www.nukegate.org Glasstone's book exaggerates urban nuclear weapons effects by using unobstructed terrain data, without the concrete jungle shielding of blast winds and radiation by cities!
Patient rebuttal. Exactly what the arrogant, egotistical, impatient scientists, engineers and politicians lack when dealing with propaganda claims both from lobby groups and also from genuine critics. The arrogant, egotistical, and impatient prefer to ignore any criticisms instead of answering them, or they simply adopt the stance of Prime Minister Gordon Brown by Gillian Duffy, in taking the perceived path of least resistance when making decisions, then later trying to sweep concerns under the carpet and dismiss the critics as mere bigots, instead of undertaking the harder work of taking the hard choices, listening to the concerns, doing the research to find out the facts, and patiently explaining and discussing the facts in detail:
This demonstrates beautifully some of the problems in trying to make people really listen and take you seriously if there is too much difference. Prime Minister Brown was determined not to admit that he had made costly mistakes. He persuaded himself that every decision he made was backed up by "solid" reasoning, for example he was under pressure from the trade unions which prop up the Labour party, to create the many unproductive but expensive state sector jobs at a time when the economy was shrinking and government tax revenues were falling, not increasing. To him, these decisions were inevitable and necessary. In fact, they were the height of folly, and a sign of his weakness and preference to the path of least resistance for his own party politics, rather than a sign of his strength to take the difficult choices in the national interest. Moreover, like antinuclear protestors, he surrounded himself with like-minded "media spin-doctors" to "educate" and "inform" the "ignorant", a situation slightly analogous to one German Chancellor's use of spin-doctor Dr Goebbels (propaganda minister) to "explain" the "morality" of racist eugenics and ethnic extermination. They rewarded the spin doctor Mandelson with a Lordship, despite claiming to be critical of the democratic basis of the House of Lords! Even when confronted with examples of his failure which he could not deny, like the sale of Britain's Gold Standard at the minimum value of gold which cost Britain a massive £7 billion loss, he refused to accept responsibility and selectively tried blamed his predecessors who were not responsible because they were no longer making the decisions:
"A huge cloud rose from the ground and followed the trail of the great sun. ... All through the very short but long-seeming interval not a sound was heard. I could see the silhouettes of human forms motionless in little groups ...
"Then out of the great silence came a mighty thunder. For a brief interval the phenomena we had seen as light repeated itself in terms of sound. ... The big boom came about a hundred seconds after the great flash ...
"It brought the silent, motionless silhouettes to life, gave them a voice. A loud cry filled the air. The little groups that had hitherto stood rooted to the earth like desert plants broke into a dance ...
"Later that Monday morning, at the breakfast table in the pleasant dining room of the Los Alamos Lodge, the silence was broken by Dr George B. Kistiakowsky of Harvard. ... 'This was the nearest to doomsday one can possibly imagine,' he said. 'I am sure', he added after a pause, as though speaking to no one in particular, 'that at the end of world - in the last millisecond of the earth's existence - the last man will see something very similar to what we have seen.'
"And out of the silence that ensued I heard another voice - my own ... 'Possibly so', I said, 'but it is also possible that if the first man could have been present at the moment of Creation when God said, Let there be light, he might have seen something very similar to what we have seen. ...
"That afternoon I encountered the late Dr Lawrence, one of my neighbors on the hill in the desert. 'What a day in history!' he exclaimed. 'It was like being witness to the Second Coming of Christ!' I heard myself say.
"It then came to me that both 'Oppie' and I, and likely many others in our group, had shared in a profound religious experience, having been witness to an event akin to the supernatural."
DNA-TR-82-18: Dust-Cloud Effects On Aircraft Engines-Emerging Issues and New Damage Mechanisms (U) DNA-TR-87-106: Characterization of Dust Environments for the F.I07, TF-33, and J.57 Engine Tests (U) DNA-TR-90-72-1: Exposure of Air Breathing Engines to Nuclear Dust Environment (U)Volume I-Performance Deterioration of an Operational F100 Turbofan Engine Upon Exposure to a Simulated Nuclear Dust Environment (U) DNA-TR-90-72-3: Exposure of Air Breathing Engines to Nuclear Dust Environment (U)Volume III-Performance Deterioration of a Second F100 Turbofan Engine Upon Exposure to a Simulated Nuclear Dust Environment (U) DNA-TR-91-160: The "Most Probable" Dust Blend and Its Response in the F-I00 Hot Section Test System (H STS) DNA-TR-91-26: Response of an Operational Turbofan Engine to A Simulated Nuclear Dust Environment (U) DNA-TR-92-111: The Response of an F107-WR-102 Engine to a "Most Probable" Nuclear Dust Environment (U) DNA-TR-92-121: The Response of a YF101-GE-100 Engine to a "Most Probable" Nuclear Dust Environment (U) DNA-TR-93-124: Response Models for the FIOI, TF33, and F107 Turbofan Engines to Dust Environments DNA-TR-93-2: Influence of Ingested Nuclear Cloud Dust, and Overpressure Waves on Gas Turbine Engine Behavior (U) DNA-TR-94-110: The Response of a Third F100-PW-100 Engine to a "Most Probable" Nuclear Dust Environment (U) DNA-TR-94-24: The Response of a Second YF101-GE-100 Engine to a Dust-Laden Environment (U) DNA-TR-94-45: The Response of a F112-WR-100 Advanced Cruise Missile Engine to a Dust-Laden Environment (U) DNA-TR-94-46: The Response of a Second F112-WR-100 Advanced Cruise Missile Engine to a Dust-Laden Environment (U)
There is a problem with using this close-in volcanic ash situation to infer such a hazard when aircraft are not 110 miles from a volcano, but 1,200 miles, which is the distance of London from Iceland. This is because the concentration of airborne ash decreases rapidly the further you go downwind, as a result of diffusion. Ultimately, some of the dust from any volcanic eruption diffuses into the air around the world. This doesn't mean that all aircraft should be grounded. The danger depends on the dust concentration. The lesson from the 1982 Boeing 747 experience at 37,000 feet near Jakarta, 110 miles from a volcano, is that the visible effects of dust on the aircraft such as static electricity on the windshield, correspond to turbine blade and dust clogging to the engines, and the crew of such an aircraft should get it out of the high concentration of dust immediately, just as they should avoid other aircraft, severe storms, mountains, etc.
Grounding aircraft over a thousand miles away from a volcano is not needed, judging from flights through low concentrations of volcanic dust (for a list of general consequences, see the paper linked here):
Which is a shame, because it is costing airlines and millions of stranded passengers many millions, while the concentration of the volcanic dust over Britain has not proved enough to cause visible damage. If the airborne dust cloud is invisible to the eye (as this volcanic dust cloud over Britain is) the concentration of dust in grams per cubic metre is simply too low to cause any risk of engine failure. It won't sand-blast turbines to shreds and it won't clog air intakes. There is always some dust in the atmosphere, including rough particles of silicate (glass). These come from micrometeorites which are broken up during entry to the atmosphere from space, volcanic eruptions, erosion in sandy desert areas, etc. Aircraft are always flown through these natural low concentrations of airborne dust. Aircraft are designed to take it. As the dust concentration increases but remains invisible to the eye thousands of miles downwind from a volcanic eruption, the sandblasting of the engines will at least theoretically reduce the total engine lifespan or the time to full overhaul (worn engine parts can be replaced). However, this cost is not the overriding factor, requiring the grounding of aircraft, because engines will not shut down in such low (invisible) dust concentrations; the cost in replacing compressors and servicing engines needs to be offset against the costs of keeping aircraft grounded. You have to do a cost-benefit analysis that takes account of the costs to the airways of shutting down for long periods, thousands of miles from volcanoes, where diffusion has reduced the dust concentration to the extent that it is no longer visible:
Apart from the (over exaggerated) hazard to aircraft, the close-in volcanic ash is naturally toxic fallout because it can cause fluoride poisoning if inhaled in large quantities, resulting in "internal bleeding, long-term bone damage and teeth loss". Unlike radioactive fallout, the danger doesn't decay quickly with the -1.2 power of time. Close-in visible deposits of volcanic ash are a very long-term chemical hazard until the excess fluoride has been physically weathered out of the biosystem. Additionally, the fluoride in volcanic ash causes a corrosive effect on metals.
Instead of the government analyzing scientifically the concentration of airborne dust and evaluating whether it is cost-efficient to fly aircraft through (we know it is safe to fly aircraft through it, i.e. engines don't cut out in invisibly low dust concentrations), the government follows the scientifically inept BBC and instead confuses the close in threat from flying aircraft through visible dust clouds with invisibly low dust concentrations:
This is just the political "no threshold theory", which in the context of radiation was discussed in an earlier post. The "no threshold" propaganda started with low level radiation in the 1950s. The idea is that if something is dangerous in large concentrations, it must also be banned in small concentrations, a form of pseudoscience which - if really true - would lead to most vitamins and minerals (which are dangerous in large amounts) being completely banned even in small concentrations, with tragic consequences.
Their logic is that something is either good or bad, so if dust causes engine failure in visible concentrations, it must be dangerous at all concentrations. This is contradicted by the evidence:
Jet aircraft were routinely flown into dust laden mushroom clouds a few minutes after 1950s nuclear weapons tests to collect "cloud samples" of fission products. This is important because it is easy to determine the airborne dust concentration from the specific radioactivity of fallout (the amount of radioactivity per gram at 1 hour after detonation); the total lofted dust in grams is simply equal to the total radioactivity produced in the bomb, divided into the specific activity. For decades this data was secret, but after the "nuclear winter" controversy in 1983, Dr Edward Teller managed to get a small amount of data declassified and released in a report by R. G. Gutmacher and others, Total Mass and Concentration of Particles in Dust Clouds, UCRL-14397 (revision 2) which showed that the 110 kiloton 1954 Castle-Koon surface burst at Bikini Atoll produced 500 tons of fallout per kiloton (this production ratio was much less for megaton bombs, because the lofted mass is a constant fraction of the cratered material, and crater volumes scale up less than linearly with increasing total explosive energy). By dividing this total measured dust cloud mass into the total visible volume of the dust cloud, you find the dust concentration in grams per cubic metre. Since many jet aircraft flew through that measured dust loading for known periods of time without suffering damage during nuclear tests, it sets an effective safe threshold.
Brick, concrete, and steel frame buildings are far more fire resistant (the Twin Towers fires were due to the injection of aviation fuel, which nuclear weapons don't provide). Feinstein's report AD676183 is based on a 10 megaton nuclear surface burst, which has a longer blast wind drag duration than the smaller Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, so the speed attained by blast carried debris is greater and casualty rates are higher for blast for any fixed peak overpressure. There are huge differences in the median (50%) lethal peak overpressure for different situations: outdoors, 50% of people standing without any thermal radiation shadowing will be killed by burns and wind drag impacts for 3.0 psi, but inside a 7-story load-bearing brick warehouse 9.2 psi is needed. The types of buildings predominating in all modern cities provide immensely more protection than was generally available in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the predictions above, people are assumed to be standing with no "duck and cover" countermeasures. Injuries are here due primarily to flying glass, flying debris, bodily displacement by wind drag, and flash burns.
Because the blast wave takes time to arrive after the flash over large areas, unlike the popular impression based solely upon the always-lying television propaganda films of nuclear detonations whereby the blast effect is without exception falsely superimposed on the first flash of the explosion, there is enough warning time over most of the damaged area for people to effectively duck and cover even if there is no attack warning given (due to government secrecy or incompetence), since lying prone allows the body length to attenuate some of the direct initial gamma radiation mid-line dose by self-shielding of tissue (see U.K. National Archives report HO 225/14, linked here), cuts down exposure to the thermal radiation by shadowing, and eliminates most dangers from wind drag and the exposed body area to flying glass and other debris as will be illustrated later in this post with data from Hiroshima.
Note that Feinstein's model for standing personnel is accurate, but the results predicted for prone personnel are exaggerations because they ignore the shielding from thermal radiation by shadowing and do not properly account for the sliding resistance to translation. In addition, covering under a strong table or under a strong staircase - the "Morrison shelter" effect in WWII Britain, also demonstrated by 1950s nuclear tests on brick houses - protects reasonably well against the debris collapse of a house, since the weight of falling debris when a house collapses is completely unaffected by the strength of the blast wave.
Above:as we shall see in this blog post, hiding under the stairs or under tables like the "Morrison" led to survival in houses destroyed in the Blitz. This page is from the 1964 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons and shows two supposedly "brick" houses (actually the brick finish was just a veneer: "The exterior walls were of brick veneer and cinder block and the foundational walls of cinder block", according to page 182 in the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons) subjected to peak overpressures of 5 and 1.7 psi from the 29 kt Apple-2 Nevada tower test of 5 May 1955. In the film of the 5 psi blast hitting the wrecked house, the wind pressure peels the roof off while the peak overpressure cracks the front wall, enters the house through the windows, and then (as the blast passes and the external pressure drops below ambient pressure in the "negative phase") the blast overpressure inside the house causes the cracked walls to visibly explode outwards. The brick debris goes outwards, not inwards. People ducking under the stairs or a strong table to avoid flying glass could have avoided injury from blast, as well obviously as all of the thermal radiation and the larger part of the nuclear radiation dose. By ripping the roof off, the debris load on the floors below was reduced, preventing total collapse (some photos taken from other angles make it look as if this house was squashed flat, which is untrue). Of the house at 1.7 psi, Glasstone and Dolan (1977) state: "its condition was such that it could be made available for habitation by shoring and some fairly inexpensive repairs." They also show that precast concrete houses survived 5 psi in that test with just damage to windows and doors.
At higher blast yields, the wind pressure duration increases so debris loading problem is actually further reduced (making duck and cover countermeasures still more important), because the wind pressure carries more and more of the rubble horizontally beyond the building, instead of allowing it to fall vertically straight down on to the ground floor. The collapsing load is therefore reduced, unlike the situation with controlled demolition, the Twin Towers (which collapsed due to the heating of the metal frame, weaking it as a result of the intensely burning aviation fuel from the planes, which has little relevance to nuclear weapons), or with conventional TNT bombing (short duration wind pressures) in WWII, which all maximised the debris load per unit area on the ground floor.
Above: Dr Shields Warren and Dr Ashley Webster Oughterson compiled detailed data on the survival of groups of people at various distances in Hiroshima according to the degree of protection they had in their book Medical effects of the atomic bomb in Japan, by the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan (McGraw Hill, New York, 1956, p. 103). The high casualty rates from thermal radiation in Japan are not generally applicable to other situations. The U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment study The Effects of Nuclear War in 1979 pointed out that on a cold winter night typically only 1 % of the population would be exposed to thermal radiation, compared to typically 25 % for the summer and daytime. In addition, the weather (atmospheric visibility) affects thermal transmission from bomb to target, just as the wind direction affects fallout delivery to a target in a surface burst. Nobody therefore can assert that a nuclear weapon explosion will automatically produce the effects exhibited on Hiroshima. Even if the atmospheric conditions were similar, other factors would be different and the results would not be the same.
This demonstrates that a reduction of the area of skin exposed to the fireball thermal radiation can be vitally important in reducing the risk of mortality in nuclear war. Duck and cover is not a fraud. The protection afforded by clothing was established by Nevada nuclear tests and is reported in Capabilities of Atomic Weapons TM 23-200, November 1957 (dark clothing may flame and smoke at the higher exposure levels, but if the person is lying on the ground they can roll over to extinguish flames as the thermal pulse subsides):
It has been brought to our attention that certain elements among the passengers and crew favor the installation of "life" boats on this ship. These elements have advanced the excuse that such action would save lives in the event of a maritime disaster such as the ship striking an iceberg. Although we share their concern, we remain unalterably opposed to any consideration of their course of action for the following reasons:
1. This program would lull you into a false sense of security.
2. It would cause undue alarm and destroy your desire to continue your voyage in this ship.
3. It demonstrates a lack of faith in our Captain.
4. The apparent security which "life" boats offer will make our Navigators reckless.
5. These proposals will distract our attention from more important things i.e. building unsinkable ships. They may even lead our builders to false economies and the building of ships that are actually unsafe.
6. In the event of being struck by an iceberg (we will never strike first) the "life" boats would certainly sink along with the ship.
7. If they do not sink, you will only be saved for a worse fate, inevitable death on the open sea.
8. If you should be washed ashore on a desert island, you will be unaccustomed to the hostile environment and will surely die of exposure.
9. If you should be rescued by a passing vessel, you would spend a life of remorse mourning over your lost loved ones.
10. The panic engendered by a collision with an iceberg would destroy all vestiges of civilized human behavior. We shudder at the vision of one man shooting another for the possession of a "life" boat.
11. Such a catastrophe is too horrible to contemplate. Anyone who does contemplate it obviously advocates it.
- Committee for a Sane Navigational Policy: Stephan A. Khiney '62, Robert Fresco '63, Richard W. Bulliet '62, Donald M. Scott '62.
In fact, the analogy of civil defence to lifeboats goes a lot deeper: for many years lifeboats were in fact "debunked" and ridiculed as silly, expensive, useless, etc. That came to a dramatic end in 1912 with the testimony of Commander Charles Lightoller, the Second Officer aboard the Titanic, who was ordered to fill a grossly inadequate number of lifeboats, choosing who would survive and who would die. He recommended to the inquiry that lifeboat capacity be based on numbers of passengers and crew instead of ship tonnage, that lifeboat drills should be conducted regularly on ships so passengers know where their lifeboats are and crew know how to operate them, and that early warnings of ice and collision should be given by radio communications in all passenger ships. Summarizing the points made in Walter Lord's minute-by-minute account of the disaster based on interviews with 63 survivors, A Night to Remember (Longmans, Green and Corgi, London, 1956), Dr Tom Stonier explained this obvious analogy between the inadequate disaster preparations of the Titanic and the panic due to the inadequacy of civil defence for nuclear attack in Hiroshima, on page 55 his 1964 book Nuclear Disaster (Penguin, London):
"The immediate survivors of a disaster are ... frequently so frightened or so stunned that they cannot utilize the resources available to them with the greatest effectiveness, nor can they muster the courage to conduct rescue operations. Nowhere is the incapacitating effect of fear more clearly illustrated than by the events that followed the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Of sixteen hundred men, women, and children in the ice water, only thirteen people were picked up by the half-empty lifeboats nearby. Only one of the eighteen boats made the attempt to return and rescue them. The others failed to lend assistance out of fear of being swamped. In boat after boat, the suggestion to go back and help was countered by the sentiment, 'Why should we lose our lives in a useless attempt to save others from the ship?'
"The damaging effect of fear is therefore not so much that it elicits the flight reaction, which is a healthy, normal, and life-saving response, but that it leads to a paralysis of judgement and action that tends to prevent the maximum use of available resources and thereby prevents preserving the maximum number of lives."
Robert Jungk's book, Children of the Ashes (Heinemann, London, 1961) 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 Hiroshima nuclear explosion, only 26 percent (153 out of a random sample of 589) of bomb survivors in Hiroshima gave any assistance at all to anybody else after the explosion. Only 5% of people trapped alive by blast debris in Hiroshima were freed by others, while 50% freed themselves before the firestorm took hold. Because British brick houses produce heavier debris than Japanese wooden houses, only 25% of people trapped alive under the stairs or a strong table (Morrison shelter) in collapsed houses after air raids in Britain could free themselves, although the fire risk was lower because bricks do not burn as U.K. Home Office proved. Organised rescue efforts (see the earlier post, linked here) could therefore increase the survival chance even in demolished wooden buildings substantially.
Above: the new Blitz-experience-based Shelter at Home handbook, published in June 1941, marked a shift of civil defence policy away from cold, damp, flooded outdoor shelters toward the more popular home Morrison protected bed shelter. The British Government under Prime Minister Chamberlain had failed to properly fund civil defence research against high explosives in good time before World War II, resulting in idealistic solutions which were not properly tested for practical effectiveness before being deployed in panic after the September 1938 Munich crisis (when Prime Minister Chamberlain was intimidated in his second meeting with Hitler). The panic civil defence countermeasures were outdoor trenches in public parks and the "Anderson" shelter, a corrugated steel arch buried in the ground and covered with earth.
"... distribution of 'Andersons' had begun before their testing had been completed. At the opening of 1939 'load tests' had shown that 'Andersons' were strong enough to bear the weight of any debris falling on them from the type of house for which they were intended. But it was not until some months later [Sectional Steel Shelters, Cmd. 6055, July 1939] that a series of 'explosion tests' proved conclusively [that they] could withstand without damage a 500 lb. [227 kg] high explosive bomb falling at least fifty feet away [equivalent to a 12 kt Hiroshima nuclear bomb some 50(12,000/0.227)1/3 = 1,880 feet away: thus, Anderson shelters would have survived undamaged at ground zero after the air burst that high over Hiroshima] ... It was established at the same time that they would protect their occupants against blast from a bomb of this size bursting in the open at a distance of thirty feet or more. But this soundness of the 'Andersons' from a structural soundpoint, it soon became clear, was counterbalanced by an important practical defect, namely liability to flooding."
"By Christmas more than one-half of the 1,500,000 mothers and children concerned had returned home; in the London and Liverpool areas about two-thirds of the evacuated children had returned. (The first count taken in January 1940 disclosed that about 900,000 had returned.) ... this evacuation scheme had, as Mr Titmuss says, 'largely failed to achieve its object of removing for the duration of the war most of the mothers and children in the target areas'."
These Morrison table shelters were named after the Minister of Home Security (Herbert Morrison) and were introduced in March 1941. More than 500,000 were issued by November 1941, and they simply consisted of a strong dinner table containing a mattress for sleeping. They were 6' 6" long x 4' wide x 2' 9" high with a top consisting of 1/8" solid steel plate, with welded wire mesh sides and a metal lath floor. One wire side lifted up, allowing people to crawl inside the structure, where there was sleeping space for several people. These were placed in a ground floor (or basement) "refuge room", a technique revived for blast, thermal flash and fallout radiation shielding by the U.K. Government in its 1980 civil defence manual against nuclear attack, Protect and Survive. Edward Leader-Williams, assistant to Morrison shelter designer Sir John Baker during the experiments, worked in the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch until 1965, and in 1955 initiated the basic Protect and Survive "inner refuge" research against nuclear war.
The 22 May 1940 booklet Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter had already marked a change in policy as the discomfort and flooding of outdoor Anderson shelters became clear. As a result of the experience gained during the Blitz bombing, it was revised and greatly improved in June 1941 to create the new handbook (featuring the indoor Morrison shelter), Shelter at Home, which states:
“people have often been rescued from demolished houses because they had taken shelter under an ordinary table ... strong enough to bear the weight of the falling bedroom floor.”
“The walls of most houses give good shelter from blast and splinters from a bomb falling nearby. The bomb, however, may also bring down part of the house, and additional protection from the fall of walls, floors and ceilings is therefore very essential. This is what the indoor shelter has been designed to give. Where to put it up, which floor? Ground floor if you have no basement. Basement, if you have one. ... Protect windows of the shelter room with fabric netting or cellulose film stuck to the glass (as recommended in Your Home as an Air Raid Shelter). The sides of your table shelter will not keep out small glass splinters.”
“The public outcry about conditions in the largest public shelters, often without sanitation or even lighting, and the appalling inadequacy of the over-loaded and ill-equipped rest centres for the bombed-out led to immediate improvements, but cost Sir John Anderson his job. ... His successor as Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison ...
“The growing reluctance of many people to go out of doors led the new Home Secretary to look again at the need for an indoor shelter… The result was the Morrison shelter, which resembled a large steel table … During the day it could be used as a table and at night it could, with a slight squeeze, accommodate two adults and two small children, lying down. The first were delivered in March 1941 and by the end of the war about 1,100,000 were in use, including a few two-tier models for larger families. Morrisons were supplied free to people earning up to £350 a year and were on sale at about £7 to people earning more. … the Morrison proved the most successful shelter of the war, particularly during the ‘hit and run’ and flying-bomb raids when a family had only a few seconds to get under cover. It was also a good deal easier to erect than an Anderson, and while most people remember their nights in the Anderson with horror, memories of the Morrison shelter are usually good-humoured.
“... A government leaflet, Shelter at Home, pointed out that ‘people have often been rescued from demolished houses because they had taken shelter under an ordinary table... strong enough to bear the weight of the falling bedroom floor’. I frequently worked beneath the solid oak tables in the school library during ‘imminent danger periods’ and, particularly before the arrival of the Morrison, families became accomplished at squeezing beneath the dining table during interrupted meals. ... Although the casualties were mercifully far fewer than expected, the damage to property was far greater. From September 1940 to May 1941 in London alone 1,150,000 houses were damaged ...”
1. Introduction 2. Height of burst blast curves: American and British analyses 3. Ground shock, cratering, water waves 4. Thermal phenomenology 5. Initial nuclear radiation 6. Fallout 7. Radio and radar temporary attenuation by ionization 8. Electronic and electrical equipment damage by EMP 9. Biological effects
1. Introduction
Each edition of the U.S. Department of Defense's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons has coincided with significant public concern over a nuclear weapons threat. The first version dated 1950 was a response to the development of nuclear weapons by Russia, which tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949 (the preparation for the 1950 edition actually began before the Russian test, when it was clear that Russia would have the bomb within a few years). The 1957 edition, based mainly on the Nevada tests up to and including Operation Teapot in 1955 and the Pacific tests up to and including Operation Redwing in 1956, was a response to the bigger threat from the megaton range hydrogen bombs and their fallout, and the increasing test data. The 1962/4 edition responded was a completely rewritten, expanded version written in response to the new data from the many 1957 Nevada tests of Operation Plumbbob, and the 1958 Pacific tests of Operation Hardtack, and to support President Kennedy's civil defense initiative has the best final chapter on the principles of civil defense, silencing most of the "protection is futile"-appeasers whose aim is always to exaggerate the effects to such a lying extent that civil defense disappears as an option and the only option to avoid the risk of "total annihilation" is the surrender to secret terrorist regimes (as occurred in the 1930s when Germany secretly rearmed and was able to intimidate a largely disarmed world).
The 1977 edition was published at a time when the Soviet strategic nuclear threat was finally outpacing the American stockpile, and is technically the most sophisticated. It is really a military textbook. It is not a compendium of all of the best nuclear test data, let alone of the scientific literature, although it does have many excellent chapter bibliographies listing very important research reports and books on each topic. Instead, it is a state-of-the-art summary of the results that have come out of generally secret research, as we will show later on. The result is a reliance on authority to a certain extent, although in some cases - the best example being the chapter on "Radio and Radar Effects" - most of the basic calculations are clearly set out in detail. Because detailed comparisons between theory and nuclear test data are generally excluded from the book due to secrecy in 1977, it suffers from an overly "theoretical" feel. The secrecy of nuclear test effects data, and even the full U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, misleads the public (particularly many academic scientists) into believing falsely that such data simply does not exist, and was never measured accurately. One problem with The Effects of Nuclear Weapons in every edition has always been that it tends to encourage this belief by excluding a full comparison of theory versus all the (secret) nuclear test data.
People believe that the book contains everything known, rather thay just being a summary of the conclusions to far more detailed secret research reports, and therefore they assume that human knowledge on nuclear effects is more "theoretical" that it really is. For instance, when we go right back to 1945, only a brief summary, excluding the mechanism of the firestorm, was published in unclassified form in 1947 of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The full report has never been published to this very day!
It was declassified in 1972 and is held in the U.K. National Archives in Kew, London (document references: AIR 48/160, AIR 48/161, AIR 48/162, AIR 48/163, AIR 48/164, and AIR 48/165). It is six volumes long (three volumes on Hiroshima and three on Nagasaki), is full of tables and graphs of data which were excluded from the 1947 published resume, and has the word "Secret" printed at the top of every page.
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 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.’
Unlike the previous editions, which were cheaply printed in paperback with an empty pocket for the "Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer" inside the back cover (which was sold separately), the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was published hardback with the slide-rule included. It is considerably shorter than the 1964 edition, since the civil defense final chapter was removed. It presents example problems and solutions in textbook format, and indeed a major purpose was for the instruction of military personnel in nuclear weapons effects, not civil defense. Philip J. Dolan drafted the 1977 edition at Stanford Research Institute, California, shortly after editing the 1972 first two-part version of the U.S. Department of Defense's Secret-Restricted Data 1,650 pages long Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, Effects Manual EM-1. Many of the new diagrams in the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons were declassified from the 1974 NATO edition of EM-1.
The military focus is shown by the relatively brief treatment of fallout radiation, ignoring the prediction of specific activity of fallout (the visibility of its mass deposit, as related to its hazardous radioactivity content), the uptake of fallout nuclides in food from contaminated soil, solubility of fallout from different kinds of detonation, decontamination measures and their effectiveness, and so on. The major focus is on blast, shock, cratering, thermal effects, initial nuclear radiation, and radio and radar effects. The chapter on "Radio and Radar Effects" is brilliant technically and scientifically, but is written up more like a detailed scientific review paper than a brief book chapter. All of the material there is excellent, but requires a lot of very close technical study to understand. Some of the material, such as detailed equations for calculations of the disappearance of electrons in the ionosphere due to combination with neutral particles or their ions, is more important for detailed EMP field predictions, which were not provided due to classification.
The ionization from a nuclear explosion attenuates or refracts radio and radar signals for relatively short periods of time for the extremely high frequencies that are used now. Satellite based communications systems are designed to use extremely high frequencies to penetrate the Earth's natural ionosphere, and such frequencies will also penetrate most nuclear explosion ionization regions at high altitudes, with only a temporary disruption at most. Radio systems that don't use satellites or the bouncing of signals off the ionosphere are immune to ionization regions unless the explosion is so close that blast and initial nuclear radiation would be of overriding importance. The permanent damage due to EMP is of more concern. The EMP can of course be degraded by the ionization. For instance, in a surface burst, the EMP radiated by the net upward Compton current above ground zero is partially absorbed by the air ionization caused by the gamma rays moving outwards in more horizontal directions. This reduces the observed EMP at a long distance from a surface burst to less than the field strength that could be predicted from the net vertical Compton current if air ionization is ignored.
The 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons is not a book whose content can be assimilated quickly. I think that a lot of the information could be communicated in a faster, more appealing way by changing the format to a larger, A4 size, and laying out the pictures and diagrams in a graphics designer way which helps to achieve rapid communication, preferably with equations briefly summarized inside graphical diagrams (so that they are available for checking and computation, but can be ignored if not needed). Pictures of blast destruction to buildings could be arranged in order of blast pressures and duration, showing at a glance the visible effects of different pressures and durations. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carefully documented survival rates in the various kinds of buildings could also be included, as well as declassified information on how the fires began and when buildings caught fire. Photographs of nuclear explosions should be laid out to demonstrate more clearly the visible time-sequence of detonation effects for the various kinds of burst and yields (surface bursts, underwater, air bursts, and high altitude bursts). The 1964 civil defense material should be similarly revised and included.
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.
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.'
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."
It is a fact that 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.)
Both General Groves and New York Times science journalist William Laurence attacked this falsehood that caused needless panic among the survivors of Hiroshima and later Nagasaki. Most of the casualties in both cities were due to blast and thermal radiation, with infected wounds made worse by the synergism of initial radiation exposure, which lowers the white blood cell count; see the PDF linked here of James W. Brooks et al., "The Influence of External Body Radiation on Mortality from Thermal Burns", Annals of Surgery, vol. 136 (1952), pp. 533–45. (See also: G. H. Blair et al., "Experimental Study of Effects of Radiation on Wound Healing", in D. Slome, Editor, Wound Healing, Pergamon, N.Y., 1961.) There was no local fallout because the fireball did not touch the ground. The neutron induced activity in Hiroshima was (as intended) too low even at ground zero to cause radiation sickness, owing to the height of the detonation. The "black rain" in Hiroshima originated from the firestorm which began 30 minutes after the explosion, by which time the radioactive mushroom cloud had been blown many miles downwind by the wind.
- Complete lie, even in the worst city firestorm on record, that in Hamburg (not Hiroshima!). If there was no oxygen, there would be no fire! Fires only burn where there is oxygen. Underground shelters proved effective in Hamburg, contrary to unending lies from CND for over fifty years. In any case, underground structures are not needed for civil defense: it is possible to protect against all the effects in a normal city building to such an extent that the casualty rate is reduced by a factor of 120, as in the example for Hiroshima already given.
- Complete lie, disproved by survival data from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks, where there was no medical assistance available or given to survivors.
- Complete lie, ignoring all the research on the long term effects of radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation. The long term effects have been well documented:
CND forgot to add the lie that the "nuclear winter" from the soot rainfall in Hiroshima froze the planet and exterminated all life, making the rebuilding of "eternally contaminated" Hiroshima impossible, and making the all the tens of thousands of "survivors envy the dead" as Khrushchev's propaganda claim stated (after he brutally suppressed the peaceful uprising in Hungary using tanks in 1956), thereby disproving the value of civil defense for survival. Maybe they will add this media lie later on? That policy will encourage aggressors to develop weapons of mass destruction in order to intimidate us into appeasement towards them, just like Hitler did in the 1930s, while they prepare for war! Is this what CND wants? Why can't they ever tell the truth about the effects of nuclear weapons? Why do people listen to their Goebbels-style "big lie" propaganda confidence tricks? Why can't the civil defense authorities publish the truth in a clear concise way and debunk these people?
2. Height of burst blast curves: American and British analyses
The 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons contains revised height-of-burst blast curves, with "knees" differing from those in the 1962/4 edition. The 1957 edition contained no such curves at all, merely data for a surface burst, a "free air burst" (i.e., where the blast wave reaches the observer without first striking the ground), and for "typical air burst" at the altitude of the Nagasaki detonation, with burst altitude and ground distance scaled by the cube-root of the explosive yield in all cases. The 1950 edition, The Effects of Atomic Weapons contained more information on the effect of the height of burst on blast pressures, based partly on the chemical high explosive air bursts and partly upon the data from early tests like Trinity, Crossroads-Able, and Operation Sandstone.
Before going into the full details, it is worth jumping forwards in time to the present day. The current compendium is John A. Northrop's 736 pages long 1996 Handbook of Nuclear Weapon Effects: Calculational Tools Abstracted from DSWA's Effects Manual One (EM-1), a compendium of declassified key equations and data extracted on Brode's 22-volume revision of Dolan's EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons. Northrop's book is unclassified but of "limited" distribution and is banned from export outside the U.S.A. Regarding the height-of-burst effect on blast pressures, it follows a review by Brode, in which Brode developed an awesome-looking page-long mathematical formula to summarize the nuclear test data on height-of-burst effects in the massive secret American compilation, report DASA 1200.
This thermal enhancement on air blast is quite apart from the (1) dust storm "precursor" which can occur and (2) the "Mach effect", which is the simple merging of reflected and incident shock waves, due to the fact that the reflected shock wave is travelling through air heated by the incident blast wave and therefore travels faster, catching up and merging with the incident shock wave to form the so-called "Mach stem". The thermal enhancement is also separate from the enhancement of the air blast by regular reflection and by the fact that air bursts have more blast and thermal energy available owing to the fact that they do not expend fireball energy in cratering, severe ground shock, and melting on the order of 100 tons of soil per kiloton to form fused fallout particles.
Penney's height-of-burst curves from British nuclear tests can be directly compared to those in Glasstone and Dolan, and show a yield effect. Most of the American Nevada test data in the "knees" region is for yields in the range of 20-30 kilotons. British test data is mostly for yields in the range of 1-20 kt. The American data shows greater "knees", giving larger ranges of blast for optimum heights of burst. This could be partly due to the higher average yield in American tests, because the blast radii scale as W1/3 whereas the thermal ranges (over relatively small distances in clear atmospheric visibility, so that thermal attenuation by air is trivial) scale more far more strongly with yield, as W1/2 not W1/3. The thermal contribution to the "knees" means that the blast wave from optimized air bursts will depend on the colour of the soil and also will not scale simply by the cube root law in clear atmospheric conditions, but will scale up more rapidly and for very high yield optimum air bursts over dark colored soil, the peak overpressure distances will scale with yield more like W1/2 than like W1/3.
However, unlike the Nevada test site, city buildings shadow the thermal radiation (at least prior to blast arrival at any given building), eliminating most of this effect over large ranges. Penney also points out another factor which is ignored by Glasstone in all editions after the first (1950) edition, namely the use of blast energy in irreversibly causing destruction of buildings in any given radial line outwards from ground zero. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Penney's research found that each wooden building blown up by the blast took out on average around 1% of the blast peak overpressure (compared to the unobstructed Nevada desert), so after 100 buildings in any given radial line from ground zero had been destroyed, the peak overpressure was down to just 0.99100 = 0.37 of that in unobstructed terrain. Although you might naively expect some non-radial diffraction of blast energy downwards from higher altitudes to offset this cumulative energy loss due to damage done, the blast pressures are greatest near the ground surface due to the thermal interaction anyway, so the general non-radial flow of energy due to vertical diffraction is upwards, not downwards. You can't get around this problem.
All factors considered, the blast height-of-burst curves are oversimplified by Glasstone, Brode and Northrop. Most nuclear test data is applicable to unobstructed deserts with dark color Nevada soil and clear atmospheric visibility, and these conditions are not applicable generally to the use of nuclear weapons. It is easy, however, to use the nuclear test data to validate full theoretical solutions of the height-of-burst curves. All you need to do is to integrate over the amount of thermal energy (emitted by the time the blast reaches any given radius) absorbed by the ground and add a fraction of that energy to the effective blast yield of the weapon. The fraction will simply be dependent on the albedo of the ground for absorbing the thermal pulse (this is well known, since the fireball thermal pulse spectrum is very similar to that of sunlight), and the sine of the angle which the radial line from the fireball makes with the ground. A considerable proportion of the thermal flash energy absorbed by the ground can convectively heat the air above the ground by "smoking" (a phenomenon visibly clear in many films of nuclear test effects) prior to the blast arrival at that point. The exact fraction of energy transferred from the thermal heating of the ground to the blast wave can be determined by comparing the calculations to the observed blast for given weapon yields in the Nevada, and the result can then be used to predict height-of-burst curves for other bomb yields allowing accurately for the pre-shock thermal layer boosting of the Mach stem.
