Sunday, August 09, 2015

Thermal radiation shielding by crater ejecta in the 1.4 kt Buffalo 2 test, Maralinga, 1956




For some time sequence data, click here.  The crater ejecta is thrown up within mere milliseconds, ahead of the main thermal pulse from the fireball, drastically reducing the thermal radiation in a terrorist type surface burst, even before building skyline shielding is included in the analysis for a city (rather than an unobstructed desert like Maralinga, Australia, seen in the Buffalo-2 test of 1956).

Buffalo 2 crater throwout stream trajectories, and cloud rise.  Effective early mixing of sand and bomb debris produces a relatively large amount of stem radioactivity.
Buffalo-2 cloud rise and mixing.
For the fallout pattern data on stem and cloud head fallout from this test, see the previous post.

Compare the surface burst 1.4 kt Buffalo-2 burst (above) to the 15 kt burst on a 100 ft aluminium tower, Buffalo-1 (photos below):

15 kt Buffalo-1 burst on top of a 100 ft aluminium tower.  There is no crater throwout cone to shield the fireball because cratering is effectively suppressed by the height of burst, although precursor dust has some shielding effect as in the Trinity test of 1945.
Key data from some British nuclear weapon trial research reports (summary of some British nuclear weapons reports, linked here and here).

Islamic State plan for world domination, Part 1, the Islamic State in 2020: "storm in a teacup" to be ignored or discounted as "war-mongering propaganda", like the Nazis threat was minimized by the British proto-racists, fascists and appeasers.
Islamic State plan for world domination, Part 2: assassination of HM Queen of England on 15 August 2015: again the "politically correct" will blow raspberries and ignore dangers.
International Business Times on assassination plot by Islamic State to murder the Queen of England in VJ day ceremony
Update (21 September 2015):
Jeremy Corbyn anti Trident anti nuclear agenda propaganda: if we "save" £100 billion (7% of the National Debt), we can spend it on the NHS instead!  Unfortunately, we already spend £100 billion per year (or more) on the NHS.  That's its budget now.  We we get rid of nuclear deterrence and simply end up unable to deter provocations that lead to a third world war (which Putin is currently rehearsing close to UK airspace, according to the latest news), the cost to the NHS of casualties from the resulting war could be considerably higher.

This is related to the anti-interventionist stance in Syrian civil war, which is now causing a crisis of refugees across Europe, in addition to the 200,000 dead in the war itself, which continues.  Non-interventionism and disarmament to save cash may sound a great "peace" agenda, but it simply turns the murder weapons from sniper bullets and IEDs to starvation, cold and disease in concentration camps, set up for ethnic cleansing.  When the NHS began in 1948 "it had a budget of £437 million (roughly £9 billion at today’s value)", therefore in real terms the NHS budget has multiplied by a factor of over 10 since it began, despite all the hype about "cutbacks" and "underfunding".

Putin prepares for nuclear war with the UK, 21 September 2015 news report:

"Pilots in one of the two Russian supersonic bombers intercepted near UK skies last week had started the countdown to arm a nuclear bomb, sources revealed last night. The discovery was made after RAF specialists analyzed a four-second signal transmitted from one of the Tupolev Tu-160 bombers, known by Nato as "Blackjacks", in the days following Thursday's incursion. Analysts at RAF Boulmer, Britain's Control and Reporting Centre, confirmed that the Russian bombers had begun the sequence to arm nuclear weapons while carrying out the incursion. It is not the first time they have done this and comparison with a similar signal transmitted by a TU-95 "Bear" bomber revealed Russian air crew had begun the countdown during an incursion last year, as well. The Sunday Express revealed that the bomber involved in the February 2014 incident had been carrying a submarine-busting nuclear depth charge designed to attack Britain's Trident-carrying Vanguard submarines. "All I can say is that we now know it related to the first stage of arming a nuclear device," said a senior RAF source last night.  "There are several additional arming procedures which, thankfully, were not carried out."  Last week's air incursion, which was intercepted by Two RAF Typhoon jets, was the seventh this year by Russian forces. RAF Boulmer, in Longhoughton. Northmberland, is the headquarters of the Air Surveillance and Control System force and the nerve centre of UK air security operations. Once a target is tracked the information is fed into the NATO network operated by the Combined Air Operations Centre at Uedem, Germany and the RAF's Air Defence Operations Centre at Air Command, High Wycombe.  However it was only when a female analyst decoded last week's transmission that it was realised Russia had carried out a similar exercise last year. Aviation expert Justin Bronk, of the Royal United Services Institute think tank, said the revelation confirmed a "worrying" development in Russian strategy. "Putin does not allow his air force to fly with cruise missiles because he is so worried about defections, but dual purpose bombs such as nuclear depth charges are a different matter. And these are designed to be a direct threat to or nuclear deterrent. ... Britain's Nimrod fleet, which was scrapped as part of the SDR in 2010, used to perform so-called "delousing" exercises, whereby it would give advanced warning of Russian aircraft when Trident-carrying Vanguard submarines set off on patrol. ...

Nato aircraft were "scrambled" more than 500 times over Europe in 2014, a fourfold increase over the previous year. Almost 90 per cent of those flights involved Russian incursions."
Seeing that Richard Rhodes (author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb in which quotation marks are used to try to validate a scare-mongering Japanese claim of seeing nuclear survivors running around without feet and false claims are made that the incorrect single mortality curve for Hiroshima which ignored grossly differing survival rates in different situations - 50% survival at 0.12 mile from ground zero in modern concrete city buildings versus 1.3 mile radius for personnel outdoors, according to the 1962-1977 editions of Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons) in his more recent, openly prejudiced anti-nuclear rant Arsenals of Folly poured a great deal of opprobrium on Reagan for U2 and other aircraft incursions bordering Russian airspace during the Cold War, perhaps he will write a similar book critical of Putin's nuclear bomber buzzing of Britain and Continental Europe today?  Dream on!

The disarmament agenda of the "pacifists" of the 1930s tells you that it's the defense of (limited) freedom which causes protests. Anyone who dares to ask for more freedom, more democracy, and more liberty is hated by those political elitists whose power comes from ignorant, subjective populism, which is catering to prejudice and delusion.

Britain's New Labour Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is anti-nuclear, anti-Trident renewal. He won a majority in the leadership after "Red" Ed Miliband was defeated in the May 2015 general election. At least Corbyn is honest (to start with), in the sense we know he's a Marxist-communist at the hard left of socialism.  He is not pretending to be otherwise, although that may come yet (Hitler pretended to be a pacifist, and to want peace when it suited him, on his road to war).  Note that Britain's £1.4 trillion national debt is exactly the same as that of bankrupt Greece when expressed per capita, since Greece has one sixth the population and one sixth the national debt of Britain, each person in each country has £22,000 of national debt.  The reason why Greece is in credit crisis is that Britain is able to go on borrowing more money at a reasonable interest rate (running a deficit, or an growing debt) is that people trust Britain's economy more.  The Greek economy and government has a null credit rating because it is corrupt: tax collection doesn't work, the state spends vast sums employing people in unproductive work, etc.

The criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn and Marxists generally on the left of socialism in Britain is that they will spend huge sums re-nationalizing the railways, etc., thus increasing the inefficient, subsidised public sector of the economy which live off tax revenue, and also in the process trying to do that by taxing to death (or driving away from Britain by threats of high tax) the Marxist-hating "capitalist, imperialist, immoral" private sector of the economy, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.  Already, however, we have the worst of all worlds, since the debt is there, as bad per person as Greece's, awaiting a crisis to spark off a large increase in interest rates from their rock bottom level today of under 1%, and thus Britain's bankrupcy (a return to the 1970s when we relied on an IMF bailout).  Instead of reducing the debt, the "Conservative" prime minister David Cameron has actually increased it to record levels, far higher than in May 2010 when Labour lost power: he has continued to allow the deficit (rate of increase of debt) to rise, far from reducing the debt.  The deficit is the time-derivative of the debt, so simple calculus tells you that the day the deficit finally falls to 0, the debt problem will be far from solved: on that day, the debt will be at its maximum!

Furthermore, David Cameron is now plagued by allegations from his former funder, of taking part in weird Oxford University "Pig gate" ceremony.  Thus, the credibility of all of Britain's "political elite" is next to absolute zero, just like the future credibility of our nuclear deterrent.  It's a repeat of the 1930s financial crisis, "disarmament makes enemies feel safe to provoke us"-propaganda, and the war crimes will follow from our lack of money, arms and civil defense.  A problem with leaving civil defense to be implemented in a period of international tension is that you need it set up in times of peace, because as events in Britain around 22 October 1962 showed, when there is an imminent threat of war, politicians can become paranoid that civil defense is so effective it will - like mobilization in August 1914 - act as a trigger for war itself.  However, Putin's invasion of Crimea - supposedly protected by Britain under the 1994 Bucharest Memorandum - in January last year proves that there are provocations that seriously need addressing.  Putin has just agreed a deal for building a new airbase in Belarus for Su-27 fighters, the first full scale base in that country since the USSR was abolished.  Putin is partly responsible for the Syrian massacre, by backing President Assad and supplying him weapons, killing 50,000 a year and driving over half a million refugees out annually (due to destroyed cities and homes).  This can crudely be compared to the fascist role in the Spanish civil war of the 1930s, when Hitler propped up General Franco's regime against freedom fighters which included an international brigade (George Orwell and many others).  Freedom was lost in Spain, and then WWII started.

Last month, it was questioned in the press whether Russia is "actively preparing" for war in Europe after 80,000 Russians were mobilized for massive military exercises (4,000 military exercises were scheduled for this year).


Above: "Ian Kearns, director of the London-based European Leadership Network, which conducted the study, said the war games 'are contributing to a climate of mistrust' that have 'on occasion become the focal point for some quite close encounters between the NATO and Russian militaries.'  The research found signs that 'Russia is preparing for a conflict with NATO and NATO is preparing for a possible confrontation with Russia.'  The ELN study said NATO plans approximately 270 exercises this year, while Russia has announced 4,000 drills at all levels."

Let's see how many of the "pacifists" start campaigning for either credible nuclear deterrence (neutron bombs to deter those massed lines of tanks from invading) or civil defense to mitigate the damage of war and save lives.  The 1930s experience of appeasement, plus the Cold War experience shows that you don't ever get pro-civil defense rallies or pro-deterrence marches.  Most people always prefer to leave it too late to deter a world war or a cold war, then they complain about the consequences when the events escalate without provocation.  Facts: (1) Appeasement failed to achieve peace in the 1930s.  (2) Rearmament ended the Cold War in the 1980s. These facts are usually camouflaged with a lot of nonsense.  A fact of human nature is that any perceived weakness, of either will or actual strength, encourages aggression, coercion, and thus war.
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Monday, July 13, 2015

Hiroshima's air raid shelters were unoccupied because Japanese Army officers were having breakfast when B29s were detected far away, says Yoshie Oka, the operator of the Hiroshima air raid sirens on 6 August 1945


Bigger bombs produce fewer blast and thermal casualties per ton of TNT energy because you have more time to duck and cover at the radius of devastation and because of the scaling laws: actual casualty data proves this.  Simple civil defense reduces casualties still further, and nuclear radiation is shielded by modern city buildings.




Above: benefits objective scientific comparisons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear war survivors to an unexposed control group with similar diagnosis methods (which wasn't done after Chernobyl or any other radiation propaganda study, in which natural cancers were reported as radiation effects) proves that overall, the nuclear radiation exposure increased survival and lifespan.  Dr Sanders in his 2010 book Radiation Hormesis and the Linear No Threshold Assumption, has disproved the LNT (linear no threshold) propaganda by objective human and animal radiation effects data.  

 Review of documentary, Hiroshima: the aftermath, UK Channel 5 TV, 6 July 2015, 8pm (online here)

This documentary is very important because it proves the reason why no final air raid warning was given in Hiroshima, by interviewing the military personnel in charge of air raid warnings both in Tokyo (by radio identification of B29 call signs) and in Hiroshima's main military base, particularly Yoshie Oka, a female army B29 tracker based in the military bunker at Hiroshima Castle, near ground zero.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki both had enough air raid shelters for the people, which remained intact and shielded most of the radiation, but only 400 of the more than 70,000 shelter places in Nagasaki were occupied, and a similar situation occurred for Hiroshima.  Thus, the failure of the warning system in the surprise attack caused the casualties.

Above: it is a myth that the holocaust in World War II was that done to the unwarned populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. This Daily Express Giles drawing was published on 3 February 1944, showing that atrocities during CONVENTIONAL warfare were occurring long before August 1945, killing MORE people despite less apparent "violence": e.g. starvation and disease of Anne Frank and others in concentration camps or gas chambers, and in Japanese forced labour camps, and human experimentation on prisoners of war.  (Note that Giles was NOT sitting in an armchair located out of harms way but was of course actually in the thick of the war, as Captain in the Coldstream Guards, sent to record the devastation of conventional warfare in the devastating battle Arnhem.  For more about his wartime work, see Giles at War by P. Tory, 1994.)  Churchill approved nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.


Facts debunk a popular myth that Oppenheimer didn't know anything about radiation hazards.  He specifically used the neutron bomb effect in 1945.  Sam Cohen, who worked in the Manhattan project, later developed the idea into a clear bomb to deter tank and infantry street fighting in modern concrete cities, to prevent conventional war, saving many millions of deaths.  Propaganda from Russian comrades against the neutron bomb was never seriously opposed by the Pentagon, so conventional war is not credibly deterred today.  (Oppenheimer agreed with a suggestion from Kenneth Bainbridge after the Trinity test on 16 July 1945 that "Now we are all so [expletives deleted]", which sought to spread the blame around to everyone, even though Edward Teller had urged Oppenheimer unsuccessfully to have a demonstration test before the Japanese, before dropping the bomb on a city.  Oppenheimer simply told him scientists should stay out of "politics" and "war", and refused to circulate the petition which Teller showed him.  The illiberal, conservative hypocrisy of Oppenheimer is testified by Feynman and Feynman's sponsor Freeman Dyson, who was abused verbally by Oppenheimer for daring to advocate non-orthodox but correct relativistic quantum mechanics, the path integral multipath interference mechanism for quantum field theory, where vacuum particles constitute a non-classical Coulomb field that create atomic electron position indeterminancy by discrete, random, stochastic, interactions represented by Feynman diagrams.  Sam Cohen also explains that Oppenheimer was an irrational bully, a cruel self-obsessed egotist (you probably have to be such a person to be a "leader" of politics-physics, simply to climb the greasy pole of hypocrisy, obfuscation and corruption in today's mainstream physics which is a dogmatic cult valuing consensus and voting far more than free interpretation of the factual evidence).  The problems with Teller's idea to demonstrate a bomb by exploding one in Tokyo bay were the kind of practical matters that Teller always avoided or messed up. (The detailed design for the first H bomb was done by Richard Garwin, not Teller and certainly not Ulam who merely suggested using a fission bomb to compress fissile material more efficiently than using TNT.)  A 1 ton TNT explosion 0.1 mile away gives similar pressure and visual effects to 1 kiloton at 1 mile or 1 megaton at 10 miles.  That's cube-root scaling: the peak pressure (about 1 psi) and blast wind speed (40 miles/hour) is the same in each case, so the only thing that distinguishes the three events for an observer is that the effects occur quicker for the smaller explosions (blast arrives at 0.4 seconds for 0.1 mile from 1 ton TNT, 4 seconds for 1 mile from 1 kiloton, and 40 seconds for 10 miles from 1 megaton).  Teller completely misunderstands the Hiroshima firestorm effect in his 1962 book The Legacy of Hiroshima, which is probably typical of nuclear warhead designers who with the exception of former LANL Director Harold Agnew, do not care about the actual physics of nuclear weapons effects or data from Hiroshima, just like most "nuclear historians" who preserve a dangerous secrecy!)


“I knew [Stalin’s spy Dr Klaus] Fuchs, who was in my division [at Los Alamos in WWII], but only slightly, which undoubtedly was the way he wanted most people to know him. His assignment was to calculate how the high explosive system that detonated the Nagasaki bomb (the one I worked on) should be designed. … it was Fuch’s turn to give a seminar. Oppenheimer not only found time to attend but was so fascinated with what Fuchs had to say that he stayed throughout his recitation. … When Fuchs had finished, Oppenheimer got up and praised him to high heaven … to expose another side of Oppenheimer’s personality, which could be intolerant and downright sadistic, he showed up at a seminar to hear Dick Erlich, a very bright young physicist with a terrible stuttering problem, which got even worse when he became nervous. Poor Dick, who was having a hard enough time at the blackboard explaining his equations, went into a state of panic when Oppenheimer walked in unexpectedly. His stuttering became pathetic, but with one exception everyone loyally stayed on trying to decipher what he was trying to say. This exception was Oppenheimer, who sat there for a few minutes, then got up and said to Dick: “You know, we’re all cleared to know what you’re doing, so why don’t you tell us.” 

“With that he left,
leaving Dick absolutely devastated and unable to continue. Also devastated were the rest of us … Fuchs … finally was caught and sent to prison in England … I think he should have been shot … American commies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg … getting atomic bomb secrets during the war from Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, an Army enlisted man at Los Alamos who was in my barracks and whom I knew somewhat … should have been executed for treason, but Greenglass, a real loyal family type more than willing to rat on his own sister, copped a plea by helping the government prosecute her and her husband and send them off to the electric chair, Greenglass got away with murder and received a relatively light jail sentence.”

- Samuel T. Cohen, Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb, pp. 24-25.  (Emphasis added.)

“I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture … ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

– J. R. Oppenheimer, filmed wiping away crocodile tears in the 1965 TV show, “The Decision to Drop the Bomb” (Emphasis added to all, an effort to spread blame on everyone, despite the disagreement of others, like Edward Teller, that he doesn't mention.  Teller testified Oppenheimer was hard to understand.)



Air raid sirens had been sounded hours earlier when the Hiroshima mission weather survey plane (flying far ahead of the bomb carrying Enola Gay) flew over Hiroshima, but that was a false alarm.  Some have speculated that no effort to give another air raid alarm was made when the final three B29s appeared - the Enola Gay with the bomb, a blast measurement plane which dropped parachute-delivered radio-telemetry blast pressure gauges (because nobody had ever tested the gun type Hiroshima bomb unlike the implosion Nagasaki weapon to measure the yield), and another plane lingering behind with British and other observers - because of this "crying wolf" effect.  But this is simply not true.  Many people were travelling outdoors, and school children were in work parties clearing firebreaks outdoors, at 8:15am when the Hiroshima explosion occurred.

In modern cities, all concrete buildings offer good radiation and blast shelter, unlike the predominant wooden houses of Hiroshima.  In Pacific nuclear tests, concrete buildings with simple earth buttressing survived close proximity to the biggest American multi-megaton thermonuclear weapons ever made.

Yoshie Oka, who is still alive, explained that she tracked the final B29s and sent a message to higher authority in good time, but no order came back to sound the air raid alarm until 8:13am, just two minutes before the explosion, because the officers were all having breakfast at the same time and nobody was on hand to immediately order the air raid sirens!  When she was given the order, she was unable to put the authorization code into the air raid siren system before the flash of the bomb came through the window.  Therefore, it was an air raid blunder that prevented people taking shelters in Hiroshima.

Naturally, following politically-correct CND type propaganda, the survival possibilities from the simple but effective air raid shelters was ignored in the Channel 5 program, which tried to contrast the American celebrations of Japanese surrender with the misery of the people burned outdoors in Hiroshima. It also obfuscated the mechanisms and time scales for mortality, claiming initially that the population was "instantly" vaporised, then at 11 minutes 9 seconds into the program claiming they died in "five seconds" before finally declaring at the end that they died over many decades.  The reality is that blast injuries killed within a few days, while thermal and nuclear radiation killed on average within a month, as the official detailed Japanese study confirmed: fires started in now-obsolete city wooden houses with charcoal braziers that were overturned by blast, along with paper screens etc, not due to thermal radiation which did not start the firestorm in Hiroshima (click here). (Direct link to Japanese graph of casualty rate versus time, here.  From a few days after the bombing onwards, the local newspapers like the Hiroshima Chugoku Shimbun restarted, and published daily casualty lists, so there is extensive data available on casualty versus time for different kinds of buildings, as shown in the Dirkwood report on 35,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki casualties which uses the Hiroshima USSBS building index linked here.)

“The low incidence of predicted indoor ignitions results from the low elevation angle of the fireball. The artificial horizon of trees and buildings obscures the fireball from most residential windows ... the average elevation angle of the artificial horizon is about 6 degrees for New Orleans.”

- Philip J. Dolan, editor, CAPABILITIES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, 1972, classified secret restricted data, chapter 11, Damage to Structures, thermal radiation fire predictions.

“The intensity of a large fire depends, in part, on the average amount of combustible material per unit area. In Hamburg, where 45 percent of the firestorm area was covered by buildings containing about 70 lbs/ft2 of fuel, the average loading was 32 lbs/ft2. A strong firestorm was produced in the area from the World War II incendiary bomb raid. In Hiroshima the average fuel loading [for the firestorm area] is estimated to have been 8 lbs/ft2. [In typical American surburbs the fuel loading is just 10-24 kg/m2, according to the 1979 U.S. Office of Technology Assessment report The Effects of Nuclear War, which vastly exaggerates blast, thermal radiation, and nuclear radiation effects by ignoring Dolan, despite access to classified data.]”

- Philip J. Dolan, editor, CAPABILITIES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS, 1972, originally classified secret restricted data, chapter 11, Damage to Structures, page 11-143.

Only massive overdoses of radiation can cause cancer or other injury: smaller doses unbind anti-cancer P53 from its MDM2 inhibitor, increasing anti-cancer DNA repair enzyme metabolism and lifespan:


Chernobyl's 1.8 mR/hour = 0.018 mSv/hour = 18 microSieverts/hour, in the hormesis range, with reduced cancer.  After an hour, many of your cancer preventing P53 DNA-repair molecules start to unbind from their MDM2 inhibitor, boosting the portion of your metabolism used for repairing DNA double strand breaks and repairing radiation damage.  Over-responding, P53 the the centre of a enzymes giving mechanisms to repair DNA and also cuts down natural cancer and genetic risks, increasing lifespan.  It's covered up by secrecy from biased, ill-informed, complacent anti-nuclear quacks.
When DNA damage is done at by moderate levels of radiation, DNA repair enzyme P53 is activated because the detection of damage leads to the unbinding of P53 from its inhibitor, MDM2.  P53 is then able to accumulate, repairing DNA damage by the use of an array of DNA repair enzymes, and if the repair is unsuccessful, killing the cell (apoptosis) with the damaged DNA, to prevent cancer.  The net result is that in a radiation environment, we adapt and burn up more calories detecting and repairing damaged DNA:

"DNA damage induces phosphorylation (P) of p53 (at the Mdm2 binding site) and Mdm2, preventing Mdm2 from binding to p53. As a result, the p53 level increases, and stops cells from entering cell cycle until the DNA is repaired. If repair fails, p53 initiates apoptosis (programmed cell death). Mechanisms resulting in a decrease in p53 steady-state levels are indicated with green arrows and those resulting in increases p53 levels are indicated with red arrows. Solid lines indicate active mechanisms and broken lines indicate inactivated mechanisms. Figure taken from [3]. ...

"In the cell, p53 protein binds DNA, which in turn stimulates another gene to produce a protein called p21 that interacts with a cell division-stimulating protein (cdk2). When p21 is complexed with cdk2, the cell cannot pass through to the next stage of cell division. The growth arrest stops the progression of cell cycle, preventing replication of damaged DNA. Mutant p53 can not longer bind DNA in an effective way, and as a consequence the p21 protein is not made available to act as the "stop signal" for cell division. Thus cells divide uncontrollably, and form tumours [4].


- Proctor and Gray (2008), The p53-Mdm2 System, February 2009, model of the month by Vijayalakshmi Chelliah.  Original models: BIOMD0000000188 and BIOMD0000000189
Above: How radiation suppresses cancer (by activating P53 as we explained above).  Note the gamma dose rates.
Above: How radiation boosts lifespan.  Again, note the dose rate needed.   As with vitamins, getting far too much radiation has the opposite effect, an overdose.  The whole of medicine is based on the principle of not giving overdoses.  The whole of radiation fear mongering, on the other hand, is based on falsely claiming that because overdoses are bad, so too must optimal doses.  By this argument, all medicines should be banned, because they are all dangerous in excessive doses.  The media, including so-called scientific journals with anti-nuclear "peer" reviewers of the politically fanatical, dogmatic variety, pretends not to understand that cancer induction suppressing P53 is activated by moderate dose rates of gamma radiation, which unbinds P53 from its MDM2 inhibitor.  So they suppresse these life saving facts.

Above: a scientific photo set unsuitable for the scare mongering anti-nuclear front page of the New Scientist, Scientific American, BBC "news" website, or Nature Medicine.  Not exactly suitable for the front cover of Helen Caldicott's next bestseller on the effects of the aftermath of nuclear reactor warfare and the neutron bomb, either.
Above: no front page newspaper headlines appeared when Dr Dino Samartzis in 2011 found that bone cancer from radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki required a threshold dose of 85 rads (0.85 Gray or 85 centigray) to the bone marrow (which is shielded by tissue, so that the corresponding threshold radiation meter free air dose is 1.5 times greater than the bone marrow dose, or about 128 rads).  Only 19 cases of bone cancer occurred in 80,181 persons studied.  This was peer reviewed and published after Sanders 2010 book on Radiation Hormesis, so it is not included there.  For the more moderate dose rate exposure of radium dial painters, bone cancers only occurred when the radium intake was at least 100 microcuries (10 Grays delivered over  about 20 years), because moderate dose rates have larger threshold doses for cancer, while low dose rates have an hormesis effect (reducing cancer risks, by increasing the metabolism devoted to DNA repair enzymes).

 Dr Dino Samartzis instead conflated the radium and Hiroshima bone cancer data in his conclusions, by the specious tactic of merely pointing out that the 85 rad bone cancer threshold he found in high dose rate Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors is smaller than the >1000 rad threshold dose needed for the lower dose rates (20 mR/hour for 20 years) in radium painters.  This confusion by him probably helped to give the media an excuse to ignore the truth.  Linus Pauling President Kennedy lied when they claimed that a thousand bone cancers per megaton of nuclear weapons tests due to millions of people getting less than 1 rad each to bones from strontium 90.  In reality, as proved by Finkel in Radiology v67 p665 right back in 1956, the threshold dose for bone cancer from strontium-90 is about a hundred times that for radium painters, so the threshold dose for bone cancer in high dose rates (Hiroshima, 85 rads bone cancer threshold to bone marrow) and radium (1000 rads threshold), prove nobody got any bone cancers from nuclear weapons testing.  The same massive dose-rate-dependent dose thresholds for bone cancer apply to Fukushima's harmless strontium-90 leaks today!

Exaggerations of radiation effects and suppression of benefits are deliberate lies beyond the pale
Note that only 10.7% (848) of the 7,851 solid cancers in 44,635 Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivors were caused by the bomb!  Note also that only 46% (94) of the total of 204 leukemias in 49,204 Hiroshima-Nagasaki survivors were caused by the bomb!  These are trivial compared to deaths from wind farms, coal, etc (in December 1952, nearly four thousand people died in London from coal smog.  Thus, Britain's nuclear industry, just as nuclear weapons were made to more safely deter war than the equivalent megatonnage of conventional arms, which would be more expensive, dangerous as proved two world wars with many megadeaths, and would require conscription).

These data are STILL being censored by fear mongering media like Richard Rhodes, The New Yorker, pseudo-scientific journals edited and peer reviewed by ignorant and biased quacks who make their money from hating reality and creating science fiction.  If you think it may be a little rude to treat fanatically biased terror supporting thugs who are obsessed with exploiting and increasing the suffering of others with malicious scare mongering, try to find a single unbiased quotation about Hiroshima or nuclear testing in Richard Rhodes books.  It is simply unprofessional and nasty behaviour which we are truthfully calling completely disgusting, unethical, unprofessional, dangerous, deluded, fanatical and complacent, because the data are VITAL for survival in nuclear terrorism:

Above: CENSORED OUT OF THE DOCUMENTARY AND OUT OF JOHN HERSEY NEW YORKER SENSATIONALISM AND TERRORISM MONGERING, AND RICHARD RHODES PROPAGANDA BOOK: THE SURVIVAL IN MODERN CONCRETE BUILDINGS DESPITE THE FIRESTORM IN HIROSHIMA


Los Alamos report on Trident W76 warhead development history (declassified): LA-14066-H, Tracing the Origins of the W76: 1966-Spring 1973 (U) by Betty L. Perkins. Note the "Confetti argument" section where legendary Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Harold Agnew (the man who personally filmed the Hiroshima explosion using a cine camera in a B29, see photos below) points out that the effects of Hiroshima on substantial buildings was NOT impressive.  (Also on Scribd; also item 548 in the DOE declassified PDF documents list, all FOIA requests).  Compare that to the American Office of Technology Assessment's widely hyped lies on the Effects of Nuclear War, 1979.  For a refutation of Rotblat-CND Hiroshima and fallout radiation effects deceptions by the hard truth, please see Radiation scare mongering debunked.
Harold Agnew LANL Director and Hiroshima film cameraman, debunked Hiroshima exaggerations with "confetti argument".
In regards to the popular exploitation of Hiroshima suffering by those who wish to profit from sensational "journalism", Penney proved that buildings absorb substantial amounts of energy in the act of being damaged or shaken, thus weakening the blast in a city relative to that over unobstructed ground, like a desert or ocean in a nuclear test, so the city damage attenuates the destructive pressure and reduces the range of blast, particularly for the larger distances affected for higher yield bursts.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki were air burst to maximise the range of damage to wooden buildings, which averted fallout and left concrete buildings standing (if you ground burst the bomb you greatly reduce the blast ranges for wooden house destruction, and the cratering action throws up a cone of dirt within milliseconds, shielding and cooling the fireball, thus reducing the radiating temperature and the thermal yield and also increasing the shielding effect due to the city skyline):
Hiroshima ground zero, after 6 August 1945, quite a different story from American propaganda.  Modern city type concrete buildings and the people in them survived near ground zero, which is in the foreground of this photo (photo source here or here).  The media's secrecy over real radiation health effects is tragic in the cost to humanity, even before the cost in conventional war casualties is included.



Hiroshima's brick and concrete buildings airbrushed out of history, to create the myth of total devastation for propaganda.  How many concrete and wooden buildings do modern cities contain today?  Unlike Hiroshima which was mainly wooden housing, today's cities are mainly brick and concrete, not wooden.
Surface burst blast effects on modern city buildings: surface bursts also result in immense thermal radiation shadowing which prevents fires and burns in modern cities (apart from a few upper windows on buildings facing the fireball near ground zero) even in megaton yield bursts, and very substantial initial radiation shielding and fallout radiation shielding, all of which are usually ignored totally by popular hype ("Nukemap" or Carey Sublette FAS-cist style anti-civil defense, anti-deterrence, brainwashing propaganda) of Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons data, applied from unobstructed deserts to cities with no correction for shielding by buildings.  Such deceivers win acclaim, like Richard Rhodes who denied civil defense in Hiroshima in his popular deceptive books on atomic and hydrogen bombs.

 Note that, in the table above, for a 0.5 kiloton ordinary nuclear blast you can avoid any severe damage at 150 metres distance, hence the 1 kiloton neutron bomb (with enhanced neutron and suppressed blast and heat) air burst at 500 metres altitude will avert the kind of devastation you get in conventional warfare and even civil wars in Syria, Ukraine, etc.  As in the 1980s when Reagan deployed the W79 neutron warhead in Europe, the threat of a neutron bomb then has a deterrent effect on people planning invasions: they tend to want to negotiate and end their Cold War, instead of losing a war.

American sanctions against the anti-West nuclear Iran are lifted in July 2015 (just like American sanctions against North Korea were lifted in deal in 1994 which promised international inspections of nuclear plants, but instead led to North Korea's nuclear weapon tests and ICBM development), releasing to Iran £100 billion in frozen assets and £20 billion annually from oil exports.  Iran has a track record of hiding the construction of two uranium enrichment plants, before spies found them.  The American-Iranian deal means that Russia will be able to sit on the International Atomic Energy Authority inspection panel to hold up justice as usual by groupthink veto; Russia has a vested interest in preparing Iran for war with Israel (and therefore America) by supplying Russian S-300 surface to air missiles to Iran.  (Back in April 2015, Putin lifted his ban on delivery of S-300 missiles to Iran.)  In 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Israel must be "wiped off the face of the earth", and allies of Israel "will burn in the fires of the Islamic nation's fury."  Israel fears that the lifting of the sanctions against Iran will lead to an arms race and nuclear war, while America is lifting the sanctions in an effort to outdo Russia in being friendly to Iran, to win friendship with cash (always a disaster, as proved in the Cold War, where rival sides' attempts to win over megalomaniac dictators just increased their egotism and craziness).  Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the deal a "bad mistake of historic proportions".  He explained: "Iran will get a cash bonanza of billions of dollars, which will enable it to pursue its aggression."


We do not have a truly free media when fashion prevents the facts from being openly and freely discussed to ascertain the truth on nuclear weapons deterrent capabilities for ending warfare.  The perils from pseudoscience surviving in popular culture on the basis of "gut feeling" censorship of truth was revealed when the consequences of eugenics pseudoscience were exposed in 1945.  Science is not a particular method (methods change as a result of science, as Feyerabend explained), but an objective attitude, an interest in understanding and expanding upon the data from every objective angle, and of critically testing ideas  and theories, and contrasting them to alternative models.  Censorship due to bias is anti-science, and leads to disaster, as in anti diversity eugenics.  Resources end up focussed on dealing with false scare-mongering paranoia, just as eugenics ended up being used by racists and holocaust deniers.  If everyone was objective, the money-making eugenicists and racist holocaust deniers could be ignored, and the real problems could be solved.

Why do CND people dogmatically reject truth, and go espousing the old weapons effects exaggerations that in the 1930s proved invaluable to enemies for coercion, appeasement, and megadeaths by costly "conventional" warfare?




 Here is a positive suggestion.  If the survivors of Hiroshima and the so-called "politically correct" of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the media really want to do something towards eliminating the megadeaths caused by conventional war and the squandering of money on hate based propaganda campaigns against the only proved deterrents we have, perhaps one day they could accept the truth and consider the possibility to back cheap, fact-proved, effective civil defense to eliminate most of the collateral damage and casualties, allowing relatively clean (low fission yield) tactical nuclear weapons to credibly deter conventional wars (the costly Trident-type strategic second strike capability can be retained to deter escalation, just as our mustard gas and gas masks in WWII deterred 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas being sent over in bombers, V1 cruise missiles and V2 rockets). 

Why didn't nuclear weaponeers like Harold Agnew in public advocate the truth about nuclear weapons, too?  Instead of silly "shoot the messenger" hate campaigns and tantrums, the facts should be rationally considered, if indeed concerns for nuclear weapons are real (rather than just a proxy for political untruths).  Part of the reason is explained in a 1950 report on nuclear weapons in Korea, which completely missed the point that the fear factor for enemy insurgents in the open or in tanks with poor neutron shielding will deter the enemy politicians from aggression, by easily stopping aggression.  The 1950 report (linked here) instead tries to use enemy propaganda as an excuse to forego nuclear deterrence of conventional war, and also claims that the (un) United Nations (a propaganda term, not a reality) would become disjointed by vetoes or hostility if conventional war was ended by nuclear deterrence.  Sure it would.  The enemies of peace would complain.  Hitler complained to Prime Minister Chamberlain about David Low's cartoons of him in British newspapers, a complaint that led to secret pressure on Low's editors to try to stop publication of cartoons critical of Hitler.  This is what you must expect!


Professor Baker proof tested these cheap, effective indoor and outdoor WWII British shelters are ideal for use against conventional and nuclear war, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.  Where houses were completely demolished, 97.5% survived in shelters.  This fact has enormous utility for civil wars in Ukraine and Syria, if adequate warning sirens systems can be put in place.



The popular CND-hyped myth that the city was vaporized in a nanosecond or so just doesn't survive a reality check: in the Bank of Japan near ground zero, survivors remained right through the surrounding firestorm, extinguishing the few firebrands that were blow in, using water buckets.

If the Hiroshima population had been in their air raid shelters, over 99% could have survived the 16 kt explosion (survival data for Hiroshima and Nagasaki from Dirkwood researchers and others linked here justify a protection factor of at least 25 or more for shelters, reducing mortality in Hiroshima from 25% to 1% or less; additionally, Glasstone and Dolan 1977 point out that the median lethal range in concrete buildings was 0.12 mile compared to 1.3 miles outdoors, which is a difference in median lethal areas and in casualties by over a factor of 100).  This fact is little changed when the yield increases, contrary to the usual direct scaling propaganda, since a modern MIRV warhead of say 160 kt yield actually blasts a median lethal area that is bigger by only about the 2/3-power of yield, hence giving a casualty amplification factor of 10^(2/3) = 4.64, which implies a survival fraction of 0.99^(4.64) = 0.95 or 95% survival.  But the popular science fiction based quack media anti nuclear propaganda completely ignores all these facts.  As it was, despite not being in their shelters, 75% of the population of Hiroshima survived, making a fast recovery.


REVIEW OF HIROSHIMA: THE AFTERMATH



Freedom of factual criticism in objective science versus subjective opinion or fashionable dogma, the findings of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty

“There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just … the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Above: for the trivial fallout and residual radiation patterns measured at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the soil activity versus depth, see the original December 1945 classified report by the US Naval Technical Mission to Japan, linked here or here.  The originally classified Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons has a detailed prediction method for the neutron induced activity and the effect of burst altitude on fallout (omitted from the unclassified Glasstone and Dolan propaganda scare mongering bible, Effects of Nuclear Weapons).  (Click here for some other editions of the secret Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, which should have been published widely decades ago to reassure people about radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)


The joint Japanese-American Hiroshima and Nagasaki Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF) confirmed the following cancers of the blood (leukemia) and tissue (solid tumors) from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in well over 40,000 survivors over a period of about five decades (note that the excess leukemia rate peaked in 1952 and fell rapidly thereafter and is no longer showing up).  The "excess" is derived from comparing the measured rates of cancer in irradiated survivors to a carefully matched group of people of the same age, smoking habits, etc., to establish the natural cancer rates with the same diagnosis systems to avoid bias (this was not done after Chernobyl, when 100% of cancers and birth defects were claimed to be radiation effects by anti-nuclear propaganda money making, terror exploiting big business corporations).

 Note that only 10.7% (848) of the 7,851 solid cancers in 44,635 survivors were caused by the bomb!  Note also that only 46% (94) of the total of 204 leukemias in 49,204 survivors were caused by the bomb!  (These data are from the RERF official peer reviewed, published data tables below.) Result: about 90% of cancers in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were natural.  Why isn't that fact newspaper and TV news headline, after all the scare mongering propaganda about radiation:

Conversion of metric units is: 1 Gy (Gray) = 100 rads = 1 Joule/kilogram of energy absorbed.  However, note that the doses in RERF tables are not air doses (measured on civil defense radiac meters) but internal doses, e.g. bone marrow doses which are shielded by the surrounding tissue and thus are lower than the air dose by about the factor 1.5.  In other words, you have to multiply RERF doses by about 1.5 to get air doses that are measured on normally calibrated radiation meters.


As usual for media anti-nuclear propaganda "education", the TV program totally ignores the published DS02 research program which established the radiation dosimetry for different kinds of buildings and exposure sources (prompt and delayed), and thus fails to discriminate between the immediate nuclear radiation received within 20 seconds (neutrons and gamma rays from the fireball before it ascended to 60,000 feet) and the subsequent rainout of firestorm soot by condensed moisture.  The fires took 20 minutes to begin to merge, and 2-3 hours to reach peak firestorm intensity, which:

(1) allowed many survivors to escape the firestorm area in good time, having survived in concrete buildings,

(2)  the soot rainout process proved by Hiroshima debunks the "stable soot cloud" theory behind "nuclear winter", even if modern tall city concrete buildings didn't block out the heat flash by George R. Stanbury's shadowing effect, and

(3) allowed the radioactive cloud to be blown many miles downwind before the black rain was even formed over Hiroshima.  Therefore, the radioactive cloud was blown away before the firestorm created soot rainout.

The two never mixed to any appreciable extent, because the action of the wind in blowing fallout away before the firestorm begam.  So the local radioactive fallout in Hiroshima when actually measured (as recorded in the book Hiroshima by John Hersey in 1946, and other studies) was trivial and contributed an insignificant percentage of the total radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Essentially all of the dose came within 20 seconds from initial radiation, not fallout.  It is shameful that this myth, started by Stalin's alleged communist spy and propagandarist Willfred aka Peter Burchett in 1945, continues, aided by well known propaganda organizations like CND and the Kremlin, that obfuscate the truth and deliberately distort the facts.  As for the inhabitants of Rongelap after their exposure on 1 March 1954, the lingering radiation years afterwards is soon dwarfed by natural background radiation, and so contributes an insignificant percentage of the total dose, most of which comes soon after a nuclear explosion (owing to the rapid decay rate).

Nevertheless, the program does document the rapid recovery of trams, railway, electricity, and the rapid rebuilding of Hiroshima.


Height of burst curves developed by Los Alamos mathematician John von Neumann and physicist Fredrick Reines during World War II and secretly published in the classified 1947 report LA-1021, Blast Wave.  So secret was this data that when the report was supposedly "declassified", Los Alamos issued a report of re-typeset extracts (LA-2000, March 1958) edited by anti-civil defense fanatic Hans Bethe which deliberately omitted the key height of burst graph and also omitted the explanation that reflected pressures are false for non-rigid buildings.  In other words, you only get the predicted "reflected" pressures on walls if they do not absorb energy and are not damaged or moved by the blast.



Dr Sanders has actually tested plutonium for safety, proving evidence of a threshold dose for lung cancer, and also proving evidence that gamma radiation reduces the harm from alpha radiation by hormesis.  As the references above prove, this is peer reviewed research, included in top journals and in his 2010 book published by Springer.  It is the effect of DNA repair by protein P53 which is kicked into action by radiation, which unbinds it from its MDM2 inhibitor.  DNA repair enzymes, controlled by P53, prevent the proliferation of cancer below the threshold dose rate.  Only higher dose rates than the threshold, which overwhelm P53 repair systems, result in an increase in natural cancer rates.  This is still censored out, because a pseudoscientific "no threshold" dogma was established by anti-nuclear geneticists before P53 had even been discovered.

 Plutonium-239 is even less harmful per gram than the Americium-241 in your household smoke detector, which emits higher energy alpha particles and also has a specific activity (decays per second per gram) which is more than fifty times lower than Americium-241.

 Plutonium-239 emits 5.25 MeV energy alpha particles.  Your smoke detector's Americium-241 emits more damaging 5.49 MeV alpha particles!

 The specific radioactivity of Americium-241 is 3.2 curies/gram, whereas plutonium-239 is only 0.062 curies/gram.

 Note that the formula for specific activity is false as given by anti-civil defense crackpot Joseph Rotblat in his shoddy, biased, inaccurate and ill informed mouthpiece book, Nuclear Radiation in Warfare.  The truth is, the specific activity per gram is equal to number of radioactive atoms in a gram, divided by the effective mean life, which is bigger than the half life by a factor of 1/(natural logarithm of 2).

 So plutonium-239 certainly is a lot less dangerous than the familiar household element that we rely on for safety in efficient, reliable smoke detectors, just as we rely on plutonium to deter world wars.  (As someone rude might add: "Stick that fact in your pipe and smoke it, antinuclear dictators of the deluded media."  The deeper question, however, is why the so-called "nuclear industry" doesn't explain any true facts credibly, failing to reply to arrogant, patronising, authoritative-sounding, drivel and deceit.  It is running scared, just like the American nuclear deterrence people, who are deterred by first the "threat" of enemy propaganda and secondly the "threat" of an end to pseudo-"United Nations" unity, something that only exists in pipe dreams.)
Natural thermal instability of DNA at 37 C body temperature causes the vast majority of the DNA damage: 2 mSv/year radiation is trivial!


“Compared to notorious killers like driving, smoking or drinking, nuclear risks – though objectively carrying little danger in their modern deployments – stir the deepest fears ... we are being bombarded with cosmic radiation ... 6.2 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation a year ... Familiar risks like car accidents, though far more likely to kill people, are still better accepted. ... About 35 years ago ... the nuclear industry approached Fischhoff, who is now a professor of decision science at Carnegie Mellon University ... He found an industry that struggled to explain, without condescension or untoward complexity ...  "The nuclear industry had done a terrible job communicating the facts ..." Fischhoff said ... "It continues to do a horrible job of communicating." ... call-backs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki are frequent, for good reason – and they seriously stigmatize the industry, in the psychological sense of the word, said David Ropeik, a former television reporter ... "We have a particularly good memory for the scary stuff," Ropeik added. ... During his work as a television reporter, he reported on nuclear power plants like they were a "second Satan" for two decades, he said. ... "We have very little ... that will make it clear to people what's going on in a credible way," Fischhoff said.”

– Paul Voosen, Humans “Wired” for Terror Over Remote Radiation Threats, New York Times, 18 March 2011.

What Fischhoff should do, is start the rebuilding with the foundation, Hiroshima.



“I’m assuming everyone knows that [Richard] Broinowski is Helen Caldicott’s brother and so he’s just another mouthpiece for her misinformation ... Caldicott is not a radiation scientist who has spent countless hours studying the effects of radiation on people. She’s ... someone who has made a name for herself by making outrageous, unsubstantiated claims about nuclear power. ... she’s held up as some fount of all nuclear wisdom we need to tell people the truth about her.” (Terry Krieg, 22 February 2012.)  [This is unhelpful, because it lacks specific examples of their agenda, so it backfires.]

We have to be sure our facts about nuclear power are right, as the latest exchange with Helen Caldicott shows.

By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 13th April 2011 

"My request to Helen Caldicott was a simple one: I asked her to give me sources for the claims she had made about the effects of radiation. Helen had made a number of startling statements during a television debate, and I wanted to know whether or not they were correct. ...

"At first I asked for general sources for her claims. She sent me nine documents: press releases, newspapers articles and an advertisement. Only one of them was linked to a scientific publication, the BEIR VII report published by the National Academy of Sciences. She urged me to read it. I did so and discovered that, far from supporting her claims, it starkly contradicts them. For example, it says: 

- The risk of radiation-induced mutations ... “is sufficiently small that it has not been detected in humans, even in thoroughly studied irradiated populations such as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”  
- Regarding transmissible genetic damage from the exposure of future parents, such as “spontaneous abortions, congenital malformations, neonatal mortality, stillbirths, and the sex ratio of offspring ... there is no consistent evidence of an association of any such outcomes with exposure to environmental sources of radiation.”  
- “On balance, the existing evidence does not support the conclusion that rates of childhood leukemia have increased as a result of radiation exposures from the Chernobyl accident.” 

"I began to wonder whether Helen has actually read this report, or was hoping that, at 423 pages, it would scare me away. ... She claimed that isotopes of krypton, xenon and argon “can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease.” When I asked her for a source, she told me, “This is also described in my book.” In fact her book says (page 55): “There have never been any epidemiological studies performed on the effects of exposure to the noble gases xenon and krypton.” This flatly contradicts her own claim.  When I pressed her for better sources, her publishers wrote to me and said she did not have time to find them. Now she has had time – time enough to write an article for the Guardian attacking me – but still hasn’t supported the claims I questioned.

 "Then she appears to suggest that iodine-131 can “continuously irradiate small volumes of cells ... over many years”. As it has a half life of 8 days, this seems unlikely. ... Then she makes a remarkable allegation. As a result of a conspiracy hatched with the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 1959 the World Health Organisation has “made no more statements on health and radioactivity.” This is completely false ... the WHO currently runs an Ionizing Radiation Programme and a Radiation and Environmental Health Programme .... It has set up an International Research Advisory Committee “to identify gaps and under-discovered areas on health effects from low-dose exposures to ionizing radiation”. In 2006 it published a 167-page report titled Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident.  As for the alleged conspiracy, this is a story that has been circulating among anti-nuclear campaigners for many years, becoming ever more lurid. ... This is what happens when we fail to be as sceptical about the ideas we like as we are about the ideas we don’t.  Incidentally, Helen has still not provided a shred of evidence for her claim that the recent report by another UN agency – the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation – into the Chernobyl disaster is “a total cover-up”. Twice I have asked her to substantiate this allegation; twice she has replied with accusations about the WHO. Is she aware that these are different agencies? 

"But perhaps most alarming is her continued reliance on the report by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko, which claims that 980,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl. As its critics have pointed out, this figure cannot possibly be correct, as it arises from the extraordinary assumption that all increased deaths since 1986 from a host of diseases – including many which have no known connection with radiation – were caused by Chernobyl. The report has not been peer-reviewed and the academy which published it has distanced itself from it. 

"Continuing to use such a severely flawed document for your central claims about the health impacts of radiation hardly inspires confidence. ... I think these points are worth making, for several reasons. I believe that journalists should not stand by while misinformation is spread. If there is any value in journalism, it lies in trying to winnow fact from fiction, and helping people to form a more accurate view of the world.  If, on the basis of falsehoods and exaggerations, we make the wrong decisions, the consequences can be momentous. ...

"What if, for example, the continuing dangers of radioactive pollution for the people in the nations around Chernobyl have been so greatly exaggerated that they have been exposed to 25 years of unnecessary terror and distress? What if this has caused serious and widespread psychological problems, as the UN Scientific Committee suggests(Page 513)? What if we have exploited vulnerable people – those born with deformities and genetic diseases – by parading their conditions as examples of the damage radiation has done, when the evidence suggests that they are not? What if the same burdens are inflicted on the people of Japan? 

"If that has happened, is it not a terrible thing to bear? Don’t we have a duty to interrogate ourselves as scrupulously as we can to ensure that we have not and will not do such a thing? ... If we spread misinformation, we could inadvertently achieve the opposite."

Journalists did that long ago, starting with misinformation published widely after Hiroshima, 1945.



Ryoji Hasegawa of Japanese Secret Intelligence Headquarters, Tokyo, monitored the B29 Enola Gay's call sign, correlating it with other information (the weather planes that flew over the target before hand, etc.) and worked out it was on a special mission to drop a new weapon, probably an atom bomb, on Hiroshima. PICTURE CREDIT: He is interviewed in the 6 July 2015 Channel 5 program, Hiroshima: the Aftermath.


Yoshie Oka then detected the approached B29s with the atomic bomb in her station in the military headquarters bunker, just north of Hiroshima Castle.  However, she needed to report her findings to senior officers for them to authorize another blast of the Hiroshima air raid sirens to get the people into their numerous air raid shelters again (as the U.S. Strategic Bombing survey documented, there were false alarms hours earlier when the weather survey plane ahead of Enola Gay flew over the city).  This time, Yoshie Oka was left waiting.  All senior officers were having breakfast.  Finally, at 8:13am - just 2 minutes before the explosion - she got the authorization to sound the sirens.  She did not manage to do this before the explosion.  This explains the disaster at Hiroshima for the first time.  The shelters survived and shielded the blast, heat and radiation.  People were not in them due to the failure of the administration of the civil defense warning system.  The harm done to civil defense by a handful of anti-truth, anti-fact, anti-deterrence, deceitful, fear-mongering, war-continuing "journalists" who abuse their position of trust and authority, is the real crime against understanding truth in the story of Hiroshima.





Hiroshima cloud seen from ground level: the stem and fireball are separated due to the height of burst.  By the time fireball soot rainout started, 2 hours later, the mushroom with most of the radioactivity, had been blown many miles downwind from Hiroshima, explaining why there was no significant fallout (click here for Hiroshima fallout map; note that the doses were proved to be insignificant compared to natural background radiation over the period for long term effects):


Hiroshima fireball and cloud stem are separate when first filmed from a B29 observation aircraft.  By the time the stem entered the fireball, it had cooled below the condensation temperature of most fission products, so little contaminated dust was produced.  Significant fallout requires surface bursts or thunderstorms.
Modern city buildings made of concrete did not blast or burn down, unlike the predominant wooden buildings in Hiroshima.  Recovery was very rapid.
Modern buildings survive proximity to a nuclear explosion, central Hiroshima, 1945. The multistory building in the centre is the famous Hiroshima Chugoku Shimbun newspaper office.

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." (Source: 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.)


Journalism on nuclear war has changed since the 1945 Chugoku Shimbun.  The consensus now allows editing all of the facts out of a newspaper, leaving superstitions, anecdotal fear mongering:



Trains resume almost immediately in Hiroshima.
Cleaning up debris in Hiroshima, prior to rebuilding work.
Modern bridges and modern steel/concrete buildings survived even close to ground zero.  The aiming point for the bomb a T-shaped bridge in the centre of the city.  It survived.
Trade is soon restored in Hiroshima.
75% of the population of Hiroshima survived, most making a full recovery.  What about solid cancer tumors?    During the period from 1958-98, in 44,635 survivors, 7,851 malignancies (first primary) were observed, of which 848 were due to radiation (10.7% due to radiation).  Almost 90% of these cancers were not due to radiation, but were natural cancers (RERF).  What about the blood cancers, leukemia?  From 1950-2000 in 49,204 survivors there were 94 leukemia deaths due to bomb radiation (RERF data).




Thermal flash scarring only on side facing bomb.  Any duck and cover prevents this.  Yoshie Oka's superiors prevented the air raid warning being sounded because they were all having breakfast together, with no one senior on duty.


Nuclear weapons effects secrecy allowed Stalin's - aka Wilfred Burchett's - myths to circulate: for the air bursts on Japan the radiation dose was received in 20 seconds, causing a minimum in white blood cell count 30 days later.  Fallout was trivial in comparison.  This has been confirmed by radiation measurements in the cities.  The false correlation between delayed effects and lingering radiation is still loved and claimed to be "uncontroversial journalism" by certain deluded media.
The basic problem for the newspapers is conflicting interests.  See the example below from the inaugural issue (issue number 1, 24 April 1900) of the same newspaper, the Daily Express.  Note the contradiction. This newspaper's innovation was printing news on the front page (other newspapers of the period printed out adverts on the front page, to make the reader buy the paper to see news).  But the point is, the inaugural issue contains a big front page sensational story about the German Kaiser's pro-peace claims (he actually sparked world war one 14 years later by invading Belgium, forcing Britain to declare war on Germany for the Treaty of London, 1839), yet on page 4 the editor, C. Arthur Pearson, states he: "will not provide a parade ground for marshalling the fads of any individual.  It will advertise all men, but no man in particular - outside its advertisement columns."  But it had already advertised the German Kaiser's peace propaganda for free on page 1!  Then, it continues about the Kaiser: 

"Somehow, is has become a newspaper tradition to love the darkness better than the light, to put the bad news in bigger letters than the good news, to make capital out of the sudden ending of life, the catastrophe ... all the bitterness and sorrow ... As we start, we were cheered by a message from the German Emperor ... Peace is the hope of all sensible rulers ... the earnest desire of the Kaiser. ... What conscientious monarch could want war, with its dreary records of lives sacrificed, of treasure squandered, of industry interrupted, and national progress stopped?  Not one.  We have passed the period of conquest by War Lords for the sake of conquest ... We are in the midst of war, but none the less we recognise that this is the age of peace, of quiet conquest by commercial arts.  The trader rules the world; we have almost outgrown the soldier.  No man is more in sympathy with the times than the German Emperor - equipped as he is with a hundred uniforms, skilled to marshal armies ... not ignorant of the control of warships ... His first hope is the preservation of international peace ..."



The crew of the B29 Enola Gay, piloted by Paul W. Tibbets, speeded up the end of the war.  Like the Vietnam war decades later, heavy conventional (explosive and incendiary/napalm) bombing actually hardened the will to fight in some quarters.
Rebuilding work in Hiroshima. A majority of homes were rebuilt within 4 years.
Makeshift homes in Hiroshima, employing surviving debris outside the firestorm.
Hiroshima recovered fast from nuclear attack, beginning within days of the explosion with trams, trains, and electricity restored in some areas, even before any help from outside arrived:
Hiroshima power lines were repaired, soon after nuclear explosion.
Trams operation was restored in Hiroshima within days of nuclear attack.
ABOVE: Yoshie Oka in Hiroshima identified the B29 bombers and passed on a report to her seniors in time to get the people of Hiroshima into their air raid shelters, most of which proved to survive intact against a 16 kt nuclear air burst at 600 metres, but the officers were taking breakfast, and she only received the order to start the complex sequence needed to sound the public air raid sirens at 8:13 am, two minutes before the explosion.  She was still trying to get the air raid alarm out when the bomb went off with a flash.
Even without air raid shelters (which survived close to ground zero in Hiroshima), many modern buildings near ground zero, made of brick or concrete, did offer protection from blast winds, heat flash, and radiation shielding.  This is a fact applicable to civil defense considerations today, even without special shelters.


The documentary Hiroshima: the Aftermath unlike previous Cold War propaganda on the subject, at least makes some admission of the rapid recovery from nuclear warfare!


John Hersey's 1946 book Hiroshima summarizes the rapid recovery thus:

"In Hiroshima, all utilities and transportation services were disrupted for varying lengths of time. In general however services were restored about as rapidly as they could be used by the depleted population. Through railroad service was in order in Hiroshima on 8 August, and electric power was available in most of the surviving parts on 7 August, the day after the bombing. ... Rolling transportation suffered extensive damage. The damage to railroad tracks, and roads was comparatively small, however. The electric power transmission and distribution systems were badly wrecked. The telephone system was approximately 80% damaged, and no service was restored until 15 August."

This is confirmed by other studies of the rapid recovery of Hiroshima, before significant help arrived.






Above: the actual Nevada nuclear test EMP effects data in the 1964 Capabilities of nuclear weapons page 13-2 is a summary of E.G. & G.s 1961 secret report by B. J. Stralser, Electromagnetic Effects from Nuclear Tests, which describes the EMP effects on tripping circuit breakers over 30 miles away from kiloton yield Nevada tower bursts.  Additional EMP data was obtained in the 1962 Nevada surface burst Small Boy, a deliberate EMP effects test.


1964 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, the one which compares American nuclear fallout predictions to the 1956 British Buffalo Round 2 ground burst nuclear test at Maralinga, Australia, has been kindly emailed to me as a PDF by

Fina Martinez-Myers
702-794-5112

Nuclear Testing Archive
National Security Technologies, LLC
Contractor to the U.S. Department of Energy

Title: TM 23-200/OP NAV INSTRUCTION 03400/C/ AFM 136-1/FMFM 11-2 "CAPABILITIES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS (U) ( 1964 )
Author(s):
Subject Terms: NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Document Location: Location - NNSA/NSO Nuclear Testing Archive Address - P.O. Box 98521 City - Las Vegas State - NV Zip - 89193-8521 Phone - (702)794-5106 Fax - (702)794-5107 Email - CIC@NV.DOE.GOV
Document Type: REPORT
Publication Date: 1964 Dec 31
Declassification Status: Declassified
Document Pages: 0214
Accession Number: NV0105483
OpenNet Entry Date: 2006 Jul 01


Fig 4-4 in 1964 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons compares the actual fallout pattern from the 1956 Buffalo-2 surface burst in Australia with the idealized model based on Nevada tests.  For a different plot of this Buffalo-1 fallout pattern, please see http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA956123:


The Buffalo-2 test was used to determine the partition of radioactivity between stem and cloud, based on the measured wind shear, which acted to separate the two components of the fallout pattern (the stem went only northwards, whereas the cloud top went due eastwards before the particles settled out, see the hodograph of wind pattern above).  This is very useful for civil defense, because it comparison of the wind pattern to the fallout map makes it clear precisely why the fallout has spread out like a fan, and you can then develop simple methods to extrapolate from this solid example to make allowances for wind shear in fallout prediction.  In addition, Buffalo-2 was instrumented to measure EMP, which is also unclassified now:

‘The first attempt at a theory of [surface burst] radioflash was by [T.S.] Popham, in 1954, who suggested that radio signals were due to currents carried by Compton electrons arising from gamma rays produced in the nuclear explosion…  Both the period and amplitude of the radio signal would be expected to increase very slightly with yield.’
– J. B. Taylor, A Theory of Radioflash, U.K. Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, Aldermaston, report AWRE-O33/59, October 1959, originally classified "Confidential", pp. 3-18.

Fig 1b in Taylor's report AWRE-O33/59 plots the radiated EMP electric field as measured from a kiloton surface burst (presumably the Buffalo-2 shot in 1956 at the Marcoo site in Maralinga): the peak field measured at a distance of 300 km is 28.1 v/m in the NEGATIVE direction at a time of 5 microseconds.  Zero field is at 17.2 microseconds.  Peak positive is at 23 microseconds with 15.4 v/m and second zero is at 42.5 microseconds.  Second negative is at 54 microseconds with about 3.75 v/m.  



Buffalo Round 2 was a 1.4 kiloton fission bomb (an AWRE declassified photo of bomb being set up for the test is shown above) surface burst on Maralinga soil, which is calcium carbonate topped with a thin layer of silicate sand.  This Maralinga soil produced silicate sand (Nevada test like) fallout for tower bursts like Buffalo Round 1 which produced no significant crater, proving that for low altitude bursts the fallout is caused by the sweep-up of loose desert sand by the afterwinds and updraft under the rising fireball.  But for the surface burst Buffalo Round 2, the fallout particles were composed of calcium oxide surrounded by calcium carbonate which must have come from the calcium calcium subsoil, like the American tests on coral islands in Bikini and Eniwetok Atoll.  This proved that the cratering ejecta provides the fallout material in a surface burst.  The 1964 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, TM 23-200, uses this British surface burst to check its fallout model (the illustration was deleted from the 1972 edition and does not appear in the 1957 edition).

In other news, a new colour photo of the surviving 44 kiloton Plumbbob-Smoky nuclear tower burst tower in Nevada has been published:


The significance of the tower remains is that they were not vaporized by the heat of the 44 kt explosion, 700 feet above the ground.  For Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the yields were smaller and the burst heights larger, no buildings were vaporized at all.  For a detailed description of this, see Plumbbob weapon test report WT-1488, page 59:

 "Observations of the remains of towers and shielding material after detonation at several ground zeros indicate that large masses of material are not vaporized. Observation of the residue of the Smoky tower indicated that a very significant portion of that tower remained including the upper 200 feet of steel. Another example similar to Shot Smoky was Shot Apple II, Teapot Series. Even though the total yield of Shot Apple II was about 32 kt, the floor of the cab and the main tower support columns remained intact. The results of the [11 kt] Shot Fizeau tower melt studies (Reference 3) show that about 85 percent of tower material was accounted for after the detonation and that only the upper 50 feet of tower was vaporized . No melting occurred beyond 175 feet from the top of the tower although the fireball theoretically engulfed more than 400 feet of the tower."

Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons 1964 proves this by the following graph showing the small surface ablation of various metal spheres placed within 400 feet from the 23 kt Teapot-Met nuclear test in 1955:


29 kt Teapot-Apple 2 nuclear test house survived 1955 shot and remains in Nevada today, 60 years later.
J. E. Kester and R. B. Ferguson, Operation Teapot, Project 5.4, Evaluation of Fireball Lethality Using Basic Missile Structures

Much of the 29 kt Teapot Apple 2 bomb support tower 500 ft high was neither vaporized nor melted, nor was lethally radioactive!

J. E. Kester and R. B. Ferguson report in Operation Teapot, Project 5.4, Evaluation of Fireball Lethality Using Basic Missile Structures, WT-1134 (originally Secret – Restricted Data), AD0340137, that within the 23 kt Teapot-Met (Nevada, 15 April 1955, 400 ft steel bomb tower) although the bomb test steel tower was blown down, it was not vaporized and much survived despite having been engulfed by the fireball itself, as stated on page 30:
“... nearly 225 feet of the main support members of the shot tower were still intact and laid out radially from their original position.”


Page 116 of WT-1134 states that after the 2 kt Moth shot atop a 300 foot triangular tower on 22 February 1955: “The three tower legs were laid out approximately radially from their pre-shot positions. The longest tower leg found was about 200 ft long. The other two legs appeared to be about 150 ft long. All three guy cables were still attached ... A few large pieces of the tower, about 20 to 30-ft long, were strewn to ranges of about 200 feet.” It adds that after the 7 kt Tesla shot atop a 300 ft square tower on 1 March 1955: “the four tower legs ... were laid out radially from their original position ... The tower legs remained intact to lengths of about 125 feet. All four guy cables were still attached ...” The 43 kt Turk nuclear test was fired atop a 500 ft square tower, leaving 100 ft lengths of tower lengths on the ground (page 118). The 8 kt Bee shot atop a 500 ft tower failed to even knock down most of the tower (pages 120-1): “A large portion of this tower was still standing after the shot. ... It is estimated that at least 150 feet of the tower was essentially undamaged and standing erect with an additional 50 to 75 feet of the tower slightly melted and drooped over at the top.” The 14 kt Apple 1shot atop a 500 ft square tower results (page 121): “The main support members of the shot tower still remained to lengths of about 150 feet with the top 25 to 50 feet being crushed and split ... Some of the legs remained attached to the base.” The 23 kt Met shot was atop a 400 ft square tower (pages 123-4): “About 225 feet of the tower legs were still intact with the top 25 to 50 feet being crushed, split and slightly melted ....”



“Observations of the remains of towers and shielding material after detonation at several ground zeros indicate that large masses of material are not vaporized. Observations of the residue of the Smoky tower [44 kt bomb atop a 700 foot high steel tower] indicated that a very significant portion of that tower remained, including the upper 200 feet of steel. Another example similar to Shot Smoky was ShotApple II [29 kt atop a 500 ft steel tower], Teapot Series. Even though the total yield of Shot Apple II was about [29 kt], the floor of the cab [housing the nuclear bomb itself, at the top of the tower] and the main tower support columns remained intact. The results of the ShotFizeau [11 kt atop a 500 ft steel tower] tower melt studies (W. K. Dolen and A. D. Thornborough, Fitzeau Tower Melt Studies, Sandia report SC-4185, 1958, Secret) show that about 85 percent of tower material was accounted for after the detonation and that only the upper 50 feet of tower was vaporized. No melting occurred beyond 175 feet from the top of the tower although the fireball theoretically engulfed more than 400 feet of the tower.”

- Dr Kermit H. Larson, et al., Distribution, Characteristics, and Biotic Availability of Fallout, Operation Plumbbob, weapon test report WT-1488, ADA077509, July 1966, page 59.
American public enthusiasm for nuclear weapons effects studies, Nevada 1953 troop tests for Korean War deterrence:
Letters from American patriots begging to be used as guinea pigs for nuclear explosion radiation effects studies, including one from a woman with a terminal illness.  In those days, the knowledge of the devastation of conventional warfare in WWII was still fresh, and nuclear deterrence against conventional warfare was applauded, not hated as it is today by the deluded.
School boy volunteering to the President in 1953 to donate his life by becoming a human "guinea pig" at the Nevada nuclear weapon test site, to assess the effects of nuclear explosion radiation on human beings.  The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission radiation effects director, Dr John C. Bugher, politely declined the patriotic offer.  (What a different set of letters they would receive nowadays if nuclear weapons tests were resumed, I wonder?)



Above: No significant danger from Kubrick's Colbalt 60 bomb sci fi, debunked in 1954 by USAEC's health physicists.

An analogy to the anti-nuclear religion of dogmatic pseudoscience is Michael Mann's error in denying natural climate change: Mann's interpretation of ice sublimation and tree ring proxies relies on an implicit assumption of positive feedback from H2O, not the reality of negative feedback from condensed atmospheric water clouds, an assumption which suppresses the much wider range of natural past climate fluctuations, since it completely ignores the fact that when temperature rises, you get more water evaporation and clouds blocking sunshine for photosynthesis or ice sublimation of heavy oxygen-18 in water molecules, so these proxies record less apparent temperature effects than really occur when you take account of cloud cover being a function of temperature.  As with Sternglass's pseudoscientific correlation of infant mortality to trivial (compared to natural background) fallout nuclear radiation during the Cold War, CO2 correlations to temperature using ice core and tree ring proxies are inaccurate, since they ignore cloud cover (negative feedback from water evaporating and forming clouds, a thermostat that regulates temperature).  Plant growth by photosynthesis and ice molecule sublimation are both a function of direct sunlight exposure providing energy to break chemical bonds, not merely ambient temperature as Michael Mann implicitly assumes.  
Deniers of the facts, and the deaths they cause by diverting limited resources from real dangers.

 Many millions of people have been killed in conventional wars since 1945.  That's the real problem to be addressed by nuclear deterrence and civil defense.  Conventional wars in Europe were deterred by Reagan's W79 neutron bomb deployment, during the 1980s.  That event was greeted with condemnation, but the Cold War soon ended, with a negotiation from a position of strength.  The W79 tactical nuclear weapon is a purely defensive weapon against conventional warfare, since it causes minimal damage to civilian targets, but maximises damage to mobile, active military invading forces.  If they are dug in deep in defensive, they are safe like civilians in modern concrete cities, so tactical nuclear weapons are purely defensive weapons against an invading army on the move on foot, in tanks and APCs.  The point of tactical nuclear weapons is that they keep the enemy penned into defensive positions, preventing invasions.  Russia did not want to stock it, because we were not prepared for, or interested in, any invasion of Russia. CNDs propaganda war against the neutron bomb, masterminded by Baroness Cathy Ashton, proves this.


All existing thermonuclear weapons can be converted into relatively clean devices by using a lead pusher  in place of fissionable material like uranium in the secondary stage.  Note that lead is more effective as a neutron multiplier than beryllium for 14.1 MeV neutrons from DT fusion, as this graph shows.  Lead has a cross-section of nearly 2 barns for the beryllium equivalent neutron multiplying reaction (n, 2n) for 14.1 MeV neutrons.  For beryllium, the cross section is less than 0.6 barns, less than that of lead by a factor of about 3.3.  Notice also that lithium-7 (92.5% of natural lithium) is actually better at producing tritium and neutrons when combined with deuterium in the fusion stage, than expensively enriched lithium-6 (7.5% of natural lithium) which is only best for neutrons of less than 4.7 MeV.


 Why not put tactical nuclear weapons to their original purpose of saving lives by deterring or rapidly ending conventional wars?  As Hiroshima's experience of survival of modern concrete buildings and the people in them proves (see below), you get less destruction of modern concrete-built cities and less lives lost if you have cheap effective but working civil defense and tactical nuclear weapons, a situation you need in civil wars regardless of whether nuclear or "conventional" weapons are used.

The truth is simple to grasp: when a 1 kt tactical neutron bomb detonates 500 metres over a target you get far less heat and blast effects than you get with conventional weapons!  What you do get is a burst of neutrons which stop insurgents in tanks, APCs, and in the open.  The neutrons are rapidly attenuated by city concrete buildings, but not by steel armour.  Popular propaganda myths that the enemy can absorb the 14.1 MeV DT fusion neutrons with plastic or thermal neutron (0.025 eV) absorbers used in reactors (boron, cadmium) are false.  As neutron bomb developer Samuel Cohen shows, the neutrons are scattered to a greater extent in air than gamma rays, so they arrive from many directions (not merely from the direction of the bomb), so the modifications needed to a tank or APC to make it absorb the high energy bomb neutrons would prohibit its function as an effective fighting vehicle.  This is not true of the much heavier mass of shielding in all modern concrete city buildings (which would prohibit movement of a tank) and simple earth covered shelters, such as were used in Britain and Japan in WWII (see below for the reason why air raid warnings failed in Japan in August 1945).  The credible deterrent capability of this innovation offers a real alternative to the millions of "conventional warfare" casualties in protracted battles in Korea, Vietnam and recent wars like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria:


The 1 kt neutron bomb detonated at 500 metres altitude produces similar radiation to the 16 kt Hiroshima bomb, but without the destructive blast and thermal flash effects, which are suppressed.  This would produce minimal effects on a properly protected civilian population, and maximum effects on invading forces and personnel in military vehicles.  Demonstrating this survival potential of modern city buildings is experience from Hiroshima: the  Bank of Japan, Hiroshima, survived 380 m from Ground Zero, within the firestorm area, when fires were extinguished by water buckets by its survivors, the majority of people in the building having survived.  Secret US Strategic Bombing Survey report proves civil defense for modern concrete buildings is effective.  The building was reopened as a bank on 8 August, merely two days after nuclear attack, and continued in use as a bank until 1992.  It remains in Hiroshima.  This beautifully designed and sturdy reinforced concrete building was designed in 1936 by Nagano Uheiji.
Since Putin invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, early last year, approximately 31,000 visitors from Ukraine have come to this blog.  We hope to continue to encourage a realistic approach to both proof tested cheap civil defense countermeasures against bombing, and the practical, credible use of nuclear deterrence to end conventional warfare, invasions, and mass killing.  Political paper promises like the 1938 Hitler-Chamberlain peace deal or the 1994 Bucharest Memorandum cater to utopian lawyers and nuclear radiation pseudoscience, and are the ideal of the enemies of realistic life saving deterrence and protective countermeasures.  The non-United Nations has actually been responsible for many protracted, horrific conventional wars since 1945 in trying to bring together of conflicting interests, so that realistic, prompt, effective resolutions are prohibited by veto.  This is the fundamental, intrinsic flaw of international peace keeping.  If everyone must agree before decisive action is taken, nothing will be done in time to save lives.  We see this effect in all forms of groupthink, where vetoes are used to hold up, if not prevent, all realistic hopes of progress.
Peace in our time political propaganda.  Arms spending data prove that Chamberlain was rearming Britain slower than Germany was rearming during the entire 1930s, so Britain was losing the arms race, and losing time, rather than "buying time" as revisionist historians insist (they do this by ignoring the facts).  In fact, like the USSR in the 1980s, Germany was a socialist state with massive financial restraints which would have inevitably gone bankrupt very quickly - or more likely - gone against Hitler's leadership very quickly - if credibly contained by a full on arms race, of precisely the sort Churchill called for.  The limited military expenditure of Chamberlain did not deter war.  This economic reality check is not speculative.  
As occurred tragically in the 1930s when criticisms of Nazi eugenics "science" were censored out as being quackery by a media which was deluded by fashionable best selling books like Man the Unknown by gas chamber eugenics proponent Medical Nobel Laureate eugenicist Dr Alexis Carrel and other big shots, the popular media prefers to cater to groupthink consensus, and to get quotes from bigots, instead of digging up the truth.  

In other news, Alex Wellerstein has been censoring out polite comments pointing out errors in his "nuclear secrecy" blog.  He managed to delete some of my comments without my having any copy of the information, so I guess I just don't have the time or interest in reading and making constructive suggestions anyone.  There is no problem for me in people honestly being biased against nuclear weapons provided they do not manipulate the data and then censor out the facts using untruths about rudeness.  In fact, Wellerstein's New Yorker article, which he thinks is exciting (as opposed to the facts we have dug up on this blog), does not dig up anything new, just the sensational words that convey no hard data of use to anyone for any purpose, and have blocked popular understanding of nuclear science since 1945:

 "Being able to write something for them has been a real capstone to the summer for me. It was a lot of work, in terms of the writing, the editing, and the fact-checking processes. But it is really a nice piece for it. I am incredibly grateful to the editor and fact-checker who worked with me on it, and gave me the opportunity to publish it. Something to check off the bucket list."

 So now we know what Alex finds exciting, a bucket list.  Of course the New Yorker published John Hersey's Hiroshima, a literary-journalistic piece of anti-science propaganda to capture attention by scare mongering and ignoring a comparison to deaths in conventional and incendiary warfare, that ignored or failed to investigate the survival of air raid shelters and people in modern city concrete buildings in Hiroshima, and that even managed to mislead Einstein on the effects of nuclear weapons, thus helping to create the megadeaths of conventional war since 1945.

Truth isn't actually what concerns "fact" checkers of magazines, which consider a fact to be a spelling or whether one statement agrees with the policy of a powerful bigoted media baron.  News or history for them is something to be manipulated by selectively censoring out critics and comparisons to all interpretations of the data!  Well, at least he ticked one thing off a bucket list.  Hopefully, he therefore will not feel the need to keep on sensationalizing nuclear fears for cash like CND, Caldicott, North Korea and Scientific American.
Russia in 2015 has at least 619 megatons of yield in 2,500 nuclear weapons and has declared an arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons in 1997, 43% of which still remain. Putin may be linked to using radioactive polonium-210 to kill a Russian dissident in 2006, the invasion of Ukraine and taking over Crimea, shooting down civilian airliner MH17 and now using its so-called (un) United Nations veto to ban an objective investigation of the crime, etc. The idea of spreading antinuclear propaganda for disarmament was always supported by coercive enemies.  Britain fell for that ploy in the the 1930s.
Me (your anti-profiteering Nige Cook) measuring the radiation of the Chernobyl fallout across Western Europe in May 1986 using a radiation meter, doing so by self-calibrating this meter with a safe 100 microcurie Cs-137 source. Today, regulations are so strict kids can't even calibrate radiation meters. Even using a lab sized Panax scaler to count over eight hour periods with large scintillation tube (phosphor: sodium iodide/thallium crystal) detectors, there was no fallout hazard compared to natural background radiation. I sent New Scientist and all other journals the results, which were censored out. Lies were printed. New Scientist anti nuclear scare propaganda from Rob Edwards et al. has had a devastating effect on nuclear science.  People who are honest are driven out of physics by personal abuse, censorship, and pure hatred, all based on pseudoscience, politics, Dark Ages type superstition, and money making quackery.  The BBC and the Government funds the biased "environmentalists".
LAWYERS, POLITICIANS, FILM AND TV PROPAGANDA EXPLOITING FAME OBSESSED STARS AGAINST JUSTICE, HUMAN RIGHTS, EQUALITY, AND DEMOCRACY: THE EUROPEAN UNION'S THREAT TO THE SURVIVAL OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION

"The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Viewed by this light it becomes a coherent scheme, and not the monstrous maze the laity are apt to think it. Let them but once clearly perceive that its grand principle is to make business for itself at their expense, and surely they will cease to grumble." - Court reporter Charles Dickens (author's narrative in Bleak House, Chapter 39).

"I went as a spectator [17 March 1968 pro-Vietcong "peace" demonstration, Trafalgar Square, London] ... Vanessa Redgrave read out messages ... in a voice like the Queen's.  She concluded: 'I feel that my presence here today speaks for itself.' ... Police on the outskirts of London ... stopped several coach-loads of students ... and removed marbles for throwing under the [police] horses' hooves, pepper (invisible on TV) for throwing in police faces, and sachets full of red paint to simulate blood ... elements in the production of a drama for television ..." 
- Peter Laurie, Scotland Yard, 1970, pages 105-106.


Last year we exposed how an unelected former CND neutron bomb proved deceiver in the so called "European Union" dictatorship was risking World War III by provoking a war with Russia over greedy efforts to exploit the possibility of Ukraine's membership of the EU (click here).  The bestselling Fourth Protocol nuclear terrorism warning author, Frederick Forsyth, has now explained in an open article directed to President Barack Obama why the European Union needs addressing to secure peace:

 "A brief briefing to educate the president of the United States. ...  The European Union, under the title Corpus Juris, intends to institute a single binding criminal justice system on all Europe, based on the Code Napoleon, the prevailing European system. It abolishes trial by jury, Magna Carta, presumption of innocence and lay magistrates. The Code Napoleon insists on a single examining magistrate, the presumption of guilt until the defendant can prove innocence, a single judge assisted by two law assessors in place of a jury of 12 ordinary citizens, and detention in custody on the whim of the accuser magistrate. Would you Americans want such a law code? In short, Mr President, if we are not going to abolish our pound and join the euro; if we are not going to abolish our already too porous borders and join the Schengen Treaty; and if we are not going to abolish a law code that puts the citizen first and dates to 1315, what are we doing in the EU?"


Above: socialist fascism can arise in any country with a ruined economy, or an economically failing superstate like the USSR or today's European Union (UK national debt now over £1.4 trillion and still rising due to a continuing deficit, which will cripple the economy in the case of any large instability such as war, which could massively increase the historically small interest rates currently being paid). Such a socialist style debt bomb country, run by profiteering political-class lawyers, including Lords, must increase crime rates to profit sufficiently from the criminal trial cases they need for their lavish lifestyle, which includes anti-truth activism for attacking nuclear deterrence, radiation, clean power, etc. In the 1930s, the socialist Sir Oswald Mosley started riots with police in London, but probably partly because the economic conditions were better in England than in Germany, things did not get as far out of control as when Hitler rose to power.  Nevertheless, a pro-Nazi appeasement agenda set in, where top UK politicians were urged to shake hands with Hitler, ostensibly to guarantee peace by collaborating or condoning terrorism of the Jews after the 1935 racist Nuremberg Laws were passed in Germany.  (Photos from P. Laurie, Scotland Yard, 1970.)

Fame seeking British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to shake Hitler's hand three times, three years after the racist Nuremberg Laws were passed.  Not a word from eugenicist history professors, except for lies claiming falsely that despite losing the arms race every second (Germany was rearming faster than Britain under Chamberlain), Chamberlain is a pacifist hero for "buying time" (he was LOSING TIME because Germany was rearming faster, you number blind ranting historians).  Actually, eugenics was made popular by Britain's elitist quack, Sir Francis Galton, just as gas chambers to implement eugenics against critics of GOVERNMENT POLICY (the definition to those quack lawyers of morality) were hyped in a bestselling eugenics book by a famous French Medical Nobel Laureate, Alexis carrel, Man the Unknown, who escaped trial for Nazi collaboration in the holocaust by dying in custody.  Today, he is still applauded as a Medical Nobel Laureate for finding a way to rejoin severed arteries, which is like applauding Hitler for building the first motorways (autobahn) and ending employment by conscripting a massive army to create a European Union of socialism (something the Napoleonic French are being aided to do today by the Germans and others, creating misery for anybody with alternative ideas like the Greeks, Spanish, English, et al.).  The Americans think it is a storm in a teacup in Europe, just as they did before WWI and before WWII, when they stayed out while the troubles were being brewed up by thugs in smart suits who passed the Nuremberg "laws".  In the end, they got sucked in to the way too.  If you refuse to put out an incipient fire because it is "too small to bother with" and go back to sleep, expect a firestorm.  See previous posts here and here.

DETERRENCE OF MAJOR CRIMES AND WARS: THE ROLE OF LAWS, PUNISHMENT AND EFFECTIVE ENFORCEMENT

The abolishment of credible deterrence beginning with the Bentley hanging case in 1952 and its terrible effect on the murder rate in London: in 1956 "diminished responsibility" effectively abolished the deterrent of hanging by allowing lawyers to have a profitable lengthy trial, arguing the murderer did the crime in an unfit mental state (they nearly all do).  This was exploited by a surge in armed robberies, then preventative detention to prevent murders was banned in 1965, along with capital punishment to deter crimes.  By keeping murderers at large and permitting the get out of "diminished responsibility", lawyers profit from the taxpayer by lengthy or repeated trials.  A disproportionately large proportion of the anti nuclear bigots and their campaign funders are rich lawyers who profit by maximising human suffering.  The death of one criminal was cynically exploited to ensure a massive rise in killings.  We often hear a dogmatic and feeble claim like: "it is better for thousands of guilty murders to be encouraged and let off scot free, than to risk one error."  British law is being turned into despot Napoleon's lawyer exploited anti-deterrence, anti-victim, secret police state.  The terrible results are plainly revealed for all with eyes to see.

 There is a popular delusion that "laws prevent crime".  It is false, because criminals often do not even study the law.  The idea that a law on a piece of paper will prevent a crime is disproved by the data (graph above).  Preventative detention used to prevent a lot of crime (graph above), but was abolished in 1965, by which time it had already lost force due to the use of "diminished responsibility" to let off the guilty in 1956.  The police and crown prosecution service have limited funds and cannot prosecute all crimes, especially when there is no public gain to be had from deterrence or stopping repeat offenses (e.g. weak sentences).  This is highly relevant to the problem of trying to use "laws" to prevent larger crimes like invasions of Ukraine, and aggressive wars.  Peter Laurie explains how deterrence worked in his 1970 book Scotland Yard, page 279:

"In reality, those who get arrested, persecuted and punished are extremely unlucky.  But what matters is not the physical effect on them, so much as the deterrence which their example sets for the rest of us. The whole system of the police, courts and prisons works because the fate of the unfortunate few is designed to be extremely public ..." (Emphasis added in bold.)

Naturally, the more effective deterrence is at preventing crime, the less money for criminal lawyers, because of the fewer cases (again, see the facts in the graph above).  Therefore, a concerted move is being made to rescind the notion that "justice should be seen to be done", and to make as many courts as possible (family courts, etc) operate behind a cloak of secrecy, to minimise the deterrence of crime.  This provides "work" for the whole criminal law fraternity, putting champagne and caviar on the tables of the lawyers:

"The overall deterrence of the combined law-enforcement system, we might say, is the product of two factors: the chance of detection multiplied by the severity of the sentence. ... Police can only affect one half of this equation - the chance of detection - but they are judged by the success of the whole of it."

- Peter Laurie, Scotland Yard, 1970, page 264.

Laurie goes on to explain that incredible deterrence was attempted in London in the early 1800s, when London became a cesspool for crime which parish constables could not detect, so that draconian punishments were put in place to try to make up for the failure to reprimand criminals: over 400 different types of offence were then supposed to be punished by hanging.  But in reality, most juries would not convict petty criminals because of the sentence of hanging, and crime rates soared.  The system did not prevent organized crime.  This is like the present system of strategic counterforce nuclear deterrence, which fails to stop or deter conventional wars!  In order to make deterrence credible, better detection and prosecution was needed.  The Metropolitan Police were formed in 1829, finally allowing the four hundred hanging offences to be cut down to fifteen in 1839, and to just four in 1861 (murder, treason, piracy and arson in warships):

"A further defect of the draconian eighteenth-century system was its failure to provide for an escalating ladder of deterrents.  It tried to divide society into two: the righteous and the wicked, but those who are as likely to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, steal lambs too.

"We now have an elaborate ladder of punishments which has two functions: (i) to deter any crime, (ii) to deter people who have steeled themselves to one level of crime from stepping up to a more serious one. ... the abolition of capital punishment ... crams the same number of crimes into a smaller range of punishments.  The effect of this is first seen at the top of the ladder, in the armed robbery figures.  It is the almost universal opinion of the police that murder and robbery with violence have increased since the end of this ultimate sanction. ... However fair the English system of trial - and abolitionists can point to some irreparable failures -  it was nevertheless true that, unless the CID chose us, we would not get hanged."  (Source: P. Laurie, Scotland yard, 1970, pp. 265-266. Emphasis added in bold.)

In other words, an single type of punishment, without a ladder with a range of credible punishments to deter escalation to more serious offences, effectively gives criminals a carte blanche to do whatever they want, and can actually encourage the most serious offences, because the punishments exactly the same in any case.  Laurie's point about the CID choosing who got hanged in the spirit of the law (regardless of whether they were technically guilty in the letter of the law) is that Derek Bentley's friend murdered a policeman in his presence, and there was a dispute over whether this was caused or not by Bentley's words of advice to his friend "let him have it", and whether Bentley should have been let off scot free for being involved in a police killing, due to being mentally unbalanced.  In the end, the police prosecuted Bentley as an accessory to murder, and he was hanged inflaming the wrath and tears of the "law to the letter, not spirit of the law" human rights lawyers who in the 1930s loudly applauded Prime Minister Chamberlain's repeated attempts to shake Hitler's hand long after the racist and ultimately genocidal "Nuremberg Laws" were passed in Germany in 1935.  Result: as the graph above shows, the one doubtful hanging caused a huge increase in violence and murder rates in London when hanging was abolished for "diminished responsibility" and finally abolished for all cases, sane or insane.  The only people to profit were, of course, criminal lawyers and the law society.


 Above: while some credible deterrence against serious crime existed in Britain (before 1965), the police were able to concentrate on diffusing tensions in society, for example by the well publicised football match with strikers in the General Strike of 1926 and by training to help defend Britain against Russian invasion parachutists and looters in 1964.  Once credible deterrence ended, pressures existed to try to prevent crime by other means, such as secret police tactics of the repressive techniques (not tension diffusing) of trying to recruit informers so that people spy on others in an effort to find criminals before serious crimes or terrorism occurs.  These pictures are from Laurie's 1970 Scotland Yard. Laurie explains on page 180 that there were three ways to prevent crime: luck (stop and search), police records (keeping tabs on known offenders) and information (informants).  He also explains what is today the mainstream technique for anti-terrorism, which is needed if we have no effective civil defense training: taping a percentage of private phone calls and other personal information exchanges and using a computer to scan it for keywords relevant to terrorism/crime.


Laurie explained in Scotland Yard in 1970, page 223, that without credible deterrence for serious crimes like like murder or terrorism, the police has to try to adopt the secret police tactics of the SS or the KGB in snooping on people, just as Herman Kahn predicted on page 97 of his 1968 book The Year 2000:

"Furthermore, there is the unpleasant prediction by Kahn ... A capacity for listening and recording temporarily, or even permanently, can be made very inexpensive.  One can imagine the legal or illegal magnetic or other recordings of an appreciable percentage of the telephone conservations that take place ... scan these conversations rapidly by means of a high speed computer - at least for key phrases - and then record conversations that meet some criteria of special interest or placement in a more permanent file ... If one imagines this ability - and what governments could resist it, if it was cheap and discreet enough - coupled with a national 'voice-print' file [similar to finger print type forensic databases] which would identify anonymous speakers, added to all the other personal information available, it is apparent that one would have little freedom ... the honest man has no need to worry ... But it is the slight inaccuracy that alarms; for 'honest' one should read, 'Government approved'."


 A TRUTH ABOUT LIBERTY: FACT CENSORSHIP BY FAMOUS MEDIA LOVED BIGOTS

 Eugenics is wrong because it claims strength comes from a lack of diversity, whereas evolution shows diversity is strength, for providing the foundations for evolution!  Nazi or communist clones are not what we need, because they share the same weaknesses, and weakness is subjective.  For example, height might be useful for changing light bulbs, but not necessarily for crews of cramped spaceships, aircraft or or tanks.  Weight might be useful for surviving winter without central heating or a supermarket nearby, but not for running marathons.  What you need for success in one thing may be the exact opposite of what you need for success in another.  This is why eugenics is pseudo-science, but Darwin wouldn't condemn the eugenicists because of bias (he is also supposed to have ignored Mendel's paper on genetics out of elitist quackery) and his half cousin, Sir Francis Galton, claimed that success is an inherited attribute, an argument used by racists, that reminds you of the quack theory of Larmarckism, the obsolete evolutionary theory inheritance of acquired characteristics which he claimed to oppose!

Galton simply ignored a rival theory that explains the correlation between his measure of "success" and that of offspring.  The rival theory is the Biblical "Matthew Effect", namely the fact that success, as he defines it, breeds money, which pays for education and research, and thus an environment for offspring which is more conducive to further success!  In other words, if you are born in a family of poor miners with no access at home to study time and facilities, then you're more likely to end up a miner than a mathematics professor, regardless of what your brain is like.  If you don't have a swimming pool within a hundred miles of home, you're less likely to end up an Olympic swimmer.  If you are born in a backward third world country, you are less likely to be exposed to the fertile soil needed for Galton's measure of "success", regardless of how large your brain capacity is.  If you do not speak English, you are less likely to spell English words correctly.

This is not a "speculative theory" requiring peer reviewed publication and thousands of citations and Nobel Prizes to become acceptable.  You don't need to wait for someone to be awarded a Nobel prize for publishing a paper showing that a hammer can bruise your thumb before you can state that fact.  It is not your personal "limited and bitter experience," that critics can sneer at.  You do not need "multiple sources to confirm a fact in writing" that anyone can confirm themselves by simply observing that physical fact.  Yet, British quack eugenicist Galton was permitted to lay the foundations for Hitler's racial holocaust, and it appears to still be taboo to point out the errors in eugenics theory.  This appears to be down to the continuing very convenient and illegal use of eugenics in crank "peer review" to censor out alternative ideas and being a danger to conservative orthodoxy, an falsehood ironically propounded by allegedly "liberals".  If you can't or won't provide honest answers to critics, then you are an illiberal groupthink-founding dogmatic danger, as shown by what the greatest Liberal said about censorship.


Freedom of factual criticism in objective science versus subjective opinion or fashionable dogma, the findings of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty

“There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of the truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just … the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The assumption that we are infallible can we justify the suppression of opinions we think false. Ages are as fallible as individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling ...”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another … in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism … An education established and controlled by the State should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“[For people] to refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. … Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. … he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think …”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“… the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“It is not because men's desires are strong that they act ill; it is because their consciences are weak.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character …”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage … But there is no parity between the feeling of a person for his own opinion, and the feeling of another who is offended at his holding it; no more than between the desire of a thief to take a purse, and the desire of the right owner to keep it. … It is easy for any one to imagine an ideal public, which leaves the freedom and choice of individuals in all uncertain matters undisturbed, and only requires them to abstain from modes of conduct which universal experience has condemned. But where has there been seen a public which set any such limit to its censorship? … In its interferences with personal conduct it is seldom thinking of anything but the enormity of acting or feeling differently from itself; and this standard of judgment, thinly disguised, is held up to mankind as the dictate of religion and philosophy, by nine tenths of all moralists and speculative writers. These teach that things are right because they are right; because we feel them to be so. They tell us to search in our own minds and hearts for laws of conduct binding on ourselves and on all others. What can the poor public do but apply these instructions, and make their own personal feelings of good and evil, if they are tolerably unanimous in them, obligatory on all the world?”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them: how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be originality.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“… the general or prevailing opinion in any subject is rarely or never the whole truth; it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“If there are any persons who contest a received opinion, or who will do so if law or opinion will let them, let us thank them for it, open our minds to listen to them, and rejoice that there is some one to do for us what we otherwise ought, if we have any regard for either the certainty or the vitality of our convictions, to do with much greater labor for ourselves.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“When there are persons to be found, who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

This last quotation really is the root cause of wars, when bigoted dogma by the democratic majority censors out the views and facts of minority opponents, causing wars.  This censorship mindset of bigoted democratic “might is right” dictators is the error made by Hitler and Stalin, but instead of recognising that it is wrong and needs to be replaced by more open debate and less censorship, the “when in a hole, keep digging” mindset insists that if censorship is not working, we need more of it, not less.  This is what happened when conventional weapons failed in Vietnam.

“In countries of more advanced civilisation and of a more insurrectionary spirit, the public, accustomed to expect everything to be done for them by the State, or at least to do nothing for themselves without asking from the State not only leave to do it, but even how it is to be done, naturally hold the State responsible for all evil which befalls them, and when the evil exceeds their amount of patience, they rise against the government and make what is called a revolution; whereupon somebody else, with or without legitimate authority from the nation, vaults into the seat, issues his orders to the bureaucracy, and everything goes on much as it did before; the bureaucracy being unchanged, and nobody else being capable of taking their place. A very different spectacle is exhibited among a people accustomed to transact their own business.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The "people" who exercise the power are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised; and the "self-government" spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority: the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“All errors which he is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“This is the case over the whole East. Custom is there, in all things, the final appeal; justice and right mean conformity to custom; the argument of custom no one, unless some tyrant intoxicated with power, thinks of resisting.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“In many cases, though individuals may not do the particular thing so well, on the average, as the officers of government, it is nevertheless desirable that it should be done by them, rather than by the government, as a means to their own mental education—a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Government operations tend to be everywhere alike. With individuals and voluntary associations, on the contrary, there are varied experiments, and endless diversity of experience.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Where there is a tacit convention that principles are not to be disputed; where the discussion of the greatest questions which can occupy humanity is considered to be closed, we cannot hope to find that generally high scale of mental activity which has made some periods of history so remarkable.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The beliefs which we have the most warrant for have no safeguard, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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WHAT IS NUKEGATE? The Introduction to "Nuclear Weapons Effects Theory" (1990 unpublished book), as updated 2025

R. G. Shreffler and W. S. Bennett, Tactical nuclear warfare , Los Alamos report LA-4467-MS, originally classified SECRET, p8 (linked HE...