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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Quoted in 2006 on this blog here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honest Effects of Nuclear Weapons! The Effects of Nuclear Weapons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, July 13, 2015

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


Bigger bombs produce fewer blast and thermal casualties per ton of TNT energy because you have more time to duck and cover at the radius of devastation and because of the scaling laws: actual casualty data proves this.  Simple civil defense reduces casualties still further, and nuclear radiation is shielded by modern city buildings.
Britain has only Trident as its nuclear deterrent, which in January 2014 failed to deter the Russian incursion into Ukraine and seizure of Crimea, as a result two different actions of the EU's foreign affairs boss Baroness Cathy Ashton. First, while in CND, Ashton produced a notoriously inaccurate propaganda booklet on the W79 "neutron bomb" which Carter wanted to deter a Russian invasion of places like Afghanistan. Ashton won, and Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
Reagan reversed Carter's decision to procrastinate and deployed the W79 deterrent against the Russian conventional invasion tanks superiority. Thus may have contributed to the USSR defeatism which ended the Cold War in 1991. Unfortunately, at that time, Bush reversed Reagan's decision and abolished the W79. This was opposed by a now-declassified report authored by Joseph S. Howard, II, and Edward I. Whitted, “The Future of Non-Strategic Nuclear Forces; are these capabilities still needed”, report LA-12063-MS, April 30, 1991, originally classified Secret – Formerly Restricted Data, Nuclear Weapon Data, Sigma 3.
Page 7 of the report warned that Trident's (strategic) nuclear weapons were not enough to credibly deter the kind of provocations that led to world wars, so a low yield tactical weapon is needed: "As a deterrent to future non-superpower nuclear-capable adversaries" and also, crucially, "As a deterrent to regional Soviet or Russian aggression as long as resurgence or reconstitution remains feasible.”
The usual argument here is that Kennedy deployed vast numbers of W54 tactical anti-invasion nuclear weapons to Europe to deter invasions in Western Europe in the 1960s, and it worked as well as Reagan's updated W79 deployment for the same purpose in the 80s. The aim is to deter conventional warfare breaking out, might could escalate to strategic nuclear city bombing. In other words, if you credibly deter conventional invasions, the world is a safer place.
Page 16: “Deployment of nuclear weapons to Europe created an extended deterrence umbrella for conventional force deficiencies. … The US, after fighting a war against totalitarianism, turned to a grand strategy of containment of Soviet imperialism. … therefore, the NATO alliance was formed to draw the line against further Soviet expansion. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) alliance deployed forces far beyond those required for its own defense. Unable and unwilling to match the conventional force goals of the 1952 Lisbon Conference, the US deployed its first theatre nuclear weapons for NATO in 1953. … the presence of theatre nuclear weapons (now NSNF) gave an aura of credible response options before the ultimate response.”
Page 18: “The presence of NSNF in Europe contributed to the long peace of 45 years. These weapons helped to DETER the Soviet Union from initiating nuclear coercion or overt aggression against the NATO alliance. … We argue that the existence of theatre nuclear weapons was a major factor for the past 45 year peace in Europe. ... The strategies of NATO worked. They worked in spite of ambiguities in NATO declaratory policies; ambiguities necessitated by political constraints and public acceptability. … But it all worked to keep the peace. The US policy of extended deterrence within NATO’s nuclear declaratory and operational strategies made the cost of aggression too high to Soviet leaders. These weapons engendered cautious behavior. …”
Page 21: “A future nuclear-proliferated world would present enormous challenges to US defense interests. … Several of these nations maintain profoundly hostile relations to the US. … a future resurgent and mobilized Soviet Union remains feasible. While intentions can move towards amicability, they can subsequently be reversed … the greater Russian Republic, should some republics become autonomous, may have future cause to counter US vital interests … Therefore, we are incredulous of US forces without NSNF [tactical nuclear weapons] to prevent war or to terminate war against hostile nuclear-armed states. The rationale for NSNF must rest upon its capabilities to deter a plausible resurgent Soviet Union...
Page 27: “Credible deterrence necessitates WILL to employ nuclear weapons as expressed in declaratory strategies and roles, and effective military CAPABILITY.”
Page 32: “Based upon IC projections we assumed … three future regional threats …
“ 1. Reconstituted Soviet Union or greater Russian Federation. …
“ 2. Pacific Basin, regional nuclear adversary, e.g., North Korea …
“ 3. Middle East, regional adversary, e.g., federation of Iran and Iraq [currently IS, Islamic State]…
“… It is not necessary for our purposes to spell out the road to crisis or to war. It might be a future combination of nuclear coercion, renewed interest in East European domination, oil proclivities towards the Middle East, or others.”




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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


"During growth arrest, p53 may activate the transcription of proteins involved in DNA repair. One of its transcriptional target genes, p53R2, encodes ribonucleotide reductase, which is important for both DNA replication and repair. p53 also interacts directly with AP endonuclease and DNA polymerase, which are involved in base excision repair.

"Apoptosis is the "last resort" to avoid proliferation of cells containing abnormal DNA. Apoptosis can be induced by the binding of Caspase 9 to cytochrome c and Apaf1.  p53 may activate the expression of Apaf1 and Bax. The latter can then stimulate the release of cytochrome c from mitochondria."

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



Above: a scientific photo set unsuitable for the scare mongering anti-nuclear front page of the New Scientist, Scientific American, BBC "news" website, or Nature Medicine.  Not exactly suitable for the front cover of Helen Caldicott's next bestseller on the effects of the aftermath of nuclear reactor warfare and the neutron bomb, either.


Above: no front page newspaper headlines appeared when Dr Dino Samartzis in 2011 found that bone cancer from radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki required a threshold dose of 85 rads (0.85 Gray or 85 centigray) to the bone marrow (which is shielded by tissue, so that the corresponding threshold radiation meter free air dose is 1.5 times greater than the bone marrow dose, or about 128 rads).  Only 19 cases of bone cancer occurred in 80,181 persons studied.  This was peer reviewed and published after Sanders 2010 book on Radiation Hormesis, so it is not included there.  For the more moderate dose rate exposure of radium dial painters, bone cancers only occurred when the radium intake was at least 100 microcuries (10 Grays delivered over  about 20 years), because moderate dose rates have larger threshold doses for cancer, while low dose rates have an hormesis effect (reducing cancer risks, by increasing the metabolism devoted to DNA repair enzymes).

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

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

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

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


Los Alamos report on Trident W76 warhead development history (declassified): LA-14066-H, Tracing the Origins of the W76: 1966-Spring 1973 (U) by Betty L. Perkins. Note the "Confetti argument" section where legendary Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Harold Agnew (the man who personally filmed the Hiroshima explosion using a cine camera in a B29, see photos below) points out that the effects of Hiroshima on substantial buildings was NOT impressive.  (Also on Scribd; also item 548 in the DOE declassified PDF documents list, all FOIA requests).  Compare that to the American Office of Technology Assessment's widely hyped lies on the Effects of Nuclear War, 1979.  For a refutation of Rotblat-CND Hiroshima and fallout radiation effects deceptions by the hard truth, please see Radiation scare mongering debunked.


Harold Agnew LANL Director and Hiroshima film cameraman, debunked Hiroshima exaggerations with "confetti argument".


Hiroshima ground zero, after 6 August 1945, quite a different story from American propaganda.  Modern city type concrete buildings and the people in them survived near ground zero, which is in the foreground of this photo (photo source here or here).  The media's secrecy over real radiation health effects is tragic in the cost to humanity, even before the cost in conventional war casualties is included.



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

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

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


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

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




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

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


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



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


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


REVIEW OF HIROSHIMA: THE AFTERMATH



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

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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


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





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


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

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

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

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

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

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

'Housing. The building of houses is to be systematically begun on 15 November. ...'Tramways. At present, ten trams are in commission on the main route, eight on the Miyajima route and five muncipal buses. These twenty-three vehicles must cater for an average of 42,000 persons daily.

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


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



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




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


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

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



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


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


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

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

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






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


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

Fina Martinez-Myers
702-794-5112

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

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


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


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

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

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



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

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


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

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

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


29 kt Teapot-Apple 2 nuclear test house survived 1955 shot and remains in Nevada today, 60 years later.


J. E. Kester and R. B. Ferguson, Operation Teapot, Project 5.4, Evaluation of Fireball Lethality Using Basic Missile Structures

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

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


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




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

- Dr Kermit H. Larson, et al., Distribution, Characteristics, and Biotic Availability of Fallout, Operation Plumbbob, weapon test report WT-1488, ADA077509, July 1966, page 59.





American public enthusiasm for nuclear weapons effects studies, Nevada 1953 troop tests for Korean War deterrence:


Letters from American patriots begging to be used as guinea pigs for nuclear explosion radiation effects studies, including one from a woman with a terminal illness.  In those days, the knowledge of the devastation of conventional warfare in WWII was still fresh, and nuclear deterrence against conventional warfare was applauded, not hated as it is today by the deluded.
School boy volunteering to the President in 1953 to donate his life by becoming a human "guinea pig" at the Nevada nuclear weapon test site, to assess the effects of nuclear explosion radiation on human beings.  The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission radiation effects director, Dr John C. Bugher, politely declined the patriotic offer.  (What a different set of letters they would receive nowadays if nuclear weapons tests were resumed, I wonder?)



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

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

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


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


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

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


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





As occurred tragically in the 1930s when criticisms of Nazi eugenics "science" were censored out as being quackery by a media which was deluded by fashionable best selling books like Man the Unknown by gas chamber eugenics proponent Medical Nobel Laureate eugenicist Dr Alexis Carrel and other big shots, the popular media prefers to cater to groupthink consensus, and to get quotes from bigots, instead of digging up the truth.  

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

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

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

Truth isn't actually what concerns "fact" checkers of magazines, which consider a fact to be a spelling or whether one statement agrees with the policy of a powerful bigoted media baron.  News or history for them is something to be manipulated by selectively censoring out critics and comparisons to all interpretations of the data!  Well, at least he ticked one thing off a bucket list.  Hopefully, he therefore will not feel the need to keep on sensationalizing nuclear fears for cash like CND, Caldicott, North Korea and Scientific American.


Russia in 2015 has at least 619 megatons of yield in 2,500 nuclear weapons and has declared an arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons in 1997, 43% of which still remain. Putin may be linked to using radioactive polonium-210 to kill a Russian dissident in 2006, the invasion of Ukraine and taking over Crimea, shooting down civilian airliner MH17 and now using its so-called (un) United Nations veto to ban an objective investigation of the crime, etc. The idea of spreading antinuclear propaganda for disarmament was always supported by coercive enemies.  Britain fell for that ploy in the the 1930s.


Me (your anti-profiteering Nige Cook) measuring the radiation of the Chernobyl fallout across Western Europe in May 1986 using a radiation meter, doing so by self-calibrating this meter with a safe 100 microcurie Cs-137 source. Today, regulations are so strict kids can't even calibrate radiation meters. Even using a lab sized Panax scaler to count over eight hour periods with large scintillation tube (phosphor: sodium iodide/thallium crystal) detectors, there was no fallout hazard compared to natural background radiation. I sent New Scientist and all other journals the results, which were censored out. Lies were printed. New Scientist anti nuclear scare propaganda from Rob Edwards et al. has had a devastating effect on nuclear science.  People who are honest are driven out of physics by personal abuse, censorship, and pure hatred, all based on pseudoscience, politics, Dark Ages type superstition, and money making quackery.  The BBC and the Government funds the biased "environmentalists".


LAWYERS, POLITICIANS, FILM AND TV PROPAGANDA EXPLOITING FAME OBSESSED STARS AGAINST JUSTICE, HUMAN RIGHTS, EQUALITY, AND DEMOCRACY: THE EUROPEAN UNION'S THREAT TO THE SURVIVAL OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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

― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

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."