There is now a relatively long introduction at the top of this blog, due to the present nuclear threat caused by disarmament and arms control propaganda, and the dire need to get the facts out past pro-Russian media influencers or loony mass media which has never cared about nuclear and radiation effects facts, so please scroll down to see blog posts. The text below in blue is hyperlinked (direct to reference source materials, rather than numbered and linked to reference at the end of the page) so you can right-click on it and open in a new tab to see the source. This page is not about opinions, it provides censored out facts that debunk propaganda.

Click here for the key declassified nuclear testing and capability documents compilation (EM-1 related USA research reports and various UK nuclear weapon test reports on blast and radiation), from nukegate.org

We also uploaded an online-viewable version of the full text of the 1982 edition of the UK Goverment's Domestic Nuclear Shelters - Technical Guidance, including secret UK and USA nuclear test report references and extracts proving protection against collateral damage, for credible deterrence (linked here).

https://hbr.org/1995/05/why-the-news-is-not-the-truth: "The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works ... The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity. What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying."

This blog's url is now "www.nukegate.org" (when this nuclear effects blog began in 2006, "glasstone.blogspot.com" was used since it briefly mentioned the key issue of Glasstone's obfuscating "Effects of Nuclear Weapons", specifically the final 1977 edition, which omitted not just the credible deterrent "use" of nuclear weapons but the key final "Principles of protection" chapter that had been present in all previous editions, and it also ignored the relatively clean neutron bombs which had been developed in the intervening years, as a credible deterrent to the concentrations of force needed for aggressive invasions, such as the 1914 invasion of Belgium and the 1939 invasion of Poland; both of which triggered world wars. Those editors themselves were not subversives, but both had nuclear weapons security clearances which constituted political groupthink censorship control, regarding which designs of nuclear weapons they could discuss and the level of technical data (they include basically zero information on their sources and the "bibliographies" are in most cases not to their classified nuclear testing sources but merely further reading); the 1977 edition had been initially drafted in 1974 solely by EM-1 editor Dolan at SRI International, and was then submitted to Glasstone who made further changes. The persistent and hypocritical Russian World Peace Council's and also hardline arms controllers propaganda tactic - supported by some arms industry loons who have a vested interest in conventional war - has been to try to promote lies on nuclear weapons effects to get rid of credible Western nuclear deterrence of provocations that start war. Naturally, the Russians have now stocked 2000+ tactical neutron weapons of the sort they get the West to disarm.

This means that they can invade territory with relative impunity, since the West won't deter such provocations by flexible response - the aim of Russia is to push the West into a policy of massive retaliation of direct attacks only, and then use smaller provocations instead - and Russia can then use its tactical nuclear weapons to "defend" its newly invaded territories by declaring them to now be part of Mother Russia and under Moscow's nuclear umbrella. Russia has repeatedly made it clear - for decades - that it expects a direct war with NATO to rapidly escalate into nuclear WWIII and it has prepared civil defense shelters and evacuation tactics to enable it. Herman Kahn's public warnings of this date back to his testimony to the June 1959 Congressional Hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, but for decades were deliberately misrepresented by most media outlets. President Kennedy's book "Why England Slept" makes it crystal clear how exactly the same "pacifist" propaganda tactics in the 1930s (that time it was the "gas bomb knockout blow has no defense so disarm, disarm, disarm" lie) caused war, by using fear to slow credible rearmament in the face of state terrorism. By the time democracies finally decided to issue an ultimatum, Hitler had been converted - by pacifist appeasement - from a cautious tester of Western indecision, into an overconfident aggressor who simply ignored last-minute ultimatums.

Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons (US Government) is written in a highly ambiguous fashion (negating nearly every definite statement with a deliberately obfuscating contrary statement to leave a smokescreen legacy of needless confusion, obscurity and obfuscation), omits nearly all key nuclear test data and provides instead misleading generalizations of data from generally unspecified weapon designs tested over 60 years ago which apply to freefield measurements on unobstructed radial lines in deserts and oceans. It makes ZERO analysis of the overall shielding of radiation and blast by their energy attenuation in modern steel and concrete cities, and even falsely denies such factors in its discussion of blast in cities and in its naive chart for predicting the percentage of burns types as a function of freefield outdoor thermal radiation, totally ignoring skyline shielding geometry (similar effects apply to freefield nuclear radiation exposure, despite vague attempts to dismiss this by non-quantitative talk about some scattered radiation arriving from all angles). It omits the huge variations in effects due to weapon design e.g. cleaner warhead designs and the tactical neutron bomb. It omits quantitative data on EMP as a function of burst yield, height and weapon design.

It omits most of the detailed data collected from Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the casualty rates as a function of type of building or shelter and blast pressure. It fails to analyse overall standardized casualty rates for different kinds of burst (e.g. shallow underground earth penetrators convert radiation and blast energy into ground shock and cratering against hard targets like silos or enemy bunkers). It omits a detailed analysis of blast precursor effects. It omits a detailed analysis of fallout beta and gamma spectra, fractionation, specific activity (determining the visibility of the fallout as a function of radiation hazard, and the mass of material to be removed for effective decontamination), and data which does exist on the effect of crater soil size distribution upon the fused fallout particle size distribution (e.g. tests like Small Boy in 1962 on the very fine particles at Frenchman Flats gave mean fallout particle sizes far bigger than the pre-shot soil, proving that - as for Trinitite - melted small soil particles fuse together in the fireball to produce larger fallout particles, so the pre-shot soil size distribution is irrelevant for fallout analysis).

By generally (with few exceptions) lumping "effects" of all types of bursts together into chapters dedicated to specific effects, it falsely gives the impression that all types of nuclear explosions produce similar effects with merely "quantitative differences". This is untrue because air bursts eliminate fallout casualties entirely, while slight burial (e.g. earth penetrating warheads) eliminates thermal (including fires and dust "climatic nuclear winter" BS), the initial radiation and severe blast effects, while massively increasing ground shock, and the same applies to shallow underwater bursts. So a more objective treatment to credibly deter all aggression MUST emphasise the totally different collateral damage effects, by dedicating chapters to different kinds of burst (high altitude/space bursts, free air bursts, surface bursts, underground bursts, underwater bursts), and would include bomb design implications on these effects in detail. A great deal of previously secret and limited distributed nuclear effects data has been declassified since 1977, and new research has been done. Our objectives in this review are: (a) to ensure that an objective independent analysis of the relevant nuclear weapons effects facts is placed on the record in case the currently, increasingly vicious Cold War 2.0 escalates into some kind of limited "nuclear demonstration" by aggressors to try to end a conventional war by using coercive threats, (b) to ensure the lessons of tactical nuclear weapon design for deterring large scale provocations (like the invasions of Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939 which triggered world wars) are re-learned in contrast to Dulles "massive retaliation" (incredible deterrent) nonsense, and finally (c) to provide some push to Western governments to "get real" with our civil defense, to try to make credible our ageing "strategic nuclear deterrent". We have also provided a detailed analysis of recently declassified Russian nuclear warhead design data, shelter data, effects data, tactical nuclear weapons employment manuals, and some suggestions for improving Western thermonuclear warheads to improve deterrence.

ABOVE: "missile gap" propaganda debunked by secret 1970s data; Kennedy relied on US nuclear superiority. Using a flawed analysis of nuclear weapons effects on Hiroshima - based on lying unclassified propaganda reports and ignorant dismissals of civil defense shelters in Russia (again based on Hiroshima propaganda by groves in 1945) - America allowed Russian nuclear superiority in the 1970s. Increasingly, the nuclear deterrent was used by Russia to stop the West from "interfering" with its aggressive invasions and wars, precisely Hitler's 1930s strategy with gas bombing knockout-blow threats used to engineer appeasement. BELOW: H-bomb effects and design secrecy led to tragic mass media delusions, such as the 18 February 1950 Picture Post claim that the H-bomb can devastate Australia (inspiring the Shute novel and movie "On the Beach" and also other radiation scams like "Dr Strangelove" to be used by Russia to stir up anti Western disarmament movement to help Russia win WWIII). Dad was a Civil Defense Corps Instructor in the UK when this was done (the civil defense effectiveness and weapon effects facts on shelters at UK and USA nuclear tests were kept secret and not used to debunk lying political appeasement propaganda tricks in the mass media by sensationalist "journalists" and Russian "sputniks"):

Message to mass-media journalists: please don't indulge in lying "no defence" propaganda as was done by most of the media in previous pre-war crises!

Above: Edward Leader-Williams on the basis for UK civil defence shelters in SECRET 1949 Royal Society's London Symposium on physical effects of atomic weapons, a study that was kept secret by the Attlee Government and subsequent UK governments, instead of being openly published to enhance public knowledge of civil defence effectiveness against nuclear attack. Leader-Williams also produced the vital civil defence report seven years later (published below for the first time on this blog), proving civil defence sheltering and city centre evacuation is effective against 20 megaton thermonuclear weapons. Also published in the same secret symposium, which was introduced by Penney, was Penney's own Hiroshima visit analysis of the percentage volume reduction in overpressure-crushed empty petrol cans, blueprint containers, etc., which gave a blast partition yield of 7 kilotons (or 15.6 kt total yield, if taking the nuclear blast as 45% of total yield, i.e. 7/0.45 = 15.6, as done in later AWRE nuclear weapons test blast data reports). Penney in a 1970 updated paper allowed for blast reduction due to the damage done in the city bursts.

ABOVE: The 1996 Northrop EM-1 (see extracts below showing protection by modern buildings and also simple shelters very close to nuclear tests; note that Northrop's entire set of damage ranges as a function of yield for underground shelters, tunnels, silos are based on two contained deep underground nuclear tests of different yield scaled to surface burst using the assumption of 5% yield ground coupling relative to the underground shots; this 5% equivalence figure appears to be an exaggeration for compact modern warheads, e.g. the paper “Comparison of Surface and Sub-Surface Nuclear Bursts,” from Steven Hatch, Sandia National Laboratories, to Jonathan Medalia, October 30, 2000, shows a 2% equivalence, e.g. Hatch shows that 1 megaton surface burst produces identical ranges to underground targets as a 20 kt burst at >20m depth of burst, whereas Northrop would require 50kt) has not been openly published, despite such protection being used in Russia! This proves heavy bias against credible tactical nuclear deterrence of the invasions that trigger major wars that could escalate into nuclear war (Russia has 2000+ dedicated neutron bombs; we don't!) and against simple nuclear proof tested civil defence which makes such deterrence credible and of course is also of validity against conventional wars, severe weather, peacetime disasters, etc.

The basic fact is that nuclear weapons can deter/stop invasions unlike the conventional weapons that cause mass destruction, and nuclear collateral damage is eliminated easily for nuclear weapons by using them on military targets, since for high yields at collateral damage distances all the effects are sufficiently delayed in arrival to allow duck and cover to avoid radiation and blast wind/flying debris injuries (unlike the case for the smaller areas affected by smaller yield conventional weapons, where there is little time on seeing the flash to duck and cover to avoid injury), and as the original 1951 SECRET American Government "Handbook on Capabilities of Atomic Weapons" (limited report AD511880L, forerunner to today's still secret EM-1) stated in Section 10.32:

"PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT ITEM TO BE REMEMBERED WHEN ESTIMATING EFFECTS ON PERSONNEL IS THE AMOUNT OF COVER ACTUALLY INVOLVED. ... IT IS OBVIOUS THAT ONLY A FEW SECONDS WARNING IS NECESSARY UNDER MOST CONDITIONS TO TAKE FAIRLY EFFECTIVE COVER. THE LARGE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES IN JAPAN RESULTED FOR THE MOST PART FROM THE LACK OF WARNING."

As for Hitler's stockpile of 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas, whose strategic and also tactical use was deterred by proper defences (gas masks for all civilians and soldiers, as well as UK stockpiles of fully trial-tested deliverable biological agent anthrax and mustard gas retaliation capacity), it is possible to deter strategic nuclear escalation to city bombing, even within a world war with a crazy terrorist, if all the people are protected by both defence and deterrence.

J. R. Oppenheimer (opposing Teller), February 1951: "It is clear that they can be used only as adjuncts in a military campaign which has some other components, and whose purpose is a military victory. They are not primarily weapons of totality or terror, but weapons used to give combat forces help they would otherwise lack. They are an integral part of military operations. Only when the atomic bomb is recognized as useful insofar as it is an integral part of military operations, will it really be of much help in the fighting of a war, rather than in warning all mankind to avert it." (Quotation: Samuel Cohen, Shame, 2nd ed., 2005, page 99.)

‘The Hungarian revolution of October and November 1956 demonstrated the difficulty faced even by a vastly superior army in attempting to dominate hostile territory. The [Soviet Union] Red Army finally had to concentrate twenty-two divisions in order to crush a practically unarmed population. ... With proper tactics, nuclear war need not be as destructive as it appears when we think of [World War II nuclear city bombing like Hiroshima]. The high casualty estimates for nuclear war are based on the assumption that the most suitable targets are those of conventional warfare: cities to interdict communications ... With cities no longer serving as key elements in the communications system of the military forces, the risks of initiating city bombing may outweigh the gains which can be achieved. ...

‘The elimination of area targets will place an upper limit on the size of weapons it will be profitable to use. Since fall-out becomes a serious problem [i.e. fallout contaminated areas which are so large that thousands of people would need to evacuate or shelter indoors for up to two weeks] only in the range of explosive power of 500 kilotons and above, it could be proposed that no weapon larger than 500 kilotons will be employed unless the enemy uses it first. Concurrently, the United States could take advantage of a new development which significantly reduces fall-out by eliminating the last stage of the fission-fusion-fission process.’

- Dr Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Harper, New York, 1957, pp. 180-3, 228-9. (Note that sometimes the "nuclear taboo" issue is raised against this analysis by Kissenger: if anti-nuclear lying propaganda on weapons effects makes it apparently taboo in the Western pro-Russian disarmament lobbies to escalate from conventional to tactical nuclear weapons to end war as on 6 and 9 August 1945, then this "nuclear taboo" can be relied upon to guarantee peace for our time. However, this was not only disproved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but by the Russian tactical nuclear weapons reliance today, the Russian civil defense shelter system detailed on this blog which showed they believed a nuclear war survivable based on the results of their own nuclear tests, and the use of Russian nuclear weapons years after Kissinger's analysis was published and criticised, for example their 50 megaton test in 1961 and their supply of IRBM's capable of reaching East Coast mainland USA targets to the fanatical Cuban dictatorship in 1962. So much for the "nuclear taboo" as being any more reliable than Chamberlain's "peace for our time" document, co-signed by Hitler on 30 September 1938! We furthermore saw how Russia respected President Obama's "red line" for the "chemical weapons taboo": Russia didn't give a toss about Western disarmament thugs prattle about what they think is a "taboo", Russia used chlorine and sarin in Syria to keep Assad the dictator and they used Novichok to attack and kill in the UK in 2018, with only diplomatic expulsions in response. "Taboos" are no more valid to restrain madmen than peace treaties, disarmament agreements, Western CND books attacking civil defense or claiming that nuclear war is the new 1930s gas war bogyman, or "secret" stamps on scientific facts. In a word, they're crazy superstitions.)

(Quoted in 2006 on this blog here.)

All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of DELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace":

"Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.

ABOVE: Example of a possible Russian 1985 1st Cold War SLBM first strike plan. The initial use of Russian SLBM launched nuclear missiles from off-coast against command and control centres (i.e. nuclear explosions to destroy warning satellite communications centres by radiation on satellites as well as EMP against ground targets, rather than missiles launched from Russia against cities, as assumed by 100% of the Cold War left-wing propaganda) is allegedly a Russian "fog of war" strategy. Such a "demonstration strike" is aimed essentially at causing confusion about what is going on, who is responsible - it is not quick or easy to finger-print high altitude bursts fired by SLBM's from submerged submarines to a particular country because you don't get fallout samples to identify isotopic plutonium composition. Russia could immediately deny the attack (implying, probably to the applause of the left-wingers that this was some kind of American training exercise or computer based nuclear weapons "accident", similar to those depicted in numerous anti-nuclear Cold War propaganda films). Thinly-veiled ultimatums and blackmail follow. America would not lose its population or even key cities in such a first strike (contrary to left-wing propaganda fiction), as with Pearl Harbor in 1941; it would lose its complacency and its sense of security through isolationism, and would either be forced into a humiliating defeat or a major war.

Before 1941, many warned of the risks but were dismissed on the basis that Japan was a smaller country with a smaller economy than the USA and war was therefore absurd (similar to the way Churchill's warnings about European dictators were dismissed by "arms-race opposing pacifists" not only in the 1930s, but even before WWI; for example Professor Cyril Joad documents in the 1939 book "Why War?" his first hand witnessing of Winston Churchill's pre-WWI warning and call for an arms-race to deter that war, as dismissed by the sneering Norman Angell who claimed an arms race would cause a war rather than avert one by bankrupting the terrorist state). It is vital to note that there is an immense pressure against warnings of Russian nuclear superiority even today, most of it contradictory. E.g. the left wing and Russian-biased "experts" whose voices are the only ones reported in the Western media (traditionally led by "Scientific American" and "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"), simultaneously claim Russia imposes such a terrible SLBM and ICBM nuclear threat that we must desperately disarm now, while also claiming that Russian tactical nuclear weapons probably won't work so aren't a threat that needs to be credibly deterred! This only makes sense as Russian siding propaganda. In similar vein, Teller-critic Hans Bethe also used to falsely "dismiss" Russian nuclear superiority by claiming (with quotes from Brezhnev about the peaceful intentions of Russia) that Russian delivery systems are "less accurate" than Western missiles (as if accuracy has anything to do with high altitude EMP strikes, where the effects cover huge areas, or large city targets. Such claims would then by repeatedly endlessly in the Western media by Russian biased "journalists" or agents of influence, and any attempt to point out the propaganda (i.e. he real world asymmetry: Russia uses cheap countervalue targetting on folk that don't have civil defense, whereas we need costly, accurate counterforce targetting because Russia has civil defense shelters that we don't have) became a "Reds under beds" argument, implying that the truth is dangerous to "peaceful coexistence"!

“Free peoples ... will make war only when driven to it by tyrants. ... there have been no wars between well-established democracies. ... the probability ... that the absence of wars between well-established democracies is a mere accident [is] less than one chance in a thousand. ... there have been more than enough to provide robust statistics ... When toleration of dissent has persisted for three years, but not until then, we can call a new republic ‘well established.’ ... Time and again we observe authoritarian leaders ... using coercion rather than seeking mutual accommodation ... Republican behaviour ... in quite a few cases ... created an ‘appeasement trap.’ The republic tried to accommodate a tyrant as if he were a fellow republican; the tyrant concluded that he could safely make an aggressive response; eventually the republic replied furiously with war. The frequency of such errors on both sides is evidence that negotiating styles are not based strictly on sound reasoning.” - Spencer Weart, Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another (Yale University Press)

The Top Secret American intelligency report NIE 11-3/8-74 "Soviet Forces for Intercontinental Conflict" warned on page 6: "the USSR has largely eliminated previous US quantitative advantages in strategic offensive forces." page 9 of the report estimated that the Russian's ICBM and SLBM launchers exceed the USAs 1,700 during 1970, while Russia's on-line missile throw weight had exceeded the USA's one thousand tons back in 1967! Because the USA had more long-range bombers which can carry high-yield bombs than Russia (bombers are more vulnerable to air defences so were not Russia's priority), it took a little longer for Russia to exceed the USA in equivalent megatons, but the 1976 Top Secret American report NIE 11-3/8-76 at page 17 shows that in 1974 Russia exceeded the 4,000 equivalent-megatons payload of USA missiles and aircraft (with less vulnerability for Russia, since most of Russia's nuclear weapons were on missiles not in SAM-vulnerable aircraft), amd by 1976 Russia could deliver 7,000 tons of payload by missiles compared to just 4,000 tons on the USA side. These reports were kept secret for decades to protect the intelligence sources, but they were based on hard evidence. For example, in August 1974 the Hughes Aircraft Company used a specially designed ship (Glomar Explorer, 618 feet long, developed under a secret CIA contract) to recover nuclear weapons and their secret manuals from a Russian submarine which sank in 16,000 feet of water, while in 1976 America was able to take apart the electronics systems in a state-of-the-art Russian MIG-25 fighter which was flown to Japan by defector Viktor Belenko, discovering that it used exclusively EMP-hard miniature vacuum tubes with no EMP-vulnerable solid state components.

There are four ways of dealing with aggressors: conquest (fight them), intimidation (deter them), fortification (shelter against their attacks; historically used as castles, walled cities and even walled countries in the case of China's 1,100 mile long Great Wall and Hadrian's Wall, while the USA has used the Pacific and Atlantic as successful moats against invasion, at least since Britain invaded Washington D.C. back in 1812), and friendship (which if you are too weak to fight, means appeasing them, as Chamberlain shook hands with Hitler for worthless peace promises). These are not mutually exclusive: you can use combinations. If you are very strong in offensive capability and also have walls to protect you while your back is turned, you can - as Teddy Roosevelt put it (quoting a West African proverb): "Speak softly and carry a big stick." But if you are weak, speaking softly makes you a target, vulnerable to coercion. This is why we don't send troops directly to Ukraine. When elected in 1960, Kennedy introduced "flexible response" to replace Dulles' "massive retaliation", by addressing the need to deter large provocations without being forced to decide between the unwelcome options of "surrender or all-out nuclear war" (Herman Kahn called this flexible response "Type 2 Deterrence"). This was eroded by both Russian civil defense and their emerging superiority in the 1970s: a real missiles and bombers gap emerged in 1972 when the USSR reached and then exceeded the 2,200 of the USA, while in 1974 the USSR achieve parity at 3,500 equivalent megatons (then exceeded the USA), and finally today Russia has over 2,000 dedicated clean enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons and we have none (except low-neutron output B61 multipurpose bombs). (Robert Jastrow's 1985 book How to make nuclear Weapons obsolete was the first to have graphs showing the downward trend in nuclear weapon yields created by the development of miniaturized MIRV warheads for missiles and tactical weapons: he shows that the average size of US warheads fell from 3 megatons in 1960 to 200 kilotons in 1980, and from a total of 12,000 megatons in 1960 to 3,000 megatons in 1980.)

The term "equivalent megatons" roughly takes account of the fact that the areas of cratering, blast and radiation damage scale not linearly with energy but as something like the 2/3 power of energy release; but note that close-in cratering scales as a significantly smaller power of energy than 2/3, while blast wind drag displacement of jeeps in open desert scales as a larger power of energy than 2/3. Comparisons of equivalent megatonnage shows, for example, that WWII's 2 megatons of TNT in the form of about 20,000,000 separate conventional 100 kg (0.1 ton) explosives is equivalent to 20,000,000 x (10-7)2/3 = 431 separate 1 megaton explosions! The point is, nuclear weapons are not of a different order of magnitude to conventional warfare, because: (1) devastated areas don't scale in proportion to energy release, (2) the number of nuclear weapons is very much smaller than the number of conventional bombs dropped in conventional war, (3) because of radiation effects like neutrons and intense EMP, it is possible to eliminate physical destruction by nuclear weapons by a combination of weapon design (e.g. very clean bombs like 99.9% fusion Dominic-Housatonic, or 95% fusion Redwing-Navajo) and burst altitude or depth for hard targets, and create a weapon that deters invasions credibly (without lying local fallout radiation hazards), something none of the biased "pacifist disarmament" lobbies (which attract Russian support) tell you, and (4) people at collateral damage distances have time to take cover from radiation and flying glass, blast winds, etc from nuclear explosions (which they don't in Ukraine and Gaza where similar blast pressures arrive more rapidly from smaller conventional explosions). There's a big problem with propaganda here.

(These calculations, showing that even if strategic bombing had worked in WWII - and the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded it failed, thus the early Cold War effort to develop and test tactical nuclear weapons and train for tactical nuclear war in Nevada field exercises - you need over 400 megaton weapons to give the equivalent of WWII city destruction in Europe and Japan, are often inverted by anti-nuclear bigots to try to obfuscate the truth. What we're driving at is that nuclear weapons give you the ability to DETER the invasions that set off such wars, regardless of whether they escalate from poison gas - as feared in the 20s and 30s thus appeasement and WWII - or nuclear. Escalation was debunked in WWII where the only use of poison gases were in "peaceful" gas chambers, not dropped on cities. Rather than justifying appeasement, the "peaceful" massacre of millions in gas chambers justified war. But evil could and should have been deterred. The "anti-war" propagandarists like Lord Noel-Baker and pals who guaranteed immediate gas knockout blows in the 30s if we didn't appease evil dictators were never held to account and properly debunked by historians after the war, so they converted from gas liars to nuclear liars in the Cold War and went on winning "peace" prices for their lies, which multiplied up over the years, to keep getting news media headlines and Nobel Peace Prizes for starting and sustaining unnecessary wars and massacres by dictators. There's also a military side to this, with Field Marshall's Lord Mountbatten, lord Carver and lord Zuckerman in the 70s arguing for UK nuclear disarmament and a re-introduction of conscription instead. These guys were not pacifist CND thugs who wanted Moscow to rule the world, but they were quoted by them attacking the deterrent but not of course calling for conscription instead. The abolishment of UK conscription for national service in 1960 was due to the H-bomb, and was a political money-saving plot by Macmillan. If we disarmed our nuclear deterrent and spend the money on conscription plus underground shelters, we might well be able to resist Russia as Ukraine does, until we run out of ammunition etc. However, the cheapest and most credible deterrent is tactical nuclear weapons to prevent the concentration of aggressive force by terrorist states..)

Britain was initially in a better position with regards to civil defense than the USA, because in WWII Britain had built sufficient shelters (of various types, but all tested against blast intense enough to demolish brick houses, and later also tested them at various nuclear weapon trials in Monte Bello and Maralinga, Australia) and respirators for the entire civilian population. However, Britain also tried to keep the proof testing data secret from Russia (which tested their own shelters at their own nuclear tests anyway) and this meant it appeared that civil defense advice was unproved and would not work, an illusion exploited especially for communist propaganda in the UK via CND. To give just one example, CND and most of the UK media still rely on Duncan Campbell's pseudo-journalism book War Plan UK since it is based entirely on fake news about UK civil defense, nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, fallout, blast, etc. He takes for granted that - just because the UK Government kept the facts secret - the facts don't exist, and to him any use of nuclear weapons which spread any radioactivity whatsoever will make life totally impossible: "What matters 'freedom' or 'a way of life' in a radioactive wasteland?" (Quote from D. Campbell, War Plan UK, Paladin Books, May 1983, p387.) The problem here is the well known fallout decay rate; Trinity nuclear test ground zero was reported by Glasstone (Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950) to be at 8,000 R/hr at 1 hour after burst, yet just 57 days later, on September 11, 1945, General Groves, Robert Oppenheimer, and a large group of journalists safely visited it and took their time inspecting the surviving tower legs, when the gamma dose rate was down to little more than 1 R/hr! So fission products decay fast: 1,000 R/hr at 1 hour decays to 100 at 7 hours, 10 at 2 days, and just 1 at 2 weeks. So the "radioactive wasteland" is just as much a myth as any other nuclear "doomsday" fictional headline in the media. Nuclear weapons effects have always been fake news in the mainstream media: editors have always regarded facts as "boring copy". Higher yield tests showed that even the ground zero crater "hot spots" were generally lower, due to dispersal by the larger mushroom cloud. If you're far downwind, you can simply walk cross-wind, or prepare an improvised shelter while the dust is blowing. But point any such errors out to fanatical bigots and they will just keep making up more nonsense.

Duncan Campbell's War Plan UK relies on the contradiction of claiming that the deliberately exaggerated UK Government worst-case civil defense "exercises" for training purposes are "realistic scenarios" (e.g. 1975 Inside Right, 1978 Scrum Half, 1980 Square Leg, 1982 Hard Rock planning), while simultaneously claiming the very opposite about reliable UK Government nuclear effects and sheltering effectiveness data, and hoping nobody would spot his contradictory tactics. He quotes extensively from these lurid worst-case scenario UK civil defense exercises ,as if they are factually defensible rather than imaginary fiction to put planners under the maximum possible stress (standard UK military policy of “Train hard to fight easy”), while ignoring the far more likely limited nuclear uses scenario of Sir John Hackett's Third World War. His real worry is the 1977 UK Government Training Manual for Scientific Advisers which War Plan UK quotes on p14: "a potential threat to the security of the United Kingdom arising from acts of sabotage by enemy agents, possibly assisted by dissident groups. ... Their aim would be to weaken the national will and ability to fight. ... Their significance should not be underestimated." On the next page, War Plan UK quotes J. B. S. Haldane's 1938 book Air Raid Precautions (ARP) on the terrible destruction Haldane witnessed on unprotected people in the Spanish civil war, without even mentioning that Haldane's point is pro-civil defense, pro-shelters, and anti-appeasement of dictatorship, the exact opposite of War Plan UK which wants Russia to run the world. On page 124 War Plan UK the false assertion is made that USA nuclear casualty data is "widely accepted" and true (declassified Hiroshima casaulty data for people in modern concrete buildings proves it to be lies) while the correct UK nuclear casualty data is "inaccurate", and on page 126, Duncan Campbell simply lies that the UK Government's Domestic Nuclear Shelters- Technical Guidance "ended up offering the public a selection of shelters half of which were invented in the Blitz ... None of the designs was ever tested." In fact, Frank Pavry (who studied similar shelters surviving near ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 with the British Mission to Japan_ and George R. Stanbury tested 15 Anderson shelters at the first UK nuclear explosion, Operation Hurricane in 1952, together with concrete structures, and many other improvised trench and earth-covered shelters were nuclear tested by USA and UK at trials in 1955, 1956, 1957, and 1958, and later at simulated nuclear explosions by Cresson Kearny of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA, having also earlier been exposed to early Russian nuclear tests (scroll down to see the evidence of this). Improved versions of war tested and nuclear weapons tested shelters! So war Plan UK makes no effort whatsoever to dig up the facts, and instead falsely claims the exact opposite of the plain unvarnished truth! War Plan UK shows its hypocrisy on page 383 in enthusiastically praising Russian civil defense:

"Training in elementary civil defence is given to everyone, at school, in industry or collective farms. A basic handbook of precautionary measures, Everybody must know this!, is the Russian Protect and Survive. The national civil defence corps is extensive, and is organized along military lines. Over 200,000 civil defence troops would be mobilized for rescue work in war. There are said to be extensive, dispersed and 'untouchable' food stockpiles; industrial workers are issued with kits of personal protection apparatus, said to include nerve gas counteragents such as atropine. Fallout and blast shelters are provided in the cities and in industrial complexes, and new buildings have been required to have shelters since the 1950s. ... They suggest that less than 10% - even as little as 5% - of the Soviet population would die in a major attack. [Less than Russia's loss of 12% of its population in WWII.]"

'LLNL achieved fusion ignition for the first time on Dec. 5, 2022. The second time came on July 30, 2023, when in a controlled fusion experiment, the NIF laser delivered 2.05 MJ of energy to the target, resulting in 3.88 MJ of fusion energy output, the highest yield achieved to date. On Oct. 8, 2023, the NIF laser achieved fusion ignition for the third time with 1.9 MJ of laser energy resulting in 2.4 MJ of fusion energy yield. “We’re on a steep performance curve,” said Jean-Michel Di Nicola, co-program director for the NIF and Photon Science’s Laser Science and Systems Engineering organization. “Increasing laser energy can give us more margin against issues like imperfections in the fuel capsule or asymmetry in the fuel hot spot. Higher laser energy can help achieve a more stable implosion, resulting in higher yields.” ... “The laser itself is capable of higher energy without fundamental changes to the laser,” said NIF operations manager Bruno Van Wonterghem. “It’s all about the control of the damage. Too much energy without proper protection, and your optics blow to pieces.” ' - https://lasers.llnl.gov/news/llnls-nif-delivers-record-laser-energy

NOTE: the "problem" very large lasers "required" to deliver ~2MJ (roughly 0.5 kg of TNT energy) to cause larger fusion explosions of 2mm diameter capsules of frozen D+T inside a 1 cm diameter energy reflecting hohlraum, and the "problem" of damage to the equipment caused by the explosions, is immaterial to clean nuclear deterrent development based on this technology, because in a clean nuclear weapon, whatever laser or other power ignition system is used only has to be fired once, so it needs to be less robust than the NIF lasers which are used repeatedly. Similarly, damage done to the system by the explosion is also immaterial for a clean nuclear weapon, in which the weapon is detonated once only! This is exactly the same point which finally occurred during a critical review of the first gun-type assembly nuclear weapon, in which the fact it would only ever be fired once (unlike a field artillery gun) enabled huge reductions in the size of the device, into a practical weapon, as described by General Leslie M. Groves on p163 of his 1962 book Now it can be told: the story of the Manhattan Project:

"Out of the Review Committee's work came one important technical contribution when Rose pointed out ... that the durability of the gun was quite immaterial to success, since it would be destroyed in the explosion anyway. Self-evident as this seemed once it was mentioned, it had not previously occurred to us. Now we could make drastic reductions in ... weight and size."

This principle also applies to weaponizing NIF clean fusion explosion technology. General Groves' book was reprinted in 1982 with a useful Introduction by Edward Teller on the nature of nuclear weapons history: "History in some ways resembles the relativity principle in science. What is observed depends on the observer. Only when the perspective of the observer is known, can proper corrections be made. ... The general ... very often managed to ignore complexity and arrive at a result which, if not ideal, at least worked. ... For Groves, the Manhattan project seemed a minor assignment, less significant than the construction of the Pentagon. He was deeply disappointed at being given the job of supervising the development of an atomic weapon, since it deprived him of combat duty. ... We must find ways to encourage mutual understanding and significant collaboration between those who defend their nation with their lives and those who can contribute the ideas to make that defense successful. Only by such cooperation can we hope that freedom will survive, that peace will be preserved."

General Groves similarly comments in Chapter 31, "A Final Word" of Now it can be told:

"No man can say what would have been the result if we had not taken the steps ... Yet, one thing seems certain - atomic energy would have been developed somewhere in the world ... I do not believe the United States ever would have undertaken it in time of peace. Most probably, the first developer would have been a power-hungry nation, which would then have dominated the world completely ... it is fortunate indeed for humanity that the initiative in this field was gained and kept by the United States. That we were successful was due entirely to the hard work and dedication of the more than 600,000 Americans who comprised and directly supported the Manhattan Project. ... we had the full backing of our government, combined with the nearly infinite potential of American science, engineering and industry, and an almost unlimited supply of people endowed with ingenuity and determination."

Update: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility, NIF, using ultraviolet wavelength laser beam pulses of 2MJ on to a 2mm diameter spherical beryllium shell of frozen D+T inside a 1 cm-long hollow gold cylinder "hohlraum" (which is heated to a temperature where it then re-radiates energy at much higher frequency, x-rays, on to the surface of the beryllium ablator of the central fusion capsule, which ablates causing it to recoil inward (as for the 1962 Ripple II nuclear weapon's secondary stage, the capsule is compressed efficiently, mimicking the isentropic compression mechanism of a miniature Ripple II clean nuclear weapon secondary stage), has now repeatedly achieved nuclear fusion explosions of over 3MJ, equivalent to nearly 1 kg of TNT explosive. According to a Time article (linked her) about fusion system designer Annie Kritcher, the recent breakthrough was in part due to using a ramping input energy waveform: "success that came thanks to tweaks including shifting more of the input energy to the later part of the laser shot", a feature that minimises the rise in entropy due to shock shock wave generation (which heats the capsule, causing it to expand and resist compression) and increases isentropic compression which was the principle used by LLNL's J. H. Nuckolls to achieve the 99.9% clean Ripple II 9.96 megaton nuclear test success in Dominic-Housatonic on 30 October 1962. Nuckolls in 1972 published the equation for the idealized input power waveform required for isentropic, optimized compression of fusion fuel (Nature, v239, p139): P ~ (1 - t)-1.875, where t is time in units of the transit time (the time taken for the shock to travel to the centre of the fusion capsule), and -1.875 a constant based on the specific heat of the ionized fuel (Nuckolls has provided the basic declassified principles, see extract linked here). To be clear, the energy reliably released by the 2mm diameter capsule of fusion fuel was roughly a 1 kg TNT explosion. 80% of this is in the form of 14.1 MeV neutrons (ideal for fissioning lithium-7 in LiD to yield more tritium), and 20% is the kinetic energy of fused nuclei (which is quickly converted into x-rays radiation energy by collisions). Nuckolls' 9.96 megaton Housatonic (10 kt Kinglet primary and 9.95 Mt Ripple II 100% clean isentropically compressed secondary) of 1962 proved that it is possible to use multiplicative staging whereby lower yield primary nuclear explosions trigger off a fusion stage 1,000 times more powerful than its initiator. Another key factor, as shown on our ggraph linked here, is that you can use cheap natural LiD as fuel once you have a successful D+T reaction, because naturally abundant, cheap Li-7 more readily fissions to yield tritium with the 14.1 MeV neutrons from D+T fusion, than expensively enriched Li-6, which is needed to make tritium in nuclear reactors where the fission neutron energy of around 1 MeV is too low to to fission Li-7. It should also be noted that despite an openly published paper about Nuckolls' Ripple II success being stymied in 2021 by Jon Grams, the subject is still being covered up/ignored by the anti-nuclear biased Western media! Grams article fails to contain the design details such as the isentropic power delivery curve etc from Nuckolls' declassified articles that we include in the latest blog post here. One problem regarding "data" causing continuing confusion about the Dominic-Housatonic 30 October 1962 Ripple II test at Christmas Island, is made clear in the DASA-1211 report's declassified summary of the sizes, weights and yields of those tests: Housatonic was Nuckolls' fourth and final isentropic test, with the nuclear system inserted into a heavy steel Mk36 drop case, making the overall size 57.2 inches in diameter, 147.9 long and 7,139.55 lb mass, i.e. 1.4 kt/lb or 3.0 kt/kg yield-to-mass ratio for 9.96 Mt yield, which is not impressive for that yield range until you consider (a) that it was 99.9% fusion and (b) the isentropic design required a heavy holhraum around the large Ripple II fusion secondary stage to confine x-rays for relatively long time during which a slowly rising pulse of x-rays were delivered from the primary to secondary via a very large areas of foam elsewhere in the weapon, to produce isentropic compression.

Additionally, the test was made in a hurry before an atmospheric teat ban treaty, and this rushed use of a standard air drop steel casing made the tested weapon much heavier than a properly weaponized Ripple II. The key point is that a 10 kt fission device set off a ~10 Mt fusion explosion, a very clean deterrent. Applying this Ripple II 1,000-factor multiplicative staging figure directly to this technology for clean nuclear warheads, a 0.5 kg TNT D+T fusion capsule would set off a 0.5 ton TNT 2nd stage of LiD, which would then set off a 0.5 kt 3rd stage "neutron bomb", which could then be used to set off a 500 kt 4th stage or "strategic nuclear weapon". In practice, this multiplication factor of 1,000 given by Ripple II in 1962 from 10 kt to 10 Mt may not be immediately achievable to get from ~1 kg TNT yield to 1 ton TNT, so a few more tiny stages may be needed for the lower yield. But there is every reason to forecast that with enough research, improvements will be possible and the device will become a reality. It is therefore now possible not just in "theory" or in principle, but with evidence obtained from practical experimentation, using suitable already-proved technical staging systems used in 1960s nuclear weapon tests successfully, to design 100% clean fusion nuclear warheads! Yes, the details have been worked out, yes the technology has been tested in piecemeal fashion. All that is now needed is a new, but quicker and cheaper, Star Wars program or Manhattan Project style effort to pull the components together. This will constitute a major leap forward in the credibility of the deterrence of aggressors.

ABOVE: as predicted, the higher the input laser pulse for the D+T initiator of a clean multiplicatively-staged nuclear deterrent, the lower the effect of plasma instabilities and asymmetries and the greater the fusion burn. To get ignition (where the x-ray energy injected into the fusion hohlraum by the laser is less than the energy released in the D+T fusion burn) they have had to use about 2 MJ delivered in 10 ns or so, equivalent to 0.5 kg of TNT equivalent. But for deterrent use, why use such expensive, delicate lasers? Why not just use one-shot miniaturised x-ray tubes with megavolt electron acceleration, powered a suitably ramped pulse from a chemical explosion for magnetic flux compression current generation? At 10% efficiency, you need 0.5 x 10 = 5 kg of TNT! Even at 1% efficiency, 50 kg of TNT will do. Once the D+T gas capsule's hohlraum is well over 1 cm in size, to minimise the risk of imperfections that cause asymmetries, you don't any longer need focussed laser beams to enter tiny apertures. You might even be able to integrate many miniature flash x-ray tubes (each designed to burn out when firing one pulse of a MJ or so) into a special hohlraum. Humanity urgently needs a technological arms race akin to Reagan's Star Wars project, to deter the dictators from invasions and WWIII. In the conference video above, a question was asked about the real efficiency of the enormous repeat-pulse capable laser system's efficiency (not required for a nuclear weapon whose components only require the capability to be used once, unlike lab equipment): the answer is that 300 MJ was required by the lab lasers to fire a 2 MJ pulse into the D+T capsule's x-ray hohlraum, i.e. their lasers are only 0.7% efficient! So why bother? We know - from the practical use of incoherent fission primary stage x-rays to compress and ignite fusion capsules in nuclear weapons - that you simply don't need coherent photons from a laser for this purpose. The sole reason they are approaching the problem with lasers is that they began their lab experiments decades ago with microscopic sized fusion capsules and for those you need a tightly focussed beam to insert energy through a tiny hohlraum aperture. But now they are finally achieving success with much larger fusion capsules (to minimise instabilities that caused the early failures), it may be time to change direction. A whole array of false "no-go theorems" can and will be raised by ignorant charlatan "authorities" against any innovation; this is the nature of the political world. There is some interesting discussion of why clean bombs aren't in existence today, basically the idealized theory (which works fine for big H-bombs but ignores small-scale asymmetry problems which are important only at low ignition energy) understimated the input energy required for fusion ignition by a factor of 2000:

"The early calculations on ICF (inertial-confinement fusion) by John Nuckolls in 1972 had estimated that ICF might be achieved with a driver energy as low as 1 kJ. ... In order to provide reliable experimental data on the minimum energy required for ignition, a series of secret experiments—known as Halite at Livermore and Centurion at Los Alamos—was carried out at the nuclear weapons test site in Nevada between 1978 and 1988. The experiments used small underground nuclear explosions to provide X-rays of sufficiently high intensity to implode ICF capsules, simulating the manner in which they would be compressed in a hohlraum. ... the Halite/Centurion results predicted values for the required laser energy in the range 20 to 100MJ—higher than the predictions ..." - Garry McCracken and Peter Stott, Fusion, Elsevier, 2nd ed., p149.

In the final diagram above, we illustrate an example of what could very well occur in the near future, just to really poke a stick into the wheels of "orthodoxy" in nuclear weapons design: is it possible to just use a lot of (perhaps hardened for higher currents, perhaps no) pulsed current driven microwave tubes from kitchen microwave ovens, channelling their energy using waveguides (simply metal tubes, i.e. electrical Faraday cages, which reflect and thus contain microwaves) into the hohlraum, and make the pusher of dipole molecules (like common salt, NaCl) which is a good absorber of microwaves (as everybody knows from cooking in microwave ovens)? It would be extremely dangerous, not to mention embarrassing, if this worked, but nobody had done any detailed research into the possibility due to groupthink orthodoxy and conventional boxed in thinking! Remember, the D+T capsule just needs extreme compression and this can be done by any means that works. Microwave technology is now very well-established. It's no good trying to keep anything of this sort "secret" (either officially or unofficially) since as history shows, dictatorships are the places where "crackpot"-sounding ideas (such as douple-primary Project "49" Russian thermonuclear weapon designs, Russian Sputnik satellites, Russian Novichok nerve agent, Nazi V1 cruise missiles, Nazi V2 IRBM's, etc.) can be given priority by loony dictators. We have to avoid, as Edward Teller put it (in his secret commentary debunking Bethe's false history of the H-bomb, written AFTER the Teller-Ulam breakthrough), "too-narrow" thinking (which Teller said was still in force on H-bomb design even then). Fashionable hardened orthodoxy is the soft underbelly of "democracy" (a dictatorship by the majority, which is always too focussed on fashionable ideas and dismissive of alternative approaches in science and technology). Dictatorships (minorities against majorities) have repeatedly demonstrated a lack of concern for the fake "no-go theorems" used by Western anti-nuclear "authorities" to ban anything but fashionable groupthink science.

ABOVE: 1944-dated film of the Head of the British Mission to Los Alamos, neutron discoverer James Chadwick, explaining in detail to American how hard it was for him to discover the neutron, taking 10 years on a shoe-string budget, mostly due to having insufficiently strong sources of alpha particles to bombard nuclei in a cloud chamber! The idea of the neutron came from his colleague Rutherford. Chadwick reads his explanation while rapidly rotating a pencil in his right hand, perhaps indicating the stress he was under in 1944. In 1946, when British participation at Los Alamos ended, Chadwick wrote the first detailed secret British report on the design of a three-stage hydrogen bomb, another project that took over a decade. In the diagram below, it appears that the American Mk17 only had a single secondary stage like the similar yield 1952 Mike design. The point here is that popular misunderstanding of the simple mechanism of x-ray energy transfer for higher yield weapons may be creating a dogmatic attitude even in secret nuclear weaponeer design labs, where orthodoxy is followed too rigorously. The Russians (see quotes on the latest blog post here) state they used two entire two-stage thermonuclear weapons with a combined yield of 1 megaton to set off their 50 megaton test in 1961. If true, you can indeed use two-stage hydrogen bombs as an "effective primary" to set off another secondary stage, of much higher yield. Can this be reversed in the sense of scaling it down so you have several bombs-within-bombs, all triggered by a really tiny first stage? In other words, can it be applied to neutron bomb design?

ABOVE: 16 kt at 600m altitude nuclear explosion on a city, Hiroshima ground zero (in foreground) showing modern concrete buildings surviving nearby (unlike the wooden ones that mostly burned at the peak of the firestorm 2-3 hours after survivors had evacuated), in which people were shielded from most of the radiation and blast winds, as they were in simple shelters.

The 1946 Report of the British Mission to Japan, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compiled by a team of 16 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during November 1945, which included 10 UK Home Office civil defence experts (W. N. Thomas, J. Bronowski, D. C. Burn, J. B. Hawker, H. Elder, P. A. Badland, R. W. Bevan, F. H. Pavry, F. Walley, O. C. Young, S. Parthasarathy, A. D. Evans, O. M. Solandt, A. E. Dark, R. G. Whitehead and F. G. S. Mitchell) found: "Para. 26. Reinforced concrete buildings of very heavy construction in Hiroshima, even when within 200 yards of the centre of damage, remained structurally undamaged. ... Para 28. These observations make it plain that reinforced concrete framed buildings can resist a bomb of the same power detonated at these heights, without employing fantastic thicknesses of concrete. ... Para 40. The provision of air raid shelters throughout Japan was much below European standards. ... in Hiroshima ... they were semi-sunk, about 20 feet long, had wooden frames, and 1.5-2 feet of earth cover. ... Exploding so high above them, the bomb damaged none of these shelters. ... Para 42. These observations show that the standard British shelters would have performed well against a bomb of the same power exploded at such a height. Anderson shelters, properly erected and covered, would have given protection. Brick or concrete surfac shelters with adequate reinforcement would have remained safe from collapse. The Morrison shelter is designed only to protect its occupants from the refuge load of a house, and this it would have done. Deep shelters such as the refuge provided by the London Underground would have given complete protection. ... Para 60. Buildings and walls gave complete protection from flashburn."

Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons in Table 12.21 on p547 flunks making this point by giving data without citing its source to make it credible to readers: it correlated 14% mortality (106 killed out of 775 people in Hiroshima's Telegraph Office) to "moderate damage" at 500m in Hiroshima (the uncited "secret" source was NP-3041, Table 12, applying to unwarned people inside modern concrete buildings).

"A weapon whose basic design would seem to provide the essence of what Western morality has long sought for waging classical battlefield warfare - to keep the war to a struggle between the warriors and exclude the non-combatants and their physical assets - has been violently denounced, precisely because it achieves this objective." - Samuel T. Cohen (quoted in Chapman Pincher, The secret offensive, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1985, Chapter 15: The Neutron Bomb Offensive, p210).

The reality is, dedicated enhanced neutron tactical nuclear weapons were used to credibly deter the concentrations of force required for triggering of WWIII during the 1st Cold War, and the thugs who support Russian propaganda for Western disarmament got rid of them on our side, but not on the Russian side. Air burst neutron bombs or even as subsurface earth penetrators of relatively low fission yield (where the soil converts energy that would otherwise escape as blast and radiation into ground shock for destroying buried tunnels - new research on cratering shows that a 20 kt subsurface burst creates similar effects on buried hard targets as a 1 Mt surface burst), they cause none of the vast collateral damage to civilians that we see now in Ukraine and Gaza, or that we saw in WWII and the wars in Korea and Vietnam. This is 100% contrary to CND propaganda which is a mixture of lying on nuclear explosion collateral damage, escalation/knockout blow propaganda (of the type used to start WWII by appeasers) and lying on the designs of nuclear weapons in order to ensure the Western side (but not the thugs) gets only incredible "strategic deterrence" that can't deter the invasions that start world wars (e.g. Belgium in 1914 and Poland in 1939.) "Our country entered into an agreement in Budapest, Hungary when the Soviet Union was breaking up that we would guarantee the independence of Ukraine." - Tom Ramos. There really is phoney nuclear groupthink left agenda politics at work here: credible relatively clean tactical nuclear weapons are banned in the West but stocked by Russia, which has civil defense shelters to make its threats far more credible than ours! We need low-collateral damage enhanced-neutron and earth-penetrator options for the new Western W93 warhead, or we remain vulnerable to aggressive coercion by thugs, and invite invasions. Ambiguity, the current policy ("justifying" secrecy on just what we would do in any scenario) actually encourages experimental provocations by enemies to test what we are prepared to do (if anything), just as it did in 1914 and the 1930s.

ABOVE: 0.2 kt (tactical yield range) Ruth nuclear test debris, with lower 200 feet of the 300 ft steel tower surviving in Nevada, 1953. Note that the yield of the tactical invasion-deterrent Mk54 Davy Crockett was only 0.02 kt, 10 times less than than 0.2 kt Ruth.

It should be noted that cheap and naive "alternatives" to credible deterrence of war were tried in the 1930s and during the Cold War and afterwards, with disastrous consequences. Heavy "peaceful" oil sanctions and other embargoes against Japan for its invasion of China between 1931-7 resulted in the plan for the Pearl Harbor surprise attack of 7 December 1941, with subsequent escalation to incendiary city bombing followed nuclear warfare against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Attlee's pressure on Truman to guarantee no use of tactical nuclear weapons in the Korean War (leaked straight to Stalin by the Cambridge Spy Ring), led to an escalation of that war causing the total devastation of the cities of that country by conventional bombing (a sight witnessed by Sam Cohen, that motivated his neutron bomb deterrent of invasions), until Eisenhower was elected and reversed Truman's decision, leading not to the "escalatory Armageddon" assertions of Attlee, but to instead to a peaceful armistice! Similarly, as Tom Ramos argues in From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Kennedy's advisers who convinced him to go ahead with the moonlit 17 April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba without any USAF air support, which led to precisely what they claimed they would avoid: an escalation of aggression from Russia in Berlin, with the Berlin Wall going up on 17 August 1961 because any showing weakness to an enemy, as in the bungled invasion of Cuba, is always a green light to dictators to go ahead with revolutions, invasions and provocations everywhere else. Rather than the widely hyped autistic claims from disarmers and appeasers about "weakness bringing peace by demonstrating to the enemy that they have nothing to fear from you", the opposite result always occurs. The paranoid dictator seizes the opportunity to strike first. Similarly, withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021 was a clear green light to Russia to go ahead with a full scale invasion of Ukraine, reigniting the Cold War. von Neumann and Morgenstein's Minimax theorem for winning games - minimise the maximum possible loss - fails with offensive action in war because it sends a signal of weakness to the enemy, which does not treat war as a game with rules to be obeyed. Minimax is only valid for defense, such as civil defense shelters used by Russia to make their threats more credible than ours. The sad truth is that cheap fixes don't work, no matter how much propaganda is behind them. You either need to militarily defeat the enemy or at least economically defeat them using proven Cold War arms race techniques (not merely ineffective sanctions, which they can bypass by making alliances with Iran, North Korea, and China). Otherwise, you are negotiating peace from a position of weakness, which is called appeasement, or collaboration with terrorism.

"Following the war, the Navy Department was intent to see the effects of an atomic blast on naval warships ... the press was invited to witness this one [Crossroads-Able, 23.5 kt at 520 feet altitude, 1 July 1946, Bikini Atoll]. ... The buildup had been too extravagant. Goats that had been tethered on warship decks were still munching their feed, and the atoll's palm trees remained standing, unscathed. The Bikini test changed public attitudes. Before July 1, the world stood in awe of a weapon that had devastated two cities and forced the Japanese Empire to surrender. After that date, the bomb was still a terrible weapon, but a limited one." - Tom Ramos (LLNL nuclear weaponeer and nuclear pumped X-ray laser developer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Prevent Nuclear War, Naval Institute Press, 2022, pp43-4.

ABOVE: 16 February 1950 Daily Express editorial on H Bomb problem due to the fact that the UN is another virtue signalling but really war mongering League of Nations (which oversaw Nazi appeasement and the outbreak of WWII); however Fuchs had attended the April 1946 Super Conference during which the Russian version of the H-bomb involving isentropic radiation implosion of a separate low-density fusion stage (unlike Teller's later dense metal ablation rocket implosion secondary TX14 Alarm Clock and Sausage designs) were discussed and then given to Russia. The media was made aware only that Fuchs hade given the fission bomb to Russia. The FBI later visited Fuchs in British jail, showed him a film of Harry Gold (whom Fuchs identified as his contact while at Los Alamos) and also gave Fuchs a long list of secret reports to mark off individually so that they knew precisely what Stalin had been given. Truman didn't order H-bomb research and development because Fuchs gave Stalin the A-bomb, but because he gave them the H-bomb. The details of the Russian H-bomb are still being covered up by those who want a repetition of 1930s appeasement, or indeed the deliberate ambiguity of the UK Cabinet in 1914 which made it unclear what the UK would do if Germany invaded Belgium, allowing the enemy to exploit that ambiguity, starting a world war. The key fact usually covered up (Richard Rhodes, Chuck Hansen, and the whole American "expert nuclear arms community" all misleadingly claim that Teller's Sausage H-bomb design with a single primary and a dense ablator around a cylindrical secondary stage - uranium, lead or tungsten - is the "hydrogen bomb design") here is that two attendees of the April 1946 Super Conference, the report author Egon Bretscher and the radiation implosion discoverer Klaus Fuchs - were British, and both contributed key H-bomb design principles to the Russian and British weapons (discarded for years by America). Egon Bretscher for example wrote up the Super Conference report, during which attendees suggested various ways to try to achieve isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel (a concept discarded by Teller's 1951 Sausage design, but used by Russia and re-developed in America on Nuckolls 1962 Ripple tests), and after Teller left Los Alamos, Bretscher took over work on Teller's Alarm Clock layered fission-fusion spherical hybrid device before Bretscher himself left Los Alamos and became head of nuclear physics at Harwell, UK,, submitting UK report together with Fuchs (head of theoretical physics at Harwell) which led to Sir James Chadwick's UK paper on a three-stage thermonuclear Super bomb which formed the basis of Penney's work at the UK Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. While Bretscher had worked on Teller's hybrid Alarm Clock (which originated two months after Fuchs left Los Alamos), Fuchs co-authored a hydrogen bomb patent with John von Neumann, in which radiation implosion and ionization implosion was used. Between them, Bretscher and Fuchs had all the key ingredients. Fuchs leaked them to Russia and the problem persists today in international relations.

ILLUSTRATION: the threat of WWII and the need to deter it was massively derided by popular pacifism which tended to make "jokes" of the Nazi threat until too late (example of 1938 UK fiction on this above; Charlie Chaplin's film "The Great Dictator" is another example), so three years after the Nuremberg Laws and five years after illegal rearmament was begun by the Nazis, in the UK crowds of "pacifists" in Downing Street, London, support friendship with the top racist, dictatorial Nazis in the name of "world peace". The Prime Minister used underhand techniques to try to undermine appeasement critics like Churchill and also later to get W. E. Johns fired from both editorships of Flying (weekly) and Popular Flying (monthly) to make it appear everybody "in the know" agreed with his actions, hence the contrived "popular support" for collaborating with terrorists depicted in these photos. The same thing persists today; the 1920s and 1930s "pacifist" was also driven by "escalation" and "annihilation" claims explosions, fire and WMD poison gas will kill everybody in a "knockout blow", immediately any war breaks out.

Update (4 January 2024): on the important world crisis, https://vixra.org/abs/2312.0155 gives a detailed review of "Britain and the H-bomb" (linked here), and why the "nuclear deterrence issue" isn't about "whether we should deter evil", but precisely what design of nuclear warhead we should have in order to do that cheaply, credibly, safely, and efficiently without guaranteeing either escalation or the failure of deterrence. When we disarmed our chemical and biological weapons, it was claimed that the West could easily deter those weapons using strategic nuclear weapons to bomb Moscow (which has shelters, unlike us). That failed when Putin used sarin and chlorine to prop up Assad in Syria, and Novichok in the UK to kill Dawn Sturgess in 2018. So it's just not a credible deterrent to say you will bomb Moscow if Putin invades Europe or uses his 2000 tactical nuclear weapons. An even more advanced deterrent, the 100% clean very low yield (or any yield) multiplicative staged design without any fissile material whatsoever, just around the corner. Clean secondary stages have been proof-tested successfully for example in the 100% clean Los Alamos Redwing Navajo secondary, and the 100% clean Ripple II secondary tested 30 October 1962, and the laser ignition of very tiny fusion capsules to yield more energy than supplied has been done on 5 December 2022 when a NIF test delivered 2.05 MJ (the energy of about 0.5 kg of TNT) to a fusion capsule which yielded 3.15 MJ, so all that is needed is to combine both ideas in a system whereby suitably sized second stages - ignited in the first place by a capacitative charged circuit sending a pulse of energy to a suitable laser system (the schematic shown is just a sketch of principle - more than one laser would possibly be required for reliability of fusion ignition) acting on tiny fusion capsule as shown - are encased to two-stage "effective primaries" which each become effective primaries of bigger systems, thus a geometric series of multiplicative staging until the desired yield is reached. Note that the actual tiny first T+D capsule can be compressed by one-shot lasers - compact lasers used way beyond their traditional upper power limit and burned out in a firing a single pulse - in the same way the gun assembly of the Hiroshima bomb was based on a one-shot gun. In other words, forget all about textbook gun design. The Hiroshima bomb gun assembly system only had to be fired once, unlike a field artillery piece which has to be ready to be fired many thousands of times (before metal fatigue/cracks set in). Thus, by analogy, the lasers - which can be powered by ramping current pulses from magnetic flux compressor systems - for use in a clean bomb will be much smaller and lighter than current lab gear which is designed to be used thousands of times in repeated experiments. The diagram below shows cylindrical Li6D stages throughout for a compact bomb shape, but spherical stages can be used, and once a few stages get fired, the flux of 14 MeV neutrons is sufficient to go to cheap natural LiD. To fit it into a MIRV warhead, the low density of LiD constrains such a clean warhead will have a low nuclear yield, which means a tactical neutron deterrent of the invasions that cause big wars; a conversion of incredible strategic deterrence into a more credible combined strategic-tactical deterrent of major provocations, not just direct attacks. It should also be noted that in 1944 von Neumann suggested that T + D inside the core of the fission weapon would be compressed by "ionization compression" during fission (where a higher density ionized plasma compresses a lower density ionized plasma, i.e. the D + T plasma), an idea that was - years later - named the Internal Booster principle by Teller; see Frank Close, "Trinity", Allen Lane, London, 2019, pp158-159 where Close argues that during the April 1946 Superbomb Conference, Fuchs extended von Neumann's 1944 internal fusion boosting idea to an external D + T filled BeO walled capsule:

"Fuchs reasoned that [the very low energy, 1-10 kev, approximately 10-100 lower energy than medical] x-rays from the [physically separated] uranium explosion would reach the tamper of beryllium oxide, heat it, ionize the constituents and cause them to implode - the 'ionization implosion' concept of von Neumann but now applied to deuterium and tritium contained within beryllium oxide. To keep the radiation inside the tamper, Fuchs proposed to enclose the device inside a casing impervious to radiation. The implosion induced by the radiation would amplify the compression ... and increase the chance of the fusion bomb igniting. The key here is 'separation of the atomic charge and thermonuclear fuel, and compression of the latter by radiation travelling from the former', which constitutes 'radiation implosion'." (This distinction between von Neumann's "ionization implosion" INSIDE the tamper, of denser tamper expanding and thus compressing lower density fusion fuel inside, and Fuchs' OUTSIDE capsule "radiation implosion", is key even today for isentropic H-bomb design; it seems Teller's key breakthroughs were not separate stages or implosion but rather radiation mirrors and ablative recoil shock compression, where radiation is used to ablate a dense pusher of Sausage designs like Mike in 1952 etc., a distinction not to be confused for the 1944 von Neumann and 1946 Fuchs implosion mechanisms!

It appears Russian H-bombs used von Neumann's "ionization implosion" and Fuchs's "radiation implosion" for RDS-37 on 22 November 1955 and also in their double-primary 23 February 1958 test and subsequently, where their fusion capsules reportedly contained a BeO or other low-density outer coating, which would lead to quasi-isentropic compression, more effective for low density secondary stages than purely ablative recoil shock compression. This accounts for the continuing classification of the April 1946 Superbomb Conference (the extract of 32 pages linked here is so severely redacted that it is less helpful than the brief but very lucid summary of its technical content, in the declassified FBI compilation of reports concerning data Klaus Fuchs sent to Stalin, linked here!). Teller had all the knowledge he needed in 1946, but didn't go ahead because he made the stupid error of killing progress off by his own "no-go theorem" against compression of fusion fuel. Teller did a "theoretical" calculation in which he claimed that compression has no effect on the amount of fusion burn because the compressed system is simply scaled down in size so that the same efficiency of fusion burn occurs, albeit faster, and then stops as the fuel thermally expands. This was wrong. Teller discusses the reason for his great error in technical detail during his tape-recorded interview by Chuck Hansen at Los Alamos on 7 June 1993 (C. Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, 2nd ed., pp. II-176-7):

"Now every one of these [fusion] processes varied with the square of density. If you compress the thing, then in one unit's volume, each of the 3 important processes increased by the same factor ... Therefore, compression (seemed to be) useless. Now when ... it seemed clear that we were in trouble, then I wanted very badly to find a way out. And it occurred to be than an unprecedentedly strong compression will just not allow much energy to go into radiation. Therefore, something had to be wrong with my argument and then, you know, within minutes, I knew what must be wrong ... [energy] emission occurs when an electron and a nucleus collide. Absorption does not occur when a light quantum and a nucleus ... or ... electron collide; it occurs when a light quantum finds an electron and a nucleus together ... it does not go with the square of the density, it goes with the cube of the density." (This very costly theoretical error, wasting five years 1946-51, could have been resolved by experimental nuclear testing. There is always a risk of this in theoretical physics, which is why experiments are done to check calculations before prizes are handed out. The ban on nuclear testing is a luddite opposition to technological progress in improving deterrence.)

(This 1946-51 theoretical "no-go theorem" anti-compression error of Teller's, which was contrary to the suggestion of compression at the April 1946 superbomb conference as Teller himself refers to on 14 August 1952, and which was corrected only by comparison of the facts about compression validity in pure fission cores in Feb '51 after Ulam's argument that month for fission core compression by lens focussed primary stage shock waves, did not merely lead to Teller's dismissal of vital compression ideas. It also led to his false equations - exaggerating the cooling effect of radiation emission - causing underestimates of fusion efficiency in all theoretical calculations done of fusion until 1951! For this reason, Teller later repudiated the calculations that allegedly showed his Superbomb would fizzle; he argued that if it had been tested in 1946, the detailed data obtained - regardless of whatever happened - would have at least tested the theory which would have led to rapid progress, because the theory was wrong. The entire basis of the cooling of fusion fuel by radiation leaking out was massively exaggerated until Lawrence Livermore weaponeer John Nuckolls showed that there is a very simple solution: use baffle re-radiated, softened x-rays for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel, e.g. very cold 0.3 kev x-rays rather than the usual 1-10 kev cold-warm x-rays emitted directly from the fission primary. Since the radiation losses are proportional to the fourth-power of the x-ray energy or temperature, losses are virtually eliminated, allowing very efficient staging as for Nuckolls' 99.9% 10 Mt clean Ripple II, detonated on 30 October 1962 at Christmas Island. Teller's classical Superbomb was actually analyzed by John C. Solem in a 15 December 1978 report, A modern analysis of Classical Super, LA-07615, according to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by mainstream historian Alex Wellerstein, FOIA 17-00131-H, 12 June 2017; according to a list of FOIA requests at https://www.governmentattic.org/46docs/NNSAfoiaLogs_2016-2020.pdf. However, a google search for the documents Dr Wellerstein requested shows only a few at the US Gov DOE Opennet OSTI database or otherwise online yet e.g. LA-643 by Teller, On the development of Thermonuclear Bombs dated 16 Feb. 1950. The page linked here stating that report was "never classified" is mistaken! One oddity about Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" is that the even if fusion rates were independent of density, you would still want compression of fissile material in a secondary stage such as a radiation imploded Alarm Clock, because the whole basis of implosion fission bombs is the benefit of compression; another issue is that even if fusion rates are unaffected by density, inward compression would still help to delay the expansion of the fusion system which leads to cooling and quenching of the fusion burn.)

ABOVE: the FBI file on Klaus Fuchs contains a brief summary of the secret April 1946 Super Conference at Los Alamos which Fuchs attended, noting that compression of fusion fuel was discussed by Lansdorf during the morning session on 19 April, attended by Fuchs, and that: "Suggestions were made by various people in attendance as to the manner of minimizing the rise in entropy during compression." This fact is vitally interesting, since it proves that an effort was being made then to secure isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel in April 1946, sixteen years before John H. Nuckolls tested the isentropically compressed Ripple II device on 30 October 1962, giving a 99.9% clean 10 megaton real H-bomb! So the Russians were given a massive head start on this isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel for hydrogen bombs, used (according to Trutnev) in both the single primary tests like RDS-37 in November 1955 and also in the double-primary designs which were 2.5 times more efficient on a yield-to-mass basis, tested first on 23 February 1958! According to the FBI report, the key documents Fuchs gave to Russia were LA-551, Prima facie proof of the feasibility of the Super, 15 Apr 1946 and the LA-575 Report of conference on the Super, 12 June 1946. Fuchs also handed over to Russia his own secret Los Alamos reports, such as LA-325, Initiator Theory, III. Jet Formation by the Collision of Two Surfaces, 11 July 1945, Jet Formation in Cylindrical lmplosion with 16 Detonation Points, Secret, 6 February 1945, and Theory of Initiators II, Melon Seed, Secret, 6 January 1945. Note the reference to Bretscher attending the Super Conference with Fuchs; Teller in a classified 50th anniversary conference at Los Alamos on the H-bomb claimed that after he (Teller) left Los Alamos for Chicago Uni in 1946, Bretscher continued work on Teller's 31 August 1946 "Alarm Clock" nuclear weapon (precursor of the Mike sausage concept etc) at Los Alamos; it was this layered uranium and fusion fuel "Alarm Clock" concept which led to the departure of Russian H-bomb design from American H-bomb design, simply because Fuchs left Los Alamos in June 1946, well before Teller invented the Alarm Clock concept on 31 August 1946 (Teller remembered the date precisely simply because he invented the Alarm Clock on the day his daughter was born, 31 August 1946! Teller and Richtmyer also developed a variant called "Swiss Cheese", with small pockets or bubbles of expensive fusion fuels, dispersed throughout cheaper fuel, in order to kinder a more cost-effective thermonuclear reaction; this later inspired the fission and fusion boosted "spark plug" ideas in later Sausage designs; e.g. security cleared Los Alamos historian Anne Fitzpatrick stated during her 4 March 1997 interview with Robert Richtmyer, who co-invented the Alarm Clock with Teller, that the Alarm Clock evolved into the spherical secondary stage of the 6.9 megaton Castle-Union TX-14 nuclear weapon!).

In fact (see Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear warhead designer Nuckolls' explanation in report UCRL-74345): "The rates of burn, energy deposition by charged reaction products, and electron-ion heating are proportional to the density, and the inertial confinement time is proportional to the radius. ... The burn efficiency is proportional to the product of the burn rate and the inertial confinement time ...", i.e. the fusion burn rate is directly proportional to the fuel density, which in turn is of course inversely proportional to the cube of its radius. But the inertial confinement time for fusion to occur is proportional to the radius, so the fusion stage efficiency in a nuclear weapon is the product of the burn rate (i.e., 1/radius^3) and time (i.e., radius), so efficiency ~ radius/(radius^3) ~ 1/radius^2. Therefore, for a given fuel temperature, the total fusion burn, or the efficiency of the fusion stage, is inversely proportional to the square of the compressed radius of the fuel! (Those condemning Teller's theoretical errors or "arrogance" should be aware that he pushed hard all the time for experimental nuclear tests of his ideas, to check if they were correct, exactly the right thing to do scientifically and others who read his papers had the opportunity to point out any theoretical errors, but was rebuffed by those in power, who used a series of contrived arguments to deny progress, based upon what Harry would call "subconscious bias", if not arrogant, damning, overt bigotry against the kind of credible, overwhelming deterrence which had proved lacking a decade earlier, leading to WWII. This callousness towards human suffering in war and under dictatorship existed in some UK physicists too: Joseph Rotblat's hatred of anything to deter Russia be it civil defense or tactical neutron bombs of the West - he had no problem smiling and patting Russia's neutron bomb when visiting their labs during cosy groupthink deluded Pugwash campaigns for Russian-style "peaceful collaboration" - came from deep family communist convictions, since his brother was serving in the Red Army in 1944 when he alleged he heard General Groves declare that the bomb must deter Russia! Rotblat stated he left Los Alamos as a result. The actions of these groups are analogous to the "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" in the 1930s. After Truman ordered a H-bomb, Bradbury at Los Alamos had to start a "Family Committee" because Teller had a whole "family" of H-bomb designs, ranging from the biggest, "Daddy", through various "Alarm Clocks", all the way down to small internally-boosted fission tactical weapons. From Teller's perspective, he wasn't putting all eggs in one basket.)

Above: declassified illustration from a January 1949 secret report by the popular physics author and Los Alamos nuclear weapons design consultant George Gamow, showing his suggestion of using x-rays from both sides of a cylindrically imploded fission device to expose two fusion capsules to x-rays to test whether compression (fusion in BeO box on right side) helps, or is unnecessary (capsule on left side). Neutron counters detect 14.1 Mev T+D neutrons using time-of-flight method (higher energy neutrons traver faster than ~1 Mev fission stage neutrons, arriving at detectors first, allowing discrimination of the neutron energy spectrum by time of arrival). It took over two years to actually fire this 225 kt shot (8 May 1951)! No wonder Teller was outraged. A few interesting reports by Teller and also Oppenheimer's secret 1949 report opposing the H bomb project as it then stood on the grounds of low damage per dollar - precisely the exact opposite of the "interpretation" the media and gormless fools will assert until the cows come home - are linked here. The most interesting is Teller's 14 August 1952 Top Secret paper debunking Hans Bethe's propaganda, by explaining that contrary to Bethe's claims, Stalin's spy Klaus Fuch had the key "radiation implosion"- see second para on p2 - secret of the H-bomb because he attended the April 1946 Superbomb Conference which was not even attended by Bethe!  It was this very fact in April 1946, noted by two British attendees of the 1946 Superbomb Conference before collaboration was ended later in the year by the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, statement that led to Sir James Cladwick's secret use of "radiation implosion" for stages 2 and 3 of his triple staged H-bomb report the next month, "The Superbomb", a still secret document that inspired Penney's original Tom/Dick/Harry staged and radiation imploded H-bomb thinking, which is summarized by security cleared official historian Arnold's Britain and the H-Bomb.  Teller's 24 March 1951 letter to Los Alamos director Bradbury was written just 15 days after his historic Teller-Ulam 9 March 1951 report on radiation coupling and "radiation mirrors" (i.e. plastic casing lining to re-radiate soft x-rays on to the thermonuclear stage to ablate and thus compress it), and states: "Among the tests which seem to be of importance at the present time are those concerned with boosted weapons. Another is connected vith the possibility of a heterocatalytic explosion, that is, implosion of a bomb using the energy from another, auxiliary bomb. A third concerns itself with tests on mixing during atomic explosions, which question is of particular importance in connection with the Alarm Clock."

There is more to Fuchs' influence on the UK H-bomb than I go into that paper; Chapman Pincher alleged that Fuchs was treated with special leniency at his trial and later he was given early release in 1959 because of his contributions and help with the UK H-bomb as author of the key Fuchs-von Neumann x-ray compression mechanism patent. For example, Penney visited Fuchs in June 1952 in Stafford Prison; see pp309-310 of Frank Close's 2019 book "Trinity". Close argues that Fuchs gave Penney a vital tutorial on the H-bomb mechanism during that prison visit. That wasn't the last help, either, since the UK Controller for Atomic Energy Sir Freddie Morgan wrote Penney on 9 February 1953 that Fuchs was continuing to help. Another gem: Close gives, on p396, the story of how the FBI became suspicious of Edward Teller, after finding a man of his name teaching at the NY Communist Workers School in 1941 - the wrong Edward Teller, of course - yet Teller's wife was indeed a member of the Communist-front "League of women shoppers" in Washington, DC.

Chapman Pincher, who attended the Fuchs trial, writes about Fuchs hydrogen bomb lectures to prisoners in chapter 19 of his 2014 autobiography, Dangerous to know (Biteback, London, pp217-8): "... Donald Hume ... in prison had become a close friend of Fuchs ... Hume had repaid Fuchs' friendship by organising the smuggling in of new scientific books ... Hume had a mass of notes ... I secured Fuchs's copious notes for a course of 17 lectures ... including how the H-bomb works, which he had given to his fellow prisoners ... My editor agreed to buy Hume's story so long as we could keep the papers as proof of its authenticity ... Fuchs was soon due for release ..."

Chapman Pincher wrote about this as the front page exclusive of the 11 June 1952 Daily Express, "Fuchs: New Sensation", the very month Penney visited Fuchs in prison to receive his H-bomb tutorial! UK media insisted this was evidence that UK security still wasn't really serious about deterring further nuclear spies, and the revelations finally culminated in the allegations that the MI5 chief 1956-65 Roger Hollis was a Russian fellow-traveller (Hollis was descended from Peter the Great, according to his elder brother Chris Hollis' 1958 book Along the Road to Frome) and GRU agent of influence, codenamed "Elli". Pincher's 2014 book, written aged 100, explains that former MI5 agent Peter Wright suspected Hollis was Elli after evidence collected by MI6 agent Stephen de Mowbray was reported to the Cabinet Secretary. Hollis is alleged to have deliberately fiddled his report of interviewing GRU defector Igor Gouzenko on 21 November 1945 in Canada. Gouzenko had exposed the spy and Groucho Marx lookalike Dr Alan Nunn May (photo below), and also a GRU spy in MI5 codenamed Elli, who used only duboks (dead letter boxes), but Gouzenko told Pincher that when Hollis interviewed him in 1945 he wrote up a lengthy false report claiming to discredit many statements by Gouzenko: "I could not understand how Hollis had written so much when he had asked me so little. The report was full of nonsense and lies. As [MI5 agent Patrick] Stewart read the report to me [during the 1972 investigation of Hollis], it became clear that it had been faked to destroy my credibility so that my information about the spy in MI5 called Elli could be ignored. I suspect that Hollis was Elli." (Source: Pincher, 2014, p320.) Christopher Andrew claimed Hollis couldn't have been GRU spy Elli because KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky suggested it was the KGB spy Leo Long (sub-agent of KGB spy Anthony Blunt). However, Gouzenko was GRU, not KGB like Long and Gordievsky! Gordievsky's claim that "Elli" was on the cover of Long's KGB file was debunked by KGB officer Oleg Tsarev, who found that Long's codename was actually Ralph! Another declassified Russian document, from General V. Merkulov to Stalin dated 24 Nov 1945, confirmed Elli was a GRU agent inside british intelligence, whose existence was betrayed by Gouzenko. In Chapter 30 of Dangerous to Know, Pincher related how he was given a Russian suitcase sized microfilm enlarger by 1959 Hollis spying eyewitness Michael J. Butt, doorman for secret communist meetings in London. According to Butt, Hollis delivered documents to Brigitte Kuczynski, younger sister of Klaus Fuchs' original handler, the notorious Sonia aka Ursula. Hollis allegedly provided Minox films to Brigitte discretely when walking through Hyde Park at 8pm after work. Brigitte gave her Russian made Minox film enlarger to Butt to dispose of, but he kept it in his loft as evidence. (Pincher later donated it to King's College.) Other more circumstantial evidence is that Hollis recruited the spy Philby, Hollis secured spy Blunt immunity from prosecution, Hollis cleared Fuchs in 1943, and MI5 allegedly destroyed Hollis' 1945 interrogation report on Gouzenko, to prevent the airing of the scandal that it was fake after checking it with Gouzenko in 1972.

It should be noted that the very small number of Russian GRU illegal agents in the UK and the very small communist party membership had a relatively large influence on nuclear policy via infiltration of unions which had block votes in the Labour Party, as well the indirect CND and "peace movement" lobbies saturating the popular press with anti-civil defence propaganda to make the nuclear deterrent totally incredible for any provocation short of a direct all-out countervalue attack. Under such pressure, UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson's government abolished the UK Civil Defence Corps, making the UK nuclear deterrent totally incredible against major provocations, in March 1968. While there was some opposition to Wilson, it was focussed on his profligate nationalisation policies which were undermining the economy and thus destabilizing military expenditure for national security. Peter Wright’s 1987 book Spycatcher and various other sources, including Daily Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp's book Walking on Water, documented that on 8 May 1968, the Bank of England's director Cecil King, who was also Chairman of Daily Mirror newspapers, Mirror editor Cudlipp and the UK Ministry of Defence's anti-nuclear Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Solly Zuckerman, met at Lord Mountbatten's house in Kinnerton Street, London, to discuss a coup e'tat to overthrow Wilson and make Mountbatten the UK President, a new position. King's position, according to Cudlipp - quite correctly as revealed by the UK economic crises of the 1970s when the UK was effectively bankrupt - was that Wilson was setting the UK on the road to financial ruin and thus military decay. Zuckerman and Mountbatten refused to take part in a revolution, however Wilson's government was attacked by the Daily Mirror in a front page editorial by Cecil King two days later, on 10 May 1968, headlined "Enough is enough ... Mr Wilson and his Government have lost all credibility, all authority." According to Wilson's secretary Lady Falkender, Wilson was only told of the coup discussions in March 1976.

CND and the UK communist party alternatively tried to claim, in a contradictory way, that they were (a) too small in numbers to have any influence on politics, and (b) they were leading the country towards utopia via unilateral nuclear disarmament saturation propaganda about nuclear weapons annihilation (totally ignoring essential data on different nuclear weapon designs, yields, heights of burst, the "use" of a weapon as a deterrent to PREVENT an invasion of concentrated force, etc.) via the infiltrated BBC and most other media. Critics pointed out that Nazi Party membership in Germany was only 5% when Hitler became dictator in 1933, while in Russia there were only 200,000 Bolsheviks in September 1917, out of 125 million, i.e. 0.16%. Therefore, the whole threat of such dictatorships is a minority seizing power beyond it justifiable numbers, and controlling a majority which has different views. Traditional democracy itself is a dictatorship of the majority (via the ballot box, a popularity contest); minority-dictatorship by contrast is a dictatorship by the fanatically motivated minority by force and fear (coercion) to control the majority. The coercion tactics used by foreign dictators to control the press in free countries are well documented, but never publicised widely. Hitler put pressure on Nazi-critics in the UK "free press" via UK Government appeasers Halifax, Chamberlain and particularly the loathsome UK ambassador to Nazi Germany, Sir Neville Henderson, for example trying to censor or ridicule appeasement critics David Low, to fire Captain W. E. Johns (editor of both Flying and Popular Flying, which had huge circulations and attacked appeasement as a threat to national security in order to reduce rearmament expenditure), and to try to get Winston Churchill deselected. These were all sneaky "back door" pressure-on-publishers tactics, dressed up as efforts to "ease international tensions"! The same occurred during the Cold War, with personal attacks in Scientific American and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and by fellow travellers on Herman Kahn, Eugene Wigner, and others who warned we need civil defence to make a deterrent of large provocations credible in the eyes of an aggressor.

Chapman Pincher summarises the vast hypocritical Russian expenditure on anti-Western propaganda against the neutron bomb in Chapter 15, "The Neutron Bomb Offensive" of his 1985 book The Secret Offensive: "Such a device ... carries three major advantages over Hiroshima-type weapons, particularly for civilians caught up in a battle ... against the massed tanks which the Soviet Union would undoubtedly use ... by exploding these warheads some 100 feet or so above the massed tanks, the blast and fire ... would be greatly reduced ... the neutron weapon produces little radioactive fall-out so the long-term danger to civilians would be very much lower ... the weapon was of no value for attacking cities and the avoidance of damage to property can hardly be rated as of interest only to 'capitalists' ... As so often happens, the constant repetition of the lie had its effects on the gullible ... In August 1977, the [Russian] World Peace Council ... declared an international 'Week of action' against the neutron bomb. ... Under this propaganda Carter delayed his decision, in September ... a Sunday service being attended by Carter and his family on 16 October 1977 was disrupted by American demonstrators shouting slogans against the neutron bomb [see the 17 October 1977 Washington Post] ... Lawrence Eagleburger, when US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, remarked, 'We consider it probably that the Soviet campaign against the 'neutron bomb cost some $100 million'. ... Even the Politburo must have been surprised at the size of what it could regard as a Fifth Column in almost every country." [Unfortunately, Pincher himself had contributed to the anti-nuclear nonsense in his 1965 novel "Not with a bang" in which small amounts of radioactivity from nuclear fallout combine with medicine to exterminate humanity! The allure of anti-nuclear propaganda extends to all who which to sell "doomsday fiction", not just Russian dictators but mainstream media story tellers in the West. By contrast, Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons doesn't even mention the neutron bomb, so there was no scientific and technical effort whatsoever by the West to make it a credible deterrent even in the minds of the public it had to protect from WWIII!]

"The Lance warhead is the first in a new generation of tactical mini-nukes that have been sought by Army field leading advocates: the series of American generals who have commanded the North Atlantic Treaty organization theater. They have argued that the 7,000 unclear warheads now in Europe are old, have too large a nuclear yield and thus would not be used in a war. With lower yields and therefore less possible collateral damage to civilian populated areas, these commanders have argued, the new mini-nukes are more credible as deterrents because they just might be used on the battlefield without leading to automatic nuclear escalation. Under the nuclear warhead production system, a President must personally give the production order. President Ford, according to informed sources, signed the order for the enhanced-radiation Lance warhead. The Lance already has regular nuclear warheads and it deployed with NATO forces in Europe. In addition to the Lance warhead, other new production starts include: An 8-inch artillery-fired nuclear warhead to replace those now in Europe. This shell had been blocked for almost eight years by Sen. Stuart Symington (D-Mo.), who had argued that it was not needed. Symington retired last year. The Pentagon and ERDA say the new nuclear 8-inch warhead would be safer from stealing by terrorists. Starbird testified. It will be "a command disable system" to melt its inner workings if necessary. ... In longer-term research, the bill contains money to finance an enhanced-radiational bomb to the dropped from aircraft." - Washington post, 5 June 1977.

This debunks fake news that Teller's and Ulam's 9 March 1951 report LAMS-1225 itself gave Los Alamos the Mike H-bomb design, ready for testing! Teller was proposing a series of nuclear tests of the basic principles, not 10Mt Ivy-Mike which was based on a report the next month by Teller alone, LA-1230, "The Sausage: a New Thermonuclear System". When you figure that, what did Ulam actually contribute to the hydrogen bomb? Nothing about implosion, compression or separate stages - all already done by von Neumann and Fuchs five years earlier - and just a lot of drivel about trying to channel material shock waves from a primary to compress another fissile core, a real dead end. What Ulam did was to kick Teller out of his self-imposed mental objection to compression devices. Everything else was Teller's; the radiation mirrors, the Sausage with its outer ablation pusher and its inner spark plug. Note also that contrary to official historian Arnold's book (which claims due to a misleading statement by Dr Corner that all the original 1946 UK copies of Superbomb Conference documentation were destroyed after being sent from AWRE Aldermaston to London between 1955-63), all the documents did exist in the AWRE TPN (theoretical physics notes, 100% of which have been perserved) and are at the UK National Archives, e.g. AWRE-TPN 5/54 is listed in National Archives discovery catalogue ref ES 10/5: "Miscellaneous super bomb notes by Klaus Fuchs", see also the 1954 report AWRE-TPN 6/54, "Implosion super bomb: substitution of U235 for plutonium" ES 10/6, the 1954 report AWRE-TPN 39/54 is "Development of the American thermonuclear bomb: implosion super bomb" ES 10/39, see also ES 10/21 "Collected notes on Fermi's super bomb lectures", ES 10/51 "Revised reconstruction of the development of the American thermonuclear bombs", ES 1/548 and ES 1/461 "Superbomb Papers", etc. Many reports are secret and retained, despite containing "obsolete" designs (although UK report titles are generally unredacted, such as: "Storage of 6kg Delta (Phase) -Plutonium Red Beard (tactical bomb) cores in ships")! It should also be noted that the Livermore Laboatory's 1958 TUBA spherical secondary with an oralloy (enriched U235) outer pusher was just a reversion from Teller's 1951 core spark plug idea in the middle of the fusion fuel, back to the 1944 von Neumann scheme of having fission material surrounding the fusion fuel. In other words, the TUBA was just a radiation and ionization imploded, internally fusion-boosted, second fission stage which could have been accomplished a decade earlier if the will existed, when all of the relevant ideas were already known. The declassified UK spherical secondary-stage alternatives linked here (tested as Grapple X, Y and Z with varying yields but similar size, since all used the 5 ft diameter Blue Danube drop casing) clearly show that a far more efficient fusion burn occurs by minimising the mass of hard-to-compress U235 (oralloy) sparkplug/pusher, but maximising the amount of lithium-7, not lithium-6. Such a secondary with minimal fissionable material also automatically has minimal neutron ABM vulnerability (i.e., "Radiation Immunity", RI). This is the current cheap Russian neutron weapon design, but not the current Western design of warheads like the W78, W88 and bomb B61.

So why on earth doesn't the West take the cheap efficient option of cutting expensive oralloy and maximising cheap natural (mostly lithium-7) LiD in the secondary? Even Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons on p17 (para 1.55) states that "Weight for weight ... fusion of deuterium nuclei would produce nearly 3 times as much energy as the fission of uranium or plutonium"! The sad answer is "density"! Natural LiD (containing 7.42% Li6 abundance) is a low density white/grey crystalline solid like salt that actually floats on water (lithium deuteroxide would be formed on exposure to water), since its density is just 820 kg/m^3. Since the ratio of mass of Li6D to Li7D is 8/9, it would be expected that the density of highly enriched 95% Li6D is 739 kg/m^3, while for 36% enriched Li6D it is 793 kg/m^3. Uranium metal has a density of 19,000 kg/m^3, i.e. 25.7 times greater than 95% enriched li6D or 24 times greater than 36% enriched Li6D. Compactness, i.e. volume is more important in a Western MIRV warhead than mass/weight! In the West, it's best to have a tiny-volume, very heavy, very expensive warhead. In Russia, cheapness outweights volume considerations. The Russians in some cases simply allowed their more bulky warheads to protrude from the missile bus (see photo below), or compensated for lower yields at the same volume using clean LiD by using the savings in costs to build more warheads. (The West doubles the fission yield/mass ratio of some warheads by using U235/oralloy pushers in place of U238, which suffers from the problem that about half the neutrons it interacts with result in non-fission capture, as explained below. Note that the 720 kiloton UK nuclear test Orange Herald device contained a hollow shell of 117 kg of U235 surrounded by a what Lorna Arnold's book quotes John Corner referring to a "very thin" layer of high explosive, and was compact, unboosted - the boosted failed to work - and gave 6.2 kt/kg of U235, whereas the first version of the 2-stage W47 Polaris warhead contained 60 kg of U235 which produced most of the secondary stage yield of about 400 kt, i.e. 6.7 kt/kg of U235. Little difference - but because perhaps 50% of the total yield of the W47 was fusion, its efficiency of use of U235 must have actually been less than the Orange Herald device, around 3 kt/kg of U235 which indicates design efficiency limits to "hydrogen bombs"! Yet anti-nuclear charlatans claimed that the Orange Herald bomb was a con!)

ABOVE: USA nuclear weapons data declassified by UK Government in 2010 (the information was originally acquired due to the 1958 UK-USA Act for Cooperation on the Uses of Atomic Energy for Mutual Defense Purposes, in exchange for UK nuclear weapons data) as published at http://nuclear-weapons.info/images/tna-ab16-4675p63.jpg. This single table summarizes all key tactical and strategic nuclear weapons secret results from 1950s testing! (In order to analyze the warhead pusher thicknesses and very basic schematics from this table it is necessary to supplement it with the 1950s warhead design data declassified in other documents, particularly some of the data from Tom Ramos and Chuck Hansen, as quoted in some detail below.) The data on the mass of special nuclear materials in each of the different weapons argues strongly that the entire load of Pu239 and U235 in the 1.1 megaton B28 was in the primary stage, so that weapon could not have had a fissile spark plug in the centre let alone a fissile ablator (unlike Teller's Sausage design of 1951), and so the B28 it appears had no need whatsoever of a beryllium neutron radiation shield to prevent pre-initiation of the secondary stage prior to its compression (on the contrary, such neutron exposure of the lithium deuteride in the secondary stage would be VITAL to produce some tritium in it prior to compression, to spark fusion when it was compressed). Arnold's book indeed explains that UK AWE physicists found the B28 to be an excellent, highly optimised, cheap design, unlike the later W47 which was extremely costly. The masses of U235 and Li6 in the W47 shows the difficulties of trying to maintain efficiency while scaling down the mass of a two-stage warhead for SLBM delivery: much larger quantities of Li6 and U235 must be used to achieve a LOWER yield! To achieve thermonuclear warheads of low mass at sub-megaton yields, both the outer bomb casing and the pusher around the the fusion fuel must be reduced:

"York ... studied the Los Alamos tests in Castle and noted most of the weight in thermonuclear devices was in their massive cases. Get rid of the case .... On June 12, 1953, York had presented a novel concept ... It radically altered the way radiative transport was used to ignite a secondary - and his concept did not require a weighty case ... they had taken the Teller-Ulam concept and turned it on its head ... the collapse time for the new device - that is, the amount of time it took for an atomic blast to compress the secondary - was favorable compared to older ones tested in Castle. Brown ... gave a female name to the new device, calling it the Linda." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp137-8. (So if you reduce the outer casing thickness to reduce warhead weight, you must complete the pusher ablation/compression faster, before the thinner outer casing is blown off, and stops reflecting/channelling x-rays on the secondary stage. Making the radiation channel smaller and ablative pusher thinner helps to speed up the process. Because the ablative pusher is thinner, there is relatively less blown-off debris to block the narrower radiation channel before the burn ends.)

"Brown's third warhead, the Flute, brought the Linda concept down to a smaller size. The Linda had done away with a lot of material in a standard thermonuclear warhead. Now the Flute tested how well designers could take the Linda's conceptual design to substantially reduce not only the weight but also the size of a thermonuclear warhead. ... The Flute's small size - it was the smallest thermonuclear device yet tested - became an incentive to improve codes. Characteristics marginally important in a larger device were now crucially important. For instance, the reduced size of the Flute's radiation channel could cause it to close early [with ablation blow-off debris], which would prematurely shut off the radiation flow. The code had to accurately predict if such a disaster would occur before the device was even tested ... the calculations showed changes had to be made from the Linda's design for the Flute to perform correctly." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp153-4. Note that the piccolo (the W47 secondary) is a half-sized flute, so it appears that the W47's secondary stage design miniaturization history was: Linda -> Flute -> Piccolo:

"A Division's third challenge was a small thermonuclear warhead for Polaris [the nuclear SLBM submarine that preceeded today's Trident system]. The starting point was the Flute, that revolutionary secondary that had performed so well the previous year. Its successor was called the Piccolo. For Plumbbob [Nevada, 1957], the design team tested three variations of the Piccolo as a parameter test. One of the variants outperformed the others ... which set the stage for the Hardtack [Nevada and Pacific, 1958] tests. Three additional variations for the Piccolo ... were tested then, and again an optimum candidate was selected. ... Human intuition as well as computer calculations played crucial roles ... Finally, a revolutionary device was completed and tested ... the Navy now had a viable warhead for its Polaris missile. From the time Brown gave Haussmann the assignment to develop this secondary until the time they tested the device in the Pacific, only 90 days had passed. As a parallel to the Robin atomic device, this secondary for Polaris laid the foundation for modern thermonuclear weapons in the United States." - Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon designer), From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War, Naval Institute press, 2022, pp177-8. (Ramos is very useful in explaining that many of the 1950s weapons with complex non-spherical, non-cylindrical shaped primaries and secondaries were simply far too complex to fully simulate on the really pathetic computers they had - Livermore got a 4,000 vacuum tubes-based IBM 701 with 2 kB memory in 1956, AWRE Aldermaston in the Uk had to wait another year for theirs - so they instead did huge numbers of experimental explosive tests. For instance, on p173, Ramos discloses that the Swan primary which developed into the 155mm tactical shell, "went through over 100 hydrotests", non-nuclear tests in which fissile material is replaced with U238 or other substitutes, and the implosion is filmed with flash x-ray camera systems.)

"An integral feature of the W47, from the very start of the program, was the use of an enriched uranium-235 pusher around the cylindrical secondary." - Chuck Hansen, Swords 2.0, p. VI-375 (Hansen's source is his own notes taken during a 19-21 February 1992 nuclear weapons history conference he attended; if you remember the context, "Nuclear Glasnost" became fashionable after the Cold War ended, enabling Hansen to acquire almost unredacted historical materials for a few years until nuclear proliferation became a concern in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea). The key test of the original (Robin primary and Piccolo secondary) Livermore W47 was 412 kt Hardtack-Redwood on 28 June 1958. Since Li6D utilized at 100% efficiency would yield 66 kt/kg, the W47 fusion efficiency was only about 6%; since 100% fission of u235 yields 17 kt/kg, the W47's Piccolo fission (the u235 pusher) efficiency was about 20%; the comparable figures for secondary stage fission and fusion fuel burn efficiencies in the heavy B28 are about 7% and 15%, respectively:

ABOVE: the heavy B28 gave a very "big bang for the buck": it was cheap in terms of expensive Pu, U235 and Li6, and this was the sort of deterrent which was wanted by General LeMay for the USAF, which wanted as many weapons as possible, within the context of Eisenhower's budgetary concerns. But its weight (not its physical size) made it unsuitable for SLBM Polaris warheads. The first SLBM warhead, the W47, was almost the same size as the B28 weapon package, but much lighter due to having a much thinner "pusher" on the secondary, and casing. But this came at a large financial cost in terms of the quantities of special nuclear materials required to get such a lightweight design to work, and also a large loss of total yield. The fusion fuel burn efficiency ranges from 6% for the 400 kt W47 to 15% for the 1.1 megaton B28 (note that for very heavy cased 11-15 megaton yield tests at Castle, up to 40% fusion fuel burn efficiency was achieved), whereas the secondary stage ablative pusher fission efficiency ranged from 7% for a 1.1 inch thick natural uranium (99.3% U238) ablator to 20% for a 0.15 inch thick highly enriched oralloy (U235) ablator. From the brief description of the design evolution given by Dr Tom Ramos (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), it appears that when the x-ray channelling outer case thickness of the weapon is reduced to save weight, the duration of the x-ray coupling is reduced, so the dense metal pusher thickness must be reduced if the same compression factor (approximately 20) for the secondary stage is to be accomplished (lithium deuteride, being of low density, is far more compressable by a given pressure, than dense metal). In both examples, the secondary stage is physically a boosted fission stage. (If you are wondering why the hell the designers don't simply use a hollow core U235 bomb like Orange Herald instead of bothering with such inefficient x-ray coupled two-stage designs as these, the answer is straightforward: the risk of large fissile core meltdown by neutrons Moscow ABM defensive nuclear warheads, neutron bombs.)

The overall weight of the W47 was minimized by replacing the usual thick layer of U238 pusher with a very thin layer of fissile U235 (supposedly Teller's suggestion), which is more efficient for fission, but is limited by critical mass issues. The W47 used a 95% enriched Li6D cylinder with a 3.8mm thick U235 pusher; the B28 secondary was 36% enriched Li6D, with a very heavy 3cm thick U238 pusher. As shown below, it appears the B28 was related to the Los Alamos clean design of the TX21C tested as 95% clean 4.5 megatons Redwing-Navajo in 1956 and did not have a central fissile spark plug. From the declassified fallout composition, it is known the Los Alamos designers replaced the outer U238 pusher of Castle secondaries with lead in Navajo. Livermore did the same for their 85% clean 3.53 megatons Redwing-Zuni test, but Livermore left the central fission spark plug, which contributed 10% of its 15% fission yield, instead of removing the neutron shield, using foam channel filler for slowing down the x-ray compression, and thereby using primary stage neutrons to split lithium-6 giving tritium prior to compression. Our point is that Los Alamos got it wrong in sticking too conservatively to ideology: for clean weapons they should have got rid of the dense lead pusher and gone for John H. Nuckolls idea (also used by Fuchs in 1946 and the Russians in 1955 and 1958) of a low-density pusher for isentropic compression of low-density fusion fuel. This error is the reason why those early cleaner weapons were extremely heavy due to unnecessary 2" thick lead or tungsten pushers around the fusion fuel, which massively reduced their yield-to-weight ratios, so that LeMay rejected them!

Compare these data for the 20 inch diameter, 49 inch, 1600 lb, 1.1 megaton bomb B28 to the 18 inch diameter, 47 inch, 700 lb, 400 kt Mk47/W47 Polaris SLBM warhead (this is the correct yield for the first version of the W47 confirmed by UK data in Lorna Arnold Britain and the H-bomb 2001 and AB 16/3240; Wikipedia wrongly gives the 600 kt figure in Hansen, which was a speculation or a later upgrade). The key difference is that the W47 is much lighter, and thus suitable for the Polaris SLBM unlike the heavier, higher yield B28. Both B28 and W47 used cylindrical sausages, but they are very different in composition; the B28 used a huge mass of U238 in its ablative sausage outer shell or pusher, while the W47 used oralloy/U235 in the pusher. The table shows the total amounts of Pu, Oralloy (U235), Lithium-6 (excluding cheaper lithium-7, which is also present in varying amounts in different thermonuclear weapons), and tritium (which is used for boosting inside fissile material, essentially to reduce the amount of Pu and therefore the vulnerability of the weapon to Russian enhanced neutron ABM warhead meltdown). The B28 also has an external dense natural U (99.3% U238) "ablative pusher shell" whose mass is not listed in this table. The table shows that the 400 kt W47 Polaris SLBM warhead contains 60 kg of U235 (nearly as much as the 500 kt pure fission Mk18), which is in an ablative pusher shell around the lithium deuteride, so that the cylinder of neutron-absorbing lithium-6 deuteride within it keeps that mass of U235 subcritical, until compressed. So the 400 kt W47 contains far more Pu, U235, Li6 and T than the higher yield 1.1 megaton B28: this is the big $ price you pay for reducing the mass of the warhead; the total mass of the W47 is reduced to 44% of the mass of the B28, since the huge mass of cheap U238 pusher in the B28 is replaced by a smaller mass of U235, which is more efficient because (as Dr Carl F. Miller reveals in USNRDL-466, Table 6), about half of the neutrons hitting U238 don't cause fission but instead non-fission capture reactions which produce U239, plus the n,2n reaction that produces U237, emitting a lot of very low energy gamma rays in the fallout. For example, in the 1954 Romeo nuclear test (which, for simplicity, we quote since it used entirely natural LiD, with no expensive enrichment of the Li6 isotope whatsoever), the U238 jacket fission efficiency was reduced by capture as follows: 0.66 atom/fission of U239, 0.10 atom/fission of U237 and 0.23 atom/fission of U240 produced by fission, a total of 0.66 + 0.10 + 0.23 ~ 1 atom/fission, i.e. 50% fission in the U238 pusher, versus 50% non-fission neutron captures. So by using U235 in place of U238, you virtually eliminate the non-fission capture (see UK Atomic Weapons Establishment graph of fission and capture cross-sections for U235, shown below), which roughly halves the mass of the warhead, for a given fission yield. This same principle of using an outer U235/oralloy pusher instead of U238 to reduce mass - albeit with the secondary cylindrical "Sausage" shape now changed to a sphere - applies to today's miniaturised, high yield, low mass "MIRV" warheads. Just as the lower-yield W47 counter-intuitively used more expensive ingredients than the bulkier higher-yield B28, modern compact, high-yield oralloy-loaded warheads literally cost a bomb, just to keep the mass down! There is evidence Russia uses alternative ideas.

This is justified by the data given for a total U238 capture-to-fission ratio of 1 in the 11 megaton Romeo test and also the cross-sections for U235 capture and fission on the AWE graph for relevant neutron energy range of about 1-14 Mev. If half the neutrons are captured in U238 without fission, then the maximum fission yield you can possibly get from "x" kg of U238 pusher is HALF the energy obtained from 100% fission of "x" kg of U238. Since with U238 only about half the atoms can undergo fission by thermonuclear neutrons (because the other half undergo non-fission capture), the energy density (i.e., the Joules/kg produced by the fission explosion of the pusher) reached by an exploding U238 pusher is only half that reached by U235 (in which there is less non-fission capture of neutrons, which doubles the pusher mass without doubling the fission energy release). So a U235 pusher will reach twice the temperature of a U238 pusher, doubling its material heating of fusion fuel within, prolonging the fusion burn and thus increasing fusion burn efficiency. 10 MeV neutron energy is important since it allows for likely average scattering of 14.1 MeV D+T fusion neutrons and it is also the energy at which the most important capture reaction, the (n,2n) cross-section peaks for both U235 (peak of 0.88 barn at 10 Mev) and U238 (peak of 1.4 barns at 10 Mev). For 10 Mev neutrons, U235 and U238 have fission cross-sections of 1.8 and 1 barn, respectively. For 14 Mev neutrons, U238 has a (n,2n) cross section of 0.97 barn for U237 production. So ignoring non-fission captures, you need 1.8/1 = 1.8 times greater thickness of pusher for U238 than for U235, to achieve the same amount of fission. But this simple consideration ignores the x-ray ablation requirement of the explosing pusher, so there are several factors requiring detailed computer calculations, and/or nuclear testing.

Note: there is an extensive collection of declassified documents released after Chuck Hansen's final edition, Swords 2.0, which are now available at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/*, being an internet-archive back-up of a now-removed US Government Freedom of Information Act Reading Room. Unfortunately they were only identified by number sequence, not by report title or content, in that reeding room, and so failed to achieve wide attention when originally released! (This includes extensive "Family Committee" H-bomb documentation and many long-delayed FOIA requests submitted originally by Hansen, but not released in time for inclusion in Swords 2.0.) As the extract below - from declassified document RR00132 - shows, some declassified documents contained very detailed information or typewriter spaces that could only be filled by a single specific secret word (in this example, details of the W48 linear implosion tactical nuclear warhead, including the fact that it used PBX9404 plastic bonded explosive glued to the brittle beryllium neutron reflector around the plutonium core using Adiprene L100 adhesive!).

ABOVE: Declassified data on the radiation flow analysis for the 10 megaton Mike sausage: http://nnsa.energy.gov/sites/default/files/nnsa/foiareadingroom/RR00198.pdf Note that the simplistic "no-go theorem" given in this extract, against any effect from varying the temperature to help the radiation channelling, was later proved false by John H. Nuckolls (like Teller's anti-compression "no-go theorem" was later proved false), since lowered temperature delivers energy where it is needed while massively reducing radiation losses (which go as the fourth power of temperature/x-ray energy in kev).

ABOVE: Hans A. Bethe's disastrous back-of-the-envelope nonsense "non-go theorem" against lithium-7 fission into tritium by 14.1 Mev D+T neutrons in Bravo (which contained 40% lithium-6 and 60% lithium-7; unnecessarily enriched - at great expense and effort - from the natural 7.42% lithum-6 abundance). It was Bethe's nonsense "physics" speculation, unbacked by serious calculation, who caused Bravo to go off at 2.5 times the expected 6 megatons and therefore for the Japanese Lucky Dragon tuna trawler crew in the maximum fallout hotspot area 80 miles downwind to be contaminated by fallout, and also for Rongelap's people to be contaminated ("accidents" that inevitably kickstarted the originally limited early 1950s USSR funded Communist Party anti-nuclear deterrence movements in the West into mainstream media and thus politics). There was simply no solid basis for assuming that the highly penetrating 14.1 Mev neutrons would be significantly slowed by scattering in the fuel before hitting lithium-7 nuclei. Even teller's 1950 report LA-643 at page 17 estimated that in a fission-fusion Alarm Clock, the ratio of 14 Mev to 2.5 Mev neutrons was 0.7/0.2 = 3.5. Bethe's complacently bad guesswork-based physics also led to the EMP fiasco for high altitude bursts, after he failed to predict the geomagnetic field deflection of Compton electrons at high altitude in his secret report “Electromagnetic Signal Expected from High-Altitude Test”, Los Alamos report LA-2173, October 1957, Secret. He repeatedly caused nuclear weapons effects study disasters. For the true utility of lithium-7, which is actually BETTER than lithum-6 at tritium production when struck by 14.1 Mev D+T fusion neutrons, and its consequences for cheap isentropically compressed fusion capsules in Russian neutron bombs, please see my paper here which gives a graph of lithium isotopic cross section versus neutron energy, plus the results when Britain used cheap lithium-7 in Grapple Y to yield 3 megatons (having got lower yields with costly lithium-6 in previous tests!).

Update (15 Dec 2023): PDF uploaded of UK DAMAGE BY NUCLEAR WEAPONS (linked here on Internet Archive) - secret 1000 pages UK and USA nuclear weapon test effects analysis, and protective measures determined at those tests (not guesswork) relevant to escalation threats by Russia for EU invasion (linked here at wordpress) in response to Ukraine potentially joining the EU (this is now fully declassified without deletions, and in the UK National Archives at Kew):

Hiroshima and Nagasaki terrorist liars debunked by secret American government evidence that simple shelters worked, REPORT LINKED HERE (this was restricted from public view and never published by the American government, and Glasstone's lying Effects of Nuclear Weapons book reversed its evidence for propaganda purposes, a fact still covered by all the lying cold war pseudo "historians" today), Operation Hurricane 1952 declassified nuclear weapon test data (here), declassified UK nuclear tested shelter research reports (here), declassified EMP nuclear test research data (here), declassified clandestine nuclear bombs in ships attack on Liverpool study (here), declassified fallout decontamination study for UK recovery from nuclear attack (here), declassified Operation Buffalo surface burst and near surface burst fallout patterns, water decontamination, initial radiation shielding at Antler nuclear tests, and resuspension of deposited fallout dust into the air (inhalation hazard) at different British nuclear tests, plus Operation Totem nuclear tests crater region radiation surveys (here), declassified Operation Antler nuclear blast precursor waveforms (here), declassified Operation Buffalo nuclear blast precursor waveforms (here), declassified UK Atomic Weapons Establishment nuclear weapons effects symposium (here), and declassified UK Atomic Weapons Establishment paper on the gamma radiation versus time at Crossroads tests Able and Baker (here, paper by inventor of lenses in implosion weapons, James L. Tuck of the British Mission to Los Alamos and Operation Crossroads, clearly showing how initial gamma shielding in an air burst can be achieved with a few seconds warning and giving the much greater escape times available for residual radiation dose accumulations in an underwater burst; key anti-nuclear hysteria data kept covered up by Glasstone and the USA book Effects of Nuclear Weapons), and Penney and Hicks paper on the base surge contamination mechanism (here), and Russian nuclear warhead design evidence covered-up by both America and the so-called arms control and disarmament "experts" who always lie and distort the facts to suit their own agenda to try to start a nuclear war (linked here). If they wanted "peace" they'd support the proved facts, available on this blog nukegate.org since 2006, and seek international agreement to replace the incredible, NON-war deterring strategic nuclear weapons with safe tactical neutron warheads which collateral damage averting and invasion-deterring (thus war deterring in all its forms, not only nuclear), plus civil defence against all forms of collateral damage from war, which reduces escalation risks during terrorist actions, as proved in wars which don't escalate because of effective civil defence and credible deterrence (see below). Instead, they support policies designed to maximise civilian casualties and to deliberately escalate war, to profit "politically" from the disasters caused which they blame falsely on nuclear weapons, as if deterrence causes war! (Another lie believed by mad/evil/gullible mainstream media/political loons in "authority".) A good summary of the fake news basis of "escalation" blather against credible tactical nuclear deterrence of the invasions that set off wars is inadvertently provided by Lord David Owen's 2009 "Nuclear Papers" (Liverpool Uni Press), compiling his declassified nuclear disarmament propaganda reports written while he was UK Foreign Secretary 1977-9. It's all Carter era appeasement nonsense. For example, on pp158-8 he reprints his Top Secret 19 Dec 1978 "Future of the British Deterrent" report to the Prime Minister which states that "I am not convinced by the contention ... that the ability to destroy at least 10 major cities, or inflict damage on 30 major targets ... is the minimum criterion for a British deterrent." (He actually thinks this is too strong a deterrent, despite the fact it is incredible for the realpolitik tactics of dictators who make indirect provocations like invading their neighbours!) The reality Owens ignores is that Russia had and still has civil defence shelters and evacuation plans, so threatening some damage in retaliation is not a credible deterrent against the invasions that set off both world wars. On page 196, he gives a Secret 18 April 1978 paper stating that NATO then had 1000 nuclear artillery pieces (8" and 155mm), 200 Lance and Honest John tactical nuclear missile systems, 135 Pershing; all now long ago disarmed and destroyed while Russian now has over 2000 dedicated tactical nuclear weapons of high neutron output (unlike EM1's data for the low yield option of the multipurpose NATO B61). Owen proudly self-congratulates on his Brezhnev supporting anti-neutron bomb ranting 1978 book, "Human Rights", pp. 136-7. If Owen really wants "Human Rights", he needs to back the neutron bomb now to deter the dictatorships which destroy human rights! His 2009 "Nuclear Papers" at p287 gives the usual completely distorted analysis of the Cuban missiles crisis, claiming that despite the overwhelming American tactical and strategic nuclear superiority for credible deterrence in 1962, the world came "close" to a nuclear war. It's closer now, mate, when thanks to your propaganda we no longer have a credible deterrent, civil defence, tactical neutron warheads. Pathetic.

ABOVE secret reports on Australian-British nuclear test operations at Maralinga in 1956 and 1957, Buffalo and Antler, proved that even at 10 psi peak overpressure for the 15 kt Buffalo-1 shot, the dummy lying prone facing the blast was hardly moved due to the low cross-sectional area exposed to the blast winds, relative to standing dummies which were severely displaced and damaged. The value of trenches in protecting personnel against blast winds and radiation was also proved in tests (gamma radiation shielding of trenches had been proved at an earlier nuclear test in Australia, Operation Hurricane in 1952). (Antler report linked here; Buffalo report linked here.) This debunks the US Department of Defense models claiming that people will automatically be blown out of the upper floors of modern city buildings at very low pressures, and killed by the gravitational impact with the pavement below! In reality, tall buildings mutually shield one another from the blast winds, not to mention the radiation (proven in the latest post on this blog), and on seeing the flash most people will have time to lie down on typical surfaces like carpet which give a frictional resistance to displacement, ignored in fiddled models which assume surfaces have less friction than a skating rink; all of this was omitted from the American 1977 Glasstone and Dolan book "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons". As Tuck's paper below on the gamma radiation dose rate measurements on ships at Operation Crossroads, July 1946 nuclear tests proved, contrary to Glasstone and Dolan, scattered radiation contributions are small, so buildings or ships gun turrets provided excellent radiation "shadows" to protect personnel. This effect was then calculated by UK civil defence weapons effects expert Edward Leader-Williams in his paper presented at the UK's secret London Royal Society Symposium on the Physical Effects of Atomic Weapons, but the nuclear test data as always was excluded from the American Glasstone book published the next year, The Effects of Atomic Weapons in deference to lies about the effects in Hiroshima, including an "average" casualty curve which deliberately obfuscated huge differences in survival rates in different types of buildings and shelters, or simply in shadows!

Note: the DELFIC, SIMFIC and other computer predicted fallout area comparisons for the 110 kt Bikini Atoll Castle-Koon land surface burst nuclear test are false since the distance scale of Bikini Atoll is massively exaggerated on many maps, e.g. in the Secret January 1955 AFSWP "Fall-out Symposium", the Castle fallout report WT-915, and the fallout patterns compendium DASA-1251! The Western side of the Bikini Atoll reef is at 165.2 degrees East, while the most eastern island in the Bikini Atoll, Enyu, is at 165.567 degrees East: since there are 60 nautical miles per degree by definition, the width of Bikini Atoll is therefore (165.567-165.2)(60) = 22 nautical miles, approximately half the distance shown in the Castle-Koon fallout patterns. Since area is proportional to the square of the distance scale, this constitutes a serious exaggeration in fallout casualty calculations, before you get into the issue of the low energy (0.1-0.2 MeV) gamma rays from neutron induced Np239 and U237 in the fallout enhancing the protection factor of shelters (usually calculated assuming hard 1.17 and 1.33 MeV gamma rads from Co60), during the sheltering period of approximately 1-14 days after detonation.

"Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr Dulles calls 'brinkmanship'. This is a policy adopted from a sport ... called 'Chicken!' ... If one side is unwilling to risk global war, while the other side is willing to risk it, the side which is willing to run the risk will be victorious in all negotiations and will ultimately reduce the other side to complete impotence. 'Perhaps' - so the practical politician will argue - 'it might be ideally wise for the sane party to yield to the insane party in view of the dreadful nature of the alternative, but, whether wise or not, no proud nation will long acquiesce in such an ignominious role. We are, therefore, faced, quite inevitably, with the choice between brinkmanship and surrender." - Bertrand Russell, Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1959, pp30-31.

Emphasis added. Note that Russell accepts lying about nuclear weapons just as gas weapons had been lied about in the 1920s-30s by "arms controllers" to start WWII, then he simply falls into the 1930s Cambridge Scientists Antiwar Group delusional propaganda fraud of assuming that any attempt to credibly deter fascism is immoral because it will automatically result in escalatory retaliation with Herman Goering's Luftwaffe drenching London with "overkill" by poison gas WMDs etc. In particular, he forgets that general disarmament pursued in the West until 1935 - when Baldwin suddenly announced that the Nazis had secretly produced a massive, unstoppable warmachine in two years - encouraged aggressors to first secretly rearm, then coerce and invade their neighbours while signing peace promises purely to buy more time for rearmament, until a world war resulted. Not exactly a great result for disarmament propaganda. So after obliterating what Reagan used to call (to the horror of commie "historians") the "true facts of history" from his mind, he advocates some compromise with the aggressors of the 30 September 1938 Munich Agreement peace-in-our-time sort, the historically proved sure fire way to really escalate a crisis into a major war by showing the green lamp to a loon to popular media acclaim and applause for a fairy tale utopian fantasy; just as the "principled" weak, rushed, imbecile withdrawl from Afghanistan in 2021 encouraged Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022, and also the green lamp for Hamas to invade Israel in 2023.

"... deterrence ... consists of threatening the enemy with thermonuclear retaliation should he act provocatively. ... If war is 'impossible', how can one threaten a possible aggressor with war? ... The danger, evoked by numerous critics, that such research will result in a sort of resigned expectation of the holocaust, seems a weak argument ... The classic theory of Clausewitz defines absolute victory in terms of disarmament of the enemy ... Today ... it will suffice to take away his means of retaliation to hold him at your mercy." - Raymond Aron, Introduction to Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 9-12. (This is the commie support for arms control and disarmament has achieved, precisely the weakening of the West to take away credible deterrence.)

"75 years ago, white slavery was rampant in England. ... it could not be talked about openly in Victorian England, moral standards as to the subjects of discussion made it difficult to arouse the community to necessary action. ... Victorian standards, besides perpetuating the white slave trade, intensified the damage ... Social inhibitions which reinforce natural tendencies to avoid thinking about unpleasant subjects are hardly uncommon. ... But when our reluctance to consider danger brings danger nearer, repression has gone too far. In 1960, I published a book that attempted to direct attention to the possibility of a thermonuclear war ... people are willing to argue that it is immoral to think and even more immoral to write in detail about having to fight ... like those ancient kings who punished messengers who brought them bad news. That did not change the news; it simply slowed up its delivery. On occasion it meant that the kings were ill informed and, lacking truth, made serious errors in judgement and strategy. ... We cannot wish them away. Nor should we overestimate and assume the worst is inevitable. This leads only to defeatism, inadequate preparations (because they seem useless), and pressures toward either preventative war or undue accommodation." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 17-19. (In the footnote on page 35, Kahn notes that original nuclear bullshitter, the 1950 creator of fake cobalt-60 doomsday bomb propaganda, Leo Szilard, was in the usual physics groupthink nutters club: "Szilard is probably being too respectful of his scientific colleagues who also seem to indulge in ad hominem arguments - especially when they are out of their technical specialty.")

"Ever since the catastropic and disillusioning experience of 1914-18, war has been unthinkable to most people in the West ... In December 1938, only 3 months after Munich, Lloyd's of London gave odds of 32 to 1 that there would be no war in 1939. On August 7, 1939, the London Daily Express reported the result of a poll of its European reporters. 10 out of 12 said, 'No war this year'. Hitler invaded Poland 3 weeks later." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 39. (But as the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 proved, even the label "war" is now "controversial": the aggressor now simply declares they are on a special operation of unifying people under one flag to ensure peace! So the reason why there is war in Ukraine is that Ukraine is resisting. If it waved a white flag, as the entire arms control and disarmament lobby insists is the only sane response to a nuclear-armed aggressor, there would be "peace," albeit on Russia's terms: that's why they disarmed Ukraine in 1994. "Peace propaganda" of "disarmers"! Free decent people prefer to fight tyranny. But as Kahn states on pp. 7-9:

"Some, most notably [CND's pseudo-historian of arms race lying] A. J. P. Taylor, have even said that Hitler was not like Hitler, that further appeasement [not an all-out arms race as was needed but repeatedly rejected by Baldwin and Chamberlain until far too late; see discussion of this fact which is still deliberately ignored or onfuscated by "historians" of the A. J. P. Taylor biased anti-deterrence left wing type, in Slessor's The Central Blue, quoted on this blog] would have prevented World War II ... If someone says to you, 'One of us has to be reasonable and it is not going to be me, so it has to be you', he has a very effective bargaining advantage, particularly if he is armed with thermonuclear bombs [and you have damn all civil defense, ABM, or credible tactical deterrent]. If he can convince you he is stark, staring mad and if he has enough destructive power ... deterrence alone will not work. You must then give in or accept the possibility of being annihilated ... in the first instance if we fight and lose; in the second if we capitulate without fighting. ... We could still resist by other means ranging from passive resistance of the Gandhi type to the use of underground fighting and sabotage. All of these alternatives might be of doubtful effectiveness against [the Gulag system, KGB/FSB torture camps or Siberian salt mines of] a ruthless dictatorship."

Sometimes people complain that Hitler and the most destructive and costly war and only nuclear war of history, WWII, is given undue attention. But WWII is a good analogy to the danger precisely because of the lying WMD gas war propaganda-based disarmament of the West which allowed the war, because of the attacks by Hitler's fans on civil defense in the West to make even the token rearmament after 1935 ineffective as a credible deterrent, and because Hitler has mirrors in Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon and Stalin. Kahn explains on p. 173: "Because history has a way of being more imaginative and complex than even the most imaginative and intelligent analysts, historical examples often provide better scenarios than artificial ones, even though they may be no more directly applicable to current equipment, postures, and political situations than the fictional plot of the scenario. Recent history can be especially useful.")

"One type of war resulting at least partly from deliberate calculation could occur in the process of escalation. For example, suppose the Soviets attacked Europe, relying upon our fear of their reprisal to deter a strategic attack by us; we might be deterred enough to pause, but we might evacuate our cities during this pause in the hope we could thereby convince the Soviets we meant business. If the Soviets did not back down, but continued their attack upon Europe, we might decide that we would be less badly off if we proceeded ... The damage we would receive in return would then be considerably reduced, compared with what we would have suffered had we not evacuated. We might well decide at such a time that we would be better off to attack the Soviets and accept a retalitory blow at our dispersed population, rather than let Europe be occupied, and so be forced to accept the penalty of living in the hostile and dangerous world that would follow." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, pp. 51-2.

"We must recognise that the stability we want in a system is more than just stability against accidental war or even against an attack by the enemy. We also want stability against extreme provocation [e.g. invasion of allies, which then escalates as per invasion of Belgium 1914, or Poland 1939]." - Herman Kahn's 1962 Thinking About the Unthinkable, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, p. 53(footnote).

Note: this 1962 book should not be confused with Kahn's 1984 "updated" Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, which omits the best material in the 1962 edition (in the same way that the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons omits the entire civil defense chapter which was the one decent thing in the 1957 and 1962/4 editions!) and thus shows a reversion to the less readable and less helpful style of his 1960 On Thermonuclear War, which severely fragmented and jumbled up all the key arguments making it easy for critics to misquote or quote out of context. For example, Kahn's 1984 "updated" book starts on the first page of the first chapter with the correct assertion that Johnathan Schell's Fate of the Earth is nonsense, but doesn't say why it's nonsense, and you have to read through to the final chapter - pages 207-8 of chapter 10 - to find Kahn writing in the most vague way possible, without a single specific example, that Schell is wrong because of "substantive inadequacies and inaccuracies", without listing a single example such as Schell's lying that the 1954 Bravo nuclear test blinded everyone well beyond the range of Rongelap, and that it was impossible to easily shield the radiation from the fallout or evacuate the area until it decays, which Schell falsely attributed to Glasstone and Dolan's nonsense in the 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons! Kahn eventually in the footnote on page 208 refers readers to an out-of-print article for facts: "These criticisms are elaborated in my review of The Fate of the Earth, see 'Refusing to Think About the Unthinkable', Fortune, June 28, 1982, pp. 113-6. Kahn does the same for civil defense in the 1984 book, referring in such general, imprecise and vague terms to Russian civil defence, with no specific data, that it is a waste of time, apart possibly one half-baked sentence on page 177: "Variations in the total megatonnage, somewhat surprisingly, do not seem to affect the toll nearly as much as variations in the targetting or the type of weapon bursts." Kahn on page 71 quotes an exchange between himself and Senator Proxmire during the US Congressional Hearings of the Joint Committee on Defense Production, Civil preparedness and limited nuclear war where on page 55 of the hearings, Senator Proxmire alleges America would escalate a limited conflict to an all-out war because: "The strategic value and military value of destroying cities in the Soviet Union would be very great." Kahn responded: "No American President is likely to do that, no matter what the provocation." Nuclear war will be limited, according to Herman Kahn's analysis, despite the bullshit fron nutters to the contrary.

Kahn on page 101 of Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s correctly and accurately condemns President Carter's 1979 State of the Union Address, which claimed falsely that just a single American nuclear submarine is required by America and has an "overwhelming" deterrent against "every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union". Carter ignored Russian retaliation on cities if you bomb theirs: America has avoided the intense Russian protection efforts that make the Russian nuclear threat credible, namely civil defense shelters and evacuation plans, and also the realpolitik of deterrence of world wars, which so far have only been triggered due to invasions of third parties (Belgium '14, Poland '39). Did America strategically nuke every city in Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022? No, debunking Proxmire and the entire Western pro-Russian "automatic escalation" propaganda lobby, and it didn't even have tactical neutron bombs to help deter the Russians like Reagan in the 1980s, because in the 1990s America had ignored Kahn's argument, and went in for MINIMAL deterrence of the least credible sort (abolishing the invasion-deterring dedicated neutron tactical nuclear stockpile entirely; the following quotation is from p101 of Kahn's Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s):

"Minimum deterrence, or any predicated on an escessive emphasis on the inevitably of mutual homocide, is both misleading and dangerous. ... MAD principles can promote provocation - e.g. Munich-type blackmail on an ally. Hitler, for example, did not threaten to attack France or England - only Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. It was the French and the British who finally had to threaten all-out war [they could only do this after rearmament and building shelters and gas masks to reduce the risk of reprisals in city bombing, which gave more time for Germany to prepare since it was rearming faster than France and Britain which still desperately counted on appeasement and peace treaties and feared provoking a war by an arms-race due to endless lying propaganda from Lord Grey that his failure to deter war in 1914 had been due to an arms-race rather than the incompetence of the procrastination of his anti-war Liberal Party colleagues in the Cabinet] - a move they would not and could not have made if the notion of a balance of terror between themselves and Germany had been completely accepted. As it was, the British and French were most reluctant to go to war; from 1933 to 1939 Hitler exploited that reluctance. Both nations [France and Britain] were terrified by the so-called 'knockout blow', a German maneuver that would blanket their capitals with poison gas ... The paralyzing effect of this fear prevented them from going to war ... and gave the Germans the freedom to march into the Ruhr, to form the Anschluss with Austria, to force the humiliating Munich appeasement (with the justification of 'peace in our time'), and to take other aggressive actions [e.g. against the Jews in the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, etc.] ... If the USSR were sufficiently prepared in the event a war did occur, only the capitalists would be destroyed. The Soviets would survive ... that would more than justify whatever sacrifice and destruction had taken place.

"This view seems to prevail in the Soviet military and the Politburo even to the present day. It is almost certain, despite several public denials, that Soviet military preparations are based on war-fighting, rather than on deterrence-only concepts and doctrines..." - Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s, 1984, pages 101-102.

Kahn adds, in his footnote on p111, that "Richard Betts has documented numerous historical cases in which attackers weakened their opponents defenses through the employment of unanticipated tactics. These include: rapid changes in tactics per se, false alarms and fluctuating preparations for war ... doctrinal innovations to gain surprise. ... This is exactly the kind of thing which is likely to surprise those who subscribe to MAD theories. Those who see a need for war-fighting capabilities expect the other side to try to be creative and use tactical innovations such as coercion and blackmail, technological surprises, or clever tactics on 'leverage' targets, such as command and control installations. If he is to adhere to a total reliance on MAD, the MADvocate has to ignore these possibilities." See Richard Betts, "Surprise Despite Warning: Why Sudden Attacks Succeed", Political Science Quarterly, Winter 1980-81, pp. 551-572.)

Compare two situations: (1) Putin explodes a 50 megaton nuclear "test" of the warhead for his new nuclear reactor powered torpedo, Poseidon, a revamped 1961 Tsar Bomba, or detonates a high-altitude nuclear EMP "test" over neutral waters but within the thousands of miles range of USA or UK territory; (2) Putin invades Poland using purely conventional weapons. Our point here is that both nuclear AND conventional weapons trigger nuclear threats and the risk of nuclear escalation, as indeed they have done (for Putin's nuclear threats scroll down to videos with translations below). So the fashionable CND style concept that only nuclear weapons can trigger nuclear escalation is bullshit, and is designed to help Russia start and win WWIII to produce a world government, by getting us to undertake further unilateral (not multilateral) disarmament, just as evolved in the 1930s, setting the scene for WWII. Japan for example did not have nuclear weapons in August 1945, yet triggered not just tactical nuclear war (both cities had some military bases and munitions factories, as well as enormous numbers of civilians), and the decision to attack cities rather than just "test" weapons obove Tokyo bay as Teller demanded but Oppenheimer rejected (for maximum impact with a very small supply of nuclear weapons) showed some strategic nuclear war thinking. Truman was escalating to try to shock Japan into rapid surrender emotionally (many cities in Japan had already been burned out in conventional incendiary air raids, and the two nuclear attacks while horrible for civilians in those cities contributed only a fraction of the millions killed in WWII, despite anti-nuclear propaganda lies to the contrary). Truman's approach escalating to win is the opposite of the "Minimax game theory" (von Neumann's maths and Thomas Schelling's propaganda) gradual escalation approach that's currently the basis of nuclear deterrence planning despite its failure wherever it has been tried (Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc). Gradual escalation is supposed to minimise the maximum possible risk (hence "minimax" name), but it guarantees failure in the real world (unlike rule abided games) by maximising the build up of resentment. E.g. Schelling/Minimax say that if you gradually napalm civilians day after day (because they are the unprotected human shields used by terrorists/insurgents; the Vietcong are hiding in underground tunnels, exactly like Hamas today, and the Putin regime's metro 2 shelter tunnels under Russia) you somehow "punish the enemy" (although they don't give a toss about the lives of kids which is why you're fighting them!) and force them to negotiate for peace in good faith, then you can pose for photos with them sharing a glass of champagne and there is "world peace". That's a popular fairy tale, like Marxist mythology.

Once you grasp this fact, that nuclear weapons have been and will again be "used" explosively without automatic escalation, for example provocative testing as per the 1961 Russian 50 megaton bomb test, or the 1962 high altitude EMP bursts, you should be able to grasp the fact that the "escalation" deception used to dismiss civil defense and tactical nuclear deterrence against limited nuclear war, is fake news from Russian fellow-travellers like Corbyn. Once you assign a non-unity probability to "escalation", you're into conventional war territory: if you fight a conventional war, it can "escalate" to nuclear war as on 6 August 1945. Japan did not avoid nuclear attack by not having nuclear weapons on 6 August 1945. If it had nuclear weapons ready to be delivered, a very persuasive argument could be made that unless Truman wanted to invite retaliation, World War II would have remained strategically non-nuclear: no net strategic advantage would have been achieved by nuclear city bombing so only war-ending tactical nuclear threats could have prevailed in practice. But try explaining this to the groupthink pseudosocialist bigoted mass murderers who permeate fake physics with crap; it's no easier to explain to them the origins of particle masses or even dark energy/gravitation; in both cases groupthink lying hogwash persists because statements of proved facts are hated and rejected if them debunk religious style fairy tales the mass media loves. There were plenty of people warning that mass media gas war fear mongering was disguised Nazi supporting propaganda in the 1930s, but the public listened to that crap then just as it accepted the "eugenics" (anti-diversity evolution crap of Sir Galton, cousin of Darwin) basis for Hitler's Mein Kampf without question, just as they accepted the lying propaganda from the UK "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group" which like CND and all other arms control and disarmament lobbies supporting terrorist states today, did more than even Hitler to deliberately lay the foundations for the Holocaust and World War II, while never being criticised in the UK media! Thus, it's surely time for people to oppose evil lying on civil defence to save lives in all disasters from storms to conventional war, to collateral damage risks in nuclear terrorism by mad enemies. At some point, the majority has to decide to either defend itself honestly and decently against barbarism, or be consumed by it as a price for believing bullshit. It's time for decent people to oppose lying evil regarding the necessity to have credible tactical (not incredible strategic) nuclear weapons, as Oppenheimer called for in his 1951 speech, to deter invasions.

Democracy can't function when secrecy is used to deliberately cover-up vital data from viewing by Joe Public. Secrecy doesn't protect you from enemies who independently develop weapons in secret, or who spy from inside your laboratories:

"The United States and Great Britain resumed testing in 1962, and we spared no effort trying to find out what they were up to. I attended several meetings on that subject. An episode related to those meetings comes to mind ... Once we were shown photographs of some documents ... the photographer had been rushed. Mixed in with the photocopies was a single, terribly crumpled original. I innocently asked why, and was told that it had been concealed in panties. Another time ... questions were asked along the following lines: What data about American weapons would be most useful for your work and for planning military technology in general?"

- Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, Hutchinson, London, 1990, pp225-6.

ABOVE: The British government has now declassified detailed summary reports giving secret original nuclear test data on the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) damage due to numerous nuclear weapons, data which is still being kept under wraps in America since it hasn't been superseded because Western atmospheric nuclear tests were stopped late in 1962 and never resumed - even though the Russians have even more extensive data - completely debunking Glasstone and Dolan's disarmament propaganda nonsense in the 1962, 1964 and 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons which ignores EMP piped far away from low altitude nuclear tests by power and communications cables and falsely claims instead that such detonations don't produce EMP damage outside the 2psi blast radius! For a discussion of the new data and also a link to the full 200+ pages version (in addition to useful data, inevitably like all official reports it also contains a lot of "fluff" padding), please see the other (physics) site: https://nige.wordpress.com/2023/09/12/secret-emp-effects-of-american-nuclear-tests-finally-declassified-by-the-uk-and-at-uk-national-archives/ (by contrast, this "blogspot" uses old non-smartphone proof coding, no longer properly indexed any long longer by "google's smartphone bot"). As long ago as 1984, Herman Kahn argued on page 112 of his book Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s: "The effects of an EMP attack are simply not well understood [in the West, where long powerlines were never exposed on high altitude nuclear tests, unlike the Russian's 1962 Operation K, so MHD-EMP or E3 damage wasn't even mentioned in the 1977 Glasstone and Dolan Effects of Nuclear Weapons], but the Soviets seem to know - or think they know - more than we do."

BELOW: declassified British nuclear war planning blast survival data showing that even without special Morrison table shelters, the American assumption that nobody can survive in a demolished house is false, based on detailed WWII British data (the majority of people in houses flattened within 77 ft from V1 Nazi cruise missiles survived!), and secret American reports (contradicting their unclassified propaganda) proved that blast survival occurred at 16 psi overpressure in Hiroshima's houses, e.g. see limited distribution Dirkwood corp DC-P-1060 for Hiroshima, also the secret 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons DNA-EM-1 table 10-1, and WWII report RC-450 table 8.2, p145 (for determining survival of people sheltered in brick houses, the WWII A, B, C, and D damage versus casualty data from V1 blast was correlated to similar damage from nuclear blast as given Glasstone's 1957 Effects of Nuclear Weapons page 249, Fig. 6.41a, and page 109 Fig. 3.94a, which show that A, B, C, and D damage to brick houses from nuclear weapons occur at peak overpressures of 9, 6, 3 and 0.5 psi, respectively; the longer blast from higher yields blows the debris over a wider area, reducing the load per unit area falling on to people sheltered under tables etc), and the declassified UK government assessment of nuclear terrorist attack on a port or harbour, as well as the confidential classified UK Government analysis of the economic and social effects from WWII bombing (e.g. the recovery times for areas as a function of percentage of houses destroyed):

Unofficial Russian video on the secret Russian nuclear shelters from Russian Urban Exploration, titled "Проникли на секретный Спецобъект Метро!" = "We infiltrated a secret special facility of the Metro!":

ABOVE: Moscow Metro and Metro-2 (secret nuclear subway) horizonially swinging blast doors take only 70 seconds to shut, whereas their vertically rising blast doors take 160 seconds to shut; both times are however far shorter than the arrival time of Western ICBMs or even SLBMs which take 15-30 minutes by which time the Russian shelters are sealed from blast and radiation! In times of nuclear crisis, Russia planned to evacuate from cities those who could not be sheltered, and for the remainder to be based in shelters (similarly to the WWII British situation, when people slept in shelters of one kind or another when there was a large risk of being bombed without notice, particularly in supersonic V2 missile attacks where little warning time was available).

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ABOVE: originally SECRET diagrams showing the immense casualty reductions for simple shelters and local (not long distance as in 1939) evacuation, from a UK Home Office Scientific Advisers’ Branch report CD/SA 72 (UK National Archives document reference HO 225/72), “Casualty estimates for ground burst 10 megaton bombs”, which exposed the truth behind UK Cold War civil defence (contrary to Russian propaganda against UK defence, which still falsely claims there was no scientific basis for anything, playing on the fact the data was classified SECRET). Evacuation plus shelter eliminates huge casualties for limited attacks; notice that for the 10 megaton bombs (more than 20 times the typical yield of today’s MIRV compact warheads!), you need 20 weapons, i.e. a total of 10 x 20 = 200 megatons, for 1 million killed, if civil defence is in place for 45% of people to evacuate a city and the rest to take shelter. Under civil defence, therefore, you get 1 million killed per 200 megatons. This proves that civil defence work to make deterrence more credible in Russian eyes. For a discussion of the anti-civil defence propaganda scam in the West led by Russian agents for Russian advantage in the new cold war, just read posts on this blog started in 2006 when Putin's influence became clear. You can read the full PDF by clicking the link here. Or see the files here.

ABOVE: the originally CONFIDENTIAL classified document chapters of Dr D.G. Christopherson’s “Structural Defence 1945, RC450”, giving low cost UK WWII shelter effectiveness data, which should also have been published to prove the validity of civil defence countermeasures in making deterrence of future war more credible by allowing survival of “demonstration” strikes and “nuclear accidents / limited wars” (it’s no use having weapons and no civil defence, so you can’t deter aggressors, the disaster of Munich appeasement giving Hitler a green light on 30 September 1938, when Anderson shelters were only issued the next year, 1939!). For the original WWII UK Government low cost sheltering instruction books issued to the public (for a small charge!) please click here (we have uploaded them to internet archive), and please click here for further evidence for the effectiveness of indoor shelters during WWII from Morrison shelter inventor Baker's analysis, please click here (he titled his book about WWII shelters "Enterprise versus Bureaucracy" which tells you all you need to know about the problems his successful innovations in shelter design experienced; his revolutionary concept was that the shelter should be damaged to protect the people inside because of the vast energy absorption soaked up in the plastic deformation of steel - something which naive fools can never appreciate - by analogy, if your car bumper is perfectly intact after impact you're unlikely to be because it has not absorbed the impact energy which has been passed on to you!). We have also placed useful declassified UK government nuclear war survival information on internet archive here and here. There is also a demonstration of how proof-tested WWII shelters were tested in 1950s nuclear weapon trials and adapted for use in Cold War nuclear civil defence, here, thus permanently debunking the somewhat pro-dictatorship/anti-deterrence Jeremy Corbyn/Matthew Grant/Duncan Campbell anti-civil defence propaganda rants which pretend to to based on reality, but obviously just ignore the hard, yet secret, nuclear testing facts upon which UK government civil defence was based as my father (a Civil Defence Corps instructor) explained here back in 2006. The reality is that the media follows herd fashion to sell paper/airtime; it doesn't lead it. This is why it backed Nazi appeasement (cheering Chamberlain's 1938 handshakes with Hitler for instance) and only switched tune when it was too late to deter Nazi aggression in 1939; it made the most money that way. We have to face the facts!

NUKEGATE - Western tactical neutron bombs were disarmed after Russian propaganda lie. Russia now has over 2000... "Disarmament and arms control" charlatans, quacks, cranks, liars, mass murdering Russian affiliates, and evil genocidal Marxist media exposed for what it is, what it was in the 1930s when it enabled Hitler to murder tens of millions in war. Glasstone's and Dolan's 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons deceptions totally disproved. Professor Brian Martin, TRUTH TACTICS, 2021 (pp45-50): "In trying to learn from scientific publications, trust remains crucial. The role of trust is epitomised by Glasstone’s book The Effects of Atomic Weapons. Glasstone was not the author; he was the editor. The book is a compilation of information based on the work of numerous contributors. For me, the question was, should I trust this information? Was there some reason why the editors or authors would present fraudulent information, be subject to conflicts of interest or otherwise be biased? ... if anything, the authors would presumably want to overestimate rather than underestimate the dangers ... Of special interest would be anyone who disagreed with the data, calculations or findings in Glasstone. But I couldn’t find any criticisms. The Effects of Nuclear Weapons was treated as the definitive source, and other treatments were compatible with it. ... One potent influence is called confirmation bias, which is the tendency to look for information that supports current beliefs and dismiss or counter contrary information. The implication is that changing one’s views can be difficult due to mental commitments. To this can be added various forms of bias, interpersonal influences such as wanting to maintain relationships, overconfidence in one’s knowledge, desires to appear smart, not wanting to admit being mistaken, and career impacts of having particular beliefs. It is difficult to assess the role of these influences on yourself. "

Honest Effects of Nuclear Weapons! The Effects of Nuclear Weapons

ABOVE (VIDEO CLIP): Russian State TV Channel 1 war inurer and enabler, NOT MERELY MAKING "INCREDIBLE BLUFF THREATS THAT WE MUST ALL LAUGH AT AND IGNORE LIKE DR GOEBBELS THREATS TO GAS JEWS AND START A WORLD WAR" AS ALMOST ALL THE BBC SCHOOL OF "JOURNALISM" (to which we don't exactly belong!) LIARS CLAIM, but instead preparing Russians mentally for nuclear war (they already have nuclear shelters and a new Putin-era tactical nuclear war civil defense manual from 2014, linked and discussed in blog posts on the archive above), arguing for use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine war in 2023: "We should not be afraid of what it is unnecessary to be afraid of. We need to win. That is all. We have to achieve this with the means we have, with the weapons we have. I would like to remind you that a nuclear weapon is not just a bomb; it is the heritage of the whole Russian people, suffered through the hardest times. It is our heritage. And we have the right to use it to defend our homeland [does he mean the liberated components of the USSR that gained freedom in 1992?]. Changing the [nuclear use] doctrine is just a piece of paper, but it is worth making a decision."

NOTE: THIS IS NOT ENGLISH LANGUAGE "PROPAGANDA" SOLELY ADDRESSED AS A "BLUFF" TO UK AND USA GOV BIGOTED CHARLATANS (those who have framed photos of hitler, stalin, chamberlain, baldwin, lloyd george, eisenhower, et al., on their office walls), BUT ADDRESSED AT MAKING RUSSIAN FOLK PARTY TO THE NEED FOR PUTIN TO START A THIRD WORLD WAR! Duh!!!!! SURE, PUTIN COULD PRESS THE BUTTON NOW, BUT THAT IS NOT THE RUSSIAN WAY, ANY MORE THAN HITLER SET OFF WWII BY DIRECTLY BOMBING LONDON! HE DIDN'T. THESE PEOPLE WANT TO CONTROL HISTORY, TO GO DOWN THE NEXT "PUTIN THE GREAT". THEY WANT TO GET THEIR PEOPLE, AND CHINA, NORTH KOREA, IRAN, ET Al. AS ALLIES, BY APPEARING TO BE DEFENDING RATIONALITY AND LIBERTY AGAINST WAR MONGERING WESTERN IMPERIALISM. For the KGB mindset here, please read Chapman Pincher's book "The Secret offensive" and Paul Mercer's "Peace of the Dead - The Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers". Please note that the link to the analysis of the secret USSBS report 92, The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (which google fails to appreciate is a report with the OPPOSITE conclusions to the lying unclassified reports and Glasstone's book on fire, is on internet archive in the PDF documents list at the page "The effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan" (the secret report 92 of the USSBS, not the lying unclassified version or the Glasstone book series). If you don't like the plain layout of this blog, you can change it into a "fashionable" one with smaller photos you can't read by adding ?m=1 to the end of the URL, e.g. https://glasstone.blogspot.com/2022/02/analogy-of-1938-munich-crisis-and.html?m=1

PLEASE BEAR WITH US - THIS SITE WAS DEVELOPED IN 2006 BEFORE GOOGLE SMARTPHONE BOT CACHING (GOOGLE BOTS CAN'T INDEX THIS FORMAT ANYMORE AS IT IS SIMPLY UNSUITABLE TO SMARTPHONES WHICH DIDN'T EXIST BACK IN 2006 - WILL MOVE TO A NEW DOMAIN SOON TO OVERCOME THIS. (HOPEFULLY THE TEXT WILL ALSO BE EDITED AND RE-WRITTEN TO TAKE OUT TYPING ERRORS AND DEAD LINKS DATING BACK TO 2006 WHEN THE BLOG BEGAN - A LOT HAS CHANGED SINCE THEN!)

Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons exaggerations completely undermine credible deterrence of war: Glasstone exaggerates urban "strategic" nuclear weapons effects by using effects data taken from unobstructed terrain (without the concrete jungle shielding of blast winds and radiation by cities!), and omits the most vital uses and most vital effects of nuclear weapons: to DETER world war credibly by negating the concentrations of force used to invade Belgium, 1914 (thus WWI) and Poland (WWII). The facts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the shielding of blast and radiation effects by modern concrete buildings in the credible nuclear deterrence of invasions (click here for data) which - unlike the countervalue drivel that failed to prevent WW2 costing millions of human lives - worked in the Cold War despite the Western media's obsession with treating as Gospel truth the lying anti-nuclear propaganda from Russia's World Peace Council and its allies (intended to make the West disarm to allow Russian invasions without opposition, as worked in Ukraine recently)! If we have credible W54's and W79's tactical nukes to deter invasions as used to Cold War, pro Russian World Peace Council inspired propaganda says: "if you use those, we'll bomb your cities", but they can bomb our cities with nuclear if we use conventional weapons, or even if we fart, if they want - we don't actually control what thugs in dictatorships - it is like saying Hitler had 12,000 tons of tabun nerve agent by 1945, so lying we had to surrender for fear of it. Actually, he had to blow his brains out because he had an incredible deterrent, as retaliation risk plus defence (masks) negated it!

Credible deterrence necessitates simple, effective protection against concentrated and dispersed invasions and bombing. The facts can debunk massively inaccurate, deliberately misleading CND "disarm or be annihilated" pro-dictatorship ("communism" scam) political anti-nuclear deterrence dogma. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda effects lies on blast and radiation for modern concrete cities is debunked by solid factual evidence kept from public sight for political reasons by the Marx-media which is not opposed by the remainder of the media, and the completely fake "nuclear effects data" sneaks into "established pseudo-wisdom" by the back-door. Another trick is hate attacks on anyone telling the truth: this is a repeat of lies from Nobel Peace Prize winner Angell and pals before WWI (when long-"outlawed" gas was used by all sides, contrary to claims that paper agreements had "banned" it somehow) and WWII (when gas bombing lies prior to the war by Angell, Noel-Baker, Joad and others were used as an excuse to "make peace deals" with the Nazis, again, not worth the paper they were printed on). Mathematically, the subset of all States which keep agreements (disarmament and arms control, for instance) is identical to the subset of all States which are stable Democracies (i.e., tolerating dissent for the past several years), but this subset is - as Dr Spencer Weart's statistical evidence of war proves in his book Never at War: Why Democracies Won't Fight One Another - not the bloody war problem! Because none of the disarmaments grasp set theory, or bother to read Dr Weart's book, they can never understand that disarmament of Democracies doesn't cause peace but causes millions of deaths.

PLEASE CLICK HERE for the truth from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the shielding of blast and radiation effects by modern concrete buildings in the credible nuclear deterrence of invasions which - unlike the countervalue drivel that failed to prevent WW2 costing millions of human lives - worked in the Cold War despite the Western media's obsession with treating as Gospel truth the lying anti-nuclear propaganda from Russia's World Peace Council and its allies (intended to make the West disarm to allow Russian invasions without opposition, as worked in Ukraine recently)! Realistic effects and credible nuclear weapon capabilities are needed for deterring or stopping aggressive invasions and attacks which could escalate into major conventional or nuclear wars. Credible deterrence is through simple, effective protection against concentrated and dispersed invasions and aerial attacks, debunking inaccurate, misleading CND "disarm or be annihilated" left political anti-nuclear deterrence dogma. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda effects lies on blast and radiation for modern concrete cities is debunked by solid factual evidence kept from public sight for political reasons by the Marx-media.

Glasstone's and Nukemap's fake Effects of Nuclear Weapons effects data for unobstructed deserts, rather than realistic blast and radiation shielding concrete jungles which mitigate countervalue damage as proved in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by Penney and Stanbury, undermine credible world war deterrence just as Philip Noel-Baker's 1927 BBC radio propaganda on gas war knock-out blow lies were used by Nazi propaganda distributing "pacifist disarmers" to undermine deterrence of Hitler's war, murdering tens of millions deliberately through lies (e.g. effective gas masks don't exist) that were easy to disprove, but supported by the mainstream fascist leaning press in the UK. There is not just one country, Russia, which could trigger WW3, because we know from history that the world forms alliances once a major war breaks out, apart from a few traditional neutral countries like Ireland and Switzerland, so a major US-China war over Taiwan could draw in support from Russia and North Korea, just as the present Russian invasion and war against Ukraine has drawn in Iranian munitions support for Russia. So it is almost certain that a future East-vs-West world war will involve an alliance of Russia-China-North Korea-Iran fighting on multiple fronts, with nuclear weapons being used carefully for military purposes (not in the imaginary 1930s massive "knockout blow" gas/incendiary/high explosive raids against cities that was used by the UK media to scare the public into appeasing Hitler and thus enabling him to trigger world war; Chamberlain had read Mein Kampf and crazily approved Hitler's plans to exterminate Jews and invade Russia starting a major war, a fact censored out of biased propaganda hailing Chamberlain as a peacemaker).

Realistic effects and credible nuclear weapons capabilities are VITAL for deterring or stopping aggressive invasions and attacks which could escalate into major conventional or nuclear wars debunk Marx media propagandarists who obfuscate because they don't want you to know the truth, so activism is needed to get the message out against lying frauds and open fascists in the Russian supporting Marx mass media, which sadly includes government officialdom (still infiltrated by reds under beds, sorry to Joe MaCarthy haters, but admit it as a hard fact that nuclear bomb labs in the West openly support Russian fascist mass murders; I PRAY THIS WILL SOON CHANGE!).

ABOVE: Tom Ramos at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (quoted at length on the development details of compact MIRV nuclear warhead designs in the latest post on this blog) explains how the brilliant small size primary stage, the Robin, was developed and properly proof-tested in time to act as the primary stage for a compact thermonuclear warhead to deter Russia in the 1st Cold War, something now made impossible due to Russia's World Peace Council propaganda campaigns. (Note that Ramos has a new book published, called From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War which describes in detail in chapter 13, "First the Flute and Then the Robin", how caring, dedicated nuclear weapons physicists in the 1950s and 1960s actually remembered the lesson of disarmament disaster in the 1930s, and so WORKED HARD to develop the "Flute" secondary and the "Robin" primary to enable a compact, light thermonuclear warhead to help deter WWIII! What a difference to today, when all we hear from such "weaponeers" now is evil lying about nuclear weapons effects on cities and against Western civil defence and against credible deterrence on behalf of the enemy.)

ABOVE: Star Wars filmmaker Peter Kuran has at last released his lengthy (90 minutes) documentary on The neutron bomb. Unfortunately, it is not yet being widely screened in cinemas or on DVD Blu Ray disc, so you have to stream it (if you have fast broadband internet hooked up to a decent telly). At least Peter managed to interview Samuel Cohen, who developed the neutron bomb out of the cleaner Livermore devices Dove and Starling in 1958 (Ramos says Livermore's director, who invented a wetsuit, is now trying to say Cohen stole the neutron bomb idea from him! Not so, as RAND colleague and 1993 Effects Manual EM-1 editor Dr Harold L. Brode explains in his recent brilliant book on the history of nuclear weapons in the 1st Cold War (reviewed in a post on this blog in detail) that Cohen was after the neutron bomb for many years before Livermore was even built as a rival to Los Alamos. Cohen had been into neutrons when working in the Los Alamos Efficiency Group of the Manhattan project on the very first nuclear weapons, used with neutron effects on people by Truman, back in 1945 to end a bloody war while the Livermore director was in short pants.)

For the true effects in modern city concrete buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, disproving the popular lies for nudes in open deserts used as the basis for blast and radiation calculations by Glasstone and Nukemap, please click here The deceptive bigots protraying themselves as Federation of American Scientists genuine communist disarmers in the Marx media including TV scammers have been suppressing the truth to sell fake news since 1945 and in a repetition of the 1920s and 1930s gas war media lying for disarmament and horror news scams that caused disarmament and thus encouraged Hitler to initiate the invasions that set off WWII!

Glasstone's Effects of Nuclear Weapons exaggerations completely undermine credible deterrence of war: Glasstone exaggerates urban "strategic" nuclear weapons effects by using effects data taken from unobstructed terrain (without the concrete jungle shielding of blast winds and radiation by cities!), and omits the most vital uses and most vital effects of nuclear weapons: to DETER world war credibly by negating the concentrations of force used to invade Belgium, 1914 (thus WWI) and Poland (WWII). Disarmament and arms control funded propaganda lying says any deterrent which is not actually exploded in anger is a waste of money since it isn't being "used", a fraud apparently due to the title and content of Glasstone's book which omits the key use and effect of nuclear weapons, to prevent world wars: this is because Glasstone and Dolan don't even bother to mention the neutron bomb or 10-fold reduced fallout in the the Los Alamos 95% clean Redwing-Navajo test of 1956, despite the neutron bomb effects being analysed for its enhanced radiation and reduced thermal and blast yield in detail in the 1972 edition of Dolan's edited secret U.S. Department of Defense Effects Manual EM-1, "Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons", data now declassified yet still being covered-up by "arms control and disarmament" liars today to try to destroy credible deterrence of war in order to bolster their obviously pro-Russian political anti-peace agenda. "Disarmament and arms control" charlatans, quacks, cranks, liars, mass murdering Russian affiliates, and evil genocidal Marxist media exposed for what it is, what it was in the 1930s when it enabled Hitler to murder tens of millions in war .

ABOVE: 11 May 2023 Russian state TV channel 1 loon openly threatens nuclear tests and bombing UK. Seeing how the Russian media is under control of Putin, this is like Dr Goebbels rantings, 80 years past. But this doesn't disprove the world war threat any more than it did with Dr Goebbels. These people, like the BBC here, don't just communicate "news" but attempt to do so selectively and with interpretations and opinions that set the stage for a pretty obviously hate based political agenda with their millions of viewers, a trick that worked in the 1st Cold War despite Orwell's attempts to lampoon it in books about big brother like "1984" and "Animal Farm". When in October 1962 the Russians put nuclear weapons into Cuba in secret without any open "threats", and with a MASSIVELY inferior overall nuclear stockpile to the USA (the USA had MORE nuclear weapons, more ICBMs, etc.), the media made a big fuss, even when Kennedy went on TV on 22 October and ensured no nuclear "accidents" in Cuba by telling Russia that any single accidentally launched missile from Cuba against any Western city would result in a FULL RETALITORY STRIKE ON RUSSIA. There was no risk of nuclear war then except by accident, and Kennedy had in his 25 May 1961 speech on "Urgent National Needs" a year and a half before instigated NUCLEAR SHELTERS in public basement buildings to help people in cities survive (modern concrete buildings survive near ground zero Hiroshima, as proved by declassified USSBS reports kept covered up by Uncle Sam). NOE THAT THERE IS A CREDIBLE THREAT OF NUCLEAR TESTS AND HIROSHIMA TYPE INTIMIDATION STRIKES, THE BBC FINALLY DECIDES TO SUPPRESS NUCLEAR NEWS SUPPOSEDLY TO HELP "ANTI-NUCLEAR" RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA TRYING TO PREVENT US FROM GETTING CREDIBLE DETERRENCE OF INVASIONS, AS WE HAD WITH THE W79 UNTIL DISARMERS REMOVED IT IN THE 90s! This stinks of prejudice, the usual sort of hypocrisy from the 1930s "disarmament heroes" who lied their way to Nobel peace prizes by starting a world war!

The facts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the shielding of blast and radiation effects by modern concrete buildings in the credible nuclear deterrence of invasions (click here for data) which - unlike the countervalue drivel that failed to prevent WW2 costing millions of human lives - worked in the Cold War despite the Western media's obsession with treating as Gospel truth the lying anti-nuclear propaganda from Russia's World Peace Council and its allies (intended to make the West disarm to allow Russian invasions without overwhelming, effective deterrence or opposition, as worked in Ukraine recently)!

Realistic effects and credible nuclear weapon capabilities are required now for deterring or stopping aggressive invasions and attacks which could escalate into major conventional or nuclear wars. Credible deterrence necessitates simple, effective protection against concentrated and dispersed invasions and bombing. The facts can debunk massively inaccurate, deliberately misleading CND "disarm or be annihilated" pro-dictatorship ("communism" scam) political anti-nuclear deterrence dogma. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda effects lies on blast and radiation for modern concrete cities is debunked by solid factual evidence kept from public sight for political reasons by the Marx-media, which is not opposed by the fashion-obsessed remainder of the media, and so myths sneak into "established pseudo-wisdom" by the back-door.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

North Korean strike plan for mainland U.S. revealed and EMP risks evaluated




Above: a peak of 21,244 hits per month occurred on this blog in December 2012, when North Korea successfully launched a 3-stage missile carrying a satellite, Unha-3, into orbit. Few hits on this blog from North Korea, but interest from Russia.  Judging by the size of the vast USSR civil defense system and early USSR EMP space bursts on 22 October and 1 November 1962, during the Cold War, there are no real "secrets" here for Russians to find.  They have the data already.




North Korean leader Kim Jong Un photographed on 29 March 2013 in front of a large map labelled “U.S. Mainland Strike Plan,” with missile trajectories plotted from North Korea to four American state targets: Hawaii (Pacific), San Diego (California), Washington D.C., and Austin (Texas). The question is, are these intended EMP target points (high altitude nuclear bursts)?

North Korea has tested nuclear weapons (0.48 kiloton on 9 Oct 2006, 2.35 kilotons on 25 May 2009, and 7.7 kilotons on 12 Feb 2013) and missiles, most recently placing a satellite in orbit on 12 Dec 2012 using a 3-stage rocket.  This indicates that North Korea could deliver nuclear warheads exceeding 7 kilotons yield to detonate 75 km over several major American cities, producing E1 (prompt gamma ray) EMP damage that could cripple the USA.  As the graphs and maps below show, even major inaccuracies in detonation location and altitude would have comparatively little effect on the devastating EMP results.


Above: E1 (prompt gamma ray) EMP field strengths for a 0.3 gauss magnetic field at the equator.  Over central USA, the EMP strengths are doubled because the magnetic field is twice as strong, about 0.6 gauss. Notice that owing to the conduction current, the EMP increases only slowly with bomb yield.  (Note also that the EMP that crippled 30 strings of streetlamps in Hawaii from the nuclear test 1,300 km away on Johnston Island on 9 July 1962 was only 5.6 kV/m in strength as Dr Longmire reveals in EMP interaction note 353, in the era before EMP-sensitive modern electronics, thus all of the damage in 1962 was caused to large relatively insensitive overload fuses, not microprocessors or computers and power supplies.)

If the North Korean bombs have a thin beryllium tamper and minimal thickness of high explosive around the core, quite a high fraction of prompt gamma rays will be released (3.5% of the energy of fission is in the form of highly penetrating ~2 MeV prompt gamma rays, many of which obviously can escape from small, low yield bombs with relatively little shielding around their core).  The distribution of the EMP over America is plotted in graphs below, taken from the recent 2010 report for the US EMP Commission, Meta-R-320:



Herman Kahn surveyed the wide spectrum of coercive uses for nuclear weapons tests - from underwater to high altitude (EMP effects) - in his 1965 book, On Escalation, pages 214-5 (linked here):

'Consider ... the use of nuclear weapons to coerce an opponent by means of a spectacular show of force. In this case, it is clear that there is an almost continuous spectrum of alternatives available. They can be ranked as follows:

'1. Testing a large weapon for purely technical reasons almost as part of a normal test programme.

'2. Testing a very large weapon, or testing on a day that has particular political significance, or both.

'3. Testing a weapon off the coast of the antagonist so that the populace can observe it.
'4. Testing a weapon high in outer space near the antagonist's airspace [EMP].

'5. Testing lower in outer space, or directly over the opponent's country [EMP].

'6. Testing so low that the shock wave is heard by everybody, and perhaps a few windows are broken.'













Above: America is preparing for urban nuclear detonations due to nuclear proliferation, which itself stems from the attraction to dictatorships of exaggerated urban nuclear weapons effects hype from the cold war era.  In the Cold War, exaggerations aided nuclear deterrence of the tremendous conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact, which was relatively cheaply (compared to conscripting half the population into a conventional army).  For example, houses were built with a clear radial line-of-sight to the fireball in the unobstructed Nevada desert in 1953 Operation Upshot Knothole test Encore which proved that if we knock all the houses down in a city to prevent any shadowing effects, thermal radiation still cannot ignite a whitewashed wooden house, but will ignite one packed with inflammables at the (very dry) 19% relative humidity of that test.  The same stunt was repeated in 1955 at Operation Teapot, shot Apple 2, where again thermal, blast and nuclear radiation effects were exaggerated by failing to simulate the shadowing and shielding of a modern city.  In Hiroshima, the secret USSBS report 92 volume 2 showed that there was an enormous difference in mean areas of effectiveness for destruction of modern city buildings and the predominant wooden houses which are not found in modern city centres, which would be the targets for nuclear attack:














Glasstone and Dolan write in the 1977 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, pages 611-612 (paragraphs 12.209-12.211):

"From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies, ... The mutation frequency appeared to be independent of the rate at which the radiation dose was received. ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions must be revised, at least for mammals. ... in male mice ... For exposure rates from 90 down to 0.8 roentgen per minute ... the mutation frequency per roentgen decreases as the exposure rate is decreased. ... in female mice ... The radiation-induced mutation frequency per roentgen decreases continuously with the exposure rate from 90 roentgens per minute downward. At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 roentgen/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent or negligible, no matter how large the total (accumulated) exposure to the female gonads, at least up to 400 roentgens."







Above: land equivalent 48 hour downwind fallout doses from even dirty H-bombs would be survivable in a modern city concrete building with a protection factor of 10 or more, and people could evacuate from the path of the fallout, which is even more predictable with modern weather computers today than in the 1950s.

"Outrageous, unsubstantiated statements are made concerning the hazards of ionizing radiation, in spite of a vast published, peer-reviewed literature … The result of this deception is not insignificant: literally millions of lives are less healthy … annual billions of dollars spent needlessly to protect us from radiation that we need for optimal health. Radiophobia limits the political will of people and governments … Radiophobia prevents the logical and safe burial of nuclear wastes. Radiophobia causes serious psychological effects leading to loss of life (>100,000 abortions and >1,000 suicides attributed to Chernobyl fallout).  My career was initially funded by the AEC, starting at the Radiobiology Laboratory at Texas A & M … All graduate students in the lab participated in a large reproduction study with rats who received continuous gamma irradiation … I can remember their discussions about why rats receiving 20 mSv/day [2 R/day] (~ 7 Sv per year) lived longer … I spent about 25 years (1968-93) working on inhalation toxicology of transuranics [plutonium, etc.] in the Biology department at PNL … A large practical threshold of 2-10 Gy [2,000-10,000 R, for low dose rates of ~10 mR/hour] is seen in humans for thorotrast patients (liver cancer) and radium dial painters (bone cancer)."



Above: In unstressed cells, the level of p53 DNA repair protein is minimised via its binding to protein MDM2, which is the oncogene that normally inhibits p53. (Second illustration from http://p53.free.fr/p53_info/p53_dev.html.  See also Lawrence Donehower et al., "Mice deficient for p53 are developmentally normal but susceptible to spontaneous tumours," Nature 356: 215-221.)

MDM2 levels increase with p53, causing a negative-feedback "regulation loop" thereby keeping p53 at a low level in normal cells.  Low level radiation exposure increases tumor-suppressor levels, reducing cancer:


Radiation causes stress mediators (like ATM and CHK2) to "activate" p53 by separating the protein p53 from its inhibitor, MDM2. This increases the level of active p53, not bound to MDM2, for 12 hours after irradiation. Thus, low level radiation causes an increase in tumor-suppressing p53, reducing the cancer and genetic risks by repairing DNA damage that would otherwise lead to cancer or genetic defects in offspring.

Direct measurements reported by Jamie Lamkin in his book, Investigating the Role of p53 in the Germ Cell Apoptotic Pathway (Rhode Island College, 2011, Chapter 2, "Effect of Radiation Exposure on p53 in Mouse Germ Cells," Figure 9), determined that the p53 level in cells showed a 5-fold increase in tumor-suppressing p53 levels, peaking at 6 hours after exposure of mice to 5 Gy of Cs-137 gamma radiation given over a 44 minutes exposure time.  This proves the radiation stimulated repair potential for DNA damage, but at high dose rates, some DNA damage can occur before p53 levels rise enough to suppress damage.


The mechanism for DNA repair and cancer avoidance by p53 is as follows (note that other tumour suppressor genes also exist, e.g. PTEN regulates the growth rate of cells, but p53 is central):

1. Once activated by radiation, p53 arrests the cell cycle at the G1/S regulation point by activating the expression of a transducer gene like the kinase inhibitor p21 (which stops the cell division cycle by binding to CDK2), or the Growth Arrest and DNA Damage "GADD45" gene, and then – while the cell cycle is stopped – it repairs the DNA damage using a DNA repair enzyme like p53 R2, GADD45, p48 or XPC.

2. If the damage is beyond safe repair, p53 uses genes like DR5, Plg3, AIP1, Noxa, Bax-2, Puma or Fas to produce proteins that kill the cell by "apoptosis" (programmed cell death), to prevent it from turning carcinogenic. P53 is so effective at preventing cancer that in most cancers (over 50% of human tumours including lung, colon, breast, cervical and bladder cancer) only arise when defective mutations of the p53 gene (TP53) occur because the defective p53 cannot activate p21 to stop a cell’s division for repair work (reference: M. Hollstein, et al., "p53 mutations in human cancers," Science, v253, 1991, pp.49-53).

Proof of the importance of p53 is shown by the fact that most of those who inherit a mutated p53 gene suffer from childhood cancers (Li-Fraumeni syndrome). Similar early vulnerability to cancer was also observed in p53-deficient mice (Reference: Lawrence A. Donehower, et al., "Mice deficient for p53 are developmentally normal but susceptible to spontaneous tumours," Nature, v356, 1992, pp. 215-21).

Toshiyuki Norimura, et al., "p53-dependent apoptosis suppresses radiation-induced teratogenesis [birth defects]," Nature Med. 1996 May;2(5):577-80: "This reciprocal relationship of radiosensitivity to anomalies and to embryonic or fetal lethality supports the notion that embryonic or fetal tissues have a p53-dependent "guardian" of the tissue that aborts cells bearing radiation-induced teratogenic [birth defect-causing] DNA damage." 

It should be noted that p53 suppresses all kinds of DNA damage, both that leading to cancer and that in germ cell DNA that leads to genetic defects in offspring.  p53 cancer-suppression is stimulated by radiation, which releases p53 from its MDM2 inhibitor.  These are hard scientific facts which explain the scientific evidence of lifespain increase in controlled mice irradiation experiments, and the bone cancer threshold dose rate evidence from human radium dial painters whose bones were measured to accurately determine their radium content.  Cancer occurs when low levels of p53 repair multiple double-strand breaks (entire chromosome breaks) too slowly, allowing mistakes to occur, mainly due to the loss of sections of DNA which contain tumor suppressor genes or cell cycle regulation genes (p53 or PTEN).  The cell which no longer has these vital genes then starts undergoing uncontrolled proliferation without adequate DNA repair mechanisms in place.  The second stage is that the defective cells undergo evolution as more and more errors accumulate in their DNA.  This accounts for the delay time of years that it usually takes for a cancer evolve aggressive characteristics, like a special network of blood supply vessels and extra insulin and insulin growth factor (IGF) receptors, both of which speed up the rate of growth of the cancer.  These facts are relevant to the long term risks from exposure to high dose-rate, high dose radiation, because someone who knows they have been exposed can take precautions to reduce the risk of the secondary stage of evolution of aggressive cancers.  Minimal intake of simple sugars and regular exercise (to keep blood insulin levels low), help to reduce the risk of aggressive tumors evolving in this second stage.

"Chromosome breaks occur at all dose rates, but the … dose rate dependence … depends on the presence of two breaks in close proximity at the same time. The probability of this occurring will be greater at high dose rates than at low, since the breaks are assumed to stay open for only a few minutes [before repair by a DNA repair enzyme, like P53]. Unless another break is produced close by within this period, the first will reconstitute and no injury will be seen. … Austrian miners from Schneeberg and Joachimsthal [inhaled radon gas resulting in lung cancer after an average period of] about seventeen years, and during this time the lungs of the miners will have received a dose of at least 1,000 rads and possibly more."
  • Dr Peter Alexander, Atomic Radiation and Life, Penguin Books, 1957, pages 59, 148-9.
"A marked contrast in the production of persistent chromosone aberrations in mouse cells by ionizing radiation delivered at a high dose rate (30 rad/min) versus a low dose rate (1.45 rad/hour) was observed. ... none of the 17 mice exposed to the continuous low dose rate gamma radiation (1.45 rad/hour) showed definite clones of abnormal marrow cells ... If some of the late effects of radiation, particularly leukemia incidence, are related to the frequency of chromosome aberrations, it is possible that low dose rate gamma radiation may be less leukemogenic than high dose rate radiation."
Cancer arises from incorrectly repaired, multiple uncorrected double-strand breaks at high dose rates, or in situations where DNA repair enzymes are dysfunctional due to loss, mutation, or breakdown of the activator mechanism which releases DNA repair proteins from binding their normal inhibitors in healthy cells, when radiation stress occurs. At normal mammal cell temperatures, the Brownian motion of water molecules is sufficient to induce single-strand DNA breaks (only one strand in the double helix of DNA being broken) at a rate of 2 per cell per second. These single-strand breaks are easily repaired without shutting down the cell cycle, because the double-helix ensures that the other strand of DNA continues to hold the molecule together, preventing any risk of the transposition of sections of DNA within genes along chromosomes. Since base-pairs are always "matched up" between one strand and the other in the double-helix of DNA, with the base in one strand being paired with a base in the other strand, correct repair of single strand breaks is easy. A missing base in a single strand break is simply replaced with a base that pairs with the remaining DNA base in the unbroken strand.

Double strand breaks, in which both strands in the double helix are severed

In addition, natural double-strand breaks in which both strands in the double-helix of a DNA molecule are broken occur at the natural rate of 0.5 per cell per hour (i.e., 0.007% of all natural DNA breaks). Unlike single-strand breaks, these double-strand breaks completely sever the chromosome at the break point, since DNA consists of two strands of DNA in the double-helix form. If two double-strand breaks occur in rapid succession within a chromosome, a free section of DNA is completely unleashed, which in the fluid environment of the cell may rotate or even be lost before the loose ends are reconnected by a DNA repair enzyme. If the wrong ends of severed DNA segments are connected during the repair process, a cancer may occur, depending on which genes have been transposed or lost by the error.

Cancer growth is accelerated by high blood insulin and insulin-like growth factors like IGF-1, since cancer cells typically have more insulin and insulin factor receptors than healthy cells. Aggressive cancers proliferate by rapid cellular division, so they have a higher metabolism than healthy cells. Blood glucose levels control insulin levels. While all healthy cells require glucose that is obtained from food of all types, simple sugars are broken down into glucose more rapidly than complex sugars in the form of starch. Simple sugar ingestion may preferentially fuel cancer proliferation by delivering 20 calories/minute to the blood stream, compared to just 2 calories/minute for complex sugar breakdown from foods like potato starch. Obtaining glucose through the slow breakdown of complex sugars in starch or in fat minimises the blood glucose level and therefore minimises the insulin level, which limits the rate of proliferation of cancer. Alarmingly, these facts have been obfuscated and dismissed by oversimplifications that merely claim that "all cells need glucose." The research literature indicates that low glucose and low insulin can reduce cancer cells to a fasting condition with slow proliferation. Another area of research needed is "insulin potentiation therapy" where a combination of reduced blood glucose with excess insulin and insulin-like growth factors has been suggested to starve aggressive fast-proliferating cancer cell that fail to respond to other treatment. To starve cancer, insulin is used to increase cancer metabolism while simultaneously depriving cancer of sufficient glucose (fuel). Cancer cells can have up to 10 times more IGF receptors than non-cancer cells, and so suffer greater effects from a variation in insulin than healthy cells, which survive fasting.  It is easy to measure blood sugar levels during this treatment to prevent brain damage, but very few controlled experiments have even been undertaken to discover how to optimise such radical ideas, due it seems to political and financial inertia of traditional drugs industry research which seeks only new chemicals.  It you want to beat cancer, you first must kill the demented hostility/apathy from the intellectual dictatorship of basically fascist capitalists who wear the cloaks of moralistic socialists and preach subjective radiation dogmas as a modern substitute for witchcraft superstition and taboos.






"Today we have a population of 2,383 [radium dial painter] cases for whom we have reliable body content measurements. . . . All 64 bone sarcoma [cancer] cases occurred in the 264 cases with more than 10 Gy [1,000 rads], while no sarcomas appeared in the 2,119 radium cases with less than 10 Gy."

- Dr Robert Rowland, Director of the Center for Human Radiobiology, Bone Sarcoma in Humans Induced by Radium: A Threshold Response?, Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting, European Society for Radiation Biology, Radioprotection colloquies, Vol. 32CI (1997), pp. 331-8.


This extensive and accurate dose-effects data debunks the claims of Linus Pauling in the 1950s that fallout strontium-90 caused bone cancer during nuclear testing.  See graph above relating radium to plutonium and strontium, which all have safe doses with thresholds for cancer which get larger for lower dose rates, e.g. see graph below for bone cancer threshold dose data in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (very high dose rates):






Linus Pauling versus radiation facts
"Small doses of any drug possess a bio-positive effect while the large dose of the same compound has the opposite bio-negative effect. In short, all drugs have opposite effects in two dose extremes. The young scientist that worked on this hypothesis for his PhD under the famous Stanford immunologist, George Fegan, to show that vitamin C could be dangerous in bigger doses while it is a stimulant and good for the health in very small doses never made it and had to leave science research altogether because Linus Pauling, the great hero of science, destroyed the young scientist completely. It was Pauling himself that had induced Fegan to work on the good effects of vitamin C on the immune system in the first place. The hormetic effect of vitamin C could not be swallowed by Pauling. Pauling could never agree with vitamin C being poisonous in larger doses! Later he fought an expensive legal battle against his own colleague, a former Director of the Pauling Institute, for showing that cancer growth is stimulated by vitamin C in larger doses, but Pauling lost the battle and was disgraced. Pauling got the second Nobel (Peace) Prize, after his first for the discovery of vitamin C, by the same antipathy towards hormesis. Edward Teller was the father of American Nuclear deterrent against the communists. While Teller was testing atomic weapons, he showed the hormetic effect of radiation by accident. In very small doses radiation stimulates the immune system and increases human life span, radiation hormesis. It also slows the ageing processes by the hormetic effect of working as an anti-oxidant. … The famous Teller-Pauling debates that followed took the whole of America by surprise. Pauling succeeded in demonizing Teller to the extent that the Swedish Nobel Academy gave Pauling the Nobel Peace Prize, his second Nobel! There are many such frauds that have occurred in science … However the technology industry has become a big money spinner and that feeds society with the myth about science."

- Professor B. M. Hegde, MD, FRCP(Lond.), FRCP(Edin.), FRCP(Glas.), FRCP(Dub.), FACC(U.S.A.), FAMS, "Hormesis", http://www.bmhegde.com/hormesis.htm



THE EXAGGERATION OF URBAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS EFFECTS

The nuclear weapons effects urban targets exaggeration policy back fires when human-rights-violating dictatorships make nuclear weapons to use the exaggerated threats against democracies.









But hopefully, the North Koreans are just interested in Project Orion, the nuclear weapon powered spacecraft developed by Freeman Dyson, as the only practical way to safely and cheaply put a large colony on Mars. It would travel directly (in a straight line!) and quickly to Mars using 2,000 nuclear bombs, carrying 150 people and attaining a top speed of 45 km/second. The travel time would be 3 months for the minimum distance to Mars of 56 million km and 6 months for the maximum Mars-Earth distance of 101 million km. In 1959 the stability of the entire system was completely proved in a scaled-down demonstration test which impressed Dr von Braun. Declassified nuclear test tower steel ablation studies, referred to vaguely by Dyson in the BBC documentary above, are given in weapon test reports WT-1134 and page 59 of WT-1488, both quoted and discussed here. Photo of the 29 kt Apple-2 tower legs blown down here, see discussion here and additional photos here.  (General information on Project Orion is linked here.)

It's obvious that the photo is a publicity gimmick intended to bolster North Korean military prestige, otherwise they would have kept their attack targetting plans a closely guarded secret. On the other hand, just because North Korea is issuing threats of strikes, there is no certainty that the situation will not develop:  remember Herman Kahn's analysis of the Munich Conference of September 1938. Kahn pointed out in his testimony to the June 1959 Congressional Hearings before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, on page 904:

"I have a book with me today which I recommend to those who want to exaggerate the impact of thermonuclear war.  It is called 'Munich: Prologue to Tragedy,' by Wheeler Bennett. ... As far as we can tell, Hitler was not bluffing [at the September 1938 Munich Conference where Chamberlain and Daladier gave in to Hitler's intimidation, handing over the Sudetenland, in exchange for a worthless peace promise]. The men who were in the room with him could see he was not bluffing. It was easy for the people back home to say he was bluffing, but not for the men who had the decision to make.  The German people did not want war. The German Army did not want war. They literally threatened to have a military revolution [this premature argument with Hitler tragically discredited their opinion when Hitler succeeded, due to Chamberlain's softness]. But Hitler seems to have been willing to have a war if he couldn't have his way."
The posturing with published photos of missile trajectory strike plans is very much in the spirit of the Munich Conference, or for that matter the Pearl Harbor military threat evaluations done prior to 7 Dec 1941 (which Kahn discusses in his book "On Thermonuclear War").  In these cases, there were obvious crises existing but various expert authorities found reasons which seemed good to ignore the threat or downplay it; basically these reasons were soothing "no-go theorems" based on very shaky assumptions, of the type often historically used to try to prevent radical ideas upsetting status quo in mainstream physics (like the solar system, quantum theory or relativity).  Kahn explains that it was impossible to believe that Japan would attack Pearl Harbor in 1941, according to the best experts, because (1) Japan couldn't hope to win a war with the USA, and (2) torpedoes need over 75 feet of water and Pearl Harbor is largely only 30 feet deep.  In addition, anyone pointing out a threat in public was deemed a scare-mongerer or war-mongerer.  If everyone just ignored the threat, it would cease to exist, popular consensus decided.

The combination of political and technological "no-go theorems" in this analysis made the idea of a surprise attack on Pearl taboo, and anybody who wanted to discuss the matter was dismissed as a time-waster.  Japan saw the situation very differently, using different political and technological thinking.  For example, Japan developed special torpedoes that only need 30 feet water depth, unlike the 75 feet believed by American experts.  Similarly, as Dr Irving Janis explains in "Victims of Groupthink", Kennedy's most brilliant top experts failed to foresee that the USSR would put nuclear IRBMs in Cuba.  The point is, as Professor Feynman explained, averaging the best guesstimates of the experts does not put you in possession of hard facts, it's merely a consensus of fashionable speculation, just a form of Cargo Cult pseudoscience.  You cannot always rely on reason to predict what enemies will do.

If your enemies were totally reasonable, they simply wouldn't be enemies of free democracy in the first place.  There has been speculation that North Korea can't place a nuclear warhead on top of a missile (despite having tested nuclear explosives successfully, and having put a satellite into orbit).  This guess is not hard intelligence!  As with Munich in September 1938 or Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the credibility of coercion is down to the dictator's fanaticism and desperation, precisely the things that would be laughed at in a democracy.  Hitler in 1938 had a financial crisis due to ending unemployment by conscripting a massive National Socialist army (as explained in the previous post on this blog).

Germany was spending far more each year on arms than Britain, which was therefore slipping back and losing ground, not "buying time to rearm" with the policy appeasement, as Chamberlain's apologists claimed, but at the same time, Germany couldn't afford what it was spending.  The arms race would have come to an end through dictatorial failure (just as Reagan's capitalist arms race challenge threatened to bankrupt the USSR in the 1980s), and Germany simply could not afford to support the financial strain of the arms race indefinitely without having a war (or "peaceful" invasions).  The only way to avert economic collapse was by war, both in the hope of winning through superior technology and skill, and to deflect attention from internal matters by utilizing the massive army, navy and air force.

Similarly, Japan in 1941 didn't use simple calculations to determine whether it was likely to win a war against America. Instead, it relied on its own determination and fierceness to overcome the odds, plus a calculation that the chances of success - such as they were - would get smaller as time went on and the relative strengths of the two nations changed.  The major implication of this fact is that history shows that what appears to be common sense and reasonable from the perspective of planners in a democracy, may not be applicable to the situation inside a bankrupt and desperate dictatorship, which has starved its people to make nuclear weapons and generally prepare for a war.  This is similar to the situation in 1951, when the Korean War was raging, Russia was building nuclear weapons, and Prime Minister Attlee and later in 1952 Winston Churchill were informed by military intelligence that the impoverished USSR dictatorship was making small numbers of nuclear weapons and might try a surprise attack using a smuggled nuclear weapon, either hidden in cargo containers in an innocent neutral ship and timed to explode when it entered a British city port, or else smuggled in small radiation-shielded parts using drug-smuggling technology, and assembled by secret agents (a major Cold War civil defence threat that continued from 1951 to the end of the USSR, as described by Frederick Forsyth in his August 1984 novel The Fourth Protocollater made into a 1987 film; a major nuclear attack was always actually less likely than this type of subversive attack using a false flag or no flag at all, because of the deterrence from having a protected second strike retaliation capability):




Above: nuclear weapons testing was used in part as a tour de force, or show of strength, during the Cold War (such as this spectacular U.S. Air Force colour photo of the 25 July 1946 Crossroads-Baker 23 kt test at 90 feet underwater in Bikini Lagoon, with the water column and Wilson condensation cloud dwarfing the target array of discarded WWII battleships).

The fallout data measured by George R. Stanbury and others from the British nuclear test in a simulated terrorist ship attack, Operation Hurricane, is linked here, and it was used in 1954 by Stanbury to assess radiation hazards in the restricted U.K. Home Office civil defence report, "Assumed Effects of Two Atomic Bomb Explosions in Shallow Water Off the Port of Liverpool," CD/SA51, U.K. National Archives report HO 225/51. Stanbury used a contamination arrival time of 5 minutes, assumed that the population outdoors would take 2 minutes to move indoors, and used an average protection factor of 100 for buildings to allow for radioactive rain to run off roofs and into underground drains or soak into the soil. He concluded that two 20-kt bombs detonated in cargo freighters 180-m off shore at lunchtime when 20% of the population is outdoors, on lunch breaks, would kill 78,600 by blast and by the radiation if the wind was blowing inland at 10 miles/hour.

The initial radiation is reduced for the Hurricane bomb-in-ship burst (with the bomb centre located 2.7 m below the waterline), and only 1.4% of the 25 kt total yield (or 1.8% if a total yield of 20 kt is assumed) was radiated as thermal radiation because the water cone thrown up rapidly quenched the fireball.  The main problem is the rapid arrival time of the fallout from such a low yield near surface burst, which leads to incredibly high radiation doses in a small "hotspot" area directly downwind.  (For the 15 megaton Castle-Bravo test, the maximum measured fallout doses in the hotspot areas were actually far lower as explained in weapon test report WT-915, because of the decay which occurred during the longer arrival time due to the higher mushroom cloud.  Measurements from automatic recorders showed that fallout from Castle-Bravo began to arrive under the mushroom at a mean time of 28 minutes after burst and the dose rate only peaked at 65 minutes after detonation, so people in a real city would have had a relatively long time to organise and evacuate from the hotspot area directly downwind.)  The shorter arrival time from the lower clouds of lower yield detonations gives less time for evasive actions like evacuation and sheltering.  However, the smaller downwind hotspot area of intense "stem" fallout from a low-yield kiloton-range detonation allows its evacuation, since people will be able to literally run cross-wind to get out of the area, without receiving a lethal dose, if people are fully informed about the details.

THERMAL SHADOWING BY WESTERN CITY BUILDINGS (MODERN CITY SKYLINES):

EXAGGERATIONS OF THE FIRESTORM AND FLASH BURNS EFFECTS USING INAPPROPRIATE WOOD-FRAME HOUSE IGNITION DATA FROM HIROSHIMA



The firestorm in Hiroshima (8:15 am, 6 August 1945 nuclear attack) was due to severe overcrowding of wooden buildings containing coarcoal braziers used for breakfast, as proved by a survey of over 1,000 survivors from concrete buildings (who survived the firestorm), reported in the secret 1947 US Strategic Bombing Survey report on the firestorm, volume 2 of report 92, The effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (which has nothing whatsoever to do with the 1946 US Strategic Bombing Survey report, which omits every single piece of data and just gives emotional propaganda to bolster deterrence):







Firestorm and nuclear winter (firestorm dust loading of stratosphere) liars debunked by hard Hiroshima evidence!
The effects of a surface burst nuclear explosion in any modern hi-rise concrete and steel frame city are grossed reduced, compared to the numbers frequently cited using Glasstone and Dolan's 1977 "Effects of Nuclear Weapons".  This should be publicised, to discourage potential aggressors from even thinking about trying such an attack.  In addition, this new urban effects research should be extended to determine precisely the extent to which the effects of higher yield surface bursts and air bursts would be attenuated in modern cities.  If this is done, the attractiveness of city targetting to potential aggressors would be reduced, and cheap duck and cover and fallout sheltering civil defense, with power system hardening against both EMP attacks and solar storms, would then appear a more credible and cost-effective option, taken more seriously than today.  Nuclear targetting credibility would then be constrained to military targets, reducing the hysterial fears and political instability that results from nuclear proliferation.  The original aim of nuclear deterrence was to deter military aggression, not to hold civilian targets hostage (counterforce, not countervalue).

Discrediting over-hyped exaggerations of urban nuclear effects and propaganda using unobstructed desert tests on isolated houses is a vital step towards peace and against encouraging nuclear proliferation in every tin-pot dictatorship of the world.

The deceivers who exaggerate undermine the credibility of simple civil defense countermeasures, and simultaneously gives reassurance to dictators that making a bomb will make their dictatorship secure.  We have gone into this in detail in previous posts, using the example of gas warfare exaggerations upon the September 1938 Munich Conference and earlier British policy concerning appeasement, pacifism and disarmament.  If you lie to yourself and the public - either deliberately or due to careless calculations and secrecy of civil defense research on weapons effects in urban environments - then all your policies are going to be derived from inaccurate scientific data!


It was George R. Stanbury (brief extract above) who first disproved the possibility of urban firestorms and thus firestorm-injected stratospheric soot "nuclear winter" using a simple calculation of the thermal radiation flash "shadowing" of modern city buildings: in a nutshell, only the uppermost floors of a few percent of the buildings in London or any other modern city can "see" the surface burst fireball if the yield is below a megaton, and WWII firebombing experience proved that you need to set alight 50% of the buildings to cause a firestorm, so it is impossible for a nuclear burst amid skyscapers to cause a firestorm!  Stanbury also refers to two 1950s studies of firestorm impossibility in British cities (Birmingham and Liverpool) where the fire departments used details maps and made scale models of the cities, then found that even for an air burst like Hiroshima, in modern Western cities the average height of buildings prevents enough ignition to cause a firestorm!  (reference: U.K. National Archives document HO 225/121, George R. Stanbury, "Ignition and fire spread in urban areas following a nuclear attack", September 1964, relevant extracts included in my compilation of British civil defense nuclear testing reports linked here).  QED.

Hence, no firestorms in modern cities, confirming page 350, paragraph 7.76 in the 1964 edition of Glasstone's "Effects of Nuclear Weapons":

"Based on these criteria, only certain sections - usually the older and slum areas - of a very few cities in the United States would be susceptible to fire storm development." (Extract linked here.)
Now what about fireball rise?  As the "Trinity" near surface burst nuclear test proved in 1945, as well as the "Sugar" surface burst in 1951 and Britain's surface burst Buffalo-2 in 1956, there is no fireball rise involved here, because the fireball ceases to radiate any significant thermal radiation long before buoyancy sets in.  Buoyancy isn't caused by a law of Archimedes (which only applies to bodies in a fluid where there is fluid pressure pushing upwards from below).  A nuclear surface burst fireball doesn't rise until the partial vacuum at ground zero has been filled by the afterwinds, which causes an appreciable "hover time", during which there is very little upward motion.

Fireballs and hot air balloons rise because the pressure pushing upwards on their base is greater than the pressure pushing downward on their top.  The fireball "sticks" to the ground initially because there is no significant upward pressure on its base.  So only when the afterwinds return air to the vicinity of ground zero, does buoyancy and fireball rise commence.  The photo below demonstrates that even at 9 seconds after the 1945 Trinity near surface burst test (22 kt on 30 m tower), very little fireball rise had occurred (contrasted to higher air bursts, which were already fast-rising toroidal vortices by this time):



The thermal radiation was long since over, the glow of the fireball is only just visible, since it had ceased to radiate appreciably within 3 seconds of burst (the pre-dawn test was in total darkness, and was self-illuminating).  The slow fireball rise in surface bursts is such that it can generally be ignored when evaluating the shadowing effects of buildings on thermal burns and ignitions.  However, a computerized study of city shadowing on fires and burns including fireball rise had been done: UCRL-TR-231593. Thermal Radiation from Nuclear Detonations in Urban. Environments (R. E. Marrs, W. C. Moss, B. Whitlock), June 7, 2007, which finds on page 11 that Glasstone's "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" grossly exaggerates the thermal fires and burns from nuclear explosions in cities (all "evidence" from nuclear tests in the Nevada desert is fakery, since there were no skyscrapers in the Nevada desert around the fireball, or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where 1-2 story wood-frame buildings predominated):


"Even without shadowing, the location of most of the urban population within buildings causes a substantial reduction in casualties compared to the unshielded estimates. Other investigators have estimated that the reduction in burn injuries may be greater than 90% due to shadowing and the indoor location of most of the population. We have shown that common estimates of weapon effects that calculate a “radius” for thermal radiation are clearly misleading for surface bursts in urban environments. In many cases only a few unshadowed vertical surfaces, a small fraction of the area within a thermal damage radius, receive the expected heat flux." (Emphasis added.)
Since most of the Compton-scattered gamma rays (Compton scattering predominates) are scattered in the forward direction, the fission product component of the initial gamma ray dose is also substantially shielded by tall city buildings in the radial line between the fireball and observer.  The secondary gamma rays from neutron capture by nitrogen and also from inelastic scattering of neutrons are emitted in random directions (isotropically from the point of emission), but since most neutrons are captured and scattered quite close to ground zero (within a few mean free paths), most of those "air secondary" gamma rays still originate from the vicinity of the fireball.  Neutrons are scattered over a wider range of angles than most gamma rays, so there is more "skyshine" and buildings have a smaller shielding effect than for most of the initial gamma radiation, but there is still some shielding of neutrons by buildings in densely built-up hi-rise city areas.  The dynamic pressure (wind) of the blast wave is also attenuated in a city, discrediting the application of the Rankine-Hugoniot equations (similarly, in a open trench, overpressure can diffract in, but the wind pressure just blows over the top without entering the trench).  Every joule of energy imparted from the blast wave to a building to cause destruction by accelerating debris must be subtracted from the energy of the blast wave, or else energy is not conserved!  Dr William G. Penney, 1950s Director of AWRE, explains this clearly in his 1970 paper on the yields of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where he finds clear evidence from laboratory-quality blast sensors like bent steel flag poles on buildings and the volume of semi-crushed petrol cans, that in both cities the act of causing destruction absorbed appreciable energy from the blast wave.  This debunks all of the "data" from Nevada tests on houses in unobstructed desert terrain, which does not model city attenuation!


As Glasstone's 1964 "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" graphically shows, in the ~1760 ft altitude, ~20 kt air bursts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fused Mach stem only began to form at a peak overpressure of  ~16 psi and reached a height of ~185 feet at a distance of around 0.87 mile from ground zero, at 3 seconds after burst.  Thus, most of the close-in damage to modern buildings - mostly near ground zero in Japan - resulted from regular (not horizontally travelling Mach) reflection, where the incident blast wave was coming downwards on a slant radial line from the fireball, avoiding any blast shielding by intervening buildings.  This is not the case in a surface burst, where the blast comes horizontally and does suffer close-in attenuation effects by damage caused to intervening buildings.  Surface burst attenuation by modern city buildings is therefore much greater than for the air bursts over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where regular reflection caused much damage to the relatively few modern buildings, and where the predominant building types were 1-2 story wooden homes.

EMP from Surface Bursts in Urban Environments

What's brand new and very surprising in the urban nuclear weapons effects business is a careful computer study last year (2012) by William Scott Smith and others at Los Alamos of the effects of building attenuation in a modern city on the electromagnetic pulse from an urban nuclear surface burst.  A Nagasaki type nuclear weapon was assumed to explode in a van parked in an open parking lot in Houston, Texas, with sky-scrapers to its East and more-or-less open ground (low buildings) to its West.  The effects of (1) building attenuation on the prompt gamma ray radiation which causes the Compton current to drive EMP and (2) building attenuation on the EMP itself (radio frequencies up to UHF) were computed.  The "EMP was channeled outward along street canyons" (Los Alamos reports LA-UR-12-24078 and LA-UR-12-20227 ):



The EMP propagating Westwards over fairly unobstructed terrain was similar to that seen from Nevada and British surface bursts, showing a large EMP (peaking at 16,000 v/m vertical component at 130 metres West), but at similar distances East the EMP is trivial by comparison!  This shows that for low yield surface bursts in cities, modern concrete and steel framed buildings will ensure than built-up areas "protect themselves" to an appreciable extent by mutual shielding, both by absorbing the prompt gamma rays and thus interferring with the production of the EMP in the first place, and secondly by reflecting most of the actual radio frequency EMP energy back (or absorbing it) when it is produced.  So the free-field EMP data given for surface bursts in EM-1 "Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons" is a gross exaggeration when applied to modern urban targets!

Britain has declassified one early report on surface burst EMP:

J. B. Taylor, A Theory of Radioflash, U.K. Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, report AWRE-O33/59, October 1959, "Confidential" (UK National Archives document ES 4/361; related reports ES 12/458 and ES 10/1343 are still restricted) which states on pages 3 and 18:

"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."

Fig 1b in Taylor's 1959 report gives the EMP electric field from a surface burst the peak field measured at a distance of 300 km:

-28.1 v/m (this minus sign implies the negative direction, i.e. a vertical upwards Compton current and opposite "conventional current" due to Benjamin Franklin's convention that current is defined as the flow of positive, not negative, charge) 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.

This EMP data from nuclear tests on unobstructed deserts or the Pacific ocean is totally misleading for surface bursts in urban environments, where the city buildings interfere with both the prompt gamma ray EMP mechanism itself and then attenuate (like attenuation of line-of-sight UHF signals) the (minimal) EMP signal produced!  Thus, ground-level EMP sensors will not be likely to give a useful waveform to determine the EMP characteristics of a nuclear detonation in an urban environment, and satellites will be little use because surface bursts radiate most of their energy horizontally, and the small amount radiated in (slant) upward directions will be at frequencies that are severely if not completely attenuated/reflected by the earth's ionosphere before getting anywhere near a detection satellite.  Collecting fallout samples will not help determine the yield much in a terrorist attack, either, because radiochemical analysis only gives the ratio of fission products to unfissioned fissile material (including material which has captured neutrons in non-fission reactions).

In nuclear tests, radiochemical analysis determined fission yield because the people doing the analysis knew exactly how much fissile material was in the bomb in the first place.  So multiplying the ratio of fissioned material to fissioned plus unfissioned material in a fallout sample by the mass of the fissile material originally present in the bomb gave the total fission yield.  Without knowing the amount of material originally present in the bomb, fallout samples only tell you the efficiency of the bomb, not the total yield.  You would have to resort to accurate total yield determination methods used by Penney and others in Japan, such as damage caused to simple structures like blast-bent flagpoles, plus an area integral of the measured 1 hour reference time dose rate fallout pattern, which would give a good idea of the fission yield.

Secrecy of nuclear weapons capabilities: new information about updates to EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons



On the cover of last month's (March 2013, vol 3, issue 1) Defense Threat Reduction Information and Analysis Centre journal, The Dispatch, DTRIAC Program Manager, Lt Col Craig Hess announces: "This issue of DTRIAC Despatch focusses on Effects Manual One, or EM-1, and I hope it is of interest and of value to you."  It certainly is!





The first published, unclassified admission I have found of the existence of the then-secret forerunner to EM-1, Capabilities of Atomic Weapons, TM 23-200, was made by Dr Frank H. Shelton (then Technical Director of AFSWP, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project charged with compiling and editing Capabilities of Atomic Weapons; Shelton discusses the precursor discovery in the nuclear testing TV/DVD documentary film, Trinity and Beyond) in his testimony to the May-June Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation, of Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, page 90:



This immediately led to its request by the George R. Stanbury and other British civil defense nuclear weapons testing researchers at the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch and the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons research Establishment. As a result, in November 1957 a new edition was prepared which was degraded from Secret - Restricted Data to Confidential, and this was exchanged with Britain in exchange for British testing information.  (Britain had been exchanging nuclear weapons testing data with America since 1954, the American FWE or "Foreign Weapons Effects" reports.)

Stanbury uses the data in TM 23-200 in his classified British civil defense reports from 1958 onwards.  The problem here is that the whole basis for British civil defense casualty reduction planning was submerged ever deeper into secrecy, so the unclassified publications made assertions which were not backed up by any available published references, and were attacked by both political anti-civil defence media and pro-USSR Marxist critics.  This continued after the Home Office got the 1974 NATO edition of EM-1, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, which in Table 10-1 "Estimated Casualty Production in Buildings For Three Degrees of Structural Damage", uses the WWII British data for casualties versus the amount brick house destruction.  This data was falsely "debunked" in attacks on British handbooks by Marxist Union groupthink Dogma Scientists in the 1980s, who claimed that because the blast duration at a given overpressure increases with the cube-root of weapon yield, it follows that WWII data from small ~0.1 ton TNT bombs on London is inappropriate.  Actually, the WWII correlation was never based on casualties versus overpressure for WWII bombings (nobody measured the overpressures in WWII!), but was based on casualties versus degree of damage.  This automatically takes account of the blast duration effects.  E.g. collapse of a 1-2 story brick house without a Morrison shelter (where people are merely ducking under the staircase or table in WWII resulted in 25% fatalities; this is not fixed to a given, fixed overpressure.



The corresponding overpressure (house collapse) falls with weapon yield, so there is no omission of the blast duration effect: the "critics" simply didn't know the secret facts and are pseudoscientifically guessing how the data was analyzed in the first place, and then attacking their own deluded guess as wrong!  It is also important to note that blast duration has no effect below threshold overpressures for damage: if you exert a pressure (force per unit area) which is not enough to deform a wall, then regardless how long you continue to apply that force, the wall doesn't fall down.  Dynamic pressure impulse does not determine when a tree falls down.  E.g., a 100 mile/hour wind for 1 second duration is equivalent in dynamic pressure impulse to 10 miles/hour for 10 seconds or 1 mile/hour for 100 seconds, but the effects are not the same: no trees fall down if the wind pressure isn't enough to bend them over, no matter how long it lasts!  Blast duration is only important for situations where the peak overpressure or peak dynamic pressure is above the threshold needed to cause damage.  Increasing the blast duration increases the amount of damage done at high pressures; but it does not reduce the threshold peak pressure which is required for the onset of damage:

Just as important, thermal flash shielding by clothing (whose ignition in Hiroshima was easily rolled out by people who are lying down to avoid the blast), and the low casualties due to the firestorm in Hiroshima are obfuscated in popular propaganda that exaggerates nuclear effects for political dogma that dislikes duck and cover civil defence effectiveness:




The analysis of the Hiroshima thermal flash ignition mechanism at the 1953 Encore nuclear test is still limited in publically unavailable nuclear weapons tests reports WT-774 and WT-775, dealing with interior and exterior thermal flash ignition, respectively.  Problem is, the Nevada desert is very dry compared to most modern cities which are built around rivers or near ocean.  The secret U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report 92 volume 2 on the Hiroshima firestorm discloses that a survey of survivors showed that the firestorm was due to blast overturned charcoal braziers in the wooden homes filled with paper screens and bamboo furnishings, and states that the thermal flash only caused black coloured air raid blackout curtains to ignite very close to ground zero; there was no widespread ignition of wooden homes.  The Nevada Encore test is being used by various propaganda historians to represent a modern city, when in fact most windows don't see the fireball due to intervening buildings, the infrared component which actually starts fires isn't appreciably scattered (unlike the visible light component, which is often significantly scattered by clouds and dust), and the higher humidity out of a desert means that the transient flaming of newspapers and curtains during the thermal flash has less effect in igniting other materials, which contain moisture due to the humidity in most cities and real homes.



In addition, city buildings often contain fire sprinklers and fire extinguishers, so the few uppermost rooms facing the fireball which suffer thermal ignitions can easily be tackled.  Unlike WWII, where the air raid continued for a long time and included explosives, delayed detonation anti-personnel fragmentation bombs, etc., to deter the immediate extinguishing of kilo magnesium incendiary bombs, a nuclear bomb's effects have a definite time sequence imposed by the laws of physics, which means that once the blast wave passes (extinguishing most solid fuel fires exposed to the blast winds above 2 psi peak overpressure, although deep-sided trays of burning liquids in tests were protected from the blast winds and continue to burn) incipient fires can be stamped out before they grow large enough to spread to other objects in a room.  The great attacks on civil defense in the 1930s asserted that gas would be used in combination to incendiary bombs, preventing people from sheltering against gas attacks in rooms with closed and sealed doors and windows; this led to the pretty disastrous decision by Anderson to order outdoor shelters (which ended up being rejected by most people as shown by the November 1940 shelter survey, due to cold and damp during repeated Blitz bombings), rather than Morrison type indoor shelters which utilized the house as the first line of protection (absorbing energy by the act of being damaged by blast, like a car's "crumple zone") and simply withstood the weight of falling debris from the house: the force due to the weight of a house is due to its mass and the acceleration due to gravity, both of which are totally independent of bomb size or pressure!



Above: everyone was encouraged to put out incendiaries, and to roll out burning clothing, during the WWII air raids on Britain.  This applies even better to nuclear fires, where the fires are not hard-to-extinguish burning magnesium, phosphorus, or napalm, but merely everyday materials like paper, which can be in most cases be easily stamped out, if tackled before fire spread.  Anti-civil defense propaganda not only fails to take account in the proper scaling laws in comparing WWII air raids to nuclear explosions, it also tries to claim that somehow the nuclear attack fires are worse.  The real WWII incendiary problems occurred during protracted air raids where falling high explosives (some with delay fuses to protract the danger) and fragmentation butterfly bombs were deliberately included in bomb loads, specifically to try to prevent people from easily extinguishing incendiary bombs before they had time to set alight houses!  This is a far worse situation than than fire-fighting in a nuclear attack, where the time dependent effects sequence is simple!  The worst fire destruction of WWII in London occurred in deserted book warehouses in the Docklands, before firewatching was made compulsory by law.  Putting people in outdoor shelters increased the fire threat, because small incipient house fires were able to burn out of control.


Critics of civil defense deplored its cheapness and demanded a "Maginot Line" of expensive deep shelters as being the "only trustworthy safeguard against attack", which is totally crazy.  As for the Maginot Line, or Hiroshima (which had plenty of shelters, with nobody in them), the enemy simply has to change the targetting and strike plan to either areas or allies which lack the expensive defenses, or else to use a surprise attack when nobody is in the expensive deep shelters!  It's the spur of the moment knowledge about duck and cover that really counts in civil defense.  Outdoor shelters in WWII prevented people from remaining indoors and immediately extinguishing fires, so the policy maximised the amount of house destruction.  In addition, the incendiary threat had been exaggerated.  When there is a real risk of attack, people at the end of the day value life, and in WWII they lost apathy about civil defense, and reduced the fire risk by removing clutter, ensuring adequate buckets of sand/water or other fire extinguishers for firefighting, and this response negated dire assumptions in pre-war fear-mongering "predictions" of weapons effects.  All nuclear weapons effects predictions should clearly state what assumptions they use, and should compare the results with and without simple countermeasures!


Above: flying glass is a typical example of an effect of nuclear weapons that is easy to protect against using knowledge and evasive action, both relatively cheap countermeasures that don't have the drawbacks of Maginot Line shelter psychology.  Firstly, as this graphs demonstrate, high overpressures mean very small sized glass window fragments, almost a powder, which are mostly superficially penetrating to skin, and are unlikely to penetrate through the abdominal wall to deeper tissue.  Obviously, since the outer skin can stop these fragments, so will most types of clothing.  To avoid the major problem of glass in the eyes, you can turn away and duck and cover in the relatively long time interval (an average of several seconds over most of the area where duck and cover is needed) between a visible light flash brighter than the sun and the arrival of the blast wave.  This is a benefit of nuclear weapons over a similar amount of blast destruction by a large conventional air raid: the flash of nuclear weapons gives advance warning of the blast, provided people are aware and informed of this fact (rather than the usual propaganda by TV media, which lies that the sound accompanies the flash!):


Glasstone's 1962/4 "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" contained a chapter emphasising the time factor "Principles of Protection", which don't exist for conventional weapons where the blast arrives too fast for duck and cover over the area where windows are broken:

Above: the time factor for initial gamma radiation.  Note that soldiers who stood up in Nevada trenches after the blast wave passed to get a better view of the rising fireball, got more initial gamma radiation that those who remained lying down.  This is partly because of the "hydrodynamic enhancement" which occurs once the compressed shock front passes the observer's location, leaving only low density air (the partial vacuum blast phase) between the fireball and the observer, which increases the gamma radiation transmission rate.  Close to the burst, only a small fraction of the initial gamma radiation is received prior to the arrival of the blast wave, so you should remain lying down behind a dense wall or shielding for 20 seconds or so to minimise this dose.  Also note that fallout effects like radioactive iodine-131 in milk are predictable and occur on a definite timescale, so contaminated milk can be avoided for a particular period after burst to avoid the threat, without the need to keep taking measurements.  The laws of decay for nuclides don't need re-evaluation!  There is a lot of propaganda about radiation, all of it based on pure ignorance.
Above: duck and cover not only reduces flying glass and thermal flash exposure, it also reduces the body area exposed to the blast winds and so reduces or eliminates impacts from debris carried by the winds, and translation due to being blown along if standing.  Fallout similarly takes time to arrive, is predictable with weather forecasts, so again "sitting duck assumptions" that people will remain outdoors with no protection as in March 1954 on Rongelap Atoll is totally misleading.  People thus can take evasive action by sheltering in buildings or leaving the area when the see fallout arrive, which is fused grains of sand unlike blast-lofted dust:



Above: Dr Terry Triffet's testimony to Congress in 1959 make it clear that people can identify fallout particles, distinguishing them from blast-blown dust in a nuclear attack.  It's a matter of knowledge of the facts replacing ignorance derived fears. Also note that very low energy gamma ray emitters Np-239 and U-237 in the fallout from bombs with U-238 tampers or fusion capsule pushers makes the mean gamma ray energy decline especially fast in the fractionated close-in fallout (8 miles downwind) from a land surface burst (just 0.25 Mev at 1 week, compared 0.7 Mev in Glasstone and Dolan's book, and 1.25 MeV Co-60 gamma rays which are used to determine protection factors).  This means protection is boosted; lower energy gamma rays are shielded more easily.






EM-1 tree blowdown data for road blockage around a 1 kt surface burst nuclear detonation in two types of forest, based on various tests.  Note that radial movement (directly towards or away from the explosion) is far easier than movement around the circumference of damage, because trees blown down fall mostly away from the point of the explosion.  Therefore, you can more easily walk or drive between tree stems when evacuating or entering a damaged area for rescue purposes, without having to drive over trees.  (These graphs are included as an appendix to the unclassified report by Phillip J. Morris, DNA 3054F, AD763750, "Forest Blowdown from Nuclear Airblast.")

  • Update 8 April 2013:


‘The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. ... Aggressors ... start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace.’

- The Iron Lady’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on Disarmament (after pointing out that since Nagasaki, 10 million people had been killed by 140 non-nuclear conflicts), 23 June 1982.

On 29 October 1982, she predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR:

‘You may chain a man, but you cannot chain his mind. You may enslave him, but you will not conquer his spirit. In every decade since the war the Soviet leaders have been reminded that their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day comes when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks: the mortar crumbles ... one day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.’

On 22 November 1990, after a long struggle against USSR aggression with Ronald Reagan, she declared:

‘Today, we have a Europe ... where the threat to our security from the overwhelming conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact has been removed; where the Berlin Wall has been torn down and the Cold War is at an end. These immense changes did not come about by chance. They have been achieved by strength and resolution in defence, and by a refusal ever to be intimidated.’ (Quotations: The Downing Street Years.)





Update (17 May 2013): the political problem of exploiting tragedy to "close down the argument"

The "cognitive dissonance" that the facts on nuclear weapons bring home is simply Orwell's "doublethink". When political ideologues lose an argument, they resort to emotional smears and seek to "close down the argument", a tactic guaranteed to "work" if it happens that they can ban any last word from their opponents from being published or broadcast.  This is proved for all time by the ranting and screaming being used to hide rational facts in the current political debate on Britain's USSR/commie type socialist economic debt bomb, costing over £220 billion a year when the government is still borrowing more money each year on top of its record £1 trillion total debt. (The debt is still rising, they are merely making a small reduction in the rate at which it grows, the annual deficit between revenue/income and expenditure.)

This emotional screaming to hide facts is something that civil defense and nuclear weapons deterrence debaters need to understand, because ever since Hiroshima and the Bravo fallout on the Marshallese islanders and Japanese fishermen, emotions have been exploited to "close down" all rational, fact-based discussions on the bomb.  The response by James Newman in the Scientific American to Herman Kahn's 1960 book On Thermonuclear War is proof of that.

Leo McKinstry has written a nice discussion of the desperate tactics of political hypocrisy of exploiting emotions to "close down" debates, some extracts are given below:


All political parties in Britain are making a mockery of the whole concept of true democracy, which was originally in ancient Greece a daily referendum "choice" on issues, not an EUSSR-style "choice" between a few rival dictators who then proceed to ignore critics and run things for 4-5 years.  The way that emotional ranting and screaming between a few greasy-pole-climbing geniuses replaces rational debate puts me off all political parties.

The mix-up between Marxist-socialist ideals and capitalist economic necessities creates the major financial problem.  If you're going to have socialist welfare, you have to do it in a slightly Marxist fashion using hostels for low-cost (to taxpayer) accommodation and maybe collective farms and so on, as the USSR had: you cannot afford to mix-up the two systems and use socialist safety-net ideology to fund Capitalist-style lifestyles.  The current system not only demotivates many, it also runs up the national debt.  The hypocrisy of the Socialists is precisely the fact that they are really all Capitalists at heart, not Socialists.  They want to distribute not equality, but money.  That's why they're Capitalists of the worst sort, Capitalists disguised in the cloak of Marxism.

McKinstry states: "The Left knows that it has lost the argument ... so in place of rational discussion it resorts to emotional blackmail and bullying.  ... politicians and their pressure group allies now indulge in desperate smear tactics by trumpeting individual cases ... Balls claimed that the Chancellor's 'calculated decision' to use this individual case was 'nasty and divisive and demeans his office.' Yet oblivious to the grosteque double standards Balls is now eagerly ... exploiting personal tragedies ..."

This exploitation of personal tragedy is precisely what happens in nuclear radiation controversy, nuclear weapons effects discussions of Hiroshima, and fallout effects on the Marshallese and Japanese fishermen. 

You don't find individual cases of conventional war being used by bankrupt pacifist arguments against war to "close down" the argument in their favour: Stalin murdered 40 million by starvation and Hitler 6 million in concentration camps, without technological "weapons".  These millions upon millions killed by disease in a freezing concentration camp.  It's not necessary to use weapons to kill millions: the worst "weapons" in human history are political policies, not weapons.  Banning nerve gas or nuclear weapons can never stop this evil, which is not based on technology.  It's not technology that is evil, it's unopposed pseudoscience like eugenics, Marxism, and other ideologies that provide a fig leaf for bigoted dictatorships.  This is pacifist pseudoscience, and it is morally wrong.  You're either for evil or against it.

The emotional rants "banning" nerve gas and nuclear weapons haven't prevented the Syrian regime apparently using nerve gas like Aum Shinrikyo in 1995, or the North Koreans from testing nuclear weapons.  There is no such thing as an effective "ban" in the real world.  The ban by itself is, at best, is a cosy delusion.  At worst, it fosters an atmosphere which encourages violation.  If you "ban crime" and then feel free and safe to leave your door unlocked, you may be encouraging an increase in crime rather than stopping it.  What counts is the enforcement.  Banning drugs and laws don't prevent drug smuggling, banning alcohol didn't work in the prohibition era, etc.  Banning rearmament didn't do a thing to stop Hitler rearming in the 1930s.  Laws and bans will be broken by law-breakers.  Banning the Syrians from using nerve gas is akin to the "banning" of Hitler's regime from rearming illegally in the 1930s. 

Law-breakers of course are precisely the people laws and bans are ineffective against, while those who try to abide regulations for the most part are not the real problem.  This is why we need a police force, not merely "laws" and "bans".  This is a fact ignored by ideologues (ideology fanatics) who wish to believe that removing offensive weapons from democracies (that agree) will make the world safe.  This is like outlawing crime to abolish the need for a police force!  Laws should be concerned more with reducing risks, than with blind obedience to the "authority" of officialdom, which is a dictatorial coercion tactic used by terrorist regimes, not real democracies.  People in free democracies must be given the hard factual evidence that justifies and supports laws, i.e. reasoning rather than just dictatorship from a secret elite.

CIVIL DEFENCE AND WINSTON CHURCHILL'S 4 JUNE 1945 WARNING OF SOCIALIST DICTATORSHIPS IN PEACETIME BRITAIN

The key problem is not scientific data, but the political groupthink ideology which asserts in a moralistic, dogmatic sneering manner: "weapons are the cause of war, and civil defence stands in the way of utopian surrender to every dictatorship which acquires weapons whose effects have been exaggerated and turned into a mythical-type Golem; survival tactics against nuclear or any other weapons are immoral, because they decrease suffering in war and thus make war fighting a more realistic alternative to surrender than would otherwise be the case; scientific evidence on the exaggeration of nuclear weapons effects must be ignored (head in the sand policy) as if it is immoral war-mongering, since the only aspect of war to be feared is its deterrence with technological weapons; we must not allow facts and truth to distract us from our Ivory Tower moralistic/ethical preaching that peace and utopia will come in a guaranteed way through socialist equality and disarmament (despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the failure of USSR dictatorship...)".

The background to this weird dogmatic madness is as follows:

"But when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery."

-
Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), The Road to Serfdom, "Planning and Power."

(THIS IS THE REASON FOR CHURCHILL’S WARINESS OF ATTLEE’S PLANS FOR EXTENSIVE NATIONALIZATION AND EXPANSION OF STATE CONTROL.)
(1) Civil defence, not Marxism, introduced state social security (basic socialism), including nationalised wartime industries, and a forerunner to the national health service which was organized to deal with not only widespread air raid casualties but also over a million evacuees) during WWII.  (Clement Attlee, by contrast to civil defence, had been a pacifist as Labour Leader in 1935, and had refused to endorse even modest rearmament proposals and civil defence precautions at that crucial time, when Hitler's remilitarization could have been stopped without world war.) Churchill accepted the most important and economical findings of Beveridge welfare report in 1942, and planned comprehensive education from 1944.

But Churchill had to support Joseph Stalin's USSR as a wartime ally after Hitler invaded the USSR (both the USSR and the Nazis, by a secret mutual pact, had invaded Poland from opposite sides in 1939).  This allowed the socialist supporting British media to produce endless pro-USSR propaganda, a backdrop which was more important to Labour's Clement Attlee securing victory in the 1945 general election, than Churchill's heavy-handed attack on socialist dictatorship.  Labour won in 1945 because Churchill was associated with war, which people were tired of (to put it mildly), and wanted a change.  In addition, socialism seemed nice because it helped deal with social problems during the war, and the socialist USSR was a wartime ally (after being invaded by the Nazis), causing loads of pro-USSR, pro-socialist hype.

(2) Churchill's 4 June 1945 radio broadcast warning of socialist brainwashing groupthink was based on
Friedrich Hayek's 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom (full version here), which was the key influence behind Thatcher, and is a knife twisted into Marxist socialism.  Hayek's book backs up Churchill's speech!  No word from Attlee to deny this!  The problem was that Churchill said of Attlee's socialist government: "They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance." The word Gestapo was seized out of context of the rest of Churchill's speech, because in 1945 socialism seemed a far cry from the Gestapo.

It was prior to the discovery of the mass graves from Stalin's Katryn Forest Massacre of polish officers, it was prior to Churchill's "Iron Curtain" warning about the whole of Eastern Europe falling simply from Nazi tyranny to USSR dictatorship, and it was prior to the 1948 Berlin airlift when Stalin tried to use starvation to bring about submission.  In other words, on 4 June 1945 Churchill was a prophet ahead of his time and his warning was ridiculed by Mr Clement Attlee just as his warnings of Hitler in 1935 had been ridiculed by Mr Clement Attlee.



Churchill's warning (4 June 1945):

"My friends … Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. … Look how even today they hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of wartime inflictions and monstrosities. There is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. The State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, and arch-administrator and ruler and the arch-caucus-boss. … A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and its aspects—and that is what I am speaking of—could not afford to suffer opposition. … Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils. ... no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are short-sighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

"No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, and violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles over their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants, and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?"

This is not an absurdity, it is the reality of politics today, when emotional screaming and hysteria, reflexive blind hatred, ridicule and contempt, worship of conventionality and subjectivity have replaced objectivity.  Even in June 1945, Clement Attlee could only reply with a patronising sneer at Churchill’s bombastic style of argument, and would not lower himself from his high horse to address Churchill argument itself:

"How great was the difference between Winston Churchill the great leader in war of a united nation, and Mr. Churchill the party leader of the Conservatives."

This is purely ad hominem abuse, since there is neither objective rebuttal from Attlee of Churchill's carefully reasoned argument, nor admission that Churchill was right.  There is just a sneer from Attlee, exactly the kind of sneer Attlee had for Churchill in 1935.  Churchill fought Germany's National Socialists (who were led by Hitler) and he opposed this socialist state-control idealism from taking root in Britain.  Attlee had fought against Churchill's efforts to stop Hitler in 1935 as being ridiculous, and in 1945, ten years later, he did the same thing.  Attlee made the same mistake in 1945 in dismissing Churchill's comment as ridiculous as he did in dismissing the threat of Hitler's fascists in 1935 when Churchill warned of them.  If someone gives a warning and is ignored and ridiculed as Churchill was in 1935, should you repeat the error a decade later when he gives another warning?  Contrary to misquotations of Churchill's 4 June 1945 speech ,made by those who want to both (1) claim the speech is so important that it single-handedly lost Churchill the election, and (2) treat the speech as unimportant enough not to be correctly quoted, the fact is that socialism is a religion of dictatorial control censorship.  They resort to ad hominem attacks on critics, not to objective argument:

"... Hayek [The Road to Serfdom, 1944] challenged the general view among British academics that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism, instead arguing that fascism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and the power of the state over the individual." - Wikipedia.

"The increasing veneration for the state, the admiration of power, and of bigness for bigness’ sake, the enthusiasm for ‘organization’ of everything (we now call it ‘planning’) and that ‘inability to leave anything to the simple power of organic growth’...are all scarcely less marked in England now than they were in [Nazi] Germany."- Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), The Road to Serfdom, 1944.

"The subtle change in meaning to which the word ‘freedom’ was subjected in order that this argument sound plausible is important. To the great apostles of political freedom the word had meant freedom from coercion, freedom from the arbitrary power of other men, release from the ties which left the individual no choice but obedience to the orders of a superior to whom he was attached…The demand for the new freedom was [in contrast]…only a name for the old demand of an equal distribution of wealth."- Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992), The Road to Serfdom, "The Great Utopia"

(Two diametrically opposed kinds of "freedom" can be defined: freedom from state control, and the Nazi/socialist freedom for state coercion to oppress criticisms of the enforcement of utopian dogma.)

This doublethink is best demonstrated by the history of nuclear weapons effects and radiation effects, both of which are "defended" by emotional propaganda which declared it immoral or unethical not to tell lying exaggerations.  This closes down all discussions before the facts have even been aired.  The only people the media now prefer to report are subjective pseudoscientists who have political affiliations within the professional money-making side of the large-scale industry of "science" but use that political muscle to issue fashionable groupthink.  There is no objectivity involved, no comparison with natural risks which are larger than those from radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by massive factors: even at high dose rates (where DNA repair mechanisms like enzyme protein P53 are of minimal utility, as compared to low dose rates) you need a radiation dose of 10-100 cGy (rads) to merely equal to natural cancer risk.  Below that dose, the natural risk of cancer from copying errors and chemical breaks in DNA exceed the risk from radiation:

Above: Radiation Effects Research Foundation (funded by Uncle Sam and Japan) results of the Life Span Study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki irradiated survivors.

The excess leukemias were 94 out of 49,204 irradiated survivors: a risk of 0.19% from radiation

The excess solid tumors were 848 out of 44,635: a risk of 1.9% from radiation.  These general effects have long been known:



Above: improved cancer treatment gives better than a 50% chance of surviving 5 years with leukemia and better than 97% chance of surviving thyroid cancer more than 5 years, provided you don't have to rely on a USSR-type British NHS (National Health Service) which is an ineffective, monolithic, demotivating, failure at everything except for its "success" in spending taxpayer's money in promoting itself as "the envy of the world" (in true Stalinist propaganda fashion).

Cancer research: insulin and sugar

Aggressive, fast-spreading cancer cells spend a much greater fraction of their time dividing, which is why they are more vulnerable to radiation than non-cancer cells.  This is the basis for radiotherapy treatments, and was discovered by J. Bergonie and L. Tribondeau in 1906 (Acad. Sci. Paris, v143, p983; English version in Radiation research, v11, 1960, p32): "The sensitivity of cells to irradiation is in direct proportion to their reproductive activity ..."  By the same token, fast dividing cancer cells can't regulate their metabolism and so are more vulnerable to starvation than non-cancer cells. This means that effective fasting to reduce insulin levels (which accelerates cancer cell spread) can reduce the spread of aggressive cancer and give time for other treatments or natural defenses to work.  A study back in 2002 by P. J. Goodwin, et al., "Fasting insulin and outcome in early-stage breast cancer," , v20, pp42-51 concluded: "Fasting insulin level is associated with outcome in women with early breast cancer. High levels of fasting insulin identify women with poor outcomes ..."  This research merely correlates the risk of mortality with the insulin level once cancer is detected; it does not check the influence of insulin level on the risk of cancer risk in the first place.  In addition, blood glucose levels show a stronger correlation to cancer spread than insulin: P. Muti, et al., "Fasting glucose is a risk factor for breast cancer", v11 (2002), pp.1361-8, which found that "There is some evidence that glucose and other factors related to glucose metabolism, such as insulin and insulin-like growth-factors (IGFs) may contribute to breast cancer development. ... These results indicate that chronic alteration of glucose metabolism is related to breast cancer development."

The primary driver of insulin is carbohydrate, including starch, not fat.  In 2005, a study of 1.3 million Koreans correlated sugar consumption to cancer risk.  Despite this research and the mechanism for aggressive cancer fuelling by insulin and glucose, there is (1) a reluctance to fund research into this simple approach and (2) a widespread dissemination of inaccurate claims and obfuscation on the link between sugar and aggressive cancer proliferation. e.g. the downright deception propaganda of the website "Caring4Cancer":

"The concept that sugar feeds cancer is not useful. Sugar feeds every cell in our bodies. Our bodies need glucose, or simple sugar, for energy. Even if you cut every bit of sugar out of your diet, your body will make sugar from other sources, such as protein and fat. So cancer cells need sugar to grow, just like healthy cells. It helps to remember that there is nothing particular about sugar that “feeds” cancer cells any more than sugar feeds all cells in our body."

It is a complete deception, it simply ignores the factual evidence that aggressive fast-proliferating cancer cells are continuously dividing with vast power requirements, and so are more vulnerable to starvation during fasting than healthy cells, which are not spending all their time dividing!  The ignorant statement is drivel (like saying that throwing water on a fire is no help, because everyone knows water contains oxygen and hydrogen).  The page then correctly states that an increase in sugar increases blood insulin levels, which cause cancer cells to "rev up" and spread faster, but this confuses the accelerator pedal for the fuel.  To kill cancer you need to make the cancer cells "rev up", but without supplying the fuel sugars they need to do so, so they starve and are killed.  Research which looks at the situation where blood sugar and blood insulin levels are connected is missing this whole point, that an effective treatment for cancer is to desynchronise insulin from sugar.  You can do this on a short-term treatment basis by simply administering insulin without administering sugar, killing the cancer cells by cutting off their fuel supply (sugar) while maintaining the cancer accelerator (insulin) so that the cancer cells are forced to try to continue dividing, with inadequate fuel, and so die.

If you reduce blood sugar and blood insulin falls, then the cancer cells go into fasting like normal cells (due to the fall in insulin), and survive, ready to spread aggressively when sugar and insulin levels increase.  A good analogy to this is the tactic of cutting off fuel and logistics supplies for enemies in war, while they are on the offensive: the tanks and aircraft run out of fuel and are vulnerable.  But if they are holed up and on the defensive when their fuel is destroyed, they won't budge and you are in a long, protracted conflict of attrition.  With cancer, you don't want to to help the cancer cells survive by making them go into a fasting state by reducing the insulin level; you want them to be killed by starvation as they try to replicate quickly.

The linkage between blood sugar and blood insulin in research to covers up this simple mechanism for killing cancer cells by starvation.  Cutting the throttle (reducing the insulin) while cutting the fuel (sugar) allows cancer cells to throttle back and survive fasting.  What you need to do to kill cancer cells by starvation is to force them to divide faster (increased insulin), while reducing blood sugar to starve them when they try to do this.  It seems that this point isn't getting through to cancer researchers.  It is not a long-term solution, but a short-term treatment to kill cancer.  Obviously, you can't and don't want to increase insulin while reducing blood sugar for long periods, but merely for the time it takes to kill off an aggressive proliferating cancer.

The insulin-like growth hormone activator IGF-1 is involved in the ageing process and disease. By promoting rapid cell division and inhibiting cell death, high levels of IGF-1 in the blood promote cancer proliferation and ageing. Malignant cells are continuously dividing, with high energy requirements and cannot survive fasting. Non-cancer cells can regulate their metabolism to survive fasting. Fasting affects cancer risks. Pity this isn't being researched by anyone (drug companies have a very different approach, looking for profit-making drug solutions, not testing out simple ideas based on the mechanism for aggressive cancer proliferation!).

Exaggerated risks of radiation

There is such a thing as "minimising risk", but there is also such a thing as "exaggerating risk".  The media are guilty of not publishing the truth.  Note that in the Hiroshima-Nagasaki table above, even for 0.1-1 Gy (or 10-100 cGy or rads), 52% of leukemia deaths were natural and a smaller proportion, 48% due to bomb radiation, while for the same dose all other (solid tumor) cancers, 84% of the cancer deaths were natural and 16% were bomb radiation.  We're dealing with massive radiation doses compared to natural background, which is 0.01 mRad/hr in London, i.e. 1 rad or 1 cGy is equal to 100,000 hours or 11.4 years exposure to external radiation from natural background, chiefly cosmic rays and gamma rays from natural uranium in the soil.  However, the risks are real enough.

Dr Carl F. Miller, the author of Fallout and Radiological Countermeasures, of the U.S. Naval Radiological Lab and later Stanford Research Institute, collected Operation Castle H-bomb test fallout samples on the deck of Liberty ship YAG-39 near ground zero in 1954, personally measuring a dose (with his own dosimeter) near the upper end of the 10-100 rad interval from those tests and others such as Plumbbob Diablo and Coulomb B in 1957, and tragically did get leukemia in 1980.  This was over 50% likely due to fallout exposure, and less than 50% likely to be natural leukemia incidence.  One of the 64 Marshallese on Rongelap, Lekoj Anjain (son of the 1954 Mayor of Rongelap, John Anjain) who received about 175 cGy aged 1 in 1954, contracted fatal leukemia in 1972.  His sister Mijjua Anjain in 1966 was the first from Rongelap diagnosed with a thyroid tumor, which like others, was treated successfully (the first thyroid nodules had been discovered in 1963), a result of a massive (up to 20,000 cGy for children 1 year old in 1954) thyroid iodine-131, iodine-132, and iodine-133 dose from drinking fallout water contaminated in the open rainwater cistern.  Two children on Rongelap suffered growth retardation due to thyroid damage (hormone deficiency), also due to drinking water contaminated with iodine isotopes on the day of the fallout.

As with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, anti-radiation propaganda has ever since sought to conflate the extremely low level radiation persisting on Rongelap with long-term radiation effects due not to persisting low dose rate contamination, but to delayed effects from the high dose received outside on 1-2 March 1954, which caused all of the long-term effects.  Although many people less than 1 rad from drinking milk after Nevada tests in America, there are good reasons from the Hiroshima threshold dose thyroid cancer data to suppose that zero percent of them got thyroid cancer; after nuclear tests and later Chernobyl, the lack of a proper control group leads to natural cancer incidences being reported as fallout radiation effects.  Greenpeace and other anti-nuclear politics movements persuaded the people in 1984 that low-dose rate radiation was causing the long-term effects which were actually due to doses received back in 1954.

The dose intervals are fiddled in the RERF table so that an artificially large number of survivors are clumped into the 0.005-0.1 dose interval and only half that number are in the 0.1-1 dose interval: this statistical trick hides the decline (so to speak) in the cancer risk from low doses, where there is actually evidence of a hormesis and "threshold" dose of up to a few cGy at high dose rates for initial radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the threshold is about one thousand times greater for low dose rates, as evidence from the radium dial painters shows, see graph below).

Above: a costly Uncle Sam-funded dosimetry project measured the bone radium doses for the WWI radium dial painters, discovering evidence for a ~10mrad/hour (1000 times natural background) dose rate threshold for cancer.  This graph is adapted from Dr Charles L. Sander's recent book, Radiation Hormesis and the Linear-No-Threshold Assumption (Springer, 2010 edition), which - like the declassified Hiroshima damage data - has been studiously ignored by the media.  As our annotations on the graph show, we wish to emphasise the dose rate influence that seems to be inadequately thought about by Dr Sanders (as well as Dr Luckey and others) in the context of radiation hormesis.  The fact is, the "threshold" dose for net injury is inversely proportional to the dose rate.  Hiroshima (initial flash radiation) and the X-ray machine deliver doses in a short space of time (seconds), so the dose rate is high, and the threshold dose is low.  This is why Dr Alice Stewart found a large rise in childhood leukemias where the mothers has X-rays while pregnant: the dose rate was high, so the threshold dose (especially for rapidly dividing cells in infants) was small.  The reason for the dose rate dependence is P53 and other DNA repair enzymes having time to repair double-strand breaks correctly if the dose rate (double-strand break rate) is small, but sticking the wrong ends together (causing cancer) when the DNA is fragmented into lots of pieces all at once (high dose rates).  It's as simple as that.  DNA repair enzymes are overloaded at high dose rates.  At dose rates up to 10 mrad/hour, hormesis evidence shows DNA repair over-compensates for radiation: more metabolism is devoted to DNA repair enzymes and as a result there is a net fall in overall cancer risk (hormesis).

Dr Sander's publisher's book back cover description on Amazon states:

"Current radiation protection standards are based upon the application of the linear no-threshold (LNT) assumption, which considers that even very low doses of ionizing radiation can cause cancer. The radiation hormesis hypothesis, by contrast, proposes that low-dose ionizing radiation is not only safe but is healthy and beneficial. In this book, the author examines all facets of radiation hormesis in detail, including the history of the concept and mechanisms, and presents comprehensive, up-to-date reviews for major cancer types. It is explained how low-dose radiation can in fact decrease all-cause and all-cancer mortality and help to control metastatic cancer. Attention is also drawn to biases in epidemiological research when using the LNT assumption. The author shows how proponents of the LNT assumption consistently reject, manipulate, and deliberately ignore an overwhelming abundance of published data and falsely claim that no reliable data are available at doses of less than 100 mSv. The consequence of the LNT assumption is a radiophobia that is very costly in terms of lives and money."

At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dosimetry and effects data is better at the lower doses than the higher doses (mostly survivors in concrete buildings with large protection factors) because of (1) the errors in calculating the shielding for survivors of large doses, and (2) the statistically larger number of low-dose survivors (see table above).  The standard error for x cancers out of a large population (compared to the number x) is +/-100/x1/2 %, which is 10% error for a result of 100, about 3% for 1000 and 1% for 10000.  So you get more accuracy for more effects, especially as the high dose (well shielded) survivor dosimetry is more error-prone for the concrete buildings near ground zero than for people either in wooden homes or outdoors at the greatest distances in the study.  So Dr Sanders is correct here.

Unfortunately, he writes about dose thresholds, and doesn't fully analyze the dose rate dependence.  The problem is that the medical diagnostic health physics industry uses high dose rates to ensure quick and unblurred X-rays (while keeping the total dose as low as reasonably achievable), and have a vested interest in turning a blind or bigoted eye to dose rate evidence.  You don't want patients to be scared off by high dose rate X-ray machines, do you?  Where jobs depend on a technology or science, i.e. in any professional science areas, you get some (often overwhelming) doublethink that hold back progress: people don't want to risk damaging the foundations of their discipline or even being ostracised socially in their profession for rocking a boat.  This grass roots groupthink is always more effective in suppressing genuine discussion than high-handed obvious censorship, which is a target than can be attacked, rather than hidden in widespread prejudice.

Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski, Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, "Radiation Risks in the 20th Century; Reality, Illusions and Risks", Lecture at the Discovery of Polonium and Radium; It's Scientific and Philosophical Consequences, Benefits and Treats for Mankind, International Conference (100th Anniversary of the Discovery of Polonium and Radium by Marie Sklodowska- Curie), held 17-20 September 1998:

"Between 1945 and 1980 there were 541 nuclear atmospheric tests performed, with a total energy yield of 440 Mt. In these explosions, about 3 tones of plutonium (that is, almost 15,000 "deadly" 200 gram doses) were injected into the global atmosphere, and, behold, a miracle: we are still alive! The average individual radiation dose from all these nuclear explosions, accumulated between 1945 and 1998, is about 1 mSv, that is. less than 1% of natural dose (UNSCEAR, 1998). In the record years of 1961 and 1962, there were 176 atmospheric explosions, with a total yield of 84 Mt. The maximum deposition, on the surface of the Earth, of radionuclides from these explosions occurred in 1964. The average individual dose accumulated from this fallout, between 1961 and 1964, was about 0.35 mSv. The global nuclear arsenal being about 50,000 weapons, with a combined explosive power of about 13,000 Mt (Rotblat, 1981; Waldheim, 1991), is only 30 times higher than the megatonnage already released by all previous nuclear tests in the atmosphere.  ... At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, short-term radiation doses of less than 200 mSv did not cause induction of cancers among the atomic bomb survivors (UNSCEAR, 1993). Among survivors exposed to much higher doses, no adverse genetic effects in their progeny have been detected during 50 years of study (Sankaranarayanan, 1997). Until recently, such information from the study of survivors has been ignored. Instead, the driving force of radiophobia has been the linear no-threshold theory, assumed for relationship between radiation and its effects on the living organism (essentially, the assumption that the detrimental effects of radiation are proportional to dose, and that there is no dose at which such effects are not detrimental). It is on this assumption, that the International Commission of Radiological Protection (ICRP) arbitrarily based its rules of radiation protection in 1959. This was an administrative decision, not an effect of scientific proof. It was based not on science, but on political considerations, which influenced the philosophy and practice of radiation protection (Taylor, 1980). ... The absurdity of the no-threshold theory was brought to light after the Chernobyl accident in 1986, when minute doses - for example, reaching in the United States 0.004% of the average natural dose, or 0.3% at the rest of the Northern Hemisphere - were used to calculate 53,400 cancer deaths over the next 50 years (Goldman et al., 1987). ... The bomb survivor data, however, are not relevant for such estimations, because of the difference in the dose rate."



L. E. Feinendegen, MD, "Evidence for beneficial low level radiation effects and radiation hormesis", British Journal of Radiology, 2005, v. 78, no. 925, p. 3:

"Adaptive protection causes DNA damage prevention and repair and immune stimulation. It develops with a delay of hours, may last for days to months, decreases steadily at doses above about 100 mGy to 200 mGy and is not observed any more after acute exposures of more than about 500 mGy. Radiation-induced apoptosis and terminal cell differentiation also occur at higher doses and add to protection by reducing genomic instability and the number of mutated cells in tissues. At low doses, reduction of damage from endogenous sources by adaptive protection maybe equal to or outweigh radiogenic damage induction. Thus, the linear-no-threshold (LNT) hypothesis for cancer risk is scientifically unfounded and appears to be invalid in favour of a threshold or hormesis. This is consistent with data both from animal studies and human epidemiological observations on low-dose induced cancer. The LNT hypothesis should be abandoned and be replaced by a hypothesis that is scientifically justified and causes less unreasonable fear and unnecessary expenditure."


Above: low dose rate hormesis for bone tumors in mice injected with Sr-90 (M. Finkel et al., Second U.N. International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, geneva, 1958, v22, p65, published by the United Nations, 1959).  This data, along with the human evidence from bone irradiation in radium dial painters who gave evidence for a >1000 R threshold dose for bone cancer (for doses spread over 25 years, which would be similar to strontium-90 bone retention), experimentally debunked the idea that the small strontium-90 in bones from global fallout due to H-bomb tests in the 1950s caused cancer.  Linus Pauling and many others with a political edge over scientific objectivity chose to use their personalities and emotional socialism media domination to portray the illusion that such data simply doesn't exist, and that all radiation is as evil is witchcraft was viewed in the medieval period.  The media listened to them.  The human suffering costs are high:

Maurice Tubiana, MD, Ludwig E. Feinendegen, MD, Chichuan Yang, MD and Joseph M. Kaminski, MD, "The Linear No-Threshold Relationship Is Inconsistent with Radiation Biologic and Experimental Data", Radiology, 2009, v. 251, p. 13:

"The French Academies report (10) concluded that the LNT model and its use for assessing the risks associated with low doses are not based on scientific evidence. In contrast, the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) VII report (11) and that of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) (12) recommended the use of the LNT model. ... Deinococcus radiodurans bacteria have error-free repair mechanisms that can tolerate doses of 7 kGy (17) ... The two main repair systems for DSBs are homologous recombination and nonhomologous end joining (NHEJ). ... At low doses of x-rays, homologous recombination is error free, while NHEJ is low error prone. ... Defects in DNA repair systems are associated with a higher cancer incidence in animals and in humans. ... The concept that cancer induction proceeds similarly after low and high doses and dose rates is inconsistent with biologic evidence.  ... Contrary to previous claims, there was no increase in leukemia or other cancers (except thyroid cancer) in regions contaminated after the Chernobyl accident where thyroid doses ranged up to 1 Sv (123). The increase in thyroid cancer among young children is correlated with dose (124), and a threshold at 200 mSv is compatible with data (125). ... The data suggest that a combination of error-free DNA repair and elimination of preneoplastic cells furnishes practical thresholds ...

"The Chernobyl accident showed that overestimating radiation risks could be more detrimental than underestimating them. Misinformation partially led to traumatic evacuations of about 200 000 individuals, an estimated 1250 suicides, and between 100 000 and 200 000 elective abortions outside the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (164,165). [Emphasis added. So much for the ethical morality behind the "logic" of the "precautionary principle's" exaggerations and censorship of the data in the name of "safety".] ... DNA repair systems are very effective at low doses or dose rates (about 5–10 mGy/min) and become more error prone with increasing dose and dose rate. ... The elimination of mutant cells by death or proliferation arrest is a crucial defense. Most human cancers display defects in apoptosis or other means of eliminating mutant cells (167). Damaged cells can be eliminated after low doses by means of death, senescence, or immune response. Low-dose-rate irradiation (approximately 10 mGy/min) is less carcinogenic (per unit dose) than high-dose-rate irradiation (1 Gy/min)."




Above: hormesis for a 3000 Rad dose by single exposure at 10.3 Rad/minute of flour beetles to X-rays (J. M. Cork, Radiation research, 1957, v7, p551).  Commenting on this data in the 1961 Pergamon Press revised edition of the textbook by Bacq and Alexander, Fundamentals of Radiobiology, on page 442 stated: "Perhaps the hypothesis that all effects of ionizing radiation are inevitably deleterious has outlived its usefulness ... certain levels of radiation can be tolerated by animal population ..."  Robin H. Mole in 1957 published evidence in Nature v180, p456, showing that mice and guinea pigs given 1 R/week had increased lifespans, which is now well substantiated and is a hormesis effect due to the over-stimulation of DNA repair enzymes like P53 by low-level radiation, with beneficial health effects.  This of course violates the "precautionary principle".  When the linear, no-threshold dogma set in, with the 1956 presidential election hinging on the nuclear testing radioactive fallout issue, it was politically concerned with left winger scientists using it to peddle USSR-appeasement.  A pitched technical battle in the mainstream media ensued:

"Strontium-90 ... without doubt the most technical subject ever injected into a political campaign.  In no previous campaign had so many scientists been inspired to send so many statements to newspapers.  Never had the voting public had such a difficult, if not insuperable, job of trying to understand the arguments involved."

- Newsweek, "The 'Unpleasant Debate'," 26 November 1956, page 64.

The result was that the "precautionary principle" triumphed at the US Congressional Hearings in May-June 1957, becoming dogma before the facts on DNA repair enzymes like P53 as a low dose rate hormesis mechanism were finally uncovered beginning about twenty years later, in the late 1970s.

Anyone complaining about emotional groupthink on radiation is now abused with lying ad hominem sneers.  This is what Churchill predicted on 4 June 1945.   Clement Attlee had to keep rationing going postwar, because there was a lack of money for social reforms, thanks to his decision in 1935 to ignore Churchill and thereby to allow WWII to increase Britain's national debt to record heights.  Churchill's reluctance to implement the reforms were due to the financial constraints.  In 1951, after the true socialist face of Joseph Stalin had been revealed in the Cold War, Attlee was thrown out in the general election.  Churchill was back in, and ended rationing, which throws light on Attlee's socialist popularity, once a WWIII threat from the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" emerged.  Which was more important then, ivory tower political idealism, or liberty?


Above: in the 10.4 megaton Mike nuclear test on Elugelab Island, Eniwetok Atoll, 1952, the rats (species Rattus exulans) of Engebi survived the heat, blast, and fallout as explained by Neal O. Hines in his book Proving ground: An account of the radiobiological studies in the Pacific, 1946-1961, dramatically on pages 143, 151, 209-212, and 297:

Page 143: "On ... November 8 [7 days after Mike] ... At Engebi the group went ashore on an island ... that had been swept by the blast and by the succeeding surge of water. ... survey meters indicated radiation was at 2 to 2.5 R/hr [about 1,000 R/hr at 1 hour after detonation, allowing for t-1.2 fallout decay] ...

Page 151: "The exposure of Engebi to the effects of the Mike shot made it seem impossible that rats had survived.  The view was expressed in a subsequent summary by [Frank] Lowman, who said that there was 'little probability that rats had lived through the heat, the shock wave, the rush of water, and the nuclear radiations that Mike had inflicted on the island.  Members of the rat colonies apparently did live through the holocaust, however, and the questions presented by this circumstance would intrigue the investigators for years."

Page 209: "Their nests, composed of loosely matted grass stems, usually are built in burrows 6-12 inches below the surface of the ground, but occasionally the tunnels extend to 18-24 inches below the surface, or nests are found immediately beneath boards, slabs of concrete, or protective rubble. ... In 1955 the rats of Engebi were living on a treeless plain ... they fed on the seeds of Lepturus, Thuarea, and Fimbristylis, and on the leaves of Triumfetta and Sida, all common grass plants."

In 1954, the rats that of Engebi surviving Mike were exposed to the 1.69 megaton Castle-Nectar test, which is discussed on page 212:

"After the Nectar detonation concentrations [of I-131] in the thyroid were at levels considered excessive ... within 9 weeks activity in the thyroid was so low that measurement was difficult. ... most of the radioactivity in muscle was due to the presence of cesium-137, and no strontium-89/90 was found in that tissue. ... In January, 1955, the bones of rats contained strontium 89/90 in amounts approximating the maximum permissible dose, but no bone tumors have been discovered and none was found in specimens collected later."

Page 297: "The survival of the rats in the face of repeated atomic bombardment had seemed in 1955 a circumstance approaching the phenomenal.  Even more so was the continued health of the colonies ... The case was important because it seemed to bear so directly on one of the broadest of the unanswered questions of the nuclear age, the effect on warm-blooded, vertebrate animals of continued exposure to low-level irradiation."


Above: the rapid fall in cesium-137 uptake by plants and animals with distance from the lip of the Redwing-Cactus nuclear surface burst crater in 1967 (note that in 12 years later, in 1979 this particular crater was used as a convenient dump for contaminated soil during the Eniwetok Atoll cleap up campaign, and then it simply topped with a concrete dome).

18 June 2013 update:

The London Sun on 17 June 2013 published on page 7 an article by Trevor Kavanagh on the Syrian civil war and the G8 conflict between Russia's President Vladimir Putin and America's Barack Obama. If Putin supplies arms to Assad in Syria, and Obama supplies arms to the Syrian rebels, we are back to the days of Vietnam, albeit in a concrete jungle this time.  In a nutshell, Russia wants to arm President Assad's brutal dictatorship in Syria because it is a long term friend of Russia.  Putin excused his decision by referring to a film clip of alleged cannibalism by a rebel against a Syrian government soldier to explain his decision, conveniently ignoring the evidence that President Assad used sarin gas.  The problem here is that Israel, America and Britain want to arm the rebels to fair up the fight, because President Assad is supported by Israel-hating Hezbollah and al-Queda jihadists.  This loosely connects to the Iranian nuclear problem, since Iran is controlled by the Shia wing of Islam and supports Assad and Hezbollah.  The majority of the people in Syria are Sunni Moslems, not Shia Moslems.

The Syrian civil war had been steadily escalating since it began in March 2011, and 90,000 have been killed so far.  In one way of looking at history, every major war is sparked off by some kind of civil war which acts as the initial spark, with various other countries taking sides to give "horizontal" escalation, while stating that they are just trying to support the weaker side, or to bring the war to a close sooner and with less suffering.  (Alfred Nobel supplied explosives to both sides in the Crimean War, justifying his profit making scheme by claiming it would help bring the war to an end quicker because both sides would give in and come to their senses.  The idea was wrong, but it made money.)  The problem is pretty obvious: the various countries which supply arms to both sides may just deepen the conflict.  Trevor Kavanagh writes that America and Russia must: "either sit on their hands and watch freedom-loving Syrian rebels brutally crushed by the Russian-backed President Assad ... whether to throw in our lot with treacherous ganges of fanatical killers who might one day turn upon us ...

"Today there is a risk the conflict will escalate dangerously into a new Cold War, with Assad as Russia's puppet and America supporting a ragbag jihad army - many of the from the streets of Britain.  We are already on the brink.  America, under pressure from well-intentioned David Cameron, is siding with the rebels.  Britain is supplying 'non-lethal' equipment, like bulletproof jackets and radio communications.  He promises [just like President Johnson circa 1964, with regards to sending military advisers to Vietnam] there will be no 'boots on the ground' ... there is talk of a Nato-enforced no-fly zone over Syrian airspace.  And once the military dips its toe in the water, we risk inevitable escalation."

As LeMay made clear in 1968 (quotations included if you scroll down this blog), escalation is the key to ending any war, by forcing peace talks as the IRA did in Northern Ireland where the G8 summit is being held.  Escalation is precisely the whole point of war: to intimidate the opponent into surrendering as soon as possible or at least reaching some kind of acceptable compromise like democratic proportional representation power sharing, to overcome the normal dictatorship by the majority.  Otherwise, you end the war by surrendering, in which case you might as well not bother fighting in the first place and just use a policy of appeasement to give in to threats and coercion from anybody who makes them, for fear of the "risk of escalation".

Kavanagh goes on about the threat that a Nato no-fly zone enforced by Nato fighters will escalate the conflict because Assad will simply use some of their mobile Russian anti-aircraft rockets to shoot the planes down.  This gives the Russians the opportunity to send in tanks, planes and advisers, and "vertical" escalation then proceeds: "Some even fear such an incident could trigger World War III."  This is an exaggeration, provided that the second-strike nuclear capability on both sides is retained and not abandoned as the disarmers would like.  If nuclear disarmament did occur, it would pretty much guarantee a nuclear arms race in a life-or-death conventional war, ending in nuclear war.  In addition, it would increase the risk of this war starting in the first place, because the removal of the nuclear second-strike capability would remove the deterrent to a major war.

The world of 1939 was non-nuclear.  The two nuclear weapons which ended WWII were not drawn from pre-war stockpiles, but were manufactured from scatch in a rush during the war itself, in an effort to end conventional protracted warfare as soon as possible, saving lives.  The perversion of history by dogmatic propaganda is a serious danger.  Remember that tabun nerve gas was discovered in Germany in 1938, and Germany stockpiled 12,000 tons of tabun by 1945.  It was never used in WWII.  Escalation is deterred by effective countermeasures and retaliation capabilities.  Anthrax was available to retaliate, and Hitler did not know whether nerve gas was available here or not.  Had we openly renounced gas defenses and retaliation capabilities (as many idealists prefer), Hitler would have known where he stood, and would not have been desisted from using his 12 kilotons of tabun for fear of retaliation.

But the basic tragedy being overlooked here is that both sides in the Syrian war are Islamic; Shia vs. Sunni.  This is analogous to the troubles in Northern Ireland between two Christian communities: Catholic and Protestant.  Neither is about religion, but about freedom from political control.  The religion just acts as a community definition.  It's quite possible for a protestant to become catholic, but the person then changes communities or becomes an outsider.  This groupthink aspect of religion is also seen in political party politics, where people may belong to a community for reasons of social standing or influence, or simply family history.  The ineptitude of the conflict resolvers to understand that war is the escalation of attempted political dialogue in order to try to force reasoned negotiation or concession, is clearly visible in all civil wars.  People fight when diplomacy fails, for a simple reason: action speaks louder than words.

All of this data should have been published to inform public debate on the basis for credible nuclear deterrence of war and civil defense, PREVENTING MILLIONS OF DEATHS SINCE WWII, instead of dDELIBERATELY allowing enemy anti-nuclear and anti-civil defence lying propaganda from Russian supporting evil fascists to fill the public data vacuum, killing millions by allowing civil defence and war deterrence to be dismissed by ignorant "politicians" in the West, so that wars triggered by invasions with mass civilian casualties continue today for no purpose other than to promote terrorist agendas of hate and evil arrogance and lying for war, falsely labelled "arms control and disarmament for peace": "Controlling escalation is really an exercise in deterrence, which means providing effective disincentives to unwanted enemy actions. Contrary to widely endorsed opinion, the use or threat of nuclear weapons in tactical operations seems at least as likely to check [as Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as to promote the expansion of hostilities [providing we're not in a situation of Russian biased arms control and disarmament whereby we've no tactical weapons while the enemy has over 2000 neutron bombs thanks to "peace" propaganda from Russian thugs]." - Bernard Brodie, pvi of Escalation and the nuclear option, RAND Corp memo RM-5444-PR, June 1965.

Update (19 January 2024): Jane Corbin of BBC TV is continuing to publish ill-informed nuclear weapons capabilities nonsense debunked here since 2006 (a summary of some key evidence is linked here), e.g. her 9pm 18 Jan 2024 CND biased propaganda showpiece Nuclear Armageddon: How Close Are We? https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001vgq5/nuclear-armageddon-how-close-are-we which claims - from the standpoint of 1980s Greenham Common anti-American CND propaganda - that the world would be safer without nuclear weapons, despite the 1914-18 and 1939-45 trifles that she doesn't even bother to mention, which were only ended with nuclear deterrence. Moreover, she doesn't mention the BBC's Feb 1927 WMD exaggerating broadcast by Noel-Baker which used the false claim that there is no defence against mass destruction by gas bombs to argue for UK disarmament, something that later won him a Nobel Peace Prize and helped ensure the UK had no deterrent against the Nazis until too late to set off WWII (Nobel peace prizes were also awarded to others for lying, too, for instance Norman Angell whose pre-WWI book The Great Illusion helped ensure Britain's 1914 Liberal party Cabinet procrastinated on deciding what to do if Belgium was invaded, and thus failed deter the Kaiser from triggering the First World War!). The whole basis of her show was to edit out any realism whatsoever regarding the topic which is the title of her programme! No surprise there, then. Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia are currently designing the W93 nuclear warhead for SLBM's to replace the older W76 and W88, and what she should do next time is to address the key issue of what that design should be to deter dictators without risking escalation via collateral damage: "To enhance the flexibility and responsiveness of our nuclear forces as directed in the 2018 NPR, we will pursue two supplemental capabilities to existing U.S. nuclear forces: a low-yield SLBM warhead (W76-2) capability and a modern nuclear sea launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) to address regional deterrence challenges that have resulted from increasing Russian and Chinese nuclear capabilities. These supplemental capabilities are necessary to correct any misperception an adversary can escalate their way to victory, and ensure our ability to provide a strategic deterrent. Russia’s increased reliance on non-treaty accountable strategic and theater nuclear weapons and evolving doctrine of limited first-use in a regional conflict, give evidence of the increased possibility of Russia’s employment of nuclear weapons. ... The NNSA took efforts in 2019 to address a gap identified in the 2018 NPR by converting a small number of W76-1s into the W76-2 low-yield variant. ... In 2019, our weapon modernization programs saw a setback when reliability issues emerged with commercial off-the-shelf non-nuclear components intended for the W88 Alteration 370 program and the B61-12 LEP. ... Finally, another just-in-time program is the W80-4 LEP, which remains in synchronized development with the LRSO delivery system. ... The Nuclear Weapons Council has established a requirement for the W93 ... If deterrence fails, our combat-ready force is prepared now to deliver a decisive response anywhere on the globe ..." - Testimony of Commander Charles Richard, US Strategic Command, to the Senate Committee on Armed Services, 13 Feb 2020. This issue of how to use nuclear weapons safely to deter major provocations that escalate to horrific wars is surely is the key issue humanity should be concerned with, not the CND time-machine of returning to a non-nuclear 1914 or 1939! Corbin doesn't address it; she uses debunked old propaganda tactics to avoid the real issues and the key facts.

For example, Corbin quotes only half a sentence by Kennedy in his TV speech of 22 October 1962: "it shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States", and omits the second half of the sentence, which concludes: "requiring a full retalitory response upon the Soviet Union." Kennedy was clearly using US nuclear superiority in 1962 to deter Khrushchev from allowing the Castro regime to start any nuclear war with America! By chopping up Kennedy's sentence, Corbin juggles the true facts of history to meet the CND agenda of "disarm or be annihilated." Another trick is her decision to uncritically interview CND biased anti-civil defense fanatics like the man (Professor Freedman) who got Bill Massey of the Sunday Express to water down my article debunking pro-war CND type "anti-nuclear" propaganda lies on civil defense in 1995! Massey reported to me that Freedman claimed civil defense is no use against a H-bomb, which he claims is cheaper than dirt cheap shelters, exactly what Freedman wrote in his deceptive letter published in the 26 March 1980 Times newspaper: "for far less expenditure the enemy could make a mockery of all this by increasing the number of attacking weapons", which completely ignores the Russian dual-use concept of simply adding blast doors to metro tubes and underground car parks, etc. In any case, civil defense makes deterrence credible as even the most hard left wingers like Duncan Campbell acknowledged on page 5 of War Plan UK (Paladin Books, London, 1983): "Civil defence ... is a means, if need be, of putting that deterrence policy, for those who believe in it, into practical effect."