British Restricted manual, An Introduction to Nuclear Weapon Effects 1959, War Office code 9612. (Updated 14 July 2017.)
World War I was sparked by the invasion of Belgium, World War II by the invasion of Poland, the first Gulf War by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and basically all wars of high casualty rates (plus refugees) are due to invasions or attempted invasions (sieges such Leningrad, invasions of South Korea and South Vietnam, and so on). So how do you stop or prevent invasions by massed terrorists and rogue states with credible nuclear deterrence, of kiloton yield? In previous posts, there were discussions of some of the declassified reports on effects of Australian-British nuclear test data from 1956 Buffalo and 1957 Antler operations at Maralinga, Australia.
In order to make nuclear weapons into a credible deterrent of the kinds of invasions that escalate into world wars and wars with high casualty rates and refugee problems, it is necessary for terrorists and rogue states to be deterred, so they need to know what the capabilities are. So it is interesting that the results from those tests were summarised in a British Restricted manual, An Introduction to Nuclear Weapon Effects 1959, War Office code 9612, which gives the scientific facts in tables and graphs; Table II is a particularly useful summary of deterrent capabilities against all military equipment:
An Introduction to Nuclear Weapon Effects 1959, War Office code 9612.
How to avoid collateral damage to civilians and friendly troops is discussed in the accompanying, also Restricted, Precautions against nuclear attack, War Office code 9466:
The whole idea here is to terrorise the terrorists into becoming peaceful and reasonable, something that Corbyn doesn't really believe in. (For his terrorism support in the name of "peace" see that post, while for his racism support in the name of "peace" see this one.) The basis for credible, successful deterrence is achieving real peace. While it is relatively easy to "achieve peace" (of a sort) by surrendering, that's not real peace. Two world wars have demonstrated that conventional weapons are not a sufficient deterrent. Far from it, the visible mobilization of the huge amount of conventional weapons needed for an attempted deterrence in 1914 has been blamed for escalating the tensions, something you don't have with more compact nuclear weapons. (For a debunking of radiation scaremongering, see this post.)
Above: a Roman wall in Colchester. Walled cities were built to keep out terrorists, invaders, etc. This wall is nearly 2,000 years old. Sure, it's not impossible to climb it or blast through it, but it makes attacks less effective: it tips the balance of power away from the insurgents. It makes defence easier, and attack harder. It is well proved technology. While Mr Rich Anti-Christ in the Vatican may issue damnation type threats against those who genuinely believe in peace walls, the reality is that "peace walls" helped to pave the way for peace in multicultural conflicts in both Northern Ireland and Israel. Just as the tactical nuclear weapons of Kennedy and Reagan helped to deter invasions, so peace walls do too. When lying nasty, racist, terrorist backing inhumanity of Marxist propaganda in the BBC is exposed for what it is, peace is possible without either bloodshed or surrender to terrorists.
CND appeasement of terrorism exposed in London Sun newspaper: 18 June 1983.
Above: terrorists in anti-nuclear pseudo-peace campaign CND opposed the credible nuclear nuclear deterrence which ended the Cold War peacefully! Peace hating terrorist thugs in CND were controlled by the Kremlin (see link here).
CND terrorists who were anti-nuclear deterrence attempted the sick blackmail of mothers into supporting terrorism, using false fears, as exposed in Daily Mail newspaper: 25 October 1983.
Update (17 June 2017) on the need to debunk the populist lies and myths of nuclear deterrence
1. The claim that nuclear weapons risk escalating a conventional war into an all out world war was debunked on this blog years ago in several posts, for example the one linked here concerning the motivations and backgrounds of the editors of the 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan.
Britain's Vice Chair of CND, the campaign for nuclear disarmament founded in 1957, Jeremy Corbyn, is now the Labour Leader and thus Shadow Prime Minister. He was first elected a Labour MP in 1983 when that party's manifesto carbon-copied the Communist Party's manifesto, and then his militant extremism was exposed in a 1987 general election poster where he rejected democracy.
Above: there was no secrecy on the neutron bomb's deterrent value at the Royal Military College of Science! (Cold War era letter in the 12 June 1986 New Scientist debunking scare mongering propaganda by anti nuclear ignorant fanatics. This letter went completely ignored by CND!)
2. There is often a claim made that a "single one megaton nuclear bomb over a city" could accidentally trigger WWIII or cause mass casualties, despite the successful testing in 1962 of a reliable ABM system capable of countering such accidental launches, and the preventative technology in warheads to prevent unauthorised fully yield nuclear detonation in accidents! In fact, this claim is completely debunked by a close study of the "debate". Dr Hans Bethe and CND repeatedly campaigned against ABM protection of cities from accidental missile launches (carrying one megaton warheads, or several sub-megaton warheads designed to wipe out military targets). They didn't want to avoid the very threat they claimed was the main problem!
They falsely claimed that if ABM was banned, such an agreement would stop the arms race and protect us from WWIII. It instead led, as Reagan's defense secretary clearly explained, to the huge build up of USSR arms in the 1970s! The one thing Khrushchev and Brezhnev should be praised for is pushing through, unlike America and Britain, both civil defence shelters and effective ABM defences for Moscow (that can shoot down accidentally launched Western missiles) to prevent the need to escalate a small attack such as an unauthorised launch into an all-out and devastating WWIII. This crisis-stability afforded by civil defense shelters, fallout area evacuation plans and ABM is a vital anti-escalation measure to prevent retaliation after attack! This is also useful in other disasters.
But ironically the supposedly pro-peace "peace movements", as well as significant and influential ignorant fools in the Western military and political scene, have been taken in by decades of eugenics style "fake news consensus science" by fascists and communists. When this is pointed out, lying blather comes back claiming that communists helped fight the Nazis when London was Blitzed. False, the Communists were in August 1939 responsible for WWII by forcing Hitler into invading Poland jointly with them in September 1939, and this USSR-Nazi collaboration lasted throughout the Blitz of London, only ending in June 1941 when the Nazis invaded their former friends, the Russian communists. The unvarnished truth is that there is as much difference between the militarism, groupthink, paranoia, and socialist over-spending of the National Socialist fascists of Hitler and the USSR, as there is between the Labour and Communist party agendas: none whatsoever.
ABM offers protection against rogue missiles, as does civil defence. But neither are accepted by the pseudo-peace campaigners like Jeremy Corbyn, Marxist vice-chair of anti nuclear movement CND. Try to expose this in the BBC and Guardian, and you're treated like a leper. The media hates peace.
3. A specious claim is sometimes made that credible, tactical nuclear weapons, deployed to Europe by Kennedy in the form of the W54 and by Reagan in the form of the W79 which averts collateral damage to personnel by detonating at an altitude too great to do blast damage on the ground (neutrons deter the invaders) would "lower the nuclear threshold". Well, that's the precise point! We've got tens of millions dead since 1945 due to the fact that the nuclear threshold has been set too high to deter conventional war. The nuclear bomb designers, apart from Samuel Cohen and (on occasion) Robert Oppenheimer, usually tended to stay out of the truth about the nuclear weapons effects data! They were happy to hide behind secrecy and allow CND style Corbynism or mythology to "inform democracy of the facts"! In reality, as explained in a previous post, the hundreds to thousands of millions of conventional bombs used in the conventional wars of history are more than equivalent in actual destructive capability (which is not proportional to energy yield) of existing nuclear weapons!
“The first objection to battlefield ER weapons is that they potentially lower the nuclear threshold because of their tactical utility. In the kind of potential strategic use suggested where these warheads would be held back as an ultimate countervalue weapon only to be employed when exchange had degenerated to the general level, this argument loses its force: the threshold would long since have been crossed before use of ER weapons is even contemplated. In the strategic context, it is rather possible to argue that such weapons raise the threshold by reinforcing the awful human consequences of nuclear exchange: the hostages recognize they are still (or once again) prisoners and, thus, certain victims.”
- Dr Donald M. Snow (Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies, University of Alabama), “Strategic Implications of Enhanced Radiation Weapons”, Air University Review, July-August 1979 issue (online version linked here).
But Snow over-states the "lowering the nuclear threshold" argument by explaining it makes no sense after you are in a large nuclear war. The reality is that in WWI, Britain's fired 170 million shells at German trenches, of which 1.5 million were fired in the brief barrage before the Battle of the Somme. In 1917 alone, Britain produced 50 million shells containing 185 kilotons of explosive. In the Battle of Amiens, August 1918, the firing of 4,000,000 allied shells broke down German positions. In a final push, devastation at a rate similar to nuclear war bombardment occurred when 943,947 shells were fired in a 24-hour period by the British Army on 28-29 September 1918, resulting in the Armistice ending the war (source: Malcolm Pearce and Geoffrey Stewart, British political history, 1867-2001, page 296). Altogether, from 1914-17 Britain fired 290 kilotons of high explosives in shells at German trenches The "equivalent megatonage" or equivalent to 1 megaton nuclear weapons, isn't just 0.29 megatons, but is immense because the area of destruction and thus casualties scale by only about the 2/3 power of energy, not directly with yield, and each average shell contained only 3.7 kg of explosive. Thus, the equivalent megatonnage of Britain's shelling in 1917 alone is:
50,000,000(3.7 x 10-9)2/3 = 120 separate 1 megaton nuclear weapons. In the whole of WWI, the British Army fired 170 million shells, with equivalent damage to:
170,000,000(3.7 x 10-9)2/3 = 408 separate 1 megaton nuclear weapons.
(We can neglect the 50% blast partition of total yield in nuclear weapons, because that's also true for conventional explosive shells that are 50% explosive, 50% steel case by mass.)
Dr Ralph E. Lapp's 1965 book The New Priesthood (Harper, New York) on pages 113-114 gives an honest "equivalent megatonnage" comparison between conventional weapons and old high-yield megaton single warhead nuclear missiles (which have now been replaced with lower yield MIRV warheads) instead of following CND by claiming falsely that the energy equivalent of 1,000,000 tons of TNT kills the same number as a million separate tons of TNT in explosions of conventional weapons:
"A warhead for a Minuteman or Polaris missile costs about $1 million each. ... To produce damage comparable to that from a one-megaton bomb, some 8,000 'old-fashioned' bombs each containing one ton of TNT would have to be dropped uniformly over the same target area."
In other words, according to Lapp: 8 kt of conventional weapons = 1 megaton. Using the two-thirds power of yield scaling, the equivalence is: 10 kt of small 1 ton TNT bombs = same area of damage as 1 megaton in a single bomb. The American B-52 bomber has a payload of 32 tons, so it takes 313 sorties to drop 10 kt of TNT which (if the bombs are 1 ton each) is equivalent in damage area to a 1 megaton nuclear weapon. For solid direct evidence for the validity of this scaling law, whereby bigger bombs cause fewer fatalities per TNT ton of energy equivalent than smaller bombs, see the graphs linked in the earlier post here and the ease of protection against the increasingly delayed heat, fallout and blast arrival time over larger areas for bigger explosions, as proved here. At the 1 psi peak overpressure range for shattered windows in a conventional 1 ton TNT air burst explosion, there is only 0.4 second available between the flash and the blast arrival, little longer than the blink reaction time for human beings. Hence, for small bombs, you can do little. But, contrary to BBC TV fiddled sound tracks on films of nuclear explosions, for a 1 kt bomb you have a full 4 seconds before 1 psi arrives, while for 1 megaton you have 40 seconds. This effect reduces casualties.
In Vietnam, 7,662,000 tons of conventional bombs were dropped (according to Micheal Clodfelter's Vietnam in Military Statistics, 1995, page 225), which by this reckoning (10 kt of conventional bombs = 1 megaton of nuclear) is equivalent in terms of damage to a nuclear war of 766 separate 1 megaton explosions.
Now consider WWII, where London alone received about 18.8 kilotons in roughly 188 thousand separate 100 kg explosives in the 1940 Blitz :
188,000(10-7)2/3 = 4 thermonuclear weapons, each 1 megaton.
The 1.3 megatons of conventional bombs dropped on Germany in WWII was likewise equivalent to:
13,000,000(10-7)2/3 = 280 separate thermonuclear weapons, each 1 megaton.
In total, 74.2 kilotons of conventional bombs were dropped on the UK in WWII causing 60,000 casualties, equivalent to 16 separate 1 megaton nuclear weapons, confirming the British Home Office analysis that - given cheap-type civil defence - you get about 3,750 casualties for a one megaton nuclear weapon. Naturally, without civil defence, as in early air bombing surprise attacks or the first use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, casualty rates can be over 100 times higher than this. (For example, Glasstone and Dolan, in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 1977 point out that in Hiroshima the 50% lethal radius was only 0.12 mile for people under cover in concrete buildings, compared to 1.3 miles for those caught totally unprotected outdoors. The difference in areas is over a factor of 100, indicating that the casualties in Hiroshima could have been reduced enormously if the people had taken cover in concrete buildings, or simple earth covered WWII shelters which offered similar protection to concrete buildings.)
About ten percent of the conventional bombs failed to detonated, creating a massive bomb disposal problem that slowed down civil defence in WWII, where the protracted air raids over many months progressively reduced shelter utilization in London, increasing the casualty rate. In neither Britain nor Germany did the bombing of civilians lead to a clear defeat: the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that generally the outrage about being bombed offset the depression of morale from the devastation. Strategic bombing of military manufacturing targets like ball bearing factories failed because the steel machine tools could easily withstand the blast and shrapnel. Only the bombing of fuel and munition supplies (both of which will destroy themselves easily, once ignited) crucially helped to end the war: German production of aviation fuel fell from 156,000 tons in May 1944 to just 11,000 tons in January 1945, thus defeat. The point is:
Conventional weapons failed to deter two world wars, which were each the size of a substantial nuclear war (in terms of devastation and overall casualties). Disarmament after WWI led to WWII.
That's what you get when you don't even have a nuclear deterrent.
The idea that we can gain from not "reducing the nuclear threshold" is absurd, being a product of Brezhnev era propaganda. As the declassified table at the top of this blog post shows, unlike conventional weapons, nuclear weapons like the neutron bomb offer the hope of ending massed invasions by peaceful deterrence, since even the crudest of civil defence measures, dirt cheap, saves lives of non-combat civilians.
At the end of the day, tactical nuclear weapons has been historically proved in the 1960s and 1980s to help deter the conventional invasions that trigger devastating World Wars, which cost tens of millions regardless if economy-busting conventional weapons are used. This damns the mythical "lowering the nuclear threshold argument" against credible deterrence.
'The neutron bomb, so-called because of the deliberate effort to maximize the effectiveness of the neutrons, would necessarily be limited to rather small yields - yields at which the neutron absorption in air does not reduce the doses to a point at which blast and thermal effects are dominant. The use of small yields against large-area targets again runs into the delivery problems faced by chemical agents and explosives, and larger yields in fewer packages pose a less stringent problem for delivery systems in most applications. In the unlikely event that an enemy desired to minimize blast and thermal damage and to create little fallout but still kill the populace, it would be necessary to use large numbers of carefully placed neutron-producing weapons burst high enough to avoid blast damage on the ground [500 metres altitude for a neutron bomb of 1 kt total yield], but low enough to get the neutrons down. In this case, however, adequate radiation shielding for the people would leave the city unscathed and demonstrate the attack to be futile.'
- Dr Harold L. Brode, RAND Corporation, Blast and Other Threats, pp. 5-6 in Proceedings of the Symposium on Protective Structures for Civilian Populations, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, Symposium held at Washington, D.C., April 19-23, 1965.
4. As we explained in the previous post:
Paul Mercer's brilliant 1986 book, Peace of the Dead, exposed how the Marxists infiltrated "peace lobby" CND (which wanted to disarm Britain to allow the Russians to invade without a deterrent) with IRA supporters, Brezhnev era terrorists, and bombers. Sean MacBride was on the Irish CND Committee, and on the International Peace Bureau (which counted on CND as a member body), and so on up to Boris Ponomarev, Head of the International Department for the Kremlin's Politburo, which ran the World Peace Council (a front for war). What we see today from Jeremy Corbyn is just a repeat of the endless propaganda for Marxist revolution, dressed up in Orwellian Doublethink as "peace". In the 1980s, most people had some resilience to this propaganda due to reading Orwell's 1984, or Constantine Fitzgibbon's When the Kissing had to stop. To counter this, CND and fellow travelling "biased scientists" like Carl Sagan abused the data on thermal shadowing in cities by buildings (assuming falsely that cities are like unobstructed deserts) to exaggerate fires and "predict" firestorms that release enough soot to cause a "nuclear winter". This lie was debunked in 1951 by the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch's George R. Stanbury in secret studies of thermal shadowing by modern city skylines in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, etc.
We have repeatedly exposed "nuclear winter" debunking evidence on this blog, but it is still being ignored by CND fear mongering terrorism supporters. The truth is, nuclear deterrence using tactical nuclear weapons helped avoid aggression in the Cold War, but it was ended in 1991 due to propaganda from the Corbyn-Chamberlain breed of "peace monger", and has led to more terrorism. Invasions of massed terrorist groups in trucks or in tanks can be stopped or deterred, or at least forced to disperse into a less concentrated force, by this method. By the nuclear deterrent effect of forcing enemy tanks and vehicles to disperse, their ability to invade is diminished, and conventional weapons are then more effective in combating the dispersed invasion force. For example, if invading enemy tanks are dispersed to reduce their vulnerability to a tactical nuclear explosion, then it is easier to pick them off one by one using hand-held anti-tank rockets. You can't do that so effectively against the barrage of fire from a large, concentrated, invading tank force. Kuwait was invaded by Iraq, sparking off the first Gulf War, because Reagan's W79 tactical nuclear deterrence against concentrated invasion forces had not been deployed against Middle East dictatorships, after the Cold War ended.
5. The "nuclear threshold" or anti escalation argument against tactical nuclear weapons is also, independently, debunked as we have previously shown in posts on this blog, by Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute study of escalation to city bombing in WWII, when it was Churchill and not Hitler who started regular city bombing in an effort to get the Nazis to bomb British cities which were fully equipped with civil defence shelters, instead of having Hitler bomb British airfields where bombing was helping the Nazis to win the war by destroying Britain's capability to resist invasion!
Additionally, Kahn showed how gas masks and retaliation capabilities by Britain, even though Britain had less effective gases (e.g. Britain had mustard gas while Hitler had 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas as well as large amounts of sarin nerve gas) helped to achieve a non-escalation to city bombing by gas. If you have crude civil defence - masks to prevent inhalation and bricked or sandbagged windows to prevent droplets of mustard liquid or nerve liquid getting on your skin - you deter attack! That's because the risks of escalation, such as retaliation, outweigh the gains, once cheap but effective civil defence countermeasures have been taken. The same goes for cheap foxholes and shelters from blast and fallout collateral dangers during a nuclear attack involving surface bursts.
This is of course why CND's Cold War (and present day) civil defence haters like Phil Bolsover and Jeremy Corbyn want us to be vulnerable. (That way, we have to surrender to aggressors who will destroy democracy, liberty and freedom!) Their whole approach, like that of the BBC and Guardian, is not only one-sided, but outrageously fake news. For a detailed debunking of anti-neutron bomb propaganda which was published by Moscow's friends in the Western media, see our previous posts here on Samuel Cohen's Vatican peace prize winning deterrent (yes, there was once a pro-peace Pope in the Vatican, long ago), and also here. In fact, as the extracts from the British 1959 manual at the top of the blog post indicate, even before the enhanced neutron bomb was explained by Samuel Cohen, it was observed that for low yield tactical fission nuclear weapons with light casings (e.g. small diameter, linear-implosion shells and bombs), neutrons were the prominent military effect!
Sam Cohen's book, The Truth About the Neutron Bomb: the Inventor of the Bomb Speaks Out, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1983, on page 48 states that he referred to the two 1958 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory clean (low fission) enhanced neutron Plowshare (peaceful explosives) devices by their code names Dove and Starling:
'The first time I recall seeing the term "neutron bomb" was in U.S. News and World Report. This was in May 1959, when the magazine revealed that the U.S. was working on a "neutron 'death ray' bomb which would kill man with streams of poisonous radiation, while leaving machines and buildings undamaged.'
Secret report LA-12063 was declassified is on the internet archive, with the secrets all blanked out (we combined two different declassified versions to provide a more helpful document there!). The co-author, Joseph S. Howard II, of this secret report also has an unclassified article in the public domain on the same subject: Thomas W. Dowler and Joseph S. Howard II, "Countering the Threat of the Well-Armed Tyrant: A Modest Proposal for Small Nuclear Weapons," Strategic Review volume 19, no. 4 (Fall 1991), pages 34-40.
“1. Army should keep an organic capability
–
Maintain the W79 [the credible deterrence of the W79 tactical nuclear weapon
that deterred Gorbachev’s tanks and thus helped defeat the rationale of the
USSR in the 1980s] …”
This
recommendation was IGNORED. The W79 was
scrapped instead of being redeployed as recommended to other regionally
unstable areas, such as against Iraq .
Result: Iraq was undeterred from sending
in its army to invade Kuwait, thus setting off the first Gulf War and setting
off a wave of escalating tensions and wars across the Middle East that continue
to this day, costing many thousands of life. In addition, the 1994 anti-nuclear tripartite UK-USA-Russian "Budapest Memorandum" guarantee to defend Ukraine after it surrendered its nuclear weapons proved well and truly a lie: it was invaded, lost Crimea, and has suffered terrible devastation and loss of life! (Page 32 of the 1991 Secret report specifically singled out the need for tactical nuclear weapons to deter aggressors in North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, in addition to warning of a "reconstituted Soviet Union"!)
All this was done simply to appease the powerful, pseudo-liberal, pseudo-peace, pseudo-democracy, pseudo-fact, scare mongering, ranting, inhumane “lawyer/political elitist class” of bigots of the pseudo “peace movement” in America and Britain. These people must be held to account for lying.
*****************************
Above: Cohen's comparison of the destruction he saw first-hand in Korea from conventional war (1950-3), with the nuclear destruction in Hiroshima. The only difference is that Hiroshima had mainly wooden houses which were burned down, whereas Seoul had more brick and concrete buildings. The Hiroshima photo was taken on 12 October 1945 (U.S. Army Photo #SC 290666); the Seoul photo was taken on 1 November 1950 (U.S. Army Photo #SC 352260).
In 1961, Cohen briefed President Kennedy's national security advisor McGeorge Bundy on the neutron bomb (The Truth About the Neutron Bomb, 1983, pp. 72-3): 'His response was that if we had to use nuclear weapons to stop the Red Army from taking over Europe, he would favor hitting them with the biggest weapons we had. My riposte was: "On our allies' soil?" He didn't reply. ... He had gotten the point. That ended the meeting.' Consequently, President John F. Kennedy authorized the 1963 testing of the neutron bomb underground by Livermore scientists in the Nevada, which 'worked out extremely well' (page 83).
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev fanatically denounced the discriminate neutron bomb in his speech to the Romanian Party Congress in Bucharest: 'More and more frequently now, we hear from statesmen and military leaders, particularly in the United States, that they are working toward the creation of a neutron bomb. ... They are acting on the principle of robbers wanting to kill a man in such a way that his suit will not be stained with blood, in order to appropriate the suit. ... the bestial ethics of the most aggressive representatives of imperialism. ... Man to them is nothing. For them the main thing is to plunder, a quest for profit which prods the imperialists to the most horrible crimes.'
Cohen prints a Dunagin's people satire from 1977, showing a politician ordering physicists to modify the neutron bomb to fit Khrushchev's alleged morality:
'There are strong moral objections to a bomb that kills but doesn't destroy buildings. Fix it so it destroys buildings, too.'
On pages 91-2, Cohen explains: 'A discriminate tactical nuclear weapon is one whose effects can be confined mainly to the military target, minimizing damage to non-combatants and their property. So neutron bombs, which are intended to kill enemy soldiers but spare civilians and their towns, are, by this definition, discriminate weapons. For example, had they been available in the Korean War [which Cohen saw first hand] for use against enemy soldiers fighting in the city of Seoul, their application would have represented a highly discriminate attack - far more so than was the attack that actually took place using conventional weapons, and which pretty well levelled the city.'
He was inspired to invent and promote the neutron bomb by the vast civilian casualties from collateral damage due to the conventional weapons he saw in Korea, and by the NATO 'Carte Blanche' exercise of 23-28 June 1955, which predicted that the 268 nuclear explosions over 3 days in Germany which would be needed to defend Western Europe from Warsaw Pact forces would kill 1,500,000 civilians, and injure a further 3,500,000. By using neutron bomb air bursts (500-1,000 m altitude for 1-10 kt yields), all of these civilian casualties could be avoided. There would be no significant fallout, and the small area of neutron induced activity at ground zero decays very rapidly, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The uselessness of conventional defences to stop massed tank invasions was clearly demonstrated by the French anti-tank Maginot Line, which failed in World War II when Nazi tanks bypassed it and went through the Ardennes Forest to invade France.
On 12 July 1977, President Jimmy Carter publically announced the development of a neutron bomb to deter massed Soviet tank invasions of Western Europe because the Warsaw Pact had 25,000 tanks in Eastern Europe, ready for an invasion. Cohen on page 109 points out that President Reagan in 1981 stated that the Soviet Union responded by pumping over $100,000,000 into an anti-neutron bomb 'peace' propaganda campaign. Premier Leonid Brezhnev offered to refrain from building the neutron bomb if America agreed to do likewise! President Carter responded (Cohen, p. 111):
'The Soviets know and President Brezhnev knows that the neutron weapon is designed to be used against massive and perhaps overwhelming tank forces. ... The neutron weapons are designed to equalize that inequality. ... The Soviets have no use for a neutron weapon, so the offer by Brezhnev to refrain from building the neutron weapon has no significance in the European theatre and he knows this.'
But Carter chickened out when the Soviet anti-neutron bomb propaganda assault on the media commenced. Moscow radio was followed by 28 different European communist parties statements denouncing the neutron bomb as an immoral weapon, and the Soviet funded 'World Peace Council' (similar to Hitler's '25-year-peace plan' propaganda spin before World War II) called a week of international anti-neutron bomb action in August 1977, lying that the neutron bomb was designed to kill civilians and leave cities intact for American invasions and plunder. The pro-communist left-wing media of the West, plus the anti-nuclear biased groups, lapped it all up. Grigori Gokshin, Secretary of the 'Soviet Peace Committee' from 1973-91, conducted war on the neutron bomb through the media to protect the Soviet tank advantage in Europe!
The media pressure, including continuing bias from the BBC, which still falsely claims that horrific fallout and collateral damage was a good thing because it allegedly increased deterrence (in fact, collateral damage potential reduced deterrence by making the threat totally non-credible: as proved by the fact that the Soviets were so fearful of the neutron bomb but were undeterred by nuclear weapons which would produce collateral damage and amassed a tank superiority in the Warsaw Pact for a possible invasion of Western Europe precisely because they knew that indiscriminate American weapons could not be used without millions of casualties, so that such indiscriminate threats had zero, nil, nada, zip credibility as a deterrent to war or aggression), forced President Carter on 7 April 1978 to delay his decision to produce neutron warheads, and although he ordered the production of the fusion capsules for neutron bombs in October 1978, he continued to delay making a decision on the production of the rest of the bomb! (Cohen, page 115.)
The next month, Premier Brezhnev responded to Carter's half-hearted decision by telling a group of U.S. senators visiting Moscow that 'many years ago, we tested but we never started production of that weapon'. They didn't want or need low yield anti-tank tactical weapons, because they were the ones with the 4-to-1 tank superiority in Europe! They didn't want or need low yield collateral-avoilding neutron bombs, because they didn't give a damn about civilian casualties and collateral damage. But Premier Brezhnev pretended that the reason they did not have neutron bombs was because they were morally superior!
Carter continued to postpone his decision on the neutron bomb. Undeterred, the Soviet Union in 1979 invaded Afghanistan with tanks in what many considered a forerunner to an invasion of Western Europe and the rest of the free world. President Ronald Reagan was elected, and he ordered the production of 700 neutron bombs (350 nuclear 20-cm diameter shells for howitzers, and 350 W70 warheads for tactical Lance missiles) on 8 August 1981 to help to deter an invasion from the 19,500 Warsaw Pact tanks. Responding on 8 March 1983 to the Soviet 'peace morality' propaganda, Reagan pleaded: 'I urge you to beware the temptation to label both sides "equally at fault", to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a "giant misunderstanding", and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.'
The neutron bomb is efficient against massed tank invasions, thus an aggressor would be forced to disperse tanks; making them easy for troops to destroy or halt individually using simple hand-launched anti-tank rockets.
Dr Edward Teller and Dr Albert L. Latter were the first to suggest this solution on page 171 of their book Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers and Opportunities, Criterion Books, New York, 1958:
'In a nuclear war it will not make sense to use massed manpower. Any such concentration will provide too good a target for atomic weapons. ...
'Any fighting unit in a nuclear war will have to be small, mobile, inconspicuous and capable of independent action. ...
'If an invader adopts extreme dispersion, it will become impossible to defeat him with atomic weapons. But a very highly dispersed army can be defeated by a determined local population [with hand-held anti-tank rockets, etc.]. Therefore the main role of nuclear weapons might well be to disperse any striking force so that the resistance of people defending their homes can become decisive. Nuclear weapons may well become the answer to massed armies and may put back the power into the hands where we believe it belongs: the hands of the people.'
On page 135 of The Truth About the Neutron Bomb, 1983, Cohen stated that the neutron bomb is inefficient against cities with civilians because: 'All they have to do is construct very simple radiation shelters and, as the eemy approaches, get into them. ... Because there is no blast to contend with ... all that is called for is piling several feet of earth over the shelter. And dirt is cheap.' Earth slows down neutrons efficiently (removing neutron energy) because it contains a lot of light elements, but the heavy iron nuclei in steel tanks don't absorb much energy when they scatter neutrons around, so tanks only have a protective factor of about 2 against neutron radiation (tanks have a protection factor of 10 against initial high energy gamma rays, which are better attenuated by scattering the many electrons in iron atoms).
This is simple physics, but chemist George Kistiakowsky falsely claimed in MIT's Technology Review that 'A 10-cm (about 4 inches) layer of a suitable hydrogenous material, say water in plastic bags over the crew compartment, followed by a thin sheet of cadmium metal, would reduce neutron radiation intensity by about a factor of 5.' A factor of 5 reduction only reduces the neutron range by 15-20% because the dose drops off sharply with distance. But the factor of 5 calculation is false anyway, as Cohen explains on page 142, because the majority of the neutron dose is not coming straight down, but is coming from all directions due to the scatter of neutrons by the air, the ground around the tank, and the remainder of the tank itself! Kistiakowsky's stupidity is like trying to shield gamma radiation from fallout by wearing lead-soled shoes, in the mistaken belief that the hazard is due to fallout under your feet:
'Shielding a tank crew against neutrons is an enormously complicated problem. It is not solved by simply placing the shield over the crew compartment. By the time the neutrons reach the tank, they are bouncing around in all directions, and to protect the crew properly, the shielding will have to be placed around the sides of the crew compartment as well. As a consequence, the shielding weight begins to pile up: to a much greater level than Kistiakowsky realizes. ... The tank's mobility would be cut appreciably, as would the ability to swing the turret around to fire at acquired targets. In fact, were the tank to be shielded to a degree where the radiation was no longer the primary threat ... the added weight would cripple the tank's combat effectiveness.'
Another wild claim against the neutron bomb, made by Dr Herbert Scoville, Jr., which Cohen debunks (page 140), is that tank crews who are lethally irradiated will fight a 'Kamikaze' attack even more efficiently that they were fighting before, despite having radiation sickness. Cohen points out that they will not know exactly what their neutron dose is in a combat situation, and in any case the symptoms of radiation sickness will prevent their efficient execution of military functions.
Cancer and genetic effects are another hoax which was levelled against the neutron bomb: lethally irradiated people don't get cancer (as we shall see, Cohen shows that the effects of radiation sickness are no worse than other lethal combat injuries in modern conventional warfare due to organ damage, burns effects, and so on). In any case, no excess of genetic effects occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as compared to a matched non-exposed control group. For all types of cancers, radiation has only contributed a small fraction of the cancer in survivors, most of which is natural cancer, as shown by comparison with the matched non-exposed control group. Claims that neutron bomb radiation is 'inhumane' ignore the comparison with the organ damage consequences by conventional nuclear weapons (as well as with conventional weapons, which rip organs to pieces, burn, crush and so on), and they ignore the primary purpose of the neutron bomb is to deter an aggressor.
Cohen further points out (pages 153-5) that two radiation accident victims who survived 400-600 cGy air doses (300-450 bone marrow doses): 'were back to normal some number of weeks [discharge from hospital at 2 and 6 weeks, respectively, and full recovery of strength at 10 weeks postexposure] after their accidents. They bore no scars from their mishaps (apparently not even emotional scars) and were able to pick up where they left off when they were irradiated. As to how these aftermaths compare with those resulting from being wounded by conventional weapons, if one so desires you can find out by visiting the nearest Veterans Administration hospital.'
On 11 November 1981, the Los Angeles Times printed an article called 'Neutron Weapons: an Agonising Death (I've seen it)', by Professor J. Garrott Allen at Stanford University Medical School, falsely claiming that the death of Dr Louis Slotin 9 days after a criticality accident in May 1946 indicates the radiation effects of a neutron bomb: 'The production of neutron weapons is probably as immoral a concept as human minds have yet devised.' Cohen debunks Allen on pages 156-7: Dr Slotin was touching a plutonium bomb core with his bare hands when he made it supercritical, so he got terrible localized exposures to his hands and arms, which were way higher than the doses you can get from a neutron bomb. This is why Dr Slotin had the painful radiation burns which Allen observed in treating him. Allen was dishonest in claiming that those radiation burns were analogous to neutron bomb exposures. In any case: 'Allen never mentioned the terrible burns that can result from ... the heat from fission battlefield nuclear weapons.'
On 10 September 1981, two months before Allen's notoriously inaccurate article was published, Cohen had written to the Secretary of Energy James B. Edwards, asking:
'Why is it, Mr Secretary, that after more than four years of intense, often acrimonious and almost always highly emotional, debate over the neutron bomb, the government has never put out an official statement to dispel the distorted technical charges which have been made about the weapon's effectiveness and alleged immorality? It seems to me that had this been done at the start, today we would not have the same anti-nuclear scientists making the same distorted charges; leaving the American people as confused as ever - and probably the Europeans as well.
'I would strongly suggest that DOE and DOD get together (as they did some 30 years ago, when they first issued The Effects of Nuclear Weapons to responsibly inform the American people what nuclear weapons were all about) and provide an official document spelling out the true facts of the issue.' (As we shall see, the declassification of Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons is a step in that direction.)
Samuel Glasstone was well aware of the facts on the neutron bomb, for he had taught classified nuclear weapons design at Los Alamos until he retired and moved to Oak Ridge (Glasstone was co-author with Leslie M. Redman of the originally Secret - Restricted Data June 1972 report WASH-1038, An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons):
'When I arrived at the [Los Alamos] Lab 36+ years ago ... though I was a lowly postdoc, we took a course on nuclear physics (as did every new employee) and then a class on elements of bomb design both taught by Samuel Glasstone. This was required training. ... After that approximately 3 weeks of training, I understand what the Lab was about and why it was important to the nation. I'm certain it contributed to my wanting to stay on after my postdoc and has helped me in my work over the years. This was part of the "openness" despite the secrecy associated with the Lab. I believe we have lost this over the years ...' - Dr David Forslund
'During the Manhattan Project, classification was easy: everything in the project was classified. Then and later, information on nuclear weapons was "born classified" in the Restricted Data category. During the [Los Alamos National] Lab's orientation for new hires in the mid-1960s, Sam Glasstone, who had been a chemist in the Manhattan Project, drew one circle on the blackboard and another inside it. "Drawing concentric circles used to be classified," he joked. Fission bombs are designed in concentric circles.' - Dr Cheryl Rofer, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Part I - Historical Perspectives ['Cheryl Rofer is a chemist who worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 35 years. ...'], Word Worth, September 2004, volume IV, No. 9.
In December 1977, the 653 pages long revision of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,, compiled and edited by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, was published by the U.S. Department of Defense, and was a brief summary of some of the material from extensive data in the secret Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons.
Joseph C. Harsch, Neutron Bomb: Why It Worries The Russians, Christian Science Monitor, August 14, 1981, p. 1. (quoted here): '[there] are 19,500 tanks in the Soviet-controlled forces of the Warsaw Pact aimed at Western Europe. Of these, 12,500 are Soviet tanks in Soviet units. NATO has 7,000 tanks on its side facing the 19,500.'
FROM THE NEW EDITION OF SAM COHEN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
'... I [neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen] asked him a direct question: "Father, why don’t you like the neutron bomb?" His answer was equally direct: "Because it’s immoral." "Why is it immoral?", I asked. "Because it’s a nuclear weapon", he replied. "Why are nuclear weapons immoral?", I asked.
'And now came the answer I was hoping to get: "Nuclear weapons are vastly more destructive than conventional weapons." Now I had him.
'I proceeded to explain to him and the others, as I’ve explained to you, what the neutron bomb was all about, summing up by saying that the only thing "nuclear" about this weapon, as compared with other nuclear weapons, was that it derived its effectiveness and discrimination from nuclear reactions. I could have added, hypocritically in my mind, that it was God, not me, that ordained the Bomb to be nuclear and that it was also God who established the precepts of Just War theory I assumed he religiously subscribed to, but I couldn’t get myself to do that. Instead, I reacted emotionally and intemperately, and shamefully, for I never doubted the sincerity of his beliefs. I informed him in no uncertain terms that I held his views on the neutron bomb to be, in effect, immoral, grossly immoral. Where did he get off implying that I was, in effect, an immoral person for having devised and espoused a weapon that allowed a country to defend itself in a fashion having practically none of the grossly immoral features of conventional weapon defense he and his Harvard professors seemed to espouse?
'The father flushed in anger, as I had been doing, but did not respond. At this point, Casaroli finally opened his mouth to say he had just flown in from Rome, was dead tired, and badly needed some sleep to get ready for his UN speech the next day. He thanked me so much for coming, and left. So did the priest from Harvard, without thanking me. The others diplomatically stayed around for a while, I guess to let me know they weren’t as offended as the Harvard guy was.
'Some weeks later I received a medal from his Holiness, Pope Paul VI. ...
'About a year goes by. One day [in June 1979] while I was in Washington on some business, I got a call from Dick Cella. It was elevation time at the Vatican. The new Pope, John Paul II, had promoted a number of bishops to cardinalcy, one of them being Casaroli, who was also to become Vatican Secretary of State, Number Two on the church totem pole. A contingent from the U.S., headed by Cheli (who by now had been double-jumped in rank to archbishop), was heading off for the affair and I had been invited to join up. (Not invited was Father Hehir.) Could I drop whatever I was doing and get up to New York right away to join the party. ...
'I stopped what I was doing, participating on a Pentagon committee, put myself on unannounced vacation (and unpaid to stay honest) and took the first shuttle out of Washington National Airport. A few hours later I was on another airplane heading for Rome. We landed. Dick and I checked into a hotel, freshened up and headed off for the Vatican. There we met Cheli who escorted us to Casaroli’s Vatican apartment where he officially greeted us as his guests. We chatted amiably about almost everything but nuclear weapons and neutron bombs, after which Cheli escorted us around the Vatican showing us what I had seen 20 years back when I first visited Rome as a gaping tourist, plus a number other places tourists normally weren’t allow to gape at, where those in attendance gaped at my seersucker suit. The greeting formalities over, Dick and I left, strolled around the Eternal City for a few hours and spent a pleasant evening with some of his wife’s friends and relatives. As for my comportment around the dinner table, it was identical to the first hour or so at Dick’s restaurant; I sat there happily eating, saying nothing, while everyone else chatted away in Italian.
'The next morning was investiture time for the new cardinals. Off to the Vatican again, where we were met by Cheli who escorted us and the rest of the U.S. delegation to a huge auditorium where the ceremonies would take place. As we walked in and to our seats (way up front, probably due to Casaroli’s impending status), I had the feeling I was attending a U.S. presidential nomination convention, sans flags, banners, buttons, etc., representing delegations from the 50 states. The various contingents from the various countries whose archbishops were about to be promoted were assigned seats in certain sections of the auditorium and the place was abuzz with excitement.
'On stage were all the cardinals from all over the world, plus the cardinal designates. This was the first time I’d ever seen a cardinal, let alone all of them; and in seeing all this clerical brass together had me totally dumbfounded. Suddenly a tremendous roar went up. The Pope was coming on stage. When the cheering had died down, the ceremonies began and one-by-one, their contingencies whooping it up, the cardinals-elect rose, knelt at the feet of his Holiness (now John Paul II, Paul VI had died not too long after bestowing the medal on me), and received their scrolls. Casaroli, about to become the most eminent of their Eminences, was first to be called up. ...
'The first guy was a little Italian cardinal of such timid demeanor that if it weren’t for his priestly finery I would have guessed him to be a downtrodden clerk in a Charles Dickens tale. "Your Eminence," says Cheli, in English, "may I introduce you to Sam Cohen. He is the Father of the Neutron Bomb." ...
'It’s my last day in Rome (Cella had left the night before) and early that morning I grabbed a taxi and headed off to the Vatican again. There I met Cheli and a few others who had been invited to attend a special Mass given by the Pope honoring Casaroli. A few dozen people were there, including some of Casaroli’s relatives ... A few minutes go by and the Pope appears, stands a few feet in front of me and conducts Mass, in Latin.
'The Mass over, the Pope leaves the altar and starts mixing it up with the audience. I’m standing there off to the side, wondering what to do with myself, when Casaroli comes up to me and with a look of total innocence on his face (God forgive him) asks me if I had met His Holiness. ... I gave Casaroli an honest answer and said no I hadn’t met His Holiness. Whereupon he took me by the arm and led me to the Pope, introducing me in glowing terms as the Father of the Neutron Bomb. Unlike the little cardinal a couple of days before who had practically trembled in the presence of Satan, the Pope was one cool customer. He didn’t bat an eyelash.
'We shook hands, he expressed his pleasure over meeting me. I expressed mine. Then he looked me squarely in the eye (I’m not so sure how squarely I looked back at him) and asked me, "Mr. Cohen, I trust you are working for peace?" What could I say. I told him I was, as best I could, in my own way, and then poured it on by telling him how much I appreciated his own efforts for peace.' - How Cohen met Pope John Paul II in June 1979 (Shame, online edition, pages 216-8).
Above: the target for Sam Cohen's neutron bomb was these T-54/55 Russian main battle tanks, which had the highest production run of any tank ever made (over 86,000 were manufactured). They were manufactured chiefly for the invasion of Western Europe, once tactical nuclear weapons had been removed by political lobbying of Western disarmament activists via the Kremlin-controlled World Peace Council based in Moscow.
Update (19 June 2017):
After further terrorism and also Communist riot threats in London (see comments section discussions), I'd just like to point out again that we put on the Internet Archive last year the key parts of the declassified proof-tested Restricted manual on countering terrorism and insurrection: War Office Code 9455, Keeping the Peace, which contains useful advice on preventing and stopping extremism. This advice formed the basis for the successful strategy against terrorists in Northern Ireland and Israel. These techniques are also of interest to continuing wars where there are no city "peace walls" yet (a needed countermeasure to reduce the use of human shields due to terrorist infiltration). It is also important to draw close attention to chapter 10, "Psychological Warfare" where on page 52, paragraph 232 states: "No subversive or terrorist movement can exist without support from the people. The support may be popular and voluntary or it may be involuntary through fear. Psychological warfare seeks to deny the movement that support which it requires, as well as to undermine terrorist morale [the very opposite of Corbynism]."
Update (21 June 2017): I am grateful for a comment which points us to a brilliant analysis of the hypocritical tolerance to hate crimes and terrorism by the so-called Left (actually the far right fascists, when you obliterate the "doublethink" propaganda and accept instead fascist was instigated by communist newspaper editor Mussolini and that Stalin in August 1939 motivated the Joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland a month later, causing WWII, or that Hitler's National Socialist party, the Nazis, were bankrupted by socialist state spending, leading to the Holocaust and WWII in collaboration with the communists; in reality both "Left" fascists and "Right" fascist ideologues share the same intolerance of the BBC/Guardian towards free liberty, and love all forms of terrorist activity that divides a country, segregates and murders people):
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3846217/why-do-lefties-say-london-bridge-attack-was-an-incident-but-finsbury-park-mosque-attack-was-terrorism/ :
BRENDAN O'NEILL Why do lefties say London Bridge attack was an ‘incident’... but Finsbury Park Mosque attack was ‘terrorism’?
By Brendan O'Neill
21st June 2017, 12:59 am Updated: 21st June 2017, 12:56 pm
THIS week, leftists finally got animated and angry about an act of terrorism. They did not just say “Keep calm and carry on”, as they did after the Manchester and London Bridge attacks. ... They did not try to shush debate or discourage national soul-searching, as they do after Islamist atrocities, always fearing that heated debate might “cause offence”.
No, they ... finally said we Brits need to ask ourselves why our nation is afflicted by ideological violence. What made them change their tune? The horrific Finsbury Park Mosque attack. ... It enraged them, prised open their eyes, made them realise there are some serious tensions slicing through 21st-century Britain. ...
The very people who tell us we must not extrapolate from terror attacks have now done precisely that. [Emphasis added]
The same people who insist we treat Islamist attacks as acts of individual violence ... are citing Finsbury as proof that Britain is in the grip of hatred. ...
Labour MP Diane Abbott referred to last month’s Manchester Arena bombing, in which 22 souls were wiped out by Salman Abedi, as a “horrific incident” — making it sound like a traffic accident.
But she swiftly applied the T-word to the Finsbury assault. This was a “shocking terror attack”, she said on Twitter, even before all the facts were known.
Her party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, did not refer to the Westminster Bridge attack as terrorism for five days.
In his first comment on this Islamist attack in March — in which Khalid Masood killed four civilians and a police officer — Corbyn described it as a “serious incident”.
In his second, the day after the attack, he said it was an “atrocity” but warned us not to “rush to judgement”.
He had no problem “rushing to judgement” on the Finsbury attack, however.
“This is terror on our streets,” he said just hours after it happened. The double standards are extraordinary.
After acts of Islamist violence, many leftists flat-out refuse to talk about the ideological cause. ... It is “outrageous” to use that word, said Green Party leader Caroline Lucas — even though the dictionary definition is an “advocate or supporter of Islamist militancy”, making it an apt term for the Manchester and London Bridge murderers.
Following the Finsbury attack, however, leftists have felt no qualms about naming the ideology allegedly at play.
They have fallen over themselves to brand this “Islamophobic terrorism”.
Suddenly it is OK to talk about the warped intellectual underpinnings of terrorism.
After Islamist assaults, leftists lecture us about how important it is not to hold whole communities responsible. They patronise us with sermons about how acts of terrorism are the work of one individual, not a community or any culture of hatred.
But after Finsbury, they point the finger at a wide-spread communal hate.
Labour MP Yvette Cooper claimed the Finsbury attack speaks to “an increase in Islamophobia all over the country”.
To get a sense of the double standards at play here, just imagine if a politician went on TV after Manchester and said: “There has been an increase in Islamist prejudice all over the country.” ....
Left-leaning publications which insist Islamist attacks are isolated acts by individuals hypocritically claim the Finsbury attack is the product of a bigger hatred.
This attack confirms that we have “allowed Islamophobia to flourish”, says the New Statesman. It shows how “normalised” anti-Islam prejudice has become, says the Guardian. ...
(17 June 2017 Daily Express page 12 article exposing the continued excess immigration based housing crisis and NHS disaster being covered up by incompetent bigots and pro EU open borders UK government bureaucrats. However, the problem is that it suits BOTH the Conservative Party and the Labour Party: uncontrolled immigration through supply-and-demand economics increases rent prices for rich Conservative landlord MPs, and also increases the voter strength for Labour MPs. As for nuclear weapons, therefore, all "sides" in the debate are really in a cartel agreement, agreeing with one another to maintain secrecy and lunatic level incompetence, to defraud taxpayers with lies, and to present a false "disunited front" for the sake of maintaining the appearance of disunity. The reality is, they are all on the side of scare mongering and suppressing or closing down factual arguments that debunk them. The media knows that scare stories for simpletons sell more far papers, and attract far more sci fi loving viewers, than factual graphs, tables, equations, and evidence, which is never aired.)
Update (14 July 2017):
Christianity and nuclear deterrence
There are a surprising number of people in jihadi and quack pseudo-moral movements who think that riding over the facts in the name of "peace" is justified. In reality, Foreign Secretary Grey's refusal to deter the invasion of Belgium in 1914 (by being unwilling to state war would result in that case) was what prevented deterrence being credible then, while his post-war lie that the war was caused not by his incompetence to use deterrence credibly, but instead by the pre-1914 arms race (which in reality deterred war and bought peace, when done properly) led to a repeat performance in the 1930s, and another world war. The facts are still taboo to anti-nuclear bigots and charlatans who will go to any lengths to use hubris and arrogant abuse to prevent a rational discussion being based on facts.
We see the same in the status of hypocritical religions which are based on war, fear and hatred, yet like the USSR propaganda machine, claim the exact opposite! So it's worth reviewing here some historical research into:
The historical, fact-based truth about Jesus
1. Jesus lived in Galilee, northern Israel, which was under control of a Jewish Governor (a puppet for Roman rule), King Herod Antipas (son of Herod the Great).
2. Jesus born in Bethlehem, in the West Bank, Palestine, was known as Judea and was under direct Roman control via a Roman Governor or procurator of Judea, who from 26-36 AD was the famous Pontius Pilate (an historic fact that confirms the range of possible dates for the crucifixion).
3. The Temple of Jerusalem, which had a Roman fortress attached, was also under direct Roman control by the Roman procurator of Judea.
We therefore have a political situation with a tension between the Jews and Romans: the Jewish homeland of Israel and Palestine (Galilee and Judea) is surrounded and invaded, with enemy soldiers effectively overseeing and thus in command of the Temple of Jerusalem.
Jesus was born under the rule of the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar, who died on 19 August 14 AD (his adoptive father Julius Caesar had been a Roman Dictator, rather than Emperor). Augustus Caesar was a powerful peace maker, who consolidated Roman power by defeating the rebel leaders in the civil wars and revolts which broke out after his father's assassination. Having come to peaceful power through using every means at his disposal to liquidate rivals, he led an age of peace.
The rise of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ as rebel leaders in Israel (Galilee) occurred during one of the most controversial Roman reigns, under the Emperor Tiberius. Tiberius became emperor after Augustus Caesar died in 14 AD, and technically remained emperor until his death on 16 March 37 AD. Tiberius had been overcome with grief following the deaths of his sons Germanicus in 19 AD (from poisoning in Syria) and Drusus in 23 AD, later blamed on foul play by the head of the Roman Emperor's personal Praetorian Guard, Lucius Sejanus.
Thus, at the time of rebels John the Baptist and Jesus in Galilee and Judea, soldier Sejanus with his newly doubled (10,000 strong) Praetorian Guard had moved itself inside Rome and effectively seized power while Tiberius was away mourning his lost loved ones on his Roman party island, Capri.
It was Sejanus who sent his friend Pontius Pilate to Judea's port, Caesarea, to take control in 26 AD. Jewish historian Josephus and Philo of Alexandria both document Pontius Pilate's reputation for execution of rebels without trial. Pilate's written ironic inscription sign, "I.N.R.I." (I am King of Jews) on the cross of Jesus shows that he was executed as a threat to the "Roman Peace" ("Pax Romana"). In other words, that is evidence that Jesus was executed on a charge of insurrection.
The successful Roman method of dealing with rebellions was to liquidate in public all rebels: this is the price of integration, empire building, and averting civil war. Disintegration gives freedom.
However, the full story involves a woman. Jesus' local Jewish King, Herod Antipas of Galilee (modern day Israel), was mixed up with the Romans. He was a Roman puppet like the East European communist state country rulers during the Cold War when they were puppets of Moscow, and were assassinated or replaced if they stepped an inch out of line, as in Hungary 1956 or Prague 1968.
But he was also in direct conspiracy with the acting ruler of Rome, Sejanus, because according to Josephus's and other sources of history, Herod Antipas went to see Sejanus in Rome who approved of Herod marrying his brother's divorced wife, Herodias. This wedding was criticised as violating the ten commandments (his brother was still alive) by John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus. Herod was reluctant to risk insurrection by executing such a popular person, but the bitter and coercive Herodias coerced her daughter, Salome, to dance for Herod and begged him to execute John the Baptist as a personal present.
As a result, John the Baptist was executed ostensibly to prevent revolution, but actually doing the opposite and enraging all those baptised by John. They became followers of Jesus, who was far more careful about making inflammatory remarks. Herod Antipas recognised what the consequences of his execution was, and how difficult it would be to arrest Jesus on any credible charge, so he instead tried to bribe Jesus by funding him - Herod's chief of staff Chuza sent his wife Joanna into Jesus's inner circle with help and money for the minstry of Jesus - to derail not Herod, but instead the orthodox, elitist leaders of the Temple of Jerusalem, the Sadducees led by High Priest Joseph Caiaphas.
Herod was Jewish king, wanted control of the Temple of Jerusalem, the only temple of the Jews on the planet. Although there were Synagogues with Rabbis in every Jewish community throughout the Roman Empire, these were inferior to the one Temple in Jerusalem with its Priestly caste of powerful, elite Sadduccees (until the Temple was destroyed during the first revolt of the Jews in 70 AD, after which political power was lost as Rabbis replaced the Priests, and Synagogues replaced the Temple).
The only way to do this was an agreement between Herod and the acting Roman ruler Sejanus to allow Jesus entry to the Temple of Jerusalem (which was directly controlled by an attached Roman garrison) to oppose Joseph Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest viewed by both Jewish King Herod and Roman ruler Sejanus's procurator Pontius Pilate as a political rival. Allowing the Roman guards to permit rebel Jesus his entry to the Temple of Jerusalem to cause unset would undermine Caiaphas.
Because palm fronds are only harvested and available for waving by rebel crowds at Jesus during the Feast of Tabernacles (not Passover six months later), it is now argued from historical evidence that Jesus's entry to Jerusalem, when he caused a riot in temple's banking department, was during the Feast of Tabernacles in the autumn of 31 AD, at the time that Emperor Tiberius on Capri was told about Sejanus's excesses, possibly by Sejanus' rival Macro (who succeeded Sejanus) using evidence from the nephew of Herod, who later told the new emperor Caligula that "my uncle conspired with Sejanus" (documented by historians Philo and Josephus).
As a result, Tiberius liquidated Sejanus shortly after the Temple riot by Jesus in late 31 AD. Tiberius later issued an edict, which sealed Jesus' fate, stating that contrary to Sejanus' manipulations in Judea, Roman Procurators should not interfere with the orthodoxies of provincial religions. Jesus was then crucified at Passover, spring 32 AD. Jesus was found not guilty by his benefactor Herod, but then had to be passed to Pilate, who in accordance with the new edict of Tiberius (the opposite of Sejanus), enforced the will of High Priest Caiaphas and had Jesus executed for insurrection.
The bottom line is this: corruption has subverted the historical truth and present a warped message in which orthodoxy triumphs over Jesus's peaceful rebellion against superstition-based elitist hubris. Conclusions:
1. Jesus was funded by King Herod via Joanna, wife of his chief of staff Chuz, to rebel against Caiaphas with a view to overthrowing the Sadducees' control of the Temple of Jerusalem, until Sejanus was removed from office by Tiberius in 31 AD. If Sejanus had continued, it may have prevented the tensions that led to the Jewish insurrection and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.
2. Jesus was crucified for attempted insurrection, because his support from Sejanus in Rome ended in late 31 AD, after news of such plots was received by Tiberius on Capri from Sejanus' enemy, Macro.
3. Support for Jesus came from the oppressed, over-taxed people of Galilee and Judea who were subjects of not just Roman rule, but also a corrupt, superstitious, elitist Temple based cult which Jesus opposed for profit making at the expense of the people. Huge quantities of arms, paid for by the Temple, were found in the Jewish fort mountain of Masada by Jewish rebels after the fall of Jerusalem in the Roman siege of 70 AD. The Romans simply encamped around the mountain, turning it into a prison. Huge numbers of Jews died, who might have been saved if Jesus had been able to establish a working settlement with Rome.
4. The omission of this permanent-fact based history from "Christianity" in preference to contradictory superstitions and confusing propaganda from elitist Vatican bigots has prevented the integration of the true message of Jesus with that of other religions, thus causing wars with Islam.
5. The truth about Jesus shows him a pragmatist, who was prepared to use any peaceful means at his disposal to liberate and free his people, even if that meant insurrection to clear out the dead wood.
World War I was sparked by the invasion of Belgium, World War II by the invasion of Poland, the first Gulf War by Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and basically all wars of high casualty rates (plus refugees) are due to invasions or attempted invasions (sieges such Leningrad, invasions of South Korea and South Vietnam, and so on). So how do you stop or prevent invasions by massed terrorists and rogue states with credible nuclear deterrence, of kiloton yield? In previous posts, there were discussions of some of the declassified reports on effects of Australian-British nuclear test data from 1956 Buffalo and 1957 Antler operations at Maralinga, Australia.
In order to make nuclear weapons into a credible deterrent of the kinds of invasions that escalate into world wars and wars with high casualty rates and refugee problems, it is necessary for terrorists and rogue states to be deterred, so they need to know what the capabilities are. So it is interesting that the results from those tests were summarised in a British Restricted manual, An Introduction to Nuclear Weapon Effects 1959, War Office code 9612, which gives the scientific facts in tables and graphs; Table II is a particularly useful summary of deterrent capabilities against all military equipment:
An Introduction to Nuclear Weapon Effects 1959, War Office code 9612. |
How to avoid collateral damage to civilians and friendly troops is discussed in the accompanying, also Restricted, Precautions against nuclear attack, War Office code 9466:
The whole idea here is to terrorise the terrorists into becoming peaceful and reasonable, something that Corbyn doesn't really believe in. (For his terrorism support in the name of "peace" see that post, while for his racism support in the name of "peace" see this one.) The basis for credible, successful deterrence is achieving real peace. While it is relatively easy to "achieve peace" (of a sort) by surrendering, that's not real peace. Two world wars have demonstrated that conventional weapons are not a sufficient deterrent. Far from it, the visible mobilization of the huge amount of conventional weapons needed for an attempted deterrence in 1914 has been blamed for escalating the tensions, something you don't have with more compact nuclear weapons. (For a debunking of radiation scaremongering, see this post.)
Above: a Roman wall in Colchester. Walled cities were built to keep out terrorists, invaders, etc. This wall is nearly 2,000 years old. Sure, it's not impossible to climb it or blast through it, but it makes attacks less effective: it tips the balance of power away from the insurgents. It makes defence easier, and attack harder. It is well proved technology. While Mr Rich Anti-Christ in the Vatican may issue damnation type threats against those who genuinely believe in peace walls, the reality is that "peace walls" helped to pave the way for peace in multicultural conflicts in both Northern Ireland and Israel. Just as the tactical nuclear weapons of Kennedy and Reagan helped to deter invasions, so peace walls do too. When lying nasty, racist, terrorist backing inhumanity of Marxist propaganda in the BBC is exposed for what it is, peace is possible without either bloodshed or surrender to terrorists.
CND appeasement of terrorism exposed in London Sun newspaper: 18 June 1983. |
CND terrorists who were anti-nuclear deterrence attempted the sick blackmail of mothers into supporting terrorism, using false fears, as exposed in Daily Mail newspaper: 25 October 1983. |
Update (17 June 2017) on the need to debunk the populist lies and myths of nuclear deterrence
1. The claim that nuclear weapons risk escalating a conventional war into an all out world war was debunked on this blog years ago in several posts, for example the one linked here concerning the motivations and backgrounds of the editors of the 1977 Effects of Nuclear Weapons, Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan.
Britain's Vice Chair of CND, the campaign for nuclear disarmament founded in 1957, Jeremy Corbyn, is now the Labour Leader and thus Shadow Prime Minister. He was first elected a Labour MP in 1983 when that party's manifesto carbon-copied the Communist Party's manifesto, and then his militant extremism was exposed in a 1987 general election poster where he rejected democracy.
Above: there was no secrecy on the neutron bomb's deterrent value at the Royal Military College of Science! (Cold War era letter in the 12 June 1986 New Scientist debunking scare mongering propaganda by anti nuclear ignorant fanatics. This letter went completely ignored by CND!)
2. There is often a claim made that a "single one megaton nuclear bomb over a city" could accidentally trigger WWIII or cause mass casualties, despite the successful testing in 1962 of a reliable ABM system capable of countering such accidental launches, and the preventative technology in warheads to prevent unauthorised fully yield nuclear detonation in accidents! In fact, this claim is completely debunked by a close study of the "debate". Dr Hans Bethe and CND repeatedly campaigned against ABM protection of cities from accidental missile launches (carrying one megaton warheads, or several sub-megaton warheads designed to wipe out military targets). They didn't want to avoid the very threat they claimed was the main problem!
They falsely claimed that if ABM was banned, such an agreement would stop the arms race and protect us from WWIII. It instead led, as Reagan's defense secretary clearly explained, to the huge build up of USSR arms in the 1970s! The one thing Khrushchev and Brezhnev should be praised for is pushing through, unlike America and Britain, both civil defence shelters and effective ABM defences for Moscow (that can shoot down accidentally launched Western missiles) to prevent the need to escalate a small attack such as an unauthorised launch into an all-out and devastating WWIII. This crisis-stability afforded by civil defense shelters, fallout area evacuation plans and ABM is a vital anti-escalation measure to prevent retaliation after attack! This is also useful in other disasters.
But ironically the supposedly pro-peace "peace movements", as well as significant and influential ignorant fools in the Western military and political scene, have been taken in by decades of eugenics style "fake news consensus science" by fascists and communists. When this is pointed out, lying blather comes back claiming that communists helped fight the Nazis when London was Blitzed. False, the Communists were in August 1939 responsible for WWII by forcing Hitler into invading Poland jointly with them in September 1939, and this USSR-Nazi collaboration lasted throughout the Blitz of London, only ending in June 1941 when the Nazis invaded their former friends, the Russian communists. The unvarnished truth is that there is as much difference between the militarism, groupthink, paranoia, and socialist over-spending of the National Socialist fascists of Hitler and the USSR, as there is between the Labour and Communist party agendas: none whatsoever.
ABM offers protection against rogue missiles, as does civil defence. But neither are accepted by the pseudo-peace campaigners like Jeremy Corbyn, Marxist vice-chair of anti nuclear movement CND. Try to expose this in the BBC and Guardian, and you're treated like a leper. The media hates peace.
3. A specious claim is sometimes made that credible, tactical nuclear weapons, deployed to Europe by Kennedy in the form of the W54 and by Reagan in the form of the W79 which averts collateral damage to personnel by detonating at an altitude too great to do blast damage on the ground (neutrons deter the invaders) would "lower the nuclear threshold". Well, that's the precise point! We've got tens of millions dead since 1945 due to the fact that the nuclear threshold has been set too high to deter conventional war. The nuclear bomb designers, apart from Samuel Cohen and (on occasion) Robert Oppenheimer, usually tended to stay out of the truth about the nuclear weapons effects data! They were happy to hide behind secrecy and allow CND style Corbynism or mythology to "inform democracy of the facts"! In reality, as explained in a previous post, the hundreds to thousands of millions of conventional bombs used in the conventional wars of history are more than equivalent in actual destructive capability (which is not proportional to energy yield) of existing nuclear weapons!
“The first objection to battlefield ER weapons is that they potentially lower the nuclear threshold because of their tactical utility. In the kind of potential strategic use suggested where these warheads would be held back as an ultimate countervalue weapon only to be employed when exchange had degenerated to the general level, this argument loses its force: the threshold would long since have been crossed before use of ER weapons is even contemplated. In the strategic context, it is rather possible to argue that such weapons raise the threshold by reinforcing the awful human consequences of nuclear exchange: the hostages recognize they are still (or once again) prisoners and, thus, certain victims.”
- Dr Donald M. Snow (Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of International Studies, University of Alabama), “Strategic Implications of Enhanced Radiation Weapons”, Air University Review, July-August 1979 issue (online version linked here).
But Snow over-states the "lowering the nuclear threshold" argument by explaining it makes no sense after you are in a large nuclear war. The reality is that in WWI, Britain's fired 170 million shells at German trenches, of which 1.5 million were fired in the brief barrage before the Battle of the Somme. In 1917 alone, Britain produced 50 million shells containing 185 kilotons of explosive. In the Battle of Amiens, August 1918, the firing of 4,000,000 allied shells broke down German positions. In a final push, devastation at a rate similar to nuclear war bombardment occurred when 943,947 shells were fired in a 24-hour period by the British Army on 28-29 September 1918, resulting in the Armistice ending the war (source: Malcolm Pearce and Geoffrey Stewart, British political history, 1867-2001, page 296). Altogether, from 1914-17 Britain fired 290 kilotons of high explosives in shells at German trenches The "equivalent megatonage" or equivalent to 1 megaton nuclear weapons, isn't just 0.29 megatons, but is immense because the area of destruction and thus casualties scale by only about the 2/3 power of energy, not directly with yield, and each average shell contained only 3.7 kg of explosive. Thus, the equivalent megatonnage of Britain's shelling in 1917 alone is:
50,000,000(3.7 x 10-9)2/3 = 120 separate 1 megaton nuclear weapons. In the whole of WWI, the British Army fired 170 million shells, with equivalent damage to:
170,000,000(3.7 x 10-9)2/3 = 408 separate 1 megaton nuclear weapons.
(We can neglect the 50% blast partition of total yield in nuclear weapons, because that's also true for conventional explosive shells that are 50% explosive, 50% steel case by mass.)
Dr Ralph E. Lapp's 1965 book The New Priesthood (Harper, New York) on pages 113-114 gives an honest "equivalent megatonnage" comparison between conventional weapons and old high-yield megaton single warhead nuclear missiles (which have now been replaced with lower yield MIRV warheads) instead of following CND by claiming falsely that the energy equivalent of 1,000,000 tons of TNT kills the same number as a million separate tons of TNT in explosions of conventional weapons:
"A warhead for a Minuteman or Polaris missile costs about $1 million each. ... To produce damage comparable to that from a one-megaton bomb, some 8,000 'old-fashioned' bombs each containing one ton of TNT would have to be dropped uniformly over the same target area."
In other words, according to Lapp: 8 kt of conventional weapons = 1 megaton. Using the two-thirds power of yield scaling, the equivalence is: 10 kt of small 1 ton TNT bombs = same area of damage as 1 megaton in a single bomb. The American B-52 bomber has a payload of 32 tons, so it takes 313 sorties to drop 10 kt of TNT which (if the bombs are 1 ton each) is equivalent in damage area to a 1 megaton nuclear weapon. For solid direct evidence for the validity of this scaling law, whereby bigger bombs cause fewer fatalities per TNT ton of energy equivalent than smaller bombs, see the graphs linked in the earlier post here and the ease of protection against the increasingly delayed heat, fallout and blast arrival time over larger areas for bigger explosions, as proved here. At the 1 psi peak overpressure range for shattered windows in a conventional 1 ton TNT air burst explosion, there is only 0.4 second available between the flash and the blast arrival, little longer than the blink reaction time for human beings. Hence, for small bombs, you can do little. But, contrary to BBC TV fiddled sound tracks on films of nuclear explosions, for a 1 kt bomb you have a full 4 seconds before 1 psi arrives, while for 1 megaton you have 40 seconds. This effect reduces casualties.
In Vietnam, 7,662,000 tons of conventional bombs were dropped (according to Micheal Clodfelter's Vietnam in Military Statistics, 1995, page 225), which by this reckoning (10 kt of conventional bombs = 1 megaton of nuclear) is equivalent in terms of damage to a nuclear war of 766 separate 1 megaton explosions.
188,000(10-7)2/3 = 4 thermonuclear weapons, each 1 megaton.
The 1.3 megatons of conventional bombs dropped on Germany in WWII was likewise equivalent to:
13,000,000(10-7)2/3 = 280 separate thermonuclear weapons, each 1 megaton.
In total, 74.2 kilotons of conventional bombs were dropped on the UK in WWII causing 60,000 casualties, equivalent to 16 separate 1 megaton nuclear weapons, confirming the British Home Office analysis that - given cheap-type civil defence - you get about 3,750 casualties for a one megaton nuclear weapon. Naturally, without civil defence, as in early air bombing surprise attacks or the first use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, casualty rates can be over 100 times higher than this. (For example, Glasstone and Dolan, in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 1977 point out that in Hiroshima the 50% lethal radius was only 0.12 mile for people under cover in concrete buildings, compared to 1.3 miles for those caught totally unprotected outdoors. The difference in areas is over a factor of 100, indicating that the casualties in Hiroshima could have been reduced enormously if the people had taken cover in concrete buildings, or simple earth covered WWII shelters which offered similar protection to concrete buildings.)
About ten percent of the conventional bombs failed to detonated, creating a massive bomb disposal problem that slowed down civil defence in WWII, where the protracted air raids over many months progressively reduced shelter utilization in London, increasing the casualty rate. In neither Britain nor Germany did the bombing of civilians lead to a clear defeat: the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey found that generally the outrage about being bombed offset the depression of morale from the devastation. Strategic bombing of military manufacturing targets like ball bearing factories failed because the steel machine tools could easily withstand the blast and shrapnel. Only the bombing of fuel and munition supplies (both of which will destroy themselves easily, once ignited) crucially helped to end the war: German production of aviation fuel fell from 156,000 tons in May 1944 to just 11,000 tons in January 1945, thus defeat. The point is:
Conventional weapons failed to deter two world wars, which were each the size of a substantial nuclear war (in terms of devastation and overall casualties). Disarmament after WWI led to WWII.
That's what you get when you don't even have a nuclear deterrent.
At the end of the day, tactical nuclear weapons has been historically proved in the 1960s and 1980s to help deter the conventional invasions that trigger devastating World Wars, which cost tens of millions regardless if economy-busting conventional weapons are used. This damns the mythical "lowering the nuclear threshold argument" against credible deterrence.
'The neutron bomb, so-called because of the deliberate effort to maximize the effectiveness of the neutrons, would necessarily be limited to rather small yields - yields at which the neutron absorption in air does not reduce the doses to a point at which blast and thermal effects are dominant. The use of small yields against large-area targets again runs into the delivery problems faced by chemical agents and explosives, and larger yields in fewer packages pose a less stringent problem for delivery systems in most applications. In the unlikely event that an enemy desired to minimize blast and thermal damage and to create little fallout but still kill the populace, it would be necessary to use large numbers of carefully placed neutron-producing weapons burst high enough to avoid blast damage on the ground [500 metres altitude for a neutron bomb of 1 kt total yield], but low enough to get the neutrons down. In this case, however, adequate radiation shielding for the people would leave the city unscathed and demonstrate the attack to be futile.'
- Dr Harold L. Brode, RAND Corporation, Blast and Other Threats, pp. 5-6 in Proceedings of the Symposium on Protective Structures for Civilian Populations, U.S. National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council, Symposium held at Washington, D.C., April 19-23, 1965.
4. As we explained in the previous post:
Paul Mercer's brilliant 1986 book, Peace of the Dead, exposed how the Marxists infiltrated "peace lobby" CND (which wanted to disarm Britain to allow the Russians to invade without a deterrent) with IRA supporters, Brezhnev era terrorists, and bombers. Sean MacBride was on the Irish CND Committee, and on the International Peace Bureau (which counted on CND as a member body), and so on up to Boris Ponomarev, Head of the International Department for the Kremlin's Politburo, which ran the World Peace Council (a front for war). What we see today from Jeremy Corbyn is just a repeat of the endless propaganda for Marxist revolution, dressed up in Orwellian Doublethink as "peace". In the 1980s, most people had some resilience to this propaganda due to reading Orwell's 1984, or Constantine Fitzgibbon's When the Kissing had to stop. To counter this, CND and fellow travelling "biased scientists" like Carl Sagan abused the data on thermal shadowing in cities by buildings (assuming falsely that cities are like unobstructed deserts) to exaggerate fires and "predict" firestorms that release enough soot to cause a "nuclear winter". This lie was debunked in 1951 by the UK Home Office Scientific Advisory Branch's George R. Stanbury in secret studies of thermal shadowing by modern city skylines in London, Birmingham, Liverpool, etc.
We have repeatedly exposed "nuclear winter" debunking evidence on this blog, but it is still being ignored by CND fear mongering terrorism supporters. The truth is, nuclear deterrence using tactical nuclear weapons helped avoid aggression in the Cold War, but it was ended in 1991 due to propaganda from the Corbyn-Chamberlain breed of "peace monger", and has led to more terrorism. Invasions of massed terrorist groups in trucks or in tanks can be stopped or deterred, or at least forced to disperse into a less concentrated force, by this method. By the nuclear deterrent effect of forcing enemy tanks and vehicles to disperse, their ability to invade is diminished, and conventional weapons are then more effective in combating the dispersed invasion force. For example, if invading enemy tanks are dispersed to reduce their vulnerability to a tactical nuclear explosion, then it is easier to pick them off one by one using hand-held anti-tank rockets. You can't do that so effectively against the barrage of fire from a large, concentrated, invading tank force. Kuwait was invaded by Iraq, sparking off the first Gulf War, because Reagan's W79 tactical nuclear deterrence against concentrated invasion forces had not been deployed against Middle East dictatorships, after the Cold War ended.
5. The "nuclear threshold" or anti escalation argument against tactical nuclear weapons is also, independently, debunked as we have previously shown in posts on this blog, by Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute study of escalation to city bombing in WWII, when it was Churchill and not Hitler who started regular city bombing in an effort to get the Nazis to bomb British cities which were fully equipped with civil defence shelters, instead of having Hitler bomb British airfields where bombing was helping the Nazis to win the war by destroying Britain's capability to resist invasion!
Additionally, Kahn showed how gas masks and retaliation capabilities by Britain, even though Britain had less effective gases (e.g. Britain had mustard gas while Hitler had 12,000 tons of tabun nerve gas as well as large amounts of sarin nerve gas) helped to achieve a non-escalation to city bombing by gas. If you have crude civil defence - masks to prevent inhalation and bricked or sandbagged windows to prevent droplets of mustard liquid or nerve liquid getting on your skin - you deter attack! That's because the risks of escalation, such as retaliation, outweigh the gains, once cheap but effective civil defence countermeasures have been taken. The same goes for cheap foxholes and shelters from blast and fallout collateral dangers during a nuclear attack involving surface bursts.
This is of course why CND's Cold War (and present day) civil defence haters like Phil Bolsover and Jeremy Corbyn want us to be vulnerable. (That way, we have to surrender to aggressors who will destroy democracy, liberty and freedom!) Their whole approach, like that of the BBC and Guardian, is not only one-sided, but outrageously fake news. For a detailed debunking of anti-neutron bomb propaganda which was published by Moscow's friends in the Western media, see our previous posts here on Samuel Cohen's Vatican peace prize winning deterrent (yes, there was once a pro-peace Pope in the Vatican, long ago), and also here. In fact, as the extracts from the British 1959 manual at the top of the blog post indicate, even before the enhanced neutron bomb was explained by Samuel Cohen, it was observed that for low yield tactical fission nuclear weapons with light casings (e.g. small diameter, linear-implosion shells and bombs), neutrons were the prominent military effect!
Sam Cohen's book, The Truth About the Neutron Bomb: the Inventor of the Bomb Speaks Out, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1983, on page 48 states that he referred to the two 1958 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory clean (low fission) enhanced neutron Plowshare (peaceful explosives) devices by their code names Dove and Starling:
'The first time I recall seeing the term "neutron bomb" was in U.S. News and World Report. This was in May 1959, when the magazine revealed that the U.S. was working on a "neutron 'death ray' bomb which would kill man with streams of poisonous radiation, while leaving machines and buildings undamaged.'
Secret report LA-12063 was declassified is on the internet archive, with the secrets all blanked out (we combined two different declassified versions to provide a more helpful document there!). The co-author, Joseph S. Howard II, of this secret report also has an unclassified article in the public domain on the same subject: Thomas W. Dowler and Joseph S. Howard II, "Countering the Threat of the Well-Armed Tyrant: A Modest Proposal for Small Nuclear Weapons," Strategic Review volume 19, no. 4 (Fall 1991), pages 34-40.
“1. Army should keep an organic capability
– Maintain the W79 [the credible deterrence of the W79 tactical nuclear weapon that deterred Gorbachev’s tanks and thus helped defeat the rationale of the USSR in the 1980s] …”
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Above: Cohen's comparison of the destruction he saw first-hand in Korea from conventional war (1950-3), with the nuclear destruction in Hiroshima. The only difference is that Hiroshima had mainly wooden houses which were burned down, whereas Seoul had more brick and concrete buildings. The Hiroshima photo was taken on 12 October 1945 (U.S. Army Photo #SC 290666); the Seoul photo was taken on 1 November 1950 (U.S. Army Photo #SC 352260).
In 1961, Cohen briefed President Kennedy's national security advisor McGeorge Bundy on the neutron bomb (The Truth About the Neutron Bomb, 1983, pp. 72-3): 'His response was that if we had to use nuclear weapons to stop the Red Army from taking over Europe, he would favor hitting them with the biggest weapons we had. My riposte was: "On our allies' soil?" He didn't reply. ... He had gotten the point. That ended the meeting.' Consequently, President John F. Kennedy authorized the 1963 testing of the neutron bomb underground by Livermore scientists in the Nevada, which 'worked out extremely well' (page 83).
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev fanatically denounced the discriminate neutron bomb in his speech to the Romanian Party Congress in Bucharest: 'More and more frequently now, we hear from statesmen and military leaders, particularly in the United States, that they are working toward the creation of a neutron bomb. ... They are acting on the principle of robbers wanting to kill a man in such a way that his suit will not be stained with blood, in order to appropriate the suit. ... the bestial ethics of the most aggressive representatives of imperialism. ... Man to them is nothing. For them the main thing is to plunder, a quest for profit which prods the imperialists to the most horrible crimes.'
Cohen prints a Dunagin's people satire from 1977, showing a politician ordering physicists to modify the neutron bomb to fit Khrushchev's alleged morality:
'There are strong moral objections to a bomb that kills but doesn't destroy buildings. Fix it so it destroys buildings, too.'
On pages 91-2, Cohen explains: 'A discriminate tactical nuclear weapon is one whose effects can be confined mainly to the military target, minimizing damage to non-combatants and their property. So neutron bombs, which are intended to kill enemy soldiers but spare civilians and their towns, are, by this definition, discriminate weapons. For example, had they been available in the Korean War [which Cohen saw first hand] for use against enemy soldiers fighting in the city of Seoul, their application would have represented a highly discriminate attack - far more so than was the attack that actually took place using conventional weapons, and which pretty well levelled the city.'
He was inspired to invent and promote the neutron bomb by the vast civilian casualties from collateral damage due to the conventional weapons he saw in Korea, and by the NATO 'Carte Blanche' exercise of 23-28 June 1955, which predicted that the 268 nuclear explosions over 3 days in Germany which would be needed to defend Western Europe from Warsaw Pact forces would kill 1,500,000 civilians, and injure a further 3,500,000. By using neutron bomb air bursts (500-1,000 m altitude for 1-10 kt yields), all of these civilian casualties could be avoided. There would be no significant fallout, and the small area of neutron induced activity at ground zero decays very rapidly, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The uselessness of conventional defences to stop massed tank invasions was clearly demonstrated by the French anti-tank Maginot Line, which failed in World War II when Nazi tanks bypassed it and went through the Ardennes Forest to invade France.
On 12 July 1977, President Jimmy Carter publically announced the development of a neutron bomb to deter massed Soviet tank invasions of Western Europe because the Warsaw Pact had 25,000 tanks in Eastern Europe, ready for an invasion. Cohen on page 109 points out that President Reagan in 1981 stated that the Soviet Union responded by pumping over $100,000,000 into an anti-neutron bomb 'peace' propaganda campaign. Premier Leonid Brezhnev offered to refrain from building the neutron bomb if America agreed to do likewise! President Carter responded (Cohen, p. 111):
'The Soviets know and President Brezhnev knows that the neutron weapon is designed to be used against massive and perhaps overwhelming tank forces. ... The neutron weapons are designed to equalize that inequality. ... The Soviets have no use for a neutron weapon, so the offer by Brezhnev to refrain from building the neutron weapon has no significance in the European theatre and he knows this.'
But Carter chickened out when the Soviet anti-neutron bomb propaganda assault on the media commenced. Moscow radio was followed by 28 different European communist parties statements denouncing the neutron bomb as an immoral weapon, and the Soviet funded 'World Peace Council' (similar to Hitler's '25-year-peace plan' propaganda spin before World War II) called a week of international anti-neutron bomb action in August 1977, lying that the neutron bomb was designed to kill civilians and leave cities intact for American invasions and plunder. The pro-communist left-wing media of the West, plus the anti-nuclear biased groups, lapped it all up. Grigori Gokshin, Secretary of the 'Soviet Peace Committee' from 1973-91, conducted war on the neutron bomb through the media to protect the Soviet tank advantage in Europe!
The media pressure, including continuing bias from the BBC, which still falsely claims that horrific fallout and collateral damage was a good thing because it allegedly increased deterrence (in fact, collateral damage potential reduced deterrence by making the threat totally non-credible: as proved by the fact that the Soviets were so fearful of the neutron bomb but were undeterred by nuclear weapons which would produce collateral damage and amassed a tank superiority in the Warsaw Pact for a possible invasion of Western Europe precisely because they knew that indiscriminate American weapons could not be used without millions of casualties, so that such indiscriminate threats had zero, nil, nada, zip credibility as a deterrent to war or aggression), forced President Carter on 7 April 1978 to delay his decision to produce neutron warheads, and although he ordered the production of the fusion capsules for neutron bombs in October 1978, he continued to delay making a decision on the production of the rest of the bomb! (Cohen, page 115.)
The next month, Premier Brezhnev responded to Carter's half-hearted decision by telling a group of U.S. senators visiting Moscow that 'many years ago, we tested but we never started production of that weapon'. They didn't want or need low yield anti-tank tactical weapons, because they were the ones with the 4-to-1 tank superiority in Europe! They didn't want or need low yield collateral-avoilding neutron bombs, because they didn't give a damn about civilian casualties and collateral damage. But Premier Brezhnev pretended that the reason they did not have neutron bombs was because they were morally superior!
Carter continued to postpone his decision on the neutron bomb. Undeterred, the Soviet Union in 1979 invaded Afghanistan with tanks in what many considered a forerunner to an invasion of Western Europe and the rest of the free world. President Ronald Reagan was elected, and he ordered the production of 700 neutron bombs (350 nuclear 20-cm diameter shells for howitzers, and 350 W70 warheads for tactical Lance missiles) on 8 August 1981 to help to deter an invasion from the 19,500 Warsaw Pact tanks. Responding on 8 March 1983 to the Soviet 'peace morality' propaganda, Reagan pleaded: 'I urge you to beware the temptation to label both sides "equally at fault", to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a "giant misunderstanding", and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, and good and evil.'
The neutron bomb is efficient against massed tank invasions, thus an aggressor would be forced to disperse tanks; making them easy for troops to destroy or halt individually using simple hand-launched anti-tank rockets.
Dr Edward Teller and Dr Albert L. Latter were the first to suggest this solution on page 171 of their book Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers and Opportunities, Criterion Books, New York, 1958:
'In a nuclear war it will not make sense to use massed manpower. Any such concentration will provide too good a target for atomic weapons. ...
'Any fighting unit in a nuclear war will have to be small, mobile, inconspicuous and capable of independent action. ...
'If an invader adopts extreme dispersion, it will become impossible to defeat him with atomic weapons. But a very highly dispersed army can be defeated by a determined local population [with hand-held anti-tank rockets, etc.]. Therefore the main role of nuclear weapons might well be to disperse any striking force so that the resistance of people defending their homes can become decisive. Nuclear weapons may well become the answer to massed armies and may put back the power into the hands where we believe it belongs: the hands of the people.'
On page 135 of The Truth About the Neutron Bomb, 1983, Cohen stated that the neutron bomb is inefficient against cities with civilians because: 'All they have to do is construct very simple radiation shelters and, as the eemy approaches, get into them. ... Because there is no blast to contend with ... all that is called for is piling several feet of earth over the shelter. And dirt is cheap.' Earth slows down neutrons efficiently (removing neutron energy) because it contains a lot of light elements, but the heavy iron nuclei in steel tanks don't absorb much energy when they scatter neutrons around, so tanks only have a protective factor of about 2 against neutron radiation (tanks have a protection factor of 10 against initial high energy gamma rays, which are better attenuated by scattering the many electrons in iron atoms).
This is simple physics, but chemist George Kistiakowsky falsely claimed in MIT's Technology Review that 'A 10-cm (about 4 inches) layer of a suitable hydrogenous material, say water in plastic bags over the crew compartment, followed by a thin sheet of cadmium metal, would reduce neutron radiation intensity by about a factor of 5.' A factor of 5 reduction only reduces the neutron range by 15-20% because the dose drops off sharply with distance. But the factor of 5 calculation is false anyway, as Cohen explains on page 142, because the majority of the neutron dose is not coming straight down, but is coming from all directions due to the scatter of neutrons by the air, the ground around the tank, and the remainder of the tank itself! Kistiakowsky's stupidity is like trying to shield gamma radiation from fallout by wearing lead-soled shoes, in the mistaken belief that the hazard is due to fallout under your feet:
'Shielding a tank crew against neutrons is an enormously complicated problem. It is not solved by simply placing the shield over the crew compartment. By the time the neutrons reach the tank, they are bouncing around in all directions, and to protect the crew properly, the shielding will have to be placed around the sides of the crew compartment as well. As a consequence, the shielding weight begins to pile up: to a much greater level than Kistiakowsky realizes. ... The tank's mobility would be cut appreciably, as would the ability to swing the turret around to fire at acquired targets. In fact, were the tank to be shielded to a degree where the radiation was no longer the primary threat ... the added weight would cripple the tank's combat effectiveness.'
Another wild claim against the neutron bomb, made by Dr Herbert Scoville, Jr., which Cohen debunks (page 140), is that tank crews who are lethally irradiated will fight a 'Kamikaze' attack even more efficiently that they were fighting before, despite having radiation sickness. Cohen points out that they will not know exactly what their neutron dose is in a combat situation, and in any case the symptoms of radiation sickness will prevent their efficient execution of military functions.
Cancer and genetic effects are another hoax which was levelled against the neutron bomb: lethally irradiated people don't get cancer (as we shall see, Cohen shows that the effects of radiation sickness are no worse than other lethal combat injuries in modern conventional warfare due to organ damage, burns effects, and so on). In any case, no excess of genetic effects occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as compared to a matched non-exposed control group. For all types of cancers, radiation has only contributed a small fraction of the cancer in survivors, most of which is natural cancer, as shown by comparison with the matched non-exposed control group. Claims that neutron bomb radiation is 'inhumane' ignore the comparison with the organ damage consequences by conventional nuclear weapons (as well as with conventional weapons, which rip organs to pieces, burn, crush and so on), and they ignore the primary purpose of the neutron bomb is to deter an aggressor.
Cohen further points out (pages 153-5) that two radiation accident victims who survived 400-600 cGy air doses (300-450 bone marrow doses): 'were back to normal some number of weeks [discharge from hospital at 2 and 6 weeks, respectively, and full recovery of strength at 10 weeks postexposure] after their accidents. They bore no scars from their mishaps (apparently not even emotional scars) and were able to pick up where they left off when they were irradiated. As to how these aftermaths compare with those resulting from being wounded by conventional weapons, if one so desires you can find out by visiting the nearest Veterans Administration hospital.'
On 11 November 1981, the Los Angeles Times printed an article called 'Neutron Weapons: an Agonising Death (I've seen it)', by Professor J. Garrott Allen at Stanford University Medical School, falsely claiming that the death of Dr Louis Slotin 9 days after a criticality accident in May 1946 indicates the radiation effects of a neutron bomb: 'The production of neutron weapons is probably as immoral a concept as human minds have yet devised.' Cohen debunks Allen on pages 156-7: Dr Slotin was touching a plutonium bomb core with his bare hands when he made it supercritical, so he got terrible localized exposures to his hands and arms, which were way higher than the doses you can get from a neutron bomb. This is why Dr Slotin had the painful radiation burns which Allen observed in treating him. Allen was dishonest in claiming that those radiation burns were analogous to neutron bomb exposures. In any case: 'Allen never mentioned the terrible burns that can result from ... the heat from fission battlefield nuclear weapons.'
On 10 September 1981, two months before Allen's notoriously inaccurate article was published, Cohen had written to the Secretary of Energy James B. Edwards, asking:
'Why is it, Mr Secretary, that after more than four years of intense, often acrimonious and almost always highly emotional, debate over the neutron bomb, the government has never put out an official statement to dispel the distorted technical charges which have been made about the weapon's effectiveness and alleged immorality? It seems to me that had this been done at the start, today we would not have the same anti-nuclear scientists making the same distorted charges; leaving the American people as confused as ever - and probably the Europeans as well.
'I would strongly suggest that DOE and DOD get together (as they did some 30 years ago, when they first issued The Effects of Nuclear Weapons to responsibly inform the American people what nuclear weapons were all about) and provide an official document spelling out the true facts of the issue.' (As we shall see, the declassification of Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons is a step in that direction.)
Samuel Glasstone was well aware of the facts on the neutron bomb, for he had taught classified nuclear weapons design at Los Alamos until he retired and moved to Oak Ridge (Glasstone was co-author with Leslie M. Redman of the originally Secret - Restricted Data June 1972 report WASH-1038, An Introduction to Nuclear Weapons):
'When I arrived at the [Los Alamos] Lab 36+ years ago ... though I was a lowly postdoc, we took a course on nuclear physics (as did every new employee) and then a class on elements of bomb design both taught by Samuel Glasstone. This was required training. ... After that approximately 3 weeks of training, I understand what the Lab was about and why it was important to the nation. I'm certain it contributed to my wanting to stay on after my postdoc and has helped me in my work over the years. This was part of the "openness" despite the secrecy associated with the Lab. I believe we have lost this over the years ...' - Dr David Forslund
'During the Manhattan Project, classification was easy: everything in the project was classified. Then and later, information on nuclear weapons was "born classified" in the Restricted Data category. During the [Los Alamos National] Lab's orientation for new hires in the mid-1960s, Sam Glasstone, who had been a chemist in the Manhattan Project, drew one circle on the blackboard and another inside it. "Drawing concentric circles used to be classified," he joked. Fission bombs are designed in concentric circles.' - Dr Cheryl Rofer, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Part I - Historical Perspectives ['Cheryl Rofer is a chemist who worked for the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 35 years. ...'], Word Worth, September 2004, volume IV, No. 9.
In December 1977, the 653 pages long revision of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons,, compiled and edited by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, was published by the U.S. Department of Defense, and was a brief summary of some of the material from extensive data in the secret Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons.
Joseph C. Harsch, Neutron Bomb: Why It Worries The Russians, Christian Science Monitor, August 14, 1981, p. 1. (quoted here): '[there] are 19,500 tanks in the Soviet-controlled forces of the Warsaw Pact aimed at Western Europe. Of these, 12,500 are Soviet tanks in Soviet units. NATO has 7,000 tanks on its side facing the 19,500.'
FROM THE NEW EDITION OF SAM COHEN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY:
'... I [neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen] asked him a direct question: "Father, why don’t you like the neutron bomb?" His answer was equally direct: "Because it’s immoral." "Why is it immoral?", I asked. "Because it’s a nuclear weapon", he replied. "Why are nuclear weapons immoral?", I asked.
'And now came the answer I was hoping to get: "Nuclear weapons are vastly more destructive than conventional weapons." Now I had him.
'I proceeded to explain to him and the others, as I’ve explained to you, what the neutron bomb was all about, summing up by saying that the only thing "nuclear" about this weapon, as compared with other nuclear weapons, was that it derived its effectiveness and discrimination from nuclear reactions. I could have added, hypocritically in my mind, that it was God, not me, that ordained the Bomb to be nuclear and that it was also God who established the precepts of Just War theory I assumed he religiously subscribed to, but I couldn’t get myself to do that. Instead, I reacted emotionally and intemperately, and shamefully, for I never doubted the sincerity of his beliefs. I informed him in no uncertain terms that I held his views on the neutron bomb to be, in effect, immoral, grossly immoral. Where did he get off implying that I was, in effect, an immoral person for having devised and espoused a weapon that allowed a country to defend itself in a fashion having practically none of the grossly immoral features of conventional weapon defense he and his Harvard professors seemed to espouse?
'The father flushed in anger, as I had been doing, but did not respond. At this point, Casaroli finally opened his mouth to say he had just flown in from Rome, was dead tired, and badly needed some sleep to get ready for his UN speech the next day. He thanked me so much for coming, and left. So did the priest from Harvard, without thanking me. The others diplomatically stayed around for a while, I guess to let me know they weren’t as offended as the Harvard guy was.
'Some weeks later I received a medal from his Holiness, Pope Paul VI. ...
'About a year goes by. One day [in June 1979] while I was in Washington on some business, I got a call from Dick Cella. It was elevation time at the Vatican. The new Pope, John Paul II, had promoted a number of bishops to cardinalcy, one of them being Casaroli, who was also to become Vatican Secretary of State, Number Two on the church totem pole. A contingent from the U.S., headed by Cheli (who by now had been double-jumped in rank to archbishop), was heading off for the affair and I had been invited to join up. (Not invited was Father Hehir.) Could I drop whatever I was doing and get up to New York right away to join the party. ...
'I stopped what I was doing, participating on a Pentagon committee, put myself on unannounced vacation (and unpaid to stay honest) and took the first shuttle out of Washington National Airport. A few hours later I was on another airplane heading for Rome. We landed. Dick and I checked into a hotel, freshened up and headed off for the Vatican. There we met Cheli who escorted us to Casaroli’s Vatican apartment where he officially greeted us as his guests. We chatted amiably about almost everything but nuclear weapons and neutron bombs, after which Cheli escorted us around the Vatican showing us what I had seen 20 years back when I first visited Rome as a gaping tourist, plus a number other places tourists normally weren’t allow to gape at, where those in attendance gaped at my seersucker suit. The greeting formalities over, Dick and I left, strolled around the Eternal City for a few hours and spent a pleasant evening with some of his wife’s friends and relatives. As for my comportment around the dinner table, it was identical to the first hour or so at Dick’s restaurant; I sat there happily eating, saying nothing, while everyone else chatted away in Italian.
'The next morning was investiture time for the new cardinals. Off to the Vatican again, where we were met by Cheli who escorted us and the rest of the U.S. delegation to a huge auditorium where the ceremonies would take place. As we walked in and to our seats (way up front, probably due to Casaroli’s impending status), I had the feeling I was attending a U.S. presidential nomination convention, sans flags, banners, buttons, etc., representing delegations from the 50 states. The various contingents from the various countries whose archbishops were about to be promoted were assigned seats in certain sections of the auditorium and the place was abuzz with excitement.
'On stage were all the cardinals from all over the world, plus the cardinal designates. This was the first time I’d ever seen a cardinal, let alone all of them; and in seeing all this clerical brass together had me totally dumbfounded. Suddenly a tremendous roar went up. The Pope was coming on stage. When the cheering had died down, the ceremonies began and one-by-one, their contingencies whooping it up, the cardinals-elect rose, knelt at the feet of his Holiness (now John Paul II, Paul VI had died not too long after bestowing the medal on me), and received their scrolls. Casaroli, about to become the most eminent of their Eminences, was first to be called up. ...
'The first guy was a little Italian cardinal of such timid demeanor that if it weren’t for his priestly finery I would have guessed him to be a downtrodden clerk in a Charles Dickens tale. "Your Eminence," says Cheli, in English, "may I introduce you to Sam Cohen. He is the Father of the Neutron Bomb." ...
'It’s my last day in Rome (Cella had left the night before) and early that morning I grabbed a taxi and headed off to the Vatican again. There I met Cheli and a few others who had been invited to attend a special Mass given by the Pope honoring Casaroli. A few dozen people were there, including some of Casaroli’s relatives ... A few minutes go by and the Pope appears, stands a few feet in front of me and conducts Mass, in Latin.
'The Mass over, the Pope leaves the altar and starts mixing it up with the audience. I’m standing there off to the side, wondering what to do with myself, when Casaroli comes up to me and with a look of total innocence on his face (God forgive him) asks me if I had met His Holiness. ... I gave Casaroli an honest answer and said no I hadn’t met His Holiness. Whereupon he took me by the arm and led me to the Pope, introducing me in glowing terms as the Father of the Neutron Bomb. Unlike the little cardinal a couple of days before who had practically trembled in the presence of Satan, the Pope was one cool customer. He didn’t bat an eyelash.
'We shook hands, he expressed his pleasure over meeting me. I expressed mine. Then he looked me squarely in the eye (I’m not so sure how squarely I looked back at him) and asked me, "Mr. Cohen, I trust you are working for peace?" What could I say. I told him I was, as best I could, in my own way, and then poured it on by telling him how much I appreciated his own efforts for peace.' - How Cohen met Pope John Paul II in June 1979 (Shame, online edition, pages 216-8).
Above: the target for Sam Cohen's neutron bomb was these T-54/55 Russian main battle tanks, which had the highest production run of any tank ever made (over 86,000 were manufactured). They were manufactured chiefly for the invasion of Western Europe, once tactical nuclear weapons had been removed by political lobbying of Western disarmament activists via the Kremlin-controlled World Peace Council based in Moscow.
Update (19 June 2017):
After further terrorism and also Communist riot threats in London (see comments section discussions), I'd just like to point out again that we put on the Internet Archive last year the key parts of the declassified proof-tested Restricted manual on countering terrorism and insurrection: War Office Code 9455, Keeping the Peace, which contains useful advice on preventing and stopping extremism. This advice formed the basis for the successful strategy against terrorists in Northern Ireland and Israel. These techniques are also of interest to continuing wars where there are no city "peace walls" yet (a needed countermeasure to reduce the use of human shields due to terrorist infiltration). It is also important to draw close attention to chapter 10, "Psychological Warfare" where on page 52, paragraph 232 states: "No subversive or terrorist movement can exist without support from the people. The support may be popular and voluntary or it may be involuntary through fear. Psychological warfare seeks to deny the movement that support which it requires, as well as to undermine terrorist morale [the very opposite of Corbynism]."
Update (21 June 2017): I am grateful for a comment which points us to a brilliant analysis of the hypocritical tolerance to hate crimes and terrorism by the so-called Left (actually the far right fascists, when you obliterate the "doublethink" propaganda and accept instead fascist was instigated by communist newspaper editor Mussolini and that Stalin in August 1939 motivated the Joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland a month later, causing WWII, or that Hitler's National Socialist party, the Nazis, were bankrupted by socialist state spending, leading to the Holocaust and WWII in collaboration with the communists; in reality both "Left" fascists and "Right" fascist ideologues share the same intolerance of the BBC/Guardian towards free liberty, and love all forms of terrorist activity that divides a country, segregates and murders people):
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3846217/why-do-lefties-say-london-bridge-attack-was-an-incident-but-finsbury-park-mosque-attack-was-terrorism/ :
BRENDAN O'NEILL Why do lefties say London Bridge attack was an ‘incident’... but Finsbury Park Mosque attack was ‘terrorism’?
By Brendan O'Neill
21st June 2017, 12:59 am Updated: 21st June 2017, 12:56 pm
THIS week, leftists finally got animated and angry about an act of terrorism. They did not just say “Keep calm and carry on”, as they did after the Manchester and London Bridge attacks. ... They did not try to shush debate or discourage national soul-searching, as they do after Islamist atrocities, always fearing that heated debate might “cause offence”.
No, they ... finally said we Brits need to ask ourselves why our nation is afflicted by ideological violence. What made them change their tune? The horrific Finsbury Park Mosque attack. ... It enraged them, prised open their eyes, made them realise there are some serious tensions slicing through 21st-century Britain. ...
The very people who tell us we must not extrapolate from terror attacks have now done precisely that. [Emphasis added]
The same people who insist we treat Islamist attacks as acts of individual violence ... are citing Finsbury as proof that Britain is in the grip of hatred. ...
Labour MP Diane Abbott referred to last month’s Manchester Arena bombing, in which 22 souls were wiped out by Salman Abedi, as a “horrific incident” — making it sound like a traffic accident.
But she swiftly applied the T-word to the Finsbury assault. This was a “shocking terror attack”, she said on Twitter, even before all the facts were known.
Her party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, did not refer to the Westminster Bridge attack as terrorism for five days.
In his first comment on this Islamist attack in March — in which Khalid Masood killed four civilians and a police officer — Corbyn described it as a “serious incident”.
In his second, the day after the attack, he said it was an “atrocity” but warned us not to “rush to judgement”.
He had no problem “rushing to judgement” on the Finsbury attack, however.
“This is terror on our streets,” he said just hours after it happened. The double standards are extraordinary.
After acts of Islamist violence, many leftists flat-out refuse to talk about the ideological cause. ... It is “outrageous” to use that word, said Green Party leader Caroline Lucas — even though the dictionary definition is an “advocate or supporter of Islamist militancy”, making it an apt term for the Manchester and London Bridge murderers.
Following the Finsbury attack, however, leftists have felt no qualms about naming the ideology allegedly at play.
They have fallen over themselves to brand this “Islamophobic terrorism”.
Suddenly it is OK to talk about the warped intellectual underpinnings of terrorism.
After Islamist assaults, leftists lecture us about how important it is not to hold whole communities responsible. They patronise us with sermons about how acts of terrorism are the work of one individual, not a community or any culture of hatred.
But after Finsbury, they point the finger at a wide-spread communal hate.
Labour MP Yvette Cooper claimed the Finsbury attack speaks to “an increase in Islamophobia all over the country”.
To get a sense of the double standards at play here, just imagine if a politician went on TV after Manchester and said: “There has been an increase in Islamist prejudice all over the country.” ....
Left-leaning publications which insist Islamist attacks are isolated acts by individuals hypocritically claim the Finsbury attack is the product of a bigger hatred.
This attack confirms that we have “allowed Islamophobia to flourish”, says the New Statesman. It shows how “normalised” anti-Islam prejudice has become, says the Guardian. ...