ABOVE: 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 by the sneering Norman Angell). 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 (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 complex SLBM and ICBM threat that we must disarm now, while also claiming that their tactical nuclear weapons probably won't work so aren't a threat! In similar vein, Teller-critic Hans Bethe also used to falsely "dismiss" Russian nuclear superiority by claiming (with any more evidence than Brezhnev's word, it appeared) 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 thousands of miles radii). 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 would turn into a "Reds under beds" argument, designed to imply that the truth is dangerous to "peaceful coexistence"!
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, and (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! 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..)
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."
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?
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.
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.
"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.)
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.)
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!]
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!
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).
Russian propagandists are discussing the best way to scare the West - testing a nuclear Tsar Bomb or checking bomb shelters.
pic.twitter.com/qWCaxjvfM8
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!
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 at collateral damage distances all the effects are sufficiently delayed in arrival (unlike the case for the smaller areas affected by conventional weapons), 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 bullshit superstitions.)
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.
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.
Nuclear saber-rattling from Russian propagandists. They think tactical nuclear weapons aren't enough, and strategic ones should be used.
Review of Peter Kuran's excellent "Neutron Bomb Movie".
Below is a brief clip for review purposes from a longer newsreel of President Eisenhower, enthusiastically promoting the 96% clean fusion Poplar nuclear test (detonated 12 July 1958). On 30 October 1962, Kennedy tested… pic.twitter.com/y4QpR5eCum
More news of Russian TV population preparation for nuclear escalations, which the Western media and politicians continue to ignore as propaganda, just as Novichok and the Ukraine invasion prep was ignored as propaganda bluff, until it took us by "surprise". We need to prepare now https://t.co/tiFmJw0Htq
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."
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).
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. "
ABOVE: Hardtack-Oak, 8.9 megatons W-53 weapon test, seen 2 minutes after detonation. The photograph is taken from land and the test was on a 223 ton barge over 12 feet of water in Eniwetok Atoll's reef. The test device, which became the warhead design of the massive liquid-fuel Titan II missile (stockpiled until 1997), was 37 inches in diameter and 100.5 inches long, and weighed 6113 lb (these data come from the declassified DASA-1220, Nuclear Test Summary: Trinity to Hardtack, online as AD-A955363.) The 'saucers' and or 'skirts' below the mushroom cap are simply due to layers of moist air entrained by the vortex to greater altitudes, where the moist air expands and cools so that droplets condense in the lower pressures, to produce visible white cloud. The pulverised coral crater was 5740 feet diameter and 204 feet deep (many times the size for a detonation in a non-coral medium like ordinary soil). For fallout measurements at Oak, see online weapon test report WT-1625 available on line in two draft versions here and here (which include some tables which are blanked out in the final version) and a final version with extensive deletions here. Another Hardtack shot strikingly demonstrates the fallout decay rate: at 1 hour after the 18-kt Cactus surface burst on 6 May 1958, the gamma dose rate on the crater lip at Runit Island, Eniwetok, was 2,200 R/hr, but measurements showed it to have decayed 1,830,000-fold to 1.2 mR/hr in July 1971 (before decontamination; the crater was later used as a convenient nuclear waste dump and during the clean up of Eniwetok in the late 70s, and then topped off with a concrete dome).
'The contours from the large burst [REDWING-TEWA, 5.01 Mt, Bikini Atoll, 1956] are very irregular compared with those from the small burst. This is because the megaton burst produces a cloud which rises into the high level winds, and these may vary in direction. ... Notice the contours of the 1 kiloton burst [SUGAR, Nevada, 1951]. The cloud did not get into the high-level winds in this case; consequently, it is easy to see how the contours could be generalized into a cigar shape. ... There is another factor that should be brought out, too, and that is that the winds over the Eniwetok Proving Grounds [which included Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls] have a tendency to vary more than the winds over the United States - the high-level winds, that is.'
Shafer the next day testified:
'With regard to irregularities of fallout deposition, Dr Triffet showed yesterday an analysis of a multimegaton detonation [REDWING-TEWA, 5.01 Mt] in the Pacific in which there was a tremendous fanning out of the fallout with several hot spots. I would like to make it clear to the committee that ... we do not have that type of wind behavior in the United States except possibly in the Gulf States in the summertime, only one season out of four.'
‘The increased efficiency with which superweapons disperse radioactive materials is to some extent counter-acted by the delay in arrival of fallout from the high source cloud and the rapid rate of decay which occurs in the interim.’ – R.L. Stetson, E.A. Schuert, W.W. Perkins, T.H. Shirasawa, and H.K. Chan, Distribution and Intensity of Fallout, Operation Castle, Project 2.5a, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, weapon test report WT-915, January 1956, classified ‘Secret – Restricted Data’ (only 240 copies printed), p. 101.
ABOVE: the Apple-2 fireball creating fallout. It was 29 kilotons yield, detonated on a 500 feet high tower. The 1955 Nevada test series, Teapot, which included Apple-2, released 24.5 megacuries of iodine-131. Apple-2 probably released 4.9 megacuries of this. A 1998 review of Nevada iodine-131 effects by the National Cancer Institute concluded that civilian thyroid gland exposure from Teapot totalled 41 million person-rads (11% of the total from New Mexico and Nevada tests, 1945-62). The human cost of Teapot, assuming their assumptions are correct in calculating the thyroid doses, is 13,000 cases of thyroid cancer, of which 650 will prove fatal. However, this was from drinking milk and was a known consequence of the testing programme. They could have eliminated this but didn't because statistically it was so small; similarly they could have banned cars to avoid many thousands more being killed. For iodine-131 inhalation studies during the Sedan nuclear test, see the online report Iodine Inhalation Study for Project Sedan.
ABOVE: Dr Gordon Dunning's candid plot of total off-site fallout external gamma doses from Nevada tests to 1957, published on page 195 of the U.S. Congressional fallout hearings of June 1957, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man.
ABOVE: another Nevada map, updating the total external gamma doses from test fallout to 1959. The man responsible for health physics safety at American tests was Dr Gordon Dunning, I'll quote his 1957 testimony to U.S. Congressional Hearings below. Dr Dunning was completely candid and open about the iodine-131 thyroid exposure hazards, writing an article about "Effects of Nuclear Weapons Testing" (Scientific Monthly, Vol. 81, NO. 6, December 1955), organizing a fallout symposium in 1956, and he later wrote the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's public information book on exposure data, Health Aspects of Nuclear Weapons Testing. He also wrote a public account of nuclear testing fallout in the Pacific, available online here and here, and compiled data on the CASTLE-BRAVO fallout here.
Fallout is predictable but even where you get heavy fallout, you don't have to get thyroid cancer from I-131. Dr Lubos Motl, an assistant physics professor at Harvard, recently remarked of Chernobyl in 1986: 'It seems that only 56 people were killed directly and 4,000 people indirectly [I-131 to thyroid from drinking milk, etc.].' Motl states:
'In a 1986 disaster that many were comparing to the third world war and that others have used to interrupt the progress in nuclear energy for at least 20 years, only 56 people were directly killed. A new 600-page report also estimates that the total number of indirect deaths caused by thyroid cancer - usually of the people who worked on the recovery of the plant after the disaster - will stay below 4,000. There has been no measurable deterioration of the public health in the surrounding areas. Was the anti-nuclear reaction to the Chernobyl accident appropriate? The Reference Frame does not think so and encourages the developed countries to build new nuclear power plants. The previous numbers were inflated because of miscalculations of exposition to radiation, and by attempts of various not-quite-honest countries to boost the financial assistance flowing to the area.Compare the new numbers with the typical number of people that are killed by natural disasters such as the typhoon in Southern Japan today (100,000 people ordered to flee their homes), plane crash that has just killed 147 people in Indonesia, and, of course, Katrina that has killed thousands. (The French Quarter will be fine.) And these disasters represent a small fraction of the people who die under more prosaic circumstances.'
Since the 1950s, it has been known that iodine-131 exposure is one of the easiest threats of fallout to take countermeasures against:
1. Don't drink fresh milk for a few weeks if the cattle are eating pasture grass contaminated with fresh fallout. (You can still use the milk to make cheese to be eaten after the 8-day half life of the iodine-131 has ensured its decay to insignificance.)
2. Or, continue using the milk so long as you can put the cattle indoors on winter feed until the iodine-131 (which has a mere 8 days half-life) has decayed.
3. A third option - which is not sensible unless the thyroid dose is expected to exceed 25 R - is to administer 130-milligram potassium iodide tablets to everyone daily who is drinking contaminated milk within a month of detonation; this blocks iodine-131 uptake by the thyroid by saturating it. But the evidence is that the risk of getting iodine-131 induced thyroid cancer from long-range fallout is so low that, in general, the low-risk of side effects from potassium iodide are similar or greater than those for radiation. The U.S. Federal Drugs Administration evaluated the risks of administering potassium iodide for thyroid blocking under emergency conditions:
Inhalation doses were measured and found to be generally trivial by comparison to doses from drinking milk, despite the volatility of iodine. At nuclear tests animals exposed did not acquire significant iodine-131 uptake by breathing air during and after fallout. Almost all the dose comes from drinking water from open rainwater-collecting cisterns (in the case of the Marshallese Islanders in the Pacific, 1954) and drinking fresh milk (in the case of the Americans during Nevada tests). Cresson Kearny of Oak Ridge National Laboratory has compared long range fallout on America from the fifth Chinese test (300 kt on 28 December 1966) with that released from the explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986, which emitted a similar amount of iodine-131:
Iodine-131 has a half life of just 8 days, so you don't need to give up fresh milk for very long after a nuclear explosion in order to eradicate the great hazards of thyroid cancer from fallout. The U.S. National Institute of Cancer factsheet states:
'Iodine 131 is a radioactive isotope of iodine - an altered form of the element that is chemically the same as the naturally occurring element but is radioactive. I-131 is found in fallout from atmospheric nuclear bomb explosions, along with a variety of other radioactive substances such as strontium-90. I-131 has been of greatest concern because it concentrates in the thyroid, particularly in children, and may increase the risk for thyroid cancer. There appears to be little risk of thyroid cancer for people exposed to radiation as adults. Because iodine concentrates in the thyroid, high doses of I-131 are used to treat some types of benign thyroid disease as well as thyroid cancer. ...
'For most people, the greatest I-131 exposure came from drinking contaminated milk. I-131 fell on pastures, and cows ate the vegetation, contaminating their milk. People received smaller levels of exposure from breathing contaminated air and eating other contaminated dairy products, eggs, and leafy vegetables. ... Because I-131 has a short half-life, less than 1 percent remained 80 days after most nuclear tests. ...
'Thyroid cancer is relatively uncommon compared with other forms of cancer, accounting for 1.6 percent of all cancers diagnosed in the United States. An estimated 20,700 cases will be diagnosed in 2002. The number of new cases is about 16 times the number of deaths, which is estimated to be 1,300 for 2002. Thyroid cancer occurs more than twice as often in women as in men. The rate of new cancers (invasive) for 1999 - the most recent year available - was 10.4 per 100,000 women and 3.8 per 100,000 men. Thyroid cancer death rates for 1999 were 0.5 deaths per 100,000 women and 0.4 deaths per 100,000 men. The lifetime risk of invasive thyroid cancer is estimated at 0.82 percent (1 in 122) for women and 0.30 percent (1 in 333) for men. Thyroid cancer is also highly curable. The five-year relative survival rate is 96 percent.'
In short, America was prepared to take some risks during the 1950s in order to reduce other risks. The bigger risk by far was considered to be a nuclear war with Russia. In order to collect civil defence data, nuclear weapon trials on home soil resulted in small doses to a vast number of people across America. The individual risk to any single individual was tiny in comparison to dangers from natural background radiation. But when you expose a vast number of people to a small amount of radiation, cases of long term effects result. These have to be balanced against the risks of war from not testing. People often say that a nuclear war was never possible during the Cold War because nobody would have won. However, Russia had a different attitude from Western pacifists (despite often using anti-American propaganda which appealed to pacifist sentiments, 'disarm and surrender, and we promise we won't bomb you' stuff).
"In describing the therapeutic use of iodine 131 in the treatment of hyperthyroidism, the [U.S. National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council, Pathological Effects of Thyroid Irradiation, A Report of a Panel of Experts from the Committees on Biological Effects of Radiation, July 1962; revised version date December 1966 is AD0651181, which notes that for a given dose the thyroid damage due to X-rays is more severe than that due to iodine-131 because the X-rays are received at a higher dose rate in a matter of seconds, while the dose from iodine-131 is received at a lower rate, spread over several weeks] report stated: '... There is no evidence at hand, except for one doubtful case in a child, that any of the treatments for hyperthyroidism has produced a thyroid cancer, although doses have ranged from a few thousand rad (roentgens) upward ...'."
Dr Dunning added in his letter to the September 1964 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, pages 29 that (because iodine-131 is of course highly volatile and doesn't condense quickly on fast-falling large fallout particles, so it is fractionated i.e. severely depleted from local fallout near the test site, but enriched in the distant fallout far downwind): "... the highest annual levels of iodine-131 in milk ever reported by the U.S. Public Health Service Milk Monitoring Network were at Palmer, Alaska (October 1961 through September 1962) ... The iodine-131 fallout in Alaska was largely the result of the USSR tests i.e., not local fallout. Incidentally, the Russian tests also were the principal source of the cesium 137 fallout in Alaska ..."
U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, 27 May - 3 June 1957. Some extracts from these 1957 hearings will be given below. Because all the people interviewed and cross-examined were engaged in actually measuring the fallout and predicting it during the nuclear tests, it is not obsolete. The data it contains for nuclear tests is relevant today, because nuclear test data is not exactly obsolete just because it was collected a half-century ago. It contains extensive scientific first-hand accounts of nuclear test fallout incidents in Nevada and at the Eniwetok Proving Grounds (Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls). All you have to remember is that some of dose-activity conversion factors, half-lives and such like have since been improved. They include extensive references to documents which were secret in 1957, but have since been declassified. I'll include links to online versions of these declassified documents as they are mentioned.
U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, 27 May - 3 June 1957, pages 105-115:
Dr William W. Kellogg (born 1917), RAND Corporation:
‘In the case of the surface burst, large quantities of surface material are broken up, melted, and even vaporized, and some of this material comes in intimate contact with the radioactive fission products. ... In the case of an air burst in which the white-hot fireball never reaches the surface, the radioactive fission products never come into close contact with the surface material; they remain as an exceedingly fine aerosol. At first sight this might be thought to be an oversimplification, since there have been many cases in which the fireball never touched the ground, but the surface material was observed to have been sucked up into the rising atomic cloud. Actually, however, in such cases a survey of the area has shown that there has been a negligible amount of radioactive material on the ground. Though tons of sand and dust may have been raised by the explosion, they apparently did not become contaminated by fission products.
‘The explanation for this curious fact probably lies in a detailed consideration of the way in which the surface material is sucked up into the fireball of an air burst. Within a few seconds from burst time, the circulation in the atomic fireball develops a toroidal form, with an updraft in the middle and downdraft around the outside. Most of the fission products are then confined to a doughnut-shaped region, and may be thought of as constituting a smoke ring. When the surface debris is carried into the fireball a few seconds after the detonation, it passes up along the axis of the cloud, through the middle, and can often be seen to cascade back down around the outside of the cloud. In its passage through the cloud, it has passed around the radioactive smoke ring but has never mixed with it. (Reference: Kellogg, W. W., R. R. Rapp, and S. M. Greenfield: Close-In Fallout, Journal of Meteorology, vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 1-8, 1957.) [Another contributory factor is that by the time the dust in the updraft stem eventually reaches the fireball, it has cooled below the solidification temperature of the fission products.]
‘There has not been a large number of surface shots in the United States test series, and most of these have been set off in the Pacific area ... a method of surveying the ocean to determine the distribution of the fallout was used which has given us some fairly complete and quantitative data on the pattern from some larger yield devices. (Reference: Van Lint, V. A. J., L. E. Killion, J. A. Chiment, and D. C. Campbell: Fallout Studies During Operation Redwing, Field Command, AFSWP, Operation Redwing Preliminary Report, ITR-1354, October 1956, Secret, R. D.) A reanalysis of the fraction of the debris which came down within the first few hundred miles from the various Operation Redwing surface shots by Tucker (Reference: Tucker, B. J.: Fraction of Redwing Radioactivity in Local Fallout, RAND Corp., Report in preparation, May 1957, Secret, R. D.) based on the ocean and atoll survey made jointly by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the Evans Signal Laboratory, the New York Operations Office of the AEC, the Chemical Warfare Laboratories of the Army Chemical Centre, and the Air Force Special Weapons Centre, reveals that from a large yield surface burst about 85 percent falls down in roughly the first 24 hours: for a barge shot in the water of a lagoon the fraction is between 65 and 70 percent. [The original analysis gave figures of 50% for land surface bursts and 30% for water surface bursts but used an inaccurate dose rate-to-activity deposit conversion factor, and an inaccurate decay curve to extrapolate back from measurement time to 1 hour which did not include neutron induced activities.] According to Tucker, the accuracy of the estimates here is probably no better than 20 or 30 percent ...
‘... a fallout pattern which changed its direction during the later stages of the fallout is the March 1, 1954, Castle [-Bravo] shot … In this case, the fallout apparently started out in a direction east-northeast, but a continued veering of the wind caused it to curve more to the east and east-southeast, until one side of it lay across some neighboring atolls. A study of this event by Rand in which the fallout was computed with the shot-time wind alone, and then again with the variable (true) wind, shows clearly how the pattern must have curved as it progressed. (Reference: Greenfield, S. M., and R. R. Rapp: Fallout Computations and Castle-Bravo – A Case Study, Rand Corp., RM-1855, January 1957, secret, R. D.)
‘... It appears that there are some few radioactive particles which escape from the mushroom while it is rising and are left behind in the stem cloud, and these will, of course, find their way to the ground sooner ...
‘In order to demonstrate the time of arrival of radioactivity at points relatively close to ground zero, the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory [WT-615, WT-915] and the Army Chemical Corps [WT-916] have designed equipment which records the fallout as a function of time. Though their respective instruments were designed independently, they both work on essentially the same principle: a small tray or container is uncovered for a certain period of time (say, 5 minutes), then covered again. Automatically the next sampler is uncovered for its sampling period, and so on. It should be mentioned that both sets of instruments remained closed for the first minute after shot time, to allow the shock wave to pass the sampling station [without depositing non-radioactive blast wind carried dust into the fallout collection trays, as occurred during the 1951 GREENHOUSE and JANGLE fallout sampling efforts when only a small percentage of the material collected in open trays near ground zero was actually radioactive fallout and the rest was blasted dust].
‘A large number of such fallout versus time measuremtnts were made at the time of the Castle shot 1 [BRAVO], and a few had been made earlier at the Ivy Mkie test by NRDL. When all the results using 5-minute sampling times (20 cases) are plotted up one is impressed, first of all, at the erratic nature of the results. This is probably due to the fact that the samples are made with small areas and small time intervals, and therefore do not give results which are entirely representative of the fallout at that location[WT-915].
‘The next thing which one notices about the results is that the majority of them show no fallout for the first 30 minutes; the average time of arrival for all stations which received any fallout was 28 minutes. These stations were located at distances from ground zero ranging from 8 to 30 miles. In visualizing these distances, recall that the Ivy Mike cloud had a radius at about 5 minutes of 10 miles, and at 10 minutes it was nearly twice this. For the Castle shot 1 the radius at 10 minutes was about 30 miles, and still growing. Thus, all the stations represented were literally in the shadow of the great mushroom cloud - though none were in the initial part of the stem.
‘The few stations which did apparently receive fallout earlier may have had something wrong with their mechanism (as would appear to be the case where two nearby stations give completely opposite results, or they were in a direction from ground zero which allowed them to be dusted by the material from the crater area which was born by the low level winds. This latter explanation appears to be reasonable, since we know that a certain small fraction of the radioactivity produced does reside in the stem cloud at relatively low altitudes.
‘It is therefore tempting to visualize the fallout as a slowly descending blanket, with a diameter roughly the diameter of the mushroom cloud. The blanket starts its fall as soon as the atomic cloud stabilizes (about 4 to 6 minutes after burst time) and touches the ground over a large area simultaneously. While this mushroom material undoubtedly represents the major fallout, some material from the stem may reach the ground sooner, and the direction of this immediate fallout from the stem would be determined by the mean wind in the lower levels, below, say, 20,000 feet.’
U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man, 27 May - 3 June 1957, pages 173-216:
Dr Gordon M. Dunning (born 1910), Pacific and Nevada tests fallout safety:
‘The relative biological effectiveness of differing energy photons and their varying depth-dose curves has been shown for X-rays. Similar results have been obtained for gamma rays as illustrated by one set of experiments using burros where there was a shift of the LD 50/30 values (lethal dose to 50 percent of the exposed animals who died in 30 days) from 684 roentgens with cobalt 60 (1.25 MeV mean energy) to 585 roentgens with Zr-95/Nb-95 (~0.7 MeV mean energy). ... The geometry of the source can make a significant difference in depth-dose curves and resultant biological effects. This may be illustrated by one experiment using swine where the LD 50/30 values for external dose decreased from 500 to 350-400 roentgens when the exposure was changed from unilateral to bilateral (the radiation exposure was first on one side only, then from opposite sides of the subject). ...
‘In the case of the Marshallese who were in the fallout from the [BRAVO] detonation at the Pacific on March 1, 1954, most of the more heavily exposed showed some degree of skin damage, as well as about half of them showing some degree of epilation [hair loss] due to beta doses. However, none of these effects were present except in those areas where the radioactive material was in contact with the skin, i.e., the scalp, neck, bend of the elbow, between and topside of the toes. No skin damage was observed where there was a covering of even a single layer of cotton clothing. ...
‘These findings indicate the obvious benefits to be expected from (a) remaining inside during the time of actual fallout to reduce the possibility of direct body contamination, or, if out of doors, to keep the body covered, and (b) early removal of the body contamination, since higher doses are delivered during early times after fallout [when the radiation level is highest].
‘The Marshallese were semi-clothed, had moist skin, and most of them were out-of-doors during the time of fallout. Some bathed during the two-day exposure period before evacuation, but others did not; therefore, they were optimal conditions for possible beta damage. The group suffering greatest exposure [Rongelap Islanders, who received 175 R of gamma exposure from 5-50 hours after detonation] showed 20 percent (13 individuals) with deep lesions; 70 percent (45 individuals) superficial lesions; and 10 percent (6 individuals) no lesions. Likewise, 55 percent (35 individuals) showed some degree of epilation followed by a regrowth of hair. ...
‘The principal hazards from intake [by food, milk and water] of relatively large amounts of radioactive fallout for several weeks immediately following a nuclear detonation are doses to the:
‘(a) gastrointestinal tract, from the gross fission product activity, ‘(b) thyroid, from isotopes of iodine, and ‘(c) bone, principally from isotopes of strontium and barium-lanthanum.
‘The solubility of the fallout material is a major factor in determining the resultant fate, and thus radiation doses, within the body. The solubility varies, depending among other factors upon the surface over which the detonation occurred. The fallout material collected in soil samples at the Nevada test site has been quite insoluble, i.e., only a few percent in distilled water and roughly 20 to 30 percent in 0.1 N HCl [eg, stomach acid]. However, it would be expected that the activity actually present in drinking water supplies would be principally in soluble form. The water collected from a well and a cistern on the island of Rongelap about 21 months after the March 1, 1954, fallout, was found to have about 80 percent of the activity in the filtrate ... Other data suggest the material to have been about 10 to 20 percent soluble in water. ... 90 percent of the material is insoluble (when calculating doses to the gastrointestinal tract) ... all of the isotopes of iodine are soluble (when calculating doses to the thyroid) ... 25 percent of the ingested strontium isotopes and 7 percent of the barium-lanthanum reached the bones. ...
‘In an area of heavy fallout one matter to consider is the relative hazards from the external gamma exposure versus internal doses from ingestion of the material. One of the best evidences on this point was the fallout that occurred on the Rongelapese in March 1954. Those in the highest exposure group received 175 roentgens whole body external gamma exposure yet their body burdens of internal emitters were relatively low. ...
‘Since 1951, the United States has conducted 11 series of nuclear tests, 5 at the Nevada test site and 6 at the Eniwetok Proving Ground, for a total of more than 63 test detonations. A sixth series is currently underway at the Nevada test site. The fallout on the inhabitants of some of the Marshall Islands in March 1954 (which will be discussed by others) and fallout on some Japanese fishermen, have been the major effects off the testing areas. The only other off-site damage has been in the United States where the blast wave has caused minor structural damage [broken shop windows in Las Vegas, and elsewhere] for which about $45,000 has been paid in claims, and fallout that occurred on some horses and cattle grazing within 20 miles of ground zero, causing skin burns for which about $15,000 was paid.
‘At the Eniwetok Proving Ground, where the larger devices are tested, the warning area covers nearly 400,000 square miles. This area is under constant surveillance during the time of testing both by surface ships and by aircraft. Starting 2 days prior to a detonation, the search is intensified in the sector of probable fallout. If any transient ship is located in the warning area, it is advised to leave and the detonation is delayed until it is clear.
‘Fully manned weather and fallout prediction units are an integral part of the task force conducting the tests. Since the larger detonations in the Pacific require additional information on the upper air, new types of high-altitude balloons and missiles are used. Nine weather stations are established by the task force during the test series on islands around the site, in addition to the eight regular weather stations in operation on other islands.
‘After each detonation, aircraft track the radioactive air out for several hundred miles. Other aircraft, with special monitoring equipment, fly over land and sea areas to measure any residual contamination.
‘Through the cooperation of the United States Public Health Service, trained monitors were present during Operation Redwing (spring 1956 series) on the populated islands of Wotho, Ujeland, and Utirik.
‘As would be expected, the delineation of fallout patterns in the wide expanses of the Pacific is difficult. For the immediate monitoring, aerial surveys are conducted as mentioned above, automatic equipment are placed on land areas, and a variety of ships, skiffs, and buoys are utilized. Following each test series, large-scale radiological and biological surveys are made. ...
‘The Nevada test site covers an area of about 600 square miles, with the adjacent 4,000 square miles being a United States Air Force gunnery range. Surrounding these areas are wide expanses of sparsely populated land. ... Each nuclear detonation is publicly announced ahead of time.
‘As part of the test organisation there is an advisory panel of experts in the fields of biology and medicine, blast, fallout prediction, and meteorology. A series of meetings is held before the firing of each shot to weigh carefully all factors related to the safety of the public.
‘A complete weather unit is in operation at the Nevada test site, drawing upon all of the extensive data available from the United States Weather Bureau and the Air Weather Service, plus six additional weather stations ringing the test site. These data are evaluated for the current and predicted trends ... A shot can be cancelled at any time up to a few seconds before the scheduled detonation. In the past, more than 80 postponements have been made due to unfavorable weather conditions.
‘Several measures have been made to reduce the radioactive fallout off the test site. First, of course, only small nuclear devices are tested at Nevada. Since the greater the height of the fireball above the surface the less is the fallout in nearby areas, the test towers have been extended to 500 feet, and during Operation Plumbbob (spring 1957) there will be at least one 700-foot tower. Also, a new technique of using captive balloons is being developed. Extensive tests are being conducted to determine the feasibility of detonating nuclear devices so far underground that all of the radioactive material will remain captured and thus, of course, completely eliminate any fallout.
‘Prior to each nuclear detonation a warning circle is established for aircraft, designed to provide control of aerial flights within the area of predicted path of the atomic cloud. ... This may typically extend about 150 miles in radius and be in force for a period from about H minus one-half hour to H plus 10 hours. All aircraft are required to check through the Civil Aeronautics Administration before flying in this area.
‘After each nuclear burst, aircraft from the test organization track the cloud until it is no longer readily detectable. Behind this come other aircraft to plot the fallout pattern on the ground. This survey is repeated on D plus 1 day. ...
‘... natural background radiation is roughly 4 roentgens per 30 years ... The average exposure to only those communities around the Nevada test site that experienced the greatest [annual] amount of fallout (0.2 roentgens or more) is 0.6 roentgens for the 6 years since the regular nuclear tests were started. The round numbers are 58,000 man-roentgens for 100,000 people. If the area considered around the Nevada test site is enlarged to include 1,000,000 people the average exposure is about 0.1 roentgens for the 6 years, or at a rate of about one-half roentgen per 30 years. This is one-twentieth of the recommendation of the National Committee on Radiation Protection and Measurements for maximum exposures.
‘The highest measured concentration of fission product activity in the air off the Nevada test site was at St. George, Utah, during the spring 1953 test series, amounting to about 1.3 microcuries per cubic meter of air averaged over a 24-hour period. It was estimated that the radiation dose to the lungs from this activity was less than that delivered every month by naturally occurring radioactive isotopes in the air that we breathe.
‘The highest measured concentration of activity from fallout material in water off the controlled area was at upper Pahranagat Lake, Nev., in the spring of 1955, amounting to 1.4 x 10-4 microcuries per millilitre at 3 days after the detonation. This is one-thirty-sixth of the operational guide – an amount that is considered safe for continuous consumption. ...
‘In the case of the Marshallese, it was very illuminating to note that even a single layer of cotton clothing was enough to prevent a serious beta dose to the skin, and where the fallout material did land on the skin and did remain there, such as in the folds of the neck and in the elbow, there were these so-called beta burns, burns of the skin from beta rays. Yet, where they had the light clothing on, there were no burns. Nor were there any on even the lower part of the leg, but there were on the feet where again the material had been scuffed up from the ground. ... The inhabitants of Rongelap Island were about 110 statute miles from the point of detonation. Some were evacuated at 36 hours, and some at about 48 hours after detonation. Upon evacuation, they took baths. Some of them did beforehand, and some of them not. It would appear that those who did take baths in the ocean did not get beta burns. It was merely a physical picture of moving the material from the body. [The Japanese fishermen on the Lucky Dragon were] somewhat closer than the Rongelapese. This fallout occurred on them, and they did not wash in general. Most of the dose was delivered in the first few days ...
‘One example of the effects of winds was observed during Upshot-Knothole. The fallout from the March 17, 1953, detonation was in a long narrow pattern to the east of ground zero. The second day after the fallout a rather strong surface wind blew almost at right angles across the area, for about a period of a day. Dose rate readings were taken on the first and fourth days at the same localities and then compared. The fourth day dose rates were less, by factors of 3 to 6, than those to be expected from the first day’s readings, based on rate of decay of t-1.2. (Other fallout measurements indicated that the rate of decay of this fallout material [in a laboratory, in isolation from the wind dispersal mechanism] was not significantly different from t-1.2.) ...
‘The highest whole-body gamma dose recorded for any locality where personnel were present outside the Nevada test site was at Riverside Cabins, Nevada (about 15 people), following shot No. 7 of Upshot-Knothole. The maximum theoretical [t-1.2 calculation] infinity dose was estimated to be 12 to 15 roentgens.’
Pages 944-948:
Dr Eugene P. Cronkite (born 1914), author of TID-5358 (online versions of that report here and here), nuclear test project officer in charge of the medical care of the Marshallese contaminated by heavy fallout (64 Rongelap islanders received 175 R of gamma exposure plus much higher surface skin doses from beta fallout on the skin) after the 1954 Castle-Bravo test:
‘The fallout material consisted predominantly of flakes of calcium oxide resulting from the incineration of the coral [reef near Namu Island at Bikini Atoll]. Upon the flakes of calcium oxide fission products were deposited. At Rongelap Atoll the material was visible and described as snowlike. ... To arrive at some physical estimate of the skin dose, an attempt must be made to add up the contributions of the penetrating gamma, the less penetrating gamma, the beta bath to which the individuals were exposed from the relatively uniform deposition of fission products in the environment, and the point contact source of fallout material deposited on the skin. By all means, the largest component of skin irradiation resulted from the spotty local deposits of fallout material on deposited surfaces of the body.
‘To put it in reverse, the individuals who remained inside had no skin burn. It was only on those on whom the material was directly deposited on the skin that received burns. ...
‘Itching and burning of the skin occurred in 28 percent of the people on Rongelap, 20 percent of the group on Ailinginae, and 5 percent of the Americans [weather station staff exposed to fallout on Rongerik Atoll]. There were no symptoms referable to the skin in the individuals on Utirik. In addition to the itching of the skin there was burning of the eyes and lacrimation in people on Rongelap and Ailinginae. It is probable that these initial skin symptoms were due to irradiation since all individuals who experienced the initial symptoms later developed unquestioned radiation-induced skin lesions that will be described later in detail. It is possible, however, that the intensely alkaline nature of the calcium oxide when dissolved in perspiration might have contributed to the initial symptoms.
‘About two-thirds of the Rongelap group were nauseated during the first 2 days, and one-tenth vomited and had diarrhea. One person in the Ailinginae group was nauseated. No one in the Rongerik or Utirik group, or Americans, had gastrointestinal symptoms. Between the 33rd and 43rd post exposure day, 10 percent of the individuals from Rongelap had an absolute granulocyte level of 1,000 per cubic millimetre or less. The lowest count during this period was 700 per cubic millimetre. ... The normal count would be approximately 5,000 to 6,000 in American population. ... [On page 946, Dr Cronkite adds that in eleven individuals the platelet count dropped to 35,000-65,000 per cubic millimetre, without causing hemorrhages.] During this interval the advisability of prophylactic administration of antibiotics was seriously considered. However, prophylactic administration of antibiotics was not instituted for the following reasons:
‘(1) All individuals were under continuous medical observation so that infection, if it developed, would have been discovered in its earlier stages.
‘(2) Premature administration of antibiotics might have obscured medical indications for treatment, and might also have led to the development of drum resistant organisms in individuals with lowered resistance to bacterial infection.
‘(3) There was no accurate knowledge of the number of granulocytes required by man to prevent infection with this type of granuloctyopenia as occurred in the Marshallese. ...
‘The few individuals that received antibiotics had conditions that would have been treated with antibiotics in the absence of any previous exposure to radiation. During the fourth and fifth exposure weeks an epidemic of upper respiratory infection occurred [colds]. … It was of interest to determine whether this respiratory infection could be correlated with the dose of radiation received or changes in the leukocyte count. There was no correlation. The respiratory infection in the medical personnel involved in the care and study of the irradiated individuals was similar in incidence and severity. …
‘On first examination by the medical team on the ninth post exposure day the exposed people appeared to be in good health and the skin was definitely normal in external appearance. Evidence for the development of skin lesions commenced approximately 2 weeks after exposure.
‘During the early stages of development of the lesions, itching, burning and slight pain were experienced with the more superficial lesions. With deeper lesions the pain was more severe. The deeper foot lesions were the most painful and caused some of the people to walk on their heels for several days during the acute stages. Some of the more severe lesions of the neck and axillae were painful. There were no constitutional symptoms associated with the skin lesions.
‘The characteristic sequence of events in the development of the lesions was the occurrence of symptoms, then of black pigmented areas, small in size, which grew larger in size and coalesced. Later the skin began to shed from the inside of the pigmented plaques to the outside, and in some cases resulted in the production of large depigmented areas. In most of the lesions the shedding was limited to the superficial layers of the skin. In some the process continued with the development of superficial ulcers. A few became infected. ...
‘In addition to the skin burns, loss of hair, spotty in nature, occurred in some of the individuals. The hair grew in again with normal color and texture and the regrowth was complete in all except possibly one middle-aged man in whom it came in somewhat sparsely. … Some of the skin burns became infected, particularly those on the feet, and were treated locally by cleansing and applications of antibiotic ointments. The skin burns healed in most cases with return of normal color and texture of the skin, and in some cases scars were left with depigmented areas. …
‘Certain lessons were learned from the Marshallese experience.
‘Burns were caused by direct contact of the radioactive material with the skin. The perspiration as common in the tropics, the delay in decontamination and the difficulties in decontamination certainly favored the development of the skin burns. Those individuals who remained indoors or under trees during the fallout developed less severe skin burns. The children who went wading in the ocean developed fewer lesions of the feet and most of the Americans who were more aware of the dangers of the fallout, took shelter in aluminum buildings and bathed and changed clothes. Consequently they developed only very mild beta burns.
‘Lastly, a single layer of cotton material offered almost complete protection, as was demonstrated by the fact that skin burns developed almost entirely on the exposed parts of the body.’
Pages 258-260:
‘Statement of United States Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL): Prediction of Fallout
[by Edward A. Schuert (b. 1923) and Charles F. Ksanda (b. 1921); see pages 321-3]
‘It was realised after the early weapons test operations that there existed a requirement for predicting the then little understood phenomenon of fallout. NRDL made the first studies on this subject by employing scaling techniques (1, 2, 3) similar to the approach used in the determination of blast and thermal effects for weapons over a wide range of yields. Such scaling of radiological phenomena resulted in satisfactory results when compared to the meagre experimentally determined field data (4). As more effects data became available from subsequent weapons test operations (5, 6, 7, 8) the limitations of a straightforward scaling technique were observed and the increasing dependence of the fallout on the dynamical parameters involved, such as the meteorological variables, became apparent. This led to the development of a physical model that would hopefully explain the mechanism of fallout such that, given the required input parameters, a knowledge of the fallout phenomenology for any type of nuclear detonation could be predicted (2, 9, 10). This model development was initiated by concentrating the effort on surface land detonations. Very little factual data were available for construction of such a model. However, it was realised that this approach offered the most positive chance of success and consequently theoretical assumptions regarding the model input parameters would have to be made. This model then defined the cloud source and associated parameters such as particle size distribution and relation of activity to particle size. A mechanism theory based on the particle settling rates and the effect of the winds aloft in determining the trajectories of these particles was established. A mathematical technique of summing the deposited activity on the earth’s surface was developed such that the fallout pattern would then be established.
‘Because of the many initial assumptions made, a great deal of effort was taken in subsequent nuclear weapons test operations to obtain refinements of these parameters by measurement (2). This work included detailed physical, chemical and radiochemical analyses of fallout particles, time dependent studies on the fallout such as time of arrival as a function of distance, rate of arrival, and time to peak activity. Activity levels as a function of distance were made (5, 6, 7). Rockets were employed to establish the radioactivity profiles within the mushroom cloud (11). Such experimental data were employed in the refinement of the physical model, as well as were detailed studies of the effect of time and space variation of the winds aloft on the trajectories of the fallout particles. This data greatly improved the ability of the model to predict the fallout and continuing refinements are being made. The use of a physical model for understanding and predicting fallout appears justified (12).
‘A fallout forecasting technique has been developed to satisfy the immediate needs of the military. This technique employs many of the model parameters established. However, it was designed for operational use and predicts only the perimeter of the fallout pattern and the radiological axis of the area or "hot line" (13, 14). It is a rapid system that was tested at Operation Redwing and proved very satisfactory for both surface land and surface water detonations. The details of this technique are described in the enclosed NRDL Technical Reports TR-127 and TR-139.
‘The accuracy of prediction of fallout is very dependent on the quality of the meteorological data available. With precise meteorological data the area of fallout and direction of the axis of the pattern can be excellently forecast. The quantitative prediction of radiation levels at any point within the fallout area is much more difficult to predict.
‘It is considered essential, in order to insure the application of fallout prediction technique and radiological hazard assessment to a wide variety of detonation conditions, that the basic mechanisms responsible for formation of fallout, movement of fallout material in atomic clouds, its dispersal by meteorological forces and return to the earth’s surface be thoroughly understood. Only a beginning to develop such an organised set of scientific data has been made.’
‘REFERENCES
‘1. Scaling of Contamination Patterns, Surface and Underground Detonations by C. F. Ksanda et al, USNRDL TR-1, September 15, 1953 (secret RD). ‘2. Proceedings of the AFSWP Fallout Symposium, AFSWP 895, January 1955 (secret RD). ‘3. Comparisons of Methods Used in Scaling Residual Contamination Patterns, by Boyd and Baker, AFSWC-TN-56-1, Kirkland AFB (secret RD). ‘4. Fallout Studies, Project 2.5a-2 Operation JANGLE, by I. Popoff, et al. WT-395 (secret RD). ‘5. Nature, Intensity, and Distribution of Fallout from Mike Shot, Project 5.4a, Operation IVY, WT-615 by W. B. Heidt, Jr., et al. April 1953 (secret RD). ‘6. Distribution and Intensity of Fallout, Project 2.5a, Operation CASTLE, WT-915 by R. L. Stetson, et al. January 1955 (secret RD). ‘7. Characterization of Fallout, Operation REDWING Project 2.63, ITR-1317 by T. Triffet, et al., April 1957 (secret RD). ‘8. Fallout Studies During Operation REDWING, program 2 summary, ITR-1354 by A. J. Van Lint, Victor, et al. October 1956 (secret RD). ‘9. Spheroidal Cloud Theory by J. M. McCampbell, NRDL TM-11 September 1954 (secret RD). ‘10. Theory of Fallout by J. M. McCampbell, NRDL TR, in preparation (secret RD). ‘11. Rocket Determination of Activity Distribution Within the Stabilized Cloud, by R. R. Soule, E. C. Guilford, ITR 1315 (secret RD). ‘12. Proceedings of the Rand Sympopsium on Fallout 1957, unpublished (secret RD). ‘13. A Fallout Forecasting Technique with Results Obtained at the Eniwetok Proving Ground, USNRDL Technical Report 139, May 1957 (unclassified) by Edward A. Schuert. ‘14. A Fallout Plotting Device, by E. A. Schuert, USNRDL Technical Report 127, February 1957 (unclassified). ‘15. Fallout Phenomenology, Annex 6.4, Scientific Directors Report, Operation GREENHOUSE by Charles E. Adams, WT-4 August 1951 (secret RD). ‘16. Employment of Time and Space Variable Winds, Including Vertical Predictions, on the Analysis of Particle Trajectories by E. A. Schuert. USNRDL Report R. and L. Series, unpublished (confidential). ‘17. A Theory of Close-In Fallout, by A. D. Anderson, in preparation (secret RD). ‘18. The Use of Winds for Finding Seasonal Fallout Patterns, by A. D. Anderson July 27, 1956. ‘19. A New Wind-Measuring System for Tactical Fallout Prediction by A. D. Anderson, W. E. Strope, May 13, 1957 (unclassified). ‘20. A Proposed Rocket-Radar System for Measuring Winds up to 200,000 Feet by A. D. Anderson, June 13, 1956 (unclassified).’
Pages 260-262:
‘Statement of United States Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory (NRDL): Measurement of Fallout
[by Terry Triffet (b. 1922); see pages 321-3]
‘It has been the overall objective of the fallout measurements made by NRDL at the Nevada test site (2-4, 9-11) and the Eniwetok Proving Grounds (1, 5-8, 12) to obtain those data which would allow prediction techniques to be tested and assessment methods developed for the radiological situations resulting from a wide range of nuclear detonation conditions (8).
‘Since fallout predictions result in the construction of gamma intensity contours, one group of measurements has featured the collection of experimental data for such contours. Direct measurement of the gamma ionisation rate at a large number of points in the fallout area with a hand survey meter is the simplest and in many ways the most satisfactory method of obtaining this type of information (2, 4). When the fallout has been deposited on a solid surface, as in Nevada, surveys of this type have generally been used and further supplemented with measurements on instruments calibrated in terms of ionisation of the activities of samples collected at certain locations for the primary purpose of physical, chemical, and radiochemical studies. When the fallout has been deposited on a water surface, as in the Pacific, certain other measurements are required for the interpretation of survey results.
‘Because of the way in which the fallout material settles and disperses in the water, it has been necessary to measure its distribution to the total depth of mixing at each point of measurement before the total fallout deposited at that point could be computed. This has been accomplished in part by the use of a radiation sensitive probe which could be lowered to various depths, and in part by measuring the activities of samples collected at various depths. Both procedures have required critical instrument calibrations and theoretical work involving a number of assumptions, however, and it is probable that the results are much less accurate than those for the land surface case. In general, the measurements of this kind made by NRDL have shown that areas of the order of tens of square miles are subjected at early times to ionisation intensities greater than 5 r/hr by events in the low kiloton range and areas of the order of thousands of square miles to ionisation intensities greater than 5 r/hr by events in the megaton range. Levels of several thousand r/hr at early times for both yield ranges have been measured or inferred, although less than 10 percent of the total affected area was estimated to have experienced these levels. While the probable error for contours from survey ionisation rate measurements has been estimated ± 20 percent for Nevada kiloton events, corresponding land equivalent contours for megaton events in the Pacific cannot be estimated closer than within a factor of 2 or 3 at the present time.
‘Another group of measurements has been directed toward obtaining time dependent data, such the variation of the gamma field intensity and gamma energy spectrum with time and the distribution of particle sizes deposited with time at a number of locations in the fallout area (10, 12). Such information is needed both to check model theory, which yields similar results, and to provide a complete description of fallout phenomena. The changing gamma radiation field has usually been measured by means of an instrument which recorded increments of ionization dose received at its location from all sources within unit time intervals, while gamma energy spectra have been measured on fallout samples from a known fallout area with an instrument utilizing a crystal detector, a photomultiplier and a pulse height discriminator (7, 12). NRDL results have shown that the gamma radiation field due to fallout outside the area of severe blast damage tends to build up to a maximum in approximately twice the time required for the fallout to arrive, varying from a few minutes near ground zero to 24 hours or more at distances of over 100 miles. The radioactive decay of fission products may be approximated by a straight line of slope –1.2 on a log-log plot; however the more general case in which several induced activities are present, and the fission products are fractionated, leads to a complex decay curve. Spectral measurements show the average energy of the fallout gamma radiations to vary from about 0.6 MeV at 10 hours to 0.3 MeV at 360 hours.
‘The determination of particle size distributions with time has required the development and application of specialized collectors capable of sampling automatically over consecutive time intervals from a few minutes to an hour or more, as well as special methods and instruments for sizing and counting the collected particles. It has been found that particles with diameters between 100 and 300 microns predominate in most collections with larger sizes (2,000-3,000 microns) increasing nearer ground zero and smaller sizes (20-200 microns) increasing farther away from ground zero. In general, data of this kind, being more direct, are more reliable for computing fraction of the bomb in the total fallout than survey results – although several sources of error such as sample bias (11) and radionuclide fractionation, do exist. On the scale utilized above, standard error in fraction calculations might be estimated at about ± 25 percent for the gamma energy and emission rate method, as opposed to possibly several hundred percent by the survey method for water surfaces and than 100 percent for land surfaces.
‘Extensive physical, chemical, and radiochemical analyses have been performed on the particulate produced by detonations occurring on the sandy Nevada soil and on coral atolls and the ocean surface in the Pacific. The mass of such material as well as the fraction of the bomb deposited per unit area at a number of locations has also been determined by weighing collected samples and performing radiochemical analyses. Since fallout ingestion constitutes a separate hazard from exposure to external fallout radiation, and since countermeasures and recovery procedures depend heavily on knowledge of the various properties of the contaminant, information of this kind is essential for assessment purposes.
‘NRDL has consistently emphasised measurements of local fallout and characterization of the phenomena associated with it. It has been possible, nevertheless, to estimate the fraction available for worldwide fallout by subtraction of the local fallout from the total produced, and this has been found to be something of the order of 50 percent for both land surface and water surface events. No closer estimate can be given because of the many uncertainties and sources of possible error in the measurements and calculations.
‘REFERENCES
‘Greenhouse
‘1. Adams, C. E., Holden, F. R., Wallace, N. R., Fallout Phenomenology, Operation Greenhouse scientific directors report annex 6.4, WT-4, August 1951 (secret R. D.)
‘Jangle
‘2. Johnson, G. W., Monitor Survey of Ground Contamination, Operation Jangle, project 2.1d, may 1952 (confidential, security information). ‘3. Poppoff, I. G., et al., Fallout Particle Studies, Operation Jangle, project 2.5a-2, WT-395, April 1952 (secret R. D.). ‘4. Laurino, R. K., Poppoff, I. G., Contamination Patterns at Operation Jangle, USNRDL-399, April 1955 (secret R. D.).
‘Ivy
‘5. Heidt, W. B., et al., Nature, Intensity and Distribution of Fallout From Mike Shot, Operation Ivy, project 5.4a, WT-615, April 1953 (secret R. D.).
‘Castle
‘6. Stetson, R. L., et al., Distribution and Intensity of Fallout at Operation Castle, project 2.5a, WT-915 (secret R. D.). ‘7. Cook, C. S., et al., Gamma Ray Spectral Measurements of Fallout Samples from Operation Castle, USNRDL-TR-32 (AFSWP-822) January 1955 (confidential).
‘Wigwam
‘8. French, F. A., Fallout and Airborne Activity in Operation Wigwam, with Notes on Surface Effects, project 2.7, WT-1017, May 1955 (confidential).
‘Teapot
‘9. Stetson, R. L., Shirasawa, T. H., Distribution and Intensity of Fallout from the Underground Shot, Operation Teapot, project 2.5.2, ITR-1154, May 1956 (secret, R. D.). ‘10. Webb, L. A., et al., Analysis of Gamma Radiation from Fallout from Operation Teapot, USNRDL-TR-106, August 1956 (confidential). ‘11. Sandomire, M. M. TeapotFallout Sampling Studies, memorandum dated December 1955 (unclassified).
‘Redwing
‘12. Triffet, T., LaRiviere, P. D., et al., Characterization of Fallout,ITR-1317, April 1957 (secret R. D.).
‘General
‘13. Fallout symposium sponsored by AFSWP, AFSWP-895, January 1955 (secret R. D.) ‘14. Fallout symposium sponsored by RAND, March 1957, proceedings in publication (secret R. D.).’
There are previous posts on this blog which review fallout data here, here, and here.
posted by Nuclear Weapons Effects 1:48 pm1 comments
Saturday, April 22, 2006
White House issues new Civil Defence Manual
ABOVE: fallout from Sugar, a 1.2 kiloton surface burst in the Nevada on 19 November 1951, illustrating the very limited range of the major residual radioactivity threat from a terrorist nuclear detonation in a city. (Mean wind speed between surface and top of cloud was 46 km/hour.) People can walk away and save their lives because the fallout in danger areas was highly visible (more about this later) and you can see it and walk out of the contaminated area without waiting to get a fatal radiation dose. After deposition, the fallout dose rises gradually over hours and days. The fallout brushes or washes off clothes and skin, which averts the risk of beta burns. The Sugar crater (90 feet wide, 21 feet deep) trapped a lot of activity and was highly contaminated (7,500 R/hr at the crater lip at 1 hour after burst), but the contamination downwind could be avoided by simply walking to the edge of the fallout area. The highest intensity fallout contour is 500 R/hr. These hard-won civil defence facts seem to be ignored in modern planning.
The fallout pattern for a 1-kiloton near surface burstis very small, and the fallout is deposited in massive visible particles where the dose rate is dangerous. See Dr Carl F. Miller, USNRDL-466 page 17 for the mass deposit of fallout associated with 1.2 kt Nevada surface burst S-shot and underground or Uncle U-shot, 1951. Fallout patterns from 1 kiloton surface bursts and shallow buried bursts show that the serious fallout radiation hazards occur a few hundred metres around ground zero upwind and a few kilometres downwind, so people seeing fallout can simply walk away as the time to do so is short compared to the time taken to accumulate a serious dose.
It updates some of the data in Glasstone and Dolan for general blast and radiation effects, but in doing so it focusses on a terrorist 10 kiloton U235 gun type surface burst. It extracts more up-to-date information from more recent sources including revisions of Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons Effects Manual EM-1. Unlike Glasstone and Dolan, although it begins with nuclear threat effects, it then deals with a wide range of biological and chemical weapons attacks and their effects.
Two supplementary manuals are also being released, Attack Timelines (February 2006) and Universal Adversary Group Profiles. Of these supplements, so far only the 112 pages long Attack Timelines is available, at least in unclassified form. The draft versions so far available, while unclassified (containing no sensitive or secret data), are marked official use only, and presumably changes may be made before final versions are published.
To give an idea of the scope of National Planning Scenarios, the frontspiece and contents are:
Version 21.2 DRAFT
NATIONAL PLANNING SCENARIOS Created for Use in National, Federal, State, and Local Homeland Security Preparedness Activities February 2006
One issue is that it ignores the effects of EMP from high altitude bursts using a terrorist missile-launched warhead, and the base surge and hard-to-remove ionic contamination from a shallow underwater burst, like Britain's Hurricane ship-burst nuclear test in 1952. If someone is able to smuggle a nuclear warhead in aboard a ship, they might very well just detonate it off shore beside a city when the wind is blowing inland.
George R. Stanbury of the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch attended the Hurricane nuclear test at Monte Bello in 1952 and a year later wrote Restricted level reports showing the effects of a terrorist attack with nuclear bombs in a ship near Liverpool, without mentioning that the fallout pattern used was based directly on the Top Secret results of Hurricane shot (HO225/42, 1953: Estimates, for exercise purposes, of the radioactive contamination of land areas from an adjacent underwater explosion, and HO225/51, 1954: Assumed effects of two atomic bomb explosions in shallow water off the port of Liverpool) . The residual radioactivity was very severe. The declassified American manual on underwater explosions ignores the data: mainly because of some data American which showed little residual contamination.
Page ii the new civil defence book states:
'The Federal interagency community has developed 15 all-hazards planning scenarios (the National Planning Scenarios or Scenarios) for use in national, Federal, State, and local homeland security preparedness activities. The Scenarios are planning tools and are representative of the range of potential terrorist attacks and natural disasters and the related impacts that face our nation. The objective was to develop a minimum number of credible scenarios in order to establish the range of response requirements to facilitatepreparedness planning. Since these Scenarios were compiled to be the minimum number necessary to develop the range of response capabilities and resources, other hazards were inevitably omitted. Examples of other potentially high-impact events include nuclear power plant incidents, industrial and transportation accidents, and frequently occurring natural disasters. Entities at all levels of government can use the National Planning Scenarios as a reference to help them identify the potential scope, magnitude, and complexity of potential major events. Entities are not precluded from developing their own scenarios to supplement theNational Planning Scenarios. These Scenarios reflect a rigorous analytical effort by Federal homeland security experts, with reviews by State and local homeland security representatives. However, it is recognized that refinement and revision over time will be necessary to ensure the Scenarios remain accurate, represent the evolving all-hazards threat picture, and embod ythe capabilities necessary to respond to domestic incidents.
'How to Use the National Planning Scenarios:
'Capabilities-Based Planning –In seeking to prepare the Nation for terrorist attacks, major disasters, and other emergencies, it is impossible to maintain the highest level of preparedness for all possibilities all of the time. Given limited resources, managing the risk posed by majorevents is imperative. In an atmosphere of changing and evolving threat, it is vital to build flexible capabilities that will enable the Nation, as a whole, to prevent, respond to, and recover from a range of major events. To address this challenge, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employs a capabilities-based planning process that occurs under uncertainty to identify capabilities suitable for a wide range of challenges and circumstances, while working within an economic framework that necessitates prioritization and choice. As a first step in the capabilities-based planning process, the Scenarios, while not exhaustive, provide an illustration of the potential threats for which we must be prepared. The Scenarios were designed to be broadly applicable; they generally do not specify a geographic location, and the impacts are meant to be scalable for a variety of population and geographic considerations.'
'In this scenario, terrorist members of the Universal Adversary (UA) group—represented by two radical Sunni groups: the core group El-Zahir (EZ) and the affiliated group Al Munsha’a Al Islamia (AMAI)—plan to assemble a gun-type nuclear device using Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) stolen from a nuclear facility located in Pakistan. The nuclear device components will be smuggled into the United States. The device will be assembled near a major metropolitan center. Using a delivery van, terrorists plan to transport the device to the business district of a large city and detonate it.
'Detailed Attack Scenario –
'Current intelligence suggests that EZ may be working with AMAI to develop an Improvised Nuclear Device (IND). It is suspected that special training camps in theMiddle East have been established for IND training. Some IND manuals have also been confiscated from suspected EZ operatives. The volume of communications between EZ and AMAI operatives has increased significantly in past two weeks. EZ operatives have spent 10 years acquiring small amounts of HEU. Operatives acquired the material by posing as legitimate businessmen and by using ties to ideologically sympathetic Pakistani nuclear scientists. EZ plans to construct a simple gun-type nuclear device and detonate the weapon at a symbolic American location. EZ Central Command initiates the operation. To preserve operational effectiveness at all levels, compartmentalization and secrecy are required. Due to fears of penetration, EZ has become increasingly discreet in its decision-making process, with few operatives informed of the next target. Target selection, preparation, and acquisition are confined to a small number of terrorist operatives.'
page 1-2:
'This scenario postulates a 10-kiloton nuclear detonation in a large metropolitan area. The effects of the damage from the blast, thermal radiation, prompt radiation, and the subsequent radioactive fallout have been calculated (based on a detonation in Washington, DC), and the details are presented in Appendix 1-A. However, the calculation is general enough that most major cities in the United States can besubstituted in a relatively straightforward manner. Enough information is presented in the appendix to allow for this kind of extrapolation. The radioactive plume track depends strongly on the local wind patterns and other weather conditions. In a situation where the wind direction cycles on a regular basis or other wind anomalies are present, caution should be exercised in directly using the fallout contours presented in the appendix. If the incident happened near the U.S. border, there would be a need for cooperation between the two border governments. Additionally, the IND attack may warrant the closure of U.S. borders for some period of time. If the detonation occurs in a coastal city, the fallout plume may be carried out over the water, causing a subsequent reduction in casualties. On the other hand, the surrounding water will likely restrict the zones that are suitable for evacuation. Bridges and tunnels that generally accompany coastal cities will restrict the evacuation, causing delay and an increase in the radioactive dose that evacuees receive. This delay may be substantial, and the resulting dose increase maydrive a decision to shelter-in-place or evacuate-in-stages. This assumes that the authorities have an effective communication channel with the public.'
The nuclear weapon effects section of this new civil defence planning guide was 'Prepared by the Department of Energy (DOE)/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Office of Emergency Response and Sandia National Laboratory' (chapter 1 page 12, or '1-12').
Despite the fact that they are assuming a 10 kiloton surface burst, they manage to calculate far more casualties than occurred at Hiroshima or at Nagasaki, which had higher yields. This arises because of fallout calculations. The absurdity of the whole thing is just crazy. The lethal fallout pattern for the 10 kiloton weapon is a couple of miles wide.
You can actually walk to safety in about a quarter of an hour, by walking cross-wind. How? Well you see flash and mushroom cloud stem direction even if there is cloud cover blocking out your view of the top of it, and if you then get a dust arriving you know you are downwind. You then walk crosswind (neither towards not away from the explosion) for about fifteen minutes, until you arrive at a location which isn't covered with avisible film of heavy fallout.
People can see lethal concentrations of fallout because it only arrives rapidly from the high mushroom and produces a danger if it falls fast, so it is large particles: see major fallout reports by Miller here and by Triffet and LaRiviere here.
‘Perhaps the most important application of radiological warfare would be its psychological effect as a mystery weapon, analogous to the initial use of poison gas and of tanks in World War I. The obvious method to combat radiological warfare in this case is to understand and be prepared for it.’ – Dr Samuel Glasstone, Editor, The Effects of Atomic Weapons, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, September 1950, p. 289.
LEFT: These Buffalo-1 fallout particles are examples of exactly what would happen if a nuclear weapon was detonated in a city. This bomb was detonated on a metal tower over sand which simulates the concrete and steel frame building material of a modern city that would become fallout. Particles in the lethal short-term danger zone are larger than sand; as shown many of them are 3-4 millimetres in size and will make a noise like hail as they land.
The fallout photo above was secret during the Cold War but has been declassified in the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment report by D.H. Peirson, et al, report AWRE-T28/57, 1957, page 26. Crown Copyright Reserved.
The photos of the mushroom cloud are for the same detonation that created the fallout particles: Buffalo-1. The photos were taken at 8 and 20 seconds after detonation of the 15 kiloton bomb on a 30 metre high tower, Maralinga, 27 September 1956.
The fallout consists of a mixture of large, smooth, globular, glossy, spherical particles resulting from the solidification of melted silicate sand with molten aluminium oxide from the tower, and a variety of unmelted, irregular sand grains. You can hear fallout hitting surfaces and bouncing off. You can also see, touch, and feel them, but you will not smell them (because of gravity, the fallout particles do not tend to enter your nose!). The melted particles are contaminated with insoluble activity trapped throughout their fused volume. Contamination on unmelted particles is limited to the surface, but is relatively soluble.
America also determined that lethal fallout concentrations are visible. If the fallout is on particles so small they can't be seen, the time taken for fallout ensures that the radiation decays to tolerable levels before that occurs. Obviously you have to be wary of rain for several hours after a nuclear explosion, as it can wash fallout out of the atmosphere, but again rain is visible. Also, rain can carry most of the radioactivity into sewers, where the radiation is well shielded from the pavement. American studies were done both top examine the visibility and mass deposits of dry and wet fallout at various types of nuclear explosion in 1956:
‘Sampling stations were located … aboard anchored barges, type YFNB, and manned ships … Particles collected in the incremental type of collector were used for these fallout studies. Since this device sequentially exposed trays … particles could be classified by time of arrival. One of the ship sampling stations was connected by an elevator device to a radiation-shielded laboratory, permitting almost immediate examination of fallout samples.’ – N.H. Farlow and W.R. Schell, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, technical report USNRDL-TR-170, 1957, p. 1.
ABOVE: visible dangerous fallout; 1956 secret photo from WT-1317 of a fallout tray automatically exposed for just 15 minutes at 1 hour after detonation of the 3.53 megaton, 15% fission surface burst Zuniat Bikini in 1956. Fallout on barge YFNB 13, at 20 km North-North-West of ground zero (downwind). The tray’s inner diameter is 8.1 cm. This sample is only 22% of the total deposit of 21.9 g/m2 at that location. The barge’s radiation meter recorded a peak gamma intensity of 6 R/hr at 1.25 hours.
Generally speaking, because fallout sinks in the ocean and the barge deck was more limited in area than a flat land area, the barge radiation meters record only about 25% of those on land which are contaminated to the same extent. So on land the peak gamma ray intensity for this fallout would have been 4 x 6 = 24 R/hr at 1.25 hours. Correcting from 15% fission yield to 100% fission yield would increase this to 160 R/hr. The infinite time fallout dose is 5 times the peak intensity times the time of that intensity as measured from the time of explosion. Hence the infinite dose outdoors on land for pure fission would be 5 x 160 x 1.25 = 1000 R which is lethal. Any house would provide enough protection to save your life, however. (The dose law of 5 times intensity times arrival time is based on the t-1.2 decay law. Obviously it is well known that the fallout intensity drops below that law within 200 days, and a better law is 4 times intensity times arrival time. On the other hand, some radiation is received before the peak dose rate occurs, so it is sensible to use the factor of 5 multiplication factor as a rough approximation.)
ABOVE: Seen and felt, 1956 secret photo from WT-1317 of a fallout tray automatically exposed for just 15 minutes at 6 hours after detonation of the 3.53 Mt surface burst Zuni. Fallout on ship YAG 40, at 97 km North of ground zero (downwind). The tray’s inner diameter is 8.1 cm. This sample is only 12% of the total deposit of 14.1 g/m2 at that location. The ship’s radiation meter recorded a peak gamma intensity of 7.6 R/hr at 6.7 hours.
Notice that although this tray has a lighter amount of fallout, it only contains 12% of the total deposit on the Liberty ship YAG40, whereas the previous photo is of a tray with 22% of the fallout on it. These trays were taken from 'differential fallout collectors', machines which sequentially exposed a series of trays to fallout at successive intervals, so that the particle sizes and masses, etc., deposited could be analysed as a function of time. (In early 1951 Nevada tests, trays left out to collect fallout were filled up with desert dust, blown up by the blast wave, and by the wind. Little was learned then about the mass of fallout per unit area!)
There are 45 different fission possibilities with uranium and plutonium, each creating two radioactive fission fragments, which decay in a chain of beta and gamma radiation emissions into other fission products. Hence 90 different immediate fission fragments are formed. A stable product is formed at the end of each ‘decay chain.’ There are 210 radioactive fission products, plus another 90 stable end products, a total of 300 products from fission. Some 72% of the radioactive half-lives are under 24 hours, and only 4% exceed a year.
The total radiation emission from fallout is the sum of three distinct components: the non-fractionated fission products (Zr-95, Nb-95, Mo-99, etc.), the fractionated fission products, and the neutron induced activity (Np-239, U-237, etc., which are non-fractionated).
‘Examination of the radiochemical analysis of the fall-out shows that fractionation... occurred during the formation of the particles... Most of the Kr-89 [gas] formed in fission would not have decayed [into solid rubidium-89] at the time of formation of the spherical particles… From the half-lives of their gaseous ancestors, it would be expected that there would be considerably less strontium [-89] in the fall-out particles than barium [-140]. This is actually the case.’ – Charles E. Adams, et al., Fall-Out Phenomenology, Operation Greenhouse, Annex 6.4, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, weapon test report WT-4, originally Secret, 1951, p. 16.
The main radiation emissions from fallout are beta particles and gamma rays, but some delayed neutrons are also emitted during the first few minutes by nuclides such as bromine-87, -88, -89, and –90. These neutrons have no effect on exposure, since the fallout is too far from the ground while they are emitted. The number of gamma rays emitted per beta particle (decay event) depends on the specific nuclide, e.g., it is only 0.000009 for Sr-89, but it is 0.891 for Cs/Ba-137. Radioactive fission fragments and their decay products consist of 36 different chemical elements, with nuclides ranging from zinc-72 up to terbium-161. Some of these are gases, but then decay into solid elements.
The decay chain precursors for the fractionated fission products like Cs-137 and I-131 eventually deposit at late times on the external surface of already-solidified fallout particles. For comparison, non-fractionated or ‘refractory’ decay chain nuclides like Zr-95, Mo-99, Np-239 and U-237, immediately condense and diffuse throughout the internal volume of hot, still-molten globules. The fireball warmth keeps gaseous and volatile elements vaporized until they decay into solids which condense on molten or solidified particles. The large, fast-falling fallout particles deposited near a nuclear detonation therefore contain reduced quantities of nuclides like strontium-89, -90, cesium-137, and iodine-131. This ‘depletion’ in local fallout is balanced by enrichment upon the small, slow-falling particles which remain in the fireball longer. This is ‘fractionation’:
‘As expected … strontium exhibits very definite fractionation... at Operation Castle after the Bravo shot... For a fall-out sample collected on land at approximately 80 miles [130 km] from the burst point, the R [reduction] value for strontium-89 was 0.14. The R value for strontium-90 using the same fall-out sample was 0.29… Fractionation … means that the quantity remaining in the atmosphere should be greatly increased over the calculated [non-fractionated] value ... The findings of the gum paper experiment of the New York Operations Office, AEC [U.S. Atomic Energy Commission], indicate that this is true and that the [strontium-90] discrepancy factor is about 3.’
– Roy D. Maxwell, et al., Evaluation of Radioactive Fall-Out, U.S. Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, September 1955, originally Secret, report AFSWP-978, p. 33.
Because of the time-dependent motion of fallout through and around the cooling fireball, fractionation is independent of explosion yield, shown by the comparison of data from 1956 megaton-yield tests with 1962 kiloton-yield tests. Fractionation is more important than fissile material.
The effect of close-in fractionation is to reduce the contributions from nearly all of the nuclides present from 1 hour to 14 days after burst. From 14 to 200 days, the effect of fractionation is gradually eliminated because non-fractionated nuclides (Nb-95, Zr-95, Ru-103, Rh-106, etc.) then predominate. Between 200 days and 10 years, the contribution of fractionated Cs/Ba-137 increases from under 1% to over 90%, so fractionation again becomes important in determining the gamma emission rate at very long times after detonation.
The average decay rate of severely fractionated close-in land burst fallout, including non-fractionated Np-239 and U-237 induced activity, is proportional to t-1.2 up to 208 days after detonation, t-2.50 from 208 days to 10 years, and then e-0.023t(years) after 10 years (Cs/Ba-137). It often decays somewhat faster. Many measurements substantiate the rapid decay. One example:
For rapid decay curves from measurements taken on land across contaminated Rongelap Atoll in the days, months and years after for the heavy Bravo fallout of 1954 see online report UWFL-91, for a large number of plotted rapid decay measurements on the 1954 Castle tests thermonuclear weapon fallout see the online report USNRDL-TR-147, for extensive clean weapon (Zuni and Navajo) rapid fallout decay curves (despite some neutron induced activity) see WT-1317 online, also note that report includes data for the dirty (87% fission) Tewa and the so-called salted Flathead test fallout decay rates; for the case of the 1954 Bravo fallout mishap which contaminated many people see Dr Carl F. Miller, speech to the U.S. National Council on Radiological Protection (NCRP) symposium on 27-29 April 1981 in Virginia, published in The Control of Exposure of the Public to Ionising Radiation in the Event of Accident or Attack, pp. 99-100.
‘The increased efficiency with which superweapons disperse radioactive materials is to some extent counter-acted by the delay in arrival of fallout from the high source cloud and the rapid rate of decay which occurs in the interim.’ – R.L. Stetson, et al., Operation Castle, Project 2.5a, Distribution and Intensity of Fallout, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, report WT-915, originally Secret, 1956, p. 101.
For Castle coral and water burst test fallout particle chemical and radiological analysis see WT-917.
‘A number of factors make large-scale decontamination useful in urban areas. Much of the area between buildings is paved and, thus, readily cleaned using motorized flushers and sweepers, which are usually available. If, in addition, the roofs are decontaminated by high-pressure hosing, it may be possible to make entire buildings habitable fairly soon, even if the fallout has been very heavy.’ – Dr Frederick P. Cowan and Charles B. Meinhold, Decontamination, Chapter 10 (pp. 225-240) of Dr Eugene P. Wigner, editor, Survival and the Bomb, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1969.
As Fredrick Cowan and Charles Meinhold argued in 1969 (above), decontamination is practical in areas of very heavy fallout. In fact, it is most effective where the fallout particles are largest, so it is actually easiest as well as most effective where dangerous fallout is deposited. A range of tested techniques is available to decontaminate different surfaces. Roads, paved areas, building surfaces, vehicles, aircraft and ships can be decontaminated by water hosing to wash contamination harmlessly down the drain. Fallout is deep-ploughed to a depth below the root length of the crops, or the long-term agricultural uptake of strontium-90 and cesium-137 is diluted by adding chemically-similar calcium and potassium compounds, respectively, to contaminated soil.
Research has been conducted to determine how soon to begin decontamination, to trade-off the benefits of decontamination against the outdoor exposures involved during the work. There are three basic stages during radiological recovery from a nuclear war: (1) evacuation of old people with inadequate radiation shielding from heavy fallout areas if they are unable to improve their shielding sufficiently with sandbags, (2) sheltering in heavy fallout areas for a few days in the part of the house furthest from the roof and outside walls, with as much mass shielding as possible, while the danger falls sharply, and (3) outdoor decontamination.
It is also possible to essentially avert the entire fallout problem by using the washdown system during fallout deposition. It is more effective to fix up a cheap water hose spray to clean the roof, walls, and surrounding urban paved areas while fallout is landing, than to spend money on sheltering, which will not remove a single fallout particle. Focus on expensive sheltering and measuring of radiation was a mistake made by Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation in 1958, and has unfortunately overshadowed the more valuable discovery that if you do not waste time, you can just wash the fallout down the drain. Kahn thought just in terms of an invisible radiation problem, not in terms of a sand particle problem. The continuous washdown system was tested on manned ships during the 1950s nuclear tests, having been developed after a study of the 1946 Bikini fallout problems. (If you leave the fallout for weeks, decontamination becomes more difficult, because particles end up firmly lodged in crevices; and you also miss the enormous benefit of reducing the intense early time hazard.)
Between 70-75% of the non-fractionated nuclides were deposited within just 20 minutes of the 0.5 kt surface burst Johnnie Boy at Nevada on 11 July 1962. (I.J. Russell, U.S. weapon test report WT-2291, 1965.) For a study of the mechanism of fractionation effects for fallout predictions in another Nevada nuclear surface burst (Small Boy), see Charles R. Martin's online report AD-A159226. Martin plots how fractionation varies of Sr-89, for example, varies with sample size assuming that Zr-95 is a good non-fractionated reference nuclide (which is true). He also plots specific activity versus particle size. Because of fractionation, there is a mild variation in the overall specific activity of fallout with particle size.
beta microcuries of Sr-89 per milligram of fallout debris, where d is the fallout particle diameter in microns (micrometres).
Here the first term (a constant) represents the radioactivity which is diffused throughout the fallout particle volume (and which is therefore independent of particle size) and the second term represents surface contamination on fallout particles, the specific activity being proportional to particle surface area (proportional to the square of the diameter) divided by particle volume (proportional to the cube of the diameter), i.e., the specific activity for surface contamination is proportional to (d^2)/(d^3) = 1/d where d is particle diameter. For very small particles, the majority of the radioactivity is on their surfaces, so their radioactivity is relatively soluble in water. But for large particles, the overall activity is less and it is diffused throughout the interior of the particle, leading to relatively low solubility of the radioactivity in water.
Exaggerated fallout patterns in the new manual?
Page 1-22 of National Planning Scenarios states 'AIRRAD is used to predict fallout from nuclear devices.' AIRRAD (downloadable DOS version here) reproduces grossly exaggerated nuclear test fallout patterns. So it is probably an over-estimate. I'll justify this in detail now.
The source of careless error causing an exaggeration is the nuclear test data compilation:
Manfred Morgenthau, et al., Local Fallout from Nuclear Test Detonations, Volume II: Compilation of Fallout Patterns and Related Test Data, U.S. Army Nuclear Defense Laboratory, report DASA-1251-2, 1963, Secret – Restricted Data. An unclassified extract from this was released in 1979 as DASA-1251-2-EX. I have already mentioned DASA-1251 fallout pattern selection problems in a previous post. This is not an attack at Morgenthau in general, although something was seriously wrong with the analysis of the maps of Bikini and Eniwetok on which fallout patterns were plotted. Morgenthau's compendium of Nevada and other continental fallout patterns is also available on line and is far more accurate than the Pacific test data (beware if you have a slow internet connection, it is 620 pages and 21.1 MB PDF file): DASA-1251-1-EX. The British and French test fallout patterns supplement to DASA-1251, Local Fallout From Nuclear Test Detonations, Volume 2, Compilation of Fallout patterns and Related Test Data, Supplement: Foreign Nuclear Tests, is also now online. (It contains British fallout patterns for some tests including the 25 kt Hurricane ship burst 2.7 m below the waterline at Monte Bello and the 1.5 kt Buffalo-2 surface burst at Maralinga, and a French surface burst on 1 April 1960. British test report fallout patterns are also available in better quality copies in the full AWRE reports at the UK National Archives. The French data is little use because the French didn't release the wind patterns and explosive yields to accompany the fallout patterns.)
But the chief problems with DASA-1251 results from the use of data for operations Castle and Redwing, which contain most of the measured surface burst fallout data (other test series were mainly air bursts or tower shots).
For Castle, Morgenthau carelessly reprints fallout patterns from Stetson’s 1956 report WT-915, including Stetson’s inaccurate scale on lagoon area maps.Stetson’s scale gives the distance from Enyu to Namu Islands to be 54 km, whereas it is actually 32 km, an exaggeration factor of 1.69 for the upwind fallout maps on Bikini Atoll for Castle shots Bravo, Koon, and Union. Since area depends on the square of distance, this means that the fallout areas are exaggerated by the factor 2.86. Morgenthau, et al., corrected the scale on the Bravo map of Bikini Atoll, but made the situation worse for the Koon and Union maps, where the distance from Enyu to Namu becomes 59 km and 56 km, and the distance exaggeration factors are 1.84 and 1.74, for Koon and Union, respectively. These imply fallout area exaggeration factors of 3.39 and 3.03, respectively.
This is a major exaggeration of upwind fallout data. It has particularly dramatic effects since the exaggerated Koon fallout map was used in 1997 to validate a computerised fallout prediction system called Airrad, with the report’s author stating that: ‘most of the Koon pattern area was covered by an array of fallout collection stations, so this pattern is probably reasonably accurate.’ - Mathias J. Sagartz, Testing of the AIRRAD Fallout Prediction Code, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico, report SAND97-2613, 1997, p. 19.
This comment is totally bogus. If you compare two versions of the Koon fallout pattern, say the WT-915 version with the completely different WT-934 version which shows a 'hotspot' downwind in the Koon fallout within Bikini Lagoon (even neglecting distance scale issues), it is clear that the contours are more imagination than a reflection of the data points, which are extremely sparse. There is not a single upwind fallout measurement for the Koon fallout pattern contours exists, yet they are plotted as a series of imaginary solid lines (not dashed lines to indicate extrapolation).
The Airrad prediction beautifully matched the falseKoon fallout contours, with a mean error of only 20% for downwind distances and only 26% for contour areas!
In fact, the trueKoon fallout contours are a factor of 1.84 smaller in distance, 3.40 times smaller in area, so the Airrad prediction exaggerated the Koon fallout downwind distances by an average of 67%, and exaggerated the contour areas by an average of 222%. Airrad gave better results for some Nevada nuclear tests, however.
A careful check on other fallout maps in DASA-1251 shows that the distance scale of Eniwetok Atoll for the Mike shot is exaggerated by 5%. More important, the selection of fallout contour maps to represent tests of Operation Redwing, particularly Zuni, Flathead, Navajo, and Tewa, and the accompanying comments on unreliability, is unhelpful. The Redwing fallout was researched jointly by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the Evans Signal Laboratory, the New York Operations Office of the Atomic Energy Commission, the Chemical Warfare Laboratories of the Army Chemical Centre, and the Air Force Special Weapons Center.
However, DASA-1251 ignores the composite fallout maps for each shot, and instead gives just the close-in data from the army Atoll survey and the partial Scripps ocean survey reprinted directly from weapon test report WT-1316, 1961. The problem with this approach is that large areas between the ocean survey and the Atoll survey are uncovered, so that no closed fallout contours for any of the tests is given, and no reconciliation between land and ocean readings are made. DASA-1251 also comments, falsely, that the amount of fallout which sank below the ocean thermocline after shots Tewa and Zuni is simply unknown.
In fact, Dr Triffet, in weapon test report WT-1317, p. 128, directly compares the total deposit of fallout on collection platforms aboard ships with the amount inferred by taking water samples and radioactivity readings at varying depths underwater. In addition, the rate of particle sinking in the water was measured by underwatre probes. The large fallout particles of calcium oxide disintegrated in the ocean (just as they did when landing on on moist skin), and even while 80% probably remained insoluble, it was then mixed with the water as tiny particles with an insignificant sinking rate. Consequently, the complete, reconciled fallout maps for Redwing tests given by Triffet in WT-1317, 1961 will be used in this book, in preference to the partial and misleading data given in DASA-1251.
On the subject of falsified fallout map distance scales, it is interesting that the June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings of the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man reprints a submitted U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory report (Edward A. Schuert's U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Lab. 1957 report USNRDL TR-139, A Fallout Forecasting Technique with Results Obtained at the Eniwetok Proving Grounds) with a falsified distance scale for some fallout maps including the Redwing-Tewa test. All distances shows on that Tewa fallout pattern are half the correct scale, so the areas are underestimated by a factor of 4. However, Triffet's report on pages 60-98 of the June 1959 U.S. Congressional Hearings (held before the same subcommittee), The Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, contains a reprint of the Tewa fallout pattern with the correct distance scale. (The British Home Office, in it's 1959 and 1974 civil defence publication Nuclear Weapons, reprinted the version of the Tewa fallout pattern with the false distance scale from the 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings, which has fallout areas only a quarter of the actual size.) Triffet's major report discloses:
‘The general objective was to obtain data sufficient to characterize the fallout, interpret the aerial and oceanographic survey results, and to check fallout model theory for Shots Cherokee,Zuni, Flathead, Navajo, and Tewa… This report summarizes the times and rates of arrival, times of peak and cessation, mass-arrival rates, particle-size variation with time, ocean-penetration rates, solid- and slurry-particle characteristics, activity and fraction of device deposited per unit area, surface densities of chemical components, radionuclide compositions with corrections for fractionation and induced activities, and photon and air-ionisation decay rates.’
– Dr Terry Triffet and Philip D. LaRiviere, Operation Redwing, Project 2.63, Characterization of Fallout, U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, San Francisco, California, report WT-1317, originally Secret, 1961, p. 5.
Blast exaggeration in the new manual?
Blast reduction due to ground-level diverging blast energy being irreversibly lost in the act of doing damage to buildings. This was pointed out by Dr William Penney in 1970, but is ignored in American studies. It is quite easy to calculate. Simplistically, the energy needed to knock a building down is the force (i.e. the net peak reflected pressure multiplied by the exposed cross-sectional area) multiplied by the distance the building is moved. The distance a building or wall is moved is known from the amount of destruction produced. This calculation is valid if the damage depends on peak overpressure (diffraction type damage). For rigid diffraction-sensitive buildings, the pressure on the front wall is typically ten times that on the back wall, so the latter can be ignored. (However, for drag sensitive targets the time factor is important.)
Civil defence can deter terrorist attacks by making the effort that goes into them meaningless. If people know the effects and how to mitigate them easily, instead of panic and nonsense, terrorists will be more likely to stay away. In that sense, despite various possible issues with the new civil defence handbook, it is valuable. People often say that civil defence against terror weapons like gas was useless in World War II because the weapons were not used. Actually, the Nazis did not use gas because Britain had taken precautions against it, training everyone, issuing cheap light weight gas masks to everyone, and advertising the fact it was prepared. They would have been more likely to use such weapons if Britain had not been prepared, so civil defence was useful not only in the Blitz but in negating many threats:
Exaggerating nuclear effects will encourage nuclear terrorism and make the threats worse, see previous posts here and here. Similarly for other kinds of threats. The whole 'mass destruction' exaggeration and hype industry needs to be taken out:
‘During World War II many large cities in England, Germany, and Japan were subjected to terrific attacks by high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Yet, when proper steps had been taken for the protection of the civilian population and for the restoration of services after the bombing, there was little, if any, evidence of panic. It is the purpose of this book to state the facts concerning the atomic bomb, and to make an objective, scientific analysis of these facts. It is hoped that as a result, although it may not be feasible completely to allay fear, it will at least be possible to avoid panic.’
ABOVE: the limited reality of fallout gamma doses and dose rates outdoors on an ideal smooth infinite surface, 2 Mt land surface burst with 1 Mt fission yield and a 24 km/hour wind speed. Curves are from Glasstone and Dolan, 1977 which is based on DELFIC, DEfence Land Fallout Interpretative Code; for a discussion of DEFLIC's cloud rise model see Daniel E. Zalewski's report AFIT/GNE/ENP/01M-06, Vincent J. Jodoin's ADA265587, and Karson A. Sandman's report AFIT/GNE/ENP/05-11, and for an analysis of the particle size distribution details, their effect on fallout pattern predictions, and how DELFIC calculates rainout and other weather phenomena effects on fallout, see Eric T. Skaar's report AFIT/GNE/ENP/05-13. For a detailed comparison of DELFIC predictions against measured fallout at six Nevada tests, including subsurface bursts and low air bursts (George, Ess, Zucchini, Priscilla, Smoky and Johnie Boy) see Richard W. Chancellor's report AFIT/GNE/ENP/05-02. You can escape lethal doses the fallout by walking crosswind. For a history of fallout prediction see Jay C. Willis' report ADA079560. You don't need a radiation meter because fallout is visible as shown above. We have already discussed here and here how America exaggerated the gamma ray energy from fallout during the Cold War, despite British opposition. Fallout is a seriously exaggerated threat. With public knowledge, it can be mitigated.
Even normal houses provide a large protection factor which would dramatically cut down the effects, assuming people don't run away from the fallout to simply avoid it (obviously, wearing rain gear to prevent skin contamination and associated beta burns). The doses above would be reduced by 30% on a desert due to terrain roughness, and by 50% in a city due to buildings absorbing long range gamma rays. Inside houses, the doses and dose rates would be additionally reduced by factors ranging from 2 (for small wooden sheds) to 20 for typical brick buildings and 200 or more for apartments or offices in tall blocks (well away from the ground and from the roof).
posted by Nuclear Weapons Effects 8:14 pm2 comments
How to achieve peace through tested, proved and practical declassified countermeasures against the effects of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and conventional weapons. Credible deterrence through simple, effective protection against invasions and collateral damage. Discussions of the facts as opposed to inaccurate, misleading lies of the "disarm or be annihilated" political dogma variety. Hiroshima and Nagasaki anti-nuclear propaganda debunked by the hard facts. Walls not wars. Walls bring people together by stopping attacks by "divide and rule" style divisive terrorists, contrary to simplistic Vatican propaganda.
Historically, it has been proved that having weapons is not enough to guarantee a reasonable measure of safety from terrorism and rogue states; countermeasures are also needed, both to make any deterrent credible and to negate or at least mitigate the effects of a terrorist attack. Some people who wear seatbelts die in car crashes; some people who are taken to hospital in ambulances, even in peace-time, die. Sometimes, lifebelts and lifeboats cannot save lives at sea. This lack of a 100% success rate in saving lives doesn't disprove the value of everyday precautions or of hospitals and medicine. Hospitals don't lull motorists into a false sense of security, causing them to drive faster and cause more accidents. Like-minded ‘arguments’ against ABM and civil defense are similarly vacuous.
‘As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile system that is cost-effective and proven. If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile-defense construction in Europe will be removed.’
‘The [ABM] treaty was in 1972 ... The theory ... supporting the ABM treaty [which prohibits ABM, thus making nations vulnerable to terrorism] ... that it will prevent an arms race ... is perfect nonsense because we have had an arms race all the time we have had the ABM treaty, and we have seen the greatest increase in proliferation of nuclear weapons that we have ever had. ... So the ABM treaty preventing an arms race is total nonsense. ...
‘The Patriot was not a failure in the Gulf War - the Patriot was one of the things which defeated the Scud and in effect helped us win the Gulf War. One or two of the shots went astray but that is true of every weapon system that has ever been invented. ...
‘President Bush said that we were going ahead with the defensive system but we would make sure that nobody felt we had offensive intentions because we would accompany it by a unilateral reduction of our nuclear arsenal. It seems to me to be a rather clear statement that proceeding with the missile defence system would mean fewer arms of this kind.
‘You have had your arms race all the time that the ABM treaty was in effect and now you have an enormous accumulation and increase of nuclear weapons and that was your arms race promoted by the ABM treaty. Now if you abolish the ABM treaty you are not going to get another arms race - you have got the arms already there - and if you accompany the missile defence construction with the unilateral reduction of our own nuclear arsenal then it seems to me you are finally getting some kind of inducement to reduce these weapons.’
Before the ABM system is in place, and afterwards if ABM fails to be 100% effective in an attack, or is bypassed by terrorists using a bomb in a suitcase or in a ship, civil defense is required and can be effective at saving lives:
‘Paradoxically, the more damaging the effect, that is the farther out its lethality stretches, the more can be done about it, because in the last fall of its power it covers vast areas, where small mitigations will save very large numbers of people.’
‘The purpose of a book is to save people [the] time and effort of digging things out for themselves. ... we have tried to leave the reader with something tangible – what a certain number of calories, roentgens, etc., means in terms of an effect on the human being. ... we must think of the people we are writing for.’
“FY 1997 Plans: ... Provide text to update Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... Update the unclassified textbook entitled, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. ... Continue revision of Glasstone's book, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, the standard reference for nuclear weapons effects. ... FY1999 Plans ... Disseminate updated The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.”
‘The evidence from Hiroshima indicates that blast survivors, both injured and uninjured, in buildings later consumed by fire [caused by the blast overturning charcoal braziers used for breakfast in inflammable wooden houses filled with easily ignitable bamboo furnishings and paper screens] were generally able to move to safe areas following the explosion. Of 130 major buildings studied by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey ... 107 were ultimately burned out ... Of those suffering fire, about 20 percent were burning after the first half hour. The remainder were consumed by fire spread, some as late as 15 hours after the blast. This situation is not unlike the one our computer-based fire spread model described for Detroit.’
- Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, DCPA Attack Environment Manual, Chapter 3: What the Planner Needs to Know About Fire Ignition and Spread, report CPG 2-1A3, June 1973, Panel 27.
“... the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only:
“... capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).”
Volume two examines the firestorm and the ignition of clothing by the thermal radiation flash in Hiroshima:
Page 24:
“Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.” [Contrast this to the obfuscation and vagueness in Glasstone, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons!]
Page 88:
“Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 unclassified USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims]
“... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.”
‘During World War II many large cities in England, Germany, and Japan were subjected to terrific attacks by high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Yet, when proper steps had been taken for the protection of the civilian population and for the restoration of services after the bombing, there was little, if any, evidence of panic. It is the purpose of this book to state the facts concerning the atomic bomb, and to make an objective, scientific analysis of these facts. It is hoped that as a result, although it may not be feasible completely to allay fear, it will at least be possible to avoid panic.’
‘The consequences of a multiweapon nuclear attack would certainly be grave ... Nevertheless, recovery should be possible if plans exist and are carried out to restore social order and to mitigate the economic disruption.’
‘Suppose the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had been 1,000 times as powerful ... It could not have killed 1,000 times as many people, but at most the entire population of Hiroshima ... [regarding the hype about various nuclear "overkill" exaggerations] there is enough water in the oceans to drown everyone ten times.’
In 1996, half a century after the nuclear detonations, data on cancers from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors was published by D. A. Pierce et al. of the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, RERF (Radiation Research vol. 146 pp. 1-27; Science vol. 272, pp. 632-3) for 86,572 survivors, of whom 60% had received bomb doses of over 5 mSv (or 500 millirem in old units) suffering 4,741 cancers of which only 420 were due to radiation, consisting of 85 leukemias and 335 solid cancers.
‘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.’
‘... it is important to note that, given the effects of a few seconds of irradiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a threshold near 200 mSv may be expected for leukemia and some solid tumors. [Sources: UNSCEAR, Sources and Effects of Ionizing Radiation, New York, 1994; W. F. Heidenreich, et al., Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1999), p. 205; and B. L. Cohen, Radiat. Res., vol. 149 (1998), p. 525.] For a protracted lifetime natural exposure, a threshold may be set at a level of several thousand millisieverts for malignancies, of 10 grays for radium-226 in bones, and probably about 1.5-2.0 Gy for lung cancer after x-ray and gamma irradiation. [Sources: G. Jaikrishan, et al., Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. S149 (for natural exposure); R. D. Evans, Health Physics, vol. 27 (1974), p. 497 (for radium-226); H. H. Rossi and M. Zaider, Radiat. Environ. Biophys., vol. 36 (1997), p. 85 (for radiogenic lung cancer).] The hormetic effects, such as a decreased cancer incidence at low doses and increased longevity, may be used as a guide for estimating practical thresholds and for setting standards. ...
‘Though about a hundred of the million daily spontaneous DNA damages per cell remain unrepaired or misrepaired, apoptosis, differentiation, necrosis, cell cycle regulation, intercellular interactions, and the immune system remove about 99% of the altered cells. [Source: R. D. Stewart, Radiation Research, vol. 152 (1999), p. 101.] ...
‘[Due to the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986] as of 1998 (according to UNSCEAR), a total of 1,791 thyroid cancers in children had been registered. About 93% of the youngsters have a prospect of full recovery. [Source: C. R. Moir and R. L. Telander, Seminars in Pediatric Surgery, vol. 3 (1994), p. 182.] ... The highest average thyroid doses in children (177 mGy) were accumulated in the Gomel region of Belarus. The highest incidence of thyroid cancer (17.9 cases per 100,000 children) occurred there in 1995, which means that the rate had increased by a factor of about 25 since 1987.
‘This rate increase was probably a result of improved screening [not radiation!]. Even then, the incidence rate for occult thyroid cancers was still a thousand times lower than it was for occult thyroid cancers in nonexposed populations (in the US, for example, the rate is 13,000 per 100,000 persons, and in Finland it is 35,600 per 100,000 persons). Thus, given the prospect of improved diagnostics, there is an enormous potential for detecting yet more [fictitious] "excess" thyroid cancers. In a study in the US that was performed during the period of active screening in 1974-79, it was determined that the incidence rate of malignant and other thyroid nodules was greater by 21-fold than it had been in the pre-1974 period. [Source: Z. Jaworowski, 21st Century Science and Technology, vol. 11 (1998), issue 1, p. 14.]’
‘Professor Edward Lewis used data from four independent populations exposed to radiation to demonstrate that the incidence of leukemia was linearly related to the accumulated dose of radiation. ... Outspoken scientists, including Linus Pauling, used Lewis’s risk estimate to inform the public about the danger of nuclear fallout by estimating the number of leukemia deaths that would be caused by the test detonations. In May of 1957 Lewis’s analysis of the radiation-induced human leukemia data was published as a lead article in Science magazine. In June he presented it before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the US Congress.’ – Abstract of thesis by Jennifer Caron, Edward Lewis and Radioactive Fallout: the Impact of Caltech Biologists Over Nuclear Weapons Testing in the 1950s and 60s, Caltech, January 2003.
Dr John F. Loutit of the Medical Research Council, Harwell, England, in 1962 wrote a book called Irradiation of Mice and Men (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London), discrediting the pseudo-science from geneticist Edward Lewis on pages 61, and 78-79:
‘... Mole [R. H. Mole, Brit. J. Radiol., v32, p497, 1959] gave different groups of mice an integrated total of 1,000 r of X-rays over a period of 4 weeks. But the dose-rate - and therefore the radiation-free time between fractions - was varied from 81 r/hour intermittently to 1.3 r/hour continuously. The incidence of leukemia varied from 40 per cent (within 15 months of the start of irradiation) in the first group to 5 per cent in the last compared with 2 per cent incidence in irradiated controls. …
‘What Lewis did, and which I have not copied, was to include in his table another group - spontaneous incidence of leukemia (Brooklyn, N.Y.) - who are taken to have received only natural background radiation throughout life at the very low dose-rate of 0.1-0.2 rad per year: the best estimate is listed as 2 x 10-6 like the others in the table. But the value of 2 x 10-6 was not calculated from the data as for the other groups; it was merely adopted. By its adoption and multiplication with the average age in years of Brooklyners - 33.7 years and radiation dose per year of 0.1-0.2 rad - a mortality rate of 7 to 13 cases per million per year due to background radiation was deduced, or some 10-20 per cent of the observed rate of 65 cases per million per year. ...
‘All these points are very much against the basic hypothesis of Lewis of a linear relation of dose to leukemic effect irrespective of time. Unhappily it is not possible to claim for Lewis’s work as others have done, “It is now possible to calculate - within narrow limits - how many deaths from leukemia will result in any population from an increase in fall-out or other source of radiation” [Leading article in Science, vol. 125, p. 963, 1957]. This is just wishful journalese.
‘The burning questions to me are not what are the numbers of leukemia to be expected from atom bombs or radiotherapy, but what is to be expected from natural background .... Furthermore, to obtain estimates of these, I believe it is wrong to go to [1950s inaccurate, dose rate effect ignoring, data from] atom bombs, where the radiations are qualitatively different [i.e., including effects from neutrons] and, more important, the dose-rate outstandingly different.’
‘From the earlier studies of radiation-induced mutations, made with fruitflies [by Nobel Laureate Hermann J. Muller and other geneticists who worked on plants, who falsely hyped their insect and plant data as valid for mammals like humans during the June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings on fallout effects], it appeared that the number (or frequency) of mutations in a given population ... is proportional to the total dose ... More recent experiments with mice, however, have shown that these conclusions need to be revised, at least for mammals. [Mammals are biologically closer to humans, in respect to DNA repair mechanisms, than short-lived insects whose life cycles are too small to have forced the evolutionary development of advanced DNA repair mechanisms, unlike mammals that need to survive for decades before reproducing.] When exposed to X-rays or gamma rays, the mutation frequency in these animals has been found to be dependent on the exposure (or dose) rate ...
‘At an exposure rate of 0.009 roentgen per minute [0.54 R/hour], the total mutation frequency in female mice is indistinguishable from the spontaneous frequency. [Emphasis added.] There thus seems to be an exposure-rate threshold below which radiation-induced mutations are absent ... with adult female mice ... a delay of at least seven weeks between exposure to a substantial dose of radiation, either neutrons or gamma rays, and conception causes the mutation frequency in the offspring to drop almost to zero. ... recovery in the female members of the population would bring about a substantial reduction in the 'load' of mutations in subsequent generations.’
George Bernard Shaw cynically explains groupthink brainwashing bias:
‘We cannot help it because we are so constituted that we always believe finally what we wish to believe. The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it and become blind to the arguments against it. The moment we want to disbelieve anything we have previously believed, we suddenly discover not only that there is a mass of evidence against, but that this evidence was staring us in the face all the time.’
From the essay titled ‘What is Science?’ by Professor Richard P. Feynman, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and published in The Physics Teacher, vol. 7, issue 6, 1968, pp. 313-20:
‘... great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
‘We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields - radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners' airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. ... you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.’
Richard P. Feynman, ‘This Unscientific Age’, in The Meaning of It All, Penguin Books, London, 1998, pages 106-9:
‘Now, I say if a man is absolutely honest and wants to protect the populace from the effects of radioactivity, which is what our scientific friends often say they are trying to do, then he should work on the biggest number, not on the smallest number, and he should try to point out that the [natural cosmic] radioactivity which is absorbed by living in the city of Denver is so much more serious [than the smaller doses from nuclear explosions] ... that all the people of Denver ought to move to lower altitudes.'
Feynman is not making a point about low level radiation effects, but about the politics of ignoring the massive natural background radiation dose, while provoking hysteria over much smaller measured fallout pollution radiation doses. Why is the anti-nuclear lobby so concerned about banning nuclear energy - which is not possible even in principle since most of our nuclear radiation is from the sun and from supernova debris contaminating the Earth from the explosion that created the solar system circa 4,540 million years ago - when they could cause much bigger radiation dose reductions to the population by concentrating on the bigger radiation source, natural background radiation. It is possible to shield natural background radiation by the air, e.g. by moving the population of high altitude cities to lower altitudes where there is more air between the people and outer space, or banning the use of high-altitude jet aircraft. The anti-nuclear lobby, as Feynman stated back in the 1960s, didn't crusade to reduce the bigger dose from background radiation. Instead they chose to argue against the much smaller doses from fallout pollution. Feynman's argument is still today falsely interpreted as a political statement, when it is actually exposing pseudo-science and countering political propaganda. It is still ignored by the media. It has been pointed out by Senator Hickenlooper on page 1060 of the May-June 1957 U.S. Congressional Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The Nature of Radioactive Fallout and Its Effects on Man:
‘I presume all of us would earnestly hope that we never had to test atomic weapons ... but by the same token I presume that we want to save thousands of lives in this country every year and we could just abolish the manufacture of [road accident causing] automobiles ...’
Dihydrogen monoxide is a potentially very dangerous chemical containing hydrogen and oxygen which has caused numerous severe burns by scalding and deaths by drowning, contributes to the greenhouse effect, accelerates corrosion and rusting of many metals, and contributes to the erosion of our natural landscape: 'Dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year. Most of these deaths are caused by accidental inhalation of DHMO, but the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide do not end there. Prolonged exposure to its solid form causes severe tissue damage. Symptoms of DHMO ingestion can include excessive sweating and urination, and possibly a bloated feeling, nausea, vomiting and body electrolyte imbalance. For those who have become dependent, DHMO withdrawal means certain death.'
Protein P53, discovered only in 1979, is encoded by gene TP53, which occurs on human chromosome 17. P53 also occurs in other mammals including mice, rats and dogs. P53 is one of the proteins which continually repairs breaks in DNA, which easily breaks at body temperature: the DNA in each cell of the human body suffers at least two single strand breaks every second, and one double strand (i.e. complete double helix) DNA break occurs at least once every 2 hours (5% of radiation-induced DNA breaks are double strand breaks, while 0.007% of spontaneous DNA breaks at body temperature are double strand breaks)! Cancer occurs when several breaks in DNA happen to occur by chance at nearly the same time, giving several loose strand ends at once, which repair proteins like P53 then repair incorrectly, causing a mutation which can be proliferated somatically. This cannot occur when only one break occurs, because only two loose ends are produced, and P53 will reattach them correctly. But if low-LET ionising radiation levels are increased to a certain extent, causing more single strand breaks, P53 works faster and is able deal with faster breaks as they occur, so that multiple broken strand ends do not arise. This prevents DNA strands being repaired incorrectly, and prevents cancer - a result of mutation caused by faults in DNA - from arising. Too much radiation of course overloads the P53 repair mechanism, and then it cannot repair breaks as they occur, so multiple breaks begin to appear and loose ends of DNA are wrongly connected by P53, causing an increased cancer risk.
1. DNA-damaging free radicals are equivalent to a source of sparks which is always present naturally.
2. Cancer is equivalent the fire you get if the sparks are allowed to ignite the gasoline, i.e. if the free radicals are allowed to damage DNA without the damage being repaired.
3. Protein P53 is equivalent to a fire suppression system which is constantly damping out the sparks, or repairing the damaged DNA so that cancer doesn’t occur.
In this way of thinking, the ‘cause’ of cancer will be down to a failure of a DNA repairing enzyme like protein P53 to repair the damage.
'For the mindset that engendered and enables this situation, which jeopardizes the existence of the United States as a nation as well as the lives of millions of its citizens, some American physicians and certain prestigious medical organizations bear a heavy responsibility.
Charles J. Hitch and Roland B. McKean of the RAND Corporation in their 1960 book The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age, Harvard University Press, Massachusetts, pp. 310-57:
‘With each side possessing only a small striking force, a small amount of cheating would give one side dominance over the other, and the incentive to cheat and prepare a preventative attack would be strong ... With each side possessing, say, several thousand missiles, a vast amount of cheating would be necessary to give one side the ability to wipe out the other’s striking capability. ... the more extensive a disarmament agreement is, the smaller the force that a violator would have to hide in order to achieve complete domination. Most obviously, “the abolition of the weapons necessary in a general or ‘unlimited’ war” would offer the most insuperable obstacles to an inspection plan, since the violator could gain an overwhelming advantage from the concealment of even a few weapons.’
Disarmament after World War I caused the following problem which led to World War II (reported by Winston S. Churchill in the London Daily Express newspaper of November 1, 1934):
‘Germany is arming secretly, illegally and rapidly. A reign of terror exists in Germany to keep secret the feverish and terrible preparations they are making.’
British Prime Minister Thatcher's address to the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament on 23 June 1982, where she pointed out that in the years since the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 million people had been killed by 140 non-nuclear conflicts:
‘The fundamental risk to peace is not the existence of weapons of particular types. It is the disposition on the part of some states to impose change on others by resorting to force against other nations ... Aggressors do not start wars because an adversary has built up his own strength. They start wars because they believe they can gain more by going to war than by remaining at peace.’
J. D. Culshaw, the then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his article in the Scientific Advisory Branch journal Fission Fragments, September 1972 (issue No. 19), classified 'Restricted':
'Apart from those who don't want to know or can't be bothered, there seem to be three major schools of thought about the nature of a possible Third World War ...
* 'The first group think of something like World War II but a little worse ...
* '... the second of World War II but very much worse ...
* 'and the third group think in terms of a catastrophe ...
'When the Armageddon concept is in favour, the suggestion that such problems exist leads to "way out" research on these phenomena, and it is sufficient to mention a new catastrophic threat [e.g., 10 years later this was done by Sagan with "nuclear winter" hype, which turned out to be fake because modern concrete cities can't produce firestorms like 1940s wooden-built areas of Hamburg, Dresden and Hiroshima] to stimulate research into the possibilities of it arising. The underlying appeal of this concept is that if one could show that the execution of all out nuclear, biological or chemical warfare would precipitate the end of the world, no one but a mad man would be prepared to initiate such a war. [However, as history proves, plenty of mad men end up gaining power and leading countries into wars.]'
J. K. S. Clayton, then Director of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, stated in his introduction, entitled The Challenge - Why Home Defence?, to the 1977 Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch Training Manual for Scientific Advisers:
'Since 1945 we have had nine wars - in Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam, between China and India, China and Russia, India and Pakistan and between the Arabs and Israelis on three occasions. We have had confrontations between East and West over Berlin, Formosa and Cuba. There have been civil wars or rebellions in no less than eleven countries and invasions or threatened invasions of another five. Whilst it is not suggested that all these incidents could have resulted in major wars, they do indicate the aptitude of mankind to resort to a forceful solution of its problems, sometimes with success. ...'
It is estimated that Mongol invaders exterminated 35 million Chinese between 1311-40, without modern weapons. Communist Chinese killed 26.3 million dissenters between 1949 and May 1965, according to detailed data compiled by the Russians on 7 April 1969. The Soviet communist dictatorship killed 40 million dissenters, mainly owners of small farms, between 1917-59. Conventional (non-nuclear) air raids on Japan killed 600,000 during World War II. The single incendiary air raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 killed 140,000 people (more than the total for nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined) at much less than the $2 billion expense of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs! Non-nuclear air raids on Germany during World War II killed 593,000 civilians. The argument that the enemy will continue stocking megaton fallout weapons if we go to cleaner weapons is irrelevant for deterrence, since we're not planning to start war, just to credibly deter invasions. You should not try to lower your standards of warfare to those of your enemy to appease groupthink taboos, or you will end up like Britain's leaders in the 1930s, trying to collaborate with fascists for popular applause.
Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone: ‘My Lords, if we are going into the question of lethality of weapons and seek thereby to isolate the nuclear as distinct from the so-called conventional range, is there not a danger that the public may think that Vimy, Passchendaele and Dresden were all right—sort of tea parties—and that nuclear war is something which in itself is unacceptable?’
Lord Trefgarne: ‘My Lords, the policy of making Europe, or the rest of the world, safe for conventional war is not one that I support.’
Mr. Bill Walker (Tayside, North): ‘I remind the House that more people died at Stalingrad than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Yet people talk about fighting a conventional war in Europe as if it were acceptable. One rarely sees demonstrations by the so-called peace movement against a conventional war in Europe, but it could be nothing but ghastly and horrendous. The casualties would certainly exceed those at Stalingrad, and that cannot be acceptable to anyone who wants peace’
On 29 October 1982, Thatcher stated of the Berlin Wall: ‘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, she said: ‘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.’
‘... peace cannot be guaranteed absolutely. Nobody can be certain, no matter what policies this or any other Government were to adopt, that the United Kingdom would never again be attacked. Also we cannot tell what form such an attack might take. Current strategic thinking suggests that if war were to break out it would start with a period of conventional hostilities of uncertain duration which might or might not escalate to nuclear conflict. ... while nuclear weapons exist there must always be a chance, however small, that they will be used against us [like gas bombs in World War II]. ... as a consequence of war between other nations in which we were not involved fall out from nuclear explosions could fall on a neutral Britain. ... conventional war is not the soft option that is sometimes suggested. It is also too easily forgotten that in World War II some 50 million people died and that conventional weapons have gone on killing people ever since 1945 without respite.’ - - The Minister of State, Scottish Office (Lord Gray of Contin), House of Lords debate on Civil Defence (General Local Authority Functions) Regulations, Hansard, vol. 444, cc. 523-49, 1 November 1983.
‘All of us are living in the light and warmth of a huge hydrogen bomb, 860,000 miles across and 93 million miles away, which is in a state of continuous explosion.’ - Dr Isaac Asimov.
‘Dr Edward Teller remarked recently that the origin of the earth was somewhat like the explosion of the atomic bomb...’ – Dr Harold C. Urey, The Planets: Their Origin and Development, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p. ix.
‘But compared with a supernova a hydrogen bomb is the merest trifle. For a supernova is equal in violence to about a million million million million hydrogen bombs all going off at the same time.’ – Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), The Nature of the Universe, Pelican Books, London, 1963, p. 75.
‘In fact, physicists find plenty of interesting and novel physics in the environment of a nuclear explosion. Some of the physical phenomena are valuable objects of research, and promise to provide further understanding of nature.’ – Dr Harold L. Brode, The RAND Corporation, ‘Review of Nuclear Weapons Effects,’ Annual Review of Nuclear Science, Volume 18, 1968, pp. 153-202.
‘It seems that similarities do exist between the processes of formation of single particles from nuclear explosions and formation of the solar system from the debris of a [4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, type Ia] supernova explosion. We may be able to learn much more about the origin of the earth, by further investigating the process of radioactive fallout from the nuclear weapons tests.’ – Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001), University of Arkansas, ‘Radioactive Fallout in Astronomical Settings: Plutonium-244 in the Early Environment of the Solar System,’ pages 83-96 of Radionuclides in the Environment: A Symposium Sponsored By the Division of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology At the 155th Meeting of the American Chemical Society, San Francisco, California, April 1-3, 1968, edited by Symposium Chairman Dr Edward C. Freiling (1922-2000) of the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, Advances in Chemistry Series No. 93, American Chemical Society, Washington, D.C., 1970.
Dr Paul K. Kuroda (1917-2001) in 1956 correctly predicted the existence of water-moderated natural nuclear reactors in flooded uranium ore seams, which were discovered in 1972 by French physicist Francis Perrin in three ore deposits at Oklo in Gabon, where sixteen sites operated as natural nuclear reactors with self-sustaining nuclear fission 2,000 million years ago, each lasting several hundred thousand years, averaging 100 kW. The radioactive waste they generated remained in situ for a period of 2,000,000,000 years without escaping. They were discovered during investigations into why the U-235 content of the uranium in the ore was only 0.7171% instead of the normal 0.7202%. Some of the ore, in the middle of the natural reactors, had a U-235 isotopic abundance of just 0.440%. Kuroda's brilliant paper is entitled, 'On the Nuclear Physical Stability of the Uranium Minerals', published in the Journal of Chemical Physics, vol. 25 (1956), pp. 781–782 and 1295–1296.
A type Ia supernova explosion, always yielding 4 x 1028 megatons of TNT equivalent, results from the critical mass effect of the collapse of a white dwarf as soon as its mass exceeds 1.4 solar masses due to matter falling in from a companion star. The degenerate electron gas in the white dwarf is then no longer able to support the pressure from the weight of gas, which collapses, thereby releasing enough gravitational potential energy as heat and pressure to cause the fusion of carbon and oxygen into heavy elements, creating massive amounts of radioactive nuclides, particularly intensely radioactive nickel-56, but half of all other nuclides (including uranium and heavier) are also produced by the 'R' (rapid) process of successive neutron captures by fusion products in supernovae explosions. Type Ia supernovae occur typically every 400 years in the Milky Way galaxy. On 4 July 1054, Chinese astronomers observed in the sky (without optical instruments) the bright supernova in the constellation Taurus which today is still visible as the Crab Nebula through telescopes. The Crab Nebula debris has a diameter now of 7 light years and is still expanding at 800 miles/second. The supernova debris shock wave triggers star formation when it encounters hydrogen gas in space by compressing it and seeding it with debris; bright stars are observed in the Orion Halo, the 300 light year diameter remains of a supernova. It is estimated that when the solar system was forming 4,540 million years ago, a supernova occurred around 100 light years away, and the heavy radioactive debris shock wave expanded at 1,000 miles/second. Most of the heavy elements including iron, silicon and calcium in the Earth and people are the stable end products of originally radioactive decay chains from the space burst fallout of a 7 x 1026 megatons thermonuclear explosion, created by fusion and successive neutron captures after the implosion of a white dwarf; a supernova explosion.
How would a 1055 megaton hydrogen bomb explosion differ from the big bang? Ignorant answers biased in favour of curved spacetime (ignoring quantum gravity!) abound, such as claims that explosions can’t take place in ‘outer space’ (disagreeing with the facts from nuclear space bursts by Russia and America in 1962, not to mention natural supernova explosions in space!) and that explosions produce sound waves in air by definition! There are indeed major differences in the nuclear reactions between the big bang and a nuclear bomb. But it is helpful to notice the solid physical fact that implosion systems suggest the mechanism of gravitation: in implosion, TNT is well-known to produce an inward force on a bomb core, but Newton's 3rd law says there is an equal and opposite reaction force outward. In fact, you can’t have a radially outward force without an inward reaction force! It’s the rocket principle. The rocket accelerates (with force F = ma) forward by virtue of the recoil from accelerating the exhaust gas (with force F = -ma) in the opposite direction! Nothing massive accelerates without an equal and opposite reaction force. Applying this fact to the measured 6 x 10-10 ms-2 ~ Hc cosmological acceleration of matter radially outward from observers in the universe which was predicted accurately in 1996 and later observationally discovered in 1999 (by Perlmutter, et al.), we find an outward force F = ma and inward reaction force by the 3rd law. The inward force allows quantitative predictions, and is mediated by gravitons, predicting gravitation in a checkable way (unlike string theory, which is just a landscape of 10500 different perturbative theories and so can’t make any falsifiable predictions about gravity). So it seems as if nuclear explosions do indeed provide helpful analogies to natural features of the world, and the mainstream lambda-CDM model of cosmology - with its force-fitted unobserved ad hoc speculative ‘dark energy’ - ignores and sweeps under the rug major quantum gravity effects which increase the physical understanding of particle physics, particularly force unification and the relation of gravitation to the existing electroweak SU(2) x U(1) section of the Standard Model of fundamental forces.
Even Einstein grasped the possibility that general relativity's lambda-CDM model is at best just a classical approximation to quantum field theory, at the end of his life when he wrote to Besso in 1954:
‘I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the [classical differential equation] field principle, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, [non-quantum] gravitation theory included ...’
‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Professor Richard P. Feynman (quoted by Professor Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, New York, 2006, p. 307).
‘The expression of dissenting views may not seem like much of a threat to a powerful organization, yet sometimes it triggers an amazingly hostile response. The reason is that a single dissenter can puncture an illusion of unanimity. ... Among those suppressed have been the engineers who tried to point out problems with the Challenger space shuttle that caused it to blow up. More fundamentally, suppression is a denial of the open dialogue and debate that are the foundation of a free society. Even worse than the silencing of dissidents is the chilling effect such practices have on others. For every individual who speaks out, numerous others decide to play it safe and keep quiet. More serious than external censorship is the problem of self-censorship.’
— Professor Brian Martin, University of Wollongong, 'Stamping Out Dissent', Newsweek, 26 April 1993, pp. 49-50
In 1896, Sir James Mackenzie-Davidson asked Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays in 1895: ‘What did you think?’ Röntgen replied: ‘I did not think, I investigated.’ The reason? Cathode ray expert J. J. Thomson in 1894 saw glass fluorescence far from a tube, but due to prejudice (expert opinion) he avoided investigating that X-ray evidence! ‘Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.’ - Richard Feynman, in Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, Houghton-Mifflin, 2006, p. 307.
Mathematical symbols in this blog: your computer’s browser needs access to standard character symbol sets to display Greek symbols for mathematical physics. If you don’t have the symbol character sets installed, the density symbol 'r' (Rho) will appear as 'r' and the 'p' (Pi) symbol will as 'p', causing confusion with the use of 'r' for radius and 'p' for momentum in formulae. This problem exists with Mozilla Firefox 3, but not with Microsoft Explorer which displays Greek symbols.
Mean yield of the 5,192 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed Russian nuclear stockpile as of January 2009: 0.317 Mt. Total yield: 1,646 Mt.
Mean yield of the 4,552 nuclear warheads and bombs in the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile as of January 2007: 0.257 Mt. Total yield: 1,172 Mt.
For diffraction damage where damage areas scale as the two-thirds power of explosive yield, this stockpile's area damage potential can be compared to the 20,000,000 conventional bombs of 100 kg size (2 megatons of TNT equivalent total energy) dropped on Germany during World War II: (Total nuclear bomb blast diffraction damaged ground area)/(Total conventional blast diffraction damaged ground area to Germany during World War II) = [4,552*(0.257 Mt)2/3]/[20,000,000*(0.0000001 Mt)2/3] = 1,840/431 = 4.3. Thus, although the entire U.S. stockpile has a TNT energy equivalent to 586 times that of the 2 megatons of conventional bombs dropped on Germany in World War II, it is only capable of causing 4.3 times as much diffraction type damage area, because any given amount of explosive energy is far more efficient when distributed over many small explosions than in a single large explosion! Large explosions are inefficient because they cause unintended collateral damage, wasting energy off the target area and injuring or damaging unintended targets!
In a controlled sample of 36,500 survivors, 89 people got leukemia over a 40 year period, above the number in the unexposed control group. (Data: Radiation Research, volume 146, 1996, pages 1-27.) Over 40 years, in 36,500 survivors monitored, there were 176 leukemia deaths which is 89 more than the control (unexposed) group got naturally. There were 4,687 other cancer deaths, but that was merely 339 above the number in the control (unexposed) group, so this is statistically a much smaller rise than the leukemia result. Natural leukemia rates, which are very low in any case, were increased by 51% in the irradiated survivors, but other cancers were merely increased by just 7%. Adding all the cancers together, the total was 4,863 cancers (virtually all natural cancer, nothing whatsoever to do with radiation), which is just 428 more than the unexposed control group. Hence, the total increase over the natural cancer rate due to bomb exposure was only 9%, spread over a period of 40 years. There was no increase whatsoever in genetic malformations.
‘If defense is neglected these weapons of attack become effective. They become available and desirable in the eyes of an imperialist dictator, even if his means are limited. Weapons of mass destruction could become equalizers between nations big and small, highly developed and primitive, if defense is neglected. If defense is developed and if it is made available for general prevention of war, weapons of aggression will become less desirable. Thus defense makes war itself less probable. ... One psychological defense mechanism against danger is to forget about it. This attitude is as common as it is disastrous. It may turn a limited danger into a fatal difficulty.’
Advice of Robert Watson-Watt (Chief Scientist on the World War II British Radar Project, defending Britain against enemy attacks): ‘Give them the third best to go on with, the second best comes too late, the best never comes.’
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."