 0.5 km to 49% at 1.5-2 km in Hiroshima. The overall average is that 70% of the deaths occurred on the first day. The major nuclear radiation hazard was the fall in the white blood cell count due to bone marrow damage (bone marrow, which produces the white blood cells that fight bacterial infection are produced inside the bones that shield the marrow from ultraviolet rays). Because this coincided with skin blistering from thermal radiation, many infections resulted which overwhelmed the immune systems of survivors. Deaths from infection due to a lack of white blood cells began within a week of the explosion, reached a peak at 3 weeks after exposure, and ceased at 6-8 weeks.
According to the 1979 U.S. Office of Technology Assessment report The Effects of Nuclear War, p. 31: ‘... on a winter night less than 1 percent of the population might be exposed to direct thermal radiation, while on a clear summer weekend afternoon more than 25 percent might be exposed (that is, have no structure between the fireball and the person).’
The secret 1981 U.S. Department of Defence Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons (c. 10, p. 10) states that pain produced by intense thermal radiation provides ‘a useful tool in warning an individual to evade the thermal pulse.’
R. A. Langevin and others in 1958 compared the ability of trained troops and the untrained civilian population to duck and turn away, covering exposed skin (Operations Research, vol. 6, p. 710). Trained troops duck and cover in 0.75 second when a very bright flash occurs. The untrained civilians fared less well: 2% protected themselves within 1 second, 15% by 2 seconds, 50% by 3 seconds, 70% by 4 seconds, 80% by 5 seconds, 90% by 7 seconds, but 7.5% are still fully exposed at 10 seconds after detonation. The young and the old react most slowly if they lack clear simple knowledge of the dangers. Langevin shows that even this untrained protective reaction increases the amount of energy required to cause burns to an exposed population, especially in the case of high-yield weapons which expose the most people.
Dr Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan stated in the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (U.S. Department of Defence, p. 561):
‘Persons exposed to nuclear explosions of low or intermediate yield may sustain very severe burns... These burns may cause severe superficial damage similar to a third-degree burn, but the deeper layers of the skin may be uninjured. Such burns would heal rapidly, like mild second-degree burns.’
At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, high mortality from superficial burns occurred despite the slight depth of charred skin, because of synergistic interaction between nuclear and thermal radiation exposure. This was discovered by Dr James W. Brooks et al. in 1952, and published in their paper ‘The Influence of External Body Radiation on Mortality from Thermal Burns’ (Annals of Surgery, vol. 136, p. 533). Although superficial third-degree burns from the brief thermal pulse of a nuclear explosion are easily survived, a concurrent nuclear radiation exposure of 100 r interferes with recovery by suppressing the white blood cell count, allowing otherwise minor infections to become lethal.
Contrary to antinuclear propaganda claims that people were ‘vaporised’ in Japanese photographs of human ‘shadows’ left behind on otherwise melted asphalt paint and road surfaces, the fact that these shadows exist proves that people blocked the thermal radiation without disappearing. The peak skin temperature is reached when the rate of absorption of energy equals the rate of dissipation of energy by re-emission, blood circulation, and air-cooling. The human body (mainly water) could not be vaporised by the thermal exposures present at ground zero, even if the energy could have somehow diffused throughout a person within the time available. Skin has a thermal conductance of 8 kg.cal/m2/hour/C. Another recurring myth are spectacular keloids (overgrowths of scar tissue) misrepresented as ‘nuclear bomb’ burns: ‘The degree of the keloid formation was undoubtedly influenced by secondary infections, that complicated healing of the burns, and by malnutrition, but more important is the known tendency for keloid formation to occur among the Japanese, as a racial characteristic. Thus, many spectacular keloids were formed after the healing of burns produced in the fire raids on Tokyo.’ (Dr Samuel Glasstone, editor, The Effects of Atomic Weapons, U.S. Department of Defence, September 1950, p. 337.)
In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. (Data: Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pages 1-27.) Over 40 years, in 36,500 survivors monitored, there were 176 leukemia deaths which is 89 more than the control (unexposed) group got naturally. There were 4,687 other cancer deaths, but that was merely 339 above the number in the control (unexposed) group, so this is statistically a much smaller rise than the leukemia result. Natural leukemia rates, which are very low in any case, were increased by 51% in the irradiated survivors, but other cancers were merely increased by just 7%. Adding all the cancers together, the total was 4,863 cancers (virtually all natural cancer, nothing whatsoever to do with radiation), which is just 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, the total increase over the natural cancer rate due to bomb exposure was only 9%, spread over a period of 40 years. There was no increase whatsoever in genetic malformations.
Contrast these hard facts to the propaganda first spread by Dr Harold Jacobson, a nuclear effects ignorant Manhattan Project physicist at Los Alamos, who claimed to the International News Service that Hiroshima will be uninhabitable for 75 years, and then falsely added: ‘Any Japanese who try to ascertain the extent of the damage caused by the atomic bomb are committing suicide.’ Neutron activity doses were not high enough to do that, and there was no significant local fallout (firestorm soot and moisture rainout occurred an hour after the Hiroshima explosion, by which time the radioactive mushroom cloud was far downwind and did not contaminate the rain). Examine the post-attack recovery rate in Hiroshima before any significant outside help arrived:
7 August (Day 2): Survivors open bridges and roads to pedestrian traffic, clearing away debris.
8 August (Day 3): Tracks cleared and trains to Hiroshima resumed.
9 August (Day 4): Street trolley bus (electric tram) lines return to service.
Next, consider what civil defence did during the post-attack recovery process to help aid survivors in Nagasaki, subjected to a nuclear explosion just 3 days after Hiroshima:
9 August (Day 1): Emergency rations are brought in to feed 25,000 survivors (though less than the required amount, due to bureaucratic confusion). The survivors lived in the air-raid shelters, which had survived.
10 August (Day 2): Emergency rations are brought in to feed 67,000 survivors: ‘this represents a remarkable feat of organisation that illustrates the great possibilities of mass feeding.’ - Fred C. Ikle, The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction, University of Oklahoma Press, 1958, p. 147.
7 October (Day 60): The first green shoots of recovery appeared on an irradiated and firestorm burned chestnut tree, photographed by U.S. Air Force observers, and published in the U.S. Congress book, The Effects of Nuclear War, 1979.
Above: the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment published a very poorly researched book in May 1979 (full of popular lies about ozone layer damage, and so on) called The Effects of Nuclear War in which the one useful disclosure (on page 114) was this U.S. Air Force photo of the leaves and new shoots appearing on a chestnut tree in Nagasaki 2 months after being irradiated with gamma rays and neutrons and then charred and burned in the fires which followed. Predictably, this one piece of honesty is omitted from the online PDF version of that book by the Federation of American Scientists here (which is so poorly scanned for page 114 that not even a single word of the photo caption is readable), and also hosted by Princeton University here. Robert Jungk, Children of the Ashes (Heinemann, London, 1961): 'one morning in April 1946, the Vice-Mayor [of Hiroshima] gazed for a long time. For what met his eyes was a sight he had scarcely hoped ever to see again ... The blackness of the branches was dappled with the brilliant white of cherry buds opening into blossom.'
Robert Jungk carefully investigated the history of the recovery in Hiroshima by interviewing the people involved and collecting first hand reports, and gives further interesting details in his book Children of the Ashes (Heinemann, London, 1961):
1. On 31 August 1945: 'the first locally produced and locally printed post-war edition of the Chugoku Shimbun was on sale in the streets of Hiroshima ... 'Our darkroom was an air-raid shelter dug into the hillside [which survived of course]', one of the editors remembers, 'but our type had to be cast in the open air, under the sunny sky.'
2. On 7 September 1945, the Chugoku Shimbun reported that Hiroshima then had a population estimated to be 130,000.
3. On 10 September 1945, electricity was reconnected to some parts of Hiroshima: 'huts made of planks quickly knocked together ... already had electric light.'
4. On 5 November 1945, the Chugoku Shimbun reported that - despite inertia and delays due to 'the rigidity of bureaucratic procedure' which was hindering the recovery rate - a lot of progress was being made:
'Housing. The building of houses is to be systematically begun on 15 November. ...
'Tramways. At present, ten trams are in commission on the main route, eight on the Miyajima route and five muncipal buses. These twenty-three vehicles must cater for an average of 42,000 persons daily.'
Some 70% of the destroyed buildings of Hiroshima had been reconstructed by mid-1949. (Ref.: Research Department, Hiroshima Municipal Office, as cited in Hiroshima, Hiroshima Publishing, 1949. Other recovery data are given in U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Washington, D.C., 1946, p. 8.)
Above: the Chugoku newspaper building 870 m east of GZ Hiroshima, gutted by fire. Unlike the CND-pandering 'survivors would envy the dead' propaganda-lying big name 'journalists' (mostly scum) of today, those journalists at Hiroshima didn't let a nuclear attack deflect them from their duty of reporting news truthfully. They go on with the task of helping to keep morale up, and assisting the flow of information needed to rebuild Hiroshima. They rolled their sleeves up, and got to work, setting type outdoors, processing photographic prints in an old air raid shelter! These journalists are a model for civil defense, unlike their modern lying counterparts!
'I must confess that as an expert, my original view, and the view I held during the time I was on the SALT delegation, was that there was no defense against nuclear war and that there was no realistic recovery from it. ...[However, upon checking the actual facts... ] The day after the blast, bridges in downtown Hiroshima were open to traffic. Two days later, the trains started to run again, and three days later, some of the streetcar lines were back in operation.'
- Thomas K. Jones, Program and Product Evaluation Manager, Boeing Aerospace Company, Testimony the Hearings before the Joint Committee on Defense Production, U.S. Congress, 17 November 1976.
(See also his report: T. K. Jones, Industrial Survival and Recovery after Nuclear Attack: A Report to the Joint Committee on Defense Production, U.S. Congress, Boeing Aerospace Company, Seattle, Washington, ADA041540, 1976. Another relevant report is: U.S. Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, Research Report on Recovery from Nuclear Attack, Information Bulletin No. 307, Washington, D.C., 1979.)
With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War is the title of a 285 pages long pseudoscientific political diatribe against the value of dirt in shielding fallout gamma radiation in civil defense, written by Robert Scheer and published by Vintage Books in 1983. There is an extract here which clearly shows the pseudoscientific, unbalanced, arm-waving, fact-denying style. It was reviewed by Andrew J. Pierre in the Spring 1983 issue of Foreign Affairs, who clearly doesn't know the first thing about fission product fractionation, the Compton effect, or the low energy of gamma rays from neptunium-239 produced by dirty nuclear weapons with uranium-238 casings:
'The sensationalism of the approach of this widely touted book about the Reagan Administration's attitude toward nuclear war somewhat reduces its credibility. There are too many alarums and extreme statements. Yet it remains a troubling work which emphasizes the degree to which at least some in the current Administration hold views which are outside the mainstream of America's strategic and arms control policy of the past 20 years.'
Notice the way that mainstream views are implicitly assumed to be right, contrary to all the lessons of the failure of groupthink dogma for the whole of human history in the fields of politics, war and science. All of the reader reviews currently on Amazon.com also miss the science. The nearest one to truth (at least in the context of Reagan's Starwars SDI project, which came after Scheer's book) is probably the following by Donovan Colbert (Sacramento, California United States) who focusses on Sheer's diatribe against President Reagan and his Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger who both used Jones' research as the basis for making claims to the media that America could not just survive but actually 'win' nuclear war. In 1982 the Reagan administration presented a program to Congress requesting $4.2 billion for civil defense over seven years, to save 80 percent of the U.S. population in the event of a full scale nuclear war with the USSR. In 1980, presidential candidate, George H. W. Bush, later Reagan's Vice President and President himself, answered Robert Scheer's question about how a super-power can win in a nuclear exchange: 'You have survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That's the way you have a winner ...'. It's clear that this 'Hawkish' approach was designed to stand up to the Soviet Union which had just invaded Afghanistan, and make it understand that Reagan's administration was tough on terrorist states, the nuclear threat notwithstanding. Colbert's review of Sheer's book states:
'The goal was to convince them to enter into an arms race that they couldn't possibly win, which would cause their economy to collapse and make them reform their Communist system of Government. That loony neocon Mr. Reagan... what a crazy cowboy. How could he ever have thought that this plan could have worked... What... what is that? The Soviet Union suffered an economic collapse and embraced a more democratic society? You don't say... The value of this book is that it the author got it ALL right. Reagan was in a staring contest with the Soviet Union, and he made them blink. He convinced them that he and his administration was crazy, and they were so caught up in that - they bankrupted themselves, causing the collapse of soviet communism.'
Robert Scheer wrote a series of articles in the Los Angeles Times attacking the Reagan people who tried to implement Cresson H. Kearny's 1979 Oak Ridge National Laboratory book, Nuclear War Survival Skills in national civil defense plans for American survival. In 1983, Scheer in his book With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War ridiculed the policies based on the Kearny book without once mentioning or discussing Kearny's book or his prior Oak Ridge National Laboratory research reports. Sheer attacked Thomas K. Jones, the man Ronald Reagan had appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces. Sheer wrote in his yellow bellowied, subversive (non-mentioning) attack on Kearny's research:
'Very late one autumn night in 1981, Thomas K. Jones, the man Ronald Reagan had appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, told me ... that nuclear war was not nearly as devastating as we had been led to believe. He said, "If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it." The shovels were for digging holes in the ground, which would be covered somehow or other with a couple of doors and with three feet of dirt thrown on top, thereby providing adequate fallout shelters for the millions who had been evacuated from America's cities to the countryside. "It's the dirt that does it," he said.
'What is truly astounding about my conversation with T. K. is not simply that one highly placed official in the Reagan Administration is so horribly innocent of the effects of nuclear war. More frightening is that T. K. Jones's views are all too typical of the thinking of those at the core of the Reagan Administration, as I have discovered through hundreds of hours of interviews with the men who are now running our government.'
This kind of sneering by the media against the people implementing civil defence in the Reagan administration, while ignorantly ignoring the scientific facts from tests as published in Kearny's book, led to the whole civil defence effort being ditched. Sheer also promulgated lies about civil defense evacuation effectiveness, quoting some lunatic who claimed that evacuation of densely populated cities and dispersal of the population could be overcome by the Russians if they 'simply retarget to hit the evacuated populations'. Duh! The whole point of nuclear weapons is that they concentrate the effects in a small area which is why cities could be targets, so they're no use for a dispersed population which is protected against blast, thermal and fallout effects! While you can hit 100 cities with 100 nuclear weapons, you would need millions of nuclear weapons to target a dispersed population, and then you would have to keep re-targetting every weapon non-stop as people moved around (the coordinates of cities are fixed).
America and Britain dropped 1.3 Megatons (1,300,000 tons) of conventional high explosives and incendiaries on Germany, while in August 1945 America dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan. Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualties were about 25% of the population of each city (only 1% of casualties have been due to long-term radiation injuries, such as leukemias), and the cities recovered quickly, despite a lack of assistance from other cities.
Remember that the firestorm in Tokyo from one air raid of conventional incendiaries in March 1945 produced more casualties than either atomic bomb, including long term casualties. Many of the incendiary victims suffered worse injuries than nuclear casualties. There was no significant residual fallout in Japan because the bombs were air bursts. (Compare these scientific facts to popular fiction in newspapers and widely published political books 'explaining' the horrific effects of nuclear weapons compared to other weapons.) Remember than 62 million people were killed by conventional warfare in WWII.
Also remember that the blast effects radius scales as the cube-root of yield, so the area devastated is only proportional to the two-thirds power of yield (for fallout there is an analogous effect, since the bigger areas covered by fallout involve longer fallout arrival times than in the case of smaller weapons, so more fallout decays in transit, reducing the doses below those you would expect from linear scaling). The result is that the 2 megatons of bombs dropped in WWII (in the form of 20 million TNT bombs, each of 100 kg average size) is equivalent to an 'equivalent megatonnage' of 431 nuclear bombs each of 1 megaton yield.
The thing about a big nuclear explosion is that it gives you more warning than a conventional low yield bomb - the flash of light travels faster than the blast wave(which takes about 4 seconds to travel one mile), the heat and initial nuclear radiation pulses (the heat and initial nuclear radiation pulse travels at light velocity but is released slowly and takes several seconds to be delivered from the glowing fireball), giving most people time to get out of the line of sight (duck and cover).
Fallout is wind carried dust and again takes time to arrive, giving people who are downwind vital time to evacuate or at least get some shielding in a brick building or one of Kearny's improvised shelters (e.g., each foot of dirt shielding reduces the fallout gamma dose rate by a factor of ten). The nuclear winter hype relies on firestorms, which were feasible in the medieval part of Hamburg and in Japanese cities in 1945, but are not possible with the brick/concrete modern cities around today: any fires get extinguished by rubble. You can't get firestorms. The nuclear winter people like Sagan had to invent a targetting strategy that would put nearly all nuclear bombs on oil refineries. Actually, Saddam set alight all of Kuwait's oil fields before the First Gulf War, but it didn't freeze the planet. Soot layers don't remain stable in the atmosphere: they quickly get dispersed and washed out in the 'black rain' that was seen in Hiroshima (an hour after the radioactive mushroom cloud had been blown miles away by the wind) and conventional firestorm places.
Above: Mannequins at 2.1 km ground range from the 29-kt TEAPOT-APPLE 2 Nevada 500 ft altitude tower test on 5 May 1955. Clothes did not ignite, but the exposed colour of a dark suit faded while a dark pattern on a dress was burned on to the underwear. Clothing protects skin.
Above: UPSHOT KNOTHOLE-ENCORE 27 kt air burst at 2,423 feet altitude at the Nevada nuclear test, 8 May 1953. Wooden houses, black and white, resisted ignition by a thermal flash of 12 calories/cm2, despite ‘smoking’ during exposure. But a badly decayed dark wooden fence and piles of old leaves and newspaper trash set their adjacent houses on fire within 15 minutes. The light-painted house with a tidy yard survived. Far right: two wooden houses 10-by-12 feet in size with large windows facing ground zero were exposed to 17 calories/cm2 from ENCORE. In one house piles of inflammable newspaper trash indoors set a house on fire due to thermal radiation from ENCORE entering the large window, but an identical house beside it survived because inflammable trash had been removed! Page 343 of the 1962 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons explains the significance of this ENCORE test:
‘The value of fire-resistive furnishings in decreasing the number of ignition points was also demonstrated ... where the thermal radiation exposure was 17 calories/cm2 ... draperies were of vinyl plastic, and rugs and clothing were made of wool ... the recovery party, entering an hour after the explosion, was able to extinguish the fires.’
Note that the house which did burn which was loaded with trash with a large window facing the fireball and underwent immediate room 'flashover' with no delay because all the easily ignited trash in it simultaneously burst into flames. Lynn Eden falsely makes a great issue out this fact in her 2004 book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation, on pages 256-7, where she simply ignores the vitally important civil defence fact that the identical house with the trash like old newspapers and highly inflammable old type furniture removed did not undergo instant flashover!
The immediate flashover effect was confirmed at the 1 kt high explosive test DIRECT COURSE in New Mexico, October 1983. There was no surprise there: light tinder filled rooms facing the fireball and irradiated with 17 cal/cm2 instantly burst into flame, but clean tidy rooms without trash don’t, even if they face the fireball. This is what ENCORE proved!
Thomas Goodale's report Effects of Air Blast on Urban Fires, URS Research Company, California, report URS 7009-14, also AD723429, December 1970, showed that where thermal radiation from a simulated 1 megaton burst ignites curtains and papers, the blast wave arrived and blew fires out. At 1 psi, 50% of burning curtains are extinguished by the blast wave, burning fragments from the remainder can be blown into the room by a peak overpressure of 1 psi. But in all case above 2.5 psi peak overpressure, 100% of incipient fires were extinguished by the blast wave, unless the whole room was filled with tindering like newspaper trash and directly facing the fireball so as to suffer immediate 'flashover' like the trash filled room exposed to ENCORE.
Blast winds displace flames and cool the burning material to temperatures below those needed for ignition, thus extinguishing fires. Burning beds, all curtains and upholstered furniture are only extinguished by peak overpressures of 2.5 psi and higher. The beds and upholstered furniture may then continue to smoulder, and can rekindle into fires after 15 minutes or more. During this time it is very easy to stamp out the potential fires.
Lynn Eden falsely comments on Goodale's research in her 2004 book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation, where she writes on page 218 that:
'The next year [1971] Goodale conducted more experiments ... One experiment examined the effects of blast overpressures of up to 9 psi on the smoulder that remained after the flames had been blown out. These findings, however, were not conclusive: "The higher overpressures did not produce a smoulder-extinction counterpart to the blowout of flames. No trend was evident".'
This statement about the trend in smoulder extinction with increasing peak overpressure, has nothing to do with the fact that blast waves do extinguish 100% of solid fuel (not burning liquid fuel pans or burning papers and trash such as in the ENCORE room) of incipient fires above 2.5 psi, even if some are left in a smouldering condition at high overpressures and can re-ignite if not dowsed with water or stamped out.
Lynn Eden continues:
'Another experiment showed a very different outcome in which low blast pressure could increase fire spread. In this study, Goodale subjected burning curtains to blast overpressures of 1 psi "only to discover that transport of burning curtain fragments may become a considerable hazard under suitable conditions".'
Ignition of curtains depends on the curtain colour (curtains with common white linings are resistant to ignition by thermal radiation), but if they are ignited it is true that when blasted into a room they can cause fires under some conditions. yet this does not discredit the finding that other internal room fires are blown out by the blast wave. Burning curtain fragments are easy to deal with, by stamping out. It is not an immediate flashover mechanism, like the trash filled ENCORE room.
Even where rooms are ignited by thermal radiation, this does not instantly spread burn the house down, unless the room is filled with fine tindering such as trash newspapers, magazines, etc., as in the ENCORE room which burned rapidly by immediate flashover (contrasted to the identical room without trash which did not undergo immediate flashover and was extinguished an hour later by the recovery party). It takes 17 minutes for 50% of normal living room fires to 'flashover' so that the whole room bursts into flame, and 8 minutes for 50% of bedroom bed ignitions to flashover to the rest of the room. (F. J. Vodvarka and T. E. Waterman, Fire Behavior, Ignition to Flashover, IIT Research Institute, Chicago, report AD618414, June 1965.) Until flashover occurs, it remains possible to extinguish the fire with water, sand, or by beating it out with wet blankets.
Collaborated evidence from observers at Hiroshima shows that the ignition of dark air raid blackout curtains occurred at up to 1.1 km from ground zero, whereas the more likely blast ignition due to overturned charcoal cooking stoves caused a firestorm to burn everything within an average radius of 1.9 km. Curtain ignition was limited to rooms facing the explosion with uninterrupted line-of-sight to the fireball. Now that upholstery fabrics are fire retardant by law, research has been done into the risk of internal house fires being started by bits of ignited window curtains being thrown into rooms. The main risk occurs if there are piles of old newspapers in the rooms which can act as tinder, because the wood used in flooring and furniture is too thick to be ignited before curtain fragments burn out. (Thomas Goodale, The Ignition Hazard to Urban Interiors During Nuclear Attack due to Burning Curtain Fragments Transported by Blast, URS Research Corp., San Mateo, California, report URS-7030-5, 1971.)
There are lots of simple countermeasures against thermal ignition in the threat of a nuclear attack. For rooms containing ignitable items like beds, upholstered furniture, or rugs: choose light-coloured curtains, paint a mixture of flour and water on to the inside of windows with a potential view of the fireball, or even better simply tape sheets of aluminium cooking foil over those particular windows. For other rooms and offices: dispose of loose combustible materials like newspapers, magazines and trash, and place in the rooms buckets filled with water or sand to use to extinguish fires before they can spread. Blankets soaked with water are useful to beat out tindering fires before they spread.
Lynn Eden goes on (pages 218-9):
'Many studies followed, but the results were inconclusive. One experiment undertaken in the spring of 1973 ... subjected twenty pans of burning fuel to blast ... "no fire at any of the three stations was extinguished by the shock wave". ... Some experiments ... appeared to bear out Goodale's findings, others did not.'
This is dishonest because burning liquid in pans involves the circulation of hot convection currents of liquid with a much higher specific heat capacity (heat retaining ability) than air. Solid fuels only circulate hot gases, which have a low specific heat capacity and so are easily blown out by a blast of relatively cool air. But burning liquid is totally different and can be much harder to extinguish once the liquid is heated to ignition temperature by convection currents within it. This has nothing to to with the extinguishing nature of the blast wave on burning solid fuels: it is patiently and fundamentally dishonest to compare experiments on dissimilar phenomena and then claim that they are contradictory so that those which support civil defence can be ignored as 'inconclusive'. That is just fact ignoring pseudoscience, a political dodge with no place in fact-based science.
Lynn Eden states on page 219:
'... In the "doughnut hole", the area immediately surrounding the detonation, collapsed strustures would prevent fires from burning or would extinguish incipient fires; farther away, fires would burn vigorously. ... at Hiroshima ... there was no "hole" near the detonation, nor was there evidence of such a hole at Nagasaki.'
This is a dishonest 'comparison' because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were wood frame cities, not brick and concrete. The few brick and concrete buildings survived in each city, often with minor damage. It is dishonest for Lynn Eden and her sources like Postol and Brode to ignore the fact that brick and concrete can't burn but wood can burn. The May 1947 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima, pp. 4-6:
‘Six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet [975 m] of air zero 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... There had been practically no rain in the city for about 3 weeks. The velocity of the wind ... was not more than 5 miles [8 km] per hour....
‘The fire wind, which blew always toward the burning area, reached a maximum velocity of 30 to 40 miles [48-64 km] per hour 2 to 3 hours after the explosion ... Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion... almost no effort was made to fight this conflagration within the outer perimeter which finally encompassed 4.4 square miles [11 square km]. Most of the fire had burned itself out or had been extinguished on the fringe by early evening ... There were no automatic sprinkler systems in building...’
The British Home Office Manual of Civil Defence, Vol. 1, Pamphlet No. 1, Nuclear Weapons, 2nd edition, 1959, states that the 'main fire zone' in a British brick built city will not exist within the radius of peak overpressure 11 psi because the rubble will exclude air and prevent significant fires within that radius. It specified four damage zones:
A - 11 psi (75 kPa) peak overpressure: complete destruction of ordinary houses, so brick rubble extinguishes fires.
B - 6 psi (40 kPa) peak overpressure: brick walls cracked or demolished, houses irreparably damaged, streets blocked with debris until cleared with mechanical aids.
C - 1.5 psi (10 kPa) peak overpressure: doors and roofs smashed in addition to broken windows and tiles blown off roofs.
D - 0.75 psi (5 kPa) peak overpressure: light damage, just glass and tiles.
Russian nuclear test based civil defence data indicated that brick houses do not burn at overpressures above 7 psi because the rubble prevents fires, as quoted Cresson H. Kearny, Nuclear War Survival Skills, Updated and Expanded 1987 Edition, Oak Ridge National Laboratory/Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, 1987, Chapter 1:
'Soviet propagandists promptly exploited belief in unsurvivable "nuclear winter" to ... demoralize their enemies. Because raging city firestorms are needed to inject huge amounts of smoke into the stratosphere and thus, according to one discredited theory, prevent almost all solar heat from reaching the ground, the Soviets changed their descriptions of how a modern city will burn if blasted by a nuclear explosion. ... [before nuclear winter hype in 1983] Russian scientists and civil defense officials realistically described ... the burning of a city hit by a nuclear weapon. Buildings in the blasted area for miles around ground zero will be reduced to scattered rubble - mostly of concrete, steel, and other nonflammable materials - that will not burn in blazing fires. Thus in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory translation (ORNL-TR-2793) of Civil Defense, Second Edition (500,000 copies), Moscow, 1970, by Egorov, Shlyakhov, and Alabin, we read: "Fires do not occur in zones of complete destruction . . . that are characterized by an overpressure exceeding 0.5 kg/cm2 [7 psi peak overpressure], because rubble is scattered and covers the burning structures. As a result the rubble only smolders, and fires as such do not occur." ... No firestorm has ever injected smoke into the stratosphere, or caused appreciable cooling below its smoke cloud.
'The theory that smoke from burning cities and forests and dust from nuclear explosions would cause worldwide freezing temperatures was conceived in 1982 by the German atmospheric chemist and environmentalist Paul Crutzen, and continues to be promoted by a worldwide propaganda campaign. This well funded campaign began in 1983 with televised scientific-political meetings in Cambridge and Washington featuring American and Russian scientists. A barrage of newspaper and magazine articles followed, including a scaremongering article by Carl Sagan in the October 30, 1983 issue of Parade, the Sunday tabloid read by millions. The most influential article was featured in the December 23,1983 issue of Science (the weekly magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science): "Nuclear winter, global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions," by five scientists, R. P. Turco, O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and C. Sagan. Significantly, these activists listed their names to spell TTAPS, pronounced "taps," the bugle call proclaiming "lights out" or the end of a military funeral.
'Until 1985, non-propagandizing scientists did not begin to effectively refute the numerous errors .... A principal reason is that government organizations, private corporations, and most scientists generally avoid getting involved in political controversies ... Stephen Schneider has been called a fascist by some disarmament supporters for having written "Nuclear Winter Reappraised," according to the Rocky Mountain News of July 6, 1986. Three days later, this paper, that until recently featured accounts of unsurvivable "nuclear winter," criticized Carl Sagan and defended Thompson and Schneider in its lead editorial, "In Study of Nuclear Winter, Let Scientists Be Scientists." In a free country, truth will out - although sometimes too late to effectively counter fast-hitting propaganda.'
DPA Attack Environment Manual: Chapter 3, What the Planner Needs to Know about Fire Ignition and Spread, U.S. Department of Defense, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, Panels 3 and 5:
'Of course, hardly anyone lives in an area where they would be certainly exposed to thermal radiation ... There would be buildings, trees, hills ... Virtually any opaque material will serve to shield against the thermal pulse. ... nearly all of the radiation would be shielded out by objects before they are damaged or moved by the blast wave. ... tinder fuels do not usually contain sufficient energy by themselves to cause a sustained fire. What is needed is a "fuel array" containing both tinder and other burnables. ... Hardly anyone puts black curtains at their windows. In the thousands of sites that have been surveyed, none have been found. Crumpled newspaper and dry leaves are found in urban areas but, like people in the streets, they are very often not in a position to "see" the fireball and rarely are they located with other burnables to form a sufficient fuel array to cause a building fire. ... Some fire analysts consider only upholstered furniture and beds as the fuel arrays of significance. About 35 to 40 calories per square centimetre are required for ignition by a 5-Mt weapon.'
Curtains and drapes should be closed across windows in an impending nuclear attack, to shield beds and upholstered furniture from thermal radiation. Ignition of curtain fragments are easily stamped or doused out. This occurred at Hiroshima, where the main source of fires was the overturning of charcoal braziers in wooden houses by the blast wave.
John McAuliffe and Kendall Moll studied the blast wave role in starting fires in their 224 pages long report, Secondary Ignitions from Nuclear Attack, Stanford Research Institute, California, report AD625173, July 1965. They found that flying debris and building collapse data on fire ignition was available from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings, high explosive disasters such as the massive Texas City ship explosion in 1947, World War II bombings, earthquakes and tornadoes. They concluded that for American cities (which don't use Japanese charcoal cooking braziers in indoors in homes filled with paper screens and bamboo furnishings), there are only 0.006 fires ignited by the blast wave per 1,000 square feet of floor area damaged by peak overpressures of 2 psi or more. This is approximately 1% ignition of typical American homes, one fire in every three blocks, or 80 fires per square mile in an area which is 25% builtup with 2-story buildings. Electrical wiring and gas piping were considered equally vulnerable. (Actually, this will be an overestimate because the source-region cable pick up of light-speed EMP current surges will automatically shut down transformers within a few microseconds of a surface burst or low air burst on a city; power stations and substations may be ignited by the EMP, but it will prevent secondary ignitions of electrical fires by blast wave debris in homes.)
A theoretical study of the combined effects of both primary thermal ignition of American homes by thermal radiation and also blast wave effects in extinguishing most of those fires but causing some secondary fires by damaging electrical and gas installations (they ignored the role of EMP) is the 97 pages long report by R. K. Miller et al., Analysis of Four Models of the Nuclear-Caused Ignitions and Early Fires in Urban Areas, the Dirkwood Corporation, New Mexico, report AD 716807, August 1970. This report used a combination of computer models to show that a 5 megaton surface burst on Detroit would ignite 2% of buildings at 8 miles from ground zero where the peak overpressure was 2 psi, rising linearly to a maximum of 10% of buildings at 5 miles (and within 5 miles) where the peak overpressure was 5 psi or more.
The poorly researched 1979 U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment report The Effects of Nuclear War ignorantly used these figures of 2% ignition at 2 psi and 10% at 5 psi without understanding that they include thermal radiation effects and therefore do not scale with peak overpressure!
Another study of fires ignited in Detroit by a 5 Mt burst is Arthur N. Takata and Frederick Salzberg, Development and Application of a Complete Fire-Spread Model: Volume II, IIT research Institute, Chicago, report AD684874, June 1968, found that 3.8% of all buildings could be ignited initially, but that firespread could burn down many more if initial ignitions were not stamped out. Radiation from a burning wooden building emits about 4 cal/cm2/sec, and it takes only 0.4 cal/cm2/sec to ignite wood, so whenever another wooden house occupies more than 10% of the field of view of a burning house, it will be ignited. (Takata and Salzburg note that in the Darmstadt fire of 11 September 1944, where firebrands were negligible, thermal radiation from burning wooden houses caused a 72% probability of igniting immediately adjacent houses, a 50% probability of igniting houses 8 metres away, and a 10% probability of igniting houses 12 metres away.)
This short-ranged radiation firespread mechanism could nearly double the number of house ignitions in Detroit over the first hour, from 3.8% to 6.5% of houses burning at one hour post attack. After an hour, firebrands from burning houses would start to seriously contribute to the ignition of fires at much greater distances than the heat radiation from burning wooden buildings, so by 3 hours 18% of buildings in Detroit could be burnt out, and by 28 hours the figure could rise to 50%. Unlike a firestorm, this would be a very slow process, like the Great Fire of London in 1666 where only 8 people were killed when 32,000 homes were burned over 1.8 km2, because the fire spread very slowly over 4 days; and the Chicago Fire of 1871 where only 50 people were killed when 17,500 homes burned over an area of 8.6 km2 over a period of 3 days. (Wind carried burning firebrands from the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 caused fires to wooden houses at distances of up to 800 metres downwind. Landing on wooden roofs, they are very difficult to deal with when the fire brigade is preoccupied with the existing fire zone.)
In Hiroshima, the secret May 1947 report of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (Fig 5-IX) found that for wooden houses, the probability of one burning house igniting another by firebrands is 50% for a separation distance of 26 m, and shows (Fig 4-IX) that the risk of fire spread is 50% where 21% of the ground area is covered by wooden houses or 32% of the ground area is covered by industrial buildings.
‘Considerable war-time experience in the UK established beyond doubt that the chance of a continuing fire in an ordinary British house spreading and involving another house is less than 40%.’ – George R. Stanbury, The number of fires caused by nuclear attack, British Home Office, Scientific Adviser’s Branch, report SA/PR 90, 1965.
Many American buildings are wood-frame. For the brick and concrete type buildings that prevail in Britain, the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch Scientific Advisers' Operational Handbook, Scottish Home and Health Department, H. M. Stationery Office, Edinburgh, 1979, states on page 39:
'The density of initial ignitions in the main fire zone, for UK houses, is likely to be very roughly one house in thirty, with a fire-spread factor of about 2 [i.e., each initial ignition will on average ignite one other building by thermal radiation, wind blown convection flames, and hot burning firebrands]. About one house in fifteen is expected to become burnt out. This situation would not constitute a "firestorm" or "mass fire", and the number of fire casualties should be small.'
Firestorms have always required at least 50% of buildings to be ignited. A 71 pages long report by Robert M. Rodden, Floyd I. John, and Richard Laurino, Exploratory Analysis of Fire Storms, Stanford Research Institute, California, report AD616638, May 1965, identified the following parameters required by all firestorms:
(1) More than 8 pounds of fuel per square foot (40 kg per square metre) of ground area. Hence firestorms occurred in wooden buildings, like Hiroshima or the medieval part of Hamburg. The combustible fuel load in London is just 24 kg/m2, whereas in the firestorm area of Hamburg in 1943 it was 156 kg/m2. The real reason for all the historical fire conflagrations was only exposed in 1989 by the analysis of L. E. Frost and E.L. Jones, ‘The Fire Gap and the Greater Durability of Nineteenth-Century Cities’ (Planning Perspectives, vol. 4, pp. 333-47). Each medieval city was built cheaply from inflammable ‘tinderbox’ wooden houses, using trees from the surrounding countryside. By 1800, Britain had cut down most of its forests to build wood houses and to burn for heating, so the price of wood rapidly increased (due to the expense of transporting trees long distances), until it finally exceeded the originally higher price of brick and stone; so from then on all new buildings were built of brick when wooden ones decayed. This rapidly reduced the fire risk. Also, in 1932, British Standard 476 was issued, which specified the fire resistance of building materials. In addition, new cities were built with wider streets and rubbish disposal to prevent tinder accumulation in alleys, which created more effective fire breaks.
(2) More than 50% of structures ignited initially.
(3) Initial surface winds of less than 8 miles per hour.
(4) Initial ignition area exceeding 0.5 square mile.
The fuel loading per unit ground area is equal to fuel loading per unit area of a building, multiplied by the builtupness fraction of the area. E.g., Hamburg had a 45% builtupness (45% of the ground area was actually covered by buildings), and the buildings were multistorey medieval wooden constructions containing 70 pounds of fuel per square foot. Hence, in Hamburg the fuel loading of ground area was 0.45*70 = 32 pounds per square foot, which was enough for a firestorm.
By contrast, modern cities have a builtupness of only 10-25% in most residential areas and 40% in commercial and downtown areas. Modern wooden American houses have a fuel loading of 20 pounds per square foot of building area with a builtupness below 25%, so the fuel loading per square foot of ground is below 20*0.25 = 5 pounds per square foot, and would not produce a firestorm. Brick and concrete buildings contain on the average about 3.5 pounds per square foot of floor area, so they can't produce firestorms either, even if they are all ignited.
On the night of 9-10 March 1945, 334 B-29 aircraft dropped 1,667 tons of high explosives (to open up buildings to allow incendiary bombs inside) and incendiaries on Tokyo, creating a firestorm which burned down 41 km2 or 15.8 square miles, killing more people than at Hiroshima (where only 4.7 square miles was burned down) or Nagasaki (where the valley geography meant that only 1.8 square miles burned down). These data come from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report, The Effects of Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1946.
THE BOMBING OF HAMBURG AND HOW THE FIRESTORM WAS PRODUCED
London was bombed in 1940 by about 200 aircraft for 61 consecutive nights. Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote in September 1940 that ‘The bombers alone will provide the means of victory’, but in August 1941 an analysis of British night-time bombing raids showed that only 10-33 % of British bombers dropped their bombs within 8 km of their targets, the lower (10 %) figure being due to heavy anti-aircraft artillery in Ruhr. In conclusion, it was decided that precision attacks on small targets by bombers were a waste of time, and cities would be targeted instead. Arthur Harris became chief of bomber command on 25 February 1942 and wanted to accumulate a vast number of aircraft and to pound Germany’s capital city, Berlin, into submission. In a filmed statement, Harris said: ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. My answer to that is: it has never been tried yet, and we shall see.’
However, Churchill rejected Harris’ demand to concentrate on Berlin. Churchill then nick-named Harris ‘Bomber’ (Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris) and personally instructed him to bomb other German cities, such as Dresden, to support the Russian attack on Germany. On 14 February 1942, bomber command had received a directive stating: ‘the primary object of your operations should now be focussed on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of the industrial workers.’
George R. Stanbury, the Home Office scientist who conducted Civil Defence research int fallout protection at Monte Bello for Operation HURRICANE, Britain’s first nuclear test in 1952, explains in detail how the Hamburg firestorm was produced in his originally restricted article, ‘The Fire Hazard from Nuclear Weapons’, Fission Fragments, Scientific Civil Defence Magazine, Home Office, London, No. 3, August 1962, pp. 22-6, British Home Office, Scientific Adviser’s Branch, originally classified Restricted:
Above: effect of the Hamburg firestorm.
'We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation … we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ... Firstly ... the collapse of buildings would snuff out any incipient fires. Air cannot get into a pile of rubble, 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This is not just guesswork; it is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb [V1 cruise missile] incidents in London supported by a wealth of experience gained generally in the last war. Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general. Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited, it by no means follows that a continuing and destructive fire will develop. ... A window of two square metres would let in about 105 calories at the 5 cal/cm2 range. The heat liberated by one magnesium incendiary bomb is 30 times this and even with the incendiary bomb the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5; in a large room it is very much less. Thus even if thermal radiation does fall on easily inflammable material which ignites, the chance of a continuing fire developing is still quite small. In the Birmingham and Liverpool studies, where the most generous values of fire-starting chances were used, the fraction of buildings set on fire was rarely higher than 1 in 20.
ABOVE: the heat flash radiation which causes the scorching is so unscattered or unidirectional that any shading from the fireball source stops it even if you are exposed to the scattered radiation from the rest of the sky: shadows still present in October 1945 in the bitumen road surface of Yorozuyo Bridge, 805 m SSW of ground zero, Hiroshima, pointed where the bomb detonated (U.S. Army photo).
'And this is the basis of the assertion that we do not think that fire storms are likely to be started in British cities by nuclear explosions, because in each of the five raids in which fire storms occurred (four on Germany - Hamburg, Darmstadt, Kassel, Wuppertal and a "possible" in Dresden, plus Hiroshima in Japan - it may be significant that all these towns had a period of hot dry weather before the raid) the initial fire density was much nearer 1 in 2. Take Hamburg for example:
'On the night of 27/28th July 1943, by some extraordinary chance, 190 tons of bombs were dropped into one square mile of Hamburg. This square mile contained 6,000 buildings, many of which were [multistorey wooden] medieval.
'A density of greater than 70 tons/sq. mile had not been achieved before even in some of the major fire raids, and was only exceeded on a few occasions subsequently. The effect of these bombs is best shown in the following diagram, each step of which is based on sound trials and operational experience of the weapons concerned.
'102 tons of high explosive bombs dropped -> 100 fires
'88 tons of incendiary bombs dropped, of which:
'48 tons of 4 pound magnesium bombs = 27,000 bombs -> 8,000 hit buildings -> 1,600 fires
'40 tons of 30 pound gel bombs = 3,000 bombs -> 900 hit buildings -> 800 fires
'Total = 2,500 fires
'Thus almost every other building [1 in 2 buildings] was set on fire during the raid itself, and when this happens it seems that nothing can prevent the fires from joining together, engulfing the whole area and producing a fire storm (over Hamburg the column of smoke, observed from aircraft, was 1.5 miles in diameter at its base and 13,000 feet high; eyewitnesses on the ground reported that trees were uprooted by the inrushing air).
'When the density was 70 tons/square mile or less the proportion of buildings fired during the raid was about 1 in 8 or less and under these circumstances, although extensive areas were burned out, the situation was controlled, escape routes were kept open and there was no fire storm.'
Often people point to bits of glass melted by the firestorm in Hiroshima, and ignorantly claim it was a special effect of nuclear weapons. Alas, such melted glass occurred in the GreatFire of London, 1666, and it didn’t need a nuclear explosion:
‘Having stayed, and in an hour’s time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody, to my sight, endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire; and, having seen it get as far as the Steelyard, and the wind mighty high, and driving it into the City; and everything, after so long a drought, proving combustible... So near the fire as we could for smoke; and all over the Thames, with one’s face in the wind, you were almost burned with a shower of fire-drops... took up, which I keep by me, a piece of glass of Mercers’ chapel in the street, where much more was, so melted and buckled with the heat of the fire like parchment.’ – Samuel Pepys (1633-1703), Great Fire of London, Diary, September 1666.
The Hamburg air raid be compared directly to the eventual policy of the U.S.A.F. bombers that were attacking Japan. The man who would pilot the nuclear bomber to Hiroshima, Paul Tibbets, who had been in Europe, advised General C. E. LeMay ‘many Japanese buildings were constructed of flammable material. Paper houses, we called them. “All you need to do is ‘area bomb’ these cities [using incendiaries],” I said.’ [P. W. Tibbets, The Tibbets Story, Stein & Day, 1978.]
LeMay took Tibbet’s advice and in his 1965 book (Mission with LeMay, Doublesday) explained why this was acceptable in World War II: ‘It was their system of dispersal of industry. All you had to do was visit one of those targets after we’d roasted it, and see the ruins of a multitude of tiny houses, with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage of every home. The entire population got into the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war ... men, women, children.’
After the single Tokyo air raid killed 83,600 people on 10 March 1945, Dr Robert Oppenheimer predicted that a nuclear air raid at night (people indoors) would kill 20,000 people. Oppenheimer wanted the attack done at night to prevent women and children receiving flash burns in the daytime. He received a very cold reception from people like LeMay, owing to the insignificance relative to conventional air raids. Oppenheimer then began to sell the nuclear bomb as a thermal and nuclear radiation killer, instead of a blast device to be used at night.
Colonel Paul Tibbets was instructed by LeMay to ignore Oppenheimer’s wish and only to drop the bombs in the daytime visually to prevent the risk of a serious radar aiming error. He maximised casualties by minimising warning (although this was done for the deliberate purpose of minimising the risk of serious anti-aircraft gun attacks on the bombing aircraft): for weeks before dropping the bombs, the cities that had been carefully spared incendiaries were daily flown over by weather and photographic aircraft. This was to prevent surprise when the plane carrying the bomb appeared. Tibbets recorded in his autobiography that this ‘would accustom the Japanese to seeing daytime flights of two or three bombers over their target ... we hoped they would be lulled into ignoring us, when we came to deliver the real thing ... air raid sirens would sound when we came overhead.’
This ‘lulling’ meant that many people outside would merely watch the planes without taking shelter, and receive serious facial burns and direct exposure to other effects. Nobody was vaporised; the skin burns were deep enough near ground zero to be lethal in combination with the nuclear radiation exposure. In the case of Hiroshima, the weather survey aircraft caused a night time air raid, and a final weather aircraft ahead of the nuclear bomber set off air raid alarms at 7:30 am (cancelled by an all clear at 8 am), before the nuclear armed bomber arrived at 8:15 am. Mrs Nakamuru, a widow with three children had only just arrived back home after the ‘all clear’ from the weather aircraft-caused alarm, as described by John Hersey in his 1946 book Hiroshima:
‘They reached home a little after 2:30 am and she immediately turned on the radio, which, to her distress, was just then broadcasting a fresh warning. When she looked at the children and saw how tired they were, and she thought of the number of trips they had made in the past weeks, all to no purpose, she decided that inspite of the instructions on the radio, she simply could not face starting out all over again.’ When the all clear sounded at 8 am, she lit her stove and started cooking rice. She was in a wood frame house 1,230 metres from ground zero: ‘everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She had taken a single step when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house ...’ Others were burned when they looked up at the B-29 and received facial flash burns, some behind windows which resulted in glass fragment lacerations in addition.
Tibbets remarked in his autobiography, The Tibbets Story: ‘Of course, one hopes that civilians will have the good sense to seek protection in bomb shelters.’ If so, there would have been far fewer casualties, and less impact, and Tibbets admitted: ‘In the case of Hiroshima, I was to learn later that Eatherly’s weather plane ... had set off air raid sirens but, when nothing happened, ours were ignored.’ The Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (Oughterson and Warren, editors, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1956), found ‘there only about 400 people in the tunnel shelters [Nagasaki] which had a capacity of 70,000’ and that such people survived ‘even directly below the bomb.’ Describing the situation in Hiroshima, it stated:
‘Most of the people were at home preparing breakfast; consequently thousands of fires were burning in charcoal braziers. Only a few people were in modern buildings.’
DR HAROLD L. BRODE AND FIRESTORM ERRORS IN LYNN EDEN'S BOOK, 'WHOLE WORLD ON FIRE'
'At a range of more than 1 nautical mile [= 6,076 feet = 1,851 m = 1.15 statute mile], more than half the buildings [in Hiroshima] were gutted by fire. At that point, the peak overpressure of the nuclear blast wave was about 3 psi, and the fireball heat or thermal fluence was about 8 or 9 cal/cm2.'
- Dr Harold L. Brode and Dr R. D. Small, A Review of the Physics of Large Urban Fires, in The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, U.S. National Academy Press, 1986, page 79.
This correlation of thermal radiation to the firestorm radius is totally bogus, because no fires at that radius were ignited by thermal radiation! Some 100% of house fires at that radius were ignited by the blast wave overturning charcoal cooking braziers inside wooden houses filled with paper screens and bamboo furnishings. Dr Brode and Dr Small might as well have correlated the radius of the firestorm to the EMP field or to the mushroom cloud radius, for all the relation that there was between thermal radiation and the firestorm radius in Hiroshima. They neglected the physical mechanism entirely, and practised the worst form of pseudoscience.
Brode on page 84 states that 'Threshold ignition levels ... for common susceptible materials in an urban environment increase with yield roughly as ... 3.5Wkt0.113 cal/cm2. This gives 9 cal/cm2 for 5 Mt, when as we have seen it actually takes four times more energy to ignite beds and upholstry in a sustained way which won't be blown out by the blast or die out without spreading to the rest of the room, even when the window can 'see' the fireball:
'About 35 to 40 calories per square centimetre are required for ignition by a 5-Mt weapon.' - DPA Attack Environment Manual: Chapter 3, What the Planner Needs to Know about Fire Ignition and Spread, U.S. Department of Defense, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, Panels 3 and 5.
Lynn Eden, who had numerous interviews and discussions with Dr Brode since the late 1980s, is also duped entirely by this outrageous anti-civil defence lie in her 2004 book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation, where she writes on page 120:
'At Hiroshima, the perimeter of mass fire ... occurred about one mile from the detonation ... at this distance, the thermal fluence deposited was estimated at 10 cal/cm2 ... The deposition of thermal fluence of 10 cal/cm2 is the basic measure used in much of Theodore Poston's published work on fire damage ...'
Theodore Poston in his ignorant paper 'Possible Fatalities from Superfires following Nuclear Attacks in or Near Urban Areas', in the 1986 U.S. National Academy of Sciences book The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, assumes falsely that brick and concrete cities can burn like the small areas of medieval German cities and like Brode and Small, he simply ignores the mechanism for the firestorm in Hiroshima which had nothing to do with thermal radiation but was just due to overturned breakfast charcoal braziers. Theodore Poston also falsely complains that wooden houses exposed to nuclear tests didn't burn because they had white paint on them and shutters over the windows. That discredits Theodore Poston's whole anti-civil defence countermeasure tirade by actually PROVING the value of simple civil defense; but actually if you open your eyes, you find that most wooden houses are painted white, and in a real city - unlike the empty Nevada desert - few windows will have a line of sight to the fireball anyway!
The pseudoscientific fanatical thuggery against civil defence countermeasures to nuclear terrorism must be deplored. (Another basic scientific error Lynn makes is trying to use firestorm data from incendiary phosphorus bombing in humid weather to discredit the fact that thermal ignition depends on humidity! Unlike nuclear weapons thermal radiation which demands dry tindering to cause ignition, phosphorus is actually ignited by water! You must never pour water on a phosphorus bomb, or it will flare up. Ignorance of such basic chemistry is lethal.)
Brode and Small make the worst error of all when they state on page 94: 'Despite a well-organized German civil defense, firefighting, rescue operations, and emergency medical aid were severely limited in many of the fires and totally ineffective in the intense fire storms.'
They incorrectly ignores all the evidence that the civil defence operations were hampered by the extended period of air raid bombing, which did not occur at Hiroshima or Nagasaki where only a single bomb was dropped. They ignorantly take no account or make any mention whatsoever of all the studies done on the efficient, extremely easy and effective firefighting that readily saved buildings near Hiroshima's ground zero, well within the firestorm area, reported by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. For example, the Bank of Japan, Hiroshima branch, was a 3-story reinforced concrete frame building at just 400 m from ground zero. There were no initial ignitions at all by either blast or thermal radiation. However, 1.5 hours afterwards a a firebrand started a fire in a room on the second floor. The survivors in the building simply extinguished the fire with buckets of water! Duh! Hiroshima in the very middle of the intense fire storm?! Buckets of water? Yes. They simply put the fire out. Later another firebrand ignited the third floor, and the survivors this time ran out of water and just shut the doors and allowed it to burn out. The fire did not spread to the lower floors.
This incident is explained in panel 26 of the DPA Attack Environment Manual: Chapter 3, What the Planner Needs to Know about Fire Ignition and Spread, U.S. Department of Defense, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, which adds that the Geibi Bank Company in the firestorm area of Hiroshima also survived the bomb with no thermal or blast ignitions: 'However, at about 10:30 A.M., over 2 hours after the detonation, firebrands from the south exposure ignited a few pieces of furniture and curtains on the first and third stories. The fires were extinguished with water buckets by the building occupants. Negligible fire damage resulted.'
It is either incompetent or else dishonest of Dr Harold L. Brode and Dr R. D. Small to try to discredit civil defense countermeasures against firestorms in nuclear attack by giving the false example of German bombing raids and totally ignoring the experiences of the Hiroshima firestorm to nuclear warfare (below).
I wish the Radiation Effects Research Foundation will start caring less about abiding politically correct, scientifically misleading dogma; and instead focus on helping the world to understand the vitally important scientific facts on radiation.
DECEPTION OVER OZONE LAYER DAMAGE
One of several errors in the 1977 3rd edition of the U.S. Department of Defense book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons is the false claim on page 78 that air bursts like those over Hiroshima and Nagasaki damage the ozone (O3) layer which exists at altitudes of 15-30 km:
'... nuclear explosions are accompanied by the formation [in the blast wave at high overpressures] of oxides of nitrogen [causing the red-brown colour to the rising fireball before condensing water vapor turns it white]. An air burst, for example, is estimated to produce about 1032 molecules of nitrogen oxides per megaton of TNT equivalent ... hence, the nitrogen oxides from such explosions would be expected to enhance mechanisms which tend to decrease the ozone concentration.'
This is false because:
(1) the initial gamma radiation from both surface and air bursts produce a large ozone layer around the early fireball, shielding the early thermal radiation from the fireball after nuclear explosions, and this ozone production is not mentioned in the book. The mechanism for the production of ozone naturally is the absorption by oxygen molecules (O2) of short-wavelength ultraviolet light, bordering the soft X-ray spectrum. In addition to ozone formation by gamma radiation, nuclear weapons release typically 70-80% of their energy as such soft X-rays in a blackbody distribution (Glasstone and Dolan, pp. 23-5) which is soon degraded by air scatter into ultraviolet radiation which forms ozone. The reaction is: 3O2 + energy -> 2O3. The heat released by the natural ozone-forming process is the reason for the increase in the temperature of the stratosphere with altitude. The natural chemical reaction produces about 4,500 tons of ozone per second in the stratosphere, which maintains equilibrium by being broken down at a similar rate by other natural chemical reactions.
(2) the nitrogen oxides, largely nitrogen dioxide, in the fireball soon reacts with moisture in the white mushroom cloud to produce nitric acid, which is later precipitated in rainfall along with naturally produced nitric acid from lightning storms, and has no effect on the ozone layer. A lightning storm is qualitatively like a nuclear explosion in that it produces both ozone (from the electrical discharge air ionization) and nitrogen oxides (from the shock waves formed around the extremely hot lightning bolts, which are later heard as thunder). Nitric acid (HNO3) production from the mixing with nitrogen dioxide and water vapour in the fireball is described by the reaction:
3NO2 + H2O -> 2HNO3 + NO
then the nitrogen oxide, NO, itself gets oxidized into nitric acid by the reaction:
4NO + 3O2 + 2H2O -> 4HNO3
It was a bigger hoax than Piltdown Man to suggest that nitrogen oxides from nuclear bomb tests could break down ozone; they instead get oxidised into nitric acid by atmospheric moisture and oxygen before they can reach the ozone layer. For a published discussion of the nitric acid production in the air around the fireball from an atmospheric nuclear explosion, see Murray Scheibe, The Increased Attachment Due to Ionization-Induced Smog in EMP Environments, Mission Research Corporation, California, MRC-R-532, DNA5077F, ADA087850, 1979: 'The increased electron attachment due to HNO3 production in the EMP source region is investigated. The HNO3 produced is found to be roughly linear with the total ionization up to an ionization value of about 2 x 10 to the 16th power ion pairs. Above this, the HNO3 production is less than linear.'
P. Goldsmith, A. F. Tuck, J. S. Foot, E. L. Simmons and R. L. Newson, reported in their paper, 'Nitrogen oxides, nuclear weapon testing, Concorde and stratospheric ozone' published in Nature, vol. 244 (1973), issue 5418, pp. 545-551:
'Although amounts of nitrogen oxides equivalent to the output from many concordes were released into the atmosphere when nuclear testing was at its peak, the amount of ozone in the atmosphere was not affected.'
In total, the U.S.A, U.S.S.R., U.K., France and China detonated 545.4 megatons in the atmosphere, the peak rate of testing occurring in 1962, see page 295 of Merril Eisenbud and Thomas F. Gesell, Environmental Radioactivity, Academic Press, 4th ed., 1997 (the ten biggest atmospheric tests are listed on an earlier post, here).
Finally, for high altitude explosions, there is no high pressure air blast wave, thus no production of nitrogen oxides whatsoever, but the gamma radiation striking the atmosphere still produces ozone! Therefore, such explosions have the exact opposite effect on the ozone layer to the claims being made. This has some importance to the issue of holes in the ozone layer by CFCs, and the way to repair such damage.
Above: effect of ozone on early thermal radiation emission from a nuclear explosion. The first graph above shows the thermal radiation calculated by computer when ozone is ignored, while the second shows how it reduces the (mainly ultraviolet) radiation emission from the very hot fireball at early times, before the shock wave has formed and penetrated through the 'veil' or shell of ozone caused by the intense high energy X-ray and gamma radiation interacting with the air just around the fireball. (Thermal Radiation From Nuclear Weapons, Defense Nuclear Agency, February 1991.)
The fact that nuclear explosions produce ozone was first published in paragraph 6.26 on page 190 of the 1950 U.S. Department of Defense book, The Effects of Atomic Weapons: 'there may be some absorption of ultraviolet radiation by ozone which is produced by interaction of gamma rays from the atomic explosion with atmospheric oxygen.' Herman Hoerlin states on page 43 of his 1976 Los Aamos report LA-6405 United States High Altitude Test Experiences: 'significant amounts of ozone are produced in sea-level explosions.' (Hoerlin cites as reference: H. E. DeWitt, A Compilation of Spectroscopic Observations of Air Around Atomic
Bomb Explosions, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory report LAMS-1935, June 1955.) However, since the time that was written, full calculations have been performed which show that high altitude nuclear detonations (above 100 km altitude) produce large excess amounts of ozone, strengthening rather than depleting the ozone layer. Finally, sampling of the cloud of a 1976 atmospheric Chinese megaton range test showed confirmed that there was no ozone depleting nitrogen dioxide: it reacts with water vapour to form nitric acid, instead of destroying ozone! Anyway, nitrogen dioxide is only formed in high pressure shock waves from low altitude detonations, not from high altitude bursts, which produce an excess of ozone.
The ozone destruction lie
The U.S. Department of Defense book The Effects of Atomic Weapons reported in 1950 that nuclear air bursts near sea level produce 5 tons of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) per kiloton, producing the flame-like red-brown colour of the fireball. The pressure and temperature of the shock front turns 1% of the air it contains into nitrogen dioxide when it cools to 2000 K, below which no further nitrogen dioxide is formed. The shock waves around bolts of lightning in thunderstorms also produce nitrogen dioxide, and it is quickly transformed into nitric acid, causing the natural acidity (pH 4.5) of thunderstorm rain. Thunderstorms produce 100,000 tons of nitric acid daily.
Ozone (O3) is created in the stratosphere in part by the action of ultraviolet light with wavelengths less than 0.24 microns upon molecular oxygen (O2):
3O2 + ultraviolet -> 2O3
Nitrogen oxide (NO) acts as a catalyst to break down ozone in the atmosphere. The reaction requires the energy of sunlight:
2O3 + NO + O + sunlight -> 3O2 + NO + O.
This is the principal cause of destruction of stratospheric ozone. Nitrogen oxide (NO) is naturally produced in the upper atmosphere (the thermosphere at 90-120 km altitude) by sunlight at the mean rate of 73,000 metric tons per hour!
In the troposphere (below the stratosphere), ozone is also destroyed by the reaction with sunlight:
O3 + H2O + sunlight -> O2 + 2OH,
Where OH is the hydroxyl radical (negatively charged) which is a vital catalyst in other reactions. A catalyst is defined as a vital component of a chemical reaction that is nevertheless returned to its original state at the end of a reaction, so that it is able to endlessly function without being permanently modified. (Therefore, chemical reaction formulae containing catalysts should never have the catalyst deleted from both sides of the reaction to ‘simplify’ the equation, because that will produce a false reaction that will not work!) Nitrogen oxide, NO, is also an essential catalyst in the creation of ozone in the troposphere from carbon monoxide (CO) and methane (CH4), both of which exist in the troposphere in concentrations of several parts per million of air. The CO reaction creating ozone requires the energy of sunlight and is given by:
CO + 2O2 + OH + NO + sunlight -> CO2 + O3 + OH + NO.
If there is an insufficient concentration of the NO catalyst present, ozone is actually destroyed by CO, since the following reaction is then favoured:
CO + O3 + OH + O2 -> CO2 + OH + 2O2.
This reaction predominates in the atmosphere today, since the concentration of NO is less than 0.025% of the concentration of ozone. If the concentration of NO were raised above 0.025% of the ozone concentration, then this rate of destruction of ozone would be overtaken by the rate of creation of ozone using the NO catalytic effect.
With CH4, the ozone creation reaction, which again requires sunlight, is represented by:
CH4 + 4O2 + OH + 2NO -> CO + H2 + H2O + 2O3 + OH + 2NO.
Finally, ethane (C2H6) in the troposphere racts with sunlight to produce ozone if NO is present:
C2H6 + 10(O2) + 2OH + 5NO + sunlight -> 2 H2O + H2 + CO2 + CO + 5(O3) + 2OH + 5NO.
The CO produced in this reaction is then available for other ozone reactions, already listed.
As a result of all these reactions, NO injections to the atmosphere at altitudes below 20 km actually increase the ozone layer concentration! For the mushroom cloud heights from the yields of stockpiled nuclear weapons today, the effect of a nuclear war would be to strengthen the ozone layer rather than to destroy it. High altitude bursts don’t produce nitrogen oxides because they don’t produce high-pressure air blast waves, although they too do produce ozone by the action of gamma radiation on oxygen! So the entire ozone destruction myth is a complete and utter fraud, both in theory and in extensive observed nuclear test evidence on the ozone layer.
Quite frequently during testing, an ‘excuse’ was made for the theoretical lies, that the ozone layer is naturally highly variable, masking any effect from the hundreds of megatons of atmospheric tests. Duh! Even if it were true (which it is not) that the ozone layer is slightly damaged by a nuclear war of hundreds of megatons (as known from testing data), what is the significance of such slight damage when the concentration is so naturally variable that it masks the effect anyway?
In a slightly different context, but to give some feel for what the nuclear effects exaggeration hype is about, see what Dr John Maddox, editor of Nature, wrote in his editorial in 1983 (vol. 312, p. 593) about the ‘nuclear winter’ scandal (‘hype’ was Maddox’s own word for it!) from the TAPPS (the ‘nuclear winter’ pseudo-scientific propaganda group consisting of Richard Turco, Carl Sagan, et al.): they got publicity by means of handing over $50,000 to a public relations company (the funding came from the Kendall Foundation). This is how political pseudo-science is marketed. Caveat emptor!
Professor Brian Martin (then a physicist at the Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Australian National University, Canberra, but now he is Professor of Social Sciences in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Communication at the University of Wollongong), 'Critique of Nuclear Extinction', published in Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 287-300 (1982):
'The idea that global nuclear war could kill most or all of the world's population is critically examined and found to have little or no scientific basis. A number of possible reasons for beliefs about nuclear extinction are presented, including exaggeration to justify inaction, fear of death, exaggeration to stimulate action, the idea that planning is defeatist, exaggeration to justify concern, white western orientation, the pattern of day-to-day life, and reformist political analysis. Some of the ways in which these factors inhibit a full political analysis and practice by the peace movement are indicated. Prevalent ideas about the irrationality and short duration of nuclear war and of the unlikelihood of limited nuclear war are also briefly examined.'
The U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency report in 1975, Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War, incorrectly asserted that:
'It has been estimated that a 10,000-megaton war with half the weapons exploding at ground level would tear up some 25 billion cubic meters of rock and soil, injecting a substantial amount of fine dust and particles into the stratosphere. This is roughly twice the volume of material blasted loose by the Indonesian volcano, Krakatoa, whose explosion in 1883 was the most powerful terrestrial event ever recorded. Sunsets around the world were noticeably reddened for several years after the Krakatoa eruption, indicating that large amounts of volcanic dust had entered the stratosphere.'
This is false because 25,000,000,000 cubic metres of rock and soil per 10,000 megatons, with an average density of 2 tons per cubic metre, implies 5,000 tons of lofted fallout material per kiloton. As we saw in a previous post, the specific activity of fallout (fraction of bomb per kg of fallout debris) was extensively measured (although all this kind of vital fallout results were kept secret for some crazy reason). The 3.53 Mt ZUNI coral land surface burst and 5.01 Mt TEWA coral reef shots produced 136 and 210 metric tons of fallout per total yield kiloton, respectively (Rhodes in his book on the H-bomb confused the entire crater ejecta mass for the fallout mass, as exposed in a previous blog post). For the Nevada desert, Dr Carl F. Miller's 1963 Stanford Research Institute report Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures, vol. 1, estimated similar amounts of fallout mass per kiloton, around 200 tons per kiloton of yield. Hence, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency exaggerated the mass of lofted fallout debris by at least a factor of 25. (In fact, a lot of the heavier particles reside in the stem of the mushroom and never make it into the stratosphere, so the exaggeration is even bigger than a factor of 25.)
DOSE RATE MECHANISM FOR LOW LEVEL RADIATION EFFECTS: AT LOW DOSE RATES P53 AND OTHER DNA REPAIR MECHANISMS, AND THE IMMUNE SYSTEM, ARE STIMULATED TO REPAIR DNA DAMAGE FASTER (JUST AS REGULAR WORKOUTS AT THE GYM INCREASE FITNESS, BUT A ONCE-OFF MASSIVE EXERCISE IF TOTALLY UNFIT CAN CAUSE INJURY OR HEART DAMAGE); BUT AT HIGH DOSE RATES THE DNA REPAIR MECHANISMS ARE OVERLOADED AND UNABLE TO REPAIR ALL THE DAMAGE CORRECTLY, THUS CANCER RATES DEPEND ON THE DOSE RATE, AND NOT MERELY UPON THE TOTAL DOSE, CONTRARY TO THE CENTRAL DOGMA OF MAINSTREAM HEALTH PHYSICS TODAY
W.L. Chen,Y.C. Luan, M.C. Shieh, S.T. Chen, H.T. , Kung, K.L. Soong, Y.C.Yeh, T.S. Chou, S.H. Mong, J.T.Wu, C.P. Sun,W.P. Deng, M.F.Wu, and M.L. Shen, ‘Is Chronic Radiation an Effective Prophylaxis Against Cancer?’, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2004, page 6, available in PDF format here:
‘An extraordinary incident occurred 20 years ago in Taiwan. Recycled steel, accidentally contaminated with cobalt-60 ([low dose rate, low-LET gamma radiation emitter] half-life: 5.3 y), was formed into construction steel for more than 180 buildings, which 10,000 persons occupied for 9 to 20 years. They unknowingly received radiation doses that averaged 0.4 Sv, a collective dose of 4,000 person-Sv. Based on the observed seven cancer deaths, the cancer mortality rate for this population was assessed to be 3.5 per 100,000 person-years. Three children were born with congenital heart malformations, indicating a prevalence rate of 1.5 cases per 1,000 children under age 19.
'The average spontaneous cancer death rate in the general population of Taiwan over these 20 years is 116 persons per 100,000 person-years. Based upon partial official statistics and hospital experience, the prevalence rate of congenital malformation is 23 cases per 1,000 children. Assuming the age and income distributions of these persons are the same as for the general population, it appears that significant beneficial health effects may be associated with this chronic radiation exposure. ...’
A recent example of the pseudoscientific radiation 'education' masquerading as science that Feynman (quoted below) objected to in the 1960s was published in 2009 in an article called 'The proportion of childhood leukaemia incidence in Great Britain that may be caused by natural background ionizing radiation' in Leukemia, vol. 23 (2009), pp. 770–776, which falsely asserts - in contradiction to the evidence that the no-threshold model is contrary to Hiroshima and Nagasaki data: 'Risk models based primarily on studies of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors imply that low-level exposure to ionizing radiation, including ubiquitous natural background radiation, also raises the risk of childhood leukaemia. Using two sets of recently published leukaemia risk models and estimates of natural background radiation red-bone-marrow doses received by children, about 20% of the cases of childhood leukaemia in Great Britain are predicted to be attributable to this source.' The authors of this pseudoscience which is the opposite of the facts are R. Wakeford (Dalton Nuclear Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK), G. M. Kendall (Childhood Cancer Research Group, Oxford, UK), and M. P. Little (Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Imperial College, London, UK). It is disgusting and sinful that the facts about childhood leukemia are being lied on so blatantly for non-scientific purposes, and it is to be hoped that these leukemia investigators will either correct their errors or alternatively be banned from using scientific literature to promote false dogma for deception until they mend the error of their ways and repent their sins in this matter.
‘What is Science?’ by Richard P. Feynman, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and published in The Physics Teacher, vol. 7, issue 6, 1968, pp. 313-20:
‘... great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
‘We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields - radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners' airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. ... you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’
Richard P. Feynman, 'This Unscientific Age', in The Meaning of It All, Penguin Books, London, 1998, pages 106-9:
'... another example of the same thing is the famous Protocol of the Elders of Zion, which was a fake document. It was supposed to be a meeting of the old Jews and the leaders of Zion in which they had gotten together and cooked up a scheme for the domination of the world. ... it was one of the strongest forces in the development of anti-Semitism.
'What I am asking for in many directions is an abject honesty. ... Scientists are not honest. ... By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.
'For example, in connection with nuclear testing ... the greatest question on nuclear testing is the question of its future effects. ... You can play games and show that you will kill 10 million people in the next 2000 years with it. If I were to walk in front of a car, hoping that I will have some more children in the future, I will kill 10,000 people in the next 10,000 years, if you figure it out, from a certain way of calculating. ...
'How much is the increase in radioactivity compared to the general variations in the amount of natural background radioactivity from place to place? The amounts of background radioactivity in a wooden building and a brick building are quite different, because the wood is less radioactive than the bricks. ... the difference in the [weapons fallout] effects was less than the difference between being in a brick and a wooden building. And the difference [due to natural nuclear cosmic background radiation, which is well shielded at sea level because the atmosphere is a radiation shield equivalent to being protected by 10 metres of water] between being at sea level and being at 5000 feet altitude was ... bigger than the extra radioactivity produced by the atomic bomb testing.
'Now, I say if a man is absolutely honest and wants to protect the populace from the effects of radioactivity, which is what our scientific fiends often say they are trying to do, then he should work on the biggest number, not on the smallest number, and he should try to point out that the radioactivity which is absorbed by living in the city of Denver is so much more serious ... that all the people of Denver ought to move to lower altitudes.'
Protein P53, discovered only in 1979, is encoded by gene TP53, which occurs on human chromosome 17. P53 also occurs in other mammals including mice, rats and dogs. P53 is one of the proteins which continually repairs breaks in DNA, which easily breaks at body temperature due to free radicals produced naturally in various ways and also as a result of ionisation caused by radiation hitting water and other molecules in the body. Cancer occurs when several breaks in DNA happen to occur by chance at nearly the same time, giving several loose ends which P53 repairs incorrectly, causing a mutation. This cannot occur when only one break occurs, because only two loose ends are produced, and P53 will reattach them correctly. If low-LET ionising radiation levels are increased to a certain extent, causing more single strand breaks, P53 works faster and is able deal with faster breaks as they occur, so that multiple broken strand ends do not arise. This prevents DNA strands being repaired incorrectly, and prevents cancer - a result of mutation caused by faults in DNA - from arising. Too much radiation of course overloads the P53 repair mechanism, and then it cannot repair breaks as they occur, so multiple breaks begin to appear and loose ends of DNA are wrongly connected by P53, causing an increased cancer risk.
1. DNA-damaging free radicals are equivalent to a source of sparks which is always present naturally.
2. Cancer is equivalent the fire you get if the sparks are allowed to ignite the gasoline, i.e. if the free radicals are allowed to damage DNA without the damage being repaired.
3. Protein P53 is equivalent to a fire suppression system which is constantly damping out the sparks, or repairing the damaged DNA so that cancer doesn't occur.
In this way of thinking, the ‘cause’ of cancer will be down to a failure of a gene like P53 to repair the damage.
‘Professor Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to the accumulated dose of radiation. ... Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957 Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress.’ – Abstract of thesis by Jennifer Caron, Edward Lewis and Radioactive Fallout: the Impact of Caltech Biologists Over Nuclear Weapons Testing in the 1950s and 60s, Caltech, January 2003.
Dr John F. Loutit of the Medical Research Council, Harwell, England, in 1962 wrote a book called Irradiation of Mice and Men (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London), discrediting the pseudo-science from geneticist Edward Lewis on pages 61, and 78-79:
‘... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., vol. 32, 1959, p. 497] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls. ...
‘What Lewis did, and which I have not copied, was to include in his table another group - spontaneous incidence of leukemia (Brooklyn, N.Y.) - who are taken to have received only natural background radiation throughout life at the very low dose-rate of 0.1-0.2 rad per year: the best estimate is listed as 2 x 10-6 like the others in the table. But the value of 2 x 10-6 was not calculated from the data as for the other groups; it was merely adopted. By its adoption and multiplication with the average age in years of Brooklyners - 33.7 years and radiation dose per year of 0.1-0.2 rad - a mortality rate of 7 to 13 cases per million per year due to background radiation was deduced, or some 10-20 per cent of the observed rate of 65 cases per million per year. ...
‘All these points are very much against the basic hypothesis of Lewis of a linear relation of dose to leukemic effect irrespective of time. Unhappily it is not possible to claim for Lewis’s work as others have done, “It is now possible to calculate - within narrow limits - how many deaths from leukemia will result in any population from an increase in fall-out or other source of radiation” [Leading article in Science, vol. 125, p. 963, 1957]. This is just wishful journalese.
‘The burning questions to me are not what are the numbers of leukemia to be expected from atom bombs or radiotherapy, but what is to be expected from natural background .... Furthermore, to obtain estimates of these, I believe it is wrong to go to [1950s inaccurate, dose rate effect ignoring, data from] atom bombs, where the radiations are qualitatively different [i.e., including effects from neutrons] and, more important, the dose-rate outstandingly different.’
WHY IS THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY CONTINUING TO FUND THE RADIATION EFFECTS RESEARCH FOUNDATION (RERF), WHICH IS BLATANTLY COVERING UP THE EFFECTS OF RADIATION?
According to James Muckerheide's article, It’s Time to Tell the Truth About the Health Benefits of Low-Dose Radiation (Summer 2000 21st Century), the U.S. Department of Energy and its predecessor have cut off funding to studies which showed benefits of radiationm, and the RERF may fear the same thing if it tells the truth:
'Low-dose radiation has been shown to enhance biological responses for immune systems, enzymatic repair, physiological functions, and the removal of cellular damage, including prevention and removal of cancers and other diseases. ... about 0.012 percent of natural potassium is a radioactive isotope, potassium-40. Potassium was processed to separate the potassium-40 from natural potassium at Oak Ridge to conduct radiobiology experiments in the 1950s. Dr. Willis [Charles Willis of the NRC] confirms that radiation research, funded for radiation-protection objectives, supported the linear no-threshold concept by suppressing contrary scientific data, and that this activity dates back more than 40 years, to the 1950s.'
He quotes Dr Marshall Brucer: 'Health Physicists soon learned that their livelihood depended on scaring the pants off Congress. Every Genetics budget meeting opened its request for funds with an anti-nuclear litany. During the 1960s and 1970s about 40 articles/year described hormesis. In 1963, the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] repeatedly confirmed lower mortality in guinea pigs, rats, and mice irradiated at low dose. In 1964, the cows exposed to about 150 rads [of gamma, and about ten times as much beta skin dose due to contamination sticking to their hides in the dry Alamogordo desert] after the TRINITY A-bomb in 1946 were quietly euthanized because of extreme old age.'
Muckerheide has an interesting discussion of:
'The Case of the Radium Dial Painters
'In 1974, the pre-eminent radium health effects researcher, Dr. Robley Evans [author of the famed 972 pages long textbook, The Atomic Nucleus], of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, rigorously demonstrated in an article in the Health Physics Journal, that BEIR in 197220 [reference: R. D. Evans, 'Radium in Man', Health Physics, Vol. 27, 1974, pp. 497-510] had misrepresented the data on the health effects of radium in order to produce a linear no-threshold result from extremely non-linear data21 [ref.: BEIR, 'The Effects on Populations of Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation', Report of the Advisory Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiations (BEIR Committee), Washington, D.C., National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, 1972]. On Evans’s retirement in 1970, the Center for Human Radiobiology (CHR) was established at the Argonne National Laboratory.
'In 1981, Dr. Evans gave the "Invited Summary" at an international conference in which it was reported that in thousands of cases of radium dial painters worldwide, there were still no occurrences of bone cancer or nasal carcinoma in individuals who had ingested less than 250 microcuries [of which 50 was taken into the bone] of radium-226, which produced an estimated dose of 1,000 rad to the bone. A report on these data was published in 1983. Dr. Evans told the conference22 [ref.: R. D. Evans, 'Highlights of the Meeting—Invited Summary', In Radiobiology of Radium and the Actinides In Man, Proc. of an Int’l Conf., Health Physics, Vol. 44 (Supp 1), 1983, pp. 571-573]: The studies of the radium cases during the past dozen years . . . have continued to show no radiogenic tumors, or other effects, in hundreds of persons whose effective initial body burden was less than about 50 microcuries of Ra-226, and whose cumulative skeletal average dose is less than about 1,000 rad.
'In 1983, DOE initiated termination of this program, which had been established for the life of the dial painters, while more than 1,000 individuals were still alive. It may be that this message was received by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), which was established to follow the Japanese A-bomb survivors for life. The reports of the RERF produce consistently biased data.
'It is significant that systemic intake of 50 microcuries of radium-226 is about 125,000 times the annual ingestion of 5 picocuries/liter allowed by the EPA in its drinking water limits. The EPA is even proposing reductions in these limits, which will require even greater public water supply expenditures under EPA program control. If, instead, the EPA were to mandate a moderate revision in its limit by a factor of 4, this would essentially eliminate the need for monitoring for radium in drinking water, and eliminate significant unnecessary costs, while still providing a safety margin of 30,000 (times 50 picocuries) to a person who drinks 1.1 liters per day of that water. ...
'Further analysis by Dr. Robert Rowland, former Director of the Center for Human Radiobiology, has more conclusively determined that a threshold exists. Rowland states25 [ref.: R. Rowland, 'Bone Sarcoma in Humans Induced by Radium: A Threshold Response?', in Proc. of the 27th Ann. Meeting, European Society for Radiation Biology, Radioprotection colloquies, Vol. 32CI, 1997, pp. 331-338]: Today we have a population of 2,383 cases for whom we have reliable body content measurements. ... All 64 bone sarcoma cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy, while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy.
'To contradict these objective results, in an analysis used in BEIR IV to misrepresent the actual data, Drs. Charles Mays and Raymond Lloyd selected, first, a wide low-dose group range that included no cancers, and, second, a wide dose-group range that included the lowest dose with cancer; from this, they manufactured a “linear” result. [Prof. Otto G. Raabe: 'By grouping the Evans data into six non-uniform dose groups selected so that only one dose group included no bone cancer cases (one with average skeletal alpha doses from zero to about 500 rad or 10,000 rem)and so that the next highest dose group included a few cases of bone cancer (cases were only observed for average skeletal alpha radiation doses that exceeded 1,000 rad or 20,000 rem), Chuck Mays and Ray Lloyd created the appealing, but misleading, linear plot shown on page 198 of BEIR IV. In their plot the "threshold" region, which is below 1,000 rad, is obscured near the origin since the abscissa is extended to 16,000 rad and only one dose group was assigned to this region. Their plot proves nothing about linearity. Evans's analysis shows that no linear model fits these data.']
'In the Federal Register in 1991, the EPA explicitly favored duplicity in the matter, by responding to a recommendation by its Science Advisory Board (SAB) that the radium dial painter data be used to establish the radium limits in water, as follows26 [ref.: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Register, Vol. 56, No. 138, 1991, pp. 33050-127]: EPA policy is to assess cancer risks from ionizing radiation as a linear response. Therefore, use of the dial painter data requires either deriving a linear risk coefficient from significantly non-linear exposure response data, or abandoning EPA policy.
'Simply put, science is irrelevant in this campaign to mislead the public about the hazards of radium, and radiation generally.
'It was after a notorious radium poisoning case in 1932, that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) achieved control of radiation from Congress. Well-known Philadelphia industrialist and socialite Eben Byers, died from a massive overdose of radium ingested in large quantities over three years. The Byers case had great publicity and created great public fear of radiation. The truth is that Byers did not die of cancer. Bone necrosis led to removal of his jaw and other interventions that put a gruesome image on the radiation effects. The FDA did not then assess the dose effects to the thousands of persons who had also used radium and other radiation sources in more moderate amounts; or acknowledge that Byers had been the victim of the equivalent of a drug overdose. The amount of radium that Eben Byers ingested daily is about 2,000,000 times the current EPA limits, based on drinking 1 liter/day at 5 picocuries per liter (pCi/l). The threshold for latent bone cancers from ingesting radium by the dial painters is more than 125,000 times the annual limits from drinking water at 5 pCi/l. After the Byers case, Dr. Edna Johnson, and others, suppressed well-known data on the stimulatory effects of low doses of ionizing radiation, especially, a 1936 report for the National Research Council, to claim that “radiation is harmful at low doses”. ...
'Japanese Survivors Study
'The Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) studies of Japanese atomic bomb survivor data at low doses have been substantially questioned, without resolution. This is especially true since the Department of Energy’s arbitrary reassignment of the RERF from the National Academy of Sciences to a DOE-recruited and selected investigator at Columbia University. Many independent studies of the RERF data contradict the RERF analyses, even when limited to using the RERF’s own processed data in the absence of the ability to access the raw data. Even BEIR V consultants were unable to obtain the data to undertake an independent analysis. Some of the RERF data show more evidence of hormetic effects than adverse effects at low doses. However, critical analyses are not considered by radiation protection interests in BEIR V or NCRP SC1-6. Certainly however, in the first instance, the conditions of doses to persons exposed directly to an atomic bomb, and confounding factors of survivors, both before and after the bombing, are of no significance to the assessment of the health effects of chronic low-dose exposures to environmental contamination. Use of the RERF results for the assessment of health effects is well known to be inappropriate, because the exposure does not apply to radiation protection for workers or for the public exposed to chronic and highly fractionated and low dose-rate radiation, especially for extreme costly cleanup and decommissioning standards.'
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY, ORAL HISTORY OF BIOPHYSICIST DR. ROBERT E. ROWLAND
The biophysicist in charge of dosimetry and effects studies for the radium dial painters gave is on the U.S. Department of Energy radiation research site here.
DOE/EH-0461, Human Radiation Studies: Remembering the Early Years, Oral History of Biophysicist Robert Edmund Rowland, Ph.D., onducted January 27, 1995, United States Department of Energy, Office of Human Radiation Experiments, published in June 1995:
Dr Robert E. Rowland, PhD.: '... we used to think for a while that the radium cases were very lucky, because when they got induced sarcomas, maybe the alphas there that induced it were turning around and killing it. ...Well, we weren't able to prove it or anything about it. ... what we learned was that the gamma-ray measurement of a skeleton was really all you needed ... about 37 percent ... of the radon escaped from the body, so you could account for that without too big an error. So, we got a body content. ... It turned out the average dial painter was measured 40 years after their first exposure. ...
'I then was interested in getting an equation which would give me the probability of a sarcoma, for example, as a function of what went in during the exposure. We were very surprised to find that when you did this for bone sarcomas, it was an equation best described as a square of the dose, a square of the systemic intake.
'This is not very acceptable in radiobiological quarters, because everybody knows that the response is linear. There ought to be some sort of a linear relationship, extending back down to zero dose. Instead, we kept seeing that these sarcomas seemed to respond as a square. ...
'So, our earliest studies said, "Linear fits," meaning we tested by a chi-square 44 relationship. "Linear fits. Use linear for the head carcinomas. Use square for the sarcomas." This we did for some time.
'The fact of the matter is, Mays and Rowland and Stehney have a paper about radium and uranium in drinking water, and ... There, we actually go and use linear relationships, which I regret very much, because I don't believe they're true at all. ... whether we like it or not, they are the best definition of a threshold relationship that I've ever come across. ...
'The big dilemma in malignancies induced by radium is, "Why aren't there leukemias?" ... Bill Spiers, F. W. Spiers as written. He wrote what I think is the definitive paper in looking over all of the data, [and Spiers found that] there is no excess of leukemia in radium-exposed people. ... So, leukemia is a non-event. [We have, for radium-induced malignancies] bone sarcomas, a total of 85 in the whole population; carcinomas in the paranasal sinus and mastoid air cells, 37 in the whole population. [That population totals 6,675 measured and unmeasured radium-exposed individuals]. ...
'Stehney examined the life expectancy of dial painters ... If you then went back and took out all those cases that had radiation-induced malignancies — bone sarcomas and head carcinomas — took them out, there was no life shortening.
'So it says if you didn't get one of those two malignancies, you didn't have any visible effect on, at least, life shortening, which implies indirectly that other cancers aren't causing problems, cancers induced by radium.
'This was done about 15 years ago, and he brought it up-to-date at the conference in Heidelberg last April [1994]. That's a very nice paper, and it should be published sometime this summer [1995] ...
'... an initial systemic intake of less than about 75 microcuries of radium[-226] ... which is one-fifth of the total intake has never induced a malignancy, either bone sarcoma or carcinoma of the air cells. ... 75 microcuries, systemically, which is five times that in terms of oral ingestion, or 75 if you inject it with a needle in the vein. ... And that works for either of the two types of malignancies. ... if you quote rem, 20,000. And, that's another reason why I don't like to use skeletal dose, either in rad, rem, grays or sieverts, because the number is meaningless: it's so high.
'I mean, I [grew] up with the idea that 600 rad, to the whole body, was lethal. And then I go talking about, "But we've never seen a malignancy under 20,000 rem, or 1,000 rads, of radiation." You know, you don't even get a malignancy, yet you kill someone with 600 rads! It just didn't have meaning in the same sense. [Protracted, chronic exposure to radiation over 40 years from radium in the bones happens at a low dose rate so is less lethal than the same dose as rapidly received radiation given at high dose rates over a minute or so as at Hiroshima.]'
At this point Dr. Darrell Fisher from Battelle, Pacific Northwest Laboratory states: '... in the dogs that have inhaled plutonium-239 oxide, I don't believe we've seen any lung cancers in dogs with less than about 150 rads to the lungs. ... It hasn't been published, but one thing we have observed is that in dogs with some plutonium, but less than 150 rads to lungs, there have been no lung cancers, and the incidence has been zero, whereas the incidence of lung cancers in the controls range between 3 and 16 percent. ... A protective that, with no incidence of lung cancer in the very low-dose-plutonium dogs ... where plutonium is administered by inhalation.'
Dr Robert E. Rowland: 'I mentioned that we have good measurements on 2,400 people who acquired radium, either dial painters or medical injections or drinking water. ... This population of people we've measured, if we line them up in order of initial systemic intake, how much radium got into the bloodstream, and put them in pecking order — of the 2,400, all of the malignancies occur in the highest 280 cases. The lower 2,100 cases, nothing. All of it occurs right there.
'And so, another way of looking at the doses in a way, I think, that is striking to the layperson, that up to this level nothing happens, and all the experience and all the bad things you've heard about what radium can do — and it can do bad things — are all right here at the end, at the highest levels, which is another way of saying, "It sure looks like a threshold relationship".'
Dr Rowland's 246 pages long book, Radium in Humans: A Review of U.S. Studies, Argonne National Laboratory, ANL/ER-3, 1994, is available here as a PDF file (5.3 MB), and page 80 states:
'When the measured radium cases are arranged in order of increasing initial systemic intake, expressed as μCi of Ra-226 plus 2.5 times μCi of Ra-228, the lowest-dose case with a bone sarcoma is number 2,102 on the list of 2,383 cases. That is, no bone sarcomas occurred in the 2,101 cases with lower combined intakes than this case. The value of the combined systemic intake for this case was 100 μCi, from 81.53 μCi of Ra-226 and 7.42 μCi of Ra-228. This lowest-dose sarcoma case was a female dial painter who started work in 1918 and died in 1983 of a bone sarcoma diagnosed in 1981.'
Page 87 states:
'When the measured cases are arranged in order of increasing initial systemic intake, the head carcinoma occurring at the lowest dose (Figure 13) is found to be number 2,024 in the list of 2,383 cases, with a calculated intake of 25.63 μCi of Ra-226. As indicated below, this intake value is incorrect; the true value is larger ...'
THE STERNGLASS 'SECRET FALLOUT' DECEPTION AND DR ALICE STEWART'S COVER-UP OF THE TRUTH ABOUT RADIATION
We have already seen in the previous post here how Professor Sternglass, author of Secret Fallout, Low-Level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three Mile Island and Before the Big Bang (which at least is anti-groupthink rubbish in physics, such as debunking Bohr's and Heisenberg's Copenhagen Interpretation and correctly analyzing the double slit experiment where a single photon's transverse wavelength is big enough to make it interact with both slits, where the slits are close enough that you get a diffraction pattern on the screen) fabricated false 'evidence' of low level radiation effects from fallout:
Above: the biggest hoax in the history of science, bigger than Piltdown Man, Cold Fusion and 11 dimensional Superstring. Professor Ernest Sternglass plots the rate at which infant mortality falls from 1935-68. He ignores the godd*mn mechanism for the fall in infant mortality in the period 1935-50, which was better medical treatment such as the sulfonamide-based drugs! Once this had reduced the infant mortality, the rate of year on year decrease would flatten out. Sternglass ignores this mechanism, and pretends that the cause of the flattening of the curve is all due to nuclear bomb test fallout instead! DUH!!!!! What's amazing is that people want to believe such lies with no control group, no mechanism, and inconsistencies such as the implication (from Sternglass' no-fallout straight line in the graph above) that childhood mortality was above 100% in the past and will drop to zero in the future! Duh! Who is he kidding???? But unfortunately, a lot of people believe these lies, simply because they want to believe them for non-scientific reasons like wishful thinking (so they don't have to study the facts, but can just dismiss radiation as scary and believe that it can be removed as a terrorist threat somehow politically by our disarmament):
'Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
'I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Sternglass' straight line extrapolation is completely pseudoscience, because if carried into the past it predicts a time with over 100% infant mortality (evidently wrong, because people are alive now!), and extrapolated into the future it predicts 0% childhood mortality (clearly false, because disease cannot be eradicated, despite the innovations like sulfonamides and antibiotics in the 1935-50 era). This type of error, due to a lack of causality and lack of proper mechanism-based predictions is not limited to the controversy over the effects of radiation. It's also shown by 10 dimensional superstring dogma and other groupthink rubbish in physics.
As shown in an earlier post, quite a bit of iodine-131 was released across America by Nevada testing in 1951-62, but even the effects of that were far smaller than what Sternglass was claiming.
Darrell Huff wrote a book called How to Lie with Statistics which has the example that researchers found that the number of children in a family in Holland correlated to the number of storks nests on the roof of the home! Perhaps that proves that storks really deliver children to families? Well, actually the bigger the family, the bigger the home they needed on the average. The bigger families with more children tended to have bigger, older houses, with big old roofs which had more storks nests because of their size and age. Professor Sternglass has recently had a change from claiming that low-level radiation is lethal: he has published a book about what happened before the big bang, an analogy to an egg dividing many times to produce all the particles.
Sternglass' first presentation was at the 9th Annual Hanford Biological Symposium, May 1969. Dr Alice Stewart was honest enough at that time to debunk Sternglass on 24 July 1969, in her article for the New Scientist, 'The Pitfalls of Extrapolation', which exposed the fatal contradiction in the Sternglass 'evidence' (besides the lack of a control group!):
'Sternglass has postulated a fetal mortality trend which would eventually produce rates well below the level which - according to his own theory - would result from background radiation.'
Dr Alice Stewart had discovered in 1956 that the exposure of pregnant mothers to an X-ray doubled the natural risk that the child would develop leukemia by the age of 10 years, but was biasedly anti-nuclear and ignorant of the initial effects of nuclear weapons. She falsely claimed that the 73.5% of the population of Hiroshima and 78.1% of the population of Nagasaki who survived the initial effects - these statistics are from Glasstone and Dolan, page 544 - were 'superfit' before exposure to radiation - when they were in fact undernourished on wartime rationing - rather than superfit as a consequence of exposure to radiation, e.g. see her lie in New Scientist magazine, 5 August 2000:
'Our paper also shows that the A-bomb survivors were not a normal, homogenous population. They were the best athletes - the top 10 per cent - and did not include the young and the old. This means that we cannot base standards of radiation safety on such an elite cohort.'
That is a blatant lie, because the initial effects survivors were 73.5% of the population in Hiroshima and 78.1% of the population, and did include young and old; additionally, at long ranges and thus low doses there were very few fatalities from initial effects. So it wasn't a biased population, it had a carefully matched control group unlike Sternglass' garbage and the Hanford study.
Despite this falsehood, Alice Stewart continued to deceive others, falsely claiming that the initial bomb effects like blast and thermal (but conveniently for her bias, not radiation!) made the survivors superfit:
STOA Workshop 5th February 1998
STOA WORKSHOP
SURVEY AND EVALUATION OF CRITICISM OF BASIC SAFETY STANDARDS FOR THE PROTECTION OF WORKERS AND THE PUBLIC AGAINST IONISING RADIATION
Brussels, LEO 5-E-2
Thursday, 5 February 1998
0925-09.40 A-bomb Survivors. Reassessment of the Radiation Hazard. A. Stewart, The University of Birmingham, UK
Summary of Dr.Stewart's Presentation at STOA 1998:
'Dr. Stewart remarked that the ... radio-sensitive people were removed from the population from the destructive effects of the bomb. That is why we are currently working on a basis which only provides for extremely resistant people. If the population was composed of young men, this condition would represent extreme-radio-resistance, which is in fact exactly what happened in the A-bomb survivor study.'
This was a tissue of lies, because at the low doses where the whole controversy arises, nobody (i.e., 0%) died from the acute radiation syndrome! There has never ever been any controversy that acute radiation syndrome has a threshold for lethal effects above at least 1 Gy (the 64 Marshallese exposed to BRAVO fallout in 1954 got 1.75 Gy of gamma plus a larger skin dose from beta, and 0% died from acute radiation syndrome). Dr Alice Stewart was covering up the truth.
She, and her supporter Klaus Becker at that meeting, simply had no excuse, because right back in 1961, Dr Clayton Samuel White (1912-2004) and others of the Lovelace Medical Center, published Comparative Nuclear Effects of Biomedical Interest, Atomic Energy Commission Civil Effects Test Operations report CEX-58.8 (also available online in a high quality format here), analyzing the mechanisms of all the initial effects. Clayton S. White, I. G. Bowen, and Donald R. Richmond also wrote A Comparative Analysis of Some of the Immediate Environmental Effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, report ADA438031, 1964, also published in Health Physics, vol. 10, issue 3, pp. 89-150, March 1964:
'The problem areas of concern to those who would establish a quantitative relation between biologic response and the more immediate environmental variations caused by nuclear explosions were defined. The scope of blast and shock biology was set forth and a selective summary of current knowledge regarding biological blast effects was presented. Tentative criteria useful in assessing the hazards of some of the major nuclear effects were noted. Following elucidation of the range-yield-effects relationship applicable to high-yield explosions generally, the criteria were applied specifically to a 20-kt yield burst at heights assumed to apply to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. The procedure, establishing the range-effect relationships for the two Japanese cities, was carried out through use of the free-field scaling laws and a mathematical model allowing scaling of translational effects for both debris and man. Thus an attempt was made to predict the ranges inside which the potential existed for producing specified levels of biological damage. For each of the predicted ranges, values for overpressure, thermal and initial nuclear radiations along with translational velocities for man and glass fragments were computed to allow a more balanced appreciation of all the effects parameters that pose a hazard to man. The implications of the free-field range-effects data in interpreting some of the immediate effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were explored and discussed. Though the over-all analytical approach followed was thought to be useful and sound, the tentative nature of many of the numerical data presented was emphasized. Thus those numbers employed representing best current estimates as well as values arbitrarily assigned were all noted to be subject to future refinement as new information expands the understanding of nuclear phenomenology and the consequences of exposure thereto.'
Dr Clayton S. White, who worked on nuclear weapon blast effects at Nevada test series’ Upshot-Knothole (1953), Teapot (1955) and Plumbbob (1957), testimony to the U.S. Congressional Hearings, 22-26 June 1959, Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959, pp. 364-5:
‘We were fortunate enough at a 5 psi station in one of the 1957 shots in Nevada to photograph the time-displacement history of a 160-pound [standing] dummy, and we were able from analysis of the movies to determine the maximal velocity reached ... about 21 feet per second. This velocity developed in 0.5 second. The total displacement of the dummy was near 22 feet ... It was this piece of empirical information that helped greatly in getting an analytical “handle” on the “treatment” of man as missile.’
In his 1985 oral history for the University of New Mexico, Dr White pointed out that all researchers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki need to study initial effects of nuclear weapons:
'More time was spent right after Hiroshima-Nagasaki in picking window glass out of people than in treating any other one entity.'
See also White's reports here, here, and particularly the report by Clayton S. White, Robert K. Jones, Edward G. Damon, E. Royce Fletcher, and Donald R. Richmond, The Biodynamics of Air Blast, The Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, report ADA384508, July 1971:
'After pointing out that accelerative and decelerative events are associated with the direct (pressure) and indirect (translational events including penetrating and nonpenetrating debris and whole body impact) effects of exposure to blast induced winds and pressure variations, some of the relevant biophysical parameters were selectively noted and discussed. These included the pressure time relationship; species differences; ambient pressure effects; the significance of positional (orientational) and geometric (situational) factors as they influence the wave form, the pressure, and the biologic response; and data bearing upon the etiology of blast injury. The consequences of pressure induced, violent implosion of the body wall and the significance of the associated variations in the internal gas and fluid pressures were described and emphasized as were alternating phases of "forced" hemorrhage and arterial air embolization; fibrin thrombi; coagulation anomalies; and renal, cardiac, and pulmonary sequelae. Tentative biomedical criteria consistent with recent interspecies scaling and modeling studies for assessing primary blast hazards were presented.'
Also, Donald R. Richmond, Edward G. Damon, E. Royce Fletcher, I. Gerald Bowen, and Clayton S. White, The Relationship between selected blast wave parameters and the response of mammals exposed to air blast, was published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 152 (2006), issue 1, pp. 103-21, while E. Royce Fletcher and I. Gerald Bowen, Blast-induced translational effects, was published in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 152, issue 1, 2006, pp. 378-403.
We have given links to some of their studies on the glass fragment hazard, in the post here. See also the reports here (essential report), here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
The danger that Sternglass and Alice Stewart both succumbed to is that bad science, lacking mechanism, can be asserted and become credible in the public despite being completely false; just because a scientist misuses authority to gain attention. In this case, when Sternglass' paper was rejected from a scientific journal, he had it published in the September 1969 issue of Esquire magazine, titled ‘The death of all children’. That magazine advertised the story as a selling point, and sent out copies of the magazine to prominent people in politics. If he had scientific evidence that was being covered up, that would have been reason to do that, assuming that the media would be interested in making a political storm out of the facts (which strongly support a result which is the opposite of that which Sternglass makes). So you end up with the idea that these false claims about low level radiation stem from politics: if the public wants to fear low level, low dose rate radiation, someone will fiddle the statistics accordingly. Anyone giving the facts is conveniently ignored or ridiculed as being ‘out of touch’ or part of a conspiracy and cover-up by the paranoid, deluded, media-manipulating charlatans.
R. H. MOLE AND F. W. SPIERS: HANFORD RADIATION STUDY
Mole and Spiers, as mentioned above, did the crucial work on radiation effects that others used. Both were scientific advisers to the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch on radiation effects for civil defence. Mole discovered the effect of dose rate on leukemia induction in mice, while Spiers discovered that the radium dial painters had no excess of leukemia, despite the gamma radiation from its decay chain daughter nuclides. There is an interesting argument by Mole over the statistical bias of the Hanford radiation study, which lacked both proper control groups and supervision of the diagnosis of cancers online here.
NUCLEAR TEST PARTICIPANTS RADIATION INDUCED CANCER RISKS
In May 1985, a U.S. National Research Council report on mortality in nuclear weapons test participants raised several questions. Some 5,113 nuclear test participants had died between 1952-81, when 6,125 deaths would be expected for a similar sized group of non-exposed Americans. The number of leukemia deaths was 56, identical to that in a similar sized non-exposed group. However, as the graph at the top of this post shows, the risk depends on the dose, so the few people with the highest doses would have far greater risks. In 1983, a C.D.C. report on the effects of fallout from the Plumbbob-Smoky test in 1957 showed that 8 participants in that test has died from leukemia up to 1979, compared to only 3 expected from a similar sized sample of non-exposed Americans. However, even for the Plumbbob-Smoky test, the overall death rate from all causes in the exposed test participants (320 deaths from 1957-79) was less than that in a matched sample of non-exposed Americans (365 deaths). The average dose to American nuclear test participants was only about 0.5 rad, although far higher doses were received by those working with fallout soon after nuclear tests. Altogether, out of 205,000 U.S. Department of Defense participants in nuclear tests, 34,000 were expected to die from naturally occurring cancer, and 11 from cancer due to radiation exposure. (According to the March 1990 U.S. Defense Nuclear Agency study guide DNA1.941108.010, report HRE-856, Medical Effects of Nuclear Weapons.)
CHERNOBYL 1986 NUCLEAR DISASTER RADIATION AFTER EFFECTS
We will now discuss the long term effects of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion (already discussed in some aspects, in a previous post here). Unlike the authorities in Poland, the Russians decided not to issue 130 mg potassium iodide tablets to civilians exposed to short-lived radioactive iodine isotopes like iodine-131, which is concentrated in a small area of the body (the thyroid gland) producing massive doses there (unlike other nuclides!). As a result of the lack of protection against radioactive iodine, many people subsequently had thyroid abnormalities, nodules and some cancers.
Dr Valerie Beral of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund showed in the 1 June 1995 issue of Nature that in the Ukraine there was no rise in general cancers or leukemia after Chernobyl, but there was a rise in thyroid cancers from 8 children with thyroid cancer in 1986 to 42 in 1993. The risk to children is greatest because they drink more milk and have smaller thyroid glands, which concentrates the iodine in a smaller volume, producing a greater dose within that volume. Dr Beral also found that children born after 1986 had no extra thyroid cancer risk, confirming that the threat died quickly with the 8-day half life of iodine-131.
Other data were reported in Health Physics, vo. 71 (1996), p. 47, showing that in Belarus (population 2,348,300 including 720,000 children exposed to a mean thyroid dose of 337 mGy) the number of thyroid cancers in the years from 1986 to 1992 inclusive were 1, 2, 2, 2, 10, 32, and 31. Back in 1961, the Lancet (vol. 2, p. 1097) published the fact that that 200 mg tablets of potassium iodide block iodine-131 uptake effectively even if they are taken up to 2 hours after exposure, and showed that each tablet is effective for several days. D. N. Pahuja, et al., in 1993 published the fact in Health Physics vol. 65, pp. 545-9, 'Potassium iodate and its comparison to potassium iodide as a blocker of I-131 uptake by the thyroid of rats', that although potassium iodide (KI) has a short shelf life in hot conditions, potassium iodate (KIO3) is more stable and is just as effective.
Nigel Hawkes, Science Editor, wrote an article called 'Born Under the Cloud of Chernobyl' in The Times on 1 June 1995, stating:
'Ukrainian officials reportedly claimed that 125,000 people had died as a result of the radiation release. It turned out that this was the total of all deaths in the affected area since the accident.'
Dr Roger Highfield, Science Editor of the Daily Telegraph, wrote about Chernobyl radiation hysteria on 9 April 1996:
'In 1991, 45 per cent of people in the contaminated areas claimed to be suffering from an illness due to radiation, but Western medical teams found no such effects. ... One fascinating discovery is that the feeling of fatalism is so strong among many that they do not comply with restrictions on eating contaminated foods and drinking radioactive milk.'
The cause of such hysteria is clear in the 28 April 1994 issue of the Daily Express newspaper which reported falsely that Chernobyl radiation could melt snow: 'Out here in the countryside, the land either side of us is so radioactively hot that when snow falls it melts instantly.'
In the same Daily Express newspaper on 2 May 1996, Sir Bernard Ingham stated: 'the population in general is damaged psychologically, blaming every ailment on the disaster ... a report which said radioactivity at Chernobyl "melts the winter's snow as it falls" exaggerates its effect by a factor of 26,000,000,000.'
The Chernobyl accident occured when, on 26 April 1986, a 1 GW badly designed Soviet Union nuclear reactor (i.e., it was a boiling water reactor with pressure-tube heat exchanger, and used a graphite moderator at a temperature of 700 oC with a poor safety system - an electronic safety switch which could be turned off while the reactor was in operation!) at Chernobyl in the Ukraine was being used for an unofficial experiment and a number of decisions combined to make its power level accelerate to 100 GW (100 times normal full power) in just 4 seconds. The operators (1) turned off the automatic safety protection system, (2) withdrew the neutron-absorbing control rods, then (3) turned off the coolant flow.
You don't need to be a reactor physicist to work out that the incredible heat generated in the (now stagnant) cooling water dissociated the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gas, which then exploded, blowing the reactor lid off and sending up a cloud of fission product smoke and fallout. Potassium iodate tablets were issued to all Chernobyl workers 1.5 hours after the accident, but not the the civilians downwind! Most of the deaths occurred from whole body gamma radiation, and from beta skin contact burns when workers without waterproof protective clothing were drenched with highly contaminated water during decontamination work.
Some 31 people died from short-term exposure to gamma exposure and beta burns. One died from physical injury, one from thermal burns, and 29 from acute radiation syndrome. Out of 22 patients with dosimeter readings of 6-16 Gy, 21 died; for 23 patients with 4-6 Gy, 7 died; for 53 patients with 2-4 Gy, 1 died; and for 105 patients with dosimetry readings of 1-2 Gy, no acute radiation syndrome deaths occurred.
A total mass of 6 tons of fragmented concrete, steel and graphite debris formed the contaminated fallout from Chernobyl. Downwind fallout was substantial 6 km away on the town of Pripyat, giving a peak measured gamma dose rate of 600 mR/hr (about 0.6 cGy/hour when converting from air ionization units to absorbed dose units) at 40 hours after the explosion; by the end of 1987 it had decayed to 0.2 mR/hr (about 10-20 times the natural background radiation level for most soils at sea level). The inhabitants of Pripyat were given by potassium iodate tablets, but were evacuated beginning the day after the explosion in 1,216 buses and 300 trucks from the upwind city of Kiev.
A total of 135,000 people from a 30 km radius of Chernobyl were evacuated by 5 May 1986. The 25,000 people living within 3-15 km of the reactor received an average of 0.45 Sv (0.45 Gy for gamma radiation where the RBE is 1), while the 110,000 people within 15-30 km received an average of 0.043 Sv. On 10 May 1986, the 5 mR/hr fallout contour extended 110 km downwind, while the 2 mR/hr fallout contour covered 200,000 km2.
Initially, most of the dose rate was due to permanent gases (e.g., the full reactor inventory of 1.7 x 1018 Bq of the nobel gas Xenon-133 was released, which has a half-life of 5.27 days). But after the cloud dispersed and those gases decayed, the activity from deposited fallout and rainout predominated. About 20% of the 1.3 x 1018 Bq reactor inventory of iodine-131 was released, which decayed with a half life of 8.05 days. (This release was 350 times greater than the amount of iodine-131 emitted in the 1957 Windscale graphite reactor fire in Britain, and about a million times greater than the iodine-131 released in the Three Mile Island accident of 1979.)
Iodine-131 in the Pripyat river water reached a peak concentration of 0.03 microcuries/litre on 3 May 1986, but then fell rapidly due to the effects of dilution and natural radioactive decay.
The alleged long-term radioactive hazard was mainly due to caesium-137. Some 13% of the reactor inventory of 2.9 x 1017 Bq of caesium-137 was released, and it has a half life of 30 years. Rainout of Chernobyl smoke over North-West England on 2-3 May 1986 deposited 6 kBq/m2 of caesium-137, and by 15 June the caesium-137 content of grazing sheep exceeded the 1 kBq/kg safety limit. The sale of sheep for feed was banned, but wool production for clothing was safe and was continued. After 12 weeks, 3 million British sheep were banned from consumption due to uptake of caesium-137 from grass. Milk contamination was a short-term problem in the rainout areas of Britain, reaching a peak of up to 1.1 kBq/litre before decaying.
'The maximum measured radioactive contamination of milk in the United States by iodine-131 from the Chernobyl disaster was in milk produced by cows grazing on pasture in Washington: 560 picocuries per liter. The much greater potential danger from trans-Pacific war fallout is brought out by the fact that the approximately 300-kiloton Chinese test explosion of December 28, 1966 resulted in worse iodine-131 contamination of milk produced by a cow grazing on pasture near Oak Ridge, Tennessee: 900 picocuries per liter.' - Cresson Kearny.
But the most serious short-term effects of Chernobyl were due to fictitious media hyped scare stories from ignorant and biased non-threshold dogma-abiding idiots, setting off a series of panic-induced abortions across Europe. During May 1986 alone, 2,564 babies (23% of early pregnancies) in Greece were aborted due to radiation fears, although as we have shown these particular fears proved groundless judging by the results in the heavily-contaminated Gomel district:
'The clear aim of the anti-nuclear movement is to silence all opposition ... theirs are now the only voices heard ... In the Gomel district ... which was one of the most heavily contaminated [after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986], the death rate per thousand newborn babies was 16.3 in 1985, 13.4 in 1986, and 13.1 in 1987; in Kiev region the figures ... were, respectively, 15.5, 12.2, and 12.1.'
- Environmentalist Michael Allaby, Facing the Future: the Case for Science (Bloomsbury, London, 1995, pp.191-7).
The effects of distant strontium-90 in milk due to fallout from nuclear weapons tests were similarly exaggerated. After the largest atmospheric nuclear test series ever by America and Russian in 1962 (they ceased atmospheric tests in December 1962), the peak concentration of strontium-90 in milk in Britain reached 1.5 Bq per gram of calcium in 1963, and it thereafter diminished to half that over a period of 18 months (mainly due to the downward movement of fallout washed ever deeper in the soil by rainfall, until less and less of it was available for uptake by grass). For America, there is a graph on page 303 of Merril Eisenbud and Thomas F. Gesell, Environmental radioactivity, Academic Press, 4th ed., 1997, which shows that strontium-90 reached a peak concentration of Sr-90 in milk in New York City of about 1 Bq (26 picocuries) per gram of calcium in 1963.
Up to 1962, the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. conducted a total of 496 Mt of atmospheric tests, of which 183 Mt was from fission. The highest rate of nuclear testing was in 1962: see the graph on page 295 of Merril Eisenbud and Thomas F. Gesell, Environmental Radioactivity, Academic Press, 4th ed., 1997. Because strontium-90 is chemically similar to radium in being concentrated in the bones, and because of the censored evidence we have discussed about the threshold dose for bone cancer of radium by the 1920s luminous watch dial painters who licked the radium/zinc sulphide paint on their brushes (and in some cases painted their teeth with it), the widely believed effects of such fallout have no scientific evidence behind them. Page 305 of Eisenbud and Gesell 1997 shows that the peak concentration of strontium-90 in adult bone in New York City was 2.2 picocuries (0.08 Bq) per gram of calcium, reached in 1965. Humans are 1.5% calcium by mass, thus an average 70.0 kg adult contains 1.05 kg or 1,050 grams of calcium, so that the total peak body burden in 1965 was about 2,300 picocuries = 2.3 nanocuries. This body burden is 22,000 times lower than the 50 microcuries of Ra-226 which was the threshold needed to produce 1,000 rads and bone cancers to the radium workers. Thus the 183 megatons of fission yield in atmospheric tests was 22,000 times too low to produce the observed threshold for bone cancer from strontium-90 uptake, according to the previously quoted data.
NOT JUST 'EXAGGERATION' BUT WHOLESALE LYING ABOUT RADIATION EFFECTS FOR POLITICAL ENDS
Dr Jane M. Orient wrote a paper on 'Nuclear weapons: surrender or defense?' published in the Journal of the American Medical Women's Association, vol. 37, number 10, October 1982, pp. 260-2, stating: 'Nobody remembers that the French had enough ammunition in the Maginot Line to kill every German many times.' The Germans simply bypassed the Maginot Line and went through the Ardennes Forest to invade France. This shows why anti-nuclear 'overkill' hype totally misses the whole point: having piles of 'overkill' weapons doesn't prevent terrorism (state-sponsored or otherwise), you need the effective means to defend yourself! In 1985, she published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, vol. 28, issue 2, Winter 1985, pp. 218-22 an analysis of 'Nuclear Winter' deceptions by TTAPS, e.g., 'the TTAPS model assumes, without comment, that 50 percent of the urban area in the 2-5 psi overpressure zone would burn, in contrast to the 10 percent or less estimated by the Office of Technology Assessment. ... Whether or not the nuclear winter is credible, the conclusions drawn by its major promoter, Carl Sagan, are non sequiturs. Sagan calls for rejecting civil defense and appears on public television to denounce the concept of weapons that might disarm nuclear warheads before they could start a firestorm.'
She states in her paper 'Homeland Security for Physicians', Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, vol. 11, number 3, Fall 2006, pp. 75-9:
'As older physicians will recall, in the 1950s and 1960s Americans had a high level of awareness that they were targeted by Soviet missiles armed with nuclear warheads. As reminders, there were periodic checks of the air-raid sirens and the Conelrad
emergency broadcast system, and signs identifying designated fallout shelters were visible in public places. Our high school had a civil defense club. ...
'In the 1960s, a group of activist physicians called Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) undertook to "educate the medical profession and the world about the dangers of nuclear weapons," beginning with a series of articles in the New England Journal of Medicine. [Note that journal was publishing information for anti-civil defense propaganda back in 1949, e.g. the article in volume 241, pp. 647-53 of New England Journal of Medicine which falsely suggests that civil defense in nuclear war would be hopeless because a single burned patient in 1947 with 40% body area burns required 42 oxygen tanks, 36 pints of plasma, 40 pints of whole blood, 104 pints of fluids, 4,300 m of gauze, 3 nurses and 2 doctors. First, only unclothed persons in direct line of sight without shadowing can get 40% body area burns from thermal radiation, second, duck and cover offers protection in a nuclear attack warning, and G. V. LeRoy had already published, two years earlier, in J.A.M.A., volume 134, 1947, pp. 1143-8, that less than 5% of burns in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were caused by building and debris fires. In medicine it is always possible to expend vast resources on patients who are fatally injured. In a mass casualty situation, doctors should not give up just because they don't have unlimited resources; as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they would need to do their best with what they have.]
'On its website, www.psr.org, the group boasts that it "led the campaign to end atmospheric nuclear testing." With this campaign, the linear no-threshold (LNT) theory of radiation carcinogenesis became entrenched. It enabled activists to calculate enormous numbers of potential casualties by taking a tiny risk and multiplying it by the population of the earth. As an enduring consequence, the perceived risks of radiation are far out of proportion to actual risks, causing tremendous damage to the American nuclear industry.
'Over the next decade, governmental civil defense programs declined, and public interest waned. By 1974, only 29 million public shelter spaces had been added to the 110 million catalogued by 1963 on order of President John F. Kennedy. The Medical Self-Help Program and the Medical Education for National Defense Program were terminated. ...
'I became involved in the early 1980s, when Australian pediatrician Helen Caldicott, M.D., gave a lecture at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. She handed out copies of the articles from the New England Journal of Medicine, displayed posters equating nuclear weapons with nuclear power production, and gave an impassioned appeal for physicians to join in the disarmament movement du jour, the Nuclear Freeze. ...
'PSR's successful efforts in garnering physician members and support sparked the formation of another group, International Physicians for the Prevention of NuclearWar (IPPNW), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its disarmament advocacy. ... Nuclear war, it declared, meant the utter destruction of the planet; if the explosive force of the weapons weren't enough, there was always an ensuing climate catastrophe. During the 1980s, that was nuclear winter, although current visitors to the PSR website will find only allusions to global warming, not the slides about the Cold and the Dark that its members formerly showed to frighten schoolchildren. Using a medical metaphor, PSR claimed that treatment was impossible, and only prevention was acceptable. Efforts to save lives were not only futile, but unethical ...
'Physicians could help save millions of lives by serving as a credible source of crucial lifesaving information. Simply preventing panic would probably save more lives than almost anything else. ...
'Chances of surviving the blast at some distance from the fireball are much enhanced by "duck and cover." Soldiers are taught to lie down immediately if they see a flash or hear an explosion. It takes eight times as much force to move someone who is lying down as opposed to standing up. The flash travels with the speed of light; the speed of the blast wave is a function of the speed of sound. Many would be killed by being thrown against hard objects or struck with flying debris. Cover could protect against flying glass shards; any type of cover, even a newspaper, would provide some protection from the thermal pulse, which can last several seconds ...
'Radioactive fallout would cause delayed casualties many miles away. But effective action can be taken. People need to understand that radiation is not forever. It has a half life, in contrast to microorganisms, which have a doubling time. The isotopes generated in a nuclear explosion decay very rapidly. The exponential decay curve is such that within 7 hours, the radiation level is one-tenth the original [1-hour] level, and within 49 (72) hours, the level is about one-hundredth (1/10)2 of the original [1-hour] level. Dangerous fallout should be visible to the naked eye, as it consists of larger particles that have come to earth quickly while still very "hot."
'No special materials are needed for shielding. People simply need to put sufficient distance or mass between themselves and the source. Water or wood or paper or buckets of rice can serve as shielding, but a greater thickness is needed, compared to denser substances such as concrete, earth, or lead ... One half-value thickness of concrete is 2.4 in; of compacted earth, 3.6 in. Five half-value thicknesses reduces the radiation dose by a factor of 25, or to 1/32 of the incident dose. Two tenth-value thicknesses reduce the dose to 1/100 of the incident dose. ...
'For the mindset that engendered and enables this situation, which jeopardizes the existence of the United States as a nation as well as the lives of millions of its citizens, some American physicians and certain prestigious medical organizations bear a heavy responsibility.
'Ethical physicians should stand ready to help patients to the best of their ability, and not advocate sacrificing them in the name of a political agenda. Even very basic knowledge, especially combined with simple, inexpensive advance preparations, could save countless lives.'
Note the we have already discussed the morality of civil defence in previous blog posts: because the facts show that nuclear explosions are survivable if the correct simple actions are taken, it is immoral and evil to not take precautions:
'On the one hand, a strong point can be made for the fact that civil defense, appropriate civil defense, would save a great many lives; on the other hand, one can also make a strong case that any civil defense, appropriate or otherwise, may increase the danger of a war because people will feel that they don't have to avoid it because they have civil defense.'
- Dr Frank Fremont-Smith, director of the New York Academy of Sciences Interdisciplinary Communications Program, Proceedings of the Second Interdisciplinary Conference on Selected Effects of a General War, DASIAC Special Report 95, July 1969, vol. 2, DASA-2019-2, AD0696959, page 281.
'I must just say that as far as I'm concerned I have had some doubts about whether we should have had a civil defense program in the past. I have no doubt whatsoever now, for this reason, that I've seen ways in which the deterrent forces can fail to hold things off, so that no matter what our national leaders do, criminal organizations, what have you, groups of people over which we have no control whatsoever, can threaten other groups of people.'
- Dr Theodore B. Taylor, Proceedings of the Second Interdisciplinary Conference on Selected Effects of a General War, DASIAC Special Report 95, July 1969, vol. 2, DASA-2019-2, AD0696959, page 298.
The big lie of the civil defense rejection is the false assumption that the only threat from nuclear weapons is a situation in which civil defense is clearly useless, e.g., if you are at ground zero and literally hit on the head by the bomb; although there is documentary evidence of survival at ground zero itself both in tunnel shelters in Nagasaki, and also at ground zero directly below the fireball of several nuclear tests. In 1958, the 3.8 megaton TEAK test missile malfunctioned and the bomb detonated 77 km directly above the control shelter on Johnston Island instead of 32 km downrange as planned (a group of men standing at the shelter entrance without goggles were filmed, and can be seen being dazzled by the flash, and running back into the shelter; nobody was injured). In 1962, 410 kt BLUEGILL was detonated just 48 km over Johnston Island and the only injuries were two people with retinal burns, neither of whom was wearing dark goggles at the time of detonation.
Dr Edward Teller and Dr Albert L. Latter on page 143 of their book Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers and Opportunities (Criterion Books, New York, 1958) give details of another example where five men were deliberately exposed at ground zero to the nuclear air burst on 19 July 1957, 2 kt PLUMBBOB-JOHN, the live test firing of the Genie air-to-air nuclear warhead air defense rocket:
'This possibility would fill most people with alarm lest the population underneath the explosion be hurt. Fortunately, in a recent nuclear test in Nevada, five well-informed and courageous Air Force officers demonstrated that there is complete safety to people on the ground. They did this by standing directly beneath the explosion at ground zero. ...
'An F-89 jet fighter plane flying at 19,000 feet above sea level delivered an air-to-air atomic rocket to a preassigned point in the sky. The ground zero men were 15,000 feet immediately below. They wore no helmets, no sun-glasses, and no protective clothing.
'At the instant of the explosion the men looked up, saw the fireball and felt the heat. There was no discomfort, only a gentle warmth. Then they waited for the shock wave to arrive - approximately ten seconds. When the shock came, it was actually just a loud noise. However, one of the men ducked his head instinctively.
'The blast and the thermal pulse were over. One question still remained: Would there be any fallout? They checked their radiation instruments and waited while the cloud drifted slowly away. There was no significant rise in the [natural background] radiation level. ... The effects of the explosion were utterly insignificant on the ground.'
On page 144 they explain: '... in our conflict with the powerful communistic countries which strive for world domination, it may be too much to hope for uninterrupted peace. If we abandon our light and mobile [nuclear] weapons, we shall enable the Red bloc to take over one country after another, close to their borders, as opportunities arise. The free nations cannot maintain the massive armies throughout the world which would be required to resist such piecemeal aggression.'
On pages 170-1 they show why limited nuclear war is more likely than a massive annihilating nuclear war:
'The certainty of a counterblow gives real protection against all-out war. No such protection exists against wars limited in territory and in aims. In the history of humankind such wars have been most frequent. There is no indication that these limited wars have ended.'
The attack on civil defense by propagandarists is thus lie in which the particular details of the assumed nuclear attack are deliberately selected in order to negate the value of civil defense: such an assumption is biased against civil defense from the word go, so 'investigating' the consequences of such an attack is totally meaningless for any practical purpose, except propaganda. Objective analysis of the history of nuclear war against Japan in 1945 shows that limited nuclear war is more likely than total annihilation, so protection is both possible and desirable.
This was first made clear by Dr Paul Tompkins of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, in his statement to U.S. Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, 26 June 1959, pp. 953-4:
‘I had the experience of being on the Manhattan District in 1943. I am very familiar with the psychology of revulsion against the effect these weapons can produce ... The facts themselves are bad enough. However, it is crucially important to look those facts squarely in the face if one is going to face the necessity for survival, if against your will or despite anything you can do about it, it is imposed on you ... As far as I am personally concerned, by looking at the problems, understanding what they are composed of, and by necessity being an incurable optimist, I never expect to see a war of this [world destroying] kind happen. It is possible that more limited engagements of a more sharply defined type will be fought under the sword of Damocles ... If so, let us be prepared for that.’
Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 2nd ed., April 1962 (reprinted with corrected, dramatically altered thermal ignition energy data in February 1964), contains a civil defense analysis chapter, Principles of Protection, which was replaced with a new EMP effects chapter in the 1977 3rd edition.
Page 645 (1962/4 edition) explains:
'The major part of the thermal radiation travels in straight lines, so any opaque object interposed between the fireball and the exposed skin will give some protection. This is true even if the object is subsequently destroyed by the blast, since the main thermal radiation pulse is over before the arrival of the blast wave.
'At the first indication of a nuclear explosion, by a sudden increase in the general illumination, a person inside a building should immediately fall prone, and, if possible, crawl behind or beneath a table or desk or to a planned vantage point. Even if this action is not taken soon enough to reduce the thermal radiation exposure greatly, it will minimise the displacement effect of the blast wave and provide a partial shield against splintered glass and other flying debris.
'An individual caught in the open should fall prone to the ground in the same way, while making an effort to shade exposed parts of the body. Getting behind a tree, building, fence, ditch, bank, or any structure which prevents a direct line of sight between the person and the fireball, if possible, will give a major degree of protection. If no substantial object is at hand, the clothed parts of the body should be used to shield parts which are exposed. There will still be some hazard from scattered thermal radiation, especially from high-yield weapons at long ranges, but the decrease in the direct radiation will be substantial.'
A person on the ground whose clothes ignite (which is only a risk under extremely high thermal exposure to dark coloured clothing) can immediately extinguish the clothes by simply rolling over to starve the flames of oxygen.
Page 653 (1962/4 edition) correctly explains:
'Some, although perhaps not all, of the fallout in the Marshall Islands, after the test explosion of March 1, 1954, could be seen as a white powder or dust. This was due, partly at least, to the light color of the calcium oxide or carbonate of which the particles were mainly composed. It is probable that whenever there is sufficient fallout to constitute a hazard, the dust will be visible.'
Page 658 (1962/4 edition) shows how to deal with fallout on food and water:
'If emergency food supplies do become contaminated, or if it is necessary to resort to contaminated sources after emergency supplies are exhausted, many types of food can be treated to remove the radioactive material. Fresh fruit and vegetables can be washed or peeled to remove the outer skin or leaves. Food products of the absorbent typecannot be decontaminated in this manner and should be disposed of by burial. Boiling or cooking of the food has no effect in removing the fallout material. Milk, from cows which survive in a heavily contaminated area, may not be safe to drink because of the radioiodine content and this condition may persist for weeks or months. [It can be turned into cheese while the iodine-131 decays rapidly with an 8-day half life.]
'Domestic water supplies from underground sources will usually remain free from radioactive contamination. Water supplies from surface sources may become contaminated if watersheds and open reservoirs are in areas of heavy fallout. However, most of the radioactive fallout material would be removed by regular water treatment which includes coagulation, sedimentation, and filtration. If a surface water supply is not treated in this manner, but merely chlorinated, it may be unfit for consumption for several days after an attack. As a result of dilution and natural decay the contamination will decrease with time.
'If the regular water supply is not usually subjected to any treatment other than chlorination, and an alternative source is not available, consideration should be given in advance planning to the provision of ion-exchange columns or beds for emergency decontamination use. Home water softeners might serve the same purpose on a small scale. The water contained in a residential hot-water heater would serve as an emergency supply, provided it can be removed without admitting contaminated water. Water may also be distilled to make it safe for drinking purposes. It should be emphasized that mere boiling of water contaminated with fallout is of absolutely no value in removal of the radioactivity.'
Decontamination of streets, buildings and farm land is discussed on page 659 (1962/4 edition):
'Because of its particulate nature, fallout will tend to collect on horizontal surfaces, e.g., roofs, streets, tops of vehicles, and the ground. In the preliminary decontamination, therefore, the main effort should be directed toward cleaning such surfaces. The simplest way of achieving this is by water washing, if an adequate supply of water is available. The addition of a commercial wetting agent (detergent) will make the washing more efficient. The radioactive material is thus transferred to storm sewers where it is less of a hazard [underground drains are well shielded from people]. ... if facilities are to be provided across open country which is contaminated over large areas, bulldozing the top few inches of contaminated soil to the sides will be satisfactory only if a wide strip is cleared. Thus, if the strip is 250 feet in width, the radiation dose rate in the middle will be reduced to one-tenth of the value before clearing. A similar result may be achieved by scraping off the top layer of soil and burying it under fresh soil. Something like a foot of earth cover would be required to decrease the dose rate by a factor of ten.'
Dr Glasstone is wrong here, assuming that gamma rays are coming straight upwards! Actually, because most radiation from fallout comes directly from a wide surrounding area, the protection afforded is much better than a factor of 10: the gamma rays from a smooth uniformly contaminated terrain come from an average distance of 15 metres from the observer centred at 1 metre height. These direct gamma rays are therefore travelling through not the 1 foot vertical earth cover (the contribution from fallout below your feet is negligible) but are travelling at an angle of only 3.8 degrees from the horizontal (not 90 degrees as the 1 foot or factor of 10 shielding suggests), and hence travel through a much bigger slant distance of earth, about 5 metres thickness of earth for the fallout 15 metres away. Obviously, this effect increases the amount of earth-scattered radiation reaching the observer, so when you put an earth layer over fallout, the distance of mean fallout contribution (i.e., the radius beyond which the fallout gives 50% of the total dose) is no longer 15 metres, but is reduced greatly. However, the shielding is still much better than Glasstone's factor of 10 protection suggests. James Sartor gives data on page 96 of The Control of Exposure of the Public to Ionizing Radiation in the Event of Accident or Attack, Proceedings of a Symposium Sponsored by the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), April 27-29, 1981, Held at the International Conference Center, Reston, Virginia which show that 1 foot (30 cm) of earth cover over fallout gives a protection factor of 50, while 6 inches (15 cm) of earth cover gives a protection factor of 6.7.
The final page of Chapter 12, page 661 (1962/4 edition), has a Conclusion which states:
'Much of the discussion presented in earlier sections of this chapter have been based, for simplicity, on the effects of a single nuclear weapon. It must not be overlooked that in a nuclear attack some areas may be subjected to several bursts. The basic principles of protection would remain unchanged, but protective action against all the effects of a nuclear weapon - blast, thermal radiation, initial nuclear radiation, and fallout - would become even more important. There is a good possibility that many people would survive a nuclear attack and this possibility would be greatly enhanced by utilizing the principles of protection in preattack preparations and planning in taking evasive action at the time of an attack, and in determining what should be done in the recovery phase of an attack.'
There is also some important censored information in the earlier June 1957 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which is available online (see pages 514-517 of the 1957 edition): on page 514-5 three photos of successful Japanese 'blast-shielding walls' at Nagasaki which stopped damage from the nuclear explosion are shown. These walls are about 10 feet tall, and are wider at their base than at their top to avoid overturning by blast. They are made out of either precast reinforced concrete or earth-filled wooden panels. Both types fully protected vital Japanese machinery, such as electrical transformers, at 0.85 mile from ground zero in Nagasaki. Pages 516-7 of the 1957 edition shows photos of unprotected earth-moving equipment (bulldozer and road grader) badly damaged by 30 psi peak overpressure in a Nevada test: the road grader has lost tyres and the bulldozer is overturned with track damage. Another picture is shown of identical equipment completely protected after exactly the same 30 psi peak overpressure nuclear blast, because the bulldozer and road grader in this example are in an open trench (at right angles to the blast motion) which has a depth equal to the height of the equipment. Although some blast wave energy diffracted straight into the trench, the main mechanism for blast damage is wind drag, which is caused by directional dynamic pressure. Unlike the overpressure, the wind pressure does not diffract unless it is forced to do so by being blocked. Hence the blast wind blew straight over the top of the open trench, without causing any displacement or damage to the equipment. All of these photos and information were removed from all future editions of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
Above: All that happened to the Anderson shelters 400 yards from the 25 kt Hurricane nuclear test on 3 October 1952 was that a few sand bags were blown off by the arrival of the blast wave, but by that time the initial nuclear radiation and thermal radiation pulses were already over, so the sandbags had shielded the radiation. Frank H. Pavry, who as part of the British Mission to Japan had observed the surviving air raid shelters near ground zero in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, organized the construction of 15 Anderson shelters. In World War II, two types of shelters were issued by the U.K. government to householders: the 'Morrison' (a steel table designed to resist the debris load from the collapse of a house, which was introduced in March 1941 and named after the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison), and the 'Anderson' which was an outdoor shelter supplied to 2,100,000 householders (a 14-gauge corrugated steel arch shelter, 2 m long, 1.4 m wide and 1.8 m high, designed to accommodate 6 people and to be sunk to 1.2 metre depth and covered by at least 40 cm of earth; it was invented in 1938 and named after Sir John Anderson, who was in charge of U.K. Air Raid Precautions/Civil Defence).
Frank H. Pavry's report, Operation HURRICANE: Anderson Shelters, Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, AWRE-T17/54, was originally classified 'Secret - Atomic'. The 15 Anderson shelters had survived very well. Nearest to the bomb ship, they survived a peak overpressure of 55 psi or 380 kPa without internal damage: sand bags on the outside were hurled off when the blast wave arrived, but by that time they had done their job of shielding the initial neutron and gamma radiation. (They could have been replaced before fallout arrived.) At a peak overpressure of 12 psi or 83 kPa, even the sandbags on the outside remained intact. (Pavry had used sand bags instead of the recommended packed earth as a convenience.)
This rightly gave conviction to the British Home Office civil defence effects team. The bomb ship HMS Plym, can be seen moored in 40 feet of water 400 yards off Trimouille Island, Monte Bello group. The public information film on Operation Hurricane states: 'At Montebello the advance party is already at work: 200 Royal Engineers had arrived in April to find an empty wilderness of salt, bush and spinifex ... Within the danger zone they erected the familiar [World War II British civilian] Anderson shelters, well-protected by sandbags ... These tests would influence the pattern of civil defence against some future atomic attack. ... On shore, they find many of the Anderson shelters have survived the ordeal remarkably well – better than some of the concrete-block houses.' (The full report on the Anderson shelters exposed at Operation Hurricane is 'Operation Hurricane: Anderson Shelters', Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston, report AWRE-T17/54, 1954, UK National Archives reference ES 5/19 and also duplicated at DEFE 16/933. See also 'Penetration of the gamma flash into Anderson shelters and concrete cubicles', AWRE-T20/54, 1954, UK National Archives ref ES 5/22 duplicated at DEFE 16/935.) For more about British civil defence nuclear weapons effects testing programme, and the influences of Glasstone's 1957 book and Dolan's 1974 NATO version of Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, see this post.)
PLUTONIUM DIOXIDE AND THE ANALOGY OF RADIUM-226 TO STRONTIUM-89, -90
While there is evidence mentioned in this blog post for a threshold dose for lung tumours from plutonium dioxide inhalation and from radium-226 uptake by bone, these studies have only focussed on bad effects and so there does not seem to be any research into beneficial effects. In the absence of any benefits, it is safest to try to avoid any exposure to these forms of contamination.
The analogy of radium-226 to strontium-89 and strontium-90 fallout nuclides has the following limitations. First, studies were done in the 1950s on what happens to radium-226 and strontium-89 taken up from diet or injection and deposited in bones. Although are similar in so far that they both get deposited in the bones, there may a significant chemical difference on the way they are deposited within bone: radioautographs (self-producing X-rays) of cross-sections of human leg bones from old people who died after massive doses of radium contaminated 'therapy' water showed that the radium ended up concentrated at discrete hotspots in the bone. By contrast, bones from young rabbits injected with strontium-89 contamination just a few minutes before sacrifice showed that the strontium was deposited uniformly throughout bone tissue. The difference may be due to the way calcification occurs, with crystals forming where the hotspots are located. Whether the effect is entirely due to chemical differences between radium and strontium, or whether it is due in whole or part to the age of the bone tissue, the duration of uptake and bone deposition process (just a few minutes for the rabbits, but years for radium exposure in humans) or differences in diet and calcium intake as a function of age, is unclear. The radium hotspots in the bones of old people would have produced higher doses than the uniform deposition of a similar amount of activity from strontium in the bones of young rabbits. However, as suggested in the material quoted on the radium cases earlier, there was the suggestion that some tumour incidence did not increase even at large doses because continuing irradiation of the bone marrow by alpha and gamma emitting radium-226 may have acted as automatic radiotherapy and suppressed and killed cancer. If so, then the fact that strontium-90 is a pure beta emitter, whereas radium emits gamma rays as well as alpha particles, may be a significant difference, given that there is statistical evidence that gamma radiation is a threshold effect with benefits below the threshold. So there are still unresolved questions about the way in which radium threshold doses should be modelled mathematically to predict low dose effects.
Professor Bernard L. Cohen in 1995 published a 'Test of the linear no-threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis in the low dose, low dose rate region' in Health Physics, vol. 68, pp. 157-174, which is very unconvincing (like the Hanford radiation workers study, which reached opposite conclusions) because it lacked individual-level statistical control for factors like smoking and radon exposure. It therefore lacks statistical power. It is vital in studies to match the control group with the group under study or you end up with false excesses or false benefits. Without a properly matched unexposed control group (against which to measure excesses or benefits in the exposed group), 'adjustments' are needed to 'correct' observed data for various factors like the effect of smoking, age, diet, exercise and so on, and the uncertainties in the adjustment factors soon exceed and statistically mask the real effect, so the more convoluted the correction-analysis, the more likely it is to misinterpret data (an excellent example being Sternglass' false correlation and extrapolation, already discussed in detail).
Professor Cohen's investigations into the benefits of radiation at low doses, such as a correlation of cancer risks versus background radiation doses in America (which shows a trend to lower risks at higher doses, but is meaningless because no proper individual level control is used to exclude other factors than radiation), is damaging to the cause of promoting science in society, because it is poor science if not mere propaganda, and thus it acts as a straw man for attack by those who prefer to ignore the statistically undeniable evidence from other studies, such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those people need only point to pseudoscientific 'benefits' claims in order to falsely deny all the evidence, or to point out that there are some 'controversial' claims so they can use that as an excuse to avoid any change. For example, both Bernard Cohen and Ernest Sternglass are retired physics professors from the same institute, the University of Pittsburgh, and they are now arguing with one over whether low level radiation is harmful, through letters in the newspaper, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
In Rebuttal: Overblown fears of nuclear power
There is no credible evidence that suggests nuclear power plants give their neighbors cancer
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
By Bernard L. Cohen
I am writing in response to the Dec. 6 Forum commentary by Ernest J. Sternglass, "Trade Nukes for Gas." In it Mr. Sternglass claims that there have been excess cancers in areas near nuclear power plants, which he explains as due to radioactivity released from those plants. ...
But even if there were such excesses in the particular areas Mr. Sternglass carefully selects, he cites no reason to believe that they are caused by releases from nuclear plants. There are many environmental causes for cancer, and many of them, such as air pollution, chemicals and the effects of poverty, are especially important near the big cities cited by Mr. Sternglass. He offers no evidence that radiation was the cause. ...
... even ... natural and medical exposures cannot be responsible for more than about 1 percent of all cancers. Clearly then, the thousand-times-smaller exposures that nuclear-plant neighbors receive from those plants cannot be responsible for the effects claimed by Mr. Sternglass.
Mr. Sternglass has been making claims about excess cancers near nuclear plants for more than 45 years, never publishing them in regular scientific journals, but getting publicity from them in the mass media.
As a result of this publicity, the governor of Pennsylvania set up a fact-finding committee consisting of eight distinguished scientists, including some known to be opposed to nuclear power; the 1974 report of that committee completely rejected the Sternglass assertions. ...
The fact that Mr. Sternglass was a professor of radiology at the University of Pittsburgh is irrelevant. His research here dealt with X-ray image intensifiers, not with health impacts of radiation. ...
Errors in Bernard Cohen's 1995 paper are addressed in his 2000 paper in Technology, vol. 7, pp. 657-72, where he compensates for 450 confounding factors, but although his data survive because none of the factors can explain the 'discrepancy', it is not convincing study because of the lack of a proper individual level control. It's not clean, clear scientific evidence: without a proper control group there is always some risk that some effect is biasing results.
A good review of the problems in old studies is: Nonlinearity of Radiation Health Effects by Myron Pollycove, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C., Environmental Health Perspectives Supplements, vol. 106 (1998), Number S1.
IMPORTANT NOTICE ON LINEAR ENERGY TRANSFER (LET) AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR DIFFERING EFFECTS FROM ALPHA, BETA AND GAMMA RADIATIONS:
Just in case anyone ignorant of the basics of radiation reads this post, it should be explained that the data and conclusions given in this post apply to gamma and also neutron radiation, both of which are ELECTRICALLY NEUTRAL PARTICLES, which is the major threat from nuclear explosions. Because gamma rays and neutrons are UNCHARGED, they tend to be weakly ionizing (i.e., they penetrate easily, and deposit energy only in discrete events such as occasional collisions with orbital electrons and nuclei of atoms, e.g., the Compton effect for gamma rays striking electrons). Neutrons however can emulate charged radiations when they hit protons (hydrogen nuclei): the protons are electrically charged and can carry off much of the energy, behaving almost like alpha particles and causing 20 times as much damage as gamma rays for every unit of dose (Joule per kilogram). This correction factor of 20 for neutrons is termed the relative biological effectiveness (RBE). However, low-energy (well scattered or 'thermalized') neutrons are unlikely to be scattered by protons, and instead are captured by protons to form heavy hydrogen (deuterium); in this 'radiative capture' process the surplus energy is released in the form of gamma rays.
The weakly ionizing nature of gamma rays means that they deposit relatively little energy per unit length of their path through living matter, so are LOW-LET (Linear Energy Transfer) radiations. This is not the case with the ELECTRICALLY CHARGED alpha and beta particles from internal emitters like iodine-131 in the thyroid gland of people drinking milk without taking any precautions from cattle eating contaminated pasture grass, which occurred in Russia which didn't issue potassium iodide tablets to civilians after the Chernobyl disaster, but not in Poland where the tablets were issued (ion exchange removes iodine-131 from milk, as does turning it to cheese and storing it, because of the short 8-days half life of iodine-131, and if the predicted dose is above 25 cGy then the excess risk is negated by taking 130-milligram potassium iodide tablets to prevent the uptake of iodine-131); electrically charged alpha and beta particles in the body are stopped over a very small path length in tissue, and so they deposit all of their energy in that small amount of tissue which means that a single alpha or beta particle can potentially saturate the P53 DNA repair mechanism in a single cell nucleus and cause a cancer risk: hence, alpha and beta particles, because of their electrical charge, are HIGH-LET radiations, that probably have no threshold for effects, and are dangerous at all doses. On the positive side, this high-LET nature of alpha and beta particles means that they are not very penetrating, so they cause relatively little risk as long as you don't ingest or inhale contamination. Protective clothing and respirators can totally negate the risks from alpha and beta radiations during decontamination work after fallout. A report on beta skin burns from fallout on the Marshallese in 1954 is here, and calculations of the length of time over which fallout can cause beta burns when deposited on skin are reported here in the post about Dr Carl F. Miller's excellent fallout research. For proof of U.S. Department of Defense fallout exaggerations and the continuing cover-up of the limited extent of nuclear test fallout during the Cold War, see this post. For underwater burst contamination see this post. For data on the efficiency of decontamination, see this post as well of course as the post about Dr Miller's work.
