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

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

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..)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility, NIF, using ultraviolet wavelength laser beam pulses of 2MJ on to a 2mm diameter spherical beryllium shell of frozen D+T inside a 1 cm-long hollow gold cylinder "hohlraum" (which is heated to a temperature where it then re-radiates energy at much higher frequency, x-rays, on to the surface of the beryllium ablator of the central fusion capsule, which ablates causing it to recoil inward (as for the 1962 Ripple II nuclear weapon's secondary stage, the capsule is compressed by a factor of 35, mimicking the isentropic compression mechanism of a miniature Ripple II clean nuclear weapon secondary stage), has now repeatedly achieved nuclear fusion explosions of over 3MJ, equivalent to nearly 1 kg of TNT explosive. According to a Time article (linked her) about fusion system designer Annie Kritcher, the recent breakthrough was in part due to using a ramping input energy waveform: "success that came thanks to tweaks including shifting more of the input energy to the later part of the laser shot", a feature that minimises the rise in entropy due to shock shock wave generation (which heats the capsule, causing it to expand and resist compression) and increases isentropic compression which was the principle used by LLNL's J. H. Nuckolls to achieve the 99.9% clean Ripple II 9.96 megaton nuclear test success in Dominic-Housatonic on 30 October 1962. Nuckolls in 1972 published the equation for the idealized input power waveform required for isentropic, optimized compression of fusion fuel (Nature, v239, p139): P ~ (1 - t)-1.875, where t is time in units of the transit time (the time taken for the shock to travel to the centre of the fusion capsule), and -1.875 a constant based on the specific heat of the ionized fuel (Nuckolls has provided the basic declassified principles, see extract linked here). To be clear, the energy reliably released by the 2mm diameter capsule of fusion fuel was roughly a 1 kg TNT explosion. 80% of this is in the form of 14.1 MeV neutrons (ideal for fissioning lithium-7 in LiD to yield more tritium), and 20% is the kinetic energy of fused nuclei (which is quickly converted into x-rays radiation energy by collisions). Nuckolls' 9.96 megaton Housatonic (10 kt Kinglet primary and 9.95 Mt Ripple II 100% clean isentropically compressed secondary) of 1962 proved that it is possible to use multiplicative staging whereby lower yield primary nuclear explosions trigger off a fusion stage 1,000 times more powerful than its initiator. Another key factor, as shown on our ggraph linked here, is that you can use cheap natural LiD as fuel once you have a successful D+T reaction, because naturally abundant, cheap Li-7 more readily fissions to yield tritium with the 14.1 MeV neutrons from D+T fusion, than expensively enriched Li-6, which is needed to make tritium in nuclear reactors where the fission neutron energy of around 1 MeV is too low to to fission Li-7. It should also be noted that despite an openly published paper about Nuckolls' Ripple II success being stymied in 2021 by Jon Grams, the subject is still being covered up/ignored by the anti-nuclear biased Western media! Grams article fails to contain the design details such as the isentropic power delivery curve etc from Nuckolls' declassified articles that we include in the latest blog post here. One problem regarding "data" causing continuing confusion about the Dominic-Housatonic 30 October 1962 Ripple II test at Christmas Island, is made clear in the DASA-1211 report's declassified summary of the sizes, weights and yields of those tests: Housatonic was Nuckolls' fourth and final isentropic test, with the nuclear system inserted into a heavy steel Mk36 drop case, making the overall size 57.2 inches in diameter, 147.9 long and 7,139.55 lb mass, i.e. 1.4 kt/lb or 3.0 kt/kg yield-to-mass ratio for 9.96 Mt yield, which is not impressive for that yield range until you consider (a) that it was 99.9% fusion and (b) the isentropic design required a heavy holhraum around the large Ripple II fusion secondary stage to confine x-rays for relatively long time during which a slowly rising pulse of x-rays were delivered from the primary to secondary via a very large areas of foam elsewhere in the weapon, to produce isentropic compression. Additionally, the test was made in a hurry before an atmospheric teat ban treaty, and this rushed use of a standard air drop steel casing made the tested weapon much heavier than a properly weaponized Ripple II. The key point is that a 10 kt fission device set off a ~10 Mt fusion explosion, a very clean deterrent. Applying this Ripple II 1,000-factor multiplicative staging figure directly to this technology for clean nuclear warheads, a 0.5 kg TNT D+T fusion capsule would set off a 0.5 ton TNT 2nd stage of LiD, which would then set off a 0.5 kt 3rd stage "neutron bomb", which could then be used to set off a 500 kt 4th stage or "strategic nuclear weapon". It is therefore now possible not just in principle but in practice, using suitable already-proved technical staging systems used in 1960s nuclear weapon tests successfully, to design 100% clean fusion nuclear warheads! Yes, the details have been worked out, yes the technology has been tested in piecemeal fashion. All that is now needed is a new, but quicker and cheaper, Star Wars program or Manhattan Project style effort to pull the components together. This will constitute a major leap forward in the credibility of the deterrence of aggressors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The basic fact is that nuclear weapons can deter/stop invasions unlike the conventional weapons that cause mass destruction, and nuclear collateral damage is eliminated easily for nuclear weapons by using them on military targets, since 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.)

(Quoted in 2006 on this blog here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honest Effects of Nuclear Weapons!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, October 25, 2013

NUCLEAR DETONATIONS IN URBAN AND SUBURBAN AREAS (updated 3 January 2014 with latest secret UK National Archives files from 1984)

In the previous post on this blog, The exaggerated urban effects of nuclear weapons: proof tested civil defence, we reviewed the evidence for shielding of thermal and initial nuclear radiation effects by city urban and suburban landscapes (concrete jungles), and compared modern cities with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Update (3 January 2014): Britain's National Archives in Kew have today released the previously secret files on Gorbachev's December 1984 meeting with Thatcher when he was just a member of the Politburo and before he became USSR Premier (file PREM 19/1394) and also the secret British Ministry of Defence evaluation report (file PREM 19/1188, which has an earlier number since it begins in December 1979, with reports on American laser weapons developments) about President Reagan's SDI or "Star Wars" (the space-based anti-ballistic missile system, or space ABM, designed to protect US cities and replace the risky policy of "mutual assured destruction" with a safer policy of "mutual assured survival").  Some brief extracts from these documents (of relevance to this blog) are linked here.





The Prime Minister's five hours long December 1984 meeting with Gorbachev (file PREM 19/1394) led to her reporting to President Reagan: "He talks readily and, in contrast to the stultified manner of Soviet leaders, does not just stick to prepared statements.  He picks up points made in discussion and responds to them.  He was clearly not used to the sort of rigorous questioning which he got from me on things like human rights in the Soviet Union ... I certainly found him a man one could do business with. ... the most striking point was the amount of time devoted to the threat of an arms race in outer space."  (Emphasis added.)


"how should we react when allies of a totalitarian system try to use the freedom of our press as a protective screen behind which they can conspire to destroy freedom itself? ... The remedy is more investigation, more information and more publication of the truth.  And for each of us in our own way to draw attention to the facts. ... Every time the Soviets embark on a new 'peace' offensive, too many of us are pitifully eager to forget that this is no more than a modulation of Soviet tactics ... many of us still want to believe that the problems that separate us are problems that can be resolved by negotiation and mutual goodwill.  But unfortunately we must realize that we cannot find lasting peace through negotiation because what the Soviets really want we cannot negotiate [emphasis in bold to Thatcher's heavy underlining of words]. ...  We cannot negotiate away our freedom ...

"There is no easy solution, no quick fix. ... the Soviets recognise that their most effective current strategy is not armed conflict but instead to weaken us from within. ... then they can win without armed conflict. ... Europe would fall like a rotten fruit. ... Politically they have established communist parties in each country.  In Italy, France, Greece and Portugal, for example, these have grown to a substantial size, gaining between 12% and 30% of the vote.  But whenever candidates, standing under the Communist party label, are unable to succeed at the ballot box, they switch labels and adopt the camouflage of socialism.  They penetrate local socialist parties.  Recently in Great Britain, the Cabinet papers for Clement Attlee's period in office as Prime Minister were declassified.  They show that Attlee, a moderate socialist leader, understood and stated clearly, as early as 1950, that as a result of electorial support, the Communist Party of the UK had changed its strategy from trying to obtain parliamentary representation to infiltrating the socialist party [and later CND and environmentalism lobbies] and other centres of power. ... Their major propaganda thrusts have to encourage

  • Unilateral disarmament
  • neutralism
  • increased trade with the Soviet bloc
  • anti-Americanism

"... Evidence is available which indicates that the investment by the Soviets in propaganda [in the West] is between $3 and $4 billion per annum. ... An analysis of the principal Soviet front organizations illustrates the breadth of the active measures effort.  One of the major organizations is the 'World Peace Council' (WPC).  It originated in 1949 from the 'World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace.'  The WPC owns a number of publications which are printed in English, French, Spanish and German.  Its principal propaganda objective is to encourage the West to disarm.  The WPC conducts its operations on a worldwide basis and it has spawned regional and national peace committees [e.g. CND, as documented in detail by Paul Mercer's 465 pages long 1986 book, Peace of the Dead: The Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers; for detailed review see the London Review of Books, v9, n1, 8 Jan 1987, pp 10-11; see also Dr Julian Lewis's "When is a smear not a smear?" article in the Salisbury Review, October 1984, also published in the Summer 1984 issue of Defence Campaigner: "Several years ago the political analyst, S. E. Finer, wrote a book about pressure groups, concluding that the more noise an organisation makes publicly, the more this indicates its lack of real influence in the corridors of power. People shouting on the streets are usually obliged to do so because of their failure to influence the policy process. ... it was just 'bad form' to criticise the Holy Movement – irrespective of the validity of the criticism. ... The late Senator Joseph McCarthy certainly has a lot to answer for: his campaign of wild and often unsubstantiated allegations of Communist activity has almost succeeded in giving anti-Communism in general a bad name. There is today a great propensity for 'reverse McCarthyism', a willingness to dismiss any charge of far Left misbehaviour, however accurate, as just 'Reds-under-the-Bed’ – even when the Reds are no longer under the bed, but in it. Have you noticed, for example, how the allies of the Militant Tendency (in what currently passes for the Labour Party) continually refer to the feeble attempts being made to keep these revolutionary Trotskyists in check as a 'witch-hunt'? Now, the whole point about a witch-hunt is that it was always unjust, because witches were non-existent and the poor wretches accused and killed for sorcery were totally innocent of any crime. Had they really possessed evil supernatural powers, the injustice of hunting for witches would have been far from self-evident. ... So it is with the 'smearing' of the CND by its opponents. Basically, this organisation sails under false colours. ... The CND is not only one-sided in its disarmament recommendations, it is also grossly one-sided in its political affiliations. ... Take the December 1983 Annual Conference elections, for example, when the six CND officers and 20 CND Council members were chosen. Here is a breakdown of the officers: Chair: [sic] Joan Ruddock – a committed Left-wing Labourite who has repeatedly belittled the existence of a Soviet threat, advocates a neutral Britain out of NATO, and recently admitted: "My life has become one of greater and greater commitment to Socialism." (City Limits, 2 March 1984) Vice-Chair: (i) Professor Michael Pentz – former Communist Party local government candidate, now (like so many other ex-CP members) on the hard Left of the Labour Party. Has been involved with the Soviet front body, the World Federation of Scientific Workers, as well as the British arm of the Kremlin-backed World Peace Council. (ii) Joy Hurcombe – like Ruddock, a former Labour Parliamentary candidate on the Left of the Party. Deeply involved in the controversial, Trotskyist-dominated Labour CND group. (iii) Roger Spiller – a full-time trade union official and Labour activist, on the Tribune wing of the Party. Delegated as an 'Observer' representing the CND at the World Peace Council's phony Prague Peace Assembly in 1983. (iv) Meg Beresford – who has described herself as a 'Socialist Feminist'. Treasurer: Mick Elliott – delegate in 1980 to the World Peace Council's so-called World Parliament [!] of Peoples for Peace in Bulgaria, which according to Vladimir Bukovsky unanimously voted to endorse the puppet régime in Afghanistan, installed by Soviet tanks the previous December. Which way did Elliott vote? Elliott was also 'Parliamentary Adviser' to Richard Caborn, a pro-Soviet World Peace Council member – and the MP installed by the hard Left after a constituency coup in Sheffield led to the ousting as Labour candidate of the former Secretary of State for Defence Fred Mulley. Of the combined total of 26 CND officers and Council members elected at the 1983 Annual Conference, at least 20 are committed Communists, Labourites or 'Socialists' of one description or another. Of the 20 Council members chosen, a summary can be given as follows: Four open members of the British Communist Party – (i) Professor Vic Allen – Arthur Scargill's eminence grise and a leading member of the British-Soviet Friendship Society. Now serving on the CND's International Committee, which organises delegations to the so-called Soviet Peace Committee and other World Peace Council fronts, (ii) Jon Bloomfield – the CND's other 'Observer' at the Prague Peace Assembly, (iii) Mary Brennan – who calls herself a 'Catholic, Communist, Doctor', (iv) lan Davison – Secretary of Scottish CND and a senior figure in the CND 'establishment’.  Nine known Labourites – (i) & (ii) the Trotskyists Dick Withecombe and Judith Bonner. The latter wrote in her CND election manifesto: "our allies are not NATO generals and the likes of Mountbatten who support the butchering of liberation movements in Central America and Northern Ireland". (iii) & (iv) Two defeated Left-wing Labour MPs, Joan Lestor and Bob Cryer. (v), (vi) & (vii) Labour activists Walter Wolfgang, Penny Auty and the unspeakable Helen John – the last of whom is a close political ally of Ken Livingstone, is a veteran Greenham Common camper, and had her fares paid to the 1983 Prague Peace Assembly by the Women's International Democratic Federation, a notorious Soviet front organisation. (viii) Candy Atherton – a leading light in the 1982 anti-Falklands Task Force agitation within the CND and the Labour Party. Finally, (ix) Jenny Edwards – a full-time employee at CND Head Office until late 1983, when Labour's Camden Council took her on with a five-figure salary at the ratepayers' expense as a full-time 'Peace Officer' for the Borough.  One 'unaffiliated Socialist' – James Hinton – of the far Left persuasion.  Even of the remaining six, (i) & (ii) Annajoy David and Dan Plesch appear to stand well to the Left of Centre; (iii) Paul Johns (of Christian CND) was happy to write an article for the Communist Morning Star newspaper in January 1984, and (iv) Giles Perritt (formerly of Schools Against the Bomb) described himself as a 'Labour supporter' at a conference in the spring of 1983.  Nor should we forget the (non-elected) Vice-Presidents of the CND, 11 in all, including Labour Leftists Lord (Hugh) Jenkins, Ron Todd (Transport & General Workers Union), Frank Allaun (of the pro-Soviet British Peace Assembly, and Labour Action for Peace), and Jo Richardson; ex-Communist Party members E. P. Thompson and Phil Bolsover; and, last but not least, Dr John Cox who was elected to the Executive Committee of the British Communist Party at its 38th Congress in November 1983. This was, of course, the memorable assembly when CND General Secretary Bruce Kent referred to the Communists as "partners in the cause for peace in this world", and praised the nauseatingly pro-Moscow paper, the Morning Star, for its "steady, honest and generous coverage of the whole disarmament case". (A measure of its honesty, and of its conception of 'Peace', can be gauged from its banner headline on the death of Andropov, just three months later. "MAN OF PEACE DIES", it said of the butcher of the Hungarians, the architect of Soviet psychiatric abuse of dissidents, and the ruthless former head of the KGB.)  The notion of 'smearing' is that of making broad, unspecific and untrue allegations. The person-by-person analysis just set out is as specific as can be. Furthermore, it is accurate – Bruce Kent's response to a similar account published in the Daily Telegraph mainly being to assert that the CND Council would also include many more delegates from the regions, and that the "entire Council then forms its Executive". What he failed to predict was that of the 25 places on the CND Executive, more than half were to be filled from the 26 individuals elected by the Annual Conference, who in December 1983 constituted almost a clean sweep for the Left, as we have seen.  In any case several of the other Executive Members turned out to exhibit exactly the same sort of Leftist orientation, including Labourites Jane Mayes and Jane Oberman, and Communists Paul Nicholls and Alan McKinnon. Such are the convolutions of the CND's internal 'democratic' procedures, that the first three of these – all of whom were rejected by the Annual Conference as ordinary Council members – nevertheless have managed to find their way indirectly, not only onto the Council after all, but also onto the national CND Executive as well...  However, let me leave the last word on whether or not it is a 'smear' to denounce the CND as a Left-wing front, to the National Election Agent of the Communist Party of Great Britain, John Peck. According to the January 1984 issue of World Marxist Review, Peck gave the following reassurance to yet another Kremlin-backed 'Peace' symposium in Prague: "some participants in the campaign [for nuclear disarmament] tend to equate the Soviet Union with the United States as being equally responsible for the arms race. But these are in a minority. The national leadership of the CND see the main threat as emanating from the United States." [Lewis's emphasis.]  A smear is not a smear, it seems, when it comes from the mouth of a Communist."]. ...

"An example of a Soviet propaganda campaign was the campaign against the neutron warhead.  It was part of the Soviet general campaign aimed at preventing NATO from modernizing its Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF).  The campaign was led by the World Peace Council who declared the 6th to 13th August 1977 as an international 'week of action'.  It then became a coordinated effort of the whole propaganda apparatus including the use of agitprop.  The sequence of events was:

  • Peace councils in various East European States held protest meetings.
  • In Istanbul, a peace committee demonstrated in front of the U.S. Consulate General.
  • In Accra, a group delivered a protest letter to the U.S. Embassy.
  • In Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, front groups organized demonstrations in front of the U.S. Consulate General.
  • Similar agitation was carried out by front groups in Lima and Tanzania, as well as a Peruvian protest to the United Nations.
  • Other major international fronts such as the 'World Federation of Trade Unions' participated in the international week of action.

"Also there were the series of Communist-planned conferences in Europe.  The target of this effort was the United Nations 'Special Session on Disarmament' (SSOD) to be held in New York from 23rd May to 28th June.  Three conferences were organized to provide psychological momentum to the SSOD.  The World Peace Council, through one of its sub-fronts, the 'International Liaison Forum of Peace Forces', organized a symposium from the 6th to 8th February in Vienna on 'Nuclear Energy and the Arms Race' in collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations body. ... there was the 'International Forum on the Neutron Bomb' held from the 18th to 20th March in Amsterdam. ... All this activity was picked up [naively, not critically] in the Western media.  NATO Secretary-General Luns described this Press comment as all consisting of 'half truths, untruths, and ignorance'.  On 8th April 1978 it was announced that President Carter [as a result of WPC pressure in the media] had decided to delay the production and deployment of the neutron warhead.   The chief of the International Department of the Hungarian Communist Party, Janos Bercz, wrote that the 'political campaign against the neutron bomb was one of the most significant and successful since World War II.'  Another type of propaganda campaign is the type which attempts to discredit an individual [e.g. Franz Josef Strauss, Herman Kahn, Reagan, Thatcher, other opponents of tyranny].  ...

"The campaigns often begin as a result of a clear policy decision taken by the Soviet propaganda apparatus. ... As explained by the defectors such as Levchenko, Bittman and others ... The work of the inner core of agents and front organizations then influences a far larger group of sympathetic left leaning journalists. ... They do not realize that they are an extension to the Soviet propaganda apparatus and would indignantly and sincerely reject any such suggestion.  Then comes the outer layer consisting of those who follow fashion and seek easy praise.  Responsible journalists can also be disinformed by these campaigns.  When a journalist works on an article, he refers to the press cuttings file which covers the subject about which he is writing.  Information ... will be used over and over again.  So, once the press cuttings files have been polluted by propaganda, the false information will be repeated quite innocently and as it is repeated will gather further credibility and momentum. ... Here are some thoughts ... We need ... better journalism.  The better informed the public, the better equipped it is ... The trouble with today's intellectual environment is that few dare discuss the problem.  It attracts accusations of McCarthyism.  It is taboo. ... It is a genuine problem which needs free and open discussion. ... in a free country the best remedy is wide publication of the true facts. ... journalists should investigate and publish.  But they face a problem.  There is a tradition of forbidden areas.  Dog must not eat dog.  Not only is it unpopular to expose a colleague or a journal, bit it is also difficult to find papers who would publish your material.  Investigation should not be concentrated on the unpopular.  It takes no courage to be fashionable, to express conventional wisdom and comfortably to join the pack in attacking the same wounded stag.  Courage resides in saying the truth that does not please and which can make you a pariah in the eyes of your peers.  This precisely is the duty of the press and one of the great justifications for the freedom of the press."

Exactly!  This taboo censorship of truth by the non-free but self-praising taboo-laden media continues today.  The key problem with hegemony is that straw-man "critics" are used to try to defend objectivity.  E.g., if the left make up a lie, the media will claim to be objective by the tactic of quoting a "straw-man" (some prominent right-winger for instance), who doesn't know what he is talking about.  Then they claim to have disproved the best criticisms of the left, while all the time ignoring the objective facts which are promoted by less prominent people who have less media influence.  The example below proves the vital censored facts that need to be addressed.







Above: by evacuating the central areas of cities near the fireball and crater, and sheltering the evacuated people from the heat (which is largely stopped by the city skyline shadowing effect anyway, except for upper floors of very high buildings, facing the fireball), blast and fallout, all casualties could be avoided, in accurately-placed 20 megaton surface bursts on cities.  With the much smaller MIRV warheads (around 200 kt) or terrorist/clandestine threat (around 10 kt) today, the situation is even more positive as based on a re-evaluation of civil defence in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  (Since blast waves travel over large distances averaging only about a quarter of a mile per second, there is plenty of time to "duck and cover" to avoid blast wind displacement and flying debris.)  On 1 September 1939, two days before Britain declared war, it evacuated children from London.

This was partly about sending a deliberate political message or "signal" to the enemy about the seriousness of the ultimatum, and partly as partial insurance against a surprise "knockout blow" air strike.  Herman Kahn made the point in 1976 congressional hearings (included in the appended documents to the report linked here) that evacuation and improvised shelter are more credible than surprise attacks, because we have a protected second-strike retaliation capacity (submarines at sea) which takes away any incentive for a nuclear 9/11 or Pearl Harbor type surprise attack.  Leader-Williams concludes that even in the worst case, the fatalities in 100 megaton nuclear attack on Britain that tried to target the evacuated (dispersed) population could be kept to 2% of the population by a combination of shelters and evacuation from the crater and fireball or severe blast area, leaving 98% of the population alive.


This declassified Secret 1954 British scientific report (linked here), Some Aspects of Shelter and Evacuation Policy To Meet H Bomb Threat, by Edward Leader-Williams of the U.K. Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch, points out how to use a combination of city centre evacuation and blast/fallout sheltering of the evacuated personnel to avoid coercion and potential casualties in a September 1939-type crisis from the threat of five 20 megaton thermonuclear bombs (100 megatons total) on major UK cities.  Other relevant declassified documents are appended.  The copy of this secret turned into PDF format was the one issued to William Strath (Cabinet War Plans Secretariat), who used it in his March 1955 report "Defence Implications of Fall-Out from a Hydrogen Bomb", which William Strath and Sir Normal Brook discussed with Defence Secretary Harold Macmillan (who was later Prime Minister) on 24 March 1955 (the following quotations from the meeting report are from U.K. National Archives file CAB 130/109, "GEN.491/1st Meeting, Defence Implications of Fall-Out from a Hydrogen Bomb, 24 March 1955"):


"The Meeting first examined the report's proposals on evacuation which were based on the promise that a wider distribution of the population would reduce the number of casualties. ... The meeting were informed that, while it was not possible to provide effective shelter within the vicinity of a hydrogen bomb, it would be practicable to provide adequate shelter against fall-out beyond the area of devastation by blast. Scientific thinking was at present moving towards the view that brick-built houses would give better protection against fallout than had previously been thought. A trench with overhead earth cover would make more effective shelter but it would be a damp and uncomfortable place in which to have to stay until the radio-activity had abated. It was hoped that future research would devise a refuge room giving adequate protection which could be constructed in the ordinary house. If this could be done, house-holders could be advised what steps they could themselves take to secure satisfactory protection. [Emphasis added.]"

The secret March 1955 Strath report on the effects of 100 megatons of surface bursts on British cities, far from dismissing cheap and effective civil defence against fallout and condemning Protect and Survive type improvised civil defence for personnel evacuated from the centre of target cities (as most historians have claimed on the basis of brainwashing by Duncan Campbell's heavily-biased and misleading War Plan UK: The Truth About Civil Defence ...), did the very opposite, concluding that fallout from 100 megatons (i.e. 10 x 10 megaton surface bursts) would "immobilise considerable areas of the country and force inhabitants to keep under cover for some days and in certain areas [directly downwind of explosions] for a week or more ... A consistent policy of education is therefore required to acquaint everyone with the effects of the hydrogen bomb, and particularly with the hazard from radioactivity about which people are still largely ignorant." [Source: Lorna Arnold and Mark Smith, Britain, Australia and the Bomb, Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd ed., 2007, page 79].  This is directly contrary to what many British political academics and historians have chosen to "read into" the Strath report, when claiming that Strath dismissed the value of simple of simple countermeasures. The policy of evacuation from cities was openly published in the UK Home Office Civil Defence Instructors' Notes: Welfare Section Part III: Evacuation and Care of the Homeless, H.M.S.O., London, 1960 (revised 1963), which has three parts, dealing with (1) Billeting, (2) Dispersal of the Priority Classes, and (3) Care of the Homeless, and a film shows the rest centres and billeting, sheltering and emergency feeding of the evacuees or homeless which was the British Civil Defence Corps "Welfare Section" role until Labour closed it down in March 1968. The basis for evacuation planning in 1956 extended for fallout "hotspots" where sheltering was inadequate to enable survival, Dr John McAulay's Manual of Civil Defence, Vol. 1, Pamphlet 2, Radioactive fallout - provisional scheme of public control (originally unclassified in 1956, but reprinted in 1957 classified "restricted"). This is totally at odds with most popular historian's biased treatment of the Strath report, due to prejudice stemming from Duncan Campbell's 1982 political propaganda book which ignores the scientific evidence and historical facts entirely (see for instance the sources here and here)

Edward Leader-Williams, an engineer, was Lord Baker's assistant during the invention and testing of the indoor "Morrison shelter" in World War II, which proved vital and highly effective against V1 attacks.

In 1955, Leader-Williams drafted the first U.K. Home Office "Protect and Survive"-type indoor "inner refuge" improvised fallout shielding advice, as documented in detail in Dr Smith's paper, "Architects of Armageddon: the Home Office Scientific Advisers' Branch and civil defence in Britain, 1945-68", British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 43 (2010), pp. 149-80.  (See also discussion linked here.)


Above: Peter Laurie's 1970 book (revised 1979 and 1983) alleged that CND's and Nature journals published emotion-based "defence" of exaggerations of nuclear attacks of nuclear war and dismissals of cheap and effective civil defence actually lay behind the arms race (the stockpiling of weapons at immense expense): because if you refuse to defend yourself against fallout you must instead pile up more and more weapons!  (The man who refuses to wear a flak jacket in case it doesn't work, must instead trust on deterring attacks by carrying more impressive weapons.) Of course, like the fact-intolerant idealists like the 1937 "Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group", what CND claimed it was doing during the cold war was somehow reducing the threat by scare-mongering for pacifism.  However, their scare-mongering exaggerations (claims that London would be totally annihilated by a single gas air raid which would definitely be the opening event of WWII) caused the appeasement policy which gave the Nazis time to rearm faster than Britain, widening the disparity in arms and decreasing the possibility for Britain to win a war with minimal casualties!  It seems to still be taboo to even cite Paul Mercer's debunking of this allegation in his well-researched 1986 book, Peace of the Dead: the Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers (Foreword by Lord Chalfont).  This book documents the funding and control of communist CND committee members by the Moscow Kremlin-controlled "World Peace Council".  One ignorant abusive bigot who refused to read the book even claimed that the title of the book implied a prejudice, when in fact it just summarized the conclusion the author arrived at after years of infiltration of CND's head office!





Above: Hiroshima had few modern Western-standard concrete buildings and they survived with relatively minor damage.  The 50% casualty rate for the unwarned people of Hiroshima in concrete buildings occurred at just 0.12 mile from ground zero, compared to 1.3 miles for school students outside clearing firebreaks, many of whom - in survivor accounts - actually moved out of life-saving shadows and into an unobstructed radial line of sight in order to watch the B-29 aircraft when it dropped the bomb!  The ratio of these median lethal areas is 120, so in concrete buildings the overall casualty rate is 120 times lower than for people standing outside without any shadowing.  The burned out areas were filled with overcrowded wooden frame buildings, containing no fire sprinkler systems (unlike modern city buildings) but containing now-long-obsolete breakfast (8:15 am) charcoal braziers along with bamboo and paper frame furnishings which were blown over by the blast winds and caused the wooden buildings mostly burned down when the firestorm peaked 2-3 hours later (after the evacuation, as proved by survival rate data of 50% for concrete buildings at just 0.12 mile from ground zero).  Survivors in concrete buildings successfully used water buckets to put out burning firebrands blown into windows from the "firestorm" of wooden burning houses outside, which peaked at 2-3 hours after the bomb (source: USSBS report 92, vol 2).  CND-type propaganda falsely uses the 19% humidity (DASA-1251) 1953 Encore Nevada desert test ignition data to claim the firestorm was instantaneous with the thermal flash.  The actual humidity in Hiroshima when the bomb fell was 80%, over four times greater than in the 1953 Nevada test (table VI of William E. Loewe, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report UCRL-90258, 1983).  Modern cities have taller concrete buildings which oscillate more in blast waves, absorbing energy from the blast wave and thereby attenuating it as it diffracts around them, because energy is conserved.


Volume 2, Issue 3 of DTRIAC's (U.S Defense Threat Reduction Information Analysis Centre) journal, The Dispatch, 2013 is now available, and has several highly relevant articles on the effects of nuclear detonations air blast effects in urban areas, a subject whose origins go back to WWII when Dr William Penney determined that the air blast overpressure in Hiroshima and Nagasaki decayed faster with distance than in the unobstructed Maralinga and Nevada deserts during nuclear tests, due to the irreversible loss of blast energy from the Mach front as it causes damage.  The energy taken out of the blast wave by a "reflecting" wall is product of the applied force (net pressure multiplied by area) and the distance the wall moves in the direction of the applied force. If the wall collapses, the energy acquired by the wall fragments (the kinetic energy of the debris) is taken out of the blast wave.  Energy must be conserved!

Energy is removed from the blast wave by the following processes when the blast damages a building:

1. SEISMIC WAVES WITHIN THE BUILDING MATERIAL.  Some of the blast energy is transformed into a seismic wave in the concrete or steel of the building material, similar to a ground shock wave.  This is however only a relatively small use of blast energy (for the reasons that the article above points out).

2. DAMAGE TO BUILDING.  Breaking the thick large glass windows and wall panels of modern city buildings absorbs some blast wave energy (quite apart from the seismic coupling mentioned above).  This energy is used in breaking the chemical bonds in the materials, like the crystalline lattice of the glass.  This energy ends up as a small rise in temperature of the debris.

3. KINETIC ENERGY OF DEBRIS ACCELERATED BY THE BLAST WINDS.  Once windows are broken, the winds behind the blast front accelerate the fragments to some extent.  The peak wind velocity behind a 1 psi peak overpressure blast wave is 40 miles per hour, but the blast wave has passed at supersonic velocity before the debris has been accelerated to 40 mph.  Nevertheless, this can be very important in absorbing the energy of the drag or dynamic pressure of the blast wave.  (Blast walls, for instance, work by deflecting and stopping the blast winds.  If a building wall survives the blast wave, it does the same job of stopping the blast winds/dynamic pressure and has a shielding effect.).

3. ENERGY OF OSCILLATION OF BUILDING AS A WHOLE.  (See graph below from Professor Bridgman's 2001 unfortunately limited distribution book on the physics of nuclear weapons effects.)  Apart from the energy used in sending a seismic wave through the building, and apart from the energy used in breaking doors and windows or panels and apart from the energy used in accelerating the resulting debris fragments, there is another use of energy that absorbs energy from the blast wave: this is the oscillation of the building as a whole.  The whole building oscillates like a massive tuning fork, at its resonate frequency, after being hit by the blast loading.  The amplitude of the blast wave determines the amplitude of the oscillation of the centre of mass of the building.  (If the oscillations lead to forces beyond the strength of the building, as at extremely high peak overpressures, some of the upper floors could be broken off, as occurred during some very powerful nuclear weapon tests on multistory concrete buildings which had been located near ground zero in several multimegaton bursts at Bikini Atoll, Operation Hardtack in 1958.)


Bridgeman (Introduction to the Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects, 2001) considers a building with an exposed area of 163 square metres, a mass of 455 tons and natural frequency of 5 oscillations per second, and finds that a peak overpressure of 10 psi (69 kPa) and peak dynamic pressure of 2.2 psi (15 kPa) at 4.36 km ground range from a 1 Mt air burst detonated at 2.29 km altitude, with overpressure and dynamic pressure positive durations of 2.6 and 3.6 seconds, respectively, produces a peak deflection of 19 cm in the building about 0.6 second after shock arrival. The peak deflection is computed from Bridgman's formula on p. 304: deflection at time t, 

xt = [A/(fM)] {integration symbol} [sin(f t)] (Pt + CDqt) dt metres, 

where A is the cross-sectional face-on area of the building facing to the blast (e.g., 163 square metres), f is the natural frequency of oscillation of the building (e.g., 5 Hz), M is the mass of the building, Pt is the overpressure at time t, CD is the drag coefficient of the building to wind pressure (CD = 1.2 for a rectangular building), and qt is the dynamic pressure at time t. 

This 19 cm computed maximum deflection allows us to estimate how much energy is permanently and irreversibly absorbed from the blast wave by a building and transformed into slow-moving (relative to the shock front) debris which falls to the ground and is quickly stopped after the blast has passed it by: E = Fx, where F is force (i.e., product of total pressure and area) and x is distance moved in direction of force due to the applied force from the blast wave. If the effective loading pressure (overpressure and dynamic pressure combined) on the building for the first 0.5 second is equal to 12 psi (83 kPa) then the mean force on the building during this time is 13 million Newtons, and the energy absorbed by the building from the blast wave (reducing the potential of the blast to cause further destruction at greater radial distances) is simply: 

E = Fx = 13,000,000*0.19 = 2.6 MJ. 

This is interesting because we have already discussed earlier the problem that Penney found a large attenuation in peak overpressures due to the irreversible energy loss via damage done at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although you might expect some overpressure to diffract downwards as the energy is depleted near ground level, the effect of the fall in air density with increasing altitude will tend to prevent this. In any case, only blast overpressure diffracts. Dynamic pressure is a directional (radial) wind effect which does not diffract downwards. Hence, blast energy loss from the wind (dynamic) pressure cannot be compensated for by downward diffraction. This is why shallow open trenches provided perfect protection against wind drag forces at nuclear tests in the 1950s, although the overpressure component of the blast did diffract into them: the wind just blows over the top of the trench without blowing down into it!


Above: Bridgman's 2001 book The Physics of Nuclear Weapons Effects calculated the time-dependent oscillation of the centre of mass of a typical city building, finding oscillations much larger for the moderate damage region (say 10 psi peak overpressure from a 1 megaton surface burst) than the paltry 1 cm quoted wrongly in the paper above (buildings actually move 1 cm from natural earth tremors and normal wind, without damage).  In Bridgman's example above, which ignores damping of the oscillations (damping is not significant for the first full oscillation), the initial displacement is nearly 20 cm, not merely 1 cm.  If a force (i.e. net loading pressure times area), F moves the centre of mass of a building distance x, the energy absorbed by the building is simply E = Fx.  There is nothing complex here.  You don't need to obfuscate the physics by comparing the density of a building to the density of the air.  This kind of silly density comparison is first made by Dr Harold Brode in his 1968 paper "Review of Nuclear Weapons Effects" in Annual Review of Nuclear Science v18, pp153-202, in order to try to justify why about 15% of the energy of a megaton surface burst was coupled into the ground (rather than the air), by pointing out that air is about a thousand times less dense than soil.

The acoustic impedance of air compared to soil is pretty irrelevant because the 15% figure is - as Brode explains later in his paper - nothing to do with air blast but actually due to the half of the dense metal case shock of the weapon (the half moving downward) burying itself in the ground and causing the cratering effects and ground shock.  The ratio of densities of air and building material is irrelevant to the energy coupled into the building. This ratio would only matter if you are calculating the reflection of a sound wave or weak blast wave from a large homogeneous, non-breaking mass of the material.  I.e., it is useful for estimating the energy absorbed (transformed from sound waves into weak seismic waves) by a concrete ground surface when a sound wave hits the ground.  This is not the only use of energy anyway, because as we have explained, the seismic wave coupled into a building from a blast wave reflection is only one mechanism by which the building absorbs blast wave energy.  Apart from a seismic wave being sent through the building, blast energy is also absorbed through the building suffering cracks to glass and panels, the blast wind energy used to accelerate fragments of the resulting debris, and the overall vibration of the whole building which can absorb lots of blast energy!

Glasstone's nuclear effects handbook, The Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, on page 57 has a section written by John von Neumann and Fredrick Reines of Los Alamos (it is attributed to them in a footnote) stating factually:
"... the structures ... have the additional complicating property of not being rigid. This means that they do not merely deflect the shock wave, but they also absorb energy from it at each reflection.

"The removal of energy from the blast in this manner decreases the shock pressure at any given distance from the point of detonation to a value somewhat below that which it would have been in the absence of dissipative objects, such as buildings."
This was removed from future editions. This isn't speculative guesswork: it's down to the conservation of energy.  Penney published the experimental proof from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1970, after being made a Lord and FRS:




* Hiroshima was an air burst not a surface burst.  Therefore, "regular" blast reflection (incident blast coming downwards on a slant path from the burst point, with little shielding, apart from the effects of tall buildings near ground zero, followed by a separate ground-reflected upward slanted blast wave) predominated for near ground zero, and "Mach reflection" (merged incident and ground-reflected blast, in a single horizontally-travelling vertical shock front) predominated at larger distances (overpressures below about 16 psi).  Hence, in the graph plotted above we excluded Penney's two data points closest to ground zero, where regular reflection prevented the exponential attenuation from blast shielding effects from being cleanly observed.  In a ground surface burst in a city, Mach wave reflection occurs at all ranges, so the exponential attenuation law will be valid, and faster blast attenuation will occur for tall modern city concrete buildings than was observed in the predominantly low (1- and 2-story) wood-frame dwellings than covered most of Hiroshima.  The exact range to which "Mach reflection" occurs is dependent on the height of the target above ground zero, because the Mach front (merged incident and reflected blast waves) grows higher with increasing distance from ground zero.  For an air burst, in tall buildings, regular reflection blast (separate incident and reflected blast waves) will hit the upper floors if they are above the height of the Mach stem, while the lower floors in the same building (within the Mach stem height) will only be subjected to a single Mach wave:



Above: for a 1 kt air burst at height H feet, the Mach stem height at ground distance R feet is given by approximately R - H / ( R + 7.4  x 10-5 ) feet ± 20%, for distances R > H.  (Our equation is based on the Mach stem height graphs given in TM 23-200 and DNA-EM-1. This is Nevada desert data for unobstructed terrain.  This equation thus ignores terrain and building effects on the development of the Mach stem.)






Penney had earlier supported some experiments at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment by W. Worsfold, published in the 1957 secret report The Effects of Shielding a Building from Atomic Blast by Another of the Same Size and Shape, AWRE-E4/57 (declassified only in May 1985) and further experiments in the report AWRE-E8/57. Each individual building causes only a trivial net reduction in the peak overpressure (1-5 %), but after some tens or hundreds of houses in any radial line from ground zero have been totalled, the blast wave is seriously depleted in energy. Hence, predictions of blast damage using desert nuclear test data with the cube-root scaling law are massive exaggerations.


ABOVE: Modeling Nuclear Blast in Urban Terrain with NucFast, an article by Charles Needham and Joseph Madrigal, Applied Research Associates, Inc., in the latest DTRIAC Dispatch issue, gives the blast wave conservation laws.  It is totally uncontroversial that blast waves do use up energy when causing damage, and this reduces the pressure in the blast wave to values below the data measured over unobstructed surfaces in desert and ocean nuclear tests.

26 October 2013 update: the "Rankine-Hugoniot ideal condition" equations relating wind speed, dynamic pressure and reflected peak pressure are totally misleading

As for the precursor region, or for dynamic pressure in foxholes or behind obstacles shielded from the radial blast winds and dynamic pressure, there are no reliable "Rankine-Hugoniot" equations for urban conditions, and it is vital to realize that whenever a building reflects a blast wave, the increase in the pressure on the building is not due to magical non-conservation of energy, but is simply a physical result of stopping the blast winds and reversing the direction of the blast wave (so that the front of the wave collides with the rest of the wave as it begins to reverse direction, allowing the pressure to add).

The increase of the free-field overpressure when the blast wave reflects from the front face of a building at normal incidence (head on to the blast) is only possible if the blast is reflected ideally.  If the blast is reflected ideally, the building is totally undamaged!  You can't have your cake and eat it!  If you want to model ideal reflections, there is no damage done by the blast.  If there is damage done, there are no ideal reflections.

If windows cover most of the surface area of the building and they shatter, there is no ideal reflection, energy is absorbed in shattering the window, and the blast winds or dynamic pressure are also depleted in energy by the amount of kinetic energy which the glass fragments pick up from the blast wind pressure subsequent to the shattering.

The acoustic analogy in a city compared to a desert is useful to understanding what happens in the low pressure region where dynamic (wind) pressure is insignificant.  Sound and wind are both attenuated more in a built up modern city than they are over open desert-type (nuclear test) terrain.  Sure, sound waves diffract around buildings, just as they diffract into open foxholes or around blast walls.  But the whole point is quantitative.  The overpressure in the diffracted sound or blast is reduced by obstacles, since they absorb energy, and don't diffract energy ideally or completely.  (This is analogous to scattered radiation: sure, some radiation is scattered in all directions, but it's intensity is lower than the unscattered radiation because some previously downward-travelling direct radiation gets scattered upwards and is thus lost in the scattering process.)

If you stand in a foxhole, behind a blast wall or a strong building which survives the blast, you are sheltered from the blast winds and drag effect or dynamic pressure of the blast wave, although some (reduced) overpressure will diffract in to you.  This is not generally understood, and although Dolan's secret EM-1 contains a useful explanation on blast shielding, Glasstone and Dolan's unclassified Effects of Nuclear Weapons not only omits this blast shielding fact, but also misleadingly conflates ideal condition equations with city conditions, on the absurd basis that a precursor does not form over concrete.


Above: the Teapot-Met Nevada nuclear test in 1955 subjected bulldozers and road graders to 30 psi peak overpressure (photo was taken AFTER the blast!), proving  blast wind shielding by a shallow-open trench.  Similar equipment on open desert without protection was blown along and wrecked. (S. Glasstone, Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 1957.)


Above: shielding of overpressure by blast diffraction, from Dolan's secret DNA-EM-1.  If you are in a trench, foxhole, or behind a blast wall, the overpressure that diffracts in to you is reduced below the free-field value.  This vital civil defense blast shielding evidence is excluded or is obfuscated (made unclear) in Glasstone's unclassified book. Additionally, as DNA-EM-1 illustrates, the blast winds (dynamic pressure) which cause the greatest threat from being blown along and from debris impacts, are excluded by simply being in an open trench or foxhole.  The wind just blows over the top, without entering.  You don't need an air-tight blast door to reduce blast effects.  Any baffle or "blast wall" will reduce both the overpressure and dynamic pressure (drag and debris/missiles) dangers.  People need to know this for self-protection.

At the 1955 Teapot-Met nuclear weapon test in Nevada, road graders and bulldozers were exposed both outdoors and in shallow open trenches at a distance where the free-field peak overpressure was 30 psi.  The results are published in photo form in the 1957 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.  The bulldozers and road graders in shallow open trenches were essentially unharmed because the blast winds blew over the top without entering, but those in the open (in unobstructed desert, with no protection or shielding by city buildings) were rolled along and wrecked by the blast wind drag.  The same 1957 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons contains photos showing blast walls (simply walls that are prism shaped, wider at the base than at the top to reduce the risk of being shattered or overturned by blast, and the consequences if overturning occurs) that protected transformers at an electric substation 0.85 mile from ground zero in Nagasaki after the nuclear air burst there.


Above: 1986 USSR civil defense posters showing how to protect against neutron bomb radiation and blast.  The USSR had the temerity to fund its Moscow "World Peace Council" propaganda front to persuade communists in CND like Phil Bolsover to write nonsense like the CND book Civil defence - The cruellest confidence trick, which was the 1980 version of notorious 1930s anti civil defence scare-mongering propaganda, which massively exaggerated the gas bomb effects to sneer at civil defense, in support of deluded political strategies which the public liked (in the hope of avoiding war) but which weren't realistic.  While doing this, the USSR was investing in realistic civil defense itself, which it had proof tested at its own nuclear weapons tests.


Car crashes due to bright flashes

Culbert B. Laney's article on page 2 of Dispatch very usefully points out that the well-filmed and documented 15 February 2013 meteor strike over Chelyabinsk in Russia was a 470 kt TNT equivalent air burst at 15 miles altitude, 30 times the yield of Hiroshima according to Dr Peter Brown's Meteor Physics Group at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.  It shattered over 100,000 square metres of glass in 3,000 buildings, cutting 1,500 people but killed nobody and apparently blinded nobody, despite facial injuries.  The overpressures were so low that most of the glass injury was from falling glass fragments, not blast wind accelerated fragments.  What is maybe more interesting however is the film from traffic cameras showing no panic of motorists on highways when the flash (visibly much brighter than the ambient sunlight) occurs: nobody panics and swerves, slams on breaks, or accelerates needlessly.  People simply close their eyes for the couple of seconds of very bright, noiseless light.  No car accidents occur, unlike the popular terror-spreading propaganda which claims without evidence that people will panic in any soundless flash (ahead of the blast) and crash cars on highways (note that in a terrorist burst in a city, the shadowing effects of buildings and trees will prevent retinal burns to eyes, although the bright scattered light will still provide a useful duck and cover warning for those people near windows facing the burst who are at risk of glass fragments accelerated after the blast wave arrives subsequent to the noiseless flash):





ABOVE: dirt cheap countermeasures worked against blast.  Earth cover was blown off this Anderson shelter in London during the 1940 Blitz.  This damage to the shelter absorbed blast energy, permitting survival inside, just as car bumpers and "crumple zones" absorb impact energy and thus afford protection.  Tables indoors offered similar protection against house collapse and flying debris.

Above: 20 July 1940 London Board of Education "duck and cover" school drill for air raids. The bigger the bomb, the bigger the average time between the light-velocity flash of the explosion and the arrival of the blast wave.  It is a fact that 76.5% of kids ducking and covering in totally demolished houses survived in 2,340 V1 cruise missile attacks on London within 70 ft of the 1 ton TNT equivalent explosion (type A damage, complete collapse).  This data, given in both the 1957 Capabilities of Atomic Weapons and the 1972 Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, is proved by Dr Derman Christopherson's Confidential report RC-450, Structural Defence.  Bigger yield explosions increase the average arrival time of the blast within the flattened area (for any given pressure, the arrival time increases in proportion to the cube-root of the explosion energy yield, i.e. it takes 10 times longer for 1 psi to arrive in a 1 megaton bomb than in a 1 kiloton bomb), and the thermal and initial nuclear radiation (due to hydrodynamic enhancement of fission product gamma rays, a blast effect on the average air density between bomb and target) are both delivered more slowly as the yield is increased, giving people more time to avoid most of the potential exposure by taking cover.  As the original Secret-classified American Handbook on Capabilities of Atomic Weapons (AD511880L) admitted on page 81: "The large number of casualties in Japan resulted for the most part from the lack of warning."




This blast effects data was however shamefully not used in the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment's 1979 report The Effects of Nuclear War, or any of CND's publications attacking civil defence.  We then gave the evidence that a bias is the cause.  This was nothing new.  Herman Kahn was vilified by James Newman's review of "On Thermonuclear War" in the Scientific American, after debunking early fallout radiation "genetic mutation" fears as bunk compared to normal risks in peacetime (see quote from OTW below) and also debunking strontium-90 food contamination doomsday exaggerations.  He was also vilified by a Kubrick film called Dr Strangelove which parodied Kahn's analysis of the rationale for a nuclear war.

As William A. McWhirter explained in his Herman Kahn article in the 6 December 1968 issue of Life magazine (below), Herman Kahn was not trying to get a first strike or start a nuclear war:

"The Left, Kahn argued, by insisting war was unthinkable and impossible, placed the U.S. in a position where it could be blackmailed by an enemy."



U.S. Army strategic nuclear forces analyst Dr Michael F. Altfeld explained "Why MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) was Insane" in his article of that title published in the U.S. Army Nuclear and Chemical Agency NBC Report (Spring/Summer 2006, pp. 56-61).  First, the John Foster Dulles "massive retaliation speech" of 12 January 1954 was, as Dulles later clarified in Foreign Affairs, only a policy of "massive retaliation" as the most extreme possible option in a strategy of "selective retaliation".  At that time the actual policy was geared towards tactical nuclear weapons of low yield (hence the Nevada "Desert Rock" tests).  In 1962 the 0.02 kiloton Davy Crockett was test fired in Nevada shots Little Feller II and Little Feller I (Little Feller I was fired in front of Robert Kennedy).  The point of nuclear weapons stockpiles, after their strategic use against wooden Japanese cities in August 1945 ,was to save money by replacing the massive conventional armies which led to WWI and WWII, with relatively cheap and more highly deterring nuclear weapons.  American was able to demobilize (Russia did not) after WWII due to its possession of nuclear weapons.  To make bombs credible as a deterrent during the Cold War, accurate delivery systems (computer guided cruise missiles, MIRV warheads, etc.) were developed to hit military targets with pin point accuracy, rather than civilian cities:

Above: U.S. Congressional Hearings on Civil Preparedness and Limited Nuclear War from 1976: "Over the past two years, the United States has been moving from a declared nuclear policy of mutual assured destruction to one of flexible response, or limited nuclear war."  This is validated by declassified documents written by senior nuclear weaponeers.  That was at the deepest point of the arms race during the Cold War, when the USSR was both achieving nuclear parity with the West at excruciating economic cost, and this led to civil defence in both the USA and UK (e.g. Cresson Kearny's 1979 official Nuclear War Survival Skills, based on proof-tested American versions of Russian civil defence sheltershttp://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA328301, and British civil defence, which included some of Kearny's designs but also incorporated improved versions of WWII shelters as proof tested during British nuclear tests; these countermeasures were similar to army field defenses, so their nuclear test validation evidence remained a military secret).




Above: CND/Moscow "World Peace Council" produced propaganda supporting the enemy, which first falsely correlated the energy release with the TNT equivalent, ignoring

(1) the cube-root distance scaling which means that blast casualty areas only scale as the two-thirds power of yield (i.e. the casualties per ton of TNT equivalent aren't proportional to total yield of an explosion, to the two thirds power of yield per unit yield, which using the law of indices results in the casualties per ton being proportional to 1 / [cube root of yield]), and
(2) bigger yields which produce larger areas of destruction increase the mean time between the flash and the blast arrival over the serious blast area, allowing more time for duck and cover against blast wind displacement and flying debris.  The "overkill" concept is also bogus for the strategic and tactical reasons linked here (there is no "theoretical limit" to how many people a single stick or stone could kill, so you could say that any rock could in theory kill everyone in the universe; the practical limitations are simply more obvious with a rock than a nuclear weapon due to widespread ignorance of the true limitations and physics of the latter).

The propaganda also ignored the military threat from the USSR's massive arms spending, presenting the nuclear threat as being our own deterrent, not the enemy.  (As if we are at risk of bombing our own country.)  Paul Mercer worked for CND's head office as a "spy for peace" but after discovering - in CND's confidential files - the evidence that the leaders of CND were communists who were being aided by the USSR "Moscow World Peace Council" (a Kremlin KGB-front) - he exposed the shocking truth in his 1986 book Peace of the Dead: The Truth Behind the Nuclear Disarmers (which we reviewed here), with a foreword written by Lord Chalfont:





Media enemy-supporting propaganda within democracies: simple lies win out over complex truths


“... fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable ... what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges.  Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day.  There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development. I have received letters in America from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, blindness, which is most dangerous in our dynamic era.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address (section discussing the dictatorship by fashion).

USSR dissident Solzhenitsyn, a maths and physics graduate, served as an artillery officer in the Red Army from 1941-5, and was decorated for gallantry, but in February 1945 he was arrested for making a critical reference to Stalin in a letter, receiving as punishment 8 years hard labor, before being exiled in 1953.  He was refused permission to collect his Nobel Prize for literature in 1970, and then was arrested for treason in 1974.  He moved to Vermont, USA, in 1975.  USSR dissidents were the major problem for the USSR "appeasers" in the Western media, scientific, and political unions during the Cold War, so the British Prime Minister met him on 11 May 1983 (UK National Archives document PREM 19/1103), expressing interest in his statement that "the West believed it had a free press but that in fact it had a censorship of fashion."

Solzhenitsyn explained that Lenin in 1919 created Comintern to destroy Western capitalism: "The worst thing about the Politburo was [that] … Marxism ... obliged them to act in certain ways. ... He did not believe that there would be a nuclear war.  For a nuclear threat was sufficient to paralyse an adversary."


“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”  ― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

“Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.”  ― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays




Solzhenitsyn was not the only man of peace to defect from the USSR.  Colonel Oleg Penkovsky was executed by Khruschev's thugs by firing squad on 16 May 1963 (photo below from Sbornik, the KGB magazine) after he leaked photographs of top secret classified nuclear war planning employment documents from the USSR "Military Thought" journal to the West (example linked here):


Always look for people's reactions to alternative solutions to problems.  If they dismiss alternative ideas without objectively evaluating them, their own "argument" is likely based on the threatening and false dictatorship premise: "you must do as I say, because there are no alternatives to doing so!"  This dictatorial out of hand dismissal of alternative ideas, combined with fear-mongering terrorism designed to "close down arguments" before they have occurred, is designed to prevent and deter effective, objective thinking.  The "pacifists" who use lying exaggerations and claims that "there are no alternatives to disarmament/surrender" (dismissing civil defense countermeasures, deterrence, and all out possible solutions) are using unjustified and unjustifiable deceptions.  This occurred with poison gas back in the 20s and 30s (illustrations below are adapted from "Debunking Poison Gas War Scares" in the July 1935 issue of Modern Mechanix and "Gas Masks for All" in the Modern Mechanix, March 1937 issue):




Popular media deceptions about gas annihilation and the "impossibility" of any simple deterrent like a gas mask or a room with windows closed (despite evidence to the contrary, as illustrated above) during the 1920s and 1930s fostered the appeasement culture which actually encouraged thugs and dictators to abuse Western disarmament and pacifist "no first strike" propaganda.  Timidity merely encourages thugs to succeed by the use of fear-based coercion or violence.


Above: 10 Megaton Mike (1952) and 15 megaton Bravo (1954) recur in CND-type propaganda, yet were dismissed by Professor Freeman Dyson in his 1984 book Weapons and Hope, where he points out that the 10-15 megaton bombs were absurdly large and obsolete by the time of his visit to Los Alamos in 1956, where people were working on much smaller, lighter devices to fit into the cramped warheads of missiles with precision, computer guided delivery.  The shot below is 11 megaton Romeo:




It's not easy to dig up the truth.  It is easy to believe in plausible lies and brush off "alternatives" to those lies.  Furthermore, as Janis explains in Victims of Groupthink, anyone can easily and cheaply earn kudos by dismissing the truth as false, using ad hominem attacks on people while ignoring the substance of their factual argument (or picking out "strawman" trivia from the edges of an argument, and making a show out of charging it).


Above: this kind of simplistic "hierarchy of disagreement" rhetorical tool fails to address religious-like belief systems which are deliberately constructed with a network of multiple hubs, thus lacking any "central point" of specific foundation.  You can't destroy the heart of a dispersed network that lacks a heart.  Is the "central point" or heart of exaggerations like gross nuclear weapons effects lies the strontium-90 radiation, the blast, heat, firestorms, ozone layer damage, EMP, the fireball, or nuclear winter?  If you painstakingly debunk all the exaggerations, the audience is too bored to listen, or forgets the earlier arguments that have been debunked and repeats the debunked arguments.  This difficulty is like the debunking of communism by American counter-propaganda in the Vietnam war (or the debunking of Al Queda beliefs):

“The Americans came to our country and brought death and destruction to our people. They are aggressors and we Vietnamese are fighting the aggressors. We shall fight till final victory. ... Vietnam is a peace-loving country. We did not invade or bomb any country. It is the American presence in Vietnam that started the war and made the war continue so long. ... North Vietnam and South Vietnam are but one country. North Vietnam certainly has the right to help his brothers in the South and fight the aggressors. ... Vietnam belongs to the Vietnamese. The United States has nothing to do with our country.”

- Vietcong cadre quoted by Konrad Kellen, Conversations with Enemy Soldiers in Late 1968/Early 1969: A Study of Motivation and Morale, RAND Corporation, RM-6131-1-ISA/ ARPA (AD0714834), September 1970, page 92 (originally secret).

This Vietcong attitude was shared with many communist and Marxist socialist fellow-travellers, communist party members, politicians, and media personalities, and similar arguments today appear in the Western media with regards to Afghanistan.  Kellen's Vietnam RAND Corporation report (DTIC document AD0714834) summarizes this situation on page x:

“Only by immersing himself in these responses can the reader obtain a genuine feeling of how high morale or how strong motivation is on the other side. ... The enemy's picture of the world, his country, his mission, and our role in his country is remarkable by its simplicity, clarity, and internal consistency. ... Finally, the responses are impressive by their straightforwardness. Unlike interviews with prisoners or defectors of World War II, the Korean War, or refugees from behind the Iron Curtain, these interviews reveal few attempts of the Vietnamese prisoners to ingratiate themselves with the interviewer, nor do these prisoners appear sullen. Prisoners report and explain, one is tempted to say, patiently, to the interviewer what they have experienced and what they believe and think.  Analysis of the present material indicates that neither our military actions nor our political or psywar efforts seem to have made an appreciable dent on the enemy’s overall motivation and morale structure. The findings also disclose, as in the aforementioned 1967 study of the enemy, that both morale and motivation in fighter and cadre ranks are unlikely to collapse under similar circumstances in the near future.”

This high-enemy-morale problem was not new to America, of course, and in August 1945 the Japanese kamakaze mentality was dealt with by the Democrat, President Harry S. Truman, using two nuclear weapons.  The simplistic attitude of the Vietcong and Afghan insurgent is very similar to the hardened mindset of many people in the West today with regard to the supposed immorality or immense risks of low level radiation, civil defence against disasters, and nuclear weapons for cost effective and militarily effective counterforce deterrence (deterrence against military targets, not cities).  Always, plausible-sounding authoritative-appearing consensus lies triumph in politics, the media and science, over scientific objectivity based on hard facts because it tells people what they want to hear, which is not the truth!  The truth always takes too long to explain, fails to provide funding eternal funding to researchers, or sounds "boring" or "old fashioned."

“Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.” ("The people wish to be deceived, so let them be deceived.") Most prefer utopian hopeful fantasies to tough reality. They are ideologues who want to believe in contrived propaganda that reinforces their ideals:

“I use the term “groupthink” ... when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. ... the group's discussions are limited ... without a survey of the full range of alternatives.”

- Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1972, pp. 9-10

“The path of truth is paved with critical doubt, and lighted by the spirit of objective enquiry... Always the tendency continues to be shocked by natural comment, and to hold certain things too ‘sacred’ to think about. I can conceive no finer ideal of a man’s life than to face life with clear eyes instead of stumbling through it like a blind man, an imbecile, or a drunkard – which, in a thinking sense, is the common preference. How rarely does one meet anyone whose first reaction to anything is to ask: ‘is it true?’ Yet, unless that is a man’s natural reaction, it shows that truth is not uppermost in his mind, and unless it is, true progress is unlikely.”

- Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, "Why Don’t We Learn from History?", PEN Books, 1944; revised edition, Allen and Unwin, 1972.

Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1972, pp. 61, 197-8, and 206:

“The objective assessment of relevant information and the rethinking necessary for developing more differentiated concepts can emerge only out of the crucible of heated debate, which is anathema to the members of a concurrence-seeking group. [Factual arguments are being simply censored out as being shocking, distasteful, rude, aggressive, or provocative; see for instance James Newman’s Scientific American “review” of Herman Kahn’s book On Thermonuclear War in 1961!] … symptoms run through the case studies of historic fiascoes ... an unquestioned belief in the group's inherent morality ... dissent is contrary to what is expected of all loyal members ... self-censorship of ... doubts and counterarguments ... a shared illusion of unanimity ... (partly resulting from self-censorship of deviations, augmented by the false assumption that silence means consent)... the emergence of ... members who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions. [This is crucially important; in all cults there are kudos to be “earned” by lower-rank members who launch kamakaze-type emotional, subjective, screaming abuse on objective critics, or who repeatedly chant messages in the manner of George Orwell’s sheep in Animal Farm.  These people act as official or unofficial gate-keepers of the cult, allowing the “leadership” to appear clean and quiet, if need be, not engaging with people smeared falsely as “warmongers” or “quacks” by the self-appointed gate-keepers formed of the lower ranks.  By analogy, Hitler’s SS and Khrushchev’s KGB quietly dealt with critics using gas or the gulag, leaving the leadership looking pristine and pure, to shake hands with men like Prime Minister Chamberlain.]
“... other members are not exposed to information that might challenge their self-confidence.  [Censorship of truth is the foundation of dogmatic lying cults; any disclosure of the facts is a kick in the head for the liars, so they are protected legally in dictatorships where pseudo-laws are passed to send critics to Siberian salt mines, or to concentration camps.  These “laws” and pseudo-lawyers can then scream that the critics are acting “illegally” and must be punished, the way that “pacifists” screamed “thou shalt now kill” whenever anyone suggested saving many lives by effectively dealing with Hitler, or Bin Laden.]”

There is also the problem of attrition through survival, where self-righteous enemy morale ensures that even when they are "clearly defeated" as in the case of Japan by August 1945, they adopt a "survivalist" strategy, waiting for the enemy to bankrupt itself, to become weary of the human costs of war, or to doubt victory:

“Most [Vietcong] interviewees believed the war would last a long time and would end not in a VC [Vietcong] military victory, but in a gradual exhaustion of the enemy [America].”


- John C. Donnell, Guy J. Pauker and Joseph J. Zasloff, Viet Cong Motivation and Morale in 1964: A Preliminary Report, RAND Corp RM-4507/3-ISA (DTIC doeument AD0738742), March 1965, page xiii.  (Originally secret.)

What's important here is that the hard pacifist left frequently put out propaganda claiming that in August 1945, America had won against Japan without needing to drop nuclear weapons; yet it takes the opposite attitude to the situation in Vietnam twenty years later where it stresses that despite terrific bombing (730 pounds of TNT per person in Vietnam, and 3,000 pounds per person in prime target areas), America was not "winning".  The reason is psychological:

“The interviews indicated that U.S. efforts to explain the air raids on North Vietnam had failed to eradicate the impression among the people of the North that the raids were unprovoked acts of U.S. aggression.”

- L. Goure, A. J. Russo, and D. Scott, Some Findings of the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study: June-December 1965, RAND Corp RM-4911-2-ISA/ARPA (ADA032192), February 1966, page ix (originally secret).






ABOVE: Dr Frank H. Shelton, author of Reflections of a Nuclear Weaponeer (1989, illustrated above), was the 1950s Technical Director of the AFSWP (Armed Forces Special Weapons Project) and organized the fallout research project at Operation Redwing which compared directly the fallout from clean and dirty nuclear weapons (see illustration above, taken from US nuclear test report WT-1316, of the ship measured land-equivalent 48 hour fallout doses from the 15% fission "clean" Zuni test compared to the 87% fission "dirty" Tewa test at Bikini Atoll).  Shelton states on page 7-41 of Reflections of a Nuclear Weaponeer: "TEWA was a companion event to ZUNI for documentation of fallout from large yield thermonuclear weapons.  In early Operation REDWING planning, the location of the TEWA event had been moved from deep lagoon waters to as near the coral reef as possible. ... Total weight of the barge was 440,000 pounds, including 410,000 pounds of steel, all of which contributed to the fallout ... it was observed that the downwind 'hot spot' for TEWA (1000 R/hr) was much higher than on ZUNI (150 R/hr). The difference was primarily due to the higher percentage of fission yield for TEWA compared to ZUNI."

In other words, with a 15% fission nuclear weapon, fallout from 3.5 megatons was survivable even outdoors without any protection from buildings whatsoever (for 3.5 megatons, the areas covered by imaginary "1 hour reference time" dose rates in R/hr are similar to the actual outdoor accumulated dose for the first 48 hours, at which time the dose rate is only 1% of the 1 hour level).  So much for the unsurvivable clean bomb fallout  myth.




ABOVE: the precursor (due to thermal-flash "popcorned" desert sand grains which loaded hot, dense dust into the blast wave near the ground) produced spectacular blast effects on Land Rover cars (British jeeps) at 600 yards from ground zero in the 12.9 kt Buffalo-1 nuclear test at Maralinga in 1956.  But, fortunately for civil defense, and unfortunately for the nuclear exaggerations propaganda that tries to compare unobstructed desert blast effects with actual nuclear attack blast effects in cities, a precursor doesn't form over concrete.  Thermal shadowing by buildings is accompanied by radiation and blast energy absorption by buildings, reducing the range of effects dramatically.  Desert nuclear tests were unobstructed and exaggerated the effects of nuclear weapons from the perspective of modern concrete based cities.  (Image source: UK National Archives document reference WO 320/2: Operation Buffalo, effects of blast on Land Rover test vehicle, 1956.  "Copyright clearance for publication is not required," because taxpayers paid for nuclear research. See also images here, here, herehere, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  Declassified British nuclear test civil defence research reports are in UK National Archives DEFE 16, here.)

Above: X-ray film reveals that most fallout particles were retained at the stem base of grass, in civil defence research at the 1956 Maralinga tower burst Buffalo-1, as reported by John Freeman Loutit and Robert Scott Russell, Operation Buffalo, Part 5, The entry of fission products into food chains, AWRE-T57/58, May 1959. Table 27 in this report shows that the water solubility of Buffalo-1 fallout was 80% for strontium nuclides (-89, -90, etc.) and iodine nuclides (-131, -132, -133, -135), 40% for Ba/La-140, 35% for Te-132 and Mo-99, 5% for Zr/Nb-95, and only 3% for Ru/Rh-103. Thus “solubility” depends entirely upon the nuclide involved. It is misleading to quote a percentage solubility figure without saying which nuclide is referred to.

The percentage solubility in water of the "overall" beta or gamma activity will obviously vary with time after burst, due to the changing composition of the fission product activity, because short half life nuclides (like iodine-131) which predominate in fallout soon after the explosion, will not be present a few months later.

Maralinga has silicate topsoil which produced glass-type (Nevada like) fallout particles for the Buffalo-1 tower burst, but the calcium carbonate substrata produced flaky Bikini-type calcium oxide fallout for the Buffalo-2 surface burst (photos below).

ABOVE: fallout on grass from the Buffalo-2 nuclear surface burst at Maralinga after 2 cm of unexpected rainfall, from John Freeman Loutit and Robert Scott Russell, Operation Buffalo, Part 5, The entry of fission products into food chains, AWRE-T57/58, May 1959.  A total of 15% of the Buffalo-2 fallout was retained by pasture grass, mainly in the stem base, and the rain has smeared the leaves with a coating of calcium oxide fallout.

Table 15 shows that threshing wheat after Buffalo-2 left 90% of the fallout on the chaff and only 10% on grain, and the authors spell out these implications plainly: “At a dose rate of 50 R/hr at 1 hour, 80 kg of flour would contain only 0.06 microcurie of Strontium-90. ... The hazards arising from the consumption of contaminated flour appear therefore to be smaller by a factor of more than a thousand than those arising from milk.”

Therefore, limiting fallout contaminated milk consumption for a month after a nuclear explosion is an adequate countermeasure for ingested fallout, while the iodine-131 decays.  Contaminated milk need not be wasted: it can be frozen, powdered, or processed into cheese or ice-cream that can be stored for a month while iodine-131 decays with its 8 days half-life, during storage.  Alternatively, cattle can be kept in barns on winter fodder while the iodine-131 decays on fields outdoors.  Temperature has no effect on radioactive decay, so it is safe to freeze radioactive fallout contaminated food while it undergoes rapid radioactive decay!  (A more "hairy chested" option where the projected iodine-131 thyroid dose is above 25 R or 25 cSv, which is preferred by some in the nuclear industry, is obviously to simply administer 130 milligram potassium iodate tablets daily, and keep consuming the contaminated milk and water as normal; the thyroid is flooded with stable iodine which effectively blocks uptake of radioactive iodine isotopes.)  Fallout uptake by the roots is relatively small and was well investigated in American nuclear tests.

Above: John Freeman Loutit and Robert Scott Russell determined the ratio of I-132 and I-133 activities to I-131 in milk for unfractionated cloud samples from the Buffalo-3 nuclear bomb test (AWRE T-57/58, 1959).  Within the first few days, most of the total iodine radioactivity is from I-132.  For fractionated fallout close-in to a surface burst, I-132 is even more important because it is less depleted from the local fallout than is I-131 (click here to see the depletion factors for all the major isotopes of biological uptake importance).  The thyroid doses for the Rongelap inhabitants (exposed to ingested fallout-contaminated water from an open rainwater-collecting cistern for the first two days after the 1 March 1954 15 megaton Bravo test, 115 miles downwind) were initially underestimated by calculations based solely on I-131.  Then in a paper published in April 1958 and reprinted in the June 1959 congressional hearings on the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, Dr Gordon Dunning showed how the other iodine isotopes contribute to the early-time thyroid dose.  Utilizing the experience of measuring iodine isotopes in UK milk during heavy nuclear testing by the USSR in 1961-62, the co-author of the Buffalo nuclear test fallout study, Robert Scott Russell of the Agricultural Research Council, Radiobiological Laboratory, England, wrote an interesting paper called "The Extent and Consequences of the Uptake by Plants of Radioactive Nuclides" which was published in the Annual Review of Plant Physiology, vol. 14 (June 1963), pages 271-294:

“Iodine-131 is ... of concern primarily as a source of exposure of infants who consume appreciable quantities of fresh milk, partly because of the very small size of their thyroid glands in which it is concentrated, and partly because milk is usually the most highly contaminated food.  Doses to infants from iodine-131 have on occasions been considerably higher than those from any other component of fallout; for example, towards the end of 1961 it was estimated from the analysis of milk that the thyroid glands of infants fed on fresh milk in the United Kingdom would have received about 170 mrems. ... Caesium-137 which was deposited on foliage of plants appears to be retained relatively similarly to strontium 90, and like strontium it is readily removed from foliage by rain [L. J. Middleton, Intern. J. Radiation Biol., 1, 387-402, 1959].  The concentration of caesium-137 within different tissues which results from direct contamination, however, can contrast very markedly with that caused by strontium-90.  This is due to the mobility of caesium-137 within tissues; thus nearly 30% of the caesium-137 which has been deposited on the foliage of potatoes may reach the tubers, as compared with less than 1% of strontium-89 [L. J. Middleton and H. M. Squire, Agv. Res. Council Radio biological Lab., Report ARCRL 8, pp. 60-61, H. M., Stationery Office, London, 1962]. ... Zinc-65, together with the induced activities, cobalt-59 and -60 and iron-55, has also been found to be the main source of radioactivity in fish and sea water soon after nuclear explosions [A. D. Welander, U. S. Atomic Energy Commission Report UWFL-55, 1958]. The low concentration of the carrier isotopes in water can cause these nuclides to be absorbed and concentrated to a spectacular extent in plants and animals.  Plutonium.  Because of its very long half life and high toxicity to animals consideration has been given to the entry into plants of the fissile element plutonium. A very slow rate of absorption is to be expected because it forms high valency (usually 4 or 6) ions; this has been confirmed in several studies and, over 1.5 years, grass grown in pot culture may absorb less than 0.0001% of that added to the soil [L. Jacobson and R. Overstreet, Soil Sci., 65, 129-34, 1948; and P. Newbould and E. R. Mercer, Agr. Res. Council Radiobiological Lab., Report ARCRL 8, 81-82, H. M. Stationery Office, London, 1962].”

The two Operation Buffalo fallout effects report authors, John Freeman Loutit and Robert Scott Russellboth went on to debunk the longer term effects of fallout hype; see proof here and here

The authors of AWRE-T57/58 (which was the basis for the agricultural fallout sections in the UK 1959 and 1974 Nuclear Weapons civil defence book published by HMSO):
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/513207/Robert-Scott-Russell
Robert Scott Russell
British botanist and mountaineer, became in 1957 the first director of the Agricultural Research Council Radiobiological Laboratory, a facility in the U.K. established to monitor and predict the consequences of nuclear fallout on food crops and human nutrition. He studied at Imperial College in England and in 1938 joined the college’s expedition to the Arctic island of Jan Mayen. There, along with research on the effects of the Arctic climate on plant metabolism, he reached the summit of the previously unclimbed northeast peak of the extinct volcano Beerenberg, thereby renewing the enthusiasm for climbing that he had developed during his boyhood in New Zealand (b. Feb. 14, 1913, Penge, Eng.—d. July 29, 1999, Wantage, Eng.)
John Freeman Loutit CBE FRS[1] FRCP Also known as 'Ian'. (19 February 1910 - 11 June 1992) was an Australian haematologist and radiobiologist. ... He contributed significantly to the development of improved techniques for the storage and transfusion of blood during the Second World War. After the war he became a leading researcher in the then novel field of radiobiology. He established and ran the Medical Research Council's Radiobiology Unit at Harwell from 1947 to 1969. He gave the 1969 Bradshaw Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians on the subject of malignancies caused by radium. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1963.[1] His candidature citation read:

"Distinguished for his experimental studies of tissue transplantation after lethal doses of ionising radiation. Skilful experiments led Loutit to form the opinion that, contrary to the prevailing view, the survival of irradiated mice after the implantation of haematropoietic tissue was due to colonization by living cells. The truth of this interpretation has been rapidly confirmed. Loutit was the first to recognize 'secondary disease' in irradiated mice restored by the transplantation of foreign cells, and his interpretation of the disease as the consequence of a reaction of the grafted cells against their recipient is now accepted. Loutit has further shown that a substantial proportion of mice with leukaemia can be cured by whole body irradiation followed by the grafting of bone marrow cells. Earlier, he separated the mechanisms of origin of congenital haemolytics and acquired icterus and developed a practical method of increasing the storage time of blood for transfusion. Loutit's work is fundamental to an understanding of the mechanism and repair of radiation injury and has important bearings on immunology and the study of leukaemias."[2]


As at Bikini Atoll (scene for 42 megatons of fission yield in 23 nuclear tests), cesium-137 is only important in food chains in soil deficient in potassium, and cesium-137 uptake by crops at Bikini was diluted by adding potassium chloride fertilizer to soil (potassium is chemically similar to cesium, and thus works by the same dilution mechanism as iodine tablets for thyroid protection).  (Strontium-90 uptake isn't a problem, as illustrated in the previous post.)   Note also that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found that the "effective half-life of cesium-137 on Bikini, Eniwetak, and Rongelap Atolls is around 8 to 9.8 years", not the laboratory radioactive half life figure of 30 years!  This is because cesium compounds are relatively water-soluble and cesium-137 (as with iodine-131 and strontium-90) is fractionated in fallout (coated on the outer surface of fallout dust, not fused inside the particles) so it dissolves in rain and is soon weathered out of the local environment, ending up in the ocean (where it's totally insignificant compared to the immense natural radioactivity of sea water from potassium-40). Similarly, if you eat cesium-137, it doesn't build up in your body with a 30 year half life, but is flushed out with water with an effective half life of only about 3 months!

"Large-scale field experiments on Bikini Island have been used to optimize the required amount and application rates of potassium (Figure 3). The results from these experiments show that a single application of 2000 kg per ha of potassium can be effective in reducing the cesium-137 uptake in coconut meat (and juice) to about 5% to 10% of the pretreatment level. Multiple applications (over several months) of the same total amount of potassium produce even better and more consistent results. Moreover, the concentration of cesium-137 in the coconuts following remediation remains low for an extended period of time, so the need for continuous effort and retention of scientific and technical expertise is minimized (Robison et al., 2004)." - https://marshallislands.llnl.gov/bikini.php#remed


ABOVE: the May 1980 British Government "Protect and Survive" and "Domestic Nuclear Shelters"civil defence handbooks, issued after the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and exceeded the USA in the nuclear arms race, was based on: (1) British government research on civil defence effectiveness at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions (linked here), (see also the list of reports linked here), (2) Australian-British Government research on civil defence at Operations Hurricane, Totem, Buffalo and Antler in nuclear tests in Australia from 1952-56 (see also here), (3) Blitz bombing shelter experience in London during WWII, and (4) radiation shielding experiments on improvised fallout shelters .  All of this is totally ignored by biased "historians" and politicians who falsely assert - contrary to hard evidence - that nothing can absorb thermal and nuclear radiation, extinguish fires in the Hiroshima firestorm with water buckets, or deflect blast winds from a nuclear explosion.





ABOVE: Secrecy on civil defense against nuclear weapons effects has always been a head-in-the-sand fallacy because potential enemies are well aware of the effects.  For example, Russia tested nuclear weapons from August 1949 on, and had its own data on the effectiveness of civil defense countermeasures.  After three high altitude 300 kt nuclear explosions in 1962 for Russia's Operation K system proof test for the original Moscow ABM system, Russia gained extensive experience of EMP effects, so American secrecy was of no use in preventing Russian knowledge of EMP.  It merely hinders free world (not communist world) civil defense.  There is no security in making civil defense effectiveness data unavailable to those who need it.









Above: Five flashes of lightning around the 1952 Mike nuclear test fireball; air ionization due to the initial nuclear radiation shorted out the natural potential of the atmosphere causing the discharges (as predicted by Enrico Fermi prior to the 1945 Trinity test).  Contrary to the Glasstone and Dolan textbook, however, modern city skylines provide a typical 100 fold reduction in the transmission of initial radiation.  On top of that concrete terrain shielding factor, there is additional shielding from the building a person is located within.  Below: Trinity test photos (16 July 1945, 19 kt on top a 100 ft tower at Alamogordo, New Mexico):



"The entire Free World, despite its intellectual sophistication, is being held hostage by fear.  This fear of the unknown has proliferated for the past 80 years through propaganda, unsound pronouncements of world leaders, and misleading labels compounded by a public press that has neglected its own mandate to seek out and tell the truth."

- James W. Hammond, Poison gas: the myths versus reality, Preface (Greenwood Press, 1999).




Conflict resolution or conflict perpetration? The threat to civil defense from the intolerant idealists who caused WWII and prevented proper civil defence in the 1930s (28 October 2013 update)

"It is easy to forget how simple and superficially alluring wallowing in the feeling of injustice or retribution for past hurt can be. The alternative requires the development of a wholly new narrative, the admission that the other side might have a point. So leaders have to speak of the possibility of reconciliation with those for whom history has been about the utter unacceptability of reconciliation. This is real political leadership, and it takes real character to do it."

- Tony Blair, Guardian 24 October 2013, Foreword to The Irish Diaries (1994-2003) by Alastair Campbell, published next week by The Lilliput Press.






"On May 14, 1938, in Berlin's Olympic Stadium, the English football team were blackguarded by the Foreign Office and the Football Association into giving the "Heil Hitler" Nazi salute ... But that picture of impressionable footballers obeying orders from mutton-headed apparatchiks went round the world and became a lasting source of shame to this country. This was, after all, just weeks after Hitler had annexed Austria and came at a time when plans for the Final Solution were well advanced. ... Was Hitler made more reasonable by that salute, or by the willingness of the world to offer him a massive propaganda boost two years earlier at the Berlin Olympics by turning up without a squeak of protest? Of course not, which leads to some interesting parallels with today. ... This idea that to criticise totalitarianism is a breach of the Olympic spirit is as wretched a perversion of logic as even the Nazis ever attempted. ... China is a menace to the civilised world for many other reasons, ranging from its support for renegade regimes such as the government of Sudan, who used Chinese weaponry to commit the Darfur massacres, to its shameless emergence as the number one polluter. ... Over the next 20 years, they will create as much pollution as the rest of the world has since the birth of the industrial revolution.  This is a shocking statistic worthy of condemnation anywhere and everywhere. If British athletes feel strongly about that, why shouldn't they speak out?" - David Mellor.


ABOVE: former Cabinet Minister David Mellor writes that the "Shameful picture of England squad giving Nazi salute ... 70 years later, why do we still suck up to dictators?"  Answers abound: Pacifism.  Appeasement.  Anything is better than everyone on earth being gassed.  In the 1930s, the popular journalism claim - as Professor Kendall points out on page 110 of Breathe Freely - was that 1 ton of mustard gas "is sufficient to kill 45,000,000 people", despite the fact that during World War I given cheap relatively primitive and easy WWI anti-gas countermeasures, it actually took 8 tons of mustard gas to kill 1 person, as Kendall points out on page 45, which is 1/8 of a death per ton, compared to the theoretical "ideologue" estimate of 45,000,000 deaths per ton.  In other words, the war effects exaggerations in the 1930s exaggerated the effects of gas by a factor (45,000,000)/(1/8) = 360,000,000.  This lying is why pacifism turned evil: ideologues lie because they are wrong and know they are wrong so they are "forced" to lie in order to sell their dysfunctional propaganda to the media.  They home in on anything joe public can't understand clearly just as in olden times evil dictators used witchcraft superstitions as a scapegoat for all ills.  Any smokescreen to deflect attention from reality!

A couple of additional points.  First, Chinese pollution effects are exaggerated by Mellor's political ideologues, because all 21 IPCC 2007 models of climate change ignored negative feedback from water cloud cover which is a natural thermostat, preventing a runaway greenhouse effect (which would definitely have happened long since due to water if water had a purely positive feedback, which the IPCC wrongly assumes).  The continued ocean heating effects (like ice melting) while the lower troposphere failed to continue to warm since 1998 is purely down to the massive heat capacity of the ocean and the slow mixing of the warmed upper ocean (above the thermocline) to greater depths.  It takes decades for the air to heat up the entire ocean slightly, its a slow process.  This slow transfer rate of temperature rises established in the air prior to 1998 is not a continued atmospheric heating effect.  It's merely a slow response of the ocean, a time lag effect due to the slow transfer of heat through the depths of the ocean (warm water floats on cool water, which inhibits heat transfer).  Second, the Chinese communists are largely funding the West through the debt situation.

America has over $12 trillion national debt, Britain over £1 trillion.  As in Germany during the 1930s, state spending on national socialism and other things (wars for example) is being funded not by taxation, but by national debt.  The governments have to be elected, and to do that they must keep taxes low.  They must also be popular by spending lots of money on social things like health industries (which nobody objects to), and this huge state socialist spending can't be funded by low taxes, so it must come from the national credit card - debt.  The Chinese, bless them, have a different system to old USSR and actually manage to combine communism with capitalism in such a way they can save up loads of money and lend it out (directly or indirectly by investment schemes) to cash-strapped Western countries.  The result?  We owe a lot of money to communists (either directly or indirectly).  Obviously at some point common sense dictates that the interest repayments will result in pressure for reform, particularly if there is another big slump for the West like the 1929 Wall Street crash.

Civil defence comes into this directly, because in 1929 anyone who announced that bankrupt cash-strapped, disarmed, democratic Germany would have turned into a threat to world peace would be laughed out of town.  But contrary to today's popular historians, it wasn't just popular eugenics pseudoscience that lay behind WWII.  It was debt.  Hitler borrowed his way into war.  Massive national socialist state spending to build the autobahn, the V1 cruise missile, the V2 IRBM, full employment, etc., had to be funded from somewhere.  Where did Hitler get all the cash to reverse Germany's fortunes in a few years after the Wall Street crash of 1929 without a return to 1923-type German hyperinflation?  The Nazis were bankrolled by debt.  This was ignored by pacifists and the popular media at the time.  This goes some way to explaining why Hitler and his gang were so keen to use their massive army to keep invading.  They had to keep expanding their borders to build up financial security.  Their "peace" promises were dud because they would have gone bankrupt - returning to the ruinous 1923 days of hyperinflation - if they didn't keep seizing new territory.  This was the hidden debt picture.  Like the USSR in the 1980s, Nazism wasn't financially viable and would have gone bust in a real arms race (which simply didn't happen in the 1930s despite Chamberlain's contrived lies to the contrary later).  This is why financially stable democracies are needed to prevent war, not appeasement or weapons effects exaggerations or lying "peace treaties" which were not worth the paper they were written on.  Weart's 1998 book Never at War shows that to have world peace, we need financially stable democracies not lying peace treaties, not lying disarmament brainwashing, not exaggerated weapons effects delusions, not a ban on civil defence or survival in disasters.  (See page 33 of my review of Watermelons, linked here.)  These rude, ignorant, "angry" abusive and insulting ideologue morons's lies have cost millions of human lives.  It's time that CND liars were confronted with the undeniable truth.



Above: listening, compromising and expressing empathy is all well and good for the trivial conflict resolution of storms in teacups (Everybody Loves Raymond comedy episode Father Knows Least, starting clip at 1103 seconds), showing a Blair-like peacemaker faced with an easy and a difficult conflict, leading inevitably to predictably different results). Talking fails, however, for the real challenges where actions speak louder than words.  The enemy of preparedness against nuclear disaster is intolerant idealism which tries to use simplistic, appeasing techniques to peacefully resolve great, deep chasms, before warfare has reduced aggression levels and made reconciliation credible and achievable.  As long ago as 1929, Churchill warned: "No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism."  As Weart explained in his 1998 book Never at War, the road to peace is the transformation of dictatorships and communist regimes into financially stable democracies (not intolerant idealist or socialist basket cases like today's bankrupt Spain and Greece), see the quotation from Weart which is linked here.


The problem with Tony Blair's sweeping argument (quoted above) is that he assumes that the leadership is in a position to negotiate, and is willing to negotiate.  What happens in most dictatorships is that as soon as the dictator at the top "goes soft", there's a revolution and he's replaced by a hard-liner who can "maintain order and discipline".  In the worst cases, like Hitler's and Stalin's national socialism, the massive state spending sprees created a debt crisis that in part motivated the aggressive impulses of evil empires, a fact ignored by democracies who listened instead to people like Nobel Peace Prize winner Sir Norman Angell, whose book The Great Illusion claimed that the financial costs of war made war a great illusion, a prize-winning argument which totally ignored "peaceful genocide," concentration camp eugenics, slavery, and the non-quantifiable value of individual freedom from state control.  In other words, Angell's theorem was the opposite to reality: financial debt problems motivated Hitler's aggression, rather than fear of war debt showing war to be a great illusion.  Similarly, Prime Minister Chamberlain used fears of the financial cost of a preventative war to stop German rearmament as an excuse for appeasement and for not investing enough in an arms race and in civil defence to counter the effects of enemy action (like all politicians, he was after a Nobel Peace Prize and eternal glory).  Thus, fears of debt motivated the very policies that led to war, instead of preventing the war.

Northern Ireland's peace agreement in 1998 was a special case because the majority of the people (ignoring a few extremists) on both sides by then (after decades of violence) felt that violence wasn't getting anywhere, because violence had run its course and BOTH SIDES (not just one side) were prepared to negotiate meaningfully and reach an agreement involving compromise.

Could the peace agreement have been reached earlier, without generations of violence leading to weariness of violence?  No more than Japan's early surrender could have been secured without Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the disintegration of the USSR without its bankruptcy in the arms race.  In all these cases, peace talks and arms agreements were desperately attempted, yet went nowhere until the stakes were raised high by violence, war (or cold war) weariness, or the threat of violence.  Action had to speak louder than words before before a negotiated change to a more peaceful direction.

As Herman Kahn points out in his 1960 classic On Thermonuclear War, the problem is not even a direct "threat" of war or a direct threat of "violence".  Germany never directly threatened to attack Britain or to "start" a war with Britain, either in 1914 (when Britain's Foreign Secretary Edward Grey minced his language and procrastinated from decisive warnings so badly that the Kaiser believe that Britain wouldn't declare war if Germany invaded Belgium) or in 1939 (when Chamberlain similarly misled Hitler by repeatedly backing away from confrontation as Germany rearmed and broke treaty after treaty, invading successive countries, until war was finally precipitated not by a direct threat to Britain but by Germany's invasion of Poland, with which Britain had made a military support agreement in a plan that was supposed to be "war preventing" but of course did the opposite, like all such idealistic agreements).

Like Grey's appeasement of the Kaiser in 1914, Hitler in 1939 was repeatedly told by Chamberlain that Britain had no stomach for war, and was obsessed with peace.  In a sense, appeasement action conned the Nazis into believing they would be allowed to do what they like.  Thus, as Kahn points out, we need not to merely deter or counter direct threats, but we need to be ready for the kinds of indirect threats that we have seen in history.  The world has not "moved on" from the basic key problems of the 1930s.

Violence, the threat of violence or a weariness of war or cold war, is always needed to bring about a sincere desire for peace; "exceptions" to this rule are always the trivial "conflict cases" where there is no serious conflict of interests to begin with and the "conflict" is just a contrived effort to get talks started  (sure, conflict resolution talk and agreement can resolve low-level or exhausted crises which are - or have degenerated into - "storms in teacups").  The fashionable pacifist dogma asserts the opposite, claiming that peace-talk is an alternative to fighting or a replacement for fighting, using the "foot in the door" sales technique.  First, they take an example of a low-level conflict or one which is contrived in an effort to force negotiation, and is easily resolved; then this "example" is false extended into the general case of all arguments, including those like the 1930s where all atempts at conflict resolution made things worse by allowing the enemy to rearm faster than democracies and to extend its lead (the gap in the arms race which led to a full scale world war, with tens of millions dead).  Human nature is such that peace-talk by Grey in 1914 and Baldwin and Chamberlain in the 1930s encouraged aggressors, by inviting coercion and by displaying fear and weakness to terrorists.

There is a difference between "reconciliation" and "appeasement", and the difference is this: reconciliation is what happens after a violent fight, whereas appeasement is what happens before one.






Above: at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September 1939, Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broadcast the admission: "This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would 
exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.  You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed. Yet I cannot believe that there is anything more or anything different that I could have done [for the Nazis, he means; there was a hell of a lot more he could have done to effectively deter horrors for the Jews, for civil defence shelter research funding, and for a real arms race that would exceed Nazi spending and deter Nazi invasions until Germany went bankrupt, like Churchill called for in the early 30s, and Reagan did in the 80s with the USSR] that would have been more successful [where "success" is judged by the criterion of achieving a Nobel Peace Prize, not success as judged by more objective criteria, e.g. stopping what is today called "ethnic cleansing" by appeasers of terrorism].  Up to the very last it would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful and honourable settlement between Germany and Poland, but Hitler would not have it. He had evidently made up his mind to attack Poland whatever happened, and although He now says he put forward reasonable proposals which were rejected by the Poles, that is not a true statement. The proposals were never shown to the Poles, nor to us, and, although they were announced in a German broadcast on Thursday night, Hitler did not wait to hear comments on them, but ordered his troops to cross the Polish frontier. His action shows convincingly that there is no chance of expecting that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will. He can only be stopped by force."

The threat of force is why we need war capabilities that go beyond mindless yammering, and why we need civil defense to take the edge off terrorist intimidation and coercive indirect or direct threats. Chemical disarmament pledges and treaties like the 1925 Geneva Protocol did not prevent millions of defenseless people being gassed to death at concentration camps in WWII. Bits of paper and unarmed policemen do not deter thugs today, didn't deter thugs in the past, and certainly won't deter thugs in the future.

Over a month before the Damascus sarin nerve gas attack that killed 1,300 civilians, Foreign Secretary William Hague on 16 July 2013, British Foreign Secretary issued a written statement to Parliament which stated: "There is evidence of attacks using chemical weapons in Syria - including sarin. We believe that the use of chemical weapons is sanctioned and ordered by the Assad regime. ... We plan to equip the moderate armed opposition with 5000 escape hoods, nerve-agent pre-treatment tablets (NAPs) and chemical weapons detector paper."

What he could have done was to have prepared civilian kids using civil defence. Sarin is liquid droplets which at typical ambient temperatures take 3 times longer to evaporate than water droplets of similar size. Britain's Porton Down in the 1970s proved how to keep sarin droplets and their vapour out of houses with blast-broken windows, using a simple, DIRT-CHEAP, duct-tape-and-plastic-sheeting method which was proof-tested against simulated nerve and blister gas liquid contaminants! The actual method is very simple and was first tested and employed in 1917 by America in gas-proofed trenches. (Page 14 of the Confidential-classified American manual of 1917, "Defensive Measures Against Gas Attacks", states: "The value of gas-proof dugouts and cellars has been clearly demonstrated. This should be borne in mind in view of the inflammation of the skin produced by mustard gas.") In 1937, the government published a 7-page printed report on experiments to determine the effectiveness of anti-gas protection of houses and of people wearing gas masks or not wearing gas masks in sealed rooms. (I've put it on the Internet Archive at: http://archive.org/stream/AirRaidsWhatYouMustKnowWhatYouMustDo/AirRaidsHandbook#page/n141/mode/2up together with some of the updated research proving that nerve liquids can be kept out the same way, while it evaporates, plus declassified effective civil defence evidence for other weapons than can be used in war.) This Experiments in Anti-Gas Protection of Houses ARP report was published by the Home Office Air Raid Precautions (ARP) Department to disprove fears circulated by various critics in 1937 (especially the Cambridge Scientists' Anti-War Group which published a book claiming to entirely discredit all air raid precautions), that the gas masks and gas proof rooms did not work, were unreliable, or were just armchair advice invented to support anti-Nazi warmongering rather than appeasement policies:

"The experiments were conducted by the Chemical Defence Research Department under the aegis of a special Sub-Committee of the Chemical Defence Committee. That Sub-Committee was composed of eminent experts not in Government employment, and included a number of distinguished University professors and scientists."

This report first summarises the protective anti-gas advice published in ARP Handbook 1 in 1937, and then gives the results of experimental tests at Porton Down, using a draughty game-keeper's cottage with windows shut:

"... over a ton of chlorine gas was released 20 yards from the house so that the wind carried it straight on to the unprotected room. ... Human beings who occupied this unprotected room found that gas penetrated slowly into the room, and after about seven minutes it became necessary for them to put on their respirators. ... In another experiment the house was surrounded at a distance of 20 yards by large shallow trays which were filled with mustard gas ... Animals were placed in an unprotected room ... Observations made upon the animals ... showed that none of them were seriously harmed by the mustard gas. The third type of gas used was tear gas ... after 3/4 of an hour the strength of the gas inside the house was still very much less than that outside."

The report then goes over the same experiments done on a protected room with door and window frames sealed up and shows:

"The animals in the 'gas protected' room, however, were unaffected and remained normal, nothwithstanding the severity of the trial."

In no case could toxic concentrations of a gas penetrate into a sealed up room before the gas outside had been blown away or evaporated by the weather.

"The entire Free World, despite its intellectual sophistication, is being held hostage by fear. This fear of the unknown has proliferated for the past 80 years through propaganda, unsound pronouncements of world leaders, and misleading labels compounded by a public press that has neglected its own mandate to seek out and tell the truth."

- James W. Hammond, Poison gas: the myths versus reality, Preface (Greenwood Press, 1999).

Trust the (un)United Nations to push ahead with "banning" the most easily produced and cheaply protected against weapons, while ignoring and permitting the harder-to-protect-against weapons like snipers bullets (requiring helmets and flak jackets at least) or high explosives (involving shelter from blast and fragments). As the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult which used sarin in 1995 proved beyond any doubt or denial, Chemical disarmament pledges and treaties like the 1925 Geneva Protocol did not prevent millions of defenseless people being gassed to death at concentration camps in WWII. Bits of paper and unarmed policemen do not deter thugs today, didn't deter thugs in the past, and certainly won't deter thugs in the future.




"IT IS CORRUPTION, NOT OVER-POPULATION, THAT IS STARVING THE WORLD'S POOR

"Sir David Attenborough tells us that mankind's real problem is over-population, leading to starvation ... nonsense.  ... the people of Singapore ... Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea ... Japanese ... all are among the wealthiest and best fed in the world.  The starving are not those who lack land ... If Sir David's equation was right, we British would eat less well than the folk of Mali because their land is bigger. [Across much of East Africa and other impoverished "overpopulated" starving and disease ridden areas] beneath even arid land there are aquifers ... Yet the people ... are desperately poor and thus hungry and, from drinking filthy water, diseased. ... In just about every impoverished country on earth there is one scourge worse than malaria, dysentery, or even hunger: corruption. ... The wells are never dug ... There is no end to the appetite of the corrupt." - Frederick Forsyth, Daily Express, Friday 27 September 2013, page 15.

As we show in Figure 12 of our review of Delingpole's book Watermelons (the relevant page of our review is linked here), Sir David Attenborough is ignorant, arrogant, and plain wrong in repeating the Malthus lie: under capitalism a growing world population increases the food supply per person, because food production increases faster than population due to factors called "science" and "technology" which Malthus didn't have a clue about.  What's Attenborough's excuse?  Ignorance?  Stupidity?  Propaganda?  Saving the world by killing it?  The ends justify the means?  Whatever, it's just the pathetic lies used to defend pseudosciences, from epicycles to eugenics to shooting people climbing the Berlin Wall.  What's interesting in addition is that the very corruption that diverts charity from wiping out starvation and disease in the world is mirrored in the West by compulsory funded (USSR media type) BBC and (loss making) Guardian newspaper propaganda lies in the name of "peace".  According to Jesus, it's best to remove the plank from your own eye before attending to the splinter in somebody else's.  So maybe it is wisest that we root out, expose, and discredit popular corrupt propaganda liars in the West, before we can hold the moral high ground to wipe out corruption elsewhere.  (Marxism and eugenics propaganda are products of Western culture.  No surprise, really.)

“In 1952 Doris Lessing, a British writer who has since won the Nobel Prize for Literature, was part of a delegation visiting the Soviet Union. Her memories of the trip are clear and unforgiving: “I was taken around and shown things as a ‘useful idiot’... that’s what my role was.” … Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and American journalist Walter Duranty were some of those people who also visited the Soviet Union. However as stories mounted of mass murder and starvation in parts of Russia and the Ukraine, reporters such as Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge investigated and reported on ‘the creation of one enormous Belsen’. Duranty responded with an article in the New York Times headed ‘Story of the famine is bunk’, and got an exclusive interview with Stalin. Soon after, Jones died and Muggeridge’s career nose-dived. Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer.”
The point is, as with Duranty, when there are two sides to any story, the BBC and Guardian newspaper unfailingly manage to swallow the liars propaganda (hook, line and sinker), thus taking the wrong side. The simple answer is that these pseudo-intellectuals find fiction more appealing than facts. They prefer utopian hopeful fantasies to tough reality. They are ideologues who want to believe in contrived propaganda that reinforces their ideals.



Don’t panic! There’s no population bomb

 6 November 2013 17:32
Our planet is now home to seven billion people, with ravenous appetites for fuel and food — and the number keeps growing. ... Yet paradoxically, the number of children in the world is not going to rise from now on. Let me first bust a few myths. How many babies do Bangladeshi women have on average ... by now it’s actually 2.2 ... This is what Brits don’t know: that in Bangladesh — and also in Brazil, Vietnam, India and big African cities like Addis Ababa — two-child families are the norm.  ... It’s unprecedented in human history. It also means that we’ll see the end of fast population growth by the end of this century. ... Here’s the thing. Around 2000 we reached the period of ‘peak child’ — from then on, the number of people under the age of 15 stayed at about two billion of the global population ... 

The population growth since 1800 was due to a much longed-for drop in child mortality. A wonderful thing occurred, which is that medical advances meant fewer people died in childhood, while humans in general could expect to live longer. In 1972, the year of Bangladesh’s independence, there was on average seven babies per woman, and the lifespan was less than 50 years. Today, the average Bangladeshi family has 2.2 children, while life expectancy is 70. ...

This pattern is occurring everywhere — especially in countries like China and India, which people normally think of as contributing most to the population ‘explosion’. Fifty years ago, the global average number of babies born per woman was five; today it’s 2.5 and decreasing. People think that countries like Bangladesh are the epicentre of a population bomb but they couldn’t be more wrong. ... By 2050, Asia will have one billion more people — then its population growth is over. During this time, Africa’s population will double to two billion, and is set to double again to four billion by 2100. By the end of the century, with no more population growth in Europe, the Americas and Asia, there will be 11 billion people on earth, with four billion of that in Africa. ...

 Here’s another question we posed to British people: what’s the literacy rate of the world — 20, 40, 60 or 80 percent? Half chose 20 and 40 percent, nearly 45 percent of them chose 60 percent, and only 8 percent picked 80 percent. The answer, of course, is 80 percent (and rising). Four-fifths of the world can read and write, and thus hold the means to pull themselves out of poverty. You see? Our perception of things is very different from the reality.
I am not an optimist, but I do call myself a possiblist. And I say the world is much better than many think.
 
Prof. Hans Rosling's graph of population: the number of kids (under 15 years old) on this planet peaked at 2 billion in 2000 and has not risen since then, because the population growth was just due to medical advances that increased childhood survival and lifespan.  The continued increase in total population is  due to a temporary lack of sync between births and deaths, due to increasing lifespan.  By about 2100 (provided that nobody produces a cheap effective cure for cancer, heart disease, etc.) the total population will stabilize at 11 billion (less than twice today's 7 billion).  Most of the increase will be Africa, where technology has time (87 years) to politically reintroduce DDT to kill off the malarial mosquitoes and make capitalist civilization succeed and provide a high standard of living.  (The eco-eugenicists would prefer to wipe out the "excess humans" by reintroducing lions or other pests, therefore they tend to either "slow handclap" or scream to drown out the voice of anybody who tells the unfashionable truth.)

13 November 2013 update: the Cold War, Communist marine sharp shooter Lee Oswald, and conspiracy-based denials of a simple explanation to the Kennedy assassination




ABOVE: on 22 November 2013, there will be another round of conspiracy theories, since it will be 50 years after the Kennedy assassination by ex-marine, the Communist Lee Oswald, who ran a "Hands off Cuba" protest campaign against Kennedy after returning from a trip to Russia.  Instead of focusing on these actual facts, conspiracy theorists "set aside" the Oswald facts in the same way that Marxist teachers "set aside" the USSR evil empire evidence.  The latest 2013 conspiracy theory is that Oswald fired only two shots and the third spent bullet casing (found by his gun) is claimed to be just an empty casing kept loaded in the gun to keep dust out from the breech.  This new conspiracy theory by Australian police detective Colin McLaren asserts that a Secret Service agent (George Hickey, who died in 2005) accidentally shot Kennedy using a AR-15 from the car behind the President's, as his car accelerated after the first two shots.  (Hickey in 1995 had sued a previous conspiracy theorist, author Bonar Menninger.)  What is the probability that a bullet fired by accident by Hickey happens to hit Kennedy's head?   Even if it is true, Communist Oswald doesn't disappear.  (He shoots at Kennedy twice, triggering a fatal accident.)


Just as with witchcraft, 10/11 dimensional superstring/supergravity, CO2 induced runaway climate change, gas bombs, nuclear radiation effects, and the effects of nuclear weapons, the popular media "sets aside" the laws of physics, empirical evidence and mechanisms involved; which clears the canvas of reality so that they can have a field day inventing nonsense/conspiracy theories, and blaming anyone but the fact-proved culprit (a crazy, dangerous, deluded Communist).  Irrational, fact-denying groupthink is "defended" by censorship, as Irving L. Janis pointed out on page 206 of his 1972 book Victims of Groupthink, censorship of facts is vital for irrational cults.  This censorship, Janis explained on page 198, is performed by: "members who protect the group from adverse information ..."

Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth is an example: in testimony to congress, Gore simply avoided all evidence against his dogma by making the claim that any evidence against runaway CO2 induced climate change is analogous to "conspiracy theories about the moon landings".  Yet the moon landings "critics" don't know any physics: that rocket engines don't produce sound waves in the vacuum on the moon, that without air drag to damp the oscillations of a flag, a flag will continue to oscillate for a long period, that diamond scratched cross hairs on photographic lenses are not black or white paint but instead always appear over the image, that radio transmissions from the moon were by directional S-band microwaves (to penetrate Earth's ionosphere) that were received by directional dishes around the Earth as the planet rotated.  It would have been more expensive to "fake" moon landing, than to have the real thing.



Delivered in person before a joint session of Congress
May 25, 1961:

One major element of the national security program which this nation has never squarely faced up to is civil defense. … Public considerations have been largely characterized by apathy, indifference and skepticism ... this deterrent concept assumes rational calculations by rational men. And the history of this planet, and particularly the history of the 20th century, is sufficient to remind us of the possibilities of an irrational attack, a miscalculation, an accidental war, which cannot be either foreseen or deterred. It is on this basis that civil defense can be readily justifiable - as insurance for the civilian population in case of an enemy miscalculation. It is insurance we trust will never be needed - but insurance which we could never forgive ourselves for foregoing in the event of catastrophe. ... no insurance is cost-free; and every American citizen and his community must decide for themselves whether this form of survival insurance justifies the expenditure of effort, time and money. For myself, I am convinced that it does.

(Note that this pro-civil defense quotation from Kennedy's moon landing speech has been reversed by many deliberate "pacifist" misquotations, omitting Kennedy's warning against civil defense apathy and irrational attacks by enemies, and trying to imply falsely that Kennedy's words "
an irrational attack, a miscalculation, an accidental war, which cannot be either foreseen or deterred" was aimed at the nuclear weapons in the hands of democracy.)


Delingpole's new book on Ecofacism will be published in December 2013.  "Godwin's law" states that we must avoid any analogy of the 1920s Brownshirts to modern fascists, until after a full holocaust in the name of eugenics pseudoscience.
Plausible-sounding consensus lying triumphs over scientific objectivity and facts because it tells people what they want to hear, which is not the truth!

The only reason why significant CO2 related temperature rises are predicted by all 21 IPCC climate models is that they all contain the same error: assuming that water vapour absorbs sunlight to amplify the CO2 injection by positive feedback, ignoring the fact that it would gain buoyancy, rise and condense into cloud cover.  See the corrected IPCC results in Figures 2 and 3 in my paper: Failure Evidence for All 21 Ipcc Positive-Feedback Climate Models, http://vixra.org/pdf/1302.0044v2.pdf.  (There is no significant effect from CO2, in agreement with air observations over the past 15 years.)

Elizabeth Nickson states on page xiv of her 2012 book Eco-fascists (published by HarperCollins):

“My father landed on D-day and, at the end of the war, was put in charge of a Nazi camp and told to ‘sort these people out.’ … That darkness and history taught me that man defaults to tyranny over and over again, and while the tyranny of the environmental movement in rural America has not reached what its own policy documents say is its ultimate goal – radical population reduction – we cannot any longer ignore that goal and its implications.”

On page 1, she summarised the problem in the ancient Roman proverb:

“Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.” (The people wish to be deceived, so let them be deceived.)

Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Eco-fascism Revisited: Lessons from the German Experience, New Compass Press, second edition, 2011, pages 10-12:


“In fact, ecological ideas have a history of being distorted … Nazi ‘ecological’ ideology was used to justify the destruction of European Jewry. … these reactionary and outright fascist ecologists emphasize the supremacy of the ‘Earth’ over people; evoke ‘feelings’ and intuition at the expense of reason; and uphold a crude sociobiologistic and even Malthusian biologism. … More than ever, an ecological commitment requires people today to avoid repeating the errors of the past, lest the ecology movement become absorbed in the mystical and antihumanistic trends that abound today.”

Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart, Why Don’t We Learn from History?, PEN Books, 1944; revised edition, Allen and Unwin, 1972:

“If a man reads or hears a criticism of anything in which he has an interest, watch whether his first question is as to its fairness and truth. If he reacts to any such criticism with strong emotion; if he bases his complaint on the ground that it is not in ‘good taste,’ or that it will have a bad effect - in short, if he shows concern with any question except ‘is it true?’ he thereby reveals that his own attitude is unscientific. Likewise if in his turn he judges an idea not on its merits but with reference to the author of it; if he criticizes it as ‘heresy’; if he argues that authority must be right because it is authority; if he takes a particular criticism as a general depreciation; if he confuses opinion with facts; if he claims that any expression of opinion is ‘unquestionable’; if he declares that something will ‘never’ come about, or it is ‘certain’ that any view is right. The path of truth is paved with critical doubt, and lighted by the spirit of objective enquiry... We learn from history that in every age and every clime the majority of people have resented what seems in retrospect to have been purely matter of fact … We learn too that nothing has aided the persistence of falsehood, and the evils resulting from it, more than the unwillingness of good people to admit the truth … Always the tendency continues to be shocked by natural comment, and to hold certain things too ‘sacred’ to think about. I can conceive no finer ideal of a man’s life than to face life with clear eyes instead of stumbling through it like a blind man, an imbecile, or a drunkard – which, in a thinking sense, is the common preference. How rarely does one meet anyone whose first reaction to anything is to ask: ‘is it true?’ Yet, unless that is a man’s natural reaction, it shows that truth is not uppermost in his mind, and unless it is, true progress is unlikely.”  (Emphasis added.)

This is precisely the point Herman Kahn made in his 1962 book Thinking About the Unthinkable (quoted on 34 of my review of Watermelons, linked here).  The "protective stupidity" described by Orwell in 1984, where the majority is "bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction," is behind all unresolved outstanding problems.  Alternative ideas are simply being killed off before they are objectively investigated, by a dictatorship of status quo.

In politics, for example, we have 1 election in 4 years which gives a choice between a couple of relatively fashion-dominated parties, not really "democracy" (democracy in ancient Greece was a daily referendum on issues rather than a choice of dictators or fashion dominated parties).  This election once in 4 years is at least 4 x 365 = 1,460 times less democracy than in ancient Greece (the factor much is larger if you take account of the actual voting for issues, rather than parties).  If ancient Greek democracy (a daily referendum) is the benchmark at 100% democracy, modern "democracy" is less than 0.07% of that benchmark (1/1,460).  Winston Churchill's defence on 11 November 1947 in the House of Commons (having been kicked out of office in 1945 due to an opposition which promised socialist utopia) is that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."  However, this conflates modern "democracy" (only 0.07% of ancient Greek democracy) with daily referendums, which was genuine democracy.  The fact is, 0.07% democracy is closer to 0% democracy, than it is to 100% democracy.  It is indeed better to have 0.07% than to have 0% as in a total dictatorship, yet there is a lot of room for improvement.  Traditional excuses like technical problems with daily referendums are null with secure internet database technology.  If everyone can log in securely to a bank account online, they can do the same to vote.

If democracy is banned from objective discussion, or taboo, then you can see why the effects of nuclear weapons, or the progress in quantum gravity or negative-feedback by water vapour on climate change, are taboo too. The first job of lying revolutionaries is to make their dictatorial power secure, and they do this by the use of censorship to prevent the completely objective discussion of errors, omissions, failures, and particularly alternative (rival) possibilities and solutions:


20 November 2013 update: nutcases in the British Government restrict unclassified fallout data

This blog post (above) includes a summary (including key photographic evidence) of the key points of UK National Archives document ES 5/262, Operation BUFFALO: target response tests; Biology Group; Part 5; entry of fission products into food chains, 1959, which is now labelled:


"This record is closed and retained by Ministry of Defence



This is a good example over the secrecy of civil defence evidence which is needed to be made widespread for people to understand why civil defence works.  This report ES 5/262 is by Dr John F. Loutit and Dr R. Scott Russell, Operation Buffalo, Part 5, The entry of fission products into food chains, Atomic Weapons Research Establishment report AWRE-T57/58, May 1959.

This report gives the scientific basis for the assertion after Operation Buffalo in the unclassified British Government publication "Nuclear Weapons" (1959 and 1974) that there are simple and obvious countermeasures for fallout in food (British fallout uptake research began at the 1952 Operation Hurricane nuclear test, but this detailed nuclear test civil defence data was also kept secret from public study!), e.g. peeling crops, and even the normal threshing of wheat after the British-Australian Buffalo-2 nuclear test left only 10% of the fallout radioactivity on the corn, 90% on the chaff, and strontium-90 intake from food was a problem over 1,000 times smaller than iodine-131, which has a short half life (thus higher specific activity, decays/second) and is easily dealt with by preserving milk (powdering, freezing, turning to cheese/ice cream etc.), by simply blocking iodine-131 uptake with KI tablets (yes, there is are tablets which block the worst risks of cancer from nuclear fallout, contrary to liars), or by simply moving dairy cattle off pasture grass and onto winter feed while most of the iodine-131 quickly decays with its 8 days radioactive half life (with typical weathering, it disappears even faster - typically an effective half life of only 5 days - from pastures since it is physically removed from grass by wind and rain, in addition to radioactive decay; even in experiments in the dry Nevada desert after nuclear tests). 

The two Operation Buffalo fallout effects report authors, John Freeman Loutit and Robert Scott Russell, both went on to debunk the longer term effects of fallout hype; see proof here and here.  

Moreover, their now "closed or retained" report AWRE-T57/58 was reprinted verbatim in technical book form (Progress in Nuclear Energy. ser. 6. vol. 3, Pergamon Press, 1961) and was deposited in university libraries worldwide, as well as being cited in the biological effects chapter in the 1962, 1964 and 1977 edition of Glasstone and Dolan's Effects of Nuclear Weapons. 

This example of retrospective classification or limitation of vital research by officialdom is typical of the mechanisms by which myths are allowed to perpetuate, totally unchecked by effective credible evidence.  Scare-mongering due to keeping facts (evidence credibly debunking war/weapons effects exaggerations) secret, was tried by the British government in the 1920s with gas warfare, where it backfired by allowing exaggerations from liars to be actually rewarded by popular anti-war acclaim, causing the 1930s appeasement policy that led to WWII.  The situation today is an exact repeat of the 1920s policy!  Truth hurts liars, who scream about rudeness when exposed as quacks who make money by selling lies.



Update on UK National Archives "retained under section 3.4" nonsense (24 November 2013):

It's not only the UK Ministry of Defense that adopts a national security-endangering secrecy with respect to making public at the National Archives the facts on nuclear weapons and civil defence!  Here's another example:

"Home Office reaction to book on civil defence ('Beneath the City Streets') by Peter Laurie, 1977, report CDA 74 43/28/3" (UK National Archives document HO 322/777) was retained until 1 January 2005 and then released.  (Link here.)

However, the version of this report in the Cabinet Office files at the UK National Archives (document CAB 196/25) is being retained by the Cabinet Office under section 3.4 of the 1958 Public Records Act for at least the next 10 years, until at least the year 2023!  This decision to retain it was made just two months ago, on 18 September 2013!  The details of the CAB 196/25 report limitation are reproduced below:




Above: Peter Laurie's "Beneath the city streets" (first edition 1970 published by Allen Lane, revised 1979 edition published by Panther, including as Appendix A his New Scientist article of 13 July 1978: "Can a secret be secret if it isn't actually secret?") was based in part with discussions with the Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch nuclear weapons effects experts for civil defence.  As a mathematics graduate, Laurie began researching the subject of nuclear weapons and civil defence for a Sunday Times magazine article in 1967 (the editor of the Sunday Times wanted to know whether the BBC film "The War Game" nuclear effects portrayal was all lies - it was, falsely claiming to rely on data from Nevada nuclear tests done in 1954, a year of course no Nevada nuclear tests occurred, and falsely claiming that the firestorm was predicted by Glasstone's 1964 Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which of course was quite the opposite - Glasstone repudiated the firestorm even for most American wooden cities, based on Encore nuclear test evidence) before the UK Civil Defence Corps was closed down by Labour in March 1968 (after anti-civil defence propaganda which exaggerated nuclear effects).








Above: "The War Game", a 1965 Peter Watkins BBC propaganda film, is debunked at the previous post linked here.  See also our discussion of Phil Bolsover's CND "Civil Defence - the Cruellest Confidence Trick", linked here.

31 December 2013 update: statistics for monthly visitors to this blog (see graph below: total visitors from May 2007 to Dec 2013 is over 550,000, of whom 9.7% visited the Glasstone and Dolan page)



“In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and now of the recession I observe a mounting pressure to co-operate and to promote ‘teamwork’. For its anti-individualistic streak, such a drive is of course highly suspect; some people may not be so sensitive to it, but having seen the Hitlerjugend in action suffices for the rest of your life to be very wary of ‘team spirit’. Very. I have even read one text that argued that university scientists should co-operate more in order to become more competitive..... Bureaucracies are in favour of teamwork because a few groups are easier to control than a large number of rugged individuals. Granting agencies are in favour of supporting large established organizations rather than individual researchers, because the support of the latter, though much cheaper, is felt to be more risky; it also requires more thinking per dollar funding. Teamwork is also promoted because it is supposed to be more efficient, though in general this hope is not justified. … the co-operation seems more to force the researchers to broaden their outlook than to increase the efficiency of the research. … everybody complains about the amount of red tape … Why should a vigorous, flourishing department seek co-operation when it is doing just fine all by itself? It is the weak departments that are more tempted to seek each other's support and to believe that there is might in numbers. But such co-operation is of course based on the theory that, when you tie two stones together, the combination will float.”

- Professor Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930-2002), The strengths of the academic enterprise, EWD 1175, University of Texas, 9 February 1994.


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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."