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! The Effects of Nuclear Weapons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, May 17, 2015

In 1,881 burns cases in Hiroshima, only 17 (or 0.9 percent) were due to ignited clothing and 15 (or 0.7%) were due to the firestorm flames


Robert Trumbull - the New York Times Pacific and Asia war correspondent, 1941-79 who had been in Iwo Jima - documented the facts about the people above (who all survived the Hiroshima nuclear explosion on 6 August 1945, travelled to Nagasaki and survived the nuclear explosion there as well on 9 August) in his 1957 book Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Personal Experiences of Nine Men who Lived Through Both Atomic Bombings. Here are their experiences and ages on 9 August 1945: 

Kenshi Hirata, 26, accountant at Mitsubishi Shipbuilding Company, Hiroshima (Trumbull pp. 25, 61, and 119): “‘through an open window what looked like a golden lightning flash ... had blown up out of the earth. The weird light was everywhere. I immediately thought of an air-raid, and hurled myself prostrate in the passage.’ Hirata’s quick action probably saved him serious injury, if not his life. ... Because it was the middle of summer, which is exceptionally hot in southern Japan, most of the people of Hiroshima were very thinly clad that morning, so they had less than ordinary protection against burns, Hirata observed. ... [Back in Nagasaki] ‘I shouted to my aged father ... ‘Lie face downward!’ In the immediate moment I was expecting that terrific explosion blast and roar.’ ... Kenshi and his father were unharmed. ‘But in two or three minutes ... I saw people running out of their houses, holding their hands over injuries on their heads, faces, and bodies. Most of these were wounds caused by flying pieces of glass.” 

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 29, Mitsubishi ship designer who died in 2010, aged 93 (Trumbull pp. 28 and 109): “‘Suddenly there was a flash like the lighting of a huge magnesium flare,’ Yamaguchi recalls. The young ship designer was so well drilled in air-raid precaution techniques that he reacted automatically. He flung his hands to his head, covering his eyes with his fingers and stopping his ears with his two thumbs. Simultaneously he dropped to the ground, face down. ... ‘As I prostrated myself, there came a terrific explosion’ ... [The left side of his face and arm facing the fireball were burned, and he returned to Nagasaki, experiencing the second nuclear explosion on the sixth-floor of the headquarters office of Mitsubishi.] Spelling out the danger of flying glass, he urged them to keep windows open during an air-raid alert, and at the instant of the flash to seize at once upon any shelter available ... the second A-bomb confirmed young Yamaguchi’s words, exploding in a huge ball of fire about a mile away. Yamaguchi’s lecture ... was not lost upon his colleagues. With the young designer’s words still fresh in their minds, they leaped for the cover of desks and tables. ‘As a result,’ said Yamaguchi, ‘my section staff suffered the least in that building. In other sections there was a heavy toll of serious injuries from flying glass’.” 

Shigeyoshi Morimoto, 46, maker of kites for air defense of Japanese ships, used his Hiroshima experience to take cover in Nagasaki after seeing the flash, before the windows were blasted in. Tsuitaro Doi, 47, was on his Hiroshima hotel bed, a thin floor mattress called a “futon” when he saw the explosion flash (Trumbull pages 42 and 106-7): “I quickly rolled over and covered my head with the futon ... The floor of the room and my futon were covered with tiny bits of shattered glass. I noticed that I had a slight cut on one arm, and another on the leg, where I wasn’t covered. ... [He returned home to Nagasaki] “Doi was telling his wife in detail about the bomb. ‘If you ever see that flash,’ he said, ‘immediately prostrate yourself on the floor, or the ground if you are outside. ...’ As he was saying these words, the windows lighted as if giant searchlights had been turned directly into the house. ... Mrs Doi startled, jumped to her feet impulsively and turned to run out of the house. Doi grabbed her and pulled her and the baby down as the blast wave shattered all the glass in the little cottage and ripped off the wood and paper sliding doors. As the flimsy house steadied Doi opened his eyes, and saw that the interior of the room was a wreck. But neither he nor his wife nor the baby was hurt.” 

Shinji Kinoshita, 50, was hit by falling roof slabs in a Hiroshima warehouse but returned home to Nagasaki and was just outside the door of his family home when the bomb fell (Trumbull p105): “he was momentarily blinded by a flash that seemed to cover the sky. Like the other survivors of the Hiroshima attack, Kinoshita realized at once what the strange, blinding light meant, and reacted without a second’s hesitation. He threw himself face first on the ground, at the same time shouting into the house, ‘Cover yourself with futons!’” 

Masao Komatsu, 40, was hit by falling beam in a Hiroshima warehouse and was on board a train in Nagasaki when the bomb fell (Trumbull, p101): “the interior of the coach was bathed in a stark, white light. Komatsu immediately dived for the floor. ‘Get down!’ he screamed at the other passengers. Some recovered sufficiently from the daze of the blinding light to react promptly to his warning. Seconds later came the deafening crack of the blast, and a shock wave that splintered all the windows on both sides of the train. The passengers who had not dived under the seats were slashed mercilessly from waist to head by glass flying at bullet speed.” 

Takejiro Nishioka, 55, publisher of Nagasaki’s leading newspaper in 1945 who became Governor of the Nagasaki Prefecture in 1957. In Hiroshima on business on 6 August 1945, he survived the first nuclear explosion and noted the delay of the blast wave after the visible flash. When he returned to Nagasaki he was not allowed to publish the facts, and only survived by diving into an air raid shelter when he saw the flash after a single B-29 appeared over the city. He explained (Trumbull, p92): 

“I had observed in Hiroshima that when the flash came, there would be a few seconds before it was followed by the blast wave ... I have often bitterly regretted the law that gagged me as a newspaperman, and forced me to confine my communications to the governor’s ear alone.” 

Japan only permitted civil defense advice against nuclear attack to be published after the second nuclear attack on Nagasaki, which was too late. Even at ground zero, the blast wave was delayed after the first flash because of the height of burst, so quick reactions could limit exposure to flying glass. Proof of the efficiency of duck and cover advice against the blast wind and flying debris was given by Nagasaki’s police chief Mizuguchi, who had been told Nishioka’s advice by the Nagasaki governor and had passed it to his first-grade middle school student son, who was with three friends in Daikoku-Machi street, Nagasaki, when the flash occurred (Trumbull pp. 114-5): 

“The police chief’s son remembered his father’s warning at once. Hauling his friend with him by the hand, he dashed for a shelter on the pavement ... The two boys in the shelter were saved; the other two, who stayed on the street, seemed to vanish ... Mizuguchi’s wife, at the same moment, happened to be standing just outside their house, under the eves, with a baby in her arms. The instant she saw the flash, she recalled her husband’s words of the night before and rushed back into the house. She opened a closet and, with the baby still in her arms, crowded inside and pulled shut the sliding door. ... The room, and the area outside the house, was covered with innumerable sharp, pointed slivers of shattered glass. Clearly, she had escaped serious injury by shutting herself in the closet. ... 

“Nishioka was bitterly upbraided by Hiromasa Nakamura, chief of the foreign affairs sections of the Nagasaki Prefectural Office, for not briefing other government officials on the happenings at Hiroshima and the efficacy of bomb shelters. ... ‘I could only tell him that I was indeed anxious to tell everyone in Nagasaki what I had learned, but that if I had done so, I would have been liable for violation of the law against spreading ‘wild rumors’, and could have been arrested and convicted.” 

Akira Iwanaga (25, engineer at Mitsubishi ship yard, a friend and colleague of Yamaguchi). After surviving at Hiroshima, he arrived in Nagasaki just as the bomb exploded, aboard the same train as another double-survivor, Masao Komatsu (Trumbull p101). Sakajiro Mishima, 36, dockside worker at Mitsubishi ship yard, also survived both nuclear explosions. Yamaguchi’s friendKuniyoshi Sato, along with Masako Suga and her baby boy and Hiroshi Shibuta were all also double-survivors of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Another double-survivor is Mrs Kazuko Sadamaru (aged 20 in 1945), who was interviewed aged 80 in 2005 in The Observer (London, Sunday 24 July 2005). She was a nurse in a Nagasaki’s Ohmura Naval Hospital but on 5 August 1945 had to accompany a soldier to Hiroshima by train, where she survived and returned to Nagasaki before the second bomb:

‘“I never wanted to speak out about my experience. I haven’t published anything or talked to anyone because I didn’t want anyone to know. I only became a nurse because I wanted to devote myself to patients and the country. I never dreamt Japan would lose the war. I worked and worked believing Japan would win. I cannot forget the events on 6 and 9 August 1945. I saw the flashes and the mushroom clouds of both A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So many were exposed to the A-bomb but I am one of the few people who have experienced the two bombs, and still I am in good health. It was fate that I was there, but I had good luck in that I survived both bombs.” Despite being close to both bombs, she suffered only a temporary abnormal white blood cell count and loss of hair.”’
 

“No statistically significant increase in major birth defects or other untoward pregnancy outcomes was seen among children of survivors. ... The incidence of major birth defects (594 cases or 0.91%) among the 65,431 registered pregnancy terminations for which parents were not biologically related accords well with a large series of contemporary Japanese births at the Tokyo Red Cross Maternity Hospital, where radiation exposure was not involved and overall malformation frequency was 0.92%. No untoward outcome showed any relation to parental radiation dose or exposure. ... Since many birth defects, especially congenital heart disease, are not detected in the neonatal period, repeat examinations were conducted at age eight to ten months. Among the 18,876 children re-examined at that age, 378 had one or more major birth defect (2.00%), compared with 0.97% within two weeks of birth. Again, there was no evidence of relationships to radiation dose.”

– RERF, Birth defects among the children of atomic-bomb survivors (Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons explosion irradiated survivors).
 

The Hiroshima-Nagasaki nuclear attacks RERF life-span study (LSS) from 1950 to 2000 for leukemia deaths and from 1958 to 1998 for solid cancer occurrence showed that for 49,204 survivors in the leukemia study group, there were an excess of 94 leukemia deaths attributed to radiation, risk of 94/49,204 or 0.191% (above the natural number of cancers in the unexposed control group), and an excess of 848 solid (tumour) cancer deaths in 44,635 survivors, a risk of 848/44,635 or 1.90%. In each case, the excess radiation cancer risk was smaller than the natural risk of 0.22% for leukemia and 15.69% for solid (tumour) cancer deaths. It is significant that the natural cancer death risk was higher than the radiation cancer death risk for both leukemia and solid tumours unless the dose exceeded about 1 Gray (100 R or 100 cGy). E.g., 48% of leukemia deaths from doses of 10-100 R were due to radiation and 52% were natural (a bigger risk than radiation). Likewise, only 16% of solid tumour cancer deaths for doses of 10-100 R were due to radiation (84% were natural)

Glasstone and Dolan, “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,” 1977, paras 12.14, 12.17, 12.22, pp. 545-7:


“The high incidence of flash burns caused by thermal radiation among both fatalities and survivors in Japan was undoubtedly related to the light and scanty clothing being worn, because of the warm summer weather ... If there had been an appreciable cloud cover or haze below the burst point, the thermal radiation would have been attenuated somewhat and the frequency of flash burns would have been much less. Had the weather been cold, fewer people would have been outdoors and they would have been wearing more extensive clothing. Both the number of people and individual skin areas exposed to thermal radiation would then have been greatly reduced, and there would have been fewer casualties from flash burns. ... The death rate in Japan was greatest among individuals who were in the open at the time of the explosions; it was less for persons in residential (wood-frame and plaster) structures and least of all for those in concrete buildings. These facts emphasize the influence of circumstances of exposure on the casualties produced by a nuclear weapon and indicate that shielding of some type can be an important factor in survival. ... Had they been forewarned and knowledgeable about areas of relative hazard and safety, there would probably have been fewer casualties even in structures that were badly damaged.” 


The 1957 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, published just before Operation Plumbbob results were in, acknowledged that clothing had provided protection from flash burns in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but then resorted to the usual obfuscation tactic of claiming that clothing can be ignited and so flame burns can occur, although it is explained in U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports published in 1946 and 1947 that survivors easily beat out burning clothing without sustaining burns (you can extinguish a candle flame with your fingers without severe burns).  Anti-nuclear groups traditionally since 1947 have used as "examples" of nuclear burns case studies not from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but from American gasoline-soaked clothing ignition in automobile burns accident victims, where severe burns resulted.  This is similar to experiences in WWII, Korea and Vietnam with clothing drenched with burning napalm.  In such cases, you cannot beat out the burning clothing before severe burns result, but nuclear weapons do not produce the same results as we will prove in this post.

In peacetime gasoline-soaked clothing automobile accident burns casualties, typically a huge number of specialists have used many gallons of blood plasma, bandages, etc., and the casualty has ended up dying anyhow.  This peacetime experience is then falsely used as an example applicable to nuclear weapons thermal radiation.  Glasstone and Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 1977 seem to go along with this by ignoring any protection giving by clothing (or city skyline shadows, for that matter) in their misleading predictions of burns.  They implicitly assume that a nuclear weapon is detonated over a nudist result in an unobstructed desert, like the Nevada test site.  Although 1953 Nevada tests proved that clothing does provide protection from thermal radiation, in 1957 Plumbbob tests, a highly contrived and misleading situation was used to roast pigs in their jackets.  Pigs were tied down to tables and given anesthetic so they were unable to roll out the flames of ignited clothing.  Many suffered severe burns and died of shock.  Because the reports were classified for security reasons, democratic debate about the reasonableness of the assumptions used in this test was never possible.  The few scientists involved tended to suffer groupthink conformity, in which the heated, often rude, arguments needed to break down hardened dogma were taboo.

Nevertheless, some of the classified reports continued to show that, if people wear clothes or are in a modern hi-rise city, the Nevada test site experiences with pigs strapped to tables in a radial line to ground zero are irrelevant:










The photo on the left is the burns received to bare skin at just 900 metres from ground zero in Hiroshima, as photographed in mid-October 1945 at the Hiroshima First Army Hospital, Ujina branch.  The photo on the right shows the protection afforded by clothing, as seen on 7 July 1947, two years after the Hiroshima attack.  Burns scars occur on the arms, called keloids, caused by malnutrition and infection of burns during prolonged recovery.

Source: Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, by The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (706 pp, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1981.)

After studying hundreds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, Dr. Irving L. Janis reported that the bright flash arriving at light speed ahead of the blast wave allowed them to take evasive action in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a fact ignored in computer models of blast casualties (Psychological Effects of Atomic Bombing, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Publication No. L54-134, 14 May 1954, page 4):

“A substantial proportion of the survivors reacted automatically to the brilliant flash of the A-bomb as a danger signal, even though they knew nothing about the existence of atomic weapons at that time. Some who were not located near ground zero took prompt action – such as falling to a prone position – which minimized exposure to the blast and to the secondary heat waves. In many other cases, however, the opportunity to minimize the danger was missed because the individual remained fixed or because the action which was taken proved to be inappropriate.”
 

Dr G. Andrew Mickley explains how workers who returned to Nagasaki after surviving at Hiroshima were able to use their experience to survive the second nuclear explosion, and to help others to prepare, in his paper “Psychological Factors in Nuclear Warfare”, Chapter 8 in Textbook of Military Medicine; Part I, Warfare, Weaponry, and the Casualty; Volume 2: Medical Consequences of Nuclear Warfare, U.S. Army, 1989, pp. 184-5:

“The benefits of training are confirmed by the remarkable experiences of nine persons who survived the Hiroshima bombing and then fled to Nagasaki in time for the second atomic bomb. They remembered very well what they had done that allowed them to live, and they quickly instructed others in Nagasaki: “Yamaguchi's lecture on A-bomb precautions, he pointed out later, was not lost upon his colleagues. With the young designer's words still fresh in their minds [on 9 August 1945, in Nagasaki] they leaped for the cover of desks and tables. “As a result,” said Yamaguchi, “my section staff suffered the least in that building. In other sections there was a heavy toll of serious injuries from flying glass.” (Quoted from Robert Trumbull, Nine who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki,New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1957.)”
 

Robert Trumbull’s Nine who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki (E. P. Dutton and Co., N.Y., 1957) interviewed nine of the sixteen who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions (travelling to homes in Nagasaki immediately by train after surviving at Hiroshima). The double-survivor Takejira Nishioka (a newspaper publisher) observed in Hiroshima that the blast wave was delayed after the flash, and, being friends with the Governor of Nagasaki Prefecture, tried (but failed) to get permission to send out a warning prior to the Nagasaki nuclear attack that people can avoid being knocked down or hit by horizontally-blasted window glass and debris if they duck and cover on seeing the very bright visible flash. Duck and cover also provides shielding from thermal and nuclear radiation, because it increases the fraction of the free-field air radiation dose which is attenuated through obstructions before reaching a person, as was known in 1949 (HO 225/14, The advantage of lying prone in reducing the dose of gamma rays from an airburst atomic bomb). 

The advice was experimentally verified in the 37 kt Plumbbob-Priscilla nuclear test of 1957, where a standing dummy and a lying dummy were actually filmed being hit by a 5.3 psi peak overpressure blast wave. The lying dummy was completely unmoved, but the standing dummy was accelerated to 21 ft/s in just 0.5 seconds, and blasted a distance of 22 feet. However, in humans the feet rotate forward (because the centre of the body mass is above mid-height) so head-first impacts at the maximum velocity are prevented by the laws of physics, and the only risk to the head is from the vertical fall, and even this is delayed for the blast duration, giving at least 0.5 second of extra time to use the arms to protect the head. Even in the 43.7 kt Plumbbob-Smoky nuclear test where the dummies were in a “blast precursor” desert sandstorm with a very much high dynamic pressure, the lying dummy was only blown half the distance of the standing one. In 1964, the 0.5 kt Snowball explosion confirmed the data and showed that goats are a proxy for humans in translation experiments (DASA-1859). Experiments prove that 77% (23/30) of goats survived a blast which gave them a velocity of 51-78 ft/sec and a decelerative tumbling displacement of 59-151 ft (I. G. Bowen, D. R. Richmond and C. S. White, Translational Effects of Blast Waves, “Minutes of the Tripartite Technical Cooperation Program, Panel N-1, Sub-group N, 14-16 March 1963”, Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, 11 March 1963, page 57). In a built-up area, most people will never even reach the peak velocity observed in desert tests, because they will be stopped by obstructions after typically 10 ft, before they have even been accelerated to the optimum velocity. Therefore, any injury will be less serious, due to the smaller velocity at the time of impact. 

On 27 September 1956 dummy men were exposed to the 15 kt Buffalo-1 nuclear test at Maralinga (similar yield to Hiroshima). Dummies standing facing the burst were blown ~0.35ppsi2 feet (p = peak overpressure, psi). But the dummies lying facing radially towards or away from ground zero were only blown 10% of this distance, because of (1) the smaller area exposed to the blast wind and dust, and (2) the greater area in contact with the ground, providing frictional resistance against drag. References: W. J. H. Butterfield, E. G. Hardy and E. R. Drake Seager, The effects of blast on dummy men exposed in the open, Operation Buffalo,Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, report AWRE-T2/59, 1959 National Archives documents DEFE 16/165, A. R. F. Martin,The effects of blast on dummies and scout cars, Operation Antler, report AWRE-T6/59, ES 5/270, 1959, and the research on the reduced blast displacement of lying dummies exposed to large conventional explosions: DASA 2710

George Monbiot, The Guardian, Tuesday 5 April 2011: “The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all: I’ve discovered that when the facts don’t suit them, the movement resorts to the follies of cover-up they usually denounce. ... Dr Caldicott is the world’s foremost anti-nuclear campaigner. ... Caldicott’s response ... a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so – all 423 pages. It ... strongly contradicts her claims ... For the last 25 years anti-nuclear campaigners have been racking up the figures for deaths and diseases caused by the Chernobyl disaster, and parading deformed babies like a medieval circus. They now claim 985,000 people have been killed ... there have been 6,848 cases of [treatable] thyroid cancer among young children – arising ‘almost entirely’ from the Soviet Union’s failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131 [which has a half life of only 8 days, so cattle can be taken out of fields and given winter feed while it decays, or else the milk can be dry powdered or used to make cheese, or even frozen; if people must drink contaminated milk, they can block iodine-131 uptake by daily 130 mg potassium iodate tablets, which nuclear industries stock for emergency distribution].” 

Weapons effects exaggerations against civil defense are escalated by successive journalists and editors, who increase circulation against ever increasing noise levels from rival journals by publishing lying scare mongering which is “justified” by the allegedly moralistic pseudo-ethical assumption that “the ends justify the means”. Environmentalists who worship subjective, fashionable groupthink like a religion scream and conflate natural cancers with the effects of radiation. Like a Gordian Knot, any attempt to pull apart this scam “orthodoxy” just hardens the dogma, because its proponents do not believe in it on the basis of hard objective science, but just as an emotional, ethical, moralistic piece of patronising high-horse politics. As Glasstone pointed out in the 1950Effects of Atomic Weapons, it is like the gas effects fear-mongering exaggerations propaganda before WWII (which claimed that gas would destroy civilization and lied that there was no defense). 

“The unsuspecting layman naturally swallows it whole ... but they do want to get their manuscript accepted for the feature page of the Daily Drivel or the Weekly Wail. In order to do that, they must pile on the horrors thick.” – James Kendall, Breathe Freely!, quoted by Fair (ADA488135, linked here). 

An early example of “ends justify the means” exaggeration of weapons effects is Will Irwin’s 1921 book, The Next War, exaggerating gas war into the end of civilization to “justify” 1920s disarmament. This was followed by a chorus of others, before appeasers like Chamberlain stepped in to “guarantee peace in our time” by shaking Hitler’s hand (while Britain only rearmed at a fraction of the rate of Germany, so as “not to risk another war”). Instead, this increased the danger of war: 

“These weapons often appear mysterious and sinister to the general public. I think that much of the responsibility for this feeling falls on our government which, by placing great restriction on the public discussion of these weapons by military officers, has fostered this miasma of ignorance. ... the government perpetuates the mysteriousness of these weapons by its restrictions. Until I retired as Commanding General, U.S. Army Chemical Corps Research and Development Command, I was under such restrictions. ... An uninformed public will not support urgently needed research and development on these weapons, nor will it be prepared psychologically for their use against us. ... Only knowledge of these weapons will make them less terrifying. 

“In 1959, after hearings on research in CBR (Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Warfare), the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives stated that. ‘There is an urgent need for greater public understanding of the dangers and uses of CBR if proper support is to be given to our defenses and countermeasures’. ... The attitude of our government not only prevents the public from learning of these weapons: it is also greatly responsible for the failure of our military personnel to learn about them. ... The military, in our country, are not a caste apart, but simply an extension of the civilian populace.” 

- Brigadier General J.H. Rothschild, Tomorrow’s Weapons, McGraw-Hill, N.Y., 1964, pp. xi-xiii. 

“Is it really necessary for peace on this planet that an increasing number of governments have the power to destroy the lives of millions of Americans on short notice? Do the opponents of civil defense not see that such power also provides a temptation to use it, at least for blackmail? Mr Margolis points repeatedly and emphatically to the public apathy with regard to civil defense. ... But, in any case, if history is any guide, public apathy toward a measure would in no way prove the undesirability thereof.”

- Dr Eugene P. Wigner, “Civil Defense: Wigner on Project Harbor”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1966, pp. 21-22 (quotation on page 22).


Attacks on civil defense are akin to attacking home fire insurance, hospitals, ambulances, seatbelts, lifeboats, and other damage reducing precautions on the false allegation that they deflect attention from utopian accident prevention, or that they are “inefficient” and “the survivors would envy the dead”. The “false sense of security” and “recklessness” historically is shown to occur not with civil defense, but with a lack of civil defense, leading to either appeasement or a maximum amount of damage, escalating the problems. “At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to ‘retaliate’ ... The technique he used is such an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs that it is of extreme value to all who are concerned with the problem of maintaining a peaceful and secure world ...” – Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, p. 403.

President Barack Obama, Prague, Czech Republic, 5 April 2009:


Dr Clayton S. White, M.D., “Biological Effects of Blast,” report DASA-1271, 1961, pp. 32-36:
“The area of complete destruction at Hiroshima [the area of the firestorm which developed to a maximum intensity 2-3 hours after the explosion was] about 1.2 mile radius (4 square miles), a range at which 4-5 psi existed. At this range there was an overall survival of near 90 percent. ... one must not confuse the area of complete destruction of houses ... with ‘complete destruction’ of people. ... The gloomy habit of confusing the two concepts is, I am afraid, as prevalent as it is unrealistic and, indeed, untrue. ... Think of the differences in casualties which might have occurred in Hiroshima had the population just been mostly indoors.”

U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, never-published full May 1947 report 92 on Hiroshima, volume 2, typeset edition pages 126-8 (quoted on pages 176 and 98 of Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945): 

Structural damage by blast to multistory, steel- and reinforced concrete-frame structures did not extend beyond 2,000 feet from GZ. The buildings within this radius sustained an average of 12 percent structural damage. The average for all the buildings of this type in Hiroshima was 8 percent.”


These are modern city buildings. The burned out areas in old photos are congested (a roof to ground area averaging 42% in firestorm areas) wood frame houses. On page 98, Hiroshima: Ground Zero 1945 quotes the secret 1947 USSBS Hiroshima report, vol 1, pp 13-14 (typeset edition): 

“... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits.”

Note also that 
formerly secret measurements of the specific activity of fallout show that only about 1% of the crater volume becomes lofted fallout dust, most of which falls back rapidly: nuclear tests in the 1950s thus confirmed that there is no significant nuclear winter (cooling) from the cratered dust lofted as fallout. This claim relies on the carbon soot from large-scale firestorms (not just fires) which are supposed to inject a stable, non-humid, layer of hydroscopic carbon soot to altitudes where it can be warmed and achieve stable stable buoyancy, blocking out sunlight from lower altitudes. This contravenes the facts concerning the black rain in Hiroshima, which rapidly precipitated the soot. Robock's poorly researched but politically correct (peer-reviewer passed) Climactic Consequences of Regional Nuclear Conflicts (Atmos. Chem. Phys., v7, pp. 2003–2012, 2007) maintains the nuclear disaster delusion by ignoring all factual data on firestorm dust from Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 



The authors assume that all targeted cities will produce mass fires with efficient pyroconvective pumping, that these fires will consume basically all available flammable material in the target cities, and that rainout will only remove 20% of the soot before it reaches the upper atmosphere. These are not valid assumptions, and real-world experience with atmospheric nuclear weapons detonations does not bear them out. ... even Brode's relatively extreme views are incompatible with the bizarre assumptions made in the 2007 Toon et al. study, and consequently the many studies that now use its conclusions to model the effects of regional nuclear conflict. The extremely low 20% rainout value is particularly problematic- the authors have no real justification for it other than "because we used it in 1990, and it arguably happens this way in some forest fires." ... Indeed, neither Hiroshima or Nagasaki appears to fit the assumptions made in the study - rainout at Hiroshima seems to have been pretty pronounced (the famous black rain), and Nagasaki failed to develop into a full-blown firestorm due to the local topography. In any case, rainout after a nuclear explosion isnot the same as rainout resulting from a forest fire, as is attested by this 1988 study and this 1979 study of rainout following the atomic bombings in Japan. In short, Toon et al. really didn't do their research - at all.

Before quoting the firestorm details from the secret Hiroshima report, it is worth pointing out that all nuclear weapons stockpiled today are much smaller yield MIRV (multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles) than the heavy fallout weapons tested in the 1950s. Most are relatively little more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons. Professor Freeman Dyson debunked the popular myths in his 1985 book Weapons and Hope (Harper and Row, New York, pp. 33-41): 

“In 1957 ... Nevil Shute Norway published On the Beach, a description of mankind wiped out by radiological warfare [he had also previously published guesswork speculations about war in Britain in his April 1939 novel, What Happened to the Corbetts, which incorrectly speculated that bombing would cause a lack of clean water and cause that diseases like cholera to spread]. Norway's poignant translation of apocalyptic disaster into the everyday voices of real people caught the imagination of the world. His book became an international best-seller and was made into a successful film. The book and the film created an enduring myth, a myth which entered consciously or subconsciously into all subsequent thinking about nuclear war. ... Almost all the details are wrong: radioactive cobalt would not substantially increase the lethality of large hydrogen bombs; fallout would not descend uniformly over large areas but would fall sporadically in space and time; people could protect themselves from the radioactivity ... 

“The first generation of hydrogen bombs which were tested in 1952 and 1954 had yields running from ten to fifteen megatons. They were, from a modern point of view, absurdly and inconveniently large. ... By the time I paid my first visit to Los Alamos, in the summer of 1956, hydrogen bombs of the twenty-megaton class were already considered technologically obsolete; all the experts I spoke to were working on smaller bombs with lower yields. ... The race toward smaller bombs has been driven by ... the cruise missile and the MIRV (Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicle). ... As soon as cruise missiles and MIRVs are available, high-yield weapons rapidly become obsolete. ... The central paradox of the arms race is the discrepancy between public perception and reality. The public perceives the arms race as giving birth to an endless stream of weapons of ever-increasing destructiveness and ever-increasing danger. ... In the 1950s there was indeed a race to produce weapons of mass destruction ... Since then the arms race has been running strongly in other directions, away from weapons of mass destruction toward weapons of high precision. ... One consequence of the computer revolutions has been the replacement of big hydrogen bombs by the MIRV and the cruise missile.”

Above: of a sample of 1,881 burns cases in Hiroshima surveyed by Tokyo Imperial University in October-November 1945, only 17 (or 0.9 percent) were due to ignited clothing and 15 (or 0.7 percent) were due to the firestorm flames.  This disproves the myths of clothing ignition risks and firestorm burns risks from nuclear weapons.

Source: Table 8.2A in Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, by The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (706 pp, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1981). (In Japan, Iwanami Shoten, Publishers.)  



Extracts from Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, by The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (706 pp, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1981).  Tables 7.3 (casualties in wooden buildings) and 7.4 show that at 1 km from ground zero in Hiroshima the mortality rate was 75.3 percent for the 402 people in the wooden Second Hiroshima Army Hospital, but it was about twelve times smaller, only 6.5%, at the same distance for the modern concrete Hiroshima Broadcasting Station within the Hiroshima firestorm area.

These data prove that being inside the firestorm area was not the determining factor for survival and mortality; concrete buildings ensured survival by providing protection from radiation.  People surviving in concrete buildings could extinguish fires with water (as occurred inside the Bank of Japan, near ground zero, as proved by the secret classified report of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey on Hiroshima, evidence which was censored out of the unclassified version Truman published to try to intimidate Russia).

Table 7.2 in Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings shows that 580 members of the Labor service group from Otake, Hino Group, were walking on a road at Fukushima-cho, 2.3 km West from Hiroshima, and suffered 9 fatalities (1.6 percent mortality), of which 2 died on the day of the nuclear explosion and the other 5 died within the week.  Clothing provided great protection in Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, US Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Theatre, report 92, volume 2 (May 1947, secret):

Volume one, page 14:


“the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only “capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).”

Volume two examines the firestorm and the ignition of clothing by the thermal radiation flash in Hiroshima:

Page 24:

“Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.”

Page 88:

“Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims] ... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.”



What about long-term radiation effects?

"Up to 1975 a total of 1,838 cases diagnosed as leukemia in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been registered.  Among these were 512 cases exposed to the atomic bomb (those exposed within 10,000 metres of the explosion), and 256 cases considered to have received more than 1 rad. The yearly chance in the number of leukemia cases showed a peak in 1951 and 1952 and tended to decline thereafter in both cities."

Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, by The Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, page 259.

This is misleading, because it gives only the total number of leukemia cases, not the smaller proportion that are actually due to radiation in the group of 109,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki persons who were alive in 1950 and have been followed by the National Institute of Health in Japan:




Above: the latest data on solid cancers and blood cancers (leukemias) in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compiled by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation of Japan, show that only 10.7% of solid cancers were due to radiation and only 46% of leukemias were due to radiation.  In both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the majority of cancers were natural, therefore, and were not a result of the nuclear radiation exposure.  Contrast these facts to the mythology of the popular media, which is so corrupted by communist and American secrecy based money-spinning fear-mongering exaggerations of radiation and nuclear weapons effects that it is now taboo to tell the honest truth on nuclear matters.

The truth is that you needed between 0.5-1 Gray (50-100 rads) in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to get a leukemia risk from radiation equal to the natural leukemia risk, which is low anyway.  Thus, only personnel receiving over about 0.75 Gray (75 rads) who got leukemia were more likely than not to have got the leukemia as a result of the radiation exposure.  People getting leukemia who have received less than that massive radiation dose were more likely to have natural cancer, than radiation induced leukemia.

The latest DS02 dosimetry also supports a dose threshold of about 0.1 Gray or 10 rads, below which all leukemias are natural, for the very high dose rate of the initial radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  For low dose rates, as there is more time at a given dose for protein P53 to repair DNA damage caused by radiation (radiation unbinds P53 from its MDM2 inhibitor) so the dose threshold is much larger, about 20 Gray or 2000 rads, as proved by the radium dial painters discussed in Dr Sanders radiation hormesis research book.

For solid cancers, the RERF data show that you need over 2 Gray (200 rads) before the risk of radiation induced cancer equals the natural cancer risk.  Therefore, if you get cancer after an exposure to less than 200 rads (or 2 Grays), it is more than 50% probable than the cancer was natural DNA damage due to causes like natural thermal instability (brownian motion impacts of water ions against DNA molecules), not the radiation exposure.

These facts are vital for civil defense and nuclear weapons employment tactics, because they debunk exaggerations due to traditional weapons fear-mongering propaganda.  It is a crime to let lies circulate without opposition.  The efforts made by liars to shut down arguments they cannot win rationally, using censorship and "shoot the messenger" taboos, are threatening the future of terrorism safeguards.  If they succeed, we will return to the age of massive military spending on conventional arms which fail to deter and which therefore lead to world wars.  Whether those people are criminally ignorant or insane, they are a danger because their fear-mongering prevents the widespread objective assessment of serious dangers.

Above: recovery of population in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following nuclear war (Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings Figure 10.16).  The total mortality rate in each city was about 25 percent, so the majority of the population survived the nuclear warfare and rebuilding was rapid, as was the decay rate of the radioactivity.  At no time was either city evacuated completely.

Simon Kuznets, a Nobel laureate in economics, studied economic recovery from war in his classic book Postwar Economic Growth (Harvard University Press, 1964), disclosing that within five years the destroyed cities were exceeding their prewar economy provided that capitalism was embraced: the socialist central planning of East Germany meant that it only achieved 73% of its prewar economy by 1950, compared to 117% for the free capitalist economy of West Germany in 1950.

Therefore, those who seem to want socialism seem also to want an economic crisis after a nuclear war, by advocating Marxist economics.  The strong economy of capitalism enabled support for Western Germany in the Marshall plan, whereas East Germany was looted and heavily taxed by USSR thugs intent on persecution and enslavement.  No country can prosper under tyranny.  Capitalism works and is an essential component of recovery from war damage.  We discussed some aspects of the recovery in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a previous post linked here, and another linked here.

Robert Jungk carefully investigated the history of the recovery in Hiroshima by interviewing the people involved and collecting first hand reports, and gives further interesting details in his book Children of the Ashes(Heinemann, London, 1961):

1. On 31 August 1945: 'the first locally produced and locally printed post-war edition of the Chugoku Shimbunwas on sale in the streets of Hiroshima ... 'Our darkroom was an air-raid shelter dug into the hillside [which survived of course]', one of the editors remembers, 'but our type had to be cast in the open air, under the sunny sky.'

2. On 7 September 1945, the Chugoku Shimbun reported that Hiroshima then had a population estimated to be 130,000.

3. On 10 September 1945, electricity was reconnected to some parts of Hiroshima: 'huts made of planks quickly knocked together ... already had electric light.'

4. On 5 November 1945, the Chugoku Shimbun reported that - despite inertia and delays due to 'the rigidity of bureaucratic procedure' which was hindering the recovery rate - a lot of progress was being made:

'Housing. The building of houses is to be systematically begun on 15 November. ...

'Tramways. At present, ten trams are in commission on the main route, eight on the Miyajima route and five muncipal buses. These twenty-three vehicles must cater for an average of 42,000 persons daily.'

Some 70% of the destroyed buildings of Hiroshima had been reconstructed by mid-1949. (Ref.: Research Department, Hiroshima Municipal Office, as cited in Hiroshima, Hiroshima Publishing, 1949. Other recovery data are given in U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,Washington, D.C., 1946, p. 8.)


Examine the post-attack recovery rate in Hiroshima before any significant outside help arrived:


7 August (Day 2): Survivors open bridges and roads to pedestrian traffic, clearing away debris:


“The [Hiroshima] prefectural governor issued a proclamation on 7 August, calling for ‘a rehabilitation of the stricken city and an aroused fighting spirit ...’. To prevent the spread of rumors and brace morale, 210,000 out-of-town newspapers were brought in daily to replace the destroyed local paper.” (Source: U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 19 June 1946, page 9.)

8 August (Day 3): Rail tracks cleared and trains to Hiroshima resumed.

9 August (Day 4): Street trolley bus (electric tram) lines return to service.

1 November (Day 86):


“the population of Hiroshima is back to 137,000. ... The official Japanese figures summed up the building destruction at 62,000 out of a total of 90,000 buildings in the urban area, or 69%. An additional 6,000 or 6.6% were severely damaged, and most of the others showed glass breakage or disturbance of roof tile. These figures show the magnitude of the problem facing the survivors. ... In view of the lack of medical facilities, supplies and personnel, and the disruption of the sanitary system, the escape from epidemics may seem surprising. The experience of other bombed cities in Germany and Japan shows that this is not an isolated case. A possible explanation may lie in the disinfecting action of the extensive fires. In later weeks, disease rates rose, but not sharply.” (Source: U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey,The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 19 June 1946, page 9.)

Next, consider what civil defence did during the post-attack recovery process to help aid survivors in Nagasaki, subjected to a nuclear explosion just 3 days after Hiroshima:

9 August (Day 1): Emergency rations are brought in to feed 25,000 survivors (though less than the required amount, due to bureaucratic confusion). The survivors lived in the air-raid shelters, which had survived.

10 August (Day 2): Emergency rations are brought in to feed 67,000 survivors: “this represents a remarkable feat of organisation that illustrates the great possibilities of mass feeding.” (Source: Fred C. Ikle, The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction, University of Oklahoma Press, 1958, p. 147.)


“On the morning of 10 August [in Nagasaki], police rescue units and workers from the Kawami-nami shipbuilding works began the imperative task of clearing the Omura-Nagasaki pike, which was impassable for 8,000 feet. A path 6 ½ feet wide was cleared despite the intense heat from smouldering fires, and by August 15 had been widened to permit two-way traffic. No trucks, only rakes and shovels, were available for clearing the streets, which were filled with tile, bricks, stone, corrugated iron, machinery, plaster, and stucco. Street areas affected by blast and not by fire were littered with wood. Throughout the devastated area, all wounded had to be carried by stretcher, since no motor vehicles were able to proceed through the cluttered streets for several days. The plan for debris removal required clearance of a few streets leading to the main highway; but there were frequent delays caused by the heat of smouldering fires and by calls for relief work. The debris was simply raked and shoveled off the streets. By 20 August the job was considered complete. The streets were not materially damaged by the bomb nor were the surface or the abutments of the concrete bridges, but many of the wooden bridges were totally or partially destroyed by fire. ... Despite the absence of sanitary measures, no epidemics broke out here. The dysentery rate rose from 25/100,000 to 125/100,000. A census taken on 1 November 1945 found a population of 142,700 in the city [Nagasaki]. ... Of the 52,000 residential units in the city [of Nagasaki] on 1 August, 14,146 or 27.2 percent were completely destroyed (by Japanese count) (11,494 of these were burned); 5,441 or 10.5 percent were half-burned or destroyed; many of the remaining units suffered superficial or minor damage.” (Source: U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 19 June 1946, pages 12-13.)



Above: rapid recovery of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (source: Dr Fred C. Ikle's book The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction).  In addition, the worst firestorm in history, that on Hamburg, which destroyed 48% of the houses in the city and 3% of the population (the wooden medieval area was subject to the firestorm; other areas of brick houses burned more slowly with far fewer casualties) recovered its prewar population by 1950, and had recovered 80% of its building trade within 7 months of the firestorm, while Greater London recovered 98% of its prewar population by 1948 (see pages 16, 163 and 215 of Dr Fred C. Ikle's book The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction).  Dr Fred C. Ikle's book The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction, pages 159 and 163 also discloses that the destruction of a UK city did not spell doomsday: Coventry's destruction by a massive Nazi air raid on 14-15 November 1940 resulted in 4.5 working days lost per employee, and only 1.3-1.7% of England's population was in full-time civil defense.




Above: nobody was instantly killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki according to the data given in Figure 7.2 of Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings.  The vast majority of the deaths in both cities were spread over a period of about 30-40 days, with 50 percent within the first 6 days.  This corresponds to the time taken for deaths from thermal burns, radiation sickness and infected wounds from flying glass and other debris.  All of these sources of mortality can be minimized by civil defense, such as shelter away from windows on the floor of concrete buildings.

Oughterson and Warren's 1956 McGraw-Hill published book Medical Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, page 134, shows that hair loss rates peaked at 26 percent of survivors at 15 days after the Hiroshima strike, falling rapidly to a few percent at 40 days, while purpura (blood spots visible under the skin, due to a decreases in blood platelets which are essential to prevent such bleeding by clotting small blood vessel leaks effectively as soon as they occur) incidence peaked at 25 percent of survivors at 25-30 days after the Hiroshima burst, before falling rapidly to a few percent at 55 days.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear war exaggerations for the USSR backed surrender movement

Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings contains an introduction which falsely implies that all deaths which occur anywhere downwind from the 1954 Bravo nuclear test are caused by radiation (page 4):

"A total of 290 people were affected - 239 inhabitants of three atolls in the area, of whom 46 people died during the period 1954-66 ..."

What is not stated is that the 46 people were deaths from natural causes.  The one fatality in the Marshallese group probably due to radiation occurred in 1972, a leukemia death.  You would expect to get over 1 percent mortality per year in any population due to natural mortality!  The Preface to the English edition dated 12 February 1981 makes similarly misleading propaganda claims, exaggerating the scaling laws of nuclear weapons effects and ignoring the smaller casualty rates in modern city concrete buildings, than in the wooden buildings that predominated in cities in 1945 Japan.  The facts given in the book do not, therefore, agree with the narrative dogma of anti-nuclear propaganda which is included in the book. The Preface admits that recovery of populations and wealth following nuclear war was rapid, despite the wooden houses being burned down and only concrete buildings surviving in the firestorm areas.

The fact is that radiation scare-mongering for political purposes as well as for Hollywood style science fantasy (On the Beach, Dr Strangelove, Planet of the Apes, etc.) terrorized many of the survivors and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and caused the social and psychological fears which have proved unnecessary as the effects of radiation have become clearer.  This is obfuscated by those who try to use Hiroshima data peace propaganda, by falsely pretending that all deaths after a nuclear war are due to fallout.

One more interesting fact in Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings is worth mentioning.  Tables 10.1 and 10.3 show that Hiroshima had 76,327 buildings of which 64,521 were wooden dwellings, and 47,969 were burned down with 3,818 demolished by blast alone.  But Nagasaki had 48,950 buildings of which only 11,574 (23.6 percent) were burned out and 1,326 were demolished by blast alone.  Lesser damage was sustained by the remaining buildings.  The variability in the total number of deaths in Hiroshima is also explained on page 470:

"To summarize the preceding sources, almost 50,000 Koreans lived in Hiroshima city at the time of the atomic bombing, and roughly 20,000 of these died."

The inclusion or exclusion of these Korean slaves causes a disagreement in the numbers killed for Hiroshima, in different sources.  For this reason, they are generally unreliable, and the important fact is that the mortality depended very strongly on the type of building (wood or concrete) and whether the people were standing and exposed to blast winds and flying glass, or lying prone and relatively safe from wind drag and debris.

Part IV of Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings is labelled "Towards the abolition of nuclear arms" and consists of anti-nuclear weapons propaganda and pro-disarmament lobbying of the sort which created the 1930s appeasement era leading to WWII, and therefore makes for unpleasant reading.  However, it does describe the American secrecy, for example the decision to seize Japanese data on survival in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to classify it as secret during the intense nuclear publicity period of the late 1940s, only declassifying some of the data in 1951 (when the San Francisco Peace Treaty was signed by Japan), well after public prejudices had hardened and the "science had settled" without the correct facts being included in the undemocratic debate.  The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in 1946 seized all the Japanese films and other data (page 510):

"All films, including 30,000 feet of negatives and other data, were requisitioned by the American authorities and sent to the United States in mid-May.  Only ten reels of film ... were left in Japan. ... The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey [USSBS] had been organized by the U.S. Army in November 1944 to investigate the bombing effects in Germany.  On 15 August 1945, the day of surrender, President Harry S. Truman ordered the USSBS to investigate all effects of the atomic bombings on Japan and to report the findings to the United States departments of War and of the Navy.  This survey staff was headed by T. D'Oliver, assisted by Paul M. Nitze and Henry Alexander, and was composed of 1,150 personnel ..."

The role of Stalin's communist propaganda machine in the anti-nuclear movements of Japan is documented on page 573, to try to ban American nuclear deterrence that might interfere with communist expansion across Eastern Europe, prior to the first Russian nuclear test of August 1949:

"In August 1948 intellectuals from East and West met in [communist] Poland [location for the 1955 Warsaw Pact of Eastern Europe] for the World Congress of Intellectuals to Protect the Peace; and in April 1949 the First World Assembly to Protect the Peace was held in Paris and Prague.  The assembly committee called for 'an absolute ban on atomic weapons' and 'establishment of international supervision to guarantee its observance'."

Page 591:

"The Peace Problems Research Group was formed at Hiroshima University in September 1951.  In February 1953, volunteers from universities throughout Hiroshima City organized the University Group to Protect Peace and Learning ..."

Page 594 notes that the Japan Teachers Union, 500,000 members strong, began in June 1947 and was mobilized as a peace movement after the Korean War broke out in 1950, with 1951 seminars throughout Japan under the slogan "Don't send our students to the battlefield again."

Page 595 explains how the teachers unions peace propaganda then diversified into the Hiroshima anti-nuclear campaign, much to the horror of those conservatives in Japan who wanted to rearm for deterrence:

"Peace education was promoted in each prefectural teachers union.  The Yamaguchi Prefecture Teachers Union, for example, collected daily diaries ... excerpts ... from a primary school pupil's 1953 diary, expressed opposition to rearmament - and provoked fiery criticism about 'ideologically prejudiced education' from the conservative camp that was pushing for the rearmament of Japan."

The Chronology at pages 615-629, also page 6 for the typhoon on 17 September 1945 which wiped out a majority of the bridges of Hiroshima:

23 August 1945: Mainichi Shimbun newspaper reports false American claim that Hiroshima and Nagasaki will remain uninhabitable for 70 years due to radiation.

24 August 1945: Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Hochi Shinbun newspapers report false American claim that Hiroshima and Nagasaki will remain uninhabitable for 75 years due to radiation. (Five years longer than previous day's news.)

17 September 1945: typhoon hits Hiroshima, with flood waters sweeping away over half of the bridges of the city (which survived the nuclear blast on 6 August!).  Natural disasters can be worse than nuclear war.

3 September 1945: Russian spy and propaganda spreading "journalist" Wilfred Burchett arrives in Hiroshima and starts to write exaggerating accounts of radiation to drum up anti-nuclear movement to help Stalin.

7 February 1965: Democratic President Lyndon Johnson begins to bomb North Vietnam with disastrous results (ignoring the lessons of air power in WWII), instead of using nuclear weapons to blow down a proper demilitarized belt of jungle between North and South that could be patrolled safely from the air.  It is believed that this policy will avoid intensifying the Cold War, but it does the opposite, leads to failure when the economic costs become too high, and promotes communist-encouraging "peace" protests and thus appeasement with the massive USSR military build-up, continuing until Reagan opposed it during the 1980s.

Psychological effects of the Atomic Bombings and civil defense

The greatest irony of Hiroshima and NagasakiThe Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings is that on page 14 it repeats the finding of Seiichi Nakano who in October 1952 surveyed the social-psychological effects incidence for 332 Hiroshima survivors as compared to a control group of 268 unexposed personnel in Kure City.  Nakano discovered that survivors within 1 km of ground zero in Hiroshima suffered trauma and guilt afterwards because most abandoned family members to escape soon after the explosion.  (Reference: Seiichi Nakano, "Sociological Study of Atomic Bomb Effects, in Genbaku to Hiroshima or The Atomic Bomb and Hiroshima, Collection of Research Papers of University Men's Group, first collection, University Group to Protect Peace and Learning, ed. Hiroshimaken Kyoshokuin Kumiai Jigyobu, Hiroshima.)  This is precisely in accordance with the 1966 Dirkwood Corporation analysis of rescue efforts in after the nuclear attacks in Japan (in AD0653922), which showed that only a few percent of people near ground zero were rescued by others, leading to guilt in the survivors.  This is therefore one of the strongest arguments for increasing world knowledge of nuclear weapons effects and civil defense rescue techniques.


The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, secret, unpublished three-volume May 1947 report 

The 14 October to 26 November 1945 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of Hiroshima is the key compendium of data, with much more data than any nuclear test report from the 1950s. A 1946 British Mission to Japan report includes photographs of air raid shelters which survived near ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but gives the survival data of 15,000 school children (in teams clearing firebreaks mainly outdoors), without stating the survival rates inside modern buildings. This is also done in Manhattan District report on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the 1950-77 editions of The Effects of Atomic Weapons and The Effects of Nuclear Weapons where no breakdown of survival data in different kinds of buildings and in the open is provided. In particular, the cause of the Hiroshima firestorm was determined by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in its secret May 1947 report, but this was omitted from publications such as its unclassified report and the book, The Effects of Atomic Weapons. 

Beginning with an incendiary raid on Tokyo on 9 March 1945 which Japanese records showed killed 83,793 and burned out 267,000 buildings (25% of Tokyo’s buildings), sixty-four Japanese cities were destroyed by non-nuclear air raids.The detailed and objective analysis of these incendiary air raids was classified “Restricted” in April 1947 by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in its unpublished limited distribution typeset and printed report Number 90, Effects of Incendiary Bomb Attacks on Japan, (108 MB PDF linked here). Part 3 (pages 65-118) documents the effects of the 9 March 1945 Tokyo incendiary raid, with photos on pages 104-109 very similar to the damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (combustible light frame buildings burned out with their steel distorted by the fires, and piles of charred bodies in streets). By omitting to publish this, an objective comparison of nuclear with conventional attacks was prevented. 

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, USSBS report 92, volume 2 (typeset May 1947 edition, secret) 

Volume one, page 14: “the city lacked buildings with fire-protective features such as automatic fire doors and automatic sprinkler systems”, and pages 26-28 state the heat flash in Hiroshima was only “capable of starting primary fires in exposed, easily combustible materials such as dark cloth, thin paper, or dry rotted wood exposed to direct radiation at distances usually within 4,000 feet of the point of detonation (AZ).” Page 85 of volume one explains why so many people were outdoors in Hiroshima at 8:15 on 6 August 1945: 

Conditions on Morning of Attack. The morning of 6 August 1945 was clear with a small amount of clouds at high altitude. Wind was from the south with a velocity of about 4.5 miles per hour. Visibility was 10 to 15 miles. An air-raid ‘alert’ was sounded throughout Hiroshima Prefecture at 0709 hours [the weather survey B-29 aircraft flying one hour ahead of the nuclear bomber]. ‘All-clear’ was sounded at 0731 hours. The following circumstances account in part for the high number of casualties resulting from the atomic bomb: 

(1) Only a few persons remained in the air-raid shelters after the ‘all-clear’ sounded.

(2) No ‘alert’ was sounded to announce the approach of the planes involved in the atomic-bomb attack.

(3) The explosion occurred during the morning rush hours when people had just arrived at work or were hurrying to their places of business. This concentrated the population in the center of the city ...”


Volume two examines the ignition of clothing by the thermal radiation flash in Hiroshima: 

Page 24: “Scores of persons throughout all sections of the city were questioned concerning the ignition of clothing by the flash from the bomb. ... Ten school boys were located during the study who had been in school yards about 6,200 feet east and 7,000 feet west, respectively, from AZ [air zero]. These boys had flash burns on the portions of their faces which had been directly exposed to rays of the bomb. The boys’ stories were consistent to the effect that their clothing, apparently of cotton materials, ‘smoked,’ but did not burst into flame. ... a boy’s coat ... started to smoulder from heat rays at 3,800 feet from AZ.” 

Page 28: “Wood poles as far as 10,000 feet in a southerly direction from AZ [air zero] and 13,000 feet in a northerly direction were flash-burned but the burns, generally not much more than a discoloration of the wood, were in all cases only on the side of the pole facing AZ. ... it is logical to conclude that wood (ignition temperature approximately 450 F) was not raised to its ignition temperature, except possibly in its most easily ignitable condition, such as dry-rotted. Surface spalling or roughening of granite by heat was observed near GZ and as far as 2,400 feet from AZ. This condition was only noticeable where the granite was directly exposed to rays from the bomb (surfaces facing AZ but shielded from it were not spalled) indicating that extremely high temperatures lasted only a fraction of a second. Asphalt road surfaces and asphalt-painted surfaces also were flash-burned, distinct shadows of objects being cast upon them, which again indicated that the radiated heat from the bomb created a temperature which was high but of short duration. ... Blisters as much as one-sixteenth inch high were raised on exposed tile at GZ (2,000 feet from AZ), decreasing in size as the distance from AZ increased until they were barely visible at 4,400 feet from AZ (4,000 feet from GZ).” 

Page 34: “The fire wind seems to have reached its maximum velocity about 2 to 3 hours after the bomb explosion, following which it began to diminish in intensity. ... the heavier rain began about 3,500 feet west of GZ and extended westward about 5,000 feet. Light rain was reported to have fallen near the center of the city. ... Rain fell almost exclusively in the northwest area of the city ... accounted for by the light natural wind from the southeast which blew particles of hot carbon northwestward to a cooler area where moisture condensed about them and fell as rain.” 

Page 44: “A special effort was made to determine the probable cause of initial ignition in buildings in which there was fire and the reason for non-ignition in buildings in which there was no fire. By observation and by interrogation of persons who were in or near the buildings when the bomb detonated it was established that the probable causes of initial ignition in 40 of the 58 fire-resistive [not wood frame] buildings in which there was fire were as follows: 8 by heat radiation from the bomb (primary fire); 3 by blast disturbance of telephone or chemical laboratory equipment (secondary fire); and 29 by fire spread from exposing buildings.” 

Page 45: “Direct Ignition by the Atomic Bomb. ... 

“(1) Each of the eight fire-resistive buildings in which primary fire was reported had unprotected windows facing AZ. Black cotton black-out curtains or light-weight paper, or both, were reported to have ignited initially in most of these buildings. All buildings in Hiroshima whose windows were not equipped with steel-roller shutters, which were considered light-proof, were required to have black-out curtains. Among the eight buildings which had primary fires, the farthest from AZ was Building 64 [Hiroshima Communications Hospital] at 5,300 feet [from AZ, or 4,900 feet from GZ]. 

“(2) A doctor who was in the first story of Building 64, a hospital 5,300 feet from AZ, stated that he discovered fire in the second story 10 minutes after the detonation, but was unable to identify the source. ... Cotton black-out curtains were drawn across the second-story windows only. ... Contents in the second story were totally damaged by fire, but in the first story only a few pieces of wooden furniture near the windows in the south wall facing AZ were scorched ...” 

Page 70: “Direct Ignition by the Atomic Bomb. None of the 8 non-combustible buildings which had [contents] fire in them was reported to have had its contents ignited by radiated heat from the bomb. All except 3 (Buildings 46, 78, and 81) of the 12 non-combustible buildings had at least some unprotected wall openings facing AZ at the time of detonation of the bomb. The contents of these 3 buildings were shielded from direct radiated heat from the bomb by a blank wall, closed fire shutters, or another building. ... 

Pages 74-75: “Combustible Construction. a. General. ... combustible buildings were load-bearing, brick-wall structures with wooden floors or roof, or both; steel-frame structures with wooden purlins and studs ... It was established that the probable cause of initial ignition in 23 of the 41 buildings which had fire was as follows: 3 by secondary fire (electrical equipment, stoves and industrial furnaces), and 20 by fire spread from exposing buildings. ... No eyewitness testimony was obtained to the effect that any one of the 41 fire-damaged combustible buildings was ignited directly by flash heat from the bomb. 

b. Direct Ignition by the Atomic Bomb. Although none of the 41 fire-damaged combustible buildings was reported to have been ignited by radiated heat from the bomb, it is considered probable that the contents of a few of the buildings which had unshielded wall openings facing AZ and which were within 4,000 feet of AZ were ignited in this manner. Since wooden poles and other exposed wood, even near GZ, were only flash burned by the bomb, it seems unlikely that exposed wood outside or inside buildings was ignited directly. ... 

c. Ignition by Secondary Fire. It was established that the initial ignition in three combustible buildings (3 [Hiroshima Electric Company’s Yagurashita Substation 900 feet from GZ], 37 [Takano Bath House 4,200 feet from GZ], and 72 [Toyo Light Alloy Company 6,200 feet from GZ]) was probably by secondary fire. These comprise 13 percent of the cases in which the probable cause was determined in this class of building. Building 3, an electric substation, was ignited by short circuits in electric generating and transforming equipment after the blast had collapsed the combustible roof. ... Building 37, a public bath house, was ignited by a hot stove after the blast had collapsed the combustible roof so that it fell on the stove. The combustible debris and contents were completely consumed. Building 72, an aluminum foundry, was ignited by a hot stove ...” 

Page 88: “Ignition of the City. ... Only directly exposed surfaces were flash burned. Measured from GZ, flash burns on wood poles were observed at 13,000 feet, granite was roughened or spalled by heat at 1,300 feet, and vitreous tiles on roofs were blistered at 4,000 feet. ... six persons who had been in reinforced-concrete buildings within 3,200 feet of air zero stated that black cotton blackout curtains were ignited by radiant heat ... dark clothing was scorched and, in some cases, reported to have burst into flame from flash heat [although as the 1946 USSBS report admits, most immediately beat the flames out with their hands without sustaining injury, because the clothing was not drenched in gasoline, unlike peacetime gasoline tanker road accident victims] ... but a large proportion of over 1,000 persons questioned was in agreement that a great majority of the original fires was started by debris falling on kitchen charcoal fires, by industrial process fires, or by electric short circuits. Hundreds of fires were reported to have started in the centre of the city within 10 minutes after the explosion. Of the total number of buildings investigated [135 buildings are listed] 107 caught fire, and in 69 instances, the probable cause of initial ignition of the buildings or their contents was as follows: (1) 8 by direct radiated heat from the bomb (primary fire), (2) 8 by secondary sources, and (3) 53 by fire spread from exposed [wooden] buildings.” 

Page 110: “The most common failure of wood-frame buildings was buckling of the relatively slender columns ... This resulted usually either from a mass displacement of the building away from the blast, or from panel walls being blown in and carrying the columns along.” 

Pages 126-8: “Structural damage by blast to multistory, steel- and reinforced concrete-frame structures did not extend beyond 2,000 feet from GZ. The buildings within this radius sustained an average of 12 percent structural damage. The average for all the buildings of this type in Hiroshima was 8 percent.” 

Page 96 gives the mean destructive distance for multistory steel and reinforced concrete frame (both earthquake and non-earthquake resistant) buildings at 700 feet, compared to 9,200 feet for Japanese (wood-pole constructed) wooden houses. The damaged areas are proportional to the square of the radius, so although the Japanese wooden houses were only destroyed out to a radius about 13 times greater than modern city buildings, they were destroyed over an that was 173 times greater. Thus, for a similar bomb yield and altitude, the number of damaged buildings in a modern city would be 173 times less than in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. 

Page 126 states that the effects would have been stronger near ground zero for a lower burst height, but “lowering the height of detonation would have increased the amount of shielding of one structure by another”, thereby preventing the wide-area Mach stem enhanced blast and thermal effects like flash burns. Penney published extensive evidence of blast wave attenuation by the work energy done in causing damage (the force F due to a blast pushing a wall distance D in the direction of the blast uses energy E = FD, so energy is continually lost from the blast wave in a city, in doing damage). 

Although fashionable books on Hiroshima tend to print pictures of the “blasted” twisted metal beams of the Odamasa Store (former Taiyo Theatre), USSBS building 52 at 2,800 feet from ground zero, page 322 explains it is an effect of fire: “Severe distortion caused by burning of combustible construction and contents.” Furthermore, similar twisting of metal frames in wooden buildings occurred in the Toyko incendiary attack, but those photos remained Restricted. It is not a special “nuclear” effect, nor are the burned bodies in the streets of Tokyo photographed after the main non-nuclear attack, despite all the polemic and inaccurate claims attacking civil defense. 

Volume three states on page 29: 

“The atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima, although it was an extremely powerful blast weapon, caused relatively little structural damage to the 81 important bridges. Scattered throughout the entire city, the bridges, 260 to 15,600 feet from ground zero (GZ), connected islands to islands and islands to the mainland, forming an adequate and efficient bridge system. ... impressive evidence of the ability of the bridges to resist the forces of the Hiroshima atomic bomb (air-burst at 2,000 feet) was found in the facts that (1) 10 of 19 timber bridges studied were undamaged, (2) 10 of 15 concrete bridges had no damage, and (3) 14 of 23 steel bridges were undamaged.” 

This is illustrated by the survival of the nuclear target point, the distinctive T-shaped Aioi bridge at the intersection of the Ota and Motoyasu Rivers (located 1,000 feet from ground zero due to the Hiroshima bombing error). Volume three at page 40 explains: “This bridge of plate-girder design received physical damage of a spectacular and interesting nature but it continued to carry unrestricted highway, pedestrian, and street railway traffic. The longitudinal steel girders suffered no great structural damage although a slight lateral deformation indicated that they had been highly stressed.” Bridge 20 over the Motoyasu River at 2,900 feet from ground zero retained clear “shadows” of non-scorched asphalt cast by the hand railings, one of the pieces of evidence which allowed geometric determination of the burst location and altitude. 

EMP effects in Hiroshima may have been masked by blast and fire damage, as indicated in volume three, pages 191-6: “Of the 7 substations of the Chugoku Electric Co., the Sendamachi substation and steam-electric plant at 7,700 feet from GZ were heavily damaged by fires which spread to the area. The Otemachi substation, 2,400 feet from GZ, was heavily damaged by blast and fires started by the short-circuited equipment. The Dambara, Misasa, and Eba substations were only slightly damaged at distances from GZ of 5,500 feet and beyond. ... Analysis of the Damage. The Hiroshima substation, 15,000 feet from GZ, was undamaged by blast as a direct effect, but the tremendous overload created by the short-circuited damaged electrical equipment in the city of Hiroshima tripped the circuit breakers in the substation and immediately interrupted all electrical services in the Hiroshima area.”


The reason why there is statistically reliable data on high doses of radiation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is simply the fact that many people - far from being instantly vaporized along with all buildings near ground zero - survived all of the nuclear explosion effects within the Hiroshima firestorm in the Bank of Japan and Geibi Bank Company, and extinguished fires 2-3 hours after the nuclear explosion when firebrands (burning cinders) were blown through broken windows from the wooden areas firestorm surrounding these modern concrete city buildings. The U.S. Department of Defense DCPA Attack Environment Manual 1973, chapters 3 and 8, documents the successful firefighting in modern buildings within the Hiroshima firestorm. Amateur fire-fighting in the Hiroshima nuclear attack is more applicable to modern cities today which contain fire-sprinkler systems in vulnerable buildings and fewer wooden houses: 

“The study involves the development of techniques to evaluate the effect of fire defenses on building fires caused by a nuclear burst and the incorporation of the fire-defense techniques in a fire-spread model. ... Preliminary computations indicate that within a few hours about 1/4 of the manpower available in a tract can suppress all fires created by the initial ignition of 1/2 or less of the buildings. Most of the manpower, particularly those in the self-help teams, can be diverted to other activities after several minutes of effort. The preliminary results show that ordinary citizens with minimal instruction and training can bring about very pronounced reductions in the total fire damage.”

- Arthur N. Takata, Mathematical Modelling of Fire Defenses, IIT Research Institute, report AD0688941, 1969
 (See also part 2, AD0705388.) 

The U.S. Department of Defense's 1973 DCPA Attack Environment Manual, chapter 3, panel 26 used the examples of successful amateur fire-fighting modern Western-type city buildings in Hiroshima as proof that people can survive in modern city buildings exposed near ground zero within the firestorm of a nuclear explosion (due to overcrowded wooden housing areas). The data came from reports which remained limited or secret in distribution, however. Panel 27 in chapter 3 of the 1973 DCPA Attack Environment Manual states:

"The evidence from Hiroshima indicates that blast survivors, both injured and uninjured, in buildings later comsumed by fire were generally able to move to safe areas following the explosion. Of 130 major buildings studied by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey ... 107 were ultimately burned out ... Of those suffering fire, about 20 percent were burning within the first half hour. The remainder were consumed by fire spread, some as late as 15 hours after the blast."

This proves that the rapid room flashover filmed Upshot-Knothole Encore test effect in a litter-filled wooden and imflammable materials-filled room with a large window facing the fireball with no obstructions or "shadowing", did not occur in the 80% humidity conditions of Hiroshima, far higher than in the drier Nevada test site desert (the humidity in Hiroshima was 80% and in Nagasaki it was 71%, see table VI of William E. Loewe, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report UCRL-90258, 1983). Although humidity has relatively little effect on the ignition energy for thin fine kindling materials, the proportionate effect is far greater for thicker fuels with the same equilibrium moisture content. The thermal flash can dry out damp paper; but it cannot dry out damp wood (a maximum of 0.85 mm of the surface of wood was charred by 50 cal/cm2 from a 30 kt test in 1955 as proved by Kyle Laughlin in nuclear weapon test report WT-1198, 1957). Therefore, rapid flashover does not occur in realistic city humidity (most cities are beside rivers, lakes or the ocean). It did not occur from thermal radiation in Hiroshima.

Panel 3 of chapter 3 of the 1973 DCPA Attack Environment Manual also points out that the predictions of thermal burns in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons omit protection due to shadows by tall buildings in modern cities, and duck and cover evasive action: "Persons caught in the open or near windows can also take advantage of the relative slow pace of the thermal pulse from large-yield weapons. ... Further out, even more time would be available. In the light damage area (1 to 2 psi), evasive action within the first four seconds would avoid significant burn injury."
 

In The Number of Atomic Bombs Equivalent to the Last War Air Attacks on Great Britain and Germany (National Archives piece HO 225/16, 1950, Top Secret for 8 years then Restricted until 1980), the British Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch points out nuclear war damage and casualties tends to be exaggerated by the media’s incorrect use of Hiroshima. For example, it found that actual WWII damage on Britain was found to be equivalent to 52 Hiroshima bomb’s “for the night raiding conditions on London in the last war, where something like 60% of the population were in houses, 35% in shelter and 5% in the open ...” 







Above: conventional warfare dropped 240 kilotons of bombs on Germany in the month of March 1945 alone, equivalent to 15 times the 16 kt Hiroshima nuclear bomb, i.e., one Hiroshima every 2 days during March 1945. 

Note that in both WWI and WWII the vast majority of the weapons and explosives used were manufactured during the war itself, so prior disarmamant would not have assured that no weapons were used. One assumption in most disarmament propaganda is that a war is an instant all-out blitz; this assumption was made prior to WWI and was proved false, and again before WWII and was proved false again. The whole of the second-strike capability of hardened silos and hidden submarines designed by RAND Corporation strategists in the late 1950s was specifically aimed at removing any temptation for such a short knock-out war. This second-strike system remains and takes away any rational incentive to launch a surprise all-out attack.


This is why, as President Obama stated, the major risk from nuclear weapons is a limited nuclear attack due to terrorism and rogue states. A nuclear attack will have a similar effect to large WWII air raids, but the effects will be easier to mitigate than V2 warheads, if people are informed about the reality of nuclear weapons effects phenomenology, and duck before the blast wave arrives, stamp out fires, and take cover from fallout. EMP will often rapidly disconnect the electrical fire risk by activating circuit breakers in substations, as at the Nevada test site after EMP pick up in long cables which carried thousands of amps from close-in locations out to the control point 30 miles away (not only to the 2 psi overpressure range gives in Glasstone and Dolan, which confuses the range to which cables pick up EMP with the range to which currents can be carried by cables). This is made clear in B. J. Stralser's secret 30 April 1961 E.G. and G. report Electromagnetic effects from nuclear tests

Distributing the same explosive energy over many small bombs (rather than a single large bomb) in conventional is actually more damaging, since people have no time to respond near a small bomb that explodes. Additionally, the overpressure-damaged area from a bomb scales up only as the two-thirds power of the explosive energy, and is equivalent to megatons of nuclear weapons per month. The Manhattan Project in 1945 at best could produce only two bombs per month. There is a tendency among many politicians, historians, disarmers, and others to down-play conventional warfare and to exaggerate the effects of nuclear weapons, by misleadingly selective use of statistics.


As for evidence for firestorm soot causing nuclear winter, the sun was obscured by the mushroom cloud dust and smoke for 25 minutes (from burst time at 8:15 am until 8:40) in Hiroshima as shown by the meteorological sunshine records printed in Figure 6 (3H) of Drs. Ashley W. Oughterson, Henry L. Barnett, George V. LeRoy, Jack D. Rosenbaum, Averill A. Liebow, B. Aubrey Schneider, and E. Cuyler Hammond, Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs: The Report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, Volume 1, Office of the Air Surgeon, report NP-3036, April 19, 1951, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (linked here). There were no reported casualties due to 25 minutes of sunlight deprivation.

(Source of WWII monthly bombing weight bar charts: Overall Report, European War, USSBS, 1945, charts 3 and 4. Chart 1 in this document shows that 2,697,473 tons of bombs were dropped on the occupied countries in Europe by the US Army Air Force and the RAF, including 50.3% on Germany, 21.8% on France and 13.7% on Italy. In 1945, essentially all of the bombing was on Germany.)

The fact that civilian damage can be accomplished by conventional warfare led the British Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (William Waldegrave) to explain in the 28 July 1988 House of Commons debate on Disarmament (HansardHC Deb 28 July 1988 vol 138 c778):

"Britain and Europe have suffered dreadfully from conventional wars during this century, and modern conventional weapons are many times more destructive than those of 40 years ago. ... That is why we must insist that nuclear arms control must not make Europe safe for conventional war ..." Nuclear weapons were clearly not responsible for WWI or WWII, despite false and misleading anti-civil defense propaganda spread by Noel Baker, Joseph Rotblat and others who found it immoral to use nuclear weapons for ending WWII but were happy to work on them when it happened to suit their personal pet politics. When a terrorist uses a weapon and thousands of people don't duck and cover against blast, glass and radiation, what does the great "free" media of fashionable groupthink prejuduce do then? Laugh at the needless suffering? Pretend that they followed the consensus of politically dogmatic consensus that was justified by the long term ambition to end nuclear deterrence and go back to conventional war, and to do this by telling lies about civil defense? Or do what it usually does, and learn the lessons when it is too late to prevent needless suffering? here.) 

London received 71 major raids (over 100 tons/raid) in the Blitz from 7 Sept 1940 to 16 May 1941, consisting of 18,291 tons or 18.291 kilotons of high explosive, over twice the blast yield (8 kt) of the 16 kt Hiroshima nuclear bomb (O’Brien, Civil Defence, 1955, Appendix IV, p681). These explosives were mainly 50 kg and 250 kg (B’Brien, p505), an average of about 0.1 ton of explosive per bomb. The scaled area equivalent megatonnage for overpressure damage areas and casualties from the London Blitz is therefore 4 thermonuclear weapons, each with a total yield of 2 megatons (1 megaton of which is blast): 

(4 bombs) x (1 megaton TNT blast yield)2/3 = (182,910 bombs of 0.1 ton each) x (10-7 megatons blast yield)2/3

Home Office experts had experience from the WWII Blitz, visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 after the nuclear air bursts (as part of the British Mission to Japan), and set up Anderson shelters at Monte Bello to assess their protection against nuclear war at the first British nuclear bomb test. The first manual they issued on nuclear attack was the excellent 1950 “Atomic Warfare” (PDF file, 6 MB, linked here) with 24 photos of damage from blast, heat and fire from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the protection from heat flash by shadows, a discussion of shelters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a blast pressure graph and discussion, and a Foreword by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee. Then, under Prime Minister Churchill, in 1953 the British Government published its excellent civil defence training notes “The atom bomb, its effects and how to meet them: Heat” (0.6 MB PDF) and “The atom bomb, its effects and how to meet them: Effects on personnel” (0.8 MB PDF). 

Most later British manuals appeared to be mindless drivel, despite being based on more solid evidence from nuclear testing,because all the evidence was secret and had to be omitted, leaving patronising advice that looked pathetic to readers. Even the Hiroshima and Nagasaki shelter photos and discussions were omitted from future Home Office Nuclear Weapons and Protect and Survive handbooks, instead of adding more photos and data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to inform the readers about the possibilities for survival. However, the 1960 Civil Defence Handbook no. 7 Rescue, a 25 MB PDF file, linked here does reprint key Hiroshima and Nagasaki building damage photos, showing building response to blast from the standpoint of improvised rescue techniques, comparing it to the London Blitz. Also in 1960, concise Civil Defence Instructors’ General Notes (78 pages, PDF linked here) were published which provide an excellent brief overview of civil defence against conventional high explosive bombs, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons

What went wrong with civil defense during the Cold War era was the move towards hubris, arrogance, patronising, dependence upon authority, and increasing secrecy over the basis of the evidence for widely mocked and attacked civil defense countermeasures against nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Instead of focussing on making the lessons of Hiroshima clear for all to understand, these lessons went unpublished or were actually classified secret. The failure of the government to effectively and scientifically answer and demolish false propaganda attacks in the media against civil defense undermines national security when the chips are down: 

“The only way to win a war is to escalate it one way or another above what the enemy can endure. If we feel that we cannot win without unacceptable risk we have no business fighting in the first place.

“There are just two checks on escalation. One is the waning of motivation for fighting the war in the first place. A long grinding war of attrition on the ground might achieve this ... The second check on escalation is to so overwhelm your enemy with such heavy and rapid destruction that he loses all hope of winning. Then surrender is an attractive choice when compared to inevitable defeat or certain death. This, of course, is the way we brought Japan to terms in 1945. It was unnecessary to invade with infantry and fight a ground war. We seem to have forgotten this fact. Even though Japan had four million troops under arms with two million guarding her shores, not a shot was fired. We invaded with fourteen hundred military administrators, by air. Not a life was lost in this invasion.

“The Japanese had been highly motivated to wage war against us. Kamikaze tactics and no-surrender policies were typical. Yet a realization that Japan simply could not win and the certainty that continued resistance meant mounting devastation caused her to toss in the sponge. ... In the final analysis, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved and dozens of cities spared ... In Korea ... there were three and a half million military casualties on both sides during three years of drawn-out war. Over a million civilians were killed ...”

- General Curtis E. LeMay, America is in Danger, pages 307-9.


In a surprise attack, conventional weapons give practically no time for defensive countermeasures, unlike the bright flash prior to the blast arrival over most of the damaged area in a nuclear explosion, which acts as a warning. With nuclear weapons, there is an automatic warning prior blast and fallout arrival over the wide areas of destruction, which gives time for most people to take effective countermeasures and was used by people who experienced the Hiroshima nuclear explosion before travelling to Nagasaki and surviving the second nuclear explosion. As explained by Professor Joseph O. Hirschfelder, “The Effects of Atomic Weapons”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August-September 1950, vol. VI, no. 8-9, pp. 236-40 and 285-6 (quotation from page 238):

“Because of the comparatively long duration of the thermal radiation, exposed personnel can greatly reduce their exposure by ducking behind an obstacle or dropping prone. Ducking behind an obstacle would also considerably reduce the exposure to gamma rays and place the person in a more sheltered position to withstand the flying debris which will shower the area a few seconds later when the blast wave passes. It takes the blast wave one second to reach one-half mile, three seconds to reach one mile, and seven seconds to reach two miles.”


Dr Samuel Glasstone in 1950 compared psychological fears of radiation to ignorance of gas warfare in Effects of Atomic Weapons, 1950, page 289, paragraph 8.116: “perhaps the most important application of radiological warfare would be its psychological effect as a mystery weapon, analogous to the initial use of poison gas ... The obvious method to combat radiological warfare in this case is to understand and be prepared for it.” By educating people in simple effective fallout countermeasures, the use of fallout in warfare by ground bursting nuclear weapons may be discouraged, like gas in WWII. In the event of a disaster, panic can be replaced by actions that will reduce the danger. The gas illusion: 

“In the next war, with its overwhelming air raids, its gases blotting out life over square miles, its bacilli, possibly its rays, munitions works and the services of the rear will be special objects of attack.”

- Irwin Will, The Next War: An Appeal to Common Sense, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1921, p77 (best-seller first published by Dutton in April 1921, 23rd printing, October 1921).


“The chemical Warfare Research Department [prior to 1927] had been making experiments to determine how long persons could remain under certain conditions in a ‘gas-proof’ room ... a broadcast in February [1927] by Professor Noel Baker, on ‘Foreign Affairs and How They Affect Us’ ... claimed, ‘all gas experts are agreed that it would be impossible to devise means to protect the civil population from this form of attack’. The Chemical Warfare Research Department emphatically disputed the accuracy both of the details of the picture and of this general statement. They considered it unfortunate that statements of this nature should have been broadcast to the public, particularly after the Cabinet’s decision that the time was not ripe for education of the public in defensive measures.”

- T. H. O’Brien, Civil Defence (official U.K. history), 1955, p31.


Like civil defense attacking polemics today, Noel-Baker had made a completely false claim about "all experts" agreeing that gas masks and civil defense are useless in that influential and dangerous February 1927 BBC radio broadcast, Foreign Affairs and How they Affect Us. As British official civil defence historial Terrence H. O'Brien states, the British committee on civil defence chickened out of censoring or even bothering to correct Noel-Baker, despite disputing his assertion in secret meetings. They agreed that he was wrong, but then agreed to do nothing, because they didn't want to risk the work of censoring all BBC broadcasts on gas war. In the true spirit of British officialdom, they only considered censorship, not democratic argument by exposing the falsehood and demolishing it with facts. The Cabinet had decided gas defenses were a classified secret, so their hands were tied as they were bound by the Official Secrets Act. However, Noel-Baker was not telling the truth and the original 1915 British gas mask inventor Professor J. B. S. Haldane (who one of the experts on the gas civil defence committee advising the Cabinet) had published a very different view of gas warfare in his 1925 book Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare. It is a fact therefore that was a lie for Noel-Baker to two years later make his claim about a complete consensus of experts denying defense against was warfare. Here are Noel-Baker's lying February 1927 BBC broadcast words of political Correctness and groupthink ideology:

“‘In the first phase of the next war,’ says a high authority, ‘there is little doubt that the belligerents will resort to gas bomb attack on a vast scale. This form of attack upon great cities, such as London or Paris, might entail the loss of millions of lives in the course of a few hours. Gas clouds so formed would be heavier than air and would flow into the cellars and tubes in which the population had taken refuge. As the bombardment continued, the gas would thicken up until it flowed through the streets of the city in rivers. All gas experts are agreed that it would be impossible to devise means to protect the civil population from this form of attack’."

(Source: Peter Adey, Aerial Life, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, p189.)

Noel-Baker, athlete and Quaker disarmer typical of the ideologues exaggerating weapons effects and denying facts about the efficiency of civil defence countermeasures today, later won a Nobel Peace prize and become a Lord, but his fear-mongering and scare-mongering lies about civil defence actually helped to enable Hitler to murder millions by cultivating appeasement. I have yet to find any historian who addresses the ideology whereby lies about civil defence for utopian dreams of disarmament are compared to Adolf Hitler's or Joseph Stalin's ideological lies of eugenics or Marxism; all are ideologies where "the ends justify the means" and since the ends are not achieveable in the real world, all of these ideologies which rely on lying fear-mongering about the alleged evils of weapons, minority races, or genuine democracy. He failed to achieve peace and his lying ideology against civil defense actually made the war risks and the war dangers of the world worse, by removing support for Churchill and allowing public empathy to side with Hitler, even to the point of the British football team being forced to give the Nazi salute at a game in Germany. Support for appeasement was due in large part to the anti-civil defense groupthink polemics which played up WWI effects, but Noel-Baker did not do this by accident or genuine error, because he was still continuing the same inaccurate anti-civil defense polemics in 1980 to deny any possibility of civil defense being of value under any circumstances, again by examining only the worst and least probable possibility, despite this being proved in WWII to be a contrived, unbalanced piece of sophistry. This is like denying the value of hospitals, seat-belts or life-boats by the trick of only considering worst-case eventualities where they are of minimal utilityHouse of Lords Home and Civil Defence Debate on 5 March 1980 (Hansard, vol 406 cc260-386): 


“... I want to argue that no measure of civil defence, in any war which we can realistically expect to have, will save a single life, and that to nurse a hope of safety from civil defence is to indulge a self-deceiving, futile and dangerous illusion—self-deceiving and futile because, as I said, civil defence will not save our lives; dangerous because it diverts attention from the only policy that gives us any genuine hope. It makes the public think that there will be safety where no safety is. It obscures the fact that the only way to avert disaster is to avert the war, and to abolish those offensive weapons without which aggressions cannot be begun. ... My Lords, the first atom bomb weighed two kilogrammes—less than 5 lbs [sic]. ... Against such a danger civil defence offers us no help ...”

But this is another falsehood of the same type as his 1927 BBC broadcast on gas: as WWII indicated (where gas was not used against Britain or Germany), by reducing the scale of the disaster if a terrorist or accidental nuclear explosion should occur, civil defense could help avoid escalation to a massive war by minimizing the effects even within war itself, stabilizing the political situation. 

Denying civil defense facts, apart from maximising casualties, is a constraining act which forces only military responses in a crisis. Noel-Baker was never openly criticised for his propaganda and also dismissed civil defence against biological warfare in a letter to the New Scientist (14 Dec 1961, no 265, p700), after they published an article called “Biological agents in warfare and defence” by Dr LeRoy D. Fothergill of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps: 

“May I express my gratitude to you for publishing the article ... Dr Fothergill writes with admirable restraint ... very little progress has been made in ... defending the citizen ... there is at present no defence against them, and none likely in the measurable future.”

Fothergill’s article (aimed at raising concern to encourage more research and defences) gave outdoor data for wind dispersion of spores released by a ship off the Californian coast in 1950. Being inside with the windows closed gives good protection while the cloud is blown past (even anthrax has a half life of only 25 minutes outdoors in bright sunlight in dry air and less in humid air; see Field Manual FM 3-3, 1992, Fig. B-1). Noel-Baker deceptively seized on an omission as if proof that countermeasures do not exist, exactly what he had done in 1927 when the government kept civil defence experiments and weapons effects facts secret. 

“In May 1929, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom sponsored a conference in Frankfurt on ‘modern methods of warfare and the protection of civil populations’. ... While the overall objective of the proceedings was to enhance pleas for disarmament, individual participants did so by calling attention to the stakes of future wars ... conference speakers emphasized that ‘the worst of the past gives little idea of what would be the horrible reality of a future war,’ one where ‘the civil population ... will be massacred by gas bombs from thousands of aeroplanes ...’”

– Professor Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp149-50 (citing Getrud Woker, “The Effects of Chemical Warfare,” in Les methodes modernes de guerre et la protection des populations civiles / Chemical Warfare: An Abridged Report of Papers Read at an International Conference at Frankfurt, London, 1930, p45).

“Most of the books and pamphlets on the subject seem to me to be of the nature of propaganda ... a great many opponents of the Government state that such things as gas-masks and gas-proof rooms are completely useless, that London could be wiped out in a single air raid ... a frightful responsibility rests on those who expose British children to such a death in order to score a point ... In 1915 ... I was at that time a captain in a British infantry battalion and was brought out of the trenches to St. Omer, where I assisted my father in the design of some of the first gas masks. ... one would be safe in a phosgene concentration of one part per thousand, of which a single breath would probably kill an unprotected man. Hence in practice such a mask is a very nearly complete protection. ... These gases can penetrate into houses, but very slowly. So even in a badly-constructed house one is enormously safer than in the open air. ... even if a new gas is produced, it is very unlikely that it will get through our respirators. ... Now all the poisonous gases and vapours used in war are heavier than air, so it is thought that they would inevitably flood cellars ... But within a short time it would be mixed with many times its volume of air. Now air containing one part in 10,000 of phosgene is extremely poisonous. But its density exceeds that of air by only one part in 4,000.” 

- Professor J. B. S. Haldane, A.R.P., 1938. 

“Ever since the Armistice, three classes of writers have been deluding the long-suffering British public with lurid descriptions of their approaching extermination in the next war ... pure sensationalists, ultra-pacifists, and military experts. ... they do want to get their manuscript accepted for the feature page of the Daily Drivel or the Weekly Wail. In order to do that, they must pile on the horrors thick ... The amount of damage done by such alarmists cannot be calculated, but is undoubtedly very great. ... It is significant that they concentrate almost unanimously on poison gas, and that the dangers of high explosive and incendiary bombs are seldom stressed. The reason, of course, is obvious – poison gas has a much greater news value. It is still a new and mysterious form of warfare, it is something which people do not understand, and what they do not understand they can readily be made to fear. ... Millions of people, perhaps, have been impressed by the authority and reputation of Mr H. G. Wells into believing that this picture represents the plain truth.”

- Professor James Kendall (a 1917 Chemical Warfare Liaison Officer), Breathe Freely! The Truth About Poison Gas, G. Bell & Sons, London, 1938, pp. 11-13.


“... in spite of the tremendous scale of the violations it still took the Germans five years, from January 1933 when Hitler came in to around January 1938, before they had an army capable of standing up against the French and the British. At any time during that five-year period if the British and the French had had the will, they probably could have stopped the German rearmament program ... one of the most important aspects of the interwar period [was] the enormous and almost uncontrollable impulse toward disarmament ... As late as 1934, after Hitler had been in power for almost a year and a half, [British Prime Minister] Ramsey McDonald still continued to urge the French that they should disarm themselves by reducing their army by 50 per cent, and their air force by 75 per cent. In effect, MacDonald and his supporters urged one of the least aggressive nations in Europe to disarm itself to a level equal with their potential attackers, the Germans. ... Probably as much as any other single group I think that these men of good will can be charged with causing World War II. [Emphasis by Kahn.]. ... At no time did Hitler threaten to initiate war against France and England. He simply threatened to ‘retaliate’ if they attacked him. ... an obvious prototype for a future aggressor armed with H-bombs ”

- H. Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, 1960, pp. 390-1 and 403.

Future President John F. Kennedy's college thesis, Why England Slept, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1962 (first published 1940), pages 7, 169, 170 and 179: 

Page 7: “What had England been doing while Hitler was building up this tremendous German Army?... To say that all the blame must rest on the shoulders of Neville Chamberlain or of Stanley Baldwin is to overlook the obvious. As the leaders, they are, of course, gravely and seriously responsible. But, given the conditions of democratic government, a free press, public elections, and a cabinet responsible to Parliament and thus to the people, given rule by the majority, it is unreasonable to blame the entire situation on one man or group.”

Page 169: “... I believe, as I have stated frequently, that leaders are responsible for their failures only in the governing sector and cannot be held responsible for the failure of a nation as a whole ... I believe it is one of democracy’s failings that it seeks to make scapegoats for its own weaknesses.”

Page 170: “Herbert Morrison, the able British Labour Leader ... was being criticised in 1939 for co-operating with the Government ... ‘At the beginning I got plenty of abuse from the irresponsibles because I said that Labour administrators must play their full part in A.R.P. [Air Raid Precautions, i.e. civil defense], which was denounced as a fraud and a plot... to create war psychology. For Labour local authorities to co-operate with state departments in this task was treachery ... no A.R.P. could possibly be effective’.”

Page 179: “... the dictator is able to know exactly how much the democracy is bluffing, because of the free Press, radio, and so forth, and so can plan his moves accordingly.”

Kennedy stuck to his guns with civil defense. After the first Russian nuclear weapon test, he wrote a public letter to President Truman warning of the risk of an "atomic Pearl Harbor", published in the New York Times of 10 October 1949. Kennedy also attended the 22-26 June 1959 nuclear war congressional hearings which featured Herman Kahn on civil defense, and Kennedy used the supposed missile gap as the basis for his Presidential election campaign (which in the even only appeared in about 1975 when the USSR achieved parity and went on bankrupting itself by churning out more missiles). Kennedy set up the public fallout shelter allocation in 1961. All of this goes back to his time in the American Embassy in 1939 and the research he did into the connection between British civil defense apathy in the 1930s and appeasement (even encouragement) of fear exploiting Nazi thugs.He could see that aggressors are all alike: they are all self-deluded, they all have an ideology, and they all use fear-mongering lies. 

Professor Susan R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge University Press, 2012) finds that (p176): “a variety of voices reflected on the enormous destructive potential of air power in interwar Britain, and many determined to prevent the imagined horrors of the next war from coming true. Several important constituent bodies of the nation – including key segments of women, trades unionists, and members of the state itself – worked fervently for disarmament and to challenge efforts to accept aerial and perhaps even chemical attacks as somehow inevitable in a future war.” 

Pro-disarmament propaganda which was based entirely on exaggeration of weapons and war effects (ignoring the real dangers of ideologies like racist eugenics and ethnic cleansing) and denials of civil defense efficiency went largely unopposed until 1938, partly due to official secrecy to keep both the enemy and the public ignorant (while they were being sold exaggerations by the media). To be heard, disarmament activists had the temerity to falsely dismiss all countermeasures, to exaggerate the scale of potential attacks, and to ignore the fact that countermeasures were a tried and tested solution (unlike disarmament without civil defense, i.e. complete vulnerability). Public apathy allowed doom exaggerations to be mainly supported or allowed to circulate without correction. How many newspapers, popular historians, or TV stations stand up and publish the facts on nuclear weapons and Hiroshima today? None. Civil defense has never had any backing and has always been violently opposed by ideologies which prefer war. When Noel-Baker claimed to have an "authority" which proved a consensus of gas war experts who knew gas had no countermeasure, he was simply lying to the nation. In any case, his claim that science is determined by a religious type consensus, was again lying to the nation, because science is distinguished from political agreements by its factual evidence rather than its fashionable popularity and the number of votes its adverts gain.


For a full analysis of the small amount of fallout measured in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, see W. McRaney and J. McRaney, Radiation dose reconstruction U.S. occupation forces in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, 1945-1946, DNA 5512F, 1980, and for a comparison of the fallout pattern to self-induced rainout computer predictions see Charles R. Molenkamp, An Introduction to Self-Induced Rainout, URCL-52669, 1979, and Numerical Simulation of Self-Induced Rainout Using a Dynamic Convective Cloud Model, UCRL-83583, 1980. Neutron-induced activity dose rate and decay rate data from the 2002 Japanese dosimetry project (DS02) is linked here and is verified by neutron induced activity in debris from both cities. The only fully scientific (quantitative) discussion of the relative contributions of initial flash radiation, neutron induced activity, and fallout as a function of burst altitude is given in Chapter 5 (Nuclear Radiation Phenomena) of Dolan’s effects manual EM-1

White shows that Hiroshima’s Post Office, 0.12 mile from ground zero, was gutted by fire hours later well in the firestorm, but over 50% of its 400 occupants had already survived the explosion and escaped. Photos of the final burned out areas show firestorm effects which occurred after survivors had time to escape, not unsurvivable, instant Encore-type thermal radiation-induced newspaper-filled inflammable room flashover in a dry desert. The firestorm in Hiroshima took 2-3 hours to reach a maximum intensity. The secret (full) U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey May 1947 report on Hiroshima interviewed over 1,000 survivors, and their evidence was that the fires were started by the blast wave overturning the obsolete charcoal braziers in obsolete city-centre wooden housing slums, which were full of inflammable paper screens and bamboo furnishings. The report shows that no building in Hiroshima had any fire-sprinkler system, and that the only fires started inside modern buildings by thermal radiation were in black coloured (heat absorbing) blackout air-raid curtains within 2,500 feet of air zero (close to ground zero). These and firebrands entering the Bank of Hiroshima through broken windows were easily extinguished by survivors with water buckets, in the centre of the "firestorm".

This obsolete mechanism caused the firestorm, not thermal flash ignition, which cannot directly ignite sound wood.
 The danger from exaggerations of weapons effects in order to underplay civil defense and leave yourself vulnerable to an enemy was clearly demonstrated in the 1930s, when British Government scientists exaggerated war effects. They exaggerated the effects by using the July 1917 surprise attack bombing data, when people stood outdoors during the air raid, or watched the explosions ignorantly from behind glass windows: exactly the situation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were again surprise attacks.This exaggeration by using 1917 data led to Nazi appeasement in the 1930s, when they could have been stopped with minimal casualties if civil defense effectiveness was understood earlier. Civil defense did work to prevent a poison gas attack by the Nazis, despite gas masks never being 100% effective: the efficiency of the countermeasure was sufficient that the Nazis never tried to use their 12,000 tons stockpile of tabun nerve gas in WWII.

Civil defense did not need to be 100% effective in order to remove the attractiveness of "weapons of mass destruction" to coercive thugs wishing to threaten civilian targets.
 Exaggerations of weapons effects, by downplaying or ignoring simple countermeasure effectiveness prior to World War I, actually encouraged the warmongers to plan for WWI prior to 1914 in the belief of achieving a quick victory using big guns and other offensive weapons. By ignoring the efficiency of simple improvised blast and flying missile defenses like trenches against explosive blast, shelling, mortar fire, shrapnel and machine guns in the American Civil War, European planners exaggerated weapons effects predictions.

This exaggeration led to WWI by falsely predicting a quick and easy outcome from the use of offensive bombardment and machine guns against completely exposed and unprotected opponents. Simple trenches and gas masks in WWI proved highly effective at reducing casualties, thereby turning the war into a protracted affair that Germany had not prepared for. Thus, two world wars have proven conclusively that deceptive exaggerations and attacks on defensive countermeasures against explosive and contaminating weapons effects like blast and persistent mustard and nerve gas did not guarantee peace. Instead, weapons effects exaggerations for "peace" actually encouraged thugs to acquire precisely the most scare-mongered weapons for coercive intimidation, and to use them to threaten the unprepared into appeasement, causing wars.
 

Some myths debunked: 1. nobody was "vaporized": people are 70% water which has far too high a specific heat capacity and latent heat of vaporization even at ground zero, 2. fallout and neutron induced activity were insignificant compared to the initial nuclear radiation doses, because of the height of burst, 3. the long term effects of radiation were trivial compared to the natural cancer rate in an unexposed control group, and genetic effects were insignificant, 4. conventional weapons killed more people and resulted in more deaths and suffering because conventional wars lasted for years: the "blunt knife" is more dangerous overall, because it is likely to slip and cause injuries, because you need to use more force on a blunt knife to achieve any given result, 5. shallow underground bursts avert collateral damage around bunkers, while retaining credible deterrence. Downwind fallout can be washed or brushed off, and nuclear radiation is attenuated by buildings, 6. nuclear weapons with individually larger areas of effects are actually easier to protect against than an immense number of conventional weapons, because the blast wave is delayed for a longer period of time after the bright visible flash over most of the damaged area: fashionable lying "films" falsely superimpose the sound on the flash to "discredit" civil defense, one of the most sinister deceptions. The same applies to fallout: the further an effect has to travel, the longer it takes to arrive, so there is time to evacuate or to take cover in a safe building. Conventional weapons failed to deter two world wars, which explains why Cold War nuclear weapons were relied upon for deterrence. Anti-civil defense propaganda for nuclear disarmament politics is reducing not only deterrence but public safeguards against nuclear terrorism. Nuclear disarmament will put the clock back to the pre-nuclear era of conventional world wars. Nuclear safeguards and inspections will simply drive proliferation further underground, or risk war in themselves (just as 1930s efforts to oppose proliferation risked starting a war). 

“If individuals feel they can do little about possible dangers, they have to flee from such threats by the use of denial. ... such individuals are not prepared to deal with the danger situation when it appears. ... In the early days of training for nuclear disaster, we stressed the number of casualties that even a nominal bomb could produce. Our listeners were alarmed, thinking, ‘How could we care for a thousand burn cases when only four or five such cases demoralize our hospital?’ The result of this approach was to lose our audiences.”

– Albert J. Glass, MD, “Mass Psychology: the Determinants of Behavior under Emergency Conditions,” Mass Burns: Proceedings of a Workshop, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. (linked here), pp. 11-20 (quotations from pages 13-14).

Exposed burned skin evaporates water at the rate of 10 litres/m2/day, which dries out and cools the body temperature, and this water evaporation rate is the actual physical mechanism behind the well-known dehydration, hypothermia, and shock in serious burns victims. The exposed burned skin also offers direct entry to the body tissues for bacterial infections (sepsis) which overwhelm the immune system and in combination with lowered temperature due to evaporation, escalate to pulmonary complications, and also allow direct contamination with radioactive fallout particles after a nuclear attack. Because severely burned victims reject food, they soon lose the energy needed to recover due to the cooling from water evaporation from the burned areas. At Hiroshima nothing was done to address the causal mechanism for burns mortality, instead efforts were made to treat dehydration by providing more fluids and antibiotics for infection. Reversing this whole approach, in order to actually prevent the underlying causes of these secondary effects in an emergency situation (nuclear attack), it has been found that simply covering exposed severe burns wounds with plastic film has been proved to avoid or reduce the immense evaporation of water which actually causes all of these immediate dehydration, shock, and hypothermia effects, and also much of the infection and contamination danger in the first place.

See Carl Jelenko, III, MD, “The Burn Surface as a Parasite: Water Loss, Caloric Demands, and Therapeutic Implications” and E. J. L. Lowbury, “The Prevention of Sepsis in Burns” (which shows in table 2 that 70% mortality from infected burns is reduced to 5% mortality if the burns are not infected) in Mass Burns: Proceedings of a Workshop, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. (linked here).
 

Think Plastic Wrap as Wound Dressing for Thermal Burns

ACEP (American College of Emergency Physicians) News

August 2008

By Patrice Wendling

Elsevier Global Medical News

CHICAGO - Ordinary household plastic wrap makes an excellent, biologically safe wound dressing for patients with thermal burns en route to the emergency department or burn unit. The Burn Treatment Center at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Iowa City, has advocated prehospital and first-aid use of ordinary plastic wrap or cling film on burn wounds for almost two decades with very positive results, Edwin Clopton, a paramedic and ED technician, explained during a poster session at the annual meeting of the American Burn Association. “Virtually every ambulance in Iowa has a roll of plastic wrap in the back,” Mr. Clopton said in an interview. “We just wanted to get the word out about the success we’ve had using plastic wrap for burn wounds,” he said. Dr. G. Patrick Kealey, newly appointed ABA president and director of emergency general surgery at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics, said in an interview that plastic wrap reduces pain, wound contamination, and fluid losses. Furthermore, it’s inexpensive, widely available, nontoxic, and transparent, which allows for wound monitoring without dressing removal. “I can’t recall a single incident of it causing trouble for the patients,” Dr. Kealey said.
 

Professor Eugene P. Wigner, “Why Civil Defense: A consideration of its effects if war comes, if not, and on the likelihood of nuclear war”, The Technology Review, v66 (1964), no. 8, pp. 21-23:

“No one, least of all the soldier, thought it ill-fitting or cowardly to seek protection ... rather than to meet enemy shells fatally in the open. ... Let us assume, for example, that the United States and the Soviet Union reach some accord on gradual disarmament, and that many weapons and missiles are destroyed. ... If some small country, ruled by a dictator, built or otherwise acquired a few megaton-size weapons, its ruler might be tempted to threaten the U.S. with a few bombs with primitive delivery systems, such as mined merchant ships or concealed bombs in cities, to gain a free hand in his part of the world. ... It often has been said that the protection of our population might make our leaders more aggressive ... The absence of civil defense also could generate aggressiveness in leaders aware of the advantages of striking the first blow.”
 

'Restricted' classified U.K. Home Office Scientific Adviser's Branch journal Fission Fragments, W. F. Greenhalgh, Editor, London, Issue Number 3, August 1962, pages 22-26:

'The fire hazard from nuclear weapons

'by G. R. Stanbury, BSc, ARCS, F.Inst.P.

'We have often been accused of underestimating the fire situation from nuclear attack. We hope to show that there is good scientific justification for the assessments we have made, and we are unrepentant in spite of the television utterances of renowned academic scientists who know little about fire. ...

'Firstly ... the collapse of buildings would snuff out any incipient fires. Air cannot get into a pile of rubble, 80% of which is incombustible anyway. This is not just guess work; it is the result of a very complete study of some 1,600 flying bomb [V1 cruise missile] incidents in London supported by a wealth of experience gained generally in the last war.

'Secondly, there is a considerable degree of shielding of one building by another in general.

'Thirdly, even when the windows of a building can "see" the fireball, and something inside is ignited, it by no means follows that a continuing and destructive fire will develop.

'The effect of shielding in a built-up area was strikingly demonstrated by the firemen of Birmingham about 10 years ago with a 144:1 scale model of a sector of their city which they built themselves; when they put a powerful lamp in the appropriate position for an air burst they found that over 50% of the buildings were completely shielded. More recently a similar study was made in Liverpool over a much larger area, not with a model, but using the very detailed information provided by fire insurance maps. The result was similar.

'It is not so easy to assess the chance of a continuing fire. A window of two square metres would let in about 105 calories at the 5 cal/cm2 range. The heat liberated by one magnesium incendiary bomb is 30 times this and even with the incendiary bomb [which burns for 15 minutes, not the few seconds or less for a nuclear flash] the chance of a continuing fire developing in a small room is only 1 in 5; in a large room it is very much less.

'Thus even if thermal radiation does fall on easily inflammable material which ignites, the chance of a continuing fire developing is still quite small. In the Birmingham and Liverpool studies, where the most generous values of fire-starting chances were used, the fraction of buildings set on fire was rarely higher than 1 in 20.

'And this is the basis of the assertion [in Nuclear Weapons] that we do not think that fire storms are likely to be started in British cities by nuclear explosions, because in each of the five raids in which fire storms occurred (four on Germany - Hamburg, Darmstadt, Kassel, Wuppertal and a "possible" in Dresden, plus Hiroshima in Japan - it may be significant that all these towns had a period of hot dry weather before the raid) the initial fire density was much nearer 1 in 2. Take Hamburg for example:

'On the night of 27/28th July 1943, by some extraordinary chance, 190 tons of bombs were dropped into one square mile of Hamburg. This square mile contained 6,000 buildings, many of which were [multistorey wooden] medieval.

'A density of greater than 70 tons/sq. mile had not been achieved before even in some of the major fire raids, and was only exceeded on a few occasions subsequently. The effect of these bombs is best shown in the following diagram, each step of which is based on sound trials and operational experience of the weapons concerned.

'102 tons of high explosive bombs dropped -> 100 fires

'88 tons of incendiary bombs dropped, of which:

'48 tons of 4 pound magnesium bombs = 27,000 bombs -> 8,000 hit buildings -> 1,600 fires

'40 tons of 30 pound gel bombs = 3,000 bombs -> 900 hit buildings -> 800 fires

'Total = 2,500 fires

'Thus almost every other building [1 in 2 buildings] was set on fire during the raid itself, and when this happens it seems that nothing can prevent the fires from joining together, engulfing the whole area and producing a fire storm (over Hamburg the column of smoke, observed from aircraft, was 1.5 miles in diameter at its base and 13,000 feet high; eyewitnesses on the ground reported that trees were uprooted by the inrushing air).

'When the density was 70 tons/square mile or less the proportion of buildings fired during the raid was about 1 in 8 or less and under these circumstances, although extensive areas were burned out, the situation was controlled, escape routes were kept open and there was no fire storm.' 


Modern buildings in modern cities do not suffer firestorms. 

“The only way to win a war is to escalate it one way or another above what the enemy can endure. If we feel that we cannot win without unacceptable risk we have no business fighting in the first place.

“There are just two checks on escalation. One is the waning of motivation for fighting the war in the first place. A long grinding war of attrition on the ground might achieve this … The second check on escalation is to so overwhelm your enemy with such heavy and rapid destruction that he loses all hope of winning. Then surrender is an attractive choice when compared to inevitable defeat or certain death. This, of course, is the way we brought Japan to terms in 1945. It was unnecessary to invade with infantry and fight a ground war. We seem to have forgotten this fact. Even though Japan had four million troops under arms with two million guarding her shores, not a shot was fired. We invaded with fourteen hundred military administrators, by air. Not a life was lost in this invasion.

“The Japanese had been highly motivated to wage war against us. Kamikaze tactics and no-surrender policies were typical. Yet a realization that Japan simply could not win and the certainty that continued resistance meant mounting devastation caused her to toss in the sponge. … In the final analysis, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved and dozens of cities spared … In Korea … there were three and a half million military casualties on both sides during three years of drawn-out war. Over a million civilians were killed ...”

- General Curtis E. LeMay, America is in Danger, pages 307-9.
 

General Curtis Emerson LeMay (1906-90) developed and led the B-17 and B-24 incendiary bombing missions first in Europe and then B-29 missions in the Pacific during World War II, including control of incendiary raids and the two nuclear attacks. In the Cold War he headed the Berlin airlift of 1948, was the founder of SAC (the Strategic Air Command), and from 1961-5 was Chief of Staff of the USAF, retiring after arguments with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara over the Vietnam War. LeMay advised declaring war on North Vietnam (which McNamara refused to do) and the escalatory winning tactics that had proved successful against Japan without requiring a ground invasion of Japan in 1945. McNamara instead initially used the failing flexible response efforts to try to encourage negotiation with the least possible force, and later a gradual rather than overwhelming vertical escalation which simply resulted in media criticism for the killing of civilians with no positive result. While LeMay requested the bombing of North Vietnam harbors, but McNamara preferred to leave them untouched and bomb insurgent camps and supply routes within Vietnam, claiming that LeMay’s scheme would kill Soviet Union advisers in supply ships in the harbors of North Vietnam, escalating the war horizontally, destabilizing Europe. 

General Curtis E. LeMay’s 5 June 1968 book America is in Danger (Funk and Wagnalls, New York) is still valid today, and it predicted on page 307 that America was going to lose in Vietnam, if McNamara’s graduated response war policy continued. The book jacket clearly summarizes LeMay’s case: “America is in danger. … We find ourselves in a purely defensive role, unable to make our will felt even in a conflict with a backward jungle country. … Our strategic nuclear superiority has given us much diplomatic strength in the past. Do we still have that strength? … I think not. That is why America is in grave danger. … Assessing the strategic situation, General LeMay argues that our former policy of overwhelming nuclear superiority proved itself during the crises in Berlin, Taiwan, and Cuba, and produced twenty years of relative peace. Yet the current Administration has opted for a new and untested posture that permits, even encourages parity with Russia.” 

On pages viii-ix LeMay explains that the worst wars are caused by dogmatic censorship in democracy: 

“The equivocal manner in which we are waging the war in Southeast Asia [Vietnam] is a direct result of the bankrupt nature of a deterrent policy. … ‘defense intellectuals’ go unchallenged simply because the experienced professional active duty officers are officially prohibited from entering into public debate. … In 1916 while war in Europe was raging, President Woodrow Wilson banished from Washington a few officers at the Army War College who had the temerity to plan for war. … I. S. Block, ‘proved’ statistically in a popular book The Future of War, and in numerous speeches, that war was an economic impossibility [Norman Angell’s Great Illusion in 1908 deluded Britain into viewing war as economically absurd, but was still awarded a Knighthood and a Nobel Peace Prize after WWI, since facts are always distorted to fit in to a hardened ideology]. His disciples (among whom was David Starr Jordan) were still plugging this doctrine in America in the face of the Battles of the Marne and the Somme. 

“Just a few months before Sarajevo in 1914, David Starr Jordan, President of Stanford University and a renowned naturalist, said, ‘It is apparently not possible for another real war among the nations of Europe to take place.’ … Before World War II the military profession was again pre-empted by the ‘defense intellectuals.’ … The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 had outlawed law in principle. The Washington Disarmament conferences of the 1930s, if not arriving at a treaty had at least condemned ‘offensive’ weapons. … There was no one who could tell America that wars cannot be won with defensive weapons. … In the Army Air Corps we developed the B-17 Flying Fortress almost clandestinely. … Thirteen were ordered in 1937 and with them we worked out the tactics and strategies which carried the war to Germany and Japan …” 

On pages xiii-xiv, LeMay points out that in any war, be it Japan or Vietnam, there is no certain quantitative prediction possible of the effect of weapons on the will of the enemy to resist or surrender, and this factor must be either omitted or faked in all computer “predictions”: 

“We computerized every activity susceptible to machine analysis long before most businesses or other government agencies … What we did not do was to force non-quantifiable data into a quantified mold in order to feed it to the machines. … when defense intellectuals attempt, in deadpan seriousness, to quantify the effect that x number of casualties will have on the government or the will to resist, they are entering the Land of Oz. Some countries have succumbed, as France did in 1940, with minor casualties. Carthage and Paraguay (in 1870) show that other countries never give up, no matter what the casualties. … Such unknowns in the strategic equation are anathema to the quantifier.” 

LeMay elaborates this on page 77: 

“An enraged country may go to war against impossible odds, with no logical change of victory. This is another example of weakness in the concept of deterrence – the possibility of the illogical reaction. Thus did Paraguay fight against an overwhelming alliance of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in 1864. So did little Serbia stand up to the great Austria-Hungarian Empire in 1914. And thus did England and France declare war on Germany in 1939 … Almost any country can be pushed too far, as was Hungary in 1956. It then feels compelled to fight regardless of the consequences. Patrick Henry’s remark ‘give me liberty or give me death’ is not an isolated human decision.” 

LeMay’s points out that Defense Secretary McNamara’s failure in the Vietnam War was due to the abuse of science, in fiddling computer model assumptions about the political response to the enemy to military coercion. LeMay on page 89 shows that this failure of analysis in Vietnam also applies to general nuclear war deterrence planning, e.g. McNamara’s 1967 Posture Statement: “To deter deliberate nuclear attack upon the United States … ability to inflict an unacceptable degree of damage …” Here the word “unacceptable” is a subjective function of the emotional state of mind of the enemy. 

Anti-nuclear war propaganda like Kubrick’s pseudoscience film Dr Strangelove is attributed by LeMay on pages 8-12 to ideologues (the pseudo-pacifists, the pseudo-moralistic crusaders, and the well-meaning media whose lying “anti-war” propaganda lay behind previous wars): 

“This large peace-time military establishment has allowed many scaremongers to capitalize on the traditional anti-military American attitudes and thus sell books and movies. … It is like yelling fire in a crowded theatre. Some … is encouraged by our enemies to weaken faith in our military leadership and thus to undermine our resolve or capability for self-defense. Some of it, of course, is a perfectly legitimate concern over how a large, perpetual military establishment will change our system of values, society, and government. … One must keep in mind the communist technique of ‘boring from within.’ … History illustrates that the first act of a dictator is to distort and suppress the news. Free speech and press permit the truth to be aired and opposing opinions to be expressed. … The world is moving too fast today, particularly in technology, for us to be tied to a monolithic organization which stifles all thought outside its own party line of hackneyed solutions. … One of the greatest dangers in a military estimate of any situation is to believe, through party-line strategic concepts, that you know what the enemy will or will not do. We knew that Japan would not attack Pearl Harbor, our best-defended outpost. … We knew that the Soviet Union would not put nuclear intermediate range ballistic missiles in Cuba. … We must – but do not – have a defense organization which permits controversy, which permits the ‘unthinkable’ condition to be debated freely, which permits the screwball idea to come forth, and which tolerates the maverick officer. The Andrew Jacksons, the Zachary Taylors, the Ulysses S. Grants, the George Deweys, the Alfred Thayer Mahans, the Billy Mitchells, are not nurtured in orthodoxy. They are not products of a party line.” 

In a chapter on the “Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons” LeMay explains on page 204 that although “Every large war, of course, is sparked by some relatively minor event, as the murder at Saravejo in 1914 or the Nazi march into Poland in 1939”, ignition sparks are not the fuel. The straw that breaks the camel’s back is not the sole or even the major problem: 

“The small countries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, or Poland most certainly cannot be accused of ‘catalytic’ behavior during these tense times. Should Poland have succumbed for the sake of world peace? The small country argument is sometimes related to the ‘statistical’ theory. As more countries get the bomb, goes the reasoning, something is likely to happen that will cause a bomb to go off. … This fear should be laid to rest. The number of nuclear bombs and warheads have already proliferated to the thousands and the first accidental nuclear explosion has yet to occur. … For example, on December 8, 1964, a B-58 Hustler bomber with a ‘nuclear device’ in its bomb bay caught fire at Bunker Hill Air Force Base, Indiana … no radioactive contamination occurred. Of the four bombs dropped from a B-52 off Palomares, Spain, as a result of a refueling collision in 1966 … there was some relatively harmless contamination caused by two which broke up. A nuclear bomb is a highly complicated device and many sequential steps must be taken to light it off. … At worse, the chemical high explosive components of a bomb might detonate from fire and scatter some nuclear material which could cause a small area to become mildly and harmlessly radioactive, as in Spain. Nothing of this sort is liable to lead to a nuclear war.” 

On pages 242-260, in his chapter on “Counterinsurgency and the War in Vietnam”, LeMay points out: 

“It is a war waged simultaneously on many fronts and in many forms. It is a cold war and a hot war, and economic war and a political war, a propaganda war and an ideological war. It is waged by the communists according to their own timetable and on battlefields of their choosing. … By 1965 we were bombing North Vietnam and landing combat troops to engage with the Viet Cong. Yet the South Vietnamese army was shot with desertions and down to one-third strength. Equipment worth millions of dollars from the United States was finding its way into Viet Cong hands. … It is a war of flexible response not designed to win but rather to punish, and to punish only enough to bring the Hanoi government to the conference table. … It is a war where our powerful Navy allows foreign ships to supply the enemy with war materials. … It is a war where we allow the one principal harbor – the harbor through which the large majority of enemy supplies must flow – to remain undamaged. … This is the war of flexible response and graduated deterrence applied for the first time. This is the war concocted by the arms controllers of the Kennedy-Johnson Administrations to prevent, they believed, the feared nuclear holocaust. The consequences of such a cruel non-war will be heartache, frustration, and death, rather than a reasonable political settlement. We must change our strategy. … 

“The long, drawn-out conflict has created dissension, disillusion, and dispute in America. It has seemed to foster a greater sense of determination and purpose in North Vietnam. … Oriental stoicism and patience make North Vietnam willing to extend the struggle from generation to generation, or so they say, to have a ‘protracted war’. … we are fighting with the commodity most precious to us … the lives of men. And what is our objective? To negotiate. … Our continued pleas for peace and talks can only leave an impression of irresolution, which encourages North Vietnamese resistance. … we dribbled in reinforcements, taking one half-measure after another in the ‘graduated’ manner of flexible response, pursuing a peculiar strategy which said, in effect, ‘Fight the enemy on his own terms.’ … we must fight the war from our position of strength, not theirs. We must fight it at the lowest cost to ourselves and at the greatest cost to the enemy. … Probably the weirdest aspect of this Alice-in-Wonderland war is that we have dropped more explosive on Vietnam than we did on Germany in World War II. … It is not air power that is wanting. It is the wrong employment of air power. … The sanctuary we have granted to the port of Haiphong is one of the strangest anomalies in the history of warfare. During the past two years 827 ships have brought munitions and supplies to North Vietnam. Of these ships, 267 were Russian, 258 were Red Chinese, 94 were from Eastern European countries, and 210 were ships of our alleged allies and foreign air recipients. … There are so many ways we could close that port! We could blockade it. We could bomb it to rubble. We could mine it. We could sink a ship in the entrance channel.” 

The American gradual response doctrine in Vietnam backfired and built up resistance and hardness in North Vietnam. When finally the bombing intensity was increased, the people were by then well accustomed to bombing and inured to bombing. Vietnam is the textbook example of what happens when you try to fight a politically correct war: not only do you lose militarily, but you also cause more destruction and suffering in the process of losing and then suffer more savage propaganda from the “peace” movement for having done so. In his chapter on “Limited War”, LeMay explains how Einstein’s equation can be used to intimidate an enemy thus actually preventing the usual massacre: 

“Modern delivery systems make it possible to achieve great accuracy in placing weapons on target, and technology has made it possible to tailor the size of the nuclear yield to fit the situation [dial a yield]. The basic target system for nuclear weapons, as in all conflict, is the enemy’s military capability … The introduction of appropriate-sized nuclear weapons should insure an early termination of hostilities, reduce casualties among American and friendly forces, and limit, not expand, the amount of economic disruption and destruction … As to the question of escalation to general nuclear war, it would seem that this is a matter which should concern the Communists more than it does the United States … With United States superiority, the crossing of any threshold of escalation presents an outcome progressively worse for the Communists. Lacking a capability to fight and win a full-fledged war with the United States, they are obliged, in their own interests, to keep any war at a low level of intensity. … 

“The idea of controlled escalation is not valid when we are confronted by an irrational enemy. A country bent on suicide cannot be stopped short of that. … 

“1. Success in limited war is contingent upon maintaining a superior general war capability. 

“2. Escalation must be feared most by the power with the weaker general war capability. … 

“Unless we start to win the wars we get into, we may find ourselves overextended around the world on several frontiers, fighting equivocal wars. To maintain such vast military forces America would become an armed camp with all our sons being drafted for these endless foreign wars. God forbid! The 1984 of George Orwell would be here. America could then offer little more to its citizens than communism does to its comrades.” 

In a chapter on “Military Superiority” at pages 273-309, LeMay explains that fashionable arms control and weapons parity is a dangerous policy because it encourages aggression and coercion by the enemy: 

“The desire to reduce the huge expenditure for armed forces and armaments is universal. Measures to reduce the risk of war or its destructive nature are crucial matters to all. … Why have physical scientists taken up arms control with such consummate zeal? Some scientists have suggested that there is a guilt complex at work. The physical scientists unleashed the horrible genie of nuclear energy and now they feel morally responsible for putting the genie back into the bottle. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [which responded with a damning review of LeMay’s book, written by Dr Ralph Lapp, ignoring the military lessons about war and quibbled about the yields of some Russian missiles] has beat this drum for almost two decades. Activists … set out to change the national ethos by making nuclear war so horrible to contemplate that national defense with nuclear weapons would be considered immoral and unthinkable. … This anti-nuclear movement is a highly charged, emotional ‘cause’ which has attracted many other groups. The peace organizations have joined with vim. Yet so have many able and well-intentioned politicians, diplomats, and businessmen. … These are all people with a crusading zeal to do away with nuclear weapons and save the world from nuclear war. … They conceive of nuclear weapons to be the greatest evil in the world, and this thought seems to becloud all judgement, knowledge, and sometimes even loyalties. … 

“The accidental war concept was popularly launched by the novel Red Alert [by Peter George in 1958, which was made into Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb using cobalt bomb propaganda against LeMay, Kahn and Teller], a horror story describing a war started by a crazed SAC commander. … Soon after the story was published in 1958, it was ordered that tactical pilots would be medically examined for possible mental abnormalities. The connection seems obvious. Fail-Safe by Burdick and Wheeler was a later thriller of similar plot. This impossible yarn related how a condenser blew in communications equipment, causing a bomber force to fly past its fail-safe point and attack Moscow. Such a ridiculously inaccurate story, deliberately twisting the whole concept of fail-safe which simply meant that if any part of the system failed the system was safe, was passed off by the authors as an authentic possibility, even a probability. Said the authors, ‘it represents a competent estimate of the technical and scientific factors involved in the ‘fail-safe’ system. … 

“War is never ‘cost-effective’ in terms of dollars and blood. People are killed. To them the war is total. You cannot tell bereaved wives, children, and parents that today’s war in Vietnam, for example, is a counter-insurgency exercise into which the United States is putting only a limited effort. Death is final, and drafted boys should not be asked to make this ultimate sacrifice unless the Government is behind them 100 percent. If we pull our punches how can we explain it to their loved ones? … Our losses so far in Vietnam exceed those of the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War combined. Are we paying this price simply to help a friendly country stop outside aggression, or are we actually fighting expanding communism? … we should never engage in a small war unless we are prepared to fight and win a large war. This is fundamental. … The only way to win a war is to escalate it one way or another above what the enemy can endure. If we feel that we cannot win without unacceptable risk we have no business fighting in the first place. 

“There are just two checks on escalation. One is the waning of motivation for fighting the war in the first place. A long grinding war of attrition on the ground might achieve this … The second check on escalation is to so overwhelm your enemy with such heavy and rapid destruction that he loses all hope of winning. Then surrender is an attractive choice when compared to inevitable defeat or certain death. This, of course, is the way we brought Japan to terms in 1945. It was unnecessary to invade with infantry and fight a ground war. We seem to have forgotten this fact. Even though Japan had four million troops under arms with two million guarding her shores, not a shot was fired. We invaded with fourteen hundred military administrators, by air. Not a life was lost in this invasion. 

“The Japanese had been highly motivated to wage war against us. Kamikaze tactics and no-surrender policies were typical. Yet a realization that Japan simply could not win and the certainty that continued resistance meant mounting devastation caused her to toss in the sponge. … In the final analysis, hundreds of thousands of lives were saved and dozens of cities spared … In Korea … there were three and a half million military casualties on both sides during three years of drawn-out war. Over a million civilians were killed ...” 

On pages 104-5, LeMay recommends ABM, pointing out that enemy nuclear missile warheads are vulnerable to initial nuclear radiation and X-ray ablation extending over immense distances in the vacuum of space by a defensive nuclear explosion, so they are shot down without having to “hit a bullet with a bullet”. On page 106, LeMay points out that on 10 November 1966 Defense Secretary McNamara publicly admitted that Russia was employing these ABM systems around Moscow and Leningrad. The three 300 kt Russian Operation K nuclear tests at altitudes of 290, 150 and 59 km on 22 and 28 October and 1 November 1962, respectively, were ABM system proof tests. Unlike American high altitude nuclear tests (where EMP damage on Hawaii was discovered purely by accident), Russia specifically instrumented burned power transmission lines and telephone lines for EMP damage research before setting off these nuclear tests. Russian unveiled its Griffon ABM in 1963 and “The Galosh ABM was displayed in a Moscow parade in November, 1964.” 

Despite this proof-tested Russian ABM accomplishment which would have shot down rogue nuclear missiles falling on Moscow, America never protected its cities by ABM systems. Civil defense is also derided in democracies by utopian ideologies who are rewarded Nobel Peace Prizes for censoring out the facts.



“Appeasement seldom works in the long term ... appeasement will not prevent every possible attack.”


- Robert C. Harney, “Inaccurate Prediction of Nuclear Weapons Effects and Possible Adverse Influences on Nuclear Terrorism Preparedness”, Homeland Security Affairs, volume V, No. 3, September 2009, pp. 1-19 (quotation from page 18). (PDF here.)

“... before World War II, for example, many of the staffs engaged in estimating the effects of bombing overestimated by large amounts. This was one of the main reasons that at the Munich Conference, and earlier occasions, the British and the French chose appeasement ... Many people object to air and civil defense, not because they underestimate the problem, but because they overestimate it. They think there is nothing significant that can be done ...”

- Herman Kahn, testimony to the Biological and Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 86th Congress, 22-26 June 1959, Part 1, at pages 883 and 943. (139 MB PDF.)


“No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.” - Winston Churchill

“U.S. leaders will be compelled to temper their objectives visà-vis nuclear-armed regional adversaries ...”

- David Ochmanek and Lowell H. Schwartz, The Challenge of Nuclear-Armed Regional Adversaries, RAND Corporation, 2008, Monograph MG-671-AF, pages xi-xii.


“... We learned about an enemy who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined, and lethal. ... We learned that the institutions charged with protecting ... did not adjust their policies, plans and practices to deter or defeat it.” - Thomas H. Kean (Chair) and Lee H. Hamilton (Vice Chair), Preface to The 9/11 Commission Report, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, 2004.

Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1972

Janis, civil defense research psychologist and author of Psychological Stress (Wiley, N.Y., 1958), Stress and Frustration (Harcourt Brace, N.Y., 1971), and Air War and Emotional Stress (RAND Corporation/McGraw-Hill, N.Y., 1951), begins Victims of Groupthinkwith a study of classic errors by “groupthink” advisers to four American presidents (page iv):

“Franklin D. Roosevelt (failure to be prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor), Harry S. Truman (the invasion of North Korea), John F. Kennedy (the Bay of Pigs invasion), and Lyndon B. Johnson (escalation of the Vietnam War) ... in each instance, the members of the policy-making group made incredibly gross miscalculations about both the practical and moral consequences of their decisions.”

Joseph de Rivera's The Psychological Dimension of Foreign Policy showed how a critic of Korean War tactics was excluded from the advisory group, to maintain a complete consensus for President Truman. Schlesinger's A Thousand Days shows how President Kennedy was misled by a group of advisers on the decision to land 1,400 Cuban exiles in the Bay of Pigs to try to overthrow Castro's 200,000 troops, a 1:143 ratio. Janis writes in Victims of Groupthink:

“I use the term “groupthink” ... when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”(p. 9)

“... the group's discussions are limited ... without a survey of the full range of alternatives.”(p. 10)

“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 [to overcome inert prejudice/status quo], which is anathema to the members of a concurrence-seeking group.”(p.61)

“One rationalization, accepted by the Navy right up to December 7 [1941], was that the Japanese would never dare attempt a full-scale assault against Hawaii because they would realize that it would precipitate an all-out war, which the United States would surely win. It was utterly inconceivable ... But ... the United States had imposed a strangling blockade ... Japan was getting ready to take some drastic military counteraction to nullify the blockade.”(p.87)

“... in 1914 the French military high command ignored repeated warnings that Germany had adopted the Schlieffen Plan, which called for a rapid assault through Belgium ... their illusions were shattered when the Germans broke through France's weakly fortified Belgian frontier in the first few weeks of the war and approached the gates of Paris. ... the origins of World War II ... Neville Chamberlain's ... inner circle of close associates ... urged him to give in to Hitler's demands ... in exchange for nothing more than promises that he would make no further demands.”(pp.185-6)

“Eight main symptoms run through the case studies of historic fiascoes ... an illusion of invulnerability ... collective efforts to ... discount warnings ... an unquestioned belief in the group's inherent morality ... stereotyped views of enemy leaders ... 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.”(pp.197-8)

“... other members are not exposed to information that might challenge their self-confidence.”(p.206)

William J. Broad, U.S. Rethinks Strategy for the Unthinkable, New York Times, December 15, 2010:

“But a problem for the Obama administration is how to spread the word without seeming alarmist about a subject that few politicians care to consider, let alone discuss. So officials are proceeding gingerly in a campaign to educate the public. “We have to get past the mental block that says it’s too terrible to think about,” W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in an interview. “We have to be ready to deal with it” and help people learn how to “best protect themselves.” ... Administration officials argue that the cold war created an unrealistic sense of fatalism about a terrorist nuclear attack. “It’s more survivable than most people think,” said an official deeply involved in the planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The key is avoiding nuclear fallout.” ... “There’s no penetration of the message coming out of the federal government,” said Irwin Redlener, a doctor and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “It’s deeply frustrating that we seem unable to bridge the gap between the new insights and using them to inform public policy.” ... “Public education is key,” Daniel J. Kaniewski, a security expert at George Washington University, said in an interview. “But it’s easier for communities to buy equipment — and look for tech solutions — because there’s Homeland Security money and no shortage of contractors to supply the silver bullet.” ... Some noted conflicting federal advice on whether survivors should seek shelter or try to evacuate. ...

“In 2007, Congress appropriated $5.5 million for studies on atomic disaster planning, noting that “cities have little guidance available to them.” The Department of Homeland Security financed a multiagency modeling effort led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The scientists looked at Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other big cities, using computers to simulate details of the urban landscape and terrorist bombs. ... The big surprise was how taking shelter for as little as several hours made a huge difference in survival rates. “This has been a game changer,” Brooke Buddemeier, a Livermore health physicist, told a Los Angeles conference. He showed a slide labeled “How Many Lives Can Sheltering Save?” ... Soon after Mr. Obama arrived at the White House, he embarked a global campaign to fight atomic terrorism and sped up domestic planning for disaster response. ... The agenda hit a speed bump. Las Vegas was to star in the nation’s first live exercise meant to simulate a terrorist attack with an atom bomb, the test involving about 10,000 emergency responders. But casinos and businesses protested, as did Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. He told the federal authorities that it would scare away tourists. Late last year, the administration backed down. “Politics overtook preparedness,” said Mr. Kaniewski of George Washington University.”







Update (5 June 2015): The nuclear proliferation data secrecy problem and Dr Timperley's new Academic Press book "Organophosphorus (V) Chemistry" which covers nerve gases


Dr Chris Timperley's book "Organophosphorus (V) Chemistry" published 2015 by Academic press, for understanding nerve gas protection

Academic Press's modern chemistry series, Basic Synthetic Methods, now has a volume covering nerve gas chemistry and biological effects including protective measures and lethal doses, called Organophosphorus (V) Chemistry, edited by Dr Christopher M. Timperley of the Detection Department, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), Porton Down, Britain's chemical and biological protection laboratory.  The letter V in parentheses denotes that the book deals with phosphorus of valency 5.  Phosphorus has 5 electrons in its outer shell which has a capacity for 8 electrons, so has 5 electrons that can undergo bonding, but it can also bond by borrowing 3 electrons from other atoms to completely fill up its outer shell to 8 electrons.  Thus, depending on whether it achieves chemical stability by loaning out 5 electrons to other atoms in a compound, or instead borrowing 3 electrons to fill up the outer shell, it can have a valency of either 5 or 3.  The nerve gases and organophosphates of valency V in general employ valency 5, with 2 of the 5 electrons utilized in a double-bond to an oxygen atom, leaving 3 electrons to bond with various molecules that creates a variety of nerve gases, insecticides, anti-cancer drugs, and even fire-retardants (see illustration below).

It is really not surprising that the study of nerve gas  type compounds compounds has led to anti-cancer drugs.  The very first effective chemotherapy agent for cancer was mustard gas, a discovery made by Louis Goodman and Alfred Gilman of Yale University, when they halted and subdued an aggressive, advanced cancer of the lymph system by using a sequence of small injections of nitrogen mustard gas (a liquid precursor of mustard gas, itself used in WWI for warfare) beginning on 27 August 1942, which prolonged the patient's life until 1 December.  In 1948, Professor Alexander Haddow by trial and error experiments with tumours in rats, gradually modified the nitrogen mustard into other related chemicals that had even better results against cancer, with fewer serious side effects.  Later research showed that the mechanism for many of the early anti-cancer drugs, from nitrogen mustard onward, was a chemical activation of apoptosis (cell self destruction) in fast-dividing cancer cells, which is normally prevented in cancer cells, since cancer arises, in the majority of cases, from DNA damage to the apoptosis and DNA repair system controlled by protein enzyme P53 (which becomes activated when P53 is removed from its inhibitor, MDM2).  The analogy here is fire "resulting from" damage to the sensors of a fire-sprinkler (fire suppressor) system.  By finding chemicals that can switch-on the natural tumour suppressor systems in cancer cells with defective apoptosis controllers, cancers are suppressed.

The story of nerve gas and its related organophosphate insecticides, anti-cancer drugs,and fire suppressors starts in November 1936, when the discoverer of the first nerve gases, Dr Gerhard Schrader, was hospitalized for 14 days with severe nerve gas poisoning, including the general nerve gas exposure sympton of contracted (pin point) eye pupils (illustration below).  After Germany lost the war, Schrader was interrogated by the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee (BIOS), and his secret report The development of new insecticides and chemical warfare agents, was published in BIOS's final report 714, item 8.






Above: declassified data on the discovery and performance of the latest high-energy cross-linked solid propellants for ICBMs and SLBMs, like Trident.  Thus, North Korean nuclear proliferation efforts like its SLBM program can proceed faster and more cheaply than expected from naive analogies to earlier nuclear powers, since the modern dictatorship can simply bypass a lot of the research "dead ends" by using the end results of the research of other nations to focus its own research on tried-and-tested technology that works.


According to the diagram above, modern primary and secondary stages for nuclear warheads were developed back in the 1960s.  So just how much safe-guarding secrecy is continuing over effective non-lens type implosion systems relevant for compressing fissile material and thereby (with an nuclear initiator and high-current switched capacitor bank X-unit) causing nuclear explosions?

U.S. military physicist Bernard E. Drimmer (who worked in the Explosives Division in the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory, and died on 3 December 2008), an expert with numerous patents for shaped explosives, anti-tank mines, etc., has an unclassified US patent number 5450794, filed on 29 November 1963 and granted on 19 September 1995, for an implosion system relevant to compact nuclear shells, although the patent makes no mention of nuclear applications, but is passed off as merely a more efficient way of detonating conventional explosions.  If you simultaneously detonate the outer edges of an explosive,the implosion wave burns inwards, rebounds in the centre - especially if there is a dense metal core there like uranium - and then rebounds outward.  All of the explosive material is therefore engulfed twice by the main shock wave, once during the implosion and then again during the outward rebound.  This ensures more effective burning and energy transfer to the shock wave than occurs otherwise in a non-nuclear bomb (from Newton's 3rd law, when you detonate the surface of an explosive, half the force or pressure times area goes inward and the other half goes outward, so if you are outside of a detonated implosion system with a non-fissile core, you first experience a direct shock wave, followed by the rebounded implosion wave, but the latter is much stronger than the former, because it picks up more energy from its two transits through the fully burned and hot detonation product gases):



Notice the shaping of the "inert barriers", or steel discs, which are thicker in the middle (pointing towards the core) in Figure 3 (showing the linear implosion system).  Linear implosion of this sort was first used successfully in the first successful Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapon, Teapot-Tesla (7 kilotons, detonated in Nevada on 1 March 1955) soon followed by an even smaller linear implosion weapon, Teapot-Post (2 kilotons, detonated in Nevada on 9 April 1955).  Linear implosion does not produce as much implosion pressure as a spherical implosion system of the same mass, but it does have the advantages of (a) requiring only two simultaneous detonators (reducing the complexity of the weapon design and allowing a smaller capacitor bank in the firing system, the X-unit) and (b) being a compact cylinder in shape, it fits into small nuclear bombs and shells.  For low yield weapons designed for battlefield use where the yield is deliberately not-maximised in order to avoid collateral damage to civilians due to fallout, the lower fission efficiency, due to the smaller core compression in linear implosion, is simply not a problem.



The point we are making is that the North Korean nuclear threat is not necessarily as small as certain American politicians have claimed, who frequently and falsely assert that it will by necessity of technological barriers take many years before North Korea will be able to eject one of its proof-tested nuclear weapons from one of its proof-tested long range missile systems.  That assertion is akin to the vague and misleading guesswork claims made by certain anti-war elements in America before 7 December 1941, that Japan could not launch a surprise attack on the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor, because it would take years to develop innovative air-dropped torpedoes that could cope with the shallow water.  In reality, as Herman Kahn pointed out in On Thermonuclear War, the worst wars of history occurred when liberal opinion duped itself and many others into believing that such wars were history, using spurious technical claims and shutting down discussions of the errors of those claims.  Historically, such people have proved to produce the culture of delusion that leads to policies maximising terrorism, surprise attacks, and mortality.  The first step in getting effective civil defense in place to deter or mitigate terrorism is a realistic appraisal of the facts, not a delusion that official secrecy exists and will keep us safe.  The first Russian nuclear test of 1949 came as a surprise to many in officialdom who believed that stamping "secret" on the facts would protect the free world.  They were wrong.  Secrecy is not only the instrument of totalitarian dictatorships, it proved that the totalitarian dictatorships actually had access to the free world's secrets, due to spying.  So secrecy is no real defense.  Only widespread realistic understanding of the facts can reduce terrorism by honest civil defense.


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."